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"What. The. Fuck."
Wide sea green eyes stared at the reflection of a child in the mirror, a child who's expression mirrored the one he was fairly certain shaped his own features.
"Why the fuck do I look like a baby," he breathed the question out, tone closer to a bewildered statement than the shock that parallelized him. He had woken on the floor a minute ago, head pounding, the air around him smelling of acrid room temperature beer and cold cigarette smoke. His hand reached to the back of his head, hissed when it burned and small fingers came back red. "Damn asshole got me good."
The man paused, 40 years old, a divorce and a failed relationship with his daughter and nights spent in dingy bars to drown his sorrows under his belt, he thought himself fluent in the low dredges that humanity could reach he-
"Fucking bastard killed the kid," he hissed out between milk teeth, incensed.
Water hissed out of the faucet, the small, still round with baby-fat face was cleaned, wiped of accumulated grime - a tomato sauce stained on the cheekbone and chocolate on the chin.
When he'd raised his face, his look was dark.
He paused at the sight. A small child, glaring with his whole being, eyes the dark blue of the ocean.
That… was not normal, he'd thought.
Loud cacophonous snoring could be heard when he opened the bathroom door, the kind that came from untreated sleep apnoea. The smells were more pungent now, mixed with that disgusting acidic bodily odour he'd grown familiar with taking the subway during his long life in New York.
Eyes trailed over furniture and belongings, relaying a story to him he was very much annoyed to find matched what he had guessed. A woman's shoes and coat by the door, small hand-prints on orange paper scotch on it, crooked and off-centred. A man's tennises, nice and new, barely worn. A child sized pair, a hole in it's sole.
He set the shoes down, eyes falling on the print upon the sleeping shorts he was wearing. Sharks.
How cute, he had thought, pushing himself back up.
The scalding heat in his chest reached smouldering temperatures when eyes searched for family pictures and found none, when a man was seen sleeping on the couch, scattered empty bottles on the ground.
Whistling was heard, thing pounded, loud and metallic, echoing between walls. The wall exploded, water gushed out, serpent like and wrapping around the sleeping figure of that tall, whale like garbage of a human.
The man woke up.
Who wouldn't, he'd thought macabre humour dark and sharp and just right for the occasion.
Of course one woke up when water wrapped around their flailing limbs, raising them up in the air like it was presenting them to a knife thrower as a nice tempting target.
"Wha- you little-!"
"Quiet," he said, cutting the foul being off, voice silencing the very air around them. He did not know what this was, did not know how he suddenly turned into a water bender straight out of Avatar, did not care to. Only knew, in that deep instinctive part of one's being that made you breathe when your attention turned, that the water was his as much as his hand was, that water was life and that the ocean killed.
Water was life… oh. Nice, he thought a plan coming to mind.
"There," he murmured, grasping at this feeling originating from the body in the water's grasp. A giggle left his lips when he made it stop, when it remained unmoved despite a pumping heart. When panic made lungs try expanding, when the heart remained stillstillstill despite straining to move.
A high, bell-like bark left him, "Oh! You're face!" His eyes closed, and he fell backwards.
The body thumped on the ground.
Hyperventilating could be heard, socked feet scrambling for purchase on the planked floor, stuttered words or rage.
His eyes widened, large much too large hand wrapped around his arm, a fist smacked unto his abdomen, his back and head slamming into the ground, stealing the breath from his lungs.
Panic seized him.
A hand found purchase on one of the scattered bottles, he smashed it into a fat rounded side.
"Oh! You really though this would work?" The bottle was stolen from him at his second attempt at a swing.
Glass shattered.
His face burned, vision turned red.
His breathe stopped.
The whale stopped moving, blood stopping its circulation to the central nervous system.
His lower lip wobbled.
40 years, dozens of street brawls under his belt, he'd thought distant and panicked and not himself, he had never been this close to death.
____
Morality had… he'd thought as he clumsily controlled his corpse puppet, gone out the window, quite quickly.
There had, he supposed, been rather a lot of blood too. His of course, not the whale's, that would, he supposed, have made the impression he wanted to give the police quite odd. Although he supposed, a toddler's blood contaminated by water from shattered pipes already rather bizarre, adding an adult's wouldn't have made it any less.
But he did rather want to fake his death, and he had learned just as he was familiarizing himself with driving a stick shift second hand, swerving around vehicles that followed traffic laws like one did suggestions, found that it was rather thrilling.
He'd given himself, generously, fifteen minutes to find the rhythm of it before conceding that puppeteering a corpse through New York traffic was, in fact, a skill with a steep learning curve.
The body kept wanting to slump. He kept correcting.
The truck just ahead of of him, decided that braking was the perfect thing to do in that specific moment and he, with the magnificent reflexes of a terrified man in the body of a toddler that had just learned he was the second coming of the avatar in a world that was not the elemental nations or whatnot, made the puppet-corpse's foot slam down on the correct pedal on the second attempt.
Brake-plates and tires squealed, small hands tightened around a seatbelt that had in a rather - much to his later bewilderment - disgruntled manner been put up earlier, the diagonal part of the belt having been tucked under his arm, digging into his armpit much less than it would have his neck.
He was, for once, very grateful to have left more than the safety distance between the car and the truck earlier.
The gap opened and they were moving again and he breathed through his nose and prayed like his life depended on it, which he rather thought it did.
About an hour later, the city gradually thinned the way it always did, begrudgingly and leaving him surrounded by concrete and asphalt dotted with potholes, which made his milk teeth dance more than he felt they should. Boroughs turned to countryside before soon enough, only distant farms could be seen.
He was rather lucky that no cops decided to stop him for the half-hazard way he'd been driving the last few hours.
The sun was starting to set, sky pink in front of him and behind him, framing the city he had grown up in in his other life with the dark blue of impending night.
He'd gotten better at it, he thought as the body drove on, requiring less input than earlier in the day.
The neck he'd mostly given up on, had wedged it against the headrest at an angle that read, he thought, as a man that had been a cat in a past life. The hands he kept loose on the wheel. The rare times the stick had to be use to shift gears had been a exercise in patience. The feet on the pedals he'd stopped over-correcting when the third was not required.
It was, in the specific way that terrible situations sometimes were, almost meditative.
Almost.
The body's face caught the headlights of oncoming traffic periodically, and he had made a decision very early on not to look a gift horse in the mouth and just continued driving. Quietly ignoring the slowly harder to move body driving the vehicle in the front seat just like he had his bar tab until the end of the night.
Minutes later, nearly missing the perfect exit - to the Susquehanna's closest verge
"A dam good sight," he said to the wind, watching the car slowly sing into the muddy water, slowly pushed deeper by currents he controlled.
minutes passed.
A beat.
Lips pursed.
"Shit. I forgot to take his wallet."
He stole for the first time in this life the very next day, very much thankful it was 1996 with the accompanying culture, if one were to ignore his sometimes scramble to find a smartphone that was not there.
A jacket from a playground, shoes from next to a sand pit, snacks and basic small camping tools from a Walmart he'd strategically followed close when entering and exiting.
In the past week of constant storms, he had learned where water fountains were, how to control soapy water and separate soap from it to rinse off. Learned that water healed him. Learned he dried off instantly with less effort than it took one to flick his wrist.
He'd learned he still hated walking and much preferred sitting at one of the rare wooden docks, feet grazing the muddy water under, legs too short for his feet to be submerged, which, as he had repeatedly thought, a shame. Cold water seemed to revitalized and warm him now, an experience than juxtaposed with his past life's experience of shivering and goose flesh after exiting a pool because of a small breeze despite being under the warm summer sun.
He slept where he wanted, when he wanted, careful to remain out of the common man's sight, careful to throw the rugs of humanity to the Susquehanna's greedy embrace.
Drops fell on his face, wind whipped his hair sideways, "I like this new life," he'd mumbled to the air, "but it is getting a tad much."
The fish, he had decided on the first night, under the dark star filled sky, were perhaps the strangest thing yet, which was saying something.
He'd barely dipped a toe, water by it's own free will trailed up his legs and reached to the screaming heat of his wounds and soothed them until it vanished. In that same instant one came rushing towards him, bumping into his toes, tickling him and making him fall back. He'd snatched it from his side, where it had decided to bump into him next, and had held it in the air, "Are you even edible?" he asked to no one in particular, trying to remember his aquatic fauna obsession as a child but only came up with different sharks after his eyes fell on his mud stained - still proudly sporting sharks - short.
"Yes I am! I am! Eat me little prince! Eat me!"
And he, newly water bender able to heal when touching water, decided, well decide was a rather grand word for what had been him grimacing when he'd felt his empty stomach tighten in hunger and had promptly bitten the wiggling fish's head off by some automatism he had promptly decided to not delve deeper.
And with the dignity of a man that had lost everything to his divorce more then eight years ago and had tried for those first two years to remain a father to his daughter only for her to scream in his face every weekend he had her that he was the worse and she hated him and never wanted to see him again. He had swallowed the fish's head with a grimace and eaten the rest body careful to not eat it's digestive system.
"Little prince," he repeated to himself, echoing the words the fish had said.
"Thank you," he had then said, remembering to thank the fish's sacrifice.
The fish, he learned over the following days, had opinions.
Not complex ones. Not the nuanced grinding interior monologue of a human being slowly dismantling all his previous assumptions about the nature of reality after having a demonic dog try to bite his head off only to be exploded from the inside out by his water and its flesh turning to dust the next instant.
Fish always came to him when hunger strikes and he touched the waters of the river.
The storms, by the end of the first week, had become a fact of his life the way traffic had been a fact of his previous one. Constant, occasionally dramatic, not something he'd chosen and not something he could do anything about.
He sat on a dock in the rain and let it not touch him - it did this now, he had found not long after the first drops fell, the rain, parted around him with the cooperative ease of everything wet, leaving him dry in the middle of a downpour like a small and thoroughly unimpressed eye of a very personal storm.
He'd looked at the muddied path he had planned to walk along on the river's verge - and did not fear being dragged the waters having learned after one slip too many into the muddy water that he could breathe despite being submerged - bemoaning his very good chair that had hugged his behind rather comfortably whilst he worked.
He thought about the chair sometimes, walking through Pennsylvania.
The second monster came at him outside a rest stop not far from Dungannon and he killed it with the drainage ditch before he'd fully processed what he was looking at, which he thought was probably for the best.
The dust settled. He stood in the silence of it - birds already gone, insects already quiet, the specific held-breath that he'd learn to recognize as the world politely excusing itself before something went wrong in it.
"Huh," he said, "So that wasn't a fluke."
The third had been a bizarre metallic bird he had nearly lost an eye and and arm to before he was reminded it was raining and water was his best friend forever now.
"You give fucking loot?" he'd paused, "Could I sell that?"
The bird had dropped a shiny, terrifyingly sharp feather he had quickly wrapped his spare jacket before shoving it in his Goldorak backpack.
He blinked, spending longer than he cared to remember gaze jumping from the wrapped feather in his open backpack to the damp dust on the ground.
The feather, he had found out when arriving near Columbia, was quite a problem. The more he'd walked, the more noticeable it's hum was becoming.
He stopped right there, on the muddy path, the sound of rain falling having grown so familiar he found himself forgetting drops still hammered down from the sky, and had sat down, shark short covered bum hitting the ground first.
He slipped the backpack off, zipped it open and pulled the annoying thing out, unwrapping it from the jacket.
He's gripped the plume from it's thicker part and the thing promptly decided to turn into a bronze Swiss-knife, "Just- just how? How does that make sense!" He shouted at the singing trees.
He's collapsed backwards then and had after a nap and the impending feeling of doom, found out it served rather well in turning these monsters to dust.
He still thought water was cooler.
He really, really liked sharks, he found himself thinking, as he carved the shape of a hammer shark into a piece of driftwood a rather big fish had gifted him earlier during his break. Ignoring the pile of dust not far from him.
The children started in Ohio.
He didn't know how he arrived in Ohio following a river that should have led him to Virginia, but here he was.
They came, yes. But not all at once.
In the way these things went, it started with one, and then the world, having established that he would respond to one, began producing more like he was hired as its newest errand boy.
He really felt like he was the butt of some joke.
He really wanted a nap.
It was always the same pattern: child in danger, monster is danger, he as a magnificent knight in blue shark pyjama-shorts saved the day and pointed in a direction that matched the definition of 'away from me' and glared at the child until they left him alone.
No, he needed a nap.
He was, he had decided somewhere between the fourth and fifth child, being cosmically pranked.
Maybe a bed of damp leaves would do?
The sixth child had told him he was cool.
HE was, decidedly not. He was forty, he was a divorcee and kept forgetting he murdered the murderer of the child who's body he now possessed. And yeah he was basically all in all pathetic because he preferred unseasoned raw fish to unseasoned cooked fish.
Should he raid Walmart again?
The nature spirit beings he was tentatively calling Naiades found him on the third day in Virginia, which raised the question, he thought, of where they'd been for however long he'd spent on the Susquehanna.
Weeks, maybe. Months. He hadn't counted, only partially recalled trees with blooming flowers at the beginning, and that the leaves were now an reddish orange and starting to fall. The shoes he'd lifted from beside a sandbox somewhere in Pennsylvania were starting to pinch his toes, which was the closest thing he had to an exact calendar, a pair could last as little as 6 months to a year, and he hadn't looked at it closely enough to draw conclusions other than the fact they would not do for winter-wear.
He had not intended to be in Virginia. He had not, if he was being precise about it, intended Ohio either, and yet Ohio had happened to him at length and with great enthusiasm, so he had decided some time ago that intending things was largely useless and the currents were going to take him wherever they wanted.
Rivers were good.
Rivers went somewhere, had banks to walk along, kept humans at a comfortable distance and fish at a comfortable proximity, and did not require him to produce a story about parents who were just around the corner, he swore, they'd be here any minute.
He had tried that once, in Ohio, for a woman who had looked at him with the specific expression of someone about to involve authorities, and had spent the following ten minutes elaborating a fiction about a mother named Janet with increasing desperation before a monster had, for once, arrived at a convenient time.
He thought about Janet sometimes, thought about how much of a bitch she had been.
Thought about the ring he'd slipped on her finger, thought about how it had been thrown back in his face.
And that had made the next few day in Ohio rather painful, mind cycling through memories of his daughter and the email he hadn't had the courage to open before ending up here, in the past, in the body of a toddler with water magic.
That period was in his recollection - which was poor even on a good day no - the longest yet shortest depressive episode yet.
The Shenandoah was quiet. A fact he was grateful for.
He was sitting in its shallows, shoes off and to the side, the water cold around his ankles in the way cold was now, which was to say fine, pleasant even, a fact he had long since stopped remarking upon internally. The storms had been going for - he looked up at the sky, which was doing what it had been doing since approximately the beginning, which was threatening rain or actively raining or recovering from having rained - a while now, nearly his entire time since making the body drive itself to it's watery grave.
It made him wonder sometimes, about global warming and all the warnings that had gotten ignored since the 70s.
Not his problem, he had thought.
The first one surfaced three feet away and stared at him.
He looked at her. Looked back at the water.
She had dark hair that moved wrong and eyes the colour of creek-water over pale stone and an expression of mischief.
He hadn't.
He wasn't sure he remembered how to make his face morph that way, and found he didn't particularly want to try.
Things happened, he dealt with them, he moved on, that was more or less the shape of his days since he'd walked out of his daughter's life.
A shape emerged from the water then next to it. The second spirit, he had decided on, had considerably more- presence, he decided, the quality a thing had when it took up more space than its physical dimensions warranted.
Where the first had mischief, this one had weight. Dark eyes that had been watching things longer than he could realistically picture. She looked at him with the particular attention of something very wise and knowledgeable encountering something it hadn't seen before and finding this worth its time.
He found this faintly unsettling.
He noted it and set it aside, burying the pout that wanted to emerge.
The third surfaced upstream without announcing herself, settled on a half-submerged rock that may or may not have been there a moment ago, and appeared to have no interest in him whatsoever. He approved of this immediately and completely.
"Little river-son," she said. Her voice had the quality of water over shallow stones. "You've been sitting in our waters."
"I have," he agreed.
"You have been helping the demigods," the third said airily, absentmindedly drawing shaped with water into the air.
"The children," he stated more then asked.
"Yes."
"They leave faster when I deal with their problem," he offered, uncharacteristic of him, yet hoping this would prompt them to relay more information about this new world.
Demigods, he thought again, so gods exist.
A beat, the pause lasted, settled over them. His attention turned back to the sound of the water.
"You smell like open sea," the second one said, leaning forward with the unselfish-conscious invasion of personal space he was learning was characteristic of things that had never had to consider the concept. Her hair moved against the direction of the current. "But you're sitting in a river. How interesting."
"Mm," he said.
"What's your name?"
He smiled, closing his eyes in response.
"You know," the third started, "word travels fast amongst Naiades."
"Gossip tends to do that," he confirmed, voice still carrying that bell like quality that still made him, at times, shiver in disgust.
"Are you a god?"
That interaction, he later supposed, had been rather odd and was perhaps his oddest yet.
Still, children still happened to be in the middle of the semi-wilderness, somehow happening to cross his specific path by the behest of fate, with what seemed to be higher frequency.
"The king of the seas is still furious," he heard as he approached a boulder.
"He is, someone took something from him 6 months ago," another voice said.
"Still to send all his children and all of his court out to the world in search of it-"
The third voice cut itself off just as his shoed foot squelched in the mud, sound loud and evidently reaching the group.
"Don't stop your gossip on my account," he said as he walked around it, hair falling over his face, dark and green like algae. He did not know when it had turned that colour.
"We wouldn't dream of it, Lordling," the one with eyes like creek-water said, her voice a bubbling brook. She bowed her head, though her eyes remained fixed on his Goldorak backpack. "Not when the Sea is screaming for what was stolen."
"Stolen," he repeated, his voice carrying that bell-like resonance he still wasn't used to. "You make it sound like he lost his car keys. From what I’ve heard, the big guy is ready to drown the coast over it."
"Oh that's what he's been doing!" Came a chipper voice from behind him, Caduceus in one hand, a block-note in the other, "Ladies," he'd nodded at the spirits before turning to him.
"Here sign here, and here," a pen was shoved in his hands faster that he could process. "A package for the little god wearing sharp pyjamas in Ohio, well it's not Ohio but i found you anyways, glad to meet one of Uncle P's kids, Hermes messager of the gods at your service."
"Oh and you've been summoned to Olympus, you know Uncle P's crankiness for the past half year," a hand fell on his head, ruffling green strands.
He had taken a step back scowling at the god, "hands off."
He was swept of his feet like simba, presented to the Naiades like simba in the lion king. This was deeply annoying.