Chapter Text
There was blood in the water, metallic and sweet in the way that made hungry stomachs lurch with need. Instinct yanked Keith out of his shipwreck home, taking him out to the open water with the rush of a hunt. From the taste on the current, whatever was bleeding wasn't too far. Good. Close enough to swoop in and steal a few bites before something bigger and stronger came around.
It had been days-- or weeks, since he'd last had a proper meal. Long enough that the prospect of eating both hurt and drove him harder. Whatever it was tasted fantastic.
His meal was snagged in the fishing ropes just off the reef. Fortune smiled on the starved; nothing had shown up to claim his meal, and the ropes would keep most fish from bothering him too much. But they were lost on merpeople. Which meant free reign for Keith to feast.
Drifting closer he found not a thick-bodied fish, but another mer, tangled up in the ropes. Surprised but not unguarded he diverted to instead circle the nets, eyeing his prey anew. "You're bleeding."
The other mer, a strong and healthy looking guy-- definitely too well fed to desperately go for fish in the ropes-- startled and twisted to watch him circle just beyond the trap. It was a convincing ruse, he'll admit, the blood a risky but alluring touch. But Keith wasn't hungry enough to fall for such an obvious trap.
When their eyes met there was real pain there. Real surprise, like he'd expected to be left to bleed in peace. Ha. So he could be stupid enough to get caught, maybe he'd gotten snagged in the dark? Even the possibility was enough to lure Keith closer; time to decide, and quickly, whether the mer was easy prey before something else decided for him.
The only thing stalling him was, despite being hooked to the gills, the other didn't seem too rushed to get loose. Not that he should have any trouble: his teeth were razor sharp and the ropes weak with age.
"I'm alright. They'll come get me soon. You should leave though; aquariums are a bit smaller than open water.”
Aquariums? Was he sick? "Are you an idiot? You want the fishermen to get you?" Keith snarked.
"Biologists," he corrected, innocently hopeful and patient as a clam. "They probably realized I missed the migration and came back for me."
Delusioned maybe, but Keith decided he was rational enough, healthy enough to eat. Slipping in close he reached out and tugged at one of the lodged hooks, darting out of reach when his meal yelped and jerked away. Away from him. Huh. Really not a trap.
A cloud of blood swelled with the digging of another hook in the captured mer’s arm. At least he knew to be still on the ropes lest he cause more damage or, more importantly, more trouble for Keith to work him loose.
Circling back he scowled and drifted even closer. "You're bleeding, and if fishermen don't kill you something else will."
"You mean like you?"
"Or worse. Can't you smell it? This place reeks like death. Rotten, dead fish."
That seemed to be enough to rattle the complacency and had the other mer tracking shadows beyond the ropes. The skin beneath Keith's touch leaped at the contact; a pair of steely grey eyes watching him carefully. Keith bared his teeth in warning; "I'm going to take these hooks out. They're meant to catch and kill you, dumbass. If you bite me I'll leave you to die."
"They won't kill me," the idiot scoffed, turning his head away as if it somehow proved he wouldn't try anything stupid-- like he clearly was. Of course it didn't last when Keith yanked a hook from his dark underbelly and jerked out of the way of a reflexive lunge at his arm.
The dumbass came back to his senses a half-second later with a bashful,"Sorry."
Once the other mer was freed Keith lead him out the maze of hooks to safety but the other mer didn’t let them swim far, "Come, I'll show you."
Keith had not expected a lot of things when he turned his back on another shark-mer, but the last he expected was to be gently lead to the surface by the wrist. He was also put off by his readiness to humour a complete stranger. A stupid stranger. "Humans are... strange, but rather harmless. They're just curious. Mer are new to them."
Keith pushed the hair out of his eyes as he broke the surface in time to see a handsome face fall dark; confusion was an easy emotion to name. "That's not..."
Not a white shiny boat? Not full of happy humans blasting music and gaping at little clownfish from the bottom glass? No. These humans were coarse and their boats had nets of overfished stock hanging off the sides.
Keith didn't care to think of what would happen if they pulled him into the boat. From the corner of his eye he watched the other mer curl in on himself, floating in a cloud of pink that clung in a film to his shoulders.
"Can we go please?" The stranger whispered, confused and hurt as he stared at the unfamiliar boat.
Keith was the first to slip under the surface, down deep where the coarse barking laughter of humans was drowned by the steady poundin of the tide.
Grabbing his bleeding refugee by the wrist he tugged him out of fishing territory, out of open water and back towards the reef. While Keith himself wasn’t the biggest threat in the ocean the trail of blood they left behind then was damning them to the will of bigger and stronger things.
Man, was this guy a slow swimmer! If he had any doubts about the whole aquarium story (which he did. A lot.) then he was definitely a believer now: no one who swam that slow ever ate, and judging the stranger’s appearance he was pretty well fed before this.
“Down here,” he whispered and tugged him along a bit harder to a tall patch of kelp. “I can’t take you any closer to the reef if you’re bleeding. We wouldn’t want a great white sniffing you out. Well… you wouldn’t at least.” He would have gotten the hell out of there in a heartbeat.
Kelp wasn’t the best for bandaging wounds but it certainly made do in a pinch, covering and sealing off the holes and scrapes in both skin and scales alike. His only concern now was anything that might be intrigued by a couple mer bobbing about in the algae. “Keep an eye out while I wrap these.”
“What am I looking out for?” he asked curiously, peeking around the forest of kelp.
“Bigger sharks. Great whites, tiger sharks, hammerheads?”
“Oh. We didn’t have those in the aquarium.”
“What a shame,” Keith sighed voice dripping with sarcasm, the length of kelp in his hands snapping in two against the punctured white and black of his companion’s tail. “Eyes up.”
His companion did as he was told. Whether he knew what to look for was the real question: he was looking around too quickly to be taking in much more than the local flora and anything that would have been right at their tails. “Do you know when I can eat?”
Keith started at that. When he could… well wasn’t that life’s great mystery! Keith wanted to know when he could eat too. Actually he’d originally been hoping his lucky friend here was small or hurt enough to eat. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“When I was released… A couple days ago I think.”
Wow. This guy was gonna hate the ocean if he’s upset over going hungry a couple days. “We’ll see if there’s anything around to eat.”
No promises on whether they’d actually find anything.
The larger mer nodded at that, thankfully either taking the hint or being too oblivious to read between the fronds. He glanced around lackadaisically, keeping an eye out for nothing. “You knew a lot about those fishermen, have you lived here long?”
“My shoal used to live out around here until we got separated. So now I live and eat off the reef.” And now that the injured mer was all patched up and not a meal, he could help Keith hunt bigger game. What he’d give for dolphin right about now. “We’re all done here. Let’s go find something to eat.”
As they drifted out of the tall kelp, Keith lead them up to the edge of the reef to circle the outer edge. Best to be out here and see trouble coming than be caught in the middle by something smarter.
None of this seemed to be an issue with his companion who swam around with big eyes and too much teeth. Every now and again he would look back and wander over to Keith’s side. It was like taking a pup into open water for the first time.
Near the drop off by the fishing lines they spotted a school of marlin. Humans liked marlin, those might have been what the traps were for. Regardless they wouldn’t be eating marlin; the risk of being impaled was too high with a novice like this guy. So instead he turned his gaze down, spotting a couple clusters of oysters dotting the sand by a couple overgrown rocks.
“What’s your name anyway?” Keith asked, passing his new friend a handful of oysters before hunting up the bigger ones under the rocks.
The mer seemed… confused, poking around the oyster for the seam and lightly scratching at the shell. Keith couldn’t help it if his stare was obnoxious, it’s just that holy hell...
“My name’s Shiro,” Shiro said finally, taking a chance at sinking his teeth into it, and that’s when Keith had to intervene:
Snatching the oyster from Shiro’s mouth he smashed it as hard as he could off the closest rock, cracking it open and handing Shiro back the mess. It took a moment and some persistence for Shiro to take back his oyster and pick the broken pieces of shell apart to get at the meat. “Did you not know—”
“I wasn’t allowed to mess around with the oysters; never had to eat them, they gave me my own meals.”
“They’re just oysters,” he said with a snort, though he felt a little bad about smashing the oyster when he could have opened it.Humans. Keith seamlessly opened the oyster before using his claws to tear away the meat and plop it in his mouth; “My name’s Keith by the way.”
Oh, yuck, the thing was overripe, but Keith ate regardless. “So… you really haven’t lived in the ocean? Like ever?”
If this guy had been living in an aquarium his whole life Keith doubted his skills would even touch sub-par; aquariums meant walls and trapped prey. Out here fish learned to be quick and if you weren’t quicker you didn’t eat, and cornering wasn’t always an option.
Shiro grimaced through another oyster and shuddered, pushing the rest of his portions Keith’s way. It was an acquired taste it seemed. “I lived in a small group when I was a pup, but a few of us were beached in a nursery just off shore. I’ve been with the humans ever since I could remember.”
What confused Keith about it all was the idea that humans of all creatures would raise a pup and just… let him go. And for what? To study? Put on display for the world to see? Could Keith sign up too? “Sounds lonely,” Keith noted, snapping open another oyster and digging in.
From the sand Shiro rolled out a trough and settled, eyes turned up to the water. “It was. But I suppose no lonelier than being separated from your shoal.”
Instead of answering Keith flattened out on his belly and slipped his hands under a nearby rock to feel out for more oysters. It was hard enough to live it every day, at least now he could just focus on eating—“Ah!” Teeth, nettled and little, locked into the meat of his hand with a sickening snap; Keith pulled back to drag out a slimey, writhing eel, which he promptly pried out of his skin and smashed its head in with a rock. Even a free meal wasn’t worth it. “We should go, eels live in groups.”
Shiro was already out of the sand, eyes like sand dollars and checking his fins for any lingering friends and grimacing at the smashed-open eel that lay bleeding in the sand while Keith turned his attention out to open water.
“Hey! I had one of these in my tank!” Shiro exclaimed, drifting over his shoulder. “But yours is much bigger—you live here alone?” He swam up ahead and inspected the soggy torn sail of Keith’s ship with a couple cautious pokes. “Where do you sleep?”
“Down below.” Keith waited for Shiro to return to his side, slow from either his injuries or his captivity Keith couldn’t quite tell yet. Regardless it was a bit frustrating to force himself to slow down for someone else’s benefit. Something he’d long grown out of.
Through the hole in the bow Keith lead Shiro down through a maze of waterlogged, swollen wood and murky shadows. Among the splintered wood and collapsed hallways lay one of the few intact chambers from the ship’s working days; “I sleep in this box.”
Shiro slipped beneath Keith to ‘walk’ himself around the box’s ground with his fingertips. “No glass,” he said appreciatively, eyeing a small wooden frame Keith had never realized the purpose of. The way Shiro looked at it—and even his sleeping box—had him giving the place a second glance. No glass. Four sturdy walls and privacy. Suppose it could have been worse.
And just like that Shiro was off again, drifting over to the far corner of the room. With his back to Keith and his guard lowered now was the first time Keith could actually get a decent look at him, though the important features he’d already sussed out: thick and healthy—small like a reef shark but definitely bigger than a tiger shark. What he was exactly Keith couldn’t tell on his own. Regardless he was well taken care of. “Look!” Weaving to some toppled furniture Shiro plucked up a rusty looking piece from the wreckage and held it for Keith to see. It looked like the other garbage lying around the ship. “It’s like in the movies with the lost treasure.”
“Movies?” Keith asked, squinting to try and get a good look at whatever it was he’d found from a safe distance. After a bit of that curiosity got the better of him and he picked the small round piece from Shiro’s palm, scratching away at the sediment to get a small glint of gold. It was nice, but useless; if Shiro liked it he could keep it.
Shiro was a slow swimmer but he made a habit of moving impulsively in a way that always caught him off guard. This time he caught Keith by the wrist, gentle as he was quick, and turned it over to inspect the eel bite. It was a furious red and burned like a jellyfish sting but it definitely wasn’t what it could have been. Judging by the fact Shiro looked like he was about to lose his scales, they didn’t have eels at the aquarium. “What… what do we do?” he worried as he reached over to snap a piece of kelp from his tail to press to try and wrap around the wound.
“Don’t be an idiot!” Keith snapped reflexively, bunching the kelp in his fist to push it back to the hook wound under Shiro’s scale, “You need those to keep your wounds closed.”
He might have been a tad aggressive because Shiro was right away darting away to get out of Keith’s range. As if a mer Keith’s size and build could take on Shiro on a bad day. He mumbled a half-apology and proceeded to eye him cautiously; the false sense of security had fallen away and now they saw each other for who they really were: two lone mersharks taking a huge risk.
As expected Shiro started to grow antsy and fidgety, rubbing at the rust on the coin as he took stock of Keith, somehow not drawing the same conclusions about their odds on each other. Which wasn’t bad per se.
“There were a couple sharks like you in the aquarium. They let the human pups touch them. They seemed happy.” An odd thing to say, especially if he’s just now gathering that Keith isn’t exactly living under the best of circumstance.
Keith’s arms came to rest across his chest, “You mean the humans were happy or the sharks?”
“Well… I mean they both did. The pups liked the humans and would always swim up with the stingrays to be pet.”
Pet. Like something cherished and loved; Keith remembered his mom petting his back when he was young, sitting with him until he fell asleep on her lap. Did humans pet these pups the same way? The memory was sweet but it twisted in his gut like a years-old hunger. Sinking to the floor he sighed and wished he’d saved more of those oysters. At least his hand wasn’t bleeding, so he couldn’t tell what was making Shiro so anxious. “So what are you anyway?”
Keeping a notable distance, Shiro followed his lead and sunk to the floor, flinching with a disgusted grimace and running his hands over the swollen wood before deciding he couldn’t afford to care. Instead he focused on polishing his gold piece. “Just a bullhead. Nothing fancy or fast.”
“Not like any bullhead I’ve seen,” Keith mumbled, resting his head on the crook of his arm. Not looking up from his work Shiro shrugged and curled in a bit tighter; the water had started to grow cold this side of summer.
“It’s getting late. Shouldn’t we be getting back to the reef?”
“How long have you been in the ocean? The reef is dangerous at night, you’ll be chum before you know it.” With that in mind, Keith pushed up and over to the door of the box: their only defense against anything that might want to make a midnight snack of them.
“Well, I mean, you’re a black tip. Nothing up on the reef would think to mess with you,” Shiro mused, more to himself than at Keith.
If Shiro were any smarter he might have pieced together that the qualifier ‘reef shark’ put him light years away from any old blacktip shark; if Keith were any dumber he might’ve corrected him. But with a strange shark locked in his home for the night, Keith would gladly sacrifice Shiro’s peace of mind for his own safety.
That didn’t help his anxiety any. He still spent half the night with his back against the wall watching Shiro with one eye opened. Keith couldn’t afford to let his guard down one more time; he was the only one left now.