“My dear Navigator,” Kleken murmurs into your ear, his body pressed against your side like he wants to meld into you. His skin is cold, the fine fabric of his suit even colder. It feels like the deep sea is trying to crawl underneath your skin, the water desperate to fill your lungs so it could become one with you.

You shiver, and Kleken notices.

“Cold?” he asks, a rhetorical question. Something that isn’t a human arm wraps itself around your waist. One of Kleken’s tentacles, you realize. It is just as cold as the rest of Kleken but it grips you with a tightness that borders on bruising.

“Better?” Kleken breathes against your temple, his hand holding one of your own; the touch is almost too gentle in comparison.

You feel him press a kiss against your skin, sweet and chaste and honest.

“Better,” you lie through your teeth and you wonder why Kleken – someone who breathes lies like he breathes air – doesn’t seem to notice at all and merely smiles at you with an ardor so fiercely genuine it’s almost painful to see.

Kleken holds you close for the rest of the night.

You sleep fitfully, your dreams consumed by the deep sea that presses against you on all sides. When you awake, it is to the terrifying thought that there is water in your lungs and that you are drowning, the deep sea of your dreams coming to claim you.

Kleken does not so much as comfort you, as he kisses you until you find yourself breathless for an entirely different reason then.