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atmilliways · 4 years

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Dethentine’s Day 2

February 9th - In the Style of Disney/Studio Ghibli

Inspired by but not closely following The Little Mermaid. Charles is a merman, Nathan is a human, they... meet and stuff.

Blood Ocean

When it storms over the open sea, flashes of lightning illuminate the upper reaches of the depths in a pale facsimile of sunlight. It lasts for only an instant, and below the surface the sound of thunder feels like the impact of whale sonar. But when the lightning comes thick enough, it takes on the strobe effect of a stop-motion picture show.

A man falls into the water, followed by the downed mast of a wounded ship.

Impact.

The man is sinking faster than the debris around him, weighed down by his heavy boots and coat. He moves his limbs, but sluggishly. Too slow to make any difference, at the rate he's going.

Impact.

Tiny bubbles stream from the man’s mouth as he fights a losing battle to hold his breath. In the inky blackness below, just at the outside range of the storm’s light, something is beginning to dart upwards.

Impact.

The man is gone.

Charles doesn’t know what possessed him to do this. He hadn’t liked the Water God’s order to destroy any ships that ventured through their waters. That’s what the rest of the patrol are off doing, and tearing the throats out of any sailors trying to swim to safety besides—he can taste it in the water even at this distance.

But he swims on, balancing the necessity of speed with the difficulty of keeping an airtight seal between his mouth and the now-unconscious human’s, sharing oxygen and releasing the creature’s exhales through his gills. This one must have been smart enough to try and climb to safety, and fell with the mast when the ship finally capsized. If Charles hurries, he can throw the man up onto the nearest accessible bit of shore and race back before he’s missed.

The place he finds is rocky, but not so shallow that he can’t swim up to it or too steep that the human won’t be able to climb back to its people. Getting the man onto it takes some effort—he’s very broad, and overburdened with approximately the same amount of muscle as a blue whale. No wonder you nearly drowned, Charles thinks with an irritated frown, and gives one final heave—there, he’s up. Should be fine. The tide isn’t due to come in for another hour.

He prods him, just to make sure, with the heel of one hand. The human groans and coughs up sea water. Yeah, he’ll be just fine.

Suddenly a big hand closes around Charles’ wrist. “Hey,” the human he’s just rescued mumbles. “Hey, you . . . saved my life. . . .”

Charles feels his dorsal scales prickle in alarm. This isn’t good, the human wasn’t supposed to wake up. Humans aren’t supposed to know that merpeople exist, let alone go around thinking that they’re particularly friendly towards them. In spite of what Charles has just done, it wasn’t because he liked humans, it just . . . didn’t seem right, clawing holes in the bottoms of their ships as the Water God had ordered. It was like shooting birds in an air bubble.

“No, I didn’t,” he hisses, panicking and yanking his wrist free. “And, ah . . . don’t tell anyone about this!”

The surf is trying to push him past the rocks into tide pools but Charles kicks off hard, both hearts hammering and doesn’t slow down once he’s out over deeper water. He still feels a phantom of that hand on his wrist, and he doesn’t understand why any more than he knows why he saved the man in the first place.

He does not see the pale shape following at a distance.

It takes Nathan a while, but he does manage to make his way up the rocky incline. Doesn’t help that it’s February, and that between his already wet clothes and the rain he’s shaking almost too hard to stand by the time he reaches the nearest town, but still, he gets there.

No one believes him when he tries to explain how he survived the wreck.

He spends the next several days in bed, still shivering. From time to time he rambles about shapes in the water and being rescued by a man who had a tail in place of legs, and people are pretty nice about it but they clearly think he’s touched in the head. By the time the fever breaks even he isn’t sure if what he thinks he remembers is actually what happened.

Once he’s recovered enough to move on, Nathan decides to stay. It’s a nice enough town, and he’d been on that ship in the first place because he was leaving his parent’s home to find his place in the world. The town butcher needs an apprentice and has a room to rent above the butcher’s shop for cheap. He makes friends with the town drunk, who knows some guys who’re great on string instruments. They’re thinking of putting a band together. There are a lot of things that make hanging around worthwhile. . . . None of them are why he actually stays.

Every night, Nathan dreams of his mysterious rescuer. Of hazel eyes and a blur of skin and scales. Of a mouth on his, breathing life and a heavy taste of salt into him.

“‘Course ya dream about it,” Pickles tells him one night, when they’re both wasted past the point of Nathan being embarrassed talking about what might just be a vivid remnant of fever dream and possible head trauma. “Yer the sole survivor of that shipwreck, dood. If someone or something saved you, yer connected to it now. Gonna be until that debt is repaid. So, y’know, meybe that is why yer still here, yer all . . . connected to somethin’ by one’a those strings of fate or whatever.”

Nathan squints in conversation as he slowly absorbs this new idea. His hair falls across his face—it’s getting long, but it doesn’t bother him much so who knows when he’ll bother to cut it. “You mean like . . . an anchor?”

“Sure, either that’r survivor’s guilt.” Pickles shrugs, belches, and signals for the barman to bring them new pints. “I’d say it’s a fifty fifty chance that one’a those is true.”

That percolates in Nathan’s thoughts for a while, and in the meantime he finds himself picking his way back down to the rocky beach every day, rain or shine, and looking out across the water.

Where are you? Nathan wonders. What are you? It had spoken to him with the voice of a man, so it, he, obviously had some reason. Nathan wonders if he has a name, and if so, what it is.

He knows he’s obsessing. But if it’s fate or whatever, then what choice does he have?

Charles is going about his business, updating the abacai records for his patrol, when a great white behemoth of a merman crashes through the shell-curtain door of his office cave. Only a last minute dive saves him from being barreled into, but not before he gets a good look at the gnashing rows of teeth that belong to one of the Water God’s watchsharks. This one looks to be half Great White, and is wearing a misshapen piece of welded metal as a mask over the top half of his face.

Fuck. This is because of that damn human, he just knows it. He’d thought he’d been so careful, and in the days since nothing had happened, reinforcing his sense of relief. . . . until now.

The other merman has a crude knife, one of his own long teeth strapped to a handle with. After the first miss he turns—slowly, Charles notes—and lunges again.

Everyday patrol schools are usually only taught minimal hand-to-hand combat skills, focusing mainly on hunting outer ocean game, targeted destruction of ships, and techniques for drowning struggling humans. But Charles had mastered the latter skills years ago and had, out of boredom and perfectionism, made a thorough study of the former in his free time. It’s something his colleagues often tease him about.

Who’s laughing now?

He waits until the last second before darting to the right, counting on his own agility—and catches the arm with the knife, kicks into a spin, and pushes the razor-edged tooth into his attacker’s own side. The sand-rough skin scrapes at his palms, but if that puts any of his own blood in the water it’s definitely covered by the red gout billowing from the other merman, who Charles shoves ruthlessly into the wall before slipping out of the cave and swimming for his life.

Leaving as quick as a riptide, for Charles, isn’t simply a matter of skipping town. It’s not just that he left without any of his personal effects until all this blows over. He knows his absence will be quickly noticed, and that means goodbye career. Between that and the watchshark—who could be dead or could have survived, there’s no way to know now, but even a corpse would tell a damning story—it’s goodbye colony as well. If the Water God has it out for him, no one will dare to take him in, not in any colony. He’s completely alone.

Charles tries not to think about this, focusing instead on more immediate problems such as shelter and food. The further he gets from the colony’s heat vents, the colder the water becomes, so he’s forced to stick to the relative shallows along the coast, where there’s less chance of something spotting and ambushing him from below.

Where he’d left that human.

Somehow he proves harder to avoid thinking about than all the rest; when Charles floats awake at night in whatever new crevice he’s found to hole up in, he pictures the man’s face. Strong, stubborn jaw and high cheekbones. Heavy brow overshadowing eyes that are a deeper green than seaweed, with the dark depth of an ocean except without a trace of blue. Black hair that had streamed straight back during the hurried swim. Charles’ hand had brushed through it when first grabbing him and again when grappling to get him onto the rock, but out of the water it had clung to the man’s head and shoulders like an oil slick.

He can still feel where the man had grabbed his wrist, an indelible handprint. Sometimes he catches himself rubbing at it absently. Still has no idea what possessed him to save someone only to lose everything, but for some reason he can’t move past that blankness of not knowing into being angry about it—at himself, at the human, at anything, because it just feels so . . . inevitable. As though he’d had to do it, no choice in the matter.

This does not help him sleep, but eventually he does drift off.

In some underwater caves there are pockets of air that were trapped tens of thousands of years ago when the sea levels rose. They sit, without light or wind, and do not wait because they expect nothing.

But this one has light. This one has wind, and a smooth beach of solid rock against which Charles wakes, half out of the water. Using his lungs instead of his gills, which is more odd than uncomfortable. The air tastes clear and he smells the greenness of above-water plants. He has no idea how he got here; it’s definitely not where he fell asleep.

A human man stands above him. Not his human—Charles realizes he’s thought this an instant after doing so and feels his dorsal scales prickle—but an old man dressed in dark red and black robes.

Somehow the old man knows that Charles is alone, an outcast in hiding. He introduces himself as Ishnifus Meadle and offers a way to escape pursuit for good.

Naturally suspicious of both the offer and this whole set-up, Charles asks what the price is.

Ishnifus tells him.

Charles listens in dawning horror. It’s not the answer itself, but the scope of it; a coral outcrop that, upon further inspection, has formed an entire reef that he had until now mistaken for bedrock. Ishnifus knows things that no human should know. He knows things about Charles’ own life that no one could have possibly told him. Somehow it’s all connected, and the feeling of inevitability rises in Charles again like bile—but ultimately what Ishnifus is offering is an explanation.

“Do you accept?” Ishnifus asks in his whispery voice.

Impact.

Charles takes a deep breath, slides down the rock shore briefly to wet his gills one last time, and says, “Yes.”

Impact.

The merman is gone.

On his daily visit to the rocky beach, Nathan finally sees something. He makes his way carefully but as quickly as he can down to the edge of the water, where a figure is sprawled on one of the rocks. It is in fact, he realizes when he gets there, the same rock he’d found himself on after the shipwreck, unexplained miles from where the ship actually went down.

The naked figure is pale and hardly moving, cold and clammy to the touch, but Nathan helps him sit up because he recognizes him. Except for having legs instead of a tail, it’s the same mysterious hazel-eyed stranger who saved him from drowning.

“It’s you,” Nathan says stupidly. He hesitates, but the guy is so weak from cold that before he even realizes he’s doing it he’s got his shirt off, a paltry offering but it’s better than nothing. It drapes hugely from the man’s damp, smaller frame, but after getting it on him Nathan feels like he’s at least provided some protection from the cold sea breeze blowing in from across the water.

He scoops the man up—there’s something so weird about this, like their roles are reversed and how he has to stumble through the roll of rescuer like some sort of bumbling idiot with no experience in this sort of thing. But he manages to get them up the rocky incline and into town, into his room above the butcher’s shop without attracting anyone’s attention. Wraps the man in blankets and gets the kettle going until the bath is filled with steaming water. When the tub is full, Nathan turns back and sees the man struggling to unwrap himself, straining to get to the water on his own power.

“I can do it,” the man rasps as Nathan helps him, but it’s like watching a baby deer try to walk for the first time. This guy seems to have no control whatsoever over his shaking legs. But Nathan gets him stripped down again and into the hot bath, and he sinks into it with a sigh that borders on indecent.

Nathan doesn’t know what to do with his eyes. It’s just the one room, and there’s not much to it, so it’s kind of hard to ignore the naked dude in his tub. Plus, he’s already seen everything the guy’s got to offer while carrying him in. So he settles for sitting on the end of his bed, shirtless and holding his wet shirt, and just . . . staring. He watches the man in the tub carefully pull each limb into the water and then dip under the surface, completely submerged, and stay there for a full minute.

When he comes back up for air he uses the water streaming off him to slick his short hair back from his forehead and sits, nose just above the water to breathe, and stares at Nathan.

“You, uh,” Nathan starts awkwardly. “You had gills before. On your neck. Right? Or did I hallucinate that?”

The man in the tub doesn’t answer, just stares at him.

“What’s your name?” Nathan tries. “I’m Nathan.”

There’s a long pause, and then the man in the tub lifts his head just enough that his lower lip is out of the water. “Charles,” he says hoarsely, then coughs and dips down to sip from the tub.

“Shit, don’t—You don’t know what I’ve had to scrub in there, don’t drink that. Hang on.”

Nathan gets up and pulls on a shirt to go back out into the hall again, and returns with a glass of water. He hands it to Charles and watches him slowly try to sip from the middle of the glass.

“It’s, uh, you gotta put the edge to your mouth and tip it,” he offers, miming it.

Charles—fuck, it’s just so weird to finally have a name attached to the face, but a good weird, the reassuring Okay so I’m definitely not totally crazy after all kind of weird—gives him a skeptical look, but mimics the motion and successfully gulps the water down. Soon the glass is empty, and he hands it back.

They stare at each other.

“So, uh,” Nathan says, “you saved my life.”

“I did,” Charles replies. “And I, ah, think you might have just saved mine.”

For some reason, Nathan wants to deny this. Here he’s been, thinking about Charles literally every day for a while now, feeling at the very least like he owes him some sort of debt, then the minute he shows back up in his life they’re suddenly even again and that’s it? No. He shakes his head. “Nah, I just helped you get up the hill. You could’ve done that on your own.”

They stare at each other again. Nathan gets the distinct impression that they’re both fully aware that what he just said is all bullshit; Charles couldn’t even make it into the bath on his own.

Charles says, carefully, “In that case, I, ah . . . I could use a place to stay.”

“You got it,” Nathan replies instantly, and is he really offering to share his small room and small bed with some stranger who he’s pretty sure is an honest to god merman, an actual mythic sea creature, no questions asked?

. . . Yeah. Yeah, he is. He’s not totally sure why, but he really means it, too.

Charles is going about his business, updating the accounting book in the back of the butcher’s shop. Word has gotten around town that he’s good at this sort of thing; he’s due at the bakery first thing tomorrow morning to go through their books and make sure all the math is correct, and then in the afternoon the grocer wants him to perform an audit to make sure that none of the employees are stealing from the till. He actually much prefers this bloodless work to patrols.

But he still practices hand to hand combat in his free time. Now that he’s found his land-legs it seems even more important to maintain whatever physical prowess that he can in this dry, non-buoyant environment. Nathan is helping him get better at lifting weights, and they both benefit in their own ways from the bar fights Nathan and his friends get into and that Charles finishes.

At night, they share Nathan’s narrow bed. Charles is never cold anymore with Nathan there, although the man is strangely shy whenever he mentions this—some strange human hangup, he assumes, and doesn’t press the issue. He’s become unexpectedly fond of his human, more than fond if he’s really being honest with himself, but hasn’t yet learned the culturally appropriate way to act on this yet.

Sometimes when he’s waiting for sleep to come, or when the figures on the page and flowing from the nib of his ink pen become so tedious he needs to tear his eyes away to stare at nothing for a moment, he thinks about what Ishnifus told him before giving him this above-water life. He wonders if it’s for the best that Nathan remains oblivious to all of it, Charles’ feelings included.

There’s a storm coming, and Charles hopes that, if it comes to that, he’ll be able to save his human from drowning again.

#metalocalypse #dethentines 2021 #my fanfiction #narles #nathan explosion #charles foster offdensen #metalocalypse au #metalocalypse fanfic #pickles the drummer #mma #ishnifus meadle

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