#sleepy holllow fanfic

[yespolkadotkitty]

Siren

This little drabble is a gift to @nathyfaith as she made me a gorgeous cover for my Ichabbie fic, Paperback Hero.

****

Of all the brainless, charmless activities I could be engaging in today.. Advertising was not what I suspected I would be doing.

Ichabod Crane rubbed a hand over his tired eyes as he waited at the massive tent that had been erected half a mile from the shore of Llyn y Fan Fach, the Welsh lake. Said to be the home of the mythical Lady of the Lake, it was perfect.

For dreams. For storytellers. For thinkers and artists.

Not for perfume adverts.

Ichabod cursed the bottle of beautiful Welsh whiskey that had led him to this beautiful lake. The scenery was magnificent, but he didn’t look forward to his friends and peers laughing it up at him portraying a sailor lured to his potential death by a mermaid - nay, a siren. Yes, that’s what the perfume house had named its concoction of cedar, birch and lemon.

He shook his head. He was a Royal Shakespeare Company actor, not some sort of…. model. But he’d made the bet. And he had lost.

Whiskey was a cruel, faithless mistress.

“Mr Crane?” A skinny twenty-something holding a clipboard rushed over and offered him a cup of coffee. “Got you coffee, black.”

“May angels kiss your feet.” Ichabod accepted it gratefully.

The intern eyed him. “Whatever, dude. Costume trailer’s that way.”

Ichabod sipped the coffee - thick, dark, just as he liked it - and followed the intern’s gesturing hand. His boots crunched on the litter of tiny rock and fossil fragments blanketing the shore of the huge lake.

It was a warm day, but despite that, clouds gathered, their moody grey a perfect reflection of Ichabod’s mood.

He was halfway through a second internal monologue, now caffeine fueled, about what a crock of horse excrement this filming would be, when the door of the trailer he mooched towards opened.

And every single thought dropped out of his head.

He’d never seen a mermaid before - no one had, of course, they were a product of myth.

But standing on the Welsh beach, miles from civilisation, he looked into the stranger’s eyes, and for a moment he believed that he was just a humble sailor who longed to kneel at the feet of a water goddess.

Iridescent scales had been brushed on to her dark skin, the odd peek of sunlight catching on specks of gold. A crown of corals threaded through her obsidian hair, curls of which wove around her heart shaped face like ivy.

The magnificent tail had that been created for her hid her legs as she descended the steps of the trailer, and her gait made even the too-modern, hulking vehicle take on a sort of otherworldly magic.

This was the model he’d be working with on the advert?

Ichabod suddenly no longer regretted the drinking or the fact he’d lost a bet. That he got to be in this siren’s orbit was worth a thousand hangovers.

He crossed the ground towards her and extended his hand to the siren who had unwittingly sunk the ship of his heart.