#auxfic

She’s shorter than you would like, your reflection, with skinny ankles that make her jewelry clink quietly. (Most things underwater are quiet, but that’s another problem to unpack later.) Her hair is halfway to her elbows, and when you let go of the locks in your hand they kinda drift back into place like seagrass. There are many more feet above her to the top of the mirror, and you have to tip your head back to look at where the tines of )(er diadem would reach.  

You sigh, again, and wave away the bubbles that float up in its wake. The knife disappears into your sylladex. You have a stint at conchmunity service you’ll be late for if you keep brooding like this, even if it is, at least for the time being, one of your more versatile hobbies.  

Nofin really reminds you of the endless possibilities of your eternity like not being able to try any of it.  

* 

Barely after breaching five you find yourself swimming against the current of a whirlpool, stretching your fledgling curse vocabulary as far as it will go. Now and again it sucks you back a waves, and you set your jaw and flex your feet and kick and kick.  

Eventually, the current dies away, and you float on your back all the way to shore, staring at the moons, breathing hard. Your hair snakes out around you, black as the sky you’re under and twice as heavy. Sometimes you have dreams about something yanking you by the roots to the white-sanded bottom of your domain, where the pressure will squeeze at your fins and your bones will bend like mangled driftwood. Pain, you think on evenings you wake up from those visions, is something you don’t mind being acquainted with, as long as it’s on your watch.  

Speaking of which.  

You stomp, barefoot and dripping, into the unassuming halls of the secretarial wing. The tealblood clacking away at the husktop looks up. “Miss Peixes,” she chirps, a little unsure. Unsure teals are rare, and you don’t pity this one. “You’re done earlier than expected. Did, um, did you want your scores?”  

“Don’t fuckin try me, penpusher,” you reply pleasantly, sloshing past.  

She trips over her seely protocols. “Do you have an appointment?” 

“That sounds like tryin me!” 

You push open the door, your slowly drying curls leaving puddles in your wake. 

* 

Of course s)(e isn’t there. You’re greeted by one of her cohorts, some placid goldie who, by the looks of it, has outlived his expectations by several decades. Neither of you acshelly acknowledges the other.  

He says, “You don’t have an appointment.” 

You say, “You don’t have fuckin eyeballs.” 

“That’s fair.” He stands from his desk, stretching. He’s lanky; you think of another psion kid you know, growing into his limbs like it’s a coddamn race. “Here to leave )(er a message?” 

“Yup.”  

“Lay it on me.” The psion waves a hand, bored, and all the adrenaline you thought you had expended in the whirlpool comes back to flood your chest cavity.  

You cross your arms. “Shore.” A deep breath, a faint, not-at-all frustrated pop of your gills. “What in the fresh frozen hell is the point?” 

He opens his mouth like he wants to interrupt you already. You plough onward. “I don’t wanna hear that lifesaving capability bullship or whatebber it’s called this week. Okay? It ain’t my fault a couple dipshits go past the safety line. You expect me to give a fuck about these idiots who can’t defend themselves from half our glubbin planet?!” 

The psion looks at you to the best of his ability and says, matter-of-factly, “Yup.” 

“Fuck you, old man. I have betta shit to do than wriggler-sit drowning starry-eyed morons. I have moar impoartant”— ick, the same pun twice in a row, you’re slipping — “things on my plate if I’m gonna make any difference ever. So sorry if my pump biscuit don’t bleed like a hemophilic lobster.”  

Even a mock apology does not sit well between your fangs. Who the shell are you, princess in name and queen in dramatics, to be sorry? 

He rattles out a very long sigh, and you realize with a start that you may have a thing or two in common. “I’ll pass along your complaint. Anything else?” 

“No,” you grumble.  

Your hair is drying in frizzy clumps against your fins; the knife stays on your dresser when you drag your ass hive and flop facefirst into your coon, and let yourself dream. 

* 

“Nah, I get you,” Cronus is saying from somewhere in your curls. “The ocean’s a prison with a high salt content. Our shackles are just particularly shiny.” 

You’re a league away from six and Cronus Ampora does not get you even a little bit. His hands are more graceful than yours, though, and you let him attempt to comb your mane and half-listen while he prattles on about the liberty of things lower than you.  

“I ain’t talkin aboat the ocean, picklebrains. I mean this whole…this.” You wave your hands in broad semicircles at your sides.  

His fins cock forward, attentive, before he can do his stupid thing where he tries to suppress it. “You’re losin me.” 

“I’m naut! You just don’t get it. No one could possibly get this except )(er, and it was )(er stupid mandates that put me here in the first place!” You twist in your chair, and Cronus glubs at you in protest when your hair swallows his comb. “I have fuckin millennia to squander watchin over ungrateful shits who can’t even spell the damn word.” 

“Bein fair, Meen, it’s a complex jumble of letters.” 

“Whose side are you on, buoy?!” 

Cronus frees the comb back from your hair, sticking the end in his mouth. Ew. “What other choice you got?” 

“When I find it, I’ll be shore to let you minnow,” you lie.  

He does not call you on it, and works the tangles out while you watch the moon from your window, too familiar a colour for comfort.   

* 

Until, one of its cycles later, you figure it out.  

“I figured it out.”  

Cronus looks up from the instrument he’s tuning. He’s a decent singer but a terrible tuner: you don’t ever mention the former and work the latter into several conversations. “Figured what out?”  

“What I’m supposed to do.”  

He twists the peg closest to him, chewing on the inside of his cheek. When you were younger, you would snap and bite at each other with restless energy. Now, you…well, you still kinda do, if at a slowed pace—Cronus pushes your buttons passively, like an itch just outta reach. You long for the kind of synchronicity that’s been leaking moar and moar into your daydreams. 

The prawnblem that you have finally acknowledged, at least for your immediate future, is that this synchronicity doesn’t exist, not where Meenah Peixes is concerned.  

You lean forward in your chair and stare yourself down. Your ‘do, untamed, takes up most your respiteblock mirror’s width, leaving you with no silhouette that is truly your own.  

“Make yourshellf useful, will you?” you call behind you.  

Cronus finally wrenches his attention from the penned rose-coloured garbage he’s turning into a paper wingbeast. His feet barely make a noise as he hunts down ties; his genes are wasted on him, and the both of you agree on this for entirely different reefsons.  

You haven’t braided your hair since you were two. Back then, they were stumpy, and lopsided, and when hatchmates pulled on them you chomped just a tiny bit on their limbs before a guardian wrestled you politely away. Now, as Cronus twists em good and even, his tee shirt collar adorned in bobby pins, you run your tongue over your fangs.  

Your features are more prominent; you can’t tell if that’s from the braids pulling your hair away or cause you’re coming on another moult, but your eyes behind your glasses are darker, your cheekbones are sprayed in pinkish freckles. You look, tragically, like a princess.  

“Done,” says Cronus, snapping an elastic and reaching in his pocket for a smoke. He offers you the pack, and you grimace until it disappears again. 

Yes, you think. “I gotta go. I’ll text ya.” 

He shows himself out, his guitar slung over one broadening shoulder. You don’t watch him, already busy cramming shit into your sylladex—husktop, charger packs, clothes, shiny shit, whatever your current impulsivity decrees to be required. When all is done, you find your best stationary and spend ten minutes bedazzling FUCK DIS SHIT IM OUT and taping it to your door as you ride the current to the nearest spaceport.  

Never let it be said that you don’t know how to make an exit.  

* 

Not long after your sixth wriggling day is etched into your bones, you will find something lodged in one of the craters some miles outside your hideout. Ain’t much else to do on the moon but explore, after all—a blank slate domain is still a domain that you much preefer to your old lot.  

You will fuck around with the conchtraption until it boots up, and then you will send an ill-fated message to an ill-fated gill about another, somehow blanker slate.  

CC: guess w)(at 

AG: If I start guessing, will you block me again? 

CC: o)( s)(ip youre probubbly rig)(t  

CC: fine ill save you the trouble 

-- CromwellsCosmos (CC) has sent AftwardGraces (AG) a file! -- 

AG: ::::O 

CC: you fuckin know it 

* 

You will be nine years old and staring your death in the face, and the sea will be light years away, and you will raise your face to the sky you raised into being. Your braids will touch the ground, and probably get some blood or somefin gross on the tips, and when you burst free of the last of your planetside bonds you’ll think, maybe there is some truth to lifesaving, if it’s yours.  

* 

AG: What do you want me to do with it? 

CC: pass it on du)( 

CC: were aboat to do somefin AW-ESOM-E 

The customer is directly behind your table. Your building had no business installing a bean shop in its claustrophobic lobby, but nine times out of ten you’re grateful for the caffeine and the only exercise you get all day.

L-O-L, like you’d exercise if you had the time anyway. God, you kill yourself, sometimes.

“Did you check the back?” the customer’s pleading. You roll your eyes.

“Our back’s an empty shelf with a dead spider an’ a sign that says help me. Pick somethin’ else or I pick for you. And you’re not gonna like what I pick.”

“Ampora?”

The barista’s eyes snap up over his glasses. “You.”

Fuck, you really weren’t imagining things. “I have a name, but sure, second person gives me the warm fuzzies, too.”

“Get bent.”

The customer scoffs and leaves. ED flips him off; you take the opportunity to wander back up to the counter. “Since when are you here?”

“Five-thirty. Someone’s gotta open.”

“That was never cute.” You glance back at your forgotten drink. Eridan proffers two new cups. “I mean here-here.”

“Work here same as you.” ED drums his fingers on the counter. It’s a tell you’ve always had the misfortune of sharing. “Bad investments.”

You can’t help yourself. “Dad didn’t invest in my shit, did he?”

“Fuck yourself, Sol.”

He does remember your name. Your fingers drum, mercifully, against your pants leg. “Look, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Would you believe you deserve better than this dump?”

ED actually laughs, then. It’s a little deeper than you remember, just shy of the hoarse harmonics of the rest of his family. “Not really.”

“Yeah, well. Baby steps, I guess.” You take a sip of your cup. “Look. I can do a little digging, see if there’s a position with an actual desk or something, if that’s what it takes.”

“Apron don’t do it for you, does it?”

“ED, dude, the apron doesn’t do it for anybody.”

He switches your cups around to drink from yours. His own has whipped cream over the shots, and you swirl it until it melts. “Think on it.”

Eridan looks you over. You’d forgotten how blue his eyes were. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” You grin. “Unless you’d like me to find one.”

“I’m a big boy, I can find one myself.”

He flips your cups back. You grimace. “That’s basically liquid second base.”

“You’re basically gross.”

“Missed you, too.” You slide him a tip and a business card; it shimmers a muted green pattern when he holds it up to the fluorescent lights. “See you tomorrow, Ampora. Wear something interview-appropriate.”

He smiles, and you realize with a start you have never really seen it before. “It’ll clash with my apron.”

The sea’s first daughter hatched long before anything crawled ashore. She listened to the cresting of waves above her, and the shifting of the sands beneath. She wove jewelry out of kelp strands and coral, and sang to her mother. And this pleased the sea greatly, and she bestowed long life upon her child.

Before long, creatures began to fill the oceans, first small, then greater and greater, until the child fancied they would eclipse the very stars. They bled the same blood, and sang the same songs, and for a time all was calm at sea.

But the sea is ever-changing, and soon a second daughter emerged from the mouth of the cavern. The first daughter did not know what to do—such a small creature would obviously not survive long in this world of giants. After much time to reflect, she found her answer in the whisper of the reeds and shushing of crabs and shells.

The first culling was still quick, and still merciful. She did not leave her sister to suffer. And when she felt shame for her actions – duh, what, you think you’re the first troll to invent guilt? Now hush – she wept onto the bones of the second daughter. Her tears gilded her ribs, and sharpened her fangs, and from her heartache she fashioned a weapon.

It came to be that the first daughter would need this weapon quickly, for the sea grew restless once more. This time, it was hunger. You see, in the time the first daughter had taken to decide how to handle a second child of the ocean, there was no one to keep the sea-mother sated. She began to moan, and wail, and all around the daughter beasts would float belly-up; her fins would tremble and ache; blood would pour from her—

Seriously? You’re squeamish? You’ve been out with me, we’ve seen way worse than a little—

Wait, hey, don’t. Don’t go. I’m sorry, okay? This is important stuff.

Okay. I’ll skip it and everything. Uh—fins trembling, blood blah blah orifice, somethin somethin agony...okay, cool, here we go.

The child began to think of this as her punishment, and became angry. Not with the sea, who had given her life and food and shelter, but at this second child, who had twisted her thoughts and planted this doubt deep in her mind. When a third daughter surfaced, she struck her down without question. And this time, she did not weep.

Now the fourth child was just as small as the others, but she was quiet, and she was clever. She sang the same sea-songs but bloodied her hands with creatures that could have swallowed her whole. In doing this, she gained her strength, and when the time came when she was to be culled she gripped the trident and drove it between the first daughter’s ribs.

And this was the first overthrow, and the woven crown tumbled from her hair and at the fourth child’s feet, and when she placed it on her own head the sea held its breath to watch and listen.

By now the daughters’ blood had mixed with salt, and when the sea felt this she screamed anew; lightning tore the sky asunder, and bolt after bolt struck the waves for seasons on end. Great mountains breached the whitecaps and spat fire and smoke. When it was all over, continents spread themselves across the sea, barren only for the blink of an eye.

No, no trolls. You’re still not payin attention! It’ll be a sight longer before—

I don’t know how long, they hadn’t invented time yet, I guess.

Haha, nah, I guess I don’t know everyfin. Everything, fuck.

Sorry, shouldn’t say fuck. Let’s keep goin, yeah?

Hang on, I lost my fuckin spot.

Amid the shaking of the earth and the shrieking of the open sky, the cavern had begun to rise. New children crawled their way free. The first of these stumbled forth, and caught the next jagged blast of lightning to strike the surface in his palm. He offered this gift to the princess with a bent knee, and she accepted, and this was the first right hand of the Tyrian Line.

…yeah, haha. That’s me.

Sweeps passed, measured in the roaring of tides, rising of floors, raising of temperatures. The children that struggled ashore had never known the frozen embrace of the sea-mother. When word of this sank slowly back among the reeds, she wep. It was low. It was deafening to the bones. Even those on the dirt fell dead, and their souls trickled into the sand and fed the gardens of new beginnings.

Deep, deep beneath the glow of the moons, the sea’s daughter and her second trained: the mother’s crying settled over their fins, and they swore to soothe her, as it had been before the great rising. They bided their time, and when the waves next cast their highest shadows over the beaches they raised weapons against the lesser children; the finless sons and daughters who swore their allegiance to dirt, their depths forsaken.

There was bloodshed the likes of which will not be seen for millennia.

The remaining land children — whose children are they? You ever wonder what they really believe in? No I will not ask I have a little somethin called pride, thank you — built foundations in the sand. They slipped, and sank, and the sea-daughter watched: when she was eventually struck down by a younger princess, her own second at her side, she took up the mantle, and watched in turn.

Crown after crown dangled from endless strands of sea-grass. The garden of empire is tended by every princess, fed in blood and salt and song.

Ugh, symbolism. They must have changed authors here.

The lineage has continued thence, and is destined to follow the pull of the stars into oblivion. So sings the sea-mother.

Wait.

That’s it?

This looked way bigger on the shelves. Hang on, lemme—

There’s a shit ton of blank pages. Nobody bothered to keep goin.

…you think so?

I do think you can do it, Fef. You can do anything, you’re talkin about it all the time.

Aboat it. Yeah, that one’s free.

So how about it? You’re the next crown in the lineage. So sings the sea-mother.

Your name is Feferi Peixes, dammit.