Australian instinct not to touch octopuses is warring with the urge to want to pet Robin's red belly
Robin wasn’t poisonous, so yey!:D
Now, to followup on the previous installmentXD
Dick returning to the centre with a row of sucker bruises on his body pretty much lighted a fire under everyone’s asses, because it was quite obvious this wasn’t a stray octopus that helped him to the shore. They most probably had an octomer on their hands!
The mer team was brought on board and they were all very concerned, because octomer were always a problem - they were usually very territorial and violent and a problem most of the time to have on the outskirts of your kingdom. They don’t subscribe to established borders or politics, they do their thing and usually cause some sort of chaos. So, the mer are very invested in finding out the octo and checking what do they want?
A promising thing is that the octo in question seems to have saved Dick’s life, so they are probably not a homicidal murderer, but still, they are a concern.
Dick involves himself into that situation 100%, because maybe he’s being naive, but he feels that the octomer in question didn’t have bad intentions. He wants to protect the creature if the need arises and he wants to thank him. And he wants to be the one to research that new mysterious species:O
However, it takes forever to find any trail of the elusive octomer. The sea around the island is dangerous for humans and underwater there’s a lot of rocks and crags and tight, sharp spaces not easy for the mer to search. The theory emerges that maybe the octo was there just for a fortunate moment and then swam away? Maybe it was a fluke.
Dick is not convinced, though. He visits the reef as often as he can, this time armed with a radio and provisions, because he isn’t stupid. He spends time walking up and down the beach, diving into the reef, exploring as much of the underwater as he dared. Usually, he’s accompanied by a mer on the order of Bruce - who was unwilling to let his son get stranded again:O
Then, weeks later, Dick ended up doing a late overtime - because due to his new project all of his other ones suffered and he had to catch up.
So, in the afternoon he’s walking down the beach around the centre, trying to get his head around the few paragraphs of his thesis when his eyes catch something. A bit of colour being washed back and forth by the waves. As he’s nearing it, his stomach drops and he rushes, because he knows that colour! It’s Robin!
Indeed, it’s the little octopus, ad Dick knows it’s him, has to be! This time he isn’t tangled in a net - even worse, his arm seems to be trapped in a split of a big piece of driftwood.
“You little klutz!” Dick exhales, kneeling in the water by the octopus and getting a hold of the driftwood. “We have to stop meeting like this!”
Robin is so tired that he doesn’t put up a fight, hanging limply as Dick lifts him and tries to free him. The driftwood splits easily in his hands and Robin is free, but too weak to swim away.
Dick picks him up and carries him deeper into the water, trying to revive him a bit, and it’s working slowly. Robin starts to move a bit more while Dick is cataloguing all the little changes since the last time he’s seen the octopus. He knows that the chance it can be the same octopus is slim, because they don’t tend to live that long, but one can hope, yes? And this one is bigger than Robin was, and also just looks... looks a bit more worn out. And is just as klutzy.
When Dick is standing in the water up to his waist, Robin is getting lively and then - suddenly and without warning - shoots out of his hands and disappears from sight. Dick startles and laughs. “Jeez, no thank you again, eh?”
Then he turns out to return to the shore, new information in mind - at least he tries to.
He can’t, because the moment he makes a move, something tugs on his waist and he’s spun back around.
Heart in his throat, Dick freezes and lets his hands drop into the water, and there it is, a slick, slippery thing wrapped around his waist. A look down reveals just a dark shape, but the touch tells him the texture is familiar. He presses and it flexes and he can feel the press of the suckers on his skin. Jesus, it’s thicker than his arm and taking into account the usual scale of these things...
There are people on the shore, he can see them away from the corner of his eye, but he can’t move, his throat is closed, he can’t move...
A panicked, frantic search gives him nothing, he can’t see under the water, the sun is low and he can’t see under the water....and then the light reflects off the water just right and he sees two bright spots just above the surface. He stares. They blink.
Dick starts to shiver, but can’t tear his eyes away from the two lights that slowly, slowly raise. And there is skin around, there is a face they belong to, but it’s black like a void and he can only see it by the shine of the water flowing down. Speechless, he looks on as the head and neck and shoulders emerge from the water.
He can’t move, because it’s hypnotic, it’s terrifying, he can only tighten his hands on the tentacle holding him in place, otherwise he’d fall down... this is mesmerising, fascinating, terrifying, he’s going to be killed, isn’t he? His first octomer and it’s going to kill him!
“H-hey,” Dick finally manages to choke out of his tightening throat. “Nice to... to meet you...?”
The eyes look at him for a long minute, from across the distance that again made the calculations in dick’s head happen... Then the eyes move forward, the silent figure draws closer and the colours start to change. The splash of dark around Dick blossoms into red and shit, shit! For a moment he thought hit was blood! That he was wounded and simply didn’t realise! And then his brain caught up and he almost pissed himself, because the calculations he did in is head? They were way off, the spread of the body around him was fucking immense! TAT
And then the human part of the mer turned horror-movie bloody for a moment and then finally finally it settled on a human-skin colour... Dick’s skin colour.
It wasn’t at all like the sea-mammal mer, the eyes were bigger, flatter, the hair very short and the mouth seemed wider than...
“Really?” Dick gasped, eyes glued to the mer’s chest. “You little shit, really?!”
Robin, cradled in the mer’s arm, didn’t look at all ashamed of himself.