Work Text:
“We are getting out of here.”
“We're doing no such thing,” Van snaps back. “Or did you forget we have an art collab due in a week?”
“I'm sure they'll give us an extension due to, you know, the fucking salmonid invasion!” Rich throws his hands in the air. “We can't turn in our homework if we're dead!”
“And if there isn't an extension then we fail , Rich!” Van moves in front of the door. “It's our senior fucking year, I am not flunking out now.”
Rich rubs his face with one hand, turns back to the bed, and continues throwing clothes in the open duffel bag. “Look, we have another twelve hours to get out. If you change your mind, you'll find me—”
“Here,” Van says. “I'll find you here, because neither of us are going anywhere. We've spent over three years designing our future fashion line together, Rich.”
“Yeah, and we'll make it.”
“We won't,” she says, and there's such a tone of finality in her voice that Rich pauses with his bag half-zipped to look back at her. “If you leave me alone here, Rich, I swear that's all off the table. I will never go into business partnered with someone so untrustworthy as to run away and leave me due to a small thing like a big run.”
Rich stares at her. “You can't be serious.”
“Serious as the great turf war.”
Rich's face hardens. He zips up his duffel bag and swings his already-bulging backpack on over his shoulders. “When you cool down and change your mind, I'll be at Lexi's. She's always said she's got a spare room if we need it; you can join me. I won't even say I told you so.”
“COWARD!” Van yells as he opens the door.
“Sure,” he says, and glances back over his shoulder. “Good luck finding another collab partner for the project. It's only a quarter of our grade.”
He closes the door behind him, so she opens it again and slams it.
~~~
A particularly loud explosion makes Van flinch. She crouches down by the bed, covering her head with her arms, as more booms and wails come louder and louder, then move a bit away. Maybe she made a mistake.
No. No, she can do this.
Van spent a couple hours pouring over the requirements. Technically, this project doesn't require a collaboration. But groups of up to four are allowed. And since it involves designing, sewing, and modeling outfits for at least two species or two gender representations, doing it solo will mean getting someone outside the project to model whatever she made, which means she'll have to pay them, and she doesn't have any money after paying tuition. She's playing turf war just to afford to eat— turf war, like she's a cod-flipping teenager!
No. She can do this.
Van reaches under her bed and pulls out the boxes upon boxes of fabric. She and Rich were letting this slide a bit, anyway. She just has to draw some mock-ups, sew them, and... hmmm. Maybe if she gets an Octoling from the splatlands to model she can get the two species thing done okay? There have to be a few exchange students.
Another crash from outside, and a huge boom makes her cover her head. The crash sounds closer, and something rains on her head, as Van opens her eyes in shock to see a tiny salmonid roll across her floor and smack against the wall.
It rights itself, scratches behind its head with the spoon in its hands, and looks around. It sees her, and stares.
Van stares right back, and wrinkles her nose. The thing stinks of seawater and... ugh. Should she kill it?
With what? She doesn't have any ink weaponry in her dorm. Smack it with a ruler? Suffocate it in her blanket? Maybe she should just throw it back out the window. Carefully, Van gets to her feet. “All right, you,” she says, reaching out.
It darts between her legs and right into her boxes upon boxes of fabric.
“NO!” Van twists and dives after it. The tiny thing is quick, burrowing in, and Van's fingers keep slipping off its slimy little body, stinging from the ink it exudes. At last, she corners it in the box of fabric scraps, gets a good grip on its tail, and pulls it out. She's gonna have to wash all this, it's stained by the stupid things ink trail. Stupid thing is... she actually looks at it, and her jaw drops.
It's tied one of the scraps around its head in a bonnet.
“Okay, first off, that is mine,” Van hisses at it. “Second, purple-rose patterned with whatever you've got on? It doesn't go at all.” She reaches for the knot.
It bites her finger. She yelps and lets go, it hangs off her hand, hurting worse, and she whips her hand, again and again until it lets go and flies across the room
right into her open closet. Oh, Kraken save her, this is a nightmare. She dives in after it.
By the time she fishes it out, it's so tangled in her skirts and shirts that she holds its mouth closed with one hand while she disentangles it. “Ya know, I can see why you like this stuff,” she says, as she unwraps one of her socks from its torso. “This, uh, thing you've got on is well made, sure, I can tell by the stitching, but it's so old . And soaked, was it even that color originally? It really needs some good cleaning, and pizzaz...” she stops, her eyes widening.
This fish needs a wardrobe .
And she needs a partner.
She lets a smile cross her face while she picks the little guy up to eye level. “Ya know what I'm supposed to be doing right now, little guy? I'm supposed to be designing clothes. Clothes like what you're trying to give yourself, but better and fancy. ”
It stops squirming with one of her brother's ties and stares back, the thing knotted into a loose bow around its lower jaw.
“Here's the deal,” she says, and shifts it until it's sitting on her uninjured hand. “One,” she holds up one finger, “you need to get clean. My species standards, not yours, cause you kinda stink. Second... can you stop the ink trails?”
The thing burbles and bounces on her palm.
“Right, do your best about that, we don't wanna stain all that pretty fabric. And three, anything I make you need to model for my class next week. Can you stick around until then? I'll, uh... I'll figure out how to get you back home after, with all your new stuff.”
She'll walk into grizzco carrying it and say 'Hey, this guy was found in my dorms after the big run' and let what happens, happens. But it doesn't know that.
“Oh, and no more biting,” she says, because her finger really throbs. She's gotta get a bandage on that. She looks—yep, bleeding. “Ready to get started?”
It blurbles at her.
“Great. Wait here,” she sets it on the desk, “so I can gather the fabric to get washed, and then we are going to get you, and these, all nice and clean and un-smelly!”
~~~
So, showering with a smallfry? Actually kinda fun. And it's surprisingly good at scrubbing her back. And now that she's rubbed her fingers through its finstrands and straightened them out and gotten them all clean, they're surprisingly soft to the touch. She swaps the fabric to the dryer and takes it back to her room, where she lays on the bed, it beside her, and opens her sketchbook.
Before she can think too hard about it, she runs her fingers through its finstrands again. It burbles and leans against her. The dishcloth she used to towel it off stays wrapped around its waist. “Okay, are you a boy salmonid or a girl salmonid?” she asks.
It climbs up her arm and sits on her shoulder.
“Right, okay, guess that doesn't matter to salmonids.” Van's just gonna have to guess. Well, she did take it into the shower with her. “Girl salmonid,” she decides.
The thing licks Van's cheek. She wipes it. Should've put that in the rules, oh well. “Now then,” she says, setting pencil to paper. “You're... a smallfry,” she says, and doodles her out. Sideways first, profile, the tail, and the arched back, and the fins, and paying special attention to the cute little head fronds. “About... this tall, and this wide, and...” slowly, several sketches take shape. Every now and then, the smallfry would climb off Van to take the eraser in her fins and get rid of something. She never puts down the spoon.
Under Van's pencil, an outfit takes shape. A skirt that sweeps back around the tail and hides it while leaving it free to move, a flowing shirt, a veil that covers the head completely. “For formal, dressy occasions,” she murmurs as she works. She glances at the smallfry. “You've got your, uh, inking under control?”
She's not stinging Van anymore, so that seems likely, and she grins as the smallfry chirrups.
Then they both jump at the sounds of battle right outside her window. With her window broken, the sounds are even louder. Van puts a hand on the smallfry to steady her as she gets to her feet and peers out.
What the actual fuck is that—that thing flying around? It makes her gut clench, but the salmonid on her shoulder chirps and bounces as the giant slithering thing burps an explosion that levels her favorite reading bench.
And on the ground, a splatoon of workers in—she wrinkles her nose. “Ugh, Grizzco Workers have no sense of style,” she complains.
The smallfry rubs her little head against Van's cheek.
A giant flying thing spewing acrid smoke hovers near her window, and Van coughs. Two oversized compartments open, one on either side, and start spewing out missiles; bombs fly through the air. Van backs away, still coughing.
Another explosion damn near shakes her bed and a smallfry smacking her in the face does shake her, almost as much as it latching onto her nose with its sharp teeth!
Van shrieks and grabs the thing, pulling on it; it growls and bites harder.
On her shoulder, the smallfry TRILLS, and the smallfry biting her's eyes widen. It releases her, and Van snatches it away, but the first smallfry's fin on her hand keeps her from chucking it back out the window.
The smallfry on her shoulder slides down her arm and starts chirping, waving its fin. The one Van is holding chirrups back, looking confused.
Carefully, Van sets them both down on the floor. “You two...” she winces and presses a hand to her nose, takes it away: bleeding. And Cod there could be anything on its fangs! “I'll be back, I'm going to take care of my nose.”
~~~
Van returns an hour later, a nose slathered in bandages and disinfectant, bearing a laundry basket of clean fabric and a couple gallons of hot purified water suitable for drinking or bathing. She blinks at the scene before her: now there are three smallfries. And it sounds like the worst of the explosions have moved away.
The new ones have kept themselves contained to a small section of the room, at least; she won't have to do that much more cleaning. She sets everything down. “I don't speak Salmonid, but, did Towel there tell you two the rules?”
They nod enthusiastically.
“And you two agree?”
More nodding.
Well, her group can have up to four members. Van digs under her brother's bed until she finds a large bowl. “Okay, any gender shyness or whatever in your species? Because if not, you can get washed up in this. One at a time, but I've got enough towels.”
One of them immediately shimmies out of its disgusting pants-things and, yeah, the one Van showered with is a girl. Van fills the bowl with hot water and some handsoap, stirring it until it sudses, and the salmonid climbs in. Van picks up Rich's toothbrush and starts to scrub.
“Okay, I don't speak salmonid, but I need different names to call you,” she says as she scrubs (he seems particularly happy with her attention to his fin-fronds). “I know it's not very imaginative, but would 'towel' be okay with you?” she asks the first.
She chirrups and wraps the towel more firmly around herself.
“And you ,” she says to the one who bit her, still waiting its turn to be cleaned, “can be Bite.”
It grins widely and bites the air at her a couple times, before trilling what seems to be a laugh.
“And you...” Van pulls the boy from the makeshift bath and wraps another dishtowel around him. “I have no idea. Do you?”
He shakes fast, water flying everywhere, and scampers to Van's door and starts jumping. Van looks up and grins: she's got a hanger on there, with all her hats on it. “You want a hat? Are you Hat?” She has a few hats from an earlier project, doll clothes, and she opens her bottom dresser drawer and digs one out and offers it to him.
He puts it on with a delighted chirrup, and she smiles at him. This is going to go well, really.
She doesn't need Rich's help. She can do this.
Then she's lost in a world of sketching and fabric, choosing colors and styles with a freedom she's never had before with Rich tearing up anything that shows her middle. Now and then, Bite bites one of the pages, which after a bit of discussion she takes as a mark of approval; she gets frustrated at one point, and Hat slimes her page with green ink a few shades different from her own, then scrubs his own tail to get rid of the excess. That page goes in the trash.
Then it's time to cut and sew. Van gets the chalk, and with careful references to her measurements and a steady practiced hand from everything she's done before now, draws outlines. Scissors weren't made for Salmonid hands, but Hat aims and Towel pushes them open and jumps on them to close and the edges may not be as neat as she'd like but it doesn't matter that much if the seam allowance is bigger than it needs to be, no one will see the edges. And creating clothing for such small creatures is saving her enough fabric that she's still coming out ahead.
She's so busy she jumps when someone knocks on her door. “Grizzco,” calls a voice. “We saw a broken window here. Is it debris, or did salmonid come in? We can take care of them.”
Van presses her finger to her lips and winks at her new friends, then opens the door a crack. The Grizzco worker is in a very unflattering suit, and she wrinkles her nose at that as much as the smell of dead fish drying in the sun. “One did, but I threw it back out the window,” she says.
“You let us know if any more are found,” says the short...probably an inkling, at that height. He hands her a business card with a phone number on it in shiny letters. “We at Grizzco believe in completing the jobs we take.”
She smiles back, takes the card, and closes the door in his face. She turns back to her new friends, all looking up at her with their wide-eyed expression. Hat is already outfitted in his new clothes, with vest, suspenders, and sharp khakis properly cut for his fins.
She gives them all a thumbs-up and bursts into laughter.
AFTERMATH:
“Okay, Van, I—what the fuck?! ”
“Put down the phone!”
“Hello, Grizzco, we have—”
“We have nothing.”
“Why the fuck—”
“I told you, I don't need you. I found some new partners.”
“You partnered with fucking fish?”
“And we don't need people who run away at the first sign of trouble. Trouble is opportunity. I gave them your bed.”
“What the actual fuck!”
AND
“Thank you for coming to see us on such short notice, Miss Todarodes.”
“It's my pleasure.”
“And I see you brought your... new partners.”
“Yes, they're trying to formally enroll in the school next semester. Do you have any scholarships?”
“Formally enroll? Scholarships? Miss Todarodes, this is no joking matter.”
“Who's joking? These salmonids, a known sentient species, are trying to further their education. You're not speciesist , are you?”
“There is nothing speciesist about denying admission to—”
“Really? Looks like I'll have to contact Inkopolis News. Something about you denying admission to fish varieties that don't fit your image?”
“We, uh, I...”
“Now then. I think we all deserve scholarships. Don't you?”
OF COURSE
Vanessa Todarodes, Hat Salmo Salar, Towel Salmo Salar, and Bite Salmo Salar received an A on their fashion design project. Van took her scholarship and began a two-year degree in business with the trio as roommates.