started: 1/8/2019
finished: 1/14/2019
Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! is the creation of Kazuki Takahashi. "Space Oddity" is the creation of the extremely talented (and missed) David Jones (aka David Bowie).
The original merfolk culture in this series is the creation of Lucidscreamer.
Tags: alternate universe - mermaid, alternate universe - fantasy, established relationship, culture shock, David Bowie references
Songs of Happiness (and Other Forbidden Things)
Of all Yami's learning about the Charm, what surprises him most is the tabu against singing. Words for entertainment are spoken, never sung.
Music fills the grotto. Someone's always piping tunes, ringing bells, beating drums. Yugi often plays the haunting pipe he'd serenaded Yami with on his lonely island. But it's only instruments; Voices are reserved for Aheni's Red Songs.
Yami likes to sing. Not perform; he's not that good. He just misses belting out Bowie in the shower, singing along with the radio. He forgets he can't.
Somehow, reciting the lyrics to "Space Oddity" just isn't the same.
Grateful once more for his memory, Yami "plays" songs inside his head, swimming to the beat only he can hear. He's woven a plaited bracelet of pandanus leaves around his wrist as a reminder that singing along, aloud, isn't allowed. He chafes at the tabu, but respects it, as he does all these new restrictions. (Yugi is worth it.)
Some restrictions are more obvious than others. Cutting one's hair is unthought-of - without long tresses, how would one display their many tokens, amulets, and charms to best advantage? - but Yami is uncertain if it's actually forbidden. He has seen a few merfolk with shaven heads, devotees of certain orders and supplicants in search of atonement for secret sins. They wear their tokens on fine chains wrapped about their arms or waists, odd among their long-haired fellows and more difficult to read.
None of the seaborn will touch a thing crafted on land without uttering a blessing to ward off the Lales, those malevolent spirits that live beyond the great waters. Many, it is said, have fallen victim to curses laid by the Lales upon seemingly innocent flotsam as traps for the unwary. (Yugi swats Yami's hand away whenever he forgets and reaches for a bit of floating flotsam.)
Some foods are tabu, but not for everyone all the time. A certain small blue fish, whose name escapes Yami's memory, is forbidden to the priests of Cothea; he never recalls why. Considered a delicacy - as landbound foods are - coconut is only consumed by the royal family, and then only for the tenth day feast, where it infests almost every dish. (Yami, who feels as if he's eaten enough coconut to last a lifetime, does not enjoy tenth day feasts.) There are more tabus, convoluted and confusing; he sometimes dispairs of keeping them straight, but he's managed, thus far, to give no offense at meals.
The most important tabu is this: No one may interfere with a human. In times long past, Sirens lured sailors to their doom or, on a whim, saved them from drowning. Both actions brought unwanted attentions, most of it ill. Now, to interact with a human is still to court death - not from the land-dwellers, but from the judgment of other Merfolk. There are few exceptions; Yami will always be grateful for the one which brought him to Yugi.