Chapter Text
“But… why me?”
“Because you are the calmest, most rational person I know”, Namjoon told him, as Yoongi looked down at the child bundled up in his lap.
Namjoon, who happened to be Yoongi’s best friend, also happened to have just found… whatever it was that was now resting on Yoongi’s thighs.
“But… but…” Yoongi started again, though the sentence ended there, with Yoongi just opening and closing his mouth like a fish.
“But… what?”, his friend asked him with a dimpled smile, prodding him to talk and bracing himself for the wave of questions that inevitably was gonna come. He could almost see all of the gears in Yoongi’s head turn.
Yoongi was thinking back to the phone call he had with Namjoon just last night. Namjoon had called and said he found something whilst at work out on the boat. He sounded so scared, so desperate, on the verge of tears, and he pleaded for Yoongi to help him, and Yoongi was a weak man, never ever denying his friends help. He agreed to helping even before knowing what he had agreed to. How bad could it be, really? Namjoon had been distressed before. It was not the first midnight phone call Yoongi had gotten from Namjoon, and they had always figured out a solution together.
But never ever in his 29 years of existence had he imagined Namjoon would turn up at his doorstep to hand him a child that was half octopus.
“But… but… But so many things!”, desperation crept up and Yoongi was almost shouting in frustration, though Namjoon quickly shushed him before he was in danger of waking up the child.
“But so many things!” Yoongi hissed this time, in a hushed voice, the child not even stirring.
“So, so many things! How being the main one. How… how, this? Just, how? And why? What do you expect me to do?” All the oddity and all the hows was catching up to Yoongi who was suddenly unable to form any coherent sentences.
Namjoon sighed and nodded, walking over and sitting next to Yoongi on the couch.
“I found it in the water.” His voice was calm, almost soothing. Whether he tried to soothe the child or Yoongi didn’t matter. It worked.
“I just… saw something in the water and couldn’t really figure out what it was, so I got the net and… yeah. It was… whatever this is. First I thought it was dead, it was so quiet, but I could see it breathing. And I got scared, really scared, and hurried to my cabin to hide it.”
He brought out his hand and put it gently on the head of the child, stroking its forehead with his thumb.
“I was scared, am scared, of what the others would do if they found it. If people would begin experimenting on it or in other ways hurt it because, let’s be real, this goes against nature. People have been writing myths about mermaids for years, but an actual living, breathing child that is half octopus? I can’t even imagine what people would do.
So, yeah, I hid it, and it was fine until it… woke up. Do you have any idea how hard it is to hide a crying octopus child from 8 marine biologists on a 60 foot boat?”, he almost chuckled, still soothingly stroking the bundled up child.
“I can’t have it in my place, and your place is practically ideal for hiding it. And you are the calmest, most rational person I know.”
Namjoon looked almost apologetic but he was sincere. He was afraid of the octopus child, or whatever it was, being hurt. And Yoongi was the most calm and collected person in his friend group. A down to earth, introverted artist who lived far from the city in a big, abandoned cottage he had purchased cheaply because of all the restoration that needed to be done. Which meant he could have an octopus child at his place until Namjoon figured out what to do with it, as there wasn’t really any risk that people found out.
“Look, I… I don’t have a plan, and I don’t know any more about this than you do,” Namjoon tried, but Yoongi gave him the eyes.
“Okay, I know a little bit more than you do, but I’m also lost, I promise. I know that when it cried yesterday and sought comfort, it very much sounded like a human child. But I don’t know how human it is. Octopi are smart. They can use tools and unscrew jar lids and such. They are often considered the smartest invertebrate, though I’m not sure this one can be classified as an invertebrate, but… “ He sighed again and looked at Yoongi.
“I just need you to care for it until I find out what to do. I can’t let the people at work know this exists. As I said, I’m scared of what they would do. So, I just need you to care for it for now. And I know it’s a lot to ask but I’m desperate. And I know you can do it.”
Yoongi swallowed air and looked from Namjoon and back at the bundle. He didn’t really know if the ‘just’ in “I just need you to take care of it for now” was fitting. The child had a round face and pitch black hair. The face was completely human, maybe except for the splattering of something resembling gray-ish, purple-ish, maybe blue-ish freckles that decorated the child across the nose. You maybe wouldn’t think much of it, but then came shoulders, pale, but human peach-skin coloured shoulders with the same dark purple markings, and the peach skin faded and became all grey and wet-looking and very clearly octopus. Its arms were out of the towel it was bundled in, and crossed over its chest, arms twisted together as to protect itself. The ends of its tentacle arms were splattered with the same dark freckles and the tips were entirely that dark grey-ish purple color. It was almost beautiful, if you could forget the fact that it was attached to what looked like a small, human child.
Yoongi swallowed again as he took in the soft features; the round cheeks, the little button nose, the eyebrows that lay relaxed on its forehead, the long, dark lashes.
And because Yoongi was a weak, weak man, he agreed to take care of the thing to the best of his abilities.
🦑
Yoongi’s approach was to treat the thing like a child. He had asked Namjoon all sorts of questions.
Did it need to live in water? But apparently it hadn’t been submerged since Namjoon retrieved it from the ocean and it seemed completely fine.
Did it need any special diet? And Namjoon had shrugged and said he fed it some small kelp-like fish, actually mostly nervous about whether it could handle “adult food” and scared that it would choke, but it gulped down the fish just fine.
So, Yoongi was going to treat it like a child. That seemed to be the best approach. But Yoongi knew very little about children in general and even less about childcare. So he started with googling stuff and soon realized that “how to take care of a child” was too wide of a question, as there is a huge difference between taking care of a child that is 3 months versus 3 years old.
He looked down on the child that was still sleeping all bundled up in his lap. How old was it? Or, rather, how old did it look like it was?
He googled pictures of children - in a private browser, because he expected that this would quickly fuck up his search history. But judging faces was hard. All the kids he looked at seemed to have button noses and squishy cheeks.
He signed and gently lifted the bundle, slowly unwrapping it to get an idea of the child in its entirety. As he removed the towel, he also got a whiff of sea water and algae, and it was not entirely pleasant. This is also when the child started to stir, its face squeezing together, nose scrunched, before it looked at Yoongi with the biggest, round, brown eyes Yoongi had ever seen.
"Ssh ssh ssh, I know, I know”, he tried in a low voice, standing up to rock the child, holding it on one arm as he used his other to get the towel completely off.
“I just need to get a look at you, buddy.”
He didn’t really know what to look for, but for the first time he got to see the octopus child in its entirety. Just like with the tentacles on its upper body, the lower half seemed to go from soft, peachy human skin to the purple tinted gray, with the splatter of darker freckles in the middle of the tentacles and again at the very tips. It had 6 tentacles on its lower half, Yoongi noted. At the underside of each tentacle there was a white, but not completely white-white, strip with suction cups neatly arranged from end to end.
And given its head size to body size ratio, he would say it looked like a child around the age of a year. Maybe a little less, it was hard to judge. There was no ankle fat or small toes or anything to look at, just big round eyes that followed Yoongi with quiet curiosity and 8 appendages that still looked odd, no matter how long Yoongi stared at it.
Which he didn’t do for long, because the face scrunched up again and the child looked like it might start crying again.
“Oh shit, no no, don’t cry, don’t cry,” he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. He hugged the child closer to his body to get a better hold of it, and stirred towards his bedroom, still rocking the child.
“Are you cold, perhaps? The towel must have kept you warm. Or perhaps you’re just confused. You went to sleep and suddenly you were at a boat with a dimpled giant of a man, who was panicking and probably breaking stuff. But he fed you, and he said you calmed down. And then you went to sleep again and this time you woke up with another strange giant you don’t know. I think I would cry a little as well.”
He wasn’t really sure why he was talking to it, knowing very well it probably didn’t understand him. But it seemed to soothe it; at least it hadn’t started actually crying yet. And talking also seemed to help stop the thought train that went 200 miles an hour in Yoongi’s head, so even if it wasn’t calming the child, it was calming him.
After looking through his closet he could quickly confirm that he had around nothing that could fit a child around the age of 1. Yoongi wasn’t even a big man, but the kid could basically use his shirts as a tent.
He ended up finding an old, slightly worn out gray t-shirt that he pulled over the head of the child. Luckily the neckline didn’t fall over both its shoulders, so that was a start. The shoulder seam, however, went way past what would have been the child’s elbows, if it had any, and the hem of the shirt was just gracing over the tips of the lower tentacles.
As the child was curiously rolling around Yoongi’s floor, eyes still wet but whatever made it cry momentarily forgotten, Yoongi found a pair of scissors, cut a slit in the shirt and with swift hands tore the bottom half of the shirt, so it had a more fitting length that didn’t constrict the movements of tentacles. He rolled up the t-shirt sleeves and pinned them with two safety pins each, and had to admit that he was quite proud of his handiwork; the child was clothed, it looked decent enough and the child didn’t seem to mind. A win overall.
Then came the time for food. Yoongi carried the child with him to the kitchen and placed it on the kitchen floor. Namjoon had fed the child fish, which seemed logical given that it was part aquatic creature. Yoongi was really curious about whether it needed to diet on fish only like octopi probably did - he also made a mental note to look up what octopi actually eat - or if it could, and would, eat normal human food. But not tonight.
In his fridge he found a package of smoked salmon, and before he could worry about ‘the smoked part’ being good for kids or not, he opened the package and put some of it on a plate. For a moment, he considered just placing the plate on the floor in front of the child and let it eat, but as he looked at it… crawling? around the floor, looking with curious eyes at a stray pencil that had rolled onto the floor, he was reminded again that this was a child. Not a creature, not an animal; a child. Just a child that happened to have tentacles for arms and legs.
Instead, he put the plate on the table and went to get the child. He placed it on his lap as he sat down, grabbed for a fork but then put it down. A fork could hurt it. He needed to get child safe cutlery, he reminded himself, and instead picked at the salmon with the hand he didn’t use to hold the child, and with two fingers brought the salmon towards it. The child seemed very curious, following Yoongi’s hands with great interest. When the salmon came towards the child, it held up its upper two tentacles and wrapped them around Yoongi’s wrist. The sensation was… strange. He could feel the suction cups pecking at his skin. But he was more distracted by the small huffs of air he could feel on his fingers, as the child was sniffing the contents in his hands. It felt hesitant, though, as if it couldn’t really figure out whether it was safe to eat or not. It was probably the smoke. Plain salmon would probably be better, Yoongi thought, and suddenly he could feel something wet and warm and confirm that the child very much had teeth. It liked the salmon, even if it seemed hesitant at first and even if it insisted on sniffing each bite before eating it. In the end, it ate everything Yoongi gave it. He even had to get some more from the package. It ate around 2/3rds of the salmon before it seemed sated, and Yoongi stroked its hair, whispering to it that it did good.
He put it back on the floor as he went to wash the fish and saliva off his hands, and the child immediately got teary eyed again, though the water went away as soon as Yoongi picked it up again.
Yoongi went back to his computer, placed the child in his lap, and started his search again, this time aiming at learning about how to care for a child around 1 year of age. He quickly found that a lot of the articles seemed to revolve around how to bathe a child and what to feed it, though as he read, he kept wondering how much of it could be applied to a child that was half octopus.
Bathing a child seemed to be important, so he started there, reading about making sure they were clean of grime and bacteria, keeping hair clean to avoid build up and irritated scalps. He ended up on a forum where people - or, let’s be real, moms - were discussing the best way to give their babies a bath, the pros and cons of getting into the bathtub with the child, which kind of shower gel and shampoo to use, and whether or not to lure the children into the bath with toys or not.
But again, this child wasn’t a normal child, and as Yoongi read on, more and more questions seemed to surface, like should he get some toys for his new little buddy to enjoy in the bath? Should he get in the first couple of times to make it feel safe? And are there certain types of shampoos that are toxic to octopi? The last one could not be googled (Yoongi tried), and he ended up deciding that a hyper allergy-friendly children’s shampoo would probably be best, and he prayed to all the gods he didn’t believe in that it wouldn’t give the little thing a rash, because how do you take a child that is also half octopus to the doctor?