Prompt from kashmir-bbj on Tumblr. This could be the beginning of a longer fic if I had the time for it. Think of it as a pilot.
prompt: AU where mythological creatures are common but considered animals, beasts. Anna works in a aquarium full of all sorts of beasts. Recently a new creature has been put in the aquarium and she's super excited to know it.
On the list of Impossible Things that Anna had running in her head, she'd systematically proven that everything actually was possible with a little luck (and magic, if she were honest). For instance, she'd always wanted the monster under her bed to be real (because yay more friends) (or, well, a friend). Turned out that a Shisa had crawled its way under there to hide after it got lost, and Anna ended up spending three days trying to coax it out without alerting her parents.
She'd been nine.
The mere fact that it hadn't killed her was more than enough for the Fabulalogical Society to hand her their card and tell her that 'if she were ever looking for a job…' with a meaningful look.
As soon as she was old enough, Anna rang them up and joined.
That was pretty much the end of her not-so-exhaustive list of Impossible Things (and the list was so short because she'd stopped believing that most things were impossible). The items that remained were things like 'second season of Firefly' and 'become an astronaut'.
And, as her job was in talking care of the marine-dwellers for release into the wild (and, if that wasn't possible, at least so they wouldn't attack other people while in the aquarium), 'meet a female nøkk' was pretty high on her list of Impossible Things.
It wasn't even something she'd thought of consciously, either. The simple fact was, nøkker were male. Not all were evil, and many were so old that they couldn't be bothered to harass innocent people anymore.
The fact was that there hadn't been any new nøkker in over two hundred years (at least, according to the very comprehensive registry that the Fabulalogical Society had drawn up) because all the females had died out.
Apparently, this wasn't the case anymore.
Nøkker only bred under very specific circumstances (something to do with saltwater, a lily plant, blood of a three-week-old boy – not a lot, just a drop – and the eyelash of a shaman with eyes of blue), which didn't help matters, either. The last female Anna had heard of had died in the 1800's when it (and its partner) had been caught in a severe storm.
Anna had rehabilitated all of the surviving ones in North America (a staggering total of three), and was extremely under-prepared to meet the fourth. She'd probably have doubted the veracity of the information but for the fact that it came from Kristoff; if anyone knew the Scandinavian species, it was him.
He was raised by trolls.
So when Kristoff woke her up in the middle of the night, a giddy smile on his face and citing a child nøkk, Anna was intrigued. And excited. And when he leaned close and whispered, in the same excitable tone, that it was a girl, Anna felt as though she could faint.
And here she was, just outside of the room that held the nøkk, severely underprepared.
"Do we have any information?" Anna hissed at Kristoff, who was standing just behind her.
He shook his head, "Nothing, except Marshmallow picked her up near Corona. She was trying to seduce them, and… well, you know Marsh."
Anna nodded. Marshmallow was invaluable (and pretty fantastic at their job) by essence of being completely untouchable by spirits and demons who relied on infatuation to get what they want.
"Obviously untrained, then," she murmured. "No other nøkker to tell her not to?"
"Corona's over a hundred miles from Triton's location, and he's the closest. We have no idea about her – not even how old she is, but I'd wager she's pretty young."
Anna turned around and looked at Kristoff. "What makes you say that?" she asked. He offered a shrug.
"She was terrified."
With a grim nod, Anna stepped through the door.
Oh… wow…
Suspended in a tank of water, the nøkk was… well, it was invisible. But still! All the others had been too old to do that, their power and magic waning over the years. Seeing one who could actually fully disappear was… amazing.
Shooing Kristoff from the room, she walked around the suspended tank and over to a table and chair, sitting in the corner. There was a bucket and a knife, and she smiled approvingly as she dimmed the lights a little.
Reaching into the bucket, she pulled out a fish and cut a slit in its belly. Throwing it into the tank, she watched as it began to sink, blood leaking from it in wisps, before the whole thing suddenly vanished.
So, hungry.
Sitting in the chair, Anna pulled out another fish and did the same to it, only she didn't through it into the tank. Instead, she began to speak, keeping her eyes averted. Nøkker didn't like being watched – something she had learnt painfully, if the scar on her back was any reminder.
"I'm Anna," she said slowly, softly, speaking at the fish but to the tank. "I'm here to help you. We can't have wonderful creatures like you going around hurting people. That's not fair, is it? Hmm, no it isn't. So I'm going to be your friend for however long it takes. First we're just going to work on acquainting you with people. No one here is frightened of you. No one here will hurt you." She glanced up, but the nøkk was still invisible. Terrified, Kristoff had said. Well, that needed to change.
Standing up, she approached the tank, infinitely aware of how the water became more agitated the closer she got.
"Shh…" she cooed, placing a hand on the glass. "I'm not going to hurt you. Come on, you can do it…" She held the fish up. "Come on, I just wanna see your pretty face. You can show me that, right?"
The water calmed and stilled, and Anna smiled. "That's it, that's okay. I'm not going to hurt you…"
Her breath caught in her throat as the nøkk became visible. The fish slipped from her grasp, smile falling with it, as her eyes raked over the creature in the tank.
Yet another thing to tick off her list.
And another one added, because as the fish fell, the nøkk's own expression warped. Icy blue eyes turned a deep midnight; the blonde hair that hung so freely suspended in the water became river weeds; the snow-pale flesh decaying before Anna's very eyes.
Without warning, the nøkk charged at the glass, and Anna barely had two seconds to jump back. She picked up the fish and threw it in the tank, hoping to subdue the creature.
She threw it right back at Anna.
One more Impossible Thing, she thought later, sitting in the bath and picking fish scales from her hair. The nøkk had been moved to a bigger tank, and Anna had retreated to her room to fill out paperwork (and get rid of the awful fish smell).
I am never going to tame her…