Mercy became Lucio's biggest fan, as far as he was concerned. In the days that followed his introduction to the mermaid, he spent almost all of his free time in the small storage room, playing music for the creature, who was absolutely enamored with his instruments, the melodies he created. Lucio had even begun calling it therapeutic, as just his presence alone had drastically improved Mercy's mood in a way that was almost hard to believe. No longer did the mermaid look at them with a wary fear - though it was far from calm and comfortable in the tank, it also no longer laid on the floor of the tank in a state of lethargic sadness. There was even a couple times where Fareeha walked in on Mercy spinning and twirling around towards the middle of the tank, but that was always when the mermaid was alone, and it always stopped the second it noticed her. It was always a beautiful, blissful sight, perhaps a small glimpse of the type motions the mermaid would be performing had it not been trapped behind four glass wall, and it always made Fareeha feel more than a little guilty to witness.

Even more surprising to her, however, was that Hana was taking an active interest in caring for Mercy. Hana wasn't exactly lazy; she just didn't go beyond her assigned duties as the Raptora's engineer. She began to get pickier about the fish she caught, always opting for bigger, fatter ones and throwing back the bonier specimens. She had also grown into a habit of changing the water in the tank daily, which was a long, tedious process that involved dipping bucket after bucket tied to a rope into the ocean, then carrying them individually down two sets of stairs to the storage room. It wasn't too far from her job of cleaning out the ship's bilge chamber, so Fareeha assumed she was well-accustomed to the monotony of it. With both Lucio and Hana doing such a good job of watching out for Mercy in their frequent free time, Fareeha found herself descending the stairs to check up on the mermaid less and less often, though she still tried to make it a point to stop by in the early morning.

That particular morning, the both of them were up before Fareeha was, already seated on crates piled around the tank. Mercy had its eyes closed, peacefully resting its tail on the floor of the front corner tank, back and dorsal fin pressed against a wall. Lucio was softly beating on his drums, creating a steady rhythm that permeated a calm atmosphere throughout the tiny room. Hana was sitting adjacent to him, doing something with some playing cards laid out in front of her, but Fareeha had no idea what.

Mercy's eyes opened when it heard the door open, which prompted Lucio, in turn, to look at her.

"You two are up early," Fareeha mused, leaning against the door frame. Hana grunted in response, still barely paying any attention to her at all, too focused on her cards.

Lucio just shrugged. "I figured she'd be awake since I don't think I've seen her sleep once, so I was giving her a bit of company before the day got going."

"That's thoughtful, but-"

Lucio held his hand up. "I know, I know. Other morning duties come first, playing music for the mermaid comes second." He stood up, tapping Hana on the shoulder as he moved past her. "Let's go, gamer girl. You have a ship to walk."

When Fareeha stepped outside shortly after making sure Mercy had enough to eat, the first thing she was greeted to was her first mate leaning over a railing overlooking the bottom half of the deck, looking down at her with a smirk on his face, cigar still hanging out of his mouth like it was attached to his lips.

"You done wooin' the fish?" he called down to her.

Fareeha tried to resist the urge to glare at him, and instead moved toward the ladder directly adjacent to the door she had just come out of. Upon reaching the top with McCree, Fareeha could also see that Lena was also standing nearby, one hand on the wheel that controlled the ship's rudder, while she watched the Captain with her familiar smile.

"I wasn't wooing a mermaid." Her tone matched the annoyed looked she was giving him, but he seemed to completely ignore it.

"I suppose that sounds about right," he droned, leaning back against the railing. "I don't suppose you'd be able to woo your way out of a paper bag."

To that, Lena let out a loud laugh. "I think we got a slight case of the pot calling the kettle black here."

McCree drew a long puff back on his cigar before looking at the navigator. "You think I don't know what women like, Tracer?"

"Do you want the honest answer, or do you want me to stroke your ego?"

"Enlighten me," he goaded with a small chuckle.

"I've seen more action from women in my weeks off than you have in your entire life, I can guarantee that."

He arched an eyebrow at her. "Woah, there. I need a doctor."

"I'd say that was brutal, but she's probably right," Fareeha commented, leaning against the ship's railing.

"Can't say much to her," he gestured to the captain, looking back at Lena "But I sure as hell can put you on kitchen duty for a few days."

Lena snorted. "Go right ahead, luv, if it helps you sleep at night better."

McCree opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by Lucio's sudden appearance.

"Captain," Lucio said, his face unusually grim, "I think you need to go down to Mercy's tank. That's been an...incident."

The way that last word hung in the air brought an immediate, heavy silence to the playful atmosphere that had previously surrounded the three of them. As if a switch had been flipped in her brain, Fareeha shifted to a much more serious demeanor, as she had trained herself to do for years.

"What happened?"

Lucio just shook his head. "I'm not sure. All I know is a few of the deckhands brought me a sailor that was half-drowned. Totally unconscious, drenched from head to toe. They said Mercy attacked him."

Fareeha blinked at him, not fully processing what he was telling her. The mermaid had attacked someone? How? The tank had a latch on it; there was no way to open it from the inside. And even so, Fareeha had specifically forbidden the crew to interact with the mermaid, exactly for the sake of their own safety. Lucio and Hana were the only ones allowed in the storage room beside McCree and herself - Hana because she had taken on a role as Mercy's caretaker, and Lucio because his music was almost therapeutic for the mermaid's emotional health. Deckhands weren't even supposed to go near it, let alone get attacked by it. And the entire crew knew how low their captain's patience was when she was blatantly defied.

"How the hell did it get out of the tank?" she finally asked, a part of her refusing to believe that she had been disobeyed so belligerently.

"She didn't."

"What do you mean 'it didn't'?" she asked sharply, her demeanor quickly shifting from surprise to very, very angry.

"Someone fell into it."

"Jesse," she beckoned, turning away from Lucio, not needing to say anything else to prompt him to follow her.

"I hear ya."

When Fareeha finally made it to the lower deck, all hell was breaking loose in the small storage room. There were at least three people in addition to herself and McCree already standing around the tank, and what she saw made her blood boil in a way that was very uncharacteristic for the usually-calm captain. The first thing she heard even before the door opened was the very pointed sound of growling and hissing, and when they actually stepped into the room, Fareeha was rather horrified to see that Mercy was no longer in the tank, but was on the wooden floor, tangled in a thin net. Three men surrounded the mermaid, whose dorsal fin was flared. The sailors stood on the ropes in a way that Mercy was tightly pinned to the floor, nets cutting into the skin of its back as it occasionally lurched around in the fibers, trying to appear threatening. Water pooled underneath the mermaid's damp body.

"What in the name of hell are you boys doin'?" McCree spoke up first, sounding just as angry as Fareeha felt. "Now, I'm not a mind reader by any means, but I seem to recall you bein' told to stay away from this room. Care to explain why you got that animal out of its tank?"

There was a long silence, where none of them said anything.

"Your superior officer asked you a question," Fareeha told them coldly. "Answer him."

"We had to take it out to save Peterson," one of them finally defended, trying not to shrink under the angry, penetrating glare of both his captain and her first mate. "It wouldn't let us down into the tank. He would have drowned."

"What was he doing in the tank in the first place?" Fareeha's voice was harsh. "Better yet, what were any of you doing in this room in the first place? You're not even supposed to be down here, much less dragging that dangerous animal out of its tank."

Silence just followed her questions, as none of them had an excuse as to why they had directly disobeyed her.

"Fareeha," Jesse suddenly piped up from the other side of the room, to where he had wandered while Fareeha was chewing them out. "Take a look at this."

Fareeha turned her angry brown eyes to the tank, which McCree was looking into with an arched eyebrow. She, in turn, peered past the glass, to see that the floor of the tank was littered with wooden and metal debris that definitely had not been there the last time she had stopped by to check up on Mercy. Her own face darkened even more so at the realization of what those absolutely bullheaded deckhands had done.

"Were you throwing things at that mermaid?" she asked sharply.

"It tried to drown us," one of them grumbled. "Knocked Peterson out cold with its voice. And when we tried to help him out, it started snarling like a damn wolf."

"It's almost like it's a dangerous animal that you were told to stay away from," McCree said, sarcasm drenching his tone. "If you were stirrin' it up, I'd say you all earned a little dip in that tank."

"You've seen what that monster can do, haven't you?" was the heated reply he got. "It tried to kill all of us."

Fareeha finally turned her glare down to the creature on the ground that was no longer growling but rather was hyperventilating as Mercy struggled to breathe through panicked gasps of air, more so due to fear than an actual difficulty breathing air. When Mercy finally looked up at the human towering overhead, meeting her brown eyes, the mermaid recoiled heavily under her gaze, pressing itself as close to the ground as it feasibly could. Terror unlike anything Fareeha had ever seen in her life shown all too clearly on the animal's face. The mermaid's tense state was no surprise to her considering what kind of stress those idiots had just subjected the poor creature to.

"Good riddance, I'd say," McCree said, his icy tone matching the exact thoughts going through Fareeha's mind at how absolutely well they had traumatized the mermaid.

"Damn thing is a menace," one of them muttered, in a tone that was most likely not intended to not be heard.

"What was that, sailor?" she asked. "If you have something to say, say it. Don't lower your voice to me."

"They clearly don't belong around people," he replied, voice only growing marginally bolder.

"I didn't want this animal on board my ship in the first place!" she barked back, finally raising her tone of voice for the first time in longer than she could remember. "The entire crew disagreed with me because you all thought the money you'd make from selling this mermaid was worth the risk of having it on board." Fareeha laughed without humor. "Now, you're all going to have to live with that. You want to be afraid of it? Good. It reminded you of all the stories you've been told of merfolk since you were infants sucking on your thumbs. Spread the word that the mermaid on the lower deck is dangerous, by all means. Maybe you'll think twice before openly defying me again, hm?"

When none of them replied to that she waved them away. "You're all dismissed. Tomorrow morning, report to the front deck as normal and McCree will decide your punishment for such blatant stupidity."

All three of them gave her a half-hearted salute and muttered "Yes, Captain," in unison before leaving the room as fast as they could without running.

As they walked by, McCree drew back on his cigar. "Those boys were drunk as skunks. I could smell the booze on 'em from halfway across the room."

"That doesn't excuse anything," Fareeha grumbled, watching after them, trying to will herself to calm down. "I've never been drunk enough in my life that I'd think it was a good idea to climb down into a tank with a live mermaid and pelt it with pieces of wood." More so than just the fact that what they had done was stupid, Fareeha was more concerned with the type of damage they might have done with the progress Lucio had made with Mercy. The skittish mermaid had only just started to warm up to them - that could have been totally ruined by their actions.

And now she was faced with the very daunting task of lifting the terrified mermaid back up into that tank. A part of her had almost ordered the deckhands to do it, but she didn't want to put Mercy through any more contact with them than she had to.

As if on cue, Lucio quietly stepped into the doorway; he'd cleary been waiting form the outside. "Do you need help getting her back in the tank?" He gave Mercy a good-natured smile. "I am her favorite, after all."

"It would be appreciated," she replied, not entirely liking the idea of having to lift Mercy in the animal's current state; while the mermaid may not have been as uncomfortable around them as it had once been, to say it trusted them was a huge stretch. Mercy recognized and tolerated them, but that was about the extent of it. Fareeha approached the mermaid slowly, hyper-aware of the way it's wary blue eyes tracked her every motion. Not once breaking eye contact with the creature, she crouched down directly in front of the cryptic, pulling out a knife. At first, Mercy pulled away, but Fareeha quickly began to cut away at the ropes entangling the mermaid and once it realized that she wasn't planning on attacking it with the weapon, some of the tension left the mermaid's body.

"There," she said softly, pulling away the last of the ropes. "That feels better, doesn't it?" She received Mercy's usual silence as an answer. "Let's get you back in that tank." As she had been freeing Mercy from the twine, she had noticed that the mermaid's skin had almost totally dried, and it's breathing had become noticeably more labored. Fareeha had no idea how long merfolk could survive outside of water, as Mercy clearly possessed some kind of lung in addition to gills, but she assumed that it wasn't a very long time.

Fareeha tucked her arms underneath the mermaid's back, lifting it in a scooping motion, while Lucio assisted with Mercy's tail. McCree stood back, helping to direct them instead of actually touching Mercy, as he was nowhere near a friend of the mermaid's. While they slowly clamored up onto a crate and did the admittedly difficult process of lifting something the size of a grown man over their heads and into the tank, Fareeha couldn't help but notice the feeling of Mercy's skin against her own hands. It felt intimately human; she had always expected that merfolk's skin would be more similar to the rubbery texture of a dolphin, but it was like touching the smooth, soft, flawless skin of a baby.

Something about it sent chills down her spine and peppered her skin with goosebumps.

When they finally managed to hoist Mercy over the tank, it didn't immediately allow itself to sink to the floor, but rather folded its arms on the top of the glass wall, watching both her and Lucio intensely for a few seconds, blonde eyebrows knit as wide blue eyes studied them critically.

"Yes?" she asked. Mercy's brow furrowed even more for a few seconds, but it eventually dove under the water, going back to looking at them through the glass. As Fareeha shut the lid of the tank and redid the latch, frowning, she returned the unreadable look the mermaids was fixing her in. She had no idea what the cause of such an intense stare was, but she gave the mermaid a small smile. "I won't let those men bother you again. You have my word. Just put your seacurity in my hands."

Mercy cocked its head at her, but Lucio actually moaned, as if he was in physical agony. "I can't even take you seriously right now."

Within the hour, Hana installed a lock on the door.

Within nightfall, almost everyone on board the Raptora had fallen terribly ill. Lucio was the busiest he had been in five different trips, as he ran around trying to mix up remedies for an absurd amount of stomachaches and fevers and Fareeha wouldn't have been surprised if the vomit from the amount sailors that had emptied the contents of their stomach into the ocean had caused an environmental health hazard to the local sea life. After some digging around the kitchen, she had discovered the culprit: a meat barrel filled with some bacteria, that they had apparently eaten out of. She quickly disposed of it, but that was far too late to help those already suffering from the effects of the tainted food. By the time she normally would have gone to bed, she herself started to feel the effects of the sickness that had taken hold of almost her entire crew.

Hana was among those too sick to even go about her evening walk of the ship, so Fareeha took it upon herself to see to it that Mercy was fed that night. Lucio, somehow immune to the illness, had expressed his concern about the captain overexerting herself, but she insisted she was fine, that he was far too busy for something so simple, and she wasn't so sick that she couldn't drop a fish in a tank.

That was what Fareeha thought, until she actually tried to climb onto the crate she normally did, and her entire world began to shake in five different directions at once. With her mind clouded from the effects of the sickness, Fareeha's judgment had become just as muddled as she leaned over the tank, staring down at the mermaid below her. Holding the tank open with one arm, she dangled a fish over the water and dropped it in, she was only vaguely aware of the nagging voice at the back of her head reminding her she was in a very vulnerable position. Mercy immediately kicked upward from its spot in the back corner and moved toward her, giving her a smile before taking the fish and starting to eat. Fareeha grimaced slightly, not from the sight of Mercy disemboweling another tuna, but because of the throbbing headache that had accompanied her fever and stomach problems. Whatever sickness has taken hold of half of her crew was wrecking havoc on her as well, but she wouldn't set aside her duties as Captain for something so trivial. Still, she patiently waited until the mermaid was done with its first fish before dropping another.

As Mercy sunk its razor-sharp teeth into the second fish, the entire ground beneath Fareeha's feet gave a jolting lurch. Normally, she would have been able to react to it well enough. Rough patches of waves were commonplace for her; just a part of daily life. Normally, however, Fareeha would not have been leaning over the top of a large pool of water, balancing on a loose wooden crate with one hand keeping hold of a heavy lid, and while so sick she barely knew what balance was. As the ship shifted forward, she was suddenly surrounded by water, vaguely aware of a loud slam as the lid of the tank closed on top of her.

Somewhere through her feverish stupor, Fareeha was aware of the direness of the situation she as in; she forced her eyes open in the water, trying to ignore how badly the salt water caused them to burn. Everything was blurred and indecipherable, the familiar layout of the room on the other side of the tank becoming a mix of brown shapes and shadows that her eyes simply could not make sense of. Instinctively, she began to kick her legs to propel herself forward, however, she hit one of the glass walls, not even able to tell which way was up. In the next second, she felt something brush us behind her, and was jolted into remembering that she was not alone in the tank.

The mermaid.

Oh, god, the mermaid.

The only image that filled Fareeha's panicked mind in that instance was the razor-sharp teeth the monster possessed, the way it stripped flesh from the bone, the fact that's tail would be infinitely more powerful than her awkward kicks. All it would have to do would be to grab her, to pin her against the floor of the prison that she had herself allowed the mermaid to be placed in, and she'd be helpless. She'd almost surely die to the animal's bloodlust. She'd-

NO.

Like hell would she die on her own ship, to an animal of all things. Like hell.

She turned around as fast as she could to face the mermaid in the water, only making out a faint outline of white and blonde before she balled one of her hands into a fist and swung at the oversized fish with all her might. Something that sounded chillingly like a woman's gasp of pain came muffled to her ears, but Fareeha became unaware of what happened after that, as she was starting to feel the effects of a lack of oxygen in her lungs. Her headache was only getting worse, and precious bubbles of air were slowly seeping from her nose. Ignoring the potentially enraged mermaid, and tightly grasping her nose shut with a free hand, Fareeha kicked her legs again, moving in the direction that she prayed was upward.

In a few seconds, she came to the lid of the tank, but found herself unable to force it open; it was simply too heavy for her weakened body to lift. Before a new panic could seize her chest, however, Fareeha once again felt the presence of Mercy in the water directly next to her. However, before she could swing at it once more, the mermaid kicked her away, pinning her against the wall of the tank with its powerful tail. As she started to struggle, the mermaid wrapped her up in its arm, pinning both of her own arms against her body as a webbed hand carefully covered her mouth and nose.

Fareeha's eyes slammed shut, now totally at the mercy of the cryptic as all she could do in protest was kick.

As she resigned herself to her fate, air suddenly filled her lungs when she broke the surface. In shock, her brown eyes opened once more, to find herself mere inches from Mercy's blue eyes, as the mermaid watched with concern on its face. Mercy had released her arms, but still kept its own arm wrapped tightly around her waist, supporting her carefully as she caught her breath. Mercy's other arm kept the tank propped open, giving Fareeha a big enough gap between the water and top of the tank to potentially climb out.

Fareeha found that to be a daunting task, especially given how exhausted she felt, but as if reading her mind, Mercy gave her a boost by situating its tail underneath her legs, giving her something to stand on as she managed to clamber over the glass. There was no box for her to stand on where Mercy had lifted her out, but Fareeha nonetheless less allowed herself to fall to the ground, where she laid still for several long moments trying to focus on breathing and slowing down her racing heart.

After she found the strength to sit up again, she looked back at Mercy, who was still staring at her, one hand resting on the glass of the tank. For a long several seconds, Fareeha started at the mermaid's concerned blue eyes, her own expression intense over what had just happened.

When Lucio appeared in the doorway, Fareeha almost arched an eyebrow at him; he'd been quite useful with randomly manifesting out of thin air that day.

He blinked at her. "I noticed you were taking a while feeding Mercy, but..." he paused, noticing how soaked she was "Did Mercy attack you too?"

Fareeha glanced up at the mermaid once more, who still looked too worried about her to touch the fish still floating at the tank's surface. "No." she shook her head. "She saved my life."