Work Text:
Once upon a time there lived a family of four fearless explorers. They sailed the most advanced submarine ever built, thriving in and exploring the high seas far away from the land and all its vices.
When the Aronnax — named of course after that famed protagonist of classic literature, a man of science who had gone twenty thousand leagues around the globe on an impossible ship — first set sail it had been a quiet affair, no grand sendoff by an applauding crowd waving handkerchiefs or anything of the sort. None bore witness to it except the professor who had helped his dearest friends William and Kaiko build a miracle.
A massive high-tech submarine that carried only two adults, two children and a fish by name of Jeffrey did not sound like it would work on paper. Yet it did, and despite their desire for complete disappearance and anonymity under the waves it took no time at all until this quartet were hailed as the greatest ocean explorers of the century, perhaps even of all time.
The Nekton family — for that was the surname spoken by the terrestrial world with reverence and a sort of awed disapproval in equal measure — adored two things above all else; the ocean and one another. Anybody who had spoken with one of the Aronnax’s crew, even if only for a few minutes, could attest to this easily. Just how dedicated did one have to be to the sea, people would wonder, to invent equipment like nothing ever seen before and then vanish into the depths with it? What kind of willpower and singular fixation did one have to possess?
(The Nektons seemed not to care at all about any profits they could have made, for the knowledge of their submarine’s deepest inner workings was kept a secret to avoid it being replicated. Their home was one of a kind and by every storm to ever sweep the shore they promised it would stay that way. A single one of those knight mech-suits of theirs could have easily made millions, if not for the seafaring family’s promise that none of their gear was for sale and it never would be. But some people unfortunately had more money than common sense, and many a billionaire had been unceremoniously thrown off the Aronnax after a failed sales pitch.)
The Nektons loved the ocean, that much was clear even to a blind man. They’d dedicated their existence to it, searching for every secret and every myth that their chosen home hid.
What no one knew, not even the explorers themselves, was that the ocean loved them back.
For as long as civilizations sought things to worship, for hundreds of generations, there had been men who venerated the sea as a god. And why was that? Did they perhaps, in spending so much time in that great blue, see the mind it held and sought to gain its favour? Did they recognize its consciousness, and in being utterly unable to understand that consciousness label it divine?
It was not a living organism. Not in the way that humans, small and limited as they were, would define living. But it, all of it, was far from inanimate — that cerulean void that held life beyond counting. It had memories. Thoughts too, in a way. It could certainly feel. It could mourn, it could be angered, and most important of all it could love.
Oh, and it certainly loved the Nektons, these brave little humans who armored themselves in glass and steel to plunge into the abyss so eagerly and so willing to drown. They wanted to know all that it had to teach, bear witness to every one of its wonders, dance with its currents and let its salt suffuse their very being. The ocean had inspired Kaiko and Will to sketch up and then make manifest the impossible. It had seen the births of their children. It watched those children, clever Fontaine and daring Antaeus, as they grew up cradled by water on all sides — learned to walk with sea legs as their only legs, took their first dive, learned to respect and never mistreat the deep so it would respect them in turn. So that they would earn its favor and be allowed to prosper where people were never meant to go, so that if they were to ever die in the great blue it would be by their own foolishness and not by their home’s wrath. The ocean was most attached to these kids who had been raised within its vast self among all its other creatures, it would admit. To the whole lot of them, really. It would hate to see any Nekton suffocate or be crushed in its adoring depths.
It loved them with every droplet of water that made up its being, with every beam of gossamer sunlight that filtered through its surface, with every current and tooth and grain of sand. These four — a marine biologist, an oceanographer, and their young — had sworn themselves to the sea in a way that captivated the sea itself. It could not remember the last time it had seen someone, let alone an entire family of someones, give their lives wholly to the waters in the way the Nektons did.
Labels like romantic or platonic did not apply when one spoke of the deep. Certainly not good or evil. It did not show its fondness in the same way that sentient creatures did, far from it, but this did not diminish the feelings it held in the slightest. It was most foolish, really, to expect something so vast and so different in how it experienced its own existence to love exactly like land-people did. How could one ever hope to ascribe human morality to azure water and sunlit marine forests and undulating lines of sand on the seafloor? The ocean was there long before such concepts were spoken into existence, and odds are that it will still be there when no one is left to enforce them.
So the ocean loved the Nektons, and it expressed that love in the only way it knew how: by remaking them in its own image.
To its dearest humans — who were more than half-percent water, half-percent sea — it gave all they could ever need to prosper in its cobalt expanse. Rebuilding them from the inside out with oh-so-tender hands.
The first thing it did away with was the need for manmade diving gear and all the constraints that came with it — limited oxygen, limited agility, so on and so forth. When Ant’s mask shattered after an unfortunate encounter with a Humboldt squid and let the ocean in (how delighted it was!), his lungs filled with water and breathed it as easily and naturally (perhaps even more so?) as they did air.
The Nektons stopped wearing masks.
Kaiko swam down too deep in pursuit of a rarely-sighted species of jellyfish, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (oh, thought the ocean with some mirth, if only she knew there were countless such opportunities ahead for her and her kin). Down there she saw the husk of a submarine crushed like a tin can, and in its metal her own pristine reflection stared unaffected at her.
Deep sea pressure was no longer a concern, it would seem, and a million new places hidden in the darkest trenches opened their doors.
After those two alterations, the ocean’s gifts only became more obvious.
The neoprene of their custom-made wetsuits would itch, much in the way that a scab did when it was healing. When Fontaine hit a growth spurt, her suit stretched and grew with her like it wasn’t clothing at all. Will tried to take his suit off and found that it was impossible. There was still a seam on all their suits, of course, but it was a seam the way there was a seam between two layers of skin.
When it grew deep and dark, the sea gave them bioluminescence and the colored accents on these second skins glowed — symphonies of blue, purple, green and orange every time the Nektons swam together into underwater caves.
When the Nektons next came ashore for an audience with the World Oceans Authority, the waves on the beach washed a few extra inches inland to soak their ankles, like hands grasping the hem of a lover’s robe — begging please don’t leave. Ant had felt his throat go dry when he got into the car that would take the four of them to the WOA building, which was about a ten-minute drive inland. Apparently the Aronnax had been somehow rendered invisible — its presence could no longer be detected by any navigational tool or technology employed by the people of land, and Commander Pyrosome wanted answers that the ship’s crew did not have.
Fontaine and his parents had looked equally disquieted, and the familiar sweet sea salt that still clung to their hair and skin gave little comfort. Even after years had passed, Ant still remembers the way his lungs seemed to strain more and more as the WOA chauffeur drove the four of them farther from the coast. When the car turned onto some highway or other and home completely vanished from his line of sight, he felt the exact moment he stopped breathing. There was oxygen all around them, and yet in perfect unison at the same second of the same minute the Nektons began to suffocate as one like fish out of water.
Kaiko had barely managed to get the words out when she demanded that the vehicle be turned around, for the distance between them and the ocean to be closed. If Pyrosome wanted to speak to her family so badly, then she could certainly meet them in the middle. As the car drove in the opposite direction Ant’s breathing evened out, but he hadn’t felt fully at ease until he heard the sound of waves crashing against the shore and felt the salty breeze in his lungs.
The Nektons could breathe oxygen just fine, but to stray too far from the sea was unthinkable. They were part of the deep as much as the deep was a part of them; without it they’d be nothing at all.
So they’d returned to life underwater, and found more and more excuses to avoid coming to port.
(Interacting with land people had made Ant look at himself, and his whole family, differently in the mirror. It was only on that day of suffocation, faced with those who lived normal lives on dry soil, that he realized the ocean had been making subtle tweaks to their appearance. Nothing particularly groundbreaking or noticeable; just enough to explain the unease plainly written on the WOA chauffeur’s face when Will had tried to make small talk. Eyes that were a bit too bright and a bit too large, teeth that were a bit too sharp and smiles that stretched a bit too wide. Voices that were a bit too lilting and musical to be human, like the songs that sailors of old claimed to have heard beckoning them into the blue.)
Little by little, the explorers found themselves needing less and less food and water each day to feel sated. The ocean would not deprive its humans of the ability to enjoy earthly delights altogether, for there were many things in its depths that tasted most marvelous, but to die from malnutrition was so terribly inconvenient. The Nektons would never again know hunger, thirst or sickness.
With no more need for food or water, the last thing they depended on land for was officially gone. The ocean would take care of them.
When Ant’s blind bravery got him injured while on a mission, the laceration healed in hours. When the spinning blades of a boat’s rudder cut Fontaine’s arm clean off at the elbow, the bloody stump mended far too quickly and the limb had grown back after an impossible three days, complete with wetsuit sleeve. The wounds still hurt, of course. Pain was the surest sign of being alive and the sea would not take away the human body’s natural warning system lest the Nektons become far too reckless for their own good, but it did grant to its favorites some most remarkable powers of regeneration. No injury would cripple them for too long and no matter the agony it would never be fatal.
Their bodies developed resistance and then total immunity to the ocean’s extremes, waters freezing and scalding hot. The sea would not dilute itself for the Nektons’ comfort, but it would grant them everything they needed to endure it and perhaps even a bit more.
After that came strength and speed. Will may have been an Olympic swimmer before handing his soul to the deep on a silver platter, but nothing human could have kept pace with a pod of dolphins for hours completely unassisted, and when Kaiko punched a metal wall in frustration it left a rather respectable dent. Large obstacles were moved aside far more easily, and when confronted by the pirates of the Dark Orca in a relatively routine crossing of paths the Nektons found that their agility in the water was unmatched. The grace with which they swam on that day, and every day after that, seemed beyond natural. It made every step they’d ever taken on dry land look like clumsy stumbling.
Despite these myriad blessings the sleek mechanical power of the knights never did grow unwelcome, but as a method of protection against environmental hazards they became largely obsolete. What need for such safeguards, when the very sea was making the Nektons themselves better suited for a life spent beneath the waves?
At first Kaiko and Will had approached the changes to themselves and their children like scientists: conducting experiments (nothing overly hazardous, obviously, they weren’t monsters), forming and confirming theories, testing newfound limits. It was a bit amusing for the ocean to watch, really.
In time, though, its humans finally realized that attempting to fully comprehend and compartmentalize the mind of the living infinite, stuff its great entirety into neat little boxes, was a most futile endeavor. It would never prevent the family from chasing their curiosity across all the seas, for they were explorers and to deny them their greatest passion was anathema to the love the ocean held for them, but there were certain places and living beings in its depths that were best left unexplained. Lost to land forever and untouched by the surgical hands of people who would cut strange and beautiful things apart (not that its dearly loved Nektons would ever commit such a horrific crime against wonderment, of course). Silent awe was preferred, when it came to such phenomena.
Unable to understand meant unable to resist, and would resistance even be worth it to begin with? They were more at home in the deep than ever before, they could go above and beyond when exploring, and the slow change into something else was almost comforting when the people you loved most were becoming that something else right alongside you. The four certainly weren’t quite human anymore, but whatever they were now they could be together.
There was no stopping the will of the ocean, for it could erode any cliff to sand given enough time. Similar principles applied when it came to the remaking of the Nekton family, which was carried out with an adoration so fathomless that it made the deepest underwater abyss seem puny by comparison.
The explorers would draw a looping ever-changing path around the world on their submarine, never bothering to come up for air. During the daytime they would spend hours upon hours immersed in uncharted depths and all their marvels, and when they laid down to sleep the ocean would hum them its ephemeral lullabies of whalesong and flowing water.
But the final, greatest gift the sea gave only became known years and years after the adaptations first began.
It was in the way the children never grew a single inch, the way the adults’ hair never silvered and the way none of their bones ever knew the exhaustion of old age. The ocean washed away their very mortality, loved these four humans so much it swallowed them whole. Even Jeffrey the fish was blessed in such a way, for Ant could never bear to part with him and the ocean knew this.
The Nektons’ feet would never touch land again and that was okay. The sea was theirs to explore and wander through forever, ‘til the day the ocean itself dried out.
Somewhere along the way, they grew acutely aware of the ocean’s plight. Pollution, acidification, marine life in pain. For a time the family despaired, and tried to console each other in turn. But what good was immortality, if it was spent in a ravaged hellscape of murky water and plastic waste?
Until the day Fontaine’s hand brushed against a branch of dead white coral off the coast of Australia and sparked it back to colorful life. Until it was observed that waters would somehow turn clear and habitable wherever the Aronnax sailed. Until Ant’s touch dissolved the fishing line that was choking a seal, until the day Kaiko marched out of the roiling sea towards the headquarters of an infamous underwater mining company and brought a typhoon in her wake. The sea’s anger was their anger, or perhaps it was the other way around. That distinction hadn’t mattered for a long time anyway.
Quietly they ceased contact with the mainland, and the world forgot them. That was okay too. The guardians of the deep could do their job far better without any eyes on them.
Those who respected the sea could tell of glowing patterns in the water and gentle hands that pushed them to shore when they would have otherwise drowned, but greedy land-crawlers who desecrated the Nektons’ home and holy ground for profit were dragged down by those same hands. Many marine creatures who displayed bioluminescence did so for purposes of hunting and luring prey, after all.
Decades passed, maybe even centuries. The Nektons had stopped keeping track a long time ago.
Over time the Aronnax and its crew became myth. Men of rationality insisted that the Nekton family were long dead, disappeared in the abyss, but stories told by seafarers and swimmers during stormy nights said otherwise.
Nobody quite knows what fate the Nekton family met, in the end, only that the ocean loved them so deeply that it took their very souls for its own.
But you can hear Ant’s laughter in the waves crashing against rocks on the shore, and you can glimpse the color of Fontaine’s eyes in tropical turquoise waters on sunny days. You can feel the wake the Aronnax’s propellers leave behind every time you stick your hand into flowing water. Some even say you can still see Will and Kaiko’s silhouettes, colossal ghostly shapes made of clouds and mist and the glare of the sun, dancing on the line where the sea meets the sky.
All four of them, together in sapphire eternity.