Work Text:
Casida Tasend
2 sweeps // 5ish Earth years
Llunegloirs city docks
You jump into the water before one of the older kids can push you in. They’ve no patience with pupas, particularly with pupas what are scared of water – like, you just watched a tall olive punt Hester Amayye off the dock because he was sick of Hester’s snivelling.
And, like, you could totally have told her snivelling wouldn’t help. It doesn’t matter that your whole cohort’s never been in water over your heads before, never been out of the baby hives and their shallow pools, ‘cause in a few weeks? The fishery hives are gonna pick apprentices, and nobody wants to bid on a new ‘prentice who can’t swim.
If you don’t get ‘prenticed, you’re on your own for finding a way to make money beyond whatever stipend you get, and most kids in the baby hives don’t have that big of a stipend.You certainly don’t. But it’s fine, because, like, you’ve been practicing your swimming, and how hard can it be?
You smash through the surface hard enough to hurt your stomach, but – it’s a hot night, and the water’s deliciously cool.
Cautiously, you open your eyes – the big kids said it would sting, but it doesn’t really. All around you, everything is blue-green and shimmery and kinda blurry? Anything more than a few feet away fades into darker blue and then into black, but you can still see okay up close. You’re already bobbing back up towards the surface, but you push yourself back down because –
You have the weirdest feeling?
Somewhere out in the deep, beyond where you can see… something is listening. You know it is. It heard you get into the water, and now all its attention is on you, which should be creepy? It’s not, though. It just feels – focused.
It takes a lot more effort than you’d think to keep yourself from floating up, but you curl your toes into the sandy floor of the bay. The sand slides away under your feet and over on top of them until they’re buried, and then you just huddle there, hugging yourself, cheeks puffed out with air and eyes bugged out with trying to see… what? Something. Something big and old and watchful.
Besides that feeling of being noticed, you don’t see or hear anything before your lungs finally start burning and you have to claw your way to the surface again. But just for a second, just before your ears come out of the water, you think you hear a deep, old, far-off voice say Ah.
Then you pop back into the air with a splash, and Hester’s clinging to the edge of the dock and crying and the big olive is teasing her and the other pupas are trying to drag themselves out and someone says, “Hey, how long were you under?”
And that’s what you remember, mostly, of that night: you stayed under for two-and-a-half minutes, longer than everyone else in your cohort. You’re very proud of that, and it’s not until sweeps later until you remember that odd feeling, and wonder about it.