Chapter Text
Splash
“Timmy! Timmy! Wake up! Wake up!”
Splash
He awoke to cold water splattering across his face and into the carpet. Tim shot up and sputtered at the water in his nose and eyes. He blinked rapidly and moved to stand, but his legs were unresponsive and he fell to the floor on his bare chest.
Ow
“Timmy! Timmy! Get up! Timmmyyyy!!!”
Danny’s frantic warbles, half-human and half-siren, were what finally anchored Tim’s focus. His vision narrowed in on the siren boy, still standing though now covered in scaly patches where the water landed on him. Danny stood on wobbling legs, one of them having already half-shifted and the other on its way to join it. Clutched against his belly was a bucket sloshing with water, the source of Tim’s impromptu shower.
When his eyes met Danny’s, the toddler lit up and danced in place, doing no favours for the poor carpet beneath him (which was five hundred years old and never supposed to get wet). “You’re awake! You’re awake! Timmy’s awake!”
“Danny…?”
That was what Tim was supposed to say, the sound shaped by his vocal chords, tongue and lips. But the sound that rang in his bones and rebounded in the air and into his ears was alien to him entirely.
Well, not as alien as it could’ve been.
Danny clicked in response, fully siren. Timmy?! You really are a siren now!!!
“That’s impossible!” Tim’s mouth moved before he could think, and the sound that came out with a soft bark and two trills that met in the middle. He slapped his hand over his mouth but the glove was still on and there was fur on his mouth and brushing against his hand and he felt fur brushing against fur and nudging his whiskers aside and since when did he have whiskers and where was the zipper on this thing and what happened to his legs
His legs. Were gone.
Tim screamed.
Then Danny screamed.
They both screamed. Continuously. For ten seconds. Straight.
~~
After the screaming subsided – and Tim had never been more grateful for his lack of close-by neighbours than in that moment – they quickly put their heads together.
Or rather, Tim put his head together while Danny set to poking at his fur.
Because Tim had fur now. Like a seal. And whiskers too. Everywhere the grey cloth had touched, which was every part of his body, the near-sickly paleness of his skin and turned to a warm grey. When he touched his own body, it was not like skin beneath clothing, it was like skin on skin. When he tried to pull at one of the hairs of the suit (the evidence was pointing against it being any kind of suit, but for his sanity’s sake he insisted on the term) it stung as if anchored deep into his actual body.
And then there was the tail.
“You’re like me now!” Danny declared. “Let’s be sirens together!”
He held the bucket of water up over his head, precariously close to tipping it over. Tim yipped at him with his webbed, flipper-like hand out. “Wait!”
Danny halted. His left ear, having turned into a fin from the water, perked up in confusion. “Why?”
“I can’t walk like this. It won’t be good if we both have tails and neither of us can walk. I still need your help.”
This explanation seemed to sink in to the toddler’s head just fine, a relief. He nodded sagely. “Ooooh, ok. But I can belly slide with my tail!”
Had Tim still been in possession of his legs, or any of his bodily faculties, he would have been able to leap out and intercept the bucket. Alas, he had neither his legs or any sense of how to move the sheets of muscle and fat that clung to his frame. All he could do was uselessly flop against the floor and cry out as the bucket tipped over Danny’s head.
In comparison to Tim’s harrowing ordeal, Danny’s change occurred almost seamlessly. Scales bloomed over his face like spring time flowers and fins unfurled like butterfly wings. Danny dropped the bucket and it landed goofily on his head as he bend down and stood on his hands right as the transformation reached his legs, which twisted like a rope around each other. Finally his feet stretched like flattened dough as toes turned to spines and his nails became fin tips holding up a translucent membrane. Clothes tore up from the force of the change, already weakened by water damage. Danny’s hand stand turned to an impromptu back flip as his tail wobbled and his balance wavered from its weight and he rolled onto the floor, happily squeaking and flopping.
Could things have gotten any worse?
“Danny…” he groaned. “Now what are we gonna do?”
“Let’s go swimming! Swimming! I wanna go to the beach!” Danny cheeped as he grabbed handfuls of Tim-blubber (which, ouch) and pulled himself onto Tim’s lap, rubbing his cheeks against his belly and purring.
“Danny, focus! I can’t swim!”
“Liar!” Danny trilled into Tim’s belly. His voice sent ripples through his blubber. “You can swim with your stupid legs and now you have a tail so you can swim way better!”
Oh, if only. Poking around his chest area, he found nothing to suggest any underwater breathing apparatus. With how uncoordinated he was, the most likely outcome of an impromptu swim was drowning.
“There’s so many things wrong with that, firsty— Wait! Priorities, Danny! We have to figure out how to get turn me back into a human!”
Danny slapped his tail fin on one of Tim’s flippers. He was never going to get used to feeling all that. “What’s a pie or rinny?”
“It’s basically what– Wait, that’s not important right now. Also, why are we on the stairs? I thought we were in my parents’ office?!”
Danny’s ear fins fluttered over his cheeks in a display of shyness. “Oh, I was really scared, so I tried to carry you. But you’re really heavy, so I gave up here and got some water instead, ‘cause sirens need water, and you’re a siren now!”
“Why- What- I’m not a–” Tim forced his breathing into a semi-natural rhythm, a lifeline against the impending mental breakdown. “That’s fine. Thanks, Danny. Do you know where my phone is?”
Danny smiled blissfully. “Nope!”
So proceeded the great ritual of Tim’s humiliation. Without legs or help to speak of, he was left with no other choice than to gracelessly flop inch by inch like an oversized worm. To make the tiniest amount of headway, he had to rear his whole body back and then throw himself forward, dragging underside against the dusty carpet. When was the last time it had been vacuumed?
The worst part was that dryness did nothing to help him. The carpet and his continual flinging of the self had swiftly done away with Danny’s previous attempts at watering him, but at no point did his legs decide to make a return. Even worse, Danny’s own drying body had begun to shift back to human form, and the little boy was inadvertently flaunting his greater mobility by hopping around Tim, grabbing his hands to ineffectually pull him forward.
Overall, the journey back to the study was long and arduous, and Tim prayed that the bruises on his belly wouldn’t show when if he managed to turn back.
The study was positively ransacked, with puddles of paper and water scattered all over the floor, remnants of Danny’s attempts to rouse him whilst unconscious. He groaned at the damage, and even more so at the trail of torn up rags – what remained of his poor clothes, going from the still-untouched box to the door way.
He identified one of the scraps, a slightly thicker piece of denim than the others, as what used to be his jean pockets. And he identified the sparking piece of plastic and metal within as what used to be his phone.
“Oops…” Danny chirped guiltily. “I’m sorry…”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine,” Tim muttered. “I just.”
Tim flopped himself towards the desk and planted his face into it.
“AAAAA”
And then rolled over on his back to stare bleakly at the ceiling upon his life. This was it. No more walking, no more skateboarding and days spent with Jason and Danny, no more human life, no more rights. All those years of effortless, thoughtless self-locomotion had come to an end. All the things he had taken for granted now looked longingly back at him across the trench. He once bemoaned never being able to stand out at school, but if he showed himself like this? He was as good as a side show attraction, if not an intelligent pet for some random rogue. What could he do to fight back? Run away?
It was the end of the road for Timmy.
Pat, pat, pat
“Thanks, Danny,” he muttered. Danny kept on patting the top of Tim’s head, humming.
He closed his eyes. The thrumming pain in his head had returned with a vengeance. Each moment pounded stronger than the last, the strike of blacksmith’s hammer on his malleable skull. Each pulse threatened to spin the whole world around his eyes, threatened to split his very head open.
Tim felt cool air on naked skin. Actual bare skin, exposed to the cold without fur or fabric.
He raised his hand. Pink skin. Grey fabric draped around it and bunched up at his elbow.
~~
The runes we uncovered depicted images of grey-skinned sirens chasing their more colourful counterparts. Considering the presence of siren bones in the dig site left along with discarded tools and other animal bones, this lends further credence to our theory that selkies were a predator species to sirens, using their superior stamina to chase down their prey until they gave out.
…
Jack uncovered a treasure trove of information! The tablet’s long and complicated, but one of the primary details that piqued my interest was the epithet used for selkies. It’s the same one used for whale sharks, dolphins and orcas, both predators and prey to sirens.
…
We found one.
The rest was blank.
Tim had a sneaking suspicion that that “one” was himself. He was a selkie, a creature of the sea, just like Danny. He was built for endurance swimming over thousands of miles, and keen senses to track down his primary prey.
Sirens.
Sirens like Jason, his best friend and now-adopted brother. Sirens like Danny, the toddler bouncing around him in circles.
“What’s it say? What’s it say? Tim? Tim? Tim timtimtimtimttimtimmmyyy what’s it say I’m bored and I’m hungry. Oh I think that’s Alfred’s car.”
Tim froze. He snapped his head to face the window and sure enough he recognised the sleek black car pulling up to the driveway, no doubt Alfred having had enough of waiting for him. Immediately sweat beaded on his neck and his hands turned cold.
“Let’s show him your new powers! Timmy’s gonna join Danny and Jason in the pool and we’ll swim at the beach together and—”
“NO!” Tim shouted.
The hurt on Danny’s face stabbed him like a harpoon. Tim scrambed to recover.
“I-I mean. Not yet. I want this to be a…. a…” A secret he would take to the grave. “A surprise! Yeah! Jason loves surprises!”
Danny gasped, his shock forgotten. “He does.”
“Think of how happy he’ll be once we show the surprise to him. But I need your help. You know what that means? You can’t tell Jason about this. Or Bruce, or Alfred or Dick or anyone. I wanna surprise them too.”
“Oooohhh! Ok! I won’t tell anyone, promise!”
Tim almost cried with relief. “Pinky swear?”
“Pinky swear!”
He heard a car engine die, and a door swing open. “Master Timothy, you and Master Danny will be late for tea! What’s taken you?”
Tim locked eyes with his little brother. “It’ll be our little secret. No one can know.”
Danny nodded. “Nobody!”
On the car ride back, he endured Alfred’s chidings and allowed Danny’s ramblings to fill the silence afterwards. The seal skin hung heavy beneath his replacement hoodie. If Alfred noticed the change in clothes for both of them, he didn’t say anything.