Chapter Text
The ocean lay still and peaceful as the sun grew nearer and nearer to the horizon, casting a darkness on the surface where waves lulled gently with the breeze and the current deep within. Few creatures milled about, content to follow the current wherever it took them. It was peaceful; quiet. Calm.
Until--
"Come on, Rolo, keep up with us or you'll get left behind!" Prince Lance called behind him and his companion Nyma.
A huff sounded right after, though it seemed labored. "I'm trying! You know I don't swim well after eating!"
A higher voice laughed at that. "That's a lame excuse, Rolo, and you know it!"
The three merfolk rounded up together despite their laughs, the two ahead slowing down for the one behind to catch up. Lance knew very well that it wasn't wise for them to be exploring, especially this close to sundown, but his need for adventure--and more human artifacts for his collection--outweighed his desire to avoid the consequences.
"The faster we get there, the sooner we can see if there's anything I don't already have," Lance reasoned, knowing Rolo was concerned about their adventuring despite the fact that he wouldn't say anything.
"Besides," Nyma reasoned, flipping her golden mane of hair behind her and out of her face as she swam beside them. "We'll be fine. Nothing happened last time, right?"
"Right," Rolo drawled, though his face was one of suspicion.
"Then what could go wrong?"
Rolo's eyes widened, and he tugged on the ends of his long hair, tied into a ponytail out of his face. "Don't say that!" He whined, though he chuckled despite himself. "You're asking for trouble, saying things like that."
Lance rolled his eyes and picked up his pace, forcing his friends to stop talking and work to catch up. He could see the looming figure of the ship in the distance, growing bigger as they drew nearer. This was one of Lance's favorite things to do--he loved exploring sunken shipwrecks for human artifacts, loved adding them to his growing collection. He was fascinated by the lives of humans, fascinated by the prospect of living on land. He'd collected numerous things from various shipwrecks, but his favorite item to collect by far had to be the books. Those he kept in trunks on the shore of his little hideaway cavern, dry and safe for him to read whenever he made the time--which he did often. He loved reading in his spare time, loved learning about the strange imagined worlds the humans came up with.
It was in those times that he was at least somewhat grateful for the history between merfolk and humankind. He'd heard the stories from his parents numerous times, and couldn't help feeling saddened by the way things were now. They'd lived peacefully alongside each other, merfolk and humans, aiding each other with technology and food and language--hence Lance's ability to read the books he found. There was peace--until the humans grew wary of the merfolk, and the merfolk likewise grew wary of the humans and their intentions.
"Humans like their power," King Alfor, Lance's father, always said. "When they learned of our magic, our bond with the ocean, they did not like that they didn't have control over our home, over us. They believed it was a power they could harness, a power we were keeping from them; they wanted it badly. So badly that they kidnapped one of our own."
The mermaid they'd kidnapped had been King Alfor's eldest sister, Moira. She had a love for humans known by all, a detail carried down in all the stories. They'd taken her, experimented and tortured her in the hopes that she would tell them what they wanted. But it was all in vain--unable to give them what they wanted, she was tortured to death, leaving Alfor as the next in line to take the throne. The humans who'd kidnapped her, leaders of the Galra kingdom, had presented her body and dumped her in the ocean for her family and people to see. It was a sign clear as day: it meant war.
Enraged and wracked with grief, Alfor, the merfolk, and the ocean herself fought against Galra kingdom and their allies, drowning ship after ship and destroying the architecture of the land in vicious hurricanes and tsunamis. The Galra ruthlessly captured and killed many merfolk soldiers, often returning them to the sea in the worst conditions.
It was a war that went on for decades. It took a toll on many on both sides; Lance had been born long after the war, but his eldest siblings and elderly neighbors would tell him of the times they could barely remember, when his father did not have that stern, constant frown, when his face was not marred by the scars and stress of war, when heart had not been hardened by the blood and cries of his people and the people of land. There were things his father had seen and lived through that haunted him to this day, decades later. He and the Galra King finalized a peace treaty that ended the war--and the relationship between humankind and merfolk. The Ocean, who had taken her mutilated children in her arms of seafoam and eased them into the foam of her embrace, was calm once again, and humans allowed their children to walk in the sun once again. Peace, however tense and late-coming, was achieved.
The King found love in his wife, the late Queen, and slowly but surely the kingdom began to pick up the pieces and mend. Soon there was light again, and the merfolk flourished and thrived anew. It helped, of course, to see their hardened king open his heart and lead with a kind heart; it helped even more to see that heart softened with each of his children. And although the light in his eyes darkened with the passing of his queen, shortly after the birth of Lance, his kingdom was there for him. Just as he was strong for his kingdom during the war, they were strong for him during their mourning.
"Lance!"
Startled out of his thoughts, Lance turned to look at Nyma. She raised a thin brow at him, but pointed ahead, already used to his habit of getting lost in thought. He followed her finger to the shipwreck that had grown much closer than he'd realized. He shot her a grateful grin and shot off into the gaping opening at the hull of the ship.
"Come on!" He called behind him, ignoring the exasperated groan of Rolo and the amused snicker of Nyma.
He searched through every nook and cranny of the hull, amazed at the amount of random knick-knacks everywhere. A lot of them he knew the names of--there were forks and spoons and knives, and plenty of human clothing in the trunks. He was quite fond of the bowls and plates that held things, particularly liquids, on land. But there were other things he didn't recognize, things he hadn't had the chance to take to his "Land Consultant," as she liked to be called. The object holding his attention in particular was round, with a thin chain hanging off a small hoop at what Lance assumed was the object's top. There was a small knob just before the hoop, and Lance pressed it with his thumb, blinking and jerking slightly when the golden surface popped open to reveal a white surface underneath. It was marked with numbers, and had two black lines pointing at different numbers, one longer than the other.
He had no certain idea of what it could be, but he tucked it away into the bag at his waist for safekeeping. He swam forward to another area of the hull, but stopped abruptly, going defensively rigid all over as he caught a scent that had red flags going off in his head.
"Rolo, Nyma," he called lowly to his friends, afraid to talk louder than a murmur.
Luckily his friends heard him. "What, Lance?" Rolo drawled, voice close to a whine as he turned away from the trunk he was inspecting. Nyma also looked up, her own form going still as she took in Lance's body language. "What do you--"
"Rolo," Nyma said, voice just as hushed as Lance's. This caught Rolo's attention, eyes widening and stance mirroring his friends'. He looked between the two, eyes landing on Lance with a silent question. They drifted closer toward their prince, eyes scanning everywhere as they did for danger.
"What is it?" Nyma whispered, eyes peering into the darkness of the ocean outside the shipwreck.
"I smell something," Lance murmured, slowly drifting to follow the scent against his better judgment. "It smells like..."
They all locked onto the source of the smell right as Nyma uttered the word.
"Blood," she breathed in horror.
A mangled corpse, too mutilated to identify what it was before its gruesome death, hovered twenty feet away from them, trails of blood thick in the water around it. The creature at fault was in the middle of the cloud, a great white shark still in the heat of a frenzy. In silent agreement, the three mermaids swam backwards, keeping their eyes locked on the predator before them--but this was their mistake, Lance realized as he felt Nyma stiffen at his side, her body having bumped into one of the various stacks of trunks. It fell into the side of the ship with a loud thunk, deafeningly loud in the silence of the sea.
For two blissful seconds, nothing happened. But then the shark was swimming their way at frightening speed, and Lance's instincts kicked in.
"Swim back now!" He shouted, pushing his friends into action. They shot off as fast as they could, but Lance easily took the lead, a much faster swimmer than the two of them. He grabbed their hands, tugging them behind him and pushing himself to swim harder, slicing through water to put as much distance between them and the shark as possible. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, fear and his determination to keep his friends safe fueling him. The shark swam after them, hot on their tails.
Suddenly, a high pitched trill reached them in the water, alarmed, concerned, and wonderfully familiar to Lance.
"Blue!" He called, and sent an urgent trill back to the creature in question. He followed the sound of the answering call and gained a burst of speed when he spotted the pod of dolphins swimming towards them. There were eight of them total, all familiar to Lance, but the one he'd addressed swam to him the fastest, giving him a spiel of concerned clicks and squeaks and urging her pod to surround the three mermaids protectively. The shark halted, threatened and outnumbered, backing away from the aggressively circling pod and leaving before a confrontation could begin.
"That," Rolo heaved as they drifted together amongst the dolphins, "is why we don't go to places we aren't supposed to go!"
Lance frowned, breathing heavily himself. "They don't usually lurk around the shipwrecks," he said. "He must've chased his prey pretty far if it got him here."
But that was an issue to think about another time. Right now, he was among friends, family even. He turned to Blue, the dolphin who'd taken a maternal liking to him since he was much younger. She and her ever-growing pod came by when they migrated; she always tried to visit him, and he tried to catch her whenever he knew she'd be around. She was very fond of him, protective and fierce, and he loved her to bits.
"How you doing, Blue?" He asked, caressing the sleek skin beneath her watchful eye.
She chattered back to him, expressing her concern for him with the shark incident, and telling him of the newest developments with her pod. The others crowded around the three mermaids, pitching in with their own squeaks and clicks here and there. Lance listened through the Ocean, who allowed him to understand their clicks and squeaks.
Come next season, we will have new young, Blue was telling him, a happy glint in her eye.
Lance's heart swelled with joy. "You're having a baby, Blue?" He cried, grinning from ear to ear.
She clicked a confirmation. Ophelia and I.
Ophelia wasn't the dolphin's actual name--just as Blue wasn't Blue's true name--but Lance had given them all names when he'd met them, most of them stemming from the books and stories he'd read in the books he'd collected.
"That's amazing!"
"Lance," Nyma interrupted, and her anxious tone caught his attention instantly. "Lance, your concert! The presentation performance! That's tonight!"
Lance's heart stopped in his chest as panic overtook him. How could he forget the ceremony he has been looking forward to since he was a young guppy watching his elder sisters perform before the kingdom for their presentation at 72 seasons? This was the biggest day of his life--and by the lack of sunlight penetrating the waters, it seemed he was in danger of missing his own performance.
"We gotta go, Blue!" Lance shouted in panic, hurriedly kissing her nose and swimming past her. "Visit the kingdom soon!"
He gave a parting trill and took the hands of his friends again, dragging them along with him as he swam in the direction of home. The back of his neck ran hot, his stomach twisting with anxiety. He was fast, he told himself. He could make it in time, surely! They couldn't be too upset if he was a little late, right?
He didn't feel an ounce of relief until he let go of Rolo and Nyma's hands to let them join the crowd while he went to the stage. He froze, suddenly unsure of where to go.
“Prince Lance!” Coran, the royal advisor, flapped fins wildly, waving him over. Lance had never been happier to see the manta ray. Lance swam as fast as he could, following Coran as he led Lance over to a small corner of the stage. Merfolk were still settling themselves in the warm sand below them, chattering excitedly to each other. Just seeing them sent a flurry of excited nerves through Lance’s tummy in anticipation of his performance. His father and eldest sister Allura sat to the side of the stage in the crowd, waiting for the show to begin. Allura often stuck to their father's side; as the future Queen, she wanted to learn as much as she possibly could, becoming King Alfor's shadow.
“You’re lucky I love you dearly, my boy,” Coran muttered to him. “Your parents would have your head for this!”
“Thank you, Coran!” Lance said as he drifted to his place on stage. “I owe you one!”
Coran hrrumphed as he drifted away to his place beside the king and eldest princess. “You owe me more than one, little guppy.”
The crowd hushed as their attention went to their youngest prince. He hovered center-stage, back straight, head high, looking them over with a small smile on his face. He'd be lying if he said he didn't like the attention.
The band began to play their music, soft and sweet, and Lance took a breath and opened his mouth, melodies just as sweet drifting into the current of the sea. He was adored by his subjects for his charm and his voice, often told that the Ocean herself had adored him so much that she gave him the most beautiful voice in the sea. As much as he liked the praise and attention, he couldn't help dismissing their claims; he was just Lance, nothing special, he told them. He was the same as everyone else.
He sang his heart and soul out for his people, losing himself to the music and truly putting on a show. His markings began to glow, a luminescent blue hue shining from the scales along his spine and on his elbows and shoulders, a gene that had skipped every one of his siblings except for Allura. He was a sight to behold, and the applause of his people when he finished his performance warmed his heart. He swam among the first few rows, thanking people for coming and for their compliments as they all left to sleep for the night. His heart and mood were light and happy, especially with the praise of his siblings.
"You did great, Lance!" His older brother Hunk praised him.
"Thank you, brother," Lance said, leaning into the arm slung over his shoulders.
"The glowing markings were a great touch," Amara, his third eldest sister, said. "Added a very you kind of flair."
Lance laughed, shrugging. "I didn't do it on purpose! It just happens whenever it wants. I can't control it."
"You'll learn," Allura said, sending him a wink. At the same time, she flashed him with the luminescence of her own markings, a bright pink to match her scale colors. She turned as their father called to her, but Lance's attention was quickly taken by the rest of his siblings.
It wasn't until his name was called that he realized he should've known the happiness of the night wouldn't last.
"Lance," Allura called, voice stern. Her stance was stoic and serious; Future-Queen Mode initiated. "We'll need to speak to you in the throne room before you go to bed."
One look at his father's face told him everything. They knew.
He swallowed, willing his face to remain impassive and not give himself away. "Alright," he said, plastering a smile on his face. "I'll be there soon."
He and his siblings watched as his sister and father turned to go to the throne room and wait for him, dread coiling in his gut at the thought of his guaranteed punishment.
"Did you tell, Coran?" He asked his advisor. He couldn't be mad if the manta ray had; it was his job, after all.
"No, my Prince," Coran said. "They just seem to have that sixth sense with you."
Lance sighed, resigned and unhappy, mood killed. "Good luck, little brother," Hunk said, their other siblings nodding in agreement.
Lance pressed his lips together, drifting away to face the path to the throne room, squaring his shoulders in preparation. "Time to face the music," he sighed sadly.