Take A Dive [AquagirlxAqualad]

~8~

Lorena dipped her hand into the aquarium, waiting for the injured turtle to come to her.

"Miguel and Maya named him Nemo," Mamá said. Doctor Rachel Marquez stopped typing up her lab report, slowly turning her chair around to watch the way her daughter tenderly handled the sea creature. Lorena hand fed him a piece of lettuce, which he gobbled up furiously.

"Can he be set free in the ocean?" Lorena asked, hardly noticing her mother. Sarah began fussing in the pack'n'play set up in the corner of Doctor Marquez's home office. Before Lorena could turn around, Mamá was already lifting the baby into her arms, soothingly rubbing her back. She set up the baby to breastfeed while she went back to typing up her lab reports with one hand.

"He's a strong swimmer, so he could probably survive on his own at this point, but since there is a bit of a stump where the fin should be, I think giving him a prosthetic should put him on level ground with the others."

Lorena whipped our a phone to take a selfie with Nemo, quickly texting it to Maria and Jackson with an update on their rescue turtle.

"LEEEENAAAAA!" Miguel burst in the door and threw his arms around her legs, face planted in her shirt as she braced herself against the aquarium.

"Woah, little buddy, you sure you don't have super strength?" Lorena asked. She placed Nemo back in the aquarium that took up half the wall of the office and swept Miguel up into her arms. Miguel nodded shyly, burying his face in her neck.

"Lena, will you take us to the beach?" He asked, looking up at her with wide, puppy-dog like eyes.

"Miguel-" Lorena started, fully intending to say no.

Then his bottom lip jutted out.

"Not the pout," Lorena groaned, fixing her gaze on the ceiling lamp.

"Please?" Maya implored, one foot and half her face peeking in the doorway.

"Well, what does Mama say?" Lorena asked, hopefully glancing over at her preoccupied mother.

Mamá gave Lorena just as much of a pleading look. Her oldest daughter was rarely ever home, and though she was proud of Lorena's ambitions, she sorely wanted her to have a close relationship with all her siblings, a relationship Rachel had lacked with her family. Not to mention that once Sarah went back down for a nap, she could use the peace and quiet caused by a lack of children.

"If Lorena wants to go, you can go with her," she said, and turned back to the baby and her reports.

The focus of the puppy eyes returned to Lorena, whose wall started to crumble.

"She said we could go if you said yes." Maya repeated Mamá's compromise.

Lorena pursed her lips.

"I'll take you two if Danny goes with us."

Maya spun on her heel, and Miguel took after her, screaming for Danny to finish his homework so that they could go to the beach. 

Minutes later, Lorena was trekking down the sandy path as Miguel and Maya sprinted ahead, absently checking her phone as she had for the past two days.

"Texting your boyfriend?" Danny jibbed half-heartedly. 

Lorena smirked at him, "Maybe. What of it?"

She finished composing her agonizingly short text to Kaldur to accompany the photo of Nemo, and tossed it back in her bag as if she had not a care in the world.

She propped the big beach umbrella higher up on her shoulder so that she could thread her left arm through the handle of the cooler, using her free right hand to grab Danny's hand and pull him down the path after the twins. He hadn't finished his homework yet, but agreed with Mama that doing algebra and world History reading on the beach in the fresh salty air was better than doing it stuck indoors.

Maya and Miguel dropped their towels in the sand, stopping only to tighten their water shoes before sprinting into the crashing waves. Danny helped Lorena spread their towels and set up the umbrella without a word, and went right back to his homework. Lorena took a Pepsi bottle from the cooler and pulled her towel out of the shade to lie in the sun.

The beach Lorena and her family used was sheltered off from the streets by trees and near-mountains of sand. Tourists never really ventured out this far from the city, and the only people who knew about it were those who lived there, who took the beach for granted and never really came down. That made it the perfect hiding place for Aquagirl to surface and stash her uniform in some nondescript tidepool, changing it out for a shirt and shorts stashed in the branches of one of the trees. 

"Leeeena!" Miguel asked a few minutes later, standing over his big sister so that he was blocking her sunshine.

He held out a bucket to her. "Will you collect seashells with Maya and me?" 

Lorena smiled, and placed her half-filled Pepsi back in the cooler.

She walked up and down the beach with the twins for a good hour, letting Danny finish his homework in peace. When Maya and Miguel were finally satisfied with a haul three buckets full, they made their way back to the towels for soda and popsicles. 

"Hey, Fatty." A sharp voice stopped Lorena, and she turned to see Maya and Miguel, with three tan, blonde, grade-schoolers towering over them.

Miguel cowered behind Maya, whose face was bright pink.

"H-Hi Deidre. Hi Maxx. Hi Lillee." She stuttered.

"Collecting seashells? That's childish, even for you!" The only boy, with hair way too short for the amount of gel used to spike it back, yanked the heavy bucket from Miguel's caring hands, dumping them on the ground. 

"Stop! You'll break them!" Maya sobbed. Lorena leaped in front of her siblings, grabbed the bucket back from the bully, and showered him and his companions with sand.

Miguel and Maya's tear-streaked faces brightened. "Get 'em, Lena!" they shouted as their bullies ran off.

"How do you do that?" Maya asked as Miguel hugged Lorena again.

"Do what?" She asked, kneeling down in the sand to help Miguel fill his bucket again.

Maya and Miguel looked at each other sheepishly. "Mama always says that ignoring them and turning the other cheek will make them stop, but it never does. How come you know how to drive them off?"

Lorena looked between her tiny brother and sister for a long time, before grabbing them up in a hug.

"I wasn't gonna let them mess with the Marquez family and get away with it." She told them solemnly.

"But fighting them is just going to egg them on," David said solemnly, coming up behind her. "What are Miguel and Maya supposed to do when they come after them again, but they're not afraid to get physical?"

As annoying as it was, Danny had a point. 

"Come on," Lorena took Maya's bucket with her own and grabbed her hand, "It's about time I taught you all some of my Atlantean self-defense."

Danny looked suspicious, but interested. He took Miguel by the hand, though Miguel held on to his bucket of recovered shells with a death grip, and followed Lorena and Maya back to their beach setup. The rest of algebra was forgotten as Lorena stationed her brothers and sister in starting defense positions.

"We can never tell mom about any of this," Danny sighed.

Lorena grinned, "What she doesn't know won't kill her. Now pinch your hands together like a crab, I'm about to teach you three seven pressure points that Queen Mera taught me. A quick pinch at any of these points can take out a limb, cause severe nausea, or knock your opponent out completely."

Maya and Miguel cheered, and even Danny began to grin.