Last year I promised to write a fic for queer-space-mermaid and it's finally here. Linden, I haven't seen you around lately but here's your gift fic, with lots of love.

This is also for the Bubble Bath Day Event at the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry forum. Prompt: Bolivian salts (write a story in a remote location: Shell Cottage & the ocean). Wampus house :)

Shell Cottage was a beautiful place. The cabin itself looked magical and mysterious as if taken straight from a fairy tale and given a little beam of divine light. For a tired woman like Ginny, this secluded spot, so far from the tiring city, was heaven-sent.

She walked the remaining distance from her small car (and it was a miracle how the thing hadn't given up yet) to the beach itself. The tide was low but she could enjoy the breeze hitting her face with windblown kisses that relaxed her immediately. Here, with only the sound of the ocean and the few seagulls here and there, she could truly rest.

It wasn't as if her life was difficult, she thought as she made her way into the cabin, but being a P.E. teacher could get tiring quickly. There were kids running around screaming, parents complaining that their children didn't make it into the soccer team and the school board taking more and more resources for other, more academically oriented practices. And it all tired her.

She deserved a vacation, and this beautiful place seemed to be perfect. Even if the kitchen was empty and she forgot to bring food from the nearest village, ten kilometres from here.

Huffing in resignation, Ginny went out. She could venture out to the village tomorrow, and for the rest of the evening, she would perfect the art of loving her own company.

It was what she came here to do.

—

She woke up with the first rays of sunlight, though it was more because of her stomach complaining about not having food yet. The hammock in which she slept was swinging slowly, lulling her to sleep even before she could truly wake. But if there was something a P.E. teacher had was willpower and Ginny stood up, stretching her body and looking around.

Last night she had been too tired and went to rest early, but now she could enjoy the soft, beachy decor and the cosy space. There was a single bed near the window with blue and grey sheets, a nightstand with a couple of books from the man who rented the cottage, and the hammock. That was it.

Ginny went out of the room and grabbed a ribbon from her small backpack so she could tie her hair up. The red mess of not-quite-curls was rebellious on a good day and completely anarchist on a bad one. Today was a bad one.

She breathed in the fresh sea breeze when she stepped out of the cottage. The water that had looked grey and red at sunset yesterday now shone silver and blue, basking in sunlight and calling Ginny. She smiled at the sea and felt at peace.

Then her stomach grumbled, ruining the moment.

From her car, she took her trustworthy folding bike. It was the same pink one Charlie gave her when she turned fourteen (she hadn't grown beyond that year, to her dismay), but it was in mint condition and Ginny loved it.

She made sure to lock well her car before pedalling away to the village, with an empty backpack ready to hold the food for the week she would stay at the cottage. Hopefully, the small market would have grapes. Ginny loved green grapes more than any other fruit and just thinking of them made her giggle with childlike excitement.

She didn't notice the pair of grey eyes watching her from the sea.

Pansy would turn one hundred and fifty-three next moon, young as she was. It was hard to believe she had lived this long without trapping someone to eat like her sisters had done plenty of times for the past years since they were deemed old enough to do so.

Just a few days past, Daphne went home with a handsome man-boy that had good, clean teeth and bright brown eyes that had looked around their home for an escape route. He found none and that night they feasted on human flesh for the first time in what it seemed like an eternity (last week).

Pansy feared she wouldn't find anyone to take home that day. The village was too far from the shore and she wasn't the most beautiful mermaid around. Or the one with the fairest voice, like Astoria, who could lure people from hundreds of kilometres away just with her voice. Pansy was a below-average mermaid, but she was determined to find someone to take back home.

It was then, as she swam on the shallowest waters to scare the little fish around when she heard what she knew to be an engine. Peeking out from the water, she saw a small red car from which an even smaller red came out. It was the same hue as her tail scales, contrasting with her black fins.

"Oh," Pansy vocalized without meaning to. The small human hadn't seen her, smiling as she was to the sea, and so Pansy stayed to observe.

It was a human with hair as red as the sunset. Her skin was pink like Astoria's favourite shell-bra. Her smell enticing and delicious. Pansy only regretted that she couldn't see her eyes from this distance. Humans with brown eyes were the most delectable, with salty blood so different from the bitter green eyes or the sweet blue ones. Pansy's favourites were the brown, and something inside her smallest heart made her think this human had them.

But she went away to the cabin before Pansy could even think of swimming closer to try to snare her, and Pansy's song wasn't pretty to hear and the human wouldn't respond to it. Mother often told her she had too much human blood from her father and not enough salt in her veins. She was a shame to her mother, but Pansy loved her nonetheless.

—

When Pansy swam back to the shore the next day, her nose found no human around. There were traces of her in the sand, smelling of blood and flesh. Pansy's mouth watered and she had to dive into the cold waters, the deepest waters before she lost her mind.

When would the human come back? Pansy couldn't wait, and so she went to the fish banks to have a snack before her mind was lost to the hunger. She had never felt something like it, and perhaps if she had eaten the human yesterday she wouldn't feel this now.

How did mother put it? Humans are a dish best served cold, and it was too bad Pansy's sisters never obeyed in that and always shared the warmest bits of their trapped humans.

"Pansy!" she didn't have to see who it was. The merman's voice was bold and cocky, but more elegant than even Astoria or Daphne could be.

"Draco," she greeted with not as much enthusiasm as he had. That prompted him to frown, not because he was worried for her but because he felt entitled to the adoration of others. Or so Astoria said, but even the girl couldn't shake off her crush on him.

"Don't tell me you are sad again," he rolled his eyes and Pansy felt anger rise in her throat. "Last time it took a whole school of blenny fish before you looked like yourself again."

"If you don't want to be around, then swim away, Draco," she spat, doing exactly that and swimming over to a conglomeration of silver algae she found especially pretty.

"Hey, don't do that," he intercepted her with a hand on her shoulder. His green tail was flapping back and forth in the way that yelled he was impatient. Poor Draco never was a listener, but he tried sometimes and that melted away Pansy's anger. "What is going on?"

Pansy thought about keeping quiet and not telling him of the human, but Draco's barely-there pout had her smiling and talking in no time.

She described her to him: red hair, pink skin, the most delicious aroma she had ever smelled. She felt her hearts beating erratically and loved that feeling.

Draco, with a hand on his chin and narrowed eyes, smirked.

"It seems, my dear Pansy, that you still haven't found prey," he said cryptically, trying to sound as mysterious as his mother did when they were children and she told them tales of humans, selkies and leviathans.

She took the bait. "I will get her," she affirmed, certain of how she would steal the human and feast on her flesh with her sisters. "Believe me. I will even invite you to dinner tonight!"

Even his chuckles sounded more pleasant to the ear than her most intoned songs.

"Don't be stupid, Pansy," he reprimanded with a grin that showed his pointy, silver teeth as. "I'm merely saying she isn't prey. She's your true love!"

She laughed so loudly she scared a passing pair of sand eels that hissed at them before swimming away. Draco looked impatient again and his white fins were stiff.

She shook her head.

"That doesn't exist," she said. "It's a cautionary tale to not let ourselves be taken by the humans."

At least she believed so because her mother had told them countless times of how humans spoke about love just to steal them from the sea and open them up to see how different from them mermaids are. Pansy wasn't particularly scared; no one she knew had ever been taken, but the warning remained firmly etched in her mind.

"I assure you it is true! My mother said so," he spoke adamantly, with a childish stubbornness that decades ago Pansy found cute. He swam around her and she crossed her arms. Her red tail swatted his own. "Ow! You can act like a child sometimes."

"You're the child!"

He looked at her with a smirk, as if her outburst proved his point. Pansy looked up to avoid his eyes. Over them, the water appeared darker.

"She has to be on the shore by now," she said excitedly, grabbing Draco's hand and taking him with her to the surface. "It's almost sunset and she seemed to like the sunset yesterday."

"I can swim on my own!" Draco said, but he was giggly and Pansy remembered a time in their childhood when they swore they'd be the best hunters: she, luring humans to their waters and him, killing creatures just for sport.

When they surfaced, well away from the shore, Pansy immediately spotted her.

The afternoon had gone by without Ginny having to worry about anything.

The successful trip to the village had her eating sandwiches and fruit of the season (sadly, no grapes were found), and to pass her time she curled up on the sand with a book and a soft but sturdy blanket that would protect her from the sand's grittiness.

Then she looked up, looking at the vast ocean. The peace that it irradiated was broken by a spike of adrenaline in her blood. It was a sensation akin to fear but not as pronounced, and Ginny couldn't go away or stop staring at the sea because she could have sworn she saw a big, red coloured fish.

Believing her mind to be exhausted from reading, she set down the book, stood up and stretched.

There! The red coloured fish was there again! It wasn't her mind.

Wanting to take a closer look, Ginny walked to where the waves crashed against the sand and shivered at the touch of the coldness of the water. She took her phone from her pocket and prepared the camera app in case she saw it again, but when she looked up she promptly dropped her phone to the ground, where a retreating wave caught it and took it into the water.

"What the hell?" she whispered, scared. The fish had come out of the water again, only it wasn't a fish at all. The red scales she had seen were there, forming what looked like a mermaid's tail with big black fins that looked like a butterfly's wings.

What startled her was the human body attached to the scales. A pronounced waist and breasts covered with what looked like an algae bra with little shells decorating it. The creature was too close to the shore, a few meters from her. It —no, she had her forearms on the sand, where the waves kissed her skin, as if supporting her weight. The tail —and it was indeed a red scaled tail— was up in the air, moving back and forth.

"A real mermaid," Ginny said. Her hand was on her chest, barely touching her skin. If she weren't so surprised, she would find a striking similarity to her mother's posture when Charlie said he was dating an international soccer star. "How can you be real?"

But the mermaid was frozen in what seemed like fear. Her mouth was opening and closing like a fish's, and Ginny couldn't control her laugh when she thought of that.

"Don't laugh at my friend, human!" someone said and Ginny saw, behind the pretty mermaid, what could only be described as a merman. He was different from his friend, with silver and green being his colours instead of red and black. Ginny looked at the one, then at the other.

"I'm hallucinating," she realized only to hear the merman's laugh.

"There aren't any blowfish around," he said, getting nearer to his friend. He adopted a more relaxed posture than she had, and Ginny thought that he might have been more comfortable in beaches than her. "But if I find some I'll share the goods."

"What?" Ginny asked, feeling stupid. Here she was, meeting fantastical creatures and failing miserably at communicating with them.

She saw the merman nudging the mermaid and turned her eyes to her. She was strikingly beautiful and Ginny was sure she would have lost her words even if she had been another, normal person instead of a mermaid.

"Oh, yes," the mermaid said, and though she sounded shy Ginny could hear how confident she was through her pleasant and lovely voice. "Hi, I'm Pansy."

The mermaid gave her the tiniest smile, showing two rows of pointy pearlescent teeth.

Ginny felt herself blush.

—

The cheeks of the human turned red and Pansy breathed in the scent of her blood. Now that she could see the brown of her eyes she knew her to be delectable, but the tingling in her hearts was unlike hunger or thirst. It felt strange, like the caress of the warm currents or a bed of blue algae at night, in the shallowest waters where the moon shone through.

"I'm Ginny," the human said in a whisper. Pansy grinned, showing her teeth and seeing how she flinched.

"Well, I'm Draco," her friend introduced himself with a big wave of his hand and his usual tone. "You don't need to fear us, Ginny the human."

Ginny nodded and Pansy recovered her wits, pushing Draco into the coming wave. "Go away, Draco. I'll be there for dinner."

He shot her a look as if reminding her what he told her about true love. She hadn't believed him then but now, as she stayed alone with her human she reconsidered.

She didn't feel hungrier than usual and her fins were tingling with excitement. Perhaps Draco was right, and hadn't mother said she had liked her father quite a lot? Maybe Narcissa was right.

"Sorry," Ginny said. "I'm still a little bit... confused? How can you exist?"

Pansy grinned and this time Ginny didn't flinch.

"Well, my mother met my father a few centuries ago and she liked him so much that they cop—"

"Wait! I didn't mean that!" Ginny said, laughing and covering her mouth with her hand. "Though I'm sure that would be a very educative story, I meant I can't believe mermaids are real!"

"Why not?" Pansy asked, confused, before frowning and swatting away a spider crab that had gotten too close to her. "I assure you we are very real."

She looked into Ginny's eyes as she grinned this time. "I know that now, but when I was a little girl I could only dream of having a tail to swim like a mermaid. I think all little girls dream of being one."

Pansy found that strange and snorted. "Mermaids don't dream of being humans. We love the ocean too much to go to ground like the selkies do."

"Well, I'm glad you decided to come and visit me," Ginny said.

Pansy saw her sit down on the sand with her legs crossed. Pansy wondered what it would be like to have legs instead of fins.

"I'm glad you aren't running scared!" Pansy told her and got nearer, using the tide in her favour. They were close and Pansy's shyness almost came back.

"You're too pretty to scare me, Pansy the mermaid," Ginny said grinning and Pansy blushed. "Perhaps I could swim with you. Maybe I'll find my phone though I doubt it works anymore."

"Phone?" Pansy echoed with a small frown. "Is it anything like a fork?"

Ginny laughed. "Not at all! I'll show you if we find it."

"I'd love it," she smiled and retreated into the ocean. She went in and out twice and saw Ginny back on the shore taking off her feet garments.

—

Ginny wasn't the best swimmer, but as P.E. teacher she knew more than the basics and so she could easily follow Pansy as they swam around each other.

It was an experience unlike any others and Ginny thought that maybe she was dreaming. The thought of the fruit from the village being spoiled and inducing her hallucinations was ultimately hilarious, and she rather chose to enjoy the moment and simply believed.

Pansy grabbed her hand.

"Breathe in. We're going down for a few seconds so you can see these little fish I love to eat. They're delicious!"

Ginny laughed and took a deep breath, following her companion. Her eyes stung from the salt but she didn't dare to close them and miss the wonders of being underwater with a mermaid.

She would lie to herself later on and refuse to acknowledge how enthralled she was with her colourful red scales and how she felt her chest tighten as she saw Pansy's hips moving as she swam. Ginny had relationships in the past, but not even the most passionate nights compared to the feelings running through her heart when Pansy turned back with a graceful twirl and pointed at a school of fish that formed the funniest shapes as they moved, their scales reflecting the filtering light.

Soon, Ginny couldn't hold her breath any longer and let out big bubbles of air. Pansy grabbed her waist and swam up, pulling Ginny to the surface with soft hands and sharp nails.

They surfaced and Ginny saw the moon shining on them. She hadn't realised it got dark so quick but couldn't care. This was one in a lifetime experience and more than that, she thought as Pansy's lips hovered close to her own.

The mermaid didn't look as if she were going to kiss Ginny. Instead, she was simply staring into her eyes with a smile on her lips and a content expression.

"It was only a few seconds but it was great!" Ginny told her with a big grin and a blush. She wanted to go down again but the merman from before, Draco, surfaced at their side.

"Sorry to get in the way of true love, but we have to go," he said hurriedly. Pansy let go of Ginny's waist but kept holding her hand. The tips of her finger were reddish as if she had dipped them into paint and let them dry before trying to washing them off.

"Why? Pansy's showing me around!" Ginny said, waiting for an explanation.

Instead of getting one, Pansy turned to her and smiled apologetically.

"It was lovely meeting you, Ginny," she said and pulled her to the shore. "I have to go, but I hope I can return sometime."

Ginny's face fell. "I'm leaving in five days," she told Pansy with sadness in her voice. Her new friend was wonderful and had many new things for Ginny to see.

"Oh," Pansy said looking at Draco, who shook his head with a resigned expression. "I can't promise I'll come tomorrow, but I'll be around for a few days before you go. I really want to be with you again."

It surprised Ginny how much she mirrored Pansy's statement. She wanted to get to know her, to be more than just a human she met one afternoon. She wanted to know which fish she liked and to discover how vast the underwater world was, but she was a human.

"Pansy, they're coming and we have to go."

Pansy nodded at Draco and let go of Ginny's hand but Ginny swam back to her, held her face and stared into her grey, worried eyes.

"I will never forget you, Pansy the mermaid," Ginny said, kissing the corner of her lips for a long second before swimming the rest of the way to the beach.

When she looked back, Pansy was gone.

Pansy didn't see Ginny again. Her sisters were adamant that if she found a human she should share with the rest of them as they all did with her, and they promised to help her bring the prey home next time. So she didn't dare to get near the beach in case they followed her.

Draco kept the secret well. He never told anyone that Pansy had the vulnerable human in her arms, ready to be taken down and eaten.

What he did was bring her a gift a few weeks after their little adventure.

"What is this?" Pansy said as she took a metal rectangle with what felt like grass. It had two little buttons on its side and did nothing when she pressed them.

"The device your human had when you scared her," Draco smirked, clearly pleased with himself for getting her Ginny's phone.

Pansy squealed with delight and swam in circles around Draco twice before hugging him.

"It's the best gift, Draco! Thank you!"

Pansy swam away with the device she called phone and Draco stayed back. He felt sad for his friend and for the little human that would never meet again.

For his part, he only wished to someday find someone, mermaid, selkie or human, that he could see with the same awe with wich Ginny and Pansy saw each other.