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Once upon a time, far away where the ocean is deepest drowning midnight blue there was a black castle. It loomed sinister and spiny, many fathoms below the waves. The labyrinthine palace was ruled by a fearsome and volatile king who had six favorite daughters. Every night the princesses swam gracefully together in the spires of bubbles rising from the palace, always under the watchful red eye of their lord.
As each princess grew up and began asking questions, the leviathan would send them up to the surface, always with a thin silver thread trailing behind to call her back. Once her question was answered the princess was compelled to return with stories of the world above. First the eldest sister returned and said, there are streaks of flame that fall out of the sky! Then the second sibling said to their eager crowd, there is lightning trapped in a jar that calls creatures around it. The next daughter said, there are boats that float between the clouds, springing quickly across continents!
With each passing year, the princess who named herself Crowley became more and more curious about what was waiting on the other side of the waves. Very slowly, like cracking of a glacier, Crowley grew convinced–no single answer would be big enough to slake all the questions that made her gulp and struggle to speak freely.
How long do the humans live? she whispered to her sisters. Her sisters whispered back, the people up there live so desperately, so frantically, they are like wax candles that last barely even a century. We will not yet be mature when every human of this generation has died.
How odd, said Crowley. How… interesting. Don’t cry for them, they reassured their little sister. You have so much here to enjoy, the feeble humans should be of little concern… But Crowley grew distracted, anxious, and yearned to see everything she heard about from her sisters’ tales for herself. There must be more, she thought in frustration, to the story. (More to my story too. Though Crowley could not say what that meant.)
As winter came upon the sleeping world, Crowley chose the longest night to sneak away from home and swim up and up, following glints of starlight and mist til she broke through the surface. Crowley felt wind ghosting across their sharp, pale face for the first time. Crowley breathed air and it cut into the lungs. Then Crowley threw back volcano-red hair and laughed til they were dizzy. There was indeed, as her sister had said, glittering fire in the night–and it was drawing nearer. Something on the approaching boat caught Crowley’s heart like a leaf and pulled it out of their chest. On the prow of a white boat was a prince, with sleek dark hair and neatly tied scarf, arms crossed and staring up into the night with a look of concentration.
Crowley sank into the water ‘til only their eyes burned above the surface. Their curls snaked out across the water like a kelp forest. Crowley remembered the words of the terrible king below, promising his subjects easy millennia of safety and power in exchange for obedience. Now, for the first time, Crowley wished only to grasp a moment of time like an ember and lock it up tight. They opened their mouth beneath the water and let loose a cry of inarticulate longing and bitter sorrow that rolled through the waves.
The tide listened to Crowley’s pain and veered sharply off course. The calm sea turned wild and stormy. In the roiling tempest that emerged, the pristine ocean liner was swallowed by the water, and its passengers with it. Crowley dove in anguish and regret, looking for the serious face of the young prince, and caught her by the waist. If she died here… one more short human life snuffed out like a candle… Crowley felt frantically certain that they would never know how to answer any of a million questions. The mermaid turned and thrashed, swimming hard to bring the prince to the surface and life, one lanky arm holding her close, envious of the sharp desire to live they could feel thrumming in the prince’s pulse.
The next morning, the sleeping body of the prince was found by a frantic person wrapped in cream and light blue. “Michael! We all thought you drowned, we couldn’t find you, oh my.”
Michael coughed and sputtered, looking up at the wild tumble of her colleague’s hair crouched above her. “Aziraphale?”
“Oh, we thought you’d lost you. Wait, what was that?”
As Aziraphale’s head swiveled towards the sea, Crowley ducked quickly out of sight. They were gone as the dawn rose on the beach. Crowley sank back deep and quietly said to themself… “Michael.” It tugged at their heart. They knew the last night had changed them somehow, or maybe showed them something they’d always known quietly without words. “Michael.” Crowley feared these new emotions would spin them away into the currents of the seas to wander forever, wondered if this love for Michael would ever be known. Would Michael ever know Crowley how would move the oceans for her, tear the moon out of the sky at a single word?
Life went on, with Crowley treading barely on top of it. Crowley’s siblings collected treasures from sunken ships, raced sharks and explored canyons. Crowley trailed behind like a ghost, always distracted and never smiling. Crowley thought of Michael’s fragile human heart, pounding away somewhere far away, and they knew their longing was too heavy to be borne.
Thus Crowley traveled hidden ways to find the most ancient of the mermaids. Few denizens of the black spire knew it was possible to seek her counsel, and even fewer would ever dare to try. Crowley swam up slowly, entering the long shadow cast by the tail of the seer with blank grey eyes and a knowing smile.
“What can I do?” asked Crowley, “Is there any way for you help me? It feels like I’m wrong, like I’ve never been whole.” The oracle smiled wider and asked, with careful concern, if Crowley knew the meaning of the word transgression. “It means, my child, to step over the line and become something else. Sweet child, your desperate yearning to be something other than who you are may be your doom.” Crowley shook his head. “It won’t be.” A second time the oracle asked Crowley to swear his certainty, renouncing thousands of years at the bottom of the sea for a flicker of a century, living amongst the changeable and fickle humans. “Yes, grandmother, I’m certain.”
The seer of the deeps turned her silver eyes away for a moment, then looked gravely back at Crowley. “Very well. Stick out your tongue little girl.” She took just a clip, notching a divot into the tip of Crowley’s tongue, and purple blood spooled away into the water.
“You will have legs to walk among the humans, but to break your silence you must win your beloved’s heart. If you fail…you will turn back into the salt water you came from. But who knows, perhaps a mortal heart can love you so deeply it can never bear to part from you. Only then can you escape the ocean currents forever.” Crowley tasted the pain on his slit tongue, nodded, and a cry bubbled out of his mouth as the sea-witch’s magic took sudden and sharp hold. His hair swirled back and forth, his chest heaved, and his tail split smoothly into a pair of long, skinny legs. The sea witch looked at his weak human-like form, smiled, and swept Crowley away in the grasp of her long, inky shadow. Crowley’s siblings saw, and wept at the loss of their sister, taken from them forever.
Up on the shore, Crowley curled his new legs up to his chest and shivered in the late afternoon, feeling the harsh grit of dry sand for the first time. He heard a shout– “Hey! Hey, are you alright?”
Twisting over his shoulder, Crowley locked eyes with Michael, seeing the prince leaning down in concern. He wanted to tell her that she looked so powerful, so gorgeous, and opened his mouth.. but could not utter a single word. The sun was sinking fast, and the beach growing damp with the cold. Crowley shifted anxiously as Michael led him away from the beach, stumbling on brand new legs.
“Listen, Aziraphale, just take care of him for a little bit. It’ll be a huge favor for me, I’ll be right back.” Crowley loitered awkwardly in the doorway, wrapped in a towel and little else. Michael had just brazenly sauntered out, leaving Crowley in a brightly lit dance studio with this sturdy and flustered person called Aziraphale running hands through curly white hair in consternation. “Back in a few hours, you’re the best buddy!” Crowley felt off-balance and unsteady with Michael gone so suddenly.
“Hey,” Aziraphale’s face melted into simple concern as he turned towards Crowley, “what do you say we get you some dry clothes, dear boy?”
Minutes later Crowley was pointing his new toes in white socks, looking at the stretch of his unfamiliar calves in black leggings, which he liked already. He curled and uncurled his fingers in the warm hem of an oversized beige sweater. The generous neckline was already working its way down his left shoulder, and Crowley fidgeted it back up. “Doesn’t that feel better?” Aziraphale was clasping his hands together and smiling gently. “What’s your name, dear?”
Crowley looked up sharply at the other man in bewilderment, not sure what to do. Turning in place aimlessly for a moment, he walked slowly towards a row of framed posters on the wall. One of them said “Rusalka” and showed a fanciful aquamarine mermaid perched on a rock over a lake. He tapped at the poster to indicate, and Aziraphale’s face lit up suddenly into a smile that startled Crowley back half a step.
“Ah, that’s our spring show! I’ve been watching auditions all week, with no luck for our prime dancer I’m afraid.” Aziraphale shook his head with good humor, then gently took Crowley’s elbow and steered him into a cluttered back room of the studio. It was tiny but felt warm somehow to Crowley, crammed as it was full of books, pamphlets, dance shoe boxes, tools, and a nubbly sofa drowning in fluffy pillows. Aziraphale was rummaging through a pile near the small television. “Ah! This is Dame Frances McDormand. My guiding light from the history of dance.”
Sighing, Aziraphale set up the video to play and settled Crowley on the sofa with a hot mug pressed into his chilly hands. Crowley forgot to pay attention to the new type of drink as Aziraphale’s icon began to spin across the grainy stage on screen. Aziraphale’s eyes glowed with passion as he began to explain the history of the performance, pointing out the lead dancers to Crowley by name, discussing the details of staging that had inspired his own production plans. “I watch McDormand whenever I feel as though nothing I’m doing will ever really make a difference, you know.” He suddenly flushed and stepped away from the sofa. “Oh, look at the time, dear me.”
Crowley shuffled around in his seat, not wanting to stop hearing Aziraphale describe the dancing in such glowing terms all of a sudden. He stood up and tapped Aziraphale’s shoulder, then slowly began imitating the swaying he had seen on screen.
Michael strode back into the double doors of the theater, jacket buttoned up high and calling out, “Aziraphale! I didn’t mean to be so late, the board couldn’t get a quorum until…” her voice trailed off at the sight in front of her. Crowley was up on the dark stage with his hair brushed back in a ponytail, chin raised to follow the lines of his fingers to the sky and leg trailing up behind him. He spun to the left, torso gently twisting to brush his cheek against his own arm. Eyes closed, he was mirroring the pull of the waves in his blood and did not hear the words being exchanged in the seats below. “Michael, this is it! He’s our Rusalka, I just know it.”
“This is surprising, Aziraphale, but I have to admit…”
Crowley staggered to a stop, realizing all of a sudden that the prince was here now, him and watching. Ducking his head, he dared to peek out with eyes shining amber like a flash of iridescent scale.
“…it is quite beautiful.”
From that day on, Crowley danced on and on, every day. Even when the ground felt like knives passing under his feet he didn’t miss a step or fall. He danced. Stretching and searching, hoping that Michael would turn his way and smile. That he and his prince could clasp hands and be almost, but not quite, the same.
But on opening night, Crowley stood alone, silent and broken backstage. With his shoulders hunched he listened to the other dancers whispering about how the prince had most certainly given his heart away this night. Michael would belong to another, someone who wasn’t strange and speechless and... Crowley would surely dissolve into saltwater at the stroke of midnight. His shoulders shivered underneath the rippling silver and purple gossamer of his costume, but his face stayed dry.
Mermaids can not cry, after all. What would a tear be inside an ocean?
I’ll never be free of it, Crowley thought in a panic, feeling a strangling tightness in his throat. He could not utter a whimper or a cry for help if he tried. I was a fool to try…
Hearing a slight rustle, Crowley looked to his right. There was Aziraphale buttoned up in gold-trimmed uniform, leaning in to slip a white flower into Crowley’s accent braid. “You look lovely, dear boy. Are you ready?”
Then the curtains were rising and the orchestra began the first notes and Crowley stepped out under the golden arch of the stage. He reached out as if to fly over the audience, and Aziraphale’s wide hands were steady at his waist to pull him back, easing the tingling pain of dancing on awkward toes. Crowley leaned sinuously back in a wide arch of fluid spine and red hair, trusting that Aziraphale’s arm would be braced under his lower back for the next lift and… just like that the story came to the life. He was the water fairy in the dark forest, falling in love with a hunter and pleading with her father to follow him. ..
Aziraphale’s hand stretched confidently towards the stage wings as Crowley twirled away from him, dancing Rusalka’s exhortation towards the cardboard moon hanging in the backdrop. He danced, on and on, past the edge of hope and into the final scene where Aziraphale came at last to Rusalka’s lake with bitter regret falling from his lips. Crowley leapt to meet him with black streamers of death trailing behind his fingers.
Aziraphale’s own soft fingers came up to caress Crowley’s unruly hair. This time, unlike the rehearsals, he gave Crowley a deep and searching kiss on the mouth. Crowley’s fingers tightened unconsciously in the deep navy fabric of Aziraphale’s costume jacket, not hearing the echo of flutes rising around them like sea spray.
After a single, suspended moment, Aziraphale sank gracefully to his knees at Crowley’s feet, accepting his death in his role as the doomed prince. One last coda across the stage by the impish goblin dancer, and the audience roared with applause. Crowley ghosted his fingers across his mute mouth as he took his bow.
At the reception afterwards, Michael called to Aziraphale, “Over here! I need a word in private.” Aziraphale turned away from Crowley, reassuring, “I’ll be back in a minute my boy.” Then Crowley was alone, fading back into a corner.
He palmed a sharp knife off of one of the food tables, and held it surreptitiously behind his back. Looking back at the dark door to the theater, Crowley thought he heard his siblings’ voices winding out to catch him, calling “sister, are you ready to return home? We miss you. You can take the heart if she will not give it freely, you know, and regain your form…”
Crowley shook his head and clutched the silver blade to his chest, dizzy with the loss of hope that was crashing back now he was no longer on stage.
“Rusalka?” A voice behind his shoulder, and he turned to see Aziraphale standing with hands clasped behind his back expectantly. “I was looking for you.” Somewhere near the podium, the harpist’s fingers trilled a glissando that ran through Crowley’s stomach like a school of minnows.
He tilted his head in a clear question. “Oh, it’s the silliest thing, really… Michael was asking if I would form an alliance with her. A betrothal, as it were. I’m afraid she’s always thinking so politically…”
Crowley knew his mouth was hanging open, bewildered, but he couldn’t help it. Aziraphale continued, “I said no. I told Michael I’ve been feeling a great deal of affection for somebody else, actually. Although he hasn’t been in my life very long.” Aziraphale drew in a slow breath. Behind his back the dagger slipped out of Crowley’s nerveless fingers to clatter on the floor. “I was hoping that you might… give me a chance? Oh, I do hope this isn’t too fast for you, dear.”
Crowley drew his hand down from where it had gone to cover his mouth without his permission. Aziraphale looked downright anxious now. “Do you think we ever might…”
“Yes!” Crowley shook his head, breath heaving, and felt something hot and wet slip out of his eyes. “Yes. Yes.”
Aziraphale drew close, shuffling and tender this time, so much more real than the regal confidence he’d inhabited onstage. His hand settled gently on the point of Crowley’s hip. Crowley threw his arms around Aziraphale’s neck unashamedly. “Yes,” he murmured, as Aziraphale drew his face in to be kissed through tears.
And so it was that Crowley won the heart of a human, and they lived their very human lives together. And they were happy.