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'How cheerfully he seems to grin...' (How Doth the Little Crocodile, Lewis Carroll)

Ammut had been left on the doorstep of a Brazilian orphanage before he'd been old enough to have known how to talk. He'd been far too young to have even remembered anything about his life before the orphanage. Ammut didn't have papers with him, or a name tag, no indication of who he was or of where he was from anywhere on him. With his heritage as uncertain as it was, it was assessed that 1 out of his 8 great-grandparents had been a lion, and that 3 or 4 of the remaining 7 had been sharks and crocodiles, but it was impossible to determine whether his shark or crocodile heritage predominated.

They named him Ammut because of his appearance. With his mane around his crocodile face, even with his shark fins that didn't quite match it, Ammut still very much looked like the Egyptian Devourer of Souls. Some mammals and reptiles disliked fish, some reptiles and fish disliked mammals, and some mammals and fish disliked reptiles. It wasn't hard to imagine any number of reasons why Ammut may have been abandoned in a social context like that.

Ammut learned that, when they wanted to get rid of someone, the Egyptians had sent them to the crocodiles, the Romans had sent them to the lions, and pirates had sent them to the sharks. Ammut was going to develop a weird relationship with eating, there would be no getting around it. When he was still of kindergarten age and too young to have much of a sense of hygiene quite yet, he would put his little action figures in his mouth.

Some of the fish and mammal children became scared of him. They believed that the fact that he did this meant that Ammut wanted to eat other people, and that he would eat them if given half a chance. But the reptile children found a much crueler reason to make fun of him because they, understanding other reptiles based on their own experience as they did, knew the real reason for which Ammut would do this, and found it a greater source of shame still.

He was playing at being their mother.

When a mother crocodile's children were very small, and she wanted to protect them and carry them with her to and fro wherever she would go, she would put them in her mouth to carry them in it. You could see them poking their heads out between her teeth, staring at the outside world from it with that big proud grin on their faces. Children, reptile or not, were taught strict gender roles early on, and they began to bully and pick on Ammut as not being a real boy.

Hurt by their behavior, Ammut thought of stopping, but the more he'd think about it, the more he'd grit his teeth and refuse to give in. Ammut wasn't going to simply let them win. Even when he'd become old enough to know better than to put action figures in his mouth, although he never switched pronouns or considered transitioning, Ammut still embraced the 'girly' aspects of his personality around others to the fullest, without apology. It cheered him up.

He liked how jarring others would find them sometimes, how surprisingly they contrasted with his fearsome appearance and completed it. It would throw off the people Ammut didn't want around in the first place and it would put the people he did want around at ease. Rejecting his 'Devourer' aspect all the way to its logical conclusion, he became a vegetarian. He loved expressing affection by making food for others, having learned at the orphanage at an early age.

Having grown up at the orphanage had also meant that the nuns who had raised him had also taught him about Christianity, as nuns were wont to do. When he was very small, he only knew about Christianity through what the nuns taught him, so his perspective of it was necessarily limited by what they thought it good for him to know. In such an environment, he developed a naïve, idealistic understanding of Christianity, becoming a passionate believer.

Ammut started to wear a Jesus fish around his neck.

People would make fun of Ammut and ask him if he was sure that he wasn't carrying that fish around as emergency rations, but he'd just laugh it off. He tried to look like he had a thicker skin than he really did, and his uproarious laughter was sometimes contagious, even to the people who would make fun of him. Ammut would try to be self-deprecating to disarm teasing, to push when he wanted to pull. He feared abandonment so, desperate for people to like him.

Christianity, as he understood it, spoke to him. Every time he would submerge himself in water three or four times a day to make sure that his body would remain hydrated, as even hybrids between fish and other species still needed to do, he would think about the meaning of baptism, the meaning of washing away sins with water and breathing in new life once out of it. Early Christians were described to him as revolutionaries and agitators, even as he heard about liberation theologians trying to create God's kingdom on Earth around them to this day. The ideals of complete, infinite love and peace for everyone on Earth appealed to his innocent nature.

But there was the fishing.

According to his own interpretation, when Jesus had told his fishing apostles 'Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men,' it meant that you were supposed to want to be one of the men being fished in the context of the metaphor. Obviously, no one would have wanted to have been 'fished,' to have been killed and eaten by Jesus or his apostles. Ammut did not believe that the apostles would have been drawn by an offer from Jesus for them to be cruel to others.

However, there were many Christian reptiles, mammals, birds, and insects who believed that Jesus' status as a known fisherman had meant that Jesus believed that fish people in general deserved to be killed. What Ammut interpreted metaphorically, others interpreted very literally. These were the same people who believed that it was their Christian duty to discriminate against dryads because Jesus had been a carpenter, with unflattering words comparing dryads to wood.

Discriminated against by other Christians so, in spite of his best efforts, Ammut did some historical research. He was horrified to discover how many cruelties Christians had perpetrated on others in the name of their own interpretation of Jesus' doctrine throughout history, all over the world. Out of all religions, as a historical force, Christianity had even perhaps been the cruelest of all. It made Ammut cry to imagine Jesus saddened by everyone dead in his name.

Eventually, having been raised a Christian grew to make him fear his own capacity for cruelty more than having been a shark, crocodile or lion ever had. It got so bad that he felt compelled to distance himself from Christianity because of it. While Eli and Klein had experienced their apostasy as a liberation, Ammut's was grudging and regretful. He'd always wanted to imagine that everyone would meet in the afterlife and everyone would just be okay.

Disillusioned with Christianity, but still seeking out an outlet for what was left of his idealism, Ammut turned to fish rights activism, hoping to fill just the void that his experience with Christianity had left him with. He met Fugue at a Brazilian fish rights protest that had been organized by Eli. A counter-protestor had attacked Fugue, and Ammut had jumped on the bigot to take him down with a gator roll choke, or a crocodile roll choke, as Ammut liked to call them.

Fugue had been impressed with Ammut's Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Ammut would say that, as an extrovert who loved being around people as he did, it was the perfect style for him. He would describe it jokingly as the art of hugging people close, and never letting them go. Fugue, as an introvert, had also thought of his staff fighting as a perfect expression of his own personality. It let him keep people at a distance and it appeased his OCD to fight without having to touch them. When it all came down to it, Fugue tried to tell himself that a staff was just a really big needle, just as he worked with at the hospital, wielding it merely another matter of utmost precision.

Once, Fugue had started having a panic attack, and Ammut had tried to put his hands on Fugue's body to help him calm down. They'd known each other well enough by then that Ammut knew, even though Fugue disliked being touched by strangers, that they'd reached a level of closeness where Ammut was no longer a stranger, which made it okay. However, Fugue's panic attack had been too strong for him to contain, and his spikes had erupted all over his body, including where Ammut had put his hands on Fugue, piercing a hole through both of them. Ammut had screamed and, surprised, had yanked his hands back before looking at them.

His expression went from stupefaction, to dawning understanding, to... laughter?

This time it had been Fugue's turn to have been stupefied. No one had ever reacted to having been poked by his spikes this way, that much was for certain. Ammut had looked at the Shintoist with that big crocodile grin on his face, and he'd told Fugue "It looks like you've found a way to make me more Christ-like than I ever thought I could be after all!" With the bleeding holes in his hands, Ammut looked like he'd been on the receiving end of divine stigmata himself.

They'd shared their first kiss just after Fugue disinfected and bandaged Ammut's hands.

When Ammut's apartment had collapsed in an earthquake, Fugue had offered to Ammut to move in with him, to save him from having to live on the street. They cared for each other deeply, and Ammut was immensely grateful to Fugue for being there for him in his time of need. Fugue was glad to have been able to do something to repay Ammut for having protected him before.

It started out being difficult for Fugue to adjust to having anyone living with him. Even though Fugue hadn't slept, he'd been used to having had a lot of free time to himself outside of work, which was harrowing, to recover from having had to be around so many people for so long, especially people who had all needed his help so urgently at all times. He'd used his free time to sew and knit his plush animals, practicing his precision handiwork as he'd become accustomed to. He'd play his video games to increase his hand-eye coordination and to turn his mind off from the stresses of his job. He'd painted ofuda, and done elaborate purification rituals.

When Ammut began to live with Fugue, they had to go through a bit of an adjustment period. Ammut's extreme extroversion clashed with Fugue's extreme introversion. Ammut loved spending time with Fugue, but whenever Fugue would take time by himself to do the things that he had become used to doing, Ammut would get hurt. He'd interpret it as meaning that Fugue didn't enjoy spending time with him after all, but only helped him out of pity. Fugue loved spending time with Ammut, but whenever he would want time to himself, he would feel like Ammut had no sense of boundaries, feeling encroached on by what he knew was just affection.

Ammut never tried to diminish Fugue's ordered nature to impose his more chaotic way of existing as objectively better somehow. But where Fugue would always sit up straight, Ammut would lounge about in his underwear picking his teeth. Ammut wasn't messy, but he was more comfortable on the ground than Fugue was. Ammut did his best, but it was sometimes difficult for him to remember the way Fugue preferred to have everything done around the apartment. Fugue would stay polite toward Ammut when he'd make a mistake, but Ammut would feel sad to have disappointed him.

Fugue had always disliked the idea that introverts needed to be 'fixed' by an extrovert, as though there were something inherently wrong with them. The fact that Ammut never played into that trope soon became one of Fugue's favorite things about him. They just did what they could to learn to exist around each other in a way that met both their needs as well as possible, even though sometimes it didn't quite work out as well as they both wished it would.

Ammut would talk to Fugue while he sewed, while he gamed, while he shopped, while he painted, while he bathed, while he worked, while he cleaned, while he'd read, while he'd talk to other people, while he'd go to the bathroom. There were times when Fugue snapped at Ammut then apologized when he'd see how hurt Ammut would get, feeling guilty for having made Ammut feel like his feelings hadn't been important. There were times when Ammut would feel especially lonely, and Fugue would stretch himself even thinner than usual trying to be there for him, until he'd gone so long without being alone that he'd been wiped out.

Be that as it may, Fugue would never have wanted Ammut to have stopped living with him. He'd gotten so used to Ammut's company by then that he couldn't even imagine having had to go through the day without hearing Ammut tell him about his day. The sound of Ammut's voice became the soundtrack to his life, silence from him became almost eerie, like a ghost limb that should have been there but was not. Ammut admired Fugue for helping people the way he did. Fugue felt so embittered and disillusioned by life himself that he found Ammut's idealism inspiring, and he hoped to someday learn to love people as unconditionally as Ammut did.

Before Fugue had met Klein, he might have reacted to Ammut more coldly, with less sensitivity about how asking Ammut for space may have made Ammut feel bad. He would have thought about it as a matter of protecting his way of life, as a matter of emotional survival that he would simply have to prioritize no matter what. But having been left by Klein, having been hurt by Klein's departure the way he had been, Fugue knew the pain of being abandoned by someone you care about all too well. Despite his need for occasional solitude, he related to Ammut's need for company greatly, seeing some of his own suffering reflected in the pain of the man he loved.

Ammut would say he felt as though there were this void in him that he was trying to fill.

Once, when Fugue was feeling particularly stressed out because he'd been spending literally all of his time around other people for far longer than was healthy for his metabolism and he'd been working a double shift at the hospital, Ammut had walked into Fugue's operating room just before Fugue had been about to perform a serious operation. Fugue had yelled at him "You're eating me alive!" and Ammut had stormed out sobbing while Fugue had concentrated on saving his patient's life. Fugue had run out trying to find Ammut as soon as he'd been done, wracked by guilt by how badly he knew that what he'd said would've hit Ammut where it hurt.

"That... that formula you've been, been working on to... to be able to control when your spikes pop out or not?" Ammut had struggled to tell Fugue when Fugue had finally found him, through his tears. Fugue had nodded, failing at holding back his tears himself. "It... It works. You won't... You won't have that problem anymore. Ever. I just... I just thought you should know. I thought... I was just excited for you. You've wanted this for so long! I thought you'd be happy. I thought... you'd want me to tell you," Ammut had sobbed as Fugue had held him in his arms apologetically. "You were right" Fugue told him, petting him softly. "You did good. I'm sorry..."

When Eli had died, and Mano had vanished, Ammut and Fugue had both been hit very hard by it. They had great admiration for her, and she held special meaning for them because she'd been part of why they'd met in the first place. She'd given them hope for a world in which fish rights could become seen as something more than mere pipe dreams. When Atlan had shown up to replace her, joining his Fishism had seemed like the right thing for both of them to do.

At first, Ammut had been excited about flooding anti-fish workplaces, freeing fish people from fishing nets at sea, and fighting back against anti-fish gangs. It had brought back Ammut's memories of what he'd imagined early Christianity to have been like, when Christians had still been just a persecuted minority who believed in a God of love, before power had corrupted them. Ammut imagined that, if Jesus had been alive today, he would have supported the Fishist cause. Whenever ordinary means had failed at protecting the oppressed, people had had to resort to extraordinary means, until enough attention had been drawn to force a more permanent solution.

The first time someone had drowned because of one of their floods, Ammut had cried. When Ammut had carried Fugue in his arms while jumping off a fishing ship that Fugue had just set charges to blow up, they'd believed at first that the ship had been left there without anyone on it at the time. When Ammut had smelled blood in the water, no amount of shark DNA had made him even remotely happy about having smelled it. When Ammut had gotten hurt fighting a gang because no one in it was a fish, it had been Fugue's turn to save Ammut's life again on a hospital bed. When Atlan took Fugue's blood to force Milgram to kill Ogun, it was the last straw.

Ammut became as disillusioned with Fishism as he had with Christianity, and said so.

Before long, Atlan had Ammut captured, imprisoned, judged, condemned, and punished by being genetically modified by Descartes. He had been thrown in The Pit, where Atlan decided he'd be throwing down the bodies of those who betrayed him to 'sleep with the fishes,' as Atlan liked to call it. When Atlan had thrown Ammut down The Pit, he had sarcastically told Ammut "For it is my body, given for you...!" Ammut was disgusted at being given dead people's bodies as food with the expectation that he would eat them, and initially refused to, but soon the effects of Descartes' genetic modifications became apparent: unnaturally over-active stomach acid.

If Ammut did not eat, his stomach would eat itself faster than usual, and he would die.

He resisted as long as he could, twitching and squirming as he'd felt the acid do its work, fighting back the urge to throw up. Finally, terrified at the thought of dying, he'd given in, and had eaten the first corpse that Atlan had thrown down to him after all. As horrible as it was, in a fucked up kind of way, though he cried and screamed and almost threw up after having eaten, even the horror that he'd just experienced still didn't quell the pain of being in The Pit alone.

But Ammut's worst punishment for his betrayal still awaited him: he was going to be force-fed his first live prey.

When Fugue walked into The Pit, and saw the bones that were scattered on the ground around them, he understood what had happened. It fully hit Fugue just how horrible Ammut would have felt after having been put through something like this. Fugue found Ammut panting, unable to stand, clearly struggling to somehow resist the pain that the acid was putting him through but ultimately unable to do anything to reduce the agony it was inflicting on him.

"Kill me," Ammut begged Fugue, "before I really do eat you..." Fugue looked right into his eyes. His face was so emaciated that it almost looked skeletal in the torchlight. "I can't live with what I've done," Ammut added, "it's too late for me, but you can save yourself. Just don't... Don't just let the acid do its work. You're a doctor, Fugue... Have mercy on me," Ammut panted breathlessly, his whole body shaking as though he were going to collapse any second now.

Before Ammut could react, Fugue stung him with one of his modified spikes that he'd been carrying, injecting an unknown substance into Ammut's body. Ammut felt his control over his body give way to mild paralysis, and wondered if Fugue had given him poison that would put an end to his suffering. Perhaps a sedative or anesthetic that would make his last moments less painful than they had to be? Ammut couldn't be sure. He hoped it would make it hurt less.

"It's a base," Fugue finally told him as he picked up Ammut's weakening body to carry him over his shoulder, "I created it with Soma, Mandrake, and Mano. It should neutralize the acid for a while, until we can reverse engineer the genetic modifications that he made on you permanently. They should all also be able to help me do that. They're good at what they do, you'll see," Fugue forced a smile at Ammut as he brought him all the way back aboard Mano's sub to lie him down on a stretcher, tend to his injuries, and monitor his vital signs. "Don't you think you should go back for your friend?" Ammut asked Fugue weakly.

"No," Fugue answered, holding Ammut's hand, "I'm staying right here, with you..."