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mediumgayitalian · 11 months ago

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The Great Current is, as most things in Hades’ domain, expressly forbidden.

The Surface is iffy grounds. If Nico is feeling strong enough to brave his father, he may attempt to convince him to allow him up on the ice sheets long enough to catch some of the sun, unbidden, even as he is burned by the winds. If he is lucky he will have the time to watch the penguins as they tussle, leaping and bounding down their steep slides. If he is luckier Hades will allow Hazel to come with him, and he will poke her in the ribs, teasing, one when of the nestlings waddles after its father, tripping down the slope and rolling into a feathery birdball. On his luckiest days she will shove him tail over fin as she cursesinto a half-frozen ravine, cackling as he shrieks his promise for revenge.

Neither have them have been to the Surface in a some time.

It’s hard in the winters, he knows. Air whistles away the sun’s warmth so quickly, as flighty and biting as a dolphin, and to be beached upon the ice sheets in the dark is to die buried and forgotten under the snow, too far gone even too pay the due rites. But even the dry and barren ice sheets are a mercy compared to beyond the Great Current. As much as Nico chafes under Hades’ frozen glare and icicle rule, his strictness is protective. He has swum the wide expanse outside of the Underworld; endured the desert endlessness, the scarcity, the risk. Here m, within the boundaries of the Current, the boundaries in which Hades as confined them, they have plenty. Here there is no surface untouched. Here there is ice and cold and silent, endless stillness, but never emptiness. Inside the Current, inside the castle walls, is safe.

Nico peers around the castle wall. A small hole in the ice-crust allows a beam of sunlight, brightening the grounds significantly more than inside, bouncing and twinkling off the frozen pillars. Many of the bottom feeders have retreated away from it, slinking into the shadowy corners, but a minke whale floats near the surface, basking in the heat. Her warped shadow leads a trail across the grounds to a small-mouthed tunnel — more of a crack in the ice sheets than anything.

She catches sight of Nico’s lingering form, raising a lazy brow. He shrugs — minkes, unlike his father’s favoured starfish, know to mind their own — and smiles sheepishly. She holds his gaze for a moment, blinking long and slow, and then begins carelessly floating upwards towards the square. With every inch, her shadow grows larger, darker.

Nico grins.

As fast as he dares, mindful of the chattery crabs still hiding along the edges of the seafloor, Nico darts across the path, keeping every stroke of his tail short and shallow to remain within the minke’s shadow. She, for her part, takes an extra-long breath, cheekily enjoying the sweet air of the wintery Surface, remaining up top until Nico is curled entirely in the tiny crack, careful to tuck his fins against the ice walls.

“Thank you,” he whispers, poking his head out.

She shifts, humming low and rumbly. She begins her descent, slower even than her climb to fresh air, and winks when she is low enough to be eye level. Nico waves one more time before turning and rushing, careful not to get stuck between narrow walls, through the tunnel. The ice is slick enough to almost push him through, which is as fun as it is disorienting. The isopods hadn’t mentioned that when he’d asked for directions, but he supposes they’re not quite big enough to notice. Nor are they very smart, so Nico will have to take the sacrifice. The crabs would have surely tattled to his father after one too many questions.

He’d worried, in the weeks he’d planned this, that he would grow tired in the middle of the tunnel and die, hands outstretched, trying to wiggle his way out either end. Usually during long swims he can simply float somewhere to rest, or lie against the back of a blue whale if there’s one around. (Aside from the scratchy barnacles a whale ride is almost pleasant.) But the tunnels are thin and long, and colder than the regular waters. If he pauses to catch his breath, how long would he have before the blood moved too sluggishly in his veins; before eternal sleep would pull as he used to on Bianca’s sweeping fins? A question he’d save usually for Seph, on her kind days, but they’d been few and far between. Lately the cold has made her irritable.

Thankfully, his worries had been unfounded. Energy thrums unusually in the cavity of his chest, pounding along with the erratic beat of his heart. Even if he grew tired the endless twitches of his tail would surely propel him forward enough to eventually escape the tunnel’s narrow confines. Even moreso when the end of the tunnel begins to grow brighter, burning his pupil-blown eyes — he’s close. Bright enough to be blue, the isopods had promised; nothing but sun past the widest expanse of the ice. Sun and churning, twirling water, disturbed flurries of floor flakes.

His heart grows loud enough to echo, with every swish pushing him closer to the exit.

When the tip of his head breaches the narrow end of the passage, he hesitates. The tunnel has widened, now, wide enough that he can just barely bend his tail up under him, fins brushing gently on the round icy walls. His hair has escaped from his tie in his rapid drag against the ice and it floats around his head, now, inky against the startling bright blue of the definitely-warmer water.

The stories his father would warn of him, when he and his sisters were young. The stories he still tells, when he catches Nico watching out the castle windows. Of snarling mers and sharpened coral, of flesh-feasters, of endless grudges. Of monsters from the depths and water hot enough to boil a mer alive.

He is fabricating. Or at least exaggerating; that kind of danger cannot be so adequately held behind a border. Not for so long.

Other mers must be gone by now, mustn’t they? So much fighting, so many wars…wiggling migration lines and danger after danger…endless scarcity of food, of shelter…even the relentless beat of the sun, with no ice for shelter. How could they survive? Seph braves the Current to pay her respects, as is her duty. The restless dead are worth the risk of the living; they demand that respect. But had her kin lain inside the Current, she surely would never breach it. She charges under Hades’ strictness, sours under his chains like the rest of them, but she returns. With great harry, usually. The Underworld is the only place the Ocean will accept his kind; will welcome them.

But a visit is, Nico is sure, warranted.

Without another lingering second to talk himself out of it, Nico darts forward. The moment he is free from the close-cropped ice walls he can feel the difference, the beat of the sun pressing into his skin, the giggling warmth of the shallow waters. The unbelievable blue of the water makes him lighter, makes the near-translucence of his skin even more obvious, the dark of his hair almost navy. He spins, once, to watch his scales catch the light, his fins flare out and swirl against each other in a spiral as dizzying as snail shells. The smile on his face is wide and unbidden, ache pulling at his cheek, and he can’t help quiet laughter, carried away by the roar of the Current.

He’s hardly a few dozen sponge-lengths from home, but he feels as if he’s woken up from a dream, floating within a brand-new planet.

All the worries that had plagued him burn to melting lava in the bright heat of the sun. They have no place to fester here, in the shimmering light, the roaring water. The flakes from the seafloor shoot upwards in a constant stream, unrested by the rapidly cycling streams, and they catch the sunlight in little burst of light, dotting Nico’s skin. He’s seen snow like this only in the deadliest of Surface storms, watched safely from the thinnest sheets of ice in the top of his father’s castle, but it is beautiful without the barrier; delicate.

There is no one beyond the Current. Only pods of dolphins, at this time of year, and the beautiful, brainless fish they brag of teasing; graceful whale sharks and pretty pink corals. Nico won’t stray too far. He only needs shells, glittering and iridescent, and a moment in the open sea. Hardly longer than a minute, really.

He needs to feel it. For himself. To say that he’s done it, if nothing else, to remember in his own head that there is somewhere outside his father’s domain.

With a resolute, steady nod to himself, Nico swims towards the Current.

It gets louder as he approaches. The churned-up snow gets thicker, too, so much so he swims nearly blind, and he is grateful for it. Much harder to back away from a threat he can hardly evaluate. He lets himself sink into it all, the roar of the current, the tickle of the flakes, the thick presence of them in the water, the lovely, bubbling warmth. They swirl around him, a pressurized swell of constancy, and drag him forward, swirling hands of promise, if chainbreakers, of swelling breaths of freedom. He churning current whips him around and he rides through it with all the bravery he can summon, loose somewhere in the expanse of his skull, churning identically to the water in the echo of his chest. He forces his tail to rest loosely, to ride along where the water takes him; swimming, he knows, is futile, fighting against the current useless. There is no force more powerful than the water, no pillar thicker or stronger than ice. The ocean will drive as she sees fit and Nico can only hope she finds him satisfactory enough, that she hears his silent begging, his endless longing. I want to see all I can, he whispers to her, eyes squeezed shut, teeth burrowing into his bottom lip, gills flaring. Please, even just a sponge-length into the open sea. Under the wide, sizzling sun.

It is only after an eternity in the brushing pound of the current that he is released. His skin almost aches with its absence, body reeling from the sudden loss of feeling; his ears, only, relish in the still-constant sound, if at all muffled. His head still spins as dizzy as the hermit crabs he and Hazel used to toss around, chasing after their warning claws and retreating legs. His hair billows in every direction.

Slowly, allowing himself to relish in the sensation, he blinks open his eyes. His fins are the first thing he sees, tangled as they are all around him, reaching far enough even for of them that the tip of it tickles his wrist. Some of his scales are missing, even, torn off in the power of the water, but he is almost pleased at the physical marker of this change. No matter what, pieces of him will have stayed in the Current. Even, perhaps, crossed the border entirely.

In looking under him he realizes the water is still churning — he has not, yet, made it entirely outside of the Current. Water roars in a wall behind him, circling around him in a giant, lengthy spiral. He hovers in the inside of the great churning river; hardly a sponge-length away from fully foreign waters. Once he crosses he has a few hours, at least, before his absence is noted; to swim around, to note, to gather. Or even simply to bask in the sun, swim up the the Surface and breathe air outside of what his father rules.

Smile spreading giddily across his face, he looks up, determined to find the weakest link of the Current wall and swim right through it.

And locks eyes with another mer, staring at him as if he’s a ghost.