Chapter Text
Diluc is not a boring person.
He is an absolute great person to have at parties, thank you very much. Spouting facts about starfish and the concentration of plankton in various levels of the ocean… sexy, isn’t it?
Oh, don’t even mention the time he got set up on a blind date with a pretty girl (courtesy of Jean and Amber, because they said he was quote, ‘so lonely it was depressing’ ) and literally bored her into walking out on him because he was too busy fact-dropping on whale excretion. In his defense, that was what he was researching at the moment as a budding young marine biologist, so…
All things considered, he’s perfectly fine. Very mentally stable. Diluc does not associate with the dozens of empty plastic bottles and crusty ramen noodle cups that litter his lab. He certainly does not perceive the moldy pizza box lying on top of the ultrasonic bath (he thinks there’s a biohazardous bacteria clump festering in there). Amber even dubbed his lab ‘the nerd’s equivalent of a gamer dude’s basement’.
Well. Diluc is fine with how life is. He likes it plain and simple, albeit kind of depressing.
However, he would also like to mention that it was not his decision to turn everything into a Liyuen period drama by reeling up the biggest, cockiest, most arrogant, life-ruining and horny fish ever known to man from the ocean.
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Diluc’s arms flex as he pulls on the sail, hooking the thick rope around a pole. He tightens it, brows furrowing in concentration-- it’s not often he goes sailing himself. Usually, it’s with a bunch of nervous interns who look like they’re being forced to skinny dip into the arctic ocean, when in reality it’s just simple scuba diving.
Surprisingly, Diluc really enjoys diving. It’s the feeling of heavy pressure of water around him, the multicolored coral and fish he gets to observe that really calm him down. Everything looks so ethereal underwater, like the way his hair floats up around his face and how his skin looks even more deathly pale than it already is.
Today though, is what he likes to call his self care day. A whole entire day dedicated to himself, starting off with early morning sailing. Admittedly, Diluc is nowhere near a morning person (in fact he’s quite the night owl in the sense that he tends to fall asleep at 4am and wake at 5pm on his off days), but it all changes when it comes to sailing. It’s better when done in the morning anyway, with the cool ocean breeze that tastes and smells faintly of salt.
Diluc is also a good person who cares about the environment; he’s been told he preaches about preventing water pollution a bit too much-- that’s why behind his boat trails a sizeable net designed to sweep up floating trash.
He sails in silence, occasionally squinting up at the seagulls above him or adjusting the sails and ropes. Diluc likes to think of sailing as an art-- subtle, but still an art. He doesn’t do any of those fancy tricks his father liked to do. It was never his style. He doesn’t surf, either, but he did like watching his father perform flashy moves- up and down the huge waves little child Diluc would be be afraid of.
Now, he wonders why he’d ever been scared of the ocean. It isn’t a bad place at all, even during the raging storms and those looming tidal waves. Diluc likes to watch the way it transforms into a monster, roaring and crashing and devouring everything that came into its path-- Osial, the sea monster, like in the legends.
The fact he likes it should actually be kind of concerning.
His therapist did tell him that it might be a way his brain copes with the trauma he’d experienced as a child-- losing his father to the deep blue, and that’s why he has such an obsession with it now, almost as if he wished it would do the same to him.
Yeah… a little depressing.
Diluc is so lost in thought that he doesn't notice his entire boat shaking and trembling enough to almost throw him overboard.
He grabs onto the side to steady himself, shooting a confused glance towards the back-- is there an unusually large fish caught in the net? There aren’t fish big enough in this area to almost capsize a small fishing boat.
Diluc stumbles towards the net, gripping his hand around the lever connected to it and turning it with all his strength. Whatever creature this is, it’s big and heavy. Not a fish, then.
“Archons, what the hell…” he mumbles when he finally yanks the entire net out of the water, leaving it suspended in the air by a mechanism connected to the boat-- a bit like a crane.
What he sees is enough to send Diluc’s soul hurtling straight to Celestia.
“What the fuck.”
Caught in his little net designed to reel up fucking plastic bottles and styrofoam food boxes, is a mermaid.
“What the fuck.”
You’re kidding. You actually have to be kidding. There’s no fucking way--
The mermaid trapped inside Diluc’s net has long, dark blue hair that looks impossibly silky and not at all tangled. Actually-- on closer inspection, he’s a merman- six-pack abs and everything. He has dark skin and a really weird looking tail, as far as the kinds of tails mermaids from Disney usually had. It’s dark blue and about as long as three Dilucs, littered with various scars and ripped up scales. The pelvic, dorsal and tail fin are in a state of distress-- ripped and teared in a violent way, as if they’d been torn during some sort of scuffle. No, more violent than that. More like a battle.
The merman’s face… wow. Diluc isn’t into, err, fish, but his face is surprisingly human, apart from a few small iridescent scales here and there, and an eye that appears almost catlike. Only one eye-- the other is obscured by a black eyepatch. Almost… attractive, honestly. Sharp features, chiseled jaw, neat eyebrows… did all mermen live looking like this, or did this guy just get good genes?
“Are you some sort of role playing cosplayer?” Diluc blurts out.
The merman bares his teeth in a pearly white grin, which would have been nice if his teeth didn’t look like fucking arrowheads. “You look delicious.”
Diluc physically stumbles back at that. “ Excuse me? That is not the compliment you think it is. Your costume looks really realistic, holy shit…” He moves along towards the back of the merman and gingerly tugs on the end of his tail.
To his surprise, it moves , promptly slapping Diluc in the face and showering his complexion with a lovely spray of seawater.
“ Ow! What the fuck--” Diluc raises his arm to wipe the water away, feeling something trickling down his cheek. It’s blood; somehow this guy’s tail fins and scales were sharp enough to slit his skin.
The merman turns his head to raise an eyebrow at Diluc. “It’s not very polite to grope at a guy’s tail, you know.”
“Well how the hell would I know mermaid etiquette?”
What’s more, the tail really doesn’t seem to be synthetic. It looks like it’s actually made of fish scales, arranged intricately in a way that couldn’t possibly be man made. And the way the tail merged with the merman’s body-- they sort of… melted together, like it was really attached, scales fading into skin and everything.
Okay, so Diluc had been taking too much Adderall. This had to be some sort of crazy hallucination side effect.
“No. No way, this isn’t real. You’re not real.” He groans, burying his face in his hands. His cheek still stings faintly, so then maybe not a hallucination.
“Well that’s rather rude.” The mermaid appears amused, the goddamned fish bastard.
Diluc turns around, his back facing the monstrosity that is stuck in his humble little net. What the fuck does he even do? Google is a reliable search engine, but he doubts searching ‘what to do when you catch a huge ass mermaid with an attitude in your fishing net’ would yield any helpful results. Where does he even begin? His entire perception of reality has been folded like Sunday laundry in a matter of seconds because of this magical glorified fish he’d just dragged up from the bottom of the ocean. Mermaids exist now, apparently, or maybe they always have.
Through his marine biologist lens, this is a massive breakthrough. Diluc is possibly the first person to capture an actual , living merman, not like those pathetic attempts at trolling uploaded on YouTube. The amount of discoveries he could make about their entire species were endless with this one specimen in his possession--
Something sharp collides with Diluc’s back, grabbing and pulling with things that feel like claws digging into his skin. He cries out, twisting in its grasp until he falls backwards onto the deck with a thud.
There's a throbbing pain on his back that burns while Diluc can feel blood drip and stain the wooden flooring beneath him. Breathing heavily, he looks up at the merman who only grins scarily back. Now, Diluc can see his arms and hands clearly-- if you could even call them hands. They’re darker blue at the ends and resemble claws more than fingers, razor sharp and dripping blood-- Diluc’s blood.
The merman brings a claw up to his face, opens his mouth and tastes the blood, an eerily long tongue darting out to snake around the claw, licking and sucking then retracting back behind his lips.
The way the merman’s eyes dilate once the blood stains his lips, those jagged claws and teeth, the way everything is almost engineered perfectly as a weapon to hurt and kill--
Diluc is in the presence of a predator, and he’s the prey.
“Aw, come a little closer, would you? It’s a little hard to reach you from here. I haven’t eaten in awhile.” The merman purrs, an arm dangling leisurely out of a hole in the net. Diluc’s breath shudders as he watches the sunlight glint off the edge of the claw. Oh, so mermaids eat humans now, how splendid.
He stands shakily, backing away from the trapped merman. Diluc has to bring him back now, there’s no way he’s going to let the merman go. People go diving in these waters, what if they ran into this cannibalistic abyss fish and couldn’t swim away? In fact, he doubts any human could outswim that huge, threatening tail, with muscle flexing under the scales as Diluc watches it flap side to side.
He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the merman. Study him, most likely, but he’s going to have to do it in a way that doesn’t endanger his life. He’ll figure it out.
Diluc fires up the engine-- no time for leisurely sailing or tying bow ties with the rigging ropes, he had to get this thing stuck in his net back to his lab as soon as possible. Not to mention cleaning and treating his wounds, the three long slashes across his back that have turned the fabric of his shirt damp with blood. Oh, and they hurt like hell.
Gods fucking damnit. This was not the ideal self-care day for Diluc.