#seazine

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