The sun rises to the cool embrace and soft kisses of the receding tide, leaving the shore wet and alive with burrowing oysters and scuttling crabs. Abandoned shells glitter in the pink morning light. The breeze carries salt and tiny beads of the ocean inland; Chanyeol wakes up to the sea on his tongue. Chimes made of found shells are his alarm to get out of bed and get dressed. He's already late.

His dad's already long gone by the time he goes downstairs. Fishing boats leave before dawn and return just before night. There's a covered plate with grilled fish and rice sitting in the cooker on the counter. No matter how old he gets, Chanyeol still wakes up to breakfast from his dad.

He takes his time eating, watching the sun drops glimmers of brilliant light onto the shells and rocks exposed in low tide. When he’s done, he washes the dishes and wraps the leftover food for lunch.

The lighthouse is weathered and crumbling in places, but it’s stood for much longer than Chanyeol’s been alive, and he feels safe in it. During the day, its lantern isn’t all that visible, but it’s a life-saving beacon to returning fishermen and the ships passing by towards the mainland.

He kicks a barnacle off one of the bottom stairs, quickly walking up again and climbing over the rough path towards the beach.He’s wondered why there are stairs all the way into the water, but he’s never asked, and his dad’s never offered an explanation, so he just accepts it.

His morning continues on land. Since childhood, he's never been allowed on or in the water. Instead, he walks the beaches, collecting trash or shells to make souvenirs for tourists. They particularly like the chimes he makes, even marvelling at the broken glass shards worn smooth by the water. It’s ironic that they pay for the trash they throw out, just because it’s made into something pretty.

Following a random direction, he stops every once in awhile to pick up a shell, seeing if it’s occupied before dropping it into his pocket. He collects trash in a woven bag hanging from his wrist. Later, he'll collect the driftwood and set it farther inland, where the water won't reach it, so it'll dry and become kindling or logs for their fire. A lot of useful things come from the ocean, pushed out of the water onto the beach like an offering. Sometimes, things are valuable; other times, they're useful; still other times, it's nothing but garbage, and too often, the garbage is clutching a dead fish or bird. Chanyeol cuts them free and leaves their bodies for the scavengers.

The wind changes, blowing at him rather than off the water, and he’s struck by a heavy stench of rotting flesh. It’s something big, not yet fully decomposed. He’s used to the smell of partly dried seaweed and fish birds have abandoned for the crabs to pick apart, but every few months, he’ll find the corpse of a seal or, more often, blobs of jellyfish.

Very rarely does he come across a dead whale.

Chanyeol nervously picks his way around the bloated creature. A decorator crab scurries away from his feet as he climbs a cluster of rocks. Gulls squawk and take to the sky, screaming into the wind. Even without the methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulphide gases inflating its corpse, the whale is a massive beast. He's always been amazed at how something so huge could be so gentle and non-violent, teaching him from a young age that size does not equal power or menace. Growing up to a great height of more than six feet, he embraces the lesson.

Regardless, he knows that carcasses filled with gas explode eventually, and the force of this big of a release could knock him clear off his feet. Add to that whatever the whale has eaten and the organs loosened by death, and he could die from the impact.

So he's careful. He checks the blade on its handle and makes sure it’s securely extended. If he wasn't in such a hurry, he'd just come back after the stages of decay took its course, but the rising tide could wash away precious resources or bring in more scavenging predators.

He stabs into the whale's belly and begins to saw through the tough skin and layer of blubber. The smell would make a lesser man faint, but he's grown up with the stench of the sea and everything that comes with it, so he only feels mildly nauseous. The gases push against the seam of his incision, and it's only instinct that throws him aside a safe distance as the belly explodes outwards and throws out blood, blubber, and organs with a resounding bang that sends the sea birds to the sky and crabs scuttling back into their dens.

Chanyeol's about to return to the corpse to start harvesting the blubber for oil and muscle for meat when he sees something strange up the beach, lying among the expended detritus.

It looks like an arm.

Closer, he recognizes it as a human arm and isn't sure if he should run away or get closer. He’s seen Jaws; scavengers don’t discriminate species, so odds are good there is far less than what he sees, but they could also be alive and need help. The lighthouse is about as far from town as possible without being on a boat; Chanyeol’s the closest help there is.

He leaves his bags and struggles over the sandhill. There’s a piece of intestine over what covers more body or show the end of it. His stomach turns, but he finds the upper body of a man.

Chanyeol sees their chest move and panics. They’re bloody and wet from the whale and water, flat on their back. He's found Jonah. A living person inside of a whale. Dragging more of its and pieces away, he discovers Jonah has been eaten by a smaller fish before being swallowed by a whale.

A merman…

Any fish needs water to survive. It's summer, but the water is still cold. Chanyeol grabs the merman beneath their arms and drags them down the beach, flinching when the ocean wash over his feet—waves pulling at his pantlegs like clinging fingers—but trudging further until he trips and falls with a wet splash. He’s completely soaked, and the saltwater stings his eyes, yet he catches the merman before they’re carried away, hauling the creature over his lap and crossing his arms over their body.

He watches, fascinated, as gills open and close beneath the water. Sand and bits of bloody debris are washed away. Their inky black hair is combed by the same clinging fingers that tried to lead Chanyeol away.

Chanyeol breathes with the ocean, exhaling when the waves rush from the beach and inhaling when they’re pulled back to shore. The sun warms his face and dries his shoulders and hair, leaving a crust of salt. It’s almost relaxing, sitting in shallow water and breathing with the ocean. It’s natural and soothing, something more familiar than it should be.

The ocean can’t be trusted. She—always she, and always affectionately—can turn cruel and torturous when mere minutes earlier she was tranquil and sedate or sending quick waves to collide with the rocks surrounding the lighthouse and spray entire exterior. Those playful times, Chanyeol finds her the most beautiful, when the spray hangs on the wind like gems that catch the sunlight to glisten so vibrantly he can almost hear her voice laughing, Look at me!

The merman breathes deeply; many minutes have passed with them lying in Chanyeol’s loose embrace.

Their eyes open, and Chanyeol thinks of the sea, almost falling into the deep blue-black. The sunlight illuminates fine ripples of celeste and sky blue.

They says something, more of a mumble, but Chanyeol can't understand the movement of its lips nor the sound that comes from their throat. It's unlike any language he's ever heard, and he wonders if the creature is even speaking or will understand his own speech.

He breathes out with the receding surf. "Are you alright?"

“I think so.” They push into the sand with their hands to sit more upright against Chanyeol’s chest and look to the beach. Seagulls and terns wheel over the whale carcass, crying to their flock to feed. “She saved me.”

“The whale saved you?” Chanyeol can’t understand. “It swallowed you.”

They push their hair away from their face and lean forward, although the water is too shallow to swim farther. “Her calf was killed and about to be eaten. I protected it with the pod but got separated. She took me in before I could be killed, too.” Beneath the sadness evident in their heavy eyes is an affection Chanyeol’s never seen towards a whale. His father is a fisherman; he, too, is sorry when he sees a whale caught in their nets, but he has never seemed tender towards it.

“I am sorry.” Chanyeol feels the whale deserves something for saving a life after her child’s was taken, but what could be given to a whale? He was planning to take more from her before finding the creature in his arms. It seems fitting, though. A mother’s life gives without asking anything back; the ocean gives and takes indiscriminately. A baby is dead but another is alive. There’s something poetic Chanyeol doesn’t understand.

The merman sighs, a very human sort of thing. Chanyeol didn’t notice the seamlessly closed gills or rise and fall of breathing lungs. “I should go,” they say, twisting and rolling to plunge their head under an incoming wave. It takes them out towards darker water, and Chanyeol watches from his sandy seat. It the moment the water is still, not coming or going, their head and shoulder break the surface. “May I see you, again?”

Chanyeol nods. “Of course.” He’s not asked where he lives, and he doesn’t offer it himself. He lives alongside the ocean; she’ll let them meet again.

Shorebirds cry overhead. Crabs scurry beneath their shadows. A whale carcass is slowly picked apart. Chanyeol climbs out of the water, gathers his bags, and goes home.

---

a/n: Written for EXO Mostly Human. (prompt #43: Finding a dead whale is not uncommon in a small island, but cutting it to take oil and meat and find a barely breathing merman is something Chanyeol could have never imagined.)

I was really thinking of Hemingway while writing this, although it's pretty far from his style or anything. There's a whole AU I came up with from this prompt, and it kind of centralizes around a quote from The Old Man and the Sea, trying to have that same whimsicalness and poetic romanticism that really isn't shown here.

Fun fact: Humpback whales have been known to protect other species from predators.

The Jonah reference is from the Bible, the Book of Jonah, in which his assigned job is to tell the people of Nineveh they're in big trouble and will be destroyed. Jonah doesn't wanna do that and tries to skip out. God whips up a storm and tells a big fish/whale to swallow him and then spit him up on shore after a few days. Maybe that'll learn 'im. (It did.) He finally does his job, and everyone's saved. It's another book of miracles, and that's more of my intended reference than any biblical reference, because it is pretty much impossible to survive in anyone's stomach. Unless you're bacteria.