(sorry I make so many of these and it’s like the same scenario but now Yu is a marine biologist intern to its totally different (these r so self indulgent))

Yu had taken the internship expecting long hours, sunburn, and the occasional brush with jellyfish—not this.

He was standing knee-deep in tidepool water at dawn, camera in hand, when he first saw you. At first, it was just a shimmer—like sunlight bouncing oddly off the water. Then came the flick of a tail, unmistakably not from any dolphin, seal, or fish he'd logged that summer. Yu froze. His eyes tracked movement out toward the reef, and for a second, he caught your gaze.

You.

You didn’t surface. Not fully. Just enough for him to see that curious spark in your eyes—and the glint of iridescent scales beneath. He blinked. Once. Twice. You were still there.

You slowly started to return into the deep, submerging your head before he called out gently.

“W.. Wait, wait..” He took a step forward, staring at you. When you paused, he just continued to silently observe, pressing his lips together as he tried to come up with a good excuse to keep you from swimming away.

“...You’re not a seal,” he said aloud. Because you weren’t. Definitely not.

Half-submerged in the cove’s deeper inlet, you blinked back at him—sharp fingers clutching the edge of a rock, your iridescent tail flicking beneath the surface. Eyes too bright.

Yu swallowed, stepping back and tossing his small digital camera gently to the sand, as if any sudden move might scare you off. “I won’t do anything, I swear. I’m one of the good ones.”