٠࣪⭑ you and aonung are very oblivious, and everyone is very not.
aonung has never in his life been good at wanting something quietly.
he’d been obvious about hating you, once. loud and pointed and impossible to ignore. and it turns out that aonung deciding he likes you is exactly the same energy, just rotated.
aonung notices none of this because aonung is looking at you, and when he looks at you he tends to forget other people exist. which is a lot. and you have to look away before you do something embarrassing like smile too big in front of everyone.
the two of you are together, technically.
that’s the word for it — together, a thing, whatever you want to call what happens when two people stop pretending and just do something about it.
it’s new enough that it still feels a little unreal sometimes, new enough that neither of you has said much about it out loud, to each other or anyone else.
you’re not hiding it exactly. you just haven’t announced it. there’s a difference. probably.
not that it needed much explaining.
aonung kisses you because it’s something he gets to do now, casual and sure about it, and that pretty much settles the question of what you are to each other.
the thing is, you wouldn’t even realize it if rotxo’s face wasn’t so loud.
you’re coming back from a dive — nothing special, just a regular afternoon, — and aonung pulls himself up onto the rock right after you and says something, just something simple, and you laugh. and that’s it. that’s the whole crime. you laughing .
rotxo, sitting three feet away, and he makes a face like he has just seen something he cannot unsee. like he has been shown a vision of his future and it involves a lot of watching this happen and not being able to do anything about it.
you don’t notice. aonung doesn’t notice. you’re both just sitting there on the boat like normal people and rotxo is over there having a whole silent crisis.
you’ll think about it later and realize: that was probably when it started. not for you and aonung. for everyone else.
٠࣪⭑
kiri is the one who actually says something, because kiri has no concept of minding her own business when she finds something interesting.
you’re sitting with her and tsireya a few nights later, the three of you picked clean of anything useful to do, and kiri is quiet in this particular way she gets sometimes, like she’s been turning something over for a while and just decided it’s time, and then she says, apropos of absolutely nothing:
“he says your name differently.”
you look at her. “what.”
“aonung. when he says your name.” she’s not even looking at you. she’s looking at her hands. “it sounds different than when he says other people’s names. i’ve noticed it for a while.”
tsireya, to her credit, says nothing. she just takes a very slow sip of whatever she’s drinking.
“kiri,” you say. “what does that even mean.”
“it means what it means,” she says, unbothered, like she hasn’t just rewired something in your brain permanently.
you look at tsireya. tsireya looks back at you with an expression that says i know and i have known and i have been waiting for someone else to bring it up so it wasn’t me.
“you’re both insane,” you say.
neither of them argues with you.
you spend the next three days noticing every single time he says your name. you’re being deranged about it. you know you’re being deranged about it. you cannot stop.
(kiri is right, by the way. there’s a difference. you wish she wasn’t right.)
٠࣪⭑
here’s what you figure out about aonung: he doesn’t know what to do with his hands when he’s around you.
this sounds small.
it is not small.
aonung is one of the most physically confident people you’ve ever met. He moves through water like it’s a language he was born speaking, he takes up space like it belongs to him, he never seems to not know what to do with himself.
except around you, sometimes, he’ll go slightly still. or he’ll find something to do with his hands that’s unnecessary. or he’ll stand somewhere and then shift, just slightly, like he’s recalibrating.
and it’s not just that.
He’s developed this habit of running his fingers over the beads on your loincloth or through the ones in your hair, absentminded, like a fidget he found and claimed without asking.
He’ll trace along your spine without seeming to realize he’s doing it, this slow idle drag, and the first time it happened you made a small yelp and your back arched away from it before you could stop yourself and he pulled his hand away like he’d touched something hot.
lately he’s been doing it more, and there’s something in his face when he does it that’s a little too composed, a little too non innocent, and you think he knows exactly what he’s doing.
you think he just likes to hear you let out small whimpers just for him.
you could be wrong. you’re probably not wrong.
you notice this and then immediately try to unnotice it because noticing it is dangerous.
lo’ak notices you noticing it, which is worse. you see him see you see aonung adjust his stance for no reason, just something simple like pulling his lioncloth lower because he said one day that ‘ he likes a little low rise ‘
Lo’ak has to look away and he’s pressing his mouth together in this extremely suspicious way and you want to walk into the ocean and not come back.
“don’t,” you tell him.
“i didn’t say anything,” lo’ak says.
“don’t.”
“i’m not—”
“lo’ak.”
he holds up his hands. innocent. completely unconvincing. later you see him talking to neteyam and neteyam looks over at you and then back at lo’ak and says something that makes lo’ak nod seriously and you don’t know what that means but you know it’s about you and you hate it here.
٠࣪⭑
you’re practicing a knot — metkayina rigging, complicated, you keep losing the tension at the end — and you’ve been at it for a while and you’re getting frustrated, and aonung comes over for something practical, something about the next dive. he tells you what he came to say and then instead of leaving he watches you for a second and then just—
“here.” he crouches next to you. “you’re dropping it there, that’s why.”
and then his hands come over yours and he adjusts your grip and talks you through it, and he’s close, and he’s being so matter-of-fact about it, like this is just a thing he’s doing and not a thing that’s making it very difficult to remember what a knot is.
you get it right. he says “yeah, there it is” in this quiet satisfied way, almost to himself, and he’s still close when you look at him and he’s already looking at you, and for a second neither of you does anything, and then he stands up and says the group’s leaving soon and walks away.
you sit there. you hold the knot. you think: okay.
ronal saw the whole thing from across the bank. she watches aonung walk away and then watches your face, and then she goes back to what she was doing and says nothing to anyone. but that evening she watches aonung at dinner more carefully than usual.
The way he angles toward you in a group without meaning to, the way his eyes track you when you move. she’s quiet about it. ronal is always quiet about it. she files it away the way she files away everything that’s becoming.
tonowari figures it out for a different reason entirely. aonung mentions you at dinner — just relaying something, something about the tides or the dive, nothing significant — and tonowari hears the way he says your name and he goes still. looks at his son. aonung doesn’t notice, he’s still talking, and tonowari picks up his food and doesn’t say a word.
that night he tells ronal: “aonung is in trouble.”
ronal says, without looking up: “i know.”
٠࣪⭑
it’s not supposed to be anything. rough water, longer route than usual, nothing you haven’t handled before. but there’s a current midway through that catches you wrong and by the time you surface you’re further out than you meant to be and disoriented and — fine. you’re fine. you’re already fixing it.
but aonung surfaces in front of you before you’ve even gotten your bearings and he’s looking at your face the way you look at something you were scared about. this quick, urgent scan, like he’s running inventory, and you watch him find that you’re okay and then watch the tension leave his shoulders like something let go of him.
“i’m fine,” you say.
“i know,” he says. he very clearly did not know thirty seconds ago.
you look at him. he looks back. the water is moving around both of you and something is happening in his expression that he’s not trying hard enough to hide, and you think — not for the first time, but more clearly than before — i really like this man.
behind him, rotxo surfaces and takes one look at both of you and closes his eyes.
lo’ak comes up next, then neteyam, then kiri, and they all surface into this loaded silence and nobody says a word. lo’ak looks at neteyam. neteyam looks at lo’ak. kiri looks at you specifically, at your face, and stores whatever she sees there.
“the current shifted,” rotxo announces loudly to the open ocean. “that happens...”
Eventually, everyone moves. you let the water carry you back toward the boats and you don’t look at aonung until you’re climbing up and you can’t help it, and when you do he’s already looking at you and he turns away first, jaw set, ears doing something you don’t have a word for.
٠࣪⭑
tsireya finds you that evening sitting by the water on your own.
she doesn’t make a thing of it. she just sits down next to you and lets you be quiet for a while, because that’s what tsireya does, and the night comes in and the water goes dark and eventually you say:
“is it obvious.”
she’s quiet for exactly one second. “yes.”
“both of us?”
“both of you,” she says. “very much both of you.”
you put your face in your hands. not upset — just. overwhelmed by the realness of it, by the fact that it’s a thing that exists outside of your own head, that other people can see it, that rotxo is out there right now sighing about you somewhere.
tsireya puts her arm around you and doesn’t say anything else, because she doesn’t need to. across the bank you can hear the others, lo’ak’s voice carrying over the water, and you can hear aonung laugh at something, that real laugh he has, the one that sounds like it catches him off guard.
you close your eyes.
it’s something and it’s early and nothing has been said and you have absolutely no idea what happens next.
but aonung surfaced in front of you today before you even knew you needed him there, and he looked at your face like he’d been scared, and kiri said there’s a difference in his voice when he says your name.
you can start there, probably. that feels like enough to start.
٠࣪⭑ lowkey i was tired when I wrote this and I went back and I realized some of these words not capitalized 😭
٠࣪⭑ based off this request!
