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His kind and humans had always been aware of one another. While maybe they hadn’t always gotten along perfectly, it was by no means a hostile cohabitation. There were times of peace, and times of strained relations as was true of any two factions of people. It was by no means the thing of fairy tales, of an elusive game of cat and mouse like the humans played with supposed-creatures called “centaurs”.
His kind—called many a name in many a language, ‘mermaid’ most often, ‘ningyo’ in his language—and humans were equals, and yet—
A carrier supporting one of the four corners of his container stumbled, the edge dipping down, and the water sloshed as his shoulder firmly slammed into the lowered side. Poorly-oxygenated water passed through his gills faster, ear fins pressing even closer to his head.
—why was he imprisoned?
---
They name him with familiar characters made up of the strokes of an ink brush. They read ‘Kinteki Kou’un’ in his native tongue, though the words those before his strange new home uttered sounded nothing alike. The varied patches of gold decorating the scales of his tail iridescent in the afternoon light falling through the windows, he supposed the meaning could be similar. ‘Golden Fortune’.
… He liked his real name much better.
---
He’s not felt right since transferred from his home water to the transport vessel hardly over two weeks previous. Not only is the water off—too clean, too stagnant, too not right—but all he does, day and night, dawn to dusk, is swim back and forth. Not even—two lazy strokes of his tail and he’s from one end of the tank to the other. No, it’s more like drifting. Idly, without any purpose, and the repetition is beginning to get to him.
Everything is.
---
There are strange humans adorned in a single garment of a single color sporting odd attachments on their backs and wearing false, split fins in his tank, prodding him with various peripherals and sticking him with long, sharp protrusions. Most often the entire process would’ve been unnecessarily stressful, even the dubiously harmless round, flat disk pressed against his chest and back terrifying. But he was sicker than he’d ever been in his admittedly short life, and found little energy to care. He barely possessed the strength to meander through his water a time or two before slowly sinking back down to the glass-pebbled bottom. His translucent fins began tattering at the edges, scales losing their sheen before flaking off all together.
No more, he thought miserably, weakly filtering the stringent water through his gills as one of the strange humans pushed yet another pointed stick into his tail.
Please, no more.
---
This water’s even worse, he thinks tiredly, oh so tiredly, and it’s a chore to lift his head from the surface to breathe.
His overly-sterilized home of not even two months is long gone. Or, maybe it’s not. He’s very unsure—he’d awoken here just this morning. He isn’t even really sure where “here” is. It’s a thin channel of water, so green and murky he’s afraid to filter it, littered with more things than he has the time to count flowing slowly through high walls.
With each weak tip of his chin out of the contaminated water, he catches a glimpse of blindingly blue up above, and can’t help a faint smile.
He had never really seen the sky since coming here.
---
“Hang – Hang on—Shit,”
There was some great fwoosh of water. He felt cold. Or was it warm? No, cold then warm.
“Th-there. Okay. Any injuries? … No. Heartbeat? … Weak. Breathing? … Also pretty weak.”
The warm enveloped him wholly. Solid ground disappeared entirely. He felt a faint th-thump, th-thump, th-thump against his cheek.
“Stay with me, now.”
---
Eyes groggily blinking open, they slid shut the next moment and he exhaled a breath. Slumping sideways, cheek resting on the edge, he started an inhale before pushing it back out. Sliding further into the water in which he was immersed, he filtered it and began to feel himself wake more. All at once the slow process kicked into high gear, and recollections of the events prior to now came rushing back.
Flailing in the body of water he now realized to be quite shallow, he tried best he could to take hold of the sides of the… whatever holding him to lift his upper half. It failed more than miserably, but very shortly after he was gripped under both arms and hoisted up. Leverage gone, his tail flopped uselessly in the water, splashing more of it out.
“Hey. Hey. It’s okay,” a voice above soothed flatly as he was placed back on the bottom of the whatever. “It’s okay. Calm down. You’re all right.”
He looked at the stranger, brows arching up in mild surprise. Standing outside the whatever was a human male. Judging from the size difference between his own body and the other’s, it seemed safe to assume this one was of adult age. His face, only partially obscured by short falls of dark hair, still retained youth, so maybe they weren’t all that far apart. Most notably, though, were his eyes. Expression overall disinterested, they shone with more emotions then what should be possible. Dark and reflecting, they shimmered like the ocean he’s heard so much about—
“—mething wrong?”
“Hah?” he breathed in panic, cheeks flushing a light pink as he realized he’d been staring.
“… I asked ‘is there something wrong?’” the human man asked again.
“I – uh – well…” his eyes widened, and he regarded this stranger with unabashed wonderment. “You… you can understand me? I can understand you?”
“A lucky coincidence,” the human agreed with a soft nod of his head and a barely-there smile.
“Can you keep yourself upright?” the human asked, and to illustrate his point allowed his hands to drift away from supporting him.
He panicked a moment, clutching at the slippery walls of his confinement. It took a few moments of shifting and adjusting, but he managed in settling down into a gesture humans called ‘sitting’. It was a little awkward, and he wasn’t sure how much he liked it or how long he’d be able to keep it up. It wasn’t until he was for sure steady that the human man left the whatever to a piece of furniture with swinging wood panels that hid many bands of different colors. The human pulled one or two out, and they then grew in size. The human then spread the rectangles of color on the surface below the whatever, and patches begun turning dark.
“You got water everywhere,” the human explained, pushing up his darkened sleeves. “I love water a lot, too, but everything has its limits.”
The human sat himself on the colorful rectangles, resting an elbow up on the edge of the whatever. “My name is Nanase,” the human paused, a thoughtful and debating look passing over his features. “… Haruka Nanase.”
“’Haruka’,” he repeated in awe, excitement soon taking its place. “’Haruka’ like ‘distant’?”
“Mmh, yeah,”
He giggled softly, to which the human—Haruka Nanase—furrowed his brow unnoticeably.
“It fits you, Nanase-san,” he said, and he swore Nanase-san looked taken aback.
“I’m Makoto. O-of the Tachibana clan.”
“’Makoto’…” Nanase-san copied him, though his tone was infinitely more careful. “’Makoto’ as in ‘sincere’?”
Bobbing his head eagerly, Makoto couldn’t help the manner in which his face heated at the sound of his name on Nanase-san’s voice.
“… It fits you, Makoto-kun.”
---
Makoto learned the whatever was a human commodity referred to as a ‘bathtub’. ‘Bathtub’, he learned after inquiring, because a ‘tub’ was often a container used to hold water and ‘bath’ was from ‘bathe’ which is to cleanse oneself.
“We don’t use it for that, though,” Nanase-san explains, twisting around to pull off a strange protrusion from the wall. “This is a showerhead. It sprays water, and we use it to wash off before getting into the tub.”
That’s another matter he’s learned. When Nanase-san uses ‘we’, he specifically refers to his country’s people—the Japanese, they’re called. They hail from a country known as Japan, and it sounds familiar to him, but he can’t quite place why. It’s not all too surprising as, though ningyo tend to adapt their language based on the local humans’, they often make their own words and terms for things as they see fit.
“Are we in Japan now?” Makoto questions as Nanase-san tests the quality of the water he’s sat in. He had explained how the various strange tubes and strips of color on them would help keep the water conditions optimum for him. While the wording made him apprehensive, a flash of the suffocatingly clean water of his last home appearing from the back of his mind, Makoto was coming to like Nanase-san more than any other human he ever encountered and found himself trusting the man.
“No,” the man answers holding the tubes connected by a flat bottom up to the light as he scrutinizes them closely. “A country called ‘China’.”
Makoto lets the name roll off his tongue a time or two.
“But if you live in Japan, why are you are in… China?”
“Work,” Nanase-san answers shortly and squeezes droplets of colored liquid into the larger of the tubes before swirling them around. “… It’s hard to explain. I’ll—“ Blue eyes move up to meet Makoto’s green ones before drifting back down to what he’s doing. “—We’ll be going home in a couple of days.”
He hadn’t felt such elation since the day his twin siblings had been born.
---
He didn’t like traveling. Not the way humans seemed to. Not the way he had to travel in the human world.
While grateful for being once more wholly submerged in water, the enclosure was small. Tiny as he was in comparison to Nanase-san, he couldn’t even turn around in this case. That on its own may not have been so bad, as the man promised the trip wouldn’t take all too long, but then it was revealed they would be separated for most of it. Makoto didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t like the sound of that one bit. He panicked, begun wondering if trusting this unbearably attractive human was really such a smart idea.
But, then, as if by some sort of sorcery only existing in fry’s rest time stories, Nanase-san met his eyes seriously, faintly smiling in reassurance, and it no longer felt like the entire world was coming down around him.
---
For Makoto, the trip was longer than he could’ve ever anticipated. He had been unconscious for most of the journey from his home to where ever it had been in China that he was taken. But from the moment he was forced to watch Nanase-san walk away from his portable container the merboy was wide awake. Because shortly then he was hauled to sit for an indefinable amount of time in terrifying pitch darkness. Once freed from that void, he briefly reunited with Nanase-san before being hauled into yet another abyss—this one noticeably less nosy and thus not quite as scary.
After a passing of time he was unsure of, as he’d actually managed in resting his eyes for some period of it, he was set down on the ground in front of a building Nanase-san very shortly appeared from. Talking with the men having handled Makoto, passing some sort of slab between them, he shortly wondered over to open his container.
“Ready to see your new home?”
---
Being put through so much in just one sun span, Nanase-san’s arms supporting both his back and tail felt wonderfully comforting. Though it would never fail to be anxiety-inducing to be completely suspended out of the water like this, he thinks if he’s held by the dark-haired man like this, he wouldn’t ever mind it too much. Or, really at all. In fact he’s so content he begins to trill softly, quietly without the water to amplify the sound. His ear fins vibrate faintly with the noise, and it all seems to take Nanase-san off-guard.
Nevertheless, he continues on to Makoto’s promised new water, and not all too long after he feels the lukewarm liquid envelop him. Envelop them both, actually. Nanase-san still retains a hold on him, until he loosens his own grip from around the human’s neck, and takes in what is to be his new home.
Even from here he can tell it’s bigger than the last two places he’s taken residency in. It’s outside, too, set in what looks to be stone and canopied by the sky turning violets with dusk. With a look seeking permission, and then a nod granting it, he twists, diving down under the placid surface to turn sharply and head for the far end of the body of water. Where Nanase-san stands is a little shallower than his tank in China, but at the other side its depth increases greatly. Most importantly is the very water itself. While maybe not quite as great as his home water’s, it’s a stellar improvement to what he’s been in lately.
So overwhelmed by an onslaught of emotions, varied and intense, Makoto can’t help but speed over and launch himself at Nanase-san, who tumbles over onto what seem to be steps leading into the water.
Even though it’s through pitched ‘thank yous’ and barely audible sniffles, he thinks he can tell that the man doesn’t mind as he strokes the merboy in his lap’s back.