Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mers were a greatly endangered species in the wild. There were many people who were just itching to get their hands on a mer fin or tail. The overhunting problem caused their population to dwindle exponentially, especially with the recent uptick in mer based fashion and even fight rings. The world the mers were subjected to was a harsh one and it made Xisuma shudder.

He was brought back from his thoughts by Keralis poking him in the stomach. The older mer was sitting near Xisuma in one of the side pools off from the main leisure pool in the cafeteria. Xisuma turned his focus back to his friend. "Sorry about that, Keralis. Just a little lost in thought today it seems." Xisuma sighed and leaned back against the concrete. Keralis chuckled at him and his earfins flexed downwards in concern. "You seem worried, Shashwammy. What's been bothering you?" Keralis inched over and laid his head in Xisuma's lap. Xisuma carded his hands through Keralis' hair and hummed.

"I'm not supposed to tell anyone this just yet but I supposed I can make an exception just this once. Well… I got a call recently about a mer that needs to be rehabilitated. There was a fighting ring bust recently and some of the mers got sent to a center just south of here. One of these mers has some, quote unquote, behavioral issues that they would like our assistance with. I'm not sure we have room for another mer right now, especially one that will need round the clock care like I suspect they want us to provide." He let out another heavy sigh and shook out his shoulders. Keralis moved his head away from Xisuma's lap to pull himself up and look Xisuma in the eye. "I think we can help. I can try and talk to the others and ask if they'd be willing to accept a new mer into the pod. I'm sure everyone will be willing to pitch in! You aren't alone in this Shashwam." Keralis said softly. Xisuma gave him a kind look and opened his arms silently. Keralis dove in to hug his friend. They would make this work.

~-----~

About two weeks later, there was a fresh medical room cleared for the new arrival and staff waiting to receive news about their transfer. The whole facility was abuzz with the news about the new mer they were going to get.

Xisuma paced the hall as he waited to receive the phone call from the other mer care center. When the transport team got there, they needed to be ready to move as quickly as possible. A few minutes passed and then suddenly his cell phone rang loudly. He quickly answered and put the call on speaker. "Hello? This is Xisuma Void speaking." He said into the phone. The caller on the other end was quick to move on. "Hello Mr. Void. The transport team is here in the loading dock and ready for transfer." Xisuma looked at the team in the hall with him and gave them the hand motion for 'go go go' and turned back to his phone. "Thank you so much. We're on our way." He quickly ended the call and followed his transport team down the hall.

They reached the loading dock quickly and began work opening the truck. Inside the truck was a metal containment cage, standard for transporting mers deemed aggressive. The team started to push and pull the cage out of the truck before a very angry yowl rang out. The sound of an angry mer hissing and screaming put the team on edge immediately. They pushed the cage out of the truck and backed away. The yowling died down as the water in the cage began to still.

They began to wheel the cage to the medical room down the hall as fast as they could. Xisuma stayed behind to give the driver a thumbs up and help close the back of the truck. As the driver left the loading dock, he turned and followed the screeching mer down the hall. The team had gotten them to the medical room successfully, but now came the hardest part. The release. Aggressive mers could be some of the hardest mers to rehabilitate, especially ones from fighting ring backgrounds.

Xisuma pushed the transport team out of the way and positioned the cage so that the door would open and the mer would follow the water flow into the observation pool in the room. He undid the locks on the cage and I slammed their body into the wall and it fell forward without the locks to keep it in place. The mer spun wildly for a moment and clawed into the air as it fell into the water. Once they hit the water, they stiffened up and sank like a stone.

Xisuma knew better than to look into the water to see if they were ok. The mer would undoubtedly pull him in if they had the chance. However, he could look at the surveillance camera in the water to keep tabs on their newest little friend. Before he could, he beckoned the team to come over and help him move the cage. They pulled the crate away from the water and resealed it before one of the team members wheeled it away.

~------~

Grian was petrified. One moment, he was locked up in his cage being so good, and the next there were people and they were pulling and yelling and taking pictures. He tried to be quiet through the whole process until one of the humans, a younger female he thinks, prodded at a newer wound while he was being restrained. He remembers breaking from his hold and lunging at her. He remembers a scream and the taste of blood and a stabbing feeling in the back of his neck. And then he woke up in a small tank. There were people all around him and they were talking really loudly. He thinks they might have been talking to him. Or maybe not. He knew that he was tired. And then it was dark again. But he was awake and the water was sloshing and he was getting flung around in the dark. So he began to yell. It hurt!

 And then there was a pounding on the wall and he was terrified. He needed to defend himself. He couldn't see and then he flung himself and suddenly it was all too bright. The light burnt his eyes and the water was cold. And he sank. He was scared. Scared mers don't survive in the fights. So he looked around his new area for a place to hide, a place to ambush. He found it in the carved out nook in the wall, partially covered by a thin colored plastic of some kind. It was dark and cool down there. It made him kind of drowsy.

He needed to stay awake. They would kill him if he went to sleep. He needed to be ready to fight at any moment. Ready to defend himself. He stared into the cool water and flexed his claws. Anxiety thrummed through his scales and he moved a hand down to pick at the scales on his arm.

~-----~

New mer at the facility usually stirred up quite a bit of anxiety and excitement for the residents already living there. They wouldn’t meet the new mer until they had done a two week quarantine, had the resident doctor check them for injuries or anything else that could be of concern, and Xisuma had outlined the long term recovery plan. However, they had been given some information about their new visitor. They had been rescued during a raid on a fighting ring and hadn’t been tagged beforehand, so they were a wild caught mer. The mer had been found in an area with only other male mer, but lacked the typical back sail most male mer possessed, so the staff were hesitant to declare their new ward either male or female. Intersex and transgender mers were surprisingly common either way; Iskall, Ren, and Bdubs being proof of that in their own establishment (though in Bdubs’ case pygmy mer almost always fell into the human definition intersex anyways).

To prepare the new mer for socialization after their quarantine, as mer were social creatures who suffered during the long periods of solitude a quarantine entails, Xisuma was looking through volunteers to try and interact with them. Scar and Ren had offered to do so pretty quickly, before either Cub or Doc could object to the idea. Later, if some of the mers saw Doc lay with Ren at one of the wall’s outcroppings and brush through his hair for a few hours, they said nothing. Doc was anxious by nature, being a disabled former fighting mer. Coddling things made him less anxious, so the others were content to be coddled by him for however long he needed.

Xisuma came to the pod a few days later and told them that they had done the new mer’s medical exam earlier than expected due to some unforeseen medical issues and had decided to end the quarantine period prematurely. The group had responded with concern immediately. They had made the decision to send Ren as soon as possible as he could defend himself if the other mer decided that the company was too much. Doc hissed at the news and Ren tucked his head under his chin and purred comfortingly to try and reassure his bonded that he would be alright. There was still time before Ren had to meet the other mer. They were going to send him in tomorrow morning. Doc curled his arms around Ren’s middle and buried his face in his hair to calm himself. Ren gave everyone a thumbs up and a chirp and gently moved himself so he could guide his bonded to their den. The group dispersed pretty quickly after that.

The pod spent the rest of the day in little groups discussing the news. Soft calls and trills of concern permeated through the water and some of the pod began to get restless. They had never met the other mer and yet they were so concerned about their health. The picture Xisuma painted for them wasn’t a pretty one. A mer rescued from a fighting ring that was so sick they had to end the quarantine period early. Just what had happened to this mer?

Chapter Text

To say Grian was anxious would be an understatement. Terrified was probably not an accurate descriptor of his current situation either. Grian was angry and incredibly sleep deprived though. He had bunkered down in the darkest corner of his enclosure and stared at even the smallest ripple in the water with enough intensity to kill a small squid. The thought of squid startled him a little. Squid was always Pearl’s favorite.His fins flared and he warbled in his small, broken kind of way. A head peaked over the far edge of the water. They were a younger human, but not a guppy, or whatever the humans called their hatchlings.Grian locked eyes with them and let out a sharp hiss, snapping his tail fins to his body and flaring them out again. They simply held up a bucket and threw in some kind of fish meat. At least, he assumed that’s what it was. There was no full fish, just a slab of salmon. Grian let it sink to the bottom and shook his gills in disdain. He was always more of a cod fellow, and the salmon smelled off anyways. It was nothing like the salt and rot that the humans would feed them before, but it still put him on edge. It smelt a little too clean and human for his tastes. It smelt almost like what his “doctors” would force feed him to make him fall asleep.

Grian turned to the human above the water and snarled. He pushed all his fins away from his body and rattled them, trying to seem bigger than he was. They were trying to poison him! Getting up from his corner for the first time in days, he swam lowly back and forth along the wall and gave shrill warning yips out into the water. The human backed away from the water’s edge and turned away from him and Grian used that as an opportunity to dart across the pool and lunge at the young human. They screamed as Grian grabbed onto their arm and dug, using his body weight to pull them into the water with him. He knew humans couldn’t breathe under the water like he could. If he held them under long enough he could prove to them that he was strong, not to be messed with. It also came with the promise of fresh food, something to chase and devour while hot. It had been so long since he had tasted human blood. The last time he had tried something like this was when he had first been taken, lunging at his attackers in blind desperation to save himself from his fate. Grian saw red and swam deeper into the water, gripping harder and harder and harder. The human fought against him as they descended and he grabbed their hair to expose their neck. Before he could lunge for the bite he was ripped away by a sticky net-like substance. He flailed and swung at his invisible attacker, screeching as his meal was ripped away from him. There was a prick at the back of his neck and he tried to spin and bite whatever had hurt him but as soon as the sensation was gone the world went dark and Grian fell limply into the arms of his captors.

The world passed in a blur, Grian laying on a cot falling in and out of consciousness. His limbs felt heavy and breathing in the dry air made his gills ache slightly. Laying on his back like this made him feel exposed and unsafe. He found he was too tired to do anything about it. He could vaguely feel the humans poking and prodding at him, moving his fins around and running all sorts of tests. He sank further into his cot and closed his eyes once more. Human words entered his ears and he caught some of the words they exchanged. He wasn’t very fluent in any human tongue, but he knew enough to catch the general idea. Words like small, weak, pod, and ocean floated through the room and hung on every surface. Grian felt himself shiver involuntarily and tried to bring his arms around himself. The air felt heavy, like his gills were congested with seafoam. His hands did nothing more than twitch weakly and he whined softly. He felt his fins try to curl around his lower half, but they could do nothing but hang limply in the dry air. He chirred to himself in frustration and tried to move his arms again.

He became aware that the humans had stopped talking and he went rigid. He peeled open his eyes and stared at the humans that stood shocked in the middle of the room. There was a human with dark, poofy hair and a very large “X” shaped scar across their nose. They wore some kind of dark mask that covered the lower half of their face. It reminded him of the masks that the medics wore after he finished a fight. The other human in the room was shorter than the other. They had yellow hair, shiny and coiled, dressed in a white lab coat and holding a wooden clipboard. The yellow haired human let out a heavy sigh and began to talk to the other human faster than Grian could comprehend the words. He slowly looked between the two as they got more agitated and felt his eyes fall shut again. He hissed under his breath and let himself fall back into the emptiness of sleep.

~-----~

The next time Grian came to himself, he was back in his pool. He flexed his hands slowly and, upon seeing that they worked, moved to sit upright from the floor. The pool looked mostly the same, but the water seemed to rub his gills in a much heavier way than before. He experimentally gave his tail a small flick. Everything seemed to be in working order. He pushed himself fully off of the pool floor and swam in a small circle. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong however.

He didn’t have time to think for very long before a panel on the wall slid open and a new mer swam through. This mer was bigger than Grian, with long brown hair and soft blue and purple scales. He noticed the lack of a sailfin and relaxed slightly. They stopped when they saw Grian, slipping easily into a pose of submission. Grian backed away and flared his fins. The other mer replied with a shy warble, extending his hip fins out slowly. Grian pulled his fins down and sent the other mer a questioning chirp. They came towards him with their head tilted to the side. Grian bowed his head and settled on the pool floor, giving a confused warble. They grabbed his wrist gently and Grian flinched away, shrieking and thrashing away from the hold. They held on tighter and pulled him towards their chest. He began to trill and call out like a lost guppy, wanting anyone to find him, to save him. The bigger mer purred as they settled him against their chest. Grian fought against his instincts, being treated like a fresh hatchling making him let down his guard. The other mer began to card a hand through his hair and he lost all fighting spirit.

He felt the other mer begin to swim upwards. He felt panic gather in his chest, but it was quickly pushed down by the much louder purrs of the other mer. They breached the surface and Grian was deposited on the edge of the water. No longer being held by the bigger mer, he quickly reigned in his instincts and stared at the other mer. His fins raised in alarm once more but the other mer started speaking before Grian could do anything. The words were too fast for him to understand so he just continued to stare at the other. He could feel himself beginning to zone out quickly. He realized that the other mer was looking at him expectantly. Grian picked at a scale and chirped his confusion to the other. The other looked at him puzzled for a moment before making an odd coughing sound. Then, he began to speak some human language again, but slower and simpler than before. Some of the sounds seemed to get stuck on his tongue, mers not being made for human sounds. The mer pointed at themself and said a funny word. “Ren.” Grian repeated the word and the other mer bared their teeth. Grian flinched and the other caught their mistake. They whistled their praise to him for repeating the phrase and said it again, pointing at themself. “Ren!” Then they trilled a masculine pod call, affirming that they were a male mer. Grian trilled the same call back to him. Then he pointed to Grian and made a questioning chirp. Grian yipped back a warning, swatting away the finger. They chirped in question again and Grian titled his head. He shook his head and pointed at themself, saying “Ren” once more. Then he pointed back at Grian and chirped once more. Grian sat up straighter and tried to figure out how to vocalize his name. Mer words don't translate very well, so he opted to give the mer word instead. He opened his mouth and Ren perked up. The word “Grian” slid off his tongue like a sea urchin.

Ren whistled in happiness and pulled Grian closer to his chest once more. Grian pulled away from the contact, hissing and spitting. Ren purred and dragged him down into the water. They sank to the bottom and Grian pulled away from the embrace. He moved towards the back wall, away from where Ren had decided to lay and comb through his hair. Ren flopped over to look at Grian, lazily purring and picking any grime off of his chest scales. His tail fins stayed open and relaxed, offering up affection and safety to anyone in the vicinity. His tail wagged a little when he caught Grian’s gaze. Grian grumbled at him and settled back in his corner. Eventually, he got bored of watching Ren laze about in his space and began to work a claw under one of his side scales. The dull, muddy colors of his scales that should be shiny upset him even more. He pulled up one of the scales gently and began to gnaw on it. It would grow back anyways. And if he had a sizable pile of scales in his corner by the time Ren left, well, that didn’t matter really. They were ugly scales anyways.