YURO

But there is always something else. Always something peregrine when you look at a stranger you’d mapped out your life with.

“And I’m thrilled to hear you have so little faith in me,” a chair scrapes, and a shadow deluges the space once bared before you. “Tell me, did you really think I’d still sulk over you? You give your name its meaning, Leech.”

For six months,  fifty minutes, and ten seconds, he realizes, your face has changed. Perhaps it is the mirage of makeup, or perhaps the inevitable memento of a cicada shedding itself, your own ecdysis,  open to reveal hardened wings that coalesce around your face so magnificently well. Cicadas cannot remain forever imprisoned within the husk that first sheltered it. Neither, it seems, could you. In other words, you have matured, and now neither of you are those bygone, lovesick teenagers. Some traitorous part of him thinks this is what makes the reunion worthwhile. Some traitorous part of him thinks that it is you. After everything, it is you.

 "How have you been?"

Something dances and gyrates behind his eyes.  

"Fine. How’s Floyd? And yourself? Is he still torturing everyone?"

That language of vagueness you cannot parse slips over his face for half a second. You don’t realize when you’ve started looking at it, but you do not acquiesce in detaching yourself from it too.

"I've managed."

Of course he has. When has he, ever, in his life, cared about small you and your even smaller questions? Never has he once relinquished the chance to humor you so vaguely, without shape. That’s who he is. He is shapeless. There is no husk to him, there is no rind, and there is no shedding. He has never slipped out of his second skin like Viper, neither has he gone limpid like Schoenheit. Jade is Jade, and he always will be. 

“That’s a very Jade answer.” You raise your glass. For a second he thinks you are about to toast him, but what do you even have left to toast? It is a chalice of beetroot or fermented fruit that you dip over the cusp of your lips, never knuckling under the urge to drink. He notices you no longer meet his eyes so readily.

“It tells me absolutely nothing.”

His lips work around a strange smile. “I suppose old habits die rather reluctantly."

"They don't die at all."

“They don’t.”

An awkward silence nearly tramples you both. 

———

“—Should I cut my hair?”

“Hm.”

“Really?”

“Hm.”

“Are you even listening?”

“Hm. You shouldn’t.  I quite like it when it’s long and unbidden.”

“ ‘Kay.” You stick your tongue out. “Now I’ll never cut it just ’cuz you said that.”

“Do you really hold me in such high regard?”

“Yeah. Now the question of the hour: would you still love me if I was a turtle’s shell?”

Jade's hand stills where it rests against the page of his book. He says nothing except:  “What an awfully predictable question.”

Your limbs are splayed out, and there is an amorphous look in your eyes as you lift yourself up. Your room smells of cat fur and long since desiccated homework sheets, but his sense is severed just as you adjust yourself and lull your head on his lap, now latching onto his legs, for some mercurial reason of yours.   For a moment longer, there is something else on your face before it pops and fizzes into boredom as you stare up at him.  “Wow. Okay. That's not an answer.”

“Is it not? I believe my answer was rather clear.”

“No, your answer was you insulting me.”

“I would never insult you.”

“Jade.”

“Very well. Perhaps I am teasing you.”

He closes his book with a quiet sigh, though the faint curve of his lips is a nefarious traitor.  “To answer your question properly, it depends entirely on what sort of answer you desire from me. Would you prefer a comforting lie, or the honest, unadulterated truth?”

“Lie to me.”

“Very well. The lie would be that I would continue loving you despite your unfortunate transformation into a mere turtle shell.”

“A lie?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. Rude.”

“Allow me to finish.” His smile sharpens. “I would not love you despite it, I would love you regardless. Do you not know such creatures like me mate for life?”

“That’s just your sweet talker talking.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

 His lips part in preparation for speech — sweet talker, he thinks, at the moment he did not have any qualm with your assessment — so he hesitates upon the threshold, then devolves into frazzled fragments that coax a chuckle from his chest. It is hazy, foggy, but you lose your own footing and dissolve into sputters of giggles. Is it sweet talking? Servile, sycophant, but he was speaking what he thought was real.

But he cannot tell you that. Cannot tell you you’re wrong and that he really wishes to never be divested of you. Shorn of you, cleansed of you, denuded of you. It is not a brotherly rapport confining him to Floyd, it is something else. 

Why can he not tell you that? As simple as it is, it is also the most arduous thing to exist.

“..How unfortunate. I had hoped the delivery would distract you from the flaw in my argument.”

“What’s the deep sea like?”

That black strand of his coils around your finger before it springs back to life.  You’ve been kneading his face between your palms for a minute, but it’s only now he deigns you that look. Oft times, he’s discovered, you do not not show willingness to comb through his past, partly because you’re so unaccustomed to the sea, where he wades through the water in that colossal form of his. The other part lies in your bygone venture to the museum, where he and Floyd had wreaked havoc over you and your little friends. He has endured it with saintly patience, only now does one golden eye peel open.

“..Is this interrogation truly necessary?”

“It wasn't, but you can’t blame me for being curious.” You give his cheek another squish, to which he hums, looming over you.

"I see." Jade sighs with theatrical resignation, once again closing the book resting upon his lap. “I was beginning to think your fascination with my face would distract you.”

Your fingers find another loose strand of his hair in lieu of a response, and he regards you for a long moment. It is a black swathe deluging the lifelines on your palm, when you give it a tug, he speaks. 

“As a rule, humans do not ask about the Coral sea. They ask whether merfolk sleep underwater.”

“..Do you?”

“They ask whether we eat sailors.”

"...Do you?"

"They ask whether octopi are pleasant company."

You lean your chin over his shoulder now, one bare leg shrouds him before the other joins. Wrapped in an interminable embrace, you’re ensnaring him, a cage of limbs cinching tight around his waist. A slurred drawl of words rests heavy on your tongue, but you can only concede:    “..I'm serious."

“I know.”

“ ..I just...” You hesitate. “I keep realizing there's so much about you I don't know.”

He doesn't answer immediately. His gaze wanders toward the window, where afternoon sunlight spills lazily across the floorboards.

“...Quiet,” he says at last.

"Excuse me?” Your face flares irked before he placates it.

“The deep sea.” His voice softens. “The pressure is immense. The water is cold enough to make even the hardiest creatures reconsider their ambitions.”

You wrinkle your nose. “That doesn't sound very inviting.”

“It isn't.”

“But...?”

A fondness slips into his expression before he can cage it.

"It is home."

Silence settles between you. You shift. 

“I wish I could see it someday.”

Jade watches you quietly, long enough that you begin wondering whether you've said something foolish, but then he smiles. If you could bottle it up and feast on it forevermore, you’re certain you would’ve.

“I should like that.”

“You would?”

“Mm. The sea looks quite different when one has someone worth showing it to.”

“Ok, Mr. ‘Eels mate for life’. God, so cheesy and for what? I don’t like it when you lie.”

Shy happiness has etched itself into the soft grain of your mouth before you speak once more. 

“..Jade.”

“Yes?”

Your lips skim over the corner of his mouth. 

“..That was disgustingly romantic. You’re a heartless beast.”

Something winged batters free from its silk-bound prison, your soul molts its husk and emerges dusted in impossible colors, and joy germinates as you tackle him. Laughter, laughter, laughter. He holds you as you hold him, and there is nothing else.

———

Where there was once love, there is loathing now.  When he finds you again, you are miserable.

In the attire you’re clad in, you look so very much like a Pink Betta, deluged in amorphous, finger-like fins of soft pink and snow-like whites, yet he is more compelled to compare you to a jewel-toned insect freshly enclosed, its prismatic hues still too delicate for the world. Your own aversion is now entombed, confined to the space of the wedding, it is probably throbbing and gnashing at the chrysalis of your heart and begging to be released in the gusto of a slap, or a well-deserved punch, but as he nears you, you do none of those things. You go slack, and those colorful wings of yours do not flap and send him to his resting place as he had expected. 

It is one of the first times you’ve caught him off guard. Admittedly. Regrettably. 

Your lips dwindle into a crinkled scowl, and the prongs of your fork have guillotined the sweet pastry into two. You do not bring it up to your lips, and something tells him its frosted corpse is a double-edged warning. 

“No matter what your mom says, I’m not going to take a photo with you.”

Georgina had received you well, and you feel awful you cannot reciprocate the favor. After that day, there is nothing you can do, but as the chair opposite you shifts with the svelte body, one more tired exhalation leaves your nose. 

“I don’t remember inviting you to sit.” Folding your arms, it is more so a barrier around your ribcage. “Don’t you need an invitation for those things?”

“I don't believe I required one. It would appease my mother, yes, but I wished to see whether you had eaten.”

“Bastard.”

“I’ve heard worse from you.”

“You should. ‘Cuz you're acting like.. that didn’t happen.”

“I assure you, it has occupied rather a significant portion of my thoughts.” His nose, of all things, burns. It’s an unfamiliar thing. “.. I simply fail to see what either of us gains from making a spectacle of it.”

“There doesn't always have to be something to gain, Jade.”

That wasn’t what he meant, he wants to say, but his lips settle into his undeviating signature.

Against all odds, you heave yourself up from your tomb and stand in front of the camera. There is little distance to cover between you and the eel, even less when she tells you to move closer. Once more, you’re pressed against him, your shoulder entwined, and the watery remnants of when he wreaked havoc on the boat seeps into your attire. Frigid. Arctic. Glacial. It smothers his body, as it does yours, but it is his voice that, amid the cheerful hubbub of the guests, brings you out of your shell. 

“I suppose you were right about one thing, after all.”

Your nose puckers. It burns. “What?”

“I’m heartless.”

There is a veil on your eyes. Did the water from his hair drip onto your lashes? “You’re not.”

“If I weren’t,” he never looks at you. "I would not be making you cry. I am heartless. I am heartless, aren’t I?”

“I’m—‘m not crying."

There is something churning in his gut, splashing and swirling and sloshing around.  When you blink, salt-born water tumbles out of your eyes like a cataract, a waterfall, and a half-choked sentence sputters along the futile endeavor. Your throat feels like it’s been constricted,a narrow passageway from which only a slip of air emerges, and your face is so, so terribly scrunched up. He does not like it, he does not like seeing you weep, not right now, because of him, no less. (He can tell you now. The answer is on the precipice of his tongue. When he’d told you that eels mate for life, it hadn't been the by-product of his suave disposition. He had meant it, so maybe that’s why, he justifies, that his own eyes are scorched raw at their seams. They mate for life, so he will always have a little bit of you in him—)

“You cut your hair.”

That is the only morphed thing that comes out. He chuckles, it drowns. 

“You cut your hair.”