Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

This morning was like any other. 

It was calm today– no storm throwing itself against the rocks, no booming crash of heavy waves against the cliffs. Just the long, slow hush of water pulling in over sand and slipping back again, patient as a living thing, as if the world beyond your cottage still slept, and the sea alone had risen early enough to keep watch. Pale light filtered in through the linen curtains and fell across the hardwood floors in cool bars. Somewhere outside, gulls had already begun their bickering, shrill and indignant over whatever scrap or shell or fish head had become worth squabbling over.

You stayed where you were for a while, staring up at the dusty beams of the ceiling, still covered in that half-awake quiet where memory and dream were difficult to separate. There were some mornings, still, when old instincts commanded you instead of new ones– the thoughtless expectations that if you listened hard enough, you would hear your mother moving about the house. How she would drag a chair over the floor without picking up the feet of it, the creak of the kettle hook over the hearth because she was partial to the old-fashioned way, and her soft humming, beautiful but absentminded as she braided her hair with damp hands and salt still drying in the sleeves of her dress.

You never heard the sounds of her anymore.

The pain of it no longer tore at you like it once had. It lived deeper below the surface, hidden away in the familiar hollow inside your ribs that made itself present in quiet moments like these, before the day had properly begun. Something old and tender, something that had healed wrong.

You sighed and pushed yourself upright.

The cottage greeted you with the same spare, well-worn comfort it always had. The kitchen and sitting room downstairs had been made more welcoming by books and drying herbs that you still hadn’t moved since your mother first hung them up several years ago. And everywhere, the smell of salt lingered. In the small loft where you slept beneath slanted rafters, by the old wooden table by the windows, by the shelves crowded with jars and glass bottles filled with unique sea glass and bits of sea trash that you found decorative. The shawl your mother always wore still hung from the peg by the door because no matter how many times you told yourself you had to move on and fold it away, you could never quite bring yourself to do it.

You dressed in the soft gray shirt and faded blue jeans that you wore most days, light enough for the heat but sturdy enough for climbing the bluffs and wading the shallows. Then you tied your hair back with a ribbon you picked out of your mother's old sewing materials. As you bent to pull on your shoes, the silver chain around your ankle caught the early light.

The pearl there gleamed like a trapped drop of moonlit water. You brushed your fingers against it like you always did on the days you felt grief in the mornings. It was cold at first, then faintly warm beneath your skin, as if it recognized the touch.

You had worn the anklet so long it was less adornment than part of you, as natural as your own pulse. You could not remember the first day it had been fastened around your ankle, only the shape of your mother’s hands there when you were still small enough to sit obediently and let her fuss. She had never gone a single season without checking the clasp herself, and never let you enter the water after dark without touching the pearl once or twice, with a look in her eyes that had always suggested some semblance of prayer and warning.

You used to ask her why she was so protective of it, and her answer was always paired with a smile. “Because it’s yours.”

Which was also no answer at all. You realized that as you grew older, no longer content with such simple words.

Outside, the morning had opened up into one of those bright, clear, coastal days that made the world seem newly scrubbed clean. The breeze rolling up from the shore smelled of salt and wet stone and sun-warmed kelp that made you inhale harder but newcomers only wrinkle their nose and proclaim disgust. Far down the bluff, the water stretched out in a sheet of shifting blue and silver, already sparkling from where the sun struck it. Fishing boats rocked gently near the harbor, and farther inland the village was stirring to life in slow, familiar motions– doors opening, laundry being hung, and the dull thud of heavy baskets being set down outside shops. 

You took your woven satchel from its hook by the door, slipped your latest book into it, along with a small cloth for cleaning wounds, a heel of bread wrapped in wax covered cloth, and an empty sack you used for collecting anything that didn’t belong in the sea. Then you stepped outside and pulled the cottage door shut behind you. 

This village had known you all your life. Not in the way small villages claimed to know everyone, which often meant only that they knew how to speak of one another with great confidence and very little truth. No, they knew you because they had known your mother, and there were some names the sea itself seemed reluctant to let disappear. Her physical presence may have been gone for some time now, but her memory had not died. The people still spoke her name, just like the sea still carried her soul and her love. 

Your mother had been respected in a way people rarely respected women who lived alone and answered to no one. The elders, especially, had treated her with a kind of careful reverence, as if they were never quite certain where ordinary regard ought to end and something else– something older, more superstitious, perhaps– ought to begin. When nets tore in strange weather, they sometimes sought her blessing before taking the boats back out. When dolphins drove the fish unexpectedly close to shore, it was said she had walked the cliffs the night before. When a child went missing by the water and turned up safe among tide-carved rocks that should have been too dangerous to climb, people crossed themselves and said nothing too loud about luck… but whispered their thanks to her instead.

You had grown up in the wake of that respect. It followed you now, even if no one quite understood why.

As you crossed into the square, old Mrs. Sato, who sold herbs from the bunches hanging outside her crooked little shop, lifted a hand in greeting from where she sat sorting fennel from various weeds on her front step. “Morning, girl.”

“Morning.”

Mrs. Sato’s eyes fell to the satchel at your shoulder and the sack tied at your hip. “Off to clean up after the rest of us, are you?”

“You know me too well,” you said, smiling faintly. Then you shrugged one shoulder. “It keeps me out of trouble.”

The old woman snorted. “I doubt trouble could keep up with you, let alone catch you.”

As you passed by the fishmonger’s stall, Mr. Higa was grumbling over a crate of mackerel as other elders listened with long-suffering patience. He brightened when he saw you approach. 

“There she is,” he said, jerking his chin toward the sea. “Go tell your friends out there to stop stealing my bait fish before I’m forced to start charging them rent.”

You stopped in front of the stall, making a show out of looking thoughtful. “Well, that depends, Mr. Higa. The gulls or the seals? I’m likely to only have success with one of them, as you may well know.”

“The seals have more manners,” he muttered. He shook his head. “It’s not them. Never them.”

That earned a dry laugh from one of the older men nearby.

“Your mother said the same thing once,” Mr. Higa added, softening in the way people often did when they spoke of her. Then, as if realizing he had let something tender show, he cleared his throat and thrust an apple at you from a basket tucked beneath the table, waving it in front of you brusquely. “Here. It’s bruised on one side, so no one’s buying it.”

You laughed, but let him set it in your hand. “You say that every time.”

“And you take it, every time.”

You did. With thanks.

There were others, too, as you continued your walk throughout the village and down the path leading towards the shore. Old women whispered blessings after you under their breath, men mending nets who tipped their heads respectfully as you passed. Today, even some children who had once seen you coax an injured gull into your lap and now looked at you with the wide, fascinated caution reserved for saints and witches and anyone else who deserved such wary respect. 

The pattern of oddness you sported had long since been something people decided was better to honor than question. You belonged to the coast in a way others did not. Sea creatures somehow always found you, storms always seemed to avoid your little cottage when they split roofs farther inland. Once, when you were twelve, a pod of dolphins had followed your mother’s skiff all the way back to harbor, surfacing in graceful arcs on either side like a royal escort, and even the oldest, most stoic of men in town had watched in complete, awed silence.

They had revered her for it. 

You thought that they probably revered you in a similar way, but you couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t here anymore– which meant you couldn’t pelt her with questions about her relationship with the sea.

The beach waited broad and pale beneath the descending slope of the bluff, stitched with ribbons of washed-up seaweed and glimmering scatterings of shell. You kicked off your shoes at once and carried them in one hand, letting the sand shift cool and soft beneath your feet. The tide was partway out. Pools had formed in the rocks farther downshore, clear as glass and crowded with tiny, darting lives. Beyond them the sea stretched vast and blue-green, breathing under the morning sun.

It only took a half hour– maybe less than that– before the first creature found you. Or rather, you found it.

A juvenile cormorant had managed to wedge one wing through a twist of fishing line and plastic scraps stuck between two tide-blackened rocks. It thrashed weakly as you knelt beside it, dark eyes bright with pain and fear, beak opening wide in sharp warning clicks.

“It’s okay,” you murmured, setting your satchel down next to your knees. “I’m here to help you.”

The bird did not seem inclined to forgive you for existing, but it held still after a moment when your fingers found the line and began working it loose with practiced care. Bits of blue plastic and translucent filament came away one piece at a time. It was easy work, and the bird seemed to have calmed down somewhat. Unfortunately, the wing underneath had been rubbed raw where it had struggled.

You sighed softly. 

“Who loses fishing line like this?” You muttered, more to yourself than the bird. “No, they didn’t lose it. Probably tossed it straight into the sea and figured it wasn’t their problem anymore.”

The cormorant gave a petulant squawk.

“Yes, I know,” you said. You liked to imagine it was complaining about human carelessness. “I agree.”

When the last of it came free, you cupped the injured wing gently, closing your eyes for just a moment. The familiar coolness answered almost immediately, sliding through you in a silvery hush that always felt older than your own body, more sacred than any text you’d studied. The pain under your palm eased as the torn skin knit enough to stop bleeding. Not perfect, never perfect, but better.

The bird shuddered, then blinked up at you with sudden offended dignity before scrambling free and flapping awkwardly towards the waterline.

“You’re welcome,” you called after it.

By midday, the sack at your side had grown heavy with garbage: cracked plastic floats– lots of plastic in general, lengths of rope, glass too jagged and hazardous to leave behind, rusting hooks and fishing lures, strips of fabric bleached white by salt. Between stretches of collecting, you read with your back against a sun-warmed rock, one knee bent and your book braced there while gulls circled overhead and the surf rolled in and out nearby. Every so often you glanced down to see what the sea had decided to leave for you– smooth shards of green and brown glass, with rounded edges from years of current and sand: a shell striped rose and ivory; a bit of pottery painted with blue flowers so faded they looked like ghosts.

You tucked the sea glass into a separate pocket of your satchel, just like your mother used to do.

She had lined every windowsill with them, and on bright afternoons the cottage filled with dulled color where the light shone through. Green, brown, white, the occasional rare blue or lavender when the tide was feeling particularly generous, the little broken pieces made soft and beautiful by time and water. You were always expanding the collection, even if you weren’t trying to.

The sea spat out trash almost as often as people threw it in. And one man's trash is another woman's treasure, as the saying kind of goes. 

By the time the sun began its slow drift westward, your skin was warm, your shoulders pleasantly tired, and your sack of trash nearly full. You made your way back up the path with sand clinging to your calves and sea wind knotting your hair loose from its ribbon. The village was quieter now, even though only a few fishermen had returned. Nets hung like gray veils from posts to dry. Somewhere a woman was singing while she worked, her voice carrying faintly over the roofs.

At home, you emptied the trash into the larger bins kept behind the cottage for sorting, rinsed the sand from your feet, and set your small treasures on the table: the sea glass, the shell, an apple core for your compost bin, and your book. The house felt cooler than outside, shadowed and still. For a little while, you moved through its familiar tasks without thinking. You set water to boil, then opened the window above the table to let in the salt air. Folded a shawl, then unfolded it again, wondering if it was better to wear it with the way the air was starting to chill slightly, and touched the back of your mother’s chair as you passed.

When the kettle began to whistle shrilly, you switched off the stove and poured the steaming water over the tea bag in the mug you’d set out. Then you carried the cup over to the chair by the window, where you sat by the sill to watch the water below.

It had darkened into a deep blue as the horizon began to blur where day had loosened its hold. Soon the moon would rise. You could already feel the hour changing, and with it, you felt more… you.

You propped your heel up on the edge of your seat and traced the pearl fastened around your ankle. It was cold, and for a long moment, you sat there with your fingers resting on it, brushing your thumb over the perfectly smooth surface, as memories rose so quickly you almost gasped.

You could almost hear your mother’s laugh like she was next to you, low and warm and surprised by something outrageous you’d said. The two of you sitting on the floor before the hearth while she combed sea salt from your hair. Her hands pausing at your ankle to fasten the clasp, always checking it, always too careful for it not to be as casual as she made it seem.

You remembered once, asking whether she had a matching one. She had only smiled in that secretive way of hers, the one that always made it seem as though she knew the answer to the question you were always struggling to ask. 

“No,” she’d said. “That one is yours alone.”

“But why?”

“Because one day…” she said. And then she stopped. You had waited, impatient with the solemnity of adults that you rarely saw in her. 

“One day what?”

She only kissed your temple, touched your hands gently, and told you to stop fidgeting. 

You shook your head once and looked back out towards the sea. The moon had risen while you had been remembering. 

It was large and luminous, hanging just above the horizon, bright enough to lay a wavering silver path across the surface of the water. From here it looked like a road made for ghosts, or gods, or all the things men told stories about because they knew better than to pretend they understood them. The entire ocean seemed to change beneath it. It was soft and strange. Awake in a different way. 

You sat there longer than you meant to with your tea cooling between your hands, grief and wonder and remembrance twisting together in the quiet of your chest until they felt impossible to separate.

Then, because some habits had become ritual in the years since her death, you changed into your lighter swimming shift, braided your hair back again, and made your way down toward the water.

There was a little rock island not too far from shore, revealed at lower tides and half-submerged at higher ones, its back smooth and dark from years of waves breaking over it. You had swum there since childhood. In the village, people called it Widow’s Rock, though no one agreed on why. Your mother used to take you out there on calm evenings when the moon was high. You used to lie on your backs atop the warm stone after sunset and count stars until the chill drove you both home.

Tonight the water was crystal clear and warm on the surface, getting cooler the deeper you went. You waded in until the sea reached your thighs, then your waist, then made your way over to the rock, swimming strongly and surely in the water in a way you never quite had been on land. 

The turtles were already waiting when you arrived.

You laughed softly when the first broad shell broke the surface near the rock, sending up a spray of silver droplets. Another surfaced farther out, then another still, until there were four of them drifting lazily in the current around you, dark heads bobbing, ancient and unbothered.

“Punctual tonight, aren’t you,” you said, as you treaded water.

One of them nudged your hip with its smooth beak. 

“Oh, is that how tonight’s going to be?” You reached out and ran your palm along the slick curve of its shell. Barnacles roughened the back edge, and a ribbon of algae trailed from one side. “No greeting? No proper courtesy? Just straight to demanding attention?”

The turtle blinked at you with slow, unimpressed dignity.

“Yeah, I should’ve expected it,” you said with a quiet laugh, as you hauled yourself partway onto the rock island, water streaming from your legs, while the turtles circled close enough to brush the stone with their flippers. You settled on your knees at the edge and began the familiar work of cleaning them, scraping away clusters of barnacles with careful fingers, tugging strands of algae free, talking the whole while because it felt less like solitude when you did.

“You should have seen Mr. Higa today,” you told them, smiling faintly as you worked your fingers beneath a stubborn line of barnacles. “Lots of grumbling.”

One of the turtles made a soft, breathy sound through its nostrils.

You laughed quietly. “I know. Apparently the gulls are stealing from him now, which is very likely, though mostly I think he mostly just likes having something to complain about. There’s a new thing every week.”

You leaned over another shell, tugging a stringy piece of algae free with careful fingers. “He gave me a bruised apple afterward, though, so I can’t judge him too harshly. That seems to be his way of apologizing for pretending he isn’t fond of me.”

Another turtle drifted closer, blinking at you with that same old, patient expression.

“Mrs. Sato was sitting out front sorting herbs when I passed,” you went on. “She asked if I was off to clean up after the rest of the village again, which, to be fair, I was.”

When the nearest turtle made another little sound, you shook your head, smiling wider.

“Don’t look at me like that. Somebody has to do it.” A third turtle lifted its head and drifted nearer, its dark eyes fixed on you with the unnerving steadiness sea creatures always seemed to bring to bear where you were concerned. You cupped your hand to pour water over its shell and scrubbed gently with the cloth you had brought.

Then you paused your movements and looked at them with pursed lips. “The gossip isn’t very good today, is it?”

“But, I do have this,” you continued, going back to de-barnacling, “the baker’s son dropped an entire basket of sweet rolls into the square this afternoon because Mira touched his arm and smiled at him. There were sugared buns everywhere. Mrs. Tanaka stepped on one and went around telling everyone that the shape the cream left on the bottom of her shoe was a bad omen.”

This time, the sound the turtles made after your little story sounded so much like a laugh that you paused for a moment, then snorted. “Are you laughing at me, or the story I just told?”

Then you added, “Actually nevermind, I don’t know why I’m asking– you can’t answer me anyway.”

They all just blinked slowly. 

“Now I know you're judging me.”

The sea lapped gently at the rock as you began to speak of little things. Of the bits of sea glass and the book waiting for you on the table at home, and the old shawl of your mother’s you still had not put away, though you knew you needed to. The turtles clustered around you and listened– or seemed to.

You had long ago stopped trying too hard to make sense of that. It was enough that they showed up to see you at all. 

As the sky deepened and the last traces of daylight vanished, you noticed how the breeze changed and the moon rose higher. Strange shapes began to swirl below the surface of the water. You sat back on your heels and glanced toward shore.

From here the village looked softened by distance, scattered lanterns glowing warm and golden amongst the dark streets. Your cottage window was only a pinprick of reflected moonlight, beautiful and quiet. You had stayed later than you meant to. 

“I should go,” you murmured, giving the nearest shell one last smoothing pass with your hand. “If I linger any longer, you’ll all expect me to start singing for your entertainment.”

One turtle slapped the rock with one of its flippers as if in protest. 

“Yes, yes,” you murmured, sliding carefully back into the cool water. “But I’ll be back soon.”

You began to swim towards the shoreline at a measured pace, but you only made it a few body lengths before something caught your ankle. Not brushed it. Not snagged on it.

Caught it. 

The grip was sharp and strong and unmistakably alive, claws biting just enough to shock, and then you were jerked under the surface so violently that the cry that had been caught in your throat never made it out. Water closed over your head in a roaring rush of bubbles and darkness as instinct began to take hold of you. You kicked hard, twisted, clawed at the water, one hand flying to your trapped ankle even as the other struck out uselessly into the open sea.

Panic was starting to overtake your mind, but you still managed to remember to hold your breath. 

It was painful. Your chest locked tight around it while terror burst hot and blinding behind your eyes. The surface vanished above you faster than should have been possible, silver moonlight disappearing into thin strips overhead as you were dragged deeper, deeper, deeper. Pressure built in your ears and your heartbeat became a frantic hammer.

You only thrashed harder.

The grip on your ankle never loosened. 

You twisted so hard a muscle in your side pulled. Salt burned in your nose as the horrible realization crossed your mind. This was how people died. Your lungs were starting to ache from holding your breath for so long.

Your hand locked around whatever held your ankle. Fingers met something slick and hard and… webbed? It was alive and strong, far too strong for you to escape from. You clawed at it uselessly, kicking so violently that pain shot up through your hip.

Then you felt a gentle presence brushing against the edge of your mind. 

Easy.

Your mind knew who it was immediately. The very same broad-shelled sea turtle that always nudged your hip first when you reached the rock. The one with the pale scrape along the rim of his shell and the habit of lingering closest after you’d cleaned the barnacles from his back. You could feel him now somewhere nearby, circling anxiously just outside your line of sight.

Easy, he repeated. 

You stared blindly into the dark water, chest seizing tighter. This is not happening, you thought wildly. I hit my head. I swallowed too much saltwater. I’m dreaming.

The reply came back strange and soft and almost impatient. 

Not a dream.

Your lungs spasmed.

Panic surged again, hotter for the brief interruption. You thrashed harder, trying to wrench yourself free, but the hold on your ankle only adjusted, tightening just enough to keep you from breaking away. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t gentle either. More efficient than anything else, as if whoever had hold of you had no time to spare for whether or not you were frightened.

Can you stop freakin’ out already? We’re wasting time. 

This voice was also in your head, but sounded distinctly more human than the one you knew belonged to your turtle friend. Something moved in the darkness, and suddenly the grip on your ankle vanished. 

Thought you’d be a better swimmer, the voice said drily. It sounded like a man– or something close to one. Then he added, You’re going to pass out if you keep holding your breath. This ain’t a trick, and I’m not trying to kill you.

You looked to the left, at the only thing you could see in the fading slivers of moonlight that were still lighting things up under the surface. The turtle. He hovered next to you, closer than before, his old, steady attention fixed on you. 

You finally inhaled. Water poured into your throat. But where you expected burning pain and choking, the sea seemed to slip into you as easily as night air through an open window. 

You jerked, more in shock than pain, and inhaled again on accident. Then again on purpose, because your mind refused to trust what your body had already accepted.

You could breathe. The realization hit so hard you forgot, for a moment, to be afraid.

All around you, the water sharpened.

Not visually– though that too, perhaps. More like the world had been muffled your entire life and someone had just torn the cloth away. You could feel the small bright flickers of fish nearby, their curiosity darting like reflected light. You could sense the slow old steadiness of the turtle at your shoulder. The lazy drag of a ray over the sand below, and how, farther out and deeper down, there were bigger things. Heavier presences. Ancient and patient and aware in ways that made your skin prickle.

Then the shape circling you cut across one of the bands of moonlight, and every thought you had fled. It was not a shark or a seal or anything that your mind could jump to fast enough. Except, it looked a bit like a lionfish. 

Not because it resembled one in shape– because it didn’t– but because something about it carried that same mesmerizing warning. Beautiful in a way that felt dangerous. Striped in black and orange where the light caught the spread of fins and an exceptionally long and powerful tail. You couldn’t look away. 

He circled once more, slower now.

He was unquestionably a male. A huge one.

Broad through the chest and shoulders, with ash-blond hair drifting around his head in pale disordered strands, as though the sea itself had never once managed to smooth him into something tame. His face was all sharp angles and hard edges, made harsher by the way he watched you– alert, assessing, clearly prepared for you to do something stupid. Fins flared subtly from his forearms and along parts of his tail, dark at the edges and bright as embers nearer the center. Scales climbed over him in irregular patterns, black in some places, burnt orange in others, catching what little light there was in slick, deadly flashes.

His hands weren’t human either. Too webbed, too clawed. 

One of his hands flexed at his side, and your ankle throbbed just looking at the size of them. Yeah, you really hadn’t stood a chance against even just one of his hands. 

Done panicking?

His words were so rough and blunt, they almost caught you off guard again just like when he’d first spoken a minute ago. So you just stared.

He stared back, already looking annoyed. 

You–, you began, and the word never made it to your mouth because you did not say it aloud at all. It left you in the same strange interior way his had reached you. Your eyes widened. You’re hearing my thoughts?

His mouth pulled into something that was not a smile in the slightest.

Don’t worry too much. I’m only hearing the ones you project to me, whether you mean to or not. 

Even in the cool water, you could feel your cheeks flush in embarrassment. 

So you decided to ignore him for a minute and focus on the turtle, who was still swimming very close to you. 

I know you, you thought towards the turtle. Don’t I?

Yes, he answered. But that was all he said, sounding pleased with himself now that you had calmed down and had recognized him.

You felt an overwhelming sense of fondness for the creature, but you knew you had far too many questions to address such a feeling now. You shoved it down immediately and looked back at the creature who had dragged you under. He had moved closer.

You weren’t sure if you liked that he had, but at least you could see him clearer in the dark water. You could see, especially, how stress was pulling at his features and tensing his muscles. Something hotter and meaner than simple worry. He had a temper on a short fuse with fear banked under it. 

He looked like danger. He looked like he had not slept in days. 

He looked, irritatingly, a little like he expected you to waste more time asking useless questions.

You tilted your head slightly, studying him with a frown. Are you in pain?

He scowled and seemed to hiss the next few words into your mind, Not the kind you can fix.

You ignored the warning snap of his tone.

Stress like that dragged the body down bit by bit. You could see where it started in his jaw and browbone and shoulders. He was waiting for something bad to happen. Human or otherwise, you had seen enough grief– known it personally– to know its posture.

You’re exhausted, you said, in a quieter voice, because for all the fear still clinging to you, that much was plain. And angry.

No shit. Got any other observations?

You might have laughed from the bluntness, if not for the fact that you were still suspended strangely underwater with a stranger who had abducted you by the ankle. That reminder made you focus again, fear returning steadier now, more controlled.

You stared into his blood-red eyes. Why did you bring me here?

He didn’t speak immediately. Instead, his gaze dropped to your ankle. To the pearl. 

A grim kind of relief passed over his face, as if he was confirming something he’d already checked for a thousand times. When he looked back up at you, his expression was flat again. 

I have someone who needs you.

Questions gathered on your tongue, but you suppressed them when you saw he wanted to go on.

She’s sick, he continued, clipped and hard. And you’re going to heal her.

And there, deep under the moonlit sea with one old turtle at your shoulder and a black-and-orange creature from the oldest corners of nightmare and folklore staring you down like this was the simplest thing in the world, your life split cleanly into before and after.

Chapter Text

He did not look away when he said it. 

I have someone who needs you to heal her.

The words cut through the water and entered straight into your mind, rough and low, and for one long moment, all you could do was stare at him- at the hard line of his mouth, at the black-and-orange sweep of his enormous tail cutting slowly through the dark. The red eyes fixed on you with a focus so severe it felt less like attention and more like being pinned.

Then you collected yourself enough to ask a question.

What?

You didn’t mean to project the thought so loudly, but he didn’t even so much as blink. 

You heard me.

Well… pulling me under the water and demanding it isn’t really the proper way to ask for my help. You pushed back a little farther in the water, your heart still hammering hard enough to tremble your limbs. Who are you? What are you? And why in God’s name did you think dragging me under by the ankle was acceptable?

His gaze turned sharp and mean, but not with guilt- with impatience. 

His attitude exhausted you. Even more so when all he chose to say was, Later. 

You stared at him with slight disbelief. Later?

Yes.

That’s not an answer.

He blew bubbles from his nose in an underwater version of a huff as his reply echoed in your mind. 

Didn’t say it was.

The turtle at your shoulder brushed lightly against your arm, his presence soft and steady at the edge of your frustration in a way that should have comforted you more than it did. It was difficult to feel soothed when the creature in front of you was treating your unraveling as an inconvenience.

You folded your arms over your chest, though the gesture felt absurd suspended in open water. I think it’s awfully convenient for you that you want to dismiss all my questions after you snatched me.

At that, you thought you were able to see a subtle change in his expression. It still wasn’t guilt and certainly wasn’t shame, but more like aggravation being worn raw by exhaustion. You could understand it. It was the look of someone who had spent too many days too close to disaster and had no patience left for delay of any kind.

I didn’t take you for fun.

That doesn’t really make this better. 

It isn’t supposed to make you feel better, he snapped. It’s supposed to make you move.

You almost laughed, but not because it was funny. It absolutely wasn’t. The alternative, though, was getting angry, and doing that underwater seemed like a poor use of your energy.

You tilted your head instead. I’m not going anywhere until you give me a real answer.

For a moment he just swished his tail aggressively behind him. Then he exhaled again through his nose with visible annoyance, as though the very act of giving you the smallest scrap of information offended him. It’s Bakugou.

You frowned. That’s your name?

What else would it be?

You ignored the insulting tone. And what are you?

One of his spiny fins flared faintly and settled again. Use your eyes. Stop wasting time.

No, you said at once, the refusal rising before you could even acknowledge it. No. I’m not going any farther until you tell me exactly what’s going on.

He stared at you as the water around him shifted. It wasn’t dramatic or a quick movement that caught you off guard, just a slight change in the line of his shoulders and the poised readiness of that massive tail beneath him, enough to remind you what he was built for and what you were not. 

You don’t have that option, he said, and the words were spoken quietly into your mind. A wave of empathy washed over you, though you knew you could not show it. He was too prideful– too stubborn of a creature to accept shared sadness like that. He would only accept exactly what he was demanding of you. 

Bakugou seemed to read the answer in your face before you gave it. He turned without satisfaction, without triumph, only urgency, and began to swim.

You pushed after him, realizing that he was moving far too quickly for your body to keep up. 

The water closed around him as if it had been made to fit him, his tail driving him forward in long, ruthless strokes that left you chasing after the wake of him while your own body still struggled to understand what it was doing. Breathing seawater was miracle enough, but swimming through it with anything akin to confidence was another matter entirely. Your limbs felt too heavy and too slow, the current tugging at your swimming shift and your hair as if eager to remind you that this world was not yours, however cleanly your lungs had accepted it.

Or not the part of it you knew.

You kicked harder.

The turtle stayed near, circling your shoulder or drifting briefly ahead before looping back again, his calm a steady pressure at the edge of your mind. It helped more than you wanted to admit. More than it should have, perhaps, considering that less than an hour ago you had believed him incapable of actual thought and now he was the most stabilizing presence in your life.

Moonlight filtered down from the surface, the wavering ribbons thinner now than they had been moments ago, slipping between vast curtains of kelp that moved in the current like silk hung from unseen rafters. The deeper you followed, the more layered the sea became. Light over shadow, stillness over motion, familiar shapes over stranger ones that moved farther below and farther out, just beyond sight. Glowing fish slipped through the dark in sudden little flashes of silver-blue, jelly-like creatures drifted on translucent bells, their trailing tendrils lit from within by soft green light. Once, something broad and sleek passed beneath you, scales gleaming briefly before vanishing again into the dimness. 

It was beautiful. 

It also felt crowded. 

Not physically, though there were creatures everywhere now that you knew how to sense them. Crowded with awareness. Small bright minds flickering at the edges of your thoughts. Slow, ancient presences deeper down, moving with patient certainty through the black. Curiosity and caution. Recognition, sometimes– brief, strange little turns of attention that made the skin at the back of your neck rise. 

The sea, which had always felt like solitude, suddenly became company.

Ahead of you, Bakugou got far enough that you had to push harder just to keep him properly in sight. When he looked back and saw how far behind you were, his expression soured visibly.

He circled back with obvious reluctance.

You swim slower than a legless crab. 

Your face screwed up. Legless crabs couldn’t swim…

Oh. 

You rolled your eyes at his muscled back as you projected your thoughts again. Forgive me for not being properly acclimated to my underwater kidnapping.

His mouth flattened, but he did slow down considerably after that. You also noticed, a few moments later, that he looked back again. And then again. 

Each time with the same irritated set to his face, as if your continued existence behind him were both expected and somehow personally offensive. You might have found it funny under different circumstances. As it was, the repeated glances planted something quieter in the middle of your anger. He was not only hurrying you. He was checking that you were still there. Every few strokes, that flash of red eyes over his shoulder– not impatient anymore, but checking that you hadn't vanished or changed your mind or decided to be difficult. It was almost protective, the way he looked back.

He only seemed to realize, after the third or fourth time, that you had noticed his constant checking. That only made him look more annoyed. 

The turtle drifted close enough for one old dark eye to fix on you. You are stubborn, too. Don’t judge him.

The betrayal of being judged by marine life was so profound it nearly knocked the panic right out of you. Excuse me?

His reply came with what felt suspiciously like placid amusement. You don’t think you are?

Ahead of you, Bakugou glanced back again, eyes narrowing faintly when he caught the look on your face. What now?

You looked from him to the turtle and back again, still too offended to form a dignified answer.

Nothing, you thought with quiet resentment. Apparently I’m being criticized by sea turtles now.

He held your gaze for a few moments, and for a split second you thought you could see the start of a smirk begin to stretch his mouth. The sight of it startled you, but he turned away too soon for you to see anything else. 

The farther you swam, the darker the sea grew. Beauty began, slowly, to give way to a kind of sickness. You noticed the smaller things first.

A patch of coral that had grown too pale, and a cluster of fish moving through the current more sluggishly than they should have. And the water wasn’t as clear as it should’ve been. It looked polluted, which was unusual for this part of the coast.

You slowed down to examine further. 

Ahead, the seabed rose in a wide shelf of reef. What should have been lush branching coral had gone white in some places, blackened in others, as though some blight had spread through it from the inside out. Delicate fans drooped limp and brittle-looking and small silver fish threaded through the dead sections in erratic little patterns. One turned just enough for you to see the ragged mark along its side.

The coral didn't just look pale, it looked like life had been extracted from it. Whatever brightness had lived in it was gone, leaving behind only the skeleton of color. More than several branches of the bleached, bone-colored coral had crumbled to the sea floor, suggesting they were gone past the point of return. One cluster of polyps had gone completely black instead of white, as though something had burrowed in and rotted it from the inside out. And Bakugou swam through this every day. Lived in it. Carried whatever this was spreading through his home.

Without thinking, you angled your body downwards. Bakugou noticed your movements immediately. He cut across your path so fast the water jolted around both of you, the dark spread of his fins throwing off the last thin strips of moonlight. He did not touch you, but his body was barrier enough.

Don’t.

The word cracked through your mind. You blinked a few times at him, then tried to look around his shoulder towards the reef. But it’s sick.

Yeah, no shit, was his not-so-eloquent reply.

You made to go around him, but he blocked you again. Irritation flashed through you, hot and instant. Move.

No. His hackles seemed to raise, but on him, it looked like his lionfish-like spines flaring out in an attempt to intimidate you. 

There are injured creatures down there. 

And there will still be injured creatures down there after you’ve seen my mother.

You hadn’t been aware of who he’d wanted you to heal until now. The mention of his mother made you feel a little differently towards him. There was something in him that sharpened around the words so violently there was no mistaking what sat beneath all the rudeness and temper and clipped impatience.

It was fear.

You felt a sort of kinship with him now. But still, you didn’t feel right ignoring all the other hurt sea life. You do not get to order me around every time I try to help something. I’m only still here because I’m doing you a favor.

His expression changed, tightening like he was in pain. The fins along his forearms lifted and settled. His gaze cut once towards the bleached reef, then back to you. If you waste your strength here, he said, each word clipped hard enough to bruise, if you burn yourself out before you even see her, then I dragged you down here for nothing.

He was afraid of losing time. 

You looked down at the reef and at all the sluggish fish and the dark thread of corruption running through the water that should’ve been clean. Something more cold and awful than fear moved through you. Dread. 

This was not just one sick body somewhere ahead for you to prepare yourself to heal. This was spreading throughout the ocean, and likely, throughout his people, too.

When you looked back at him again, he was still watching you with that same terrible intensity, as if waiting to see whether your compassion would make you reckless or useful.

Slowly, and with visible reluctance, you drew back. 

He still didn’t relax, but you saw some of the violent readiness in him ease. In the brief shift of his attention as he turned to continue onward, you caught something. 

He had seen you reach for the reach, he had understood why. He knew now that even angry, even frightened, you would still reach towards suffering.

You knew now that his cruelty had a center, and at the middle of it was a mother you hadn’t met yet. 

Bakugou turned and began to swim again. This time, after a slight pause, you followed. 

𓆝𓆟༝˚｡⋆𓆉︎⋆｡˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚｡⋆𓆉︎⋆｡˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚｡⋆𓆉︎⋆｡˚༝𓆞𓆝

As the underwater world began to open up below, you came to a stop again. It wasn’t fear that stopped you, though there was still enough of it left in your body to make every movement feel a little too careful, a little too brittle at the edges. 

It was wonder. 

The kingdom spread beneath you in a sweep of stone, coral, and living light so beautiful it almost hurt to behold.

It had not been built against the cliffs so much as into them, shaped from the bones of the sea rather than forced over them. Towers rose in pale spirals from shelves of dark stone veined through with shell and pearl, their sides carved with curling patterns that looked like waves caught mid-motion. Broad arches swept between them in elegant spans, draped with luminous vines and soft fronds of sea flora that cast everything in muted washes of blue, green, and pearl-white. Some structures gleamed smooth and rounded as conches split open to reveal their inner shine while others seemed half-grown from the reef itself, all branching coral and curved alcoves and delicate ridges that should have looked fragile and somehow did not.

Currents moved through it all like roads. 

You could see them when you looked closely enough, the slow broad channels of cleaner water winding between terraces and through open courtyards, carrying schools of silver fish in shimmering ribbons through the city’s heart. Smaller creatures darted through columns and windowed openings in bright nervous flashes, and gardens clung to ledges where no gardens ought to have survived, lush with waving grasses and strange flowering things that gave off their own pale glow. Lantern-plants hung beneath archways, their bell-like bodies lit from within.

It seemed ancient.

It was old in that way moonlight was old. Worn smooth by time and inhabited so completely that it no longer felt like architecture at all, but like some natural extension of the deep itself. It was lived-in, too, which made it seem stranger. You could feel life moving through it, steady and layered and wholly at ease in a place you had not known existed an hour ago. It was a city that breathed beneath the sea.

And still, threaded through the beauty of it, there were wounds. You could see them from here.

The coral terraces were going gray at the edges, and the stretches of reef near the lower wall bleached in ghostly white. Gardens that should have glowed lush and strange left dull in patches, as though sickness had moved through them in quiet little bites. It made the whole kingdom feel like a jewel with a crack through the center. Lovely still, but not untouched.

For a moment, you forgot your frustration. That, perhaps, was what gave you away.

Because when you slowed, staring openly now, Bakugou circled back with visible annoyance already gathering at the corners of his mouth. He followed your line of sight downward and then looked at you again with something almost like exasperation.

Keep moving, he said, his voice sounding rough in your head. I didn’t drag you down here so you could float around and gawk.

You were in too much awe for the anger to come up with a retort. You tore your gaze away from it and looked at him instead. There was no pride in his face at your reaction. No softening or satisfaction, no trace of someone pleased to see his home admired. Only that same taut impatience, that same urgency held too tightly beneath the skin.

Still, when he turned and began descending again, you followed more quickly this time.

The closer you got, the more detail the kingdom revealed. The towers were carved with symbols you didn’t understand– crescent shapes, fishbones, wave-lines, spirals that turned inward on themselves like shells. Broad platforms of stone curved outward from the cliffs in layered rings, their edges lined with pale coral that had been coaxed into rail-like lattices. There were places where the city seemed to disappear briefly into the reef and then emerge again, as though it had been grown in partnership with the sea rather than imposed upon it.

It was too amazing. And maybe that was why you nearly failed to notice the first turning heads.

You didn’t want it to seem like you were staring at the other merpeople. There were so many types of tails that were catching your eye that you were overlooking the fact that people were staring at you and Bakugou. At first it was only one or two, but the number grew as you swam deeper into the heart of the underwater kingdom. 

A merman carrying a bundle of long-stemmed glowing plants slowed as you passed overhead, his gaze catching first on Bakugou and then on you. A pair of guards standing beneath a high carved arch straightened all at once, bodies going still in that careful way of people who had been trained not to flinch too obviously when something important approached. Farther down, a healer moving quickly along one of the current-roads changed direction the moment they saw Bakugou’s face, as though deciding whatever errand had been urgent a second before could now wait.

They were noticing you. But they were noticing him, too. 

The farther inward you moved, the more obvious it became that this was not merely a city he knew. It was a city that knew him. Guards moved aside for him without being told and others dipped their heads as he passed, not deeply and not ceremoniously, but with the ease of practiced deference. A broad-shouldered, older merman near a descending stair set one hand to his chest and swam back immediately upon seeing him. A group of younger merpeople clustered near one of the terraces fell abruptly quiet the moment Bakugou’s gaze cut in their direction.

Some looked relieved to see him, but most looked wary.

A few even looked almost afraid, though whether of him or of whatever expression he was carrying across his face tonight, you could not yet tell.

No one stopped him, but no one looked inclined to try, either. Your eyes drifted over him, more carefully this time. 

He moved through the kingdom with ruthless efficiency– the same kind he had when he’d moved through the open water in circles around you, waiting for your panic to die down. Here it meant something different, though. Here, where others shifted around him without question, where whole stretches of space seemed to open in his wake, and the shape of him took on something newer and more dangerous. He was powerful. 

He mattered to these people. 

He had rank– and a great deal of it, if the reactions around you meant anything at all. He wasn't just some wild creature of the deep, then, though there was enough wildness in him still to make using the word tempting. He had been raised in this place. You suspected that he carried much more burden than just that of his temper. 

The proof of it arrived moments later. 

A young guard stationed near one of the lower arches straightened so quickly he nearly collided with the column at his back. My prince–

Bakugou did not slow down. Later. 

It was only one word, but the flat venom in it made the guard recoil from it as if he had been struck. His gaze darted once towards you, then down to your legs, and his whole expression changed. 

You followed the line of his sight instinctively, to your ankle. The pearl flashed faintly beneath the folds of your swimming shift.

When you looked back up, the guard had already lowered his eyes.

That explains why you were away, my prince. 

Bakugou said nothing as he beckoned you past the line of guards and into the city. That was when you started to become much more aware of the merpeople's reactions to you. 

The first older healer to catch sight of the anklet stopped so abruptly that the cluster of fish drifting behind her were forced to split and swerve around her shoulders. Her gaze moved from your face to the pearl at your ankle and stayed there. A second healer near her followed the same line and made a small sharp motion with one hand, not quite pointing, not quite brave enough to be obvious. Two elderly merpeople beneath a strand of swaying lantern-vines exchanged a look so startled it sent a shiver through you.

And it kept happening. That same kind of reaction, again and again and again. 

Their eyes would catch on the silver chain, then on the pearl, and lastly, on you. 

A broad scarred guard who had first looked at you with nothing more than suspicion glanced down and went still in a way that felt stranger than suspicion ever could have. A merwoman carrying bundles of woven cloth to one of the upper terraces nearly dropped them altogether. Even the sea life around the city seemed altered by your presence. Small fish gathered too near before darting away again and a pale ray skimmed beneath you with a slow deliberate calm that felt a lot like recognition, or like they'd known you in another life. 

You weren’t sure if the fish or the ray were able to speak into your head like the turtle could, as they stayed silent upon their passing.

You were being watched not only as an outsider, not only as the strange land-born creature brought into the kingdom at the prince’s side, but as something known. They knew something about you– or perhaps just the pearl, since that was what they seemed to recognize. 

It left you feeling like everyone else had been handed the opening lines of a story you had been made to live without being allowed to read first. 

Bakugou noticed them noticing. It was impossible not to. And so it was that his already bad mood worsened. You could tell just by the uneasy puffing of his fins and restless swishing of his tail. 

When one of the older healers drifted a little too near, mouth already parting as if to speak, Bakugou’s head snapped around with such abrupt force that the man stopped short.

What?

His words came out aggressive and flat. The healer’s gaze flicked once to your ankle, his tail swishing anxiously, then back to Bakugou. I-I only thought that maybe I could–

You thought wrong.

And that ended that. You gave the older man an apologetic smile, which he seemed delighted to have received from you before being urged away by Bakugou. He turned away before the older man could attempt anything else, and this time when the current narrowed between two carved pillars and a cluster of passing guards crowded too close on the other side, his hand closed briefly around your wrist to guide you through.

The touch was not gentle, as his black claws scraped your inner wrist. It wasn’t careless, either- just firm and maddeningly certain, as if it had not occurred to him that you might object to being handled at all. 

You jerked your wrist back the moment the space widened enough for him to release you.

I can swim on my own. 

I noticed, he said dryly, not looking at you. You’re just extremely slow. 

You frowned at the side of his face. He pointedly ignored it, though the set of his jaw told you he knew you were frowning anyway. 

Around you, the staring hadn’t lessened. If anything, it had increased at the sight of him touching you– however briefly– had given the city something new to feed on. Whispers stirred through the water in broken little currents and questions hovered at the edge of hearing. No one said anything directly again, not with Bakugou looking ready to eviscerate the next person who tried, but the whole kingdom had begun bending around your presence in tiny quiet ways.

They knew something. You could feel it now with growing certainty, not in the newly awakened way you sensed the creatures of the sea, but in the older ordinary way people knew when a room’s energy had gone all strange and quiet. These merpeople were not only looking at you because you had arrived beside their prince, they were looking at you because the pearl at your ankle had immediately drawn their eye.

Whatever it meant, you were the only one here who didn’t understand it. 

Bakugou’s hand landed once, briefly, at the small of your back when another cluster of bodies threatened to crowd you from both sides. He continued to steer you forward, his expression growing harsher every time another pair of eyes lingered too long.

You probably should’ve disliked the possessiveness of it all. Maybe you did, deep down. 

But beneath that, there was understanding.

He was not only trying to get you somewhere quickly now, he was trying to keep the rest of the kingdom away from you.

And the farther into the city you went, the more obvious it became that everyone was far too interested in you to remain harmless.

𓆝𓆟༝˚｡⋆𓆉︎⋆｡˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚｡⋆𓆉︎⋆｡˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚｡⋆𓆉︎⋆｡˚༝𓆞𓆝

The underwater palace grew quieter the deeper you travelled, though not silent. The sea didn’t know how to be silent any more than the wind did– there was always motion somewhere, always the hush of current against stone, the flicker of fish through open spaces and the low chiming of shells against coral. Even the whispering of different types of fronds bending in the water. But the noise of life thinned here. The clustered movement of the city gave way to something more careful… more watchful than anywhere you’d ever been before.

Even before you saw the chamber ahead, you knew you were approaching the center of the wound, of the rot that was spreading throughout this small part of the sea.

Its archway had been carved directly into the pale face of the cliff, edged in pearls and bleached, bone-white shells that caught the lantern-glow and returned it in softened silver ripples. Long ribbons of sea silk drifted on either side like veils. Two guards stood at the entrance, neither one speaking as Bakugou approached, though both straightened immediately and moved aside without being ordered to. Their eyes cut to you only once, quick and startled, before dropping to the ground again as their tails flicked behind them in a manner that could’ve only been described at anticipation.

Inside the chamber, the water was different. 

It felt cleaner, more filtered in some way. However they had done it, the place had been tended to with such relentless care that the difference washed over your skin instantly. The bitter metallic taint that had clung to the outer reef had not vanished entirely, but it had been layered over with a medicinal sharpness and a strange sweet smell of herbs you didn’t recognize that had been suspended in glasslike bowls along the walls. 

The chamber itself had been built in a wide circular shape, its ceiling ribbed with pale stone and branching coral. Light gathered softly from dozens of bright white lantern-plants, leaving no corner fully in the dark. Low, merman-made channels had been carved into the floor to keep the filtered seawater flowing in loops through the room, carrying the clean current towards the center. 

And the center was where she lay. 

For one long moment, you didn’t even connect the figure resting in the healing cradle to the merman beside you at all. You should have– they looked just like each other… but she was too still.

The cradle had been built shallow and broad, lined in smooth, pale stone and fed by the narrow flowing currents lining the floor and along the walls. The same glowing lantern-plants had been arranged around its edges in delicate, deliberate spirals. Bundles of herbs, presumably taken from the glass bowls, drifted from weighted cords above the waterline right above her head. 

It should’ve looked peaceful, but you knew it wasn’t.

She was beautiful, even so close to death. The structure of her face bore enough of Bakugou’s in it to strike you only once you looked properly– high cheekbones, a proud sharp mouth, the severe line of brow and nose. But where he looked made of force and motion and sharpened temper, she looked thinned by stillness– worn down by it. The scales along her tail had dulled from what must once have been some rich deep color into something bruised and darkened at the edges. Strange black staining crept through the finer parts of her fins like ink sunk into silk. Even from where you hovered, you could see the strain in her breathing.

The chamber wasn’t empty, either. There were healers crowding around her in a loose half-circle, their weariness visible even before they had turned towards you. One older merman, smaller in stature than Bakugou with brown hair and glasses stood nearby with an anxious expression. His gaze lifted at your entrance and fixed first on Bakugou, then onto you.

Then on your ankle, and that’s when everything on his face changed.

The change wasn’t dramatic or anything much more than shock. But it quickly turned into recognition, like everyone else's had. 

Bakugou moved before anyone else could say anything. 

She’s here, mom.

Bakugou moved to the side of the cradle. His rough, angry expression didn’t ease or soften as he looked down at her. Instead, something in it became even more raw. The temper did not leave him; it only lost some of the armor that usually sharpened it into aggression. You could see now, too clearly, what it had been hiding all along. Helplessness. Fear banked so hard it had nowhere left to go but outward.

His hand flexed by his side, as if resisting the urge to reach for her. 

The older merman with brown hair kept watching you, and so did the rest of the healers.

You became uncomfortably aware of your own body again. You were all too aware of the way swimming shift clung to your body and moved in the water, of your hair drifting loose around your shoulders, of the fact that you had been brought into the center of some hidden underwater kingdom and placed in front of a dying queen with all the ceremony of a blade set on a table next to a lamb.

Bakugou looked over his shoulder. Well?

The word held no patience at all. You moved forward slowly, and the nearer you drifted towards the cradle, the worse the corruption became. 

It was not only the visible sickness, not only the staining through her scales or the strain in her lungs or the way her tail seemed to have lost some essential brightness from within. It was deeper than that. It seemed rooted. The poison in her did not feel like ordinary illness. It felt active. Clever, in the way rot could be clever when it found something living and burrowed down into it.

One of the healers made as if to speak, perhaps to tell you what they had already tried. Bakugou’s head turned sharply enough that his next command died before it was born.

You swam over to the cradle's edge and hesitated. 

She won’t hurt you, Bakugou said.

You looked up. 

The words themselves were quieter than anything else he had said to you in some time. He must have realized it too, because his mouth hardened immediately after. But it was too late– you had already heard the shape of concern in it.

You looked back down at his mother. I’m not worried about that.

Your hand hovered in the water over his mother’s blackened veins. For one terrible moment, the truth of what you did not know pressed in around you all at once. You did not know what she was. You did not know what lived in her. You did not know why the pearl at your ankle had made a whole chamber of strangers look at you as though you had arrived out of old stories. You did not know whether your magic could touch this at all.

But you knew suffering.

That had always been enough to make you reach forward. So you did.

And everything in the room seemed to sharpen as you pushed your focus into the figure lying before you. 

The familiar coolness answered at once, but not in the quiet easy way it answered when you soothed an injured gull or knit shut a cut along a dolphin’s side. This came harder and deeper, as if some much older power had been waiting just beneath your skin and had finally found reason to stir. Silver light spilled through your hand and into the water in thin bright strands, pale as moonlight laid over black tide. The chamber reacted all at once– a collective stillness, a held breath, the sensation of several people watching something they had only ever hoped might exist.

Then the poison seemed to lash out at you.

Pain shot up your arm so sharply that your whole body jerked.

It wasn’t hot pain, but it wasn’t cold either. It was more like pressing your hand into something dead that still had the ability to bite or sting. The corruption in her body recoiled from your power for one brief astonishing instant, then surged against it. The silver brightened, spread over her throat, shoulder, the upper curve of her tail. You thought, for one impossible moment, that you had it.

Then it rooted deeper, and the force of it nearly stole your breath.

You weren’t going to give up so easily. 

You gritted your teeth and pushed harder, dragging from yourself whatever strange old current of healing had awakened, refusing to stop even when the muscles in your shoulder began to shake. The pearl at your ankle burned hot against your skin. The blackness at the edge of one fin retreated by the width of a fingernail. Her breathing eased somewhat. 

Only enough for you to notice. Maybe Bakugou, too, with how hard he was staring.

Then your vision blacked out momentarily. The silver around your hand frayed into drifting ribbons. You pulled back too fast and the spotting in your vision got worse.

Strong arms were there to steady you before you could black out completely. You blinked against the spinning dark and found Bakugou’s face too close to your own, his red eyes narrowed with something sharper than anger.

Well? He demanded.

You swallowed, trying to blink the darkness out of your vision and focus back on him. That depends, you said, breathless despite the water surrounding you. Are you asking if I’m conscious or if I fixed her?

Something moved, quick and strange, at the corner of his mouth. Gone before it could properly become anything.

One of the older healers was already at the cradle, checking his queen’s pulse, the channels of water feeding the chamber, the darkened edge of her fin. The staining receded.

Not by much, another muttered. 

She is breathing more easily, Bakugou’s father said, flicking his tail once to move closer to the cradle again. He looked anxious and sad that what you had done hadn’t worked completely.

Bakugou still had hold of your arms, and he seemed to realize he was still holding you at the same time you did, because his grip slowly loosened again. 

When he let go, your head was still spinning, though you weren’t sure if it was from being so close to him, or from the magic you’d just used too much of. 

He turned so abruptly the current whipped around him. 

What the hell do you mean barely? 

The words came out rough and raw, not directed at you at all now, but at the room itself, at the healers, at the reality of how little had changed. You said nothing’s been able to touch it. She touches it and all you’ve got is barely?

My prince–

Don’t ‘my prince’ me, he growled. 

The nearest healer flinched away as though she’d been struck. Bakugou did not notice, or did not care. His tail lashed once, violent enough to send a rush of water through the herbs suspended above the cradle. One of the shell lanterns chimed against the wall. If this is the first thing that’s worked, then figure out how to make it work again. That’s your job.

Katsuki, it nearly took all of her strength with it, his father said, his voice even despite the worry in his eyes.

Bakugou wheeled on him, every line of his body drawn so tight it looked painful. And what, exactly, do you want me to do with that?

You were still swaying where you were suspended in the water, one hand braced against the lip of the cradle, and only then did it strike you that he had not once turned that anger on you. Not once looked at you as though the partial failure belonged to you. He had taken the sharp edge of it and flung it outward at everyone and everything else in reach.

You had expected blame, or at least bitterness. Instead, his terror had made him cruel in every direction except yours.

His father rubbed a hand once over his mouth, looking all at once older than he had a moment ago. Enough. She needs rest.

Bakugou’s head snapped towards you again at once, his expression darkening not with disagreement but with immediate, possessive alarm, as though the reminder of your unsteadiness had only now fully reached him. She stays close.

There was then some silent exchange between the older healers and his father and Bakugou himself. A conversation you had not been invited into and did not know enough yet to understand. One of the older women near the back of the chamber looked once, quickly, from your face to the pearl at your ankle and then away again.

His father exhaled slowly and adjusted his glasses. Not in your rooms.

Bakugou’s expression went flat with disbelief. Why not.

Because she is already strained and she is not made to remain beneath the water every hour of the day while healing your mother. If you drive her into the ground by morning, your panic will have accomplished nothing.

Bakugou looked ready to argue anyway. You, meanwhile, had only caught onto the first part. 

Not in his rooms? Then your mood soured further. He wouldn’t be letting you go back home, is what this sounded like.

You looked from one to the other, your tired mind refusing for one slow ridiculous second to accept that this had apparently already been considered.

His father turned to you before Bakugou could launch himself into another argument. There are upper guest chambers built into one of the palace caves. They are above water level and dry, sheltered, and connected to the castle by a private pool. You may rest there.

Dry. The word moved through you like prayer.

Air and stone. A place where the sea would not be pressed against your skin every second while your body tried to recover from whatever impossible thing it had just done.

Bakugou noticed your positive reaction and seemed to grow even more irritated. 

Too far. He said.

It’s attached to the palace. His father countered.

It’s not close enough to– what if we need her urgently and she’s too far away?

His father only gave him a quiet look laced with melancholy and shook his head. You know it is what she needs right now.

For one charged second it looked as though he might keep fighting purely because the thought of letting you out of his sight was unbearable to him. Then his mother’s breathing hitched in the cradle behind him, small but enough– and he went still again. 

When he looked back at you, the decision seemed to have been made up in his mind, as much as he hated it. Come on.

It wasn’t really an invitation, but you followed anyway because you were too tired to argue further.

The way upward wound through a quieter stretch of the palace, the city thinning again into stone corridors and carved openings where the sea pressed blue-black beyond. Bakugou did not touch you at first, but he stayed close enough that the spines of his tail brushed your hip every few strokes. The guards and attendants you passed moved out of his way before he could tell them to. None spoke to him. None spoke to you, either, though a few looked as though they wanted to.

Yet, no one dared with the way Bakugou was moving so aggressively by your side.

The cave lay above the main waterline, hidden in the upper bones of the palace where sea and stone met. You rose through a narrow pool cut into the rock itself and broke the surface into cool damp air fragrant with moss, salt, and something sweetly green. The chamber beyond took your breath in a different way than the kingdom had.

It was smaller. Softer. Built not for spectacle but for refuge.

Moss spread thick and luminous over the stone in velvety green drifts. A bed had been shaped into one side of the cave, layered with woven blankets and soft sea-silk coverings in muted shades of cream and gray-blue. Lanterns hung from hooks driven into the rock, their golden light warmer than anything below. Fern-like plants spilled from a shallow stone-carved basin. The pool where you surfaced ran deep enough for Bakugou to enter and leave through the sea but shallow enough along one edge for you to climb out easily. Somewhere farther back, fresh water trickled softly down one wall into a smaller basin lined with polished shell. 

You inhaled the damp air and sighed. You were away from home, but this wasn’t so bad. It would provide you with what you needed so you could heal Bakugou’s mother.

You hauled yourself onto the stone ledge with less grace than dignity and sat there for one moment just breathing. Bakugou emerged a moment later in a sweep of water, then stopped half in the pool as he looked around the chamber with obvious dissatisfaction, as though measuring it against all the reasons it might fail you.

You looked over at him, watching as he surveyed the chamber with narrowed eyes. 

“What,” you asked half-seriously, too tired to be patient, “is it not royal enough?”

His red eyes cut to you sharply. Then his voice– his actual voice, not just the one you heard in your head– filled the chamber. It was harsh and grating and raspy and almost like he hadn’t used his vocal cords in years. “I’m checking it.”

“For what.”

“That it’s usable.”

“It’s just a room.”

The unsatisfied look on his face might’ve made you laugh, if exhaustion had not already begun to settle into your bones. The healing had taken something from you. Not all of it, not enough to frighten you properly yet, but enough that your body felt thinner somehow, as though whatever strange silver current had moved through you in the basin had left its wake behind.

Your eyes drifted around the chamber again, slower this time. 

The bed had already drawn your attention, of course, soft-looking and layered in the sort of woven blankets no one hauled into a damp cave by accident. But now that the immediate relief of air had dulled enough for you to notice details, other things began to stand out. The carved drawers along the far wall and the folded clothing set neatly atop them. A basin holding combs, oils, and cloths and a narrow shelf lined with little glass bottles you did not recognize. Even the tray left nearby looked too deliberate to have been assembled in a rush– bread still warm, fruit already cut, steaming broth in a bowl.

You frowned. There were human things here. 

Not merely objects that could have belonged to anyone, but things arranged with land-dwellers in mind. Dry fabrics. Personal care items you knew how to use. Cooked food prepared as though someone expected it to be eaten above the water rather than swallowed between currents.

A thought rose before you could stop it. 

Who has lived here before me? Do more humans live in this cave system than–

Bakugou’s head snapped towards you so quickly the water at his shoulders slapped softly against the stone.

“Damn, woman. Quit projecting so hard.”

You startled so hard you almost slipped back into the pool. 

“What?”

He looked annoyed that you had made him say anything aloud at all. “Your thoughts. You’re thinkin’ very loudly.”

The cave felt different. Stranger, perhaps. Beneath the water, the rough pressure of his thoughts against your mind had become its own sort of horror, something you had not asked for but had no choice but to endure. But this was air, stone, dry ground. It hadn’t occurred to you– not once– that any of that might follow you here.

“You can still hear me?”

“Yeah.”

His answer came out so flatly, it almost made the reality of him being able to hear even worse. 

You folded your arms. “That is something a person should mention.”

“Well, I just did, didn’t I?” He said, as his harsh rasp grated his vocal cords. “Maybe think quieter next time.”

You blinked at him. “That’s not how thoughts work.”

He seemed to repeat your slow blink in an almost condescending way. “That’s the way they work around me.”

You pressed the heels of your hands briefly to your eyes, then dropped them again and looked towards the drawers. Bakugou’s gaze followed the motion automatically, as though your attention itself had become something he needed to track.

“There are clothes,” he said, gesturing towards the drawers. 

“Yes, I can see that.”

“Then use them.”

Your gaze slid past the drawers and caught on the narrow opening cut into the stone farther back.

“What’s through there?”

Bakugou followed your line of sight with visible reluctance. “Washroom.”

You frowned. “What?”

“You heard me.” He said, as if you were being the difficult one.

You stared at him. “How do you know what a washroom is, but I’m still supposed to accept the rest of this on blind faith?”

He made a low, dismissive sound in his throat. “You ask too many questions.”

“And you answer none of them.”

“I know. I like it that way.”

At least it was honest of him.

You crossed towards the opening to examine the washroom. 

The little chamber had been carved directly into the rock, smaller than the main cave but no less carefully arranged. A shallow stone basin had been built along one wall beneath a trickle of running fresh water that poured clean and cold from a carved spout in the cliff itself and another basin sat lower and wider, made for bathing. Towels had been folded on a nearby shelf and a carved drainage channel cut through the floor, clever and neat and entirely unlike anything you had expected to find beneath the sea.

You stared at the water for a few seconds then walked back to the main chamber, where Bakugou still lingered in the pool like some monstrous guard dog too stubborn to admit he was keeping watch.

“How is that possible?”

He didn’t ignore your question, but he immediately dismissed it. “Doesn’t matter right now.”

You stood there another moment, the cool fresh water slipping steadily into the basin, and let your thoughts move where they were probably going to move whether you wanted them to or not. The cave had not been thrown together for you– that much was obvious. The clothes were folded too neatly. The personal items were too specific. Even the food had been prepared with land habits in mind.

The image of your mother popped into your mind. Had she been here before?

You kept the idea in your mind, not caring if Bakugou could hear it as you returned to the washroom with a stack of clothes in your hand. 

You washed yourself, because the salt had begun drying on your skin and pulling it tight, because your limbs still trembled faintly from what you had poured into his mother, and because if you remained in the same room with him much longer without some kind of barrier between you, you were going to say something sharp enough to sour what little peace the cave held.

The outfit you had picked out was a loose wrap nightgown– something obviously human-made, or made for humans at the very least. That thought remained with you as you changed. The whole cave did not feel hastily assembled, it felt prepared… known. Familiar in ways you did not yet understand.

When you stepped back into the main chamber, still tying the wrap at your waist, you stopped short.

Bakugou had not moved much at all.

He remained in the pool exactly where you had left him, broad shoulders above the waterline, hair still damp and half-wild around his face, red eyes cutting to you the moment you reappeared. If anything, his expression had worsened while you were gone, as though waiting had only driven the strain in him deeper.

“You’re… still here.”

“Yeah.”

You rolled your eyes at his duh tone of voice. “I just thought you’d have left by now.”

“No.”

You stared at him. 

He huffed. “I said I’m not leaving.”

There it was again– that grating, impatient edge that made every answer sound like an insult.

“You cannot possibly mean to stay in this cave all night.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“But why?”

Your obvious exasperation made something in his face tighten. Not because he did not know the answer, but because he did, and apparently hated being asked for it.

“You almost passed out.”

“Yes,” you said dryly. “I remember.”

“You don’t know this place.” He said, ticking off the second reason on his claws.

“That is because you dragged me into it.”

His jaw flexed. He looked as though he wanted to snap back. Instead he only said, “You really think I’m leaving you alone after that?”

The words weren’t said out of care for you. More for what you were capable of doing and trying to protect that skill. He was not here because he wanted your company, he was here because fear had wrapped itself around your usefulness and refused to let go.

And maybe because, beneath that, something about leaving you unwatched now felt impossible. You looked away from his piercing stare first. The silence was awful.

Eventually you realized fighting him would be pointless, so you crossed to the bed and sat, drawing one leg up beneath you. “You cannot keep watch from the pool all night.”

“Want to bet?”

You laughed softly. “If you insist on being impossible,” you said, “you may as well sleep there.”

Your words seemed to catch him off guard. Good. The moment vanished quickly, followed by offense. “On the floor?”

“You were planning to lurk in the water like some half-feral guard beast. I fail to see the difference.”

His mouth flattened as he regarded you with narrowed eyes, his tail lashing in the water behind him. 

For one long second, you thought he might refuse purely on principle. Then his gaze flicked once to the bed, once to you, once to the floor you had indicated, and something moved through his expression– pride warring with practicality, annoyance warring with the certainty that he was not, in fact, going anywhere.

At last, with the air of a man giving in to a profound insult because the alternative offended him even more, he hauled himself from the pool.

You had to look away as he did it. It was more self-preservation than modesty. There was simply too much of him, too much wet muscle and striped scale and sharpness, too much of the deeply unreasonable reminder that beautiful things were often the most dangerous.

Behind you, water streamed back into the pool in slow heavy rivulets. He settled at last on the cave floor across from your mossy bed with all the grace of a weapon being set down reluctantly. His orange and black spines and fins shook once before laying flat along his damp skin. One arm folded behind his head and the other remained close to the beautiful-yet-practical dagger strapped at his hip.

“There,” you murmured, pulling the blanket over yourself. “Now you can be paranoid more comfortably.”

His eyes didn’t close. 

“...Will you be okay out of water all night?” You asked, as he continued to stare at the ceiling.

He said your name once in a low voice, which you hadn’t realized he’d even known. “...Go to sleep already.”

A small smile curled your lips as you laid back down, the moss and woven blankets giving beneath you. Across the room, Bakugou remained awake in the lantern-glow, still and sharp and very obviously listening for any sign that the cave or the palace or fate itself might dare take one more thing from him tonight.

You didn’t want to tell him to leave anymore. You understood his grief and the way it manifested, in a way.

You fell asleep knowing the cave was warm, the sea was close, and across from you was the prince who had stolen you from the surface and kept watch like he had already decided you were his to guard.

Chapter Text

You woke to the sound of water moving softly against stone.

There was no sound of the sea, no heavy breathing of tide against the shore below your cottage, nor the faint rattling sigh of pebbles dragged back by retreating waves. This was smaller and closer than that. This was a smaller rush of water, slipping through hidden channels in the rock somewhere beyond the bed, trickling into stillness and beginning again.

For one short moment you wondered if it had all been just a dream. But then your leg touched the surface of the bed of moss, and your memories returned with brutal efficiency.

You were in the cave, not in your cottage.

The unexpected journey to the kingdom below and the poisoned queen in her basin of purified seawater had happened last night. You remembered Bakugou’s hand and how it locked around your arm before the chamber had gone completely dark and the warm damp air of the hidden room where he had refused to leave. His harsh voice had scraped against the cave walls as though words spoken above water were things he used rarely and disliked every time.

You lay beneath the blankets, very still, and let the realization settle properly into your bones. The bed beneath was not yours, only borrowed. The moss and woven cloth gave under your weight in a way no normal bed did. The shell lanterns had burned low in the night, leaving the chamber washed in a dim amber glow and thin roots and trailing green things hung from the stone overhead in little shadowed drifts. Somewhere to your left, the pool gave a quiet lap against the ledge as something shifted in it.

No, not something.

Someone.

You turned your head.

Bakugou was awake already, swimming in impatient circles in the small pool. Even from the bed, even with sleep still half-clinging to your thoughts, you could see the taut line through his shoulders and the weary severity still caught in his face. His eyes shifted towards you the moment you moved.

Red in the low lanternlight, sharp and far too awake for the time it probably was.

You pushed yourself upright as your aching body screamed at you to stay still.

The healing you had done the night before had not left any ache you could put a hand over and identify clearly– no pain bloomed in one place. The aftereffect lived lower and deeper than that, in the joints of your limbs and the faint hollowed feeling in your chest, as though something had been squeezed out of you and hadn’t returned. Even lifting the blanket from your legs felt a little more laborious than it should have.

Bakugou took notice of it. His gaze dropped, flicking over the set of your shoulders and the careful way you were sitting, even the brief pause you took with your feet still on the bed as if deciding whether standing was worth the trouble.

“Eat.”

The command caught you off guard. You stared at him, then looked around for whatever food he might’ve been talking about. There was a tray you hadn’t noticed on the low table beside the bed with fresh bread and fruit and herb-filled, fragrant broth. There was also a cup of fresh water. It had all been arranged neatly enough that someone had either taken pains with it or been frightened into taking pains with it.

You suspected the latter.

You looked back at him. “Good morning to you, too.”

He made a sound under his breath that might have been impatience or simple acknowledgement. With him, the difference was rarely worth trying to make out.

“You’re staring,” he said, as he crossed his arms over his chest.

“So are you.”

“Yeah.” His mouth flattened a fraction. “And?”

You rolled your eyes as you pushed the blanket away and slid carefully from the bed. The stone beneath your bare feet felt cool after the trapped warmth of the bedding. Your pearl anklet flashed once as it caught the lanternlight, pale and secretive and suddenly more noticeable than it had ever felt on the shore.

You noticed the way Bakugou’s eyes dipped down and watched the pearl as it slid against your skin, though he didn’t seem to care whether you knew he was looking.

He seemed to be keeping track of everything about you, now. How you stood and how quickly you moved, whether your hands shook when you reached for the cup. It should’ve bothered you more than it did, and perhaps it would later, once the lingering fog of sleep and exhaustion had cleared. But for now, you were content with allowing him to self-soothe in that way.

You drank some water, then tore off a piece of bread and forced yourself to chew and swallow around the thickness in your throat. Hunger came back in little waves after that, as it often did once you acknowledged it in the first place. You sat on the edge of the bed and ate while Bakugou watched in maddening silence.

At last you lowered the cup and said, “Has anyone ever told you that glaring at someone while they eat is strange behavior?”

“Has anyone ever told you that passing out after promising to help isn’t helpful?”

You frowned. “I didn’t pass out.”

And you were also positive that you hadn’t promised to help, either– but saying as much would only anger him.

“You were close enough,” He said, his voice rough and harsh in the otherwise silent cave. But there was something else in it too, something not quite unused to speech but not made for it either, as if words spoken aloud were less natural to him than the forceful interior pressure of his thoughts against yours. It gave every short sentence an unintended lilt that was a little bit endearing.

You tore off another piece of bread. “How is she?”

He seemed surprised that you had asked. Not in a dramatic way, but in a way that made his face set even harder. “She’s awake.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, yet it told you enough. “That’s good, then?”

“She’s in pain.”

The words were flat. You could tell he was upset– as he often was when speaking about his mother, but it wasn’t directed at you. Rather, at every minute that had passed while his mother remained below with something poisonous rooted inside her body.

You lowered your eyes to the bowl cupped between your hands, suddenly not hungry at all.

Bakugou pushed off the stone edge of the pool and rose more fully, water sliding from the broad line of his shoulders and back in narrow streams. His hair was still faintly damp where it brushed his neck. The black-and-orange markings of his scales caught strangely in the low light, bright one moment and almost swallowed by shadow the next.

“We’re going down.”

There was no room for argument in the way he said it.

You looked up. “Now?”

“Yeah. Now.”

The exhaustion still curled around your body at the thought of touching Mitsuki again so soon. You remembered the way the poison had recoiled and then driven back, the way the silver light had frayed around your hand, the awful slipping sensation of your own strength giving way beneath you. It had only been one night. Hardly even that.

Bakugou saw the hesitation as it crossed over your face and his mouth hardened.

“You said you could help.”

“No, I didn’t say anything. And I was only able to touch it.” You set the bowl down more carefully than you wanted to, considering how riled your emotions were. “That isn’t the same as being able to fix it.”

He turned his head towardss the stone wall, where you couldn’t see his expression anymore. “You did more than anyone else down there.”

“That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing.”

“No,” he said, “it means we don’t have time for you to start doubting it now.”

You stood up because remaining seated felt too much like letting him tower over you in every possible sense, even though he was still in the water. Your vision went dark for a few moments– not long enough to truly unbalance you, but enough to remind you that your body hadn’t forgiven you yet for what you’d demanded of it yesterday. Bakugou watched you sway and seemed to tense up even further. His eyes didn’t leave you until you had steadied again.

“Wear the wetsuit today and cover the pearl.”

You nodded, though you didn’t know what a wetsuit was. You opened the drawers and stared until Bakugou spoke again. “It’s all black and has a zipper on the side.”

He sounded exasperated, like he couldn’t believe you hadn’t heard of whatever this wetsuit thing was.

You grabbed the item that matched his description and walked towardss the bathroom to change.

You put the strange piece of clothing on as fast as you could, knowing that he was steeping in worry because he couldn’t see you from where he was in the pool.

It was skin-tight, which you weren’t used to but didn’t entirely mind, since modesty didn’t really seem to be a concept amongst Bakugou’s people. You zipped it up on the side and slipped the fabric over the pearl anklet before heading back out.

He said nothing, but his eyes scrutinized your figure before he nodded once. And then, with the clipped impatience of someone who had already wasted too much time sleeping badly in a cave he disliked, he begrudgingly helped you into the pool.

The water felt colder this morning.

Or perhaps your skin was only more aware of the change after the damp closeness of the cave. You slid in behind him and the sea closed around you at once, familiar and uncanny in equal measure. Breathing it no longer struck you with the same violent shock it had the night before, but that did not make it natural. It only made it one more impossible thing your body had chosen to accept without permission.

Bakugou waited just long enough for you to get fully submerged before he started swimming down.

You were able to keep pace with him more easily this time.

It wasn’t because your body had become stronger overnight. It was only because you weren’t fighting the water so hard anymore. The route from cave to palace had already begun settling in your mind: the narrow channel cut through the rock, the bend where the darker current pressed up from below, the brief opening where the sea widened before narrowing again into the carved ways of the kingdom. The city emerged around you in small shapes once more– stone arches, glowing gardens, terraces built into the cliffside, schools of fish weaving through the open spaces like dreams taking shape before your eyes.

It still would have stolen your breath if you had not already given that luxury away the night before.

Now, what you were more focused on were all the eyes fixed on you. It didn’t help that the pearl was covered up, because news of your arrival had already spread.

There was no doubt about it. Merpeople turned to look before you and Bakugou had even fully entered the broader current roads of the palace. Some stared at him with the same wary deference you had already seen– others looked at you outright now, their interest no longer softened by uncertainty. Their gazes dropped, almost without fail, to where the pearl anklet made a slight bulge under the tight fabric of the wetsuit.

The more often it happened, the more Bakugou’s mood visibly worsened.

You had the strange sense that they knew something you did not, something not only about the pearl, but about you, and that the only person in the city who might have explained it was choosing instead to stalk ahead of you in rigid furious silence.

The healing chamber waited where it had the night before, carved pale and round into the side of the cliff, bright with pearl-white lantern-plants and scrubbed currents. The guards at its entrance bowed their heads and moved aside before Bakugou had fully reached them.

Inside, the water was even cooler.

The medicinal scent invaded the water around you as soon as the two of you entered. The sweetness of herbs you weren’t familiar with layered over the metal-bitter traces of corruption still lingered beneath it. Healers were swimming to and from the raised healing cradle at the center of the chamber, some faces you recognized from the night before and some new ones. They were less frantic now, and more tightly organized and expectant.

Mistuki still lay where you left her, but not unchanged. Her eyes were open, only partly at first, as if keeping them that way cost her something, but open enough that she looked first at her son when he entered and then, with a look that seemed to take a lot more effort, at you.

Even diminished by sickness, Mitsuki carried herself– or as much of herself as her body allowed to carry now– with an odd strength that you rarely saw in people on their deathbeds.

She looked terribly ill, the black staining still threaded through the delicate ends of her fins and the scales of her tail, but the eyes that fixed on you were alive and aware. And she didn’t seem very surprised to see you there.

Bakugou immediately went to her side.

You slowed a little behind him, taking the chamber in with clearer sight now that the first shock had passed. The herbs suspended above the healing cradle. The channels carved through the floor to keep purified current moving around her body. The weighted shell tablets and thin sheets of reed-paper marked with careful notes. It looked less like a room now and more like the center of a campaign being slowly lost.

One older healer drifted forward before Bakugou could turn his impatience on the whole chamber.

She held the improvement through most of the night, he said, his attention on you rather than Bakugou. The spread along the dorsal fin slowed. Pain returned with waking.

You moved a little closer, and noticed how Mitsuki watched every inch of the way.

The healer continued, perhaps encouraged by the fact that no one had cut him off yet. We kept the purifying currents steady. No other treatment altered the corruption. Only yours.

The implication of that statement sat badly on your shoulders.

You hovered near the edge of the healing cradle and let your gaze move from Mitsuki’s face to the darkened lines along the curve of her tail. Even without touching her yet, you could feel the wrongness from here. It sat in the water around her like a distortion, subtle enough to escape anyone who did not know to look for it and obvious now that you did.

What have you tried? You asked, not taking your eyes off of Mitsuki.

The answers came all at once, overlapping until your head throbbed with them.

Herbal washes.

Purified currents and–

Heat drawn up from deeper vents in measured streams.

Old healing rites!

Substances ground from shell and kelp and–

Methods we typically use for venom, fever, rotting wounds, blood sickness!

The conclusion was that some had eased her pain and some had slowed the spread, but none had reached the center of it like yours had.

You ignored the pounding in your head. How long has she been in this state?

Their answer was: not long enough, apparently, to explain the progression of the disease. The healers admitted others in the kingdom had begun showing lesser symptoms. Fish brought in from certain lower waters and reef creatures found sluggish or blackened at the edges of the gills, the coral you’d seen yourself on the way to the kingdom. A child with lesions along the arm after swimming too near one blighted current and a guard sickened for days after clearing the dead coral from the outer wall.

Bakugou listened through all of it with his arms tightly crossed and his claws digging into his skin, but he did not interrupt.

You lifted your gaze to Mitsuki again. I’m not going to do what I did last night. I’m going to try something new.

The corner of her mouth moved the slightest bit. It was more of a smile than her son had ever given you– but still closer to approval than true mirth. Alright, then.

You lowered your hand into the purified currents encircling her body and hovered your fingers over her wrist.

This time you did not force your power into her all at once. You let it reach slowly instead, the way you might lower a hand towards a frightened animal and wait to see whether it would flinch or trust. The silver answered more cautiously now too, a pale shimmer beneath your skin, a fainter glow than before. You traced the outline of the sickness, trying to find its origins rather than trying to tear it loose.

Then you found it.

The same buried corruption, the same sense of something not only resting deep within her but feeding off of her life force.

Mitsuki’s breathing eased as soon as the silver light touched her.

Only a little, but enough. You watched as the blackened edge near one delicate fin drew back by the smallest visible measure.

Then you were hit with resistance. You felt it immediately, not as a biting pain this time, but only because you had not thrust your magic deep enough into the rot to be bitten hard. But it was there all the same– clever, clinging, and wrong. It was less like illness than like a type of contamination with a horrible willingness to remain.

You pulled back before your vision could start swimming again.

Murmurs stirred through the chamber at the small retreat of black along her fin.

It changed, my prince!

Again, this time–

Only where she touched her.

Bakugou’s father had moved closer without you noticing, his face lined with worry and sleeplessness. He remained controlled, but you could see the tension in him as obviously as you could see it in his son, especially in the way his hand had clenched the carved edge of the healing cradle.

What is it? He asked.

You looked at the darkness spreading along her tail as you tried to form the right answer.

It’s anchored, you said at last. But not to her. To something else, maybe. Or through something else. You lifted your eyes. It doesn’t feel like the sickness started in her body.

That seemed to disturb some of the healers– a few of them even made some kind of sign over their forehead.

Bakugou’s gaze moved from you to his mother, then to the channels of water moving around her, then back again. His mouth had gone very still.

A curse? Someone asked.

No, you said, the conviction coming out of you was as strong as you could manage. Not like that. You frowned, trying to name what your own body had understood quicker than your mind. It feels carried. Like rot in a current…. Or something that keeps finding new places to live.

Mitsuki hadn’t looked away from you, not even one time as you spoke.

And now, as the atmosphere seemed to shift around your words and the healers began speaking into one another’s minds with words you weren’t able to hear in your own, she lifted one hand weakly from the cradle’s carved edge and let it fall again as though even that small motion had cost her.

I knew one of hers…would come…

The words had been whispered so weakly into your mind you might have thought them meant only for herself if her eyes had not still been fixed on your face.

What do you mean? You asked softly, swimming closer to the cradle's edge.

You watched as her eyes dipped down towardss the slight rise where the pearl sat under the fabric of the wetsuit. When it lifted again, something old and difficult moved through her expression. Recognition, yes, but also sorrow and memory. It was the look of someone seeing one old grief laid over another and being unable to separate them.

You came, she murmured.

Bakugou moved to your side and placed a firm hand on your shoulder. What is she saying to you? None of us can hear it.

I knew you…would, she said again. And that was all.

Her lashes lowered and her hand went slack in the water.

The chamber moved instantly after that– Bakugou to her side, his father moving to the other, a healer reaching for the pulse at her throat, another shifting the purified current through the carved channels to better reach her.

Bakugou looked at you once over his shoulder while his mother drifted back into exhausted half-sleep. There was still a question on his face.

By the time the healers had gathered themselves enough to begin speaking again– this time of rest, of limits, of timing and what might be risked later if your strength held– you no longer felt as though you had entered the same chamber you were now floating in.

𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝

Every time you touched Mitsuki, it felt less like healing and more like surrendering some living part of yourself for her body to borrow.

The thought unsettled you deeply, and stuck to the inside of your mind until the healers finally insisted the session end and the Queen get some rest and alone time.

You didn’t want to stop, quite the opposite, really. Part of you still strained towardss the healing cradle, towardss the black creeping lines hidden under Mitsuki’s skin, towardss the shape of the rot you almost but not quite understood. You had been able to touch it differently this time. You had felt the place where it had rooted, the way it clung to her very being, the way it didn’t just live inside so much as pass through her from somewhere else. Another few minutes and you might’ve found something more useful than instinct and fragments.

Another few minutes and, judging by the unsteady drag in your limbs, you might also have fallen comatose in front of half the kingdom.

The healers saw that even if you tried not to let it show. The older one nearest Bakugou’s father lowered his head and sent a gently voiced thread of thought through the chamber.

Enough for now.

Bakugou looked ready to argue at first, but then he looked at you as you drew back from the healing cradle and shakily kicked back through the water and over to the corner of the room. He ended up just nodding once in agreement.

Mitsuki’s eyes were partially shut, and her breathing remained easier than it had been. It still seemed like each breath took a toll on her, but there was no rattling in her chest this time.

You told yourself you’d provided a bit of comfort for her. It had to be enough for one morning.

The chamber had grown crowded with too many hopes and fears combined. The healers were trying to keep theirs leashed, but you could still feel the edges of them pressing against one another, sharp and anxious and hungry for any meaning they could drag from what you had done. It made your own head throb.

Bakugou moved towardss you the moment you pushed away from the cradle. He was just near enough that the wake of his body disturbed the surrounding cleaner water around your arms.

We’re done here, he said.

You nodded slowly.

You could see his earlier question forming on his face, so before he could ask it, you projected your next few words quietly. I’ll tell you when we get to the cave.

He hesitated. You hadn’t expected anything less from someone who was so used to arguing until getting his way– but to your surprise, he relented and turned away again.

The two of you started for the chamber doors, the filtered current brushing coolly against your skin as you exited. No one tried to stop either of you.

The palace beyond the healing chamber felt cooler and less crowded than it had on the way in, though perhaps that was only because your head was still full of Mitsuki’s voice.

Bakugou didn’t speak the rest of the way to the cave. He only swam too close, the edge of his tail brushing yours once in a way that felt less accidental than it ought to have.

You gave him a sidelong glance.

He was glaring straight ahead. He was probably thinking about nothing but the words he hadn’t been able to hear.

You decided now was as good a time as any, since there was no one around for you to accidentally project your thoughts to.

She said ‘I knew one of hers would come.’

He quickly turned his head to look at you. There was no missing the effect the words had on him. He was silent, but it seemed to be in a contemplative way. His face gave away very little, but the little it did give was enough for you to see recognition in his eyes, as well as frustration.

You continued before he could dismiss anything.

She looked at the pearl and said that I had come for her, she said that she knew I would.

Bakugou said nothing.

For once, you felt a tiny flare of anger.

Well? What does it mean?

He looked away again.

Means she was half-conscious.

He was just insulting your intelligence at this point.

Don’t lie.

His eyes cut back to yours, blazingly crimson and sharp with anger. I’m not lying.

Then what are you saying?

I’m saying she was weak and talkin’ strange because of it.

No, you snapped, frowning deeply. You’re saying things you hope will shut me up without actually answering me.

His tail lashed once, hard enough to send a dark ripple through the water.

Then stop asking questions I can’t answer right now.

There.

Not won’t.

Can’t.

You caught that and watched the moment he realized you had. It was too late for him to backtrack now.

So you do know something, you said more quietly.

He refused to say anything this time, and it sat between you uncomfortably, heavy as iron sinking through water.

You kept swimming because there was nowhere else to put the frustration. Back through the carved passageways, past the watching eyes of the palace, past guards who lowered their heads to Bakugou and tried not to look too openly at you. The bulge of the pearl beneath the tight black fabric of the wetsuit drew attention anyway. You felt it every time someone’s gaze snagged there.

Bakugou seemed to despise every single time someone looked at your ankle, because it only seemed to make the need for your questions to be answered grow.

Even the merpeople knew more about the importance of the pearl than you did, and you didn’t like that.

By the time you reached the hidden cave again, the quiet between you had grown sharp and tense.

You rose through the narrow pool without waiting for him, broke the surface into damp cave air, and hauled yourself up onto the stone ledge with less grace than irritation. Water streamed from the black fabric of the wetsuit and back into the pool in thin cold rivulets. You pushed wet hair from your face and turned, fully intending to demand answers whether he liked it or not.

He was already gone.

Not gone gone. He hadn’t vanished miraculously from the cave. He’d just submerged himself again, disappearing beneath the surface with the efficiency of something that had no intention of lingering for a fight it had the option to postpone.

You stared after him in disbelief.

“Asshole.” You muttered under your breath, as you began heading towardss the washroom, unzipping the wetsuit as you went.

A little while later, you exited the freshwater pool and changed into looser, cave-appropriate clothing with enough sharp frustrated movements that any sane person would have taken it as a warning and stayed well away.

As you moved around in the small washroom, you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and paused. You didn’t look like yourself.

In fact, you looked a little like Bakugou with the way your brows were furrowed and your mouth was downturned with a little upset pout. The mere comparison made you laugh a little, and instantly, you felt like yourself again.

You weren’t an angry person. Bakugou was.

You both dealt with your negative emotions in different ways, but it seemed like Bakugou’s method had been rubbing off on you a tad bit lately. You needed to nip that in the bud before it grew worse, otherwise the communication you were able to have with Bakugou would crumble in an instant.

Bakugou returned within the hour, pretty much as soon as you had begun to look around the drawers and personal items for clues about whoever had resided in the cave before you.

You heard him before you saw him, the heavy rush of displaced water in the pool followed by the slap of something broad against stone. When you came back out from the washroom tying the wrap more tightly over your chest, he was braced half out of the pool with one arm hooked over the ledge and a miserable-looking silver fish pinned gently but firmly against the rock beside him.

You stopped rummaging around in the drawers and stood up.

He looked at you, then at the fish, as if expecting something to happen.

“Why…” you began, tilting your head. “Why did you bring that?”

His expression turned flat with impatience. “It’s a fish.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

He ignored you, and instead nodded towardss it. “Heal it.”

You didn’t understand at first. It was only when the fish gave a weak, unhappy twitch under his hand that you noticed the lesions along one side of its body, darkened scales around the gills, the sluggishness of its movements.

You looked back up at Bakugou.

“You swam off in the middle of an argument.”

“Yeah.”

“And came back with a fish.”

“Yeah,” he said again, this time a bit more huffy.

Then understanding washed over you. You folded your arms and raised an eyebrow. “What are you trying to do here?”

He straightened a little more, water pouring down his shoulders. “You need stamina.”

Of course he’d forgo the apology and replace it with near-offensive practicality. You gave the fish another look, irritation warring with reluctant comprehension.

“I need sleep.”

“You shouldn’t get used to sleeping after healing something.” He said, his voice low and frustrated like it always seemed to be when he was talking to you. “You won’t always be able to.”

His bedside manner needed work. Yet beneath his logic was the same ugly truth that had been coiling through your thoughts since the chamber.

You did need more control and better stamina.

You crouched at the edge of the pool with a whispered curse and reached towards the fish. Bakugou’s hand loosened at once, though he did not remove it entirely until he was sure the creature would not bolt.

The moment your fingers brushed the damaged scales, the familiar coolness of your magic answered.

This patient was easier, but you expected that. It was a fish, not a merperson.

There was poison in it, yes, but less deeply embedded than in Mitsuki. The corruption moved through the flesh in thinner threads, less rooted, more like a sickness caught early enough to still be remedied. Your power moved through it in a pale silver wash. The fish twitched hard once under your hands, then stilled. The black at the edge of the lesions pulled back. The frantic flutter at the gills eased.

You drew back before the effort could turn painful or ugly for both you or the fish.

Bakugou lifted the fish and examined it with all the intensity of someone inspecting a weapon after repair.

“It looks better.”

He gently released it, and the both of you watched it swim in a few circles, testing its newfound health, before it darted through the exit of the underwater pool.

He looked back up at you once the fish had disappeared. “You didn’t black out. You were fast, too.”

You nodded at his assessment, then narrowed your eyes. “Have you been timing me from the start?”

His mouth flattened, which you were beginning to learn was answer enough in itself. You pushed the annoyance aside as you watched him dip back under the surface. He arrived with the next creature not long after that.

A ray this time, pale-bellied and slow-moving, one edge of its broad body marred by black creeping marks that made the thin fin look as though it had been singed. Bakugou brought it through the pool and into the cave with more care than you expected from him, one hand braced beneath it and the other keeping its tail from striking the rock.

You looked at him. He looked at the ray.

Neither of you mentioned the obvious. You especially didn’t because you weren’t even sure he had done it consciously– that he had chosen something easier for you to touch.

Less wriggly, anyway.

The ray calmed beneath your hands more quickly than the fish had, possibly because they seemed a bit more connected to your emotions and thoughts than the fish. You felt the damage differently this time. The poison again, but also ordinary pain where the tissue had struggled against it. Healing the ordinary damage still came easiest to you– muscle, skin, and blood. The corruption fought harder, but it was not impossible to combat. Not yet, anyway, which was a great relief.

By the time Bakugou brought the third patient– a reef fish with cloudy eyes and a tumor near its spine– something like rhythm had begun to take over.

He set the flapping creature onto the cave floor where you could reach it.

You healed it while he watched far too closely for comfort. It was almost becoming normal to expect such watchfulness from him, though.

You wondered if, in a few days, you might even find yourself not minding it anymore.

The hours that followed blurred together. They weren’t too repetitive, but the pattern had locked the both of you in and pulled you to focus too much to think about much else.

Bakugou kept bringing things from the reef and lower currents. Some were only injured with hooks or torn fins, wounds made worse by infection and neglect. Those you mended easily enough, your power flowing through them with the same familiar certainty it always had on the shore. Others carried the black disease in them too. Those animals made you work harder, but you learned from it.

The differences. Ordinary injury felt open, like something you could sew closed.

The corruption felt like something that was determined to stay and burrow deeper, and the only way to get it out was to be precise and dig and dig until you felt that black rot bite you hard enough to pull away.

By the fifth or sixth creature, your body had begun giving you warning signs you would once have heeded more carefully. You had grown slower, and the beginnings of a headache were starting to form by your temples. Your heart was starting to hurt, too, but you didn’t know why that was.

Bakugou noticed before you said anything aloud. He always was able to do that– watchful as he was.

You set your hands against a small seabird he had somehow managed to frighten into submission long enough to carry to you, a black line creeping along one wing joint where oil or poison or something fouler had worked itself into the feathers and skin beneath.

“Don’t even think about doing that thing with your face,” you muttered.

Bakugou, leaning against the pool’s edge with his arms folded, frowned. “What face.”

“I don’t know,” you sighed. “The one where you decide I have to be done before I’ve decided that for myself.”

“You look tired.”

You rolled your eyes. “Shouldn’t you want me to continue?”

“You need to stop acting like your own health doesn’t matter,” he said, dead serious enough that your hands stilled. “Because it does.”

“Okay,” you said quietly. Then you whispered with a small smile. “I didn’t know you cared so much.”

It was quick and tired and gone almost as soon as it was said, but something in the cave shifted with your words. Bakugou looked at you differently for half a second. Not softer, just… caught.

Then the moment closed, and he looked irritated again, which was apparently his preferred state whenever anything threatened to become human.

The seabird healed well enough, and then you moved to the next thing.

That was when the chapter of the day changed.

Bakugou brought the coral in near twilight– if twilight could be said to exist in a cave hidden above an underwater kingdom, where the only measure of time came from your body and the changing glow of the lantern-plants. It was only a branch of reef no longer than your forearm, broken free from somewhere deeper in the blighted outer currents. One half still held traces of color beneath the sickly gray. The other had gone white and brittle, then black along the edges, as though rot had learned how to bloom in something so stone-like.

You took it from him carefully.

The moment your fingers touched the deadened branching shape, the same crawling wrongness that lived in Mitsuki’s body shivered up your wrist.

Not similar, like the rest of the sea animals had been.

The exact same.

You slowly set the coral back down on the sea floor and thought for a moment.

Bakugou looked between you and the coral. “What.”

You didn’t answer right away.

The silver glow of your healing magic moved through you cautiously, probing the coral the way it had probed Mitsuki earlier. The result was immediate and awful. The corruption in the reef was less concentrated, less deeply fed, but it was alive in the same way. Carried. Rooted. Passing from body to body and current to current like a thing with hunger and patience both.

You looked up at him.

“This is it, Bakugou.”

His face changed as he pushed farther from the pool onto the stone, dripping cold water over the rock as he came closer. “What do you mean, this is it?”

“This.” You lifted the coral branch slightly. “This is what’s in her. The other things have been similar but this is it exactly. Wherever you found it… you need to tell others not to go there until we’ve found out what’s wrong with the area.”

Something dark flashed through his eyes. “It can’t be the same. It’s coral.”

You pursed your lips and held up the brittle piece of coral. “Does it not look like the same black veining that was on your mother’s tail?”

He was silent– furious and frustrated and helpless– as his tail lashed behind him in the water.

“Besides, I’ve been able to feel the differences in each animal. Like I said before, this is the same concentration of whatever poison is in your mother.” Your words were blunt and obviously hitting Bakugou in an ugly, undeniable way, because he was looking at you like you were the one making the world worse by naming what it already was. “And it feels the same, Bakugou.”

He hated that. You could see him hate it.

His jaw went rigid enough to hurt. “Then fix it.”

Your fingers clutched the coral loosely. “I’m trying. I’ve been doing this all day–”

“Try harder.”

The words had barely left his mouth before regret– or at least something close to it that you noticed– moved through his face. But it was too late. The words had already hit their mark.

You looked at him in open disbelief, then in open reproach. “That’s your solution to everything, isn’t it?”

“It works on you,” he said, his voice nothing but a raspy grumble.

“No,” you said, colder now. “It doesn’t.”

The coral trembled slightly in your grip. It wasn’t from exhaustion, but from your dysregulated emotions.

You forced yourself to breathe, forced your attention back to the branch in your hands, and pushed your power into it harder than you should have. The silver answered, lightning fast. Too fast to be sustainable. Too fast to be safe.

It wrapped through the branching skeleton of the coral and drove against the rot clinging to it. For one blinding moment, black shrank from white and color pulsed back into part of the reef.

Then the resistance began to surge as pain scraped up the nerves in your arm. It wasn’t sharp enough to stop you yet. You kept pushing.

Behind you, Bakugou swore roughly. Then he hissed out a loud, “Stop.”

“No. You wanted me to try harder.”

“You’re doing it again.”

Doing what? Not caring about your health? You scoffed at the thought. He would show care towards you until it inconvenienced him, and then he would push you past your limits again.

That alone might have been enough to make you stop under better circumstances. Under worse ones, it only made you more stubborn. You had it– you were close, you could feel it, the feeling of the corruption giving way just enough to prove the pattern, just enough to tell you that Mitsuki’s illness was not separate from the reef or the fish or the poisoned currents below.

“Mitsuki has this in her,” you said through your teeth. “The whole sea is carrying it–”

Then the black spots appeared in front of your vision. Just enough that the edges of the lanternlight went dark and your hands forgot, briefly, how to keep holding things.

The coral branch slipped from your fingers and you swayed a little, back and forth.

Bakugou was there immediately, not catching you upright the way a land-born man might have, because the cave did not allow for that and neither did his body. Instead he got to you low and fast, one arm hooking around your back while the other braced against the stone, pulling you down with him before you could pitch face-first onto the rock.

Your shoulder hit him first, and then your temple. By the time your vision began clawing its way back from black, you had half-collapsed against him with your weight resting awkwardly but undeniably along the broad line of his shoulder and upper arm.

The first thing you were able to hear clearly was his breathing. The second was his voice, berating you.

“What the hell did I just say?”

His grip tightened at your back when you tried, weakly, to lift your head too fast. “Mm. I don’t know,” you said, talking into his shoulder now. “I kind of remember you saying I had to try harder. If I made that up, feel free to correct me.”

“Don’t start shit with me right now,” he muttered, though very faintly, you swore you could hear an echo of his voice in your head.

I’m sorry.

I didn’t mean it.

The arm that was slung around his waist held him a little tighter.

Eventually, your vision came back in wavering smears of gold and green and shadow. Then the cave ceiling and the glow of the lanterns. The dark stripe of his shoulder too close beneath your cheek and the paleness of his skin and the light reflecting off of his striped scales.

You shut your eyes again, before you could begin to think too much about the lack of distance between the two of you.

That, apparently, was the wrong choice.

“No. Open them.”

“I’m not dying.”

“I know that.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

His whole body went rigid beneath yours.

Then, very quietly and very furiously, he said, “You don’t get to joke right now.”

The words pulled your eyes open more effectively than the order had. You lifted your head enough to look at him properly. He was very angry.

Not in the familiar way you had already come to recognize– the irritation, the snapping, the constant blade-edge impatience. This was narrower. More vicious. Fear-driven in a way he could no longer hide. His eyes looked almost black in the dim.

“I told you to stop.”

You swallowed. Your mouth felt dry. “I was getting close to healing it completely, though.”

“You were past your limit,” he countered.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You almost passed out.”

You didn’t feel angry at this argument anymore. You would only be talking in circles if you brought up the fact that you had been trying to appease him when you pushed past what you could handle. “I was trying to help. I thought I was doing what you wanted me to do.”

“I changed my mind,” he said quietly. Then, “And what happens if you burn yourself out before touching her again?”

The question affected you more than it should’ve. Because there was a part of you, small and ugly and terrified, that already knew exactly what happened when hands were willing and power was not enough.

“I already know what will happen,” you said a bit too forcefully, but the words still came out weaker than you wanted them to. “You think I don’t know what it feels like to have someone dying in front of you and still not be able to fix it?”

Bakugou didn’t say anything, waiting for you to continue. His silence was a small act of mercy. You didn’t think you could bear any more of his questions or commands tonight.

“I watched my mother die with my hands on her,” you said, and once the words were out, there was no taking them back. “I gave her everything I had. Everything. And it didn’t matter. I could feel her slipping away, and I still kept trying because I thought if I just pushed harder, if I just found the right place to put the healing, if I just gave more–”

Your breath caught hard enough to hurt. His arm remained at your back, steadying you, but all the fury in him had vanished and been replaced with a still silence as he listened.

“She died anyway,” you finished, quieter now. “So yes. I know what happens when I’m not enough.”

For a few seconds, he said nothing at all. Then his grip around you tightened slightly, the small, sharp sting of his claws pressing into your skin making you jolt a little.

“You couldn’t have stopped that.”

You stared at him. “What?”

His jaw worked once, like he had already regretted saying it.

“You couldn’t have stopped it.”

Something cold and uncertain moved through you. “How would you know that?”

He didn’t answer.

“Bakugou.”

“Not now.”

“What does that even mean?” You asked incredulously.

His eyes cut back to yours, sharp again, but there was something strained beneath it. Something that almost looked like guilt, but was gone too quickly to be sure.

“It just means you don’t get to use her as proof that you can’t do this.”

You sat very still against him as the words soaked in, your hands trembling where they pressed to the stone. His voice was still rough and raspy, still angry, but there was no meanness in it anymore. Not in the way that could’ve hurt you most.

“That’s why we’re working on your stamina,” he said, quieter but no less firm. “So when it’s something you can stop, you don’t drop before it’s done.”

You looked away before he could see too much of your face. You didn’t want him to see how much his words impacted you. Maybe he really did care.

The coral branch lay near the pool where it had fallen, a thin strip of color restored along one side and the rest still blackened, brittle, and wrong. Bakugou’s gaze followed yours to the coral after a moment, and another wave of anger seemed to roll over him. This one was older, more resentful.

“I should’ve found you sooner,” he said.

You looked back at him, but he wasn’t looking at you anymore.

“I knew there were old stories about the surface. About healers and the pearl.” His mouth twisted faintly. “Didn't matter. I waited until she was half-gone before I went looking.”

“That isn’t your fault.”

His eyes flashed as he snapped his head towardss you. “Don’t.”

You stopped short, sighing softly. The word had come too sharply from him, but not because he was angry with you. It seemed like absolution was apparently another thing he did not know how to accept. So you gave him something smaller.

“You found me when you were ready to go looking.”

He scoffed under his breath. “That supposed to help?”

“No,” you said. “It’s just true.”

He looked at you then, and for a moment, neither of you said anything. Your grief sat outside of your body where you didn’t have to directly wallow in it, and in the space next to you, and his joined your side. Neither fit neatly with the other, but somehow they made the cave feel less empty.

At last, Bakugou loosened his hold at your back.

You sat up slowly, and the cave went dark for a split second. Only enough to remind you how close to fainting you’d actually come.

Bakugou watched you for one long second.

Then he said, with terrible clipped precision, “Bed.”

You almost refused on instinct, but eventually relented with a roll of your eyes. He was right in thinking you were exhausted.

He helped you in the only way he could, being a merperson and not a human with legs. He moved close and low beside you, one hand firm at your upper arm and the other braced against the rock as you pushed yourself up and towards the moss bed in small humiliating stages. By the time you sank back into the blankets, every part of you felt heavier than before.

Bakugou remained beside the bed for a moment, watching you and breathing hard through his nose like he was warring between something bigger than the both of you, and he was not enjoying winning the fight.

Then he turned away, snatched the fallen coral branch from the floor, and stared at the blackened edge where your power had forced a strip of living color back into it.

His shoulders were as tight as ever as he said, “You were right.”

The words came so grudgingly you almost missed them.

You looked up, but he didn’t turn around.

“The reef. Her. It’s the same.”

You pushed yourself higher against the blankets. “I know.”

“Yeah.” His jaw flexed as he muttered the words, “I know you know.”

Chapter Text

Morning came quickly in the cave.

There was no sun to announce its presence. No gold spilling across your bedroom floor, no gulls arguing over the roof of your cottage, no town waking in slow little sounds beyond your windows. There was only the shift of the lantern-plants, their glow paling from warm amber into something softer and more green, and the quiet change in the air that told you night had moved on without asking you if it could.

You hadn’t slept well.

It wasn’t the bed. The bed was very soft, so soft you almost resented it, moss and woven blankets that felt too much like comfort for a place that still felt like captivity no matter how pretty it was. It wasn’t the cave, either. The cave was warm and damp and strangely gentle around the edges, filled with little sounds that normally would’ve soothed you– the trickle of fresh water in the washroom, the low lap of the pool, the distant pressure of the sea beyond the stone.

It was him.

Not because he had done anything, but because he had stayed.

Again.

At some point in the night, Bakugou had moved closer to the pool, though not fully into it. He had taken the blanket you had told him to use and dragged it with him like admitting he needed one physically pained him. Now he sat with his back against the stone, tail half-curled towards the water, arms folded across his chest and eyes open in a way that made you suspect he had not slept much either.

You watched him for a little while before you spoke.

“What did you mean last night?”

He looked up and blinked a few times. “What?”

“When you were talking about my mother.”

The confusion was quickly gone from his face. He knew what you were asking about, which only irritated you more when he said, “I said a lot of shit last night.”

“You know what I mean.”

You held his gaze until he looked away first, towards the pool, as if the water might provide an exit he had not already abused enough during your disagreements.

You pushed yourself upright slowly, being very careful with your body after the way it had almost betrayed you the night before. The exhaustion had lessened, but not fully gone away. It still existed in the tender parts of you, behind your eyes and temples and near your heart and in the faint shakiness of your hands when you moved too fast.

Bakugou’s attention dipped, quick and sharp, to your fingers before returning to your face as you stood up and approached the dresser.

“You said I couldn’t have stopped her from dying.”

He looked irritated by the reminder. Not with you, maybe, but with himself. With the fact that the words had left him at all.

“You couldn’t have.”

“How do you know?”

He still didn’t answer.

You picked the dry wetsuit up off of the top of the stone-carved dresser where it had been laid out to dry and turned back towards him. Then you said in a quiet voice, “Bakugou, you can’t keep doing that when you don’t want to answer me.”

“Doing what?”

“Acting like saying nothing counts as conversation.”

His eyes narrowed, but he wouldn’t look at you– his eyes were still fixed on the lap pool. “You keep asking questions I’m not going to answer.”

“You not wanting to answer isn’t the same as you being unable to.”

His expression changed then, almost like he was going to give in.

Your heart started beating faster.

“So you can answer.”

“I… know some things.”

“That’s the least helpful sentence you could have said. Obviously you know something.”

His tail moved once against the stone with a restless scrape before settling again. “Yeah, well. Get used to it.”

You stared at him with annoyance. He stared back in defiance.

For a split second, it almost felt familiar, like the kind of argument you could tuck safely into the category of irritation because it was easier than feeling fear of his eventual answer. But then you remembered your mother’s face near the end, her skin gone pale and cool, her fingers weak around yours while the sea outside your little cottage had risen too high for a windless night. You remembered pressing both hands to her chest and pouring until your vision spotted, until she had begged you to stop, until you hated her for asking because stopping felt like killing her yourself.

The frustration drained from you a little.

It wasn’t gone. Just too tired to make itself known.

“She was sick,” you said, quieter now. “I know she was. I was there.”

Bakugou didn’t look away from you this time. His expression was still hard and guarded, but he was listening.

“She got weaker for weeks. Some days she could barely stand. Some days she would sit by the window and stare at the water like she was waiting for someone to come out of it.” Your throat tightened, but you forced the words out anyway. “I thought if I got better at healing, I could fix whatever was taking her. I thought I was just too young. Too weak, too late.”

His claws curled once against his own arm.

You saw it. Neither of you said anything about it.

“You told me I couldn’t have stopped it,” you continued. “So either you were trying to comfort me without knowing what you were talking about, which would be new and weird for you, or you know something about what happened to her.”

His brows lowered faintly.

“New and weird?”

“That’s the part you focus on?”

His mouth twitched like he almost wanted to scoff but did not quite have the energy for it. “You’re fuckin’ annoying.”

“Yeah, well, you kidnapped me.”

“You keep bringing that up.”

“It keeps being relevant.”

That did get a sound from him, low and rough, almost a laugh if you were being too generous. It vanished quickly, swallowed by the heavier thing sitting between you.

You looked down at the pearl adorning your ankle. His eyes dropped, too.

“And then there’s this,” you said. “Mitsuki looked at it like she knew it. Everyone down there looks at it like they know it. You told me to cover it before we went back into the kingdom. Your mother spoke to me in my head and no one else heard it.” You looked up at him. “That is not nothing.”

His expression closed off again.

You hated it. Hated the feeling that everyone else had a hand around the edge of a curtain and you were the only one being told not to peek.

“Did my mother know your people?”

His answering silence told you everything you needed to know.

“So she did,” you said, rapping your knuckles on the stone dresser.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

He muttered something under his breath that sounded insulting but too low to make out. Then he dragged one webbed hand up his face and through his hair, water-damp claws briefly catching in the wild mess of blonde spikes.

“Yeah. She was known,” he said at last.

You sat up straighter. “Known by who?”

He huffed. “The sea.”

“That’s not a who.”

“Down here, it is.”

You stared at him, trying to decide whether to be angry or unsettled first. He looked like he already knew both were coming.

“What does that mean?”

“It means she wasn’t just some woman who liked the beach.”

The words were a lot more gentle than what he had probably planned to say. They still weren’t nice, but they weren’t harsh or cruel. If anything, there was too much restraint in them, like he had cut the sentence down from something larger and more dangerous.

Her hands full of herbs. Her hair loose in the wind. The elders lowering their heads when she passed, not quite bowing, but near enough to it that as a child you had always felt embarrassed by it. Her voice telling you never to take the anklet off near the water. Her eyes, sad and fond, when you asked why.

“What was she?”

Bakugou’s gaze immediately moved away from you again.

“No.”

The refusal was immediate and infuriating, but you willed yourself to stay calm.

“Please, Bakugou. You cannot keep telling me half of something and then act offended when I want the rest.”

“I can when the rest isn’t mine to share.”

“She was my mother.”

For the first time since you had started speaking, he looked genuinely cornered– maybe even a bit guilty.

He couldn’t possibly feel even a fraction of the guilt you felt surrounding her death, so you let him wallow in it for a moment longer.

“She was my mother,” you repeated, your voice shaking now in a way you did not like. “Whatever she was to your people, whatever she was to the sea, whatever story everyone down there seems to know except me, she was mine first.”

That resonated with him– you could see the words change his expression as you said them. He looked at you for a long moment, red eyes tired and sharp and full of things he still refused to give you.

When he spoke again, his voice was lower.

“I know.”

It was only two words– not enough to satisfy your need for answers, but not meaningless either. You didn’t know how to feel anymore, so you looked away.

The surface of the pool rippled before either of you could speak again, drawing both of your attention.

Bakugou’s head snapped towards it, irritation returning so quickly it almost looked like relief. A healer surfaced near the far edge, careful enough not to come too far into the cave but not timid enough to leave. She rose only to her shoulders, wet hair slicked to her neck, and claws scraping against the edge of the stone.

Her voice came out strange above the water, rough and layered in the same way Bakugou’s did, almost like it had been made for another element.

“My prince.”

Bakugou’s mouth pulled into an immediate scowl at the title. “What.”

The healer’s eyes moved to you, then back to him. She shrunk away from the edge of the pool, like she feared speaking the request she was sent to voice.

“Lord Masaru requests you both below.”

“No.”

You looked at him incredulously. “You don’t even know why.”

“Don’t care.”

The healer swallowed visibly.

You turned fully towards the healer. “Why are we being summoned?”

Bakugou shot you a look that would’ve made any other person cower. “You’re staying here.”

“I’m asking her,” you said, as you crossed your arms and leaned against the stone dresser.

His eyes narrowed.

The healer seemed to regret every decision that had led her to this moment. Still, she looked at you when she answered, perhaps sensing that you were the less likely of the two to bite. “The healers gathered samples through the night. From the outer currents, the damaged reef, and the creatures brought to the palace after your discovery.”

Right. The coral.

You felt the memory of it crawl up your wrist before you could stop it. The exact same wrong feeling as Mitsuki. Not just similar. The same.

“They want me to compare them,” you said. The healer nodded.

Bakugou’s tail struck the water from where it hung over the ledge with a sharp slap. “She’s not healing anything today.”

“I wasn’t asked to heal anything,” you said with a frown.

“You’re going to touch them, aren’t you?”

You turned to him slowly. “That is usually how examining something works.”

“That is also usually how you end up half-dead on the floor.”

You scoffed. “I was not half-dead, I was just–”

“You were close enough.”

“You are very dramatic for someone who acts like he hates drama.”

The healer made a sharp sound that was almost like the bark of a seal. It startled you at first, but you relaxed when you realized she was laughing.

Bakugou’s glare moved towards her, and she immediately looked at the wall. You would’ve enjoyed his dissatisfaction more if your body didn’t feel like it was at war with itself.

Bakugou looked back at you. “You’re not pushing your magic into anything.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

His expression made it clear he believed that about as much as he believed fish could fly.

You folded your arms. “I won’t.”

“You say that now...” he said lowly.

“And you can hover over my shoulder being miserable about it the entire time, if that makes you feel better.”

“It won’t.”

His eyes dragged over your face, your shoulders, the way you were standing with more confidence than your body deserved. You hated being inspected like that, but you let him do it because the healer was still watching and because you knew, no matter how irritating he was, he had reason.

When his gaze returned to yours, he looked angry in that quiet, frustrated way that meant he was about to lose an argument and knew it.

“Wetsuit,” he said.

It was already in front of you, which he knew very well. You held it up and gave it a little shake, with as much attitude in your face as you could manage while staying true to yourself. You went to change before he could say anything else too snarky. You didn’t want to lose your usual calm, rational mind around him more than you already had.

By the time you returned in the black wetsuit, the pearl hidden beneath the fabric again, Bakugou had already submerged. The healer waited below, her shape wavering in the dark pool. You slipped into the water after them, the cold closing over your skin and taking the sound of the cave with it.

The moment your head went under water filled your lungs, taking a few slightly uncomfortable seconds to adjust. Your thoughts sharpened– you could hear the ones that were so loud they were almost being projected to others, and you could feel Bakugou’s presence pressed against the edge of your mind, hot and irritated and too close.

Do not touch anything without telling me first.

You looked at him through the dim water. No drama from you today, remember?

His eyes narrowed as he slowly turned away.

You smiled anyway, and followed him down.

𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝

Every time you returned to the underwater palace, it felt like an entirely different journey.

This time, it didn’t feel easier, as you’d originally expected. You weren’t sure anything about this place would ever become easy, not with the way the current seemed to know exactly where it wanted your body to go. But the strangeness of it had dulled. You were beginning to understand where to put your hands when the water shifted too quickly, how to move your legs without wasting so much effort, how to let your body follow the current roads instead of fighting every pull like it was an insult to your swimming ability.

Bakugou still slowed down more than he wanted to, but the fact that he did it at all made you that much more grateful for him.

He stayed ahead of you, but not so far that you had to struggle to keep him in sight. Every so often his gaze cut back over his shoulder, sharp and annoyed, as if checking on you had personally offended him. The healer swam a little ahead of both of you, smart enough to keep herself just outside the space Bakugou had claimed around your body. She did not say anything, but you caught the occasional nervous flick of her tail whenever he got too quiet.

The kingdom watched you go by. Even with the pearl hidden beneath the black fabric of the wetsuit, eyes still found your ankle. You could feel their attention snag there first, then lift to your face, then slide quickly away whenever Bakugou looked ready to notice. It was strange how much more aware of it you were now. Before, the staring had been unsettling because it had no explanation. Now there was an explanation, and everyone seemed to have part of it except you.

Your mother was known.

The words echoed in your mind like a thought that was screaming to be projected.

Known by the sea.

Down here, it is.

You looked at Bakugou’s back as he swam ahead of you, at the hard line of his shoulders, the irritated flick of his tail, the black-and-orange spines shifting faintly with the water.

He knew more than he’d told you.

Maybe not everything. Maybe not enough to explain the whole of your mother’s life or the way she had died or the reason Mitsuki had looked at you like she’d been waiting for someone of your blood to arrive for so long. But he knew enough. Enough that each refusal to tell you something stung even more. His silence felt chosen.

The healer didn’t take you to Mitsuki’s chamber, which surprised you. You had expected the same bright, purified room, the raised cradle, the filtered current wrapping around the queen’s body.

Instead, the healer led you through a narrower passage along the palace’s inner wall, then down into a chamber carved lower into the stone.

It wasn’t as beautiful as the rest of the palace. It wasn’t ugly– no part of the palace was– but the room had a practical severity to it that the public terraces and glowing gardens did not. The walls were lined with shallow shelves and the lantern-plants glowed in glass-like bowls along the corners, their light colder and whiter than the cave’s golden lamps. Thin strands of shell-marked cord drifted from hooks overhead, each tied to some small object or sample kept suspended in the clean current.

At the center of the chamber, several healers waited, along with Bakugou’s father. Masaru was his name, if you were remembering correctly.

His father turned as you entered, and the first thing you noticed was how tired he looked, as if the night hadn’t let him rest. His face was as composed as ever, but the strain around his eyes and mouth gave him away. His gaze moved to Bakugou first, then to you.

You dipped your head in greeting before you could think too much on what was correct down here. He returned the gesture, small but sincere.

Your instinct was to think it was odd, but then you realized it was only because everyone else treated you like an object from a prophecy and he was the only one determined to treat you like a person who accidentally got involved in one.

Thank you for coming, he said into your mind.

Before you could answer, Bakugou cut in.

She’s not going to heal anything.

Masaru looked at his son over his glasses, and then there was a long pause as the two of them stared each other down. Maybe Masaru wasn’t as passive as you originally thought he was.

Then, with a patience that seemed to have been worn thin by years of practice, he said, Good thing no one has asked her to.

Bakugou still didn’t relax, but you hadn’t expected him to. He never seemed to relax when the two of you were in the palace.

You moved a little farther into the chamber, close enough now to see what the healers had arranged across the central stone table. It wasn’t really a table in the human sense, more of a wide slab grown or carved from the chamber floor, its surface covered in a thin pane of clear glass. There was a gap between the stone and glass with some hollow depressions where the healers were able to set the items so they wouldn’t be able to float freely in the water.

One of the items was blackened coral, similar to the one you had touched last night but in much worse shape. The second was a vial of cloudy water that had been weighted to keep it from drifting, sealed with waxed shell and a strip of sea silk. Beside it lay a cluster of scales, pale silver, their edges stained dark, slightly magnified by the glass depression it was resting in. There was also a feather, oily and stiff, floating inside a small ring of coral. The last item was a small petri dish of sediment, dark and grainy, gathered in a transparent shell dish. Something about it looked wrong before you ever touched it. Sand should have settled, but this seemed to cling to itself in slow ugly threads.

Your stomach turned just looking at the items– all not right and not normal in some way. Bakugou moved closer to take a look with you, which made you roll your eyes. I haven’t even done anything yet.

Bakugou’s eyes narrowed. You’re looking at it like you’re about to.

I’m observing it. Because they all have something in common.

You didn’t have to say what that was, because everyone in the room could see what it was. Corruption in some form. Signs of pollution.

Masaru moved closer to the table. These samples were all taken from the strongest affected sites we could reach safely after your discovery last night. Not all carry the same concentration of… whatever it may be.

You looked back down at the coral as the memories of the previous night surged through your wrist all over again. How the rot bit your nerves and stung your skin.

You pulled away before your hands could drift too close to the sample.

Which ones came from the same area as the coral he brought me? You asked.

One of the younger female healers swam forward. These three.

She pointed first to the blackened coral, then to the cloudy vial, then to the dark sediment. Outer nursery current, she said, listing where they’d collected them from as she went. Lower west channel. The current catches along the old reef wall before turning towards the palace.

Your attention caught on one word. Nursery?

The healer’s face changed, enough to know you’d hit a tender spot for her.

A nursery reef, Masaru answered when she did not. It was where the young merpeople were first taken to learn the softer currents. Many sea creatures used it for their young as well.

Used to, Bakugou said. We’ve restricted access to the areas now that we know the worst of it is around there.

He spoke too flatly to be as calm as he was pretending to be. You looked at him. His gaze was fixed on the coral now, and there was something in his expression you had not seen much of before. It wasn’t anger or fear, but something deeper that you weren’t sure how to categorize yet.

You thought of the dead coral you had seen on the way to the kingdom. The sluggish fish and the black threads moving through what should have been clean water.

A nursery. The location made the corruption feel worse.

The objects were pointing to signs of pollution, but even if it was, why was it poisoning the merpeople and the sea creatures in such a venomous way? First that, then learning that the worst of it was centering around a nursery.

Was this accidental harm that humans along the shoreline had caused? You weren’t too sure.

But you had to be sure before you started throwing theories around. You needed evidence. Some sort of proof before you started riling up the people of the sea. Pitting them against the people of the land.

You looked back at the samples. I’ll touch lightly.

Bakugou’s head snapped towards you. No.

You frowned. I can’t compare them from across the room.

You’re not pushing magic into them.

I said I would touch.

You say a lot of shit.

Your brows rose. For a moment, it looked like even Masaru was fighting the urge to step in. You turned to Bakugou fully.

I will tell you if I want to do anything else.

He stared at you with obvious suspicion. You let him, because matching his hostility wouldn’t help anyone. At last, he moved closer to the table and planted himself beside you like an irritable guard fish.

Fine.

You looked down at where his arm hovered near yours. Am I supposed to thank you for allowing me to do the thing I was summoned here to do?

He looked away with a sulky expression. Piss off.

Masaru moved away after that, clearly satisfied with how the situation had concluded. You reached for the fish scales first.

The moment your fingertips brushed over them, you felt your power flare under your skin. You were able to hold it back, keeping the silver glow from rising past the faintest shimmer beneath your skin, but something was calling it forward– which meant your magic was trying to heal it even though it wasn’t attached to a fish anymore. The scales were cold and thin, lighter than you expected. The sickness in them was present but weak, more residue than root.

Similar, you said after a moment. But not the same as Mitsuki. Concentration levels of the water where the sickness first took hold of them, I think.

One healer marked something down on a thin sheet of treated reed-paper.

I have a question, you asked, as you let the fish scales float down to the glass surface of the table in front of you. One of the healers nodded for you to continue. The fish that these scales came from– is it… I mean, has it died?

The healers exchanged weighted glances with one another before the younger one answered you.

Yes. All of these items have come from creatures that have passed on, or from areas where we’ve found a large concentration of sick or dying animals.

You nodded. An awful feeling was forming in your stomach. You couldn’t look at the expression on Bakugou’s face. He was probably thinking the same thing as you. If so many animals were dying from this sickness, how long would it be before his people started dying? His mother?

You moved to the feather next. It felt different. Oily and wrong in a more normal way. Human pollution– the kind you recognized. Or something close to it. The feather made your skin crawl, but it did not bite back. Not like the coral and Mitsuki.

This is contamination, you said slowly. But not the deepest kind.

Bakugou’s gaze slowly fixed on you. What does that mean?

It means it only hurt the bird at first, but it didn’t become part of the bird in the same way. It sat on the surface, then worked inward. That’s when the bird died from it.

The healer who had led you and Bakugou to the room nodded quickly. We thought the same. The creature was found floating near the rocks by the upper currents.

Upper?  You repeated to yourself, accidentally projecting the thought to everyone. How had the bird been affected by something that had only been affecting things below the surface until now?

Unless, the problem had never just been below the surface.

No one responded quickly enough, which made sense. They didn’t have an answer to give you. You moved to the cloudy vial. The moment your fingers touched the shell that sealed it shut, the pearl under your wetsuit warmed.

It wasn’t painful, but it did make you pause. Bakugou noticed the sudden stillness and leaned even closer. What.

You looked at him, then down at your ankle. It just grew… warm.

The healers looked at one another in a way you thought was very suspicious.

Please don’t do that, you said.

The young healer turned back to you and tilted her head. Do what?

Leave me out of the secretive glances and hidden conversations. You looked at each other like you knew what the pearl meant.

Masaru’s expression turned careful. We may know what it suggests. Not what it means.

You didn’t feel comforted by his words, but you didn’t try to continue pushing back against them. Bakugou’s voice echoed into your head again. Keep going.

He hadn’t said it because he was eager, he’d said it because if the conversation stayed on the pearl too long, you would ask more questions. That only made you feel left out and more frustrated, which now felt like two things you were cursed to feel every time you were around him.

Fine.

You touched the vial again. This time, the corruption you felt moved through your fingers in a thin but eager way, like something tasting the edge of your attention. Your magic stirred harder this time, instinct rising before thought could stop it.

You pulled back quickly, flexing your hand. Bakugou’s hand shot out and closed around your wrist.

You looked over at him in surprise. He looked back at you, furious already. You weren’t really sure why.

I stopped, you said.

You almost didn’t.

But I did.

His grip stayed for a few more seconds, and then he let go. Your wrist felt strangely cold in his absence.

That one is closer, you said, trying to ignore it. Not exact. But closer.

No one said anything, but you knew they were listening intently. You moved, reluctantly, to the sediment.

The dark grains curled in their shell dish as the current brushed them. You didn’t like the look of it. You liked even less the way your magic seemed to draw towards it. It wasn’t in a way where your magic was openly recognizing it, but it was like it was warning you in a way. You didn’t understand what the warning was for. The pearl warmed again beneath the wetsuit. Stronger and hotter this time.

Bakugou’s voice rattled your mind as soon as you looked down at your ankle. No.

You looked up. I have to.

No, you don’t.

This is why they called me here, Bakugou.

They called you to compare the samples, not continue to exhaust your magic by picking the most affected ones.

Oh please, I’m not exhausting anything.

Masaru looked between the two of you and then gave a short nod to one of the healers. The woman used a slender tool made of bone to lift only a small streak of the sediment into a separate current bubble, keeping it contained and away from the main dish.

This is more minimal contact, Masaru said. Safer.

Bakugou still didn’t look satisfied, though, you didn’t think anything short of removing you from the room entirely would satisfy him. Still, you reached forward.

This time, when your fingertips made contact on the edge of the current bubble, the reaction was instant. The corruption inside the sediment turned towards you. There was no better way to think of it. It didn’t move physically, as nothing in the black grains changed in a way one could see, but you felt it all the same– a slow internal shift, like the dark inside it had recognized the magic inside you and targeted it.

You inhaled sharply. Bakugou’s hand came to your back. Not in a rough way this time, but resting gently between your shoulderblades.

This is the same, you said. No one in the room said anything, but a few healers moved forward to take note of whatever it was they thought they were observing about your reaction.

You shuddered and forced yourself to keep your fingers steady. It’s not as concentrated as the coral, and not as deep as it is in Mitsuki, but it is the same thing.

The atmosphere of the room was suddenly more serious than ever. Bakugou’s hand remained at your back, warm even through the wetsuit.

Where did this come from? You asked.

The older healer answered this time. The nursery current.

You looked back at the black grains suspended in the current bubble. Then we need to see it. Or, I do at least.

You could feel the tips of Bakugou’s claws dig into your back through the wetsuit as he shook his head furiously. Absolutely not.

You had expected him to say that. You even had prepared an answer to counter him with. If that current feeds back towards the palace, then Mitsuki is not the end of this. She is just the worst case you’ve noticed.

His eyes flashed as the words hit their mark. You knew they hurt him, but you said them anyway because they were true, and he had to hear them to let you have some control.

If I can feel it better there, I might be able to understand how it’s moving.

You almost fainted in the cave after touching the dead coral. No way am I letting you go to that place.

Good thing I’m not trying to heal the entire nursery. I just want to take a look around.

He turned to you and said nothing for a long moment. Then, I don’t believe you.

The younger healer made the same seal-bark laugh as before, but instantly stopped herself when she realized the two of you weren’t just bantering anymore. Bakugou did not even spare her a glance this time. His attention stayed on you.

You lowered your voice in your mind, making the words steadier than you would’ve been able to get them across if the communication had been verbal. Your mother is sick because something is still reaching her. We can keep easing her breathing and making the black veins shrink by tiny amounts, or we can find where it is coming from.

He said nothing again, and for a moment, you thought you might’ve pushed too far. Then Masaru spoke.

She is right.

Bakugou turned on his father with a look so sharp it made two healers drift back.

No, she isn’t. And don’t get involved.

Masaru didn’t move, unblinking as he stared at his son. Katsuki.

No!

The word hit harder the second time. It filled the chamber, hot and furious and emotional and raw beneath the anger. You didn’t look away from him. You understood his anger, especially how it was stemming from his grief, but it was also captivating to see in another person.

Masaru sighed and fixed the set of his glasses. You would go with her.

That’s not the point.

That is exactly the point. She will not be alone. She will not be asked to heal. She will observe the current and return.

Bakugou’s tail lashed once behind him, scattering the nearest fronds of sea silk. You think that means shit if the current reacts to her?

The pearl reacted here, Masaru said. Better to know what draws it while we can still retreat.

Bakugou looked at you then, and for one short moment, the whole chamber seemed to fade into the background. You could see it plainly on his face.

He wanted to say no because he was afraid.

He wanted to say no because you had frightened him the night before.

He wanted to say no because his mother was lying in a room below, because his kingdom was rotting current by current, because you had become the only living thing that could touch the poison and make it recoil.

But none of that made his decision to keep you hidden away in the cave the right one.

You swam closer before you could overthink it. I will tell you before I touch anything, you said. I will not push my magic into anything without warning you first. And if you tell me to stop, I’ll stop.

His expression turned from pain and anger and helplessness to pure doubt and disbelieving.

You sighed. I will actually stop.

He stared at you. You stared back.

Fine, he said at last, and the word was so bitter it barely counted as agreement. Edge of the current. Not inside it. You drift too close, I will drag you back and you can’t complain.

You nodded. That’s fair.

His eyes narrowed further, as if he disliked you being reasonable even more than he disliked you arguing.

Masaru exhaled quietly. The healers began gathering the samples again, sealing the darker ones with extra layers of shell and silk. The younger healer avoided looking at Bakugou entirely now, though you noticed she still kept stealing glances at you with a strange mix of nervousness and awe.

Bakugou moved towards the chamber entrance without waiting for you, but you automatically followed before he could accuse you of being slow. As you passed the central table, your gaze caught once more on the contained bubble of sediment. The dark grains shifted faintly in the current, harmless-looking now that you were not touching them.

But you could still feel the warmth beneath your wetsuit.

𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝𓆝𓆟༝˚。⋆𓆉︎⋆。˚༝𓆞𓆝

The trip to the nursery wasn't long, but it felt like you’d left the kingdom entirely.

The transition from the palace to the nursery felt layered. The glowing terraces slowly disappeared, then the number of carved arches grew fewer and fewer until there were no more. Then the busier current-roads where merpeople drifted between buildings and gardens with nervous eyes and careful distance. Soon, even the lantern-plants thinned out, their pearl-white light swallowed by darker water and colder stone.

Bakugou stayed close. Closer than before, close enough that the dark sweep of his tail cut through the water just ahead of your knees and every shift in the current brought the edge of one fin near your leg. He kept positioning himself between you and the murkier water ahead, not subtle about it in the slightest.

You didn’t call his controlling demeanor out this time. The energy of the entire day felt too wrong to do that to him.

The first thing you noticed as you grew closer to the nursery was the cold. The water wasn’t a natural type of cold. This carried a stagnant quality, something trapped and sour that moved over your skin and made the pearl beneath your wetsuit pulse with heat. Then came the color of the water. The farther you swam, the more the clean blue dimmed into gray-green shadows, streaked through with darker trails that twisted through the current like blood.

And it was too quiet.

Before you had been taken under the surface, you would’ve never imagined the sea to have sound besides the occasional keen of a whale. But the bending and whooshing of the water as the schools of fish darted around, and the hum of reef life was nonexistent here. There was no chatter from hidden things, no startled turns of attention, no soft recognition brushing against the pearl at your ankle.

At first, you thought it was peaceful. That was before you realized it was because it was empty.

Bakugou glanced back at you. Stay close to me.

I am close.

Closer, he repeated.

You looked at him, ready to argue on instinct, but the words died before they could leave you. His face was fixed forward, jaw tight, eyes narrowed on the darkness ahead. He wasn’t irritated this time. At least, that wasn’t his primary emotion.

You moved closer as the nursery reef started to appear. At first it was only a pale shape in the murk, a long broken rise along the seafloor. Then the current shifted, and the whole ruin of it opened beneath you.

You stopped swimming.

You could tell it had once been beautiful. The reef curved in gentle shelves and shallow pockets, softer than the sharper outer walls you had passed before. Little tunnels threaded through coral that must have been shaped for small bodies, and shallow bowls dipped between stone and reef where young creatures could have hidden from rougher currents. Long beds of seagrass spread along the sand in limp gray ribbons, their ends blackened and still.

It had been made for safety, which exacerbated the horror of how it looked now.

Now most of the coral had collapsed into pale rubble. What remained stood in broken branches, white at the base and black along the edges, as though rot had eaten its way through the bones of the reef and left the body standing only out of habit. The sand below was coated in dark residue that shifted strangely when the current moved. Not like silt or ordinary sand. It clung to itself in oily threads, drawing together before breaking apart again.

There were no small fish. No clusters of eggs tucked into coral hollows. No little minds curious enough to poke into yours.

Nothing at all.

This was a nursery? you asked, though you already knew.

Bakugou didn’t answer right away. His eyes had gone to one of the broken coral arches near the lower slope. The structure was half-collapsed now, but it still looked purposeful, curved low and wide over a shallow channel where the current must once have been gentle enough for children to practice in.

Everyone learned how to navigate currents here, he said at last.

His voice in your mind was flat. Emotionless, as if he were trying to numb what he was actually feel.

You looked at him, but he didn’t look back. You tried to imagine him smaller. Younger. Happier. Still sharp-mouthed, probably. Still angry when anyone tried to help him do something he wanted to master himself. You imagined him in this same place when it was alive, bright with little fish and young merpeople and sea grass moving cleanly with the tide.

The image made the ruins in front of you even more unbearable.

I’m sorry, you said.

His mouth tightened. Don’t be.

You hated that answer, but you understood it well enough now not to press. He didn’t want your pity. He wanted your cooperation.

Instead, you looked back towards the reef and forced yourself to focus. You had promised not to touch anything without warning him. You had promised not to push magic into whatever you found. So you kept your hands close to your body and tried to do something else.

You listened very carefully.

Not with your ears and not with your mind, either.

You let your awareness stretch towards the current the way it had stretched towards the turtles near the shore, towards Mitsuki in the healing cradle, towards the coral branch in the cave. You expected silence again.

You detected movement, and you reached your hand out for Bakugou to stop swishing his tail so restlessly. But he didn’t listen immediately, he swam to your side and looked around.

What?

It’s moving, you said.

His eyes sharpened as he tried even harder to find whatever you were looking at. What is?

The corruption. You looked towards the darker streaks threading through the nursery reef. It’s not just sitting here. The current is carrying it.

You drifted slightly lower, careful to stay above the worst of the residue. The pearl beneath your wetsuit grew warmer, then hotter, reacting to something you couldn’t yet see.

Bakugou’s hand closed around your wrist. You followed his line of sight, and there it was.

Half-buried beneath a collapsed shelf of coral, was something that didn’t belong. It wasn’t stone or shell or bone. The shape was too hard-edged, too deliberately manufactured, its surface dulled by salt and grime. A cracked container lay wedged in the dead reef, one side split open where too much pressure or impact had broken it apart. Black residue clung to the inside, thick and oily, shifting sluggishly whenever the current slipped through the crack.

You knew what it was before you wanted to. You body understood it first, as chills rippled down your spine and raised the hairs on your arm. Then your mind caught up, and dread sank your heart.

What is it? Bakugou asked.

You didn’t answer him. What were you supposed to say? How would he handle the truth?

He shook your wrist slightly. You recognize it.

You swallowed, staring at the faded label still clinging to the container’s side. Most of it had been scraped away by coral and time, but enough remained. The warning symbol and a block of human lettering. The smeared remains of a name you had seen before from the road north of the village, painted on signs beyond tall fences and metal gates your mother had once told you never to go near.

HANEDA INDUSTRIALS

Below it, in smaller text, half-erased by the sea:

BUNKER FUEL. HAZARDOUS. DO NOT RELEASE INTO OPEN WATER.

You reached towards it without thinking. Bakugou yanked you back immediately.

You said you wouldn’t touch anything.

I’m not. I’m trying to unbury the rest of the container.

Don’t care.

His anger scraped through your mind, but underneath it was something worse. He had seen your face. He had read the recognition before you could hide it.

You forced yourself to look at him.

It’s from the surface, you said.

His expression did not change, but something in him went colder. From where?

You looked back at the broken container, swimming downwards and brushing the sand away from the container. Bakugou let you do it.

With each swipe of your hand, more oily sand shifted away. More and more containers appeared. All empty, all of them labeled as different types of lethal chemicals.

The words felt like betrayal, though you were not sure who you were betraying by saying them. I’ve never been to that side of the island. My mother forbade it. But the villagers… talked. It’s the reason there’s no tourism and such cheap land. No one wants to live where they are.

Where who is? Bakugou asked. He released your wrist and swam farther back to survey just how many empty containers littered the sea floor of the nursery.

An industrial plant. They own the oil rig that’s pretty far out, but they do a lot in the actual industrial plant. I’m not sure exactly what, though. I’ve never even seen the place. Like I said, I wasn’t allowed to even get within a few miles of it. They have half the island to themselves, and it’s all fenced off with electric wiring, and my mother always drilled into me that it was an evil place.

He turned towards the graveyard of containers again, and towards the dead nursery around it. He looked more than angry. For a moment he didn’t say anything.

Then, very quietly, he asked, That place did this?

You wanted to say you did not know. You wanted to say maybe. You wanted to say human things were complicated, that mistakes happened, that perhaps they had broken loose in a storm or fallen from a ship or washed down from somewhere else by accident.

But your mother had spent years watching that part of the shore with a look on her face you had never understood as a child. Men from the village had argued about Haneda in low voices outside the market. The water near the northern rocks had smelled wrong some mornings after heavy rain. And more than once, your mother had come home from that stretch of beach with black stains and chemical burns on her hands that did not heal until days later.

And this many containers was no accident. You looked at the dead nursery.

I think so, you said.

Bakugou closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, the renewed fury was duller than you expected. We’re leaving.

You didn’t argue.

The return to the cave passed in a silence so thick it felt like another current.

Bakugou took the cracked container– the first one you’d found– with him, wrapped in a sheet of sea silk one of the healers had brought along in case anything needed carrying. He would not let you hold it. You didn’t try to. The heat of the pearl had faded to a dull warmth under the wetsuit, but you could still feel it.

The palace watched your arrival. You felt the eyes again on your covered ankle and your face. But especially on the wrapped object in Bakugou’s hand. The staring had felt invasive before, but now it only felt deserved in a way that made your stomach twist.

You didn’t poison their water. You knew that. It didn’t matter much right then.

When you rose into the cave, the air felt smothering.

Bakugou surfaced behind you and set the wrapped container on the stone with a care that looked almost violent. You climbed out and sat on the ledge, unable to make yourself move farther.

You were both quiet for a while. Water streamed from your wetsuit and pooled around your thighs before slipping back into the pool. The cave’s low light and mossy softness felt wrong after the nursery. It was too safe. Too soft. It was unsettling.

“My mother used to come home from that beach with oil on her hands,” you said at last.

Bakugou remained in the pool, water up to his waist. Eventually his eyes moved to you, so you took it as a sign to continue.

“She told me not to go near the northern rocks after rain. She said the water there got mean.” You let out a breath that almost wanted to be a laugh and failed. “I thought she meant the currents.”

His jaw flexed, but he stayed silent.

“She spent her whole life trying to keep things like that out of the water.”

Bakugou looked towards the wrapped container with a scowl. “Didn’t work.”

The words hit before he seemed to realize what he had done. You looked down at your hands as the cave grew painfully quiet.

Then he cursed under his breath. “I didn’t–”

“No,” you said.

He stopped.

You rubbed your thumb against the zipper of the wetsuit that ran down your chest, over and over, because it gave your hands something to do. “No. It didn’t.”

His expression twisted. He looked angry with himself now. You wished that helped how you were suddenly feeling, but it didn’t.

“I know you didn’t say it was my fault,” you continued, voice quieter. “But it came from my world. From above… the same shore she spent her life protecting.”

“She wasn’t protecting a stranger’s home.”

You looked up, but Bakugou was looking like he regretted the words already.

“What does that mean? You keep saying things like that.”

He looked away.

“Bakugou.”

He exhaled forcefully. “It means your mother was familiar with what she was guarding.”

The answer wasn’t good enough. His answers regarding your mother never were, which just made you more upset.

You slid from the ledge and stood, tiredness dragging at your body again. “Then I need to go back.”

His head snapped towards you so fast his hair flicked water onto your face. “No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“I can guess.”

“You know the container came from Haneda. I know Haneda. Or… where it might be.”Your voice steadied as you spoke, as if the next step had been waiting underneath the guilt. “I know the roads around it. I know the fences that border the property. I know where the drainage cuts through the rocks after rain. I know where things wash up when the tide turns.”

“You’re not going alone.”

“You can’t come with me.”

You could tell the words hit him hard.

You hadn’t said them to be malicious, but because it was the truth he needed to hear. Bakugou stared at you from the pool, shoulders tense, water clinging to his skin, tail shifting beneath the surface where it belonged. He had dragged you into his world because you could survive there with the pearl, but now he couldn’t follow you into yours.

He couldn’t follow you past the rocks or onto the village roads. He couldn’t follow you through the fences and protect you in the town and the landlocked places where humans did damage and pretended the sea was too far away to notice.

His hands curled against the stone edge, his claws making white gouges in the stone.

“I can get you to the northern rocks,” he said.

“And then I go the rest of the way.”

His eyes flashed. “You come back before dark, hear me?”

“You don’t get to order me around on land too.”

He grabbed the ledge of the pool on either side of you and pushed himself upwards until he was looking down on you, leaning in so close you could feel the tips of his spiky hair brushing against your forehead. “Watch me,” he growled raspily, baring his two cuspids in what he thought was an intimidating way.

Instead, it seemed to have the opposite effect. You felt your cheeks grow hot as you recoiled slightly, looking away so he couldn’t see your reaction.

Bakugou pulled back slightly, a small confused scowl on his face. “Why’s your heart beating so fast?”

You lifted one foot out of the water and planted it on his abdomen, pushing him backwards into the pool again. There. Now you had some space again.

Bakugou hit the water with a sharp splash, though not because you had actually been strong enough to shove him very far. You knew that. He knew that. It was just odd that he had let you.

He sank only to his shoulders, hair dripping into his eyes, both hands still braced against the ledge where your ankle had been a moment before. For several seconds, he only stared at you.

You stared back, face still warm, foot still hovering uselessly between you like you were considering kicking him again if he decided to lean too close.

“Put your damn foot down, woman,” he said, smirking softly as one of his hands came to pull your ankle back into the water. You let him do it.

You still avoided his eyes. It was even more tense now that you knew he could hear your heartbeat, but neither of you discussed it further.

“I’ll get you as close as the tide lets me,” Bakugou said, as he glanced back at the container. You nodded.

He didn’t look away. “And the second something feels wrong,” he added, “you start thinking as loud as you can.”

The pearl at your ankle gave one faint pulse beneath the wetsuit.

Above you, beyond stone and sea and all the secrets your mother had left behind, the shore waited for your return.