Chapter 13
Fian was creative. He had the capabilities to imagine countless scenarios of pain he might inflict on the barnacle human, but he didn’t waste his time on even one.
The only person he allowed to matter in the cramped little room with just that thin curtain between them and the world was Kai.
Kai was soft and stiff at the same time, and his skin tasted both bitter and sour.
He was however getting calmer with each passing second, with each stuttering breath.
Fian dabbed at Kai’s cheeks with the careful tip of a tentacle, not wanting those cheeks to be soaked in tears or lined with crusted salt.
Kai was also shivering all over, and while he held him tightly, Fian was less certain about what to do about this. Putting his clothes back on him seemed the obvious choice, but Kai clearly loathed them.
I can’t do anything he loathes. He’s so weak right now. If I do something that isn’t right, he might get worse, and that can’t happen.
So Fian waited yet longer. When Kai’s heart beat evenly against his chest, he asked, “I understand you want new clothes. How about we just find one set that fits you for now, and then we go looking for food? Does that sound good?”
A nod. Fian took it.
Finding clothes Kai liked was easy. He had picked out enough to choose from, and he had the wherewithal to point.
“Yeah, those,” he said, voice rough.
Fian helped, but only for stability and warmth.
When Kai was dressed, he looked at himself in the mirror.
He roamed over the new clothes with his hands, a hoodie in all black with purple lining the hood and black jeans with intricate stitching in the front.
Every now and then, Kai stopped to stroke one of Fian’s tentacles, dark blue against Kai’s all-black outfit of choice.
“I need to pay for these.”
Fian nodded. “If you are agreeable, I will do that for you. Using your money, of course.” He plucked the tags from the clothes, barely disturbing them while pulling Kai’s wallet from the pocket of his discarded jeans, along with a set of keys he put in the new ones.
“I’ll shift back now. You’ll have to wait for me for a few moments. ”
The payment was all too easy, especially when Fian added some of his magic to make the human clerk very ignorant and indifferent. They left a heap of clothes in the small changing room and walked out of the store hand in hand into the brightly lit center of the mall.
There, low music played, and humans talking and laughing created a low background noise that wasn’t unlike the sound of waves echoing through the ocean.
Fian beamed at Kai whose eyes were red but mostly dry. “I get to buy you food now.”
Fian spoke just to fill the silence that came in the wake of whatever scar the magic had left behind on his landbride. Kai nodded, which was a relief, if only because it told Fian the human was still here with him, was still paying attention to what was happening around him.
“I don’t want to go back there.”
Fian looked at Kai. “Back where?”
There was the panicked fear that Kai might not want to dream himself into the ocean with Fian again, but it vanished when the human looked up, his eyes swelling with tears again and his cheeks hollow.
Kai stopped next to a large planter with some type of aggressively growing land flora, one of the tall leaves slightly wilting at the tip. “Back to the Jammery. I’m not sure where else to go. I don’t have anyone.”
Simply taking a human with you might be counted as an abduction of non-dreamers, but this has to be an exception. Except he must have things like identification and keys and bank accounts. Humans need all of those.
Fian nodded. “I didn’t have time to clean my place and get human things so you’d feel more at home, but if you don’t mind that—”
Kai shook his head. “That isn’t what I mean.
I don’t just want to move in with you, that’s not what I was angling for.
I should go to a hotel, and then I should plan—I have stuff there.
My consoles. And I think my old laptop is still in one of the boxes.
I need to get a job. Fuck, I’m not even sure I quit the last place I was working for. ”
Fian understood. Kai was planning to run, but he was doing so in order to be able to walk by himself again.
“Can I help?”
Kai looked at him, glancing at Fian’s legs every now and then which hadn’t been there when he’d gone into his cecaelia form earlier. “You have tentacles,” Kai whispered.
“I do,” Fian whispered back. “But I can still help.”
“I dreamed about you. And what your tentacles can do.”
Fian nodded and leaned forward. “I told you that it wasn’t a dream. I mean, it was. There’s all kinds of metaphysics—we don’t have to get into science stuff, but it was real.”
Kai scratched the back of his head and looked around. Fian followed his line of sight to a kitchenware store. He wondered whether Kai was really looking at the corkscrews and salad bowls on display or whether he was just drifting on the tides of his own mind.
“What are you?”
Fian looked around before leaning closer to Kai. “A demon. A dream demon. Oh, and in case you mean my job, I’m a carver. I make things from driftwood. That means—in human terms—I am gainfully employed. Self-employed actually. I live alone, I can cook, and I don’t snore.”
Fian thought those were the most important things to know for humans. Human dreamers always complained about them when seeking dream counseling about their spouses, or so he’d heard.
Kai’s mouth had fallen open. His lips were pale. Fian didn’t like it.
“You’re a dream demon with a job.”
“Yes.”
“And you live alone. In a seashell?”
Fian frowned. “You have seen me. Do you really think I would fit into a seashell?”
Kai shrugged. He shuffled a few inches closer to Fian. “Who knows? Maybe you have giant shells in dreams.”
“We have all kinds of things in the Morpheusrealm. The dream world, I suppose you could call it. I’ll show you all of them, but I live in a real house. Well, it’s a small cottage with a studio where I work.”
Kai cackled, the noise grating. “I get it. You live in my dreams. I can only ever visit you in my dreams, so in a sense, this isn’t real.”
Fian was unprepared for the turn this conversation was taking, and that in a place as public and noisy as this mall. Someone was walking past them with a dog in their purse, and the dog was looking, those canine eyes intrusive.
I would have liked to take him somewhere, a romantic place for humans, but he wants answers. Maybe he wants certainty. Maybe he needs to know I’m nothing like the barnacle man.
Fian spoke, doing his best to mind his surroundings and talk quietly.
“Kai. This is real. Me coming here…I came because I didn’t want to be without you.
You can come with me even without falling asleep.
It’s yet more metaphysics, but at the base of it, magic allows me to travel between realms, and it allows me to take humans with me if I want to.
I do want to take you if you’re willing to come.
If you do, you’ll really need that swimsuit though, because I don’t want you to get cold. ”
Kai nodded. “I don’t know what I want. No. I want to leave the fucking jam place. I want to…I want to punch…I don’t want to ever see him again.”
Kai was white as a sheet, and when Fian shifted so that he had a few suckers on the tips of his fingers, he could taste that sour fear on Kai again, hating it, hating it in ways he’d not hated anything.
“You mean that barnacle man.”
Kai nodded.
“When we are in the human realm, you can always look at me, and when you sleep, I will make sure no echoes of him haunt your dreams. This I vow to you, salt and sea grass be my witness.” He looked around. “And maybe this plant thing here. I don’t know what I should swear to in the human world.”
“We swear on something we love here.”
But I cannot swear on you! Fian thought, his heart noisy as the storm-tossed ocean.
He cleared his throat. “That is good to know. Thank you for telling me.”
Kai lifted his chin. He looked so drained of all his salt, but his eyes were clear.
“I’ll help you buy a phone, and I’ll buy one for myself.
That’s actually going to make me feel good.
Then you can help me go get my stuff, only what I really need.
I’ll check into a hotel—not in Salt Harbor.
And then maybe when I sleep, you can show me around?
I don’t just want to go to a place without knowing how to leave it. ”
Fian gaped. “Kai. Oh, Kai. That would never…there is an agency. I will show you how to contact them. They are called the Human Liaisons Unit, and they are very strict about not harming dreamers. If you are ever unhappy or if I’m unable, they will take you to the human realm.”
“Still. I want to go to a hotel.”
Fian nodded. “Of course. Whatever you want.”
Kai let out a long breath. “Okay. I don’t know where the electronics store is. Let’s go look.”
“We’ll find it together, I’m sure. The ocean always takes you where your heart wants to be, that’s what they say.”
“No ocean here. Just concrete and tile.”
And that is just the problem with the human realm if I am any judge of the matter. That, and humans like the barnacle man.
Fian walked with Kai, not eager to buy a phone but all the more eager to have Kai select it for him.