Drowning my Sorrows, Breathing your Secrets

[NicTheDjinn]

It was raining.

Huh.

Facial fins lifted and spread slightly as their owner became aware of the soft pattering sound. Usually, he wouldn’t have noticed with all the raucous noise of low bloods having a good time in this shitty bar that apparently couldn’t even afford to keep the tables clean or the booths in any sort of repair. The lighting was sparse, obscuring those that desired to be obscured. Not that it was particularly easy to obscure a sea dweller in a bar like this, especially not when he was a few heads taller than most of the patrons and covered in gold and jewels.
But the rain.

He used to like the rain. His hive was much too deep for it to ever reach, but back sweeps ago he’d find out there were rainclouds coming in and swim up through the darkness to see them. From below the water’s surface, it was quite a show- little droplets creating rings that spread and spread and spread… until they ran into each other, becoming a pattern of noise and chaos as saltwater met fresh. It had felt so strange in his gills, in those moments when enough rainwater had fallen into the sea to throw off the equilibrium of solutes at the surface.

She had liked the rain too.

They used to sit outside her tiny shack of a hive, and listen as it struck little metal containers and sculptures all around her lawnring. She was always accumulating things like that- sculptures that seemed so weird and out of place until the wind blew or the rain fell and their true purposes were revealed. Low blooded neighbors had thrown a fuss about them, calling them junk until the sight of his bared fangs sent them off to find other people to bother…

“Listen, B, you can hear it right..? The rain plays such beautiful music.”

They didn’t speak often during rain storms, comfortable without the need for words expressing such. Hours would pass while they sat together in silence, rain playing its music for her and the high humidity tricking his gills into opening as if they could breathe. It always made them feel a bit dry, later, but he didn’t mind a little bit of discomfort to spend time with her.

Or he.

He hadn’t minded, back when she’d…

She’d…

A shot glass rose up to disrupt the thought, clinking as it met the twin rings on either side of his bottom lip. Burning liquid poured down the troll’s throat, following the fate of each shot he’d had before. A hiss forced its way through jagged fangs as he slammed the tiny glass down, a crack spreading across the rim. The low blooded bartender washing a glass in front of shelves and shelves of colored bottles glared, but said nothing.

“Fuck the rain… Another.”

Shots blurred together until he found himself out on a street, staggering past shops and hives alike. He’d started another fight, got kicked out of another bar… Shit bloods. Joke was on them, he’d made off with a bottle, even if it was smeared with someone’s olive blood… At least it looked olive. It was hard to tell with violet tinting the vision in one eye. Felt like one of his facial fins had been injured too, the usual resistance between the tines oddly slack. Some bastard must have grabbed a hold of the piercing and ripped it out. Well. He hoped they were happy with their spoils. Unless that had been the one he had punched in the mouth, in which case, hey, material for a couple of shiny new teeth. Probably not all of them but eh. Semantics.

Right, he'd punched that guy in the mouth... That was probably why his hand was bleeding.

The sea dweller raised said appendage up, squinting at a wound that was the exact shape of that bartender’s jagged teeth. It was still bleeding sluggishly, though the majority of the mess had been washed away as the rain soaked him through… Being wet on land was oddly more miserable than being in the ocean. It was probably the air, there wasn’t enough water, too little humidity to surround him in it's embrace...

That hard-won bottle came up, and a messy gulp of the contents led to some escaping the corners of his mouth and running down into his gills. It burned different that way than when it seeped into his busted lip or down his throat. Got it into his blood fast though, went right up into his brain to chase away the discordant music of the rain and the grief. Rain was stupid. Grief was stupid.
Grief was painful.

What did he even have to grieve? There was no blood, no corpse… He didn’t even know if she was alive, couldn’t even bury her body if she wasn’t. She had to be, though, didn’t she..? It had been so long, she wouldn’t disappear like this on him, on her hive, on her lusus…

“I’ll be back in an hour okay B? Just chill out and watch something.”

She’d been smiling… Not worried, not a care in the world. It hadn’t been raining that night, the moons out in full force. He hadn’t been worried either. He hadn’t known… It was only after hours had passed and messages had gone unanswered that he had become worried. She’d never left him hanging for long, never. Never.

Until she had permanently.

Water dripped down the back of his yellow rain slicker, pooling in the thrown-back hood. Yellow… The color of her blood. Why did he bother wearing the colors of his dead matesprit..? It was stupid. It was all so stupid… He should have been with her. How could he have let her go alone when her smile was so sure and bright. He’d watched a movie. Stared at some plot hole-ridden storyline while she was stolen away, forever. It was just a trip to get a new one of those fucking sculptures, she’d been so excited. He’d just stayed at her hive, not able to help or protect her when the danger reared its head. A pathetic waste of space.

The toe of his boot caught on something, and the violet blood found himself pitched forward face down in the mud and grass… Someone’s lawnring. With some maneuvering and a series of grunts, he rolled onto his back, ignoring the dull thudding in his knees and the scrapes on his palms. She probably would have laughed at him, stumbling around drunk and lost in the city that had taken her from him. Called him a fish out of water, or something equally punny. Then she would have helped him up, cleaned his scrapes, told him how much she cared about him...

The rain had stopped, and Beluge no longer had a scapegoat for the fluid distorting his vision. Thick, heavy tears trailed down from the corners of his eyes, running along the tines of his fins before finding the damp soil.

The bottle rose a final time, the sea troll emptying its contents and tossing the bloody thing aside somewhere. He barely registered the sound of it shattering against some hard surface. Didn't matter anyway, land dwellers tossed their trash in the waterways all the time... Fuckers could deal with some glass shards…

That was his last thought for a while, as darkness closed in from the edges of his vision, everything going black.

When consciousness returned, it was less of a wave and more of a trickle. Sensations came on slowly, thickly, like mud. Lots of little wounds called for attention, his hands, his fin, his face. They didn’t feel... Horrible, though. Not as bad as he would have expected after passing out in the rain, after falling into the mud. He also felt… Drier, than he would have expected. Beluge braced a hand on the not-grass floor, using it to lift himself up a bit. Come to think of it-

Nope, moving had been the worst idea.

“Fuck…”

Claiming it’s due much like that bartender had tried doing hours ago, his inebriation came back all at once. Ever the sea dweller epitome of grace and style, Beluge groaned loudly, covering his eyes with a hand as he fell back prone, head thumping dully against the floor. It felt like a tsunami had somehow taken root in his skull, bashing his brain around and smearing it within the walls of the cavity. All he could hear was the pounding of his own blood, rhythmic like his hammer flattening metal but way less soothing… This must be what it felt like to be his hive, all the pressure closing in and trying to crush everything as compact as it could go.

Wait, his hive. Was this his hive?

It would be hard to tell while covering his eyes, so the sea troll flung the hand covering them off to the side, only for it to land in something soft and… warm? Alarm bells went off in the hung-over troll’s head, managing a sort of flop away from the mystery item, eyes cracking open to find-

Was that grubloaf?

A plate of food had been set out for him.

Huh.

The rest of the room held unfamiliar furniture and objects, further solidifying that this was not, in fact, his own hive. This was a fact his hungover brain was both worried about and glad for. His lusus always threw the biggest fit when he came home drunk… Let’s see, there was a recoopracoon, a desk, and a chair… A pretty normal set up for a guest block. Considering his history with waking up in strange places, Beluge was honestly relieved at the lack of torture devices and knives. He’d take a guest block over someone’s murder basement any day of the sweep... That still left the issue of who’s hive he was in, though. Squinting so that the light stopped trying to drill into his retinas, the violet blood did a quick sweep of the block, hoping for clues-
Oh.

In the doorway stood an indigo blood. Well… That was quite the clue, as it so happened. Also quite a smug clue, too.

Beluge forced himself to sit up straighter, mustering the most aristocratic expression he could- as if he hadn’t just shoved his hand into a plate of food, and then wiped said hand on the floor. He met the troll’s eyes head-on, his own half-closed to avoid the bright, merciless light.

“Can I help you?”