Y’ALL ARE AWESOME and have made this birthday a nice one indeed
Thank you for you unusual, unflinching support; there are so many stories out there and all an author can hope to do is write a story that is worth anything to anyone.
SO HERE HAVE SOME IFFY DRAWINGS (i’m so sorry)
And also have this portion of a chapter from the third book (Spoilers, obviously!)
*In this scene, just days after the two have met, the search for Moritz’s mother has led Ollie, Moritz and company to the forests and mountains of Appalachia. Up to this point, Moritz has kept his “emolocation” in check, worried about overwhelming Ollie with his feelings. However, a series of mishaps results in a rowboat overturning and the pair scrambling for shore, and Moritz can’t hide so easily.
This is written (probably obviously) from Moritz’s POV.
from Chapter Twelve: The Hat
It doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Truly, it doesn’t. My vision should improve beneath the water. Echolocation is typically used in such circumstances, I know. I have theories as to why I really could never be the Dolphin-hero you joked I was. (I miss those jokes, Oliver.)
We have spoken of adaptation. My ears are altogether too good at deciphering noise. The sounds of fluids in bodies, the sounds of aging wood and wind from kilometers away. My ears are too keen. Echolocation beneath the waves is a slow-motion slurge. An altogether lethargic animal. Sounds here move in great curves.
There is an idiom in English: can’t see the forest for the trees. I have the opposite problem. I am so used to seeing each and every tree that when the picture is larger I can’t see the trees for the forest.
You had hold of me beneath my arms, and you pulled me with you. Were your shoes as heavy as mine? Was your head aching from the spines of cold pricking us in every pore, the cold wet uncertainty of being tangled up in an atmosphere of water, not air?
Which way was up? The lake beneath us. Dark, I imagine. I could feel the unknowing of it. How deep?
But the more pressing issue: we both had to breathe. My ribs ached already, and my pacemaker could not fix that.
You must have known which way was up, because with a hollow thumping of your feet (was it your feet? There was so much, so vague beneath this icy swill) and the sensation of upward motion we broke the surface.
You gasped and I heard only half of it. There echoed a great cracking in my eardrums. Did water rush into your ears, too? Doubtless I’d suffer another ear infection.
But for now it was you, pulling me across a wide, wide lake. The weight beneath me, my feet dragging behind. I don’t envy astronauts as you do, Oliver.
“We’re nearly..to…shore,” I heard you gasp. “Moritz? Can you hear me?”
The third time you asked? I answered:
You didn’t respond. We weren’t really near shore, were we?
I may have fainted. But you carried me with you. Did you see my heartbeat swell? Did you see my madness? Because I was too disoriented to keep the filters on.
Perhaps you dipped in the water when the heavy weight of my affections struck you. A crash of sound and emotion that I could not restrain any longer, but you didn’t let me drown.
“Ollie, I… always hear you. You’re in my very skull and bones.”
“Okay, you dork!” You gasped. You spat water and plowed ahead, arm over arm with mine draped around your warm neck. You kept my head above the water, and the weight of my feelings as well, as I drifted in and out of myself.
A hard slap against my face. Brutal, bracing, warmer than the cold air and the stones against my back. Water clogged my treacherous right ear, rendered vision hazy.
A click revealed that we were still woods-bound, on some shore far from the one we’d left. Reeds at my feet, branches overhead. No stones here. Just cold mud to cold earth. The smell not unlike sewage, nearly. Sulphur in the earth? In the trees?
I tilted my head; a wave crashed inside my skull. Water in my head.
“Earth to Dolphinmo!” you cried. And then, because you couldn’t pretend to be laughing. “Please, Moritz. Please wake up.”
You slapped me again. But this time, the force had been altered — the striking of your gloved palm was accompanied by a sharp electric shock that coursed from my cheek to my chest. A blade of electric sharpness.
I sat immediately up, hands over my heart.
"Confound it! I’m already awake!“
“Well, how am I supposed to know!” You shifted your weight back to your feet. I could hear that you were sitting just out of my reach — close enough for you to slap me. Not close enough for me to touch you. I don’t have your reach. "It’s not like you, um, opened your eyes!“
Of course. First I’d bared my feelings and now my emptiness. I put a hand to my face. And then the other. You’d been looking at my naked skin. My goggles. Where were they?
"My goggles. Where are they?”
“Must have lost them in the water?” You wiped your nose on your sleeve. You were hazy with shivering, just as I was. How cold was it? Cold enough to make your boundaries blur.
“Ah, thank you. For pulling me through.”
“You basically already said that. Or felt that.” How cryptic, Ollie. “No biggie.”
I cocked my functioning ear your way. Were you only cold? Or had I frightened you that much? What had you felt from me when my guard was down? Damn it. Damn me. Everything was bottled again, but you’d seen me for who I was.
I combed my hair in front of my face. You looked away, quieter than I’d seen you. Averting your eyes. For me, or for you?
“I just sorta swam towards solidness. What should we do?”
“Ah.” I tilted my head away. To the left. Too late, for you’d seen me. God knew no one could forget what I look like. I had been punished for it before. I knew, on some level, that you would not hate me. I knew it, but even so.
“Hey. I felt a little of that. Moritz, if you really think that I care what you look like — just. Never mind.” I missed your false smile now that it was nowhere to be found. “Never mind.”
“I’m afraid my hearing’s going to take a moment to, ah, adjust. But no, I don’t hear them. I’m a useless, ugly creature is what I am never to mind. Ha.”
You didn’t look away from me. "You are the dumbest smart person, Moritz. You know that?”
"Thank you for informing me.“
You groaned. "I mean that you look like you should. You look like you. There aren’t holes in your face, like I kind of imagined. It’s just…you.”
“I meant that in a nice way! For the love of pajamas! You look fine! Well, you don’t look, because you don’t have eyes to look with, but — dang it. You know what I’m saying.” Did you blush, Oliver? “I’d never change the way you look, dumbass. I’d never change you.”
You stood then, arms folded. I clicked— something really had changed about the shape of you. I heard a faint buzz beneath your skin. I had attributed it to the water in my ear and your shivering, but —
“Well. Probably. There’s at least one more doozie to deal with, dummy,” you said.
I did not want you to mention my unleashed feelings, so: “Auburn-Stache will be okay. Bridget will do as she’s said…we have to hope.”
“They’ll be fine. Bridget’s the shit.” You were buzzing. The trees were stationary, so were the rocks. But you, you were different than before, Ollie. It wasn’t just the chill —
I smacked my skull. Smacked my hand once more against the opposite side of my head until the water in my ear, warmed by my heat, leaked out. So I could see/hear you properly.
Your buzzing remained, just beneath the susurrus of night creatures.
“Um, when we were in the water?” You scratched the back of your hooded head.
“…yes?” Do not ask me about my feelings. Do not make me speak them, now that we are lost and alone and you would want to flee.
“I lost my hat,” you said faintly. “It’s gone, like your goggles.”
I clicked my tongue once. I saw you, saw all of you. Froze. The buzzing intensified, didn’t it?
Because your hat was not all that was gone. Where the hat had been I saw the rubber tubing wrapped around your cranium with its gaffer tape peeling away. Your temples were exposed. Only a strip of cotton between my pacemaker and your electrical outbursts, now.
“My mother gave me that hat.” You slumped. Granted me a half-smile that tore me in two. “Mom did.”
You hadn’t meant to shock me, then. When you slapped me. It was only that your hat was gone. Only that you were upset enough to emit an electromagnetic pulse and there was nothing to restrict your pulses now.
It was only that for the remainder of our journey up the mountain, our journey that had so quickly resulted in our being lost and confounded in the cold mountains —
You were yourself in full. Fully equipped to kill me, should you lose yourself as I had.
And yet. I would never want to change you, either.
