In-Marketable

You remain unanchored as you finish up your final tasks for the evening. It’s soothing work, this fishermen business. Repetition in motion, a checklist worn into your hands and the soles of your feet as you walk across the small, narrow deck. It creaks in the same spot, no matter how often the boards are replaced, and you eventually grew so familiar with the sound it follows you on brief trips ashore.

You don’t do that a lot. Visiting towns and villages to sell whatever you catch, and buy necessary parts for maintaining the boat is one thing. Lingering on dry land is another, when you’ve bound yourself so thoroughly to this new existence.

It used to be different, you remember that much. Twice over.

Once, to the rush of fantastical impossibility, a violence between stretches of calm. You had an aptitude, but no one ever got the joke of a dead girl playing pirate. You think they’d get the new joke, as you venture below deck to check the humming engine, soothe its heartbeat for the night.

It pulses beneath your palm, an echo to your own. “That’s a good girl,” you murmur, and she sighs an affectionate melody for your ears only, beneath the slow, careful rumble. “You can settle down. We need to wait a little longer.”

Speaking isn’t necessary, but it feels right. Reminds your throat how to remain open, your tongue not too flexible, your teeth settled into your gums.

One, two- ah, there’s three new ones. They should be gone by morning, with any luck. If not you’ll grab the pliers again, if they haven’t fallen into one of the darker corners of the hold. It isn’t worth the time wasted stuck there, searching for all you used to be, and can never be again. You’ve got fish to catch.

A deeper rock of the boat has you pausing, watching the lantern sway. The flame is red now. It started off yellow, you think, but the red is a nice shade. Gentle dawns and the sun on your face, reminders of humanity in the freckles drawn to your skin by long, warm days.

Your overalls aren’t the type you used to wear, and neither are the heavy boots that stick to each step up out of the hold. The footprints you leave are too large to be just your feet. The Keeper must be closer than usual, checking in on you again.

“I’m alright here,” you say, in case he’s worrying. “Stop fretting. This isn’t your fault.”

He doesn’t speak. He hasn’t since the second time you died. Cut off on a connection already stretched thin, a recording played back one too many times. He was never meant for you, anyway.

The sky is fully dark when you emerge, and it gives new weight to your next inhale. Burrows into your lungs, one breath at a time, but you don’t let it bloom. You’ve learnt your way around it now, so the attempt is a little silly. You’re a part of this world whether it likes it or not.

Some might like your presence more than others.

This far out, there are no distant lighthouses to pull on your gaze. Your chosen spot is away from the reefs and their lullabies, golds and pinks and oranges to sway and churn beneath the boat, and new species to meet, lure, and carry away in the dead of night.

The darkness here is like an oil spill. A refusal of the few stars peeking through the fog stretching across the area, unable to touch the waves cradling your vessel. The closest thing to nothingness there is, unless you choose to journey further south again.

You move toward the trawl on the back of the boat, and rest your elbows on the wooden railing. And you wait. Expectant, certain, and fond.

He asked for somewhere darker tonight. You provided.

It starts in a glimmer of sunshine beneath the waves. Paler and purer than the gold you can muster, this yellow is entirely other, rippling out in cheerful, inviting trails. Back and forth with dizzying speed, as if only one small creature is lighting up the dark.

Then another, much further east in an electric blue. It chases the yellow, spins and collides with a blinding pulse that sends a scattering of firework sparks to crest close, so close to the surface. Each one sinks too fast to touch, and flares out into the next chaotic and mesmerising sequence.

Slowly growing brighter, larger, until long, thick strips of colour mimic the veils of an aurora around the boat. They slow in their motions, emphasise the real size of the monster beneath, and the dark below now highlights his features in camera-flash moments.

The curve of a dorsal fin, a sharp ridge capable of slicing through the most stalwart of ships.

Glinting scales along the winding stretch of his tail, each attuned to the lightshow. Each larger than you are tall.

A flutter of one of the smaller, feathery fins at his neck.

“I see you,” you say, smiling.

Only now, with your full attention, does the humming begin.

The depth of the frequency should distort against your eardrums, threaten the fragile stability of flesh and bone, but you let it settle instead. The gentle rocking of the boat is all the surety you need, and this hymn can’t disrupt all you’ve become part of.

It’s a warm invitation, a leap in confidence since the first halting attempts, closely attuned to the glow and fade of the colours circling your vessel. He said he wasn’t very good at it, how much was just plain instinct.

You find it lovely. It quiets the parts of you which are always, always trying to pull away, until you feel so wonderfully present in here, now, this. A deck beneath your feet, the salt on your tongue, and him beneath you.

When the show fades out, you awake the engine and bring the boat west.

As far out as you were, and as deep as the ocean became, it doesn’t take too long to feel the shift in the waves where a protrusion of rocks create hidden shallows. A basin to wade into before the growth in the centre, otherwise only hinted at by the childish glow of coral and a few tiny, curious eyes.

They hide away the moment your companion joins you.

The impossible size of him lessens to fit the basin, but there’s no denying the impressive sight of each huge spine cutting above the water as he swims over the lip. The showoff flicks his tail up and creates a playful tidal wave, the blue of the fins merging into the black of his scales when they aren’t deliberately lit.

His distant upper body curves around the shallows, fits himself delicately into a smaller form in a slow process he said he struggles with more than he should. He’ll get faster at it as he grows older, according to his dad. He’s still young, despite reaching his maturity a year ago. Shortly before he found you again.

You move your boat toward the rocky cluster he likes best, and send down the anchor. You feel his claw nudge the chain briefly, before they pierce the waters and gouge deep wounds into the rock. Webbing connects each finger, scales covering the back of his hand, and as you watch the hand gradually shrinks until it’s-

Well. Still really fucking big.

Just the size of a car in your old world instead of the crushing threat out in the depths. The rest of him is a match, as he drags himself up onto the perch only a few metres in front of you.

“Robin,” he greets with a wide grin, exposing the shark-like teeth filling his mouth. His voice carries an inhuman undercurrent, hinting at the humming of earlier. “Did you like it?”

“I did,” you say, and the softer fins on either side of his neck flick and flutter beside his gills. His eyes are bright in the gloom, their brown out of place but so perfectly him. “It was even better than last time.”

“You always say that.” He huffs, as if he isn’t still smiling like it’s exactly what he wants to hear.

He folds one arm on the rocks so he can lean over, chin resting on his forearm. Faint dartings of yellow and blue pass over the scattered scales on his cheekbones that thicken on the path to his ears. His dark hair sticks to his forehead and he pushes it back with an impatient sweep of his fingers.

“I always mean it,” you point out, nudging the boat a little closer so you’re almost eye level. Close enough to touch, and you watch the subtle flare of his slitted nostrils as he breathes you in. “You spoil me.”

“I have to court you properly,” he mumbles, a shy tilt to his smile now.

He’s a very sweet monster, fumbling through only a vague understanding of what he’s meant to do, and where it overlaps with human culture. Or at least, the culture you’ve been somewhat exposed to in this odd world, in its uncertain era in history.

Oil lanterns and no electricity in the towns you visit, isolation writ large in this particular part of the world. Chaos and order a fine line elsewhere, but you only fell across its borders before you died the second time, and found your way here.

This place is better for a thing like you. It cradles a thing like him, after all.

“I got you something,” you say, watching the brightening of his eyes, the flares of colour in his scales, the angle of the fins at his neck.

“You did?” he breathes, a faint trill curling around his voice.

“Nothing impressive.” You reach into your overalls for the small piece of what you used to be, could’ve been. It feels right to give it to him.

“It’s…sentimental,” you say as you hold out the trinket; a nickel swallowed up by glass, and the gold chain carefully attached to it. “The chain will change shape with you, if you want to wear it.”

His lips are parted as he stares at the gift, and there’s a softer, crooning note from deep in his throat. It shivers across the floorboards of your boat, nudges at the back of your neck.

“Of course I want to wear it,” he says abruptly, his smile wide and joyful as he leans in so close, you feel the heat of his exhale on your much cooler skin. “Will you put it around my neck? Please?”

Oh. You were thinking he’d wear it on his wrist, not…

“Sure.” The chain uncoils at your urging, and as you shift back he perches his chin on the railing.

You keep the boat from sinking under just the weight of his head. He’s much too large for you to do this without touching him, even with the gradual shrinking he’s been keeping up, but you guess that’s maybe half the point. If he’s even thought so far ahead.

You crown him with the token, thumb skimming his temple as you guide the chain down. You take great care over the tapered points of his ears, feeling their damp scales shiver and watching his slit pupils dilate.

“Over, or under?” you ask, pausing once you reach his jawline. His gills and the delicate fins behind them are more of an obstacle, and currently out of reach.

He blinks slowly, before understanding dawns. He clears his throat - a dull hiss to the sound - and lifts his chin, bringing up a hand to cup the enshrined coin. It looks hilariously tiny against the mass of him.

“Under,” he says, and the neck fins slope down and back, so you don’t accidentally touch them when you lower the chain to where his neck meets his shoulders. You get the impression touching these fins would be a step too far in this odd courtship.

“I love it,” he declares, letting the coin sit in the hollow of his throat. He’s all bare, almost-human skin there. “I’ll wear it forever.”

You smile, leaning your hip to the hull. “Forever is an awfully long time. You might change your mind after a few centuries have gone by.”

“I won’t,” he says confidently.