Catarina (catdevigri) wrote in no_true_pair, @ 2010-08-12 15:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! 2010 eight characters challenge, author: catdevigri, crossover: tol/tor, pairing: fenimore/mao |
Summer Girl Out of the Waves (ToL/ToR, Fenimore/Mao)
Title: Summer Girl Out of the Waves
Author: catdevigri
Fandom: Tales of Legendia/Tales of Rebirth
Pairing/characters: Fenimore Xelhes/Mao, Eugene Gallardo
Rating: G
Warnings: Slight spoilers regarding Mao's background and the end of Tales of Rebirth
Word count: 1066
Prompt/challenge you're answering: Mao and Fenimore, not fully human
Author's comment: For this one, Fenimore is in the ToR world! Tales games cross over with each other so easily, don't they?
Mao pulled off his boots, then his socks. First once pair, then the other, tossing them away onto the sand without a care in the world. He ran cheerfully down into the gushing surf, laughing at the rush of cold the water sent up through his body from his toes, up higher and higher into his legs. If he stayed in too long he would be chilled through to his bones.
At the sound of an unusual splash and the gasp of breath that accompanied it, Mao looked up from his feet out over the water. The sea was dark, sot he blond head bobbing above the water stood out clearly. Mao rubbed his eyes. yes, he really was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
"Someone's swimming out there!" Not just someone either- pigtails - a girl. No one ever swam here as far as he knew, not in such cold water, not that far from the shore. It was dangerous. ...Was she in trouble? Should he try and use his force to rescue her somehow? Should he run and bring back Eugene?
He stared in shock, not knowing how to proceed. Her twin pigtails waved for a while above the waves, then disappeared. He stared at the last place he had seen her, willing his eyes to cut through the waves and pick out her fragile form, but although he looked and looked for such a long time that was all he saw of her. Maybe there hadn't been a girl after all, just a strangely shaped piece of driftwood or a sea creature. He couldn't believe that he had just seen a girl silently drown before his very eyes.
When he met up with Eugene again, Mao didn't immediately tell him what he had seen that afternoon on the beach. It was hard to understand. He didn't know what to think about it. Of course, Eugene knew Mao better than anyone else. It didn't take him long to see that something was troubling his young friend. Over a plain dinner of soup and pumpkin bread that Mao picked at uncharacteristically, Eugene managed to coax the story of his distress out of him. Eugene was sympathetic regarding Mao's puzzling feelings and somewhat supportive of the "you saw something that wasn't a person" theory of what had happened. Mao was soothed and settled down to finish his dinner, but one way or other, the matter remain unresolved.
Eugene had friends in this coastal town. He didn't want to impose on them, so he had found other lodgings for Mao and himself, but training with them, Ganja and Shiralo, took up most of his day. Mao wasn't interested in training that much, so he took breaks here and there, wandering around town, pressing his nose up to the glass of shop windowpanes and walking in the pleasantly warm sand of the beach. It was on one of these random, ambling strolls through town that he saw the pig-tailed girl once more. He was coming out of the bakery with a bagful of goodies he had picked up to surprise Eugene with and he saw her- well, her bobbing pigtails anyway, passing through a crowd.
"Ah!" he gasped, pushing his way after her through the crowd, "Wait! Hey!" He would've called out her name, but he remembered belatedly he had never known it. Would she taken offense if he called out "Pigtails?"
He was going against the main flow of the crowd. By the time he reached the spot where he had seen her, she was gone. He looked down into the paper bag he had been crushing between his arms. A bit of filling had been squeezed out of a jelly-filled pastry, but, for the most part, his baked goods appeared none the worse for the wear. At least he hadn't messed that up.
He signed and wandered over to the fountain to sit down. While leaning his head down and peering into the bag at least the sweet, sticky scent of the pastries could console him. A shadow fell over him, bringing a sudden drop in temperature. It felt like a premonition. Mao turned.
There she was, looking at him, her large eyes as lucid and reflective as puddles. "You're not Huma," she said.
"Neither are you," he recalled her strange disappearance at sea. Was she some kind of amphibious Gajuma? Even though her demeanor and his experience with her had been a bit strange, she looked completely Huma with no tail, small ears, and no feathers or fur. He couldn't answer the question, "What are you?" so he wouldn't ask her to address that same query. Instead he chose to consider what he had seen. "How did you manage to swim out there? I've heard that it's really rough."
"I'm always swimming," she replied, as though it was, for her, the most easy and obvious thing in the world. "My whole life's been spent in and out of the water."
"You can," he made an intellectual leap, "You can breath underwater, can't you?"
"Yeah." She smiled, a small and bitter grimace of a smile. "All my people could do that. There are barely anymore of us left now."
He felt that he could understand her sorrow. He had never really been a proper one of the Sacred Beasts, but now that they were gone, he really was alone in that sense- in all this world, the only one of his kind. "Do you know... Are you, uh, Huma or Gajuma?"
"I don't know anything about that. I'm a Ferines. I couldn't say if that one or the other or something else entirely." She walked around slowly to sit beside him on the rim of the fountain, enjoying the refreshing feeling of tiny droplets of water bouncing up against her back. "You can't tell anyone else about us, little boy."
"Phew!" Mao puffed up his cheeks indignantly. "I know you don't know me, but please trust me more than that! And, anyway, I'm not just some little boy- my name's Mao!"
"Heh heh," she chuckled despite herself at the fiery ball of energy at her side. "Okay, Mao. I'll trust you." She got up and took her first few ambling steps away from him, back into anonymity in the seaside town.
"What's your name?"
"I'm Fenimore," she said and melted away into the fluttering crowd.