Hayden groaned as he flopped onto the couch.  “I mean, at least I get to skip months of healing, I guess?  I just figured I’d be back to normal thanks to magical healing powers.”

I patted the top of his head and then changed my mind and leaned down to kiss the top of his head instead.  “Your body still went through something traumatic.  Even if all the muscle and tissue and whatnot are healed now, it’s a lot for your system to handle.”  Especially since he was a human.  Humans couldn’t bounce back as quickly as most supernaturals from injuries.

Hayden grabbed at my waist as I went to walk by, missed, and captured my hand instead, which he tried to tug towards him.  “Come sit with me?”  He begged.

“He’s been sitting with you for most of the past two days in the hospital,” Vance pointed out as he emerged from the bathroom, where he’d taken a quick shower after our return.  “Give him a break to change clothes at least.

I had shifted back to my male form before leaving the hospital, as promised, just to make sure none of the human hospital staff noticed that one of the room’s inhabitants had switched genders without, you know, medical help.

Hayden made a pouty face but let me go, watching me leave reluctantly.

Instead of changing, though, I decided to prepare something quick and simple for us to eat.  Hayden raised an eyebrow when I offered him a sandwich.

“I can’t cook like you,” I pointed out, “and I need to take a quick swim – I won’t take long, I promise.”

Hayden looked a little guilty at the realization.  “Sorry, I forgot about that.”

“It’s okay.”  I leaned over the back of the couch to kiss his forehead.  “It’s kind of like an itch that builds.  It isn’t usually fatal unless we go a long time without getting in the ocean, like several months.  It’s just uncomfortable at most otherwise.”

When I did end up going outside, they both followed me, tugging on coats as they did.  Hayden was currently using a cane, though that wasn’t supposed to be permanent – while we did suspect he might always have a slight limp and would of course always carry the scars from his shark shifter encounter, his leg otherwise was fairly normal.  Aka normal feeling, movement, all that.  I think we were all deeply relieved that the fairy doctor’s healing had worked so thoroughly, but I actually thought Vance might have been even happier than his brother that the injury didn’t end up costing him more.

I still wished he hadn’t been hurt at all, but…some things were outside my control.

I made a clean dive into the ocean, allowing the towel I’d been wearing to float off behind me while I dove underwater and took a moment to close my eyes and just breathe deeply of the ocean.  We actually breathed both water and air, our respiratory systems filtering both separately when in aquatic form, and to me, the water was just as nice to feel in my lungs as air was in my human form.

The ocean would always be where I belonged.  I couldn’t hate it as much as I used to – after all, its currents were responsible for bringing me to the twins that night I’d almost died, like it was actually trying to save me.  Whether or not the ocean was a sentient thing itself wasn’t really important.  Instead, the important thing was that I was starting to move on from the arbitrary burdens placed on me by my first merfolk community and was learning to accept myself – all of me – just as I was.  That included the fact that I would always belong to the ocean.  It might not give me the same warm feelings that the twins did, but it was still home in the same way they were.

I was sticking fairly close to the surface, so I noticed when a small cloud of jellyfish with long, nearly invisible tentacles blew by me in the current.  Their stings wouldn’t bother me, but they might bother the twins, so I surfaced quickly to make sure they weren’t hanging their feet in the water.

Which, of course, Vance was, despite the freezing temperatures, watching for me.

He smiled and waved at me when he spotted me.  “Having fun?”

“Jellyfish!”  I called back, swimming in his direction.  “Get your feet out of the water!”

He obeyed instantly, quickly looking at his feet as he did, but by the time I’d gotten there he already looked relaxed again.  “Looks like they didn’t get me.  Thanks.  I’d rather not go back to the hospital today.  Tomorrow, maybe, but we just left today, we should at least have one day between hospital visits.”

I snorted and rolled my eyes, untangling a jellyfish from me as I did, tossing it gently back out towards the ocean.  Given their trajectory, I was surprised – but grateful – none of them had harmed Vance.  That was one more thing we didn’t need in our lives.  Kind of miraculous, really, that none of the tangles of tentacles had managed to brush against him.  If my protection mark worked properly, I’d assume it had done its job, but since it didn’t, it had to just be sheer luck that he wasn’t hurt.  Well, I could be thankful for luck.  Especially under the circumstances.

Hayden was reclining in a lounge chair, but he was watching me, a smile playing across his lips.  “I kind of like that your male form has so much exposed skin when you swim.  Enjoyable for us to watch.”

I cupped some water in my hands and flung it at him, just close enough to splash some cold water on his face but not close enough to drench him.  “Very funny.  Come summertime, you’ll be in the water with even less on.  At least I have a full tail in the water, you just wear swim trunks.”

“On your female form, your scales come all the way up to your neck, right?”  Vance asked.  Given that he’d seen it for himself, it wasn’t really a question I needed to answer, so he continued without waiting.  “Is there a reason the scaling is different on male and female or just has to do with modesty?”

I considered, then sort of shuddered slightly, and scales started to ascend up my male chest to my neck and then down my arms.  “We can actually fully cover our bodies with scales if we want,” I explained calmly as they watched in fascination, “we just…tend to sort of have presets for what we want, as it were?  Some oceanids wear full scales for both genders, some wear less than I do for their female form, it all depends on what we want.  We can shift our scales to cover our bodies as we want, the only exception being our tails don’t have a skin version so they’re scaled all the time.”

Vance reached out to touch my arms, clearly marveling over this as his fingers lightly traced the patterns of my scales.

I grinned wickedly and glanced back at Hayden, who was working on getting to his feet so he could come over and touch, too.  “Since Hayden seems to be having trouble focusing when I don’t use scales on top, maybe I should just keep covered up.”

“No!”  Hayden yelped.  He frowned at me, then relaxed when he saw the laughter in my eyes.  “I was not complaining, my dear Morgan.  I was complimenting you.  Admiring the view.”

I chuckled and kept myself pressed against the retaining wall so Hayden would also have a chance to get hands-on with my “new” scales, since he seemed curious about it.  When he sank to the ground next to his brother, I offered him my hand so he could investigate for himself.

Downside to this was they now each had a hand/arm, and I saw them exchange a look before they seemed to reach an agreement and both of them suddenly yanked upwards and back, pulling me out of the water to land on top of them.

Hayden ended up mostly on his back, laughing despite the cold water raining down on him.  Vance looked pleased, too, but then he suddenly remembered something and turned red.

“Oh, shoot – I forgot about clothes, I’m so sorry, Morgan, I didn’t mean to….”  He trailed off when he realized that I hadn’t shifted back but was squirming backwards, tail still intact.

“I don’t have to shift back on land,” I explained in a huff, “and I can shift without water.”  We rarely did that, for extremely practical reasons – mobility on land while having a tail instead of legs was very slow, at best.  Of course I’d hold back from shifting right now, though, even if it meant I was semi-stranded awkwardly in my aquatic form on land, not when shifting would mean landing on top of the two of them while not wearing anything at all.  That would likely lead to things I wasn’t quite ready for yet.

“Sorry.”  Vance grabbed my wrist and kind of helped lift me back towards the retaining wall, where I gratefully slipped back into the water.  “We’ll be more careful about that in the future.”

I splashed him a bit, too, startling him with the cold water.  “Next time think before you kidnap someone from the ocean, idiot.”

Vance wiped some of the water from his face but gave me a bright smile.  “Love you, too, Morgan.”

I paused, feeling warmth fill my chest.  Yeah.  I definitely did love them.  Idiotic activities and all.

~~~~

I was awoken in the middle of the night by the loud ringing of the telephone.  For a moment I just opened my eyes, rolled over, and stared in the dark, wondering why someone was calling us at this hour, before I realized that if someone was calling us at this hour, it must be important.

I jumped up and exited the smaller bedroom, reaching the phone just as the twins tumbled out of the master bedroom.

“Morgan!”  Bruce wasted no time.  “I think something’s going on with the Elder – I think she’s planning something for tonight.  I was feeling like something was wrong when I was down there today but I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was out just now for a midnight swim and something is definitely off.  I’m not even sure what, but something is.  I know it.”

My fingers tightened on the phone.  I trusted Bruce’s judgment, so something must be going on.  “You think Skye is in danger?”

“The Elder’s been too calm about this whole thing – like she knew she wasn’t in real danger.  I’m worried she’s planning something to take Skye out when she’s least expecting it.  Something that would force her and all the others to back down.”

In the middle of the night would be the perfect time, but what would – ?  Oh no.  There was only one thing I could think of that would force an entire community to back down against a crazed person.

Threatening the children.  It worked in a lot of societies, really.  Threaten the young, innocent children.  Those who didn’t yet have enough magic to defend themselves.  Threaten the future of the entire community, and they’d have to yield.

And by attacking in the middle of the night, when people were usually sleeping, the Elder might stand a better chance of actually getting her hands on a lot of the children, especially if this was planned.

“Bruce,” I said urgently, “approach from the west.  I’ll come from the east and if I need to, I’ll draw her attention, give you time to get the hostages – assuming she has some.”

Bruce didn’t need to ask about my reasoning – he knew as well as I did that the most likely way to force Skye and most of the community to yield would be through hostages.  He also would have a pretty good idea of what hostages would be most effective, too.

Bruce swore, agreed, then hung up.

“Morgan,” Hayden started, his eyes concerned.

“No.”  I held up my hand to stop him.  “I have to go and you can’t come.  This is a merfolk thing.  I warned you that the supernatural world can be dark sometimes – this just happens to be one of those times.”

They both looked agitated, worried, but they didn’t protest, didn’t try to stop me until I got outside and was about to dive in.

Then Vance grabbed my wrist and pulled me to him, one hand cupped behind my neck as he gave me a deep, intense kiss.  “Come back to us,” he whispered.  “In one piece.”

I nodded slightly, feeling my throat constrict, then turned to Hayden, who crushed me in his arms like he was afraid he’d never see me again.  Maybe he wouldn’t – it wasn’t an impossibility.

“I love you, Morgan,” he murmured before giving me a kiss of his own, hot and passionate.  “And I will not forgive you if you don’t come back.”

I laughed slightly and then let him go, pausing at the edge of the retaining wall to look back at them.

“I love you,” I told them both.

And then I dove in.