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Bokuto has always liked shiny things, and in her coastal town that borders the sea, the seashells that decorate the sand are the prettiest and shiniest things of all.
She spends most of her days helping her mother and her brothers around the house, tending to the chickens, the garden, and whatever else needs to be done. She feeds the chickens, she uproots the weeds, she helps to fold all of the laundry. But after she’s done with all of that—and she makes sure that she gets done very quickly, because doing chores is boring—she runs down to the sea.
She likes going down to the sea, because she never knows what she’s going to find that day, what new and pretty things will wash up on the shore. Her mom tells her to be careful, to watch out for jellyfish and kidnappers and whatever else, but Bokuto’s a big girl now! She’s a whole five years old! She can handle anything that comes her way!
So she hikes up her dress and waddles down to the shore, laughing as she digs her toes into the sand. The sand is soft, and squishy, and it cushions her every time she falls down on her knees. The sand is kind.
The sea—not so much.
Its crystal-clear waters ebb and flow as they lap at her feet, almost like they have a mind of their own. Bokuto squats down, digging her fingers through the sand, trying to see if there’s any shiny new treasures buried in the sand. After a couple minutes of digging, she doesn’t find any, and so she decides that she needs to dig a little bit deeper, go a little bit farther in.
So she does. And she continues digging, but she doesn’t find anything. The sand is getting meltier, squishier, and she suddenly realizes—
She can’t feel the sand underneath her feet. She kicks her feet, and she realizes—
I’m too far out.
She frantically moves her legs around, trying to find the solid ground underneath her feet, but she can’t find anything. She looks up at the sky, at the slowly darkening sky—when did it get so dark? When did it—
She takes one last good breath before the sea’s waves crash over her head and swallow her whole.
The saltiness of the sea stings her eyes, and she might be crying, but she can’t tell, because—it’s all salty, and it all stings. Bokuto tries to scream, flailing her arms and kicking her legs, trying to fight against the waves, but it’s no use—maybe she’s not so big after all, maybe she’s only five years old, and maybe she’s a lot weaker than she thought she was.
Her lungs are heaving, desperate and begging for one good breath of air—she wasn’t made for this, she’s not like the fish in the sea, the ones who can spend their entire lives in the water, she needs to get to the surface, she needs to breathe—
And suddenly, a hand closes around her wrist, and she finds that she can breathe once more.
Bokuto shouts, a feral shriek escaping her throat as she frantically waves her arms around, trying her best to keep her head afloat. Someone is helping to keep her afloat, someone—
She turns around, the question on her lips, but as soon as she opens her mouth to ask it, she finds that her very breath seems to be stolen from her lungs.
Swimming next to her is the most beautiful girl she has ever seen. She must be around Bokuto’s age, but—she’s never seen her before. She’s sure of it. She thinks she would be able to remember a face that beautiful. She has the most gorgeous eyes that Bokuto has ever seen—they are somewhere in between blue and green, and they seem to change in the light, like the prettiest pieces of sea glass, or like the sea itself. She’s never seen anything like it! Her hair is thick and black, like how the sea must look, a thousand miles beneath the surface, and it tumbles around her shoulders in dark waves, and she’s holding onto Bokuto’s wrist with an iron grip. There’s a determined look on her face as she swims towards the shore, dragging Bokuto behind her.
“Who are—” is all Bokuto manages to get out before the girl is throwing her onto the shore. She tumbles onto the shore, the sand getting everywhere—in her feet, in her clothes, in her hair. A yelp escapes her throat, because—ow—but then she looks up, and she sees the mysterious girl turning her back to leave. Wait, she’s leaving? Wait, that doesn’t make sense! Where was she going to go? Into the sea? How could anyone just go into the sea like that? Where was she going to go after that? Was she going to be safe? Bokuto should at least thank her for saving her life, right, isn’t that the polite thing to do?
“Wait! Wait!”
But it looks like she’s too late. Whoever the mysterious, beautiful girl is, she’s long gone.
The thought of that saddens Bokuto, just a little bit. Because that really was the most beautiful girl she’s ever seen in her life, so much more beautiful than even the shiniest of her seashells.
But then she looks down at her feet, and she sees a scallop shell drift onto the shore, near her feet. It’s a perfect, creamy white, and it’s perfectly symmetrical as well. It’s one of the most beautiful shells that Bokuto has ever seen, and—though she is sad that she only got a glimpse of that beautiful girl, she can’t be too sad.
Seashells are, after all, the prettiest and shiniest things of all, this side of her coastal town. At least, she thought they were.
Now that she’s seen this beautiful girl, with eyes like sea glass and hair like the dark waves of the sea, she might begin thinking that the girl is the prettiest thing of all, this side of her coastal town.
—
In all honesty, Bokuto almost forgets about that beautiful girl as soon as she comes back home, back to her mother’s worried shrieking and her brothers’ enraged screaming. Her family was worried sick, or so they said, worried that she had been taken off by the tide. They ban her from going to the beach for a month after that.
But she never truly forgets the girl—the thought of her is always lingering in the back of her mind. She never truly forgets, not even for years later.
It’s not like she’s going to go out searching for the girl, because she wouldn’t really have any idea on how to start searching for her. It’s not like she can go up to the people in her town and say, “A really pretty girl with black hair and blue eyes rescued me from drowning a while ago, like five years ago, have you seen her? She’s really strong, and she saved my life. And she’s very pretty, the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life, have I mentioned that?”
So she just accepts that she may never see the girl ever again. And so she goes about her daily routines, helping her mother and brothers with the chores, collecting seashells, and spending her days at the sea’s edge. And she does this for the next five years. It is a nice life, and it is a good life, but—something feels like it is missing. And Bokuto doesn’t quite know what.
And one day, she stumbles upon a lagoon, hidden within a cave. The entrance is clear, and the water is shallow, connecting with the sea outside, probably. Bokuto’s not really sure how caves work, but—there’s pretty shells in the water! And she’s ten whole years old now, and she’s big and strong, and she can handle anything that comes her way!
Bokuto kneels down, dipping her hands into the crystal-clear blue water, pulling out a pretty pink shell, one that curls into itself in a spiral. Her brother said that most shells used to hold living creaches, so Bokuto squints one of her eyes shut and stares into the shell. Nope, there’s no nasty critters in there! She’s not really sure what she would have done if there was a nasty critter in there. Maybe she would have gotten her brother to get it out? Wait, but then she’d be pushing it out of its home, and that’s kind of mean.
In any case—this one is pretty. Very, very pretty. She thinks that it might be the prettiest one so far. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen a shell that looks like this before, so—maybe someone put it here? It’s way more close to the shallow parts of the lagoon, so somebody could have definitely done that. Maybe they were saving the shell for later? Well, that’s a shame, because now Bokuto’s going to take it, and whoever originally put the shell there is going to lose it forever.
Well, she thinks cheerfully, shrugging her shoulders as she turns the shell over and over in her hands. It’s really pretty. Their loss!
So she picks it up and puts it on the banks of the rocks behind her, and she goes back to searching for more shells. Maybe she should bring a bucket when she does this, it would definitely make it easier on her for when she has to carry home armful after armful of shells.
That is, if she had any more shells to carry. Rather unfortunately, she doesn’t find any. So she picks up the single pretty shell and turns to leave, when suddenly—
There’s a splash in the lagoon. And she’s not in the lagoon’s waters itself, so that must mean that someone else is in the lagoon, and so she turns around to catch this intruder red-handed in the act. What if it’s somebody that wants to try and steal her really cool seashell?! She’s gotta fight back against them! She’s not afraid! Nuh-uh! She’s big and she’s strong and she’s ten whole years old, and—
And it’s that girl from the sea.
“You!” Bokuto blurts out, cradling her new shell to her chest with one hand and pointing at the beautiful girl that’s standing—floating?—in the water. That’s strange, how could the girl be floating? Is she using magic? Is she magic? That would be so freaking cool!
She can see her face more clearly now. Her facial features are soft, and curved a bit, and her eyes are just as pretty and bluey-green as ever, sparkling like jewels. From the waist up, she’s wearing some sort of green tunic, and it looks like it’s made from some strange fabric. From the waist down—well, Bokuto can’t really tell what she looks like from the waist down, because the rest of her body seems to blend into the water.
“It’s you!” Bokuto shouts, hurrying back towards the lagoon’s edge. But once again, she’s too late—as soon as she begins approaching, the girl’s eyes widen in either fear or surprise, and she takes a deep breath before diving below the water. Bokuto shouts, scrambling at the edge, searching for any sign of the girl. “Wait! Wait, please, I’m not going to hurt you!”
The girl’s gone. Bokuto looks closely at the waters of the lagoon, and she looks really closely, observing every square inch of the crystal-blue waters, but she finds—nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s as though the beautiful girl never existed at all. How could that be? Bokuto definitely saw her, and she definitely saw her dive beneath the water’s surface, but—could she have swum away that fast? What kind of girl is this mysterious, beautiful girl?!
She searches and searches for a long while after that, but it’s no use. It’s as though the beautiful girl never existed at all, like she was only a figment of Bokuto’s imagination.
Then again, if nobody but Bokuto has ever seen this beautiful girl—maybe she exists to nobody but Bokuto.
—
She goes days without thinking about the beautiful girl, then weeks, then months, then years. The next time she is reminded of the beautiful girl’s existence, she is no longer a meager ten years old, but fifteen whole years old, and she is well on her way to becoming an actual adult. Or something. That’s what her family tells her, anyway.
Her brothers and her mother give her more things to do—she starts helping out at the docks, hauling fish in nets and learning how to gut them open with butcher’s knives. She does most of the laundry, while her brothers are off at work at the ships, repairing and sailing them.
She’s very busy, and she sees plenty of pretty girls and boys while she’s out, and so she never really has time to think about that beautiful girl with the sea-green eyes, the one that she saw so long ago.
But sometimes—sometimes, late at night, on lonely nights, she sits by her window and watches the sea crash and froth against the rocks, and she wonders what became of that beautiful, beautiful girl.
And then one night, when she’s walking on the shore, she sees her once more. This time—this time, she’s not too late. In fact, she might actually be early.
The girl is leaning against a rock, in the shallower parts of the sea. Every part of her body is submerged in the water, save for her head, shoulders, and arms. Her hair has grown out a lot, and she’s idly twisting a strand of hair around her finger. It must go all the way down to her waist, judging by how long it is.
Bokuto watches for a second, entranced by the girl’s every move, and she’s even more entranced still when the girl opens her mouth and begins to sing.
It’s something straight out of Bokuto’s dreams, the way the girl sings notes as high as the whistling wind, then as low as the roaring tides. There are no lyrics, and it sounds like no song that Bokuto has ever heard before, but—even still, it sounds familiar. It sounds so very familiar, so much so that she may begin tearing up.
She recognizes what that song’s about. That song’s about love. About what kind of love, Bokuto doesn’t really know. But it sounds sad, like the girl’s lost a lover—or maybe, she never even got a chance to have a lover.
The girl sings so softly, so sweetly, and Bokuto is so very lost in the moment. And for a moment, the girl herself seems to get lost in the moment, because she raises her voice, louder and louder, and she plants her hands on the rock and hoists herself onto it, and she kicks her legs up—
Those aren’t legs.
From the waist down, the girl’s body is one long, smooth fish tail, with sparkling green and blue scales that seem to shimmer in the light of the stars, matching her eyes exactly. At the end of the tail, there are two sets of fish fins, and the girl—the mermaid?—slaps her fins against the surface of the water.
And that seems to startle Bokuto out of whatever trance the mermaid puts her in, because she abruptly stumbles forward—had she been walking?—and shrieks, “Holy shit, you’re a mermaid?!”
The effect is instantaneous. The mermaid whips her head over to Bokuto, a look of complete and utter fear on her face, and with one fluid moment, drives straight into the water, her tail cutting through the water smoothly. Bokuto is a fast swimmer, but she doesn’t think she can beat a mermaid in swimming.
“Wait—!” Bokuto shouts, sprinting over to the girl on the rock. She’s gotten faster and stronger, now that she’s fifteen years old, but it’s far too late. The beautiful girl is gone, with a quick flick of her mermaid tail, and now—
Now Bokuto is not sure if she’ll ever see her again.
She stares out into the sea, feeling a pout beginning to cross her face. That’s not fair! The mermaid looked so scared when Bokuto called out to her, but she wasn’t even going to hurt her or anything like that! She’s just curious, honest, and—she just thinks the mermaid is the most beautiful person she’s ever seen.
Well—but maybe the mermaid has good reason to be scared of her. Scared of humans in general. Bokuto has heard the stories about mermaids from her mother, about how they’re vicious creatures who would drag sailors to their deaths. She believed them when she was younger, but she’s grown up, and she knows that they’re just fairytales now. Wait—but she just saw a mermaid, so they’re not fairytales! But she’s seen the mermaid all her life, and never once has the mermaid tried to kill her.
Bokuto sighs, loudly, as she approaches the rock. She hikes up her dress to her thighs, wading into the sea. She goes to sit down on the rock, but then she sees—
A seashell. A very pretty conch seashell, one that’s pink and orange and white, with pretty striped presents. And it’s large as well—probably the size of Bokuto’s hand.
Did she leave this for me? Bokuto thinks to herself as she turns the shell over in her hands, hope beginning to rise in her chest. She has been leaving these for me, all this time, right? Wait, wait, wait—if she left this for me, then why would she run away from me? That doesn’t make sense.
Bokuto sighs out loud, staring out at the sea. She doesn’t know a lot about how other people’s minds work, much less how mermaids’ brains work, and now—now, she’ll never know.
I won’t be seeing her ever again, Bokuto thinks as she cradles the pretty shell to her chest, squinting her eyes as she tries to search for any sign of the mermaid. She finds none. All she sees is the sea, for miles upon miles. Will I?
—
She doesn’t see the mermaid for many, many more years. Five years isn’t long, in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like an eternity. The days all bleed into one long, monotonous dirge of working and helping out around the village. Bokuto barely even has any time to herself anymore.
It seems like an eternity since she’s taken a walk by the sea. It seems like an eternity since she’s seen that beautiful mermaid.
She’s collected a lot of shells, over the years, for no reason other than because they look pretty. But the times have been getting hard, and her mother is getting older, and—well, the shells aren’t doing much good, sitting pretty up on her shelf.
But they would do some good sitting pretty up on some other people’s shelves…for the right price.
She sells off her collection, slowly, bit by bit. She tries to keep the prettiest ones for herself, but the prettier they are, the more they’re worth—and her family sort of needs the money. They really do.
Now all she has left is a singular sand dollar. She keeps it in her pocket at all times, like it’s her lucky charm. Any time she’s scared or anxious or worried, she reaches into her pocket and rubs her hand over the smooth surface, and a little bit of her woes abate, just a little bit.
She gets a rare break, and—as always, she heads to the sea. She sits down at the edge of the shore, feeling the waves lap at her feet, and she stares out at the neverending black sea.
She wonders what it might be like, to wade out into the sea and never return. The sea takes so many people, and they’re never seen from again. Like that girl—
Wait. That girl.
“HEY!” Bokuto shouts, sprinting towards the sand. She’s twenty years old, and she’s worked in the docks and in the sea, and she’s built up a good amount of muscle and speed over the last few years. She easily makes her way down to the sea, hiking her dress up her legs. “WAIT—WAIT! I’M NOT GONNA HURT YOU!”
And this time, the mermaid—the beautiful girl that Bokuto has been seeing all of her life—does not run away. Or rather, she does not swim away. She does look like she’s thinking about it really hard, though. Her hair is long, so very long, and it trails all the way down to her waist. Her bluey-green, jewel-like eyes are just as beautiful as ever.
“You’re that—” Bokuto gasps out, planting her hands on her thighs. She is fast, but she doesn’t think she’s ever run this fast. “You’re that girl. That girl that I’ve been—seeing all my life—it was you leaving the shells for me, wasn’t it? You’ve been giving me gifts all this time, haven’t you?”
The mermaid nods her head timidly, clasping her hands together.
“I’m sorry, I sold all of them, because—my family needed the money, I’m really sorry, but, uh—oh! I still have this!”
She digs around in her pocket, triumphantly holding out her worn-out sand dollar to the mermaid. “It’s not much, but—uh, I hope it’ll be enough for you!”
The mermaid stares at Bokuto for a little bit, then at the seashell, and then—her face begins to flush a bright red, so bright that Bokuto can see it in the darkness of the night.
“Do you not like it?” Bokuto asks nervously, flipping it around in her hand. She begins putting it back in her pocket, turning away from the mermaid. “Sorry, I know it’s not the prettiest shell ever, but—it’s all I have left. Sorry, this was—this was stupid, I’m gonna just—
“Wait.”
This isn’t the first time Bokuto’s heard the mermaid’s voice, she’s heard her sing, but it is the first time she’s heard the mermaid speak.
“It’s beautiful,” the mermaid says, holding her hand out for the sand dollar. “I love it. Thank you. But…”
And here, she whispers something under her breath, shaking her head a little bit.
“What?” Bokuto asks, stepping just the tiniest bit closer to the mermaid. “But what?”
“…mermaids only give each other shells when they want to…get married.”
Bokuto blinks for a couple seconds before saying, “But haven’t you been leaving me shells for, like, the past fifteen years? Oh—” Suddenly, there’s a huge surge of excitement rushing through Bokuto’s every vein. “Does that mean you want to get married?! To me?!”
The mermaid wrings her hands together, biting her lip. “…I don’t even know your name yet.”
“Oh. It’s Bokuto!” Bokuto holds her hand out to the mermaid, and the mermaid cradles the sand dollar to her chest and shakes Bokuto’s hand, with the gentlest hold Bokuto has ever seen anybody give to a handshake. “If you get me a stick or something, I could probably write the kanji for it in the sand. What about you, what’s your name?”
“…Akaashi.”
Bokuto scrunches up her eyebrows. “Akashi?”
“No—Ah-kah-ah-shi.” The mermaid—Akaashi, that’s her name, that’s the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard, does it mean, like, red and reed? Red reed? That fits her so well—fidgets once again with her fingers as she stares down at the sea. “That’s my name, Bokuto-san.”
“It’s a really pretty name! I think it really suits you, Aghaashi!”
“Ah-kah-ah-shi, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi says, in the most patient voice. Bokuto doesn’t think she could ever get tired of it.
The two of them remain there for a little bit. They have not yet let go of each other’s hands, and if Bokuto had her way, they wouldn’t ever let go. She carefully, carefully moves her fingers so that they’re interlocking with Akaashi’s. Akaashi doesn’t seem to mind it, judging by the tiny grin on her face.
“So,” Bokuto says, swinging their hands around slightly. “I think it’s a bit too early to get married, dont’cha think? I wanna get to know you a little bit better before I marry you!”
“But you…” Akaashi’s voice trails off, as she squeezes Bokuto’s hand a little bit tighter, as though now that she has Bokuto, she’s terrified to let go of her. “You want to marry me?”
Bokuto blinks, and then she nods her head vigorously. “Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting all this time? Y’know, because you’ve been giving me seashells?”
Akaashi smiles, the corners of her bluey-green eyes crinkling up, and Bokuto vaguely thinks that she could look at that beautiful smile and those beautiful eyes forever. Well—she’s going to be able to look at this beautiful girl forever, isn’t she? After all, they’re going to get married! At some point. Sometime in the distant future, probably.
“Akaashi,” Bokuto says, very seriously, looking Akaashi in the eye. “What sort of decorations do you want at our wedding?”
“Let’s take this one step at a time, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi chuckles, patting Bokuto’s hand. Her touch is so gentle, so familiar. She looks up into Bokuto’s eyes, blinking the saltwater from her lashes—her very long and pretty lashes—and smiles once more.
“We’ll have our whole lives to figure this out.”