Chapter Text
Hank Anderson wakes the way he usually does: cotton-mouthed, every muscle aching, and desperately reluctant to open his eyes and find out where he’s landed this time.
There’s the distant sound of surf, which could be good or bad. Whatever’s under his back is hard as hell. Less good.
He counts his way through ten dull thumps of his dehydrated brain before he cracks an eyelid. It takes him a few seconds to bring gray-washed rafters into focus, a few sun-faded post-its tacked to the beams.
So he made it home, then. That’s good.
Ended up on the bathroom floor, though. His back feels most of the way to locked up, although he’d at least had the presence of mind to drag a pillow in with him.
He rotates his head towards the toilet - lid up, but looking as clean as it ever gets - and then he glances towards the bathtub. There’s the edge of a blanket, trailing up towards…
Two glistening black eyes, staring at him with a steady intensity.
Hank barks a surprised yelp and full-body flinches back, slamming his head into the toilet bowl with a meaty clunk.
There’s an alien in his bathtub. Gray dome of a skull with eyeballs as big as headlights, what else could it be?
Hank croaks out a breathless, “What the fuck?”
The thing blinks wetly and coughs.
Hank bears his palm into the tile, keeping his shoulders pressed as tightly against the cabinet as he can. The thing rotates its head with a disturbingly inexorable slowness to watch as he rises, pausing only occasionally to unfold its nostrils and exhale-inhale with a wet snort.
Wait.
He gets a better look at its body as he rises up, and - yeah. A gray, freckled sausage body and fins.
A seal?
There’s a seal in his bathtub, flopped on top of a quilt.
“Jesus Christ, Anderson,” Hank mutters. “You couldn’t steal a traffic cone like a normal drunk?”
The seal purses its whiskers and snorts again, withdrawing into itself in that weird semi-solid seal way. It doesn’t look as plump as the harbor seals he usually sees skulking around the piers, but it’s about the right coloration for one. Pale fur and a smattering of dark freckles all the way down to its thickly-whiskered nose.
He should call someone, right? He should probably call someone.
Or maybe just… put it back, putting it back would be good? But as he reaches for the pup, it yawns, revealing a shiny row of teeth.
Okay. Calling someone, first.
Ben gives Hank a long look when he climbs into his car an hour later. “You’ve got something on your shirt.”
Hank squints down at the brightly-patterned flannel myopically before he finds the bit in question. He flicks a piece of drying fish chunk off to disappear into the depths of Ben’s footwell. “Tuna.” He’d offered a paper plate of Chicken of the Sea to the seal at the end of some tongs. The seal grabbed it and flung most of it back at him, paper plate and all. Didn’t like it much, apparently.
Ben snorts. “Hell of a breakfast.”
“Yeah,” Hank says distractedly. “Hey, I didn’t come home with anything last night, did I?”
“Anything? What, like a lady of the night, or...”
“Ha, ha. Ben, c’mon.”
Ben flaps a hand. “Nah, you were empty-handed when I dropped you off.”
Hank answers with an eloquent, “Huh.”
Maybe his piecemeal memories aren’t too far off, then. He remembers stumbling down to the shore under bright moonlight, chasing what sounded like a kid yelling for their mom. Finding a miserable comma of seal curled up in the rising surf under the dock, staring up at him with those saucer eyes.
Great.
He’d looked up a few marine rescue numbers, scrolled his way through a few articles on marine rescue. Turns out the government doesn’t look too kindly on people kidnapping seals. He can’t quite work out how to phrase, “I stole it while I was drunk” to a bunch of seal rescue people. So he called Ben, instead. He figures it’s better to just get the pup fed and drop it off under the dock so Mom can come round it up.
Easy peasy.
He picks up his old beater from the town deli/barbershop/pub and drops by the harbor to ask Luther if he’s pulled in any octopus. The internet said seals liked that kind of thing. Luther inclines his head, saying, “Didn’t know you had a taste for it, Hank.”
“Nah, my sister’s coming into town. She loves it.” He hasn’t seen his sister in a decade, but he’s distracted and hungover and his mouth’s running on autopilot. Luther’s little girl eyes him from her perch on the trawler with guarded curiosity. He trades a tightly-sealed bucket of small octopi for a couple bucks and a promise to take a look at one of Kara’s delivery vans - the usual barter economy in tiny coastal towns.
He heads to the general store to take a look at the van next. Bad alternator, as suspected. He helps Kara get the right one ordered, and picks up a random selection of canned fish while he’s at it. Maybe the seal likes them better with the head on and a nice coating of oil.
When he turns back from the counter, there’s another kid staring at him. That artist guy’s son. Mark? Something like that. The kid’s standing three feet behind him, eyes narrowed. Hank sidles around the pipsqueak with his bag of canned fish clutched to his chest.
There’s nothing suspicious about this. Certainly not the ‘stole a seal while I was drunk’ kind of suspicious.
He books it out of the high society of Hilsea before he can get any more creepy scrutiny from elementary school kids.
He scopes out the beach first once he’s home. There’s a few footprints, a few drag marks. Everything else has been lost to the surf. No sign of a fretful mother seal poking her head out of the waves, just the foam-speckled roll of a gray autumn surf.
The internet said it was something like a 50% survival rate on these little buggers, but he’s trying not to think about that.
He’s trying not to think about a lot of things, like the sound the baby seal had been making last night. That seems to have cemented itself firmly even in his mostly-drunk mind. A long, echoing warble that reverberated off the rocks and sank into the waves.
He knows something’s off as soon as he opens the door. Sumo’s standing right in front of it, swinging his tail in an apologetic way that says, It wasn’t me this time, I swear.
The bathroom door’s open.
He’d left that decidedly closed. Sumo might be a talented oaf of a dog, but he’s never figured out doorknobs.
Then there’s the quilt, abandoned in a twisting trail pointing southeast.
Hank freezes in place as he follows that trail towards its natural conclusion.
There’s a kid in his living room.
He can see bare feet peeking under the edges of a dull gray cape the kid has thrown over his shoulders. He’s pale and small with a salt-mussed shock of dark brown hair. The kid has a solid grip on the back doorknob, tiny hand splayed wide. But this one’s deadbolted, and the kid seems to be having a hard time figuring out why it’ll turn but won’t open. He can’t be more than four.
Hank sets the bucket down slow, dropping into the voice he might’ve used for a skittish dog back in his cop days. “Hey there.”
The kid turns with a surprised squeak. Hank realizes the kid’s wearing a seal pelt, head and all, and not anything else. The teeth graze his bare shoulder as he pulls the pelt tighter around himself.
The kid opens his mouth, frowns in thought, and then makes a shapeless noise almost like a two-note bark. The same cadence as Hank’s ‘Hey there’, if not the same shape.
Ok. Weird. Toddlers can be weird. Toddlers wandering around in seal pelts is very weird. Hank asks, “How’d you get in here?” but the kid just blinks. “Where’s your parents?” just gets him another echoed pantomime of parents.
Hank tries a good old ‘Stop’ hand gesture and says, “Stay here”, as he backs towards the bathroom.
The tub’s empty, of course. Hank lingers to stare at his own face in the mirror, bloodshot and thoroughly hungover. That weird feeling like he’s slipping sideways into a dream keeps getting worse.
There’s one odd thing. Uncanny valley, almost: the freckles on the seal’s face line up with a few on the kid’s pale face.
And he’s heard stories - shit, he’s told them, who doesn’t love a good sailor’s tale?
But here he is, walking back into his living room to see a selkie kid plopped right there in the middle of his floor.
The internet was right about one thing: the kid’s gotten the lid off the bucket, and he’s shoving the last octopus into his mouth right as Hank steps back into the room.
The kid slurps down the last tentacle and turns wide, dark eyes his way, expectant.
All Hank can muster is a hoarse, “Well, shit.”