The cliffs seem like a good idea, in his defense. They say at the top of the hill, there's a spot you can watch the sun meet its reflection and Keith wants to see it at least once in his life. He's been living on the beach a month when he decides to brave the climb.
The shack is quiet. No one goes so far out. There's one paved road that goes to the local fire training station, but Keith's beach is a dirt road drive of more miles than any tourist wants to make time for on the one day they allotted for the peninsula. It's on a white sand cove with tall rocks and one picturesque sea stack. He spent the whole first day kicking sand to see the pink beneath the white.
It's shell, Kolivan told him when Keith asked, with something faintly amused. The entire beach, shell and bits of coral broken up by shrimp and parrot fish and waves and wind. Kolivan explained it and showed him the breakers in the distance, where the waves hit the reef. He'd shown Keith how the solar panels connect to the power and how to turn on the water and where his Dad's old box of books was, and then he'd left and Keith was alone in earnest, with a month's supplies and a number to call if anything happened—and a promise he'd be back in a few days to check on him, anyway.
Quiet is what he wanted. He tells himself it's a good thing as he lies awake that first night, listening to the waves heave themselves up the beach.
It's the second time he's been to the ocean. The desert was silent. The city wasn't, but it all paled out to white noise. The water is different. He can feel it under his hands when he sits on the beach watching it. The waves are deceptive, quiet. Their white foam edges chase up the shore, grasping and hissing before they slip back, casualties of gravity, pulling all things in after them. He has the irrational fear that if he's careless, if he lets them lap at his feet, they'll pull him in, too,
Don't turn your back on it, Kolivan said, one of his tidbits of parting wisdom.
Keith had laughed, but Kolivan had frowned and insisted. It doesn't matter how well you swim; if the current grabs you, you can't fight it—and Keith is new to the ocean, for all that it feels familiar.
After a month, he's getting the gist. Sometimes when he's sitting on the beach, there's a sense like the ocean is holding its breath for him. And sometimes when he walks up from the dock, he gets the cold, phantom drip of water down his spine that makes him feel like he's being watched.
But it's quiet. No one comes out so far.
The cliffs above the sea are white chalk and steep, but there's a trail from the shack that he can pick his way up, lined in tall grass and little glassy flowers that cling to the rock with long tendril roots. He likes hiking. There's a studious care to it that means he can't think too deeply about anything but where to put his feet, and he's good at that. Or—he was.
He goes up to see the sunset. His dad talked about it once, the way the sun met its reflection in the waves and how if you were lucky and if the sky was clear and if you didn't blink, sometimes you could see the sun on the waves and then through them. Green fire, and the most beautiful thing he ever saw.
By the top of the hill, he's more than out of breath, but it's old news. The sun is dipping toward the horizon when he starts; by the crest, it's low and bloody. He clears himself a spot in the rock and grass to watch and wait and breathe. He focuses on the sun and lets it burn against his eyes.
The light starts to fade out on the horizon, a hemisphere of perfect light that glitters in the water. It sets without fanfare, a little, slow death. No green, but he didn't really expect it and the disappointment doesn't bite. It was worth it just to stretch his legs.
It was worth it to try.
The downhill is what gets him. It's always harder and he always forgets.
The desert was more forgiving. You could pick a trail there in the dark by starlight and moonlight, but after sunset the fog starts rolling in, thick as soup. He measures his steps, tries to remember the path down but his breath is starting to sting in his chest. Later, it will feel like a dream.
He doesn't realize he's off the path entirely until he can feel the flowers crushing under his feet. He used to be good at this, he reminds himself. He used to be good at a lot of things. He can smell the salt, feel the spray of it on his cheek like a kiss.
And then he feels it in his chest: an ache, old a horrid. His next breath stings on the inhale.
He missteps. The ground crumbles under his foot before he can catch himself and the shock isn't the fall but that he keeps falling, like misjudging the height of a step, that moment of suspension before the hard landing.
But it isn't. The ocean is what reaches up to catch him. The cold of it shocks the last of his breath out. He's a good swimmer, but not without air, and the waves are unrelenting against the rocks. He has an instant to register the cold shove of water against his body in the dark and then whites out in pain as his head cracks against the rocks.
Breath and thought leave him utterly, except that it's funny in a distant way that he still wants to fight it.
And then reality shifts. He feels lips on his. A mouth, wide and hard, and air flooding his lungs. He tries to pull back but there's an arm around his chest and a hand buried in his hair, keeping him pressed in tight, forcing air into his lungs. There's still water in his throat—he pushes back with the last of his strength and breaks the surface, gasping for air, coughing.
He blacks out then because he still can't get air and it's that old familiar burn, a tightness in his chest, ruining him.
It abates with agonizing slowness and he realizes he's on hard land—the dock. There's the grain of wood under his cheek, rough and worn, and a hand petting him with frantic care, pushing back his hair and tracing his face. He rolls and coughs, but when he looks to see whose hand is on his back, the touch disappears and there's nothing there but open sea.
He lies there on the dock, feeling the water cool on his face and the dragging sting of air in and out of his lungs and tries to remember what happened. It feels like something he'll forget, like a dream he's half woken up from and already losing. By the time he drags himself up and back to the shack, it's gone.
There are no obvious injuries, but his body drags.
When he checks himself in the mirror under the single bulb light, there's a cut on his bottom lip, a row of tiny lacerations that smart when he pulls at them to get a better look. It's not bad, but it stings when he brushes his teeth. He makes it to the shower without blacking out again and then it's all he can do to pull on his warmest clothes and crawl into bed.
He doesn't notice the bruise on his upper arm until the next day when he catches the edge of it at the corner of his eye when he's pulling on a fresh shirt. Blue lines, like stripes, but when he turns and twists to see how they ring his arm, he realizes what they look like.
The lines are like fingers. It's a handprint.
Kolivan picks him up that day. The firehouse's training station is on the road between the shack and town proper—though it's not much of a town at all. No one's ever explained to Keith why they need a fire station with full-time staff, or why it's miles from town, but he's not going to question a free ride.
"We have some old clothes if you want them," Kolivan says when he climbs in. It's never a how are you. Keith appreciates that. Kolivan always has little suggestions instead. That place looks like it's falling apart, he says, and then shows up a few days later with a spare can of paint. They're good to him.
He fingers the tear in his shirt. "It's fine." It's the only shirt he had with sleeves long enough to cover up the evidence of his nighttime adventure.
Kolivan glances back to him pointedly. Years since Keith's Dad passed, and he's eight riding shotgun on some dirt road again. "I can fix it," Keith amends. A few stitches are all it needs. He's horrible at it, but he can manage. And he doesn't need more station shirts; if he wears any more clothing stamped with their logo, people will start assuming his the station's mascot.
This is just the last survivor of his wardrobe pre-shack. He moved in at the start of summer because it was the only place he had. It seemed better than the alternative. He leans into his seat, staring out the window at the beech trees and grass and lets the sun and fresh air ease him to sleep.
Kolivan wakes him when they get to town with a gentle hand on his shoulder.
Ostensibly he's there to help carry groceries, but it's a thin excuse when Kolivan looks like he could carry Keith under one arm along with the rest of the load. He sees Keith eyeing the pile of apples and throws one to him. "I'll get it."
"I have money," Keith says.
Kolivan doesn't deign to reply. The store doubles as the town's sole gift shop and there's a display of books and little glass figures along one wall. Most of it is tacky. No—all of it is tacky, but there's a book of local myths written for kids on a shelf by the checkout. The cover catches Keith's eye. It's stylized, drawn in blues and greens and curling lines: a mermaid luring some poor fisherman into the sea with pretty eyes while the man's ship runs aground.
"You want that, too?" Kolivan asks. He's not making fun; everyone under the age of 30 is the same age in his eyes, Keith's realized, and they all go in the category of child-to-teenaged entity. He offered Keith a set of abandoned sandcastle making supplies when he'd first moved in—the kind meant for toddlers.
Keith almost said yes.
He's staring at Keith out of the corner of his eye, now, frowning. His eyes flick down to Keith's mouth and back up. The marks around his mouth look worse than they are, and there's a bruise to match, puffing the edge of his lower lip. It doesn't look like anything unless you get close and Kolivan isn't.
Keith reaches across him to grab the book and leaf through it to distract them both. It's children's rhymes. The art inside doesn't match the cover, to a ridiculous degree. Keith holds it open to a page where two buxom mermaids are striking magazine poses. "Really? Who buys this?"
"You'd be surprised."
"What? Do you guys have a copy?"
Kolivan pulls the book out of his hand and sticks it back on the shelf. "The sea is deep," he says sagely, as if that's a common saying that everyone knows. Keith isn't from around here, but it isn't. No one says that.
"Is this like when you guys tried to convince me there were penguins?" Keith huffs. It almost worked. Antok even pulled out photos.
"There are," Kolivan says carefully, "just not here."
Keith squints at him. He didn't answer the question, but Keith isn't going to press it. He isn't sure he wants one. It'll give Antok an excuse to razz him the next time he comes to the station for their pity pizza.
The drive back is as quiet as the drive out, but Keith doesn't fall asleep this time. Kolivan unrolls the windows and goes slow so they can enjoy the air. Everything is in flower and it makes the air smell like honey. He catches Kolivan glancing at him and tries not to sound petulant when he asks, "What?"
Kolivan shakes his head.
When they pull up to the shack, he reaches to the back seat and rummages around for a moment. Keith knows what he's going to do before he does it and has to resist snapping at him.
"Here." Kolivan sets a bulging bag of groceries in his lap.
This is an old fight. Keith sighs and gears up for the argument. "I don't need you to—"
"I know." He closes the truck's door with a slam and leans out the window far enough to throw out an, "Eat more," behind him as he pulls away.
That's his summer. Brief pauses for cliff adventures and occasional trips into town or pity meals at the station aside, it's him on the dock, reading or watching the ocean or picking his way over tidepools. He needs time. That's what the doctors said, in so many words. There are worse ways to live.
The beach stretches for miles. He walks as much of it as he can. The tidepools keep him occupied for a full day. Most of his time is spent on the dock, reading. After Kolivan drops him off he grabs an apple and the wrinkle-covered and dog-eared tome he's been working his way through and heads out. It's a short walk: straight out the door and down the old wood stairs to the beach. There's peeling white paint on everything; it was a beautiful home once, though he was too young to remember it.
His hip smarts on the walk down, some other bruise making itself known. It distracts him until he's almost to the dock, and then he glances up and his breath catches in his chest.
There's something there, glittering against the wood. Keith can make it out as he gets closer: a line of sea glass, pebbles of blue and green and amber laid out in a row along the edge.
Keith stops. It's his dock. No one else uses it. No one else comes this far out. His mind scans through every possibility and comes up blank.
Keith picks them up, rolls them between his fingers. They're smooth in his hand, like little, frosted stones of perfect glass. They're lined up one every few boards, all the way to the end of the dock. He starts gathering them, making his shirt into a makeshift basket. It's only when he gets to the last one, perched on the final board of the dock that it occurs to him what he looks like: a child following a trail of candy, right to the spot where something can grab him.
The handprint on his arm, the picture on the stupid book in the grocery store… He almost doesn't pick up the last one, but then he realizes he's being ridiculous and grabs it before he jumps back from the water with reasonable speed, not at all scared. Not at all.
It's the only one that's white. It looks like a little shard of ice, frosted and glittering. He turns it back and forth in the sun, watching the reflected light play against his hand.
Later, he sets them on the windowsill in the kitchen. It's the one that faces the ocean and gets the most sun in the afternoon. They cast a little rainbow over the floor.
He falls asleep tracing it with his eyes.
The next morning feels different. The beach is always quiet, but it's never alien, never strange.
There's a low, cool breeze running in through the curtains, the light through them casting shapes against the threadbare old sheets. When he checks in the mirror, the bags under his eyes are mostly dispelled and the bruise on his arm has faded to a dull yellow, and he feels good, for the first time in a long time—good enough to do more than sit on the beach and read and heal.
There's nothing on the dock, nothing on the water when he steps out but there's still something odd in the air that he can't place. Like the wind skittering through his hair, or eyes on his back. But no one comes out so far. No one but him.
There are tide pools in the rocks at the far end of the beach that he's been meaning to check out since he saw them on top of the hill. It seems like a good way to pass the time and while away the day. Time is, as always, his greatest enemy.
The first shell he finds by accident. It's resting at the bottom of a pool, nestled with anemones and little crabs. It's spiral and spiked, the same bright spectrum as a sunset. He picks it up, shakes out the water and sand, and then closes his eyes holds it to his ear to hear the rush of blood in his head mimic the sea and almost missed the discordant splash of water against the rocks.
When he opens his eyes, it takes a moment to distinguish the difference and then he sees it: another shell resting on the rocks a few yards out.
It was a wave, he tells himself when he picks it up and turns over the pearl-white half-moon in the sun, but he can't believe it.
The persistent sense that he's not alone comes flooding back.
He puts both shells in his bag and decides to call it a day. There are a hundred innocuous things to think about, like buying a guidebook next time he's in town or one of the laminated sheets of shell pictures and names they keep at the kiosk by the door—
When he turns, there's another along the path he picked to get there.
His breath stops in his chest.
There's a natural explanation, but the bruise on his arm still hurts when he forgets to take care and he can see in the distance the spot on the cliff where it gave way under his feet. He didn't pull himself out of the water.
The next day he goes back and finds nothing. There's no sense of being watched, no errant shells nestled in tidepools for him to find, and maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was chance, but when he trudges his way back to the dock, there's another line of sea glass glittering at him from the end of it. His heart thuds in his ears like the rush of waves against the piles of the dock and he knows it's not in his head. The shells and glass are solid and real and he is being watched.
There are no tracks on the beach.
"Hey," he says to himself, and then repeats it, louder as he runs to the dock.
Nothing but silence, and then almost imperceptibly, there's a sound contrary to the waves, the splash of something slipping into water. Under the dock, he thinks and falls to his knees so fast they scrape against the rough wood of the dock. He braces himself on the edge and ducks his head under. Nothing, again, but bars of light glittering through the slats of the dock. The water is clear. It shines down to the sand below and there's nothing there.
The sense of being watched rushes back in full and hits like primal terror. He raises his head, slowly, and then he sees it yards out like something out of a horror: the top of a head, floating in the water.
A dead body, he thinks for a moment with terror singing through him, but then it rises, slowly.
It's a man with oil-sheen eyes and pale skin and short slick-dark hair that looks like it was shorn off. The silver strands at the front stick across his face and then Keith realizes what he's seeing isn't human—not close. His tail rolls in the water behind him, a momentary shimmer of black scales and silver lacing. He smiles; his teeth are longer than they should be, narrowing to lethal points. He's beautiful and terrible.
Keith can't form thoughts past the fear freezing him to the dock. The man—the creature—cocks his head and then ducks under the water a little, until he's submerged up to the line of scar over his nose, before he rises back up. It's a shy, nervous gesture—one an animal would make.
"Did you like them?" he asks.
The voice is guttural. His breath makes a soft whoosh as he speaks, like the wind around the edges of the shack's warped screen door at night, and Keith realizes the raised marks below his ears are gills and he's breathing through them. He cocks his head again, as if Keith is an object of fascination as if Keith is the anomaly here.
The shells. The glass. The feeling of being watched and the mark of a hand around his arm and the line of pin-prick scabs over his lips. He raises a hand to his mouth and the creature's smile widens. He slides through the waves with the ebb and flow, a few feet at a time, until he's close enough that Keith can see the size of him at a distance was an illusion. The creature is massive, bigger than any human.
"Did you like them?" he repeats, voice a touch smoother.
Keith's mouth works for a moment, but he can't find a reason not to answer. "Yeah," he hears himself whisper.
The creature's eyes go bright and he smiles wider. That's—a lot of teeth. That's more teeth than a person has. That's more teeth than anything needs.
"I found them for you," the creature says. His voice ghosts and echoes in the space between them.
It's not a dream. Nothing in him could conjure anything this beautiful or this terrible. His arm and hip still ache and the feeling of the sun beating down is too visceral. The sting of salt in the air, the sickly sweet smell of the ocean, the back-and-forth flicker of light on the water and the creature's tail swirling below. No. Not a dream.
He's close enough to touch now. He's been moving closer by little degrees and Keith should run, but there's something hypnotic in his eyes.
The creature reaches out and grabs the edge of the dock. The motion is sudden, but the way he moves is so fluid, Keith doesn't flinch back. His fingers are unnaturally long; there's webbing between them, black as the tips of his fingers, and then he pulls his other hand out of the water and Keith can't stop himself from a little shudder and intake of breath.
It's covered in silver scales and tipped in long claws that click against the wood. He should be running—he should be gone. The primal part of him not mesmerized is screaming at him to get away from the water as the creature readjusts his grip on the dock. The spiked appendages bite deep enough into the greyed wood to splinter it.
He pulls himself closer. There's something sinuous in the way the muscle ripples under his skin. Keith is within reaching distance now, frozen like prey, but the creature sets his elbow on the dock and leans his cheek on his hand lazily. His eyes are so dark and so bright.
"Who are you?" the creature asks.
It's Keith's question. It's Keith's dock.
He's too quiet for too long. The smile falls off the creature's face. "I'm Shiro," he enunciates with care, as if it's hard to speak and he thinks those two syllables might be too much for Keith to understand. It's a sweet name for something that could kill Keith with a whim and a touch.
"Keith," he replies faintly, by habit more than anything else. What are you, he wants to ask, but the question dies in his throat. It doesn't matter. It could be a hallucination, something brought on by lack of air. He could be in the shack right now, dreaming this—but the glass was real, and the marks on him are real, too.
The creature's eyes are flickering back and forth over him, pupils like pinpoints in the grey, lips parted. "...I'll bring you more," he says with conviction, still searching Keith's face, and then he slides his hand off the dock and slips back into the water with soundless grace, sinking under it, not taking his eyes off Keith even as the waves cover his head.
Keith stares at the spot where he disappeared for minutes after. Every flicker of dark on the waves looks like his tail, and every glitter of light looks like his scales, and if he moves he'll lose what he saw.
Keith goes through the rest of his day wide-eyed, pulse pounding at every small sound, but for nothing. He goes back twice to check and see if the claw marks are still there in the wood of the dock. They seem so unassuming in the sun and breeze, and then he bends and angles and sets his hand to match where Shiro's fingertips dug in and realizes that even splaying his hand out as wide as it will go, the span of the marks dwarfs him by inches.
The next morning, there's a line of shells where the glass was the first time. It's early and the sun is still rising over the hills. Keith stares down at the fragments and loses a minute imagining the creature's—imagining Shiro's massive hands sifting through sand, picking them out, one by one.
Keith gathers them up and adds them to the collection on the windowsill without thinking about it too hard.
If it's some fever dream, some byproduct of his night swim, at least it's a nice one. At least it's harmless. But the shells are always there in the morning and when he shows one to Kolivan on their next trip to town, he picks it up and holds it to the light and there's real wonder in his eyes. It's real, and he's sure. Nothing's felt so visceral since the desert and his bike and the stars drawn by a computer across the cockpit windows in the simulator. All of that is done now and gone like a dream.
The figure waiting for him at the end of the dock is real.
Keith can only see his head peeking up above, the shock of white hair sticking up a little in defiance of gravity and water. He smiles when Keith gets closer and then ducks out of sight.
When he gets there, all that's waiting is a shard of opalescent shell. It's polished and fine and this is something Shiro thought he would want. This is something Shiro found for him.
"You can stay," he yells at the water, shocked at how desperate he sounds.
It take minutes, but his shoulders rise above the water slowly, inspiring the same primal fear as before; Keith has to wait a moment and breathe before he can speak again. There's too much to ask. He doesn't know where to start.
Shiro watches him, the same small, smile on his lips. His mouth twitches, the smile widens, and the teeth aren't that bad, really. Keith can get used to it.
It becomes a regular thing. Keith goes to the dock in the mornings with his book and breakfast and waits for the familiar feeling of eyes on him. He comes and goes in a breath and he always brings something.
Keith keeps all of it. The glass he leaves on the window to catch the light. The rocks he lines up on the edge of the bookshelf in the bedroom. The shells he spreads on a plate on the table.
Later, he thinks better of it and collects them up in his hand, spreads then out on the kitchen table while he eats the pasta Kolivan foisted on him. He finds twine in a drawer in the kitchen and knots it around each fragment of white and calls himself silly with every twist of his fingers. The result is shoddy and ridiculous and he wars with himself for only the briefest, most requisite minute before he slips it around his neck.
It's something special. It's something just for him.
The third day, Keith wakes up to a fish on the dock.
It's singular and huge and for once, Shiro is waiting unprompted. Keith doesn't know enough to identify what kind it is, but its blue scales glitter in the morning sun, in horrible fashion. There's a rent across their perfect shimmer and Keith didn't know fish could bleed. He didn't know fish could be that big.
Shiro is leaning on one elbow on the dock next to it, smile blinding and wicked. "Do you like it? I caught it." Keith could tell.
"I… I don't think I can eat that much."
Shiro frowns. "I can."
The thought is horrific and endearing in equal measure. Shiro makes his scaled hand into a claw and flexes it in the sun as if he needs to prove it.
He's preening. He's showing off. Keith covers his mouth to smother the manic little smile trying to sneak across his face. "That's cool."
It is, somehow. It reminds him off the thrill of seeing an engine opened up, all the strange, alien pieces coming together to form a thing of pure power.
Shiro glides closer in the water. The reflex to flinch back is still there, but he fights it. The grin on Shiro's face mirrors Keith's so he gives up trying to hide it and admires the light on his skin and scale.
The tide is in; he doesn't have to reach far to set his hand on the dock. He lays it there, palm down, like an offering. Keith feels like a child with a new toy, the way the urge to look at something shiny is perennial and consuming. It's inches from his thigh and his fingers are long; if Shiro wanted to grab him, there's no need to be coy about it. He could have had Keith a dozen times over, but the most threatening thing he's done is turn Keith's shack into a cliche seaside curio shop.
Keith reaches out, hesitates for a moment, and then presses down. He draws a finger from Shiro's wrist to the knuckle of his ring finger. The scales feel cold, like metal and polished to a mirror finish. His nail clicks over them with the clear click of coins falling together.
Keith wants to know how it would feel in his hand, on his hand. He wonders if this is what left the mark on his arm, and then wonders why the thought doesn't scare him.
"It's different…"
Shiro's other arm has scales over the back, webbing between the fingers, but it's darker and closer to human.
"It was a prize," Shiro says, the answer to a question he didn't ask and can't begin to parse.
The hand under his turns palm up and then Shiro's fingers close around Keith's hand where it's hovering. He draws Keith forward, urging. "Come in with me." His hand is bigger than Keith thought it would be, and stronger, too. The tug is gentle, playful. "Are you scared of the water?" he asks when Keith doesn't answer. "I'll help you."
That's not it. Shiro's hand tightens. He could hold Keith's wrist in the same grip with the smallest shift. Keith draws a breath and Shiro releases him with visible reluctance.
"I won't hurt you. I don't eat your kind," he says, low and strange and soft. He makes it sound like a personal choice, which is far from comforting. "If I did, I would have had you the night you fell in."
It's an admission. It's the first time he's had confirmation that Shiro saved him, though he knew. Of course, he knew. The memory comes back to Keith in a rush of water and terror. "I didn't fall in."
Shiro stays in perfect stillness, bobbing up and down in the water, watching him. Keith doesn't know an elegant way to explain the fine points of human health to someone who's only just learned they can't eat a hundred pounds of fish in a day. He doesn't know how to explain it, and he doesn't want to be something damaged in Shiro's eyes. He looks down and watches the way the light reflects off his foot under the water and the shadow of Shiro's tail below, black and flickering.
"I didn't fall in," he repeats, quieter.
He did, but it's nothing Shiro can fix.