Fishing Box

"Thought you said we weren't going near the water," Basil muttered, keeping his head low. His fur was bristling out. Next to him, Furiet was similarly uneasy. They both stared out at the ocean in all its vastness, its ebb and flow, the unmatchable power of it. It was every bit as horrifying as it was beautiful. The waves broke against the shore and sprayed Basil in the face-- he took a few steps back. "Seriously, this is a bad idea. You can't even swim and I'll panic the second I hit the water."

Furiet shook themself out. "We don't have to go into the water, remember? That guy said there was a dock around here somewhere, so we just find that. It'll be easy. No big deal." They repeated themself in a reassuring mumble. "We don't have to go into the water."

The thing was, they were both terrified of it. Furiet had never learned how to swim at all and still had that visceral, animal terror of deep water, made worse by their thick fur. Enough water soaking that and they wouldn't be able to get to the surface even if they could find it. Basil, on the other paw? He knew how to swim, but he freaked the fuck out whenever he tried. Something about getting repeatedly chucked in the water by his dad whenever he tried to get back to the shore as a puppy kicked Basil's panic instinct into overdrive when he went into water he couldn't easily stand up in. The vesper-friendly fishing poles were an uncomfortable weight on both of their backs, reminding them that they were, in fact, about to get far too close to the water. The two of them glanced at each other, eyes sliding to the side in unison.

"This was a fucking awful idea," Basil said at last.

Furiet's lip pulled up. "I can't hear you over the sound of all the fish we're going to catch." They nudge him with their full weight and he stumbles to the side because wow they were much weightier than him and actually he was pretty easy to throw off balance with those long, absurd limbs of his. "Come on." Again, they set off, but Basil was right by their side this time.

It took some walking, but they did find a dock-- fairly well-kept by the look of it, although there wasn't anyone around at the moment. The wood creaked underfoot, their claws clicking over top of it. Basil swallowed and watched Furiet take a few steps out, but when they turned back to give him a look, he followed. "This is fine," he said all flat and tired. "There's not any fire. Of course not, because we're surrounded by water. Lots and lots of water."

"Shut up, you're making it worse," Furiet squawked at him, skirting down the dock on careful paws. "At this rate you're just going to have a heart attack and die before you hit the water."

"If I do, I'm taking you down with me. I'm grabbing all your scruff and just barreling down off this dock."

"Literally you still can't move me." Again, Furiet nudged him and he stumbled, uncomfortably close to the edge of the dock. They stuck their tongue out at him. "You can't even stand your ground when I bump you!"

Normally Basil might play around a little bit more, but he kept looking at dock's drop into the water and he hunched down at the end of the dock instead of bumping them back. "Yeah, but I still win. I'll take you down with that adrenaline rush from death. I may be nothing but bones and maybe, questionably, some skin and fur, but I can still end you."

"False. Wrong. Nuh-uh."

"Yep." Basil turned his head and pulled his fishing pole off his back. It was the sort of thing made so that his lack of opposable thumbs weren't a huge issue, capable of reeling in automatically by the push of a button. Of course, that required it to be clunkier than the average fishing pole, among other things. He set it down and slung the fishing line out into the water with his teeth. "Let's see how these things work, huh? They look weird as hell."

Furiet made a farting noise at getting brushed off so easily, but they tossed their line out too. "They really do, like. Whose idea was this? It's like a box with a stick sticking out." They batted a paw against the fishing pole and then scrambled to stabilize it before it fell over.

"I mean, it's pretty clever. The automatic mechanism is in the box, the buttons control it. All we have to do is watch the baubles out there and feel the vibrations in the pole. Theoretically. It still looks weird. And it seems like this sort of mechanism could break pretty easily? Like, honestly. It's an automatic reeler in a box." Basil's muttering was enough to put Furiet at ease, at least a little bit. It was kind of familiar, him analyzing inventions like this. He didn't do much inventing himself, but he read a lot and he liked the way things went together. "Hopefully it's enough to net us at least a few fish for dinner tonight. I don't want to have to buy any more."

"Who said anything about buying?" Furiet's doggish grin made Basil groan.

"Literally no. We already went over this. Swiper no swiping. Furiet no thieving. If you try to steal one more thing from these folks I'm going to shove you into the sand."

Furiet laughed, all teeth and loud and spit. "They wouldn't even know it was gone! There's so many fish around here anyway, right? It even smells like fish. Besides, you can't tell me that guy in the tent next to us doesn't deserve it. He keeps kicking at the wall in the middle of the night."

"Yeah, no. He's probably just got restless legs or something."

"No way! It's totally on purpose. It's, like, rhythmic."

Basil hadn't noticed that, but he stopped paying attention on the grounds that Furiet's fishing pole had suddenly jerked forward. "Furiet!" he barked, and they startled, turning back toward their pole. As soon as they saw what was going on, they scrabbled forward, smacking both paws on the reeling mechanism.

"Come on come on come on," Furiet was mumbling under the sudden shriek of fishing line coiling back in.

A fish broke the surface of the water, squirming on the hook.
"Holy shit!" Basil leapt to his feet, his tail wagging. "We caught one!"

"We caught one!" Furiet shrieked back excitedly.

They bounced together for a moment before Basil came to a screeching halt. "Wait." Furiet slowed down too, looking at him quizically. "Where the hell do we put it now that we have it?"

Beat.

Furiet groaned.