"What."
"They only work on merfolk."
"No yeah I got that part but I'm just- I'm not mer?"
Mr. Drake shot him a sympathetic smile. "That's the problem then, isn't it? How was a human affected by mer magic? Watch-" Mr. Drake reached out, cupping the red pendant in his hand. Letting it sit there for a moment or two before he spoke up again. "See? It doesn't do a single thing to me. And neither does this one-" here he touched the yellow sea glass pendant hanging around his own neck, "even though it has plenty of magic too."
Terry felt his stomach give a tight little squirm. After the day of his dad's murder he hadn't touched the thing once, being sure to wrap it in a sock before he stuffed it in a box to take to his mom's place. He had almost touched it again, when he was unpacking that very box, before deciding that he did not have the emotional energy to become the next Chosen One in whatever YA fantasy novel he had found himself in as of late.
"Wait so does then that, I mean, my parents are human so how does that even work?"
"We don't know, and that's what we wish to find out." Damian said.
And that sounded great, except… "I guess this means I can't just hand this thing over and leave, then?"
"Yes." replied Damian. "For your health and safety this matter must be investigated thoroughly. Also, you know of the identity and location of the Bat Mer. We cannot let you roam free with this information."
Terry's mind short-circuited a little bit because that sounded a lot like he was being threatened? Was Damian threatening him? Damian then opened his mouth to say something else, but was hastily interrupted by a contrite looking Dick.
"Not that we'll be like, holding you hostage or anything! It's simple, really. Blood tests and whatnot for the mer stuff, and being sworn into secrecy for the bat stuff."
"Wait, like, for real? I'm going to have to go into magical witness protection? Change my name and crap?" He was panicking again now but c'mon, this is really not how he wanted this week to go!
"No no!" Dick cried, waving his hands as if to calm a wild animal. "That was just a joke! A bad joke, I'm sorry."
"Ah."
"Yeah."
Silence reigned for a moment then as the rest of the group did that conversation thing-with-the-eyes that adults do that usually meant Terry would not like whatever they were about to say next. Damian and Bruce looked tense, Barbara and Mr. Drake looked curious, Dick was still looking at him, slightly apologetic and Cass looked… Well. Terry couldn't actually see her features well enough at this distance due to the… everything about her. But from the set of her shoulders he thought she looked relaxed? Maybe. They were still going at it with the mind reading (wait, mind reading? Did mer have the ability to communicate telepathically? If so he was so screwed. So screwed. This situation had just become most un-schway. Please don't let them be telepaths that would just be the worst. Ugh! Focus, Terry!)
Surprisingly, it was Cass who broke everyone out of their respective headaches with the simple call of "Sit."
"What?"
"You all should sit."
Terry's gaze immediately drifted to Barbara.
She shot him an amused smile. "Cass is right. Let me go get you a chair. We'll talk more in depth once we're all comfortable. Dick!"
"Yeah?"
"Come with me."
"Kay!"
Terry realized now that the entire cave had both wheelchair and mer accessible paths spanning the length of the place, branching out in some spots over into what he assumed were storage rooms. He watched Barbara wheel down the path while Dick swam alongside and wondered how much help Dick would be in fetching chairs if one wanted to sit somewhere dry. Though, based on the voices he could faintly hear coming from the hallway they'd gone down, it might be fair to say she'd asked him along for the company. Terry hadn't realized he'd completely zoned out till a tug on his pant leg broke his concentration. He looked down to see Cass in the pool right in front of him. From this distance he realized that the yellow of her eyes also made an appearance in a little line of scales trailing down her cheekbones and arms. It was actually pretty schway in a striking, inhuman way.
"Are you ok?" said Cass in a small but soothing voice.
Terry wanted to lie to her. Even more, he wanted to be able to say 'yeah' and mean it, but he couldn't, so he settled for "Kinda. I guess."
Cass' smile was the same as her voice. Small but soothing. Then she reached her hand up, and Terry found himself crouching down to take the bit of proffered comfort. Her hand was colder than a human's, and he was right in assuming that the sheen of her skin meant she was slightly slimy. It felt a bit like holding a fish, but Terry had also never held a fish that didn't try and run away from him, so he wasn't even really sure what comparison he was trying to make. It wasn't bad though. Wasn't bad at all. Terry wondered if this was maybe what having a big sister felt like.
He was still crouched there when Barbara came back with two folding chairs balanced across her lap, Dick swimming just beside her, and, in response to her silent question when their gazes met, simply sat down right where he was. Barbara set up the chair anyways.
By the time they were finished talking Terry still hadn't used it.
It was decided that a blood test would be administered. Terry had been hesitant at first, but when Mr. Drake had shown him the state of the art medbay equipped to handle both human and mer treatment, he was reminded of the fact that these were the people who had taken it upon themselves to fight crime as a hobby. Mr. Drake ran him through all the things they would be looking for in his blood as he was poking an IV line in Terry's arm, but since Terry only had tenth grade biology to go off of, he got that the basic gist was 'mer DNA' and that was fine by him.
After that, there was tentative discussion about getting him an actual internship at the aquarium. Now that he wasn't being cornered into playing along, Terry told them that he would consider it. It certainly wouldn't hurt to do actual job stuff. Besides, he needed all the help he could get to distract potential employers from the big fat 'JUVIE' stamped on his record. Either way, he was going to need to keep it up as a cover story.
By the time they had set up a schedule (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from four to seven. They'd be researching his mer-ness but also kindly promised to help with whatever homework he had, so really this was just an elaborate set up for what was quickly becoming the weirdest study hall of his life), and run a couple more medical scans it was nearly time to drop him back off at his mom's. He was just moving to collect his jacket from where he'd left it in the medbay when Bruce beaconed him aside. He was still intimidating, but now that Terry had spent the past couple hours watching him and his kids interact, it was easier to look past the dark mysterious air surrounding the mer.
"Terry, you seem to be handling this well, but I still wanted to ask you- how are you doing?"
Terry shrugged in lieu of a verbal answer. Bruce had been watching him all afternoon, and everyone seemed to know what happened to his dad, so…
"You know you don't have to do anything about this, right?"
"Huh?"
"The pendant. This whole situation. It doesn't have to mean anything you don't want it to mean." When Terry only gave him a blank stare, he continued. "I just wanted to make sure you know that this knowledge doesn't put you under any obligations. If you want to go back to your normal life after we've cleared up the health aspects and forget this ever happened, that's ok. Don't rush into life changing decisions."
That got Terry to crack a weak smile. Bit of a late warning. Every life changing decision he's ever made had been rushed. But, what Bruce was offering… would be nice. Leave the pendant, leave the mer, focus on school, family, friends and forget this whole ordeal. It would be nice. But at the same time, some part of him, deep down in a place he was going to ignore for the time being, knew he could never. Not when this made so much sense. But he didn't want to, or know how to express that right now, and all he said was, "Ok."
Bruce gave him a small smile in return and a pat on the shoulder before waving him towards the door with a little goodbye.
Terry had a lot running through his mind on the ride home. Like the fact that his Magical Girl transformation wasn't all just a bad dream, or the fact that he would have to give his mom some crap about how "The aquarium was great! Lots of pools. Lots of cool creatures. We're doing a real schway bit of genetics research actually, it's super interesting. Lots of fancy tech I gotta learn how to operate", and how he was probably going to lock himself in his room and watch farming videos to decompress for the rest of the night. But the thought that kept coming back to him, the one that stuck like the barnacle on a rock that slit your leg open when you slipped and fell, was just how kind they all were. And yeah, maybe he should have expected it when meeting the people who fought crime on the streets out of the goodness of their heart, but meeting them- seeing it in action was something else entirely.
It was weird, but maybe he had unwittingly found more than a pod of crazed magical mer with too much time on their hands.
Maybe he had found some friends.
