Human Tears
A The Little Mermaid fanfiction
one-shot
With stinging eyes, Vanessa watches the royal couple make their way down the shoreline amid cheering and music and flying flower petals – the scent of which are lost entirely in the briny air that feels like sandpaper when it blows hard against her skin – towards the waiting coracle.
The bride – Prince Eric's wife – in gleaming white-and-pink stops to converse with a bird – a Northern gannet – and it's not so strange an action when you consider she's half a creature, half fish, herself.
She is beautiful, though, fish or no, with her dark skin and pretty – vaguely reddish – dreads setting off her white gown in a way Vanessa's pale complexion couldn't manage with a so light-tinted a fabric.
Vanessa has heard the servants – they never liked her – talking and knows this is what they wanted. They think she got what she deserved. Nothing more and nothing less.
Letting the prince believe she was the girl who rescued him! When they all knew it was Ariel, his little mermaid.
She knows she could have been nicer – less snobbish. Certainly, she could have been less of a braggart. Only, she'd been so caught up in the excitment. Holding onto the handsome prince's arm, getting to tell all the royal guests about her heroics... But of course she didn't consider herself a hero, really... It was just an instinct, rushing into the water to save him.
They all hate her for lying, now the truth has come out, but Vanessa, princess of a little nothing kingdom that was forced to embellish the truth all the time simply to avoid open warfare, more than half believed her own story.
At least, she thought she had at the time.
What a boon!
A poor monarch's second daughter, never a single bit of luck in all her life, and suddenly she comes to this sea-side kingdom and has the good fortune to be at the shore singing on a dark, foggy night, and is swept away by Prince Eric.
What were the odds she would have the same voice as a mermaid? She knew she was a good singer – her music tutor had told her as much often enough growing up – but to find out her voice could pass for magical! The same siren voice a mermaid had given to a sea witch in exchange for a pair of legs.
Then, in a blink, the truth came out and it all went away.
Ariel has her siren voice back now, and the salt air has made Vanessa's sore throat so hoarse it's hard for her to get out so much as a single right note at present.
The sad truth is, she didn't only do it, only lie, because she wanted to be queen.
She loved him – Eric – too.
In that moment, when he found her on the beach, she fell in love at first sight. It wasn't her fault he was already in love with Ariel but believed he owed her his life.
So, stripped of everything, even goodwill, she has celebrated this wedding with death in her heart. Her father the king will never forgive her for letting such a chance, such an alliance, slip through her fingers. She is dead when – if – she goes home again. He will crush her like he'd crush her namesake, a butterfly, if one fluttered foolishly into his hand. And she must think all the while of the happiness of the mermaid and prince, venturing off to see the world, to collect strange baubles.
(That was one thing she didn't care for about Eric, when she was going to marry him – she thought him a bit of a hoarder and had meant to coax the tendency out of him in time.)
A human maiden has tears, but she must hold them in throughout her anguish, lest she be judged, and therefore she suffers all the more.