Original Prompt: pirate!Taeil thalassophobia

From: tumblr - lirrili

Note: Thalassophobia – fear of the sea, or fear of being in the ocean

This is not where Taeil had pictured himself a year ago when he had graduated, top of his class, with a degree in marine biology. When he got his internship with the marine conservation center, he had never imagined that it would have led to his current position: on his knees in front of a wild-eyed man, a pistol in his face, begging for his life.

Just a week before, he had been going about his tasks at the center as usual, running errands, inputting data, making sure the fish and other animals were fed, the tanks clean, the temperature and salinity levels correct.

There was a disease that was causing starfish to dissolve, and he had been assisting with the research—keeping close observational notes on several specimens and their reactions to different solutions meant to cure or at least slow the progression of the mystery ailment, and several petri dishes of tissue samples and cultures from the infected creatures.

That day, it had been left up to him to finish the center’s move from paper to digital data tables. The sun had gone down, everyone else had gone home, and he was just typing his way through the last notebook of an old project’s observations when he heard it.

It would have been hard to not hear it. The voices echoing through the halls from the other side of the center were anything but subtle. Loud, rowdy laughter, rough and unfamiliar, had the blood chilling in Taeil’s veins.

Were they being robbed? They didn’t exactly have anything the usual break-and-enter thief would be after. There were no cash registers to be emptied or jewelry or brand items that could easily be turned around and sold off quickly.

They just had… animals. And research equipment. Expensive research equipment, but not really anything that had a high turn-around rate, that he knew of.

Were they drunk? Or drugged?

Whatever they were, they were coming closer.

.

Taeil dropped, scooting under the nearest desk and quickly glancing around him for a means of escape.

There should really have been more than one door. Wasn’t that a fire hazard?

Could he get through a window? Did those big, ocean-facing windows on the other side of the room even open? Probably not.

.

"Mr. Lee!" One of the voices called, a sound like hammering on metal accompanying it.

Lee…? Were they… were these people here for him? He didn’t know any other Lees in the center.

That didn’t make sense he hadn’t done anything to have anyone looking for him.

"Mr. Lee, where are you? We’re here for that thing you told us about."

What? Had he told anything about anything to anyone who would want whatever it was he hadn’t told them about?

The voice, and the footsteps of the speaker and whoever was with him, were getting closer, and Taeil was just realizing what an awful hiding place he had: completely exposed except from the top, and the door was a level below where the research desks were set up. He’d be seen as soon as someone walked in.

Where else could he hide?

A cabinet? A closet?

Did he have time to get to one?

He was up, sprinting, had his hand on the door of a large closet in the back of the room when the entrance slammed open behind him, causing him to jump.

"Found you~" The voice was playful, like they were childhood friends playing a game of hide-and-seek.

Taeil was frozen to the spot, hardly able to draw in a steady breath with the way his chest felt like it was being constricted, tighter and tighter as the heavy footsteps drew up behind him.

They stopped just short of him, a hand clamping down on his shoulder and wheeling him around to face the speaker.

He was young, wild eyes hidden behind messy bleached hair and a thick lower lip pulled up in a smirk, “You’re shorter than I expected.”

"He looks even shorter than me!" Another man, one of the two who had followed the blond into the room, called from near the door, sounding more than pleased by the discovery.

"What do you want?" Taeil was surprised with himself for how steady his voice came out, and he tried to straighten himself out to match it, doing his best to keep his hands and legs from shaking.

"We came to pick up the fish you told us about," The fish? “But the door was locked.”

Fish? What fish were they looking for? He hadn’t been informed of any aquarium pick-ups… Not that they looked like they came from any aquarium he knew about.

"Do you have the keys?" The man asked, then frowned, voice going icy, "Or are you having second thoughts?"

Taeil shivered, glancing from the man in front of him to the two near the door—the shorter one had wandered, and was tapping obnoxiously on the glass of one of the quarantine tanks. The other, taller (though not as tall as the blond), with dark hair and an unreadable expression, hadn’t moved and inch since they’d entered.

He had no idea what he wasn’t having second thoughts about, or what door they wanted to open, but he quickly shook his head, pointing at the desk where he had been working, “The… keys…”

"Excellent!" The cheerful tone was back, and Taeil was dragged along by his arm as the man made his way to the desk, plucking a lanyard with its messy ring of keys from the tabletop, "Let’s go get our fish."

—

To say that Lee Taeil had seen a few strange, creepy, and otherwise otherworldly creatures in his time at school would be an understatement. Blobfish, goblin sharks, batfish, vampire squids, barreleye fish. Fish with human teeth and creatures that could revert to their youngest stage of growth and live indefinitely.

But the what he found himself staring at in the tank in the locked room of the basement under the far end of the building, where he had never been before, was something he knew didn’t exist outside of children’s books and botched taxidermy fakes on shock TV programs.

"Is that—" One of the two men who had been waiting for them in the basement—a tall, immaculately groomed man with features that looked too soft for the rest of the company—began, stepping up next to the glass and staring, slack-jawed, words trailing off, at the thing inside.

"That," The tall blond grinned, hands on his hips, "Is our winning lottery ticket."

Taeil and the pretty one weren’t alone in their stunned silence. With the exception of the man Taeil assumed was in charge, the other three were likewise in varying states of bug-eyed wonder and disbelief.

There was a man in the tank. A man with short, choppy black hair that waved about in the water and a young, smoothly rounded face that looked… off. The anxious way his eyes stared back at them and the nervous tension pulling his lips down into a thin line didn’t seem right, didn’t fit his features.

The uncomfortable expression wasn’t what had everyone’s attention, however, and if he tried to say he had noticed it at all at first, Taeil would have been a liar.

The focus of the six outside the tank was on everything else about him.

His hands, resting on a large rock on the bottom of the tank, were webbed up to the last knuckle, and at his waist the familiar human torso and pale skin transitioned into a long, dark grey tail, flukes and all. Taeil was sure he even caught sight of a dorsal fin on the small of his back when he moved just a little bit.

Finally, someone—Taeil didn’t know who, couldn’t tear his eyes away from the thing in the tank to check—said it.

"That’s a mermaid."

"Yep!" The blond replied, grinning, "That’s a mermaid, and we and our most generous friend, Mr. Lee here, are going to make a fortune from it."

Taeil finally pulled himself out of his stupor, blinking at the other man, “What?”

"I hope you’ve got everything you need, Mr. Lee. It’s going to be a long trip."

—

"I think… I don’t… I can’t come with you, I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding," Whatever had managed to keep Taeil’s words steady in the research room had deserted him, his voice cracking at least twice in the short rush of speech, wide eyes fixed on the large dinghy bobbing in the water just outside the conservation center.

"Come on, Mr. Lee, you’re wasting time," The blond—Jiho, Taeil had learned from the conversation of the other four—frowned impatiently, his grip vice-like on Taeil’s upper arm, "I want to get that fish back to our ship and get out of here before morning, if you don’t mind.”

"And I’d really like to get my nose set,” The short one—Kyung—whined, one hand clutching at the bruised and bleeding thing as he glared at the finned man.

The creature glared right back, struggling weakly against the net, hands, and feet that held him at the bottom of the boat.

It had taken hours for the five men—Taeil had stood back, at a loss—to net him and get him out of the water, up the basement stairs and into the dinghy, and in the process he had definitely broken Kyung’s nose, and left ugly, sizable bruises on the others.

He hadn’t gotten out of it mark-free, either, though the injuries he’d received were nothing compared to those he’d dished out.

"Please, really, you have him, you don’t really need me anymore, right?" Taeil tried to reason, pulling backwards with all his weight against Jiho as the other man tried to lead him into the boat, "I’m… I’m not good with boats. Or ships. Or the whole… Ocean thing.”

"You’ll get your sea legs in a couple of days. Hell, we’ve even got seasickness patches, now would you please get on.”

Taeil was sure, at this point, that he could label the five men as pirates. He was, somewhere behind the blinding panic, aware that they probably could have shot him or tied him up and tossed him into the dinghy with the merman and saved themselves some time. So they were, on some level, trying to be nice about all this.

But he had absolutely no intention of stepping foot on the wobbly little vessel or leaving the safety of the shore.

"I can’t go. Please.”

"You can’t bail out on us now. We had an agreement that you would come and make sure the big fish made it to our buyer alive. If it gets sick on the trip, you are responsible for fixing it. Now. Let’s. Go.”

Jiho gave a hard shove and Taeil, caught off guard, stumbled, splashed, and collapsed forward over the edge of the dinghy, hands quickly pulling him in the rest of the way and securing him—in a much more comfortable position than the merman—on the floor of the boat as Jiho pushed it further from the shore and hopped in, the craft rocking and tipping harshly under his weight.

That was probably when Taeil out.

—

In hindsight, he probably should have tried to keep up the pretense that he was the Mr. Lee that they thought he was.

After being hauled up the ladder onto the deck of sailing ship—where his legs promptly gave out and he clung to the loops of rope hanging from the railing for steadiness they did not provide—he had watched as they dragged up the net, and the merman in it, before all six disappeared through a doorway, leaving him alone with only the sound of waves splashing against the side of the ship as company.

Jiho had reemerged some time later, helping him up and leading him through the same doorway and down into the belly of the ship (Taeil had almost been sick when he pictured the crushing ocean water on all sides of him, only held back by the too-thin-for-comfort hull).

He had been brought to a cramped cabin, and told it was his, and then left to ‘get some rest’. Which, technically, he had—after passing out again when he felt the ship lurch to one side.

He’d been woken at some point the next day by the quiet one—Minhyuk—who stuck a seasickness patch behind his ear and attempted to give him a quick tour of the ship. He didn’t manage to retain any of the layout, though, and had thrown up anyway when he was brought up above deck and saw no trace of land or the conservation center, only dark ocean on all sides for as far as he could see.

Finally, they had shown him where the merman was being kept, in what could have better been described as a large bathtub than a tank. Which, as it turned out, was in the room right across from his cabin.

He vaguely remembered thinking the creature looked unwell. Even worse than he had when they had pulled him out of the dinghy.

For the most part, however, his memories of the first few days on the ship were of throwing up and trying not to think about the fact that he was on a very-much-not-unsinkable ship in the middle of the ocean.

It was the fifth—sixth?—day that he heard shouting outside his door and, before he could pull himself up out of bed, Jiho had burst into the room and growled, “The fish is dying. Fix it.”

And Taeil had tried, he really had.

He tried changing the water for sea water, to no effect.

He tried different food options, all of which earned him only a turned-away head, tight lips, and an increasingly dull stare.

He tried putting medicines on the bruises and scrapes he’d gotten when he’d been moved from tank to tub, which it looked like had some effect on the overall comfort of the merman but didn’t change the lethargic movements or the dark shadows under his eyes or the sick pallor of his skin.

And the whole time, Jiho was demanding him to fix the fish.

He didn’t have any sort of equipment, and even if he had… he didn’t know the first thing about the man in the tub.

Finally, Taeil had cracked.

"I don’t know how to ‘fix the fish’.”

The dark glare Jiho gave him should have been his warning to shut up, take it back, and try again, and again, and figure something out.

"What do you mean? That’s what you’re here for that’s your job.”

"I don’t know anything about him or how he works or what he needs! I don’t know what to do."

"Mr. Lee…"

"I’m not Mr. Lee. I don’t know who told you about him or how they knew about him or what they did or how they planned on doing any of this but I only found out that he even existed when you came and took him. I don’t know what to do!”

Jiho had him by the collar of his shirt before he could realize just how poor the timing of his confession had been.

He was hauled up, out, and on deck quicker than he could get his legs—which still had refused to get used to the ominous rocking of the boat—underneath him, and before he could say another word he was shoved hard back towards the railing, limbs flailing, grabbing onto anything they could, heart slamming in his chest before his wonderfully unsteady legs finally gave out and dropped him to his knees before he completely toppled over the side.

And then he was staring at the shaking barrel of a gun.

"I suggest you start laughing right now and tell me that you’re joking,” Jiho’s voice when he spoke was more dangerous, more frightening even than when Taeil had first heard it back in the research center, and he found himself regretted every choice that had got him there, all the way back to getting his first fish when he was a child.

"I-please, I didn’t mean—"

"Because if you aren’t Mr. Lee, then you are a stowaway and a liar and I don’t take kindly to either of those things. So please, tell me again, who are you? I hope you know the right answer.”

"I’m…" Taeil’s voice cracked, eyes locked onto the pistol in his face, "My name is Lee… Taeil. There’s not… there’s not any other Lees that work there. I thought… I thought…”

"Thought… What? That you’d get a free vacation cruise with a briefcase full of cash at the end, and no one would notice?”

"I tried to tell you—!"

Jiho had him by his collar again, pulling him up and pushing him back until he hit the railing, and kept pushing, Taeil’s heart stopping as he was leaned precariously over the water, hands grabbing desperately onto the other man’s arm.

"Stop stop stop please stop I’m gunna fall I can’t swim!"

"That’s kind of the point."

He clawed up Jiho’s arm, pulling himself forward only to be pushed back once more, pistol leveled at him again.

"Please—"

"Captain!" Minhyuk called from the door, "Captain you’re going to want to come down here!"

Jiho growled, wild eyes still locked on Taeil as the shorter man panicked, his face losing all its color, “This had better be good, Minhyuk, I’m in the middle of something.”

"The… the mermaid, Captain. He talks."

Taeil had never felt so relieved to be dropped and left alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean before in his life.