Harley's so much more comfortable in nature because it's the only place he's ever felt safe, and his animals have never judged him for how he looks or his behaviour. If he makes a mistake, drops something, breaks something by accident, they never scream or sigh in disappointment or raise a hand to hit him. The cows still nuzzle at his arm for pets and the chickens still cluck just as happily when he feeds them. When Erika, Elias' mother, first stumbled upon him in the woods after he'd been abandoned on the side of the road by his own mother, he was absolutely terrified of her and tried to bite her when she held his hand to help him up. Even when he was coaxed out of the woods towards the farmhouse, he was still too scared to walk inside until she helped him calm down by showing him the barn. Before then he'd never really seen farm animals at all, so being guided to pet them and be shown that they were gentle, peaceful creatures helped him to find his place in the world. Since then he decided to dedicate himself to the only thing he's ever known he's good at, which is taking care of the farm and tending to the animals that he considers his true family.

That's also why Harley is so self-sufficient and hates having things done for him by others. He was never able to rely on his mother and in fact was relied on by her to steal food, money, and valuables to sell to sustain her addiction. On the farm, even with Erika's kindness and her attempts to give him a proper childhood, he was still expected by Elias' father to work for his keep and do the heavy lifting on the farm to earn his room and board. For his whole life he's never had anyone to fall back on but himself, save for Elias (and even that was shaky during their marriage) so he's not used to it, doesn't like it, doesn't know how to deal with it. He doesn't trust people and he'd rather die than admit he needs help.

Part of that also comes from his time at boarding school. Although he's never blamed Elias for that part of his life, Elias still holds an immense amount of guilt for being the reason why Harley was sent away, since he was the one that slipped up and caused his father to find out about his and Harley's budding relationship in their teens. It was obvious he was already looking for a reason to kick Harley off the farm after Erika was no longer alive to protect him, because despite his free labour and work ethic he'd grown big enough to defend himself and Elias from his abuses. Being that he was intensely homophobic was the icing on the cake for him to send Harley off and hope he didn't end up coming back.

While he was there, he suffered torturous bullying from the other boys and was picked on for any possible weakness he showed, so it was there that he learned how to use his size to his advantage--particularly after a serious incident where he was nearly drowned in the bathtub when several students held him underwater. That was the last time he would allow himself to be victimized, and from then on he learned to fight back and became a much more hardened, emotionally repressed person when he returned home after the death of Elias' father.

Aside from those physical characteristics, the differences between sirens and mermaids is vast. For example, merpeople can be of any gender, but two sirens cannot produce a pure-blooded male offspring. They will only conceive females unless one parent is of a different species, like a human or elf. So male sirens are exceedingly rare, and sirens have evolved so that two female sirens can reproduce if they bond together as lifelong partners (which can also be done by a couple of any mix of genders). Bonding can be done through a ritual that involves sharing blood, laying a claiming bite to one another, and copulating with each other for between 1-3 days. The ritual can also be done with a non-siren partner, so long as one of the couple is a pure or partial siren, and is not limited to a pair, so it can be performed in a group of up to 3-4 people or more.

Siren culture also isn't as diverse as merculture, in part because their numbers are much smaller. Sirens tend to be identifiable by a few select features, like darker skin tones, vivid eye colours, and sharper facial features, as well as paler scale colours. Whereas merpeople are extremely diverse in both species and physicality; some are an equal measure of fish and human, and some look almost entirely human or entirely aquatic. Some very closely resemble their species, such as female anglerfish mer having lures and pitch-dark skin, and there are much higher numbers of feral merpeople than any other primarily domestic species. Feral sirens are mostly stories of legend as nobody can really prove that they actually exist, at least in the modern age. Culturally, merpeople have much more varied practices and faith systems whereas sirens all tend to behave and believe in the same manner.

And, of course, sirens possess the power of suggestion while merpeople have the ability to live and survive in aquatic environments. It's more common for sirens to interbreed with other species, while merpeople tend to stick to their own groups and families. Adventurous mer who venture close to the shallows and fall in love with earth-walkers are considered more rebellious and odd in most mer circles. Sirens also have very similar reproductive organs to humans and copulate and breed identically, whereas merpeople's reproduction is very different. Males and females are less distinguishable from one another because mer in general tend towards more feminine appearances, so males often have longer hair and females bear their chests openly. The only main difference is that some are born with ovipositors and some are born with egg clutches, but you wouldn't be able to tell who has what unless you saw it for yourself--those who have both are higher in numbers than you would ever think. In fact, a theory has been proposed in recent history that all mer are born with egg clutches and thus have the capacity to carry their own offspring, as many cases of male-presenting mer have been examined only to find that they have unfertilized eggs they never knew about.

A merperson's ovipositor is usually about 3-6 inches in length, kept in a sheath beneath their waistline where skin meets scales. The scales will part to unsheathe it when they're aroused, and apart from a bulbous sphere midway up the shaft and a pointed tip, they look like a thinner male organ one would find on a human. They function similarly to a knot on a hybrid, but the bulb doesn't grow or shrink and isn't meant to lock a mate when they're inside. Instead, it contains seminal fluid and small eggs that will be deposited once the mer is fully seated inside their partner. However, if their partner is female or has a womb, the mer will be instinctively driven to press the bulb inside and latch it within the womb to breed...which you can imagine is a very intense, often painful, but very rewarding process. Once the eggs are deposited and fertilized, they'll grow to their full size and mature in as little as a few hours up to a week, before they'll have to be pushed out and delivered by the mate in question. They can be about the size of a fist, and are usually much softer than traditional eggs and have an almost jelly-like consistency, so the process isn't usually intensely painful especially if they've matured quickly. Roughly half of the eggs will develop into the fetal stage, so a clutch may produce between 1-3 surviving mer babies on average for every ten or so eggs in a clutch.

Not so! When Hinata was young, she was characterized by her bad attitude and almost pathological hatred of authority. As a child she was constantly in trouble for running away, drinking, smoking, and throwing herself into the thick of danger seemingly for a thrill. Her family largely considered her to be the problem child, and as the oldest of only girls she definitely didn't give her parents much hope for carrying on their dwindling clan's name. Imagine their surprise when a family friend had a chance meeting with one of the Azumakos, and they ended up with the opportunity to wed their daughter to the most prestigious yakuza family that survived the war?

And imagine Byakuya, Yuya, and the rest of the Azumako's shock when their first introduction began not with pleasantries, not with gifts or with gratitude, but with Hinata vaulting over a coffee table to punch her potential husband in the face. She had to be wrenched off by two Azumako cousins, Byakuya, and her own mother and father before she finally stopped beating him, and left him with a broken nose and a face full of blood.

Although she never explained her reasons for that unexpected assault, the truth is that she was furious about the arrangement before she even laid eyes on Yuya. The grudge she held over losing her freedom she aimed directly at him--unable to express it to her strict parents, forbidden to work it out in the destructive ways she normally would, she honed in on Yuya like a target and from that day became his biggest bully. As the discussions continued, she took the chance to degrade and lash out at him whenever she had it, hoping quietly that he or his family or both would get so fed up with her they just left her alone. Bizarrely, broken bones and her relentless aggression weren't enough to sway Yuya or his family. He still wanted to marry her, and when the engagement was made official and the wedding was to go ahead, Hinata was so terrified that she tried to drink herself to death. Her greatest fear was to be a trophy; she feared being a challenge for some man to break down and force into submission, knowing that she would lose every piece of herself in the process and forget the taste of her own freedom. She never wanted to be a mother, or a wife, or a prize--all she wanted was to be independent, to be her own person, but it seemed it would never become a reality for her.

On the day of their wedding, her family were forced to station members of their clan all over the hall to make sure she didn't escape. Her mother had to pat her down before she walked down the aisle, for fear that she might've stolen a dinner knife or a letter opener to stab her new groom in the heart. Hinata definitely considered it, not for Yuya, rather for herself. But by the time the ceremony took place she was so numb she could barely pay attention to her own vows. When it was all over and she and Yuya were ushered to their own estate, where they would live out their married life and bring up their children, Hinata ended up reacting slightly better than expected--she kicked Yuya out of their bedroom and threatened to burn the house down if he came in.

So, with little else he could think of to appeal to her, Yuya dug out a deck of cards and asked if she would play Execution with him. With a bit of convincing, he slowly enticed her into opening up; instead of christening their marriage bed as Hinata feared, they spent their wedding night with a bottle of expensive sake and played card games. Over time they slowly got to know each other and Hinata gradually warmed up to him, but that was mostly because Yuya wasn't like anyone she'd ever willingly spent time with.

As a teenager, Yuya was a bit of an oddball and not at all what Hinata expected as the heir to an immense family name. He was quiet and awkward, almost boyish in the sense that he was somewhat naïve, and he never seemed to get angry or hold grudges against anyone, especially not her. The time she spent berating him, the way she spoke about him in front of his family, even the beating she gave him...he never held any of it against her and forgave her immediately. It saddled her with an intense feeling of guilt when she finally spent time getting to know him, and realized that he bore a very similar burden as her, he just wore it much differently. They both experienced hardships and persecution as a result of the war, but Yuya spent a lot of time listening to her speak about her pain, and that was the first inkling she had that she might be falling in love.

Hinata had a pretty dry sense of humour too, and was incredibly sarcastic, so it got Yuya accustomed to her and her antics and really refined his sense of resilience. People would find it odd that he, as the head of a perceivably traditional household, would hear his wife complain about how annoying he was or make fun of him and just smile. But being that Hinata almost never said "I love you" or showed any genuine sensitivity, he slowly realized that those little jabs were her way of telling him without having to say the words. She was a stern mother with her children too, taking to calling them "their father's demon-spawn" when they acted up, but they adored her and enjoyed teasing their mother to see her blow up in hilarious and harmless fashion. For a woman who never once spanked her children, she threatened to feed them to evil spirits when they misbehaved more times than any of them could count.

Despite appreciating and loving her children more than she thought she would, being that she never aspired to motherhood, the childbearing aspect of it all was the worst part of it for her. She nearly died giving birth to Izumi, their first, had complications with the twins, and suffered several miscarriages throughout their marriage that took a heavy toll on her body. They considered quietly arranging for Hinata to have her tubes tied and Yuya to get a vasectomy after Mamoru was born, but after the children were murdered and their house grew silent and empty, neither of them could even bear the thought--especially not with Hinata's injuries after the massacre. Yuya loyally tended to his wife and her slow recovery after the tragedy, but Hinata was devastated at the loss of their family and couldn't bear to even look at herself in the mirror. The only time she could bear to meet her own eyes was when she saw them in Makoi's little face once he was born, and spent the last few precious moments of her life looking into the first child she birthed that was the spitting image of herself, instead of Yuya.