Chapter Text
His life has always been filled with shadows counted by the ten. There were lights above, skies, space, whatever hung above that attempted to reach into the depths, before being culled away piece by piece.
Megumi hated the shadows. The darkness, encroaching and encapsulating, that of which desired to consume everything. It was evil, as evil as cursed energy, a terribly twisted nature. Why? Why was he afflicted with this curse?
Answers were impossible to be scrounged with the way the world worked its cogs, turning and revolving. All he could do was let everything be drowned by the waters of his shadows, endlessly, without remorse.
The notion remained the same ever since he stepped foot into this new world. Even in a new dimension, worldly passions, desires, hate, anger, sadness, and perversion remained the same. His vices, troubles too, remained the same.
Drowning, drowning, suffocating too by waters that cur-sed be.
How many times had he desired to clip his own wings and let himself fall to the deepest trenches? Flapping those elongated, imaginary wings proved fruitless within viscous liquid pounds.
That was what he believed, and would have continued on with his eternal journey…
If it weren’t for her.
Hair, pale and luscious. Radiance unrivaled even by the moon, peerless in her elegance and ferocious in her approach. There was something about her that enamored him. His eyes couldn’t stray away from her as she danced underneath the night, frills swaying with cheers between each step.
Rigid movements turned fluid. Immaculate, simply immaculate. He couldn’t express his admiration in words, only through eyes.
That light, a goddess. He wanted to reach out to it, but he knew he shouldn’t. They were worlds apart, they could never connect by strings or threads, for none could cover the distance between them. Alien, they were aliens to one another.
When he hesitantly turned away, the light remained, reflecting and refracting between the waters. Her grace attempted to reach them still, and it tremored guilt in his chest. His wings remained receded, curse coiled around his heart.
There was an ideation: to drown.
But even then, through all trials, tribulation, between maledictions thrown and squeezed blood; a hand had touched his shoulder. Tonnages of water and shadows pressed upon them like pressure beneath his abyssal sea, yet she still hadn’t relented.
Not one bit.
He saw it in her emblazoned vermillion eyes with his own, spiraled crimson ones.
These eyes, four of them, were not his own. And Megumi knew it. Knew the ugliness. Laurentina’s eyes were her own, beautiful, utterly beautiful.
How deep were they? How deep had he traversed? How deep was he willing to go? To drown?
The depths of the sea were endless, and he could only see himself further dropping.
There was no home for him anywhere. Not for a curse.
There was something, many things in actuality, that Laurentina admired about beauty. An expression of the human heart in all its unbidden glory, flashing like the icon it should be, a representation of all that was right with the world. But as long as there was rightness, so was there ugliness.
Creatures, trench-sucking monsters that held no admiration for such things were dregs in that regard. How revolting it was to imagine such a thing could exist. But of course, with how demented the world was with their horrors, showcasing their revolting visages, could she even be surprised?
The sea was a home, but now tainted.
That did not mean she despised the waters. Wary she was, absolutely, but detached? Never. Aegir’s origins bled deep by the sea, and from the sea. How could she ever abandon it?
Home.
There was home there.
Lost she was now from home, the same siren songs beckoned from those pristine underwater cities unable to be heard by her awaiting ears. None of those structures, outstretched to the artificial heavens, for her to commend and praise; or draw inspiration.
It was all taken away from her, and the blame lay to some damnable creatures—they shan't even be called human—stole from her. Poking, prodding needles, profane injections, chemicals, blood, minerals… All of it. All of it she could still feel prying into her body, flaying her skin; piercing her flesh and gnawing her blood.
She was forcefully betrothed to clutches clawed by malignancy. There was no escape, she couldn’t find any, not when every day they would keep stabbing those instruments again and again and again and again and—
…
…
…
Haha, it didn’t matter. They were all dead.
Except for one.
But, that was a story for another time.
How had it been achieved? By her own means? Certainly not, loathe she to admit it.
It was by him, stygian hair with a lonesome face and unassuming features, barring his clothing of course. Nothing like a white knight from trite fairy tales, but breaking away from those monsters was welcome.
The position of a damsel in distress was unbefitting of herself, but circumstances by diluvian means had weighed it against her.
Ah, that man, Fushiguro Megumi. His hair looked like a small but cute sea urchin. Though he had the image of a rather handsome individual, his personality was lacking in comparison to that strange… majesty that bled off him.
A blood-stained monster he would be if it weren’t soaked by a feeling akin to ‘divinity.’ How cursed he seemed to be, and she was right to hold some suspicions behind playful countenance.
Troubled he was. Lacking a home he was, just as she herself did. Every night, he quarreled his own mind in slumber, whispering sorrow ‘neath his labored breaths.
There she came to realize he was, in some measure, a damsel himself.
And she had seen it—oh, she had felt it—the way the waters dragged at him.
The gentle pull of the tide, it wasn’t, instead holding the gravity of trenches, the call of black vents where heat and death mingled, the hungering suction that never relinquished its prey.
Megumi lived there, within those shadows.
Felled further down, and he was approaching the seabed, an interpersonal self-deprecating kingdom of pressure that even light could not reach. Void stirred beneath, and life didn’t dare swim.
He did not call for help, he never would.
Men like him believed drowning was inevitable, deserved even, and that if the sea wanted them, then they might as well sink without a fight.
But she was born of Aegir blood.
The ocean flowed in her blood, and she knew its moods just as well as she knew the beating of her own cardium. She knew everything pertaining to its treacheries, little mercies, and so on and so forth. She knew that if she left him there, the darkness would keep him forever.
By her will, it would not. So she went down.
Her descent rushed deep in the chilled water, tasting old stone and bitter blood. There just ahead belonged a sensation of movement, a human silhouette pitched black.
She saw him suspended, wings clipped, as if the water itself had grown hooks in him. He didn’t thrash. He didn’t fight. The currents had made a still statue of him, and the shadows were weaving kelp around his arms and throat.
Laurentina reached through it, through the needling cold, through the dense curtain of black. Her hand found his shoulder, and the shadows shuddered away. They recoiled as if they knew her grip threatened their claim.
She tightened her hold.
When he turned to look at her, despondency was the only thing ladened. He was at a complete loss. Eyes were storm-lanterns caught between worlds, spiraled crimson lit faintly under the burden of fathoms.
They were carried by strength, and by the stubbornness of someone who had learned to outswim riptides; herself.
Her vermillion gaze locked to his, daring him to remember light. She didn’t promise rescue. She didn’t lie to him about the climb. She only told him, with the sheer force of her presence: I will not let you go under without me.
Even if they were from different seas, different oceans, two souls split by borders stretching far vaster than mind could even begin to comprehend, a shark and a sea urchin, an Abyssal Hunter and a ‘human…’
…Nothing would separate or drown them.
The metaphorical waters were gone.
Beneath them were shattered lands caved in by force and grit long since passed in their course. Megumi laid on the ground, whilst Laurentina straddled over him, hand gripping the collar of his haori.
Blood was splattered burgundy across in streaks and puddles. Both panted as if air were a luxury, their conclusive quarrel having drawn to an end.
Their eyes met in a moment prolonged infinitely.
Memories uncountable mesmerized their minds. Different countries, cultures, and views bestowed to the two across the lands of Terra; both wasted and clean.
Back then, when they first met, it was her who he saved.
Now, it was him who she saved.
“Does something ail you?”
“…A little, I guess.”
Megumi’s voice was quiet and tired. His eyes stayed on the window, where Rhodes Island’s outside view was seen through the glass.
“Brooding over something again, hm?” Laurentina’s tone was teasing, but her head tilted ever so slightly, gauging the shadows under his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m brooding.” He rolled one shoulder in a shrug. “A lot of people say I do that too often.”
“And here I thought you’d try to sneak off while I was asleep. Bad habits do die hard.”
“Yeah, no.” He let out a short breath that might have been a laugh. “You clung onto me too tightly.”
“Oh? Was it not you who was doing so?” she countered, lips turning faintly, elegant hand over her mouth revealing black manicure.
“…Really?” He narrowed his eyes, but let the thought pass. “Ah, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I won’t run away. Not again.”
“Oh, you’d better not.” Laurentina smirked, and jabbed his side with just enough force to make him flinch.
“You—urgh—have my word on that.” He made a halfhearted attempt to bat her hand away. “I could even make a Binding Vow.”
“Who cares about a Binding Vow?” she said with a mock scoff. “I trust you enough, Princess.”
That caught him off-guard. He glanced at her, startled, as though unsure if she was mocking him or, worse, meant it.
Trust him? That much? He was a bonafide crashout.
“What? Flattered, are you?” she asked, eyebrow raised.
“It was unexpected,” he admitted.
“Hmph. If you go on another gloomy streak, I could always drag you back.”
“Do I have your word on that?”
“Without fail.” Her voice landed, solid as a harpoon stationed upon a deck. Ironic.
“…Thank you.”
An interlude of silence followed, calming the same way the shores of the beach were when waters instead of creatures would crawl upon its golden sheets.
His gaze drifted from the window to her. For a moment, Megumi imagined it.
A place where the waters didn’t pull him under. Where her light didn’t have to reach through fathoms to find him, where their hands could remain above the surface without fear of losing grip.
Laurentina, for her part, had already come to a decision. Her eyes met his, and something in them said she’d already claimed this place.
Lost as they were, and far from their respective worlds… there was a home.
They had found their home.
Author’s Notes:
Waaah! Thulium/SolanShallow/Dhrallis actually reached out and helped me push out this chapter with insights and suggestions!!! Also beta-reading it for me, thank you! (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶) (And thank you for providing me with TSSoT’s idea docs, it helped so much).
He writes so fast when it comes to Megumi’s perspective and imagery. It was astonishing to see on his stream.
A memorable bit was when he said it was difficult attempting to write how Megumi and Laurentina feel about each other in context of their logic, until he decided that he was going to wing it because love can sometimes be illogical.
I feel sort of guilty, since a lot of this was co-piloted by Thulium, but I’ll make sure to take his tips to heart when I begin writing the next chapters!
