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Rainbow refuses to be as plebeian as her sisters and brothers. They might have had to bedazzle and enchant their wives to keep them from gibbering in madness, screaming the whole way as they were dragged down into the depths, but Rainbow is better than that.
Her wife will love her. They are going to fall in love, like in those songs she’d found wafting in the wavelengths of deep space. That’s when she’d started pondering what it might be like to take a wife and what humans were about, anyway, besides all the screaming and bleeding and crunching pleasantly between one’s teeth.
Her siblings are, as usual, super boring about it, blah blah tradition, boo hoo broken minds taste worse, whatever. They like to be unknowable and ineffable and far below the world of Homo sapiens, who are so very avant garde and nouveau horrible. As if. Rainbow might rule the depths, but at least she’s flexible.
If she’s getting married, Rainbow wants to be cross-culturally respectful or whatever, and get a vague idea of what humans do and eat and how they reproduce and bang and stuff before she glides in and swoops her destined babygirl, name as yet unknown, off her whatchamacallit. Oh yeah, feet.
Anyway, humans call Rainbow’s kind weird and unknowable and deadly, but they’re the weird ones - blundering around, inventing cancerous isotopes and plaid fabric and boy bands. Rainbow is surprised to find she actually really, genuinely likes the sugary brassy sounds they make, shallow and tectonic, spewing out in radiowaves against the universe. It’s like, humans are both 100 percent super aware of everyone’s ceaselessly approaching, impending death, but also totally oblivious to it all at once? Rainbow can dig it.
Rainbow doesn’t really give a fuck about what’s proper, but she also doesn’t want to, like, insult her bride to be, so she follows tradition and doesn’t look upon her bride until the day of Rainbow’s first offering. She breaches the surface for the first time, for real, and sends her best hagfish heralds to beach themselves in adulation and ecstasy.
Then she peeks a few eyes above the waves of the pond and sees her.
Oh.
Her wife-to-be is scribbling frantically in her notebook, eyes bright like a seabird’s over a ship of starved sailors, curious and hungry as she nudges a hagfish over and traces the tip of a pencil over the serrated, circular teeth.
Oh.
Is this what it was, to be hungry but not want to eat? Rainbow wants to boil out of the tidepool and devour her but then she’d be gone, and Rainbow wouldn’t be able to see what she does next.
The girl - her girl - is muttering and Rainbow realizes with dawning delight she’s speaking in the dread tongue. Except with, like, the cutest little accent? So that meant her wife is a freaking Blake. Wow. The one kind of human she’s forbidden to devour or touch! It’s totally Romeo and Juliet, just like in TayTay’s song. This is a forbidden love story. Rainbow just has to convince her boo to say yes.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Rainbow bounces back to the dark and depths to find one of the few siblings who is tolerable to freak out at. The youngest one, that she’s practically raised herself instead of letting her mother devour, because it was, like, super lonely being the only cool dreadlord in the grotto all the time? Everyone had gotten all weird and judgy about that, too. Whatever. Rainbow had rent half of them into shreds and gobbets and made their gladius bones into her throne walls, and the rest shut up. She made her own decisions. Fuck the man!
And there’s a bright-side!
“She’s a Blake! She totally won’t go mad when she sees me!” Hester crows, gleefully braiding her little sister’s mass of tendrils into elaborate updos like the one she’d seen yesterday on the You Tube. “She’s had practice, right? Reading omens, seeing the unseeable. She’s gonna love me.” To be kind of honest, Rainbow has never super paid attention to the Pact with the aboveworld heralds her family has. They do something with spacetime and like, tea leaves or soda, or something, and record the magnificence of the deep ones occasional surface forays. It sounds boring, but Rainbow is sure that it’s less boring when her fiancée does it.
“Uh, Blakes go mad all the time? Isn’t that their thing?” her smallest sister huffs, all show-off spines and sparkling toxins. Playacting at being big, a little pufferfish of a thing. What sass. She’s a good kid, just needs toughening up before she was released to seed her own nightmare dimension one day. And Rainbow won’t be alone then, because she’ll have a wife of her very own, so she doesn’t even have to plot to sabotage and keep her around!
“Don’t be a hater,” Rainbow says cheerfully, and bullies her sister into helping her pick out a human form. Super weird and ticklish, being three dimensional. She has to decide on a hair color, and a skin color, and whether or not she really needs all the right organs, for verisimilitude, and what are the organs humans have again, anyway? Only two eyes, right?.
It’s exciting? Like, Rainbow can’t remember the last time she’s been so excited. Imagine, just slurping onshore like a dumbass and whammying a wife, when you could do it in style like this. Do it fucking right.
Though she does kind of see the point of the whammy, just a little bit, once she’s onshore and unsure of how, exactly, to get prickly, perfect Hester Blake to fall in love with her.
The first time Hester Blake sees Rainbow (well, sees part of her), her adorably squishy, jelly-filled eyes narrow into slits. Suspicious, judging slits. Rainbow feels it again, that all-encompassing fondness. All the other humans are shrieking at the dread rain of seawater, or panicking, or - yes, fine, gibbering. But not her Hester. Hester’s trembling faintly in her black boots, but still coolly assessing. She stands out, a dark smear of charcoal in a watercolor world. She’s so different than the others. Her human. Her bride!
Rainbow is too excited to keep doing recon with the human teenagers she's infiltrated. They’re just window dressing, anyway. Rainbow sheds them like loose skin, darting into the shimmering drizzle. She knows she’s aglow in halite and flickering halogen lights, dancing for her lover’s eyes only. She’s especially proud of the blooming gypsum roses creeping up the streetlights. Super romantic, right? And she feels her carefully crafted human heart flutter weirdly in her chest when Hester scowls, and drops her bags, and stomps off.
Okay, her wifey to be fleeing the scene instead of immediately begging for kisses isn’t the most ideal. Rainbow’s best beloved bff forever, hallowed be her name, which will resonate in the drowned halls with Rainbow’s own - how could someone whose timeline resonated sulky and sweet with Rainbow’s own when plucked - how could Hester not love her immediately, as Rainbow loved Hester?
Whatever, it’s fine. This is just the start. Rainbow peruses the abandoned offerings her human had left behind. A flimsy plastic bag spilling out crunchy breakfast cereal. If Rainbow were a Blake, maybe she’d read the future in it and know what her chances were, but instead she just inhales the leftover scent lingering there and crunches on the cardboard sugary pieces. She doesn’t mind not knowing. Not knowing is part of the fun, after all.
Sharks, maybe? Everyone loved sharks. Humans had a whole damn Shark Week of worship. Sharks were a perfect next step. Rainbow goes to her human lair to lick her wounds and plan and listen to Keisha’s Cannibal on sulky repeat while adjusting the nacreous lacquer on her nails.
Rainbow will definitely win Hester over. The salt, okay, fine, maybe it was overdone. Maybe the hagfish were too fresh. But Rainbow will definitely figure out what Hester likes, and then they’re gonna totally get married and have a thousand babies and live together forever.
And then! Hester shows up out of nowhere in her backyard, scowling adorably up at the shark - nailed it. Hester is even more adorable up close. She’s so tiny and unimpressed! She calls Rainbow Miss Kipley, and she has a little dimple that appears when she’s trying not to smile.
Rainbow’s totally got this in the bag.