Work Text:
She learns to swim before she learns to breathe.
In the places where light doesn’t touch, in the places where the cries of gulls are as foreign to her as fire, as wood, as friends, she learns how to kick her feet, how to stretch her webbed fingers, how to catch the water in her hands and change it, how to bend it to her will.
Her father tells her that she is the most single-minded child he knows. Her mother says that she needs to clean her eyelids and see those around her. Her people are content with the quietness of the deep, are satisfied by the predictability of the depths.
No. Delara was born with quick fins and a quicker mind. There is more for her life than chores and play. A different fate waits for her, more than wasting away at the bottom of the sea. She wants more. She deserves more.
Delara finds more.
Her scales are warm, and her legs are wobbling, and her long, knotted hair is clinging tackily to her neck.
She’s made the surface, and the first draw of salty air into her untested lungs is freedom.
Delara crosses her arms over her chest. She blinks seawater from her eyes; up at the sun, down at herself, around at the surface dwellers eyeing her up with guns and spears ready in-hand.
She must look a slight, shivering thing as she drips onto their wooden deck. Delara bares her shark teeth, lets them know she is anything but.
“It’s one of those fish persons, Captain!”
“Yes, Clancee, I can see that for myself.”
This captain doesn’t walk. He swims, as if the air were his personal ocean, but he’s no more mastered by it than a serpent by a fish. He treads the sky and summits its currents better than any of her people could hope the seas.
It’s what drew Delara initially to him. It’s what’s led her to this exact moment, to joining his crew.
"Who are you?" he asks now, rising over her with an arrogant brow.
Arrogant, and handsome. She draws herself to her full height, smiles her winningest smile. "I am Delara. Your new sea artist.”
He laughs in the way one laughs at a child’s joke. "Is that so? But I am afraid we have no need for a navigator. I know these seas better than anyone alive."
“Is that so?” she parrots back. Her smile turns sharp; her heart pounds with a thrill. “Darling, I am the sea. And I know we’ve never met.”
A genuine smile crawls slowly across his handsome face. “Indeed. What a clear oversight on my part.”
He turns. “Come. Why don’t you show me how you handle a map?”
This is how Delara learns to breathe:
In great, heaving lungfuls directing Misfortune’s Keep through storm and reef unscathed.
In air-starved, wheezing bursts from laughing to one of Flintlocke’s jokes.
In quiet, quick intakes when Nadakhan’s hand lingers on hers over parchment.
And in moments like this one, stolen and special and magic .
Gulls sing their harmonies over her head. Fire burns in lanterns. Wood pounds beneath her feet. The crew shouts as she spins with Nadakhan in the center of the ring, clapping hands and warm laughter and gulping breaths that burn her throat like strong drink.
They dance and dance, and the night hangs suspended about them like a globe.
This is what Delara was made for. Not to sink forgotten at the bottom of the ocean, not to squander away her fins and her mind – no, it’s these moments that hang around her heart like spun silk and priceless jewels.
Nadakhan throws his head back and laughs, and she downs her drink and joins in his joy.
Delara loves this life. Loves him. There is no way she can go back to swimming.
The Departed Realm drags like seawater over a fresh wound.
Insipid grandmothers and grandfathers, stifling quiet, elapsed hours marked only by the lapping tide – it’s a brig as bad as any Delara’s ever seen, and guarded tighter than them all.
Oh, she walks for hours in every direction. She tries to dig. To run. To climb.
All of it is no use. Inevitably, she finds herself back at the same waters she appeared in when she arrived.
It figures that even in death she’s drowned by the ocean.
But she’s not without hope. Nadakhan is nowhere to be found. The cursed teapot that did him in has not sent him here.
He may not be trapped forever.
She may not be trapped forever.
Time passes like the tide, but Delara refuses to be eroded. She will not waste away.
The call comes like a hook around her navel, a whisper in her ear. It comes with a shimmer in the water and a soul in her hands, delicate and struggling and alive .
“I wish for my love to return.”
It comes laced with the power of a Djinn.
She flings herself for the water, stares breathless at the rippling surface. Stares until the water bends so she can see through it, until she can see him .
He’s been freed. He’s done it. He’s come for her at last.
And Delara does what she always has.
Catch the water.
Change it.
Bend it to her will.
Nadakhan is life. Delara will have him again.