Chapter Text
Truthfully, Hal never planned on flying seaplanes for a living. It wasn’t like he had anything against them. Planes were planes, and he was the kind of guy who would’ve flown a beat-up F7U if it meant he could be in the sky. It was just that ‘seaplane captain’ wasn’t the kind of career he thought he’d fall into, not when his résumé included cool things like Captain and aircraft test pilot.
Then again, he also never planned on quitting Ferris Aircrafts
Or breaking up with Carol.
Or realising that there was just no good way to keep working for his ex without it turning into an awkward exercise in social interaction. There was really only so much missed eye contact and strained smiles a man could take before the impulse to eject himself out the nearest window became way too tempting.
In the end, Hal had been the one to fumble it all. Out of the two of them, he was the one who wasn’t emotionally evolved enough to suffer through that brand of workplace torture for five, sometimes six days a week.
So, he left. Told her it’d be easier that way, and he was right. The soft look of relief on her face would’ve stung if Hal himself hadn’t felt an embarrassingly similar rush at the thought of seeing the back of her. They exchanged the standard pleasantries of exes that somehow managed to twist their very bad break up into something only a little tragic. ‘Let’s keep in touch’, ‘no hard feelings’, ‘sorry for stringing you along since we were kids but you’re way too good for me and I’m a total asshole who sabotages every good thing in my life’. Casual stuff like that.
He landed a new job pretty quickly. Way quicker than he expected in the current climate, if he was being honest. Turns out, a guy who put his callsign on his résumé and had as many flight hours logged as he did had no trouble finding work. It wasn’t exactly the high-stakes flying he was used to, but it was steady. And, bonus, it came with his own plane.
Well, technically it was his. In the sense that he was responsible for keeping it in the air, paying for its maintenance, and sinking a heavy portion of his salary into it month. If he stuck with it for about ten years, he’d be able to pay off the company and the plane would officially belong to him. Just in time for his late forties, when he’d be well on his way to dying alone.
Still, there were worse ways to spend a decade. At least he had the sky.
It was a simple gig, but simple didn’t matter if it kept him in the air. It did mean, however, that now he was a glorified delivery boy with wings. He flew supply runs out to the Channel Islands. National Park stuff, mostly. Some days it was researchers and rangers; other days it’d be crates of equipment and food. Every now and again, he’d even get an eccentric billionaire who paid through the nose because they wanted to impress a date by whisking them off to an island. (Which, incidentally, was how he met Ollie and Dinah.)
So maybe it wasn’t flashy work, but it paid well enough and it gave him something to focus on besides wondering if Carol had moved on yet.
Which she had, of course. Hal found out through the gossip pipeline. Carol had met a nice guy, someone stable and reliable and kinda hot, the kind of person you could build a life with without worrying if they were gonna get cold feet because things got a little too real. They were getting married next fall.
Hal wanted to be bitter about it. He wanted to feel something sharp enough to match the old ache in his ribs whenever he thought about what they used to be, or what they could’ve been if he hadn’t been so emotionally immature. But at the end of the day, if anyone deserved to be happy in love, it was Carol. And if Hal wasn’t the guy who could give her that, well, at least someone could.
Life went on. Hal got a crummy apartment a few blocks off the Coast City strip. He flew his rickety seaplane from one island to the next, patched it up when it complained too loudly, and got just enough of a paycheck to keep everything going smoothly.
Every other night, he ate out at the same local diner where the waitstaff now knew him by name. Every Thursday he killed time at the laundromat with a magazine left behind by someone else. Every Saturday, he’d buy a six-pack of beer and pretend he was going to pace himself, but by Sunday he’d have drunk them all.
It was all one big routine by now. Not how he pictured his adulthood when he was a kid dreaming of the clouds and watching Dad soar, but it was good enough for him. He was happy in the sense that he was settled. For now, at least. Until he inevitably got itchy feet and started chasing that rush of excitement once again.
Routines, no matter how established, never stayed the same. There was always some little thinking barrelling in out of nowhere to mess with him. Nothing catastrophic, not these days in his boring, humdrum life. Just little, irritating distractions. The kind that weren’t big enough to ruin his life, but were just annoying enough to feel like a pebble in his boot for the rest of the week.
Maybe it was his plane throwing a fit over some minor mechanical issue that wasn’t terribly urgent, but still meant he’d be shellign out for repairs. Maybe it was the laundromat eating his quarters again, or the ancient plumbing in his apartment deciding, hey, what if we just stopped working? Or maybe it’d be his local diner eighty-six-ing the Big Boy Burger he liked, leaving him to stare blankly at the menu and wondering if crying about it was too much of an overreaction.
It was the little things. Stupid things.
Take now, for instance.
Hal lingered at the open door of his seaplane, one foot hovering over the edge of the floating dock as he stared down at the angriest seal he’d ever seen in his life.
He’d been to this island a few times in the past year. Some marine researchers had set up shop for a long-term study, and Hal had become friendly enough with them that he managed to bag a retained position. He hauled out their equipment, food, and whatever else they needed for their remote research station somewhere along the north side of the island.
In an ideal world, he’d be able to land and dock by their station, but thanks to shifting tides and the occasional temperamental sandbar, he had to settle for the closest viable dock. It wasn’t too far out, just a little further east than he’d like, but it meant he always had to hoof a dolly full of supplies on foot.
A small colony of seals had taken over the coastline a few months ago, which should’ve been a cool thing. Nature was fascinating, nature was majestic, nature was cool, all that jazz. Hal had nothing against it in theory. He liked to fall asleep on the couch with a wildlife documentary lulling him in the background, and it was always nice to see an unusual animal just chilling and living its life in the real world. It was just that Hal was pretty much convinced that these particular seals had the devil in them.
Before he took this job, he hadn’t even known seals could get angry. He always figured they were just happy, blubbery beach slugs that spent their days flopping around and living their best, stress-free lives in the Californian sun.
They usually left him well enough alone, probably because he was a frequent flyer on the island. He’d set his plane down a little ways out from their haul-out rocks and do his best to ignore how all of them, without fail, seemed to immediately lock onto him the second his pontoons touched water. They’d just look at him. And not with the confused curiosity of wildlife, but with the flat, assessing disapproval of the TSA..
He’d nod politely most days. Like an idiot. Like they were old men on a porch instead of giant sentient sea tubes silently judging him and his life choices. It was mostly because he couldn’t not acknowledge them, not while they stared at him with an unsettling sort of intelligence.
There were seven of them, by Hal’s count. No, wait — eight. He always forgot about the small creepy one that liked to circle the jetty in slow arcs, watching him with a weird intensity he would usually associate with those gothic portraits with eyes that followed you around the room.
They were different shapes, different sizes, and, when they weren’t busy banding together to form some kind of marine intimidation circle, they had completely different vibes. There was one that flopped around like a beach ball and made kazoo noises whenever it sneezed. Another had weirdly intense energy, like it was seconds from launching itself into the stratosphere just to see what would happen. A third just sat motionless with serial killer eyes, blinking once every ten minutes.
The only thing that seemed to connect them was how they orbited Spooky.
Goddamn Spooky.
That one was the biggest of the bunch. The top dog. The hot tamale. The one who always parked his broad, glossy ass on the central rock and looked incredibly displeased about it. He only ever sat there when the plane was docking, like he was deliberately putting himself on display to warn Hal not to start some shit in his weird little seal kingdom. Otherwise, he preferred to avoid the sun and sit in the shady outcrop of rocks by the shallows.
Spooky was midnight black and, somehow, was easily the size of a small boat. Hal was pretty sure seals weren’t supposed to get that big, but this one had either missed the memo or decided he simply didn’t care. And if his size wasn’t unsettling enough, he looked like he'd been through hell. Scars covered him from tip to tail; long, jagged things that crisscrossed along his body. Some had faded into silvery streaks, while others were fresher, new enough that Hal could still see the way the skin puckered where something big had taken a swipe at him.
Hal liked to stay far away from Spooky. Which was just as well, because Spooky liked to stay far away from him.
The same could not be said for Asshole.
Asshole was the current problem. He was nearly as big as Spooky, which was already stretching the limits of what Hal thought a harbor seal was supposed to be. His coat was dark, nearly black in some lights, but his fur tapered off into a patch of white at his forehead.
He showed up very rarely, but when he did, he usually hung back from the main group. He liked to sprawl on his own patch of rocks a little further down from the shoals, spread his flippers, hunch himself over, and bark at anyone and anything that came too close to his territory. Which was a problem, because recently he’d decided that the wooden jetty was a part of that.
“You can’t do this every time I come here, man,” Hal said. “Move.”
Asshole didn’t bark so much as he made a deep hnnk noise at him. Hal snapped his teeth back in retaliation. At his core, he was a petty little shit who was absolutely down with wrestling a seal if it meant he could go about the rest of the day without incident.
He shifted his weight further onto the dock and Asshole lunged a little. “I will cut you,” Hal hissed, brandishing the closest thing to a weapon he could find. It turned out to be a really pathetic looking clipboard with a soggy flight log attached.
“Hnnk,” Asshole snapped.
“You’re a seal. You can’t just take over the dock, I need to use it. I’m just here to do my job.”
“Snrk.”
Hal bristled like he’d just been insulted. “I swear to god, if you don’t let me pass I’ll—I’ll—” He flailed a little before pointing at Spooky, who was glaring over from his rock throne. “I’ll tell your goddamn dad.”
The noise Asshole made in response to that threat was definitely not a good thing. It was low and guttural, like he was an engine ramping himself up for takeoff. It was the kind of thing that made Hal suddenly very aware of just how much muscle was packed into that big, blubbery blob. Asshole slapped his flippers hard against the dock like he was seriously calculating the cost-reward of launching himself at Hal’s gut like a torpedo.
He didn’t think Asshole would actually attack him, but Hal braced himself just in case. Not that it would help in the slightest. He had excellent reflexes, sure, but there was no universe where he won a fight against a seal that was almost as big as Spooky.
“Oh, you wanna go?” he called out, squaring his shoulders and wielding his sad little clipboard like a sword. “Step up, I’ll send you back to the trench you crawled out of.”
He didn’t know if he actually intended to go through with a duel against a huge fucking sea blob, but before he could do something truly stupid, Spooky made a noise. It wasn’t loud, not really. It was more of a low, rolling vibration like distant thunder rumbling over open water.
Hal glanced over grudgingly, still holding his clipboard like he was about to slap Asshole with it. Spooky stared back.
Despite the overt threat, there was a pup nestled between his thick front flippers. That image should’ve destroyed the whole fear me, mortal effect he was clearly going for, but Spooky had a strangely cognizant gaze that trumped any fluffy exceptions. It was a weird experience, Hal realised absently, being menaced by a group of animals that were supposed to be adorable.
The pup, for its part, looked profoundly offended to be involved. Just a disgruntled, wiggling meatball of pale brown fur, making irate little hissing noises and trying to worm free. Spooky was too busy glaring at Hal to acknowledge it. He shifted his weight, half-resting on the little thing to keep it from escaping
“I wasn’t really gonna hit him,” Hal called, inexplicably feeling the need to defend himself.
Spooky just continued to stare. The baby continued to hiss at Hal’s general existence.
“I wasn’t!”
Apparently, Asshole had very strong opinions about the big boss getting involved. The moment Spooky so much as twitched — not even all that aggressively, just in a way that made it very clear he was aware of the situation and would probably eat Hal if he started shit — Asshole whirled on his blubber to face him. He growled low and bobbed his head, honking in that very specific way teenagers did whenever they wanted their parents to stop barging into their room without knocking.
Spooky didn’t look particularly offended, just resigned. If seals could look resigned.
“C’mon, man,” Hal groaned. “Let me pass already. I got work to do.”
Asshole either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. Or, more likely, didn’t understand because he was a seal and seals didn’t have the mental capacity to grasp the finer points of human speech. Though Hal had his suspicions, with the way all the seals liked to stare and laugh at him.
The pup wedged beneath Spooky’s flippers tried to wiggle free again, perhaps angered by whatever exchange had just happened in the seal hierarchy. Spooky just shifted to press a little more of his weight on him. The pup let out an angry squeak of protest, but it went completely ignored. This was, Hal realised the equivalent of a dad placing one massive hand on his kid’s head to stop him from running away.
If he let go, Hal had no doubts that the little one would dart straight over to the jetty to help Asshole be a nuisance. He’d never seen the two interact before — in fact, he hadn’t actually seen Asshole interact with any of the other seals before today — but the pup just looked like it was born to be a dick. Something that probably ran in the family.
“Move,” Hal tried when Asshole stayed put. “Move. Move. Move.”
“Hnrk,” replied Asshole.
Hal stared at him. “Move.”
Another bark in the distance made him shut his eyes and almost pray for salvation.
“What now?” he said weakly.
A lithe, dark seal who had up until now been lounging in the sun like a melted piece of saltwater taffy, evidently decided that whatever telenovela that was currently playing out in front of them was definitely worth getting involved in. With the slow, languid grace of something that has no immediate plans beyond continuing to exist, he flopped over onto his belly.
Then…well, Hal didn’t have many words he could use to describe the way this seal moved.
This one didn’t do the usual sluggish, belly-scooting seal walk. This one bounced. Just…like…straight up bounced. Less like an animal, more like an overfilled water balloon with dreams and ambitions and the inherent need to be a show off.
Hal did not know if this was normal. He only ever watched animal documentaries when he was feeling sucky and needed some British noises to lull him to sleep on the couch. He stared, a little impressed, as the seal (here on out named ‘Bouncy’ in Hal’s head) moved towards Asshole with a series of oddly graceful bounds, like his flippers had figured something the rest of seal-kind never got the memo about.
It wasn’t just a distraction for Hal, but for Asshole too. He cut himself off mid-bark to first stare at his…brother(?), before snapping his teeth like an afterthought. Notably, he didn’t actually move into attack. Hal was pretty sure male seals were supposed to be, like, nuts when it came to protecting their territory.
"Right, so, I’m just gonna…" Hal shifted his duffle further up his shoulder. "...let you guys sort out whatever this is on your own. No need to drag me into—" He didn’t even get to finish before Asshole honked at him specifically,
“Hwah,” said Bouncy.
“Hnk,” said Asshole.
“Are you kidding me right now?” said Hal, who was probably two minutes away from committing a federal protection crime.
At least the presence of Bouncy gave Hal the opportunity to be a little sneaky. With all the honking and flopping and seal-ish flailing, he finally had a window of opportunity. Very, very carefully, he stepped fully off the seaplane onto the dock. The wood shifted under his weight, bobbing a little in protest, but Asshole was far too busy being physically bodied by the other seal to do anything about it.
“That’s right,” Hal said as he began the slowest, most awkward side-shuffle of his life. He hugged the delivery crate to his chest and turned his body just enough to make it clear he meant no harm. “Thaaaaat’s right. Good seals. Just stay there…”
The dock creaked beneath him and he was pretty sure Asshole tried to look at him. Hal paused mid-shuffle, foot half-raised, muscled tensed in waiting for the inevitable seal-sized football tackle. When nothing happened, he resumed his slow walk onwards, inch by painful inch.
Behind him, Bouncy had decided that now was the time to assert dominance. Hal didn’t turn to look now that he was finally making ground, but he could hear the enthusiastic flops, the exaggerated honks, and the indignant noise Asshole made that sounded a lot like a motorcycle backfiring underwater.
By the time Hal risked a glance over his shoulder, Bouncy had apparently won the battle of attrition through sheer force of will and lack of personal space. Despite being smaller than Asshole by a fair margin, he had thrown his whole weight onto his massive back and was now fully melting across in a wobbly puddle.
Nature documentaries dictated that Asshole should’ve been going ape-shit at this point, but while he looked furious (for a seal), he also looked completely resigned. He was staring straight ahead with the dead-eyed expression of someone who had made mistakes in life and was intimately aware of this fact. His flippers twitched like he wanted to slap something but knew it would only make things worse.
“Hang in there, Asshole,” Hal muttered as he slipped past the last cluster of seal-shaped obstacles and finally reached the path to the inland. “You’re doing great.”