Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pia is never alone. She always has fishy friends around! (Like, literally fish, they aren’t suspicious or anything!) And even if she is just a regular mermaid, not an univir, the Univir Settlement has always been very kind and welcoming towards her. She is very grateful for what she has.

So it's excruciatingly frustrating that sometimes she feels like… like she’s missing something. She’s happy , dammit. What more is there to want?

No one answers her questions. How could they, when she never speaks up to ask?

~~~~~~~~~~

Sakuya is always alone. Well, okay. Not really. In fact, it’d be really nice if she could actually be alone sometimes instead of having a constant guard or maid or whatever-politician-of-the-week-thought-they-could-use-her-to-get-to-her-mother constantly following her around everywhere.

So, yeah, fine. Physically, she’s never alone. But where it counted? When she found yet another unexplainable (or, easily explainable, if they’d just listen to her! ) proof of the existence of something other?

“Don’t be absurd, Princess,” they say.

“Your head is always so high in the clouds, Princess,” they say.

“It’s cute that you still like to play games like this, Princess,” they say.

“When are you going to start taking your duties seriously?” her mother says, with a sigh. Always with the sighing.

No one gets it! How can they all ignore so many obvious signs! There are monsters in the woods, in the water off the coast, in the goddamn castle itself! But no one will believe her!

Don’t they have any idea what that would mean?

Imagine the money to be made!! If they could capture a real live monster, or harvest the strange monster materials Sakuya finds, they could get themselves out of the red!

Then, the kingdom would be prosperous once more, tourism would be booming, the famed bathhouses would be full once again, and they wouldn’t have any need of any treaties or…

Sakuya pauses as she catches a glimpse of herself in her mirror, her hands still tangled in her hair where she’s been pinning it up to hide it under her hat. The face reflected there isn’t her “tough capable warrior” face, the one she’s been practicing. Instead, she’s frowning.

“Arrghhh..!” she hisses, staring herself down. “You. Are. Not. Upset!”

Like saying it can make it true.

There’s no point in arguing with her own emotions, but there’s also no point in wasting her time thinking about them. She’s good at compartmentalizing. She can pack all of that away, and never think about it again.

Her quest, on the other hand, is of pressing importance.

She wants what’s best for her kingdom, and what’s best is finding a monster so they can start a monster zoo, or… something. They could weaponize the monsters and conquer more lands..? Although, war isn’t something Sakuya is particularly keen on, so it’d be better if they could use the products from the monsters to grow commerce. Sakuya’s better at economics than battle tactics, anyway.

So she’ll focus on that, rather than the pit of dread she can always sort of feel growing in the pit of her stomach, lately. Dread from the impending economic collapse of the Miyako Kingdom, of course. Not… not because of…

Look. She’s worried about her kingdom and her people; she’s a princess, after all.

So take that, naysayers. There’s a perfectly acceptable justification for all of Sakuya’s “unsanctioned” adventures. Including, of course, the one she’s heading out for right now.

She’ll find a monster, and she’ll bring it back home, no matter the cost. Before it’s too late.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Ah- ha! ” Pia darts out from her hiding place among the rocks on the seabed and snatches her prey. Before the vile, ugly, horrible thing can even react, Pia knocks it out with her makeshift rock weapon. “Mmmmm~! Yay! Finally!”

Pia has been dying for some raw squid. Plus, it’s fish day at the Settlement, and it’s not a “let’s celebrate how wonderful fish are!” kind of fish day. Sure, monsters gotta eat, but Pia isn’t very comfortable with that particular dinner menu. She much prefers squid day. Squid harass and eat innocent fishes, and Pia will exact justice on them. (She can’t exactly exact justice on monsters in the Settlement who rely on a fish diet to, like, live, so she’ll take it out on the squids.)

Anyways, now that she’s got her hands on her dinner, she can ditch the boring rock formations outside the Settlement, where nothing much happens, and head back to the Settlement proper, where hopefully something is happening. Something besides fish cruelty.

Pia hums an upbeat tune to herself as she swims back toward civilization, pleased with the prospect of squid for dinner.

She’s a bit further out from her usual hunting spot, so it's probably going to take awhile before she's back near anything of interest. Might be for the best. She’s not in any particular rush to get back while they’re still finishing dinner at the settlement.

Not to mention that there’s a storm brewing. Bad weather always gets everything acting a little more agitated than normal, even if the effects aren't as noticeable below the surface. Critters (squid included) are quicker to hide and harder to find.

Even Pia finds herself sticking closer to the bases of the rock clusters rising from the seafloor than she usually would.

And as she slips around the corner of the nearest jagged spire, she realizes what a mistake that might be.

She’s been neglecting her surroundings. Before her, she can see the slope of a shoreline . She must have gotten turned around after she caught the squid, and now she’s entirely too close to the surface. How had she not noticed how shallow the water’s gotten?

The waves are crashing violently against a rocky beach. It's a wonder she hadn't noticed all the noise.

She knows she should turn around, now , but it’s really a sight to behold. This is the closest she’s ever gotten to seeing a storm up close, not just from far beneath the surface. It would hardly take a flick of her tail to swim up and touch it.

Rocks and sand are clouding up the beach, churning in vicious repetition. Though, Pia can’t really see much of anything in the dark muck. Unfortunately, it seems the sun has already set (has she really been out here that long?), and any possible remaining light has presumably been blocked out by the weather. Ondorus once told Pia that storms come with ‘clouds’ that float on the surface of the air the way seabirds and ships float upon the water, only storm clouds coat the whole sky.

Why had Pia never thought to go see them before?

Aside from the fact that Kuruna would definitely have her tail for even thinking to poke her head beyond the surface.

The rocking of the waves is only getting worse the longer Pia stays here. It’s difficult to remain in place when the currents are getting so strong, which is the only signal she should need to get a move on.

Next time there’s a storm, Pia’s definitely planning on checking it out, from a safer distance. Or, maybe, if it’s still going in the morning, Pia can--

“--aaaaAAAAAHHHHH!!”

Something almost like screaming, but... off in the way it sounds, somehow, echoes closer and closer and--

In a flurry of falling rubble and churning bubbles, something comes tumbling down off one of the rock stacks and crashes into the sea near Pia.

It's all so startling that Pia almost flees then and there.

She stops when the smell of fresh blood in the water hits her.

Chapter Text

Sakuya wakes up clutching the tattered remains of a dream she can’t quite remember. The details are a whirl of sensory input -- she's not used to dreaming in such vibrant detail. Colors, bright colors, blues and pinks like nothing she’s ever seen before. A beautiful melody. The smell of the sea. The softest, nicest pillow... And also slamming into something very solid at a high speed. A high-pitched, cheerful voice… saying… something…

Something...wet? Something -- a bunch of somethings -- digging unevenly into her back. Hair in her eyes and her mouth and plastered to her bare arms and something grainey clinging to the side of her face and something metallic-smelling hanging heavy in the air -- is that blood??

Sakuya no longer cares about whatever dream she was having. She’s far more concerned by her pounding headache, the throbbing in her right arm, in her left hand, in her shoulders and her legs and tearing across her back, and--

(Okay. Okay, Sakuya. Calm down. Where are you, what’s the last thing you remember, oh, shit, what if I have a concussion, shit, shit, shi-- Where’s my bag of monster drops?)

When Sakuya reaches for the familiar shape of her “souvenir bag,” hoping for some, for any, sort of familiarity in whatever terrible situation she’s gotten herself into, she immediately regrets it. And not only is her favorite bag missing, but she quickly realizes that the simple tunic and the short travel cloak she’d donned for her journey are missing, too -- wait, is she naked?? Why???

More than anything, the lack of clothes alarms her, surprising her into the realization that she still hasn’t opened her eyes since she woke up. (She does not remember falling asleep.)

When she does, she first confirms her lack of clothing, though that shortly becomes the least of her concerns.

While she remembered the scent of the sea earlier, she had simply attributed it to the nature of the Miyako Kingdom, that at any point one could not, by simple geography, be very far from the ocean. Now, the salty brine hits her anew, along with the (extremely loud, how had she not noticed it immediately?) crashing of waves and the sight of, well, black on black on black. 

Sakuya can see that it’s nighttime. The moon is only a crescent, but it’s giving off enough light through the thin wispy clouds that she can clearly see her own pale skin against the dark pebbles and rocks she’s apparently laying on, as well as the fact that those rocks are being repeatedly chewed up and spit out by the dark ocean water only a few meters before her, which itself is swallowed up at the horizon by a dark, star-speckled, cloud-dotted blanket of sky.

Superb. 

If she had to wake up in the middle of the night, alone, with no idea how she’d gotten there, would it have killed whatever cosmic forces were at work to have let it happen on one of Miyako’s more popular, more comfortable , white sand beaches instead of such a rocky one?

Also, for the night to have been a warmer one? Sakuya’s freezing . And, considering that she doesn’t actually know how long she’s been out here, that might just be more literal than she’d like.

Some clothes would probably help with the cold, too. And speaking of Sakuya's inexplicable nakedness, a closer inspection of her body reveals that she isn't completely bare. She's covered in globs of what appear to be seaweed? Which is incredibly gross.

She aches, and she’s cold, and she’s confused, and the seaweed is just one too many insults for one morning. Er, night. Whatever time it is.

As she peels herself off the rocky stones of the beach and her eyes adjust to the dim lighting, Sakuya comes to realize a few more things. Namely, she's not actually peeling herself off the rocks, because in actuality there's a barrier of fabric between them and her body. It's her tunic, which again, she should be wearing, but maybe having both the front and back layers underneath her is better. It's not thick enough to pad her to the point where she's comfortable, but it's surely better than just one layer or nothing at all.

In fact, her head had likewise been pillowed with her cloak. And her bag isn't missing, it's laying innocently on the rocks next to her, with her folded-up leggings and undergarments resting atop it. One of her boots is also there, although it’s laying at a weird angle on its side rather than on the sole, and she can’t see the other one anywhere nearby, which is only notable due to how meticulously everything else is stacked.

What all of this adds up to is that someone must have positioned Sakuya here like this. 

The thought shoots bolts of fear straight to the pit of her stomach. She feels queasy. She can't remember anything, she wakes up with all her clothes carefully arranged around her, and her whole body hurts?

Is it some kind of political coup? Has she been set up? (Shit.) Who did this? Where is she? Why can't she remember? (Shit, shit.) Why the beach, why not someplace more comfortable? (Shit, shit, shit.) If only she were more like her mother, she could have fought them off easily, she could have… Wait, hadn't she smelled blood earlier? (Shit, shit, shit, shit, sh--)

Sakuya takes a deep breath in. Holds it there; counts to five. Slowly blows the air out through her mouth. Repeats.

It won’t do anyone, least of all herself, any good to go into a panic over this. Sakuya can be calm and rational when she needs to be. Meaning she can take stock of what’s happening -- of what’s happen ed -- and figure out what to do about it. Easy peasy. 

First things first. What’s the last thing she can remember? Freaking out over the naked thing. Before that: waking up, the strange dream she had. Had she imagined a song? The chances are fairly high that hadn’t actually been her own imagination. Sakuya is the furthest thing from a musical person. She has definite doubts her brain would be able to conjure up such a pretty melody out of nowhere.

No, wait. Focus . There are more pressing matters than a song she may or may not have heard. Although, a song did mean a voice or an instrument, which meant a person … 

What came before the dream? Falling asleep somehow. No, more likely, falling unconscious . The question is, how? Not being able to remember those specifics is troubling, but that doesn’t mean there’s no chance of figuring it out. 

Before whatever had caused her to lose consciousness, she had been… Of course. She’d been on a monster hunt. That’s no surprise. It also helps to explain the beach thing. 

She has always been certain there were monsters that lurked in the waves; she swears she’s seen faces and strange forms in the waves before, and no, not just tricks of the light. Real creatures swimming beneath the surface. Sakuya’s always believed she might be able to find some answers if only she were better at holding her breath.

This trip had been no different. Sure, her motivations to get out of the castle might have been… slightly less single-minded than usual. But only slightly, so, not worth mentioning, really. The main purpose was always to find proof of monsters, and maybe even bring one back with her.

But. That’s right. She hadn’t anticipated the storm. Unlucky timing, really.

Even so, she’d been too stubborn to heed all the warning signs of trouble brewing in the atmosphere around her to give up her search completely.

It had been dusk, or approaching dusk. The sudden cloud cover made it darker than usual, but the fading light of the sun had been just enough for Sakuya to catch a glimpse of movement in the water farther off the shore.

A glint. A flash of something. Something too bright to be the water or some kelp or the reflection of the sky. 

And, unlike any other time she’d sworn she’d seen something, this time it had been moving closer . How could she resist?

Sakuya remembers now. She had seen movement in the water, the promise of proof , and she’d completely lost all common self-preservational sense. She’d run towards the water, but the waves that had been crashing down were bigger and harder than she’d been willing to battle through, even with her urgency.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t still urgent, though. She’d lost sight of the thing when she’d run to shore. The crashing waves and churning water, as well as the slope of the beach, meant she no longer had a vantage point from which she could see the whatever-it-was moving in the water. Every moment she wasted was another moment it could get too far away to do Sakuya any good.

So, of course, she’d done the freaking rational thing. 

She had backtracked further up the shore, her boots crunching on the shifting stones, and climbed up one of the tall rock formations jutting out from the shore into the water. All while rain had started to fall around her. What the hell had she been thinking?!

Her mom is going to kill her. Technically speaking, she probably could and it’d still be legal. The queen has the right to put down anyone so willfully endangering the kingdom’s only princess, right?

The thing is, Sakuya knows exactly what she had been thinking. She had been thinking about finding a monster. She had been thinking about putting all her problems and fears to rest, of finally doing something on her own and being successful. She had been thinking about how good it would feel to say “I told you so!”

She had been feeling premature vindication, and it had made her think she was invincible. She’d barely felt any fear at all to be so high up, to have the wind whipping around her, to be so far from anyone who might be able to help her. 

Sakuya shudders to think, now, about what might have happened if she’d been successful. She has no idea how violent a monster might be towards a defenseless human such as herself.

She can’t clearly remember what had happened after that, but she thinks she has a pretty good guess. Maybe she had been distracted, seen the monster more clearly, leaned too far over the edge to get a better look. Maybe it hadn’t been her at all, maybe the rock she had stepped onto had been unstable and crumbled underneath her weight. Maybe she’d simply tripped. 

Whatever had happened, it was clear she had not gotten back down the same way she had gotten up. 

It is probably worrying she can’t remember the exact circumstances though, right? That means it’s likely she hit her head. Sakuya admittedly does not have the greatest medical knowledge, but what she does know is that head injuries are never a good thing. 

She doesn’t really want to think about it too hard, so she starts smaller. Now that she’s sitting up, she can clearly see all the seaweed -- she supposes this means she fell into the water -- plastered in various places on her skin. Gross. Her body is protesting in a million different places every time she moves, but she’s gonna have to get up sometime. Might as well be a little cleaner when she does.

She starts to peel one of the larger globs of what turns out to be more of a weird gunky sort-of-paste than actual seaweed off the side of her right thigh while she scrunches up her face and tries not to think about what she’s doing. Rip it off like a bandage, right? She only gets partway through before she stops, however.

It’s the pain that gets her to pause, hissing as dramatically as she likes considering no one is around to look down on her for her weakness, but it’s the sight that freezes her in place. She realizes, belatedly, that maybe she was a little too close to the truth about the bandage thing. 

She still only has the moonlight to see by, but it’s plenty to realize that her leg underneath the mushy “bandage” is a disaster. She’s terribly scratched up, strokes of thin scratches painting up the side of her leg. As she watches with morbid fascination, she notices the largest gash in the middle of the bunch starts to bleed. (Presumably, starts to bleed again .)

Sakuya lets out a long shaky breath that sounds a little more like a whine than she'd prefer. 

"Ohhkay. Alright. Cool." She presses back down (perhaps a little too harshly) to seal the gunk back over the wound. "Ow. So, I guess that's staying on…" 

Sakuya might be giggling nervously. Or that might just be the phantom sound of what she anticipates hearing when she gets back home and the aristocrats that like to hover around her mother hear about this. They're like their own species of particularly nasty gnats.

If all of the icky seaweed stuff covering her body like patchwork is holding together similar wounds… No matter what, Sakuya is in trouble this time. There’s no way she’ll be able to hide all of this once she gets home. It’s nothing like the small scrapes she sometimes manages to get on her little “adventures” (which are bad enough to hide, honestly. If it weren’t for Raven always covering for her, these little escapades would have ended a long time ago).

Sakuya needs to take stock. There’s the gash on her leg, obviously. And it’s certainly not the only bit of her legs that’s patched up, either. Her left shin has a big glob as well, and it doesn’t stop ‘til above her knee. There’s also her arms, which are practically wrapped up completely. She can’t tell if that’s because they’re covered in scratches or just because it was easier to get everything to stay by wrapping it fully. She’s not sure she really wants the answer.

Her back aches, but she can’t see it, and her arms really don’t want to bend far enough to reach it right now. That’s fine. She’ll just assume it’s bad. That seems reasonable.

Miraculously, her stomach and chest seem mostly fine. There’s less sea-gunk there than anywhere else. Whatever happened, at least she’d done a decent job keeping her organs and important stuff protected. Hopefully. It’s not like she can really see what’s going on on the inside.

Her feet are fine, too. Presumably her boots had done their job, though she sort of wishes they were doing their job of keeping her feet warm right now. She can’t really feel her toes.

Her hands are shaking. From the cold or the situation, she can’t tell. They’re also beat to shit, but upon closer inspection she sees that rather than the seaweed stuff that’s everywhere else, they’re covered in some sort of translucent jelly. She can’t really feel them, but from the looks of things that might be for the best.

Judging by the pain, her right side took more of an impact in general. Also, now that she’s seen exactly what’s going on with her leg and her hands, it feels a hundred times worse. Stupid psychology.

And, finally…

She raises her protesting arms to feel around her head, but thankfully she can’t find anything that seems seriously amiss. Holding her arms up hurts worse than her head does. Or at least injury-wise. She still has a pounding headache, but it doesn’t feel too different from any ordinary headache. 

There is a small patch of the seaweed gunk stuck to her forehead, and pressing on it hurts, but it doesn’t feel like she’s dying or anything. She’s definitely got at least a bruise going on under there, but she has no mirror or way of checking it and definitely no way of fixing it if there is something wrong, so. Seaweed bandage it is.

So, this means that someone else really was here. Only, Sakuya might have been wrong when she jumped to the worst conclusions at first. It seems like all this person did was save her life and tend to her wounds?

Wait. Maybe it only seems like that, but it was a… Nope. A quick inventory check reveals that nothing is missing from her bag. Not even her tiara, which she lugs around as a last resort when she sneaks out. Meaning this person wasn’t just a thief with a moral compass, or something. No criminal in their right mind would save a princess and not demand something in return, right? 

Sakuya didn’t get to leave the castle often, so it wouldn’t be surprising for a random citizen to not recognize her, but if anyone looked in her bag and saw her tiara they’d know what it meant in an instant. And even if they didn’t want to hold her for ransom or something, saving a princess was an obvious way to earn some favors.

So then… someone had simply seen her in danger and saved her? For no reason? But if they’d done it out of the kindness of their heart, why the heck hadn’t they left her with anything warmer? Or, better yet, carried her to someplace nicer than a rocky beach in the middle of a storm??

Or… the end of a storm. The sky isn’t exactly clear, but it isn’t raining and the wind seems like it might be a little calmer than it’d been before Sakuya had gotten herself injured with that stupid stunt earlier.

Speaking of the wind, a particularly nasty gust blows by and Sakuya’s teeth start chattering. Or, maybe they were already chattering and she hadn’t noticed until now. Her head is swimming in questions with no answers, but she knows what she really needs is to get someplace warm, now .

Sakuya really hates the cold.

The adrenaline from waking up in this strange place in this strange position is fading, fast. It feels like she’s stuck moving in slow motion.

If Sakuya has to stop a few times as she struggles to her feet, no one ever has to know. If she curses at the wind, at her mystery savior, if a few tears from the pain and the stress and her simple exhaustion slip out, she’ll never tell. 

Sakuya wrestles with her tunic before giving up. It’s soaked and cold, and she can’t seem to get her arms through, never mind her head. She snatches up her cloak with an embarrassing lack of grace and wraps it as solidly around herself as she can. It’s similarly wet and cold, but it makes her feel a tiny bit better to not be completely bare. 

She clutches her bag and everything else she has to her chest beneath her cloak, not even bothering to attempt to put on her leggings. Her missing boot is probably gone forever, and she has the smallest amount of energy to be indignant about it. She liked those boots. 

It’s not a great sign that her feet are so numb that she isn’t even bothered by the rocks beneath them as she starts trudging away from the sounds of crashing waves. Maybe she should put the one boot she has left on, to minimize damaging herself further, but she’s starting to feel… very tired.

It might have been nice to just roll over where she’d been laying and go back to sleep…

But. It’s too late for that. She’s up now, so she might as well get on with it.

She’s struggling to keep her eyes open, shivering so hard the trinkets in her bag are jingling against each other, and more falling forward than walking, but she manages to get off the beach. 

She’s not sure how long she walks for. It feels like an eternity, but it also feels like she only just started. It’s like one of the dreams where she’s trapped in the castle and she finally catches sight of the exit only to find that the hallway leading to it stretches with every step she takes, so that she never actually gets any closer to the door no matter how long she runs.

Maybe this all is a dream. That would explain the mirage she’s seeing right now. It’s the perfect picture of a cozy little cottage, and, yeah. It’s just in her head. Why would there be a cottage so close to the water? No one would want to live here. It’s her fault she’s in this situation, and now her mind’s giving her what she deserves. False hope.

Sakuya did this to herself. There’s no way she can make it home in this state. She can’t even make it to the nearest town. She doesn’t even want to make it another step. 

She knows how these dreams end. She never makes it out. That door is never gonna be close enough to reach. Why bother?

Sakuya’s bare foot snags on something. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter that all her things fall to the floor around and beneath her, that she doesn’t have the energy to raise her arms to break her fall. It doesn’t matter that the hard impact rips through all her cuts and bruises. She can barely feel it.

She thinks she hears something. There’s someone in the illusory home. They’re laughing -- at her, most likely. The laughter stops. They’ve noticed her, then, so they’ll be whispering instead. Sakuya is tired of being watched, made fun of. She’s tired of the cold and the pain and she is. Just. Tired.

Sakuya falls asleep humming the melody of a song she doesn’t know. She dreams in pink and blue.

Pia shouldn't have brought up the drowning creature with Kuruna. Pia should have told Ondorus first; she annoys him less, and he’s more interested in the things that happen beyond the settlement borders. 

But her curiosity had been bursting at the seams, and she wanted to know so badly , and there was no way she could have waited until she found Ondorus, specifically. As soon as she'd gotten back to the settlement, Pia had enthusiastically launched into her exciting new story about the exciting new creature she'd found to the first monster she'd seen.

Thank goodness she hadn’t gone so far as to show off her new little secret souvenir.

Because fortunately, she hadn't had to wait nearly as long or research nearly as much as she thought she might to learn what sort of creature it was that she'd saved. Unfortunately, it had been a human . Least fortunately was, of course, the fact that she'd told Kuruna all about how she'd saved the poor thing and patched up their wounds and left them back on the shore (since they obviously weren't anything that could survive in the deep ocean).

The expressions the univir elder sometimes made when she was mad at something Pia had done were usually at least a little funny, but Pia wasn't laughing this time. 

“What were you thinking ?! How could you help a human , of all things?! Do you have any idea what they did-- what they've done-- what they're doing, still!”

Pia hadn't meant to do anything bad! She wasn't trying to aid the race that had decimated the univir to the point that the two she knew might be the last two, ever. Kuruna had told her about the atrocities committed by humans plenty of times, but she could have described how they looked at least once so Pia would know not to make this mistake!

“How could you be so naive; what if it had been a trap?! What if you had led them right to us!?”

Humans were supposed to be, like, pure evil, right? So Pia had always imagined them with lots and lots of teeth, and sharp claws, and squid-y tentacles, and evil eyes. Rows of evil eyes. To see all their evil deeds with. 

“You could have brought ruin upon the whole settlement!”

They were strong enough to wipe out an advanced and extremely smart and magical race, and take over all the land and stuff! At least, based on all the stories Pia had heard. They were responsible for disrupting the peace and balance in the world. They were bad, and liked to hunt and kill monsters for fun!

“You're incredibly lucky they didn't hurt you as it is, don't you realize that?”

No one had told her they looked like finless merfolk! Or… hornless, finless univir!

“You had no idea… that human could have just been faking it! What if it had just gotten up and attacked you after you tried to help it?!”

Wait, maybe Kuruna had called them “Hornless” before. Although, technically, Pia was lacking in the horn department too, and Kuruna had never cursed Pia's mere continued existence. (At least, that she knew of…) 

“I can't believe that you would betray us like that! That you would aid one of them ...”

More than that, though, Kuruna usually refers to humans as the “Legged.” 

“You know what the Legged have done to us!”

So, how was Pia to know that “Legged” meant they only had two weird arm-ish-but-longer-and-with-weird-longish-stubby-hands legs and not, like, a million creepy teeny-tiny shrimp legs. Oh, or crab legs, with those big nasty pincers. Wait, no! Lobsters. Worst of both worlds.

“What's going -- Kuruna, calm down, I'm sure she didn't realize--”

Not that it mattered, not that any of it mattered. Pia was a bother normally, so maybe no one had described humans in detail to her on purpose, so they'd have an excuse when…

“Ondorus! Let go of me! We cannot allow those who would aid our enemies to endanger the settlement, and you know it!”

When Pia finally messed up, big time. And… and even if she'd known that it was a human she was saving… Pia knows she still would have done it. Easily. How could she leave another living creature to die so horribly, so hopelessly?

“Kuruna. You know that was not her intention--”

And. It hadn't exactly helped that the human had been so beautiful. Once the thrashing and the drowning and the bleeding had been taken care of, anyway (all of which were not so beautiful, as dying often isn't). But its -- no, their -- face looked like any mer's face, but no scales, and their hair like a mer's hair, but black black black like a squid's ink instead of bright and colorful and warning of danger. The human's top half had looked more like a female mer's, but Pia was starting to think she couldn't trust anything she thought she knew when it came to humans, so she'd have to reserve her judgement for now.

“What does intention matter, when we are talking about humans!”

And their bottom half… Pia really didn’t know what to make of it. She thought that being out of the water made things heavier -- no, she knows that it does, because when she was helping drag the strange creature back out of the water it had felt like she’d had bags full of sand pulling her down. And no water around her to support her on the sides, to push off of and share the work with. Maybe it was the storm and the adrenaline influencing her opinion, but it had felt like everything had moved all too fast in the air, yet it was also so, so still. So how could these humans manage all of that, while only balancing on those two legs?? 

“Kuruna…”

And, those legs were so long! Like, longer than Pia’s arms, and longer than the human’s own arms, but shorter than Pia’s tail. Dragging the both of them along on the beach with really only her own arms doing most of the work, Pia can’t imagine how those things would be useful for much of anything.

“Ondorus! This is not. About. You. This is about this traitor. ”

If only Pia could have gotten a better look. Truthfully, she hadn’t had much time to admire the human’s anatomy while she’d been busy making sure it all stayed where it belonged. As far as Pia could tell, the human had thrown themself down one of the rocky spires near the beach and tumbled as though they were a rock caught in the waves.

“Kuru--”

Unlike a rock, however, humans apparently didn’t get very smooth and shiny from repeated scraping contact with rocky surfaces. Their skin seemed to work like mer skin, and when they got cut they bled, just like merfolk did.

“That is enough! Pia, you have disappointed me, and all the members of the Settlement, immensely. You have betrayed the goodwill that allowed you to stay here.”

And boy, could that human bleed. Pia wasn’t sure how much blood humans had compared to merfolk, but she was kind of hoping the answer was ‘more.’ Hopefully, she’d managed to patch the human up well enough to save them. Pia had never been more grateful that she used to get herself scraped up as much as she did. At least she’d learned some rudimentary healing techniques.

“Therefore, your punishment shall be fitting. If we can no longer trust you, then you are banished, henceforth.”

At least, she certainly hoped she’d learned the healing techniques correctly. It had been a lot of pressure to work under, and she’d only had so much in the way of supplies.

“Kuruna, you can’t be--”

It would be just her luck if all of it ended up being for nothing.

“Would you stand against your elder?!”

If she’d endured every horrible second of that conversation, if she’d lost her new home...

“That is what I thought.”

And she hadn’t even managed to save the human, after all. Even the thought of it makes Pia’s skin crawl. She wouldn’t change a thing about her decision, but the conversation she’d had with Kuruna (and Ondorus) has been playing on a loop in her mind. The words hurt the same every time she remembers them.

“Get. Out.”

And Pia had. She was out. She hadn’t even had anything to go collect. The only things she owned were already in her small woven bag. It had only been a matter of time before she was no longer wanted, really. They’d been so nice to tolerate her for so long. She had always known she’d have to leave and find someplace new, someday. She just… hadn’t expected that time to come so soon. 

Stupid. 

It was her own fault she didn’t know where to go, now.