Chapter Text
The problem with having a hundred days to kill someone was that, eventually, the number stopped sounding like a promise and started sounding like a sentence.
Froggydude had discovered this somewhere around the beginning of the second week, though he could not remember the exact day. The days had become difficult to distinguish from one another. Morning meant checking his supplies, afternoon meant trying to accomplish something useful before the light began to fail, and night meant lying awake in whatever shelter he had managed to put together, listening to the sounds of a world that seemed perfectly content to continue existing without him. There were moments when he could almost convince himself that he was making progress, that every resource gathered and every plan considered brought him a little closer to the end of this miserable undertaking. Then something would go wrong, as things tended to do, and he would find himself back where he started, tired, hungry, and painfully aware that the world did not reward effort simply because effort had been made.
He had never particularly liked the idea of destiny. It seemed like something people invented when they wanted to give suffering a purpose, and Froggydude had seen enough suffering to know that purpose was often the last thing it possessed.
His reflection in the dark surface of a pool of water was not much help, either.
The face looking back at him belonged to someone who had not slept properly in days. His green hair had grown untidy, the blue streaks running through it dulled by dust and the occasional unfortunate encounter with rain. The little tufts of skin at either side of his head, unmistakably frog-like in their shape, drooped with exhaustion, and the damp air made his skin feel unpleasantly tight. He rubbed at one eye, watched the water tremble beneath his fingers, and considered whether he had the energy to care about any of it.
Being a hybrid had never been particularly remarkable to him. It was simply the body he had been born into, with all the ordinary inconveniences and occasional advantages that came with it. His long tongue was useful when he needed to catch something at a distance, although it had a terrible habit of making otherwise dignified situations deeply embarrassing. His hearing was sensitive enough that certain nights left him wishing the world would learn some restraint. His body had its own requirements, its own limitations, and its own irritating ways of reminding him that he could not always pretend to be entirely human just because it was convenient.
Most days, he did not think about it very much.
Lately, however, he had begun to think about nearly everything too much.
There was a particular kind of loneliness that came from having a task so large it consumed every other part of one's life. People spoke about determination as though it were an endless supply of something noble, but Froggydude had begun to suspect that determination was often just exhaustion that had not yet found a convincing excuse to stop. He kept moving because stopping would mean having to sit with his thoughts, and his thoughts had become increasingly unpleasant company.
He missed ordinary things. He missed waking up without immediately calculating what he would need to do to survive the day. He missed conversations that did not eventually return to Grox, plans that did not involve violence, and the simple comfort of being around someone who knew him well enough to understand when he was having a bad day without requiring an explanation.
It was embarrassing to miss such things when the fate of the mission supposedly mattered so much.
He wondered, occasionally, whether everyone else felt this way and had simply learned to keep it to themselves. It was a comforting thought, though not a particularly useful one.
On the Seventeenth day, he received word that he would be working with someone new.
He was not pleased.
The message was brief, offering little information beyond the fact that the other participant had experience worth considering and that cooperation would improve their chances of success. Froggydude read it twice, searching for some indication that this arrangement was optional. There was none. Apparently, the people responsible for organizing these things had decided that what he needed most was another person to coordinate with, which was an impressive conclusion to reach without asking him whether he wanted one.
He folded the message and put it away.
For the remainder of the morning, he tried not to think about it. He checked his equipment, repaired a section of his shelter, and spent an unreasonable amount of time reorganizing supplies that had been perfectly organized to begin with. By the time he finally set out to meet his new partner, he had convinced himself that his irritation was entirely reasonable and that he would be perfectly capable of behaving like a normal person for the duration of their first conversation.
This confidence lasted until he saw Seawatt.
The first thing Froggydude noticed was his hair.
It was black, not the sort of brown that appeared black when the light was poor, but a deep, unmistakable black that reminded him of charcoal left behind after a fire had gone cold. It fell past Seawatt's shoulders in a loose, heavy sweep, catching against the dark fabric of his clothes whenever the wind moved through it. There was something strangely incongruous about seeing hair that long in a place where nearly everyone seemed to have adopted the practical habits of people who expected to spend their days running, fighting, or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves.
The second thing he noticed was the kohl around his eyes.
The third was that he had apparently forgotten how to walk.
It was only a brief stumble, hardly enough to qualify as an actual incident, but Froggydude caught himself against a nearby surface with all the grace of someone who had just been reminded that his limbs were not, in fact, decorative. He straightened immediately, hoping that the other man had not noticed.
Seawatt looked directly at him.
Of course he had noticed.
There was no polite way to pretend that Seawatt looked ordinary. His skin held a rich brown warmth beneath the daylight, luminous against the dark fabric draped around him, and the fine details of his clothing seemed to belong to a time that had long since disappeared from the world. Gold ornaments caught the light at his wrists and along the edges of his outfit. The cut and arrangement of the fabric were unlike anything Froggydude had grown accustomed to seeing during the mission, carrying the unmistakable influence of ancient Egyptian dress without looking like a costume assembled for the sake of novelty.
His clothes were impractical, Froggydude thought immediately.
Then Seawatt moved, and Froggydude had the deeply inconvenient realization that he did not particularly care.
There was something composed about the way Seawatt carried himself, a quiet certainty that made the difference between them seem more pronounced than it actually was. Froggydude, with his rumpled clothes, green hair, blue streaks, and frog-like ears that had begun to sag with fatigue, felt suddenly and acutely aware of his own appearance. He had never been especially concerned with looking impressive, but standing in front of someone who looked as though he had stepped out of an entirely different century made him feel as if he ought to apologize for the general state of his existence.
Seawatt's gaze traveled over him, pausing briefly at his ears.
Froggydude's ears twitched, He hated that they did that.
"Froggydude?" Seawatt asked.
His voice was lower than Froggydude had expected, steady without being particularly deep, and the sound of it seemed to bring the moment back into focus.
"Yeah." Froggydude cleared his throat. "Seawatt?"
"That's me."
There was a pause in which neither of them seemed entirely certain what they were supposed to do next.
Froggydude had prepared himself for a difficult conversation. He had expected questions about supplies, disagreements about strategy, perhaps an irritating lecture about cooperation from someone who had mistaken the ability to speak confidently for the ability to lead. He had not prepared himself for the possibility that his new partner would be beautiful enough to make him forget every complaint he had rehearsed on the way there.
It was not merely that Seawatt was attractive, though he was, in a way that Froggydude found almost offensive in its completeness. It was that there was no obvious effort behind it. Seawatt did not seem to be performing for anyone. He stood beneath the open sky in his ancient-looking clothes, his long black hair falling around his shoulders, his kohl-lined eyes fixed on Froggydude with mild curiosity, and behaved as though there were nothing remotely unusual about the situation.
Froggydude found himself wondering whether he looked this good every day.
The thought arrived uninvited and stayed.
"So," Seawatt said, glancing at the equipment Froggydude had brought with him. "How much do you know about the area?"
Froggydude stared at him. "Enough," he replied, It was not a particularly useful answer, and he knew it the moment he said it.
Seawatt waited.
Froggydude could practically hear the silence becoming judgmental. "I mean, I've been here a while," he added. "I know where most of the useful resources are, and I've got a decent idea of the terrain. There are a few places we should avoid, though."
"Why?"
"Because they're dangerous."
Seawatt's eyebrows rose slightly. "That narrows it down."
Froggydude stared at him for another moment before a reluctant laugh escaped him. It was brief and rusty, as though the sound had not been used in some time, but Seawatt's expression softened at the corners, and something in Froggydude's chest shifted in response.
There it was again. That ridiculous, unhelpful feeling.
He looked away.
They spent the next few days discussing the mission, and Froggydude was relieved to discover that Seawatt was neither incompetent nor needlessly argumentative. He asked sensible questions, listened to the answers, and challenged the parts of Froggydude's plan that deserved challenging without turning every disagreement into a personal contest. He had a way of considering information before responding to it, which Froggydude appreciated more than he wanted to admit. Too many people seemed to believe that confidence was a substitute for thought, and too many of them became dangerous when their confidence was misplaced.
Seawatt, at least, appeared capable of recognizing when he did not know something.
He also had opinions about nearly everything.
Froggydude discovered this when they began discussing their supplies and Seawatt questioned the arrangement of his equipment, then the route he had chosen, then the amount of time he intended to spend at their next stop. None of the questions were unreasonable, which somehow made them more irritating. It would have been easier to dislike Seawatt if he had been foolish.
Instead, he was intelligent, observant, and apparently determined to make Froggydude justify every decision he had made in the past three days.
By the end of the discussion, Froggydude had revised their route, reconsidered two of his assumptions, and developed a strong desire to find a wall to lean against while he contemplated his life.
"You do realize," he said eventually, "that we don't have to discuss every single detail before we do anything."
"I realize that."
"Because it feels like we are."
"I prefer knowing what I'm walking into."
"Sometimes you just have to improvise."
"Sometimes improvising is another word for not planning properly."
Froggydude opened his mouth then Closed it, Seawatt watched him with an expression that was far too close to amusement.
"I don't like you very much," Froggydude informed him.
"That's unfortunate."
"You seem very comfortable with that."
"I've only known you for a few days."
Froggydude had no answer to that, either, It should have annoyed him more than it did.
They set out together shortly afterward, moving through terrain that had become familiar enough to Froggydude that he could navigate parts of it without looking at the map. Seawatt walked beside him, asking questions whenever something caught his attention, and Froggydude answered them with varying degrees of patience. He discovered that Seawatt was not particularly bothered by silence, which was a relief. There was nothing worse than spending several hours with someone who treated every quiet moment as a problem that needed solving.
For a while, they walked without speaking.
The afternoon light stretched thin across the landscape, catching on the edges of distant structures and turning the dust beneath their feet a muted gold. Froggydude could hear the wind moving through the sparse vegetation, the occasional scrape of their equipment, and the faint rustle of Seawatt's clothes whenever he moved. His own ears shifted toward the sound without conscious instruction.
He caught himself listening.
It was an ordinary sound. Fabric moving against fabric. Nothing important, nothing worth remembering.
Yet he found himself noticing it again a few minutes later, He tried to concentrate on the path.
This was becoming a problem.
He had met attractive people before. He was not so inexperienced that he believed beauty was a supernatural phenomenon, nor was he foolish enough to assume that finding someone attractive automatically meant anything significant. People were beautiful all the time, in all kinds of ways, and the world continued to function regardless. There was no reason why Seawatt should be an exception.
And yet Froggydude kept looking at him.
Not obviously, he hoped. He had enough self-respect left to avoid turning his first afternoon with his new partner into an embarrassing display of infatuation. He looked when Seawatt was examining the terrain, when he was adjusting something at his wrist, when the wind moved his hair away from his face. He looked for a second, perhaps two, then returned his attention to the path with the exaggerated seriousness of a man who had never done anything suspicious in his life.
It did not help that Seawatt occasionally looked back at him.
Each time, Froggydude experienced the distinct sensation of having been caught doing something illegal.
By the time they stopped to rest, he had learned three things about Seawatt. The first was that he took his work seriously. The second was that he had a dry sense of humor that appeared without warning and usually at Froggydude's expense. The third was that Froggydude was in considerably more trouble than he had initially anticipated.
They settled beneath the partial shelter of an old structure, where the fading sunlight did little to soften the chill gathering in the air. Seawatt sat with his back against the stone and began checking his supplies. Froggydude lowered himself onto the ground nearby, stretched his legs, and tried to convince his body that a few minutes of rest counted as an acceptable substitute for an actual night's sleep.
For a while, they occupied themselves separately.
Then Seawatt reached into his bag and produced a small portion of food. "You should eat something," he said.
Froggydude looked at him. "I'm fine."
"You've been staring at that bag for five minutes."
"I have not."
"You have."
"I was thinking."
"About the bag?"
Froggydude's ears lifted in irritation, Seawatt's mouth curved.
It was not a particularly dramatic smile. It was small and brief, barely more than a change in the shape of his mouth, but it transformed his face in a way Froggydude found deeply unreasonable. The composure that had made him seem distant softened into something almost boyish, and for a moment he looked less like a stranger from another time and more like someone Froggydude might have known for years.
Froggydude took the food. "Thank you," he muttered.
"You're welcome."
He ate in silence, acutely aware that Seawatt had offered without making a spectacle of it. There had been no lecture about self-preservation, no suggestion that Froggydude was incapable of looking after himself. Seawatt had simply noticed that he was hungry and done something about it.
It was such a small thing that Froggydude felt faintly ridiculous for appreciating it.
He had become accustomed to treating his own needs as inconveniences. There was always something else to do, something that needed repairing, some resource that had to be collected before the light disappeared. Rest was something he allowed himself when there was nothing more productive to accomplish, and even then he often felt guilty about it. The idea that someone might notice his discomfort and respond without being asked was unfamiliar enough to leave him unsure what to do with it.
He wondered whether Seawatt was always like this.
Then he remembered the way Seawatt had dismantled his plan earlier that afternoon and decided that he was probably not going to make the mistake of romanticizing every aspect of the man's personality.
That would be ridiculous, Completely ridiculous.
He glanced sideways.
Seawatt was studying something in his hands, his long hair falling forward over one shoulder. The last of the sunlight caught the warm brown of his skin, and the kohl around his eyes looked darker as the surrounding world grew dim. His clothes were dusty now, the edges of the fabric marked by the same harsh conditions that had worn down Froggydude's own appearance, but somehow the contrast only made him seem more real.
He was not untouched by the world. He was simply carrying himself through it differently.
Froggydude wondered what Seawatt had been doing before this mission, what kind of life he had left behind, whether he had someone waiting for him somewhere or whether he had become as accustomed to solitude as Froggydude himself. He wondered what Seawatt looked like when he was genuinely happy, what made him angry enough to lose that careful composure, whether he laughed loudly when something was truly funny or preferred the quiet, knowing smiles that seemed to appear whenever Froggydude said something particularly foolish.
The questions came too easily.
He stopped himself.
He had known the man for less than a day. He had no right to be this curious about someone whose name he had only recently learned, and there was certainly no reason to start imagining what his laughter might sound like in a place where neither of them had to worry about Grox.
That was the worst part, perhaps. Not that Seawatt was beautiful, but that Froggydude's mind had begun building a life around the possibility of knowing him better.
He had not asked for this.
He had a mission to complete, a limited amount of time to do it in, and a perfectly reasonable expectation that his new partner would make the work more manageable. He did not need to complicate things by developing a ridiculous attachment to the first man who had been kind enough to share his food.
Especially not a man who looked like that.
"You've gone quiet," Seawatt observed.
Froggydude nearly choked. "I'm always quiet."
Seawatt glanced at him. "No, you're not, you talk a lot."
"Well, I am quiet now."
"Did I do something?"
The question caught Froggydude off guard. Seawatt had asked it without irritation, apparently taking his silence as a sign that something might genuinely be wrong.
For one brief, humiliating moment, Froggydude considered telling him the truth.
*Yes, actually. You exist, and it's making it difficult to think.*
Instead, he shook his head. "No. Just tired."
Seawatt accepted the answer, although he seemed unconvinced. He returned to his supplies without pressing the matter, leaving Froggydude to sit with the uncomfortable awareness that he had been given an opportunity to be honest and had immediately chosen the least informative response possible.
He supposed this was how people got themselves into trouble.
The light continued to fade. Somewhere beyond the shelter, the wind picked up, carrying the dry smell of dust and stone through the narrow opening. Froggydude rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes, intending only to give them a moment's relief.
He must have drifted off for a few minutes, because when he opened them again, the world had changed.
Seawatt was standing at the edge of the shelter, looking out toward the distant horizon.
There was nothing unusual about the sight. People stood and looked at things all the time. Yet something in his posture made Froggydude hesitate before speaking. The relaxed composure had disappeared, replaced by a stillness that did not quite resemble rest. His shoulders were held a little too rigidly, and his hands were motionless at his sides.
For the first time since they had met, Froggydude wondered whether Seawatt was as comfortable in this world as he appeared to be.
Perhaps the clothing, the careful manner, the quiet confidence were not signs of someone who belonged everywhere. Perhaps they were simply the things he had chosen to keep when so much else had become uncertain.
Froggydude knew something about that.
He did not ask what Seawatt was thinking. There were questions that became cruel when asked too early, and he had spent enough of his life answering questions he did not want to answer to understand the value of leaving someone alone with their thoughts.
Instead, he rose, brushed the dust from his clothes, and joined him at the opening. "Tomorrow," he said, "we can take the northern route. It'll save us some time, assuming the terrain hasn't changed too much."
Seawatt looked at him. "That sounds sensible."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I wasn't aware I'd expressed surprise."
"You have a very expressive face."
"So I've been told."
Froggydude laughed, and this time the sound came more easily.
Seawatt looked back toward the horizon, but the tension in his shoulders had eased a little. They stood there for another minute, neither of them speaking, and Froggydude found that he did not particularly mind the silence anymore.
That was the part he would remember later, though he did not know it yet.
Not the first sight of Seawatt's hair, or the gold ornaments catching the light, or even the humiliating realization that he had nearly forgotten how to walk because someone happened to be beautiful. Those things would remain vivid, certainly, and for a long time he would be unable to explain why the memory of their first meeting made him feel so strangely exposed.
But what he would remember most clearly was standing beside a man he barely knew, looking out at a world that had given them very little reason to hope, and discovering that the silence did not feel quite so empty when someone else was there to share it.
He didn't trust seawatt completely.
He was still sensible enough to know that attraction was not Intimately, that curiosity was not affection, and that a single afternoon was hardly enough time to know whether a person was worth trusting. Seawatt was a stranger, and Froggydude had no intention of making the mistake of treating him like anything else.
Still, when they finally settled down for the night, Froggydude found himself thinking about the next morning with an anticipation he had not felt in weeks.
He told himself it was because they had work to do.
It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, He repeated it until he fell asleep.
The following morning, Froggydude woke to the sound of Seawatt speaking to someone.
At first, he assumed he was dreaming. The voice was distant, muffled by the shelter's walls, and he was tired enough that it took several seconds for the words to register. When he finally sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he realized that Seawatt was not speaking to a person at all.
He was reading a message.
Froggydude listened as Seawatt repeated a few of the words under his breath, his tone growing increasingly serious. Then there was a long pause, followed by the sound of something being folded.
"What's going on?" Froggydude asked, his voice rough with sleep.
Seawatt turned toward him, For the first time since they had met, he did not look amused ."We have a problem."
Froggydude pushed himself to his feet. The last traces of sleep disappeared almost immediately. "What kind of problem?"
Seawatt held out the message.
Froggydude took it, read the first few lines, and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
Their original plan had depended on information that was no longer reliable. The route they had intended to take was compromised, and the window they had been given to prepare for their next move had been reduced considerably. Whatever advantages they had expected from working together had suddenly become less certain, and the mission that had already begun to wear Froggydude down was threatening to become something considerably more dangerous.
He read the message again, hoping he had misunderstood.
He had not.
"How long have you known?" he asked.
"About five minutes."
Froggydude lowered the paper.
Outside, the morning had begun in earnest. The wind moved through the dry grass, and somewhere in the distance a bird called to another, indifferent to the fact that two people had just discovered that their carefully arranged plans were no longer worth much.
Froggydude looked at Seawatt, searching his face for some indication of what he was thinking.
Seawatt met his gaze without looking away. "We'll figure something out," he said.
It was not a promise that everything would be fine. It was not even a particularly convincing statement of confidence. It was simply an acknowledgment that they had a problem and would have to deal with it.
For reasons Froggydude could not explain, that was enough to make him feel a little less alone, He folded the message and put it away. "All right," he said. "Let's figure it out."
Neither of them knew, standing there in the cold morning light, that this would become a familiar conversation. Neither knew how many times they would say those words to each other over the coming weeks, or how much they would eventually come to mean. They had no way of knowing that the mission would give them reasons to trust one another, that trust would become friendship, or that friendship would quietly turn into something neither of them had planned for.
For now, there was only the task ahead of them, the time running out, and the uncomfortable certainty that they would have to depend on each other if they wanted to survive what came next.
Froggydude picked up his equipment and followed Seawatt out into the morning.
He was careful not to look at him for too long, He was not entirely successful.
Then-
"AYO CHILL!! I FINALLY FOUND YOU!"