I am a HOAX

He sighed and stood. The pack went over a shoulder and the Saint adjusted the straps.

“Exhausting,” he stated. “To answer your second question.”

(And Hoax was clever to avoid the bait. Still, it was its own kind of halfway confirmation, with the somewhat limited knowledge he had of active Regulators in Maroa.)

“I may not feel thankful in this moment, but thank you. I make for a poor patient.”

Mercy continued packing and was careful to tuck the mirror-charm he’d taken from Vic’s car into the folds of his clothes.

“You ‘save’ brazenly for the only one of your kind.”

<Have you ever thought about talking like a normal person? What is a regular conversation with you like, huh?>

As invective as her words were, the feeling to them was exhaustion. She was gathering the strength to raise the tide and pull her bulk back into the water, where it would be easier to move, get home, and eat. That this human knew something he probably shouldn’t would sit with her for a bit, but right now it felt like bait she didn’t want to bite. Something horrible she didn’t want to know. If he knew that, then he might know it wasn’t technically true, either. Guarding her eggs was still the most important thing in all the universes.

“Ah. Regulators think in terms of ‘wrong’ now?” Mercy mused, weary, almost to himself. The world was disorienting. It had been agony but now it was better, and the absence of suffering almost felt like a punishment. Ah… and how many times had he admonished a patient for that same thought process?

His family was dead.

(Sobering grief.)

(He reached up to touch the old, old burn that had graced his face for many years, half-expecting it to have vanished with the fresh ones, but it was still there. Was he thankful for that? Was it time to move on?)

(You never move on. You just learn to carry the weight of it.)

The Saint grimaced to quell his mind and knelt to refill his pack of the clothing he’d been cleaning. His rejuvenated eyes, which still burned with the haze of healing as though the light was too bright and stabbing to look at, flicked over the bushes Hoax had mentioned.

The sound Hoax made in response was like a backed up fountain, gargling and hacking, sputtering out water and bile. She’d tried to laugh and had instead choked. Oh, she was not feeling good at all.

Mercy sheathed the blade but didn’t remove his hand from its hilt. His palm relaxed atop it instead, as provocative as the fish-breath was.

“I would prefer not to.” It was a straightforward, if noncommittal answer. He suddenly turned and trudged toward his belongings that were folded neatly at the shore.

“It creates such paperwork for them.”

<I would prefer not to.> Hoax mocked, watching him, wiggling backward into the lake very slowly. <Everyone is so ungrateful. I didn’t do anything wrong. Not even a thank you! Fucked up. What’s it called? Toxic masculinity. Humans don’t stop at making toxins, just are toxic. We’re in a toxic relationship.>

“I’m not known for my humor.”

As even-headed as he sounded, in truth, Mercy wasn’t sure how to take his sudden renewed health. He watched his hand clench and unclench with the finesse of a surgeon and the return of youthful strength. Those same fingers reached out to grip the blade Hoax offered to return it with a surety that was almost comical considering he had nearly tried to gut her.

It felt false–this health; the sudden washing away of blood. This. It felt as though today had never happened. He almost wished it hadn’t.

The grief bundled tight in his chest. At least his eyes were trained on Hoax herself–ever practical, the doctor, a detached clinician marking her weakened state. So, she had healed herself. She still did not look well.

Tired.

“Will you live?”

Other words nested on the tip of his tongue, waiting.

There was a pause. Hoax held his stare wearily, though without lids one could forgive anyone from being disconcerted. She could not emote quite the ways humans liked. A gurgling sigh washed out of her; her breath smelled like iron and fish, and she purposely let it wash over the hale and hearty human.

The agony was white-hot and searing, as though the flames that had scorched him were withdrawn in reverse. The water of the lake burned and sloughed off healing flesh and retracting bruise as suddenly, Mercy endured a snapshot of healing that in other instances would have been considered a miracle.

Tendon snapped. Flesh bloomed and receded its bloody purples and blues and blacks and the Saint crumpled to one knee after finding the ground. Mercy caught himself just in time–whether due to stubbornness or the renewed zeal of his knees.

The pain of his hyper-healed body grew and diminished like the waves that eeked around the body of the massive eel before him. He sucked in a sharp breath and felt his ribs ache by how full it was.

Slowly, he stood. With clear eyes, he stared at the weakened Regulator in front of him.

Healed. He had been healed.

For a moment, he wished they could talk about it. It was something they had in common; something that could save lives, ones more than his.

Mercy looked at the blood in the water and licked at flecked lips and then back to Hoax. Labored breaths colored the quiet.

“How do you feel?” he asked suddenly.

<Oh, he’s got jokes.>

Hoax’s voice in his head was pained mockery. The orange eye rolled to look at him as she heaved another breath, then wound her long head up and over his form. The last of the blood on her hide fell from her in watery rivulets; the wound had closed.

<Does it matter? You can’t do shit about it.> She twisted her head back and retrieved--his dropped needle. It had wedged into her coral while thrashing about, luckily causing no damage. She held it out to him, the tentacle shaking with irrepressible weakness. <Don’t leave your trash on the beach. That’s how people get hurt and sick and have to have nasty shots and their feet rot off.>

There was something bitterly divine about a bloodied Saint fighting a serpent amid froth and foam and sin-red water that stuck, stinger-sharp, to raw, fire-licked wounds. Mercy had wept here; perhaps he would die as well, if that was the Plan, an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

He was no fighter, though he did so well, but Justice would’ve done better, and Humility, Temperance, and ____. But this Devil in Maroa had been his to handle, because suffering is cruel in that way and so is love. Mercy was old and tired and dying.

But he was still a Saint.

He felt the blessed weapon leave his hand. He heaved against the coils and, wrenching himself among them, smaller but mountainous, he freed a gilded blade from his sleeve and flashed it, blinding white, up to be driven behind the joint of the serpent’s jaw.

It was not the soul cleaver he had used on the devil, designed to break down soul-casings like acid, and that was its own mercy. He was still this.

Hoax did not care one tooth or scale for the poetic imagery, heaving like she’d forgotten how to breathe oxygen without filtering it out of the water. The cry when the knife cut into her was both audible and telepathic, miserably reproachful. This was much worse than a kick in the face.

Her blood dripped down the man’s arm. She hurt everywhere. The temptation to abandon him to his fate, or, worse, rip him apart, flared up in white-hot anger.

It would be so easy!

Her tentacles seized him about the waist, wrapped around the stabbing arm and the other, lifted him off the ground, and she shoved her healing into him. That anger was glad it would hurt, that it would itch, that her power manifested in a fast-forward of the agony of health. Her energy left her in a rush as his wounds closed, his burns receded, and his heart beat strong.

She set him down, the last of her will spent in wrenching out the knife and making sure she wouldn’t bleed out. Her breathing heaved and her long eel form twitched, but Ha! Ha ha! You fucker, I hope you’re embarrassed. I hope you’re ashamed. I hope you feel guilty and sad you stabbed me.

Too close. He would not be hemmed in and corralled.

“Back!”

Waning as he was, weakened as he was, still Mercy struck out and lashed the brunt of his inlaid whip across the massive eel’s ringed body. It was not with full force, not with cracking coil, not yet, not so close, but it would hurt.

The air around the Saint sigils branded into the hilt sparked. He kicked out, moving back as best he could in the sudden froth.

Hoax let out a low sound like distressed bass reverb as the whip hit her. That hurt far more than a whip should! And with it, she felt another stutter of her control on everything. Everything important.

That whip had to go.

Mercy watched Hoax’s form writhe and contort with the same distant calculation as he might a particularly gruesome injury. His chest heaved and the burned skin of his face had started to bleed again, bruises and cuts alike reopening with all the sudden movement.

He caught his breath and blinked away the dark encroaching on his vision.

“You will not touch my mind,” he stated, fierce and ragged. “And you will not touch me without saying what–” (Breathe. Release.) “What you are doing.”

He took a step back from the eel’s convulsing, morphing figure. With a sharp, thundering snap the massive coils, like an eerie mirror of Hoax’s were brought back to his hand and caught along with the whip’s hilt. It trembled.

Hoax stopped fighting whatever weirdness had hold off her and let her full form take hold, the large eel-and-coral creature ringing Mercy as suddenly as his snapped whip. Her head rose up level with his from the flippers and she gurgled in annoyance and frustration. The tentacles around her head squirmed as she felt everything about herself--her grip on the oversoul, her powers--flicker and fight.

Patience was not Mercy’s Virtue. Nevertheless–contrary to popular opinion, and contrary and in accordance with his profession–he tried to exercise it.

But not today. His nephew was dead and in hell and Mercy was not so far off himself.

The needle that had been taken between large, careful if nail-bloodied fingers fell to the ground and the whip that had not strayed far from his hand cracked across the shallows between them in a blow that spewed a torrent of lake water skyward. Mercy was half on his feet, visage pale and furious.

“Get your hands off me!”

As the whip came out, Hoax felt a stutter of a problem with her healing. It was that, moreso than the weapon, that made her jerk away from him in a panic. If a healing went sour, she did not know what might happen to him. Her blood burned as the energy went awry--or, no, her form was struggling to remain--was that--

Hoax hit the beach facedown with a garbled yelp as her legs became paddle-like, her lower body reverting to the eel without consistency or consent. If this had been on purpose she might laugh and make snarky comments about mermaids, but it was uncomfortable along with being comically grotesque.

“Put that a̸w̵a̸y̸ b̸͕̎e̸̟̕f̸̳̀o̴̼̚r̶̥͐e̸̬̕--” Hoax’s body suddenly lost speech with too many teeth in her mouth, but her telepathy seemed fine. ...Fine enough. <Before I hu̶̹̞͕͌̒͝rt you on acciᵈᵉⁿᵗ!>

The heavily injured Saint continued to hold his grip for several seconds, and it didn’t get any lighter with each that passed. The knuckles gripping the whip tightened once and audibly.

He then let go.

Mercy folded himself down onto the bank with a meticulous care that spoke of silent pain. Yes, he was in agony; yes, he knew how to deal with such feelings, and this Regulator wouldn’t be handed them on a platter. Regardless, the skin on half of his face bubbled with a searing fire that his body had not forgotten and would long remember, and cracked bone and bruising did not vanish overnight. He was only thankful his contacts were not yet here to see it.

“You would try.”

His weight heaved down and he began to retrieve what he needed to finish stitching up his hands. The small kit slid next to his lap.

“The Hoax?” he spoke up.

Hoax could make this easier on them both, explain what she was doing. But her willfully stupid and aggressively annoying persona were both habit and defiance now. If sometimes she wondered when she lost her gentleness, it wasn’t on her mind now.

Instead, she rubbed her wrist and scoffed. You would try. What did he know! Sure, she was bad at it, but she could erase a memory or two if she needed to. She bet that burn went all the way to his brain, ‘cause he was being an idiot about all of this.

Mercy’s eyes hardened at the sudden vivid flutter of his heart and his grip tightened.

“You-”

The whip was in his other hand and he was up on his feet in the next breath.

"You’re either a fool or a Regulator to be so brazen.”

Or both. Though–this one seemed familiar, somehow; like a study under glass.

“Wow, wow.” Hoax said, watching him stand up and pull a weapon. She’d seen those before; humans liked to use them against each other. It had been a very long time, though.

Oh. He mentioned Regulators.

“Hey! You know what you’re talking about, then. Let go?” Hoax pulled on her captured wrist like a child might, completely unconcerned with this man’s bravado. Yeah, she’d healed him a little, but he was, like, old and hurt still. She’d be fine.

A passing fancy tempted him to say that it was interesting for someone of her bearing to comment on what he should do with his clothes. That was a joke Sean would make (another ache; still raw, mingling with everything else.) Mercy, instead, said nothing—nor did he acknowledge the steady approach.

That was, until his hand shot out and grabbed Hoax’s wrist. His bright eyes snapped up as surely as his whip might.

“Not dead yet,” came the cold reply.

“Hey?” Hoax barked, brow furrowing. She looked at the hand on her wrist and then back into those eyes, hers huge behind thick glasses. “I know?” Clearly he wasn’t dead yet.

What a pain! Humans were so weird about everything. Sure, she was violating a whole slew of their social norms, but she was behaving perfectly well for an eel. Sort of! When she was the only Aquovan alive, she got to set the norm, so she was, and he should appreciate that.

Mercy’s vision had suffered, certainly, but even he could make out the figure of an irreverently rude person striding buck-naked from the lake. Several seconds of silence followed as his expression went both serene and cold.

He finished wringing his shirt as though he hadn’t heard them and folded it neatly at his side. His hands shook, fingertips raw and roughened–nerve damage, possibly permanent. The thought felt like a knife.

(His nephew stumbles and screams.)

“I imagine so.”

He didn’t need to respond, or even want to–but it gave him the chance to hear his own voice. It sounded winded but at least he wasn’t slurring. Small mercies.

The human was probably dying. He was older, and severely hurt, and he didn’t even care that she was naked and being rude. Clearly, he was halfway through death’s door.

“I hope you’re not planning on wearing those without washing them properly.” Hoax announced primly. “Lake water’s gross. Gonna crawl into all your wounds and make you all fester-y.”

Hoax had edged closer, approaching from the side as she’d crawled from the water. She was certain he’d get a little nervous, either from the weird air of anxiety she gave off ever since she’d been made a Regulator, or the fact that she was bare-skinned and humans freaked out. If he could put up a fight, maybe she didn’t have to heal him. But, yikes, he looked more and more like shit the closer she got.

“Alright.”

Noemi wanted to know more, but it really wasn’t any of her business. And from what she’d heard so far, this really was beyond her.

“If there’s ever anything I can do to help, just let me know. And thank you again.”

She glanced around the cave awkwardly.

“I guess I can leave now.”

<...> The pause was palpable in Noemi’s head, an actual telepathic pause instead of dead air. Then, <...Thank you. For caring. You shouldn’t, but thank you.>

The water gently began to wrap around Noemi, careful of anything it might damage, and Hoax continued. <If you need me to heal something, please come. My warning isn’t meant to make you never visit. Just be careful who you trust. I’ve seen too many die for less.>