The Breathing Lessons

The Breathing Lessons is a story written by shukyou and illustrated by Tamago. It originally ran in Issue 55 at http://s2b2.livejournal.com/309100.html, and is mirrored at http://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/the-breathing-lessons/.

Summary

A young athlete has to learn to grow up with his late father's legacy, his remaining family, dreams of stardom, and the mysterious man who may be able to teach him how to breathe underwater.

He showed up three months after the memorials had ended, which was three months of accepting fate after a little over a year of hope. But hope had been stupid from the beginning, because ships that got lost in the night didn't have happy endings.

Author's Notes

From http://ladysisyphus.livejournal.com/885801.html:

I'm cribbing pretty hard from fanon here, but if you think you recognize the source, you probably do.

I also apologize for the general ridiculous philosophical wanderings, but in my defense, at the same time I was writing this, I was also preparing introductory lectures (among other things) on Buddhism and Daoism. The stuff about breathing is true, though. Well, the general mechanics of it, anyway. Then again, I've never tried breathing breathable liquid, so it could be!

Now: I am generally a person who thinks that it's kind of jerkish when an auth or comes in to close the canon outside of the story. So basically, whatever you think was happening with Taran, whatever conclusion that you come to based on the information presented, that counts as correct. However, if you want to know what I was thinking when I wrote it, read on:

The Galena crashes because it runs into a cloud of sentient electricity beings, trapping one with as it goes down. Unable to figure out how to communicate, the electricity alien picked one of the dead bodies and zapped its way inside, not realizing that once it did, it wouldn't be able to get back out. Therefore, the alien has to figure out how to be human, and in doing so, it steps into the life of the person whose body it took.

This is part of why Taran's scars take so long to fade; they are technically postmortem injuries.

I sort of wish I could have submitted this story for this issue and August's space-and-aliens issue and October's creepy horror issue. I didn't mean to hit a weird trifecta, but it happened.