InsaneJournal

While Gio hadn’t booked a flight anywhere for some international mini-break holiday, he had thrown around a little money for this excursion. In part, this was because he’d never been on a date and wasn’t sure what to do, but also because Dom’s bar had been so high, he didn’t want the gap between her expectations and reality to be too noticeable. God knew how he was going to deal with the rest of those gaps.

“Have you ever been on one?” he asked as he skipped down the boardwalk towards the small speedboats, a messenger bag bumping against one hip. “I kinda wish it was warmer, but I think it’ll be worth it.”

Dominique kept up with his pace as best she could, honestly too distracted by the sights and smell of the ocean to hear most of what he was saying. The open water was as relaxing to her as a tiny bookshop. It reminded her of home. But — “Non, this is my first time,” she told him, softly. Apollonia had given her good advice with the light sweater, though she’d made sure to wear some of her better, more first date appropriate jeans.

“It’s not supposed to be that choppy out there today - with your powers I’m guessing you don’t get too shaken by waves, but… uh… yeah, it should be fine,” Gio dismissed as he realized that maybe he should have found out whether or not Dom got seasick. This was not going to be as fun as he hoped if she did.

His pace slowed up as he started looking at the boat names for the one he’d rented. “Ah - right there. Magdalene. You know in the UK they pronounce it maud-a-len?”

Too distracted to watch her footfalls or notice that Gio had slowed his pace, she plowed directly into his back with a muffled fils de pute and no grace whatsoever. Her hands scrambled to grip the back of his shirt. “Is that it?”

He spun around, eyes wide in surprise as he reached out to see if she was okay. “Oh - uh,” he stammered as she looked fine and he straightened himself up. “Yeah. This one. Just here.”

Gio hopped lithely from the dock into the covered speedboat, her eyes tracking his movements, then held out a hand to help her into the thing. “Careful.”

She was that, but it was difficult to focus when his palm was warm to the touch and she was staring down at the space between dock and boat. The last time she’d been on a boat had been back in Albi, and even that memory was blurry. A vacation, she thought. Thinking was hard.

When they were both settled on their feet, Dom took a moment to get used to the slight rocking sensation. Nothing like her own vibrations, but she hadn’t expected a similarity. More like — wobbling. Wobbles. Struck by bravery, she threw a bright smile up at him and hopped up and down once, twice without her shoes technically leaving the deck.

He took the bag off of his shoulder and handed it to her with a grin. “Okay, now you can look inside. Go ahead and have a seat while I get us untied.”

Curiosity certainly got the best of Dominique as she did as instructed. The messenger bag, limp in her lap but with something solid inside, was undone to reveal… binoculars? Sandwiches, a thermos. She picked up a pair of the binoculars and looked into the eyepieces for great comedic effect. “C’est pour quoi?”

“Les baleines,” Gio replied from over his shoulder, then paused his unwrapping to actually look over towards her. “Les baleines,” he repeated in his terrible French accent as he coiled the rope into a small pile. “It’s gray whale season. I thought we’d go take a shot at seeing if we can find some.”

Over the edge of the binoculars, her big eyes were, well, bigger. Whales.

He came back over to her and turned the messenger bag around on her lap to pull out a spiral bound notebook that was concealed in the wide pocket. “The map,” he said with a grin as he put it on the console and flipped open the first couple of pages. Maps indeed had been glued into the thing.

A sensation of wonder overcame Dominique. She forgot all of her nerves and hobbled to the console, an immediate presence at Gio’s side. This wasn’t a book of maps purchased at the store. This had been meticulously planned right down to routes. Her cheek found his upper arm; her eyes, his face. “Do you think we will see any?”

He looked down at her leaning against him and smiled. "I mean, that's the hope. I checked it out with one of my former professors and we might catch a couple of glimpses. Hopefully."

Gio had to shift his arm a bit to pull the key out of his pocket. "Hopefully nothing has changed much since the last I went out."

Warmth swelled in Dominique’s chest. There might as well have been an aquatic mammal inside her ribcage, or a school of fish in her belly, and before her cheekbones could burst off her face, she took a swaying step back. “Where are the ugly orange vests?”

Gio looked at her blankly for a moment, then shook it off. “OH! Right. There… oh, there in there. You see that locker at the stern?” He pointed towards what looked to be a very sturdy fiberglass cooler with metal latches. “Uh, you can grab me one too.”

Off she wobbled, fueled by the knowledge that there was a chance, however small, they would see a whale. Not that she knew much about the ocean, or if there was that exact same chance of spotting a shark — were there dolphins on this coast? — but once the lifejackets had been freed from their metal confine, she found she didn’t especially care which of the three they spotted, as long as it was something.

One was offered to Gio while she fumbled with her own clasps. “Can you, ehm…”

“Oh, sure,” he said, blithely unaware that his hands were going right for her chest. His head tilted slightly as he slid the two plastic buckles together. “You just tighten them with the strap. You, um, do know how to swim? Not like I’m going to throw you over but…”

Because he didn’t want her to look like a dork alone, he pulled a vest on over his long sleeved fleece.

“I swim like a frog,” Dom joked without any intonation, and tugged at the straps as directed. Buckled in, she directed a nervous glance upward, the ocean breeze pushing stray hair across her forehead that she couldn’t quite brush away. “How attractive are we right now?”

Gio put his hands on his hips in a sharp motion, billowing out his padded chest. “So hot!” he announced dramatically, then laughed and turned the ignition over.

****

“I know for some people it’s terrifying, but… I don’t know. I don’t. This, to me, is awesome.”

They’d been sitting there, the engine cut and their eyes scanning the waters for whales, for almost half an hour. So far away from the coastline, all the signs of life outside of themselves were under the water. “So yeah, if I was a Disney princess, I’d totally be Moana.”

This was the sort of conversation that was safe for bobbing alone with someone you liked in a boat you couldn’t escape from. Even if Dominique were to roll out of the boat — not the most intelligent idea, but surely there were some hungry sharks to put her out of misery — she wouldn’t get far. Idle, easy conversation was safer than pestering Gio over what the rest of his feelings were on this, if he was really just humouring her, if this was as one-sided as she worried it might be.

But Gio had prepped peanut butter sandwiches for them, her mostly, and hot chocolate. He’d thought to bring her out to experience something he enjoyed, when she had always been the one to offer and press for what he wanted. She hadn’t asked what he’d wanted now. She had pushed, again. She did want his feelings on her, but she wasn’t going to wrench them out. Not here, in a place, a mindspace where he had serenity and she was fighting not to feed herself to sharks.

She dipped her hand back into the water to skirt her fingers over the surface. They were cold by now. “Do you have a nice singing voice? This is a very important quality,” she smiled.

“I have a singing voice, but I wouldn’t call it nice. I can stay in tune, but that’s a pretty low bar,” Gio snickered. “Oh wait - am I supposed to lie cause you can’t tell? I have an AMAZING singing voice, actually. I thought about Broadway or the Opera but, you know, who likes New York?” he amended dramatically again and laughed a little. She snorted with incredulity. He put the binoculars to his eyes again and scanned around quickly.

“You want to try that stirring thing? You know - waves?” he suggested, his mouth turning into a frown.

Dominique peered down into the water, so deep it was more black than anything. So deep, too deep to fathom. Easy to get lost in.

"Okay, hold my arm," she instructed with one arm already held out for him, the other dipping in a little more. "You'll— you will feel it. It goes through my body." And she hadn't used her powers since the end of last month. Both of these arms had broken then.

Her smile was weak but encouraging. "Don't let a shark eat me, okay?"

He took her arm in his very firm grip and braced his legs out shoulder-width apart. “I will punch it in the face, I promise,” he swore as he reeled her out a little so that she could put her hand down deeper into the water.

As it rose up higher on her arm, Dominique shivered, though she couldn’t say it was from the sensation alone. A number of things began to tingle in her middle and crawl their way up through her body, and she closed her eyes, willing herself to remember she might’ve been in a boat with Gio in the middle of nowhere, but it was just Gio. Just Gio, no monsters. Pain was in the mind. Pain would disappear.

Think of whales, not sharks.

The boat rocked beneath them. Her vibrations echoed out of her arm through to his, but she directed as much as she could down into the water where the frequencies could pierce much deeper than waves caused by a motor. The surface of the water rippled and bubbled not far from her face.

Then — pain, pain pain pain. Dominique’s body seized up, tensing in his hold. “Gio—”

It had felt like his arm was strapped onto a motorcycle, the hum of vibration going clear up through to his shoulder as he’d instinctively tightened his grip. When her body seemed to tighten too, it was fairly easy to pull her back up into him.

Pain criss-crossed her features and he immediately loosened the grip he had on her, but didn’t release. “Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.

Dominique had no answer for that. Physically, yes. Physically nothing had broken, because it wasn’t the presence of pain, but the memory of it, of her upper body cracking like twigs with the force of her power and the blinding thought that she was dying. When her bones had mended, her body screamed with every touch. Nothing had broken. She wasn’t dead or dying. Just Gio, no monsters.

She tried to swallow the solid lump in her throat. “The water is cold.”

“Breaking news,” he said, a little skeptically, then gestured with his head back to the seat under the canopy. “Come on,” Gio added, leading her over to go sit back down, “lets see if it worked.”

Silence fell upon them while they awaited the results. Whales, from what Dominique knew, communicated in high frequencies. She had yet to be able to narrow her power to precise frequencies; a goal for later, she was sure. Something hopefully noticed the distress in the water. Ideally, it’d be a curious whale and not a curious shark that Gio would have to punch in the face.

Folding up her hands into her lap — she didn’t dare reach for his — she took a deep breath of salty air. “When did you decide you wanted to study the ocean?”

“About the time my mother let me swim in it,” Gio replied with his binoculars up to his eyes. It had been a purposeful change - switching the aunt-and-uncle to mom-and-dad in his speech - one that made both him and his parents feel better about all the upending that had happened in the last month. “But honestly, after 4 years in oceanography classes, I found that what I really preferred was swimming in it and not, like, doing chemistry labs and computer models. That’s why I kind of abandoned it when I went — OH SHIT I THINK I SEE ONE!” Gio suddenly whooped excitedly as he peeled back and looked excitedly at Dominique. “Come here, come here!”

Her body startled not with the volume of his voice, but his excitement. “Ah, where?” She padded the bench down for her own abandoned binoculars, then simply moved for his. “Show me, show me.”

Gio handed his binoculars over hurriedly and leaned in while stretching his arm out towards some seemingly raucous waves. “Can you see it?!”

She didn’t. There was movement in the water, yes, but no sign of actual life beneath it. And then — “I see it,” she chirped. “Ah, c’est trop cool. Here,” the binoculars were offered back, because this was for his excitement, first and foremost. Sturdier on her feet now, Dominique skipped over to the closest edge of the boat and braced her hands on it to yell: “Monsieur ou madame baleine!”

Gio caught the binoculars and, rather than run to the edge like Dom had, he looked through the lenses again and smiled broadly. “Man. I wish I knew more about whales so I could, you know, identify what kind from here,” Gio said, awed nonetheless.

No, that wouldn’t work. Dom brought her left hand up and whistled, hard. There were some things she hadn’t forgotten how to do upon losing her hearing, especially with practice, and because she could hear this high frequency, albeit through layers of cotton.

He dropped the binoculars and looked over at the sharp whistle. Dom looked bright and cheerful again, which couldn’t help but make Gio smile. He looked back on the water and felt kind of proud of himself.

****

The speedboat knocked gently against the side of the dock as Gio fastened it back into place. Unable to offer any help, Dominique scanned through her pictures and videos of their whale friend. Not ideal photos considering the distance, and the zoom was questionable, but it was clearly a whale. Her smile was soft and content.

Gio too had a hop in his step as he tied the ropes at the various points and secured the life preservers. Pulling the key lastly out of the ignition (he didn’t want it to accidentally fall from his pocket), he leapt back onto the dock and once again held out a hand to help stabilize Dom.

“Oh - damn, can you grab the bag, Dom?” he asked after waving for her attention.

Everything had been tucked away on the ride back, leaving her with a simple task of hefting the bag (lighter now than it had been when they’d begun their whale-watching adventure) and, after a final check, she abandoned the boat and took his helping hands. The aftertaste of peanut butter hung on her tongue and there was salt in her hair and Juliets in her middle; it had been a good day.

“Ah, hey, do you like sharks?” And potential second dates. “And aquariums?”

“Of course! Who doesn’t like aquariums?” Gio laughed as he took the bag and slung it over his shoulder. Without prompting, he grabbed her hand in his comparatively gorilla-sized one and started walking down the boardwalk back to drop off the key. “What I really like,” he said, dipping his head closer to hers, “is diving to see them myself in the wild, but the coast of California isn’t super great for that. What about you? Maybe not to see sharks, hm?”

Emotions hurtled into Dominique in quick succession: surprise, awe, panic, then right into a quiet vulnerability she had entertained only in the presence of Talia. She opened her mouth to reply, except the firing neurons in her head decided that English was no longer a language she knew, and French was all that it could provide for the time being, because Gio was holding her hand. Gio was holding, with his own hand attached to his body, her hand. Of his own volition.

Gio had left her in the ocean and brought back a fish. She was a fish now. A fish out of water.

“I ain’t afraid of no sharks,” was the sole thing her mind could conjure in her significantly dazed state.

"You strike me more as a fan of jellies. Graceful with a sting," Gio replied, blithely unaware of Dom's internal distress. On his end, it felt nice to hold hands, like they were elementary school kids and might break out into skips any moment. He dropped the keys in the lock box at the end of the dock and looked back towards Dom.

"Are you still full up on sandwiches or do you want to grab some food?"

He didn’t need food the way she did; he was asking for her sake. Today had been for both of them, a little bit more for him, and this was for her. The awe trickled back in as she twisted her hand to fit more comfortably in his. “Fish and chips?”

“Asserting your dom-inance over the ocean?” he quipped with a wicked grin.

Her English brain caught up to her French brain. She stared, not willing to be the last laugh. “I can communicate with whales,” she declared boldly, shuffling ahead of him into a slight jog with their hands linked still. “I already have!” And off went her legs to drag him down the rest of the pier, ponytail fluttering behind her like a jellyfish’s delicate arms.