Title: Fishes and Birds

Author: Alex Foster

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Category: Fantasy

Rating: PG

Summary: She is a creature of the space between clouds. Thunder follows in her wake, forever trying to catch up. A flicker of light, pure power and whim, going wherever she pleases except down below the waves. Mild femslash warning.

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by NBC. No money is being made and no infringement is intended.

Author’s Notes: I really hope this makes sense. This was written for the Taming the Muse writing challenge. The prompt was Dreamworld so I decided to go a little surreal with the imagery. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy…

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Sweet is the dream, divinely sweet, when absent souls in fancy meet.

-Sir Thomas More

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She dreams of water all the time now.

Long ago sky and wind dominated her dreamworlds. She is a creature of the space between clouds so this is understandable. Thunder follows in her wake, forever trying to catch up. A flicker of light, pure power and whim, going wherever she pleases except down below the waves.

It isn’t nice down there, Daddy told her in a bedtime story. The water stretches power and whim out until it is everywhere and nowhere at once. She didn’t like the sound of that so as the little boy with wings made of wax she stayed high in the sky. Moving between clouds merrily.

Now however she sees fishes in her dreams, with their red and indigo fins, moving in perfect schools. Among them a tiny shark (an evolved sea dweller) that could kill all the other fishes if she wanted to—but never did. The tiny shark with neat teeth not yet honed to razors just moves in time with the other, less important, fish. All in formation together like expert dancers, cheering for the home team.

Oddly the ocean doesn’t scare her anymore because of that sea dweller. It is still an impenetrable floor to her, but she drops to the shore in order to peer at the curious civilization below the waves. It is a sad and rigid world, she knows. Without the freedom and whims those like her (birds) possess. Not all the fishes have daddies that love them as much as hers.

When she was seven years old, her Daddy took her to a big building called an aquarium. She remembers walking down the steps in the cool building and seeing the massive room surrounded by water for the first time. Painful, deadly water on every side and overhead held back by a thin piece of glass.

Oh how she screamed and cried at the terror of it.

To quiet the nightmares after that field trip, Daddy showed her something called an electric eel in a (smaller) water tank. She watched delightedly as it wrapped around a small fish and sparked it until the fish stopped moving.

Sixteen years later she still giggles like a seven year old when she thinks about that fish attempting to get away from the eel. She wonders what it would feel like to curl around the special little sea dweller and spark until she screamed.

In dreams the bird learns about the other girl beneath the sea. A top predator that refuses to prey. The girl’s daddy (an air breather that somehow came to live under the waves) loves her very much but wants her to be ordinary, not special. Why would a daddy want that?

Sometimes when she is happy, when electricity glides through her veins like wind over grass, she dreams the sea dweller grew up in the sky and knows all the same pretty things she does. Together they hunt. Two of us and none of them. Company girls out on the town looking to paint it red with viscera.

The girl’s father (the other one) is of the sky. A pretty bird that refuses to leave his cast-iron cage even with the door left open. The girl’s mother (the other one) is stony with skin made of flame. Lies slip tight around her like lashes and she would burn the Company down if she ever unwound them all. The bird thought it would be fun to one day fly through the ashes.

A child of wind and fire has no business beneath the sea (she thought anyway) so in her dreams she pulls the girl ashore. But once there the girl simply flops and flounders until dead. Fishes asphyxiate in the air. That innocence which the bird loves so much about the sea dweller dies in her world. Mouth to mouth doesn’t help.

Sometimes when she is lonely, when electricity hums along her skin like an echo through a canyon, she dreams that she is of the sea as well. Together, with their good air-breathing daddies, they play and visit the aquarium to point and laugh at the silly humans on the other side of the glass. Two eels intertwined in an intimate dance with shocks firing between them. She wakes from those dreams intoxicated with lust and has to scream into her pillow.

Those dreams never last because the air breathers need her above the water, flashing between clouds. It’s good work, what they do, her Daddy says. The bird flies from one end of the sky to the other, trying to return to before she saw the girl under the water. But eventually she runs out of places to go and always returns to the shoreline.

The bird sometimes forgets what is real and not, but two things she knows as fact are:

Fishes drown in air.

Birds can’t swim.

These are the worlds she sees behind cold blue eyes every night. They have no meaning or depth for her and just are. And with the morning’s light they vanish from her mind.

Elle wakes tasting saltwater on her lips.

Claire wakes with the echo of thunder in her ears.

End