A Drop in the Ocean

By Jixie

A/N: This is specifically for Sura's MerNavi AU. All you need to know is mermaids.

- Takes place after "A Fish Out of Water", which is not required reading. (But if you like this one, you'll probably enjoy that one, as well.)

Special thanks to Sura for help, suggestions, and beta reading.

Mega Man Battle Network © Capcom

Lost at Sea

It was a beautiful afternoon, absolutely perfect, because of course it was.

The waves were a little choppy, but that wasn't really noticeable from the yacht. Personally, she would've described them as 'rollicking'.

Her husband was napping inside, and her son was pretend sword fighting as he raced up and down the deck, their au pair struggling to keep up with the energetic five-year-old, and she was finishing off one too many glasses of plum wine than she perhaps should have had.

(Okay, it was probably more like three too many— but it was a beautiful day! Peaceful and quiet and on the yacht. What was the harm?)

With a bold cry of, "Can't catch me!" Enzan scrambled up the deck railing.

"Get down from there, sweetie," she said. There was a small rush of anxiety— a normal maternal response, but she restrained herself… he had good balance and coordination and like most kids his age loved to climb. She knew he'd be fine, just like he had been fine a thousand times before.

And if worst came to worst, he was wearing a life jacket.

Normally the sturdy railing wouldn't have been a problem for Enzan, but it was wet and slick and those rollicking waves caused the boat to pitch just enough. He lost his grip, bonked his head on the edge of the deck on his way down, and landed in the ocean with a decidedly unimpressive splash.

That was going to leave a bad lump, for certain.

"ENZAN!"

She might've well have been a mile away, the au pair a hundred miles. They both bolted for the rail, and his mother didn't even bother with a life jacket: she just dove.

A terrible idea.

Unlike her husband or her son, she'd grown up in a highrise, her world made of steel and glass. She'd taken swimming lessons since they got the yacht, but she was barely passable, unable to do much more than dog paddle. The warm day and gentle salt-spray breeze, the rollicking waves, became a shockingly cold, unforgiving sea, sharp wind cutting over the waves, violently tossing her and her child around like they were nothing. To the ocean, they were nothing.

Hurt and scared and freezing, Enzan screamed and thrashed, choking as he swallowed mouthfuls of sea water. The life jacket was up around his neck, half of it bobbing in front of him, and his mother realized with horror that he must've loosened the belts. Cleverly, the young au pair had convinced him the life jacket made a fitting armored vest for his sword fight, but it was still clunky and he didn't like it. He had a habit of unsnapping the buckles to get better maneuverability.

"Hold onto the jacket! Hold onto it, baby!"

If he heard her, if he understood, she couldn't tell. Adrenaline fueled her forward, the waves knocking her under, and it felt like no matter how much she gained the ocean pulled him further and further away.

Then a particularly strong wave swept over him, and he disappeared under the water. Moments later he surfaced, if only for a second, the life jacket drifting away in another direction.

His mother kicked, and kicked, and stroked with her arms but it just wasn't enough.

Enzan surfaced one more time.

Then he was gone.

In a big-picture sense, Blues both liked and disliked humans.

He didn't care for their shortsightedness, their callous treatment of others, of nature, of their own environment. Their inherent destructive tendencies.

On the other hand, he was impressed by their ability to overcome. They were physically fragile and extremely limited, built around living on land in a world that was mostly water. Although they were technologically behind mernavi, they'd managed to overcome their failings, finding inventive ways to live on and under the ocean, in the air, in the sky. What mernavi had ever tried to live on land, much less take a rocketship into space?

On an individual level, he had no opinion. He'd never met one and felt no particular desire to.

Fate would intervene.

Fate… or more likely pure dumb luck.

'Pure dumb luck', as it happened, was how a lot of ocean rescues went. There were mernavi who specialized in emergency response, helping humans just as they would another navi. There were even some navi who dealt exclusively in human search-and-rescue missions, usually working for humans, ambassadors of inter-species cooperation, just as there were humans who did the same for navi.

But most of the time it went something like this:

Blues, minding his own damn business. Little boy, falling off a boat and drowning.

He didn't even know it was a human child at first. He just saw something flailing and jerking and then sinking. Something that didn't move like any ocean creature, something clearly out of its element. As he got closer, he could see the child was very young, very small, very fragile, very limited.

How long could they breathe underwater? No, wait, he was thinking of something else. How long could they hold their breath? He caught the child in his arms. They were unconscious, but fortunately, still holding their breath.

Right? No, that didn't sound right.

He quickly swam to the surface, and realized that no, the child definitely wasn't holding their breath. They were simply not breathing. How long…?

Moving even faster, he carried the child towards— their parent? A human female, swimming frantically… and badly… towards them, away from the ship. Blues found himself shoving the child into her arms, then grabbing her by the waist and towing both of them back to the boat.

The crew had gathered around the edge, and someone dropped a ladder where Blues approached. Three of the crew members donned life jackets and headed down to meet them, one grabbing the child and carrying them up, the other two helping the mother. They shouted a hurried thanks to him, clearly preoccupied with more pressing matters, but grateful nevertheless.

He couldn't see what was going on once everyone was up on the deck, but there was a lot of screaming and wailing and then silence.

What he expected was for the boat to take off, heading straight for the nearest port. Instead, it stayed right where it was. He couldn't understand, not at first. Perhaps the child had died, and there was no need to rush?

Then, after about twenty minutes, there was a strange whooshing sound in the air. It grew louder, and Blues realized it was an aircraft, with a round little body and oversized propeller on its top. He'd seen these before, in some of the dorky human movies Rock and Netto were so fond of, but the name of it escaped him. It was fast, whatever it was, and clearly it could make the round trip to the boat and back long before the ship itself could've gotten anywhere.

It was impressive. In spite of the dire situation, Blues found himself wishing he could ride in such a craft.

The child was loaded on, along with the mother, and two others— the other parent, he supposed, and… an older sibling, perhaps? Then it took off. Blues waited around a little longer, expecting someone might hail him, let him know how the child fared…

…but no one did, and after another twenty minutes or so, he plunged down into the warm current he had been coasting along before and went back to minding his own damn business, thinking that was the last he'd see of this tiny human fry.

It would turn out he was wrong about that.

Five years later, Blues received an electronic message. He thought it was just tedious algae scum— junk messages, scams, often riddled with viruses and malware and other digital threats, named after the brown foamy crud that sometimes collected along the shore.

So he put it into the scum folder without reading and forgot about it. He had training in an hour with one of the instructors and she was not known for being patient with tardiness in trainees.

Another message came the following week, and it gave him pause. It had the same heading as the message he had discarded.

He gave it a thorough scan before reading, just in case, but it came up clean. It was from one Ijuuin Enzan.

A short, decisive message saying that he wanted to reconnect with Blues.

At first, he had no idea what any of this meant. The number of encounters he'd had with humans could be counted on one hand, and none of them were named 'Enzan'. Scratch that. All of them had involved Meiru, Roll's human friend, and her family— seven seas knows how Roll managed to drag him into these things. These had been pleasant encounters, but nothing worth following up on, and certainly not worth 'reconnecting' over.

Well…

No, those weren't his only encounters. There'd been the drowning child he'd saved, the family who'd left in a rush on that flying— on a helicopter, these humans who'd crashed into his life and then vanished just as quickly.

Was it possible the child was now old enough track him down like this, to send a message? Humans grew much faster than mernavi, that much he knew, but he also knew they were helpless— dependent— for much of their youth. Navi could download literacy applications straight out the egg capsule, but humans developed those abilities later, and Blues hadn't the slightest clue how old one needed to be to send him a written message. And if it wasn't the child, if it was their parents or sibling… why now? Why wait so long?

He hesitated, then wrote an equally concise reply.

Not only was it possible, but Blues was surprised by how much the kid had grown in just five years. He'd more than tripled in size. This boy, Enzan, stood alone on the pier and regarded Blues with a steely look. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.

Then he bowed, stiff with his hands at his side. He was composed, dignified beyond his years. Formal.

"Hello, it is a pleasure to meet you. I am Ijuuin Enzan. Please, remember me favorably."

Japanese was spoken fairly commonly on the island, but his accent was not local. Blues remembered the large leisure ship— the yacht, and made an educated guess: he must one of the many, many 'summer home' crowd, living on the island only part time.

Fortunately, Blues was a practical navi, and in addition to the four major official Pacific and eighteen most commonly spoken mernavi languages, he had downloaded packs for several of the major human languages of the south Pacific. So he knew Japanese, as well as English, Hawaiian, Filipino, Indonesian, Hiri Motu, Solomons Pijin, and Mandarin.

Being halfway out of the water made it difficult to bow back, so he simply offered a curt nod. "Blues."

The Hikari brothers or Roll would have been engaging, excited to meet this new person, eagerly accepting. Blues, on the other hand, struggled with what was effortless for his friends. When it came to action he was sure and decisive, but when it came to people… his apprehension often came across as stiff and wary. Usually he counted on the other person picking up the slack, compensating for his social awkwardness.

"Thank you for saving my life."

"Just doing my job."

Blues neglected to mention he'd yet to be formally inducted into the job he was training for, much less expected to carry it out alone.

Silently, they measured up one another. Then, Enzan's gaze fell to the weapon on the navi's hip.

The change in his expression was subtle. A flicker of excitement in his eyes, a slight flush of red across his ears, the almost imperceptible curl of the corner of his lips. "Is that… a sword?"

"Yes."

No longer able to maintain his aloof appearance, Enzan broke into a grin.

"Cool."

"Yeah, it is."

This kid was not bad. Certainly more agreeable than Roll's human friend (in Blues' opinion), and…

…oh.

He'd just made a friend— his own human friend— hadn't he?