Fakir stretches his hand, fingers popping loudly as he drops his quill to the table, glaring at the smudges of ink it leaves on the wooden surface but doing nothing to clean it up. Another day passed, another day of writing possible scenarios of me returning to human form, another round of failures scattered across the room.

He rises and stretches his back, listening to it pop just as loudly as his fingers, protesting the long hours of sitting in the rough wooden chair, bent over parchment. All around, on the table, the floor, the extra chair beside the desk, lie pages of his scrawling handwriting, words for which no one but he can be held accountable, all focused on one brave little duck and her desire to return to human form.

All focused on me.

Nearly a year now. Nearly a year and he’s beginning to worry about the lifespan of a common yellow duck. He’s already lost Mute. He can’t bear to lose me, too. He doesn’t say it out loud, but he talks in his sleep, and it’s clear in his nightmares.

He’s scared.

“Qua~,” I say. You shouldn’t push yourself so hard.

“No, not today. I’m sorry,” he says, stroking the soft feathers at the back of my neck.

“Qua?” Are you feeling alright?

“Maybe. But tomorrow I’ll have to work in the shop for Charon, so I won’t have as much time to write.”

“Qua~, qua-qua-qua~,” I say, hopping up and down a little. I want to tell him to relax, to stop worrying himself sick with writing my story. It will come if it’s going to come. He swallows hard and scoops me into his arms, cuddling me close.

“I’m so sorry, Ahiru,” he whispers. “I can’t understand you. I can’t talk to you. I miss you, and I can’t seem to bring you back.”

“Qua~,” I say, rubbing my head against his cheek. I hold still and feel him shudder, feel his tears roll off my feathers and drip to the floor, water-off-a-duck’s-back. I can’t hug him, can’t comfort him. Can’t tell him that even if he can’t turn me back, he’s made me happy just staying by my side.

It’s been a rough time for him, the excitement and optimism of Mute’s freedom cooling into frustration and impatience, which eventually dulled to desperation and tacitly accepted defeat. Failure is no longer surprising, more expected than anything else. I can barely remember my time as a human, much less as Tutu, my days now consisting of little more than floating in the pond and eating the bits of bread Fakir brings me, just like he did the first day he found me as a duck. Some nights, night like this when he cries and apologizes for failing me, I often sleep with him, curled up on his pillow while he sleeps instead of in the little nest he made for me that sits on the low table by his bed, keeping him company as best I can.

I know he’s lonely without Mute. I know a little duck isn’t any kind of substitute for companionship. And where he doesn’t like to talk about how deep his relationship with the Prince went--I certainly can’t ask him, in this state--I have my suspicions. He loved Mute and misses him. Misses having him in his bed, in his arms.

He settles me on his pillow, kisses the top of my head. I watch him undress, tunic folded neatly over the foot of his bed, shirt hung in the closet, pants folded and put away in the top drawer of his dresser. By the time he’s settled in bed beside me, he’s got another stack of parchment and his pen, one last go before he falls asleep. I watch him write, brow creased and lower lip caught between his teeth in concentration, drift to sleep to the sound of his quill against the paper, the sound of his breathing, choppy from his tears.

He’s having a nightmare when I wake again.

“No, Mute,” he mumbles. “Not tonight.”

The Prince. He dreams about Mute often, always nightmares that leave him either crying or close to it. Growing up, I didn’t think boys cried. I learned when Fakir took me in that I was wrong, that boys cry and have feelings, lots of them, even more than I returned to Mute when I was Tutu.

I snuggle closer, wishing I could make him feel better.

“Mute~,” he growls. “I said no.” He grabs my arm and shoves it away roughly, grumbling incoherently and trying to scoot closer to the other side of the bed, away from me.

Wait, my brain says. Arm? Ducks don’t have arms.

I open my eyes, fully awake and groping the darkness. Hands. My hands. Arms. Neck and chest and belly, even a belly-button. Legs, knees, feet, toes. No webbing between them or between my fingers.

I’m human. I’m back. And Fakir . . .

Fakir’s falling off the bed, cursing Mute and scolding him for being impatient. I open my mouth, feel my tongue form the words.

“Fakir, it’s me, Ahiru. Not Mute.”

His name feels like chocolate, smooth and rich in my mouth. My own name feels like warm tea, light and comforting. Mute’s name feels indescribable, like a memory or a dream that I can’t quite remember upon waking.

A thud tells me Fakir’s fallen out of the bed. I can’t see, so I stay on the bed and call to him.

“Fakir, are you alright?”

“Ahiru?” he says from the floor.

“Fakir,” I say again, loving the feel of it. It’s been so long since I could say his name, since I could say anything, really, but I missed saying his name, missed talking with him, the most.

Scrabbling, then the bed shakes and there’s another thud, telling me he’s run into the bed and fallen over again. I sit still and wait, wishing I could help him but knowing I can’t. His room feels so different, in this body, that I’m certain I wouldn’t know my way around it in the dark, accustomed as I am to the room being human-sized from a duck’s perspective. There’s quite a bit of cursing, then he’s by the bed, carrying a lantern, studying me wide-eyed, reaching out a tentative hand to touch me.

“Ahiru,” he breathes, “you’re . . . you’re human.”

_,_,_~&~_,_,_

It’s strange.

Fakir can’t keep his eyes off me. He stares at me, blushing whenever I catch him, mumbling something about being used to a duck, not a human, sharing the store with him. Every time he brushes against me, I feel his fingers through the shirt he loaned me, touching me like he thinks I won’t notice.

“You’re swimming in that shirt,” he says. “Need to get you some proper clothes.”

It’s nice to need clothes again. Nice, but strange.

When a customer came in with a leather bag that needed to be mended, the stitching on one side worn down with age, Fakir was making lunch in the kitchen, so I took the order and was tying off the end of the twine when he returned. The customer was pleased and praised my work, work I haven’t been able to do for nearly a year now, work only fingers could do, never webbed feet and wings.

It’s nice to have hands again. Nice, but strange.

“You did that really well,” Fakir says as the door closes behind the customer. “I didn’t know you knew how to stitch leather.”

“I’ve watched you do it enough times,” I say. “I know how to do a lot of things you do.”

He blushes, and I can’t help but wonder why.

“Fakir?”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“What did you write that night?”

He looks at me, dark green eyes blinking at me from under his long hair. “What do you mean?”

“Whatever you wrote right before you went to sleep had to be what worked, because I changed before dawn,” I say, straightening the tools on the workbench, fiddling with the sharpeners and awls. “What was it?”

He snorts and looks away, toes fidgeting on the rough wooden floor, a nice blush rising on his cheeks.

“Nothing worth reading, that’s for sure.”

“I’d like to read it.”

His eyes are sharp when he looks at me, one eyebrow arched dangerously. “Why? You’re back, what’s it matter what brought you back?”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t, I guess.”

He looks hurt, hunched over the table like an irritated cat, so I pad across the floor to stand behind him, wrap my arms around him and lean against his back. “Whatever it was, thank you for writing it,” I say softly, rubbing my cheek against the back of his sweater. He turns and wraps his arms around me.

“You’re welcome, Ahiru,” he says, so quiet I wouldn’t hear it if I weren’t in his arms, his breath ghosting over my ear. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“Me, too,” I say. I want to tell him more, want to tell him that I’m glad I can finally talk to him, glad I can feel him hug me, glad I can hug him back, but I stay quiet, holding him, listening to his heart beating, until the door chimes and another customer comes in. Fakir stands by and lets me handle it, sharpening the man’s carving knife and polishing it, just as I’ve watched Fakir do a hundred times, at least. The man pays and leaves, smiling at me with curiosity in his eyes that he’s too polite to voice. Fakir gives me a little hug after the door closes, kisses my hair and tells me I’m good at doing what I’ve watched him do.

It’s strange, but I like it.

_,_,_~&~_,_,_

Charon doesn’t quite know what to make of having me back in human form, quietly nodding his acknowledgment of my presence in the shop, making polite conversation with me over dinner. Fakir and I cook together, although it’s mostly Fakir cooking and me doing the little tasks he gives me to do. At night, I sleep in Fakir’s bed, a tighter squeeze now that I’m human and significantly larger than a duck, but the one time I tried sleeping in the guest room, I had horrible nightmares and kept Fakir and Charon awake half the night, waking up crying out. Fakir finally dragged me into his bed and cuddled me until I fell asleep. We’ve never seen a reason to change the arrangement since, both of us learning to share the covers and the pillow, managing by no small miracle to keep our elbows out of each other’s face and ribs.

Charon doesn’t quite know what to think of it. He watches me get up before Fakir and heat the water for tea, one of the few kitchen tasks I can do without burning the place down. Watches me mind the shop while Fakir runs errands or sits in the corner, writing. He never mentions propriety, but I can tell he thinks about it. He thought it was weird enough that his foster son carried a pet duck around, claiming it was really a girl--a princess, even--but now, with his son sharing a bed with a girl, the duck mysteriously gone, Charon walks around like a man who’s stuck in a dream and can’t quite wake up.

“Fakir?” I say one day, sweeping the shop.

“Hm?” He’s writing, a dangerous time to disturb him.

“Is Charon uncomfortable with me staying here?”

Fakir doesn’t even look up. “No.”

I sweep the back portion of the shop, taking care to reach in between all the swords and into the corners, catching stray leaves and bits of dust, scraps of leather and twine. Elbowing the door open, I empty the dustpan and shake out the broom, pausing in the doorway to watch Fakir write. He’s practiced hiding his emotions since his parents died, his skills increasing from years of living with Mute, but when he writes, every emotion he pours into his stories are reflected on his face, a handsome array of small smiles, fine lines of worry creasing his brow, sometimes even a full-on leer or scowl. I often try to guess what he writes, never permitted to read the finished pages. This day, I’m guessing he writes about Mute, because he looks nostalgic, a little smile turning the corners of his mouth, a terribly sad expression in his eyes.

“Mute stayed with you, too, didn’t he?”

I’m right, he was writing about Mute, because he jumps at my question and glares at me, looking guilty as anything. I pull the door closed and sweep the front of the shop, finding no dust, but the motion gives me a good excuse to avoid his glare.

“Yes, when we were children,” he says, just as I’m putting the broom away and trying to decide where I can hide until he’s no longer angry with me.

“Did Charon mind that?”

Fakir sighs and sets down his quill, popping his joints like he always does after a few hours of writing. He stacks his papers, blowing on the top one to dry the ink.

“No, and he doesn’t mind you, either. I told you, it’s fine.”

I sit down behind the counter, winding a ball of twine, watching him pad across to me, reaching out to stroke his hand down my braid before sitting on the stool beside mine, resting his elbow on the counter and his chin on his hand.

“Why do you ask, Ahiru?” he says gently. “Something wrong?”

I shake my head. I can’t tell him about the dreams he sometimes has at night, dreams that have him moaning softly against my neck, his hands wandering over my belly and thighs, clutching at me like something’s missing between my legs, something he’s used to touching. I can’t tell him that I know when he’s writing about Mute because he smiles, that he never smiled like that when writing about me. I can’t tell him that Charon looks at me in a way that makes me feel like a poor substitute for the beautiful Prince, just an ordinary girl who keeps his foster son warm at night.

He tugs on my braid. “I can’t make it better if you don’t tell me what’s wrong. You know that, right?”

I nod and he drops the subject, tugging the tie out of his ponytail and combing his fingers through his hair, smoothing it before tying it back again, neat and perfect at the nape of his neck. I toy with the end of my braid and watch him, fascinated as always by his movements. Like when he dances, he’s graceful and strong, even when doing something as simple as tying his hair back. Mute was graceful like that, graceful in an unconscious, natural way that Rue never quite reached, in a way I know I’ll never even dream of accomplishing.

I can’t help but wonder if Mute taught it to Fakir, and that inevitably leads me to wonder how he taught Fakir, if he taught him at all.

Fakir’s fingertips rest on my shoulder, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“Mind the shop a minute? I’m going to go wash the ink off my hands.”

I nod and watch him gather his writing and disappear into the house, holding the papers to his chest to hide them from me. Jealousy wells up in my chest, unbidden and unwanted. I swallow it down and focus on rearranging the tools on the wall, dusting them with a rag until Fakir returns, hands clean and tunic damp, a sad smile on his lips as he takes the rag from me and cleans the higher places I can’t reach.

_,_,_~&~_,_,_

I wasn’t looking for the papers when I found them, Charon was. And he found them first and read them, then left them out on the desk, where I found them, but it wasn’t until I was reading them that Fakir came in, so it looked very bad and he got mad at me.

“Ahiru,” he says, his voice dangerously low, “why did you have to read those?” Fakir doesn’t shout, he growls, and somehow, it’s much more frightening than if he were to scream at me.

“They were out when I came in, Fakir. I was looking to see what they were, because you never leave your writing out.”

“No, I don’t, and do you know why?” he asks, stalking towards me. “Because I don’t want anyone to read it, that’s why. If I wanted you to read it, I’d give it to you the minute the ink was dry, wouldn’t I?”

I feel tears prickling at the corner of my eyes. I shouldn’t have read them, should have locked them back away, covering myself and Charon, protecting us from Fakir’s anger, but I didn’t. I read the stories because they were out, because Charon had read them and I wanted to read them, too. Because Charon gets to know everything and I don’t seem to know anything, anything about Fakir when he lived with Mute, about Fakir when he was a child. I couldn’t stand to not know what he writes about, couldn’t stand not knowing what he’s putting on paper during the long hours he sits, bent over the parchment, scribbling madly and staining his fingers with the dark ink.

“I’m sorry, Fakir,” I whisper, tears falling and rolling ticklishly down my cheeks, dripping chill and wet from my chin. “I’m sorry.”

He sighs and rubs his temples with the pads of his fingers. “What did you read?” he says, but it’s more of a demand than a question. I open my mouth to answer, but no sound comes out. He’ll be furious if he sees what Charon and I have read. I wouldn’t blame him if he threw me out and never wanted to speak to me again, if he gave Charon the silent treatment for weeks before needing or wanting to forgive the man long enough to speak a few words to him.

I hold the pages out. No delaying the inevitable, really. He’ll find out what we read soon enough.

“Ahiru sleeps on my pillow every night, sits on the table in the shop all day when I have to mind the store. She’s a very sweet duck, I suppose, as far as ducks go, but it’s not the same. I sit in the corner and try to write her story, but she’s so complicated, all her feelings and thoughts bottled up inside her with no way to come out, that I can’t possibly write about her without sounding a fool. I think that’s why all my attempts to write her back to her human form have been failures: I know I’m not doing her justice. I know I’m failing her by over-simplifying her character.

If Ahiru were a human, I think I’d kiss her every single day, even if we were never more than just friends.”

He skims the first few lines of the page, eyes widening when he realizes what it is Charon and I have read. I watch him skim to the bottom of the page, watch him leaf through the others, through the pages and pages of graphic descriptions of him making love to Mute, written in a way that makes me think they’re not stories so much as a record of what actually happened between them. He mentions me, every so often, mentioning the piece of Mute’s heart I returned and the affect it has on Mute as a lover, sometimes mentioning built-up sexual tension from being around me.

Fakir thinks about sex much more than I thought he did. I think he can tell I was surprised, or at least has guessed that it’s surprising in general, because he covers his face with the parchment and groans. He takes hold of the pages like he’s going to rip them, and before I’ve really had a chance to think about it, I launch myself at him, grabbing his wrists and holding them still.

“Fakir, no!” I beg. “You can’t tear it up, that’s the story that turned me back into a human! If you tear it up, I might go back to being a duck and I really don’t want that.”

He blinks at me, then down at the parchment. “This didn’t turn you back,” he says. “This is just drivel. This is just . . . gah, this is just embarrassing.

“Then what turned me back, if not this?”

“I don’t know, but this isn’t a story. It’s just an entry into my diary, which you should not have been reading.”

“I know,” I say softly. “I’m sorry. But it is a story, there in the middle.” I point to the section in quotation marks, halfway down the page. “You wrote what you said would be the theme of any story involving me, and it worked.” I watch him re-read it, understanding lighting his dark eyes.

“That lame excuse for sentimental drivel turned you back into a human?” he says, voice faint, a weak smile teasing the corners of his mouth. “I worked so hard to write a story that would turn you back into a human, and all I had to do was write that?” He snorts, setting the papers back onto his desk and pulls me into a hug. “I’m glad it worked, even if it seems ridiculously simple. But I still wish you hadn’t read the other things. There are things about me you shouldn’t know, things you probably don’t want to know.”

I wonder if he realizes that Charon’s read it, too, but decide that’s not an issue we need to deal with right now. “I already knew about you and Mute-sempai,” I say into the front of his sweater. “It was pretty obvious that you were more than just roommates.”

He stiffens in my arms. “What do you mean?” he says in that low, threatening tone, all warmth gone from his voice again. I swallow hard, trying to come up with a way to get out of this without having to tell him that he touches me at night like I’m a boy, murmuring Mute’s name into my hair.

“You obviously loved him, Fakir,” I say simply. “You lived together, so it’s not surprising it turned physical.” It surprised me, actually, to read that he’d been so involved with Mute, that they’d been lovers for such a long time before the Prince got his heart back, not to mention the surprise that Fakir would fall in love with another boy, but I keep that to myself.

“I love you and live with you,” he says into my hair, “but we’re not lovers.”

“You thought we’d become lovers, though. It said so in your journal.”

He pulls away and looks at me, eyes wide and serious, cheeks burning with embarrassment. “What do you mean, Ahiru?”

I nod towards the desk. “You said a couple of times that you’d kiss me if I were human, that you wished you had before . . .” I shut up and look away, embarrassed and wishing the floor would swallow me whole.

“I suppose I did write that,” he says. For a long, tense moment, he’s silent, staring at me while I stare at the floor, then I feel his fingers under my chin and know what’s going on even before I look up at him, long before he leans down and kisses me, soft and chaste on the lips. He feels shy, and a little awkward, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s the year he’s spent separated from Mute that makes his kiss shy, or if it’s because it’s been so long since he’s just kissed someone, rather than taking them to bed and doing far more intimate things.

Charon clears his throat, a looming shadow in the doorway, looking away from us like he’s embarrassed to see us kiss. I scuttle away, mumbling apologies, but Fakir faces him, scowling.

“You read my journal,” he says, and I’m glad he knows already, that I don’t have to be the one to tell on Charon for sneaking in and reading Fakir’s journal, just like I did.

“I was concerned about you. You’ve been having nightmares again,” Charon says, his tone low like Fakir’s, probably where he learned it.

“Ahiru will take care of me if I dream at night,” Fakir says, glancing over his shoulder at me as he speaks. “You don’t need to worry.”

Charon nods. “Very well, then. I will not look into your journal anymore.”

And then he’s gone, back to mind the shop until closing. Fakir turns and holds out his hand.

“Help me make dinner?”

I follow him and wait for instructions, and even from the kitchen, I can see Charon’s shadow in the doorway.

_,_,_~&~_,_,_

Heavy snow usually means no customers, and today is no different. Fakir settled himself by the fire an hour ago, a blanket draped over his shoulders like a shawl. He claimed he was going to get to work staining the leather for new scabbards, but he fell asleep almost immediately and hasn’t woken yet. I sit at the front table, watching him and working, slowly, musing about things in the quiet of the shop.

Charon went out a few hours before to visit Ebina-san, claiming a craving for hot soup, but we have plenty of soup left over from the night before, so I suspect it’s Ebina-san’s company he’s interested in, more than lunch. Fakir seems pleased by that, so I’m happy too. Charon makes me nervous, watching me carefully, still giving me the impression that I’m a poor substitute for the Prince, but when he’s distracted, thinking about Ebina-san, it’s better.

I watch Fakir and slowly wax the twine we got yesterday just before the storm hit, spinning the strands between my fingers to check for lumps and missed spots. Two balls of twine sit on the edge of the table, waxed and wound into balls, the final length of string spooled in my lap.

A log in the fire shifts, breaking and sizzling enough to stir Fakir from his nap, his gaze moving lazily from the fire to me, a sleepy sort of smile greeting me as I watch him stretch and stand, leaving his blanket on the chair by the fire.

“You should have woken me,” he scolds softly. “I didn’t mean to sleep.”

“There haven’t been any customers,” I say, “so it’s been quiet. You needed your sleep.”

The dreams are back, as are his restlessness and constant whimpering of Mute’s name, his body grinding against mine in the middle of the night. But I don’t tell him that, don’t need to tell him that, the blush that warms on his cheeks telling me he knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“What are you doing?” he asks, avoiding my gaze by looking at the table.

“Waxing the new twine.”

“Oh. Thanks, that needed to be done.”

I continue my work, pulling the twine through the block of wax, spinning it in my fingers, stretching out another length once the lumps are all smooth and the twine bends nicely, without flaking wax or cracking. I feel Fakir’s hand on my neck, rubbing stiff muscles under my braid.

I jump when he grabs my wrist.

“Ahiru, have you been writing?” His tone is almost disbelieving, like he expects me to say no and tell him something else, anything else. I start to ask how he knows, how he can tell, but he turns my hand and I see the ink smudges on my fingers, as clearly as he sees them.

“I just wanted to try it, since you do it so much. Wanted to see if it helped me get things off my chest.”

“Did it work?” he says, rubbing the rough pad of his thumb over my index finger.

I shrug. “Kind of.”

“May I read it?”

“It’s not very good,” I say. “Nothing you’d want to read, really.”

“You read mine,” he says. “Please?”

“If you really want to,” I say. It seems only fair, since I read his. At least he’s asked permission of me before reading it.

He whispers “Thank you,” then cradles my chin in his palms, lifting my face to his and kissing me, a deep, real kiss, not chaste and light like the other kisses he’s given me. I wrap my arms around his back, holding him and letting him show me what to do. He kisses me with enough experience and patience that I can figure out what I should do with my tongue, and figure out what he’s going to do with his. When he finally pulls away, I lean against his chest, wanting warmth and closeness. He doesn’t stop me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders, bringing me even closer.

“Thank you, Ahiru,” he murmurs into my hair. “I would love to read it, sometime.”

I don’t have to answer, saved from offering my writing immediately to his scrutiny by another kiss, this one longer and rougher than before, more passion and heat, less teaching and learning.

We close the shop and go upstairs, not thinking of the snow falling thick until Charon comes home, cold and shaking snow off his boots. Together, we make him a cup of tea.

_,_,_~&~_,_,_

“I wonder how Fakir is,” Mute sighed, leaning on the windowsill of the castle. Life as a prince, for the most part, suited him, the only real void in his life being the absence of his best friend, his lover and protector. Rue nuzzled his shoulder, hugging him from behind, knowing well enough that her comfort would only barely register to the Prince, lost as he was in his musings.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” she said.

“Do you think he’s returned Ahiru to her human form yet?”

Rue kissed his shoulder and rested her cheek on him, soft muscle and sharp shoulder-blade. “It’s been over a year. I’m sure he has.”

“Do you think they remember me?”

She nodded, scrubbing her cheek against his sweater. “I’m sure they do.”

“Do you think they miss me?”

Rue hugged Mute more tightly, closed her eyes and kissed him through his sweater. Jumped when she felt his arms over hers, hugging her back as best he could with her standing behind him.

“I’d miss you, if I didn’t get to see you anymore,” he said. “I love you very much, you know.”

Rue smiled. “Yes, Mute, I know.”

And together they looked across the rolling hills towards Kinkan Town, silently watching the sun come up for another day.