Jeongguk has been working at Aqua Planet Jeju for more than twice as long as Namjoon has, but there’s something about the way Namjoon talks that makes him feel like he’s being lectured a little. Not in a bad way — more in the sense that Namjoon is well-spoken about things Jeongguk has only ever thought about in passing, or never took the time to articulate.
Maybe Namjoon pays more attention to those things, or maybe his head is just full of more words about everything. Either way, Jeongguk likes hearing him talk.
That’s part of the reason why, at least once or twice a month, he invites Namjoon up to the maintenance deck of the Sea of Jeju exhibit after hours. Namjoon’s a part-timer, like Jeongguk was his first year of college; even though he’s younger, he likes the feeling of getting Namjoon access to somewhere special. It’s not mentorship, because Namjoon already has a degree and a career and everything, so it can just be — Jeongguk likes hearing him talk, and likes spending time with him, and likes that even though it’s all above-board it feels like a secret.
Namjoon likes to pick his brain, too, about the Sea exhibit and his work and the mers especially, because some insider knowledge always makes him a more popular tour guide. So they’re chatting while Jeongguk weaves a new food stretcher for Kkobugi. The last one is worn out, fraying at the borders, and Kkobugi likes to snap at it when they don’t give him an endless supply of squid.
That’s the kind of thing that makes Namjoon laugh.
“Ah, really?” He asks. He bumps one broad, strong shoulder into Jeongguk’s.
They’re on the dock where Jeongguk meets V, legs crossed and knees pressed together. The view isn’t too pretty, just the dimmed lights reflecting off the tank’s surface, the deck cluttered and enclosed, but it’s Jeongguk’s favorite place in the entire building.
“He’s feisty,” he assures Namjoon.
V came up for breath just a minute or so before Namjoon arrived, a spray of water erupting from the blowhole that even Jeongguk, with his hard-earned degree in marine zoology, can’t think about for too long without getting a headache. V can hold his breath for an hour, but rarely dives longer than thirty minutes. Jeongguk has timed him, over and over again. More times than he can count.
The memories come practically unbidden. V had spent months in a small tank near the veterinary bay, and Jeongguk had been in his third month of full-time work. He’d clawed his way into V’s rotating schedule, somehow, and spent hours observing him in that cramped tank, checking the filtering system, prepping his meals. He’d watched as V was weaned off his painkillers, the sutures in the mess of scars along his side dissolving into healed flesh. He’d held V’s hand, once, during an appointment where the anesthesiologist had to inject him with local anasthesia to re-sew a gash that had split.
V had spent those long months in a two-meter deep tank, breathing at a pace closer to human. His first dive in the holding tank joined to the Sea of Jeju had only lasted five minutes, between his wounds and decreased lung capacity.
But by then, Jeongguk had become his favorite aquarist. By then, V’s eyes had started to linger on him when he spoke, eyes wide and curious and uncomfortably human.
How’d you manage that? One of Jeongguk’s coworkers asked him once, when he noticed that V only came to Jeongguk when called for anything except meals. Jeongguk remembers shrugging, but feeling a blush burn at the tips of his ears.
Maybe he just likes my voice, he’d replied, because the truth was that he wasn’t sure. He liked talking to V, but mostly just because he could hardly stand silence. It felt like the kind thing to do, when V looked so miserable all the time. When sometimes, when he was drifting in sleep, he’d let out the most awful, mournful noises Jeongguk had ever heard.
He talked to V, and as he talked, he saw — not sentience, or at least not anything he could prove. But he saw intelligence. He sees it every day, the way V looks at him and responds to him and imitates conversational expressions.
Jeongguk feels bad for it, but he’s explained to supervisors and friends and even Namjoon that he thinks V does understand him. The way dogs understand things, he’s mentioned. Gureum had definitely known dinner, and so does V. Gureum had known tricks and manners and want a treat, and so does V.
V knows a lot, after five years in the Sea of Jeju. Jeongguk tries not to think about how much more he might learn in the next decade, or two, or three, because it makes him too sad.
Namjoon notices the shift in Jeongguk’s mood as he thinks, but doesn’t comment. He only picks up the conversation, easily switching them to his work in music production, bringing up some of the stressors that made him flee to a tour guide gig in the first place.
As he talks, Jeongguk sees the long, warped shadow of V under the water’s surface. His breaths are always lovely to watch, the flash of almost-human skin that melts into his tail, the hump around his blowhole, the final splash of his flukes. He sees the glimmer of Little Red’s tail, too, finally regaining some of what must have been a spectacular original luster, after almost half a year of recovery.
But then V surfaces, and all of Jeongguk’s nostalgia and delight vanishes.
Little Red is draped over V’s back. His head lolls, unresponsive, his skin pale. His whole face looks gaunt — everyone’s worried about him, starting to put their heads together about testing his metabolism.
But this is serious. V looks panicked, his long dark hair plastered to his cheeks as he pokes his head out of the water, a meter or so away from the edge of the dock.
Namjoon has gone silent. Jeongguk just stares, overwhelmed and terrified as V looks between him and Little Red’s drifting, lifeless hand.
Jeongguk blinks. V’s chin breaks the surface of the tank.
His mouth — his human mouth — it opens.
“Help him,” V says, in a voice that Jeongguk has never heard before. A human voice. Deep and throaty and rasped. Saying human words, Korean on his tongue without even a skipped syllable.
For a moment, Jeongguk can’t breathe. It’s like the shock has frozen everything in him, down to the blood in his veins. All he can feel is a roiling, powerful nausea, creeping up the back of his throat. As V stares at him, plaintive and furious, and clutches Little Red against his back.
Jeongguk wants to throw up. Jeongguk wants to burst into tears. And he doesn’t have time to do anything except exactly what V has asked him for.
He scrambles for the phone in his pocket, and tries to shove everything about the last minute into the back of his head, somewhere it can’t hurt him. Somewhere he can pretend doesn’t exist.
He tries, and he fails. But Jeongguk has a job to do, and a mer to save, and so he keeps moving anyway.
Taehyung forgets, sometimes, that he’s bigger than Jimin.
He’s bigger than most things, true — bigger than every creature in this tank except the whale sharks. If he stretches himself out, finger to flukes, he’s as long as the smallest female. He’s longer than Jimin by a handspan or two, but Jimin is so —
Jimin is bright, and flashy, and puffs himself up like any good reef-dewller when he’s threatened. And he’s always threatened here, by humans above and around them. He spends most of his time awake trying to look bigger than he is. Trying, Taehyung knows, to make himself look unafraid.
And now, with the shame of apology, Taehyung is trying to make himself smaller.
I’m sorry, he says with his mouth, and gives Jimin his regret and sadness and guilt. I miss you.
He’d thought — he can’t remember why, but the blur of fury at the story Jeongguk read him had taken over in a way it hasn’t in what feels like endless seasons. He’s just so tired, so sick of the false lure of freedom, so outraged at the mockery of his label. Unreleasable. And he hadn’t wanted to inflict it on Jimin, and he’d wanted to wallow in the bitterness he’s accidentally cultivated in himself, and for half the night all he could think was that his mother would be so, so ashamed of him.
He’d dreamed of her, like he does sometimes. He dreamed of the sea, like he does every day. He’d woken up from a short span of sleep, and seen Jimin, curled in his nest, looking achingly small.
And then Jimin is holding him. He seems bigger again, even though Taehyung can still see his ribs, even though his eyes are sunken and his fins flutter nervously. Taehyung tries not to cling, tries not to latch on too tight after pushing him away for no reason. No good one, anyway. Only his own fears, and his own shame, and an anger that he knows well enough that Jimin shares and understands.
Mine, Jimin presses into him, and pulls him in tighter. They roll in the gentle current; Taehyung’s tail pressing up against Jimin’s. Jimin’s teeth pressed up against his neck.
It’s a feeling, not a word. A pulse of possessiveness that comes with flashes of Jimin’s siblings. Of his territory. Of days carved into rock, and fleeting memories of hands and scales and flesh. Taehyung’s not low on air, shouldn’t need to breathe for a while yet, but his lungs tighten when Jimin bites in harder, more intentional. He thinks he makes a sound, but can’t pay attention when his fists are buried in Jimin’s hair, when Jimin’s deadly canines are pressing almost-punctures into his skin.
It’s a bite that doesn’t take Taehyung back to the open ocean. It’s a bite that makes him wish, desperately, that they weren’t always being watched.
And it lasts an eternity. Long enough that Taehyung settles back into the embrace, scraping the blunt nails of one hand along the scales that pattern up Jimin’s spine, feeling the brush of his dorsal fin along his forearms. He’s buzzing on that thrum of possession, of Jimin’s unwillingness to let him go.
Keep you here, Jimin promises him vague and incomplete, and doesn’t mean to share it. Keep you mine.
Taehyung doesn’t respond, but when Jimin lets him go, he offers out the mussel with a promise to himself.
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