Disenchanted
Pairing: Dramione (Draco x Hermione)
Universe: fairytale AU
Rating: T
Summary: Olivie Advent cont'd.
Prompts: 1) dramione mermaids/sirens; 2) grindelverse!Draco personality from Paradox.
Once upon a time, a handsome prince lived in a shining castle. Although he had everything his heart desired, he was spoiled, selfish, and unkind.
But then, one winter's night, an old beggar woman came to the castle seeking shelter from the bitter cold. Repulsed, the prince turned her away.
"Whatever this is, consider it declined," he said, about to close the door, when the old woman revealed herself to be a young enchantress. The prince glanced over her wild curls, her diminutive form, and added with a derisive sneer, "Not much better, if we're being honest."
"Not everything is about looks, you absolute cockstain," said the witch, raising her wand in her hand.
The prince moved to shut the castle door again but it was too late, for the witch had already seen there was no love in his heart. As punishment, she transformed the prince into a creature—half-man, half-fish—and placed a powerful spell on the castle, concealing it from any who aimed to seek it.
"Where are you going?" demanded the prince, who was now confined to his enchanted cove. He glanced over his silvery-grey scales, frowning at the pearlescent blue, and glanced up again to face her, scowling. "You can't just leave me here."
"I can and I will," replied the witch. "I'll be back to check on you at some point."
"When?"
"None of your business," she told him, though truth be told, she couldn't have told him even if she wanted to. Life as a vengeful enchantress left her without a proper home, and unfortunately, humans were mostly rubbish. Already she had a collection of spoiled princes and warmongering kings to keep track of, and this was only one stop on her rounds.
"Well, in that case, you may as well run along," said the prince, sparing her a fleeting look of annoyance as he splashed his tail below the water's tranquil surface. "Unless you plan to curse me further."
She opened her mouth, about to do precisely as he suggested, when she paused instead, frowning at him.
"You really mean that, don't you?" she asked him, and he glanced up.
"Mean what?"
She bristled, considering that perhaps this was a tactic of some sort. After all, men had been known to trick enchantresses before. Look at Odysseus and Circe.
"You do realize I won't turn you back," she warned him. "Nothing you say can convince me to forgive you. You will simply have to stay here until you learn to love another and earn their love in return," she informed him, watching his handsome face contort with displeasure. "Only then will the spell be broken."
"I didn't ask for forgiveness," he said, and she blinked.
It was true, he hadn't. Typically, they begged. They pleaded. They fell over themselves clutching at her ankles, clinging to her robes. Anything to be a man again—to be a prince again. She'd seen many of them weep rather than let her go, though she invariably did.
"So you'd rather be a merman forever?" she asked, bewildered.
"Yes," he said flatly. "If that's what it takes."
She considered that maybe she ought to try a different tactic—perhaps she'd left too much human in him, and could always swap the top and bottom halves—but in the end she decided to trust her instincts, leaving him as she'd initially intended. After all, this was the perfect trap. He might be intoxicated by his own beauty for now, or enamored with the power of his new exotic form, but coaxing others to shore with his song would become an exquisite trap eventually. For each person he lured, he would only become lonelier, more desolate with boredom. As the years passed, the prince would fall into despair and lose all hope.
After all, who could ever learn to love a fish?
"Fine," she said, certain he would come to regret this soon enough.
Then she disappeared, leaving him to the solitude of his cove.
"Well," said Hermione. "Can't say I like what you've done with the place."
It had been at least a decade, though of course neither of them were much in the business of aging. He was trapped in a curse, and she was a powerful witch. Unfortunately, she may have underestimated his sense of entitlement, as he appeared to have spent the last ten years doing nothing more than collecting trinkets, presumably from ships.
At the moment, he was polishing what appeared to be a lovely bronze bust.
"I intend to put it there," he remarked, gesturing over his shoulder to an empty spot in the corner.
That seemed to be all he planned to say, though Hermione remained at the edge of the banks, considering the rest of his interior design.
"I see you've discovered the luring bit," she said, and he glanced up.
"I never really had a voice before," he commented, fins glinting opalescent in the midday sun. "Never intended to make music my vocation, either, but candidly, there are worse things."
"What about the people?"
"What people?"
"The people on the ships," she said. "The ones you lure. What do you do with them?"
He shrugged. "I don't," he said, which wasn't an answer, though she opted not to get into it at the moment. Other curiosities were more pressing.
"You're really not sorry?" she asked him.
"I don't think being sorry would help," he remarked, returning his attention to the polishing of his bronze. "Would it?"
She considered it. "No," she admitted. "What's done is done. But you understand, don't you, what happens if you don't find someone to fall in love with you?"
"Well, as far as my calculations have taken me," said Draco, pursing his lips, "I'll either be a merman forever or I'll die alone."
She waited for him to express malcontent with either option, but he didn't.
"Are you really this stubborn?" she asked him, irritated. "Or are you truly psychopathic?"
That time, he glanced up at her, fixing her with a princely look of impassivity.
"Does it matter?" he asked.
She was starting to get the feeling she ought to leave.
"Well, goodbye," she concluded, rising to her feet. "I'll be back at some point, maybe."
He placed the bust in his intended corner, fiddling with its placement.
"Yes, goodbye," he said disinterestedly, not even looking over his shoulder as she went.
The next time she arrived he had managed to build his own castle out of the gold stolen from ships. Half of his eccentric construction was underwater, or appeared to be. He was the one with the fish lungs, not her, so she didn't bother trying to find out.
"Exactly how many ships have you robbed at this point?" she asked him.
"Does it matter?" he asked her again.
She was starting to think maybe it should.
"You're supposed to be falling in love," she told him. "You know. Breaking the curse?"
"Love is a fallacy," he replied. "There's not a force on earth more destructive than love."
"That's ridiculous," she told him. "Haven't you seen greed? Hate?"
"Yes," he said.
"Avarice? Envy? Wrath?"
He glanced up fleetingly. "Have you ever watched a heart break?" he asked her. "Really break, I mean. Shatter. Have you seen love's desolation? Its loneliness, its emptiness. That can be far more persuasive than envy or wrath. In fact it can be envy and wrath even while it is love."
"Yes, but love is also beautiful," she told him, and this time, his lips curled up thinly.
"Aren't you the one who told me beauty isn't everything?" he said.
Irritated, Hermione rose to her feet and left.
When she returned, he was in the process of painting a mural. His original castle—the one she'd cursed—was starting to crumble, so he appeared to have taken on the task of refreshing it with a bit of art. He was about halfway through, as far as she could tell, though the scene was unrecognizable to her.
"What's this?" she asked.
"You obviously haven't gone far enough if you don't recognize it," he said without turning around, though he paused his brush to swim slightly backwards, looking over his progress. "Where is it you go, anyway?" he asked, sweeping one hand through his hair and leaving behind a bit of pink; coral, she presumed, which had been ground down to pigment.
"I told you," she said, settling herself on a rock. "You're not allowed to ask me questions."
"Fine." He swam forward again, fixing a spot on the sunrise he was painting.
She watched him mix darker and darker pigments, the sunrise gradually becoming a night sky. He painted the stars in precise patterns, using a constellation map for reference that he must have drawn by hand.
"There's a fine line between observation and voyeurism, you know," he told her.
She had half-forgotten they'd been sitting in silence for hours.
"Aren't you lonely?" she asked him.
He twisted around, glancing at her, before turning back to his painting. He had aged a little over the years, just slightly. Just enough that he was unquestionably a man now. Perhaps in a century or so he might start to have a few silvery strands woven into his pale hair.
"Are you lonely?" he asked her.
"You're not allowed to ask me questions," she reminded him.
"Why not?"
"Because you're not. I'm the one who cursed you."
"You know, for someone who puts so much stock in love, you don't seem to understand it," Draco remarked. "You have to give, too. You can't just curse one-sidedly."
She couldn't tell if he was joking. He seemed like maybe he was, but if he was, then he was making her the joke, which she didn't appreciate.
"You're selfish," she told him. "Vain."
"Yes, I know."
"You're cruel and unkind."
"Yes."
"That doesn't bother you?"
"From time to time," he said.
"Then why not try to break the curse?"
He paused, then set down his brush, turning to face her.
"Do you want me to be a better person," he asked, "or do you want me to not be alone? Because they're not the same thing."
She frowned at him. "You can't ask me questions."
"You keep saying that," he said. "But you're the one who could easily make me stop."
She sighed, rising to her feet. "You're tiresome," she said.
"So I've heard," he told her, plucking his brush from the ground.
Agitated, Hermione turned and left.
When she came back, he was singing. It was a little sailor shanty, something about storms on the horizon. All sailors sang about storms, and obviously Prince Draco, who was no longer prince of anything, had come across plenty of them over the course of his curse. By now, his castle gleamed with paint and gold, his cove half-buried under riches.
"Sounds lovely," she said when he finished.
"Thanks," he said. "I like that one."
He was lying on the roof of his underwater castle, sunning his grey-blue tail and turning his skin slickly bronze. How he had gotten up there, she wasn't totally sure. Upper arm strength, she supposed. Ropes or seaweed or something.
"Don't you ever wonder what happened to your kingdom?" she asked, treading carefully over the beams toward him and then, giving up, choosing to magically levitate herself over them instead.
"Not really," he said.
"Don't you want to know what happened?"
He cracked one eye, turning to face her. "Sure," he said, impassive. "Tell me."
"It's a democracy now, sort of. Little city states."
"Ah. And does that work?"
She considered it. "Have you heard of Florence?" she asked him. "Or Naples?"
"Yes."
"Well, so basically no," she concluded, "it doesn't work."
A moment passed in silence.
"People can be tricky," remarked Draco, closing his eyes again.
Hermione settled herself back on the roof of his castle, soaking in the warmth of the sun. It was an unusually calm day, or so she assumed, though it was difficult to tell. He had cleverly built his castle to block most of the tempestuous winds from the sea.
"Do you still curse people?" Draco asked, half-startling her.
"Hm?"
"It just seems like a lot of work," he said. "And most people are looking for love anyway. They don't need to become strange creatures just to be incapable of finding it."
She remembered that she had forgotten to tell him he wasn't allowed to ask her questions.
Oh well. Too late.
"I think you might be right about love," Hermione admitted softly. Cursing was increasingly difficult work as humanity progressed, and hardly even worth it. Beasts got things they didn't deserve every day, and the business of reprisal was a rather demanding vocation. It turned out that even love could be toxic and unwell, parasitic and fleeting.
Worse, it could be beautiful and harshly unforgiving.
After a moment's silence, Draco reached over, brushing the knuckles of her hand with the soft, worn wetness of his fingers.
"Don't take it personally," he said.
He was never going to break the curse. Or maybe he already had. Maybe she didn't actually understand the first thing about curses.
In the end she simply nodded and closed her eyes, content to lie beside him in the sun.
a/n: Onto week two! Oh my word. I am tired.