A/N: hello guys! 💙 how are you? I'm so excited to post this story and many others! for so many years, The Deep was what inspired me to write, even now, more than 5 years after discovering the animated series, it helped me choose my career. This is for the people who are obsessed with the Nekton family, just like me. enjoy and tell me what you think of it, oh, and I accept requests! 🐻❄️ྀིྀི
Plot: One fever. One husband who turns into an immovable wall of you are not getting up. One wife who tolerates exactly as much tenderness as she can before she pulls him in herself. Some things don't change after twenty years.
The thing about Kaiko Nekton was that she did not get sick.
This was not a medical fact. This was a matter of principle.
She had, over the course of her life, developed a finely calibrated system for managing physical inconvenience: acknowledge the symptom, assess its severity, determine whether it was compatible with continued function, and proceed accordingly. A headache was hydration and two painkillers. A pulled muscle was compression and modified movement. A fever was… well. A fever was something she was currently in the middle of deciding the correct classification for while standing at her station, gripping the edge of the console with both hands, and waiting for the room to stop tilting.
The room, unhelpfully, continued to tilt.
She had woken at five-thirty as usual. The first sign had been the sheets, too warm, unbearably so, the kind of warmth that had nothing to do with the Aronnax's climate systems. The second had been standing up, which had gone fine for approximately three seconds before the floor did something it was not supposed to do. She had held onto the wall, recalibrated, and decided this was within acceptable parameters.
She had made it to her station. She had pulled up the morning diagnostics. She had stared at the screens for six minutes and processed approximately none of them.
The ocean outside the observation panels was its usual deep blue, indifferent to her condition, which she respected.
Kaiko did not turn around. "Good morning, Will."
"No, I mean— " His footsteps crossed the room and stopped just behind her. She felt him before he touched her, that particular quality of his presence, the way a room shifted slightly when he entered it, the way her body had been calibrated to him for so long that it registered him like a change in pressure. "Kaiko." His hand came to her forehead. Flat, careful, the back of his fingers. He left it there for two seconds. "You're burning up."
"You're holding onto the console."
The way he said her name, not sharp, just the tone of someone who had already made a decision and was giving her the courtesy of a brief window to agree voluntarily, that made her close her eyes for a moment.
"It's just a fever," she said. "I'll take something and it'll —"
"Come on." His hands were on her shoulders, turning her gently but with absolutely no negotiation in them. She turned because the alternative was making a scene, and because her legs were quietly voting against prolonged standing. He looked at her face and something moved through his expression. "Back to bed."
"You don't know the calibration sequence for —"
"Will, I am not an invalid, I just have a slight —"
"Kaiko." He said it the same way again. "You are not standing at that console for the next eight hours with a fever. That is not happening. So you can walk back to the cabin or I can carry you, and I want you to know I will absolutely carry you and I will not be embarrassed about it."
He looked back. Completely serious.
She thought, not for the first time in twenty-something years of knowing this man, that his particular brand of stubbornness was genuinely one of the most infuriating things she had ever encountered. She also thought, and would never say out loud, that it was one of the things she loved most about him.
He settled her back into bed with the focused efficiency of someone who had thought about this more than the last five minutes. Cool sheets pulled back, pillow adjusted, the weighted blanket she preferred but never asked for already at the foot of the bed and now drawn up. He disappeared and came back with water and two tablets and stood there while she took them, which she did without arguing because her head was starting to pound in a way that reclassified the situation from minor inconvenience to acceptable to acknowledge.
"You were up at five-thirty with a fever."
"I'm always up at five-thirty."
"Without the fever part." He sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the back of his hand to her forehead again, checking.His jaw tightened slightly at whatever he found. "You're really warm."
"I'm aware. I'm the one with the fever."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, too worried for that but close. "Get some sleep. I'll check on you in an hour."
"Will, you don't have to —"
"Kaiko." Third time. Same tone. She recognized it as the version that meant the conversation was over and further debate would be acknowledged but not acted upon.
She laid back against the pillow.
He pulled the blanket up. His hand lingered at her shoulder for just a moment, a brief and careful weight, and then he stood.
"Will," she said, before he reached the door.
She looked at him in the low light of their room, the set of his shoulders, the particular furrow between his brows that only appeared when he was worried about someone he loved. She'd memorized that furrow years ago. It meant more to her than most people's smiles.
Something in his face softened. "Sleep," he said again, and pulled the door.
She woke to the smell of something warm and the sound of Will trying very quietly to open a door, which meant he was being considerate, which meant she had been asleep longer than she'd thought. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and found him in the doorway holding a bowl and a mug with the expression of someone who had been hoping to arrange everything before she woke and had narrowly missed.
"You made soup!" she said.
"You made soup from scratch."
"I had help." He crossed the room and set the tray on the bedside table. She could smell the stock, something with ginger in it, which meant Fontaine had been involved because Fontaine was the one who'd learned that ginger soup was what Kaiko's mother had made when she was sick, a recipe of generations.
"Better." It was, marginally. The pills had taken the edge off.
She ate the soup. It was, in fact, good.
He sat beside her on the bed while she ate, a steady and comfortable presence, scrolling through something on his tablet with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere else to be and had decided this was true entirely voluntarily. She found this more affecting than she intended to.
"Where are the kids?" she asked.
"Ant's playing with Jeffrey and Fontaine's drawing, I think." He glanced up from the tablet. "They both said to tell you to rest."
"Fontaine's exact words were *tell her we love her and she's not allowed to get up.* Ant said *transmission received, resting recommended.* Which is his version of the same thing."
Kaiko looked down at her soup. The warmth of it spread through her chest and she couldn't entirely attribute it to the temperature.
"My family is very strange…" she said.
"Yeah," Will agreed, with complete contentment.
The morning passed softly.
Will did not leave. This was the thing, he didn't make a production of staying, didn't announce that he was sacrificing his day or position it as a grand gesture. He read to her from her research journals, which she had expected to find patronizing and instead found deeply, unreasonably soothing, his voice moving through her own notes and observations, giving them back to her in a different register. He brought water at intervals she hadn't asked him to track. When her temperature climbed again mid-morning and she pushed the blanket off with a noise of pure frustration, he replaced it with a cool damp cloth on her forehead without comment, and she lay there staring at the ceiling feeling simultaneously feverish and more cared for than she could easily hold.
"You're thinking very loudly," he said.
"I'm not thinking anything."
"You've got your equation face."
"I don't have an equation face."
"You have at least five faces and that's the one where you're working something out." He didn't look up from the journal. "What is it?"
Kaiko was quiet for a moment.
"I don't like this," she said.
"Being.." She gestured vaguely. "This. Dependent. Horizontal."
He did look up then. Studied her. "You're not dependent. You're sick."
"The symptoms are similar."
"They're not, actually." He set the journal down and turned toward her, and she recognized the shift in his posture that meant he was going to say something real and had decided it was worth saying. "Dependent means you need someone to function. You are the most functional person I've ever met.” He stopped, exhaled. "You're allowed to be taken care of, Kaiko. It's not a character flaw."
She looked at the ceiling.
"It feels like one," she said, quietly.
"I know." His hand found hers on top of the blanket, and he laced his fingers through hers with the ease of long habit. "It doesn't look like one from out here."
She turned her head to look at him in the middle of an ordinary morning that he had rearranged entirely around her without being asked.
"When did you get so wise?" she said.
"I've always been wise. You just have high standards."
She laughed, short, genuine, ending in a wince because laughing with a headache was inadvisable. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back and they stayed like that, fingers laced together, the Aronnax moving silently around them.
By afternoon the fever had eased.
Not gone, she could still feel the residual warmth in her skin, the slight heaviness in her limbs, but the pounding had reduced to a manageable pressure and the room had stopped performing unauthorized movement. She pushed herself up to sitting and Will looked up from the chair he'd migrated to, one eyebrow raised.
"I'm sitting up," she said, preemptively. "Not standing. Sitting."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were making a face."
"I was making a neutral face."
"Will. I have known your face for over twenty years."
He settled back in the chair with the expression of a man who had been caught. She rearranged the pillows behind her and looked out to the light that was lower now, that late-afternoon quality that turned everything into a more cosy space.
Will had brought her tea at some point in the last hour. It sat on the bedside table. She reached for it.
"Tell me something," she said.
He looked up. "What kind of something?"
"Anything. A memory." She wrapped both hands around the mug. "You've been reading my words at me all day. I want to hear yours."
Something moved across his face. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at her with an expression she recognized as choosing which true thing to say.
"I remember the first time you let me see you fail at something" he said.
"Third year. That fluid dynamics assessment. You came out of the exam room and I could see it in your face before you said anything — you'd gotten something wrong and you knew it, and you were furious." He was quiet for a moment. "You didn't want to talk about it. You wanted coffee, so we went, and you were so contained. So controlled. And I remember thinking that I was watching you decide, in real time, whether it was safe to let me see that you weren't perfect."
"And then we sat down and you told me exactly what question you'd gotten wrong and exactly why and exactly what the correct answer should have been. Like if you explained it well enough, out loud, it would retroactively fix it." He smiled, the real one, the private one. "I thought I'd never been so in love with anyone in my life."
Kaiko looked at him over the rim of her mug.
"Because I failed an assessment."
"Because you trusted me with it." He held her gaze.
Kaiko thought about that exam. She remembered it, the specific wrong answer, the exact mechanism of the error, the way it had itched at her for a week. She remembered the coffee shop.
"I didn't know you remembered that…" she said.
"I remember everything," he said simply. Like it was obvious. Like it was the most natural thing in the world, to have been paying that quality of attention for that long.
She looked at him, really looked, the way the morning had been making her want to, the way a full day of being quietly, immovably loved tended to make you look at the person doing it. The lines of his face, all of them earned, all of them known. The brown eyes that still, still did the same thing to her they'd done at twenty-three. The particular way he held himself when he was with her, easier, somehow, than anywhere else, like she was the place where he didn't have to hold anything in reserve.
Something in her chest had been building all day.
She was tired of being on the receiving end of gentleness and not being able to give anything back. Tired of being handled carefully when what she had been wanting, since the fever broke and the afternoon went golden and he'd sat in that chair and given her twenty years of careful attention as casually as breathing was to remind him that she was not fragile. Had never been fragile. And that she had things to give him too.
He looked up at her tone. Read something in her face that made him go still for just a moment.
"I'm not standing up," she said. "Come here."
He crossed the room in three steps and sat on the edge of the bed, close, and looked at her with an expression that was equal parts desire and the particular cautious tenderness of a man who had been taking care of someone all day and had not quite switched registers yet.
She reached up and put her hand against his jaw.
Kaiko's hand came up. Her fingers curled to pull him closer.
"Will…" she said again, lower this time. A warning. A prayer. A green light.
The first press of lips was almost tentative. His nose nudged against hers the same way it had on that campus bench decades ago. Her breath fanned warm across his mouth.
Then Kaiko made a sound. A small sound from the back of her throat.
And Will stopped being careful.
His hand slid into her hair and he kissed her like he was drowning and she was the surface. His other arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her into him until there was no air between their chests, no thought between their hearts.
Kaiko gasped against his mouth. He swallowed it. Then she was kissing him back with the same ferocity, her fingers fisting the collar of his shirt, her nails grazing the back of his neck, her body arching into his like she was reminding every cell in his body whose name he used to moan in his sleep.
He deepened the kiss. His tongue swept her lower lip. She opened for him without hesitation, she knew him, every angle, every pressure, every desperate little shift of his jaw and when his hand pressed flat against the small of her back, she rose into him like she'd been waiting all day for exactly this.
When they finally broke apart, it wasn't because they wanted to.
It was because Kaiko had stopped breathing.
She pulled back a centimeter, just enough to drag air into her lungs. Her lips were swollen, red, parted. Her pupils were blown wide. Her chest heaved against his. For a long, shuddering moment, she couldn't speak.
Will pressed his forehead to hers. His breathing wasn't steady either. His thumb moved slow against her jaw, like he was grounding himself in the realness of her.
"You're still warm…" he said. Low. A little wrecked.
"That," she said, when she found her voice, "is not the fever."
He laughed breathlessly, genuine and pressed his mouth to her forehead, her temple, the corner of her jaw. Soft now. Unhurried. Like the kissing had reset something in both of them and they could afford to be slow.
"You initiated that.." he said.
"I had a fever. It broke."
"That's not —" He pulled back just far enough to look at her, and she could see him fighting with himself, that same internal argument she'd watched him lose to her for decades. Taking care of her versus wanting her. The two things had always been the same thing with him and she had always loved him for it. "You should rest."
"I rested all day," she said. "You made sure of it."
"Will." She put her hand flat against his chest, over his heart, and felt it beating faster than usual. "I'm not made of glass. You know I'm not made of glass."
His hand came up and covered hers, pressing it more firmly against his chest.
"I know," he said. Quiet. Certain. "I never thought you were."
She pulled him back down.
Later, Kaiko lay with her head against Will's shoulder, his arm around her, both of them listening to the Aronnax noises. Her fever was gone, really gone now, she could feel the absence of it, the clean cool of her own skin returned to itself. She felt wrung out in the good way, the way of things fully spent, and more settled than she had in weeks.
"You should sleep.." Will said, into her hair.
"You've been saying that all day."
"And I was right all day."
She didn't argue, because she was, in fact, already most of the way there. She could feel the weight of the day pulling her down, the fever, the afternoon, all of it.
"Will," she said, quieter.
She felt him smile against the top of her head. "Fontaine picked the recipe."
"I know." She paused. "The ginger. My mother used to make it."
"I know," he said. And then, simply: "She told me."
Twenty-something years, and he was still learning her. Still asking, still listening and she didn't know what she had done to deserve someone who paid that quality of attention and had never, not once, made her feel like it cost him anything.
"I love you," she said. Low, unhurried, the way she'd learned to say it from him.
His arm tightened around her.
"I love you," he said back. Like it was the most obvious thing. Like it had always been.
Down the corridor, Fontaine looked up from her sketchbook and listened to the quiet.
Ant appeared in the doorway of the common room, checked his watch, and sat down.
"She's sleeping?" Fontaine asked.
Fontaine looked back down at her sketch.
"The soup was good," Ant said.
"It was Grandma's recipe." Fontaine said.
Ant was quiet for a moment. "Good call."
The Aronnax hummed around them, low and constant, and outside its walls the ocean kept going, deep and patient and full of things worth diving for.
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