Titolo: Not alone
Fandom: Free!
Personaggi: Nanase Haruka, Nagisa Hazuki
Genere: fluff
Avvertimenti: mermaid!au, in inglese, gen (anche se si può vedere come shounen-ai molto lowkey o pre-ship, che è come la intendo io XD ma si può vedere in entrambi i modi.)
Parole: 2313
Note: COW-T6, 5° settimana, Lezione Settimanale, "Sirena" + "cambiamento" (in questo caso il cambiamento è il fatto che sia una AU)

Summer burns and evaporates on his scales and skin like fire, intolerable. Only the breeze makes the sun less harmful for him, one of the ningyo people coming from the depths of the Ocean, cold and unforgiving of explorers both from the land and from the water itself. Especially small ningyo like him, who still have to learn how to move in situations where all control seems to escape them. After all, he is only eight summers old.
And water seems to have abandoned him, spat him out from its big womb during a storm, or at least he seems to think so. He's been lying on the beach all night, crying from that rejection, curled up on the sand and feeling lost.
Now, however, his eyes are tired and sad, his body exhausted from fighting against its own environment when the waves were so tall they almost made him unconscious. Under the hot sun, which clearly will not spare his body from turning dry, he starts thinking about diving back into the water which is now a lot calmer...
But all of a sudden a cold, icy current seems to flow through him, inside his head and his lungs and around his heart, taking his breath away. He needs to go back, right now, immediately. But the moment he begins crawling towards the frothing shoreline, some soft noises and a loud sound startles him into looking behind.
A human! A human is rushing towards him, showing all of his teeth in what is undoubtably a sign of threat!
"Wait! ningyo-kun!" The small human screeches, flapping a fish around. And that catches the ningyo's attention, because he stills and stares even though he knows humans can be very dangerous. Of course, ningyo have just started making contact with humans and some of them even began getting along, but Haruka always lived in the darkest parts of the Ocean. That felt lonely, but he had never thought of interacting with one of those land creatures with weird limbs from the waist down...
"You look tired!" The human continues, crouching next to the lying sea creature. "Here. I saw you seemed to have a hard time, so I got you this!"
Haruka exhamines the human, glancing at him suspiciously up and down. The small man's hair have the same color of Yellow-fish, his eyes look like the anemone sitting in Haruka's den, his skin is bright and the sun splashing on it does not seem to hurt him the way it does Haruka's skin. The bottom half of his body does not look like it's covered in scales - as Haruka would consider it normal - but then again he does not have a tail either. Haruka lifts a curious hand, going for the fish, while staring attentive into the human's eyes, which then smile down at him as the human stretches his hand and offers the mackerel his mother was about to cook in his fisherman's house by the shore.
Haruka tilts his head while hissing in warning and his eyes melt into black for a moment before swiftly moving and snatching the fish. He tiredly moves sideways, wary, but the human just calmly looks at him, tilting his head and then sitting down on the sand with a curious gaze. But then he begins laughing, a sound Haruka never heard before and that throws him off balance, curious as it makes him.
He moves a little closer again, sliding on the humid sand and flicking his tail, inquisitive. The human blinks at him, grabbing a handful of sand while leaning back, and then begins laughing again, cheerful and excited.
"Do you want another? Wait here!" He asks quietly after a few seconds of silence and studying each other, moving to stand back up, and without waiting for any kind of reaction he turns around, then trots back to where he came from. Now, Haruka squints in that direction before looking around and noticing that other humans are starting to move around, exiting from their own dens.
Haruka shivers, with dread crawling up his back so strong that it outweighs his curiosity towards the human. So he quickly crawls back towards the sea shore, before swimming fast back to his den in a cave, deep down the Ocean's mouth, in the dark. There, he lays back down relieved from the dryness he experienced on the beach, but with something moving inside. The human was helping him. It gave him food. Maybe some of them are not dangerous. Besides, that human looked like he was Haruka's same age, or almost the same. Maybe some of them are not scary at all. And that one sounded and looked absolutely harmless if not pleasant to be around, even. He lies playing with an anemone planted on the ground, hoping to see that small human again.

The second time they meet, it's by accident, in the water, a few days later. Haruka has spent a little time exploring the surface of the water, drawn to it by a growing curiosity, and despite it all being almost the same he can tell the difference between the salty water coming from the human's face and the rest. The human is crying. For a second Haruka allows himself to be surprised at this discovery, but then he swims closer, feeling like that human cannot surely harm him in his own habitat.
It takes the kid a little to realize the ningyo is there, but when he sees him his eyes go wide with surprise, his tears stop. Nagisa is quite the friendly type of boy, and yet being cheerful and loud, noisy, that apparently does not do well where he lives. Loneliness defined his friendships long before he met the ningyo for the first time, but it seems to be relieved with one glance at his new, beautiful friend. He quickly reaches back up for the surface, and Haruka follows, more out of empathy for the human's sadness than anything else.

"ningyo-kun!" The boy squeals, seemingly having forgotten all about whatever was making him upset, and he bares his teeth again in what Haruka still interprets as a threat - but apparently it constitutes an empty one. Humans are weird. This one shakes his head a little to get his golden hair out of the way and Haruka does the same, but a lot more gracefully, being more used to it. Which seems to make the human's eyes sparkle, and then smile. That, Haruka can recognize. He can smile with his eyes as well. His own smile back, and the human blinks the way he did before, but then his face relaxes and the corners of his lips tilt up. He does not look threatening, thus Haruka moves closer, touching his leg underwater to verify whether there are really no scales or he is actually all covered in skin like his own top half, and he realizes he is. Not only that, but he has something wrapped around his waist and thighs, flapping slightly at each movement of the human's legs. This Haruka hadn't even noticed a few days before, but now surprises him. Despite that, even though humans looked so fundamentally different from ningyo before... now they don't anymore. They just need to move their bodies more to stay afloat and cover some parts of them, even though Haruka does not really understand the reason's why.
"Na-gi-sa," the human spells, touching his chest. "I'm Nagisa."
It's Haruka's turn to tilt his head, one way and then the other, provoking a little giggle in Nagisa.
"Nagisa," he repeats, a few times later, and the human beams so suddenly that it almost feels like watching a ray of sunlight hit something shiny on the shore.
"Yes, that's me!" Nagisa replies with an enthusiastic tone, splashing his hands happily on the water and smiling wider at Haruka. "Can you speak my language?"
Haruka doesn't know the meaning of those sounds, so he just stares confused, but Nagisa shakes his head again.
"Nevermind! We can be friends anyway. Right?" He continues, smiling again and grabbing the ningyo's hand. "I'm so happy! I don't really have many friends here, so I'm happy I found you!"
Haruka just looks at him, with a frown and his hand going still the moment it gets touched, but he does not pull it back.
"Hey, feel this!" Nagisa chirps, bringing Haruka's palm to his own chest. "Can you feel my heart?"
Haruka doesn't know what the human just said, but he can feel it alright. It thrums fast, and it feels so alien despite being so familiar and normal that he brings his other hand to his own heart, to sense and measure just how different the two organs' speeds are. And he finds out, they aren't beating that differently after all. Nagisa's hand reaches for the same spot, and presses gently against Haruka's ribcage listening to the ningyo's heart through the palm of his hand, with a big, wide smile stretching across his face excitedly.
"They beat the same!" He chirps, overjoyed for some reason, and then sort of hop in the water, beginning to splash some of it playfully on his new friend.
Big mistake, Haruka thinks, finally smiling with a sly look. He dives down deep, deep enough to not be seen anymore and Nagisa's smile fades, his eyes flutter open and closed a few times, until all of a sudden a big quantity of water splash directly on his face from somewhere on his left. He squeals sharply, shakes his head to get rid of the water and then blinks his eyes, looking at Haruka smile cheeky with his tail still flicking above the water's surface.
"Hey!" Nagisa squeaks with a giggle, and rubs his eyes, before swimming closer to the ningyo.
They play and frolic merrily in the water for the rest of the day, then for days and days after, swimming across the sea but never getting too far from the beach, for the whole summer.

As fall and winter roll by, Nagisa obviously stops getting inside the water, but he starts meeting the ningyo at the piers beginning with a "welcome back". The place is quiet, with small fishing boats getting lulled by the sea. Nobody can see and subsequently bother Nagisa and Haruka, or hear the former talk incessantly while the latter listens, swimming in quiet circles and repeating syllables and whole words when he hears them often, at which point Nagisa stops saying whatever he was saying and energetically struggles to explain what he meant. He does this over and over, without growing frustrated: he enjoys hearing his friend speak, it feels like their differences matter so much less, then.
That way, with several attempts, patience and mutual curiosity, finally Haruka begins learning words and then whole simple sentences, but also learns to feel entirely comfortable around the human and human things, like those boats which he generally fears for the noise they make.
"Hey, I won't be able to come to the pier every day, from now on," Nagisa begins one afternoon, snuggling into his heavy coat. "It's starting to get cold, and I'll be home a lot more, you understand?"
Haruka looks at him tilting his head and frowning, rolling the words he knows around in his mind and, when he sees Nagisa hug his own arms with cold, he nods quite a bit saddened.
"But...! I'll be back around spring, when the warm weather comes around again! So it'll just be a few months and then summer will come, then we'll play together in the water again!" Nagisa adds, smiling to fight the disappointment on Haruka's face. It seems to work, even a little, because Haruka nods, before quietly diving back and reaching the depths of the Ocean again.
It feels a bit blunt to Nagisa, but after all he is used to his friend being a bit sharp in his reactions, by now, and after all it might just be a difference in the way they both perceive each other, then humans and ningyo. So he finally stands up, walking quietly back to his place.

The third time they meet, it is months later, when the sunlight starts feeling warm on Nagisa's skin again and he begins wearing lighter clothes. Subsequently, he visits the pier again a few times, since that has basically become their meeting spot, waiting. The first time he does, he scans the surface of the water hopefully and excitedly, but after hours sitting there with nothing happening, he begrudgingly walks back home, reprimanding himself for not having set a date or something. But he does not give that up, because friends are precious.
And while a few days are spent sitting on wet wood for hours without seeing his friend, one day as he gets up to leave again a gurgling noise comes from the water, followed by bubbles reaching the surface and then out of the blue Haruka's tail splashes out, throwing water on Nagisa and making him squeak then shiver again. It's cold, and unexpected, but somehow it wipes all those hours spent waiting in a burst of relief.
"Haru-chan!" He calls, half amused and half startled.
Haruka emerges the moment after, feigning a colorless expression but showing amusement in his eyes.
"Welcome back," he spells slowly, saying it for the first time.
Nagisa blinks surprised, before smiling.
"Welcome back," he replies, with his feet now dangling happily from the pier. His smile is reflected on the Ocean's surface, and even though it might be just a moment, even though they might be separated in the future, even though he might forget about this small episode in a few years, it does not matter, because in this moment, right now, he has a friend and that, for now, is enough.