Chapter Text
Juleka has always known death. She was born into it, bookended by the loss of siblings before and after her. Life is hard—that’s what her mother says each time she buries another baby.
But at every small funeral, her older brother Luka picks her up in his arms and holds her close. Life is beautiful, too, he whispers, and the kiss he places on her forehead shifts the world back into its rightful order.
He is the only beautiful thing in a very hard life. Born in Russia amid the revolution to parents who have little hope of her survival, she isn't even named until her fifth year.
It's Luka, of course, who finally christens her.
“Juleka,” he says one day, touching her hair like a benediction. “My little jewel.”
Their tiny village is filled with cold air that never rests, always biting at exposed skin and turning what little food manages to grow into broken, withered shards. The ocean is no kinder, heaving with disdain when the men push their little boats into its waves. From it, they draw up nets full of silvery fish—often the only thing standing between them and starvation.
Other families have some stock: goats, chickens, a few cows. Juleka’s home has none of the comforts an animal like that would bring. Even in this pitiful place, they are lower than the rest. Besides the fish her father wrestles out of the sea and the wild plants her mother scavenges from the land, they have but one other livelihood: Juleka’s rabbits.
Luka catches them for her, and she keeps them in a ramshackle enclosure with no floor. The rabbits eat what's available on the ground, then the cage is moved to another spot with fresh foliage. They're wild things, used to surviving in this barren climate, tough and lean and able to breed at an impressive rate.
She cries each time they have to eat one of them, and her mother slaps her if she goes on too long.
Luka always looks disturbed by this, but doesn't intervene. He works on the boat with their father, and the passing years find him growing more restless, more dissatisfied.
“You deserve more,” he tells Juleka. “You shouldn’t be hungry. You shouldn’t cry.”
So he leaves, as if that were better somehow. He’ll find a job working in the gold mines, he says. He’ll save up money and then come back, and they won't have to struggle so much.
“Promise me something, Juleka.” His tone is fervent, his vivid blue eyes staring hard into her own. “Make me a vow.”
She nods, willing to do anything at all for him.
“Keep living. Stay alive. No matter what, you understand? If you’re not here when I get back…” And he trails off, such sorrow on his face that she gives him her rarest gift.
“Promise,” she whispers, her voice slithering into the chilled air.
That makes him smile at last. He thanks her, and then he leaves, and she knows no more blue or green or red or yellow. All fades to gray.
It takes a long time for the news to reach them. The workers in the mines, poorly treated and malnourished, went on strike. The government responded with imprisonments and, in the end, gunfire. Nearly three hundred men, dead for the crime of wanting to be more than slaves.
That was in Juleka’s thirteenth year. Her words, always sparse, vanish entirely, and she lives like a ghost. No one notices or cares. Lacking a son, her father insists she go out on the boat with him, though she's terrified of the water and has never been taught how to swim. Her hands bleed when they pull in the nets and ache with sorrow in the night.
The rabbits wither away without her tender attentions. They starve for love, and, eventually, all of them are gone.
Gray are the skies, gray are the rocks and dirt and houses. Her dress, her shoes, her lips, and the restless waves under the rocking boat: all gray.
On the day she fumbles and falls into the ocean, her father is too focused on his work to notice. It’s a quiet death, for the cold shocks her into stillness and her rarely-used voice is unable to escape past the need to take in short, shallow gasps of air while she still can. She cannot call for help, and she cannot stay afloat.
Life is hard, she thinks, then goes under.
Her eyes are closed, and the world is black outside her eyelids. She holds readiness inside her chest, awaiting that great wolf named death that has lingered over her since birth. It never was fair, that she should survive when all her siblings were gone. Life is hard, and she’s grateful to leave it behind.
Then she remembers:
Life is beautiful, too.
Make me a vow.
As she thinks of the color blue, her lungs stop hungering for air. The needy pain in her stomach ceases as well, and her hands give up their throbbing. Is this what it’s like to die? It’s not how she imagined it would be. Something pulls at her. Not by the wrist as her mother sometimes does; it pulls her entire body at once, feeling like nothing so much as the heavy winds when she stands on the tallest hill in her village.
She ends up on a beach. Not dead, not cold, not hungry. None of it makes sense, and she weeps for fear of the unknown. When two beautiful women rise up out of the water, her tears stop and turn to astonishment. Perhaps this is death.
A third woman arrives, even more beautiful than the others, and significantly more hostile. Juleka shrinks away from her, and one of the nicer women steps forward.
“What’s your name?” she asks, her Russian flowing as naturally as if she were born to it—though she clearly wasn’t.
If ever there were a time to speak, this would be it. “Juleka.”
“Hello, Juleka. Have you ever heard of a rusalka?”
Her mother had told Luka many times to be careful near water. There was a girl in the village who had drowned in the ocean, and others said she came back as a rusalka and would drag any man she could capture under the waves to die alongside her.
Is that what these women are? Rusalki?
A more horrible thought: is that what Juleka is now? She died in the water, yes, but she feels no urge to kill.
As if hearing her thoughts, the kind woman kneels down and confirms: "We are rusalki, Juleka.” But then she continues, and the rest doesn’t make sense. “We serve the ocean,” she says, “who nourishes and sustains this planet. She supports all life, and in turn we support her by helping her gather her food." Why refer to the ocean as a person? She leans a little closer, speaking in a low, earnest voice. "You didn’t die today. You've been given a second chance at life, if you’d like to join us."
The woman’s eyes are the exact shade of blue that Luka’s were, a spot of color within their dreary surroundings. They’re conflicted, those eyes. As if she’s yearning for something that will destroy her.
Rusalki are not food gatherers; they are vengeful murderers. Pulling together her voice until it’s strong enough to push out a few words, Juleka asks, "What does the ocean eat?"
She senses the answer even before it comes.
"People. The ocean eats people."
Yes, Juleka has known that all her life. She’s seen it happen many times before, and hasn’t it just happened to her? The horror is this: the violence isn’t done by a dispassionate natural force or by twisted specters too lost to know the harm they do. It’s done by women in mesmerizing gowns who have all the steadiness and good sense of any human. They’re completely in control of themselves, and yet they take lives like her father pulls in a net of squirming fish?
The other woman, not the glaring one but the one who has hair as orange as a sunset, steps forward. She looks… excited.
"We understand that this is a difficult idea to come to terms with. We've all felt what you're feeling now. But as Marinette said, we need the ocean. By helping her take a handful of lives a few times a year, we save billions .” She continues speaking, delivering a speech that has clearly been made before.
This is the justification, then: take lives to save them.
Introductions are made. Marinette is the sweet one, Alix the impassioned one, and Chloe the angry one. The others stay quiet as Marinette continues to explain these bewildering circumstances. There are benefits: temporary immortality, freedom, luxuries. But there is duty, as well.
When she stops for a moment, Juleka pushes out her primary concern. "What if I don't want to do this?"
Alix takes over, sitting beside Juleka so that she’s crowded between two strangers. "How did you end up here tonight?" Alix asks, reaching up to lay a hand on Juleka’s shoulder.
No one has given her a comforting touch since Luka went away, and it makes her shiver with unease. “I fell…off the boat. No one noticed.”
"I'm so sorry. That was a terrible end… Do you understand that you were meant to die today? That that was your fate?"
Juleka thinks again of the wolf that has stood over her since the cradle, and she nods.
Alix continues: "If you choose not to become a siren, you must return to your fate."
The wolf snarls, eyes gleaming with victory, and her heart beats in fear of it. Kill or be killed? Stay a rabbit, or become the wolf? She’ll never be able to fit into that role.
“How long?” she asks. Maybe she can hold on just long enough.
Marinette is the one to answer. "A hundred years.” So long. A lifetime, two lifetimes. “We each serve for a hundred years. Alix’s time is almost up, but I’m only a few years in, which means we'd be together for most of it...if you wanted, that is. You could also go off on your own like Chloe, if that's your preference."
Juleka looks up, then, into those eyes that are like echoes of Luka’s. She won’t have to be alone? Marinette will stay with her?
She remembers her vow. Keep living. No matter what, you understand?
And so, to her brother she says, “I’ll stay alive.”
Juleka learns the price of her decision immediately. The women—who refer to themselves as her sisters, which feels like a shiny new pair of shoes that will rub her feet raw—direct her into the water she only just escaped from. They tell her that the voice she hears is that of the Ocean. It would seem the water really is alive. Juleka balks in fear at the edge of the waves, and Marinette speaks gentle words, coaxing her forward.
When they go under, she takes Juleka’s hand, and Juleka thinks she can handle almost anything.
She’s wrong. Allowing the Ocean’s song to rush up through her throat and call other human beings to their deaths is an experience unlike any other. It’s all men on that ship, and she wonders how many of them have little sisters waiting at home. Sisters who will lose all warmth and softness when they are told of what's been taken.
The only comfort is collapsing into Marinette’s arms even as the Ocean tears apart the ship with an awful noise.
Afterward, they want Juleka to suggest where they should go. She barely even knows the names of other countries, let alone which one she’d prefer. She asks instead to go somewhere warm, because anywhere warm must be entirely opposite from the place she’s left.
Her first months as a siren are…strange. Alix is their leader, deciding where they go and what they do. Marinette seems happy to go along with it, and Juleka doesn’t have anything better to offer. Alix is as wild as a young hare driven mad by spring. She bounces around and attacks life with a ferocious kind of glee that Juleka can’t understand. What’s the point of any of it?
Juleka chooses sleep over everything else. There’s no need to eat, no need to find shelter, no wind-worn home to clean or nets to pull in, no tiny graves to dig. What else is there to life? Alix seems determined to give her options, but none of them appeal to Juleka.
The moments that give her hope are the ones filled with the most vibrant color. When Alix takes them into a volcano, Juleka’s eyes can hardly handle the intensity of the glowing lava. It’s beautiful, and for the first time, she feels a flicker of gratitude for the chance to still be alive.
When Alix leaves, it’s a little bit of a relief. Though her body doesn’t tire anymore, Juleka feels exhausted by the constant surging of the woman’s enthusiasm. Marinette cries a little, then draws herself back up and asks again where Juleka would like to go.
The words won’t come out with enough force to be audible, not when Juleka is this drained. She tries to say, “I don’t know.” Tries to ask, “Where would you like to go?” All she manages to give is the barest of mumbles, though, and Marinette grows frustrated.
“How about Italy? Would that be okay with you?”
It feels like destiny, that decision. While Alix was dragging them all across a place she called Central America, Juleka had wondered if perhaps this was all there was to the world. The hills and volcanoes and lush forests didn’t ignite any kind of fire in her. There was no sense of recognition—a feeling she hadn’t known she was searching for until she found it in Rome.
The city fits into her heart the way a well-fed rabbit used to fit into her arms, and it brings the same feeling of comfort. Sunlight falls upon the stones and statues and ancient pillars so perfectly, she wishes she could capture it somehow.
Then they visit art museums, and she sees how others have found a way to take light and shadow and bring them together to form something new and wonderful. Juleka can’t believe the variety of paintings, so many sizes and mediums and things depicted. They tell stories. They conjure emotions.
They hold so much color.
Marinette sniffs out Juleka’s interest and stalks it, catlike in her intensity. It makes Juleka uncomfortable. She’s never wanted anything before, and to have someone read the wanting so clearly makes her feel exposed. She works harder to push it all down and hide it away, retreating into the safe harbor of impassivity.
Her control breaks, though, when presented with too great of a temptation: Marinette buys the art supplies Juleka has longed for and spreads them before her like a feast. Then she leaves, and Juleka can’t hold back. She runs her hands over the brushes, feeling the soft bristles tickling her fingertips. The tubes of paint are pleasantly cool when she rolls them in her palms. The canvases smell like possibilities.
From that moment forward, art becomes all she thinks about. It’s an obsession that seizes her in a way Alix would probably have approved of, and Juleka embraces it fully.
It doesn’t even bother her to see the complete satisfaction on Marinette’s face. If she’s honest with herself, Juleka knows that the approval of her only companion means more to her than she’d like. Marinette finds her own passion in making clothes, and together they settle into this new way of life.
The paintings themselves don’t matter much. Whether they’re good or bad, Juleka doesn’t care. What happens to them once she’s finished doesn’t bother her either. When they begin disappearing, she doesn’t even notice. It’s the act itself that keeps pushing her forward. After awhile, though, Marinette confesses how she’s been sprinkling them like gifts throughout whatever city they’re currently living in.
“They make people happy!” she asserts. Juleka isn’t sure about that, but if that’s what Marinette wants to do, Juleka won’t stop her.
“This is beautiful,” Marinette says when Juleka finishes a painting the size of a dinner table. “But how can we give it away?” She proposes a ridiculous idea: “We can go hang it somewhere! See if people notice! Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll be vandals in the best way.”
It takes some convincing. In the end, it’s the debt she feels toward Marinette that gives Juleka the push to go along. Marinette is ecstatic, bouncing on her toes as she searches for the perfect spot. She points toward an apartment building and dashes inside, leaving Juleka to follow, awkwardly lugging the giant canvas. When the deed is done, Marinette practically glows with accomplishment. A little laugh escapes from Juleka—she didn't know laughter still lived inside her, surviving somehow after so many years of absence.
The brief moments of levity are always chased away by her duties, though. It never gets any easier to open her mouth and sing. Juleka has always kept her voice close, a precious treasure entrusted to a very few, but when the Ocean hungers, a song Juleka doesn’t control rises out of her lungs. It doesn’t belong to her, yet it comes from within her, and it brings death.
There is more reason now than ever to be silent.
Another war begins, like the one that raged across the world in her youth. At first, Marinette wants to hide, and Juleka follows her from one neutral country to the next. There’s a simmering under Marinette’s skin, though, a tension that only builds until one day she asks Juleka to join her in her new crusade.
“I want to help people,” Marinette says. “We have all these resources. We can do something for good.”
Had she thought of it herself, Juleka would have been convinced she’d get it wrong somehow, that she’d only make things worse. She would have been too afraid to take the steps to make the plan a reality. But Marinette has a strong inner core, a kind of bravery and sense of justice that propels her over every hurdle. In her wake, Juleka absorbs some of that resilience.
Helping people feels nice.
Decades pass without much notice. Juleka doesn’t starve anymore. No one slaps her or eats her rabbits. She no longer fears the water, for now she cannot drown. Things are better, but still…something is empty.
A new siren is chosen, a hateful girl named Kagami who has glaring eyes and a vicious mouth. Marinette, always too kind, is determined to befriend their new sister. Kagami takes those earnest efforts and tears them apart like sheets of paper. Then she leaves, and Marinette is crushed, wondering what she did wrong.
Juleka doesn’t know how to help, so she doesn’t.
When they see Kagami at a feeding, it’s painful to watch Marinette perk up with hope. She greets Kagami enthusiastically, and Kagami gives a minimal response. Juleka clenches a fist, wishing she could punch the horrible girl.
Then, things change, as they always do. Kagami refuses to sing, and in a flash she’s dropping under the water, disappearing as if she never existed at all. And Juleka sees in an instant what this will do to Marinette. Even now, Marinette is lurching forward, trying to go after Kagami.
“No!” Juleka shouts and grabs her sister’s arm. She won’t lose her, too. Not like Luka.
Marinette gives in, hugging Juleka’s waist and sobbing even as she begins to sing again. The close contact is such a comfort, Juleka almost protests when Marinette lets her go. The singing is over, and Marinette is huddled on the surface of the waves, shuddering with grief. It terrifies Juleka more than anything has since the moment she fell out of her father’s boat.
Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.
Chloe makes a rude comment, and the Ocean has to stop Marinette from launching an attack. Marinette screams out at the futility of it all and pounds her fists against the wall of water that’s blocking her from Chloe. It’s enough to make Juleka brave. She’ll try to help, even if she messes it up. So she wraps her arms around Marinette’s shoulders and pulls her away from the Ocean’s barricade, and when Marinette falls into tumbling apologies, Juleka gives her words of reassurance.
Just stay. I’ll do whatever you want.
Once they get back to their current home, though, Juleka is useless again. Marinette shuts herself in her room for days, not making a sound, and the Juleka takes to sitting under her window—keeping watch, in case Marinette decides to sneak through it and give herself up to the Ocean.
She’s sitting there when her worst fear comes true: footsteps from within the house, a slamming door, and then Marinette running down to the beach, not listening at all when Juleka calls out for her.
She’s gone in an instant, leaving as suddenly as Kagami did. Juleka stands in shock for a heartbeat before following, hoping she’s not too late. She’s only a few steps into the water when the Ocean’s voice fills her mind, reassuring her that Marinette isn’t surrendering her life.
Juleka waits, checking in occasionally, one foot dipped in, then returns to pacing. Her fear builds and builds into a crescendo, and when Marinette finally reappears, Juleka rushes forward and clings to her sister, her only friend, the one thing standing between her and utter isolation.
"You can't leave, too. Promise." She understands now more than ever the fervency with which Luka requested this vow.
And Marinette gives it, returning the hug and whispering, "Promise. I won't abandon you."