Yixing was far too cheerful for six o’clock in the morning. It was dark outside, still, although the sun was starting to think about peeking over the horizon, and a little chilly, enough to wear a jacket over his jeans and aquarium polo shirt. The weather combination meant that things were pleasantly quiet: the nocturnal animals were starting to go to sleep, but the diurnal animals hadn’t woken up yet. There were two other cars in the employee parking area behind the aquarium, and most of the aquarium employees and volunteers wouldn’t be there until the buses began their regular schedule. And yet, Yixing was humming softly as he walked from his car to the back door of the aquarium and opened it, stepping eagerly into the warmer air and harsh fluorescent lighting of the “staff only” area.

 

He walked into the break room, and stopped humming, but kept the same smile on his face when he saw Lu Han, who looked bleary-eyed and miserable as he nursed a cup of coffee.

 

“Good morning!” Yixing almost sang as he opened the refrigerator to put his lunch in.

 

“Morning,” Lu Han grunted. “I’m still trying to decide if it’s good or not, but morning.”

 

Yixing just smiled, and continued through the break room and into the locker room where all the diving equipment was stored. He knew that Lu Han wouldn’t be up for conversation until his coffee had kicked in: the brief exchange first thing was their routine.

 

In the locker room he stripped out of his jacket and uniform, and shimmied into his wetsuit. It was a “spring suit” with short sleeves and short legs, and while Yixing knew that, with his charge, he’d be fine in just swim trunks and a t-shirt, safety regulations said he had to be in a wetsuit, so the spring suit was the compromise. He folded his work clothes quickly, making sure his car keys and wallet hadn’t fallen out of his jeans (that had happened a few too many times) and put them on the shelf of the locker. He grabbed his fins and mask, and shoved his feet back into his old, worn, boat shoes before heading out.

 

“You are too cheerful to be human,” Lu Han muttered, still not done with his coffee, as Yixing walked back through the break room.

 

“You love me and you know it!” Yixing laughed as he walked out of the room and down the hall, stopping by the diving equipment room near the back entrance to some of the larger exhibits to grab a pony bottle, before heading for the stair entrance.

 

Out the windows, the sky was slowly but surely getting lighter as Yixing started up the stairs. There was an elevator, of course, but it tended to lurch when it started and stopped in a way that scared Yixing more than a little bit so he only ever took it when he was carrying something heavy, and he’d long gotten used to the weight of the pony bottle in his hand.

 

He had several flights to go up; his charge had the largest exhibit tank in the aquarium, so the door to the entrance area was higher than any other in the aquarium. The actual area that visitors could see was about the same as their regular large tanks, maybe a little bit more, but the ethics behind the display had been a tricky thing. All the details had gotten muddled in Yixing’s head, but the aquarium administrators and exhibit designers had had a lot to deal with back when the tank was being designed.

 

When Yixing opened the door to the tank entrance area, he couldn’t help but smile. He loved this, especially in the morning. The only sounds in the room were the hum of the refrigerator in the meal prep area and the much louder hum of the filtration system. The surface of the water wasn’t quite still, since the filtration kept it moving, but it had a sort of serenity to it, like a quiet lake or slow-moving stream. His charge wasn’t awake yet, so there were no splashes, no sign of any other movement under the surface, no muffled noises of excited children on the other side of the tank glass.

 

Yixing moved to the edge of the tank; with a tank as large as this one was, entering it was more like entering a pool than the standard aquarium tank, and slid his boat shoes off his feet, and sat down to put on his fins and diving mask. He dropped into the tank quietly, from a sitting positon his head didn’t even go under all the way, before turning to grab his pony bottle, and start down.

 

The water wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm, either. Just a degree or two cooler than room temperature, and so it didn’t take getting used to. Yixing dove down past the multiple levels of the display area. The back of it had ledges that acted like shelves, full of different things he’d given his charge in the two years he’d been here. Different things to figure out, so he wouldn’t get bored during aquarium hours.

 

For the visitors, it appeared as though the tank only reached about five feet lower than the bottom floor of the museum, but in reality, a section of it went deeper. Blocked from the public eye by well-placed rocks, was the entrance to his charge’s sleeping area. It was meant to look more like the sea floor in the area where he’d been found, and was constantly lit with soft underwater lights.

 

Minseok’s top half looked primarily human. His skin was about the same shade as Yixing’s own, his arms were proportionate to a human’s, he had a human chest, stomach, there were no fins on his back, and there wasn’t even anything different about his face. It was a normal, strikingly handsome, human face. The only thing decidedly inhuman about his upper half were the gill slits that ran around his neck.

 

His lower half, however, was not human in the slightest. No one had seen anything like him before; in place of human hips and legs were eight tentacles. Right now they were a light brown color, the same as the hair on Minseok’s head, but Yixing had seen him make them change colors to everything from almost white to a deep blue.

 

In his sleep, Minseok’s gill slits moved slowly, keeping enough air moving over them so that he could breath. His hair moved in the gentle current made by the filtration system intake and release inside the room, and one of his tentacles twitched gently.

 

Yixing wanted to let Minseok sleep as long as he could, it was hard not to when he looked so peaceful like this, but at the same time he needed to wake him up and start the day.

 

He reached out and touched Minseok’s arm gently. One of Minseok’s tentacles lazily reached up and felt around his arm and hand, er pads attaching and then detaching, before pulling away.

 

Yixing squeezed Minseok’s arm gently, and this time the merman stirred; stretching his arms over his head and his tentacles straight out around him as they changed colors rapidly before settling back on light brown. He wrapped one around Yixing’s waist and smiled, and Yixing smiled back at him.

 

Good morning, he signed to Minseok. Hungry?

 

Minseok nodded, and signed good morning.

 

For the past two years, Minseok the octopus merman had been in the aquarium, and for the past two years, Yixing had been his handler. The aquarium had never planned on having a merperson (of any kind, let alone an octopus) but Minseok had been tangled in a fishing company’s trawling net, injured and scared and hissing at anyone who tried to go near him. The aquarium had already been building a large tank in preparation for the acquisition of a whale shark, but when the museum administrators had been approached about taking in a merman, the board of trustees had jumped at the chance.

 

At first it had been hard; they hadn’t been able to open up Minseok’s exhibit for over two months because the merman was so stressed. He’d dart around frantically at first, looking for a way out despite his injuries, but Yixing had been patient. The gentler Yixing was, and the more Minseok’s injuries healed from Yixing’s careful treatment, the more Minseok began to trust him. He’d stopped searching for a way out, but then became depressed, physically responding when Yixing was there but spending most of his time either sleeping or just floating, eerily suspended mid-tank.

 

It was around then that Yixing had begun teaching him to sign. Yixing had learned when he’d been in college and volunteering for different aquariums and had wanted to docent, guide people through the aquarium and talk about the different exhibits. Minseok had learned surprisingly quickly, and he began to come out of his depressive state the more he was able to converse with Yixing. He asked question after question and what Yixing couldn’t sign to him, he’d show him directly.

 

Now Yixing was teaching Minseok to speak. The merman could speak, he had humanoid vocal cords, but the mermaid language was so vastly different from any kind of human language that there was currently no point trying to understand it. Minseok wasn’t actually the merman’s real name, just one that Yixing had asked if he could call him (his first instinct was to give him a Chinese name but this was an aquarium in Korea with Korean visitors) and the merman had agreed to.

 

The two of them headed up out of Minseok’s sleeping area and into the exhibit area of the tank. Minseok was clingy after he’d just woken up, and wrapped both his arms and tentacles around Yixing, making him do all the work to propel the two of them. Yixing gave him an exasperated look, and Minseok just laughed.

 

Eventually their heads broke the surface of the water, but Minseok still didn’t let go. Yixing felt the suction pads on his legs unstick briefly only to latch back on with the tentacles wound even tighter around him.

 

“I can’t make your breakfast like this,” Yixing told him once he was able to take the pony bottle out of his mouth. He was able to kick feebly enough to bring them both over to the edge of the tank, and he set the bottle up on the edge along with his mask.

 

“Maybe I’m not hungry,” Minseok teased.

 

“You said you were ten minutes ago.”

 

“That was a trick to get you to cuddle with me.”

 

Just then Minseok’s stomach growled and Yixing laughed.

 

Eventually Yixing was able to coax Minseok into letting him free, and got started making his breakfast.

 

Whenever the aquarium opened to the public, Yixing was always proud of Minseok. Minseok might be able to legally be displayed in an exhibit tank, but his mind and half of his body was very much a human and Yixing knew that it had to be at least a little demeaning. But Minseok seemed to look at being on display like being a children’s party entertainer. He took breaks; to eat lunch, talk to Yixing, or sometimes to work out the various puzzles Yixing gave him, but for the majority of the aquarium’s visitor hours, he focused on the guests, particularly the children. Occasionally he could find a child who signed, and he’d spend as long as he could, sometimes up to an hour or more, signing back and forth.

 

The children loved him for it, and it made Yixing’s heart warm like nothing else.

 

One morning he came in a little later, along with Lu Han, and for once was similarly groggy. He had to nurse a cup of coffee before he was ready to get to Minseok, which would have gone a lot faster if he could stop yawning ever few seconds.

 

“I am never doing that again,” Yixing groaned and laid his head on Lu Han’s shoulder.

 

“You liked it when we were there.”

 

“That was the alcohol talking.”

 

Yixing’s birthday had been the day before, and Lu Han had taken him out clubbing. Yixing was not a party person, and his alcohol tolerance was crap… if he remembered right he’d let Lu Han give him several too many and had ended up grinding on a guy whose name he’d never gotten like he was being paid for it while talking his ear off in a mix of Mandarin in Korean about merpeople behavior theories. The guy hadn’t seemed put off by it, and he’d tried to get Yixing’s number, but Yixing wasn’t sure his handwriting had been at all legible.

 

By the time he had finished with his coffee, Yixing was much more awake and pried himself away from Lu Han to change clothes and head to Minseok’s tank.

 

When he got there, Minseok was already awake, and waiting for him. His arms were crossed on the edge of the tank, and he was resting his chin where they crossed. He looked half asleep still, but raised his head when Yixing came in, and it was only a moment before he looked at him in surprise.

 

“Your hair!” he blurted out.

 

It took Yixing a second before he remembered… Lu Han had talked him into dying his hair, too. He’d had solid black hair all his life, and now it was VERY blond.

 

“You said humans couldn’t change colors!” Minseok said when Yixing had been silent for too long.

 

“I can’t change its color on my own, it’s hair dye,” Yixing told him.

 

He had to explain hair dye to Minseok, but Minseok seemed fascinated by the idea.

 

“So you could have hair like…” He flopped one of his tentacles out of the tank and onto the floor, and changed it to be a pretty deep blue violet.

 

Yixing nodded. “I think they make hair dye just about every color you can think of.”

 

Minseok looked excited by the idea. “Could I have hair that color? Could you use hair dye on me?”

 

Yixing couldn’t help but smile back. “Hopefully someday, but I need to talk to the higher ups first.”

 

Minseok didn’t stop smiling, and seemed to be unable to keep his hands out of Yixing’s hair once he’d gotten into the water with him.

 

A few days later Yixing did go to the curator to tell them about Minseok’s fascination with hair dye, but what he got was a very different conversation.

 

They were assigning the interns to Minseok. Yixing had tried to protest, and the curator agreed with him, but there was nothing either one of them could do. Someone on the board had put their foot down (because of what the curator thought was probably a non-reported conflict of interest but wasn’t entirely sure if it was legally called that since no money or contracts were on the table) and that was that. Yixing would still be working with Minseok, of course, he was Minseok’s handler and these kids were just interns, but he’d be teaching them on Minseok.

 

As if being on exhibit wasn’t demeaning enough.

 

Minseok was a bit apprehensive when Yixing broke the news to him, but he thought that might have been partially because Yixing was still visibly frustrated with the whole thing.

 

“But you’ll still be the one taking care of me, right?”

 

Yixing nodded, and couldn’t help but start to relax when Minseok began to play with his hands. Minseok’s finger tips were wrinkly but his hands were warm.

 

After a few moments of silence, Yixing sighed:

 

“I just… they shouldn’t assign the interns to you. It’s not… you might live in the aquarium, half of you might look like an octopus, but you’re still human.”

 

Minseok held his hands gently. “I trust you; I think it’ll be okay.”

 

It started out okay; the kids who had made it into the intern program were all good, smart, kids. Minseok answered their questions about merpeople specifically and Yixing walked them through the daily ins-and-outs of working at the aquarium, and the more specific medical tasks with Minseok.

 

Minseok was clearly tired at the end of the day; he wasn’t used to sharing his “free time” with anyone other than Yixing, and he wanted Yixing to stay after all the interns had gone home for the evening. He was cuddly then, wrapping his tentacles around Yixing’s legs in a sort of hug, and resting his head and chest in Yixing’s lap while Yixing ate his own dinner, sometimes staring at the food until Yixing offered him a bite.

 

But of course the slightly uneasy but relatively comfortable routine couldn’t last. The director wanted the interns to start doing more with Minseok, rather than observing while Yixing did everything. They said it would be good for the interns, and good for Minseok. When Yixing protested they said that Minseok needed to get used to other people anyway.

 

And of course it was a complete disaster.

 

Minseok had started to wake up earlier, waking up before Yixing and the interns got there so that the interns didn’t see him sleeping. Apparently it was as private a thing for merpeople as it was for humans, and Minseok didn’t want to wake up to half a dozen faces in his sleeping space. So, of course, Minseok was awake and waiting at the edge of the tank when the interns all filed in… without Yixing.

 

Yixing was waiting just out of sight in the doorway, so he heard everything but didn’t see what was happening.

 

“Where’s Yixing?” He had never heard Minseok sound that guarded before.

 

“Yixing isn’t coming today.”

 

“We’re going to take care of you, though!”

 

“Everything will be fine!”

 

. That was not the right tone to use. They were talking to him like someone would talk to a small child or a dog. This wasn’t going to end well.

 

“I don’t want you, I want Yixing!” Minseok was clearly angry.

 

“Well Yixing isn’t coming in to-“ The girl cut herself off with a scream, and there were several more shocked yells.

 

Yixing’s heart dropped to his stomach, and he sprinted into the room.

 

Minseok had grabbed the girl who had been speaking, probably with his tentacles, they were stronger, and had thrown her into the tank. She hadn’t resurfaced yet.

 

Yixing ran to the edge of the tank, jumped over Minseok, and dove in.

 

The girl’s eyes were wide in panic, but she was conscious, and holding her breath. But she appeared to be too shocked to move on her own, and momentum was carrying her deeper and deeper.

 

Yixing finally reached her and wrapped one arm around her waist. He’d jumped in with his regular clothes on, and they were weighing him down, but all he could do was kick his shoes off, he’d have to deal with his jeans.

 

It seemed like far too long before his and the girl’s head broke the surface, but she breathed in with a terrified gasp and he knew she’d be okay. He hung onto her as he swam to the side of the tank, and the other interns hauled her up and out of the water.

 

He felt Minseok’s hands on his hips.

 

“Get off!” he roared without looking behind him, and pulled himself up and out, going to check on his intern.

 

She was shaking, and crying, but she was breathing and sitting up. Still, they shouldn’t take chances.

 

“Jimin! Get her a towel,” Yixing told one of the boys, and he jumped up and brought back two, one for the girl and another that he handed to Yixing.

 

Yixing left with the interns trailing behind him like ducklings after their mother. For once they took the elevator, headed to the medical station.

 

It was an hour or two later, after the on-call nurse in the medical station had checked the girl out and said that she was shaken, but fine, and Yixing had dried off and changed into dry clothes, when he came back into Minseok’s preparation area.

 

He couldn’t believe Minseok had done that. He never thought the merman would lash out like that when angry. And Yixing was still too angry to come back here, he knew, but the interns hadn’t had a chance to make Minseok’s breakfast before everything had gone wrong.

 

Minseok was waiting for him, his hands clinging to the edge of the tank, his chin resting on them, and his tentacles moving around anxiously behind him.

 

“What the hell was that?” was all Yixing said.

 

“I don’t want anyone else to look after me.” Minseok sounded sheepish, but the words out of his mouth were anything but.

 

“You don’t want anyone else to look after you?! A girl could have died because you were angry that I wasn’t here?!”

 

“You heard how they were talking to me!” Minseok was getting defensive and angry. “Like I was stupid, like I wasn’t human!”

 

“You almost drowned a little girl, Minseok! People don’t do that!”

 

He knew he’d gone just a bit too far by the look on Minseok’s face.

 

“Minseok, I… I’ll get your breakfast for you. Then I’m going to talk to the director and make sure you don’t get hurt because of this. Yerim is fine, she’s just scared. I’ll be back in later to feed you lunch.” Yixing’s voice was back to being gentle.

 

Minseok didn’t say a word to him as Yixing made his breakfast, gave it to him, and left.

 

When he came back to feed Minseok lunch, the breakfast plate was untouched, Minseok was nowhere to be seen, and Yixing’s boat shoes that he’d kicked off while underwater were sitting neatly on the edge of the tank, laces re-tied.

 

In the weeks that followed, anyone could tell that Minseok was regressing. Yixing had apologized for what he’d said, explained what he’d really meant. The interns had all talked with him, and little Yerim had even seen him in private, with Yixing nearby but not close enough to hear. He did know that Minseok had given her an apology gift, a beautiful little decorative hair comb made out of shells. Yixing wasn’t entirely sure where he’d gotten the supplies or how he’d made it in the first place.

 

But the damage had been done, and Minseok was regressing. Yixing thought that Minseok was also probably upset with himself, since he knew Minseok wasn’t the type to hold a grudge.

 

He wasn’t eating. He wasn’t interacting with any of the guests or anything in the tank. He woke up when Yixing dove down to him in the morning and let Yixing coax him out into the open, but he rarely talked or signed anymore.

 

They’d closed the exhibit to the public when Minseok had gone back to floating listlessly in the tank again.

 

Yixing could coax him to eat occasionally, but he was terrified at how quickly Minseok was dropping weight. He was getting more and more listless the longer time went on, and Yixing was scared.

 

Minseok was the topic of discussion of emergency board meetings, meetings with the director and the curator, consultations with academic professionals… everyone was worried about Minseok in some capacity.

 

And then some good news. A merperson couple, living in a nearby aquarium, were due to have a baby. Due to ethics regulations, namely because the tank would be considered to be too small, the aquarium wouldn’t be able to legally keep the trio once the baby was born, and so they’d reached out to aquariums in the area for help. And this one was the only one with a tank big enough to meet regulations.

 

“What about Minseok?” Yixing had asked.

 

“After several consultations, we’ve decided that Minseok will get an early retirement in an open ocean pen. Mr. Zhang, should you choose to, you’ll remain his handler. The museum owns a bit of property on the edge of the pen, zoning can be changed to allow for a house to be built. The director has been given full approval for whatever contract the two of you reach regarding utilities.”

 

Yixing knew where the open ocean pen was. Not too far of a drive out of the city, and just far away enough from the local beach town that Minseok wouldn’t be bothered if he didn’t want to be. It would be a quiet life for the both of them, but Yixing himself wouldn’t be completely cut off from family and friends. And Minseok had a chance at reaching out to his again.

 

Later that night found Yixing with his cargo shorts rolled up as he sat on the edge of the tank. Minseok’s head was in his lap and Yixing ran his fingers through Minseok’s hair while he ate his own dinner and coaxed Minseok into eating a bit of his.

 

“Minseok,” he smiled. “I have good news.”