This is based on an e/e prompt given to me by Kaylee, La Patron-Minette, for an e/e pirate and mermaid AU (with a twist)
i~how to be brave?
When he is young, he is taught to sing and smile. He is told to twist someone's heart into his hands and yank at it until they yearn for him. He learns how to kill by ripping heartstrings.
Sometimes he has nightmares of holding a beating heart in his hand—pink and fleshy, the heart of a human child—and he will gently squeeze it until the beating grows incessant under his fingers and the glow of warmth begins to turn red. The heart bursts from the pressure and the pain with a sad whimper, leaving trails of innocent blood running down his pale hands.
He wakes with water filling his lungs and his blue eyes full of the ocean.
ii how can I love when I'm afraid to fall?
When she is young, she is taught how to love. First by her mother, who sings to her in a raspy, scraping voice and combs her hair. Then by her siblings, who win over her precious little heart with their wide eyes and naïve smiles. She is so young, though… Too young to understand time and how it is the cruelest of all the elements, how it will take away what was yours simply a second ago.
It doesn't take long before her mother grows ill and submissive. Her siblings' eyes grow empty and their smiles are hollow. Tears are as rare as bread, for, when you feel nothing it is hard to cry.
It is not long after that she learns to steal, to trick and to lie. She learns how to hold in her feelings, how to patch up scrapes and bruises. How to be a mother to children barely five years younger than her.
Sometimes she will sleep and con herself into believing that the past has not ended, that the present is a nightmare instead of reality.
She wakes with dust in her throat and a once-loving, bitter heart.
iii ~one step closer.
There is a point where any adolescent realizes that there is nothing for them where they were raised. Enjolras feels it the first time he swims to the ocean floor; his tail flaps the warm, dark water and his humanoid ears ache despite their enhanced strength. His hand folds into the deep muck that lies beneath a world of water and he thinks, there must be so much more.
To battle the sudden feeling of being trapped, he churns his arms and rolls his hips until he reaches the very different top of the ocean. As he nears the surface, the light eliminates the world around him as if he has gone to a heavenly place. The water around him turns chilly, and when he breaks surface he is welcomed with a freezing wind that skates along the water.
It is a fresh, cold, free pain that Enjolras closes his eyes against and raises his arms against the wind. His tail keeps him floating on the rolling waves, and once his eyes have adjusted to the pale light and his skin to the cold, he looks.
And he sees.
There is a glowing orb in the sky that shimmers off the waves. The sky folds around it in a sparkling veil, the twinkles reminding him of filtered sunlight skirting off of his tail. As far as he can see, there is nothing but waves and dark rolls spiking from the water. The air is dry on his eyes, and when he dives beneath the water to calm his shaking nerves (for the storms where he was taught to drown sailor were never this beautiful), he feels replenished enough to spend a lifetime above water.
But when he comes up again to the night sky, he spots something moving towards him. Curious the way the young are, he moves to meet it.
iv ~time stands still, beauty in all she is
As soon as she could, Éponine took to the sea. The smell of salt could wash out the stench of iron and blood. Combined, the two made a perfume that Éponine was meant to wear. The bruises on her skins fade to internal scars that she keeps well hidden. A cap hides her hair, now tangled and curly from missing her mother's comb. An over-large smock hides what little she has beneath the fabric and the smooth wood of the deck feels like kisses under her street-scarred soles.
The sea is her heaven. In the sun, her skin bakes and cools bronze. The air simmers around her and the lazy breeze does little to dispel the dainty droplets of sweat that bead upon her forehead. In the cold, every breath is like a sharp prick of existation, and her red nose feels tingly and like the peak on an ice-cap far, far away.
It is a night like the latter when they find the drowning man.
Éponine is the one on watch as the little pirate ship cuts through the water like a knife through warm butter. The hull is sharp, and soon they have made many more leagues than the captain expected to cover in such a short time.
This patch of water is one that this crew has navigated many times before. It is nearly routine to them, without a thought. Just an empty span of sea and sparkling reflections.
Until Éponine spots a head bobbing in the water.
"Marcello!" She calls to the other man on watch. "Come see this!"
Her crewmate, a thin, bespeckled whose only real attribution to the ship was his art (the captain was amused by it), is soon by her side, peering into the water as well. When he sees the man, his pale eyes widen and he pushes his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose.
"What should we do?" Éponine asks. Marcello shrugs.
"Throw him a rope."
v~ every breath, every hour has come to this
Enjolras sees the rope thrown into the water, and before he can think of any better solution, he grasps hold of it and allows himself to be tugged up the side of the ship. His heart lays still within him, for sea children's hearts do not beat, but still he sweats and breathes in the air slowly. His tail touches the first brush of breeze and he feels it tingle. As he continues holding onto the rope and slowly rising over the water, his tail continues to tingle until suddenly there is a strange feeling—as if he has been split in two. He doesn't want to look down, but he is sure that he does indeed have the human equivalent of a tail, the two fleshy limbs that allow them to swim on land.
He is lugged up to the deck and dropped there like a fish drawn up on a line. He stares into eyes of darkness, like the murk that he could still feel between his fingers from the bottom of the sea. If he is to look down, he will see full, plump lips parted to show slightly crooked teeth. The skin surrounding the beautiful mouth and the hidden eyes is weather beaten. A tendril of dark hair falls from a cap, and the way the wispy strand falls across an exposed shoulder is like octopus ink in the sand.
"What is your name?"
For the first time, Enjolras notices the accompaniment to the collection of assorted human fragments. His lips form to speak his name, but not a sound comes out. He reaches and pats at his throat, trying to get a message through.
The foggy features suddenly collect and condense into a person who speaks with the sound of the sea rolling over rocks, "He can't speak."
vi ~I have died everyday waiting for you
Éponine is interested by the angel they plucked from the sea. His skin is pale and sickly almost, and paired with his pale blond hair and pink lips he is like the moon personified, but when the sun comes out he is set alight; he is suddenly golden with eyes that have stolen the sky. He is beautiful.
And surly.
And silent.
Éponine yearns to hear him speak the way she has not yearned for anything since she was last starving. Soon she is drawn to him like a moth to the light, and throughout their missions (which this sea boy takes valiant part of) she sticks beside him, sometimes thinking of herself as his protector, for he seems like a baby animal taking its first steps.
Soon she begins talking to him when she walks beside him on deck. He listens, too. She guesses that he can hide behind his eyes if he so chooses, but when she speaks to him it is as if all the clouds have vanished from those patches of sky. He is all the more beautiful when he is focused.
He gets angry when she tells him about the poor, the people like her and Marcello, the ones looked down upon by society. His useless Adam's apple bobs under the skin of his throat when he swallows furiously. His eyes are thundering. His knuckles turn white.
She likes to think it's for her that he cares so much.
vii ~time has brought your heart to me
The storm hits when Enjolras is staring at Éponine.
It did not take long for her to confess her true gender identity to him. He feels unique in that he is the only one who knows, and something twinges the useless organ inside of him when she releases her tangled hair from her cap, allowing it to frame her narrow, time-brutalized face. She is everything his fabled sisters are not, and yet all that he can find beautiful anymore. Nothing else can compare.
He listens to her tales and wishes he could have made life better. He wishes to go to her home and give bread to the starving children, to revolt against their uncaring king and to take the rich down several notches. Then, he realizes that this mission is doing all of this, just in a passive-aggressive manner. And so, while he believes he could take to the land-bound city of Paris with those human weapons, instead he sticks with the ship.
He sticks with her.
For all that Enjolras had been taught to make someone love him, so he had also never been taught what love felt like. Maybe sea-children did not naturally feel such things, but it was something strange brought about by only her, only Éponine.
They are below decks, and she is trying to comb the worst of the knots out of her hair with her fingertips. Enjolras is sitting and watching. The lull of the sea rocks them both into a false security before the sudden crash of thunder sends them both leaping from their bunks.
Éponine relaxes and smiles assuredly at Enjolras, "Don't worry. It's just a storm."
It is not! He wants to warn her. It is so much worse. It is death, waiting to capture you.
But, he can say nothing. All he gives her is a wan smile, which she returns with practiced ease. He can see right through her. She is scared too.
So when their faithful little ship finally spills over into the sea, Enjolras tries to keep his eyes on Éponine. The tales his mother used to tell him remain fresh, If you are ever to love a human, you may clutch onto them as they drown so that you may have them for eternity.
They sink beneath the water. Éponine struggles for a bit, flailing in the water. Enjolras's heart sinks as he realizes she can't swim. Her hair spreads about her head like a dark halo, and he dives beneath the water to watch the hope drain out of this funny human girl. With each added inch between her reaching fingers and the surface, she seems to wilt.
Enjolras knows what he can do to have her all to himself. He can hold her the way he sometimes did on the ship when her memories got too bad, or the way she held him when his skin grew too dry and he scratched himself into a red mess. He can bring her deeper until her delicate lungs crush from the pressure. He can keep her heart and her soul with him.
Of course, he does nothing of the sort.
Enjolras swims her back up to the surface and holds her above water. His borrowed smock is ripping, and the spots of scales on his back feel like stings from months without usage. Éponine lolls over onto his shoulder and he knows that she is fine. Her pulse is beating in his hand and she stirs occasionally.
She is peaceful, and although he wants her he cannot bring himself to watch her die.
viii~ and all along I believed I would find you
Éponine feels dry sand like scrapes against her skin, and when she opens her eyes she sees something blocking the sun. It is the silhouette of a head with bouncing curls, one that she recognizes. Her weak hand reaches out to touch her sea boy, for he is alive. He has somehow survived with her. God is forgiving.
He leans down close to her, and she can see every salty pore on his face and can smell the ocean on his breath. One of his hands holds hers to his face, and as his eyes meet hers, he tells her, "My name is Enjolras."
Within a flash he has pulled away from her. Confused, Éponine sits up only to see a splash as a flicker of glowing rubies and hair like gold disappear beneath the waves.
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