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The water was supposed to be Nita's thing. Kit had gone to college with a brain full of numbers and a book full of wizardry, and then he had taken a course about fluid mechanics—
And it had been like looking at one of those wonder eye puzzles. He'd stared at a familiar thing so hard and for so long that it had transformed into something astonishing and new.
Water was about memory but it was also about possibility. Kit poured over his textbooks and did extra readings in his manual, and slowly something large and deep and endlessly wonderful began to emerge. The way that water was flexible but also rigid, the way it seeped into every part of the world and subtly flexed itself in the earth.
He had been across the country from Nita then, though the distance didn't mean much to two wizards. (It meant she was in his head less. He had been surprised to miss it.) But it meant that they saw each other less often than they had, living in the same city.
It had felt like he might be stepping on her toes, the first time he had brought the interest up. But instead, Nita had lit up.
"There's so much stuff I've got to show you."
And Kit had relaxed into that shared joy, and learned that he had been entirely ignoring the potential of how sound traveled in the ocean. Neets was awesome.
College was hard.
Kit took up walking the halls of his dorm at odd hours, haunted by ideas and essay deadlines and who knew what. He was having fun, sure. He was learning, sure. It was just— a mess, in his head. He wasn't sure what he was so restless about.
The thing was, college wasn't really about Kit. He was fine with that; there were a lot of things he did in life that weren't about him at all. He didn't expect to make his living with wizardry, and a college degree would be useful. He wanted to make his parents proud, and they had never really understood the wizardry, not in the same way they would a degree.
He switched majors twice that semester. Passing his classes was no trouble after learning wizardry for half his lifetime. He kept his head above water.
When midnight walks proved to no longer be enough, he picked up swimming. Long laps in the pool, up and down until his thoughts finally fall silent.
It was a couple months later that Kit was sprawled out on the floor of Nita's dorm room, working his fingers into the carpet and staring at her ceiling. Her roommate had let him in with a knowing glance that he didn't know how to respond to. He had just gone slightly red and nodded to her as she slipped out.
"It's not that I don't think I'd be suited for it. I've been studying. It's just that—"
"There aren't a lot of hydromages," Nita said, thoughtfully.
Kit remembered Mars, then. How Nita had looked holding the Gibraltar Passthrough wizardry over her head, trembling with the strain of it. How she had looked magnificent. How she had looked tired.
"It's a juice issue," Kit said.
Nita made a face. Possibly at him calling wizarding power "juice". But she also hummed thoughtfully. There was a mirror-flicker at the edge of Kit's thoughts, like light off the ocean, like she was thinking of that same day. "Water takes a lot of power. I want it, but S'reee says a lot of potential hydromages have burned themselves out before."
"Do you remember that power-sharing technique the twins had? In the invitational?" Kit asked, rolling the thought around in his head.
"Yeah, the amplification. Bouncing the power back and forth?"
"Do you think…"
"It'd be dangerous, but we could message them," Nita said, but her voice hadn't lost that thoughtful edge. She sat down on the floor next to him and drummed her fingers on the carpet.
Kit sat up. "I'm surprised you're even considering it."
Nita grinned. "It sounds like a challenge." Her delight in it was obvious. Kit could hear it sparkling at the edge of his thoughts, like light off the crest of a wave, like a rush of bubbles beneath the surf. It was intoxicating, being this close to her focus.
She was so close.
Kit couldn't help himself; he leaned in closer and had the faintly feverish thought that up to 60% of the body was water, but concentrations varied, and the heart was around 73%, which was all numbers until you considered how water wizardry interacted with healing wizardry, and shouldn't he be past these nerves but it's Neets and really, knowing her had only ever made him trust her with more—
And then Nita rolled him entirely over on the carpet, and he stopped thinking about very much at all.
He didn't know what they'd look like, when he graduated.
It was one thing to be partners as teenagers, one thing to date your partner, even, and another thing to think about the future. It wasn't a crisis of confidence, but more of a persistent worry. How could he support her when he was so far away?
He missed her voice in his head when he was away. Living in separate cities was good for them, probably. But he missed it.
"Do you think there's a reason this is coming up?" he asked Nita.
They were off-planet and away from school for once, assisting Mamvish on a planet she had recently calmed. Tectonic activity had been increasing in an alarming way until she had talked the magma flows into something more stable. She was still in the process of relocating the local population to a planet that wasn't doomed to collapse via fault line, but her working had bought her (and the rest of the wizards on the problem) some time.
He and Nita were crouched at the lip of a volcano, watching steam pour from the crater in front of them. The water was pouring in from somewhere he couldn't quite see, and the steam made detail difficult to discern. Mamvish had asked them to follow up on her work in the area, since Nita had told her about their growing specialty.
Beside him, Nita was dressed in a pair of cargo pants and a vest with even more pockets. She was pointing a wand at the volcano ahead of her, and watching the readings with a furrowed brow.
"There used to be a spring here of some sort," she said, voice distracted. Kit was running his own diagnostic function on his manual. They'd had to spell everything against the heat and even still he was sweating in the oddest places—the backs of his knees, the small of his back. "The rock is still soaked, and the sudden influx of magma is just forcing it out in unusual ways."
"It was always going to come up," Kit agreed, running a finger down the table his manual was generating. He stopped halfway down, alarm spiking through his nerves. It was second nature to slide into telepathy, where thought ran faster than his voice ever could. Uh, Neets—
I see it. Her mental voice was lightning in a clear sky.
We're going to have to handle that now, before it chains into—
But the heat protection we have on—
Fold it into the water manipulation—
We'll need the amplification if we want to pull this off, there's no time to call Mamvish—
Ask Bobo to do the diagraming—
Here we go—!
Later, after everything had calmed down again, Kit was flat on his back from exhaustion.
Their riff on the amplification wizardry worked, but it felt like being kicked in the spine every time he tried to move.
"Everything's changing," Kit said to the rock he was laying on. "But you know water. You'll be fine."
Nita laughed to herself a little. Kit tried not to look like he was staring, even if she could probably tell. She was magnificent like this, sweat sticking her hair to her head, cheeks flushed, triumph making her glow. "So much for my plans after this."
Kit was debating throwing another layer of shielding on himself and falling asleep right then and there. "Plans?" His voice stumbled around the question.
"It was, uh, my turn to plan a date," she said. Despite himself, despite the exhaustion, Kit felt his stomach flip with nervous delight. They had decided to split up planning dates, after one disastrous attempt on both of their ends that had ended with Kit in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts in a fancy Italian restaurant, holding a bag of tropical fruit. For their last date he had taken them to a museum that was entirely non-wizarding related, and in a blessed break from every one of their responsibilities, they had wandered around reading about local history for three hours.
Kit smiled at her. "There's still time before we have to go back."
"Come on then," Nita said, and smiled back. "I have something to show you."
She didn't let him power the wizardry at all, just laid out the transportation with a flick of her wrist and had him check his name.
It was perfect, down to the last curl.
She spoke and the universe leaned close to listen. In front of them, space collapsed like origami, and Kit stepped through the façade into—
Kit remembered when he was twelve, reading the wizard's oath for the first time, the words tumbling from his lips and nearly running into each other.
He hadn't thought then, that he could ever end up where he was now.
He had friends in other galaxies now, as well as steady confidence in his own knowledge of the Speech. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, probably. It was just that Kit had never been an expert at dealing with his own uncertainty.
There were things he wanted, still.
When he had first thought about why he and Nita made good partners, he had thought about paired opposites. Not made for each other, exactly, but similar enough.
Kit understood water. He had to work for it, it didn't come naturally to him the way that other areas of wizardry did or had, but he loved it fiercely. He loved it because there was always a way to circle back around. There was always something unexpected at the end of the spell.
He hadn't started this because of her. But he had pursued it perhaps because of that moment on Mars, where he had seen her lift the weight of the world and not been there to raise a finger in return. He had continued because he wanted to bear that weight.
Darkness.
They arrived on the shore of a small beach. He could smell salt in the air and see violet grass waving in the dunes behind them. There was no one around for miles. In front of them, small waves crashed onto the soft sand. He couldn't tell where they were besides not-earth and not the planet they had just been on. It was night here, and two moons hung above them, both shining silver.
With a grin, Nita said a short phrase and her clothing was replaced by a swimsuit. Kit raised an eyebrow, but he had a swimsuit in his otherspace as well, a request from Nita that was a week or so old. He had entirely forgotten until now.
His muscles ached from the working they just did, and his thoughts were slow. For once, he didn't feel at all worried. Water worked in a cycle—it always came back around. Kit could learn to trust in that.
It was just as quick for him to change into swim wear, and when he was done the night air was warm on his skin.
Kit breathed slowly. And then he dove into the water. Nita was already there, waiting.