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It was the peak of summer, when the sun felt magnified through an invisible glass hovering above the Earth and clouds blew halfway across the sky in just a few minutes. You and Rafayel had found a groove throughout the season, your frequent trips to the beach behind his home down to a science by this point. Once you dropped your towels onto the sand, most of your time was spent amongst the waves.
These days were always your favorites. Filled with splash fights, stinging eyes, and plenty of salty kisses, what wasn’t there to like? You’d always had an affinity for the ocean, and being with Rafayel had only brought out that love even more. Whether it was the fact that you were dating a Lemurian or something to do with your elusive past, you’d never felt so connected with Rafayel than being together in the water.
Sometimes it felt like a competition to see who would crack first and return to shore. Hours would go by with your sunscreen in desperate need of reapplication and your hands and feet wrinkled to a texture beyond that of a raisin. By the time you would leave the water, your beach towels would be covered in sand and your hair would be a tangled, salty disaster.
Today was no different.
Going on what you could only guess was hour two of your second stint in the water on the same day, Rafayel finally ended his merciless game of grabbing you by the ankles underwater to resurface and hug you from behind.
“I’m tired,” he whined, plopping his chin onto your shoulder and rubbing his mop of wet hair on your cheek. “Wanna go back to shore?”
“Already?”
You shrugged, remembering how late Rafayel had stayed up last night putting the finishing touches on his latest masterpiece. “You go ahead, I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”
“Don’t be too long, yeah? Otherwise there might not be any snacks left by the time you get back.”
After sending Rafayel off with a half-hearted threat of murder, you watched his figure shrink as he returned to shore, finding a surprising amount of entertainment in the way he struggled to shake the sand off his towel.
Without the ankle-grabber there to ruin your fun, you began a hunt along the sandy bottom to find seashells to bring back to Rafayel. The chill in the water that sat near the sand was a mercy on your sunburnt skin. You got into a flow, diving down and digging your fingers through the sand to feel for shells, not bothering to wipe your eyes between dives.
In hind sight, you should’ve noticed the change in texture of the sand, or the way it took longer to reach the bottom each time you dipped beneath the water. By the time you found your prize—a flawless, magenta scallop shell the size of your hand—you’d drifted a long way from where you started.
The shore was far—so far that had it not been for Mo Art Studio standing so tall and proud along the coast, you wouldn’t have been able to spot where Rafayel was lying on the sand.
The cycle of diving and resurfacing now broken by the simple act of treading water, exhaustion finally had a chance to hit. You stretched a toe down as far as you could, but never met sand. The shell still in hand, you pointed yourself in the direction of Rafayel and started into a front crawl toward shore.
Dating a Lemurian meant you’d grown to be a rather strong swimmer, yet you found yourself having to breathe between strokes much more frequently than usual. Maybe it was the shell slowing you down, or the exhaustion that showed itself far too late, but you lost your energy rather quickly, having to take a break to catch your breath not long after you started.
You rubbed the saltwater from your eyes, in disbelief at how wrong you were in your interpretation of how far you’d swam upon reevaluation. It was like a mirage. You were even farther than where you’d started. Rafayel was no larger than a tiny speck atop the sand.
Then you noticed it—the scenery actively shrinking as you treaded water.
A current was pulling you away from shore. A strong current.
The realization slapped panic straight to your core. The flawless shell now forgotten, you tried swimming against the current even harder now, pushing your already-tired limbs to cut through the water while forcing yourself to go longer between breaths.
All it did was drain your strength.
Forced into another break, you clawed the water from your face while kicking to stay afloat. Your lungs burned, your panicked body requiring more air than you could possibly provide—huffing or not. Your heartbeat hammered in your chest, a fast pounding that felt so intense it sent shockwaves that could be felt throughout the entire ocean.
And after all that effort, you’d only been dragged farther from the shore.
“RAFAYEL!” you yelled between breaths, trying to force calm through your nerves as you treaded water. “RAFAYEL HELP!”
You shouted your throat raw, the yells shredding their way out of your body to probably die somewhere over the water, never reaching the shore.
“RAFAY—”
An errant wave smacked the backside of your head, clipping your call short with seawater that filled and burned your mouth and nose. You sputtered it back out—an act that hurt twice as hard as when it forced its way in.
Fatigue forced you to resort to floating any way you could. You swiped at your burning eyes, the act as desperate as it was futile. Head tilted to the sky, you squinted against the sun beaming onto your face, trying not to think about how every muscle in your body felt it was moments from disobeying your pressing orders to keep you afloat.
Stuck in some primal survival mode, your breaths turned to an urgent staccato, a rapid exchange of air too fast for your own good. Every aspect of breathing became terrifying. That you would inhale more seawater, that you would exhale and dip below the water’s surface, that the pain while holding your breath would make drawing another impossible.
The horrible cycle repeated on a desperate loop as your limbs increased your demand of oxygen beyond what you could adequately suck in.
Eventually, equilibrium broke.
Gravity turned against you, an invisible hand that pressed your head down enough for water to rush into your mouth and nose on a sporadic inhale and into your windpipe. You rushed upwards to open air, the salt burning your throat and watering your eyes as you coughed it out and doubled your efforts to prevent your head from dipping down again.
Then it happened again.
Cold, abrasive water covered your face before you’d recovered. You hadn’t sucked in a good enough breath to hold before the sea breeze whipping past your ears became snuffed by water.
You clenched your eyes shut, thrashing in complete darkness as your legs used up the last of their energy. They twitched, your muscles so spent that even the small movements felt like acid had been injected into your limbs. Your shoulders gave in too, reducing you to flapping at the elbows. It was a pathetic motion, nowhere near what you needed to come back up for air.
Pressure built against your chest, crushing your lungs and screaming at you to suck in more air. It took a surprising amount of willpower to fight against that growing need.
After struggling for so long, you weren’t sure which way was up anymore. You opened your eyes, forcing them to remain open against the horrible sting of saltwater.
You could still see shreds of sunlight at the water’s surface. Still facing the right direction, then. Only the sunlight was fading.
You were sinking.
For all the infrequent bursts that felt like pushing your limbs through molasses, they did nothing.
You were a good swimmer. You were dating a Lemurian for fuck’s sake! This wasn’t supposed to happen.
The pressure against your ribcage grew to be unbearable. An invisible force gripped your torso, crushing your lungs to half their size.
Amongst the panicking, the sinking, and the strain, you lost track of the one thing you were determined not to do—suck in another breath. It was a faulty reflex. One you didn’t have the power to override any longer.
Water rushed down your throat, tearing into your windpipe. Even more flooded into your stomach. You needed to cough it back out. But you couldn’t. Another reflex had kicked in that squeezed your throat shut. Nothing else could go in, and nothing could get out.
Not long after, your struggle slowed. The crushing, terrible pain dwindled until it was gone entirely.
Somewhere in your fading consciousness, you realized you were dying. And as personal of a realization as it was, your fleeting thoughts turned to Rafayel. Had he heard you before? Was he still asleep on the sand?
Your heartbeat slowed from its panicked pace, growing faint in your ears. The muddled sounds of moving water thinned to total silence. Your murky, blue vision turned black.
Had you been able to sigh, you would have. Rafayel would be devastated. If only he knew this part wasn’t so bad.
The path back to consciousness wasn’t straight. It dragged you up only to let you slip again, sensation coming back until it became too much and vanished.
The peace that cradled your final descent was gone.
You wanted to stay numb in the darkness. But something familiar was pulling you back. A voice—muffled, familiar, exhausted—beckoning you to crawl back to reality.
You were freezing.
Pressure still wrapped around your chest, only now, it was different. No longer suffocating, not an un-oxygenated vice. Somehow, it was even worse. Each rib pulsed in aching throbs like they had been cracked open from the inside.
You sucked in a breath, and that ache tripled. Air scraped down your throat, sharp and cold against the irritated flesh. Your throat was raw beyond belief, like you’d been swallowing acid.
The familiar voice was closer now, somewhere above, repeating your name to prevent you from slipping back under. It was breathy with panic, the muffled layer receding.
“Are you with me?!”
You didn’t answer. Your body tensed before you could even try. The breath you took never made it back out. You choked on it instead. A wet, violent cough tore through you, dragging up liquid with it.
Once you started, it felt like you could never stop. Each cough felt like a hammer striking your chest from the inside. You gasped when you could, until your stomach tightened and cut off the dramatics entirely.
“Shit—okay, okay!”
A pair of hands rolled you onto your side, your cheek meeting sand. Your stomach lurched, and everything came up. Seawater, bile, fire. If what you coughed up before burned, then this was a straight inferno.
“She’s throwing up,” the voice said, panicked, but not to you.
A second, tinny voice responded nearby, “That’s good. Roll her onto her side and make sure her airway—”
“I am, I am!”
His hands stayed at the back of your neck, bracing you as your body wracked again.
“Hey— hey breathe! You have to breathe through it, okay?”
Easier said than done. By the time your stomach relaxed, you were in so much pain that you felt unable to draw another breath before it would start again. Tears dripped from your closed eyes as you coughed the rest out.
Finally, you took in a real breath.
“That’s it, just like that.”
A finger wiped the tears that fell from throwing up before the back of a hand swiped away the mess left on your cheek.
Recognition slammed into you.
Rafayel!
Your eyes forced themselves open to a fuzzy silhouette against a too-bright background. Panic hit before thought did, the shapeless world too harrowing for you to make sense of it. For a moment, you were underwater again.
You jerked upwards. Pain flared in your chest from the attempt, but that wasn’t what stopped you. Hands did.
“No, don’t—” Rafayel’s grip tightened, his hands trembling as he tried to keep your shoulder planted against the sand. “Hey, hold still! You’re okay!”
You fought him anyway, even when he repeated your name to get you to stop.
“Look at me,” his voice cracked, closer now. “Look at me!”
With forced guidance, your eyes found the familiar silhouette. Rafayel—wide-eyed, pale, panting like he was even more exhausted than you. You realized it wasn’t just his hands that were shaking. His entire arms, all the way up to the shoulder, were trembling like they only had a shred of strength left. His hair was sopping wet, dripping down his cheeks and neck.
Suddenly, your panic had a place to go. Your hands latched onto his wrists, the grip desperate as if everything would slip again if you let go.
It finally hit you. You hadn’t died, but that thought was equally horrifying—the recognition that you’d come so close.
“You’re safe,” Rafayel said, a forced calm in his voice now. “It’s alright, I’ve got you. Just— just keep breathing, okay?”
His hand moved to your back, unsteady at first, then more deliberate. It glided along your skin, leaving behind a warm trail that soothed you.
The tinny voice you’d forgotten about came back, “Is she conscious?”
“Yeah— yeah, she’s awake.”
“Keep her on her side and continue to monitor her breathing until help arrives. I’ll stay on the line until then. It shouldn’t be much longer.”
“Did you hear that?” His skin felt so warm against yours. You shuddered, a chill pulsing from your torso out to your extremities. “I’ve got you. It’s gonna be alright, okay? Talk to me. Can you talk? What’s my name?”
Throat still burning with every breath and chest still an aching disaster, you weren’t sure you could manage an answer. But for his sake, you tried.
“R-Raf—”
The remaining syllables were lost to another coughing fit.
Rafayel shuddered at the answer. “Oh, thank god,” he whispered, just barely loud enough for you to hear. “Listen— you’re gonna be okay, alright? It’s okay. I’m right here. Just keep breathing. That’s all you need to do for right now. Are you cold?”
Tears pooling at his eyes, he leaned closer, and the familiar heat of his Evol warmed your skin.
“I’ll keep you safe, okay cutie? Is that better?”
You nodded, taking solace in his words and warmth.
The tone of his voice, however, wasn’t as comforting. Even in your tattered consciousness, you could tell Rafayel was terrified. He looked utterly spent, like if he let go of you, he too would fall into the sand.
Acting as your tether to reality, he kept up the reminders to breathe while acting as your personal heat lamp until a siren approached and a pair of EMTs took over.
One of them pulled him aside, and the calm you’d worked so hard to find left along with him. It wasn’t until after they’d run through whatever immediate diagnostics they needed to get out of the way that he was allowed to return to your side, readily offering his hand for you to clutch as they finished getting you settled on oxygen and fluids. All questions beyond “what’s your name” and “can you tell me where you are” were directed to Rafayel. He answered without his eyes ever leaving you, watching the jagged rise and fall of your chest with a look of disbelief on his face, as if the very fact that you were awake was a miracle.
After a dizzying voyage atop a stretcher, the paramedics got you settled inside an ambulance with heating pads and a thick blanket. Rafayel still proved to be the best heat source, though. He was allowed to sit beside you, his Evol humming onto your hands and beneath the blanket, keeping you warm.
A minute into the ride, his Evol thinned out. He still held on, but the trembling in his arms worsened enough for you to notice. You cracked your eyes open again and saw his gaze had unfocused, like he was looking at nothing at all. His skin lost a shade or two of color since you’d last looked.
He sighed, dropping his head to hang between his knees and catching the attention of the paramedic who was watching your vitals like a hawk. Before long, he too was wrapped in a blanket that matched yours, being talked through a sudden adrenaline crash with a pulse ox of his own clipped to his finger just to be safe.
You squeezed his hand for some reassurance, crushed that this was the only comfort that you could offer. There was your worn-out hero, probably fighting a storm of self doubt now that the worst of it was over. While words still wouldn’t do in your current state, you could only hope he wasn’t twisting what happened to blame himself.
It didn’t matter how many medical professionals told Rafayel he did a good job. Up until a doctor found him in the back corner of the waiting room and gave a final update that she would be fine, he was stressed beyond belief. And when that confirmation came, he was glad to be sitting down. The relief shot through him all at once, dropping his head into his hands and letting what he hoped would be the last batch of tears slip down his cheeks.
She’ll be fine.
The words settled, heavy against everything that had come before—those dragging minutes spent in nothing but a bathing suit and a medical blanket, replaying the way she’d reached for him when they wheeled her away for imaging.
Waiting had been torturous. Though she had been rapidly recovering by the time they arrived at the hospital, a doctor had pulled him aside and warned him of the complications of drowning. Complications that wouldn’t start until hours later—if they would start at all.
Rafayel had toiled over the possibilities since that warning, berating himself for every misstep he’d taken starting with deciding to go back to shore without her. Her shredded voice still echoed through his head, screaming his name and prodding the same dread he’d felt when it struck him the first time. The phantom screams were almost as unsettling as the real one—the way such a terrified shriek could sound so small from such a distance. And it hadn’t hit him how if she was slightly farther away, he might’ve not been able to hear her at all.
It was cruel the way the sea tried to claim her. His true home, the place where their bond was born and so deeply entwined. He’d felt the moment her heart stopped beating, striking him as a mighty, invisible blow to the chest while he’d only crossed half the distance to get to her.
By the time he’d reached her, her body was already cold and limp. Pulseless. Dead, like he already knew she would be.
He’d never swam so fast in his life—lugging a body or not.
Once on shore, the rest was a blur. Dragging her far from where the waves could touch her, dialing for help and tossing his phone onto the ground on speakerphone—which he only just now realized was still half-buried somewhere in the sands of Whitesand Bay. The person on the line had been his rock, some nameless person in a call center having to reassure him over and over that he wasn’t breaking her ribs, that help was coming, to redirect his attention every time he muttered “she’s dead” after digging his fingers in the side of her neck and not feeling a pulse.
He’d done CPR for what felt like an eternity, breathing life between her parted lips only to see her chest rise a measly inch. More than once, he’d tried to use the same power that would let her breathe underwater. But apparently that wasn’t how it worked. He kept up the cycle until he’d nearly convinced himself that his arms would slug off at the shoulders and that hell would come to claim them both.
When he finally felt the weak thrum of her pulse against his fingers, he couldn’t believe it. A new fear was quick to tear through him, though: that her memories would be gone. The business of her Aether Core was still an enigma. How long did she have to be dead for the thing to kick in?
He still debated whether asking the first thing to come out of her mouth to be his name was selfish or not. But after convincing himself that her heart wouldn’t just up and quit again, he needed to know if she was still in there. After seeing her lips form the syllables of his name, that fear dissipated.
His long recount of what were contending as the worst moments of his life now over, Rafayel waited until the last of his guilty tears dried up before heading to her room. He hugged the blanket around his shoulders a little tighter, regretting not figuring out a change of clothes while he’d waited. This wasn’t exactly the first image he wanted to present to her after all of this, but… whatever.
All those extra minutes he spent gathering himself and sorting out his thoughts ended up being a waste. The moment he peered through the doorway and saw her again, the waterworks started right back up.
She looked so small in the bed—his brave, little hunter—her hair a tangled, sandy, half-damp mess on the pillow. Her eyes crinkled as he came closer, hinting at a smile hidden behind the oxygen mask still strapped to her face.
Guilt forced Rafayel’s gaze away, instead trailing over the wires snaking into her gown or the IV line beneath the blanket. Rafayel wrapped his own blanket around himself tighter, unsure of what he really wanted. To scoop her into his arms and feel her warmth, or to let his guilt take over and make himself disappear entirely.
He cleared his throat, intent on apologizing at the very least, his vision blurring with tears before he managed to get his first words out.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice cracking, pathetic in his own ears. He wasn’t even sure what he was sorry for. Separating from her, not paying attention, not being fast enough, the shittiness of the entire situation. Keeping her safe was square one of what he’d promised himself when they reunited so long ago. And he’d blown even that.
From the edge of his blurry view of the floor, he saw her arm slip from beneath the blanket, palm held up in silent invitation.
Rafayel did as she wanted, placing his hand in hers and letting her pull him closer until his knees were flush against the bedrail. Still, he couldn’t look at her. But when he saw her slip her mask off with her other hand, his worries flared.
“What are you doing?! I don’t think you’re supposed to—”
“It’s fine, Rafayel,” she interrupted, her voice small but steady in a way that undid one of the many knots of worry hidden within his stomach. “It’s only for a second. C’mere.”
Again, Rafayel let her pull him closer, this time pulling his torso down so his face was inches from hers. Without anywhere else to avert his gaze, Rafayel looked into her eyes.
She really was smiling. Exhausted, but smiling. And of course she was. She was strong—in many ways, stronger than Rafayel. His steadying anchor who was constantly stopping his straying mind from floating off his shoulders and into the cosmos.
“A little closer…” she whispered, lifting her head to meet him halfway.
She pressed her lips to his, and something inside him unfurled. This feeling—her warmth on his lips, her breath puffing against his skin—Rafayel needed it. He cupped her jaw and leaned in just as much as she did, having to actively hold himself back from devouring her whole.
She really did know how he operated. That words as meaningful as “I love you” could be shut down and deflected depending on how much turmoil shrouded his thoughts. Right now, he felt everything he needed to. That she forgave him, that she thanked him, that she still loved him, that nothing would ever break them apart. For what he could express with his art, no piece would ever hold a candle to this. Because this gesture said more than all the words in the world ever could.