Chapter Text
“Ilya, what did you…. do? Are the siphons…. just siphons? Does that magical glitter do anything else?”
“See for yourself,” Illyana said, placing her hand on her best friend’s thigh. Kitty looked down.
“Are you ready to go in?” Kitty asked.
“Not yet. Oh, wow, take a look.” Illyana gestured to the far end of the pool, pointing two fingers straight out as if she were casting a spell: Kitty, beside her, and then Amara, standing behind them both, followed with their eyes.
Sam and Roberto floated together on the surface of the pool, Bobby on his back and Sam—the much taller, blond one—curled up beside him, one pale lanky arm around his darker friend. Bobby’s black hair snuck out from behind his ears to splay itself across the water as Sam’s other hand moved, in full sunlight, towards…. Bobby’s crotch. Right between his legs.
“Are they…?” Amara asked, pretending to be shocked.
“Shut up. I know you’ve always wanted to see this,” Illyana said. “You knew it was happening.”
“Nil admirare,” Amara replied, and kept watching.
Whatever it was inside Roberto da Costa’s swim trunks, it moved, and grew taller, and as the Brazilian mutants, his eyes closed tightly, smiled—Sam had his eyes closed too—another inky stain began to spread across the surface of the pool and into its depths, a faster, thicker stain than anything they had seen before, red and blue and gold and silver and black, moving out in all directions like a liquid firework from Roberto’s crotch.
“He’s got an outie,” Illyana said, smirking a little. Xi’an quietly padded up behind Illyana, her bare feet smacking on the poolside mat, and placed her palm in Illyana’s until Illyana sprinkled the rest of the blue glitter over Karma’s shoulders and hair. Xi’an had changed her mind about undergoing the mermaid spell, about entering the magic water.
Still smiling, eyes still closed, Sam plunged himself and Roberto back into the depths of the pool, though Roberto was able to open his eyes for a second, smiling raptly as he continued to… whatever the siphons did.
His eyes met Amara’s. “Come on in!” he exclaimed, as the Doug-and-Warlock submarine-torpedo-phallus chugged happily past, trailing its own clouds of ink.
“I’d…. love to come. Did I say that right? Weenio!” And Amara dove in after the boys she had followed so long with her eyes.
“Weenio?” Kitty asked, looking around for Doug and realizing he has spoken for.
“I think it means ‘I’m coming,’” Xi’an sighed. She wondered whether she were too old for the pool party, or whether she, too, ought to dive in.
She dove in, first doing a neat Australian crawl to the far corner of the pool, then letting herself sink to the bottom as she flapped her powerful tail. “I’ll bet she is,” Illyana smiled.
Then it was just Illyana and Kitty beside the increasingly colorful pool, with Amara diving after Roberto and Sam, and Dani and Rahne submerged.
“Roomie?” Kitty asked, stretching out.
“Yeesssss?”
“Are all the siphons… are they all the same size and shape?”
“Nope. Not with this spell. This one… there are innies and outies. Roberto’s got an outie. See?” On his back again with Sam in tow, Roberto was making a series of liquid shapes in the air, like a dolphin with his blowhole, like a decorative fountain. Better yet, he didn’t care who saw: he waved his siphon in the air above his thighs with an exuberant unconcern, one Sam, swimming circles around his friend—his boyfriend?—shared.
“Mmmmm. Do I have an outie?” Kitty Pryde squirmed, as if her thighs and knees wanted to merge into a fishtail like Dani’s, as if only the slightest signal from Illyana would get Kitty, too, to jump into the pool.
Seeing no signal yet, Kitty pointed shyly to her own. Something had changed, surely, between her thighs, inside her swimsuit: a mound getting higher, taller, wetter, something straining to poke out, something almost joyful, wanting someone—wanting Illyana—to touch…
Illyana reached over and placed her palm where Kitty wanted it. “That’s not an outie.” And Illyana, followed by Kitty, sprang into the now rippling, now technicolor pool.
As they both sank, happily, breathing freely, sending bubbles up towards the surface, as they both sank feet-first—no, tail-first, in Kitty’s case—towards the bottom of the pool, Kitty kept her eyes open. Something changed in Illyana’s body, something fast and whiplike, something ecstatic, something poking itself out from between her---
Kitty put her hand on Illyana’s thigh as Illyana’s siphon, great and stiff and commanding, bobbing and smooth and tapered right at the tip, sprayed all the colors of the rainbow in all directions, stimulated beyond reason, beyond measure, beyond logic by the rushing water and the touch of her roommate’s hand.
“Now that,” Illyana said through the moving water, as if with marbles in her mouth, though Kitty could make it all out—“Now that’s an outie.”
Still under the water, Kitty stared, feeling answering warmth between her own legs. Kitty flexed her tail up to her knees and let her momentum carry her into Illyana’s arms, and she let her roommate—her girlfriend, really—hold her close and stroke her curly, dark mermaid hair.
Kitty closed her eyes underwater, then, and opened them briefly to see Illyana close hers. If they could drift together like this… if they could flap their fins and Kitty could feel Illyana’s powerful siphon propel them along the pool floor, the river bottom, the ocean bottom, forever and a day… Illyana’s hands on Kitty’s shoulderblades, her siphon prodding and stimulating Kitty’s softer, smaller siphon, the two of them just spinning slowly together, chatting slowly about nothing, pausing for the occasional underwater kiss….
Ink drifted slowly from Kitty’s own thighs, her soft, unfolded siphon responding slowly but joyfully to Illyana’s great harder one. Inside her something vibrated and vibrated again, as if she could get wet inside when she was already wet inside, as if there were folds within folds, each one releasing some new pleasure, flapping her tail...
The reverie broke to a shout. “Weenie!” It was Amara, crying happily as something erupted from her own mermaid body, poised and blond below Berto and Sam.
“Weenie?” Illyana asked.
“It means ‘I came,’” Doug mumbled, smiling, pulling up close to the pair of Kitty and Illyana, still encased in Warlock.
“Self also came,” Warlock added, rotors spinning, miniature periscope extruded, for all the world like a pint-size USS Los Angeles. “Self and selfsoulfriend came together in sub form. Query: is self sub, or is selfsoulfriend true sub? Can self and selfsoulfriend be sub together, or must someone be in command of a given sub?”
Kitty snarfed a little. Nobody answered.
“Weeeeennie!” Amara exclaimed, and the redness erupting from her own fishtail wasn’t ink or siphon-juice or anything else sweet and hot and watery any more: there was lava erupting below her, breaking up through the floor of the pool, turning the water around it into steam.
“Xi’an! Roman candle alert!” Illyana shouted, and as if from nowhere the older Vietnamese mutant swam up to Illyana and Kate and Doug/Warlock and nodded towards Amara, possessing her. Instantly the lava ceased erupting, cooling into a pillar poking up through the floor of the pool.
"Problem solved," Illyana said confidently.
“We’re still gonna get… in trouble,” Kitty said, sleepily, her own siphon still in progress, ink swirling around her. She kept almost phasing through Illyana’s arms.
“No we’re not. Dani?” Illyana called, still underwater, and Dani stared at the possessed Amara, then at the pillar in the pool.
Then Illyana waved her hands and mumbled and the pillar changed shape. “It’s turning into what Amara wants to see,” Illyana explained, “which Dani draws out of Amara’s mind, and then I’m magicking it to stay that way, so we’ve…. given a special statuary gift to the Salem Center pool. No problem.”
“I don’t think a statue of Sam Guthrie as a hot merman sucking off Berto is what the good people of Salem Center want to see,” Kitty objected. “I mean, maybe it is, but we do want them to let the X-Men rent the pool again.”
“We could just threaten them with demons… Oh, fine.” The image on the pillar wavered and shifted into a triton, blowing a conch shell horn.
Amara, released from Xi’an’s possession, swam after the boys to the edge of the pool, while Xi’an and Kitty followed Illyana into the shadow of the diving board and up into sunlight and air.
“Did the two of you… plan that? All of it?” Kitty asked Xi’an and Illyana together. “Like… Xi’an, did you think we needed a day off, and notice that Bobby and Sam could use an excuse to show their feelings for each other, and the same for Dani and Rahne?”
Illyana shrugged. “A magician never tells her secrets.” And she splashed water in Kitty’s face, and dove down, ad Kitty dove after her, into the sweet deep blue of the late afternoon.