Chapter Text
The phone had no business being here.
And yet there it lay, on the very bottom, among the silt and the wreckage, in the ribs of a long-sunk boat, glowing stubbornly in the green dusk where the sun never reached.
It wasn’t the phone itself that was strange - humans were forever dropping their trinkets into the sea - but that it still glowed. By the time such things sank this far down, their owners were usually long dead, and the things themselves blind and harmless: spent, switched off, silenced for good. This one still breathed light, as though it were alive.
Louis should have left it be and swum away; the caution of a long life demanded exactly that. But something - the same curiosity that had killed more of his kind than all the nets of men together - made him reach out and draw a finger across the smooth, cold glass.
The screen woke, and a photograph bloomed across the whole of it.
Himself.
Silver scales, wet dark hair, half a face above the black water - caught in the very fraction of a second before he knew he was being watched.
For several long moments Louis could only hold the glowing thing and keep perfectly still. His blood knocked at his temples, duller than surf against rock. Someone had seen him. Not a scrap of foam, not a seal’s slick head, not a glint on a wave - him, as he truly was. For a century he had been careful. For a century no human had come close enough to turn this damning glass eye on him. He knew far too well what was done to the ones who were seen - the memory of it still ached beneath his ribs like an old wound touched with cold water. And now his face lay in a stranger’s hand, locked in a sliver of dead light, ready to travel anywhere, to anyone.
Everything in him dropped, as though the seabed itself had gone out from under him.
He shot upward and broke the surface - just enough to look around.
The town on the cliff still slept in the dawn haze: blind windows, an empty pier, a thin thread of smoke above the one chimney that had woken. The cliffs stood empty. The beach stood empty. But farther out, rocking on the slow swells gone oily with first light, a small boat lay at anchor - the sort you take out not for fish but for something more interesting - and on its deck a man stood looking straight at the place where Louis had just been.
Even at a distance he saw him too clearly. Tall, gangly-long, in a shirt open at the chest; dark hair, long uncut, fell in spray-wet waves below his shoulders and clung to his cheekbones. His face was open, boyish, nothing at all like a hunter’s. The man wasn’t hiding, wasn’t levelling a harpoon - he simply stood there, frozen, binoculars at his eyes, and there was far more of a child’s astonishment in him than of any threat.
The man slowly lowered the binoculars.
Their eyes met.
“…Oh, you have got to be joking,” Louis breathed, to no one.
On the boat, Harry gripped the binoculars so hard he nearly dropped them overboard.
He’d been chasing this half his life - fishermen’s yarns, blurred photographs, the kind of thing colleagues traded sidelong looks over: there he goes again, off with his fairy stories. He’d learned to laugh along, and never stopped looking. And now one of those stories rocked thirty feet from him, half-risen from the black water, looking back at him - flat, unimpressed, like someone interrupted at something important.
His heart was somewhere up in his throat. Harry lowered the binoculars slowly - the way you smother a sudden move near a wild animal, so as not to spook it - and couldn’t hold back a laugh, cracked, half exhilaration and half fear.
“Well,” he managed, to no one in particular. “That’s new.”
The creature in the water was lovelier and more terrible than anything Harry had seen in his years at sea. Skin pale, all but luminous in the grey dawn, scattered with fine silver scales across the cheekbones and shoulders, as though the sea had dusted him with frost. Wet dark strands clung to his brow. His eyes - impossibly bright, blue gone green, like shallows over sand - were cold and clever. And where a man would have had legs, the black water hid something long and supple, shimmering now blue, now green, like an oil-slick in the sun; it stirred lazily beneath the surface, and a slow, heavy wave rolled out across the whole bay.
Harry discovered he had forgotten how breathing was done.
He made himself smile - as though this were a curious dolphin and not a creature that could haul him under with one hand. His fingers drifted toward the camera at his chest; he forced them to stay. Something told him: one wrong move, and it would be over before it began.
“Hey,” he called, careful and soft, across the strip of water. “Easy. I’m not...” He faltered, not knowing how to finish, and blurted the first thing that came: “You’ve got a beautiful tail.”
He groaned inwardly. A beautiful tail. God.
The creature raised an eyebrow. Something stirred again below, and a wave rolled lazily up to slap the hull - not a threat even, just a small warning wrapped in boredom.
“A beautiful tail,” it repeated, and the voice came back startlingly human: low, dry as old rope, and steeped through with irony. “Imagine that. And here I thought you’d open with a harpoon, like all decent people.” It tilted its head, considering him the way you consider an amusing but not especially bright fish. “A human. With a camera and a death wish. Didn’t your fairy tales warn you about creatures like me?”
“They did,” Harry said honestly. And, surprising himself, he smiled - wide, open, thoroughly boyish. “That’s why I came. As for the death wish - not really. I just want a good story for the grandchildren.”
The creature blinked, as though it hadn’t expected that answer. The tail stirred again below - and this time, as if against its owner’s will, lifted above the surface just enough to draw a band of dawn-light along the scales. Showing off. He’d have denied it under any torture.
“Let me guess what comes next,” it said. “You ‘just want to talk.’”
“Actually, yes.” Harry tipped forward over the rail and whistled, watching the gleaming tail. “And... you’re the first one who hasn’t bolted or tried to drown me on sight. I’m calling that a personal best.” He gestured vaguely, as though the motion might finish his sentence for him. “All that… shimmer.”
The creature huffed. Something at the corner of its mouth threatened to move, and it crushed the threat by force of will. It drifted a little closer: wary, keeping the water between them, but closer than it had any business being.
“You saw something shiny, and you couldn’t help but follow it. Like a stray dog.”
“Guilty,” Harry agreed, folding his arms and making no attempt to wipe the spray off his face. “Though honestly, your lot could stand to be less sparkly. It’s very distracting.” He pretended to weigh it. “And anyway - most stray dogs are too busy with the chase to make conversation.”
That earned him a reluctant smirk and another wave across the bow.
“Right. The lesson of the day: merfolk should dull themselves down for human convenience.” The creature flicked a wet strand from its brow and tipped its chin up. “Tell you what, Curly. Throw the camera overboard, and I might just consider not dragging you under for the next ship to find. Only to see whether your nerve holds.”
The threat came teasing; the look beneath it did not - bright, testing, sharp as the edge of coral. The camera was the real danger; the camera held his face. All the rest of it, all this sparring, was only a way to measure how foolish this man was, and how dangerous.
Harry clutched the camera to his chest and gasped as though wounded.
“Over my dead body. Which, now that I think of it, is well on the table.” He grinned, entirely unbothered. “But if you actually wanted me drowned, you’d have done it already. Admit it - you’re interested.” He leaned harder over the rail, beaming like a fool. “It’s the hair. Works every time.”
The creature laughed: short, startled, as if against its own will, and for it soaked him with a clean wall of water. The laugh seemed to frighten it; it had come up from some long-locked room, from a part of it that hadn’t made a sound in a very, very long time.
“Interested,” it repeated, hiding its confusion behind sarcasm. “More like infuriated.” But it didn’t leave. Instead it folded its arms along the boat’s edge and rested its chin on them, looking up with a tangle of irritation and something it refused to name. “You’re lucky I’m bored today. And maybe the hair is decent. For a human.” The tail traced a slow ring of ripples beneath it. “So. What’s a land-dweller doing out here, really - besides stalking legends for an audience?”
Harry scrubbed the salt from his eyes and shook his head like a dog, leaving his hair to hang in wet ropes in every direction. He looked thoroughly ridiculous. He only smiled wider.
“For an audience? You wound me. I’ll have you know I’m a respectable marine biologist.” He puffed out his chest. “I study wildlife. Dolphins, whales, sharks. And, as of this morning, apparently you.”
The creature looked him over - all those long limbs, the dripping mane of hair, the open shirt, the expensive camera - and found, with visible annoyance, that the man was handsome enough to be both educated and good to look at, which struck it as a flagrant injustice.
“A biologist,” it said, in no hurry to part with its doubt. “You look more like a washed-up rock musician than a scientist.”
“Now that,” said Harry, dragging a hand through his wet hair, “is the best thing anyone’s said to me all week.” He leaned in as though sharing a secret. “I do play guitar though. Badly.”
The creature let the quiet sit a moment. And then an old, cold thought stirred in it - the kind that had saved its people more than once and ended other lives just as often. This man had a camera, and who knew how many pictures had already gone out into the world, how many eyes had already seen what they shouldn’t. The surest way to put out a curiosity was to lead it somewhere it could not come back from. The creature’s eyes narrowed, gone thoughtful in a way that would have warned someone cleverer.
“There’s a place,” it said, lower now. “Down where the light doesn’t reach. Where you’d see what no one up here has ever seen.” A pause, soft as a lure. “I could take you. It’s worth the trouble.”
Harry’s eyebrows climbed. The deep, on the word of a creature he’d known ten minutes - it was thrilling and reckless in exactly the proportions he liked. He braced his elbows on the rail and looked down into the water with open wonder.
“You mean it,” he said. “You’d take me down there?” A glance at the dark water. “You’re not just trying to drown me, are you?”
There it is, Louis thought, and let a slow, easy smile cross his face. Too easy.
“Of course not,” he murmured, his gaze drifting over the man’s frame. “I’ll show you everything. Things no one’s ever seen.”
He had met naïve humans before, but rarely one this far gone - bright, eager, trusting like an animal that has never once been hurt. How did he imagine he’d breathe down there? Louis knew how it went: a warm body grows heavy in the cold dark, and the light goes out of the eyes, and there is only silence and the long way down. It was almost a shame to put out something so alive. But Louis had trained himself out of pity long ago - pity cost too much; and humans, in his experience, pitied nothing and no one, so why should he pay them a kindness they had never known.
So he told himself. And nearly believed it.
Harry didn’t hesitate for a second: he was already shrugging the jacket off his shoulders and flinging it somewhere into the bottom of the boat; his fingers flew at his shirt buttons, as though he meant to dive that very minute, just as he was.
“Brilliant!” he burst out, his eyes alight in a way that left Louis taken aback. “Hang on, let me just grab the waterproof camera, it’s here somewhere… aha!” He surfaced from the depths of his bag clutching a small camera in triumph - shirt half undone, wet strands slid down over his brow - and he smiled: wide, bright, disarming, thoroughly childlike, the way you smile when the world has turned out exactly as wonderful as you’d always secretly hoped to find it. “Ready. Do I hold my breath? Or is there some sort of mermaid trick for it? How deep are we going? Will it be cold? God, I’ve dreamed about this for years, you have no idea...”
He was already swinging a leg over the side.
And Louis, who a minute before had been so pleased with himself, so sure it was all going just as it should, suddenly found that he wasn’t moving.
He looked at this absurd man - half-undressed, glowing, ready on a single word to leap into the black water toward a creature that had just promised to show him “everything” and meant to show him only the bottom - and could not make sense of what was in front of him. Where was the caution? Where was the saving animal fear that kept his whole kind afloat? He was used to humans who shrieked at the sight of him, crossed themselves, snatched for an oar. This one strained toward him the way a boy strains after a drifting balloon: heedless, delighted, not pausing a single second to think that the balloon might burst right there in his hands.
It was so stupid. So impossibly, insultingly stupid that something in Louis lurched and went wrong.
Damn it, he thought, almost in despair. What in the deep is happening. It’s simple enough: smile, beckon, lead him down - and there’s one threat the fewer, one witness the fewer. He’d done it before; all his kind had done it; that was how it was done. Drown the brat and swim home. What are you waiting for.
He looked into that upturned, trusting, foolishly happy face - and could not.
“You’re completely mad,” he said aloud, and beneath the mockery, for the first time, a real edge of exasperation rang through. “Do you have any sense of self-preservation at all?”
Harry paused halfway, one leg already over the rail, and blinked as though the question genuinely puzzled him.
“Self-preservation.” He scratched the back of his head. “Right. That. No, I... I think I lost it around the time I decided to swim with great whites without a cage.” He waved it off. “But come on. When’s the next time I get a merman for a tour guide? Worth the risk.”
“Oh, for the love of the deep - are you serious?”
And there the exasperation broke through - not as anger, but as something far more inconvenient. Because the man said it lightly, gladly, without a moment’s doubt that Louis would do him no harm - and would have been dead within the quarter hour, and never understood why. And the unbearable part was that Louis, it turned out, didn’t want that. Didn’t want to put out one more warm little flame. And that unasked-for, shameful tenderness enraged him more than anything in the world.
He brought his tail down hard and threw a whole wall of water over the boat - less to soak the man than to knock a drop of sense into him - and dropped beneath the surface in a clean, furious arc.
A second later he was up again, eyes blazing.
“You stupid little brat. I’m a merman. Do you understand what that means? My kind kill people.”
He struck the water again, and out of him broke despair - at the man, at himself, at this whole absurd, unbearable minute.
“Now get out of here. And don’t let me see you again.”
Harry came up out of the spray drenched through, hair plastered to his face, shirt clinging to him. He spluttered, swiped the strands away - and started to protest, but caught the look on Louis’s face and stopped cold. The fury was real. The tail lashed just under the surface, like something deciding.
He went still. It came to him at last - all at once and to the bottom - exactly what he’d been so blithely bantering with this whole time. He swallowed. He had, perhaps, pushed it too far.
“Wait...”
Louis glared up at him, every line of his body drawn tight. Even a couple of feet shorter, even at a disadvantage, he looked every inch the predator the legends promised. But there was a hitch in it too, a hesitation that didn’t match the snarl - caught between wanting the man gone for good and being unable to look away from his recklessness.
Harry chose his words carefully.
“Look. I get it. You’re angry.” He raised both hands, fingers spread - the universal shape of no harm. “I’m sorry. I got carried away. I don’t mean any disrespect. I’m just… curious.”
“You think this is a game.” Louis’s voice dropped to something low and dangerous. “I should drown you here and now, for being this arrogant and this careless...”
The smile finally fell from Harry’s face. He pulled his leg back over the rail and stepped down, away from the edge, and all the playfulness drained into something quieter.
“No. No, I don’t.” He kept his hands up. “I was being stupid. I know what your kind can do - I’ve read the stories. I just got too carried away. That’s on me.” A beat; and his eyes met the merman’s, without flinching now. “I’m going.”
He gathered his jacket and his camera, then paused before he’d quite turned away. And when he spoke again it was lower - almost an apology to the water itself.
“For what it’s worth - I really did just want to talk.”
The engine coughed and caught. The boat began to come about.
Louis watched it go, anger and disbelief still warring across his face, and beneath them ran a thin, unwelcome thread of disappointment. No human had ever behaved so idiotically in front of him - nor left so alive, by his own grace. The man was a complete fool: reckless, loud, impossible. He ought to forget this ridiculous morning by sundown, the way you forget the gulls squabbling over the pier.
He knew he wouldn’t. Already knew it. And that frightened him more than any camera.
As the boat drew toward shore, almost lost beneath the noise of the engine, Louis muttered into the empty air - whether about the man or about himself - “Insufferable,” and went under.
***