Rosy Skies (Otayuri)

Noon

When Yuri awoke, the first thing that he was aware of was the sharp ache in his jaw. His mouth simultaneously felt too empty and too full. Blearily, he opened his eyes to golden light streaming down from above. In his sleep inertia state, he wondered why he felt so light. Lying on his side, he could see peculiar, green-brown plants that stretched towards the sky. They danced lazily in the wind, but he felt no breeze.

Yuri reached out out to one of the fronds in an attempt to touch it, and noticed that his hand looked strange. Was he wearing a glove? He drew it closer to his face to inspect it. It was covered in tiny, light-gray scales almost to the elbow. When he rubbed his fingers together they felt gritty. There were membranes between his fingers. Was this some kind of a strange dream? It felt like he was underwater...

With a sinking feeling in his belly, he remembered the events from the previous night from before he fell unconscious. The spell, the tongue, passing out... He felt so stupid. Regret filled him up like a rotten meal. What on earth had he been thinking? He glowered up at the surface of the water, blinking tears away. Ruefully, he reflected on how it didn't matter how much you cried into the ocean. It was just salt water melting into more salt water.

Yuri tried to push himself upright, but his head ached so much and he felt so nauseous that he had to immediately lie back down again. In the moments that he was sitting, he briefly glimpsed a massive gray tail that had darker bands. Well, at least his tail looked impressive.

He tried to rest on his back, but he found that there was something protruding from it and he was forced to flip onto his stomach. The action stirred up a cloud of sand. It got caught in his gills, and he almost choked. It was a very unfamiliar feeling. He hadn't realized that he'd been filtering water through his gills until that moment; he'd been doing it automatically. (However, now that he was aware of his breaths, he couldn't take his mind off of them.)

Experimentally, Yuri softly flicked the caudal fin of his tail. Just that small movement delivered the same shooting pain as when one stubs their toe hard against something solid. The sensation lingered on for quite some time, and Yuri bore it by gritting his teeth.

His teeth. He went to run his tongue over them, and his mind became confused when nothing happened. With a pathetic sob, Yuri instead touched the tips of his lower teeth with a finger. They felt serrated and pointed, like little knives. No wonder his jaw hurt so badly, it'd had to adapt to new additions. He was quite certain that there were more than 32 teeth in there.

Having nothing better to do, Yuri surveyed his surroundings. From what he could see, he determined that he was in a kelp forest of some kind. Little fishes darted through the seaweed, and one of them came up to nibble at his face before he swatted at it irritably and it sped away like lightning.

He laid there for what could have been hours, sifting his fingers through the coarse sand and holding broken shell fragments up to the light. Picking up a snail shell, he silently admired how the rich taupe of its interior shone.

Closing his eyes and feeling the current washing over him, Yuri wondered if he would be stuck there until he starved to death. He still felt too ill to go anywhere, and no other merfolk seemed to be nearby.

Just as that thought crossed his mind, however, he opened his eyes and they were met by another pair of earnest, coal-black ones. It was the very merman that Yuri had rescued. His stoic face was marred by a touch of concern. Long, dark tendrils of hair drifted around him in the water. A complicated array of braids loosely tied the top half of his mane back. The plaits were strung with chunky, colorful beads.

The mer narrowed his eyes in thought, and scrutinized Yuri. Yuri found himself blushing, embarrassed at being fixed under such an intense gaze. His recollections of the merman paled in comparison to having him right there, in the flesh. He was right there, after all this time and suffering. The merman clicked something that might have been a question, and Yuri shook his head bitterly in response. The mer cocked his head to the side slightly.