allowed

🔞

Ishmael hadn't yet grown accustomed to the test pool, even though he'd been allowed to visit for months. It was a dim space at night, when he was allowed to slip out of the lab, and now he sank into the cool water without so much hesitation at the brink as before.

But it still jarred in his mind like a malformed brick. He was allowed to come here every night. He was allowed to. He barely knew what that meant! It pissed him off to poke at its shape, the ‘allowance’, the loose grip of the lab workers. He could go every night, so most nights he spent in bed.

But Cherta had started to invite him more frequently, which meant Ishmael was relieved of the annoyance of being allowed to do something.

He slipped into the illuminated water under the dark ceiling, and the pain in his wrists and hips faded away as the water held him in its grip.

The first few times had been frightening.

Being fully submerged was a new experience for him and if he'd expected that he'd ever be as graceful as the beta phocids on his first try, he was very quickly proven wrong. Tail flukes, a dorsal fin, and the ability to hold his breath for an hour had all been forced upon him, but he didn’t know how to use them. They weren’t his.

His first time in the pool, his instinct had been to climb back out again. His limbs were all uncoordinated and his tail didn't help at all, bashed against the pool wall where the grippy polymer tiles scraped his skin painfully.

The only blessing was that his body was long enough that he could stand on the ramp in the shallow end, head over the water, and awkwardly walk to the exit ramp. He’d splashed up onto it, shuddering, his face burning at the sight of Cherta laughing at him. They had been ready to slide in after him, down that ramp, where they would move through the water with more ease than even a normal human walking on land. Ishmael lacked any of that. He had clamped himself down on the ramp as he shook and spat out water.

But it wasn't enough to put him off forever. Once he tried to stand on the ramp, rising to his feet, gravity had taken hold of him with force and he missed the support of the water.

Now he could swim, or paddle at least, but the main draw of the pool was floating. If he took a deep breath and forced it down, so that his chest seemed to crush in on itself, he would sink below the surface and simply hang in the water column, freed from the ground, the air, the overwhelming noises and lights of the world outside the water. He could stretch out his arms and legs and tail and not touch the sides. He did not feel outsized, ill-fitting, too strangely-shaped for the space. He was the right size, here. The inconveniences of his body slipped into the background.

His hands, which were always so awkward, stubby fingers and too-big palms, became paddles that cut through the water. His tail, which had been so useless his entire life as anything other than a counterbalance, could nudge him in any direction he liked with a twitch. But it was the halo of whiskers around his jaw that came alive in the water, when he was floating. The flow brushed over them, around his face, and he felt the shape of the pool when he closed his eyes. Like this, he could imagine what it was like to fly in the wind currents that flung playing siphos past his windows. He felt light.

A flicker of movement crumpled the water against his face. He opened an eye and saw Cherta shooting under him along the sloping pool floor, a dark brown shadow. They dipped down into the deep end, where the pool floor had been decorated with obstacles and toys for the beta phocids, big building blocks and tiled tunnels.

Cherta cut through the water with grace. Ishmael usually preferred to float and relax, but Cherta was flying in and out of the tunnels and he wondered, suddenly, if he could ever catch them. Probably not. He still couldn't time his tail strokes not to foul his paddling, but he let himself slide deeper with a small push, and followed Cherta.

He angled down, an uncoordinated glide, and reached the bottom of the deep end. He poked a head into the tunnel just as Cherta's tail whipped out of the other end, and while he was still trying to remember how to go backwards, hands slipped down over his eyes. Cherta was over his back, laughing. The touch was jarring—it was still rare for Cherta to make much contact—but under the water there was an odd friction about it, too. He shook them off, and they touched down on his back briefly before using him as a platform to rocket off again. He felt the twisting currents and slopping edges of the pool as Cherta breached twenty metres overhead.

Looking up he saw the splash as they came down, a halo of white bubbles spreading out and all around. He tried to copy them, but only managed to get his torso out of the water before falling back into a graceless flop. But even that was fun, a fall with no danger, no gravity dragging at his every movement and his painful joints.

Cherta was under him. He reacted on instinct, reaching out, and managed to grab them under their arms. They made a furious barrage of clicks, tail whipping against him, but he felt—he felt as he had when he'd looked at Callum all those times, the itch in his bones that told him to drag Cherta closer, and closer, and try to fit his mouth around some part of them so that he could bite. There was no closer contact. He was bigger, and stronger, after all, and managed to drag Cherta up against his belly, and held them there. It felt good, but he couldn't get carried away. The imprint of Callum's boot in his face was an ever-present sting.

Cherta wriggled free and turned to stare at Ishmael, a question in their eyes. Ishmael didn't wanna acknowledge what he'd done—or his baser motivations for doing it—so he turned away. Cherta shoved a shoulder against his side, harder, and then simply grabbed his hand and dragged him to one of the platforms close to the surface, covered by only a foot of water.

Ishmael clambered on but stayed low, trying to remain supported by the pool as much as possible.

"What?" he muttered, not meeting Cherta's eyes again.

"You always do this!" Cherta exclaimed, sitting up on the platform, well-used to the fluctuations of gravity. "You grab me too hard, okay? Ease off." With a snort, they extended an arm, showing the red welts where Ishmael had squeezed them.

"Sorry," Ishmael said, waiting to be kicked in the face again. He felt monstrous beside Cherta now.

"Why do you do it?"

"I don't wanna talk about it."

"Tell me! If we're just playing, that's fine," Cherta said, "but it's like you wanna drown me sometimes."

"I just—it's like wrestling," Ishmael said, relieved at the excuse that came swooping down at the last second. He'd always wanted to wrestle with Callum, and he knew the principles from watching sports videos and seeing the phocids playing. He didn't have to let Cherta know how watching it made him feel. Imagining that it was him seizing onto the defeated opponent, bearing him down to the ground. The biting desire again.

Cherta flicked water at his face.

Ishmael didn’t know if this was joking or serious, and his first instinct was to shrink back and scowl, hunching his massive shoulders in preparation to flinch, or pull away.

"It's a joke," Cherta said quickly, flicking another few drops of water. Ishmael flinched again, his whiskers quivering, so Cherta stopped. They flipped their tail over his. "You like wrestling? It wouldn't be fair, you're twice my size."

"Y-yeah," Ishmael stammered. "It's—silly, I'm bigger than everyone here, I shouldn't..."

Cherta looked at him for a long moment, their whiskers twitching. "But you want to."

Ishmael expected to be kicked in the face again. Was it that obvious? Why could he never hide how he felt? His face felt far too hot and the weight of Cherta's tail on him was feeling a bit too nice again. He watched beads of water slide down Cherta's cheek, tracing the roundness of their face.

"Sorry," he said quickly, again. "I'm sorry."

Cherta seemed confused. "No need to apologise. Even the big guys deserve to have fun sometimes."

"I'm sorry," Ishmael said. He couldn't stop. He buried his face in his big shovel palms and tensed for another attack.

Breath ghosted over his forehead. He glanced up, in surprise, and saw Cherta's warm brown eyes inches away.

"Is this about what Callum said?" Cherta said softly.

"No!" Ishmael stammered. But he had been told to never lie, and that was definitely a lie. So he shrank himself even more and quickly nodded. "Yes. I hurt him, I shouldn't have, it's not for me—not my thing to-"

"Fuck that guy," Cherta said. They rolled over onto their side, still facing Ishmael. They were so sleek, not lumpy and wobbly like Ishmael himself, with that blubber layer the genetic engineers had not given to Ishmael.

Ishmael had to look away, humiliated. He didn't like to hear Cherta dismissing Callum, it felt even worse. "You didn't hear what I did...."

"I did," Cherta said. "Callum told everyone."

Ishmael suddenly found himself blinking back tears. Even here he couldn't escape what Callum had said about him. It shouldn't have hurt—he'd grown up with all kinds of stuff being said about him, worse things, but from Callum it was unquietly painful. Because it was about not just his body, but his wants.

"If you ask me," Cherta said way too loudly, "you were stupid for even going to him. What the hell were you thinking? They don't see us as anything near their level. It was never going to work out, idiot."

Ishmael flinched with each word. He hated to hear Cherta so casually exclude him from them. It wasn't true. "Well," he mumbled, "I'm more like them than you-"

"Are you blind?" Cherta demanded. "Because I'm seeing an alpha-gen phocid sitting in front of me now, not a human."

Ishmael shrank even further, until he was clamped to the platform, water lapping over his nose. But at Cherta's words, he sprang up, his scowl returning. "I am nothing like you!" he snapped. "I'm a human!"

Cherta snarled right back at him.

"Cop yourself on," they said, shrinking back just as Callum had when Ishmael had moved closer to him. Cherta looked frightened of him, and Ishmael found he enjoyed this. He surged forward, grabbing for them, and they rolled again to meet him with their fists.

It was like some other force moved his body. He was angry, so angry, but the burning under his skin was overwhelming and he felt almost that he was grabbing Callum again, forcing him down, so that Ishmael could feel good. He pressed Cherta to the platform, tried to get on top of him, and Cherta sank his fangs into his wrist.

Ishmael gasped in surprise. The pain shocked up his arm and he forgot that Cherta had already given him prior permission to object—he went pliant, and weak, ready to accept whatever hurt he was due.

Cherta struggled out from beneath him and launched bodily at his side. He was too shocked to react – he rolled sideways, onto his back, and stared up with glazed dread at Cherta arching over him.

"I'm not attacking you," Cherta said. "You're more like me than Callum. You know this. You've always known it."

"But I—I can change-"

"You CAN’T!" Cherta's tail smacked down onto the water covering the platform, sending up another huge splash. Their voice slowed. "You can't, man. What are you going to do, cut your tail off? Rip out your whiskers?"

And Ishmael saw a tiny memory play out at the corner of his mind, behind his fear and shut-down panic. Ripping his own whiskers out one by one, planning to save them and maybe sell them, and when he was finished, when they were all gone, he could shed his ungainly self and underneath he'd be human. Like he was supposed to be, like his foggiest childhood memories. But ripping out his whiskers had never achieved anything but spots of blood on his jaw and a lot of pain.

The weight of Cherta pressing down on his belly was dragging at his focus, too. He could not think about much else. In fact, he had not experienced such contact from anyone who was not a lab worker in a very long time and even they had not lain on top of him like this.

"You know what else?" Cherta said softly. "I know you're not like them because they don't wanna fuck us."

"I don't want-"

"You just tried to," Cherta said.

Ishmael's face was burning, too. He couldn't meet their eyes. "Well, I can't do that, either," he mumbled.

Cherta gazed down at him. "Are you okay?" they said in a light voice, almost violent in its amusement. "You've gone red. We only just started wrestling."

Ishmael's voice had descended into a whinge. He hated the sound of it and he hated how Cherta looked at him so knowingly. He wished he'd been able to push Cherta into the pool, instead of opening this can of maggots.

"It's fine," Cherta said, sliding off him onto the platform again. "Unlike you, I'll actually ask first. Do you want to wrestle?"

He didn't know what he wanted. The things he desired seemed entirely contradictory. He had to think it over, the way Maris had once taught him, to turn over his feelings until he could develop and voice an opinion.

"Maybe," he said.

"Do you?"

"Maybe!"

Cherta pulled away. "So it's a no."

"No!"

"It's a yes?"

"It's a maybe!"

Ishmael lashed his tail, forgetting all he’d been taught about not making any sudden, violent movements. He hit the edge of the platform, shocking himself, and sprayed water over them both. He blew some out of his nostrils.

"Yes or no?" Cherta said softly.

"Yes," Ishmael muttered, dragging it out from the depths of his being. He still wasn't sure but if the idea of no was so bad, then surely it meant yes was the right answer. It was the answer Cherta wanted to hear, anyway.

Cherta nodded and launched at him again. This time it was deliberately gentle, two hands on his front while Cherta tried to shove him off the platform. Ishmael resisted it easily, and fully intended on playing along, but that monster inside him just had to raise its head again, and his mouth flooded in anticipation of biting. Cherta caught the look in his eyes and wriggled out from another hard lunge.

"You're hopeless," they said. "Five seconds in and you can't even control yourself. It's not wrestling that you want, Ishmael."

He knew that, and it had been plain enough. He hated feeling this way. This was what had made him destroy his friendship with Callum, after all. It was what everyone around him hated so much. Your body was designed for a different purpose was what Dan had said to him ten years ago when he'd dared to mention what puberty had done to him, and what he'd been doing to his pillows.

That was all well and good for other people. Even for Cherta. But not Ishmael. Where other people had at least something between their legs, he had nothing at all but a hole to piss from. He'd found that if he rubbed against his firmer pillows it had felt good, but it never fulfilled him. Not like how Callum and his classmates had described, boasting, to one another.

"Maybe," Ishmael said faintly again. "It happens so much."

"Do you like it when I do this?"

"N- mayb- I don't-"

"I can do more than that," Cherta said, a similar sort of boastfulness in his voice to Callum's friends. "C'mere. Lie on your back. You think Callum would have been able to do this?"

This time it was deliberate. Cherta's body slid against his, between Ishmael's legs, and Ishmael had to reach up and cover his face with his hands at how that felt.

"How's that?" Cherta said softly.

He didn't know. It was not like the lab workers reaching around to check his hepatic cannula again, groping fingers over his skin with businesslike detachment. But that was the only frame of reference he had. Cherta watched him curiously, as Ishmael peeked out from behind his fingers.