Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

༄

The day Jimin is scheduled to be released back into the large territory, the deck erupts into noise.

He’s been lingering by the gate all day, tail twitching with anticipation and relief, and only pokes his head out when the shouting doesn’t stop. For a moment he blinks—vision hazy, eyes adjusting to the shock of air—and then focuses as well as he can as the humans. They’re gathered in a crowd, around a man Jimin doesn’t recognize. He’s the one shouting, his voice nasal and booming in the echo chamber Jimin has learned that the building can be, with words Jimin can’t hope to understand.

Another strange human is creeping past the crowd, holding a camera up to his face. Snapping pictures of Jimin, and then over at the surface of the larger territory where Jimin can’t help but assume that Taehyung is watching.

The shouting continues, and gets louder as more voices join the fray, and Jimin watches, captivated despite himself, as a more familiar human points at the man with the camera. A few people split off to confront him, and the man runs, one of the strangest motions Jimin thinks humans are capable of. The two strange men are out of the room as quickly as they seem to have arrived, but the shouting takes longer to die down. Someone is talking angrily into a phone; a few are grumbling amongst themselves.

Jimin glances over to where the stranger had been photographing Taehyung, and sees Jeongguk crouched on the dock. His face is tight, his hand reaches out through the air.

Something sharp cracks on his face, as Jimin watches. Jeongguk snatches his hand back, and stands up, and rejoins the rest of the humans, the cloth of their uniform rendering them all nearly the same. Jimin ducks back under the water, twists in his familiar circle once, twice, his arms crossed over his chest, his fingers toying with a smooth pearl on his necklace.

After an age, the gate creaks open. They don’t even bother sending divers in to herd him; Jimin darts through the opening as soon as it’s large enough to fit his shoulders, and dives down immediately for the bottom.

His favorite ray is there to greet him, lingering by Jimin’s rock until it gets indulged with enough petting. A shark bumbles by, a smaller maintenance breed that knocks its head clumsily into his tail and then darts away. Jimin checks under the sand, finds the bumps of his oyster shells and a few half-disintegrated scales, and rubs his fingers over the grooves Taehyung had carved into the stone. Ten of them, a blur of the same walls and water and few inhabitants.

The humans behind the window gasp and point and wave. Jimin is too tired to glare, or even really look; as much as he doesn’t want them to see him, he’s so sick of caring what humans think of him. He’s so sick of getting hefted into the sling and poked at and fed pills, and so he turns his face away from the flash of cameras and ignores everything else when he swims out to find Taehyung.

Taehyung, it turns out, is swimming with his favorite whale shark. His eyes are closed, his palm pressed to the shark’s side, just under the cut of its gills. They’re going slow, by Jimin’s standards, but he knows that they move differently than he does.

In the open ocean, slow and constant movement is what makes a journey. In the reef, quick bursts of speed have saved Jimin’s life more times than he can count.

Taehyung blinks his eyes open sleepily only when Jimin falls into pace beside him. Then he jolts, smiles, fumbles his hand away from the shark to reach out instead for Jimin. He sleeps only sometimes, Jimin has learned, and more often than stopping he drifts with his eyes shut, resting his mind as his body continues on without him.

The touch of Taehyung’s mind is a confirmation of what he’d suspected. Taehyung is sleepy, warm and fuzzed and all too happy to nudge Jimin onto his back, delight pricking at their skin as they press close like they haven’t been able to for days.

Missed you, Taehyung tells him. Jimin nuzzles his face into his neck, tangles his fingers in Taehyung’s hair, just tight enough to keep himself anchored.

The whale shark peers at them with one lazy eye, and turns toward the center of the territory.

Taehyung takes the time during this swim to update Jimin on the latest of the aquarium’s news. One of the seals is pregnant, and two ray pups are almost ready to be transferred to their territory, and the penguins are in a temporary enclosure while the humans clean their cage. Jimin prods him with questions, sometimes—how long have the pups been gone, where are the seals, what is a penguin—but stays mostly content to listen. Relishes how easy it is to speak like this, one arm around Taehyung’s chest and his tail brushing against the years-old barnacles on Taehyung’s massive tail.

Finally, when he’s settled and content even with the humans gawking at them from every angle, Jimin asks—who were those men?

He sends the memory of the strangers on deck, the shouting one and the quiet one. He hadn’t seen their faces well, but Jimin can recall the echo of the loud one’s voice, rising in pitch the longer it went on. The tone wasn’t quite angry, though; more dramatic, than anything.

Jimin expects an answer, or at least a silence. He doesn’t expect the rush of coldness that shivers through him, enough of a shock that he nearly pulls himself away from Taehyung entirely, before a hand wraps around his forearm.

Sorry, Taehyung apologizes. The cold seals itself away, like it had never existed, but some echo lingers in Jimin’s stomach. It feels like Taehyung’s memory of an iceberg, solid and frigid and heavy in his gut.

Taehyung pulls them up, slowly, so he can sigh a burst of water that splatters hard against the surface as it falls. He gives Jimin two names, Seokjin and Hoseok, and the memory of two faces looking down from the aquarium’s deck. There’s no emotion attached to them at all, not even anger.

Jimin doesn’t get the chance to ask, before they dive. Down and down and toward the largest window, the one that makes the humans standing against it look even smaller than they already are. Jimin shies away on instinct, but Taehyung pulls him closer to the window than he’s ever been before; close enough that he could reach out and skim his hand along the smooth surface of it. Like the prisons they’d kept him in, Jimin thinks, and shudders in disgust at the association.

Taehyung gives him a nudge. Just a sense of which direction to look, and Jimin follows it to find—those same men, leaning against a wall. The smaller one, Hoseok, has his camera still hanging around his neck. Seokjin has his face screwed up, in concentration or anger maybe.

They’re both watching, as Taehyung swims Jimin past. They’re going slowly, Taehyung’s most relaxed pace, so Jimin gets a good look. He meets both of their eyes, and finds nothing more concerning than the kind of intensity that Jeongguk sometimes looks at them with, or Namjoon when he thinks neither of them are paying attention.

Reporters, Taehyung says. A strange word with an even stranger meaning, one that even Taehyung himself doesn’t quite understand. Something to do with telling other humans information, explaining things to them. Telling them how to feel, maybe. Influence is what Jimin mostly understands, like the elders of the reef who pass through unchallenged, always expected to be invited for a meal and a night’s sleep in the nest.

He wants to ask further, interest piqued enough to almost force him into wakefulness, but Taehyung doesn’t seem inclined to answer. He picks up speed to get them away from the large window, and starts circling the area where smaller windows give them comfortable views of children and smaller groups.

Eventually, inevitably, Jimin drifts. He half-sleeps on Taehyung’s back until they call him to eat. The humans feed Taehyung and the whale sharks from a surface-reef, dumping their food into the water to trail behind them, and Jimin is grateful for the small mercy of not being expected to follow a human around like a net of dead fish. Instead, he swims up to his target and accepts the larger portion of fish, a few squid, a handful of shrimp.

Something about the shrimp tastes strange. A little more like the human chemicals that everything, even the water, tastes like in here. Jimin thinks for a moment about spitting out his mouthful and feeding the rest of the shrimp to one of the sleek little sharks following him in hopes of a castoff, but he’s grateful enough to have his appetite back that he eats everything they give him.

That night, Jeongguk doesn’t talk much. He hands them both strips of a rich meat called beef, and a steamed bun that makes Jimin want to beg as shamelessly as Taehyung does for more. He keeps his legs drawn up toward his chest, his chin tucked into his knees, and Jimin watches the strange contortion and wonders what it means.

Finally, Jeongguk sighs. He closes the box he always takes food from, and says a long string of jumbled words that come out on a single gust of air.

When he leaves, Jimin has to bother Taehyung into translating. It’s not often that he sees this look on Taehyung’s face—closed, wary, unhappy. He wants to know, even through the pit of exhaustion dragging him down toward the sand.

Finally, Taehyung scowls. Shakes his hair so that it floats in front of his face, as he reaches out to grab Jimin’s hand.

The memory hits him hard. Jeongguk sitting on the dock, arms wrapped around his folded legs.

They’re still campaigning for your release, you know. Enough people are starting to get angry that the aquarium executives are going to make a statement. A pause, then another sigh. I wonder what you could tell us if we asked you, huh? That’s what Jung Hoseok was asking. Whether you wanted to go back to the ocean, or if you’d rather stay here.

Taehyung pulls back as soon as the memory ends. He swims away, slow and heavy through the water, and leaves Jimin to drift back down on his own, the understanding of Jeongguk’s words burrowing its way into the iceberg-thing in his stomach.

Jimin thinks he’ll be awake for too long, the words and meaning too uncomfortable to sit with peacefully, but his eyes close as soon as he hits sand.

He sleeps long, and hard, and only wakes up long after the lights have brightened.

༄

Something is wrong. Jimin knows as soon as he wakes up, his stomach tight with hunger or sickness or maybe both. There’s a fish poking around by his head, the flutter of its fins against his neck just agitating that Jimin snaps out a hand with the intent to grab it and misses by an age, his whole body stiff and slow and unfamiliar.

“Tae?” He says, throat rough from the disuse of sleep, before he realizes that Taehyung probably isn’t close enough to hear.

Jimin sends off a string of clicks, a question and a complaint, as he stretches himself out to try and fix the inexplicable tension in his muscles. The clicks rebound off a body coming toward him, smaller than the largest whale shark, its tail working a constant up and down.

Taehyung slows down by Jimin’s rock, though Jimin is too afraid to open his eyes. He doesn’t want to know what the light will do to him; it’s just barely tolerable now with his hands covering his face. Taehyung’s hands curl gentle around his wrists, a question, and Jimin shudders as he lets them be pulled away. As he squints through the painful blur of light, Jimin takes careful stock of his body.

His tail feels better. His stomach is twisted in on itself. Something in his chest is almost painfully tight. His gills feel gummy, almost like the last time he’d been sick at the nest, brought low with a painful fever and labored breathing. His mouth tastes awful, stale; his head hurts so badly that he’s scared to move.

Jimin only realizes that Taehyung is listening when he feels the concern pressed into him, too specific. He wants to shake Taehyung off, to set his jaw and stomach and swim through the pain, but—he can’t. Not with Taehyung looking at him like this, eyes big and worried and sad.

“Jimin,” Taehyung says. Even angled away from the window it’s a risk.

Slowly, cautiously, Jimin reaches out to touch his face. Taehyung lets him pull his arms away, and Jimin drifts closer into his space, wraps himself around Taehyung like seaweed, fights the urge to be sick. He wants to swim, but doesn’t trust his body to keep him moving through the water.

In the ocean, sickness is dangerous. Soomin had been sick for a long time when she joined the shoal, starved out by her larger siblings, and Jimin had traded with Jihyun to keep watch over her until she was well enough to hold her own. She was vulnerable, and worth protecting, but the reef could change as suddenly as a storm, and Jimin hadn’t slept well or deeply until the day she beat Eunji in a race, her cheeks rounding out and her ribs losing prominence under her skin.

If he were back at the reef, Jimin’s family would protect him. Jihyun would take over patrol, and Jisoo would keep watch over him, and their smallest sisters would take turns bothering him endlessly. Maybe Eunji would make him braid kelp into her hair, and maybe Yeojin would force him to help her polish the brightest shells she could find. He’d never be alone, at least; he’d never have any reason to miss them.

But if he were back at the reef, he wouldn’t be sick in the first place. He wouldn’t have the fading scar on his side, or the dots littering the inside of his elbow, or the taste of human chemicals lingering on his tongue.

Breathe, Taehyung tells him.

Jimin sucks in water, and feels it leak sluggish through his gills. Taehyung’s fingers are there before Jimin can even reach up, smearing away something viscous from the slits until water passes through easier.

He breathes. Taehyung stays with him until he can’t anymore, and then Jimin holds tight to his wrist and follows him up to the surface.

There are humans on the deck watching him. Jimin shudders, and hides under the bulk of Taehyung’s tail with a handful of the fish that shadow him everywhere. They’re well used to Jimin’s presence, by now. In the reef, the bright colors of his tail were a warning; here, they’re a novelty for the humans to gawk over.

The day passes. Taehyung brings down a new puzzle to show him, and Jimin squints in the light at the moving tiles that reveal an image when fitted together correctly, and he scratches his scales against the rough edges of a rock outcropping just for the sensation of it, the way they shine healthier than they’ve looked in a long time. The day passes, but the sickness doesn’t fade. The awful taste in his mouth lingers, even after his first meal. He still aches everywhere.

And something is wrong, because Jimin can’t sleep.

Drifting off during the day used to be difficult, but it was the only thing that distracted him from the light. The pain of it, like constantly staring at the sun from just an arm’s length underwater. Now, Jimin curls up to rest by his rock and stares at the inside of his eyelids for seven of Taehyung’s laps around the territory, longer than it’s ever taken him to fall asleep before. He sits up, when it’s clear that he won’t be able to rest, and drifts back down when dizziness hammers into his head as vicious as a killing blow.

Taehyung frowns, when Jimin swims up to meet him, and holds him close when Jimin practically begs. He’s rolled over to face the surface, so Jimin settles on top of him and wraps his arms tight around the smallest point of Taehyung’s waist, and buries his face in the soft skin of Taehyung’s shoulder.

This is the closest to darkness he can get. The slow, steady beat of Taehyung’s heart; the brush of hair across his ear, the rhythmic contraction of his abdomen as he swims.

For a while, they just drift. Taehyung angles them neatly to keep Jimin almost entirely underwater when he breathes, forgoing his spout to push air out through his mouth like a human, the top of Jimin’s head exposed and sending shivers down to the tip of his tail. A small school of fish swims with them, at one point, and Jimin recognizes the rhythm of a ray, and for a while Taehyung keeps them near his favorite whale shark, the largest female.

Jimin’s second meal tastes strange again. It’s disguised better, in a more richly flavored piece of meat, but he grimaces at the aftertaste in the back of his mouth and scowls at the human feeding him. They can’t keep their pollution out of his food, out of the water that he breathes, and he’s on edge from the longest period of wakefulness he’s had since being taken from the reef.

He hangs back, tonight, when Jeongguk comes. Taehyung hands him down their treats, and Jimin eats them with no small amount of resentment, and he keeps one hand on the smooth patch of skin on Taehyung’s tail just underneath the jagged cut of one of his scars.

While Jeongguk talks, Jimin maps Taehyung’s markings. There are barnacles clustered together underneath the flippers that steer him through the water, a few patches of bumpier skin along his flanks. The scars ripping down his side are neatly healed, but an ugly reminder of teeth, and tearing, and losing whatever fight that might have been brought to him.

Jimin hasn’t ever asked about the attack. He doesn’t think Taehyung wants to talk about it.

Right around when Jeongguk usually leaves, Taehyung grabs Jimin’s hair—the only part of him he can reach—and gently tugs him up. Jimin follows slowly, reluctant to give up his newest fascination, and only after an irritating amount of prodding deigns to slip his eyes above the surface.

Jeongguk is holding—Jimin thinks it might be paper. There are several layers of it folded together, and it’s covered with dark print and blurry pictures.

“Newspaper,” Jeongguk says, carefully enunciated, for Jimin’s sake. And then he reads what must be words inked onto the paper, though Jimin understands only Jeju and the name of the aquarium.

Jimin doesn’t understand, but Taehyung obviously does. He jerks, slips down from where his torso is curled up and over the edge of the dock, until his head is the only thing left resting on his arms. Jimin can’t see anything but his profile; the furrow of his brows, the downturn of his lips. Jeongguk blinks, surprise coloring his expression, and asks something in a low, careful voice.

The last thing Jimin expects is for Taehyung to duck down, and take Jimin’s wrist, and pull him away. But it’s just heartbeats later that they’re a quarter of the way across the territory, and Taehyung hasn’t said a word, and Jimin can’t think of anything but the shock on Jeongguk’s face.

“What was that?” Jimin clicks, and winces when the sound reverberates off a too-close window and flares up the pain in his head.

Nothing, Taehyung answers. Or maybe I don’t want to talk about it. The most Jimin catches is that he’s upset, that he’s angry, but—he can’t find a target for the anger. Taehyung snatches his hand back before Jimin can ask, and dives down deeper.

Jimin tries to follow. His tail is stronger, his speed not what it used to be but still recovering, and he catches up to Taehyung’s flukes before a rush of dizziness sends him tumbling. Spots swim black and hazy in his vision, his head throbs with the pound of his heart. A passing whale shark sends him spinning, and Jimin reaches out to grab its tail, letting it pull him along in rhythmic, vague annoyance.

The shark drags him close enough to his rock that Jimin risks swimming for it. His hands grip the jagged surface, his stomach twists tighter and tighter until he has to look down to check that it hasn’t caved in.

He doesn’t notice falling asleep. He does notice the silence, when Taehyung’s song doesn’t lull him into rest.

༄

For a day, Taehyung avoids him. There’s no way for Jimin not to notice; Taehyung is all he has, and he feels awful enough that he hardly moves from his not-quite-nest except to eat in the morning. He drapes himself over the rock to watch the humans come and go, until the roughness of it starts to dig red imprints into his arms, and then he curls up again in the sand.

Taehyung doesn’t visit. He swims with the whale sharks all day, and doesn’t look down.

Jimin watches him, when he passes. It hurts to squint through the light, but he focuses on the tight frown pulling at Taehyung’s lips. The crease between his brow, the hunch to his shoulders.

What aches more than any part of his body is the understanding that Taehyung is ignoring him. Taehyung is angry, upset, and Jimin can’t help; Jimin might have made it worse. Being angry at Taehyung feels like the most wrong thing he can imagine, in this place where they only have each other, and yet he can’t help but nurse resentment at the silence he’s left to stew in as the humans gape from the windows.

Everything feels too large inside of him. Jimin paces for a while, ducks in tight circles that stab behind his eyes like the worst human weapons, and gives up when all it gets him is a flock of humans pressed as tight to the window as they can manage. He bares his teeth, and shoves away the overly-familiar sea turtle with his tail, and dives down behind his rock to sulk.

Finally, the humans call him for his second meal. Jimin swims up quickly, and grabs his food without sparing anyone or anything a second glance, and drags it down to the bottom with him. The bounty is larger, the humans still concerned about his weight, and it means they give him more shrimp and lobster and cuts of meat than he can stand to eat while lingering at the surface to let them watch him.

Carefully, Jimin picks around the meal. The fish is fine, the lobster is fine, but—there’s that chemical taint to some of the shrimp. The touch of humans, more prominent than it is on anything else in the territory.

Jimin breathes slowly, and separates the good shrimp from the bad. Thinks about the way he’s been feeling the last few days; the way he can’t sleep during the day, and the awful taste in his mouth, and the headaches, and the nausea.

Humans ruin everything they touch. Even him.

Jimin buries the shrimp in the sand, under one of the small rocks at the bottom, and scarfs down the rest of his food.

That night, Jimin doesn’t follow Taehyung up to see Jeongguk. He falls asleep before he can regret it; the lights dim, and Jimin’s whole body goes heavy. He’s exhausted from another entire day of wakefulness, exhausted from the burden of anger and anxiety. He feels cut off and isolated and vulnerable, and doesn’t like not knowing what the humans might do to him next. And below it all lingers misery and hurt and the overwhelming need to have someone to hold onto again.

Jimin doesn’t remember any dreams he might have. He wakes up, and light pierces him sharp and heavy, and Taehyung swims closer, that day.

The evening meal—Jimin wrinkles his nose, when he realizes that the chemical has spread from a handful of shrimp to more than half the meat he’s been given. He can’t bury it all without suspicion, so he feeds small pieces to passing sharks and groupers, until all of the tainted food is gone and his stomach twists in hunger at the halved portion.

He sleeps, badly, and jerks awake when something brushes him.

Taehyung pulls back, when Jimin flinches. His eyes are downcast, his hair drifting carelessly in front of his face. He’s holding something in his hands, cradled against his stomach. For a moment, Jimin watches him, and breathes.

“I’m sorry,” Taehyung finally says. The words burst from him like water from his back, too-loud and warped in the water.

Jimin wants, badly, to be angry. He’s held long grudges before; at a certain pod of dolphins that kept picking off the reef’s turtles, at his older brothers for pushing him out, at the old head of an adjacent shoal that kept hunting in his territory. What Taehyung has done feels like a breach of trust as severe as any territory negotiation, and Jimin wants to spit the anger back into his face.

But—shame makes Taehyung look small. Even with the mass of his tail, and the handspan or so his torso has on Jimin’s in length, he looks like a contrite child. A seal pup, Jimin thinks not for the first time, fleeing after a blow.

Jimin sighs. He thinks of all the feelings raging for space in his chest, and pictures tucking them all into a hollowed-out shell. He reaches out and presses that into Taehyung’s shoulder, just a pulse, and then pulls away. He watches Taehyung absorb it, the frown digging deeper and deeper into his lips, the shine to his eyes even sadder as his face contorts.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, helpless. He knows more words in Jimin’s tongue, but so few of them are relevant for apologies.

Jimin reaches out his hand, and leaves his fingers trailing halfway between them. Taehyung’s sadness shifts, just a little, and he relinquishes one of his hands from whatever he’s holding near his stomach to meet him there.

Shame is what Jimin had seen on his face, and shame is what he feels when Taehyung gives him a glimpse into the last day. Shame and a kind of upset Jimin has never felt from him before, tinged with anger and sadness and so much homesickness that Jimin feels all the time, every day. And all of it connected to the newspaper Jeongguk had shown him, and something wrong inside of Taehyung, and not wanting to explain it.

“I miss you,” Taehyung says, so low and mournful that it almost sounds like his song.

He sounds so sad. Sad enough that Jimin moves from the delicate press of their fingertips to grab his wrist, and pull them in close, and fit himself perfectly into the curve of Taehyung’s body.

It hurts, how much Jimin has missed this in just two days. Taehyung holds him delicately, like he’s afraid Jimin will push him away at any moment, and it only furthers Jimin’s resolve to grip tighter. One of Taehyung’s shadows, a fish just shorter than the length of Jimin’s forearm, tries to nudge between them. Jimin tickles freshly sharpened jaws at its belly, and the fish darts away.

Mine, Jimin wants to click, so that every creature in the territory hears it. So that the humans hear, and start to understand, just so they can be told of his claim.

So possessive, Taehyung gives him, wrapped up in amusement and the warm blush of forgiveness. Jimin opens his mouth, and feigns a bite into his shoulder. The pressure is nice, and Taehyung shivers at the graze of Jimin’s sharpest teeth against his skin. Even the humanlike parts of him are tougher than Jimin, and so he presses more into the bite, enough that it would puncture his own skin. Enough that Taehyung makes a soft, deep noise, from the place in his throat where he sings, and Jimin shudders through the tingle it sends through him, from the top of his head and all the way down his spine.

When Jimin finally lets him go, Taehyung’s cheeks have darkened with blood. There’s a red mark on his shoulder in the shape of Jimin’s mouth, and the knowledge that it will fade into a bruise is more pleasing to Jimin than anything else in the world.

Taehyung’s hand is still curled tight around something. Jimin nudges a question into his wrist, and Taehyung blinks, and his fingers slowly straighten to reveal the mussel he’d been holding tight enough that it’s left an indented line in his palm. He offers it out, and Jimin takes it with enough fondness to chase away the last lingering dregs of irritation.

It’s nice, that Taehyung so clearly wants to make them right. It’s nice to feel wanted again.

Jimin sucks out the flesh from the mussel and then drapes himself more comfortably over Taehyung’s back. It feels petulant to insist to be carried like this, but he’s starting to notice the heavy exhaustion again, and Taehyung feels bad enough about everything, including waking him up, that he gladly takes the chance to let Jimin rest on him.

Even with the cloudiness of captivity and whatever it is that the humans have been feeding him, Jimin falls asleep happy. He loves the rhythm of Taehyung underneath him, loves the vibrations in Taehyung’s chest when he sings, loves the song wrapping around him like the gentlest current as they drift slowly through the water.

You’ll tell me, Jimin pushes at him sleepily, wrapped up in the image of the newspaper. Eventually.

It’s not a question. Taehyung’s song wavers, and shifts, and Jimin understands that as agreement.

༄

The humans keep trying to feed him something. They seem to have noticed that Jimin hasn’t been eating everything, and he takes his first meal the next morning only to realize that all of it has been tainted with the chemical, in small doses that he just barely tastes on his first mouthful.

He feels more alert than he has in days, and better rested too. After a night without what must be a new kind of medicine, he’s only now realizing just how terrible it made him feel.

But the humans look concerned. Jimin sees the distinct color of a uniform lingering by one of the windows, craning to catch a glimpse of him from around the rock that hides most of his body. It’s a woman Jimin only vaguely recognizes, from one of his visits to the vet, and he curls himself tighter as he focuses on tearing his meal into very small shreds, to easily bury or disperse as he swims.

He’s hungry all day, but he manages three naps. It’s as relieving as fresh water in his gills to be able to close his eyes against the harsh lights and sleep, once with Taehyung’s arms linked in his to keep them moving, Jimin’s tail just barely working to keep him propelled.

For that one, he’s more drifting than anything, but the rest is sweet. The squid Taehyung brings down for him after another puzzle is even sweeter, and Jimin tears into it in front of a human crowd of children and relishes their expressions of shock or delight or disgust. Taehyung smiles, his mouth much more human than Jimin’s, and bites into his own treat when they’re out of sight of that particular window.

The hunger gnaws at Jimin’s stomach, but the relief at swimming with Taehyung again is enough that he can almost forget.

About halfway through the day, Jimin spots the divers. It’s not unusual for humans to venture down, with the equipment that Taehyung has told him allows them to breathe under the surface, but they almost always keep their distance. Most days, there’s a group of women who dive in front of the largest window, and Jimin knows exactly when to vanish for the show. Today, Jimin starts to steer them away before the first drifting human can notice them, but Taehyung wraps a hand around his bicep and juts out his chin.

Look, he presses, and Jimin squints. The human is familiar, like most of them are by now, but he takes the time to judge how. The proportion of the limbs, the square of the shoulders. The eyes behind the mask, turned toward them, wide through the stream of bubbles.

Jimin flinches back at the memory of the divers at the reef. He hadn’t known anything about them, then; he’d known to be afraid, but not much beyond that. Taehyung’s touch is reassuring, but there’s an awful part of Jimin that hates himself for daring to know a human enough to recognize it by face, and the hatred burns in his veins like the worst poisons he knows, and it’s almost enough to force him away from Taehyung’s careful trajectory to meet Jeongguk above the human tunnel.

From what Jimin can see of him, Jeongguk looks surprised. Jimin is too; he’s never seen Taehyung approach a diver, even Jeongguk himself. But today Taehyung reaches out, and puts on his sweetest blank face, and taps lightly at the hard material of Jeongguk’s diving mask.

The bubbles that burst from Jeongguk might be laughter. He waves, and Taehyung rolls in a circle around him, and Jimin hangs back just far enough that he can see them both fully. He’s barely reassured by how massive Taehyung looks next to Jeongguk, now that they don’t have to look up at him from the water. Taehyung is almost twice his length, and Jimin just barely less than that, but nothing in Jeongguk’s body language as he paddles feebly to keep himself steady speaks of fear.

And then, so quickly that Jimin almost misses the transition, they’re playing. Taehyung bumps Jeongguk with his tail, and Jeongguk streams bubbles as he spins and flails, and he reaches out to catch on Taehyung’s dorsal fin to let himself be dragged forward. Taehyung rolls to get him off; Jeongguk chases him with pathetic kicks of his legs that leave him bobbing in the ripples of Taehyung’s wake.

It’s so much like the kind of playing Jimin misses. His chest aches; his skin burns. He hates himself for wanting to join, and hates himself for that too, and wants to bite down on the skin of his own wrist until he bleeds.

Instead, while Jeongguk treads water at the surface for a moment to catch his breath, Jimin turns off his brain. He forces himself to pretend, just for a moment, that this is a place he can be happy.

Jeongguk shrieks, when Jimin grabs his ankle. Taehyung grins, his eyes sharp for just a moment before he slips back into vapidity.

They don’t play for long. Jimin knows from Taehyung that the air machine on Jeongguk’s back is finite, and he can tell they’re wearing him out, like two dolphins heckling a mer child, and there are so many humans watching them from the windows and the surface that Jimin gets too self-conscious to let the fleeting moments of excitement last.

He’s also hungry. So hungry that it hurts, that he almost lets his claws graze skin when Jeongguk hoists himself onto the dock to hand them both squid as a reward. It’s not nearly enough to fill him, but he’s desperate enough that even long minutes later, drifting off into another nap, Jimin is still licking the taste off of his teeth. Taehyung looks at him strangely but doesn’t pry, content with himself in a way that radiates through his skin in a way Jimin isn’t sure he’s aware of. It’s nice to bask in, to be soothed by.

Jimin tries not to think of his siblings, scared or scattered. He tries not to think of the worst possibility, which is that they’ve moved on without him. That they don’t miss him, or need him, or want him back.

It’s a consolation to consider that they probably think he’s dead. Jihyun must have taken over his patrol, with Jisoo and Taehyun as his seconds. They’re all enough together to keep the littlest ones safe, Jimin knows, but it aches too much to know that he can’t be there for them anymore. Carefully, he keeps these thoughts to himself.

That night, Namjoon and Jeongguk talk louder and laugh more with them. Taehyung lets Jeongguk scratch briefly against his scalp in exchange for squares of chocolate, and Jimin lets Namjoon’s fingers linger a little longer on the webbing between Jimin’s than he should.

The chocolate is rich and overwhelming, but it isn’t filling. Jimin’s stomach constricts tighter, and tighter, and haunts him well into sleep.

༄

There’s something wrong with Jimin.

Taehyung is ashamed of how long it takes him to realize. But once he does, he doesn’t know how he hadn’t seen it—the dullness to Jimin’s eyes, the slow cave in of his stomach, the panic at any food that Taehyung isn’t also offered.

He’s not eating, Taehyung realizes, and it’s only then that he starts to understand just how far Jimin has gone to hide it.

It’s not even that Jeongguk doesn’t seem to know. He’s not one of the senior members of the staff, and deals more with the day-to-day life of the two of them and the whale sharks and the rays, and so he’s not always the first one clued in on major veterinary projects. But Taehyung spends days watching the other humans, and they give Jimin his meals like they expect him to eat it, and Jimin mimes chewing in his nest and buries the scraps that nothing else will touch.

The only time Taehyung tries to bring it up, Jimin retreats. Not physically, but—his hand tightens around Taehyung’s, and any openness in his mind slams shut like the gate to the holding tank.

Once Taehyung starts noticing, he can’t stop. Jimin is sleeping more, and talking less, and losing more and more weight as the days go by until he looks almost as bad as he had when he arrived, skinny and bruised and terrified. Even with Taehyung giving him every scrap of food he can hold onto from his own meals, and the treats he gets from Jeongguk for the puzzles, Jimin gets worse.

One night, when Jimin is supposed to be sleeping, Taehyung catches him swimming in circles around his nest, twisting his body in a dizzying spiral that never seems to end, clutching his arms around himself like he’s afraid of a coming blow. His eyes are squeezed shut, and Taehyung can’t bear it anymore, and Jimin almost cuts him with the sharp slivers of his claws when Taehyung puts himself in Jimin’s path to stop him.

Move, Jimin begs, but it isn’t any coherent word. It’s panic, plain and simple, manifesting in a need that itches under Taehyung’s skin—a need to move, and stop thinking, and get rid of the thing twisting in his stomach like an eel.

“Jimin,” Taehyung says. Over and over, trying to break through Jimin’s panic and dizziness and compulsion.

It doesn’t work, until Taehyung does the only thing he can think of, and crushes Jimin tight against his chest. There’s a brief moment of struggle, where Jimin fights him with everything he has. A brief moment where Jimin is so out of control that Taehyung feels everything.

And then Jimin goes limp. His breaths even out, into a more comfortable rhythm of water from his gills, and he shudders over and over until Taehyung is holding him tight enough to bruise. Jimin feels so small, so delicate that Taehyung can’t help but be afraid that he’s hurting him, but as soon as he tries to relax his grip Jimin makes a pained sound in his throat that stings as badly as the red marks from his nails on Taehyung’s stomach.

Sorry, is what Jimin gives him next. Taehyung shakes his head, and buries his nose in the silver float of Jimin’s hair, and digs his own blunt nails into Jimin’s shoulder, just next to the growth of his dorsal spines.

You need to eat. Taehyung sends him the memories he has of Jimin hiding his food, of slipping scraps into groupers’ mouths, of twisting over and over before he has to go up to collect his meals. What are you afraid of?

Jimin hesitates. They’re so close that it’s inevitable, some bleed from intent to instinct in what they send to each other. Taehyung remembers—his mother held him like this, when he was young, and each sibling after him. Sometimes, when a calf is tired, one of the whales will blink and offer its back as a resting place, and they’re so much less filtered than any mer Taehyung has met.

Jimin is nothing like the great whales Taehyung swam with for so long. He’s small, and his heartbeat is fast, and his thoughts race far beyond the whales’ memory of blue and migration and song, but the comfort is the same.

Some of the tension in Jimin’s body eases. When he makes a sound high in his throat, it’s sad instead of terrified.

Finally, he answers. Jimin gives him the memory of the chemicals in his food, and the way it forced him to stay awake through the blinding days, and all the different pains and discomforts that it made worse. He’s scared, Taehyung understands, of more than the side effects of whatever medicine they’re trying to give him; he’s scared of the power humans have over him, and scared of never being the same when they’re trying to change him from the inside out, and scared of never being safe enough to go home.

He’s scared of never going home. He’s scared of Taehyung, and the hopelessness he sees, and the awful understanding that they’re going to die here, instead of the ocean where they belong.

There’s no comfort Taehyung can give for that. There’s no way to make it better. There’s just—the memories he has of his family, his pod, and the ocean stretching out endless and bottomless and terrifying around him, and the way it made him feel safer than any acrylic walls ever could.

So Taehyung holds him tight as they float, aimless, and gives him those memories. Long days of only swimming, sometimes with a whale or another mer and sometimes alone. A vague destination, guided only by gut feeling and years of memories. It’s all he has to give, and all he has to keep himself sane, and even though he’s given impressions of them before he’s never fully submerged them both in a memory like this, so that when he closes his eyes he can almost believe that the water around him is part of something greater than anything humans could create.

But eventually, he has to breathe. Eventually, Taehyung drags them to the surface with Jimin’s face buried in his chest and blows out the water he’d taken in from his blowhole, and sucks in another breath to fill his lungs so that he can spend another twenty or so human minutes under the surface.

Jimin stays clinging to his front like a barnacle, no matter how many times Taehyung tries to nudge him onto his back. It’s not inconvenient, really, except for maybe the fish that follow him around, so in the end he gives up. He wraps his arms back around Jimin’s slim torso, and worries about how easily he can feel bones protruding from underneath skin, and keeps them both moving.

Taehyung feels it, when Jimin starts to dream. He draws his mind back, but can’t help what Jimin sends him in his sleep. It’s just glimpses, just clouds, but Taehyung gets the impression of a warm current cradled around him. A gentle hand scratching at his scalp. Safety, and home.

When Taehyung sleeps, for short bursts drifting at the surface, he lets Jimin’s dreams wash him away.

༄

The next day, Taehyung catches the larger fish the humans mix into his food and envies them—not for the first time—the clothing they wear that lets them carry things around. Back in the ocean, Taehyung had kept a bag woven from seagrass to hold food, when he knew he was approaching long stretches of emptiness, and gifts for his siblings when he ran into them, and of course the weapons he always kept within reach.

Here, stripped of anything to call his own, Taehyung is reduced to holding as many fish as he can in his hands, close to his chest, and depositing them in front of Jimin. He feels like an otter pup, holding up a rock for its mother like it might be a mollusk, as Jimin picks at the gift with a tight smile.

“Sorry,” Jimin says, when he’s sure they can’t be seen from any windows. “It’s hard.”

Taehyung loves Jimin’s voice. It’s soft and light and the cadence of it is so strange, almost like a dolphin. When he echolocates, Taehyung is reminded of the dolphin pod that made a point to swim with him for a few days every season, when their migration paths intersected.

When there are humans around, though, Jimin speaks like he’s afraid. Taehyung doesn’t blame him, because Taehyung is where he’d learned the habit of it.

Slowly, Jimin eats. Taehyung thinks about asking him why he hadn’t taken to picking out food from the broadcast feeding, when food is sent into the water for any creature willing to pick at him, but he doesn’t want to risk scaring Jimin off of the first meal he’s seen him eat in days. He keeps his movements slow, and holds his breath with every fish that swims between them.

Jimin eats half of what Taehyung has brought him, and then Kkobugi butts her head against his tail. Jimin curls down to look at her, his eyes narrow and rimmed with exhaustion, and offers out the severed top half of a herring after a quick stroke down her shell.

“Jimin,” Taehyung groans, as Kkobugi snaps it out of his hand. Jimin bares his teeth and looks up, and Taehyung pulls on the pout that always makes Jeongguk feed him more than he’s allowed. Jimin just curls back his lip, and lets the rest of the fish drift away, and Taehyung thinks again how different the two of them are. How much sharper Jimin is, and how unused he is to being provided for.

It’s something Taehyung worries about. Less often now than he used to, before Jimin, but—he has nightmares, sometimes, of being back in the ocean. Of fish slipping through his fingers, of collapsing from exhaustion halfway through a migration. Of being the weakest, and the slowest, and the easiest prey for another shark to tear its teeth into.

Taehyung has nightmares about that, too, and even Jimin can’t make them go away.

I’m okay, Jimin gives him, when he reaches out. Taehyung thinks he believes it, but there’s so much heaviness to the words, to the parts of his mind Taehyung can feel, that it’s difficult to trust him.

But Taehyung tries. He forces a smile, a real one, because Jimin knows the difference. He leaves Jimin for a nap, and swims with Hwanghu for a lap, and appreciates that neither of them are ever really alone, the crowd of fish underneath each of them merging as they trace the perimeter of the tank. Taehyung wonders whether swimming with them is anything like swimming with the true whales; feeling small and insignificant and yet, somehow, treasured for it.

Jimin is awake at the end of the lap, twisting anxiously as he waits for his meal. Taehyung holds his hands to keep him still, but it’s not enough to stop the nerves he can feel eating away at Jimin’s stomach, almost as bad as the hunger.

Taehyung watches this time, when they give Jimin his meal. Jeongguk is one of the humans on duty, and he taps out Jimin’s rhythm and stands by as they hand down the bundle of food, wrapped in netting that they only trust him enough to hand out because Jimin knows where and how to return it to a hook. By now they understand that he wants privacy while he eats, so Taehyung almost understands how they might not notice the way Jimin only mimes it, in between shredding pieces to drift away or bury or feed to unsuspecting fish.

Most of what Taehyung remembers of his first few months here are a blur. He remembers the vet, and the endless parade of faces, and a quarantine in a pool just barely twice as long as he was. He remembers Jeongguk sitting by the edge of that pool and handing him down food every time he stopped, and talking quietly. He remembers being desperate enough to reach up, and brush Jeongguk’s fingers, and take small parts of his language just so he could understand.

Jimin is different. Jimin doesn’t have any reason to trust humans, not like Taehyung does. They’d ripped Jimin from his home; they’d dragged Taehyung bleeding from the ocean, and saved his life.

As much as he hates to admit it, they’d saved his life.

Taehyung holds that thought close, as the humans wind down for the evening. More often than not the deck is close to empty at night, only occasionally disrupted for medical or transport reasons, and it’s always a relief to watch as most of the humans leave, saying their goodbyes as they go.

Most nights, Jeongguk takes this first night shift. He’s the only one who really talks to Taehyung, or Taehyung only lets him be, and he always sneaks in food for them from what he calls the break room fridge, though Taehyung can really only guess at what that means. It’s a good routine to have; it’s something consistent to look forward to.

Tonight, Jeongguk waves his supervisor goodnight, and crouches down to finish his evening’s work on weaving Kkobugi a new stretcher.

There’s usually a window of a couple minutes, in between the shift ending and whatever work Jeongguk needs to finish, so Taehyung doesn’t bother sticking around. He takes a loop, peers at Jimin sleeping half-nestled in the sand, and takes another. The largest ray, Lima, swims part of that one with him. She’s larger across than his arm span, her spots as large as his eyes, but she’s also sweetly gentle, and loves to be stroked. She darts off quickly after Taehyung indulges her, but he’s close enough to Jimin’s nest to not mind swimming alone.

Jimin isn’t awake. It’s not common that Taehyung has to wake him up for Jeongguk’s visit, and it tugs worry into his chest, but—it isn’t as rare as it used to be. He takes another lap, and pokes his head up to watch Jeongguk welcome Namjoon onto the deck.

Namjoon sees Taehyung’s head, where he’s half-out of the water, and waves. Taehyung blinks, and ducks back down, and follows the familiar path back down to Jimin.

He’s asleep. For a moment Taehyung watches the shifting of his gills, the stillness of his chest, the curl of his fingers around his necklace. For a moment, he looks peaceful, and Taehyung almost regrets having to wake him from what seems to be such a deep rest.

And then he reaches out, regret overpowered by the need to watch Jimin eat, and touches his shoulder gently. And Jimin doesn’t move, but for the sway of his body in the water, and Taehyung feels that fear in his chest expand, and tighten something inside him. Another touch, and Jimin doesn’t so much as twitch his eyes under their lids.

“Jimin,” Taehyung says. Loud enough that he should hear it, loud enough that his eyes should snap open. He’s not difficult to wake, neither of them are, because the ocean is always ready to change everything in a single moment.

This time, the touch to his shoulder is more of a shove. Taehyung crowds in close, hands fluttering useless by Jimin’s face. His ribs—he’s so thin, it’s terrifying to look at him and the fragile way his skin fits tight over his bones, and realize that he could have stopped it. Jimin isn’t responding, and his eye rolls blankly when Taehyung gets desperate enough to peel back a lid, and there’s panic crushing Taehyung’s chest so tight and painful that it feels like he’s forgotten how to breathe.

Taehyung is well used to the weight of Jimin on his back, but it’s never been like this. Jimin is deadweight, floating with the barely-there current and drifting aimlessly while Taehyung tugs him up, and fits Jimin’s arms around his neck, and works his tail as hard as he knows how to propel them to the surface.

For a moment, when they break the surface, Jeongguk and Namjoon are smiling. They’re barely looking at each other, but pressed close enough that their legs touch, and the flush of blood is high on Jeongguk’s cheeks in a way that Taehyung knows means that he’s embarrassed. Their smiles grow when they see Taehyung, and then—they see Jimin, draped lifeless over him, and happiness gives way to shock.

Taehyung swims closer. He’d put his hands on the dock if it didn’t mean that Jimin would fall, would push himself up to try to get them to understand the urgency.

Jimin isn’t waking up, and there’s nothing Taehyung can do.

Except—the humans aren’t moving. They’re staring, wide-eyed, mouths open. Jimin’s head rolls lifelessly, and Taehyung slips down enough to keep his gills in the water, and they aren’t doing anything.

There’s one thing Taehyung promised himself he wouldn’t do. One thing, to remind himself where he came from, and where he hopes so desperately to go back to. He understands the humans because it’s necessary, and has almost befriended a few because he thinks if he didn’t he might go crazy, trapped and alone in this minuscule prison. He understands the humans, and interacts with them, but he doesn’t speak to them. He doesn’t trust them with what they’d do if they knew he could.

But Jimin isn’t waking up, and neither Jeongguk nor Namjoon have moved. He doesn’t have any other choice.

“Help him,” Taehyung says, in a human language he’s only ever heard spoken, and the words tear out of his throat as rough as sand.

Jeongguk’s whole face contorts in shock. It hits him physically, and for a split second he goes still enough to make Taehyung regret speaking already. Namjoon’s eyes have never been wider; neither of them have ever looked at him this way, fear and surprise and confusion mixing in ways Taehyung has learned to read on them both.

And then Jeongguk scrambles up, and fumbles for the phone in his pocket, and starts speaking so quickly and gesturing so rapidly that Taehyung struggles to keep up. Namjoon wipes his hands off on his aquarium sweatshirt and stands as well, and Jeongguk points them both toward the entrance to the holding pool even as he presses his phone between his shoulder and his ear and speaks words Taehyung is too worked up to try and understand.

By the time Namjoon slides the gate open, Taehyung’s breaths are coming quick and desperate. Jimin is terribly still, and he doesn’t do more than twitch uncomfortably when Taehyung rolls him off his back, and it feels like torture to move away when Jeongguk splashes into the pool fully clothed and presses his fingers to a pulse point at Jimin’s wrist.

“The vet is coming,” he says, voice strained as he treads water. “Hold him up for me.”

Taehyung blinks once, at being spoken to like a person instead of a particularly smart pet, and then ducks under Jimin’s body to press against him, wrapping arms careful around his waist. He angles them so that he can stick his face out of the water, Jimin’s hair pressed against his chin, and listens to Jeongguk count Jimin’s heartbeats.

“What happened?” Jeongguk asks, breathy and low. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

Taehyung clenches his teeth so hard that his jaw aches. Jeongguk knows, now, and so does Namjoon, and that means that sooner or later everyone else will know too. He’s been around humans long enough to be afraid of what they do to things they don’t understand, and he knows how deeply some of them are so invested in feeling like they’re smarter than the animals they care for.

But—this is Jimin. This is Jimin with his lips pursed as he sleeps, his hands now drifting aimlessly by his sides, his ribs pressed painfully into the taut stretch of his skin.

“He hasn’t been eating,” Taehyung says, very quietly. “He was scared of the new medicine. I tried to help him.”

He hadn’t tried enough. He hadn’t paid enough attention during those first crucial days, when he was too busy wallowing and holding onto anger to watch Jimin like he should have been.

Jeongguk makes a worried sound in his throat, and looks up at the deck where Namjoon is watching them and glancing back to the door every handful of seconds. There’s no sign of the vet, but it opens once to let through a gaggle of the few humans allowed to operate the sling. Taehyung keeps his lips pressed tight together, breathing through his nose when he has to, and refuses to answer any more of Jeongguk’s questions.

Finally, finally, the veterinarian arrives. There are two of them usually, and this one is the older of the pair; her hair is mostly gray, and tied back in a neat tail that dangles over her shoulder as she leans down toward them. Compared to the commotion of the sling being prepared, commands and affirmations barked across the deck, she seems remarkably composed. Taehyung almost has to admire it, but for the way he can feel his hands trembling where they’re pressed along the scattered scales and soft skin of Jimin’s lower stomach.

“Pulse?” She asks, brusque. Jeongguk replies, and a technician scrawls down the number. “How are you getting V to hold him like this?”

Jeongguk hesitates, just long enough that everyone watching notices. He shrugs, maybe, or perhaps just treads water more aggressively. Taehyung watches him, eyes narrowed, and Jeongguk doesn’t meet his gaze.

“He carried Little Red up to us, when he knew something was wrong. I think he’s just picking up on my cues, and he didn’t want to let go in the first place.”

The doctor’s lips thin out into a flat line.

“Well. He’s going to have to.”

The stretcher is being lowered. Taehyung feels the disruption of it, hears the whir of machinery under the constant voices. Jeongguk’s hand brushes his shoulder, and Taehyung flinches back, and he tightens his grip on Jimin’s waist, and he closes his eyes to pretend that he has any power here. If he fights, they’ll sedate him. If he drags Jimin back down, they’ll send divers to take him away.

“V-yah,” Jeongguk says, and shoves against every resolve Taehyung has made to never respond to the name they gave him. “Come on. We have to let Doctor Ahn look at him, okay?”

Taehyung shakes his head, just barely. He knows it’s right, he knows that the humans can help Jimin more than he can, but—he doesn’t want to be here alone anymore. He doesn’t want to have to live with knowing that if they take Jimin now, he might never come back. He doesn’t want to do it, but Taehyung doesn’t have a choice. He presses everything he’s feeling into Jimin’s chest, just between his ribs, and feels a barely-there shift. And then he lets go.

Jimin doesn’t move, or open his eyes, but he makes a high, lilting sound in the back of his throat. It could be nothing, or it could be everything, and Taehyung clings onto it like he’d clung to the fishing net that dragged him bloody and dying out of the water, just as he’d resigned himself to drown.

༄

They do most of Jimin’s medical work in the pop-up pool next to the tank. It means that Taehyung could watch if he wanted, but as soon as the crowd around Jimin gets too thick, Taehyung ducks away. He doesn’t want to watch them stick him with needles for blood tests, doesn’t want to watch them hold Jimin still and lifeless as they stick a tube down his throat to help him breathe.

The humans are doing their best, Taehyung knows, but their best always disgusts him.

In the ocean, Taehyung’s best had been singing to his pod as he bled out, the shark’s carcass sinking more quickly than his own. Everyone else had been too far to help, too far to know, too far to touch, and so Taehyung gathered the last scraps of his breath and sang for them. A dying song, a mourning song.

His best had been seeing the boat, the empty drag of its nets, and telling his family humans.

If they hadn’t told him to, Taehyung wouldn’t have tried to live. He was bleeding so much, the clouds of it choking and heavy around him, and he could almost feel the teeth of whatever it might attract tearing into him already. But—the boat was already close, and all he had to do was kick his tail once, twice, to force his head to break the surface.

He doesn’t remember much, after that. Remembers shouting, and the net, and the sway of the boat as it adjusted to his weight. Human hands on him, at once terrifying and reassuring.

They pass down stories, through mers and the whales themselves. Many humans hurt, and many boats kill, but there are the few that rescue and help and heal. It was only luck, Taehyung thinks, that the humans who’d dragged him in had been the kind uninterested in slitting his throat and selling his parts.

If Jimin hadn’t been rescued from the smugglers—Taehyung can’t bear the thought. He pushes himself faster, farther down, until his stomach scrapes sand and his chest feels tight from too long spent holding his breath. Fish dive out of his way, scattered anxious and glittering, as Taehyung rolls in the circles he’s seen Jimin twisting through over and over again. Taehyung’s are slower, and they aren’t comforting. They only make him dizzy, and so he lurches back up to breathe.

Instead of swimming back down, Taehyung lingers. He presses his head against the wall and listens to the commotion, the beep and whir of machinery, the constant back and forth of voices. There’s someone breathing, close. Sitting on the dock, gently dripping over the edge.

“Hey,” Jeongguk says, and Taehyung very carefully doesn’t look. He keeps his eyes closed, his hands flat against the wall, his cheeks burning with upset. “Can you look at me?”

Taehyung feels his whole face screwing up. He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to, he wants to dive down and never look at Jeongguk again, and he wants to slam himself against the acrylic windows over and over until he shatters every bone in his body. He doesn’t know what to do with all of the discomfort lingering everywhere inside of him, his stomach and his chest and his spine. He hates, more than anything, how stupid he feels for trusting anyone but himself.

“Please?” Jeongguk’s voice is so soft. Despite everything, Taehyung still wants to trust him, because he’s so tired of being alone. He’s so tired of having to hold himself back at every moment, except with Jimin, and he’s so tired of having to live together with him in misery.

So he looks. He peels his eyes open, and turns around slowly, and takes in the gentle drip of Jeongguk’s pants. The towel wrapped around his shoulders, the shoes discarded next to him, the flex and wiggle of the things at the end of his feet called toes. He looks—cold, Taehyung identifies first, and then sad. Maybe anxious, or concerned.

“Hey,” Jeongguk says. “V-yah.”

“That’s not my name,” Taehyung tells him, after four terrible years.

Jeongguk blinks. He almost smiles, Taehyung thinks, but not at the actual thought. More of a giddy thing, like he hadn’t actually expected Taehyung to speak, like maybe he thought he’d imagined it in the panic.

“Okay.” Jeongguk breathes. “I’m sorry. Can I ask what it is, then?”

Taehyung furrows his brow. His tail twitches thoughtlessly, enough to propel him forward, to give him the familiar momentum to rear up, to balance himself on his forearms at the end of the dock, putting his face just a few handspans away from Jeongguk’s. This close, he lets himself look, at Jeongguk’s wide eyes and earnest brow and curious mouth.

“No,” Taehyung decides, and ignores the way Jeongguk’s expression falls, just a fraction. “Not yet.”

Maybe later, he thinks. Maybe when they aren’t a breath away from being listened in on, and only Jimin’s condition is keeping anyone else from paying attention to the two of them in their routine spot. And Jeongguk seems to catch the nuance, because he brightens again. There’s still that shadow of worry, though, that Taehyung remembers when Jeongguk’s eyes flicker back over to the medical pool.

“They sent me to check on you.” Jeongguk sounds almost stilted, a little unused to speaking to Taehyung with the expectation that they’ll be having a conversation, instead of a one-sided dialogue supplemented with Taehyung’s sweetest facial expressions. It might be that, too, throwing him off; the way that Taehyung is no longer pretending to barely understand.

“I’m fine,” Taehyung says, and ignores that it tastes like a lie. It’s such a human thing, to lie. “He’s sick.”

“Right,” Jeongguk agrees. An awkward pause. He clears his throat. “So—um. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. So far, all they have to really work on is low blood sugar, and obviously the weight loss. But it would be really helpful if I could tell them what you told me.”

Taehyung scowls. It’s almost enough to make him shove off from the dock and find a whale shark to swim the rest of the night swimming beside, because at least they don’t ask him impossible questions. They don’t give him decisions he doesn’t know how to make, with consequences he doesn’t think even Jeongguk could possibly understand.

But—he thinks of Jimin, picking scared at a pile of fish. Jimin, breathing lethargic against his back. Jimin, who’s supposed to go with him back home.

Slowly, agonizingly, Taehyung nods. He regrets it almost as soon as he’s finished, when Jeongguk’s face washes stark with relief and gratitude, but he can’t take it back. It will help Jimin, he rationalizes, and hates the world for forcing him to give up this one last thing, this one piece of himself away from the human urge to take and study and flay wide open for thousands of their species to walk past and ogle every day.

“Thank you,” Jeongguk says, and now he sounds so exhausted that Taehyung regrets staying under for so long. His teeth are chattering, now; the towel looks soaked through.

But he has what he wants, so Taehyung pushes himself off the dock. He thinks about diving deep, but—above him, Jeongguk stands. Makes his way over to the crowd, and so Taehyung follows him through the gate that opens at his approach to let him into the holding pool, quickly enough to poke his head out to hear the conversation.

"—hasn’t been eating,” Jeongguk is saying to the vet. The hand not clutching the towel gestures down at the pool Taehyung can’t see into, and wouldn’t want to if he could. “He detected the medication in it, and started skipping meals. It must have been almost a week, now.”

“And how do you know?” Doctor Ahn says, almost a snarl. The intensity of it widens Jeongguk’s eyes, and for a moment he looks over toward Taehyung, like he’s trying to apologize.

“I didn’t,” he says, placating. Swallows hard enough that Taehyung can see it in his throat. “Not until V told me.”

The crowd of humans goes very quiet. Taehyung sees Namjoon at the back of it, his face pinched and upset, but the rest of them look anywhere from uncomfortable to incredulous.

“I’m sorry,” Doctor Ahn says, her voice so sharp that it cuts even with how quietly she’s speaking. “You didn’t just tell me that V spoke to you.”

Jeongguk flushes so red that Taehyung winces in sympathy. A few humans have turned to look at him, now, instead of Jeongguk; he lowers himself until his mouth is submerged, his breaths coming slow and even through his nose.

“He did.” Jeongguk sounds almost apologetic, layering on formalities and politeness like protection. “Three times. Namjoon-ssi heard him as well.”

When a skeptical eyebrow arches in his direction, Namjoon blanches. But he agrees, and Doctor Ahn’s incredulity deepens into something more like displeasure, and as a whole the party turns to Taehyung, watching as he drifts closer and closer toward the edge. He closes his eyes like that might stop them, and dips down again just to hear the shifting of water, the blur of everything else as he submerges. But he can’t stay down here forever, and Jimin won’t stay stable for long unless they know how to treat him, and so he stays only for a moment.

Taehyung resurfaces, and Doctor Ahn is looking at him. She’s crouched down, her face deeply skeptical, her lips pursed.

“Well?” She asks, and it’s so patronizing that Taehyung feels his lip curl back on instinct. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” he spits, and this time he gets to enjoy the shock, the horror, the confusion that bursts across the face of each human in earshot, as obvious as a jet of squid ink. The satisfaction only lasts for a moment, no match for the crush of disappointment and the sting of misery, both bubbling too close to the surface to let the moment feel very good at all.

And before anyone else can ask him anything, before he can watch whatever might come up to replace the shock, Taehyung dives. He fits himself through the gate as soon as it opens far enough, and swims faster than he can ever remember feeling the urge to here, trying as hard as he can to get away even though he knows from years of swimming the same circles that there isn’t anywhere for him to go.

For the rest of the night, Taehyung swims constant laps, too keyed up to sleep and too terrified to try. He sticks close to the whale sharks, and avoids Jimin’s nest. When he surfaces to breathe, he stays in the middle of the tank, and never once glances back toward the humans lingering on the deck.

༄

Jimin wakes up blurry. He feels sore all over, aching and too cold and shivering. When he breathes, there’s an awful scrape against his throat like he’s spent hours and hours screaming; when he moves, something tugs sharp and insistent in the crook of his arm.

There are voices coming from above him. Hands reaching out, steadying, all of them too small to be who Jimin really wants. The memory of a song, and a smile, and dark hair drifting around the two of them to block out everyone who might be watching. He lets himself be held anyway, because some part of him remembers that he’s supposed to trust these hands, and feels sick at the unnatural stillness of the water, and the silence echoing under the human voices, and the pain wracking every part of him that he doesn’t remember ever being gone.

It doesn’t make sense. Jimin knows that he must have been free, once. He’s sure that he lived without this awful ache everywhere, he’s sure that he used to swim fast and sure and strong, but it all feels as far away as the moon.

He doesn’t have to worry for long, because he drifts deeper and deeper into darkness with every passing moment, but the thought is coherent enough that it lingers. Enough that Jimin is still thinking it when he wakes up again, eyes peeling open in the stagnant water, to see the too-familiar face of the veterinarian above him.

She says something, and squints down at him like she’s suspicious. Jimin blinks, scowls on instinct, winces at the way his throat still hurts when he breathes. A moment passes, and she seems to relax; when she gestures at another human, her face has straightened back out into professionalism.

Jimin stops caring about her the moment Jeongguk stands above him. He’s almost smiling, the expression ruined by the furrow of worry in his brow, but he looks pleased enough when Jimin tries to reach up despite the twinge in the crook of one of his elbows. He takes Jimin’s hand, and squeezes gently, and Jimin shudders at the contact and the reminder that—these humans don’t speak like Taehyung, and they don’t speak like Jimin, and he only understands a handful of words in their language.

“Hey,” Jeongguk says, warbling through the scant amount of water between Jimin and the surface of the pool. It’s one of the few words he knows, a casual greeting, one Jeongguk uses almost every night. “Hey, Little Red.”

Jimin wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t like the name, and doesn’t like that they’d assigned it to him, and at the same time can’t imagine his real name coming out of a human’s mouth.

Jeongguk says a few more things, and Jimin closes his eyes. He doesn’t care about the words; he just likes the sound of it, the reassurance of someone familiar and friendly, who Jimin cares about enough at least to keep his claws out of the way as Jeongguk clings to his hand. Jeongguk pauses, like he expects Jimin to respond, and then squeezes again.

He’s so tired. Jimin blinks up at him, eyes half-shut to stave off the light, and sighs.

There’s a moment where he’s almost ready to resign himself to a life of this. There’s a moment where Jimin wants so badly to give up, to let himself slip away and let himself swim lifeless and dumb in this aquarium for the rest of his life, like any other fish. There’s a moment where he feels awful enough to think that it might even be better. There’s a moment—and then Jeongguk beckons with one hand, and there’s the sound of machinery whirring, and Jimin remembers Taehyung.

Taehyung is waiting for him. Someday, the ocean is waiting for him, and if he stops believing that he thinks he might die in every way that matters.

The stretcher lowers into the water. Jimin wriggles in voluntarily, and looks up at the satisfied pride on Jeongguk’s face, and keeps a tight hold on his hand, just to feel better. Even as he holds his breath, feels the awful and alien touch of air everywhere around him, he clings to Jeongguk like that might keep him safe.

In some ways, maybe it does. Jeongguk only lets go when Jimin is too far down for him to follow, and by then Jimin can feel the water again. By then, he’s looking forward to stretching himself out despite the soreness, and looking forward to finding Taehyung more than that.

The holding pool is almost empty, and Jimin enjoys the luxury of swimming for a short few moments before the pain sets in. He’s never that stagnant for that long in the ocean; he doesn’t know how long he’s been stuck on the deck, but the lights are dim enough that it must be night. It’s been a day, or more, and his body lets him know with a soreness that stretches through every muscle in his torso, in his tail, in his neck.

But Jimin reaches the closed gate, and wraps his hands around the bars, and waits for Taehyung to come. He waits, and waits, and waits long enough that his eyes start to ache from refusing sleep.

Taehyung doesn’t come. Jimin watches two of the whale sharks swim past, and hundreds of other fish, and even the turtle that’s stubbornly trying her best to grow on him, but there’s no glimpse of Taehyung. Panic is the first thing to well up in his chest, a bubble trying to burst, and Jimin shoves down on it as hard as he can.

“Please,” he clicks out into the water, too unsettled to care about the humans who might notice. And then again—please, over and over until he’s sure that every creature in the territory must have heard him.

And it pays off. Jimin counts his heartbeats in his chest until he sees a shape, blurry with the light, getting closer, and closer, until Jimin can make out dark hair and pale skin and a dark, bulky tail pushing him faster than Jimin has ever seen.

“Tae,” Jimin gasps, and presses close even as Taehyung almost hits the gate head-on, his hands wrapping around the same bars as Jimin’s so that their fingers overlap, until Jimin has the presence of mind to unclench his fists and reach out to grab Taehyung’s forearms instead. His claws dig in, hard enough to leave indentations, and Taehyung makes a soft noise at the sting. Jimin looks down, and searches for the bruise on his neck from Jimin’s teeth, and tries to guess how long it’s been by how much it seems to have faded.

There’s a moment where Taehyung is very quiet. He doesn’t respond to the relief Jimin is pushing into him I missed you almost ridiculous since he’s been unconscious for most of their parting, and Jimin almost draws back when he sees how hard Taehyung is biting his lip.

“What’s wrong?” He dares to ask, soft throat noises in the barely-there space between them. Taehyung looks away, and his hands flex against Jimin’s arms. His throat bobs, anxiety clear even though he isn’t speaking, isn’t sharing anything through the touch like Jimin wants him to. Like Jimin needs him to, almost, after the awful isolation of the medical pool.

Finally, finally, Taehyung blinks. He presses his lips together, unhappy, and gives Jimin a bundle of tightly anxious memory. His own sleeping face, and dead weight around his neck, and—speaking. To Jeongguk and Namjoon and the doctor, speaking to the humans to get Jimin the help he needed. And the day following that, swimming as unreachable as he could manage, picking at the broadcast feed to avoid having to interact with anyone who might prod him to talk. Not knowing that Jimin was coming back, not knowing that Jimin was alive.

If Jimin could, he would tear out the gate and wrap himself around Taehyung and never let him go.

What next, Taehyung is wondering, as they press as close as they can through the bars. What next, what will they do to me, will we ever be safe here again?

Jimin accepts the anxiety, welcomes it into his skin, tries his best to give Taehyung a fraction of the clarity he’s offered Jimin dozens of times by now. He starts with the reef, the shark that waited for him each day for its affection, the familiar flashes of brightly-colored fish, the almost-peaceful routines of tides and seasons and ages.

Together, Jimin promises him, because he can’t promise anything else. We’ll do it all together.

༄

Jimin hates the holding pool. He hates it even as he swims tight laps around the perimeter, trying to never stay in one place for too long, trying to remind his body that he’s alive. The ocean should never be still, and so he never should be either.

He has to stop, eventually. It’s only when he’s exhausted his meager reserves of stamina that Jimin stops by the gate, and clicks out for Taehyung.

Now, Taehyung always comes quickly. They don’t have much to do, and Jimin misses swimming with him more than anything else, but being close to him is worlds better than curling up in a corner here and hoping that the humans don’t try to take him out again, or try to coax him up for anything but clean, untainted food.

It had taken Jeongguk sucking the flesh out of a mollusk himself for Jimin to take the food they offered him. None of it is tainted, now, the chemical gone, but Jimin still resents that he couldn’t finish the half-portion they gave him in the middle of the day. He resents that they watched him eat it, with nowhere to hide in the holding pool, and that the vet jotted down notes and Jeongguk’s supervisor spoke in hushed tones to him and a few other humans who feed Jimin and Taehyung the most regularly.

It’s one of the other humans who brings Jimin his food that night. There’s a crowd behind her, but none of them approach as Jimin takes the bundle and rifles through it, feeling the burn of shame in his cheeks as she watches him. They’ve thrown in an oyster, and Jimin eats it first, unwilling to risk giving it up because he’s overestimated his appetite, and picks his way slowly through the rest.

The only other occupant of the pool—a spotted ray as wide across as Jimin’s outstretched arms, begs politely from a distance. The human smiles, when Jimin tosses it the last half of a herring, and leaves the net empty.

When he surfaces, briefly, to toss the net onto the deck, Jeongguk is waiting for him. On his stomach, hand waving to catch Jimin’s attention, face a little red from the strain. Jimin almost laughs, before he sees the small group of people standing behind him, waiting as Jeongguk waves him over and calls words Jimin doesn’t understand.

It used to not bother him. Now that the humans expect to be listened to, Jimin is almost more frightened than before. He doesn’t know these words, doesn’t know more than a handful at all, and the way Jeongguk is speaking to him is frightening. Jimin doesn’t want to talk to them, and he doesn’t want them to think that he will. He wants Taehyung. He shies away on instinct, even though Jeongguk’s face falls when he moves.

For a moment, the humans converse. Jeongguk is arguing something, maybe; his hands are gesturing broadly, where he’s sitting back up, and he’s pointing out at the larger territory. Jimin catches the shape of the name—V, Jeongguk’s insistence making him over-pronounce—and the doctor frowns.

She nods eventually, though. And then she turns to Jimin, lingering just underneath the surface, and raises an eyebrow as if to say—well, go ahead.

Jimin blinks. He doesn’t know what they want from him. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t know how to communicate that to them, until he hears the scrape of the gate opening behind him. The heavy weight of it, sliding against concrete, and the promise of freedom.

Jeongguk throws up both of his hands when he sees Jimin about to bolt. He calls something, says V again, points between himself and the territory waiting for him. The movement of the motion is clear, and his anxiety is even clearer. They don’t want Jimin to leave, to go out into the territory where they can’t monitor him without sending down divers and cameras to disrupt his nest by the rock that hides him from every viewing angle.

They want him to call Taehyung over. They know that he speaks their language better than Jimin could ever hope to.

Jimin doesn’t want to talk to them, but—he trusts Jeongguk. He misses holding Taehyung. He doesn’t know what they’ll do to him if he refuses.

“Taehyung,” he clicks, sending it as far into the territory as he can. Some of the humans make impressed noises; one starts scrawling something down onto a pad of paper.

It doesn’t take Taehyung long to join them. He eases slowly into the holding pool, before reaching Jimin and taking his hand. He looks scared, more scared than Jimin has ever seen him, as he looks up at Jeongguk through the quiet ripples breaking the surface.

What do they want? He asks, and all Jimin can give him is a vague sense of confusion. Taehyung can rarely translate things from his memories, since Jimin doesn’t understand what he’s hearing enough to hold onto the pattern of sounds. There had been a point where Jimin wanted to know what his first captors had been saying about him, as he choked in stagnant water; now, he thinks he was better off not understanding in the first place.

After what feels like an age, Taehyung sticks his head out of the water.

Jeongguk starts talking immediately. There’s something in his hand, now, too small and fragile for Jimin to get a good look at before Taehyung tugs him forward, interested or at least curious enough that he reaches out to take whatever it is from Jeongguk’s hand. He gives Jimin a summary of the translation: that they think these might help his head, with the brightness of the lights.

Taehyung unfolds his hand, and shows Jimin the thing in his palm. Glasses, Taehyung tells him, and frowns a little. The lenses are dark, not like the ones Namjoon usually wears. He sticks his head up again, asks something low and rough, and then ducks back down to amend his translation to sunglasses. It comes with confusion, but also a tint of curiosity. Jimin takes the sunglasses, and fiddles with the thin sticks until they unfold on hinges from the tinted glass circles. They’re a comfortable size, much larger than anything a human could wear, and Jimin wonders idly why they exist, and how the humans found them.

With a nudge from Taehyung, he slides them onto his face. They don’t quite sit still, the movement of the water making the fit just barely precarious, but—

Jimin blinks. The world is dark. The world is dark, twice again as dim as the lights go at night, and it’s not enough that his headache abates immediately but it’s such a shock that Jimin loses his concentration and falls back in the water just barely, until Taehyung catches him with a bracing hand against his wrist.

Well? Taehyung asks, the curiosity rising. And Jimin shows him, the tint of the glasses almost as good as darkness. He can still see, and his eyes have stopped straining, and for the first time he can’t feel anything but gratitude to these humans, even if they’d created the problem to be fixed in the first place. He gets an image back from Taehyung: himself, blinking around, eyes wide and lips parted and face altered strangely by the presence of the glasses, though not in a way Jimin finds completely repulsive.

For the first time, Jimin is the one to pull them both to the surface. He keeps his gills in, but sticks his head out far enough that the humans can see most of his face, and most of them burst into pleased or surprised sounds, lilting chatter that sounds pleased.

Tell them thank you, Jimin pushes at Taehyung. And Taehyung does, and Jeongguk beams, and he says something long and complicated that makes Taehyung’s brow furrow, his fingers tangling tight with Jimin as he does his best to keep up with what’s being said. Jimin gets glimpses of it—how it had been someone else’s idea, and they’d asked visitors for input on the style through something called the internet, and partnered with people who produce glasses to get them made in a custom size.

Fashion, Jeongguk says, like it’s something humans are immensely proud of. None of that makes any sense to Jimin, and he only gets annoyed when he tries, so he settles for a shrug as he pushes the glasses farther into his face.

“Oh!” Jeongguk exclaims, and holds his hand out.

Jimin hesitates for a moment, before handing them back to him. He watches closely, afraid that they’ll be taken away now that he’s blinking in the light to realize how awful it really is, how impossible it’s been to feel safe or sleep well when it’s either as bright as an ocean day or several times brighter for close to fifty days. But all Jeongguk does is bend the sticks at the end slightly, and when he hands them back the fit is better, and they don’t threaten to fall off of Jimin’s face when he swims.

It’s small, Jimin knows. One small dignity in a place where no such thing exists. It’s small, and it feels more important than it should, but—

Jimin sleeps well, that night, in the darkness. He wraps it around himself like a blanket of woven seagrass, and lets himself breathe.

༄

The next day, when humans start showing up to gawk at them through the windows, Jimin feels inexplicably shy. He hides behind Taehyung, when he can; whenever he emerges, the humans point and smile and aim their cameras at him in a way that feels infinitely more patronizing than it used to. Jimin wants to hate the glasses badly, but even with the ridicule it’s the least painful day he’s had in so long that it exhausts him to think about.

Jimin catches his reflection in the window, a few times, and how human he looks always startles him.

You’re feeling better, Taehyung confirms with him, as they swim. It comes with satisfaction, with relief, with affection; Jimin can feel it through where they’re pressed together, his chin hooked over Taehyung’s shoulder because he still can’t swim as far or as quickly as he wants to. He’s sick of having to be carried around like a child, but it’s a small price to pay for the freedom of the territory, since the humans had let him out of the holding pool after making sure he ate everything he was supposed to.

“Mm,” Jimin confirms. His stomach feels uncomfortably full, and he itches with fear at the sensation, but having Taehyung close helps. Having his headaches eased helps, just enough that he can relish in it even with the spotlight of unwanted attention.

Taehyung rolls. Jimin floats above him, their tails pressed together as they drift vaguely down, and Taehyung beams like it’s the only affirmation he’s ever wanted to hear. Like Jimin feeling better, even marginally, was worth everything he went through to get him that help. The smile tugs at something in Jimin’s stomach, and his fingers drift from Taehyung’s shoulder to the fading bruise on his neck. He presses the darkest parts, two patches where his incisors felt so close to breaking skin, and Taehyung shudders.

Mine, Jimin reminds him, deeply pleased. Taehyung nods, and reaches up to keep Jimin’s hand steady.

They’re far enough from most of the windows that Jimin feels safe with this. He doesn’t want to be seen, with Taehyung gone loose and pliant as he accepts Jimin’s claim, with his own face twisted into an expression he can barely feel.

In the reef, Jimin had played courtship with a few others before. Nothing that lasted beyond a season, nothing that didn’t fall away when borders and alliances broke or shifted, but he’s no stranger to the patterns of this, or the mechanics. He doesn’t know Taehyung’s habits, his customs, his experience, but—Jimin is willing to learn.

“Not here,” he says, quiet. His only condition.

Taehyung nods, and clings tighter to Jimin’s fingers. His eyes are wide, dark; his lip, when it springs free of his teeth, is a swollen-looking red.

Jimin’s kind doesn’t kiss, like he’s seen humans do so many times that he’d finally stooped to asking about it. But if Taehyung does—

He shakes the image from his head. He can tell it’s too late, from the way Taehyung’s eyes have narrowed, from the smile that tugs up at the corner of his mouth. Jimin feels his face warm, and he squirms uncomfortably against Taehyung’s grip on his hand, and Taehyung doesn’t let him go. There’s amusement in the touch, and fondness, and happiness that settles on top of the constant ache of captivity like a loosely wrapped bandage.

Mean, Taehyung scolds him, layered with the sight of Jimin above him, the tease of the glimpses of his thoughts, the brief indulgence Jimin had unconsciously allowed. And Jimin wants to argue, but there’s hardly a point when all Taehyung does is pull him close again, and keep him steady on their way back to Jimin’s nest. Jimin is napping less often, now, but he’s used to the rhythm of it now; he sleeps when he wants to, and wakes when he can, and enjoys how much less it hurts him now.

He has to swim back into the holding pool to eat, that evening, but they let him out again after. Jeongguk waits for them on the dock, and Taehyung gets almost close enough for him to touch, and Jimin holds on to his wrist as the two of them linger farther away than they ever have before, as Taehyung listens to whatever it is that Jeongguk has to say.

Will it ever be the same? Jimin asks, in a way that means everything but mostly just Jeongguk, talking idly and handing them morsels of human food. Taehyung shrugs, a human thing, and frowns at how naturally the action had seemed to come.

They aren’t human. Jimin knows from Taehyung’s memories that the humans don’t treat them like they are even now, that the veterinarians and the scientists and the businesspeople are arguing day in and day out about what to do with them, now that they’ve reached some arbitrary level of intelligence. He knows that they’ve tried to ask Taehyung questions about all species of mer, about their communities or societies or hierarchies.

Taehyung doesn’t answer. Taehyung doesn’t speak to anyone except Jeongguk, and once Doctor Ahn, and Jimin knows that so much is changing that he doesn’t know enough about humans to even begin to understand.

But he misses those minutes caught with Jeongguk, listening to words he doesn’t know and being fed things he’s never gotten the chance to taste. He misses feeling like they have a friend among the humans, even in only the most superficial of ways. Jimin doesn’t want to push, but—he trusts Jeongguk because Taehyung had taught him to, and it hurts to follow his lead when he wants to cut Jeongguk off.

Sorry, Taehyung gives back, low and mournful. He hasn’t sung since he spoke; Jimin doesn’t dare ask why.

Helplessness resonates between them. Jimin hates feeling it, after so long spent learning his family and his shoal and his territory as best he could, to be the leader they deserved. In the ocean, a thousand times more unpredictable than the aquarium, Jimin was safer than he’s ever felt here.

“I’m thinking,” Taehyung says, halfway through a slow lap of the territory. His voice sounds more comfortable with Jimin’s words than with human ones, but Jimin still expects a song every time he opens his mouth. And Taehyung doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t give Jimin any more than a hint of consideration, of apprehension, but he trusts that.

The memory of Jeongguk’s face falling as they kept their distance lingers. Jimin sleeps in his own nest, that night, and tries to forget.

༄

The next night, Taehyung drags himself up on the dock before Jeongguk has time to wonder. The wood digging into his stomach is uncomfortable, will leave a red indent in the softness there to make Jimin frown and try to poke it away, but it’s a good weight against the anxiety thrashing at the back of Taehyung’s throat.

“Hi,” Jeongguk says, after he finishes tripping over his own voice. His eyes are wide, his lips in a strange shape that Taehyung can’t quite pin down. “Um—hi.”

Taehyung blinks. He thinks—the worst part of all of this is how much humans talk. They do it all the time, and they expect so many words. Taehyung only knows a handful of phrases in Jimin’s tongue because he needs so few of them, and the ways he speaks to his pod and their whales are so different than the way humans give things meaning. A hundred words could mean so little, to a human, where Taehyung is used to communication that shifts with pitch and distance and mood. For whales, no two sounds are ever the same, but the meanings are always clear.

But Jeongguk expects a response to his greeting, so Taehyung parrots it back to him, and it settles something in Jeongguk’s joints. He relaxes, his posture losing some of its stiffness, and cracks open the container at his side.

“I brought you churros,” Jeongguk offers. Taehyung doesn’t know what that means, but he peers into the box and doesn’t immediately hate what he sees. “I bought them this morning so they aren’t warm, but they’re still good. “It’s just fried dough with sugar and some other stuff. I think you’ll like it, but they get soggy really easily.”

Not for underwater eating, Taehyung understands from that, and so tugs Jimin up beside him. He wipes his hand off on Jeongguk’s pant leg, taking the moment to curiously grope at the ankle beneath, and snatches one of the churros while Jeongguk is busy yelping and sputtering at the touch. Taehyung taps Jimin’s neck and pops half the churro into his mouth, when he surfaces just briefly enough to hold it open, and then stuffs the remaining half into his own cheek. The sugar is nice, the dough is nice, the texture is fun. Human food is—it’s maybe the part of being here that Taehyung likes the best.

“Mm,” he says, because Jeongguk is sitting like he wants confirmation that he’s done well. It’s cute, really, that four years of the routine hasn’t lessened his excitement every time he gets to bring Taehyung something new.

And that sets Jeongguk off. He starts talking about the cart he bought the churros from, and the grandmother who gave him an extra order because she said he was too skinny and too polite, and then he’s talking about—Namjoon, for some reason, who apparently always says similar things when they stop for street food on their way out of the aquarium at night. It’s reassuring to hear him chatter, no matter the nerves Taehyung can hear underneath it, but the anxiety is inside his mouth, now, and his tongue is threatening to wither away in protest if he doesn’t speak now.

Taehyung puts his hand on Jeongguk’s knee, and Jeongguk closes his mouth so hard that Taehyung can hear the clack of his teeth.

“Jeongguk,” Taehyung says. He makes sure to leave off all the complicated formalities of the language, to make everything as simple as possible. “I want to talk to the reporters.”

Jeongguk, predictably, blinks in shock. A half-formed word dies in the back of his throat. Taehyung looks away, because he can’t stand to make any more eye contact than he already has, and slips down a finger’s length on the dock. The place where wood dug into his stomach aches, and before he even really registers the sting, Jimin’s fingers are there to prod irritably at the dent. He can probably feel at least a few of Taehyung’s feelings through the touch, because he doesn’t have enough control right now to stop himself, but Jimin doesn’t pry.

“What?” Jeongguk says. Not like he hadn’t heard, but like he doesn’t understand. Taehyung stops himself from digging fingers into the wood hard enough to cut splinters under his nails, and grits his teeth.

“We can’t stay here anymore. It’s killing him. I want to talk to Seokjin and Hoseok, so that they can help get us out.”

He interprets the pained look on Jeongguk’s face as a kind of long-suffering regret at his own loose tongue. Not that he’d known Taehyung understood every word, but he’d always slipped into the habit of explaining human things like a part of him had known that Taehyung needed it anyway. But there’s no taking back the things Jeongguk explained to him; there’s no taking back the knowledge that those two journalists have been trying to get him free for years, and that Jeongguk knows them somehow, and that so much of all of this relies on the fickle nature of human opinion.

“Are you sure?” Jeongguk asks. “They’ll want to film it, probably.”

Taehyung looks at him. He’s had cameras pointed at him through the worst years of his life; he still doesn’t like the skin-crawling invasiveness of it, but he can put up with one more round if it means what he thinks it will.

Jeongguk deflates like a punctured pufferfish. He looks defeated more than relaxed, like he knows there’s no use putting up a fight, but that’s what Taehyung was going for. Jimin pokes at his stomach, and sends a request, and Taehyung snatches another churro to feed to him. Jimin munches almost obliviously, and Taehyung does his best to enjoy his own portion, but the nerves have ruined something inside of him.

“So?” Taehyung asks, after a moment of consideration. Jeongguk sighs, and looks up at the ceiling like it might give him a different answer.

“Fine,” he says. “If it’s what you think is best, I’ll call hyung tomorrow.”

Taehyung doesn’t know who Seokjin is to Jeongguk, but the way he speaks has always implied that they’re close. He trusts Seokjin, that much at least Taehyung knows without a doubt, and he wouldn’t even consider this if he wasn’t sure of that. He has so much to lose—and Jimin has more at risk than even Taehyung.

“It is,” he tells Jeongguk, to leave no room for doubt. “He needs help.”

“We’re trying.” Jeongguk sounds tired, maybe a little upset, but Taehyung knows how to hear earnestness in his voice. He knows that the humans think—always, incurably—that they’re doing the right thing.

Taehyung purses his lips. He wants to reach out and push at Jeongguk all the ways it isn’t enough, all the ways being kept here is killing Jimin both in body and in heart, even if Jimin doesn’t have the words for it yet. But he doesn’t know if Jeongguk can listen like that, and he isn’t willing to risk that kind of failure. Humans speak only with their mouths; their touches are silent, if loud, and he doesn’t want to know what they might do to him if they realize that his aren’t the same.

When Jeongguk leaves, Taehyung thanks him. He doesn’t know why, really, but Jeongguk’s eyes go wide and startled, a little sad, as he waves it off.

There are a lot of near-human things Taehyung hates about himself, and the constant urge to apologize is only the first of the dozens trying to swarm in his stomach, eating away at him, the more he thinks about home.

༄

“Why were you so angry?” Jimin asks, as they swim. His arm is hooked through Taehyung’s, his head rests gently on Taehyung’s shoulders. He’s comfortable enough to use his throat-voice, but the meaning of the words echoes through the touch.

Jimin is remembering the reporters, after Taehyung had explained his request. He’s remembering the days of silence, and the bitterness in Taehyung’s response to the newspaper, and the flash of frigid numbness he’d given unintentionally when Hoseok and Seokjin slipped security to visit the exhibit’s deck. His eyes are bright and hard behind the shade of the glasses, and Taehyung knows that this time he won’t accept silence as an answer.

Carefully, he bundles up the memories. Each time he’s seen Seokjin and Hoseok, including a short introduction after-hours from Jeongguk, they’ve been promising to get him free. They’ve written countless stories about him, enough that humans outside the aquarium want him released back home, but they’ve never been able to follow through. They’ve never accomplished anything more than words, even as Taehyung’s hopes climbed higher and higher the closer he got to a full recovery. When the bandages had come off, and Seokjin had raged against his new status of non-releasable, he’d been more disappointed and angry and hurt than he knew how to deal with.

It’s been a long time since Taehyung did much more than stare placidly out at them from the water. It’s been a long time since he let himself hope, because of how badly it burned when they failed.

“Oh,” Jimin says, lilted like a song.

Taehyung is angry all the time, and scared all the time, and every day he forces himself to ignore sadness so heavy that it threatens to break him. He thinks—the only creature in the world who understands that feeling is swimming beside him, and pressing closer with each passing second.

He remembers how upset Jimin had been, after those two days of silence. He remembers how badly it hurt to feel all of that emotion pressed into him, that quick pulse; he remembers that it had been necessary. Taehyung tries to hold that sensation in his chest, as if to prepare for the hurt of baring himself so deeply to humans.

Jimin’s arms wrap around his shoulders. Jimin’s lips brush against his neck.

Taehyung doesn’t know how to make the humans understand what he needs them to, and he doesn’t know whether or not this will backfire and end with him cut open from belly to throat on some researcher’s operating table, and he doesn’t know how much longer Jimin has to live if he stays in here, this artificial environment that’s all wrong for his body and his mind.

But Taehyung knows how to carry Jimin. He knows how to swim, the unending movement that he’d been born with.

The night passes.

༄

Jeongguk is jumpy, for the next couple of days. When Taehyung manages to bother a few words out of him, he mentions that the reporters have to arrange travel to the island, that they’re preparing things with something called a news outlet, that he’s busy, V-yah, let the sharks eat.

He still hasn’t told Jeongguk his name. Jimin curls his lip whenever someone calls Little Red, and doesn’t acknowledge any of the other names the humans have given creatures in the exhibit, but he shakes his head when Taehyung asks if he wants to tell them his real name. It’s a sentiment they both share, but Taehyung keeps himself awake far longer than he should worrying over that one small detail.

Should he tell them his name? Would it matter? Would it change something, anything, if he did?

No one has answers. Taehyung swims with Wonja one evening, the smallest of the whale sharks, and keeps a hand pressed to his side to appreciate the simplicity of his being. The confinement isn’t good for him, isn’t good for anything that lives in a cage like this, but—the sharks and rays and fish can live in this stasis as long as they can swim freely and eat what they need and bond with their own kind. Taehyung drifts like the lazy, unconscious impulses in the shark’s mind, and wishes only mostly out of anger that he could slip into that kind of mindlessness.

The days pass. Jimin gets healthier, though they keep him supervised when he eats. Jeongguk, as skittish as he is, brings Jimin double servings of whatever snack he sits down with for them in the evenings.

And then, before Taehyung is ready, it’s time.

He doesn’t realize, at first. Jeongguk waves goodbye to his supervisor like normal, and spends a little while adjusting the weaving on Kkobugi’s just-finished stretcher, and Taehyung doesn’t bother staying at the surface to watch. Jimin is playing with the ray he likes, a game of chase that helps him build up his speed and gets the ray exactly what she wants, which is mostly as many scratches as Jimin’s hands can provide.

Liako follows them up for a while, before she realizes that neither of them are paying attention to her any longer. Taehyung is busy inspecting Jimin, letting his hands map the gentle gain of softness over his ribs, around his stomach, while Jimin tries to swat him away; his face is set in a pleased kind of irritation, as if he likes the attention but might be getting sick of the reason for it. Taehyung can’t blame him, but also can’t stop himself from touching, just to reassure himself that Jimin isn’t going to slip through his fingers. Not yet, anyway, when he still winces through headaches and spins desperate spirals through panic Taehyung can’t ever soothe.

Taehyung feels a bit of that unknowable panic, he thinks, when he slips his head out of the water and finds three humans watching him, instead of one.

Seokjin and Hoseok work fast. There are things on the deck that Taehyung has never seen before, tall shapes on precarious-looking legs. One of the shapes is a camera, he knows, but it’s nothing like the ones he’s seen through the windows. This one is large, and bulky, and Taehyung shies away from the shine of its eye as much as he shies away from the humans watching him.

What is it, Jimin asks, with a tug on his hand. Taehyung gives him the image, and Jimin shudders, and he drifts down to grip at the smallest point of Taehyung’s tail, just above the flare of his flukes.

Taehyung looks up again. Jeongguk is talking to Seokjin; his hands are moving like they always do when he’s upset; Hoseok is watching them in the water, his hands very still where they’re hanging between his legs as he crouches. His head is tilted, his lips are pressed together. Taehyung doesn’t know this human, beyond a few cursory interactions, but it’s enough to know that Hoseok isn’t pleased.

Hoseok’s reluctance is just enough for the tension in Taehyung’s chest to break. He doesn’t want to do this, but he’s going to anyway; maybe the humans feel the same way.

When Taehyung approaches the dock, dragging Jimin behind him like a reluctant calf, Hoseok stands up and backs away. Jeongguk’s slew of words falters, and Seokjin’s face smooths out from irritation into something uncrackable that Taehyung doesn’t bother trying to figure out. His hands are clasped in front of himself, knuckles white with tension. Most humans, at least, express things with their bodies similarly. Seokjin wears tension like most of the men Taehyung has seen.

Seokjin manages a greeting, and Hoseok follows quickly, and all Taehyung gives them is a nod. Casual conversation is too human for him right now, with the camera watching him, dissecting him. Under that gaze, inhuman and impossible to understand, Taehyung feels like nothing more than what he had acted the part of for so long. A dumb fish, playing at human, pretending he could ever understand what happens in their minds.

“I’m going to start recording,” Hoseok says, when he’s done adjusting the angle of the video camera. There’s another hanging around his neck, one that Taehyung is much more familiar with, that he uses to snap intermittent pictures of the process. Jeongguk, cross-legged on the dock. Seokjin, sitting down next to him. Action shots of Taehyung pulling himself up, bracing himself on his forearms, running one hand through his hair to push it out of his face.

“You don’t have to do this,” Jeongguk tells him, before he moves out of sight of the camera.

Taehyung feels the gentle stroke of Jimin’s hands along the rubbery skin of his tail. He twitches his flukes when Jimin pokes at a cluster of barnacles, inspecting for ones ready to slough like Taehyung has shown him. There are parts of his tail almost impossible to reach, that he hasn’t had someone else to check for him in years.

“I do,” Taehyung replies. The touch is a promise, and a reminder to keep his own.

Seokjin startles, a little, at the sound of Taehyung’s voice. Hoseok doesn’t, but there’s enough tension in his body that Taehyung doubts a harpoon shot could make him flinch.

Jeongguk doesn’t look happy. None of them look happy. But it’s what needs to be done, and Taehyung has never had a problem before with flinging himself blindly into the future and hoping for the best. Jeongguk eases out of the frame, and Seokjin takes his spot, and he gets over his discomfort with Taehyung’s speech quickly enough to be reassuring.

Taehyung grips the offered thing called a microphone tight enough that it hurts. He waits for Hoseok’s mark, before he pulls on the mask that settles over his face like a second, human skin.

༄

The interview isn’t perfect. Seokjin reassures him after that it can be altered, using words that Taehyung doesn’t know to explain concepts that Taehyung won’t ever understand. What he gathers is that the parts he’d stumbled through can be removed, and the long pauses in his speech where he’d struggled to find the right amount to give up can be shortened.

He still feels scrubbed raw. He still feels violated, in a way so different from the everyday parade of thousands of eyes.

Jimin had stayed near the end of Taehyung’s tail for the interview, but now he’s further up. Now, his arms wrap around the small point of Taehyung’s waist, and he nudges Taehyung’s arm out of the way, and his head fits himself in the junction between Taehyung’s torso and bicep as he peers up out of the water.

“Oh,” Hoseok whispers. He’s closer, now that he’s finished packing away the artificial lights and the camera that set Taehyung’s teeth on edge, and he looks at Jimin like he’s never seen anything like him this close before. Jimin, for his part, is blinking through the dripping lenses of his glasses, the ends hooked around the inhuman flare of his ears. His hair, darker gray out of the water than in it, plasters against his forehead until he sweeps it back.

Taehyung tries to look at him like a human might. The cut of his claws, the sharper edge to his pointed teeth, the patches of skin on his torso that nearly slip into scales. His gills are jagged, the edges of the fluttering skin almost see-through and tinged pink.

Jimin looks—different, from Taehyung and from the humans on deck. Untouchable, almost, and Taehyung has to blink to see his friend again before he reaches out to take Jimin’s hand, to absorb the question and the request and the reassurances Jimin is pushing at him, in the quiet bustle of Seokjin packing away the microphone Taehyung had done his best to keep dry.

“Hi,” Hoseok says, and sits down to scoot closer to the edge. Jimin doesn’t shy away, but his eyes narrow. His grip tightens.

Jimin hums, under the water. It burbles on its way up, and Taehyung catches Jeongguk’s wide-eyed surprise in the corner of his vision, but Hoseok just smiles like he’s never been happier to hear an acknowledgement.

“He wants to know if you’re taking pictures.” Taehyung braces himself for Hoseok to ask how he knows, a lie stinging the tip of his tongue, but Hoseok’s hands only jump to the controls of the camera around his neck. He fiddles with a switch, a button, without looking away from the water.

“Only if he wants to be included.”

The translation goes through Taehyung, and Jimin nods. It’s suspicious, it’s strange, but—Hoseok doesn’t seem interested in pushing. Seokjin and Jeongguk are arguing again. Taehyung feels ridiculous for the fear he can feel all the way to his teeth, cold and upsetting enough that he can feel his lips pull into a frown when Jimin stretches himself out along the surface, posing so that the shine of his scales glints just under the tension of the water before it breaks. He doesn’t pull himself up onto the dock to be photographed, not like Taehyung, but Hoseok crouches down and lies flat on his belly and contorts himself in strange ways to get the right angles, to adjust himself to what Jimin is willing to give.

Do you think it will help, Jimin had asked, earlier. And Taehyung doesn’t know, and he feels guilty for implying that it might, especially when he feels so stripped by the knowledge that these pictures won’t ever go away. That they’ll live, always, in the eyes of humans that don’t care to look beyond the glimmering surface of Jimin’s scales.

But it’s over quickly. Hoseok crouches down to show Jimin the images, so different than the glimpses they get of themselves in the windows when the world outside of them goes dark, nothing distinct, their features blurred.

Taehyung spent most of his life knowing his face only through the memories of his family. All of them saw him a little differently, so his image of himself was always changing, always making up for their biases. He’d never thought to wonder what he would see, if he could look without being distorted by someone else’s mind.

Taehyung doesn’t like his reflection. Jimin stares at the pictures, his face carefully blank, and then slips back under the water. His hand trails down Taehyung’s tail again, all the way to the tip of his left fluke, before it vanishes as he dives.

Hoseok lets the camera fall back against his chest, and sighs. It doesn’t leave much room for incorrect interpretation.

Before Seokjin and Hoseok leave, all their equipment packed and hefted onto their backs, Taehyung takes a moment to examine them, and commit their faces to memory. He wants this to be the last time he sees them; he wants this to be the last time he feels so trapped. Seokjin looks at him like he understands—or at least like he’s trying to—and tips his chin up to let Taehyung catch the cut of it, the angle, the strength.

He thinks Seokjin would do well in the ocean.

Jeongguk, though, looks fragile enough that Taehyung doesn’t want to think about subjecting him to it. The weeks of hunger, and the threats lurking just past the murk of water, and the loneliness that cuts as sharply as a boat’s propellor. Jeongguk is too sweet, maybe, or Taehyung just hasn’t seen him pushed to that edge of survival yet. Humans like to be comfortable, and don’t like to think about what it costs.

Taehyung is unsettled, even long after the humans leave. Jimin stays close, his hands tight around Taehyung’s torso as they swim, and even that isn’t enough to calm him down. The feeling of the camera lingers, his hands grasp at the memory of the microphone’s unfamiliar weight, his own stuttering helplessness around human words.

Thank you, Jimin tells him, so many times that Taehyung loses count. He knows why Taehyung is doing this, even if they don’t speak of it. He knows, as well as Taehyung does, that neither of them can do this for much longer.

They swim. Nothing changes. They swim, and Taehyung sings, and he closes his eyes to pretend that the echo of his voice is more than it ever will be.

༄

And then, suddenly, everything changes.

Three days after the interview, the aquarium opens to the incessant clamoring of human voices. It’s enough to wake Jimin, who wriggles his way blearily to Taehyung’s side with his sunglasses dipped low on the wide bridge of his nose, his lips pouted out as he shields himself from the endless array of cameras flashing.

What’s going on? He asks, heavy still with sleep. There’s a sweet grumpiness there that Taehyung always likes as long as it isn’t directed at him, and he can’t help the smile that lifts to his lips.

He can’t read the signs some of the humans are holding, so he doesn’t know. But so many of them are looking at him, are pointing at the two of them and shouting. On one of the signs closest to the window, Taehyung can see the crudely-drawn outline of a mer. And so he can guess, and tells Jimin that guess, and watches the surprised satisfaction settle across Jimin’s features.

The humans don’t leave. Jimin sticks close, and doesn’t even peel away from Taehyung to nap; he sleeps, as usual, with his cheek pressed against the back of Taehyung’s shoulder. His glasses press into the skin there, leaving an indent that will fade much faster than the bruise Jimin’s teeth had dug into his neck. A claiming mark, Taehyung remembers, and drifts his fingers over where he still remembers the dull throb of the bruise.

It’s gone, now, and Taehyung had mourned the loss when he first saw it gone from his distorted reflection. But Jimin can give him a new one, he thinks; there’s a thrill that shivers through him, when he thinks about what might be different next time Jimin sees fit to mark him.

The humans on deck are nervous, that day. Jeongguk calls him up to offer another Rubik’s cube, this one a different shape—a higher difficulty, he promises—but his eyes keep twitching to the side. He keeps rubbing his neck, even as he hands the two of them squid from the bucket at his side.

“What’s happening?” Taehyung asks, in his best imitation of blameless curiosity. The woman standing behind Jeongguk flinches, still surprised and uncomfortable to hear him speak, and Jeongguk’s cheeks flush dully as he looks around to see who might be watching them. He pulls the sleeves of his sweatshirt down low over his palms, wipes the squid residue off the tips of his fingers with a cloth, settles back down on his heels with a grimace.

“You gave an interview,” Jeongguk tells him, pointed. “Now people are protesting.”

Taehyung is, above all else, satisfied. It’s some kind of proof; that this shouldn’t be happening, that something is wrong, that he and Jimin deserve to go home.

He wants to ask if Jeongguk is in trouble, but he’s quiet enough that Taehyung holds his tongue. He hasn’t been paying much attention to the familiar humans today, too distracted by the anger of the crowd, so he doesn’t know what might be happening to Jeongguk. He doesn’t seem upset—more nervous, Taehyung thinks—but it’s not as reassuring as Taehyung wants it to be.

Jimin’s hands slip down his spine, just underneath his dorsal fin. His fingers hesitate, and then—his mouth, Taehyung thinks distantly, even as he jolts with the drag of a tongue against the thicker skin of his tail. Teeth graze, and then tongue again, dragging and exploratory. Taehyung jerks, and pushes himself off the dock with more force than really necessary. Enough force that he splashes Jeongguk thoroughly, if that upset shout is anything to go by.

What are you doing, Taehyung thinks, very clearly, when he gets his hands on Jimin’s shoulders.

Jimin grins, all teeth. Taehyung pushes the question, wonderings about any of Jimin’s mating rituals, something personal and intimate. But the smile just grows, and he nudges into Taehyung’s space, and he presses his smiling mouth against the tense part of Taehyung’s neck.

I just wanted to, he thinks, full of a floaty sort of feigned innocence. He licks his lips, and Taehyung’s neck too, like he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

“Are you going to eat me?” Taehyung asks, in Jimin’s tongue. Jimin laughs, their amusement shared and resonating. Under the dock, obscured just barely from the humans up above, they can luxuriate in the slip of privacy.

“Maybe,” Jimin says. Taehyung can feel it in the water against his skin, the way the sound ripples as they float, still but for the barest hint of downward momentum.

“Maybe?”

Teeth drag. Jimin pulls back, and tucks his arm against Taehyung’s waist, and presses his cheek against Taehyung’s chest, just above where his heart beats delicate against his skin.

“Maybe,” he repeats, a delicate sound. “I’m still making up my mind.”

His touch says no such thing. His touch gives Taehyung too many things to pull apart in a single moment, but the warm flush of it will be plenty to keep him occupied as he swims, as he gives half of his brain over to the human puzzle and keeps the rest for puzzling out Jimin himself.

They’re both a little giddy, he thinks, from the novelty of humans caring like this. They’re both a little out of their minds with the possibility that they might really, truly get to go home. It reminds Taehyung of the moment after a fight or a chase, a threat or competitor warned off and escaped from, the ocean once again endless after the trapped terror of motion. It’s overwhelming.

Everything about Jimin is overwhelming, after so many seasons of dulling himself to the horror of this life. Everything about how viciously Taehyung wants now is too frightening to really contemplate.

So they swim. The humans pick up in volume again when they see the puzzle in Taehyung’s hands, and Jimin clinging to him like one of his familiar barnacles; Taehyung can’t understand their words, through the thick wall of acrylic holding in the water, but he can see many humans’ lips moving in unison. A few mothers bustle children away, and Jimin presses his face tighter against Taehyung’s chest, so tight that he has to hold his glasses in one fist to get the closeness he seems to crave.

That night, humans in aquarium-branded clothing and uniforms Taehyung doesn’t recognize have to herd the crowd away from the exhibit. A few don’t want to go, he thinks, but any resistance is brief and almost half-hearted.

Almost all of the few children turn around as they go to wave goodbye. Jimin indulges one of them, a chubby little girl who waves at them stubbornly even as her mother tugs her away by one wrist, and her whole face shatters into glee when Jimin raises his own hand in return.

Cute, Taehyung thinks. And then he thinks of Jimin’s family, and the memories of his young sisters, and the sweetness hardens into something harder in his chest.

Jimin can feel it, he knows. Jimin can feel everything, because Taehyung has forgotten how to want to keep up barriers between their minds.

Jeongguk has the evening off, the human wandering around the deck oblivious to their expectations of snacks, so Taehyung follows Jimin down to his nest. It’s cluttered, now; there are shells and trinkets littered in the sand around the indent where Jimin rests, a cluster of lines carved into the stones, small mounds where Jimin has buried things he finds important. Kkobugi drifts close, familiar enough to butt her head against Jimin’s side, and Jimin rewards her with an absent scratch to the top of her head.

Jimin gives him an image, through their connected hands. Taehyung’s own face, his expression pinched, every part of him radiating exhaustion.

You’re tired, the image translates. Jimin smiles, soft. He nudges Taehyung down, toward his nestled spot of sand. Rest.

Taehyung doesn’t sleep like Jimin does, curled up and deep. He’s used to drifting in motion, or risking safe spots at the surface for a handful of breaths; it’s how they all sleep, back home. In a pod, for those rare moments of togetherness, they take turns pushing each other up to the surface to breathe.

But Jimin gives him a series of images. His strength is back, enough to nudge Taehyung all the way back up, and he wants Taehyung to rest here, at least for the twenty or so human minutes before he needs to breathe again. It would be easier to go back to the surface, would be less work for Jimin, but—there’s something insistent about his desire for Taehyung to try the nest. It’s the closest thing to a home for him here, and he’s inviting Taehyung to sleep there.

He’s inviting Taehyung to trust him. It’s a startling realization, and yet not startling in the slightest.

You’re safe, Jimin is telling him. Against all odds, Taehyung believes it.

So he sleeps. He settles with his stomach pressed into the sand, and his hands resting under his cheek, and sleeps before he even recognizes the feeling.

He wakes, if barely, to Jimin’s hands strong and gentle underneath him, holding him up as he breathes.

༄

The next evening, Jeongguk is less jumpy. He gives Taehyung a message from his friends, the ones who came with cameras and seemingly endless questions, and Jimin listens to the translation as he chews thoughtfully on jjinppang, maybe one of his favorite foods so far. He has to dry off his hands to eat it, on a towel Jeongguk holds out for him, but he likes it enough to try and steal Taehyung’s second portion.

“Stop it,” Jeongguk scolds, like no one has scolded Jimin since before he left his first shoal. He understands that human phrase, at least, because Jeongguk says it every time Jimin tries to take more of his portion.

The only benefit to being sick, he thinks with a stab of viciousness, is that Jeongguk slips him an extra bun anyway.

In between the breaks Jeongguk takes from speaking, mostly to eat his bun in small bites, Taehyung tells Jimin what he’s saying. Most of it Jimin doesn’t have the energy to puzzle out immediately, too based in things he needs Taehyung’s help with context for, but he picks up on the tone of it. He picks up Jeongguk’s most important information, which is that the head of the aquarium spoke today with someone who runs what Jeongguk calls a sanctuary.

That takes more explaining. After, when the jjinppang is sadly gone and Jeongguk with it, Taehyung does his best to explain what he’d been able to understand.

It’s a place in the ocean, Jeongguk had said, and Taehyung latched onto it strongly enough that it hits Jimin like something physical. A place in the ocean, where captured dolphins—ones who are injured or can’t hunt or never learned because they were born in human cages—can live in the ocean safely. It’s far away, and they’d have to share space with dolphins, but it’s the first proof that Jimin has heard that they might be leaving.

They might be leaving. They might be going back to the ocean, on what Jeongguk has described as a test to see whether they’re really fit to be released.

If Little Red doesn’t get better there, it might be different, Jeongguk told them, like a threat. But Jimin can feel his heartbeat pick up just from the thought of it; he feels more alive than he has in the too-many days scratched into the side of his rock. He squeezes his hand around his necklace so hard that the shards of shell dig raised red lines into his palm that make Taehyung frown.

Jimin gives him the only thing he knows. This want, desperate and clawing in his chest, and Taehyung takes it and lies with it and gives it back from himself, in that place inside both of them where they want nothing more than to taste real water again.

The next day, Jeongguk says that the aquarium has released a statement with their intent to transfer the mers in their care to an open water sanctuary. The words are so foreign and so soulless and so full of hope that Jimin can hardly sleep, twisting in circles over and over and resisting the urge to hit his head against a stone just to check that he’s awake.

He settles for counting his scars. The one on his side from the human weapon, the small cut on the back of his head that’s healed into a scar no longer than one of his claws, where no hair grows. The dozen or so from other fights, easier ones, though they certainly hadn’t felt easier at the time.

The day after that, Taehyung meets with a crowd of humans that Jimin doesn’t know and doesn’t care to learn.

Instead of wasting his time being stared at by adult humans that think they know what’s good for him, Jimin finds a few children. There’s a skinny boy plastered against a small circular window who gawks with his mouth open when Jimin approaches, and spreads his arms out against the surface like they could embrace. He’s talking, not that Jimin can hear, and his eyes sometimes stray from Jimin’s face down to his tail, the drift of his caudal fin in the barely-there current.

The humans talking to Taehyung are dressed strangely, and looked at Jimin with the same glint in their eyes as the first humans who caught him. The humans talking to Taehyung are loud and angry, Jimin thinks, so he keeps his eyes wide and his face soft for the child, tries to affect the same sweet curiosity that Taehyung pulls off so well.

The child’s face is slack with awe. He smudges his face across the window, and pouts up big dark eyes.

It still reminds him of Jihyun, when he was small. Taehyun and Eunji and Yeojin, all of them. He still misses them so much it hurts worse than anything else. But he doesn’t run from the human, this time; he pushes himself forward through the water, lets the boy look his fill until he starts to smile.

Jimin lets the boy look, until an older human comes to take him away from the window. Then he retreats to his nest, and counts his buried shells and the pearls on his necklace and the lines scratched into the stone. He runs through it four times, before he feels the water shift new, and clicks out to find Taehyung close, already halfway across the territory.

“So?” Jimin clicks, before he’s even close enough to see.

Taehyung doesn’t respond. Not until he can reach out to touch, his hands tight around Jimin’s forearms, his eyes big and his skin pale.

The answer is a rush of too many things. Faces and voices and new words and impossible explanations, and underneath it all a wash of so many things Jimin doesn’t know how to untangle it all. Relief is strong, and so is fear, and so is a bubbly something in their stomachs that Jimin might call a version of excitement. And—

The ocean. Again and again, Taehyung gives him the ocean through the touch, under the voices of the strangers and Jeongguk’s waving hands and Taehyung’s own concern, the touch and taste of the ocean.

We’re going, Jimin understands.

Home. They’re going home.

༄

Taehyung has to translate everything for Jimin. It’s difficult when he doesn’t even understand half of the plan himself, his mind cluttered with words like airplane and borders, but explaining their journey to Jimin helps him straighten the ideas out.

What do you mean, flying, Jimin asks, the strange word echoing back between them in all the places they’re pressed on top of each other. Taehyung groans, the sound reverberating, and tries to imagine the video Jeongguk had pulled up on his phone. That clarifies little for either of them, but Taehyung thinks the repetition helps him believe that it might be true.

That sounds uncomfortable.

It does sound uncomfortable. It sounds terrifying, actually, and Taehyung doesn’t know what to do with his nerves except let them eat him up from the inside as he swims, as he ducks under the gaze of the humans who give him food and never quite manage to look him in the eye anymore.

They finally understand, Taehyung thinks, the smallest bit of how awful these years have been for him. Part of him wants to gloat, wants to rub it in their faces and watch discomfort blossom. But that’s the human urge; in the ocean, in the pod, there’s no need for that mean-spirited kind of gloating. Taehyung takes the time to separate these feelings, now. He needs to know how much he’s changed.

Every day, more of the plan falls into place. Jeongguk is coming with them, he shares not long after Taehyung’s meeting with the administrative board. He’ll have his own translator, because the humans at the sanctuary speak a different language, but everyone at the aquarium knows that Jeongguk is the only human Taehyung wants to speak to.

“Are you angry?” Taehyung asks him one night, when Namjoon is there to help smooth over the gaps in Taehyung’s vocabulary, and to settle some of the tension in Jeongguk’s shoulders.

“No.” Jeongguk answers too quickly, and frowns. He shakes his head. Taehyung’s forearms ache from bracing himself against the dock, and he can feel Jimin’s concern from the cheek pressed against his stomach. Jeongguk’s hair falls over his eyes.

Namjoon’s mouth purses. He doesn’t intervene, though; they both wait for Jeongguk to gather his thoughts, one of his hands tracing lazy patterns in a puddle of water next to his leg.

“Not angry,” Jeongguk clarifies, more slowly. “It’s just… a long trip. I didn’t expect it, and I’m bad at being spontaneous.”

His mouth twists, differently than Namjoon’s. His fingers start drumming against the dock.

“I want to help you. I’m happy you trust me, and I’m excited to go see the sanctuary. I’m just—nervous, I think. I’ve never flown before.”

That last part isn’t exactly reassuring, but—Taehyung thinks he understands. He thinks he knows Jeongguk well, after so long spent in his company. Namjoon’s face has relaxed into something soft, and Jeongguk’s hands slowly go still. He offers Taehyung a smile, when he catches him looking.

“Thank you,” Taehyung offers. He doesn’t think he’ll ever really understand what this means for Jeongguk, but it’s enough that he’s coming anyway. It’s enough that no matter how different this sanctuary might be, he and Jimin will have someone familiar to keep them company. Someone who can be their voice, since Taehyung doesn’t ever want to risk touching a human enough to understand their language again.

Jimin’s hands creep around Taehyung’s waist. Both of them, fingers pressing into the soft parts of him, the indents deep and familiar. His nails scrape, almost gentle; his grip tightens, when he has his arms wrapped all the way around.

Jeongguk doesn’t look happy. Taehyung knows what that looks like on him, and this isn’t it, but—he’s so tired of fitting himself between two worlds. He can feel something inside of him stretching, separating, waiting to snap like a fishing line pulled too tight. He can feel his own reluctance to speak like a ship’s anchor lodged in his throat.

He’s spent so long convincing himself that he’s not an animal for humans to prod at, that he thinks he might have forgotten how to be free.

Jimin’s hands are steady, as they take it all in. Jimin feels steady, when Taehyung reaches out just barely with an apology.

Mine, is the word that reverberates. A reassurance that Taehyung didn’t know he needed, but that he clings to through the last fading conversation. Through the next day, and the next, and the clamor that grows and grows and doesn’t stop until finally, the day arrives.

They’re going home.

༄

When Jimin feels the world around him tremble like the worst heaves of an earthquake, relief grips him so tightly that he almost cries.

Even with Jeongguk there to ease some of the panic, the journey hasn’t been pleasant. Jimin suffered through the stretcher, and the small prison, and the shift of water around him as it rolled toward an unknown destination, but the airplane had been too much. The ascent was the worst thing he can remember, not just physically but also the knowledge of it, the understanding that he now regrets begging Taehyung to share.

“It’s okay,” Jeongguk says. He’s in the water with Jimin, his wetsuit unzipped in the back, letting Jimin’s hands grip his arms so tight he’s afraid he might break them on accident. There are a few more words, that Jimin doesn’t understand and doesn’t care to try, but he understands those two.

It’s over. They’re back on the surface, which is already an awful place to be, but at least it’s not higher.

He can’t help the relieved little keen that leaves him. Jeongguk’s whole face melts, his voice pitching into a soft array of reassurances, and Jimin closes his eyes as movement shifts the water and his body and lets the tone work its magic.

Jeongguk is good at this. Jimin doesn’t know what he’s saying, but the way he talks makes it easier to breathe through the reminders of the first prison, the filthy water, the fear of being trapped and left to die at the hands of human carelessness. There’s no way Jeongguk knows that, but—it works anyway.

The rest of the journey is a thankless blur. Jimin tries to sleep, since he’s been too long awake, but the jolt of movement and the muffled sounds of humans keep piercing through the water enough that all he can to is butt his head against the muscle of Jeongguk’s thigh and accept the tentative hand on his forehead for his trouble.

It’s not like his sisters, who would pick through his hair for fun armed with shells or sea grass to weave into it; it’s not like his brothers, who scratched their claws against his scalp as thanks for a meal, or protection, or advice. But it’s close, and it settles Jimin’s nerves a little further, and it makes Jeongguk smile. Part of Jimin thinks it should be demeaning, to be petted like he might offer scratches to a shark, but—most of him just wants the comfort.

There’s a kind of sadness, too, in knowing that Jimin won’t see so many of the animals he’d started befriending at the aquarium again. He’d been there for a hundred and seven days, a hundred and seven scratch marks on stone, and his body feels different and he doesn’t know how to live anymore without anxiety tight in his chest, but he’d also made friends.

Jeongguk, he thinks, is a friend. And Namjoon, who they left behind, who Jimin finally offered his hand to on their last night together.

There’s a clamor, and then a crack of sunlight, and Jimin stretches himself out to catch it with his skin. The first time he’s seen sunlight in so long, the aquarium left behind too early in the morning.

He almost cries. It’s ridiculous, that his face burns at the glimmer of light across his scales, but—Jeongguk’s hand strokes, slightly, and Jimin gathers himself enough to breathe, steady and just barely stale. The sun is warm. He’d almost forgotten.

More movement. More voices, Jeongguk half-shouting back and forth with the humans outside this prison that Jimin can’t see through. He can’t see Taehyung, and every sound is muffled and amplified by the walls and the water all at once, and Jimin grits his teeth at how blind he feels from it. He could lift his lips to shout, maybe, but there are so many things wrong with that that it’s not even really an option.

After the airplane is another truck. A few days ago, when Jeongguk took Taehyung step by step through the process, Jimin learned that the two of them would be in separate trucks for most of the journey. In the airplane, they were side by side, the lids of the containers fastened tight until they were stable enough that Jeongguk could crack it open and crawl inside. Now, Jimin counts down the steps Taehyung reminded him of over and over again, until they feel like the only thing keeping him sane. The last truck, and then the surface-reef, and then the ocean.

The ocean. The water in Jimin’s prison is slowly growing stale, but he can almost taste the salt on his tongue already.

This isn’t his ocean. Jimin knows that the aquarium had found the records from the humans who took him from the reef, knows that this sanctuary is far from his home, but it’s not an impossible distance. When he’s stronger, Jimin reminds himself, and twists tight circles until Jeongguk has to stop him from scraping his dorsal fin against the bottom of the container.

When the truck stops, voices flood the air. Jimin doesn’t bother trying to follow any of it; he presses his head against Jeongguk’s leg and tries to focus on anything but how violently his heart is beating, like it’s about to burst out of his chest and swim away without him.

Voices. Machinery. Seabirds screeching. Jimin holds his breath, as the stretcher cradles him snug and suffocating.

This air is warm. Strange hands are underneath him, supporting him, lowering him down, and down, and—

Jimin keens, when he tastes the ocean on his tongue.

It’s not his ocean. The temperature is just subtly wrong, the color of the water is different, the currents are unfamiliar, but it doesn’t matter. There are currents, there’s movement against his skin, and Jimin doesn’t wait for the sling to go lax before he claws his way out, tail scraping against the rough cloth and humans scattering to give him space to move.

And oh, there’s space. There’s so much space that Jimin can’t breathe, that all he can do is wrap his arms around his torso and dive down to feel the sand against his scales, to peer through the water and the netting enclosing this territory as he breathes in, and in, and in so deep that he doesn’t think he’ll ever exhale again. Somewhere past the net, dolphins are clicking out to greet him. Somewhere past the net, his family has learned how to live without him.

Jimin doesn’t realize he’s spinning, twisting, until a hand against his head stops him. And then he looks up, and sees Taehyung pale and wide-eyed and stunned silent, his hands trembling even as he threads fingers through Jimin’s hair. He gives an image of the humans, watching; Jeongguk nervously worrying at a fingernail with his teeth.

“Jimin,” Taehyung says. They don’t need words between them, any more, but they make everything feel more real.

This is the ocean against his tongue. This is the ocean sifting through his gills.

Jimin laughs or sobs or maybe does both, as his hands beat fists against Taehyung’s chest. There’s something in his stomach that he can’t explain, something twisting and bubbling like seafoam off a tidal wave, like the froth left in the wake of a surface-reef.

“Jimin,” Taehyung says, more insistent. He’s smiling, in a way that hurts to look at. “Watch.”

He lets Jimin go. He starts swimming, and Jimin keeps himself loose because he doesn’t want to lose himself to the overwhelming feel of the ocean, and he takes a moment to appreciate how large Taehyung really is, how much he fills space. How steady his movements are as he builds up speed, makes a turn, swims back toward Jimin faster and more powerful than he’s ever seen before.

And then Taehyung twists, and kicks, and flings himself up and out of the water.

Even from below, Jimin hears Jeongguk’s victorious whoop. It’s drowned out by the crash, the shudder of Taehyung breaking the surface, his arms around his chest as he makes impact.

And he laughs, impossible and dizzy and drifting with his belly to the sun as Jimin wraps around him, joy and relief and the electric undercurrent of fear cutting through them both until Jimin can’t tell either of them apart any longer and it doesn’t matter, because the tides are shifting and the sun is warm and they’re closer to freedom than either of them have been for a hundred and seven days or four years or as long as they both can remember.

Taehyung’s face is still split by a smile, when Jimin tips his head up to check. His eyes are closed, sunlight dancing through the water to scatter across his face, and Jimin’s chest aches at the happiness threading between them, infinite and complicated but the most blissful thing he can imagine right now.

They drift, swaying with the tide, and Jimin clings onto Taehyung so tightly that even the ocean can’t tear them apart.

༄

Jimin adjusts to the sanctuary quickly. He doesn’t need the sunglasses anymore, now that the night is black and chilled in the nest he’s slowly starting to build in a crevice of rock. He’s eating more, and hunting some of the slower tropical fish on his own to build his reflexes back up.

He’s gaining weight, and he and Taehyung are both building up muscle they’d lost in the endless monotony of the aquarium, and Jimin’s nerves are almost always smothered with a twitching kind of excitement that has him almost happy when the humans decide they’ve been isolated long enough to be introduced to the sanctuary’s dolphins.

Jimin doesn’t like dolphins, as a rule, but Taehyung seems excited, and both of them are bursting for something to do. Jeongguk brought a few puzzles with him, but there’s a joint effort to wean them both off of being fed by humans, and Jimin finds himself more than busy every day darting after schools of fish long used to being hunted, and digging in the unfamiliar sand for trinkets he keeps hoarded in his nest, waiting to be put to use.

“Play nice,” Jeongguk warns them both, as they’re waiting to be released out into the larger sanctuary. It’s not permanent—they’ll come back to this smaller enclosure every night—but Jimin’s tail is already twitching.

Taehyung’s translation from above the water gives Jimin an impression of amusement, and of excitement. He can feel it echoing behind the touch, can feel Taehyung ready to burst. The netting is pulled back slowly, the drag of it heavy as it swirls up sand from the bottom, and then—there’s freedom, or some approximation of it, and Jimin shoots out into the open water with all the tension he’s been winding up in his tail and abdomen.

Immediately, he’s set upon by a dolphin. A young one, from the looks of it, clicking out in curiosity as others circle Jimin more warily.

What is it, he can almost imagine the yearling asking its elders. Most of them, Jimin knows, were bred in captivity; he’ll be surprised of any of them have seen a mer before.

Quickly, they’re all crowding in close. Jimin keeps his hands far away from their jaws and tries his best to stay polite, to not let tension bleed into his body language, before Taehyung swims up behind them and scatters the dolphins with his sheer bulk, the imposing length of his tail.

Even the dolphins are bearable, when it means having the entire bay to roam. Jimin races the younger ones, the yearlings bursting with energy and frantic to chase the glimmer of his tail, and Jimin isn’t satisfied with the slow progress but he relishes the burn in his gills and his muscles when he pushes himself until all he can do past nightfall is curl up in his nest or sleep draped over Taehyung’s back, chin hooked over shoulder and hand pressed against the slow, steady beat of Taehyung’s heart.

They’re getting better. Every day Taehyung smiles more, his cheeks rounding out with the diet that means he’ll be going out into open ocean soon. Every day Jimin feels a little more himself, now that he has a territory to patrol and fish to chase after. One of the smaller sharks has started offering its head to be stroked; the dolphins are starting to adjust to them, and to welcome Jimin into their games. Sometimes, he lingers by the net that guards them from the rest of the bay, to peer out at the water beyond what space they’re allowed.

You look better, Taehyung translates for Jeongguk, one late afternoon when the sun is pink and gold over the horizon. Jimin smiles, puts on his best face to beg for one of the pale crispy things Jeongguk is shoveling into his mouth, and gets only a pointed look.

He gives the glimmer of sadness to Taehyung, the longing for what had started to become normal. As much as he loves the ocean, there are things he’d never thought he might miss. There’s a kind of fear, here—the ocean looms past the net endless and more intimidating than he’s ever thought of it before. Captivity, Jimin thinks, has started to feel like safety.

That’s what he’s thinking about, one early morning, when a pod of dolphins approaches from the ocean side of the net.

These are wild creatures. They’ve seen Jimin’s kind, before, click curiously at him like they aren’t sure what he’s doing on the wrong side of a human’s nest. They scatter when they see Taehyung, but not far; they want to play, and race, and they toss their heads in irritation when all Jimin can offer them is a shrug.

All Jimin can offer is a shrug, before he sees the flash of tan skin at the center of a pod. He isn’t sure, not at first, until Taehyung’s attention is caught by it too. Until they can make out features—arms, hands, eyes—of a mer, swimming toward the net, with a spotted seal nudging at the flank of his dolphin’s tail.

Jimin clicks out a greeting, in his own words. The mer catches it, and tips his head as he swims, and echoes the greeting in a strange-sounding series of clicks and whistles.

The mer looks young. Younger than Jimin, maybe older than Taehyun; his face is unlined, his hair dark and tied back with a tangle of netting.

At his side, the seal twists. It ducks under the bulk of the mer’s tail, and Jimin jerks when it emerges with a humanlike torso, pelt rolled down to its waist to wrap arms around its companion’s shoulders. This one is young, too, though lankier; Jimin has heard of seals like this, but seeing the shift in person is only eased by the sweetness of the boy’s smile.

“Jimin,” he introduces himself. He gathers their names—Yeonjun, Soobin—and waits for Taehyung to reach out, to poke his fingers through the net and offer them a touch.

They seem to know what it means. They share a look, before brushing their fingers against his, one at a time, and Jimin presses himself against Taehyung’s side to get glimpses of what they show him. There isn’t much—the ocean, the pod, the rocky shore where Yeonjun helped Soobin to safety when they were young—but Jimin is desperate for it. He can feel it in his chest, a physical thing, an ache to remember that there are more of them in the world than just him and Taehyung, alone in a human prison.

Show them this, he begs, and gives Taehyung his best memory of the reef. The colors of it, the map of his territory engraved into his muscles, the landmarks and shoals and currents that make up his home. There’s so much that has faded, since he was taken, but there’s still so much he remembers. There’s still so much he can feel waiting to come back to him, waiting to be home before he remembers who he used to be.

He won’t ever be unscarred again. He won’t ever forget the things he’s learned since leaving. But more than anything, Jimin wants to go home and be a brother again, and he wants Taehyung with him to tell the tale.

For a moment, as Taehyung gives the images to the mers, Jimin is almost afraid of it. He’s almost afraid of going home, to find out that there isn’t a place for him any longer.

His necklace floats in the current, as Yeonjun peels his eyes open and clicks out an understanding. Jimin hardly understands it, but Taehyung gives him the only confirmation he needs. That Yeonjun knows his reef, knows mers with the same flash of color as Jimin’s, that they aren’t too far away to travel after all.

“Are you going there now?” Jimin asks. His throat-voice feels like the sheen of water left in the wake of surface-reefs; poison in his throat.

He doesn’t know if Yeonjun understands, or if Taehyung asks the question for him. He doesn’t know when they’ll get to leave the sanctuary, or what the journey will do to either of them, or whether Taehyung will want to come with Jimin at all. But Yeonjun is young enough that all Jimin can think about when he looks at him is Jihyun, and the burden Jimin had left him with, and the way he would do everything all over again if it meant he could keep his family safe.

“Here,” Jimin says. He tugs off his necklace, feels the tight fit of it around his ears, and shoves it through a gap in the net. The pearls glimmer in the sunlight, the shells reflect and scatter it, and Jimin aches with its loss like removing a limb, like saying goodbye to another part of his life he won’t ever be able to get back.

Through Taehyung, he gives Yeonjun an image of his siblings. Jihyun, broad and confident; Jisoo, quick and bold; the girls, and Taehyun, and the sweet mischief in their smiles whenever they thought they could get away with something.

“Take this to them,” Jimin begs. Sand in his throat. Ache in his chest. “Tell them I’m coming home.”

Home. The ocean is home, and the reef is home, and the crevice in stone worn soft around the edges from years of nesting is home. But Jimin watches the pod disappear through the water, his necklace glinting around Yeonjun’s wrist, and finds himself wrapped up in Taehyung’s arms as he heaves with the effort of keeping himself contained.

Taehyung gives him images of a journey. Of the two of them swimming, Jimin carried on Taehyung’s back when he needs to sleep. Of Jimin hunting, and bringing them meals, and guarding Taehyung as he rests at the surface in his short, shallow fits of sleep. The ocean blue and unending in front of them, the reef waiting, the promise of something new to follow. There’s a hope, there, that Jimin remembers from the cramped pain of the aquarium. The type that Taehyung hadn’t let himself feel, for four years trapped by himself among humans.

The ocean is home for both of them, Jimin knows. He knows it as sure as whale song, as sure as the arms around him, as sure as the presence of Taehyung’s touch against his mind.

But Taehyung is his home too, now, Jimin thinks. There isn’t a Jimin without him, any longer.

Jimin lets himself be held, and breathes in the salt touch of the ocean, and surrenders himself to Taehyung’s arms and the soft, inexorable pull of the tides.

༄

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