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He’s lounging on a rock, dozing off a full belly, when Matt pops up beside him. He’s seething so hard the water around him nearly boils.
“Nick.”
He hums, shutting his eyes again. Matt has never needed his input to launch into a full scale lecture, so he doesn’t bother prompting him.
“Nick, look at me.”
Matt’s tone is getting terse. The water is temperate, sunlight filtering hazy down around them, but the peace of it is rapidly disintegrating. Nick grunts and turns over on the rock, putting his back to Matt. He had been having a very good daydream about swimming in the western Atlantica gulf, which they only frequent a few months of the year. Figures Matt would find a way to ruin it. He’d been making a habit of doing that to Nick’s plans lately.
A sharp jab in the back sends him rolling off the rock, and he bites out a curse, catching himself before he floats to the seafloor. He surges up, gripping the rock to stop himself launching at his brother – who is raising his eyebrows, plainly waiting for him to try exactly that.
“What the hell’s your problem?” Nick says angrily, shoving away from the rock. He doesn’t wait for Matt to reply, instead swivelling and swimming away, fists clenching. He finds a random grotto nearby, and hisses at the pack of eels inside it to make them scatter. He stuffs himself inside, and elbows an octopus that drifts too close. It puffs away, disgruntled.
Matt swims up to him, looking annoyed, which annoys Nick in turn.
“Listen,” Matt begins, but Nick has abruptly had enough of doing just that.
“Hells!” he shouts in Matt’s face, making him rear back. “Can’t you give me two minutes to myself?”
Matt’s expression hardens. “If you stopped picking fights with angler-mers maybe I would. That freak was twice your size, why would you take –,”
“He wasn’t using them,” Nick interrupts, too quickly, and Matt’s eyes narrow.
The brawny mer had been hoarding a whole pile of cod, and Nick had been too lazy to hunt. It had been a simple matter to distract him with a noise and then swipe the food. He hadn’t counted on the mer chasing him halfway around the nearest continent, nor Matt interfering to ward him off. Nick had at least gotten his dinner, and he’d scrammed before Matt could chew him out. Of course Matt tracked him down before he could get in a full nap. He always seems to know where Nick is, no matter how far Nick tries to go.
“You can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what,” Nick says, lying back. He bends his tail so that his fins flap in Matt’s face. Matt bats them out of the way irritably.
“Acting out! I’m trying to keep us both safe –,”
“Well, I didn’t ask you to,” Nick says, and pushes his fins into Matt’s chest, forcing him back a few feet. Matt is turning pink, looking fit to burst. He looks down at the sand below them, and breathes deeply for a moment, while Nick watches him, bored. When Matt faces Nick again, he braces his hand on the top of the grotto and keeps his shoulders forcibly relaxed. The whole production he makes of staying level-headed is funny, these days. Nick knows how easy it is to set him off.
“Nick. I’m trying to take care of you –,”
“I’m not a kid,” Nick says, sitting up. He can feel an old, familiar pain in his gut, as memories surface that he’d rather ignore. “I’m not your kid.”
Matt chews the inside of his cheek. “I know that. I just – Mom and Dad, they would’ve wanted –,”
“Shut up,” Nick says harshly. He gets in Matt’s face, shoves him back. “Shut the hell up.”
Matt is frowning, but his eyes are getting big and sad, and the sight makes Nick feel like shit. So he shoves him again.
“Nick –,”
“Stop following me,” Nick snaps, and pushes past him to go – anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Anywhere he can lie around and eat as much as he wants and talk to whomever he likes and take whatever he feels like having. He’s almost grown now, and he deserves that freedom. He’s sick of this shadow, this horrible sad shadow with his dad’s eyes and none of his strength.
A hand closes vice-like around his wrist, and yanks him back.
“Just let me –,”
Nick tries to bite him, and Matt jumps out of his reach. He’s angry enough that he lunges again, latching onto Matt’s shoulder.
“Ow! Nick, knock it off!”
Matt’s not hitting him, not punching his head or twisting his arm like he’s seen bigger, deadlier mers do to their young. He’s not doing anything. Just sitting there and whining, like he’s been doing at Nick for almost a year, since the mako-mers came in a horde and ripped their family to shreds. He’s completely useless.
Nick spits him out, and drifts back. There’s a small cloud of blood over the puncture marks his teeth left. Matt covers the marks with his hand, looking hurt. Not even pissed off. He only seems to get pissed and mean when Nick is using his freedom to do something he enjoys, like he wants to mess up any sliver of happiness he has left.
“Leave me alone,” Nick says, baring his teeth. He doesn’t have a full set yet – Matt doesn’t even have them, both of them still growing, but he thinks his intentions are clear. “Forever.”
He turns and shoots off in a storm of bubbles, moving quicker than he ever has – quicker, even, than on the day he and Matt heard the thunderous clashing of many bodies and saw the crimson flood that had infected the water above their home, so far from here. He’d tasted metal for weeks afterwards. His light-coloured hair had looked red at night, in shadows, in his own hands. He remembers Matt’s wan face, the stains under his nails when they’d huddled under a cliff miles from the massacre. It was Matt who had pulled Nick away from the remains. He’d said it wasn’t safe, that they had to be careful from then on.
Clearly that meant wasting away, hiding like worms, buried in the sand.
Not Nick. He’s not going to spend his life being cautious, not when his parents and sister and little brother don’t have their own lives anymore. It would be an insult to creep around for all time, not doing anything, not being anything except pathetic. Matt can do that, if he wants. He can be grim and boring and fearful while Nick explores. Maybe brooding on his own for a while will wake him up to how pointless it all is.
He swims for what feels like hours, weaving between boulders, hills and seamounts, exploding through schools of fish and forests of weeds. He takes a winding, random route, making no visible trail, making sure Matt can’t track him. Leaving him far behind.
*
Nick is breathing hard by the time he comes to an unknown plain, the area littered with rocks and building to a reef, sloping gently upwards. He follows it to shallows that are lit blue from bright sunlight, peach and pink and yellow polyps twitching in the current, swaying under the stream of Nick’s passing movement. He dives in and around the little tentacles and large stalks, brushing up against the delicate little growths on top fondly. He loves the coral, loves it likes he loves being in shallow water. He should be living here all of the time.
He meets a dolphin, who barks a greeting at him; he twirls around her for a while, then initiates a game of tag, which takes them in a broad circuit around the patch coral. She tires of him after a few minutes, and bops her nose into his belly as a goodbye before roaming away.
He scares a few barracuda, then snatches up some squid, making them ink so he can gulp at the stinking clouds. After while spent belching spectacularly, he starts building a few rock-castles out of pebbles, lying on his stomach in the sand and swiping at the many curious fish that come to investigate. Doing it by himself gets boring before long, and he knocks it down with a powerful whack of his tail, sending his wide-eyed audience in all directions.
After that he rolls around, digging idly in the sand for lost valuables. There’s usually a lot of landman detritus in places like these. Maybe if he meanders in a bit closer to a beach or bay he’ll find some gold, or one of those boxes that traps crabs. They’re useful for someone like Nick, who greatly prefers the act of eating food to the long, tedious process of hunting it down.
He’s not really meant to comb through the sand for landman leftovers, not since the time he scratched up his hands on a rusty old metal weapon. Matt had freaked out and commanded him to be more careful, or failing that, to always fetch Matt if he ever got hurt.
“Idiot,” he mutters to himself, waving off a sea turtle who’s butting into his back. He doesn’t want to think about Matt, or his rules. Thinking about Matt makes him think about the way Nick had bit him. Which had probably been – not so great. Of him.
He’s not crazy or anything. If Matt wasn’t so dumb and bossy, always telling him what to do, he wouldn’t have had to bite him in the first place. So it had really been Matt’s fault. The biting, and – the rest of it. The things he said.
The thought doesn’t alleviate the sudden heaviness in his stomach. He pushes off from the sand, chewing on his lip, needing a distraction. He wants to do something for himself, and to think about something besides Matt for as long as possible in the meantime.
He bobs to the surface, and sees an island close by, the continental shelf he had been skirting for so long. He swims towards it, dipping in and out of the waves as he does so. The island looks enormous from where he is, a great mound of grey rock, brown sandstone and tall, dark green trees that loom far overhead.
He swims to a large boulder that juts up and out of the water, not far from a cliff face. The perfect place for the nap he’d missed out on, and somewhere he won’t be hounded for taking a rest. He hauls himself up, using his hands to pull himself nearly to the peak of it. He peers over the edge and giggles at the considerable distance to the waves. They lap against the stone like he’s on the top of a land mountain, teetering over a great height. His hair swings on either side of his face, and drips drops into the tide. He shakes his head to make it rain. A silverfish pops up and then back down into the water, as though to tell him off.
Nick laughs, and turns over, lying back on the sloping side of the boulder. He squints at the glaring sun, and closes his eyes, coiling his tail up on a lumpy part of the rock for balance. He breathes steadily, his throat and nose still adjusting to the intake of air rather than water. It’s always a strange transition, especially as they don’t come to the surface often. Never, really. Matt goes, sometimes, to double-check their location, but he rarely lets Nick go with him. Dumb. Selfish. Probably wants to keep the fun sights and sounds to himself.
Nick grumbles to himself. Dumb, dumb Matt. He’s not thinking about him.
The air starts to stream in and out of him more smoothly, no longer quite as dry. He tilts his head back to get more of the sunlight, relishing the warmth of it, though he knows he can’t do so for very long. Mer skin is prone to burning under the sun, particularly outside of the water. He hums experimentally as he breathes out, and the sound emerges pleasant. He can hear the squawks of gulls and the twittering of other seabirds close by, likely circling as they look for food, and he hums louder. He settles naturally into a tune his mom used to sing. A lullaby in the evenings. High and sweet, her hair drifting gold around her head, her smile perfect and loving and just for Nick.
His voice hitches a bit. He coughs slightly, and starts singing properly, more intently, combing his fingers through his hair. It’s darker than hers was, but maybe it doesn’t look it in the beaming light of the sun. Matt says he reminds him of her, sometimes. Looking at him at night, when they’re clumped together, and it’s too quiet. Nick hates those times. Hates how potent Matt’s grief is, so thick he can nearly taste it. Like blood in the water, again.
He drags his hand down his hair too hard, and grunts at the pull on his scalp. He sits up, and opens his eyes to find and undo the tangle.
He sees the boat first, before anything else. Its prow is bumping softly against the base of the rock, where it emerges from the waves. It’s weatherbeaten, and mid-sized, the type of vessel he’s seen from below a thousand times.
He looks up higher and sees what’s inside of it: a landman, broad and tall, with a bushy brown beard and round, awed eyes, holding a massive tangle of weeds.
Nick blinks and realises – no – not weeds –
The net pins him to the rock the second it hits him, sodden and heavy. He can feel a bruise forming under his eye where a knot in the rope had whacked his face, and another trail of them across his tail, the first points of impact. He’s stunned, for a moment, sliding a little down the rock, and then he sees the man with the beard start to move. Climbing onto the rock with him.
He keens in panic and pushes off violently, hurtling into the sea. He crashes hard, on his front, and sinks quickly – the net gains weight as it soaks through, and Nick instantly thrashes to get out of it. His urgent twisting doesn’t work as efficiently as he expected. He wriggles through one gap and finds his tail fins are wrapped in rope; squirms through another and feels his arm trapped in the mesh; turns to feel another rope looping around his neck, everything going tighter and more constricting no matter which way he moves.
“No, no,” he whispers, his breath coming fast, water icy down his throat as he wrenches his body this way and that, disentangling one limb and seeing another, pulled taut –
He gasps, as the ropes stretch suddenly, and the sea starts streaming past him in a rush. He’s moving, but not swimming, and he knows that’s bad, that’s very bad, especially because he’s moving up instead of down. Bubbles and foam cascade over him as he surges back to the surface, his tail immobile under a pile of knotted nets so heavy they may as well be chains.
His body rocks abruptly into something hard, a layered surface that scrapes down his arm and the side of his tail as he’s drawn up, against it. He looks up and around, wildly, and sees a set of burly, hairy forearms, towing the net hand over hand up the side of a boat. A bushy beard and eager face appears above them, getting closer and closer by the second.
Nick starts panting, shaking, body numb as he writhes limply inside the net. He can’t find a hole, can’t find an escape, and the landman is right above him, then right beside him, then close enough to smell – fish and sweat and smoke – and then he’s wrapping his big arms around Nick and lifting him inside his boat.
Nick is lowered to the wooden floor of the boat, which is big, for a rudimentary fishing vessel. It’s got one of those mast poles in the middle, and a rolled up sail at the top of it. There’s a pile of nets in one corner, along with some strange equipment Nick has never seen, and a large vat full of dead fish. A few green bottles are set neatly into bands against the inside of the boat, and the dark liquid inside sloshes with the waves.
The landman is making sounds, looking down at him. Nick remembers the immediate danger, shocking his curiosity out of him like a jellyfish sting, and he begins to struggle, whimpering.
The landman stoops beside him, and puts a hand on his chest, crooning something Nick doesn’t understand. Landman languages are all rounded and swooping and oily, unpleasant to the ear and utter gibberish whenever he’s heard men call out to each other. He doesn’t listen to it, his heart pounding like a drum inside him. He feels sick, and tries again to worm away, shuffling bare inches across the deck before the landman is taking a hold of the net and pulling him back. It’s wrapped around his throat, his arms, weighing down his tail in large clumps of rope, mesh bound tightly around his fins. He thinks of the crabs he wanted to snare in a landman-made trap like this one, and his gorge rises. He wouldn’t wish this on anybody, not even food.
The landman says something else, and strokes a hand down his face, thumbing at his chin. Nick tosses his head, and the landman chuckles, big deep sounds that seem to come from the bottom of his chest. He moves his hand to Nick’s hair, and starts rubbing it between his fingers, the locks of it gold in the sun. Like his mother’s.
He doesn’t want that memory in this creature’s hands. He pulls his head away, and the landman frowns. He snakes his hand inside the ropes over Nick’s chest and draws them up, up, so Nick is close to his face.
The landman says something softly, and touches Nick’s face again, and Nick has a very bad feeling. The kind like while he was hiding from the angler-mer, and saw his rows of sharp teeth, and realised he’d messed up. Beyond what he could fix.
He shrieks loudly, not knowing what else to do, and the landman drops him, scowling. Nick’s back hits the floor, hard, winding him. He rolls to his side and attempts to claw at the boards at the bottom of the boat, dragging himself away. If he can just get over the side, and sink to the bottom, maybe he can –
The landman is pulling him back, again. He looks a lot less soft now, and a lot more irked. He threads a hand into Nick’s hair and fists it there, keeping him still, then fiddles with the ropes of the net. Making some tighter, others looser.
“Stop,” Nick yelps. Maybe he can get through to the landman by speaking to him. Even if he doesn’t understand him. If he knows Nick’s a person, and not even a fully grown person, maybe he’ll let him go.
“Please,” he says desperately, as he feels ropes constrict his tail further down. “Please, just – just let me go, I don’t have anything you want – I – please – don’t –,”
The landman grabs his face, and squeezes his jaw, and the rest of the pleas die on Nick’s tongue. The landman says something else, low and guttural, and drops his hand from Nick’s face. He grips his hair tighter, then stands, and Nick inhales sharply, realising –
The landman drags him by the hair across the boat, and Nick screeches, the pain tugging on his scalp, then scratching along his back as he’s hauled carelessly from one end of the vessel to the other. The landman chatters on as he slams Nick into the tall mast with the folded sail, and starts binding him to it with the net.
“Don’t,” Nick yells, panic overriding the agony in his head. If the landman succeeds in keeping him here, Nick will get weaker, drier, less likely to escape. He won’t be able to fight him off at all. The landman could take him to a harbour, or a landman town. He could – serve him up as seafood, or – he’d heard stories when he was younger, merpeople found and stolen and violated in ways that had made his insides curdle to hear them. His parents had told him off for listening when he wasn’t supposed to. Matt had taken his hand and towed him away and told him not to worry about stuff like that. He’d proclaimed that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Nick, not ever.
Nick feels an odd prickling in his eyes as the landman binds him tighter. Water brims there and trickles down his face, the sea coming out of him as he thinks about Matt, and how he had left him bleeding, Matt who is never going to know how Nick died.
The landman is speaking again, low, gentle tones, caressing Nick’s cheek. Wiping away the hot water. Nick shakes his head viciously.
“Let me go,” he screams, and screams again in sheer frustration, terror and hatred combining to make his tail strain horribly against the net, his arms sore from being wrenched so awkwardly for so long. He can’t disappear like this, leave Matt alone, Matt whose sadness is so overwhelming and lonely that Nick had tried to escape it, over and over again. Dumb and selfish, that’s him, not Matt, that’s his own weakness.
“Matt!” he screams, ignoring the landman’s hands pressing harder on him. “Matt! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Matt – please! Matt! HELP ME –,”
The landman strikes him across the face, a blow that makes his ears ring and heat rise to his cheek, making it throb with his heartbeat. He gasps in short breaths, and the landman puts his hand around his throat, forcing his face up. He speaks to him, long nonsense words, and then thumbs at Nick’s chin again. Smiles, teeth bared in the way of a real predator.
Nick squeezes his eyes shut. He’s shaking so hard he doesn’t realise the landman has let go of him until he hears the thudding of something large impacting wood.
He opens his eyes and sees his brother, hair draped half over his face, slithering across the deck and up to Nick. Up to the landman, who is standing ramrod straight, jerky, bushy face rigid in surprise.
Nick feels his entire body sag without his permission. Relief at seeing Matt drains the fight from him so fast he feels like he might pass out.
Matt doesn’t pause for even a second, snatching up the landman’s ankle as soon as he’s close enough and yanking it towards him. The landman loses his footing, and his back hits the floor with an almighty crash. Matt is on top of him immediately, movements sharp, so rapid Nick can barely follow the sequence of them. He watches as Matt rams the landman’s arms to the floor, and hovers above him.
The landman says something to him, licking his lips, and Nick barely has time to thrash in anger before Matt is descending in greater fury, clamping his teeth around his throat and ripping upwards in a spray of gore. Nick blinks as blood speckles his face, dribbling down his chest, turning the net red in places. Matt dives in again, and tears to his left this time, squidgy tubes and tissue plopping out beside him. His eyes are bright and manic, and his skin is white, his muscles undulating in spasms as he continues to gnaw and bite and chew like his life depends on it.
Nick wriggles desperately, trying to get to him, to help. Matt is shaking, snarling as he works, and he looks scared – as scared as Nick was. He has to make sure he’s okay.
He struggles against the net and the mesh presses hard into his fins. He keens in pain and Matt whips around, his face drenched in blood. He’s panting as he stares at him, his hair wound all around his neck and his chest, looking like he’s caught in another net, another trap.
“Matty,” Nick pleads, and Matt startles, like he’s waking up from a dream.
He scrabbles for Nick, clambering gracelessly off the body. He grabs at Nick’s shoulders, and starts biting at the ropes, snapping them off with clean gnashes of his teeth. He frees Nick’s arms, then works on the ones around his tail. Nick bends to help him as much as he can, working frantically, wondering about other boats, other landmen, other nets that can hold him. Bigger nets, even, ones that can maybe hold two mers. The panic comes back, hot as bile. He’s moving too slow, his fingerwebbing catching on his bindings. He’s going to get them both killed, for real this time.
The water is seeping from his eyes again, and his breath is hitching, wet and loud. Matt stops what he’s doing and takes his face in both hands. Nick trembles, still trying to rip away the net.
“Nick. Look at me.”
He does. Matt is dripping blood, his eyes wide and black-dark.
“We’re getting out of here.”
Nick sobs a little. He’s slow and stupid, but Matt looks so certain. He looks dangerous, too, even more dangerous than the body lying motionless behind him had been.
“Nick.”
When they’d found their parents’ bodies he hadn’t been this sure. This stationary, holding Nick like he’s the treasure instead of something leftover, salvage from a wreck. He’s bigger. He’s steady and constant as the tide. Nick hadn’t been paying attention before.
“Okay,” he whispers, nodding, and Matt nods too. He pushes Nick back smoothly and takes over, ripping at the ropes around his tail like they’re landman innards, chewing through them in a single bite. Within seconds he’s disentangling them from his fins, letting Nick’s tail uncurl out on the floor, into the pool of blood. Matt gathers him up, and Nick leans into him, shuddering.
“Nicky,” Matt murmurs into his temple, like he’s reassuring himself. He wraps an arm firmly around his waist, and tows him to the side of the boat. He springs up with his tail to grab the edge of it, sliding slightly in the blood. He hauls Nick up like he weighs nothing at all, and Nick hurries to help him, gripping the edge and pulling himself up to balance on it. He doesn’t wait for Matt to tell him to go, but reaches back to intertwine their hands, so he can’t drop away without him. Matt holds his hand tightly and launches himself up in one fluid motion. Nick lets go of the boat and they splash into the open sea together, the water around them stretching far from the nearby cliff face. The boat has drifted a long way, now, from the rock on which Nick had sang so thoughtlessly.
Matt hooks him around the middle and dives the second they sink under the surface, and Nick lets himself be pulled, clinging back.
Matt swims down the slope that had led to the shallows, cresting a seamount and then going deeper behind it, so deep the sunlit aquamarine ripples fade to a dark, misty blue. He dives into a narrow canyon and locates a cave mouth in the sandstone wall, then wedges Nick inside it. Nick instantly shifts over to make room in the small space – one that can barely fit two mers of their size – and Matt slips in right after.
Nick blinks to let his eyes adjust to the darkness, bringing Matt’s face into shadowy view. When he does he can see Matt looking at Nick, his eyes wide, his mouth gaping as he pants.
Nick crashes into him, and Matt wraps him in a hug so tight it hurts. His ribs compress as Matt curls around him, and makes frightened, tripping gasps into his hair.
“Matty, it’s okay,” he swears, though it wasn’t, for a while, and that was Nick’s fault. He closes his eyes and buries his face in Matt’s shoulder. “It’s okay, now. I’m – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry –,”
Matt groans wordlessly into his hair, and Nick just holds him, for a long moment. He can taste blood, tinges of it still in Matt’s hair, sludge smeared on his skin. He scrubs at what he can see, needing to make sure the landman is definitely gone from them, that no part of him remains.
“It’s okay, now,” Nick continues to say, rubbing Matt’s back, curling his tail in a spiral around his brother’s. “You’re okay –,”
“Me,” Matt chokes out, and pulls back, holding Nick at arm’s length. He scans him all over, his expression pinching when his gaze lands on Nick’s cheek. He touches him hesitantly, and Nick does his best not to flinch. The side of his face is sore, certainly, but it’s nothing compared to what could have happened. Knowing that is making him feel small and shrivelled. He’d been such a fool.
“Did he hurt you anywhere else?” Matt asks, and Nick can feel him holding on tighter. Terrified.
“He just hit me,” Nick says quickly. “And – pulled my hair. That’s all.”
Matt sighs out a gush of warm water, closing his eyes briefly. He starts stroking the swollen skin of his cheekbone.
“Is it painful?” he asks, and Nick shakes his head automatically. Then he thinks better of it, and nods, slowly.
“A bit. Not badly.”
Matt looks fit to crumple again, and Nick can’t bear it. He hugs him close, avoiding the mark on his shoulder. The one in the shape of Nick’s teeth.
“I’m sorry,” he says, into Matt’s chest. “I’m – I’m sorry for the stuff I said, I didn’t – I was awful.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Matt says, putting a hand on the back of Nick’s head, and pressing him even closer. “That doesn’t matter now.”
“Of course it does,” Nick says, sniffling. He’s squeezing Matt’s arm over and over, the security of him so real and solid and warm. “I was terrible to you. I left you. I – I thought I’d never see you again.”
Matt’s arms tighten around him, and his tail does the same. Containing Nick, like he’s a baby mer again, and a current is threatening to whisk him away.
“I would never let that happen,” Matt says, his voice stronger, angrier. “I wouldn’t leave you alone.”
Like Nick had left him alone. Nick’s eyes burn. Matt must have followed him, even after he did his utmost to flee, to leave no trace, to lose himself to the vastness of the sea and let Matt moulder in uncertainty and fear. Even after Nick had bit him and told him off and been cruel, he’d come for him as he always does. Getting him out of trouble that Nick had created.
“Why,” he says, muffled, miserable, and Matt draws back again. He looks upset, colour building in his pale face, his lip quivering.
“You’re my whole family,” Matt says, his hand on the side of Nick’s neck. “I’m going to keep you safe forever, Nicky.”
Nick feels like he does under the beams of the sun. Lit up and shining, heated with a force he can’t even begin to understand.
He grabs onto Matt’s wrist, and tips their foreheads together.
“I want to keep you safe too,” he insists, and he means it. He’s not going to swim off again. There’s nothing out there that means as much as Matt’s safety, he knows that now. The corals and dolphins and other mers and new seas – they can wait. One day he and Matt can explore the world and see them together. Until then, he has to help Matt make sure they both survive to have that future. He can’t put Matt in the position he did today ever again. He can’t see him that way. Riven open, his caring, sweet-natured brother with a mouthful of blood.
“It’s you and me,” he says, petting at Matt’s hair, pulling him closer. “We’ll – we’ll stick together, okay? Even – even if we fight, or whatever, I won’t – I won’t go. I was dumb earlier, I was – I won’t do it again, I won’t –,”
Matt hushes him, taking him back in the cradle of his arms. He settles to the bottom of the cavern and Nick nestles in as much as he can and tries to communicate with his body how much he means what he’s saying. He’s won’t split from Matt. Not ever.
After a long while, when Matt’s breathing has become even, and his heat has seeped into Nick’s bones, he asks the question that’s been haunting him.
“What did the landman want? Do you think?”
Matt goes still, and Nick almost regrets ruining his calm. But Matt doesn’t get jittery again. He just sweeps his hand up and down Nick’s back, until Nick puddles on top of him, languid and warm.
“He wanted to steal you.” Matt sounds like he’s keeping his rage bound in iron.
“But – why? I didn’t – I didn’t go looking for land people, I promise –,”
“I know,” Matt says quietly, and Nick goes silent. Normally Matt presumes he’s troublemaking. He usually is.
“Landmen are violent beings,” Matt says. “He just wanted to hurt someone. That’s why he took you.”
“Oh.” Nick had known that, he thinks. Hearing Matt say it so baldly makes him feel small again. Whittled down, and worried.
“We’re not going to the surface again,” Matt says, carding his fingers through Nick’s hair. “We’re going to stay in the mid-depths, okay? Around the continent, where the mako-mers don’t go. Where the men can’t reach.”
Their family home had been in a trench. Staying away from places bigger mers frequent makes sense, and so does keeping at a depth too intense for swimming landmen. It still twinges at his pride; them scurrying around like insects, afraid of every little thing. But clearly Matt had had a point when he said the ocean – and the land – was full of dangers. They need to stay together from now on, at all costs.
“No landmen,” Nick says, tracing shapes on Matt’s stomach.
“No landmen,” Matt confirms, hugging him close. “Not ever.”
Nick nods, and nuzzles his brother reassuringly. Just the two of them. It’s not a whole lot, but they can make a life with each other that way. A safe life. That will be enough.