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This story was written for Catprog as part of my Patreon Request Days for January 2018. It contains transformation, gender shifting and nudity involving a consenting adult. :3

[center][b][u]A Return to the Water[/u][/b][/center]

I love the water. I always have, for as long as I've lived. As a child, my parents used to have to fight to get me out of the tub. I wouldn't splash or make a mess or insist on filling it with rubber toys or anything, I'd just love to lie and make myself float there until the water was so cold that I'd start to shiver. The first time they took me to a public pool I broke away from their hands and leapt into the water without any help or support. They were terrified, and furious at me afterwards. I wasn't scared though, and I was swimming within seconds like I'd been doing the doggy-paddle all my life. We never had a real pool of our own, but on summer days when I couldn't convince my parents to take me to the local pool I'd laze around in a kiddy-pool in the back garden. I'd sit and soak all morning, come in for lunch, then dash right back outside and rest in the water until dinner time. My parents worried I wasn't spending enough time with my friends, that I wasn't running around playing games and getting in trouble like all the neighbour's kids. But they saw how happy being in the water made me, so they let me just lie there and soak. I'll be forever grateful to them for not denying me that joy.

When I got to high-school, I joined the swim team. It wasn't that I was in any way interested in competition, it wasn't that I wanted a chance to show myself off to the ladies, or other guys for that matter. I just wanted to be in the water, and people who were on the swim team got to spend extra hours in the pool for practices and swim-meets. I won so many races. So many meets that they tested me for drugs. They didn't believe I could be this naturally good. Call it racism coz I was brown-skinned, call it what you will. I was clean, and once I proved that to them with all the tests they could ask for, they didn't have a choice but to let me back in the water.

My swimming got me a full ride scholarship to a college of my choice, and of course I picked the one with the best pool facilities and the nearest proximity to open water. On one of the campus grounds there was a lake, and on weekends and days when I had time between classes I'd go there, strip off every last scrap of my clothes, and swim naked in the cool, refreshingly chemical-free water. I'd swim laps. I'd float. I'd dive down and look at that whole other world underneath the surface. I swear, there were times it felt like I spent hours underneath the water, not drawing a breath or even feeling the slightest burning in my lungs. At the time I thought it was just wishful thinking on my part. Funny how things work out sometimes.

By the end of my college career, I had international titles under my belt and more opportunities coming my way every day. I had the national Olympic committee begging for me to consider them, and companies asking me for sponsorship opportunities. I had more drug tests too. More people who couldn't accept that I was just that good, no matter how many hours upon hours of time I put in to doing what I loved. More people who just couldn't believe that I did what I did because I loved being in the water, not because I cared about winning at all, never mind to the extreme where I'd pollute my own body with steroids or engage in oxygen doping to do a little better. On the occasions when someone swam faster and better than me, I was more than happy to congratulate them on their well deserved win. I still got to swim, so I was happy.

It was for that reason I said no to the offers. No to the Olympics, no to the sponsorships. No to all the things that would keep me [i]away[/i] from the water more than it would give me the chance to get closer to it. Instead I took the money I'd made from my wins thus far and bought myself a small place up North. A cabin beside a lake that was meant to be a holiday home, but which became my permanent residence... for a while at least.

There were days I never put clothes on. Days when I would grab some breakfast and eat it upon the banks with my feet dangling in the water, totally foregoing the recommended thirty minutes before swimming and diving right in as soon as I was done. It would be getting dark by the time I slipped out of the water again, scooped my bowl off the bank and returned to the house for dinner. I would go days at a time, weeks sometimes if my groceries held out, without seeing a single human. That was okay though, because no matter how much time I spent at my home or in the lake, I wasn't ever alone. All I had to do was dive under the water and swim around for just a few minutes, and they would visit me.

The otters.

Not otters like you might expect, not the small, frankly rather adorable fish-eating mammals I'd grown up reading about and playing make-believe like I was one in the bathtub so many years ago. These otters were more like people. Impossible as it sounds, insane as you might have thought I was had you heard me talk about it at the time, they were like people, just in the shape of otters. Fur covered, whiskered, bearing thick tails and the capacity to glide through the water like no human I had ever known. No human except myself, that is.

I spent hours every day playing with them. Swimming, cavorting, dancing beneath the water's surface. Whenever I surfaced though, whenever I emerged above the water and looked around to see them, they were never anywhere to be found.

Then, I met her.

I never knew her name, not back then anyway. But, despite not being human or a [i]person[/i] as I understood the definition, that otter... I fell for her. I fell in love with her, and it became harder than it had ever been to leave the water each day. Harder than ever to finally start to feel my lungs burning after hours and hours under the surface, all too aware of how impossible that may have been, but not letting myself acknowledge it. Not letting myself care. It couldn't be impossible. Not just because I was doing it, but because if it was impossible, I'd be able to spend even less time than was already the case with her.

We lay together beneath the surface day after day. Smiling. Nuzzling. Touching one another all over. Embracing, revelling in our intimacy. Until one day, I couldn't let her go.

I just... I couldn't say goodbye.

She tried to make me as I felt my breath growing short, as I struggled and fought not to seek to draw new oxygen into my submerged lungs. She tried to push me away, to swim me back to the surface. But I wrapped myself around her, I centred my gravity and I made sure we sank to the bottom together like a pair of entwined rocks.

My lungs burned.

My whole body burned.

I wept, my tears not falling but simply joining with the waters of the lake. I wasn't sad because I thought I was going to die there, but because if I did, I would never get to see her again.

Finally, it happened.

I choked. I had no air left to breathe, no time left to restrain myself from doing what my body commanded. I tried to draw in a lungful of air, and instead gulped down only sweet, cool H2O.

But, I didn't die. I wouldn't be telling this story if I had, would I?

Instead, I changed.

Instead of the cold darkening of consciousness slipping away, I felt new life, new strength surging through me. I felt warmth as lush brown fur spread across my dark skin. I felt the water's currents whipping around my whiskers, and I felt my tail curling around hers as she stared deep into my eyes, rapt with wonder and joy. I felt my chest swelling, not just with new air as she nuzzled gently against me, then pressed her lips to mine. I felt my body trembling, not with cold, not with fear, not with shock as I clung to her, but shaking as it changed. As it twisted and shifted to take on a new form, a new identity.

I would be lying if I said I expected this change, or if deep down a part of me had always known that this was going to happen. I didn't. But, once it happened... once the change was made, I wondered how I hadn't considered it before. How I hadn't longed for it. How I hadn't been aware that my every action, my every wish in life had been guiding me towards that eventuality.

To this.

To now.

I spend my days swimming, darting back and forth through the waters of the lake. But when night falls and the water gets too cold for even my furred form to stand, any sorrow I feel at having to stop swimming is mitigated by the fact that when I finally do leave the water, I don't leave it alone. When I break the surface now, a dozen other otters do so with me. When I splash my way back to the bank, I find hands grasping at mine, leading me up to the bank where a roaring fire awaits us. We eat fresh fish. We talk, laugh, sing, and embrace. We spend our nights together. All of us, but me and her in particular. We kiss. We touch. We... we do all the things we desire to do together, while all the other ladies do the same to the ones whom they brought into the fold. We enjoy one another until sleep claims us, our naked bodies dry, soft and fluffy as we slumber under the open sky, looking across the lake at the long abandoned cabin upon its opposite bank.

And then, in the morning, we return to the water once more.

We return to the water, and we do what I've loved to do all my life.

We swim.

We float.

We play.

We [i]live[/i] in the water.

By Jeeves

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