Clear Blue

by Elamimax

Break, O waves, see the

Wait

Are you okay?

I had expected a moment of shock. Fear. Drowning. None of that came. There was only the water, surrounding me on all sides, and me a part of it. It was like I’d always been here, like I’d always belonged in the water. That I breathed in it seemed only natural. I swam in a little circle, laughing to myself, and realized that I could hear myself laugh, instead of the muffled “bloop” of the normal attempt to speak underwater.

Without the fear of drowning, the need to swim up to the surface, I could calmly look around, play, observe. Swim. And, of course, I drank in all of Aria, who circled me with a barely contained excitement. It was impossible for my eyes to land anywhere that wasn’t her, her beautiful white dress flowing around her, the long tail coming out of it, glittering brightly even underwater. 

“How do you feel?” she asked. Her voice was strangely bubbly, but perfectly clear and easy to understand. “No issues acclimatizing?”

I shook my head. “No,” I tried, and found that my words came as easily here as they did on land. “This is… perfect.” I swam in a circle. Even if it had been ages since I’d been to a pool or the beach, my body still remembered perfectly how to swim. Maybe it did. I looked at the hands, the slender yet muscular arms that seemed to fit a swimmer. 

I was drawn again to the strangeness of the body and how it hadn’t felt strange the past few hours. The dancing. The laughing. Dining with Aria and being in the town. I hadn’t been in my own body and it had just stopped bothering me. I was in a woman’s body. Wasn’t there supposed to be a negative feeling associated with that? Instead, I let my body just do its thing. Here, under water, without anyone around, I could…

Could what? Lie to myself? Be something I wasn’t, so that when I was around people again I’d be more comfortable pretending to be something else, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, like some kind of predator who–

“You are lost, again,” Aria said. “Somewhere in your own head, saying horrendous things to yourself.” She put her hands on my shoulders, both as comfort and, I expected, to keep me from quite literally drifting away. I looked at her through the strands of hair that floated gently in front of my face, feeling guilty she had to take care of me this way. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

“Don’t be. These waters of yours are deep, and I am not convinced they are worth exploring. I suspect that the only thing that lies at the bottom of that trench is endings, no beginnings.” She pulled me in and wrapped her arms around me. “Whatever you are, think you are, feel you ought to be, let it be washed away by the ocean, for but a moment.” She whispered in my ear, which was a strange sensation under water. The intimacy of the gesture was the same as it had been on the dock, but now I could feel her every word as a current in the water. “Simply be as you desire to be. You said you wished to swim, so let us swim. If you like, I can show you my house.” I nodded, and let her take my hand, for the who-knows-how-manieth time today, and guide me into the ocean. 

It had always scared me, as a kid. Going too deep into the ocean. Every bit of love I had of swimming, that’s how scared I was of the open sea. Scared of the dark of it, how deep and cold it was, and what might lurk deep under those waves. 

With Aria holding my hand, there was none of that. Sure, it was still dark, but somehow I could make out enough for it not to bother me. I felt the currents almost like a landscape. The cold I expected didn’t seem to come. Her fingers touching mine, her hand in mine, was enough to warm me ten times over. 

And then I saw it. Little pricks of light piercing through the darkness. Little currents of heat and… taste? I took a breath and realized I tasted something in the water. Something slightly spicy and savory. I tried again, not exactly used to smelling the liquid I was breathing. There was definitely something there. A scent. 

I heard Aria giggle and turned to her. She’d been observing me, and seemed very amused at my attempts to make sense of my new, well, senses. Putting my hands on my hips, I did my best to give her my best indignant scowl, but cracked after just a second. 

“That,” she said, “is what my home smells like. Come.” She took my hand again and swam faster. I allowed her to drag me along. She was a lot faster in the water, and with my little wimpy human legs I would never be able to keep up. 

The little spots of light came into view better and better. They were lanterns, of a sort. Some kind of yellow luminescent balls on lanterns, hung all around the ocean floor. They illuminated little houses, inside of which I saw more of their warm light. When we got closer I realized that the lanterns weren’t lanterns at all, but nets, keeping their content from floating up. The houses themselves were half-built into the stone of the ocean floor, construction extruding slightly. In some places I saw what had to be chimneys, heated water and bubbles coming out of them. 

There were people like Aria everywhere. Mermaids, I thought, then corrected myself. Marina. All of them with gorgeous, colored tails. I thought they’d be similar to Aria, beautiful and fishlike, but there were all kinds. Some were just as rainbow-colored as hers, but others were more like sharks or dolphins. All of them were, for lack of a better word, perfect. Someone waved. I waved back. 

“Down here,” Aria said and led me to one of the entrances. It was a circular doorway that led into a round, open space. In the middle hung another net with a multitude of the light-giving spheres. All around the room were little cupboards and openings to adjacent rooms, some with covered entrances. I hazarded a look down one of the uncovered ones and realized there was another cavern down a small passageway. 

“Wait,” I said, thinking back to the layout of the town as I’d seen it from above, “isn’t that your neighbor’s house?”

“Yes,” Aria said. “We aren’t much for the isolated structures like they do on the surface. That makes child-rearing too difficult.” 

“Why would it–” I said, just as three people entered. Aria took my hand and pulled me up to them. 

“Ma, Fa, Da,” she said. “This is my friend.”

One of them, an older woman, raised her eyebrow. “A friend, hm?”

“Do not pay her any mind,” the older man on the other side of the threesome said. “She is hungry and grumpy and very, very, very old and does not know how to mind her manners.” That got him a jab in the ribs, but he went on with a grin anyway. He had the kind of gentle face that only came with aging gracefully, bald and bearded and a glint of mischief in his dark eyes. “It is good to meet you, Aria’s friend. You are visiting from Azuro?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m from… much further away. I’m sorry, are you two Aria’s parents? It’s lovely to meet you.”

“We are,” the person in the middle said, “although it’s apt to say we are three of Aria’s quite extensive circle of parents.” They smirked at her. “She was a handful, as a child. It took the whole village to get her to behave, some days, and even now she can not be contained to the ocean.” 

For the first time, I saw Aria really blush. Parental embarrassment really was universal. “Hold on,” I said, catching myself, “the three of you? Or more? How does that…” My voice trailed off, not knowing how to even begin to explain my confusion. The three people swam into the room and started taking things from the little cupboards and putting them in satchels.

“She comes from a land very far away,” Aria said, “with different customs. Child-raising, I think, is not communal where you’re from?”

I shook my head. “A mom and a dad. Sometimes less.”

“Ah,” the woman said. “Well, I am glad you’ve decided to join us in civilized society, then.” She seemed to have just barely caught herself. “Not to say that your culture is uncivilized, of course. It just seems a bit…”

“Old-fashioned,” the man said. “Community is family. You can’t expect everyone to survive on their own, can you?” he laughed, and the other two laughed with him like he had said something very funny instead of describing, well, my life. 

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Well… it’s lovely meeting you.”

“And you, Aria’s ‘friend,’ whose name seems to have escaped me,” the third person said as they wrapped the satchel around their neck. Their tail was long, with black and white markings. “My name is Scio. These are Mauritus and Amata.” They paused, leaving me with an unspoken question I did not have an answer to. 

“She is currently between names,” Aria said, coming to my defense. 

“Ah,” Mauritus said, putting his hands on his sides and nodding vigorously, causing him to drift ever so slightly backwards. His wide tail resembled that of a giant carp I’d seen at a koi pond once. “A name-choosing. It is good to see your home, wherever that might be, respects proper traditions.”

“I don’t…” I started, and then decided it was better not to start a confusing conversation. “Thank you,” I said instead. “It may take me a while.”

“Well, you are in good hands,” Scio said. “Aria took two years to choose her name when she came of age. If anyone can help you figure yourself out, it is her. Now, we would love to stay and talk longer, but I’m afraid we have plans for the evening.”

All three of them gave Aria a quick peck on the cheek. “She seems nice,” Amata said, then winked. Aria hid her face in her hands as her parents left the house. 

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I did not think they would be here.”

“No, this was good,” I said, “I like the fact that you turn into this when your parents are around. Speaking of which…” I looked around. “Three?”

“Well, technically, uh… some seventy, eighty. Practically, seven,” she said. “They are as much my parents as the one that gave birth to me.”

“Sharing parents, sharing food…” I shook my head. “It’s all so alien.”

“In a good or a bad way?” she asked. 

“I don’t know yet. I can’t help but feel like I’m the odd one out. This is a community and a family, just like the one up top, in Azuro. These are all people who have their place, know who they are and where they fit, and what they do to deserve their place. I don’t.”

“Well, in your defense,” she said, “you are expecting yourself to do something they have been learning how to do since they were born. How good of a cook were you at the age of ‘less-than-a-day’? Give yourself some grace.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but didn’t really have a response. There was something else poking at the back of my brain, though. “Name-choosing?”

“When someone comes of age, they choose their name. That is only normal, isn’t it? Nobody knows you better than you, so you choose how you are addressed. They do not have something like that where you’re from?”

“Not for most people, not really. Changing your name is a lot of work and it can get pretty expensive, depending on where you’re from.” I paused for a second. “I looked into it a while back, but it wasn’t in the cards for me back then.”

“Oh?” she asked, swimming in a circle around me, closing in. “If you’d had the choice back then, what would your name have been?”

I shook my head. The water was getting cold. “I can’t, Aria. This… it’s not really real, is it? This is a dream. A fantasy. And I think… I think this is a step too far. If I say it, out loud, then waking up will be like dying, and I don’t want that.”

She looked at me and blinked, hovering in front of me, then closed the distance. “If you can’t say it out loud,” she said, “then whisper it to me. So quiet you can not even hear it yourself.” I closed my eyes and shivered again. I felt myself starting to curl up, until her warm arms wrapped themselves around me. Her cheek against mine. 

I opened my mouth and said my name.