The Curran Sea

Alfred Current

He held up his free hand to ward her off, but she dove for the airlock, instead. He sagged with relief. Once on the other side of the glass, away from temptation, she signed "I will return tomorrow, with your grandfather."
   "It is well," he rumbled.
   Her eyes closed briefly, and then she was gone, swirling away into the darkening waves.
   Alfred's voice broke into the silence that followed. Hal must have called, he thought.
   "Dad? Are you okay? Dad!"
   He slowly turned toward the monitor. The look in his eyes haunted his son. He's not okay, he thought.
   "I have heard her terms," he said, at length.
   "And?"
   "You're not going to like it." He sighed, walked to the med bed, and lay down with Emmett sprawled across his chest, still nursing.
   "Do you like it?"
   Ibrahim groaned, long and low.
   "How deep is the shit?"
   "Language," he wheezed.
   "That sounds like it's as deep as you were, for the past five weeks! I'm coming down."
   He made to sit up, but his son had disconnected the call. His head thudded against the paper on the pillow. He didn't even get up when Alfie came in, dripping, until the blast dryers did their job.
   Alfie didn't wait long enough. It had been five long weeks, and his father was finally close enough for him to leap over his dad's balcony, and dive down to the lab. He was damned well going to get a hug!
   Emmett's vitals perked up, with two bodies pressed against him, though Alfie was careful to only squeeze the daylights out of his father.
   They clung for two full minutes, before son backed up to look at father. "How are you? Really? You look like Hell."
   "She wants to get married, but also pimp me out once a year," he blurted.
   Alfred Edison Curran dropped to his knees, right there in the lab, stunned speechless. His father laughed, but little mirth colored it.
   "That's about how I felt. How do I get into these messes?"
   "I mean, it's less than Pop Pop's peeps asked of you, but marriage?" He looked up at his dad, vision sort of wobbly. "You've never been the marrying kind. Not even Kitty."
   He flinched. Alfie immediately apologized. After a while, Ibrahim said that he had never felt drawn to a woman for emotional attachment.
   "Obviously, I do not swing for the other team. It would..." He sighed. "It would make sense, given that I am half mer, that it would be one of them that tugged on a cord I thought... I thought hadn't been installed at birth."
   "Half?"
   His broad, strong face turned toward his son. "My mother," he whispered. "Mona Curran." He half laughed. "Curran, current... we've been making the joke this whole time, only none of us knew that that was sort of the point."
   "Sheeit," Alfie said on a sigh.
   Ibrahim sat up, then, and aimed the Dad Finger at his eldest son... Not eldest... The eldest he'd borne, himself.
   "You've been hanging around Ed and Liam too much. I have to say 'language' one more time, and you're grounded. Land and sea, you hear me?"
   Alfie was already shaken, so he didn't fight it. He just nodded at the floor. "Yes, sir."
   Ever compassionate, Ibrahim knelt next to his grown son, while cradling his infant son. "It all makes sense, but it doesn't. My grandfather's size, my mother's grace. His fertility, her charm." He sniffed. "Neither of them had much of a nose."
   "You fixed that," Alfie said, loyalty rising to the fore.
   "So I did. Now, I must wonder, though: How many of my coworkers were also lost daughters of Halcyon? I could not always resist; even before they clouded my mind with pheromones."
   "S word," Alfie breathed.
   Ibrahim laughed. "It makes too much sense, doesn't it? Too much to ignore." He sobered. "I should send them to the lab, but I am afraid they will bring elements we left behind."
   "Dad, I know we keep harping on it, but... I don't think you can do what they want. Not like this." He reached, reluctantly, to touch the small crater in his sternum.
   He put his large paw over his son's lean hand. "It was an accident. Both times. There is no blame to be had. Did the stone not protect my heart, when Judah's ceiling beam fell on me?"
   "Heart, yes. Spine, no." His jaw firmed.
   Ibrahim sighed. "You all would have had me print a new body then, had the stone been in a gauntlet. Yet I live, fourteen years later." His free hand moved to grip that stubborn chin, forced him to meet his eyes. "We do not play God, my son."
   "This time is different!" he insisted. "I don't think this will heal right, and if you're going back to the meat grinder... Cloning's gotta be less painful than this!"
   One thick brow raised. "'Meat grinder'? It feels accurate, yet crude."
   His son scoffed. "Can you think of a better way to describe Lo--" The word was cut off by one paw, before Emmett's vitals could tank.
   "Her name causes the little one stress. Apologies, my son. You were saying?"
   Free to speak, and worried for Emmett all over again, Alfred wavered. "Do we even know if they want you going Spongebob, or can you stay here with us?"
   "We do not."
   "Well, if they want you living underwater, I don't think I can watch you swim away with a spinal fracture, and a dent in your chest that makes you flinch, if you grab something the wrong way."
   "Hairline fracture," he corrected, "and it healed over a decade ago."
   "Then how come there's a hitch, if you bend over wrong?"
   "I am sixty two years--"
   "Nobody else has problems! None of them are grey yet! Yeah, I like the grey, makes you human, except we're really not very human, apparently, and now they wanna whisk you away forever..."
   Ibrahim held both of his sons while they wept, remaining strong for all of them.