Harpoonshipping (Mako Tsunami x Ocean) for The Yu-Gi-Oh Crack Pairing Oneshot Contest. Now that I have written it, it MUST become fanon. I demand that Harpoon gets added to The Shipping List, wherever it might be. :D
Disclaimer: Saying I own YGO is like saying that wildebeests are known for crossing the Serengeti River in dignified, orderly files. Saying I own YGO:TAS is like saying I'm a twenty-something British man.
Sango is a Japanese name that means coral. Yoko is a Japanese name that means ocean-child. An amabie is a Japanese mermaid. Mako is Ryouta Kajiki in this fic, for the sake of Japanese-ness.
Credit goes to the7joker7 and LadyBlackwell for beta'ing. Enjoy!
Partition Postulate
When he was a child, Ryouta had no fear of the sea.
"Mother!" he called, running across the cool, wet sand as the salt-scented breeze blew into his eyes, waves washing gently against his feet. "Mother, I caught a fish!" The slick, scaled creature wriggled in his arms, its flopping becoming wearier and wearier as the seconds dragged on in its lagging mind. Ryouta tightened his grasp, determinedly clutching what he envisioned as that night's dinner in his trembling boy's fingers, and fought his way through the dry, sinking sand above the interface where the water met the beach.
His mother looked up from the sweater she was knitting for him, sitting on a wind-worn rock that the waves could not reach. "And how did you manage that?" she asked.
"I swam into the parts where I couldn't stand," Ryouta declared proudly, although that in itself wasn't much of an accomplishment when it was taken into consideration that he was barely over three feet tall. "And then I saw it and grabbed it and swam back into the beach!"
His mother smiled, regarding him fondly. "Well done."
He beamed at her praise, his face bright and innocent.
She drew him closer, lowering her voice. "You have a gift, Ryouta-chan, and this will be only one of the ways you can exploit it. Listen closely," she whispered in his ear, tugging him yet nearer to her so that her hair brushed against his neck. "Always trust the sea. No matter what it takes, no matter how much you may want to leave it and never look back, remember: what enters it will always wash up somewhere, no matter on what lonely shore."
"Yes, mother," he said solemnly, his blue eyes staring without blinking into the sunlight beaming in blinding lines on the sparkling waves. He did not understand, but something about her tone told him that she was speaking of serious matters, that he should at least listen well so he would remember, and understand later.
The ocean laughed quietly to him, an easy, almost silent laugh that only he could hear, a laugh that spoke of perfect white coasts hundreds of miles away and boats painted blue that sailed among foam-capped waves. "Let's play together, Ryouta. Just you and me."
"Okay," he found himself mouthing, as if the ocean could hear him. "I will."
It smiled, and the wind suddenly turned cool, the water darker. Then give me back my children and my beauty, my safety and my mystery and all that your people have taken without compensation—
"Let the fish go," his mother said gently, standing and leading him into the water. It washed almost to his knees while barely covering her shins. "What belongs to the ocean belongs to the ocean, and when the time comes your father will tell you that the first rule of being a fisherman is that you only take what you need. Nothing more."
Almost as if he were not controlling them, his arms fell to his sides and his fingers went slack, and he watched as the half-dead fish dropped with a splash into the sea before him. It wriggled there for a few moments before disappearing into the deeper waters, a final splash of its fins sending a stream of water that hit him squarely in the forehead.
He wiped at his eyes to dispel the saltwater burn, his crying coming to an end as he realized his mother was not comforting him.
She simply looked down with something between amusement and sympathy in her eyes, her face shadowed by the afternoon sun. "The ocean will take its payment, Ryouta-chan," she said, voice tender, "and you had best let it do so."
He nodded obediently, the salt and sand drying in gritty streaks on his skin as the sun beat down upon his face, and the ocean laughed once more. "I will not hurt you, child. I will never hurt you."
With all his heart, he believed it. With his child's mind, he could do nothing but believe it.
The water is warm and comforting against his legs, the air sticky with summer humidity. The sun forms hazy light in the sky and on the horizon, making the beach glow pleasantly before his eyes.
There is a woman sitting on the sand in front of him, her back turned, facing the waves that wash lightly against her feet. She is wearing a white, sleeveless dress made of some sort of cottony material, her dark hair fluttering lightly in the breeze.
She turns and smiles at him with blue, blue eyes, bluer and deeper than his, and holds out one hand, beckoning to him. "Come here."
"Who are you?" he asks, teetering warily in his position, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and sinking slowly deeper into the sand.
"I'm your friend," she says, her voice soft. She picks up a shell and holds it in the sunlight, showing him how rainbow colors glittered in arcs along its inside. "Let's play."
"Okay," he says.
He isn't sure what happens next, but suddenly there is a sand castle in between them, its walls studded with stones and seashells, smooth and symmetrical and perfect. Strands of seaweed wash into the moat around it as the tide rises up another inch, and the foundation begins to crumble and drift away. The bits of shells littering the interface between the dry and the wet press uncomfortably against his legs, but he remains frozen—something in him is telling him not to move, not to break the moment, and even as a child of seven, he knows that much.
The woman raises her hand again and sweeps it underneath the castle, knocking it to the ground with one easy motion of her arm. The remainder of the turrets and walls stick up unevenly from its ruins, and he notices with some surprise that the entire collapsed heap has gently rounded corners and slopes—as if it had been slowly eroded away by the waves, and not destroyed in an instant.
"Nothing can last forever," the woman says quietly. "Sooner or later, everything is washed away and comes back to the sea."
"The merchants said that everything returns to the earth," he pipes up, childishly wondering.
Her eyes are distant, the sun haloing her face in gold. "The earth will change with time, child, but the ocean will always be there. When you die, when your mother dies, when your father dies—through this all, long past this all, the ocean will remain."
"Die?" he asks her, eyes round at the new word. It feels uncomfortable on his lips, something to be harshly spit out instead of rolling off the tongue with liquid grace.
"Death." It is a kinder sound on her lips. "Death is eternal, but you have no need to worry about that now, child. Death will not come to you for many years."
He nods, reassured, trusting in the infinite wisdom of adults. "But what is it?"
She pauses and thinks for a moment as the waves crash below them and the wind blows colder and colder against his skin. "Think of it as sitting in your room, child, sitting there forever and ever without being able to move, and yet comfortable in that position. Without distractions, without toys, without anything. Think of it as not being able to think."
He gives a gasp of horror at that, eyes welling up with tears. "I don't want—" He sniffles slightly, and the tears trickle saline lines down his cheeks.
"What are you afraid of?" asks the woman with eyes the blue of the sky and the water below it. "Fear is for the unfamiliar, and yet you know what death is. Cease your crying, stand, and forget." She reaches up and tugs him closer, reminding him of another day not too far in the past, with his mother whispering words of trust in his ear. The woman's breath is cool on his neck. "Forget everything."
Ryouta's father had always feared the sea.
"It can kill you easier than anything that walks on land," he said on the day that Ryouta was to first go fishing with him, helping his son clamber onto the boat. "Those waves, those creatures that live in it and give us life—we exist in an unspoken agreement with it that we will take only what we need, and it will let us. But go too far, push your limits a little bit beyond what it will take, and it will kill you without hesitation."
Ryouta frowned at him, crossing his arms—he was twelve now, and had outgrown those days of building sand castles at the beach and chasing seagulls through the waves; he liked to think himself as above any of his childhood superstitions. Dreams are good, child. They prevent those clever few who treasure them from going insane. "You talk about it like it can think."
"Of course it can," his father said, giving him a look that asked what rock Ryouta had been hiding under for his entire life. "Our family has always lived by the sea, and so we have a stronger connection to it than most. The water is a part of us; it practically runs through our blood, as the old stories would say. It speaks to us through our dreams—at least, until we have children who will carry on the family tradition. I don't hear it anymore, because it has transferred its guidance to you."
"If it's so helpful to us and it only kills us when we've done something wrong, then why are you afraid of it?" Ryouta asked, puzzled.
His father was silent for a moment, winding ropes into coils as he thought. "It gives warnings too," he said at last. "If we anger it, then its vengeance will be terrible to behold. And sometimes, when it's bored… sometimes, it takes you without reason."
"Why?" Ryouta said.
Why, why, why. Don't ask why. What would be left if there was nothing to wonder about?
His father shrugged, staring out into the horizon, where the water stretched on for as far as the eye could see. The sun was beginning to rise, lighting up the cloudless skies in streaks of red and orange, creeping in golden sheets across the sea. "Because it can."
Ryouta scowled out at the dawn-darkened waves, which sparkled blithely back at him. Why so angry, child? Hatred will only eat you out from the inside. "That's not fair."
Life's not fair.
His father gave him a weary smile, the sunlight shadowing the lines on his face. We all age. We all die. Do not fear this; be brave. "Does it need to be?"
Ryouta was shaken awake in the middle of the night on their first day out at sea to find the cabin floor tilting wildly under his feet. "What happened?" he demanded, sitting up quickly, his mind suddenly sharpened by the terrible, terrible feeling that something was wrong.
Something is wrong. Something is always wrong. And it is a gift that you are able to feel it.
"There's a storm," his father answered as the distant howl of wind resounded outside the door. The boat lurched abruptly to the right before straightening itself.
"A storm?" Ryouta asked in disbelief, a sound frighteningly like thunder crashing through his ears. Rain began to pummel the roof in a thousand tiny droplets, falling so hard that he feared the wood would cave in. "But the weather was perfect this morning—"
Ah, but the weather is apt to change, is it not?
"The ocean will act as it will," his father said gravely, dragging him out from under the covers and jerking the cabin door open. "And we can do nothing but hope to survive."
Outside, sheets of water pushed them down as they struggled to make their way to the sails to pull them down before the mast snapped under the pressure of the winds. Ryouta's clothes were soaked in seconds, his bare feet slipping on the liquid-slick planks, his hair sticking to his face and his neck. The sky was frighteningly dark, the clouds massed thickly in the air above them, and the entire sea seemed to be eerily lit with a faint luminescence, allowing them to faintly see what they were doing. Flashes of lightning, leaving streaks of afterimages in his vision, came dangerously close to hitting the boat.
Slowly, inch by inch, they yanked the sails down, the heavy weight of the waterlogged cloth leaving their arms aching with the strain. Once they were piled in a soggy mass on the deck, Ryouta was ready to collapse on the spot, but his father continued on to the tiller and grabbed it with both hands, wrenching it to the side in time to let the boat ride over the crest of an oncoming wave.
Ryouta froze in place, unsure of what to do—what could he do, after all? He would only be a hindrance among the wildly careening deck of the vessel, something that would only worry his father because he could fall down into the waves and die—
You will not die. Not this soon. Not while I watch over you and protect you. There shall be no death in your future—not until you step too deep into the land, until I grow bored of your presence.
The wind around him seemed to calm, the lurching of the deck beneath his feet stilling somewhat, the endless pouring of the rain no longer felt by his skin. The lightning flashed, forcing the scene around him into painfully bright shades of white, and Ryouta saw with terrible, terrible clarity the electric crackle in the air at it hit the mast of the ship.
Down, the wind sang in his ear, its voice breathy and high and eerily familiar. Down, down, down. The bridge is falling down, down, down, collapsing into the water.
The beam splintered, burned, snapped at the base, and it tumbled to the deck in a flurry of smoke and ashes. Ryouta opened his mouth with a scream that was lost to the unforgiving night air as the wooden mast smashed down on top of his father. "Dad!" He scrambled to Kajiki-san's side, ignoring the renewed rolling of the waves beneath him and the way the wind attempted to push him back.
Are you scared, child? It was a hiss in his ear, spoken in the voice of the burning ship as it was besieged with rain. Are you scared? Don't be scared. You aren't dead. You will not die for years to come, because you are one with the ocean and a part of the ocean, and you are me. You are not dead, but he will die in your place.
His next shout choked in his throat as an unfamiliar burn began in the backs of his eyes, because he knew then that it was too late. "Dad," he whispered as the storm howled in his ears and the black water before him glittered ominously with the next flash of light. Tears meandered their way down his cheeks, and he stretched out one arm hopelessly as he collapsed to the wooden floor. "Dad, I'm sorry."
Sorry for what? You were not the one who killed him. I killed him.
The boom of thunder shook him out of his thoughts, and he jerked his head up as the ship teetered to the side. "Wha—"
The sight of the wave, rising as a frighteningly dark wall in the air before him, froze him in place, and he could only watch in terror as it grew higher, higher, higher, blotting out the world in its depths. Then it fell with the roar of the pounding rain, and he was smashed into wood and stone, tossed as flotsam on an inexorable tide toward whatever location the ocean wanted to drag him—
"Dad," he said petulantly as salt water rushed into his eyes and mouth. "Dad, help me."
The world was cold, cold, cold, freezing his fingers and toes, numbing him until he could not think. There was home somewhere far away on the horizon, there was emptiness in the other direction, and in between was the ocean, the barrier that spanned those two lands. He was cold. He was alone. He was dead...?
Not dead, child. It is not yet your turn to die.
He cried, choking, water burning in his lungs.
The voice whispered soft nothings in his ear, its fingers caressing his skin. Sleep. Close your eyes, forget, and sleep.
The world melded into blurs of lucidness and incoherence, time spinning around him in an endless reel as he somehow managed to stumble his way up the sand of an unknown beach and onto the stone doorstep of an unknown home that looked vaguely familiar. He did not know how he had ended up there or how he had survived the countless hours (days, weeks, months?) breathing in the water of the sea, but there were fixed ideas running an infinite loop through his mind, leaving no room for other thought.
Air. Have to get air. Have to live and inhale and exhale and live and mother and father's dead.
The door opened, a woman's voice gasped—gasped a word that sounded hazily like his name, but Ryouta didn't care; he was a child again (when had he not been?), desperately latching on to whatever means of salvation were left in his grasp. He was a person, a being—wholly, irrevocably human, and he wanted to live.
Then there was that voice again, the voice that whispered in the back of his mind, fainter than it had been in those years past but still there. Exasperated, now, although he did not know because of what.
How many times must I tell you, child? You will not die. You are favored by Me, born to live half in the water and half on land; what makes you think that you can drown? I will not let you drown—not when you lie mere feet from my domain.
He understood nothing the voice said, its words scrambling into a garbled mess in his mind.
There was a sigh, so soft it could have been wind from the remnants of the storm, speaking its last verses in his ear. Arms lifted him up and carried him somewhere, to a place where the breeze no longer blew in his ear, where there was nothing but silence. A hand pressed against his forehead, yet he could not tell if it was hot or cold to his skin.
He was numb, frozen, immobilized with shock. He could not remember what had happened; he could not remember who he was; he could not remember his name or his father or his mother or the color of the ocean; he could not remember why had bothered to survive the pounding waves if he had to return to whatever world this was.
Ah, now—no pessimism, child. Leave that for the adults.
He collapsed onto something soft, fabric pressing against his back. Grains of sand tangled in his hair and clothes, salt drying in gritty white streaks on his skin, and he winced as something dabbed at the side of his face and left it stinging with a burning, acidic pain. He shifted in his position, uncomfortable and wishing that he could run back outside and search—for what, he did not know, but he knew that there was something missing.
Concerned blue eyes peered down at him, worry knotting the person's brow, and Ryouta remembered distantly a dream of a woman who had built a sand castle with him while speaking of death and destruction and immortality. "What happened?" she asked, and he did not know how to answer. He thought he had forgotten the ability to speak.
father dead mother home I want to go home
"Ryouta-chan?" she repeated again.
sick I'm sick ow mother it hurts make it stop
Sleep.
The word interrupted him, interwoven through his own thoughts.
Sleep. Close your eyes, and sleep.
Almost mechanically, he did so.
Darkness engulfed him, blue eyes still glancing into his with a sort of detached concern—was that his mother or a stranger or that woman whom he had dreamed of all those years ago?
The questions merged together into an snarled mass, until his head pounded and his throat burned and he heard as if from far off a sound oddly like laughter or crying—he could not tell which—whistling through the air, diffusing on the winds, spinning amongst the storm clouds that were fading into morning high up in the sky.
Listen, child. Listen; I am mourning your father, mourning a generation of fishermen with the sea in their blood—and you are the generation after him. Fulfill what you were born to do, and you and what family you will keep by the end of this will be grateful. You are the last of your line, no matter what you do. The words were sweet, light, with no indication of the serious topic they spoke of. Turn against me, and you die. Come with me, and you die too.
The ocean was glitteringly blue beneath his feet, the waves gently washing against his legs and leaving salt and sand drying in white lines on his clothing. The water swelled higher, higher, higher still, until it was brushing gently against his chin and rose another inch, until he was choking on it with every breath he took.
He was frozen in place, his ankles sinking ever deeper into the sand and his arms immobilized by his side, and he coughed and felt the brine burning through his nose and throat. He felt the waves caressing his skin, too calm to knock him over and send him plummeting into the water but still rising past his ears and into his eyes.
He was burning, oh god he was burning as fire ate through his head and spread to the rest of his body, burning despite the fact that it was impossible to burn when he was in the sea—
Did you know, child, that there is a kind of fire that burns even underwater?
no I don't know I don't care I'm dying mother father help
You're not dying, silly child. Listen now, listen to me listen listen listen well
The waves crashed over his head, and he was swept into the sea, blackness rushing around him in giant swoops and tangling like seaweed through his hair, prodding curiously at the edges of his mind. He was sinking, he was falling fast, he was traveling deeper and deeper below the surface, the pressure beating at his eardrums and crushing his head. He curled up on himself, instinctively cradling his head in his arms, before they were ripped away and he was shot back up, fast, too fast-
it hurts it hurts I'm hurting I'm dying mother father help make it stop
His head hurt and his joints ached, his lungs choking on the salt water and giving him no air. The world was bursting into a series of flashes, blinding him and disorienting him and dragging him through the water and up into the air that splintered against his skin like a thousand needles. The clouds gathered, lightning flickered with agonizing lethargy through the air, and rain fell like water but froze into ice when it hit him, so cold it burned—
The sand is soft beneath his feet, the water pleasantly cool as it brushes against his hand.
He holds his pail, red and made of thin plastic, to the waves and watches as it fills with water before he turns and splashes it resolutely on top of the sand castle he has just built.
The woman from his dream all those years ago sits there, gentling rounding off the top of a turret into a perfect cone. She smiles at him before waving a hand for him to join her, patting the ground next to where she is. The white dress pools around her knees, though she does not seem to mind the fact that its hem is drenched where the waves have reached it, and as he watches, she rips off a bit of the edge and ties it to a stick propped up at the top of the tower to form a makeshift flag.
"What's that?" Ryouta looks at the piece of cloth fluttering lightly in the wind that blows across the shore, puzzled.
She tilts her head. "A banner of mourning."
"For what?"
"For your father." Her smile widens, her eyes—so, so blue—locking with his.
"My father—"
"Your father is dead. You are the new generation of your kind, the fishermen who live by the sea and live only because of the sea. Feel honored that you will be the first to take that connection further than that." She sculpts a window into the wall with her finger, tracing out perfectly identical rectangles equally spaced across the side of the castle.
Ryouta frowns at her. "What if I don't want to?"
She shrugs easily. "That's not for you to decide."
"Of course I can decide what I do with my life!" he protests, indignant.
"Oh, not your life, Ryouta-chan," she says. "I was talking about your will."
The underwater palace was made of large rocks on the foundation that steadily decreased in size until the towers that rose staggeringly high had walls with fine clay that had the appearance of stone. The water around him flared red with fire, flames eating up the castle and burning brands of heat into his skin.
Ryouta turned to the side, and he saw his father there, watching as the palace was consumed by fire. "Dad!" he said, startled, before he ran up to Kajiki-san and hugged him.
His father remained immovably still, not responding to Ryouta's actions.
"Dad?"
Stone does not speak, child. Stone does not breathe.
He looked up and was met with cold granite—a statue of a person, not real, not human, not his father, not human not human—
"Ryouta-chan? Are you feeling okay?"
no no not okay not okay I'm sick I'm dying mother father help me
"Drink something."
drink what I can't drink it's all salt all salt it hurts my mouth it hurts
"Ryouta, please. You need to eat if you're going to recover at all."
I don't want to recover I don't want to live father father's dead are you mother I want my mother
"Listen to me."
no I don't want to listen she tells me to listen but father's dead and she didn't tell me
Wind blew cold by his ear, and Ryouta shivered violently enough for him to feel the linen scrape of blankets against his skin. I tell you these things for your own good, child. You have a gift to be able to hear the sea, to have it deign to speak to you, and you should not regard it lightly. Dreams tell you things—dreams remind you how to live. Do not throw away your life with such little thought. Many would kill to be in your position.
"You're sick."
I know I'm sick I know I know who are you mother?
"You're dying."
Ah, you are not, child; do not believe her. She has forgotten, daughter of mine though she is, that I do not kill those whom I take under my care. I would never kill you. You amuse me, child, and you will remain alive as long as you do not bore me.
"There are some stories about the ocean loving our family, Ryouta—do you remember them? I used to tell them to you…I wonder—would she help you now?"
ocean what ocean there is no ocean only fire I'm dying mother I'm dying
Arms lifted him up, carrying him into the night air and letting the breeze blow against his hair. It smelled of the sea, of the wind and the waves that raged far, far out in the distance, fighting over the ships that dared to venture out there. They neared the crashing of the ocean, spray hitting Ryouta's cheek and feeling as cold as ice against his skin.
He was laid onto a stone, and the arms left him.
"It's still low tide now…"
low tide I don't care if it's low tide the ocean is right there right there so close to me I don't want it to be there please mother I don't want to why can't I move
"…and it'll be high tide soon."
He lay there, the air making him shiver, the voices carried on it whispering in his ear—
Don't worry, child. You will not die. It is far too soon for you to die.
He could sense, though he could not see it, the tide rising steadily, inching nearer to him until the slightest bit of water brushed against the top of the rock, until the waves, with a final resolute crash, washed over the rest of his body.
The world exploded.
The fisherman's market is crowded, the shouts of merchants filling the air as they attempt to attract customers to their stalls.
Kajiki Sango stands at his, the table covered with what little he has to offer to the world—a basket of clams and a few lobsters lying pathetically in a tub of salt water. This is what he has found in his last fishing trips; this is what makes his fellows laugh at him and whisper among themselves when they think he is not looking.
"Bad luck," they say—"See that man, Kajiki Sango? Stay away from him; he has bad luck."
It has been like this for months. Now he is living off of nothing but the little he fishes and the remnants of whatever he has saved over the years, and that supply is dwindling quickly.
He does not understand what is wrong. His family has always been beloved by the ocean, and never have they suffered through such a terrible time as this. What has he done to provoke the ocean's wrath? And if he does not know, how can he hope to appease it? It has not whispered to him in nearly half a year, but he does not dare to tell that to the other fishermen, for fear that word will begin spreading about how the Kajiki family, once so beloved of the sea, is now losing its blessing.
Nobody approaches his stall, a loner amongst the others that nearly overflow with merchandise. He sighs, watching the lobsters sulk at the bottom of their makeshift cage—he has not been able to afford a proper one—and resigns himself to another night of his friends' silent judgment.
Footsteps approach, and he looks up to see a woman with blue eyes—as blue as the sea itself—and dark hair looking at him, wearing a simple white dress that glows in the sunlight that hits it.
She is, quite possibly, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
"My name is Yoko," she tells him, her voice sweet. "What's yours?"
"Kajiki Sango," he says, too surprised to notice that she does not say her last name.
She smiles at him, eyes alight with something he cannot quite pin down. "Tell me, Kajiki Sango, do you know how to swim?"
He marries her a few months later, and his fellows whisper about how the luck of the Kajikis has returned.
The ocean's whispers return too, but softer than before, and they speak of things he does not understand—he listens, though. He has learned well that he should always listen.
You will have a son, and that son will grow up to follow in your footsteps until he breaks away from family tradition. But I have claimed him, claimed him because I have gifted your family for so long without retribution, and you will die for him because your line will die with him.
No more will pass down the gift of having the ocean speak to them. That ability dies with him. That ability dies with the half-spirit blood he will possess.
This whisper repeats even softer, over and over until he wakes up.
Amabie, the ocean says, and sometimes he thinks it is laughing. Amabie.
He remembers the Amabie—mermaids of Japan, only surfacing to warn the people that the future will swing one way of two: plague or a good harvest. He has heard of them, yes, but he does not recall their significance beyond that. He does not think it is pertinent, although he knows better than to disregard anything the ocean tells him as unimportant.
Fourteen years later, on a boat as he takes his first fishing trip with his eager son, he hears the whisper of the ocean once more in his sleep. This is the end, it says, and he believes it.
He knows better than to think it is telling a lie.
He looks across the boat to his son, whose eyes are the dark blue of the sea that is miles away from the land, and he realizes that he is looking at the last of the Kajikis, the last of the fishermen who live by the sea—live for the sea—and hear its words warning them of danger.
He does not have time to say goodbye. He would not want to alarm his son by saying goodbye.
Immersed in his thoughts, in the knowledge that his death is inevitable, he does not see the lightning or the mast or the wave that engulfs them all.
I thought you said he'd be safe, is his last thought before he simply breathes in a lungful of water and lets it burn death into his chest.
He will be, he thinks he hears the ocean reply one final time. It is not yet his turn to die.
Ryouta woke to the sun shining blindingly down into his eyes.
"I knew you'd be better," his mother said from his right, and he turned to see her sitting on the rock next to him, smiling.
She had blue eyes—he knew that before, just never saw them as fully as he did then—and dark hair, and she was wearing a white, sleeveless dress. And for that moment, he looked at her and saw superimposed upon her image the memory of the woman in his dreams and the woman his father had seen that day in the market.
"Amabie," he said hesitantly, the word unfamiliar on his tongue, his voice hoarse from misuse. His arms felt achingly tired, too much so for him to lift them.
She blinked at him in utter shock for a moment, and the wind blew cold, cold, cold against them, harshly enough to make sand sting as it whipped against his cheeks, harshly enough for him to instinctively bring his hands up to his face and rub frantically at his eyes to clear them.
When he looked again, his mother was gone, with nothing left of her presence save for a card lying on the stone—a card made of thin paper and plastic, with a printed image of a fisherman on it and kanji underneath detailing its name and its abilities.
What a lovely card, Ryouta-chan—don't you think?
No. No, I don't want to die at your hands, I don't want to be your puppet, I don't want to live my life in fear that you'll take me like my father did, like my mother did, like the rest of my family did. I don't want to live under your doctrine, I don't want to be your servant, I don't want to be a fisherman anymore! Not after this.
The ocean was silent.
In the years that had passed since he was twelve, Ryouta had tried to forget the sea.
But dueling against Jounouchi Katsuya had taught him much, he mused as he stood on beach in front of his childhood home, staring out at the stone cottage that still stood resolutely, though its walls were weathered with wind and stained white with sea spray.
It had taught him that the past was not something to be left behind and forgotten, to be shoved into locked doors and given no credit for existence. It was not something that deserved to be skimmed over in conversation and thoughts; it was something that one faced head-on and cast aside of one's own accord.
The ocean had not whispered to him for all those years, had left him on his own while he pointedly wandered cities far inland with his mother's final gift to him. He did not know if it was angry with him for avoiding it, if it would kill him with one fatal blow or if it would simply not accept him at all. He did not know how he was going to die.
He was tired of not knowing.
He stepped into the water, feeling it wash, cool and comforting, against his skin.
He was tired of deliberately staying away from the shore, afraid that the ocean would strike.
"Hi." It felt strange to be talking to nothing, but by this point, Ryouta no longer cared. He walked forward another few feet, the afternoon sun beating down onto his head. "I'm sorry."
What for, Ryouta-chan?
He jumped at the ocean's words, its voice unfamiliar after the long time that he had not heard it.
You have grown, child, grown and matured and learned what it is to live without companions. You have learned what it is to live life, and you are different now. You are older now.
Tell me, Ryouta-chan, would you say this life is worth living?
"Yes," he said, "for some people."
Are you one of these people?
"Maybe," he said, softly, hesitantly.
I see.
"But I don't want to be like my father," he added. "I don't want to marry a woman who's a part of the sea, I don't want to have children who might turn out like this because of the deal you made with my family, I don't want to see my children suffer through what I did—"
You are angry at me, then?
He thought, remembered those years of loneliness that he had spent wandering Japan and America, searching for something he could not name. "No, I'm not mad at you." Alone, he would have done the same thing. "It's just that I don't want to live on luck that can change with an instant, and I don't want to pass on this ability to my children."
Then what will you do?
He shrugged. "What my dad always knew I'd do eventually, I suppose."
And that is?
"Die." He paused, realizing that the word—the word that the ocean had taught him—might not be the best suited for the situation. "In a way." His next words were awkward, the strangeness of the situation making him feel uneasy. "How do I do it?"
Go further, until the water covers your face. The voice was soft. Are you afraid?
He did not lie, his heart pounding as he opened his eyes to the sea that stretched around him—oddly, the salt did not burn against them, as they had once done. "Yes."
Breathe in.
Ryouta remembered the memory in which he had been his father, unafraid and accepting as he sank beneath the waves did what the ocean was telling him to do now.
He breathed, and there was no pain. He breathed again, relief making his head light, and felt his feet sinking deeper into the sand—he looked down and realized with mild surprise that they had faded, dissolved into nothing.
Are you afraid now?
No, he thought, and he was telling the truth.
The waves brushed gently at his body, like kisses against his skin with each current that passed him by. The sun was hot above the surface, but in the water it was pleasantly cool, undertow tugging gently against his legs—tugging him further in.
Am I crazy? he wondered, the thought floating aimlessly in the sea beside him.
No, the ocean said.
"Hey," a child said, picking up a Duel Monsters card that had drifted up by his feet. His friends stood by his side, watching curiously. "Do you think it's rare or something?"
"Nah," another boy snorted. "It's just a stupid fisherman with a magic wand riding on a shark. I bet it couldn't even defeat Kuriboh."
"Alright then," the child said, and he tore the card into pieces and pressed them into the sides of the misshapen sand castle that he and his companions built, using them as makeshift windows.
They were washed into the water when the tide rose, and the child and his friends assumed, when the castle and its ornaments were not there the next day, that they had simply been lost to the ocean.
"I don't want to take the cruise ship back," he complained to his parents nearly a week after that, stamping his feet on the wooden dock. "I always get seasick."
That time, he didn't.
And beside the ship, the ocean whispered, Thank you.
End.
A/N: This has been many months in the making, so I hope it doesn't seem too disjointed to you.
The Partition Postulate is a basic Euclidian geometry postulate that states a whole is the sum of all its parts. Not one of my best titles, but whatever.
Reviews are lovely things - concrit is appreciated, but gushing is also taken. xD Please review!