Bound to the Sea
Author's Note: This story was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's, The Little Mermaid. This chapter is more like a preface, or introduction, to set up the story and the circumstances so it is a bit short. Regardless, I hope you like it! I haven't decided if it will be a happy ending, like Disney's, a tragic ending, like the original story, or a kinda in between one like Ponyo. Let me know what you think and which direction you want it to go! Also if anyone want's to be my beta I would really love your help! Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Neither Fairy Tail of The Little Mermaid is mine :'(
Chapter 1
Perception is often ignored regarding the conception of time. Most have the misinformed view that time, like other measurements, is constant, with each passing second elapsing an equal length. However, this notion fails to explain phenomena associated with the Celestial Spirits.
To humans, the ethereal beings occasionally summoned in combat, and even more rarely observed without the assistance of a mage, defy the aging process. Yet, despite the human belief in their immortality, the Spirits are as mortal as the common man. The explanation of their ageless appearance lies in the unequal allotment of time between the dimensions that the two races inhabit.
Time in the celestial realm passes exceedingly slower than time in the human world, which ultimately does not have negative affects as long as the laws governing interaction between the domains are not broken. Fortunately for a special human abandoned on the ocean shore, these laws are sometimes ignored.
Pieces raced along the warm salty coast of Fiore. The mother accepted her son's request to test his speed in order appease him, though she secretly reduced her speed, sparing the boy's pride as mother's often do. Their sleek bodies easily cut through currents as the dim lights from seaside cities flashed beside them. They had nearly completed their circuit when a noise caught the mother's attention.
Diverting from her previous course, she followed the muffled noise. Though sound travels further over water, the vibrations are often distorted by the crashing waves above. Unrecognizable as it was to the untrained ear, such as her son's, the mother had an unsettling knowledge to the sound's origin, and despite the hope that her ears were failing her, her thoughts were confirmed and her small fishlike head broke the water's surface.
A few yards in from the lapping waves, a baby lied screaming on the pebbly shore. Apprehensive about approaching the distressed infant, and risking an adult human seeing, the mother settled into the bobbing waves to watch the child before her.
Disturbing the water beside her, the son's black head rose from the surface. With quicken breath from his excursion along the coast he light heartedly mocked his mother.
"What's up, mom? Did you finally realize that I'm to fast for you and bailed on our race early? Cause you know, even if you quit before you finished that still means I won." His thick fish lips twisted into a crooked smile as he waited for his mother's response, obviously ignorant of her diverted attention. When she failed to answer his humored remark, he tried to understand what her mind was occupied with. Scanning the starlight shore, he reasoned she must have been hung up on the little lump on the beach.
"What is it?" he asked, not making the connection between the little dark spot a few yards ahead and the piercing wails the filled the otherwise silent night air.
"A baby" his mother responded in a light, airy tone.
"A baby?" Though the son had spent some time exploring the human world under the cloak of darkness, he had never seen a human child, as they typically retreated indoors long before his adventures began. His inexperience was also due to the unusual nature of the celestial world. Though the spirits were mortal, and thus had a finite beginning, he was the youngest. The star that completed the second fish in his consolation was the last to appear, thus prompting his late birth. With his situational ignorance, he could not conceptualize his mother's fascination with this baby.
His mother, on the other hand, has raised her son and therefore had ample knowledge of infants. She also had more experience with humans. Between these two pools of knowledge, she was able to tell that a child, especially one as young and the one on the beach, did not belong so close to the water, nor out that late at night.
After concluding that an adult human was not present-for if one was, he or she would definitely have responded to the crying baby-the mother transformed into her human form and waded out of the water to investigate the unusual situation. Following her lead, the son, in his unchanged form, followed her, floating through the air as the water retreated behind them.
"Mom! What are you doing? You know that interaction between humans and spirits without the medium of a mage is forbidden by Celestial Law!" The son was not one to blindly obey rules in most circumstances, but he feared the old, powerful Celestial King, as he was a strict enforcer of felonies.
"I just want to make sure the child is not hurt," the mother explained. Though she knew the law and also respected the Celestial King, her longer life had given her a better understanding of the laws-and how detection for breaking them could be avoided.
Slowly approaching the wailing baby, it became obvious that the child had been unattended for far too long. Her skin was flushed with fever, and her pungent smell indicated a soiled diaper. The mother reached out to sooth the child, but drew back when she heard her son's voice next to her.
"Don't touch it!" he exclaimed. Though their close proximity to a human was risk enough, physical contact would surely draw the attention of the Celestial King.
Clenching the hand that had previously reached out into a fist and looking away from both her son and the child, the mother tried to quickly assess her conflicting emotions. She feared the Celestial King, and knew that punishment for her actions would jointly affect her son, with whom she shared a spirit, but her maternal instincts would not allow her to watch the baby die.
Sighing she looked to her son, his dark, thin body coiling in the cool air. She had to buy time to think about this, surely there must be something that she could do.
"Go find her family," she demanded of her son.
"And do what? Scold them for leaving a baby on the beach and hope they come back and don't do it again? Come on mom, we can't protect a human forever." Even as he said it, he could feel his body begin to feel weak, a sign that they've overstayed their welcome in a foreign dimension.
"Just do it! I just, I need to know…" She paused, fighting back a sob threatening to escape her chest, and willing her clenched jaw to slacken. "Why," she finished.
The son sighed. Despite sharing a spirit, there were times that he simply couldn't understand his mother.
"Just don't touch it," he reminded. Submitting to her request, his serpentine body slid through the air toward the nearest village, hoping whoever put her there was indeed a member of her family, and they hadn't reached the small town yet so he could at least identify them.
Meanwhile, the mother slid to the pebbly ground and hugged her knees to her chest. The baby beside her had quit screaming, the last few screeches being a bit horse. The poor child, she thought. It would be bad enough for her to die from hunger or exposure, but the mother had figured out why the family had chosen to leave the baby hear-it would only be a few more minutes before the ocean waves reached the child and carried her into their dark depths. The poor thing would be killed by the mother's element, the place she loved and frequented, the world whose immeasurable beauty she adored. There must be a way that she could protect the child's life, and if she couldn't spare it, perhaps she could at least allow her to see life's beauties. Lost in thought, she felt the waves begin to lap at her feet. It would be soon, she concluded.
It was then that her son returned. He transformed to his human form and sat beside his mother. His mood was obviously darker than before, as he was finally able to understand the situation as his mother had.
"Well?" she prompted.
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "I caught up to her mother. At least I'm assuming it was her mother. She was crying and kept murmuring, 'Juvia'. Do you think that's her name? Anyway, I followed her back to their house, if you could call it that. It was more like a shack set up on the edge of town. There was another little kid, but he, like his mother, was very frail. I don't think they've eaten in a while. Behind their shack was a fresh grave. It was big, large enough to fit an adult man." Letting the words sink in and allowing his mother to infer what he didn't want to say, he remained silent.
The mother didn't know what to say. She assumed a tragic story was behind this mysterious child, but the confirming story didn't prevent the heartache that accompanied it. It seemed that if the baby wasn't destined to succumb to the waves now, she would have only lasted perhaps a week with her family.
Waves were now threatening to cover the tiny infant's mouth. The son looked away, but the mother couldn't tear her eyes from the tragedy that was playing out before her. There was no way, she concluded that she could spare the baby's life, and her son from punishment, but decided that she wouldn't let this be the end of the child either.
As the water finally eclipsed the baby's mouth, gurgling as she sputtered to breath. The mother used her ethereal magic to enclose the child in a sphere of ocean water. Silently, the water began to glow and the tiny body inside it went limp. Emitting the lifeless body from the saline sphere, the glowing water retreated into the space that the body previously inhabited. In it's place was the shape of a baby, the same baby's whose corpse had been consumed by the tides, but this one was noticeably healthier. The skin was pale, unlike the flushed corpse, and the tiny arms and legs were a bit chubbier than before. The mother smiled down at her ingenuity. True, she was certain that she had broken a number to Celestial Laws, but she was able to give this child a true gift, the gift of artificial life.
The son, having averted his gaze was clueless to his mother's actions until, after several minutes of silence, assumed that the child's body had long been consumed by the sea. Risking a glance to the place previously occupied by the baby's body, he was astonished to find that it wasn't vacant.
"Mom!" he exclaimed, not sure what else to say in his awestruck state.
"Don't worry-I didn't touch her," she assured him in mock humor and his earlier warnings.
"Then what did you do?" I was obvious from the tide that surrounded the little body that it should no longer be there, yet there it was, and the chest rose and fell as if it was breathing.
The mother chuckled at his bewilderment, apparently she still had a few tricks that even he didn't know about. "I connected her soul to the sea. I couldn't save her body, but I wasn't willing for her life to end. Her body is nothing more than an illusion created by my magic. At least this way she can live to see the beauty of life, and in the most beautiful of places. Because she is bound to the ocean's water she will not be able to break its surface, but that is a small price to pay considering. Now come, I think we've spent too much time in the human world as it is." Concluding her explanation she returned her spirit to the celestial plane, forcing her son to join her.
In their absence, the tiny body, which had consumed so much of the mother and son's energy that night, drifted into the sea with the dark waves.