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Peko’s new legs shake horribly the first time she steps out on land. Even though the sand is soft and warm under her feet, the weight of her own body is almost unbearable; she would collapse into a heap on the ground if not for Ibuki, who swoops in with the grace of a raptor going after a fish in the sea and slings an arm underneath Peko’s.
“Careful, careful!” Ibuki chirps, her shrill voice as oddly melodic as always. Peko feels heat rushing through the scales on her neck and swallows, averting her gaze. The feathers on Ibuki’s hands—which are human-like, save for the long talons at the end that rest lightly against Peko’s ribs—are incredibly soft. She’s never felt them while dry before, having met Ibuki in the middle of the ocean most times, but under the high sun, the water that drips off her body has almost completely evaporated, leaving crystalised salt glittering against her scales and rubbing off onto the ground.
And Ibuki’s feathers feel something like Peko had imagined clouds to feel like, back when she could never leave the ocean. She wants to wrap her arms around Ibuki and bury herself into the harpy’s wings, breathe in the smell of her down and stroke her hands up and down. She wants to feel Ibuki’s softness all over her, on her face, against her stomach, beneath her fingertips. Ibuki is so close— she always gets so close—but somehow the proximity just isn’t enough. Peko’s skin tingles at every point of contact. She clears her throat, chews the inside of her cheek, and looks back into Ibuki’s mirth-filled magenta eyes. This isn’t worth losing her composure over, especially when she has more important things to be thinking about, like learning how to walk.
“Don’t want to become a fish cake!” Ibuki continues, tossing her large head of black hair over her shoulder. Peko blinks at the comparison, her brow knitting.
“I’m not a fish,” she says, scanning Ibuki’s face for the punchline. “And… cake is a human delicacy, is it not? Made of… bread, and sugar.” Peko remembers the song she sang for her last ever human meal, before she met Fuyuhiko. The contents of her songs all revolve around utterly human desires, concepts she has no way of understanding interwoven within the music, but she knows about cake. Her last song had been so vivid, she can still remember the way the white frosting had been blinding to look at. She could even almost taste the sweetness on her tongue. Such is the power of siren magic, Peko supposes. Before then, she’d never even considered that she had a taste for sweet things.
Ibuki laughs though, her familiar, high pitched giggle, and tosses her hair again. “Ibuki was being met-a-pho-ri-cal,” she sings, punctuating each syllable with a poke to Peko’s ribs. Somehow, she manages not to puncture Peko’s skin—which is appreciated—but it still tickles, and Peko lets out an involuntary laugh as she squirms away from the touch, briefly escaping Ibuki’s grasp and tumbling backwards into the sand.
The moment before she makes impact, Ibuki rushes forward and a strong, feathered arm wraps itself around Peko’s bare lower back. Peko’s eyes had closed as she began to fall, but when everything is still once again, she gazes up into Ibuki’s face, suddenly much closer. Ibuki’s features are beautiful in a distinctly bird-like way, her nose sharp and curved to resemble a beak, cheekbones high and slender, but her eyes gleam with a keen curiosity, an intelligence, that sets Peko’s heart aflame. She’s so soft, and so close, and so uncharacteristically serious, and her breath fans across Peko’s face, warming her down to her core.
“U-Um,” Peko swallows, “my apologies.”
“Peko sure is awkward for a siren,” Ibuki coos. She drags Peko to her feet again with remarkable strength before pulling away, leaving just a hand resting against the small of Peko’s back. She stays within an arm’s length, but her hand does little more than ghost against Peko’s scales. The purpose of the exercise is clearly to help her stand on her own, but after a few seconds of maintaining balance, Peko’s knees wobble, and she grips Ibuki’s shoulder for stability.
Ibuki’s free hand comes up to grasp Peko’s and squeezes.
“It’s okay,” Ibuki offers. “It’s a long, long journey to where Peko’s friend is being kept. Faster by air! Peko should know how to walk, but she’ll get plenty of time to learn.”
By air… Peko peeks around at Ibuki’s large dark wings, sweeps the length of them with her eyes. They extend from her shoulder blades and bend about a foot up above her head, and the feathers are long enough to sweep against the sand with every movement Ibuki makes. Indeed, when she shifts her weight again, one of her wings gives what appears to be an involuntary clap; a tick that Peko has observed a number of times since meeting the other woman. Ibuki has powerful wings, powerful enough to knock a harpy off their rock with their incredible gusts of wind, but even so… Peko swallows.
She pulls her hand out from Ibuki’s, and Ibuki allows her to withdraw, even allows her to take a step back without protest, her feathered hand dropping to her side. Peko immediately misses the warmth, the touch, the softness, but she swallows again and forces herself to focus on Ibuki’s face instead, her carefree smile and her tellingly shrewd eyes.
Peko clears her throat. “Do you… really think you can carry me? And beyond that…” Peko hugs her chest and shifts her weight, digging her newly acquired heels into the sand in the hopes of remaining standing without assistance. She wobbles, but otherwise stays planted, which is a relief. “Are you sure that you want to? Your help is appreciated, I assure you, I… I don’t know how I would save Fuyuhiko without your assistance, but… this charm you used to give me legs, it was already a lot to ask of you. I couldn’t ask you to carry me all the way there.”
“Funny wording!” Ibuki clucks. She spins around, wings raising, and lifts off without a word of warning. Peko watches her fly up and then down again, turns in anticipation of Ibuki’s landing.
Though Ibuki returns to eye-level with Peko, her toes barely brush the ground. She takes Peko’s chin with two taloned fingers and smiles.
“Think of it this way! Ibuki’s not doing all the work. She’s barely doing any of the work, in fact! A charm to give sirens legs, that’s nothing for me!” She pumps one of her fists. “And getting to hold Peko for so long is a pleasure in and of itself, ehehe. The real demon is gonna be the one that you will have to defeat when we get to the castle.” She moves her hand from Peko’s chin to her chest, poking her sternum with one claw. “It won’t be easy, and Ibuki might be good with charms like this, but she’s a lover, not a fighter. It’ll all be on you and your pretty, pretty teeth!”
Self consciously, Peko cups her jaw, as though she could feel her sharp teeth through her skin. She clears her throat. “R-Right. But…” Well, Peko’s immediate concern is not that she’s asking Ibuki to help her, but rather the promise she made Fuyuhiko when they became friends, that she would never kill another human. She knows already that Fuyuhiko’s captor is a human wizard. Should it come down to it, just as Ibuki is implying… Peko isn’t sure she would be able to hold back.
Still, airing that with Ibuki is…
“Are you really sure?” She looks back up into Ibuki’s eyes, searching for confirmation. “You needn’t assist me further. With these legs alone, I can find my way. I can—”
Before Peko can finish, Ibuki darts forward and sweeps her legs out from under her, one arm tucking beneath her knees and the other around her shoulders, and then once again shoots back up into the air. This time, though, Peko is very much present for it—she feels the rush of wind hitting her face and her new human legs as Ibuki sends them flying through their clouds, feels the wind escaping her lungs, feels the cold nipping her skin. She gasps, gripping onto Ibuki’s neck, and screws her eyes shut, burying her face into Ibuki’s feathered neck and waiting for the panic to subside.
Ibuki gives her a squeeze. “Hey, hey hey! It’s not so bad up here! Open your eyes, Peko-Peko!”
Peko thinks, I’m not sure I’m capable of that, and swallows thickly, but withdraws her head regardless, more out of a desire to oblige Ibuki than much else. She starts by peeking one eye open, letting her gaze dart around them, taking in the expanse of blue and the puffy white clouds, and when she’s certain that she isn’t going to fall, she opens the other one, adjusting her hold on Ibuki so that she isn’t strangling her.
It’s… breathtaking. Yards and yards beneath them, the ocean glitters a clear, crystal blue, and the white sand of the beach extends far into the distance on both sides. Peko can see figures moving, but she’s much too high to make them out. If she lifts her thumb and closes one eye, the people vanish entirely, small enough to be hidden beneath her claw.
“Woah,” Peko breathes.
“Uh-huh!” Ibuki sings. “That’s not even the best of it. You ready?”
Peko barely has time to nod, disoriented and numb and breathless, before Ibuki is taking off again with another great flap of her wings. This time, she sends them soaring over the forest that leads out to the beach. Peko has never been this far on land before; she’s never been on land at all, save for her rock back home where she used to sit to lure in sailors. She’s seen trees before, passing islands and listening to her own songs, but this is her first time seeing them from overhead, as opposed to from the water. The forest is filled with rich greens, tall and pointed evergreens swaying back and forth in the breeze, tinted gold by the dappled sunlight. Peko’s heart stutters against her ribcage, splits and crawls into her throat, dries out the roof of her mouth. There’s so much to see and Ibuki moves them so quickly, she barely has time to take it all in.
They reach a break in the trees, a large circular patch of lime green grass, and Ibuki lowers them into it. Peko’s legs give the moment her feet hit the ground, but Ibuki is there to catch her—this time, she doesn’t keep them standing, but rather allows them both to sink into the grass, all tangled limbs and extended wings and arms, wrapped around each other.
Peko finds it impossible to catch her breath. “That—That was—”
“Ibuki never really gets used to it,” Ibuki admits, softer and more subdued than Peko has ever heard her speak. Peko finds herself drawn to the wistful look on Ibuki’s face, the slight curve of her lip, the furl of her brow. She wants to reach out and touch, smoothe out every crease, feel the lines and dips of Ibuki’s features, touch her cheeks, her nose, her lips. She wants to be closer, she wants to take Ibuki in her hands and hold her tight, she wants…
She wants.
“Did you like it?” Ibuki asks. Her eyes leave the clouds and return to Peko’s face, soft, like she’s no longer looking at something wondrous, but something precious. That kind of look should flush Peko to her fins, but she finds herself smiling instead, fiddling with a feather on Ibuki’s neck that the wind knocked astray.
“I did,” Peko admits. She tilts her head to the side, gazes into Ibuki’s eyes. They’re much darker in this lighting than they were on the beach, almost a purple. Peko wants to cup her face and brush her thumb under the pad of Ibuki’s eye. She stares, instead. “It was… exquisite. Thank you for showing it to me. I hope that you will continue to.”
Ibuki grins, her eyes crinkling at the edges, and brushes her pointed nose against Peko’s. “That’s the plan! But not right now. Peko should practice walking right now, and maybe get some sleep. Transformation magic is super duper tiring! Factually. Literally.”
Tired is probably the last thing that Peko is feeling right now—adrenaline still courses through her veins in the aftermath of that flight—but from the softness of Ibuki’s face and the slow, dreamlike quality of her movements, she must not mean it’s exhausting to be transformed. Thus, Peko nods without complaint and pushes herself onto her shaking knees, hesitating for just a moment before she rests a hand on top of Ibuki’s head. Her hair is just as soft as her feathers, and Ibuki lets out a coo at the touch, eyelids fluttering, head tilting forward into Peko’s palm.
A soft smile curls onto Peko’s face. She shifts closer, allows Ibuki’s arms to wrap once again around her waist, and rests her weight on her heels, tucking Ibuki’s head against her chest. Ibuki is asleep in minutes, shoulders rising and falling with each quiet, whistling breath, but Peko stares at her for hours to follow, heart calm but nerves buzzing, feeling as though she and Ibuki are still soaring through the skies. Still flying, even now as they rest together on the ground.