He waited until the fidgeting movement had gone completely silent in the room. And then he waited even longer, just make sure. It wasn't until a full hour after shutting the Makoto in for the night that he finally breathed and threw his harvesting bag over his shoulder to set off for the left side of the cliffs.
The night was warm and the sky clear. The moon was just peeking over the mountain and the stars were brilliantly elaborate tonight. He breathed much easier, walking through the sand, listening to the waves. He was careful to avoid the water as he walked down the strip, and climbed over a small boulder blocking the natural tunnel in the cliff. It wound around a short distance, completely dark for a good handful of heartbeats, but Haru was so familiar with the path that he hardly needed to brush his hand along the rough-textured wall to find his way.
It didn't take terribly long anyway before the inside of the cliff opened to a small cave, dimly illuminated by the moonlight leaking in with the tide, forming a small blue pool underneath a jutting rock ledge, which Haru climbed on top of. It was already stocked with algae-covered wire cages, a couple of coolers, more harvesting baskets, and a camping lantern, which he turned on, casting the cave in a sphere of white light and shadows.
He checked the ropes tied to the cages, which anchored them to a sharp corner of the ledge, and after giving them a few test tugs, he kicked the cages into the water, then dropped the baskets on the surface to float. He pulled a fresh towel out of his harvesting bag, then set both to the side just long enough to strip down. After making sure his clothes and the towel were tucked well out of the way on a dry rock, he secured the strap of his bag snuggly around his torso and jumped into the pool.
The water was perfect — it always was. Thousands of bubbles tickled his skin as they brushed up his body while he sank. There was just the smallest hiccup of a moment in which he couldn't breathe, and during that time, a familiar tingle in his spine locked his legs and he was also immobilized. But that hiccup was always over just as quickly as it started, and all discomfort became irrelevant and forgotten. He could breathe just as normally as he could above the surface, and his legs were no longer legs, but a shimmering blue tail that glistened with ripples of purple, and green, and white in the moonlight.
He dove down toward the sea floor, swimming out of the shadows of the cave where the sea opened onto a vast land of underwater life. Everything moved and swayed with a sleepy lull, schools of fish passed by in scattered pockets. Crustaceans, and eels, and stingrays kept low to the sandy bottom. Brightly colored fish hid in the brightly colored coral mosaics. And sprouts of green sea vegetables lined the sand in organized rows just outside of the cave, like an ocean garden.
He tugged the cages further out to start, and gathered handfuls of mollusks to toss inside. He did nothing more than move them from one spot to the other and let them be as they were thereafter. Nature would do the rest. Once he'd laid his bait, he switched to checking on his mussel lines, which were hanging from the cliffside — dozens of ropes that had been seeded and left to cultivate were now heavy with bunches of black mussels, plenty of which were ready to market, and so he took his time picking through them and placing them in his bag.
He rather enjoyed the process of gathering a harvest. It was peaceful. The sea was constantly breathing and bubbling with life, but it was a comforting white noise that swallowed him in a not-too-silent quiet and took him back to the hours he would spend doing this with his grandmother while she told him stories, or taught him all about how to communicate with the sea and earn its favor, or just simply sang to herself, which he enjoyed just as much as everything else.
They always started with baiting the traps to leave either over night or across the time that their attention was on other things — depending on how soon they would go into town after. Then they sorted through the mussels, sometimes seeding new ropes to string up with the others. Then they would weave through the rows of wakame, and nori, and konbu and swim large armfuls back up to the surface of the cave to set in the floating baskets.
He did all of this now, moving quickly and efficiently, as though it was second-nature, which it certainly was after so many years, and yet he didn't rush himself either. He even took his time to free a sea turtle from a tangle of netting somewhere in the midst of it.
Things like that were constant. Thankfully, his cove was well enough out of the way of the humans and their trash not to be flooded with pollution, but inevitably things that didn't belong always drifted in here and there, either on their own or attached to a living soul, and he always stopped to help when he noticed — and/or collected the offensive empty bottles, and cans, and stray nets, and hooks, and sunglasses to dispose of them properly.
He'd just finished sending the sea turtle on its way when there was a distant chirping that echoed through the water, and he turned his head as a shape caught his eye in the corner.
He found himself stilling with great curiosity, watching as an orca turned in slow circles — a good distance away, but still far closer than orcas usually were around these waters. In fact, it was rare to find them here at all, and especially not this close to the shore.
The dolphins always came and went with glee, as though this was their home base, but that was due in part to the connection that he and his grandmother had with them specifically, to the point that they'd become a part of at least a few different pods, and communicated with them regularly.
Sometimes he might find sharks hunting in their grounds, but they tended to keep away for the most part, seeing as they were not so fond of the dolphins, and they knew this was their territory. But when he swam out far enough, they were always there.
And of course there were the hundreds of varieties of fish and other small burrowers, but whales were never a thing out here. Maybe a few times he'd come across some minkes on trips through the northern most waters, but the only other time he'd seen an orca was when he was seven.
At that point, neither he nor his grandmother had been living on the surface, but he just so happened to be with her at the time. She'd been taking him to look at an underwater shrine that the humans had built to the Umibōzu to protect themselves on their fishing voyages. His parents had strictly forbade him from having anything to do with it, which was why his grandmother had decided to take him up close and tell him all about it along the way.
She'd told him thrilling stories about how the Umibōzu was the humans' way of explaining random tsunamis and typhoons to themselves. It was a sea spirit that could sometimes appear titanic in size, but was only ever seen looming partway above the surface. So to the humans it was a big black blob of a head with glowing eyes, rising above their boats with tentacles hidden underneath the waves that were powerful enough to shatter ships with a single blow.
Haru — who at that point lived in the sea — had never seen a creature like that in his seven years, and he certainly didn't believe in one, but the stories had rippled his skin with goosebumps and made the scales on his tail shutter. It was utterly fascinating, and just as he'd been about to beg his grandmother for more details, they'd turned their heads to that sound — the distant chirping of a large creature — and there was the first orca he'd ever seen, swimming in the same slow winding circles, as though searching for something.
"Ah," his grandmother had cooed, pulling him close and pointing as though he wasn't already looking at it. "Do you know what that one is?"
"No."
"That, Haruka, is a symbol of love. It's called an orca. Do you hear that?" She'd tilted her head, encouraging him to listen closely to the very familiar-sounding song of curling whistles.
"It sounds like a dolphin."
"That's because they're related," she informed him. "They're very social creatures, just like our friends. They stick close together in pods and take care of each other. And it's said that when you see an orca by itself like this, it's searching the world for its one true mate."
"One true mate?"
"Mm hm. The orcas mate for life. Even if it means traveling through the winds and the waves and the roughest of seas, they'll find the perfect match for them, and they'll stay by their side forever."
"That's too long."
"No, Haruka. That's called devotion."
His grandmother's words echoed away, settling somewhere silently in the back of his memory as he watched this orca now, turning in slow circles. This one was bigger than the one they'd seen on that day, and he supposed it must be full grown. Only vaguely did he wonder if they were connected, because the way it swam was so eerily exact that Haru felt a chill on the back of his neck.
He didn't approach it — didn't try to speak with it. He just watched, wondering if it was lost, or if it was truly searching for its one true mate, like his grandmother had said. If it was, he felt it would be wandering in circles for a very long time, because there were no others of its kind out here.
But still, he felt some kind of reverence and respect for it, simply for having that amount of dedication. And it was undoubtedly a majestic creature. Even from this far, the size of it was grand and the decorative white painting its otherwise sleek black body was an attractive contrast, especially against the backdrop of blue.
The chirping whistles grew louder, and he realized only after a moment that he was no longer hearing the call of the orca alone. By the time he picked up on this, there was a torpedoing silver shape speeding toward him, and the dolphin that he had been talking to when the Makoto first woke up that evening swam in happy spinning circles around him, nudging him with her nose until Haru brushed a palm over her smooth body.
He turned his attention away from the whale. "Did you tell him?"
The dolphin clicked proudly and swam in another twisting spin around him, brushing close under his arm like a dog looking for more pats on the head. He obliged.
"Has he found anything yet?"
The dolphin's response was a hopeful negative, though they hardly ever knew how to be despondent about anything. Either they were overly cheerful and mischievous, or they were full of attitude.
Haru didn't concern himself with the lack of findings. The human Makoto had told him about its family and where it came from. It should be fairly simple at this point to send it back home.
"Do you know this one?" he asked curiously, nodding to the orca out in the distance.
The dolphin sang and flapped her tail before barrel rolling in circles. Haru wasn't one-hundred percent sure what that was suppose to mean, but given the way the bottlenose sped off to swim in excited loops around the orca, he assumed the answer to his question was yes, which was interesting.
The orca responded shortly to the bottlenose, and before Haru got the chance to ask her anymore questions, she zipped off to return to her pod, and Haru let it be with a sigh.
He gave the orca one last lingering stare, until it turned in his direction and stared back across the distance. It didn't move for a good long moment, and Haru felt his heartbeat pulse a little heavier, a little slower for all of a few elongated seconds. Then he was racked with more chills and convinced himself to turn away after nodding curtly to the creature — just so it knew he wouldn't be a bother, and it could continue its aimless search in peace.
He returned to his harvesting, and once he was satisfied with his haul, he swam his bag and one last armful of seaweed back up to the surface of the cave, leaving the cages until morning. He shook his hair out of his eyes when he resurfaced and plopped the seaweed in one of the baskets with the rest of the pile. He towed them with him to a rock seated halfway in the tide and set them up on top of it before pulling himself out of the water and relieving his shoulder of the harvesting bag, which was bulging and impressively heavy now. He let the water assist him back up to the main ledge where it deposited him with a gentle swell, and he wrapped himself up in the towel, then just sat for a while with his tail swaying, watching the water below as he waited to dry.
The transition back to being a land creature was much more uncomfortable than it was the other way around, but it still only lasted a brief moment, and all of that was gone before he could truly think about it. He just breathed out a heavy breath and pushed himself to his feet, slipped into his clothes, and used the coolers to drag his load back up the beach to the cottage.
It wasn't until passing by on the way back that he glanced up and noticed that the bedroom doors were closed and the curtains drawn, and he found himself pausing there at the odd sight.
He always kept the doors open — doors and windows alike — all of them. He had to be able to hear the sea at its fullest volume, had to be able to smell it and feel the ocean mist breezing through the rooms. So it was a bit irritating to find one of them shut, as he had entirely forgotten that they did that.
Maybe he should rip the doors off of their tracks while the Makoto slept and dispose of them so that they couldn't be used again.
There was a whisper in the waves behind him, and he looked over his shoulder.
It wasn't so much that the sea had a distinct voice or language that it used, like most living things did. It didn't "speak," but it always made itself clear through the way the water moved and shifted, through the weight of the mist or the intensity of the currents.
If Haru had to put words to what the sea was communicating in this very moment, it would probably be something like, "Be kind," which he admittedly wasn't quite fond of, but he would never argue with the very entity that had given him life, so he sighed cooperatively and gave up on being miffed about the doors.
He dragged his haul in through the main door, and set to work on cleaning and preparing everything for the market.
By the time he was done, he was more exhausted than he could ever remember being, and he decided to blame that on the radical turn of events to what was supposed to have been an uneventful, normal day. And even though he could have dropped on the couch and gone straight to sleep, he found himself glancing over to the bedroom door and staring at it for a good long while.
He wasn't sure what the allure was specifically, if it was the fact that there was a stranger in his home, that that stranger was a human, or maybe even the sudden realization that he had been the only one occupying this space for the past two years and now all of a sudden that wasn't the case anymore. It for sure had nothing to do with the human itself, or any curiosity he may have had about it, and definitely nothing related to the lingering thought of those green eyes. But either way, he approached the room and quietly opened the door.
It was even stranger, how dark the room was without the light of the moon, but he ignored that and stepped quietly up to the bed.
The Makoto was turned on its side, one hand buried beneath the pillow, the other delicately resting on the corner in front of its face. It breathed steadily, quietly, somewhere in its deepest level of sleep, and yet there was the smallest bit of stress between its eyebrows — a burden, like maybe whatever it was dreaming wasn't so pleasant an experience.
Haru watched it for a moment, for no particular reason other than just simply feeling compelled to. He was a little bit tempted to rub the stress away with his thumb. It hadn't been there the first time he'd found it unconscious.
Humans worried so easily, feared so easily, took too many things far too much to heart. They were bodies of tension more often than they weren't, always holding things back.
Normally, he didn't care.
But maybe this itched at him quite a bit, and he supposed that was his sentence for engaging in so much conversation with the human before this moment. He'd never spoken so many words to one before, never had bothered to listen. And so now he was encumbered with knowing things about it, with being some kind of invested in its journey, and now he was supposed to feel … empathy for it.
He didn't like that, but it was there anyway, so there wasn't much to be done about it. He breathed out the exhaustion and lightly pulled the duvet up from where it lay on the Makoto's waist to rest it across its shoulders instead. Then he wrinkled his nose and turned away to sleep it off.