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Andrew doesn’t know a lot about merfolk. He should, because he is one, but he came into the world wrong. Cursed by the moon on the night he was born. That’s what his pod said. About him and Aaron. It took less time to figure it out than it should have, young and still green around the gills. He saw the way the pod stared and gawked and led their young away from him and his tail-twin.
It’s an omen, he learned. To be born as one of two, tails wrapped in the womb and the moon splitting her light between them. Only one is supposed to live. That’s the curse.
And then they both lived, and kept living, and kept living.
And the pod watched and waited and forced them out before they could pass their curse on to someone else.
The only pod he had was the one he was born into. He didn’t get the gift of hanging around for long, cursed as he was with a tail-twin. They drove him and Aaron out as soon as they were old enough to catch guppies. That hurt less than watching Aaron swim away in the dark, guided by the moon’s light and all the blame in his heart for Andrew. He left him for the first groups of gills that came along, swimming far enough away Andrew couldn’t feel him in the currents anymore.
He hadn’t felt him since.
What Andrew does know about merfolk, is they’re not supposed to be alone. Most of them at least. He thinks deep-sea merfolk are…different. But then, he’s not sure deep-sea merfolk are real or if they’re one of those moon-tales parents tell their young to keep them from swimming into waters too cold and too deep to survive.
Another curse.
He doesn’t care.
The water’s cold. It hurts, but he’s mostly used to it by now, the chill on his scales and the way it makes it hard to swim sometimes. If he’s not careful, he loses feeling in the tips of his fins, and then he has to struggle up to the surface until he’s warm enough to feel them again.
Sometimes he thinks about letting the cold creep higher up his tail, until he can’t feel it at all. Until he can’t swim.
Merfolk can drown, if they try really, really hard. The cold makes it an easier thing to do.
He could do it, he thinks. Close his eyes and close his gills and swallow water through his mouth until his throat stings with all the salt of sorrow and sadness. He wonder if Aaron would feel it happen. If he’d know that somewhere in the water, his tail had lost its twin.
He doubts it. Andrew can’t feel Aaron anymore, hasn’t in more moons than he can count. And he doesn’t know if that’s because he’s dead, landlocked, or if he hates Andrew enough to have cut him all the way off. But he doesn’t think it matters which it is, it just matters that it’s happened at all. He can’t feel Aaron, can’t call to him, can’t swim through the oceans until his tail tells him which way to go. Andrew’s a lost little guppy who can’t find his way home.
He hopes it makes Aaron feel hollow too.
He’s hungry.
His teeth taste like rocks.
He’s not sure if those things have to do with each other, but he thinks they might. Just to see, he picks up a rock, has to dig it out first, shuffling in the dark sand with sensitive hands and bright eyes. It’s dark enough down here, the way it always is, that he can disappear if he stays still. The light doesn’t reach this far. Can’t find him.
He flicks his tail, just so he can see a little better, and it flashes red and copper and bright, too bright almost, and he has to squint away from himself.
But he finds a rock, heaves it up into his arms and sniffs. Smells like the sea. Like stone. Tastes just like his teeth.
The last time he ate, he fought off a fangtooth to do it. It means he hasn’t eaten in more than a quarter moon, too busy licking his wounds and easing back his mobility. Fangtooths aren’t big fish, but they have big teeth, and this one got him good in the side. He had to find a kelp forest to staunch the bleeding and kept it wrapped there when he retreated darker and deeper into the sea.
He’s hungry.
He clicks, low in his chest and bouncing up through his throat. Waits. Nothing bounces back to him. Slowly, claws dragging in the sand as he goes, he winds around the sea floor. He goes slowly, with long movements and haunting glides. The water doesn’t move around him much, he’s sharp enough to cut through without sending ripples out around him. Sharp enough to snap left and sink his own fangs in the gulper eel that doesn’t see him fast enough.
His tail flashes, shining copper and red, and his teeth taste like blood.
The eel thrashes and he bites down harder, shaking violently from tail to tip. It goes limp and loose in his jaws. He tears.
When he’s done, stone-toothed and shadow-like above the unstirring sand, he sings. If there’s anything listening, it knows he’s coming now. His tail flicks bright and alluring.
He’s still hungry.
There’s something in the water with him. Close, he thinks, but not close enough to see.
Not a shark. There’s been a few, looking for a mid-sun meal and curiously circling until he flares dark fins and snarls. That scares most of them off, even the ones larger than him. Not all of them though. A lantern shark follows him for a while, too long. It glows after him, keeping just enough distance that he can’t spin around and snatch it up before it has the chance to dart away. If he’s quicker, maybe, but merfolk are only so fast. Warm-water merfolk at least.
He chased it away eventually, not quite quick enough to get it in his hands or between his jaws, but fast enough to run it down until, when he slowed, it kept swimming away.
This, whatever it is, isn’t a shark.
A predator, yes, but a far more dangerous one than a dog-like great white looking for a snack or a nose rub. This thing stalks. Andrew just can’t figure out if it’s stalking him.
He glides, tries to look at ease this far beneath the surface. His tail stutters though, can’t quite bend as fluidly as it should. It’s why the sharks got so close, he thinks. That and he’s not sure how often these deep-sea sharks see merfolk. But he looks like an injured one. Like easy pickings.
His teeth are still sharp enough to prove otherwise. If he gets the chance to use them.
It’s below him, cruising along without stirring the water, without making a movement large enough to be seen. He just knows it’s there. Can feel it in the currents of the water and the unreaching light of the moon. Or the sun. He’s not sure which is out right now, but he tries to hate them both. And to hate the thing swimming under him.
If it thinks he’s an easy meal, he wants it to bite.
Now.
And it doesn’t. Just keeps mirroring him. He drifts lower, and the water cools over his scales like ice in the shallows during the long-moon months. His tail twitches, trembles. He slows, because he has to, and the thing underneath him slows too.
Copy-cat, he thinks. Because if he thinks anything else it might scare him, and he’s not the sort to get scared of things that slink around in the dark and the depths.
Not anymore.
He’s deep enough now that if he looks, when he looks, Andrew can make out the shadow of it. Long, longer than him at least, slender. It moves with the grace he doesn’t, can’t. Seamless in the water, silent. He looks, and it brightens from the tail, a flicker of red and then copper, a chase of bright colour up the long line of a strong tail, he tracks it up to–
Oh.
To a set of slender hips. The light dances out then, trickling a few last flashes up across the reaching scales at the base and a sturdy spine.
Andrew dips, and, on instinct, sings.
His hum starts low, quiet. It’s mostly sad, he thinks. Tragic. Like he’s mourning. Still. Like he never stopped. His song haunts and harrows and he stops, because it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you sing to scare someone off or to ask them closer.
The song that rises up to meet him… eerie feels a weak word. It’s spectral, almost, uncanny and unnatural. A floating note that warbles up through the currents and washes across his scales even colder than the water. It warms. Rinses. Andrew’s heard a lot of merfolk sing, heard hundreds of songs. He’s never heard a song like this.
The song ends in a click, the bouncing sort. And there’s a strange trill that chases up after it. Another sound Andrew hasn’t heard. He sinks. Low, lower. The creature, the merfolk, under him winds. Wiggles. He can see it, tail lighting up again to show him details of the movement, the squiggle and wriggle and the sharp, sharp flick at the end.
He’s… Andrew’s never seen a tail like that. He’s never seen a merfolk like that. He’s never seen anything like this.
The trill comes again, and the merfolk rises. It’s dark, and hard to see, but Andrew still can see. The bulk of their scales look like ash, dark and smooth and smoke-curled. He’s seen fires burn, the thick, heavy plumes of dark air that rise from it. This mer wears that, rolls in it. They’re textured with copper, too. Smears of it that aren’t quite stripes and aren’t anything else either. The ash slides into copper, slides into bright, brilliant, dangerous red.
And his eyes are blue.
Andrew meets them, holds them, and when the mer beneath him starts to sing again, Andrew echoes the song back. Slow, quiet, long.
And then he’s gone, and Andrew’s alone in the water with half a song ringing in his ears.
He sings until his gills flutter and his throat hurts and he’s pulled half a dozen fish to him. He eats half, slaughters them all, and swims up high enough to drop the rest down where the warm-blood can find them.
He’s too cold to swim right, he can tell. His tail doesn’t work like it should, and he’s slower than he should be. He’ll die.
He doesn’t want the warm-blood to die.
He likes having a friend.
Andrew hasn’t seen the deep-sea mer in a quarter moon. He knows he’s still close, still watching. Every so often there’s a bloody fish floating ahead of him, torn in a perfect crescent of sharp teeth.
It’s…
Strange, mostly. But it’s also keeping him alive. He didn’t realize he was hungry, too busy being cold, until he didn’t have to be hungry any more.
He circles another one, sniffs. Freshly dead. Not more than a night old. Less than, he’d bet. The bristlemouth drifts, slowly, slowly oozing blood. Andrew won’t say no to good fish. Especially fish he doesn’t have to kill himself.
Less work, larger reward.
He holds onto the bones, wraps them in kelp he harvested a while ago and ties the package around his torso. Above where his skin meets his tail. He tests it, darts forward, up, twists around in a large, wide circle. It doesn’t slow him down. Doesn’t impede him at all.
He should head to the surface for a while, or, if not that, head for shallower waters. Neither is a particularly nice option. Both run the risk of other merfolk, of landfolk, of …
He likes it here, in the cold, in the dark, alone.
Mostly.
He drifts, slowly rising, rising, rising. He’s in no rush. No hurry. But his tail needs warming. Needs sun. He needs water more suited to him. Needs to be more suited to the waters he prefers.
Someone follows him up.
He sees the sharp cut of copper in the water, a stain of red. Doesn’t feel a single change in the current, the movement of the sea. Sneaky little thing. Andrew clicks. Calls.
The mer down below answers.
He chirps first, whistles a high, clear song, and Andrew keeps an eye on him as he circles, climbing up through the water to get close, closer. It feels like he’s one of the boatfolk, pulling in catch. Slowly, carefully, drawing him in until he’s close enough to see properly, stretches of pale skin, dark scales. Preternatural and strange and wonderful. He looks, sounds, and moves like a dangerous terrible thing. Like a nightmare creature from the stories his pod used to tell. Wicked, horrid deep-sea beast. Feral, frightening, fearsome.
Andrew wants to pull him in closer.
The surface looms, closer to Andrew than it’s gotten in half a moon. He can feel the sun reaching him, fingers and talons of warmth stretching down to curl around him. He hates how nice it feels, how gentle. How it calls and draws and begs him closer.
The other mer, deep-sea and lurking, circles, lingers just in his shadow. Like he’s hiding.
Andrew hasn’t cooed since Aaron left. Hasn’t needed to try and soothe or ease. Even before Aaron left he wasn’t often one to comfort. The sound curls in his chest, through his throat. Soft, gentle, kind.
Not anything the other merfolk he knows would call him.
This one though, he slows. His tight, anxious circles loosen, stretch, and he starts rising again, drifting slow, slow, slow up to Andrew. To the sun.
His expression folds, wrinkles, and he bears his teeth up at the surface like he can scare it away. Like he can bring it a wild enough fight it’ll turn tail and run. Andrew would like to see him try, lets him snarl and hiss until he blinks and settles. He’s lower than Andrew still, more than three tail lengths away. He knows, from watching the mer swim and circle and glide, that he can’t catch him if he darts away. No point in trying even. So Andrew slows even more, moves as little as possible, and lets the deep-sea mer close the distance at his own pace, if at all.
“Bright.”
Andrew almost startles. Does, really, but he keeps it to his head, the sharp twist to look at the mer who’s drifted closer now, head turned up to the surface still. It’s cocked to the side, his jaw sharp and angular and dotted with ash and copper where his scales curl around from the back of his neck and over his shoulders. They spread across his temples too, reach for his cheekbones. It’s not particularly bright at all, but the copper shines like it is.
Andrew thinks, for as dangerous and strange and un-mer-like as this mer is, he’s never seen something so beautiful.
And he spoke.
Andrew hums, a proper vocalization and not just the start of a mersong. “It’s brighter,” he counters. “Closer up.”
The mer flicks his tail, an anxious, nervous tic. It lights up, sparks red at the tips of his tail-fins and climbs coppery up until it hits his waist. He flicks it again, and rises just the slightest bit more. A sonar rattles in his throat, strange and clicking and sweet.
“What’s your name?”
The mer turns from the surface, higher in the water than Andrew is now, and half his face pinches and smooths in quick succession.
“Name?”
Andrew…wasn’t expecting the answer to be a question.
“What are you called?” he rephrases.
The mer shakes his head, his tail flicking red and copper to echo. “I’m not called anything,” he says. His tail flicks again, not agitated but edging closer to it. Like he’s not sure his answers are the right ones, and can’t figure out if he should swim off or stay. “You’re called something?”
Andrew nods. “I’m called Andrew.”
The mer mumbles his name back to him, twice. A third time. Then he clicks and flutters three of his fins restlessly. “Why?”
“It’s my name,” Andrew says. “Your pod gives you one.”
That’s a mistake. The other mer curls his tail in, folding it around himself like he’s trying to avoid an injury.
Oh.
Andrew’s spent a lot of time looking at the red and copper and shine of this new, strange mer. But not enough time looking at the rest of him, the long lines from someone else’s claws, bite marks marring the mid-section of his tail.
Maybe not every story about the deep-sea merfolk is made up. Maybe the awful ones are true.
“Do you want one?” Andrew asks.
The mer stops tightening, stops swirling up into a mess of tail and fin and flinching fear. His tail pulls away from his face first, from wide, blinking eyes. His gills flare and tuck against his neck, and when he grins there’s just a touch too many more teeth than Andrew expected.
“Yes,” he says.
Andrew gives him different names for a moon before he likes one enough to keep it. Neil.
Sometimes, when Andrew’s up in the sun and he darts down, down, down to find something soft, and squishy and alive to sink his teeth in, he takes a little extra time to say it to himself. Neil, Neil, Neil.
He has a name. Like Andrew does.
He likes hearing it.
“Neil,” Andrew calls.
They’re deep. Deep enough that Andrew, warm-blooded and built for shallow, sunny waters, can’t see properly. Neil’s his light, his tail sweeping in wide, bright strokes through the water. He snaps his fins, and feels Andrew turn toward him, moving through the water with stilted movements. Cold.
Neil waits for him to catch up, circles slowly in the dwindling shine of his own light. Andrew will swim to the right spot even if Neil’s not in it anymore. Neil comes up behind him, then, slightly above his shoulder. Andrew’s gills are narrow, his scales tight and rigid.
“Cold,” Neil says. “Sun time?”
Andrew shakes his head. “Not yet,” he argues.
Neil knows his language needs work. Andrew has more of it than he does. A lot more. But Andrew’s a warm-blood. From the waters where pods stay together and share. They talk. Pass on stories and secrets and memories.
Neil doesn’t.
Solitary and strange.
Deep-sea merfolk don’t stay in pods. Or groups. They come together to reproduce, and if they do they stay together long enough to teach their young how to tear at things with their claws and their teeth and how to use their tail to stun anything they can’t kill in one bite. And then they swim off into the dark and they don’t come back.
His mom stayed longer than she should, he knows. Because he learned slowly. She didn’t know a lot of language either, clicked and sung and whistled until she had to use her teeth and talons to get her point across.
Neil can speak to sharks and whales and, if they linger and let him linger long enough to chat, he can speak to the giant squid too. But he can’t speak to merfolk. Not well. It’s not a language anyone ever gave to him. Just like no one ever gave him a name.
He wants to talk to Andrew like Andrew talks to him.
“Warm-blood,” Neil argues. He rolls away from Andrew’s shoulder, slides in underneath him and tries to bully him up. “You need sun-time.”
“I don’t yet.” Andrew swims sideways, and Neil floats up past him before doubling back to try again.
“Sick,” Neil warns.
“I won’t get sick.”
“Yes,” Neil argues. “Get sick with no sun.”
Andrew tries to dodge him again, but Neil’s faster, quicker, and he butts up against Andrew, from underneath. It forces him up, not by much, but up.
“Neil,” Andrew protests.
“Sun-sick,” he says. The words aren’t right, he knows they’re not right, but they work fine for now. Andrew lets him buffer him up again, and again. And then Andrew, slowly and not without a long, pointed look, starts actually swimming.
“I’m not sick, Neil,” Andrew says. “Just cold.”
“Now,” Neil argues. “Not always.”
Andrew doesn’t argue anymore, just follows Neil up until the surface shines on them both.
It’s pretty. Andrew’s pretty.
His scales don’t look like Neil’s do, or like his mom’s did. They’re black as ink in the water, the deep, but the sun makes them shift, different colours chasing and rounding and curling into a mix of blues and purples and greens. Pink, too. The sun finds Andrew and he warms, gills opening up, scales gentling. Neil nudges him up higher and Andrew sighs, drifts. He tugs Neil up with him.
Andrew knows, the same way Neil seems to, that his time in the deep has to come to an end. Soon, too. It’s not sustainable for him, even if he suns himself more frequently than he used to at Neil’s constant insistence.
It takes him longer to warm up, and less time for him to get cold enough that he can’t swim right, or breathe right, or think right. He puts up less of a fight when Neil pokes and prods and shoves him up to the surface, and they both know what it means.
“I’ll come too,” Neil says.
He’s rolling, tight, controlled spins as he keeps moving forward beside Andrew. They’re close to the surface, closer than Neil is really suited to be, and closer than Andrew wants.
“And get sick too?”
Neil stops rolling. “Don’t know that,” he counters. “Maybe just you.”
Andrew almost takes offence. Almost, because he knows Neil doesn’t mean it as an insult. Neil’s just saying what they know, and, conveniently, what they don’t know. Andrew can’t get mad at that, or offended. It’s only the truth.
“You could,” Andrew says. “Then what?”
“I come back,” Neil shrugs. “I like the sun.”
“I like the cold,” Andrew argues.
When Neil frowns, and he does that more and more now, he does it with his whole body. Any expression really. Andrew can usually see it in his tail more than he can see it in his face. And it’s pretty visible in his face too. So Neil frowns, mouth turning down and his shoulders following. His tail swipes side to side and then it bends to the left, hovering there like a question. A sad little complaint.
“You don’t,” Neil says. “It makes your tail hurt.”
Andrew turns away, rolling up to the sun and closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at the way all of Neil is frowning and unhappy. The way there’s still more to say hiding under his tongue. He’s taking his time more often now, saying things slowly to make sure he’s saying them right. And he does say them right, picking up more and more mer-speak every day.
Sometimes, Andrew thinks it really is a shame no one ever taught Neil the language in the first place, he’s good at putting together words in ways that keep Andrew listening.
Sometimes, when Neil talks like this, all correct and rude and honest, Andrew wishes he didn’t teach Neil mer-speak either.
Neil’s hand reaches, tapping gentle fingers on the outside of Andrew's elbow first. When Andrew doesn’t pull away or tell him no, his hand slides to the inside, where the skin is softer, and then down to his wrist. Andrew doesn’t have to look to know that Neil’s hand stops on the mean-looking scars there, torn and jagged things he’d left behind after tearing at himself with claws he’d been born with. His own special curse.
“You like hurting,” Neil says.
There’s a hum behind his voice, two vocalizations coming out together. The song that rises, almost without Neil’s knowing, is as sad as Andrew’s ever heard. Lonely and quiet and hurting.
Andrew pulls his arm away, and he swims.
He doesn’t feel Neil following.