#these eels are supposed to be safe for tank mates

[show-us-your-wrasse]

That’s a very brave shrimp 🦐

[chainsxwsmile]

conseelgiere answered:

I’ll keep you safe. I’ll keep you safe. It echoes through his mind, and what teeming emotions it stirs up he can not even begin to untangle and decipher. Longing, perhaps. Remorse he can’t place, the strongest yet vaguest conviction that he has been wronged in some way. Some deeply-buried part of him wants dearly to believe it’s kindness alone which drives the shark, but he can’t be certain, and that uncertainty may prove to be the difference between continuing to walk this tightrope he’s committed himself to and catastrophically slipping off it.

What must he do, he wonders, to keep this no doubt coveted spot as something too useful to devour? He’s done little for Bruce so far. In the meantime, he supposes his old cool affability might buy him time.

“That’s kind of you,” he starts with, though it comes out startlingly more mechanical than he’d intended. In a seeming attempt to make up for it, he adds, “Thank you.”

Bruce would have been lying if he said that he wasn’t still trying to... ‘figure out’ Anago. Few fish had escaped the clutches of death from the decidedly inescapable fate of a ‘restaurant’. Few fish had ever managed to escape back into the sea, back to freedom from such a dreadful place. The shark hadn’t been anywhere near these ‘restaurants’ before, but he had heard some rather gut-churning tales of horror down the proverbial grapevine.

And Bruce decided that the very worst thing to do would be to bring it up in conversation. The shark hadn’t any idea of what terrors and monstrosities the eel had faced at the hands of the two-leggeds. There was no point picking at wounds that may have only just scabbed over... even if Bruce found himself wondering what Anago would have been like had he been born and raised, free and happy in the reef instead of a sterile tank.

“It’s no problem at all, mate,” Bruce replied. “I mean it. Lot’sa fish look out for each other ‘ere—” And I won’t let you get captured again. Bruce didn’t vocalize the last sentence, unsure how so premature a promise would taste. But he would try to keep Anago safe, and away from the humans and their knives.