A treat for airairo
A treat for airairo
Cooked up by: A Friendly Chef
Title: Depth Gauge
Characters/Groups: Maru, Yoko, Hina, (mention of Yasu)
Genre: Slice of Life
Rating: G
Warnings: n/a
Author's Notes: Dear airairo, I was very happy to work with your favorite three and though I took a different path from your prompts, I hope you'll enjoy your gift fic! And to the you-know-whos, thank you so very much for all the you-know-whats.
The only way to sink was to exhale - and then he went from there.
He always found the second breath the hardest. It was supposed to be the one that submerged him as the vest deflated, but his inexperience and personality showed every time he popped back up and had to start over. He could easily exhale deeply enough to start the descent. But sometimes he got ahead of himself or gave in slightly to the inherent panic of purposeful sinking. The excitement kept air in his lungs and too much air in his lungs kept him close to the surface.
Yasu had once told him that it went away with time - everything, all of the counterproductive reactions and hesitation did. He had said there was a click, something just clicks, and all the anxiety floods out of your system. The environment becomes second nature - well, it was nature, Yasu had argued. After all, everyone starts off submerged in water.
The basic concept wasn’t unfamiliar to Maruyama Ryuhei. It seemed like a lot things in life, or his life specifically, were like that: he had to keep diving until it clicked.
The cameraman next to him pointed to his ear and gave an “okay” sign. Maru signaled “okay” back and followed him further down the dive line into what easily seemed like never-ending green-blue. Even though he was enveloped in noise - the mechanical breathing of the regulator, the actions of the other divers, every movement and stroke cutting through the water, the sound of the ocean itself, magnified and filling all of the large, empty space around them - the loudest thing in Maru’s head was his own thought process. He understood the importance of being attentive while diving, moving his jaw from side to side every so often to readjust the pressure in his ears and looking around him as he descended - but it couldn’t be helped. Until the floor, the ocean was a vast space of claustrophobic nothingness and everyone around him had their mouths full. The only person to talk to was himself.
And when he got tired of hearing his own voice in his head, he started thinking about being on the boat at the surface just a few minutes before.
“Hm, well, I’m thinking about getting certified,” Hina said.
“Why?” Yoko asked.
“It’s fun. It’s fun, right?”
Maru nodded.
“See?” Hina continued. “I think it’d be fun. And it’d be good for work, you could film things underwater.”
“That’s why we have Maru and Yasu,” Yoko replied.
“But if we were certified, we could do those jobs too - you’d have more opportunities. We could go to training together.”
“No.”
“You’re not interesting in diving?” Hina asked.
“Absolutely not. No way.”
“Really?”
“There’s no point in it,” he argued.
“No point? You get to see the ocean and fish-”
“I can go to the aquarium,” Yoko countered. “There’s a lot of fish there, that’s what the aquarium’s for.”
“Yeah but-”
“I can see all the fish there and I don’t have to ride a boat to get there,” Yoko replied. “And I won’t drown looking at fish.”
“You won’t drown,” Hina said, “that’s why you have the oxygen tank.”
“It won’t save me from drowning if there’s something wrong with it or if I run out of air! What if I’m all the way at the bottom and I run out of air looking at fish when I could have just gone to the aquarium! Or the fish market - there’s fish there! I’ll be at the bottom drowning and the fish won’t care.”
Back underwater, Maru was starting to see more wildlife as they continued down. Maybe they would care, he mused. Or maybe not care, but probably be more interested than Yokoyama realized. After all, fish would sometimes swim up to him, curiously looking at something they couldn’t possibly decipher - confusedly fascinated by Maru’s eyes behind the treated glass in the diving mask - and then swim off; other fish passed at a casual distance, less brave but no less aware of his presence.
That was probably his favorite part of diving - so much so that often times he’d have to quell the impulse to forget the job at hand and go off chasing fish, just follow them to see what fish did during their daily lives. He usually only dove when he had to for work, but he knew, even if he wasn’t being filmed, he couldn’t swim off to watch fish. Even with your closest friends, you can't just swim off.
Closer to the bottom, he started to feel the effects of infrequent diving. His mouth was already dry from breathing through the regulator. His legs were starting to get a reactionary pull to them, the muscles twitching and ready to cramp from the unfamiliar motion of kicking with large and heavy swim fins. That was definitely his least favorite part - his leg would cramp every dive, it seemed. He knew how to grab the tip of the fin and pull back until the tension released, but it didn’t make it any less unpleasant when it happened. Especially under a considerable amount of water.
He tried to recall the last time he had seen or heard of Yasu cramping during a dive. Nothing really came to mind.
Whatever it was that led to that “click” Yasu talked about, Maru hadn’t found it yet.
That had been evident enough on the surface when he had hesitated to take the step off of the boat and into the water. He hated plunging in. The boat wasn’t that high up and the ocean was there to catch him - yet it always felt like jumping off of the high board at a pool. And once in the water, there was always that moment of disorientation, the sometimes uncoordinated movements as the air-filled buoyancy compensator vest rolled him around on his side or back from being too full at the start. He hesitated because he remembered the feeling of falling out of one normal world and splashing into a gravity-less, spinning one, immediately popping up to glimpse the normalcy again before having to sink-bob his way down.
But even before the hesitation, Maru remembered nodding, smiling, waving to the crew as he slowly put on his equipment, eagerly agreeing to dive down with some locals for the sake of their tv show.
“Good luck,” Hina said.
“Don’t drown,” Yoko said after.
Maru tried not to smile too hard. “Don’t drown,” was just as serious as it was teasing.
Before the hesitation, he had nodded, smiled and waved to Yoko and Hina too.
At the bottom of their dive, Maru and the cameraman caught up with the rest of the team. Someone handed him part of their net, motioning for him to spread it one direction while the cameraman backed up to start filming.
The descent there took longer than their entire task and the descent itself hadn’t taken nearly as long as it felt. In a land of bright yellows and blues and strange landscape that breathed and crawled, time was money and sightseeing wasn’t on the agenda. With the net in place, the dive leader gave the thumbs up to start the ascent.
Maru nodded and then quickly gave an "okay" sign back, remembering that a nod meant nothing under water. By the time it was his turn to start up, another curious little fish had come near. Apologetically, he waved goodbye to it and raised the inflator hose, pushing the button to put oxygen into his vest to head toward the surface.
Even though he knew it wasn’t, it always seemed like ascending was faster than descending. Maybe it’s easier to swim than sink, he thought. He knew he was supposed to look up as he went, but Maru would take quick glances around and below him whenever he could. For all the trouble and anxiety and fear that it cost to dive, he thought it worthwhile to try to steal as many of the benefits as possible - pull the tranquility and nature and the best part of the open space back up to the surface with him. Catch the attention of as many little fish as possible.
First a little too fast, then a little too slow, his pace evened out and within minutes he could start to see signs of life above water. Soon he’d have to be back in variety filming mode. Even now, after years of being on tv and making a living by selling his image, if he thought too hard about the whole process, he’d get a little nervous. Talking to people was easy, being himself was easy; being a presence took a lot of work.
One of the first real times he was on television, it was some sort of cooking battle amongst juniors. East versus West, Kyoto special. Pros like Aiba, Ninomiya and Matsumoto on one side and pros like Yokoyama and Murakami on the other. And then him.
He had shown up with paper to take notes on the cooking tips, missing the point entirely, while Yoko and Hina could hardly be contained. He couldn’t remember saying anything, really cooking anything, not much beyond the general feeling of being nervous and being somewhere uncomfortable and new; but he could vividly remember looking over at Yoko, who had almost sprawled out across Hina as they both excitedly tried to help Maru answer the host’s questions.
On broadcasts now, they didn’t have to prompt him to speak; the difficulty was mostly in trying to get a word in edgewise. Sometimes he didn’t feel the pressure to be noticed at all; he would just relax and enjoy what went on, feeding off of it and learning, even still, from both of them.
It was a lot like being the kid in the backseat of a car, leaning forward into the front to listen in on the conversation between parents.
Maru was breaking the surface and trying his hardest not to laugh. There was nothing he could do now to stop his imagination from picturing the idea a little too well and replacing parents with the unwelcome images of Yoko and Hina. And there was really nothing he could do to keep his imagination from filling in the rest of Kanjani8 as family members too. Grandma, two younger siblings…maybe a family dog.
It was extremely difficult to pull off his fins and hand them to the crew on the boat while laughing.
“Maru,” Hina called over the side.
Maru waved it off. He couldn’t even begin to explain.
“See,” Yoko said to Hina, pointing down. “He ran out of oxygen.”
“What’s so funny?” Hina asked, helping pull Maru, complete with heavy tank, out of the water and back onto the boat.
“Haaaaaaaa.” His laugh cracked and he tried to pause to catch his breath. By the time he sat down and took off the tank, he was considerably calmer…but purposefully ignoring Hina’s question.
“There should be a photographer at the dock for a magazine tie-in,” the cameraman told them.
“Nn, okay,” Hina replied, nodding and standing in the middle of the group with his arms crossed.
“Maru,” Yoko asked, sitting next to him. He was glancing off to the side, poking his tongue around in his cheek trying to hide a smile. “Did you see any?”
“See any what?”
“They told us there are a lot of sharks in this area.”
“What? Here?”
“Unbelievable,” Yoko commented, sitting back. “This guy’s constantly going around yelling out 'shark' and dives into an area with tons of them and doesn’t see one.”
“Did I miss them? I didn’t see any, did I miss them?” Maru asked the cameraman, somewhat bouncing in his seat.
“I didn’t see any,” he replied.
“Well, they probably didn’t know you were coming,” Yoko said.
“Next time,” Hina stated, not even in reassurance - just as matter of fact.
“You’re going to go with me, right?” Maru replied.
“Yeah, probably.”
“You know there are giant bugs in the ocean too, right?” Yoko added.
“No there aren’t!” Hina yelled at him. “You’re making that up!”
“I’m not. I saw it on tv.”
“And you’re going with us, Yuuchin,” Maru finished, in a bit of a singsong voice.
Yoko laughed. “Uh-un, absolutely not. No way.”
“Come on,” Hina prodded.
“And get eaten by giant bugs?”
“There aren’t any giant bugs!”
Maru unzipped the top of his wetsuit, peeling it half down to stay warm under the sun. It was much more comfortable without the weight of the tank on his back and the extra constriction on his chest from the suit.
He exhaled, smiling at them, and said, “What next?”