He watched as the kid sat on the pier, rolling a blitzball between his hands and playing his small fingers across the bumps of the surface. He lied, and said he was watching so the kid didn't lose the ball. But when the ball toppled over the edge and splashed into the seawater, bobbing gently away from the pier, and the kid curled his toes over the edge and leaned forward just a little too far, he was there.
He told them the kid needed to know how to swim. It was dangerous, he said, for him to live over so much water, and not know how to move through it. He told them it was for the kid's own good. He lied.
Blue eyes always looked bigger underwater. His short blond hair wisped away from his head and spread through the water, moving with it in waves, glinting gold with the detached sunlight. He wondered how the kid had gotten so much of his mother in him. He wondered where he was, in that tiny bundle. The kid smiled at him, and when he spread his arms, swam towards him like he'd always known how to.
Perhaps, he had.
