Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hammerhead knew he probably wasn’t the best parent out there in the world. He wasn’t winning any parent of the year awards. He didn’t have any ‘Best Dad Ever’ mugs. But he wasn’t the worst parent either. There was responsibility in admitting one’s own faults! It showed signs of maturity, and wisdom. It made him a good role model, despite what the haters said. And there were a lot of haters who didn’t like Hammerhead, and made jabs about his kids because they couldn’t get to him any other way. Hammerhead normally wouldn’t stand for slander against his kids, but the vast majority of people who had something to say about his parenting usually weren’t prime examples of parents either. 

Acker from two docks down with his rust bucket contraption had kids missing teeth because he refused to get them dental care. Hammerhead’s kids had a wide selection of toothbrushes and floss and toothpaste to pick from the assortment they stole from the ships they raided. Lady Margo in the center of the maze of stalls that sold anything from goods to actual junk could never confidently tell anyone where her kids were at any given moment. Hammerhead more or less knew where each of his kids were at any given moment, and if they went silent for too long he always went about tracking them down, or he sent someone after them. And where Scurvy Stan never knew anything about his kids, and couldn’t even tell you their names without messing it up, Hammerhead knew what his kids liked and he certainly knew their names. 

The other pirate parents hemmed and hawed, disguising their jealousy over the Dark Orca by criticizing anything they could find. But above anyone else, Hammerhead could practically hear the Nekton parents commenting on his parenting style. Though, they’d never actually said anything. But he could imagine all the things they would say, with their superior parenting with their two behaved kids and their shiny and technologically superior submarine. Or maybe he was just projecting on them due to all the comments from his mother in law that he was forced to see once a year on Christmas when he took the kids to see their mother’s side of the family.

Hammerhead always grumbled at the thought of his mother in law. Though, technically, he supposed she wasn’t his mother in law anymore. Someone was only an in law through marriage, and Hammerhead’s love was gone now. 

Whether she was technically his mother in law or not anymore, she was a spiteful woman, and half of the reason Hammerhead had gone after the Dark Orca all those years ago. Her lovely, pleasant, banned-from-multiple-bars daughter and their two children had been the other half. Hammerhead’s mother in law had never liked Hammerhead, and she always insisted he didn't know the first thing about raising children. Which was entirely false. Hammerhead knew kids! He knew that they were messy. Kids were loud, and especially stubborn when they were teenagers. They didn’t like cleaning their rooms, and they complained when you tried to send them to bed when they wanted to do something else, whining about pickpocketing just one more idiot with his wallet in his back pocket! They were bottomless pits, eating anything and everything like mini whirlpools, and would get sick of something as soon as you produced it in bulk. 

Hammerhead wasn’t like the Nektons. He didn’t have someone to help him with the kids, someone to tap out with when the teenage angst and the early onset of puberty hormones kicked in and became too much. Hammerhead was going at it solo, aside from the crew’s various unhelpful recommendations and Danny Boy’s this-and-that about what his sister did with her kids. Hammerhead wasn’t Danny Boy’s sister, he wasn’t Acker or Lady Margo or Scurvy Stan. He wasn’t the Nektons, and he wasn’t his mother in law. 

And he wasn’t the worst parent in the world! He was teaching his kids valuable life skills! Piracy was a hard business to run nowadays, possibly the hardest of them all! There were little laws, and no one to enforce them. The government had their fingers in nearly every corner of the world, meaning that running a business somewhere where they weren’t was hard to do. And that was if you got away without some smooth paper-pusher wearing a fresh set of worn-down clothes like it made them fit in, poking their nose into places they weren’t wanted. 

Hammerhead didn’t care for the government. He was a pirate, it was part of the job. He also didn’t care for capitalism. He didn’t care for politics much either. Why should he? No ones politics really affected him. He belonged to no country, the ocean his home and sandbox to play and plunder in. He didn’t know where in the world his ancestors came from, though his dear Madeline had been yapping about something called a genealogy test to see if she was related to any of the great pirates whose names she taped to stolen posters so she could have her actual idols on her bedroom wall. Hammerhead didn’t know where she learned about it, and he didn’t know why she cared. The Dark Orca pirate family was one of the greats. Why bother saying you were related to someone great in the past, when you could be that great person in the present?

But capitalism? That did affect Hammerhead, even though as a pirate he himself didn’t partake in it. Capitalism claimed to give people the rights to own their own things, when all it did was take opportunity after opportunity from the pirates who worked hard to make a living. It felt like everything was capitalized nowadays, everything had somebodies name on it. Nothing was free for the taking anymore, even though as a pirate, that should mean that everything regardless of who it belonged to should be Hammerhead’s for the taking. But capitalism took the joy out of taking something unclaimed. It took the fun out of stealing something from someone and feeling like you’d worked hard to get it when they just complained about the law afterwards. It made it feel like you weren’t the first to claim something. Capitalism was taking over the world, the old days of trade and workmanship becoming a distant memory.

Those were the skills Hammerhead was trying to teach his children. Nobody understood the intricacies of Piracy anymore. All the new kids on the block didn’t know what the older pirates put into it, what it had taken to be a pirate back in the day. You needed to feel the sea, the rush of adrenaline in a job gone south or right. The feeling of stealing something that no one else had been able to, and getting to it first. The feeling of accomplishment, of victory! All the younger pirates nowadays cared about was baseless scheming and stealing. There was no skin in their game. There was no care for the delicacy of Piracy, there was no repartee in their interactions with one another. 

The utter hooligans that were roaming the seas now treated being a pirate like they were sticking a middle finger to the law. Like it was a joke. Like it was their way of saying they were different, they were oh so bad. Like there wasn’t culture to it. Piracy was more than just a way to stick it to any law-enforcement of any time. Piracy was a business, it was an art, one that Hammerhead would not stand to see any teenage delinquent put a smear on just because they thought they were special or making a point by being a bad guy. 

Hammerhead’s children were going to be proper pirates. Not like those idiots that had started popping up in the last decade or so, sauntering around with the stuff they stole, boasting about the jobs they did. Pulling stupid, pointless stunts that bordered on being little more than bad pranks, done all just because it ruined someone’s day. They were all bark and little bite, floundering when someone who’d been on the block for a couple decades like Hammerhead crowded up in their space. They liked to act tough, using cheap tricks and shortcuts to pull things off. 

That wasn’t to say that Piracy wasn’t made of underhanded jabs. But you had to work for your score, you had to build your reputation from scratch. These new pirates had it all handed to them, hardly putting any effort into what they felt they were owed just because they called themselves pirates. Where was the class? Where was the wondering of how they’d pulled something off? Where was the intrigue when they showed up, picking through the stories that followed them to see what was a rumor or real? What happened to the technique? To the trademark they’d leave behind to let other pirates know it was them? What happened to the mystery that followed a crew like the capes made of rumors and second-hand accounts that they wore like their own military badges of honor? What happened to the cleverness in their dirty tricks, the brilliance of pulling them off? It was all but gone in the face of the new generation of pirates who were nothing more than second-hand criminals that called themselves something they weren’t.

Well, Hammerhead’s kids weren’t going to be like that. They were going to be pirates that made their way to the top the good old fashioned way. Hammerhead wouldn’t allow any sort of shortcuts when it came to building their portfolio. His dear Finn and Madeline would be taught the skills needed to steal anything they wanted, from trinkets to expensive equipment to the treasure of their wildest dreams. Even when they used technology, as it was virtually inescapable these days, they would have those skills to fall back on. Lock picking, repartee, sneaking, pocket-picking, they’d know it all. They’d have the know-how to steal any of the taken-by-chance equipment that their so-called competition flaunted like they even earned it in the first place. And the Floating Market was the perfect place to teach them from a young age the ins and outs of being a good pirate. 

The Floating Market was a respectable business place. Filled with pirates and traders of questionable goods, keepers of information like Dolos who weren’t afraid to stick their fingers in places people without a sense of risk wouldn’t think to go to. And all just to learn something that the good people of the Floating Market and Piracy trade would love to know. The newcomers would show up, sticking out like a lighthouse on a dark night with how they carried themselves, trying too hard to act like they fit in. The stalls that made up a thriving community, filled with highly-sought out business men and women like Dolos, each with a plethora of clients. The pirate crews haggling over the wares that they sold and bought as a way to make quick money and show off their skill by showing off what they stole, and the newcomers gaining their footing as they took their first dives into the deep end of the pirate trade. 

The Floating Market was where the professionals went. Where they sold their goods and hard-earned wares to each other, free from the eyes of the World Ocean’s Authorities. It was left unsaid amongst the piers that the World Ocean’s Authorities knew of their existence, but the Floating Market was off the grid, and moved so much in the past that the World Ocean’s Authorities gave up on pinning them down. It was almost neutral ground now, or a safe zone that the pirates could go to avoid the authorities. The World Ocean’s Authorities didn’t bother them there, leaving the business they produced there alone. Sometimes they’d even sneak agents in, not to dismantle it but to meet up with the unsavory folk needed to help with something, or to find out information they couldn’t find anywhere else. 

Not just anyone knew where the Floating Market was though, only those welcomed or invited in given that knowledge. Those who had been in the trade long enough that the Floating Market was made known to them. And those esteemed guests who were in no way members of the community, but were respectful enough about the unspoken rules of the Floating Market that no one batted an eye when they appeared. Like the Nekton family. 

Hammerhead didn’t know how the Nektons knew about the Floating Market. They were too goody goody to come across it by chance, and it always made Hammerhead feel odd to think that they purposefully sought it out. That they went out of their way to go into this place of piracy and shady dealings, of illegally obtained knowledge. Hammerhead knew there were a number of crews on the docks who didn’t believe they were the actual Nektons, their reputation as environmental nuts and animal lovers painting a specific picture of what people assumed they were like. Hammerhead himself had thought the same once upon a time, until he actually met them and realized they had what it took to handle themselves at the Floating Market. 

Apparently Will and Kaiko had known of the market for quite a while before their recent, and frequent, expeditions to its docks. If what Dolos had muttered under his breath was to be believed, they’d visited it a few times before in the past. Hammerhead supposed either Dolos or the World Ocean’s Authorities tipped them off. Dolos had been an old college acquaintance of Kaiko and Will’s, though it was clear the affection wasn’t there anymore, and Hammerhead wondered if it had ever been at all. And Kaiko had been under the World Ocean’s Authorities employment some time ago, and quite a favored employee too apparently. Hammerhead wondered what she did to stop working under them anymore, yet still remain in their favor.

But regardless of how they learned of both its existence and location, the Nektons had the decency to not blab its exact coordinates to everyone they came across. And whenever they appeared, they held their own well enough on the Floating Market’s docks. Hammerhead could respect the grit that the Nektons had in spades, and the way they handled themselves in the presence of the pirates and assorted folk that inhabited the Floating Market. If Hammerhead didn’t know any better, there had been a few moments where he would have almost believed they were pirates themselves with how they handled themselves. 

But the world of piracy was cutthroat. You didn’t last long in it with compassion or decency. Something else that the Nektons had in great amounts. In piracy, your focus was your crew and captain first, and yourself second. Sometimes the other way around depending on the crew or captain. You got far in piracy with debts. With favors thrust onto others that you held over their heads to get them to do what you wanted. With getting your hands dirty and making sure you were the first to get to something over anyone else. You got far by stealing from others, because if it was so easy to steal, than they didn’t care about it that much. 

That was what Hammerhead’s father told him. Stealing things wasn’t just how the people at the bottom of the food chain survived when their government failed them; it showed your talent. Stealing things that were hard to get showed off your skill and competency on a job. It made your own life easier, but also set a reputation for yourself. Made people second guess going against you, and made them consider dealing with you. 

Most pirates got into the Floating Market to browse. A once in a lifetime opportunity for a small few. Others worked their way in as sellers instead of buyers, lacking the guts to brave the open ocean but equipped with the sharp tongue needed to battle bargain hunters. But few were there through generational occupation. Through the legacies their parents set the barebones of, that they would twist and make into their own, and so on and so forth with their children and their children’s children. 

Hammerhead himself and the Dark Orca were two of those select few pirate crews. Hammerhead’s family had been in the depths of the Floating market for three generations now, Hammerhead himself number three. His grandfather was the first in his family to be welcomed as a proper member of the Floating Market. His father had been a mighty good pirate as well, teaching Hammerhead all the things he himself had vowed to teach Finn and Madeline.

In fact, he’d been so good of a pirate that it had been hard for Hammerhead to separate himself from his father’s image. Hammerhead had always only ever been referred to as ‘Captain Reuben’s son’, with the name he was given before he chose Hammerhead tacked on as well. After Hammerhead had started insisting that people call him Captain Hammerhead, a fresh captain of his own submarine with his beautiful love at his side, a bit of independence had been established. But it had taken claiming the Dark Orca as his own submarine to get people to truly stop referring to him as ‘son of’ and rather ‘Captain Hammerhead’ alone. 

But while Hammerhead’s family had been at the Floating Market for a while now, the Dark Orca had been around even longer. She wasn’t always in Hammerhead’s family, Hammerhead himself the one to steal it. The Dark Orca’s prior owners had been fending off generations of whimsical dreamers who dared to think that they had a chance to steal her from her captains. At least until Hammerhead had come along. 

Hammerhead’s submarine had just sank, a problem with the hull causing it to rupture, taking the love of his life and half his crew with it. His children and surviving crew had been left with his mother in law, who’d told Hammerhead if he didn’t produce a submarine come the end of the week, she’d take them and refuse to let him see them ever again. But Hammerhead had been filled with a promise to watch his and his sea jewel’s children, fresh off the grief of losing the only home they’d known and the woman he’d loved. And the Dark Orca was nearby. 

He’d tracked the Dark Orca and her past crew down, and stormed it solo early into the night. Come the next morning, he’d had the helm, and the Dark Orca was his. The crew was evicted to the nearby shores, and Hammerhead went to pick up his children and surviving crew in their new submarine. His mother in law had spluttered and spat as he loaded them onto the Dark Orca, refusing to believe he’d accomplished something like stealing one of the pirate submarines in existence as his own ship. Hammerhead had given her a few rude gestures before they left, and she’d called him a few rude names in return. The Dark Orca was a formidable pirates submarine, and it was that night he stole her for his own and showed up to the Floating Market as her captain that Hammerhead was separated from his father at last, allowing the name he’d chosen for himself to be truly made known with the first of many tales. 

It was this that Hammerhead wanted to pass on to his children. The Dark Orca’s mantle was sure to pass to them, Hammerhead couldn’t see anything else happening to his dear ship. The thought of the Dark Orca in someone else’s hands made him queasy, and he’d spend hours stroking the old fashioned wheel in the helm to remind himself that it was his family and crew that ran her now. He’d spent hours taking her, and he wasn’t going to let her go so easily. 

So Hammerhead made it his goal to teach his children everything they needed to know about being pirates. Everything they’d need to know to deal with those ungrateful and inconsiderate scoundrels who called themselves pirates because some fancy tricks and equipment made it easy for them to live the life others worked so hard to set the foundation for. He would teach his children everything they’d need to know to defend the Dark Orca from anyone who dared try to take her. 

His wonderful son, his first mate Smiling Finn, was more reluctant than eager. Hammerhead didn’t understand why, pirating was in their families blood, for so many generations that there was no other record of any other occupation in either side of their family. He was sure that Finn would come around eventually. Teenagers were always filled with self-imposed drama and doubts. A bit of growing would do the boy some good. There was so much ocean to uncover, surely he’d find something that would pique his interest. 

His little Madeline was the opposite of her brother, always excited for new lessons. Eager to learn new pirating skills, applying them in her own ways that made Hammerhead swell with pride. She was a ferocious little piranha, hungry for gold and riches, always the first to leap at the chance to steal something. Hammerhead supposed that if Finn chose to not become Captain, instead happy with being a regular crew member, that Madeline would be more than capable of being Captain of the Dark Orca. 

Hammerhead ignored the talk from other, lower pirates, that a woman shouldn’t be Captain. He didn’t understand why some of the male pirates seemed to think women couldn’t be pirates. Women made great pirates, hagglers all their own and on a whole different level then men. His wonderful love had been a spitfire of a pirate, going so far as to persuade Hammerhead in that foxy way of hers that he couldn’t resist to bring their old submarine close to land so that she could raid the stores there for groceries and her crafts. Hammerhead would be waiting in the helm, far from shore, and a rowboat containing his gleeful love cackling like the mad woman that she was would come rowing by, the little boat packed with her treasures that she stole from the shelves under the noses of underpaid employees. 

Hammerhead worked hard to teach his children the things they needed to know about being proper pirates. But he didn’t like to admit that he was probably not the best in any other aspect of parenting. His lady love, whom he had always recited bad poetry to on every anniversary and would have stolen the stars for if she’d so asked, had always told him he needed to be more gentle with their kids. She’d always made the best out of anything. She could whip up a five course meal from practically nothing, and the meals she’d made with stolen groceries were even better. Their old submarine had been smaller, but she’d made it into something that the other pirate crews were envious of. She loved arts and crafts, creating the most elaborate birthday parties for their children, treating them like royalty on their special days. 

She was a catch. She was gorgeous and everyone had known it. Hammerhead had to fight off so many jealous suitors while they dated, and he’d had to fight off even more just for the chance to speak to her. She always did her hair up in curls and jewels, adorned in jewelry around her neck and wrists and fingers, and Hammerhead had gone to great lengths to steal only the finest for her to wear. He had her jewelry box still with all of her jewels and accessories. He’d had it and its contents restored to its former glory years ago, by the best from the deeper parts of the Floating Market. He’d visited constantly while the woman did her work, making sure to see the progress she made and to make sure she wasn’t stashing any of it for herself. He’d counted three times to make sure that not a single piece was missing when he got the box back, and he was waiting until their children were a little older to gift it to them. 

Hammerhead’s love had always told him that he needed to use his words more, though, when it came to their children. That no one could read minds. His dear wife was always better at the kid stuff. She’d always known what to say to them when they were upset. Hammerhead always found her cuddling them to sleep in their bed, a book of sea monsters left open near them as all three of them snored up a ruckus. She didn’t shy away from the messy things, rolling up her sleeves and taking off her jewelry to get down and dirty about anything. She’d sing like an angel, like Hammerhead’s personal siren with her raspy voice and swinging in the kitchen. 

Her loss had hit hard for all of them. The crew and Hammerhead tended to fight often without her stern lecturing in the door making them feel like scorned children. The Dark Orca’s kitchen was never refurbished, no one who knew how to use it on board anymore, leaving the crew subsisting off of shelf stable foods and anything under the sun that could be pickled. There were no stolen paintings on the walls, no closets stuffed full of craft projects and supplies. There was no laughter and sailors shanties belted into the open air, her melodic, raspy voice leading everyone on. There was no huffing and whining every time the submarine passed an art galley or a makers market, fluttering eyelashes paired with begging for just five minutes to browse that turned into five hours and three bags of stuff Hammerhead didn’t know where to put. No one to tell Hammerhead to wrestle their children into something other than crew uniforms, holding up something else and gushing about how darling their children would look in it. 

It had only been five years since she passed away, and Hammerhead wondered how things might have been different if she hadn’t passed away. If the repairs and upgrades to the Dark Orca that Hammerhead had been meaning to get to might have actually been finished. If she’d have been able to figure out why their son seemed so reluctant to be a pirate. If she’d help Madeline with her new obsession with makeup, showing her off to Hammerhead when they were done. Exclaiming about how beautiful their baby girl was, stealing Madeline that makeup set that she really wanted. Hammerhead wondered if she’d have sided with Finn when he spent three days begging Hammerhead to let him get a tongue piercing, even though Hammerhead knew he’d have spent a week whining like he did after he got his ear pierced. Teenagers were hard, and Hammerhead yearned for the days when his darling children were small and not nearly so argumentative. The days when his wife was still alive, and his bed wasn’t so empty. 

He always wondered what she would have thought about these new pirates. The ones that took joy in baseless cruelty, destroying things for the sake of wreaking havoc, arming themselves to the teeth just to seem scary, and not because anything they had held much function. The way that they didn’t care for the beauty that came with getting away with something hard, the art of stealing something right from under someone’s nose. The pleasure that came in gloating about it. Hammerhead could hear her scoffing in his ear, and could picture her giving them a piece of her mind every time they boasted about their latest job that was mere child’s play. But what Hammerhead wondered most of all was what she’d think of the Nektons. 

They’d known of the Nektons, their sea-faring adventures and their state-of-the-art submarine the Aronnax. But Hammerhead didn’t run into them until he was already Captain of the Dark Orca, and his beautiful love had passed at the bottom of the ocean, forever a siren haunting Hammerhead. He wondered if they would have ever gotten one up on the Nektons if she’d been there to help him. If it would have been even harder for the Nektons to deal with the Dark Orca. Hammerhead prided himself on his ability to not make it easy for the Nektons, but he wondered how it would have been if his lady love had been there. He didn’t think she had anymore in common with them than Hammerhead did. 

Life just wasn’t the same without her anymore. Hammerhead didn’t know where he would have ended up if it weren’t for their children. There were plenty of days where they were the only thing keeping him going. And there were plenty more days where he chose not to dwell on that train of thought. Hammerhead still had moments where he wanted to turn and show her something he found, only to be painfully reminded that she wasn’t there anymore. He’d find something that he just knew she’d love, but she wasn’t there to see it. Hammerhead would sometimes bury himself in piracy work just to avoid the dull moments when his memories would catch up to him, leaving him drowning in what if’s and the could-have-beens. 

Moments like today. It was Restock Day, the day that Madeline and Finn hated most, as it was spent dealing with the worst of the Dark Orca’s gunk. Hammerhead didn’t really have the supplies to do a full body scrub like the Nektons seemed to do on a regular basis to make their submarine so shiny all the time. Restock Day included tossing out the old pickled food and scrubbing down the rooms that were used most. Danny Boy would spend the day in the engine room or moon pool, working on whatever big repairs needed done. He usually did that sort of thing anyways, but he took Restock Day as an opportunity to get to the ones that had been put off for too long, and to play that awful country music he loved so much. He’d also spend the day applying any new technology that the Dark Orca had stolen, updating their systems. 

Today Danny Boy was applying new motion sensors to the Moon Pool, so anyone that tried to sneak on board would get caught. It was sorely needed with how often the Nektons liked sneaking on board. And with how often Finn and Madeline liked sneaking out. And with how often other pirate crews tried to sneak on board to sabotage the Dark Orca or take her for themselves. Honestly, Hammerhead felt a little embarrassed not having motion sensors sooner with how many times they could have used them. 

Restock Day was the perfect day to catch up on overdue work. Hammerhead would always park the Dark Orca somewhere quiet, and unassuming. Today he’d hidden the Dark Orca near the bottom of a deep ravine, in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing but rocky outcrops and open, blue ocean for miles around. No World Ocean’s Authorities stations, no marine reservations, no commercial fishing lines. It was the perfect place to park the Dark Orca, shutting down most of the external systems so Danny Boy could work his uneducated magic and update them all, while the rest of the crew tidied up. 

Hammerhead made sure to always keep himself in the helm on Restock Day. He took the opportunity to sort through Danny Boy’s mess, swiping the dishes and garbage left everywhere on the counters. Hammerhead didn’t like cleaning, and he’d get distracted pretty easily by something new, like a new piece of equipment broken or a gimmick that his children left in their seats. Finn had once walked in on Hammerhead messing with a keychain with a ship in a bottle that Finn had scored at a stand at the Floating Market, sitting on the floor in a pile of garbage. He’d said something about getting tested for 80 H-D after Hammerhead finished his spluttered excuses at being caught. Hammerhead didn’t know what H-D was, or why Finn thought he had eighty of them, but he’d dismissed it as nonsense. He didn’t need to be tested for anything, and besides, there was no way for any of them to get tested anyways. And Hammerhead had never been good at quizzes. 

Hammerhead had gotten distracted again, stumbling across the picture of his mesmerizing wife that he’d given Madeline for her last birthday. It had been a hassle getting the photo, Hammerhead having to rely on the Nekton’s eldest child, Fontaine, and her newfangled Mimic Knight to get it for him. Hammerhead had thought he’d lost the photo for good, until she’d popped up in their moon pool, tossing him the box. He’d been so excited about gifting it to Madeline that he’d jumped the gun, forgetting what day it was and giving it to her a week before her actual birthday. Finn had coughed something about that cursed 80 H-D again, but Hammerhead had let it slide, Madeline’s joy at having a photo of her mother all her own distraction enough. 

Madeline usually kept it in her room, propped up on her nightstand and facing her pillow. Sometimes Hammerhead would linger outside her door to hear her humming to herself while looking at the photo, like she were trying to replicate her mother singing her to sleep. But sometimes she’s carry it with her to the bridge, setting it up at her station while she did busy work. Hammerhead supposed it was like she was doing things with her mother, something she’d never gotten the chance to ever remember doing. 

Hammerhead stroked the photo, sitting in Madeline’s chair. It was one of the last photos that had been taken of Hammerhead’s darling sea star, and it was the last birthday she’d gotten to celebrate. She’d always loved birthdays, especially other peoples. It was her favorite thing in the world, setting up parties for other people. She’d make a party out of every occasion if she’d been allowed. Hammerhead and their children’s birthday’s were her favorites to throw parties for. Their little Madeline, who had taken ankle-biting on like it was the Olympics, had been babbling about mermaids for weeks. Something she still loved to this day. Her wonderful mother had turned it into a whole spectacle, as she’d always done. The whole room looked like a mermaid’s boutique, Madeline seated in her lovely mother’s lap with their matching mermaids tails, all dolled up like princesses. She’d even managed to wrestle Finn and Hammerhead into ties shaped like mermaids tails, calling them handsome. 

Hammerhead sighed. She was forever immortalized in this photo, dressed up in jewels and hand-sewn clothes, cradling Madeline with an endearing smile on her face. Hammerhead had few things left to remember her by, and he’d been desperate to give a piece of her to his children. Especially Madeline. She had so few memories of the woman that swindled Hammerhead all those years ago, and she deserved to have something to remember her by. Hammerhead groaned as he pushed himself forward, placing the picture right back where Madeline had left it. He knew that the girl was sure to stop by soon, to see the picture and eat something while Hammerhead cursed over the sonar that Danny Boy had put him up to rewiring. 

Hammerhead got up, readjusting his pants with a grunt. Aside from motion sensors, there was a new program that would further enhance the Dark Orca’s long range sensors. They’d be able to detect other submersibles from even further out now, giving them time to make a getaway while their scrambler bought them time. It was something Hammerhead was quite excited for, until he’d seen all the wiring and button punching it was going to take to set it up. Hammerhead had taken a break from swearing over it to reminisce over his darling love, and sighed as he looked down at the mess that he’d left under the console. 

He tried to tell himself that it was going to be so much nicer with the long range scanners up. It helped a little, until Hammerhead knelt on the ground, trying to piece together what he’d started. Then he got frustrated again. The wires all looked the same, and the outlets were even more impossible to distinguish. Hammerhead swore under his breath, reaching for the walkie on the counter. Switching it to Danny Boy’s channel, he snapped. “Danny Boy! Which one am I supposed to plug in to connect it to the main systems?”

Danny Boy sighed in frustration, which only frustrated Hammerhead more. “I told you, it’s the one on the left!” 

“There’s six of them on the left, be more specific!”

Danny Boy groaned, and spent a few moments longer than Hammerhead was happy with messing with something on his end. Hammerhead was pretty sure he was in the moon pool, setting up the new motion sensors first. Which he wanted Danny Boy to do, but after he answered Hammerhead’s question. Eventually, Danny Boy made a sharp sigh, and a grunt as he presumably picked himself up off the floor. “It’s the only one on the left that’s round, Captain.” He reminded Hammerhead. “And I’m pretty sure you plug in the wire that’s red.”

Hammerhead grumbled under his breath, remembering now what Danny Boy had said at least four times now. “What about the motion sensors? How are those coming along?”

“They’re set up perfectly!” Danny Boy chirped, while Hammerhead dug through the cables to find the wires and outlets Danny Boy described. “Er, well, except for the fact that they only register something leaving the moon pool, and not entering.”

Hammerhead glared at the walkie. “They’re supposed to register both ways!” 

“I-I’ll get to work on it, Captain!” Danny Boy announced, in the way that Hammerhead was sure meant he was standing to attention as he said it. “After I spend a jiffy or two in the engine room, checking up on all the cables in there.”

Hammerhead growled. “Get to it then! I want those motion sensors working, so that the Nektons can’t sneak up and into the Dark Orca again!”

“Right on it, Captain!” Danny Boy turned his radio off, leaving Hammerhead with his frustration and a bunch of cables. Hammerhead managed to unearth the only round outlet, and after some digging, he found a handful of red wires. Hammerhead tried all of them, leaning up to check the main console each time, and grew ever more frustrated each time nothing popped up. After the sixth and final red wire refusing to produce any results, Hammerhead tossed the walkie onto the counter in rage. “Danny Boy!” Hammerhead shouted. He wasn’t expecting the tiny man to actually appear or even hear him, though he’d mostly been shouting out of frustration.

Hammerhead sighed, leaning back on the floor and dragging a hand down his face. Why did putting in new equipment have to be so frustrating? Why couldn’t it be as simple as just plugging in a single cord? He was sure Danny Boy would argue that plugging in a single cord was all there actually was to it, but with so many other cords his argument was moot point. Hammerhead wished there was a way to just sort all the cords, instead of just leaving them in a mess on the floor underneath the console. 

Suddenly, in the middle of his musing, there was a rapid tapping on the window. Hammerhead looked up sharply, mind racing. What could it have been? Who could it have been? There weren’t many people with the equipment to go down this deep, other than other submersibles. Especially here. Hammerhead always made sure to bring the Dark Orca somewhere relatively off of the map whenever they had a Restock Day, hiding her under a sea stack or deep in a ravine. The ravine they were in was completely unassuming, with the bottom of it right in front of the Dark Orca. Restock Day was a day best spent dealing with all the problems they couldn’t ignore in regard to the Orca, and it was better spent when they didn’t have competition or nuisances hounding them. 

Hammerhead looked to the window. He had been expecting other pirates. Maybe one of the crew members who had skipped cleaning the closets they kept the gear in and went to patching up the hull instead. Maybe even a simple rock. 

Anything other than Ant Nekton in his sister’s Knight, head tilted with a suspicious frown. Hammerhead sat there, gaping for a moment and spluttering. Ant’s frown deepened, and he rapped his fist against the glass again, jerking a finger at his ear. 

Hammerhead shot up from his seat on the floor, being mindful of the cables at his feet. Punching in the code that turned on the external communication radios, Hammerhead grabbed the speaker piece and turned on the comms. And not because the Nekton’s boy told him to. Adjusting the frequency to allow for the Knight in front of him, Hammerhead grumbled and cursed under his breath. He didn’t need the Nektons getting on his case over something he hadn’t done yet. Ant sat there, patiently waiting with a frown. If he could, Hammerhead was sure he’d have been tapping his foot in tandem with the finger he was tapping across his folded arms. 

Hammerhead finished adjusting the frequency, and flipped on the speaker. “Nekton!” He barked into the external comms. “What are you doing here?!”

Ant rolled his eyes. “Yep. It’s me, a Nekton. Astute observation there.” Pointing a finger at Hammerhead, he said, “And I was about to ask you the same question! There’s no treasure here! What are you guys doing here if there’s nothing to steal? Are you hiding from someone?”

Hammerhead leaned forward, holding the speaker piece to his mouth. “And why should I tell you that? So you can run off to Mommy and Daddy and tattle?”

Ant raised his eyebrows, unimpressed. It made Hammerhead feel a little stupid how unimpressed he was with his quip, but Ant kept talking. 

“Well, if you’re doing something illegal, yeah.” He said. “But there’s nothing out here, so what are you doing out here?”

Hammerhead leaned forward, dropping the speaker piece so he could plant his hands on the console. Wrinkling his nose, he sneered, “That is none of your concern, Nekton!” Ant’s lips curled into an even deeper frown, and Hammerhead folded his own arms over his chest, mocking the boy as he started to turn around to head to the wheel. “And I don’t have to tell you anything!”

Hammerhead’s foot caught on the cables instead, and he almost fell sideways onto the floor. He stumbled in his attempt to regain his balance, catching himself on the steering wheel, his rage returning. “Blasted cables!!” Hammerhead kicked them off of his foot, muttering, “Danny Boy and his wires and the scanners and their stupid, stupid outlets.”

Ant tilted his head, moving closer to the window. “What are you doing?”

Hammerhead pointed a finger at him. “That’s none of yer business!”

Ant pressed right up against the window, planting his hands against them and pressing his nose against the glass of the Mimic Knight to peer as close as he could at the mess of cables and wires and the stupid piece for the long range scanner that lay at Hammerhead’s feet. “Is that a long range scanner?” Ant stared at Hammerhead in disbelief, nose still pressed against the Mimic Knight’s glass panels. “I thought you guys had one of those already, you mean to tell me you’re only getting one just now?!”

Hammerhead glared at Ant, kicking the long range scanner back under the console. “No!”

The walkie that Hammerhead had thrown on the counter crackled to life. “Have you finished setting up the long range scanner, Captain?” Danny Boy asked, completely oblivious to the nosey Nekton just outside the front window. 

Ant twisted his head so that his cheek was squished against the Mimic Knight now to look at the walkie, and then gave Hammerhead a dubious side-eye. Hammerhead felt his face grow hot in embarrassment, and he snatched the walkie. “Yes, it is, now get back to work and leave me alone!” He snapped. Danny Boy made a confused noise that Hammerhead cut off short by switching his walkie off. Slamming it back down on the counter, Hammerhead glared at the Nekton still sitting outside of his window. “Go away, boy. I’m busy.” 

Ant gave Hammerhead a judgmental pout, and pulled his head away from the Mimic Knight’s glass. He left his hands planted against the window of the Dark Orca though, and peered down at the front console with his nose scrunching in thought. “Hmm. Are you having issues getting it installed? It’s pretty simple if you know how to do it.”

Hammerhead bent down to focus on the underside of the console, hoping that the boy would just go away. “No, I’m not. And I’m not installing a long range scanner!”

“Really?” Ant asked, though it wasn’t said in a tone that implied he believed Hammerhead. “Cause it sounds to me like you are, and it looks like you’re struggling with it.”

“I’m not struggling!” Hammerhead barked, digging through the cables again. Maybe there was a red wire he’d missed. “I just…need to find that stupid red wire…”

“Red wire?” Ant asked. “No no, it shouldn’t be a red wire. Who told you it was a red wire?” Hammerhead glanced up at the sound of something bumping against the window, and saw that Ant had almost pressed the top part of the Mimic Knight entirely against the window so he could stare at Hammerhead. “Was it Danny Boy? I bet it was Danny Boy. He doesn’t strike me as someone who knows exactly what he’s talking about.”

You and me both. Hammerhead found himself thinking. Shaking his head, he demanded, “And what would you know about this?”

Ant rolled his eyes, leaning back and away from the window to complete the dramatics of his head roll. “Helloooo, my mother is the world’s best submarine pilot? And a mechanic who does pretty much all of the stuff on the Aronnax? She taught me everything I know about this sort of thing.” Snorting, he looked back down at Hammerhead. “Which, as far as what I know about him, is more than I can say for Danny Boy. What wires have you got?”

Hammerhead narrowed his eyes at Ant. What he said admittedly made sense. Kaiko was an okay pilot, and the Aronnax ran pretty smoothly. But Ant was a Nekton, and Hammerhead didn’t trust or like the Nektons. “Why are you trying to help me with this?” There had to be a catch. There was always a catch. 

Ant shrugged. “Boredom. Now tell me what wires you’ve got, before I regret this.”

Hammerhead contemplated his choices. He rummaged through the wires again for a moment, before the taunting lack of red wires he hadn’t already tried won over and he groaned. “It’s got red, blue, and a few black wires.”

Ant hummed, before saying, “Is there a darker blue wire? If there’s a darker blue wire, that’s the one you need to try.”

Hammerhead grumbled, messing with the cables. “Well? Is there?” Ant asked, persistent. Hammerhead threw his head back with a groan and sorted through the blue wires. 

“I’m checking!” He snapped. Hammerhead dug through the wires, fuming. “It’s not gonna work.” 

“Uh-huh.” Ant said. 

“It won’t!” Hammerhead insisted. He found the wire, and untangled it from the mess of cables so he could plug it into the outlet. “This is a waste of time, I don’t know why I’m even listening to you-“

Hammerhead plugged the wire in, and the console above Hammerhead beeped. Hammerhead paused before popping up over the console to peek at the screens. A line of code appeared on the screen, the long range scanners plugged in and ready to be set up. 

Ant leaned back in satisfaction, hands still planted on the window. “Ta-daaa! One long range scanner installed and ready to be set up!” Ant waved a hand in the water with a flourish. “You’re welcome!”

Hammerhead scowled. “I’m not thanking you, boy. Now go away.”

Ant narrowed his eyes. “Nuh-uh, not so fast. I helped you, now you answer my questions. What are you doing here?”

Hammerhead planted his hands on the counter, glaring at Ant. “I don’t have to answer any of your questions, Nekton. This isn’t transactional, and I’m not one of yer little friends who does a favor for you in return just because you helped me with something!”

Ant pulled his hands away from the glass to fold them across his chest, nose and mouth scrunching up. “I don’t think so. There’s nothing out here, you’re putting in a long range scanner that you’ve apparently never had, and there’s no local stories of sunken ships carrying ancient treasures or artifacts for you to be digging into. No World Ocean’s Authorities stations for you to break into to steal something, there’s nothing out here that you would take any interest in!” Gesturing behind him, Ant cried, “You’re parked in the middle of a ravine! Like you’re hiding!” Ant narrowed his eyes at Hammerhead, pointing a finger at him suspiciously. “Fess up. What are you doing here?”

Hammerhead rolled his eyes, propping a hand against the console and smirking at the boy. “There’s nothing that I could be doing that you need to know about! I don’t have to tell you anything!”

Ant glared at Hammerhead, but before he could actually say anything the doors to the vents behind Hammerhead rattled. Hammerhead froze, and Ant’s face shifted into confusion. He peeked over Hammerhead’s shoulders with raised eyebrows, and Hammerhead turned around to see a garbage bag drop out of the vents. A pair of legs soon dangled after, and then Madeline dropped from the vents, her back to Hammerhead and the infuriating Nekton boy. 

Madeline knew the vents better than anyone on board, thriving in the mess of wires and cables that helped run the Dark Orca. It was always her job on Restock Day to go through the vents and clear them out. Garbage picked out of the corners from her snacks, plugging in any loose wires that they might not immediately notice until half the submarine lost its power. She’d be given a walkie, working with Danny Boy once he made his way to the engine room to make sure everything was working on both their ends. 

Madeline straightened up, dusting her hands and pants off. Turning around she kicked the half-filled garbage bag aside, and then readjusted her mother’s picture. “I cleared out the vents, Dad.” She said distractedly, and Hammerhead glanced at Ant out of the corner of his eyes in a bit of panic. “Can I go get some lunch now-“

Madeline had turned around to look at Hammerhead, and she stopped talking when her eyes locked on to Ant in the Mimic Knight just outside the window. Madeline didn’t seem to realize that Hammerhead was there for a moment. Her eyes lit up at the sight of Ant, and not in the way that Hammerhead had been expecting. Instead of the expected and familiar rage at the sight of one of their families sworn enemies, Madeline got what Hammerhead would almost describe as excitement on her face. Madeline’s eyes traveled to Hammerhead the second after they saw Ant though, and she blinked, and then she turned to look at Ant with a frown on her face. 

The split second reactions to Ant being outside the window and then realizing Hammerhead was there happened so fast that Hammerhead figured he must have been imagining her excitement. Or maybe he’d been misinterpreting it. Hammerhead had heard Madeline moan on slow days that she wished the Aronnax would show up out of nowhere, as they at least provided some entertainment. And Hammerhead knew that Madeline and Finn didn’t like Restock Day, complaining about the chores. 

Madeline shook herself and then glared at Ant, pointing a finger at him in outrage. “You?!”

Hammerhead heard Ant gasp, and turned in time to see him pointing his own accusatory finger at Madeline. “You!!” Madeline’s lips twitched a little, like she were fighting a smile, though Hammerhead didn’t know what was so funny. It’s not like it was some kind of inside joke or anything. 

Madeline stomped over, shoulders raised and tense. “What are you doing here?”

Ant snorted, leaning back in his Knight and drawling, “That’s funny, I was literally going over that exact same thing with your dad.” Ant’s face faded from a smirk to genuine confusion, and Hammerhead couldn’t help but realize that he seemed less antagonistic with Madeline than he’d been with Hammerhead. “What are you guys even doing here, there’s not a single story of sunken treasure within a fifty mile radius of this place!”

Madeline huffed, crossing her arms and waving her hips from side to side to enunciate what she was saying. “We’re not doing anything wrong! We’re just cleaning the Dark Orca!” Hammerhead stared at her in alarm. Why was she telling him that?!

Ant raised an eyebrow, a confused look on his face. “You’re…cleaning?”

Madeline leaned forward and stared down her nose at him. “Y-es.” She drawled, enunciating the flow of the word like she were trying to send a point across. “Just cleaning and putting in new stuff we’ve gotten over the last month or so.”

Ant glanced at Hammerhead, and then moved a bit further up the window so he could look down at the console. “Like…a long range scanner?”

Madeline’s eyes narrowed in slight confusion, and looked to Hammerhead. “Yeah…how do you know about that?”

“Er, well-“ Hammerhead tried to spin something instead of telling the truth, but Ant beat him to saying anything. 

“I helped him set it up.” Ant said it in such a matter of fact sort of manner, like he hadn’t just made Hammerhead seem incompetent in six words. He drifted back down the window, casually, like there wasn’t anything as serious as Dark Orca pirates mingling with a Nekton going on. 

Madeline stared in shock, and turned to look at Hammerhead. He spluttered, before turning to glare at Ant and demanding, “He didn’t help me with anything, I would have figured it out on my own eventually!” Ant raised his eyebrows at Hammerhead, the look on his face and the hum he let out making it clear that he didn’t believe Hammerhead at all. 

Madeline groaned, rolling her eyes. Instead of commenting on Hammerhead’s blunder, she just stared at Ant in annoyance. “We’re just cleaning. Nothing else.”

Ant hummed for a moment, thinking, before he grinned in a cheeky manner at Madeline that Hammerhead didn’t like. “Well, I suppose that’s something that’s been a long time coming.”

“We do it all the time!” Madeline snapped.

“You could have fooled me!”

Hammerhead fumed, not happy with the casual talk his daughter was having with a do-gooder Nekton. “Quiet, boy!” Ant stared at him, looking personally offended that Hammerhead told him to be quiet. Hammerhead ignored Ant, and turned to look down at Madeline instead, demanding, “Madeline! Why would you tell him what we’re doing?” It was better for the Dark Orca’s interactions with the Nektons to be best left at a minimum, and the Aronnax was certainly not far behind Ant. As far as Hammerhead knew, the whole family could be out in their Knights, and could descend upon the Dark Orca any minute now!

Madeline looked up at Hammerhead, a bit of shock on her face. Coughing into her fist for a moment, she stammered, “What? It’s not like we’re doing anything! They don’t have a reason to come near us, we’re doing nothing!”

“They don’t need to know that!” Hammerhead insisted. Ant looked back and forth between Hammerhead and Madeline, hand coming up to awkwardly scratch at his chest. “The Aronnax could be here any minute now! We’re sitting ducks right now, we can’t go anywhere!”

“Mayyybe don’t say that while I’m right here.” Ant muttered, but Hammerhead paid him no mind. 

“They could raid us, storming the Dark Orca and stealing all of our treasures!” Hammerhead said, giving Ant a dirty look from the corner of his eye. “They can’t be trusted!”

Ant planted his hands on his hips, demanding in outrage, “Hey! We’re not like you guys! And what treasures could you have that we possibly want? A dozen mugs from stolen trading vessels?”

Hammerhead pointed his own finger at Ant now. “Those mugs are collectibles, and anyone would love to get their hands on them!”

Ant was now waving a finger at Hammerhead. “I know collectibles! I have the limited edition Kaiju Daiju graphic novel from the only comic run they ever made! Those mugs aren’t collectibles, they’re bargain bin rejects!”

Madeline threw out her hands, staring up at Hammerhead with some genuine confusion while he stared at Ant in outrage. “But the Nektons don’t do stuff like that!” She insisted. “They don’t care about those kinds of things, and we’re not doing anything they’d try to stop us from doing!” Scoffing, and turning to glare at Ant, she remarked, “If anything they’d try to help us!”

Ant waved a hand, a reluctant look on his face. “Ehh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Fontaine and I don’t really like cleaning.” Hammerhead thought of the whining that Finn and Madeline would do at the start of every Restock Day, and wondered how much easier it was for Will and Kaiko to get their children to do stuff with the two of them working together. But then again, the Nektons put more work into cleaning the Aronnax as opposed to the Dark Orca, so maybe they had it worse. 

Hammerhead shook himself out of the reluctant sympathy with the Nektons about getting your kids to do something. They were enemies, what was he thinking, thinking sympathetic thoughts? There was a Nekton in front of his sub, and none of them knew why he was there in the first place!

“Enough talk about us!” Hammerhead snapped, causing Ant to blink and stare at him in confusion. “What are you doing here boy?!”

Ant scoffed, and Hammerhead watched him fold his arms across his chest. “Like I’d tell you!”

Hammerhead seethed. “You know why we’re here now! Tell us what could possibly require a Nekton to be here!”

Ant put his hands on his hips, twisting them in an overtly sarcastic manner as he drawled, “Oh, but there’s nothing that I could be doing that you need to know about! I thought I didn’t have to tell you anything.”

Hammerhead glared. “Tell us now, boy! You know why we’re here, now. Fair’s fair, tell us what you’re doing!”

Ant leaned forward a little bit, hands still on his hips as he grinned cheekily at Hammerhead. “Last I recalled, I didn’t have to answer any of your questions. This isn’t transactional, and I don’t have to tell you anything just because you told me something.”

Hammerhead balled his fists at his own words being thrown back at him not once, but twice, while Madeline peered at the sonar. “I don’t see the Aronnax on our instruments.” Grinning slyly at Ant, she asked, “Are you here alone?”

Ant stared down at Madeline, lips tightening in frustration. “What’s it matter to you if I am? You said so yourself, you’re sitting ducks and can’t chase me!” Shrugging while Madeline stewed in frustration at how right he was, he said, “And besides, any one of our Knights is more agile than the Red Claw. The Mimic Knight most of all.”

Hammerhead scowled, and looked at the Knight. “Isn’t yer sister usually in that?” The Mimic Knight was Madeline’s favorite, probably because it looked so much like an actual mermaid. Her disastrous first ride with it hadn’t deterred her obsession with it for long, and she always got giddy when Fontaine was out in it. But Hammerhead had almost only ever seen Fontaine in it.

Ant shrugged, rolling onto his back and doing lazy spins like the dolphins that the Knight was built to look like. “She got grounded for sneaking out to go see a concert with her friend in the area a week ago, when we were last near land. Stole a solar-ski and everything.”

Hammerhead paused. He didn’t know the girl had it in her. Finn was enamored with her, and Hammerhead pretended he didn’t know that his son was talking with her on that communicator he stole ages ago. Finn was always happier, a pep in his step in the days after talking with her. Hammerhead could pretend to ignore it for a bit. But he’d always wondered why Finn loved talking with her so much, since she was a Nekton and just as much of a goody-two shoes as her parents. He didn’t know the girl ever got into trouble with her parents. 

Ant stopped spinning in circles, now floating upside down in front of Hammerhead. “So now she’s grounded and can’t go out in the Knights for anything other than work. She’s really grumpy about it.”

Madeline’s eyebrows had raised, and she leaned forward on the control panels. “Really? I didn’t think she ever did anything like that.” 

Ant snorted, righting himself. “Oh, yeah, she acts like she’s super composed and normal and so smart next to everyone else, especially me. But she’s got an Oops Board all of her own, and her number just got set back to zero again. She’s really mad about it, you should have seen her sulking!”

Madeline looked delighted at the idea Ant presented, and Hammerhead looked back and forth between the pair of them. What was going on between them?

Thoughts of his little girl being comfortable with a boy, let alone a Nekton boy, had Hammerhead swelling with protectiveness, and he pulled Madeline away from the window. His little girl squawked in alarm, and Hammerhead glared at Ant. Ant stared at Hammerhead in confusion as he demanded, “What are you doing out here, boy? Where’s the rest of your family?”

Ant tilted his head at Hammerhead, a contemplative look on his face. Eventually he shrugged, turning in circles again. “Mom and Dad told me to get out of the Aronnax for a bit since they were too busy to talk to me at the moment, and Fontaine was getting mad with the reminder that she was grounded and I wasn’t. They said I should give everyone a little bit of room since I’d finished all my chores and they hadn’t, and to go out and see if there was anything interesting around.” 

Madeline pushed her way around Hammerhead. “Is there?” Hammerhead glared down at her, and she faltered. “I-I mean, like you’d find anything interesting, ever.” She glanced to the side, kicking her boot against the floor. Hammerhead only grew more confused. Why was she acting so weird with Ant? Hammerhead’s protective surge only grew stronger when he saw Madeline glance at Ant out of the corner of her eye, face softening a little bit. She was far too young to be liking boys in any capacity!

Ant hummed, swimming forward to rest his palms against the window. “Mm, no, not really. Just a bunch of rocks and stuff. There’s not even any reefs to swim through.” Shrugging, Ant glanced behind him as he said, “It’s weird that they told me to go find something interesting when there’s nothing out here at all.”

Hammerhead remembered telling Finn and Madeline stuff along those lines when they were smaller, when he and his darling needed some alone time or the children were being too much that day. It didn’t work on Finn anymore, but he’d sometimes tell Madeline to go digging in the surrounding reefs on days her glorious pirate name became a little too literal, and Hammerhead needed ten minutes to himself. He shook his head, dismissing the thoughts once again. The Nektons were the Dark Orca crews biggest nemesis. Their sworn enemies. Hammerhead shouldn’t be sympathizing with them. 

“Why are you in the Mimic Knight then?” Hammerhead didn’t know why he asked, and Ant turning around to look at him with an odd expression told him that the Nekton’s littlest thought the same. But Hammerhead was just hoping the boy would go away, and figured asking every possible question would eventually get him to leave. Either because there was nothing else left to say in the end, or because Hammerhead drove him away with the questions. 

“Well, Fontaine isn’t allowed to use it for fun right now.” Ant answered, Hammerhead a little surprised that he did. “And she never lets me use the Mimic Knight, like, ever. Says I’ll use it stupidly, or wreck it.” Ant huffed, pulling his hands away from the glass to fold them over his chest in frustration. “Which isn’t true at all! The Shadow Knight’s almost twice as fast as the Mimic Knight and I’ve never crashed it, not even once!” Ant paused for a moment after he said that, before looking away awkwardly. “At least, not on purpose.” A deep frown that was filled with a frustration Hammerhead wasn’t familiar with seeing from the boy crossed Ant’s face, and he muttered to himself, “Or because someone uses an EMP on it again.”

Before Hammerhead could ask what Ant even meant by that, Ant looked back at the pirates, lips turned into a sort of pout. “So I decided to take the opportunity to take it for a spin. I figured this would be the only time I’d get the chance to without Fontaine whining through the comms about bringing it back so she can use it.”

Hammerhead struggled not to think about the hour he spent breaking up a fight between Finn and Madeline about the Red Claw and whose turn it was to use it, and instead tried to think of another question to pop Ant. However, Ant frowned, looking down at the pirates with an uncertain expression on his face. “So you’re really not doing anything other than cleaning?”

Hammerhead glared at Ant. “Yes.”

Ant’s eyes narrowed, eyebrows raising. “No nefarious plot to steal any treasure, break into the Aronnax, wake up some giant sea monster that we have to deal with? Just cleaning?”

Madeline rolled her head back with a groan. “Ugh, YES, we told you already!”

Ant seemed to be thinking about it, trying to decide if he could trust their answer. Hammerhead was just hoping that he’d leave faster so he could get back to mindlessly pushing stuff around the counters to make it seem like he was cleaning. Eventually though, Ant seemed to accept their answer. “Okay then.” He said slowly. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.” Hammerhead insisted, watching Ant slowly back away in the Mimic Knight. “Now go away.”

Ant narrowed his eyes, uncrossing his arms. He didn’t say anything else, just looking between Hammerhead and Madeline, before hesitating and swimming away. Hammerhead watched the Mimic Knight dive a little deeper into the ravine ahead of the Dark Orca, feeling satisfied. He hit the mute button on the transmission from the Mimic Knight, and turned back to what he was doing. 

Madeline moved closer to the window, confused. “Sheesh. That’s the easiest we’ve ever gotten a Nekton to leave us alone. Who knew telling them we’re cleaning was the trick?”

Hammerhead hummed. “We’ll have to remember that next time they start bugging us.” Looking down at Madeline, who was walking over to her seat, he asked, “What was with you and that boy?”

Madeline looked back at Hammerhead peculiarly. “What are you talking about?” She plopped down in her seat, opening the drawer next to her console and pulling out a bag of chips. “He’s a Nekton, nothing special.”

Hammerhead grunted. Madeline was acting nonchalant about it, like she hadn’t gotten excited over seeing Ant, and wasn’t interested in the stuff he was saying. He watched her for a few moments, Madeline pointedly ignoring him and stuffing her face with chips. Hammerhead turned around, focusing on the console where the long range scanner needed set up now. “That’s right, he is a Nekton.” He said, Madeline glancing at him. “We don’t associate with Nektons, my dear! We’re too different, there’s nothing in common between them and us!”

Hammerhead leaned close to the console to better see the buttons and strings of code. Danny Boy had given him a written list of instructions from the people they got the long range scanner from, and he’d been very insistent that Hammerhead follow it to the letter. Danny Boy had insisted they get a good fresh one instead of taking one from someone else when Hammerhead had started thinking about getting a long range scanner, so the Dark Orca had gone to the underground market that dealt with specific submarine parts. They were expensive, the market typically dealing with arms and weapons dealers, traffickers or smugglers, bounty hunters and mercenaries. The Floating Market was the pirates world, but the market they’d gone to for a good scanner held a different sort of folk. And they had specific price ranges and various other methods of transactions that Hammerhead wasn’t used to paying. Fortunately, Danny Boy had known a guy, who owed him a favor, and so they got the long range scanner for half the price. 

“Yeah, totally!” Madeline agreed, and she slowly spun in her chair for a few moments. Hammerhead carefully went over the instructions, making sure not to mispress a button on the console. They were so small, and his hands were so large. Maybe Danny Boy’s next project would be fixing the size of the buttons so Hammerhead didn’t have to be careful when pressing the right one. Madeline hesitated, and Hammerhead could see her opening and closing her mouth a few times in the reflection of the screen. She tapped her fingers against the counter, before saying, “W-well, I mean, aside from the fact that they also live on a submarine!” Hammerhead turned around to look at her, and she avoided his eyes, playing with the corner of her chip bag. “It’s…it’s one thing we have in common.”

She said it so shyly, and hesitantly, that Hammerhead couldn’t help but stop what he was doing entirely to look directly at her. Madeline was anything but shy and hesitant. Hammerhead frowned, trying to figure out what she was getting at. “We have different kinds of submarines. And we do different things with them.” 

Madeline leaned back in her chair. “I…guess.” Shrugging her shoulders dismissively, she looked to the monitors at her station and said, “Well, we run into them a lot! Some of our last interactions have been fairly tame, and quiet. They leave us alone sometimes, now.” Turning to Hammerhead, she said, “Like that time when Ant and I got stuck at the bottom of that chasm in the Red Claw! Finn said that you and the Nektons weren’t really fighting much, and Fontaine left us alone when she picked up Ant! We didn’t even fight afterward, we just went our separate ways!”

Hammerhead hesitated, initially going to dismiss Madeline and tell her that she was wrong, before realizing that she was actually right. Some of their interactions with the Nektons as of late had been a bit more peaceful. He cleared his throat, scratching his neck as he dismissed his daughter. “Well, that was circumstantial. We don’t like the Nektons! And they don’t like us!”

Madeline frowned, slumping back in her chair. “I guess.” Hammerhead stared at her for a moment, wondering why she seemed so glum about it. She was acting like her older brother when it came to the Nektons, trying to find something between them. Hammerhead watched her dig through her drawer, pulling out a magazine. Hammerhead wasn’t really sure where she got it, and peering closer at it revealed it was a National Geographic magazine, focused on the ocean in some way. Madeline twisted her chair around and slumped into her seat, so Hammerhead couldn’t make heads or tails of what exactly it was about. 

Hammerhead scratched at his beard, even more confused. He didn’t know how or where she could have gotten it. They certainly didn’t have a subscription for them, and there wasn’t any way she could have gotten it from any of the places they’d been, especially if she stole it like he’d taught her to. And he didn’t know why she wanted anything like that in the first place. 

Hammerhead distracted himself with the console and long range scanner. His growing little baby was a puzzle he could sort out after he beat the long range scanner into obedience. Though not literally though, as Hammerhead didn’t want to deal with Danny Boy if it broke, and he certainly didn’t want to deal with getting a replacement. 

It was tedious, setting it up in the systems. Hammerhead’s temper almost got a hold of him a few times, but he would sit and remind himself just how nice it would be to have the long range scanner, and just how awful the original price for it had been before Danny Boy worked his methods with his insider and got the price knocked down. Eventually though, he got it sorted out, and stood in triumph when the system updated and the long range scanner appeared in it. 

“Would you look at that!” Hammerhead crowed, Madeline looking up from her magazine to peek around her chair. “Yer dad knows what he’s doing, my sweet! Don’t let the naysayers convince you otherwise!”

Madeline set the magazine down, leaning out and around her chair. “So we can tell when there’s other submarines from further away now?”

Hammerhead wiped his hands on his shirt, cackling with delight. “Indeed! Here, let me turn it on.” Hammerhead began messing with the buttons, talking to Madeline over his shoulder. “The only submarine nearby should be the Aronnax, and Ant should have gone back to them by now so they might not even be in the area anymore!” Madeline didn’t say anything at that, but glancing behind him revealed she was more focused on seeing the new range the scanner gave them. Hammerhead finished turning it on with gusto, standing back and turning to Madeline, gesturing to it with a flourish as the long range scanner finished uploading into the sonar. “With this, our range will be near doubled! Tripled even! Nothing can sneak up on us now-“

The long range scanner finished uploading into the sonar, and it started to ping, catching both Hammerhead and Madeline’s attention. Hammerhead looked back at the console. Something was coming in, nearing the top of the ravine. “What is it?” Madeline asked. “Is it the Aronnax?”

Hammerhead frowned, moving closer to peer at it. “No.” He said after a moment, not sure if he wanted it to be them or not. The Nektons, while annoying, were familiar. There was a routine with them, that the Dark Orca didn’t have with anyone else. And as Madeline had pointed out, they were easier to convince to leave the Dark Orca alone these days. “It’s too small to be the Aronnax. And we’ve marked it in our systems by now.”

Madeline tilted her head, asking, “Then who is it? And how close are they?”

Hammerhead tapped the sonar, trying to make heads and tails of what it could be picking up. “I don’t know. But they’re close.”

Madeline turned her seat all the way around to properly face Hammerhead, setting her magazine in her lap. “How did we not realize they were close? Our sonar should have picked them up, right?”

Hammerhead scratched at his beard, stepping back from the console. “Err, not…exactly. I turned the sonar off so I could plug in the long range scanner, and get it into its system. I’ve only just turned it back on.”

Madeline stared at Hammerhead aghast. “Why would you do that?! You don’t actually need to shut the system down to plug an additional piece in!”

Hammerhead threw his hands up in frustration. “Well I didn’t know that!”

The blip on the sonar got more clear, and bigger the closer it got to the ravine. The closer it got, the more clear it became that it definitely wasn’t the Aronnax. Whatever ship was on the sonar was at least half the size of the Aronnax and the Dark Orca herself. It could be anyone. A World Ocean’s Authorities vessel, some random divers submarine, or even another pirate ship. When the mystery submarine peeked over the edge of the ravine, revealing itself in its banged up glory, it was revealed to be the later. 

Madeline stood up from her chair, magazine falling out of her lap as she stared at the submarine in disgust. “Is that the Stinging Piranha?!” Madeline did a double take at her fallen magazine, frantically bending down to scoop it up and smooth out the pages like it were treasure. 

Hammerhead scoffed as she fussed over the magazine, glaring out the window. “There’s nothing about that submarine that deserves a name, Madeline! It’s a dump underwater!”

The radio crackled with a new transmission, and the comm line opened up. Wheezing laughter filled the air, and the Stinging Piranha inched further over the ravine. “Ha ha ha! If it eesn’t the Dark Orca! The biggest let down in pirate history!” More mad cackling filled the air, followed by hacking coughing. 

Hammerhead sneered. “If it isn’t the Stinging Piranha. The most useless heap of junk known to pirate kind!” The captain spat on Hammerhead’s name in between gasping hacks. 

The Stinging Piranha was a pirate submarine, though Hammerhead felt both parts of that description were subjective. The Stinging Piranha was little more than a heap of scrap metal welded together with some air valves slapped on to keep it from sinking and the crew from drowning. It was a pitiful excuse of a submarine, barely able to stay afloat most times. One of its two only saving graces, and ultimate trump card, was the World Ocean’s Authorities vessel that took up their whole moon pool. They had stolen it a few years back, but never even used it because they didn’t know how to disable the tracker that turned on when it was active. 

Hammerhead had sent Finn to sneak on board one time after the captain of the crew insulted Hammerhead’s mother, telling him to steal the old fashioned pirates hat that the captain and his crew fought over. His boy had said the stolen vessel was covered in graffiti and crude gestures and drawings, and that releasing it would probably wreck the hull of the moon pool room with how haphazardly it’d been shoved into it.

Amateurs. The pirate crew inhabiting the Stinging Piranha was no better than her vessel. They were made up of some of the idiotic hooligans that had started to call themselves pirates in the last decade or so, and these ones were particularly stupid. Originally made up of a bunch of moronic teenagers, they were now a bunch of moronic adults, spending as much time smoking as they did bragging and throwing the weight of the bucket they called a submarine around. Not every pirate crew had a submarine, a submarine being hard to maintain and keep, especially when other crews were eager to try stealing it from you. So those that did tended to have a little more weight in the pirate hierarchy. 

But some submarines were better than others, and the Stinging Piranha barely made the cut as a working vessel, let alone a submarine. The Stinging Piranha was so horrendous that there were some submarine-less crews that had weight above them, due to a mix of either competency or personal signature. The submarine was so poorly built that no one even wanted to steal it. The Stinging Piranha’s defining characteristics were its incompetent crew who wasted their days smoking and getting into fights that they repeatedly lost, and the harpoons that the submarine was equipped with. 

The harpoons were admittedly good quality, but they took up so much space on the front of the submarine that the Stinging Piranha’s rear ballast was always filled to counteract the weight. They were connected to the submarine with cables that broke half the time and jammed the other half. The crew was so disorganized that they fought with each other more than they did with anyone else. Their favorite thing to do was baselessly destroy anything they found just to laugh and try to make themselves seem more intimidating. They were stuck in their submarine for as long as they were underwater, their moon pool blocked by the World Ocean’s Authorities vessel they couldn’t even use, and their only other way out the hatch on the top of the submarine. And as they had no working air scrubbers, they had to resurface every few hours so they wouldn’t suffocate. 

Finn said the submarine stank of body odor, cigarettes, old take-out, and other questionable smells when he snuck on board. Every flat surface had been used as an ash tray at some point, and Finn threw himself out of the Stinging Piranha once he’d secured the hat in order to get fresh air. Hammerhead believed his report with how sick he looked, and let him keep the hat as a reward for dealing with the Stinging Piranha. Madeline was immensely jealous of the hat, especially once Finn secured some good feathers to actually stick in it. 

The Stinging Piranha was a mess. It didn’t even deserve to be called a submarine in Hammerhead’s opinion. Most of the Floating Market agreed. Hammerhead didn’t even know why they were still allowed on the docks. The Dark Orca’s systems and engine were mostly down so Danny Boy could make his fixes and modifications, and her crew was preoccupied with other things at the moment. But Hammerhead was confident that even then there was little the Stinging Piranha could do to them. He was certain even the Red Claw alone was enough of a match for the heap of junk the pirate crew now taunting Hammerhead called a submarine. 

“Yer the fool, Hammerhead!” The captain wheezed. “You’d never be able to face the might of the Stinging Piranha!”

Hammerhead glanced behind him to Madeline. “Get one of the guys to go find Danny Boy. Tell ‘im to get the engines and the rest of the systems up and running again, and the crew to help him with whatever he needs.” It wasn’t that Hammerhead thought they needed the systems up in order to fend off the Stinging Piranha. The Dark Orca was perfectly safe from the Stinging Piranha, even with a lot of their systems down. The Dark Orca’s hull was far more sturdy and compact than the Stinging Piranha, who was held together with more Duct Tape than the Dark Orca had ever used. But they did need the systems up in order to go chasing the Stinging Piranha for twenty miles just to make a point. 

“Aww, are you scared?” The captain jeered. Hammerhead rolled his eyes as the Stinging Piranha’s captain began to taunt him, while Madeline sat at her station and started organizing the crew while explaining the situation. He could hear some of the crew groaning in the background, while others were happy to stop cleaning in order to give the Stinging Piranha what for. “You know that the Dark Orca is nothing compared to the fierce Stinging Piranha!!”

Hammerhead glared out the window. “Yer just a bunch of lily-livered, wannabe amateurs! Your ship barely floats! It’s a miracle it hasn’t sunk with all those harpoons you’ve glued to the front!”

“Oh yeah?” Hammerhead had met the Stinging Piranha’s crew more often than he’d have liked, and they were so predictable in their mannerisms when being challenged or threatened that he could practically see the lifting of the captain’s chest as he tried to make himself look bigger. Hammerhead counted to two, listened to the deep intake of breath as the captain predictably inhaled to make himself appear intimidating, and then waited for ten seconds as he coughed and hacked. “Well then how about this?” The captain wheezed in between hacks, and one of the harpoons at the front of the Stinging Piranha rotated. The gears jammed every so often, angry cursing and swearing as the captain tried to get the harpoon working. Hammerhead rolled his eyes as the Stinging Piranha struggled to use its only defining feature, and then watched one of the harpoons launch. 

Hammerhead watched the harpoon sail through the water toward the Dark Orca, before he heard the scraping of metal somewhere to the right of the Dark Orca’s helm. Hammerhead peeked to the furthest side of the window, and watched the harpoon drift down to the bottom of the ravine. The captain was swearing profusely while the sounds of the crew in the bridge with him began fighting over who fired the harpoon. The cable connecting the harpoon to the Stinging Piranha groaned, and it disconnected from the submarine, drifting to the sea floor. The arguing got louder, and Hammerhead didn’t hold back his laughter at their blunder. “You can’t even aim right!” He jeered over the comms. Madeline was also laughing, and the Stinging Piranha’s captain fell into a coughing fit from his screaming at his crew. 

Hammerhead continued to laugh, the sound of footsteps entering the bridge causing him to turn around. Finn poked his head through the door, staring before he walked into the bridge. He looked really confused, and asked, “Hey, why is everyone scrambling to get the systems up and running?” He scratched at his chin as he spoke, where a few more whiskers were starting to grow in place. Hammerhead couldn’t wait for the day Finn grew more, so he could start showing him how to care for the growing hair and turn it into a proper beard. 

Finn looked ahead and out the window, and his face fell into even further confusion and a little disgust. “Is that the Stinging Piranha?” He asked. 

“I’ll show you!!” The captain wheezed. “That was just a bad harpoon!”

“Oh, sure!” Hammerhead said sweetly. “And I’m the Queen of Australia!”

Finn stared at Hammerhead peculiarly, and turned to his sister for clarification. Madeline shrugged, leaning back in her seat. “They fired a harpoon at us and it totally bounced off the hull.” 

Finn snorted. “Oh, yeah that’s not embarrassing.”

“Oh yeah?” It was a different voice than the captains, and Hammerhead assumed it was one of the other crew members leaning in to give his own piece. “Then take this!” Another harpoon launched, and Hammerhead watched it sail toward the Dark Orca. There was a thud, to the left of the bridge this time, and there was cheering from the crew. Hammerhead raised an eyebrow, and turned to look at his children. Both Finn and Madeline looked about as unimpressed as Hammerhead felt. 

“Hooray, you got one to stick.” Madeline taunted. “Now how about you actually use it to pull us in?”

Finn leaned down to his sister, muttering out of the corner of his mouth, “I’m just surprised one of them actually stuck the landing.” Hammerhead grinned at Finn’s barb. 

Madeline snickered, and whispered back, “I’m just surprised it even fired.” 

“I think we will pull you in!” The victorious crew member crowed, and Hammerhead watched the Stinging Piranha start backing up. The cable connecting the harpoon to the submarine grew taught, the Dark Orca not moving. Hammerhead heard the hull creak a little as the harpoon pulled at the metal it had barely lodged into, and felt a tiny shift under his feet. After that, the prone submarine didn’t move an inch. The Stinging Piranha chuddered and sputtered, arguing coming back to life from the crew still on the line as they struggled to move. Hammerhead heard an awful groaning, and for a second grew worried. Then he realized the sound was coming from the Stinging Piranha’s end, the sound so loud he could hear it through the comms. 

The harpoon line grew even more taught, before it snapped entirely. The Dark Orca didn’t shift, but the Stinging Piranha shot backwards. The crew screamed and swore, while Hammerhead and his kids laughed. The arguing on the other line increased ten-fold, and the Stinging Piranha inched back to the edge of the ravine. 

“Is this funny to you?” The captain croaked, fighting a coughing fit so he could snap at Hammerhead.

Hammerhead leaned over the speaker, crowing, “Of course it is! That’s why I’m laughing. Like this- HA! HA! HAAA!!!”

The captain swore and cursed Hammerhead, insulting his ship, his crew, his mother, and a couple of other things that Hammerhead didn’t quite understand through the hacking and wheezing that had overtaken him, and the shouting of his crew behind him. 

Hammerhead laughed long and hard over the Stinging Piranha’s misfortune. “Finn, my boy, come help me find that other harpoon, we’re stealing it.” Hammerhead leaned forward to look out the window, searching the rocks below them. “We’ll get that one in the hull too. Maybe even the ones they still have, once we get the systems up and running again.” Looking up at the Stinging Piranha, Hammerhead jeered, “Ye’ve got three more of those harpoons left, and they always say that seventh time’s the charm!” The pirates on the line screamed and cursed in anger, and Hammerhead cackled with delight. 

Finn shrugged, and picked his way around his sister to come to Hammerhead’s other side. “Okay. Which direction did it fall?”

Hammerhead shook his head, ignoring the wheezing screaming from the Stinging Piranha’s end to look ahead of the Dark Orca. “I’m not sure, but it’s somewhere around here. Keep looking.”

Finn peeked around to the furthest corner of the Dark Orca, while Hammerhead looked in front of the Dark Orca. There wasn’t much sun out, the ravine deep enough that there wasn’t an incredible amount of light. Hammerhead was also pretty sure that it was pretty cloudy that day, which didn’t help with the lighting. He could see the end of the cable closest to the Stinging Piranha, so he tried to follow the cable back to the harpoon that was lying somewhere in the ravine.

As he looked, a flash of blue in the ravine caught his eye. Hammerhead looked closer, wondering if it was something else of the Stinging Piranha’s that they could steal. But after careful inspection, Hammerhead realized it was the Mimic Knight. Ant was picking his way through the rocks, carefully putting the largest between himself and the Stinging Piranha. 

Hammerhead’s gut twisted a little. He’d thought Ant had long left the area to head back to the Aronnax, to tell his parents that the Dark Orca was near. Quickly glancing at the radio channels, he noticed that the Mimic Knight was still connected to their transmissions. All he’d done was mute it earlier, but he hadn’t actually disconnected the Mimic Knight’s radio transmission from the Dark Orca’s active lines. Ant had to have heard every word said between the Dark Orca and the Stinging Piranha. What was he doing still in the area?

Hammerhead almost demanded as such over the comms, before stopping. The Stinging Piranha were a bunch of low-life pirates, bottom of the piracy food chain. Their submarine was barely functional, not even equipped with the technology needed to broadcast actual video to other submarines. They could only have one active comm line on at a time, any more than that would fry their systems. It was a literal rust-bucket, equipped with nothing more than an absurd amount of harpoons and a World Ocean’s Authorities vessel they couldn’t even use. They weren’t equipped to handle the likes of the Dark Orca, even on Restock Day. And they were less equipped to handle the Aronnax. 

But a lone Knight, especially one with little armor like the Mimic Knight? It wouldn’t take much for their harpoons to pierce the metal. There were plenty of seams in the Mimic Knight’s tail to allow for its extreme maneuverability, and the top half of the Knight, where all of Ant’s very important body parts were, had even less armor than the tail. And Hammerhead didn’t know if he believed that the pirates of the Stinging Piranha wouldn’t be above shooting at a Nekton Knight, especially knowing one of their children was inside. He’d watched them snatch the parrot off a kid from another pirate crew, ripping handfuls of its feathers out while the boy screamed at them to stop. They’d been laughing the whole time, at least until the boys mother brought her lucky frying pan down on the ring leaders head, freeing the parrot before they ripped out more of its feathers. 

Hammerhead closed his mouth. The best bet was to let Ant make his way back on his own. The boy was capable. He could make it back to the safety of his double-titanium alloy hulled submarine by himself. And besides, the Stinging Piranha would hear if Hammerhead said anything to Ant. Which would only alert them to his presence. 

Hammerhead wasn’t concerned. He wasn’t. Not for a Nekton.

Finn looked in the direction Hammerhead was, and his face blanched at the sight of the Mimic Knight. “Is that Fontaine?” He croaked, and Hammerhead’s head whipped around to look at him. 

“Heh?” The captain said, the arguing starting to die down on the Stinging Piranha’s end. Hammerhead clapped a hand over Finn’s mouth, shoving him backward toward his sister. Finn’s yelp of alarm was muffled under Hammerhead’s hand, and turned into a squawk when he was pushed on top of Madeline, who made a frustrated noise. 

“We said you’d have to be stupid to believe you could obtain anything from this!” Hammerhead bluffed, while Madeline shoved Finn to the floor behind him. “Why don’t ye just cut yer losses and leave? Before you run out of harpoons.”

Madeline glared down at Finn, snapping, “What was that for? You almost crushed my magazine!”

Finn pushed himself up off the ground, hissing, “Dad pushed me! And I saw the Mimic Knight out there! It has to be Fontaine!”

Hammerhead swallowed as Finn said that, praying that he had been quiet enough and far enough that the Stinging Piranha’s crew didn’t catch what he said. It was pirate rule of etiquecy to not share what job you were planning or what goods you were planning to steal until the deed was done. It saved you from having to fight others rushing to get the bounty for themselves. It was especially worse when one was near the Stinging Piranha, who would leap at anything that seemed even remotely interesting to someone, just so they could jump and destroy it for their own amusement, or keep it for themselves. 

Hammerhead watched Ant peek around a rock, and then take a chance, dashing over an open stretch of water to duck behind a larger rock. “Hey, what was that?” Someone in the background of the Stinging Piranha’s radio said, and Ant flattened himself against the rock. Hammerhead couldn’t make out what expression he was making from here, but he had known the boy long enough that he could guess. 

“Probably just some critter or something.” Hammerhead dismissed, moments after Ant could be seen frantically tapping away at something on the Mimic Knight’s controls, and the bright blue of its default setting shifted into something white and grey. “Nothing interesting at all.”

“Oh?” The captain asked, interest in his voice. Hammerhead bit his tongue as the captain said, “Oh, why is there nothing interesting about a critter?” The Stinging Piranha inched a little more over the edge of the ravine, while Ant began creeping his way through the rocks again. “It’s perfect target practice, if you ask me!”

Madeline turned to stare at the console with wide, alarmed eyes. Hammerhead felt a little disbelief and the tiniest bit of his own panic start to settle as well. Finn crouched to the ground, messing with his stolen communicator. Madeline grabbed his wrist, and pulled him toward herself. “It’s not Fontaine!” She hissed quietly. “It’s Ant!” 

The Mimic Knight was sticking low to the ground, trying to blend in with the rocks. Hammerhead cleared his throat, and spoke over the comms. “Like you could even hit it!” He jeered, hoping to discourage the pirates. His gut twisted a little more when it became clear he’d only given them further incentive. 

“Oh, yeah?” The captain asked fiercely. “Watch this!” Hammerhead looked down, realizing that Ant had been forced to pick his way through a more open patch of the ravine, making himself a little more noticeable in the process. A harpoon rotated in the Mimic Knight’s general direction, and fired before Hammerhead could process what they were doing. 

“No!” Finn shouted, and Hammerhead didn’t have time to reprimand him or even panic that he might have given away that it was something important. Ant ducked behind a rock, the harpoon that had fired lodging into the ground in front of him, missing the Knight by mere inches. The harpoon ripped its cable right out of the firing mechanism as it launched, the cable drifting down to the bottom of the ravine. 

“Barry you idiot!” The captain shouted, an argument breaking out amongst the Stinging Piranha’s crew. The Mimic Knight hesitated for a moment, peeking out around the rock, and then bolting out toward another stack of rocks. There was no change in the arguing that had started up again, which made Hammerhead feel an odd bit of relief. 

He pressed mute on the Dark Orca’s speaker, so he could turn to his children and demand, “What was that?! They think that there’s something special down there now, when it’s really just a Nekton in a Knight, with parents who knows how far out now!”

“They were trying to shoot him!” Finn cried from the floor. “The Mimic Knight has thin armor, and it doesn’t cover the whole Knight! That harpoon would have pierced it for sure!”

“And?!” Madeline shouted, turning to glare at her brother. “What were you thinking? They could have hit him!”

“I know that! But they found him theirselves!” Finn protested, picking himself up from the floor. “What is he even doing out here, especially in the Mimic Knight?”

“That doesn’t matter!” Hammerhead interjected. “He’s a Nekton, so he’s none of our concern! Right now we have to get the systems up and running again, so we can get the Stinging Piranha out of here.” Hammerhead glanced at the submarine itself, taking note of the two harpoons still loaded. “Forget about the boy, find Danny Boy and ask him what’s taking so long.”

Finn frowned, and started heading out the door. “I’m going to go get him out of there.” He said, which was the opposite of what Hammerhead had been hoping he’d say. 

“You will do no such thing!” Hammerhead demanded, turning back around to face him. “He’s a Nekton, Finn, we’re not friends with them, and we certainly don’t help them!”

Finn turned to face Hammerhead, protesting, “The Stinging Piranha shot a harpoon at him, it almost hit him! We can’t leave him out there all by himself, he could get hurt!”

The insistence in Finn’s voice and the way his face shifted in protest made him look and sound so much like his wonderful mother that Hammerhead couldn’t say anything for a moment, stunned. Madeline turned to glare at Finn instead, saying, “You’ll just let them in on his location, dummy! They’ll know where he is for sure as soon as you go barreling in with the Red Claw!”

“But we can’t just leave him out there!” Finn exclaimed. He turned on his heel, and started running out the door and down the hall. “I’ll be careful!”

Hammerhead raced across the helm to stick his head out the door and bellow down the hall after Finn. “Smiling Finn, you get back here this instant, or I won’t let you get that tongue piercing!”

“You already weren’t gonna let me!” Finn hollered over his shoulder as he sprinted down the Dark Orca, and Hammerhead swore. 

Racing back to the console, Hammerhead punched the button for the hallway speakers. “Somebody stop Smiling Finn from getting to the moon pool!” Grabbing Madeline’s walkie off the counter next, Hammerhead switched it to the frequency Danny Boy could always be found on. “Danny Boy! What’s takin’ so long?!”

“The crew doesn’t know how to work the wires like Madeline does!” Danny Boy protested. “We’ve got Mouse up in the vents, and we’re playing a game of telephone just to get the directions to him since he don’t got a walkie!” There was the sound of mild arguing in the background, and then a loud zap sound followed by someone shrieking in pain. “I need Madeline!” Danny Boy insisted. “Why’re we in such a rush anyways? We’ve got two more hours until we’re done with the biggest parts of Restock Day!”

Madeline leaned forward, grabbing Hammerhead’s wrist and dragging it toward herself so she could shout into the walkie, “The Mimic Knight’s out there, and the Stinging Piranha just shot at it!”

“Heh?” Danny Boy asked in confusion, and then another, louder zap distracted him. “Oh, rats! Get me someone who knows what they’re doing!” Danny Boy stopped talking, and Hammerhead turned to Madeline, pushing her walkie into her hands.

“Go down there and help Danny Boy.” He demanded. “We need the system up and running so the Dark Orca doesn’t go haywire!”

Madeline stared at him, a look of something Hammerhead realized was desperation on her face. “But what about Ant?”

“It doesn’t matter!” Hammerhead barked. “The Aronnax will probably be here any minute, just get going!”

“But-“

“Now, Madeline!”

Hammerhead didn’t wait to see if she left like she was told to. He turned around to face the console, listening to the Stinging Piranha’s crew bickering. There had been no lull in their argument, throughly distracting themselves for at least a few more moments.

Hammerhead hesitated, before pushing the unmute button. His finger slipped across the panel for a moment, Hammerhead trying to veer his finger away from the unmute all button. Cursed tiny buttons and his cursed fat fingers. Hammerhead pulled his hand away to see if he’d hit the button he meant, but got distracted by Ant talking before he could tell for sure. 

“I know, I’m almost to the edge!” Ant insisted. Hammerhead paused, wondering who he was talking to. After a second he realized that Ant was probably talking to the Aronnax, which meant that they’d be there any minute. 

“Boy, get out of there!” Hammerhead snapped. Ant made a startled yelping noise, and Hammerhead watched him jump down in the ravine. He thought he heard some noise in the background on Ant’s end, presumably whoever he had on his frequency back to the Aronnax. “These pirates aren’t like us, Ant, you’d do well to get out of here! Quickly!” Hammerhead didn’t know why he was reaching out to Ant. Especially since, when he glanced behind him to see if Madeline had left like he’d told her to, he found her still sitting at her station. She was staring at Hammerhead, eyes wide and stunned. Hammerhead knew even less how to feel about Madeline seeing him act with Ant like this. 

“What do you think I’m doing?” Ant hissed quietly. Hammerhead had gotten to know Ant a tiny bit after all the times they’d interacted over the last half year. Just enough to better assume how he might react to something. Hammerhead didn’t know if it was that, or the stress he was feeling about his own children causing his parental concerns to take over, but he could hear the panic in Ant’s voice underneath his frustration. He had to have recognized the threat that was the Stinging Piranha declaring the Mimic Knight as target practice for their harpoons. “I’m trying not to draw attention to myself!”

“Who are ye talking to, Hammerhead?” Hammerhead looked down at the console, and realized he had in fact hit the unmute all button. Ant froze out in the water, not uttering even a squeak of panic over the comms. 

“I’m talking to me crew!” Hammerhead bluffed. “Since they’re all so much more competent than the lot you call a crew, since we talk to each other!”

The captain spluttered with rage, and some of his crew members started to voice their own complaints. Ant started creeping along the bottom of the ravine, but before the Stinging Piranha’s crew could get themselves riled up into another argument, one of them actually finally started to pay attention. “Hey, what’s that over there?” Someone in the background said. Hammerhead watched Ant inch closer to the edge of the outcrop he was hiding in, the sunlight reflecting off of the metal. Of course at the worst possible time, the sun started to come out more, providing light into the ravine that Ant in his shiny metal Knight was trying to hide in. 

Hammerhead had to think up something, fast. Before the Stinging Piranha got one of their stupid ideas. “It’s a picnic setting I made!” He brushed off. “I’m going to take your mother to it later today!”

“How dare you!!”

“It’s a shiny fish!” Another crew member exclaimed, and Hammerhead’s stomach dropped. Ant made a squeak of alarm, and Hammerhead watched the Mimic Knight start to pick up the pace. More sunlight reflected off of the metal, and the Stinging Piranha’s crew clamored over each other as they all one by one started to spot Ant. 

“What is that?” One of the pirates asked in awe. 

“It’s nothing!” Hammerhead insisted. Ant continued making his way through the rocks, his lack of caution starting to ebb away in the face of being spotted. The Mimic Knight continued to send flickers of dancing sunlight like a beacon in the low light of the ravine. 

“That doesn’t look like nothing, Hammerhead!” The captain jeered. “Bring us closer so we can get a better aim at it! If old man Hammerhead is interested in it-“

“Old?!” Hammerhead bellowed in outrage. 

“Than it’s definitely worth something to us!” The Stinging Piranha inched a little more over the ravine, and Hammerhead could see Ant starting to panic with the way he was moving through the rocks. 

Hammerhead slammed his fist on the radio before he could stop himself. “That’s a Nekton Knight, you imbeciles! Are you out of yer mind?!” Madeline made a weak noise behind him, Hammerhead already regretting letting the Stinging Piranha’s pirates know exactly what was out there in the ravine. Why did he do that, he could have just kept insisting it was something else!

“As if!” Someone shouted. “Everyone knows that yer making up meetin’ the Nektons, Hammerhead! They’re soft-bellied tree huggers! What are they doing so close to the Dark Orca that you know what one of their Knights looks like?”

“And besides, they don’t have any that look like that!” The captain said, while Ant was frantically weaving through the rocks, trying to stay where there was cover from the harpoons, but desperate to get out into the open ocean where the Mimic Knight’s speed and agility could be used to get him back to the Aronnax. “Don’t you know anything, Hammerhead?”

“I know that you’re making an even stupider mistake than you usually do!” Hammerhead snapped. “The Nektons have trackers in all their equipment, their Knights especially! His parents will be here any minute now!”

The captain laughed, and Hammerhead watched the fourth harpoon start to turn in Ant’s direction. Hammerhead was pretty sure that Ant didn’t see the harpoon aiming for him, the Mimic Knight’s back turned to both submarines. But he did see Ant continue to panic, the Stinging Piranha’s captains words getting to him. He bolted from the rocky outcrop where he made a mad dash for the open ocean, the Mimic Knight picking up speed fast. “If it’s a Nekton Knight, than this shouldn’t do much at all!” The captain taunted with delight. 

Hammerhead watched the harpoon follow Ant as he raced for open water, the gears sputtering. Hammerhead felt his stomach drop a little in disbelief. There’s no way that they were- the harpoons were always faulty, jamming when they fired! It wasn’t going to-

The harpoon fired, and Hammerhead watched it sail through the water directly toward Ant. Ant twisted for a brief second to look back at the submarine, and then a second later the harpoon was piercing the side of the Mimic Knight, hard.

Hammerhead had heard plenty of noises come out of Ant. Yelps of alarm, squeals of delight. Sarcastic quips aimed at Hammerhead and his crew, and nervous chuckles toward his parents and sister. Screams of terror had ripped their way from the Nekton’s littlest crew member, caused by anything from ghost eels to being thrown too close to a spinning rudder. 

The sound that tore its way through the comms, into Hammerhead’s head, and down into his chest, was unlike anything Hammerhead had heard from Ant before. Unlike anything he’d heard from anyone. If Hammerhead didn’t see that the line the sound was coming from was from the Mimic Knight, if he couldn’t see the Mimic Knight with Ant inside with the other pirates harpoon imbedded in the metal, he wouldn’t have believed that the gut-wrenching scream of pain filling the open air belonged to Ant Nekton. 

Madeline screamed behind him, and in the background of Ant’s own screams of pain, Hammerhead heard voices shouting. The Stinging Piranha’s crew cheered at the hit, clamoring over one another in their excitement. 

“Let’s reel ‘er in, boys!!” The cable started to tug as the crew hooted in delight, and Hammerhead didn’t even have a moment to panic at the idea of what they were going to do with Ant and the Mimic Knight before the cable started to actually pull the Mimic Knight in. Ant was wailing over the comms, thrashing as the Stinging Piranha pulled him away from the edge of the ravine and what should have been guaranteed safety in the open ocean. He’d have been able to evade them if he’d just made it to the open ocean. Instead, the Stinging Piranha pulled him back into the middle of the ravine, the crew hooting and hollering in delight at their catch. 

Hammerhead just stood there, shocked that the cable was working. It felt like he was hallucinating, witnessing the Stinging Piranha actually hit something, and then smoothly pull it back to the ship. 

It was then that the cable jammed. The mechanism spluttered and froze, the cable stopping its retreat. Ant shrieked in pain as the harpoon tugged with the cable moving, the tail of the Mimic Knight spasming. Hammerhead watched the Knight start to glitch back and forth between the white and grey Ant had set it to and its default blue as it hung in the center of the ravine, directly in front of and below the Dark Orca like a worm on a lure. Hammerhead faintly heard footsteps pounding against the metal behind him, but all he could focus on was the screams of pain coming from the Mimic Knight. 

They’d shot him. They’d actually shot him. It was something Hammerhead hadn’t necessarily been unexpecting. The Stinging Piranha crew was made up of a group of trigger happy individuals. They were known for taking physical violence to an extreme most other pirates frowned upon. But…they shot him. Maybe it was because Hammerhead actually knew Ant, knew him and knew his family, even though they didn’t get along. This sort of violence wasn’t out of the ordinary for the stunts the Stinging Piranha would pull. Why was it so shocking now? Was it because they’d actually managed to hit him? Or was it because Hammerhead actually knew Ant?

“Oh, come on!” The captain complained, the sound of him hitting his console trying to get the cable to pull in its load. “Why can’t you work for once?!” Ant was gasping for air now, screaming in pain every time the cable tugged on the harpoon imbedded in the Mimic Knight. Ant would cry out in pain and what Hammerhead assumed was shock whenever he could get in a lungful of air in. The harpoon had to have hit him pretty hard to get through the metal. But looking closer at the sight at the edge of the ravine, Hammerhead felt his stomach drop when he realized that it looked like the harpoon was imbedded in the black part of the Mimic Knight’s waist, though Hammerhead wasn’t sure what the material was made out of. But he did know that it was thinner material than the metal, which meant that it could have gone deeper into Ant. 

Another cry from Ant had Hammerhead suddenly snapping out of his stupor. “Have you gone MAD?!” Hammerhead bellowed into the comm line, before he knew what he was doing. “Do you have ANY IDEA what you’ve just DONE?!”

“It’s loot!” The captain crowed. “It’s ours, so you can’t have it! We got it first!”

“That’s not treasure, that’s a Nekton’s Knight!” Hammerhead shouted. Like he himself hadn’t attempted to steal the Nekton’s Knights before. That was different. Hammerhead startled himself with the attempted reasoning. The Dark Orca has the means to hold a Knight, it’s useful for us. And we never tried to do something like this to obtain it. “You’ve just harpooned a Nekton Knight! With one of the Nekton’s CHILDREN in it!!”

“It’s ours!” The captain hissed. He hacked and wheezed, the sounds mixing with Ant’s cries of pain into something awful on the ears. “Don’t you think about taking it!”

“Can’t we just swim out and get it?” A crew member asked in the background. “The cable’s jammed, anyways.”

“We can’t just swim out and get it!” The captain said. “That damn-fangled Authorities junk is blocking the moon pool!”

“It’s not junk!” Another crew member complained. “It’s art! No one else has anything like it!”

“We can’t even use it though!” The captain snapped. 

“But no one else has one!”

“We could just bring the Piranha to the surface.” Another crew member piped in, casually. Ant twisted in the water, crying out in pain while the Mimic Knight squirmed under the harpoon. The morbid picture of a fish caught on a hook filled Hammerhead’s mind, and he listened to the Stinging Piranha continue to argue as if they didn’t have a child jammed on the end of one of their harpoons.

Hammerhead slammed his fists on the console, shouting, “The Nektons are going to be here any minute! Have you not thought of that?! Of what you’re going to do when they show up?!” Hammerhead snatched his walkie off the console, screaming into Danny Boy’s channel. “Danny Boy!! GET THAT ENGINE TURNED ON!!”

“Psh, as if!” The captain dismissed. “Yer just bluffing, Hammerhead, this is no Nekton Knight!”

“Well, it’s not a fish.” A crew member muttered. “It keeps making noises over the comms.” Ant cried out in pain after twisting against the harpoon. “See? It’s making weird, not-fish noises!”

“Why?!” Danny Boy asked Hammerhead, bewildered. Hammerhead could hear arguing and a startled Finn in the background. “What’s happening?!”

“Just get them running!” Danny Boy spluttered, and Hammerhead didn’t wait for an answer, turning to watch Ant continue to writhe under the harpoon. His hands were scrabbling around the harpoon, trying to free himself as he cried out in pain, gasping for air. The Stinging Piranha’s crew continued to argue, dismissing the notion of going to the surface, what if the cable broke and their prize sank? Then they’d never be able to get it.

Hammerhead sat there, not sure what to do. Ant had clearly been in contact with the Aronnax, and they seemed to have some sort of understanding about the situation. And even if Ant hadn’t been talking to them, even if they didn’t know what was going on, they were certainly already close by. The Nekton’s children never ventured far from the Aronnax, and they always kept in steady contact with their parents. Sooner or later, Ant’s parents would have gotten suspicious and come tracking him down. And that was as if they didn’t certainly know what had happened just now. 

The Aronnax had to be close. Glancing at the long range scanners, Hammerhead could see the familiar blip labeled the Aronnax coming in their direction. Faster than he’d seen it move. The Nektons were coming. They…the Dark Orca didn’t need to go out there and get Ant. Especially not when the Stinging Piranha still had another harpoon. They’d fired at a child they didn’t know, under the delusion that it wasn’t a Knight. Hammerhead didn’t know if they actually believed it was some sort of fish, or if they just assumed it was some sort of technology. All Hammerhead knew was that they didn’t think the Nektons had anything to do with it. And regardless, they’d shot at Ant. What if they fired at Finn and Madeline?

The new motion sensors set off a warning, and Hammerhead was shaken out of his indecisiveness. Looking to the console, he saw a reading on the screen say that the moon pool doors were open. Seconds later, Hammerhead watched the Red Claw go shooting down into the ravine, beelining for Ant and the Mimic Knight.

Hammerhead panicked. What was Finn thinking?! The Stinging Piranha still had another harpoon! Bringing the walkie up toward himself again, he bellowed, “Finn! I told ye to stay on the Dark Orca!” The Red Claw sped its way toward the Mimic Knight, chuddering along with gusto.

“What? I am!” Finn said. “I’m not even in the moon pool room! The crew intercepted me, Danny Boy’s trying to shove me into the vents, I only just got away! What happened?”

“Hammerhead!” The captain shouted over his crew. “That’s ours! Keep yer grimy paws off of our bounty!!”

“That’s not a bounty!! It’s worth nothing to you!” Hammerhead shouted back. The captain cursed Hammerhead, and Hammerhead ignored him to look out into the ocean. The Red Claw was nearly halfway to the Mimic Knight, steady in its course. “Then who's in the Red Claw?!” He shouted to Finn. 

“I don’t know!” Finn cried, panicked. “Dad, what happened?!” Hammerhead didn’t answer his son, instead turning around to bark an order to Madeline. When he turned, he quickly realized with a jolt that she wasn’t in her seat. Her magazine was abandoned on her station, next to her mother’s photo. Her chair was facing the doorway, like she’d shot out of it so fast that it spun in the direction she’d gone. 

Hammerhead felt his stomach drop. Maybe she’d gone to Danny Boy, like he’d told her? He whirled back around, looking out the window anyways. The Red Claw made it to its destination, stopping next to the Mimic Knight. Its hood opened and the pilot inside swam out. Hammerhead couldn’t make out their face this far, but he recognized the mass of curls bobbing in the water behind their head. Madeline. 

What was she thinking?! The Aronnax couldn’t be too far out, they didn’t need to save the boy! Hammerhead watched Madeline swim to the Mimic Knight, grabbing Ant’s thrashing arms and pushing them out of the way. She had what looked like some sort of knife or saw in her hands, something sharp that she produced from either the junk drawer in the Red Claw, or off the floor of the moon pool from Danny Boy’s mess he’d certainly left in the wake of installing the motion sensors. Madeline fought off Ant’s flailing arms, before grabbing hold of the harpoon. 

Hammerhead looked up to the Stinging Piranha, and noticed that they had turned their undivided attention on to the Red Claw out in the open. The remaining harpoon was being aimed in the direction of the Red Claw, where Madeline was now furiously sawing at the cable connecting the harpoon to the submarine. Hammerhead slammed his fist down on the button for the Gooper before he knew what he was doing, watching the missile sail through the air. It hit its target dead on, spreading goo all across the helm of the submarine and getting all up in the corners of the harpoons launching mechanisms. A proper pirates skull and crossbones dripped down the edges of the submarine, and the crew began to cough and howl in rage. 

“Hammerhead you idiot!!” The captain of the Stinging Piranha shrieked. “Why would you do that?!”

“That’s my daughter!!” Hammerhead bellowed. “I’ll take yer ship and turn it into spare parts for my spare parts, leaving you on a deserted island if you so much as touch her!!” Madeline managed to get the cable off of the harpoon, and was now wrestling Ant into the Red Claw.

“She’s stealing our treasure!!” The captain shrieked. Madeline closed the hatch with Ant inside, and the Red Claw backed up, turning around and heading back up to the Dark Orca. “You don’t steal another pirates treasure!!”

“That’s how pirates work!!” Hammerhead screamed, the Red Claw slowly making its way up to the Dark Orca. Hammerhead could imagine Ant was being quite difficult in there, slowing Madeline down. “But yer not pirates! You’re just a bunch of stupid kids who don’t know the first thing about actual piracy!! About the culture of it! You give pirates a bad name!” 

“We’re more pirate than you are!” The captain wheezed, all the screaming he was doing causing his smoking habits to make breathing miserable. Still, he valiantly screamed into the comms, determined to have the last word.

“Uh, captain?” One of the Stinging Piranha’s crew members spoke up in the background, concerned. A new blip started to ping on the Dark Orca’s sonar at the same time. 

“Quiet!” The captain snapped. “You listen closely, Hammerhead! We’re gonna storm your ship, taking it for our own! We’re going to steal what is ours, and we’ll gut that weird fish thingy that we skewered for what it’s worth!”

“C-captain?” Hammerhead looked to the console, the pinging from the Dark Orca’s sonar getting louder. A very familiar shape started to take place on the sonar, and the captain continued to rant. 

“We’re gonna sail into the Floating Market with the Dark Orca, and everyone’s gonna respect us!” He was practically spitting, voice choked as he fought past the hacking. The Red Claw was making its way up to the Dark Orca, slowly but surely. “That metal fish armor will be the prize of our new collection, along with anything and everything else that we want!! The Dark Orca will get us all the treasures we could ever hope for, everyone will bow down to our might! Your ship will pave our way to the height of the Floating Market!” The captain cackled with delight, crowing, “We’ll get all the treasure in the world! The seven seas will be ours! AND I WANT MY HAT BACK!!”

“Captain!” The crew member insisted. 

“WHAT?!” The Red Claw disappeared under the Dark Orca’s hull, and Hammerhead saw movement in the distance. 

“Look!” The crew member shrieked, and Hammerhead turned to see what they had to be pointing at. The familiar shape of the Aronnax was speeding their way, the white and blue and orange a strangely yet not entirely comforting sight. Maybe it was the knowledge of what happened to their littlest, or maybe it was the speed it was moving at that Hammerhead had never seen it use, but there was a feeling to the Aronnax that made Hammerhead nervous. 

Kaiko and Will had come for their child. And they weren’t happy. Hammerhead couldn’t begin to imagine how they might respond. 

“Is that-?!” The captain of the Stinging Piranha choked. “That’s not- it can’t be!!”

“It’s the Aronnax!!” Another crew member shrieked in terror. Panicked screams began to come from the Stinging Piranha, and Hammerhead took the opportunity to speak into his walkie again. 

“Danny Boy! Is the engine running?!”

“The systems are! But I haven’t gotten the engine running yet!” Danny Boy said. “It’s slow work without Madeline, Captain, what’s going on?”

Hammerhead watched the Aronnax come cruising closer, their frequency automatically linking with the Dark Orca’s comm lines. “The Stinging Piranha’s here. And they’ve made a mess for themselves that puts all the others they’ve made for themselves to shame.”

“The Stinging Piranha?!” Danny Boy spat at their name. “What kind of mess did they make for themselves now?!”

“They shot a Nekton Knight!” Hammerhead said. “And if that wasn’t bad enough, they shot it with one of the kids inside of it!”

“They did WHAT?!” Danny Boy squeaked in alarm, and Hammerhead heard gasps and cries of alarm from his own crew in the background. Angry shouts and swearing followed soon after, the cacophony of outrage from his crew a little surprising to Hammerhead. 

“It’s the Aronnax!” The captain insisted, but Hammerhead could hear the panic in his voice. “They’re pacifists! Tree huggers! They’re no threat at all!”

“Was that a Nekton Knight we just shot?” A crew member asked in the background, realization quickly sweeping through the Stinging Piranha’s crew. Hammerhead felt a wave of vindication sweep through him. 

“I told you, you idiots!” He said. “Now you’re really in for it! You’ll walk the plank for this!”

“They’re the Nektons!” The captain snapped. “They don’t have a plank! Besides, they’re harmless! They don’t have any weapons on their submarine! We can take them!”

Hammerhead saw the Aronnax get closer, and watched her moon pool doors open as she sped right toward the Stinging Piranha and the Dark Orca. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Hammerhead didn’t elaborate, reveling in the panic that swept through the Stinging Piranha’s crew, and also uncertain as to how the Nektons were actually going to respond to this. They usually weren’t violent, but they also usually didn’t have a child with a harpoon stuck in him. Hammerhead had made them pretty mad before, but he’d never outright hurt one of their children. 

“What does that mean?” The captain asked shrilly, and Hammerhead didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to look at the Aronnax. 

Hammerhead watched as the Aronnax charged in, her moon pool doors open and a Knight shooting out of it before the Aronnax had even stopped. It was far enough that specific details were lost to Hammerhead, but the distinct presence of green made it clear it was the Swamp Knight. Hammerhead couldn’t tell who was inside it, and the Swamp Knight was used often enough by all members of the family that he couldn’t hazard a guess.

Hammerhead had half expected the Swamp Knight to come shooting in the Dark Orca’s direction. They had Ant after all, and Finn had to have contacted Fontaine through her stolen communicator by now. The trackers in the Mimic Knight aside, the Nekton’s had to know that Ant was on board Hammerhead’s ship by now. 

It became rapidly clear that the pilot had something else on their mind though, as the Swamp Knight made a beeline for the Stinging Piranha instead. The crew over the radio began to scream in terror as the Swamp Knight picked up speed, and Hammerhead felt his jaw drop as he watched the Knight go streaking for the Stinging Piranha without stopping. Despite the speed he was watching it move at, Hammerhead still jumped in surprise when it barreled into the side of the ship. Screams of terror filled the air as the Stinging Piranha rocked back a few yards, the Swamp Knight bouncing off the side a little bit. It quickly returned to the Stinging Piranha, slamming into the side again and pushing the Stinging Piranha back a few more yards, making the crew inside scream with more terror. 

“Stop!!” The captain screamed, as Hammerhead stared in shock at the Swamp Knight slamming its fists against the hull, trying to find grooves in which to really dig into the metal. “Leave my ship alone!! What are you doing?!”

“You call that a submarine?!” Hammerhead glanced to the console, recognizing Fontaine’s voice. He didn’t know if she was inside the Swamp Knight or the Aronnax, but it was clear she could now hear what was being said. And she had words of her own to pipe in with. “The Titan submarine was built better than that heap of garbage, and it was controlled by a video game controller and it imploded!!”

“I don’t know what that means, but you take it back!!” The captain spat, and another slam from the Swamp Knight had him shrieking in terror. 

“Fontaine!” Hammerhead called out, doing his best to ignore the screams of terror as the Swamp Knight did its level best to crack the Stinging Piranha open like a coconut. “Where are your parents?”

“Mom’s out in the Swamp Knight.” Fontaine said, and another awful bang served as punctuation. “I think she’s trying to get the submarine to the surface so she can have a word with them without worrying about drowning them.”

Hammerhead looked to the Stinging Piranha. The Swamp Knight was braced against the front of the submarine now, and Hammerhead could only imagine the hellish look of rage that the crew was being faced with. Somehow, Kaiko being the one in the Swamp Knight now wreaking havoc on the Stinging Piranha made sense. She’d used it to devastating degrees in the past, rounding up all of Hammerhead’s crew and stuffing them in the kitchen with it once. However, this was a new level of aggression, even for the most aggressive of the Nektons. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Fontaine scoffed, and sounded a little distracted in the background. “She’s dealing with them, and Dad’s-“ Her voice cut off like she were strangled, and it took a minute for her to start talking again. “D-Dad’s getting stuff. For Ant. He’s taking it to the moon pool so we can treat him there immediately.” She sounded like she was fighting to keep her voice steady, but her panic still fought its way in. The thought of Ant’s older sister hearing him get shot with a harpoon made something in Hammerhead’s stomach churn nastily. 

Fontaine was a little younger than Finn, who was an accomplished and wonderful young man, one that Hammerhead was proud to see him grow into. She was usually confident and assured, cocky and full of witty remarks in a way that put some pirates to shame. But now she sounded scared and uncertain, shakily trying to steel herself but her nerves getting the best of her. Hammerhead had never heard her like this before, and felt incredibly somber thinking about how she might be feeling.

“Tell him to get stuff to help with infection.” Hammerhead said, throat tight and words hesitant at the sensation of giving advice to a Nekton. “I doubt that the Stinging Piranha cleans their harpoons, and they only ever leave their compartments when they’re fired, so they’ve also been sitting in sea water collecting rust and who knows what else.”

“They don’t clean them?” Fontaine squeaked, aghast. “They shot my brother with a dirty harpoon?” Fontaine continued to splutter, rambling now. “And- the Stinging Piranha? What the heck kind of name is that, they have harpoons so they call themselves the Stinging- who are these idiots?! What are they doing out here?!”

Hammerhead barked a laugh, though it didn’t have as much gusto as it usually did. Not as much as he wanted it to, so he could pretend that what was happening wasn’t rattling him as much as it actually was. “They’re morons, the lot of them.” He said. “They’re poor excuses of pirates, if you can even call them that. Don’t actually, it pisses them off, and they deserve to not be called pirates.”

“Okay?” Fontaine sounded confused and rattled, and Hammerhead scratched his neck, uncertain. Drumming his fingers against the console he tried to reassure the Nekton’s eldest. 

“Pay those heathens no mind.” The screams of terror over the comms as the Swamp Knight continued to come down on the Stinging Piranha made it hard for that advice to be solid. Especially as the Stinging Piranha’s captain continued to screech protests and demands for the Swamp Knight to stop destroying his submarine, which was quickly followed by his own raspy shrieks of terror as Kaiko paid him no mind. “There are far better pirates out there, dearie, and you’ll find no finer ones than those here on the Dark Orca.”

Fontaine made a noncommittal noise, the sound of shifting coming from her end. Hammerhead could only assume that she was currently the one seated in the pilot’s seat, if her mother was out giving the Stinging Piranha what for and her father was currently trying to gather whatever he needed to tend to her brother. “Thanks?” She sounded like she didn’t know if that made her feel better or not, and Hammerhead wasn’t sure what he exactly had been aiming to do. 

Hammerhead cleared his throat awkwardly, and reached for the walkie on the counter. Instead of dwelling on Fontaine, he tried to focus on the situation within the Dark Orca. Specifically getting the engines up and running to scare the Stinging Piranha away, or maybe move closer to the Aronnax so Hammerhead could pawn Ant back off to his own father. “Danny Boy!” The smaller man shouted in alarm at Hammerhead’s sudden intrusion on whatever he was doing. “What’s the status on that engine?!”

“Finn’s run off, and the only other person who can fit up there without destroying everything is Mouse!” There was pained moaning in the background, and shouts of protest. “And he’s not going back up there, he refuses to!”

“I-Is Ant there?” Fontaine asked, voice pitched upward in worry. “Is he okay??”

Hammerhead didn’t want to admit that he didn’t actually know. From the distance that Ant had been shot, Hammerhead didn’t know how far the harpoon had sunk into him. Both in that Ant was so far from the Dark Orca that Hammerhead couldn’t see clear enough, and that he didn’t know how hard the harpoon had hit him from the distance it had traveled from the Stinging Piranha. Hammerhead hadn’t been paying attention to Ant as Madeline had wrestled him into the Red Claw, and he hadn’t looked for him in the Red Claw as it trudged its way back to the Dark Orca, too busy distracting the Stinging Piranha both times. Hammerhead had no way of gaging exactly what kind of state Ant was in. And with some of the systems still down, he couldn’t check the moon pool cameras and see for himself. 

Hammerhead also didn’t know how their harpoons fared against the Nekton’s tech. It had definitely penetrated the Mimic Knight, but how much wiring and paneling did it have to get through? The Stinging Piranha’s harpoons probably couldn’t penetrate the other Knight’s, their armor far thicker than the Mimic Knight’s. But how deep had it managed to get past the Mimic Knight’s? It had…it had definitely hit Ant. But how far into him had it gone? How bad was his situation?

“What do you need, Danny Boy?” Hammerhead asked instead of answering Fontaine’s question, doing his best to ignore her. 

“What about my brother?” Fontaine asked, desperate. “Is Ant okay?” Hammerhead grit his teeth together, trying not to let the sheer panic of the teenager on the other line get to him. 

“I need Madeline, Captain!” Danny Boy shouted over the radio. “Now, if you want the engine running!”

Hammerhead grabbed the radio. “I’ll get her now.” Turning to the console, he told Fontaine, “I’m going to check on yer brother now. Tell yer father to meet me in the Dark Orca’s moon pool. His boy will be there.”

“What?” Fontaine asked. Hammerhead wasn’t sure if she actually didn’t hear or understand him, or was so overwhelmed with the situation she didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t stick around long enough to find out. 

Hammerhead raced down the halls of the Dark Orca, leaving behind the panicked sounds of the Stinging Piranha’s crew getting tossed around by the pissed off mother of the boy they’d just shot with a harpoon. Kaiko Nekton was a person that Hammerhead did his best to not piss off further than the usual amount, and the sounds of the Swamp Knight digging into the metal of the Stinging Piranha only further cemented that desire. 

Hammerhead’s ears were pounding in tandem with his feet as he raced down the halls of the Dark Orca, making his way to the moon pool room. He hoped beyond hope that the harpoon, however deep it had gone, hadn’t hit anything important. He knew how quickly someone could die to a wound like that. Especially with a harpoon as badly maintained as the Stinging Piranha’s. 

To this day, Hammerhead still didn’t know what had caused the hull to weaken and rupture, that day. His beloved, darling love and half of his crew, gone because of it. One moment, everything had been fine. The next, the hull in the middle of the ship had cracked open, separating the crew from each other as the submarine quickly began to flood with water. Hammerhead’s love and half the crew had been on the side that flooded faster, the current stronger than Hammerhead, pushing the door shut before he could grab even one person and pull them to safety. Nothing Hammerhead had done could pry it open, and it was the members of the remaining crew that hadn’t taken the life raft with Finn and Madeline to the surface already that had pried Hammerhead from the door in the end. If they hadn’t, he’d have probably gone down with the ship that day as well, too determined to get the door open and get to his darling. 

But before that had all happened, before the water became too much, the water had busted some pipes in the initial rupture. It had happened so fast that Hammerhead barely had time to register what was happening. In the initial mayhem and panic at the realization that the ship was flooding, one of the busted pipes had jammed itself right into the gut of one of the crew members on Hammerhead’s side. He barely had time to even know what was going on before he was gone. 

He’d been a wonderful man, Hammerhead had known him for years. Ran along the piers of the Floating Market together as boys, snatching every wallet and purse they could find. He’d been the first person Hammerhead recruited to join his first submarine as crew. He’d been the first person Hammerhead had told when he’d worked up the guts to ask the dashing woman on the pier two over out, and he’d been the first to know that Hammerhead was planning to propose to her three years later. He’d been Hammerhead’s Quarter Master, and in moments, he’d been gone. Slumped against the wall amidst the rising water before he had time to register what had even hit him. 

Everything had happened so fast, the door with his wife and remaining crew slamming shut when they were mere inches away pressing Hammerhead forward. It wasn’t until later that Hammerhead had gotten the chance to really process anything. When the Dark Orca was his, and his children were tucked up in the old captain’s bed, the remaining crew who stuck around sleeping on the floor, and Hammerhead in the helm, sitting and processing everything that had happened in the last few days.

It had been quick. Over in moments. But it had been a big pipe, and it had hit his friend hard. Hammerhead didn’t think he even knew what hit him before it was over. Ant had been hit by a harpoon, a rusted one at that, and Hammerhead didn’t know how deep it had gone. How much blood he’d lost already. Ant was a small child, he didn’t have that much blood in his body. And Hammerhead didn’t know where exactly he’d been shot. If the harpoon had hit anywhere important. It was filthy, getting shot in the wrong place could be fatal. Hammerhead felt like he was back on his old submarine, racing against the clock to accomplish something when he didn’t even know what to expect.

What if he was too late? The thought that dared to enter his mind would have stopped Hammerhead in his tracks if the urgency of the situation didn’t have his muscle memory urging him forward. He hadn’t been paying attention to Ant in the moments after he’d been shot, glancing his way every so often as he cursed the Stinging Piranha over their supreme stupidity. He’d been squirming when Madeline wrestled him into the Red Claw, but it hadn’t taken much time for her to actually get him into it. 

Was it because he’d been in shock? Was it blood loss? How much blood could he have lost in that time? Hammerhead hadn’t seen much red in the water, but did that mean there was little blood, or that the Knight kept it contained to its hull? And where had it hit him? Hammerhead kept circling back to that question, because in the end, it was the most important one. Wherever that harpoon had hit Ant, and it certainly had based off of his screams, would change exactly what time Hammerhead and the Nektons had to treat him, and what the boys chances were. 

Hammerhead tried to reason with himself once he realized that he’d included himself in that equation. Ant wasn’t his child. Far from it. He certainly wasn’t in need of any parental figures. Kaiko and Will were good parents, who probably had a lot of unnecessary things to say about about Hammerhead’s parenting style compared to their own. His mother was tearing into the pirate submarine that had shot him as Hammerhead raced through the halls of the Dark Orca, and his father had to be tearing the Aronnax apart trying to get everything he could possibly need to treat Ant. Hammerhead didn’t have to do anything, he was in no way responsible for the boy. 

…the boy who was on his ship. Whose parents weren’t there. Who had been shot right in front of Hammerhead’s very own eyes. Who had been towed to relative safety by Hammerhead’s daughter, for some inane reason that Hammerhead didn’t know. 

Ant was a Nekton. The Dark Orca pirates and the Nektons didn’t get along. They weren’t supposed to. Why was Hammerhead so concerned now?

Hammerhead rounded a corner, and saw Finn dashing down the opposite hall, headed in the same direction that Hammerhead was. Hammerhead’s head was still pounding, but he heard Finn stammer, “I-I know, I’m almost there, I’m sure he’s fine.” Hammerhead realized he must have been talking to Fontaine. Either because he reached out to her, or because she called him when Hammerhead’s answers to her questions about her brother didn’t satisfy her. Finn didn’t seem to notice Hammerhead, peeling around the final corner and into the moon pool. “He’ll be fine, Fontaine, I’m sure of it, just hold on.”

Hammerhead felt himself speeding up. No no no, he didn’t know what kind of condition Ant was in. Finn couldn’t be there, he knew how soft-hearted his son was about the Nektons. How soft he was about Fontaine. He couldn’t see her little brother with a harpoon in his stomach, especially when Hammerhead didn’t know if Ant was okay or not yet. 

It was only a matter of feet before Hammerhead made it to the moon pool, but it felt like he was marching through molasses to get there. Hammerhead kept fighting with himself, that it was the Nekton’s, that they didn’t get along, that Ant had been hurt, that the Nektons weren’t on the Dark Orca, that Hammerhead and anyone else on the Dark Orca were the only people currently available for Ant to get any kind of help from, that this wasn’t how pirates worked. 

Hammerhead burst into the moon pool room. The Red Claw was in the moon pool, and Madeline was perched on its arm, Finn at her side. Madeline was holding Ant by his armpits, and she was struggling to drag him out of the Red Claw. Finn was fretting, hands in the air as he tried to find the best way to help without knocking all three of them into the water. Ant was squirming, and Hammerhead could see blood staining Madeline’s pants. 

Ant was moving though. He was still alive. And coherent enough to squirm and be impossible to move. 

Finn glanced Hammerhead’s way, and Hammerhead saw the panic setting in his face. The realization of exactly how bad the situation was. Finn hadn’t even known that Ant had been shot with the harpoon, he’d left before that had happened. Hammerhead felt awful knowing he couldn’t stop Finn from seeing what had happened without telling him first. 

Finn quickly shook himself out of his stupor before Hammerhead could figure out what to say to make him not so scared. He turned back to his sister, reaching forward. “Maddie, let me-“

“No, you’ll drop him!” Madeline snapped. She shuffled back a few more steps, tilting her head back behind her to try and focus on her footing. “Ant, stop squirming!” Hammerhead could hear Ant crying out in pain over the Mimic Knight’s external speakers. The Mimic Knight’s tail twisted, nearly knocking both Ant and Madeline into the moon pool. Finn lunged forward, grabbing the end of the Mimic Knight’s tail to try and keep them balanced. Madeline pulled back, reaching a hand forward to swat at her brother. “Leave him alone, he’s hurt!”

“I’m just trying to help!” Finn said, lifting the Mimic Knight’s tail up. Hammerhead could see Ant’s head tilt back as he screamed in pain at the movement. Hammerhead noted that was probably another good sign. He was conscious enough to not only move a lot to the point of being a problem, but he was also able to make a lot of noise as well. Ant was gasping for air, different cries of varying degrees of both panic and pain leaving him every time he managed to catch his breath. Madeline looked steadfast in her determination to be the one to help him, but Hammerhead could see the severity of the situation was starting to catch up to her. 

“He’s hurt!” Madeline protested, trying to shuffle backward and down the Red Claw’s arm. “I’ve got him!” In her haste to get away from her brother, her foot slipped. Madeline went tumbling back, Finn scrambling to try and catch her. Madeline was still clutching Ant in the Mimic Knight, and Ant screamed in pain as he went tumbling down with her, landing right on top of her. Finn dropped the Mimic Knight’s tail, and then stood there flapping his hands in panic as Madeline and Ant lay on the Red Claw’s arm. There was a heart-stopping moment where Hammerhead worried the arm would disconnect, sending Ant, Madeline, and Finn down into the water. 

But the arm held strong, and Madeline had her arms wrapped tight around Ant’s chest. Ant’s hands were scrabbling for a hold on something, and Madeline kicked her legs in the air around the tail. “Don’t help me up!” She demanded, feet pushing against the Red Claw arm and the air, trying to boost herself up from under the Mimic Knight. The sight of her swinging her feet in the air made Hammerhead think of a turtle on its back, valiantly trying to right itself. 

Finn spluttered for a moment, before trying to pick his way over and around Ant to get to both Ant and Madeline. “Okay, let me just…uh-hang on.” Madeline managed to roll over with her back to the rest of the moon pool, kicking a foot out at Finn as he tried to get closer. Her arms were still wrapped tightly around Ant, who was crying as the harpoon was pushed against the Red Claw at an angle that had to be pulling at wherever it had hit him. 

Hammerhead stood there, watching the whole time, stuck in molasses. But then the sound of Ant crying out in pain, his hands trying to push at the harpoon and the Red Claw, snapped Hammerhead’s attention span back to where it needed to be. He swept forward into the moon pool proper while his children continued to argue. Once he made it over, he reached over and  grabbed Finn by the back of his shirt, hoisting him up out of the way. “Move.” Hammerhead didn’t say anything else, Finn squawking as he was lifted into the air like a cat and dumped onto the floor of the moon pool. 

Madeline looked up at Hammerhead, surprise on her face as she still held Ant. Hammerhead could see Ant straining his head back as he tried to free himself, choking on a sob that he was somehow fighting down. Hammerhead didn’t let himself get distracted by the sight, climbing onto the Red Claw’s arm. As soon as she realized Hammerhead was coming on, Madeline scrambled to her feet, moving to crouch over Ant like some sort of weird, protective gremlin. She was too small to provide much cover for Ant though, and not nearly strong enough to actually keep Hammerhead away. Hammerhead easily bent down and pushed past Madeline, her protests failing to stop him any more than her small, angry fists pounding against his arms did. “Leave him alone, Dad!” 

Hammerhead grabbed a hold of the Mimic Knight, ignoring his daughter’s angry protests and hoisting it into the air. Ant’s strangled cry could be heard over the Mimic Knight’s external speakers, and Hammerhead shifted him more comfortably into his arms. Madeline shot to her feet like a weed, hovering next to Hammerhead as he swiftly stepped off the Red Claw. Her protests became fitful, Madeline stumbling after Hammerhead and her protests to give Ant to her, to leave him alone, to be careful, seemingly more of an afterthought now. 

Ant was crying out in pain as Hammerhead took him away from the Red Claw and out into the rest of the moon pool room. His hands shoved at Hammerhead, grappling with Hammerhead’s shirt before sliding down to his own stomach, where the harpoon was. Ant looked down at his stomach, physically recoiling and then screaming in pain again at the movement. Hammerhead carried him a few meters away from the edge of the moon pool, Madeline and Finn hanging at his heels, before he bent down and laid Ant down on the floor as gently as he could. Ant still cried out in pain at the shifting, jerking and trying to get away from the harpoon, hands moving every which way as he tried to find something to hold on to. 

Hammerhead looked down at the Mimic Knight. Its glitching had mostly stopped, settling into the default blue. Some of the honeycomb shaped sections within the panels had glitched and seemingly died near the area the harpoon had penetrated the suit, a dead grey color now. The harpoon was imbedded just above Ant’s hips, in his stomach, and Hammerhead could see that it had gone in fairly deep. There wasn’t necessarily a lot of blood coming out of the opening, but there was red smeared across the blue panels closest to where the harpoon had punctured the black material that made up the Mimic Knight’s torso. Hammerhead could only assume that was where the blood on Madeline’s pants came from. 

Twisting Ant around and ignoring the croak of pain that came with it, Hammerhead peered over his back. There was no sign of the harpoon coming out the other side, which helped provide a spurt of momentary relief for Hammerhead. Ant was arching against the floor with a screech of pain that only pitched upward as Hammerhead started prodding against his stomach, trying to feel how deep the harpoon was in. After some prodding, ignoring both his own children and the child currently writhing under his unrelenting hands, Hammerhead found that while the harpoon was in Ant a decent amount, it wasn’t in deep. Hammerhead felt a fraction of the tension in his shoulders that he didn’t realize was there ease away. 

Hammerhead rolled Ant back onto his back, as best as he could with how the Knight was built, anyways. He tried to be more mindful of how he jostled him, as a sort of nonverbal apology for pushing against his stomach and the harpoon that was in it. Hammerhead had been pretty certain that he’d been gentle, but the cry of pain that Ant made at being moved back onto his back seemed to argue otherwise. Hammerhead pointedly avoided looking at the harpoon jutting into the air, and looked at Ant himself instead. Ant was gasping for air, eyes wide and terrified. His hands were scrabbling around the shaft of the harpoon, and the Mimic Knight’s tail thumped against the ground in his panic. 

Hammerhead grabbed his hands, and pulled them away from the harpoon. “Stop that! You’ll just hurt yourself, boy!” Ant shuddered on the floor, choking as he tensed under Hammerhead’s hands. He released another scream of pain, the Mimic Knight’s tail spasming against Hammerhead’s legs.

Hammerhead looked away from Ant. The sheer panic on his face, the way his face had paled that made the freckles Hammerhead hadn’t realized he had stand out. The strangled cries and gasps as the Mimic Knight’s metal panels scrapped across the moon pool floor in Ant’s terror. The way his hands twitched under Hammerhead’s grasp as he tried to reach for something he couldn’t actually grab. Hammerhead wasn’t used to seeing Ant in such a state, and he quickly realized that he didn’t like it. 

Hammerhead turned to his own son instead. Finn was staring down at Ant, his eyes wide and jaw hanging open in horror. He looked like he didn’t know what to do anymore than Hammerhead did, and the communicator on his wrist crackled as Fontaine tried to get in contact with him. “Finn!” Hammerhead barked at his son, trying to snap him out of whatever stupor he’d dug himself into. Finn blinked, groggily, like he’d just woken up from some bizarre dream. Turning to Hammerhead, he stared at him like he barely knew where he was or what was going on. Hammerhead figured that was probably pretty accurate. Finn had left the helm before Ant was shot, and Hammerhead didn’t know what Fontaine had told him. And whatever she told him, Fontaine didn’t know the whole thing anyways.

“What’s this thing made out of?” Hammerhead asked, trying to ignore Madeline pacing opposite of him near Ant’s head, and trying to ignore Ant still squirming and crying out on the floor. Hammerhead released his grip on Ant’s hands so he could press them tight to the base of the harpoon. Ant jerked under his hands, releasing another wail of pain. “The Mimic Knight, the black part of the chest. Do you know what the Nektons made it out of?”

Finn stared at Hammerhead for a moment, trying to make heads or tails out of the question. Hammerhead wasn’t really sure why he was asking either, the material already pierced by the harpoon. He was just trying to find something to distract Finn with, get him to focus on something other than the harpoon piercing Ant. Though, maybe asking about what it had pierced wasn’t as helpful as Hammerhead initially thought it might be. 

Finn began to stammer, blinking rapidly like a camera shutter as he tried to remember. “Um, I-I think…I think Fontaine said it was some sort of high-grade fiber? L-Like the stuff used to make deep-diving wetsuits. But better, a higher quality and a lot thicker and tougher.”

Hammerhead supposed that made sense. Feeling it under his hands as he pressed them around the area the harpoon had penetrated, it confirmed his suspicions that the material wasn’t metal like the rest of the Knights. But it was far too tough and thick to be rubber, and Hammerhead didn’t think the Nektons would use something like that in their Knights anyways. They were too eco-friendly. He tried to think of something else to ask Finn, trying to continue distracting his boy and also himself as he felt Ant fight for breath against the material Hammerhead was pressing against. But Finn stumbled forward, falling to his knees next to Hammerhead and reaching over to grab a hold of the harpoon. “W-We gotta get this out of him-“

Hammerhead grabbed his wrist, pushing his hand away. “No! That’ll make it worse, he’ll bleed out before he can even be treated!” Finn stared at Hammerhead like a kicked puppy, immediately filling Hammerhead with regret at snapping. The regret pooled even deeper in his chest and down into his stomach when Finn looked down at where Hammerhead was grabbing him, looking sick at the blood Hammerhead was leaving there. Hammerhead pried his fingers off of his son’s wrist, yanking his hand back. But the damage was done, a red handprint swallowing Finn’s wrist, sticking to his skin. 

Hammerhead swallowed, trying to find something else to say. But before he could stutter out an excuse or an apology, or some other sort of distraction, Ant choked in pain underneath him. Hammerhead turned to watch him gasp in a breath of air, and then release a strangled scream. Hammerhead’s greater weight had gotten pushed further onto his wound as he leaned over to push Finn away, and it only made the pain worse. Ant almost arched his whole chest off the floor, fighting against the Knight he was still stuck in but reacting to the pain from the pressure against his wound, screaming in agony. 

Hammerhead almost leaned back and away, before the sight of the blood that was steadily leaking out of the Knight drove him to hastily shoving his hand back against the base of the harpoon. It was a bleeding wound, what was Hammerhead thinking? It was basic knowledge to apply pressure to any sort of wound that was releasing blood. Hammerhead did his best to ignore the screaming Ant made as Hammerhead pushed down on his stomach. He did his best to ignore the thrashing and jerking as Ant fought against Hammerhead and the harpoon, small hands pushing at Hammerhead’s hands and simultaneously grabbing onto them as some sort of lifeline. He did his best to ignore the slick against his palms, the red smears Ant’s hands left across his hands and wrists and the harpoons shaft as he scrabbled for a purchase on anything he could hold on to, leaving his own blood across every surface he touched. 

How did this happen? Hammerhead knew how it happened, Ant had left the Aronnax after his parents told him to. He’d wandered off and found the Dark Orca, around the same time the Stinging Piranha stumbled across them too. The Stinging Piranha acted as stupidly and irrationally as they ever did, and shot him with a harpoon as he tried to make a dash back in the direction of the Aronnax, where he’d have been safe from their harpoons. And he hadn’t moved fast enough, or the Stinging Piranha had just gotten lucky, or maybe Ant had just been unlucky. 

But this kind of thing never happened with the Nektons. It had never happened during any excursion or skirmish with the Nektons. The Dark Orca used grappling hooks, not harpoons, and they’d never done something like this. The Nektons always…they always seemed to be so lucky avoiding this kind of thing. They always held their ground so well against any unsavory folk that they ran into. They always managed to get out of the sticky situations they found themselves in. Hammerhead looked down at Ant, at the blood smeared across his hands and the Knight that Ant was stuck helpless in, and the panic and pain he was in. How did something like this happen? What was different this time, how did it go wrong this time? Hammerhead had never expected to be in this situation before. 

Piracy came with as much risk as it did reward. Hammerhead had lost his love and half of the crew he’d known for years in a matter of minutes because of a ruptured hull. Many pirate crews carried illegal equipment and many carried threats of bodily harm, and some had the means to carry them out. Hammerhead had prayed to a god he didn’t believe in that he never be subject to a situation like this with his own children. And now he found himself staring down at someone else’s child, one who should have never been in a situation that brought about this result, and Hammerhead didn’t know what to do. 

Finn was wringing his hands, staring down at Ant with wide eyes. “Dad? W-What do we do?” Ant stared up at Hammerhead, their eyes locking for a moment. Hammerhead almost didn’t recognize Ant for a moment, the level of fear and pain in his face so unfamiliar to the confident boy he’d grown to be familiar with. Hammerhead somehow managed to pull his concentration away to look at his own son. 

“Call his father, figure out where he is.” Hammerhead said, removing a hand for a brief moment to pull his walkie from his belt and hand it over to Finn. “Fontaine said that he was getting stuff to treat Ant, find out how long it’ll take before we can bring him over.” Finn blinked at Hammerhead again, hesitating a moment before the words registered in his head and he managed to work his hands into motion. Finn reached out for the walkie, hands shaking as he took it from Hammerhead. Hammerhead almost forgot about the blood on his hands again until he saw Finn gingerly pull the walkie toward himself, staring at it like he was going to be sick. 

There wasn’t any time to apologize about it. Finn began to fumble with the walkie, adjusting the channels to pick up the frequency that the Nekton’s communicators used. He would check the communicator in his hand every so often, trying to match the walkie with the one that his communicator told him Will used. Hammerhead hesitated a moment, watching his son struggle to stay composed as Ant continued to cry out and gasp in pain a few feet away from him. Eventually, Hammerhead forced himself to turn away, not sure what he could say that would make Finn feel better. Instead, he focused on his other child. “Madeline, go to Danny Boy. Help him get the engine set up.”

Madeline immediately shook her head. “No! I’m not going anywhere!”

Hammerhead pointed a finger at her, snapping, “This isn’t up for discussion, young lady! We’ll talk about you going out in the Red Claw later, but right now you’re going to Danny Boy! Like I told you to from the start!”

Madeline glared at Hammerhead, hands shaking as she balled them up into fists at her side. “I said I’m not going anywhere!” Madeline dropped with a thud to her knees on the ground next to Ant, like she were stomping her foot in a final act of defiance. Hammerhead tried to protest, but it was clear his words were falling on deaf ears as soon as Madeline looked down at Ant, ignoring Hammerhead entirely. She planted her hands on his shoulder, keeping him pinned further to the ground. Ant hadn’t stopped thrashing even a bit, too panicked about the harpoon in his stomach to think straight. 

Hammerhead was certain he knew at least a little bit of what Ant’s headspace was right now. In a handful of seconds he’d found himself with a harpoon imbedded in his stomach, dangling from a line attached to an unfamiliar pirate submarine that he’d certainly never heard of before. It had only been a few minutes since he’d been shot, and he was probably still grappling with processing what actually happened. He knew what happened, but he didn’t know what happened. 

It was only made worse by the fact that Hammerhead was also almost certain that he’d never had anything like this happen to him before. Ant hadn’t stopped panicking and thrashing, hands scrabbling across every available surface like he were trying to find something to ground himself with, something to hold on to. His hands had gone to Hammerhead’s a few times, latching around his fingers and clawing at his rings and wrists, but they always vanished after a moment or two. 

Hammerhead supposed that it was because, on top of being shot with a harpoon, Ant had been dragged on board the Dark Orca. It was familiar, but it wasn’t what Ant had wanted. The Dark Orca pirates and the Aronnax’s Nektons weren’t friends. They weren’t friendly with each other. Ant was impaled and stuck somewhere he didn’t associate with comfort and safety, surrounded by people he didn’t like in one of the most vulnerable states he’d probably ever been in. And Hammerhead couldn’t provide the comfort and security that Ant was searching for. 

But despite all that, Ant seemed to react somewhat to Madeline’s presence. His eyes flitted in her direction as Madeline pressed down on his chest, keeping him pinned to the ground, and his eyes stayed on her for a few seconds longer than they had every time he glanced Hammerhead’s way. Ant’s thrashing had continuously jostled the harpoon, which couldn’t have helped with the pain that it was causing by simply being inside of him. Madeline kept him pinned to the floor, restricting his movements and causing the harpoon to stop wiggling and swaying in time with Ant’s twisting. Ant’s hands continued to claw at his surroundings though, scraping across the floor and back up his own stomach, ending at the harpoon in his stomach and Hammerhead’s hands, before they retreated back to the floor, trying to find something familiar. Something comforting. 

Quickly, they found their way to the harpoon again, only this time they stayed. Madeline pinning Ant’s chest forced him to lift his head up to try and see around him, and Hammerhead watched his eyes lock onto the harpoon. For a moment, all Ant did was gasp and choke in pain, staring at the harpoon. His hands shifted up the shaft, and Hammerhead saw the exact moment the situation seemed to finally register in Ant’s head. The exact moment he really realized what had happened and where the harpoon was. Hammerhead watched as Ant finally registered exactly what had happened to him, and he watched the panic Ant had already been experiencing increase tenfold. 

Ant’s eyes widened, and his face paled even further. His breathing began to pick up in pace, and his hands tightened their grip on the harpoon. A strangled scream left him, and Ant’s hands tried to dig past Hammerhead’s hands to get to the root of the harpoon, where it met his stomach. Hammerhead just pushed his hands harder against Ant’s stomach, blocking Ant’s access to his wound but causing his screams to turn up a few pitches, turning into a choked sort of noise. Ant howled as Hammerhead pushed as hard as he dared against Ant’s stomach, Ant fighting against Madeline’s hands to try and curl against the pain. 

Hammerhead turned around to Finn, demanding, “Finn! William!” He tried to ignore the horrified screaming as Ant fought against Hammerhead and Madeline, focusing instead on his own son. 

Finn stammered, glancing up at Hammerhead with a panicked look. “I-I’m trying! I haven’t gotten the frequency right!”

“Just use the communicator!!” Hammerhead snapped, trying to shout louder than Ant as he continued to scream and groan. He could see Madeline trying to fight him in the corner of his eye, and she was saying something to him. Hammerhead didn’t listen in, assuming she was trying to get his attention, distract him from the harpoon he was now hyper aware of. 

Finn glanced at Ant, looking sick. “I’ve only got Fontaine on here!” He croaked. “I-…I don’t want her to hear this.” He admitted it weakly, not nearly as loud as Hammerhead had shouted or as Ant was, but it hit Hammerhead in the gut like the harpoon had hit Ant nonetheless. 

Hammerhead didn’t say anything in response to Finn. He didn’t know what to say. Finn didn’t say anything either. Finn wound up turning his attention back to the walkie and Hammerhead looked back at Ant. Madeline had pushed herself almost entirely on top of Ant’s chest, placing her arms in between his in an attempt to pry them away from the harpoon. She was leaning over him, trying to block his view of the harpoon as she rambled. “Stop looking at it, you dummy! Don’t you know you’re never supposed to look?!”

Ant gasped for air. “It’s-! It’s-! It’s in me!!” It was all he could say, crying out in pain and shock as he tried to buck underneath Hammerhead and Madeline’s combined weight. “It’s in me!!”

Madeline pushed her elbows against his arms, demanding, “Stop it, stop it, stop it! You’ll hurt yourself doing that!” Madeline pushed herself down so that she could brace her forearm against Ant’s chest so that she could reach behind her and manually try to pry his hands from the harpoon. “I-It’s not that bad! You’re gonna be fine, you idiot!”

Hammerhead’s mouth opened and closed a few times, trying to figure out what to do. Finn was scrambling with the walkie and communicator, almost dropping one or both a few times as he tried to find the right frequency to reach Will without delegating through Fontaine. Madeline was trying to get Ant to stop panicking, and Hammerhead was trying not to put too much pressure on Ant’s stomach. He couldn’t let the blood keep coming, but he surprised himself with worry about putting too much pressure on Ant in case he hurt him even more. 

The worry came out of left field, and somehow it surprised Hammerhead. Ant wasn’t his child, and he was a Nekton. Hammerhead wasn’t a pirate, so good will and Samaritan acts were the furthest from second nature for him. Not even the common decency of tending to a child badly wounded under his roof seemed to be the answer to why Hammerhead was so concerned for Ant. 

Madeline managed to wrench Ant’s hands from the harpoon, tugging on it and causing another shriek of pain to come from Ant. Ant’s hands grappled with the air for a moment, trying to find something to grab on to in the face of his newfound realization. One of Ant’s hands found Madeline’s arm, and he quickly latched on. Hammerhead panicked at the blood that smeared across Madeline’s arms as Ant’s hand ran up her arm until it reached her shoulder, before Ant grabbed a handful of her shirt. Hammerhead almost expected him to let go, like he had all the other times he’d grabbed Hammerhead’s hands. 

But Ant didn’t let go. In fact he held on even tighter. Madeline’s shirt was bunched up in Ant’s fist, Ant using it to almost pull himself up as he cried out in shock and pain. His other arm smacked against her waist a few times, before it found its way to the floor to repeat its prior process of scrabbling around for a grip on something comforting. Madeline didn’t make a move to make him let go, twisting instead to better hold him down again instead. Hammerhead heard her mutter something that sounded like it’s okay, and Ant released a guttural sort of croak in response. As Madeline twisted back into her original position, Hammerhead got a look at her face. She was panicked, barely holding it together herself. 

Hammerhead stared. First, she wasn’t all too mad at the sight of Ant outside of the Dark Orca. Then she tried to find an excuse to say they weren’t enemies with the Nektons. And then after that she was worried for Ant’s safety and even jumped out in the Red Claw herself to go save him. She refused to leave, and was now holding him down and trying to reassure him, albeit in that pirate way of hers. Hammerhead didn’t know what to think, about any of it. But as Ant continued to cry out in pain, overwhelmed with the realization he’d actually been shot with a harpoon, Hammerhead found it wasn’t the thing he was immediately concerned with. 

The Mimic Knight’s tail thumped and twisted against the ground, Ant likely trying to kick his feet in tandem with his fear. Hammerhead pushed himself forward and around the harpoon, leaning over Ant as well as Finn muttered in the background. “Boy!” Ant’s eyes snapped to him, filled with an unfamiliar sort of terror. “Calm down, you’ll only make it worse!” Ant stared at him, before screaming again, like he didn’t know what else to do. 

“It’s in me!” Ant shrieked. “I-I don’t-! I don’t want it-get it out of me!”

Hammerhead didn’t initially know what to do with the pleading. He wasn’t used to the Nektons pleading. Demanding, certainly. Demanding Hammerhead to stop doing whatever he was doing, to give back their children the few times he’d held them hostage. To return whatever he’d stolen, to leave some random sea creature alone. He wasn’t too familiar with the Nekton’s pleading. And he wasn’t familiar with seeing one of them in so much distress. Seeing Ant on the floor, covering everything he touched with his own blood and panicking about the harpoon in his stomach, left Hammerhead feeling very uncertain about what to do. 

“I can’t.” He forced himself to say. “It’ll just make it worse!” Explaining things wasn’t something Hammerhead was used to doing. Usually he just expected people to do what they were told. But he supposed a child with a harpoon in his belly might not be the most prone to just listening and not panicking instead. 

Ant made a strangled sort of cry, somewhere between a scream and a groan. Hammerhead tried to avoid nudging the harpoon as he shifted, and Ant threw his head back against the back of the Mimic Knight’s head compartment. “Why?!” He wailed. His voice was tight, like he was trying to be more assertive, more composed, but he couldn’t actually muster the strength to do so. He just sounded desperate, needy. He sounded like a child. 

“Because that harpoon is the only thing keeping you from bleeding to death, that’s why!” Hammerhead snapped, keeping his hands firm around the base of the harpoon. “It’s acting like a plug, a corkscrew in a bottle! Now hold still, and calm down!” Ant just made another one of those desperate, pained croaking sounds, twisting in protest under Hammerhead’s hands like a toddler throwing a tantrum on the floor. 

It was weird. Hammerhead didn’t know why it was so weird. Why Ant sounding like a child was so unsettling. He was used to Ant being filled with confidence. Shooting back quips faster than Hammerhead could counter them. He’d sometimes forget Ant was a child over the comms because he didn’t always act or sound his age. Right now though, he was protesting and crying, acting so unlike the Ant Hammerhead was familiar with that it just made the situation all the more jarring. Hammerhead wouldn’t call what Ant was doing a tantrum. Tantrums were thrown by someone who was upset about something not going their way. 

Ant had just been shot with a harpoon. He was in shock, and scared. Hammerhead supposed it was a good reason for him to be upset and acting the way he was. He’d seen adults panic and hyperventilate over similar or smaller injuries, and Ant was a kid. And Hammerhead was pretty sure he’d never had an injury like this before. 

“Just calm down, you’re not going anywhere.” Hammerhead said. The words felt funny in his mouth. Reassurances, especially toward a Nekton, were an unfamiliar notion to Hammerhead. He was never good with his words. He was better at doing things instead of talking them out. But in a situation like this, there was nothing he could do but talk. Not until Finn got in contact with Will, and they got the all clear to take him back to the Aronnax. After that, Hammerhead could try to forget what happened, and silently pray in the dark of his room at night that there wasn’t one less Nekton the next time they saw the Aronnax. 

Ant stared at Hammerhead, his face somewhere between losing his mind in panic and flabbergasted at what Hammerhead was saying. He was still gasping for air, and his eyes darted back and forth between Hammerhead and Madeline, like he were silently asking her if Hammerhead was being serious. Madeline just huffed, still keeping his chest pinned. “Stop squirming. It’ll make it worse!” Madeline glanced away, looking at the floor next to Ant as she snapped half-heartedly, “Pull yourself together.”

Ant continued to gasp for air, crying out every so often. But Madeline leaning over his chest blocked a good chunk of the harpoon still sticking out of Ant, and her wet hair hung heavy over her shoulder like a drowned curtain. Hammerhead found himself distracted with the notion that Madeline didn’t even bother spending time throwing on a wetsuit, just grabbing a rebreather and hopping into the Red Claw as fast as she could so she could get to Ant faster. Peeling his eyes away from Madeline and Ant, he looked behind him at Finn. Finn was still staring at the walkie and communicator, but he seemed more focused. He was switching through channels faster than he had earlier, Ant slowly beginning to quiet down probably helping him not be so distracted. 

Hammerhead almost asked what the status on Will was, before deciding to look back at Ant. Ant had started to somewhat calm down, but looking at him revealed that ‘calm’ might be more of a subjective description than what was actually happening. Ant had mostly stopped squirming, though the weight of both Hammerhead and Madeline on top of him probably helped with that. He was still gasping and choking on whimpers, but his horrifying screams of pain had all but stopped. The Mimic Knight’s tail scraped across the floor of the moon pool room, and Ant’s eyes were practically bugging out of his skull with the resolve it was taking him to not scream. But he was slightly less manic and terrified than he had been before. 

Slightly less didn’t mean entirely not at all, though. Ant looked like he was one minor thing away from unraveling back into the meltdown he had just been having. Hammerhead didn’t know if he could confidently say he weren’t still having one. Ant might just be keeping it mostly on the inside rather than the outside now. 

Looking at Ant had Hammerhead suddenly finding himself locking eyes with him again. Ant stared up at Hammerhead with wide, wide eyes. His lips were sealing together, tears on the verge of falling. Hammerhead was surprised that they hadn’t fallen already. Especially with all the screaming and thrashing he’d been doing. Hammerhead didn’t know how Ant had managed not to cry through all of that. He was clearly trying not to cry now, and the resolve he had was impressive. 

But he was still a little boy, who’d just had a harpoon shot through his stomach. 

Hammerhead found himself immensely wishing that his wife were here now more than ever. She’d have known what to do. She was better with the delicate parts of the kid stuff than Hammerhead had ever been. She’d always hovered over Finn and Madeline when they were sick or upset, wiping their faces and cooing. She had always known what to say. She’d had a soft spot for kids, and Hammerhead didn’t doubt that if she hadn’t been on that side of the door that day, Finn and Madeline would have probably had a little sibling or two running around. 

The Nektons hadn’t really been much of a topic of conversation between Hammerhead and his wife. Not really. Not in the manner of what they’d do if they ever ran into them. Kaiko and Will’s children would have been around Finn and Madeline’s age, so they wouldn’t have been taking them on their expeditions. They probably would have been dealing with a smaller amount of adventures and skirmishes since they didn’t have a crew to stay behind and watch their little ones. 

Hammerhead had never entertained the notion of running into the Aronnax until he’d gotten the Dark Orca. Hammerhead and his loves old submarine was smaller. Bigger than the Stinging Piranha, but not on the scale of the Aronnax or the Dark Orca. They wouldn’t have been a huge concern to the Nektons. And back then, before he eventually met them, the Aronnax and the Nektons had always felt exactly like what the Stinging Piranha’s captain had been screeching in defiance. A group of tree-huggers who shied away from conflict, who would never be in a position or situation that would put them within the vicinity of any pirate’s submarine. 

Hammerhead didn’t know what his love would have thought about the Nektons. How she would have gone about handling them with the Dark Orca. But he knew that she loved kids and always had a bit of a soft spot for them. And that she would have probably known just what to do or say to make Ant feel better. Hammerhead knew the basics of treating injuries. You didn’t grow up on the piers of the Floating Market, filled with scoundrels and rival crews looking for an easy target, without learning how to both take care of yourself and treat injuries. Hammerhead had made sure to learn the basics of treating bigger wounds when he first struck out solo, with his own submarine and away from his father’s shadow. Such a thing was enticing to pirates looking to join new crews, something Hammerhead had been desperate to achieve away from his father’s influence. 

But he wasn’t the best at the delicacy of handling hurt children. He wasn’t much in the practice of dealing with them in any capacity. Let alone one that wasn’t his. 

Ant was on the ground, floundering for control over his panic. One nudge about the wrong thing, one actual nudge in the wrong direction, and he was bound to fall apart all over again. The fraction of calm he had found himself in was a rudimentary comparison to the actual word itself at best, and it was balanced on a thin line. Hammerhead needed to tread carefully. He didn’t want a hysterical Ant Nekton on his hands. He just…had to keep him calm and alive until his own father could come get him. There was no way that Will was leaving his son on the Dark Orca for long, Hammerhead just had to keep him alive long enough for his father to came take him off of Hammerhead’s hands. 

However, that reassurance didn’t change the fact that Ant was gasping for air at his knees, fighting to control his panic. Madeline was keeping him pinned to the moon pool floor, rambling a bunch of nonsense that Hammerhead didn’t understand. Hammerhead forced himself to tear his eyes away from Ant’s, the look on his face making it hard to stay composed himself. His gut was starting to churn with an uncomfortable and heavy feeling, one he wasn’t familiar with and didn’t want to be. Instead of dwelling on it, he looked behind himself again, barking, “Finn! What’s the status on Will?”

Finn was staring pointedly down at the walkie, though every so often his eyes darted up to look at Ant. “I-I think I’ve almost got him, I should have him in a minute!”

“Be smart about it!” Hammerhead said, pointedly looking away from Ant as he made another pathetic, wounded noise. “You tell me as soon as you’ve got him.” Finn nodded like he were a bobble head, focusing squarely on the walkie now. Hammerhead stared at him for a moment, listening to Ant croak in pain as he tried to keep himself from slipping into panic again. Hammerhead didn’t want to look at Ant, didn’t want to see him gasping for air and frantically trying to remain calm in the face of being shot with a harpoon. 

But Ant’s gasps grew shriller and shriller, and as Finn fumbled with the walkie he looked at Hammerhead. His son looked like he was only keeping himself together only marginally better than Ant was, and that awful, awful feeling festering in Hammerhead’s gut grew worse at the sight of Finn looking at Hammerhead like he was supposed to have all the answers to this awful situation. Hammerhead couldn’t bring himself to meet Finn’s eyes either, and when Madeline’s rambling started to grow a bit shrill, Hammerhead forced himself to look back at Ant.

Madeline was leaning over Ant still, and she was rambling about stuff that Hammerhead couldn’t initially make heads or tails of. “I-I read that part you said I should, it was really cool that they were able to take photos of the flowers like that! You need to tell me more about that UV lighting thing.”

Ant didn’t say anything, gasping for air. A choked whimper left him, and the Mimic Knight’s tail curled on the ground. Madeline’s rambling grew more shrill as she tried to get Ant to stay calm. “And I found a book on local sea monsters, but like, really old ones. Not the modern kind, the really old, obscure ones that no one talks about anymore. I stole it from this really old guy at the Floating Market, at the actual market part. Did you know there’s an actual market there?”

Ant swallowed, staring directly at Madeline. “No? Maybe?” He sounded confused, trying to pay attention to what Madeline was saying but still in too much shock to really process any of it. 

“Yeah, there’s a whole market full of stalls with all kinds of stuff.” Madeline said, shifting her position on the ground so she was seated more comfortably. “It’s deep in the docks, only residing crews and esteemed guests are welcome there. It’s not like the outer docks where Dolos and all the crews park and treat customers, there’s a whole maze of stalls in the middle. L-like a flea market of sorts! But for pirates instead.”

Ant’s breathing was picking up in speed, but to his credit he managed to keep his focus on Madeline. “O-Oh? Th-that’s kinda…cool. What…what do they…” He trailed off, sucking in a huge breath, before it trailed off into a wheezy croak of pain. Ant’s hands gripped Madeline’s shirt even tighter, the Mimic Knight’s tail curling against the floor. 

Hammerhead kept his hands firmly around the base of the harpoon, glancing around to see if there was anything he could use to help with the blood as Madeline shakily asked, “What do they sell?” She paused for a moment, probably waiting for a reaction from Ant before continuing. “Uh, they sell lots of stuff. There’s a bunch of stealing, though, cause we’re pirates! B-but they sell loads of stuff too. Lots of it is stuff that was stolen on various crews outings, we sometimes sell stuff there too!”

Ant didn’t say anything in response, gasping for air. His breathing was starting to pick up, a wild, panicked look in his eyes when Hammerhead quickly glanced his way. Madeline floundered, and when Hammerhead turned to look at her, he saw that Ant’s lack of response was starting to make her panic. “I-I can show you, next time you guys are there!” She rambled, voice growing shrill and incredibly unlike herself. “W-We can look at all the cool monster stuff they have, th-there’s a guy who has a whole bunch of stuff! He’s got old cd’s and books, and trashy figurines! You’d like it!”

Hammerhead stared at Madeline, surprised. He’d never seen her so rattled over anyone except himself and Finn. Everything about her interactions with Ant was just so out of the ordinary, but Hammerhead realized that maybe that wasn’t the biggest concern right now. “Madeline.” He tried to get her attention, both to snap her out of her spiraling but also because he needed her to do something other than ramble. Madeline however didn’t appear to be listening to Hammerhead. She was too focused on Ant. 

Madeline started tapping the glass of the Mimic Knight, like it was a fish tank. “Hey! S-say something! Don’t just- stop staring at me like that! It’s freaking me out!” Ant made a weird croaking sound, staring at Madeline with what Hammerhead would concede was a weird expression. He looked like he was on the verge of a panic attack, or some other sort of meltdown, but was staring at Madeline like she was the crazy one, and like he was trying to understand what she was talking about but couldn’t. 

Hammerhead looked back and forth between Madeline and Ant, before demanding, “Madeline!”

Madeline looked up at him, snapping, “What?!” She didn’t sound angry, more distressed than anything else. Hammerhead blinked at the outburst, and Madeline paused, seemingly surprising herself as well. Ant croaked again, his only contribution to the situation. 

Hammerhead didn’t give himself a chance to think about why Madeline looked so surprised. “I need some towels, to help with the blood. Get them from the drawer over there, where Danny Boy keeps his rags.”

Madeline spluttered like a fish, head shooting back and forth between Ant and Hammerhead. “B-but! I-!”

“Go! Now.” Hammerhead ordered. Madeline stared at him with a pained expression, before looking back down at Ant. Gulping, she reached back and managed to pry his hand off of her shirt. Ant croaked again, this time in protest as his hand grasped at the open air, but Madeline shot to her feet and took off across the moon pool, her wet hair whipping in the air as she took off from the ground. Ant’s hands fell to the ground again, scrabbling for something to hold on to as he made a pathetic sort of whining sound. It was strained, Ant gasping for air he seemingly couldn’t get enough of. 

Hammerhead ignored Madeline throwing open every drawer on the other side of the moon pool, and looked down at Ant instead. Ant had his head tilted back to look at Madeline, his breathing staggering further with the angle he was twisting himself in. When he couldn’t hold it any more, he fell back into his original position, flat on his back and looking up at the ceiling of the moon pool. 

Hammerhead didn’t know what to do, or say, so he just pushed his hands tighter around the base of the harpoon, ignoring the awful squelching sound that came with it. Ant winced, croaking in pain while his hands left the floor to claw at the air. Hammerhead didn’t let up the pressure, and Ant’s head hit the back of the Mimic Knight’s glass compartment as he cried out again in protest. Hammerhead tried not to look at him, but after a moment he could feel Ant’s eyes on him, and morbid curiosity won over. When he looked over, he saw Ant’s eyes darting right to him, staring up at him with some sort of terrified question in his eyes. 

Hammerhead wanted to look away like all the other times that he had. Avoid looking directly at Ant and the situation Hammerhead had watched him land in. But Finn was muttering to himself, trying to find Will, and Madeline was tearing apart Danny Boy’s station in search of rags. And Ant looked so out of place, like everything else that had been happening today. Nektons didn’t belong on the Dark Orca, and harpoons didn’t belong in little boy’s stomachs. Ant was looking at him with that same questioning expression on his face that Finn had earlier, like he were waiting for Hammerhead to give him answers. Only, unlike Finn, Ant looked more terrified and stricken with pain. 

Hammerhead couldn’t bring himself to look away. He wanted to, oh he wanted to so bad. He didn’t want to be truly face to face with Ant in his current state. He didn’t want to deal with this situation at all. He wanted to pawn him off to the Aronnax as soon as possible, remove himself from this situation entirely. He didn’t want the potential consequences of what may happen if things went south with Ant hanging on his conscience. The death of his children’s mother and the only love of his life was more than enough for Hammerhead to deal with as was. 

But Ant was still staring at him, and Hammerhead couldn’t look away. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t run away from this one. Not when his actual hands were one of the only things keeping Ant from bleeding out right there on the moon pool floor. Not when Ant was staring at him like that. 

Hammerhead cleared his throat awkwardly. He managed to glance away from Ant for a moment, looking squarely at his chest before looking back at the boy. “You’ll be fine.” Hammerhead bit out, unused to this sort of interaction with the Nekton boy. “Ye’re tough.” 

Ant swallowed, staring up at him with teary eyes. “I am?” His voice came out in a choked squeak, small and filled with barely contained sobs. 

Hammerhead snorted. “I’ve seen full grown men blubber over smaller injuries. Ye’re tougher than them.”

Ant stared up at Hammerhead, looking puzzled enough that his panic broke further for just a moment. Hammerhead supposed that was fair. He’d never spoken to Ant that way before, and Ant hadn’t exactly been handling the situation with grace. He’d been screaming and thrashing and panicking, only just barely managing to calm down. And Hammerhead wasn’t sure he’d use calm as the word to describe Ant. Maybe contained. He was trying to stuff down the panic and fear, but the situation was settling in and making it impossible for him to get a grip on himself. 

There was a clatter and a triumphant shout, and when Hammerhead looked to the source, he spotted Madeline bolting across the moon pool. Danny Boy’s station where he kept his tools and spare parts for the Red Claw had been completely upturned, and Madeline’s arms were full of towels. She darted over, falling to her knees next to Ant and dumped the towels all over Hammerhead’s hands. The momentum in which she threw herself to the ground sent her hands pushing down hard over Hammerhead’s, adding more pressure to Ant’s stomach and jostling the harpoon for further measure. 

The moment of figurative calm that had been achieved broke. Ant bucked up from the ground, screeching. Without Madeline holding his shoulders down, he reared up almost entirely off of the floor, curling around his stomach. Hammerhead had no idea how he managed to push against both Hammerhead and Madeline’s hands, but he did. They had to wrestle him back to the ground, Madeline throwing herself back at Ant’s shoulders and using her whole body weight against him to pin him down. 

Hammerhead felt weirdly bad about pushing against Ant’s stomach so hard to get him back to the ground, Ant releasing a truly heart-squeezing scream of pain at the feeling. They somehow managed to get him back down on the floor, Ant crying out in pain as they did. Once they had him pinned, Ant gasped and croaked. He sucked in a huge breath, apparently breaking past whatever barrier was making it hard for him to do so, and then released another, throat aching scream. 

Crap, Hammerhead thought. Oh no no no, Hammerhead panicked. A whole plethora of other words that he tried not to say around the children for fear of his lady loves ghost haunting him with lectures of watching his language ran through his head. There went the fragile line of control that Ant had. Hammerhead had been hoping he’d have been able to hold out longer. He’d been so quiet, he hadn’t been screaming, he’d been kind of, mostly, sort of keeping up with conversation. It had been a calm three minutes, a tense but deceivingly hopeful three minutes. But the three minutes of peace was over, and Ant was crying into the air loud enough that Hammerhead wondered if the rest of the crew could hear him all the way from the engine room. 

Finn made a squeaky noise of alarm, and Hammerhead heard him stumble back across the moon pool floor. Madeline was practically glued to Ant, arms fighting his as he clawed at the air to get to the harpoon. Hammerhead grabbed the towels and pushed them against the base of the harpoon, momentarily relieved that he had something between his hands and Ant now. Ant continued his attempted thrashing and successful screaming however, hands pushing against Madeline. 

“Ant! Stop screaming!!” Madeline demanded, grappling with his hands. “Stop flapping around! You’ll only make it worse!”

“No! It hurts, make it stooop!” Ant wailed, trying to fight against Madeline. “Get it out of me!!”

Madeline managed to grab a hold of Ant’s arms, and started wrestling them to the floor. “If you stop flopping like a fish out of water, it’ll stop hurting as much!” Madeline managed to pin Ant’s arms, his wrists banging against the moon pool floor as he continued to fight anyways. “We can’t take it out, not yet!” She faltered as she said that, twisting to look over her shoulder at Hammerhead. “Right?”

Hammerhead hesitated, not sure how to respond. He didn’t know how much longer Ant could last with the harpoon, but he did know that it would be significantly shorter if they took it out. Everything was happening so fast, he barely had time to think anything through. Madeline was looking at him for answers, a strange look of desperation on her face that he wasn’t used to seeing. Finn had picked himself up and was back at it with the walkie, and Ant was sounding like he was two seconds away from bursting into the tears he’d somehow held back this whole time.

Madeline’s stares got to him, and Hammerhead bluffed. “Right. He’ll be fine.” Hammerhead didn’t know if he was going to be fine. A tiny voice in the back of his head was telling him he wasn’t sure how fine Ant really was right now. But another part of piracy and parenting involved lying. There was a surprising amount of lying in parenting, and not nearly enough in piracy, in Hammerhead’s opinion.

Madeline relaxed, and Hammerhead’s gut churned worse somehow. He could feel Finn staring at him from behind him, and he pointedly avoided looking at him. He didn’t want to know what expression he was making. Didn’t want to see if Finn could tell Hammerhead was lying or if he’d bought into the lie himself. Finn was a clever boy, and six and a half years older than his sister. He was almost a man now. Parental ruses didn’t work as well on him anymore. Hammerhead didn’t want to potentially confirm to Finn that he was in fact lying because his poker face sucked. 

Hammerhead decided to focus on the child in front of him. Both the one under his hands and the one that belonged to him. Ant was hyperventilating, not really listening to either Hammerhead or Madeline. He looked lost in his own world, eyes darting all across the room with a wild, panicked look in them. They were filled with tears, Ant’s eyelids fluttering as he tried desperately to keep them from falling. Madeline wasn’t nearly as calm as Hammerhead hoped his empty reassurances would make her, looking frantic like Ant. 

She looked down at the towels Hammerhead was pressing down on, and asked, “Does he need anything else?!” Before Hammerhead could actually answer, Madeline looked down at Ant, asking him, “D-do you need anything else?!” Hammerhead stared at her, briefly glancing at Finn to see that he was also staring in confusion. Madeline had never shown any interest or concern about Ant.

Ant stared at her in bewilderment, hiccuped, and then made a small choking noise. “I…I want my dad.” Hammerhead looked back down at Ant, and saw his expression was starting to crumble, the tears in his eyes growing ever larger. 

Hammerhead should have known by now how old the Nekton’s boy was. He’d never been able to confidently guess an age range on his own, and by this point in knowing the Nektons, he was too embarrassed to ask. But Ant sounded and looked very young now, and Hammerhead was reminded of how small he was. Ant wasn’t too much bigger than his dear Madeline, which made that uncomfortable feeling in Hammerhead’s gut worsen. Hammerhead wasn’t sure if Ant had been hoping for anyone to answer, but after a moment of no one saying anything Ant’s face screwed up in pain, and he sobbed at last. “I want my dad. I want my mom. I want my-I want to go home.”

Hammerhead stared down at Ant, lost on what to say. Madeline was staring at Ant like she wasn’t sure how to handle seeing him react this way. She’d probably never seen him act like this before. Hammerhead certainly hadn’t. He’d only ever known Ant to be confident and certain, cracking jokes even if he was scared. Taunting the pirates and teasing them. Seeing him burst into tears was a new one. But then again, Ant didn’t usually have a harpoon in his belly. Ant was now crying on the floor of the moon pool, his wrists still pinned under Madeline’s hands to the floor. Hammerhead was now fully convinced Ant couldn’t register anyone else now, just lost to the tears that he’d finally failed to keep away. 

The walkie behind Hammerhead crackled, breaking Hammerhead out of the stupor of awful feelings he found himself now feeling, and Finn stammered triumphantly. “I-I think I got him!” Hammerhead turned around, tearing his eyes away from the boy breaking down in front of him to see Finn fumble with the walkie, twisting the knobs until the connection was more clear. “Mr Nekton? Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Finn?!” Will’s voice came through the walkie a little crackly, but as he continued to speak Finn adjusted the frequency, making him more clear. “How did you- why are you-?! What are you doing?!” Will sounded distracted, and panicked. There was rustling and banging, and Will sounded a little out of breath.

“We have Ant!” Finn said, shuffling closer to Hammerhead. “He’s on the Dark Orca, the Stinging Piranha doesn’t have him!”

“The Stinging- what?” Will asked, incredulous. “What kind of name is that? Who’s-” Will’s voice cut off for a moment, and then he asked in a tone that Hammerhead had never heard from him before, “Is that who shot Ant?”

Well, there was no denying that the Nektons didn’t know what had happened to Ant, now. As if the background voices on Ant’s end, and Kaiko’s reaction with the Swamp Knight, and the fact that Fontaine openly acknowledged it earlier didn’t already confirm it. But Fontaine’s rage was nothing like the rage that Hammerhead was sensing from Will right now. 

Ant was still sobbing, apparently unaware that they’d gotten in contact with his dad. Madeline was stammering as she tried to keep him calm. It took Hammerhead a second to actually manifest the ability to respond to Will, and when he did he sounded more awkward and uncomfortable than he wanted to. “Er, yes. That…is who shot him.”

There was a dreadful beat of silence, before Will made an angry noise and something crashed on his end. Hammerhead did not jump at the sound of it, though it sounded like Will did, if the yelp of panic on his end meant anything. After a second though, Will made a few more noises, panic and anger and all the other emotions he was dealing with being aired out like dirty laundry, a few more bangs punctuating his frustration. Hammerhead stared at the walkie, shocked. Will was never one to act like that. His reaction was one that Hammerhead would expect from, well, himself. Not William Sensible-and-Patient Nekton. 

But then again, like everything else that was so out of the ordinary this day, it could probably be chalked up to the fact that Ant had been shot with a harpoon by the stupidest pirate crew in pirating history. 

After making a ruckus that suspiciously sounded like things being thrown against the wall, Will made another, sharp sigh, seemingly trying to calm himself down. Hammerhead could practically hear him saying that freaking out and getting upset wasn’t helping Ant, and then he grimaced to himself at the thought that he had gotten to know the Nektons so well that he could picture what they might say in a situation. Before Hammerhead could process that any further, Will spoke up. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay, moving on.” Will made another shaky sigh, before asking, “Is he okay?”

Hammerhead looked down at Ant. He was crying, Madeline all up in his face and rambling about cat and cucumber videos. “He’s…alive.”

Will sighed weakly, audibly relieved. “Good. Thank you.” Hammerhead twitched at the gratitude, but Will kept rambling. “I-I’m trying to find the things I need, but we’re not-we’re not equipped for this! Not immediately anyways! We were just in the middle of r-restocking, the place is a mess, nothing is where it should be! I-!” Hammerhead didn’t say anything, listening to Will ramble and feeling his own stomach sink further at the notion of how similar their days had been going until the Stinging Piranha decided to happen. 

“I think he needs bandages.” Hammerhead said awkwardly, wracking his brain of all the old first aid stuff he learned way back in the day. He’d been determined to get off on the right foot setting off on his own, and medical knowledge was eye-catching to pirates looking to join new crews. “Something to replace the blood he’s lost? And stitches.”

Will made a weird noise, one that matched the feeling Hammerhead was experiencing giving something like advice to possibly the third Nekton in one day. “That-…that sounds right.” Will admitted. “W-We’re all a match for him, w-we’re related anyways, but…” Will trailed off, before groaning in defeat. “Oh, Kaiko knows more about this than me, she has basic training! I-I can’t do this on my own, why did we-…why did we send him off like that?! Why didn’t we check the area first?!”

Hammerhead’s gut churned. That was right. That was the whole reason Ant was out in the Mimic Knight in the first place. He’d even told Hammerhead himself. He’d said he’d finished his chores, likely his own share of restocking and cleaning the Aronnax, and his parents had told him to go check out the area and find something interesting because he was bothering them and his sister. The only reason Ant wasn’t on the Aronnax in the first place, safe from the Stinging Piranha’s stupidity, was because his parents had sent him off to give themselves a break from his antics. 

Hammerhead almost reflexively pointed this out to Will. But another sob of pain from Ant and a panicked noise from Madeline stopped him. This…wasn’t the time. Hammerhead swallowed the reflexive taunt, uncomfortably acknowledging that this just wasn’t the time or place for their rivalry. Will was clearly beside himself over the fact in the first place. Hammerhead knew as a parent himself, there was nothing he could say to Will that Will wasn’t already blaming himself for. 

Will stammered on, unaware of Hammerhead’s inner thoughts, the sound of things being knocked around or falling to the floor in the background. “I-I don’t know, I don’t know, I can’t-! I can’t do it here! I need to you to keep him there so I can treat him there, I don’t-I don’t have the means to treat him by myself here! Not yet!”

Hammerhead almost scoffed, before remembering that aside from Will, the only person on board the Aronnax was Fontaine. And that maybe Will didn’t want his daughter helping him with something like pulling a harpoon out of her brother. Before he could absorb the notion that Will was completely alone in potentially dealing with the harpoon in his son’s stomach, what Will told him sank in first. 

Hammerhead stared at the radio in shock. “You want him here?” The Nektons didn’t like the Dark Orca. The Dark Orca didn’t like the Nektons. If it were Hammerhead’s son on board the Aronnax, he’d be rushing over as soon as he could so he could bring him back to the Dark Orca. He wouldn’t leave his children on the Aronnax for a minute longer than necessary. And the Nektons had to assume that the Aronnax was better equipped to take care of Ant’s injury. Hammerhead was now uncomfortably aware of all the dirt and grime that needed cleaned in the moon pool, and tried to figure out why on Earth Will wanted his son on the Dark Orca. 

“Just until I can get everything together!” Will said, and Hammerhead heard more rustling and banging. “I-I don’t know what condition he’s in, I don’t want to risk moving him until I can see it myself!”

Hammerhead wanted to protest some more. He wasn’t the Nekton’s babysitter, and he didn’t want Ant on the Dark Orca. He didn’t want to see him shaking on the moon pool floor with a harpoon in his belly anymore, he wanted this experience to end now. Ant needed to go home, he couldn’t stay on the Dark Orca any longer. 

Ant twisted under his hands though, and his head craned back to stare at the walkie in Finn’s hand with wide, watery eyes. “Dad?”

That word. Hammerhead had heard it hundreds of times. His own children called him it every day. He’d heard Ant say it before to Will. It wasn’t new. But something about the way he said it now had Hammerhead instinctively turning to find the source and figure out what was wrong before he could even remember that it wasn’t his own child calling for him. And that it wasn’t even him Ant was calling for. 

Maybe it was the way Ant had said it. He didn’t particularly sound like Finn or Madeline. Hammerhead had heard Ant speak enough times, and say ‘dad’ enough times to know what he sounded like when he said it. But right now his voice was strained. It was wobbling as he fought so hard to not keep crying from both the pain and panic he was feeling. Earlier, he’d talked to Hammerhead with a tone that Hammerhead had never heard from the boy. It made him sound almost entirely unrecognizable, desperate for something safe and sturdy to latch on to while he was in this situation. 

Will faltered, before choking out, “H-Hey, Ant. You okay?”

Hammerhead couldn’t help but snort that time, and Finn gave him a look. But what was Will expecting Ant to say? Yes, dad, I’m peachy-keen with this harpoon in my stomach. I’ve never been better. 

But then Ant choked on a whimper, and Hammerhead heard Will make a soft, strangled noise of his own, and it hit him that maybe Will had asked because he didn’t know what else to say. Maybe he hadn’t even realized what exactly he’d said and how it factored into the situation until he said it. “It hurts.” Ant grit out, jaw clenched tight. He was still trying to act tough, still trying not to break down in the Dark Orca, in front of Hammerhead and Finn and Madeline. Hammerhead’s stomach tightened uncomfortably, the sight and sound of Ant still trying so hard to put up a strong facade in their presence made worse by the fact that he had already failed. He’d been screaming and panicking, and he’d just started crying. Strong wasn’t what he looked like right now.  

Hammerhead wondered if maybe he was trying again because he didn’t want to worry his dad. Kids apparently had a habit of doing that, these days. And Ant seemed like the kind of kid who would do that. 

“I know, I know, I know.” Will rambled. “I’m sorry kiddo, it’s gonna be okay.” Will sounded like he didn’t know what to do with himself, on the verge of breaking down like Ant was. The fear and growing panic in Will’s voice seemed to further spur on Ant’s own growing terror. The sound of his steadfast and reliable father beginning to break down probably just made the whole situation seem so much worse. Ant’s eyes widened even more, and Hammerhead could see his chest start to rise and fall faster. Ant’s voice began trailing into a high-pitched, shrill whine as the tears began falling faster.

“Dad, I’m scared.” Ant gasped. “I-I’m scared, it hurts, it hurts really bad, Dad-!” Ant’s voice cut off into a choked sob, the boy stopping mid-sentence to gasp for air, trying to control his breathing. But the tears had long since started to roll down the sides of his head, across his ears and into his hair, and Hammerhead felt incredibly out of place witnessing it. 

Will made another, muffled, wounded noise. “I know.” His voice had gone a little shrill, trying to stay calm while repeating the same thing over and over. “I know, I’m so sorry, son.” Ant was fighting for air now, determined to not cry but too frightened and in too much pain for his attempts to be truly effective. “It’s gonna be okay kiddo, you’re gonna be just fine, I promise. I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

Ant was trying to twist his head back even more, fighting under Hammerhead’s hands to get closer to his dad’s voice. Hammerhead managed to keep him pinned, and Finn shuffled closer, holding the walkie out. “But-!” Ant gasped again, making another choked cry of pain. “But I-!” Hammerhead watched Ant start to sob again, crying, “It hurts, Dad, please!” Madeline yanked her hands away from Ant’s wrists, backing away with a horrified expression, but it only made Hammerhead feel worse when Ant used his free hand to try and reach across the floor. Like that would have gotten him closer to his dad. “Dad, it hurts!”

Hammerhead wasn’t sure how to react. He wasn’t sure how he’d respond in any other situation if Ant wanted off his submarine, wanting his dad. Maybe some mocking. Maybe some gratitude hidden under a remark about getting off his ship now. Hammerhead never liked the Nektons on his submarine, and they usually didn’t want to be there any more than he wanted them there. But as everything else with this whole messy, unfortunate, and entirely preventable situation, Hammerhead found himself feeling the opposite of what he wanted to feel. He didn’t want Ant on the Dark Orca anymore than Ant seemed to want to be, but it was because he didn’t want to witness the boy in such pain anymore. And seeing Ant cry for his dad, desperately wanting him because he was scared and hurt just made Hammerhead feel all the more awful. 

“I know.” Will sounded like he wished there was something else he could say, but he hadn’t thought of it yet. “I’m sorry, kiddo, but I don’t have everything yet. Y-you’ve got to hold on a little longer, just hang tight.”

Ant was crying now, trying to twist under Hammerhead so he could get closer to the walkie, like that would do something. “Dad, please!” He pleaded. “I wanna go home!”

“We’ll get you home, I promise!” Will tried to soothe Ant, but he sounded like he needed calming down himself. “I just-…I just need to make sure I have everything ready for when you get here. I need to have everything I might need when I come over to get you.”

Ant’s head landed with a light thunk against the glass panels of the Mimic Knight, tears and sobs starting to pick up. He didn’t say anything further, and Will made soft noises like he was floundering to find something else to say. Eventually, he somehow managed to choke out, “Hammerhead?”

Finn and Madeline were both looking at Hammerhead now, and Ant was crying on the floor. Hammerhead didn’t say anything for a moment, not sure what he should say. Ant was stuck. They couldn’t move him, not without risking further injury. His hands were covered in the boys blood, metaphorically and literally. Will asked him to keep him steady, keep him safe, until he could get his son himself. What else was Hammerhead supposed to do?

“He’ll be here.” Hammerhead grit out. “I’ve got him.” He fought not to let his own panic and discomfort at the situation seep into his voice, not wanting to distress his own children. It seemed to somehow calm Will down some, though, even though that hadn’t been Hammerhead’s intention. Maybe Hammerhead, acting as he was, sounding grounded helped ground Will himself. Hammerhead wasn’t sure anymore. Nothing about this was right, or normal. He just wanted it to be over.

“Thank you.” Will breathed out, the relief in his voice so palpable Hammerhead could see his body dragging with it from a different submarine. “I’ll be quick, I’ll be right there.” Hammerhead didn’t know who he was talking to then, his tone so overflowed with relief that Hammerhead couldn’t pick out if he was talking to Ant or Hammerhead himself. If he was trying to reassure his stricken child, or promise Hammerhead. Regardless of who he was talking to, Will got off the walkie’s channel shortly after, static and the sound of Ant crying filling the air.

Hammerhead dared to glance at Ant, and immediately looked away. It wasn't that the sight was anymore gruesome than it was before. He still had a harpoon in his stomach. He was still bleeding out from the wound it left in him. But now he had lost the battle of his subdued tears, and Ant was now crying with his face slumped against the glass, tilted in the direction of Finn and the walkie, his hand still stretched across the floor. Madeline’s hands hovered over him, before she hesitantly placed them on his shoulders again. Ant didn’t seem to register the touch, too overwhelmed with his sobs to either notice or care. 

Somehow it was worse seeing Ant actually bursting into tears than seeing him fight so hard to not cry. Trying not to cry was still, while very out of the ordinary for Ant, fairly in character to what Hammerhead was used to seeing from him. Trying to act older than he was, professional in the face of the pirates. It made it easier to forget how young he was. But actually crying just made him look more his age than he usually did, which made the reality of the harpoon in his stomach ten times worse. 

Hammerhead looked to his own son instead. Finn was staring at Ant, looking as stricken and horrified as Hammerhead felt. After a moment, he looked down at the walkie in his hand, and his demeanor shifted. He looked determined now, and before Hammerhead could even begin to wonder why, Finn was changing the channels on the radio again. 

“What are you doing?” Hammerhead asked. He saw Madeline look up out of the corner of his eye, before she looked back down at Ant again. Hammerhead could feel Ant shifting under his hand, the Mimic Knight’s tail smacking against his leg as he continued to cry. Madeline shuffled closer to Ant, leaning directly over his head, though Hammerhead didn’t pay attention to what she was doing. Instead, he focused on his son, who was staring intently at the walkie in his hands. 

Finn’s brow was furrowed, and the walkie crackled as he started to get it to the channel he wanted. “I’m sending a message.” He grit out, and Hammerhead stared at him in confusion just as the radio crackled and the garbled voices became clear. 

“THEY’RE BLUMMY PACIFISTS!!” The Stinging Piranha captain shrieked into the air. Hammerhead heard the whip of Madeline’s wet hair snapping in the air as she turned quickly at the sound, and Ant hiccuped, startling at the screeching. He wasn’t the only one. Hammerhead stared at Finn in surprise. Why on earth would he get into contact with the Stinging Piranha willingly? “THEY DON’T BELIEVE IN VIOLENCE!!”

There was a screeching, awful sound in the air, followed by screams of panic. “DOES SHE LOOK LIKE A PACIFIER?!” One of the crew members wailed. 

“THAT’S WHAT BABIES USE, IDIOT!” A different crew man said.

“SHUT UP!” The first crew member shrieked back. 

“STOP IT!” The captain screamed. “STOP WRECKING ME SHIP! WHAT DID WE EVER DO TO YOU?!”

Hammerhead almost laughed at that. What did they do? Were they seriously asking what they had done? It should have been clear by now that they hadn’t just shot a Nekton Knight, but a Nekton Knight with one of the children in it. It should have been logical that the furious woman trying to rip their submarine apart with her bare hands was none other than the furious mother of said child. 

Idiots. Their audacity was staggering sometimes. Hammerhead didn’t know how they managed to be so stupid and not learn anything from their blunders. He honestly couldn’t think how they managed to get a ship in the first place, even if it was a heap of actual garbage welded together. Whenever Hammerhead felt like he had done something stupid, he always thought of the Stinging Piranha to make himself feel better, knowing there was someone out there even more stupid and delusional than he was.

Finn cleared his throat, adjusting his shirt collar, before barking, “HEY!” There were screams of terror from the Stinging Piranha, and Hammerhead felt a bit of pride burst through the overwhelming dread and stress of the situation at the commanding tone Finn took on. 

“Who is that?!” The captain demanded. “WHO IS THAT?!” His voice was shrill, and not nearly as intimidating as Finn’s was. 

“This is First Mate Smiling Finn of the Dark Orca!” Finn crowed. “And I’m calling to give you your only warning!”

Hammerhead felt a mix of both pride and severe confusion over what Finn was saying. For a boy who was very reluctant to use his pirate name and title, Finn said it so well and inspiring. Hammerhead would wipe a tear of pride if he weren’t currently using his hands to stop Ant from bleeding all over the floor. But at the same time, Finn was warning the Stinging Piranha? Not just willingly speaking with them, but warning them? Pirates didn’t warn other pirates. Especially pirates as numbskullingly stupid as the Stinging Piranha. 

“Who are ye to give us a warning?!” A particularly brave crew member jeered from the back of the Stinging Piranha’s channel. 

“I’m giving you a warning as someone who’s dealt with the Nektons!” Finn said smoothly, grinning at the radio. “See, if you look out your window, I’m sure you’ll find a Nekton Knight absolutely battering your submarine down.”

As if on cue, there was a loud bang, and screams of alarm. Finn carried on without pause. “That is known as the Swamp Knight, and it’s one of the two toughest Knights the Nektons have. It can break through almost anything.”

There were whimpers and cry of terror, Hammerhead’s confusion making way for a bit more pride. He almost forgot about what was going on, enamored by Finn’s speech. 

“I-It hasn’t broken through our ship yet!” The Stinging Piranha’s captain stammered weakly, still defiantly holding on to a false sense of bravado. “What do you have to say to that?”

“Yet.” Finn repeated smugly. The captain whimpered as Finn continued. “And the only reason your ship hasn’t been ripped apart is because this is Kaiko Nekton, captain of the Aronnax, on a good day.”

Finn was lying. This was absolutely not Kaiko on a good day. She’d never done anything like this to the Dark Orca. Ripped their propulsion off with the Rover, maybe. Angrily yelled at them, certainly. Exhaustedly talked Hammerhead through patching the Dark Orca’s comms when he could hear her, but the Aronnax couldn’t hear the Dark Orca’s?…not that he’d ever admit, no. But this was a level of rage he’d never seen her use to such a nasty and personal degree. 

Finn was lying. Hammerhead was so proud.

There were whimpers of fear from the other channel. Finn was grinning wide now, taking clear joy in tormenting them with his casual words. 

“Now, I will say that the Swamp Knight isn’t incredibly fast.” Another bold faced lie. It was no Shadow Knight, but it could definitely outpace the Stinging Piranha. “I’ve heard it can’t even keep up with the vessels that the World Ocean’s Authorities have!”

There was an audible pause from the Stinging Piranha’s crew, and Hammerhead could see their wheels jamming as they tried to figure out what Finn was saying. He supposed it was good for them that Finn kept talking, lest they give themselves a stroke trying to think through what he said. “If you get into that World Ocean’s Authorities vessel you have, you might be able to get away from her. Not get into too much trouble, you know?”

Hammerhead figured out what Finn was playing at, and almost cackled with delight. The Stinging Piranha never used the World Oceans Authorities vessel they’d stolen because they couldn’t get rid of the tracker in it. They’d only ever managed to get it to not work when the vessel was off, but when it was on? Fat chance. Turning it on and fleeing with it would only surely get them captured by the World Oceans Authorities. And the Swamp Knight could certainly keep up with it, if Kaiko chose to give chase. 

“You think I’m dumb enough to fall for that?” The Stinging Piranha captain coughed, even though there were gasps and murmurs from his crew. “That stupid tracker is still-“ 

There was a screech and another, tremendous bang. The crew, including the captain, shrieked in alarm. 

“LET’S GET OUT OF HERE!!” Someone squealed in terror. Hammerhead couldn’t rightly tell who said it, though he chose to believe it was the captain, merely for his own entertainment. There was the sound of scampering feet, the sound of several people shoving each other out of the way in their haste to flee, leaving the channel on the other end silent in a matter of seconds. Well, silent besides the sound of Kaiko Nekton still losing it on the Stinging Piranha’s hull. 

Finn sat there, looking incredibly pleased with himself. Hammerhead began laughing, letting himself soak in the pride he felt in the midst of this awful situation. “HahaHA! That’s my boy! Way to go, giving them the spook!” Finn looked a little sheepish, straightening up with the tiniest bit of pride in himself, which faded into confusion when Hammerhead immediately followed it with, “Now gimme that walkie.”

Finn didn’t get a chance to ask why before Hammerhead just reached over and snatched the walkie out of Finn’s hand himself, his son exclaiming in protest. “Hey!”

Hammerhead ignored Finn, flipping through the channels until he got to the one he wanted. Hammerhead didn’t know the channels for the Nektons individual communicators, but he knew the ones for each Knight. They talked with the Nektons through their Knights more than their communicators, something he made a note to fix after all of this after how long it took Finn to get in contact with Will. Bringing the walkie to his mouth, ignoring the distant sounds of banging and grating screeching of metal on metal, and the angry shouting from the person he had just gotten in contact with, Hammerhead asked, “Mrs. Nekton?”

“What?” Kaiko snapped. Hammerhead almost forgot what he was trying to do, the venom in her voice so thick that it felt like she’d bitten him with it through the walkie. 

“The Stinging Piranha has a stolen World Ocean’s Authorities vessel in their moon pool that they’re currently making a break for.” Hammerhead informed her, trying to keep his cool in the face of her wrath, and trying not to sound sheepish. The Stinging Piranha was right to be terrified. “Do with that information what you will.”

Ant whimpered on the ground, and there was a brief pause from Kaiko. Then. “Give me ten minutes.” There was an awful screeching sound of metal on metal, and Hammerhead could hear louder screams of panic in the background. 

Wow. The Stinging Piranha’s crew had to be halfway to the moon pool by now. And he still heard them through Kaiko’s channel. She really had them scared. 

Hammerhead turned off the walkie, leaving Kaiko to her havoc, and the group sat in awkward silence for a moment. “I’m glad I’m not those guys right now.” He joked awkwardly, trying to break the silence. Ant just started crying again. Madeline stared at Hammerhead like it was his fault, and Finn tried reaching for the walkie again. Hammerhead almost pulled it away, before he realized he didn’t actually have a reason to keep it from Finn. There wasn’t anyone else they needed to talk to. Kaiko was…busy, Will was losing his mind, and Fontaine was sitting in the helm of the Aronnax. And also probably losing her mind.

Maybe they could get in contact with Danny Boy, check up on the progress of the engine room? But what was the point for that now? The Stinging Piranha was probably going to be in pieces on the ocean floor in a matter of minutes now, and her loyal crew would be hightailing it out of the area and straight into the World Ocean’s Authorities hands. Though the Dark Orca didn’t want to be anywhere near them when that happened, in case the World Ocean’s Authorities decided to make it a two for one deal. Though maybe he could convince the Nektons to be generous and gracious enough to convince the World Ocean’s Authorities that the Dark Orca deserved a get-out-of-jail-free card for their noble acts of keeping Ant mostly alive. Or at least a ten minute head start. 

Finn snatched the walkie back before Hammerhead could decide, pulling it close to him and making it so that Hammerhead would have to lean away from Ant to get it back. He looked like he didn’t really know why he snatched it back himself either, but was too committed to snatching it from Hammerhead to put it down himself. 

Hammerhead gave Finn a look before putting his hand back over the towels on Ant’s stomach, pressing down on them. That was one argument he could let lie for the time being. He’d told Will that Ant would be here, and he was pretty sure the man would prefer his son to not have bled out on the Dark Orca’s moon pool floor before he got there. He should probably focus more on that than arguing over the walkie. As he pushed down again on the wound, Ant made a croaky sort of noise that sounded awful with his crying, and Hammerhead tried to not let the sound get to him. Will needed to get there soon. Hammerhead was willing to bet Ant would be easier to calm down if his dad was there…or maybe he’d end up being more inconsolable, once someone he actually felt safe and comfortable with showed up. 

Hammerhead tried to take his mind off of Will, and tried to focus on something else. He’d gotten in contact with the man, told him he’d have his son waiting for him. He didn’t need to dwell on what Will told him any further. But he couldn’t stop thinking about how broken he sounded. How out of his depth and panicked Will sounded as he rambled on and on while trying to find all the things he may possibly need to help his son. The words Will mentioned about not being enough and not having the means or people to do it on his own stuck like glue to Hammerhead the most.

Hammerhead felt like he’d been slapped at the realization that Will and Kaiko might actually have their hands tied a few more ways than Hammerhead’s. Hammerhead had a crew to watch over his children when he wasn’t there. He didn’t like them stepping on his parenting toes, but they were good unpaid babysitters when he needed them to be. Kaiko and Will’s only had each other, and they had a submarine with far more equipment and maintenance put into it than the Dark Orca. 

Hammerhead was sure there were days that Fontaine could just watch her brother for them, but then what about the days when she needed watching over too? What about when Ant and Fontaine had both been too little to look after themselves or each other? And the Aronnax was so much more complex than the Dark Orca, seemingly every room used and cleaned, multiple different pieces of expensive equipment that needed maintained. And it didn’t sink in until just now that it was all maintained by four people. Two of them children. Hammerhead didn’t know how they did it.

Today seemed to be a bad day though. One child in the pilot’s chair and another with a harpoon in his stomach. One parent ripping apart the ship trying to find the things needed to help their injured child, and the other ripping apart the ship responsible for hurting him in the first place. And Hammerhead had to be the one to momentarily take care of Ant until his parents could come get him. Because somehow the cards landed on all the wrong sides for the Nektons today, and he was the only one available to take care of their boy in their stead. 

They so owed him for this. 

Hammerhead looked down at Ant. Ant was sobbing, trying to curl into a ball on the floor. It was pretty hard to with the harpoon in his stomach, and Hammerhead’s hands pushing down against him, but he seemed too upset to care. He hadn’t stopped crying since Will’s call, the sound of his dad’s voice seemingly the straw that broke the camels back that was his ability to keep it even remotely together. And when his dad ended the call, leaving him alone with the pirates he had no reason to like or trust, it just made it worse. Madeline was pushing at his shoulders, trying to get him to uncurl and stop crying. 

“Stop it stop it stoppit!” She rambled. “Stop, please! I-It’s not that bad! Stop…stop crying like that!” Madeline sounded panicked, not used to emotions on this scale, especially from someone like Ant. She sounded like she was seconds away from crying out of frustration herself, nothing she was saying being truly effective. Hammerhead was willing to bet that Ant couldn’t actually hear her right now, too lost in his own emotions to register anything else. Ant was breaking down, and Madeline was close to joining him. Hammerhead didn’t even know what Finn was doing now, aside from just sitting there.

Right. Hammerhead could do this. All he had to do was keep Ant alive until one or both of his parents could swing by and get him. Couldn’t be too hard, right?

Hammerhead looked back to where Finn was. He was still there, and looked incredibly out of place. He was clutching the walkie to his chest, looking back and forth between Madeline and Ant like he didn’t know what to do. Which was fair, Hammerhead supposed. He hadn’t really told Finn to do anything else, and there was so much going on that he probably couldn’t figure out what to do first.

“Finn.” His son didn’t seem to hear him at first, staring at his sister and the Nekton bleeding out on the floor. “Finn!” The second shout seemed to make him stir, and just as Hammerhead was about to snap at him again Finn looked at him. His eyes were wide and had a shellshocked sort of look to them. Whatever bravado he’d acquired from that call to the Stinging Piranha was gone now. There was a second where he looked like a kicked dog, and Hammerhead had to remind himself to focus on the situation first, and his son’s probable trauma second. “I need you to focus, Finn! We’ve got work to do!”

Finn sat there, blinking rapidly as he tried to follow what Hammerhead said. “Uh, y-yeah.” Finn looked at Ant again, and Hammerhead watched a determined look wash over his face. “Yeah, okay.” Finn looked paler than usual, and a few seconds away from freaking out himself. Maybe even a few seconds away from being sick all over the floor. Hammerhead figured it was because Ant was Fontaine’s little brother, and he was soft about her. But Finn looked determined to keep it together, probably pushing it all down like Hammerhead did until he could deal with his panic when he was alone. 

Hammerhead nodded, and looked back at Madeline. She was still panicking, and Ant was still heaving gut-deep sobs, but Madeline had grabbed his shoulders and started to shake them a bit. “Come on, come on! Stop it, stop doing that!” She rapped her knuckles against the glass of the Mimic Knight, catching Ant’s attention further. Ant’s head turned to look at Madeline, and she pointed a finger at him once it was clear she had a moment of his attention. “Keep it together! Stop crying, dummy!” Ant stared at Madeline, flabbergasted at the tone she used, like she were a captain speaking to a lower crewman. 

It had the same affect as if she’d slapped him. Ant was still sucking in gasps of air between hitched sobs, but he didn’t seem to be as unconsolable as he had been moments ago. Something about what Madeline said, or how she said it, seemed to ground him. Or at least shocked him enough to snap him out of his meltdown, even if it only lasted a moment. He was staring at her with a shocked expression on his face, like he didn’t know what to do with himself. 

Madeline seemed to relax a little with Ant no longer crying, but she also looked a little rattled. Like she hadn’t expected that to work the way it did. She carried on though, scolding Ant. “You have to calm down! Crying isn’t going to help right now, we need you to focus right now! You can cry later!” Ant continued staring at her like she was speaking in another language. 

Hammerhead stared in confusion, before shaking his head and turning back to Finn. “Finn, I’m gonna need your help with something.” Finn nodded, though he was also staring at Hammerhead in confusion. Maybe even a bit of dread. Hammerhead ignored him to turn to Madeline again. “Madeline, go to Danny Boy.”

Hammerhead was gonna tell her to help Danny Boy get the engine running, so that as soon as Ant was off the Dark Orca they could hightail it in the opposite direction that the Stinging Piranha’s crew had gone. Just in case whatever World Ocean’s Authorities agents picked them up didn’t make a sweep of the area they’d been in to see if they’d left anything else there, or in case the Nektons mentioned that the Dark Orca was in the area. But as soon as he told her to leave, his daughter was glaring at him viciously. “I am not leaving.” She snapped, that same tone she’d been using on Ant being directed Hammerhead’s way now. She pushed herself over Ant even more, almost flopping over his chest entirely if it wouldn’t have jostled the harpoon. “You can’t make me leave.”

Hammerhead glared back. “Yes I can. I’m ordering you to go to Danny Boy.” He could see Finn hesitating in between them, trying to decide if he should pipe in. He wisely chose not to. His sister however decided to not keep her opinion to herself. 

“Danny Boy is a big boy!” She insisted. “He can handle the engine himself. And if he really needs help, they can just shove Mouse up there!”

“No they won’t, because I’m telling you to go!” Hammerhead argued back. He decided to save mentioning that it would probably take the whole crew shoving Mouse up there to get him back in the vents based off of the earlier transmissions he’d heard. That could be his trump card. Though how effective it would be against Madeline was up for debate. 

It was looking like he might have to test that trump card though, because Madeline didn’t budge. “No!” She insisted. “I’m staying! I can help!” Ant’s eyes were darting back and forth between Madeline and Hammerhead, that same stunned look seemingly frozen on his face. 

Hammerhead stared Madeline down. “Madeline.”

Madeline stared back. “No.”

“Go.”

“No.”

“Now.”

“Make me.”

“Mouse refuses to go back into the vents.”

“I don’t care!”

Hammerhead almost removed his hand from Ant’s stomach to point to the door. “You go to Danny Boy right now, young lady!”

Madeline made a weird shuffling motion where she was sitting, like she was making herself more comfortable. “No! You can’t make me! I’ll bite you if you try to make me move!”

That made Hammerhead pause. Madeline hadn’t threatened to bite him in a long time. Hammerhead still had scars from her piranha days. He’d been incredibly relieved when she stopped threatening it every time she was upset over something, Madeline learning to resort to creative pirate insults instead. Or blackmail. She was quite fond of blackmail. 

Madeline was glaring furiously, and Hammerhead had to decide if sending Madeline away was worth getting bitten over. Ant was still glancing back and forth between them, pinned beneath Madeline and Hammerhead’s hands, and still hiccuping with tears. 

Hammerhead stared at Madeline before he sighed. “Fine.” He bit out. “Might as well have an extra set of hands when he starts moving. But only until we’re done!” He felt incredibly reluctant to have Madeline stay, but he supposed it was better than getting bitten. And he figured she’d be useful in holding Ant down when he inevitably began squirming again. She’d managed to get him to stop freaking out so bad, too. 

Madeline relaxed a bit once Hammerhead gave in, but Ant’s head twisted up from where Madeline’s body was blocking his view. His face was streaked with tears, and his voice wobbled with more when he asked, “What?”

Hammerhead ignored him. “All right, Finn, we’ve got work to do.”

Ant’s head swiveled back and forth, trying to look at the gathered pirates around him as he choked out, “What?”

“What are we doing?” Finn asked, shuffling closer on his knees. 

“Dealing with this harpoon.” Hammerhead told him. “Get the saw.”

Ant’s eyes widened even more, and he croaked again, “What?”

Finn paused for a moment, mouth opening and closing like he wanted to say something, before he chose to just do as Hammerhead said. Setting the walkie on the floor, Finn scrambled to his feet to rush across the moon pool room. Ant’s eyes followed him, and he began to hyperventilate. “Get the what?” He repeated, panic growing when he watched Finn produce a saw from the mess that was Danny Boy’s corner. 

“This one?” Finn asked, holding up a saw the length of his forearm. Ant made a strange squeaking noise of panic at the sight of it, and he began to squirm. 

“Madeline, hold him steady.” Hammerhead ordered. It took Madeline a moment to actually register what Hammerhead said, too busy staring at the saw herself. When she finally snapped back and did what Hammerhead said, he was already telling Finn, “No, the other one. The big one.”

“That’s not the big one?!” Ant squeaked, tilting his head and chest up to stare at Hammerhead incredulously. Madeline pushed him back down to the floor, and Ant turned his head back to look at Finn just as he produced the saw Hammerhead wanted. He was holding it carefully, teeth up, the saw the length of Hammerhead’s forearm. Ant’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw it. 

“Yes, that one, bring it here!” Hammerhead said, gesturing to Finn. Finn looked back and forth between Hammerhead and Ant, looking nervous before he started to slowly inch his way over to Hammerhead. “Put some back into it, son, bring it over here!” Hammerhead barked, causing Finn to jump and bolt over. 

Ant saw the saw coming and panicked exactly like Hammerhead was worried he would. He started squirming, the Mimic Knight’s tail spasming and thrashing on the ground as he pushed and shoved at Madeline and Hammerhead’s hands. “Wait! Waitwaitwait, no! No no no, what’re you doing with that? What’re you doing with that?!” His voice grew shriller the closer Finn got and the more his panic grew. 

“Calm down.” Hammerhead said, watching Finn awkwardly kneel down on the floor with the saw. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

Madeline practically threw herself over Ant, who shrieked, “You’re gonna saw into me?! THAT’S GONNA HURT!!”

“Don’t saw into him!” Madeline shouted at the same time, staring up at Hammerhead in dismay. “He’s not a lost cause yet!!” Ant’s arms flapped around Madeline, gripping the back of her shirt while his eyes stared up and over her shoulder at Hammerhead. 

“She’s right, I’m not!!” Ant squeaked. “I’m not a lost cause, don’t saw into me, please!!”

Hammerhead stared at them both, not sure where to start. “Madeline, put yer hands back on his shoulders!” Addressing them both, he scolded, “I’m not sawing into you, I’m sawing into the harpoon! I’m getting rid of the bulk of it, taking some of the strain off yer wound! I’m not an animal!”

A pair of wide, confused and panicked eyes stared up at Hammerhead and blinked in eery unison. Ant and Madeline glanced at each other at the same time as well, the same expression on their face as they thought about what Hammerhead said. Hammerhead groaned, turning to Finn. “Finn, I need you to put yer hands on his stomach, around the base of the harpoon.” Turning back to his daughter just as she and the Nekton boy looked back up at Hammerhead in their weird unison, he said, “Madeline, get back to holding him down. He might squirm again.”

It took both of his children a minute to get into position. Finn looked down nervously at Ant, inching closer to Hammerhead with the saw balanced awkwardly in his arms. He was trying not to drop it, and slowly put it down on the ground next to Hammerhead. Ant and Madeline shared another, weirdly in sync glance with each other, before Madeline scrambled back off of Ant and planted her hands firmly on his shoulders again. Ant’s head fell back against the back of the Mimic Knight’s glass panels, and he stared around him with panic. 

“Th-this isn’t gonna hurt, right?” Ant asked, staring warily at Finn as he hesitantly inched closer to Hammerhead. His hands were raised like he wasn’t sure how to put them down against Ant’s wound. Hammerhead removed one of his hands to pull Finn’s hands down to Ant’s stomach when he wasn’t moving fast enough. Finn grimaced, cautiously putting his hands where Hammerhead wanted them. Ant panicked more when Hammerhead didn’t answer him. “It’s not gonna hurt, right?!”

Hammerhead hesitated, before lying, “No, of course not.” Turning to Finn he said, “Push yer hands hard on him, ye can’t let the blood get out.” Ant yelped in pain when Finn frantically shoved his hands down as hard as he could on his stomach, and Hammerhead addressed Madeline. “You push down on his shoulders. Don’t let him move.”

Ant’s eyes locked on to Hammerhead’s. “W-Why would I move?!”

Hammerhead tried not to look at him, feeling a little awkward when he admitted, “Cause it’ll probably hurt.”

“You just said it wouldn’t hurt!”

Hammerhead wiped his hands on his pants, dismissing Ant. “You’ll be fine. It shouldn’t hurt much.” Hammerhead chose not to mention that he actually had no idea how much this might hurt. He was gonna try not to jostle the harpoon much, but it was still in Ant, and it might tug anyways. And Ant had made it pretty clear that even the tiniest bit of movement could cause pain. “You’ve got to have a bit of a pain tolerance at your age, right?”

Ant didn’t say anything, staring at Hammerhead in disbelief before whimpering in pain. There were still tears in his eyes, dripping down his face and making him look even more pathetic. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead let his head fall back against the glass with another thunk. Hammerhead watched Ant stare up at the ceiling of the moon pool room, a bewildered and rattled look on his face. After a second or two of staring into space, he squeezed his eyes shut, looking like he was both bracing and also resigning himself to the fact that this was happening anyways. Hammerhead decided to focus on trying to get as much blood off of his hands as he could so he could hold on to the saw without it slipping.  

Hammerhead pointedly ignored the stains all across his pants now, not wanting to think about how he was gonna get them out later. He picked up the saw, nervously adjusting his grip on the handle, before grabbing a hold of the harpoon. Ant made a weak noise, shifting his head to face the other direction so he couldn’t see. Like that would make this all go away. 

Hammerhead took in a tiny breath of confidence, trying to maintain the air of certainty in knowing what he was doing that his children and Will seemed to think he had right now. Grabbing a hold of the harpoon with one hand, he brought the saw up to it with the other. “Hold him steady.” He warned both Finn and Madeline. Ant whimpered inside the Mimic Knight, and Hammerhead started sawing at the harpoon before any of them could second guess themselves. 

It became quickly apparent that Hammerhead seemed to have misinterpreted the kind of strength it would need to keep the harpoon steady. In fact, he seemed to have overestimated it. Ant immediately jerked underneath Finn and Madeline’s hands with yet another cry of pain, making Hammerhead briefly panic and look down at how he was holding the harpoon. While Ant cried, Hammerhead took note of how white his own knuckles were. 

Had he accidentally pushed down on the harpoon? Hammerhead had been holding on to it pretty tight, not wanting to push it further into Ant’s wound, or shake the harpoon around. Had he just made Ant’s wound worse?

Hammerhead looked at Ant, looked back at the harpoon, and quickly got back to sawing. No, no he had to stop thinking. He was, unfortunately, the adult here now. Taking the majority of the weight off of Ant’s injury would help, hopefully. Hammerhead didn’t actually know for certain that it would. But he couldn’t stop now, they both just had to tough through it. 

“Don’t you start now!” Hammerhead snapped at Ant, who was trying his absolute hardest to buck up against Madeline and Finn’s hands. “Yer gonna be fine!”

“YOU SAID IT WOULDN’T HURT!!” Ant shrieked. 

“I said it MIGHT hurt!” Hammerhead shouted back. 

“AFTER YOU SAID THAT IT WOULDN’T!!” Hammerhead kept sawing, ignoring Ant’s cries. He was almost halfway through the harpoon, and he didn’t want to waste any breath or time dealing with Ant’s protests. 

However, when Ant’s cries pitched up a notch, Hammerhead forced himself to pause and reconsider how exactly he was holding the harpoon. His grip had hardly changed, and it made Hammerhead feel weirdly bad considering that he may have been pushing the harpoon further into Ant.

Hammerhead took in another deep, deep breath. He tried to fight his own grip, prying each finger loose like he was fighting the steering wheel. It probably only took seconds, but it felt like whole minutes before Hammerhead’s grip had loosened enough for him to readjust his grip. He tried to focus on not pushing down on the harpoon. He just needed to keep it steady so he could finish sawing through it. He needed to ignore Ant so he could finish doing this one thing, before he started worrying about the next thing. Once Hammerhead’s grip was adjusted, he started sawing away at the harpoon again without pause this time. 

Ant continued to scream and cry in pain as Hammerhead sawed at the harpoon. But there wasn’t that strangled sort of undertone to it that there had been before, so Hammerhead justified the crying as better than before. He forced himself to not readjust his grip again, and tried to ignore Ant’s crying. Every time he let himself linger on the sound of it his chest would tighten even more and he’d feel sick. Those sounds should not have been coming out of Ant, they should not have been happening on his ship, and this never should have happened.

Hammerhead didn’t know where the Stinging Piranha got their harpoons. He hadn’t put much thought into anything they did beyond the usual annoyance until today. The harpoon wasn’t the worst Hammerhead had seen, though the fact it likely hadn’t left its compartment until the moment it was fired didn’t make Hammerhead feel any better about it being in Ant. But it wasn’t the best harpoon in the world, and it didn’t take much longer for him to saw through the metal shaft. 

The harpoon snapped apart under the saw, and Hammerhead tossed the piece across the moon pool. He didn’t care to see where it landed, just wanting it out of his sight. Ant sucked in a huge breath of air, before releasing it in a strange sort of strangled cry. It didn’t seem to be filled with any more pain than usual, so Hammerhead assumed he was just loudly expressing how incredibly upset and uncomfortable he was about the harpoon that was still in his stomach. 

“There!” Hammerhead looked down at Ant. “See? Not so bad. I told you a boy yer age would be able to handle that just fine.” Hammerhead made a point to not mention exactly how old Ant was, not wanting to make it clear he had no idea what that number actually was. He dropped the saw on the floor next to him carelessly, not wanting it in his hands anymore than a hot coal. Finn jumped when the blade clattered next to his leg, and Hammerhead briefly panicked at the sight of the blade inches from his own son. Finn looked paler than usual, inching away from the saw as best as he could with his hands still pushing down hard on Ant’s stomach, and looking seconds away from being sick. 

Hammerhead didn’t know what to say to make him feel better. He pushed his hands over Finn’s, putting more pressure against Ant’s wound as he tried to think of something else to do. Fortunately, Madeline seemed to take the opportunity to pipe in with a shaky sense of cheer that proved to distract everyone else. “Y-yeah! How many eleven year olds can say they went through something like this and came out the other end? Y-you’re gonna have a wicked scar after this!”

Ant’s eyes darted up to Madeline. He twisted his head back up a little bit from where he’d turned it away so he could look at her better, and Hammerhead didn’t like the hollowed and confused look that spread across his face. Ant seemed to pause for a moment, before he swallowed, fresh tears already dribbling down his cheeks. “I-I’m thirteen.”

Hammerhead stared, and he felt his eyebrows raise. Madeline’s jaw dropped. “You’re two years older than me?”

Ant’s lips were wobbling, but Hammerhead saw them twitch with a ghost of a smile Ant seemed to really want to succeed. “I-I turn fourteen in four months.”

“You’re three years older than me?!”

Ant made a funny choking sound, like he was trying to laugh but couldn’t actually produce the noise or air needed to do so. Hammerhead just kept staring, and found himself sharing a bewildered glance with Finn. He hadn’t been expecting Ant to be that old. He’d been around Madeline’s size, and his dad was a pretty good height. He’d thought that maybe he was around Madeline’s age. They certainly bickered like it. 

But there had been moments where Hammerhead just…wasn’t sure. Something about Ant’s face structure and the way his voice occasionally cracked had him doubting many times how old Ant actually was. It was just so hard to narrow it down. Eventually it had been long enough that Hammerhead didn’t bother asking, and he decided to assume Ant was around Madeline’s age, if not a little older. But three years older than her? Hammerhead hadn’t expected Ant to be that old. 

Hammerhead stared down at Ant, suddenly stuck on the thought about how he was nearly the same size as Madeline. Maybe even the tiniest bit shorter. It was hard to tell with her hair. He was…he was tiny. Oh, he was so small. How was he so small at that age with a father like Will?

Madeline was spluttering, not sure what to say. Or maybe where to start. She kept bouncing back and forth between different starts of sentences, before settling on, “You’re three years older than me?! How did this never come up?! Why didn’t you tell me?!”

Ant whimpered, though Hammerhead felt strangely relieved about how it seemed to do less with genuine pain and more like severe discomfort. “I-I thought you knew.” He said weakly. “I don’t usually have to tell people.” Ant paused, before staring up at Madeline. “Wait. H-how old are you?”

Madeline glared at him, offended. “I’m eleven!”

Ant stared at her, a sort of weird expression on his face, like he didn’t know how to feel about that. “You’re my height.” His eyes widened, and he began to weakly shake his head in protest. “No no no, y-you’re not- you’re lying.” Madeline gave him a look, and Ant’s eyes widened even further in dismay. “Fontaine never finds out.” He insisted. “Sh-she cannot know you’re the- that much- she doesn’t need something else to hold over m-my head about my height!”

“You’re TINY!” Madeline cried. “How are you so small?! You’re three years older than me, you should be taller than me, not shorter!”

Ant shrank against the floor, eyes filling up with more tears. “I-I don’t know, I-!” He whimpered again, and Hammerhead felt his hands bump against his as Ant grabbed at the base of the harpoon again. “Please stop. Please, just…s-stop.”

Hammerhead felt his stomach drop, and Finn asked, “Why? What’s wrong? Is it the harpoon?” Hammerhead felt a little panicked when Finn said that last part, and he looked down at the boys hands. Had he pushed the harpoon in deeper when sawing it? Was something going wrong?

Ant shook his head, an uncomfortable expression on his face made worse with the tear stains. “No, I just…it’s too much.” It sounded like it had taken nearly all the effort Ant could muster to give that simple explanation, and Hammerhead could see on his face that asking more might be more than Ant could handle. Everything was all just…too much. 

Hammerhead looked at his kids. There were too many people in the moon pool room. Ant had lost a lot of blood. They couldn’t be in here any longer. Hammerhead was starting to become uncomfortably aware of how much blood Ant had lost in the short time he’d been here, and there had been no sign of either of his parents being anywhere close to coming and getting him. Hammerhead didn’t know if he could guarantee Ant would be conscious when they came, and he didn’t want his kids to be here in case something even worse happened. They had to go somewhere else. 

Hammerhead turned to look at Finn, ignoring Ant still beneath them. “Go help Danny Boy, I’ve got it from here. Take your sister with you.” Finn looked up at Hammerhead, looking spooked. Hammerhead wasn’t entirely sure why, and he found he didn’t want to dwell on it any longer. There must have been something in his face that made Finn swallow, but he turned to look at Madeline instead of asking why.

Madeline watched Hammerhead look at her, and she shook her head. “I’m not going.”

“Madeline.” Hammerhead warned. 

“N-No! I don’t want to!” She glanced back and forth between Hammerhead and Finn, trying as hard as she could to stay put. “You can’t make me leave! Why do you want us to leave so bad, anyways?”

“I told you that you could stay until I needed you to go to Danny Boy again!” Hammerhead said instead of answering why he wanted them to leave the room so bad. “And I need you to go to Danny Boy now! Take yer brother with you.” Finn jerked at that, looking to Hammerhead. Hammerhead ignored him. 

“I never agreed to that!” Madeline protested. “Why do I have to go to Danny Boy?”

“So we can get the engine running, so we can get out of here as soon as Will gets Ant!” Hammerhead said. “I’ve already told you, the World Ocean’s Authorities will be in the area any moment, and we need to be ready to leave!” Finn’s hands squirmed underneath Hammerhead’s, and before Hammerhead could ask why, he managed to pry them out from under his own. Finn started to crawl around Ant, to get next to Madeline. 

“Maddie, come on.” There was a strange tone to Finn’s voice, and looking at him had Hammerhead catching Finn’s eyes right as he glanced his way. There was a morbid understanding to them, the kind that left Finn looking very sick and made Hammerhead realize that Finn had caught on to why he was making them leave, which in turn left him feeling very sick. “We should leave Ant alone.”

“No!” Madeline protested, her voice taking on its own weird tone. But hers was less of understanding and more of desperation. “I don’t wanna leave him!”

“We can’t do anything else.” Finn stressed. “And dad’s right, we need to be ready to leave when the World Ocean’s Authorities gets here.” Finn shakily reach out a hand, stopping just short of grabbing his sister when he seemed to remember that his hands were covered in Ant’s blood. “Maddie…come on. Please?”

Madeline sat there for a few seconds, thinking over what they had said. She looked down at Ant, seemingly contemplating her decision before drooping in defeat. Hammerhead felt himself sag in relief when she started to pick herself up off the floor. “O…ok.” 

Finn pushed himself off the floor, giving Hammerhead another glance as he did. Madeline suddenly hesitated halfway off the floor, before surging forward again. “Wait!” Hammerhead almost demanded she get up right then and there and march her butt to Danny Boy, but Madeline’s hands scrabbled with the lock on the front of the Mimic Knight. She pressed down on it, twisting Ant’s shoulders over as the hatch tried to open. “L-Let him get some air!”

Hammerhead tried and failed to come up with something to say in protest as his daughter manhandled the boy bleeding out on the floor in front of them, twisting him onto his side so she could push the glass hatch open. Ant grimaced, and made a small whimpering sound as the glass dragged against his ear from where his head was laying against the glass. He struggled to lift his head up so that the hatch could be opened, and Madeline lifted it up for him once she could reach it. She slowly pushed his head back against the ground when she was done with the hatch, like she was trying to be gentle but didn’t know how. Hammerhead had never seen her try to be caring with someone like that. 

Ant whimpered, hiccuping with still-falling tears. Madeline’s hands hovered over him, her mouth opening and closing like she was trying to find something else to say, something else to protest about, some other reason to stay. Finn finally reached out and pulled at her shoulder, leaving his own red handprint on her skin. Madeline let herself get tugged away, though she was clearly hesitant about it. Finn steered her away from Ant and Hammerhead, directing her to the door. Madeline stared at Ant the whole way, Finn walking her to Danny Boy. Madeline’s eyes stayed on Ant all the way until they were no longer in the room anymore. Hammerhead was soon left alone with his rushing thoughts, and a still crying boy on his moon pool floor. 

Hammerhead sat there for a while. The walkie Finn forgot to take with him lay on the floor next to the saw, though no one tried to talk to it. Ant continued to gasp and hiccup with tears, staring at the floor in front of him with panicked, distant eyes. 

Hammerhead tried not to squirm. He wasn’t used to comforting children. He had his own roundabout way of speaking with his own, their own secret language. He didn’t know where Kaiko and Will were, but he didn’t know how to speak to Ant. He wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t know Ant, he didn’t know what buttons to avoid pushing. And that wasn’t taking into consideration that literally all of Ant’s buttons were being pushed by a harpoon right now. 

In the end, Ant spoke first. “Am I gonna die?”

Hammerhead had been resigned to waiting out however long it would take the Nektons to pick up their son in silence. But Ant asked that question so weakly, and clearly, that Hammerhead’s head snapped to his face again in panic. Ant wasn’t looking at him, and he looked weirdly clarified as he stared at the floor in front of him. Gone was the distant look in his eyes, even though he wasn’t looking at Hammerhead. Tears still streaked his face. He was still upset, and rightly so. But a frightening sense of calm clarity had crossed Ant’s face, and it made Hammerhead feel sick. 

Ant hadn’t asked that question with the panic that most people would in his situation. Maybe it hadn’t come yet, but he was too close to calm right now for Hammerhead’s comfort. Little boys shouldn’t be so calm about the idea of dying. 

“No, you’re not.” Hammerhead felt weird about how quickly he responded. “The Knight is helping keep pressure on the wound, keeping most of the blood in, you’ll be fine.” Lying came as easy as breathing to Hammerhead. He had no idea if the Knight was doing any of that. He didn’t know how fine Ant was going to be. He didn’t know how much time he had left before it was too late to do anything. He didn’t know if it already was. 

Ant sat for a second after Hammerhead said that, and then he finally glanced up at Hammerhead. “I don’t want to die.” He was still weirdly calm, but now that Hammerhead was looking in his eyes, he could see the underlying fear that Ant was momentarily keeping in check. There was something about the prospect of dying that worked more wonders than Madeline’s commanding at grounding him. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not.” Hammerhead insisted, pushing down harder in emphasis. Ant flinched, a stricken look passing his face and a weak noise leaving him when Hammerhead did. “I told you already, before. Ye’re tougher than you think.”

Something about that made Ant wilt, lip wobbling. “I don’t think I am.” He admitted. “I c-can’t do any of the stuff I’m supposed to, that people expect me to do.” Ant’s voice wobbled as he stared right up at Hammerhead, practically looking into his soul. “I don’t wanna die. I already thought- but not about this. I don’t wanna die.”

Hammerhead hesitated. This was far more vulnerability than he knew what to do with. Far more from Ant than he had ever thought he’d hear. Hesitating again, he chanced removing one of his hands to grasp Ant’s shoulder. “You survive this, you’re gonna survive pretty much anything else.” He immediately wished he’d taken the time to word that better, because it sounded like he was telling Ant there was a chance he wasn’t going to survive, which wasn’t. Going to. Happen.

Ant stared up at Hammerhead like he’d just given him revelation. “Anything?” Hammerhead suddenly felt like he wasn’t talking to Ant, or that Ant was talking about something else. 

He chose not to dwell on it, nodding instead. “Anything.”

Ant continued to stare at him, eyes wide. Hammerhead could tell he was searching his face for something, a lie, a trick, confirmation on whatever was going through his head. Hammerhead hoped he couldn’t see his own nervousness about it all. The dread that came with reluctantly admitting that this wasn’t a good situation, that things could get ugly if Ant’s parents didn’t show up fast, that if they didn’t they could come to the Dark Orca with a dead child and Hammerhead’s hands covered in his blood. 

Hammerhead didn’t know what Ant found that made him sink against the floor, head landing against the metal with a small thud as he stared at the far wall. He was scared, rightly so, though Hammerhead wasn’t going to do or say anything to confirm those fears. He just removed his hand from Ant’s shoulder and placed it back against his stomach. And then he jumped when the walkie crackled to life again, Kaiko’s voice snapping, “Hammerhead?!”

Ant croaked in pain when Hammerhead jumped, but he ignored the reaction to snatch up the walkie. “Yes?”

Kaiko audibly sighed in relief, her tone immediately changing. “Oh thank goodness. Those idiots are trying to escape, I’m on their tail now.”

Hammerhead felt a wave of salty vindication run through him. Good. That was very good. The mental image of the Stinging Piranha’s former crew trying to escape with Kaiko hot on their heels was a very pleasant picture in this nightmare of a day. “What’s the status of their ship?”

“And you care why?” Hammerhead wanted to get defensive at the scathing tone Kaiko asked that reasonable question in, but chose not to. She didn’t know the Stinging Piranha’s history any further than the shot they’d taken at her son. 

“I wanna know how many pieces you left it in so I can tell everyone at the Floating Market.” Hammerhead admitted. “That thing is a smear on the word ‘submarine’ and there’s a bet that’s gone ‘round for years now about how and when it’d meet its end.” Hammerhead was pretty sure no one had ‘pissed off Nekton smashing it to pieces’ down, but he wanted to see if Acker owed him two hundred dollars or not. 

Kaiko paused for long enough Hammerhead wondered if she ditched chasing the Stinging Piranha to come after him instead, but then she said, “I wouldn’t think it’s a submarine at first glance anymore. I…lost my temper, at the front, and that combined with the World Ocean’s authorities vessel leaving their moon pool totally destroyed the back.”

Hammerhead bit his tongue in order to not whoop in delight. Not only did Acker owe him money, Lady Margo did as well. She didn’t know the first thing about submarines and hadn’t believed Hammerhead when he insisted that the stolen ship in the Stinging Piranha’s moon pool was bound to destroy their hull one of these days. A tiny squeal might have gotten out of him anyways, because Kaiko sighed wearily. She didn’t sound nearly as frustrated at Hammerhead’s joy as she usually did, so she must not have minded the destruction as much as she normally would. 

Hammerhead never thought he’d see the day a Nekton didn’t care for near baseless destruction. But this was no normal day, and the Stinging Piranha certainly had it coming. 

“I’m in contact with the World Ocean’s Authorities.” Kaiko said instead of reprimanding Hammerhead’s joy. “They know about the situation, and we got really lucky. There was a training activity going on a few clicks from here, they’re moving to intercept the ship and they’re sending a doctor.”

Hammerhead’s gut dropped a little at the realization there was in fact World Ocean’s Authorities nearby. Not because it meant that Ant was certainly going to be okay now, which would have lifted his gut up and not down, but because he’d picked this spot for Restock Day specifically because he’d thought there weren’t any bases nearby. 

Well, he supposed he couldn't account for training exercises. And in the end, their close proximity to the area was a good thing. Ant was going to be okay, Hammerhead was certain of that now. “That’s good.” He bit out. “He needs one.”

Before either of them could say anything else about that, Ant’s watery eyes flitted to the walkie. “Mom?”

Hammerhead heard Kaiko suck in a sharp breath. “Ant?”

Ant twisted his head around again, eyes locked on the walkie his mother’s voice was coming out of. “Mom, is that you?” He sounded panicked again, which was exactly what Hammerhead had worried would happen. Ant’s parents were good parents, which meant as soon as one of them was near, even if it was just over a walkie, his composure only fell further because it meant there was someone he associated with safety nearby. 

“Yes, it’s me, Ant.” Hammerhead felt like he was intruding on a moment, so he didn’t say anything as Kaiko spoke to her child.“It’s okay, honey, i-it’s okay.” Kaiko sounded like she was fighting to keep her voice level and reassuring. “Your dad’s almost got everything he needs, he’s gonna get you back on the Aronnax real soon, okay? And a doctor is gonna be over soon as well. You’re gonna be fine, everything’s gonna be fine.”

Ant’s lips were wobbling, the boy trying to bring back composure that he had long since lost. “Are you coming?” He sounded so hopeful, so desperate for his mother that it made Hammerhead wish his wife was there all the more. She was better at this than him. She’d have been able to be a good stand in until Ant’s parents came. 

Kaiko hesitated for a moment, before admitting reluctantly, “No, honey, I’m sorry.” Ant’s face crumpled as she continued, “I’m keeping an eye on these pirates, making sure that the World Ocean’s Authorities gets them, and then I’m gonna get a doctor to the Aronnax.” Kaiko spoke gently, trying to soothe Ant over the radio. “But I’ll be right back as soon as I’m done with that, okay? You’re gonna be okay, sweetheart, you’re gonna be just fine.”

Ant’s head slumped to the ground, hiccuping as he started to cry again. “I wanna go home.” Hammerhead didn’t say anything as he cried. “I want you and Dad! Please, come!” Ant’s pleading was pitiful, but Hammerhead couldn’t bring himself to feel condescending about it. Ant was just a little boy. It was more than fair for him to want his parents more than anything right now. Heavens knows Hammerhead was doing a bad job at filling in for them. 

Kaiko made a wounded noise, and Hammerhead couldn’t imagine how she must have been feeling right then. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry. Dad’s almost on his way to you, he’s gonna be there soon, okay?” Ant didn’t respond, just crying. 

Kaiko faltered on the other line for a moment, not sure how else to comfort her son. After a moment, she sighed. “Hammerhead?” 

Hammerhead stiffened, and felt himself straighten up on reflex. “Yes?”

“What’s the name of the submarine I just capsized?” Kaiko sounded way too casual admitting that, and she also sounded tired, and ready for the day to be over. “I need to give it to the Authorites so they can put it in their database.”

Hammerhead wasn’t sure why the World Ocean’s Authorities would want the name of the worst pirate crew in history, but then remembered that they’d actually stolen one of their vessels. How they even accomplished that, Hammerhead didn’t know. He’d always wondered if maybe another crew had stolen it and the Stinging Piranha stole it when they weren’t paying attention. Though that still begged the question of how they got the vessel on board their ship in the first place. “The Stinging Piranha.”

“…the…Stinging Piranha?” Kaiko asked. 

Hammerhead felt a little awkward admitting, “Yes.”

Kaiko didn’t say anything for a moment, before making a strange huffing sort of noise that Hammerhead could picture being paired with a shake of the head as she muttered to herself, “What kind of name is that?”

Hammerhead let himself snort a little bit. “You, and every other pirate on the Floating Market have been asking that question for years.”

Kaiko hummed, not bothering to answer Hammerhead. Instead, she addressed her son one more time. “Ant? I just passed Dad, he’s on his way, honey. Just hold on a little longer, okay?”

Ant didn’t say anything, but Hammerhead watched him suck in a huge breath, squeezing his lips shut in order to not sob as he weakly nodded his head. “He understands.” He told Kaiko, knowing she couldn’t see Ant’s response. Kaiko didn’t say anything for a long moment, before hanging up. Hammerhead didn’t know if she just couldn’t bring herself to say anything else, or didn’t know what else to say. If she was struggling trying to hold on to whatever composure Ant thought she had, and speaking would have broken that illusion. But she left them alone again with the walkie and each other, Ant and Hammerhead waiting for Will to show up. 

It didn’t take long. One moment there was just the sound of Ant’s muffled sobs and Hammerhead’s heartbeat in his ears. The next there was a burst of water, and Hammerhead turned to avoid the splash. The Rover surfaced in the Dark Orca’s moon pool, and the water hadn’t even finished sliding off the glass before the hatch was springing open. Will clambered over the side of the Rover, stumbling to the floor of the moon pool. He spun in circles for a moment, frantically looking around. “Ant? Hammerhead?”

Hammerhead wasn’t sure why Will was looking for him specifically, but Ant croaked, trying to twist under Hammerhead’s hands. “Dad?” Will spun around immediately at the sound of Ant’s voice, and his eyes fell upon the Mimic Knight. Hammerhead watched Will’s eyes widen, and his face paled a few shades. He didn’t have a moment to react any further, because as soon as Ant saw his father, he sobbed. “Dad!”

Will was scrambling over as soon as Ant started crying for him. Hammerhead suspected he didn’t even realize he’d been moving until he was on his hands and knees next to Hammerhead, crouched over Ant. But then, as soon as he was with Ant, Will didn’t seem to be caring about much else. “Ant!” Will’s hands hovered over Ant, not sure where to start. Will looked like he was about to be sick, or have some sort of anxiety attack at the sight of his child on the floor, covered in his own blood. 

Ant was sobbing, his hands releasing their grip on Hammerhead’s to reach out for his dad. “Dad!” Will’s hands scrambled to grasp Ant’s, and the boy tried to twist around further to face him. “Dad!”

Hammerhead just managed to pull him back into his laying position, and Ant screamed in pain. Will jerked, yanking his hands back as Hammerhead wrestled Ant back to the floor. Ant’s hands grabbed Hammerhead’s, his grip tight. That was a good sign, Hammerhead reasoned. He’d prefer Ant crush his fingers than have his grip go slack. 

Will stared down at his son, looking like he didn’t know what to think. Hammerhead could relate. He wasn’t used to seeing Ant with a harpoon in his stomach, he couldn’t imagine how Will must have been feeling seeing his own child in that condition. The sudden thought of it being Madeline or Finn on the floor with a harpoon in their stomach made Hammerhead want to vomit. Looking at Will, he looked like he wanted to do just that. 

“Are you okay?” He asked Ant. Before Ant could even begin trying to catch his breath in order to answer, Will turned to Hammerhead with a manic look on his face. “Is he okay?”

Hammerhead was baffled. “Why are you asking me that?! I’m no doctor!”

“He’s been with you!” Will protested, ignoring the second part of what Hammerhead said. 

Hammerhead groaned in frustration, before biting. “He should be fine. We haven’t moved him at all, and I haven’t let up pressure either.” Wracking his brain for all the old first aid stuff he’d learned what felt like ages ago now, Hammerhead continued, “He hasn’t lost consciousness. He’s been somewhat holding conversation.” Ant’s grip reminded Hammerhead how tightly he was holding him. “He’s trying to break one of my fingers, so the blood loss either hasn’t hit yet or what you’re seeing is just dramatics.”

Ant gasped for air around his sobs. “I’m- I’m-! I’m s-sorry!”

Hammerhead grumbled a little, but didn’t seriously protest any further as Ant’s hands shook against Hammerhead’s. He might have been trying to loosen his grip, or was starting to devolve into hysterics. Either way, the strength behind his hold didn’t waver, leaving Hammerhead weirdly relieved. It was a good sign, regardless of the bruises he was sure to leave behind. “Can you..?” He trailed off, gesturing with his head at Will. 

Will blinked for a moment, before he understood what Hammerhead was asking. He scrambled to grab his sons hands, prying them from Hammerhead’s. “Come on, let’s go.” He said gently. Ant croaked out in pain, the sound far too familiar to Hammerhead’s ears now. He wanted to never hear that sound again. Once his hands were free, Hammerhead stretched his fingers before helping Will slowly turn Ant over and into Will’s arms. Ant cried as they did, but the physical presence of his dad seemed to be a strange comfort. He wasn’t screaming as loud as he had been when it was just Ant and the pirates. 

Hammerhead wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Haunted by the screams, but grateful that Will didn’t have to hear them the way that Hammerhead had. 

When Ant was firmly situated in his father’s arms, he whimpered. “Fontaine’s gonna kill me.”

“Why?” Will asked, completely bewildered. 

“Cause I kinda scratched her Knight.” Ant choked out. “More than a little. She hates when that happens, even when it’s not me.”

Will was staring at Ant like he didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or start crying. “I think she’ll be more worried about you than the Mimic Knight right now.” He said carefully, fighting to control his voice.

Ant stared up at Will, eyes wide. “Really?” He sounded like he was trying to be sarcastic, trying to put on a brave face, but the disbelief and pain took over instead and he ended up sounding like he’d just been kicked down a flight of stairs instead. 

Will took a moment before he answered, trying to compose himself. “Yeah, she will.” His hand reached out and brushed over Ant’s hair, smoothing it out of his face. “It’s gonna be okay, kiddo, I promise.”

Ant sniffled, whimpering in pain as Will pulled him close. Will bent down, pressing a kiss to Ant’s forehead, and Ant sobbed at the touch. 

Hammerhead didn’t say anything. His ears were practically clogged with metaphorical water as he helped Will get his son into the Rover. He ignored the saw and walkie still on the ground next to a pool of blood that would surely leave a stain, ignored the way the floor started to vibrate as the engine finally turned on now that Danny Boy had Madeline. He ignored the lingering looks Ant sent his way as Hammerhead stepped away from the Rover once he was sure that Will had his son secured. He tried to ignore the breathy “Thank you.” Will gave him before the hatch to the Rover closed, and it dipped back under that water, the new motion sensors pinging in its retreat. 

Hammerhead stood there for a moment, not sure what to do next. If it weren’t for the blood on the floor behind him, staining the metal and his hands and pants and sticking to Danny Boy’s saw and the walkie, Hammerhead could almost believe nothing had just happened at all. He didn’t know how long he would have sat there, staring at the water the Rover disappeared under if the walkie didn’t crackle and Danny Boy fretted, “Captain! The engine’s on! Aren’t we going to get out of here before the World Ocean’s Authorities shows up?!”

The molasses that had followed Hammerhead from the helm to the moon pool followed him all the way back. Hammerhead was pretty sure he didn’t actually respond to Danny Boy, just ran right to the helm and grabbed the steering wheel. The new long range scanner wouldn’t shut up about the Aronnax nearby, with incoming World Ocean’s Authorities vessels closing in. Hammerhead stared at the remains of the Stinging Piranha, littering the edge of the ravine. Kaiko had certainly not been nice to them, her own words of being unable to recognize it as a submarine at first glance the most polite way of describing it. Hammerhead ignored the destroyed submarine except to take a quick picture as proof of its destruction, and then high-tailed it out of the area. He kept an eye on the long range scanner, watching the Aronnax and World Ocean’s Authorities vessels get further and further away. Eventually, they vanished from view. 

Hammerhead couldn’t bring himself to feel relieved that the World Ocean’s Authorities didn’t give chase. He tried to. But a few hours later, when Hammerhead reparked the Dark Orca in a different ravine and he locked himself in the bathroom in the Captains Quarters, he watched the blood on his hands spiral down the drain and he hoped they had gotten there fast enough.

The following weeks dragged. The whole submarine was a little quiet, the usual energy that the crew carried different. Hammerhead didn’t say anything about it to the crew, trying to pretend that nothing had happened. The crew didn’t say anything about what happened with the Stinging Piranha either, except for a passing comment from one of them a few days before they returned to the Floating Market that his cousin that ran a stall at the Market said that the crew had finally turned up again. 

Hammerhead payed it no mind beyond a brief moment spent wondering how they escaped the World Ocean’s Authorities. He eventually figured that they must have let them go after a period of time, the Stinging Piranha not nearly equipped with the gear to pull off heists that would have them in the World Ocean’s Authorities captivity for too long. But that was the most he dwelled on the Stinging Piranha, wanting to leave that whole day behind him where he could forget all about it. 

But it was hard though, when the heavy tension that had seeped into the Dark Orca when Will left with Ant still hung in the air days later. Hammerhead hated how he felt like he was walking on eggshells around his own submarine, and he hated how he had to force himself to look away from any splotch of rust that looked a little too red. It was hard to avoid the color red with the Dark Orca’s ambiance, but Hammerhead did his best to ignore it all. 

He’d gotten to trying to clean that pool of blood a little later than he probably should have. Hammerhead had been avoiding it at first, until Danny Boy suggested letting one of the crew deal with it. He couldn’t really explain why he refused to let one of the crew do it. Maybe he just didn’t want them to see how bad Ant’s injury had truly been. Maybe Hammerhead was hoping that if no one but himself and his children saw it, it’d be easier to pretend that nothing had happened at all, even though everyone on board knew exactly what had happened. It’d be easier to confine the incident to his own mind, without one of his crew commenting on the blood in the moon pool room. 

The blood left a stain, as expected. Hammerhead tossed both the saw, the walkie, and the piece of harpoon he’d sawed off, not wanting any of them on his submarine anymore. Attempting to sand the stain away didn’t work, so Hammerhead took some pliers and ripped the piece of flooring out, and threw that out too. It wouldn’t be too hard to replace, especially as pirates who didn’t pay for anything. 

Unfortunately, unlike the flooring, there wasn’t much Hammerhead could actually do to fend off the strange atmosphere that had taken over the Dark Orca. Hammerhead wondered if the crew were just as affected by the incident as Hammerhead and his children, or if their moods were affecting them. All he knew was that it was harder to go about their pirate business without knowing if Ant was actually okay. 

Hammerhead supposed that even a child as small as Ant could leave a massive impact. He already left quite the lasting impression since they’d first met, but now there was the version of him that haunted Hammerhead as he walked down the halls and tried to sleep at night. That first day, later that very evening and the day after, had been the worst. Hammerhead hovered outside the bathroom door that first night, listening to Finn trying to reassure Madeline as she practically tried to rip her skin off with how hard she was scrubbing at her nails to get at the dried blood. He pretended to not hear Finn stay up late into the night, whispering to a communicator Hammerhead continued to pretend he didn’t know Finn had and used, despite seeing Finn openly use it during what was now being called the incident. 

The crew were somber. Hammerhead wished they weren’t, but no matter how much he demanded they stop acting like someone died, they didn’t change their attitude. Maybe specifically implying someone had died hadn’t been the best way to get them to stop being so quiet. Madeline and Finn were no better, but how could Hammerhead expect them too? He didn’t know how to speak with them about it anymore than he knew how to tell his crew to stop acting so weird. So he just cut back on their usual chores, letting them stick to their rooms for the time being. He didn’t say anything when he felt Finn drag his sister after him into Hammerhead’s room in the middle of the night, and he didn’t move on inch when they climbed into his bed for the first time since their mother had died. They didn’t mention it the next morning, slipping away when they thought Hammerhead was still asleep, so Hammerhead didn’t say anything either. 

The next time the Dark Orca arrived at the Floating Market, the crew of what was once known as the Stinging Piranha were sulking along the piers. Without their bucket they tried to pass off as a ship, they were delegated even further down the chain of respect and power. Though the crew hadn’t made it any easier to cling to what little power they’d had. Word had spread fast about how the Stinging Piranha was destroyed, the crew of the old heap digging their own grave apparently trying to fend off the rumors and taunts. 

From what Hammerhead heard, later, it had become apparent pretty quickly that the Stinging Piranha had been lost to sea when her crew showed up in a dingy rowboat and not the Stinging Piranha herself. The knowledge on how she was lost was easily coaxed out by pirates desperate to know who had won the bet. It wasn’t hard to rage bait the Stinging Piranha’s crew into admitting that their submarine had been destroyed. What they chose to omit was how exactly their ship met her watery demise. Instead, the Stinging Piranha’s crew tried to pin the blame on the Dark Orca for costing them their ship, insisting that it was their fault and not the crews like everyone had initially believed. 

Hammerhead learned of the knowledge that the Dark Orca had something to do with the loss of the Stinging Piranha before he even saw the crew themselves. Plenty of pirates flocked to the Dark Orca when she arrived, fighting each other to be the first to ask if what the Stinging Piranha crew said was true. Hammerhead didn’t say anything to them then, instead marching through the market to find the Stinging Piranha’s crew himself. He didn’t know what compelled him to do so, though any attempt to ponder why vanished when he found them hunched over an oil barrel, smoking their miseries away. The faux pirates squealed at the sight of Hammerhead, and it wasn’t until hours later that Hammerhead calmed down enough to stop chasing them through the stalls. It was when he finally returned to the Dark Orca, and saw that a crowd was still waiting outside the Dark Orca with his crew that he confirmed the Dark Orca had indeed been involved in the destruction of the Stinging Piranha, to an extent. 

While Hammerhead had been chasing the Stinging Piranha’s crew through the docks, his crew had apparently shared hushed tidbits about the information the Stinging Piranha’s had neglected to share, specifically the Nektons involvement. Hammerhead didn’t say anything about them when the crowd asked, and he hadn’t planned on saying anything until a slow night of Poker with some of the other, older Pirates on the block had him sharing what happened. 

Hammerhead played poker with most of the other pirates his age, who had been in the business as long as he had and understood the art of Piracy. They loved to join him in complaining about the new younger pirates and their lack of finesse with the art. The Stinging Piranha’s most recent and self-devastating blunder had come up, and Hammerhead found himself suddenly sharing what happened, much to his own surprise. By then, it was hot rumor that had spiraled into various different variations of the story that the Nektons had been responsible for the Stinging Piranha’s fall from grace. Though that implied the ship had any grace to begin with. 

Hammerhead supposed it was only fair he clear up the rumors. And sharing with the other pirates his age, top of the Floating Market’s hierarchy and usually sought after for advice, was the best way to dispel some of the more frankly absurd rumors. Really, the Aronnax ran the Stinging Piranha over because they couldn’t see them? Who did they take the Nektons for, amateurs? Maybe Hammerhead shared for the sake of the Nektons pride because it was clear that some of the storytellers didn’t know a thing about the family. 

But the Stinging Piranha shooting the youngest member of the family, and his mother as good as ripping the submarine apart with her bare hands was a notion that Hammerhead himself wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. However, sharing the information that the Stinging Piranha had failed to share out of embarrassment for what had followed, only further tarnished any reputation they had left. 

One of the oldest rules of the Floating Market was that guests were welcomed so long as they followed the rules. The Nektons were infamous along the Floating Market’s docks and the pirate community. And there were those in the Market who recognized them the few times they came to visit the markets. The Nektons weren’t pirates, but they were respectful guests who played by the Floating Market’s rules. Who came there to conduct business, and with Dolos of all people. Dolos wasn’t what could be described as cordial with just anyone, and certainly not several times in a row. The Nektons didn’t bring their tree-hugging attitude with them whenever they visited, they came, sought their business, and left. Hammerhead had heard many other keepers of information and stall owners whispering to each other, hoping for the chance to conduct business with the infamous Nektons themselves. And the shot the Stinging Piranha had taken at a member of the Aronnax’s crew, and the youngest one at that, had been a low blow. Hammerhead wouldn’t be surprised if their access to the Market would be rescinded sometime soon. 

He pretended to ignore the whispers and stares the Dark Orca got, collecting his share of the bet money instead and going about fixing the floor of the moon pool room and replacing Danny Boy’s saw. He pretended not to notice Madeline heading off to the maze of stalls in the middle of the Floating Market with a bag of money and unfamiliar trinkets the morning after the Stinging Piranha crew started a fight with another crew, claiming they’d robbed them of what they had and threw their smokes into a barrel full of old fish heads. He pretended not to notice how long she spent scouring the stalls, and how she came back with an empty bag and something stuffed under her shirt. He didn’t ignore the way Finn seemed to relax of his tension one day after another call with his communicator, pulling Madeline aside and whispering something to her that had her relaxing as well. But Hammerhead didn’t say anything. Just set the ship up for another round out at sea. 

It wasn’t until one day, nearly a month later, that Hammerhead was sitting in the helm once again. It wasn’t Restock Day, but it was a quiet day spent on the Dark Orca. Hammerhead was sitting in the helm, musing, when a faint tapping on the window caught his attention. Turning around, Hammerhead was met with the sight of Fontaine Nekton in the Shadow Knight. They stared at each other for a moment, before it really registered in Hammerhead’s head who he was looking at. Fontaine didn’t need to prompt him at all to get him to stand up and turn on a comm line for her. 

“What are you doing in your brother’s Knight?” It was the first thing Hammerhead found himself asking. But Hammerhead had only ever seen Ant in the Shadow Knight, the boy seemingly protective of it. Not seeing Ant in it had Hammerhead’s thoughts spiraling toward the last time he’d seen him. 

Fontaine frowned. “Hello. Hi. How are you? I’m good. Lovely weather we’re having here.”

Hammerhead felt weirdly chided. He muttered something that sounded enough like a sorry for Fontaine to relax a little. “Taking it for a spin.” Hammerhead realized she was actually answering his question. Guess she was in a good enough mood to not question him like her brother had. “It was collecting dust in the moon pool room.”

Hammerhead fought not to grip the steering wheel too tight. “Why would it? Doesn’t Ant use it?”

Fontaine huffed a small laugh, smiling. “Not since he got grounded for attempting to escape his bed rest again.” Fontaine didn’t seem to notice the heavy sag Hammerhead was nearly dragged to the floor with as she rolled her head while musing. “Ever since he was cleared to get out of bed for just a little bit, he’s been trying to do all the things he could before. Mom and Dad keep chasing him down because he’s not ready for serious exercise yet, and he keeps almost ripping his stitches. As of now, he’s banned from the Knights until he’s made a complete and total recovery.”

Hammerhead paused, before he snickered. Fontaine stared at him funnily, until he clarified, feeling a sense of Deja vu over being so casual with a Nekton in the wrong Knight. “Your brother told me that you were grounded from your Knight the last time I saw him. It’s like you swapped places or something.”

Fontaine huffed a small laugh, but there was no humor in it at all. “I wish.” The somber tone she said that in had Hammerhead feeling a pool of guilt and dread begin to build in his stomach. It made him feel as sick as he had been when Ant seemed so calm about the potential of dying. He didn’t think he’d feel any better about the incident if it had been his sister instead. 

Hammerhead cleared his throat, wanting to get away from the tenseness that clung to the air with Fontaine’s statement. “I’ve never seen you in his Knight.” Hammerhead paused, before wrinkling his face in thought. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve seen any of you aside from him in it.”

Fontaine shrugged, the heavy weight that had fallen on her dissipating some. Success? Hammerhead thought. “That’s fair enough. Ant’s kind of protective about the Shadow Knight. It was his first, big, solo project, so I kinda get it.”

Hammerhead stared at the Knight with raised eyebrows. “Solo? He built that himself?”

Fontaine looked down at the Shadow Knight, humming. “Yeah, right? And he wants to be a Marine Biologist.” A tiny smile crossed Fontaine’s face as she spoke about her brother a little more fondly. “I keep telling him he should do something with it, but he’s got his heart set on animals. Which also makes sense for him, I guess. He’s always been kinda weird with them.”

Hammerhead shuddered. “I don’t like his fish.” He admitted. “It stares at me.”

Fontaine snorted. “Wanna know something? He does that with everyone, not just you. I think Ant’s the only one not weirded out by it.”

Hammerhead didn’t say anything, though he did snort at the way Fontaine admitted that. They sat in silence for a moment, neither Fontaine or Hammerhead really sure what to say to the other. Fontaine was the one who eventually broke the silence. “Thanks for taking care of him. While he was here.” Fontaine said softly. She said it a bit hesitantly too, like she weren’t used to saying something like that to Hammerhead. Or maybe because she wasn’t sure if that was something Hammerhead was okay with her saying to him, or if she was okay with saying it to Hammerhead. 

“It’s fine.” Hammerhead forced himself to grunt. “Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t. I already don’t hear the end of it at the Floating Market.” As Fontaine frowned in confusion, Hammerhead remembered. “Which reminds me; news got out at the Floating Market. It’s kind of public knowledge what happened, so tell your parents to keep that in mind the next time you go there.”

Fontaine steered the Knight closer to the window, placing her hands against the glass. “Do we need to be worried?” She asked cautiously. 

“No, I don’t think so.” Hammerhead said. “You might get some stares though. And if your brother goes with you, some pirates might try talking to him.”

Fontaine huffed, tapping a finger against the glass. She seemed lost in thought, before her eyes locked with Hammerhead’s with a more serious edge to them. “Will the Stinging Piranha be there?” She had a controlled look to her face, collected and carefully blank, but Hammerhead could see the rage behind her eyes. 

He shook his head. “They were there when we came back. But I don’t expect them to still be there by the next time we dock. No one liked them to begin with, and no one’s happy with them now. They’ll be gone one way or another one of these days. Either because they disbanded or because they were booted out.”

Fontaine blinked, staring with a little less rage and a little more confusion to her eyes. “That’s a thing? Crews can be banned from the Floating Market?” 

Hammerhead hummed in confirmation. “Doesn’t happen often. And not just anyone’s allowed foot on the docks either, guests or residents. Like I told you, dearie. There are no finer pirates than the ones you’ll find here on board the Dark Orca, and my crew’s been a part of those docks for generations. We’re the standard. Not those hooligans.”

Fontaine didn’t say or make any kind of noise in acknowledgment. But her eyes cast down, a thoughtful look to them as a more comfortable silence seemed to overtake her. Hammerhead stared at the Shadow Knight a little more, before he dared to ask. “What about yours?” Fontaine gave him an odd look, so he clarified, “Your Knight, the Mimic Knight. What happened to it?”

Fontaine tensed, looking away. “Oh. It, uh, I haven’t fixed it yet.”

Hammerhead frowned. “It can’t be that bad, right? It’s just a hole.”

“A hole with my brother’s blood all over it!” Fontaine snapped. There was a tense silence after that, Hammerhead unable to bring himself to snap back, and Fontaine shrinking in herself. “Sorry.” She muttered after a moment. “It’s also just…there’s more than a hole in it.” Fontaine wasn’t looking at him, her tone careful as she tried to play off her earlier lash out. “Mom said they couldn’t just pull it out of him, so they cut into the Knight. The whole midsection is gone, and I don’t have the stuff on the Aronnax to fix it. And I don’t…I can’t bring myself to do it right now. Or alone.”

Hammerhead hummed. “Makes sense.” It didn’t, actually. He didn’t know the first thing about that sort of stuff, it was why he’d kidnapped the Nektons little Professor when trying to make his Super Knight. But Fontaine looked unhappy, and wanting to change topic of conversation, so Hammerhead let it slide. 

Fontaine didn’t say anything, so Hammerhead spoke first. “Aren’t you gonna ask me what I’m doing out here?” 

Fontaine glanced at him. “No.” She said after a moment. “Everyone needs a day off.”

They sat there for a few more moments. Hammerhead wouldn’t call what came after small talk, more a few sentences of conversation that kept trailing off into odd silence. Eventually Fontaine returned to the Aronnax, and Hammerhead found himself staring at the long range scanner instantly, anxious until she disappeared from its range. The Aronnax appeared at the very most corner of the Dark Orca’s range, the Mimic Knight disappearing within it, and nothing else showed up. 

Hammerhead spent the next few weeks feeling tense. He couldn’t relax like the crew grew to, the way Finn and Madeline did. Hammerhead felt like he could still feel Ant’s hands grabbing his tightly, leaving phantom bruises on his fingers. The feeling didn’t go away until they stumbled across the Aronnax, and Hammerhead saw the family having an argument out in the water. 

Hammerhead watched Ant get dragged back toward the Aronnax, the boy kicking his feet and protesting that he was fine as his mother scolded him about still being grounded from extensive exercise. He’d already met his quota for the day, and now needed rest. Ant wasn’t having it, but his protests sounded normal. There was none of that pain and fear that Hammerhead would find himself waking up to in the middle of the night. The motion sensors that Danny Boy still hadn’t fixed went off, and he watched Madeline swam out with something in her hands, her brother on her tail. Hammerhead paid half an ear to the conversation that filled the comms, Madeline following Ant and his mother up to the Aronnax’s moon pool, her package clutched in hand and likely filled with whatever she’d gone out of her way to buy at the Floating Market with the Stinging Piranha’s belongings and money. Finn was chatting with Fontaine while Will lingered nearby, glancing back and forth between his wife and son and his daughter and Finn. 

Hammerhead let Finn and Madeline come back on their own. Finn had to be dragged away from Fontaine by his sister, and when Hammerhead met them in the moon pool room, Madeline said Ant wanted her to tell Hammerhead thanks, and that the Stinging Piranha was a stupid name. Hammerhead scoffed, but felt himself relax for the first time in weeks. 

Things were okay. Ant was okay and Hammerhead could finally breathe. Madeline may complain about the apparently truly impressive scar Ant had gotten from the incident, annoyed that he got one before her. Kaiko and William may have pulled Hammerhead aside to thank him again, even though Hammerhead didn’t understand why. Ant may start to give Hammerhead these odd stares, and Hammerhead may find himself paying closer attention to the boy whenever he was out in his Knight. But things were back to normal now. 

Good. Hammerhead liked it that way.