Work Text:
Look at this clown-fish family, aren’t they funny!
Jisung poked and giggled as the little orange fish came up to peck at his fingers before disappearing into the anemone where Jisung’s fingers couldn’t follow.
It’s like our pod in the reef, they protect each other, isn’t that… cool…
When he looked around, he found himself alone, talking to himself and making the older mermaids look at him strangely as they swam past him with their basket of oysters.
Jisung was buzzing – but only in his head.
He was positively uncontrollable, a wild thing of nature– but only his brothers would say that, and only when he was telling them some fabulous thing. His mother had said it differently when she was still alive. Something about the words of a thousand worlds in his mouth, and the gentleness of the sand in his soul. Jisung still thought about those words sometimes, when he hid under the coral while the other reef mer chased each other in circles in games he didn’t understand, staring out at the open ocean where she’d answered a cry for help and never returned.
Jisung-ah, come~ Jihyo tugged playfully at the end of his tail, still sand colored and thin, We swim to the caverns, we’re showing Chan, to visit Mina and bother Sungjin, come, come!
The new mer that had brought in with the storm and never left lingered further behind her, shyly wading with his darker tail that ostracized him from the from the other reef boys, but was no problem at all for the girls, Sana and Momo teasing and tugging him along between their bright pink and peach-tinged orange. This new mer stood out in the coral, he didn’t hide in the colors with his dark tail, not unless he hid under the limestone and beneath the rocks where Jisung liked to hide.
He shook his head and Jihyo’s head tilted to the side, sad but understanding. Jisung loved the caverns. Sungjin was fun, and Mina was kind, and sometimes if he was quiet and careful, he would find Seungmin with his octopus wrapped on his back, speaking to the jellyfish and coaxing the crystals out from the stone. Mina might’ve strung up pearls for the reef mer that visited, but Seungmin had shown Jisung shimmering opal, the moon itself reflected in the rock.
But not today. Jihyo ruffled his hair and left, the deep red of her tail smacking Momo on the side of the head and drawing a laugh out of the new mer as they swam off.
Jisung floated down, closer to the sand where the angelfish nipped at his fingers and darted off. He liked being alone. He liked being small. Maybe when he became bigger and stronger, when his sand colors faded to his adult fins, and his brothers didn’t tease him about being too slow to catch a puffer fish as they blew up.
He didn’t even like throwing puffer fish. They were scared when they became round, they went round to defend themselves and it seemed cruel to use their fear in amusement.
There wasn’t much Jisung did enjoy doing with his brothers, but they were all he had, so when they called him out of the corals and out to explore beyond their reef, he was more scared that they would come back and torture him than he was at leaving. And they were his brothers, so when Jae held him by the arm and rushed him out around the outer island, where the places to hide were fewer between, he didn’t doubt his intentions. Till he saw the fin.
A hammerhead!
Sneering thing, they haggled, bet you can’t touch it, Jisung-ah!
Jisung did not want to touch it. Hammerheads could be dangerous. It whirled around on them in a moment’s notice, and once they’d scattered, it was as still as could be. There were several things that happened at once– Jisung was smaller and easily scared, and he was quickly separated from his brothers, but also made quick prey. Easy. Weak.
Help? He whimpered out, Help, help me–
But the water was murky with the sand thrown up, and before Jisung knew it, he was chased between crag and sand and thrown at the mercy of the currents. He saw little and remembered less.
When he opened his eyes he was in a cove, dark and protective, shadowed under a small grove. He poked his head and hauled himself out in the shallowest end only to find himself trapped. A long distance of shallow water he could not swim in low tide keeping him from the ocean. And when the tide came in, the ocean poured into the lagoon with a force Jisung could not swim against. It threw him back, trial after trial.
He waited. He swam the length and depth of the cove, memorized every crack and crevice. He cried out.
Am trapped!
Help?
Help me!
Anyone?
I’m here!
There was little to eat. He would jump from the lagoon to grab low hanging fruit that made him gag. Little fish would sometimes get trapped in the current that brought all things to him, and he would tear them flesh from spine and cut his throat with their bones. When the tide went out, he tried twice to follow it, only to be dashed against the rocks, left gasping and bleeding and forced to turn back or risk drying out.
Jisung didn’t like taking any risks.
He thought he would die there. He would sink to the bottom of the lagoon each night, too small for any color to comfort him, leaving Jisung to imagine each structure as a one from his home reef.
Each night he would sing out, for himself, to echo only in the lagoon, Is Jisung, you forgot Jisung, little Jisung, all-alone Jisung…
Sometimes he dreamt of his mother coming back from the open ocean, just for him. Her bright yellow tail was never fit for the open ocean anyway, it was fit for him, for the sand and the reef and to keep him tucked under her in the sand.
Being too small to save himself, and so alone he could die, suddenly made him crave companionship more than he could bear.
Jisung slept and dreamt and waited day after day, until it was nearly a week and he couldn’t find the strength to do anything more than float, gazing at the shadows the trees cast as the wind made them dance, and thinking they were as pleasant as the mantas that flew over and between their reef in elegant peace. He slept even when the sun was high above, and even more when it was only the moon and the quiet sounds of the island. Soon he couldn’t even find the strength to sing out further than in his own heart.
And the waves came in choppy and unsettled.
At first, it brought Jisung fish that he was too happy with the company of to eat, but then they darted and flit like they were thoroughly worried, and it made Jisung more scared than he usually was, and he cautiously broke the surface to gaze at the sky. Dark, menacing. The winds cold and uncaring.
The storm was terrible.
It reminded Jisung of the one that had caused chaos before, so many mourning-songs and lost-songs, the ones that had taken his mother out from the reef to answer their calls. It was those thunderous waves that had thrown Jisung’s life into terribly lonely waves.
But with this storm, the water in the lagoon rose. The passage to the ocean was no longer as shallow.
So Jisung fought the current, he fought it with such strength as he had never held before, his fear lost in desperation as the surf blinded him and the upturned ruins of the corals itself chopped the water to unmanageable power. Jisung was not strong enough but he fought, and he screamed, and he threw himself to death itself for this chance to escape the lagoon.
Here, here! Help– Jisung– help, here!
His scales were scraped off in agonizing gashes, and the ocean itself did not look on him mercifully, throwing him back to the walls of the lagoon and pushing him down till his head struck the rocks.
Jisung did not have the strength to mourn when the storm finished. The sun broke in, and Jisung only screwed his eyes shut to ignore her. He had no energy for thought, only floating through the waters, held in her embrace.
It was only when he felt himself pulled, held tightly by a warm embrace, did he dare open his eyes.
Oh, thank the stars, you’re alive!
Jisung didn’t know who carried him, dark-tailed and talkative. He didn’t know why or how they had come, or what provoked them to care for him, but he felt the strength of the mer that pulled him close, and trusted that strength.
It’s Chan, I’m Chan, don’t you remember me? Chan kept speaking, I heard you, I heard in the storm, they didn’t believe me but I did, they said I’d gone mad, your brothers thought you dead, but I knew, I knew, you were always so smart, you knew better than to get lost–
Over Chan’s shoulder, his dark fluke pushed powerfully through the waves, and Jisung realized this was the mer that had been brought in, who’s life his mother’s had been traded for. The thought made his head ache painfully, especially when Chan pulled him to rest in the sand– outside the ocean, out where his brothers had first taunted the hammerhead– and gently pulled apart shrimp for him to eat.
You’re so small, you haven’t eaten anything, have you? Chan sang mournfully, darting out quickly to hunt more and shell them for the small mer, Of course not, you’ve been trapped there, for nearly a month, and through your adult scales coming in of all things– and all alone.
Chan’s hand was kind and gentle in his hair, and rested behind his head where it throbbed and burned from being victim of the storm’s jaws. Jisung sank into his touch, and wanted to drown in it.
I didn’t… no scales…
…Jisung, your tail–
He hadn’t noticed it, but where he’d been scraped by the rocks, his scales had grown back in, a purple fringed in sandy yellow. Deep like Jihyo’s scales, to hide in the shadows, bright around the edges to blend with the coral.
The yellow reminded him of his mother.
Jisung–
My… mom… Jisung whimpered, before he lost the strength to continue and pointed to the yellow on his scales. Chan settled into the sand next to him, pulling him close, tails side by side. Jisung weakly poked at Chan’s scales, streamlined and sleek, deep blue and reflective with every movement.
Mm… made for the open ocean, not really little reefs, Chan became quiet, but… I like the reefs. Maybe there will be a place for me.
Jisung wanted to tell Chan about the shadows, the little cracks and crevices in the rocks where they could curl up together and watch the fish dart in and out and bring their little messages– even if Chan was several sizes too big to curl up the way Jisung did.
Come. We should reach the reef before night.
Slowly, Jisung clung to Chan’s side as they traveled back across the sands to the color and life of the reef. The pod was stunned, silent and staring as Chan brought Jisung back with him, and although Jisung’s eyes remained on the sand in shame, he could feel the way Chan kept them away, his arm firm around Jisung’s form.
It took several days for JIsung to find the strength to meet his brothers, and even then they did not remain together. Somehow, it felt safer under the rocks, curled between Chan’s arm and the sand, smiling as the other mer would get excited about another scale that had come loose and been replaced with his new colors.
Chan swam between him and the scary things. He didn’t mind when Jisung startled and threw his face into Chan’s arm to hide. Jisung was still small enough to tuck himself under Chan, and felt as much at peace with him as he had been alone before.
It was the sort of not-alone he liked. He wasn’t sure he could handle being alone after the lagoon– but that was something he didn’t like to think about and Chan never forced him to bring up.
And these ones take care of each other, Jisung pointed to the anemone, they protect and feed one another. Nothing like a lagoon, a lagoon isn’t made for mer, it truly isn’t.
Sana would shake her head so sadly when she heard it, You poor thing, you must have been starving, and so sick– how horrible! We looked, but we never heard you, how horrible!
Chan would hold Jisung tightly, in the shadows of the coral, looking out to the open ocean, watching the parrot fish bite off coral and be chased away by eels, listening close as Jisung marveled over the little clownfish in its bright colors.
That’s really amazing, he would say, looking at Jisung, running a hand through his hair as he drifted to sleep, that’s how it should be.
When Jisung turned over to look at him, he wouldn’t really understand what he meant, but Chan’s face was gentle and kind, even when he slept, so Jisung thought he could believe him.
He didn’t feel so scared, and the world didn’t buzz next to Chan.
The reef was safe and everything made perfect sense.