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"I dropped you in the water, and you took to it. Your mum got so cross with me, so did the lifeguards, said I was mad for throwing a newborn baby into the ocean like that. But I knew better. I knew you'd swim. You swam like you were half fish. Like maybe you were about to sprout gills and just paddle away. Didn't bother you any. You didn't cry 'til we took you out of the water."
That's Adam's grandmother's favorite story to tell about him. He isn't precisely sure it's true, because he doesn't believe that his mother and grandmother would have taken him out to the ocean three days after he was born, but then again, sometimes he believes.
More importantly, he believes there's a part of it that's true beyond the details. The part about his grandmother knowing all along and guiding him with an easy, wise hand the way she always has.
It's the part that makes it easier when he crouches down by her chair and looks up into her blue, blue eyes.
"Grandmum, there's something I need to talk to you about," Adam tells her.
She grins. "You found another ocean to swim in."
Adam stands for the excuse to turn away. "I don't know what you mean."
"Yes you do. Don't be silly, Adam. And don't look at me like I'm your dottering old grandmum who doesn't know how the world works anymore."
She, too, stands up and with easy grace takes her cane in hand. Needing the cane does not touch either her strength or dignity. She has refused to give into age. Although she told him once that she was not Thor. He had no idea what that meant.
"All right then. I won't," he agrees. She smiles.
When grandmum's at the helm, navigating everything is easier. Would've been a fight with him mum.
"You're something else, Adam. I knew it before you were born. Knew it when I laid eyes on your father, I saw it. I knew that no child of those two would be ordinary. Any child of your father and your mother would be something quite marvelous. It's why I permitted him at all," she tells him, walking into her kitchen. Adam follows her.
"I thought you never met my father," Adam says, a little disturbed to think of his grandmother as having lied to him all these years.
She reassures him with the coolness in her smile. "Don't worry, I never lied to you." She opens a cabinet and tries to reach for the top shelf to get some tea bags.
But in the last few years, she's not as tall as she used to be.
"Let me get that, grandmum," he implores. For a few more moments she stretches then gives in and watches Adam all height and beautiful, lanky limbs pluck it easily from the top shelf.
He does not face her long enough to see the sadness. He does not face the sadness long enough to think about the inevitable.
He does not hand her the tea and instead searches for teacups. He pulls out the ginger tea for her, and the chamomile for himself, automatically.
"So sure that I wanted ginger today, are you?" she asks, smirking at him.
Adam makes a valiant effort at casual. Shrugs, keeps himself looking busy with the task of putting the kettle on.
"Sorry, just assumed, did you want something else?"
"Oh, no. I had my mind set on ginger. Funny how you just knew that."
"Just coincidence," Adam says in the same vein of casualness.
The cane hits the ground *hard* and startles him. She demands full attention with merely a glare and pursed lips. Oh, he's known that look since he was a little boy. It can lock every muscle in his body into place - stop him from going places he shouldn't, call him back like a tether. Not just with fear of punishment, but with love. "No, it wasn't. You knew for a reason. And you came here to tell me that reason, but you're still denying it."
Adam fumbles for a response. "About that. It's a very long story, grandmum."
She arches on graying eyebrow and he gets the feeling that she's seen this stretch of sea before and knows exactly where she's going. So he sighs and sets the stove on medium and decides to let her do the driving, because she knows what she's doing.
Adam doesn't.
"It's all right. We all take a breath before going underwater, even you. You're only half fish, you know."
Adam can't help but chuff laughter. Fine. Let her steer them around the curves. Let her set the agenda. It's not like he's ever done this before, but she might have done it a hundred times for all the assurance in her voice.
"That's exactly what I came to tell you. I'm half fish. I started growing gills. Want to see?"
Adam turns 'round as if to pull up his shirt and show her gills right about where his kidneys would be, but stops before he untucks his shirt and turns back around.
"Oh, I've seen your gills. Had to diaper them at least a thousand times."
He hangs his head in mock-defeat and promises himself he won't try to go up against a woman who used to clean spaghetti out of his hair. There's just no winning against grandmum. Which is just fine, because defeat usually comes with tea and sweets anyway.
The kettle whistles. He turns the stove off and carefully pours the boiling water and sets the teas to steep.
"I guess that means you already know what I'm about to say," Adam says, handing her the blue teacup when he thinks it's steeped enough.
She carefully wraps two fingers around the handle and walks back to the table. Adam thinks about taking the tea and helping her, but decides that he needs to allow her to do things on her own. To let her do the things that she is able to do.
"Oh, I've know what you're about to say for years and years. But the point isn't that. The point is making you say it," she replies. "So tell me what I already know. Tell me that you're the prince of the ocean."
Adam cracks a smile. "Nothing that dramatic. Just a little different."
And there he begins his story.
When he finishes, grandmum looks somewhere between very delighted and enchanted by the entire thing and very concerned. But then again, he did just tell her that he lived on an island alone for six months and she's probably wondering what he did about clean underwear, in case there was an accident.
Because she is still his grandmum. And she still worries about things like that. Whether he's eating enough and got clean underwear and minding his manners while he's saving the world.
Apparently, saving the world on an empty stomach, in dirty underwear, with his elbows on the table is the worst possible scenario.
"You don't think the police here would come after you, do you?" she asks, quietly, lips hidden in the rim of her cup.
"I don't know. I doubt it. They know I'm Australian, but there's a lot of Australians and a lot of Australia. If I were them, I wouldn't begin to know where to look."
"Unfortunately, though, you're not the government, are you? Be a lot better around here if you were. Do you know who they've just elected?"
Adam smiles. Yes. She is definitely is his grandmum, who has convinced herself that the current government is part of a very insidious plot to ruin the country. She laid it all out for him one day. He felt very dizzy afterwards and a little worried about the throbbing vein in grandmum's forehead.
"Yes, I heard," he replies, fondly. Grandmum looks like an angry cat with her eyes narrowed just so.
"But it's a topic for another day," she says, suddenly reasonable and even tempered again. "You'll bring them by one day, let me have a look at your friends?"
"Of course. Sit down, have a proper dinner, even. I'm sure Megabyte won't pass up free food."
"Lovely," grandmum replies. "Is Megabyte his real name?"
"No. It's Marmaduke."
Grandmum makes a very approving face. "That's a good name, even if he won't use it. He'll be a good friend to you."
Adam keeps on laughing a little but he's got ice in his stomach and it's flowing out into his veins. Perhaps he comes by these gifts more honestly than he has ever realized. "Grandmum, you haven't even met him."
"Well, that doesn't mean anything. You know that I'm right, Adam. It's all there to be seen, and I've got very sharp eyes. So don't tell me that I can't see what I can quite clearly see."
Adam remembers the little sticky note in his head that said "Note to self: Arguing with grandmum - pointless."
"Of course you're right," he concedes, then sips his tea.
"You mustn't say things that you don't believe," grandmum chides. "Even if you think it makes me happy. You don't believe me at all."
"It's not that."
"Yes, it is. It's just that. You don't think my stories are true, but they are. You sift out the parts you can't believe and decide it doesn't matter because they're good stories, and there's always some little nugget of truth in the bottom of the pan for you. But that isn't the point. You're older than bedtime stories now, Adam."
Adam shakes his head. "Grandmum, I promise, I believe you."
"There you go again. You've got to watch for that. You think that if everyone's happy, the problem's solved."
"If everyone is, what else matters?" he asks, not really understanding where the problem part comes in again.
She leans in. "You never count yourself in there. You'd bear the world up on your shoulders, if only you could. You can satisfy everyone in the world, but if you never think of yourself, if you take it all inside and decide it's yours, then everything you love will become poison. It'll become bitter, Adam, and you'll have to spit it out. And then nobody will be happy at all."
Adam stares down at the scatterings of tea leaves in the bottom of his cup, the dredges that have seeped through the thin tea bags. They look like thorns and seaweed and a few of them have gathered together to look like stars. Deep down, he thinks it might mean something.
Grandmum waits until he looks up again before speaking again. "The universe has a purpose. For itself, and for all things in it. I could've stopped your father, a long long time ago, I could've stopped him from ever laying a hand on your mother. But I didn't. Because I knew you'd come from it, and I knew that the world had to have you in it. Don't you see? You were meant to be in this world, as you are. With all of your powers, and even all of your wonderful, wonderful faults. The universe has reasons, and it has plans, both great and small. And you are important. You are part of that. As are your friends. But you must learn to understand that purpose or it'll do you no good."
"But I don't believe in that, grandmum. That we're all just pieces on a chess board, meant to be moved around. I believe it comes down to what we do."
Grandmum narrows her eyes and they darken like the ocean during a storm. Her voice is the voice of all the wise old women of the world, of grandmothers telling stories and medicine women in huts. Deep, and kind, and yet somehow a little terrifying.
"Oh, there's always a choice. The universe will accomplish its goals one way or the other. How it accomplishes them is what you're meant to decide. You want peace, and there will be. Sometimes it is made, and sometimes And sometimes it comes only after a terrible storm. You could be the storm, you know."
Adam feels bitterly nauseous and spun and looks at his grandmum for a moment and does not really recognize her at all. Her face is an abstract painting. He only understands the dark points of her eyes. Then she puts a hand over his and he remembers who she is. She's grandmum again. He looks down at tea leaves and see the seaweed, thorn, and stars. He wonders what they mean.
He thinks they may mean that the story is true from beginning to end. That his grandmother willed him into the world, called him Adam, and threw him in the ocean to swim three days later.