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When Nick Fury found out about the possible Hydra infiltration into his organisation, he had been furious.
He’d spent his entire life making sure that SHIELD stood for protection of the innocent, and that nothing they did could be considered terrorism, or was taken with the aim of destroying something good.
Hydra stood for the opposite.
He had no idea how deep it went, but he knew he would have to worm out any traitors fast, before this thing got so big, it decimated everything.
There were only a few agents Fury would trust with his life, and he knew 100% that they were loyal to SHIELD, and only to SHIELD. And whilst sending the only people he knew were loyal, in to investigate their fellow agents, colleagues, and friends, was a difficult decision to make, he also knew if it weren’t done, things could go south much quicker than any of them could envision.
When he chose agents Coulson, Hand, Hartley and Sitwell, to go undercover and aboard the Meridian Star, a SHIELD vessel that Fury believed to have been taken over by Hydra, he didn’t expect three months later, to be sat in his office with a pounding headache and the report from Agent Coulson explaining something he thought to be impossible.
More impossible even, than a Hydra infiltration.
Melinda flicked her violet tail in frustration, the scales shimmering under the moonlight piercing through the waves, and propelled herself across the sandy ocean floor, stirring up the granules and creating clouds out of the coral she passed by.
She was bored. Again.
Most mermaids were perfectly content to spend their lives beneath the waves, befriending sea creatures, and telling stories of how they were regarded as myth by the humans who lived on land.
All she wanted was adventure, something to do; she wanted something other than floating around, watching her sisters braid their hair and choosing new clams, exchanging gossip of who had drowned a sailor or two recently.
She wanted freedom. Excitement.
Melinda wanted to live.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden change in lighting; despite the fact she was swimming almost thirty metres below the surface, sometimes things from above actually got through.
The ocean was lit up by an orange glow, which seemed to brighten and then fade again multiple times. It was a few moments later that she noticed the ripple that ran through the current, and the low booming sound accompanying it.
Despite the multiple lectures her mother had given her about going to the surface - if she was spotted, she’d have to drown those who saw her - this was something she had never seen before.
Why was the sky above glowing?
She swam upwards curiously, letting the train of bubbles behind her flow past as she neared the surface. The closer she got to breaking above the waves, the brighter the orange glow became, and the louder the sounds from above that were filling her ears.
She breached the surface with a gasp, the cool wind whipping at her soaked face as she peered around her at the events going on.
The was a gigantic vessel, lit up in something she had never seen before. She could feel the heat radiating from it though, from the ship, and as she wracked her brain to work out what it was, she recalled something Raina had once told her.
Raina was, like her, curious. She knew things about the outside world no other mermaid knew. This hot, glowing, orange creation in front of Melinda, was fire. It destroyed, and it consumed everything it touched, turning them to ash in it’s wake.
Melinda ducked below the waves once more, swimming closer to the vessel.
In the dark, it was hard to see, but as she got closer she could see that it wasn’t floating like other boats did. It was partially submerged, and it was with a jolt she realised it was sinking.
A shipwreck.
That was always something she had seen the aftermath of; when wrecks were discovered on the ocean floor, merfolk would flock to it, stripping it of jewels and riches and treasures. The hull would become a playground for the young, and eventually, become forgotten about,
She’d never seen one happen.
From her position behind the sinking hull of the vessel, Melinda could see most of the humans who must have been on board, were safely in a small orange boat, being tossed violently in the waves, and soaking wet.
But at least they were there. If she wasn’t spotted, she could let them live, and after escaping their ship sinking, they surely didn’t deserve to have her drag them down into the depths.
There was a woman, maybe her own age, with dark brown hair filled with red streaks, holding tightly onto the arm of the other brunette woman beside her. There was a man with skin of a similar pallor to Melinda’s own, with a bald head and deep brown eyes, clinging to the side of the boar and peering around him in desperation.
She realised they were looking for somebody, their cries being lost in the wind as it tore through the scene.
Melinda glanced back at the vessel, now sinking lower into the waves. She could see nobody, but with waves and wind like it were, she would be amazed if anyone would survive.
She dove below the waves once more, fighting the violent undercurrent that threatened to keep dragging her down, and propelled herself forwards, surrounding the now half-sunk vessel.
She searched where she could, peering underneath the wreck, before going around all sides, trying her hardest to stay out of sight of the other humans on the little orange boat.
Swimming around it once again, and out of clear view anybody living, she caught sight of the man they must have been looking for. He was resting on a large fragment of metal, half floating and half sinking, but clearly exhausted with the attempts to stay above the waves, his blue eyes flitting desperately around him for some sense of escape.
She watched him for a while, torn over what to do. He was slipping closer into the water, and she knew one-hundred percent that out here, if he went in, he wouldn’t come back out.
In her mind she could see the desperation of his friends calling out to him.
Suddenly his eyes opened, and he met her gaze head on. She froze in shock, unable to dive below the waves to safety; simply holding his line of sight until he closed his eyes once more, and slipped off the metal sheet.
Melinda knew she was about to do something risky, but she had no explanation for it; she had to save him, she couldn’t just let him drown because she was scared of the consequences should she be seen.
Her sisters may live to drown sailors, but she just couldn’t do it.
“Sir, contact with the Meridian Star has been lost.”
Nick Fury closed his one good eye, and turned away from the agent who had arrived in his office to tell him the news, staring out of the glass window and across the city.
He’d put his best, and most trusted, agents onto that ship, knowing it was infested with HYDRA, and now potentially had lost them all.
He’d been a fool.
“Anything at all?” he sighed, shaking his head at his reflection. “Any details?”
The agent shuffled slightly, before continuing in a shaky voice. “An emergency distress call was sent out by Agent Hand approximately one hour ago, minutes before contact was lost. Satellite imaging is being collected as we speak, but radar and sonar has failed to locate the vessel on the surface.”
“Thank you agent, dismissed.”
Melinda got as far up the shore as she could, before she practically collapsed, the shallow waves brushing up her tail, as she lay on the sand that covered the nearest cove she had been able to find.
When she’d decided on impulse to save the pale man with the blue eyes, she hadn’t anticipated just how hard it would have been to actually do that. Getting him back to shore had been so difficult, the weight of his unconscious body, plus fighting the waves, and the fact she couldn’t keep diving below the surface to breathe in clear water - she could breathe in the air fine, but the ocean gave her strength - made her contemplate whether drowning him would actually have been easier for everyone.
But now they lay in the gentle waves, her breathing heavily, and him lightly, she watched the morning sun beginning to illuminate his face, and she knew she’d made the right decision.
His thinning hair began to dry as the morning progressed, and Melinda took in every inch of his appearance; from the garments he wore that she knew were called “clothes”, the symbol of what looked like a bird on each arm, to the strange black things covering his feet, tied together with some kind of thread.
She was amazed with herself, for not solely staring at the fact he had legs.
"I’ve never seen a human this close before” she thought to herself, casually brushing a piece of seaweed from his cheek, before freezing when he began to stir.
He opened his eyes a fraction, and peered up at her, the sky blue of his irises surrounded by a pale pink, where the salt water clearly disagreed with his eyes.
Melinda couldn’t move, knowing she was never meant to be seen by a human. This was the second time she’d let herself slip in less than a day, and with the same person too. But it was too late now.
However he simply looked at her, before breathing out heavily, the words “thank you” falling from his lips in exhaustion. His eyes trailed down to her tail, widening slightly before closing once more, and Melinda took a moment to realise he must have fallen into the state that Raina had told her humans called “sleep”.
If she disappeared now, maybe when he awoke, he would forget everything he had seen, feel as though all that happened were simply part of a dream. She would be okay, and their secret would not be exposed.
But as she placed a gentle kiss onto his forehead, and wriggled her way back down the beach, Melinda knew she’d be back.
Back to the cove, to see if she could once more get a glimpse of the strange human, with such piercing blue eyes.
“Contact between the human world and the mer-world is strictly forbidden, Melinda you know that!” Tian growled at her daughter, flipping her tail in anger and scattering starfish from the rocks below them with the force.
Melinda had returned to her home shortly after leaving him, and her absence for the previous evening had been felt.
Somehow, although she didn’t know how, her mother had known what she had done; and she was furious.
“He would have died!” Melinda protested, crossing her arms and facing her mother determinedly. Tian simply glared back.
“One less human to worry about.”
Melinda didn’t regret what she had done.
She flicked her tail angrily through the deep green grasses below, stirring up a collection of sand and bubbles, before swimming away in annoyance, leaving her mother with nothing but a growing frustration with her daughter, and the fear she could have already changed their lives forever.
Phil Coulson awoke gradually, the warmth of the sun beating down upon his face, and it took him a while to work out where he was.
The feeling of disorientation was not one he was overly familiar with, but his head was both swimming and pounding, and his lungs burned from the salt water he knew he must have inhaled the previous night.
He was cold, lying in shallow waters on what appeared to be a random cove. There was various rocks scattered around, and as he sat himself up slowly, looking around, he realised he was below a cliff of some kind.
How had he got there?
Memories swam in his vision, memories of flames and screaming, of HYDRA betrayal and explosions, before everything went dark.
The last thing he could picture, was a flicker of violet scales, and a pair of beautiful brown eyes.