Work Text:
Ky would be the first. He was perfect. Calm, pliant, polite. He had stirred in confusion upon being awoken at an abnormal time, but as soon as he recognized one of the faces he was familiar with, any distrust or apprehension vanished. He practically crawled into the transport net as soon as it had been cast into his tank. To him, it was nothing more than just another test to sit through, or medical treatment to tolerate.
Henry supposed it was, in some way.
Of course, Ky didn’t have the manners to be a proper eel, so it wasn’t likely anyone would have much interest in eating the meat. Yet his potential overwhelmingly lay within the scientific. Full-bodied electric eels had, after all, been pivotal in inventing batteries. This could be a natural extension of that. What sort of possibilities could be found in the electric organs of a man-fish? What had gone unstudied?
Well, he didn’t care much for the details, he didn’t have to. All that was necessary on his end was to provide parts. Though that wasn’t to down-sell his own intelligence, he was a brilliant man, and he knew it perfectly well. It took intelligence just to get as far as he had gotten, setting up transactions and carefully laying out a web that only would take a matter of time before his co-workers tripped upon and tangled themselves into. He knew what his patrons wanted, and he had enough wits to get them.
Ky remained calm as the transport tank’s water sloshed from movement. There was a sense of excitement in his eyes as they passed through the lab hallways. Even if he had been ferried between places multiple times, there still must have been some kind of an exciting rarity to it. There was probably some new change or another to get his attention, anyway. Asuka and Aria had been implacable in their tacking of all kinds of stupid window-dressings on what was supposed to be a bastion of knowledge. It all felt too commercial, too non-clinical. Aria had suggested the idea of using the research facility for walk-through tours. People would pay money to see mermaids, and that side income would bolster the money they made so everything could keep afloat. Twisting his beautiful lab, turning it into some kind of aquarium for the snot-nosed masses, turning it into some kind of attraction.
She had tried to justify it all. It would still be a research facility in the end, but Henry saw through her nonsense. They’d bastardized the place with their gaudy trash before he could even try to stop them, and now look at what happened. He’d said as much to them both, that the building was practically an aquarium already. To his consternation, they had taken that as something positive, rather than share his disdain. They had drifted away from the vision they had once all shared.
The cart rattled to a stop, and he paused for a moment, taking a deep breath to regain his composure. Nothing good came from doing delicate work with hands that trembled with anger. He had already put so much work in already, no need to go and ruin it now.
In his moment of distraction, Ky had looked up at him with an innocent curiosity. Henry merely smiled back. It wasn’t entirely fake, he did have perfectly good reasons to be happy. After all, the main lab was just down the hall.
No need to be hasty. But there was a deadline to fill. The samples needed to be delivered to his intermediary within 36 hours. Flesh had a tendency to rot, after all, and if he was only slipping small parts under the table, he could only use so many work resources before something looked strange. It didn’t bother him. Planning was a skill he excelled at. And once the first exchange went through, everything would start falling into place faster and faster.
There was no question in his mind that Ky was not the perfect starter. Beyond the trusting nature, he was young, still perfectly healthy and virile. He would recover from the sample removal and grow more flesh quickly, and it would be removed again. By the time it started to impact his health in any meaningful way, Ky would likely have enough buyers to necessitate a full disassembly. Henry would never put such a valuable resource at risk.
Faust showed plenty of promise, but he wouldn’t be the best to work with until he had a better setup. There was just so much of him, so many parts to remove, and at such a large size compared to most of the rest. He’d already been contacted with a few of the folk medicine crowd. Still hush-hush on many of the details, gentle prodding from either side to reassure neither were undercover officers, but the exchange showed quite promise, even the smaller pieces would fetch a pretty penny.
Then, after him…it was less set in stone. Tallying the details in his mind, the most likely candidates would be Baiken or Millia. Baiken would most likely be little more than a pretty decoration, unless a particular buyer happened to have some unusual interests. She’d still sell for quite a handsome price, missing parts or not. And Millia practically sold herself on concept alone. An appealing specimen for either the erotic eccentric or the taboo gourmand. Or both. It really didn’t matter to him one way or another, his job was complete as soon as the money swapped hands.
Setting up was practically muscle memory. Most of the supplies used during the day had been put away, and everything was hosed down to a metallic sheen. This part of the lab was one of the few places that had avoided the two’s moronic decorations and just seeing it put him in a peaceful state of mind. This was what their work was supposed to be.
“Yes, yes, there we are.” As soon as he wheeled the tank over to his main exam table and removed the lid, Ky moved to climb right onto it. Outside of water, he was far clumsier and his long tail was heavy to maneuver. Still, he fully complied, allowing himself to be hauled up the rest of the way until he was splayed across the metal and strapped into place.
Ky was so trusting, so willing. Henry almost felt a bit bad about this. He would try to make it go smoothly. He would have done so either way, no need to mess around and brutalize a quality product with recklessness, but the thought had to count for something. Ever since Aria had started spending more time at home with the baby, Ky’s care had started falling on him more and more often. It just about made for the perfect setup in having the eel fully trust him.
Precisely the reason he hadn’t viewed any of this so far was that sense of faith. Henry could start to see it waver as soon as he pulled out the muzzle. The expression that Ky made was almost a human one, something like confused amusement. Why bother with the muzzle, he’d never bitten before! He trusted the human to be careful with him, wasn’t that something to be reciprocated back?
“Sorry, bud. Take it as a learning opportunity.”
Electric eels, even in mer form, could release a jolt in the blink of an eye. But Henry hadn’t become a grant-funded scientist by not knowing his way around getting electrocuted. Ky was startled, and between his confusion and the man’s swift movement, by the time he could release anything, the muzzle was already strapped to his head, and the thick rubber gloves and boots meant it had been pointless in the end, anyway.
Despite the obvious state of things, Ky still attempted a struggle. In a way, it was quite a beautiful thing to witness, and the sheer effort and energy he threw into snapping his upper body back and forth and gnashing his teeth was only further evidence that he was the ideal specimen.
Henry gathered the rest of his things, setting them out on trays. “How beautiful. Y’know, there’s a lot of people who are really interested in what you can do.”
Nobody was fully certain how much mer understood in terms of human speech. Even so, he could see the terror on Ky’s face, the realization that he had gone into this willingly.
“Relaaaax. You aren’t going to die. You’re still very, very useful.”
His mind laid out blueprints all along the eel’s body. Organs, skin, blood, bones. Each with its own unit pricing. A sextet of unusual organs laid out in long blocks- two main, two Hunter’s, and two Sachs’. They couldn’t be fully excised (too risky, too unsubtle) but he had a steady hand for stitches and surgery, with enough small cuts to pull samples from, neither Asuka nor Aria would notice anything.
The hand reaching for a scalpel twitched. Them. He was thinking about them again. Even without them truly nearby, they were a blight. And they deserved this.
He knew Asuka better than anyone. He could mimic his awkward stutter as much as he could forge his handwriting. The man was reclusive. It would be easy to twist that self-inflicted isolation into misanthropy and underhandedness with just the right words. Henry had sprinkled the name in his dark-web transactions frequently enough that the police were sure to notice. Aria would loathe him for it. Wouldn’t that be the most beautiful, concise ending, putting the two at each other’s throats, so distracted by their anger that neither noticed he’d fled for the border.
“Heh. I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Can’t make plans with money I don’t have. Help me fix that, won’t you?”
The idea had finally settled into Ky that there was nobody else to hear him. His screams had gone silent, and all he could do was watch. At least someone here knew their place.
Some twitching was expected, but Henry found himself genuinely surprised at how quiet and unresponsive Ky was to being cut into. He had to pause to make sure the damn thing hadn’t died of a heart attack, but no. Ky was biting his lip, and his eyes were tightly shut, but he knew better than to raise a fuss.
Well, that would suit him just fine. Anything to make this go more smoothly. The mental blueprints spread out again, right underneath his fingertips. Thin punctures, in neat little lines, just large enough to pass the ends of tools through and slice away fragments. Each piece was carefully placed in its own little container and set aside. Organ, skin, scales. Perfect sorted, perfectly organized.
When he moved lower, however, he noticed Ky starting to twitch. “Stop moving. You should know better than that. You’re almost done, anyway, you can’t just sit down and shut up for the rest of it?”
A fin membrane sample, that was all he needed. Just a little snippet from the tip of his tail. He lined the shears up perfectly, but the very moment he brought them shut, Ky jerked.
“What- you- !” Where there was supposed to be an oozing little slit was now a bleeding slice. Ky wailed in pain, spattering blood along the table as the end of his tail flopped back and forth. The lab filled with clanging metal as he thrashed, forcing the locked wheels and spokes to grind against one another in place.
“Shut your mouth!” Henry barked. “You did this to yourself, you don’t get to be upset! Shut up!”
It seemed Ky was finished with being reasonable. What a pity. The man didn’t hesitate in jamming his fingers against the older wounds in his side, earning a new round of squeals until it petered out. He kept his scowl as he pulled his hand away.
But even as Ky fell still, he could hear metal shifting. That…that couldn’t be the table this time, so where-
“Asuka!”
His insides froze. What the hell was she doing here?!
“Asuka, is that you?” Aria’s voice slipped through the lab door. “Damn, I know you stay late, but this is pushing it! Long as you’re puttering around the office, don’t suppose you’ve seen my wallet? Didn’t notice I’d left it until I had a dozen cans of formula in the checkout lane!”
Henry scrambled to clean up. The samples were swept away into his bag. The tools were dumped in a vat of cleaner. He could get rid of the accessories easily, but the real problem was still lying on the table. Ky’s presence was conspicuous enough, but as soon as he recognized Aria’s voice, he started whining again.
“Zip it!” The man snatched up a scalpel and pressed the blade against Ky’s throat. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll slice your neck. It won’t matter if she comes or not, you’ll be dead.”
“Asuka?”
The storage room. He could stuff the body in the storage room until she went away. This was still salvageable. He could still-
“Wait, Henry?”
At first, Aria only looked terribly confused. Her attention shifted back and forth between the two of them, silently trying to make sense of what she’d just walked into.
“Aria-”
“Why are you here so late? What’s wrong with Ky? Why's he muzzled?”
“I was just-”
Ky groaned, sweeping the bloody end of his tail across the table. Aria noticed that immediately.
He hated her and Asuka both, but he knew better than to think they were idiots. She was already piecing most of it together, reeling back and eyes widening in horror.
“Henry, what the fuck have you done?”
“You don’t understand,” he started, only for Aria to turn and hightail it out of the lab. ”Damn it.”
This was never how it was supposed to go, but he would do what needed to be done. With the scalpel still in his hand, Henry rushed after her. Aria was flexible, but she wasn’t fast, especially in heels.
“Aaaa-riii-a, let’s be reasonable here!”
“Reasonable?!” She shouted over her shoulder. “You’ve completely lost it! We’re scientists, we don’t kill our research for fun!”
“I wasn’t killing them,” he replied. “And you know it’s dying anyway! We can barely keep the lights on!”
He was already closing the distance between them, and they both knew it. Aria kicked off her shoes and kept running. “We’re fixing it, Henry! Converting the lab is gonna save it!”
“I’m not going to be a part of your idiotic puppet show! I’ve spent over a decade on this research, I’m not throwing it all away to entertain children!”
She didn’t respond. It did not matter whether or not she agreed with him, Henry had made up his mind. Just another loose end to clean up. Credit where credit was due, though, as soon as he managed to grab her, Aria drew up her leg and kneed him in the groin.
“Khh- classy! Real classy!” He jabbed at the air with his blade, but it hit nothing solid. Aria threw herself to the side, stumbling into a wall display.
“We were friends, Henry! We could have worked this out!”
“I am working this out. You’re just on the opposite end of the equation.”
Another swing managed to hit flesh. Just a nick to the forearm, but it was enough to immediately draw blood. Aria faltered at the sight. She tried grappling with his arm, managing to send the scalpel blade into the drywall instead of her ribs. Henry laughed at the awkward pose he found himself in, and without thinking, let it trill into a shrill, jagged sound.
Something tore apart in a dry groan. When he looked up, it was just in time to see something ugly and bright pink smashing into his head.
And, suddenly, he was on the floor. Arms felt around the cold concrete to prop himself up, but they gave out underneath him before he could try. When he hit the ground again, Aria was standing over him, still wide-eyed and frightened.
There was a naked patch on the wall, amid one of Asuka’s tacky displays of painted particleboard jellyfish. Aria had the prop in hand, the back mottled and patchy from where it had been ripped clean to bash him over the head with.
“Ah..haha…HAHAHAHA…!”
As he laughed himself unconscious, Henry had a final thought flit through.
Those hideous decorations had been useful after all.