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Castiel got a careful grip on his chosen stone, and issued a precise strike to the shell of the clam he’d placed in the shallow curve of the flattest rock he knew. The clam split open, and Castiel quickly scooped it up and raised it to his mouth, using his sharp teeth to tug the meat free and relishing the squish and tear of it. Delicious.
Some of his hair got caught in his mouth, and he was reminded that it was time to chop it shorter again. It spent most of its time drifting in a loose halo around his head, but it did get annoying when he accidentally chewed on it. He would cut it after he finished eating, he decided.
There were a dozen discarded shells already scattered around him, but he was still hungry and now out of clams. He dug under the rocks around him with a few of his arms to check for any lobsters that might be lurking beneath, but no such luck. He launched away from the rock, jetting water from the siphon at his waist, and set out to swim to his other favored foraging grounds nearby.
It took a bit of time and tide to swim there, moving through the intricate patterns of warmer and colder waters and watching with satisfaction as silver schools of fish scattered away from him in fear. Everything that lived here feared him, as well they should. He was stronger, smarter, and hungrier than any of them.
But here, in the best hunting grounds, even Castiel had something to fear.
He tangled himself in strands of kelp, wrapping his arms around and through the slick cool green of it, while he cast his eyes up toward the surface of the water. He watched until he was satisfied. Though he remained hidden for a good amount of time, no hideous shadow was cast by the hull of a human ship. So he ventured out, and nabbed himself a delectable crab. He sucked it slowly and basked in the bit of sun that filtered through the water.
Warm, full, and content at the top of the food chain, Castiel decided it was safe to splay out on the rocky bottom in the patch of sunlight to doze off. Let it never be said that his kind were not full of hubris.
He woke when he felt something touching his face, and felt the current of water shifting around him too quickly. He flailed awake, and realized quickly that he couldn’t move the upper half of his body. He immediately started panicking, sending his lower arms questing out for information while he tried to make sense of the rough texture that pressed against his face and pinned his upper arms to his sides.
His limbs slipped through holes and moved in tentative touches around him. There were fish trapped with him, straining and roiling in fishy panic against his body.
A net. Human-made ropes woven in a tight pattern that wrapped around him and held him fast. He was caught in a fishing net.
He immediately brought an arm up to reach for the sharp stone knife he kept tied at his middle, at the seam where his body transitioned from pale to purple-red, from long column of spine and ribs to flared fan of flexible arms. It took some real work to wiggle the knife free, and he realized quickly that its sharpness meant little against salt-soaked hemp. He’d only managed to fray a few fibers before the net rose above the surface of the water.
The hearts that fed his gills immediately went into panic mode, but he tried to keep his circulatory heart calm. He knew he could be out of the water for a short time before it became dangerous, and if his blood was circulating too fast, that time would just get shorter.
He tried not to panic. He kept working at the rope, knife wrapped tight in one long, flexible arm. He only needed a hole big enough for his upper shoulders to fit through, and then he could slip free. Maybe the humans hadn’t even noticed him yet.
The wet slap of the net full of fish landing on the deck of the ship could barely be heard past the cacophonous roar of voices. Human speech was as loud and deep as a thunderstorm.
Castiel tried to hide under the frantically dying fish, ignoring the way sharp scales cut his skin as he kept sawing at the rope around him.
A big hand grabbed at his knife and tried to take it from him. Castiel looked up to see a human with fuzz all over its face staring at him, and shouting at the others. Their voices were deep and stormy, and Castiel had no idea what they said. He chittered and chirped in reply, but they didn’t seem to understand him, either.
He was losing energy. His oxygen reserves were low, and his gills flexed feebly against the dry anger of the wind above the sea.
The knife was gone.
He lay quietly, trying to stay calm and just think. They would pull him out of the net to get a better look at him, to marvel at what he was, and then he would slip free of their hands and jump off the ship and back into the sea. It would work. He just had to let them grab at him with their big, blunt hands first. His own were delicate compared to theirs, the fine webbing of skin between his fingers showing purple as he held them up in surrender. He let his lower arms go slack.
He needed oxygen so badly. He had no breath to try to speak with.
All the other thundering voices went silent when an even louder roar rumbled across the deck. Heavy thunks of heavy boots clanged, and Castiel watched in confusion and fading consciousness as one of the humans came running forward to shove at the fuzzy-faced human’s shoulders and yell. One eloquent hand gestured in Castiel’s direction.
It seemed younger than the other humans. There were less lines and hair on its face.
The younger human’s strong hands grabbed Castiel by the arms and hauled him out of the net. One hand let go long enough to toss sections of the rope away from him, then grabbed him firmly again.
Castiel’s upper half was very similar to a human’s, though the poor things had no gills lining their necks and sides, no webbing on their hands for swimming, and their teeth were sad, blocky, blunt things—but was startled to learn, with his back pressed to a human’s chest, that he was only about half as large as them. His powerful lower arms could certainly squeeze and crush one of them, but he realized now that his people had been right to teach him fear of these things.
Before Castiel could make an attempt to break free and dive into the water, the human lifted him over the railing. It said something in a softer, higher voice than its previous deep noises, and Castiel was mesmerized for a moment by the wetness of its wide green eyes as it seemed to plead with Castiel for something. Then Castiel was falling, plunging back into the welcoming embrace of the sea. He greedily sucked in water and passed it over his gills. His hearts strained painfully to work them double-time, desperate for oxygen.
He looked up and saw that the human was still there. It was peering over the side of its ship, staring down at him with its face contorted oddly and its mouth partially open. Castiel pumped some water through his siphon to lift himself a little higher.
The human saw him, and suddenly bared its teeth at him. Castiel startled, but there was a lightness in the human’s eyes and the contortion on the forehead was gone. The teeth-baring seemed… friendly? And the human lifted a hand and moved it, like it was mimicking a frond of kelp moving in the current.
Baffled, Castiel lifted his own hand and repeated the gesture. That made the human display even more of its teeth and puff out air strangely. Then another human’s hand grabbed at its shoulder, and the human disappeared from Castiel’s view. He could faintly hear them start roaring again, so he quickly swam down to hide in the kelp. He kept his eyes glued to the ship to see what they would do next.
For the most part, nothing. Then the ship turned back the way it had come. They must be satisfied with the fish they’d acquired.
When the ship moved away, Castiel followed it at a distance. The strange, friendly human had saved his life, even though the action seemed to make the rest of its clan angry. Castiel needed to know why.
He also wanted his knife back. It wasn’t easy to get a piece of stone that sharp, nor to find material to wrap it in, nor to wrap it so deftly. He’d worked hard on that shark-bitten thing!
As he followed, he kept an eye out for a gift he could provide as thanks. As the ship got nearer to the shore and the human city there, Castiel spotted the perfect thing: a polished piece of sea glass that was very nearly the color of the human’s eyes. He snatched it up as he swam past and stuffed it into the empty sheath where his knife should be.
He clung to the slimy wood of the dock and watched the humans exit the ship. When he saw the one who had rescued him, he rose up just high enough to lift his head from the water, keeping the gills on his sides submerged, and started to chirp softly. He wanted to draw its attention without drawing the eyes of others.
The human’s face went through some strange contortions again as Castiel chirped and waited for it to look for him.
When it spotted Castiel, it looked funny. Eyes wide and mouth open in a very dumb way.
Castiel made the teeth-bared face and frond-waving hand gesture. And the human made a honking, screeching noise like a sea bird that made Castiel grimace in distaste.
The human flopped down on its belly and hung its head over the edge of the dock. If Castiel hadn’t already known humans were strange, that would have been all the evidence he needed.
The human made high, soft noises again. Castiel held the sea glass up in his webbed hand, using his lower arms to lift himself a bit higher so the human could stretch to reach it. The human only looked at it for a moment, then said something that ended with a noise that Castiel could also make.
Castiel didn’t know what that meant, but mimicry seemed to be helping so far. “Meeee,” he sang out.
The human made the awful honking noise again, but it took the glass and bared its teeth and said something else.
“Ank ee-oo,” Castiel repeated thoughtfully.
Its face was changing color as it hung over the dock, getting more and more red, which was interesting and bore further study. Castiel didn’t want to be seen, though, and was running out of time before that would inevitably occur. So he patted at the empty sheath around his waist and trilled out a query on the location and status of his knife.
The human made the facial contortions again and said something. Castiel gestured at the sheath for his knife again, then lifted his hand and made a cutting gesture.
A light went on in the human’s eyes. Its shoulders moved, and suddenly a strange shiny object was held out to Castiel. He eyed it suspiciously.
The human did something with its fingers, and suddenly the shiny object doubled in length. The human put the edge of it against the wood of the dock and shaved a few splinters of the dock away. The shiny thing was very sharp, it seemed. And the human held it out again, and pointed at Castiel and made the ‘ee-ooo’ noise again.
Castiel eagerly snatched it, taking note of what part the human held onto in order not to be cut by it. He tucked it into his sheath and chittered his thanks. This was much sharper than his last knife, and he was stunned that the human was willing to part with it.
He let go of the dock pilings and sank back into the water. The human stayed there, head hanging down to watch Castiel swim, for a long time. Castiel made sure to turn and make the waving-hand gesture again before he got out of sight, since the human liked it so much.
Then he hurried home, eager to get into his cave. He need to rest and recover from the adventure, and to start planning a new gift for the human. It had saved his life from the other humans and had given him a very, very good knife, and all Castiel had given him in return was a pretty piece of glass. It was unbearable that the human might think Castiel, or even all cecaelia, were rude and ungrateful creatures. He needed to go back soon to rectify the situation.
The human might like some of the shiny gold things that Castiel had liberated from a very old shipwreck a while ago and had been using to decorate his cave. If not, perhaps it liked lobster?