Siren Part I

Disclaimer: I do not own Shingeki no Kyojin

DaX0315: Pirate Captain Levi loses his crew and is saved by a siren named Petra and falls in love with her

Salt water filled his mouth.

Panicked, Levi kicked his legs and swam up, ignoring the pain. He coughed out the salty water, trying to empty his lungs of it.

Bodies and pieces of his ship floated around him. He swam over and pulled himself onto to a large piece of wood, lying on his back. Black hair stuck to his forehead and he moved it away, watching what was left of his ship burn as the wreckage stretched all around him.

Exhaustion soon claimed him.

When he woke, the sky overhead was dark and full of stars. Levi shivered. The hot evening sun had dried his clothes. Otherwise the cool night would have left him even more frozen. A piercing ache in his chest cut through the chilly temperatures. His ship, his crew, they were all gone. After years of pirating the waters, stealing from merchant ships and avoiding the navy, his luck had finally run out.

Pride had been his downfall. Years of remaining undefeated in the open waters had left him complacent and foolish. Stubbornness had kept him from joining his friends as they left the seas to find a better life on land with the riches they had gathered over the years. He should have joined them instead of continuing to sail under the black. But the life on a ship was all he had ever known and he had been afraid of losing himself at the bottom of a bottle if he left the seas. And now I'm going to lose my life.

Two days had passed since Navy Commander Erwin Smith obliterated his ship. Levi was beginning to lose sense of reality, seeing and hearing things that weren't there.

I'm going to die here. All alone. The thought left him terrified and he whimpered.

No one was around to hear him. What would it matter if he gave into weakness and vulnerability? He knew he was dying a slow, painful death.

The goddesses had a cruel sense of humor. The irony of dying of dehydration while surrounded by water did not escape him.

Levi's heart skipped a beat when he saw the dorsal fin. Finally finding the energy to sit up, he looked around with wide eyes. There was another fin fifty feet east, heading toward him. The bodies... He thought with a growing sense of dread. Sharks normally ate fish and other sea mammals. But after feeding on the bodies of his deceased crew, the sea predators would have developed a taste for human flesh.

As frightened as he had been of dying due to starvation and dehydration, hating knowing his death would be a slow one, now confronted with a much faster death, he would rather go back to the other option and not be eaten. Most preferably, he'd rather not die period.

But Levi had no chances of survival. Some of his ribs were broken, ankle sprained, his body weak due to lack of food and water. But before he could begin praying to the goddesses he had never believed in before, one of the fins suddenly disappeared. For a heart-stopping moment, he braced himself for an attack from below.

Blood then colored the beautiful blue water.

Levi noticed the other fin move rapidly away as if the animal couldn't get away fast enough from whatever had killed its friend. With wide eyes he watched the shark's body float up. Suddenly a head popped up behind the shark. It was a woman with long ginger hair and alluring amber eyes. She's beautiful.

"Hello." She tilted her head, arms folded over the dead shark. "Who're you?"

Her voice was so soothing and melodious. "Captain Levi Ackerman," the words fell out of his mouth, almost without permission.

"Captain?" The woman looked around. "Where's your ship?"

"Gone. Destroyed." He wet his dried lips. "I'm the only survivor."

She nodded, understanding washing over her beautiful face. "I'm Petra. There's an island half a day from here," she pointed. "I can take you there."

Hope welled up in his chest. "You can? Wait, you're not a hallucination, are you?" Petra disappeared under the water. "No, come back!" Levi was distraught. "Petra!" He called out frantically.

She popped up behind him and pulled herself up to the large piece of wreckage. Levi's heart nearly jumped out of his chest. The upper half of her body resembled that of a human woman, but the lower half was that of a fish. Sunlight glinted off the stunning golden, silver, and green scales.

If he didn't know what she was and wasn't so scared out of his mind, he might have admired the scales' beauty. "You're a mermaid!" A stricken look crossed his face. His first impulse was to jump into the water to get away from her, but the ocean was her domain. Quickly, he covered his ears.

"What are you doing, Levi?"

His stomach did a flip at hearing his name coming from her pretty mouth. Mentally slapping himself, he pressed his hands harder against the sides of his head.

"Isn't that—ah, I see." Petra nodded wisely. "I have heard tales of your kind spreading vicious rumors about us. Do you think I'm going to eat you?" Petra teased with a distracting smile.

Levi also tried very hard not to look at her bare, wet breasts. "And I have heard tales of your kind luring men to their deaths with your hypnotic song and eating them."

"So you can hear me," she said amusedly. Unfortunately, he couldn't squish his ears any harder. "Oh, stop that. Doesn't that hurt? And it obviously doesn't work," she pointed out.

Levi removed his hands slowly from his head and quickly pulled out his knife, holding it threateningly before him. To his annoyance, Petra laughed. Before he knew it she had snatched the knife from him. "Give that back!" The childishness of the demand made him flinch. It's her fault! She's using her siren charms to reduce me to a simpleton!

"You're so rude, Levi." Petra pouted at him. "Here I am trying to help you and you threaten me with a knife!"

"I'm defending myself!"

"From what? The sharks I stopped from eating you?"

"So you could eat me yourself!"

"For your kind information, we only eat sea creatures like fish and sharks and clams. We can eat humans but only do so if they make us really, really mad. Now, if I give this back to you, will you stop waving it in my face?"

"Okay." Still a little suspicious, he accepted the knife and watched her scoot closer to him, the end of her tail still in the water. Arms behind her, head tilted to look at him, she started flapping her tail and moving the piece of wood. "So, were you a merchant?"

Again the words came out without permission. "I was a pirate." For some reason, he felt the need to explain himself so she wouldn't think badly of him. Or eat him. "But I only stole from the ships belonging to rich noble families and let the crew go unharmed." Most of the time. "The nobles were only getting fatter from their wealth while everyone else struggled to put food on the table every week."

"Rich and poor, noble and commoner, you humans are so silly, always dividing yourselves over such insignificant things."

"What about you?" He was suddenly curious to know more about his savior. "What do you do all day?"

"Just a little bit of this and a little bit of that," Petra replied breezily. "Tell me more about yourself. About your human cities and what you do all day."

Levi looked around. There was nothing but the ocean for miles around. And now that he was mostly certain she wasn't going to eat him, and wanting her to share her story, too, he started telling her about his life, how a poor street urchin became an infamous pirate captain.

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