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glitter-lisp · 7 years ago

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Based off of this lovely piece of art by @randomslasher. Is there more to come from this? Who knows! Not me! Anyways here’s the longest fic I’ve written in months!

If asked, Logan Sanders would not call himself a cryptozoologist. He was simply a biologist who happened to have a more... open mindset than many of his colleagues. So yes, maybe that did result in him flying off to Scotland or Nepal in search of these so-called "cryptids," but he was simply examining evidence and forming hypotheses the way any sound scientist would. More often than not, what he found was nothing more than stories and folk tales and, occasionally, proof that someone had been deliberately fooling the locals.

Sometimes, however, he found himself here, in places like this: an isolated warehouse owned by a private corporation, fully of high-tech equipment and computers and a single enourmous tank that took up most of the room. Inside the tank was a perfect fascimile of the Atlantic Ocean a few miles off the coast of Florida. Logan and an oceanographer had consulted on the exact amount of sand, silt, and salt that were to go inside. Looking at the murky water now, it was almost as though they had somehow cut a piece of the ocean away and transported it several miles inland.

The water did not hold Logan's attention for a second.

What he was staring at was the creature inside. There were several large rocks piled together in a way that formed a natural cave (or as natural as it could be, with Logan and his colleague carefully designing every last detail of the tank's contents), and the creature was hiding inside there. Logan could just make out the gleam of its eyes. It seemed to have a mostly humanoid torso, though were legs should be, its body melted into a large, fish-like tail. Large spines spouted from its back down the tail, and although there were no other markers or any other members of its species to judge by, Logan would guess by their size that the creature was male. Its scales were sleek and black, and its eyes were the same. It had not come out since being put in the tank.

That was all that they knew about it.

"And the fishermen that found it signed the non disclosure agreements?" he asked the man next to him, who nodded.

"Yes. They both seemed eager to forget about it and take the money we gave them. Even if it did get out, we took all the evidence. They don't even have pictures any more. No one will ever believe them."

Logan hums, narrowing his eyes at the creature thoughtfully and deliberately quashing the slight guilt he feels at the thought of the two people who might have become rich and famous, had Logan's boss not gotten there first. The creature had been caught in the net a couple fishing a few miles out from the shore, presumably while hunting for its own dinner. It was pure chance that his boss had happened to be nearby on his own boat, enjoying the weather - he had always been fond of storms. The whole exchange had taken place before anyone made it back to land. The people who had found the creature left with no fish, no nets, and a check for a ludicrous amount of money.

His boss left with the creature.

Two days later, they had retrofitted an old sea life rehabilitation center and the creature had been transferred. And here Logan was now, head of the project, having signed his own papers to keep quiet about it and tasked with discovering everything he could. About a creature that was, by all rights, a mermaid.

"It's an ugly bastard," his boss said, voice reverent. "Ugly as hell. Absolutely stunning."

"Sea creatures are unlikely to have a concept of- oh. Yes, I see what you mean. It is certainly a unique specimen."

He grimaced when his boss clapped him on the back. "Damn right, it is. All right, everything is taken care of. You've got two interns under you, very well trained, extremely curious, and extravagantly well paid. Half a dozen guards to keep an eye of you, the facility, and the creature. If anything happens, you tell them, and then you call me immediately. I'll stay out of your hair as much as possible. You have the key code and an actual, physical key. This place is yours, Doc."

"I really prefer Dr. Sanders," he said, and his boss clapped him on the back, harder than before.

"You find out everything you can about this thing," he said in a low voice, leaning in close. "Is it intelligent? Is it dangerous? More importantly, are there more of them?"

"What do you hope to gain from this?" Logan asks. "There is only so much information that can be gathered from observing a single member of an unknown species in captivity. It's hardly going to behave in its normal manner, whatever that might be. You would gain more from tagging it and releasing it. Or, if you're that worried about being unable to track it, you could always just dissect it."

He knew the creature couldn't hear him. But that didn't change the fact that its dark, unblinking eyes looked somehow more terrified than they had just a few seconds before. Beside him, his boss gave an affected shudder.

"And kill such a beautiful thing?"

"You called it ugly," Logan mutters, and the man keeps talking as though he hadn't heard him. Probably a good thing for both of them.

"No. This is the scientific find of the century. Hell, of the millennium. The only reason I haven't already gone public with it is because I don't want it getting snatched out of my hands and carted off to people who would treat it less delicately than you and I will. Eventually, I will release it, with a tracker. Assuming I can't find any more of the creatures; I've got boats out trawling for them right now."

Logan hummed quietly. "All right. In that case, I need to get my supplies. Is this room equipped with cameras? However many there are, I want more. We're going to need to keep the creature under constant surveillance if I'm to learn anything about it."

Constant surveillance did absolutely nothing. The creature never left its cave; even when they dropped fish in twice a day for it to eat, it waited until one swam close enough for him to reach out with one long, sinuous arm - fin? - and snatch it up. Logan tinkered with camera angles and tripods. He attempted insert one into the tank itself. It was the most he saw of the creature in the first forty-eight hours, when it darted out of its cave, snatched the camera out of the water, and smashed it against the glass of the tank. Logan did not try again.

As frustrated as he was by their lack of progress, he couldn't help but understand. The creature had been stolen from its home and thrown into a strange tank, surrounded by strange creatures. It could hardly be expected to be swimming around and displaying itself and its natural behaviors for the benefit of the scientists observing it.

On day five, Logan was standing outside the tank at three in the morning, staring until his vision went blurry. He blinked several times and kept staring, until his eyes actually crossed, and only then did he reach up to rub at them with one hand, groaning. His glasses pressed uncomfortably into his forehead, and he spun around on one heel and leaned back against the glass, slowly sinking down until he was sitting. He was the only one there, save for two guards. One was outside of the room, patrolling the rest of the complex, and the other was in the main office watching the security tapes.

No one was watching. Logan pulled out his phone.

It was horribly unprofessional. It was, perhaps, slightly illegal, or at least very deeply frowned upon. His boss let Logan get away with a lot, they had worked together too long for anything other than that, but he would hardly be happy about this. Careful of the cameras that he himself had helped position, Logan ducked his head and tucked his phone in close to his stomach. He wouldn't have gotten service out here anyways, and there was a cell scrambler on the premises to make extra sure no one was sharing confidential information from the facility, or leaving themselves open to any sort of a cyber attack. That was the last thing they needed.

Instead, he pulled up one of his half a dozen puzzle and brain teaser applications, and set to work finding anagrams for the word "holiday." The graphics of the game were rather annoying; he didn't need bright colors and a vague, never fully explained plot about sentient food items to hold his attention, but the actual game play was engaging enough that he was able to look past the application's faults. He had, at the very least, disabled the sound, so it no longer played cheerful eight-bit music in a major key that got stuck in his head for days at a time.

Some time later, he had just finished his fourth word of the night ("multiplex," resulting in over fifty other words, some of which he really had to wrack his brain for) when, as the screen went black while loading the next level, he saw his reflection in it. More importantly, he saw the reflection of the creature in the tank, floating behind him and looking over his shoulder at his phone.

He would like to say that he stayed calm and did not let on that he had seen it, that he simply stayed still and waited until he could check the tapes the next morning so as not to startle it. But the fact was that he was so startled that he yelled and scrambled away from the tank, flinging his phone somewhere off to the side in his surprise. He wound up some ten feet away, having stumbled to his feet and run a few steps before his brain caught up with his body. He heard a wild splashing in the tank, and whipped around just in time to see the creature's tail disappearing back into its cave.

His heart pounding in his throat, Logan cautiously walked over to where his phone was lying abandoned on the ground, not taking his eyes off the cave as he slowly bent over and picked it up. "I, ah, I'm sorry for startling you," he called, then scoffed at himself. The creature obviously didn't speak English. And even if it did, it wouldn't hear him through the glass and the water. "Stupid," he muttered, shaking his head and pocketing his phone with, he was embarrassed to notice, trembling hands. The thing had really startled him.

He caught the briefest glimpse of its eyes staring back at him from the depths of its cave before it wriggled back into the shadows.

Reviewing the tapes back in the office, Logan watched as, exactly seventeen minutes after he sat down outside the tank, the creature emerged fully from its cave. It had stuck its head out twice before, and its whole torso once, but each time had darted back inside. Logan never even noticed. It spent another four minutes swimming back and forth between him and the cave, inching closer to him each time, and finally spent another three simply floating in the water right behind Logan. Observing him.

He copied the video clip to the file on his computer, then set to work taking several still frames from the video so he could see the creature more clearly. Fortunately for him and his research, it had spent some time staying relatively still, and he was able to make it out in much more detail than any of them had managed before. Up close in the photos, it looks almost human, with a few notable and somewhat disturbing differences. He tried to remember that it wasn't. Scales covered its head. Although its mouth and eyes were both on the front, similar to a human face, they looked almost horrifyingly wrong. The eyes were perfectly round and big and perfectly black, too far apart and angled outwards in a way that probably allowed the creature to see to the side and in front of it. Its mouth was lower on its head than a human's, and the lipless edges stretched back along its jaw, nearly twice the width of a human's.

He wasn't sure why he was so surprised by this. Of course it wouldn't look like a human. Just because its top half was roughly human shaped didn't mean it had to share any other resemblance. But the fact remained that it was just close enough to human to make it look horribly deformed, even though all evidence would suggest it wasn't. That was just what it looked like. It shouldn't be any stranger than looking at any of the other creatures Logan had studied over the years.

But that didn't change the fact that something in him simply rebelled at the creature's appearance. Something about it was wrong.

"Everything about this is wonderful!"

That was what his boss had said when Logan showed him the pictures and the video, claiming that he had pretended to pull his phone out as a distraction. His boss had been unsurprisingly thrilled, and did not seem to feel any of Logan's discomfort with the creature's appearance.

"Try it again, okay? See if you can get it to come close, just without screaming and running away from it this time!" He laughed and - Logan braced himself - slapped Logan on the back. "Keep up the good work. This is the closest we've gotten this whole time. It's all uphill from here!"

"Going uphill is more difficult," Logan said flatly. "Which is generally the way this work progresses so yes, I suppose it is all uphill from here. I'll come by tonight again, when the interns are gone. They're good scientists, but I don't want to spook the creature by having too many people around."

"Whatever you think is best."

"Everything I think is best," Logan snapped. "That's why you hired me."

Over the next two weeks, Logan was able to coax the creature out nine more times. The second it thought he was looking at it, though, it would bolt back into the safety of its cave. Logan had taken to pacing around the perimeter of the cave, because as much as he tried, he was having a difficult time adjusting to coming into the facility at night and leaving during the day. He wasn't sure if the creature was nocturnal or not, but it certainly seemed more willing to come out whenever they turned the lights down low and kept as many people out of the room as they could. So Logan, too, became more active at night, much as his body protested the change. More than once in the last few weeks he had fallen asleep while sitting by the tank. His neck had ached for hours afterwards.

In those two weeks, he had learned not nearly as much as he would have liked. The creature seemed to have no preference for any particular kind of food; it would eat whatever they dropped in its tank. No more of its kind had been found. Logan had gotten a few more detailed shots, but because everything was simply a screenshot of a video, they still weren't as high resolution as he would have liked. It was impossible to point any sort of a decent camera at the creature without it bolting.

Also, the interns had named it. Interns were idiots. They couldn't even come up with something decent, any sort of binomial nomenclature. No, they called it Annie. Because it was "an anxious little fish." As though that made any kind of sense.

Now, he simply paced around the perimeter of the tank. The creature kept pace with him, swimming almost leisurely alongside. Logan made a show of flipping threw his notebook as he walked; this game only worked if they both pretended he couldn’t see the creature. Halfway around the tank, however, it suddenly slammed both of its webbed hands agains the glass, resulting in a loud, reverberating gong. Logan jumped and stared at the creature which, for the first time, simply stared back at him. And then, slowly, it turned its head to look at the ground in front of him.

There was a puddle. It must have splashed out of the tank, or perhaps someone had spilled something. The how didn’t really matter; the important thing was that, distracted as he had been with deliberately ignoring the creature, he almost certainl would have slipped and fallen. The creature had stopped him.

“Thank… you,” he said. He kept looking at it, and couldn’t help the wondering smile that came to his face as it only looked backt him without fleeing. “You’re not an anxious little fish at all, are you?” he asked, shaking his head at himself. “You’re just… careful. And protective. Vigilant, almost. You’re not Annie. You’re Virgil.”

Almost without thinking about it, he put his palm against the tank and, to his shock, the newly named Virgil did the same, webbed fingers lining up with Logan's. He stared at them, fascinated. They were much longer that his, dark blue with translucent webbing connecting them. Fanned out the way they are, Logan could see the color of the webbing much more clearly than usual, and he was surprised to see that, while the creature- while Virgil had always appeared to be entirely black and gray, the scales along his arms and the skin on the underside of his hand was actually a dark and shimmering shade of violet, and when the light shone through the webbing on his hands, it turned it into a soft, silvery lavender.

Logan was so absorbed in looking at the colors that he didn't even think to examine the rest of Virgil. He finally looked up, wondering if he would be able to make out any new details in the scales of Virgil's face, when he shouted in surprise and scrambled backwards. Virgil flung himself back from the glass, arms pinwheeling wildly and an expression of shock and terror on his suddenly familiar face. It would seem that Virgil had, unbeknownst to Logan or any of the other researchers, the ability to mimic appearances. Logan immediately started running through possibilities and examples in his mind, examining and dismissing possibilities and theories before he could even fully process them. Mimic octopus. Various species of snakes and insects. Perhaps even-

Virgil swam cautiously up to the glass, placing his hand back where it was. He looked ready to swim away at any second. His hand looked smaller now, and even as Logan watched the color faded from dark purple, to pink, to beige, until it was the same color as his own skin, lit a strange greenish tint by the lights in the water. The webbing between the fingers was still there, still a soft pinkish blush color. Logan took a deep breath and pressed his own hand against Virgil's, and tried not to recoil when the creature smiles at him. He was smiling with Logan's face.

It wasn’t an exact match. There were still patches of scales along his cheeks and forehead and gills on the sides of his neck. His ears were long and pointed, and his hair, longer and darker than Logan's, floated gently around his face. His eyes, too, were darker, and seem almost sunken into his skull. It takes a few moments for Logan to realize that they aren't just pits or shadows beneath Virgil's eyes, but darker markings, almost like bruises or birthmarks. Curious, Logan reached up with a finger and traced the shape of them onto the glass. Virgil followed his finger with one of his own, then touched his own face, apparently realizing what Logan was looking at. An excited expression crossed his face and bubbles streamed from his mouth as he traced the shapes himself, then mimed drawing circles around his eyes. Logan stared, baffled, and Virgil repeated the movement more slowly before pointing at Logan's face.

"My... my glasses?" he asked, adjusting them. Virgil grinned and wriggled in place, tail slapping against the glass in his excitement, and Logan surprised himself by giggling. "You... you tried to copy my glasses. Because you want to look like me." Virgil couldn't hear him and probably couldn't understand him, anyways (just because he looked human, looked like Logan, didn't mean he spoke any human languages), but he kept smiling, now touching his own face. He seemed curious to know what he looked like, and so Logan gathers that Virgil has never copied his appearance before. Even if Virgil hadn’t seemed so curious, Logan still would have known. He had watched ever second of the tapes; it was the first thing he did when he arrived at the facility each night and the last thing he did when he left each morning. So what changed? Why was he suddenly staring at his own face?

“You helped me,” he mused out loud. “You warned me about the puddle. You let me look at you without fleeing. I gave you a new name.”

Virgil, the creature mouthed at him, smiling with a mouth full of canines. Logan’s eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and Virgil’s smile disappeared, replaced with a worried expression.

“You… can you hear me?” Logan asked. Virgil stared back at him, silent and unmoving except for the slightest swishes of his tail to keep him in place. “Virgil?”

Virgil.

“All right, so you know your name,” Logan said, cocking his head to the side thoughtfully. He finally took his hand off the glass to point at his own chest. “Logan.”

Virgil rolled his eyes. Lo-gan, he mouthed, moving his lips in an exaggerated point. If Logan didn’t know any better, he’d say that Virgil was being sarcastic.

Of course, he clearly didn’t know better. He had no idea the creature could change its appearance, or that it possessed this level of intelligence. It was, it a way, conversing with him. It knew his name. It knew its own name.

“Did you already go by Virgil?” Logan asked, placing his hand against the glass and drumming his fingers thoughtfully. “Did I just happen to guess correctly? Or do you just like that better than Annie?”

Virgil gave Logan’s hand on the glass a disgusted look and mimed slapping his hand away. Logan paused his drumming, and Virgil looked satisfied. The vibrations must have carried more strongly through the water that Logan expected. How sensitive were Virgil’s ears? Or was he feeling the movement of the water physically? Maybe they should-

This, time, Virgil did actually slap the glass, grimacing. Oops. Logan had started drumming again without realizing it. Virgil kept his hand where it was, though, and Logan uncurled his own fingers to press against it.

“Virgil,” he breathed, and Virgil smiled back at him.

Logan.

#analogical #sanders sides #Virgil sanders #Logan sanders #i wrote this #randomslasher #i hope you don't mind this has just been in my head for a few days now #mer virgil #mergil?#vermaid?

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