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“We hesitate at opposite shores of ignorance, gazing at one another.”
― Anne Carson
In the midst of all her thrashing, Mari’s sleep mask comes askew.
When she opens her eyes, the world is a calm, aquamarine blue, and her heart is still racing.
It’s still a little hard to breathe.
Her pillow is wet where her cheek is pressed.
And Lara is missing from her futon...
Mari’s heart twinges with unease.
Her hands fist the bed sheets as she glances at Gon-chan’s tank. She’s still sleeping... When Mari strains her ears, she can hear her snore and mumble just so. Fish don’t normally snore, do they? Then again, fish don’t normally talk, either.
Mari rolls out of bed. Her feet pad over the soft cotton of Lara’s empty futon, then the wooden floorboards of her bedroom. The blanket is rumpled, and still a little warm, Mari thinks, sighing with relief.
Lara hasn’t made her bed yet. Hasn’t left her a note of any sort. Hasn’t said goodbye...
Mari ticks off each observation in her mind like she’s notching the sides of a tree. They must all mean something, surely. Lara wouldn’t just leave in the middle of the night like that, right?
...She knows that’s not always how it goes.
The night that Mari’s mom passed away, she hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye…
.
.
.
She’s overthinking things. It’s way more likely that Lara is downstairs watching another inane romantic drama or grabbing a late night snack as opposed to being kidnapped or something along those nefarious lines.
...Right?
A cold shiver runs up her spine at the thought. The scary part is that Mari doesn’t know.
She claps her palms against her cheeks to calm herself down.
The Otsu household is a far cry from a castle under the sea, but on the surface, this is Lara’s home. Mari can’t claim to know a thing about princes either, but whatever happens, she’ll make sure that Lara comes to no harm.
All the lights in the house are off, but nothing feels amiss. When Mari steps out of her room and into the hallway, she can hear the shower running.
The lead weight lifts off Mari’s chest only when she makes out the faint tinge of red in the corner, through the frosted, sliding-glass door.
“Lara? Are you okay?” Mari calls out, voice cracking a little as she raps her knuckles against the door frame.
“Mhm.”
“Can I come in?”
Another mumbled sound of affirmation.
.
.
.
Mari quietly slides the door shut behind her, then stands in the corner as she looks at the mermaid sulking in the bathtub. The shower is still running though Lara’s pajamas are drenched. And Mari can’t remember the last time she’s seen her look so dejected.
“What happened?” Mari asks, voice calm.
“I had a bad dream…” says Lara, her voice so weak in the night it sounds like a secret whispered in the confessional booth.
Me too, Mari thinks, and swallows her words down instinctively, fearing what else will slip out of her mouth if she’s not careful.
It’s weird. It’s scary. She can’t help it.
She’s been told all her life that she’s too blunt for her own good, but it’s not like she always means for her words to cut.
She takes a measured breath, and shifts her weight from foot to foot. Weighs her words in her mouth carefully before speaking again.
“Does it help?” Mari asks, tilting her head in Lara’s direction.
Lara nods and makes an unintelligible noise as she hugs her knees to her chest.
“The water feels nice. Doing this calms me down,” says Lara.
Her shoulders are slumped, and she’s resting her cheek against the top of her knees. In the grainy blue night, it’s hard to parse her expression even with the small patch of light slanting into the room from the transom window.
Mari frowns again, then clucks her tongue. Does it really help? Mari thinks, heart twinging. You look so sad…
Overhead, the shower is still running. If her grandma knows they’re to blame for this month’s water bill, she’ll surely throw a fit. But… Maybe Yoshiya wouldn’t mind taking the fall for this if they play their cards right.
The cogs turn in Mari’s head as she weighs what to do next. When she finally settles on a decision, she doesn’t hesitate even if her cheeks are burning.
“Move over,” Mari says suddenly.
“Eh?” asks Lara, confused.
“Make room for me... Dummy,” Mari huffs.
Repeating herself is somehow even more embarrassing. Thankfully, Lara gets the memo the second time around. There’s the sound of rippling water when Lara slides back until she's up against the corner of the tub. If Mari needed to repeat herself again, who knows what mean thing she’d resort to calling her next.
Mari starts regretting her decision when she sticks her foot in the tub and a cold shiver shoots like a bolt of lightning from her toes up to her spine. The bathroom mirror hadn’t fogged up from steam because Lara hadn’t bothered to turn on the heater… Mari hadn’t noticed that before now.
Does being a mermaid make Lara impervious to cold water or something?! Mari thinks, gritting her jaw because her teeth are chattering now and she’s shivering so violently she feels like the human embodiment of a level 9 earthquake on the Richter scale.
It’s too late now to turn back, though. Brr! Excess water sloshes off the rim of the tub as she plunges in. The deluge drenches the bathroom floor as she takes her place opposite Lara.
Mari has to take a couple of deep, invigorating breaths to acclimatize her shivering body. She hadn’t stripped out of her pajamas before climbing in either, so now her oversized cotton shirt is hanging off her body like she got caught in the rain.
Even with the full extent of all her willpower, it takes a couple of minutes to stop shivering.
From this angle, the light from the streetlamps manage to slant in through the little transom window near the ceiling, casting the two of them in coppery-gold hues.
As Mari’s hands let go of the rim of the tub, she quietly admits to herself that this is probably in the list of the top 10 strangest things she’s ever done.
(So far.)
The water is so cold that Mari is a hundred percent awake now. For the record, Mari has never felt so uncool in her life, even when she finally stops shivering.
The short strands of her black hair tend to curl up whenever they're wet. It's... Annoying. She blows a soggy strand of black hair out of her face, then combs her messily-matted fringe away from her forehead, into a cowlick as the shower-head continues lightly pelting her with icy water.
She wonders if her lips are blue now, then feels her cheeks warm again when she catches Lara staring straight at her, pink lips parted and blue eyes wide with awe.
It’s distracting and unexpected.
Suddenly, acutely, Mari feels embarrassed again at being the crux of Lara’s attention. Having a thousand eyes on her in the boxing ring is different than… Than this. Whatever this is.
Radiating out from Mari’s chest and seeping into all of her limbs is a thunderous warmth she doesn’t know quite what to name.
What are you staring at? Mari wants to say, but Lara beats her to the punch by being the first to speak.
“Mari, you’re weird, huh?” Lara says, smiling bright and cavalier like she’s stating today’s weather. And then, in a quieter voice that Mari supposes might be intended as a stage whisper: “I… I really wish I had my camera with me, right now.”
!!!
Mari’s cheeks are growing warmer by the second.
“What? You started it! You’re the weird mermaid!” Mari huffs back instead, though there’s no bite to it.
She can’t stop the treacherous little quirk of her lips when Lara laughs. She can’t remember when it was that she had stopped trying.
She knows that Lara had meant it as a term of endearment. In the same vein that whenever she thinks Lara is being cute, she calls her a dummy.
There’s some degree of translation and decoding going on here: a sleight of hand between her tongue and brain and heart, like she’s juggling them all at once: the thousand inputs and outputs riding on a neural superhighway. And somewhere in the scuffle, something gets lost in-between…
It’s a bit like boxing in the sense that sometimes there’s no time to think before she needs to take action. Except unlike boxing, Mari isn’t used to being so clumsy and unsure about what to do next…
Can you blame her? They’re mincing genres here. She’s a fifteen-year-old boxing prodigy, and her best friend is the princess of a fairytale she’s had to punch straight out of the sky.
They shouldn’t make sense together at all. But somehow, they do. Lara laughs again when Mari splashes water right into her face. The water slides right off her hair and skin, like water off a duck's back.
Woah! Mari thinks, enchanted by the sight. It feels almost unfair with how she feels like a soggy slice of toast right now in contrast. Do mermaids have hydrophobic properties? Her thoughts get sidelined when Lara splashes her back with a girlish squeal.
It turns into a little game of back and forth until they’re grinning at each other in the bathtub as they sit comfortably in silence.
It’s not a particularly big bathtub. At the bottom of it, their legs intersperse like the different layers of a Baumkuchen cake.
Mari stares down at the distorted reflection of their wobbly limbs in the water before she looks back up at Lara.
She’s used to Lara standing taller than her, but she’s all legs and slouching right now, so when Mari looks up, they’re comfortably eye-to-eye.
“You’re right. It does help,” Mari says after a beat, smiling slightly under the pitter-patter of icy water. “I… I had a nightmare too.”
There are droplets of water in Lara’s long eyelashes. Mari wonders if it’s because of her, or if (like her) Lara had been crying earlier too...
Lara blinks at her admission a couple of times in surprise before her lips form the shape of a perfect little ‘o’. Pretty, Mari thinks idly. Lara’s always been pretty. She’s just never paid too much attention to that because first and foremost, Lara has always been Lara in her mind... Not Lara the mermaid, or Lara the princess, or Lara The Mermaid Princess, but Lara: the silly girl her age with stars in her eyes who wears her heart on her sleeves.
Mari’s gaze dawdles when Lara bites her bottom lip, then opens her mouth so wide that Mari can see the stitches on her tongue. She can scry the beginnings of a word there, of a question.
For a couple of heartbeats, Mari waits with baited breath, but instead of opening up, Lara shies away. Closes her mouth. Cradles her arms against her body as if she’s trying to fold herself like origami into a different shape... When their eyes meet again, she’s forlorn and lost, pouting like a kicked puppy, cowed by its own nature.
Mari’s heart prickles with pain as she helplessly watches her.
Why? Mari thinks, but does not say. What did I do? How can I help? Why do you look so sad?
It feels like she’s watching a movie or trying to read a book in a foreign language. They are enough alike that she can make an intelligent guess, but there’s so much she doesn’t understand about Lara and it’s frustrating sometimes.
Because Mari wants to help, she just doesn’t know how. Won’t know how unless Lara helps her understand...
She tries to think of their situation like another boxing match. Tries to envision the porcelain bathtub as the four corners of a boxing ring. The nebulous opponents that she needs to defeat line up, one after the next. They tend to underestimate her because of her age and her size. It’s always worked to her advantage when she takes them by surprise.
(...Maybe Mari is guilty of having a one-track mind, but can you blame her? She’s had boxing on the brain since she was five years old. And she intends to go pro.)
It’s not Lara she wants to punch out, but her demons. If she summons them here and now, they can face them together.
Her mom told her once that it isn’t right to fight other people’s battles for them. And she understands that. She does! But sometimes, Mari wants to hold Lara’s hand and tell her that whatever she’s facing, she doesn’t have to shoulder it all alone…
.
.
.
The water wobbles when Mari’s leg jostles Lara’s. She’s never felt so juxtaposed before. She’s tanner than Lara. Shorter and stockier, too. All lean muscle, whereas Lara is more slender and clumsy.
She’s no less brave though.
“Um… You look like you wanted to ask me something,” Mari says quietly, then, in a louder voice: “I… I was dreaming about my mom…”
Mari trails off. She can’t help the instinct to clam up. Her death has always been a hard topic to broach.
Lara’s eyes light up. Curious and surprised that she brought that up.
“You never told me about her before…” Lara mumbles shyly.
“Oh? Ah…” Mari blinks, breaking eye contact to dip her head and scratch her cheek. She stares at her own wobbly reflection in the water’s surface.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hide anything,” Mari continues. “She died a few years ago. I’m still not used to talking about stuff like that.”
“That’s okay. I… I don’t think I am, too...”
Lara’s smile is wan, but sincere.
Ripples form in the water when Lara knocks their knees together.
“What… What was she like?” Lara asks. “Your mom…”
“Hm? She was strong. Really strong. The coolest person I think I’ll ever know. Sometimes, I get mad that I didn’t have more time with her. But… I’m really glad that she was my mom,” Mari clumsily admits.
She’s not used to opening up about stuff like this. Her heart’s starting to hurt again. Her eyes are prickling. She doesn’t understand why it’s less painful to get punched in the face than to just admit stuff...
“Thanks for telling me. I… I think she sounds a lot like you,” says Lara, twiddling her hands in her lap. “I understand. Um. Maybe I don’t. I never knew my mother. She died before I was born, but my father told me I'm a lot like her. I wish we had pictures like you do up here... I've only seen statues of her.”
“If the two of you are alike, then I bet that your mom was really kind,” Mari says. “And strong, too. In her own way.”
“Yeah?” asks Lara.
“Yeah…”
“Thank you. Mari...”
“Hm?” Mari perks up at the sound of her name.
“Do you think we’ll get better at doing stuff we’re not good at if we practice?”
“I… I don’t know. I hope so. I think it’s worth trying,” Mari says, embarrassed again by how corny she sounds right now. “I’ve always wanted to try this too, you know?”
When Mari gestures around them, Lara blinks at her in confusion.
“You mean you’ve never taken a bath before?”
It’s Mari’s turn now to laugh.
“No, dummy. Don’t go spreading weird rumors. I bathe every day, I’ll have you know! I mean…”
Mari sighs.
“When I was little, I watched this movie on TV with my brother. I think it was about martial arts. The hero. He uh. To get stronger, he stood for a really long time under this waterfall. It feels so dumb saying it now. But I thought… Trying this would be something like that. And it would help me get stronger. Somehow…”
“A waterfall, huh?” Lara says, trailing off as her mind wanders. Dummy, Mari thinks fondly. She’s probably trying to visualize the scene now in her head.
“Can we watch that movie together?” asks Lara. “You don’t have school today, right?”
“Yeah, but. Ah. I don’t know. Maybe after I come back from my run.”
“So… Maybe then? When you get back?” Lara’s eyes light up with hope.
Her gaze is so bright that Mari needs to look pointedly away, or she’ll get sucked into her mermaid machinations. Lara is a far cry from a siren, but… She’s really good at wearing Mari down with her incessant wheedling.
“Yeah,” Mari says, smiling now.
“So that’s a promise,” says Lara.
“It’s not a promise!”
Mari swats at Lara’s knee with her hand. And then they’re laughing again as another water-fight breaks out.
.
.
.
A tilt in the tempo between them and the bitter pain has given way to something sweeter.
It’s a change that Mari openly welcomes.
After a few more minutes, Mari starts crawling forward to turn off the faucet. The Otsu household isn’t exactly made of money, you know?
In the middle of it, Lara intuits what she’s trying to do and shuts the tap off before Mari can do it herself after a quickly mumbled: “Oh? Oh! The faucet!”
Their hands brush in the scuffle. Mari’s never been particularly religious. And that fact applies even more so after her mom died. But she thanks God in that one moment because Lara doesn’t seem to notice her profusely pink face.
When they both settle back down in the bathtub, the distance between them has shrunk even more than before.
If she reclines in the tub, the water will swallow her shoulders. If she reaches forward, she can grab Lara’s hands. She bites her bottom lip at the thought. Wonders why it’s floating now in the forefront of her mind, or why her heart is beating so fast again, or why she feels far too warm, even in the cold water.
She tries her best and succeeds at fighting the urge to stick her head into the shallow depths to blow some bubbles.
A pity.
Maybe then her head will finally get the chance to cool off.
“Do you run every day?” Lara asks gently. She smiles again as her legs lackadaisically swish back and forth in the water. Little, ticklish waves brush against Mari's bare skin as the wet ends of both their t-shirts dance along to the current.
It’s Lara’s voice that snaps her out of her head and into the present moment. It’s Lara that makes her heart thunder, and her head think about drowning, and her tongue feel so clumsy and dumb...
In the depths of herself, Mari sits, coiled like a spring, facing the bare-faced truth.
On the water's surface, all is calm.
Mari nods. It’s her turn now, to slouch.
“Except for when it rains,” says Mari.
“Why?”
Another innocuous question. Some tension unspools.
“I want to be the best, so I need to try my best,” Mari answers almost instantaneously, without thinking as she stares back down into the water’s depths. She’s been asked that question so many times now that she’s lost count…
Why do you run? Why do you train so hard? What are you trying to prove? Why. Why. Why.
Lara gives a thoughtful, little hum as she chews on Mari’s answer. When Mari looks up at Lara’s face and catches her smiling at her again, her breath stalls in her throat.
“...What are you thinking?” Mari raises an eyebrow. “You way too happy. It’s suspicious.”
Lara blinks, then starts blushing.
“I was thinking… I was thinking about how that’s such a ‘you’ thing to say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mari laughs and slaps her palm against the side of the tub. “I don’t know if that’s a diss or if you’re trying to praise me.”
“It’s a compliment!” Lara insists. “Sometimes you sound like the hero in the Prince of Tennis.”
“Uh huh,” Mari teases her, halfheartedly rolling her eyes. “Geez. I can’t take you seriously. Watching weird anime again.”
“Mari! I’m being serious! You have to believe me…!” Lara laments, and tries to plead her case by surging forward to grab Mari’s hands.
It happens so fast that Mari is totally caught off-guard.
It's a devastatingly unexpected flurry of blows.
Lara's hands radiate a gentle warmth as they clasp hers and Mari gets the wind knocked out of her at the endearingly long and pitiful-sounding "Maaaari..." that spills from Lara's lips.
When Mari looks into Lara's sparkly blue and painfully-sincere eyes, her resolve crumbles in no time flat.
“Sure, weirdo,” Mari says, and doesn’t pull away even after Lara heaves a huge sigh of relief.
(It's a total K.O.)
.
.
.
“Mari… Your hands are so cold. That’s weird. Are you okay?”
Lara frowns at her. Pouting with concern, she tugs on Mari’s hands and presses Mari’s palms against her cheeks to warm her up.
Mari’s brain short-circuits, caught in a three-way tug-of-war between laughing incredulously, blushing profusely and calling Lara a big dummy. She ends up doing all three in quick succession after a 3-second lag where all she can focus on is how warm and soft Lara’s cheeks feel in her palms.
“Huh? Yeah. That’s normal for a human,” says Mari after she recovers. “The water is freezing and it’s affecting my body temperature. But… Hey. Your hands are really warm, huh? Your body is pretty warm, too. Must be nice. Being a mermaid…”
Mari’s words trail off again at the sound of Lara’s little gasp of surprise. The tempo is starting to shift again. She can feel it in the air already.
She knows that she's been in the water for too long. It’s not like she’s going to catch hypothermia here, but her hands are starting to get all pruny. Pruny hands are gross. If her pruny feet get blisters because of this, it’d be such a pain to deal with too.
Still, Mari can’t bring herself to pull away.
“No one’s ever said that to me before,” Lara says softly, hands clasped as she kneels at the bottom of the cramped tub like a sinner praying for absolution.
They're even closer now. Her knees bracket Lara's. The water is cold, but Lara's body is warm. And Mari's heart is starting again now, to ache.
There’s a strange expression on Lara’s face. She wouldn’t call it beatific. She doesn’t know what to call it, in truth. Mari’s never seen Lara make a face like that before. She’s on the verge of tears, but she looks so relieved, too.
They are trapped in the moment like a fly, perfectly suspended in amber. They're two bodies caught in the riptide of cause-and-effect stretched thin over decades and centuries. Unable to disentangle. Pulled out to sea.
Mari bites her bottom lip as she silently wipes away the tears pearling at the corner of Lara’s eyes. The moment is so precious, she's afraid of breathing. And every thump of her heart hurts. She can't stop wondering what Lara had gone through in another life.
We are born twice. Once to exist, then a second time to live. What had Gon-chan meant by that?
At first Mari had chalked it all up to mermaid melodramatics. But the more she thinks about it… The more ominous things get. The scar on Lara’s tongue. And how dreadfully afraid of everything she was when she first came to Shiga…
They stay like that for awhile, just lingering in each other’s orbit. Lara's face softens as she looks into Mari's eyes. When her tears start falling in earnest, Mari doesn’t say anything more. Just wordlessly pulls her into an embrace.
She doesn’t know how much more her heart can take here. Luca seems like an okay guy. But if this whole prince thing doesn't work out, she’s going to give Lara her own happy ending...
.
.
.
“Lara, come on,” Mari says eventually after she’s cried her fill and they've hugged it out. “Let’s get out of the water. My hands are getting way too pruny.”
“Pruny?” Lara asks as she agreeably goes along with it when Mari tugs her up and helps her out of the tub.
Her confusion makes sense. Mari doubts that ‘pruny’ factors very much into mermaid vernacular...
“Yeah, look. See?” Mari waves her hands in front of Lara’s face and doesn’t know what to make of Lara’s gasp of amazement.
“Pruny…” Lara says again, then reaches out to grab Mari’s hand again.
“What? Why are you-?” Mari starts asking, but Lara answers wordlessly by continuing to curiously squish the pads of her wrinkly fingers.
“The water does this to your skin? Huh...” Lara says, giggling. “Weird. Humans are so weird.”
Mari is blushing again. She sighs in resignation, feeling like a walking, talking human science exhibit while Lara keeps kneading her fingers like she’s playing with bubble wrap.
“You need to let go soon, unless you’re coming for my run, okay?” Mari says calmly, while their wet PJs continue to drip water all over the (already wet) bathroom tiles.
“That’s not fair,” Lara protests, pouting again. “I’m not done yet…”
Her puppy eyes won’t work this time because Mari is not going to look at her face. Not at all. No! Steel your resolve, Mari Otsu! Mari thinks with a tsk.
They’re too caught up in each other to notice the iridescent sheen from the bathroom mirror as it catches a glimpse of their reflection.
“Well, they’re my hands. So I get to decide,” Mari says as she slides open the bathroom door. “I can hear my alarm going off. Come on. I need to change soon, or I’ll be late. On the count of three, either you’re letting go, or you’re running with me today. One. Two…”
“I…!!! I’m coming. I’m coming!” Lara decides, and interlaces their fingers when Mari tugs them out of the bathroom. The puddles of water ripple underfoot as they make their exit.