This Boy Can't Swim
By Jillian Storm
(Disclaimer: Howdy, this is an alternate reality tale along the lines of a character finding what might be a modern fairy tale or a bizarre mythological experience. Something I wrote to enjoy more the questions rather than the answers. Although, I did know answers to some of my own questions, I omitted from including them hoping that the element of mystery was more important. In other words, I felt like writing something a touch odd, and here it is! I borrowed Duo and Catherine from Gundam Wing, because I'm quite certain their characters would not otherwise find themselves in any identical situation. Enjoy.)
***
When Catherine was nine years old, she had a vision. She had climbed a tall staircase, winding over and on top of its self. Upward and onward. The walls had been made of rocks and she braced herself against it rather than the unsteady railing. Following the wall with the fingers of her hand. Letting them trail over the cold roughness of the hastily cut limestone then cringing at the slick growth of vegetation brought about by a lack of up keeping. The sound of the lightning's clap and continual rain overwhelmed her persistent footfalls. Upward and onward.
The top steps led to an open peak, where she was immediately wet from exposure. Trembling with mostly cold, wrapping her hands around her soaking clothes. The sky was a dark purple on the horizon, black surrounding the tower. Violent gold strikes of lightning dancing between the clouds. Yet, while the orchestrated storm around her called for attention, Catherine felt compelled to look down.
To look down (she knew quite naturally despite the strangeness of the place) was to let herself fall. She would fall before she would know what was below. Or she could stay where she was.
Standing on her toes, Catherine spread out her arms and leaned.
She had always hated to get wet.
***
After not speaking for the first seven years of his life, Duo had surprised them all by suddenly utilizing complete sentences once taken in as a student at the St. Francis Boys' Elementary Academy. Some might have seen that as the sign of a latent genius, but such hopes diminished when they became used to his constant and idle chattering.
He like the sound of his own voice. And of course, talking is the first way to stop listening. Therefore, his studies suffered and he was always the proud name at the bottom of the academic evaluations for his grade.
Even those that found patience to strive beyond the average instructor became weary with his self-satisfied conversation. Usually about some breakthrough he had made about learning more about himself just that afternoon. Discoveries that only paled after the invention of his own ability to speak. They usually attributed it to his egotistical nature.
"I've found that my knuckles only move one way, like my knees." He would say, then sitting in his desk with his feet curled around the outside legs of the chair. Leaning forward with his shoulders slouched together to balance on his arms. Grinning, smiling as if quite pleased with the most profound insight.
Of course, his crowning glory was his hair. "If you let it alone, it just keeps growing!"
***
"Funny thing death. For once, it is something we do completely without our bodies."
It was that comment that allowed Duo to spend the rest of the funeral service sitting in his adopted parents' car. He eventually tired of playing with the manual locks on the door, watching it with his eyes very close to appreciate the length of the silver knob before and after being pushed in. He slipped from the vehicle and began to pace the length of the parking lot. Pausing to inspect each license plate. Later trying to kick up rocks into the license plates like a soccer player.
He'd made it to the last car, and was starting to aim a fair sized stone with the toe of his shoe when he noticed that there was a girl perched on the trunk of that car.
"I've been watching you the whole time." She said. She was sitting so that her knees were together, one arm crossing over them, the other pushing back reddish brown curls. Meeting his blue eyes with her own. She lowered her feet to the back bumper and stood, stretching out her arms. Balancing.
"Are you going to fall?" Duo asked. He figured she would stay there until she fell, and wondered if that was what she had intended all along.
"I never fall." The girl shook her head, and bent her knees a little before springing to the ground. "I saw them do something like that at the circus. They didn't use a net either."
"Do you live near here? I'm Duo Maxwell." He stuck out his hand, forgetting all about the perfect stone he's set in front of his shoe and stepped over it to be closer to her.
"Just down the way. I'm Catherine. However, you can call me Miss Bloom." She accepted his handshake and only allowed him to bob her arm twice before pulling her fingers out of his. She wasn't fond of prolonged greetings.
"Are you older than me?" Duo frowned, skeptical. Although he was used to being younger than just about everyone. "I want you to call me Mr. Maxwell."
"Fine." Catherine agreed. And shrugged. "Are you related?" She nodded toward the house that had been refurnished to honor the last moments with the dead.
"They have green shutters because that is what people turn into when they die." Duo said, watching them carry the red wood casket into the coach.
"You think they turn into green shutters?" Catherine crossed her arms, condescending. She stared at his hair, wondering how anyone would let it go so long on a boy. Most of it was pulling out of the braid making Duo Maxwell look more like a fey child in an asphalt park.
"No, grass." Duo said calmly. He was used to people misunderstanding him. Sometimes other people just didn't think about things before talking. It took him several times to explain to his parents that every shirt needed four holes, but a vest only needed three - like trousers.
"Do you think so?" Catherine shook her head, some of her hair catching between her lips. She pulled it out daintily before adding, "Can they get out of the coffin?"
Duo thought about that for a while. Soon his family came to collect him. Mrs. Maxwell noticing the new scuffs on his dress shoes. Duo only noticed Catherine had gone after he stopped staring wide-eyed and amazed at the marvelous, white marks left by the stones.
***
When he was just a little bit older, a teenager, Duo remembered those marks and wondered why the gulls over the ocean didn't mar the sky in the same way. They screeched violently enough that they made it seem like flying was painful.
This was very different from the spider that was scurrying away across where the sand met the soil. Silent and swift. But much more vulnerable, he realized as he watch a sneaker hover over the spider, then, hesitating, set back down. Sparing the spider.
"Do you live around here?" Duo asked, ready to make up an answer if she didn't give one. "I remember you."
"I do," Catherine pointed along the rock-splintered coast. Waves breaking open on those rocks and shortly relieving one from the singular sound of the gulls. "You're Mr. Maxwell."
"And you're Miss Bloom." He held out his hand again, and she met his firm grip squeezing his fingers with equal pressure.
"I would recognize your hair - it's the same." Catherine said, walking closer to the shoreline, kicking out her feet. Her own tanned legs quite spider-like until the bare ankle slipped into the thin sneaker. The ends of her jean shorts were ribbons of white thread, and she wore a pink tank top. It was, in Duo's opinion, not enough clothes for an autumn day on a windy beach.
"No, it's longer." Duo corrected, deliberately exercising the part of his chatter that most people could tolerate and found amusing. Humor and contradictions, humorous contradictions worked best. Better than his simple observations, such as, "You're older as well."
"Too young to grow grass yet." She teetered from her heels to her toes, leaning as if to meet the tide and then pulling back from it. Opposite from the movement of the water itself. "I feel like climbing." Catherine made her way to the larger rocks up the shore.
"You like high places?" Duo more observed than needed to confirm.
"Maybe." Catherine started to find a hand hold, and bounced on her back foot before propelling herself up the steepest part of the front rock. "But not as much as I like gravity."
"Gravity is rather reliable."
"I don't really believe in gravity." Catherine called back over her shoulder, looking to see if he was following her. Duo's eyes were glancing over the surface, eyebrows pulled together in what might have been concentration or perplexity.
"How can you like something you don't believe in?" He put one hand out testing it with his fingers, and then mimicking Catherine followed her to the flattened top where they could simply feel the touch of the wind as if it cut around them with a sharpened knife. Defining their solidness into exact dimensions.
"Well what if it stops working?" Catherine asked practically, " I wouldn't want to miss that."
"It's rather reliable." Duo insisted, crossing his arms and trying to hold in what little internal heat he still had.
"You never know." Catherine, stepped out to the lip of the rock, which was quite like an immobile diving board. She spread her arms and clicked her heels together. "It must still be there." She said after a long moment, "I haven't flown off yet."
"You'd only go backwards against this wind, anyway." Advised Duo, then he slid off the rock mostly sitting on his rear the entire way back to the immediate ground.
"Silly me." Catherine turned and pushed her toes just off the opposite edge. The wind picking up for a moment and pushing her hair into her face once more. Then as she had at their first meeting years before, she bent her knees and jumped.
He prayed to move fast enough when he realized what Catherine was going to do. For the most fleeting of moments, the sight of her arched back, spread limbs, and then closed eyes had been the most content expression Duo had ever seen. Something foolish that was all the more enchanting.
Catching her, breaking her fall had only brought back the full weight of her foolishness. He winced as she partially leaned back on her bruised knees that folded between his long and gangly legs. Balanced up on one elbow he squinted at her.
"Do you believe in gravity now?" His voice shook a little, and he already felt the tender bruises forming as he trembled, aching underneath her.
She didn't answer, but stood. Dusted herself off, and, while he sat upright, she had gone elsewhere.
***
Much older, he had learned to navigate the world and keep the insights and wonders he found more or less to himself. Adapting to the community around him while maintaining his own sense of identity and finding other outlets. One way was to write poetry. Poetry of a sentence or two, a thought, a whispered phrase taken from the context of a neighbor's table. An insight of words lost in the distraction of conversation.
Only his braid remained to physically mark his inner differences. And even that was easily forgotten when the world neglected to note what could become the familiar. Neglected to observe the extraordinary in the everyday. Art was as close as he could find understanding. But even then . . .
He curled his fingers under his chin and posed similar to the sculpted image of thinker captured in time, always contemplating. Duo enjoyed the contemplation, but was grateful that unlike the stone man, he could stretch and go elsewhere to contemplate other things.
"What are you thinking about?" She took the white cushioned chair just to his right to join him at the square café table. Clouds had just rolled over the sky, and they were the only patrons still in the outside portion of the establishment.
"I'm wondering why I'm not surprised that you're here, now." Duo glanced at her, moving only his eyes and lifting his eyebrows. She was fuller than she was last - not only in the subtleness of her curves, but also more notably in the depth of her aura. The bright blue of her eyes had adopted a more stormy grey around the edges. The simple color earning so much complexity.
Catherine held out her hand and watched the space just in front of those eyes, watching for the infrequent drops of water her palm felt. "There it is again, gravity."
"Even so." Duo pushed back to sit properly in his chair, recalling how charming she was to him. "Do you live near here?" He asked, his tone reflecting the simple formality of the question.
The fingers of her outstretched palm all curled in but the foremost finger that continued to direct his eyes out into the city, "Just over there," She replied. "Why do you think it continues to feel like it needs to prove itself to us?"
"Gravity is a law." Duo replied, having thought about gravity now and again since his adolescence. "Laws neither are obligated to prove themselves nor do they break."
Catherine put her hand down and sipped the cup of tea that appeared on the serving tray of the waiter at the same time. "I think I'd like to walk on water."
The lower lids of Duo's eyes slid upward, doubtful. "Have you?"
"Not yet." She smiled around the lip of the tea cup. "Are you forgetting, Mr. Maxwell?"
"Forgetting what?"
"That people, even people left locked in caskets in the dark ground, can break free. Can turn into grass."
Even diligent isolation makes one grow a little rust. Duo didn't speak.
***
Gravity.
He took off his shoes and let his feet practice curling in the grass. A few blades still standing, held between individual toes. A spring shower was rolling over from the fields. Chasing away the blue with a fuzzed blur of grey, then a thick smell of rain.
He couldn't remember when he'd started to forget. Wondering if in part that through the adaptation, the hiding in plain sight, he'd forgotten about pride. The sort of pride that blinded one from seeing not just the observable beauties of ordinary life. But also the exceptions - the dream of potentials, hope. Magic.
Pulling off his shirt, he marveled at how two boyishly thin arms had grown into trim bigness. How ordinary that the body he looked out of should be reshaped.
A fey prince playing in a sea of metal and concrete. Duo climbed the ladder and pulled himself to stand at the sturdy edge of the diving board. The sun warmed him for a brief moment longer before his bare back was put in the shadow of the coming weather.
He had a vision once that he had climbed. Climbed a long way up. And at the top, he'd felt the fury of an orchestrated storm.
But after going so high, one had to come down again. He had known that, and falling was only to be expected. Whether or not one jumped, inevitable.
Or was it?
Falling was partially the rush of downward motion, but also the unexpected cradling of the air itself. In those moments, calm and strangely embraced.
Too soon then, Duo lost the feeling of being held. Taken into the sharp cuts of the water, initially chill, slicing into flesh. Folding around him next like a warmer blanket, holding out the cooling air.
Relentlessly, taking him deeper - as gravity insisted. Closer, warmer at the bottom. Everything slowed. The downward movement all but stopping. Time stopping.
But before sealing him in the darkness forever, gravity relented.
Duo didn't have to open his eyes to enjoy the new sensation. That of floating. Without effort. Upward.
Like that of a dead man. Coming up for his first breath.
(Disclaimer: Howdy, this is an alternate reality tale along the lines of a character finding what might be a modern fairy tale or a bizarre mythological experience. Something I wrote to enjoy more the questions rather than the answers. Although, I did know answers to some of my own questions, I omitted from including them hoping that the element of mystery was more important. In other words, I felt like writing something a touch odd, and here it is! I borrowed Duo and Catherine from Gundam Wing, because I'm quite certain their characters would not otherwise find themselves in any identical situation. Enjoy.)
***
When Catherine was nine years old, she had a vision. She had climbed a tall staircase, winding over and on top of its self. Upward and onward. The walls had been made of rocks and she braced herself against it rather than the unsteady railing. Following the wall with the fingers of her hand. Letting them trail over the cold roughness of the hastily cut limestone then cringing at the slick growth of vegetation brought about by a lack of up keeping. The sound of the lightning's clap and continual rain overwhelmed her persistent footfalls. Upward and onward.
The top steps led to an open peak, where she was immediately wet from exposure. Trembling with mostly cold, wrapping her hands around her soaking clothes. The sky was a dark purple on the horizon, black surrounding the tower. Violent gold strikes of lightning dancing between the clouds. Yet, while the orchestrated storm around her called for attention, Catherine felt compelled to look down.
To look down (she knew quite naturally despite the strangeness of the place) was to let herself fall. She would fall before she would know what was below. Or she could stay where she was.
Standing on her toes, Catherine spread out her arms and leaned.
She had always hated to get wet.
***
After not speaking for the first seven years of his life, Duo had surprised them all by suddenly utilizing complete sentences once taken in as a student at the St. Francis Boys' Elementary Academy. Some might have seen that as the sign of a latent genius, but such hopes diminished when they became used to his constant and idle chattering.
He like the sound of his own voice. And of course, talking is the first way to stop listening. Therefore, his studies suffered and he was always the proud name at the bottom of the academic evaluations for his grade.
Even those that found patience to strive beyond the average instructor became weary with his self-satisfied conversation. Usually about some breakthrough he had made about learning more about himself just that afternoon. Discoveries that only paled after the invention of his own ability to speak. They usually attributed it to his egotistical nature.
"I've found that my knuckles only move one way, like my knees." He would say, then sitting in his desk with his feet curled around the outside legs of the chair. Leaning forward with his shoulders slouched together to balance on his arms. Grinning, smiling as if quite pleased with the most profound insight.
Of course, his crowning glory was his hair. "If you let it alone, it just keeps growing!"
***
"Funny thing death. For once, it is something we do completely without our bodies."
It was that comment that allowed Duo to spend the rest of the funeral service sitting in his adopted parents' car. He eventually tired of playing with the manual locks on the door, watching it with his eyes very close to appreciate the length of the silver knob before and after being pushed in. He slipped from the vehicle and began to pace the length of the parking lot. Pausing to inspect each license plate. Later trying to kick up rocks into the license plates like a soccer player.
He'd made it to the last car, and was starting to aim a fair sized stone with the toe of his shoe when he noticed that there was a girl perched on the trunk of that car.
"I've been watching you the whole time." She said. She was sitting so that her knees were together, one arm crossing over them, the other pushing back reddish brown curls. Meeting his blue eyes with her own. She lowered her feet to the back bumper and stood, stretching out her arms. Balancing.
"Are you going to fall?" Duo asked. He figured she would stay there until she fell, and wondered if that was what she had intended all along.
"I never fall." The girl shook her head, and bent her knees a little before springing to the ground. "I saw them do something like that at the circus. They didn't use a net either."
"Do you live near here? I'm Duo Maxwell." He stuck out his hand, forgetting all about the perfect stone he's set in front of his shoe and stepped over it to be closer to her.
"Just down the way. I'm Catherine. However, you can call me Miss Bloom." She accepted his handshake and only allowed him to bob her arm twice before pulling her fingers out of his. She wasn't fond of prolonged greetings.
"Are you older than me?" Duo frowned, skeptical. Although he was used to being younger than just about everyone. "I want you to call me Mr. Maxwell."
"Fine." Catherine agreed. And shrugged. "Are you related?" She nodded toward the house that had been refurnished to honor the last moments with the dead.
"They have green shutters because that is what people turn into when they die." Duo said, watching them carry the red wood casket into the coach.
"You think they turn into green shutters?" Catherine crossed her arms, condescending. She stared at his hair, wondering how anyone would let it go so long on a boy. Most of it was pulling out of the braid making Duo Maxwell look more like a fey child in an asphalt park.
"No, grass." Duo said calmly. He was used to people misunderstanding him. Sometimes other people just didn't think about things before talking. It took him several times to explain to his parents that every shirt needed four holes, but a vest only needed three - like trousers.
"Do you think so?" Catherine shook her head, some of her hair catching between her lips. She pulled it out daintily before adding, "Can they get out of the coffin?"
Duo thought about that for a while. Soon his family came to collect him. Mrs. Maxwell noticing the new scuffs on his dress shoes. Duo only noticed Catherine had gone after he stopped staring wide-eyed and amazed at the marvelous, white marks left by the stones.
***
When he was just a little bit older, a teenager, Duo remembered those marks and wondered why the gulls over the ocean didn't mar the sky in the same way. They screeched violently enough that they made it seem like flying was painful.
This was very different from the spider that was scurrying away across where the sand met the soil. Silent and swift. But much more vulnerable, he realized as he watch a sneaker hover over the spider, then, hesitating, set back down. Sparing the spider.
"Do you live around here?" Duo asked, ready to make up an answer if she didn't give one. "I remember you."
"I do," Catherine pointed along the rock-splintered coast. Waves breaking open on those rocks and shortly relieving one from the singular sound of the gulls. "You're Mr. Maxwell."
"And you're Miss Bloom." He held out his hand again, and she met his firm grip squeezing his fingers with equal pressure.
"I would recognize your hair - it's the same." Catherine said, walking closer to the shoreline, kicking out her feet. Her own tanned legs quite spider-like until the bare ankle slipped into the thin sneaker. The ends of her jean shorts were ribbons of white thread, and she wore a pink tank top. It was, in Duo's opinion, not enough clothes for an autumn day on a windy beach.
"No, it's longer." Duo corrected, deliberately exercising the part of his chatter that most people could tolerate and found amusing. Humor and contradictions, humorous contradictions worked best. Better than his simple observations, such as, "You're older as well."
"Too young to grow grass yet." She teetered from her heels to her toes, leaning as if to meet the tide and then pulling back from it. Opposite from the movement of the water itself. "I feel like climbing." Catherine made her way to the larger rocks up the shore.
"You like high places?" Duo more observed than needed to confirm.
"Maybe." Catherine started to find a hand hold, and bounced on her back foot before propelling herself up the steepest part of the front rock. "But not as much as I like gravity."
"Gravity is rather reliable."
"I don't really believe in gravity." Catherine called back over her shoulder, looking to see if he was following her. Duo's eyes were glancing over the surface, eyebrows pulled together in what might have been concentration or perplexity.
"How can you like something you don't believe in?" He put one hand out testing it with his fingers, and then mimicking Catherine followed her to the flattened top where they could simply feel the touch of the wind as if it cut around them with a sharpened knife. Defining their solidness into exact dimensions.
"Well what if it stops working?" Catherine asked practically, " I wouldn't want to miss that."
"It's rather reliable." Duo insisted, crossing his arms and trying to hold in what little internal heat he still had.
"You never know." Catherine, stepped out to the lip of the rock, which was quite like an immobile diving board. She spread her arms and clicked her heels together. "It must still be there." She said after a long moment, "I haven't flown off yet."
"You'd only go backwards against this wind, anyway." Advised Duo, then he slid off the rock mostly sitting on his rear the entire way back to the immediate ground.
"Silly me." Catherine turned and pushed her toes just off the opposite edge. The wind picking up for a moment and pushing her hair into her face once more. Then as she had at their first meeting years before, she bent her knees and jumped.
He prayed to move fast enough when he realized what Catherine was going to do. For the most fleeting of moments, the sight of her arched back, spread limbs, and then closed eyes had been the most content expression Duo had ever seen. Something foolish that was all the more enchanting.
Catching her, breaking her fall had only brought back the full weight of her foolishness. He winced as she partially leaned back on her bruised knees that folded between his long and gangly legs. Balanced up on one elbow he squinted at her.
"Do you believe in gravity now?" His voice shook a little, and he already felt the tender bruises forming as he trembled, aching underneath her.
She didn't answer, but stood. Dusted herself off, and, while he sat upright, she had gone elsewhere.
***
Much older, he had learned to navigate the world and keep the insights and wonders he found more or less to himself. Adapting to the community around him while maintaining his own sense of identity and finding other outlets. One way was to write poetry. Poetry of a sentence or two, a thought, a whispered phrase taken from the context of a neighbor's table. An insight of words lost in the distraction of conversation.
Only his braid remained to physically mark his inner differences. And even that was easily forgotten when the world neglected to note what could become the familiar. Neglected to observe the extraordinary in the everyday. Art was as close as he could find understanding. But even then . . .
He curled his fingers under his chin and posed similar to the sculpted image of thinker captured in time, always contemplating. Duo enjoyed the contemplation, but was grateful that unlike the stone man, he could stretch and go elsewhere to contemplate other things.
"What are you thinking about?" She took the white cushioned chair just to his right to join him at the square café table. Clouds had just rolled over the sky, and they were the only patrons still in the outside portion of the establishment.
"I'm wondering why I'm not surprised that you're here, now." Duo glanced at her, moving only his eyes and lifting his eyebrows. She was fuller than she was last - not only in the subtleness of her curves, but also more notably in the depth of her aura. The bright blue of her eyes had adopted a more stormy grey around the edges. The simple color earning so much complexity.
Catherine held out her hand and watched the space just in front of those eyes, watching for the infrequent drops of water her palm felt. "There it is again, gravity."
"Even so." Duo pushed back to sit properly in his chair, recalling how charming she was to him. "Do you live near here?" He asked, his tone reflecting the simple formality of the question.
The fingers of her outstretched palm all curled in but the foremost finger that continued to direct his eyes out into the city, "Just over there," She replied. "Why do you think it continues to feel like it needs to prove itself to us?"
"Gravity is a law." Duo replied, having thought about gravity now and again since his adolescence. "Laws neither are obligated to prove themselves nor do they break."
Catherine put her hand down and sipped the cup of tea that appeared on the serving tray of the waiter at the same time. "I think I'd like to walk on water."
The lower lids of Duo's eyes slid upward, doubtful. "Have you?"
"Not yet." She smiled around the lip of the tea cup. "Are you forgetting, Mr. Maxwell?"
"Forgetting what?"
"That people, even people left locked in caskets in the dark ground, can break free. Can turn into grass."
Even diligent isolation makes one grow a little rust. Duo didn't speak.
***
Gravity.
He took off his shoes and let his feet practice curling in the grass. A few blades still standing, held between individual toes. A spring shower was rolling over from the fields. Chasing away the blue with a fuzzed blur of grey, then a thick smell of rain.
He couldn't remember when he'd started to forget. Wondering if in part that through the adaptation, the hiding in plain sight, he'd forgotten about pride. The sort of pride that blinded one from seeing not just the observable beauties of ordinary life. But also the exceptions - the dream of potentials, hope. Magic.
Pulling off his shirt, he marveled at how two boyishly thin arms had grown into trim bigness. How ordinary that the body he looked out of should be reshaped.
A fey prince playing in a sea of metal and concrete. Duo climbed the ladder and pulled himself to stand at the sturdy edge of the diving board. The sun warmed him for a brief moment longer before his bare back was put in the shadow of the coming weather.
He had a vision once that he had climbed. Climbed a long way up. And at the top, he'd felt the fury of an orchestrated storm.
But after going so high, one had to come down again. He had known that, and falling was only to be expected. Whether or not one jumped, inevitable.
Or was it?
Falling was partially the rush of downward motion, but also the unexpected cradling of the air itself. In those moments, calm and strangely embraced.
Too soon then, Duo lost the feeling of being held. Taken into the sharp cuts of the water, initially chill, slicing into flesh. Folding around him next like a warmer blanket, holding out the cooling air.
Relentlessly, taking him deeper - as gravity insisted. Closer, warmer at the bottom. Everything slowed. The downward movement all but stopping. Time stopping.
But before sealing him in the darkness forever, gravity relented.
Duo didn't have to open his eyes to enjoy the new sensation. That of floating. Without effort. Upward.
Like that of a dead man. Coming up for his first breath.