"And they tell us you are mindless drifters," I add, holding his eyes, letting the truth of the night settle between us. "It seems we are both liars."
A faint, genuine smile touches his lips. It changes his entire face, making him look less like a perfectly carved statue and more like something feral and alive. The sight of it does strange things to my chest. It makes my blood run hot. It makes me want to close the distance between us and find out if his skin is as smooth as it looks.
The dark of the trench is absolute.
In the hollow, the only light is the faint, bioluminescent glow of Vaelis himself. It is a soft gold that spills over the harsh basalt walls. He shifts against the stone. The movement stirs the water, carrying the scent of the reef directly to my gills. It is clean and sweet. It does not belong here.
"You're shivering," I say. My voice is a low rumble in the confined space.
Vaelis pulls his tail tighter to his chest. "I'm not used to the cold."
"The cold is the only thing down here that never sleeps," I tell him. I uncoil slightly from my guarded posture by the entrance. I let myself get closer. The heat of my body displaces the chill in the water between us. "You learn to stop fighting it. If you fight the cold, the trench breaks you."
He watches me move. His golden eyes track the heavy shift of my shoulders and the scarred ridges of my chest. He doesn't pull away when my shadow falls over him.
"And the violence?" Vaelis asks softly. "Do you stop fighting that, too?"
"No." I admit. "You become it. The lower tiers are a crushing place. We fight for territory by the thermal vents. We fight the hound-eels for scraps. We fight the gravity to swim. They look at us from the shallows and see monsters." I let out a slow breath, the bubbles rising into the pitch black above. "They're right."
Vaelis tilts his head. The golden light catches the sharp angle of his jaw. "I don't think they're right."
The absolute certainty in his voice makes my chest tighten. I swim in, a fraction closer. The silk of his trailing fin brushes against the rough scales of my thigh. The contact is electric. I don't move away. Neither does he.
"You know nothing about my world," I warn him.
"I know about cages," Vaelis says. The bitterness in his tone is sudden and sharp. It strips away the polite, beautiful facade of the Vael. "My world is bright and warm, but it's a different kind of trap. The Elders watch every movement. They measure the sweep of our fins and the tone of our voices. If you are beautiful, you belong to the city. You are a prize. You are put on a pedestal and expected to be perfectly, utterly hollow."
His hands clench into fists against his tail. The vulnerability in him vanishes, replaced by a fierce, quiet rage that I recognize instantly. It is the rage of a predator trapped in a net.
"They tell us where to swim," Vaelis continues, his voice vibrating through the water. "They tell us who to smile at. If you ask a question, you are a problem. If you show anger, you are broken. I spend every day carving pieces of myself away to fit inside their safe little reef."
I stare at him. The ornamental creature I pulled from the current is gone. In his place is a survivor. A mer who understands the crushing weight of an environment trying to kill who he is.
I reach out. I can't stop myself.
I press my large, scarred hand flat against the stone wall right beside his head, caging him in. The heat radiating between us is sudden and intense.
"You are not hollow," I growl.
Vaelis looks up at me. His breath hitches. His lips part slightly, and the golden glow of his eyes darkens with something heavy and hungry. He doesn't shrink back from my size or the threat of my teeth. He leans into my space.
"Then what am I?" he challenges softly.
"You are a weapon wrapped in silk," I say. I let my eyes drop to his mouth, tracking the rapid pulse beating at the base of his throat. "You are waiting for a reason to cut them."
A shudder runs through his frame.
The silence that follows is deafening. We hover there in the dark, inches apart. The myths we were raised on dissolve into the freezing water. The mindless brute of the trench and the mindless ornament of the reef cease to exist. There are only two mers in the dark, finding a terrifying reflection in each other.
A sickening clarity takes hold. I don't want to protect him. I want to ruin the beautiful cage he came from. I want to pull him down into the dark and let him be as sharp as he wants to be.
And the way he looks at me tells me he wants exactly the same thing.
The hours stretch into a slow, cold eternity. The water in the hollow grows heavier with each passing moment, the chill seeping into our bones despite the shelter of stone. The surge outside roars on, a constant reminder of our precarious location. Vaelis pulls his tail tighter, a knot of cream and red against the dark basalt. The shivering that started as a faint tremor now wracks his body, a violent, uncontrollable response to the deep.
I watch his teeth chatter, a sound so alien in this place of predators. His golden eyes, once luminous, now seem to dimwith each passing moment. His lips have turned a faint, bruised blue, a color that belongs to the dying, not the living.
I am a furnace. My blood runs hot against the cold, a trait of the Basalt-Kin that allows us to claim the trench as our own. He is not. He is a creature of sunlight and warmth, and the deep is stealing his heat with each passing second.
