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Alfred moves lightly and swiftly over the moon-cooled sands. Although the tents look near, he knows the one he wants is at least a mile off, and he urges himself on.
This is the third day of the week-long extravaganza his father is holding for the sixteenth birthday of his beloved twin sons. It is the most elaborate celebration anyone can remember for years and years, even for generations. Today's entertainment was a traveling carnival with seven tents full of attractions, exotic animals, performers, and performances. There was a tall trapeze artist who flew high overhead, defying death, even taunting it by performing breath-taking acrobatics mid-air and without a safety net. His blond locks, lighter than the golden of the twins' hair, had flashed almost white as he danced through the air. Alfred's brother had liked that one best of all, enough to favor him with an invitation to their tables at the nightly feast. Alfred had liked the acrobat too, but the highlight for him was in the next tent they had gone to—the one he is running towards now.
He had been wonderstruck when he first entered the tent that afternoon: water. A vastness of it, contained in a wide, curving structure of glass, glimmering in the sunlight streaming through vents in the tent fabric. He had never seen so much water in one place in his life. Alfred thinks you could take all the water he has ever seen and put it in that glass tank, and it would not fill up even halfway. He has heard stories of such water, and he was amazed that the ocean—for surely this vast body could be nothing else—had been brought to him.
The water itself was such a wonder that at first Alfred did not realize it was only housing for the real attraction: The Merman. Or perhaps The Merboy. He had looked not much older than Alfred himself—though of course Alfred is not well-versed in the realities of merfolk; the one he saw today could be a hundred years old, or merely a babe.
"Alfred," Matthew said when he asked his brother's opinion on the matter, "you are too old to believe in fairytales."
Yet Alfred does believe. He thought the ocean was a tale—but now it is here, no less amazing, no less real than the merman.
Outside the tent, he stops to listen before he enters, as he has been taught. Sensing no movement or presence within, he goes inside.
It is here: the marvelous water. There is no sign of the merman, but at least the water is here. Alfred stands where he is for a while, watching the moon and stars play across the surface. Finally, he dares to approach.
The glass sides are taller than he is, but if he reaches up on tiptoe, he can put his hand over the side and touch the water. Alfred has touched the surface of water before, but it was just that: surface, shallow, meager. Now that he has touched the surface of depths, he wants more—but he doesn't know how it would work, to be in this water. He is not a merman, nor even a fake merman. Alfred does not think he would float, and he is certain his body would not know how to breathe water. Drawing his fingers back, he contents himself with standing outside it, face and hands pressed to the glass, gazing into the depths.
Suddenly, the depths are gazing back.
Alfred takes a quick, straightening step backwards. With a little distance from the distorting curvature of the thick glass, he sees that of course it is not the depths themselves. It is The Merman. The Merman smiles at him; from the corner of his mouth, little pearls of bubbles fly for the surface, and Alfred intently watches them go. He hadn't been allowed this close for the show, and he is now very certain that he would not know how to breathe water. He brings his eyes back down to The Merman's face, which looks young to him. He wonders if the sea keeps you very young-looking, with no sun to age and weather your skin. Looking at The Merman, who is still smiling, he remembers his manners and smiles too. Then The Merman raises his hand; taking it for a greeting, Alfred raises his own. The Merman extends his forefinger straight up, and Alfred mimics him again, pleased to be learning the hand language of the sea.
The Merman's mouth moves in something that is not breath, and Alfred wonders if it might be words as he knows them, spoken with water rather than air. More little bubbles trail up. Then there is a blur, a flash of glimmer, and Alfred feels drops of wetness fall about his face and shoulders. The Merman is no longer in front of him. Or he is—but not his face. The length of his tail shimmers as it pushes water back and forth, The Merman's body not moving with it but held in place.
There's another shower, and this time sound falls with it—low, light laughter. Looking up, Alfred sees The Merman's face above water, his arms hooked over the side of the glass. His hair no longer floats about him but sits in a heavy slick pushed back from his face. Thick brows keep the clinging streams of water out of his smiling eyes. His mouth is smiling too, his lips shimmering as pale light catches the droplets lingering there.
{art by OinkWarrior}
"Hello," The Merman says, his voice sounding as youthful as his face. Alfred has heard him speak before, during the performance. That was part of the evidence his brother used against The Merman, aside from the fact that only babies and fools believe in merfolk: this merman spoke their language. With an accent, yes, but still—how could a real merman speak the desert tongue?
Alfred doesn't know, and right now he doesn't care, because he is speaking with a merman. "Hello," he replies, unable to stop smiling.
The Merman lets the glass wall take more of his weight; his tail drifts and sways, the end fins curling and unfurling with ease.
Alfred looks up again when The Merman says, "You're one of the princes, aren't you? The ones being celebrated?"
"Yes. My name is Alfred F. Jones. And tomorrow—" He glances up through the ventilation slits in the tent, glimpsing the stars above. "Today," he modifies, knowing midnight has passed, "I am sixteen years old. I am a man," he can't help but add proudly.
The Merman smiles. "Congratulations on your manhood, Alfred F. Jones."
"Thank you—" Alfred starts, and then pauses. "What is your name?" he asks. "I ought to thank you properly."
The Merman's smile drifts across his lips, curving them as his fins lazily shape the water. "I don't have a name."
Alfred wonders if it was a foolish question, if perhaps merfolk don't name their children but have some other way of calling them, or if this one was taken from his home too young to remember his name—but then The Merman says, "If you wish to call me something, you may call me Arthur."
Alfred takes another step back so Arthur will be able to see him as he bows. "Thank you, Arthur. I am honored to receive your wishes."
"I am honored to offer them," Arthur returns. "But come: if we are being proper, then I should more than offer. I should grant you a wish, should I not?"
"If it so pleases you," Alfred replies, feeling an odd sparkle in his belly.
"It does. It would give me great pleasure to teach you how to swim, if you have such a desire."
Custom dictates that the one being celebrated make three wishes of those honoring him, and they in turn choose the one they will grant. All convention and proper conduct is forgotten when Alfred hears Arthur's offer. His eyes widen and his mouth comes open, but no words issue forth.
Tendrils of laughter fall from Arthur's lips. "Is that enthusiasm? Or horror? Have I transgressed such that I will be executed at dawn?"
"Our executions are at dusk," Alfred tells him, finding his voice again, "after a long and painful day in the full sun."
Arthur's tail swirls the water, sending it in slow, easy spirals. "That does not sound at all pleasant."
"It isn't," Alfred says seriously. Then, thinking to reassure Arthur, he adds, "You won't be executed," and is rewarded with another slowly dazzling smile.
"Would you like to swim, then?"
"Yes." Alfred clasps his hands to his heart. "Please." He looks at the sheer wall before him. He could probably hoist himself up, but he isn't sure about going over and just tumbling in like that.
"There are steps on the other side," Arthur tells him. "I'll meet you there." With that, he pushes off from the wall, arching backward so his head disappears under the water, then his torso; his tail comes up out of the water to follow the arc before, with a soft slap against the surface, it slides beneath again.
{"Merman Arthur" - art by DarkHeart510}
Alfred drops down to watch the tail push Arthur through the water before he runs around the circumference to meet Arthur on the other side. He finds the steps where he expected them, a little less than halfway around, and is pleased for having judged Arthur's trajectory correctly.
Arthur is waiting for him, suspended in the water, his arms caressing it in time with his tail. Alfred wonders whether that is part of swimming or if Arthur just enjoys the feel of it. It looks like it feels lovely.
Mounting the steps to the top, Alfred realizes that there are steps on the other side as well, leading down and in. He takes a moment to look at the water anew, the surface rippling as if it is a living thing. The desert lives if sand does not, and it must be that way for the ocean too, even for this captive one.
He starts to dip his foot in when Arthur says, "You'll want to take those off." Alfred looks from his toes hovering above the water to Arthur. "Your footwear. It will drag you down."
"Oh." Alfred's face colors. He feels he ought to have known this. Turning to sit on the top step, he unties his sandals and lets them drop to the floor below. It occurs to him that he ought to keep his clothing dry so his dereliction will not to be detected upon his return. Though he was not explicitly forbidden from coming here, there is something transgressive about sneaking out of your quarters in the middle of the night and intruding, uninvited, into your guest's. Especially when the guests are performers—strangers—and not family or friends or allies.
Still seated, he looks back over his shoulder. "How much of my clothing would it be decent to remove?"
"However much or little as you are comfortable with," Arthur says.
Alfred hesitates only briefly before asking, "Would you mind if I were to be naked?"
"Not at all." Arthur smiles. "I am naked."
Alfred can't help blushing at that. He keeps blushing as he stands to undress, aware of Arthur's eyes on his back. When his robes and undergarments have joined his sandals on the floor, he takes a breath and turns around.
This time Arthur doesn't say anything when Alfred's toe approaches the water. Alfred touches the surface. It is cool but not cold, though the quality of the touch is too different for him to gauge if this is as warm as the sands when remnants of the sun linger just past dusk. His toe swirls across the surface, but the tracings are more fleeting than those he makes in sand, disappearing even as he creates them. He goes beneath the surface, letting his entire foot sink into the water without resistance, engulfed by it as he reaches for the submerged glass step. Bringing his other foot to join it, he stands in water well over his ankles, lapping against his shins and calves.
All else forgotten, he looks up to grin at Arthur, who is already smiling and maybe has never stopped. Alfred looks down again as he takes the next careful step, another, and another after that, until the water is dancing around his knees. There are no more steps. There is only water now.
"It's all right." Arthur's voice is just like his laughter, low and light, words dancing and flowing. "Come in, Alfred," Arthur says, and when Alfred looks, Arthur is holding out his hand. Alfred knows that in the stories, the merfolk always say "come" in voices like music and offer their hands, and then when the sailors try to take those hands, the merfolk disappear beneath the waves. And so do the sailors, forever.
With a deep breath, Alfred closes his eyes and takes the last step that does not exist.
He knows there is no step, but he doesn't really know until he feels it not there, until he is reaching and nothing is catching him; the water does not hold him as it holds Arthur, it just takes him in, takes him down, and he opens his mouth to find that he was right: his body does not know how to breathe water—
Then there is air again, and his body tries to take it in at the same time that it is expelling the unwanted water. Alfred chokes some, but, oh, there is air. As well, there is Arthur's voice at his ear: "It's all right, I've got you"; Arthur's arms around him confirm the truth of it.
Arthur holds him like that until Alfred stops coughing. The air hovering above the water is strange with salt, and the taste is on his lips, in his nose; but it is air, and Alfred sucks it into his lungs.
The surface around him is churned up, the water distraught. "I'm sorry," Alfred says.
"You have no cause to apologize."
"For disturbing the water. For disrupting the calm and the shimmer." Alfred looks back over his shoulder at Arthur. "For that, I am sorry."
Arthur only smiles. "You have done nothing to the water. Look, it shimmers still."
Alfred looks: shimmers swell in each cresting ripple, playing even brighter now. He smiles and tries to touch them, but though he feels the water, the shimmers elude his fingers.
When Arthur's arm loosens and drifts down, Alfred reaches below with both hands to try to hold on, sinking himself down so the new ripples jump over his lip into his mouth. The taste of salt is strong, this water truly like no other Alfred has known.
Before the strange water can fill him, Arthur's arm tightens around him again, holding him up. "I'm not going to let go," Arthur promises. "But I offered you the pleasure of swimming, and if you still want that, I will make it yours."
"It is my greatest desire," Alfred says, which is the response of custom—but also, here, the truth.
Arthur smiles. "Turn to me." Alfred does and they are fully face-to-face for a moment; then Arthur turns too, arms wrapping behind himself to hold Alfred, encouraging Alfred to take his shoulders. Then he tips forward, and for a fearful moment Alfred believes he is going under again; but the fear transmutes to exhilaration as Arthur moves them across the surface, through the surface. Alfred delights in the decadence of the water as it rushes over his skin. It is one thing to see such water, and another to feel it, and still another to wallow in it as they do now.
Then there is the feel of Arthur's skin, as cool as the water and softer, just as smooth. Alfred remembers how his fingertips wrinkled when, on a decadent whim, he kept them submerged in the tea saucer of dewdrops he had painstakingly collected from cacti one morning. He supposes that human skin wrinkles up when immersed for lengthy periods—but Arthur is smooth, supple. Even the scales of his lower body and tail are soft.
After the swim, Arthur offers to bring Alfred back to the steps. "So you may rest on them, if you don't wish yet to leave."
"I don't wish yet to rest," Alfred replies, hooking his hands over the side of the wall instead, his feet touching nothing but water.
Turning, he watches Arthur's tail move with deceptive languidness beneath the surface as he treads water. It occurs to Alfred that perhaps the merfolk don't call it that. Maybe it's natural to them, like standing is for humans; maybe when merfolk sit on rocks at sea, they call it treading earth. He wonders how long they can sit on rocks, how often they surface. Taking in a deep breath, he holds it as he drops down along the wall, letting the water close over his head. He barely counts to ten before he has to pull himself back up, mouth opening greedily for air.
When he has enough breath for words, he asks, "How long can you breathe out of water?"
"Indefinitely. Or rather I should that if there is a limit, I haven't reached it yet. I seem to be capable of extracting the elements necessary to breathe from both air and water. Maybe from other sources as well, though I have yet to breathe fire or earth." Arthur's smile beguiles so that Alfred does not know if he is truthful, and he does not care, for the ideas and the mouth they come from are so pretty.
As they converse, Arthur lies on his back, body stretched in a slight arch, the fins of his tail unfurled against the surface, his hair fallen back into a drifting halo. "Shall I offer you the pleasure of floating now?"
Alfred speaks true again: "It is my fondest desire."
Once more, Arthur's arm wraps around him. "Let go," Arthur instructs. "Let yourself fall back onto me." Alfred does as he is bid, and feels himself not falling but arching, drawn back against Arthur, stretched out, cradled and supported by the body beneath him. "Relax," Arthur murmurs. "Breathe. Trust yourself. Trust me. Trust the water. Feel it holding you."
Alfred does all of it, listening to Arthur's voice, listening to his own breath, listening to the lapping of the water, the ocean's breathing; he matches his own breath to that of the ocean, slow and easy...
He doesn't realize that Arthur has dropped away, that nothing holds him but the water itself—he doesn't realize that he is floating until he sees Arthur beside him. There's a little bit of splashing and sinking—but Arthur reminds him to trust, and Alfred does. It is the single most awesome and wondrous thing he has ever experienced in his life. He never imagined anything in reality could be so glorious. It's exhilarating and soothing all at once, and gentle, blissful elation suffuses him: he is floating on floating.
His full-bodied arch of pleasure and delight causes him to slip under, but this time he doesn't panic. He comes up laughing, merriment and water sparkling on his lips. The deep breathing that Arthur taught him disrupted by his laughter, he starts to slip under again—and feels Arthur catch him.
Arthur tows him over to the side. As he holds on, Alfred moves his dangling legs, holding them together to see if he can feel a little of what it must be like to move through water with a tail, kicking apart to see what it's like for a human. Looking over his shoulder, he sees Arthur watching him. "I feel like a little boy," Alfred confesses with a grin.
Arthur looks at him straight on. Alfred is unaccustomed to being looked at so directly by someone who is not a member of his own family. Even his teacher drops his eyes when he isn't training Alfred. Arthur has been looking at him directly all night, but there is something different in this gaze. It is strange... but not unpleasant.
Then Arthur says, "You don't look like one."
It quiets Alfred, the look as much as the words; the look, more. This is not the way his father and brother and teacher hush him. This calms him, and it somehow excites him at the same time.
They look at each other for longer than they have before. Alfred had thought during the performance that The Merman had green eyes, but it is difficult to discern their color in this light, even closer; even this close.
The smile shimmers Arthur's lips again. Then that shimmer touches Alfred's own mouth.
Arthur's lips are as soft as his skin, his tongue as supple, his mouth as cool. Alfred himself feels so hot that he imagines anyone and everything would feel cool in contrast, but he thinks Arthur really is. He wonders if he feels as hot as the desert to Arthur, if Arthur has ever known that heat.
Alfred doesn't remember letting go of the glass, but he is holding onto Arthur now, held only by Arthur and the water. As they kiss, he feels something more solid than water brush against his feet and slide up between his legs; he lets himself part and feels Arthur's tail rise to support him fully as Arthur leans back, drawing Alfred down with him. It is more glorious, yes, kissing and floating like this, oh~ yes.
There is a supple ripple of movement between Alfred's legs as Arthur flexes his tail and swims them out to the center; the parted water rushes softly against Alfred's legs, thrilling him more. Each surge rubs him against Arthur just a little, and Alfred realizes he is fully aroused. He realizes that there is no way to hide it. He realizes too that he doesn't want to.
He has been taught words for different permissions, but never any for this. It is like floating, he decides: he will trust himself, he will trust Arthur. He smiles. "Is this acceptable?" he asks with a light grind.
"Yes." Arthur smiles in return, curving and flexing beneath him, stimulating Alfred with the textured softness of his scales even as he continues to support Alfred, his hands and body encouraging Alfred to rub against him more. Arousal twines with the salt in the air, and Alfred, fully open-mouthed, sucks it in for the breathable elements; he is not as practiced at such extraction as Arthur, and he feels he is inhaling arousal itself, mixing it inside himself, breathing it out again in sighs and inarticulate pleasure.
A soft splash joins the sounds of delight as Arthur arcs his tail out of the water. "Sit up," Arthur instructs, hands on Alfred's hips. When Alfred obliges, Arthur slides Alfred down his torso. He arches more and Alfred sinks in just a little deeper, just a little more, slowly, until the water has covered the head of his cock. One of Arthur's hands leaves Alfred's hip to push him back until the curve of Arthur's tail cradles him; the other hand wraps around Alfred's cock and begins to stroke, just as smooth and decadent as the water's caresses, stronger and more heated. Eyes closed, Alfred floats on Arthur's strokes; he opens his eyes as he cries out softly and watches himself spill pearlescent ropes onto Arthur's skin and into the water.
When breath enough for words has returned to him, Alfred asks, "How may I bring you to pleasure?" But Arthur only smiles and says he got his pleasure, and Alfred follows his gaze to silver threads drifting in the water, shimmering more darkly than his own offerings.
Alfred watches the drift for a while, the flow, the water itself. "Is this the ocean?" he asks, touching it; touching his wet fingers to his lips and savoring the salt. "Is this the true taste?" He inhales. "The smell?" He turns to Arthur. "What does it sound like, the ocean?"
"Here." Arthur straightens and lets Alfred down as he reaches for Alfred's face. "It sounds like this." Covering Alfred's ears with the palms of his hands, he presses gently but closely, fingers lying flush along Alfred's skin. A curious rush and thrum, low and soft, fills Alfred's ears.
As he listens, Alfred looks at Arthur, watching Arthur watch him, the smile soft on his lips. The ocean's heartbeat fills Alfred with comfort and wonderment, with longing. Looking into Arthur's eyes, he reaches for Arthur and feels Arthur's tail coming up to support him; he cups his hands to Arthur's ears and gives what ocean he can to Arthur.
They gaze at each other, delight shimmering their smiles.
In the oceans they are giving, they kiss again.
When they part, Alfred murmurs, "Tell me what is true and what is tale. Tell me if the ocean is as wide and as blue as the stories say."
"It is wide." The water around them sways with each easy movement of Arthur's lower body as he keeps them buoyed. "And yes, in some places it is the bluest blue beneath the sky, bluer even than the sky." He smiles into Alfred's wide eyes. "But too, there are places where the water runs green."
"As green as your eyes?"
Arthur's eyes sparkle as he smiles, and Alfred realizes he can see how green they are now. He sees that the sparkle is not caught moon and stars, but traces of dawn, the light that stretches from the sun just before it rises.
Alfred looks at Arthur solemnly. "I must go."
Smile gentling on his lips but not fading from them, Arthur bows his head. The water parts before them graciously as Arthur brings Alfred to the steps. "All fortune to you, Alfred F. Jones."
"I thank you, Arthur." Alfred lingers, one foot on the solidity of the first step, the other still suspended in the water. When Arthur raises his head, Alfred inclines his own without breaking their mutual gaze; the smile from his heart, meant for his lips, lodges thickly in his throat. "Thank you."
Gathering his clothing, Alfred uses an undergarment to dry himself hastily, then pulls on his robe and slips into his sandals as he plans his route back into his quarters and what he will say, as there is little chance he will make it without being seen. Much of the household will be up already, preparing for the celebrations that will continue this most important day, the actual day that marks his turning. The celebrations will continue without the carnival, which will spend most of the day packing, before moving out as soon as it has cooled enough to allow travel.
At the open tent flaps, Alfred turns around: Arthur is watching him underwater. Their eyes meet, and as surely as any lyrical invitation to the depths, Alfred walks back. Their hands touch through opposite sides of the glass; so too their lips.
Then without another word, without another look, Alfred turns and runs.
The water here is wondrously, gorgeously, awesomely blue. This is not the first stretch of ocean Alfred has seen in his travels, but no matter how much he sees, it is still a wonder to behold. As true and real as he knows the ocean to be now, it is somehow still fantastical to him. Standing on the shore, he gazes and gazes and gazes. He knows that no matter how much he does so, he will never see it all; rarely will he see more than the surface, and never even all of that. He gazes into wonder and beauty, fantasy and reality...
And he realizes that someone else has stopped to gaze too.
The salt breeze has picked up, and Alfred has to lift a hand to his face to keep his hair out of his eyes when he turns to look. The other young man does not look back but continues gazing out, eyes focused beneath his thick brows.
Alfred returns his own gaze seaward. Waves swell and crest, swallowed back down into the expanse of blue that stretches luxuriously for shore, the ocean murmuring inarticulately. "Marvelous," Alfred murmurs back.
"A marvelous blue." The breeze carries the other's words to Alfred, and Alfred looks at him again, but the man has not turned.
"Someone once told me that there also are places where the water flows green," Alfred says conversationally.
The man continues to gaze unwaveringly out to sea. "He did not lie to you."
"You have seen such waters?"
For the first time now, the man turns to him and looks Alfred full in the face. A smile slides slowly along his lips, opening his mouth as he says, "I have."
Alfred looks at him, at the sparkle of smile in green eyes. Fallen waves rustle up the sand to them and caress their feet before sliding back to deeper waters.
"It's you, isn't it?" Alfred says. "I thought it was, when I saw you."
"I didn't know if you would remember." The man is still smiling softly.
"I have never forgotten, Arthur."
"Nor have I, Alfred," Arthur says. "In fact, if my memory tells me true, this is the day you mark your turns of time in the world. Your twenty-first such day."
"It is," Alfred acknowledges with a pleased grin.
Arthur returns the smile. "Then you must allow me to grant you the wish of food and drink, if such pleasure you desire."
The ocean accompanies them as they walk. Raising his hands, Alfred twists them at the wrist to cover his ears. He relaxes his hands to listen to the ocean's true murmuring, then presses in close again and listens to the one inside him. Arthur is smiling at him, and Alfred flashes a smile too as he drops his hands. "It has never stopped speaking to me," he tells Arthur. "The whisper you gave me that night took up in my heart and remained in every beat, every pulse." He looks out to the water, though his gaze cannot penetrate its depths. There were nights he wondered if this was the song that pulled sailors beneath the water, if they went more willingly than the tales told. "The sand seas of my father and his father and his father's father no longer sang to me. And so I left two years ago, to walk the earth and sail the waters."
The sun has begun to set. They stop wordlessly. Alfred looks at the sun, at the colors seeping out of it into the sky, touching the water. He watches as the water stretches itself, stretching the sun upon it, rushing up the shore for darkened sand, touching their toes. The water is colder than the blood beneath his skin and he shivers, though not unpleasantly.
"I think this must be the most miraculous place in all the world." The salt on his lips is sweet in his lungs. "This place where the lands meet the waters meet the skies."
Arthur smiles. "Are you speaking of miracles or romance?"
Alfred turns to him, his own smile as full as his look. "Are they not the same?"
The sun has yielded the sky; melted golds and oranges and roses linger at the horizon, slowly being swallowed by the darker tones of night. On the ocean's surface, the moon shimmers a faint silver.
"You know," Alfred confesses as they begin to walk again, "I thought you were real back then." His mouth curves up on one side. "I guess I always did think so, until this very moment."
"I am real." Arthur smiles, brushing an arm against Alfred as they walk.
"Oh yes, of course." Alfred laughs. "It's only, I thought you were really a merman. What a foolish, fanciful boy I was! My father and brother always said so; everyone did." He laughs again and Arthur joins in, low and light like the voice Alfred remembers, and Alfred feels it curl warmly in his belly.
"Well," Arthur says, "I may not be able to duplicate the experiences of that waterful night, but you are welcome to spend this one with me as well."
Alfred doesn't realize he has stopped smiling until he feels himself smile anew.
In Arthur's rooms, the ocean murmurs to Alfred through the open window as they kiss. Arthur's mouth moves along Alfred's jaw to his ear, his murmuring nearer and damper now than the ocean's. Alfred turns to take his mouth again, to lick and swallow these murmurs, to breathe his own into Arthur. As they undress, their fingers whisper over skin, joining the caresses of the night breeze.
Arthur lies on his back and Alfred straddles him, gazing down as Arthur gazes up, his eyes an indeterminate shimmer of color in the moonlight; and Alfred floats upon the gaze. He leans down and kisses Arthur. "Open your eyes," he whispers, and kisses Arthur again when his lashes sweep up. He still can't see the color, and now he's no longer floating, but sinking, down and into the gaze.
He moves between Arthur's legs, and when they both are ready, Alfred sinks into Arthur: he takes a deep breath, and oh yes, his body knows how to breathe this, thicker than air; he floats and sinks and breathes, and breathes, and more than breathes. Arthur is as warm as sunned waters, and Alfred shivers warm, shivers hot, shivers and sinks and floats, inside Arthur, inside himself; inside Arthur, Alfred goes, and goes, and goes, and comes.
He slips out, takes a deep breath and sinks down again, not into Arthur this time but taking Arthur into him; he sweeps Arthur along with the gentle undertow of his mouth until Arthur spills out into him, thicker than the ocean, sweeter of salt.
Alfred shares these traces mouth-to-mouth with Arthur, then rests his head on Arthur's chest. His fingers move, casual and random, lazily exploring Arthur's body. Arthur's skin is softer to touch than that of any man or woman Alfred has been with, though he allows that the sensation could be memory-clouded senses.
His fingers slide over skin that is almost too smooth to be skin. Alfred's eyes follow his fingertips and find a trail of glimmer. He raises himself up curiously and leans in for a closer look:
It appears to be a tiny row of scales, embedded in the skin just along the hipbone ridge. Tracing them with his fingertip, he studies the way they shimmer with new angles in the moonlight.
Alfred sits up and looks at Arthur's face. Arthur is smiling a slow smile; not indolent like the lazy smiles Alfred remembers, but full of things unnamable.
"You are real," Alfred says softly.
Arthur smiles his smile. "Yes."
Their mutual gaze holds, even when their smiles are overcome.
"How?" Alfred breathes. "How can you be here?"
"I came for you," Arthur says simply, and simply touches his lips to Alfred's.
"A wish?" Alfred asks when they part. "A sacrifice?"
"Human fairytales." Arthur smiles, amused.
"You come as you will, then?"
"As the moon wills." Reaching out, Arthur strokes Alfred's hair, brushing it back from his face. "The desert claimed you with your coloring, golden sands and sun in your hair, expanses of blue sky in your eyes. This you know." His hand stills in Alfred's locks as he gazes into Alfred's eyes more deeply. "Where I am from, water claims us too—but may offer us to other elements as well: those with blue eyes may visit the sky, those with green, the grass-covered earth. Some are bound to the storming and deeper waters by their gray eyes; others, it is rumored, are silver-eyed and meant for the ocean's darkest depths."
"Your eyes are green," Alfred says.
Arthur smiles, his fingers brushing over Alfred's sun-blessed skin.
"How long can you stay?"
"How long do you want me to?"
"Forever," Alfred breathes.
Arthur smiles. "Human fairytales," he murmurs again. Kissing Alfred, he explains, "The moon accords me one cycle in twelve of my choosing to spend beyond the sea."
And so each moon-granted interval, they love as humans. And they live ever where the ocean, blue and green, meets the earth, green and golden, meets the sky, golden and blue.