Chapter Text
Prompt 2: Gift Giving
It’s never the mer who swims against the pod, weaving through traffic of fins and tails and frustrated faces, who is ever deemed anything but conventional (and all to follow an odd shimmer, which ended up being just as he suspected by the way: a pink-bellied scaledancer, a juvenile, hardly big enough to be a snack but hopeful proof that the species is reproducing, somewhere). That’s but one example to paint the reputation Orion has developed in his young life: naive, reckless, inquisitive; although, he understood that one the least. He didn’t think his curiosity was inappropriate, not when it wasn’t other people’s business he poked around in, but rather in what nobody else wanted any business in, what’s chosen to be ignored.
Chasing trinkets fallen from the surface or those already buried in the sand, scavenging foreign masses sitting at the bottom of the sea, tracking leads of species that are increasingly becoming less and less common to come by, of which directly affect their own food source—although, he may not have been given so much flack if not these interests of his often leading him into areas exclusively avoided by his kind, marked as forbidden or restricted. They are rules taught, woven into scary stories told to podlings old enough to understand language, old enough to develop a curiosity needing to be nipped before it could grow into something troublesome. That never really did work with Orion, not then nor now when scary stories morphed into arcane lore come adulthood.
And when warnings were nothing but empty words barren of any true consequence, a bark with no real bite…well, why wouldn’t Orion continue to indulge?
He’s made dozens of trips to the surface by now, probably one of his more contentious actions, should word ever make it back to his pod. If only any of them would just try and experience what he did. Orion has felt the way air caressed his plating and proto-form, cool and sometimes ticklish, like underwater currents but above surface, and a ghost to the eye. He’s seen the ocean shifting in ways he’s never known them to, the waters of his home reaching for the sky, and oh, the sky—filled with what reminded him of distant optics, or glistening treasures nestled in a blanket of black. He’s even seen far away vessels, ships, he recalled his parent referring to them once in one of his many tales of old; Orion hardly found himself thinking about the dangers of their occupants, as per warned the popular belief, because Alpha Trion had stories that strayed from what was accepted as common knowledge, common fact.
Stories were always exciting.
His satchel is sinking out of reach, and his freshly sharpened blade floats out and follows, glimmering tauntingly.
But the experience was euphoric.
He is tangled, his arms hug awkwardly against himself, and his tail can barely move.
Trips to the surface have given him memories he’d never forget.
He’s so unnaturally contorted. The pull of the water feels wrong…all wrong.
Memories that he never wanted to forget.
Now…
Orion thought the surface was beautiful, his adventures never led him to anything short of awe and wonder, but as the space between the ocean floor and the waters above lose their distance, as he breaches involuntarily and as sand begins to drag, and clog, and build into his vents and his gills, he wants nothing more than to get away from it all.
The bark of caution finally bites.
And he is helpless against it.
Between the panic and the pain and the shock, Orion can’t even begin to figure out how to free himself. The sensitive mesh between his plating and the silicon membranes of his tail are being ripped and torn into by ridged rock and coastline coral. His claw shoots out in an attempt to grip something, to—stop him from being pulled out of his home, but whatever leverage he makes snaps not a second later, adding to the cloud of disturbed sand and broken coral reefs the rest of him is dragged through.
But he isn’t deterred by the fact that he can’t swim now, that there’s not enough water, not for a second does he take his optics off the sea before him.
His home. His motivation. He wants to go home.
Orion thrashes and fights against the webs that dig into his face and body, they feel like squeezing threads of red volcanic rock, and his efforts against their pull only worsen the damage that dices his flesh and scratches his plates.
By chance he must’ve snagged a weak point in the thread along his claw enough to tear open a wide enough gap for his shoulder to pop loose.
But now there’s practically no water, and what Orion bleeds seeps in checkered lines, oozing slowly down his wounds, smearing in a grotesque, dull luminescence rather than being washed away by the sea. Instead of flaring his plating in aggression, he tries to lock up, scared and in defense, but hisses when it only snags the webs that have nestled between his seams.
Heat and needles radiate from his side through whack hard enough to make noise, drawing out a high pitched yelp cut short when he’s hit again. The front of his face meets the ground, hard but brief purely from his own adrenaline demanding he push himself back up. The next time he looks up, it’s through static and cracked visual input. His HUD, once frantic and urgent in letting him know everything wrong, goes dark.
Not a good sign.
For the first time, he’s tearing his sights away from the sea to whip around and flare his optics in a bright display of emotion at his assailants. Through big eyes that dart between three figures, he can see up close what he’s only known to exist through stories. Landwalkers. Once only a compelling creature to Orion’s curiosity, reduced now to the monsters they were described as.
Orion’s chest begins to emit an eerie growl, he’s hardly one to be aggressive, but instincts have long taken over, he isn’t thinking much of anything beyond the burning desire to live and to flee. Most of him is still stuck in the threads, useless to try and move against the uneven rocky coastline while he’s still being yanked and only has one arm to hopelessly scramble, and fail, for purchase.
His audial fins that protrude upward like attentive ears of a feline are pointedly pinned back, the vents along his abdomen whirring hard and sputtering out concerning amounts of grind from all that was tucked in there when he was pulled against the grain of his gills. The rising temperature of his internals would have been noticeably uncomfortable if not for the plethora of other stimulants of pain and panic that already overwhelm him.
The landwalkers are emitting sounds Orion can’t begin to understand, not while his spark rushes, while his body bleeds and his broken optics dart between one attacker to the next before landing on a stick that ignites with blue jagged light; a deep, electrical buzz emits from it, strong enough for Orion’s sensors to tingle in a dreadfully similar manner that would sends any creature turning the other direction in fear of running into range with an electrical eel. His tanks dip to a new degree, and Orion can only cower while the one holding it begins to approach.
White water.
Landwalkers swept away.
Orion’s sights obscured by a slate gray mass.
It’s an eruption of chaos that happens so quickly, a build up prefaced by absolute zero warning, it should be frightening.
Orion only blinks.
He swallows while his optics begin to scale the mass that moves but not enough to allow him visuals to the horrid noises of screaming and riiip-POP!-squelch happening beyond it. He’s in the middle of gazing upon a large dorsal fin and sleek, sharp protrusions of posterior armor when suddenly he’s tracking a dismembered arm flying overhead.
A broken, shouting voice whips his attention to the right where he sees a landwalker—well, not so much a walker anymore, they’re only a torso now—crawling just into view before they’re pawed by a lazy, and oh so very large claw. They’re dragged back and out of his sights leaving him to his imagination, and their terrified squall, to guess what happens next. He can only watch the hunched shoulders of this behemoth of a mermech while the screams of others grow louder and shorter, panicked and desperate.
A single wet crunch, and the cacophony ceases, but a vanishing echo to the nearby coastline waves.
There is nothing but tearing and chewing of mesh and metal to fill the absence of the terrible last moments of what apparently made this mech’s dinner.
Orion, somehow, despite his own torment, can’t help but to feel badly for such an ending…or perhaps he is only adopting the dread that is being the last one alive. It's not an uncommon thing to become food, should you run into someone as ruthless, and as hungry, enough, especially at Orion's size.
The shallow waters begin to seep and stain with pink oozing around the edges of them, dipping into crevices of the rigid rock bed below; the scent of it floods Orion’s olfactory, but rather than trigger any sort of hunger, it only picks up his own flight. Orion tries not to presume the worst of his fellow mermech, but strangers are strangers, this is one threat swapped for another, for all he knows those landwalkers won't be enough.
In a rush of new panic, Orion's gaze shoots back down and sees that the threads that still hold him are now pinned beneath the stranger's thick tail. Orion has limited mobility, but the way the moonlight reflects off the mech’s pointed, sharp armor grant him an idea; not a moment is wasted before he's acting on it. With his one free arm, Orion drags and wiggles closer to the mech’s body. He nervously checks if they’re still distracted—the sight of them suddenly giving a jerk, a tug, followed by a spray of blood is enough to cause him to grimace—before lifting the threads with a grunt and looping it around the sharp edge of one of the protruding points of the plates.
A final, tentative glance to the feasting giant, and Orion begins to pull at the threads.
And it works.
Adrenaline picks up at the success, the concept of freedom, and he gets too eager, because as the loops begin to snap away, slowly at first, then quickly in succession, Orion’s slow, calculated pulls turn into harsher, desperate tugs.
The larger mech stills, and Orion is frozen.
The air goes quiet, void of metal being torn into and internal cabling snapping away by what must only be teeth large enough to penetrate and jaws strong enough to rip. Orion watches the broad shoulders of the mech with large eyes, and slowly his hand begins to twirl the threads until he’s holding it in a vise fist. He sees the mech suddenly straighten, the back of their helm finally coming into view, and Orion gives a final strong yank.
The threads rip and form a large enough hole for Orion to really begin slipping through, but as he frantically works on pushing them off his body, the other mech turns their torso and whips their head to look right at him.
Orion flinches at the sight of dilated crimson optics locking onto him, a scarred face and a mien too unchanging for him to gauge as anything but something to be, in the least, cautious of—the suddenness of their movements doesn't help, nor the sight of blood decorating nearly their entire front, and a mangled body vaguely resembling one of Orion’s attackers hanging from their mouth.
Neither mermech releases the other from their gaze, locked in a silent standstill. Any movement that is made is done slowly, and entirely by Orion. The only thing that moves from the other are the eyes that follow.
Orion drags himself by the arms only to be halted by a resistance, a peep escapes him, and in that moment of a close-eyed grimace, he leaves himself vulnerable (even more so, considering). The threads have caught and slipped under plating at the meat of his tail, tugging at his protoform that adheres to the underside of hardened mesh-metal, of which, of course, is still pinned down by the mech that doubles his size.
The next time Orion looks up, he jolts at the sudden advancement from the stranger. His audial finials start to twitch, an inch forward, two inches back, and all over again; his chest starts to inflate and deflate in rapid succession as they draw nearer and nearer and Orion still—can’t move! He’s stuck! He can’t–he can’t–!
Like a bubble broiling from the deepest parts of him, his chin nearly touches the ground as his platting suddenly flares with a loud decompression of hot air. His hands tense into claws, leaving scratches embedded into the rock while his finials pin back as far as they’re made to. With lips pulled to bare pointed fangs, his throat draws out a very loud and a very upset hiss.
Blue, cracked optics, just as open and just as focused, just as wild, are locked onto the red ones that bore down on him from where they’ve suddenly halted. The moonlight is blocked, Orion is shadowed by the behemoth that hovers above and his plating begins to shimmer, rattle in warning while his chest reverberates a sound that’s supposed to be threatening.
Supposed to be.
There’s a slight perk in the mech’s posture, a tilt in his head and an adjustment in his arms, palms adjusting their weight from one hand to the other. Orion eyes start to narrow as he observes the more casual of body language, unsure whether—
Orion jolts enough to cause a clattering from his own plating when a rumble cuts through him, his expression popping into something less afraid and more curiously attentive, or surprised. His stance is next to follow, his arms pushing him to a gradual upright, while his finials, the first of him to stand ramrod straight, reverberate at the tips in tandem for as long as the mech before him chirrs.
It’s deep, though not a growl, a two-toned, fluctuating hum that feels…inviting, placating, under a different circumstance, maybe even comforting, but most importantly, non-threatening. Anything left of Orion’s defensive language drops, his claws retract and his platting completely settles, he openly gazes at the mech without fear entirely for the first time and begins to feed into the very thing that got him into this mess.
His curiosity.
His head moves with his optics as he begins to actually inspect who he looks upon, his gazing taking him from one guarded shoulder plate to the other. Deep crimson scales make up the first layer of their upper arms before fading into that thick, gray protective outer plating. It’s the same gray of their chest (he imagines, through the translucency of the blood from their most current meal), the patterns divulging down their abdomen to softer plates with smoother ridges; it follows along their belly until it spreads out into a deeper gray, hidden beneath the rest of their strong tail. When his eyes come back up, he notices how the surface of only one of their forearms forms into a thick, almost blade like crest. He's seen these sort of mer before, the kind that are built for battle, to be prepared and well protected for when they get into fights. An apex predator in a sea—and land, apparently, if close enough—filled with potential opponents.
Or prey.
Orion catches the way he's also being looked over, the easy tilt in their helm, and drag in their gaze as they follow down Orion's body and tail. The resonant trilling begins to tapper as crimson optics notice Orion's problem; a new look dawns upon their strong features, and it's something akin to when people would react to Orion's "reckless" adventures, disturbed or disgusted. Their chirrs take a downshift into throaty growls that have Orion feeling nervous. Before he can stop himself, his vents peek open a little more and his chest starts to vibrate, he begins a sound of his own and it immediately captures his audience of one. While it holds an unusual gravel, like the sound of tiny tumbling pebbles, it stops the mech's souring mood; they lock eyes again, this time without alarm, only mutual interest and lingering surprise. Their growls morph back into that two-toned resonance, and for a moment thereafter, it's nothing but buzzing air that trills in sets of two. A rich acoustic communication, distinct to each composer...cut short by an unfamiliar, jarring raucousness.
It sets Orion on alert, optics frantically tearing away as his finials twitch to pull back down. The noise is coming from beyond the mech, he can’t see it, but he can hear it, and it sounds awfully like the noises that had come from the landwalkers who attacked him.
Frantic, uncomfortable, and scared, he's back to square one. Trapped and helpless. He isn’t even paying a lick of attention to the mech before him anymore, only to the stupid threads he scrambles to detangle from the rest of his tail.
It’s why, before he can yet again make any sense of it, his vision is swarmed with that same slate-gray, so swarmed, in fact, it’s all he can see…That, and a layer of wet, sticky pink that now stains Orion’s own plates.
His hands are quick to press against what he realizes is the lower chest of the mech, cheek-plate pressed firmly into it by a hand he more so can feel than see, but a glance to the side easily enough reveals the way just their clawed crimson dipped fingers rest over the curve of his shoulder. In any other instance, he would have been more unforgiving than so pliant, would have pushed away to gather distance, but…Orion is not deaf to the approaching clamor of those he’s been shown to hurt him, it makes being hauled away by the being who didn’t the less harrowing outcome.
Seemingly for now, at least.