Chapter Text
Fin Shepherd
Fin Shepard pulled into a parking space at the Cape Canaveral Ikea. Popping the trunk, he retrieved the shark-proof stroller while Claudia disentangled baby Gil from his car seat.
Plopping her infant brother down in the heavily armored contrivance, she said, “You know dad, you really didn’t have to come with me just to pick out furniture.”
“Nonsense,” he said, “My daughter is moving out on her own for the first time. I’ll be damned if I don’t help her get set up in her new place with some decent furniture… and help her assemble it if I can.”
“Dad! I’m going off to work with grandpa in cutting-edge science at Astro-X. I think I can manage putting together some Ikea furniture on my own,” she teased.
“I was surprised when you announced you’d gotten a job with the Colonel after he got back from killing sharks on the moon, but I wanted to say that I am so proud of you, and that it totally makes sense that someone would hire an 18-year-old to do that for reasons other than nepotism.”
“Hey, it’s my best opportunity to work in advanced aerospace technology without needing to spend 10 years at college like some kind of nerd,” she explained. “Anyway, I’m a Shepard. Dealing with sharks is what we do! Even if we sometimes use bullshit-science-magic to do it.”
“Hell yeah! Semper Paratus,” shouted Vaughn, emerging from the car. The 18-year-old had short brown hair that had grown a little bit shaggy and wore jeans and 2 hoodies in spite of the Florida heat. Vaughn was technically a Brody but was a Shepard as far as sharks were concerned, as they had learned to smell and fear the family of Fin Shepard. (and also the writers probably couldn’t remember more than one last name in between the massive bong rips they took while writing the Sharknado series.)
Gil gurgled at seeing him as Fin took the stroller and began pushing it towards the store’s entrance. “I also wanted to say that I’m very grateful to you, Vaughn, for flying down here to lend a hand. You’ve been such a help with your cousin ever since your aunt April…” He trailed off. Gil began to cry as Fin stared off into the distance. “Would you two mind taking Gil inside? I forgot something in the car.” Claudia exchanged a look with Vaughn and wordlessly took the titanium stroller towards the Ikea’s sliding doors and the bustle of furniture-laden trolleys coming out and empty ones going back in.
Alone, Fin leaned on the side of the car, breathing heavily. His son was crying. He wanted to reach for him, to hold him in his arms, but all he could think about was that those arms should have belonged to April. The baby was crying for its mother, a mother who wasn’t there to hold him, who might never… No! He couldn’t think like that! His wife wasn’t dead; she was just in a coma. Soon she would… But what if she didn’t… “Get it together, Fin.” was all he growled before heading inside. His eyes were dry as it began to rain.
Vaughn
“Soft Toy, Blahaj, 55 cm baby shark,” the sign read, “All soft toys are good at hugging, comforting, and listening, and are fond of play and mischief.” Vaughn stared at the display of shark plushies as several conflicting emotions clouded his expression. It was hard feeling safe around any sort of shark after New York, despite the sign’s reassurance that they were “reliable and tested for safety.” Nevertheless, staring at them gave him a sense of yearning that he couldn’t quite place. Maybe he didn’t want to place it. It…it was probably nothing.
“Vaughn… Earth to Vaughn.” Vaughn realized that Claudia had been talking to him. “Do you think I should get this Dumheter?” she asked, gesturing at a nearby desk.
“Dum..te,” babbled Gil from the anti-shark-spike-covered stroller.
“No, the Dumtes are over in kitchens- they’ve been very popular,” said a passing employee. Her name tag said Maria, but her bushy red hair made her look a lot like Chappell Roan.
“Excuse me, do you work here?” Turning, they saw Florida Governor Don ReSantis glaring at the sign. “I see the length of these sharks is given in communist units. The c in cm stands for communism! I will have you know that this is America! I must speak to your manager at once about this insidious plot to destroy our freedoms!”
“I… uh… we…uh” stammered Maria.
Just then, Fin strode out on the showroom floor, and ReSantis turned to greet the shark-slaying celebrity “Mr. Shepherd. What a pleasant surprise. I never got the chance to properly thank you for saving Florida from the sharknados. The people of Florida will forever appreciate your heroism. What brings you to the sunshine state today?”
The employee took the Governor’s momentary distraction as an opportunity to slip away and deal with a less difficult customer interaction: intercepting a newly arrived shirtless man with a tattoo that said “I own three guns, two snakes, and one love” who was dragging an alligator with a matching tattoo away from the meatball display with a leash. As Vaughn looked closer, he realized that the Florida Man had an uncanny resemblance to Ally Beardsley.
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Governor,” said Fin without missing a beat, “I’m just here picking out some furniture with my daughter and nephew.” Vaughn attempted to sink further into his hoodie in the hopes that he would disappear. “What brings the governor to an Ikea?”
“I’m here to inspect the children’s play area. As governor, it is my responsibility to personally inspect all play areas in the state to ensure that they are free of any nefarious attempts to groom our children, “ ReSantis explained, “I have already confiscated several sets of crayons which could have potentially been used to draw rainbows or other pornography. This is the kind of proactive leadership needed to protect the public. Why, just today, those liberal scientists told me to declare a storm warning to try to get me to cause a panic.”
“It’s going to storm today?” asked Claudia, as all the Shepards glanced nervously at the ceiling, through which the drumming of rain could be faintly heard.
“Certainly not. They tried to make up some excuse that it was because of global warming, so I had them remove all references to temperature from their weather models. It revealed that there wasn’t going to be a storm today after all. Instead, the forecast was ‘ERROR, DATA MISSING.’”
Just then, the scent of a full diaper vented up from the stroller, as its fully functional life support system ensured that Gil received nothing but clean fresh air. Gil began to cry. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Governor, I… we need to deal with this,” Fin said, wrinkling his nose.
“What kind of man changes diapers?” scoffed ReSantis, “That’s a job for a woman! Your wife should…”.
“I’ll take him,” interrupted Vaughn, as a shadow passed over Fin’s face. He took the screaming infant’s Kevlar-reinforced stroller before the politician could get any further, “You and Claudia go and shop.”
Fin
“I’ll still need a dresser, a bedframe, and a set of drawers,” listed Claudia.
They were strolling along the showroom floor. The drum of the rain on the roof was muffled by an irate man in a Hawaiian shirt complaining about the confusing store layout to a beleaguered-looking employee.
“In that case I think we’ve gotten a bit turned around. We’re currently in the section for ready-to-assemble refrigerators,” replied Fin,
“Hmmmm…For best results, obtain either plot armor or a degree in electrical engineering,” read Claudia from the label on the side of a Köldmediumingårej.
“This stuff never ends up looking as good when you assemble it yourself as it does here in the show room,” mused Fin. “Not sure which direction we should head in to find the dressers. Too bad we don’t have your cousin and his sense of direction here with us.”
“Too bad you needed him to parent Gil. But then again, I guess someone has to.” replied Claudia, bitter sarcasm leaching into her voice.
Fin stopped walking, “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
After continuing to walk for another few moments, she stopped but didn’t turn around. “Oh, nothing. I guess history just tends to repeat itself, is all.”
“Look, could you just tell me what’s going on?” he asked, frustration creeping into his tone.
“You were never there when Matt and I were younger, even before the divorce. Your surfing career was always more important than parenting your kids. Mom was always stuck taking care of us while the great Fin Shepherd was off, god-knows-where, doing god-knows-what.” She had begun to raise her voice, “…or god-knows-who.”
“Claudia, I’m not one to deny that I haven’t always been a good father. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry I haven’t always been there for you. But I thought we’d worked through all of this after the first sharknado. I thought we agreed that, even though I can’t make up for the past, it’s enough that I’m here now.”
“Are you here now? You leave as soon as Mom’s hospital opens. You come back after it’s dark. The only time I really see you is when I go to visit Mom’s bedside. It’s just like it was before.” By this point, she was yelling, as an elderly couple in tank tops stared at them.
“Now, that’s not fair. This is completely different. Even you said that I’ve changed.” Said Fin, placatingly.
“You had changed. Ever since the sharknado in LA, I could see you and Mom making each other into better people. But now that she’s in a coma, it’s like you’ve gone back to how you used to be and stopped caring about your family.” Claudia turned around, and Fin saw tears streaming down her face. “You’re not the only one who is grieving!”
“Claudia. I’ve been spending so much time at your mom’s bedside because I care about my family. I’m sorry I haven’t been around for you more. I’ll try to do better at that. But your mom isn’t de- … isn’t gone. She’ll wake up any day now. I’m not going to grieve her as long as she still has a heartbeat. For now, it’s more important to protect everyone.”
“Not gone? WELL, MY MOM SURE ISN’T HERE RIGHT NOW!” she shouted, “And you’ve decided that that means you aren’t going to be here either. But I’m still here and I need you! Your son needs you! I can’t believe that you’ve mostly left Vaughn to raise him! On days when there isn’t a Sharknado, I don’t need Fin Sheppard the shark slayer, Order of the Golden Chainsaw. Right now I need my dad! It’s not like a shark is about to come crashing through the ceiling.”
Just then, a 15-foot hammerhead shark fell through the ceiling and engulfed the elderly couple in its toothy maw. Rain and gale-force winds swept in through the hole, scattering price tags and assembly brochures across the showroom. “We have to get to Gil, look for a weapon,” Fin shouted over the torrent as they crouched under a Ingömuntoja desk. Its label, before it had gotten swept up in the wind, had promised that it was impervious to shark attacks, but Fin didn’t have much confidence in its particle board and aluminum frame.
“I think we passed a floor model for their DIY chainsaw, but for now we have these,” replied Claudia, passing him a two-foot-long Allen wrench.
“I suppose it will have to do,” he said, hefting it, “follow me.”
Leaving the desk’s questionable security, they ran along the narrow path between the furniture and appliances. Wind tore at their hair as the lights flickered and sharks spun through the air around them.
“I don’t know which way to go?” shouted Claudia over the wind as they came to a fork in the path. “I think I remember coming from this direction, but it looks like there might be more power tools the other way.” The ground began to shake as the sharknado battered the building. “Now we could really use Vaughn’s sense of direction.”
“Maybe I can help,” said the employee they had passed earlier, as he and the man in the Hawaiian shirt emerged from beneath a table. His name tag identified him as Paul. “I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”
“We might have a bigger problem,” Fin pointed at a display of Blahaj as a cyclone tore through the ceiling, sucking its contents into the wind. The newly formed blahajnado bore down on them, along with several of the blahajs’ more aquatic brethren. “Look out!”
“Wait!” protested the man in the Hawaiian shirt, who had introduced himself as Sam. “Blahaj isn’t a real shark. They’re just stuffed animals, they can’t hurt you! Also, how are the sharks not suffocating in this tornado? None of this makes any sense!”
Everyone stopped and stared at him in utter incredulity: Fin, Claudia, the employee, and even the storm itself. Sharks hung motionless in the air, regarding him with fishy eyes and gaping mouths, gobsmacked at his audacity to say out loud something that was never meant to be uttered. The universe itself stood aghast. “You’re not supposed to think about it,” replied Fin. Then 10 sharks landed directly on top of Sam, and everything went back to the way it was supposed to be.
Paul was standing nearer the path of the storm and narrowly avoided being crushed by a flying chunk of 4th wall when several blahaj tackled him to the floor. Fin dodged out of the way as Claudia swung a nearby chair, deflecting the torrent of plushies. Unperturbed, the blue and white maelstrom spun away from them in the direction of the power tools.
“That’s the way back to the entrance,” pointed Paul as he rose to his feet. “Also, it sounds crazy in these circumstances, but I just realized that actually I’m a woman.” Ripping off her name tag, she hurled it into the mouth of an incoming leopard shark. “You hear that, shark?! My egg cracked! I don’t have to be Paul anymore. I’m Polly now!”
The pin from the name tag caught in the shark’s gills, and it fell to the floor dead.
“Nice to meet you, Polly. This is Allen,” replied Fin, swinging his oversized Allen wrench into the nose of a lemon shark and caving in its head.
“I won’t take your jokes sitting down dad,” said Claudia, jamming the chair down a shark’s throat.
“Wow, that one really bites.” Fin rolled his eyes as he used Allen to jam a shark’s mouth open while she beat it over the head with a lamp named Hajvisp. “But I think this is the last of them over here! We’ve gotta get to Gil. I think I saw a pack heading towards the dining area.”
Before they could move, the whole building shook, and the storm winds howled even louder. With a very expensive-sounding crash, the edge of a funnel cloud ripped through the ceiling, the floor, and everything else. The storm seemed to be all around them now as the floor lurched sideways and up.
“Hold on tight to whatever you can reach,” shouted Fin, as the storm lifted the building. “This Ikea is about to need some reassembly.”
Vaughn
After changing the dirty diaper, Vaughn sat down in the cafeteria to give Gil his bottle. While Vaughn was hungry too, something about the meatballs made him feel strangely uncomfortable.
“Come on kiddo, we both know you’re hungry.”
“Baba thbuuubt,” giggled Gil, sticking his tongue out and grabbing onto one of Vaughn’s fingers with his tiny, pudgy hand and refusing to let go.
“Oh- you got my finger! You grabbed right onto it like a crab! Are you a little crab?” teased Vaughn, wiggling his finger and eliciting more giggles. “Well, you were born in early July, so I suppose you are a Cancer. Are you a little Cancer? Are you my little Cancer?” He had always been interested in the zodiac, though this was more motivated by a curiosity about the lore and mythology rather than any belief in its predictive powers. However, he tried not to mention this interest much around others ever since his dad had told him that astrology was just for girls.
“Ca sa,” crooned Gil, letting go and waving his hands vaguely in the direction of Vaughn.
“No, I'm a Gemini. I was born in June. That’s just before you were born. You know, it would be cool if we named kids after their signs. Then I could be Gemini..." The thought gave him an unexpected warm glow before curdling, “Then again, it sounds like a girl’s name, so I probably couldn’t. Maybe I could name my kids like that, though.”
He had been surprised by how much he had been enjoying babysitting his cousin. It sort of made him want to have kids of his own someday. However, things were starting to get out of hand with how much he and Claudia had taken over caring for Gil. Gil had even called him “dada” a couple of times, which made him feel intensely uncomfortable for more reasons than he could put his finger on.
Dad had asked him to come down to Orlando to help his cousins and uncle Fin after aunt April got crushed by that shark. The babysitting had started naturally enough. Fin and Claudia needed to spend time with April at the hospital, and the coma ward of the ICU was no place for a newborn. Vaughn was ok with staying to take care of Gil at the rental house so that they could go and do that.
But, as the months passed, Fin continued to spend most days by her bedside even as everyone else had started visiting in shifts. Even when he came back to the rental, he barely looked at Gil. He’d occasionally change a diaper or give him his bottle, but as soon as Gil started crying, Fin would hand him off to Vaughn. He wasn’t rude about it; he was always saying, “I appreciate you so much, dude. You’re the man!” It always hurt for some reason. To Uncle Fin’s credit, he had insisted he be the one to stay up whenever Gil wouldn’t sleep because, as he had said, it wasn’t like he was going to be getting much sleep anyway.
Vaughn’s thoughts were cut short as Maria, the Chappell Roan-looking employee from earlier, walked out into the cafeteria carrying a steaming tray, “Who ordered the meatballs? They’re hot to go?”
Any answer to this was drowned out by a distant scream and the smell of sharks. Vaughn leapt to his feet. Gil balanced on his hip. He needed to find the stroller! The protection of its explosive-reactive armor was the five-month-old’s best hope of survival. He had left it right next to their table, but it wasn’t there anymore. Looking around, Vaughn spotted several incoming blahajs and other sharks and, off in the distance, the Florida man was pushing his alligator in the carbon nanofiber-reinforced stroller. Though the regular sharks were bad enough by themselves, something especially terrified him about the sight of the blahajs. It felt as if a great wave of cold and inescapable reality was rolling towards him like the charged air before a stormfront, and he felt absolutely desperate to avoid it.
Cursing the stroller thief under his breath, Vaughn set his cousin down on their table, grabbed the tray of meatballs out of Maria’s hands, and began pitching them at the sharks like he was back at Citi Field, each toss landing squarely in a shark’s mouth.
“Not my balls!” exclaimed a nearby table’s occupant, a tanned surfer bro.
While Vaughn couldn’t see anything to use as a weapon, at least his dad had taught him baseball.
“We can talk about your balls later. Right now, the sharks are hungry,” explained Vaughn in between throws, “if the sharks aren’t hungry, then they might leave us alone.”
However, there were too many hungry sharks and not enough balls.
Around them, the air began to fill with screams as diners were devoured. “I bet they’ll be satisfied by my wiener!” shouted the surfer, chucking a hot dog into the mouth of a passing tiger shark. This failed to stop it from biting a nearby Floridian in half.
“I guess your wiener isn’t as satisfying as you thought,” replied Maria, while cocking an eyebrow. “In my experience, they usually aren’t.” Another shark careened into the grocery section and crashed into a display of bottled red lingonberry juice. The food did not seem to distract the blahajs from their quest to create mayhem and mischief.
In the midst of this chaos, the Florida man was agitatedly using a Dumheter assembly manual to set up lines of a new drug called shark salts, which was supposedly made out of sharks, on the checkout counter. Perhaps incensed by this treatment of its brethren, a blahaj nailed him in the middle of his bare chest and bounced onto the floor. Looking down at it, he paused for a moment before addressing his alligator, which had crawled onto the floor to gnaw on a shark plushy.
“I just realized something! All my life, I pretended I was a Florida man, but I was lying to myself. This whole time, I was a Florida enby!” They paused to inhale a line of shark salts, “snort … And so can you!” With that, they triumphantly began to swing their alligator by the tail, knocking mako and thresher sharks left and right while belting Friday by Rebecca Black and publicly urinating.
Momentarily distracted by… whatever that was, Vaughn failed to see the great white until it was too late to do anything other than dive out of the way.
“This isn’t what I meant when I said I wanted to shred!” screamed the surfer dude as he disappeared down its gullet. The 18-foot slab of fish barreled through the dining area, bulldozing tables, chairs, and booths before sliding into the market and impaling itself on broken glass. The tabletop that Gil had been placed on went flying like a frisbee, baby and all.
Vaughn pulled himself to his feet. Where was Gil? He hadn’t seen where the table went! Suddenly, from the wreckage of the market, he heard a baby wail with all the intensity that its tiny lungs could muster. Vaughn sprinted towards the sound in a panic and almost immediately slipped on a puddle of elderflower syrup. He fell directly on his butt. Cursing as he rose to his feet for the second time in 15 seconds, he grabbed a broken bottle and proceeded more carefully. Many shelves were standing, but many more were crushed or tipped over, their contents spread on the floor. The floor was covered in broken glass, shark blood, and miscellaneous Swedish food. A crimson version of his reflection looked back up at him. Even through the gore, there was wrongness in his features, and his gaze quickly skated over it as he scanned the mess for his cousin.
The sharks seemed to have mostly let up by the time he found Gil screaming at the center of a spreading puddle of red next to the body of the great white.
“Oh no, oh god no!” The broken bottle dropped from Vaughn’s hand, and his breath caught in his throat as his eyes filled with tears. He was too late. He had let his guard down and now his baby cousin was …. Wait a second, that wasn’t blood. Bending down, Vaughn wiped a finger across Gil’s scarlet forehead and put it to his tongue. “Oh, thank god, lingonberry juice!” He straightened up and put his hands on his hips, “Well, little guy, let’s go get you cleaned up.”
Suddenly, Vaughn heard a continuous, rushing crash in the distance. The building began to shake violently, and he had to focus all of his attention on not toppling over. It was during this moment of distraction that a blahaj came out of nowhere, clocking him directly in the face.
His flat-packed soul’s packaging tore asunder from within. The stubborn staples, tape, and cardboard finally gave way, and their contents burst forth at last, visible and undeniable. He suddenly realized why life had hurt so badly as his feet finally lost their grip on the juice concentrate-soaked floor. Memories of the fall would always seem like they occurred in slow motion. There was surprise, there was fear, there was tenderness, but the overwhelming sensation was relief. The lie had been so heavy that he felt weightless in this moment now that he had set it down. However, deeper and more enduring than this was the euphoria. For the first time, he knew who he… no, who she was.
Then her head hit the floor with a crack, and everything went black.