Levi's POV

The merman wraps his strong arms around me, hugging me more tightly than before, but I feel another emotion rolling off of him as he does so. My ears pick up soft singing that's so quiet some would call it a whisper. My muscles immediately tense, knowing that the song of a mermaid or merman is what lures unsuspecting sailors to their deaths. But as I listen to the brat sing, I realize that I still have full control of my body, so I start to slowly relax.

After a little while, he starts singing a bit louder, though it's still hardly above a whisper. Until the whisper erupts into a bloodcurdling cry of pain. Shocked, I look around frantically before my eyes land on Hanji. In her hands is a syringe of dark blue fluid that she's injecting into his left shoulder.

"What the hell did you do to him, shit face?!" I demand at the top of my lungs. He goes limp in my arms just before I finish shouting, which only makes me angrier. If she doesn't give me a good reason why he had to endure a seemingly great amount of pain before losing consciousness, I'm probably going to end up killing her.

She must sense that her life is in danger because she takes a couple steps back and says as quickly as she can, "I gave him a serum that will make him tell us nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours. That specific serum messes with the nerve system a bit and causes a lot of pain until it spreads throughout the body. I added a drug that knocked him out fairly quickly, so he would be in pain for a few seconds rather than a few minutes. He should be perfectly fine when he wakes up."

I look down at the merman's face, which still has pain written all over it. It breaks my cold, black heart to see him like this. "If you're going to mess around with serums, experiment on yourself or a willing participant, not an unsuspecting victim," I spit. She has no right to make anyone who wants nothing to do with her serums feel that much pain, even if it's only for a brief moment.

"But that takes all the fun out of it!" She says with a crazed smile.

I glare at her before I ask in a bored tone, "Do you really believe that he can speak like we humans do?"

"I don't just believe it, I know it. I've talked with mermaids and mermen before, but I didn't have the proper equipment on me to catch one. They were quite interesting, and I've been dying to run some experiments on one."

I sigh and shake my head, honestly surprised that she hasn't figured out that Ocean Eyes is different than the mer people she's talked with before. I was able to spot the difference between him and the other two fairly quickly, and I'm not obsessed with them like she is. "Let's get him to your lab. The two we caught a couple days ago hate his guts and since he saved me from the female earlier today they want to kill him even more than they already did."

"I have a tank we can carry him in just inside the trees. I've learned the hard way that he can't breath air - he passed out on the first day we had him." She starts walking towards the tree line, and I almost follow her, but I figure that if she got the tank there without help, she can get it to the water without my help. Also, the male with the multicolored tail might try to kill him while he's still knocked out.

A minute later, Hanji returns, dragging what I assume to be the tank behind her. It looks big enough to carry the brat in, yet small enough that the two of us can carry it in with no trouble. She puts it down in the water, and it starts floating, so she tips it over onto it's side allowing the seawater to flow into it, causing it to start sinking.

The tank sinks fairly quickly, creating a miniature cloud of sand when it hits the bottom. I carefully lower Ocean Eyes into the tank, making sure that his tail is all the way in. I grab one end of the tank and look up at Hanji, who grabs the other end. We lift the tank into the air with ease, and even though it's rather heavy, it's actually a bit lighter than I expected it to be.

We slowly make our way through the trees to the back door of the lab, trying to spill as little water as possible. We earned a couple odd looks from some of Hanji's assistants as we passed them in the hallway, but knowing her they must have learned not to question her motives. Also, they're scared of me, so that might be another reason why they didn't ask any questions. The idiotic brats have quite a few frightening rumors about me, and I don't deny the rumors, so that adds to them being terrified of me even looking at them. The rumors aren't true, but if the imbeciles believe that they are, it gives them more reason to listen to me when I speak.

The rumors about me are ridiculous things like "I killed my twin brother without even blinking" and "I steal the souls of people just by looking them in the eyes." It truly amazes me what people are stupid enough to believe sometimes. Another rumor that the idiots have spread about me is that I'm a vampire or some other type of monster. The reasoning behind this rumor is I look exactly the same as I did when I was a teenager, no one other than Hanji and Erwin have seen me actually eat or drink anything other than tea, and I only need about two or three hours of sleep per night and I'm fine for the rest of the day, so it's common to find me roaming the halls late at night cleaning up the messes that the brats made during the day.

We finally make it to the room that she set up before we left on the expedition to catch a mermaid. It has a saltwater pool in it so she can study them up close and personal because apparently the lagoon isn't close enough for her. Though I guess it's a good thing that she has this pool in here because if she didn't, the brat would be stuck in a small tank again. That or in the lagoon with two mer people who want to kill him.

I pick up the brat gently and place him in the shallow end of the pool. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as Hanji walks over to the deeper end, which is only about ten feet deep. She might not want to be the first thing he sees when he wakes up because he might try to kill her, which I personally would be perfectly fine with. It would save me many headaches in the future.

His tail fin twitches a couple times, probably because he's starting to wake up. I hear a couple of the clicks and chirps of his echolocation, and his body suddenly stiffens. His face grows emotionless as he slowly opens his ocean blue eyes.

Eren's POV

When I wake up, I feel warm, strong arms around me. I keep my eyes closed for a second, trying to figure out the new scents that hit my nose. I smell Levi's scent along with saltwater, chemicals, something that smells like wet stone but doesn't at the same time, and several other scents that – annoyingly –  I can't identify. I feel my tail fin twitch out of annoyance without me telling it to.

I send out a few chirps so I can get a view of my surroundings without having to actually open my eyes, and the image that forms in my head from the information I receive from those chirps isn't a good one. Hanji is standing at the other side of the small pool that Levi and I are in. The pool itself is inside a large room with a few tables covered with vials, test tubes, syringes, and a bunch of other pieces lab equipment that I don't know the names for.

I feel all emotion leave my face before I open my eyes. When they focus on the person in front of me, I can feel the ghost of a smile trying to appear on my face, but I'm too confused and annoyed to let it through. Someone had better get to explaining something, and fast, before I end up killing someone just to get some answers from somebody.

I stare up into Levi's steel grey eyes, and I see a hint of concern and relief on his usually emotionless face, and it comforts me a little to know that he actually cares for me, unlike my pack who abandoned me when they could have at least tried to get me out of that net. Not that I regret their decision – I wouldn't have gotten to know Levi as well as I do without them choosing to leave me behind.

I feel his hand gently caress my face, and I feel myself leaning into it, my eyes halfway closing on instinct. It feels so amazing just having him here beside me, though I could do without the crazy scientist watching from the other end of the pool. Speaking of whom, I can hear her trying to contain some rather high-pitched squealing. It must be something humans sometimes do when they observe something that they greatly enjoy. She must think that we'd make a great pair.

While Hanji's on my mind, I remember that she's been trying to inject me with those crazy serums of hers, and that the way she does that is with a syringe. I also remember that just before I blacked out, I felt something pierce my skin and it felt like something was being forced into my bloodstream, which caused a lot of pain. She must have gotten one of those insane chemical concoctions into my system.

Just thinking about it angers me. I made it loud and clear that I wanted no part in those things, yet she went ahead and injected me with one anyway. I swear, I could kill her. I want to kill her, but Levi probably wouldn't like that, and her assistants would probably end up ending me because I ended her life. Something tells me that Levi wouldn't like that either.

"Are you feeling okay?" He asks, his voice as smooth as honey.

"Yes, I'm fine." I reply, nodding once, followed by a series of clicks and chirps. "Just annoyed is all."

"I'm glad you're okay. In case you hadn't already guessed, it was Hanji that caused you to black out like that."

I nod a few times to try to show him that I had already figured that out. "Hey!" I hear a complaint from across the room. "Don't put all the blame onto me! It's partly his fault, too! He let his guard down long enough for me to get that beautiful serum of truth into him!"

I whip my head around and glare at her, halfway tempted to go over there and splash her in the face with as much water as I can, but that would mean I would have to leave Levi's warm arms, swim through the much colder water of the pool, actually be able to splash her before she gets away, and then make the same trek back to his side. That's way too much effort for such a small result.

My glare doesn't have as powerful and effect as Levi's death glare, but it does the trick. Hanji shrinks back a little, a seemingly nervous look on her face. She takes a couple steps back, raising her hands in defeat, dropping the subject on which so few words were spoken.

"So tell me, Mr. Merman, can you really not speak like we do?" Hanji asks, staring down at me from the other side of the pool.

I just give her a look that says, "You just figured that out, did you?"

She takes the look as a yes, and because of my excellent hearing I hear her mutter under her breath, "I'm surprised that I hadn't figured that out sooner."