Note: You might be wondering why in the world I wrote a long fic with Lyon and Juvia as the main characters since they aren't my normal go-to's, and an AU at that. In all honesty, this was an original idea that I translated to fanfic, and Juvia seemed to fit best and I picked Lyon as her counter. It was supposed to be a one-shot, but I realized pretty early on that it was getting way too detailed for that. I dropped the fic about a third of the way through when I fell out of the fandom for a couple years, but I picked it back up towards the end of 2020 and finished it out. It's a little different than my normal M.O., but I promise I have a game plan and it was kind of fun to do something a bit different. I'm just glad I'm finally seeing it through lol
Prologue
In the twenty years that Lyon had lived in Port Hargeon, he had never once sighted the fabled selkies that haunted its waters. He knew of them, of course. Everyone did around here. To the people of the inland, they would be myths on the level of mermaids or dragons or fairies. The fishermen of Hargeon knew better, or would at least like to think so.
The level of belief in the elusive creatures varied even among the townsfolk, of course, but everyone knew the legends and knew someone who claimed to have been touched by one. They grew up with the stories of the mysterious seal women of the harbor and the men who caught them on their forays to shore and held their skins ransom. The stories had an air of mystique that gave them a sense of unreality, but there were enough firsthand accounts to cement the selkies as immutable fact.
Old man Zeref still told stories of the beautiful golden-haired selkie girl he'd found on the beach as a youth. He had been enchanted by her emerald eyes and spun-gold clouds of hair as she capered along the shore, and found her discarded seal skin hidden among the rocks. She had cried and begged and pleaded, but he had held firm and taken her home and married her. Apparently she had become quite taken with him and they quickly settled into domestic bliss—which Lyon would have found a little farfetched given the rather unsavory origins of the relationship, if most of the other stories didn't also go the same route—until one day seven years later when she found her skin locked in a trunk and disappeared back out to sea as a pretty gray-furred seal, never to be seen again. Zeref's eyes still lit up with wistful melancholy as he talked about his almost illusory love. He had never married again, and some of the other old folks recalled a blonde-haired girl he had married many, many years ago but had disappeared.
The older generation had all kinds of stories about men and their selkie lovers. One man, known to be cruel even among the townsfolk, had captured a selkie, held her skin hostage, and spent months imprisoning and mistreating her. One day she vanished into thin air, having finally found her skin, and her tormentor's body was found floating near the shore. Drowned. Most stories weren't quite that dark, but they rarely had happy endings. Another man had fallen in love with a selkie and fathered three children by her before she found her hidden skin and left her family behind to return to the sea with her seal brethren.
Even assuming the entire elder generation of the town was senile didn't explain away the more recent stories. Jura, the town's carpenter, swore that he'd had a selkie lover but hadn't hidden her pelt well enough and she'd escaped back out to sea. Sting, one of the younger fishermen, had come to town one day with a pretty white-haired waif named Yukino, and they had seemed very much in love until the girl disappeared the night before their wedding. Sting was inconsolable and spent months drifting along the beach, staring out to sea and chasing after any seal that neared the shore. Eventually his friend Rogue had taken measures into his own hands and dragged him inland to settle in a town away from the ocean.
Lyon could sympathize, but thought they really ought to have known better. Most tales of selkies ended the same way: the women found their hidden skins and escaped to sea. They were creatures of the ocean and saltwater ran through their veins. No matter how much they might love their mates—and there were credible accounts that there were many who did—their hearts belonged first to the sea. However happy they might be with their husbands and even children, the sea always called them and would win out against their land-bound families every time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the children of these unions were just as fascinating as the jilted spouses. Lucy, the pretty blonde who fancied herself the town's writer, had, according to the rumors, found her mother's pelt hidden away in a box as a small child and, not knowing any better, handed it over to her. Her mother kissed her on the forehead, said that she loved her dearly, and disappeared into the waves, never to be seen again. Her father had never quite forgiven her for this and became cold and distant, while Lucy herself wandered the beach and composed haunting poems of maidens lost at sea.
This generation's other sea-child's story had a bit of a twist. Most stories revolved around the alluring selkie women that lovesick townsmen caught and tried to keep, but there were a few where the roles were reversed. Maybe there really were far more female selkies than male, but, more likely, there were simply more stories about them because they were swapped on boats and in pubs the townsmen frequented. The women kept their stories quieter. There was Cana, of course, who was open about having met a charming selkie man down on the beach one night and then spent the next five years drinking herself to death when she never saw him again. But most women kept their secrets closer to their chest, perhaps more wary of tarnishing their reputations or just less willing to air their romantic conquests and heartbreaks to the world.
Natsu's mother was of this quieter, more secretive stock. She had never married, but grew round with child anyway. There were rumors of an affair, some sordid tryst not becoming of an unwed maiden, but she had kept her chin high and her mouth shut and had never revealed her child's parentage. Natsu, on the other hand, could not be considered quiet by any stretch of the imagination. From a young age, he told everyone who would listen that his father was a selkie and that he'd met him a few times as a child. He had spent the past several years searching fruitlessly for his missing father, scouring the beach and observing every seal colony until it seemed that he could tell each individual seal apart from its brethren. He even claimed that he could tell at a glance what was a natural seal and what was a selkie in its seal form.
Lyon and the rest of the town were a bit skeptical of his claims and considered him to be a little touched in the head. Other stories were regarded as fact, but Natsu's was a bit too much to be swallowed at first sight. Once a selkie disappeared to sea, it was almost never seen again, at least not in its human form. Even if Natsu had been fathered by a selkie, it was highly unlikely that father and son would have met. Still, it was possible and who was Lyon to call him a liar?
So Natsu searched the sand and waves, and the townspeople regarded him as a little crazy but cheerful and harmless enough. It seemed fitting that he and Lucy had begun courting last spring. The children of the sea were drawn to each other, and maybe they understood each other in a way that no one else could.
Lyon's own views on the issue were a bit more distant and ambivalent. The selkies were as much a part of his surroundings as the sea and sand and seals colonizing the beach, but they belonged to a different world. He accepted them as fact without ever truly considering them to be part of his world, in the same way that a man might profess to believe in a God yet feel no visceral connection despite his words.
Lyon was a pragmatist. A little too practical, some said, but being down to earth was not considered a fault in a working town such as this. The dreamers like Lucy with her poetry and Natsu with his fantastical beliefs and endless searches were considered the odd ones out. Everyone else lived day to day, waking up in the morning to do the chores and tend the children and make their living. The stories and legends they swapped at the end of the day and during midday breaks were a bit of an escape, but the rest of the time pragmatism won out.
Lyon's own small slice of the world was provincial and insular, stolid and a little bit dull, and he was content with it. He took care of himself and took each day as it came, and had little use for flights of fancy. He had seen very little out of the ordinary throughout his life, Hargeon being a fairly reserved and uninteresting town aside from its wild tales of fantastical seal women, and he expected to live out his years as an easygoing and particularly boring fisherman, possibly settle down with a wife and have a handful of children, and eventually die as quietly as he had lived. He didn't have Lucy's wild imagination or Natsu's sense of adventure, and he was quite happy not to. He was about the least likely person to be thrown into a fairy tale.
So when he wandered out to the shore one night and stumbled across the selkie, he couldn't believe his eyes.
Note: If you're not familiar with selkie folklore, this is pretty much it lol Seal-women come up on the beach and shed their seal skins to frolick around in human form for a while, and creepy men steal their skins and marry them. Almost always ends with the selkies eventually finding their skins and disappearing back out to sea, never to be seen again. If that seems kind of sketchy to you, you aren't alone lol I didn't want to go that route, but I did have a plot bunny involving selkies.