(20)
Seafoam sliding warm and wet over Yami's ankles awakens him.
He opens his eyes. Someone gazes back at him with eyes the color of amythest, filled with admiration and sweet astonishment, with desire and love. His breath catches, wonder-struck. With a certainty forged in dreams, Yami knows this is his friend, his benefactor. His sea-god.
His Yugi.
Smiling, Yugi holds out his hand. His skin is pearl-pale and perfect, flecked with irridescent scales. His hair is the blue-black of the deep sea, long and thick with braids adorned with beads of polished coral, small shells, natural pearls of every size, bits of fine gold chain and coins. Twists of fiber, beads, and shells encircle his arms and wrists. The necklace Yami crafted for him rests above his heart, seaglass glinting in the sunlight. A knife is strapped on a sealskin belt at his waist, another on his arm. A muscular, piscine tail - fine scales shimmering from moonlight to ocean blue - curls behind him, and familiar fins flick diamond droplets into the air as he smiles, revealing sharp white teeth.
"Are you ready to join me, my Yah-mee?" His words lilt with an unfamiliar accent and his eyes sparkle with an adoration that brings a flush of heat to Yami's cheeks. "Will you?"
Heart pounding like a drumbeat in his ears, Yami covers Yugi's hand with his own. With this touch, Yami's nerves settle; Yugi is real, solid, not a figment of dream or loneliness. The decision is easy and inevitable. "For you? I will."
Yugi's smile is the sun, and Yami the helpless planet caught in its gravity.
"Then swim with me, Yah-mee," Yugi says, drawing him deeper into the waves. "Swim and be mine, always."
Yami follows him down under the water and, for a fleeting moment, he thinks this time he really will drown. But then he feels the strong grasp of Yugi's hand squeezing his own, sees the promise in his eyes, and Yami's doubts float away on the bubbles of his exhaled breath. Like fragile pearls of moonlight, the bubbles rise in the green sea and burst into a waking dream.
As if he's suddenly caught in a liquid rainbow or a maelstrom of tropical fish, bubbles and color swirl around him, a curtain of light - tiny glimmers that flash and flicker like firefly squid or a swarm of fallen stars. Suspended in the water, in the colors, he inhales magic. It floods his tissues, traces his veins, remaking. No... Not remade, but unveiled. The magic is Michaelangelo freeing a statue from its entrapping marble, revealing the man Yami's soul was meant to be. Dream-like, gauzy images flow around him and he reaches, robes himself in sunset scales, red and gold, like the love tokens woven into his hair. He feels new muscles, strong and supple, slide beneath gilded scale; feels shimmering fins flex and curl against the waters of this new world. He breathes, inhales water as easily as air. Reborn, he blossoms, luminous as a lotus, lifting his face to the sun that is Yugi.
When at last their lips meet, Yami feels true, free, and filled with joy.
o0o
And, ever together, they lived - after. Happily.