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sightseertrespasser · 1 month ago

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Too Deep, Too Shallow part 2

Welp, turns out there’s more to write.

Credit to @keferon for creating the AU and to the many wonderful folks who come up with ideas to flesh it out.

Much like the first humans to discover the wonders of honey, Blurr discovers the miracle of cured ham.

———————————————————————

Swerve dreamed of Blue.

The human had dreamed he was working on an air conditioner unit on the roof of a building. The sun was scorching, and the sudden gusting breeze was a relief on his poor back. He only turned to face it when the entire city began to scream.

Swerve saw a wave.

A wall of water.

It looked liked someone flipped the island 45 degrees and the whole thing was sliding into the ocean like a cookie into milk. Victim to vertigo and unable to move a muscle, he could only watch blank faced as the water just kept coming.

Cars swept by at highway speeds. A skyscraper near the shore tilted and fell into the current like a tree trunk. Chills sparked up his spine.

Swerve’s trance broke when reality set in that his rooftop wasn’t immune to the disaster coiling closer. When the water reached his feet, he climbed on top of the AC unit, breathing too fast. And when the water reached him again, he realized he was going to die.

In that moment, Swerve finally thought to call someone on his phone, anyone. Just to not be alone.

Swerve held onto the unit with one hand, and dialed with the other.

He called his former college roommate.

The water reached his wrist.

He called his coworkers.

The water reached his elbow.

He called his boss.

The water reached his shoulders.

The worst part, Swerve learned about himself last night, was that he really couldn’t think of anyone else to call.

Swerve rolled over in his sleep. Chest and throat painfully tight. Eyes stinging.

Exhausted and refusing to wake up fully, Swerve used the little part of his active consciousness to breath normally. He had practice.

Is it me?

It’s difficult not to think that, even if it isn’t true.

When you try everything to connect with other people but it never seems to stick. Never goes anywhere. For all his efforts to socialize in public, he’d only managed make one friend that actively sought him out, and it was a friggin’ fish.

Still, Swerve thought he was content with his life. He was okay with only having work friends. Happy with his media collections. And getting to visit Blue at the marina.

He thought he was okay with it.

To be liked but not wanted.

Swerve rolled over again, half conscious. He forgot to close the curtain last night and tucked his face into his arm to block out the light.

Stop it, I’m not having another existential crisis before my alarm goes off. Bad thoughts don’t count when you’re exhausted and definitely not before 7 am. That’s for business hours only.

Swerve tried to slip back into deeper sleep. He liked to daydream a little to block out the more invasive thoughts. He had a few well fleshed out oc’s and settings to mentally play around with for that reason. Did he want to explore the space ranger one? Or maybe the superhero group. Fantasy had been nice recently.

Instead, Swerve dreamed of Blue

He went back to the end of the nightmare. His fingers were numb and stinging at the same time and his predicament felt like an impossible trap where there was no escape, just delaying the inevitable.

It felt so horrifically real. Every muscle ached, pleading to give out. Each time they did, Swerve would be overtaken by an insurmountable desperation to live. And he always clawed his way back to the surface. Fighting to breath.

All he wanted was for the nightmare to end.

Eventually, his brain took mercy on him.

Blue appeared. Close and calm. The wild mer circled him like a shark. For a few seconds he wondered if he’d committed some kind of Fish-sin and now Blue was here to enact vengeance on his soul. Via teeth.

Instead, Swerve got the surreal experience of Blue talking to him. Or that’s what it felt like. The sheer amount of adrenaline saturating his brain kicked Swerve’s rational thinking all the way down to “terrified puppy” and he was ready to accept anything that got him out of there.

Blue was gentle. Blue wanted Swerve to let go. Blue didn’t let Swerve go. And that’s all that really mattered.

Swerve settled into the dream-memory of quiet clicking and slowly drifting. Now that the specter of death wasn’t present, it was a genuinely comforting end to a horrible nightmare.

Swerve sighed. Then his face scrunched. He picked out a rock digging into his hip and rolled onto his back.

Why is my bed hard?

All of the air was punched out of his chest at once as something huge, heavy and wet impacted him from above.

A crackling wheeze was all Swerve could manage as he was shocked into full consciousness.

He was a on a roof.

And Blue was on him.

Chittering.

Swerve froze, brain not really up for processing what the fuck was happening.

Happened.

Happened and is continuing to happen.

“Oh fuck you’re real.” Swerve started getting his elbows underneath him to sit up.

Blue clicked again, looking from Swerve to back over his shoulder.

“Oh my fucking god this is real.” Swerve took in the twenty foot high water surrounding them. Shattered buildings in every direction and the complete and utter lack of human life.

The fins across Blues body suddenly flared wide, as the mer whistled shrilly and flopped off of the human, dragging himself further from the water.

Swerve had his head in his hands.

“You’re real! That was real! I was going to die and you saved me! Oh fuck me my apartment was on the first floor.”

Blue had pulled himself to the other side of the roof and screamed, pointing at the water.

At that moment, Swerve witnessed a mass of tentacles and teeth breach the surface. Barbed hook’s digging into the flat rubber roof to haul its mutant body after its prey.

Swerve didn’t remember getting up, or crossing the majority of the roof, but when he reached the chest high ledge of the adjacent connected rooftop, he did remember Blue.

The mer had his back pressed against the wall. Eyes wide in terror as it looked desperately between Swerve and certain death.

In the next second, Swerve had his hands under the mers arms, swinging them upwards in a graceless arch. Screeching, Blue thudded onto the second roof.

Swerve scrambled up after the mer, leviathan lashing at the air behind him. The predator was unnaturally persistent, crushing the lower roof under its weight in its pursuit of its prey.

The long asphalt roof stretched before him, the mere possibility of safety dangled in the broken windows of the apartment complex abutting the shopping district’s row of lower buildings. He could make it. He could make it if he ran.

Swerve had a choice.

Oh who was he even kidding?

“Please don’t bite me please don’t bite me please don’t bite me.”

He scooped up Blue like a newlywed bride, and IMMEDIATELY had to abandon that hold in favor of carrying him like a tuba. Snarling, the leviathans teeth cut into the roof’s edge, shaking the building like a dog on a car bumper.

Swerve stumbled but maintained his forward momentum. Because the alternative was flattening a terrified wild animal made of knives and a hundred pounds of pure muscle.

Blue rewarded this decision by gripping more securely onto Swerves shoulders and not tearing into his soft fleshy throat like an emergency hot pocket.

Together, they moved frantically through the blasted clear window. Swerve landed hard on his knees, sodden carpet soaking back into sun dried clothing. He stumbled to his feet, splashing through the ruined apartment in a desperate search for stairs upwards.

The tsunami tore through every barrier it encountered, leaving every doorway busted wide open. The leviathan realized their preys means of escape and dove into the water.

Swerve skidded around the corner into the hall as the leviathan began thrashing against the floor beneath him. Carpet tore and wood splintered, tentacles snaked out blindly to catch anything they struck. Retracting violently back through the floor whenever one got a hold of something solid.

Swerve could feel his pulse in his tongue. Finding the emergency stairs and taking them two at a time, he didn’t stop until they reached the top floor and even then only after reaching the other end of the hall.

The leviathan screeched far below, slamming into the foundations one last time before finally going quiet.

Swerve slid down the wall as his legs gave out.

The wounds of his scrapped raw fingers had reopened, smearing a small amount of blood across Blue’s dark scales. Indistinguishable from the mers own shallow bleeding from the scratches along his fluke.

He couldn’t feel his legs and wished he couldn’t feel his arms. Every joint had locked so tightly Swerve thought he could hear them creak when he tried and failed to let Blue go.

Luckily, the mer either didn’t mind or was in a similar position. Human-like arms rigid around his shoulders, Swerve could feel the rapid pace of his heart pounding through Blues back, pressed against his wrists.

Eventually, their limbs relaxed enough to drop into uncontrollable shaking, allowing them to release each other. Swerve slid sideways along the wall, trying not to swallow his tongue, until he was prone on his shoulder.

Blue rolled off his lap to lie flat onto his back. Staring wide eyed at the ceiling.

The mer lifted one hand above his face, watching it shake. Before dropping it to his chest again and breathlessly laughing.

“Don’t-” Swerve swallowed a threatening rise of bile. “-tell me you’re a-“ He coughed. “-an adrenaline junkie.”

Blue lulled his head to look at him and smiled, twitching his hand limply.

On the second attempt Swerve realized he was waving.

“Hi Blue.” He waved back. “How’s it goin.”

After a good ten, fifteen minutes of laying on the floor together, Blue rolled back onto his front and crawled up to the window at the end of the hall. Pulling himself up the ledge, Blue looked out onto the city. The mer made a brief noise somewhere between a throaty clicking and a wail and thunked his forehead on the window sill.

“You okay?” His entire body protested any movement but Swerve pushed through to shuffle on his knees up to the window.

Blue didn’t lift his head, but did raise a hand to point out outside.

“Oh.” The view would have been breathtaking if Swerve had any to spare.

The apocalypse had redecorated. Skyscrapers leaned on each other like drunks leaving the bar. Boats nested on top of sturdy trees. Wreckage and ruins blocked up streets and ally ways creating oversized tide pools filled with garbage and displaced sea life.

But the ocean.

“Oh buddy.”

The ocean was miles away. Pulled far beyond what a normal tide would ever go down to. Getting back to the sea would take crossing the entire city, circumventing the blockages, avoiding those freakish monsters, and fuck knows whatever other hazards.

Blue slid to sitting, rubbing his face. Swerve thumped down next to him.

“Hey.” He nudged the mer. Blue looked up, blinking at him.

“I’m gonna get you home okay? Just wait here for a minute.” And Swerve shakily got to his feet.

The top floor looked like the water only reached halfway up judging by the water damage. Still enough the break any locked doors but the dry half gave Swerve some hope. It was eerily quiet. The only sounds were the lapping of water below, the creek of the building itself, and the distant cry of seagulls.

Swerve tripped through broken homes. The water damage wasn’t as bad here as the other floors but it had still been enough to wreck anything below waist level.

It felt wrong. Going through the belongings of strangers. It felt more wrong that no one was here. Swerve strained his ears, desperately listening for boats or helicopters or any sign of human life.

Silence.

Where is everyone?

It took some scrounging, but he managed to find everything he was looking for. Some packs of water bottles, packaged food, basic first aid supplies and most importantly:

Blue looked unimpressed by the hiking backpack.

More concerningly, the mer looked wilted. Barely lifting his head up and putting it right back down into the pillow of his arms, Blue moved lethargically.

“Hold on! It gets better.” And Swerve took out his pocket knife that he managed not to loose during the flood and started cutting a hole through the bottom of the bag.

Blue tilted his head like watching Swerve at a forty five degree angle would make it make more sense.

“Tada!” Swerve did a little jazz hand.

Blue raised an eyebrow ridge. Swerve chuckled awkwardly.

Hiding his embarrassment, Swerve let it lie for now and focused on the food instead. His stomach audibly growled and he felt his mouth start to water over a bag of chips and a can of spam.

Exhaustion and hunger really do make for the best condiments.

He used the pocket knife to cut thin slices of ham to sandwich between small handfuls of chips and shoved it into his mouth without any preamble.

Blue perked up at the sound of food, pulling himself over to the cans. The mer poked at the cured meat cube, cringing like he expected it to jump out at him. Gingerly, Blue drew a talon across the surface, spiraling off a corkscrew of spam. Plucking it delicately up, Blue chittered at the human before hesitantly eating a piece.

The mer paused. Blue looked Swerve dead in the eye, “Whistle-click-click.” and proceeded to sweep all of the spam cans closer to himself like a pile of poker chips.

“I was gonna, oh okay. Fish tax. I guess.” Swerve chuckled much more genuinely as Blue started digging into the square can. “Apocalyptic Ponyo still loves ham.”

Once the two had their fill, Swerve packed up their remaining supplies into the extra pockets of the hiking pack.

Now all he had to do was stuff a wild animal into a bag and carry that around for an indeterminate amount of time.

Yay.

“Ooookay Blue, we need to cover a lot of ground and I need a better way to carry you, so would you pleeeeease get into the bag on your own so I know you’re okay with this plan and won’t claw my face off for trying?” He smiled sweetly.

Swerve slowly shifted the backpack to lie next to the mer lengthwise. Blue was licking off a couple of his fingers and idly inspected the opening of the bag, looking through to the small hole at the bottom.

Blue stopped, glancing to his own tail and back to the pack. He locked eyes with Swerve, clicking and shaking his head side to side.

“Great! Gonna take that as a yes.” Swerve started positioning the opening of the bag towards the mers tail.

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, Blue made many new and interesting noises that Swerve suspected where curses upon his life, his ancestors and any potential descendants.

Strapped back to back, Swerve carefully rose to his feet, begrudging mer in tow.

“Comfy?” Swerve steadied himself at the top of the stairs. Blue hissed at god.

By the time the human got to the end of the stairs, he’d mostly gotten the hang of his new center of balance. While it was a far cry from dry land, the debris had stuffed tightly enough between the buildings that Swerve could pretty much clamber to the adjoining rooftops. So far so good, and no sign of Satans Goldfish either.

Breathing hard but evenly, Swerve made idle conversation. “You know, I recently got into this new anime?” He huffed, distracting himself from the burn in his legs. “It’s about this mecha pilot that gets launched into space and runs into a bunch of robot aliens.”

Blue whistled and clicked lightly whenever Swerve paused. The human waiting until the mer was done before continuing to infodump. Soon they were in a back and forth double blind conversation about whatever came to mind.

Eventually they reached the end of the “land” and couldn’t go further without reentering the water. Swerve hesitated. “Um, Blue?”

The mer twisted around slightly in the pack, making a questioning trill.

“Can you do that thing where you carried me again? I uh, never really learned to swim.” He dipped a toe into the water. The parking lot they were standing on provided a gradual slop downwards.

Blue clicked again, patting Swerve on the hip. The human got the idea and turned around, walking backwards into the water. Muttering “I am full of stress hormones and micro-plastics. Nothing wants to eat me. I am full of stress hormones and micro-plastics. Nothing will enjoy eating me.”

He felt Blue tug on the extraneous buckled straps that were pulled over the mers shoulders, causing Swerve the lean backwards a bit more.

The trust fall into the water proper went surprisingly smoothly. Despite Swerve involuntarily wheezing at the drop.

After a few test swishes, Blue swam, carrying them onward. Maybe it was because of the full body exhaustion, but once they got going, Swerve felt uncannily like he was drifting down a lazy river. It was almost kind of relaxing.

The sun shone bright, refracting crazily off of broken windows and rippling water.

They passed under the uppermost branches of several sturdy trees. The shade a nice reprieve from the heat of the day. They passed by a huge metal hand sticking up out of the water and Swerve got the clue they were swimming through one of the local parks near that shady ass aquarium. He managed to direct the mer generally towards the sea and Blue adjusted course.

The pair floated along.

Swerve drummed his fingers on the backpack straps, “Why do you like me?”

The mer trilled, carrying his own half of the conversation independent of Swerves actual input.

Swerve let his head lightly rest against the back of Blues. Staring up at the apocalypse and feeling the weight of his very dead phone in his pocket. “I mean. I just kinda want to know what I did right? For you to want to come out here to save me.”

Blue chittered back for a while, ending in a quick series of whistles.

“And let me stick you in a backpack.”

Blue suddenly flipped them over, dunking Swerve into the water and sending the human scrambling.

Sputtering and snorting water out of his nose, Swerve got an unexpected hold onto tin slats. Wiping off his eyes, he saw they’d reached another barricade for him to carry them across.

“A little more warning next time?” He shook the water from his hair.

“We’re not exactly facing the same direction.” Swerve pulled them up onto the pentagonal roof, looking like the upper portion of some kind of restaurant.

Blue at least had the decency to sound halfway apologetic when he clicked this time. Swerve hummed appreciatively.

Standing up, he spotted the signature glass dome of the city mall. The structure as a whole looked like it held up fairly well. The malls second story veranda looked like it lined up pretty decently with the top of a couple of shipping containers that’d gotten stuck between the restaurant and the mall.

Path clear for once, Swerve splashed through the ankle high water into the building, hopeful they’d find more supplies or even other survivors for a change.

Once inside, it took minute for Swerves eyes to readjust to the change in light.

The shaded interior looked like if Atlantis had shopping malls.

Beams of sunlight streamed in from above, giving the space a dreamy feel. Seaweed wrapped itself around every railing like tangled garlands. Small schools of fish window shopped below the surface. There were even a couple of napping orcas in the central atrium.

“Haaaa” Swerve could have swallowed his own throat.

There is ONE napping orca in the central atrium, being held up by another VERY MUCH AWAKE orca who just locked eyes with the intruding human.

Swerve saw the full body flex the mer had at spotting him. Eyes wide and burning with a barely contained oceanic fury. Said eyes darted rapidly between Swerve and the still sleeping mer cradled in their arms, and the dilemma was so clear it could have been written in the stars.

Option A: Let pod mate sleep.

Option B: Murder.

Please pick option A please pick option A please pick option A.

The decision was made for them when, curious as to why Swerve stopped, Blue turned around and let out an ungodly shriek.

The second mer startled awake, thrashing at the water as their pod mate clicked so loudly Swerve thought they were gun shots going off.

He booked it for the broken escalators, repeating their mad dash from that morning.

Orcas can’t climb stairs! We just need to hide on the top floor until they get bored just like before!

Swerve felt the escalator shake behind him. The formally sleeping orca mer was using biceps the size of Blue to haul themselves up after them.

“Oh COME ON!” Swerve double timed it, reaching the top of the stairs just in time to see a fountain of water explode onto the third floor. The whole building rattled with the impact of the first goddamn killer whale landing directly in the way of their escape.

“𝒽ⓔ𝕐 ώα𝒾𝐭 ᵘᑭ!”

The base boosted, distorted imitation of human speech that went off behind him set whatever remaining sanity Swerve had on fucking fire.

He started laughing. Wheezing hysterically. Backing away from the two massive mers until he bumped into the inner railing of the veranda.

The mers closed in together. One snarling siren like whistles, the other mimicking human speech.

Swerve was yanked backwards, and fell through open air.

He took what he hoped wasn’t his last breath.

And then the moment they hit the water, Blue dropped into a whole new gear.

Swerves only warning was rising WHOOSH of water before he was being dragged under at highway speeds.

There were a lot of things Swerve experienced in the last 24 hours that he’d never thought of nor wanted to experience. The newest bullet point to add to that list is what it feels like to go watering skiing with a back pack instead of skis.

The froth of seawater prevented him from opening his eyes or taking a breath. Swerve tried to count the seconds but lost track when the dark blotches of color over took his vision.

He tried once, to reach down and grab at Blue, begging for air. For mercy. But the human couldn’t push past the current.

And when the ringing in his ears drowned out the beating of his heart, it all went dark.

Swerve dreamed of Blue.

———————————————————————

Swerve thinks the orcas want to eat them and one is specifically possessed by the devil.

Blurr, who hasn’t slept in over 24 hours, thinks the fish police are here to arrest him.

Prowl thinks a human has abducted a well known celebrity to put in another aquarium.

And Jazz is over stimulated as all hell but has a gut feeling all of them are wrong.

-SSTP

#apocalyptic ponyo #writing #fun times #yes the dumbasses both named each other after colors #Blurr is so tired #Swerve has aged 50 years over the course of this story #who will they run into next?

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