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Recent research suggests that lobsters may not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters...It has been argued that lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, and some scientists have claimed that they could effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc...
~
There is the story of a team, of five people working together to protect a planet that could never be ready for the interventions of, attacks from, and other miscellaneous encounters with their more-advanced neighbors. They tended to fuck things up more than fix it, for the most part, but somehow they still managed to keep our planet relatively unscathed (and then proceeded to fuck each other silly whenever the world wasn't threatening to end).
Unfortunately—or not, as the case might be—this is not that story. Rather, this is the story of a lobster.
More specifically, this is the story of a lobster that could not die.
(For the record, scientifically speaking, this lobster could die. He simply had problems staying dead long enough for it to count. Many was the time he had woken up on a platter, blinking and wiggling his eyestalks, moments before some hapless human was about to stab him with their knives and forks. In the ensuing melee his revival caused, this lobster might find a way to stagger to safety, or he might be caught and killed and boiled again and the process would repeat itself. Needless to say, the lobster had been doing this for a very long time before we meet him in this tale, but as most of these incidents occurred in his much-younger days we will not dwell on it for long here.)
This lobster called himself Jacrustacean Hardshell. Not that this was his real name—few alive knew what name this particular lobster had been born with, or which part of the sea he had come from originally. All that was known of him in current (yes, current) times was that he had mysteriously appeared in the warm waters of the Bermuda Triangle one day, spouting some nonsense about a special Dogfish and his magical coral that could take the fish swimming through it to any part of the ocean in the blink of an eye (that is, if fish could blink). Such nonsense floated through the waves and caught the attention of a certain hammerhead called Emily and a guppy named Alice, and together they captured the lobster and (after a period of interrogation involving a lobster-fryer that proved Jacrustacean's longevity beyond a doubt) convinced him to work for them—and ultimately work for their agency, known to the fish in that part of the sea as Sharkreef, which dealt with the supernatural-like mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, mysteries that usually wound up affecting life both above and below the ocean's surface. It wasn't an easy life for any of the fish who worked for Sharkreef—it was downright dangerous, in fact, and fish rarely lasted half their normal lifespans on the job—but it kept Jacrustacean out of trouble, and that was more than anyone could really ask for.
Jacrustacean was a part of Sharkreef for longer than even the oldest sea turtle could remember: first as a freelancing agent, then as leader after Sharkreef's current leader killed the rest of Jacrustacean's team members by poisoning their plankton. That left Jacrustacean alone in Sharkreef, alone in the half-rotted belly of a sunken ship that served as Sharkreef's headquarters (he had dubbed it "the Hull," and over the years the name had taken over, much like the barnacles and seaweed that clung to the outside and provided a cloak of near-invisibility over the entrance), and that left the lobster to rebuild his team from the bottom shrimp up.
This Jacrustacean did, and with relative efficiency for a lobster. He called in a few favors with a tiger shark he had once met on his travels, and Susharkie was more than happy to agree as long as there was fresh blood to be had. Then Jacrustacean met a hermit crab still mourning for the death of its mate, and Clawen's knowledge of the healing properties of seaweed made him a powerful asset to the team (when he wasn't trying to snap off everyone's heads with his powerful, name-worthy pincers). And when Susharkie heard the seaweed gossip of a brilliant starfish who had built a functional waterwheel entirely out of driftwood and other rubbish, Jacrustacean left the Hull one morning and returned that evening with said starfish in tow. Tostarfishiko (Jacrustacean liked to shorten her name to Toaster, which she didn't seem to mind, or at least she never voiced a complaint) was indeed brilliant, but also very quiet; she kept mostly to herself, filtering water in her own dark corner of the Hull and watching from the shadows as Susharkie and Clawen snapped at each other, while Jacrustacen looked on them all from the remains of the upper deck with some small amount of lobster pride.
And then Jacrustacean met Iantobster.
Technically, Jacrustacean met Myfanstingray first. The strange and exotic creature had swooped into the Bermuda Triangle, lost and confused and somehow displaced from the rest of her kind still in the Caribbean Sea; Iantobster had been following her progress and had run into Jacrustacean entirely on accident. Or so it had seemed at the time: Jacrustacean soon learned that the whole thing had been arranged by Iantobster, who was desperate to save his crawfish girlfriend from impending calcification in the salty waters of Bermuda. But by the time the truth came out, the crawfish was dead, Myfanstingray had made herself at home in the broken rafters that blocked the sunlight filtering in through the ocean's surface, and Jacrustacean (not, it must be noted, for the first time) had fallen in love with the quietly-determined lobster who brought him his daily seashell full of briny plankton.
(It is worth mentioning now that Jacrustacean, being from a different part of the ocean entirely, had a much more, shall we say, open mindset than the other fish in the warm waters of the Triangle when it came to his sexual preferences. As a general rule, if it was alive and could swim, it was open game for his seductive lobster-y dance, a mesmerizing pattern of flashing his bright-red tail and clacking his admittedly-impressive mandibles that never failed to make his target swoon with delight into his waiting claws.
But when it came to deeper relationships of the heart, Jacrustacean was no bottom feeder. Few were the fish he chose to spend his life with: he had once married a local angelfish, only to have her leave him for calmer waters when Sharkreef's activities proved to be too risky for domestic seafloor life; and a certain seahorse bragged of spending two weeks trapped with Jacrustacean inside a whirlpool, though the constant centrifugal action made the time seem more like five years. That seahorse, however, was a proven liar and had murdered an oyster for her pearls to boot, so no one really knew if the story was true—but still the fact remained that no one had affected Jacrustacean quite like Iantobster had, and that was that.)
Given Sharkreef's track record, it actually took longer than expected for the new team to fall apart. Susharkie started making night raids on the schools of fish that frequented the Triangle; when she was caught out by an intrepid clownfish that just wouldn't go away, she sacrificed herself on the rotors of a passing motorboad, and Jacrustacean resignedly asked the little fish (who went by the name of Gilly) to fill Susharkie's wake. On Gilly's very first day, she had to deal with a female squid that inexplicably shot clouds of aphrodisiac ink at its attackers—aphrodesiac ink that worked on any sex of fish, much to Gilly's mortification and Jacrustacean's obvious amusement. But the squid moved on, and so did Sharkreef, and after a few bumps in the waves Gilly came to fit in relatively well with her new sea friends.
And then Tostarfishiko came across a pendant from a drowned corpse that allowed her to read her friends' thoughts, and then Clawen fell madly in love with a passing sea turtle and was heartbroken when she chose to move on with her migration and leave him behind, and then Jacrustacean disappeared one morning and returned two weeks later and none of the other fish pretended to notice that he even existed (though Iantobster was much less quiet upon his boss' return, and his eyestalks wiggled with a definite confidence whenever Jacrustacean wandered past him), and then there was that thing with the lost whale and the other thing with the sea leech that no one could quite remember what happened exactly, and then Clawen accidentally speared himself on a rusted fish hook and died, and then Jacrustacean brought Clawen back to life, and then Clawen discovered that he was now miraculously able to understand and control all the sea slugs in the vicinity, and then Jacrustacean's crazed lobster brother (caught by humans and kept in a Florida aquarium until he was driven mad) swam into the Triangle with the aforementioned seahorse and revenge on his mind, and then Clawen died (again) and Tostarfishiko died (for the first and, unfortunately, only time), and then, and then—
—and then a seafood supplier (Frobisher Fishers, We Deliver Fish Fresher!) found its way into the Triangle and started taking the youngest of the fish for its client restaurants to serve as delicacies, which was how Jacrustacean and Iantobster found themselves in the lobster tank of a high-end Miami seafood joint ('456,' because apparently naming one's restaurant with the most random collection of alphanumerics was the only way to be considered true nouveau French), and Iantobster was already dying because the bastards had decided to filter out the tank with freshwater instead of sea.
"We've got to get you out of here." Jacrustacean's antennae flailed wildly. "I can survive anything, but you can't!"
But Iantobster shook his mandible, resigned. "It's too late. I breathed the water."
"But there's got to be something—"
A human fingertip tapped dully from the other side of the glass. "Daddy!" a little girl called. "Daddy, what're they doing? I thought you said they were gettin' ready to fight!"
A beat later, Iantobster crumpled.
"No! Nononono—" Jacrustacean scooped up an unresponsive Iantobster in his claws. "Iantobster!"
"I love you."
"Don't. Iantobster—" Iantobster began to shudder, curled in on himself even more. "Iantobster, stay with me!"
"Hey." Iantobster's eyestalks waved feebly. "It was—good, yeah?"
Jacrustacean could only nod.
"Don't forget me."
If lobsters could cry, Jacrustacean would have been shedding enough tears to float Cuba. "Never could."
Iantobster just shook his head. "In a thousand years, you won't remember me."
"I will. Iantobster, I promise, I will—Iantobster!"
But Iantobster was already gone.
"Daddy!" The little girl shrieked. "Daddy, look! They're dying—ew, I think this one's gonna eat the dead one now!"
But Jacrustacean pressed his maxillae to Iantobster's for the briefest of moments before he, too, succumbed to the warm embrace of death.
When his vision came back, he was back in the ocean (456 had been considerate enough to dump the dead lobsters into the sea via the seashore restaurant's back window instead of through the toilet), Gilly was crying over Iantobster's body, and Jacrustacean was once again alone.
Or so he thought, until Iantobster suddenly twitched and uncurled himself. "Well," he said, a little hoarse but seemingly as normal as if he had never died, "that was—interesting." Iantobster flapped his tail and waggled his eyestalks, testing them. "It would seem that your immortality is infectious through certain methods, Jacrustacean."
"Atlantis help us all," Gilly said faintly, and Jacrustacean would have agreed if Iantobster hadn't lunged for him right then and there and proceeded to suck Jacrustacean's mandibles off.
And then Gilly got caught by the aforementioned Frobisher Fishers, and then Jacrustacean and Iantobster helped Gilly organize the other trapped fish to swim downward and snap the net and break free, and then Gilly decided to swim off with her clownfish boyfriend so that they could finally lay eggs together, and then Jacrustacean and Iantobster swam off together themselves for a well-deserved vacation ("Honeymoon."
"That's only if we're married, Jacrustacean."
"Who says we're not?") away from the Triangle, and on that vacation they made friends with a pufferfish named Alonso who used to be the pet of the first mate on a cruise ship, and as it turned out Alonso had no problems with either lobsters or threeways, and that was how Jacrustacean and Iantobster wound up living happily ever after—or as happily as two near-immortal lobsters could ever be.
Until Jacrustacean got himself pregnant. But that's another story.
~
Meanwhile, somewhere in the English Channel, at an indeterminate point in time...
The female sturgeon swam into the coral reef, stopped near the entrance, and gawked. "Atlantis," she said, awed. "It's bigger on the inside!"
"Of course it is!" Her host, a piked dogfish with a grin a mile wide that for some reason didn't seem as feral as one thought it would be, was nearly doing backflips in his excitement. "And she goes everywhere! Everywhere, any time. Just name the part of the ocean, a date, and we'll be off! That is, if you want to be off."
"What, you crazy?" The sturgeon flipped her tail at him and swam closer. "Course I'm coming. When do we start, Dogfish?"
"Whenever you want, Rosturgeon." The Dogfish's grin spread even wider. "It's time to swim!"