Work Text:
‘Fantastic’, was the first thought Andy had as she hit the icy water. Just fantastic. Five years of freedom, five years since she ran away from being sold in marriage like a prize brood mare, disguised herself - enormously convincingly, thanks very much - as a teenage boy and joined Captain Ravitz’s pirate crew as a deck-swabber. Was five years all she would get? She tried hard not to think about how her current predicament was entirely her fault, how she - the entire crew - had known they were traversing through the quickest and most dangerous route on the continent. A route known to be one in which were sirens lurked, luring men to their watery deaths with irresistible swansong. And what had she done? Only insisted - along with Nate and Christian, the only other crewmates arrogant enough to presume they could withstand the creatures’ allure - that there was no need to tie herself to the mast that dusk, that she would remain unaffected.
Yeah, that had worked out for her. So well.
The sound had been all-encompassing, sweeter than honey, brighter than gold. The trio had fallen into time-honored trance almost instantaneously. With frankly humiliating haste.
And now look at them. Flailing about in the midnight ocean, surrounded by the ethereal silvery glow of monsters.
“Fuck!” Christian yelled - and then screamed as he was yanked underwater. Andy watched in horror as his clothes - ripped, shredded, clearly torn by razor-sharp teeth - floated to the surface, and the water began to bleed crimson in the moonlight. She whipped her head towards where the ship ought to have been, but instead was greeted by the mere silhouette of the structure against the horizon.
Bastards.
And if she thought the sensible crew were bastards…
“Hey!” Nate shouted from somewhere behind. “Take him!”
Her jaw dropped. Try as she might to speak, no sound would come out. Then she felt a pair of rough hands at her back, calloused hands, human hands - Nate’s hands - propelling her, sending her lurching through the water towards the cluster of sirens.
She closed her eyes as her body dropped beneath the surface, determined not to witness the exact moment of her demise for herself.
She waited.
And waited.
And God, she needed air, she needed air right now - she surfaced, spluttering - silence.
Treading water, desperately, turning around to see -
She almost vomited. Nate - or what had been Nate, but now was merely multiple dismembered limbs - was being carted away by all but two of the sirens, vanishing into the dark in the opposite direction from the departed ship.
A horrific sight. What was more horrific a sight, however, were the two remaining sirens, grinning maniacally, revealing rows of luminescent ivory fangs, one sporting violently red hair and the other a glacial blonde. They began circling her like sharks.
Andy shrieked as the redheaded one clamped clawed hands onto her tricep and hissed in her face. What she did not expect was for the siren’s face to contort in consummate disgust and recoil away from her, relinquishing her grasp as if burned.
“Ugh!”
“What, Emily?” The blonde siren called.
“It - it - it smells weird! Expired! Like…a rotten onion!”
The predominant emotion Andy experienced in that moment was still resounding terror, but a smaller part of her was just offended. She knew for a fact she practised better hygiene than the entire crew combined.
The blonde swam closer. And closer. And -
“Expired, querida? What on earth are you talking about - oh. I see. Vile.”
While still ferocious, the blonde’s expression took on an air of puzzlement. She cocked her head and promptly dove underwater. Andy screamed as she felt a pair of preternaturally strong clawed hands grasp the breeches covering her upper legs. Then, almost as soon as she felt it, they retracted and the blonde resurfaced. She looked utterly bewildered.
“It appears to be…deformed.”
“Deformed?” Andy squeaked indignantly. “I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much. And I am not an ‘it’.”
She may be at imminent risk of meeting her maker, but that was a level of slander she was not prepared to put up with.
“It is missing a part,” the blonde pronounced solemnly.
Well, great. There was a ninety-nine percent chance she wouldn’t be leaving this encounter recognisably human, let alone alive, regardless of the exact mechanism, so she might as well stay true to her pirate instincts and defend her honor.
“Look,” Andy glared, “I am not deformed. I fight as good as any, I’ll have you both know.”
“With a missing part?”
“To be perfectly honest with you, that part is typically responsible for starting the fights and doesn’t help one bit when they’ve begun - if anything, it’s a weak point, actually - so I’m doing perfectly well without it.”
The redhead eyed her critically. “A fight? You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight, you horrible thing.”
She reared back and up in the water, revealing a scarlet, scaly tail, and just as she was about to strike -
“ What on earth is the meaning of this?”
A soft, quiet, and utterly deadly voice cut through the air. Andy’s head whipped around in unison with those of the redhead and blonde to see:
Another siren, older but by exactly how much was indeterminate. An eerily ageless quality hung about her like air. The impeccable shock of snow-white hair was as short as Andy’s own, but her features appeared to have been carved from marble. Her eyes were bluer than any sea Andy had ever laid eyes on, and they blazed with unadulterated fury.
All three cowered.
“Well?” she demanded. “You know how I love to be kept waiting.”
“Miranda - “ the redhead stammered.
“No, no. Not you, Emily. You will stutter and stammer and take thrice as long as Serena to give me a direct answer.”
“It’s not like any other one we’ve ever seen,” the blonde quavered. “It’s missing a part and smells…off.”
“Missing part? It smells off? I am afraid you will simply have to be vaguer if I am to gain any meaningful understanding as to what on earth you are blathering on about.”
“I’m a she!” Andy shouted. “Not an it!”
The older siren - Miranda, apparently - cocked an eyebrow. “You presume to speak to me?”
“Yeah, I do. Actually.” Her words sounded far braver than she actually felt.
The siren swam closer. She paused at barely an arm’s length with Andy, dived, resurfaced, circled her, sniffed her hair, and surveyed her with a totally inscrutable expression.
“What on earth are you doing here? You are clearly not dinner material,” she said haughtily.
“Gee, thanks,” Andy said. “I should be relieved, but…”
“But?”
She sighed. “Aw, shucks. I just liked your voices, lady.”
Miranda looked incredulous. “You - liked our voices? You? Are you quite sure?”
“Yes. I’m here, aren’t I?” Why she felt obligated to defend her motivations from a group of predatorial human-fish hybrids, she’d never know.
“They all do, though?” Emily offered.
“Hmm,” Miranda said. “The human males do. This, you brain-dead cretinous assistant of mine, is a human female. I have never heard of our song having any effect on them at all.”
“I mean, I’ve been pretending to be one - a man, I mean - for a while, so maybe that’s it? It rubbed off on me?” Andy supplied. Then mentally kicked herself for the exponentially increasing trajectory of stupidity she seemed to be on.
“That…would not explain it,” Miranda said. “It is to do with attraction.”
Andy opened her mouth to say something, anything, but as she did -
“Mom!”
Brilliant. Two more sirens joined the group. These two looked to be juveniles, though, if their far smaller size and the higher pitch of their voices were anything to go by. They were also identical, and sported manes of hair a softer shade of red than Emily’s and a great deal wilder than Miranda’s.
“What’s going on, Mom?”
With a jolt, Andy realised they were directing their questions to Miranda. With an even larger jolt, she noticed the terrifying demeanour had given way to something notably more indulgent.
“We’ve just had a little surprise, Bobbseys. It seems dinner came with a side order of utterly inedible.”
“Going soft, Mom?”
“Far from it, Cassidy,” Miranda said - sharply this time. “One cannot consume human females. It would kill you. Like pufferfish. But with those two appallingly unsightly protrusions in lieu of a perfectly serviceable tail.”
“A human female? They actually exist? I thought they were just an excuse the regular humans use - y’know, say they had one waiting at home to try and guilt trip us into not eating them. Morons.”
“Tasty morons,” the other twin supplied.
“Indeed, Caroline. And that typically is the case, Cassidy. And yet…here one is. Before our very eyes.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Cassidy asked.
“Her,” Andy corrected.
“Precious, isn’t it?” Emily sneered.
Miranda ignored her. Andy was swiftly picking up that this amounted to a regular occurrence.
“We will take her” - oh, that was nice, Andy thought, linguistic courtesy prior to one’s impending slaughter really added a touch of gravitas to the whole ordeal - “back to the cove. If anything, it would do you both - and apparently at least two adults who really ought to have acquired something resembling fully-developed brains, but alas, some cannot meet even the bare minimum these days - some good to increase your ecological knowledge.”
“Take me?” Andy squeaked. “What?”
“Alternatively,” Miranda shrugged, “we could leave you here. You know. To drown. Or be eaten by something else which does not object to the appalling stench you are so intent upon emitting.”
Given that the creatures seemed to have established they could not devour her, against all her survival instincts and better judgement (which amounted to precisely ‘none’ and ‘exceedingly poor’ respectively, it had become abundantly clear) she resolved that letting the initial plan happen was the most appealing idea.
“I’ll go with you,” she sighed.
“Goodness. You thought you had a choice?” Emily laughed. It was a distinctly unpleasant sound, and Andy shivered.
“We always have choices, Emily.” Miranda’s correction sent a frisson of what ought to have felt like fear down Andy’s spine. It did not quite feel the same as fear, but for what it was, Andy had no name.
“How marvellous to have your consent to accompany us, little human female.”
***
The sun had just begun its daily pilgrimage across the heavens, skirting along the skyline and preparing for imminent ascent. The cove, Andy had to reluctantly, silently admit, was beautiful. Breathtaking, really. Shimmering turquoise waters, translucent in character, revealing the reef below, saturated in a dizzying array of bright colour. Shiny slate slabs served as the siren equivalent of seats. Towering - towering! - walls in which uncut gems had been embedded in intricate patterns with obvious care, cleaving wide open to create a majestic chasm through which the end of an island coast could be discerned.
Not that she’d had too much opportunity to study everything in great detail. After being roughly dragged through the ocean for what felt like miles, spluttering and coughing all the way, she’d been unceremoniously dumped onto one of the slabs and positively mobbed by curious sirens, prodding and poking in all manner of undignified places. She felt like a zoo animal.
Speaking of animals, a tan-and-white seal seemed to be taking a similar level of interest in her, steadily flopping over the slates towards her own. It was with no small degree of curiosity that Andy noted the sirens obediently parted to permit it a clear path.
Did these things think seals were gods? If the past twelve hours had taught her a single lesson, it was that anything was possible.
Okay, two lessons. The other, objectively more important lesson being to not jump overboard straight into the path of a flock of hungry sirens purely because she fancied herself immune to pretty singing.
The seal stopped right in front of her, then regarded her with what at first resembled a definitive air of suspicion, but which quickly morphed into something disturbingly like excited affection. A happy series of barks emitted loudly into the air, and the next thing Andy knew, she had been knocked flat onto her back and licked repeatedly with a fishy-smelling thick pink tongue.
“Patricia!” One of the twins - Caroline, if Andy had to take a guess - popped up through the surface like an over-wound jack-in-the-box next to them. “Down, girl!”
It appeared that Patricia was blissfully oblivious to the intricacies of the English language.
The twin cocked an eyebrow in a manner scarily reminiscent of her mother.
“Oh, how strange. She likes you. She only likes us and Mom.”
She leant closer, and stage-whispered conspiratorally. “And she really, really hates Emily.”
Andy shook her head in disbelief. Whatever was next? Painting their nails together and sharing their darkest secrets?
“Caroline!”
Miranda’s approach was signalled by an even wider parting of the assembled sirens than had been the case for Patricia.
“Oh hey, Mom. Guess what? Patricia likes the human!”
“Patricia - what?” Miranda sounded aghast. Then her eyes softened upon seeing the seal sprawled contentedly across Andy’s chest.
“Well. I suppose we all have our occasional lapses in judgement.”
Andy chose, perhaps wisely, to bite her tongue.
“Don’t get rid of her just yet, Mom. Patricia would be sad.”
“I was not planning on getting rid of her, Caroline.”
“That’s - good?” Andy offered weakly.
Miranda sighed. “Don’t flatter yourself. As we have already established, you are utterly unfit for our consumption, I am certainly not risking Patricia’s health in attempting to discern if that principle extends to her, if we disposed of you another way your corpse very well may amount to a biohazard and pollute our waters, and I can’t possibly put you back on the next ship so foolish as to sail into our territory. It would completely ruin my image. So I find myself with very little choice but to…keep you around for the foreseeable future.” Her nose crinkled in disgust at the admission.
Charming, Andy thought. Don’t rush to welcome me too quick or anything, guys. She let her gaze rove over Patricia’s head and Miranda’s shoulders, which silhouetted against the opening of the cove, and squinted as she alighted upon a recognisable cluster of shapes. Huh. Maybe…
“Have you ever tried coconuts?”
“What what now?” Caroline said confusedly. “Mom, do they speak another language?”
Miranda’s eyes had narrowed to near-slits as she fixated on the woman perched above her.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well.” Andy tried to make her body language as relaxed as possible. “I’ve just seen some on that island over there, and something tells me none of you will be scaling the trees anytime soon. Me, on the other hand…” she gestured down in the general vicinity of her lower half.
“You never know, these ‘unsightly protrusions’ could come in handy for something.”
For the first time, Miranda’s face was neither contorted in disgust, superiority or boredom. She looked…thoughtful.
“Mo-om!” Cassidy whined plaintively. “What’s a coconut?”
“A coconut, Bobbsey, is a type of land-fruit. It bears white, nutty flesh and contains slightly sweetened water.”
“That sounds great!” Cassidy piped up from behind. “I vote we let her get ‘em.”
A smidgeon of progress was as good as any, Andy mused. At least she wasn’t ‘it’ anymore.
“Them, Bobbsey. Not ‘em. We are not a codfish, and Emily’s name is not to be abbreviated.”
“I second Cassidy!” Caroline added. “If they taste nice, can we keep her, Mom? As a pet. Like Patricia. They get along, anyhow. You can literally see that. She’s covered in her spit.”
“Way to make a girl feel good about herself,” Andy muttered under her breath. Fortunately, it appeared that none of the assembled sirens had heard her. Or bothered to acknowledge her interjection. The latter option was probably the most realistic, she thought dully.
“Please?” Cassidy preened. “As a treat?”
Miranda sighed. “Alright. Fine.”
She turned back to fixate her glare on Andy.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Fetch the coconuts.”
***
It was ironic, Andy thought, that the proverb ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’ was also supremely applicable to those who ate men’s literal hearts and stomachs. However, this did not make it any less true. After enough coconut deliveries, even Emily had stopped calling her ‘it’, and Serena had engaged her services in polishing clam shells while Andy instructed her in constructing human hairstyles. The twins had enquired after her name (even if that had been prompted by their attempting to christen her themselves, which she was proud of putting a firm stop to immediately). They had also stopped describing her as a pet, and instead routinely asked for tales of lands afar and species wholly foreign to them, requests to which she willingly and gladly acquiesced. She had come to think of herself as occupying a space analogous to a nanny or au pair, given that she ended every night by regaling them with stories and lulling them - and, half the time, herself - to sleep in the process.
Miranda, however, characteristically avoided referring to her at all by all means possible, but when it was unavoidable insisted on calling her by an elongated form, Andrea, which she pronounced strangely but oddly pleasantly.
Miranda was, it seemed - no pun intended - the toughest nut to crack.
***
Sirens, Andy would have presumed, would be largely unbothered by storms. For the most part, this was true. However, the absolute titan of a hurricane which hit the seas one night a fortnight or so into the duration of her stay was the worst in living memory, as testified to by Miranda’s unusually worried murmurs.
The twins were tightly huddled together with a whining Patricia in the deepest alcove. Andy privately thought they had never looked quite so young, an impression largely formed on account of their shrunken demeanours and saucer-like eyes. Her incarnation of merely fourteen days ago would have thought her quite mad, but a lot could change in a very short space of time, she was swiftly learning. And so she clambered up next to them, and said:
“Hey. Assuming you two have never heard of Shakespeare?”
Twin uncomprehending blinks.
“Thought not. I, however, have. I’ve actually memorised a couple of his works. They’re plays - long stories humans act out. I used to sneak into my father’s library at night and read them.”
Cue a request for elaboration as to the meaning of the words ‘read’ and ‘library’. Diversion concluded, she resumed her pursuit of the initial strategy. A strategy which bore remarkable fruit, as when she drew to the close of dramatically narrating the final scene of a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, the wide-eyed gazes which fixated upon her were no longer such on account of visceral meteorological terror, but utter absorption in the narrative.
“Give me your hands if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.”
She bit back a smile as both Caroline and Cassidy obediently stretched out a hand each, which she took in a firm, reassuring grasp. And then suppressed a laugh as Patricia demonstrated that while her cognitive understanding of speech left much to be desired, her instincts were resolute - the seal began to clap. Uncoordinated, arrhythmic, sure. The thought still counted.
“Perhaps I underestimated you, Andrea,” came a quiet voice behind her. Keeping steadfast grips on the twins’ hands, she rotated her body to take in the begrudgingly impressed visage of Miranda, perched genteely not two meters away, flanked by fifteen other sirens.
She couldn’t help herself. She beamed.
“I would tell you not to look so pleased with yourself, but I must admit on this occasion it is justified. You must understand I shall have to insist on your serenading us with further stories of equitable calibre of the one you just finished to retain the right to such an expression.”
“My, my,” Andy said. “Reciting Shakespeare is my reverse siren’s song, huh? Luring you all in?”
Miranda pursed her lips. Yet there was no true malice in the movement.
“Mmm. I do hope you do not intend to follow through on that comparison.”
“Ugh, no. The food chain doesn't work that way. It'd be like eating humans by proxy. Horrible thought.”
A comfortable silence ensued, in spite of the roar and crash of the surrounding seas and the apocalyptic rumble of thunder overhead. But just as Andy was beginning to truly, properly relax -
A sharp scream. A flurry of motion. Miranda was the first to slide like a shot into the water and tear off in the direction of the cry, closely followed by the rest of the sirens - bar the children, who leant into Andy and gripped her around the waist so tightly she could scarcely breathe. She unconsciously lifted her hands to stroke through their hair in what she hoped amounted to a small comforting gesture.
A short while later - it could have been five minutes or thirty, time compressed and condensed in the anxiety until it had scarce meaning at all - the curl of distressed voices signalled the adults’ impending return. Andy reflexively covered the girls’ eyes, and was subsequently awfully glad she had.
Six sirens bore Serena between them, limp and unmoving, and made to lay her down on a nearby slab. A hysterical younger siren - not much older than Miranda’s daughters - was having to be restrained by two older ones, screaming about how Serena had rescued her from where she had been trapped between two fallen rocks with no concern for her own safety, and sustained injury herself in the process.
“Wait,” Andy called out. “Wait!”
To her surprise, they paused.
“Let me see,” she panted, scrambling over the rocks. She stood over Serena and surveyed the siren’s body. The source of the injury was obvious. A spectacularly horrible perforated slash across her upper arm was visible through a positive river of crimson blood.
“Okay,” she said. “I know how to work with this.”
She picked up a stray piece of sharpened rock and sliced a linen sleeve clean from the torso of her shirt. Leaning forward over Serena’s supine form, she reached out -
“ - Hey!” Emily snarled, raring forward and baring both rows of vicious teeth. “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you touch her!”
Andy held up both hands in the universal - at least, she hoped it was universal - sign of surrender.
“I’m trying to help, Emily,” she said quietly. “I’ve seen this kind of wound before. You seem to have roughly similar upper body anatomy to humans, so the treatment is likely transferrable.”
“Likely? Likely isn’t good enough!”
“It’s better than nothing,” she replied calmly. “The problem is less the depth of the wound itself, and more a question of the volume of blood loss. I’m going to use my sleeve to create something called a tourniquet, which is essentially a really tight knot which stops further bleeding through pressure. Alright?”
“Okay.” Emily sniffed. “But if you make anything worse, I’ll kill you and eat you myself. I don’t care what it does to me if Serena’s not here.”
Andy closed her eyes. “Understood.”
She set to work, watched by close to one hundred pairs of hawklike inhuman eyes.
***
The next day, Serena regained consciousness, and a small mountain of mussels and clams appeared next to Andy’s sleeping-slab of choice. Not a single siren claimed to know anything about their mysterious manifestation, they all declined to partake in the verifiable feast laid out before her, and the pile did not bear the tell-tale odor of Patricia’s patronage. Andy eventually gave up figuring out their provenance, and instead set about devouring them with gusto.
***
It had been a month now, and while she could confidently say she had befriended all the cove’s residents save Miranda (Emily was borderline, her mood largely dependent on how happy she was with her hair on any given day), it was becoming abundantly clear that Andy could not continue to subsist solely on mussels, clams, and coconuts. Her clothes, once cleverly fitted to perfection, now hung loose about her frame like emptied sandbags. Her skin had taken on a noticeable pallor, flirting with an unpleasant shade of greenish-gray. It was taking her thrice as long to scale the coconut trees, and twice the recovery time.
Her condition did not go unnoticed by the sirens.
Three days after she had begun seriously flagging, an enormous salmon - courteously pre-decapitated - was thrown without preamble onto the slate slab next to her with a loud smack.
“Ah!”
“You could at least attempt to display a modicum of gratitude,” Miranda sniffed from the shallows below her.
“What’s this?” Andy asked.
“It’s called a fish, Andrea. Specifically, a salmon. I would have thought you would have been capable of recognising one, given that I distinctly recall you exalting its nutritional value to humans above nigh on all other aquatic creatures.”
Huh. She had not realised Miranda had been listening in to that particular conversation.
“Yes, I can see it’s a salmon.”
“Then don’t ask inane questions. Before you bore me with another, it’s your meal. You’re wasting away, and I presumed you would reject partaking in the remainder of the preserved salted stock you used to sail on that ridiculous ship with. Of course, if my presumption was unfounded, I should be positively delighted to have Emily or Serena fetch some for you. You’ve been here far too long to still subscribe to nonsensical human behavioural codes, in any case.”
“Um. Your presumption was not unfounded. You wouldn’t eat another siren, would you?”
“Of course not. What good would that do me? I did think my assumption was accurate. They always are. So eat.”
Andy had never been skilled at setting fires. This did not appear to be likely to change any time soon. Two hours in she gave up scraping a couple of rogue pieces of slate against one another above a cluster of spare coconut-tree bark.
“Is this some obscure human culinary preparation ritual?” Emily snarked from the waterline.
“No. Well. Kind of. Yes. But, as you can see, it’s not going very well.”
“Then what are you doing? Miranda personally went out and caught that monster of a fish herself for you, you know. She’s only hunted when she doesn’t mean to share in the spoils for her daughters before. And salmon has a bloody nasty bite. She’ll be very disappointed to see you rejecting her offering when she risked marring her perfect skin for it.”
Sufficiently guilt-tripped (and more than marginally perplexed), Andy carefully peeled the skin away from flesh of the fish. She tried very hard not to grimace as she chopped off one chunk, then another. And chewed. Swallowed. On repeat. Eventually, all that was left was the skeleton.
Emily sniffed. “Took you long enough.”
Andy smiled queasily. The repeated warnings dispatched to her by her childhood cook of the dangers of consuming raw fish seemed uncomfortably close to the forefront of her mind at that moment.
Oh, well, she thought. She’d eaten it now. What’s the worst that could happen?
As it turned out, quite a lot.
***
Five hours and seven vomiting spells later - which had induced ninety percent bile, five percent coconut water and a smidgeon of fish - Andy was shivering all over and fading in and out of consciousness, her vision spotting and spluttering. In the brief - and growing briefer with every cumulative minute - flashes of lucidity, she ruminated on how ridiculous it was that she had avoided experiencing labor pains on account of her pre-marital flight from her land of origin, only to end up curled in the foetal position, besieged by a barrage of splitting cramps that caused her body to seize up with every crest. She wheezed with every successful intake of breath, and try as she might, the phrase ‘death-rattle’ refused to leave her head.
Through her delirium, she thought she heard Emily and Miranda. But that couldn’t be the case. They couldn’t come ashore.
“...do something!”
“I don’t know!”
She must really, really be feverish, because Miranda sounding panicked could only be the product of a medically-compromised brain, let alone Miranda sounding panicked and out of breath. Such a ridiculously powerful golden tail as hers ensured the latter happenstance never occurred. The rhythmic shifts and slaps of something heavy-sounding against sand, combined with the steadily increasing volume of their voices in synchrony with said sounds conjured the bizarre - and impossible, surely - image of the two sirens dragging themselves up the beach, commando-style.
“...all my fault!”
“You know, Miranda, it’s a full moon tonight.”
Her determination of pending insanity was confirmed by Emily sounding soft when speaking about someone who must be her.
Silence.
“You’re suggesting…”
“She saved Serena. And for all her litany of faults, selfishness is not among them.”
“You would be prepared…”
“Yes. What else is there to do?”
The darkness closed in.
***
She was in motion, but not by any personal command of her body. She was being cradled by many hands, gently, reverently, like a sleeping child. She was being lowered into shallow waters, lifted out, then submerged once more, again and again, and the waters were warm. Andy pled fidelity to no religion, but the overwhelming association that swam to the forefront of her subconscious mind was that of a baptismal font.
And then there was chanting, chanting, in that tongue she had heard on deck, but it was no spell, not now, but music: a veritable symphony. And instead of feeling drawn to the song she felt as if she were surrounded by it so intensely that it was seeping into her very bones, running through her veins, part of her and yet not, the ‘yet not’ diminishing with every passing second.
Two painful pricks at either side of her neck. A cool sensation, but not that of water, or anything she had ever known and thus gained the ability to put a name to. A bubbling, a churning, of skin painlessly separating and shifting and knotting itself back together in an entirely alien configuration.
And above them all, holding the symphony together with a great unshakeable thread of iron - the steady bassline to the music was one and the same. Had she been invested with great musical talent, she would have named her finest composition in homage to it.
Of Miranda, Miranda, Miranda…
***
Andy groaned into the mid-morning sunlight. It was unbearably bright, that was to be sure, yet it was not the cause of her confusion. The only way she could think to describe how she felt was…strange. She blinked, and blinked again, and Miranda’s concerned face blurred into view.
“...Andrea? Andrea, can you hear me?”
“M’rnda.” The word felt thick around her tongue, as if it was fighting to take shape in the air.
“Oh, thank heavens. The stress…”
“What - what hap’nd?”
In lieu of a verbal reply, Miranda simply laid a cool hand over Andy’s brow.
“How do you feel?”
“Weird.”
“Well, I suppose that is to be expected.”
Andy attempted to sit up, and with the movement became cognizant that she appeared to be half-submerged in the shallows bracketing the island.
“Stop that - don’t exhaust yourself.”
Andy shook her head, attempting to dislodge the bedraggled clouds that had taken up completely unauthorised residence in her skull. She bit her lip and -
“Ow!”
“What?”
She winced at the sudden flow of blood into her mouth. Raising one hand to her gums, she gingerly ran her index finger along her teeth, only to find -
“What the hell?”
Two rows of very, very sharp pointed teeth. Teeth, in fact, which were near-identical to Miranda’s own. And Emily’s, and Serena’s, and Cassidy and Caroline’s, and -
“Ah, yes,” Miranda sighed. “I should have probably warned you about that before you attempted to speak.”
Andy fixed Miranda with her best accusatory glare.
“I do accept responsibility for inadvertently poisoning you, even if my intentions were noble,” Miranda remarked, “and there was really only one available method of rectification.”
Andy remained silent, waiting for her to expand on her statement.
“Even if you miraculously recovered, which seemed unlikely given your condition, there was no realistic possibility of you surviving here in the longer-term. Not as you were. So we resorted to…drastic action.”
Andy waited some more. Miranda gently took one hand in her own, and guided it to cover the closest side of her neck. It appeared to have developed ridges.
“Look down, Andrea.”
She did. And saw a brilliant, glittering tail, strong and healthy, shaded in deep cerulean.
***
“What was that?”
“A sea shanty!” Andy protested.
“Well, stop it. God, my ears.”
“Wonderful,” Miranda remarked drily. “We have a siren who cannot sing. A truly unprecedented development.”
“That’s not my fault!”
“Indeed. It is not.”
“For fuck’s sake, you really are useless.” Emily rolled her eyes in exasperation.
“Be as that may,” Miranda said, looking directly at Andy. “Alas. I happen to rather like you.”
Andy wondered if she had gained a masochistic streak in tandem with a tail (and, apparently, a taste for human flesh, although she was trying very hard indeed not to think about that particular development, never mind how positively gleeful Miranda was about it). Namely because some not insignificant part of her blazed with humiliating warmth at Miranda’s hybrid of insult and compliment. She was incredibly grateful that Miranda had waited until that moment to admit a degree of fondness for her, given that had she experienced such a reaction before as that which she was presently undergoing, it would have raised some awfully uncomfortable questions regarding bestiality.
Then an idea hit her with all the brilliance of the sun at dawn.
“Not quite. I may not be able to sing to save my life, but do any of you know how to make tools and jewellery from trees?”
“What?” Caroline said. “We only know how to use shells.”
“Aha!” She grinned. “Human socialisation 101 coming in clutch. Who would’ve thought it?”
***
Indeed, over the subsequent months, Andy’s woodworking classes proved to be a consummate hit. The shells which adorned so many of the sirens’ hair were joined by delicately carved pendants around their necks, the wood fetched courtesy of a now exquisitely well-trained Patricia. Andy herself had not yet finished her first design, which she treated with enormous care and borderline psychotic protectiveness. Finally, it was perfected, and she swam into the cove, approaching the twins and their mother with it clutched in her hands, concealed from view.
“Andrea,” Miranda greeted her, in that warm, casual manner which had become her custom, so utterly different from their early acquaintanceship.
“Miranda,” Andy replied. “Just the one I was hoping to see.” And she let her hands fall open from their cupped position to lie flat, like a clam cleaving open to reveal a prize gleaming pearl.
“For you.”
Cassidy’s mouth fell open in shock. Caroline’s split in a grin so wide it surely bordered on the painful. Miranda merely blinked. Rapidly.
“You do know what that means, don’t you?” Cassidy whispered.
“No?”
“The first siren you give a piece of jewellery to as an adult - well. You’re as good as stuck together. For the rest of your lives.”
Not for the first time since her arrival by a long shot, Andy found herself rendered incapable of speech.
“I believe what Cassidy means to say,” Miranda whispered, “is that for us, the initial presentation of jewellery from one of-age siren to another is akin to what humans call marriage.”
It was then that Andy found out that it was possible to choke on her own breath. Fortunately, that particular development only lasted a few short seconds before she recovered. Perhaps it was something resembling longing she discerned in the cerulean eyes of the white-haired siren which matched Andy's own tail so perfectly, but a bolt of bravery struck her with the force of lightning, sufficiently emboldening her to say:
“Well. From where I’m standing - sorry, swimming, floating, whatever - that doesn’t sound like a bad proposition at all.”
The memory of Miranda’s stunned expression dissolving into one of joy would remain among her most treasured even fifty years later. As would her subsequent proclamation, even if it was merely two breathy words.
“Acceptable, darling.”
FIN