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“Hey, Barold! Time to sink or swim.”
Barry squints toward the sound of Taako’s voice and sees his blurry form striding across the sand. He’s carrying his board under one arm, waving as he approaches.
“I’m worried it’ll be the former,” Barry mutters, standing up and brushing the sand off his palms. He squints at the ocean, where the sun is just beginning to crest over the water, burning a hole in the horizon that paints the whole sky a deep rose.
“You can do magic, my dude,” Taako says. “If you manage to drown yourself, I’m pretty sure you get your wizard license revoked.” He sticks the board upright in the sand, kicks off his sandals and starts scanning the horizon, studying the waves. Barry suspects he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but has to admit: Taako looks the part. His usually well-kept hair has grown tangled and crunchy with daily exposure to salt and sand, and the sun has deepened and freckled his skin to a russet brown.
“Merle drowned just last year,” Barry reminds him.
Taako chuckles. “Oh, yeah. Well, Merle barely grasps arcane fundamentals on a good day.” He yawns loudly. “Anyway. No one’s allowed to die during beach year. It’s in the rules.”
“Isn’t Merle, like, on his actual deathbed right now?” Barry asks.
“Listen, if you’re planning to act like Merle in any way, you have to tell me right now or it’s entrapment.”
Barry smirks. “Not today.”
“Good. ’Cause I’d rather just off us both right now, save us the time.” Taako looks at him suddenly. “Where’re your glasses?”
Barry glares at him. “I left them on the ship. Didn’t want a repeat of yesterday.” The day before, Taako’s swim lesson had involved chucking Barry’s glasses into the surf and telling him to retrieve them. After an hour of wading around, groping hopelessly in the constantly shifting sand, Taako pulled the glasses out of his pocket, where they’d been the whole time. Barry had immediately stormed away, ending the session.
“What lesson was that supposed to teach me, by the way?” he asks.
“That your friends can be real boners and you shouldn’t trust any of them to save you from drowning.”
“What a valuable gift you’ve given me, thank you,” Barry says flatly.
“Don’t mention it.” Taako does a quick series of stretches, like an athlete limbering up before a big game. “Okay, let’s get moving. I just gotta carve that sick spray.”
“I don’t even know what words you’re saying,” Barry replies.
“That’s fine. C’mon.” Taako hoists his board under his arm again and starts jogging toward the water. Barry follows, heart pounding in his throat. The waves are bigger and stronger this morning than Barry has ever seen them. Each incoming wave crashing against his legs jostles him, and the sand is sucked out from under his feet as the water retreats. He feels like he’s going to fall at any moment. Taako, meanwhile, effortlessly pulls ahead, paddling on his board.
“What’s the game plan?” Barry calls over the sound of the crashing waves.
“Uh, swim?” Taako shouts back, then disappears under the crest of an incoming wave, diving with his board beneath him as if it’s part of his body. He shoots up on the other side of the wave, every bit as dexterous as the strange, enormous gray fish they spotted on their fly-over when this cycle began.
Despite his mounting terror, Barry keeps pressing forward. Truthfully, he isn’t sure Taako wouldn’t let him drown if it was easier than saving him. Then again, Barry isn’t sure of much when it comes to Taako. Over the last twenty years, out of everyone in the crew, he’s been the most difficult to get to know. His sister, on the other hand, is the person Barry feels closest to. “Taako’s really hard to read,” he told Lup once, a few cycles ago.
She just grinned and said, “Oh? It’s pretty easy for me.”
“That’s because you have that weird twin thing going on,” Barry said. “Even when you’re both speaking in mongoose, I never know what you’re talking about.”
Lup shrugged. “You should try harder. Taako’s a tough nut to crack, I’ll give you that.” She paused before adding, “He’s worth it, though.”
He believed her then, and believes her still. Granted, he’d believe anything she told him—which gets him into trouble sometimes, since Lup likes to pull pranks every bit as much as her brother. Regardless, he trusts her wholeheartedly about this, despite the predicament Taako is currently leading him into.
“I think this might be too extreme for the first day!” Barry shouts, and starts to say something else, but a wave hits him square in the face. He sputters and nearly loses his footing.
“Come on, Barold!” Taako calls back. “You can do it. You gotta be one with the water to ride the waves!”
Barry opens his mouth to respond and again, gets hit with a wave. This one succeeds at knocking him off his feet, and he falls ass over tea kettle, as his mother used to say. For a confused, horrifying moment, Barry isn’t sure which way is up. He opens his eyes and the salty water burns them; he can’t see a foot in front of his face without his glasses. His feet finally connect with sand and he pushes off, bursting through the surface of the water with a gasp that’s cut short by yet another wave smacking him full in the face and sucking him back under.
Barry has died a couple times by now. He knows at some point, the terror will give way to a quiet acceptance, before the darkness takes over. But drowning taps into a deep part of himself he doesn’t think he can ever accept. Water fills his mouth and he has the strangest urge to scream, when suddenly, he feels an arm wrap around him, tugging him to the surface. Taako.
As he drags Barry toward shore, Taako lets out a sequence of grunts and snorts. It takes Barry a moment to realize he’s speaking mongoose, saying a phrase that roughly translates to “health-status, ally.” Barry knows he’s asking, Are you okay, friend?
He grunts back an affirmative, and even though the water is knee-deep now, Taako keeps an arm around him as they shuffle onto dry land. Barry flops onto the warm sand as soon as he's able, panting hard. Taako immediately takes off toward the Starblaster. Barry can’t tell if he’s mad or fed up or simply too embarrassed by the scene Barry just made to stick around for another second. But a few moments later, Taako returns, carrying a pair of glasses. “Here,” he says, handing them over, and then he sits down beside him and waits for him to recover.
“You’re clucked,” Taako tells him.
“I’m what now?” Barry asks.
“Clucked. It means you’re scared of the waves, barney.” Taako leans back on his elbows.
“You’re really leaning into this…grating beach persona, huh?” Barry asks.
“For sure. I live like I’m dyin’, my dude. And if I die here, I wanna die in character. It’s called method acting.” Taako nudges him with his leg. “So tell me. Why are you so clucked?”
Barry takes off his glasses and attempts to clean them on his filthy shorts, before quickly giving up and putting them back on, dirtier than before. “My step-dad,” he says. “He…wasn’t a very nice guy. He tried to teach me to swim once. Carried me to the end of a pier and chucked me into the water.”
“What? Asshole.”
Barry chuckles. “Yeah.”
“Look, I know a little something about dealing with assholes,” Taako says.
“Oh yeah?”
“Of course. I’m the biggest one I know.” A grin spreads across his face.
Barry grins back. “Nah,” he says. “You’re okay.”
“Shucks, Barold. Write me a poem about it, why don’t you?” With that, Taako stands, snatching up his board. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a sport to invent,” he says. “See ya, nerd.” And he jogs away, back toward the water.
One day, swimming will be Barry’s favorite thing in the world. One day, sinking beneath the surface of a cold lake will be as comforting as returning home after a long day. One day, floating on his back—buoyed in equal parts by nature and his trust in it—will feel exactly like an old friend’s embrace. And he won’t remember why. He won’t remember where this love stems from; he’ll only know how to return to it, again and again.
This is the gift that Taako gives him, bit by bit, each morning that year. This is the gift Barry will spend a decade trying to repay. A decade inside a cave, hiding, scheming, raging. A decade following instructions he can’t begin to understand, fishing himself out of a tank filled with brackish liquid, over and over again, without knowing how he got there. A decade repaying his old friend, for this. This happy, peaceful year by the sea.
Barry is struggling to float on his back. It’s incredibly unnatural, to relax and let the water cradle him. The waves lapping at his temples make him panic. The way the water fills his ears reminds him too much of sinking to the bottom of an unforgiving lake, the pressure building around him, threatening to break him apart. Taako, seeing this, dives to the ocean floor and picks up two pebbles. He transmutates them into earplugs to keep the water out, and this helps.
As Barry tries to float—without panicking, flailing or sinking—Taako talks to him in a low voice. “Lup taught me how to swim, you know,” he says.
“Oh?” Barry tries to sound casual—which is extremely difficult, given his current position and the fact that hearing Lup’s name always makes his heart skip a beat.
“Yeah. We worked on a sailboat for a little while when we were younger.”
“No shit. Really?”
“Yeah. I hated it.”
Barry chuckles. “Yeah, you two don’t strike me as sailors.”
“Actually, Lup loved it,” Taako says.
“I can’t picture that, to be honest.”
“I know, right? She seems so cool.” Every so often, Taako taps on Barry’s shoulder blade, calf, back of his head. Just to let him know his hands are there beneath him, that he’s not going to let him sink. It’s helping Barry float a little more steadily, without as many jolts and jumps. “I think it’s just—Lup loves the water. I mean, you’ve seen it. But I swear, she jumped into the ocean Day One and…swam. No clue how she did it. I could make a joke about her being more gaseous than me, but…” Taako glances over his shoulder, as if expecting Lup to be nearby, eavesdropping despite their distance from shore. Barry can see the tangible relief on his face when there’s no fireball flying in their direction.
“And then she taught you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to learn. Well, let’s be real. I didn’t want to do anything on that fucking boat. It sucked. But Lup and I got tasked with spear-fishing.”
Barry laughs. “No way.”
“Way.” Taako gently pushes his forehead down, to keep him from craning his neck out of the water. “I guess the captain saw how great at swimming Lup was, and thought we were the same person? That happens a lot when you’re a twin.”
“I can imagine,” Barry says, and remembers with a twinge of shame how long it took him to start thinking of the twins as individuals. It didn’t happen until after they landed on the animal planet that first year.
“Anyway. She’d be a good person to ask for swimming lessons, is what I’m getting at.” Taako’s tone is casual, benign, and Barry squints up at him. But as always, Taako’s face is steely, indifferent, giving away nothing. If he suspects—well, he doesn’t seem angry, at least.
“If you don’t want to—” Barry starts to say.
“No, no. I said I would. It’s cool. I’m a dilla, if you know what I mean.”
“Rarely if ever, bud.”
Taako grins at him. “Hey, Barold. You’ve been floating on your own for a good three minutes now. I didn’t want to jinx it but—”
Barry jumps with surprise and loses control, flapping his arms, standing up to keep from sinking.
“Yeah,” Taako says, “like I was saying...”
“But I did it,” Barry says, smiling, and Taako smiles back.
“You sure did,” he says back. “Now just do it a hundred more times. While actually swimming. That’d be an improvement.”
Barry learns more about Taako than he expected to. He learns that Taako is very caring and considerate, in fits and starts. He genuinely worries about Barry’s wellbeing, but will only ask about it in mongoose grunts. He shrouds advice in silly made-up surfer lingo, but it happens to be thoughtful and kind advice all the same. He relates to Barry’s somewhat troubled past with humor in a way that masks and deflects, without rejecting the confidence Barry is granting him. In other words, he’s a lot more like Lup than Barry gave him credit for. He’s just as compassionate and generous, but on his own terms, in his own way. And with a guardedness Barry can’t help but recognize and relate to.
But he still has a lot to learn.
When Barry finally admits his feelings for Lup—in as vague a way he possibly can—he’s surprised by how Taako responds, with grace and understanding.
You got all the time in the world, my man. This will become a mantra Barry repeats to himself in the months and years to come. It will be a promise that gives him the courage to crack himself open for someone like Lup. It will be the seed that grows into the greatest love he’s ever known. And it starts here, on this beach that used to terrify him, with this elf he once suspected might leave him for dead. It starts here, with his best friend.
The last night before the Hunger comes, Barry and Taako stay up after everyone else goes to bed. They stand near the water, watching the tide roll in by the light of the six moons above. “So,” Barry says after a while. “You’re…okay with me liking your sister, right?” He’s very glad for the darkness so that Taako can’t see the heat rising to his face. The dude tends to be merciless about blushing.
Taako chuckles. “Am I okay with it?” He pauses, crossing his arms, a wide smile on his face. “What would happen if I wasn’t, Bluejeans?”
“I don’t know, man. I guess I’m just asking how you feel about it in general.”
A few beats of silence pass before Taako speaks. “I’m not gonna, like, sit you down and tell you to treat her right,” he says. “That’s not really my style. And if Lup ever found out I did that, I’m pretty sure she’d kill me. Probably literally, now that we’re immortal and all.”
“No, I—”
“Besides, I know you’ll treat her right,” Taako continues. “You’re a good dude, Barry. And even if you weren’t, the bottom line is I trust Lup. She can handle herself better than anyone I know. She’ll be okay no matter what.”
Barry nods. “That’s true.”
Taako looks at him closely. “Are you asking because I’m Lup’s brother, or because I’m your friend?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Well, yeah. It’s gotta be, right?” Taako swings his leg in a wide arc, cutting it through the water, and it suddenly hits Barry how much Taako’s going to miss the ocean. This beach. How much they all will, with the amount of misery and struggle that surely lies ahead. “Lup and I have never really done…relationships,” Taako says slowly. “I mean, we’ve dated people, natch. We’re not exactly inexperienced. Sorry,” he quickly adds.
“That’s okay,” Barry says, and means it. “We’ve all had lives before this one.”
Taako smiles. “Ain’t that the truth. Anyway, we had each other and that was enough, I guess. All of our relationships have been…shallow. Short. Low maintenance, low priority. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, you know?” He pauses, then says, “I guess if I was gonna be worried about anything, it’d be that. Because you wouldn’t just be somebody my sister was dating. Some nerd she liked for mysterious reasons.”
“You know, I’m not actually nerdier than any of you, if you think about—” Barry starts to argue.
“Yeah, okay. Nerd.” Taako blows a raspberry at him, then says, “See, the thing is, you’re a nerd that I like. A friend-nerd. Okay, a nerd that I’m basically stuck with, if I’m honest.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“That started out with how much I like you! So, you’re welcome.”
“I plan on taking your advice, you know,” Barry tells him. “I’m not gonna rush into anything. I think about it a lot. You know, what if it goes badly? We have to work together and live together and find a way to…coexist.”
“And save the universe,” Taako jokes. “Sheesh, where’s your sense of altruism?”
Barry rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. That’s what I’m saying. I want to make sure it’ll…work.”
“You won’t know if it’ll work until it does or doesn’t, my man,” Taako replies. “But hey, I meant what I said before. You definitely got time. Use that time, is my point.” He stretches, then adds, “And just so you know, if you fuck it up, I’ll have to take Lup’s side on everything from then on. And let’s be real. You’re better at finding the light of creation than she is. But I’ll have no choice, Barold. I’ll be forced to follow her around, world after world, as each one gets vored by the most gauche world-destroying entity the universe has ever seen. Millions of people will probably die. No presh.”
“You really know how to ease a guy’s mind, you know that?” Barry says mockingly.
“I have many talents.” Taako kicks at the water again. “So. Would you say you love to swim now?”
Barry smiles. “I guess so,” he says.
“It was a good year, anyway,” Taako says.
“The best,” Barry agrees, and then, with agility that surprises even him, he snatches Taako’s puka shell necklace, tearing it off his neck and tossing it into the water.
“What the f—” Taako starts to say.
“Ha!” Barry says. “Lesson one, remember? Your turn. Go find it!”
Taako stands still, staring at Barry for a moment, then shrugs, turns, and starts walking back to the ship.
“What—but—but you love that stupid necklace!” Barry calls after him.
“Transmutated shells!” Taako yells back. “It was never gonna make it off this planet, my dude!” Right before he enters the ship, he calls, “Read a book sometime!” And then he’s gone, leaving Barry alone on the beach with nothing but the ocean and the stars above. Barry smiles to himself and, for whatever time he has left, stays still and listens to the crashing waves.