Chapter Text
Grantaire is hauling in his catch and trying to ignore the pounding in his head when he realizes there's something tangled in the net.
It isn't unheard of--you wouldn't believe what kind of junk people toss overboard, and sometimes it ends up in his nets among the Atlantic salmon. He's never caught an old boot, though. Cartoons had led him to believe there would be a lot more of that sort of thing.
He bends over the net and sees a flash of pale skin, a bare shoulder, and--oh my god it's a body, there's a dead body in my fishing net, oh god oh god.
He should just leave it and radio the police, or maybe the Coast Guard? He doesn't know who has jurisdiction over dead bodies off the Maine coast. But he pushes the net aside to get a closer look, because he should probably check for a pulse, just in case...
Grantaire freezes. Just at the base of his spine, the man's skin shifts to crimson scales, and--it's a tail. It's a tail and it's moving and the mermaid is sitting up and--
And he's gorgeous. Honey-blond hair hanging in damp curls around his face, blue eyes, freckles at the tops of his shoulders. How does a mermaid get freckles, anyway? He's not wearing anything except a necklace of cloudy blue and green sea-glass.
"What, no clam-shell bikini?" Grantaire asks, and then his legs give out beneath him and he sits down hard on a coil of rope. He rubs a hand over his face. "Oh my god, I have got to stop drinking."
Only then does he register that the mermaid is glaring at him with a ferocity thus far unknown in Grantaire's life. He feels like an ant frying under a magnifying glass--or maybe that's still the hangover.
He kneels down to untangle the mermaid, figuring it's only polite, but the mermaid just shrugs and the net slides from his arms. His tail brushes the deck irritably.
The mermaid finally opens his mouth, and says the last thing Grantaire would have expected. "Your operation isn't dolphin-safe."
"I beg your pardon?"
His eyes narrow further. "Do you know how many dolphins die every year as a result of bycatch?"
"I have some idea, yes. But I've never caught a dolphin in my nets."
"And simply because you never have, of course that means you never will," he counters icily.
"Look, there aren't any dolphins in these waters at this time of year. It's too cold for them. And probably for you, come to that.”
"Your concern is unnecessary and unwelcome."
"Okay, fine." Grantaire takes a breath. "So, you're a mermaid. Merman?"
"Merling," he corrects.
"Right, sure. Gender-neutral, I like it. Mer-comrade. My name's Grantaire."
"I'm Enjolras."
"Enjolras. Okay." A French merling, or maybe a French-Canadian one. It's about as reasonable as anything else that's going on right now. "Let me get this straight. You tangled yourself in the net on purpose, as a protest against dolphin cruelty."
"Yes," he says, like that makes sense.
"Are you...particularly fond of dolphins?"
Enjolras snorts. Maybe it sounds different underwater, but on the surface it's kind of a bubbly squeaky sound, and Grantaire finds it impossibly adorable. "Of course not. Dolphins are terrible, as a rule, but it doesn't mean they should be forced to suffer painful deaths."
"What about the salmon? I mean, you do realize that they die, right?"
"They're fish, not mammals. There's a whole--it's different."
"You're half-fish."
"No, I am not."
"You have scales."
He gives an irritated wave of his hand. "There are superficial similarities, yes, but the musculature of the tail is more akin to dolphins, and we're definitely mammalian. We're warm-blooded, first of all, and even our reproductive systems resemble huma--" He breaks off, and suddenly his face is nearly as red as his tail.
"Really," Grantaire says, grinning. "Fascinating."
He folds his arms across his chest, and Grantaire notes with rising hysteria that the merling has really nice arms. A swimmer's physique, of course.
"Are you going to make your nets dolphin-safe?" Enjolras asks.
"On the advice of a hallucinatory merling? Doubtful."
"I'm not a hallucination."
"Which is exactly what all my other hallucinations say."
He frowns.
"That was a joke. Mostly. Anyway, have you considered that using pingers on your nets basically chases dolphins away from their natural habitat--and the most plentiful food sources?"
"I accept that the standard methods are far from ideal, but they're infinitely preferable to dead dolphins."
"No argument there."
"So you'll fix the nets?"
"Sure, fine. If it'll stop the Mermaid Mafia from coming after me, leaving headless tuna in my bed, or whatever. Though I'd like to see you get into my bed, what with the, you know..." It's Grantaire's turn to stop short, abruptly realizing that he had practically just propositioned a mythical being.
"We wouldn’t do that, even if we could. Tuna populations are in a dangerous decline, and anyway--we're not supposed to make ourselves known to humans at all."
"Yeah, I can understand the risk involved. What if I had decided that there was more profit in capturing a live merling than in salmon fishing?"
Enjolras produces a knife from--somewhere? Maybe he has pockets in his tail. The blade is black and translucent, and looks sharp enough to cut Grantaire's shadow from his heels.
"Obsidian," he says at last. "Nice."
"I'm glad I didn't have to use it. I didn't think you were that sort, but you can never be quite sure."
"What do you mean, you didn't think I was that sort? Have you been watching me?"
Enjolras just smiles, and the knife disappears behind his back. He hoists himself up over the rail, red scales sparkling in the sunlight. "It was a pleasure to meet you, Grantaire."
"Yeah, sure. You too."
And just like that, Enjolras is gone, over the side without the slightest splash to mark his dive. Grantaire hauls in the rest of the nets on autopilot and heads back to shore.
As soon as he docks the boat, he's going to drink until he can convince himself that this conversation never happened.