Archive of Our Own

Long before Hua Cheng fell into the sea, before he knew the names of currents or the feel of a ship's deck under bare feet, before he learned that merfolk laughter and gull cries could tangle together in the same air, there had been a boy in polished shoes.

At the time, Hua Cheng would have said the boy was the strangest thing he had ever met. And that was saying a lot.

This boy, this strange kid, just wouldn't stop talking about merfolk.

Hua Cheng knew of mers like any dock-rat kid did.

Rare. Hard to access, heavily protected, difficult to study outside specific places, routes and permitted waters. But real enough that most kids learned the broad facts in textbooks or at school just like other sea creatures. Real enough that ports sold cheap postcards with blurry tail-flukes cresting the water at sunset. Real enough that documentary specials aired late at night with serious narrators and grainy underwater footage, and every few years some new team of researchers or marine institutes proudly announced a breakthrough in mapping, sound pattern analysis, or interpod contact protocol.

Real enough that rich people donated money to research centers so their names could end up on plaques beside glass tanks full of educational models and interactive displays.

Hua Cheng knew all this because he liked places with roofs, and the coastal marine education centre had both a roof and lazy staff.

If he slipped in during some school excursion hours and kept moving with purpose, no one noticed one extra child among the clusters.

It had air-conditioning too, which in summer felt like a form of divine mercy.

So, Hua Cheng drifted through the place the way he drifted through most places then. Thin, grimy at the edges, eyes too sharp, clothes too worn, smelling like salt, and with the sort of expression adults ignored because it made them uncomfortable. He learned quickly which exhibits had benches nearby, which vending machines jammed hard enough to spit out extra packets, and which volunteers were soft enough to leave pamphlets unattended where someone could take them.

He liked the merfolk wing best.

Not because it was the grandest part of the building. It really wasn't.

The hall of deep-sea preservation got more funding. The whale skeleton in the atrium got more attention. But the merfolk wing had a pull to it that the rest of the center didn't. People lowered their voices there. They leaned in close to the glass cases displaying scale casts and sonar maps and replicas of old tracking equipment. There were maps on the walls showing protected pod ranges and migratory routes in looping coloured lines. Hua Cheng has listened to more tours and guides through the centre than the amount of staff that joined and left. There were photographs of tails half-submerged in silver water, elegant hands breaking the surface, shadowed figures sunning on black rocks too distant for features to be made out.

Most of the photos were terrible.

Hua Cheng liked them anyway.

There was one grainy image in particular, mounted beside a panel on cross-cultural contact attempts, of three young merfolk balanced on a reef shelf in the rain. The picture was badly focused. One face was turned away. Another was a blur of dark hair and pale grin. The third seemed to be staring straight into the lens with open suspicion.

Hua Cheng stood in front of that one a lot.

He had been standing there for some time that day, half-reading the words under it that he had already read a thousand times, when a voice beside him said, with heartfelt offense, "They put this one in bad lighting again."

Hua Cheng turned so fast his shoulder clipped the display wall.

The boy at his side was his age, perhaps a little older. Clean. Very clean. Neatly brushed black hair, neat white shirt, little navy jumper tied over his shoulders despite the warm day, trousers with a crease in them sharp enough to draw blood. He wore polished loafers. Actual polished loafers.

His clothes alone would have been enough to make Hua Cheng suspicious.

His expression made him confusing.

He was frowning at the display with the total distress of someone witnessing a failing of the universe.

"The glare ruins the lower half," the boy continued, mostly to himself. "You can't see the water movement at all. That's important context."

Huh?

He looked at Hua Cheng then, and whatever he had been about to say next simply... did not happen.

Not in the way Hua Cheng was used to.

Usually adults or tidy children or tidy adults reacted to him in one of a few reliable ways. They recoiled. They pitied. They narrowed their eyes. They reached for their bags. They asked where his parents were in tones that made the question feel like an accusation. Occasionally, if they were especially unpleasant, they looked relieved to find themselves not him.

This boy just looked.

Not past him. Not through him. At him.

Then he smiled. It was the sort of smile that ought to have belonged to someone much stupider. Open. Bright. Entirely without caution.

Hua Cheng distrusted it on sight.

"Do you like this one too?" the boy asked.

Hua Cheng stared. The boy waited. Hua Cheng, who had not been asked what he liked in a tone implying the answer mattered in quite some time, said the first thing that came to mind. "It's blurry."

The boy's smile widened. "It is. But they were juveniles, and the observer was on a rocking support boat in rain conditions. It's actually impressive they got this much."

That was, Hua Cheng thought, an insane response.

He said, "You sound like the sign."

"I wrote part of the sign."

Hua Cheng looked him up and down again.

There was no way.

The boy seemed to realize how that sounded and laughed, a little abashed. "Not officially. I told my mother it was missing detail, and she said if I was going to complain, I could help redraft the public version."

"Your mother lets you rewrite museum walls?"

"She lets me make suggestions."

That meant yes.

Hua Cheng hated him a little.

He also found himself unable to stop looking.

Looking closer, the boy was even stranger. He had the kind of face that made people soften before he'd said a word. Not beautiful in a fragile way, nothing that dramatic. Just clear. Kind. Bright-eyed without seeming like an idiot. The sort of child who had likely never had to learn how to make himself small. The sort of child who probably handed over his lunch money because somebody said please.

In Hua Cheng's experience, that kind of softness usually came with a smug edge or a sheltered stupidity that made conversation feel like kicking driftwood.

This one had neither.

Instead, he turned back to the photograph with the solemn concentration of a scholar twice his age and said, "Most people only care that merfolk are real. Or that they're rare. Or that they look beautiful in photographs. But the interesting part is that they have social structures we still don't fully understand, and different pods may have different traditions. Imagine if one blurry image was the only proof anyone had that humans had dances or funerals. That would be ridiculous." He said this with the intensity of revelation.

Hua Cheng had never heard someone speak about anything the way this boy spoke about merfolk. It was not the easy excitement of someone repeating facts they had been praised for memorizing. It was not performance. Not showing off. Not even childish obsession in the ordinary sense. It was devotion. Utter, earnest, unembarrassed devotion.

The boy looked back at Hua Cheng and asked, "Do you want to see the skeletal tail articulation model? It's in the next room, but they've positioned it badly too."

Hua Cheng should have said no.

He should have laughed in his face or stolen his wallet or, at minimum, walked away before someone noticed them standing together and decided questions needed asking.

Instead he said, "Why?"

The boy blinked. "Why?"

"Why are you talking to me?" It came out flatter than he intended.

The boy did not flinch.

That, more than anything, was what made Hua Cheng remember him. He tilted his head a little, considering the question seriously, as if it deserved thought. "Because you looked like you were reading the display properly," he said at last. "Most people just glance and move on."

Hua Cheng didn't know what to do with that.

The world, in his experience, rarely handed out reasons that clean.

Before he could think of a response sharp enough to protect himself, the boy added, almost anxiously, "Also, I thought maybe if you liked this one too, I could show you the field maps in the archive room. They aren't open to visitors, but my parents are upstairs and if I ask nicely—"

"There are archive rooms?"

The boy lit up.

Hua Cheng would think back on that expression years later and realize, with some bitterness, that his fate had probably been sealed in that exact moment.

Because there were many ways a life could bend.

Some bent under hunger. Some under fear. Some under grief.

Hua Cheng's, absurdly, bent because one well-dressed child with too much heart and no instinct for social boundaries asked if he wanted to see better merfolk maps.

The boy held out his hand with great seriousness.

"I'm Xie Lian," he said.

Hua Cheng looked at the hand. Then at Xie Lian's face. Then back at the hand. It was a ridiculous hand. Clean nails. No cuts. No dirt in the creases. The kind of hand that had never had to snatch food and run.

Hua Cheng did not take it. His hands smelled like baitfish and dock wood . "Do you always introduce yourself to strangers?" he asked.

"Ah, not always."

"Only the dirty ones?"

Xie Lian's expression changed at once. Not in the way Hua Cheng expected. No pity. No startled denial. No flustered correction. Just a quick, quiet sadness, as if he had heard something unfortunate and wished he hadn't. "I introduce myself to people I want to know," he said.

Hua Cheng, quite against his will, stopped breathing for a second. He recovered by becoming meaner.

"That's stupid."

"It might be," Xie Lian agreed easily. "Do you still want to see the maps?"

Hua Cheng probably should have left then. Any sensible child with his kind of upbringing would have. But the problem with Hua Cheng, even back then, was that once something caught in him, it tended to catch deep. And Xie Lian had already done something far more dangerous than offer kindness. He had offered interest. Not the ugly kind adults used when deciding whether you were trouble. Not the curious kind children used when deciding whether you were safe to mock.

Real interest.

As if Hua Cheng standing there mattered just as much as the exhibit. It was intolerable.

It was irresistible.

So he followed.

Xie Lian took him through the merfolk wing with the delighted authority of a tiny curator. He talked the whole time, but not in a suffocating way. He pointed out things no one else seemed to notice. How one tail cast showed asymmetrical wear from reef scraping, how a pod photographed off the southern coast had used woven kelp markers in a pattern no human team had deciphered yet, how the latest public acoustic studies were flawed because they treated mer vocalization like whale song instead of language shaped by social context.

Hua Cheng understood perhaps half of what he was saying. But still, he listened to every word.

At one point Xie Lian realized he had been monopolizing the conversation and asked, with earnest concern, "Sorry, am I talking too much?"

"Yes," Hua Cheng said because he really has no filter with these kind of things. Truthfully, Hua Cheng didn't really mind all the chatter.

"Oh. Sorry." A pause. Then, probably unable to help himself, Xie Lian continued in a slightly softer voice, "But look at this chart. This current line here is probably why the Jiang pod altered route in late spring two years running."

Hua Cheng laughed quietly and lingered at Xie Lian's shoulder following the finger dragging across the class protected chart. He smelled like soap and paper and the faint salt of sea air dragged in from outside. His sleeves were rolled once at the wrists, neat but not fussy. There was a little ink stain on one thumb. Hua Cheng noticed these things with the unnerving acuity of someone who had never in his life been given a reason to stand this close to goodness.

The archive room, when Xie Lian got him into it through sheer shameless familiarity with the staff, was even better.

Metal drawers. Laminated route maps, old field notes. Stacks of observational stills. Contact logs. Weather records. Maintenance records for offshore platforms and research craft. On one table lay photographs waiting to be sorted, several showing merfolk at a distance clustered near a vessel.

Xie Lian handled every sheet like it was sacred.

Hua Cheng watched him instead of the papers. That probably should have embarrassed him. It didn't. He was too busy being absolutely bewildered.

"Hey. Do you want to work with them one day?" Xie Lian asked suddenly, crouched over a file box.

"With who?"

"The pods. Or the research teams. Or both. That's what I'm going to do, Im going to make it so that everyone knows how much merpeople are truly people."

Hua Cheng scoffed. "I can't."

Xie Lian looked up at once. "Why?"

There he went again, asking impossible questions in that plain voice. Hua Cheng shoved his hands in his pockets. "Because I'm not one of the neat little scientist kids wandering around with visitor badges."

Xie Lian frowned as if Hua Cheng had said something mathematically stupid. "You don't need a visitor badge to care about merfolk."

"That's not what I said."

"No..." Xie Lian said softly. "It isn't."

For a second the room went very still. Hua Cheng looked away first, because he was not built for being understood in under five minutes and certainly not by a boy in polished shoes.

Xie Lian, perhaps sensing he had stepped too close to something tender and feral, changed tactics with the elegance of a born menace. He pulled open a lower drawer and said, "Come look at this."

Inside was a spread of photographs from a juvenile contact study off the eastern shoals. Kids. Human and mer, though never together in the same frame, mirroring play behaviour across a safe-distance protocol line. Floating rings. Painted buoys.

Hua Cheng leaned closer. The mer-children in the photos looked bright and alive and impossible, all sharp eyes and wet hair and flashes of colour that had to be scale. One had both hands wrapped around a buoy twice her size and looked furious about it. Another was mid-laugh, head thrown back, water beading down a narrow throat.

Something in Hua Cheng's chest tightened. Not painfully. More like a hook setting.

"I think," Xie Lian said, almost dreamily, "people still approach all of this wrong."

Hua Cheng glanced at him.

Xie Lian was looking at the photos with the same expression priests probably wore in front of altars.

"They treat merfolk like a subject first and a people second," he said. "Even the good researchers do it by accident. They want to know what merfolk are. But the better question is probably who."

That landed somewhere like a latch in his brain. It landed hard enough that years later Hua Cheng would still remember the exact angle of the archive light across Xie Lian's face when he said it.

Who.

Not what.

No one in Hua Cheng's life had ever been confused about what he was. Street child. Orphan. Nuisance. Liar. Burden. Occasionally thief, depending on how dramatic the shopkeeper felt. Who felt like a luxury category. Who implied something broad enough to deserve curiosity.

Xie Lian was talking about merfolk.

Hua Cheng, unfortunate by nature, took it personally. "Call me San Lang." he said, because he was still suspicious and untrusting of almost everything. But truthfully, that was one of the names he'd claimed as his own. Xie Lian could call him that.

The door opened then and an adult voice called, "A-Lian?"

A woman in a research lanyard appeared, carrying a folder under one arm. She had Xie Lian's eyes, though hers were lined by work and worry. Her gaze moved from her son to Hua Cheng in a single sweep that took in the ragged clothes, the defensive posture, the careful stillness.

Hua Cheng braced. He knew this moment. Knew its shape. The polite pause before removal.

Instead she only said, "You've been stealing my archive privileges again."

Xie Lian brightened. "I was teaching someone."

"You are nine."

"I'm good at it."

How this kid managed to sound entirely genuine and not even the slightest bit arrogant was a mystery to Hua Cheng.

His mother sighed with long practice. Then she looked to Hua Cheng and asked, very simply, "Have you eaten today?"

That nearly undid him.He hated that. Xie Lian, curse him, did not make a fuss. He only turned expectantly, like the answer mattered and the room would wait for it.

Hua Cheng said, "Yes."

It was a lie. His stomach betrayed him by growling.

Xie Lian's mother was kind enough not to comment on that either. "There are staff sandwiches in the upstairs break room that no one is touching because someone labelled the cucumber tray wrong. Tragic, really. If you two happen to solve that problem, I'm sure the department will survive."

Then she left as if nothing at all were strange. Hua Cheng stood very still after that.

Xie Lian smiled at him again, softer this time. "Come on," he said. "The egg sandwiches go first."

That was how it happened.

Not all at once.

Lives rarely changed all at once, no matter how people liked to tell stories later. Mostly they shifted in small, crooked increments. A doorway held open. A sandwich quietly given. A name offered without demand. A child looking at another child and seeing not ruin, not inconvenience, not danger, but possibility.

Hua Cheng came back after that. For the air-conditioning. For the pamphlets to read and quiet corners. For the merfolk exhibits, certainly.

There was the sea. There were merfolk. There were people who tried, clumsily and earnestly, to understand instead of take.

Even after Xie Lian and his moved away, for Hua Cheng, that small amount of time had been enough.

Enough to follow.

Enough to remember.

Hua Cheng still went to the port. Practically lived there in some way, shape, or form. Still haunted the edges of research buildings and docks. Still watched the ships that went out farther than the fishing boats, the ones with cranes and sensors and strange floating equipment strapped to their decks. He watched the crews loading insulated crates and instrument cases. He learned which vessels belonged to survey teams, which to photographers, which to the more serious researchers who moved with the clipped focus of people chasing answers instead of spectacle.

And every time one of those ships pulled away from shore, some ugly, restless thing in Hua Cheng twisted. Because the people aboard got to go where the merfolk were. They got to see them and not just the blurry photographs. Not tail shadows in old printed reports. Not schoolbook facts and museum displays and public-safe scraps trimmed down for people on land. The real thing. The water breaking over a live tail. The sound of them. The movement of whole pods gliding beneath the hull. The impossible, infuriating reality of them.

Xie Lian had once spoken about merfolk with both hands open, as if wonder was a thing meant to be shared.

Hua Cheng, unfortunate by nature and stubborn by sheer force of will, had taken that and made it half of his whole personality.

So when he noticed the ship that morning, he did not notice it because it was large, or clean, or different from the fishing vessels.

He noticed it because he knew it was going out.

A proper research vessel, not one of the little day boats that hugged the harbour routes. This one had metal arms mounted to the deck, racks for survey gear, flotation rigs stacked near the stern, and the kind of crew that moved like they knew where they were going, how long they were going and expected the sea to let them get there. His heart kicked hard enough to annoy him.

He stood half-hidden behind a piling and watched the crew load the last of their supplies. One woman checked a clipboard while two others secured crates. A man in a weather-faded cap hauled a line over one shoulder. No one was paying attention to the dock itself. No one was looking for one ragged orphan child with salt-stiff clothes and far too much nerve.

Hua Cheng stared at the gangway.

It was a stupid idea.

That did not make it less appealing. He wanted violently, irrationally, with the kind of force only children and fools managed properly, to see them.

Not through glass.

Not through photographs.

Not through Xie Lian's stories, treasured though those had become.

For himself.

Just once, he wanted to stand where the researchers stood and look down into the open water and know that all of it was real. That there truly were people beneath the surface. That the world was as wide as Xie Lian had said it was. That all the bright, impossible things Hua Cheng had quietly built inside himself after meeting that clean, kind boy had not been made from nothing.

So naturally, he climbed aboard.

Later, with the benefit of hindsight, he would admit this had been one of the greatest and most foolish decisions of his life. At the time, it felt a lot like opportunity wearing a very flimsy disguise.

He slipped onto the ship the way he slipped into most places then: quick, quiet, unnoticed. He had always been good at vanishing when he needed to. Dock workers rarely looked twice at children like him. A skinny boy in worn clothes was part of the harbour scenery, no more remarkable than gulls or fish guts or old rope left rotting in the sun. Hua Cheng knew where to duck, where to wait, how to make himself small enough that people's eyes skated over him and moved on. He tucked himself into a narrow space behind stacked tarpaulins and supply crates, heart hammering with a mixture of triumph and dread.

Above him, the deck thudded with footsteps. Ropes shifted. Someone shouted for a final check. Wood groaned beneath the transfer of weight. A gull landed somewhere overhead and screamed with what felt, to Hua Cheng, like unnecessary drama.

He stayed perfectly still.

Any minute now, he told himself.

Any minute now, this would become worth it.

Then the ship lurched, the dock creaked away, and Hua Cheng felt the unmistakable movement of the vessel pulling out to sea. Only then, crouched in the dark with fish stink in his nose and splinters pressing through the knees of his trousers, did he fully appreciate that he had made a such a risky choice.

Hours passed with the salty wind of the open ocean, the sun rising to full in the sky. The steady rock of the ship as it tore through the sea and current both. As they slowed to a stop, the energy on deck resumed with people everywhere. He risked a glance through the gap.

The adults aboard were busy with incomprehensible things. They adjusted dials. Uncoiled ropes attached to metal frames. Lowered objects over the side that vanished beneath the surface trailing lines. One woman scribbled in a notebook while another called out numbers. Someone laughed at something near the stern. No one sounded frightened.

Which made Hua Cheng feel electric.

People who were not frightened by the open ocean were probably deranged. He was starting to think he was the same.

He shifted for a better look.

Below, the water flashed blue-green beneath the midday sun, and then—

Hua Cheng forgot how to breathe.

More shapes surfaced around the equipment the crew had lowered.

At first Hua Cheng could only stare.

They moved nothing like fish and nothing like the lumbering seals he'd sometimes seen near the harbour mouth. There was intention in every turn, every circling pass. One older mer drifted beside a painted buoy and nudged it with an elbow, watching it bob back with what looked suspiciously like disapproval. Another caught the dangling edge of a ring between long, sharp-nailed fingers and gave it an experimental tug before letting it spin away. Smaller figures cut in and out between them in quick flashes of wet hair and bright eyes, too curious to keep their distance, darting close to the strange floating toys and then vanishing below the surface in silvery streaks.

Their voices carried over the water in strange, chiming bursts.

Not human. Not anything Hua Cheng had words for. Laughter, maybe. If the ocean itself could laugh, Hua Cheng imagined it would sound a lot like this.

Merfolk.

Real.

Not photographs. Not bad lighting behind museum glass. Not grainy stills and annotated maps and Xie Lian's bright, impossible certainty.

Real enough to splash.

Real enough to reach.

One of the smaller mers surfaced almost directly below the rail, both hands braced on a float while he peered up toward the ship. He looked young. Younger than Hua Cheng had expected merfolk to look, which was a stupid thought in itself. His face was curious and lively, his grin quick and looking for trouble. Another popped up beside him and slapped water at his shoulder. The first shoved back. A third darted between them and seized the floating ring, only to be pursued at once in a flurry of offended shrieks and delighted splashing.

Hua Cheng forgot, briefly, every useful instinct he possessed.

He edged out farther from behind the crates.

The deck boards were warm under his bare feet. He crouched near the rail, fingers curling around the rough wood as he leaned over to see better. There were more of them below than he'd first realized. Not only children. Adults too, keeping a wider circle around the ship, watchful even while the younger ones played. Dark heads rising and sinking. Shoulders slick with seawater. Glimpses of scaled tails beneath the surface, flashing violet, silver, lavender and purple-black where the sun struck and vanished.

One of the younger ones looked up.

Their eyes met.

For one stretched, impossible beat, neither of them moved. Then the mer's face lit with such open curiosity that it made something jolt hard in Hua Cheng's chest. He lifted one dripping hand slowly, water streaming from fingers to forearm.

Like they were simply a child discovering another strange child.

Hua Cheng, who had not planned for this part at all, stared like an idiot.

Then, awkwardly, uncertain whether he was doing it wrong, he raised his own hand.

The mer made a sharp, excited sound and splashed his companions at once. Several more heads turned. Suddenly there were too many eyes on Hua Cheng, too many bright faces surfacing nearer the hull, too much impossible life gathered just beneath him.

He wanted to see better.

He shifted his weight, leaning farther out over the rail, one hand still braced on the wood while the other gripped the post. The ship rolled lightly beneath him, not enough to alarm anyone used to it, but enough that the deck moved in a long, living sway. Hua Cheng barely noticed. The smallest mer had come even closer now, fingers hooked over one of the floating rings as he craned upward, dark hair plastered to his brow. Behind him, another juvenile swept past with a flick of tail and sent up a glittering spray. Someone farther down the deck called out to the crew. The winch creaked. One of the adults below gave a low warning sound that the younger mers ignored completely.

Hua Cheng planted one foot more firmly.

It landed on damp wood.

He did not realize how slick the patch was until his heel slid. His stomach dropped first.

His grip tightened violently on the rail, enough to wrench splinters into his palm, and for one wild second he thought he might save it. The ship shifted under him again, a slow rocking motion that might as well have been the earth giving way. The post banged against his ribs. His other foot scrambled for purchase and found none.

Someone on deck shouted.

One of the mers below made a sharp sound, the kind that cut straight through the others.

Then the rail tore out of Hua Cheng's hand and the world tipped.

He had just enough time to know exactly what was happening. Then he hit the water hard enough for it to feel like stone. The told slammed through his body like a beating with no mercy.  Not the shallow slap of harbour water at the docks, not rain, not spray. This was full-bodied, merciless cold, the sea rising up and swallowing him whole. Salt rushed into his nose and mouth. His eyes flew open, green-blue blur and shattered light. The surface was suddenly above him, distant and broken into bright pieces by the violence of his fall.

Panic took him fast and ugly.

Hua Cheng kicked, he knew how to swim but the panic set in and the sea did not care. One leg drove downward, the other twisted, and instead of rising he went crookedly deeper, dragged by wet clothes and terror and the sheer weight of his own stupidity. His arms thrashed for something solid and found only water, too vast to fight and too close to escape. He tried to breathe and got salt. Tried to shout and got more.

Light fractured above him in trembling shards.

His lungs began to burn.

The water pressed in from every side, heavy and endless and alive in a way the harbour had never been. It dragged at him, not with hands, not with malice, but with the vast, indifferent pull of something that had been swallowing the unwary long before Hua Cheng was born and would keep swallowing them long after he was gone.

Fear stopped being a feeling and became his whole body.

Scrambling. Flailing. Sinking.

Then something seized him.

An arm hooked around his chest and hauled him upward with startling strength. Hua Cheng broke the surface coughing, choking, half out of his mind. He clutched instinctively at whatever held him. Wet skin. Warm, somehow, despite the sea.

The face beside his was unfamiliar and impossible.

A man, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, calm even with a drowning child mauling him in terror. But from the waist down there was no body, no legs. Only a powerful tail the colour of deep river water and purple flowers, scaled in muted silver.

The merman said something low and soothing, a stream of sounds Hua Cheng did not understand. It rolled like pebbles in a current. Gentle. Steady.

Hua Cheng coughed seawater on his shoulder.

The merman did not seem offended.

By then the others were there. Smaller mers circled close, peering with unrestrained interest. One with a rounder face and bright eyes hovered so near Hua Cheng could have grabbed his hair if he'd had any sense left. Another child flicked water at him, then darted back when Hua Cheng jerked.

Fear still thrashed in him, but wonder had managed to claw its way in beside it.

The larger merman adjusted his hold and guided Hua Cheng toward one of the floating rings. He pressed it against Hua Cheng's chest until the his death grip transferred from merman to buoy. Then he kept a hand braced lightly against Hua Cheng's back while speaking to him in that same low current-song.

Later, Hua Cheng would know him as Jiang Fengmian.

At the time, he knew only that the sea had not killed him because this stranger had decided otherwise.

Hua Cheng spat, coughed again, and glared at the ocean as though it had personally insulted him as he kicked his legs and remembered that he was capable of not drowning like a damn rock.

One of the younger mers laughed outright.

Hua Cheng, offended by being mocked by someone who looked around his own age, glared at him too.

The little mer laughed harder.

The smaller mers stayed near him, first cautious, then delighted when he did not bolt. One showed him how to lie over the ring without tipping. Another tapped the water and dove, reappearing farther off with a spray of droplets and a smug expression that needed no translation. Hua Cheng, who had nearly died and therefore apparently lost all common sense, tried to imitate him and promptly inhaled half the sea again.

The children found this very entertaining.

By the time the crew got him back aboard, Hua Cheng was wet through to his bones, shaking hard enough to bite his own tongue, and furious about all of it.

Not about nearly drowning. That horror had not fully caught up to him yet.

No, what mattered immediately was that he was no longer in the water.

He twisted in the arms of the woman hauling him up the boarding ladder, coughing seawater onto her shoulder and trying with what dignity he had left to look over the rail instead of at the deck full of strangers now staring at him.

"Hold still, you little menace," she snapped, tightening her grip before he could pitch himself right back overboard. She was broad-shouldered, sun-browned, with her dark hair tied in a knot that had long since given up neatness. "You trying to drown twice in one morning?"

Hua Cheng would have answered something cutting if he hadn't been busy trying to get all the damn seawater out of his nose and brain.

She dumped him onto the deck with more practicality than gentleness and immediately dropped to one knee in front of him, one hand braced on his back while he cheated his lungs and what felt like the back of his eyeballs of all the water. Someone shoved a blanket at her. Another pair of boots stopped just within Hua Cheng's field of vision.

"Well?" said a man above him. "Is he dead?"

"No," the woman said. "Does he sound dead? Seems pretty lively to me, even if he does looks like a washed up pufferfish."

"Rude," Hua Cheng rasped.

That earned him a short, startled silence. Then someone barked a laugh. Hua Cheng looked up, water dripping from his lashes.

There were four of them around him at first.

The woman who had carried him up from the water. The one who had laughed was a rangy man in a faded cap and rolled sleeves, all elbows and weather lines, with the kind of grin that suggested he found most of life faintly ridiculous. Behind him stood a younger woman clutching a clipboard to her chest, still looking pale from the excitement. Beside the mast was an older man with iron-grey hair and a face carved into permanent disapproval, though even he looked more alarmed than angry.

All of them were staring at Hua Cheng.

Which was rude, considering he had just died a little.

He twisted again, trying to look past them toward the sea.

Below, the merfolk still bobbed near the vessel.

The larger one—the man who had pulled him from the water—floated nearest the hull, one arm resting against a buoy line as if he had all the time in the world. Calm. Steady. Watching. One of the younger mers slapped the surface with both hands when he saw Hua Cheng looking and nearly splashed another in the face. A second disappeared below with a flick of tail only to pop up farther aft, still peering at the boat with unabashed interest.

The older mer lifted a hand.

Slow. Open-palmed.

The gesture settled somewhere strange in Hua Cheng's chest.

He lifted his own hand back before anyone on deck could stop him.When he lowered it again, the woman in front of him exhaled hard through her nose.

"Well," she said, "that answers one question."

The rangy man tipped his head. "Does it?"

"He didn't scream at the sight of them, so he's either got a heap of courage or very poor judgment."

"I have both," Hua Cheng muttered.

That got the laugh again.

The younger woman with the clipboard crouched uncertainly. "Where did he come from?"

All eyes turned to Hua Cheng.

He hated that instantly.

The broad-shouldered woman folded her arms. "That," she said, "is exactly what I'd like to know."

Hua Cheng said nothing.

"Oh?" She raised a brow. "Suddenly mute?"

"No," Hua Cheng said.

"Good. Then use your words. Who are you?"

He considered several answers, none of them wise.

The truth seemed annoying enough to serve. "I snuck on the boat."

"Well that's obvious."

He glared at her.

She glared back with the relaxed confidence of an adult who had spent years winning arguments with weather and machinery and therefore did not find one half-drowned child particularly daunting.

"How," said the older grey-haired man, "did you get on this vessel without anyone seeing you?"

Hua Cheng looked at him, then at the crew, then back toward the water.

No one said anything.

He said, "That your own mistake."

The rangy man made a strangled sound and turned away, shoulders shaking.

The clipboard woman slapped a hand over her mouth.

The older man's expression became almost impressive in its severity.

The broad-shouldered woman just squinted at Hua Cheng, as if recalculating.

"Oh, he's awful," she said.

"Can we keep him?" said the man in the cap.

"No."

"Yes," Hua Cheng said at the same time as the staunch woman.

She pointed at him. "You do not get a vote."

"Why not?" Hua Cheng argued.

"You nearly drowned because you stowed away on a research vessel and then leaned over the rail like the ocean had personally invited you."

"I wanted to see them."

The deck went a little quieter at that.

It slipped out before Hua Cheng could stop it.He hated that too.Not because it was untrue. Because it was.

The younger woman lowered her clipboard. "The merfolk?"

Hua Cheng looked toward the water again.

The small ones were still lingering. Watching. The older mer had moved back a little, giving the vessel space while still remaining close enough that Hua Cheng could see the sunlight glittering on his shoulders.

"Yes," Hua Cheng said, more sullenly now that it had been dragged into the open. "I wanted to see them properly."

The wind moved across the deck. Somewhere overhead, rigging clicked.

The woman in front of him did not soften exactly, but something in her face shifted out of combat.

"Well," she said at last, "that was a profoundly stupid way to go about it."

Hua Cheng folded his arms as much as the blanket allowed. "It worked."

The grey-haired man looked like he regretted surviving to hear this conversation.

The man in the cap laughed outright this time. "He's got us there, Lin."

"Do not encourage him, Qian."

"Too late."

Lin—apparently—rubbed at her temple, then held a hand out toward the clipboard woman without looking. "Liren, check if the kettle's still hot."

The young woman blinked. "For tea?"

"For the child who dropped himself into the sea, yes, for tea."

"I didn't drop myself—"

"You entered the sea without authorization," Lin said. "From my vessel. Which is just a pretentious way of saying you dropped yourself."

Liren fled toward the hatchway, perhaps to hide her smile.

Qian crouched in front of Hua Cheng, balancing easily on the balls of his feet. Up close, he smelled like salt, engine grease, and sun.

"So," he said in a friendlier tone than Hua Cheng trusted, "you've got a name?"

Hua Cheng hesitated.

Names were dangerous things in the wrong mouths.

But then he looked past Qian's shoulder and saw the big mer still in the water, still there, not retreating, not frightened off by the commotion. Watching the boat with the same calm attention.

The sea had not swallowed Hua Cheng.

These strangers had not thrown him back below deck just yet.

Against every better instinct he possessed, he said, "Hua Cheng."

Qian nodded as if accepting something of actual value. "Right then, Hua Cheng. I'm Qian Su. That terror is Lin Yi. The one you insulted with that line about mistakes is Professor Zhao, who deserved it a little. The girl with the clipboard is Li Ren, and if you drip on her field notes again she may cry."

"I will not cry," came Liren's offended voice from below deck.

"Good to know," Qian called back.

Professor Zhao folded his arms into his sleeves. "What we should do is return him to the harbour and notify someone."

"No one to notify," Hua Cheng said with the casualness of a plain fact.

The words hit the deck and stayed there.

No one made a show of pity. Hua Cheng would have bitten them if they had.

Lin only asked, "No one?"

Hua Cheng stared at the boards.

He hated the shape of silence that followed.

Qian's voice, when it came, was lighter than before, but careful around the edges. "You're a port-kid?"

Hua Cheng shrugged one shoulder. He was, dock-brat, port-kid, a seaside orphan. He was used to those labels.

"Eating?"

Another shrug.

Lin swore softly under her breath.

Professor Zhao looked out over the water for a long moment, jaw set.

Liren reappeared with a chipped mug in both hands and stopped dead halfway up the stairs, having apparently walked back into a different conversation than the one she'd left.

Lin held a hand out. Liren passed over the mug.

Lin thrust it toward Hua Cheng. "Drink. Before you die of hypothermia."

He eyed it suspiciously.

"It's tea, not poison."

"That's exactly what poisoners say."

Qian made a strangled noise again.

Lin's mouth twitched despite herself. "Drink it anyway."

Hua Cheng took the mug.

It was hot enough to sting his fingers through the ceramic. He wrapped both hands around it and let the warmth sink in before daring a sip. Sweet. Too sweet, almost. Someone had added far too much sugar.

He drank again.

No one commented on that either.

Qian sat down cross-legged on the deck in front of him as if they were old friends instead of accidental acquaintances bound by drowning. "You know," he said conversationally, "most children sneak onto ships for less noble reasons."

Hua Cheng peered at him over the rim of the mug.

"Food," Qian elaborated. "Adventure. Theft. Usually not merfolk scholarship."

"I didn't say scholarship."

"No," Qian agreed. "That's how I know you might be salvageable."

Professor Zhao snorted.

Lin glanced over the rail. "They're still here."

They all looked.

"You can't blame them. They've probably never been bellyflopped by a kid before." Qian snorted.

The merfolk had not gone far. The juveniles were keeping their distance now, though one continued to circle the stern with the exaggerated subtlety of a child who wanted desperately to appear not curious. The larger mer rested farther out, one hand on a buoy, gaze fixed on the deck.

On Hua Cheng.

He did not know why that mattered so much.

Only that it did.

Lin blew out a breath. "Well. Can't throw the boy overboard now. Our hosts would judge us."

Professor Zhao gave her a dry look. "I am relieved your ethics remain externally motivated."

"My ethics are excellent," Lin said. "My patience is not."

Qian leaned closer to Hua Cheng. "Bad news, little menace. She's in charge of the practical decisions."

"I gathered that."

"Good. That means when she tells you not to touch equipment, dangle off railings, or attempt death a second time, you'll obey."

Hua Cheng scowled into his tea. "I might."

Lin barked a laugh. "No, he won't."

"No," Qian agreed. "He absolutely won't."

Liren, who had been inching closer ever since Hua Cheng admitted to having no one, crouched beside a coil of rope and said softly, "Why did you really come aboard?"

Hua Cheng looked at her, then away.

There were many possible answers.

Because Xie Lian had once taught him to look at the sea and see people, not shadows.

Because blurry photographs had stopped being enough.

Because he had wanted to stand where the researchers stood and know, just once, that wonder was not a thing reserved for cleaner children with better shoes and parents who came back for them.

Because something in him had gone crooked with wanting.

He settled on the simplest truth.

"I wanted to see if it was real."

Liren blinked. "The merfolk?"

Hua Cheng's fingers tightened around the mug.

"That they were people too," he said.

No one answered right away.

Qian's expression lost some of its teasing. Professor Zhao looked out toward the horizon again, older suddenly. Lin studied Hua Cheng for one quiet moment too long, as if filing him somewhere deeper than nuisance.

Then she stood.

"All right," she said briskly, because some people used practicality the way others used prayer. "He's alive. He's articulate. He's insufferable. We're hours from port and not turning back for one feral child who has already seen half the survey route."

"Who's the feral one?" Hua Cheng muttered.

Lin pointed at him again. "This is why people leave you in baskets."

Hua Cheng gave her a blank stare. "No one left me in a basket."

"Pity. It might have improved your temperament."

Qian grinned. "Does this mean he's staying?"

"For today," Professor Zhao said before Lin could answer. "We'll sort the rest in port."

Hua Cheng immediately said, "I'm not leaving."

Professor Zhao looked down at him. "That is not your decision."

Hua Cheng lifted his chin, seawater still dripping at the ends of his hair. "Then I'll make it your problem."

There was a beat of silence.

Then Qian laughed so hard he had to brace a hand on the deck.

Lin shut her eyes briefly, perhaps in prayer for strength.

Liren looked horrified and impressed in equal measure.

Professor Zhao stared at Hua Cheng, long and stern and unreadable.

Then, very slowly, he said, "I strongly dislike that I'm starting to like you."

Hua Cheng, despite himself, almost smiled.

That should have been the end of it. A temporary inconvenience. A child fed, dried, and returned to shore at first opportunity.

Instead, it became the beginning.

At first because no one aboard was monstrous enough to dump a half-starved orphan back onto the docks and pretend that solved anything.

Then because Hua Cheng, once installed anywhere, proved unnervingly difficult to remove and obsessively eager to learn.

He learned their tempers before he learned all their titles. Lin cursed at machinery but tucked extra food aside without comment. Qian talked through rope work, weather patterns, and bad card strategy with the same loose ease, and laughed every time Hua Cheng bit back. Professor Zhao scolded like it was a sacred duty and then quietly left books where Hua Cheng could 'accidentally' find them. Liren answered questions Hua Cheng pretended not to care about and never once looked at him like he was filth in borrowed space.

Most importantly, he learned that merfolk were neither specimen nor textbook wonder. They were a people entire unto themselves, with humor and grief and rituals and tempers and loyalties as intricate as any on land.

He learned this first by watching.

That was how all truly important things began with Hua Cheng: not with trust, not with easy belonging, but with a quiet, stubborn accumulation of evidence.

The crew kept him because they had failed at not doing so.

Lin still complained about him in a tone that suggested she would kill anyone else who tried. Qian treated him like a badly socialized cat someone had dragged aboard in a storm and now refused to admit was permanent. Professor Zhao continued to scold him with the grave disappointment of a man convinced civilization was fraying one child at a time. Liren, after only a week, had given up pretending she was not fond of him and started leaving aside extra fruit, spare socks, and sharpened pencils with such suspicious innocence that Hua Cheng refused to thank her on principle.

He stayed.

At first aboard the vessel only during research runs, then in port with Lin when the ship docked for supplies, then aboard so often that his absence would have been stranger than his presence. He learned where the first-aid kit lived, how to stay out of the swing of the crane arm, how to tell from the sound of the engine whether Qian was in a decent mood or whether everyone ought to avoid speaking to him until dinner. He learned technical jargon from weather-stiff field journals and numbers from net weights, buoy calibrations, and ration inventories. Professor Zhao, who claimed not to believe in coddling, taught him reading by leaving books in his path and pretending surprise when Hua Cheng returned them finished. Lin taught him knots and profanity with equal fluency. Liren taught him proper note-taking and the deeply humiliating fact that his handwriting looked like it had lost a fight with a shark.

And through all of it, the Jiang pod kept returning.

Never on command.

Never because the humans expected them to.

They came because this stretch of water was theirs, because the boat had become familiar, because the crew had learned—slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely—how not to trespass.

At first the mers kept their distance from Hua Cheng.

That made sense. He was a land-child dragged half-drowned from the sea and then somehow never removed from the routine. The younger mers were curious, naturally. The adults were not fooled by curiosity. They watched him the way sensible people watched sparks near dry tinder.

Hua Cheng watched back.

He learned which members of the pod approached first and which lingered farther out. Learned who tolerated floating toys and who thought them undignified. Learned that the younger ones, once they decided he was no longer immediately threatening, had the same weakness as human children: they found it very funny when other people got startled.

That was how he properly met Wei Wuxian.

It happened on a bright afternoon when the research vessel lay nearly still over a known meeting stretch, the water so clear that Hua Cheng could see shadows moving beneath it long before heads broke the surface. He had been kneeling by the rail trying to sketch the pattern of a reef marker the pod had woven from kelp strands when something cold and wet seized his ankle.

He yelped.

Qian, on the far side of the deck, barked a delighted laugh.

Hua Cheng whirled around, one hand clapped over his chest, and found a young mer half-submerged against the hull, grinning with every ounce of mischief his narrow face could hold. Dark hair slicked back, eyes bright and wicked, fingers still hooked loosely around Hua Cheng's ankle as if he had every right.

He made a quick series of sharp, chattering sounds at Hua Cheng that required no translation whatsoever.

You should have seen your face.

Hua Cheng glared at him with all the force a damp, indignant child could muster. "Let go."

The mer laughed again, released him, and vanished beneath the surface.

A second later he shot up three arm-lengths away with one of the orange floats tucked under his elbow like stolen treasure.

"Hua Cheng," Liren called from behind him, trying and failing to sound stern, "do not antagonize the juveniles."

"He antagonized me."

"It builds character. Don't antagonise back."

Hua Cheng huffed and rolled his eyes.

The same mer resurfaced beside the float and slapped it with both hands until it bounced. He looked up at Hua Cheng, pointed at himself with theatrical exaggeration, then smacked the float again.

Hua Cheng frowned.

The mer repeated the motions.

Point to self. Slap float. Point to self again.

Qian leaned on the rail beside Hua Cheng. "Looks like he wants your attention."

"I gathered that."

"No, I mean I think he's introducing himself to you."

Hua Cheng looked down again.

The mer waited with an expression so openly expectant it would have been embarrassing on anyone else.

Then, slowly, he pointed to himself one more time and made a sound.

"That's Wei Wuxian," Professor Zhao informed from farther back, notebook lowering as he listened. 

The young mer brightened instantly. He slapped the water once in approval.

Wei Wuxian.

Hua Cheng repeated, the shape unfamiliar in his mouth.

Wei Wuxian bared all his teeth in obvious delight.

That, more or less, was that.

After Wei Wuxian came Jiang Cheng, though not by choice and certainly not by smooth introduction. Jiang Cheng's earliest and strongest opinion of Hua Cheng seemed to be that he was an idiot the adults should keep on a shorter leash. Hua Cheng, who considered this a perfectly unreasonable attitude from someone who had teeth sharp enough to bite through fishing line, responded in kind.

The first time Jiang Cheng allowed himself to be close to the boat while Hua Cheng was on deck, he did so only because Wei Wuxian had already swum up and was trying to teach Hua Cheng how to mimic a particular clicking call. Hua Cheng's attempt sounded, according to everyone present, like a gull choking on a spoon. Wei Wuxian nearly drowned laughing.

Then another young mer surfaced beside him and fixed Hua Cheng with a stare of such withering contempt that even Lin muttered, "Well. He's going to be trouble."

Jiang Cheng's features were finer than Wei Wuxian's, sharper at the edges, with dark eyes that missed nothing and approved of less. He listened to Hua Cheng make the call again, visibly regretted all choices leading to this moment, then shoved Wei Wuxian aside and did it properly.

Hua Cheng stared.

Jiang Cheng did it again, slower this time, then jabbed two fingers toward Hua Cheng's face in a command that clearly meant, Try again without disgracing yourself.

Hua Cheng, who had not taken instructions gracefully from any species, not dogs or humans or apparently mers, tried again.

It was still terrible.

Wei Wuxian laughed harder.

Jiang Cheng looked offended on behalf of acoustics.

And yet he stayed.

Jiang Yanli was different from her brothers.

She came to the boat with the kind of gentleness that didn't require weakness to make itself known. When Hua Cheng first noticed her properly, she was helping untangle one of the younger podlings from a looped line after an overexcited game around the floats had gone predictably wrong. Her movements were patient, deft, and entirely unhurried. She soothed the frightened child with soft vocal trills while working the cord loose, then nudged him away with a fond little push once he was free.

Afterward she looked up and found Hua Cheng watching from the rail.

Unlike Wei Wuxian, she did not grin.

Unlike Jiang Cheng, she did not stare like she suspected him of poor design choices.

She only tilted her head, thoughtful, and lifted one hand in the same open-palmed gesture Jiang Fengmian had once given him.

Hua Cheng, after the smallest hesitation, returned it.

The next time the pod came near the ship, Jiang Yanli brought him a shell.

Not by handing it over directly, of course. That would have been too easy for everyone involved. Instead she placed it on one of the floating rings and nudged the ring toward the vessel with evident intention. It was a smooth spiral shell, pale and opalescent where the light struck it, worn enough by water to feel silky under the fingers.

Hua Cheng picked it up and Jiang Yanli smiled.

That smile was ruinous.

There were many things Hua Cheng might have done with his life if left to his own devices.

After that shell, disappointing Jiang Yanli ceased to be one of them.

Their names came gradually after Wei Wuxian's.

Some from the researchers, who had developed placeholder naming systems over the years and then, with increasing care, adapted them when individuals clearly responded to consistent sounds. Some from repeated exchange, from sound mapped to gesture, gesture mapped to person, person mapped to relationship. The adults had names that settled more slowly, tangled in caution and mutual observation. The younger pod members were easier, more eager to repeat sounds and point at one another until the humans got somewhere close.

Jiang Fengmian's name Hua Cheng learned with reverence.

Matriach Yu's with the kind of alert caution one usually reserved for storms and armed authority.

The pod was not one family alone, not in the narrow human sense. There were elders, siblings, cousins in all but blood, children found ain open waters and passed from one set of hands to another as naturally as breathing. The humans, limited as they were, understood only fragments at first: pod structures, protective circles, feeding roles, territorial boundaries, signs of courtship, signs of mourning, distinctions between play and warning that would have been disastrously easy to miss if one looked with the wrong sort of eyes.

Hua Cheng looked carefully.

He learned the water routes marked with braided kelp or clusters of shell tied into current-facing rock. Learned that certain stretches of reef were nursery grounds, approached with special quiet. Learned that bright fish laid at a particular shelf edge were not discarded food but an offering. Learned that after storms the pod counted one another by touch as much as sight—hands to shoulder, brow to brow, a full-body reassurance that everyone had returned.

He learned that laughter in the pod had textures to it, different currents within the same sea-song. The bubbling mischief of children. The sharper bark of sibling derision. The low, warm rumble of elders watching the young make fools of themselves. He learned that anger was rarely noisy until it had reason to be.

He learned that grief traveled outward in circles.

He learned enough to understand that the researchers' notebooks, however well meant, were full of the wrong kind of distance. That was where the signs began.

Not formally. Not with the grand design of scholars imagining themselves builders of bridges. The bridge was built, as most enduring things were, because the younger ones got impatient.

Wei Wuxian started it by deciding that pointing was insufficiently entertaining. If Hua Cheng was going to linger at the edge of the deck every time the pod appeared, then clearly he ought to be useful. So Wei Wuxian began repeating certain gestures with relentless exaggeration.

Hand to chest. Him.

Two fingers pointed. You.

Palm slicing sideways. No.

Open hand thrust insistently toward a buoy. Give.

Then, with all the dignity of a creature born to chaos, he tapped his own brow, pointed at Hua Cheng's sketch slate, and mimed writing.

Hua Cheng blinked. "You want—"

Wei Wuxian repeated the motions, slower, then pointed at one of the floating rings, then himself, then made a circling motion with his finger.

Qian wandered over just in time to see Hua Cheng and a juvenile mer both making increasingly emphatic hand gestures at one another while neither understood anything.

He stayed for twenty minutes and declared it the best fieldwork of the month.

The first signs were practical.

Food.

Danger.

Wait.

Come.

Stop.

Pain.

Child.

Boat.

Storm.

Again.

Some were borrowed from human deck language. Some were adapted from gestures already common among the pod. Some were invented by children and only later formalized by adults who realized, with resigned astonishment, that the juveniles had begun making a real communicative system in the margins of everyone's careful research.

Wei Wuxian used the signs fastest and least responsibly. Jiang Cheng adopted them only once they proved useful and then corrected everyone else's sloppiness with immense personal offense. Jiang Yanli made them graceful, smoothing rough motions into shapes easier to read at a distance.

Hua Cheng learned and invented quickly because he wanted to.

He taught just as quickly because he needed to.

Soon the signs grew past simple utility. They began carrying opinion.

Wei Wuxian developed signs for boring, fun, liar, and mine well before any human would have put those on an official exchange chart. Jiang Cheng added an unmistakably rude variation of idiot that he used with enough frequency to make its meaning obvious even before Liren, red-faced with laughter, penciled a discreet note beside the sketch record. Jiang Yanli contributed signs for hungry, tired, hurt-here, and later a lovely looping motion that meant pretty in the sense of cherished things—shells, songs, sunrise over calm water.

Once there were enough signs for feeling, there were enough signs for mischief.

That was the beginning of Hua Cheng's real closeness with the siblings.

Wei Wuxian taught him how to use the float-rings as springboards and absolutely should not have. Jiang Cheng taught him how to spot undertow from surface pattern and absolutely would not admit he had done so. Jiang Yanli taught him how to braid shell cords without making them ugly, which was perhaps the greatest kindness of all.

They included him by degrees so small they might have been invisible to anyone not starving for them.

A place made for him on the edge of a game. A gesture repeated until he got it right. A fish-scale charm knotted onto one of the buoy ropes because Wei Wuxian insisted the boat looked bare. A shell tucked into his hand by Jiang Yanli. Jiang Cheng slapping the back of his wrist away from a reef edge before he could cut himself and then glaring as though Hua Cheng had personally insulted him by having soft human skin.

The older mers watched.

Jiang Fengmian, from the first, observed Hua Cheng with that same steady calm he had shown in the water. He never pushed. Never crowded. But when Hua Cheng sat quietly near the boarding platform, Jiang Fengmian sometimes surfaced there too, resting one arm on the lower rung while the humans worked nearby. Not speaking—what use would spoken land words have been?—only existing in easy proximity.

That, for Hua Cheng, was somehow more disarming than affection stated plainly.

The Madam Yu was harder won.

At first her regard was flint-edged and exacting. If Hua Cheng came too near the younger podlings before she deemed him safe, she fixed him with a look sharp enough to pin him where he stood. If he did something stupid—and Hua Cheng's definition of stupid remained broader than most—she knew. Somehow she always knew. The first time he jumped overboard without permission because Wei Wuxian had shouted from the water and he, fool that he was, had gone without thinking, he surfaced to find Madam Yu already there.

She seized him by the back of the neck like an offending kitten.

Hua Cheng yelped. Wei Wuxian laughed so hard he slipped beneath the surface.

Madam Yu dragged Hua Cheng to the side of the boat one-handed, looked up at the humans shouting in horrified outrage from the deck, then looked back at Hua Cheng and unleashed a stream of furious clicks and low notes so blistering in tone that he did not need a single word translated.

When Lin hauled him back aboard, white with fury, she began, "What in God's name—"

"Don't," Professor Zhao said, arriving at speed no one his age ought to have possessed. "If you start, I may never stop."

Liren was halfway between panic and tears. Qian looked ready to either throttle Hua Cheng or nail his shoes to the deck.

"What," Lin said with dreadful calm, "did you think you were doing?"

Hua Cheng, dripping and unrepentant because repentance would not save him now, said, "Swimming."

Lin closed her eyes.

Qian turned away and put both hands over his face.

Professor Zhao sat down heavily on an equipment crate and muttered something that sounded very much like, "The sea should have kept him a little longer."

They tried to watch him after that.

This proved impossible.

If the pod came close and Hua Cheng was not accounted for, odds were good he had gone over the side. Sometimes with a line tied around his waist under strict supervision. Sometimes without, which resulted in scenes of such righteous horror from the deck that even Wei Wuxian eventually learned to warn the humans before luring Hua Cheng into the water. Jiang Cheng, who claimed constantly that Hua Cheng would die young from stupidity, nevertheless taught him by sheer force of correction how to dive without flailing, how to kick with intention, how not to waste breath in pressure change panic. Jiang Yanli stayed nearest when the swells were stronger, one hand always within reach. Wei Wuxian treated lessons like games and games like holy work and never seemed happier than when Hua Cheng managed something new and immediately pretended it had not mattered.

By the time Hua Cheng could dive cleanly some 20 feet and surface to a chorus of mer-laughter instead of human screams, the crew gave up the illusion that he was temporary.

The sea, improbably, became home.

Not because it was gentle.

It wasn't. The open ocean remained large enough to humble every human on board and every mer beneath them. Storms still rolled in with teeth. Currents still shifted without apology. People still bled, grieved, vanished, returned. But home had never meant safety to Hua Cheng. Home, as he came to understand it, meant being expected. Meant there were voices that changed when he entered a room. Hands that shoved food at him. Eyes that searched the deck and the water until they found him. Space made and kept for him in two worlds at once.

On land, the research vessel and its people gave him that.

Lin, grumbling over torn sleeves while mending them anyway. Qian teaching him cards badly and ropework well. Liren crouched beside him over notes, tapping the margin until he fixed a mislabeled observation. Professor Zhao pretending not to notice how often Hua Cheng fell asleep over textbooks and then draping an old jacket over his shoulders when the night turned cold.

At sea, the Jiang pod gave him the rest.

Jiang Fengmian's calm presence.

Madam Yu's terrible standards, which in their own way were a form of inclusion.

Jiang Yanli's impossible gentleness.

Jiang Cheng's scathing corrections and fiercer loyalty.

Wei Wuxian, who from nearly the beginning attached himself to Hua Cheng with the single-minded delight of someone who had found a new form of entertainment and, somewhere along the way, a brother.

It was Wei Wuxian who climbed onto the low sunning deck beside him one late afternoon and, after a long and companionable silence, tapped Hua Cheng once on the shoulder.

When Hua Cheng looked over, Wei Wuxian signed, clumsy with speed but clear enough.

You.

Then he pointed broadly: to the boat, to the water, to the pod gathering in the gold wash of evening.

Ours. 

Hua Cheng stared.

Wei Wuxian, seeing he had landed a blow and delighted with himself, grinned and immediately ruined the moment by shoving him sideways off the edge.

Hua Cheng hit the water cursing.

Jiang Yanli laughed so hard she nearly lost hold of the shell cord she'd been weaving. Jiang Cheng looked disgusted with both of them. Qian, from the rail above, shouted that if any of them cracked Hua Cheng's skull Lin would murder the lot.

It was ridiculous.

It was perfect.

That was how it happened.

Not in one shining revelation. Not with some grand ceremony where the world finally corrected itself and handed him a family with both hands.

It happened through repetition. Through return. Through being fed and scolded and taught and waited for. Through winter maintenance in port and bright summer surveys in open water. Through the pod's children bigger taller and bolder. Through Hua Cheng's voice roughening and his shoulders broadening and his hands learning both pen grip and rope burn. Through language built sign by sign between deck and current. Through every quiet proof that he belonged not by accident anymore, but by choice.

Hua Cheng had never been especially good at forgetting the moments that mattered.

Which was why, on mornings like this one, when the sea lay soft as blue silk around the research vessel and the sun warmed the deck beneath his back, he allowed himself a private moment of satisfaction.

He had fallen off a boat once and made it everyone else's problem.

Now, he ran the damn expedition.

"Hua-ge!"

He turned at the sharp rap of knuckles against metal. A junior researcher named Zhou Zu, the now retired Professor Zhou's grandson, was leaning out of the hatchway, holding a slate and trying, unsuccessfully, to look unflustered.

"The western sensor rig's jammed again."

"Then unjam it."

"We did. It jammed with greater enthusiasm."

Hua Cheng took the offered slate, skimmed the notes, and sighed through his nose. "You let Wei Wuxian near it."

"That is an accusation."

"It's pattern recognition."

The Zhou Zu, having no defense, simply shrugged and chose not to reply.

Hua Cheng set the slate aside and crossed toward the port rail. Sure enough, the source of mechanical betrayal was already visible.

A sleek shape sprawled across the deck half in the sun, half in the shade cast by the davit arms, utterly shameless and precisely where he should not have been. Wet black hair lay in a tangle over sun-browned shoulders. His tail, long and powerful, shifted lazily with each small movement, scales dark as stormwater with a wash of red in gradients that flashed when the light hit right. He had somehow obtained one of the orange life buoys and was wearing it around his shoulders like ceremonial attire while he screwed around with the western rig.

Wei Wuxian caught sight of Hua Cheng and grinned.

It was the grin of someone who had never in his life feared consequences because consequences had always arrived too slowly to catch him.

Hua Cheng stopped at the rail and signed, What did you break?

Wei Wuxian made a show of looking offended. Then he signed back with quick, fluid hands, Nothing. It broke itself. Weak thing.

Liar.

Hua Cheng's expression must have said as much, because Wei Wuxian's grin widened. He rolled onto one elbow and thumped the sensor housing with the heel of his hand. It gave a protesting metallic squeal.

From the water below, Jiang Cheng surfaced and barked a sharp series of clicking notes that needed no translation whatsoever.

Hua Cheng glanced down.

Jiang Cheng looked exactly like someone forced by fate to be the brother of Wei Wuxian. Hua Cheng had learned that even though they were unrelated by blood, they were brothers in all other ways that mattered. Pod-relations just worked like that. Same home, same guardians, same rules and consequences. Jiang Cheng was a mer with dark hair, fine features in a sharper arrangement, a powerful tail built for speed and abrupt violence in black, silver and stunning violet. If Wei Wuxian moved through the world like he expected it to find him charming, Jiang Cheng moved through it like he expected to be disappointed and usually was. At the moment, he had both hands braced on the hull and was glaring up at the deck with such concentration one might have thought glaring alone could restore order.

A splash sounded to the right. Jiang Yanli rose more gracefully near the boarding platform, sunlight pearling on her shoulders. Her tail was paler than her brothers', silver-lavender in the shallows, and she carried a netted pouch of shellfish looped over one wrist. She took one look at Wei Wuxian wearing rescue equipment as fashion and sighed with the long-suffering tenderness of someone who had been an elder sister since birth and would likely still be one after death.

Hua Cheng signed to her, He's breaking my stuff.

Jiang Yanli covered a smile. Jiang Cheng slapped the hull.

Wei Wuxian, unrepentant, hooked two fingers in the buoy and preened.

The sign language had started years ago as a necessity and grown into something far richer. Spoken land language remained impossible for the pod. Mer vocalizations had structures human mouths could not reproduce and tonal undercurrents human ears only partly caught. But the younger Jiang siblings had been curious, Hua Cheng patient, and curiosity plus patience had built a bridge sturdy enough to carry more than simple requests.

Now it held jokes. Insults. Questions about migratory patterns and storm behavior. Arguments over whether a plastic float was a toy or an affront to dignity. Discussions of mourning customs, offerings, reef territories, food preferences, wounds, dreams.

It held Wei Wuxian asking inappropriate things with a perfectly innocent face.

It held Jiang Cheng calling him an idiot with increasing artistic sophistication.

It held Jiang Yanli asking Hua Cheng, once, whether humans always looked so lonely when they stood on shore staring at the water.

He had not answered immediately. Some questions deserved the respect of silence before words.

This morning, though, nothing seemed inclined toward seriousness.

The deck had become, as it often did when the Jiang pod visited, less a vessel of research and more of a floating common room. A pair of younger merchildren from the outer families lounged near the stern ladder, flicking water at one another. An older auntie Hua Cheng knew by sight but had never managed to name properly had appropriated a coiled rope as a pillow and was sunning herself with utter entitlement. Two little ones were batting at a cluster of floating rings tied together on a line, shrieking in delight every time the current spun them around.

The crew moved among them carefully, accustomed now to the easy occupation of shared space. Liren knelt near the stern to note scale patterns on a cast-off fragment caught in the netting. Ji Zhan, a university graduate with an open heart, handed Jiang Yanli a shallow tray of cut fruit, which she accepted with the composure of royalty and then immediately gave half to the nearest children.

Hua Cheng had spent years building this.

Trust, after all, was only another word for time invested correctly.

When Lin had handed Hua Cheng the whole damn operation and chose to finally settle on land with her family, Hua Cheng had  spent an annoying amount of energy arguing with funding boards, drafting protocols, barring opportunistic sponsors, and had thrown one photographer's equipment into the sea after being lied to about its purpose. He had made the ship a place the Jiang pod could approach without fear. No hooks. No tranquilizers. No cages disguised as science. No hands laid on them without invitation.

Just observation, exchange, learning, and the stubborn belief that another kind of future was possible.

Jiang Fengmian hauled himself partway onto the boarding platform with the unhurried ease of someone who had once saved a drowning child and never bothered acting important about it afterward. Age had silvered some strands in his dark hair and thickened the scars along one shoulder, but his gaze remained the same calm river depth Hua Cheng remembered.

Hua Cheng inclined his head.

Jiang Fengmian answered with one of the older signs, palm to chest, then outward. Good morning. Peace.

Hua Cheng returned it.

A smaller splash followed, less graceful. Madam Yu surfaced beside him like a sea-born threat conjured by collective guilt. Her scales flashed deep indigo; her eyes, sharp as hooks, swept the deck once and caught immediately on Wei Wuxian draped where he should not be.

Her mouth tightened.

Hua Cheng had once believed no species on earth could match a human mother's ability to communicate impending doom with a single look.

He had been young then.

Wei Wuxian saw her too late. He straightened at once, buoy still around his shoulders.

Madam Yu snapped a rapid sequence of clicks and gestures.

Jiang Cheng, from below the rail, looked vindicated in his soul.

Jiang Yanli bit her lip.

Hua Cheng, who had the dignity to turn slightly away and grinned.

Wei Wuxian signed back in exaggerated innocence as he chirped. I was helping.

Madam Yu replied with a sign so crisp and emphatic Hua Cheng almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

The day should have remained like that.

Warm. Ridiculous. Easy in the way ease becomes precious when you have fought for every inch of it.

Hua Cheng would remember that later and hate it a little—the softness of the sun, the easy racket of children, the sight of Jiang Yanli patiently untangling a cord someone had wrapped around a float, the low sound of Jiang Fengmian and one of the elders chattering as if peace were a thing the world might consent to keep.

He was in the middle of logging the morning's reef approach patterns when the first warning came.

Not from the ship.

From the water.

Every mer on deck or near it went still.

It happened all at once, so sharply that even the those on deck noticed the change. Conversation cut off. Children stopped playing. The auntie by the stern rose from her sprawl in one fluid motion and slid back into the sea without a word. Jiang Cheng's head snapped westward. Madam Yu's posture changed, every line in her body drawing taut. Jiang Fengmian pushed away from the platform, his expression gone grave in an instant.

Hua Cheng looked up from the slate and scanned the calm waters. The sea itself appeared unchanged. Still blue. Still rolling. Still bright enough to sting the eyes.

Then he heard it.

A sound too low for language and too sharp for wind.

Alarm moved through the water like lightning beneath skin.

Hua Cheng's stomach dropped.

He turned so fast the world narrowed to one line of sight and barked at the nearest lookout, "West side. Now."

The scope came up.

Ji Zhan went still for half a second, then swore with unusual sincerity. "It's the Wen pod!"

On the horizon, shapes cut through the water in brutal, repeating arcs.

Too fast. Too many.

Hua Cheng felt his stomach drop clean through the deck.

The Wens moved like damage with a spine. Straight lines. Hard cuts. No wasted motion, no playful feints, no curiosity. Just speed and intent. Too many red-gold flashes breaking the surface. Too many bodies driving west to east on a collision path.

The reports had been coming in for months, one ugly fragment at a time. Broken territories. Pods driven off feeding grounds. Outer families gone missing. Juveniles not returned. Markers torn down. Survivors too frightened to linger in known water long enough to be properly studied, which told Hua Cheng all he needed to know. Merfolk did not abandon good territory for nothing.

He had known the danger was getting closer.

That was the problem with knowing something in theory. Theory sat politely in reports and notes and the tired mouths of other researchers. Theory did not hit the horizon with murder in its wake.

Reality was less refined.

Reality came for his family.

"Retrieve all signals," he snapped. "Now! Every line, every buoy, everything hanging off this vessel comes in. Lock the lower deck. Secure the side access. No one goes into the water unless I say so."

The deck moved at once.

Good. He might have thrown them overboard if it hadn't.

Cranks spun. Orders flew. Someone nearly collided with Liren hauling in a side tether. Zhao Zu was already shouting for the external rig to be lifted before it became a snare. Hua Cheng swore at a pulley as the friction burned at his hand.

Below them, the sea exploded.

The Jiang pod went from peace to formation so quickly it made the eye stumble trying to follow. Children were shoved inward, toward the hull, toward cover. Older pod members spread outward in a shifting shield line. Jiang Fengmian cut straight through the center of it, his call carrying over the water with a force Hua Cheng felt more than heard. Madam Yu vanished beneath the surface with the clean, vicious speed of a thrown spear.

Hua Cheng's heart slammed against his ribs.

He was at the rail before he fully remembered moving, one hand braced so hard against the wood it bit into his palm. Wei Wuxian was already cutting toward the western edge of the pod, tail driving hard enough to tear a wake behind him. Jiang Cheng broke off on a slant below him, angling for the defensive charge. Jiang Yanli was gathering children nearer the ship with terrifying efficiency, her hands swift, face taut but steady.

Then the first Wen mer hit the outer line.

It happened too fast for anything civilized like thought.

One moment the Jiangs were braced.

The next the water erupted in white spray, scale, blood.

Later, Hua Cheng would try to remember it properly and fail. The fight was too fast, too liquid, too unlike land violence to hold neatly in memory. It came in shards instead. A red-gold tail cutting sideways through blue water. The crack of bodies colliding. A scream from the deck that something was under starboard. One of the junior researchers dropping to her knees to help haul up a young outer-pod child who was clawing and thrashing and trying to throw himself right back into the water.

The frantic calls and screeches of mer-speech needed no translation. Calls of warning, frantic cries of names and pain sustained as the blood tinted the water and stung the air.

Hua Cheng saw another red-gold flash colliding with a darker shaded purple in a brutal ram.

Their fighting was different from the Jiangs' in the same way a knife was different from a sword. The Jiangs protected by instinct, shifting to cover, striking to drive off. The Wens were aimed to break formation. Hard impacts. Fast flanking cuts. Tearing passes meant to split a pod open and pull the pieces apart.

They wasn't any warning and they weren't bluffing.

They had come to wipe them out.

Jiang Fengmian struck one broadside with enough force to throw him half clear of the water. Madam Yu came up under another and seized him high at the throat. Jiang Cheng hit a third with such vicious precision Hua Cheng almost felt the impact in his own bones. Wei Wuxian shoved a clawed hand straight through the side of a red-gold tail and ripped it open until he vanished in the clouding blood.

It still wasn't enough.

There were too many.

Too many bodies. Too many angles. Too many places for the line to fail.

A sharp cry in mer-speech Hua Cheng recognised as the call of his own name.

He turned at once.

Jiang Yanli was at the ladder, half out of the water, one arm locked around a terrified child with arms clinging around her neck and another little one was clinging to her from below, fingers clutching at the scales near her tail. There was blood on her arm already. Not enough to be mortal, but enough that Hua Cheng's rage boiled.

Her eyes caught his.

A measured amount of panicked urgency so clean it cut.

Then she signed.

Take them. The children. Please.

Hua Cheng looked past her, because some vicious, stubborn part of him was still tracking one idiot in particular.

Wei Wuxian had broken from the defense line racing straight through the cluster of Wen mers and slamming into one's rib cage with a shoulder.

For one violent heartbeat Hua Cheng thought, you reckless, unbearable little bastard, and mistook it for insanity.

Then he saw the shape of it.

The Wen attackers were shifting toward movement, toward provocation, toward the fast target breaking wide. Wei Wuxian cut across their sight lines in one deliberate, taunting arc, splashing high, swerving close, nails raking across scale and skin, making himself impossible to ignore. He slammed a drifting float into one attacker's face for good measure—because of course he did—and then bolted west with at least seven Wen mer speeding after him and more joining the hunt.

He was pulling them away.

Jiang Cheng realized it too. The fury in his posture was visible even through the water. He shouted after Wei Wuxian, the call cracking sharp enough to turn heads.

Wei Wuxian did not come back.

Of course he didn't. He only looked over his shoulder once. Toward Jiang Cheng. Toward Jiang Yanli. Toward the ship. Toward Hua Cheng.

Then he was gone into open water with too many Wen mers after him and more beginning to break from the main attack to follow.

Hua Cheng's hands went ice-cold.

No.

No, absolutely not.

Not like this. Not for this. Not because that idiot had decided, in the middle of slaughter, to become bait.

The line near the ship was collapsing. Too many elders were hurt. Jiang Fengmian took a strike to the shoulder that turned the water dark around him. Madam Yu drove the attacker off and was hit from the side before she could fully recover. Jiang Cheng surged toward them and got forced back protecting two smaller podlings at once.

This was past fighting now. The defence couldn't hold up like this for much longer even with half of the Wen pod speeding after a self-sacrificing bastard.

This was the kind of thing that left stories with missing pieces because too many people never came back to tell them.

Jiang Yanli trilled his name again.

Not louder but definitely sharper.

The sort of command that went straight into his spine and lodged there, forcing him to move.

Blood streaked one side of her face now. The cut at her temple was running. The child in her arm was shaking so hard Hua Cheng could see it from the deck.

The only thing he had left that the Wens didn't already have their claws in.

Hua Cheng spun on the crew so fast he nearly tore his own shoulder doing it. "Platform down! Nets clear! Medical below, now! If you stand there looking clever I will throw you overboard myself!"

No one hesitated, and the whole ship was thrown from their horror into action.

The platform slammed lower. Quin and Zhao Zu dropped to their knees near the edge, hands out, bracing to guide. Liren was already dragging wet blankets and first-aid kits toward the hatch. Ji Zhan had a boathook in one hand and murder in his expression, ready to knock away anything that came too close.

Hua Cheng had one of the smaller rope ladders thrown over the edge, a leg hooked around the railing as he hauled a clinging mer child up.

Jiang Yanli shoved two kids upward with the help of Qian and Zhao Zu.

Hua Cheng caught sight of it all as he hauled a podling onto the deck in one motion. The child writhed, terrified, blood-slick, all instinct and panic. Liren wrapped a soaked blanket around them anyway. Another followed, shrieking hard enough to rattle the air. Then another.

Jiang Cheng appeared at the platform with blood all over one shoulder and murder in both eyes.

He looked like he'd rather bite through the hull than take help from humans.

Hua Cheng would have admired the commitment under different circumstances.

Jiang Cheng braced to lunge back into the water.

Jiang Yanli snapped something at him in mer-speech that made him freeze just long enough to obey. Snarling like he resented the entire structure of reality, he propelled himself upward instead, hands catching railing with the same ease he'd done all throughout the years. Jiang Cheng grabbed Jiang Yanli by the arm and with strength that probably came more from adrenaline than anything else, dragged his sister on deck.

"Grab him!" Hua Cheng shouted, already reaching. He dragged the Jiang Cheng further aboard before the stubborn prick could get any ideas like their dumbass brother. Jiang Cheng fought like a demon dragged from hell, spent and furious and wild enough that the three researchers had to rethink every career choice that led them here. Jiang Yanli resisted less with her body than with her eyes. She kept looking west. West, west, west, even as blood slid down the side of her face, even as she held steady one trembling child in her arms and accepting Liren touch.

Jiang Fengmian surfaced once more. Blood in the water behind him.

For one impossible second Hua Cheng thought he might come aboard too.

He didn't.

Of course he didn't.

He glanced at the six mer kids, at Jiang acheng and Jiang Yanli, and then looked up—not at the crew, not at the ship, but directly at Hua Cheng. The world seemed to narrow around that. At the platform. At the wounded children. At the churn of the sea. At that calm, ruined face. Then Jiang Fengmian signed.

No hesitation in his movements despite the blood.

Get them out.

It hit Hua Cheng like iron driven straight through the ribs. "I will," he said aloud and signed in sync.

Something in the older mer's gaze gentled for the briefest flicker. Then he turned back. Madam Yu came with him like wrath given shape.

Hua Cheng never saw whether they reached the line Wei Wuxian had drawn west.

"Hua Cheng!" Liren this time, breathless and pale. "We have to move!"

He knew.

He knew because staying meant the ship could be boarded from below, torn open in the chaos, turned from sanctuary into trap.

He knew because the children on deck were shaking, bleeding, half-drowned with panic, and every second spent in range of the fighting sharpened the odds that more of them would die here.

He knew because Wei Wuxian had just bought them time with his own body and Hua Cheng would rather carve his own hands off than waste it.

It did not make it easier. It only made it necessary.

Hua Cheng turned, voice ripping out of him before grief could get there first.

"Engines! Now!"

The ship lurched.

Jiang Cheng realized first.

He lunged for the rail with a hoarse, furious cry, tail striking the deck hard enough to rattle the bolts. Two crew members jumped back. Hua Cheng caught him by the shoulders before he could throw himself overboard.

Jiang Cheng wheeled on him, eyes wild.

Hua Cheng had never been the sort of man easily shaken by grief. He had seen enough of the world to know grief rarely waited its turn.

But there was something monstrous in watching a someone who had grown up half in water and half in sunlight realize he was being carried away from both.

Jiang Cheng signed so fast his hands blurred.

Turn back. Turn back! Wei Wuxian—my mother—my father—turn back!

Hua Cheng held on. He wanted to. God, he wanted to.

The horizon west of them churned red as the boat moved away.

He signed back, sharp enough to cut. You die if I do. Jiang Yanli dies. The children die.

Jiang Cheng froze. Only for a second. But long enough. Long enough for Jiang Yanli to reach them.

She was trembling. Bleeding. White around the mouth. Still she crossed the wet deck, gathered Jiang Cheng's face in both hands, and made him look at her. At the children huddled near the hatch. At the deck beneath them. At the ship that was moving, moving, moving away.

Her hands shaped the words carefully, though tears had begun to fall. We live first.

Jiang Cheng's face broke. No dramatics. No neat shattering. It happened in cruel little increments. His jaw locking, the nostrils flaring, the eyes burning brighter and then abruptly emptying into something too raw to name. He made a sound low in his throat, not quite voice, not quite pain, and folded forward against his sister's shoulder like something struck down at last.

Jiang Yanli held him.

Hua Cheng let go.

No one spoke for a long while.

The sea stretched behind them. Ahead of them. Under them. Vast and glittering and hateful in its indifference. The younger survivors were taken below. Wounds cleaned. Blankets fetched. Blood washed from cuts. One tiny podling refused every human hand until Jiang Yanli came and curled around them on the padded floor of the infirmary, bloody and exhausted and still somehow gentle enough to coax them into stillness. Another child hid beneath a storage bench until Hua Cheng rolled a basket of float toys toward him and pretended not to notice the moment a small hand reached out.

Jiang Cheng remained on deck.

He sat near the stern with his back to the rail, arms braced across his chest, staring at the broken line where sea met sky. He had refused bandaging twice before Liren trapped him with competence and stubbornness. The wound along his shoulder had stopped bleeding but not darkened yet. His tail lay tense beside him, every scale drawn tight.

Jiang Yanli joined him after the children slept.

She leaned against the rail, close enough to touch, not close enough to crowd.Hua Cheng stood several paces away, giving them what privacy a grief-struck ship could manage. The sun sank. Evening bled gold into violet across the water.

At last Jiang Cheng lifted one hand and signed without looking at either of them.

He will come back.

Not a question.

A demand made of the world.

Jiang Yanli closed her eyes. When she opened them, they shone wet in the dusk. She signed, Yes.

Whether it was fear or hope, Hua Cheng could not tell. Perhaps in that moment they were the same thing. He looked west once, to the darkening stretch where Wei Wuxian had disappeared with the Wen pod at his heels, and felt something old and vicious settle in his chest.

Years ago, the sea had spared a drowning child by placing him in Jiang Fengmian's hands.

Now the sea had taken its due back with interest. Hua Cheng was not in the habit of forgiving debts like that. He rested his hands on the rail and watched the horizon until night swallowed it whole. The ship sailed on, carrying what remained of the Jiang pod and all its misery.

And somewhere beyond the dark, one reckless mer with a thief's grin and no talent whatsoever for staying out of trouble was fighting for his life.

Hua Cheng had never liked unfinished stories.

. . . . . . . . . .

Wei Wuxian came back to himself in pieces.

First there was pain.

That arrived before thought, before memory, before the world made any sense at all. A vicious dragging ache burned through his side and shoulder, sharpest whenever he breathed too deeply. His tail felt wrong. Heavy, scraped raw in places, one fin throbbing with hot, needling pulses that warned of tears or worse. Invading grains stung every open cut. Sand clung where sand had no business being. His mouth tasted of blood and brine.

Then came light.

Not the fractured green-blue of underwater sun, but something harsher, flatter, pouring down over him without mercy. Land-light. Open-sky light. The kind that left nowhere to hide.

Wei Wuxian's eyes opened to blinding white and he flinched on instinct, only for pain to rip through his ribs hard enough to make his vision black out around the edges.

He lay still after that, breathing shallowly. The world returned in cruel little increments. Heat beneath him. Somewhat dry sand. The drag of retreating foam against the end of his tail. Wind over skin gone dry in patches where it should never have been dry. Gulls crying overhead in ugly, laughing voices.

A beach.

He was on a beach.

Panic hit like the rolling tide. He jerked, trying to throw himself forward, back, anywhere. Toward water, toward depth, toward safety, but his body refused to obey anything but the deep flash of pain. His tail lashed and struck wet sand with a weak, ugly slap. One side of him simply would not answer the way it should. The movement tore a sound from his throat, sharp and broken.

Water was only a little way off. He could hear it. Taste it in the wind. It may as well have been another world. Memory came for him then. Not all of i, not in any way that first made any sense. And especially not kindly.

The Wen pod surging out of the west in a smear of red-gold violence.

His pod's fury. His uncle's call carrying through the water like a struck current. Jiang Cheng racing into the fight before turning toward the young ones instead of toward himself because of course he did, because even furious he always knew where duty sat. Jiang Yanli at the hull of Hua Cheng's ship with blood on her arm and command in her eyes.

Wei Wuxian had looked back once. He remembered that with nauseating clarity. The ship. The cluster of frightened younglings. Jiang Cheng's face somewhere in the chaos. Jiang Yanli near the ladder.

Then the Wen pod turning toward him.

Good, he had thought with a fierce, savage sort of relief. Good. Follow me.

After that, everything blurred. Speed. Blood in the water. The exhilaration of outdistancing one attacker only to slam bodily into another. A tearing strike across his side. A dive too shallow over a reef shelf. The crack of pain down the length of his tail when something heavy clipped his fin. Swimming still, because there had been nothing else to do but keep moving, keep drawing them away, keep making himself into the brightest, loudest target in the sea.

He did not remember when he had blacked out.

He remembered dark water.

He remembered exhaustion so complete it no longer felt like a sensation but a law.

He remembered his flesh voice break apart in open ocean and digging nails into a throat.

Then nothing.

Now the beach, the sky. And the distinct feeling he'd really hate the next few hours or however long he had left to live on this stupid fucking beach.

Wei Wuxian dragged in a breath that shook badly enough to embarrass him if anyone had been there to see.

Then he heard voices. Land voices.

He whole body still.

They were distant at first, blurred by wind. A rhythm of sound he knew as human but not as meaning. Land speech had always been strange to him. Flat where mer voices curved, clipped where water-speech carried tone in the bones. Hua Cheng could produce it. The people on Hua Cheng's ship could produce it. It had never become less bizarre to listen to. Wei Wuxian knew perhaps a handful of repeated noises by association alone. Names, sometimes boat-sounds and things. The pattern humans used when startled and the odd slur here and there.

This was startled.

Several voices at once. Quick. Alarmed.

Wei Wuxian twisted, trying to lift himself. Pain knifed through his side. His hands slipped uselessly in wet sand. He bared his teeth and snarled before he could help it, all instinct and fear and sheer outrage at the world.

Figures were running toward him down the beach.

Humans and their weird leg movement and knees.

Four? Five? More behind them? It was hard to tell with the sun in his eyes and his own pulse hammering too hard against his skull.

Wei Wuxian lashed his tail, trying to pull himself toward the surf. It barely moved him. His fin struck sand again with a pathetic scrape and fresh pain burst bright behind his eyes.

He spat at the sand, he'd escaped the Wen only to die drying out in front of land people. There was something so humiliating about that he almost wanted to laugh but the pain in he breath stopped that before it even began.

The humans slowed as they approached, which was somehow worse. Caution. Hesitation. He knew caution. Knew what people looked like when approaching something they feared might bite.

Good, then. Let them be cautious.

Wei Wuxian dragged himself up on one elbow and swiped at the nearest silhouette.

A voice answered at once, low and quick and so gentle.

That made him angrier.

He did not know what the human was saying, only that the tone had all the same infuriating softness Hua Cheng used when approaching injured podlings and frightened children. Wei Wuxian was neither, and if he had been in water he could have shown them exactly how much neither.

Another human said something sharper from farther back.

Then a different presence moved into his field of vision.

Not close enough to touch. Not yet.

The man crouched several body lengths away in the sand, keeping low, empty-handed, making himself smaller in a way Wei Wuxian immediately distrusted. He was dressed in pale clothes unsuitable for any sensible fieldwork, his long dark hair bound back from his face, his expression far too open for someone confronting an injured unknown creature on a beach.

Intelligent, certainly. Idiot, possibly.

He spoke.

Wei Wuxian hissed.

The man paused, then—absurdly—put one hand to his own chest. A gesture. Slow. Clear. He made a sound. A name, probably. Then he pointed, very carefully, toward Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian stared at him.

Was this guy introducing himself?

On a beach?

To a bleeding stranger who couldn't even stand?

The man repeated the gesture. Hand to chest. Xi-e-Li-an. Then the slight, questioning point.

Behind him, one of the other humans murmured something that sounded suspiciously like concern. Wei Wuxian considered several possible responses, all of them rude. In the end he settled for glaring with enough force to curdle baitfish at twenty paces.

The man—unbelievable creature that he was—smiled a little.

Not brightly. Not stupidly. Something quieter than that. Cautious. Kind. It would have been easier to hate if it had been brighter.

He touched his chest again. The same sound.

A human-name in human words that Wei Wuxian didn't want to learn.

Then he pointed toward Wei Wuxian once more.

Wei Wuxian stared, exhausted and offended, and finally looked away, taking in the surroundings. His eyes counted four humans in total, the tide far from where he lay as it inched further and further away, two red-gold tailed figures laying motionless on the beach not far away. Blood crawling down the sand to the water that filled Wei Wuxian with a vindictive pride. His brain slammed against his skull with a throb that triggered every ache in his body and Wei Wuxian could only groan into the sand because of it.

The human's face changed immediately. Concern, again, stronger now. He said something quickly over his shoulder. The other humans moved. One ran back up the beach. Another approached with a bundle in hand and stopped the moment Wei Wuxian bared his teeth again.

Xie Lian said something soft. He extended one hand, palm upward. Empty. Wei Wuxian looked at it, then at him. Humans touched too much. Grabbed too easily. Even the kind ones. Hua Cheng was an exception carved over years, and Hua Cheng belonged half to the sea in ways no other human ever had.

This one was land through and through. Smelled of sun-warmed fabric, salt, and something faintly medicinal.

Wei Wuxian did not want his hands on him. He made the nearest approximation to that sentiment by producing a low, ugly warning noise from the back of his throat. Xie Lian stopped at once.

Good.

Then, from behind him, sudden cold water falling gently, briefly over Wei Wuxian's tail before ending again. The relief was so sharp it nearly broke him. He had not realized how dry the upper scales had grown until the water touched them and vanished. He could forgive the human that had snuck up behind him, but only if they do that again at least thirty more times.

Xie Lian noticed.

Of course he noticed. A Researcher's eyes. Annoying.

He turned and spoke rapidly to the others. Two came hurrying back with large containers. Water sloshed. They approached slowly, deliberately, and tipped the contents across Wei Wuxian's tail and lower back. Cool seawater soaked over heated scales.

Wei Wuxian shuddered.

It was not enough. Not nearly enough. But it kept something inside him from tipping over an edge he could feel waiting.

More water. More voices. A cloth this time, drenched and laid near rather than on him until Xie Lian made a small motion asking permission.

Wei Wuxian gave it because he was a simple guy who really fucking liked not drying out on some beach.

Xie Lian placed it over back and shoulder, but with such care Wei Wuxian only snapped half-heartedly at the air rather than his hand from the shock of the cold against burning skin and scale.

This was how he was defeated, apparently. Not by battle. By a soft-voiced human with some standard for boundaries and excellent triage instincts. The next problem arrived with wheels. A low cart or stretcher—some dreadful land contraption—was dragged across the sand. Wei Wuxian saw it and immediately tried to fight.

No.

Absolutely not.

He twisted, clawing at the wet ground, trying to haul himself the precious distance back to the water, because if they put him on that thing then he was caught. Caught caught caught. The panic was stupid and complete and stronger than sense. His injuries screamed. The world tilted.

Hands reached.

Wei Wuxian struck out wildly.

Someone cried out and jumped back.

 Lian said his name again—or what Wei Wuxian assumed was his own name, because by now the human had learned the sound of panic in him if not the language of it. He moved closer, too close, and Wei Wuxian turned to snap at him in raw terror. Instead of recoiling, Xie Lian caught his arm gently between both hands.

Wei Wuxian froze when the touch shocked him still, firm enough to steady, careful enough to release if he jerked away.

Xie Lian spoke softly, eyes pleading, his expression full of something Wei Wuxian did not know what to do with.

The words meant nothing.

The tone did. Concern for his wound, too bad to heal alone, too much risk for the ocean.

Wei Wuxian's eyes stared at the man's face, facts crawling back into hir brain like an unwanted hermit crab. He would. He would fucking die out there. He'd probably get mauled by a shark with how much blood and how many wounds it all spilled from every time he moved. Stupidly, traitorously, his body sagged. 

That was enough for the others.

They moved fast, but not rough. Sliding soaked fabric beneath him, supporting the damaged tail, lifting his shoulders and torso with miserable care. The world lurched as they transferred him onto the wheeled stretcher. Every injury along his side lit up at once. Wei Wuxian hissed through pain despite himself, hands clenching hard enough to whiten at the knuckles.

Xie Lian, if that was even the guy's name, stayed beside his head the entire time.

When the movement stopped, the human pressed another wet cloth into Wei Wuxian's hands, guiding them toward his chest as if giving him something to hold onto other than lash out.

Wei Wuxian nearly threw it at him just because. His pride was beyond hurt, he could be as much of a menace as he wanted to be.

Then another wave of pain rolled through and he clutched the cloth instead.

The beach vanished upward behind him as they moved.

Sand to boardwalk. Boardwalk to vehicle. More strange land sounds. Doors. Vibration. The enclosed scent of metal and salt and antiseptic. Wei Wuxian lay trapped in a shallow basin lined with damp padding, every instinct raging uselessly against the fact that he could not leap out and vanish into the sea because the sea was no longer there.

Through it all Xie Lian remained close. Not always touching. Actually, almost not at all. Just within sight. That, more than anything, kept Wei Wuxian from entirely losing hold of himself. He hated that too. By the time they arrived at their destination, twilight had begun to settle.

Wei Wuxian did not know what the place was.

His first impression was that humans had built a cliff out of glass, stone and arrogance.

The structure loomed pale and sprawling against the coastline and deep into the bay, what it looked like was an enormous enclosed nightmare. Windows reflected the dying sky in sheets of blue and gold. Wide doors opened onto lit corridors. Somewhere deeper inside, water moved. He could smell it, hear the filtered rush and circulation systems underlying everything like a mechanical imitation of the sea. His heart kicked hard against his ribs.

They rolled him through corridors bright enough to hurt, past more humans in pale clothing who stopped and stared. Their voices rose in shock when they saw him. Some said things to Xie Lian. He answered quickly without breaking stride. Wei Wuxian caught almost none of it.

He caught the looks, though.

Astonishment. Alarm. Excitement from one before it was strangled down. Pity from another. Clinical focus. Wonder.

A set of doors opened ahead. Humid air spilled through.

Water.

Real water, at least in part. Filtered and enclosed, but still smelled like the sea.

They brought him into a medical bay built around a deep pool separated from the room by thick glass and broad access platforms. Human screens lined one wall, each connected to humming equipment. Shelves gleamed with instruments. Overhead lights reflected off the surface of the pool in wavering gold bars.

Wei Wuxian stared.

Not the sea, no. But not dry land either. Which was only marginally better than the beach.

Xie Lian noticed the shift in him. He gestured to the pool, then to Wei Wuxian, slow and obvious.

There. For you.

At least, that was the shape of the intent.

Wei Wuxian's throat tightened so suddenly it hurt. He had spent the entire journey braced for cages, for ropes, for the clean cruelty of human curiosity he'd heard Hua Cheng curse about late in the night. Instead they had brought him to water. Contained water. Human water. Suspicious water.

But still water.

They transferred him again, this time with even more painful care, lowering him at last into the pool by a sloped platform rather than dropping him. The instant the water closed over his tail, the relief was savage. His whole body shuddered once, violently, and then he went limp with it, half-floating, half-held by the shallows.

It hurt. Gods, it still hurt. But the drying burn eased. The drag on his scales lessened. The torn edge of his fin stopped screaming quite so loudly.

Wei Wuxian turned at once, trying to dive deeper. Glass blocked his way. More of it than he'd ever seen in his life.

He recoiled hard enough to stir the water white around himself and spun, staring in up at the surface.

A rock pool at best.

Not open enough to swim around in, but to be perfectly fair, he probably shouldn't be swimming around too much anyway, hos brain unhelpfully supplied.

A sound tore loose from him before he could stop it. A pathetic whine at his own annoyances. He hated how lonely it sounded and huffed with a glare at the lights.

Xie Lian was kneeling at the platform above, talking softly again. Always softly, damn him. He did not move to crowd the water. Did not summon more hands. He simply stayed there while the other researchers prepared supplies and machines behind him.

Wei Wuxian swam one unsteady circle and then stopped, breath like a ship against the reef. His side was still bleeding. He could feel warmth feathering into the pool around him and the taste of his own blood in the water. His tail fin dragged wrong with every move. He was tired beyond anything useful. And there was no Jiang Cheng. No Jiang Yanli. No Hua Cheng. No familiar call threading the currents. No scent of his pod. No shared water. No known reef-song.

Just this room. This water-that-wasn't-sea. These humans.

Xie Lian watched from above while Wei Wuxian drifted to the bottom.

Wei Wuxian shut his eyes for one brief moment. When he opened them, Xie Lian was still there. Still watching him with that impossible, aching gentleness.

Behind him, through the glass wall of the medical bay, Wei Wuxian caught movement in the dimmer water of an adjacent water beyond the wall. Pale colours drifting. A flash of white through blue. Shapes gliding slow and silent in the massive area beyond.

There were other mers.

Not Jiang.

Not Wen.

Unknown.

The figure paused just beyond the partition,, golden eyes fixed.

Wei Wuxian stared back through progressively blurring vision.

The human voices faded into a dull drone at the edge of his hearing. Pain, grief, fear, and exhaustion pressed in from all sides.

Xie Lian turned, following his gaze, and his face softened with recognition toward the figure beyond the glass. Then he looked back at Wei Wuxian. Whatever happened next, it was clear in the shape of the room, the water, the eyes on him from both sides of the glass: his life had not ended on that beach.

It had only broken open into something stranger.

And Wei Wuxian, battered and grieving and far from everyone he loved, had no choice now but to survive it.

And survive, he did. Recovery, Wei Wuxian learned, was an insult. A slow one. A boring one. A humiliating one. If battle was all sharp pain and instinct and movement, recovery was the exact opposite: stillness forced on him by a body that had apparently decided to become delicate without consulting him first.

He hated it.

He hated the treatment pool, which was large enough to prevent him from immediately dying of dryness and indignity, yet far too small to qualify as proper water. It was a round little prison of filtered seawater and smooth walls, deep enough for slow turns and short dives, shallow enough in all the wrong places, and never—never—quiet in the proper way. The ocean had layers of sound. The drag of current against rock. The clicks of fish. The distant pulse of larger bodies moving through open water. 

Even silence at sea was alive.

This place hummed. Machines. Pumps. Human contraptions endlessly breathing through pipes and vents and hidden metal guts behind the walls. A mechanical sea, weak and bloodless. He hated the lights too. He hated the routine. He hated the way the humans kept insisting on checking him. Touching him. Peering at torn fin, bruised ribs, half-healed gashes along his side as though staring very seriously might make wounds close faster.

Most of all, he hated not knowing.

That was the part that hollowed him.

Pain was pain. Wei Wuxian could bear pain. Boredom, though he complained of it loudly to himself and to the walls and to the deeply unfortunate fish in the filtration side-channel, he could also bear. Even loneliness, raw as it was, could be wrestled into something survivable if he bit at it hard enough.

But the unknown sat in him like a hook.

His siblings. His guardians. The pod.

Alive? Dead? Scattered? Hiding? Captured?

The sea between not knowing and knowing was wider than any ocean he had ever swum.

Some days he woke from uneasy sleep absolutely certain Jiang Cheng was alive, because Jiang Cheng was too angry to die and the world would surely reject him on principle. Other days he thought of Jiang Yanli's face on the ship, bloodied and steady and trying so hard to be brave for everyone else, and felt cold all through. Sometimes, when he let his thoughts wander where they should not, he saw Hua Cheng and the boat, he imagined Wen claws raking at the sides. Imagined red threats circling like sharks, imagined the boat capsizing and red red red and all the blood as bodies sank with the current.

Those were the times Wei Wuxian put all his remaining energy into being insufferable, because it was that or curl up at the bottom of the pool and let grief chew holes through him.

The humans came and went around him like nervous shorebirds.

They were not entirely unreasonable.

When he had first been brought in, half-dead and furious, he had snapped at two hands, struck another away, and ricocheted off his glass boundarie after a particularly bad day inside his head like something feral enough to prove every bad story humans had ever told about merfolk. Since then, even as his condition improved, caution clung to them. They entered in pairs. They approached slowly. They murmured to each other before opening the access gate between the medical platform and the shallow examination ledge. They kept equipment tucked behind their backs until the last possible moment, as though needles and salves would somehow become less offensive if introduced politely.

Wei Wuxian made sure to notice.

Because he was not the only mer in this facility, and that mattered.

The first time he properly saw the other one, it was by accident.

He was floating near the glass divider between his treatment pool and the observation corridor, pretending not to be restless enough to claw his own scales off, when movement in the neighboring medical enclosure caught his eye.

At first he thought it might be a warped reflection of himself.

Dark hair. Lean frame. Tail marked in ocean black and deep red tones, though the shades were duller than his own. Less coral-dark, blood red and more day old fish blood and smokey shadow. Similar enough at a glance to ring alarm bells in a human brain too eager for categories.

Then the stranger turned.

Ah. No. Not similar at all.

This one had a grin like a knife slipped between ribs. Young, perhaps, though that meant little among merfolk whose faces could keep beauty while the rest of them turned ancient. His eyes were bright with the wrong kind of amusement, his posture too loose in a way that felt more dangerous than tension ever could. There was something gleefully rotten about the set of his mouth.

He was watching one of the human attendants with such focused delight that Wei Wuxian instinctively looked for blood. A heartbeat later the mer snapped forward. The human stumbled back with a cry.

The muted-red mer struck the glass with both palms, teeth bared in laughter so vicious it was almost music. One of the metal tools the attendant had been carrying clattered to the floor. Another human rushed in. Voices rose. The mer only laughed harder and dragged one hand slowly down the barrier between them, gaze unblinking. Insane, Wei Wuxian decided immediately.

Or very committed to a performance.

Either way, unpleasant.

The humans responded to him with a tension that was entirely different from the caution they brought to Wei Wuxian's pool. This was not nervous respect for a wounded predator. This was active fear sharpened by experience. They medicated him through long-handled implements, secured gates twice over, and rarely let him into the adjacent exercise area without three people monitoring from the control station. He seemed to enjoy this very much.

Wei Wuxian watched him for a long moment, then glanced back at the nearest researchers hovering beyond his own pool.

Ah.

That was what it was. The resemblance. Not in face. Not in movement. Not in spirit. In broad outline only—the dark tail, the strong build, the teeth, the possibility of violence, the colourings.

Humans, he had learned very quickly, liked convenient conclusions. And if they had one vicious red-scaled mer already locked down nearby, then of course they would look at Wei Wuxian and wonder if he was merely a prettier variation of the same problem.

Wei Wuxian, lying awake that night in the dim treatment pool while machinery hummed and filtered water moved through grates, smiled slowly to himself.

Fine.

If they wanted categories, he could give them one. Not dangerous unknown. Not unpredictable problem. He would be good. So offensively good they'd choke on it.

The next morning, he began his campaign.

It was not difficult or sudden.

Wei Wuxian had spent his entire life understanding the uses of a face to interact with humans, a posture, a well-timed look. He knew when to appear harmless, when to appear pitiful, when to seem too playful to be threatening. He knew exactly how to tilt his head and widen his eyes when a human approached with medicine. He knew how to let curiosity soften his expression. He knew how to hold still when they checked his wounds, how to accept touch with only the faintest wince, how to take the offered fish from feeding tongs with delicate precision rather than lunging like a menace.

The first time he did not resist having the torn section of his fin cleaned, the young researcher nearly cried.

Honestly. It was a bit embarrassing. He wasn't that difficult! Just maybe a little moody, which he was entirely justified for being.

Xie Lian noticed faster than the others. Of course he did.

He was the one who was in charge around, that much was easy enough to figure out. The one who seemed to understand, if not merfolk in general, then at least the shape of care required to make terror less sharp. He entered the medical bay each day with his sleeves rolled, his expression soft but observant, and those impossible human eyes that missed very little.

When Wei Wuxian floated obediently to the examination ledge at a simple beckoning motion, Xie Lian paused. When he allowed the salve to be spread along his healing side without even so much as baring his teeth, Xie Lian paused longer. When he accepted a strange object—one of the buoyant ring-things the humans liked to throw around—with a look of such bright interest that two assistants exchanged openly hopeful glances, Xie Lian's mouth twitched.

He knew.

Not all of it, perhaps, but enough to suspect performance.

Wei Wuxian gave him his sweetest, most long-suffering look and tucked the toy under one arm like a model patient.

Xie Lian, the strange human that was admittedly starting to grow on Wei Wuxian a little, looked amused.

Still, the results came.

They began opening the small gate to the adjoining exercise section more often, the one connected to his treatment pool by a narrow channel that could be locked at both ends. It was still far too small to satisfy him, but it at least allowed him a longer stretch for swimming. He made a point of using it gracefully, never testing the gates too hard, never showing how badly he wanted out or being a general menace.

He also became, to his own private mortification , helpful.

If a human dropped something into the water, Wei Wuxian retrieved it. If they wanted him nearer the platform, he came. If Xie Lian pointed toward a marked panel and then toward Wei Wuxian's tail, he would position himself to make inspection easier. He even tolerated the measuring cord. The measuring cord. Ugh.

There were humiliations that could not be forgotten.

He was patient during wound flushes. Cooperative during feeding studies. Calm when they introduced new objects into the enclosure, shell puzzles, weighted float rings, strips of woven kelp and fabric meant to mimic interactive foraging. Some were interesting. Some were insulting. He investigated all of them with the air of a mer who had never once in his life bitten a researcher. Which was a lie but still...

The humans melted.

They tried not to. Some did better than others. But it was there in the way their shoulders lowered around him, in the way voices softened from wary to fond, in the little pleased sounds they made when he accepted food from hand rather than tong. One of the assistants started calling him things in a tone that clearly meant sweet or good or well done, as if he were some rescued animal learning not to eat the furniture.

Wei Wuxian rewarded this by being even more charming.

He was, after all, a Jiang. Therefore, he was very committed to science.

And because he was so very well-behaved, he got to spend more time in the wider observation area beyond the treatment enclosure—still separated from the main habitat by thick glass and locked access currents, but closer. Close enough to see the larger tank properly. Close enough to ache for it.

It sprawled beyond his restricted section like a dream designed by a particularly cruel god. A vast, multi-depth habitat of rock shelves, swaying planted beds, open saltwater lanes, filtered current systems, sunlit upper shallows and dimmer blue reaches below. Artificial, yes. No true ocean could be contained within walls. But compared to the miserable square he had been recovering in, it was a kingdom.

And it was occupied.

The white-and-blue pod moved through it with the quiet assurance of creatures already accustomed to its limits. There were several of them, enough to form social clusters and meaningful distance both. Their tails ranged through pale silvers, deep sapphire, mist blue, and white touched with grey. Elegant all of them in a way Wei Wuxian resented on instinct. They glided rather than darted, curved rather than lunged, and communicated in low trills and gestures measured enough to look choreographed.

The Lan pod. Wei Wuxian knew of these mers from the gossip of several, frankly ancient, sea turtles. A human place that takes the wounded to care for, to learn from and give back to the ocean. A pod of mers of blue and white who stay and learn about the humans.

They were beautiful, yes.

Annoyingly so.

And among them was one who made it difficult for Wei Wuxian to remember, occasionally, that he had pressing emotional devastation to attend to.

The first time he saw that mer up close, he forgot to breathe.

He had seen him before through distances and shifting water, glimpsed the pale line of him in motion, but proximity was a far more dangerous thing.

White and blue, certainly, but not soft. His tail carried the clean, cold shades of moonlight on deep water, elegant right up until the moment one noticed the underlying power in it. He was built strong. Shoulders broad, movements economical, no wasted softness anywhere. His face was almost offensively composed. Beautiful in a way that made Wei Wuxian suspicious of the heavens for favoritism. Long dark hair drifted like ink through the water around him. His gaze, when it lifted, was clear and level and entirely too steady.

Quiet too.

While others in the enclosure interacted more openly with Xie Lian and the staff, this one kept a dignified remove. He was not unfriendly exactly. Merely self-contained, like a blade slipped between fins and not at all interested in proving itself to anyone.

Wei Wuxian became instantly fascinated.

It was not his fault.

He was trapped in a small pool, grieving, bored half to death, and the universe had seen fit to place an elegant, strong, absurdly gorgeous stranger just beyond the glass. Under such circumstances, fascination was only natural.

Wei Wuxian, in his growing boredom, started preforming. He would drift lazily in the exercise area with his hair floating prettily and his expression arranged into thoughtful melancholy. He would accept fish from the humans with polite calm, then turn just slightly so the pale mer in the big tank might happen to observe what an exceptionally reasonable creature he was. He would play with objects in a restrained, charming way rather than dismantling them out of spite. Once, when Xie Lian offered him one of the bright floating rings, Wei Wuxian pushed it back and forth through the water with such exaggerated innocence that a pair of younger Lan mers drew nearer to watch.

The quiet beautiful one lingered behind them.

Which was excellent.

The humans, meanwhile, were beginning to adore him in a manner Wei Wuxian found both useful and undignified. Wei Wuxian did not know the words they used properly , but he knew the tone: relieved, affectionate, proud. Another responded from the platform with a glance toward the neighboring enclosure, the one that housed the red-and-black psycho.

Then that researcher looked back at Wei Wuxian and made a visible effort to relax.

Yes, yes, think to yourselves how gentle and lovely I am, Wei Wuxian thought smugly as he floated near the ledge and allowed Xie Lian to examine the healing seam along his fin. Compare me favorably. Tell stories about my progress. Open gates.

Gods, open the gates.

Because beneath all his patient charm and practiced sweetness, insanity itched at him. He wanted current. Distance. More than four body lengths in any direction. He wanted to swim until his muscles burned from movement instead of stagnation. He wanted real salt and uncertain depth and the possibility of disappearing briefly behind a rock shelf without three humans peering after him. He wanted the larger enclosure so badly his teeth ached with it.

And if that larger enclosure happened to contain one devastatingly beautiful, maddeningly self-possessed mer who looked as though he might never speak unless the world deserved it, then that was simply an additional incentive.

One evening, after a day of model conduct so saintly it ought to have earned him a shrine, Wei Wuxian lingered at the transparent barrier between his section and the main tank. The lights had dimmed to evening settings. The white-and-blue pod drifted through the deeper lanes like pieces of moonlight let loose underwater. Some rested among the rock shelves. Others moved in slow, silent arcs.

The gorgeous one was nearest the glass.

He had one hand braced lightly against the stone ledge, body suspended in the water with effortless control. Wei Wuxian watched as beautiful golden eyes found his shameless staring.

Then, because he was still himself no matter how grievously circumstances had abused him, he straightened, put on his most angelic expression, and flicked his tail in a restrained little flourish that translated in any body of water as I am being exceptionally good, have you noticed?

The pale mer blinked. Then, so faintly Wei Wuxian nearly doubted it, the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile but close enough to make Wei Wuxian feel bizarrely victorious.

Good.

Someone here appreciated effort.

Behind him, the access door opened and one of the evening staff stepped in carrying a tray.

Wei Wuxian immediately dropped into his sweetest posture and turned with graceful compliance, all innocence and patience, the very portrait of a mer who had never once contemplated committing crimes against architecture.

The researcher visibly brightened.

Yes, Wei Wuxian thought, accepting the offered fish with elegant delicacy and absolutely no biting. Yes, look well. I am the goodest boy in this entire miserable place. Now let me out before I lose my mind.

. . . . . . . . . .

Xie Lian had long ago learned that the difference between observation and attachment was often only visible in hindsight.

At first, he told himself his attention toward A-Ying, as their best intern had fondly named, was entirely professional.

It was true that the rescued mer was an extraordinary case. Found beached early morning near two brutally torn corpses belongings to the Wen pod, by a man walking his dog at sunrise. The gentleman had contacted them through their emergency line and by the time they'd gotten to the sight, A-Ying was awake and still looking for a fight. Traumatic stranding, severe soft tissue injuries, likely long-distance pursuit exhaustion, evidence of violent conflict with multiple merfolk, and a temperament far more complex than the early reports had suggested. He should have been a fascinating subject for any researcher with half a brain.

Xie Lian, unfortunately, had a full one.

Which meant he noticed too much.

He noticed how cleverly A-Ying adapted once the worst of his pain had ebbed. The shift had not been abrupt. It came in layered degrees, like sunlight slowly reaching deeper water. First tolerance. Then patience. Then engagement. Not only with the human staff, but with the rhythms of the place itself. He learned the sound of each feeding cart, the difference between the junior attendants' footsteps and the older veterinary staff, the timing of enrichment rotations, which drawers held interesting objects, which humans startled easily, which responded well to charm.

And A-Ying had charm in excess of safety.

Not the careful gentleness of the Lan pod, whose trust had always come slowly and with clear conditions. A-Ying's sociability was restless, bright, playful in a way that made the room feel smaller around him. He stole gloves when someone turned away. Not to destroy them—usually—but to inspect, wave triumphantly, and surrender only after receiving the appropriate level of coaxing. He learned that if he gave the floating ring back to the interns rather than hurling it into the filtration grate, they made pleased noises and brought him more interesting toys. He discovered that if he waited patiently by the exam ledge, someone would almost certainly reward him with extra herring.

He had also, Xie Lian noted privately, become very good at appearing harmless exactly when it was most useful.

Which was not a criticism. Simply a, very amusing, fact.

The resemblance to the other black-and-red patient in the institute's care had made the staff wary in the beginning. Not because they truly believed the two were alike—not once one spent even ten minutes in the room with either of them—but because fear was a stubborn thing, and visual patterning often reached human instinct faster than reason did.

Xue Yang had sharpened that fear into something ugly and habitual.

He remained housed under much stricter conditions on the far side of the rehabilitation wing, where every interaction had to be measured three times over. He was brilliant in ways no one found comforting and violent in ways that turned even routine care into a negotiation. His amusement at human discomfort had never dulled.

A-Ying, by contrast, had begun disarming the staff one careful kindness at a time. Xie Lian watched it happen more than a few times.

A young research aide dropped a measuring tag into the water. Before she could reach for the retrieval pole, A-Ying scooped it from the shallows and laid it neatly on the ledge, looking unbearably pleased with himself. A veterinarian needed a second visual check on the scar line along his lower flank. A-Ying rolled obligingly, holding still through the entire inspection and only flicking water at her once she was finished, which under the circumstances felt less like aggression and more like a practical joke.

One afternoon, while Xie Lian was reviewing notes beside the treatment platform, A-Ying drifted over and set his chin on folded arms at the pool edge, simply watching him write. When Xie Lian looked up, A-Ying immediately widened his eyes into an expression of such sincere innocence that it became impossible not to laugh.

He laughed.

A-Ying brightened at once, victorious.

That, more than anything, began to weigh on Xie Lian.

Not because A-Ying was doing anything wrong. Quite the opposite. But the more sociable he became, the more obvious it was that all his brightness was being poured into the narrow channels available to him. He was healing well, yes. Stronger every day. The lacerations had closed cleanly. The damaged edge of his tail fin was knitting better than anyone had dared hope. His stamina had returned in increments large enough to transform the exercise pool from a relief into a frustration.

He was outgrowing the medical enclosure. And he knew it.

Every time Xie Lian entered the room, he felt it immediately, the restless energy under A-Ying's apparent patience, the way his gaze flicked past him to the larger habitat beyond, the way his fingers lingered on the boundary gate as though imagining it gone.

It was not only the space. Or rather, it was not only the space itself. It was who occupied it.

The Lan pod had taken notice of A-Ying gradually. At first, with caution.

Merfolk were not naive. Human stories liked to flatten them into noble innocents or inhuman monsters, depending on which lie was easier to sell, but reality had always been more complicated than either. Some pods were peaceful. Some territorial. Some deeply communal. Others fractured and unpredictable. A wounded outsider with no known pod standing and visible battle trauma would never be welcomed casually, not even into a controlled environment.

The Lan pod observed before approaching.

The younger ones did it most openly, drifting near the barrier separating the rehabilitation section from the main enclosure, pretending not to stare. The older members kept farther back, their attention harder to read but no less keen. They knew he was not Lan. They knew he was not one of the small coastal groups occasionally documented near the southern currents. They knew, from his scars if nothing else, that he had come from violence.

Lan Xichen was the first to make any clear gesture of welcome.

He was that sort of person.

Warm where his brother was restrained, openly curious where others maintained elegant reserve, Lan Xichen had always possessed the peculiar ability to seem kind without seeming foolish. He approached the barrier on the third day after A-Ying was first allowed extended access to the adjoining exercise channel, and trilled a greeting. An offering.

Not food. Not territory. Something gentler than both.

A-Ying blinked.

Then, after a long second, he clicked and chattered in return.

Lan Xichen smiled.

That was the beginning.

After that, interactions came easier. Not quickly. Not all at once. But enough.

A juvenile from the Lan pod began shadowing A-Ying's swims through the adjoining channel whenever their schedules overlapped, fascinated by the speed of his turns and the way he used his tail with a looser, more improvisational style than any of the Lans. One of the older aunties watched him work through a hanging puzzle feeder and made a low, approving sound when he solved it by yanking the whole thing sideways instead of delicately extracting each piece one at a time. Lan Xichen himself took to lingering near the barrier, clearly content to exchange nothing more than presence and the chirp and trill of conversation.

And Lan Wangji—

Lan Wangji was cautious longest.

Xie Lian was not surprised.

He had worked with the Lan pod long enough to know the shape of each member's wariness. Lan Wangji's was not born from fear. It was discernment sharpened into habit. He watched first. Judged quietly. Measured not only what a stranger did, but why.

At first he kept his distance.

He observed A-Ying with that same level, impossible gaze, silent and still enough to feel carved from moonlight and stone. When the other mer played to the humans, Lan Wangji noticed. When A-Ying exaggerated innocence after very deliberately committing some minor nuisance, Lan Wangji noticed that too. When he softened his movements around the younger Lan mers, careful not to scare or startle them, Lan Wangji noticed most of all.

He did not approach just because A-Ying was charming.

He approached because, over time, it became clear that A-Ying's attention moved in one direction more than any other.

Toward him.

The realization spread through the Lan pod in ways Xie Lian could not translate precisely but could certainly recognise in most people.

He saw it in Lan Xichen first: the slight lift at the corner of his mouth whenever A-Ying suddenly discovered a profound interest in whatever stretch of glass Lan Wangji happened to be nearest.

Then in the younger ones, who began drifting out of the way with remarkable and suspicious efficiency.

Then in the auntie who once watched A-Ying float himself into a nearly absurd display of graceful patience while Lan Wangji inspected a current vent on the opposite side of the barrier, and produced a slow trill that sounded, even to human ears, deeply amused.

A-Ying, realizing he was being observed, had the audacity to look embarrassed.

Lan Wangji, by contrast, seemed aware but unaffected.

From that point onward, the Lan pod's caution eased.

Not entirely. That would be foolish by mer standards. But enough that the atmosphere around A-Ying shifted from potential threat to that one whose eyes keeps circling Wangji like a bright troublesome fish and has not bitten anyone important yet.

"It's strange," Ling Wen said quietly to Xie Lian while reviewing the habitat cameras. "They're much more relaxed with A-Ying now."

Xie Lian looked up from the monitor.

A-Ying was in the exercise section, suspended half in shadow beneath the artificial rock overhang. Lan Wangji had drifted to the other side of the barrier, close enough that only the glass separated them. Neither was moving much. No showiness. No antics. Just the long, attentive stillness of two individuals still treating each other as curiosities.

"It isn't strange," Xie Lian said.

Ling Wen glanced at him.

Xie Lian smiled faintly. "Who dosnt like teasing someone about a crush? They're probably finding this hilarious."

That was becoming increasingly obvious.

Not even A-Ying's best attempt at subtlety could disguise it forever.

He brightened when Lan Wangji was near. Behaved even better when the quieter mer was watching. Offered play to the younger Lan mers with a sweetness that looked genuine and probably mostly was, but also had the distinct air of someone very aware of his audience. Once, during a supervised cross-barrier interaction session, A-Ying positioned himself beside a puzzle feeder he had already figured out and then proceeded to solve it again in a manner so elegant and restrained that Xie Lian nearly laughed aloud.

Lan Wangji, lingering just three body lengths away, watched every second. If he was immune to performance, he did not appear entirely unmoved by effort. Which, in hindsight, should perhaps have made the committee discussion easier.

It did not.

"We still don't know enough," Shi Quinxuan, senior veterinary consultants, said tapping a folder with two fingers manicured fingers. "Healing trajectory is excellent, yes. Aggression has reduced, yes. But rehabilitation transfer into the main habitat is a significant step."

"He is pacing the exercise channel raw," Ling Wen countered. "His rest cycles worsen after restricted days. Stress behavior is climbing."

"He adapts just fine."

"He is enduring." Pie Ming corrected.

Xie Lian said nothing at first.

He had made a career out of patience. Out of not pushing before trust and timing aligned. But when he looked through the glass these days and saw A-Ying trying, with almost comical determination, to be everything the institute might possibly reward, cooperative, engaging, playful, careful with hands and equipment and the younger podlings opinions, he could not pretend confinement was still the right answer simply because caution felt tidier than change.

"He needs the space," Xie Lian said at last.

The room quieted.

"He's not deteriorating because he's unstable. He's deteriorating because he's healing and still being asked to live in a convalescence pool." He folded his hands. "A-Ying is intelligent and clearly well socialised. We should be weary and on high aleart. Full visual monitoring. The Lan pod are capable, but we leave retreat channels open. No forced interactions. If stress rises, we close the gate."

The senior consultant frowned. "And if his behavior changes once the barrier is gone?"

Xie Lian thought of A-Ying returning every borrowed object. Of him rolling onto the exam ledge when asked, however dramatic his expression. Of the careful gentleness with which he had begun passing toys to the Lan juveniles through the interaction slots. Of the way he watches Lan Wangji with a yearning so visible even the interns had started noticing.

Then he thought of the ocean. Of loss. Of a young man who had survived unimaginable violence and still reached toward others rather than collapsing inward.

"Then we respond to what actually happens," Xie Lian said, "not what we're afraid might."

It took two more days.

A-Ying spent them in a state of such exaggerated good behavior that half the staff grew suspicious and the other half became helplessly devoted. He ate neatly. He accepted treatment without fuss. He did not dismantle a single enrichment device, though Xie Lian caught him looking at one hanging shell puzzle with the expression of a man refraining from arson through sheer moral superiority and the bane of being underwater.

He also, Xie Lian noticed, kept drifting to the transition gate between his section and the main habitat.

Never obviously. Never for long enough to look like impatience. But often enough that Lan Xichen caught him once and gave him such a fond, knowing look that even from the observation deck Xie Lian could read the empathy in it.

The morning the gate opened, the facility felt different before anyone touched a control.

Perhaps it was only Xie Lian's own anticipation reflected back at him by steel and glass.

A-Ying hovered at the far end of his exercise channel, then circled back, then pretended to inspect a rock outcropping he had already inspected a thousand times, then finally settled near the gate with all the tense false ease of someone who deeply wished to be moments from either freedom or homicide.

Xie Lian stood at the control panel.

"We'll open the main gate first," Mu Qing murmured behind him.

Xie Lian nodded, though his eyes stayed on the water.

The first lock disengaged with a deep mechanical thunk and A-Ying froze.

The second seal released more quietly, followed by the low shift of displaced water as the partition gate began to retract into the wall. For one breathless moment nothing happened.

Then A-Ying shot forward.

He did not dart through the opening so much as explode through it.

The water took him and he took the water back with equal force. Out into the broader lane, around the first rock rise, down into the deeper channel, up again in a streak of dark scales flashing red and wild, disbelieving joy. He moved like something returned to itself. All the careful patience, all the sweet cooperative restraint, all the studied gentleness he had wrapped around himself for days burst open into pure motion.

He swam. Heavens, he swam.

Fast enough to leave white trails in the filtered current. Wide enough arcs to use the full breadth of the habitat. He dove along the stone floor and surged upward in a ribboning twist of tail and hair. He vanished behind the central reef shelf and reappeared seconds later in the upper water column, reckless with relief. Once he struck the current lane so sharply that one of the younger Lan mers startled and then, realizing this was joy rather than danger, chirped and waved in startled delight.

The entire enclosure seemed brighter for having him in it.

Xie Lian had seen rehabilitated animals return to larger habitats before. He had seen people released form hospitals after long recoveries. He had seen injured creatures rediscover strength, cautious ones test space, fearful ones edge into freedom one measured stroke at a time.

This was none of those things.

This was a being half-starved for movement finally released from insult.

Wei Wuxian swam until anyone watching could see the exertion catching up with him.

It took a fair amount of time. He had stamina enough to make a festival of it. But healing was not the same as whole, and even joy could burn through a body faster than pride admitted. Little by little the frantic edge softened. His turns grew longer, less wild. He stopped driving himself at every angle simply because the angle existed. He circled the perimeter once more, slower this time, then cut down toward the broad sandy shelf near the central rock formation.

Lan Wangji was there.

He had not followed while A-Ying was in motion. Had not intruded on the first wild claim of open water. Only now, when the other mer's speed bled off into something softer and exhausted, and settling nearer.

A-Ying made one final, half-laughing pass through the current and then collapsed onto the sandbank with all the grace of a man who had quite literally worn himself out on happiness.

He lay there panting, one arm flung out, hair drifting around him in a dark halo. His tail gave a lazy twitch, then another, as though even resting he needed to reassure himself that the space remained. That no wall would suddenly be at his back. That he could move again if he chose.

For the first time since Xie Lian had found him on the beach, A-Ying looked... not healed, not safe from grief, not untouched by any of what he had lost. But okay. Just for this moment. He looked like he'd be okay.

The difference was small and enormous all at once.

Lan Wangji lowered himself to the sand nearby.

Wei Wuxian turned his head.

Whatever he had expected to find in Lan Wangji's face, it made him go very still. Then, slowly, the bright unruly expression that had carried him through so much of his recovery gentled into something quieter. More honest. He exhaled, long and shaking, and let his cheek settle against the sand.

The water moved softly over both of them.

Around them, the rest of the Lan pod resumed their ordinary drifting paths, no longer tense, no longer waiting for the worst. A juvenile looped once through the upper shelf current and was shushed by an older hand. Lan Xichen, farther off, watched with the sort of smile usually reserved for things unfolding exactly as he had suspected they would.

In the observation room, no one spoke for a while. Xie Lian rested one hand against the glass and let the silence sit. A-Ying's eyes had closed halfway. His body, only minutes earlier all velocity and barely-contained elation, had gone loose with exhausted relief. He looked like someone who had been holding himself above water far longer than anyone should have to, and had at last found ground enough to rest on.

Xie Lian thought then—not for the first time, but perhaps most clearly—that survival was not always dramatic. Sometimes it was simply a gate opening, enough room given to move, a body remembering itself, another presence beside you that did not ask anything at all.

Xie Lian smiled to himself.

In the vastness of the habitat, at last no longer penned in by the tiny mercy of the medical pool, A-Ying rested in the open water and looked as if, if only for a little while, that the world had loosened its grip on his throat. As if, for the first time in a very long while, relief was bigger than pain.

And that, Xie Lian thought, was worth witnessing.

. . . . . . . . . .

If recovery was the first mercy the oceanarium had granted him, then Lan Wangji became the second.

Wei Wuxian did not realize this immediately.

At first, he only knew that the larger habitat didn't felt empty in quite the same way when Lan Wangji was nearby. The water seemed less false. The rock shelves less like imitations. Even the filtered currents, so inferior to the ocean in every possible way, became tolerable if he had someone worth circling through them.

Lan Wangji, unfortunately, was extremely worth circling.

He was quiet in a way that should have made him difficult to know, but instead made him impossible to ignore. Some mers filled space by claiming it. Others by disturbing it. Wei Wuxian had always excelled at the second. Lan Wangji, by contrast, simply was, and the world adjusted itself around him. He held his stillness like a kind of strength. Moved only when movement mattered. Watched with those bright, steady eyes that never once slid away from what they meant to see.

Naturally, Wei Wuxian decided this meant he should bother him constantly.

He began small.

A drift through Lan Wangji's chosen current lane when there were at least four others available.

An inquisitive flick to the end of Lan Wangji's trailing hair before darting away just far enough to avoid reprisal.

The strategic placement of a particularly bright shell directly in Lan Wangji's path, followed by an expression of such manufactured innocence that even Lan Xichen, watching from an upper shelf, nearly gave himself away with amusement.

Lan Wangji ignored him magnificently.

Which only encouraged Wei Wuxian.

He learned very quickly that Lan Wangji's silence was not uniform. There was the silence he gave everyone. The composed, courteous reserve of a mer who did not waste sound. Then there was the silence he gave Wei Wuxian specifically, which carried layers. Flat disapproval. Mild tolerance. Faint curiosity carefully hidden beneath disapproval. The rarer silences still, the ones in which Lan Wangji said nothing but did not swim away either.

Those were victories.

Wei Wuxian collected them greedily.

Sometimes his harassment was practical. He would wedge himself shamelessly into Lan Wangji's line of sight whenever the other mer became too engrossed in one of the puzzles or current assessments the researchers seemed so fond of documenting. If Lan Wangji refused to look at him, Wei Wuxian would float upside down directly in front of him until the offense could no longer be ignored.

Sometimes it was simpler than that. He simply wanted attention. This, too, he discovered had gradations.

Lan Wangji would not respond to nonsense for nonsense's sake. Excessive dramatics earned him a cool stare at best. But the right amount—just enough interruption, just enough bright persistence, just enough exaggerated injury at being ignored—would sometimes be rewarded.

A look.

A low sound in the throat that might have been admonishment or reluctant acknowledgment.

Once, a flick of Lan Wangji's tail against his in passing, so brief Wei Wuxian nearly convinced himself he had imagined it. He had not imagined it. He knew because he spent the next hour in a state of private triumph so embarrassing he had to go harass a current vent just to recover his dignity.

Then came the gifts.

At first, this seemed only natural.

The habitat, for all its artificiality, contained objects worth finding. The humans cycled new shell clusters, smooth river stones, puzzle fixtures, floating toys, and kelp bundles through the environment regularly, and Wei Wuxian had always possessed a keen eye for interesting things. It occurred to him one day that Lan Wangji, who spent so much time being composed and elegant and unfairly beautiful, probably did not spend enough time being delighted.

Clearly, this was a problem.

So Wei Wuxian brought him things.

A shell with a spiral interior that caught the light in pale violet. A polished bit of sea-glass one of the younger mers had overlooked in the gravel bed. A braided strand of soft kelp knotted around a white stone because the contrast suited Lan Wangji's coloring and also because Wei Wuxian had hands and therefore could. Lan Wangji stared at the first offering for so long Wei Wuxian began to think, with rare uncertainty, that perhaps he had made some dreadful social error.

Then Lan Wangji took it.

He turned the shell over in his hands, thumb brushing its edge, and after a long moment tucked it into the crevice beside his preferred resting shelf rather than discarding it into the communal scatter.

Wei Wuxian lit up from the inside.

From then on, he became a menace with purpose.

The Lan pod noticed almost immediately. Lan Xichen noticed, of course, because Lan Xichen noticed everything and wore fond understanding like another current around his body. He never interfered. He only watched with that increasingly terrible smile whenever Wei Wuxian arrived with some new treasure and a face arranged into fake nonchalance.

The younger Lan mers noticed in the way younger relatives always did: quickly, delightedly, and with no respect whatsoever for subtlety. They started presenting their own discoveries to Wei Wuxian first, only to see if he would pass them on to Lan Wangji. Once, one of the small ones brought him a particularly lovely piece of abalone shell and then hovered so obviously nearby during the handoff that Lan Wangji had to fix them with a glance sharp enough to send them scattering.

The aunties watched and found it hysterical. Wei Wuxian began receiving approving little trills every time he turned up with some carefully selected pebble or edible or pretty fragment. He had no idea why, only that the older women of the pod had begun treating him like an unusually entertaining phenomenon.

Even Lan Wangji noticed that they noticed.

This did not help him all that much, to be honest. Lan Wangji became far more selective after that.

Offering food came next.

This, unlike the trinkets, had instinct in it.

Not conscious instinct, not at first that is. Wei Wuxian simply found himself doing it. A choice morsel from feeding time. The fattiest bit of fish. A rare crab piece earned from one of the human problem-boxes after considerable effort. He would take the best of it and bring it to Lan Wangji, nudging it into his hands or placing it on the stone beside him with bright expectation.

Lan Wangji resisted longer here.

Not because he did not understand the gesture.

That was, in fact, the problem, Wei Wuxian would realise in hindsight.

Among merfolk, food was never only food. Casual sharing existed, certainly. Podmates fed one another often enough, especially juveniles and elders, and communal feeding grounds rarely belonged to a single hunter. But selective offering—repeated, intentional, preferential—carried implication that Wei Wuxian never really paid all that much attention to. Especially when paired with attentive following, gift presentation, proximity-seeking, and the absurdly transparent way Wei Wuxian brightened whenever Lan Wangji accepted anything at all.

But trust crept up between them in the spaces persistence made.

In the way Wei Wuxian stopped startling when Lan Wangji approached from behind.

In the way Lan Wangji learned which touches would calm rather than agitate him—a brush of fingers along his forearm, never the shoulder at first; a tap against his tail only when he was fully alert; no crowding if grief had already made his body tight.

In the way Wei Wuxian started seeking Lan Wangji in quieter moments too, not only playful ones. Settling beside him on the sandbank after a long swim. Resting at the edge of his current lane without demanding anything. Letting silence happen without trying to fill it.

The trouble came later.

Su She had always been the sort of mer who mistook resentment for depth.

He was Lan by pod association apparently, but only loosely so—a branch-line affiliate taken into long-term cooperation before the oceanarium years, one whose place had always been maintained more by practicality than affection. Clever enough, disciplined enough, perpetually sour in the presence of those to whom ease and esteem came naturally. He had never quite concealed the particular bitterness, Wei Wuxian noticed it even before he was allowed into the main area. Not overtly challenging, but the meaner sort of pettiness. Territorial nudges. Undermining gestures. Tests of patience he liked to disguise as accidents.

Before Wei Wuxian's acceptance into the open waters, Lan Wangji had tolerated him the way one tolerated a current carrying debris: carefully, without mistaking annoyance for significance.

After Wei Wuxian's granted access, Su She grew worse.

Perhaps because Wei Wuxian made a bright contrast. Perhaps because Lan Wangji, despite all his restraint, had begun to return attention in ways visible enough to sting. Perhaps because some assholes, seeing tenderness grow, feel nothing so strongly as the urge to bruise it. Whatever the cause, the hostility sharpened.

Wei Wuxian noticed.

At first only in fragments. A subtle block in a narrow lane when Lan Wangji passed. A shell gift displaced from Lan Wangji's resting shelf and found elsewhere. A feeding moment interrupted too neatly to be chance. Each incident small enough to dismiss alone. Together, they formed a pattern ugly enough to make Wei Wuxian's temper wake up.

He did not act immediately. He sure as hell did not survive as long as he had by mistaking every irritation for battle.

But he watched.

Then came the day the younger mers were fed in the open shallows while the adults ranged wider through the habitat. A routine afternoon. Harmless on its face. Xie Lian and two others were overseeing from the observation deck. The water was bright, the current mild.

Wei Wuxian had been coaxing one of the younger Lans through a shell puzzle—mostly by stealing the shell when the juvenile lost focus and making them chase him—when he saw movement near the lower shelf.

Lan Wangji was there, sorting through a cluster of weighted food pieces one of the researchers had given him because Lan Wangji like those pensive kind of tasks. Su She cut in too close. Lan Wangji shifted, not retreating but not escalating either. Su She said something sharp. Lan Wangji answered with one low, controlled phrase.

Then Su She lunged.

Not enough to kill. But enough to wound.

A slash of nails clawed toward Lan Wangji's side where the rock narrowed and leverage favored surprise over grace.

Wei Wuxian moved before thought finished.

One heartbeat he was in the upper shallows, the next he tore down through the water like a dropped spear. He hit Su She broadside before the strike could land cleanly, driving both of them into the rock shelf hard enough to scatter shell fragments and silt.

The area erupted.

Kids scattered upward. Older mers wheeled around. Lan Xichen shot from the mid-lane current with violence rarely seen from him. Above, the humans shouted, alarms shifting in tone as cameras tracked the sudden collision.

Su She recovered first, because spite had always made people quick in a fight. He turned on Wei Wuxian with open fury, all pretense gone. The two of them crashed through water in a tangle of claws, tails, and strength. Wei Wuxian fought like someone raised outside of orderly pod schooling—fast, inventive, dirty when needed. He was not yet fully recovered, but rage made up for what healing still lacked.

Su She was driven by aggression.

Wei Wuxian was meaner.

He twisted under the second strike, seized Su She's wrist, and drove him face-first into the sandy bottom. Su She lashed backward, catching Wei Wuxian along the shoulder. Pain flared white hot. Wei Wuxian answered by ramming him into the rock again, one hand braced at the back of his neck, the other fisted in his hair.

The message was simple enough to read in any language.

"Try that again."  Wei Wuxian hissed through his teeth. "I fucking dare you."

Su She snarled, blood feathering from a split lip.

Lan Wangji's hand closed over Wei Wuxian's forearm. Not dragging him away exactly. Not even restraining him. Just there.

Wei Wuxian turned. Lan Wangji's expression was unlike any Wei Wuxian had yet seen on him—not fear, not disapproval, not even surprise. Something fiercer. Bright under the stillness. Focused entirely on him. Enough, the touch said. "Wei Ying."

Wei Wuxian held himself rigid for one more pulse of anger. Then he released Su She with a final shove that sent him sprawling backward in the silt.

By then the senior adults were there. Lan Xichen between Su She and everyone else, authority radiating off him like cold sunlight. An elder auntie ushering the younger mers farther off. Human voices overhead growing sharper, no doubt debating whether to close gates and intervene. Wei Wuxian barely noticed any of them.

He was breathing hard. His shoulder stung. His pulse was a war drum in his ears.

Lan Wangji was unhurt.

Or mostly. There was a shallow scrape along his flank where Su She's strike had nearly connected.

Wei Wuxian reached for it instinctively and Lan Wangji did not pull away. His fingers hovered just above the mark, then traced lightly over the unbroken scales nearby in a touch that had nothing of playfulness in it. A check. A reassurance. A claim he did not yet know he was making.

Lan Wangji looked at him for a very long time.

Wei Wuxian went utterly still. He knew enough, suddenly.

From teachings half ignored because there were more exciting things to do. From words somewhat dismissed because he couldn't even begin to picture his ideal partner unlike Jiang Cheng and his stupid list or ideals. From some deeper place that had understood long before his mind had bothered to interpret the signs he'd been spilling everywhere like dropped pearls.

The gifts. The food. The following. The guarding.

The wanting.

Wei Wuxian found his face boiling the water, the heat spreading quickly as Lan Wangji's hand came up to his sternum, firm and sure.

Wei Wuxian stared at him, wide-eyed in a way that probably looked like a half inflated pufferfish. 

"Ah, well, you see...."  He was scrambling for something, anything to guard against the heat flooding his body that was only half embarrassment, "Lan Wangji, ah... Lan Zhan. Heh, I think you're very good. You don't deserve that kind of treatment, so I really couldn't help but ah..."

Beat the prick into the rocks.

"Wei Ying is good."

If Wei Wuxian could make squealing look dignified and not embarrassing as hell, he would have.

The aunties looked smug enough to be unbearable. Lan Xichen closed his eyes briefly like someone receiving confirmation of a long-suspected truth from the universe itself. Even the younger mers, peering from behind rocks and one another, seemed to understand instinctively that something sacred had just unfolded.

Wei Wuxian's breath came unsteady.

His hand rose, almost uncertainly now, and touched Lan Wangji's side. Then higher. Shoulder. Neck. Not because he needed to check for injury anymore, but because he needed contact or he thought he might float apart entirely.

Lan Wangji let him.

Wei Wuxian finally laughed. Because that was usually his default to overwhelming emotions that stopped his brain from functioning right. Breathless and disbelieving and edged with the last of his adrenaline, but it was laughter all the same. Lan Wangji's mouth softened by the smallest degree in response.

Wei Wuxian, recovering his nature with supernatural speed, "So, all of that was actually working?"

Lan Wangji actually closed his eyes, huffed a little and swam back over to his arrangement.

Lan Xichen, farther back, looked moments from disgracing himself by laughing outright.

Wei Wuxian brightened like sunrise over trouble.

He moved in closer still, openly delighted now, and pressed his shoulder against Lan Wangji's side with shameless satisfaction. Lan Wangji did not resist. He only shifted enough to support the allow properly.

Welcomed. 

Accepted.

Chosen.

The grief did not vanish. Nothing so large ever did.

Wei Wuxian still woke some nights with the shape of old losses heavy inside him. Still thought of his siblings until the ache sharpened. Still carried the scar of not knowing what ocean held the remains of his old life. But now, when those shadows gathered too dark, too stiflingly bleak, Lan Wangji was there.

Steady as tide.

It never really felt like he was replacing home, or trying to find something new to replace the grief. Not replacing what was lost. He could never that.

But making, in the wreckage, something that lived so contently beside his heartache.

. . . . . . . . . .

For a long time, Wei Wuxian existed only as an absence.

It was a cruel sort of existence. Not the clean grief of certainty. Not even the violent grief of witnessed loss. Just the hollow, gnawing thing left behind when someone vanished into water too wide to search properly and time kept moving anyway.

Hua Cheng hated it.

Jiang Cheng hated it louder.

Jiang Yanli endured it in the quiet, terrible way of people who had always learned to keep themselves together for others, even when every thread inside them was fraying.

The research vessel became, for a while, less a sanctuary ship than a war room disguised as one. Routes were redrawn. Sighting reports gathered. Old current maps annotated with possible drift paths and attack ranges. Known Wen movement patterns marked and revisited. Hua Cheng contacted every research crew, marine outpost, independent observation station, and coastal institute with even the slightest chance of encountering merfolk.

Most replied with nothing useful.

Some had heard rumors. A wounded dark-scaled mer glimpsed near a shipping lane weeks ago. An unidentified pod disturbance farther south. Strange vocalizations near a reef shelf. None of it held. None of it led anywhere but back into the same broad, merciless fact: the sea had swallowed him whole and refused to say where.

Hua Cheng kept writing anyway.

He sent inquiries until the deck table in his cabin vanished beneath copies, notes, and half-drunk cups of coffee gone cold. He broadened the search from field crews to rehabilitation centers. From rehabilitation centers to oceanariums and long-term marine study facilities. Most human institutions studying merfolk were nightmares thinly disguised as scholarship, and Hua Cheng had spent years learning exactly which names to avoid. He did not write to those. But there were others. Smaller operations. Mixed ethics. Well-meaning fools. Quietly decent researchers trapped inside flawed systems.

He wrote to them too.

Every letter contained the same essentials.

Searching for a mer male, adult, black-haired, tail markings of dark storm-black with red-gradient highlights. Severe injuries possible. Likely traumatized. Wild and unaffiliated to any known human-facing pod under formal research contact. Intelligent, socially adaptive, highly expressive. Dangerous when cornered. Extremely likely to bite if treated badly.

The last line was not professionally necessary.

Hua Cheng included it anyway.

Weeks passed.

No answer.

Another week.

No answer.

Jiang Cheng took to patrolling the perimeters of every stop they made, circling the boat in long, angry loops that did nothing except exhaust him and frighten the occasional gull. Jiang Yanli stayed nearer the hull, helping with the younger survivors, keeping routines where she could, even while her eyes strayed too often to the horizon. Sometimes, in the dead space before dawn, Hua Cheng would come onto deck and find one or both of them already there in the water. Waiting, as though will alone might drag news over the surface.

He never told them to stop.

He understood.

Then, on a windless afternoon thick with heat and the smell of salt-dried rope, while the vessel sat docked for supplies and repair checks, a message came through the satellite relay. At first Hua Cheng almost ignored it in favour of his coffee but hope was a stubborn, invasive thing.

He read it once.

Then again.

Then a third time, slower, because suddenly his pulse was far too loud and his hands had developed an unhelpful tendency toward stillness.

The inquiry had been received and reviewed by the marine research division of a coastal oceanarium under the direction of one Xie Lian. They believed they might currently have in care an individual matching the description provided. Adult mer male. Extensive soft-tissue injuries consistent with conflict and stranding trauma. Initially aggressive on intake. Now stable. Highly social cognition. Dark tail with red markings. Currently integrated, under supervision, into a larger pod habitat.

For one strange second, Hua Cheng forgot how breathing was meant to work.

Not because of the clinical language. He was used to that. People on land had an almost supernatural ability to reduce catastrophe into paperwork.

No.

It was the name.

Xie Lian.

Hua Cheng stared at the line until the letters blurred.

The ocean was vast enough to swallow ships, kingdoms, whole bloodlines of grief. It stretched wider than human arrogance and deeper than most truths people were willing to survive. And yet somehow, impossibly, the world had looped in on itself again and placed that name in Hua Cheng's hands.

Xie Lian.

Years and miles and all the ugly machinery of life, and still—

For a brief, vicious moment, Hua Cheng had to close his eyes.

Then he folded the page once, too carefully, and stood up.

By the time he got above deck, Jiang Cheng had already seen his face and knew something had changed.

Of course he had. Jiang Cheng had spent enough years reading Hua Cheng's expressions to detect disaster from twenty paces and irritation from orbit. He surged up against the lowered platform hard enough to send water slapping across the stern boards. Jiang Yanli surfaced beside him a heartbeat later, quieter in movement, no less intent in the way she looked up.

Hua Cheng stopped at the edge and crouched.

For a second he only looked at them.

Jiang Cheng, tense from shoulder to tail, every inch of him braced for either hope or rage. Yanli, eyes already searching his face for an answer before he'd spoken one. The two of them, held together by endurance and the stubborn refusal to let the sea take more than it already had.

Hua Cheng held up the printed page and signed as he spoke, "I think we found him."

He knew the moment the word left his mouth that think had been a mistake.

Jiang Cheng's hand came down on the platform with a crack that made one of the deckhands jump and Liren whip around from where she'd been sorting medical stock. Hua Cheng lifted his free hand, immediately signing with a frown. "I said think. Don't start."

Jiang Cheng looked ready to start anyway.

Hua Cheng continued before he could, sharper now, because if he let hope loose too quickly it might tear something open in all of them, he tucked the paper away in his pocket and moved both hands through a language that was somehow simpler than actually speaking. "We have a facility. We have a report. We have someone saying they've got a mer matching Wei Wuxian's description under observation." He gave the page a small, frustrated shake. "We do not have confirmation until we see him."

Jiang Cheng glared Hua cheng's pocket as if the paper had personally offended him by not already being Wei Wuxian. Jiang Yanli pressed both hands over her mouth.

It only lasted a second or two. A brief, trembling failure of composure. Then she lowered them again and looked up at Hua Cheng with eyes far too bright, too full, too careful not to break. Let's go, she demanded more than said. Let's go now.

Hua Cheng looked from her to Jiang Cheng.

Jiang Cheng had gone very still in the way he only ever did when something mattered too much. His jaw was locked. His nostrils flared once. Then, with visible effort, he signed low and sharp enough that only Hua Cheng and Jiang Yanli could properly catch it. If it's not him, I'm sinking the building.

Under other circumstances, Hua Cheng might have said that seemed fair. Instead he stood and nodded, and signed, "Get ready. We're going now."

And they did.

The journey to the oceanarium was not long by actual measure, when oceans are what you're used to measuring but it was unbearable by any human standard of suspense.

Hua Cheng had sent ahead only enough to confirm arrival time and request discretion. He did not trust institutions as a rule. Even the better ones had a way of wanting ownership over whatever passed briefly through their hands. The response from Xie Lian had been prompt, warm without being presumptuous, and disarmingly open to discussion. That should have been reassuring.

Instead, it made Hua Cheng more alert. He couldn't afford to let his boyhood memories fog whatever situation might be housing Wei Wuxian. Pleasant people could do damage just as efficiently as cruel ones if they believed themselves justified, after all.

Jiang Cheng spent most of the trip in water alongside the hull, forcing himself into exhausting forward motion rather than waiting still. Jiang Yanli stayed closer to the boarding ladder, conserving strength, riding the wake with her gaze fixed so often ahead that Hua Cheng began to suspect she was trying to will the coastline nearer.

The younger survivors sensed the tension and kept unusually close. One of the smallest asked Jiang Yanli something in soft clicks and hand-shapes that made her expression crumple for just an instant before she smoothed it over.

Hua Cheng said nothing at that.

He stood at the bow with the wind in his face and read Xie Lian's message again from memory.

Currently integrated under supervision into a larger pod habitat.

Interesting.

Dangerous, perhaps. Or hopeful.

Possibly both. Wei Wuxian could really be an idiot when it came to social ques.

The oceanarium rose from the coast in a clean sweep of pale structures and glass, far larger than Hua Cheng had expected from the terse formal title in the correspondence. It was not merely a public-facing institution with a research wing tacked onto the back. It was a full marine complex built partly into the bay itself, wide terraces and enclosed observation halls stepping down toward the sea. Beyond the primary facility, auxiliary channels opened into restricted saltwater sections directly connected to the ocean outside through a gated inlet system.

Hua Cheng stopped on the dock and stared for half a beat.

"Well," he said softly to himself more than anyone else, "someone had funding."

The welcoming group waiting near the access point was mercifully small. Hua Cheng had expected a committee. Or worse, an enthusiasm cluster. Instead, there were only a handful of staff arranged near the dock access in the purposeful, slightly tense way of people trying not to look like they'd gathered specifically to inspect him.

At their center stood Xie Lian.

That was almost funny.

Not because Hua Cheng had any trouble recognizing him. That part was immediate, effortless, and deeply inconvenient. Years had changed the details, naturally. The boy in polished loafers and badly concealed excitement had become a man all clean lines and quiet confidence, dressed in pale clothes that should have looked impractical near saltwater and somehow only made him seem more composed. His hair was bound neatly. His posture was relaxed. His expression—

Still open.

Still absurdly, unmistakably sincere.

Some people grew out of that sort of thing. The world usually saw to it.

Apparently not Xie Lian.

He looked clear in the way some skies did after a storm had spent itself elsewhere. The sort of person who made harshness feel faintly embarrassing by existing in its vicinity. Hua Cheng, who had built an entire adult temperament around being difficult on purpose, found this as troubling now as he had at seven.

Xie Lian stepped forward first. "Dr. Hua?"

"Hua Cheng," Hua Cheng corrected, coming down the gangway with unhurried ease. "I only answer to doctor when someone is trying to trap me in a committee meeting."

The smile he got for that was immediate. Bright, warm, and unguarded. 

There it was.

Hua Cheng had spent years reading papers stamped with Xie Lian's name, following his research trail through journals, conference notes, policy disputes, rehabilitation case studies, and one particularly vicious academic exchange over containment ethics that Hua Cheng had enjoyed far more than was probably healthy. He knew how Xie Lian wrote. Knew where his arguments sharpened, where his sympathy overrode pragmatism, where his optimism dug in its heels and refused to die even under institutional pressure.

And still, absurdly, seeing him smile in person felt like being caught off guard by something from another life. "I'm Xie Lian," Xie Lian said. "Thank you for coming on such short notice."

Hua Cheng nearly laughed.

Yes, of course you are.

No sign of recognition. Not a flicker. Not even the faint polite confusion of someone trying to place a face from long ago.

That made sense. Hua Cheng had been a half-starved, sharp-edged little creature in ragged clothes, and back then he had introduced himself with all the honesty his circumstances encouraged as San Lang.

The thought brushed against him and stuck, light as a hook.

Xie Lian had no idea who he was. Hua Cheng found that mildly delightful.

"The matter is fairly urgent," he said.

"Yes." Xie Lian smiled politely in a way that still somehow felt like a threat. It was probably weird how much Hua Cheng liked that smile. "I really would like to know why you're searching for this mer, I'm sure you can understand."

It seemed, Xie Lian's caution had grown teeth. Troubling how that settled so nicely in his rib cage.

Hua Cheng had always been weak to sincerity. A design flaw, really. 

"I understand perfectly," Hua Cheng said. "I'm the lead researcher attached to the Jiang pod. Behavioural study, cultural work, contact mediation. I know their culture, their habits, their family lines. So when I say I'm looking for this mer, understand that I'm not here out of idle academic interest."

Xie Lian's expression softened into something more open, the edge of his caution still visible beneath it. "I believed that was the case," he said. "I've read your research on the Jiang pod. Enough of it to know you pay attention to things most people miss, and that you don't write about them like specimens." He exhaled lightly. "But I needed certainty before I put a survivor's history into someone else's hands."

Hua Cheng felt that settle somewhere unwise.

Not the caution. He approved of the caution. It had shape to it now, edges, purpose. Xie Lian was not being territorial for the sake of authority, nor posturing on behalf of a facility badge. He was protecting someone vulnerable with both hands and enough grace to make it look effortless.

No, the dangerous part was everything else.

The fact that Xie Lian had read his work. Closely, by the sound of it. Closely enough to notice the things Hua Cheng had never written for praise, only because leaving them out would have felt unfinished.

Most people in the field cited his protocols, argued with his timelines, lifted his methods when convenient and called them overly sentimental when they were not. They praised the results and ignored the heart beating under them. Xie Lian, apparently, had seen straight through to the marrow and said so in that maddeningly clear voice, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Troubling.

Deeply, specifically troubling.

Hua Cheng let a small smile touch his mouth, more felt than shown. "Then at least one person in this field knows how to read properly." His tone stayed light, but there was less mockery in it than before. Less armor. He tilted his head slightly, studying Xie Lian as though reassessing an equation that had just produced a more interesting answer than expected. "And for what it's worth," he added, "you were right to ask."

That cost him very little to say and rather more to mean.

Xie Lian's gaze shifted once toward the water near the mooring structure, where Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli lingered in the shade beneath the dockline. Half-hidden, watchful, keeping their distance from the cluster of land people on instinct and experience alike. Xie Lian looked with a surprised little glint in his eye.

That was all.

Another point in his favor. Annoying how quickly those were accumulating.

Hua Cheng stepped down onto the dock proper and offered a hand. Xie Lian took it without hesitation. His grip was warm. Steady. Easy. Not cautious. Not overcompensating either. Interesting. The formalities held for perhaps two minutes. Travel time. Dock support. Whether Hua Cheng's vessel would require additional supply access while berthed. A brief mention of weather conditions offshore and the tidal schedule for the next forty-eight hours.

Then, as expected, civility gave way to professional disagreement. Mostly because Hua Cheng could hardly help himself.

"I read your published work on pod acclimatization in mixed-contact habitats," he said as they headed toward the main entrance. "You favor earlier integration than I would."

Xie Lian glanced at him, unsurprised. "And from what I've read, you maintain observational distance longer than I would."

"I maintain consent," Hua Cheng said.

"And I'm responsible for rehabilitation," Xie Lian replied. "There are cases where extended distance preserves fear instead of easing it."

Hua Cheng considered that for a step or two. "There are also cases where pushing contact too quickly teaches them that human comfort matters more than their readiness."

That drew a small shift in Xie Lian's expression, not offense so much as thought narrowing into focus. "I don't disagree," he said. "But readiness can be difficult to measure cleanly in a subject recovering from injury, displacement, or prolonged isolation. Waiting for perfect trust isn't always an option either."

"No," Hua Cheng said. "But neither is mistaking tolerance for trust."

Xie Lian nodded once, accepting the distinction rather than resisting it. "Fair. Though I'd argue that in a controlled environment, careful exposure can become part of the trust-building process, not just a test of it."

Hua Cheng looked over at him. "Controlled for whom?"

That made Xie Lian smile, faint but real. "For everyone, ideally. Which I know is the sort of answer you probably hate."

"I dislike imprecise ones."

"And I dislike pretending caution has no cost."

That was, annoyingly, a solid response. Hua Cheng let out a quiet breath through his nose. "Then perhaps our disagreement is less about principle than threshold."

"I was beginning to suspect that," Xie Lian said. "You're working from established trust and long-term contact. I'm usually working from rupture."

That checked him more effectively than defensiveness would have.

Yes. That, at least, was true.

Hua Cheng tilted his head slightly. "And institutions usually ask you to repair damage they helped create."

"Often," Xie Lian said.

"You make that sound less irritating than it should."

"I've had practice."

The corner of Hua Cheng's mouth moved despite himself. "A dangerous qualification."

"So I've been told."

Hua Cheng's couldn't help the small smile. Of course he has.

Through one viewing panel, Hua Cheng caught a glimpse of a rehabilitation pool, quiet now except for one keeper adjusting a floating support frame. Beyond another lay a treatment bay, emptied and sterilized, metal bright beneath white light. Farther on, the architecture opened into a long seawater channel where current moved through a controlled gate system, linked beyond the barriers to the coastline itself.

"It's connected to open water," Hua Cheng said.

"Partially," Xie Lian answered. "Controlled exchange. Some habitats are fully enclosed. Some use monitored tidal flow."

"For acclimatization?"

"For water quality, behavioral stability, migration pattern retention—yes."

"It also improves the odds of escape."

Xie Lian's smile returned, this one smaller. "Only if you assume our barriers are poorly designed."

Hua Cheng gave him a flat look. "I try not to boast about containment systems while discussing people."

That landed where it should have. Xie Lian winced, slight and genuine. Good. Hua Cheng preferred people with enough sense to feel the weight of their own language.

"Fair," Xie Lian said, quieter now. "I'm less proud of the barriers than I am of what we've managed to protect within them."

Hua Cheng hummed as he let that sit. Not because he agreed but because he was willing, provisionally, to let Xie Lian earn the rest.

They turned down a quieter corridor. Fewer staff. More restricted access. The lighting shifted cooler, marine blue laid soft over concrete and glass. The sound of water grew stronger here, no longer background noise but presence—weighty, breathing, close.

Xie Lian's pace slowed by a fraction.

"He isn't in medical anymore," he said.

Hua Cheng did not ask who. He didn't need to.

"He healed well," Xie Lian continued. "Better than we expected actually."

Hua Cheng's pulse kicked once against his ribs, rude and immediate.

Xie Lian glanced at him then, and there was something almost careful in the look. "He's in the main habitat now. With the Lan pod."

Hua Cheng stopped for half a beat.

"The Lan pod," he repeated.

There was just enough satisfaction in Xie Lian's expression to suggest he knew exactly how provocative that information was. "A long story," he said.

"I would strongly advise you to start telling it soon."

"I intend to," he laughed quietly, "It's quite a sweet story, actually. I've been wanting to share it with someone for weeks now."

Good.

Because Hua Cheng already had questions multiplying like a tide line after rain, and every answer seemed likely to produce six more. The Lan pod was not a casual name to drop in passing. Reserved, difficult to approach, famously insular in most documented encounters, with internal structures researchers had been politely failing to understand for years. If Wei Wuxian had ended up among them, then either fate had finally developed a sense of humor or the ocean had made one of its stranger decisions.

Possibly both.

They passed through the last security point and entered the observation hall.

The space opened wide and sudden before him.

Water stretched beyond the reinforced glass in layered blue-green depths, vast enough that the eye stumbled for a moment before accepting its boundaries. Pale rock shelves rose from the sandy basin below. Kelp swayed in the current. The main habitat extended outward into linked channels and darker reaches, giving the whole thing a deceptive sense of endlessness.

Not the sea. But it looked like a damn near imitation of it. More alive than most facilities managed. More thought put into it. More respect.

Hua Cheng moved toward the glass before he consciously decided to.

Beside him, Xie Lian said nothing as they climbed the stairs leading up to the surface and the wide platform around the edge.

Hua Cheng stopped at the edge and looked out into the water, every line in him drawn tight with anticipation.

"There," Xie Lian pointed with a small gesture. 

Below, near a broad sand shelf not far from the central rock rise, two mers rested in the filtered afternoon light. One white and blue tailed. Elegant even in stillness. One dark-black and red, sprawled half on his side with the loose, heedless grace of someone who had always treated resting posture as a birthright.

Hua Cheng stopped breathing.

For one impossible second the world narrowed until there was only that shape below. The familiar line of shoulders. The tail markings. The way one hand lay curled in the sand even at rest, as though ready to spring into mischief at any moment.

Alive.

The fool actually was alive.

The relief that went through him was so total it almost hurt. It hollowed him out and filled him all at once. For weeks, months, he had prepared himself against every possibility except the one his body had never stopped wanting. This. Right here was mercifully real.

Beside him, Xie Lian was saying something. Hua Cheng had no idea what.

He lifted two fingers to his lips and whistled.

Sharp. Distinct. Three-note repeat, one quick rise. The same call he had used for years from boat railings and lower platforms whenever the Jiang pod drifted within signaling distance. The same one that said, hey, we're back. The same call he used for, come up here and look at this.

Down below, Wei Wuxian went rigid.

The change was immediate and sharp. One instant he was resting loose on the sand beside the white-blue mer, the next every line in him pulled taut. His head snapped up. Eyes wide. Listening.

Hua Cheng whistled again.

This time there was no mistaking it.

Wei Wuxian spun.

He looked upward so fast the movement almost blurred.

And then he was moving. Not swimming, exactly. Launching in a cloud of sand bed.

A wake tore across the habitat as he shot upward from the sand shelf. The white-blue mer jerked up, startled but not fast enough to catch. Other shapes in the water turned. One of the staff behind them made a noise of alarm. Xie Lian stepped instinctively toward the edge, caution flashing across his face.

Hua Cheng was already sitting down. At the very lip of the platform, one smooth movement, legs swinging over so his feet dropped into the water below.

"Wait—" Xie Lian started, genuinely startled now.

Too late.

Wei Wuxian hit the surface lane in a spray of white water and slammed into Hua Cheng hard enough to rock both of them.

Then he was there.

Arms around Hua Cheng's waist and shoulders, clutching with bruising force, face buried against his chest and neck in something that was not quite a collision and not quite a desperate attempt to prove that flesh remained flesh when found again.

The hall went silent. Not the ordinary silence of observation. A stunned one.

Researchers frozen where they stood. Xie Lian half-crouched in aborted alarm. Below them, several Lan mers suspended in the water at varying distances, all equally motionless with surprise.

Hua Cheng wrapped both arms around him and held on.

Wei Wuxian shook once. Then again. Still alive, Hua Cheng thought wildly. How the hell are you still alive.

He could feel the lines of healed scars beneath wet skin. The strength returned to limbs that had once nearly bled out on a shore. The lingering edge of too-thin recovery, yes, but also unmistakable vitality. Wei Wuxian smelled of salt, clean water, and just enough trouble to be himself.

For a moment Hua Cheng let the embrace say what it needed to say.

Then Wei Wuxian pulled back only a little. Not far. Just enough to look at him. And there it was—beneath the relief, beneath the disbelieving joy, beneath all the fierce hunger of reunion.

Fear.

Fear of the questions, the answers.

Hua Cheng's chest tightened. So he did not make him ask out loud. He shifted back enough to free his hands and started signing.

Jiang Cheng and Yanli are alive.

Wei Wuxian's face went blank.

We managed to get six of the kids on the boat before Jiang Cheng threw Yanli on board and I had to drag the asshole on deck.

Something in him broke open then, not in devastation but in release. Hua Cheng kept going, hands steady because they had to be.

We've been looking everywhere for you. There... Hua Cheng paused for a moment, there isn't anyone else. The reef's been claimed too.

Wei Wuxian stared, eyes too bright, breath gone ragged. Then his own hands came up, shaking hard enough that the signs stumbled before catching.

Thank you.

It was too small for what sat inside it. They both knew that. Still, Hua Cheng nodded as though it were enough. Wei Wuxian made one more aborted gesture—something between I, and I didn't know, and I thought— then gave up on language entirely. Instead he bowed forward until his forehead rested against Hua Cheng's knee. The movement was so abrupt, so unguarded, that Hua Cheng reached for him again at once. Wei Wuxian did not look like he wanted to be moved. He looked like someone who had outrun horror on sheer stubbornness and had finally, at last, found a place safe enough to let it catch up.

His hands curled in the fabric at Hua Cheng's thigh. Shoulders shaking once, then again. Relief and grief rolled through him in waves too large for dignity and too honest for restraint. Hua Cheng set one hand gently in his hair. His brother was okay, they were okay and that was all that mattered to Hua Cheng right now.

Behind them, somewhere to the left, Xie Lian made a very small sound.

Hua Cheng glanced over one shoulder.

Xie Lian stood exactly where the reunion had rooted him, all his habitual composure quietly dismantled. His eyes were on Wei Wuxian's bent head, then on Hua Cheng's hand, then on the shape of the signs still fading from Hua Cheng's fingers. Understanding hit him in visible stages.

Not just that Hua Cheng knew this mer. Not just that the bond between them was personal. But that they were communicating.

Directly. Intentionally. Fluently.

Not with trained response cues. Not with behavior approximation. Not with human projection layered over observed movement.

A bridge made by effort instead of extraction.

This was, and had been until today, Hua Cheng's most carefully guarded secret. Not because he was precious about discovery, but because institutions had a foul tendency to turn understanding into access, and access into ownership.

He had years of it tucked away in waterproof cases and overfilled cabinets: field notes, tide-linked observation sheets, sign inventories, comparative charts, annotated transcripts, statistical models, whole shelves of linguistic and anthropological reference texts. What had begun as a handful of practical gestures between him and the Jiang siblings had grown into something no one in the field had truly managed before.

A language.

Living, adaptive, relational. Not trained response. Not projection. Not a clever imitation humans could patronizingly translate downward into something simpler. Language.

If he ever published it properly, it would be one of the most groundbreaking pieces of merfolk research to date. Which was precisely the problem.

He was trying to turn it into a book now—carefully, viciously carefully—stripping out anything that could be used for control, captivity, or easy exploitation. Every useful detail had to be weighed against the damage it might do in the wrong hands. Some things would never be printed at all.

He had intended to reveal it on his own terms.

Xie Lian stared at him with the look of a researcher watching the walls of his field rearrange themselves in real time.

"Well," Hua Cheng said softly, because someone had to rescue the man from complete collapse, "you seem floored."

Xie Lian blinked once, then twice, and let out a disbelieving breath that almost turned into laughter. "You have a sign language."

"A few, actually. Context-specific variants. Age-group modifications." Hua Cheng stroked a hand once down Wei Wuxian's hair and kept his tone maddeningly even. "The younger Jiang siblings developed the first stable set with me. It expanded."

Xie Lian looked personally attacked by the existence of this information.

"You have a fully functional cross-species signed system," he said.

Hua Cheng tilted his head. "Functional enough."

"Functional enough," Xie Lian repeated faintly, like a man repeating a phrase from a dream as if reality might object.

Below the platform, the white-blue mer who had been resting with Wei Wuxian had drawn closer.

He hovered just beneath the surface lane, not crowding, gaze fixed first on Wei Wuxian and then on Hua Cheng. Calm, guarded, unreadable to anyone without experience—and to Hua Cheng, immediately obvious.

Interesting. Hua Cheng met his eyes and found himself abruptly wanting very much to ask a series of deeply inappropriate questions about exactly what had transpired here while he'd been writing increasingly hostile inquiry emails into the void.

Later.

For now, he nodded to the mer in acknowledgment. Lan Wangji's attention sharpened with startling intelligence. Then eased.

Ah, Hua Cheng thought. So that is how it is.

Hua Cheng looked down again at the mer draped over his knees and gentled his hand through dark wet hair. He signed near Wei Wuxian's line of sight, slower this time.

Everyone's here, near the boat.

Wei Wuxian jerked upright. The speed of the reaction startled even Xie Lian. His whole face changed. Still tight with grief, still bright with relief, but now suddenly alight with a need so immediate it was almost painful to witness.

Here? he signed.

Hua Cheng nodded. Of course.

Wei Wuxian turned so fast toward the outer channel that water splashed against the edge. Then he stopped. As if something checked him. He looked back toward Lan Wangji. Only for an instant. But it was enough.

Lan Wangji had risen nearer the platform, silent and steady, water streaming from dark hair. The expression he wore barely shifted, but something in the set of his shoulders had gone tight.

Not possessive. Not threatened.

Concerned.

Wei Wuxian stared at him a heartbeat longer, then flicked his back to Hua Cheng.

Been busy? Hua Cheng signed with a grin, because if he couldn't tease the hell out of his sibling, then he was probably sick.

Wei Wuxian gawked at him before slapping his hands in one of the ways to say shut up before dipping back into the water and swimming over to the lingering mer.

Xie Lian, still recovering from the fact that sign language existed at all between mer and humans, looked as though he had just realized the day's revelations were queueing rather than ending. Hua Cheng stood, drawing his legs from the water.

Xie Lian found his voice properly at last. "We can open the outer access lane. The tidal gate section is secure, but it connects to the marina channel. If his siblings are still at your vessel, that will be the fastest route."

Hua Cheng looked at him with fresh appreciation.

"You're very accommodating for someone currently watching his theoretical frameworks disintegrate."

Xie Lian smiled helplessly. "I'm trying to prioritize the reunion before my existential crisis."

Hua Cheng laughed.

He liked this man terribly.

Together they moved quickly through the corridor toward the outer connected lane, with Wei Wuxian cutting through the water beside them on the other side of the glass so fast and close that several junior staff moved themselves instinctively further from the walls whenever he shot past.

By the time they reached the outer access lane, Wei Wuxian was insufferable.

The gate opened.

Wei Wuxian was through it before the water had settled.

"Hua Cheng," Xie Lian said, half-warning, half-fascinated, as the dark blur vanished into the channel.

But Hua Cheng only leaned against the rail and watched him go.

Some reunions were not meant to be moderated.

Out in the marina water, there was a suspended second in which Jiang Cheng clearly saw the approaching shape and did not trust his own eyes.

Then Wei Wuxian called.

Not land. Not sign.

Mer-speech, bright and broken and full of everything he had not had room to feel until now.

Jiang Cheng's answer cracked across the water like lightning. Jiang Yanli made a sound Hua Cheng had only ever heard from her when one of the youngest podlings had been found after being feared lost. And then the three of them were colliding in the water beside the boat, a tangle of limbs and tails and impossible, disbelieving relief.

Xie Lian stood at Hua Cheng's shoulder in total silence.

Hua Cheng did not blame him.

There were some things scholarship could describe and still never quite prepare a person to witness.

Below them, Wei Wuxian clung first to Jiang Cheng, then Jiang Yanli, then both at once as if unwilling to trust they would remain real unless physically pinned in place. Jiang Cheng appeared to be yelling and crying simultaneously, which Hua Cheng found both expected and reassuring. Jiang Yanli kept touching Wei Wuxian's face, his shoulders, his hair, as though inventorying him by hand.

Alive, every motion said. Alive alive alive.

Xie Lian exhaled slowly. "I've spent years studying merfolk communication," he said, voice almost absent. "And somehow I feel I've understood almost nothing."

Hua Cheng folded his arms.

"No," he said. "You've understood plenty for what you had."

Xie Lian looked at him. Then back at the water, where Wei Wuxian had finally broken from his siblings long enough to turn and search the channel behind him.

Searching for white and blue.

The other mer had come as far as the inner threshold and no farther, holding respectful distance while watching the scene unfold.

Xie Lian noticed the direction of Hua Cheng's gaze and, to his credit, did not even attempt to pretend ignorance.

"That," he said carefully, "is pretty much that long story I mentioned ."

Hua Cheng smiled with all the pleasant menace of a man who had just found his missing problem child and discovered an unexpected romantic subplot attached. "I have plenty time for that story," he said.

And below them, in the water between oceanarium and sea, between loss and survival and whatever came next, Wei Wuxian laughed through tears for the first time in far too long while his family held him close enough to prove the world had not taken everything after all.

And if there was one thing Hua Cheng had learned about surviving catastrophe and hardship, it was this: the world never ran out of ways to complicate itself.

For exactly two days after Wei Wuxian's reunion with his siblings, things almost resembled peace.

Not true peace. That had already been well and truly lost until they could build it back up again. But something close enough to let everyone breathe between one disaster and the next.

The Jiang siblings remained near the oceanarium's outer connected channel for most of that time, unwilling to stray far from one another now that they had finally been gathered back together. Wei Wuxian seemed determined to exist in three places at once. Half draped over his family as though making up for lost contact by brute force, and half pulled by instinct back toward the inner threshold where the mer, Lan Wangji, lingered with all the composed patience of someone pretending not to hover.

Jiang Cheng noticed this.

He noticed everything and enjoyed none of it.

Hua Cheng, meanwhile, found himself drawn steadily deeper into the facility than he had intended.

Partly because Wei Wuxian would not stop dragging him into one fresh absurdity after another. Partly because Xie Lian proved, against all probability, as pleasant on longer acquaintance as he had on first meeting. And partly because once the immediate reunion had settled, practical concerns rose up from beneath it like teeth.

The Jiang pod remnants were not safe on the open water.

Not with the Wen pod still active and hunting.

Not with their numbers reduced, their elders dead, and their structure fractured badly enough that every journey now carried a level of risk it once had not. Hua Cheng knew it. Jiang Cheng knew it, though he hated it. Even Wei Wuxian, stubborn menace that he was, had gone quieter whenever the matter came too near.

So Xie Lian, with the deceptive gentleness of a man used to introducing terrible ideas in a reasonable tone, suggested medical evaluations.

Not just for Wei Wuxian, whose recovery the facility had already been documenting, but for Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli as well.

"Basic assessment only," he said while standing with Hua Cheng on the outer platform overlooking the connected channel. 

"Nutritional status, stress markers, any latent injuries from the attack. We can do it with minimal handling."

Hua Cheng folded his arms. "You say 'minimal' the way children say they're full."

Xie Lian smiled. "And yet you still understand what I mean."

Unfortunately, he did.

After a long discussion involving Jiang Cheng's visible suspicion, Jiang Yanli's reluctant practicality, Wei Wuxian's immediate and deeply unhelpful interest in whether Jiang Cheng would bite anyone during the process, and Hua Cheng translating everything through sign and familiarity until his hands nearly cramped, the siblings agreed.

Jiang Cheng went first.

He behaved exactly as expected: like a mer being medically assessed against his will by land people he did not trust and only tolerated because his sister asked nicely and Hua Cheng stood close enough to intervene if anyone made a poor life choice. His condition, while not good, proved survivable. Old bruising. Muscle strain. Nutritional deficit from disrupted feeding patterns. Healing surface injuries. Too much stress, not enough rest.

In other words, Jiang Cheng. Wei Wuxian found this hilarious.

Jiang Cheng attempted to drown him in two feet of examination pool before being stopped by both Hua Cheng and an amused Yanli.

Then came Jiang Yanli.

She entered the shallow assessment bay with far more grace than either of her brothers had managed. Even now—even after the attack, the displacement, the loss—there remained something in her that seemed determined to move gently through the world no matter how roughly it handled her in return. She greeted Xie Lian with calm curiosity, the veterinary staff with patient tolerance, and Hua Cheng with one small, steady look that said she was only here because she trusted him.

Which, Hua Cheng reflected grimly, was a great deal of pressure for one afternoon.

The examination began routinely enough.

Hydration. Tissue condition. Scale integrity. Stress responses. Nutritional profile.

Then one of the clinicians paused.

Just for a moment.

Too small a hesitation for anyone without practice to catch.

Hua Cheng caught it. So did Xie Lian.

The clinician glanced toward the monitor panel, then toward Xie Lian, who moved closer without speaking. The two of them reviewed the scan in a short silence broken only by the soft hum of equipment and Wei Wuxian, who was currently upside down in the adjoining observation lane trying to see around Hua Cheng's shoulder.

Hua Cheng's stomach dropped. That was never a good sign. Quiet professionals did not exchange that sort of look over trivial matters.

"What?" he asked flatly.

Xie Lian looked at him. And, unless Hua Cheng was very much mistaken, he was trying not to smile. That was somehow worse.

"Hua Cheng," Xie Lian said carefully, "how long ago was the attack?"

"I hate when you use that tone."

"The scan indicates gestational development."

Hua Cheng stared at him.

The words entered his ears, assembled themselves into meaning, and then stopped, as if his mind had decided it had reached capacity and would not be processing further at this time.

He looked at the monitor. At Jiang Yanli. At Xie Lian. Then back at Jiang Yanli.

"Gestational," he repeated blankly.

The clinician nodded, already pulling up secondary markers as if to confirm. "Very clearly. Everything is consistent."

There was a beat of absolute silence.

Hua Cheng closed his eyes for half a second. When he opened them again, three pairs of mer eyes were on him. Waiting. Of course. He was the bridge, and bridges did not get to have private collapses.

Hua Cheng exhaled through his nose and began to sign. Slowly. Clearly. Because if he mistranslated this he might actually get murdered.

Since when were you pregnant?

Wei Wuxian froze.

Jiang Cheng looked at him as if he had personally lost his ability to communicate.

Jiang Yanli did not move at all.

Wei Wuxian exploded into motion first, turning to his sister with what could only be described a squawk. Jiang Cheng was a fraction of a second behind him, but where Wei Wuxian's shock flashed bright and chaotic, Jiang Cheng's arrived like a thunderhead with a similar sound.

He whipped toward Jiang Yanli, then back to Hua Cheng, then back again.

And then, with the speed of a truly appalling conclusion, his entire face darkened.

It's that Jin bastard, isn't it?!

Hua Cheng did not even have time to start translating that particular sentiment into something fit for human hearing before Jiang Yanli made the executive decision that enough was enough.

She splashed all three of them.

Not lightly.

A full, indignant sweep of both hands that drenched Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Hua Cheng from chest to face.

The room went dead quiet. One of the younger assistants at the back made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh and might have been self-preservation failing. Wei Wuxian stared at his sister, freshly wet hair plastered to his forehead. Jiang Cheng looked personally betrayed by the water.

Hua Cheng wiped his face with all the patience of a martyr.

Jiang Yanli, still flushed but now visibly irritated, crossed her arms and signed with decisive clarity.

Dont overreact. Then, after a beat, because apparently she was determined to preserve at least some of her dignity in this catastrophe: And yes. Jin Zixuan.

Wei Wuxian groaned and covered his face.

Jiang Cheng made the sort of expression normally seen on battlefield casualties and men realizing they have been outmaneuvered by reality itself.

Hua Cheng, after a moment's consideration, decided not to translate the part where Jiang Cheng appeared ready to rise from the water and commit several crimes against a specific member of the Jin pod.

Xie Lian, standing beside him with an expression of increasingly helpless fascination, leaned slightly closer and asked in a low voice, "Should I assume the father is unpopular?"

Hua Cheng looked at him.

"Ridiculously," he said.

That, somehow, was the easy part.

Because once the initial shock settled—once Jiang Yanli stopped being splashed in return by two grieving idiots incapable of processing family news with any grace, once Wei Wuxian's panic shifted from outrage to immediate concern, once Jiang Cheng's instinct to hunt Jin Zixuan down with a trident gave way to the colder reality of circumstance—the practical implications emerged.

And those were far more frightening than scandal.

Mer-birth was not a solitary event. It was a pod event. Always. Not merely for sentiment, though there was that too. Mer communities gathered for births because life entering the water belonged, in some ways, to everyone who would help sustain it. But it was also necessity. Protection. Knowledge. Heat-sharing. Rotating watch. Nutritional support. Midwives. Elders who understood what complications looked like before they became fatal. Podmates who could ward territory and calm a laboring mother's distress.

A lone or fractured mer without pod support was vulnerable enough.

A pregnant one was courting death.

Hua Cheng knew it. The Jiang siblings knew it the moment he began signing the medical risks. He kept it plain, because dressing truth up never made it kinder. A birth without a pod is dangerous too dangerous. Pregnancy alone dangerous. The open ocean isn't a good idea. Hua Cheng signed.

Jiang Yanli's hands had gone still in her lap by the end. Wei Wuxian moved immediately closer to her, all agitation redirected into something fiercely tender. Jiang Cheng did not say anything for once because he knew Hua Cheng was right.

Hua Cheng looked at the three of them—at what remained of his water family, bloodied and unsure and trying still to hold shape around one another—and felt the old ruthless part of himself sharpen into clarity.

He turned to Xie Lian. "I need sanctuary."

Xie Lian did not answer immediately.

Not because he was hesitating. Hua Cheng could tell that much at once. He was thinking in layers now—staffing, resources, jurisdiction, institutional politics, enclosure access, external permissions, the impossible pile of logistics that lived under every act of compassion inside a formal system.

Hua Cheng stepped closer before bureaucracy could get ideas. "For Jiang Yanli," he said. "For the surviving podlings. For Jiang Cheng, because he won't leave them. For Wei Wuxian, because you know perfectly well he won't go anywhere without difficulty anyway. Temporary sanctuary. Protected connected waters, facility support, medical oversight, food access, security from outside pods. I can assist with translation, behavioral protocols, contact mediation—"

"Hua Cheng." The interruption was gentle.

He stopped.

Xie Lian's expression had changed in that quiet way of his, turning earnest without losing steadiness. "You don't need to bargain that hard," he said.

Hua Cheng stared at him.

Xie Lian glanced toward Jiang Yanli, who was now sitting very still while Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng hovered on either side of her like storm clouds trying to become a wall.

Then he looked back. "You have sanctuary here."

Simple as that. 

No grand speech. No performative mercy. Just certainty.

Hua Cheng, who had prepared twelve arguments and at least three threats already, found himself briefly robbed of all language.

Xie Lian's mouth softened at one corner. "There will be procedures," he said. "And some people upstairs will need convincing. But the answer is yes."

Relief moved through Hua Cheng so sharply it nearly resembled pain. He had not realized until that second how prepared he'd been for refusal. He inclined his head once. "You're very dangerous like this, you know."

Xie Lian blinked. "Like what?"

"So reasonable."

That earned him a laugh—soft, startled, genuine.

Within hours the facility had transformed.

Not visibly, not to an outside eye. No one ran through the halls shrieking about miracles. The oceanarium was too professional for that. But beneath the practiced calm, excitement spread. It had apparently been years since the facility had supported a full mer-birth. Most of the older staff had only heard stories from their predecessors or assisted in neonatal cases after transfer from other coastal zones. A healthy gestation under direct protected care, with a surviving maternal family unit and the possibility of real pod support within the habitat system, was something else entirely.

The excitement was not clinical.

That was what surprised Hua Cheng.

He had expected academic interest, perhaps overly bright professional focus. Instead he found warmth. One assistant wouldn't shut up because she had spent seven years in marine care and never thought she would witness a mer-child's first days up close.

A senior veterinary consultant immediately requesting revised nutrient protocols with the air of someone personally insulted by the possibility of inadequate prenatal planning.

A habitat engineer talking animatedly about current modifications, sheltered nursery inlets, thermal gradients, and privacy zones as if designing for a birth was the highest honor her profession could offer.

Xie Lian moved among it all like the axis of a wheel. Calm. Unhurried. Firm whenever needed.

Hua Cheng watched him convince administrators, redirect public-facing staff, negotiate quiet exceptions to facility policy, and build an argument for sanctuary so complete no one with sense could poke holes in it.

By the third day, the Jiang pod remnants were established in a protected connected-water section near the outer habitat lanes. Close enough to the sea to soothe displaced instincts, enclosed enough to protect them from outside incursion and linked together to the main Lan territory for Wei Wuxian to dart back and forth. Jiang Yanli had a sheltered cove-like alcove with warm currents and low disturbance. The younger podlings clustered nearby. Jiang Cheng positioned himself at her left side as though he intended personally to kill anything foolish enough to approach. Wei Wuxian divided his time between them and the Lan's area with all the frantic devotion of someone trying to knit two pieces of his heart into one body.

It should have been chaos.

Instead, under the strange and improbable collaboration taking shape, it became something almost functional.

Because Hua Cheng and Xie Lian, once pointed in the same direction, became a disaster for everyone else's assumptions.

At first it was small things.

Xie Lian learning the sign systems Hua Cheng had built with the Jiang siblings—not merely memorizing gestures, but asking why one variant was used with juveniles and another among agemates. Why certain emotional signs moved from chest outward and others low near the abdomen. Why warning shapes altered based on water depth and whether currents carried sound well.

Hua Cheng, in turn, learning the extraordinary accumulation of patient observation Xie Lian had spent his life fighting to defend. The nuanced behavioral records of the Lan pod. Long-term current preference charts. Grief responses documented over years. The exact ways institutional language failed merfolk and the careful methods Xie Lian had used to wedge personhood into every paper, every presentation, every committee argument until even those who disagreed had to respond to the shape of his evidence.

They began teaching each other constantly.

In hallways.

On observation decks.

Halfway through arguments over feeding protocols.

Midnight discussions over tea gone cold while habitat monitors glowed blue in the dark.

The paper they eventually co-drafted from those exchanges nearly started a war in three departments.

Xie Lian commented on how much loved it.

Hua Cheng could only give a little huff paired with a grin.

Xie Lian had spent most of his life trying to convince people that merfolk were not artifacts, not beasts, not symbols onto which humans could pin their fascination, but people entire unto themselves.

Hua Cheng had never needed convincing.

That much, at least, became clear to Xie Lian long before he understood why.

It came up one evening in Xie Lian's office, after a long day had dulled into the quieter labor of care. Jiang Yanli was resting. Jiang Cheng was absolutely pretending not to hover. Wei Wuxian had, with spectacular predictability, turned half the habitat upside down and charmed the other half into helping. The Lan pod had adapted with the stoic grace of people who had apparently decided this was simply their life now.

Inside, papers had spread across Xie Lian's desk in neat stacks that only looked orderly if one had never watched him work. Habitat reports, feeding logs, trauma notes, language cross-references, policy drafts Hua Cheng found intermittently tolerable. Evening light pooled gold across the desk, thinning toward blue where it touched the glass.

Xie Lian looked up from a set of annotated pages and asked, with that disarming plainness he had somehow retained into adulthood, "Why this?"

Hua Cheng, lounging in the visitor chair with the deceptive ease of someone entirely too comfortable occupying other people's space, lifted a brow. "You'll have to be more specific. I have several difficult tendencies."

Xie Lian's mouth twitched. "Merfolk research. Contact work. Why you stayed."

Hua Cheng leaned back slightly in his chair.

He could have answered cleanly. Could have said that some lives were shaped by fascination and some by gratitude and some by the simple fact of being left with nowhere else to go. Could have made it neat.

So he said, "I met an irritating child once."

That earned him a look.

"He wore polished loafers," Hua Cheng went on. "Liked museum archive rooms. Had very strong opinions about badly written display plaques. And frankly had no sense of stranger danger."

Xie Lian's pen stilled.

Hua Cheng noticed. Naturally.

"He was obsessed with merfolk," he said. "Not in the usual way. Less interested in what they looked like and what they did. More interested in who they were. Which, at the time, as a scruffy brat that people stared at more than they considered, felt like a personal attack."

Now Xie Lian was properly staring.

Hua Cheng, feeling generous and throughly entertained by the light of recollection lighting Xie Lian's eyes, continued at exactly the same measured pace. "Afterward, he left." He tilted his head slightly. "In retrospect, that was probably the point at which my life became everyone else's problem."

The silence in the office changed shape.

Not empty. Not awkward. Just full of Xie Lian thinking. "You—"

Hua Cheng watched him.

The years rearranged themselves behind Xie Lian's eyes. Not all at once. That was not his way. The understanding came in layers—the museum, the sharp-tongued orphan child trailing after him through exhibits, the name given lightly enough not to be questioned, the vanishing, and now this man sitting across from him with the same dangerous composure and the same unsettling tendency to say outrageous things in a tone meant for weather reports.

"San Lang," Xie Lian said quietly.

There it was.

Hua Cheng felt something warm and weighted curl low in his chest. He did not smile broadly. That would have ruined it. Instead, he let one corner of his mouth lift. "You do remember."

Xie Lian looked almost offended and embarrassed by the suggestion. "Of course I remember."

Hua Cheng looked away first, mostly because looking too long seemed like a good way to start making regrettable decisions in someone else's office.

"You vanished," Xie Lian said after a moment. Not accusing. Just true.

"Yes," Hua Cheng said. He could have left it there. Probably should have. But the room had gone soft around the edges, and Xie Lian was still looking at him with that same impossible clarity he'd had as a child, as if the years between then and now were not enough to make a person unknowable.

"There was vessel was doing mer observation off the coast," Hua Cheng said. "I saw the equipment. And climbed aboard. Saw mers in the water. Fell overboard in spectacular fashion." His tone stayed dry. "Jiang Fengmian fished me out before I could drown myself and embarrass everyone involved."

Xie Lian's expression shifted—surprise, then something quieter.

"I stayed with the crew after that," Hua Cheng said. "On the ship when they were at sea. With one of them when they made port. Learned enough to be useful. Then more than useful." His gaze flicked back to Xie Lian. "You could say I was badly influenced."

That, finally, made Xie Lian laugh.

Soft at first, then brighter. Not loud, never that, but real enough to light his whole face in a way Hua Cheng remembered far too well. Xie Lian shook his head, still smiling, though there was something gentler under it now. "I thought about you for a long time, you know."

Well.

That was unfair.

Hua Cheng had weathered grant panels, institutional sabotage, field emergencies, and Wei Wuxian in a bored mood. None of them had prepared him for Xie Lian saying things like that in a quiet office at dusk.

"I remember you," Xie Lian said, more slowly now, as though the act of remembering was unfolding while he spoke. "You kept appearing in the merfolk wing. You hardly said anything at first. Then suddenly you were there every time I turned around, glaring at display cases like they'd offended you personally."

"They often had."

A smile tugged at Xie Lian's mouth. "You stole at least three pamphlets."

"Only three?"

Xie Lian gave him a look that suggested he considered this deeply amusing. Then the humor gentled. Not vanished—Xie Lian was too warm a person for that—but settled into something quieter, touched through with real feeling. "I wondered what happened to you," he said.

That landed a little more cleanly than Hua Cheng would have preferred. So of course he deflected. "And now you know. Your terrible influence led directly to one of the most inconvenient careers in marine research."

Xie Lian shook his head, smiling despite himself. "I'm not sure you can blame me for all of that."

"Hm, probably not." Hua Cheng agreed, "I did have two extremely annoying brothers and a sister who somehow had the patience to keep all three of us alive."

When Xie Lian looked back at Hua Cheng, there was recognition there now in full—not just of the child he had once known, but of the thread connecting that child to the man standing before him. "I didn't know," Xie Lian said.

"I know."

"You could have told me sooner."

Hua Cheng considered that. "I could have."

"But you didn't."

"No." His smile turned sharper at one corner. "I was enjoying myself."

That earned him an expression halfway between fondness and exasperation. Xie Lian, Hua Cheng thought, wore both unfairly well.

For a moment neither of them said anything. Beyond the glass, the habitat current shifted through blue-green shadow. Somewhere deeper in the connected waters, a podling shrieked with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested someone else was about to regret allowing that game to continue.

Then Xie Lian said, quieter now, "So that's why."

Hua Cheng looked at him.

Hua Cheng could have made a joke. He often did when things edged too close to sincerity. Instead, perhaps because it was Xie Lian and always had been, he answered plainly.

"It started," he said, "when I met a boy who cared more about who people were than what they looked like to everyone else."

Xie Lian went still.

Hua Cheng, having already committed the offense, continued with all the ease of a man setting fire to a room and then admiring the light. "That sort of thing leaves an impression."

The color that touched Xie Lian's face then was subtle, but Hua Cheng had spent years becoming an expert in noticing the things most people missed. He found it deeply satisfying.

Together, they became fairly intolerable after that.

Revolutionary too, though that part took longer for everyone else to admit.

Inside the oceanarium, however, it made for something rarer than theory and far more useful than goodwill. It made possibility feel tangible. And in the sheltered nursery current of one of the side habitats, while the Jiang siblings slowly learned how to exist without bracing for disaster at every second, and while Wei Wuxian increasingly divided his shameless heart between his family and one very beautiful Lan mer, life began—against all instinct for drama—to settle.

And if Jiang Cheng muttered darkly every time Jin Zixuan's name came up in translated conversation, well. Some things, Hua Cheng thought, were simply part of a healthy family environment. 

As Jiang Yanli's pregnancy progressed, the oceanarium shifted around her. Not grandly and certainly not all at once. It happened the way care often did when it was real. With time and decent enough communication. A warmer current here. A quieter nesting cove there. Additional nutrient trays appearing without announcement. Human staff lowering their voices near her resting spaces without needing to be told. Younger podlings learning, with mixed success, that shrieking directly over a pregnant mer was an excellent way to get glared at by half the community.

The Lan pod adjusted as well.

Even the most reserved among them seemed to understand, at some old instinctive level, that something fragile and precious now rested at the center of these connected waters. Their movements near the Jiang shelter gentled. Aunts and mothers began making food and watch rotations with the brisk solemnity of people who had long since decided babies mattered more than politics and territories. The connecting gate was left open entirely as Lan Xichen welcomed in that graceful, unobtrusive way of his and somehow managed to befriend the resident thunderstorm named Jiang Cheng. Lan Wangji said little, but appeared often by Wei Wuxian's with the best cuts of fish offered to Yanli and the kind of steady silence that was beginning to feel, to everyone newly involved, like part of the bay's architecture.

It should have made things easier.

In many ways, it did.

In one very specific way, however, it seemed to have made things worse. Because Jiang Yanli was not only pregnant. She was pregnant by someone who did not know. Who likely thought she was dead.

At first, she said nothing.

Hua Cheng suspected she had been thinking on it from the moment she knew. That was how Jiang Yanli moved through difficult things. Carefully, quietly, as though holding the whole shape of a problem in both hands before deciding whether it was hers to bear alone or something that needed to be shared. She did not reach outward quickly. She did not ask lightly. Still, there came a point when the wanting began to show.

Not dramatically. Jiang Yanli was not built for dramatics. It surfaced in smaller ways instead: the slight stillness that followed whenever Jin Zixuan's name came up in translated conversation; the absent way her hand sometimes settled low over her abdomen while her brothers argued around her; the look on her face when she thought no one was paying attention.

Once, Hua Cheng came to the sheltered cove and found her turning a pale gold shell fragment over in her fingers, again and again.

He said nothing, but he suspected.

Neither did she.

Then, one evening, as artificial twilight softened through the connected habitat and the younger podlings had finally worn themselves into sleep, Jiang Yanli asked. She did not weep or beg, she didn’t hesitate.

Simply asked.

Hua Cheng was kneeling at the edge of the inlet, translating a nutritional update from one of the clinicians. Wei Wuxian floated half-sprawled beside the rock shelf near his sister, all false leisure and bright attention. Jiang Cheng sat on her other side, rigid with the sort of defensive tension that had become his natural state. Jiang Yanli waited until Hua Cheng was finished. Then she touched his wrist lightly.

When he looked at her, she signed with precise, steady hands.

I want Jin Zixuan here.

Silence hit the cove like a stone dropped into still water.

Wei Wuxian was the first to lift his head. Jiang Cheng reacted as though someone had hurled lit oil directly into his lap.

No, he signed at once.

Jiang Yanli looked at him with saintly patience.

Yes.

Jiang Cheng's hands cut through the water with enough force that Hua Cheng could practically hear the offense in it. No. Absolutely not. Why?

For once, Wei Wuxian did not leap in immediately. He only looked between them, caught in that painful place where protectiveness and understanding had both arrived and neither yet knew how to win.

Jiang Yanli's hands remained perfectly steady. He should know.

That silenced them for perhaps half a breath.

Then Jiang Cheng signed back, sharp and furious. Then he should have known before.That’s his problem.

Not, Hua Cheng felt, an especially coherent argument. Emotionally sincere, yes. Structurally useless. Jiang Yanli's expression softened. Hua Cheng distrusted that softness on sight. Jiang Yanli at her gentlest was often at her most immovable.

He thinks we were dead, she signed. We often thought many things that were wrong. I want him here.

Wei Wuxian shut his eyes briefly. Jiang Cheng looked like he would have started a fight with heaven itself on principle and accepted a lesser substitute only out of convenience. Hua Cheng, who had no interest in volunteering for the resulting family disaster, very carefully did not speak first.

Unfortunately, he didn't have to.

The practical problems surfaced almost immediately. Someone would have to go to the Jin pod. Someone who could communicate clearly enough not to start a war by accident. Someone Jin Zixuan might actually listen to. And because the universe had always enjoyed spectacle, there were exactly three realistic options.

Jiang Yanli, who was pregnant and therefore not going anywhere near open water beyond the protected range.

Jiang Cheng, who could certainly communicate, but whose ability to avoid escalating an already emotional exchange with Jin Zixuan hovered somewhere between poor and nonexistent.

Or Wei Wuxian.

Jiang Cheng arrived at the same conclusion a second before Hua Cheng did and hated it immediately. He turned on Wei Wuxian before Wei Wuxian had even moved. No. You are not going alone.

Wei Wuxian, who had very obviously been about to volunteer, blinked once. Then his expression sharpened into that infuriating brightness that meant he had already decided and was now only waiting for the rest of them to catch up. I'll go.

Jiang Cheng rounded on him with the deep moral outrage of a younger brother whose worst prediction had just been confirmed. That is exactly what I said no to.

You also say no when the sun rises too early. Wei Wuxian signed with a roll of his eyes.

Because it does.

Hua Cheng pinched the bridge of his nose. What followed took far too long.

Jiang Cheng argued that the Jin pod might attack first and ask questions never. Wei Wuxian argued that the Jin pod would be more inclined to listen if the messenger did not arrive looking personally offended by their continued existence. Jiang Cheng argued that Wei Wuxian's definition of not looking for a fight was meaningless. Wei Wuxian argued that Jiang Cheng's idea of diplomacy amounted to a threat wrapped in bad posture. Jiang Cheng nearly splashed him. Wei Wuxian grinned and, in Hua Cheng's opinion, richly deserved to be bitten.

Eventually, Hua Cheng intervened. Not because he wanted to. Because if he let them keep going, Jiang Yanli was eventually going to find something heavy and solve the matter herself.

Hua Cheng cut through both of them with a sharp series of signs. Wei Wuxian and I go.

That got their attention.

Jiang Cheng's glare snapped toward him at once and Hua Cheng held it without difficulty.

We take them boat, in case of emergency, and Wei Wuxian can play messenger.

He let that sit where Jiang Cheng could fully appreciate it.

Not trust Wei Wuxian not to do something reckless. Trust that if Wei Wuxian did do something reckless, Hua Cheng would be there to keep the disaster from becoming fatal. Jiang Cheng stared at him for a long moment, then looked to his sister. Jiang Yanli met his eyes with quiet certainty.

At last, with the expression of a man signing over his soul under duress, Jiang Cheng made one vicious, reluctant motion. Fine.

Wei Wuxian brightened instantly. Then, because he was constitutionally incapable of allowing any situation to remain merely resolved when it could instead become more complicated, he added, Lan Zhan should come too!

The silence that followed was different from the last one.

Hua Cheng slowly lowered his hands.

Jiang Cheng looked at Wei Wuxian as though some fresh and particularly personal betrayal had just surfaced wearing his face.

Jiang Yanli, to her eternal credit, did not laugh. Only because she loved him.

Jiang Cheng signed with terrifying control, Why would Lan Wangji come?

Wei Wuxian made a vague, airy gesture that translated roughly to because obviously. When no one accepted this as a serious argument, he became more specific. He has never seen open ocean. Also he is strong. Also— He stopped.

Hua Cheng narrowed his eyes.

"

Also? he asked. At this point, the humans nearby were well accustomed to him conducting one-sided interrogations in land speech for his own convenience.

Wei Wuxian's ears pinked. That was answer enough.

Delighted, Hua Cheng signed with exaggerated innocence, Also you want him there.

Wei Wuxian splashed him square in the chest. Hua Cheng, now wet and vindicated, laughed outright. Jiang Cheng looked moments away from bodily launching himself at both of them. Jiang Yanli, kind soul, intervened before fratricide could become a legitimate maternity concern. Ask him, she signed to Wei Wuxian. If he wants to go, let him.

So Wei Wuxian asked.

Or rather, he began what could only honestly be described as a campaign.

Lan Wangji, when first presented with the proposition, reacted exactly as Hua Cheng had privately expected: by going very still and very difficult to read.

They were in the broader connected habitat when Wei Wuxian approached him full of restless purpose. Hua Cheng remained on the observation deck with Xie Lian, both of them pretending they were there for a routine habitat review and not because Hua Cheng wanted an excellent view of whatever romantic absurdity unfolded next.

Below them, Wei Wuxian chirped his invitation quickly, broad enthusiastic motions cutting through the water. Lan Wangji listened without interrupting. Then he replied with one short sequence Hua Cheng could already tell was denial.

Wei Wuxian, deeply affronted, put both hands to his chest. Lan Wangji did not appear especially moved by that argument. Over the next day and a half, Wei Wuxian tried every available tactic. Reason. Persistence. Pouting. Bribery. Following Lan Wangji so consistently that even Lan Xichen eventually took pity and began gently redirecting traffic around them.

Lan Wangji remained hilariously resistant.

That much Hua Cheng could see plainly. The open ocean called to every mer in the facility eventually, even those brought in young or born within protected waters. For the Lan pod, many of whose lives had been shaped by managed habitats and careful boundaries for so long, the sea beyond the connected gates remained both real and strangely abstract—known by instinct, half-known through inherited or juvenile memory, but not lived.

No, Lan Wangji wanted to go.

That was precisely the problem but he also understood the risks. A journey beyond protected waters meant unpredictability. Strange currents. Outside pods. Humans not personally vetted by Xie Lian's maddeningly ethical standards. The possibility not of studying danger from a distance, but of swimming directly into it. And now there was Wei Wuxian to account for as well, who possessed all the survival instincts of a firework hurled into a burning temple.

Later, once the siblings had been left to settle into the shape of what had just been decided, Hua Cheng went to find Xie Lian.

He found him, unsurprisingly, in one of the glass-walled side offices overlooking the connected channel, halfway through three problems at once and pretending none of them were problems at all.

Xie Lian looked up as Hua Cheng stepped inside. "That expression usually means either excellent news or administrative ruin."

"Often both," Hua Cheng said. He shut the door behind him and crossed to the desk. "Jiang Yanli wants Jin Zixuan informed."

Xie Lian's face changed at once, attention sharpening. "Ah. The father?”

"Yes," Hua Cheng said dryly. "Exactly that sort of ah."

He explained the rest efficiently: Jiang Yanli's request, Jiang Cheng's objections, Wei Wuxian volunteering before anyone sensible could stop him, and the increasingly obvious fact that if anyone was going to cross to Jin territory without turning the whole thing into a territorial incident, it would have to be done carefully.

Xie Lian listened without interrupting, fingers loosely folded beneath his chin.

"And," Hua Cheng added, because the universe did enjoy details, "Wei Wuxian has decided Lan Wangji should go too."

That earned him a pause. Then, very calmly, Xie Lian asked, "Has Lan Wangji agreed to this, or has Wei Wuxian simply decided reality ought to rearrange itself?"

"The second one, currently."

"I see."

"You say that," Hua Cheng observed, "but what you mean is that you see six separate procedural complications and at least three ethical ones."

Xie Lian gave him a brief, rueful look. "Only three?"

That, Hua Cheng felt, was unfairly charming under the circumstances. Xie Lian rose and moved to the glass, looking out over the connected water beyond. Below them, one of the younger Lan mers cut neatly through the current gate while a researcher on the lower platform made notes with exaggerated casualness. The whole facility had been built around a principle most outside institutions still found difficult to grasp: protection was only meaningful if it did not become another shape of captivity. In theory, any mer in residence could leave if they wished.

In practice, theory required an alarming amount of trust to function.

It had never been written in those exact terms—not in policy manuals, not in the language funding boards approved, not in the careful, defensive wording used for oversight committees. But among the core research staff, and certainly between Xie Lian's team and the Lan pod, it had long ago settled into something stronger than policy and quieter than law.

If a mer wished to return to open water, and they were physically able to survive it, they would not be forcibly kept.

That was the agreement.

Unspoken, mostly. Firm all the same.

It was why rehabilitation releases happened with so little fuss once the essentials were met. No mountains of obstructionist paperwork. No theatrical human handwringing over liability. No ugly instinct to treat recovery as ownership. Assessment, yes. Support, yes. Tracking only where consent had been given. But the end point, whenever possible, was choice.

Not because it was convenient.

Because anything less made the entire facility a prettier kind of prison.

Xie Lian had fought for that principle from the beginning. Fought for it in meetings, in grant reviews, in carefully worded policy drafts and less carefully worded arguments with men who liked talking about marine assets as if personhood were a budgetary inconvenience. The Lan pod had, over time, come to trust the facility in part because they understood that truth instinctively: the gates were there for safety, not ownership. The current barriers could open. The sea was still reachable. No one would lay claim to them merely because they had once accepted care.

It made managing departures far less bureaucratic than outsiders expected.

It also made each decision matter more.

Xie Lian was quiet for a moment, watching the water. "Theoretically," he said at last, "there's nothing preventing Lan Wangji from going if he chooses to."

Hua Cheng leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. "Theoretically."

Xie Lian glanced back at him. "It takes much courage to leave a pod. Even for a short while."

"It does."

Xie Lian's eyes narrowed slightly. "That sounded dangerously sincere."

Hua Cheng had opinions on that. "He'll go," he said.

Xie Lian looked at him. "You sound sure."

"I've seen the way Wei Wuxian looks at him when he talks about the open sea." Hua Cheng folded his arms. "And I've seen the way Lan Wangji looks back."

Understanding moved across Xie Lian's face with quiet, dangerous speed. "Ah," he said again.

"Yes," Hua Cheng said. "That one."

For a moment they stood in companionable silence, watching the water move beyond the glass. Then Xie Lian exhaled, already rearranging the matter into logistics and contingencies and ethical frameworks in that infuriatingly elegant mind of his.

Hua Cheng huffed a laugh.

Below them, a dark flash cut through the channel. Somewhere deeper in the habitat, Wei Wuxian was almost certainly already trying to persuade Lan Wangji by sheer force of enthusiasm.

Hua Cheng pushed away from the frame. "I'll let you know when the campaign succeeds."

Xie Lian's smile softened, small and knowing. "When?"

"Please. We both know it's only a matter of time."

. . . . . . . . . .

Lan Wangji was cautious because he cared.

Wei Wuxian, after an entire afternoon of getting nowhere, eventually realized this. That was when he stopped performing and started telling the truth.

Hua Cheng watched from the upper platform as the two of them drifted near the tidal channel, the water gone dim gold under the setting lights. Wei Wuxian's movements and dramatis slowed. Became smaller. More precise.

Lan Wangji's entire body changed at Wei Wuxian as the more honest side of the mischievous mer came out. Not visibly, perhaps, to most human eyes. But Hua Cheng had spent too many years watching pod bonds tighten and shift to miss it.

The answer came a long moment later, a relaxing in the shoulders and a slight nod.

Wei Wuxian's face lit with such open delight that even Xie Lian, standing beside Hua Cheng with a clipboard he had long since stopped pretending to read, smiled helplessly.

"Well," Xie Lian murmured, "that seemed significant."

Hua Cheng glanced sideways at him. "They're essentially a mated pair at this point."

Xie Lian choked on absolutely nothing.

They set out under a gray-blue dawn.

Xie Lian saw them off from the dock with provisions, charts, and approximately six hundred reminders about communication intervals, all of which Hua Cheng ignored on principle and appreciated privately.

Jiang Cheng lingered at the dock's edge beside Jiang Yanli, trying very hard to look as though he had not spent half the night prowling anxious circles through the connected channels. When Wei Wuxian surfaced near the vessel ladder, Jiang Cheng caught his wrist and signed with brutal economy. Bring him back. Bring yourself back. Bring Jin Zixuan too, if he has any sense at all.

Wei Wuxian's expression softened in that way it only ever truly did for family. I will.

After that, Jiang Yanli touched his face, both hands gentle at his cheeks. Be safe, A-Xian.

He leaned into her touch for one brief second before pulling away too quickly, as though staying any longer might make leaving impossible.

Lan Wangji surfaced beside him with much less outward struggle and considerably more contained intensity. This was his first true departure beyond the facility's protected waters. No barriers. No observation glass. No managed currents and monitored gates waiting behind him.

As the vessel cleared the marina boundary and the sea opened in every direction, Hua Cheng looked over the rail just in time to catch the moment it happened.

Lan Wangji paused. Though not physically. In spirit. Then he surged forward.

Open ocean changed him.

Wei Wuxian took delight in it immediately, but Hua Cheng—who had known wild merfolk all his life—felt something sharper than delight at the sight. Vindication, perhaps. Grief too, for all the years Lan Wangji had gone without this.

The facility had never made him small, exactly. Lan Wangji was too inherently himself for that. But the sea revealed dimensions of him enclosure had only hinted at—the full reach of his speed, the ruthless grace of his turns when there were no walls to respect, the way his strength lived not only in muscle but in the instinctive reading of tide, depth, and current.

He moved like something restored to proportion.

Wei Wuxian went half wild with joy over it. He darted ahead, doubled back, called him onward. Lan Wangji answered with one long cutting pass beneath the hull that sent white wake feathering across the surface. The two of them fell into rhythm almost immediately—Wei Wuxian bright and reckless and forever trying to entice, Lan Wangji quieter but no less fierce once fully engaged.

At one point Lan Wangji rose in a clean arc clear of the water, dawn light striking the pale blue of his tail and shattering it into silver.

Wei Wuxian stopped dead to stare.

Leaning over the rail, Hua Cheng signed down lazily as he sailed past Wei Wuxian, gaping and grinning. You are doomed.

Wei Wuxian splashed the hull this time, which Hua Cheng took as confirmation.

It took them nearly a full day of searching and guided listening to find the Jin pod.

The Jin territories favored brighter shallows and richer hunting lanes than the old Jiang grounds ever had. Even before the first visual contact, the signs were there—schools moving in neater patterns, shell arrangements laid out with ornamental excess, a kind of territorial precision the Jin pod had always been known for and mocked for in equal measure.

Wei Wuxian spotted them first.

He went still near the prow, then signed sharply up at Hua Cheng before vanishing beneath the surface. I hear them north.

Lan Wangji followed at once.

Hua Cheng swore softly and ordered the engines down.

By the time he reached the starboard rail, dark-and-gold shapes were already visible beneath the water. Several Jin mers had formed a cautious line between the vessel's shadow and the deeper shelf beyond. Their tails flashed pale gold, cream, and polished amber through the shifting light. Beautiful, ornate, unmistakable.

Near the center, after one taut beat of waiting, came Jin Zixuan.

He looked exactly like the sort of mer capable of catching their sister’s interest and starting a family crisis in equal measure. Striking in that sort of arrogant Jin way, all clean lines and sunlit scales, posture too proud by half and somehow still not entirely undeserved.

He stopped when he saw Wei Wuxian.

Shock crossed his face openly.

Not hostility. Shock.

He said something immediate and sharp in mer-speech.

Wei Wuxian answered with all the warmth of a knife fight.

From above, Hua Cheng could not make out every word over the water, only tone and fragments. Which was enough.

Jin Zixuan demanded.

Wei Wuxian threw something back that made one of the other Jin mers flinch.

Lan Wangji stayed just behind Wei Wuxian's right shoulder, silent, graceful, and very obviously prepared to become a problem if necessary. Hua Cheng filed the image away for future private enjoyment.

The argument escalated quickly.

Jin Zixuan's disbelief turned to alarm. Then to something harder when Wei Wuxian, with no regard whatsoever for pacing, apparently dropped the central fact directly onto his head.

Jiang Yanli is alive. And pregnant. And wants you there for some reason.

Jin Zixuan actually recoiled.

Good, Hua Cheng thought nastily.

Jin Zixuan said something then, lower and more dangerous, glancing back toward his pod. Responsibility, perhaps. Obligation. Rank.

Wei Wuxian, who had never much cared for the gentle handling of anyone's pride, moved in until he has a nail pressed against Jin Zixuan’s chest

The sea itself seemed to still.

Behind Jin Zixuan, the pod had gone taut with collective attention. No one interrupted. No one pretended this was merely a private quarrel. Pod choices rarely were. In the water, the line between self and social structure ran differently than it did on land. Whatever Jin Zixuan did next would not belong to him alone.

He looked back once.

Then at Wei Wuxian.

Then down, as though the answer he wanted might somehow be written in the changing light over the sand below. When he looked up again, his face had changed into something more settled. He spoke something brief to the elder nearest his flank—formal, respectful, heavy with consequence. The elder answered with grim stillness.

Then Jin Zixuan turned fully back to Wei Wuxian and made the only motion that mattered.

He moved away from the pod line. Toward them. Toward the boat. Toward the open water beyond whatever had once been his unquestioned place.

Wei Wuxian blinked, as if despite everything he had demanded, some part of him had still braced for refusal. Lan Wangji, close at his side, said nothing. He didn't need to.

Jin Zixuan stopped an arm's length away and signed with measured control that did not quite hide how badly his hands wanted to shake. Take me to her.

Wei Wuxian held his gaze for a long moment. Probably hating the way he respected the choice and betrayed by their sister teaching the Jin mer how to sign. Then, with all the gravity of a brother granting temporary reprieve rather than absolution, he nodded once.

From the rail above, Hua Cheng let out a breath he had not realized he'd been holding. Well. That, at least, had gone less murderously than expected. Barely.

As Jin Zixuan followed them back toward the vessel, Hua Cheng caught Wei Wuxian glancing sidelong at Lan Wangji with a mix of triumph, relief, and something tender enough to be dangerous. Lan Wangji met the look evenly.

The ocean stretched wide around them—no barriers, no glass, no false horizons.

And somewhere ahead, in protected waters carved painfully out of disaster, Jiang Yanli waited with new life beneath her heart and the shape of another impossible reunion drawing nearer with every turn of the tide.

One Year Later

A year changed everything.

Not neatly. And definitely not gently. Certainly not in the miraculous way stories liked to lie about. Nothing that had happened to the Jiang pod became less terrible because time had passed. The dead did not return. Grief did not evaporate. The sea did not become kind.

But the shape of the world changed anyway.

It began, as most real revolutions did, with people who had grown tired of pretending truth was too inconvenient to matter.

For years, Xie Lian had stood in conference halls, academic panels, funding reviews, and policy meetings, saying the same thing in a hundred different ways: merfolk were people. Not curiosities. Not maritime anomalies. Not beasts to be documented, managed, and contained. People, with culture and language and grief and law and kinship and memory.

For years, he had been heard without being fully believed.

Then Hua Cheng arrived with salt still in his hair, a sharp tongue, a head full of lived knowledge, and a signed language substantial enough to shatter half the field on impact.

After that, disbelief became much harder to maintain.

The papers they co-authored spread through the academic world like fire through dry grass. Cross-species signed communication systems. Pod-based approaches to social interpretation and rehabilitation. Mer-specific behavioral frameworks corrected for captivity distortion. Maternal care protocols informed by actual pod practice. Evidence-based restructuring of marine research ethics.

They did not refine what was known.

They rewrote it.

Some institutions resisted, of course. Entire careers had been built on misunderstanding merfolk in ways that were profitable, tidy, and flattering to human arrogance. There were researchers who objected to the suggestion that years of study had somehow missed the central truth of the beings they claimed to understand. There were funding boards who balked at words like personhood and consent-based engagement and cultural autonomy until public pressure made resistance politically inconvenient.

Xie Lian handled those people with patience sharp enough to skin them alive. Hua Cheng handled them by being right in ways they could not escape. Together, they became a force no committee survived with dignity intact.

Within the year, the field's understanding of merfolk behavior, culture, and communication had advanced more than it had in decades. Not speculative advances. Not charming theories assembled at a safe distance. Real ones. Practical ones. Transformative ones.

The facility changed with them. Funding doubled first. Then tripled. Then came the renovations. What had once been a promising but limited oceanarium became something larger, stranger, and immeasurably more important. New connected habitats were built with merfolk access in mind from the start rather than clumsily adapted after the fact. Sheltered birthing coves. Open-current exercise lanes. Rest alcoves shielded from constant observation. Transitional spaces for newly arrived mers who did not yet trust glass, humans, or enclosed water. Communication walls designed specifically for sign exchange between land and water. Lower platforms. Safer access points. Broader marine gates with layered security that protected without feeling like traps.

Even the public-facing spaces changed.

Observation galleries were redesigned to reduce stress on the mers below. Educational materials were stripped of their old dehumanizing language and rebuilt from the foundation up. Human visitors no longer came to stare at mysterious creatures from the deep. They came to learn about neighboring people whose world had been hidden from theirs not by myth, but by ignorance.

The oceanarium became famous very quickly.

More importantly, it became trusted. That was the rarer miracle.

Merfolk came.

Not foolishly. Not in crowds. But steadily. Some arrived wounded, drawn by rumor carried through migratory routes and chance encounters. Some came only to observe from a distance, circling the outer connected waters before vanishing again into the open sea. Some sought treatment and left the moment they were strong enough to return to the wild. Some stayed longer. Some chose the protected waters as temporary refuge during dangerous seasons or after pod fracture. A few remained indefinitely—not captive, never that, but because structured safety, chosen freely, was still safety.

For the first time, there existed a place where merfolk could choose. That was what mattered most.

Not rescue imposed from above.Not domestication disguised as benevolence. Choice.

The choice to accept human protection or refuse it. The choice to enter care and later return to open water. The choice to remain in connected habitats that offered safety, community, education, and exchange without demanding surrender of self. A new age began there, though no one called it that at first. People rarely recognize the start of history while living inside it. But it did. A new age of understanding.

For merfolk, who now had a place where human curiosity could be met with language instead of violence.

For humans, who were finally being forced to reckon with the full reality of a neighboring people older than their institutions and much less forgiving of nonsense than myth had prepared them for. And somehow, at the center of it all, were Hua Cheng and Xie Lian. It should have been unbearable.

They worked too much. Argued too well. Agreed in dangerous bursts that sent entire departments scrambling to keep up. Xie Lian remained infuriatingly earnest, capable of disarming hostile officials with nothing more than a calm gaze and a precisely structured argument. Hua Cheng remained impossible, dismantling lazy reasoning with surgical pleasure and then stepping into habitat lanes to be greeted like family by mers who trusted him more than they trusted half their own species. They taught constantly.

Xie Lian taught Hua Cheng how institutions thought—which was to say badly, but predictably.

Hua Cheng taught Xie Lian the meanings beneath movement, stillness, silence, social distance, ritual gifts, pod-shaped shame, layered grief, and the thousand invisible things merfolk said with their bodies before ever shaping a sign. Sometimes they taught each other formally, over notes and protocols and reworked training modules. Sometimes it happened messier than that.

At two in the morning over cold tea and habitat monitor light. At the edge of a nursery cove while Jiang Yanli's daughter slept in the warm cradle of shared current. In the middle of a planning-room argument while three administrators slowly realized they were watching the future of marine ethics being assembled out of irritation and mutual respect.

Hua Cheng fell in love somewhere in the middle of all that. It annoyed him tremendously.

There was no dramatic beginning he could point to later. No single moment he could isolate and say there, exactly there, that was the first crack. It accumulated the way seawater wore down stone—not through singular force, but through relentless contact. Perhaps it was the way Xie Lian listened.

As though every word Hua Cheng offered—sharp, weary, mocking, or serious—deserved to be received with care.

Perhaps it was the way Xie Lian refused false divisions. He never asked Hua Cheng to separate scholarship from feeling, ethics from attachment, professionalism from love. He understood instinctively that none of those things had ever truly been separate.

Perhaps it was watching him with the mers. Watching him kneel patiently at a tanning platform while a newly arrived juvenile decided whether or not to trust his hands. Watching him revise entire facility policies because one elder auntie from an outer pod made a face of profound disdain at a badly designed current gate. Watching him stand in front of cameras and journalists and say, with maddening calm, that coexistence without dignity was merely conquest in prettier clothing.

Or perhaps Hua Cheng had simply been doomed from the first moment a sweet, clever man on a dock smiled at him and thanked him for coming so quickly, as though the world were not cruel enough to make that dangerous.

In any case, by the end of the year he was lost beyond practical recovery.

Xie Lian knew, of course.

Not because Hua Cheng said anything but rather because Hua Cheng wasn’t the kind of person to pretend otherwise even if he wouldn’t say it.

Xie Lian noticed too much anyway.

He noticed the slight shift in Hua Cheng's voice around him, the faint undercurrent of softness even when the words themselves remained sharp. He noticed how often Hua Cheng turned toward him first when something extraordinary happened in the habitats, as though wonder only became complete once shared. He noticed, perhaps most tellingly, that Hua Cheng—who trusted almost no one with his unguarded touch—had begun giving Xie Lian more and more of them.

And Xie Lian, for all his gentleness, was not foolish.

He simply waited.

Patient in that infuriating way of his. Letting the thing between them gather shape without forcing it into declaration before it was ready. Meeting Hua Cheng's gaze more often and holding it longer. Bringing him tea without asking. Taking over the more tedious committee briefings when Hua Cheng had not slept. Standing beside him at observation windows so naturally it became impossible to remember when standing apart had ever been normal.

The oceanarium grew around them.

So did the people inside it.

Jiang Yanli gave birth in the protected warm-current cove with what remained of the Jiang pod, much of the Lan pod, Hua Cheng, Xie Lian, and a medical team on respectful standby. Her son arrived furious and healthy, all tiny fists and outraged sound, and within a week became the undisputed center of at least three pods.

Jiang Cheng took to unclehood with the solemn intensity of someone personally prepared to fight the ocean for his nephew.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji became unbearable in that paired, luminous way of creatures who had found one another and no longer saw any reason to hide it. Wei Wuxian still talked enough for both of them. Lan Wangji still looked at him like silence made visible. Between the Jiang siblings, the Lan pod, and the small new family orbiting Yanli's child, what had once seemed like irreparable ruin slowly took on the shape of something living again.

Not the old pod.

But a future.

That was the place's gift, in the end.

Not rescue. Not perfection. Possibility.

The oceanarium became a hub, then a sanctuary, then something harder to name because no human institution had ever really been built for this before. A meeting point between worlds. A site of research, yes—but also refuge, translation, diplomacy, recovery, learning, birth, and return.

Some mers came and left. Some humans learned enough sign to hold simple conversations at habitat edges. Young researchers trained under protocols that would have been dismissed as absurd a year earlier and were now considered foundational.

Children visited and grew up knowing merfolk were not monsters or fairy tales, but neighbors.

The sea outside remained vast, dangerous, and free. The waters inside remained protected, imperfect, and chosen. Between them stretched a bridge.

And one evening, a year after Xie Lian's message had first arrived and altered the course of everything, Hua Cheng stood with him on the western observation terrace while the last gold of sunset bled across the connected channel.

Below them, mers moved through the evening water in glimmers of blue, silver, black, and gold. A juvenile from one of the outer pods practiced signs with a human trainee on the lower platform. Farther off, Wei Wuxian was very clearly trying to lure Lan Wangji into some nonsense involving a buoy ring and a current vent. Lan Wangji was pretending not to be entertained and failing in the smallest, most satisfying ways. Near the nursery cove, Jiang Cheng hovered guard while Jiang Yanli's son slept tucked against her mother's side in warm water.

The whole facility breathed around them.

Changed.

Xie Lian rested his forearms on the rail. "Do you remember," he asked lightly, "the first thing you said to me here?"

Hua Cheng glanced over. "Probably something rude."

"You criticized my acclimatization protocols before we'd even finished proper introductions."

"I stand by that."

Xie Lian laughed, soft and helpless and dear enough to make Hua Cheng's chest ache. "Of course you do."

The sunset wind lifted a few loose strands of dark hair across Xie Lian's cheek. Without allowing himself to think too carefully about the danger of it, Hua Cheng reached over and tucked them back.

Xie Lian went still, eyes soft and attentive.

Below them, the sea rolled against the outer gate, endless beyond the last engineered boundary. "This place changed the world," Xie Lian said after a moment.

Hua Cheng looked out at the water, at the people moving through it, at the impossible thing they had built together. "No," he said quietly. "You did." When he looked back, Xie Lian was watching him with an expression far too soft to survive at any safe distance.

That, Hua Cheng thought with the weary clarity of a doomed man, was not helping at all. But perhaps some endings were not endings.

Perhaps they were only doors left open between one world and another.

And in the year that remade an oceanarium into a refuge, remade scholarship into understanding, remade survival into something dangerously close to hope, Hua Cheng found he minded open doors much less when Xie Lian stood beside him in the light.