DROWNING
AUTHORS NOTE: It has been a very long time since I picked up my fanfiction pen. Hopefully a few of you remember me from the last captain swan fanfiction I wrote… and you aren't too mad at me that I never finished it… things have gone up and down for me and I am sort of in a love-hate relationship with this show, but captain swan will probably be my favorite ship for all time and I have had this idea sticking in my head for awhile and I want to get it down.
Please note that this will be an M rated fic sooner or later, mostly for intimate reasons. We aren't gonna do a 25 chapters without a kiss thing again. I don't know exactly how quickly I'll get chapters out, and this is probably my first and last authors note. I hope you all enjoy my fun with mermaid princesses and pirates.
She wasn't like her sisters.
She can't remember the day she realized it, just that it must have been a long time ago. She has felt apart from them for so long, she can hardly remember a time she felt like she belonged. At times, she wondered if she ever had. Piece by piece, she'd shown herself to be too different.
What had been the first piece of the puzzle to fall? The most striking wrongness is likely the fact she cannot sing. Well, she can sing. Pretty notes and light tunes, rarely any words; that was not what a mermaid song was about. Still, she couldn't sing like her sisters, high and clear and bright. So beautiful it could draw men from their ships and into the water below. She didn't care to sing, not the way her sisters did, and she could not watch as men fell to their temptation and they devoured him. It was simply the way of mermaids and she would not, could not, participate. Her heart felt too heavy as she watched them fall, watched them struggle, the bubbles escaping their mouths and Crimson clouding the water. The picture in her head soured any note she tried to sing. She didn't sing, she wouldn't feed. She didn't belong.
It was more than that, though. Of course it was. Mermaids often traveled in schools, groups that kept them safer and made life easier. Surely at one point she had a circle to swim with, she just can't recall. She drifted through the waters on her own now. She ignored the normal tendency to stay in one world and one ocean, to claim a place to be her own and never leave it. She liked to move better, liked to see every new realm and shore, even from the depths of the water. She wondered what it would be like to walk on land, to be a part of the world of men. She wondered so often at times it distracted from everything else — not that there was a great deal more else to distract from.
Life was so empty, under the water. Her fellow mermaids seemed to care little. They talked about how beautiful their hair was, or the taste of the last man they'd enchanted, or the fish they had seen. She found it all dreadfully dull. She avoided empty conversation and lazy sunning on warm rocks, seeking endeavors that could excite her. Her favorite was to dig through the ships of men, fallen and rotten and broken under the weight of the sea. She would pick out the remnants of lives lost and marvel at them in her fingertips. What had they used these things for? Sharp bits of metal with prongs, or the odd things that opened wide to disintegrate in her fingers. Sometimes she found them before they were destroyed by water and they were stained by odd black lines. She puzzled over them, what they could possibly mean. It was so confusing and so difficult to guess how shore things could possibly be of use.
Some were easier to guess than others, of course. Shiny metal and vibrant stones were likely just important because they were pretty. Mermaids loved pretty things, and yet those were of the least interest. She occasionally would drag back a fistful for her sisters. Strands of gold and silver, heavy stones. They would delight and ahh, yet without fail the greedy things wanted hers more than the ones she could bring.
She had always worn it; a snarl of gold threads and green stones, tight around her throat. She could not get it off, she'd tried plenty of times. Her sisters had pulled so hard trying to wrench it from her once that she had succumbed to darkness for a little while, coming back hours later in a bleary daze. She hated it, she wanted nothing more than to pry it off. Sometimes she would pull on it herself so hard that her fingers bled and her eyes burned. It wouldn't budge, not for anything. It made her feel so heavy, and each day it felt tighter. Constricting around her throat like a sea serpent, and it never lessened. She could not escape it.
It was worst when she slept. All her dreams were of things closing about her throat. Rope, net, seaweed, tightening and tightening — sometimes hands, brutal and strong, pressing and stealing all the breath from her lungs. She would wake with her fingers curled in metal, her chest heavy and constricted as her heart pounded in panic. A horrible feeling, her throat trying to throw up water as if that would save her. Once a mermaid had spotted her and laughed at her as if it was a joke. Don't be silly. A mermaid cannot drown. At first she had ignored it, but eventually the thought crept up to her. How did she even know what drowning felt like?
She hated feeling so separate, so wrong. Every time she tried to bend to match the mermaids around her, she always found a way to mess up. She would say or do the wrong thing, and then they'd all know that she did not belong. The few times she managed to fight how out of place she felt, she eventually forced herself away. She could not tolerate it. If she could not feel like she belonged she would at least feel like herself. It was better to be alone than to feel wrong in her own skin.
It was not always so terrible, to be on her own. She grew accustomed to it. There was no one to tell her not to do something, and she supposed that if she had one of her sisters with her always surely someone would. Perhaps she did foolish things on occasion, yet since she managed to swim out of all of them she didn't worry about them too terribly. She had no one to worry about but herself and she did not worry much about herself, either. There was nothing holding her back when she wanted to go somewhere new, and she often did. There were so many places to see and go, all she had to do was swim there and a whole new world would be at her disposal.
It was a limited view of the world, certainly. Only what she could see from shore or sand, when she got especially brave. And she did often. She was just so curious about land, how different it was from the ocean. Sometimes she would watch the shore for months, watching the leaves change from green to red, from red to brown, from brown to falling. Then the oddest thing would happen, white drops from the sky, so small and delicate it was impossible to imagine them ever becoming anything. They fell in the ocean and disappeared, yet on land they fell and fell and stacked and stacked until the land was coated with it, white clouds formed over hills and mountains and trees, remarkable and beautiful. It made her so curious, why did these little drops of white behave that way? And why did they only come at certain times, when there were no leaves on the trees and when even animals seemed reluctant to wander?
Each and every world she watched was different. Some were full of people, some were mostly animals. Some had strange trees and plants and scenery as she stared at it from the water. So different and unusual, and she had to wonder why it was so. Some worlds had magic and some did not. It was hard to explain how she knew, she just felt it. It was drier, somehow, even if she rarely left the liquid embrace of the ocean. She went to worlds without magic just the same as ones with. They made her curious, too, even though she was not certain why.
She could not help but dream about what it might be like to be on shore. Without the weight around her throat, with the freedom to walk and roam and go wherever she wished, and not just where the water could lead. She wondered what it would be like to talk to the humans that wandered about on land. She wondered if she could belong on land, like she simply could not at sea. She watched and she wondered and she wished, yet there was nothing that could grant that. She could not walk on land, she was a mermaid and she knew that there was no changing that.
It made her a bit too ambitious. Foolish, really. How she would draw as close to shore as she could manage just to watch what happened. She would watch birds in the sky and trees in the wind but oh, she liked to watch humans best. She would bob in the waves and wonder at what they did or how they moved. Why did women pin fabric to string to fly in the breeze? Why did men sometimes walk with strength and certainty and sometimes fumble and stumble like they could not remember how to walk? She had so many questions, and no one to ask. She made up her own answers, without any way of knowing if she was right.
She was growing far too bold, in her bid to watch the movements on land. She had found a beautiful world with crystal clear waters of bright sapphire, with lovely sands that sifted like powder through her fingers. It was not a large world, she'd swam the entire island multiple times in a day, and that was simply all there was to it. It was beautiful, palm trees with heavy fronds and bright skies and sparkling stars. There was a cove, just so, tucked inwards toward the island with heavy rocks flattened by the pull of waves. It was incredibly foolish for a mermaid to pull herself onto a rock, especially on her lonesome. It was very hard to get off again and everyone knew that a mermaid could not move well on her own. Simply being distant from the water was never a very good plan. And yet every day she found herself slipping toward the cove, pulling herself up on a rock and watching the activities on the shore.
Mostly it was animals. Birds and monkeys and bugs, making their life on the island. Sometimes, though, she saw humans. Some very small humans, with scuffed knees and dirty faces and wild eyes. When they saw her they had cawed and laughed and pointed, called her little lagoon mermaids cove and she'd been terrified and thrilled all at once. Then one of the boys had wondered what mermaid tasted like, and she had wisely decided to slip away before they could decide to find out. The boys were cruel, she found, though she did not totally understand why. They would throw sharpened sticks at the animals on the island, chase each other and laugh when they inspired one of their rank to tears, and yell and throw their limbs wickedly at each other when they were angry. Worst of all was at night, when even under the embrace of the water she could hear them wail. She knew not what for, yet there was something so horribly haunting about the sound. She cried too, cried with the same sorrow, even if she did not understand it.
There were more than just the boys, though. There were long and lean people with skin the color of copper. They moved silently as birds through the air. She wondered if that was why they weaved feathers into their hair. They were not as cruel as the boys, and very much quieter. She had been watching the shore for hours, once, before she turned and noticed one of them watching her. She knew not how long for, and it had frightened her, until the girl had made no attempt to do anything, and slipped back into the jungle before too long.
Most fascinating of all, of course, were the men that lived on a ship instead of the land.
They were hardest to watch from her rock. They did not go to the island often, they stayed on their ship and it was dangerous for her to swim too close, for they always had nets dragging under their vessel. Still, occasionally they would go to shore, mostly to pick fruit from the trees and swagger strangely through the sand. They were all so different, some short and some tall, some old and some young, some comely and some grizzled. Hair of copper and raven and blonde and mud and all the shades in between. Her favorite of all was the one that wore clothes as dark as his hair, his skin warmed under the sun and his shirt a vibrant luxurious red. He looked strong and certain, and yet there was a bright spot of silver at his wrist. It took many days for her to realize that he was missing a hand and not simply holding a tool. He was the boss of the strange men aboard the ship, she could tell; he shouted and they all listened, answering yes cap'n as they did. She never got the chance to really watch them, because they never came to her lagoon… until one night.
It was not all of them, of course, yet her heart thrilled as she saw her favorite of them all move out onto the sand. He was dark as the night he moved in, she hadn't spotted him until he was the dark stain against the pearly white sand. He had a bottle in his hand, and he moved to sit in the splash of the tide, staring at the stars and not moving. She was hidden in the darkness, she could watch him without fear he'd know she was there. She felt as if her breath was caught in her throat, excited and uncertain in equal measure. She wondered what it would be like if she were on shore with him. Would he let her have sips from his bottle? Would he tell her what he was looking at in the vast dark sky above their heads? What would his voice sound like, close to her ear? What would his hand feel like, on her skin?
The night stretched on and on and suddenly he fell back in the sand. She could not shake from her hiding place, and yet a terror raged in her heart. Why had he fallen? Was he well? She had never been so worried about another before, not even her sisters, not even once. It troubled her so to see his dark form sunk in the sand, not moving, even as the tide sloshed higher and pulled him in a bit deeper. It was a slow realization that if he let it keep pulling him, if he did not sit up and move back, it'd drag him into the water. For a moment she wondered if he would float all the way to her, if she might be able to see him closer if she just waited long enough.
Then she remembered. If he were to be dragged into the water, he would surely drown. He was not a mermaid, he could not breathe under the water and even a little bit of it could kill him. She watched a few seconds more, waiting for him to wake to the water sliding underneath him, a soft lap that drew him toward the mouth of the ocean. He did not and she could no longer risk the idea of him being dragged under.
She slipped from her rock with a quiet splash. She'd gotten quite good at getting on and off, if only because the boys would throw rocks at her if they got close enough. She swam into shore, so quickly it practically felt like seconds before she was there in the shallows. She could see the dark leather of his boots in the water, still being pulled deeper with every splash of the tide. It was dangerous to pull herself through the water and through the shallows, onto the sand she had never been foolish enough to risk before. Sneaking up to his side and under his arm, crawling into the rough sand, rougher than she'd ever imagined it could be. It was always so silken under the water.
For her intentions of pulling him deeper in toward land, when she was close to him it was hard to remember. His breathing was slow and steady, making his chest rise and fall. There was hair on his chest, how very strange, dark and dusted like the hair decorating his jaw and chin. The metal of his wrist was shaped in a curve, it reminded her of the quirk of the moon when it was naught but a crescent in the sky. He smelled sour, in a way she did not find very pleasant, and every breath made it smell a bit worse. Enough to make her nose wrinkle. His eyes were pressed closed and she found him very winsome. She rarely thought such things, which was a reason her sisters grew bored of her quickly. She did not think much of the beauty of things. Yet this man was beautiful, in a way she had never really experienced before.
She sat up in the sand next to him, looking skeptically at the tide and back again. She needed to pull him at least a few lengths toward land, and honestly she had no idea how she could possibly do it. It was dangerous to be on land, terrifying to be so exposed, yet no matter how impossible the task seemed, she had to try. She would not let him drown.
She realized, quite suddenly, that it could be as easy as waking him. Awake he could move himself away from danger. Awake, he could be a danger. Her breath caught in her throat as she considered it, before carefully reaching across him for the bottle that was abandoned in sand. She hucked it away, a distant splash in the tide. And then she reached for the glint of metal, fussing until it twisted off in her hand. He could hurt her and hurt her terribly with it if he wanted to. She was determined not to give him the opportunity.
There was nothing else to do now but wake him. Perhaps she'd have been wise to move away. Wake him from a distance instead of practically pressed up against his side. In her defense she'd never done anything like it before. If she needed she'd just slip back into the water and away from him. He could not harm her too terribly without his wicked curve of metal, could he? She carefully reached out to place a hand on his chest, and his skin was so vibrantly warm and wonderful she exhaled a note of pleasure. She had never touched a person before, and she found, quite perilously, that she liked it.
"If you're going to eat me, you're truly taking your time." She gasped, shifting back and green eyes blowing wide. The man, Cap'n they called him, opened his eyes and they were so bright and so blue it was like she was swimming through the ocean once more. She had never spoken to a human before and thusly had little idea what to say, yet it seemed Cap'n did not have that problem. "Now, you've something of mine, and if you're not going to eat me, I'd really like it back."