there are many benefits to being a marine biologist
summary: Goshiki x F!Reader. Ponyo!AU. one part fairytale, one part growing up, one part love language exploration. you fall in love with a human boy and then move mountains to find him again.
word count: 8.7k
cw: nothing. gets better as it progresses imo
a/n: i started writing this maybe two years ago for a contest held by two users who are now both inactive i think? the outline for this planned for like two more acts, but i thought it should stop rotting in the drafts and i like it as is now. i do have quite a lot of worldbuilding not in the fic (mostly regarding goshiki's family, who i named after the original ponyo characters lol) so please, if you happen to read this and have questions about this little story that's been living in my head, feel free to ask :)
The day before he finds you, it storms like the world is going to end.
Seawater washes into the road as the sea swells in thick knots, rising and never quite falling as far as it should. Blooms of white—foam and algae and debris, and drowned souls if folklore was to be believed—swirl on the surface, which waits to break against the cliffs until the wave inflates to grotesque proportions, as though it’s a fist hammering against a wall. The wind tries to match the hysteric sea’s beat, and comes screaming in from the horizon, wrapping around whatever it finds in its path if it cannot blow through it and squeezing like a python. With it blows in the fog, until the atmosphere brings a river of milk, writhing over the pine islands so they become black spikes against which the ocean hammers.
Tsutomu stands against the back door of his home on the cliff, hands pressed to the glass, careful not to let his breath obscure his vision any further than the mist already was. Even inside the house—where the air is still warm, where the wind can’t creep in—he can hear the crash of waves and the shriek of the typhoon, even if they’re reduced to a low-crooning song punctuated by the steady rhythm of his mother’s voice.
“Transmitting from JA4LL. JA4LL. Come in, Koichi. This is Risa and Tsutomu.”
She’s been speaking steadily into the microphone for a few minutes already, and Tsutomu pads over to press his cheek into her side, fists his hands into her shirt while she pats him on the head. When the headset crackles to life, he jumps and she doesn’t. His parents’ voices wash over him warmly, and he relaxes, hoping the weather will calm soon so they can all go to Tashirojima together.
Sound asleep in a bubble deep beneath the sea, you don’t even know that there’s a storm on the surface.
“Wake up, girls.” You wake when your father speaks to you, swim eagerly to the border of filmy water and press your nose to it in a sort of nuzzling good morning kiss. “I—yes, good morning, hello—I said I’d take you all to work with me today, if you’d like—stop pressing on the bubble, you’ll pop it!”
You do happy flips when you’re let out of the little aquarium, linger at the back of the school of your sisters as your father quickly becomes engrossed in his work. He’s often distracted and always scatterbrained, but centuries of experience have made him an expert at marine wizardry. There’s little he loves more than his work, except perhaps your family, but he’s unfamiliar with the care and keeping of young goldfish and your mother is away right now.
This is how you slip away: with discretion from your sisters, distraction from your father, and a rush of excitement you’ve felt almost never in your entire life. It’s not that you don’t love your family, that you want to run away; it’s just that your sisters are all still babies, freshly hatched, and you get bored in the little bubble, always having to watch your father work and never getting to do anything. There’s no room for anxiety in your fish-body as you swim towards the surface, wriggling your fins frantically and buoying yourself with upward currents whenever possible.
The first sight of sunlight streaming through the aqua is mesmerizing, and you kick doubly hard for the remainder of the journey.
The surface is the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen. Exhausted from the swim, you flop onto your back on top of a passing jellyfish and stare in wonder at the coastline. There’s a road, and little metal vehicles crossing it, and houses tucked into every crevice in the hills. There are jagged cliffs that look like they were hewn in half by some godly hand (one of your uncles, maybe). And on top of the tallest cliff, there’s a little house, so small you can hardly see it, yellow and red and white, and you find yourself fascinated by it.
When he wakes, Tsutomu finds himself in bed, his eyes stuck together with leftover sleep. He remembers, just barely, being carried by his mother’s strong arms to his room, the press of her lips to his forehead. It’s not an unusual occurrence, so he starts his day as usual. Breakfast is leftovers from the fridge, his mother is still half-asleep sipping coffee at the breakfast table (she’s always groggier after a late night up speaking to his father), and he walks down the path to the beach, carefully balancing his favorite toy—a beach ball light enough for him to carry and shaped like a volleyball—in his arms.
It’s clear today, almost like there was never a storm at all. The sky is a cheerful blue dotted with puffy white clouds, the temperature warm enough to only require a t-shirt, not cold enough to make him uncomfortable. The sun shines down on the beach with a smile, the morning light nearly shining a spotlight on the red lump just above the waterline.
“Eh?” Tsutomu says to himself, walking closer and struggling to peer past the bulge of his volleyball. He sets it down carefully, stopping it from rolling away with his foot, and bends at the waist to look closely at you.
You stare, eyes bulging, back up at him. A little boy, the likes of which you’ve never seen before, fringe falling into his face, is the most magical thing you’ve ever seen.
“A goldfish!” He declares triumphantly as he identifies you. “Hello, Miss Goldfish.”
You flap a fin at him as best you can. He giggles and scoops you up in both hands, wading into the water and holding you just beneath the surface so you won’t dry out. You spin in his hands, and nuzzle his chubby palm.
“Tsutomu!” Someone calls from above. “Time to go!”
“That’s my mom,” Tsutomu says to you. “We’re going to work at the senior center. Well, she’s going to work, and I get to go to school right next to there, ‘cause I’m five years old.” He adopts a wise expression. Five is the oldest he’s ever been, and it feels very big. You splash. Me too! Me too! “It was nice to meet you, Miss Fish. My name is Tsutomu. I hope I see you again. Bye bye!”
He lets go of you gently, and turns to find that his ball has rolled into the water, a little too deep for him to reach without soaking his clothes. You, still watching the curious human boy, see the frown on his face, the tremble of his lips and watery eyes, and dart off quickly. When he looks down, you’re gone. He stands on the sand in front of the ball, watching it float further away, listening to his mother’s increasingly aggravated shouting for him to come up from the beach, and feels stuck with the tide of unhappiness rising in him. He reaches up with one fist to wipe at his watering eyes.
Shock overwhelms him when a stream of water hits the ball, pushing it against the current, intermittent splash carrying it all the way back to shore. His eyes stop watering from the pure amazement of it all as he watches a little red spark flash with every spurt of water, and he has to shake himself before wading back in to grab it.
“Thank you, Miss Goldfish,” he cheers when he finally lifts the ball clear of the surf. “You’re amazing!”
There’s nothing but pure childish admiration in the words, which makes you as happy as he is. You like this boy! He thinks you’re amazing!
You flip in the air, coming down with a splash that sends droplets of saltwater all the way to Tsutomu, who shields his face and twists his whole torso away with shrieking laughter.
“Tsutomu!” You say happily. He untwists to look at you, bobbing in the water.
“You said my name! You really are amazing!”
“Tsutomu!” You cheer, and then again for good measure.
“Tsutomu!” His mother roars, coming into view on the beach, and her ferocious tone hardly seems to dent his mood.
“I have to go now. Thank you a lot, Miss Goldfish,” he waves at you and begins walking back to his mother, who’s standing with her hands on her hips and her lips set in a scowl.
“Tsutomu!” You say in farewell, and begin the swim back home.
“Mom, I made a friend! I saw a goldfish, and she talks, too. She said my name! Isn’t that so cool?” Tsutomu bounces up to his mother with his fists clenched and raised in the air, as though he’s declaring victory, and her irritation dissipates almost immediately. She laughs and swings him up onto her shoulders.
“That is cool, but we’re going to be late. Think I can drive over before they open the drawbridge?”
You’re lucky your father doesn’t notice and you know it. For the rest of the month, you listen attentively as he explains, half-mumbled and face pressed up against a blackboard, the things he believes children ought to know: potionmaking, mostly, the way that those potions affect the environment, and the filthiness of humans. You try your best to be good, but you file as much information about magic away as you can and know in the deepest depths of your heart that it’s so you can see Tsutomu again.
You sneak away again, maybe every month, and rarely have to wait longer than a few hours for Tsutomu to come rushing down the path from his house, huge smile on his face, shedding his backpack and shoes. During low tide, he can reach what becomes a tide pool, and often he shows you things from his day-to-day life. You love hearing him talk, sometimes practicing human speech by following along with his words. He gives you a name, better than the one your father calls you, you think, shaping it in your mouth. While you watch with great interest, you never bring him anything.
You are a fish, after all.
As the years pass, your visits to the surface become more infrequent. You worry about your human-hating father catching you, and your education has intensified as you age. Your little sisters are starting to grow up and, though they’re still captivated by stories of your Tsutomu, you worry about fostering jealousy of the dry world in them. One daughter your father may not notice missing for a day, but where one of your sisters go, almost all the rest will follow.
“What does Y/N mean?” You ask innocently one day, when the two of you are eight years old. You bob in the water, and he sits on a rock, the surf spraying up around him but never reaching high enough to soak him.
“Mm,” he says, looking down and kicking at a pebble. “Beloved.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know,” his grin is childish, and the effect is only lightly diminished by the way he’s clearly struggling to maintain eye contact with you. You splash him, and he shrieks and falls into the water. Both of you come up giggling. Whatever the true meaning of his name for you, you know that whenever he says it, that’s what he means; and that is all that matters.
Although he waits patiently for you for many years, Tsutomu tells you one day with a serious face that he’s going to be going to school further away, in Sendai, and will have less time to spend watching out for you. You have a year left before this happens, he says, so your visits resume a near monthly routine. Sometimes, you simply spend hours after he’s left staring at the house on the cliff and imagining living there with Tsutomu and loving him the way he tells you his mom and dad love each other.
When he leaves for school, crying a little while you blink up at him, you absorb yourself in your studies. When you really, really miss him, you swim up to the surface and remind yourself that someday, you’ll be old and strong enough to live up there with Tsutomu.
The next time he sees you, he’s twelve years old. People call him Goshiki-kun, not Tsutomu-chan, and his voice cracks when he speaks. On the train ride home from school, he worries that you’ll laugh at him, like his peers do, that the way he’ll surely tear up upon seeing you is unmanly.
It’s July, the month of salt-making rituals, and this becomes the marker of your visits to Tsutomu. To his immense relief, you still call him by his first name, you don’t laugh when his voice breaks, you throw your whole body at him to smack his cheek like you’re trying to hug him with your fins. You missed him as much as he missed you, he can tell, and the both of you spend hours catching up.
You get two more years before disaster strikes.
The day you’re due to visit the surface, it storms again. You know what lightning is, now, know the acrid scent of sky-fire splitting the air, the brutal strength of riptides and currents. When you break into the air, you find that a gray mist lingers over the bay and the mood of the few people you see appears dismal. When you look up to Tsutomu’s house and see that it shines as cheerfully yellow as always, that yellow and red seems to creep into your bones until you feel sure that everything is alright. This is a kind of magic your father has not yet taught you.
This has always been your secret, safe harbor. You don’t expect anything to go wrong here—not when you’re accustomed to submarine chemical vents and shining anglerfish in the deep blue depths. Here it has always seemed safe, calm, kind.
You learn today why your father despises his former kin so much.
There’s silt in the water, probably stirred up by the storm that took away the cheeriness of the sky. One fish swims by you, its eyes bulging frantically. Then another, and another. It’s only when an entire school passes in the same direction that you hear the ship coming closer and realize that you should probably be heading that way yourself.
You’re too late, and so are the rest of them—something huge, bigger than the mouth of a whale, you think it must be, traps you, pressing you together with sifting mud and other scales and glass, like your father’s bottles. You try to move your tail and push yourself out, but you’re packed so tightly in with a million others doing the same that the action is impossible.
You’re starting to panic.
Then, the boat attached to the net you’re in swings around, taking you and everyone else with it, and you find yourself face to face with a glass jar. Worse, you find yourself slowly being pushed into it by the sheer unluckiness of your position and the crush of animals trying to escape the churning mud and human garbage.
You push more frantically than before, thrashing your entire body violently.
“No, no, no, no!” You wail, the words bubbling in the water. Then you fall through a gap in the net.
Unable to right yourself in time, you find yourself stuck halfway into the jar, and your wriggling only makes it worse.
You can’t—you can’t breathe. This was a mistake. You’re so scared.
You have to take the last resort. You send up a prayer to your mother—please, don’t let him be too angry—and send out a spell with the last bit of energy you have. A signal that will ripple all the way to your father.
You run out of oxygen, and everything goes black.
Tsutomu has been waiting a long time by the beach. He got up early to watch the sunrise, carrying a thermos of hot tea with him as he sat by the water and wondered what your life was like through the months you don’t see him. As he wakes more fully and the air starts to warm (though not by much) he walks alongside the waterline, testing how far he could go in without getting the hem of his pants wet, how long his toes could stand immersion in the cold seawater. He ponders why you keep visiting him, year after year, bringing him good luck and sunny skies.
You’re more to him than a symbol, though; you’re amazing.
As he settles himself, he starts to walk back to the tidepools, hoping you’ll be there. He knows it’s a little early for your visit, but you’re unpredictable; besides, he’s sure you care about your weird human friend as much as he cares about his fishy one.
Near the stairs, something rolls on the sand, flashing gold. Tsutomu squints at it, then picks up his pace. Shit, shit, is that—
It is. He picks up the jar, lips pressing into a pout when he sees that you’re unmoving. He runs up the steps to his home, taking them two at a time, all the while talking to you like you can hear him through the glass barrier.
He collects a bucket and stands next to the garden hose, trying to shake you out of your jar. He thinks that it would require too much force than would be safe to get you out, but you’re clearly suffocating in there. He squats on his heels, turning the jar over in his hands and wracking his brain for a solution.
“Tsutomu, you’re gonna be late for practice!” His mom rounds the corner, startling him, and he drops you. “Tsutomu—what was that?”
You’re out of the jar, but now you’re lying in pieces of shattered glass. Eyes round in distress, Tsutomu snatches you up and plops you into the full bucket of water.
“Nothing,” he says, voice suspiciously shaky.
“Okay, well, we’ve gotta go, so get in the car now.” She jerks her thumb towards the vehicle. He nods and peeks into your bucket. You stare up at him, as alert as ever, and he breathes a sigh of relief.
In the car, you swim happily in circles, raising your head out of the bucket to peer out the window.
“What’s in the bucket?” His mom says with interest, and he presses a hand over the opening of the bucket, trying not to giggle as you nuzzle his palm.
“It’s for a group science project—Mom, watch out, you’re gonna make it spill!” She side-eyes him, knowing her son has never been so conscientious of a school project or of his own messes before, but lets it slide. There’s no point in prying when there are only so many options to be found on the beach. The worst that can happen is that he lightly traumatizes some sea creature, and she doubts that Tsutomu’s conscience and childhood obsession with marine life could let him do that. Besides, she smiles to herself. The sea is basically in his blood.
Tsutomu rushes out of the car, managing only a “Thanks-Mom-love-you-goodbye!” before he’s dashing to the gym, gaze bouncing between your bucket and the ground to avoid tripping so fast watching his eyes makes you dizzy.
He sets you down on the bench closest to the court.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” He whispers, picking you up to make sure there’s no glass embedded in your skin.
“I’m okay!” You beam up at him. “Tsutomu rescued me!”
He smiles at that, blushing faintly, pretty eyes squinting, and you pop out of the water to splash him lightly.
“Hey, I have to practice in this,” he frowns.
“Sorry,” you say, abashed, but he shoots you a small smile and you know it’s alright.
Listening to Tsutomu explain volleyball is entirely different from watching him play it. You didn’t really understand it when he spoke, before, but now you understand the difference between a fishing net and a volleyball one, as well as other crucial aspects of the game. There’s a lot of yelling, and squeaking, and it’s a little hard to see from inside your bucket, but you don’t mind. You bob up every so often, trying to find Tsutomu on the court, though it’s hard when he moves around so much.
At one point, he jumps up and slams down the ball in what’s clearly a perfect line even to the untrained eye. Around him, his teammates burst into cheers (“Nice going, bowlcut!) and you get so excited you mimic them, whooping and doing a flip in the air.
“Eh? What was that?” Someone you can’t see says, and then Tsutomu is there, grinning widely at you from above, eyes watering slightly.
“Oi, Goshiki,” a boy with hair as red as your scales slides an arm around him. “What’s this you’ve got?”
Tsutomu opens his mouth, but you beat him to it, using the name he gave you without a second thought.
“Huh? Wow, you have a smart goldfish! Reon, come check out Goshiki’s goldfish!”
Reon simply looks at you and says, “Cool.”
“Be nicer!” The redhead says, smacking him lightly on the shoulder. “She can talk!”
“I can talk!” You echo. Reon repeats cool, unfazed.
“What are we looking at, Tendō?” A boy whose shirt reads Yamagata slows his jogging to a stop, one hand running through his hair as he looks at the red bucket.
“This is Y/N,” Tsutomu says. “I found her on the beach.”
“Are you going to eat that?” A voice deeper than the others makes you poke your head further out of the water than before. It’s a boy like the others, with greenish hair and a huge stature. He reminds you, oddly, of your mother. Big and bea-uti-ful!
“No!” Tsutomu yelps. “No, we won’t! Ushijima-senpai, sir,” he adds, voice calming to a lower pitch as he does.
“Are you sure?” Asks Tendō, a sly expression crossing his face. Tsutomu pushes him away hastily and steps protectively in front of you.
“Yes! I mean no! I mean—”
“Alright,” Ushijima-senpai says slowly. “Welcome to our practice, then. I hope you enjoy watching volleyball.”
“Enjoy!” You do another flip. “Watching Ushijima-senpai!”
“Okay—” Tsutomu says, picking up your bucket, looking around as he tries to find his way out of the circle of boys.
“What’s wrong with your fish?” A boy with long bangs and pointy features grabs the bucket and peers at you. You don’t like this pointy human. “Why is it talking?”
You say nothing, hollowing your cheeks in preparation to spit at him.
“Give her back,” Tsutomu narrows his eyes. “Careful, Shirabu.”
“Is no one else concerned about the talking goldfish?” Shirabu looks around at his upperclassmen. “What the fuck, Goshiki?”
“He’s right,” Ushijima says thoughtfully. “The fish could be a spy. For Karasuno, perhaps.”
“What?” Shirabu’s outraged yell is shortly cut off by Tsutomu’s fearful-yet-determined denial that you would ever do such a thing to him or to Shiratorizawa.
A deep sigh, sounding somewhat like it’s exhaling the speaker’s entire soul, interrupts them both.
“Can we please stop staring at Goshiki’s pet and get back to practice?” A boy with ash blond hair says, and immediately, a few of the others nod and disperse.
“She’s not a pet,” Ushijima says, while Tsutomu splutters incoherently. “Or sushi. She’s a friend of Goshiki. But you’re right, we should be practicing.”
“T-thank you, Ushijima,” Tsutomu says haltingly, eyes shining in admiration. “I really appreciate it!” The captain only needs to look back at him, his face unsmiling but not at all unfriendly, for him to continue. “And I apologize for distracting everyone, I’ll get back to work now! Thank you!”
The rest of practice goes smoothly, although you get a few lingering stares and an odd few minutes of interrogation from Shirabu while they’re on their break. He tries to explain that you can talk, and this is bad, and it’s a demon, to an old man with white hair, who merely hums when he looks at you and tells him to do an extra fifteen laps as a punishment for talking nonsense about magical goldfish.
Once the games have all finished and Goshiki’s changed into street clothing, though, something horrible happens. He’s picking you up, ready to transport you to his mother’s workplace so you can drive home, but then someone taps him on the shoulder. He startles, water sloshing over the sides of the bucket, and lifts up the bucket to his chest to prevent any further instability.
“Goshiki-kun,” a girl human says. “Could I speak to you outside?”
“Ouuuu,” you hear Tendō’s voice from across the gym. “Little bowl cut is receiving a confession?”
“Uh, um, yes, you can,” he says, and when you turn his cheeks are scarlet. “Let me just pack up the rest of my things, and I’ll m-meet you out there.”
“Sounds good!” She says, and you don’t like the cheery note of her voice or the way she brushes her hand against his bicep. You make a face up at Tsutomu, but he doesn’t seem to notice, lost in his own head.
You swim all the way to the bottom of the bucket, only to feel him poking you not a minute later.
“Don’t be grumpy,” he says. “Please? It’ll be just a second.”
You flap a fin at him and make an enthusiastic noise.
It is not, in fact, a second. You wait for an eternity (and you know about eternities) for the girl to stop stuttering her way through telling Tsutomu that she thinks he’s really smart, and she likes his bowl cut, and you can just see the word amazing forming on her lips before she says it. Her hand is stretching out, dropping something shiny into his hand, and you hate it, you hate it, you hate it.
You act before you think. Your cheeks puff up and you take a big breath in and then there’s water, all over her pretty pink cardigan. She shrieks and then starts to cry a little, and you stick out your tongue and blow a raspberry at her before diving back down, flipping your tail with sass as you go.
“I’m really sorry,” Tsutomu says frantically, offering her a wrinkled handkerchief. “It was an accident, I swear. I-I really appreciate your confession and, um, I’m glad you were comfortable enough soo that you could come to me, but, oh! My mom’s here, I have to go! Bye!”
You swivel and watch as he picks you up and bolts away; her tears seem to have dried a bit as she stares after him in bewilderment. Not for the first time, you wish you had two legs and hands to hold onto Tsutomu. You wish that you could stay on shore with him, and keep away all the girls like her forever.
You know it’s childish, but you don’t care. Does it matter that it’s an immature thought when it’s completely impossible?
In the car, Tsutomu is quiet. Even his mother seems to notice his pensive aura, and frames her questions about his day carefully to avoid sounding like she’s prying.
“What’s that?” She asks, and he unclenches his hand, looking as mystified by the object in his palm as you feel. It’s a pin, gold and pink and shaped like a heart. “Oh, my gosh, is that from your girlfriend, Tsutomu?”
“No,” he says immediately. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
You frown, bumping the red walls of the bucket, and he trails his fingers through the water. Something coppery floods your senses, and you dart over to nuzzle his hand instinctively. In his palm, there’s an angry red mark, oozing little droplets of blood. When you poke it, he winces.
It tastes weird when you lick it.
“Hey!” He jerks his hand out of the water. “Whoa.”
Where Tsutomu knew he had been pricked by the pin a few minutes ago, there’s no sign of injury, even though the water surrounding you still has a faint tint in places. You watch him with round eyes, and he offers you a smile and a pat on the head. Amazing.
“What did you think, Y/N?” You stick out your tongue.
“Girlfriends suck,” is your opinion. “Pbbbt.”
The wind blows the longer strands of Tsutomu’s straight hair to the side as he stands next to the garden hose, refilling your bucket with fresh water. Above you, the sky is a weak blue, it��s brighter shades concealed by layers of white mist. A lush, slightly overgrown garden is what hides behind the picket fence you can see from the seashore, full of plants that look so familiar to the kelp forests you’re used to, yet so different. The upper lands are so strange. You’re glad Tsutomu’s mom doesn’t keep her garden dry and cut into shrubbery, like some of the houses you saw on the way to his school.
“Who are you?” Tsutomu’s voice is stiff, like his form as he drops you into the now-full bucket of fresh water while you crane your neck to see past his legs.
“Where is she?” Booms a voice you know all too well. It cuts off when he sees you, lips pursed while you try to look as inconspicuous as possible. “Captured by a human boy? Bad, that’s very bad. Give her here—“
“No!” Your friend yelps. “You want to take her? Y/N, I’ll protect you.”
“Protection?” Your father sneers, his hair puffing up threateningly. “I felt her signal for help—very good, by the way, your spellwork is coming along nicely. Give her here, now, I’ll be drying out soon.”
“I don’t care! Y/N wouldn’t do that, we’re friends,” Tsutomu says, casting a glance down at you. You nod, your tongue feeling stuck.
“My daughter would not befriend a human—“
“Y/N loves Tsutomu!” You cry. A light blazes in his eyes at the words, and his posture straightens.
“And I love her!”
“Eh?” Your father looks between the two of you. “That’s nonsense, Brunhilda, you know what humans are like, and what’s a Y/N, anyway?”
“It’s me!” You flip in the air, surging with defiant energy. “It’s my name.”
You choke midsentence as a hand closes around you; the world goes up in bubbles, and all you can hear is Tsutomu screaming your name, over and over.
Over.
And over.
And over.
“Again!” You sigh and twitch your fins lazily, watching with hooded eyes as lines only you can see race across the model mountain, glowing faintly before they settle into the material. The warding spell is clean and simple, requiring no complicated incantations or strange ingredients. However, it needs time to sink in, and when a hermit crab scuttles over the map and right onto your now-invisible lines, the whole thing goes up in a puff of smoke.
“Y/N,” your father says sternly, having given up on Brunhilda some time ago, when you refused to answer to it. “This is meant to be a demonstration for your sisters. These spells require layering, you know, one spell to ward and a secondary spell to, in a way, ward that ward. This creates an effect…”
You say nothing, merely letting a current of water roll you onto your side, your eyes rolling up to stare at the ceiling. You can feel the sympathetic gaze of your father—you know that he didn’t intend for this to happen. He only wanted to save you; he couldn’t have known that Tsutomu wasn’t the threat. You know he worries about you when he thinks you can’t hear him. You hear his every prayer for your mother to come back, to make things right, to help you see things his way. It’s only on the third point that he loses you. You didn’t want things to be this way either.
When you lost Tsutomu, something inside you boiled up and nearly steamed over. You can only remember wanting to go back, to go home to him, desperately trying to rejoin him on land. You love your father, and you only want his understanding. He left behind his humanity for your mother; why can’t you gain it yourself for Tsutomu?
The lid had clamped down on that furiously bubbling emotion, and in response it had gone to sleep, simmering but never fully boiling away. At first, you had been unmotivated even to eat or wake when your sisters did. Four years later, you still miss him: you go about your day to day life just fine, but you lack your childhood verve.
Even now, you can feel yourself slipping into slumber, exhausted by just a few minutes of magic. Your father’s voice and the clamor of your sisters meld into a comforting hum, lulling you further. You barely register the feeling of your father carrying you to your aquarium, the whisper of his goodnight lost on your drowsing mind.
When he was fourteen, Tsutomu’s mother found him in the garden. There was a wet trail leading right off the bluffs, a red bucket lying on its side, and her son, sitting with his knees under his chin and crying his heart out. The garden hose was still on.
She didn’t ask what happened, just turned off the hose and crouched next to him, arm over his shoulders, until he looked up at her with puffy eyes and wordlessly followed her into the house.
Risa had always known that she could be a little sharp with her words, and so she used food to express herself more often when she wanted it to be soft and soothing. She mixed her son some tea, the way she had every time he’d gotten sick when he was little, slid two slices of bread into the toaster, and hoped that the warmth of what she gave him would travel into his heart and help it heal a bit. Tsutomu cried into the toast a little, once it had been lavished with butter and honey, but it was just sniffling and not silent sobs, so she didn’t mind much. Then they sat on the couch and she rubbed his back while old tapes of his very first volleyball games played on the TV.
Tsutomu never told her what had happened that day. He could tell that she was curious, but unwilling to pressure him, and he wasn’t sure how to explain it. She’d always spoken about you in the same manner most adults used to describe the imaginary friends of children, and correcting that assumption seemed beyond the dignity of the man he wanted her to see him as. He knew that she guessed that he’d knocked over the bucket and sent his fish back down into the sea, and it wasn’t an unreasonable explanation. Fourteen year old boys weren’t the most rational creatures, and he could very easily have been sent into a similar kind of spiral had the fish just been a regular goldfish. It wasn’t, though, and he’d never cried so hard over any girl since.
He misses you. Though it doesn’t ache as sharply as it did when the fear of facing off against your father was fresh in his mind, he still thinks of you with a pang of sadness. There had been a sense of belonging with you he knows was more than a fleeting feeling. He hopes you’re happy in the ocean, learning new magic and spending time with your sisters, and once you’re queen of the sea, maybe you’ll come visit him. He’ll show you his cross spike.
“Again!” Shirabu barks, and Tsutomu has no trouble complying. He empties himself of every concern outside of the game and slams down a serve, just outside of the zone he wants it to land in. Without prompting, he picks up another ball and does it again.
Over and over and over.
Electricity was already crackling in the air when he woke up.
Everything felt uncomfortable, like the pressure in the atmosphere would pop and the sky would fall down in flaming pieces around them. It’s gray, like it was the day you went home. You’ve been lingering even longer on his mind than usual, and he just hopes that the knot in his throat will go away if he hits enough perfect shots.
It would probably help if his partner for the day weren’t allergic to acknowledging when he does something right.
“Alright, that’s enough,” Shirabu says. Tsutomu makes a face at him and serves one more ball, the sound of it hitting the ground echoing obnoxiously. These days, he and Shirabu are good friends, though they’re still hiding behind the thin veneer of antagonism they’d held for each other in their first years. Being teammates at Shiratorizawa means being bonded for life, after all. There’s no sense in fighting it. The powers that be (also known as Coach Washijō) are as inexorable as fate, after all.
During the school year, Tsutomu lived in the dorms, like most other academy students, but living a mere half hour ride away meant he often visited the school over summers, too. It’s a little bittersweet now to know that each day spent practicing in this gym could be his last; though he has some time before university begins, he’s not sure when graduates are supposed to lose access.
“I drove with my mom,” Tsutomu says, “so I’ll be meeting her at the senior center. You’re coming over to watch the Rockets game later, right?”
“Sure,” Shirabu says, slinging on his backpack. “I have to bring some homework, though, I have too much preliminary coursework already.”
“You asked for it, smartass,” teases his friend.
“That’s gonna be Doctor smartass to you.”
Despite the short walk between the academy and the senior center, Tsutomu is soaked by the time he walks inside. He’s careful when taking off his raincoat and shaking out his umbrella, placing it into the designated stand, stamping his boots on the absorbent mat a few times to be safe. Just past the welcome desk, he can see his mother, pushing rambunctious Mrs. Suzuki down the hall, probably to her daily bingo game, where she’ll fleece the other players just like she’s done every day for years. Mrs. Fukuyo is sitting near the terrace doors, gazing out of the big window at the wet world outside.
“Hello, Tsutomu-chan,” she says, beckoning him to sit down, taking his hand in both of hers. “Or should I say Goshiki? You’re an adult, now, aren’t you?”
“Basically,” he says, lifting his chin. “One more week.”
“Oh, yes, you’re very grown up,” she says. “I remember when you were just starting secondary school. You were a bit skinnier then, and you wouldn’t eat fish.”
Tsutomu flushes.
“A lot can happen in a week,” says Miss Itoh, who often plays Mrs. Suzuki’s partner in crime when she deigns to attend bingo, as she passes by. “You be careful, Tsutomu, with all this weather. It’s bad luck.”
“There’s always weather,” sniffs Mrs. Fukuyo. “And we need the rain.”
“I’ll take care, don’t worry,” Tsutomu says politely. “You do the same, please.”
“Good, good,” Miss Itoh sounds distracted. “Happy birthday. Keep out of the rain, you’ll get sick. And don’t go sailing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he stands to bow as she leaves the room.
“She’s crazy,” Mrs. Fukuyo sighs, half-joking. “But even a broken clock is right twice a day. You’re a good kid.”
“Thank you,” he says, stiff and awkward, cheeks glowing red.
“Tsutomu, there you are. Sorry to keep you waiting, I’m done now,” his mother lands a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Hello there, Mrs. Fukuyo. Doing well?”
“I am, thank you,” says the elderly woman. “Just telling your son what a strong man he’s grown up to be. He’ll take good care of his mother.”
“I will,” Tsutomu says with conviction. His mother’s pride beams down on him like the sun splitting the clouds.
“Thank you,” his mother says. “The storm rages on; we should probably go.”
“The roads aren’t safe,” says the the woman at the check-in desk as they prepare their rain gear to leave. “You should stay here for the night, Risa.”
Her jaw tightens. “I need to be there if Koichi radios in. We’ll make it just fine, don't you worry.”
On a nondescript day in August, you wake up.
Something tastes different on the current, and you feel almost like you’re regarding the world with new eyes again. You remember, with fierce and reckless abandon, what it is to love.
“Good morning,” you greet your sisters cheerily.
“Good morning!” They echo back, beaming at you. They feel it too, you can tell.
You eat your breakfast with gusto, examine your scales and scrub each until they shine. You kiss every sister you see on top of her red-gold head.
“I want to see Goshiki,” you tell your father, watching as his hair stands on end at the name, bracing yourself so the surprised jolt of power he emits doesn’t knock you down.
“No,” is all he can muster for a moment. “The human world isn’t safe. Look at what happened to you the last time you went up there.”
“I would have been fine because of Tsutomu,” you say, “And I’m even more powerful now than I was.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he snaps back. “They taint everything they touch. You’d have to-to literally, actually become a human to return to the surface. I don’t want them taking you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
You take a deep breath.
“Fine,” you say. “Then I’ll do it myself.”
You exhale with controlled force, closing your eyes and concentrating on the slow beat of cold blood in your veins.
“What are you doing?” Starts your father, nervously, but you don’t hear as you focus intently on the warmth spreading through you.
Pop!
You open your eyes, magic still swirling around you, and beam.
“Feet!” You chirp. “I have feet!” A little more pushing, and—
“Are those legs?” Your father shrieks. “Stop this right now!”
“No,” you say fiercely, and release an explosion of power so potent it rocks you backward. Seconds later, you realize that you’ve blasted a hole in the wall and the barrier ward; seawater rich with plankton rushes through, followed by barracuda with bulging eyes and squirming eels. You have hands, now, and something odd is happening to your scalp. You use one of the new extremities to reach tentatively up and pat your head.
“Hair!” Your sisters, freed from their own bubbles by the commotion, float around you. A shock of hair has sprouted from your scalp like a crop of coral. It tickles your forehead.
“I did it,” you say quietly, breathless. “I’m human.”
You look around for your father, but only see the tail end of him dashing into one of his back rooms, his nervous muttering echoing around the room.
Perhaps if you were human from the beginning, your mother would have taken you to the sea, held your hand as you beheld the glittering waves for the first time, and warned you never to turn your back on the ocean. Alas, you weren’t and she didn’t, so you fall with no resistance forward when a rush of water slams into your back, grinding your face into the floor and sweeping you away while you flail your little hands helplessly.
You’ve only felt so powerless in the water once before. Scrabbling for purchase as you freewheel through the halls of your home, you catch your fingers—there’s still a little rush of joy from it, you made them, you have fingers—on the spokes of a great wheel and cling for dear life. It creaks and turns, and you yelp, your words turning to bubbles that rise and pop against the ceiling, against which the water now reaches. The wheel turns again, and you try to hold your breath (something you’ve never done before) as something in the door clicks. There’s a moment where you think it’ll hold, and then you rock forward a little more, and it swings open. The ocean, eager to fill everything and make it its own, changes its course, and you tumble into the room, eyes widening when you see the enormous cauldron filled with something richly luminous and golden. Even submerged, the scent of the potion is strong, reminiscent of plant rot and blooming flowers, the same perfume that your mother exudes. For a moment, you gain breath, lungs and gills morphed and confused, and then you’re pulled back beneath the surface and pushed right into the pot.
You shut your eyes, the golden glow permeating even through your eyelids, and oddly enough, you can breathe like it’s pure oxygen. You can feel your spell being taken away from you, your limbs becoming fins, and you open your eyes.
I want to be human, you cry. I want to see my love.
The cauldron erupts, pushing you out of it on the top of a geyser. You hear popping noises and try to stand, looking down to see several of your sisters caught up in the fount of bubbling-over magic, thrashing joyfully as they try to wave at you with suddenly huge fins.
You wave back, and gasp involuntarily when you see your own hand. Five fingers, covered with soft skin, veins carrying warm blood and strong bones beneath it. Your sisters may have grown far more in the span of the last few seconds, but you’ve reached an entirely unfamiliar size and shape yourself. You stretch your legs, examining your toes, the way your dress—the same color as your scales and a little iridescent, just like they were—flows around you, and beam at your sisters.
Thank you, Mother. You bow your head quickly in short prayer.
“Let’s go see Tsutomu!” You call out, and your sisters leap in answer.
The surface world is so different through the eyes of a human. Your head is turned constantly to the shore as you race on the bubbling foam towards the highest hill you can see, a speck of yellow and red on top of it growing closer with every step. Lights turn on and off in the windows of homes, a thousand little fireflies glowing smaller in the distance. Trees, shivering and shaking in the wind, make up the landscape, shaping it into something that looks almost soft from so far above.
The broad panorama isn’t without more minor detail, though: with some fascination, you see two glowing eyes staring at you from along the road. Their owner steps out of the shadows—a furry creature with pointy ears and a tail and a sleek white coat of fur. Another cat follows him into the light, this one black and her eyes shiny green, unlike the first’s calm blue. The white cat rubs his cheek along the other’s, winding around her while she stands stock-still. Quick as a minnow, the black cat swipes at him, but the white cat darts away, checking over its shoulder to see if she’ll follow. You beam broadly and speed up, eager to situate yourself in this strange and exciting new world Tsutomu comes from.
Tsutomu can’t remember a time his mother’s spent the night away from home. Every night, without fail, if she knows that his dad will be in the harbor, she sits at home and waits for him, beaming their signal in start-stop patterns, having whole conversations with him in flashes when the radio reception isn’t to be used. It’s not often he’s away from home, either; it makes him uneasy to be away from the open sea. A closed horizon is a strange sight to him, like being a bug trapped in a bowl.
His parents’ commitment to each other has shaped him, something he’s always known. In sickness and in health, they swore to each other, and they kept it. For better or for worse.
His mother certainly seems intent on plowing through the worst to get to his father, now, the rain hitting their windshield in sheets and the water sloshing around their tires. Tsutomu doesn’t protest at all, just hangs on to the grab handle and stares out at the behemoth waves.
A flash of red shines in the corner of his eye. He sucks in a sharp breath, twisting fully around. He squints, trying to make out shapes through the rain.
“Get back in your seat,” his mother blindly swats at him with one hand, eyes focused on the road. “You’re throwing off the weight distribution.”
Tsutomu ignores her, white knuckling the cushions of the car as he watches you, dancing in the rain, running with the waves. You duck and weave, your dress red against the cold, gray sea.
“There’s a girl in the water!”
“What? Where?”
His mouth lies, but his heart knows the truth, knew it as soon as he saw you.
“There,” he points, but you pull ahead of them, and then there’s nothing but lightning flashing in the distance. “Never mind. Never mind. We just—we just need to go home, sorry.”
“Right you are,” his mother says, and drives the gas pedal into the floor.
Tsutomu is a shipwreck. Tossed around on the waves of his thoughts, he finds himself cresting and falling, one emotion followed immediately by another. It can’t be you. It is you. Tsutomu doesn’t care what you are, just that he can see you again. He wonders if this is what drowning feels like.
Their wipers battle to slough off the buckets pouring from the sky, and Tsutomu’s heart drops to his soles when a smudge of red reveals itself just to be his old bucket, hanging off the fence. His mom parks and he tries to regulate his breathing, unbuckling his seatbelt and getting out of the car on shaky legs.
“Is that…” His mother says, trailing off, and his head snaps up, the car blocking him from whatever she sees.
He walks around, trying desperately not to break into a run, trying not to get his hopes up.
Barely audible over the sound of storming, the pat-pat-pat of rapid footsteps is his only warning before—
You crash into Tsutomu, both faces scrunching up from the impact, both losing your footing on the wet pavement and falling further into each other. He knows it’s you even with his eyes closed. He would know you in every world and the next; he would know you from the beat of your heart and the touch of your skin and the way he loves you, loves you, loves you.
For a moment, before you hit the ground, you feel like you’re flying with him.
You spill together onto the driveway like an egg cracked into a pan, still holding each other in a bone-crushing embrace. You inhale his scent deeply and nuzzle into his wet-rain-jacket shoulder, and he cracks his eyes open, afraid you’ll disappear when he comes back to reality.
Tsutomu says your name quietly, on tenterhooks, almost all the breath in his body taken out of him.
You lift your head and say his louder, eyes wide and bright and wet. He can’t stop his tears from welling up, but he can blame them on the rain.
You kiss his cheeks where the salt might dry, one then the other, soft as the breeze. Tsutomu can still feel your smile, unfading. The sky turns gold around you.
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