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Don’t go to the surface, or you’ll get hurt.

That’s a mantra all Atlantis children learn early on. As soon as they’re old enough to understand, old enough to push up and up through the aquamarine depths of their home, away from the safety of their mothers’ embraces and their fathers’ protection. It’s a warning against fishermen and trophy hunters, surface people with harpoons and irrational fears of things lurking beneath their fragile boats. It’s ingrained in every Atlantis child’s subconscious, like a tug against one’s stomach whenever they swim too far, too high, a compass that always leads them back home before they can put themselves at risk.

Those words are etched into Kaldur’s mind as well - but once he learns who his father is, who he has become, everything he knows crumbles to dust and leaves his head hollow and full of half-formed echoes he can’t chase away. 

So he swims, and swims, and he half-expects that feeling the cool ocean breeze against his face will make breathing easier, but it doesn’t really happen. He swims to the shore anyway: it’s dark and deserted, and it must’ve been raining because the sand is wet under his feet. He wobbles a little, his body used to the support of water all around him, like loving hands that won’t let him fall. He collapses into the sand and it sticks to his clothes, to his hands: he rubs them against his face and the scrape doesn’t help to erase the thoughts swirling in his head. 

He stares at the waves and wonders if he should go back, but there’s no pull, no internal safety warning ringing in his head this time, so he just watches the ebb and flow of waves licking at his feet, and shivers when the wind picks up.

He can’t explain how he knows, but the sudden feeling that he’s not alone creeps up on him with dead certainty. When he turns his head, there’s a boy sitting just a few feet to his right, and Kaldur’s heart skips a beat: but he’s not really afraid. Not after learning that the blood of Atlantis’ worst enemy is sloshing around in his veins, too.

The boy’s beautiful. He’s not Atlantean, Kaldur can see that much even in the faint shimmer of the stars above. There are no gills cutting across his neck, and his fingers, wrapped around the knees he holds close to his chest, look ridiculously long without any webbing. He’s younger than Kaldur, by a year or two, if humans age the same way Atlanteans do. 

And he’s crying.

Kaldur starts to reach out, but touching a human seems to be another violation of an unwritten rule, so he lets his hand drop back into the sand.

“Hey,” he calls out softly; his voice is almost drowned out in the quiet whispering of the waves. 

The boy turns to him anyway, and his cheeks are shiny. Seeing water on someone’s face doesn’t usually surprise Kaldur, or indicate any particular sadness, but this boy is a picture of misery, and Kaldur’s heart breaks a little for his sake.

It’s strange. Kaldur’s usually not the most compassionate among his peers: some have even called him cold, another reason why Kaldur fears the legacy of his father so much.

“My parents,” the boy says, and looks back to the sea. Kaldur follows his gaze, even though there’s nothing but the reflection of the moon all the way the horizon.

“What happened to them?” Kaldur finds himself asking.

“I’m waiting for them,” the boy whispers. Kaldur feels a cold shiver starting from his core, spreading out down his arms, through his legs. Humans don’t just come back from the ocean; storms are unkind to ships out there.

“Were they on a boat?”

A nod, and a sniff. Kaldur wishes he could help; wishes he could focus on someone else’s pain instead of his own. But then, it’s probably unfair to compare dead parents to his father. His father, who’s not dead... just lost.

“Tell me about them,” he asks, and he’s almost certain that he won’t get any answers, but then the boy starts talking. His name is Dick - that’s the first thing Kaldur burns into his memory. There are bits and pieces about the boy’s parents, half-forgotten moments, smiles and words, his mother’s hair and his father’s eyes, a necklace. 

“I can look for it,” Kaldur offers, in a foolish attempt to help, somehow: Dick turns to him and smiles. It transforms his face, still shiny with tears, and Kaldur’s heart lurches violently.

He will help, as much as he can.

....

It takes a lot more time than he would’ve thought. The ocean’s vast, and even with vague knowledge of that particular ship’s path, it’s not easy to find a vessel once it surrendered to the water. Kaldur can’t search for long, either: there’s school and there’s training, duties to fulfill and people to hide from so that nobody can forbid him from going back.

And he does: he alternates his free time between looking for the ship and going back to that shore, to that boy. He’s always there, knees up to his chest and eyes relentlessly searching the rolling waves. Sometimes, Kaldur just sits next to him; sometimes, he talks about Atlantis and makes the boy stop crying for a short while.

Kaldur knows he’s in trouble. He used to be the best in his class, but now he’s slipping. He used to be focused on becoming the best warrior he can be, but now, instead of diagrams, all he can see behind his closed eyelids are the soft contours of the boy’s face; Kaldur’s muscles used to long for the strain of a good sparring match, but now, they only ever strain towards the surface.

He feels bad, whenever he puts off the search in order to go see Dick, to sit with him and stare into nothing. He feels like he’s going back on his word, and the next day, he always pushes through the ocean’s depths, trying to find what he promised... but his stomach is always churning with the wish to just go back to the shore one more time.

When he does find the ship, his throat is tight as he searches the wreckage - it’s a small one, so it’s not that hard to find the people he knows must be Dick’s parents. The necklace dangling around the woman’s neck gives way when he touches the chain; saltwater has bitten into the silver and turned it black and brittle. Kaldur carefully holds the pendant, a dark blue stone, in his palm and tucks it into his pocket - he has to wait until the next day, there’s not enough time to swim all the way back to Dick’s shore now.

It takes him three days to find the time (and the courage) to go. Dick’s curled into a tight ball on the beach, just like always, and Kaldur’s chest hurts when he thinks about giving up the only reason the boy has to come back.

Maybe he’ll come back for Kaldur, too - Kaldur tentatively thinks of them as friends, even though the word always curls strangely around the emotions filling up his chest when he looks at Dick.

He considers keeping the necklace, or whatever remains of it, for longer; but he can’t lie to Dick, and when he wordlessly sits next to the boy and pulls the pendant from his pocket, holding it out on his open palm to Dick like an offering, his heart’s doing somersaults and falling into nothing.

Dick looks at the pendant slowly; his whole face lights up and his eyes rise to meet Kaldur’s. He lifts his hand, and Kaldur almost yanks his own away - they have yet to touch, the last imaginary boundary to break, and Kaldur finds himself shivering in anticipation. Will his hands be warm against Kaldur’s skin...? Will they be cool, from sitting out here all the time; roughened by the sand, damp from the tears he’s been wiping off his cheeks?

Dick’s fingers hover half an inch above the pendant - Kaldur’s breath hitches in his chest when their eyes meet again.

And then, Dick is reaching, reaching, his hand falling through the stone, through Kaldur’s palm, shimmering and twisting like smoke in the air.

Kaldur stares in horror as Dick’s fingers disappear into the wind - thin wisps of Dick fall away, up his arm, his shoulder, his whole body is disappearing and Kaldur reaches blindly for the boy, but his touch never connects with anything but the sand where Dick was sitting just a moment ago.

The pendant is still in Kaldur’s hand. He tucks it back into his pocket before he stands up and staggers towards the waves. He lets the pull of the water drag him away, away and home, and he doesn’t really choke on the salty depths.

But now, he understands the quiet, simple warning about the surface and the hurt a little more.