He grew up staring into the abyss.
His parents were oceanographers, biologists, the story changed from day to day.
All he knew was that his sister has left as soon as the social workers managed to track them down, and he'd been living on a boat longer than he could really put into words.
His room was small, but he was used to it. More importantly, the ocean and sky was always open.
Mom and Dad… his parents, they liked to shut themselves away in the bottom of the boat, peering at clicking screens and beeping dials, listening to the static of what marine life might be below them. He had snuck in once, and found diagrams of animals he had never heard of. Most of interest to them, appeared to be a microscopic fleck of green suspended in dark liquid. It never moved from where it sat on the jar's bottom, and after a small swirl, Danny concluded it was dead.
The teen preferred to be out in the sun, slathering on sunscreen and wearing too many clothes for the heat, in some half-hearted attempt to stave off yet another round of burn-and-peel.
even after years, his skin just wasn't liking the sun.
The waves were choppy that morning. He could tell a storm was on the horizon, despite clear skies as far as the eye could see. They all could - like a sixth sense, or a premonition, even if his mom didn't like the idea of magic. Only matters of Science could triumph in this world, she said.
Even with the knowledge that the rain would come.
Even with years of experience telling him to be careful on board, to shut himself in his room as soon as possible to ride it out…
He still slipped.
The cold water seemed to suck the breath right out of him, bubbles swirling as held his arms out in an attempt to get his bearings. Danny released a small stream, following their path with his eyes and feeling a twinge of unease as they traveled out of sight. His eyes weren't that bad, underwater. It was still daylight, right?
He twisted, kicking toward where the bubbles had escaped to, and spotted something out of the corner of his eye.
In a pale sort of blue, he could see the outline of the shelf they had been anchored to. The twinge started expanding into full-on terror.
He shouldn't be able to see the shelf. It was far too deep, he was -. The fear detached into an emotionless realization when the shelf slid sideways and out of his field of vision.
He was…. in a current.
Danny looked down, at the black abyss below him, then up at the faintly lighter blue above. His chest was already burning, telling him sharply that a new breath would be needed soon. He would start drowning in 5…
He kicked twice toward the surface, realizing almost instantly that there was no point. Already the ocean was getting colder around him, darker.
4…
He curled his feet up toward him, feeling shaggy black locks of hair brush gently around his face. His white shirt billowed around him, stretched by the strong, gentle fingers of the ocean. He would die here, in this cold.
In this darkness.
3…
He couldn't close his eyes. God, he wanted to. He wanted to just surrender to the growing chill and the pressure and the slight sting in his eyes, but he couldn't look away. A swirl of green had appeared from the darkness, tiny lights sparkling like the echoes of a starlit sky.
2…
They danced vaguely toward him, growing bigger the longer he stared. At some point he realized the current must be very fast indeed, because it barely took two seconds before the fist-sized swirl turned into something that was twisting in ribbons around him. Danny could see his own hand in front of his face, pale skin reflecting the eerie green bioluminescence.
1…
His lungs heaved, bubbles finally tumbling out when his willpower finally surrendered under the instincts that had been clawing for a breath. Water rushed into his mouth and nose, punching him right through the heart with ice. He thrashed, eyes finally closing as the rush of death closed in. He could hear the pulse of his own heartbeat.
The strangled moans of a voice being smothered.
The taste of salt.
Ice sinking into his bones.
0….
He couldn't see the moment when the strange green lights converged on his body. They coalesced into ropes, smothering his body in their pale green bodies. Innumerable tiny things from the depths of the ocean, pressing up against him and the terror of drowning.
Too small to see, they wiggled into his skin, down his throat and into the fluttering, seizing lungs. They easily slid through the thin membrane in his eyes, his ears.
And oh, his blood. So warm.
Danny wasn't exactly aware of himself when he opened his eyes for the first time. He didn't know that his irises were glowing green from within the pupil, ringed in blue.
He didn't know how his muscles spasmed at first, before moving with a purpose as the hive-mind learned how tissues, how organs and organ systems worked.
He didn't feel the first pumps of his heart, nor the alien mind combing through his bodily functions to figure out why exactly he had died.
Oxygen. Carbon Dioxide. Nitrogen. All these things, the water had in abundance. For whatever reason, his lungs didn't… there!
They made a tweak, small bodies working with larger cells, pushing and pulling until they were aligned just right.
Intake, Outtake, water, oxygen, carbon dioxide. Perfect.
They inhaled.
They tried to move in the water, but failed to move far. Even with various positions and attempts at moving the muscles of this odd creature, they couldn't really go anywhere.
That, too, could be fixed. They had been in fish before.
They knew how the sleekest ones made this vast place their home.
The green bodies sank into his abdomen, stretching some things out, reassigning others. The body already had a nice blueprint of some white scales, on the tips of their strange digits.
The skeleton, too, came with the vestigal remnants of a tail. All they needed was to rearrange… there!
With a satisfied flick, the eerie white tail pushed them through the water.
Some webbing between these strange limbs, and they could act like rudders - oh, and grab onto things! What an interesting evolutionary trait, hands. So useful~
Eventually, Danny did wake up.
He could feel the curiosity thrumming through his bones, and his brain hadn't been without oxygen for long enough to do any real damage.
After what was essentially death, waking up to find oneself still in the ocean, somehow alive, with fish parts somehow didn't scare him as much as it should have.
He exhaled, but only a rush of water came out.
Danny looked at his hands, with spindly fingers and translucent webbing that wasn't anything like the hands he remembered. He brushed his knuckle along the tail, with scales that looked eerily like human fingernails. It rippled up and coiled around itself, more like a scaled eel than any mammalian structure he'd seen before.
Danny could somehow sense the water around himself, the hum of interest from within his heart - his core.
He touched the cold at this chest, where he knew they/we/he kept the main colony of those tiny little beings. They delighted at the self awareness, and he couldn't help the toothy smile stretching over his face.
That's right.
He was alive.
Danny flicked his tail, euphoria sweeping over him as the ribbons of light swirled around in the water behind him, clinging to scales and wriggling madly to keep up.
They tucked themselves under his skin, in tiny bunches within the strands of his bleached white hair. Once collected inside him, the strange translucent-white tail glowed a pale emerald from within.
They were curious. He was interested.
They were building. He was growing.
They had a new host. He was alive.
He was… they were…
Happy.
And the abyss stared back into him.