FIC: Love is a Many-Tentacled Thing, SanaYuki, NC17 (1/6)
Title: Love is a Many-Tentacled Thing (1/6)
Author: Ociwen
Pairing/characters: Sanada/Yukimura with others
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 47 000
Warning (if any): Bad fic ahoy! This fic contains spoilers for 40.5, crude humour, bodily functions and crabs.
Summary: Sanada experiences a sea change in order to begin a relationship with Yukimura. Can he balance his secrets, the Rikkai Dai tennis club, and still achieve his goal?
Notes (if any): Thank you pixxers for all the help and koneko_meow for the beta. Written for a rude and ungrateful recipient in balls_it_up. Hopefully others can appreciate the humour-and horror-involved in badfic. Have your umbrellas ready!
This fic has been truncated into 6 sections due to length. These are not chapters. [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6]
The gallery is a few blocks from the ocean cliffs. Yukimura thinks that only an architect would be moronic enough to build something so close to water. As he walks by the brass plaque, emblazoned with the firm Matsumoto, Niou and Schmidt, he laughs under his breath.
"Figures," he murmurs.
His backpack is strapped to his back. The sea air whips up around his face when he unlocks his bicycle and starts down the rode, riding toward the sea, breathing in the heady fishy scent that never leaves the air. The sky swirls with grey clouds-the approach of a spring storm that Yukimura can practically taste, that metallic tang on the atmosphere that makes the seagulls circle the beaches and his blood race. It feels wonderful to be alive, coasting down the side of the road so fast his head spins and he could laugh and shout from the simple pleasure.
Yukimura keeps peddling, turning a sharp corner onto a gravel road, his legs pumping and his heart, too. The sounds of the rushing ocean meld with the crunch of gravel under his wheels, which bounce and jerk him and his voice rattles when he laughs.
The pathway slopes, turning into scrappy sea grass that brushes his bare legs as he rides through the rolling dunes. Another crest of a hill more and the water is louder than ever, the seagulls swarm above, white specks on the sky. He hops off, parks his bike near a cement barrier, and then jumps that too.
The beach is secluded and forgotten, unpopular because the sand is too rocky and the sandbars closer to the city are here replaced by shelves of rock leading out to a deep drop in the ocean. The stretch of rocky sand is cluttered with dried black seaweed and bits of glass that glimmer on sunny days. Now and then Yukimura can feel the warmth of the sun peeping out from the clouds overhead, but it's never for very long.
He loves it here, this place. His place. He loves the mutable scenes of the ocean- some days its slate green with white-capped fingers reaching out into the horizon. Some days it’s a writhing black, spewing waste and dead fish onto the shore. Some days it's a glistening blue, warm and inviting Yukimura to strip down and dive in after he finishes.
Today, the waves slide onto the sand, lapping at his sneakers. The water might be warm enough to swim in now, but the air is still cool; there is still a touch of winter's chill on it and his hands are numb from the bike ride. He rubs them together on the hem of his shirt and walks along, searching for a place to sit.
A piece of driftwood will do. He dumps his backpack down and unzips it, pulling out his pad of watercolour paper and his favourite watercolour pencils. He likes them best because for painting the sea as he sits here and watches it, it's easy. No mess of bringing a dish of water when he can add that later.
Yukimura flips to a clean sheet of paper, cringing at his earlier attempts. They're corny and bad, as far as he's concerned, messy expanses of amateur shading and bad blending of colours. Today he can start fresh and get better, improve on his art the way he practices on his tennis.
First he draws the horizon line, using a blue because the water has a bluish-grey tinge to it today. Then he shades a section below it, before switching to another shade, filling in horizontal swaths moving left to right to avoid smudging as much as he can. Yukimura smiles; the watercolour pencils don't smudge much when he manages to keep the paper dry, but the faint mists floating off the ocean make it difficult and before too long, he's scowling at the dots of water spreading on his paper.
Dammit, he thinks. It's not ruined, but he doesn't like it. With his dark green pencil, he scribbles over the water patches as fast as he can to blend them into the rest. The wind has picked up. It blows his hair all around his face and makes it difficult to concentrate when there are locks of hair tickling his mouth and nose.
Huffing, Yukimura tries to hold his hair back with his other hand as he draws, but he can't hold his paper steady enough and it slips off his lap. He groans. "Crap," he mutters as he picks it up off the sand and brushes the pad off.
His fingertips are cold. The hairs on his legs stand up, prickling his skin with goosepimples but he keeps sketching. The atmosphere is good. The day is perfect to draw the sea-the water moves, swollen and dark, but there's no storm yet. Maybe tonight, maybe by the time the light dims and he has to ride home during the purple twilight in the rain. For now, he's content to watch the ocean, to breathe it in and absorb the life that he missed out on during his junior high years.
No! I left the disease behind!
It's been almost two years since the operation. Nothing except the occasional sleepy tingle of his fingertips or toes to suggest he ever was sick with a neurological disorder. I'm fine now, Yukimura thinks, balling his fist up with resolve.
He pushes his hair back behind his ears and bites his bottom lip, squinting out across the sea. Slight waves rise and fall as the ocean exhales, heaves with a sigh and another wave breaks on the rocks at the far edges of the beach. There, the higher cliffs hide other coves, other beaches, other caves. For a moment, Yukimura sets down his pencils and watches the ocean, trying to feel the colours, trying to see the shades of blue, grey, green.
Yukimura looks back down at his picture. He has patches of blue, grey and green, but they aren’t right. His form is terrible. It looks like a child's scribbles. He's about to rip the page from his pad and groan in frustration when he hears a noise. A soft plonk of something breaking the water's surface. He blinks and looks up, looks out, searching for a jumping fish, maybe, or a sea tern, but there's nothing around except the gulls above his head.
"Hn," he says.
But then a second noise echoes on the heavy air, a gurgling tarundoru sound that isn't quite human. He shivers, frisson sending a chill down his spine and making his body hum. The noise hangs in his mind, tarundoru tarundoru tarundoru and he doesn't understand the meaning, just the melodious sound. Like a babbling brook, only different because he can't place the sound; he can't figure it out because the sea rushes, it doesn't babble "tarundoru".
Yukimura shakes his head, shrugging the sound away, at least temporarily. He picks a pencil back up and looks at his painting, considering. He makes a line with the teal, then darkens it with a shading strip of black. No, wait, a bit heavier because it's not black enough. He licks his lips and tastes salt.
He paints because he can. He paints because he's alive, the same reason he plays tennis. He paints because there are so many views to the sea and he wants to capture at least one as perfectly as he can. Like the Muga no Kyouichi, only in watercolour.
Only when his cellphone rings does he set his pad down again. "Seiichi, it's almost time for supper," his mother says. "Where are you?"
"At the art gallery," he lies. Sort of. She doesn't need to worry about him drowning, although he's sixteen and not a little kid anymore, but its better safe than sorry. Besides, he was there before.
"It's time to come home," she tells him. And then she hangs up, her word final.
Yukimura looks out at the ocean, seeing the faintest crescent of a rising moon reflected on the dark water. The sky, too, is darker than before, although not yet the velvety black of evening, more a violet. He has to squint to see his painting now and that's usually a sign to stop for the day. Although it's not finished, it won't ever be because tomorrow the sea will have changed again and he can never catch it the same way.
"Oh well," he says. Yukimura turns, his back to the sea as he stuffs his pencils and his pad back into his backpack. He can't shake the odd feeling, the unexplained sense that something is here with him. The back of his neck prickles and he shivers again, rubbing his hands frantically over his arms to ward off the sudden chill.
As he climbs the shifting rocky sands to his bicycle, in the distance Yukimura hears that gurgled tarundoru again. Before he can check, the soft splash of something diving under the ocean makes him smile.
Because he wasn't going mad. There was something with him.
"Maybe a sea bass," he says to himself as he pauses on the top of the tune. He half-turns for one last look to the sea.
Yukimura inhales the air, leans into the ocean's wind combing through his hair and then he climbs back down towards his bike.
His mother will kill him if he's home too late after dark.
*--+--~--S--~--+--*
He watches the figure recede into the distance, lost in the shadows of the dunes though the sun hasn't fully set yet and the last few minutes of day remain, hidden by the heaving clouds overhead.
Sanada's heart is swollen, and his chest too, filled with the burning ache for the figure he's watched-day in and day out-walking along the beach, her beautiful form long and lean, and her hair blown up by the wind. Sometimes, she does something with a board and he doesn't fully understand what because he can never swim close enough to see.
So he sits on a rock shelf, hidden by cliffs, and sticks his head out of the water now and then, unable to look away but unwilling to swim closer. He's not supposed to be seen. He's not supposed to be heard either, but when the noises emerge in the back of his throat, vibrating through his gills, he can't contain them. He flushes hot under the water, berating himself for being this way, for wanting something so far from his reach.
"Don't go!" he always wants to shout, to tell her his feelings.
But he can't.
Some days, she will play with a ball, throwing it in her hand the way the sea bounces ducks and terns and even dead fish, too. The motion fascinates him and he wants to learn why she bounces that ball, why she plays with it and laughs loud enough that Sanada can hear her voice.
It's a beautiful noise, soft and strong, too. It sends pleasurable pangs through his belly and sometimes, on that rocky shelf, he'll slip off the edge because he won't be paying any attention to his body. His tail will slide into the water and he'll open his eyes to a face full of seaweed and plastic bag sludge, floating in the shallow cove along with him.
Each passing day it becomes harder to hold himself back, to keep himself here, to this place, and watch her watching the sea. Sanada doesn't understand if she's looking for something, maybe waiting for the weather to warm up enough for swimming-neither seems right.
He balls his fists and scowls to himself after her figure disappears onto dry land. Something pokes his sides, like hunger, but not quite. It's a feeling that ebbs and flows with her presence; now, its swollen so much in his throat that he can barely breathe. His gills feel clogged and when he forces them open, the air doesn't seem to reach his head. He's always dizzy, light-headed, swimming in circles because he forgets himself.
He thinks of her, always-he wants to ask her name, to come closer, but she'd be afraid. Humans always are-although Sanada has never tried.
But he wants to.
He sighs, his gills pushing air out in a gurgling bubble that makes a soft plunk plopping noise when it surfaces, bursting on the water's edge.
There has to be some way to sate this hollow feeling, to fill this void within himself, so achingly empty inside as the water begins to cool with the chill of evening and the dim grey light leaves the depths. The water swirls with an impending storm. He can't stay here, as much as he wants to wait for her to return, soon, to her place where he can watch from a distance and want and hope, but never have.
Maybe there is a way to change things.
I want to know this person, Sanada thinks. He can see her round face when he closes his eyes. He can see her dark hair, her dark eyes, alive with the ephemeral changes of the sea and heat blooms on his cheeks. He can see her walking along the edge of the beach, smiling to herself as the water laps at her toes, her calves, her…
A shiver runs down his spine, from his neck to his tail, and all the hair on his head stands up. He knows, deep down, that he wants to touch her the way the water does, and more than that, too.
These feelings inside himself…they are those feelings. The forbidden sort for a human that makes shame stain his face, slapping reality back at Sanada.
"It would never work," he grumbles. "It couldn’t." He flips his tail, starting a slow swimming trudge back home.
It couldn't work between a human and a merman…
As he's about to push himself harder through the swollen water, on the rocky sand bed, maybe a few feet away, he notices something skittering across the seafloor. Sanada stops, hovering above as he sees a small crab looking up at him, its claws clattering softly, sending a ticklish vibration his way.
Sanada blinks.
Instead of swimming home, he starts to follow the crab when it scuttles off in the opposite direction.
*--+--~--A--~--+--*
His mother chatters as loud as the tv during supper and Yukimura does his best to ignore her. He slurps his soup and chews idly on the strips of wakame and bamboo shoots in the broth. He pokes at the fried fish and watches the small tv from its perch by the kitchen sink.
"Daddy should be home soon, Rei," his mother tells his sister. "Seiichi, eat more rice." She dumps another scoop into Yukimura's bowl before he says a word. Not that he would-he's hungry enough, his body warm and his skin cool from the brisk bike ride home.
There's nothing on tv yet, just news that Yukimura doesn't really care about, but anything is more interesting than his mother talking about new throw cushions and a coffee table with his sister, as if she cares too.
"…reported seeing a mermaid last week off the coast near Sasebo…"
Yukimura blinks. He presses the volume on the remote to drown his mother out. She pauses too, noticing the flickering screen showing a reporter speaking with a fisherman in a plaid shirt and tall rubber roots.
His mother shakes her head when his sister asks, "Are mermaids real?"
"Of course not, Rei-chan!" she says, laughing at the tv. "The fisherman probably had one too many beers on his boat that day."
Yukimura, though, keeps watching. Idle interest, maybe, glues his eyes to the screen, seeing the choppy waves off the northern Kyuushu coast and the same circling seagulls that are everywhere, even around his beach.
The fisherman waves his hands, nodding vehemently when the reporter raises a skeptical eyebrow. "It made a noise, like a gurgle. Like-" as he flaps his hands and makes Yukimura's mother and sister giggle, the man manages to make a sound, almost like that bubbling "tarundoru" Yukimura heard before.
He sucks in a breath. His eyes go wide, blind to the glare of the fuzzy reception. That same noise echoes in his ears. The rushing sea, the squawking gulls, that gurgling unpronounceable noise he heard, so close to the fisherman's impression.
Did I…
No. Mermaids don't exist!
The tv screen fades from a grey coastal port back to the newsroom as a tv anchor smiles and nods to the reporter, telling him to have a good night and watch out for more Hollywood activists and fishermen out to save the whales and mermaids. Yukimura shakes his head. He's going crazy.
"Whales are tasty," his sister says. "I bet mermaids are tasty too."
"Seiichi?" his mother asks. "Did you take your pills?" She pushes a pillbox across the table. Yukimura looks down, confused for a moment until he realizes that no, he hasn't taken his pills today.
"That's probably why," he murmurs. His mother looks at him intently, smiling when he swallows the pills down with a glass of warm tea.
He hates the pills and most of all he loathes the aftertaste, that inevitable powdery, chalky feeling at the back of his mouth that bubbles up a half hour after his meal. He sits at his desk, swallowing mucus to make the bitterness leave his mouth, but it never works. Nothing-not water, not food, not even stolen sips from his father's sake stash-ever does the trick.
Yukimura cringes. If the pills keep his illness at bay, he doesn't know. Maybe they're a placebo. He tries to forget the bitter burn as he plays with his racket, winding a new roll of grip tape around the handle in preparation for the new season next week when school starts.
His afternoon trips to the beach will soon be replaced with classes and school committees and tennis club. He's excited, yes, but…
The ocean has a siren call, that distant roar he can make out on clear nights when his window is cranked open all the way, the way it is tonight. Yukimura sighs and sets down his racket. On the other side of his bedroom door, he can hear his mother greeting his father, who must have just come home from work.
Yukimura walks over and leans into his window, inhaling the breeze drifting in from the sea. Towards the ocean, lights twinkle-maybe stars, maybe ocean tankers, maybe even buoys, he doesn't know. It's a beautiful wash of ink pricked with light, as intangible as the seascapes he keeps trying to paint. With the night dawned, the awful seagulls have shut up, replaced with the first crickets of the year, softly chirping under his window sill.
A vague sense of loneliness accompanies his yearning for the spring break to last a little longer, to give him more time to capture the sea on canvas. His chest tightens as he looks out towards the ocean, sighing heavily to himself. Yukimura drums his fingertips on the window ledge, breaking up the soft silence because he can't bear it any longer.
If he could grab his bike and ride down to his place now, he would. If he could see in the dark and paint the black tide filled with starlight, he would. Instead, he stands here and listens and watches the lights flickering, windows going dark one by one as the suburbs get ready for bed.
Eventually, the breezes grow too cold and he shuts his window, slapping his face to make the feeling return. Maybe in a month or so it will be truly warm enough to swim. Yukimura smiles at the thought. His eyes drift towards his desk, to his racket, propped up against his chair legs.
Maybe the team could go to my beach, he thinks. But then…"No," he whispers. No. It's his private place. He doesn't want to share it with anyone, not until he's painted it first and captured that raw, oceanic wild.
School and tennis are coming soon, but Yukimura doesn't know if he wants to be ready for it. Somehow, he knows it won't matter. Time will pass and come anyway, as steady and predictable as the motion of the tides. Yukimura lies down on his floor, props his feet under his bed for leverage and his hands behind his head, and starts on crunches.
He sits up and his abs burn from atrophy.
"One…"
*--+--~--N--~--+--*
Everything below his navel is on fire, a searing pain that pulses through his lower body. The sharp pain makes Sanada groan out into the night, as much as he tries to bite down on his cries.
The first gasp of air through his lungs, lungs without gills on his neck, flapping against his skin, was scary enough. Now he's lying on the pebbly beach as waves seep around his feet. His feet. He can barely believe it-before today he had his tail, the same as ever, a grayish greenish scaly tail that was his body and now…
He can't even look down to see. Well, he's too afraid to look at these strange things-his tail split in two, separate limbs that move of their own accord, shuddering and twitching and he doesn't know how to control them. Even though he took the magical pearl of human wisdom and swallowed it down, he can't figure the legs out.
That, and he can't look down to even see them in the first place. His body aches, having been bashed on the waves and smashed by the surf as he struggled underwater to surface, swimming with his hands, propelled by the exploding sensation in his chest to get to the surface as fast as possible and suck in air before he burst.
And now Sanada lays there, broken and bruised with two legs, hardly able to even lift himself up. He exhales; the sensation of breathing is strange without gills. He tries to centre himself, to think move and make the legs work. One of them jerks when a rush of cold water hits it, but nothing more.
A little longer, he thinks. He sputters as the water creeps around his body, oozes into his nostrils. Never before in the sea did he notice the water filling him, coursing through his veins, his body. Now, as a human, every motion of the water around him is multiplied, the difference between it and him so very apparent-the temperature, the fluidity, the lightness.
He takes another breath and heaves himself onto his stomach, clawing at the sand with his hands. He pulls his body up further onto the shore. Pebbles scrape against his naked skin, sharp and cold, but he has to ignore them. Again, he pulls himself, hands digging into the sand as deep as possible as it floats away with the water, making it difficult to drag his weight onto the beach.
His stomach hurts too, rumbling like the churning sea. Sanada's hungry. And tired. He moves himself one, maybe two feet, and collapses onto the sand. His forearms are on fire. Yes, he was skilled at merkendo and wielding coral knives (Japanese merpeople are still Japanese after all), but…nothing prepared him for the excruciating heaviness of pulling himself onshore, not unlike a beached whale. He's too heavy for the tides to push him any further and there's nothing to grab but the crumbling, rough sand.
"Dammit…" he grumbles. A part of his mind thinks I can't do this and his legs ache and his arms hurt and his stomach is scraped up and his ribs feel the awkward pressure of continuous breathing and he could, so easily, allow himself to slide back into the sea, but…
She's on land.
Somewhere. He doesn't yet know where, but he can feel it. He sniffs the air, trying to smell her presence on the beach, but there is nothing. And in the blackness of midnight-despite the crescent moon-her footsteps in the sand would be long washed away.
With a burst of determination flushing his skin, warming his belly in weird, new ways, Sanada heaves himself onto his elbows, yelling through his teeth as he pulls himself to shaking knees.
I did it! he thinks, as he stands there, wobbling but half-upright. He shakes like an anemone in a monsoon. Pride burns inside and he imagines her, smiling at him, clapping her hands together and saying, "Oh, Sanada!" because she's so pleased with him too.
Until he crumples to the beach again.
Sanada faceplants into the sand.
It takes him ages-he doesn't know how long. Surely, its hours, because the tide retreats into the ocean, leaving him high and dry on the beach with no hope of returning home-but he manages to stumble and drag his way to the edge of a sloping dune, covered in rustling grasses.
He doesn't know if he's doing it right-his knees wobble. His steps are shuffling at best, but he thinks of her and how she walks along the beach, so easily and gracefully, and he forces himself to think, to put one foot in front of the other. Then he begins to move.
Sanada hates this, being awkward with these new land legs. He hates feeling this way, so…incomplete and failing, but at the same time, if he doesn't try, he won't make it. He won't be able to find her, to tell her how he feels, to ease the hollow emptiness inside that eats away at him, eats his thoughts and feeds them with her presence. Even now, struggling to walk across these dunes that seem as tall as sea shelves in the deepest ocean depths, thinking of her gives him courage to do it.
Sometimes, as a merman, he would swim close enough to other beaches and watch humans-from afar, though, never as close as when he watches her-and he knows that the square building lit up by artificial yellow lights is a human building. As he gets closer, it becomes apparent that no one seems to be there. It's dark inside through the glass windows. Sanada walks across a stretch of pavement, wincing at the hardness pressing against the soles of his feet. He taps the windows, searching for someone, anyone, but he cannot find anything except strange square papers on the white walls.
They look almost like the strange papers that she would throw into the ocean sometimes. Back home, he saved a collection-maybe five or six, however many he managed to salvage in the water, and he hid them under the large Sanada family stone by the cave he lived in. Sanada doesn't understand why she would throw them into the ocean-or what these land-locked square papers mean to her-but it's very obvious no one is here.
No one except him.
Sanada sighs. The sound is strange, to hear his voice in the air not under the sea, and there are no air bubbles tickling his scales, no vibrations tickling his chest. Just raw sound. He cringes a little before he starts walking again. The further he goes, the easier it becomes to take one step, then two, then three.
He doesn't know where he's going. As he walks down a beaten pathway past another patch of pavement, a shiny plaque beckons to him. He walks over, mouthing over the names engraved into the metal.
Matsumoto, Niou and Schmidt
Sanada doesn't understand what that means either, but it feels right. It feels like a sign. He reads the letters over again, memorizing them, engraving them into his mind. Further in land, he can see glittering artificial lights of what must be a human city. That, too, is a beacon.
If he wants to find her, he has to find people.
As he walks away from the building, leaving behind the square papers inside and the metal plaque outside, it occurs to Sanada that he doesn't even know her name, just her face and the sound of her laughter, her voice.
This is not good, he thinks. The city he approaches is big. He might be a merman, but he's not an idiot. He knows that dry land Japan is filled with people--they've pushed back the merpeople for centuries into the sea, deeper and deeper. More than a little tension coils in Sanada's belly at the prospect of coming across crowds of humans, more in a minute than he's seen before in his entire lifetime.
He balls his fist, clenches his jaw, and keeps walking. I'm ready.
The further he walks, the closer he gets to the city, the drier the air feels. His skin is cold and the strange new bits between his legs twitch and shrivel up more each time he shivers. His mouth is dry, his skin feels tight without water washing over it and grit scrapes at the bottom of his feet. He walks along the side of a paved pathway-a road-a little voice inside his head reminds him, the magic pearl of wisdom dropping hints of humanity that he needs to know, subconsciously, without effort.
Sanada knows when to cross the road and he can recognize what a house is when he sees the first few clustered buildings coming into view. He pauses to look at them, reading names and numbers he doesn't understand on metal plaques on high cement walls. Humans are strange, all mermen know that, but seeing these structures and knowing people live there…
Sanada snorts. A cave on the ocean floor is fine for him. One lined with sea grasses swaying in the currents, with his family rock nearby and her papers…
He's tight between the legs again and it makes him squirm. Sanada glances down and his eyes go wide when he sees that he's not shriveled anymore so much as…
Twitching.
And swollen.
And there's desire coursing through his body, the feeling that the elders said would come when he would want to fertilize an egg and make merbabies, only…
Sanada flushes. His face burns and he silently thanks the gods that no one is awake to see this, to see him try to beat the hardness down with his hand until-shamed even more-he realizes that touching only makes it worse. Only makes his…his penis, the voice says…throb even more.
So he keeps walking. Feet throbbing from the rough roads and pavements, skin cool and goosepimpling from the intermittent breezes blowing familiar, salty air into the rows of houses. Sanada creeps between them, reading the plaques when he can, until the first few fat drops of rain start to fall.
And then, a sudden rush. Pouring down onto him in a shower, quenching his body but drowning his spirits. He shudders and rubs his arms, huddling over as he picks up his pace, trying to find someplace to go before dawn when people rise. His legs are exhausted and his eyes droop, but the hair plastered down over his eyes that he has to push back every second step keeps him awake. Thoughts of her keep him going.
Her, walking along the beach and smiling, covering a laugh with her hand before she pushes her hair back behind her ears…
Her, sitting on a piece of driftwood, looking out over the ocean with her beautiful, dark eyes that suck Sanada in like an undertow…
Her, dancing through the waves and splashing up beads of diamond-bright water that cling to her round face, softened with a big smile…
Something dark on the sidewalk pavement catches his eye. He carefully shuffles closer, and then reaches a hesitant foot out to poke the object. It doesn't move on its own, just when his toe pushes it around. Sanada reads the words Jack Purcell across the front.
A hat…you put it on your head because humans wear 'clothes' to cover their naked bodies…
Realizing this makes every pore, every hair, every inch of Sanada burn with embarrassment. He winces and covers his newfound bits with his hands, but that still won't hide his cold, naked backside or the feverish shame prickling his entire body. He feels stupid and foolish and exposed the way he never had before in the sea, not just because, well, he had no real bits to speak of as a merman, but because there was no real sense of naked shame like he has at the moment, hunched over and cringing in the long shadows of a house wall.
Without anything else, he takes the hat and puts it on his head. He can cover that, at least, and hide the furious heat staining his cheeks. He knows he needs to find somewhere fast; the first flickering grey on the horizon is chasing him.
Sanada starts to run, reluctantly taking his hands off his bits, and his eyes flit back and forth from house walls, searching for that Matsumoto, Niou and Schmidt he saw before. The houses grow denser, the rain grows heavier, pounding cool water over his back and chest and legs. He shivers. The air is filled with sweet smells that must be flowers, but he doesn’t have time to think about that, not when he needs to find clothes and her.
Human roads are confusing-sharp angles that make him have to choose where to go: left or right, ahead or not. Sanada turns right, down another road filled with houses and strange metal objects with wheels. The reminder in his head tells him that they're cars, they move people but don't step in front of them. Sanada clings to the sides of the road, squeezing between cement walls and the cars to keep himself as hidden as possible. The sweet flower scent cloying to the air disappears, instead followed by a sickly addictive, almost oily smell and when Sanada looks down at the wet puddles his feet walk through. He can see the kaleidoscope sheen of oil glowing in the dimming grey light.
His insides twist up with fear of discovery, with the fear of day coming too soon and he keeps searching, keeps turning down street corners, looking for that sign but finding nothing. He groans and runs back, reading the numbers and names on the other side of the road, passing walls and iron structures-gates to homes-but there is nothing, nothing. Sanada clenches his fists, shaking his head and nearly smashing his fist into the walled fences because this is frustrating. Something wet (but hot so it can't be the rain) stings his eyes and-
Sanada blinks.
And then he blinks again.
He takes two steps back towards a cracked wooden plaque. The name Niou is there, but in different letters-no, characters--than the sign by the first building he passed.
An art gallery… the voice tells him.
Whatever that is, Sanada thinks.
He reads the sign again to make sure, but the letters don't change, not even when he runs his fingers along the strokes.
Somehow, despite the plaque being a sign of something to come, it doesn't feel good. Not when Sanada hears a creaking noise. He ducks into the shadows. The light grows ever brighter as the night recedes and the rain slackens to as well. He sucks in a breath, unsure of what to make of the pressure in his lungs.
"Yagyuu?" a voice calls out.
Sanada frowns and scrunches up his forehead. What does that mean?
But the friendly reminder doesn’t explain. A Yagyuu is something different, something he'll have to learn on his own.
Footsteps echo as the rain dulls, growing closer and closer and Sanada can see the shadowed movements of someone through the grilling of the iron grate. His eyes go wide and his hands fly down to cover himself, barely in time because someone, some human is peering around the wall and staring at him.
"What the hell…" the human says. His eyes trail up Sanada's body, then down, an eyebrow rising when sees Sanada's nakedness. Shame returns in full force to stain Sanada's body with an angry flush. Something else rises in his body, making him stick out his chest and purse his lips-
"Are you some sort of weird pervert?" the human asks. He's a boy, with messy white hair and squinty eyes, and a spot near his mouth. He's wearing clothes-a matching blue shirt and pants-and white things on his feet.
Slippers.
Sanada's feet are bare. Covered in dirt and oil and they ache. The boy keeps staring at him, his lip curling up to reveal teeth as he sneers and repeats himself. "What the hell?" And Sanada grinds his teeth, unable to stop the sensation, the desire, the need to reach out and-
Slap the boy.
His hand vibrates from the feeling of his palm smacking the boy's face. The boy keeps staring, but his eyes glaze over, dark and hooded for an instant before snapping open again, wide and round as he nods and hums.
"Right, you're Sanada the exchange student, then? You showed up earlier than I thought. Come inside or something." The boy scratches his head and cranes his neck, squinting into the eastern skyline where blue is forming, heralding the coming day. "I probably have some clothes you can wear until my mom calls the school about your uniform."
Without another word, the boy leads Sanada into his house. Sanada looks down at his hand; a hidden smile plays at his lips.
He never even would have thought that the subtle mermagic would affect humans. A sense of satisfaction warms his innards, untwisting the tension when the boy holds the door open, waiting for Sanada. He can feel his body wanting to make happy noises, having the "tarundoru" gurgle from his lips, but it comes out sounding strange on land. The sound is forced and clipped, a word that makes the boy roll his eyes.
"You coming?" he asks Sanada. "My parents'll be up soon and they'll wanna meet you."
Sanada could feel his palm tingling again; the mermagic wouldn't be a one-time event before sunrise.
*--+--~--A--~--+--*
Yukimura walks to school, passing the last of the wilting cherry blossoms and feeling vaguely sad that vacation is over, spring is going to be over soon and then the real work will begin. He scuffs his sneakers, and sighs at the displays of cherry mochi in conbini, almost all sold-out except for the lumpy, damaged ones.
He's got his tennisbag packed already; it weighs twice as much as his bookbag, which is slung around his other shoulder. He pauses at a crosswalk, waiting for the traffic to pass. The wind picks up from the east, tasting faintly of salt and sea and it makes him smile.
Soon he'll be able to swim in the ocean again, another season of splashing around in the surf, of collecting broken scallop shells on the beach and watching amber sunsets through the intermittent light of a sparkler. Yukimura smiles to himself and then hears someone calling his name.
He smothers his private feelings and looks up. Across the street, Marui waves frantically, a pastry in his hand as he jumps up and down. "Yukimura! Yukimura!"
Yukimura laughs and crosses the street to meet up with Marui.
"Yo!" Marui says. He stuffs the rest of the pastry in his mouth. Yukimura laughs at him again, seeing Marui's cheeks bloated like a chipmunk. Marui grins as food falls from his mouth until he swallows it all.
"Did you hear?" he asks as they begin to walk together. "There's a new kid!"
"Is he a relative of Jackal's?" Yukimura asks.
Marui shakes his head. "Naw. I wish. It's some kid staying with Niou. Guess he's gonna be in Yagyuu's class cuz he's smart and shit."
Yukimura hums. "That's nice. I didn’t know Niou's family hosted exchange students."
Marui shrugs. He hops ahead of Yukimura and starts to walk backwards so that they face each other. Yukimura keeps smiling, amused at Marui's skill of dodging freshmen on bicycles as they ride past, bells ringing and halting their conversation now and then. "Guess they do now," Marui says. "Dunno what this kid is like. Only Yagyuu's met him and they seem to get along. That's who I heard it from."
Yukimura nods, although he doesn't really believe Marui. He pokes Marui in the stomach, laughing when Marui makes a noise, rather like a "Hmm mm!"
"Oi!" Marui shouts.
Yukimura rolls his eyes at Marui, his smile ever-present. "Because you never talk to Niou," he says, teasing.
"Hell no~o!" Marui says, waggling his finger between them. "And I hope the new kid makes life crap for Niou. It'd serve that twit right."
While Yukimura doesn't disagree that Niou sometimes deserves less slack than everyone seems to cut him, he says nothing of the sort, instead just nodding to agree with Marui.
Marui continues on as they walk to school, passing bus stops and conbini and a couple cheap karaoke bars too. Shopkeepers sweep the pavement and traffic whizzes by, a blur of lorries and scooters and cars spitting exhaust as the world wakes up. Yukimura bites back a yawn as best he can, but he's tired. A week of sleeping in until noon takes its toll when he has to be up before seven in order to walk to school and make it in time.
When tennis practices start, it'll be worse. He groans inwardly at the prospect of 5:30am wakeups. If I'm made buchou this year, he thinks, I'm making a vice-captain run the morning practices!
"-so I was thinking we should go up to Hase, you know, and have a beach party or something," Marui says, his voice as loud as the oncoming traffic.
Yukimura looks at him. Marui looks back, bobbing his head from side to side as he waves a hand in front of Yukimura. "Well?" he asks. "Earth to Yukimura?"
Yukimura turns away, murmuring "yeah" under his breath to sate Marui. Something else catches his eye. By the brick school gates, near the camellia bushes that bloom with new green shoots is a tall boy standing with Niou. His back is turned to Yukimura, so he can't see the boy's face, but Yukimura sees enough of the boy's profile from the side, even under the dark cap he wears.
A tide of emotion swells in Yukimura's chest and as Marui goes on. Yukimura tunes his friend out because of the insatiable curiosity to see who this boy is-the exchange student staying with Niou? He's already got the Rikkai high school uniform, although almost no one wears the blazer at this time of year. Yukimura's bare arms tremble with a cold shiver as the boy half-turns his head. It's as though a cool wave washes over his entire body, thrilling him from his fingers to his toes.
But then the boy doesn't look his way. He doesn't notice Yukimura. Yukimura sighs through his nose and frowns as Niou and the exchange student walk out of sight around the gate toward the school building.
"Was that the exchange student with Niou?" he asks. Yukimura tucks a lock of his hair behind his ear. There is a warm flush over his face that he didn’t know was there in the first place.
"Eh? Sanada?" Marui blinks and starts to chew on a piece of gum, chomping in tune with his steps as they walk the last block to school. "Yeah, that was him. He walks a bit weird, don't you think? Like a duck out of water."
But Yukimura isn't listening, not really. Instead, he can't stop the thoughts bubbling up in his mind, up onto his tongue when he murmurs, "I wonder if that Sanada plays tennis…"
*--+--~--D--~--+--*
Sanada has used the mermagic to slap sense (and convince them that yes, he's an exchange student) into Niou's parents, his brother and his sister. Although he hesitated on the mangy, bedraggled creature called a Cat that slept on the end of Niou's bed. It reminds Sanada of the pet sea cucumbers back home, only less slimy. His heart warms when he thinks of it-last night, it slept on the end of his futon that now has a permanent place in Niou's bedroom, on the other side underneath the round game called a dartboard.
So, using the mermagic slap on the school secretary isn't much of a stretch. The woman looks at him blankly for a moment, then smiles with realization. "I'll go make a new file for you," she tells him. "Sanada Genichirou, right?"
Sanada nods.
He liked the structure of school from the moment he stepped inside the doorway and had to tuck his shoes in a cubby beside Niou's. Niou, on the other hand, snorts and rolls his eyes at everything. Why the sign pointed Sanada to Niou, he doesn't understand. Niou talks back to his elders, he throws darts at his game board to wake Sanada up each morning (because the darts inevitably all seem to fall down onto Sanada's head, which wakes him up in a sputtering, confused mess) and in school, he mutters that strange word "Puri" under his breath at all the other students, mocking their pristine uniforms, mocking their eager faces, mocking their desire to learn.
"You like your uniform, eh?" he asks Sanada. Niou smirks at him and the desire to smack Niou rises again. A regular kind of slap, nothing magical. But Sanada holds it back. The secretary dashes up to him with a polite smile and hands him a stack of papers.
"You're in class 2A officially now," she tells him.
Sanada mumbles a thank you, bowing his head to her.
"So you're with Yagyuu, then," Niou says as he stuffs his hands in his pockets and pushes his pants even lower on his hips. "Toodles then. You two get on well."
And just like that, Niou wanders off, lost among a sea of students, all rushing and flowing around Sanada the way the ocean used to.
"Ah, Sanada-kun! There you are."
Sanada turns to see Yagyuu standing in front of him, wearing a bland smile and a shiny badge on his left pocket. "We have class in five minutes," Yagyuu says. "It's this way." He motions down a corridor with his hand, adding, "After you" with a slight nod of his head.
There's a reason Sanada likes Yagyuu more than Niou. Yagyuu is polite. Yagyuu is thoughtful. Yagyuu doesn't snicker behind Sanada's back about the cap he wears (but not in class, Sanada-kun, because that is against school policy).
Yagyuu also shares his lunch.
Sanada doesn't mean to stare. He keeps his eyes down at the bento box on his lap. Niou's mother packs sandwiches, but Sanada has yet to understand the appeal Niou has for two slices of tasteless bread and mysterious fillings that taste mouldy or greasy. When he sees Yagyuu's lunch, filled with fresh green seaweed, nostalgic pangs hit Sanada hard in the gut. When he smells the salty nori Yagyuu eats with his rice, Sanada stares, biting his lip and frowning because it reminds him so much of the sea that it hurts the way his legs ache at night.
"Would you like some?" Yagyuu offers.
Sanada had no idea that humans ate seaweed too. He thanks Yagyuu, grateful for the salty, slippery feel of seaweed in his mouth, filling his belly with familiarity.
"Tennis tryouts tomorrow," Niou says. Sanada sees Niou steal the sandwich sitting on his lap, but he says nothing. It would be rude to tell Niou off-after all, Sanada is his guest (sort of). But Sanada does scowl.
"Lighten up!" Niou says. He chucks Sanada's cap on the brim, messing up the arrangement. "Maybe you should try out too."
Sanada doesn't know what tennis is. He doesn't ask. Its one thing that Yagyuu doesn't explain either, because he's too busy picking at his rice with those strange sticks humans use to eat. Chopsticks.
"Will you be there tomorrow?" Yagyuu asks Niou. "Yukimura-kun will want us as doubles this year again, no doubt."
Niou makes a drawn out noise and leans back into the alcove the three of them sit in. The flat coldness of the window sill reminds Sanada of the rock shelves he would sit on for hours, watching her on the beach. He sighs to himself.
I still haven't found her, he thinks.
The days are ticking. He doesn't have indefinite time on land.
"Got pool-cleaning duty first," Niou says.
Sanada blinks. "Pool?"
"The school pool," Yagyuu says. "On the roof."
Sanada blinks again. He hadn’t smelled water nearby. He hadn't heard the soft plinks of rippling waves or rushing tides. He hadn't heard seagulls or fish splashing and yet Yagyuu says there is a pool nearby. His stomach flips up like a fish. His heart swells at the hope of water.
He's been forced to use the bathtub in Niou's house. That artificial, shallow, small tub filled with too-clean water that smells of nothing and tastes the same. He yearns for the salt spray and the swollen tides of the sea.
Once, he even tried to use the garden pond at Niou's house, in the backyard, but it was stagnant and foul and Sanada picked grit and algae out of his toes for days afterward.
But a pool…
Sanada thinks about it all day during afternoon classes. The teachers have avoided asking him too many questions because Yagyuu-proper, polite Yagyuu-stands up to answer questions about mathematics and literature Sanada doesn't really understand, yet; the pearls of wisdom he swallowed last week tell him the answers, remind him of what numbers are, but they seem redundant.
He thinks about it all evening. Niou's family sleeps late, which works well. Sanada says he sleeps early-and it's true, in the ocean, he would fall asleep with his eyes open, often not long after the sun set and he swam back to his cave. On land, he suppresses his yawns and his sluggish limbs because humans don't sleep that early.
But he does have first crack at the bath tub.
He hates it-he hates the slippery, porcelain edges that trap him and force him to crunch his body up. He hates lying here for the prerequisite hour a day that he has to soak his body, his tail temporarily returned. Sanada leans over the edge of the bathtub, staring at the tiled walls and trying to keep his splashing to a minimum, lest someone discover a tail flapping around and the sheen of his scales.
A pool would have room to swim; he can't sneak down to the beach each night, not yet, because Niou's family seems firmly rooted on land, at home, not on beach walks. But even if they did, there likely wouldn't be enough time to sneak off for an hour and dive into the roaring ocean.
So Sanada soaks in the confines of the bathtub, sliding around and trying to stretch his tail as much as he can before it cramps up and makes him groan. "Tarundoru" he mumbles, his words gurgling on the water surface as he blows bubbles through his gills.
Sharp pain always signals the metamorphosis of his tail back to his legs. He bites down hard, squeezing his eyes shut as his tail rips back into two legs. They throb as blood rushes back to his feet and he unplugs the stopper before he crawls out. His legs shake as he stands. As much as he wants to drip with water until it dries naturally, humans don't appreciate water puddles in their homes.
He grabs a towel, frowning as he dries himself off.
At night, he doesn't think of the pool so much as her. He lies on the futon across the room from Niou, who snores and flops around under his sheets like a dying fish, making just as much noise from his rattling breath, too. Even though the window is open and Sanada sucks in the misty air that floats in off the coast, he feels dry. The sheets scratch his skin-the parts not covered by his yukata.
When he closes his eyes, he can pretend that he's watching her walk along the beach, her soft voice trilling in the wind as the sand squishes between her toes. Thinking about her smile sends those strange, pleasurable pangs down his belly that settle between his legs. Sanada knows that humans frown down on doing this in public places, but…
If he bites back the moans when he touches his dick, when he rubs the skin of his balls between his fingers, he can get away with it. His face burns with shame, but he can’t stop himself sometimes, not when he aches for her as much as his legs ache, separated from the sea.
Sanada always stops before the feelings go too far. Numbness sparks his thighs, his cock and he throbs, but he always holds himself back. It's probably similar for humans, what happens when males get so excited that they…
Fertilize, he thinks.
I won't do that! Not with Niou here…
Niou keeps snoring. Sanada's cock keeps pounding, hot and heavy between his legs and Sanada lies there, wishing he could fall asleep and ignore the yearning inside.
The sun hovers on the horizon, peeking through the fluttering curtains when Sanada hears Niou stir. Niou's heavy snoring suddenly stops when he sits up in bed and yawns. Sanada cracks an eye open, blinking moisture into his eyes as the dry air hits him, the same way it does every morning now.
"Where are you going?" he grumbles when Niou shuffles out of bed.
Sanada too often is tired as a human. Gone is the easy slumber of the sea, of sleeping at dusk and rising when the first fingers of light streamed into the deep. Now, he's awake and his limbs groggier than ever. Crusty bits have formed again in the corners of his eyes and his hair is a mess, he knows.
Probably as bad as Niou's…
"This morning's tennis tryouts," Niou says. He stretches his arms high above his head, then he scratches his hairy armpits, yawning again. Sanada scowls at the waft of rank teenage boy that floats his way.
"I thought Yagyuu said they were in the afternoon," Sanada says.
Niou shrugs and mutters, "Some are, some aren't. I wanna watch the freshman buggers play this morning. You could always try out, if you want," Niou tells him. "Yagyuu's on the team. So's Yanagi. You might like him. It counts as a club credit on your diploma, too."
Sanada doesn't fully comprehend the concept of tennis either. He sits up and scratches the back of his head, trying to pat down the cowlick. As appealing as sleeping is, the sounds of the toilet flushing and then the shower running across the hallway as Niou gets ready for his "tennis tryouts" wakes him up even more.
A little voice inside reminds him of the old adage of the mersamurai: Be flexible in all situations.
There's nothing to lose, he thinks.
Except time.
Sanada tosses off the futon cover. He stands up, stretching down to touch his toes, and smiling to himself when he wiggles them. Tennis it is then.
When he sees the tennis courts, Sanada frowns. He assumed that the courts, in all their green clay glory with white lines and netting, were either some sort of bizarre human landscape garden, or used to catch birds. The way nets in the sea catch fish. Instead, students use rackets to hit balls over them, with the simple goal of trying to get the ball into the opponent's court.
Huh, he thinks. Sanada pulls at the brim of his cap, trying to hide his wide-eyed curiosity. He hates feeling dumb and simple, not understanding all the complex human rules and relationships, but here, this game, it seems easy.
He flexes his fingers, wondering what it would be like to hold one of the rackets, to swing and hit a ball. He was skilled with coral swords under the sea-it's not that different. The ball is the enemy. The other player is the enemy. Battle with a racket to win.
A thick, salty breeze ghosts over the back of his neck, ruffling his hair. Maybe that's a sign…
A tall boy with slitted eyes walks up to Sanada and raises his eyebrows. "Are you here to try out?" he asks. Then, he holds his hand out. "I'm Yanagi Renji, the tennis club treasurer. You must be Niou's houseguest."
"Aa," Sanada says.
"Do you play?" Yanagi asks.
Sanada looks around. Niou had been standing near, just down the bank overlooking the courts until Yagyuu showed up, but now…Sanada doesn't see anyone else, just himself and a few short freshmen in white phys ed uniforms, waiting to try their hand at playing for a spot on the team.
"I…don’t have a racket," Sanada admits.
Yanagi Renji smiles, chuckling under his breath. "I have an old one," he says. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a racket, unzipping the cover then handing it to Sanada.
The racket is much lighter than Sanada would have expected, almost feathery in its weight. The rim shines silver in the early morning light, and the strings are tight and taught. Sanada pokes them and his palm bounces off the gut.
"It's a Babolat," Yanagi says. "You seem to like it more than I did."
Sanada blinks.
Yanagi offers to play a game. Sanada agrees because, well, he needs to be flexible. It's easy enough when Yanagi hits a ball across the court, smirking to himself no doubt because he assumes Sanada has no idea what he's doing. And Sanada doesn't really, but when he runs for the ball and the racket makes contact, something like the electric shock of an eel burns him and he swings hard, slugging the ball back to the other court, aiming deep behind Yanagi.
And scoring a point in the process.
Yanagi's mouth drops. Just a little. Sanada smirks.
Hitting that ball, slicing the racket through the air-it's not that different from merkendo. The principles remain the same and the motions his body makes, the pleasant strain in his arms, it makes Sanada feel good. It takes his mind off the constant ache of being cut off from the sea and the sharp pains that prickle his legs.
Yanagi doesn't keep score and Sanada doesn't know how to-not yet, anyway-but when the school bell rings and they shake hands at the net, Yanagi says, "You should come to afternoon practice. Yukimura will want to meet you."
*--+--~--A--~--+--*
Author: Ociwen
Pairing/characters: Sanada/Yukimura with others
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 47 000
Warning (if any): Bad fic ahoy! This fic contains spoilers for 40.5, crude humour, bodily functions and crabs.
Summary: Sanada experiences a sea change in order to begin a relationship with Yukimura. Can he balance his secrets, the Rikkai Dai tennis club, and still achieve his goal?
Notes (if any): Thank you pixxers for all the help and koneko_meow for the beta. Written for a rude and ungrateful recipient in balls_it_up. Hopefully others can appreciate the humour-and horror-involved in badfic. Have your umbrellas ready!
This fic has been truncated into 6 sections due to length. These are not chapters. [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6]
The gallery is a few blocks from the ocean cliffs. Yukimura thinks that only an architect would be moronic enough to build something so close to water. As he walks by the brass plaque, emblazoned with the firm Matsumoto, Niou and Schmidt, he laughs under his breath.
"Figures," he murmurs.
His backpack is strapped to his back. The sea air whips up around his face when he unlocks his bicycle and starts down the rode, riding toward the sea, breathing in the heady fishy scent that never leaves the air. The sky swirls with grey clouds-the approach of a spring storm that Yukimura can practically taste, that metallic tang on the atmosphere that makes the seagulls circle the beaches and his blood race. It feels wonderful to be alive, coasting down the side of the road so fast his head spins and he could laugh and shout from the simple pleasure.
Yukimura keeps peddling, turning a sharp corner onto a gravel road, his legs pumping and his heart, too. The sounds of the rushing ocean meld with the crunch of gravel under his wheels, which bounce and jerk him and his voice rattles when he laughs.
The pathway slopes, turning into scrappy sea grass that brushes his bare legs as he rides through the rolling dunes. Another crest of a hill more and the water is louder than ever, the seagulls swarm above, white specks on the sky. He hops off, parks his bike near a cement barrier, and then jumps that too.
The beach is secluded and forgotten, unpopular because the sand is too rocky and the sandbars closer to the city are here replaced by shelves of rock leading out to a deep drop in the ocean. The stretch of rocky sand is cluttered with dried black seaweed and bits of glass that glimmer on sunny days. Now and then Yukimura can feel the warmth of the sun peeping out from the clouds overhead, but it's never for very long.
He loves it here, this place. His place. He loves the mutable scenes of the ocean- some days its slate green with white-capped fingers reaching out into the horizon. Some days it’s a writhing black, spewing waste and dead fish onto the shore. Some days it's a glistening blue, warm and inviting Yukimura to strip down and dive in after he finishes.
Today, the waves slide onto the sand, lapping at his sneakers. The water might be warm enough to swim in now, but the air is still cool; there is still a touch of winter's chill on it and his hands are numb from the bike ride. He rubs them together on the hem of his shirt and walks along, searching for a place to sit.
A piece of driftwood will do. He dumps his backpack down and unzips it, pulling out his pad of watercolour paper and his favourite watercolour pencils. He likes them best because for painting the sea as he sits here and watches it, it's easy. No mess of bringing a dish of water when he can add that later.
Yukimura flips to a clean sheet of paper, cringing at his earlier attempts. They're corny and bad, as far as he's concerned, messy expanses of amateur shading and bad blending of colours. Today he can start fresh and get better, improve on his art the way he practices on his tennis.
First he draws the horizon line, using a blue because the water has a bluish-grey tinge to it today. Then he shades a section below it, before switching to another shade, filling in horizontal swaths moving left to right to avoid smudging as much as he can. Yukimura smiles; the watercolour pencils don't smudge much when he manages to keep the paper dry, but the faint mists floating off the ocean make it difficult and before too long, he's scowling at the dots of water spreading on his paper.
Dammit, he thinks. It's not ruined, but he doesn't like it. With his dark green pencil, he scribbles over the water patches as fast as he can to blend them into the rest. The wind has picked up. It blows his hair all around his face and makes it difficult to concentrate when there are locks of hair tickling his mouth and nose.
Huffing, Yukimura tries to hold his hair back with his other hand as he draws, but he can't hold his paper steady enough and it slips off his lap. He groans. "Crap," he mutters as he picks it up off the sand and brushes the pad off.
His fingertips are cold. The hairs on his legs stand up, prickling his skin with goosepimples but he keeps sketching. The atmosphere is good. The day is perfect to draw the sea-the water moves, swollen and dark, but there's no storm yet. Maybe tonight, maybe by the time the light dims and he has to ride home during the purple twilight in the rain. For now, he's content to watch the ocean, to breathe it in and absorb the life that he missed out on during his junior high years.
No! I left the disease behind!
It's been almost two years since the operation. Nothing except the occasional sleepy tingle of his fingertips or toes to suggest he ever was sick with a neurological disorder. I'm fine now, Yukimura thinks, balling his fist up with resolve.
He pushes his hair back behind his ears and bites his bottom lip, squinting out across the sea. Slight waves rise and fall as the ocean exhales, heaves with a sigh and another wave breaks on the rocks at the far edges of the beach. There, the higher cliffs hide other coves, other beaches, other caves. For a moment, Yukimura sets down his pencils and watches the ocean, trying to feel the colours, trying to see the shades of blue, grey, green.
Yukimura looks back down at his picture. He has patches of blue, grey and green, but they aren’t right. His form is terrible. It looks like a child's scribbles. He's about to rip the page from his pad and groan in frustration when he hears a noise. A soft plonk of something breaking the water's surface. He blinks and looks up, looks out, searching for a jumping fish, maybe, or a sea tern, but there's nothing around except the gulls above his head.
"Hn," he says.
But then a second noise echoes on the heavy air, a gurgling tarundoru sound that isn't quite human. He shivers, frisson sending a chill down his spine and making his body hum. The noise hangs in his mind, tarundoru tarundoru tarundoru and he doesn't understand the meaning, just the melodious sound. Like a babbling brook, only different because he can't place the sound; he can't figure it out because the sea rushes, it doesn't babble "tarundoru".
Yukimura shakes his head, shrugging the sound away, at least temporarily. He picks a pencil back up and looks at his painting, considering. He makes a line with the teal, then darkens it with a shading strip of black. No, wait, a bit heavier because it's not black enough. He licks his lips and tastes salt.
He paints because he can. He paints because he's alive, the same reason he plays tennis. He paints because there are so many views to the sea and he wants to capture at least one as perfectly as he can. Like the Muga no Kyouichi, only in watercolour.
Only when his cellphone rings does he set his pad down again. "Seiichi, it's almost time for supper," his mother says. "Where are you?"
"At the art gallery," he lies. Sort of. She doesn't need to worry about him drowning, although he's sixteen and not a little kid anymore, but its better safe than sorry. Besides, he was there before.
"It's time to come home," she tells him. And then she hangs up, her word final.
Yukimura looks out at the ocean, seeing the faintest crescent of a rising moon reflected on the dark water. The sky, too, is darker than before, although not yet the velvety black of evening, more a violet. He has to squint to see his painting now and that's usually a sign to stop for the day. Although it's not finished, it won't ever be because tomorrow the sea will have changed again and he can never catch it the same way.
"Oh well," he says. Yukimura turns, his back to the sea as he stuffs his pencils and his pad back into his backpack. He can't shake the odd feeling, the unexplained sense that something is here with him. The back of his neck prickles and he shivers again, rubbing his hands frantically over his arms to ward off the sudden chill.
As he climbs the shifting rocky sands to his bicycle, in the distance Yukimura hears that gurgled tarundoru again. Before he can check, the soft splash of something diving under the ocean makes him smile.
Because he wasn't going mad. There was something with him.
"Maybe a sea bass," he says to himself as he pauses on the top of the tune. He half-turns for one last look to the sea.
Yukimura inhales the air, leans into the ocean's wind combing through his hair and then he climbs back down towards his bike.
His mother will kill him if he's home too late after dark.
*--+--~--S--~--+--*
He watches the figure recede into the distance, lost in the shadows of the dunes though the sun hasn't fully set yet and the last few minutes of day remain, hidden by the heaving clouds overhead.
Sanada's heart is swollen, and his chest too, filled with the burning ache for the figure he's watched-day in and day out-walking along the beach, her beautiful form long and lean, and her hair blown up by the wind. Sometimes, she does something with a board and he doesn't fully understand what because he can never swim close enough to see.
So he sits on a rock shelf, hidden by cliffs, and sticks his head out of the water now and then, unable to look away but unwilling to swim closer. He's not supposed to be seen. He's not supposed to be heard either, but when the noises emerge in the back of his throat, vibrating through his gills, he can't contain them. He flushes hot under the water, berating himself for being this way, for wanting something so far from his reach.
"Don't go!" he always wants to shout, to tell her his feelings.
But he can't.
Some days, she will play with a ball, throwing it in her hand the way the sea bounces ducks and terns and even dead fish, too. The motion fascinates him and he wants to learn why she bounces that ball, why she plays with it and laughs loud enough that Sanada can hear her voice.
It's a beautiful noise, soft and strong, too. It sends pleasurable pangs through his belly and sometimes, on that rocky shelf, he'll slip off the edge because he won't be paying any attention to his body. His tail will slide into the water and he'll open his eyes to a face full of seaweed and plastic bag sludge, floating in the shallow cove along with him.
Each passing day it becomes harder to hold himself back, to keep himself here, to this place, and watch her watching the sea. Sanada doesn't understand if she's looking for something, maybe waiting for the weather to warm up enough for swimming-neither seems right.
He balls his fists and scowls to himself after her figure disappears onto dry land. Something pokes his sides, like hunger, but not quite. It's a feeling that ebbs and flows with her presence; now, its swollen so much in his throat that he can barely breathe. His gills feel clogged and when he forces them open, the air doesn't seem to reach his head. He's always dizzy, light-headed, swimming in circles because he forgets himself.
He thinks of her, always-he wants to ask her name, to come closer, but she'd be afraid. Humans always are-although Sanada has never tried.
But he wants to.
He sighs, his gills pushing air out in a gurgling bubble that makes a soft plunk plopping noise when it surfaces, bursting on the water's edge.
There has to be some way to sate this hollow feeling, to fill this void within himself, so achingly empty inside as the water begins to cool with the chill of evening and the dim grey light leaves the depths. The water swirls with an impending storm. He can't stay here, as much as he wants to wait for her to return, soon, to her place where he can watch from a distance and want and hope, but never have.
Maybe there is a way to change things.
I want to know this person, Sanada thinks. He can see her round face when he closes his eyes. He can see her dark hair, her dark eyes, alive with the ephemeral changes of the sea and heat blooms on his cheeks. He can see her walking along the edge of the beach, smiling to herself as the water laps at her toes, her calves, her…
A shiver runs down his spine, from his neck to his tail, and all the hair on his head stands up. He knows, deep down, that he wants to touch her the way the water does, and more than that, too.
These feelings inside himself…they are those feelings. The forbidden sort for a human that makes shame stain his face, slapping reality back at Sanada.
"It would never work," he grumbles. "It couldn’t." He flips his tail, starting a slow swimming trudge back home.
It couldn't work between a human and a merman…
As he's about to push himself harder through the swollen water, on the rocky sand bed, maybe a few feet away, he notices something skittering across the seafloor. Sanada stops, hovering above as he sees a small crab looking up at him, its claws clattering softly, sending a ticklish vibration his way.
Sanada blinks.
Instead of swimming home, he starts to follow the crab when it scuttles off in the opposite direction.
*--+--~--A--~--+--*
His mother chatters as loud as the tv during supper and Yukimura does his best to ignore her. He slurps his soup and chews idly on the strips of wakame and bamboo shoots in the broth. He pokes at the fried fish and watches the small tv from its perch by the kitchen sink.
"Daddy should be home soon, Rei," his mother tells his sister. "Seiichi, eat more rice." She dumps another scoop into Yukimura's bowl before he says a word. Not that he would-he's hungry enough, his body warm and his skin cool from the brisk bike ride home.
There's nothing on tv yet, just news that Yukimura doesn't really care about, but anything is more interesting than his mother talking about new throw cushions and a coffee table with his sister, as if she cares too.
"…reported seeing a mermaid last week off the coast near Sasebo…"
Yukimura blinks. He presses the volume on the remote to drown his mother out. She pauses too, noticing the flickering screen showing a reporter speaking with a fisherman in a plaid shirt and tall rubber roots.
His mother shakes her head when his sister asks, "Are mermaids real?"
"Of course not, Rei-chan!" she says, laughing at the tv. "The fisherman probably had one too many beers on his boat that day."
Yukimura, though, keeps watching. Idle interest, maybe, glues his eyes to the screen, seeing the choppy waves off the northern Kyuushu coast and the same circling seagulls that are everywhere, even around his beach.
The fisherman waves his hands, nodding vehemently when the reporter raises a skeptical eyebrow. "It made a noise, like a gurgle. Like-" as he flaps his hands and makes Yukimura's mother and sister giggle, the man manages to make a sound, almost like that bubbling "tarundoru" Yukimura heard before.
He sucks in a breath. His eyes go wide, blind to the glare of the fuzzy reception. That same noise echoes in his ears. The rushing sea, the squawking gulls, that gurgling unpronounceable noise he heard, so close to the fisherman's impression.
Did I…
No. Mermaids don't exist!
The tv screen fades from a grey coastal port back to the newsroom as a tv anchor smiles and nods to the reporter, telling him to have a good night and watch out for more Hollywood activists and fishermen out to save the whales and mermaids. Yukimura shakes his head. He's going crazy.
"Whales are tasty," his sister says. "I bet mermaids are tasty too."
"Seiichi?" his mother asks. "Did you take your pills?" She pushes a pillbox across the table. Yukimura looks down, confused for a moment until he realizes that no, he hasn't taken his pills today.
"That's probably why," he murmurs. His mother looks at him intently, smiling when he swallows the pills down with a glass of warm tea.
He hates the pills and most of all he loathes the aftertaste, that inevitable powdery, chalky feeling at the back of his mouth that bubbles up a half hour after his meal. He sits at his desk, swallowing mucus to make the bitterness leave his mouth, but it never works. Nothing-not water, not food, not even stolen sips from his father's sake stash-ever does the trick.
Yukimura cringes. If the pills keep his illness at bay, he doesn't know. Maybe they're a placebo. He tries to forget the bitter burn as he plays with his racket, winding a new roll of grip tape around the handle in preparation for the new season next week when school starts.
His afternoon trips to the beach will soon be replaced with classes and school committees and tennis club. He's excited, yes, but…
The ocean has a siren call, that distant roar he can make out on clear nights when his window is cranked open all the way, the way it is tonight. Yukimura sighs and sets down his racket. On the other side of his bedroom door, he can hear his mother greeting his father, who must have just come home from work.
Yukimura walks over and leans into his window, inhaling the breeze drifting in from the sea. Towards the ocean, lights twinkle-maybe stars, maybe ocean tankers, maybe even buoys, he doesn't know. It's a beautiful wash of ink pricked with light, as intangible as the seascapes he keeps trying to paint. With the night dawned, the awful seagulls have shut up, replaced with the first crickets of the year, softly chirping under his window sill.
A vague sense of loneliness accompanies his yearning for the spring break to last a little longer, to give him more time to capture the sea on canvas. His chest tightens as he looks out towards the ocean, sighing heavily to himself. Yukimura drums his fingertips on the window ledge, breaking up the soft silence because he can't bear it any longer.
If he could grab his bike and ride down to his place now, he would. If he could see in the dark and paint the black tide filled with starlight, he would. Instead, he stands here and listens and watches the lights flickering, windows going dark one by one as the suburbs get ready for bed.
Eventually, the breezes grow too cold and he shuts his window, slapping his face to make the feeling return. Maybe in a month or so it will be truly warm enough to swim. Yukimura smiles at the thought. His eyes drift towards his desk, to his racket, propped up against his chair legs.
Maybe the team could go to my beach, he thinks. But then…"No," he whispers. No. It's his private place. He doesn't want to share it with anyone, not until he's painted it first and captured that raw, oceanic wild.
School and tennis are coming soon, but Yukimura doesn't know if he wants to be ready for it. Somehow, he knows it won't matter. Time will pass and come anyway, as steady and predictable as the motion of the tides. Yukimura lies down on his floor, props his feet under his bed for leverage and his hands behind his head, and starts on crunches.
He sits up and his abs burn from atrophy.
"One…"
*--+--~--N--~--+--*
Everything below his navel is on fire, a searing pain that pulses through his lower body. The sharp pain makes Sanada groan out into the night, as much as he tries to bite down on his cries.
The first gasp of air through his lungs, lungs without gills on his neck, flapping against his skin, was scary enough. Now he's lying on the pebbly beach as waves seep around his feet. His feet. He can barely believe it-before today he had his tail, the same as ever, a grayish greenish scaly tail that was his body and now…
He can't even look down to see. Well, he's too afraid to look at these strange things-his tail split in two, separate limbs that move of their own accord, shuddering and twitching and he doesn't know how to control them. Even though he took the magical pearl of human wisdom and swallowed it down, he can't figure the legs out.
That, and he can't look down to even see them in the first place. His body aches, having been bashed on the waves and smashed by the surf as he struggled underwater to surface, swimming with his hands, propelled by the exploding sensation in his chest to get to the surface as fast as possible and suck in air before he burst.
And now Sanada lays there, broken and bruised with two legs, hardly able to even lift himself up. He exhales; the sensation of breathing is strange without gills. He tries to centre himself, to think move and make the legs work. One of them jerks when a rush of cold water hits it, but nothing more.
A little longer, he thinks. He sputters as the water creeps around his body, oozes into his nostrils. Never before in the sea did he notice the water filling him, coursing through his veins, his body. Now, as a human, every motion of the water around him is multiplied, the difference between it and him so very apparent-the temperature, the fluidity, the lightness.
He takes another breath and heaves himself onto his stomach, clawing at the sand with his hands. He pulls his body up further onto the shore. Pebbles scrape against his naked skin, sharp and cold, but he has to ignore them. Again, he pulls himself, hands digging into the sand as deep as possible as it floats away with the water, making it difficult to drag his weight onto the beach.
His stomach hurts too, rumbling like the churning sea. Sanada's hungry. And tired. He moves himself one, maybe two feet, and collapses onto the sand. His forearms are on fire. Yes, he was skilled at merkendo and wielding coral knives (Japanese merpeople are still Japanese after all), but…nothing prepared him for the excruciating heaviness of pulling himself onshore, not unlike a beached whale. He's too heavy for the tides to push him any further and there's nothing to grab but the crumbling, rough sand.
"Dammit…" he grumbles. A part of his mind thinks I can't do this and his legs ache and his arms hurt and his stomach is scraped up and his ribs feel the awkward pressure of continuous breathing and he could, so easily, allow himself to slide back into the sea, but…
She's on land.
Somewhere. He doesn't yet know where, but he can feel it. He sniffs the air, trying to smell her presence on the beach, but there is nothing. And in the blackness of midnight-despite the crescent moon-her footsteps in the sand would be long washed away.
With a burst of determination flushing his skin, warming his belly in weird, new ways, Sanada heaves himself onto his elbows, yelling through his teeth as he pulls himself to shaking knees.
I did it! he thinks, as he stands there, wobbling but half-upright. He shakes like an anemone in a monsoon. Pride burns inside and he imagines her, smiling at him, clapping her hands together and saying, "Oh, Sanada!" because she's so pleased with him too.
Until he crumples to the beach again.
Sanada faceplants into the sand.
It takes him ages-he doesn't know how long. Surely, its hours, because the tide retreats into the ocean, leaving him high and dry on the beach with no hope of returning home-but he manages to stumble and drag his way to the edge of a sloping dune, covered in rustling grasses.
He doesn't know if he's doing it right-his knees wobble. His steps are shuffling at best, but he thinks of her and how she walks along the beach, so easily and gracefully, and he forces himself to think, to put one foot in front of the other. Then he begins to move.
Sanada hates this, being awkward with these new land legs. He hates feeling this way, so…incomplete and failing, but at the same time, if he doesn't try, he won't make it. He won't be able to find her, to tell her how he feels, to ease the hollow emptiness inside that eats away at him, eats his thoughts and feeds them with her presence. Even now, struggling to walk across these dunes that seem as tall as sea shelves in the deepest ocean depths, thinking of her gives him courage to do it.
Sometimes, as a merman, he would swim close enough to other beaches and watch humans-from afar, though, never as close as when he watches her-and he knows that the square building lit up by artificial yellow lights is a human building. As he gets closer, it becomes apparent that no one seems to be there. It's dark inside through the glass windows. Sanada walks across a stretch of pavement, wincing at the hardness pressing against the soles of his feet. He taps the windows, searching for someone, anyone, but he cannot find anything except strange square papers on the white walls.
They look almost like the strange papers that she would throw into the ocean sometimes. Back home, he saved a collection-maybe five or six, however many he managed to salvage in the water, and he hid them under the large Sanada family stone by the cave he lived in. Sanada doesn't understand why she would throw them into the ocean-or what these land-locked square papers mean to her-but it's very obvious no one is here.
No one except him.
Sanada sighs. The sound is strange, to hear his voice in the air not under the sea, and there are no air bubbles tickling his scales, no vibrations tickling his chest. Just raw sound. He cringes a little before he starts walking again. The further he goes, the easier it becomes to take one step, then two, then three.
He doesn't know where he's going. As he walks down a beaten pathway past another patch of pavement, a shiny plaque beckons to him. He walks over, mouthing over the names engraved into the metal.
Matsumoto, Niou and Schmidt
Sanada doesn't understand what that means either, but it feels right. It feels like a sign. He reads the letters over again, memorizing them, engraving them into his mind. Further in land, he can see glittering artificial lights of what must be a human city. That, too, is a beacon.
If he wants to find her, he has to find people.
As he walks away from the building, leaving behind the square papers inside and the metal plaque outside, it occurs to Sanada that he doesn't even know her name, just her face and the sound of her laughter, her voice.
This is not good, he thinks. The city he approaches is big. He might be a merman, but he's not an idiot. He knows that dry land Japan is filled with people--they've pushed back the merpeople for centuries into the sea, deeper and deeper. More than a little tension coils in Sanada's belly at the prospect of coming across crowds of humans, more in a minute than he's seen before in his entire lifetime.
He balls his fist, clenches his jaw, and keeps walking. I'm ready.
The further he walks, the closer he gets to the city, the drier the air feels. His skin is cold and the strange new bits between his legs twitch and shrivel up more each time he shivers. His mouth is dry, his skin feels tight without water washing over it and grit scrapes at the bottom of his feet. He walks along the side of a paved pathway-a road-a little voice inside his head reminds him, the magic pearl of wisdom dropping hints of humanity that he needs to know, subconsciously, without effort.
Sanada knows when to cross the road and he can recognize what a house is when he sees the first few clustered buildings coming into view. He pauses to look at them, reading names and numbers he doesn't understand on metal plaques on high cement walls. Humans are strange, all mermen know that, but seeing these structures and knowing people live there…
Sanada snorts. A cave on the ocean floor is fine for him. One lined with sea grasses swaying in the currents, with his family rock nearby and her papers…
He's tight between the legs again and it makes him squirm. Sanada glances down and his eyes go wide when he sees that he's not shriveled anymore so much as…
Twitching.
And swollen.
And there's desire coursing through his body, the feeling that the elders said would come when he would want to fertilize an egg and make merbabies, only…
Sanada flushes. His face burns and he silently thanks the gods that no one is awake to see this, to see him try to beat the hardness down with his hand until-shamed even more-he realizes that touching only makes it worse. Only makes his…his penis, the voice says…throb even more.
So he keeps walking. Feet throbbing from the rough roads and pavements, skin cool and goosepimpling from the intermittent breezes blowing familiar, salty air into the rows of houses. Sanada creeps between them, reading the plaques when he can, until the first few fat drops of rain start to fall.
And then, a sudden rush. Pouring down onto him in a shower, quenching his body but drowning his spirits. He shudders and rubs his arms, huddling over as he picks up his pace, trying to find someplace to go before dawn when people rise. His legs are exhausted and his eyes droop, but the hair plastered down over his eyes that he has to push back every second step keeps him awake. Thoughts of her keep him going.
Her, walking along the beach and smiling, covering a laugh with her hand before she pushes her hair back behind her ears…
Her, sitting on a piece of driftwood, looking out over the ocean with her beautiful, dark eyes that suck Sanada in like an undertow…
Her, dancing through the waves and splashing up beads of diamond-bright water that cling to her round face, softened with a big smile…
Something dark on the sidewalk pavement catches his eye. He carefully shuffles closer, and then reaches a hesitant foot out to poke the object. It doesn't move on its own, just when his toe pushes it around. Sanada reads the words Jack Purcell across the front.
A hat…you put it on your head because humans wear 'clothes' to cover their naked bodies…
Realizing this makes every pore, every hair, every inch of Sanada burn with embarrassment. He winces and covers his newfound bits with his hands, but that still won't hide his cold, naked backside or the feverish shame prickling his entire body. He feels stupid and foolish and exposed the way he never had before in the sea, not just because, well, he had no real bits to speak of as a merman, but because there was no real sense of naked shame like he has at the moment, hunched over and cringing in the long shadows of a house wall.
Without anything else, he takes the hat and puts it on his head. He can cover that, at least, and hide the furious heat staining his cheeks. He knows he needs to find somewhere fast; the first flickering grey on the horizon is chasing him.
Sanada starts to run, reluctantly taking his hands off his bits, and his eyes flit back and forth from house walls, searching for that Matsumoto, Niou and Schmidt he saw before. The houses grow denser, the rain grows heavier, pounding cool water over his back and chest and legs. He shivers. The air is filled with sweet smells that must be flowers, but he doesn’t have time to think about that, not when he needs to find clothes and her.
Human roads are confusing-sharp angles that make him have to choose where to go: left or right, ahead or not. Sanada turns right, down another road filled with houses and strange metal objects with wheels. The reminder in his head tells him that they're cars, they move people but don't step in front of them. Sanada clings to the sides of the road, squeezing between cement walls and the cars to keep himself as hidden as possible. The sweet flower scent cloying to the air disappears, instead followed by a sickly addictive, almost oily smell and when Sanada looks down at the wet puddles his feet walk through. He can see the kaleidoscope sheen of oil glowing in the dimming grey light.
His insides twist up with fear of discovery, with the fear of day coming too soon and he keeps searching, keeps turning down street corners, looking for that sign but finding nothing. He groans and runs back, reading the numbers and names on the other side of the road, passing walls and iron structures-gates to homes-but there is nothing, nothing. Sanada clenches his fists, shaking his head and nearly smashing his fist into the walled fences because this is frustrating. Something wet (but hot so it can't be the rain) stings his eyes and-
Sanada blinks.
And then he blinks again.
He takes two steps back towards a cracked wooden plaque. The name Niou is there, but in different letters-no, characters--than the sign by the first building he passed.
An art gallery… the voice tells him.
Whatever that is, Sanada thinks.
He reads the sign again to make sure, but the letters don't change, not even when he runs his fingers along the strokes.
Somehow, despite the plaque being a sign of something to come, it doesn't feel good. Not when Sanada hears a creaking noise. He ducks into the shadows. The light grows ever brighter as the night recedes and the rain slackens to as well. He sucks in a breath, unsure of what to make of the pressure in his lungs.
"Yagyuu?" a voice calls out.
Sanada frowns and scrunches up his forehead. What does that mean?
But the friendly reminder doesn’t explain. A Yagyuu is something different, something he'll have to learn on his own.
Footsteps echo as the rain dulls, growing closer and closer and Sanada can see the shadowed movements of someone through the grilling of the iron grate. His eyes go wide and his hands fly down to cover himself, barely in time because someone, some human is peering around the wall and staring at him.
"What the hell…" the human says. His eyes trail up Sanada's body, then down, an eyebrow rising when sees Sanada's nakedness. Shame returns in full force to stain Sanada's body with an angry flush. Something else rises in his body, making him stick out his chest and purse his lips-
"Are you some sort of weird pervert?" the human asks. He's a boy, with messy white hair and squinty eyes, and a spot near his mouth. He's wearing clothes-a matching blue shirt and pants-and white things on his feet.
Slippers.
Sanada's feet are bare. Covered in dirt and oil and they ache. The boy keeps staring at him, his lip curling up to reveal teeth as he sneers and repeats himself. "What the hell?" And Sanada grinds his teeth, unable to stop the sensation, the desire, the need to reach out and-
Slap the boy.
His hand vibrates from the feeling of his palm smacking the boy's face. The boy keeps staring, but his eyes glaze over, dark and hooded for an instant before snapping open again, wide and round as he nods and hums.
"Right, you're Sanada the exchange student, then? You showed up earlier than I thought. Come inside or something." The boy scratches his head and cranes his neck, squinting into the eastern skyline where blue is forming, heralding the coming day. "I probably have some clothes you can wear until my mom calls the school about your uniform."
Without another word, the boy leads Sanada into his house. Sanada looks down at his hand; a hidden smile plays at his lips.
He never even would have thought that the subtle mermagic would affect humans. A sense of satisfaction warms his innards, untwisting the tension when the boy holds the door open, waiting for Sanada. He can feel his body wanting to make happy noises, having the "tarundoru" gurgle from his lips, but it comes out sounding strange on land. The sound is forced and clipped, a word that makes the boy roll his eyes.
"You coming?" he asks Sanada. "My parents'll be up soon and they'll wanna meet you."
Sanada could feel his palm tingling again; the mermagic wouldn't be a one-time event before sunrise.
*--+--~--A--~--+--*
Yukimura walks to school, passing the last of the wilting cherry blossoms and feeling vaguely sad that vacation is over, spring is going to be over soon and then the real work will begin. He scuffs his sneakers, and sighs at the displays of cherry mochi in conbini, almost all sold-out except for the lumpy, damaged ones.
He's got his tennisbag packed already; it weighs twice as much as his bookbag, which is slung around his other shoulder. He pauses at a crosswalk, waiting for the traffic to pass. The wind picks up from the east, tasting faintly of salt and sea and it makes him smile.
Soon he'll be able to swim in the ocean again, another season of splashing around in the surf, of collecting broken scallop shells on the beach and watching amber sunsets through the intermittent light of a sparkler. Yukimura smiles to himself and then hears someone calling his name.
He smothers his private feelings and looks up. Across the street, Marui waves frantically, a pastry in his hand as he jumps up and down. "Yukimura! Yukimura!"
Yukimura laughs and crosses the street to meet up with Marui.
"Yo!" Marui says. He stuffs the rest of the pastry in his mouth. Yukimura laughs at him again, seeing Marui's cheeks bloated like a chipmunk. Marui grins as food falls from his mouth until he swallows it all.
"Did you hear?" he asks as they begin to walk together. "There's a new kid!"
"Is he a relative of Jackal's?" Yukimura asks.
Marui shakes his head. "Naw. I wish. It's some kid staying with Niou. Guess he's gonna be in Yagyuu's class cuz he's smart and shit."
Yukimura hums. "That's nice. I didn’t know Niou's family hosted exchange students."
Marui shrugs. He hops ahead of Yukimura and starts to walk backwards so that they face each other. Yukimura keeps smiling, amused at Marui's skill of dodging freshmen on bicycles as they ride past, bells ringing and halting their conversation now and then. "Guess they do now," Marui says. "Dunno what this kid is like. Only Yagyuu's met him and they seem to get along. That's who I heard it from."
Yukimura nods, although he doesn't really believe Marui. He pokes Marui in the stomach, laughing when Marui makes a noise, rather like a "Hmm mm!"
"Oi!" Marui shouts.
Yukimura rolls his eyes at Marui, his smile ever-present. "Because you never talk to Niou," he says, teasing.
"Hell no~o!" Marui says, waggling his finger between them. "And I hope the new kid makes life crap for Niou. It'd serve that twit right."
While Yukimura doesn't disagree that Niou sometimes deserves less slack than everyone seems to cut him, he says nothing of the sort, instead just nodding to agree with Marui.
Marui continues on as they walk to school, passing bus stops and conbini and a couple cheap karaoke bars too. Shopkeepers sweep the pavement and traffic whizzes by, a blur of lorries and scooters and cars spitting exhaust as the world wakes up. Yukimura bites back a yawn as best he can, but he's tired. A week of sleeping in until noon takes its toll when he has to be up before seven in order to walk to school and make it in time.
When tennis practices start, it'll be worse. He groans inwardly at the prospect of 5:30am wakeups. If I'm made buchou this year, he thinks, I'm making a vice-captain run the morning practices!
"-so I was thinking we should go up to Hase, you know, and have a beach party or something," Marui says, his voice as loud as the oncoming traffic.
Yukimura looks at him. Marui looks back, bobbing his head from side to side as he waves a hand in front of Yukimura. "Well?" he asks. "Earth to Yukimura?"
Yukimura turns away, murmuring "yeah" under his breath to sate Marui. Something else catches his eye. By the brick school gates, near the camellia bushes that bloom with new green shoots is a tall boy standing with Niou. His back is turned to Yukimura, so he can't see the boy's face, but Yukimura sees enough of the boy's profile from the side, even under the dark cap he wears.
A tide of emotion swells in Yukimura's chest and as Marui goes on. Yukimura tunes his friend out because of the insatiable curiosity to see who this boy is-the exchange student staying with Niou? He's already got the Rikkai high school uniform, although almost no one wears the blazer at this time of year. Yukimura's bare arms tremble with a cold shiver as the boy half-turns his head. It's as though a cool wave washes over his entire body, thrilling him from his fingers to his toes.
But then the boy doesn't look his way. He doesn't notice Yukimura. Yukimura sighs through his nose and frowns as Niou and the exchange student walk out of sight around the gate toward the school building.
"Was that the exchange student with Niou?" he asks. Yukimura tucks a lock of his hair behind his ear. There is a warm flush over his face that he didn’t know was there in the first place.
"Eh? Sanada?" Marui blinks and starts to chew on a piece of gum, chomping in tune with his steps as they walk the last block to school. "Yeah, that was him. He walks a bit weird, don't you think? Like a duck out of water."
But Yukimura isn't listening, not really. Instead, he can't stop the thoughts bubbling up in his mind, up onto his tongue when he murmurs, "I wonder if that Sanada plays tennis…"
*--+--~--D--~--+--*
Sanada has used the mermagic to slap sense (and convince them that yes, he's an exchange student) into Niou's parents, his brother and his sister. Although he hesitated on the mangy, bedraggled creature called a Cat that slept on the end of Niou's bed. It reminds Sanada of the pet sea cucumbers back home, only less slimy. His heart warms when he thinks of it-last night, it slept on the end of his futon that now has a permanent place in Niou's bedroom, on the other side underneath the round game called a dartboard.
So, using the mermagic slap on the school secretary isn't much of a stretch. The woman looks at him blankly for a moment, then smiles with realization. "I'll go make a new file for you," she tells him. "Sanada Genichirou, right?"
Sanada nods.
He liked the structure of school from the moment he stepped inside the doorway and had to tuck his shoes in a cubby beside Niou's. Niou, on the other hand, snorts and rolls his eyes at everything. Why the sign pointed Sanada to Niou, he doesn't understand. Niou talks back to his elders, he throws darts at his game board to wake Sanada up each morning (because the darts inevitably all seem to fall down onto Sanada's head, which wakes him up in a sputtering, confused mess) and in school, he mutters that strange word "Puri" under his breath at all the other students, mocking their pristine uniforms, mocking their eager faces, mocking their desire to learn.
"You like your uniform, eh?" he asks Sanada. Niou smirks at him and the desire to smack Niou rises again. A regular kind of slap, nothing magical. But Sanada holds it back. The secretary dashes up to him with a polite smile and hands him a stack of papers.
"You're in class 2A officially now," she tells him.
Sanada mumbles a thank you, bowing his head to her.
"So you're with Yagyuu, then," Niou says as he stuffs his hands in his pockets and pushes his pants even lower on his hips. "Toodles then. You two get on well."
And just like that, Niou wanders off, lost among a sea of students, all rushing and flowing around Sanada the way the ocean used to.
"Ah, Sanada-kun! There you are."
Sanada turns to see Yagyuu standing in front of him, wearing a bland smile and a shiny badge on his left pocket. "We have class in five minutes," Yagyuu says. "It's this way." He motions down a corridor with his hand, adding, "After you" with a slight nod of his head.
There's a reason Sanada likes Yagyuu more than Niou. Yagyuu is polite. Yagyuu is thoughtful. Yagyuu doesn't snicker behind Sanada's back about the cap he wears (but not in class, Sanada-kun, because that is against school policy).
Yagyuu also shares his lunch.
Sanada doesn't mean to stare. He keeps his eyes down at the bento box on his lap. Niou's mother packs sandwiches, but Sanada has yet to understand the appeal Niou has for two slices of tasteless bread and mysterious fillings that taste mouldy or greasy. When he sees Yagyuu's lunch, filled with fresh green seaweed, nostalgic pangs hit Sanada hard in the gut. When he smells the salty nori Yagyuu eats with his rice, Sanada stares, biting his lip and frowning because it reminds him so much of the sea that it hurts the way his legs ache at night.
"Would you like some?" Yagyuu offers.
Sanada had no idea that humans ate seaweed too. He thanks Yagyuu, grateful for the salty, slippery feel of seaweed in his mouth, filling his belly with familiarity.
"Tennis tryouts tomorrow," Niou says. Sanada sees Niou steal the sandwich sitting on his lap, but he says nothing. It would be rude to tell Niou off-after all, Sanada is his guest (sort of). But Sanada does scowl.
"Lighten up!" Niou says. He chucks Sanada's cap on the brim, messing up the arrangement. "Maybe you should try out too."
Sanada doesn't know what tennis is. He doesn't ask. Its one thing that Yagyuu doesn't explain either, because he's too busy picking at his rice with those strange sticks humans use to eat. Chopsticks.
"Will you be there tomorrow?" Yagyuu asks Niou. "Yukimura-kun will want us as doubles this year again, no doubt."
Niou makes a drawn out noise and leans back into the alcove the three of them sit in. The flat coldness of the window sill reminds Sanada of the rock shelves he would sit on for hours, watching her on the beach. He sighs to himself.
I still haven't found her, he thinks.
The days are ticking. He doesn't have indefinite time on land.
"Got pool-cleaning duty first," Niou says.
Sanada blinks. "Pool?"
"The school pool," Yagyuu says. "On the roof."
Sanada blinks again. He hadn’t smelled water nearby. He hadn't heard the soft plinks of rippling waves or rushing tides. He hadn't heard seagulls or fish splashing and yet Yagyuu says there is a pool nearby. His stomach flips up like a fish. His heart swells at the hope of water.
He's been forced to use the bathtub in Niou's house. That artificial, shallow, small tub filled with too-clean water that smells of nothing and tastes the same. He yearns for the salt spray and the swollen tides of the sea.
Once, he even tried to use the garden pond at Niou's house, in the backyard, but it was stagnant and foul and Sanada picked grit and algae out of his toes for days afterward.
But a pool…
Sanada thinks about it all day during afternoon classes. The teachers have avoided asking him too many questions because Yagyuu-proper, polite Yagyuu-stands up to answer questions about mathematics and literature Sanada doesn't really understand, yet; the pearls of wisdom he swallowed last week tell him the answers, remind him of what numbers are, but they seem redundant.
He thinks about it all evening. Niou's family sleeps late, which works well. Sanada says he sleeps early-and it's true, in the ocean, he would fall asleep with his eyes open, often not long after the sun set and he swam back to his cave. On land, he suppresses his yawns and his sluggish limbs because humans don't sleep that early.
But he does have first crack at the bath tub.
He hates it-he hates the slippery, porcelain edges that trap him and force him to crunch his body up. He hates lying here for the prerequisite hour a day that he has to soak his body, his tail temporarily returned. Sanada leans over the edge of the bathtub, staring at the tiled walls and trying to keep his splashing to a minimum, lest someone discover a tail flapping around and the sheen of his scales.
A pool would have room to swim; he can't sneak down to the beach each night, not yet, because Niou's family seems firmly rooted on land, at home, not on beach walks. But even if they did, there likely wouldn't be enough time to sneak off for an hour and dive into the roaring ocean.
So Sanada soaks in the confines of the bathtub, sliding around and trying to stretch his tail as much as he can before it cramps up and makes him groan. "Tarundoru" he mumbles, his words gurgling on the water surface as he blows bubbles through his gills.
Sharp pain always signals the metamorphosis of his tail back to his legs. He bites down hard, squeezing his eyes shut as his tail rips back into two legs. They throb as blood rushes back to his feet and he unplugs the stopper before he crawls out. His legs shake as he stands. As much as he wants to drip with water until it dries naturally, humans don't appreciate water puddles in their homes.
He grabs a towel, frowning as he dries himself off.
At night, he doesn't think of the pool so much as her. He lies on the futon across the room from Niou, who snores and flops around under his sheets like a dying fish, making just as much noise from his rattling breath, too. Even though the window is open and Sanada sucks in the misty air that floats in off the coast, he feels dry. The sheets scratch his skin-the parts not covered by his yukata.
When he closes his eyes, he can pretend that he's watching her walk along the beach, her soft voice trilling in the wind as the sand squishes between her toes. Thinking about her smile sends those strange, pleasurable pangs down his belly that settle between his legs. Sanada knows that humans frown down on doing this in public places, but…
If he bites back the moans when he touches his dick, when he rubs the skin of his balls between his fingers, he can get away with it. His face burns with shame, but he can’t stop himself sometimes, not when he aches for her as much as his legs ache, separated from the sea.
Sanada always stops before the feelings go too far. Numbness sparks his thighs, his cock and he throbs, but he always holds himself back. It's probably similar for humans, what happens when males get so excited that they…
Fertilize, he thinks.
I won't do that! Not with Niou here…
Niou keeps snoring. Sanada's cock keeps pounding, hot and heavy between his legs and Sanada lies there, wishing he could fall asleep and ignore the yearning inside.
The sun hovers on the horizon, peeking through the fluttering curtains when Sanada hears Niou stir. Niou's heavy snoring suddenly stops when he sits up in bed and yawns. Sanada cracks an eye open, blinking moisture into his eyes as the dry air hits him, the same way it does every morning now.
"Where are you going?" he grumbles when Niou shuffles out of bed.
Sanada too often is tired as a human. Gone is the easy slumber of the sea, of sleeping at dusk and rising when the first fingers of light streamed into the deep. Now, he's awake and his limbs groggier than ever. Crusty bits have formed again in the corners of his eyes and his hair is a mess, he knows.
Probably as bad as Niou's…
"This morning's tennis tryouts," Niou says. He stretches his arms high above his head, then he scratches his hairy armpits, yawning again. Sanada scowls at the waft of rank teenage boy that floats his way.
"I thought Yagyuu said they were in the afternoon," Sanada says.
Niou shrugs and mutters, "Some are, some aren't. I wanna watch the freshman buggers play this morning. You could always try out, if you want," Niou tells him. "Yagyuu's on the team. So's Yanagi. You might like him. It counts as a club credit on your diploma, too."
Sanada doesn't fully comprehend the concept of tennis either. He sits up and scratches the back of his head, trying to pat down the cowlick. As appealing as sleeping is, the sounds of the toilet flushing and then the shower running across the hallway as Niou gets ready for his "tennis tryouts" wakes him up even more.
A little voice inside reminds him of the old adage of the mersamurai: Be flexible in all situations.
There's nothing to lose, he thinks.
Except time.
Sanada tosses off the futon cover. He stands up, stretching down to touch his toes, and smiling to himself when he wiggles them. Tennis it is then.
When he sees the tennis courts, Sanada frowns. He assumed that the courts, in all their green clay glory with white lines and netting, were either some sort of bizarre human landscape garden, or used to catch birds. The way nets in the sea catch fish. Instead, students use rackets to hit balls over them, with the simple goal of trying to get the ball into the opponent's court.
Huh, he thinks. Sanada pulls at the brim of his cap, trying to hide his wide-eyed curiosity. He hates feeling dumb and simple, not understanding all the complex human rules and relationships, but here, this game, it seems easy.
He flexes his fingers, wondering what it would be like to hold one of the rackets, to swing and hit a ball. He was skilled with coral swords under the sea-it's not that different. The ball is the enemy. The other player is the enemy. Battle with a racket to win.
A thick, salty breeze ghosts over the back of his neck, ruffling his hair. Maybe that's a sign…
A tall boy with slitted eyes walks up to Sanada and raises his eyebrows. "Are you here to try out?" he asks. Then, he holds his hand out. "I'm Yanagi Renji, the tennis club treasurer. You must be Niou's houseguest."
"Aa," Sanada says.
"Do you play?" Yanagi asks.
Sanada looks around. Niou had been standing near, just down the bank overlooking the courts until Yagyuu showed up, but now…Sanada doesn't see anyone else, just himself and a few short freshmen in white phys ed uniforms, waiting to try their hand at playing for a spot on the team.
"I…don’t have a racket," Sanada admits.
Yanagi Renji smiles, chuckling under his breath. "I have an old one," he says. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a racket, unzipping the cover then handing it to Sanada.
The racket is much lighter than Sanada would have expected, almost feathery in its weight. The rim shines silver in the early morning light, and the strings are tight and taught. Sanada pokes them and his palm bounces off the gut.
"It's a Babolat," Yanagi says. "You seem to like it more than I did."
Sanada blinks.
Yanagi offers to play a game. Sanada agrees because, well, he needs to be flexible. It's easy enough when Yanagi hits a ball across the court, smirking to himself no doubt because he assumes Sanada has no idea what he's doing. And Sanada doesn't really, but when he runs for the ball and the racket makes contact, something like the electric shock of an eel burns him and he swings hard, slugging the ball back to the other court, aiming deep behind Yanagi.
And scoring a point in the process.
Yanagi's mouth drops. Just a little. Sanada smirks.
Hitting that ball, slicing the racket through the air-it's not that different from merkendo. The principles remain the same and the motions his body makes, the pleasant strain in his arms, it makes Sanada feel good. It takes his mind off the constant ache of being cut off from the sea and the sharp pains that prickle his legs.
Yanagi doesn't keep score and Sanada doesn't know how to-not yet, anyway-but when the school bell rings and they shake hands at the net, Yanagi says, "You should come to afternoon practice. Yukimura will want to meet you."
*--+--~--A--~--+--*