Chapter Text
Jean-Pierre was shaking. Soaked to his veins in icy saltwater, he shook and cried, watching through blurry eyes as the rain pelted down on their tired, sore bodies in the dark, effectively drowning them on dry land.
It wasn’t supposed to go this way. The skies were supposed to be clear. He wasn’t a rookie, some wet-behind-the-ears novice! He had known these seas almost as long as he’d known his own name. He was Polnareff, sea-farer, wave-tamer, one with the waters.
He was supposed to know everything there was to know about it. He did. But in that moment, it all left him; fear seized all of his brain power, all of his nautical expertise, and cast it far away to the wayside, floating off in the direction of the violent winds’ choosing.
The stranger before him cradled his sweet baby sister in his arms, avian-like claws just barely grazing her skin. Up this close, Jean was too frozen with fright to move. His survival instincts selfishly only catered to his own mortal body, going against every brotherly ordinance he mentally laid upon himself, against every thought that screamed and roared and cursed at him to be a man and run and protect, even if he got impaled in the process! But… To approach a creature like that would be a death wish. He couldn’t do that to his mother, not after what he’d already done. She couldn’t lose her only two children; that’d be… a vicious ploy of fate—and Jean couldn’t afford to be stupid enough to contribute to such a sickening outcome.
He loves his sister. Sherry, that beautiful, aggravating girl… She can’t be dead. She’s not allowed to die, not if he can help it. She had too much time ahead of her; she was only midway through high school.
He sniffles and chokes when he sees the fiery-eyed stranger glare down at his unconscious sister, shaking her slightly as if to jostle her immobile body awaken; trying to reanimate her, like it was that easy.
“Stop,” Jean cries. He stares at the terrifying stranger, pleading.
Of course, he ignores him, beating his muscular tail against the wet sand in response. As if to tell Jean to shut his mouth, let him think. What a sight. The stranger was a mer. Imposing, mysterious, infinitely dangerous, and… infamously, antagonistic to humankind. The merman gives him a vacant look, hovering his hand over his little sister’s chest, carefully, knowingly, flattening his palm as high up as possible, his fingers rested on the dip of her clavicle, as to not grope unnecessarily, and pressing down in search of her life force—that stuttering, green organ locked behind her bones. With a look of—what was it, disappointment, pain, ire, pity?—he leans down and places his lips onto hers, sharply breathing oxygen into her battered lungs as if he were inflating a balloon, jerking back when she flinches awake with a harrowing gasp. A sound was so abhorrent and blessed and sudden that it numbs all of Jean’s thoughts, his feeling of impending doom replaced by another dreadful feeling instead. A mix of emotions. Gratitude, guilt, and sorrow. Watching Sherry breathe again, the way she did as a baby, choked-up and out-of-practice, and vomit saltwater, makes the distraught elder brother feel like his heart is being twisted and his lungs are being flattened and tied up—balloons, deflated; the air is stolen from his chest in amazement, for better or worse. The taste of her first breath, back in the realm of the living, hits Sherry’s body as if she was forcibly swallowing snowflakes made of crushed glass. It was a disgusting sound, hearing her struggle to regulate, but it was one that so desperately needed to be heard. If she struggled, she lived. If she wheezed and coughed and bleeding her nose in her sleeve, she was alive, her body was doing what it was supposed to—not quitting.
As quickly as the merman had appeared, he scurries back towards the night-blackened seas, eyes widened with shock and panic—perhaps, remembering that he’d been seen and potentially remembered by not one, but now, two humans. He vanishes into the waters with a clumsy splash, his heavy tail dragging behind him, pulled by the vicious gravity of the Upper World, where nothing floated but the eagles and bats in the sky; where everything that went up had to fall down… especially the flapping tail of a million-dollar fish.
Jean scoops Sherry up into his arms and huffs, weary and teary, checking her over and over for bruises and harm. When he feels her small, trembling hands clutching at his back, he apologizes, speaking into the wet ringlets of her hair, which shone bright, even in the storm, like their mom’s.
He got so lucky.
She got lucky, for she was saved; though, not by him.
It hurt.
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖