Chapter Text
The water seethed with Singers and human machines. The waves stank of oil, rust, and blood. Singer and human blood blended together, tinting the ocean red and sticking in Shouta’s nasal slits. Three dozen Voices howled through the water, Pearls thrumming in every Singer’s chest, sometimes building together in a unified harmony, sometimes unconnected or even discordant.
Shouta kept his own Pearl quiet. His Voice wasn’t helpful in this sort of scenario, and all singing would do for him was add another noise to the cacophony.
A smaller boat hit the water, propeller already frothing, and Singers converged on it from every direction. Shouta dove towards it himself, flipping over in the water and slamming his claws through the hull. He was flanked by a black-and-purple cantata with nasty burn scars and a green-and-yellow ayre who Shouta was pretty sure made up the entirety of the Nighteye pod. There were others, too, some that Shouta recognized and others he was less familiar with. Together, with almost a dozen Singers clinging to the boat, they managed to tip it on its side and drag it downwards, completely capsizing the craft.
Shouta pulled his claws out as soon as it was sinking, backing away to scan the battle. The assault on the poacher ship was a joint effort. Every pod that hunted in these waters had sent a small patrol, and all told they had almost three dozen Singers in the water. The pods that had contributed the most were the Yuuei and League pods, the Yuuei pod since they were the largest pod by far that was anywhere nearby and the League pod because the poacher ship was almost directly on top of the League’s den.
There were over half a dozen Yuuei Singers here, and the majority of them were songlings. Shouta found Togata easily enough, his bright yellow tail standing out even in the bloody frenzy. At his sides were Amajiki and Hadou, as always. Uraraka’s pale pink tunelight was encasing another small hunting boat, highlighting both her and Asui’s position. Kirishima had joined the battering ram squad trying to tear open the hull of the larger poaching ship.
Shouta couldn’t see Midoriya.
Midoriya was a pleco motet, and shockingly small for his age. He was the same dark green as the strands of kelp beneath them, dappled with flecks of black and white that blended him perfectly into the water. He was also Shouta’s biggest headache, as he seemed to excel at breaking his own bones and getting into unnecessary trouble.
Shouta finally caught sight of Midoriya’s dark green tail right up near the surface. Brilliant green tunelight crackled around his fins, and it looked like he had his head and shoulders above water.
With a growl deep in his throat, Shouta uncoiled his tail and shot up towards Midoriya, churning the water with his passing.
“Midoriya!” Shouta snapped, “Get down from there!”
“But Sensei!” Midoriya gasped, sinking back down into the water, “It’s not a recording!”
“What?”
“The recording they’re using to draw in Singers!” Midoriya rushed out so fast he almost tripped over his words, “It’s not a recording! It’s a living songling!”
Shouta stared at him for a beat, mind racing. They’d ruled it out as a recording because the Voice was far too young to have a developed Pearl, but Shouta knew that stress and trauma could cause an early Pearl development. The Voice didn’t carry as well as it should, but that would easily be explained by keeping the songling separate from the ocean, in a tank or net.
“Stay down,” Shouta commanded sharply, then tentatively breached the surface himself. His gills fluttered angrily as they rose out of the water, but Shouta didn’t want the extra buoyancy that would come from taking a breath of air, so he’d have to hold his breath for a moment.
Above water, it couldn’t have been more obvious that the Voice was a real songling. The music was unsteady, rough and unpracticed, clearly unused to using their Pearl. The song was too crackly and scared to be a proper mournful death-cant, but it was close. The song of a young Singer still being hurt, and not quite dead yet.
Shouta sank back under the waves, rage seething in his chest like sharks in a feeding frenzy.
“Go join Kirishima,” Shouta ground out, “I’ll deal with this.”
Midoriya looked like he wanted to argue – unsurprising, considering the amount of arguing this most recent batch of songlings had done – but begrudgingly turned down towards the battering ram squad.
Before he’d gone more than a meter, a mechanical ‘clunk’ sounded through the water, followed immediately by a sharp metallic scraping. Shouta whirled on instinct, his gaze flashing over the whole side of the poacher ship. He knew that sound. It was a sound that was only ever heard around poachers and whalers. The sound of a harpoon firing.
The barbed head of the harpoon flashed in the water, trailing a thick steel cable. It was aimed directly at Midoriya.
Shouta lunged forward, every centimeter of his tail straining to launch him through the water. He rammed Midoriya with all his weight, flinging the songling away just before the harpoon hit.
The fluted steel head slammed straight through Shouta’s shoulder, and Shouta knew that it should hurt. It would hurt very soon. But he needed to ride the shock as long as possible.
Shouta gripped the shaft of the harpoon with both hands, trying to snap it in half. He couldn’t pull it out completely – one end was flared and barbed, and the other was tethered to the ship – but with lower-quality harpoons, the shaft would be weak enough to break. This wasn’t one of those.
Too late, Shouta realized that the cold glint of light on the harpoon wasn’t a reflection at all. It was a tunelight aura, clinging to the harpoon and now rapidly spreading over Shouta. Everything seemed to speed up around him, and Shouta turned through thick syrup as the world melted and ran together.
Midoriya was shouting something too fast for Shouta to understand.
“Ravagers,” Shouta tried to say, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, “Ravagers, Midoriya, spread- spread the word.”
Shouta didn’t know if Midoriya heard him. The songling was halfway to the ocean floor in a blink, leaving Shouta behind with the harpoon. Distantly, from the direction of the looming iron whale on the surface, a steady mechanical droning had started up.
Midoriya was on his way back to Shouta in another blink, a familiar yellow-and-black figure following him. Shouta opened his mouth to call out to Hizashi – he needed to know there were ravagers, the poachers were ripping out Singers’ Pearls, don’t be surprised if a human can sing your Voice away – but the harpoon yanked sharply in his shoulder, and all the pain Shouta should have been feeling slammed into him with the force of a speedboat.
The last thing Shouta saw was Hizashi’s face, horror and fury and desperation warring for dominance. And then the world was a wash of churning colors, open air, and pain.
Shouta couldn’t tell which way was up or what language the poachers were speaking. Cold metal pinned him in place, clamped to his chest and forearms and throat. No amount of uncoordinated thrashing could free him. At some point he managed to work his jaw well enough to sink his teeth into his own bicep. He flexed his venom sacs and injected just enough of his own venom to numb the area.
His teeth were immediately ripped away from his scales, and more cold steel clamped painfully tight over his jaws, forcing his teeth closed and digging into the fragile skin between his nasal slits. Rough fabric was cinched tight over his eyes, plunging Shouta into darkness and confusion. He couldn’t see, could barely smell, and couldn’t understand anything he heard.
There were discordant Voices all around him, harsh and asynchronous and deeply, inherently wrong. Every time Shouta raised his own Voice to silence them, fire raced through his veins and left him struggling to fill his failing lungs.
Finally, after what could have been minutes or weeks, the hands vanished, the metal bands released him, and the dead Voices went silent. As soon as he was free, the floor fell out from underneath Shouta. He fell for a single heartbeat before hitting water.
Shouta flared his gills, struggling to orient himself. He couldn’t feel his left arm at all, but he only needed a few seconds and the claws on his right hand to shred the blindfold over his eyes.
Shouta had seen a Singer containment tank before. He’d been in several himself, and rescued songlings and adults alike from others. He’d never seen one quite as bad as this before.
The tank was a perfect cube of water, every surface made of what appeared to be smooth plastic. It was also tiny. Shouta was hemmed in on every side, with barely enough room in the water to fit all of his tail. There was maybe a single centimeter of air at the top of the tank, if that.
Shouta couldn’t hear any Voices from beyond the walls. The water in the tank tasted stale and empty. He could barely move. The only implication that there was an outside world at all was a tiny viewing port made of thick glass set about halfway up one of the sides of the tank. Despite himself, Shouta was drawn to it.
Beyond the viewing port there was a boxy room with metal walls. The walls that Shouta could see were covered in blinking lights and rows of buttons and switches. There were half a dozen humans in the room, running from side to side, leaning over consoles, and shouting at each other.
The world was still moving too fast for Shouta to keep track of. It felt like he watched the humans run around like schools of nervous sardines for years, his muscles getting more and more strained the longer he was cramped into a tight knot by the close confines. But the clock bolted to the metal wall showed that less than an hour had passed before there was a dull metallic reverberation that seemed to echo in Shouta’s bones, and then the roof of the tank split in half and rolled away.
Shouta shifted, roiling in the tank like an entire knot of sea kraits, trying to get his tail out of the way so he could reach the surface. It was easier to move with the extra space the open roof allowed, and Shouta found that the magic from the dead music had faded enough that he could mostly control his own limbs.
“You know, we’ve been trying to catch you specifically for years.” Though it was garbled and distorted by the water, that was undoubtedly a human voice, echoing through the empty room without a single speck of music to it.
Shouta finally managed to get his head and shoulders above water and found a human looking down at him. They were standing on a platform about a meter above the water’s surface, draped in a white waterproof coat and wearing some kind of mask over their face.
“Kai thinks your Voice is fascinating,” the human continued, “Just what we need to catch more Sirens without worrying about their songs.”
Shouta bared his teeth at the human, hissing furiously.
“Oh, don’t get too excited,” the human said, “You can barely move.” They slid a hand under their coat and pulled out a thin silver chain. There was a Singer’s Pearl dangling from the chain, caged in thick silver wire.
“We got this Pearl ages ago,” the human told him idly, “one of our first catches. If I use it on a weapon, it will slow to a crawl anything the weapon hits.”
Shouta snarled, lunging out of the water and managing to clamp his still working hand on the ledge of the platform the human was standing on. The human merely took a step back, still dangling the Singer’s Pearl like it was a simple shark tooth or pufferfish spine.
“I doubt you understand a word I’m saying, either way,” the human said idly, tucking the Pearl under their coat again, “Not to worry. We’ll get you with someone you can talk to soon enough. Goodnight, Eraser.”
The magic in Shouta’s veins was still thick enough that he didn’t even register the attack until the knife was already stuck in his arm. It was a small blade, barely a toothpick, but it was coated with the same dead music as the harpoon and the Pearl the human had stolen, and soon enough Shouta didn’t have the strength to grip the platform. He collapsed back into the water, and the world sped up around him.
Every second raced past too fast for Shouta to keep track and stretched into infinity. Even in the sensory deprivation from being stuck in the cramped tank, his head was set spinning by the potent magic.
The world was dark and cold. Bright and cold. Dark and warm. Bright and hot, so hot it was searing his scales off. Thick metal coils looped around Shouta’s tail, grating and rubbing his scales raw. He was struggling to breathe in midair. The metal coils lashed at his sides as they released, and he hit the water with bruising force. He could still barely breathe.
Shouta didn’t know how long he lay on the sandy ground, slumped over his own tail struggling to move his gills.
He did know that he was roused by a song. Not one of the dead songs from a ravaged Pearl, but the unexperienced song of a newly-Voiced Songling.
Shouta finally managed to pick his head up and look around, taking in the area around him. The enclosure was much larger than the tank he’d been stuck in before, the walls so far away that they started to fade into a blue haze. It was still an enclosure, though. The water tasted processed and too clean, not like real open ocean, and the kelp and shelves of stone were arranged too deliberately to be natural. Someone had put some amount of effort into making it look like the ocean, but they hadn’t been trying to fool anyone.
There was something stiff and plastic clamped tight around his left shoulder, holding it in place. A brief inspection revealed it was probably a bandage of some sort, akin to the ones the Musutafu Singer Outreach Program used on injured Singers that couldn’t get sufficient healing from inside their pods. There was also a thick band around his throat, though this one felt like it was made of metal rather than bendable plastic, and the muzzle was still strapped over his face, locking his jaw shut.
Fortunately, unlike a human, Shouta didn’t need his mouth to sing. His Pearl thrummed in his chest, responding to the songling’s faltering call.
Instantly, the songling cut off their music.
Shouta frowned under the muzzle, singing louder in a wordless question.
Nothing.
With a tired sigh, Shouta uncoiled his tail from the tangled knot he’d been tied in, picked himself up off the sandy floor, and went looking for the songling the hard way. He kept singing the whole time, a low tune that was one part searching question and two parts comfort and assurance.
There weren’t a lot of places to hide in the enclosure. Just a few shelves of artificial stone built into the sides, a relatively thicker patch of kelp in one corner, and a pile of stones near one of the walls.
It was the wall directly opposite the one Shouta had been dumped next to, and it was completely made of thick glass looking out into an empty room full of clinical machines and black screens. Even just being near the room made Shouta’s scales itch with paranoia, but he needed to find the songling, and this particular rocky mound was the only place he hadn’t checked yet.
On the side of the rocks facing the glass wall, there was a dark opening and a man-made cave. It wouldn’t even come close to fitting Shouta inside it, nor would it have fit the majority of the songlings that currently swam with the Yuuei pack. Probably just Mineta, Asui, and maybe Hagakure, Jiro, and Uraraka. Certainly not any of the larger songlings, and none of the adult Singers. Whoever had built this had intended for it to hold a guppy too young to sing.
A thread of anger slipped into Shouta’s song, and he immediately squashed it out, not wanting to scare the songling.
Shouta shifted his song into a greeting, curious but polite, the sort of greeting you’d give to a new pod hunting in the same waters as you.
A tiny head appeared in the opening of the man-made cave, face still round with youth and eyes wide with fear.
Shouta’s gills stilled for an instant, his own eyes going wide as the songling came into view.
In all his years, traveling far and wide and meeting far more Singers in one year than most met in their entire lives, Shouta had met one singular mammalian Singer. Nedzu was the one who had initially established the Yuuei tutor pod, one of the most well-known tutor pods in all the waters around Japan. Shouta knew that Nedzu used the loyalty of the tutors and students to protect himself, because there was nothing the roving raider pods hated more than a mammalian Singer, and nothing poachers wanted more than their Pearl.
Family pods guarded their mammalian songlings with their lives, often never even ejecting them from the pod after their Voices came in. Tutor pods – if they ever managed to get hold of a mammalian songling – were much the same.
How, then, had these human poachers managed to get their hands on a narwhal cantata, still so young she hadn’t grown her hunting teeth?
She was still so very small, less than a meter from head to tailtip. She had brilliant red eyes, not unlike Shouta’s own, and she was still almost as white as a beluga. Her gills drooped limply around her head, even underwater, and the short spiraling tusk sprouting from her forehead was barely a palm-length long. There was a thick black collar around her throat, and when she caught sight of him, she shrank back farther into the cave.
Shouta gentled his song as much as he could, humming his benign and helpful intentions.
“Who are you?” the songling whispered.
Shouta thrummed an apology, gesturing at the muzzle over his jaw that stopped him from speaking. His song tilted back up into calm and assuring, and he made the hand signs for ‘friend’ and ‘harmless’. He was not and would never be harmless, but he meant no harm to this little guppy, so the sign was true enough.
“You’re like me,” the songling said, her gaze darting over Shouta’s claws, to the long gills waving around his head, and down the length of his tail.
Shouta hummed an agreement, then curiosity. He signed ‘name’ at her, but she just stared at him. He tried again, this time with ‘you’ and ‘here’. The curious lilt of his song turned the words into questions along the lines of ‘who are you?’ and ‘where are we?’, but still the songling didn’t react.
“Why are you doing that?” She asked curiously, trying to copy the sign for ‘here’. “Are you catching something?”
Shouta’s heart sank. Fingerlings were taught to sign once they started to talk. It was the only way to communicate in a hunting frenzy, when half a dozen Voices sang so much magic into the water the whole ocean seemed to buzz even when Hizashi wasn’t one of them. The spoken language of Singers was mostly instinctive, like the call of dolphins or gulls. Singing was even more so, more like directly sharing emotions than communicating words. The elaborate hand signs they used to communicate in hunting frenzies were adapted from human sign languages, and tended to vary at least somewhat from pod to pod.
But every guppy raised in a Singer pod knew at least the concept of signing.
The foreboding feeling in Shouta’s chest grew larger and larger, like a void of ink from a startled squid. Had this guppy been raised by humans? Shouta knew of some humans who might be able to pull that off successfully – some of the more empathetic, hands-on members of the Musutafu Singer Outreach Facility – but nothing about the poachers that had captured him pointed to them knowing the first thing about raising a fingerling.
Shouta shook his head at the guppy, racking his brains to try and drag out what he knew about human mannerisms. They had a lot of the same facial expressions and upper body language, and Shouta had learned Japanese when he was a songling in the Yuuei pod himself, but not a lot of that was useful in communicating even basic questions like ‘where am I’ and ‘what’s going on’.
“I’m sorry,” the guppy whimpered, and Shouta’s attention snapped back to her as she shrank deeper into her man-made cave. “I don’t know your hand signs. I- I can learn, though, I promise! Please, please, I can learn!”
Hand signs? So she knew something about signing after all, but what had her so upset? Shouta hummed a gentle confusion and concern, starting to sign ‘safe’ but aborting it halfway through. He was just trying to figure out how to somehow comfort her when the lights built into the walls flashed red briefly and a shrill whistle cut through the water.
The songling jolted harshly, her gaze darting from Shouta to the water behind him. He realized that, in the course of their ‘conversation’ he’d managed to drift in front of the cave entrance, mostly cutting off the songling’s escape, and he hurried to correct that, easing back and to the side.
As soon as there was an opening, the songling took it, darting out of the cave and making for the surface. Shouta hesitated for a moment before following her. He needed to know what was going on, and watching the songling and the humans was the best way to do that.
The songling hesitated for only a second before breaching the surface, and Shouta, always attuned to songling Voices, could hear the faintest echo of terror from her Pearl. It made fury thrum through his own, but he paused briefly to completely silence his Voice before tentatively breaking out into the air.
Above the waterline there was a blue rubber artificial beach, and a human in a black wetsuit was standing on the beach, a plastic whistle in one hand and a bucket by their feet.