The sea is a booming rush against the sand, the rolling rustle of moving waves, the breaking crack of them hitting the beach. The salt air stings your nose and sand crunches under your sandal-clad feet, the cold night air making you shiver as the spray spatters your skin.
You aren't normally the type to wander the beach at night, but you left your favorite towel earlier in the day, when the sun was high and hot on your face, quickly drying your sodden curls as you collected your things to extend a chance meeting with a friend to a nice dinner together.
It was only after you returned home to unpack your things that you noticed the towel's absence, because it has your initials monogrammed on it, lovely blue on green in Lucida font, one of the first indulgences you ever bought yourself, and valuable to you for the nostalgia.
You are rather lost in your search, unable to remember where you were sitting in the warm daylight when faced with cold moonlight, and wander the beach. Though the night is cold, the wind chilling your still-damp hair at the roots, the night is crisp and cloudless, a full, heavy moon lighting your way, the air smelling of salt and life. If you weren't searching for your towel, it would be a lovely night for a walk.
You notice someone laying half in the surf on the beach, some yards ahead of you, though all you can make out from this distance is dark skin, sodden black curls, and...something wrapped around their legs?
Then they shift, and you see rich green cloth, of about the right size and shape to be your towel, so you advance to investigate, hoping this nighttime swimmer has found your towel, rather than having rather logically brought their own.
When you get closer, you realize that it is indeed your towel that the swimmer is looking at, face down on their stomach as they investigate it, long, huge hair blocking their face from your view. You think, for just a moment, that they have a skin-brown towel wrapped about their legs.
The crunching of your sandals through the wet sand catches the swimmer's attention, and in a sudden flurry of movement, they flip themselves onto their back, clutching your towel to their chest, pointing their legs at you. Well, not legs. A tail.
As you look at the sandy brown underside of their tail, shading into the darker brown you noticed when they were on their belly, you can't deny that you are looking at a half-fish person, one who is threatening you with a surprisingly pointy-looking crescent-shaped tail.
A mermaid? Or merman? You're not really sure, to be honest. Their face is beautiful in an androgynous model sort of way, but the rest of the human portion of their body that is not concealed by your towel provides no gender markers you can identify. They could be a slim, beautiful young man, or an underdeveloped young woman. It doesn't particularly matter, you decide, because they have your towel.
You shift forward, reaching out for your towel, and they one-handedly scrabble backwards, leaning back to lift their tail higher, clearly in some sort of threat, before beginning to scoot back and back into the water, bubbling out sounds that resemble an extended death gurgle, ending with a high, fluting noise. They can't move very fast, and certainly not towards you, but it's pretty clear they're frightened. And still clutching your towel.
"It's okay-" you begin, in an attempt to calm them, soothe them into returning your towel, but they hiss and lift their fin higher at you, almost flat on their back, and still scrabbling backwards, away from you. It looks, in all defiance of better reason and common sense, very sharp. You don't want to be cut because you tried to talk the fish-person down when they weren't interested in listening. They probably don't understand english anyway.
You watch, curious and bemused, as they use their free hand to kind of scoot and shuffle towards the water in a fishlike flopping motion, as they don't seem to have any kind of waist that would allow them to bend and move more gracefully, or more easily. Their unreasonably long hair occasionally catches their hand and fingers, tripping them up every now and again, but they eventually make it into the water, staring you down until they reach water deep enough for them to swim off, with a darted look back at you.
They take your towel with them as they swim off, and though you like that towel, you find that you don't mind so much, because in exchange for its loss, you saw something noone else ever has before. At least, not in recent history.
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