Chapter Text
When Stiles swims, he slices through the water. He shoots forward like a torpedo, leaving a trail of air pockets and disturbed water in his wake, and he is at once clear-headed and hyper-aware of his own body. Maneuvers are tricky; movement has to be precise or he’ll end up floundering, but by now his body knows how to navigate the strange half-falling, half-flying experience of being in water, and he can almost swim on auto-pilot.
Almost. There are still some tricky moves he has to learn. Kicks are harder now, with the extra weight and length to compensate for, but he needs to get the motion down so he skims the surface, pulling a few corkscrews as he glides just to get his momentum going. There’s power behind his feet, more than he’s used to, and he wants open water to try breeching like whales do, maybe even a few jumps if he can pull them off without giving Scott a heart attack. He knows the kind of swimming he wants to do, and these days it seems like the kind of swimming he can do is getting closer and closer to the stuff he sees in his head.
He’s got his momentum going, now. He’s got a feel for the shape and size of his body in the water. So with one almost lazy forward flip, he straightens his legs, overextending even as he pushes forward, bringing up his knees much, much harder than he used to and he can suddenly feel the extra pull of gravity as his toes come out of the water, a mass of patterned scales and ridged fin following them into open air before coming back down with a loud smack and a splash Stiles can hear even underwater.
He surfaces with a whoop and a victory punch in the air with one hand while he pushes his wet hair out of his eyes with the other.
“What the hell?”
Stiles freezes, starts to sink, and frantically begins to tread water, swaying his tail back and forth to keep himself buoyant. He swings around carefully until he can see the boat he’d managed to completely miss.
It’s a battered old tub with an outboard motor and a heavyset, bearded white man leaning curiously over the rowlocks. He’s wearing a floppy fisherman’s hat and Stiles can see the long pole of a fishing rod poking up behind him. This isn’t exactly prime fishing time in the cove, but it’s not the first time some old guy intruded on Stiles’ practice while trying to escape domestic life.
“You have a tail.” Fisherman Bob tells him.
Stiles is tempted to say, Oh my god, really? Where did that come from?! But he keeps his mouth shut and just nods.
“That, uh, that ain’t real, is it?”
Well it’s real silicon, real neoprene, and definitely real work to put together. But Stiles has done this dance enough times to know how it plays out. He stifles a sigh and tells Fishy McGee that no, the tail is not real. He refrains from adding that that’s just what a real merman would say if some responsibility-dodging piscitarian barged in on his “me” time, because the last time he did that he nearly ended up in a net.
Not a happy memory.
“Huh. Okay. So why you wearin’ it?”
“I’m a stunt swimmer.” Stiles lies. Though it’s not totally false, stunt swimming is a big part of what he does, but “professional merman” isn’t exactly the kind of job title people can latch onto at ten a.m. on a Sunday. “I gotta test the rig before I go on camera.”
“Rig”, he’s learned, is a good layman buzz word for putting the uninitiated at ease. He often wishes he could own his mer-life like some of the others do. Allison, who he works with the most, has mermaid business cards she hands out to everyone she meets with the words “model” and “actress” in fine print at the bottom. She refers to all of her prosthetics as “her tails” and flaunts her lifestyle at every opportunity.
Stiles does, too, but he has a few choppier waters he needs to navigate. Like pre-modern boat types with access to fishing nets and harpoons. There...may have been an incident. Or two. He ended up in the hospital once.
“This is for some kinda movie?”
Stiles shakes his head. “Commercial. Some island resort.” The spot he filmed last month for the Midas Resort and Spa will premier in a few weeks, so it’s not an entirely unfounded lie.
“Ah, pullin’ in the ladies, right?”
He’s saved from explaining himself any further by the buzzing sound of Scott’s zodiac rushing up behind him.
“Stiles! That was insane, I couldn’t even keep up with you!”
“You can never keep up, buddy.” Stiles shoots back.
“You with him?” Mr. Fishybritches asks Scott, jerking a thumb at Stiles.
Stiles doesn’t roll his eyes. At least, not while the guy can see him. Scott just puts on his PR smile and introduces himself as Stiles’ agent. Which he is. Occasionally.
“We’re actually on a pretty tight schedule right now, though.” Scott says with a perfect apology face, like he really can’t think of anything he’d rather be doing than hanging out with sun-wrinkled white guys in boats. This is why Scott handles bookings and scheduling conflicts. Stiles is rarely capable of reaching the end of a conversation without pissing someone off.
FishyBob nods what he probably thinks is sagely and waves them away. Scott turns his grin up a few hundred watts and produces a modified jetski handlebar on a rope for Stiles to hold onto. The other end is secured to the floor of the craft, so all Stiles has to do is hold on while Scott motors gently away, keeping his speed down so Stiles won’t lose control of his tail and tangle the fluke in Scott’s propeller.
That, at least, is an issue they’ve never actually had. Stiles aims to keep it that way, especially since Lydia quoted his latest tail design to be worth more than $5,000. After which Stiles may have fainted. Briefly.
Lydia herself is waiting for them on the dock. The sun is high enough in the sky that it sets her strawberry blonde hair on fire, and Stiles is struck, not for the first time, by the way she looks more like a mermaid than any of the women he swims with. She’s tiny, curvy, sinuously strong, and Stiles falls a little in love with her every time he sees her.
“How’d the tail perform?” She asks before Stiles’ head is even fully clear of the water.
“Takes some getting used to.” Stiles admits. “It doesn’t move as freely as my other tails.”
Lydia shakes her head. “No, that’s the point. Fish bodies aren’t nearly as floppy as mermaid tails usually look. It’s a semi-rigid structure, that gives it its power.”
Stiles crosses his arms on the wood of the dock, swishing his tail to help him stay buoyant. “It’s not as good for performances, though.”
“The down-kick will wow them where the bend doesn’t. Besides, you know how I feel about your knobby kees poking through the material. It kills the illusion. It makes it too obvious you’re a human in a costume; we want people believing you’re a merman, not just going along with it.”
“Yeah, I get that. Trust me. But we gotta work on the sit. The dorsal ridge makes it hard enough but you can’t get a decent curl in this thing. If a model can’t sit on a rock and tuck this tail beside them, we can’t use it for photoshoots or beach scenes.”
“And it’s too heavy and complex to be a sport tail.” Scott points out. “That limits it to dive work only, and it’s a pretty big investment for not a lot of use.”
Lydia pinches the bridge of her nose and huffs. “Look, the videos are the money-maker. People see you swim on YouTube and they get interested. Your fanbase lives on YouTube. What I’ve done is create the most biologically plausible prosthetic tail on the market. You won’t get a better swim than this, and that means you can’t get better video footage with any other tail.”
Stiles adjustes his ab muscles, locking his legs inside the tail and letting the water push him up so the ridge that hides the seam where the two sides come together is just peeking up out of the water. He gives an experimental flex of his knees and toes, and watches a good two feet of tail and fluke rise straight out of the water before splashing back down.
The tail extends more than a foot past his pointed toes before it becomes the fin, allowing some mechanical mojo of Lydia’s to hide the fact that he has heels, while simultaneously turning all of his upward kicks into downward strokes like a whale or a dolphin. It’s something human legs can’t do, and for years he had to try and compensate for his human anatomy by learning how to swim like a noodle, and he still looked like a boy in a merman costume.
Even better, Lydia rigged up something with his toes that lets him lock the fluke in place when he wants to, so he can control the movement of his tail past the point where his feet end rather than just dragging the fin and a length of tail behind him like dead weight to flop around all useless-like and kill his body line.
“I’ll admit I like controlling the fin.” He says. “And there’s some serious power behind this thing. I bet I can breech with it.”
“Do you think you can jump?” Lydia asks, and Stiles could kiss her.
Scott goes pale. “What? No! Stiles, you are not going to try to jump out of the water like a freaking dolphin, okay? I don’t care how good Lydia’s fins are, you can’t build up that kind of momentum and you’re gonna end up knocking the wind out of yourself. Then what are you gonna do?”
Stiles shrugs. “Drown?”
“Stiles!”
“Okay, okay! I won’t jump, jeeze.”
He’s totally gonna jump. Just...not when he’s alone. Never dive alone, first rule of SCUBA and, it turns out, mermaiding. His diving instructor drilled that into his head on day one, before he even touched a BCD.
“We need to do a camera test before we make a final decision, but I’m submitting a tentative yes.” Lydia says, dragging them back on topic. “As long as there are no obvious defects on video, I’d say we can premier this tail at the next shoot.”
“What about Allison?” Scott asks, carefully keeping his face blank. Stiles doesn’t miss the tiny upward curve of his mouth, though.
“What do you mean?” Lydia asks.
Stiles jumps in. “Well it’s the loggerhead turtle hatching.” He points out. “Allison never misses it. We wanted to film it together, but if I’ve got this tail and she’s still wearing the silicon sock model, it’s going to be really obvious.”
“We could chalk it up to sexual dimorphism, maybe?” Scott suggests.
Lydia rolls her eyes. “Please.” She sneers. “Okay, Scott, get Chris on the phone and see if you can confirm a joint production. If we can set a date and a plan, I can take Allison’s cast and make her her own version of the new tail. We’ll premier them together, the male and female models, then we can post them on the site made-to-order to collectors.”
“Since when do we sell performance tails?” Scott asked.
“Since the price tag is going to drive away all but the most dedicated mermaids, and since letting Allison have one even though she’s not in our company means we need to make them available to all performers or we risk alienating potential contacts. Besides, all those heels poking out of everyone’s videos piss me off. The sooner we can spread this design around, the better. Besides, I already applied for the patent. We’ll post the sale as soon as it clears.”
“You realize I’m not giving up my sport models.” Stiles says. “Heel problem and all. I can get into those by myself in twenty minutes any time I feel like a swim.”
Scott arches his eyebrows. “You do know you can swim without a tail, right?”
Stiles pulls a face and splashes him. Scott giggles and dances away on the dock, where Stiles can’t reach him.
“I’m not saying it’s a perfect design.” Lydia says, the yet hanging unspoken in the air. “But it’s the best we’ve got for publicity. The aquariums are going to eat it up.”
Stiles grins at that. He loves aquarium work. He does some of his best performing in aquariums, where he can improv as much as he likes, and they only ever accept contracts from places that meet Scott’s rigorous standards of care for the animals, so he also gets to boost business for the good guys on top of it all.
They spend the next couple of hours filming Stiles in the tail. Scott busts out his wet suit and SCUBA gear while Lydia climbs into the zodiac to check the feed from Scott’s underwater camera on her monitor. To everyone’s delight, the tail feels a lot more rigid than it actually is, and they get some beautiful curviture as Stiles spins and circles and corkscrews through the water. Lydia’s right; it is beautifully organic, and the down-kick from Lydia’s extension changes the game entirely.
Stiles could almost believe he really does belong in the ocean. Like he really was born for this.
Like he’s something magical.