Work Text:
Oscar cut though the water. Bubbles plumed behind him; he felt them rush through his hair. Above him, the sun was shining, piercing bright over the surface of the ocean waves. Dappled shapes played across his back as he rushed forward. The heat didn’t penetrate to the undercurrent he was riding, but the light did.
He felt tight, exposed, restless in the face of this beautiful day. It screamed at him to do something, anything, to seize life and make something of it. He swam faster, letting the current take him further down. Away from the taunting sky.
Darkness was comforting. A reminder that time didn’t really matter here, below the surface. He didn’t owe anything to the outside world.
As he reached the seabed, he slowed his frantic pace, letting himself drift for a while between the swaying fronds of seaweed. The sun barely penetrated down here, reduced to translucent shafts, highlighting particles of the swirling murk he had disturbed upon arrival. He felt the mud and sand swirl around his skin as he floated, settling in the crevices of his scales. It was always quiet in this area of the ocean.
A fish nudged at him, gently. Some dark scaled creatures of the depths. A lot like him really, overly curious and clueless about the world around him. He stilled, letting it nuzzle further up his body on its exploratory quest. He held his breath, letting his gills fall still alongside the rest of him. The only movement in the water was the fish’s trundling movement and the soft swaying of the seaweed.
A moment passed in perfect silence.
Then, Oscar darted his hand out, snatching the fish and breaking the reverie. Sharp teeth tore through its stomach, cracking bones and spilling guts. It was gone in a flash, reduced to a cloud of blood in the water.
He spat out the skull, before pushing off the sand and swimming up with a newfound burst of speed. He left the blood and the dirt on his scales behind.
Somehow, he couldn’t shake that restless feeling.
-
By the time he rejoined the sky, tired of circling the seabed like a trapped animal, the sun was lower on the horizon. He let himself float close to the air, facing it without breaching the surface. He didn’t want to switch from gills to lungs if he was going to go back under soon enough. A flock of seagulls squawked overhead, diving at the water before spreading their wings and letting the warm air carry them back up. Never dipping close enough for him to grab at them, the clever gits.
He wasn’t sure why he had felt so strange lately. Mer were solitary creatures, and he was used to finding fulfilment in his life under the sea. This territory, surrounding a small island a couple hundred miles off the coast of Australia, had been his home since he left his parents, and he had grown accustomed to his sleepy routine here.
Yet, for the past few weeks he had been seized by the sense that he was missing something. That he needed to be ready for some nebulous event that was about to occur. It was frustrating, and tiring, feeling like he was on edge all the time. No matter what he did, no matter how many times he circled and hunted and rearranged the seaweed, he never felt right. He had even considered travelling over to the next territory over to ask if this was normal, but the thought icked him out. The idea of relying on somebody else, especially a nearby rival, twinged against every instinct he had. Sure, they were civil, but they kept their space for a reason. Mer were prickly creatures, himself included.
So instead, he drifted, staring up at the sky as it slowly turned from blue to orange to purple red, hoping that the buzzing under his skin would resolve itself soon.
He wasn’t sure how long it was that he stayed like that, half zoned out as he watched the sky. It wasn’t until he realised that one of the figures in the sky was far too big to be a seagull that he finally snapped back to reality.
The figure was squawking, loudly, almost as high pitched as the gull’s piecing cries. It was also growing slowly larger, wings flapping ineffectually as it plummeted towards the water. Oscar realised, belatedly, that if he didn’t move soon the figure was going to fall right on top of him.
“ARRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!” screamed the avian as it plunged into Oscar’s arms.
“Aarghh- mph,” gargled Oscar as the force of the avian’s body weight pushed him further down into the ocean.
It was hard to see what was going on for all the bubbles, hard to distinguish limb from tail from wing. Even Oscar’s naturally quick reaction times floundered as the avian’s waterlogged wings dragged them both further down. It took a few moments for him to untangle their thrashing bodies and get a good look at the man that had fallen from the sky.
Oscar had to admit he was a looker. Of all the men that had plunged into his arms lately (of which there were none) he was definitely up there as one of the best looking. Gently tanned skin, curly brown hair, toned limbs. It was a shame about the legs, of course, and the wings protruding from his back, but Oscar could appreciate how the colouring of his feathers would have made a pretty scale pattern. His claws were pretty as well, more curved than his and currently trying to claw at his chest, but pretty, nonetheless.
His eyes looked terrified, blinking furiously against the salt water. Oscar tried to work out what colour they were, some interesting combination of green and blue and grey and hazel. It seemed to change every time he blinked. It was only as they started to drift slowly closed, as he started to thrash against Oscar less violently, that he remembered that avians didn’t have gills.
A few hundred years ago, he might have taken this as an opportunity to eat well for a week. There was definitely a part of his brain that told him to bite out the other man’s neck while the opportunity presented itself. But these were modern times and Oscar wasn’t a monster. Plus, he had a feeling that this moment was what his body had been tensing for all this time.
So, instead of pulling him down to the ocean floor, Oscar hoisted the avian over his shoulder and shot back up to the surface. He tried to keep his mouth above water, remembering that that was the only point avian’s had to breathe from, but the other man wasn’t becoming any more responsive. That was worrying.
Swimming to the island’s shore with a fully grown man thrown over his shoulders was one of the harder things Oscar had done over his life’s span. Even more so when he kept having to check if the other man was dead yet. By the time he made it to the beach he was exhausted, barely summoning the strength to shove the man into the shallows.
He was still unresponsive, and Oscar wasn’t sure what to do about that. For all his education on non-Mer species, drowning wasn’t exactly his forte. He settled with poking the man, prying open his eyelids to get some kind of response. Nothing worked.
He would have to take a more aggressive approach. He started by slapping the man, increasing the force with each blow. When that didn’t work, leaving both of their cheeks red and stinging, he switched to thumping at the other man’s chest, even harder this time.
His fists rained blows down awkwardly, as he struggled to hold himself up in the shallow water. Nonetheless, he continued, whacking at him for dear life. He was not about to let this man die after all the effort he had put into saving him.
Then finally, finally, one of his fists seemed to dislodge something, and the other man started to splutter, coughing up seawater as his eyes fluttered back to consciousness. All of a sudden, the thrashing was back, and Oscar backed up a little, retreating to water deep enough to swim away in if he needed to. He was pretty sure that the other man’s waterlogged wings were enough to slow him down if he decided to attack, but he didn’t want to take that chance. The stinging scratches across his chest were enough to remind him that those claws were sharp.
So, he lay there, eyes peeping just above the water, watching as the avian reoriented himself. It didn’t take long. Oscar was almost impressed.
The avian scrambled backwards, out of the water, on his hands and knees looking frantic. He tried to stand, but his wings and his drenched clothes were weighing him down. When he finally made it on to the dry sand, he turned to face Oscar, terror on his face.
“Where the fuck am I?” His voiced was high pitched and cracking a little. Oscar gave him the benefit of the doubt that it was probably because of the galleon of seawater he had just coughed up, but it was endearing, nonetheless.
Oscar raised his head out of the water, just enough to respond. “This is my island, mate.”
“The fuck do you mean, your island?” There was a touch of hysteria in the other man’s tone.
Oscar felt a little offended at the insinuation that he couldn’t have an island. “I look after it. It’s mine. My island.”
If anything, the avian looked even more panicked at that. “But surely there’s someone else here, right? It can’t be just you?”
Oscar popped the ‘p’ when he responded. “Nope. Just me around these parts. I look after this place.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. I’m so fucked.” The avian seemed to have forgotten that he was talking to somebody else.
Oscar frowned, scrunched up his nose a little. “Calm down, it’s not that bad around here.”
“Not that bad? How am I meant to get out of here? My wings are damaged, and I have absolutely no way of calling for help.” At that, the avian seemed to remember something, rummaging around in his pockets before he drew out a little black rectangle. He prodded insistently at one of the buttons on the side, looking even more dismayed when that changed absolutely nothing. “Fuck me. I’m stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere with an Aussie Mer that probably wants to eat me.”
Now that was the final straw for Oscar. He could deal with someone slighting his island, but he had gone out of his way to avoid eating the avian.
His tried to keep his words light hearted when he retorted, “If I was planning on eating you, I would’ve done it when you fell into my arms, dumbass.”
“Oh, you so considered it,” the avian hissed back. “I saw the way you looked at me down there. Like you were hungry. You probably just saved me to play with me a little before you kill me. Typical mer.”
Whoa. That was a lot. Was this what Oscar got for trying to play saviour? He saved the guy and all he got it return was attitude and stereotypes. He ignored the more vitriolic side of him that argued that this was more evidence he should have killed that guy when he had that chance. That would prove this idiot right.
He tried to stick to a measured response, but there was only one reaction that correctly encapsulated his emotions. “Fuck you,” he spat out before turning tail and swimming away, humiliation stinging at his cheeks.
If this guy wanted to ignore his help, he was happy to go along with that. Good luck surviving without my help, he thought bitterly, as the island and the sodden avian on the shore grew smaller behind him. He wasn’t going to waste any more energy on this asshole.