Love Beyond

Chapter 5

It was almost morning.

Jin knew he had to leave the tub soon.

He had to cook breakfast.

But the medicine he needed hadn't come yet.

It wasn't their fault. The situation had caught everyone off-guard.

At least his superiors were understanding.

Jin thought back to the day he had first volunteered to do this. To audition as an actor. How strict everybody had seemed.

Now he knew it had all been set up to test him, make sure he wouldn't reveal their secret.

The physical preparations building up to make sure he was physically fit for the disguise that he was forced to fuse into his body had been rigorous. Learning to use archaic technology to fit in had taken getting used to, although the way food was prepared hadn't ended up being all that different from his hobby. Maybe he had been made fun of before, but in the end it had been a deciding factor in his acceptance to this role.

And now this. It was a miracle he had been able to hide the mark on his neck when he had called for the replacement.

Thankfully they had attributed the strange position he held his head in to the pain he was feeling.

It was partly true. There was a strange sense of relief emanating from that area even as it cramped, the stabbing pain slightly fading.

Examining his webbed hands and flipper feet, running his fingers along the scales that had been hidden beneath his skin for so long, he felt pangs of sadness yet again realizing yet again that he would someday be forced to leave this place he had grown attached to. The people he had come to love better than his own family.

Despite it being his own body that would force him to return, his head cleared when he sank underwater and breathed through his gills.

He could breathe in air and water both naturally. But the water had always brought him a unique sense of relief.

The chemicals in the water burned slightly, but even that served only to clear his head.

Rolling onto his stomach again, he shook out his luminescent scaled backfins and allowed them to flex, then shook them as humans would shake their limbs to relieve numbness or a foggy mind.

If the universe had seen fit to give one of his kind a soulmate, surely he could trust that she would be the one for him.

Maybe that cheesy book was rubbing off on him but there was nothing to tell him that it wouldn't be that way.

A slight smell of burning came to him and he rose above the water to watch the metal circlets solidify and separate, revealing a new bottle of the very pills that he had discovered eaten away the night before.

Wasting no time, he opened them and took the appropriate dosage to hide his... abnormal features.

The pain was worse than when they had re-emerged.

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Y/N groaned as a horrible wave of pain rolled over her body and finally caved, heading to the kitchen to take some Benadryl.

Her hands shook as she opened the bottle and she accidentally shook out twice the amount prescribed on the bottle.

After a brief hesitation, she threw back her head and downed it with some water.