Disclaimer: as before, I own nothing but this rather hackneyed plot. Finding Nemo, the characters and all indicia thereof are the property of Disney/Pixar: no copyright infringement is intended and no money, of course, is being made.

Oddly enough I came back to this fic only through a sudden recent resurgence in my old interests in oceanography, deepsea exploration, 1980s James Cameron movies shot in abandoned nuclear reactor tanks, and the oeuvre of the Cousteau family. I bought the DVD of Finding Nemo and have rewatched it several times, and still love it as much as I did back when I saw it twice in the theater. Why do I love it? Two reasons. One is a Moorish Idol and the other is Pixar's exquisite attention to tiny details.

Ding-dong, ding-dong bell.

There are few sounds quite so mournful as a buoy's bell clanging in mist: it is a very specific and very effective noise, one which the listener will never mistake for any other, and will never really forget.

Hanging under the concrete base of the buoy's tower, looking up at the dapples of moonlight on the surface of the water, Nemo let himself think the things he knew, somehow, he wasn't really old enough to be thinking. I never really got to be a kid, not like other kids, though. I guess I had to grow up different.

Not that he was grown up. Far from it; and the presence of Gill, a little way away, invisible except for the long drifting white arc of his dorsal sail in the diffuse moonlight, gave him a sense of security he badly needed. But despite Gill's being there, Nemo knew that this time it was unlikely they'd find his father jamming filters to escape a tank, or dancing around with plastic water-plants around his middle like a hula skirt. The boat that had taken him away (was it Tad who'd called them 'butts,' or was that Pearl?) was far, far bigger than the one Nemo had caught his unintentional ride on, and its twin screws had vanished far, far into the depths beyond any of the reef fish's range.

Still he'd tried. He'd had no choice, no thought, no concept of doing anything else than swimming off alone to find his father, exactly as Marlin had done for him, and bringing him home safe and sound. He wondered what he was going to do when Nigel came back with no news whatsoever.

"Hey, kid." Gill's voice was rasping, sounded painful. Nemo wasn't at all sure the Moorish Idol was anything like a fathom close to okay. "Look, over there. Whale."

Distantly, through the murk, the vast smooth flank of a humpback could be seen undulating by. "Your dad caught a ride in one of them?"

"Yeah. Him and Dory. Cause, uh, Dory can speak whale, and so she was all "take us to Sydney Harbour" and the whale was all "okay, sure, I'm gonna sneeze you out my blowhole now" and they were shot like a hundred feet in the air with a bunch of, uh, whale snot. That's the scientific term. Mister Ray said so."

Gill turned to him in the murk and looked very odd indeed for a moment before he started to laugh. He laughed so hard that it turned into a nasty coughing fit, and he wiped at his eyes with his good fin. "Kid," he said when he could speak, "I have missed you."

The buoy clanged above them, and a triangular yellow beak broke the surface. "Nigel!" Nemo cried, and darted upwards. Gill was again struck by how small he was, a tiny mote of orange and white determination. He followed, more slowly, and poked his snout out of the water to get a look at the pelican.

Nigel was excited, in mid de-brief. "Nemo! Good news!—I talked to the bloke who saw the orange fish over by the other side of the harbour. Little orange fish with stripes, he said, it was in a big clear box thing full of water and these other humans in green outfits were taking the fish and a bunch of others into a big white building called SOBRI."

"Sobri?" Gill asked, quirking a brow ridge. Nigel blinked.

"Stone the crows, Gill, 'aven't seen you in a while! Enjoying the freedom of the ocean wave?"

"Oh, yeah," Gill coughed. "It's just peachy. What's this Sobry thing about?"

"Oh, he said it was some institute. Research."

"Institute?" Nemo asked. "Uh….what's an institute?"

"It's a place where they do experiments and learn things."

"What's an asperiment?"

"Well, you know how when the dentist didn't know how to use one of his new tools very well he'd try it out on a patient to see what happe…." Nigel wound down, like a gramophone running out of go. "Um."

"I've got to get there! I have to save my dad from drills!" Nemo was swimming almost in a circle with the thrust inequality between his left and right fins. Gill reached out and steadied him.

"Slow down, Sharkbait. Assess the situation before acting blindly. –Nigel, did this friend of yours say anything else about this institute?"

"Gill! They're gonna drill holes in my dad! We have to do something!"

"He, er, said it was right next to that big marina with all the powerboats in it…they go out a lot on boats, the green institute humans." Nigel was looking horribly embarrassed.

"Do me a favour, Nigel, would you? Get us there? With alacrity?"

Five minutes later Gill was regretting this bitterly. Regretting pretty much everything in his life was par for the course, but he seemed to be doing some intensely stupid things lately and not learning from the experiences. It was depressing.

He lay gasping and choking in the little reservoir of seawater in the bottom of Nigel's bill-pouch. The oxygen levels in the water where the pelican had picked them up weren't great to begin with, and five minutes of breathing had almost exhausted them. Nemo was clearly terrified, and he was doing his damnedest not to scare the kid any further, but it was difficult when he couldn't breathe and every line the dental blades had drawn on him burned like live wires. Should have sent the kid and come on after as fast as he could….no, that made no sense….should have come on ahead himself and left the kid safe…

Red-black swirls of asphyxia were beginning to turn in front of his eyes. He didn't hear the startled "awk" as beside him the kid he'd once named Sharkbait tugged on a piscivorean bird's tongue and flat-out ordered it to duck down to sea level and refresh the water level. He didn't hear Nemo's yelled conversation with Nigel—and that was a good thing, as it went into some detail about his original escape attempt and how long it had taken him to recover from the injuries—but he did hear the inane cries of seagulls as they circled down to the marina beside the white boat with SOBRI stencilled on its fantail.

Hey, he thought. I'm not dead.

Nemo was shaking him. "Gill! Gill, are you okay? We found the boat! We found the spermenter's boat!"

He coughed weakly, his gills flaring. Nigel flapped down between the two boats and disgorged them into the water; he could barely keep upright, but he tried. At the surface again, the bird was yelling at them.

"—can't move any further without attracting attention! I'll try to find you a way in!"

In the water he could catch his breath, slowly, and hung in the murk, panting. Nemo tumbled down toward him and butted him in the side, wriggling under his good fin, his eyes huge in the dimness of the nighttime harbour. "G-Gill….?"

"I'm okay, kid," he said, and meant it: most of the silt was cleared from his gills' delicate internal folds. "I'm okay. Thanks, you were a lifesaver back there."

"I owe you," Nemo said simply.

Apparently the inmates of SOBRI were happy to be here. At least that was the impression he got from the lively conversation between tanks and the high-eights exchanged every time one of the octopus specimens crawled into an adjoining tank.

That had nearly given him heart failure. He'd been staring glumly out as the lights in the lab flickered and went off, leaving only a few screensavers' glow and the LEDs on the computers to light the long space, and had been thinking about how just last week he had told jokes to four separate fish and each of them had laughed at the right moments, when something tapped him on the tailfin.

"Aaaagh!" He'd whirled in a crazed cavitation of bubbles. Mac grinned at him, inasmuch as an octopus is capable of grinning, about two inches away.

"Sorry, mate, didn't mean to startle ya. Just on my way to dig up some support, yeah? No worries."

Frozen in shock, Marlin had watched as the octopus flowed up the sheer side of the tank, extended a delicate tentacle-tip through the mesh at the top, and shoved the catch free: a moment later he had heaved himself up into the open air in a glistening lump of browny-gold dotted with blue, and was walking across the tops of the tanks.

I'm sick, Marlin had thought. That's it. I've got Pfiesteria and it's making me delirious. I even feel warm. Yes, definitely sick. I'll wake up in my own anemone and everything will be just fine, they'll have called the surgeonfish in…

Now, two hours later, the racks of tanks were alive with conversation. Someone was talking about security cards, someone else discussing tanks on wheels, a violent argument was going on about scientific principles and the value of research, and a crumply plasticy sort of noise revealed itself to be a transparent bag of the sort he'd last seen a possum-playing Nemo floating in, on its way from a countertop on the octopus express.

Mac flopped back down into the tank. "Here y'are, Marlin. Swim on in there and we'll work out some way to get ya down a drain and out into the harbour. I tie a proper knot, I do, you'll be nice and watertight down in there."

The thought of staying here was intolerable, but the thought of getting into a plastic bag and being rolled down a drain by a tetrodotoxin-bearing octopoid was about four point nine times worse. "Um," he said. "I…don't think that's a good idea."

Mac wriggled his tentacles. "C'mon, mate, it's a beaut plan! You'll be safe as houses, just have to get you rollin' and you can slip down a sink."

He was saved from replying by the sudden advent of a repetitive thudding noise from somewhere outside the room, and a swinging light.

"Oh bugger," Mac said. "Night watchman! Cave! Everyone back in their own tanks!"

There was a flurry of splashing activity, and then nothing—and then a wide waving beam of light played across the tanks.

Marlin decided the time had come where he could be reasonably expected to have passed the threshold for number of terrifying events in one day, and therefore sensibly fainted.