Part of your world

Just You And Me

Seb had been awake for a while.

The sun rising had woken him up, and he had been so enamoured with watching as it slowly crept above the horizon, casting a warm glow onto the streets below, that they hadn't even considered trying to go back to sleep despite the early hour.

The clock that hung on the wall read 6:30, and while Seb wasn't fully familiar with human methods of time keeping, the clock in his collection had been broken from the moment he found it, he had been able to figure out a lot of the forign aspects of the human world on their own. Things like clocks and bath tubs and pizza, while alien to Seb had been easy enough to figure out, which was lucky for Seb considering they were trying to blend in as a human.

Under the sea, they mostly used the brightness of the sun and direction of the currents to tell time, but humans had seemingly found an easier method with clocks, it was far more exact and while Seb found it fascinating, they were somewhat glad that they hadn't found a way to replicate this in the ocean, Seb had had a hard enough time sneaking away for long periods of time without their father having a way of knowing exactly how long he had been gone.

Still, on dry land things felt less urgent. Even with Ursula's five day ultimatum, which Seb supposed was now technically four days, Seb felt far more at ease than he ever had in the ocean. Maybe it was just the relaxed attitude of the people he was staying with, or the sudden absence of people breathing down their neck about royal responsibilities, but Seb felt like they didn't need to gasp for air anymore, which seemed ironic considering until yesterday, air wasn't something they actually needed. 

In the morning there was a stillness that there had never been before. The ocean was a living entity, it was always moving, changing, spinning. Seb had grown up with it so it had been easy to adapt to, they had never known anything else, but sat in the window seat of his bedroom, gazing out at the small beach town as the sun slowly rose in the sky and the world slept, it was all Seb could do to stare at the unwavering quiet in awe. Of all the new things the world above the sea had to offer, this hadn't been one he was anticipating.

There was a creaking sound from down the hallway that finally broke the silence. Seb could guess that it was Ricky, EJ had mentioned that even in the summer with no reason to wake up early, Ricky would sneak down to the kitchen, sometimes with Big Red to eat breakfast before 7am, something about the skater's weird metabolism making him hungry earlier than most people.

The creaking got louder as Ricky made his way downstairs, the thudding of footsteps sounding outside Sebs door briefly, Seb just smiled at the sound. The fact that Ricky didn't feel the need to be deadly quiet was strangely comforting to them, it was a pleasant indicator that no one had ever made him feel the need to sneak around.

With the silence broken, Seb turned back from the window to perch on the edge of his bed again, his eyes landing on the music box that sat pride of place on the bedside table. A gift from Carlos.

A gift.

Carlos had seemed shocked by Sebs reaction to it, and in a way, Seb had been too. Perhaps after so many years of being conditioned to be 'propper', to accept the flowers handed to them by strangers with a polite smile and nod, to never break in public, he had finally broken. Perhaps this was the first time a gift had actually been bought for the sake of trying to make him happy.

It worked. If Seb hadn't been so exhausted from the chaos of entering an entirely new world, they could probably have stayed up all night twisting the key in the box and watching the ballerina spin to the gentle lullaby.

There had been a music box in his collection. Or at least Seb could guess that's what it was, there was no ballerina and no matter how many times he spun the key no music came out, but they looked similar enough that Seb could guess that they were the same thing in essence. But this one worked, it spun and made music and it was his.