Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a merman lying on the rocks above his ocean home, in the deepest hour of the night. The ghostly light from the full moon shone out over the dark water, glossing the crests of the waves with silver. The stars were bright – even brighter than the best, brightest dreams, and far more numerous.
For the best, brightest dreams are the ones that come true. And those do not come around very often.
The merman’s name was Dean, and he was not very old, but not young enough to be young anymore. He was somewhere in between. In the moonlight, the scales of his long, long tail glittered dark emerald, and the water drops caught in his short brown hair and on his eyelashes shimmered, stars in their own liquid galaxy. Dean only had eyes for the constellations above him, the tip of his tail dappling the surface of the water around the rocks where he lay.
He was lonely.
It was not the comfortable sensation of solitude that came to Dean when he was gathering coral to decorate his home, or when he was looking for pearls, or riding the great rollers into shore for the fun of the feeling of falling – of being swept up by something so much stronger than himself. Dean enjoyed being alone, and often; but tonight, under the light of the moon, he was something worse than alone. His heart was heavy, his eyes sheened over with saltwater of his own body’s making.
It hurt to be lonely. He hadn’t known, before.
He’d come away from the Feast of the Spring Solstice, his throat too tight to tell anyone quite why he’d needed to leave. All he knew was that he’d been watching the guests at his father’s table – the great and the good of the Merqueen’s court, decked out in their glossiest finery – and had been suddenly struck by how different he was to every single one of them. Not that they weren’t good people, each important in their own way, and Dean knew that, but… they were all so happy with their life beneath the waves. They were all settled, they were the rocks on the seabed; the storms passing overhead didn’t disturb them. Dean – Dean was sand, was flotsam. He’d looked around at familiar faces, and felt homeless in his own home.
And he’d turned, as always, to his brother. Just a look from Sam was usually enough to settle Dean back into himself – to remind him of who he was. Big brother Dean, I’m glad you’re here. And it was enough, always.
Except – except Dean had looked to Sam, tonight, and Sam’s eyes had been on someone else. On Jess, lovely Jess, his new bride. And it had put a shark tooth scratch right over Dean’s heart, deep enough to scar, just like that – because deep within himself, Dean knew that if he’d gone over to Sam and asked, Sam would have given all his time to his older brother. But Dean didn’t want to do that, because – Dean only had to look at Sam to see how happy he was, and – how could he have ruined that? How could he have put his not-old-not-young in-between body in between their bodies? He loved Sam. He loved Jess, too; she was kind and good, a soul prettier than a feather star. Dean was so painfully proud of Sam for loving someone like her.
And he was so, so lonely.
The waves washed in and out over the rocks, sighing and trickling like tears. The darkness was a small comfort, making the infinite reaches of the ocean and sky invisible, giving Dean his own tiny world to live in – a world where there was no one else but him, and the moon, and the pinpricks of the faraway stars. No one else to miss. It wasn’t the being alone that hurt, Dean thought, feeling the pain in his heart shift and change, ebb and flow with the waves. It was the missing, the sense of absence. The could be, but is not.
Ah, perhaps he was being melodramatic. Things would be back to normal tomorrow.
Wouldn’t they?
He didn’t know. He thought perhaps he should allow himself a night of sadness, on the strength of the possibility. He had to feel it, sometimes, even though he didn’t want to. He never, ever wanted to.
Dean looked upwards, and remembered something his mother used to say to him – long ago, when she’d still lived. The stars are watching over you, she’d said. They listen. They will keep you safe.
“You’ll keep me safe,” Dean remembered saying to her, as though she were being stupid. She’d only brought him close and kissed his forehead. Now, alone in the night, Dean closed his eyes, tried to remember the feeling of her arms around him.
When he opened his eyes again, everything was still the same. The night was implacable.
“Please,” Dean said, softly, speaking upwards. The waves swallowed the sound. “Please…” He wasn’t even sure what he was asking for. The stars didn’t care. If they really kept merpeople safe, there were a hundred things they would already have stopped from happening.
Even still, Dean had no one else to talk to.
“You probably can’t hear me,” he scratched out over a tight throat. “I know you can’t. But if you… if anyone’s there…” His voice was cracking like dry, brittle seashells. “I know I’ve asked before. But I need you now more than I ever have. If you’re there…” Somewhere to the east, the wind was sighing through caves, groaning for lost things. Dean sat up, keeping his eyes on the skies above. The heels of his hands ground into the seaweed and sand on the rock beneath him.
“I’m calling it in,” he said, more firmly. He still sounded a little thick with sadness, but he cleared his throat roughly and pressed on. “You hear me? I’m calling it in. I was told you’d watch over me. I’m here now. I need help. Please, I… I don’t know who else to turn to. She said –” Dean sucked in a breath, swallowed hard. “She said you’d be here, you’d watch over me. Please… help me. ”
The sea seemed to still for a moment; the wind’s lament softened. Dean waited, unblinking, staring above…
A light changed, in the north.
Dean frowned, narrowing his eyes.
No. It wasn’t possible…
His heart started to beat a little harder.
Distant, tiny, underwhelming; so small as to be forgettable, a star was moving.
It couldn’t be.
And yet – it wasn’t that the world was moving below, as it always moved beneath the skies, no – it wasn’t that. This star was on a different path to all the others, seeming to gather speed, throwing out a tail behind it made of lighted dust.
Dean’s mouth dropped open.
This… has to be a coincidence, he thought. Shooting stars were rare, but not unheard of. So strange that it should happen now – some kind of sign from the heavens – but it wasn’t… it wasn’t an actual answer to his prayer.
Dean watched the star fly, his own tail batting at the waves in agitation, anticipation. It couldn’t be, he knew it couldn’t. This was a cruel trick of the skies, this was the universe laughing at him.
And yet. The star – it was growing larger.
Dean sat up fully, tilting back his head to watch, mouth open. The circle of brightness with its flaring tail was flying this way, down to the sea. Dean shook his head in disbelief. The stars could not hear. The stars could not be answering his call… it could not be.
When the wind drew in its breath, when the waves drew back before splashing over the rocks, Dean thought – Dean imagined – that he could hear it. A low roar, getting closer…
It could not be.
It could not be.
The light in the sky was growing brighter, painfully bright, and Dean raised his hand to shield his eyes. The star… it seemed to be right overhead now, still small and far away, but – definitely approaching.
Beside Dean, there was a soft plink, only just audible over the sound of the waves.
Dean, his sharp ears catching the sound, looked to his left. There was something small resting on the water, bright and glinting sharply in the moonlight. Dean watched it for a moment, his breath short in his chest. He looked up again, and the light was a little closer.
Dean was panicking. This couldn’t really be happening, could it? He hadn’t actually… the star wasn’t really…
Plink. Plink. Plink. Gentle noises, barely a fingertip touch on the surface of the dark, clear seas. Dean stared at the strange, glittering things that were falling all around him, not understanding. Plink. One landed on the crest of a wave that rolled over the rock where Dean sat, his eyes wide, and it was softly set down beside his clenched fist.
Dean swallowed hard, and reached over with clumsy, sand-covered fingers, and picked it up.
It lay in his palm, cold and shining. A shard of ice, smooth as a gem, finer than a diamond and twice as clear. When Dean held it up to the moon, a dark rainbow cut through it, and Dean sucked in a breath and dropped it.
It fell back into the ocean, unaffected by the brine. Plink, plink, plink, more shards, all polished to a shine. Plink, plink, plink plink plink plink plink…
Dean raised his hands above his head as the soft falling of icedrops became a shower, which turned into a storm; the glassy shards were pouring over his shoulders, not cutting his rough skin but bruising him. When he held out his hands, they were overflowing in bare moments with diamonds as cold as snow…
And all the while, the light above was growing. Its ghostly blueish tint was turning the ocean’s dark swell to an eerie turquoise, strobing rainbows through the diamonds on the surface, and then – quite suddenly –
BOOM.
A wave of sound shuddered the cold, damp, spray-laced air, loud as the footfall of a giant - and at the same time, Dean felt a great whipcrack of heat slit from the top of his head all the way to the base of his spine. He screamed, haloed in sudden stark brightness - and then the pain was gone, the light was gone, and all that Dean could hear was his own involuntary gasps, his own thudding heart.
Dean dived, even as a second great BOOM rent the air. He fled into the depths, and above him, the soundwave pounded across the water, rippling the very ocean itself for miles and miles. As he swam and swam, down and down and away and down, Dean could only see light streaking through the water, and hear a shrill, piercing, bone-breaking shriek from above… it grew louder, and louder, and Dean’s head felt as though it were going to burst, and he tried to keep swimming but his vision was clouding and his arms were weakening and all he could hear was his heart, his heart, his heart…
Thud. Thud. Thud.
And then only darkness.