Chapter Text
Your name is Dave Strider and holy hell what the fuck have you gotten yourself into?
The day started out the same as literally every other day. You woke up at around one in the afternoon, fell out of bed and scrambled to get dressed. After briefly staring at the totally un-used comb on your bedside table and running your hand through your hair, you deemed your hair brushed and sprinted off to class, which started approximately five minutes before you woke up.
You burst into the hall, take your seat at the back of the lecture hall and call out ‘HERE’ just before the Professor read out your name. Having the last name ‘Strider’ had advantages, one of them being that you were relatively low on the register. This came in handy a number of times, especially when your bio professor was a condescending bitch and insisted on doing the whole roll call like you were in fucking fifth grade or some shit.
As usual she glared daggers in your direction, made her way through some shittily pronounced asian names (“It’s pronounced ‘ Woo Shao Hwah’, ma’am”), and started the lecture. You opened your note book and started to absently make notes.
It occurred to you briefly that this past two years started because of how hilarious you thought it’d be if you ‘ironically’ did really well in your science classes, ‘ironically’ get into a world class college and ‘ironically’ take marine biology as your major. Now, you were not-so-ironically enjoying the fuck out of this subject.
“I mean,” you’d constantly say to your elder brother over skype chats, “The ocean’s hella big, and there are a shit tonne of different things that live in it. How could you not find that awesome as hell?” He’d normally shake his head and call you a nerd.
So you paid attention to the lecture, making thoughtful notes and asking thoughtful questions that frankly would have totally astounded your middle school teachers. They really hated you.
“So, to conclude,” she said, a couple minutes after the class officially ended, “Get out of my lecture hall and I mean what I said about that essay. Ten pages by the end of the week.” There was a collective groan, followed by scraping chairs. You were out of the hall before anyone got a chance to talk to you. It wasn’t that you hated people, you just generally had a hard time talking to them. Plus, you were the textbook definition of an introvert. You managed to cover this up with shitty rambles and a cool kid persona, but really your attitude to people could be summed up with one word; ‘fuck.’ It wasn’t like you had no friends, though. Normally you spent time in between classes with Dirk the Senior, and his hot as fuck (you totally didn’t think that) boyfriend, Jake. Unfortunately, Dirk was working part time at an animal rehabilitation facility, which you found hilarious. The idea of Dirk spreading awareness about endangered species was two parts ridiculous, one part alarming, because he’d already been fired from the aquarium for telling small children that barracudas will ‘Fuck you up.”
So you spent a lot of time with Jake, who was nice enough, but you could tell everything he said was in a forced attempt to be friends with his boyfriend’s friends. But you didn’t need them, you totally had other friends. Lets see, there was Terezi, a blind girl majoring in law, and Karkat, an unusually angry guy who was majoring in film studies. They were both two years younger than you, though. Plus, they were totally hot for each other. It was like awkwardly third wheeling for your little sister, hanging out with those two together. And then there was Jade. Jade was a whole other can of worms. You two had dated on and off for a couple months before you figured out you were straight as Merida’s hair. That is to say, not at all. She’d been cool about it, and now you two were fairly good friends.
You hadn’t dated anyone after that.
But other than your small posse of nearly-friends, people sucked. In your book, there was nothing worse than a crowded party, except a crowded party with literally no booze. Without the booze, you just had to put up with people.
After your classes finished for the day, you did what you always did; head for the small beach near the college. It wasn’t a public beach, and you had to scramble down a sheer rock face to get to it, which made it perfect for you. Nobody else came there, except the occasional couple to make out for a while. It was also, strictly speaking, totally against school rules because it was dangerous or some shit. But whatever. Anything for some alone time.
You slid your way down onto the thin strip of shockingly white sand, kicking off your shoes so they stayed clean and didn’t have sand in them for the next 30 months. You shuffled your toes into the sand, breathing a small sigh of relief. Through the tinted shades, you saw the sun starting to dip below the expanse of endless water. You had a feeling you wouldn’t be able to spend much time down here; getting back to campus was always harder in the dark, especially with the shades on. And there was no way you were taking them off. Period. You turned to walk a little ways down the beach, but you stopped short. There was someone else here. Someone else on your beach. You sighed a little and nearly turned to go, but something else hit you.
Whoever they were, they were lying down. Their lower half was obscured by the ocean. They were just lying on their side, facing away from you, not caring that the ocean was slowly swallowing their body.
“Hey,” you called out after a short pause. Nothing.
“Hey!” you called out, a little louder. Still nothing. You started making your way over to them, and you slowly noticed things. Glasses lying a little way aways from his head, his lack of a shirt, but most worryingly, the red in the water around his legs. You started running, suddenly very worried about this total stranger. You dropped to his side, noticing how skinny and small he was. His chest was barely moving, and he was clearly breathing through his mouth.
“Hey, hey c’mon,” you whispered, shaking his shoulder a little. He just lamely shook. Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit he’s going to die he’s going to fucking die. You grabbed your phone out of your pocket, hands shaking, ready to dial an ambulance.
Then you looked down to where his legs should be, and realised that was very much something you should NOT do.
There weren’t any legs. Instead was a tail, a beautiful, huge, long tail with shimmering scales, ranging from baby blue to electric blue to the colour of the sky just before a storm. There were long gashes from god knows what up and down the You looked back up at his face, noticing thin blue lines on his neck.
“Gills?” you whispered, mostly to yourself. It hit you slowly, like a car crash being played at a quarter of its real time speed.
The kid was a mermaid.
You knew exactly what to do. You pressed ‘5’ (of course you had him on speed dial) and tried to see what else was wrong with the kid. He looked like he’d hit his head pretty hard, there was a nice blue-black bruise coming in just above his left eye. You quickly lifted up your shades to get a better look, instantly finding the fishing line knotted around his neck and upper body. After a couple dozen rings, Dirk finally picked up.
“Hello?” he said, sighing a little.
“Mermaids are real, Mrs. Matherson was totally fucking wrong, I found one, he’s pretty beat up,” you said, slotting the phone between your shoulder and ear. This freed your hands to try and do something about the fishing line.
“What?” Dirk asked after a brief pause. You growled a little.
“There is a kid with a fucking fish tail washed up on this dumb beach and he’s bleeding what do I do?” you said, a lot slower than the first time. You gently start tugging on the fishing line, trying not to accidentally tighten it around his neck. That would be bad. There’s a long silence from Dirk.
“Okay. Okay if you’re making this up,” he starts, slowly.
“I’m not!” you hiss, managing to make some headway with the line.
“Yeah but if you are you owe me two hundred bucks. Bring the kid around to the rehabilitation centre. There’s a tank here that nobody cares about.” He hung up before you could ask how the fuck you’d get him there. You sighed, finally managing to free him from the stupid line. Fishing has got to be the single stupidest sport known to fucking man kind. Well, probably not, but that stupid fishing line really pissed you off. He was breathing a little easier now, though. Dave: 1, Fishing-line: 0.
You gently turned the boy over so he was on his back, and were struck for the first time by how utterly, undeniably, unchangeably adorable he was.
Shit
Remembering suddenly that he was bleeding out before your very eyes, you managed to scoop him up. He was a lot lighter than he looked, and a lot colder. You awkwardly made your way to your feet, lurching a little, and started off down the beach. You quickly turned back, awkwardly managing to pick up the glasses, and headed back down the beach.
About halfway to the centre, he stirred a little in your arms. Not quite enough for you to notice. A short while later, he shifted again, slightly more aggressively. You looked down, and your eyes met his. Fuck, he was terrified. Eyes the size of dinner plates. Then, he started straight up thrashing around, flailing wildly to get out of your grip. It almost worked, too.
“Hey, hey hey hey, calm down,” you said, quietly, “calm down. You’re hurt, I can help, okay? I’m not gonna hurt you. Promise.” God he probably didn’t speak the same language, it was probably some dolphin shit in a secret dolphin language. But then he looked up at you, blinking a lot.
“Nobody can know,” he said, after a brief pause, “nobody can know.” You nodded, like you know what he’s talking about.
“Nobody’s gonna know,” you said, and he relaxed, snaking his arms loosely around your neck. You felt something flutter quietly in your stomach at the contact.
Fuck.