#mer!laura

“Derek! You didn’t tell your mother about the sea witch, did you? Of all the Poseidon damned, foolish things we have done, this has to be the most-”

“Erica!” Boyd’s voice is as powerful as a tsunami wave as he tugs on his girlfriend’s fins, making her squawk and level him with the same glare she was using on Derek only a few moments ago, “Derek knows what he’s doing, he’s not some youngling that need to be reprimanded, so just give the guy a wave, alright?”

Erica huffs at him, but thankfully refrains from yelling at Derek some more, so he goes back to looking over his cave and tries to see it as a Human might…

It’s a smoothed over enclave, the water and sculptors making the walls almost reflective in their shine, with a rather large gathering of kelp as his bed. A few carvings in his walls depicting his family and an outcropping as a shelf, with the reflective shard as the only thing that he really picked in the room.

“Do you think that I should bring anything with me when I go to the Land Above?”

His question seems to have interrupted a discussion going on behind him, drawing them out of whatever debate they were having-although Derek can guess what the subject was-to give his room the same kind of once over that Derek had a few moments prior.

“I... don’t know?” Isaac offers, frowning at the reflecting shard like it was keeping the answer from him, “Do you know if we even have anything that a Human would need? Did the sea witch even say that you needed to bring anything?”

Once more biting off the need to tell someone that Stiles had a name, half because it felt like a secret that he wasn’t supposed to share and half because Derek knew that they wouldn’t use it anyway, Derek shrugs and says, “He didn’t say that there was anything I needed to bring, but I didn’t ask him either…”

“Probably will just magic up everything that you need when asked about it and make it seem like it was his idea the whole time,” Erica mutters, which earns her a sigh from Boyd that has her sticking out her tongue in response.

Derek ignores her and settles into his bed with a sigh, trying to imagine what it would be like to sleep somewhere else than this cave for however long Stiles manages to make him Human.

“I want you guys to watch over my mother while I’m gone.”

Once more, Derek’s words draw his friend’s attention, and once more, they all look over at him when he speaks; only this time, their expressions are ones of curiosity and worry instead of study.

“We always come by to see your mother and sisters, even on the days that you’ve been gone on those meets with the Aquids that migrate through here.” Isaac looks over at the other two for a nod before turning back to Derek, a frown on his face as he continues, “Did you really think we would stop because you were gone?”

“No, no, that’s not it…” Derek shakes his head as he remembers the feeling he had when he left the throne room, the thought that it was the last time that he would ever see his mother, and tries to find the words to explain how very important this is without sounding like an utter mollusk-head. “It’s just that… she seems to be under a lot of stress lately, training Laura to inherit the crown, and I just don’t want her to worry too much while I’m gone and...”

“Hey,” It’s Erica this time, her voice surprisingly soft as she moves forward to wrap Derek up in a hug. “I’m not going to say that I’m sorry, because I still think that this whole thing is a bad idea, but I will say that you will not have to worry about the Queen. We’ll keep a close eye on her and make sure she smiles at least three times a day!”

Derek chuckles and reaches out to draw Isaac into the hug, while Erica reels Boyd in, his heavy sigh not covering the smile that tugs at his lips. They stay like that for a little while, soaking in the feeling of safety these embraces always seem to carry with them.

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll meet a pretty Human up there and the sea witch will finally be good for something and give them fins!’

Stiles is a very pretty Aquid, Derek’s mind supplies at Erica’s words, making him glad his face is pressed into Boyd’s shoulder, as it is almost impossible to see his blush that way.

However, since it’s Boyd shoulder that he’s hiding in, Boyd sees his blush and thankfully, or unthankfully depending on your point of view, just raises a judgemental brow at him and doesn’t say anything.

While Derek is glad that he doesn’t bring attention to Derek’s reaction, Boyd’s silence still speaks for itself and it takes longer than he’d like to get his blush under control…

The next few days are a mixture of excitement and worry that have members of his family asking him if he’s alright more than once. 

Well, it more that Laura asks him if he has crabs pinching his fins and Cora tells him he needs to stop swimming to Coral Rock, the sea club that is just past the kelp forest, if he’s going to come home all jittery from jellyfish juice.

His mother, predictably, says nothing and just stares at him sadly while Deaton frowns at her elbow.

It really isn’t helping Derek try to come to terms with the fact that he’s going to be leaving them for an undetermined amount of time, and that he’s only told his mother and left it up to her to tell the rest of them…

That, at least, is something that he can fix.

“You’re going to do what?” Laura screeches, handing off the scroll that an aide had brought into her room at the beginning of this discussion, the Mer in question hightailing it out of there as soon as Laura opened her mouth. “Are you completely and utterly eel-touched?”

“Laura…”

“Don’t you ‘Laura’ me, Derek!” Her voice snaps through the water like a dolphin, making Derek fight off an instinctive flinch at the feeling of upsetting yet another member of his family. “You know that these next few days are important for our inauguration as Crown Prince and Princess, you can’t just decide to run off on some sort of whim!”

“It’s not ‘some sort of whim’, Laura!” Derek snaps, his tension of the past few days making his words harsher than he intended and causing Laura to blink at him in shock, “I’ve spent the past few tides trying to figure out why no one will tell me what it is that I’m missing and I need to take some time to get used to the fact that everyone is hiding something from me!”

Laura’s expression stays frozen for a few seconds before transforming into almost the exact same one that his mother had when he told her the exact same thing and before he can demand to know what in Poseidon’s deep depths is going on, Laura has swum forward and wraps her arms around him in a grip so tight that Derek is having a hard time making his gills work.

“Don’t do this, Derek.” The anger in her voice has slipped into terror and Derek immediately gives up all attempts to break free. “Whatever it is that you’re planning, please don’t do this.”

“Laura, what-”

“I know you, Derek. You’re not just ‘going for a swim around the kelp forest’, you’ve got a plan and I know that it’s going to take you away from us. Don’t do this, please.”

“Then tell me what is going on!” Derek finally pulls away from Laura’s grasp, her eyes filled with tears when he looks at her and that just makes this whole thing all that more frustrating. “If me leaving has such dire consequences, if whatever it is that you all are hiding is so dangerous, then just let me know and we can avoid all of this!”

“I can’t!” Laura seems as frustrated as Derek about all of this, and that quells most of the anger that he’s feeling, but not all of it even as she continues with, “By all the Oceans and Seas, I hate that I can’t talk to you about this! I can see how all of this is frustrating for you and how much you want to know what is being kept from you, but I can’t-”

She slams her mouth closed, a muffled scream trying to make it past her lips before she throws herself on the bed in the corner, her shoulders heaving as she tries to catch her breath.

All Derek can do is stare at her in shock, trying to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t that no one will tell him what is going on, it’s that they can’t.

“Is the way everyone is so scared of me leaving for any length of time part of all of this?”

Laura gives him a helpless look, her hands waving in a way that seems to convey her defeat at not being able to help him, and Derek just nods as he tries to think of something he can ask without hitting a shellbed.

“Does this have anything to do with the sea witch?”

The response is almost instantaneous; Laura lurches up from her bed and wraps her arms around Derek again, a babble of ‘Don’t do this, stay away from him, this is too dangerous’ falling from her lips like rain from the skies.

I guess that answers that question, Derek wraps his arms around Laura in return, trying to sooth the terror he can feel trembling her form. But what could Stiles have possibly done to inflict this level of fear? Is he the one responsible for this spell that keeps everyone from talking to me?

Derek almost immediately rejects that thought as soon as he has it; Stiles seemed as upset as Derek was hearing that he was being kept in the dark about something. Surely that was genuine and not some sort of act…?

“What’s going on?”

Pulling apart, Laura and Derek turn to see Cora swimming at the entrance to Laura’s room, looking between the two of them like she’s half expecting one of them to suddenly throw squid ink on her.

“I’m… going to go away for a little while and was just saying goodbye to Laura-” Derek barely gets the sentence out before Cora is swimming into the room so fast that Derek has to swim a few strokes back to avoid getting bowled over by her.

“You can’t leave! There are far too many things that need to be done in preparation and you are not going to finagle all of your duties off on me!”

If Derek hadn’t been paying closer attention than normal to his sister, he never would have seen the way her eyes had tightened and the nervous tick of her fingers that means she’s trying to fight off claws; it would have seemed like a normal rant from her and nothing out of the ordinary, if Derek had not been paying attention.

As a matter of fact, if he truly thought about it, he could remember a few things that had always seemed off whenever he mentioned swimming outside of Pacifica’s borders, and he must have subconsciously used that as his reason for not telling anyone about his plans to see Stiles in the first place…

“Don’t worry, Cora.” Laura doesn’t really look all that comforting, giving how her own tail is twitching worse than that time it got caught in a bit of broken coral. “Derek has promised that he’ll only be gone for a little while and that he’ll swim as fast as he can back home as soon as he’s done.”

“Maybe he should take some of the Guardsmer with him, just to be sure that he doesn’t slack off and make us do all the heavy swimming.” Cora’s voice is as petulant as it always is when she’s complaining about something, but her eyes are flickering over Derek’s face like she’s trying to memorize his features and its unnerving Derek so badly that even he is starting to flick his tail in unease.

“I don’t think Derek needs a babysitter, Cora.” Laura wraps an arm around their sister and Derek uses that moment to escape from the cave, trying to make sense of everything in he has learned in the past few waves, and just making out the last bit of Laura’s comment:

“We just have to hope that everything will be alright.”