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He was no stranger to hauntings.
He was a man orphaned by the sea and sky, the earliest memories that moored him founded of raucous waves, breaking wood, and the salt, salt, salt of the ocean around him. Even as he grew, he could never escape the longing and fears his subconscious provided for him, a whirlpool he’d never been able to escape. The itch that stung under his skin for wide open skies and expanses of blue that no eyes had lain on before, the need to repair the damage his fathers reclusiveness had taken on their kingdom’s growth, the struggle to stay true to what he was supposed to do, and what he wanted - these all, he was familiar with.
This, was not that.
She, was more than that.
Her song slipped down the rivers of his mind, and the ache for her swelled with every breath he took. He cursed himself each moment at his struggles to wake, the sliver of his eyes he’d managed to open only giving him a blurred image to cling to, the weakness in his limbs only gifting him with the smallest of moments with his hand on her skin, his inability to stay awake and -
Do something .
Run after her. Thank her. Tell her that somehow, she, and the feelings she’d awakened in him, would not let him rest. And maybe he could, if he could just be with her.
Eric’s not foolish. He knows how it sounds. Can feel the way Grimsby looks at him, as if someone to be pitied, or the cloying sympathy of his mothers touch when she tells him again to stop talking of this surely imagined mystery girl. Knows that their island kingdom, despite its modest size, was small in the talking ways that mattered and the now widespread story of his search was met with more bafflement than support.
But it is no matter.
If he’s known anything, his whole life, it’s his heart.
Listening to it had never failed him before.
He forgets, for the first time, with her.
With Ariel. Now that he knows her name.
She looks at him with those fathomless eyes, and he forgets his lungs. He forgets to speak himself, even though he is the one with a voice. Her laugh is silent, but the absence of the sound of it is something he finds himself willing to do anything to make happen. No one’s ever…listened to him like this, before. Encountered what were clearly new things with a sparkling excitement that he too, felt with the wonder of discovery. Looked at him and didn’t see someone they wanted him to be, or something they wanted him to do, but just looked. And saw. And showed him herself right back.
Hiding with her around the corner from Mother and Grimsby, adrenaline tangles with something new in his lungs, seaweed caught on a reef. She settles the hat on his head, her smile a glow he couldn’t look away from, and when she goes back up the stairs something in his chest resettles. Situates itself, and has the audacity to leave his chest and go with her.
The melody is still there, weaving through his head in a low murmur that faded whenever Ariel was near, but the mystery girl was not.
Despite himself, Eric allows himself to wonder if that was such a bad thing.
Staring out into the sea until his eyes burned with the ghostly grit of sand he did not feel and heart hurt he all too well did, he knows that if he thought her pull on him unearthly before, it was nothing compared to what it was now.
Of course it had been her. All along, his strong little mermaid. Strong, clever, beautiful, brave, inquisitive little mermaid. Under his fingertips and now, now…separated as far as nature could be.
The maw inside him that had opened, wide and jagged, since the night his voice had gone raw calling for her as the sea calmed, did not grow smaller with time that passed. Within his body the crashing waves of the love he felt for Ariel took joy in eroding further the walls of pain caused by the loss of his heart, and nothing was the same. Nothing would be again.
How could it be, when she had turned him so upside down?
Turned him, and the world they knew, into a confusing mess of possibilities that he couldn’t make sense of without her there.
He’s tried, pathetically, to come to terms. To accept that the separation of their worlds was as insurmountable as everyone agreed it was, and that they weren’t meant to be. Pored over every tome, every scroll and book he’d ever acquired that spoke or even mentioned of mermaid legend, tried to enforce the knowledge to himself that whatever immenseness he felt needed to be lost at sea. Attempted to get himself to accept that he would never again see the almost palpable glimmer of excitement spark in the horizon of her eyes - never again witness their island sun bask on dancing caramel shoulders, never again be able to hold her in his arms and do his damnedest to protect her from any harm that might try to come.
The hat she had chosen for him so unceremoniously from the shopkeeper's head had a new home at the back of his wardrobe, the sight of it bringing back memories too painful to think of. He no longer played with Max on the northern shoreline she’d brought him to after saving his life, couldn’t even find it in himself to want to take even a short trip on any number of the kingdom's ships. Eric couldn’t bear the thought of being on the water - being so close to her - and being separated by the rules of the deep that kept them apart.
Maybe there was something wrong with him. Some odd part of him that hadn’t recoiled, hadn’t rejected her when the legs he’d presumed were all hers shimmered into a full length tail whose purple and sea green sheen still taunted him at the edges of his gaze. He’d already known that she was extraordinary; on some level, it made absolute sense. No matter what she was, she was always going to be Ariel, and that was who he’d fallen in love with. Tail or no tail. Land or no land.
Happy ending or, as it looked as each audaciously bright day dawned, endless heartbreak.
He imagines her, when he’s too weak to resist it. Dreams of the mesmerizing cloud her hair had to make, the flick and shine her multicolored scales must have and how lucky all the denizens of the sea were to bask in the glory of her voice, and hopes that wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, she is happy.
It’s the only way he can go on without her.
Hours later, he still can’t let go.
I lost her once. I won’t lose her again.
Through the reunions with everyone in the castle, Eric hadn’t been able to bring himself to stop touching her. To keep a finger from trailing along the back of her hand, a palm on the middle of her spine, a twirl to the bottom of her russet thick hair.
When Ariel gets him alone - and make no mistake it is her that snags his hand and tugs him into his library - he has no hesitation wrapping his arms around her. Sitting in the broad, comfortable chair he’d spent many hours in alone, now, for the first time, with her, he cradles her as though she might break. Drinks in the steady rise and fall of her chest against his and reminds himself that she is real, and so is he, and they are here together. Her hair smells of sunshine and sea, the scent that lurked in the pale red of the scarf she’d left behind that he’d spent too many nights pressing to his face to remember what he’d lost, and it’s comforting as it’s bittersweet.
He thinks, we’ve lost so much time , and then has to remind himself that it doesn’t matter. What matters is what they’ll have ahead.
She is warm, underneath the ragged seafoam shade of her dress. Unlike most women of the kingdom, he knows from their hug that her waist lacks the rigid boning of a corset, and he finds himself liking it. Enjoying that there was little between the hug of her thighs alongside his, her feet dangling off the sides. That after so long of being so far apart, the opposite is finally true.
There’s a soft squeeze against his skin, her small hands on his shoulders, so he moves back enough so she can un-nestle her head from under his chin.
“I meant what I said, back then.” Ariel’s voice is musical and lovely, even when she’s just speaking, and with a suddenness that’s not quite Eric is sure that he wants to listen to it for the rest of his life. That is, of course, if she’d have him. “I want to tell you everything. About my father, my sisters. Scuttle, Flounder, my siren song, the coral moon, our traditions -”
Oh . He remembers. Wishes made before dreams were dashed. Finding her to lose her again. Unconsciously, he tucks her into him tighter.
“And I want to hear it all.” Eric interrupts gently, the hand unoccupied with holding her close stroking some of her hair behind her ear. “Whatever you want to tell me, I want to know. But there’s no rush for it, so don’t feel as though you need to explain it all at this very moment.” He would be lying to say that he didn’t have questions, as he, in fact, had loads of them - wonders of culture and trade, of history and how she came to be here. Came to be able to be his. For all that they certainly exist, inquiries fall far second in this moment with her.
“Are you sure?” Ariel studies his face for a moment, staring at him with those all seeing eyes, and he nods with what he hopes is demonstrative conviction. Unlike her, he isn’t as naturally gifted at expressing himself as she.
“I’m sure.”
After a few more moments of her contemplation, Ariel seems satisfied enough, and her full lips tip up. The very appearance of her smile melts him from the inside out, and oh but it feels good for your heart to no longer swim around outside your body. It feels wonderful to hold your beloved in your arms.
And speaking of…
“I love you.” Come the words, tripping from his lips somewhere between a blurt and a confession. Her fingertips pause on their tracing of his dimples and what he had thought was a light smile before turned into a sunrise. “I know it may seem sudden, and I shall have to earn your forgiveness for not knowing it was you all along - as I should have - and we have spent more time apart than together of recent, but I think I have loved you since the moment you saved me and more every day since.” Eric runs the back of his finger alongside her cheek, eyes soft and hazy with everything he feels. “Different worlds or not, I just want to be a part of the one we can make together.”
Closing her eyes, Ariel fists her hands in the soft linen of his shirt and kisses him. Kisses him on the lips, then eyebrow, then nose, then lips again. “All I want is to be with you, Eric. To discover everything there is to learn with you at my side.” She nudges her nose with his, and his heart turns into a pad of butter on a stove all over again. “Of course I love you too. Besides…did you think I’d fight the sea witch with just anybody?”
The laugh Eric lets out is a wondrous kind of healing.
Sometimes, Ariel can’t believe this is her life.
That every day she will continue to wake up in a world that still feels a little hot, a little sharper, a little warmer, and very much filled with all the things she could ever hope to know and learn.
He shows her his grandmother's ring on one of the mornings he’d snuck into her room, his too big body on her small bed causing many bouts of giggles and the use of any excuse to twine their limbs around each other. Over time Ariel had begun to discover there were many new things one could do with human legs and what was between them, and Eric had been (though blushing madly in the beginning) all too eager to assist.
She sleeps in one of his old sea shirts half the time as it is, a fact that Rosa was always kind enough not to comment on, and on one of the sweeps Eric’s hand takes up her bare leg his fingers suddenly sparkles the same shade as the waters of her home.
And when Ariel says yes with her forehead pressed to his, the human body she’d gained to be with him still warm from his loving, there is no doubt in her mind she’d do it all again.