Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dick feels kind of nervous as he looks at himself in his swimming trunks in the cabin bathroom mirror. It’s general knowledge that Dick Grayson is a mer, even if Robin masquerades as human, but after spending so long around humans, he feels kind of uncomfortable about having his scales and gills on display like this. He knows that the other Justice Leaguers’ sidekicks are unlikely to care as much as the people at his school but he misses his parents and he misses the circus and he misses walking around with confidence that no one cares if his legs are scaly or if his laughter sounds like trilling. “Hey, Traffic Light, we’re gonna leave you here if you don’t come out soon,” Roy heckles.

“On my way,” Dick replies. He takes a deep breath. This is fine. He realises that humans don’t have pouches for rocks under their armpits and wonders if he should just put a t-shirt on too but it will be fine. He steps out.

“Your scales are gorgeous,” Donna says immediately.

Dick looks down at his legs, they’re just juvenile scales, green and yellow in order to mix with sea weed and sand in the event of sharks or orcas or larger mer species. “Thanks,” he says anyway, smiling slightly.

“Yeah, pretty, the lake awaits,” Roy hurries them out. “Fishboy’s going to die if we don’t get him in water soon.”

“I’m not that fragile, Roy,” Garth bickers.

“Race you there!” Wally shouts, darting off.

The lake stretches out almost endlessly, the trees on the horizon looking closer to little paint strokes. Roy plunges into the water, Wally charging in afterwards. Dick hesitates for a moment, swimming in lakes was always a thing of his childhood, where they’d park up the circus wagons and his parents would carry him to the nearest body of water and they’d swim about and tell him stories from their childhoods that were so different to his own. Standing here now, listening to the more rounded sounds of human chatter, it feels like two worlds are colliding. Aside from the occasional aside to Bruce, he hasn’t really visited his parents’ world since… then.  Garth looks nervous and Dick remembers that the surface is still new to him, freshwater probably even more so.

“It’s less salty than seawater and a bit murkier, but once you get under the surface it’s not that different.”  He smiles at where Wally and Roy are already flailing about in the water, “We’ll swim better than them at any rate.”

“And there’s no sharks?” Garth checks.

“No sharks,” Dick agrees. He steps into the shallows and it feels like a homecoming. There are parts of the human world he loves, he adores leaping from building to building, he likes video games and chemistry and gymnastics. He loves Bruce too and definitely likes his new, more human than him, friends. But no matter how at home he is in the air and on land, he will always understand why his ancestors chose the water millions of years ago. It’s steady in the way of living things, not unchanging like stone but not in constant, uncaring flux like the winds. He looks to the way Wally and Roy are splashing about like flailing seals. When he was young, his mum would always warn him against that, telling him that that was what brought in the sharks. Once his dad had taught him to swim carefully by grabbing his leg and nipping at his ankle, pretending to be a shark, a friendly game and a stern warning about what the waters held. “Want to play a prank on the others?” he asks Garth.

“What’s the idea?” Garth asks.

And so Dick whispers his plan.

He dives underwater moments later, Garth forcing back laughter as he wades over to the others, Dick’s gills opening as he practically creeps along the mud. “Do you think there are sharks in here?”

“Nah, it’s freshwater,” Roy tells him, “No sharks about for miles.”

“Wasn’t there a case of a shark in the Ohio river?” Donna asks, Dick isn’t sure if she’s helping them on purpose or by accident, but he’s thankful for it.

“Yeah, but that’s so rare, WG,” Wally says, “We’re fine.”

Dick brushes one hand against Roy’s ankle then, feeling the muscle tense before he grazes it with his canines.

Roy shrieks, immediately flailing about in the water. “Something freaking bit me!”

Dick surfaces then, grinning with his teeth just slightly on display.

“You are a fucking dickhead!” Roy shakes him back and forth a little.

Everyone laughs then, Dick making a trilling noise at the same time.

“Wait, how do you make that noise?” Wally asks.

Dick pauses, trilling is just trilling. “I kind of just do?” He trills again.

“Wait, is it like this?” Wally makes some strange grumbling hum.

“No, you need gills to do it properly,” Dick says.

Roy suddenly looks excited, jumping slightly in the water, “Is it like what dolphins do?”

“Kind of. Trilling is more to keep your orientation and to find clams buried in the sand, it’s also a…" humans don't really have a noise that means "Yes, I'm biting you but because it's fun, not because I want to hurt you" and Dick isn't quite sure how to describe it in English, "a play noise? Kind of like laughter. We use other sounds for more complex communication." 

“So, you could use it for treasure hunting?” Wally asks.

“I want to know what’s in the lake,” Donna adds.

Dick quirks an eyebrow, “I’m not sure what treasure we’re going to find in the middle of a lake.”

“It’s actually got a pretty deep history, pun now intended,” Roy tells him. “It was quicker to send boats across the lake than to cart things to the other side of it. Every now and then one of them would sink and now there’s just stuff at the bottom of the lake. Wait, there might even be booze!”

“I thought you had to be at least twenty-one to drink alcohol?” Donna asks.

“Only when there are adults around.”

“Dude, I think you’re the only one here who can even drink,” Wally says. “Donna and Garth are too toxin resistant to get drunk, my metabolism’s too fast and if Dick can’t eat pizza, I’m fairly sure he can’t drink beer.”

“Yeah, alcohol’s pretty toxic to mers,” Dick scratches the back of his head. He hates his digestive system and its focus on meat sometimes. Pizza looks so fucking good but hyperglycaemia because his pancreas is not build for that many refined carbohydrates sounds pretty miserable. “I can search for other things. Cool rocks?”

“Rocks?” Roy asks.

“Yeah,” Dick reaches for his own. “A good rock is so useful for so many things. You can hit crabs with it, you can leave it in the sun for a while so its warm, you can hit sharks with it if you time it right, sometimes people try to punch my side and break their knuckles.”

“How much time do you spend hitting crabs?” Roy asks.

“Well Alfred insists on buying shellfish from the grocery store because he doesn’t trust the fish in Gotham Harbour to not be filled with mercury so not often. But…”

“Don’t bother with Roy, Robin, he doesn’t understand the importance for swords either.”

“Okay, if you see any cool rocks, I want a cool rock.” Roy tells him. “Although I think I’ll pass on the whole crab whacking thing, I like my seafood cooked.”

“Your loss. Garth, do you want to see what humans ditch in freshwater lakes?”

“Yeah, let’s have a look.”

They swim out for a while, Donna flying over them until they both dive down. Dick doesn’t quite get why Atlanteans spend so much time listening to fishes thoughts or how they even gained that power, but it’s useful while they’re underwater, especially seeing Garth doesn’t understand what trills and clickers and pops mean. “There’s definitely nothing dangerous in here, right?” Garth asks.

“I don’t think so, maybe snapping turtles but they’re not going to be out this deep,” Dick says. “I’m the scariest thing here.” He jokes.

Garth chuckles sheepishly and Dick remembers that a lot of people don't realise that not all mer species are dangerous to humans.

“I’m guessing the mers you grew up seeing were pretty different to me?” Dick asks.

“Yeah, in Atlantis, we mostly see abyssal and deep sea mers,” Garth tells him. “Neither of which you really want to get near. A shoal of deep sea mers can strip a person to bone in seconds and abyssal mers are so big that they can swallow you whole. They also don’t have eyes, they’re kind of terrifying.”

“Yeah, my great grandparents once went to war against a particularly annoying pack of sea otters. It cost my great uncle a toe and most of his dignity.”

“Why were they fighting otters?”

“The otters were stealing from the hermit crab farms. If it was another pod of mers, they would have maybe tried trading with them but otters are well… otters.”

“So, you had a war?”

“You know otters will break into dens and eat baby mers?” Dick said. “Anyway, Batman was telling me that the humans once had a war against emus and lost. At least my family won the otter war.”

Garth chuckles slightly. “Why didn’t your great-grandparents otter-proof the shell farm?”

“It wasn’t really viable with the resources they had.”

“They couldn’t build a cage over the shells.”

“We’re…” He tried to think how to phrase this. “I can act like a human-ish and I can understand the same things any human can.”

“You’re smarter than pretty much any human I’ve met.” Garth tells him.

Dick lets out an awkward squeak at that comment, “Thanks. But mers aren’t humans. As an Atlantean, you’re kind of a human who ended up magically underwater. Mers like me have never been human or well, it depends on whether you count Australopithecus as humans. You guys worked out how to control fire and then in the past hundred thousand years or so have somehow become the dominant species on the world. We on the other hand, found more aquatic niches and we’re good in those. But things like fire and writing and houses and medicine and science are all pretty difficult when you’ve got sand, coastal grass, rocks and fish.”

“Human ‘necessities’ also are not really necessary. My great, great, great grandparents visited a human settlement once and it was so filled with disease and poverty. Yes, the humans’ pack was very big, but so many of them were hungry and sick. We didn’t have those problems for a very long time because our packs were always small enough that there was enough food so our rocks and our crabs and our sand nests were all we needed, we were big enough that most of the land animals avoided us, especially as a group, and agile enough that if a shark or dolphin or bigger mer came at us we could dart for the shallows.”

“Also doesn’t help that the things that make us good at living in the water make us kind of bad at living on land,” he wiggled his fingers, showing the webbing between them, “You can imagine how uncomfortable it is to hold a pen when there’s a membrane connecting your index finger and your thumb. Or growing crops. We spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving to live exclusively off shellfish, fish and the occasional bit of seaweed for fibre and then you guys come along like “We’re going to grow all these food sources that are literally just starch which you can't even process properly anymore.” Although will point out, we had our agricultural revolution long before you guys did. Ours just revolved around farming crustaceans and molluscs and didn't destroy any forests.”

“Anyway, that’s very much a tangent. I guess the point is why spend hours making a hand-axe to travel to the nearest woods where there’s going to be bears and wolves and have to scavenge for branches which are the right size and shape for your cage, then bind them together with reeds and then have to lift it whenever you want a hermit crab while hoping that the otters don’t just do the same when you could just chase them away and then also not have to worry about them eating your kids?”

“We can, or at least coastal mers can, adapt to the human way of life. My parents did, I did. But before humans kind of destroyed everything with pollutants and plastics and overfishing and turning all of our beaches into tourist destinations, we didn’t have to.”

“Wow.”

“Sorry,” Dick raised his chin in embarrassment. “I think I was just working some stuff out myself there.”

“No, it’s interesting. Do you know why abyssal mers are the way they are?”

“Serious answer is deep sea gigantism although I’d argue that they’re also just proof that we can’t have nice things. Lesser pelagic mers were a much scarier thing for my parents to be honest. There was a family who’d take their calves to our beach to learn to hunt. They did this for generations.”

“I kind of forgot that mers eat other mers too.”

“Oh god, yeah,” Dick chuckles slightly. “Pretty much everything eats coastal mers.” They’re near the bottom of the lake now and he’s having to slow his movements a little in the lower oxygen.

“You okay?” Garth asks.

“Yeah, not really built for deep diving but fine,” Dick clickers then, listening out for anything interesting. “Found something.” He points out an old crate, there’s something solid inside it but he’s not really sure what. There’s a couple of breaks in the box so whatever it is, it’s waterlogged.

“I’ve got it,” Garth lifts it with ease.

The swim back to the surface and then to shore goes a lot quicker without Dick processing the impact of humanity’s ambition on his species’ chances of survival. Once they’re in the shallows, Dick collects four rocks, looking for ones that are dark and flat, comfortable to carry around and heavy enough to break exoskeletons. He shoves two of them in his pouch with his own and then carries the other three in his arms.

The others are sat on the shore when they surface, “We bring a mystery crate and rocks,” Dick tells them as Garth sets the crate on the riverbank.

Everyone takes a rock and then Donna pries open the box to find a waterlogged and swollen chair, a lamprey still trying to break into the cracked leather.

“Think we could put this in the log cabin?” Wally asks.

“Bruce will probably throw it out,” Dick says, “But you know, we could make our own base. Then we wouldn’t have to crawl through the vents in Watchtower to go on missions.”

“Or wait for the Justice League to leave!” Donna agrees.

“New base! New base!” Wally starts shouting.

“And we’ll need a team name. Junior Justice?” Garth suggests.

Roy wrinkles his nose. “We may as well be boyscouts with that.”

“What about… the Teen Titans?” Donna asks.

“Yes!” Wally agrees.

“Sounds pretty badass to me.”

“Sure.”

“All in agreement?” Dick checks, he gets four nods back. “Well then, Titans together!”