#second phase | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

veneralice · 5 days ago

Text

art credit to @Qianbenshan on X ! all credit to the artist!

divider credit to @cafekitsune ! all credit to the original creator of the divider!

the ocean’s call / rafayel (m.)

rafayel just thought it would be funny to lead the fisher’s daughter astray by crowning her in water and blood - he’s killed so many of rafayel’s brethren, after all. if only he had known how hard it is to resist the desire of something you cannot have. (14.7k words)

content/content warnings: reader as the daughter of a fisher who hunts mermaids for their caviar (yum), reader and father’s relationship is not physically abusive but perhaps emotionally idk how to properly describe but i don’t want to leave it untagged, reader probably has some daddy issues (and i don’t mean that in the mocking way but in a the-author-has-daddy-issues-and-this-shit-is-not-funny-or-sexy kind of way), some body-horror detailing caviar harvesting, stealing star wars names for my background characters because i just finished andor and i’m not good at naming stuff, oral sex (male receiving), body worship (fem. receiving), switch!rafayel who seems submissive at first but in reality is just a crybaby dom, animalistic behavior (rafayel’s shark ass bites reader), some flesh-eating thoughts on rafayel’s behalf because you give him cuteness aggression, no actual cannibalism (wouldn’t that be funny) (i love yellowjackets), some overstimulation (both receiving) if you squint, idk . Idk i just kinda went crazy over this . who even wrote this

You were nine when your father took the joy out of the sea for you.

Perhaps you should start this off differently. You should remember the way it was a perfect summer’s day, and you had just finished your very first day of tutelage under the shrine maiden in Whalefall City. Your mother, whose rejection of that idea had been whittled down like a wooden arrow for the entire spring, had finally relented and allowed you to pursue a shrine maiden’s education. One day, it would be her daughter calling her to prayer and not the sneer-faced woman who currently held the title of ‘seasinger’. It wasn’t because your household was necessarily non-religious, or averse to the faith practiced in the city.

It’s just that your father spits on the holy city’s faith by partaking in the hunt of mermaids, just for sport, just for fun, just because he can.

Before that magical summer, you had never once been able to affix a picture to that. You knew your father was a talented fisher who was able to draw out even the most difficult of oceanic bounties, and he always made sure your family was fed. But you were a daughter, you see, a fact your father always had secretly mourned no matter how much it hurt your mother (“How I have groveled and suffered to deliver you to this earth!”), and thus you had never been taken with on the boat to hunt the mermaids littering the shores of Whalefall City.

You’ve seen them. It’s impossible not to. They dive in elegant curves, as whorling as the waves, a star-speckled shadow across the water before they disappear in its depth. The colors of the rainbow, the shimmer of the night-sky in their tails. More myth than real life. More dream than reality. Yet still here, sharing these waters with the citizens of the city. Lurking. Hiding. Surviving.

As per your own tradition, you bend down at the curve of the cliffpath you always took towards the sea and scoop up the wild-growing oceanvales. This was something you never once had told anyone about, and it was a daily routine you never neglected, feeling as though the day would remain incomplete if you didn't. This was not part of the religious teachings one received in the halls of the Dolphin's Hall, but it was a part of you, just as the ocean was. In the end, everything returns to salt. You throw the oceansvale into the waves and watch as the petals dissolve above the water's surface, as if sending a paper lantern off to carry your wishes.

In that moment, on the edge of you casting one last look at the horizon and in the turn of your heel to begin the climb back home, a blue-haired, child-like head bobs above the waves. You almost miss it, absentminded as you are, but you do see it: the small hand, barely differing to your own human one, furling around the petals and taking them with it as both hand and mermaid disappear. It makes you smile, almost making it worth it; as if this routine had finally been acknowledged for what it was. You wondered if mermaids and humans could be friends.

You couldn't have known how decisively crushing your father's answer would be.

The door is already open when you come home. An ominous sign, a warning for yet to come. The door was never left open, especially not on days where your father is supposed to take to the sea so he can partake in his favorite illegal dealing. There's no specific law condemning the prizing of roe out of a mermaid's womb, but it isn't looked upon with favor, either. The scriptures had always foretold of a deep unity between earth and sea, between moving plates and shaking waves, between mineral and salt. To turn your back on the ocean's creatures was to turn your back on the seasinger's preachings. That does not erase the hunger for their caviar, though, and the black market flourishes. And as long as the black market for caviar flourishes, your father refuses to cut into his own pockets, especially now, when the taxes in the city become more unforgiving and unforgiving with the preparations for the festival that is to be celebrated in just a moon's turn.

Your father is standing just beyond the door, in the dimly-lit hallway leading to the comfort of your mother's kitchen. His face is suffused with blood, red with anger, a fact that makes you duck your head in alarm, but is in vain. As soon as he sees you, your father's hand grips your frail shoulder and turns you toward him, his face the shadowed grimace of a man annoyed. "Did I not tell you to not go near that cliff time and time again?" he chastizes. For the moment, he holds himself back; your mother has drawn herself up in preparation of your defense, and her face mirrors the storm clouds you perceived in your father's grimace. But you can feel the need for him to shout rise steadily, like a tsunami beginning to swallow you whole. You lower your gaze to the ground, not knowing what to say. When you don't answer, your father finally shakes you and barks out, "Speak, girl! If it hadn't been for old Luthen pointing you out to me, I would have never found out about this, and then we'd be fishing out your bones out of that damned cove instead of a good piece of salmon for dinner!"

"Oh, leave it!" Your mother's hands shake off your father's threatening grip, and you allow yourself to breathe again. At your mother's chest, the world is safe. There are no scary men or scary bed-time stories about the unruly ocean. Instead, the scent of cinnamon and warm wood wraps you in its’ embrace, and you hide your face in the crook of your mother’s arm as she glares at your father. “She’s gonna be a seasinger, this girl is, and I won’t have you interfering with it. We all agreed to listen to her wishes. She’s not gonna be a fisher like you, Galen!”

“Well, I sure hope she won’t, because she does not heed a single warning I’ve ever taught her about it! Those mermaids don’t exactly gallop into my nets of their own free will, they’re dangerous!”

“You’ve made your point, now shove off.” Your mother glides her hand over the curve of your head. Protective, caring. Her presence is the calming lighthouse in the stormy seas, guiding you home, and although your father is still enraged, you believe the worst to be over. You are wrapped up in a childhood kingdom that is still entranced with the unknown, the beckoning of the deep, the ocean’s call. No one has taught you how to drown yet.

Not yet. But someone will, now.

Your father, your only father. You remember him tying knots in all ur robes, the way he made you laugh when swinging you up into the skies, up, up, and beyond. His fingers digging into the sides of your tummy to tickle the giggles out of you, claiming the sound was so joyous that all on earth and in the sea should rejoice in it. But you also remember the way his fingers dug into the soft of your flesh, yelling at your fingers bitten down to the quick, belittling you for your fear. The sneer on his face when he couldn’t fathom where your stupidity came from. The stormy eyes. This was the man who had never been taught better on how to love his family, and he won’t change for you, not for your mother or anyone else.

So when he encircles your wrist with his manacle-like fingers, you already know you’d been hoping for a reprieve and now the guillotine came swinging down to behead you. Your mother’s startled voice speaks up, but you cannot even begin to decipher the words, because your father is already shouting, “I don’t want to hear it, not from you, not when it’s your fault she’s turned out this soft and naive! If she wants to be a seasinger so badly, I’ll teach her what it means to sing into the sea!”

Her panicked voice is swallowed by the wind as your father begins to tug you down the pebbled path winding down from your house into the city, but you quickly turn off-path as your father begins to steer you towards the ocean. The salt is in your eyes and in your mouth, and you cannot be sure if the sharpness on your tongue is the rain, your tears or the taste of pure fear. As you angle up your head to look at the house one last time, your mother stands in the door, looking incredibly forlorn. You understand that look very well: that although your father is an incredibly hotheaded, temperamental man, the fact still remains that his little sport paints a target on the fishers’ backs.

It is time to stop romanticizing the mermaids now.

It’s the only thing you can think of as they claw the mermaid to ship. The words repeat over and over in your head, like the sharp stones thrown against the waves as the soft water makes them yield. They become round and pliant, your thoughts, running together in a string as you stare at the sight and try not to look. You don’t want to see. You don’t want to see. But they make you: Old Luthen (you’d spit on the name if you could) has his hands settled on your shoulders, keeping you turned towards the sight of your father and his shipmates heaving the gods’ dearest creation on deck. You try to see through the face, make yourself not acknowledge it, as if it could help if you pretend not to take note of her face. But she looks back at you, straight on. Her pearlescent eyes zero in on the way old Luthen has his fingers carved into your shoulders, the way he could crush and grind you down like brittle bones if you resist. And she understands: you are as trapped as she is. It is a terrible thing, this understanding that passes between the two of you, and you wish it hadn’t happened, wish she would have growled and screamed at you as she did at her captors.

The understanding flees her eyes pretty quickly when they begin to carve her out like a pig on a spit.

It’s terrible. The fear on your tongue turns into bile, and then you find yourself swallowing back vomit, not trusting yourself to throw up when your father was still intent on punishing you. The knife glides into the soft-scaled tail way too easily, giving way to a glittering, human-like nightmare. You’ve seen the way clams guard their precious pearls, the almost pretty membrane surrounding them to keep them safe. The translucency of it made it a beautiful wonder to behold, but there’s nothing beautiful about this, not when they’re clawing at the mermaid’s insides as if they were the bothersome strings of a spider’s web. The mermaid thrashes and screams, and then the bloodcurdling noise coming out of her mouth is unrecognizable, because they begin to serrate at the edges of her wound to drive into the hard scales surrounding her womb. To get everything, y’know, there’s people paying a pretty penny for their organs. S’pposed to have miracle healing properties. You swallow and swallow and swallow, but when they begin to tear at the flesh that was supposed to keep her roe safe, and the guts begin to speckle your feet, you find your way out of Luthen’s prison-hold and throw up right over the side of the ship. You can still hear her sobs, despite the sound of Luthen’s laughter - can’t stomach the fisher’s life, can she, your daughter? - and more deafeningly so, you can hear how loud the silence is in your ears when she finally quietens down, when she returns to the sea, the only burial the men give her. One last time, you’re looking at her as she bobs in the waves, her helpless arms streaked with wounds she suffered as she strained against the nets and knives. You think of those arms, and her ocean eyes, the way they had looked like a nightmare come true and yet the gaze they contained had been softer than any look your father had ever given you. Maternal, almost.

You close your eyes and think of your own mother. You guard that image of her, imprint it on the back of your eyes as your father settles his hand on the top of your head. Wanting to slip back into the role of the nurturing, caring father. Your fists clench and unclench at your sides. “It’s not a pretty thing, girl,” he says, and it’s supposed to sound soothing. Instead, it feels like he’s stabbing your ears with the same knife he used to gut her womb with. “They know what we’re capable of. They like us just as little as we like them. Your songs will help you nothing. It changes nothing.”

But something had changed. Irrevocably, unrepairingly, it had changed. As they paddle you back to the shore, all you can think about is the fact that this mermaid, this stranger, had viewed you more kindly than your own father had. And you carry that look with you as you grow into a woman, as unacknowledged and resented as the young daughter you had been.

From his hidden viewpoint, Rafayel can only glimpse the edges of your skirt. It’s a silver, diaphanous material, hugging the back of your legs like a seastar clings to the rocks. Expensive. Noteworthy. The garb the students of the shrine’s faith don as they perform their traditions, as if they don’t smile at the sea’s creations with one corner of their mouth and spit with the other. Disrespectful, your faith is, as disrespectful as your father’s nets and his arrogance as he takes to the sea. Rafayel’s sea. “Father, you forgot to take your hooks with you again,” your voice then rings out, freeing him from his hateful looks. It sounds too melodious. It should be as scratchy, as bothersome, as vile as humanity’s existence. But he is Lemurian at heart, and he cannot help himself from appreciating your lovely voice. A true seasinger, he begrudgingly thinks, but then he hastily corrects himself. A seasinger with the talent for it, but a liar nonetheless. Humanity can only deceive. “You should at least maintain the illusion that you’re hunting for something … legal. They’ve been cracking down on the black market’s dealings for a while now.”

“Only makes my prizes more precious, girl,” comes your father’s dry retort. He’s never once called you by your name in the entire time that Rafayel has begun to trail you, following your traces around town. He hears the gentle splash of your feet hitting the water, feels his senses prickle as he becomes aware of the way your body braves the spitting sea. “Just means I’ll get a better fetch for this stuff because of how rare it is. Alright, hand it over, before you catch a cold. Stupid attire you’ve got on there barely even protects you from the wind.”

“The sea warms me, father.”

“Pah!” The mockery comes easy to your father, he, whose entire business relies on his mockery of the Lemurian species. He can’t tell whether you’ve handed the bucket to your father, but he can tell when you retreat, the way your toes send up sandstorms all along the beach as you wade back to shore. “Spare me. If I wanted a sermon, I’d be sitting next to your mother in that overstuffed hall of yours. And I’ve told you countless times to avoid this cove!”

You ignore the latter part of his sentence. “The Dolphin’s Hall would have to be hit with a meteorite to ever move you to its sanctuary, father.”

“Ha! Haha!” His laughter seems biting, then becomes less striking as your father begins to paddle away. It creaks, heavy with his gear; the little rowing boat is just a distraction from the heavy vessel way out in the ocean his friends are waiting for him on. “It hasn’t taken your humor, at least. Alright, get back now. Go on!” He has to shout as the distance grows. “Gonna catch a cold, you will! And kiss your mother from me!”

The murmured answer you give him is lost on both your father and Rafayel, but it doesn’t sound very assenting. What isn’t lost on Rafayel is the realization that your father is the worst person in the world, but you are his favorite daughter, and that knowledge drags you down like an anchor rapidly descending. Keeping you in one places, weighing you down. Your footsteps become heavy as you walk up the beach, not as graceful as the way you had carried yourself in the sea. As he begins to follow you upstream, following the ocean’s arms deeper into the woods which border your village, he can still hear you angrily muttering to yourself.

He doesn’t know what to make of that. When he had suggested to his court that he’d revenge himself on the fisher and his entourage, his advisors had only given him a pained smile. Most of the elders still cling to the memory where their devotees on land would outstretch their hands in a blessed union, where their friendship made the moon wax and wane with happiness. They shake their heads in sadness with every murdered mermaid, as if that would fix anything. And yet, there are also those with a mind as murderous as his, still cautioning him, she’s not her father. If we take what is precious to them just because we can, what makes us better than them?

Morality. Rafayel scoffs to himself, sounding as resigned as you did in your trudge upward. As if that could help with anything. Had your father thought of morality when he had killed sweet Lyra right before her wedding night? Had he thought of morality when he desecrated her corpse for a handful of eggs, which could have been Rafayel’s nieces and nephews to dote on?

The ocean merges into a river he refuses to swim in, so Rafayel halts at the edge of the water to watch your slight frame disappear into the city. He doesn’t like to leave behind his tail in favor of awkward, human legs, but if he wants to keep an eye on you, he will need to. He’s getting pretty good at this, actually: Looking at you. Memorizing the way your lips curve into a smile, the shark teeth glint inside the grin you sport for when something makes you laugh. The way your light and deft fingers can tie the most powerful of sailor knots. The way your gentle hands hold a knife in the most reverent manner, as if this was an honor entrusted to you, not in the uncouth way your father points it at precious life.

You are not like him, uncomfortably so. It rankles Rafayel to see how much you are trying to escape your father’s taint.

The more he watches, the more he sees that taint poisoning you. You are a river current, slowing, slowing under the poison the human world dumps into you. It eats away at you, the way the rust claims the metal it swallows before it destroys the metal whole. The way you lower your head like a supplicant, shameful of the tales your fellow shrine maidens carry when your father sports another ‘treasure’ on the market. The way you paint on a smile when necessary, because you do not have the strength to face the naked truth. Your careful fingers, always touching in devotion. Moving to prayer. Guiding along to the sea’s chants. Hands of peace, not of war.

Of course, that only makes you an even more delicious offering. Even the gods know an innocent life is more precious than the forced sacrifice of a man already doomed for punishment.

As the sun sets on Whalefall City, people begin to flood the Dolphin’s Hall with eager chatter. Rafayel melts back into the shadows of the impressive dome, becomes one with the many murals depicting the ocean’s history. The hall itself is decorated in such an ornate manner that it makes Rafayel question whose devotion had turned into flesh here, bearing fruit to a worship so true that even Rafayel doesn’t dare think of blasphemy. Perhaps there was a time where humanity hadn’t been an accursed thing for him to ponder over. A long time ago, when words and actions still had meaning.

But then is not now. And now, everything has changed.

He watches as that change warps you, the shadow that passes over your face taking on the shape of his long lost Lyra. When you look up again to lead the group into prayer, your eyes have steeled over - as if through the entire room full of people, his thoughts have reached you. They hang above you like the clouds gathering before a storm as you begin the sermon, your voice crystal-clear, never wavering. Whatever doubts your father has stirred in your heart, they do not find their way here.

The last bell of prayer rings out at the same time as you bow to the masses. In acknowledgement, they murmur back their only line in the script - may the moon guide you through the storm - and then turn, flooding the exit like over-eager sardines squirming inside a can. Rafayel joins the stream of people, casting one last look back at you, but you’ve already risen again and turned your back on him. Your connection is broken now, a fact that Rafayel is secretly relieved, then aggrieved about.

Why does that matter to him, anyways?

On a full-moon night, Rafayel decides to cut you loose before you can confuse him further.

He’s been anticipating this for days now, anxiously looking up into the sky every time his head broke through the waves. As a seasinger, you are required to take part in monthly ablutions under the light of the full moon, returning to her domain of power before the wax and wane pulls at the seas. You’re supposed to take the maiden in training with you, but over the past few months, you’ve rejected her every time, gently but sternly relegating her to other tasks to be completed inside the Dolphin’s Hall. You want to be alone with your shame, alone with the fact that you seem to speak to the moon like she’s your only friend.

You’re not aware of the fact that Rafayel has been quietly listening on, every full moon night. As a Lemurian, he does not partake in a faith that revels in the worship of the sea. And yet, here he sat come every full moon, hiding himself in the rivers converging into the shallow pool in which you submerge yourself. He cannot keep hanging on to your every word. If he wants to revenge himself on the old fisherman, he has to do it now, before his too-humanoid-heart foils his plans and spares you. He thinks of Lyra and her kindly face, knowing she’d disapprove, but he makes himself go through the motions anyways.

He hadn’t been prepared for your reaction.

You don’t divest yourself of your clothes when you enter the pool, but Rafayel doesn’t have to imagine much to paint a picture of what is beneath, anyways. The satin hugs the shape of your body like a fervent lover, beginning to pool around you as you accept the water’s embrace. Lower and lower you sink, before you dive into the water to be fully submerged and rise again. He comes to a halt just a few feet away from you, on the periphery of your gaze. You do not see him yet. But he sees you. He sees the way the water falls in rivulets from your luminous lashes as they frame your clear eyes, sees the way the moonlight drinks in your irises. There’s a jealousy he cannot pinpoint inside his chest as the water begins to tear down your cheeks, framing your face so gently. You shudder slightly when the cold begins to settle in your bones, and your hands come to cover your exposed arms. As Rafayel realizes that he should not feel so enticed by the sight of a mere mortal being and his heart begins to tighten, you finally turn your face and realize that you aren’t alone here.

For a very long, heart-stoppingly awkward moment, no one says anything.

Rafayel stiffens up, waiting for your scream. He has planned this carefully, and he knows there is no way any help will reach you here, not when you’re in his domain. The moon may peer her gaze over these waters, but the water is his dominion, his kingdom. You are trapped inside the palm of his hand, and he is readying himself to swallow you whole.

But you don’t scream.

Your breath comes more shallowly, speeding as your lungs rush to fill air. He idly wonders how that feels like, the way the lungs balloon inside that easily broken chest. Despite all this, despite the circumstances, despite the fact that you are quite aware what the sight of a mermaid might mean to you, your eyes do not fill with fear. So Rafayel doesn’t move, either. He watches you and the way your chest constricts, listens how your breath stutters. And then you finally speak. “Is it you?” you whisper. “Did you hear my prayers?”

The magic of the moment is broken then, and Rafayel audibly breathes out. He almost breaks out into mocking laughter, - me, fulfilling your prayers? - but he stops himself short, not intending to waste the opportunity. If you would come willingly to meet your fate, then that would be even better. “Your prayers?” he repeats, and then, although he couldn’t make his disbelief clearer, he says, “Do you really think a being like me would bother to listen to any of your prayers? After all your kind has done to us?”

You take in his words with an austere expression. “No, I suppose not,” you murmur out, biting down on that full lower lip. No, don’t think about biting that lip for her. Don’t think about it. He chases away his own thoughts and instead begins to wonder why you’re not scared yet. Are you aware that there is nothing you can do to change this fate? “But one can hope. I couldn’t ever call myself a seasinger if I didn’t still have faith that the earth and the salt could reconcile again.”

“And whose fault is it that a reconciliation seems to be so impossible?”

You blink at him, fresh rivulets of water carding through those lashes like tears. You look like you’re crying, even though Rafayel knows you are not. “Do not take me for a hypocrite,” you tell him, sounding entirely too earnest. “I am quite aware of whose fault it is. We humans bear the sins of our fathers, after all.”

You sound bitter.

She’s not her father. If we take what is precious to them just because we can, what makes us better than them?

Rafayel hums at that. It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change anything. He’ll kill you swiftly if he has to, give you a kind death. It’s better than anything your father’s crewmates have ever given to any mermaid they’ve stumbled upon. You won’t suffer, that he promises you, but he’s not going back on his word, not for anything. So he makes himself move closer. You still don’t scream for help as he approaches you, just muster him warily, like you’ve encountered a familiar face on the street yet cannot remember where that familiarity comes from. “And if I was your friend?” he asks, challenging your logic. “Then what? Would all be forgiven, and we’d dance in a circle throwing flowers?”

“Why don’t you find out?”

You stretch out a hand.

He should spit on it. If anything, he should claw at that hand like a man drowning and pull you into the depths. Your father does not deserve to cradle your corpse and reminisce about the day he’s held you for the first time. He deserves to suffer beyond all measure, and Rafayel intends to see to that. He schools his features into polite neutrality before he readies himself for the killing strike.

Rafayel draws in a shuddering breath. And then, like the liar he is, he takes your hand.

It is as soft as he had imagined. Too human, too weak, too frail. Every bone and sinew feels like it will give with just a squeeze, broken beyond repair. It feels like a betrayal.

He can barely make himself think a proper thought when you use the opportunity to step closer to him. He can smell you now, that distinct scent of myrrh and burnt offerings that clings to your skin. This is the scent he’s been using to track you for months. Below the too-thin garb of your seasinger attire, he can see the way your precious collarbones lift and sink in quick succession, your breath coming entirely too fast now. You’re panicking. You are deathly afraid of him. And yet you ignore that fear to squeeze his hand, as if this was just another interaction in the Dolphin’s Hall to you. In your eyes, he finds that steady faith that holds your spine rigidly straight, the look you can never give your father because of how you defer to him. “You’re much taller than I thought,” you tell him, your voice shaky. Then you give him a tentative smile. The light of your hope is reflected in that expression, and it hurts to realize that he will be responsible for diminishing that forever.

It’s okay, he tells himself. I’ll just grow closer to her so she’ll trust me, and then, when I’ve got her wrapped around my finger, I’ll kill her in front of her father’s eyes. “You look too small for a human, so I’m not certain you’re equipped to be delivering these kinds of judgements on appearances,” is all he says in response.

“Well, that is a valid observation.” You haven’t let go of his hand yet. Rafayel makes no move to free himself, either. You are locked into this situation, moved by something neither of you can understand. You let your gaze roam over the entirety of his face, the way it lingers on the sharp edges of his ears, the scales rippling down his throat. He certainly hopes you don’t see the way he squirms beneath that gaze. “But you’re my friend now, so you’ll forgive me for my deadly honesty. I fear that is just part of who I am, so you’re going to have to live with it.”

“Is that how one becomes a friend? This quickly?”

“Oh, certainly. You’ve been holding my hand for quite some time now. No,” you rush to say as he attempts to disentangle himself, fingers flashing to grip his arm. His first instinct is to strike out, to defend himself from humanity’s danger. He wrestles that instinct down until it becomes nil. He is bending at the edges, unraveling like threat inside your skilled hands. You guide him back towards you and intertwine your fingers. Your seasinger voice lulls him into a sense of security that is going to get him killed someday. She’s already bewitching you far too much for this plan to work, his inner voice cautions. The sound is growing increasingly frantic, every thought stumbling after the other until it turns into a senseless avalanche. Kill her now, before she undoes us all. Kill her now. “Will you let me prove that our friendship can work?”

No, his inner voice shouts. She’s your enemy’s daughter. SHE is your enemy. KILL HER NOW.

The warmth of your hand melts into his every bone. Sinking in like poison. “I suppose I have no choice,” he tells you, sealing his fate.

Rafayel begins to realize how fucked he is.

He was already quite aware of his awful disposition before he ever approached you, the way your mortal face charmed him the way a snake ensnares its victims. Too pretty for a human, a trap laid bare. He feels that very trap biting into his skin every time you smile at him. It draws blood every time your touch brushes him. As ridiculous as it sounded, he feels himself exploding from a second puberty, your every notion setting fire to his blood.

He struggles to maintain his murder fantasies. It’s a little bit difficult to focus on when all his dreams plague him with the image of you.

Today, you’ve asked him to accompany him to the hidden cove that he’s watched you frequent when he was still trailing you. It’s a beautiful location, the sandbank curving to accommodate the ocean’s kisses as it laps at the earth. Almost absentmindedly, your bare feet come to a halt every few meters to gather up a bundle of oceansvale, a flower you’re particularly fond of and have been ridiculed with by him. Idiot human, he had said, as if your obsession with the ocean wasn’t big enough already. You’re a seasinger, for crying out loud. Aren’t you religious enough without an obsession with the only flower that blooms near these waters?

You’d only looked at him with a steady, self-satisfied look. Are you jealous, per chance?

Yes. As if. Like he’d care what you’re obsessed with and what not. Anyways, mermaids don’t fall in love with humans. They kill them. By luring them to the sea, to be exact, so you’re halfway to the gallows already, so who’s the idiot now?

“What’s all this, then?” Rafayel wildly gesticulates around him - at the sweeping cliffs, the sand-carrying wind, the beautiful beach. The atmosphere is way more serene than he is, a calm and quiet getaway. The perfect hiding location for a forlorn daughter. “I hate using my human legs. If you were going to take me to the ocean anyways, why torture me before you do it?”

“I very much appreciate you using your human legs, Rafayel. But I am afraid the hike up to the mountain and down to this place is the point of the trip.” You give him a lopsided smile, the kind that makes him dizzy with emotions. Sickening. He clenches a hand inside the pocket of the jacket you lent him. “You know, I’m a little disappointed you don’t recognize the place. This is where I first met you. I remembered you straight away, yet you were ignorant.”

He waves away the words. “I’m a Lemurian, after all. Time passes much more differently for us than it does for your kind. What does an encounter like this mean in the grand scheme of things? ‘Tis a single star in the universe we traverse.”

The words make you frown. In fact, the frown disfigures your face entirely, your nose scrunching and your lips twitching together in an expression of dejectedness. He almost eats his words, almost hurries to tell you that of course he remembers, that he couldn’t forget the tiny human who bothered to throw the ocean flowers, even though its inhabitants were humanity’s enemies, but then you speak up again and the matter becomes irrelevant. “Then I ought to be thankful this star turned out to be brighter than it was. I’m quite thankful we got to meet again. I’ve always wanted a chance to meet a mermaid, to fight back against this enmity between our species.”

“Quite the conciliator, you are.” Rafayel follows you down unto the beach. Your feet trace a path into the sand which he follows dutifully, making sure to cover your tracks in case your father still admonishes you for coming here. “Is that what you meant when you saw me for the first time? ‘Did you hear my prayers’?”

“Yes. My mother’s always mocked me for that too, you know. She’s the only one who listens to me about this stuff, and even though she loves me a lot, she’s not above teasing me. I guess it’s kind of an inside joke in my family.”

Rafayel takes note of the way your eyes steel over. He knows you long enough now to recognize that stance. If you were a soldier, this would be the position you’d move into if you had to defend yourself against the thoughts about your father. Even when he is not present, he haunts your wellbeing. Even when it’s your mother you think about, his phantom always lurks right behind. “Your father isn’t too fond of the ocean?” he asks. The lie on his tongue tastes vile.

Like the rotting corpse of a gutted mermaid.

You shake your head. “No, he’s fond of the ocean, alright,” you correct. When you sink into the water, clothes and all, Rafayel joins you immediately. Before your eyes, his legs merge back into his trusted tail. It makes you shake with laughter. “You know, I wanted to make a joke about you being like a fish in water, but um. You are one. A fish, I mean. In water.”

“You’re too funny,” Rafayel deadpans. “Truly, I am beside myself with laughter.”

You turn away your face and laugh into the palm of your hand, as if that could hide your mirth. Not like he’s feeling every single vibration in the water that your quiet giggles send out. The sound settles in his chest, taking root there. “Note taken,” you chortle still. “I’ll work on my jokes.”

“Don’t bother. You’ll never be as funny as I am.”

“Oh yeah?” You swivel your head around to him. Whatever smart response Rafayel was cooking up dies inside his mouth, turning dry in the face of your beauty. The dimples in your cheeks make you look younger than you are, your face luminous with real happiness. This is what had been lacking from your expression inside the Dolphin’s Hall. You were living for your faith, for your duty, leaving yourself much too neglected. But you were finally growing comfortable inside your skin. Opening up to him.

Kill her, the voice still whispers. He smothers the spark of that thought before it sets his brain on fire. Rafayel swallows. “Is that all you brought me here for, then?” he sighs. “To bore me with your unfunny jokes and reminisce about the past?”

“You sure do know how to kill the moment.” The sentiment makes you snort. You finally turn your face to the horizon, and Rafayel can breathe comfortably again. Looking at you for too long makes him want to dig into you. With knifes, of course. Not with kisses. Or his fingers. Of course not. Nothing of the sort. None. “I just wanted to free my mind for a little bit. It gets incredibly loud in there, sometimes.” You tap your temples, the guardians of your thoughts. He wants to climb into that brain and see for himself how loud it is. He’d risk turning deaf to hear. “Everyone always looks to me, because I’m a seasinger, but they aren’t looking at me, not really. So I make myself entirely into that role I’ve been given. And I lose sight of who I really am. When I’m here, I don’t have to do that. I can just listen to the ocean. And she listens to me.”

You sound wishful.

In his own silent moments, when Rafayel discards his own roles, he is able to admit to himself that he wants to read your every wish from your lips and make them come true. If possible, he’d crown you in oceansvale and pearls, to show you the beauties of the watery underworld and all it has to offer. But that is something he can never allow himself to desire. So, like you, he makes himself steel over, and then asks instead: “Aren’t I listening to you?”

“Sure, but you’re just required to, aren’t you? You’re my friend.” You nudge him with your shoulder, the touch a brand of fire on his skin. You’re so, so warm. Rafayel chases that sensation as you lean away, and you let him drape himself over you, already used to his clingy behavior. You’re my friend. You’re my enemy. “The ocean doesn’t have to listen, but she does. She’s been a better parent to me than my father has. He’s always thought I wasn’t worth raising because I was of the cursed sex, anyways.”

“Does that matter? Your mother loves you.”

“But he’s my father.” And your voice breaks. As he angles another look at you, he realizes that you’ve been gazing at the sea with tears in your eyes. If you were Lemurian, you wouldn’t need him to crown you: your own pearl-teary eyes are already beginning to fill with treasure. Like tidepools, they spill over, painting your face in salt-burned tear tracks he wants to kiss until his mouth runs dry. Rafayel curls an arm around you, all thoughts of murder forgotten, and all he can think of is how to comfort you properly so you’ll never have to mourn your father again. “He’s my father,” you repeat with a muffled voice against his shoulder, as if he didn’t hear you the first time, “He should have loved me anyways. I would have become the son he wanted if he gave me the chance. But he didn’t want me. He didn’t want me.”

Rafayel doesn’t know if it’s the ocean or his blood he hears rushing in his ears. His mind has already become clouded with rage, swirling into a hurricane that tears your father apart. He rocks you back and forth, and he hopes it feels like the ocean is cradling you, carrying you far away from your sorrow.

It’s already been two full moons since Rafayel has become your ‘friend’.

Your birthday has come and gone, and you’ve scared Rafayel out of his own skin when you burst into tears as you accepted his gift. It’s just a necklace made of a shell, idiot, he had clarified, flustered. It’s not like I spent money on it or anything. It was just something I had laying around and wanted to get rid of.

Rafayel, you had said, voice shaky with teary joy. It’s everything to me.

It’s getting harder and harder to convince himself into doing what he set out to do.

Particularly today he finds himself reaching back for the memory of his bloodlust, watching you guide new devotees to the sea to be baptized, like turtles taking to water for the first time. He’s seen his fair share of baby turtles scrambling to the sea, muddling up the waves as their tiny legs fought to master them. These children are not dissimilar to the freshly born turtles. Traitors, the lot of them, he thinks to himself, but the threat feels hollow. Cursed species, they are. Liars and deceivers all. He tries to ignore the irony of that prejudice considering the nature of your relationship.

When you finally send the kids off and join him in the water, he schools his features into a childish pout he hopes will mask his hatred. “You’ve made me wait all evening,” he complains, the annoyance in his voice real. It has been quite some time since you got to unwind with him. The thought of Rafayel looking forward to seeing you again had made him panic, and he had scrambled to avoid you for a few days before his own longing drew him back to you. “I was freezing to death here.”

“As if!” Your laughter rings as jubilously as the bells inside Dolphin’s Hall call to prayer. There’s a myth as old as humanity which decrees that when the bells ring twelve times, the gates of heaven will open to flood the world entire. Only the true believers will become one with the sea, the earth finally reunited with its one true love. The planet will become a single ocean again, and it will be as if land and sea never had separated, all creatures under the moon united under one banner. “I know exactly well that wherever you live is way colder than whatever temperature these waters are. This must feel like a hot bath for you in contrast.”

Rafayel sniffles, caught in the lie. “It’s the principle that counts.”

Your smile gentles. “Rafayel,” you say. The way that name rolls of your tongue makes him want to roll his eyes back into his head: if all sermons sounded like this, he’d be the most devoted follower of the sea’s faith alive. Your voice is the single most exultant sound any living creature could create. Perhaps you were a siren in your past life. “Don’t tell me you missed me.”

I miss you all the time, he thinks. I miss you even when I fantasize about killing you. I miss you even when I should be grieving all the mermaids my brothers and sisters have lost. I miss you even more when I watch them take brides and grooms and make the kingdom of the depths a happier place in the face of adversity. You would like us, the way we cling to hope like you do. “I bet you’d like that,” he drawls out, feigning normalcy. “Any living being would want to be missed by me. I’m very beautiful, after all, and very desired.”

“Truly? Are they all vying for your attention down there?” You flick his shoulder, intending to be teasing. Even the pain is welcome. He tries to ignore the way his stomach flips. “And yet you’re here for me. What an honor, oh desirable bachelor.”

“You should be honored,” he tells you. It sounds arrogant, but why shouldn’t he be? He is beautiful after all. For once, he’s not lying. Rafayel takes pride in his appearance, and he preens at the chance of receiving a compliment from you.

You cock your head at him. It’s supposed to look threatening, but you hold all the danger of a sweet otter. “Don’t make me laugh,” you tell him, still joking, but your voice is breathy.

Maybe his looks don’t leave you as untouched as you pretend to be. Maybe he’s not the only one feigning.

Rafayel brushes his fingers over the hollow of your arms, following the veins as they reach upward. It makes you shudder. He delights in it. “I adore hearing you laugh, sweetling, but it’s not the intention I have here,” he says. He is in and out of his body at the same time. Most times, he smothers these thoughts before they reach his mouth, yet he continues to speak as if this were just another dream of you. “Go on. Say it. Tell me I’m beautiful.”

Your lips part, speechless. Behind you, the human world goes on, tickering away like a fluid mechanism. With or without you. You look like as if you realize that the ocean is beckoning. He is beckoning. If you’re not careful, he’ll drown you, bones and all. “You’re beautiful,” you whisper then, the sound of it caught up in the rushing of the waves. They cling to the sand, dragging it with the pull of the tide. He yearns to do the same.

His hand comes up to cradle your face. You fit perfectly into it, as if you were made for him. As if he was made to compliment you. Rafayel’s heart stutters in his chest, threatening to burst. “Again,” he says, his voice steady. (He doesn’t know how he does it. He feels like he’s about to explode.) “You can do better than that.”

You draw in another sharp breath, your lungs fluttering. The human body was so very fascinating. He wants to reach inside you and look at everything, feel it all. “You’re truly beautiful, Rafayel,” you try again, and this time, you pitch up your voice. Every word is clearly enunciated. You look at him straight on. “All the wonders in this world pale in comparison to you.”

Oh. Oh.

“You,” Rafayel breathes out. His fingers are shaking on your face, but they hold on. Latching on to you. If he strengthened his grip, will he be able to crush your skull? Will he be able to reach inside? His body feels heavy with desire; as he bends towards you, he finds that you’re already meeting him halfway, and this time, the soaked material of your clothes exposes the sight of your stiff nipples. He yearns to warm them up for you, to take them in his mouth and kiss you until you’re burning from the inside out. He’s always wondered what you would taste like.

You are both torn out of the fantasy at the sound of your voice in a human mouth, carried by the wind from the shore. You draw apart hastily, as if a spell had been broken, and you fumble to rearrange your clothes and fix your hair although nothing had happened. Rafayel tucks his traitorous hands behind his back.

“I,” you manage to say, your voice drowsy with the lingering desire, “I have to get back. I’ll see you?” You phrase the order like a plea, as if Rafayel wouldn’t bend over backwards for you. You miss his assenting, fervent nods as you whirl around and wade back to shore, your own hands drowning in the material of your dress as you lift it up and wring it out. The water trails behind you in his stead, leaving him behind.

He’ll totally be able to carry out his revenge, alright.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to resist you.

The more time passes, the more it feels like the sun rises and sets just for you. Your happiness is his own, your sadness his bitter grief. Every emotion you ever display resonates so deeply in his soul that he grows hazy with responsibility, wants to reshape the world in your image. Every tear you shed is carefully collected like his own well-cared for treasure, every laughter bottled in the memory palace of his mind. His mind traces each and every one in your absence, creating melodies which cannot compare to your voice. He is becoming enraptured. He is coming undone.

Even the distance is beginning to choke him. You feel so close and so far. He wishes to lap at your body like the ocean does when you perform your prayers, wants to smother you in a hug that threatens the ocean’s might when you dive down with him. In the few times where you were able to swim with him - your timetable strict, your parents suspicious - he’s allowed you to trace your hands over the scales of his tail. To you, it’s the satisfaction of a curiosity. To him, it is a so startling intimacy that he wants to weep. There is no room for justice as his heart expands to encompass you, and it grows inside his chest, breaking apart his ribcage so it can guard you from the world. There are no words. You’re in every breath, every steady push of his blood.

Although the active threat of your father’s suspicions has come between the two of you, every meeting rarer, but becoming more precious over time, it cannot erase the wish for his soul to reach for you. You doze away in your place on the stony slopes surrounding the pool you perform your ablutions in, and Rafayel is content to guard your slumber, dipping in and out of the water. He never strays away for too long. He makes sure to count every strand of those stunning lashes that had already enticed him when he first met you here, follows every vein inside your face to see where it branches into. What was hated has become dear to him now, your humanity as endearing as your very existence. He wonders what you dream about. Wonders if you dream about him, as often as he dreams about you. His brain has become very enamored with you, every fold of the thing having been etched over with memories of you.

Your father is already hounding you. Your newfound happiness hasn’t gone unnoticed. It should please Rafayel, how your friendship has changed your life for the better. You are standing up straight, opening up to the world. When you laugh, it finally sounds like your vocal cords are singing in true harmony, never again pushing for the falsity you used to employ to wave away concerns.

If anyone were to discover you were sneaking away with a mermaid, they’d be dumbfounded. Perhaps they’d mock you for it. But if your father were to discover you two, then it wouldn’t take much until Rafayel would find himself face to face with the same knife he used to kill Lyra.

I’ll have to tell her the truth, Rafayel thinks then, stricken. If I really love her, then I have to let her go. He closes his eyes, losing himself to the sharp sting of grief inside his chest. That’s what Lyra would have said, anyways. She was always so enthusiastic about fairy tales and happy endings and true love. He mourns for the way his childhood had been shaped with the loss of her, and the loss of all the mermaids that had ever died an unjust death. But it has taken on a new meaning. He looks into your face and cannot find it himself to justify the means to the end he had intended for you. There was nothing vengeful or freeing about this. If anything, he’d push himself off to his own metaphoric end, because Rafayel has reached the ends of his wits and he’s finally accepted that there is no you without me. He stretches out a hand to card his fingers through your dry hair before it can fall into the water. What a blessing it is to do at least this, to be cherished by you.

He begins to ask himself how he is supposed to leave you.

As Rafayel’s thoughts take a turn for the worse, you open your sleep-drowsy eyes. They are still blurred over with the dreams you’ve been chasing, just slowly becoming clear and taking in your surroundings. “Raf?” you whisper, and he tries not to melt at the nickname. No one’s ever thought up a nickname for him. So many things you’ve given him that he will never be able to repay you with. So much light you’ve brought into his dark, dark life. The bottom of the ocean, despite all its magic, had never been as bright as this. “I’m here,” he tells you, the sentence literal, but he means it with every ounce of his soul.

You blink away the last traces of unconsciousness, your pretty lips stretching open to release a yawn. “I was afraid you’d left,” you tell him. Also so literal. But in the way you look at him and your tone turns up with hope, he finds himself recognizing the underlying meaning, just as you had discerned his.

He’s told you so many lies already. What’s one more? “I’d never leave you,” he tells you, and he tries to mean it. In another universe, he would be able to mean it. Rafayel swims closer so he can throw an arm over your frame as you lie back down, and he angles himself up so he can cage you in-between his hands. As he arranges himself, he abandons the scales and tail in favor of his awkward human legs, caging your delicate waist inbetween his knees. He’s balancing himself on top of you now, not caring if the drops of water pearling off his skin splash on you.

You don’t look like you care, either. You stare at him as if there’s nothing else in the world, just the two of you for all eternity. The thought fills him with happiness.

Slowly, very slowly, as if asking for permission, you lay your hands on his naked chest. The tips of your fingers are even softer than the palms of your hands, a testament to your nature. Not a toiler, not a warmonger. Something more peaceful and calmful, that brings his own soul rest. “I dreamt about you,” you tell him, honest as a Lemurian. He smiles at the inadvertent way you had answered the question he’d been thinking of while you were sleeping. “What was your dream about?” he asks, anchoring his weight on one hand so he can use the other to curl around the side of your throat. He can feel the pocket inside it traveling as you swallow to gather your bravery.

“A little bit like this situation right now.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to elaborate, friend.” Rafayel’s fingers dig into the supple flesh of your shoulder as they move, then gently claw at your skin as he follows the curve of your arm. He’s always been fascinated with your human skin, the way it seems entirely different from Lemurians although they look so similar. The smallest of things could break it. Bruises bloom like flowers with the lightest force. It makes him want to cage you inside his chest, where he can keep you safe from harm and make sure no one will ever hurt you again. It’s irrational, and unnecessary. But he just can’t help himself.

You narrow your eyes at him playfully, blissfully unaware of his thoughts. “Are you enjoying this?”

Now Rafayel begins to smile as well. It is entirely genuine, and only reserved for you. He is yours, heart and soul. “Of course I am,” he confesses, feeling as exposed as a newborn babe. “You always act so unbothered by me, you know. I was beginning to worry whether I was the only one caring about this … friendship.”

Your own hands have begun to wander. You place them directly on his cheeks, directing his gaze at you, as if you weren’t already the single fixed point around which his entire existence was centered around “Rafayel,” you say. “I don’t want to be just your friend.”

His breath catches. He searches your eyes for a joke, for the mockery, but you are serious. And for once, his own mind blanks at the possibility that his feelings might be reciprocated. “Do you… mean it?” he whispers, afraid. Vulnerable. She’s human, she’s a liar, she’ll lie to you, watch. This isn’t possible. This is a trick.

“Shall I prove it to you?”

Rafayel’s heart stops.

(God, he always knew you’d be responsible for his death.)

The answering smile you give at the sight of his eagerness makes his insides melt into the same constitution as a jellyfish. There is a fire at the core of his existence, and you have come to kindle it. He feels the blood rush; in his cheeks, in his body, down his abdomen. He is alight with emotion, bursting at the seams. As you flatten your palm and curve it around the shape of his chest, he chokes out a, “Yes. Please.”

Your touch is hesitant, but your eyes are determined. “I love you, Rafayel,” you finally tell him, the magical words that crack open his chest like a volcanic crater exploding into the water. He collapses against you, crushing his lips against yours, and then he can’t tell where you start and he ends because of how you meld against him. Every inch of his body comes alive with the sensation of you against him, and you fit into every curve inside his body. Your lips carefully trace the shape of his own, moving against his tenderly, carefully. He can’t bring himself to entertain the same restraint as you do: as he digs his hand into the curls of your hair, he angles your head appropriately and then delves inside to finally taste that sinful mouth he’s been dreaming about for so long.

Your answering whimper is smothered almost immediately by his beckoning tongue. Greedily, selfishly, Rafayel kisses you as if his life depends on it; like he might die without ever getting lost on your tongue, dissolving like sugar. He groans into your mouth when you carefully tangle your tongue with his own, not used to this kind of kiss. When he tries to pull back to grant you a reprieve, your heavenly lips wrap around the tip of his tongue, sucking on it in the mock-fashion of a blowjob.

He almost comes then and there, that’s how embarrassingly obsessed he is with you. Only you.

You chase him as he disentangles himself, but Rafayel quickly busies himself with your throat, littering those veins he’d been staring at like a vampire starved with kisses. “You have no idea,” he whimpers into the skin there, speaking directly into your soul, “how you make me feel. No idea. You’re dangerous.”

You don’t mock him for once. Instead, Rafayel is gently pushed to the side. Before he can worry about being rejected, you straddle his lap and sit down like a queen crowned on her throne, and the sight makes him so breathless that Rafayel finds himself falling back against the wet ground without complaint. Your lips are kiss-swollen and smiling, a sight he mentally declares to be his favorite sight in the world. “I’ll find out soon, enough,” you promise, the words as delicious as your kisses. “For example, how does this feel?”

And you grind down, your clothed core sliding over his exposed cock in a perfect glide.

Rafayel throws his head back, cussing in Lemurian. He doesn’t even realize the crack of pain as his head hits the ground, his entire nervous system too caught up with the sensation of you rubbing against the most sensitive spot of his body. There’s a sound he doesn’t immediately recognize, a quiet giggle that shakes your entire body, and then the feeling of the weight on top of him shifting as you bend down to kiss your way down this body. “My Rafayel,” you murmur against his abdomen, lips shaping the words against his hipbones. He almost trills in happiness at the sound of that. Yours. “You’re so, so, so beautiful.”

If it was possible to dissolve in extreme happiness, Rafayel would be seafoam on the water surface right now.

He digs his fingers into the hard stone, unyielding as it is, as your lips seem to vanish off his skin right before reaching his already erect dick. He catches the look of your eyes, the slight surprise at his size - he can’t lie, it makes him want to puff up in pride - but then you begin to sport a scary smile, the kind that makes Rafayel realize that you’re going to suck the life out of him, and he’s already on the brink of death from the possibility of this happening alone. “My love…” he begins to caution, but then he chokes off as each and every one of your fingers wraps itself around the shaft of his cock, and there is no consciousness to form thoughts, no thoughts at all.

You kiss the tip of the head, tongue peaking out to catch the first beads of pre-cum. “Gonna make you feel good, I promise, Raf.”

He wants to answer, he swears he does. There is just no way he can. Rafayel’s entire body arches off the ground as you take him in your mouth, and he’s barely aware of the way you slightly choke on the size of it - his hands go to your head, are you alright, are you okay, love? - yet that doesn’t stop you; the slide of his cock on your tongue continues and continues and continues, and then he feels himself hit the back of your throat and he cries out in pleasure, feeling like a star that’s exploded.

“Fuuuuuuuck.”

You sound like you want to laugh; your mouth shakes and shudders around him, and that makes him tug at your hair, unwillingly, instinctively. He’s about to apologize, but your own tugged out moan makes him hold himself back. He hates hurting you, but you seem to enjoy it, so he tangles his fingers into your hair and gently begins to guide you up and down, up and down. He hisses at the sensation, of the clenching around his dick, the gentle swipes your tongue makes when you get to. “You’re so good to me,” he tells you, watches the way your eyes light up with the praise. He’s never even thought about how lovely and romantic sex could be. Love-making. “So good.”

You hum, and Rafayel hisses; it’s a delicious kind of vibration, both torturous and pleasing. “Please,” he pleads with you, his fingers shaking. Not aware of what he’s asking. But you seem to understand, you speak the language of his soul; you hollow your checks and suck, and then his eyes do roll back so far into his own head that he thinks he can finally see his brain and all the images of you he imprinted on it. As your fingers begin to stroke in time with your tongue, he begins to feel like he’s shaking out of existence, both here and not. Both bound and untied. The coil in his abdomen begins to tighten, his toes curling at the way you drag your tongue around the tip, suckling, teasing. Your lips pop as you remove your mouth, pumping him quicker and quicker, watching him. A predator devouring its prey. “Beautiful,” you say again. “The prettiest, my Rafayel. Look at you taking it so well.”

He keens at that, hands sliding down to claw at your arms, not sure if he wants you to stop or keep going. He’a never experienced an orgasm building up like this, a literal supernova beginning to build at the edges of his perception. “I,” he gasps out, looking for words, finding none, but you help him out of his predicament by kissing him messily, the taste of his own pre-cum lacing his tongue. Your hand, every caress growing in pressure, continues to pump his cock even when he cries out against your mouth, even as his teeth find your shoulder and latch onto it to bite it. You don’t push him away, not even when he explodes into your hand, his release beginning to pearl over your hand as you continue to fuck him through the orgasm. When he begins to sob against your collarbone, pushing at your dangerous hands, he finally understands how deadly a single human being can be.

You’ve ruined him, and he couldn’t be happier about it.

The second you remove your hand, Rafayel flips you onto your back and begins to lick your fingers clean, pleased at the way your mouth drops into that cute little shocked ‘o’. Intertwining your fingers, he drags his tongue over every inch of your palm, taking note of the way your eyes zero in on the length of it. His chest rumbles, pleased; he wants to be as desirable, as perfect to you as you are to him. You are an absolute miracle, a wonder to behold. “Your turn,” he tells you, and your eyes darken.

But you shake your head. “Raf,” you say. Your voice is deadly serious. “If you don’t fuck me right now, I’m going to explode into a thousand pieces and you’ll never see me again.”

Despite the sensuality of the situation, Rafayel finds himself bursting into laughter. Your own obscene, reddened lips curl into a matching grin, and for the moment, you are both innocent again, youthfully in love. Love-making, he thinks again. I want to make love to you for the rest of my life, for all eternity. “I love you,” he says out loud. “And I don’t want you to explode. But I want to show you how much I love you, as well. I want to worship you from head to toe.”

Your eyes widen in the most adorable way. As someone who’s always lowered herself as a supplicant, you find yourself entranced by the idea of being an object of worship. “You do?” you ask, unsure.

Rafayel raises your still sticky hand to his face, not caring about the mess. He wants to be messy with you. He wants to be part of you. “There’s nothing else in this world,” he begins, kissing the inside of your wrist, nuzzling the skin there. “I adore as much as you. I already worship you. Your hands, your face, your waist, your entire body. All of it is holy to me, holier than any faith I’ve ever believed in my entire life. And if that is a sin, then I will die the happiest sinner to have ever graced this earth.”

The way you blush at his words make him want to eat you whole. He’s never once considered partaking in human flesh, and although he isn’t too fond of what could possibly be considered cannibalism, his desire borders on the urge of devouring you entire. You are just too sweet.

“I’m going to eat you,” he actually tells you. Your answering laughter only makes his chest constrict in pure, unbridled joy.

He backs the words up with another gentle nip to your fingers, his sharp teeth only stopping short of breaking the skin; he finds himself back at your throat, lapping up the thin stream of blood and listening in to the way your laughter turns into a strangled moan. “Oh,” you yelp. “I thought that was a joke.” That makes Rafayel grin; with the taste of your salt on his tongue, he begins to kiss the space inbetween your chest, his fingers gently rolling your nipples through the thin dress you’re wearing. You sigh in please, your back arching just so slightly at the feeling of his fingers on you. “Adore this chest,” he tells you, trying to stay true to his word, but he’s already getting lost in the delicious sight of you surrendering to your pleasure. Following an urge that’s been haunting him ever since that almost-kiss on the beach, he wraps his lips around the rose-bud like nub and suckles it into his mouth, the sound of your sharp outcry like music in his ears. He groans against your chest and hopes you can hear the sound inside your heart; he wants to crawl inside and live there, reside under your skin. As he kisses the nipple with the same fervor he did your mouth, his other hand gently fondles the neglected nipple until you begin to whine for him to stop, the gentle torture not enough for you.

He abandons your chest in favor of your soft, soft stomach - he smushes his cheek against it like a cat, reveling in the way it feels. “God, I love you,” he says, hands cupping your waist. You don’t answer him, too lost in the sensation of his knees beginning to grind against your exposed core for some friction: your dress has ridden up, revealing the lack of underwear. His mouth runs dry, sparing only a moment of pondering where he asks himself whether the seasinger’s attire just doesn’t include underwear; you don’t leave him any more time to think as your fingers claw their way down his back, the pain as erotic as your lewd moans. “Please,” you beg him, grinding up your hips against his. He’s rock-hard again, straining to be inside you. “Please, I need you so bad. Fuck me, Raf.”

“You’ve got a filthy mouth,” he grits out. It’s not a reprimand, more an articulation of how crazy you drive him. Rafayel’s hands glide to the small of your back, lifting you up to receive him, readying you. You’re staring straight into his eyes, panting heavily, and he wonders whether you’re actually seeing him or staring into his soul. “I love you,” you say in response, clinging to the words like a lifeline. His heart jumps and jumps and jumps in chest, struggling to break out of its cage to join hands with yours. The head of his cock nudges against your labia, opening you up, and you fold open like a pond lily, more beautiful than even the oceansvale you adore. “I love you so much.”

“But I,” he tells you, voice strained, “love you more.”

And he pushes inside.

For a second, it feels like all kingdom come. It’s blasphemous and religious all at once; Rafayel feels whole, feels like you’ve become one person as he stretches you open. You feel so perfect around him, so, so perfect. “Oh, gods,” you whisper, the only time you take the name of your articles of faith in vain, a fact that he’s arrogantly proud of, and then Rafayel draws back and curls back inside again, the head of his dick nuzzling against something spongy that makes you wail like a woman stabbed. He almost pulls out, if not for the way you kiss him like this is the last time you ever will, your tongue inside his mouth before he can register, and then the hunger you illicit in him is too much to tolerate and Rafayel begins to fuck into you.

“Full,” you whimper, the words drawling together on your tongue as if you don’t even have the peace of mind to formulate the thoughts properly. Rafayel drags his cock back, pulling out almost entirely before he snaps it back inside; you bare your teeth at him in the same manner as he had done before he had bitten you, which would have made him smile at the way his behavior’s rubbing off on you. But there’s no space to do anything, no controls inside his mind. He’s become prisoner to your gummy walls, the way your warmth swallows his whole, every clench of your pussy around him like a shooting star frying his nervous system alive. “So perfect,” he whines, letting his instincts take over, and your fingers shakily hold on to his shoulder as he begins to piston in out of you. The slapping of flesh meeting skin is so loud it makes you screw your eyes shut in embarrassment, yet you offer up your body all the same. Your legs interlock behind his back as he continues to grind into you, in and out, in and out, in and out. “God, you take me like you were made for me. You’re a dream come true. You are. You are.”

“Rafayel,” comes your pitiful answer, but he’s not paying attention to you right now, not when his body is so hyperfixated on the way you make him feel and the way your own pleasure becomes the forefront of his mind. “S’too much. Slow down.” Your pussy flutters around him, dragging him back in every time he tries to pull out, and his solution is to pump into you quicker, harder, deeper. There is no sound, none that could be described when his cockhead begins to kiss your cervix, and now Rafayel’s chasing after your climax, desperate to get you there before he comes again. There are tears pooling at the edges of your eyes, tears which he licks up with the same delicacy he would use to gorge on you, lose himself in the taste of your cunt. His own tears blur his sight, dripping onto your face, searing into the skin there. “I can’t,” he bawls, sounding entirely too heartbroken for the way he fucks you, the way he folds your body into position to take him better, take him deeper. The bloody trails your nails leave on him don’t even make an impression on him anymore. He sobs into the curve of your throat, chasing, chasing. He ruts into you like a man possessed.

Even in your fucked out state, your shaky hands brush away the tears from his face. He hisses into the palm of your hand, swallowing his sobs, ignoring the hiccups. His own hand finds its way down your body until he’s sure he’s found your clitoris, finding the confirmation in your stuttered out “Fu-u-uck,”, and the hasty circles he draws have your thighs shaking in time with the constant snapping of his own hips, meeting him halfway as he chases your climax, pounding you into the ground. “Gonna come, gonna come, gonnacomegonnacomecomeRaf.” The last of your sentence becomes unintelligible as your orgasm hits you like a tidal wave, and he holds you close to his chest and continues to fuck you through it as his own begins to spill inside you, no stop to it seemingly in sight, up until the heartbreaking sob that falls out of your mouth breaks him out his trance and snaps him awake. His hips come to a stuttering halt, the picture of a stumbling drunk, then stop completely, and Rafayel slumps, still inside you. He can feel his semen dripping outside, running down his thighs, pooling on the ground. He’s dimly fascinated by the fact that he even has this much cum, but the majority of his consciousness focusses on the way you kiss his forehead, his head, everything you can reach.

“Don’t expect me to move anytime soon,” he mumbles from where his face is smushed against your boobs, and your laughter makes his head shake like the oceanvale bobs in the wind. “Well, darling. You’ve certainly showed me how much you love me.”

“Oh, I haven’t even gotten started, Raf.”

This time, it’s he who laughs. He hides his face in your chest and laughs, loud and free, in a way that he’s never been able to ever since he’s been a child. He feels your fingers comb through his blue-pink hair and feels like he’s finally home.

When you wake up from another nightmare in the night, crying for Rafayel like he’s abandoned you, he kisses every tear away until he’s positively certain you’ll never remember the way that dream felt again. You are safe in his arms, joined to his hip, bonded to his soul.

Caught up in so much luck, Rafayel forgot the looming threat.

He forgot how perfectly capable your father was of stealing away Rafayel’s happiness

The memory of Lyra drifted away from him as steadily as his craving for revenge did. She had raised him like her own in his dead mother’s stead: they’d been best friends once, and she became his only connection the mother that had labored and labored to give birth to him. Lyra had always warned him to take good care of his long hair, as it looked exactly the same as his mother’s, and she’d spent all her free time brushing the tangles out. It wasn’t Rafayel she was seeing, not really. But if she was chasing the after-image of her best friend in her son, then there really wasn’t anything he was going to do about it, not when he looked into her face and could only see his mother. They had been united in their loss, and then loss had divided them again.

It’s mother’s long hair, and Lyra’s plea for him to maintain it, that ends up being weaponized against him. Someone is tearing at his hair like a leash, pulling him from the safety of the pool. “Father, no!” You shout. You’ve never raised your voice in anger, not once. “Let go of him!”

“I’ve told you countless times!” Your father’s voice overpowers your own easily, as loud as the thunder before the lightning, as loud as the bells inside Dolphin’s Hall. Rafayel had always guessed you’d been trying to drown out the sound of your father’s shouting, the way he’d done your entire life. “They’re not to be trusted! Ask him! Ask the bastard why he’s entertaining you in the first place!”

You draw back from the accusation, the word ‘entertaining’ like a slap to the face. “He loves me,” you defend him, but your voice has become meek, small. As Rafayel thrashes in your father’s and a second man’s hold, he catches sight of your pale face, the way it’s stained with fear. For his life? Or because of an anticipated betrayal?

“Bullshit.” The unknown man spits at the ground.

“I love her,” Rafayel manages to stay. There’s a punch thrown at him that bites the taste of blood back into his mouth, foreign, not as welcome the way your blood had been. His teeth have cut into the insides of his cheek. “Which I can say with more certainty than you can, you bastard. Yes, I’ve entered her life under a guise. You murdered the woman who raised me. You’ve killed countless of my siblings. But I saw the way you starved your daughter of love and affection, and I vowed I’d never do that to her.”

“Do not play hero with me,” your father says, the hatred in his voice like the lash of a whip. Your own small hand spins out, and for a moment, Rafayel scared he’s lost you, that it’s him you’re going to strike. But your fingers wrap around your father’s wrist, as i you can do anything, as if this wasn’t the hand controlling your entire life. “Let him go, or I swear I’ll tell everyone,” you vow. The threat inside your voice is as venomous as the enmity your father’s had contained. “I’ll tell them where that caviar you so adore comes from, I swear it. Let him go or kill us both. Or maybe I’ll kill you.”

Your father halts in his shock. Rafayel can’t tell what is happening, his head still lowered to the ground by the hand pinning him there, tearing at his hair. It loosens then, and he’s kicked aside, like some stray dog that was a bother and is then forgotten. When he looks up, he sees you locked in a stare-off with your father - your father, whose looking at you as if he’s never once seen you in his entire life.

Perhaps he hasn’t.

“Walk,” is the only thing your father says then. “Walk before I forget myself.”

Rafayel struggles to sit up, to defend you as you had defended him, but you shake your head at him, the dismissal clear enough.

He watches as you leave him behind. How ironic, for you to have feared abandonment, when here he sits being abandoned now. Lost and alone.

In the following days, you don’t turn up. When Rafayel comes to search your human house, despite the fact that your father had threatened to kill him, the building is empty, stripped of all its belongings. None of the vendors in the city know about what has happened, giving only absentminded shrugs and I-do-not-cares. You’ve turned into an actual dream, a fantasy conjured by his love-sick brain, a haunting nightmare. He finds himself clenching his chest as if the heart contained inside was going to give out, broken apart like an empty shell by a mere mortal’s love.

He fears he’s going to die like this.

Alone, and unmourned, and forgotten.

When his desperation mounts in impulsiveness, he either decides to flee Whalefall City or look for you one last time. He can’t remain here, not when he looks everywhere for you, in the strange faces of this place or the gentle tosses of the waves in the harbor, in the sound of a melodious seasinger calling to prayer. It’s driving him insane. He turns up on the steps of Dolphin’s Hall, half-crazed from the loss of you.

It’s there where he witnesses the miracle of the Gods.

It’s not you, sadly; but your shrine maiden, freshly appointed as the new seasinger, hurries thorugh the throng of hall-going attendees. “It’s you!” she exclaims, a haunting echo of the very first words you addressed at him.

That makes him wary. “How do you know who I am?”

She blinks as if Rafayel was the one acting suspicious. “Well, because she’s told me, of course. And your description doesn’t really fit to any of the people here. In a city like this, it’s easy to recognize a new face.” The girl - no, woman - unfolds a letter, revealing a penmanship that he’s never seen, but which he recognizes with his heart.

Rafayel, the very first word on the paper shapes, in elegant loops, written in the soft scribbles of love.

He’s gone to meet you before the letter can hit the ground. Your successor, shaking her head, watches him go.

You’re right where you said where you would be, sitting in the surf like a mermaid would, your human legs anchored in the sand as the ocean drinks the earth. Your arms are crossed over your chest, over clothing he’s never seen before: garment from below the sea. His heart pounds inside his chest.

When you turn your head to face him, the smile on your face is entirely real.

Rafayel hurries to meet you, and then you are embracing each other like one soul being knit together; there was a physical pain in being separated from you that had strangled him for every second that you had been gone, drowning on land like a beached fish. He swipes your windswept hair out of your face, behind your ears, holding your head in his hands. You fit there, as always, like a missing puzzle piece. “I thought … you wouldn’t want to see me again,” he chokes out, the words a struggle. His tongue is heavy with sorrow, weighed down by his betrayal. “I mean, I wanted to tell you the truth. Long before I ever wanted to confess my feelings. I was going to do this properly. But I didn’t expect you.”

You snort, as if amused. “I could see that.”

His thumb strokes your cheekbone, as gentle as a clam reaches to embrace its pearl. “No, you don’t understand,” he tells you, and his chest unlocks in the same way it had when he had allowed himself to be vulnerable with you. “From the very beginning, I hadn’t expected you. I came to you with a heart heavy with hatred, blind with pain. I was so sure of myself, so sure of what was going to happen. But you reached inside me and changed everything. I’ve never even realized how painful it was to be me. Not until you administered the cure.” Rafayel leans his forehead against yours, tasting his tears. Crying, for the first time in so long. Only you. Only you. “Say something. Please.”

“Rafayel.” Your voice is wondrous. When Rafayel looks into your eyes, he only sees pure and unadulterated love, the kind of love that had drawn him off the edge of self-destruction and right into your safe arms. “Don’t you realize you’ve done the exact same thing with me? You’ve come into my life and filled it to the brim with a kind of joy I’ve never thought would be possible for me. I had resigned myself to my fate, to always be under the thumb of my father, and then you came, with all your unbridled anger and pompousness and unconditional love. If it hadn’t been for you, I might never have been able to shake off my parents’ expectations and build a life for myself with you.”

“With me?” Rafayel speaks the world gingerly. As if he can’t let himself believe it. As if he can’t let himself believe that the kinds of happy endings Lyra had always lectured him about were possible, after all.

If you witness true love, hold on to it.

Your fingers are reverent on his face, your smile so all-encompassingly loving. “How else are we going to heal this deep rift between mermaids and humans? I promised to show you, after all.”

Rafayel bursts into laughter. It’s an unexpected reaction, as unexpected as the miracle in his life that had been you, love of his life you. “That doesn’t sound too bad,” he admits, and instead of taking your hand as he had done so long ago under the secretive gaze of the moon, Rafayel finally gets to kiss you in the light of day, claiming you in front of the whole world.

490 notes · View notes