Young Justice: Poseidonis
August 18th, 2010
We spent nearly four hours in the library, but eventually exhaustion started to creep up on both of us. Poseidonis was a few hours ahead of Gotham, leaving the library all but empty when we finally returned all our scrolls and tablets to their places and began to make our way back to our rooms.
Though my body was tired (and very thankful that it didn’t need to drag me all the way through the water), my mind was racing with new ideas and concepts. Atlantean magic worked on a completely different axis then Order magic or wand magic. There were similarities and parallels, but it was still an entirely unique way of manipulating magic.
We made it back to the dormitory without any trouble and I wished Zatanna a good night as we each went to our own rooms. I had just begun to unpack my nightclothes from my bag when I heard a soft knock on my door.
I frowned and drew my wand, then went to the door. I pulled the door open with my left hand, a shield spell on the tip of my tongue and found…Zatanna, clutching her bag in both hands.
I lowered my wand. “Is everything okay?” I asked, concerned. “Did something happen?”
Zatanna smiled shyly, “No, no, I’m alright. Can I come in?”
I shrugged and stepped out of the doorway. “Of course, Zee. You’re always welcome.”
She slipped into the room and I shut the door behind her, returning my wand to its holster. Zatanna set her bag down on the table beside mine, then reached inside and tugged out a similarly sized but unenchanted bag. “I’m going to use the bathroom,” she told me firmly, then disappeared into the adjoined room, the lock clicking shut behind her.
Was her’s not working right? The bathroom here was a little weird, but I hadn’t had any issues with it. I shrugged mentally and went back to my bag. It took a bit of digging around––I wasn’t too good at the charm that let you just will an object inside an expanded bag to your hand––but eventually I found my nightclothes.
I hadn’t been able to find anything quite as comfortable as my enchanted sleepwear from back home––guaranteed to keep you warm, cool, and comfortable all night long––but the loose-fitting silk shirt and pants in a lovely shade of Slytherin green that I’d bought and enchanted myself were better than any of the garish alternatives I’d found at muggle stores.
I grabbed the shirt, then paused and looked at the bathroom door. I couldn’t hear Zatanna moving around at all, so I probably had a minute or two before she came out. I silently conjured a doorstop, just in case, then swiftly changed into my nightclothes and vanished the doorstop again.
I made it just in time. I heard the lock click open and looked up from my bag to see Zatanna step out of the bathroom wearing––
My train of thought crashed like a quidditch player flying just a little bit too close to a Whomping Willow. My jaw dropped and the question I was about to ask fell out of my mind entirety.
Zatanna stepped fully into the room, did a little spin, then posed, one foot extended forward and her hands on her hips. I stared at her wide-eyed, hungrily drinking in her appearance even as my brain tried to tell me that I should look away.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to call what she was wearing. It was…sort of a dress? But not like any sort of dress I’d ever seen her wear before. It was tiny, black, and sheer enough that I could clearly see her underwear through the fabric. A strap around her neck connected to two black cups that barely covered her bare breasts, her nipples visibly poking through the sheer mesh and leaving most of her upper chest and the valley between her breasts exposed.
A black ribbon was tied snuggly beneath her breasts, securing the rest of the dress to her body. It was made from the same sort of black mesh and extended down a scant few inches past her thighs, leaving the rest of her long, slender legs completely exposed.
The only other thing she was wearing was a black ‘thong’, a type of underwear I’d seen on several mannequins at the stores Zatanna had dragged me through but never imagined that actual people would wear. A thin strap around Zatanna’s hips held a tiny triangle of fabric in place, preserving the barest trace of her modesty.
“So, how do I look?” Zatanna asked after a moment, breaking me out of my reverie. I forcefully tore my eyes away from her body and our eyes met, amusement dancing in Zatanna’s eyes even as her cheeks were colored red by a rosy blush.
I swallowed heavily. “Stunning,” I managed after a moment. My mind raced as I tried to formulate words into a sentence. This was horribly improper, and there was no way I could allow her to walk through a public hallway dressed like…that! Many of the Atlanteans might wear clothing that even some surface muggles would find obscene, but this was another step past even that!
“I’m glad you think so, it took a long time to pick out something I liked.” Zatanna walked past me, my eyes following her of their own accord as she turned her back to me, her hips twisting from side to side with every step and making the fabric that already barely hid her rear ride up slightly.
She threw back one side of the sheets covering my bed and sat down. “I’ll be sleeping here tonight,” she told me in a voice that brooked no arguments. “Actually sleeping, I mean. The beds are plenty big enough for two and…” her voice turned husky and seductive in a way that sent shivers down my spine, “I wouldn’t want to get cold at night.”
My first thought was that I could enchant something to make sure that would never happen. My second thought was that Zatanna was in my bed and that I’d literally heard that exact line used in one of the films Zatanna had taken me too. My third thought was that it would be horrible for both our reputations if it became known that I’d shared a bed with an unmarried and unbetrothed girl, even if nothing actually happened.
The second thought swiftly clobbered the other two to death with a broadsword. This wasn’t my world. This was normal here. The biggest consequences I could face were from Giovanni, and he’d probably try to tear out my spine if he knew that Zatanna and I had already kissed several times. How much worse could this really be?”
I pushed proper etiquette aside and focused instead on mother’s other lessons. How to sway hearts and minds with honeyed words. It hadn’t exactly been my forte, but it was something a Black had to know. “Well, we can’t have that,” I answered after a moment. “A beautiful young lady such as yourself should never have reason to fear the cold when I’m around.”
Zatanna laughed. “Do you say that sort of thing to every girl you meet?”
I walked over to her side, my stride and poise projecting confidence I wasn’t really feeling deep down. “Only to you, my love,” I answered softly. Leaning over, I slipped a hand behind her head, my thumb by her ear and my fingers brushing the nape of her neck, and then I pulled her into a searing, passionate kiss that left my knees weak and my lips tingling.
After several long, blissful seconds, I broke the kiss and pulled away, leaving Zatanna staring up at me with passion and lust shining in her eyes. “Only you,” I repeated again, my fingers brushing lightly against her cheek as I moved my hand away.
Zatanna swung her legs onto the bed and moved over, wiggling under the sheets until there was enough space for me to join her. I climbed into bed after her and a wave of my wand dimmed the lights till nothing was left but a pale blue glow coming from a bowl of water on the desk––the remnant of a hydromancy training technique involving infusing large quantities of magic into water that Tula had told me about.
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It took us several minutes to get settled. Initially I did my best to avoid touching Zatanna, a challenging proposition with her in the middle of the not-that-large bed instead of on the other end, but that was clearly the opposite of what she wanted. Eventually she huffed, literally grabbed one of my hands, and pulled it under her bunched-up dress to rest lightly on the bare skin of her belly.
We ended up spooned together, with Zatanna’s back against my chest and her nearly bare butt pressing dangerously against the crotch of my silk pants. My left arm was wrapped around her waist while my right, mostly pinned in place by her weight, had found itself cupping one of Zatanna’s firm, perky breasts, my fingers automatically toying with the little nub between them before I even realized what exactly I was touching.
It was a very intimate position, not helped by the small sounds Zatanna kept making. My face was pressed into her soft, shiny hair and I could feel her heartbeat and hear her soft, gentle breathing.
“Good night, Hydrys,” Zatanna whispered sleepily.
“Good night, Zee,” I whispered back.
Zatanna shifted slightly and promptly fell asleep, her breathing and heartbeat evening out. I sighed softly and closed my eyes. I was glad that my body was as worn out by the day as it was, because there was no way I would have fallen asleep half as fast otherwise.
The next two days were just as tiring and busy as the first had been, but oh so worth it. In the mornings Zatanna and I got breakfast, then had three hours of tutoring with Tula and Garth where we learned the basics of Hydromancy and some of the theory that underpinned all Atlantean-style magic.
After lunch, Zatanna and I went off to our very first class at the Conservatory. We floated at the back of the classroom as an elderly-looking woman with shiny, eel-like skin and features lectured a bunch of fourteen to sixteen year old Atlanteans on Hydromancy. Her words were clear and concise, and her explanations made several of the concepts I’d been unsure about seem obvious in hindsight.
After the first hour, we were each given a clear glass sphere filled with water and the instructor walked us all through an exercise involving charging all the water within the sphere and then creating precise currents and disturbances that caused the glass surrounding it to move while keeping the rest of the water within perfectly still.
It was much harder than I would have expected it to be. Controlling all the water as a single mass was easy, but moving part of it while leaving the rest calm was hard, as was applying just the right amount of force at just the right angles.
It took about half an hour to get the basics down, at which point the instructor, who introduced herself as Professor Unla, gave me a few more things to try before moving on to help the student beside us who was having trouble charging the water inside the sphere rather than just the water he was touching.
After a few quiet tips from me, Zatanna got it down just a few minutes after I did, and joined me in working on the more advanced exercise. Though we had much less experience with hydromancy specifically than the students we were learning with, we both had years more experience practicing magic in general. Thus for us it was more a matter of adapting skills we already possessed to work with hydromancy rather than learning everything from scratch.
By the end of the three hour class, I was certain that I’d be coming back for the rest of Professor Unla’s Hydromancy classes over the next two weeks. She was very good at her job and I felt my skills progressing by leaps and bounds under her tutelage.
After that, Zatanna dragged me to another class that was happening almost immediately after. She was incredibly taken with the idea of tattoos that helped channel magic and insisted that we absolutely had to look into them. Most of her time at the library the day before had been spent reading about it and she’d completely exhausted Tula’s admittedly limited knowledge of the field trying to ask clarifying questions about what she’d learned.
I was initially reluctant, but I couldn’t really resist Zatanna’s pleading and eventually agreed to join her. The class did prove to be rather interesting, though Zatanna spent a fair portion of it sketching something that I think was supposed to be a tattoo in one of the notebooks I’d charmed to be waterproof.
Today’s lesson was about the preparation of magically-charged ink that was used to create the black tattoos that I’d seen on many Atlantean wizards. It was a complex, intricate process that involved harvesting ink from a specially bred type of cephalopod that was fed an exacting diet of magically-charged crustaceans, mixing it with the blood of the person being tattooed, and charging it with magic in a very specific way.
I also learned that the reason that only some of the wizards I’d seen had visible tattoos was that, once you became sufficiently proficient with its use and fully attuned all the magic in the ink to yourself, the tattoo became fully invisible except for when in use. For some reason, Zatanna seemed terribly disappointed by this fact, though it did significantly raise my own interest in the subject.
The instructor for the class was another witch, though Professor Mo’no looked about a century younger than Professor Unla had. She was a tall, slender, and very pale woman with inky black hair and almost unnaturally big eyes. She also had a lot more than just the typical eel-like arm tattoos I’d seen on Aqualad and so many others, something she was happy to show off when Zatanna approached her after class.
She clapped her hands together, releasing a pulse of mana into the water and causing tattoos all up and down her body to light up. There were of course the usual lines on her arms, but also two more sets winding around around the original markings, scale-like patterns on her neck and cheeks, a double helix descending from her back all the way down her legs, and an incredibly intricate design on her belly that vanished under the top of her skirt and extended around to join the cluster of tattoos on her back.
She then apologized, saying that she had a few others that she couldn’t show us due to where they were placed, but Zatanna seemed happy with the demonstration regardless. We ended up staying nearly forty-five extra minutes before the teacher finally excused herself and I could drag Zatanna away to eat dinner.
Our evening once again went about the same way. We ate, we spent hours reading at the library, and by the time we made it back to our rooms we were both exhausted enough to head right to bed. Zatanna joined me once again and wore the very same black…nightgown, but this time the underwear beneath it was red and lacy instead of a plain black.
The next day was much like the previous one had been. We ate, we learned from our guides, we ate, we went to classes, we ate, we spent hours at the library, and finally we collapsed into bed together.
Today’s classes were another lecture on Hydromancy, this one delivered by a muscular, shark-headed wizard with beady eyes and long, clawed fingers. He introduced himself as Batu Sha'ark––a name that I felt was a little bit too on the nose––and instead of a class, it was a one-off lecture. Batu was an officer in the Atlantean military and had a number of fascinating insights on using hydromancy in combat.
He also showed us all a special technique for creating incredibly strong barriers made from nothing but water that could nullify many forms of magic instead of merely physically blocking it. I only managed to make a palm-sized barrier out of the greenish glowing water the technique called for instead of the towering barricade Batu could call up, but now that I knew the theory it was just a matter of practice and experience.
After that we headed to another class taught by Professor Unla, this one focused on the Atlantean healing arts. Atlantean magic was not particularly good at healing from what I understood. Wizards back home could put a person back together after basically anything that didn’t instantly kill them, assuming there wasn’t any dark magic involved of course. Atlantean healing was far more limited, but it was still better than the tiny handful of healing spells I actually knew so I shouldn’t complain.
Like a lot of their magic, their healing spells used water as a medium to draw out damage and infection and mend injuries. The key weakness as far as I could tell was when it came to internal wounds. The specially infused water lost potency at an exponential rate the further it was from the actual damage, so while a cut could be fixed easily, and a deep wound was similarly not a problem, injuries like broken bones, damage to organs, and other problems that couldn’t be directly touched were far more difficult to treat.
Today’s class was focused on diagnosing and treating injuries in small fish. Many Atlanteans had just as much fish in them as they did mammal, making it a key practice aid.
After the initial lecture, every student was given a slightly injured fish inside a sealed container, and then Unla came over to Zatanna and I, along with two other students she waved to join us, and quietly helped us through the initial steps that most of the students around us had done in prior lectures. It took me a few tries to get the right balance of energies, at which point I was given a fish of my own to work on. Neither Zatanna nor the two Atlanteans figured it out while she was with us, but she told them to keep working at it. Healing, even at a very basic level, was very hard and everyone learned at their own pace.
I left the lesson satisfied. Zatanna left it fuming and frustrated. Despite her best efforts, she’d been unable to make the magic work the way she wanted it to, and it was clearly getting to her. I hugged her, kissed her, and promised to help her work on it. A story about how long it had taken me to get the hang of the Episkey spell did a lot to cheer her up and she was smiling and laughing by the time we made it to dinner.
The promise to make her her own water broom so she could be more independent with her choice of classes also helped. It was an easy promise to make because the rushed charms on my own were starting to fray around the edges. It was about time for version four and I had so many ideas for improvement I could make.