The moon is half-full - somewhere around there, anyway - it is hard to tell, cloudy as it is. Sometimes August can make out the shine of it, a foggy bottom of a glass, a torch-glow through the trees. On and off it rains, enough to make everything damp but not to soak it to the bone. It’s chilly, but the wind is low, and the thought of the bonfires back in town is enough to keep him warm, for now.
It’s habit - old habit - that’s brought him to the sea. Ever since leaving Tartarus he’s been prone to wandering at odd hours, and ever since he was a belly-high boy he’s been prone to watching the sea. Now there’s hardly anything to see of it - a thin gleam on the water - but he listens to the waves lap, gently. He can’t tell whether the tide is coming or going, and there are no ships on the water - bad weather for it, too dark, and besides this stretch of beach has some rocks a hundred yards out or so that have caused more than one wreck in recent years. There’s probably treasure out there, somewhere.
When he first hears the creature surface - the slick of something coming out of water, and the unmistakable sound of a drawn breath - he thinks it’s a seal, maybe even a whale. August pauses in his walking and turns toward the water, watching for nothing but motion, and only when the thing moves do his eyes find it. In the darkness it’s only a silhouette, vaguely horse-shaped, and his ears twist back. He has his sword on him, but he’s out of the practice of using it.
But just then the clouds part for a moment (like a thing surfacing from the sea) and there in the moon-glow he sees a broad white face, and dark shoulders, and twisting dark spires of horns.
August squints in disbelief. “Boudika?” he shouts, and his voice carries over the water, and the moon slips away again.
@Boudika
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
Whenever Boudika emerges from the water, it is difficult not to feel closer to gods and demons than to mortals and men. When the first sharp inhalation of air reaches her lungs, replacing water, replacing salt, she closes her eyes and shivers. There are certain ecstasies of living, and this is one of them: the transition from sea to land, the return to air and legs.
It is in these moments, bathed in moonlight, Boudika feels most other. Everything else can be forgotten; her history, written in silver-bright scars up and down her flanks; the aches of her heart; even the turmoil of the world beyond the water. In these moments, she is girl and monster and neither. In these moments, she is simply wild, she is simply breathing, and—
Boudika?
There is always an ending, to those stolen breaths. She does not expect to hear her name and turns her face sharply to seek out the speaker. His silhouette is small, and dark, and if not for the moonlight utterly colorless; the brief, flitting moon beyond the clouds is bright enough for just a moment to illuminate him as gold and silver, a blade glinting too-bright and too-wicked at his side—
But then, Boudika’s face splits into a smile. The gesture is thoughtless, and full of something akin to gratitude. The darkness returns; and she steps toward him.
But Boudika hesitates, remembering—
It must have been well over a year since she has last seen him. The last time had been before her turning; it had been before everything. He had told her of Vercingtorix in Novus, he had—
He had been her friend.
This, she remembers. “August.” Boudika’s voice is warm, and borderline elated. It does not seem to concern her that they are on a beach in the night; it does not seem to even occur to her that she just emerged, dripping and borderline monstrous, from the sea. “How are you?”
At first, he thinks he must be wrong. The moon hides her face again, the creature goes back to a silhouette, nothing moves or breathes but the water.
And then she’s coming toward him, the waves breaking around her belly, then her knees, then her hocks, until they’re standing a few feet apart on the beach, her dripping seawater like a faerie dripping pearls, him trying not to shiver just from looking at her.
Ah, it’s good - he’d forgotten how good - to hear his name said as affectionately as she says it.
“Older,” he says, with a wrinkle of his nose. For now he leaves it at that - if the gods are willing, this time, they’ll have time to catch up on everything stretching below that word for both of them. Words like scarred and lonely, sometimes and maybe even a little wiser than I was.
But maybe that is all too maudlin for a quiet beach on a cloudy night.
“I’d hug you if you weren’t soaking wet. Have you always been part mermaid?” He asks her lightly, though there is a more serious question in his eyes, hidden by the darkness in their moon-silver. It’s wondering if she is ok, if there is some particular reason she’s been out taking a dip when the waters must be…invigoratingly cold.
Of course he doesn’t ascribe any other reason to it. For all he’s seen in the last year, nobody expects their friend to become…well, anything else, really, other than what they were.
Which is silly, honestly. August has transformed too, albeit less dramatically. Nothing ever does stay the same. If there’s one lesson the last couple years in Novus have taught him, it’s that.
Boudika surprises herself in how much she has missed him. He makes her smile easily—unexpectedly, easily. And she does so now, because they are both older, and perhaps a little wiser. But they are also only mortal, and that comes with certain limitations of ability.
I’d hug you if you weren’t soaking wet. Have you always been part mermaid? She laughs aloud and presses forward; Boudika’s past shyness has been forgotten in these situations, and emboldened, she hugs him regardless. Wet or not.
“No,” she admits, still smiling. And then, more seriously: “I was Changed, but—it was important for it to happen, to me. I asked for it.”
The memory of Amaroq and her outside of the island after their chase—it will remain one of the most important of her life. The kiss of his teeth into her skin beneath the crystalline waves. The way, after, nothing would ever be the same again. She had to become someone else to survive.
“And you, August? How have you been changed?” Her eyes, too, remain mischievous. The night, the setting, the sea—none of it matters. In her world, and her life, such encounters seem perfectly normal. But, just as his eyes had suggested something deeper, so do Boudika’s. It has been a long time since they have seen one another. “Are you doing well?”
He laughs, too, when she embraces him, though he also makes a face and a big show of shaking off, dog-like, afterward. The seawater is cold enough on his warm skin the sensation is almost like pain, but afterward he does feel more awake.
She smells like the sea (no surprise there), all salt and brine, but August had never paid attention to the kinds of tales that spoke of kelpies. His bedtime stories were full of pirates and goddesses, brave princes and crooked kings - until there were no more stories, because there were no more parents.
All that to say, when she says she was Changed, it takes him a few beats to realize what she really means. First his brow is furrowed in confusion, silver eyes narrowed, and they widen, eyebrows arching up and up, as he puts the pieces together. The ocean behind her, the smell on her skin, the way she looked not quite equine. “Oh,” he says, and then “oh,” and he steps back, not to get away from her, but to look her over anew.
There is something sharper about her, more elegant (she was elegant before, of course, with the lifelong grace of a dancer and fighter), more leonine, almost. He shakes his head, a little dazed by the news, but before he can ask any of the questions that have flocked to his tongue like starlings she is asking him one.
“Not so dramatically as that. Just the usual standard-grade misadventures. Inadvisable fights, a near-death experience, you know. I left the Scarab - oh, about a year ago now.” August is well-practiced at light patter, waving away his experiences and all the still-tender stuff beneath them. But her last question makes him pause, and he considers it seriously. “Better than I was,” he says, more slowly, “but honestly I’m not sure what to do with myself, Boudika.”
He’s not sure why it is that telling the truth to her comes so naturally, but he’s grateful for it.
