Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‘Are you there yet?’

The sharp chime of the text alert makes you jump, ripping you from the moment of dumb disbelief you’d gotten caught in. You fumble with your phone for a moment, squinting at the screen in the glare of the afternoon sun, before typing back a quick reply.

‘Just got here. It’s bad.’

The understatement of the century.

The reply is almost instantaneous, the polar opposite of your friend’s usual texting habits which have you waiting hours for the most basic, single-syllable responses. Not that you can blame him at the moment for being a little worried.

‘ You don’t have to do this you know.’

A deep, world-weary sigh pulls itself free of you. It’s a nice thought, at least. A lie that you both wish was true.

‘ Someone has to, and I owe it to Bonnie. I’ll let you know when I’m leaving.’

You hit send and stuff the phone in your back pocket. He won't argue the point, and you don’t want to hear it even if he tries. As much as neither of you wants you to be here right now, you’re running out of leads. You need something tangible soon- some irrefutable evidence of misdeeds- or FazCo is going to keep getting away with it. With all of it. The lying, and the neglect, and the straight up abuse.

With murder.

You give yourself a shake to dismiss the unwelcome image of an empty transport harness and a draining tank and recenter. There’s a lot to cover here, and you don’t want to linger any longer than you absolutely have to. You definitely do not want to get caught trespassing on FazCo property, no matter how defunct the abandoned facility appears to be.

Every redacted file and vague description you had managed to find about the Fazbear Mega Water World temporary holding facility- not that there had been much to find- had painted a bleak picture. It was all buried under the sterility of corporate jargon, of course, but you knew what numbers were appropriate for the housing and care of large marine creatures, and every single one you’d found had fallen horrifically short of the bare minimum.

Knowing what you knew at this point, you’d think that seeing exactly what those holding facilities were like in person wouldn’t surprise you, but it’s honestly worse than you could have imagined. Set into a remote stretch of rocky coast, the “facilities” are little more than rows of small concrete pools, walled off with fences and topped with barbed wire. The concrete bowls are dirty, cracked, and mostly empty. They’re also terribly small. None of these pools were suitable for holding a large animal for more than a couple of days at most, in desperate circumstances, but these had obviously been used far beyond that, if the wear on the tanks is any indication.

You creep around, examining the rough surfaces of the pools and the filtration systems, which are broken now but even when they’d been in working order were clearly insufficient for these tanks. These models were built for commercial swimming pools, not marine mammal holding. A cheaper option, but dramatically insufficient. You take notes on the specs of everything you see in a little pocket notebook you brought with you, intent on comparing them to the current Water World utilities when you get back.

There isn’t any sort of covering for shade, and you scowl as the summer sun beats down on your back. At least you have clothes and sunscreen to protect you, but any animals kept in these pools would have developed blistering sunburns in short order. The pools are too shallow for even the water to have offered any protection.

It’s dizzying in its contrast from the Mega Water World itself: a glittering jewel in the world of aquariums, somewhere between exotic animal showcase and research facility and an extravagant theme park. You remember being as star struck as anyone else when the park first opened, and you’d practically thrown yourself at the opportunity when FazCo had offered you a job. You feel foolish (and sick to your stomach) thinking about it now, but there’s no denying that everything there is top of the line, at least where it concerns the animal facilities. And where the mers- FazCo’s prized show creatures, each unique specimens brought in from the wild- are involved, no expense is spared in their housing, upkeep, and display. So why is everything here so shoddy?

You take pictures of everything, moving slowly through the massive but stark facility, inspecting every last pool and shed (most of which look like they’d been used as small labs or offices). You have to choke back a sob when, as you move further back in the rows of pools, closer to the coast, you come upon the first corpse. The remains of what you guess had been a bottlenose dolphin lays sun-shriveled at the bottom of a concrete pool. You pull up a corner of broken fencing with a franticness, as though maybe you could revive the poor long-dead thing, and slide down the shallow walls of the pool, dirty puddles of water soaking your shoes as you get closer to inspect the body. The sun damage and what you suspect are carrion bird feeding marks make it impossible to tell what might have actually killed the dolphin.

Taking a picture with shaking hands you swallow back the bile that threatens to choke you. They’d just left it here to rot in the sun.

It’s not the last body you come upon. You find two small porpoises in a similar position in a pool further in, confirming what you’d suspected about these pools holding more than one animal each. The pools are too small for one animal, and knowing that they’d been stuffing who knows how many into each, with so little regard as to have simply left some of them to die without bothering to even remove the bodies, makes you sick to your stomach. Why leave them behind? Cetaceans were not exactly cheap to procure. Did they get too sick to bother with moving? With these sorts of holding conditions, that wouldn’t surprise you.

You’re having a hard time breathing at this point, your hands shaking in both rage and grief. You love marine animals. You’ve dedicated your life to their care. Seeing how casually they’d been neglected and abandoned is making you dizzy. You furiously scrub the heel of your palm over your eyes, wiping away the tears that are blurring your vision. You are part of this. You work for the people who did this. You owe it to every creature in your care to keep going, to do absolutely everything in your power to make sure something like this never happens again. You owe it to Bonnie to see all of this, to know better, and to find a way to put things right.

There’s just one section of the facility left: the sea pens. Built right up into the rocky coast are a set of what look like seven large aluminum sheds. They’re all rusted, the roofs of two of them having crumbled pretty much completely away, and one of them almost entirely collapsed. Based on the intel you’d managed to scrape together, these were most likely where the large wild-caught specimens- like the mers- were kept.

You approach the one furthest to the right end first, eyeing it skeptically. You pull a pair of heavy-duty gardening gloves out of your pack and tug them over your hands. There’s a padlocked door on the front, but you don’t even need your bolt cutters to get through it. With a twist of the old lock the rusted chains snap, falling to the ground with a heavy thud.

You hear a sharp splash to your left and jump, heart hammering in your chest. You freeze, listening, but it doesn’t happen again. You take a deep breath to steady yourself. It must have just been the waves hitting a rock at a particular angle, that’s all. You’re just being a little paranoid (which is fair considering you’re trespassing).

You tug on the door and it slowly pulls open with a loud, grating screech of metal on concrete. You wince, pushing yourself through the gap as soon as it’s wide enough to let you and your pack fit through. It’s actually bigger in here than it looked like it would be from the outside, maybe 800 square feet if you had to guess, and it’s dark. The roof on this shed is still mostly intact, with sunlight only sliding through a few worn holes and the bars of the pen. It’s enough to see by, but you pull your flashlight out anyways to get a better look.

It’s filthy in here. The sea pen is a larger, deeper pool than the ones outside, with one wall of it half concrete below the tidal line, and an upper half comprised of vertical bars that go up to the ceiling, letting the seawater rush in in steady waves.

Subsidized with actual water management and input it could have been an okay filtration system for wild-caught specimens, but as it is it’s just a mess, functioning like the world’s most unhealthy tidepool. Corpses of crabs, sea stars, and fish litter the dirty pool. Seaweed and kelp choke the surface and the concrete edges, rotting with a putrid, sour smell. You almost gag at the smell, acrid and thick as it is.

On the far side of the room sits a desk littered with papers, and beside that a wide rolling cart with what looks like rusted medical tools. You snap a picture of the cart and shiver at the scalpel laying rusted and abandoned. You don’t want to imagine how carelessly it may have been used on whatever had been held here.

You pick through the papers next. They’re all badly damaged, worn with dust and water and mold. The moist sea air and time certainly haven’t been kind to them.

Subject: DJMM- Mu…

Species: Octopus Mer

Status:….ed

‘The sheer size of…unrealistic for…unsustainable. Specimen is…a variety…seems to favor 80’s...

Project Ter…ed’

Beneath that is a hazy photo of what looks like an absolutely massive octopus, tentacles in white and purple and spotted with black. Its top half looks like it tapered into the humanoid form of a mer, but that part of the photo is too damaged to tell. What you are certain of is that this is not a mer the public has ever seen. So what had happened to it? Had they released it, deciding it wasn’t a good investment? Or when they realized they wouldn’t be able to make use of it had they euthanized it, so that no competitors could get to it?

You shiver and take a picture of each paper before carefully putting them in a hard case in your pack, hoping against hope that it was the former. A sense of dread washes over you. You don’t think it was.

You leave the shed and move on to the next, but as you start to push the door of the first shed closed you hear that loud splash to the left again, followed by the distinct sound of something solid hitting metal. That was not an errant wave.

Probably uselessly, you lower your stance as you try to move as quietly as you can toward the sound. Which shed had it come from? You strain, listening for any more sounds. You press your ear to the door of the next shed, one of the ones that the roof has collapsed on.

You hold your breath, listening. Nothing. You go to move on to the next when a slight creak of metal sounds from the shed you’re turning away from.

There was no way something is alive in there, is there? No way any animal could have survived here, alone in these conditions, after all this time. This facility has been abandoned for years already, and had hardly been sufficient when it was in use. There’s just no way…

You reach for the padlock on the door. This one isn’t quite as rusted as the last so you pull the bolt cutters from your pack and clench them around the old chains. The loud snapping sound of the chain links breaking apart is followed by another solid banging sound and splashing from within the shed. You get yourself through the door, doing your best to move slowly and quietly, but you’re filled with franticness. Your pulse hammers in your ears. There is something alive in there. Beyond all reason, there’s a survivor.

You half-stumble past the door into the shed, the space bright with sunlight pouring in from the ruined ceiling. The room is sweltering, humid and smelling of sea-rot. Yet, somehow, the space is markedly cleaner than you would have expected. The pool is fuller than the last, still steadily mixing with the tidewater but noticeably clear of the dead debris that had accumulated in the other. The panels of the roof that had collapsed in are in the pool, all piled with what looks like intent in one corner, interwoven with seaweed and kelp braids. And on the other end of the pool…

It’s like the whole world stops for a moment. Your blood freezes in your veins and you lock your knees to keep from collapsing in sheer shock at what you see. There, coiled back against the sea wall and clinging to the tide bars, is a mer.

The poor creature is visibly terrified, long serpentine tail writhing beneath it and milky white eyes blown wide. It bares its teeth in an anxious grimace, a reedy, thin keen coming from it as it tries to press itself into the wall away from you. Your heart breaks in your chest. The poor thing is beautiful: a full-grown golden mer looking like something between a human, a snake, and a sea dragon. Its long flexible tail is softly ridged and ends in a wide, fan-like fin of segmented fronds in sunset colors. Its head is crested with similar fins, looking like tropical foliage making up a floral sun. The mer’s sunlight body is a mix of hues, between bright gold and a pale yellow, with crimson fins at its hips and throat. More striking than all of that though is that this mer is visibly, horribly starved. Each of its ribs show with sharp definition, even from across the room, and its milky eyes look sunken- an effect only made worse by how wide they are with fear.

You lower yourself at the edge of the pool, moving slowly and raising your hands in front of you in what you hope comes across as a placating gesture. You can see the tremble in your own fingers. How is this real?

“Hey, it’s alright. I won't hurt you. I swear I won't hurt you. I’m a friend, ok? I want to help. Please, can I help you?”

Your voice cracks on the ‘please’, overcome with grief for this poor creature and the way its eyes look at you with a terrible sort of hope before it whimpers and buries its face into its arm where it clings to the wall, wailing as it tries to get away. An unrelenting wall of iron bars is all that separates it from the open sea.

“Please…please, I can help.”

You go to inch closer, slowly, carefully, with hands out and pleading, when a shift in the water draws your attention.

Too late.

It happens faster than you can process. One moment you’re trying to soothe the terrified mer on the other side of the pool, and the next you are slammed onto your back and pinned by a sharp, crushing weight. Your head hits the floor with a sharp crack, and white blossoms behind your eyelids with the pain. You smell salt and fish and death before you manage to blink your eyes back into focus right in time to look into a maw of razor-sharp shark teeth snarling in your face. You choke on a scream, straining your arms against the claws that have them pinned, trying to shield yourself. Your writhing is meaningless to the predator pinning you beneath it.

The mer on top of you is blue-black and white and red, red,red eyes full of bloodlust and rage. It hisses at you with such vitriol that it shakes your bones. The white fins that line the mer’s moon-like face flex and quiver in its aggression. Its eyes are wide, wild…and sunken, bruised with starvation. The silver-white side of its face- the markings curved in the shape of a rough crescent - is badly sunburned, angry red skin and blisters marring the entirety of its right side.

You aren’t given any more time to examine your attacker though, as its jaws stretch wide and bear down on you, going for your throat. It occurs to you only now that this mer is obviously starved, and you are very much edible. Terror seizes your whole body, making your shout of alarm come out a high and strangled sound.

At the same time, a distressed whistle comes from behind the moon-like mer and it jerks back, putting a blessed couple of feet between your throat and its dual rows of sharp shark teeth. The pressure pinning you down eases up just enough and you desperately scramble back on your hands and heels, clutching at your chest, wondering if you can keep it from bursting through your chest with just your palm. You aren’t free though. The moon-like mer clamps a hand around your ankle, a deep growl rumbling its chest, and it squeezes. You yelp in pain, trying to kick its hold off but the mer’s grip is as unyielding as steel.

The sun-like mer has a hold of the other’s tail, and is pulling it away from you. It makes a series of agitated chitters and whistles, wide eyes darting between you and the shark mer. The other refuses to take its (red, piercing, starving) eyes off you, only partially turning its head to snarl back at its counterpart, who answers with another long whining whistle.

Another yank from the sunlight mer drags its counterpart further back into the pool, and you go right along with it with a breathless scream. You catch the look of astonished regret in the bright mer’s eyes just a second before you slip into the water, and then all you can look at is the way the darker mer’s grin splits far wider than you think it should as it seems to change its plans and secures its grip around both your legs and dives.

You only manage to suck in half a gasping breath before getting plunged underwater in a shallow, twisting dive. Your shoulder clips painfully against the bottom of the tank as the dark predator turns on a dime and yanks you along with it, snapping its tail out of the other mer’s grip.

You’d been afraid of plenty of things going wrong while you’d planned to poke around this place. Tripping, tetanus, getting arrested… you had not considered drowning and being eaten among the possible outcomes. Silly you.

The water is too murky to see anything, clouded with the sand stirred up by the two mers’ agitated thrashing. You get tugged roughly back and forth, surrounded by the sounds of angry chirps and growls, but it doesn't last long. An arm comes around your middle and pulls you back with it as it surges backward through the water, knocking the last of the break from you in a gurgling gasp. the claws gripping your legs are ripped away with a hot, burning sensation of claws catching on your skin, but you kick away at them anyways, frantic for escape.

Your head breaks the water and you suck in a harsh, desperate gasp, coughing and sputtering. A hissing growl vibrates the bony chest you find yourself pressed into, and you frantically blink up through salt water and wet hair at the golden mer who yowls, wide-eyed, through bared razor sharp teeth at the other mer, who he keeps back with wild thrashing of his long serpentine tail. Unfortunately for you, he’s dragged you back to his little corner at the far end of the pool, against the tide bars. But at least this one doesn’t seem inclined to eat you (you hope).

Terror beats a tattoo in your chest when you look back at the darker mer. It stays out of range of its counterpart’s tail, face half submerged in the water as it does slow laps back and forth, keeping you trapped in the corner as it glares at you with those burning, hungry red eyes. The water by its face bubbles with low, clicking sounds, which the mer holding you responds to with deliberate hissing.

They’re communicating, that much is clear. You only hope the argument doesn’t end with them agreeing to eat you.

You shuck in deep breaths, holding them each for a few seconds trying to calm your racing heart. It seems like an exercise in futility, what with the clear agitation in the mer that still has you trapped with him in the water.

“ Please,” you swallow roughly, trying to get the shake in your voice under control. “Please, listen. I’m not here to hurt you. I can help. Please let me out of the water,” you plead.

The shark-like mer raises its mouth out of the water and bares its teeth at you with a deep, resonating growl, but the golden mer tilts its head toward you, milky eyes still trained on the other but the hissing quieting. It’s listening. You take it as enough encouragement to keep pressing.

“Look, I can see that you’re hurt, and you’re hungry. I can help! If you let me out I can get you food. I can help with your burns. I’m friends with some mers, I know where to get whatever you need. I swear, I just want to help.”

The dark mer’s tail slaps the water harshly and you flinch, but the one holding you lets out a whining, warbling sound at its counterpart. The broad forearm that keeps you locked against it- unyielding as steel despite how obviously malnourished the mers are- fidgets.

You shift in its hold, pressing your palm for just a moment against its chest and, accidentally, against a bad spot of sunburned scales. The mer flinches back with a little yelp, white eyes squinting in pain. You pull your hand away with a gasp, stuttering breathless apologies that are all but drowned out by the spitting hiss that rips from the shark-like mer as it lunges for you, barely kept back by a swipe of the golden mer’s tail.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” you wheeze, tears pricking the corner of your eyes as you regard the creature holding you. You hadn’t considered that just holding you away from its tank-mate like this would have to be painfully agitating its burns, pressed as tightly to it as you are. This close, you can see the way its skin is splattered with blisters, the paler side of its body blushed with angry red patches against its shoulder and face.

“You poor thing, what have they done to you?” You don’t mean to say it out loud, and it comes out as hardly a whisper, but the frond surrounding the mer’s face seem to tilt forward in response. It regards you with a nervous look, a little warbling noise in its throat.

Slowly, slowly, the mer starts to pull itself towards the other end of the tank, and you along with it. You only half notice that it pointedly avoids letting any part of its body move under the small patches of shade that fall over the pool. It keeps up that thin, warbling sound in rising and falling tones as the other mer trails parallel to the two of you a couple of yards away, visibly furious but seemingly unwilling to attack for some reason. You don’t question it at the moment and are simply grateful for the small mercy.

When the edge of the pool is within reach you feel a dizzying sort of hope rush to your head. You aren’t stupid. You’ve worked with mers for years, and you’re well aware that making it out of this encounter alive was not the most likely outcome. You try not to faint at the relief that threatens to overwhelm you, right as it seems you’re home clear. The moment your fingertips brush the concrete wall of the pool the mer holding you turns, it’s front covering you against the wall of the pool and it’s back to the other one. So it knows that the other mer won't attack it. Why?

Questions for another time. For now, you scramble at the pool, pulling yourself onto dry ground with a helpful shove from the golden mer, while the furious splashing and hissing of its counterpart grows louder behind you.

You practically throw yourself across the ground the moment you can get a foot under you, causing a jolt of pain to travel up from your injured calf that you ignore. You scurry back until you’re a good length from the water, what feels like enough distance that if the moon-like mer were to beach itself in an attempt to get to you it wouldn’t be able to reach.

Chest heaving, heart hammering so hard in your ribcage you think it may bruise, you regard the two mers who watch you from the water. The dark one is glaring, moving with a lethal sort of fluidness through the shadowed parts of the tank. It’s red eyes seem to sear into you. The golden mer looks between you and its counterpart with an expression of profound exhaustion, something terribly sad and resigned in its gaze. That expression breaks your heart a little bit, beneath all the residual terror of the encounter.

Your throat is hoarse and scratchy, but you make an effort to speak up loud and clearly so they can both hear you. “I’ll be back soon, ok? I’ll bring food and some other things to help. I promise.”

The sunny mer’s mouth twitches into what you think is meant to be a little smile, but its expression tells you plain as day that it doesn’t believe you’ll be back.

….

Your phone is dead, on account of taking that unscheduled swim (and getting slammed into the bottom of the mers’ tank, if the shattered screen is any indication), so you aren’t exactly surprised by the frantic greeting you get upon your return. You’re still slightly damp when you storm into the faculty housing apartment you share with your waiting roommate and almost immediately get backed into a corner by said roommate. His dark hair is a mess and his eyes are blown wide, scanning you from head to toe as he grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you.

“Three hours of radio silence?! What. Were. You. Thinking?” His voice wavers with what you expect is the effort of not just screaming.

You don’t even acknowledge his question, instead grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and yanking him close, looking him dead in the eye.

“Mike, we need to fucking talk.”

…………

The list in your hand is written in chicken scratch- a testament to how much your fingers had been shaking and how quickly you’d jotted down everything you could think of needing to bring back to the two mers. It’ll have to do. Accuracy isn’t quite as crucial for your part, mostly just a collection of different weights of various fish to grab and whatever supplements you can get out of the feed supply area. Mike is handling the more delicate list.

You aren’t authorized in the medical supply rooms anymore, after all.

Your arms burn with the weight of the cooler bags you have slung over your shoulders and forearms, all three far more full than they would be for a typical feeding. The straps bite into the flesh of your arm painfully, but at least it distracts from the burn around your ankle.

The scratch from the dark mer is rough and jagged, and had already begun to burn with the first signs of infection by the time you’d recounted your experience to Mike and he’d insisted on cleaning and dressing it before you came up with a game plan. Luckily, it hadn’t needed anything more serious than some liquid stitches could handle. It’s definitely going to scar though, that’s for sure. All things considered, it was a miraculously small price to pay for having made it out of that tank alive.

Not that that’s going to stop you from getting back there as fast as you possibly can.

Mike had tried to convince you to wait a couple of days, to recover and come up with a clearer plan and, of course, to avoid suspicion. You weren’t hearing any of it. Your stomach wouldn’t stop curdling with horror at what you’d seen, what you knew. The feel of blistered flesh under your palm, the press of too-prominent ribs at your back, the smell of death in the water. You can’t get the image of those two dead porpoises out of your head, and wonder how much longer it would have taken for that to be the mers’ same fate if you hadn’t found them.

You shake your head, trying to banish the sickening thoughts. You aren’t going to let that happen. You won't let another mer die under your care. You sink all of your resolve into that thought, and stuff more frozen squid into one of the cooler bags.

You do have to be careful about this. Most of what you bring the two mers will need to be bought out of pocket from local fishermen or grocery stores, to avoid suspicion, but some of the more specialty feed- like the squid- isn’t quite as easy to get large quantities of at short notice. If you take too much, though, FazCo will notice. You carefully toe the line between taking enough to feed the starving mers for a few days, but not so much that it’ll ping an alert on the inventory count.

As much as you hate it, it helps that the mers will need to be slowly introduced back to a healthy diet, so the first few weeks will require less fish on hand. It’ll give you time to plan out your suppliers better.

You cringe at the thought of their emaciated bodies. They have to have been eating something- full-grown mers couldn’t possibly survive with a zero-calorie intake for more than a couple of weeks, tops- but you honestly can’t image what they’ve been surviving on for so long. Presumably, they’d been there since the facility went out of use, and if your sources were correct then the very latest that could be was still over a year ago.

A sharp rapping on the door frame of the cold storage sends your heart into your throat, but when you whip around, bag of frozen squid clutched protectively to your chest, it’s just Mike in the doorway. There’s an anxious tightness at the corners of his eyes, but he makes the effort to give you a thin-lipped smile anyway, raising the hand he’d used to knock up in a placating gesture. You’re more focused on his other hand, holding a backpack stuffed full.

“Are you done here? We need to clear out.”

You heft the bags of frozen fish on your arms, passing one off to Mike, and nod.

“This’ll do for a start. Were you able to get everything we need from the med clinic?”

He ushers you out of cold storage and locks up behind you, leading you down the staff hallways with his eyes darting around attentively, lips pressed into a bloodless line, before answering you.

“Yeah. I think I packed plenty of emergency care stuff, but if it’s as bad you you say then you may need to stock up again down the line. No problem getting water purification tabs or antibiotics either. These’re at the end of their shelf life so they won't be missed.” He shoots you a glance with a long pause, then adds with a grunt, “ The supplements and vitamins were Bonnie’s supply. Looks like no one had bothered to actually redistribute them yet. Should last a couple of months split between two mers. I just grabbed the lot, you’ll need to sort it later.”

You bite your cheek between your molars. At least Bonnie’s resources will get to do some good somewhere else. You nod stiffly.

The two of you walk quickly through the back halls, ducking into a storage closet at one point when you hear another handler headed your way. You wait a long moment for them to pass before rushing onward. You’d had to wait until dusk to start this little resource collection- time that mostly got spent explaining the situation to Mike, tending to your injuries, and coming up with a rough game plan of what to do- so the facility is sparsely populated with the night crew just starting to come in for their shifts. You don’t want anyone to see you and start asking prying questions that you haven’t had time to think of a good answer for.

Mike lets out a long, groaning exhale when you finally get back to your shared faculty apartment like he’d been holding his breath the whole time. He drags a hand heavily down his face, eyes turning to the heavens for spare patience you’ve never known him to be able to find. The bags he’s holding slide down to the ground with a muted thud.

You set your own cooler bags on the coffee table in the tiny living room, turning away from them to start pacing. The adrenaline from earlier has long since worn off, leaving you exhausted, and you need the movement to keep you focused. You can’t stop yet.

Mike watches you from the door, eyes narrowing and a frown tugging at his mouth.

“Look,” he starts tensely, “ the holding facility is more than a two-hour drive, and you’re running on fumes. You can do this tomorrow. Get some rest. I’ll get what I can in the freezer for now and load whatever doesn’t fit with as much ice as I can. It’ll keep.”

You’re shaking your head before he even finishes talking, and you see a muscle jump in his jaw at your immediate refusal.

“No. No, I need to go tonight. I don’t want to just assume that they’ll be fine for however long I decide to drag my feet about this.”

You don’t mean for your voice to come out as harsh as it does. You run a frustrated hand back through your hair and sigh with a shake of your head.

Mike storms over and plants himself in your path, grabbing your upper arms and forcing you to look him in the face. You’re sure his stern scowl would effectively cow most people. He’s a tall guy with a dark disposition and unnerving silver eyes that provide one hell of a glare. He’s also your best friend though, and you know all this is just hot air blown up from his protectiveness. As much as you appreciate his concern, you won't let it dissuade you right now.

“Listen, it’s a long drive there and a long drive back, not to mention how long you’ll actually be there. Probably most of the night, knowing you. I have a morning shift, so I can’t take you. And we both can’t be off property right now at the same time if we don’t want to draw suspicion. No way are you driving like that. Sit your ass down and get some rest. A couple of hours at least. They won’t die if you take a second to breathe.”

You flinch at his wording and you see a flash of remorse pass over his expression, but only for a moment. You know what he means, and he’s probably right, but guilt curdles in your stomach. You can’t be sure of that. You can’t just assume that they’ll be fine if you wait. A few hours can make a difference, you know that painfully well now. The thought of waiting turns sour in your mouth and you squeeze your eyes shut against the tight feeling in your chest.

He is right though. You won't be helpful to the mers if you go and crash your car because you decided to drive while delirious from exhaustion. You hate it, but you relent.

“Fine. I’ll sleep for a couple of hours, but that’s it. I’ll sleep in the car on the drive back if I really have to stop, but I’m not waiting any longer than that.”

He nods stiffly. He knows that’s the best he’ll get out of you right now.

Mike nudges you back, jerking his head towards the bedrooms down the hall.

“Get some sleep. I’ll take care of these and get the car packed up with what you’ll need. You’ll just have to move the fish to the car before you go. ” You turn to go but he snatches your wrist up one more time, giving you a serious look. “Take one of the burner cells. Let me know when you get there. And if I don’t hear from you once an hour after that I will come after you, got it? Do not make me do that.”

Ah, there it is. The big softie.

You give him a thumbs up and a weak, crooked smile. It’s not the grin you intend, but you’re worn too thin to manage that at the moment.

“Ten-four boss…And, thank you.”

Mike’s face scrunches up at the gratitude and he shoos you away.

You don’t actually expect to be able to sleep, anxiety writhing in your gut both in worry for the mers you left at the facility as well as at the thought of FazCo getting wise to what you’ve been up to, but the toll of the day drags you under in minutes.

When Mike shakes you awake two hours later, you thrash away from his grip with a panicked sputter, the taste of seawater and the image of shark teeth chasing you out of your dreams. He pulls his hands away from you like he’s been burned, palms open and out in front of him. You suck in deep, hissing breaths and press the heel of your palms into your eyes with a groan.

“Sorry, sorry.”

Mike regards you with the kind of concerned caution usually reserved for injured animals, and you try not to take offense at the twisted grimace on his face.

“Are you alright?”

Your fingers drag the skin of your eyes down as you let them side off your face, and you’re sure it doesn’t help the ghoulish appearance of the shadows under your eyes when you look up and give him a brilliantly unenthusiastic thumbs up.

“All good. Just dandy, even. Is the car packed?”

The frown your friend shoots you is withering, and you ignore it with a practiced grace as you move past him to the dry suit you preemptively draped over your desk chair. You’ve gotten good at that over the last few months. You appreciate his concern- you do!- but needs must.

“Yeah, it’s packed. I even did you the favor of getting the fish in the cooler, so you just need to get that out to the car and you can go. You’re welcome.”

You pause in your fidgeting with the suit and give him a grateful, tired smile.

“Thanks Mike. Really, thank you. I’ll be careful, and I’ll keep in touch. Scout’s honor. Now, you should really get some sleep.”

He hovers there in the doorway for a drawn out moment, thinned lips and a look that says that maybe there’s more he wants to say, but he leaves it with a grunt and a muttered ‘ drive safe’ as he shuffles down the short hallway to his room.

You waste no time, roughly yanking your hair into a ponytail and pulling on a hat to help hide your face before slipping into the dark drysuit. You have no intentions of getting into the water any time soon, or even especially close tonight, but you also hadn’t meant for your first impromptu swim with the mers either, and at least with this if you go get splashed you won't start freezing.

The drive down the old coastal highway is a white-knuckled affair that you spend doing everything you can to get your mind in caretaker mode, and out of the bubbling terror it wants to slip into on instinct. Hungry, injured animals can’t be blamed for attacking, no matter how intelligent they are. You know this. You know this. But survival instinct won't let the image of teeth and the burn of claws in your skin leave your thoughts, even as you mentally prepare a feeding schedule and how best to administer medical care.

This is all assuming they even let you get close, of course.

No. No, you can do this. You’ve done this. They need you and you can do this and that’s all there is to it… so there.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been two hours when you pull up to the gravel off-road of the abandoned facility. It doesn’t feel like you were here less than 24 hours ago. You suck in a deep breath and hold it, willing your heart to stop trying to beat its way out of your ribcage, and then you move.

You owe Mike more than a simple ‘thank you’ for getting the car loaded up. There’s more than you’ll be able to carry in one trip, that’s for sure. He’d even loaded up his mini-fridge and a little solar-powered generator for it. You definitely owe him big time for that. There was a rolling cart in one of the other holding sheds, wasn’t there? The one with the medical tools on it, you remember with a shudder. It’ll do though.

You got lucky tonight, with a bright full moon hanging high in a cloudless sky. You don’t even need your flashlight to navigate the outdoor section of the facility, which you rush through while keeping your head down. There shouldn’t be any more night security than there was day (that being pretty much none at this point), but you don’t want to take the chance of your face getting caught on a camera.

The jog to the sea pen and back takes less than ten minutes, and at least two of those were spent steadying your breath when you cleared the medical instruments off of it, and another minute standing stock still to listen for any sounds from the occupied pool two sheds down. When you don’t hear anything you practically run back to your car with the cart, rusty wheels squeaking and making it hard to steer in a straight line.

Once the cart is loaded up with everything Mike had stuffed into the trunk for you the walk back to the sea pens is a slower, more careful chore. Try as you might, anxiety is creeping back in, and you try to quell the shaking in your hands by gripping the handle of the cart hard enough that the skin over your knuckles turns thin and white. Still, there’s nothing you can do to for the feeling of your heart pounding in your throat.

You can do this. They need you. You can do this.

Those phrases loop in your mind like a prayer as you approach the door to the sea pen, toeing aside the broken lock that was still left in the dirt from earlier. You position the cart so that you can push the door open with your back, dragging it in after you. You don’t want to look. You can’t help but look.

Eyes wide and unblinking over your shoulder, you scan the room as you push in. Even with the moonlight filtering in from the collapsed ceiling, it’s too dark to see much.

That is to say, you don’t immediately catch sight of either of the mers.

What you do notice is that it must be high tide. You kick yourself for not realizing that the full moon would also mean a spring tide, and the improperly filtered water of the pool has risen to the point that it spills over the edge of the pool with each gentle wave that comes in through the bars of the far wall.

The edge of the pool has just become that much more dangerous. The water looks almost black in the low light, and with the tide so high you wouldn’t even be able to see the shark-like mer come up to the edge until it was too late, and he had his jaws clamped down over your throat.

You shudder and push that thought down with a violent stubbornness. You just have to be careful. You will be careful.

You pull out your burner and text Mike. That’s you covered for the next hour. Time to get to work.

Making sure not to turn your back to the pool at any point, you slowly start to set up the generator and minifridge. You won’t be able to move the fish and meds out of the cooler bags and into the fridge until the sun has come up and juiced up the generator a bit, but you want it out of the way before the mers show up.

There’s no way they don’t know you’re here. Unless, of course, their malnourishment has them sleeping too deeply to notice the noise you’re making in order to help them conserve energy. But, based on the hair-raising feeling on the back of your neck of being watched, you’re betting that’s not the case.

Well, you’re not getting any more ready than you are now. With slow, deliberate and clear movements you take one of the fish coolers and slide it between you and the pool, still a few yards away. You crouch on the balls of your feet, ready to bolt if you have to. You unzip the smallest of the coolers and reach in bare-handed to grab a couple of cold, barely-thawed squid.

“Hi. Can you hear me? I’m the person who was here earlier. I brought some food,” you call out to the surface of the water, tossing the squid in.

You watch them sink, and then you wait. For a couple of long, tense minutes, nothing happens.

Then the surface of the water explodes, a large and luminous shape launching itself out of the water at you.

You push off of your feet and throw yourself backward, scrambling with the cooler still in your grip until your back hits the aluminum paneling of the back wall. You watch with mute terror as the shape pulls itself onto its forearms and levels a burning glare at you.

Gold spots of bioluminescence like stars glow across the head and tail of the shark-like mer, brightest at the round end of the fleshy nightcap-like appendage at the back of its head. Red eyes burn like coals, pinning you in place. With a hiss, the mer starts to drag itself across the concrete ground towards you. Despite the agony it must cause to the burns on the creature’s body, it moves with an alarming speed.

“Wait!” Your scream is a breathless, high and reedy sound. “Stop, stop! Just wait! You’re going to hurt yourself!”

You rip another squid out of the bag and toss it toward the mer, who recoils from the projectile before snatching it up into his teeth with a deep growl. It delays it only a few seconds, but long enough for you to scramble to your feet and dash across the room with the cooler.

The mer rears up and turns on you with a rattling hiss, giving you a clear view of its chest. Even in the dim moonlight, you can see the angry red of bloody scrapes smeared over irritated burns on the white side of its body.

Something inside you curdles, then hardens.

You suck in a breath, hold it, and place yourself between the mer and the cooler with your palm out. You hope the mer can’t see the terrified way you’re shaking, but you push that thought aside. This has to stop.

“Please,” you lower yourself into a crouch and keep your voice quiet and as steady as you can. The mer regards you with narrowing eyes, its head tilting to the side in sharp little increments like the ticking of a clock. “ You can have more- you can have all of it- but if you try to eat too much at once you’re going to get sick and just throw it all up anyway. You’re hurting yourself. Please, just let me help. I won't even get close if you don’t want me to, but please don’t hurt yourself anymore.”

Crimson eyes watch you plead, unblinking, as the mer’s head tilts further and further, a sharp-toothed grin spreading too wide over its features as you try to reason with it. The constant, droning hiss at the back of its throat shifts in tone, turning gravely and undulating.

Its laughing at you.

“Naauugghhttyyy,” the mer croons in razor-wire chords, sharp claws tap tap tapping and scraping on the concrete between the two of you.

The blood freezes in your veins and you suck in a sharp breath that tastes too much like the sea. You can’t be rattled. At least, you can’t let it see that you are. You knew it could understand you. You knew there was a chance it could speak. It’s an aspect of the mysterious creatures that you’re still trying to wrap your head around, but this isn’t the first mer you’ve heard speak in a human tongue.

That doesn’t exactly make the clever, aware glint in the mer’s eyes or the rough sing-song of the voice slipping past its rows of sharp teeth any less terrifying though. You have to force down bile with the acidic taste of fear, but you meet the mer’s eye with a level gaze.

“Look,” you make your voice firm, “ the people that put you here, you remember them?”

The mer’s hissing stops dead on a sharp snap of its teeth, malicious grin falling into a twisted scowl.

“Yeah, I thought so,” you acknowledge with a bitter tone. “Those people killed my friend. I hate them. And I’m betting you’re none too fond of them either, right?”

You watch the way the mer’s claws curl against the ground and resist the urge to flinch at the grinding sound it makes. Besides that tiny movement of its hands the mer has grown unnervingly still, not so much as blinking as it watches you with its head still cocked at an unnatural angle.

“I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I get it, really. But I’m not just going to sit here and let you and your…companion,” you catch a twitch in the mer’s eye at your choice of term, “suffer because of them. I just won’t. I’m not going to let you scare me away when you guys so clearly need help, so work with me. Please.”

For a too-long moment, the mer just stares. It takes every ounce of your will not to squirm under its crimson scrutiny, and your body aches from the strain of tensing to hold completely still. You wonder how much it actually matters. You bet the shark-like mer can smell your fear like blood in the water.

Then, with a slow drag of claws against concrete, the mer extends one sharp hand out toward you with a low rumble. You eye the reaching claws skeptically, and the mer narrows its eyes in apparent irritation. Its hand curls twice in an impatient ‘gimmie’ gesture, jerking its chin down to indicate the cooler, and your muscles relax just the barest amount.

You’ve reached some kind of understanding, it seems. Or, at least, the mer appears willing to put off eating you for the moment in light of your mutual hatred of FazoCo. You’ll count it as a victory in any case.

The cooler makes an awful grating sound as you drag it across the ground so it’s in front of you, and you have to work not to wince at the sound. You look between the cooler and the mer, lips pursed into a tight line.

“You understand what I said about making yourself sick, right? You can’t eat too quickly.”

The mer bares its teeth in a sour, humorless grin and repeats the grabby motion.

“Ssshhhaare,” it hisses, tilting its head to the side and slightly back, towards the pool.

Your eyes widen in slow realization. It wanted to take the food to the other mer! The zoologist in you is absolutely buzzing with interest. For an apex predator like the shark-like mer to be prioritizing the wellbeing of its companion, even while so horrendously starved itself, implied worlds about the social bonds of these creatures. Far beyond anything you’ve ever gotten to see from the mostly isolated mer’s you’ve worked with at the Mega Water World, that’s for sure. Did all mers form such strong social bonds? What’s the nature of the relationship between these two? Was it reserved for-

Your thoughts slam to an abrupt stop at the clicking sound of the mer’s claws drumming on the concrete and it’s repeated, lower, rougher hiss of “SSSSHHHHAaarrree”.

Right. Note to self: don’t keep the lunar mer waiting.

You pick up the cooler and start to walk it sideways closer to the pool, keeping the same distance between you and the mer. The two of you don’t break eye contact once. You don’t even blink. You get the impression that it finds this funny, what with the way its sharp mouth curls and its head tilts as its eyes trace your movement.

You place the cooler a couple of feet shy of the edge of the pool, so the high-tide water laps at it gently, and quickly backpedal away from the water. The mer hasn’t made any move towards you, but you don’t want to give it the chance. Instead, it waits until you’ve stopped a few yards away from the edge and…

It flops onto the ground with a fleshy whump, and slowly- keeping eye contact the whole. damn. time.- rolls itself back into the water. You feel a twitch start in your eye. This one, you resign yourself with clarity and exhaustion, is going to be something else to work with.

As soon as the mer’s long body sinks into the night-black water the spots of bioluminescence are back to gleaming like stars, allowing you to track its movement as it cuts through the water with the terrifying, effortless speed of a born aquatic hunter to snatch the cooler in one large, dark clawed hand.

Once it has the cooler in its grip the lights die. The cooler- built as it is to be buoyant- bobs along the surface as it’s dragged deeper into the pool, before abruptly going under, and staying under.

You try not to dwell on the image of something meant to stay above the surface being dragged under. With a shuddering breath, you back up until your back hits the far wall, near the other coolers and the mini fridge, and slide down. You draw your knees up and rest your head in the pillow fold of your arms, willing your heart to slow.

You pull out the borrowed phone and send a quick text to Mike that simply reads “still alive”.

You’ll stay and wait for dawn. You need to make sure the other mer is okay. You need to watch and see that the shark-like mer didn’t just completely ignore you and make itself sick. You just need to make sure they make it through another day.

You watch the surface of the water for hours, trying to plan in the dark and stillness exactly how you’re going to pull this off. There’s not so much as a ripple, but you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that beneath the black mirror of the water you are being watched right back.

Chapter Text

You’re jolted awake by the sound of thrashing water and the yowl of what you can only describe as an absolutely massive and thoroughly pissed off cat. Your head jerks back sharply from where your chin had fallen against your chest and smacks hard into the aluminum siding that makes up the walls of the storage shed, making flashes of bright white light pop behind your eyes. Twice in less than a day, it’s lucky you haven’t concussed yourself yet.

You can’t believe you fell asleep. Stupid. Stupid! You’re going to get yourself killed.

Once you’ve managed to blink the bright spots of pain from your vision you frantically scan the room for what woke you, and what you see has you scrambling back as if you could push yourself straight through the wall and further away from the danger, heart rate rocketing. The dim, pale light of dawn is just starting to creep into the shed, providing just enough light for you to get a good look at the chaotic scene before you. The yellow mer has its arms wrapped around its dark tank-mate’s waist and is pulling it back with violent, twisting thrashes of its serpentine tail from where the shark-like mer clings to the edge of the pool, claws scraping in an attempt to drag itself in your direction. The sunny mer yowls in short, loud bursts of upset but its counterpart only rolls its eyes with a look you can only interpret as profound irritation. It must hear you when you move though, because its crimson eyes snap up to lock with yours. You stare at it, mouth agape, and it flashes too many of its deadly teeth at you in a sharp grin before unceremoniously letting go of the pool’s edge and promptly getting hurtled deeper into the water by the wild struggling of the other mer.

The two mers go under, long tails thrashing and smacking the surface, before the shark-like mer darts away to the far corner of the pool, where the pile of debris creates what might been a tiny shelter if you squint and tilt your head at the right angle. It coils itself up among the bits of rusted metal and peers back at you, red eyes bright and narrowed under the water. The other one surfaces with a harsh hiss in its companion’s direction, smacking the water with an open palm.

You stumble to your feet on shaky legs, hand fisted in your drysuit over your thundering heart, and swear under your breath.

“That was rude,’ you call out in a strangled voice, pulling a face you’re pretty sure it can’t see from its place under the water, but it doesn’t deign to respond.

Its counterpart turns towards you though, hands clasped in front of its chest in a nervous sort of pose, and it warbles something apologetic sounding at you. You manage to get a smile on your face for it, if not a bit strained, and push some strands of hair that had managed to escape your ponytail back from your face with a shaky hand.

“Hi. Thanks again, pal. Hopefully we don’t make a habit of you having to save me from that friend of yours, huh?”

The mer blinks its wide, milky eyes at you and tilts its head to the side, frond-like fins swaying to-and-fro with the movement, looking almost like pale sun rays the way the early dawn light is illuminating them from behind. There’s a look on its face, like it isn’t quite sure if you’re real or not.

With a jolt, you scramble for your borrowed phone. How long were you out? You shoot Mike a quick message, and tack on an apology for being five minutes past the hour mark. Five minutes you’re certain he spent driving himself insane imagining your grisly death by fish.

To be fair, it’s not like it was that far off from reality. You try not to think of the shark-like mer’s claws dragging against the concrete, the smell of salt and iron as its teeth bore down on you.

The memory makes you too aware of the ache in your leg. You glance at the golden mer, still watching you from its place near the center of the pool. Now that you’re up, it’s as good a time as any to get to work.

You set the phone aside and pull out one of the big first aid kits that Mike had packed you with. You bring it a little closer to the edge of the pool, still a safe couple of yards away from the edge. The water doesn’t lap over with the waves anymore. In fact, the waterline has dropped significantly. A concerning amount, actually. The full moon’s light had been a welcome convenience last night, but you hadn’t stopped to consider that it’d bring a spring tide with it. You’re not looking forward to seeing how low the lowest tidal point of the month is in this pool. You can already tell that without additional water input the mer’s will be left with barely enough to stay fully submerged- if that- when the tide reaches its lowest. Gods, no wonder they have such severe sunburns. Low tide is leaving them out to cook.

You chew the inside of your cheek as you set yourself down, popping the first aid kit open next to you and fishing out some liquid stitches, antibacterial ointment, and new bandages. Getting the mers some shade is going to have to be at the top of the priorities list, but one thing at a time. For now, you work on undoing the straps of your drysuit on your injured leg, making sure everything you do is in the golden mer’s line of sight. You roll the pant leg up above your knee, careful to avoid the bandage that covers the bottom third of your calf. There are a few spots of blood soaked through the bandage, but nothing worse than expected all things considered. Still, then the first gentle tug on the tape keeping the bandage down sends a spike of pain up through your knee that makes your head spin, you think maybe you should reconsider your approach.

Ignoring the bandage for a moment, you rummage through the first aid kit for a little blue-capped bottle, sighing with heady relief when you find it and shake a couple of painkillers into your hand, throwing them back dry. You put the bottle back where you got it and rest your head on your bent knee, pulling in a deep, stuttering breath. Why do wounds always hurt so much worse when you’re looking at them?

You peak up to find the golden mer has drifted a little closer, fins wilted slightly back from its face. It makes that same little warbling sound, and you wave it off with a forced smile.

“It’s ok. It’s just a little sore is all.”

To prove it, you mentally steady yourself and go back to removing the bandage. You go slow, but eventually manage to peel the gauze away from the three angry claw marks that curl over the inner and back of your calf. They’re puffy and red with irritation, but not the feverish color or heat of infection, which you’re thankful for. You go over them with an alcohol wipe first, to clean away the dried blood and yesterday’s ointment. Lips press into a bloodless line and you hum to keep yourself from whining at the sting. The alcohol set a couple of fresh dots of blood building up, which you dab away with the old gauze before bundling it up and setting it aside.

The next part is the worst, and you try to angle your face in such a way that the mer wont be able to see your expression screw up as you paint a fresh line of liquid stitches over the cuts. The solution burns like anything, but it’ll save you the hassle of a hospital trip that you don’t want to have to explain away. You’re just lucky the cuts aren’t any deeper, or this stuff wouldn’t be enough to keep them closed.

A distraction would help, and the more you can talk to the mers the better at this point. It’ll help them get used to you.

“So, I brought you both some fish. Your friend said they were going to share with you. Were you able to eat?”

There’s a splash and a high, trilling sound. You look over at the mer and see it’s gesturing excitedly to the left corner of the pool on your end. You didn’t notice it before, but there’s your cooler. It’s scratched up and empty, but intact as far as you can tell from where you are. Honestly, you’re impressed. You’ve seen coolers come out of the mer enclosures at the Mega Water World- well, Roxy’s enclosure- more banged up than that, and those mers are well fed multiple times a day. Working with not one but two starving mers, you hadn’t really expected to be seeing that cooler in one piece again.

“Oh! Thank you,” you chirp, voice squeaky with the effort to suppress the pain in your tone. “I’m glad to know you were able to eat something. We’ve got to go slow with it, but I’ll make sure you both get more fish soon.”

Thankfully, the liquid dries quickly, and you can smooth some antibacterial- and blessedly numbing- ointment over the cuts. This you make sure the mer can see your expression for. You don’t have to fake the way the tension and pain melts off your expression for this part at all. Hopefully, seeing these supplies help you will make it a little less nervous to have them used on itself, too.

You make quick work of applying new gauze and a waterproof cover before rolling your drysuit back down over your leg and redoing the strap around your ankle. You try for a conversational tone while you pack the rest of the medical supplies back into the first aid box, only briefly glancing up to let the mer know you’re addressing it.

“You know, I noticed you’ve got some pretty rough looking injuries of your own, pal. I think I have some things in here that could help- at least to treat those burns. Is it ok if I get a little bit of a closer look? It could help me get a better idea of how I can help you. I promise I wont touch! I just want to look.”

The mer wrings its hands, facial fins shivering. Slowly, it drifts closer to the edge of the pool. You smile at it, trying to be encouraging, but end up yelping in alarm when a sudden thundering impact shakes the walls of the storage shed, causing you both to freeze up. At the back corner of the pool, the sharp curve of the shark-like mer’s tail drags across the surface and slides against the back wall, it’s furious red eyes glaring at you from under the water.

A shiver goes down your spine. It’s a fine reminder that, even in an obviously weakened state, these creatures could snap you in half with little effort.

“Easy. I’m not going to touch, I just need to look.”

You lift your hands, palm open, for both to see as you approach the golden mer. You’d be more careful, more cautious, if you had the luxury of time with these two. You don’t. When they’re in stable health, maybe then you’ll be able to slow down and do this all right, but for now, you’ll take every inch you can get away with to get them better, consequences be damned.

A low hissing can be heard the whole time you move, only quieting when you set yourself down still a yard or so away from the water. Too far for you to touch the mer without moving your whole body. Far enough to pacify the dark mer’s ire, it seems.

Not far enough away, however, that the sunny mer can’t grab you if it so chooses- something which you realize you really should have given more thought to when one of the golden mer’s massive, webbed hands shoots out and snags around the ankle of your uninjured leg.

Your scream gets caught in your throat as you fall back, coming out as a strangled sort of hiccup instead. The pounding of your heart and immediate rush of adrenaline (and who knew that you still had more of that to give today?) make you light headed, a ringing in your ears that you recognize as the pure internal sound of panic almost drowning out the frantic little chittering noises the mer is making at you as it frantically waves the hand not snaring your ankle, before patting your knee in what might be an attempt at comfort. Your terrified mind isn’t buying it. Instead, it supplies you with a helpful stream of memories of the other mer’s razor teeth, its crushing grip, the scent of death at sea as it bore down on you.

Stupidly, the absurd worry that the mers will kill themselves by eating your body too quickly after their extended starvation crosses your mind.

A shake to your leg draws you back from your spiraling thoughts. The golden mer is watching you with wide, startled eyes and is making a thin, whining sound while it shakes your knee with its free hand. The hand holding your ankle doesn’t move, doesn’t loosen or tighten to dig in vicious claws, doesn’t wrench your forward to drown you in the murky dredges of low tide. It’s just holding you.

You become aware all at once that you’re hyperventilating, and cough with the first deep breath you try to bully into your lungs. The mer makes a sound of alarm but all you can focus on is taking in full, steady breaths. You grit your teeth and fight down every survival instinct screaming at you about being in the grip of an injured, desperate apex predator and you force yourself to think.

This can’t be an attack. Malnourished or not, if the mer wanted you dead you’d be dead. If it wanted to toy with you, you’d be in the water- subjected to its element- and not still sitting on dry ground. It’s not hurting you- it’s not even using threatening body language. The golden mer has had every opportunity to tear you to pieces and hasn’t. It’s even protected you. So no, this is something else. You’re not going to die, so just keep it together.

You force out a laugh- more of a wheeze- and try to brush off the shake in your voice. “Sorry for shouting, pal, you just startled me is all. Ahm, do you mind letting go of me please?”

It ducks its chin, the fins on its head wilting around its face like a veil to hide behind. The hand on your ankle twitches, tightening the smallest amount for just a second before relaxing, and the mer peaks up at you from around its fins with its mouth pressed in a thin line. It looks more nervous than anything, like it’s afraid you’re the one about to attack it. A whine bubbles in its throat.

It’s not the answer you were hoping for, but the mer is responsive at least, so that’s a start. You swallow around the lump in your own throat, willing your heart rate to slow as you think. Could this be some sort of self-soothing gesture then? You think of the way you’d first found the mer, curled against the far side of the pool and positively wild with fear at just the prospect of a human coming near. But still, it had touched you before, when its counterpart dragged you into the water. Maybe it had been counting on the knowledge that you lashing out at it then would only put you at the other mer’s mercy? This could be something similar- the mer’s way of saying “you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you”.

Of course, you’re working off an awful lot of assumptions about a being you’ve gotten to observe for a grand total of maybe an hour. Your hypothesis is standing on shaky legs, at best. If only you could just ask the mer what it’s thinking.

Oh. Wait, maybe you can.

Your eyes track over to the far corner, still fairly shaded even as the sunrise consumes the sky in a spill of pale pink and orange, turning the water a dark sort of teal. Red eyes still peer up at you from the shadows, though now their narrow glare feels less like animosity and more like a cat squinting against sleep. When the dark mer blinks it’s a slow, unsynchronized movement. It hadn’t spoken much last night, but it’d been enough to impress you. You haven’t heard many mers speak, though you know they’re generally capable of it. Such behavior is…highly discouraged by FazoCo, to the point that you’d been unaware of the ability entirely for the first several months as a handler, despite working one on one with a mer nearly every day. Since then, you’ve heard them form entire sentences, and even carry on complex conversations. But still, that degree of fluency in human language is a skill that has to be honed. It’s not innate. You don’t know where the shark-like mer picked up any human language- least of all the words it had used- as it certainly hadn’t intentionally been trained, so the fact that it could speak to you at all showed remarkable ability. Maybe the sunny mer will have a similar aptitude?

You shift just slightly, going slow and projecting your movements. You settle back into a comfortable sitting position, back from being sprawled away from the mer. You adjust the leg in the mer’s grasp a bit, and it lets you, its grip loose but unrelenting.

“Okay pal, okay. That’s alright. But it would really help if I could understand what you were thinking a bit better, you know? If we could communicate…”

The mer perks up, the fins around its face unfurling and waving from one side to the other and back again. You take the expectant look on its face as enough encouragement to keep going, and a little bit of hopeful enthusiasm finds its way into your tone.

“Yeah! So, your, uh, friend over there seemed to know how to say a few human words last night, and you seem like you understand me pretty well, too. If you’re able to tell me even just yes or no answers, it’ll help me to avoid doing anything you don’t like. Can you try that for me, please? Use ‘yes’ for what you agree with, and ‘no’ for what you don’t,” you coax, giving the mer an encouraging smile.

The fingers around your ankle twitch as the mer seems to consider you, head tilting slightly from side to side, making its fins sway as it thinks. This close, you notice how the edges of the fins are frayed and jagged, slightly discolored in places. You try not to let the concern show on your face. You’ll need a better look at the mer’s tail, but scale rot was the very least you could have expected to find, all things considered. But knowing that and seeing the evidence of it aren’t the same. Your gut twists in renewed disgust at the conditions these creatures have been left in.

Then, the mer opens its mouth and makes a short, clipped little whistling sound, followed by a serpentine hiss. It pauses, then makes the sounds again- a bit quicker, more fluid. The sounds flow together and, while it’s not quite a word just yet, you can hear the ‘yes’ in it.

Mental processes stutter and trip into each other and for a moment you just stare- wide eyed and slack jawed- at the mer. Really? Just like that? A hysterical sort of giggle spills out of your mouth. This mer is rewriting your frame of reference for mers and just what they’re capable of in real time, right before your eyes. You thought you were being optimistic in hoping the mer would make an attempt, but you certainly hadn’t been prepared to immediately hear something recognizable.

“Yes! That’s great! Do you want to give ‘no’ a try now?” The excitement in your voice now is entirely genuine.

Oh, Mike would hate how quickly all caution and survival instinct flees your mind in the face of scientific curiosity. Even though the mer can’t quite form the word yet, it had identified the sounds that made up the word and had mimicked them within its own vocal range to a passable effect, and on the first try! So not only can it understand what you’re saying, it has a strong enough grasp on the concept of human language that it can break down word structure to accommodate its own vocal palette as necessary. How might this translate to other kinds of mers? Would a mammalian mer like Roxy or Freddy have an easier time adapting to human language due to somewhat more similar vocal chord structures? The shark-like mer was able to say at least a few words clearly, so did these two have significantly different vocal structures or did the other mer just have more practice? And what about-

Your excited stream of rambling thoughts grinds to a halt around the sound of a clear, distinct “No”.

You blink at the mer, taken aback. The “o” had been accompanied by a deep thumping sound at the back of the mer’s throat, but besides that the word was completely clear and enunciated. You hardly bother to fight the grin stretching your face as you lean slightly forward, fists balled up tight atop your legs to contain your excitement.

“Can you do that again, pal?”

The sunny mer grins, all sharp teeth and widely splayed facial fins, and chirps another thumping “No!”

Another breathless giggle escapes you unbidden. That’s brilliant.It is brilliant, and you tell the mer as much with a smile so wide that your cheeks are sore with it but you don’t care. You’re just amazed. The mer wiggles in the water, trilling a musical note, seemingly caught up in your enthusiasm and praise. Your heart softens at it. You think of those dogs you sometimes see in shelters, who bounce and writhe and absolutely melt at the barest show of gentleness and positive attention. For a second- just a second- the mer doesn’t look afraid at all, and you catch a glimpse of the bright, cheerful creature it must have been before FazCo got ahold of it.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, a resignation settles like an anchor inside you, a steady weight that won’t budge. Come hell or high water, you’re in this now. Less than 24 hours and you’re already in too deep to get out.

Mike is going to be thrilled, you’re sure.

“Okay, okay. Now that we can communicate a little better,” you start, clearing your throat and smoothing your palms over your knees. Focus, focus. It’s a fight to cap the excitement buzzing in your core, but you have other things to worry about at the moment. “I just need to check: you’re not going to pull me into the water, are you?”

The mer straightens with a chirp. “No, no, no!”

A sigh of relief leaves you. You figured by now (an assumption Mike would surely skin you for), but it’s reassuring to hear anyways. You feel the last of the tension bleed out of your shoulders.

“Alright. Well, does it make you feel more comfortable to keep ahold of me when I’m close like this, then?”

Facial fins curl over its expression, bashful, and the hand wrapped around your ankle flexes. Still, a quiet but clear little “YE-esss” is hissed out.

Ah. That is…unbearably cute. It is also, thankfully, a concession you can accommodate. You’re asking an awful lot of the mer’s already, and although you need them to trust you so you can help them, it’d be unfair to expect so much without being willing to at least return the favor. If this is going to work then you’re going to need to take a chance on trusting them.

You lean over, catching the mer’s eye with an encouraging smile.

“That’s fine. If it makes you feel more at ease then I don’t mind. It startled me at first, but now that I know you don’t mean to hurt me I’m not upset. Thank you for telling me.”

Fins fall back from the mer’s face and it looks at you like it isn’t quite sure what to make of you, but you notice the way the fins on it’s back and around it’s neck go a bit slack, releasing a stiffness that you hadn’t even recognized in them. Laying relaxed the fins around its neck look almost like a jester’s ruffle, candy red fins spotted with bright yellow dots. The tattered edges of scale rot distort it, but you imagine the healthy fins with a smooth rippling edge perfect the illusion.

“Ok. I’m going to take a look now if that’s ok?”

It straightens and drifts a couple inches closer, angling its face toward you, laying its free hand flat against the edge of the pool. You lean forward against your knees as well, taking in the damage on its face and shoulders. Scale rot on its facial and neck fins leaving tattered and discolored edges, and tiny pink blisters are spattered over their cheeks and shoulders like freckles. The damage on the face isn’t as bad as it had looked on the darker mer, at least, but its shoulders have a painful, raw looking flush to them. The skin there had likely blistered and peeled repeatedly, leaving it thin and vulnerable.

You peer a bit closer at its milky eyes. The skin around them is sunken and bruised with starvation, making any damage difficult to discern. You bite your lip, making a mental note to check up on them as the mer heals. Even if there is damage, there is very little you can do for the mer’s eyes other than what will already need to be done for its skin.

Slowly, so the mer can see everything you do, you unzip one of the pockets of the drysuit and pull out your little disposable camera. You hold it up, rotating it in front of the mer who eyes it warily.

“Have you ever seen a camera before? It will make a little sound and take a picture. This will help me remember what I see. Is that okay?”

There’s a gurgling sound in its throat before it hisses a long, hesitant “yes”, side-eyeing the camera like the device might bite it.

You snap a couple quick pictures, leaning far back to get one that has most of the mer’s body in it.

“Would you lift your tail above the water a bit, please?”

When it does, you’re impressed again by the length. The mer’s golden tail alone is longer than you are tall but at least a foot and a half, and even with the skin loose with malnutrition you can see the powerful musculature it’s made up of.

The tail, like its face and back fins, is damaged by black and white spots of infection, with bare patches of skin where scales have flaked away. Around those areas there are some old, scabbed or scarred claw marks. They’re thin and pale, left over from what must have been shallow, superficial wounds, more likely from compulsively itching at the irritated scales than an attack. You don’t see any rake marks on the mer, actually, which is both surprising as well as supportive of your current running theory on the dynamic between the tank mates. You expect the other mer’s tail will have significantly more scars.

“That’s good, thank you,” you tell it, gesturing that it can lower its tail now. “I have something with me that can help your burns, but it’ll take a bit more work to help those damaged scales. But we’ll get it taken care of, pal.”

You smile at the mer and it returns it with a wobbly smile of its own, fingers twitching around your ankle as if the reminder of the scale rot made it want to itch at it.

You tuck the camera away into your waterproof pocket and set your hands back on your knees. “What about inside? You must feel hunger pain I’m sure, but are there any other places inside that are hurting? Your chest, lower body, or gills?”

The mer frowns, making a sound something between a whistle and a whimper, and leans to the side, gesturing to the dip of its waist with its free hand. Between the bottom of its ribs and the sharp jut of its red hip fins are a set of pale gills that flex and close uselessly above the water. They look irritated and inflamed, but you don’t see any severe signs of degradation.

“I see. Does it hurt to breathe?”

The mer nods sadly. “YEEEssss…”

You chew your lip in thought. Mike packed you with broad-spectrum antibiotics, which could help with general gill infections, but getting the mer to take an oral medication might be pushing it a bit too far for one day. You don’t want to try to sneak it into their food though, since the mers would definitely taste it and likely lose whatever shaky trust they’ve afforded you so far. Still, even if mers have a dual respiratory system- making an infection of the gills less life threatening than it would be in a common fish- it’s not something you want to hold off treating if there’s any way around it. What to do, what to do?

You glance back at your first aid kit and an idea comes to you. It’s not great, and it’ll still be pushing things far faster than you would prefer if things were less dire, but it’s better than nothing.

You pat you legs with both hands and nod at the mer. “Alright. Well, I don’t have something with me right now that can help with your gills, but I can get something soon. Maybe by tonight, or tomorrow. But I can get you something for your burns now, and it should help you feel a bit better. You can share with your friend. I saw they’ve got some burns, too. And- see, I don’t think they like me very much just yet, but can you do me a favor? Will you ask them if they have any pain here,” you gesture up and down either side of your torso, where on the shark-like mer you suspect two large, fatty livers sit. “I’m worried they might be sick, but I don’t think they’d tell me. Will you ask them and let me know when I come back?”

The sunny mer glances back at their companion with a little warble, worry creasing the skin around its eyes, but nods at you when it looks back.

A breath of relief fills you. Good, at least you’ll be able to get a little insight into the other mer’s well-being. “Great, thank you pal. Can I get up now please?”

You scoot back a bit and the mer’s hand slides off your leg without hesitation as it retreats deeper into the water, watching you with a tilt to its head. You head over to your first aid kit and find a tube of burn treatment ointment. There’s at least three more in this kit alone, and likely more in the bag. This was the one thing you and Mike knew to pack for with certainty.

You return to the edge of the pool to find the golden mer back in the center of the pool, lowered so only the top of its face is above the water. You lift the ointment so it can see, and pop the cap open to squeeze some of it onto your fingers. You demonstrate smearing the medicine onto your nose, rubbing it in with gentle circles until you can’t feel it anymore, then you snap the lid shut and set the tube at the edge of the pool, backing away from it.

“You can have this. Try to let your skin dry a bit before putting it on, and let it sit for a second before getting it wet, if you can. I’ll bring more of this, so feel free to use as much as you need, ok?”

It doesn’t approach yet, but bubbles rise in the water around its face where its mouth sits beneath the water. You’ll take that as acceptance.

With the medical checks out of the way, at least as best as you can currently manage, you turn your attention to the water. There’s a good foot or more of clearance now between the edge of the pool and where the water reaches, lapping weakly at the concrete. Unhurried in the morning light you can see now that the pool isn’t especially deep- maybe 7 feet or so- and aside from the debris piled in the corner with the other mer it’s completely barren.

Over in the corner, near the discarded cooler, there’s a small divot in the side of the pool. The filtration system most likely. You suck in a deep breath, closing your eyes to give yourself a second to mentally prepare for how subpar you’re expecting it to be, and go over to investigate. While you’re there you grab the cooler and zip it up, slinging the strap over your shoulder. You snort through your nose. You wont even have to be particularly sneaky reusing this thing again.

The filtration system isn’t much different than you’d see in a human swimming pool. It’s better than what the outdoor pens had been fitted with, but still laughably unacceptable. Maybe it’d be okay for a pool a third of this size, without tidal input, but as the tank is constructed this thing would have been next to useless. Surely they must have had a more robust system in here before the facility was abandoned? At the very least there must have been a good amount of fresh water getting pumped in, which itself would have at least helped a little. There’s no sign of whatever system they had now, though.

You don’t have anything close to a plan for how to deal with that particular problem yet. You can’t use the facility’s water line without sending out a giant red flag to FazCo, and you don’t have a way to get a tank big enough to supply the amount of water you’ll need, regularly, all the way out here, let alone filled.

You rub at your temples. A migraine is starting to pound in your skull. You’re hungry, tired, and just about at the limit of the amount of stress you can take in one go. For now, you can only do so much, so you’ll do that. A little improvement is better than nothing at all. It’s at least a start.

You trudge back over to your pack of supplies, drop off the cooler, and grab a bottle of water treatment tablets, shaking a few into your hand. You also grab an empty test vial before heading back over to the pool. When you do, you notice that the tube of ointment has disappeared, and the sunny mer is making slow laps across the other side of the pool under the water near the tide bars, gold scales glittering in the morning light like sunken treasure. The overwhelmed huff dies in your throat and the sigh that replaces it has something like relief in it. Baby steps, you soothe yourself. It’s just baby steps.

The test vial is filled with a sample of the pool water and capped before you crush the treatment tablets in your palm and lower your first into the water, swirling it around to encourage the tablets to dissolve and disperse. As much as you might resent the low tide right now, it will be the best time for the tablets to work on the water. Once the waterline falls below the tide bars the water will have some time to sit and adjust to the treatment. It’s a very temporary improvement that you’ll have to keep up repeating every chance you get until you have a better solution to work with, but it’s something and it eases the sting the looming sense of uselessness needles you with.

Once the tablets dissolve you pull your hand out and shake the water off. You grab your little camera again and snap some pictures of the shed and pool in general, including a closer picture of the old filtration system. You can’t think of anything else you can accomplish here this morning, and you’re running on fumes anyways. You’ve got a long drive back ahead of you, and plenty to prepare for if you plan on coming back here this evening- which you do. There’s only one more day to work with before your next string of shifts, which will make getting out here to check on the mer’s next to impossible. It certainly wont be able to be daily, that’s for sure. You need to get things in place so they’ll be okay while you can’t be here. The thought already makes anxiety curdle in your gut.

Planting yourself near the center of the pool’s edge you cup your hands around your mouth and call out. “Hey pal! I have to go for now, ok? But I promise I’ll be back tonight and I’ll have some things for you, and some more fish for you to eat.”

The sunny mer pops up from the water with a look that borders on panic and makes a warbling cry back at you. You raise a hand and wave, plastering on a wide smile that you hope is reassuring. “I’ll see you soon,” you promise, and turn to go, grabbing the empty cooler as you pass.

As you’re slipping out through the shed door the mer makes a long, high sound that is uncomfortably close to a sob. You almost double over with the way your heart clenches painfully in your chest, throat and eyes instantly burning with tears that you absolutely can’t deal with right now. Oh, that’s not fair. You have to go. If you want to help them, you need to leave now. You have to, no matter what heartbreaking little sounds or expressions the mer throws at you. But knowing that doesn’t make it easier to finish pushing the shed door closed behind you, and it doesn’t help your breaths to come out any steadier as your practically run back to your van.

You throw yourself into the driver’s seat, slumping down against the worn leather and pressing the heels of your palms into your eyes. You can do this. You can do this. You can do this. You’re not abandoning them. You’ll be back soon. It’ll be okay.

You bite your cheek hard and shove the key into the ignition.

You shoot Mike a quick text that you’re still alive and you’re done here for the morning, then pull out onto the dirt road that’ll have you headed back to the Mega Water World. Your mind stays back though, stuck in the holding shed with the mers.

Pain throbs dully under the bandages on your leg and you shift against the wall of the dark room to take some weight off of it. Just a couple minutes left for the photos to develop and you can pack them up and get back to the apartment for some sleep, finally. Well, maybe some food and a shower first, but then some real sleep. The constant adrenaline rushes and crashes of the day have left you feeling hollowed out, and even you have to concede that you need at least a few hours of proper rest or you’re not going to be much good to the mers this evening. You mentally tally the list of things you can realistically get together for them today, prioritizing based on necessity.

The lack of shade is going to have to be pretty high up on the list if you want those sunburns to have a chance to heal, and the shark mer’s little pile of scraps definitely isn’t cutting it for shelter. A tarp could probably do, if you can get the sunny mer’s help setting it up. It wont be a problem to get that before you head back in the evening. Besides that, you need to try to restock your cooler with more squid. You should probably use an outside source this time, and alternate how often you take from FazCo freezers. There’s a restaurant supply store in town that probably has what you need, but you groan at the thought of how pricy that quantity of squid will be. Whatever. You’ll do what you have to do. Thankfully, FazCo didn’t decrease your wage when you were demoted from mer handler, probably as a subtle way to encourage you to keep your mouth shut. That being said, you can afford to foot the bill for some fish, for now. You’ll work out cheaper sources when you’ve got the luxury of time.

The mers will also both need to soak in some warm, fresh (and medicated, if you can manage it) water as often as you can facilitate it, but you’re not quite sure how exactly you’ll handle that just yet. Even if you could get a tub out there and fill it, getting the mers comfortable enough- even just the sunny mer- to climb out of the water and into a separate tub at your direction might be a bit much for day two. That gives you a few extra days to get the mers more comfortable with you, and to set that up. The scale rot isn’t good, but it’s not lethal, so the burns and gill infections can be prioritized.

You chew your lip, working on pulling the photos from the development fluid and lightly patting them dry while you think. You can generally treat them for infection and malnutrition, but you need a blood panel to really know what other invisible ailments the mers could possibly be suffering with. Slim chance of getting that anytime soon. You can’t imagine sticking the mers with needles going any way other than catastrophically bad. You’ll have to do the best you can with the information available to you. Getting medications on hand in case the shark-like mer does have a liver infection wouldn’t be a bad idea, but you’ll need Mike to get it for you. That’s assuming FazCo will even have any in their stock, which they might not considering the species of mers they have currently aren’t prone to liver conditions. Without it, you’ll have to rely on manipulating the mer’s diet as an alternative treatment plan.

Once you’ve got all the photos dried and tucked away into a paper bag you slip out of the campus dark room. The custodian- a sweet old Greek woman who has tried to set you up with no less than three of her children and at least one of her older grandchildren- is a friend of yours, and generally has no problem letting you into the college’s facilities so long as you’re sure to keep out the students’ ways. She’d definitely given you a bit of a curious look seeing you all strapped into a drysuit so early in the morning and off-site, and clicked her tongue with worry at the slight limp you walked in with, but she didn’t ask questions. That’s what you appreciate most about Eleni- she doesn’t pry.

You debate grabbing an energy drink from the vending machine to help keep you awake for the drive back to the apartment, but ultimately decide that risking the caffeine ruining your rest later isn’t worth the boost for the fifteen minute drive. You groan at the way exhaustion is starting to weigh down all of your bones, making them ache, but you manage your way back to the van and make the short drive back onto Water World property without crashing.

Mike’s shift started right after dawn, and he wont be back until the early evening, but you buzz with the need to talk to him about everything. The photographs burn in your hand through the bag you have them wrapped in, and you clutch them with a wild sort of fear. If FazCo found these you dread to imagine what would happen to the mers, let alone you and Mike. You stuff them into your pillowcase for now, until you can find a better hiding place.

You barely register eating a meal of cheap raviolis out of a can and showering before you set a timer for five hours and pass out, the fleeting thought that hopefully exhaustion will keep the nightmares at bay the last thing you know before unconsciousness finally has you.

Five hours feels like no time at all when the alarm goes off and has you dragging yourself out of bed. You thought maybe you’d still be sluggish, but despite still being far more tired than you consider fair you’re wide awake right away, already mentally tallying what you need to get done in what order.

It’ll still be another three hours before Mike’s shift is over, so you elect to spend that time getting ahold of the tarp you’ll need and calling the restaurant supply place to try and place an order for fifteen pounds of squid, keeping your fingers crossed that they’ll have enough in stock to supply you. You also need to replace your cellphone. The burner is ok to use with Mike for these emergencies, but you still need a daily device for work. That’ll probably take the longest, so you’ll try to sort that out between getting the tarp and picking up the squid.

With a plan for the next few hours in place you head out to the hardware store. They’ve only just opened for the day, and the workers move with the same sluggish sleepiness as you, squinting against the rows of fluorescents above that buzz with an electrical hum. While you peruse the aisles, finding yourself in a section full of utilities for pool care, you think about what’s waiting for you tonight. If you’re right about their alternating sleeping patterns then you can expect to be dealing with the darker mer first. Maybe if you get there early enough though they’ll both be awake? In any case, how should you go about handling the shark-like mer? It’s definitely not as willing to trust as its counterpart, but last night proved to you that it can be reasoned with. Hopefully improving its living conditions will endear you to it a bit.

You grab a large, weather-proof green tarp and, as you make your way out of the aisle to checkout, you pause. There’s one of those brightly colored foam balls for playing with in the water, the size of a beachball but denser and not at risk of popping on sharp claws or between rows of pointed teeth. You grab it, turning it over in your hands. You’ve been so worried about their physical health you haven’t given much thought yet to their mental health care. Who knows how long they’ve been in that shallow, bare tank with no mental stimulation besides circling each other?

You tuck the ball under you arm.

You give the supply place a call while on your way to the phone store, sandwiching the burner cell between your cheek and shoulder while you drive. You scowl at the grumble in your stomach while the phone rings and add picking up a quick lunch to your to-do list.

It turns out that they don’t have fifteen pounds of squid to sell you, but you can buy the eight pounds they do have on hand and put in a reoccurring order for fifteen pounds for the next few weeks. You swear under your breath when they tell you how much this is going to cost. $120 a week just for the squid is going to be great motivation for finding a cheaper option asap. You’ll have to head to the fish market at your next opportunity and see if any of the smaller vessels will make a deal with you.

You spend too long at the phone store, handing over your cracked and water-logged cell and insisting that, yes, you are absolutely sure that you’d just like a similar used model and not the newest model of the line. Yes, you are aware that your model is outdated and that the new models come with an AI assistant program and, no, you still don’t want it. Please just replace the phone, backup anything that can be salvaged (not much, you’re sure), and let you leave. No, no, you’re perfectly happy with the camera on your old model just please can we be done with this already?

The polite smile you force onto your face when you go to pick up the order of squid has to look a little insane, what with the irritated way it strains at the edges and you can feel your eye twitching. It’s not the poor cashier’s fault, and you need to keep a good relationship with this place, but you do catch the concerned and slightly uncomfortable look on their face when you thank them and haul your boxes of frozen squid out to your car. They are, at least, polite enough not to mention how strange it is that you pay in cash, for which you are grateful.

The first thing you do with your new phone is text Mike from it, letting him know you’re back at the apartment and that you need to touch base once he’s off work. He texts back five minutes later that he’s headed back himself, and to let you know to keep the spare on you anyways. You tuck the burner into the pocket of your drysuit so you remember to take it with you when you go back tonight.

You pack the frozen squid into your freezer for the time being, playing jenga with it and bags of frozen peas and a couple of tv dinners. You don’t miss the irony that you’re absolutely putting more thought and care into what the mers will be eating than you do for yourself. You’ve only just gotten everything to fit when you hear the sound of a key in the front door. That was fast. Mike must have really hauled ass to make it from the center of the park to the staff lodgings in less than fifteen minutes.

Case in point, he shoulders past the door with a winded huff, pushing damp strands back from his face as silver eyes find you and rake over you head to toe with an intimidating intensity from across the room.

You raise a brow at him. “Did you actually run here?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response, just a grunt as he tosses his work bag aside and takes a seat at the tiny dining table you share. He gestures roughly to the chair across from him, but you bypass the table and jog down the hall to your room first.

“Just a second! I have some things to show you,” you explain as you pass.

There’s no good reason to feel as relieved as you do when you find the photos right where you left them, tucked under your pillowcase, but a pressure releases in your chest when you have the bag of pictures in your hand again. You hold the bag like a talisman when you bring it out to Mike, and he sits up straighter in his chair when he sees them, that fox-like attention completely honed on the secrets in your hand.

“You got pictures of them?”

“Just one of them. Didn’t have a chance with the darker one, but this one was a real superstar this morning.”

You lay the photos out across the table, grouping them up between photos of the facility and ones of the sunny mer. You grin at the pictures while Mike looks over them, picking each one up and carefully scrutinizing them with wide, unblinking eyes. The sunny mer stands out like treasure amongst the grimy dark pictures of the facility itself, pale cream and yellow despite the damage the photos catalog.

“They’re both capable of speech, to some degree, and complex reasoning right from the get-go. The darker one said a couple of words to me- some things it must have picked up when the facility was in operation, nothing it heard from me-but you should have seen this one! It picked up new words right away, barely any prompting.”

Mike nods along, tapping one of the photos. “Impressive. Couple of smart guys, huh?” He traces a finger along a photo of the mer’s face. “Looks like he might have some ocular damage, here. See, around the right eye? Looks like he’s got some scarring. The sunburns on his face aren’t as bad as I imagined though, so that’s good.”

A frown tugs at your mouth and you lean in to look over Mike’s shoulder at the photo, trying to see the scarring he pointed out. There’s a pale curve away from the mer’s eye, but you’d chalked that up to a crease in the skin. Giving it a second look now you worry Mike is right, and the swirling curl around the outside of the eye is a scar.

“Yeah,” you murmur after a moment, “the other one’s face is more burnt I think, but this one’s face didn’t get the worst of it, though its shoulders are in pretty rough shape. Those fins on its head are articulate, so I’m guessing it was able to use them for a bit of shade but-“

You jump a bit when Mike smacks the photo back onto the table a little too hard, turning on you with a look between confused and deeply irritated. Stormy eyes scan your face like you’re a puzzle.

“What?”

“Don’t ‘what’ me. What’s with you calling him an ‘it’? Since when do you talk about mers like that?”

You shrink under his incredulousness, expression twisting with guilt and realization, but he doesn’t relent.

“You would’ve rocked someone’s shit if you ever heard them call Bonnie an ‘it’. Is this some weak attempt at staving off attachment?” He barks out a humorless laugh, arm sweeping over the table and its collection of photographs in an all-encompassing gesture. “Because I think we can both safely say that that ship has sailed, mate.”

You sputter, at a loss for words. Had you really being doing that this whole time? You hadn’t even noticed you were doing it. The realization makes something sour twist in your gut, shame and guilt eating away at you. He’s absolutely right. If you’d ever heard someone talking about Bonnie- or hell, any of the mers at the Mega Water World- like that, like they were some sort of thing rather than a sapient creature worthy of the same respect you’d give another human, you wouldn’t let them hear the end of it. Whatever messed up feelings you might be dealing with since Bonnie are your own problem to deal with. You never meant to project those onto these mers.

“I…damn Mike, I’m sorry. You’re right, I can’t believe I was doing that. I don’t know what I was thinking. They deserve better.” You scrub your hands over your face.

Mike’s expression softens, a little bit of the tension leaving the stiff line of his shoulders. A hand comes down on your shoulder, and he gives you a little shake.

“Look,” he starts, voice tight before heaving a long, tired sigh. His eyes close and he pulls a deep breath in through his nose before continuing. “I know what happened with Bonnie did a number on you. I know. I get it. But trying to keep these mers at arms length isn’t going to work. Hey, look at me.”

The expression on your face when you drag your hands away must be completely miserable, but Mike just squeezes your shoulder and gives you a lopsided grin.

“We’ve known each other a long time now, and I’ve never known you to be capable of being anything other than compassionate to a fault. It drives me crazy sometimes, don’t get me wrong, but it’s one of your best qualities. Don’t let FazCo take that away from you.”

You put your hand over his where it rests on your shoulder and squeeze back, the edges of your mouth barely twitching with your attempt at a smile. The guilt still sits like a stone in your belly, but you can’t let it distract you. Evening is falling fast and you want to get back to the mers before the sun sets, so you need to leave soon. But before you leave you still have more you need to go over with Mike. You can think through your…internal dilemmas on the drive over.

“Right, well, thanks for knocking some sense into me. As usual. Anyways,” you clear your throat, shuffling through the photos to find one of the filtration system. “So yeah, he- let’s call him Sunny, since, you know, those fins and his coloring kinda give the impression of the sun- he let me take a look over him. There’s the sunburns and scale rot you’d expect, of course, but it’s their water conditions I’m most worried about right now. Seems like Sunny’s got an infection of the gills, and I saw myself that the low tide brings the water levels way too low in that pool to provide any real protection.”

You grab another photo that shows the gap between the edge of the pool and the water level as it was right before you left this morning, passing it to Mike who looks it over with a pinched expression, mouth pressing into a bloodless line.

“That’s not ideal.”

You snort. “Bit of an understatement, but yeah. I can treat for the infections and burns, but if we don’t figure something out for the water conditions it wont matter much. I got a tarp today to put up, so that should at least give them some shade, and I have some ideas for treatment baths that I’m still working on, but I don’t know what we can realistically do about this.”

He hums, hand over his mouth as he considers a photo of the tide wall and its tall steel bars. He holds the photo up for you to see before pocketing it. “Let me hang on to this one. I’ll think on it and see if I can’t come up with some ideas, yeah?”

A spike of anxiety laces through your chest as you watch the photo disappear out of sight, but you’re quick to crush the feeling. No, this is Mike. You trust Mike. He’s got just as much skin in all of this as you do.

You make yourself nod, shuffling the rest of the photos into a pile and scooping them up. They go back in in their brown paper bag, to get squirreled away in your room again.

Before you go, you rap your knuckles on table. “By the way, I still need to get a better look at the other mer, but will you do me a favor and see if you can get your hands on some liver treatments? With the way his body resembles a shark I’m already worried he might have some infections. I can get some saline flush and use broad spectrum antibiotics for the gill infections for now, but I don’t want to leave the livers too long if there does turn out to be something wrong.”

He nods, standing from his seat at the table and stretching his back. It let’s out a few loud pops and you wince in sympathy. You almost forgot that he had already worked a ten hour shift today before this, and mer handlers don’t exactly get a lot of down time while on the clock. You have the strongest urge to hug him right now, to thank him over and over for helping you with this and making sure you weren’t getting in over your head all alone. You resist. Instead, you reach out and ruffle his already messy hair and he swats your hand away with a scowl without any real irritation behind it.

“Yeah yeah, I’ll get you your meds. Didn’t you plan on heading back there tonight? You better scram before it gets too late. Same rules as last time: you keep me posted or I’m coming out there after you, got it?”

“Yes, dad,” you drawl with a snicker. He groans, pretending to gag, and goes for the kitchen.

Your stomach decides that that is a fine reminder that you never did stop to get that lunch you’d promised yourself, and rumbles loudly in complaint. Standing with the fridge door open Mike looks up at the ceiling like he stored some extra patience up there at some point, and he’s just so disappointed to not find it there now. You let your head thump onto the table, resigned to your fate. Traitorous stomach.

“Dinner first,” Mike says, not an inch of room for argument.

“Dinner first,” you concede.

Chapter Text

Making your way through the facility to the sea pens in the back has the same feeling as walking through an old, forgotten cemetery: haunted. The burnt colors of sunset turn the shadows deep and reaching, and they puddle in the dried-up abandoned pools like ink. You move at just less than a jog, humming a favorite song in an effort at self-soothing. It doesn’t really work, but it’s something to focus on. There’s less to deliver this time, but what you did bring is balanced between your arms and your chin, the foam of the ball you bought rubbing uncomfortably at the skin of your throat, vibrating with your vocal cords.

Your humming stutters with a grunt of effort when you shift your arms around your load, trying to free up a hand as you approach the sea pen. Then, as you press up against the shed door, you hear… something. It reminds you of whale song, pitched low and quiet, gently rising and falling. You bite your tongue, holding your breath as you listen to the crooning sound loop over on itself- long, sweet notes drawing out like a lullaby.

You silently curse at your full arms, unable to reach your phone in your chest pocket to record this. You’re loathe to interrupt, but more unwilling to make the mers wait any longer to eat again. As quietly as you can- not quiet enough, the song stops with the first scraping of the shed door- you push your way into the sea pen, eyes scanning the space in the falling light of dusk.

Even backlit by the searing amber of the setting sun, the darker mer’s eyes burn like signal flares in the darkest corner of the pool, fixed on you before you can even find him. You’re surprised to see him floating at the surface at first, until your eyes trail down to what his wide, paddle-like arms clutch close to his chest. The other mer- Sunny, you remind yourself- is draped over his companion like a life raft, limp and eyes closed. Even in the shadows, a few of his golden scales reflect the dying light and wink like hidden treasure. Sunny’s facial fins twitch and the dark mer bares his teeth in a silent hiss at you as his tankmate turns to bury his face in the blue fins at the irritated mer’s neck.

You wince in remorse and crouch to set your arm load down beside the minifridge, knowing immediately that the unavoidable sound will be enough to rouse the sleeping mer the rest of the way into awareness.

“Sorry, sorry,” you mutter, raising your hands in a placating gesture towards the shark-like mer that is now fully glowering at you, arms unwinding from around his stirring companion. “I brought you both more food though. How does that sound?”

That seems to do the trick of waking Sunny fully, his facial fins splaying wide and his pale eyes blinking owlishly at you as he slips off of his tankmate. A confused little “mmrrrep?” sound bubbles out of his throat in the moment before he recognizes you and a smile splits his face with a series of excited little chirps. You can’t help but smile back and wave, despite the stubborn glare the other mer levels at you.

“Hi! Sorry to wake you. I’ll try to be back a little earlier next time.”

You go back to humming softly as you make quick work of stocking the minifridge with the new packages of squid you brought with you, pulling out a few handfuls of herring and the last batch of squid, still cold but having thawed in the fridge. They’re slimy and uncomfortable in your hand, but it’s a sensation you’re quite familiar with. You stuff the lot into a plastic bag you brought with you and face the mers, holding up the dripping sack of raw fish.

“How does some dinner sound, boys?”

Sunny’s reaction is immediate, applause and squealing “Yes, yes, yes!”

You grin at him. “That was great! Were you practicing while I was away?”

The bright mer coos and chirps, wide hands grabbing at one of his lower facial fins while the rest of them bounce with his excited nodding. He is…terribly cute. You bite your cheek to suppress the urge to laugh at his adorable reaction.

The other mer doesn’t seem to share your enthusiasm, sinking into the water until only his narrowed eyes glare at you from above the surface. Your mood dampens just a bit. It’s so easy to get caught up in Sunny’s enthusiastic and optimistic personality, but this one needs you to be a little more reserved. He’s clearly very protective of his companion, whatever their relationship my be.

You raise the bag of fish and meet his crimson eyes, making sure he knows you’re talking to him specifically. “Is it alright if I leave portions of these for both of you at the edge of the pool? It’d be good if we could add vitamins and medicine in with them soon, but I won’t do that without your permission. There’s nothing but plain fish this time. Does that sound ok?”

He blinks once, slowly, his glare losing some of its hostility to make room for a cast of confusion. His head tilts this way and that, like observing you from different angles will make you make sense to him. You and Sunny watch him for a long moment in silence, but the bright mer seems to get restless and quiet little chirps slip out between his teeth as he waits for his companion’s response. Finally, the shark-like mer’s gaze leaves you for the first time since you’ve entered the shed and glances at his tankmate. You can’t pinpoint what changes, but something about him softens, just the slightest amount.

Whatever it was, it’s gone again when he looks back to you. He raises just enough for his mouth to be above the surface and hisses a clear, slow “Yesss.”

You smile at him in encouragement, clamping down on the shiver his gravelly voice sends down your spine. He’s speaking, he hasn’t attacked you, things are going well so far tonight. He must have even practiced the new words with Sunny while you were gone! No reason to be afraid when he’s behaved perfectly well so far. Breathe through it, you’re fine.

The shadow over the pool is growing in slow, crawling inches as the sun sets deeper behind the horizon, but most of the space is still flooded with rich light. You make a point of sliding into the shadowed part of the room before you kneel at the edge of the pool, eyes locked on both mers who wait, twitchy, at the far end. You reach into the cold, slimy bag and pull out four herring and three squid. It’s not half of what a healthy mer should be eating for dinner, but it’s as much as you can risk feeding them just yet. You set the portion down at the edge of the pool and back away, moving a couple of yards into the light to deliver the rest of the fish.

You’re impressed that neither mer moves to snatch up the food until you’ve backed well away from the edge- a display of manners some of the mers at the Mega Water World don’t manage half of the time- but once you’ve backed up to the far wall again the darker mer lunges forward with a burst of speed that makes you weak in the knees and a little dizzy. You lose sight of him for a heart-stopping moment in the white spray of thrashing water, but in the next he’s at the pool’s edge with claws encircling his pile of fish.

“Slowly,” you croak out, earning you a glare as he shoves the first of the herring into his mouth, blood trickling down the pale side of his chin from biting into a fish he should’ve by all rights swallowed whole. You gulp around a sudden lump in your throat that tastes like saltwater.

Sunny moves slower, sliding along the surface like a water snake. When he reaches the pile of thawed fish at the edge of the pool, he grabs the whole lot in his hands and- with a final glance your way- slips underwater with them. The corner of your mouth twitches in amusement. You hope he takes your advice about eating slowly, but you can’t blame him for being a little protective of his food.

His counterpart has committed to the opposite approach, taking ripping bites of his fish one by one and chewing loudly with his eyes fixed on you. You choose to believe he’s not imagining tearing you into bite-sized bits instead, simply raising a brow at his antics and crossing your arms across your chest. He’s going to have to try a little harder if he wants to unnerve you with his eating habits. The pinnipeds you work with on a daily basis are vicious eaters and lack the mer’s capacity for reasoning. The mer may be menacing, but at least you know that he’s being intentional. The sea lions would bite your hand off without even thinking about it.

Now that you give him a good look though, even in the dimming light, you can see the pale crescent curve of his face is flushed pink, blistered near his eye. Concern coils in your gut and you bite your lip.

“Hey,” you start, flinching when the mer indicates you have his attention by crunching down on a fish head. “Were you both ok in the sunlight today, with the tide falling so low? Did the ointment I left help?”

His nose scrunches up on his face and he sneers. “No,” he snaps his teeth around the word, shoving a squid into his mouth, before a wave of water crashes into the back of his head and splashes up over the lip of the pool, washing his fish a couple of inches away and making him scramble after them with desperate, scratching claws.

Sunny pops back up, frowning at his tankmate with a tentacle poking out of his mouth and the wide fin of his tail swiping at the surface in agitation.

“Yeeeess!” He draws the word out with a harsh whistle, but it sounds intentional, pouting.

The shark-like mer snaps his jaws at his counterpart with a thunderous clap, his own sharply curved tail slicing through the water in furious sweeping movements. Sunny is having none of it, smacking the water again and making his tankmate hiss at the spray of water that hits him in the face.

“Yes!” He reiterates with a glare to the darker mer, and then again to you, resolute. “Yes.”

Your eyes slide over to the shark-like mer, upper body curled over his remaining fish and an impressive scowl on his face. The short white fringe of fins that frame his face have flopped forward, limp over his eyes. He’s still dangerous, still has those razor-sharp teeth on full display, but he’s lost some of his menace in the face of his companion’s scolding.

Petulant, the dark mer stuffs the remaining couple of fish into his mouth and swallows them down, sinking below the surface and darting back to the far end of the pool rather than face you and acknowledge Sunny’s contradiction. You watch him go, half amused and half disheartened at his quick departure. Sunny chitters after him, chewing on the last bits of his squid. Your hand twitches with the urge to offer up more food, and you clench your fist against the impulse. You need to heed your own advice and go slowly.

Best to take advantage of the shark-like mer’s pouting while you can. You settle yourself near the edge of the pool, just a couple of feet back, and wave over to Sunny. He chirps, facial fins perking up, and swims toward you a bit before he seems to realize what he’s doing and he doubles back on himself, long tail coiling under him awkwardly. You don’t quite manage to smother the giggle that bubbles up out of your throat at that, excusing him with a relaxed wave of your hand.

“It’s fine! You don’t need to come too close tonight. I just wanted to talk to you, if that’s ok?”

The coil of anxiety that had seized him visibly loosens at your reassurance, but after a second of handwringing he appears to change his mind, drifting a few feet towards you after all. Not within arm’s reach like last night, but close enough that you can see him clearly in the fading light.

At first, his willingness to come closer without prompting makes a smile build on your face, but then what you see makes your stomach drop like an anchor, acidic bile rising high enough in your throat to choke you. For as adamant as he had been that the burn ointment- which had sun protection in its formula- had helped, it very clearly had been woefully insufficient against the glaring heat of day with the mers stuck in what must have turned out to be little more than a shallow tidepool. Immediately you see that he’s in worse shape than what you could see of the other mer (which, admittedly, hadn’t been much yet). His shoulders and arms are red, not merely pink, and the curve of his shoulder is peppered with fresh little heat blisters. Some of the older ones have spread or split, looking raw and painful. Open sores, at risk of infection. You’re afraid to see how badly his back had fared. The compulsion to reach out, to use whatever you have with you to treat the injuries and make this better, is painful to resist.

For a long moment you are silent and staring, so overcome by your rage and hate for FazCo that you can’t process anything else. You should be able to help these mers. This, at least, you have everything you need to treat. But no, because FazCo so thoroughly traumatized these mers before leaving them to a slow and agonizing death you are forced to suppress even the most basic instinct to provided care beneath the necessity to move slowly and refrain from making them scared of you, too. Would Sunny let you help him with these injuries directly? You doubt it. Not yet, at least. He’d had a hard enough time getting close to you before just for observation. Expecting him to willingly allow you to administer antibacterial treatment by hand- something even Bonnie on his best days would shy away from- after only a handful of hours of really knowing you is absurd.

No. For now, all you can do is make note of the damage and try your damnedest to prevent it from happening again.

A concerned whine snaps you back to awareness, the golden mer’s pale eyes wide as they search your face. One large, webbed hand hovers above the water, reaching towards you, still a good distance too far to actually touch you, and your heart clenches. Looks like Sunny shares your compulsion to help. A precarious swell of fondness for the mer settles in your chest.

“Sorry Sunny, I got distracted for a second.” The smile you work onto your face feels weak even to you, and your voice sounds about as tired as you really are, but the small bit of warmth that sneaks in is genuine.

For the mer, though, it’s as if you’ve said the magic word. He freezes, even the slight twitching of his facial fins growing unnervingly still. His eyes go round and his mouth parts, slowly opening and closing a few times as if he’s trying to find the right words, before his entire expression positively lights up and a beaming smile takes over his whole expression, his facial fins splaying wide and shivering. He makes a happy, high-pitched squeal as his tail twists beneath him, making his whole form sway and driving him even closer to the edge of the pool.

“No!” he chirps, but he sounds absolutely thrilled. You watch him, a little nervous at the sudden change of mood really, but resist the urge to back away. His head bobs back and forth and makes his facial fins sway wildly with the movement, his eyes squinting tight in delight. Little coos and whistles spill out of him in a seemingly thoughtless stream until he pressed both of his hands flat to his chest and says, “Sun!”

It takes you a moment to process what he’s saying. Oh! You hadn’t even realized you’d called him by the mental nickname you’d assigned him. But…this reaction doesn’t seem like a matter of him simply not liking the nickname. No, instead it was like he was just correcting you. Not Sunny, but Sun.

The implications of the fact that he apparently already has a name- a human, English name- and is familiar enough with it to pronounce it perfectly himself, that it was so similar to the nickname you’d come up with for him, and that he appears to regard the name positively… there’s a lot to unpack here, and frankly you’re a little dizzy with the revelation. “Sun” is not a clinical name. You know the kinds of things FazCo calls their assets prior to public debut. RX-W’32. FFB-G1. GB’83. DJMM. Impersonal, sterile, hardly names at all. No, Sun is sentimental, considerate of his form and personality…it fits him perfectly. It’s the sort of thing that someone who recognized him as the warm, sweet individual you see before you would call him. So who gave him the name?

You stutter over the name once, eliciting another pleased squeal from the mer, and clear your throat and try again.
“So, your name in Sun, huh?”

He coos and applauds, nodding excitedly.

Your eyes dart to the far end of the pool, where the other mer is presumably lurking. Your lips perse in thought and you hum.

“So, does that mean that he’s Moon?”

It’s just a hunch, but apparently you had the right idea since Sun cheerfully confirms your suspicion, tilting his head back and whistling sweetly towards his tankmate, apparently over his irritation with him from a moment ago. You don’t hear a response, and the shark-like mer doesn’t resurface, but it doesn’t dampen Sun’s mood.

Sun and Moon, huh? A visually striking, intelligent, seemingly pair bonded set of mers that come with their own perfect theming? Again, you’re struck by how perfect these two would have been as attractions at the Mega Water World (you’re glad they were spared that, but the situation they’re stuck in as an alternative is hardly a victory). So what is it that FazCo deemed so catastrophically wrong with them that the company didn’t even bother transporting them to the main facility? Why were they left here, apparently written off as a lost asset, not even worth dissecting? The thought makes your stomach roil, but from the brutal, cold-hearted business perspective it’s a valid question, and so far you haven’t come close to finding any kind of answer.

You give Sun your own name almost as an afterthought and fail to smother the laughter that bubbles out of you when he tries and fails adorably to say it. He blows a raspberry, face screwing up in frustration at his own struggle, but you reassure him that it’s okay not to always get it right on his first try. He looks like he still wants to pout about it for a bit, but instead his face scrunches and contorts until his jaw opens wide (and oh gods it opens so wide and his teeth are horrifically sharp and he could bite your hand off without even thinking about it) and his eyes squeeze shut as he yawns, bright pink (barbed looking) tongue curling. He yawns so wide and long- a gurgling little sound in it- that his jaw pops loudly before it’s done and his teeth snap together with a sharp click.

You’re no stranger to sharp-toothed marine mouths, and even the scare Moon gave you doesn’t erase the itching you have to hold the mer’s jaw and poke around in there. Purely in scientific interest, of course. You won’t! You do value keeping all of your fingers, after all, and if Mike found out he very definitely would kill you for sheer recklessness. But the curiosity is there nonetheless.

“You must be sleepy, huh pal?”

Sun puts on a brave face, but it’s like a switch has been flipped in the mer and he can’t fight the sleepy squint of his eyes or the droop of his fins. You chuckle under your breath. There’s just something about seeing huge apex predators being sleepy that’s just unbearably cute, and the current circumstances don’t erase that. The tarp and foam ball wait behind you. You’d been hoping to show both to Sun this evening, but you don’t want to deprive him of rest when he so clearly needs it. You can hardly imagine how much he’s had to restrict his metabolic processes to survive starvation as long as he has, but he and Moon must need as much sleep as they can get. Still, you need a little more from the friendlier mer before you’re left alone with his counterpart.

“It’s okay, bud. I’ll make sure to be back earlier tomorrow. I just have a couple of quick questions before you go to sleep, if you’re up to it?”

Bubbles rise where his mouth has sunk below the water, pouting, but he nods regardless. You give him a smile of encouragement and run just a few quick status checks by him. Has he experienced any new stomach pains since you started feeding him? No. Despite the infection in his gills, is he able to get enough breath? Does his heartrate feel normal? He nods in affirmation to both, wincing at the reminder of his gills and you promise him you’re working on getting something together to help with those. He responds with a sleepy little coo and your heart melts a little. Better wrap this up though. He seems to be fading remarkably quickly now that the sun is down, and a quick glance to the side lets you know that Moon is growing antsy, red eyes boring into you from across the pool.

You lower your voice and ask Sun if he got an answer from his counterpart regarding any abdominal pain. He tells you Moon said no around another face-splitting yawn, and you thank him for asking for you, but you chew the inside of your cheek. You do appreciate the insight, but you can’t trust it all that much, can you? Moon doesn’t appear to have a problem lying when it comes to giving you information, even if it’s in his own best interest to tell the truth, and you can’t trust that he told Sun the truth when he almost certainly knew it was really you who was asking.

There’s no real use trying to get any more out of Sun right now- the poor thing is half asleep as it is, slowly blinking out of synch as he regards you with bleary pale eyes. You thank him for talking to you and wish him a goodnight, which he gargles a reply to that almost sounds like a goodnight itself, if spoken underwater and slurred. He sinks until only his squinty eyes and upper facial fins are still out of the water and begins to drift over to where Moon is waiting, having finally surfaced. The dark mer has his arms open to receive his counterpart, who swims into them sluggishly and immediately drapes himself over him like they’d been when you first arrived this evening. So this must be a habit for them then…

Your fingers itch to take notes, photographs. To somehow document these behaviors. In just the couple of days you’ve spent with them you’re coming to realize just how much you- and humanity in general- doesn’t know about mers because FazCo doesn’t keep them in groups at the Water World, and they are the only ones that have mers in captivity. Mer observations in the wild are few and far between, and so little is known about their social dynamics. While they share a few striking similarities- their throat and hips fins, and the crescent coloration on their faces most obviously-Sun and Moon don’t even look like the same ecotype, so what exactly is the nature of their bond?

Moon floats on his back, watching you with narrowed eyes over the mass of Sun’s limp form and drooping fins. Something shivers in the air, the thrumming of a sound you can feel ripple over your skin but can’t make out with your human ears. A hungry part of yourself wants to stay and observe, but you push that part of yourself away and, slowly, get to your feet, brushing off your knees as you stand. Moon carries Sun in slow paces from one side of the back of the pool to the other, but even as he moves through the water his head stays angled toward you, not letting you out of his sight. You raise your hands, palms out, as you back away.

“I’ll be right back,” you tell him, really just as a courtesy. The white frills around his face flex, but he doesn’t respond beyond that tiny movement. Betting on the idea that he won’t be willing to drop his sleeping tankmate to try and attack you, you allow yourself to turn your back on him while you rifle through your bag and grab your polaroid camera and notebook before slipping back out of the shed.

You double back to the other sheds, just to check and see if you missed anything the first time. There’s nothing much, besides a couple of worn and rotting report logs that you find in the DJMM shed, all the research removed but the initials of the staff scribbled on the log. A few initials repeat more than the others- no real surprise, they were probably supervisors or something. There’s H.E., W.A., and just the letter V, repeating the most, especially towards the end of the log. Is it a V, or maybe they were trying to indicate a five? Some other code? You can’t imagine the initials of some random workers being especially helpful, but you snap a photo of the logs just in case.

You never did get to the other couple of sheds beyond Sun and Moon’s the first time you were here. It doesn’t occur to you that you should’ve remembered to bring the bolt cutters back with you until you reach the door of the first, directly to the left of Sun and Moon’s shed. The padlock is rusted to hell, but try as you might to yank it free or break the old chains it’s no use. Scowling, you move onto the last of the sheds and hope it’s more willing to budge.

Lucky for you, the lock for this shed already lies broken apart on the floor, the door slightly ajar. You turn your phone’s flashlight on and peak inside before going in. The space looks messy, with carts and boxes all over the place. The ceiling seems mostly intact, making the dark in the shed thick and imposing and the lapping of the waves through the tide bars ominous in a way you never usually thought of the sea- like some hungry mouth in the dark waiting for you to step just a little too close. Your footsteps echo hollowly in the space, your breathing sounds too harsh in your own ears. You don’t know what it is, but this shed more than all the others feels claustrophobic, tomb-like.

The first thing you do is check the water. The black surface ripples with the waves, a foul foam building up on the edges of the pool where barnacles have grown in wide clusters. No gleaming eyes find you from out of the darkness, and no bodies stir the surface.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

Nothing answers but the echo of your own voice, and a shiver goes down your spine at the tin sound of it. Something is wrong about this shed, something that makes you feel more unsettled than even Moon’s red glare and snapping teeth. You know you’re being irrational- there is nothing to hurt you here in the shed- but your hand is shaking and the way your flashlight shudders across the darkness of the shed (it’s not piercing the darkness as well as it should, you’re certain of it) is only making things worse.

You backpedal to the door, gripping the wall and sliding across the aluminum siding to find your way out without having to turn your back on the darkness of the shed. You stumble, almost tripping over a small box, before making your way back into the open air of the facility and shutting the door with far more force than necessary, yelping at the loud bang you cause with the gesture.

You press shaking fingers to your lips, half bewildered by your shallow, quick breathing. What the hell was that? Maybe your nerves are just starting to get to you? Maybe it was just too dark in there and your imagination has been given too much free reign to imagine doom and danger lately. Whatever the case, you know you’ll need to investigate the two sheds properly soon, but you’re willing to set it aside until you have the reassuring light of day to keep you company.

Thoroughly freaked out, you call your sleuthing done for the night and make your way back to the mers. When you reenter the shed your eyes immediately seek out the mers in the water. Moon is easy to find, luminous red eyes wide and staring at you from near the edge of the pool. He must have deposited Sun under the water somewhere to sleep, because he’s not carrying him now. He’s out of the water up to his waist and utterly still, regarding you with a level of sobriety you’ve yet to see from the aggressive, mischievous mer. You eye him warily.

“What?”

He just tilts his head at you, mouth set in a dissatisfied line. You shift on your feet.

“Is it about the loud sound just now? Sorry about that. I didn’t wake Sun, did I? I just…spooked myself is all,” you ramble awkwardly, still shaky from the strange energy from the dark in the other shed. Moon hums a gravely low sound in his throat, and it should be intimidating like everything else the mer does but you find the fact that he reacted at all oddly reassuring. He moves across the length of the pool slowly, back and forth.

You keep an eye on him as you make your way over to your small pile of supplies. You eye the ball but immediately brush it aside. He’s doing surprisingly well with you so far tonight, but you can’t even imagine Moon being open to something like playing. The tarp sits beside it and you press your lips into a tight line, considering. How much are you going to push your luck tonight? How much can you get away with? With Sun asleep, one misstep could have you at the bottom of the pool with Moons jaws clamped around your throat.

You suck in a bracing breath through your nose (you don’t miss the way Moon stiffens at the sound, his face frills bristling) and find your nerve. You’re scared of the mers, you can admit that much to yourself. Yes, Moon more than Sun, but you can’t pretend as though you aren’t afraid even when dealing with the more docile of the two. You’d be a fool not to be. One human working alone with unknown, injured apex predators? There are protocols and procedures for mer handling for a reason. Sure, some of them are FazCo’s special, fucked up brand of controlling the humans and mers under their authority, but no small part of it is real, practical standard practice, applied to working with all large marine predators. Every minute you’ve spent working with these two so far has been a risk to your own life.

Still…

If you’re afraid, you can only imagine how Sun and Moon feel. Captured from their natural habitat, imprisoned by creatures they couldn’t communicate clearly with, and then subjected to who knows what kinds of tests and mistreatment? And after all of that, to be left behind to fester as their cage decays around them, denied even the dignity of being released to try their hand at surviving back in the sea after their time in confinement. These two have far, far more reason to fear you- a human- than you do them. Your nails and teeth may be blunt, but they know better than to think you’re harmless.

Mind made up, you turn to face the shark-like mer. The tarp is heavy in your arms, one of the largest and most durable options the store had to offer. You carry it over to the edge, staying back just a couple of feet, taking the risk of being within Moon’s reach. One eye squints at you, his equivalent of raising a brow at your brazen display. You raise your chin and push your shoulders down from the defensive hunch they want to raise up into, and you don’t think you quite manage an air of nonchalance but you fix something like a casual smile onto your face.

“Hey, Moon,” you greet. The dark mer blinks those bright ruby eyes at you quickly before his nose scrunches up like he’s smelled something sour, the long, black-tipped curve of his flukes swiping the surface of the water harshly, sending a spray of cold water over your shins. You grit your teeth but hold your ground.

“If you’d prefer I call you something else, just say so.” He splashes you again, this time saltwater misting even your face. You sigh deeply through your nose. “That’s rude, Moon.”

“Nnnaughtyyyy,” he hisses the word like a scold, but he doesn’t make a move towards you, doesn’t grab at you with those wicked claws or lunge at you for a bite. Your legs hurt from how tensely you stand, ready to leap away at any moment, fighting the impulse to do so with every sweep of his tail as he continues to do what amounts to pacing along the edge of the pool.

You shift the tarp in your arms, angling it for him to see better. “I got this today. It’s a covering for part of the pool, to help protect you two from the sunlight. But I need help putting it up. Will you help me with it? Please?”

The dark mer looks at you like maybe you’ve grown a second head, his own tilting unnervingly far to one side. Then he’s laughing again, that sharp rattling hiss edged with mania, and flashing those sharp teeth at you before he snaps them together around a simple, clear “No,”.

He flips in the water, his lazy pacing turning into figure-eights while he watches you with eyes curved into amused red crescents.

“Moon, please,” you plead, clutching the tarp.

You don’t want to push him too fast. You don’t want to force him to cooperate. The tarp will get put up either way- you’re sure Sun would be willing to help you secure it in the morning if Moon refuses- but you’ve had precious few opportunities to engage in a positive way with the darker mer and it’s crucial that you build his trust somehow, the way you’re managing to do with his counterpart. He deserves the patience of months and years to develop his trust and cooperation, but you don’t have that time.

Unsure what else to do, you set the tarp down and push it to the edge of the pool, nearly into the water, and back away with your hands up.

“Look, I won’t get near you. Take a look at it yourself. It’s harmless! Just something to help make sure you guys have some shade during the day. If we can’t give you both somewhere to get out of the sun then those burns won’t start to heal properly.”

His eye twitches minutely, the one surrounded by little burn blisters, and you think maybe you’re getting through to him.

“I just need you to secure one end of it to the bars, and bring the other end back here so I can weigh them down. I won’t even come close to the water until you say I can. Please?”

Maybe it’s a stupid idea- he could shred the thing out of spite and they’d be left to cook for another day while you went to buy another and got Sun to help you with it- but you take a half-step forward again, stretch out your leg, and kick the tarp into the water. It bobs at the surface for a moment before water floods between the folds of the fabric and it sinks sluggishly, turning into a vague shadow at the bottom of the pool. You back away again and wait.

Moon watches the tarp sink with only a slight tilt to his head, wide grin twitching into a thin, humorless smile while the rest of his expression pinches. Narrowed crimson eyes find you and you think maybe this is the first time Moon has looked at you without any apparent hostility at all. It’s all buried under the profound confusion with which the dark mer regards you, like your very existence is an enigma to him. He keeps doing that, like you refuse to meet his expectations and he just doesn’t understand why. You get the distinct impression that he’s asking you questions, but he doesn’t say a word. Maybe he just doesn’t have the language to ask with? Or maybe he wouldn’t say anything even if he could.

Then, without a sound, Moon sinks beneath the surface, disappearing into the inky water, and you’re sure you’ve missed your shot on this one. A weight settles across your shoulders and you muffle your sigh by scrubbing a hand over your face. Fine. This is fine. You just have to hope that he doesn’t destroy the tarp before Sun can help you with it in the morning. You can’t be mad at Moon for reacting with entirely reasonable distrust. It’s not his fault you’re working on an unrealistic, bullshit timeline. At least you got through the interaction with any violence. That’s a win! Still, you press the heel of your palm to your mouth to try and wipe away the frown of disappointment that wants to settle there.

It works well to smother your yelp of surprise, then, when Moon thrusts himself out of the water at the far end of the pool, one hand clutching the tide bars and the other holding an end of the tarp. With a grunt of effort he hooks an elbow around the bar to keep himself hoisted up, pulled out of the water up to the scarlet fins around his hips, and starts tying a rough knot into the straps at the end of the tarp around the bar. With a flicker, the bulb at the back of his head comes aglow with a soft golden light. It’s a warmer color than you’ve ever seen in bioluminescence, like candlelight trapped inside his body rather than the biochemical processing of luciferin. It casts gentle illumination over the mer’s back, revealing jagged blue dorsal fins you hadn’t gotten a good look at before trailing the line of his spine from the base of his neck to his mid-back, and, as the bulb swings, giving you a look at Moon’s gills.

They curve upwards sharply right under the broad jut of his ribcage, and the skin around them is scored with thin, overlapping scars. He’s too far for you to see them clearly, but the fine white scarring sticks out clear as day on the black half of his torso. You bite the inside of your cheek hard enough to taste copper, a sour feeling settling like a rock in your gut. Sun had complained about gill irritation, too, but even he hadn’t shown any signs of surface damage on them. That does not bode well…

Moon drags himself across the bars to secure the next tie, and the next. When the last of the knots is secured in place, he grabs the body of the tarp in his hands and gives it a good tug, seemingly satisfied when the ties stay together. He slides down the bars and back beneath the small waves washing in through the tide wall. This time, though, the glowing bulb on his head stays lit, giving you something by which to track his movement across the pool as he drags the rest of the tarp back to your side of the shed. You hold your breath, afraid that even the tiniest movement will set the dark mer off when he surfaces and shoves the other end of the tarp out of the pool.

Instead of diving back below, Moon backs away from the edge with languid swipes of his tail, keeping his eyes- half-lidded, waiting- on you. You don’t move, not an inch, even as he stalls in the middle of the pool, caught under a beam of moonlight from a no-longer-quite-full moon that you hadn’t noticed rise. The silver-white scales on half his face and upper torso glint in the light, and you think that maybe he was even more aptly named than his counterpart.

You swallow hard to clear your throat- becoming instantly aware that you haven’t had a drink of water since you got here and hating the dry, scratchy sensation- and make a small gesture with your hand to the soaked tarp partially bundled on the pool’s rim.

“Is it alright if I approach now?”

Moon tilts his head at you. You’re mesmerized by the glowing bulb that bobs in the water behind him.

You press your lips into a thin line, shifting on your feet.

“I told you I wouldn’t come close until you said it was okay, and I meant it. Is it okay, now?”

There’s that expression again, like you’re the most fundamentally confusing thing he’s ever seen. This time, though, there’s an edge of amusement to it, like when you see something just so bizarre that you can’t help but laugh at it.

He waves a hand dismissively at the tarp. “Yesss.” But his assent doesn’t sound dismissive. It sounds half like a dare.

Your steps are slow- partially to appease your own caution and partially to keep from accidentally startling Moon- but he doesn’t move an inch while you struggle to bundle the soaking wet length of the tarp into your arms, shivering from the cold of the water even through your drysuit. You’re suddenly very grateful that you made sure to cover the cuts on your leg with a waterproof layer before coming here tonight. The dark mer laughs lowly while you untangle and smooth out the ends of the tarp along the edges of the pool. Moon must have tied his side of the tarp above some barnacles or something, keeping the fabric suspended slightly above the water at an angle. You have to heft the fabric awkwardly to tilt water that pooled in the center, stumbling precariously and sending your heart into a terrified gallop when Moon reacts to your flailing with honest to goodness cackling. You bite your lip hard. Traumatized or not, you have a feeling Moon is just a gremlin by nature.

Once you have the whole thing untangled and spread out, you quickly move to grab your bag before the waves can stretch up their fingers and drag the tarp back into the water to muss it up again. Sitting heavy at the bottom are a stack of sand weights that you’ll be glad to be relieved of. You go along the edge, soaking each pouch of sand with water to increase its weight before settling it down to hold part of the tarp in place. You do this a dozen times, and Moon seems to grow bored of it after the first half, electing to resume his languid (ominous) pacing. Once you’ve finished the tarp hangs just a few inches above the surface of the water at an angle, covering a little less than a third of the pool, with a good amount of slack weighted on the dry ground. It’ll give the boys enough room to get both of them out of the sun for some reprieve, though not enough space to freely swim around much. It’ll do for a resting spot.

Dark as it’s already gotten, it’s nearly pitch black under the tarp as far as you can see, so when Moon ducks underwater and trails across the pool to test out the space- like a cat with a new box - he looks like nothing to you but a will-o-wisp trailing his comet-like appendage through the black water. He makes slow figure eights while you settle yourself down, cold and sore now. At least you’re still mostly dry (thank you drysuit). You stretch back and pull the foam ball toward you, rolling it between your hands. Exhaustion has crept up quickly and is starting to settle hard over your bones, and the injury on your leg is starting to burn something fierce. You’re setting yourself in a dangerous position, encouraged by Moon’s cooperation and eager to engage with the cagier mer more, but too tired to be properly alert and cautious.

Moon seems to notice your lapse in judgement, surfacing just enough to level half lidded, slightly luminous red eyes and an arched browbone at you as he drifts towards the edge of the pool. You’re a good few feet back from the water, but not so far that the mer couldn’t reach you if he really, really wanted to, and you both know it. Still, you stay where you’re at, holding the ball up for Moon to see.

“Thank you for that,” you tell him, nodding at the tarp and smiling even as Moon narrows his eyes and sniffs dismissively at your gratitude. “I also brought this for you two. It’s just a simple toy, but I thought- well, you know, I thought you guys have to be bored so it might be nice to have something?” Now that you’re explaining yourself you can’t help but feel a little silly, voice wavering with doubt. These aren’t animals to play fetch with, you hope you don’t offend him.

“So, uh, yeah! It’s just a little gift. You don’t have to do anything with it, but I figured it’d be nice for you two to have. So…yeah.” You’re not sure you’ve ever felt so awkward in your life, tapping the ball anxiously with one hand before rolling it away from you to plop lightly into the water.

Both of you watch it bob across the surface, swaying with the ripple of each gentle wave that comes in through the tide bars. Moon makes no move towards it, no move away. He just watches, gaze flicking between you and the ball a couple times, as it slowly drifts further into the pool. It floats along until it comes close enough to bump into his shoulder, his head tilting to track its path all the way, before he raises his arm with a twitch and smacks it down on top of the ball, driving it underwater. You swallow around a sudden lump in your throat. Oh good, more of this.

His arm keeps the ball down for a long, drawn-out moment. He can clearly see you squirm, and his face splits in a sharp-toothed crescent that catches the moonlight and glints unnervingly. His neck fins shiver with an amused sounding hiss before he moves his arm to let the ball go.

Apparently, he hadn’t considered the consequences of that, because when the ball relents to buoyancy and rockets up out of the water, clipping him in the face, he falls back with wide-eyed sputtering. He flails so far that his tail comes up out of the water and ends up whacking the ball as it falls towards the other end of the pool, a strangled sort of gurgling yelp getting swallowed halfway through when his head goes underwater. You smack your hands over your mouth, helpless against the bark of laughter that erupts from you. When Moon resurfaces he’s spitting clicks and growls around a chest-rattling hiss, teeth bared and hands raised up and flexed into claws like he’s strangling you from afar. You can’t help the snorts and wheezing gasps that slip between your fingers as you muffle your laughter, eyes watering with the effort.

“ Naughty!” Moon seethes lowly, smacking the surface of the water. You really, really shouldn’t be laughing but you can’t stifle the giddiness bubbling up. Hissing, snapping, miming, but he hasn’t made a single move to attack you, and you’re certain that he would have by now if he was going to.

“Are you- pfftt- a-are you okay?” You choke out around your laughter. “I didn’t mean for you to hit yourself with it!”

Flat nose scrunched, tail lashing the water beneath him if the roiling water around his chest is anything to go by, he looks like he’d be stomping his feet if he had any. Menacing, sure, but this is unmistakably pouting and nothing more. Amazingly, this is the least threatened by him you’ve felt so far. This isn’t exactly how you pictured this going, but a warm, fizzy bubble of optimism pools in your belly at the progress even so.

Still, his face is pretty burnt. The reminder sobers you a bit- enough to quell the last of your giggles- and you clear your throat. “Ah, really though, you’re not hurt, are you?”

For a second he recoils, looking offended. Then, his eyes squint and he presses the back of one broad hand to his forehead, making a strangled keening sound. He flops, face just barely staying above water, and whines, “Yesss, hurt. Hurt. I’m hurttt.” He twitches and flails, mouth opening wide and a long dark tongue flopping out with a final gurgle before he goes limp and floats belly-up like a dead goldfish.

You wheeze a laugh behind your hand and lean forward, incredulous at the downright playful behavior the shark-like mer is displaying but fully willing to play along, for now. “Oh nooo,” you wail, dramatic but keeping your volume down enough as to not risk waking Sun from wherever he sleeps beneath the surface. “Moon died. Taken out by a child’s toy. That’s so sad! How will I possibly explain this to Sun?”

You see the corner of Moon’s mouth twitch up, but he only slowly turns so that he’s floating on his side, face hanging in the water and a few bubbles rising up around his head. Even with his mouth submerged, you can hear him groan and, you might be imagining it but you think you see his shoulders shaking slightly. You’re not eager to look a gift horse in the mouth at this exact moment, but this dramatic switch in attitude has you mentally reeling.

You scoot just a bit closer to the edge and his head tilts, one eye peaking open to watch you. “Oh good, you’re alive! Well, that’s a relief,” you tease. He huffs a breath through his nose, bubbles erupting on the surface of the water, and flips so that he’s floating on his back once more, hands folded over his middle.

“Nooo, I died,” he argues, mouth pulling into a sharp smile. His tail sweeps across the surface in long, languid drags, spinning him in slow circle.

You snort, settling back down a couple of feet closer than you were before. “You’re speaking my language… exceptionally well. Did someone try to teach you before?” You cling to an air of nonchalance when you ask, smothering the shrieking part of your mind that insists that he absolutely should not be able to learn and utilize human speech at the rate he’s doing it.

He responds with a series of inhuman clicks and whistles, gesturing with his hands like he’s giving a complex lecture. You roll your eyes. You were right before: he’s just a gremlin by nature.

“Oh yeah? That’s good to know,” you drawl, playing along as if he’d answered you in perfect English. He laughs that hissing laugh again, replacing his hands over his stomach. “Alright, so your face hurts, and you’ve died. Anything else I should know of? Your abdomen, maybe?” Your prying is less than subtle now, but you’re hoping his good mood makes him a little more willing to give you some honest insight.

He just sniffs though, waving off your question.

You chew your lip. He’s clever- frightfully clever- so maybe just being upfront is the best call? “Are you sure? Because if it hurts, it could mean you’re sick. And if you’re sick, I can get you something to make you feel better,” you wheedle.

He flips onto his stomach, narrowing his eyes at you with a huff. The blue fins around his throat flex in apparent irritation. “No. No hurtsss, no sssick.”

You press your lips into a tight line and hold your breath for a long moment but… you have to take his word for it, at least for now. You can’t treat him for an illness you don’t know that he has, and you have to respect his autonomy. “Ok,” you assent, “alright, I’ll drop it. Just tell me if that changes, ok?”

Moon’s head tilts a smidge and he blinks slowly at you. Then, without another word, he dives seamlessly underwater, the fins ridging his spine and tail cresting above the surface in a smooth arch. His nightcap-like bulb glows vivid gold in the dark water, trailing through the murk in an aimless swirl before it winks out, and Moon is completely lost to your sight.

You stagger to your feet, resisting the urge to peer over the edge of the pool. You call out to Moon, wary and unsure, but after several minutes pass without him resurfacing you take the hint that you’re conversation is over. Again, exhaustion makes itself known in the ache of your limbs and you sigh deeply, collecting your bag. You risk approaching the black water just long enough to deposit another tube of burn cream. Hopefully between this and the tarp the boys will fare significantly better through tomorrow’s low tide and midday sun.

“Goodnight,” you call over your shoulder as you turn to leave for the night. You don’t see crimson eyes pop up at the edge of the pool and watch you go.

~~~

Black water bubbles up over an edge of the pool that you cannot see. The shed is humid and hot, the air thick with the choking smell of salt water and rot, the scent so cloying it floods your mouth and coats your throat. You gag, and something in the darkness shudders, preening under your disgust.

You step warily into the blackness, footsteps too loud as they meet a thin layer of cold water that seeps through the fabric of your shoes and makes you shudder. Your knees shake and despite the oppressive air your breaths come in shallow little gasps as you move forward, answering a compulsion you’re powerless to fight against. Water steadily climbs your legs as you move deeper through the gloom, fingers of what you pray is only seaweed coiling and curling around your calves before being pulled reluctantly away with the drag of the tide. The sound of the waves is hollow, sharp, cracking in a way it shouldn’t be in a man-made structure, like you’re at the bottom of a steep cliff. Like you’re standing right before the teeth of a great, gaping maw. You can’t see the walls, but the aluminum shed feels far larger than it should. Around you, the darkness feels endless.

Come. Come here. Don’t be afraid. You wont die.

You can hear something moving in the water. You can feel the way the ripples disturb the space around you, a huge form shifting and displacing the water close- too close- but out of sight. The voice is saccharine, soft, and you know in every atom of your being that it is lying. Your breaths come harsh, wheezing and the sound mingles with the mocking hush of the waves. You can’t stop moving forward. The water laps mercilessly around your hips, terribly cold.

Come, please. We need you, so that we can leave. You must help us.

You become aware of a high, wailing sound, thin and reedy. It takes another moment before it registers that the sound is coming from you, hissing out of your too-tight throat. Your whole body is tensed, shivering, every muscle viscerally rejecting your ceaseless march forward into the freezing dark. Something solid slides against your leg and a sob wrenches out of you.

It will only hurt for a moment. Isn’t this why you came here?

The voice comes from all around you, sweet and confused, as a hand wraps itself around your calf. Sharp claws crawl their way slowly up your leg, rising steadily higher as the water climbs up to your waist, your chest. No part of you beneath the water will respond to your commands, only moving forward without restraint into the cold pitch. But your arms and head thrash, terrified, meaningless sounds tearing from you in a desperate stream of horror. The hands that have you are slimy, even through your clothes. The claws prick and leave a burning trail of punctures in their wake. You are going to die.

I don’t understand…

The water reaches your throat and all you can do is sob as foul, dark liquid pours in over the sides of your wide, wailing mouth. Clawed hands enclose your neck as the sea rushes in to fill your throat. Fighting is useless. Resisting is futile. You don’t get the chance to take a final breath before your head goes under, eyes still wide open and sightless. Water floods your mouth, your nose, pooling heavy and acidic in your lungs. It burns, it burns!, You are overwhelmed with the taste of iron and salt and things left out to rot as it fills every inch of you. The hands on you creep up to your face. A cold, clammy, webbed grip secures you in a steel vice. One hand grips your jaw, fingers keeping your mouth pried open too far. The other snakes past your teeth, tearing the corners of your mouth and following the water down and into you. You want to scream, but there’s no room left in your throat.

We will find a way out.

~~~

You wake up screaming, so tangled in your bed sheets that when you flail in your half-awake panic you manage to fall off your bed. At least the impact with the floor does a fine job of waking you up the rest of the way, leaving you sputtering and squinting against the early noon light that managed to slip in around the edge of your blackout curtains. You managed to land on your leg and it starts to throb something fierce, getting better but still pretty sore.

Taking that as your cue to reapply some numbing antibacterial cream to the cuts and change their bandages, you pull yourself up by the edge of the bed and risk a glance at your bedside clock. It’s early still, Mike must have just headed out for his shift. He always get’s there well before he’s allowed to clock on at six though anyways, and FazCo never discourages mer handlers from spending extra off-the-clock time with their charges. They won’t pay him overtime for spending an extra ten or twelve hours a week with Freddy, but it’s an unspoken expectation nonetheless.

For you, that means your little nap lasted only a couple of hours, and the sun won’t be up for at least one more. You’re sleep schedule is thoroughly fucked, and you see no improvement on that front any time soon- not with your mers to see to. Still, you’ll have time to nap again before heading back to see Sun and Moon later. For now, there’s a backlog of notes you need to get down while the details are still fresh in your head. For something like this, hand-written notes is the only way to go. Keeping documents on your computer, so long as you’re under FazCo wifi, is way too risky.

You don’t quite limp over to the bathroom- it isn’t as bad as all that anymore- and pull out your first aid kit. The acts of undressing, cleaning, checking for infection, and redressing the wounds on your leg are routine, and your mind wanders as you work through them. What can you bring today to progress the mers’ care that also won’t be pushing things over the line of “too much, too soon”? You could try offering the supplements and general medication with their food, but you don’t have high hopes of Moon letting that one pass just yet. And while Sun had gotten close to let you observe him before, you can’t imagine he’d handle you flushing his gills with saline well at all. Blood tests and weight checks are off the table, and you still haven’t figured out a solution to the water quality problem.

A pool filter would be next to useless without enough freshwater influx, and there’s just no way you can provide that. Certainly not enough, or with any consistency. So what can you do to improve the quality of the water they do have, consistently, without throwing endless cleaning tablets in and crossing your fingers really hard in the hopes that it does something more than a placebo effect? Something that works with the environment they’re stuck in. Something that can keep working even with the intertidal nature of the holding pool. What’s something that can somehow manage all that, that you can also reasonably get your hands on without throwing up several red flags to FazCo and spending a fortune you simply do not have?

The question eats at you all through a sleepy, bland breakfast of oatmeal, which is made only marginally better by the overripe banana you crush into it more as an excuse to use the fruit before it spoils than anything else. It’s while you’re scrubbing out your dish in the sink and you glance up to catch a few early rays of dawn on your face through the tiny kitchen window that you just happen to catch sight of the few knick-knacks you and Mike have strewn over the windowsill. Bits of seaglass, cone shells, one of Chica’s brightly iridescent scales (that one you are absolutely not supposed to have, but the reef fish mer’s handler has very little regard for the rules and a talent for getting away with things). And, stacked in a little pile on the corner, are three oyster shells, polished and gleaming with nacre.

You want to slap yourself for how obvious it is. It’s been a long while since you’ve worked with oysters in any context other than as food, the occasional treat for the sea otters at the Mega Water World and a personal favorite that you indulge in every few months. Still, it seems like the perfect solution. Oyster are nature’s water filter, and are readily available. You’ll need…a lot of them, for a pool that size. A few dozen, at least. But it could be a start- a good, sustainable, realistic start. You spare a moment to mentally mourn your wallet, but it passes quickly in the wake of something you can do for the mers that might actually help.

It’ll be a few hours yet until you can call any of the oyster farms in the area of the facility to place an order. You’ll need to start small to avoid suspicion, keeping your order to just a couple dozen at a time. While you sit down to nurse a cup of coffee and jot down your notes for the last few days you dedicate a page to the names, numbers, and descriptions of various oyster farms and independent fishing ships you can plan to go through. You try to pick ones spaced out between the Water World and the old facility, where you can make stops along your commute to pick up orders rather than carrying a full loadout the entire two hours every time. Luckily for you most of the commute follows the coastline, giving you plenty of options.

You spend the next hour going through the polaroids and adding notes to the backs. Date, time, location, thoughts and impressions and theories. You linger over the pictures you got of Sun. The low quality of the film does no favors to hide his emaciation, but he’s still a striking thing to behold. The photos of him get slipped into your little notebook, secured to the pages dedicated to notes about his health, weight, personality, and your plans for rehabilitation. You chew on your lip (a bad habit maybe, since it’s starting to sting a bit). Really, you should probably get a separate notebook for the mers, considering the bulk of pages even these first few days have taken up in this one about them, and that is still without having any photos of Moon yet to annotate.

Page after page of notes about the darker mer get filled in anyways. Last night’s interactions had been… well, they’d been far and above what you’d expected so early on, on multiple fronts. The most obvious and paradigm shaking, of course, is Moon’s apparent talent for language. It’s absolutely gone beyond “pretty impressive” and straight into “uncanny and bordering the unbelievable” at this point. Mimicry is one thing, but last night he’d taken words he’d heard once, without practicing them at all, and used them to craft his own sentences. His own clear, coherent sentences. That is simply not how that goes. Even humans don’t have that kind of adaptability between languages, and they’re not having to work against differing biological structures in their throats. Some creatures are skilled mimics, sure, but you don’t ever expect a parrot to start forming new, unique sentences and chatting freely with you at will.

And chat he had. You’re not so naïve as to think that Moon is now comfortable with you being around, not really, but his behavior last night compared to the previous interactions with him was like night and day (no pun intended). He’d been cooperative, even playful in his own way! And sure, maybe it just comes down to his intelligence. Maybe he recognizes now that you’re trying to help and don’t seem to be much of a threat on your own. You can only guess. The mers aren’t human, but they aren’t just animals either. They’re people, capable of higher thought and emotion and reasoning just like you or anyone else. You can’t exactly expect them to react the way a seal or dolphin would, but you haven’t been. You know mers, you know how they think and how they behave…or, you thought you did. Faced with the enigma that is Sun and Moon, you feel untethered from the dock of what you believed you understood about these beings, floating in an unfamiliar sea with only vague guesses as to what waits in the water below.

You close the notebook with a tired sigh, scrubbing a hand over your eyes. The worst part is that, well, you can’t help but feel a little excited by the prospect of all that unknown. Which you also feel guilty for, of course, because you should not be getting some kind of weird biologist high off of your mers’ misfortune. But what can you do? You got into this line of work in the first place because you love these creatures, because you’re hungry to learn as much as you can about them. This is just part of your nature.

The notebook and photos get stuffed back into their hiding places and you prepare for the day. Mers aside, you still have mundane things to see to on what is technically your weekend, and they’ve been put off as much as they can. And if your grocery list happens to have more cans and fillets of fish this week than it usually does, who would notice?

----

The sight that greets you when you manage to drag your cooler full of oysters and ice through the shed doors has you immediately trying to muffle laughter in the crook of your elbow. You could hear the shrieks and whistles of delight from outside, but being able to see Sun pouncing on the pool ball with a high arch of his tail, driving the thing under water, only for it to shoot back up and beyond the surface, the bright mer launching himself right up after it, is something else. Sun goes after the simple toy with puppy-like abandon, and it doesn’t seem like he’s even realized you’re here.

Moon has, apparently. Red eyes appear just beneath the surface and blink sleepily up at you from the shade of the tarp. You spare a hand to smile and wave at him, but he just blinks again, eyes staying just baaaarrely slit open to watch you as you settle your cargo for the day in your dry little section near the far wall.

“Hi guys,” you call out, hoping to avoid startling Sun in case he catches sight of you before you’ve said anything.

You’re already reaching into the mini-fridge to collect handfuls of fish for their dinner when Sun responds with a loud, delighted gasp and a brightly squealed, “Friend!”

You fumble what’s in your hands, whirling to look at the golden mer with wide eyes and a slightly manic giggle. What the fuck?> “Hi Sun! That’s a new one, where’d you learn that?”

He just blinks those big, white eyes at you with a cheerful grin splitting his face. He makes a sweet little whistling sound, claws tip-tapping on the foam ball he holds in front of his chest at the surface. He’s startlingly close to the edge of the pool, facial fins spread wide and illuminated with the early evening sunlight. He looks…not healthy, no, but better. Happiness looks good on him.

A smile tugs at the corner of your mouth. You’re glad that you could do something- even something small- to put that look on his face.

“You seem to be having fun. How are you feeling? Ready for some food?”

Sun trills, rubbing his cheek on the ball and chirping a series of yes’. Your mouth quirks in fond amusement and you recollect your armful of fish, a few more than last time but still a small meal for a full-grown mer. His jovial mood seems to suggest at least that he’s feeling ok, and his burns don’t look any worse than they did yesterday from what you can see. It looks like the tarp did its job.

You raise a capelin up and wave it in Moon’s direction. “Would you like to eat now, or wait until it get’s a little darker out?”

Food seems to be an effective enough motivator for the nocturnal mer. His eyes blink more open, slow and out of synch, and he sluggishly drags himself through the water until he reaches the end of the pool, hidden out of sight by the tarp. One hand reaches around the edge and taps a claw on the concrete before flipping open to display a waiting palm, fingers curling out and in in a “gimmie” gesture.

You laugh, setting Sun’s portion aside to put together Moon’s lot as well. “Ok, but I’m not putting them in your hand for you. Are you up for having any supplements or medicine with the food today? It would help you two to recover faster,” you offer, setting a couple of herring aside.

Moon’s head whips out from behind the tarp with a teeth-baring hiss, his hand curling into a fist that scrapes the concrete. “No,” he snaps with a sharp clap of his jaws, hiss rumbling uninterrupted in his chest.

You raise both hands in a placating gesture, keeping a calm smile on your face despite the way your heart stutters at any sign of the shark-like mer’s hostility. “That’s fine, you don’t have to. I won’t do anything you’re not okay with, I just wanted to check. Just fish today then.”

His nose stays scrunched in dissatisfaction, but your reassurance seems to be enough for him this time. His hand smooths down flat against the floor and the fins around his face and throat relax, his hiss ending with a final huff. He stays just outside the cover of the tarp though, watching you with eyes squinting against the light. His face pinches with obvious discomfort.

On your other side Sun has dripped the edge of the pool with both hands, the ball held between the edge and his chest, with his chin resting on it lightly. He’s still smiling, apparently unbothered by his tank mate’s reaction. You don’t think his good mood will be dampened if you get Moon his fish first so that the darker mer can retreat to the shade of the tarp again, so you scoop up your slimy, cold armful of fish and squid and carefully make your way towards the shaded side of the pool where the lunar mer waits.

“Can you move back a bit please, Moon,” you ask, still a few feet from the pool. Far enough that a hangry mer would have to put a good bit of effort into getting to you if he got impatient, but close enough to acknowledge the growing trust you hope is forming between you. Maybe he is actually becoming more trusting of you, or maybe he’s just too tired right now to put up more of a fuss, but he just arches the gray curl above his eye on the light side of his face primly and slides backwards into the water, ducking back into the shadows where you can still see him.

“Thanks!” you chirp, striding forward to deposit his food at the edge nearest to the corner of the tarp. He waits until you look up and catch sight of him again before he exaggeratedly rolls his eyes, drifting forward slowly enough for you to back away before he seizes the entire bunch of fish in his paddle-like arms and sweeps them into the shadow of the pool with him. You snort. Sassy, but you’ll take it.

You collect Sun’s portion and turn to the bright mer, who has taken his tankmate’s cue and backed away from the edge of the pool…but just barely. The golden mer bobs only maybe a foot from the concrete edge, hands gripping the foam ball and curled close to his chest, but more than long enough to close the distance by simply reaching out. He regards you with wide, bright eyes and a wobbly grin, facial fins twitching just a bit. He looks like he knows he’s doing something he shouldn’t be, and is hoping that you won’t notice.

Your lips press into a flat line. You don’t want to show favoritism, especially long-term, but you want to discourage progress even less. Sun hasn’t shown any hostility to you at all so far, but that doesn’t keep your gut from clenching in harsh trepidation as you inch closer to him.

“No grabbing, ok?” You adopt a playful tone but pause your stride long enough for Sun to reply. Which, to his credit, he does with swift enthusiasm, nodding wildly and chirping his assent. Your smile becomes a little less strained against your mouth, softened with affection at the mer’s antics. Your mind whispers caution- always caution- but you want to trust him.

You crouch at the edge of the pool, wincing a bit at the way the movement stretches the skin around your injured leg, and drop the armful of fish at the lip of the pool. A couple of the tinny capelin slip into the water, but Sun ignores them in favor of sliding a couple inches forward with a worried sounding coo. His face fights to hold onto its cheerful expression but the corners of his smile dip and his facial fins wilt slightly.

“Friend? Friend?” His head tilts and wide white eyes seek out ours. He stretches out one slow, cautious hand to tap two of his claws against the concrete by your feet. “Friend?”

Thinking fast, you pick up a thawed squid and tap his extended knuckles with it, laughing softly. He burbles a flustered little noise and catches the treat out of your grip, tossing it into his mouth so quickly you wonder if it was even a conscious decision or just reflex. “Sweet boy. I’m fine, just a tiny bit sore. Don’t worry, ok?”

The fins around his face twitch from side to side but otherwise he seems reassured enough, but instead of backing up to where he began he extends the back of his hand to you again, eyes darting between you and the pile of fish. You bite your lip, stuck between fondness and reluctance. You shouldn’t have done that just now- you’ve probably just established a precedent for proximity that you’re not entirely sure you’re fully comfortable with just yet- but you’d just wanted something to distract him from becoming upset at your discomfort. And he had been, that was clear. Sun, at least, seems to be growing attached to you as quickly as you are to them. Still though, you had done it and pulling back now feels like it’d just be mean.

The slimy cold texture of dead fish hardly even registers to you now after years of doing this sort of thing, but rarely have you had them plucked from your hand so gently. Sun waits for the cold scales to slide against the back of his hand before he flips it over and- carefully, so carefully- closes his claws around it in blink. One after another you play this little passing game. Once you hover the tips of a squid’s translucent tentacles right over the scaly gold skin of his hands, just barely not touching, for a long moment, until he chirps at you in protest and you drape the squid over his fingers with a laugh. He rumbles with a sound not unlike a purr when he slips that one into his mouth, pale tongue darting out to swipe at the tips of his sharp, bony claws. His eyes squint in delight as he smiles up at you, the very tip of his tapered tongue still peeking out from between his sharp teeth.

You brush your own fingers on the pants of your drysuit as you stand. “You missed a couple that fell into the water. Don’t forget about those,” you remind, glancing up to see if you can find where Moon lurks under the tarp while Sun does a quick dive to grab his escaped snacks.

You flinch, just slightly, when you find the darker mer staring at you, ruby eyes burning with an intensity you can’t place. The fins around his face and neck are spayed wide and stiff and his face is a mask of neutrality. It…doesn’t feel like he’s upset with you, exactly, but something clearly put him on edge. You stumble a bit, turning to walk back over to your cooler and the oysters waiting inside, but keep your eyes on Moon (and he keeps his eyes on you), suddenly unsure.

The cooler has a couple dozen large, live oysters tucked into a steadily melting stash of ice. The sight makes your stomach clench painfully and you grimace with your back turned to the pool. Now that the mers have had their dinner, you need to eat an actual meal at some point tonight too. For now, you grab just one of the rough-shelled mollusks and carry it back over to where Moon lurks, Sun popping up alongside him as you approach with the shellfish held out to show them.

“So guys, I have a bunch of these that I’m going to dump into the pool, ok? They’re little fish that live in the shells, and they’ll help clean the water. I’m hoping that they’ll help your scales and gills start to feel better until we can work out some other solutions too. Try to just leave them alone to work, alright?”

You reach out to set the oyster on the edge of the pool for them to get a better look at, sacrificing one to their curiosity so that hopefully they’d leave the rest of the bunch alone, but before you can Sun reaches forward (and stars, his arms have more reach than you gave him credit for) and plucks it from your hand. You blink at him, part taken aback but mostly resigned to the confirmation that you’ve effectively greenlit him taking things from your hands now, and behind him Moon’s face pinches in a scowl, teeth bared around a low hiss.

You pull your hand quickly back against your chest, as though he might decide to lunge up and bite it from your wrist. He sorta looks like he’s considering it actually, and you frown in confusion.

“Moon, is something wrong?”

Sun turns to regard his tankmate with you, head tilting with an inquisitive whistle. Moon looks between the two of you, flat nose scrunched up in distaste. He claps his jaws, just once, making a sharp percussive sound before his face melts into a more neutral mask, mouth curling into a grin that feels not at all friendly.

“Ssssome thing? No,” he regards you with the half-lidded gaze of a cat looking at a mouse and imagining knitting its guts into a scarf. “No thing, friend.” He says it as two words, and he spits Sun’s endearment like a slur, something which his counterpart takes note of and- apparently- great offense to, because he shrieks an indignant sound and dives, tackling Moon around the top of his tail as he goes and dragging the shark-like mer down with him. Moon has only a second to loose an irritated growl before his head is yanked under water.

They’re barely visible under the shadow of the tarp as they flip each other and wrestle. Their clicks and growls are agitated, but this seems more like…roughhousing than actual fighting. Your mouth pinches, worried probably needlessly, but you pull yourself up anyways. Best to take advantage of their distraction and dump the rest of the oysters into the water, along with a few more water purification tablets. Dwelling on what’s bugging Moon won’t get you anywhere while he’s otherwise occupied.

One by one the oysters- tight lipped and smelling already of a clean and sweet brine- plunk into the pool from your hands. You keep them all in this one corner for now, and with luck the rough pile of their shells will keep them from being battered around too much by the tide. It’d be great if you could get some of the next batches already rooted to an anchor, but this works well enough for a last-minute solution.

With the last of the oysters deposited you’re left with a fishy-smelling tub of melting ice, and an idea strikes you. With a grin, you roll the cooler with you back over to the other side of the pool, crouch, and whistle. At once, two luminous pairs of eyes pop up from the water and lock on you from the shadows of the tarp, one pearlescent and one ruby.

You wave them over with a wide smile. “Come here! I have something cool to show you,” you call out, giggling at your own pun.

Whether their little spat was enough to dispel whatever funk had fallen over Moon or just compelled by curiosity, they both make their way to meet you at the edge of the pool with smooth sweep of their tails. Moon’s eyes dart between you and the cooler, all animosity from before apparently forgotten in the face of something interesting. You stifle another giggle. For all his menace, he really reminds you of a big feral cat: moody and quick to bite, but easy to catch the attention of and even playful under the right circumstances. At his side, Sun regards you with the same open interest and excitement with which he has approached everything else this evening, his lingering nerves only discernable from the way his hands fidget in front of his chest and the slight shiver in his facial fins. He cranes his neck up, as if he’ll be able to peek into the cooler even still a few feet back from it.

Once you’re sure you’ve got their attention, you reach a hand into the ice and slush and pull out a couple of thawing cubes, showing the glittering ice to the mers who tilt their heads curiously at it, Sun reaching forward to try to poke at it, before you unceremoniously pop both into your mouth. They’re salty from sitting with the oysters, maybe a little shell grit mixed in with the water, but they’re thawed enough that they crunch easily under your molars.

It’s a good thing the ice is so slippery in your mouth, or else you would choke on it with the way a yellow and cream hand darts forward to grab your wrist, yanking it back towards his round, awed face with such force that you have to catch yourself on your other hand to keep from faceplanting. Immediately, your heart is in your throat and you fear you’ve made a grave, grave miscalculation. Moon seems to share your moment of shock with the way his eyes bulge at his tankmate, all his fins snapping wide and rigid. But Sun just holds your captured palm close to his face and examines the way the cold of the ice turned the pale skin of your palm pink, head tilting with a chittering sound of curiosity.

“Sun,” you choke, working exceptionally hard to get a reign on your galloping heart. “Sun, buddy, no grabbing, please. No grabbing.”

To his credit, the golden mer only seems to realize what he’s done when you point it out, releasing your hand with a startled little yelp. You’re quick to reassure him, waving of the panic you can see wash over the nervous mer’s face, and try to laugh off the momentary adrenaline spike that just bulldozed you. Stars, it’s going to be hard finding the sweet spot between encouraging interaction and not diving straight into “this is how you get drowned or maimed” territory with these two. Even if Sun hasn’t been aggressive towards you at all (yet), that doesn’t mean that a mer twice your size with razor sharp teeth and claws can’t do a good deal of harm entirely on accident. Heck, you’d once seen one of the sea lion handlers get their leg broken just by being greeted a little too enthusiastically by one of their pinniped charges. A grabby mer could do a lot worse with even the best of intentions.

Still, you refuse to show that you’re shaken this time. Slapping a wide smile back on your face (maybe just the tiniest bit more tense at the edges), you reach back into the cooler with your once again free hand and pull out another handful of steadily melting ice. You hold it out to the mers, jerking your chin in a gesture for Sun to hold his hand out (Moon still looks a little on-edge, eyeing the ice in your palm like it might jump up and bite him).

“Have you ever had ice before? Careful, it’s cold,” you warn, dropping a few cubes into Sun’s waiting palm. He chirps loudly at the sensation when the cubes settle into his hand, immediately whirling on Moon and holding them up for his dark counterpart to get a better look at.

“It’s just water, but some people like how it feels to eat it. You can swallow them whole, they might be hard to bite.”

Moon looks almost scandalized when Sun, without any hesitation at all, throws the handful of ice into his mouth and swallows with an audible gulp. Much to your relief, his instant reaction is delight, both hands pressing to his cheeks as he makes a noise somewhere between a purr and a coo. With wide, excited eyes he holds his hand back out to you, fingers curling in a wanting gesture. You laugh, reaching into the cooler for another handful to pass him, which he then passes to Moon with a high-pitched sound of encouragement.

Moon is far less sure about the melting treat, eyeing the cubes dubiously before looking at you in narrow-eyed suspicion before slipping the ice past his teeth and swallowing them, face morphing at once into an open-mouthed grimace around a choking noise.

“Oh my god, Moon! Are you okay?” You fret, but your concern is buried under Sun’s uproarious laughter. Moon gags, nose scrunched up and tongue sticking out, and whines low in his throat, looking nothing so much as put-out.

“Ah, not a fan then I take it?”

Moon pouts, half-heartedly flicking water at you with the flat of his palm, and scowling at his tankmate, who’s still bent low over the surface of the water with the force of his laughter. Vindictive, Moon puts his hand on the back of Sun’s head and pushes his face underwater, laughter getting muffled in just a flurry of bubbles rising up around his facial fins. He doesn’t seem at all bothered by it.

You lean back, chuckling. “That’s too bad, but no problem. We’ll find something you like eventually."

Moon rolls his eyes at you, drifting on his back until he’s returned to the shade of the tarp, keeping an eye on you from under the sloped drape of the fabric. Sun pops back up from the water, laughter having died down to little amused huffs of breath through his slit nostrils, and you wave to get his attention.

You settle onto the ground properly, legs crossed, and fidget with the cuffs of your drysuit. Mirth becomes heavy on your tongue as you consider that, yeah, it’s probably best to get the bad news out of the way now, while you have both of their attention.

“Hey, there’s actually something I need to tell you two,” you say, more seriously now. “For the next few days I wont be able to be around much.” You flinch at the way Sun’s expression crumples, eyes going wide with anxiety and upset. “I’ll do my best to still show up to make sure you both get fed, but it’ll only be able to be at night, and only briefly. It’ll have to be like that every few days. I wish it didn’t, I’m sorry.”

And you are, even without Sun gripping his lower facial fins and making a terribly whine in his throat, like he’s trying not to cry. You bite your tongue against the impulse to make promises that you can’t keep- to change your mind, reassure him you’ll be back tomorrow and there’s nothing to worry about. You feel awful for having to leave him for days at a time, and you are certain you won’t see him while your visits are confined to the night. While Moon seemed ok with being awake- not well, obviously, but he was managing it- before sunset, Sun had seemed to meet a pretty hard limit at dusk as far as his energy reserves went. Besides, beyond just the anxiety of not being able to check up on his health, it’d be impossible to miss that Sun has become attached to you. And who could blame him? Stuck for stars know how long with only his nocturnal counterpart for company, you can scarcely imagine how lonely the extroverted mer must have been.

Moon, on the other hand, is regarding you with a terribly intense look, and you can’t tell if he’s angry at you for how obviously upset Sun is at your announcement, or if he, like you, is considering how many one-on-one encounters the two of you are going to be having in the dark over the next few days. Sure, he could technically ignore you when you show up each night, waiting until you’ve set two piles of fish out for him and his tankmate and leave before coming out to collect his meal, but you can’t imagine him doing that. He’s been…nice might not be the exact word you’d chose for his behavior over the last couple visits, but not antagonistic at least. Not explicitly dangerous. Will that keep up? You can’t tell by the way he looks at you now, even and unblinking. You want to believe it will. You’re not sure you do.

He must sense you’re growing uncertainty, because he answers it with a slow, sharp grin.

A tug on the leg of your drysuit makes you flinch, and Sun snatches his hand back with a whimper, looking like he expects you to shout at him. You suck in a deep breath and hold it, and when you exhale you consciously resign yourself to letting go of some of your (professional, trained, perfectly reasonable) caution and reach out your hand to him, palm up and open. An invitation, should he want it. Which he evidently does, because as soon as his eyes have darted between your face and open hand a few times, processing your gesture, both of his hands (sharp and so, so much larger than your own) reach forward to hold just your fingers.

You lean forward just slightly and tilt your head to catch his eye, smiling. “Hey pal, it’ll be okay. I promise I’ll be back, and I’ll make sure you two are taken care of. And,” you bite your lip, eyes scanning the pool until you find the toy ball, bobbing back towards the tide bars. You grin and jerk your chin towards it. “Plus, we still have time to play today, if you want?”

It seems that all is forgiven once you utter the word “play”. Sun is immediately thrilled, diving away from you to retrieve the ball so quickly that the wave of water that follows in his wake drenches you from head to toe. You don’t even have time to be upset (you wouldn’t be, not for this) before Moon’s bark of laughter devolves into high, infectious giggles and you find yourself laughing too. Sun pops back up with the ball, too excited to be convincingly remorseful. You play with the golden mer until the sun has disappeared behind the horizon and the petal-like rays around his face begin to wilt with exhaustion even as he fights to play one more round of Keep Ups. He’d been remarkably good at volleying the ball away from the darkening surface of the water with his hands, tail, and even his face once, bouncing it back to your waiting arms. More than half of the few times it had touched the water were on account of Moon’s interferences, tactically splashing water at either of you from his place under the tarp. Or the one time his long tail had smacked Sun on the back of the head just before he could catch the ball.

When sleepiness makes Sun’s reactions too sluggish to keep playing you coax him into a quick health check-up and set aside more burn cream for them. Healing will be slow, but nothing looks worse and the hollows around his eyes are looking just a bit less harsh. Impatience bites at your insides- wishing will and hope were enough to smooth away all their hurts immediately- but any sign of progress soothes the ache.

He holds your hand once more, in what you guess is a gesture of self-soothing, before he submits to the call of sleep and drifts over to where Moon waits with open arms in the darkness under the tarp. You watch them for just a moment, wondering at the way Moon carefully arranges his counterpart to lay comfortably across him in sleep. In a whisper you ask Moon if you’ll let him check his injuries too. He doesn’t say a word, and you didn’t really expect him to. You’re not surprised at all when he just regards you with those bright red eyes over the shape of his tankmate’s sleeping head, and then sinks the both of them under the water, no glow from his bioluminescent bulb to give you a hint to where he floats in water now too dark to discern the shadows in.

You call out goodnight to him anyways before you go.

Chapter Text

One would imagine that the eager barking of six Californian sea lions directly in a person’s face at the ass crack of dawn would be a more effective wake-up call than it’s proving to be, but your mind is foggy with exhaustion and half formed ideas for next steps to help your new mer friends (?) and you end up tossing handfuls of cold fish with little regard to the boisterous greetings of your furry charges. Early morning light stings at eyes raw from not enough sleep but the sea lions are too busy with their breakfast to mind if you’re a little less enthusiastic than usual this morning. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll be able to throw back a cup of coffee from one of the park stands before the Mega Water World actually opens for the day and crowds of excited guests flood in. Once those gates open it’s show time and you better put on your cheerful game face, exhaustion and deep, seething resentment for your employers aside.

Until then, the animals don’t mind if you grumble a few sleepy complaints between servings of their breakfast (fifteen pounds of fish per sea lion, twice a day- still less than Sun and Moon will be needing once they’re back up to weight). You get yappy barks of agreement and puffs of fishy breath in the in response to your grumbled complaints. Not that you take it to heart. The pinnipeds will back whoever is feeding them, the flaky scoundrels. They may look like sea puppies but they lack a canine’s loyalty.

You shake your head to clear out the fuzzy, senseless train of thought and brush your hands off on the bright teal and magenta of your uniform waders, a few tiny silvery scales flaking off on your thighs. Most of the animals have noticed your empty bucket and know the routine well enough to slip back into the water, darting away into the fabricated environment of their enclosure. A couple are a little slower on the uptake, crowding your personal space with eager little grunts and flippers slapping against the wet concrete. You nudge one away with a palm flat to her collar- a move that’s more about asserting social hierarchy than physical strength. Your arms have nothing on a 230 pound mass of muscle, blubber, and teeth.

“Ok Jessie, that’s enough now. You can have treats later,” you huff, planting a quick kiss on the young female’s snout with a loud, dramatic “mwah!” She tosses her head and flops back into the water.

You watch her go with an affectionate little tug at the corner of your mouth, your sour mood from the early hour lightening a bit. There’s a lot wrong with the Mega Water World and FazCo in general, but it can’t dampen your love for the animals, and you’ve known half of these sea lions since they were pups.

Now that the animals have been fed it’s time you try and scrounge up some food for yourself before the park opens. You haven’t been eating properly in days and your body is making a racket about it, cramping painfully with a loud gurgle. There’s a Roxy themed coffee stand not too far from your station that was usually good enough for a quick drink and a scone, but you’ve got enough time this morning to make it over to Freddy’s section of the park and say hello to the star mer and Mike. You could even bring Mike another coffee as a little thanks for all his help lately.

Mind made up, you lock up the sea lion enclosure behind you and head toward the front of the park at something of a jog. You’ve got a bit of extra time, sure, but the park is huge and traversing straight from one end to the other could easily take fifteen minutes on its own. At least you won’t have to make your way through Chica’s section of the park. The tropical reef biome is a maze, a riot of color and dynamic sculpted coral amid a vibrant rainforest setting. Even being familiar with the paths it takes a while to get through it. Luckily, Roxy and Chica’s sections of the park- including your sea lion exhibit- are situated side-by-side toward the back, with Freddy situated closest to the entrance of the Mega Water World and what had been Bonnie’s area set right behind that.

Roxy’s arctic shoreline is streamlined and coldly beautiful- much like the mer it celebrates. Silvery grays and shadowy purples accent the sculpted glaciers and jutting black stone, a single vivid green stripe winding across the ground to direct crowds to the leopard seal mer’s showcase. You can hear her music as you jog along the path out of her area, energetic and poppy. Her handler must be getting her warmed up for the day. Roxy is a temperamental and snappy mer, but she thrives with an audience if Sasha can get her in the right mood for it. The petite blonde’s fiery spirit makes her equal to it, but you never did envy her the task.

You get a couple sleepy “good mornings” as you move through the park, mostly from the ride operators doing their test runs (Roxy’s Racers highspeed coaster and the go-carts are always in high demand, lines stretching to their limits at all hours) and the people setting up the merch stands. The other animal caretakers are either too busy this early in the morning or too awkward to say anything to you. Not that you blame them. You’d made quite the scene when the higher-ups broke the news to you about Bonnie (a description of events which probably gives them more credit than they deserve), and most of the other animal caretakers hadn’t known how to treat you since. The other mer handlers had been sympathetic, of course. They understood the different kind of bond between a handler and the mer they worked with. Most of the animal handlers at the park cared for their charges, but you find it hard to imagine that any of them would need to be dragged from the park grounds literally kicking and screaming if they came to work one day only to learn that one of their charges had passed in the night.

Not your finest hour, no matter how justified. It was miraculous that you’d managed to keep your job, though that was honestly probably mostly thanks to Mike speaking up on your behalf. He never did like to talk about his family, but apparently the Afton name had held enough sway at the time for FazCo to keep you around.

Whatever he’d done, you’re grateful for it. It’s easier to find an enemy’s weaknesses when you’re within their walls.

You make your way through the arctic biome of the park quickly enough, and it’s a jarring to say the least to jog from the curated nature setting into a poorly disguised construction zone. A path remains clear for guests to traverse the park, but what had been Bonnie’s kelp forest is now rows of faux walls with “Something New Is Coming Real Soon!” and “Faztastic Surprises Coming Soon!” plastered over them in big, neon green lettering. The gift shops are closed down, Bonnie’s visage stripped from the park like a bad memory. From beyond the veneers is the constant sound of construction, hardly drowned out by the Mega Water World theme song played on loop over the speakers.

You bite your tongue, keep your eyes down, and speed up through this section. Not a word had been said for what happened to Bonnie- no public statements, no official reports of a necropsy, nothing. One day he’d been there, performing, and the next he’d been gone, and the day after that the first of the construction crew had shown up for the redesign. Rumor has it that the company has a shiny new mer to replace him with.

You taste blood in your mouth.

The show tank- hidden though it may be- is unavoidable when passing through. Muscle memory almost steers you right, towards the hidden corridor that would lead you backstage to the prepping bay you’re so used to spending your days on with your mer. You don’t turn though. For a few brief yards your little jog turns into more of a run, desperate to just get past this part, past the acrid sting of guilt and grief that bubbles in your throat when you’re here. The feeling is so distracting that it makes you almost go face-down when a deep, furious bellow erupts from behind the construction walls- distant, muffled, but unmistakable beneath the orchestra of construction there.

Fists clench tight enough to make your fingernails cut little crescents into the palms of your hands as you right yourself, neck rigid against the instinct to turn, investigate, press close to the false wall and wait for another sound. You squeeze your eyes tight and take a deep breath.

Ok, so maybe that rumor about a new mer was a little more than a rumor at this point. When had that happened? Why hadn’t Mike told you more about it yet?

No matter how much you may want to, you are the last person who should be spotted being nosy about the new exhibit. You suppress a full body shiver, compartmentalizing, and force your body to resume its path.

You keep your head down until you get through this section of the park, only looking up when you’re well into Freddy’s island paradise biome- one part grand showcase and the other a top of the line waterpark. Massive neon waterslides and playsets wind around the wave pool and the lazy river that twists itself around the glass front-of-house sections of the various cetacean habitats. Bottlenose and Pacific white sided dolphins, belugas, and harbor porpoise lap their clear, spacious, and carefully cultivated show tanks, the lot of them likely having just been fed and had their daily health checks. The beautiful flash of their sleek bodies is clear through the pristine water of their artificial coves. Their faces curve into a natural, permanent smile. One of nature’s little illusions.

It's no wonder it took you so long to realize something was deeply wrong here. FazCo does put on a convincing display, when there’s an audience. The memory of desiccated dolphins left at the bottom of a dried out pool linger behind your eyes.

You find the nearest coffee vendor at a half-run, folding your hands atop the counter of the little tiki stand as if in prayer, an exhausted smile on your face.

“Please, please, my kingdom for some caffeine,” you plead, earning a chuckle from the fresh-faced college student working the coffee stand for a summer job. You get a mostly new bunch of them every year, but a few dedicated mer-fans will return for a handful of summers. They’re good kids, for the most part- bright faced and cheerful. You envy their bubbly energy, honestly. It’s a part of yourself you’re not sure you’ve quite managed to hold onto lately.

It only takes them a couple of minutes to hand you two steaming lattes and a sweet pretzel that you chew on while you make your way (much slower now, carefully balancing your scalding hot drinks) towards the park’s principle show tank. At three stories tall at its highest point, half outside and half set into the main aquarium building and pizzeria, it’s a massive, gaudy thing that features a tropical island shoreline veneer around its wide rim, while the real art is in the Atlantian castle that dominates the center of the pool. Kids can access the bottom of the castle’s windows through a queued tunnel inside the main building, while the top portion of it is hallow and acts as an artificial reef to a rainbow of tropical fish, small sharks, and the main mer himself: Freddy.

Not that Freddy actually enters the castle ever. Grand and ornate as it may be, it’s still not quite large enough to comfortably fit the impressive mass that is the humpback mer, even though Freddy is only a bit larger than an orca in actuality, rather than the humpback whale he resembles. You’re pretty sure that’s intentional in the design though- can’t go having the star of the show get all shy and hide from the cameras when every photograph is monetized.

You suppose you should be grateful that the mers get any sort of “backstage” area at all, where they can sleep and go through their medical checks in relative peace. Mike, at least, is a stern guard of Freddy’s personal space. Not even the veterinary staff get access to the area without going through Mike first, and if they do hope to get by they better be convincing.

You balance both coffees in one hand and you the other to press a copy of Mike’s access card to the door scanner, the light flashing green and the lock clicking and giving a mechanical hiss as it disengages. With a bit of struggle you manage to stuff the borrowed ID back into your pocket and shoulder the heavy door open. You almost fall forward when the weight of the door is abruptly pulled away from you, swinging wide, before Mike’s hand pushes into your shoulder to steady you. He's swiped one of the coffees out of your hand before you’ve even fully righted yourself, taking a deep gulp, uncaring for the way it must scald his mouth.

“How do you even know that one was yours,” you pout, taking a much more reasonable sip of your own coffee.

He snorts around the lip of the lid as he goes in for another drink. “We get the same thing every time, doofus.”

“Maybe I just got myself two coffees this morning.” You sniff, “Or maybe one of these days I should have them put something crazy in there, like peppermint, to teach you some manners.”

His nose wrinkles in distaste at the idea but he doesn’t so much as pause as he downs the rest of the coffee, muttering a quick ‘thanks’ before tossing the cup into the trashcan by the door. Without waiting for you he turns back down the narrow hall that leads from the small landing room, with its dingy little folding table and chair and the chunky storage fridge that hums in the corner, where spare fish for training and treats are kept. You can hear splashing, echoing in the claustrophobic concrete space despite its gentleness, and you smell the familiar mix of fish and chlorine. Mike whistles a little tune lowly, a simple little habit that lets his charge know he’s got guests.

They’ve got lots of little signals like that between the two of them, and you haven’t quite learned them all, but Freddy clearly knows exactly who to expect when you enter the tank room.

The humpback mer grips the edge of pool, a soft smile on his ursine face. He’s a fascinating mer: his lower portion resembles a humpback whale, with long pectoral fins at his hips, while his upper half is almost bear-like. His entire body is a creamy bronze- unlike any cetacean you’ve ever seen- with sleek stripes of aqua that trace down his body from his eyes and winding all the way down to tapered points on the inside of his fluke. And unlike most mers (from the limited examples humanity bases their knowledge on), Freddy smiles at you with a mouth of mostly blunt, humanoid teeth. He’s a fine study in how mers are- at their very core- a mimic species, only aesthetically reflecting the various other species they resemble. Freddy is no more a genetically similar to a humpback than you are, at the end of the day.

You give the mer a smile of your own, wide and encouraging, and a little wave. “Good morning, Freddy.”

“Good morning!” His voice is warm and rumbling, like thunder over the water, smooth from years of practice and careful tutoring from Mike (nothing at all like your strange charges’ hissing tones and their mysterious affinity for human language). It’s subdued now, though- fragile in the way it’s been for the last couple of months since Bonnie died. What cheer he does project still feels sincere, but you get the sense it’s a struggle for him to keep up.

The corners of your mouth pinch painfully, your own smile stubbornly tacked on. You know how he feels, and here the two of you are sharing in the mutual performance of holding yourselves together. Of course, Freddy has less choice in the matter than even you do. At least you had the option to walk away from all this- you never would, you could never bring yourself to- but the gentle mer has no such autonomy in this place.

“How are you holding up today, big guy?”

You lean your side against the thick glass of his tank, letting your head gently thud against it as you look up into the mer’s expressive, open face. Inhuman as he may be, you can still see it plainly- he looks tired.

You take it as a sad sort of honor, the way his round ears and the broad slope of his shoulder droop before you. Undaunted by the weight of a thousand adoring fans staring up at him, Freddy let’s the ache he’s been carrying since Bonnie show to a precious few. It’s a thing you wish the two of you hadn’t needed to bond over, but you’re grateful at least that maybe he can take some comfort in your presence; that you can be here and offer some understanding to him.

The sound that peals from deep in his diaphragm is long and high, so musical that if you didn’t know the mer better you would have never been able to recognize it as a sigh of sorrow. It’s as if just a relaxed, natural breath to him has taken on the tune of sadness, rather than a voluntary noise. The smile wilts on his face- only the ghost of it struggling to linger- and there is such weight in his eyes that you know that if mers had tears to cry his eyes would be glistening with them.

“As best as I can,” is his quiet response, as it has been the last several times you’ve asked. It’s the same response you’ve given to Mike each time he’s asked you the same question, word for word.

You reach up the hand not holding your coffee to lay over the back of one of his massive webbed paws where it grips the rim of his pool and just nod. The routine of commiserating in your grief doesn’t help, not really, but it can be nice to have a minute to remember that, at least for the people in this room, Bonnie was not something that could just be brushed under the rug and forgotten like he’d never existed.

From across the room Mike makes a little grunt as he lifts a tray of small fish and supplements- a noise more to remind you of his presence than of effort- and brings them over to join the two of you. You’ve noticed the way he tries to give you and Freddy a moment alone when you come to visit, standing apart as if he isn’t also mourning, and you both appreciate his quiet sort of care and want to shake him over it.

Freddy glances down at the tray in his arms and pulls an over-the-top face of disgust, sinking up to his nose in the water. You don’t miss the way his ears wiggle and the corners of his eyes curve at the sound of your sputtering laugh, his dramatics entirely for your benefit- you’ve never known Freddy to truly fuss. Mike plays along, the three of you ready to set the heavy mood aside and start easing into the bright- if artificial- cheer the day ahead will demand. Setting the tray on the ground beside him, he dangles one of the small treat fish in one hand and jiggles a small paper cup in the other, the assortment of supplements rattling about inside.

“Take your pick. Personally I’d use the fish as a chaser if it were up to me bud, but it’s your call,” he says, holding both out to the mer and rolling his eyes when Freddy opens up his wide maw and tosses everything Mike offers him back in one swallow, nose scrunching in an exaggerated grimace.

“How’s the taste of cardboard then?” Mike scoffs, no real irritation in his voice and a suspicious twitch in his cheek. “You’re lucky those little cups are biodegradable.”

Freddy’s grin is a little sheepish, but he seems proud of his stunt. You chuckle, giving the mer’s paw a little pat as you push away from the tank.

“Mind if I steal Mike for a minute,” you ask, meeting your roommate’s eye and jerking your chin back towards the corridor the two of you came in through.

The mer pushes away from the glass of his tank with a languid swipe of his long, graceful pectoral fins and sweeps an arm out in a go-ahead gesture. “Of course. Be nice.”

You bark a laugh, tossing a wink over your shoulder as you start to pull your friend away. “Who, me? Freddy, when am I ever not?”

The sound of sloshing water follows you and Mike down the corridor. Even if Freddy’s decided to swim away for the moment to give you the illusion of privacy, you wait until the two of you are back in the front room before you release Mike where you’ve grabbed him above the elbow, letting him take a few steps away and shove his hands into the pockets of his waders. He’s facing away from you, going over to his schedules pinned to the wall and glancing over them, but his head stays tilted in such a way that you can tell he’s waiting for you to speak.

“So,” you start, leaning your back against the wall and taking a sip of your coffee. “The rumors are true then. There’s a new mer in Bonnie’s pool.”

Mike stiffens, then heaves a deep, weary sigh that drags his shoulders down with a great gravity. A lance of hurt stings at you, but you shove it down.

“How long have you known?”

He rubs a rough, calloused hand through the hair at the nape of his neck and half turns to face you, mouth opening and closing in a false start before he manages, “A few days. I wanted to tell you before, so you could hear it from me before the news really got out, but then…well, everything else started happening, you know? We haven’t really gotten to talk much otherwise since then.”

He does turn to look at you then, and there’s remorse in his eyes even as he shrugs.

“I’m sorry though. I really didn’t want you to learn about it on your own. Are you ok?”

The sting of offense that he’d kept this from you washes away, replaced by the unexpected heaviness of realization. “I…I don’t know, honestly. I don’t think so? I hate it. I hate knowing that they’ve got another mer locked up in that place, isolated and ready to be exploited. But at the same time- and I know it’s stupid and not right- I feel…”

“Resentment?” Mike offers gently when you trail off, and you flinch as if he’d struck you because he’s right.

“Yes,” you confess, barely a whisper. “I know it’s always just been a glorified cage, but that space… to me, that’s still Bonnie’s space. That’s where I saw him every day, where we became friends. That’s the last place I spoke with him and laughed with him. That’s where he died. It just feels wrong that someone else should fill that space, like everything else has already moved on. Like he was never even there to begin with.”

You don’t even notice your eyes have welled with tears until one slips down your cheek, salt water seeping into the seal of your lips, and Mike’s arms are around you in a hug. It doesn’t even take a thought to tuck your face into the collar of his uniform and muffle your sniffles while he rubs soothing circles on your back, always so effortlessly warm in the way you imagine a brother must be.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, gruff and so quiet. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

You only linger for a moment, embarrassed, before scrubbing away at your cheeks and clearing your throat. “Right,” you cough. “Anyways. What’s the deal with this new mer? What do you know?”

He looks at you, quiet, for a long minute before exhaling a sigh through his nose and sucking his teeth. Irritation creases the skin around his eyes.

“I’d say we shouldn’t discuss it here, but there’s honestly not much I have to say yet. It’s all being kept extremely hush-hush, even by FazCo standards. The construction workers haven’t seen what it is- the tank is covered in blinds for now. I can make some educated guesses based on what I do know so far though.”

“Which would be?”

His expression darkens, his voice dipping low and hush. “It’s big, aggressive, and they’re pumping the tank full of freshwater.” He pauses for a minute to let the gravity of that information sink in while you balk. “That, plus the bellowing sounds a few people have heard? I’d put good money on some kind of crocodilian.”

You brush the back of your hand across your mouth, unblinking. “Freshwater,” you mutter aloud, mostly to yourself. “You’re sure it’s freshwater?”

Information on mers in general is scarce and largely controlled by FazCo. What is public, common knowledge though is that- so far- mers have been thought to be an exclusively oceanic species. The existence of freshwater variants were never out of the question, but it was big news. A huge discovery that would have massive impacts on both the scientific community as well as the general population. After all, for most people the oceanic habitats that mers had been found in so far were simply inaccessible- too far from shore or too deep down or too cold. Freshwater though? Rivers, lakes, and swamps exist right in people’s backyards, reachable by something as flimsy as a kayak, or less in some cases. If mers were to be found in freshwater, that would suddenly put them within reach of the average person.

You wish that idea didn’t immediately fill you with deep, bone-crushing dread.

Mike must be having the same thought, judging by the grim nod he gives you in response.

There have been a few moments like this since you started investigating FazCo with him- moments where you both just have to pause and share in the feeling of a heavy stone settling into your guts, aware of the awful implications of what you’ve found but also aware of just how little you can do about any of it. Yet. Yet. Maybe that’s part of why you immediately became so devoted to helping Sun and Moon: of everything, this was something you could actually do to help make things better right now, not hopefully make better in a nebulous future you’re really not sure how far off it still is.

“That’s all I’ve got so far,” he sighs, a frustrated resignation biting at the edges of his voice, but he pushes off the wall nonetheless and starts arranging things around the room idly, continuing to talk to you without looking.

“Honestly, what we can learn from…the other place is a priority right now anyways, both in urgency and risk. For how secretive this place is FazCo has a history of being sloppy. We have a better chance of finding something we can use from looking around there- with less likelihood of getting caught- than trying to pry into the next huge debut that they’ve got locked down tighter than Fort Knox for stray details. We have to be patient. You keep up with what you’re doing and I’ll look into it on the backend. If I hear something new and useful about the new mer I’ll tell you.”

The practiced, almost mindless, way he moves through his routine while he talks- loading fish, weighing them, jotting down notes and measuring out supplements for the next morning- causes an itch under your skin. Familiarity fills you with a restless impulse to help, but you’d only get in the way. This is a one person job and Mike is a well calibrated machine moving through it, and no uninvited inputs would be welcome, even from you.

You watch him work, glancing at the clock. There’s really not a lot of time for lingering in the mornings here.

“Yeah, I guess. I just don’t feel like I’m doing enough.”

He throws you a look over his shoulder with a quirked eyebrow and snorts. “Oh, I think you’re current project will keep you plenty busy,” he argues, and you know he’s right, but the restlessness that’s seeped into your bones over the last few weeks refuses to budge. You could probably work yourself straight into the ground right now on this and still not feel like you’re doing enough.

“We should talk about how that’s going, by the way. Later, at home, I mean,” he adds, hefting his pail of fish and resting it on his hip. “I have some ideas.”

The clock ticks away. Ten minutes until the gates open. You need to get back to your station.

“There won’t be a lot of time,” you muse. “I need to get over there tonight to feed them.”

He scowls, shifting the weight of the fish he holds. “You need to feed yourself first.”

You raise your coffee cup and down the rest of your drink rather than argue, shooting him a thumbs-up with your free hand in acknowledgement, if not assent. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Later,” you say, jogging past him to lean your head back down the corridor to the tank room. “See you later, Freddy!”

Mike rolls his eyes in brotherly annoyance but claps you on the back as you skip past him and towards the door, counting down the minutes you have left to make it back across the park. Not enough- you’ll have to really book it.

By the time you’ve made it back to the false Arctic biome and your puddle of noisy sea lions there’s sweat slipping down the curve of your spine and budding at your hairline. The days heat quickly in the summers here, and you need to slather another layer of sunscreen on your face to protect what your work ballcap won’t shade. Not five minutes after you’ve done that the first guests to the park start to trickle in- you can hear their excitement and the high-energy voice of Roxy’s handler over the speaker systems greeting them at the front of the biome. And so your day begins, bleeding into the mundanity of routine. Feeding, monitoring, taking notes and checking charts.

But you were initially hired by FazCo to be a mer handler, and that means you’re more than just an animal caregiver: you’re a performer. And, despite everything that’s happened, the performance comes naturally to you. When crowds begin to fawn over your charges it’s easy to get excited and launch into a bit of a song and dance, one part entertainment and one part education as you demonstrate the agility, strength, and intelligence of the sea lions in your care. You really do love these animals, and the warmth that swells in your chest when you see some kid’s eyes light up with awe and inspiration at seeing them has never faded. A little copper skinned girl with her dark curls pulled into low pigtails and clutching a Roxy plush stares with unabashed adoration at the sea lions that zip and swerve under the water, and when her father starts to lead her away after your show you catch a snipit of her gleefully rambling to him about seemingly every pinniped fact she had ever heard. You don’t begrudge the smile that brings you, your own bitterness for the darker aspects of the park set aside. FazCo’s corruption isn’t that little girl’s fault- it’s not on the shoulders of the guests that don’t know any better- and you hope that if one day she learns about all the horrible truths that go into making the Mega Water World what it is, that she’ll still be able to love the animals she got to see here without those memories being too tainted.

The work is high energy, repetitive, and excessive for one person. For safety alone the park should have at least two handlers working with the large predators at all times, but safety has never been FazCo’s priority so for the days you’re on shift the full care schedule of the whole bunch of the sea lions is your sole responsibility. For better or worse this makes the days fly by, too little spare time to think or sit still.

By the time you drag yourself back to the apartment you’re properly ravenous and eager to take Mike’s advice about getting yourself some dinner before heading out to see to the mers. In a rare turn, Mike is already at the apartment by the time you stumble in, sat at the tiny table off the side of the kitchen with take-out in front of him and another unopened container waiting in your spot. He greets you with a grunt and a jerk of him chin towards the food.

“Eat up. Consider it payback for the coffee this morning,” he says around a spoonful of fried rice.

You let your work bag slide off your shoulder to the ground by the front door and trot over to the table, draping yourself in a half-hug over Mike’s shoulder and leaning your cheek on the top of his head. “You’re a saint. I take back every bad thing I’ve ever said about you,” you sing, dropping yourself heavily into your seat and digging in to the savory noodles you usually order for yourself while he kicks at you under the table.

“Oh yeah? And what bad things have you been saying about me then?”

“Only the truth,” you say matter-of-factly, twirling noodles around your fork. “Like, you smell like fish.”

He rolls his eyes. “You smell like fish. Half the people we work with smell like fish. The other half of the people we work with are fish.”

“Speaking of fish! You said this morning that you had some ideas about my new fishy friends. Let hear ‘em.”

Mike raps his knuckles on the table once and stands, holding a finger out for you to wait for a minute while he disappears into his room to get something. When he returns and sits back down he drags his chair closer to you and lays out a couple of papers with sketches and notes on them, a printed map of the coastline by the old facility, and the polaroid of Sun and Moon’s tidal pool he’d borrowed from you.

The facility’s location is circled in red ink on the map. That area of the coast is rocky, with steep underwater drop-offs and cliffs along most of the stretch. Sea caves and small coves dot the length of the coast north of the facility, which sits on the last sea-level bit of land, isolated on the other side of an inlet, before the cliffs rise up and consume the beaches of the south. Mike runs his finger up from the facility’s location to tap at a cluster of small coves tucked into the cliffs maybe a mile or two to the north.

“Alright, hear me out. First of all, if you want to get those two properly rehabilitated you’re not going to manage it from inside that tidal pool, not really. Our number one goal should be getting them into open water so that they can properly recover and start readjusting to the open space, and eventually hunting on their own. These would all need to be checked out by boat first, but the coves aught to provide a pretty good sheltered environment to rehab them in.”

He sucks his teeth, pushing forward the polaroid over the map. “Of course, that plan is reliant on a couple of prerequisites being met. First, we’d need to cut through and remove some of the bars on their tidal pen so they can get out. They’re too heavy for us to lift by hand and we can’t haul the machinery to do it out there ourselves, so they need to swim out on their own. Trick is, to remove those bars you’d need to get in the water with them,” he trails off, watching the way your shoulders automatically stiffen at the idea.

You’d gotten in the water with Bonnie plenty of times, sure. But Bonnie had been healthy, well-fed, and highly acclimated to human beings. You knew you could trust Bonnie, and you knew how to read his body language besides.

Still, you hadn’t ever pushed it. If Bonnie was stressed or having a bad day, you didn’t get in the water, and that was with years of trust built between the two of you.

Your mind replays the last time you were in the water with Sun and Moon and you feel a little sick, swallowing thickly to try and rid your mouth of the phantom taste of salt water and terror. Suffice to say that you were not exactly eager to go for another swim anytime soon.

Mike clears his throat, the sound making you jump a little as you refocus on the here and now. “The other thing is that they’d need to trust you enough to follow a boat. If they shoot off into the wild as soon as the bars are down they’re not going to last a week. I don’t know exactly how long they’ve been captive, but in any case they need time and help to be eased back into fending for themselves.”

He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest, his eyes creasing with his frown. You continue to pick at your food, eating slowly. Your appetite is abandoning you all of a sudden, heavy in your gut with the weight of the tasks ahead of you.

“We have the advantage of them being mers at least. They’re intelligent. They can be reasoned with. But still,” he meets your eye, “it’s a big ask, and we’re on a time crunch. There’s no sugarcoating it: this is going to be dangerous.”

The scabbed, healing slice on your leg itches. You smirk and shrug. “What? Not going to tell me that I don’t have to do this? That it’s ok if I’m too scared?”

You’re teasing, but for just a moment Mike looks so, so sad and tired, before the emotion is shuttered away and he just heaves one big, long, weary sigh.

“Hate to say it, mate, but those mers need you, and we both know it. I know you well enough to realizes there’s not a damn thing I could say at this point to talk you out of doing whatever is necessary to help them now,” he admits with a shrug, picking his food back up and taking another bite.

An easy silence falls between the two of you for a moment while you process his words. You suppose you shouldn’t be so surprised- Mike has always been a pragmatic sort- but you’re still a little taken aback at actually hearing his assent to your commitment to helping Sun and Moon. For as important as this cause is to him, Mike has been excessively protective of you since you got involved in it. Silly as it is, you actually feel a little proud that he seems willing to trust you on this.

The two of you finish your dinners fairly quickly after that. Mike tells you that a contact of his might have recognized some of the initials on the documents you’d found at the facility, but he’s still checking on that lead and he’ll tell you once he knows more. You give him a brief update on how the mers are doing- what little there is to say so far- and fill him in on your plan to use oysters as a makeshift filtration system. That get’s a laugh out of him but he admits it’s a good idea given the circumstances. By then you’re starting to get antsy, the evening winding down, and you rush out the door with a promise to let Mike know when you’ve arrived at the facility and when you’re headed back.

Against your expectations, you don’t see Moon at all that first night. Not really, at least. When you arrive you call out to him, quietly in hopes of not waking Sun. But after a few minutes of no response anxiety creeps into your voice, panic leaking into your tone. The fear that something could have happened to them while you were gone- that you hadn’t done enough and they’d succumbed to some illness, or that maybe FazCo had come back to tie up their loose ends- sets your heart racing and your voice cracks around his name as you call out to Moon again. Only then does that golden bulb at the back of his head illuminate, trailing in slow figure eights barely a foot from the edge of the pool. Just below the surface, crimson eyes open and blink slowly, just the once, before disappearing back into the gloom.

You don’t know if he can see the slight trembling of your hands when you set out their matching piles of fish, but there’s no way he misses the strangled, thin sound of your voice when you ask him to, please, not do that again.

“You don’t have to talk to me or interact if you don’t want to, I just want some sign that you’re ok,” you plead, stepping back from the pool.

You wait for a long, tense moment before that bulb illuminates again, slowly flashing once, then again, drifting in the water just beyond the piles of food, but Moon doesn’t reach out to take them yet. You don’t have time to play with him or wait out his mood tonight, even if you’d prefer to. It’s still a two hour drive back home and your next shift starts bright and early- you need to go. Still, you linger just a couple minutes more, just in case. When Moon still doesn’t reach out and the bioluminescence doesn’t light up again you sigh and call out a soft goodbye, promising to be back the next night. You don’t hear a sound as you leave.

The next day and night are much the same. You work your shift in the sweltering heat (you try and fail not to worry about how Sun and Moon are faring, hoping that the tarp will be enough to give them some proper respite, haunted by the mental image of pale blistered skin) and catch up with Mike in the scant few minutes you can spare between seeing to your sea lions and driving out to feed an unresponsive Moon. At least on the second night the bulb on his nightcap-like appendage lights up as soon as you enter the shed, trailing beneath the black surface of the nighttime waters until you leave him with a quiet ‘goodnight’. His unwillingness to interact is…concerning, yes, and you’d be lying if you said it doesn’t bother you. But you’d told him it was okay if he didn’t want to interact and that was the truth. You just didn’t understand the sudden shift, especially after he’d seemed keen on at least some mischief when you’d told him and Sun you’d only be by at night for a few days. If his goal thus far has been to unnerve you then it’s working.

The third day is long, and difficult, and hot. It’s a beautiful cloudless summer day and the park is absolutely full to bursting from open to close- so busy that you are called to help at additional stations on top of your usual catalogue of duties. Your usual ten hour shift is spent in a fast-paced, almost frantic scramble. At one point the crowds get a little too rowdy around Roxy’s tank and a couple of kids end up in a screaming match, which their ridiculous parents decide to join in rather than deescalate. While the leopard seal mer does well with crowds and attention, she bristles in the face of conflict and when her handler, Sasha, calls for you over the walkie comms, her voice strained, to please come give her some backup asap please, you shoo away some confused sea lions and book it to the mer showcase. Dealing with entitled, hot-headed guests is far from your favorite task, but it’s just another kind of performance and you’re not afraid to assert your authority as staff on people unwilling to behave.

That’s not the only incident of the day, the long hours a flurry of minor but persistent inconveniences, and your shift turns from ten to eleven, and then a twelfth hour no matter how hard you struggle against the press of time. You don’t even go home. Instead, you shoot Mike a text to let him know what you’re up to and head straight for the abandoned facility, promising to let him know when you start heading back. He doesn’t see your message right away, still being tied up with his own duties even longer than you were, but you turn the phone on silent and stuff it in your pocket, determined not to look at it again until you’re ready to start the drive home. You can imagine the lecture Mike will want to give you about skipping dinner and exhausting yourself, and you simply don’t want to hear it right now. Would he be right? Sure, but needs must.

Your eyes are dry and burning and the muscles in your back and shoulders are aching from the demanding day in the sun by the time you drag yourself into Sun and Moon’s shed, a heavy sigh leaving you as you lean against the door for just a moment when you close it behind you. Immediately, your eyes catch on the flicker of golden light as a slowly trailing comet of bioluminescence comes to life, serving as Moon’s greeting. The bitter tang of disappointment at the back of your throat doesn’t prevent a slight tension from bleeding out of you- the anxiety you’ve been carrying every day until you can confirm that the mers are alright.

Whatever temptation you would usually have to coax Moon to interact tonight is smothered by the need to get home to a sorely earned shower and your bed. You mumble a simple “Hi, Moon,” around a yawn and go about what is quickly becoming a routine. You fetch two equally sized piles of a variety of fish (you’ve begun adding frozen shrimp to the mix) and set them by the edge of the pool, just a few feet apart. Then, you grab another bottle of burn cream and set it near the food. When you’d come the night before you had found all the previous bottles that you’d left empty and stacked in a neat pile by the edge of the tarp. It was interesting to think that the mers had some concept of litter.

You hum a tune lowly, more as a means of keeping yourself focused than anything else, when you take a few water purification tablets and some water testing strips over to the corner of the pool where you’d dumped the first batch of oysters. It’s a broken, breathy sound full of stops and starts, half sighs, and it clearly doesn’t do enough to keep you aware because when you blink your heavy eyes and glance up from dropping the tablets in the water you are greeted by a pair of wide red eyes not two feet from you, staring from just beneath the surface.

You slap a wet hand over your mouth to smother the aborted scream that rips from you as you launch yourself back away from the edge of the water ( not far enough, your mind screams), landing hard on your backside. There is no dark, shark-like body with massive clawed hands and a razor maw that lunges at you, though. No, Moon moves so, so slowly, the water barely rippling around him as he raises his head from the water, leaving just the glowing bulb at the back of his head to bob on the surface like a floating star. His expression is peculiar- no mischievous grin or scowl or even the confusion he looks at you with so often. Instead, he looks incredibly focused, almost like he’s transfixed. The slightly paler red pupils in his ruby eyes are dilated and fixed on you and his tiny slit nostrils flare on his face as though he’s caught a scent. Without his usual sharp grin you can barely see the line of his mouth on his face in the pale moonlight.

You fist a hand over your heart- you can hear your blood rushing in your ears, but he hasn’t attacked you yet. Adrenaline almost makes you slur your words when you finally dart your tongue out to wet your suddenly dry lips and stammer, “M-Moon?”

The sound seems enough to snap him out of whatever spell he’d been under, and a translucent membrane sweeps quickly over his eyes in a reptilian blink. His mouth quirks into a thin crescent grin that looks wobbly and forced, and he raises his hands slowly from the water to lay his claws flat at the edge of the pool, leaning his weight forward until his chest is almost pressed to the concrete.

“It’s passst your bedtime,” he sing-songs, voice slippery and serpentine. Some part of your mind that you simply don’t have the bandwidth to deal with right now recognizes that you have definitely, absolutely not said those words in front of him before, but all you manage to say in response is, “What?”

There’s a scrrrt, scrrt, scrrrr of sharp nails fidgeting against the concrete edge of the pool as the mer considers you, expression twitching. You should move, you realize at this point that you should absolutely be moving away from the massive predator that hasn’t willingly interacted with you in days and barely a week ago tried to kill you, but the first hesitant shifting of your weight backwards catches Moon’s eye and a low hiss trembles in his throat until you settle back down, a palm held outwards in a placating gesture. The two of you enter a sort of stalemate: you don’t move out of his range, and he makes no move to grab at you. You try to remind yourself that Moon has just as much reason to consider you a dire threat as you do him, but it’s hard to hear those thoughts over the constant awareness of claws and teeth and sheer size. Perception of threat aside, if he decides to kill you tonight you will die.

Moon is just staring at you, pupils darting over you and his thin grin stretching the corner of his mouth such that it is almost starting to look more like a grimace. He looks like he has something to say, but the silence stretches on until it works its way under your skin and you can’t take it anymore.

“How do you know what my bedtime is,” you challenge just to break the silence, voice embarrassingly high pitched. The question seems to be absurd enough to catch the mer off guard and he blinks slowly at you once, then a couple more times quicker, and then he scoffs, exhaling sharply in something that is half laughter and half incredulity.

His claws tap twice more on the concrete before he lifts a hand and traces along the underside of his eye on the dark side of his face, his other eye squinting.

“Ssssleepy?” His voice tilts up in pitch at the end with the question before slipping into hissing giggles. “Naauughtyy.”

He reaches his hand out as if to trace your own eyes but stops well enough away, his extended finger twitching just once before he lets his arm drop and return to scraping little lines into the edge of the pool. Self-consciously, you reach your own hands up and scrub the heels of your palms across your eyes, trying to wipe away the exhaustion Moon must find there.

“I’m fine,” you tell him. “I can sleep later. I needed to make sure you and Sun were ok and had food first. That’s way more important than me losing a few hours of sleep.”

The mer’s head twitches to the side in a bird-like move and his lips pull up to reveal more of his teeth, his grin half a sneer now. He doesn’t contradict you, though the noise that rattles in his chest sounds discontent. Still, beyond the brief jolt of terror he’d initially startled you with you don’t feel threatened right now, and this is the first you’ve seen of the nocturnal mer in days. It’d be a waste not to take advantage of the opportunity, exhaustion aside.

You pull your knees to your chest, slowly, and wrap your arms around them, leaning your chin on your crossed forearms. You bury a yawn into the space between your knees and your chest and watch the way the silver, feathery fins that frame Moon’s face shiver and twitch. You try to get a look at the state of his sunburns, but it’s hard to make anything out in the thin moonlight. It’ll be helpful to get some kind of lighting out here for when you’re around late at night, though something that won’t irritate Moon. You mentally add it to your growing list of supplies you need to bring on your next day off.

The scrrrt, scrrchof Moon’s claws against the floor pulls you back from your mental checklist, and you realize that he’s just sitting there, watching you. Honestly, you’re a little surprised he hasn’t swum away yet, returning to shunning you like he has the last couple of nights. Curious, your eyes dart over to where you left him and his counterpart’s food out and, sure enough, the piles of fish are still waiting for him on the edge of the pool. You glance back at him and jerk your chin slightly to indicate the waiting fish.

“You should eat,” you point out the obvious. He sniffs lightly through his slit nostrils and tilts his head to the opposite side, not so much as glancing at the fish.

“Not hungry,” he says, eyes curving.

You snort, raising a brow and him. “Liar.”

“Brat.”

You throw your hands up in the air with a strangled sound, finally hitting your limit. “How,” you wheeze, “do you know that word?”

Moon just throws his head back and starts cackling, half flopping backwards into the water. His shoulders heave with the force of his laughter and he wraps both broad, paddle-like arms around his middle. His wide, gaping maw of razor sharp teeth is a little disorienting, but you can’t quite fight back your own smile. There’s something terribly endearing about a predator being goofy.

“Well?” You press, but you don’t really expect an answer. It’s a foreign, itchy sort of feeling to try and smother your scientific curiosity. You have a thousand questions for the mer- a laundry list that’s been steadily growing since the first moment you encountered them- but Mike was right before when he said you just don’t have time for it. Interrogating him is not going to earn you any point with Moon, you know the mer well enough for that already. So if questions won’t get you anywhere right now, isn’t the best thing to do to just roll with the anomalies these two present you as they come? Maybe one day they’ll answer you and you can learn how Moon knows English so well- clearly better than he’s let on so far-, and how Sun picks up new words so quickly but clearly doesn’t seem to have as thorough a grasp on the language as his counterpart. Or maybe that day won’t come, and you’ll be left wondering (something needy and grasping curdles in you at the thought of that but you smother it).

Moon rolls onto his back and drags himself along the pool with one hand, tail drifting limp and lazy. He watches you slowly stand to follow him, letting your path drift a little further away from the edge and the piles of fish you left waiting for him as he reaches one and picks up a herring between two claws. He opens his mouth wide and drops the fish in whole, snapping his teeth closed after it like a bear trap. You see the ruffled fins at his throat shiver as he swallows and his dark tongue flicks out to lick his lips before he shoots you a wolfish grin and just shrugs.

You cross your legs and settle down a few feet away, your feet feeling the ache of your long day. There’s a morbid sort of fascination you feel seeing Moon eat, half quivering prey instincts recoiling from a predator much bigger than yourself, half apex predator yourself admiring the way nature crafted the creature before you to be the very top of the food chain in the ocean.

But, then, this is Moon you are dealing with after all, and he is quick to remind you that- in this place- you are decidedly the prey species. He clicks his claws against the concrete twice before he snatches up another fish, making sure your attention is wholly on him, before he wiggles the dead meat at you and slowly drapes the fish over the back of his own hand. The grin he gives you is all sharp teeth and menace, mockery and threat, as he drags the fish across his knuckles. His head twitches to the side, focused and bird-like, and a rattling, hissing chuckle sneaks between his dual rows of teeth.

“No gaaame?” He taunts you, dragging the little fish back and forth, back and forth. “Played with Sssun.”

You blanch, your pulse load in your eyes, and the lunar mer’s laugh is cruel in reply. In one sharp movement he tosses the fish in his mouth and swallows audibly. His tongue darts across his claws, and his eyes never leave yours. You find yourself swallowing thickly as well, nothing in your mouth but still you feel like you’re choking. There’s no way Moon actually wants to play this little game with you- not with the malice hiding in the crevices of his expression- but the thought of essentially hand-feeding the shark-like mer is dizzyingly horrific. It wasn’t too long ago that he considered you a meal option, and you’re still not confident that he wouldn’t bite your hand off as some sort of twisted prank. He grabs another fish from the pile and repeats the process, eyes curved in amusement but still glaring.

“I, ah-,” you stammer, “I mean, you- you don’t seem to like me being near you very much, so? But Sun wanted to play.”

Moon tosses the next fish in his mouth and hums, one claw dragging slowly across the concrete between the two of you deep enough to leave a groove. “Sun, Sun,” he croons, head tilting to the other side. “Sssweet Sun. Sssstupid Sun.”

You rear back like you’ve been struck, face pinching, and you snap before you even have a moment to consider it, “He’s not stupid.”

It must be adorable to Moon, the way you bare your blunt human teeth at him. He blinks slowly, and then between one breath and the next you are on your back, one of Moon’s hands wrapped securely around both wrists and the other covering your mouth to muffle the shriek that tries to tear from your throat the moment your brain catches up to reality. He’s hauled himself out of the water up to the fanned, tattered red fins at his hips and he’s bearing the weight of his torso down on you to keep you pinned. It’s hard to hyperventilate with his chest pressing down so hard on your own, but your body gives it a good try, making black dots swim in your vision. Not enough to obscure the wide ruby eyes that stare down at you from only inches away, the glowing ball of his nightcap appendage resting bright and golden against your cheek.

Beyond the delirium of terror flooding your veins you aren’t sure what you’d make of Moon’s expression. Gone is his wicked, bear-trap grin. Missing, even, is the seething anger that had been there a moment ago. Instead, his mouth is pressed into a flat, neutral line. His eyes are wide, staring, searching. The silvery fins around his face shiver, and in the same moment you feel deafened by the pounding of your heartbeat his head angles the slightest bit, like he’s listening to its frantic gallop too, his eyes drifting down to your throat as if he can see your pulse through the thin skin there.

A reedy, thin whine of fear builds in your throat without your say-so, and it snaps the mer’s attention back to your eyes, wide and watery and pleading as you’re sure they are. It is the most resistance you can offer, trapped beneath him. It was foolish to entertain the idea, even for a moment, that a human being could be considered an apex predator when sharing a world with the mers. He was so fast, you hadn’t even seen him move. There hadn’t been a single second to react or fight back. You weren’t that exhausted, where you? Not that it would matter in a moment, you supposed. Sleep deprivation was not an issue for the dead.

But Moon makes no move to dig those wicked claws into your throat, keeping them carefully pulled away from your skin even as his palms hold you in iron restraints, and those deadly teeth of those stayed hidden behind his flat expression. Even when he leans closer still, almost flat nose half a breath from brushing yours, and speaks in his rough, hissing voice you don’t notice his mouth move more than maybe a twitch.

“Yes, ssstupid,” he growls, leaving no room for argument even if your voice wasn’t smothered beneath his wide, wet palm. “Never learns. Stupid. But,” he leans closer still, and he does part those lips just enough to press the flat front of his teeth against your ear so you can feel the way his hiss rattles them, making you choke on a whimper, “if you hurt my Sun, I will eat you. Understand, minnow?”

He leans away from you just enough to watch you frantically nod in agreement, one fearful tear slipping down the side of your face and catching on his thumb. Slowly, he slides his hand off your mouth and, with one deceptively gentle claw, boops you on the nose.

“Good fishy,” he purrs, his grin returning with mischief, his malice apparently dismissed now that you’ve been thoroughly traumatized for the night. He uses the grip he still has your wrists locked in to pull you back to sitting upright as he slips himself back into the water, releasing you once he’s submerged back up to his neck again. With a sweeping gesture, he reaches out and swipes both the rest of his pile of fish and Sun’s into the pool with him.

“Should go to sleep, minnow. Past your bedtime,” he reminds you, waving his fingers at you before diving down into the black water below, the golden beacon of his golden light blinking out.