Fins | A Klance Mermaid AU

1.

Keith Kogane loved to sail. With the wind in his hair, the smell of the sea in his nose and the feel of the sea spray on his face, it was almost as if he was in the ocean without having to touch the water. At sea, Keith was free, bound to nobody but himself and free to follow whichever rules he chose. He navigated by the stars at night and the sun during the day, pulling ropes and adjusting the sails with perfection. Guided by the fire blazing under his skin, Keith need never even check a compass to see if his boat was on track. He only need trust in his genes and the hope that the fire in his blood still burned in his brother.

Five years ago, Takashi Shirogane had disappeared on a mission for the naval forces of the Garrison. The navy had looked for him for a year before proclaiming him dead and giving his family medals of honor to consolidate them for his loss, paying no heed to the cries of Tashiki's little brother who had sworn that Shiro was still alive and that Keith could feel their connection still alive beneath the surface of his skin. Angry and humiliated by the disbelieval of the Garrison officials, Keith dropped out and struck out on his own to find his brother, vowing to either find Shiro or to die trying. The two brothers had human father, but they did not know who their mother was, only that she was a being of magic, because she left them both with a fire in their veins that connected them to each other. This fire, the only connection that the two boys had to their mother, was what Keith was using to track down Shiro.

Keith was getting close to his brother and he could feel it, the fire inside him was raging even more furiously than normal, a sure sign that his brother was in the vicinity. The fire began to pull at Keith's body furiously, as if wanting to fly him to his brother's location and Keith worked furiously to point the boat where the fire was telling him to go. With a sinking heart, he realized that the fire wanted him to sail straight into the undulating mass of storm clouds located on the horizon.

Keith knew to avoid storms, he had heard tales of sailors and even large navy vessels going into a mass of clouds and never coming out. Keith knew that storms were always composed of a mass of Galran spirits; the malicious deities that took the form of storm clouds, lightning bolts and thunder claps. The Galra were ruthless and wouldn't cease to drown anyone who came into their midst and, even worse, to capture seamen who seemed interesting and experiment on them.

With dreadful certainty, Keith knew that Shiro was in the center of that storm, most likely being tortured by the Galrans. Keith had heard tales of those who had escaped Galran clutches and come out irreversibly altered. The thought of any of those outcomes happening to Shiro made him shiver, but he knew he had to try to rescue his brother. His will steeled, Keith turned his boat towards the storm and began to race into the heart of the maelstrom.

He thought he heard the wind laughing in his ear, egging him on and he listened to it, knowing that the storm was where shirt was, and therefore where he needed to be. As his little schooner drew closer to the storm, Keith could've sworn he heard voices yelling at him to stop and turn back. He felt underwater resistance to his ship's course and looked over the sides to see webbed and humanoid hands slapping against the hull. If he had been in his right mind, Keith may have heeded the advice of the faceless hands, but he was so close to seeing shirt again that he merely took up an oar and slapped the hands away, earning himself curses and insults from unseen voices.

As Keith entered the storm, his hair began to whip in the wind, stinging his cheeks and eyes. Before his eyes, the clouds seemed to morph into horrifying shapes. Keith saw faces with large fangs and yellow eyes and cages in which prisoners struggled to free themselves. Keith felt himself begin to glow with the fire and he saw a figure in a cage a few yards off doing the same. "Shiro!" Keith's scream ripped itself from his throat and carried through the Galra to Shiro, who turned to his little brother with a look of dismay on his face.

"Keith," he shouted. "Keith get out of here!" It was only then that Keith realized that Shiro had a prosthetic arm and a shock of white in his pitch black hair.

"I'm not leaving you locked up in this place, Shiro!" Keith began to race towards his brother, his ship buffeted from all sides by the wind.

Suddenly, a cloud hovered down and materialized into a tall purple figure on the deck of the ship. "Not so fast little fireling." The Cloud Galra sneered at Keith, exposing sharp yellowed fangs that sparked like lightning, glowing yellow eyes narrowed in contempt. Keith pulled out his sword and swung at the Galra, the blade passing right through his smoky body, causing him to laugh maliciously. "Now, now fireling, lets not get feisty." He flicked Keith's sword out of his hand and into the sark water with just a wave of his hand. "We can't let you reconnect with your brother and unleash your combined power on all of us, now can we? And of course, we don't need you to experiment on, we've already used your brother, and we can't have more than one living reminder of the traitor who spawned you." The Galra laughed again echoed by other spirits in the storm as a giant hand emerged from the cloud and picked Keith up by the collar of his jacket. "I'm sorry little fireling," the Galra on the ship gave Keith a look of fake pity. "But I'm afraid we'll just have to drown you."

With that, Keith was thrown down into the ocean, hearing only Shiro's scream of rage before he hit the water and sank beneath the waves, feeling the fire within himself being slowly doused. As Keith began to loose consciousness, he felt a strong pair of arms wrap around his body and drag him into the depths before he passed into blackness, knowing that it was the end for him.

A/N

Hi friends, welcome to my book. For all of you who came her from my other book, Utopia, thanks for sticking with me and for everyone new to my writing, Hi, I'm Lailz. In Utopia, I had obnoxiously long A/Ns and I'm trying to make them shorter in this book, which will probs fail but I'm at least gonna try. Again, thank you all for reading this book, I'm super excited for it. Until the next chapter frienderinos,

-Lailz

[WC~1100]

[CP~7.22.2017]