Chapter Text
1176
Felix is running.
He’s running through the woods with no destination in mind, because he just needs to get away. Away from his father and away from the House Blaiddyd messenger who’d told them— who’d told him— that Glenn was—
Felix can’t tell if it’s tears blurring his vision or the sporadic droplets of rain falling from the grey skies above.
A storm is coming.
With the wind at his back, he runs as fast as his legs can carry him. Thin branches lash at his face, his arms, his legs, shredding the flimsy material that covers them and cutting into his skin.
He can’t feel the pain - can’t feel anything really - every tangible sensation swallowed by the gaping hole of sadness in his entire being.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been running, just keeps going until he breaks through the tree line. Finally free from the wet undergrowth of the forest, his boots sink into damp sand and the sound of waves crashing against the bluffs fills his ears.
The cove.
The rain transitions into a steady drizzle as he looks around, soaking through his jacket and cloak, weighing him down. There’s no one here, the docks abandoned save for a few empty boats, fishermen having gone home to wait out the storm.
The wind picks up, and Felix feels heavy as he makes his way to a jagged bank of rocks. It’s the rainwater clinging to his hair and his clothes. It’s physical exhaustion weighing down his limbs. It’s emotional anguish crushing down in his chest.
The rocks are slick with rain, saltwater, and algae, a definite hazard that he’s been told time and time again to avoid, lest he slip and crack his skull open.
Pushing damp bangs away from his face, he climbs them anyway, pressing forward and upward until he reaches a relatively clear area. It’s high enough that the waves just barely wash over the surface, but low enough that getting back down won’t result in a broken neck. Probably.
Rubbing rainwater - and tears - from his eyes, Felix looks out at the choppy waters, the waves turbulent and wild as they crash about without direction. A roll of thunder shakes the clouds, the deafening rumble echoing around the empty bay and only serving to darken his mood.
(In the distance, he thinks he sees a flash of pale green, but when he blinks, it’s gone.)
The rain is pouring now, relentless and unforgiving as raindrops pummel the earth around him and the sea before him.
And Felix—
Felix drops to his knees with a wail, unaware of how close he is to the edge of the rock. There’s a storm raging within him too, he feels the surge of it, dark and terrifying all at once. It’s so all consuming that he can’t think, he can’t breathe, he can’t—
“Felix!”
Turning around at the sound of his father’s voice is a mistake. Rising to his feet to yell at that damned old man to leave him alone is a mistake.
In that instance, a crack of lightning splits the heavens, and it startles him so badly that his body jolts as if struck—
—and his foot catches on an uneven groove, sending him tipping backwards.
Felix is falling.
It’s not a terrifyingly long drop. He’d jumped from higher bluffs with Sylvain before, but the waters that acted as his landing weren’t nearly as dangerous as this.
He’s instantly swallowed by the sea. The sudden plunge is freezing, saltwater stinging his eyes and tumbling uncontrollably within the current. Felix can hardly tell which way is up and which way is down, just holds his breath and forces his arms and legs to cooperate.
He breaks the surface with a gasp. The ocean around him is dark, the rain coming down so strong now that it threatens to push him back under. Felix has always been a decent swimmer, but there’s no way he can fight these waves.
He’s in the midst of drawing another breath when another wave that’s hit like a brick wall crashes into him, and he’s once more dragged into the water.
Felix is tired. His lungs scream for air as he kicks his feet to no avail, the ocean not keen on releasing him from her grasp.
The water surrounds him, a void of darkness and underwater unknowns.
He’s drowning.
He’s dying.
Maybe— maybe he’ll see Glenn again.
He’s numb, void of almost all sensation when it - it? - approaches him, and the last thing he registers is the feel of arms - arms? - wrapping around him.
The last thing he sees, however, is an iridescent flash of teal and— are those scales?
.
.
.
It’s with a great, rattling breath, that Felix comes to.
The rain is gentler now, reduced to a soft sprinkle as the warm glow of twilight peeks out behind the grey clouds.
His father is folded over him, shoulders shuddering with relief as he cradles Felix’s head to his chest. He’s no longer in the ocean, drowning. He’s somehow made it to shore despite having no recollection of doing so.
What— what happened?
He’s too disoriented to argue when his father scoops him up, carrying a shivering Felix through the woods and back towards their estate.
He shifts slightly, wincing when he feels something poke against his neck. Reaching up, his fingers find something small and slender stuck to his collar.
It’s a hair pin, lined with tiny, delicate looking freshwater pearls.
He stares at it for a moment before curling his fist around the thing, frowning deeply before he peers over his father’s shoulder to cast one last glance at the sea.
.
.
.
Ten Years Later
When Felix shoulders the door open, the first thing he notices is that there’s a thick layer of dust that’s settled over, well, everything.
Makes sense, he thinks, though it doesn’t make him any less annoyed. No one’s come here in years. The Fraldarius summer estate was meant for family trips and outings, a place to serve as a brief respite from the duties involved in governing a duchy.
He loved it here, once upon a time. doesn’t go further than the doorway.
Because for a minute, he can remember. A lot of his life is rooted into this place, and the memories - good and bad - are like tall weeds casting a shadow on a beautiful garden.
He’s five years old, running through the sitting room barefoot as he chases after Glenn with a wooden sword. Their mother watches worriedly from her rocking chair, yelling for them to slow down. Their father just laughs, saying that a scraped knee is the best teacher.
He’s seven, soaking wet and sunburnt, tracking sand through this very foyer. Glenn is behind him, a fish clutched in his hands. Their mother wraps him in a towel and wrings water from his hair, while their father takes the ridiculously small salmon to the kitchen.
He’s ten, stifling giggles as he sneaks into the pantry with Ingrid, Sylvain, and Dimitri while the adults are outside drinking. They’re terrified when Glenn catches them, but he simply grins and pulls the jar of candied ginger from the top shelf, telling them to save him a few.
He’s twelve, curled up in an overstuffed armchair and listening to Glenn read an excerpt from Loog and the Maiden of the Wind. Their father listens along as he half-heartedly flips through a ledger. Everyone ignores the ache that comes with the sight of the empty rocking chair.
He’s fourteen, oblivious to the oncoming storm as he swings his sword around in the yard and practices his footwork. His father comes out and stops him, tells him they need to talk— that something’s happened to Glenn.
Blinking back the idea of tears, Felix shakes his head in an attempt to rid himself of the cobwebs clinging to his mind. Dwelling on the past is stupid. He’s twenty-four, almost twenty-five now.
His mother and brother are dead. His father was…yeah.
The point was that this place, this house, it’d never be the same again, and ten years ago he swore he’d never come back.
But here he stands anyway, because his stupid old man had so stupidly suggested that Felix invite his stupid friends down for one last ‘summer vacation’ before they sold this stupid old house.
It was a stupid idea, really. He could already feel the headache coming on as he thought about being stuffed into this place with his three idiotic friends.
Sylvain, on the other hand, thought this trip was a great idea and was chomping at the bit to come out here and start bonding.
Blech.
“Alright!” The redhead exclaims, his loud fucking voice echoing through the empty house. “It’s so cool to be back here again.”
Ingrid comes in after him, swatting at the back of his head. “Not so loud, Sylvain!”
Felix rolls his eyes. Ingrid had only agreed to this trip because his old man had suggested it, and he was fairly sure that she was incapable of saying ‘no’ to him. Kiss ass.
“Perhaps it would be best if we tried not to argue…” Dimitri suggests, trailing into the house carrying his and Sylvain’s bags.
If Felix rolled his eyes anymore, they’d likely get stuck behind his head.
“I’m going to go train,” he announces to no one in particular, ignoring Sylvain’s insistence that they should start settling in, that they should go find some food.
“Take whatever rooms you want,” Felix throws over his shoulder. “But I’m taking the couch.”
He hears a few muffled sounds of protest as he stalks away, but he doesn’t bother turning around. “Just finish up before dinner, we’re going down to the beach!” Ingrid calls after him, sounding more like a worried mother than the soldier she’d become.
They know better than to talk to stop him when he’s like this, hissing and spitting for them to just leave him the hell alone.
(No one says it, but he knows they know he was just avoiding this damn house, and everything inside of it.)
.
.
.
It’s late when Felix finally decides to meet up with his friends, a towel slung around his neck that he uses to mop up his sweat. His feet carry him down the worn, trodden path towards the cove. He’d walked this path dozens of times as a child— still remembers where to avoid uneven terrain where his foot may catch, or that cutting a left instead of a right at the large pine with the blue-grey needles will get him to the cove faster. (He pretends not to notice the pair of initials carved into the trunk.)
When Felix emerges from the treeline, the sun is just beginning to dip towards the horizon. Its descent is slow in the summer, bleeding watercolour tones of pink and orange across the twilight sky.
His friends already have a healthy fire burning in a dug-out, lounging around it in some rickety old folding chairs they’d probably dug out of Felix’s basement. They must have done some shopping at a nearby town, because Ingrid rises on occasion to turn a few kebabs she’s laid out over the fire, along with a few fish she was frying.
Felix doesn’t announce himself as he approaches, just drops himself into the only available chair and stares into the fire.
“Good training session?” Sylvain asks, interrupting his brooding. “You were gone for a while.”
Felix grunts in reply.
His brusque nature had always done little to deter Sylvain. In fact, his indifference always made him try harder. “Tired yourself out, huh? That’s alright, I’ll talk. So, Dorothea dumped me last week…”
That’s the exact moment Felix stops listening, having no trouble with tuning out the redhead’s loud rambling. Instead, he pulls his dagger from his belt and the whetstone from his bag, focusing on the practiced motions and letting the familiarity of his routine soothe him.
It’s not that he hates spending time with his friends. He just didn’t have the energy to entertain their good-natured, jovial antics today. It was just that he was tired, sore, on the verge of overheating, and, honestly?
Being back here just made him sad.
(there was also the fact that he’d almost died in the waters of this very cove, but whatever)
Dimitri nudges a half-finished bottle of whiskey into his lap, the gesture accompanied with a small smile.
Though he accepts the bottle, Felix doesn’t return the smile, but he doesn’t scowl either. Dimitri must take it as a good thing, with the way the tense line of his shoulders relaxes.
The rest of the evening is relatively civil. The food is alright, so Felix eats quietly as Sylvain and Ingrid bicker, Dimitri occasionally adding his two cents to whatever the idiots are fighting about. He still isn’t feeling ready to join in, fully intending to just eat and get the fuck out of there.
Everyone is boozy and warm when the fire begins to die down, and Ingrid opens her dumb mouth to do what had Felix dreaded from the very beginning: reminisce.
“Remember when we used to build sandcastles on this beach?” She asks, a stupid, dreamy smile on her face as she lets a few soft grains of sand slide between her fingers.
“I remember that!” Sylvain nods. “We’d team up to see who could build the tallest one. Me and you versus Dimitri and Felix. Glenn would always judge…”
Felix’s hands tighten around the bottle.
“What was that legend he’d tell us to keep us out of the deeper waters?” Dimitri asks, now fully involved in the conversation.
“The one about the mermaids?” Ingrid suggests after a moment’s contemplation. “That one was mostly for Sylvain. He said something stupid about how they’d seduce him and pull him into the sea. He loved telling silly stories like that,” she laughs, though it tapers off into a wistful sigh. “He loved it out here.”
“I’m going to take a walk,” Felix snaps, rising from his chair and trudging through the sand. He doesn’t want to listen anymore.
Ingrid and Sylvain’s faces fall. “Felix—”
He hears Dimitri murmur a quiet let him go behind his back, and keeps walking down the beach until he’s a good distance away. He doesn’t stop until he’s almost reached the end of the cove— near a sharp drop-off of cliffs and a border of jagged rocks.
The water is calmer here, dark in the twilight and lapping softly at the shore. It looks cool, inviting.
Unthinking, Felix shucks off his boots and rolls up his pants up to his knees to move into the shallow tide. He doesn’t go far, just enough that water laps around his ankles.
Felix closes his eyes, breathing in the warm, salt air, the ocean’s breeze is a gentle touch all of its own. He’s content to let himself stand here for a while, letting the white noise of the ocean still his swirling mind.
A whole minute, that moment of calm lasts.
His eyes snap open at the sound of a large splash. It’s loud, much too loud to be attributed to the calm, shallow waves against the shore.
He looks around, but sees nothing. His little corner of the cove is still blissfully empty, the only footprints in the sand belonging to him.
He watches the water for any signs of movement— maybe it was just a fish? A big one, judging from the volume of the sound.
Having visually cleared both the surrounding land and sea, Felix knows he should retreat. Go back to the his idiotic trio of friends and go back to that stupid house and sleep—
—but then he hears another splash. It’s louder, heavier, and this time Felix can’t ignore it when he traces light ripples of movement to a small overhang a few metres into the water.
He really needs to get out of here now, because he hates fighting in the sand, he doesn’t have a sword, and his mind was fuzzied by the booze.
Something nags at him, though, and Felix’s one flaw had always been his predisposition to run towards danger rather than away from it.
Before he knows it he’s waded in deeper, now up to his waist in water. His feet shift through the sand until he’s deep enough to start swimming. The water is cold, but not shockingly so, considering how hot it is today. He glides through the water with ease, staying close to the exposed cliff face.
There are a few smaller caves carved out into the rock— little pockets of sand and rock, like personal beaches that Felix used to dig through with Glenn, pulling up sea glass and shells. Felix peers into each one, though he isn’t exactly sure what he’s searching for.
He’s just come up empty on the third cave and is heading back to the beach when his ears pick up a sharp hiss.
He jerks back with a splash, his heart hammering in his chest as his back hits the cliff wall, because no fish, no matter how large, hissed.
His head bobs underwater in his panic, earning a face full of salt water. When he rubs the slight burn out of his eyes, he notices that the water clinging to the skin is tinted red.
It’s blood.
His mind races, each dreadful possibility he was considering pulled from the tales used to keep children from venturing too far out into the ocean. There were sea-serpents, kraken—
There’s another hiss, and this time when Felix whips around to identify the source, he finds it perched on a rock a few feet away.
Translucent fins attached to the end of a long, teal tail, iridescent scales refracting the last flickering rays of twilight. Some smaller fins, cascading down the small of her back.
Her face is beautifully terrifying, complete with piercing green eyes and lips twisted into a mean scowl as she hisses once more. The pale fins on the sides of her head flaring in warning as she does so.
It’s a mermaid.
Felix presses himself against the cliff, hands scrambling for purchase on the slick surface, putting as much space between her and him that he can manage. They stare at each other, but while Felix looks on in what can only be described as chest-seizing fear, she looks pissed.
She’s got her hand - the tips blackened and tapered into deadly looking claws - wrapped around her side, where Felix spots the source of all the blood in the water. It doesn’t look too deep, but then again he isn’t exactly thinking clearly.
If he’d tried to swim away, she’d definitely catch him. That tail looked strong, powerful. What would she do if she caught him?
“You’re— you’re hurt,” he states bluntly, swallowing, wondering if she even knew what he was saying.
He deduced that she must have understood him somewhat. The response to his observation is a snarl, and she curls in on her injured side, wincing.
She must be in pain, he realizes, and he was a stranger to her, a threat.
“I can help you,” he offers, gesturing to his own side as best he can while treading water. “Wait. Just wait.”
She doesn’t say anything, just eyes him warily through narrowed slits.
Felix moves along the cliff slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements or take his eyes off the real-life mermaid glaring at him. When an animal - or…creature - is injured, it’s prone to lashing out violently in self-preservation.
He’s grateful that they aren’t too far from the shore.
He doesn’t leave his back to her, even when he has the advantage of dry land. Even when she slinks back into the water. Felix spots her the bright green of her hair when she resurfaces, having moved to observe him from below a more secluded overhang.
He could so easily leave, just head back to his friends and go home to sleep. He could forget this ever happened. Forget that mermaids were real, forget that they were quite literally living in his backyard.
But he looks to where the mermaid waits, looks at the blood seeing from between her fingers, and the way her scowl momentarily wavers into a grimace.
Though he knows he may regret it, Felix picks up the towel he’d had slung around his neck, shaking off the loose sand before heading back towards the water.
Felix Hugo Fraldarius wasn’t going to let himself get scared of a fucking fish.
(Gods, he’s so stupid.)
The spot in the water that she’d moved to shallower, the tide barely brushing his shins. Felix holds up his hands as he approaches her new position, careful not to create any big splashes and alarm her. Careful not to give her any reason to dig those claws into his throat.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he assures her when she bares her teeth at him and gives a low growl.
“Here,” he offers in a measured tone, holding out the towel. “For you to—” He wraps the towel around his side to show her before holding it out again.
She doesn’t take it right away, just hisses at him again in warning, fins standing on end. Back away, her body language suggests.
(He briefly wonders if mermaids have a rule similar to ‘don’t take candy from strangers,’ and if she was applying that to this situation.)
After a good 45 seconds of staring at each other, it’s Felix that decides to surrender. He folds the towel, leaving it on a nearby rock for her to take before slowly backing out of the water.
“I’m going now,” he tells her, though he doesn’t expect her to answer.
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t hiss or snarl or claw his throat out either. Just tracks his every movement with rapt attention.
A good thing, he thinks.
He’s distracted as he stumbles down the beach, re-evaluating what he’d seen.
He’d seen a mermaid. Those weren’t supposed to be real.
“You were gone for a while,” Ingrid frowns as soon as he returns to their smouldered fire, studying him. It’s under her gaze that he returns to his body, aware of the butterfly beat of his heart, and his wide-eyed state of shock. “Did you find something interesting out there?”
“No,” he lies once he gets past the lump in his throat. “I didn’t see anything.”
.
.
.
Felix isn’t sure what prompts him to return to the cove the next afternoon - to where he’d last seen the mermaid - but he does. Perhaps it’s curiosity, or maybe it’s his tendency to be a little self-destructive when he wasn’t thinking straight.
She’s probably long gone, he’d thought as he grabbed a bit of extra food from the kitchen. He takes Dimitri’s apple right out of his hands, and takes a second serving of whatever meat Ingrid had cooked for lunch.
She probably just left my towel there, he considered as he picked up two fresh ones from the linen closet.
When he arrives at her spot, he finds that he’s wrong.
The mermaid is there again, watching him with those mesmerising, sharp eyes. She pulls herself up onto a rock, the end of her tail stirring ripples in the calm water.
He spots the towel he’d left her, torn to thin strips and pressed against her wound. It fills him with some odd sort of satisfaction, knowing that he’d helped her.
The fins on the sides of her head expand when he wades into the water, immediately defensive as he enters her (well, legally his) territory.
“Hi,” Felix starts, awkward as hell and almost sure that this is a bad decision when she squints at him, the beginnings of another mean scowl curling on her lips. “Can you— can you talk?”
She blinks twice, brows furrowing slightly.
“Yes,” she nods. Her voice is hoarse, but there, and Felix is talking to a mermaid.
“You— thanks,” she huffs, the hint of displeasure in voicing her gratitude reminding Felix a bit of himself. She gestures vaguely to her side, struggling. “For— for—”
“The towel,” Felix fills in, and she nods once more. “You’re welcome.”
They fall into an unsettling silence, the only sound between them the soft roll of the waves against the shore.
“Are you…hungry?” Felix asks, reaching into the bag he’d brought and grabbing the first thing he feels. What exactly did mermaids eat?
She doesn’t say anything, but watches him pull the lid off a container with mild interest. It’s the bear meat that Ingrid had braised, complete with a few thickly cut carrots and potatoes.
He holds the container out to her in offering, wondering if she’ll come to him or if he needs to come to her. They’re still a safe distance apart, her in the deeper part of the water, and Felix only up to his knees.
It’s Felix who decides to close it, setting the container atop her rock, wary of her sharp gaze. It’s odd to be on the receiving end of such a menacing stare.
She doesn’t approach the food until he’s backed a safe distance away again. The sniff she takes is hesitant, resulting in an almost immediate wrinkle of her nose and a growl of displeasure.
“Don’t like it?” Felix guesses, reaching into his bag once more and digging around until he finds an apple.
He forgets who he’s around for a moment, mindlessly reaching around the waistband of his pants and freeing the dagger at his belt.
The consequence is a large spray of water that soaks him completely and she dives back into the water.
He swears he hears a low snarl fill his ears as water drips from his bangs and into his face.
Right. Maybe don’t pull a weapon out when you’re around a distrusting sea-creature.