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Chapter Text

It was the sweet yet unexpected scent of spilled mer blood that drew Bruce out of the deeper waters.

There was some sort of commotion going on near the surface and he circled curiously some distance beneath, squinting against the bright gleam of sunlight glaring off the thrashing white foam of the fight. He wasn’t hungry, but there had never been any harm in eating a little more whenever he could.

Even as he watched, a small shape suddenly broke off from the section of churning, red-tinged water, its bright tail beating frantically with more panic than speed as it attempted to escape whatever had attacked its pod.

A calf.

Bruce felt a faint stir of interest at that realisation, and his powerful tail pushed him slowly upwards towards the surface before he could think twice. Mer calves, like the young of most creatures, were easy pickings once isolated, although Bruce was a good enough hunter that he had never had to stoop to preying on helpless calves, who were usually well-guarded by their ferocious mothers.

The calf’s tail gleamed brightly in the sun at this depth, a shimmering kaleidoscope of soft blue that blended seamlessly with the sun-speckled ocean. A surface species then, unlike Bruce, whose tail shone with the deep, shifting greys of his usual domain.

The calf looked back only once, then down at Bruce with a little twitch of shock, and a horrified flurry of bubbles escaped its mouth at the sight of Bruce’s leisurely approach.

Not just a surface species then, but a dolphin mer as well. At least, that was how Bruce thought of the mers who could only breathe out of water. For those scant few moments, he was acutely conscious of the cold seawater rushing over his gills, before he refocused on the terrified calf before him.

A severed portion of fin drifted past him, and he turned to see a good half dozen mers squabbling over the limp forms of what surely had to be the young calf’s parents, their deep blue tails floating limp and bloody as the enemy pod ripped hungrily into their latest meal.

For a brief second, it was his mother that Bruce saw, an enemy mer’s fangs buried in her shoulder as she squealed and clicked in pain. His father, a huge and looming shadow, rammed the attacker with his shoulder, and blood shrouded the water as the mer was ripped away with a chunk of flesh still caught in his jaws.

Bruce shook his head rapidly, sharp claws digging into his palms as he looked back at the calf, just in time to see its mouth open wide in a soundless scream of horror. Its huge eyes were fixed past Bruce’s shoulder, and then its small body spasmed as water flooded into its lungs.

There was no time for hesitation. With a single powerful stroke of his tail, Bruce barreled into the calf, enclosing it in his arms and shoving it out of the water. For less than a heartbeat, he felt the breathless gasp of his fluttering gills as he too breached the surface, and then he sank back down into the water, holding the coughing, spluttering calf tightly by the waist.

The calf kept heaving in his grasp, huge sobs racking its small frame that were strangely muffled to Bruce, as all sounds out of the ocean were.

Once he was sure it wasn’t going to drown, Bruce let go of the calf. It didn’t even seem to notice, its tail naturally beating to keep itself afloat as it continued to wail. Half of its body was still out of the water, and Bruce circled it uneasily. He had seen particularly large albatrosses swoop down on young calves before, often inflicting deep wounds even if the birds eventually failed to snatch the calves up.

He looked back at the feasting pod. The water was already clearing of blood, the juiciest entrails long devoured, the hollowed tails scraped clean and left to sink slowly to the ocean floor. Bruce was large enough to be in no real danger, but the calf would be little more than a tasty conclusion to another hungry mer’s meal.

He tugged gently at the calf’s arm, giving it a moment’s warning before he pulled it underwater to face him. The calf gave another noiseless shriek, a thick stream of bubbles bursting from its mouth once more.

Bruce squeezed its wrist in an attempt to be reassuring, surprised to feel a faint, alien curl of worry in his stomach as he looked at this small, defenseless creature.

“We should leave before they decide to eat you too.” He let go of the calf’s wrist to grip it by the shoulder instead.

The calf blinked at him miserably. “My parents,” it clicked angrily, its accent echoing thick and unfamiliar through the water. “My parents!” It tried to swim past Bruce, wriggling wildly when he snagged it around the waist and forcibly dragged it away.

Bruce didn’t bother with another reply. He just pushed the calf back up to the surface. He had no idea how long dolphin mers could hold their breaths, let alone calves, but he wasn’t about to take any chances.

The calf was sobbing again when Bruce tugged it back down into the safety of the water, and he stiffened when its arms wrapped around his neck, tiny claws piercing into the skin of his back as it clung on tight. He didn’t dare to dive too deep with the little limpet stuck to him, and he patted its back gingerly as he started to swim, brushing his hand down the stiff edge of its dorsal fin with an odd sense of wonder.

He had never been so close to a calf before, and especially not one so young. Single male mers weren’t usually allowed near calves for good reason.

If he could find another pod of dolphin mers, perhaps one with a few calves of their own for this one to play with, they might be willing to take another young one in.

Bruce hummed a little in thought, occasionally surfacing for the sniffling calf to take a much-needed breath, and only slowed when he gradually felt the desperate grip around his neck begin to slip. The calf kept dozing off, clearly exhausted from its constant crying.

It felt like instinct for Bruce to flip himself over so that the calf was resting on his chest instead. Moving with aching slowness, he surfaced just enough for the calf to breathe, his tail beating awkwardly as he drifted backwards, keeping himself low enough in the water for his own gills to remain submerged. The sunlight was fading, and he slitted his eyes irritably against the golden glow spilling across the waves.

Bruce ran his fingers curiously through the calf’s wet hair, then thumbed at its cheek and pinched gently at its arm. The calf let out a grumbly whine, its tail slapping the water once before it stilled, and Bruce couldn’t help the faint smile that tugged at his lips. The calf was endearingly soft all over with a thin layer of blubber, probably to help it float better, quite unlike Bruce’s hard, lean form, his gills set right over the faint lines of his ribs.

A sudden fierce surge of protectiveness washed over him as he peered down at the snoozing calf curled comfortably against his underbelly. This small, vulnerable calf was Bruce’s now, and no matter what, he was going to find it a new family where it could grow up safe, loved and happy.

Chapter Text

Bruce wasn’t one to eat while he swam, or at least he hadn’t been until he’d taken in Dick.

He couldn’t hunt all that well in the light, but nor could Dick, with his limited air supply, accompany Bruce into the depths of his usual hunting grounds. The only solution then was for Dick to be left alone for however long it took him to hunt and finish eating.

Now, it was common for Bruce to find himself chomping down on the mangled fish in his hands as he made his way swiftly back to shallower waters, approaching the vast coral reef where he had left Dick to entertain himself.

“Dick?” he clicked, surprised not to see the calf’s recognisable blue fins curling around the corals as he explored. Bruce swam slowly above the reef, brushing through flustered shoals of fish without blinking as he looked around for any hint of a young mer calf.

“Dick!” he called again, louder this time as he made another anxious sweep over the reef, clicking rapidly as he tried to echolocate his missing calf. There was nothing even close to calf-sized near the reef that he could detect, and a cold panic seized Bruce.

They had gotten lucky for months, but he should have known. He should never have left Dick alone for so long.

He knew well enough that calves were often attacked and snatched away even in the safety of their pods, when they were tucked close to their mothers’ sides. At this age, calves had enemies in every size, shape and form – sharks, jellyfish, other mers, even humans on their boats when they were this close to the surface.

To make things worse, Dick was so very curious at this age. Anything and everything could and did pique his interest. Perhaps he had followed an unusually-coloured fish or wandered off to hunt for shells. Perhaps he had been lured and hooked by a passing fishing boat. He could be anywhere by now.

What had Bruce been thinking?

He whirled around, circling the reef in wider and wider arcs as he sent off clicks in every direction, turning this way and that in frantic indecision, afraid to accidentally move further away from his calf.

“Dick!” he clicked again, although he was hardly expecting a response.

Finally, he detected a small shape right at the very edge of his echolocation range, approaching about as swiftly as a fleeing mer calf could swim.

Bruce took off in an instant. The only reason Dick would be swimming towards him at top speed was because he was in danger. Bruce’s eyes narrowed, his neck stiffening and his arms pressing to his sides as he shot through the water, every stroke of his powerful tail bringing him closer to his floundering, exhausted calf.

There was an adult mer chasing Dick – Bruce was close enough to see that now.

He bared his fangs in fury, diving past Dick in an instant and crashing into the mer at top speed. The mer shrieked in a mixture of surprise and pain, and Bruce flipped swiftly to smash his tail into the mer’s face before it could rake through his sides with razor-sharp claws.

“Stay away from my calf,” he hissed, lunging at the stunned mer and delivering a savage bite to its outstretched arm. The mer screamed again, catching him across the face with its claws before clearly deciding to cut its losses. With an angry whistle, it wrenched itself free and swam away without another look back.

Bruce watched the mer go, panting and confused, his inky fins flared out wide in a defensive threat display. Mers could be opportunistic hunters, especially when they had strength in numbers, but it was still exceedingly rare for an adult mer to attack a lone calf when other prey was plentiful.

His gills fluttered a little when Dick’s small shape slammed abruptly into his side, the calf almost incoherent with distress. Hoisting Dick higher so that the calf could hold onto his shoulders, Bruce swam them both up to the surface for Dick to take a quick breath, rubbing soothingly along the edges of his dorsal fin the whole way.

“He killed my parents!” Dick wailed the moment he had managed to catch his breath, scratching furiously at Bruce’s chest with his small claws. “He was in that pod – I saw him. I recognised him. I told him you’d make him pay but you didn’t even kill him!”

Bruce froze for a moment, and then he grabbed hold of Dick’s wrists.

“Dick,” he clicked gently. “Dick, don’t be afraid. You’re safe. I’ll never let them get you. I’ll protect you, always.”

Dick twisted in his grasp and started to cry, the cascade of bubbles that flooded from his mouth a testament to his anger and grief.

“I don’t want your protection! You didn’t kill him,” Dick repeated, smacking his tail furiously against Bruce’s as he was once more pushed to the surface for another breath. “And you let him hurt you!”

A muffled sob escaped in a thin stream of bubbles as Dick pressed his hand gently to Bruce’s cheek, brushing at the bleeding lacerations the other mer had left behind. His face crumpled, and then he lunged back into Bruce’s embrace, tucking his head beneath Bruce’s chin and curling his tail towards his belly to make himself smaller.

“I’m sorry,” he clicked, sniffling and subdued. “I don’t want you to die, Bruce. I just got so angry when I saw him and I didn’t want him to leave before you got back, so I followed him. I didn’t realise I’d gone so far, and then he started chasing me and I was so scared because you weren’t there. Don’t leave me, Bruce. Please don’t ever leave me.”

Bruce held Dick tightly to his chest, aching for every bit of hurt that his sweet calf was still harbouring in his heart. He knew for a fact that the hurt faded with time, but it would be a very long time indeed if Dick was anything like him.

“I’ll never leave you, Dick,” he promised, aggressively grooming through the calf’s soft hair with his claws and watching the fine strands drift with the current. “I’ll be with you all the time, from the moment you wake up till you go to sleep, until you get so tired of me you can’t wait to swim away.”

Dick let out a weak laugh at that, nuzzling against Bruce’s neck with a tired sigh. The mad race back to Bruce and safety had clearly taken a lot out of him.

“That’ll never happen,” he mumbled, letting out a soft whistle of contentment when Bruce turned over to let Dick rest against his chest. “I’ll always want you beside me, Bruce.”

A shiver of emotion ran through Bruce’s chest, and his gills felt stiff and tight for a moment. He drifted slowly closer to the surface as Dick rested, one arm slung across the calf’s shoulders to keep him from floating away.

Dick deserved such a bright future, as bright as the sunlight he had been born to swim in. A large, loving pod. A kind, beautiful mate. Plenty of adorable little calves of his own.

And Bruce would, hopefully, be there to see every wonderful moment of it.

Chapter Text

“We’re not the same, Bruce. You’ll never understand.” There was a savagery to Dick’s short, sharp clicks that Bruce had never heard before. “You’re not even my real father anyway, so stop acting like you are.”

He whirled in a glorious, glittering flash of fins and swam away, straight up to the surface where he surely knew that the sun still shone brightly enough to sting Bruce’s eyes.

Bruce watched him go in stunned silence, drifting almost unthinkingly upwards after Dick’s disappearing silhouette. He had, quite honestly, never expected calf-rearing to be so difficult. Or so hurtful.

Perhaps the problem lay in the fact that Dick was no longer a calf at all. He was growing up so quickly, his natural ferocity developing just as much as his size, and the differences between their species grew more and more apparent with every passing year.

It felt like a very long time since Dick had last been small enough to be cradled against Bruce’s chest as he slept, his chubby calf arms looped loosely around Bruce’s neck.

That same calf was almost three-quarters Bruce’s size now and entering the final stages of his growth. Soon he would reach full maturity, and Bruce could only hope that when that day came, it would not mean the last he would ever see of his son.

Midwater mers like Bruce lived largely peaceful lives in the dim gloom, where only the faintest traces of sunlight pierced into the deep. They were apex predators in their habitats, and some mers could go their entire lives without ever getting into a single fight.

Surface mers like Dick, however, lived every day fighting for their lives. They matured smaller than midwater mers, but what they lacked in size and strength they made up for with speed and brutality. They fought among themselves, against great whites, killer whales, leopard seals, even humans. Surface mers fought anything just as they ate anything.

It was, in fact, a journey that proved to be just a little too near the surface that had gotten Bruce’s parents killed.

Just like Dick, Bruce had been angry at first, but he had thought that Dick’s anger against his parents’ killers would gradually die out. Instead, it had only festered and worsened, and eventually Bruce realised that perhaps the anger had always been there, a grim necessity of survival for Dick’s kind.

The problem was that Dick had, quite simply, outgrown Bruce and the protection he offered.

Every piece of advice that Bruce gave Dick now rebelled against, if only because it went against his natural instincts.

Stay away from the surface. Don’t go near the humans. That’s tiger shark hunting grounds – avoid it.

Bruce made his way slowly into shallower waters, knowing that Dick would be able to find him if he really wanted to. Even the bright flash of sunlight across his eyes left his gills aching with nostalgia. He had largely stopped accompanying Dick to the surface in the final years of his calfhood; instead, it was Dick who had spent most of his time down in the depths with Bruce, a shimmering wisp of sleek blue that curled and twisted around Bruce’s tail as he giggled.

His poor calf had been so afraid of the dark at first, shaking and clinging onto Bruce’s arm as he looked wildly around into the threatening gloom. Now, there was probably no other surface mer who could navigate in low light as well, or hold its breath for as long as Dick could.

Perhaps some part of Bruce had hoped that swimming closer to the surface would make him feel closer to Dick, but it only made the distance between them feel larger than ever.

Bruce didn’t belong here. He had to keep clicking constantly, echolocating frequently to make up for his sun-blindness, and he knew full well that his tail stood out like a dense splotch of black ink, distinctly visible in the clear water. His sheer size was his only deterrent, and even then there were always larger, bolder predators around.

Bruce had plenty of scars to prove it, most of them from the long, cool nights of drifting with the current, Dick curled asleep on his stomach and his back left vulnerable to the deep.

A distant, familiar click startled him from his thoughts – Dick, trying to echolocate him – and he turned towards the sound automatically, sending out a click of his own.

Dick looked annoyed as he approached, cutting swiftly through the water as he barreled straight for Bruce, but Bruce hadn’t spent years raising him for nothing. Dick looked rattled beneath his prickliness, fear showing in the whites of his eyes, although Bruce had no idea what of.

“I went back to look for you and you were gone,” Dick snapped the moment Bruce was within earshot. “Stop coming up here. It’s dangerous for you, B. You know that.”

Bruce frowned, his eyes narrowing and fins flaring slightly in an unintentional rebuke. “I could say the same for you,” he pointed out evenly. “You don’t have a pod, and without a pod you’re vulnerable. The surface is much too dangerous for a single mer.”

Dick glared at him. “Whatever,” he clicked shortly. “You’re one to talk. Just stop drifting around aimlessly like you’re dying of old age. A shark will get you that way.” The tip of his tail flicked slightly, a sure sign that he was about to swim away once more.

“Dick,” Bruce said helplessly, his fists clenching by his sides. It hurt that he didn’t seem to know how to talk to his son anymore. Once upon a time he had been able to do no wrong in Dick’s eyes; now, it seemed like nothing he said was ever right.

Dick slowed, already half-turned away, his tail beating steadily back and forth to keep himself in place.

“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, still looking stubbornly away from Bruce. “I didn’t mean it, okay? You may not have sired me, but you’ll always be my father.”

Bruce’s gills fluttered breathlessly, pulsing with a burst of emotion so strong he felt momentarily unmoored. He had always hoped, but he had never really expected.

“Dick,” he clicked again, tentatively, drifting forward to wrap his arms tight around Dick’s strong shoulders. Dick turned towards him, tucking his head against Bruce’s chest, his claws pricking into the meat of Bruce’s bicep from how hard he was holding on.

“Love you, B. You just make me so, so angry sometimes –” Dick broke off with a choked whistling chuckle, a faint trail of bubbles rising from the corner of his mouth. “But I love you. I love you so much. I’m sorry I always get mad, but I’ll always come back, I promise.”

Bruce held Dick tighter against him, his eyes squeezed shut, the cold current beaten into a swirling eddy around their tails. His chest ached, a bittersweet pulse of pride and grief as he tried to memorise the way Dick still fit into his arms, the way his salt-roughened hair felt against Bruce’s cheek.

This wouldn’t be the last time he held his son like this. He wouldn’t allow it to be.

He could still remember what Dick had once begged of him so very long ago: Don’t leave me, Bruce. Please don’t ever leave me.

How funny that it was Bruce who now felt like he was the one being left behind.

All he could do was promise in return, “I’ll be here every time you need me, Dick. I’ll always be here for you.”