Chapter Text
People spoke about the Kainas at every opportunity. They were such a favorite topic on the streets, in the shops, in the bar, that one would imagine– for all that talking– people actually knew anything about them. But most people avoided the shoreline when they could, and hurried to high ground, eyes downcast, when they saw a dark head or scythe-blade fin rise from the water. At once people regarded them as monsters of nightmare– Nina once beat upriver to snatch a child into the current, and he was never seen again, they said– and as patrons, the very creatures that drove fish into the river delta and created, prevented, or foretold storms. Maria, they said, was as demonic as her mother or more, as beautiful or more; her presence was death, her voice was death, her kiss was death. Those people knew nothing.
The dorsal lobe of her tail trailed lightly over the rough drawings on Peter's floor as it swept from side to side idly, only the very tip making contact; it wetted the chalk there and enlivened it. Uncertain, faint shapes became vivid with moisture, hatched by lines so confident that they needed no conscious thought. Her caudal fin was so long and broad, particularly the curved blade of the dorsal lobe, that she would have to hold her tail an inch or two above the lip of the bathtub to keep it from touching the floor. She had done so at first, her discomfort visible, as she’d struggled to acclimate to the alien setting and Peter had hurriedly offered to abort the whole attempt– but it was Maria’s idea, and giving up wasn’t Maria’s way. Now, victorious, she lounged in the warm water, unknowingly painting smooth, multicolored lines across the floor. She laid on her side, with her forearm resting on the lip of the tub and her head lifted just barely above it, so that only her eyes were visible, watching him draw. Although the rest of her face was hidden, a playful smile lived in her gaze and in the flick of her tail– but Maria’s fun was often deadly, that much was true, and something about the playfulness of her body language activated an innate sense of alarm.
Peter found it almost impossible to focus on anything but the brilliant chalk paste that clung to the blunt tip of her tail– and the elated anxiety trembling in his chest– as he tried to draw, but as her eyes burned a hole in his shoulder, he glanced up at her. His vision tunneled; his heart skipped a beat; he half-laughed nervously. It was the same way she had taken to watching him from the riverbanks, just dark hair and two dark eyes following him, for weeks or months; once he had noticed, he'd pretended he hadn't out of fear, until one day he had quietly pointed her out to Andrey and asked if he thought she was going to eat him, in response to which Andrey had gone over to her and asked her. Now, as Peter looked up at her, she flared the lateral fin on her forearm so that it concealed her eyes behind panels of scarlet, and his smile widened at how the gesture evoked a socialite hiding coquettishly behind a folding fan.
“Wait,” he entreated as she began to collapse her fin, and she spread the rays again hospitably, lifting her head to peek at him; he sketched that fin first because he had seen it open so rarely that he wouldn’t be able to draw its shape without her reference. Once he had captured it, he began to follow it up her arm and to her face, outlining equal suggestions of affection and danger in the slope of her eyebrows. The fin slowly lowered; when he didn’t object this time, it smoothed itself back into its shallow divot.
Her sly reticence didn’t do much to soothe his nerves. As she kept watching him, he struggled to ask, “Is the water alright?”
“Warm,” she said, eyes still smiling; the one word animated in her lustrous vocal fry was enough to send a drop of intolerable heat down his spine. If she told him to walk into the ocean, he would do so without a thought– was that her magic, or merely her effect on him?
“Do you want more hot water?” he asked, failing to sound less than desperate to please her. Her eyebrows lifted in excitement, failing to act like she had already considered this as an option; he took that as a yes, and stood up to get a pitcher of hot water from the stove. As he approached the bath, more of her body came into view: both her dorsal fins were extended, the long, forward one billowing crimson as the water moved around her, a loud color against her dark back, though the tall, narrow one behind it was cramped slightly by the side of the tub. Her pelvic fins were both collapsed, giving her more ability to roll around in the basin. Her hair pooled around her torso, black and shining. She withdrew from hanging over the lip of the bath, opening her shoulders to him, red scales shimmering where a human would have nipples.
He knelt beside her and began to pour the hot water into the bath– careful not to pour it directly onto her. Immediately, he heard a quiet sound from her chest that made him stop. It was an inhuman sound, a sort of stuttering, gravelly growl. He had heard it before: the first time she had gotten Andrey to pick her up, she had made the same noise as if unconsciously– it was quiet and had only lasted a few seconds, so neither Stamatin had mentioned it, and Andrey wasn’t one for hesitation in the moment. Peter wondered what it would sound like underwater; a diver once said that he had glimpsed Maria’s red belly while harvesting kelp and then a thumping, pulsing sound had filled the water, and seconds later Nina had shot from the depths like a torpedo to chase his team, injured, back to the shallows. So Peter withdrew the moment he heard the growl, stammering apologies: “I’m sorry– so sorry, Maria– did it hurt?”
She shook her head languidly, and deigned to speak more than one word. “No. Only I didn’t realize that you could get water so hot up here… It surprised me.” Speech wasn’t difficult for her– actually, it was probably more daunting for Peter. Although hers was sometimes constructed in alien ways, it was nonetheless uniquely compelling. “Pour again,” she encouraged.
It took all his willpower to hesitate. “I don’t want to burn you…” he worried.
Her soft lips parted to reveal sharp, white teeth. “You won’t,” she decreed, and he poured the hot water. This time she didn’t growl, but her eyes fluttered closed. He watched her for any indication he should stop, but receiving none, he finished the pitcher. Before he could return it to the stove, her gleaming hand emerged from the water to catch him by the wrist, freezing him in place. “Look,” she entreated, flicking her tail once in invitation.
When she released him, he set down the pitcher and stepped uncertainly towards the foot of the tub. “...Your tail?” he asked, and she nodded, waving it again. He carefully knelt by the stem of her caudal fin. As she lay on her side to maximize her range of motion, the fin was horizontal in front of him: unlike her others, it was dark and tough, the flesh thicker and the bony rays closer together.
“Near the end,” she guided him, “there are pits…” His heart pounding, he let his fingertips make contact with the drying flesh between the rays– she didn’t seem to react– to help him find what she was indicating on the dark anatomy, and traced his fingers along the grooves until he felt a rough recess. He looked closer: it seemed to be a lesion.
“What is…?” He wasn’t sure what to ask.
“When I swim as fast as I can,” she said, “I beat my tail so quickly that the water around me boils.” His eyebrows lifted. “That burns me… but I don’t slow down.”
Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could notice a scattering of similar lesions across the last two inches of her tail, all about the size of a little fingernail and in various stages of healing, complete with flakes of dead skin. “Does it hurt?”
“Not now,” she rumbled. She lifted herself up on her arm, then, to look at him properly. “But you… the touch- that feels nice.” Her face didn’t betray how nervous she was to say so.
For a moment, he looked at her blankly, a deer in the headlights, but then he surprised her: he pushed his sleeve up to his elbow and dipped his hand in the tub, then ran his palm over her broad fin. Painting the warm water across it, all the while watching her face. She breathed out slowly and rolled onto her back to communicate her approval, letting the tip of her tail-fin sweep across the floor again. After a moment, she could feel him gingerly loosening the dead tissue around one of the lesions that she couldn’t reach, and she closed her eyes. He had never made any attempt to touch any of her fins or scales before– he had been shy enough to reach for her pale skin, even when she told him to– and she appreciated that. It wasn’t out of fear, either– at least, not the same fear that kept other men away from her, which she was also glad for. She didn’t like the way they looked at her when they weren’t looking with fear; didn’t like their rough, dry hands. But Peter’s cautious, reverent touch sent a warm shiver up her spine. The way he looked at her, like she was an avenging angel, like she was the most beautiful creature on earth, made something flutter in her chest. He was so ingenious, so thoughtful, so emotional. He gently manipulated the rays of her fin with both hands; it wasn’t extremely flexible, but could splay further and bend slightly. The dorsal lobe was nearly the length of his arm, and he mapped out every inch. She could practically sense him planning a drawing in his head, feeling out the ratios and angles of her anatomy; it made her smile to herself. Slowly, he became braver, running his thumb firmly along the soft tissue to dislodge debris– but when he found a fresh lesion and she grunted, his hands disappeared again. “Sorry,” was his breathless refrain.
“It’s alright,” she assured him. “Touch me again– don’t be afraid.”
The latter was an order Peter simply could not follow. He wouldn’t approach her cavitation injuries again, but he ran his hand up the stem of her caudal fin and over the smooth scales there. As he explored it, he found that the black of her dorsal side and her tail-fin wasn’t really black, but a midnight purple. He wondered if Nina’s was the same: from what he had seen, her dorsal side looked like Maria’s, but her ventral side was dark grey where Maria’s was bright, shimmering, blood red. His fingers traced the grooves between her scales where the purple grew into red, and then trailed cautiously up a horizontal keel that ran along her side. She flared a ventral fin as his hand grew close to it, another gulp of brilliant red; the fluttering tissue between the narrow rays looked so delicate that he couldn’t bring himself to touch it.
“I could drown in this water,” Maria mused, making him glance up at her.
“Really…?” he replied. “I suppose so… I hadn’t thought of it that way. Would it be like being locked in an airtight room?”
“I think it must,” she said. “It’s strange to think of drowning.”
“I think of drowning often,” he admitted.
She laughed, an odd rumbling sound that wasn’t completely unlike her earlier vocalization, but her voice was affectionate. “I know,” she murmured. His eyes were fixed on her moonlike face, transfixed by the dewy rise and fall of her chest, even as his fingertips followed the seams between her scales. Her attention belonged, for the moment, to the window a few paces from her shoulder– an insurmountable distance, for Maria. A cold, pounding rain coated the panes in a layer of dancing water, and a grey daylight filtered through the rain-skin– was that what the waves looked like from below?
The motion of her chest stilled as she shifted, both hands gripping the sides of the tub to slide herself down and let her upper body sink completely into the warm water. As she pushed the last of the air from her lungs, a stream of bubbles graced the surface. Peter lifted himself higher, still on his knees, to keep his eyes on her, even as his brow knit together. Through the shifting lens, he could see her close her eyes, could see the smooth opercula behind her ears lift, thinly revealing two crimson crescents. His flat hand trailed up her red scales as he moved around to the side of the tub, following his worry in a direction even he didn’t completely understand.
She was peaceful for moments, maybe even minutes: it was hard to tell, without the visible motion of breathing air, but her pelvic fins flared in an occulting rhythm. Peter was struck with the idea that she might look this way when she slept, nestled in a bed of kelp or a smooth crevice. As she lay beneath the surface, a strange, sonorous, wordless melody seemed to fill the bath and radiate from it through the room: her song, enlivened by the water like his chalk. Watching her fins move and feeling her voice resonate in his bones, Peter felt the outside world slip away until there was nothing but this, her unearthly beauty, the faint scent of lily and brine hanging above the basin. But then her opercula opened wider, and the papery tissue of her gills bloomed from behind them, like some desperate alien flower: she gasped like that three times, and then breached violently. Her hands, which still clung to the rim of the tub, pulled her bodily out of the water so she could take huge gulps of air. Peter’s trance was broken instantly, and the shock and concern was such that he didn’t hesitate to reach for her where she was suspended, helping her turn and shift up and lower her midsection back into the water. Her tail flexed side-to-side, less so front-to-back, so it was difficult for her to find a neutral position in the basin.
Unsure what she had been trying to achieve with that, he didn’t know what to ask when she was settled again, but sat back on his haunches and watched her cough.
“What an awful feeling…” she mused at last, slowly, her voice raw. "Drowning, I mean."
True; and yet. “It is… sublime,” Peter ventured, “in its horror…” Her eyes opened darkly, fixed on him– he dared to see affection in them, especially when her hand rose to play her fingers over the wrinkles of his shirtsleeve, so he continued. “When every cell is screaming for oxygen, there’s a… a will, a desperation to live that overtakes the body. It transcends everything else… the insistence of… of water in the throat, its cold transgression into the lungs. The abject awfulness of it, like you said…”
She listened closely, as she always did when he spoke, lounging on her side against the sloping head of the tub. His face burned in embarrassment over the topic; he focused on her touch, which did nothing to settle his nerves. Her fingers were slender, with no webbing between them or any other indication of her nature; her skin, he knew, was cooler than a human’s. It always seemed just barely above the ambient temperature, the same as her scales. Still, the pad of her middle finger may as well have been a tongue of flame for the way he could swear his skin burned where she touched him. Slowly, with eyes broad and fixed on him, she pulled his wrist closer and leaned in to kiss his knuckles, her breath barely-warm against the back of his hand. At that, he lost his train of thought completely: the red membrane inside her mouth was visible as her lips parted, and there was the slightest glimpse of sharp teeth.
“Maria…” he breathed. “You… I feel foolish speaking of such things, when… You are as sublime, Maria, as insistent as drowning. More so. I can’t even think of… I can only think of you.”
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she kissed his palm and the inside of his wrist, against which she purred: “Am I as awful, too?”
He laughed nervously, and her smile widened. “You– no– well– oh, Maria,” he tried when he realized she actually expected an answer, and felt her laugh against his skin. “Loving you is– it’s more painful than being bashed to death against the rocks, I won’t lie… I love you so desperately that I fear I’ll never be able to tolerate this life, with you so near and so distant. But it makes me want to live. If only to see you again.”
At his words, she lifted herself up, leaning awkwardly over the ceramic lip, and twisted her hand into the front of his shirt to pull him in for a kiss. He went more than willingly– he all but fell forward in his rush. He followed her body with his so that she could sink back into relative comfort while he braced his forearm against the porcelain. His lips were dry where they met hers, but she didn’t mind; hers, cool and wet, kissed him as though to eat him alive. At her first gentle nip, he gasped. Still buoyed by her encouragements, he let his fingers curl into her waterlogged hair, earning a pleased sigh. His thumb ran over the stiff edge of her operculum as she painted warm water over his shirt.
“Peter,” she breathed when their lips parted, only to kiss him again, more gently and more firmly at the same time, and he was only too happy to return the gesture and feel her hands rove across his ribs and shoulders.
When he started shivering, she pulled away. She knew from interactions at the water’s edge that people got cold when their clothes were wet, and in this case she had a solution: she began tugging his shirt off, willfully ignorant to his startled noises. “Come on!” she laughed as he struggled confusedly, and shortly the white linen was clutched firmly in her hand.
To her, nudity was nothing at all, but to him it was fearful, so he swiped for it, complaining, “Ah– Maria!” and crossing one arm over his chest protectively. She only laughed, flopping deftly onto her other side so that he had to get up and hurry around the bathtub in another attempt to get it from her. One of his feet had fallen asleep, so he stumbled at first– but quickly she realized that her position put her at a strong disadvantage in this game of keep-away, and found another solution. She wriggled her own shoulders into his shirt, betting correctly that he wouldn’t be willing to wrestle her for it, and then smiled up at him in her victory. It was a funny sight, the linen undulating gently where it fell into the water; it was strange how human she looked, except for the huge red-and-black tail that emerged from the hem of the shirt. It was so bizarrely endearing that he could only look at her, watching the fabric shift over her body as she moved.
“Sit with me,” she entreated, patting the wall of the tub. “Don’t be so shy, my love. I like to look at you, actually…”
Only slightly nervously, he tried to do as she said: he set a new record on the phonograph, then settled himself on the floor, facing away from her, and reached for a sketchbook that lay nearby before leaning back against the rim. As he slipped a pencil from his pocket, he felt her presence closing in; she draped her arms over him and pressed a kiss behind his ear. He tilted his head away from the contact, baring himself, as his free hand came to rest on the soft fabric of his sleeve on her arm. He could feel the flat of her teeth against his skin as she smiled; that completely took his mind off his shyness. She prodded curiously at his nipple, reminding him again, and laughed in surprise when he jumped. Her fingers combed through his long hair; she rested her chin on his shoulder and her cheek against his neck to watch him draw.
It was an anatomy study, like so many of his drawings had been recently. He began with her tail, the spacing of its rays, the miniscule circular scars. Then there was the billowing display of her primary dorsal fin, the sharp expression of the secondary, the flawlessly imperfect pattern of her scales. He made a few quick attempts at various poses she had struck in the bathtub while trying to negotiate herself within it, the different ways her body contorted. At first, he looked back often; she would move her head out of the way and lift her tail wordlessly for a reference, flaring her fins. Eventually it was the details he had come to know by heart: her almond eyes, the perfect bow of her lips, and then his focus came to her arms. The reference there was easy, as one arm rested midair before him, slung over his shoulder; he painstakingly captured the languid pose of her hand, then tried that strange fin on her forearm. Gingerly, he found that he could open it manually, pushing her sleeve back before pressing his thumb above the fin’s base, near her wrist. She didn’t react, and the fin collapsed slowly when he released the pressure.
He couldn’t say how much time passed that way, with the whispering sound of her tail sweeping lazily across the floor beneath the fuzzy music, until he surfaced briefly from his focus and realized she must be sleeping. Her head leaned heavily against his, unmoving, and he could hear slow, shallow breaths; the motion of her tail was rhythmic, and her fins half-flared at unconscious intervals. The realization was almost overwhelming. Suddenly he was terrified to move for fear of disturbing her; simultaneously, his chest felt like it was swelling, water-logged. Almost giddy, he closed his eyes and focused on the sound of her breathing for some divine stretch of time; then he returned his attention to his sketchbook and drew quietly, moving as little as possible, until Andrey arrived to help get Maria back home.