Work Text:
It wasn’t so long ago that humans were at open war with the sirens.
In the distant past, long before Petra was born, the two species had existed in harmony. Her sisters often still sang songs of those peaceful days, but Petra herself had never witnessed them.
She had watched fishermen with harpoons hunting those same sisters under the light of their artificial moons, and she watched her sisters hunting the sailors who sailed a little too close to the rocks. She would never forget the smell of blood in the water, or how the number of both sailors and sirens has dwindled over time until they had all but disappeared. Even the lighthouses had gone dark over the years.
Petra remembered, but any humans who might have had long since died.
Now, Petra could swim all the way down to the warm waters of Derdriu and draw as close as she dared to listen to the people bustling about on docks, or hide in the reefs and watch them swim. She could wonder how people as gentle as this could have ever decended from the ones who eradicated her people.
Still, her fear and distrust would never be gone completely. She was careful not to be seen.
Usually.
A human saw her once, when she foolishly lingered on a beach near Derdriu a little too far past sunrise. He seemed young, not quite grown and with eyes that were as dark as the wood of shipwrecks but as warm as the golden evenings of late summer.
“Are you a mermaid,” he had asked, face full of amazement.
Petra had laughed, flicked his thin brown braid out of his eyes, and then poked her toes out of the water.
“Is it looking like I am having a tail?”
He grinned.
“So, not a mermaid,” he said, “but you’re not human, are you?”
“Why are you thinking that?”
“You’re too pretty to be human.”
Petra swam away before he could ask any more questions.
She saw him again a few seasons later – at least, she thought it was the same person. His hair was longer, now, and there was a hint of stubble on his chin, but his eyes were just as bright and warm as before.
When she swam close enough for him to spot her, she was proven right.
He smiled, and his grin had lost none of its boyish charm.
“I was starting to think I had imagined you,” he said.
“Oh?” Petra swam closer.
“You’re a siren.” He said it confidently, without a hint of fear or suspicion anywhere on his face. “Apparently this bay used to be full of them, but no one has seen any in a hundred years or more. I guess you must be one of the last ones, huh?”
Petra frowned.
“Shouldn’t you be afraid?”
“Why would I be?”
“My kind hunts sailors,” she said. “How can you be certain I am not here to be hunting you?”
“Easy,” he said with another easy smile. He beckoned her closer to shore and held out a towel to cover herself the way human women did. “I’m not a sailor.”
His name was Claude, she learned, and he wasn’t a sailor or fisherman or anything else that would have threatened their growing friendship.
Yes, he was a human, but he was her friend. Perhaps it was naïve to believe him when he said he had no plans to hurt her, but he smiled so kindly and looked at her with such gentle wonder that she believed him anyway.
He traveled, but he always returned and brought her some kind of trinket from the far-off places he went. Petra had no use for them, but she didn’t tell him that. Instead, she accepted each of them gratefully to stash them away somewhere later and listened to his stories and told some of her own.
Claude aged like a human: so quickly, and so unlike her. His beard grew fuller, and his eyes began to develop little crinkles at their edges.
It was odd to see up close, but it was neither foreign nor surprising. She had seen old humans many times in her lifetime. She had watched them age and die, and she had known all along that it would happen to him, too. That was simply the way of things; it didn’t bother her.
Apparently, it was different for him.
They were lying side-by-side on the warm sand, with him tracing his fingers up and down her back and her weaving and re-weaving little braids in his hair, which had recently begun to show signs of silver (the silver would suit him, she thought), when he finally asked the question she had been waiting for.
“Petra?”
“Hm?”
“How old are you, really?”
Petra thought for a while – humans measured time so differently than the wild seas did. They had to, if their time in this world was to be so short and fraught with pain and joy and everything in between.
“When I was born,” she said after some time, “there were twenty-two lighthouses on the path from my home to this beach. Now, I am passing only one.”
He let out a low whistle.
“Twenty-two? I only ever knew of six, and all but three were abandoned before I was born.”
“How many years ago was that?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Is that very many, for a human?”
Claude laughed.
“Depends who you ask.”
“I am asking you,” Petra replied, humming softly.
“No,” he said with a sigh, “it's not much. Thirty, fourty, seventy – it’s never enough.”
Petra watched his face closely as he spoke, taking note of the wrinkled in his brow, the twitch of his lips, the flare of his nostrils. She pushed herself up halfway and reached out to caress his cheek, hoping to provide some comfort – it seemed to do the opposite.
“You are having fear,” she said softly.
He didn’t respond to that, though he did speak.
“Is it true that sirens don’t die?”
“No.”
“But you won’t age,” he pressed.
“Yes.”
She lay back down to rest her head on his chest – already, she knew what he was building up the courage to ask. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders to pull her a little closer.
“I read somewhere that if a siren leaves the ocean and chooses to live on land with a human, then she'll start to age like us. Is that true?”
“I am not having certainty,” Petra admitted. “Much time has passed since one of my people has left. Humans are our enemies now – they are not loving us anymore.”
“I am,” he said softly. “And I'm not your enemy.”
Petra lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it softly.
“You are different,” she said. “You are strange.”
“I don’t suppose you'd like to be strange, too, would you?” he asked carefully.
“Are you asking me to be leaving the sea?”
He turned his face toward the sky and closed his eyes. There was already a poorly concealed regret behind them.
“Would you, if I asked?”
Petra pushed herself up again to lean over him and tuck a half-finished braid behind his ear. His eyes slid open again, and he reached up, threading his fingers though her hair and searching her eyes, pleading. He knew her answer already.
“Claude…”
“We could visit Sreng,” he said. “You told me you want to see the desert. Or I could show you the mountains – Goddess, you would love the mountains.”
She did wish she could see it all – the endless sand dunes, the towering trees and rocky peaks that rose above the clouds, everything he had described so beautifully. She would probably love it.
But that would mean losing everything else.
Never again would she be able to drift with the currents deep beneath the waves, or dive to the coldest abyssal waters where the sunlight didn’t reach. Never again would she ride waves as tall as mountains whipped up by storms, or feel the electricity of lighting striking water. Never again would she be able to call all manner of creatures to her side or swim with whales who dwarfed everything else.
She loved her strange human, but she also loved the sea.
“I am sorry, Claude,” she said gently. “I cannot be saying yes.”
He smiled sadly, then coaxed her down just enough to kiss her forehead, her nose, her lips.
“Yeah, I figured,” he murmured, “but I'd always regret it if I didn't at least ask.”
Neither said another word that day, but they stayed together on the beach for the rest of the afternoon until long after the sun had sunk beneath the horizon and the sand had grown cool beneath their skin in the pale light of the moon.
Petra watched the slow rise and fall of his chest as he slept, and she smiled.
He would never be truly gone – not if someone still remembered him, and sirens had a very long memory.
She buried her face in his neck and breathed deeply, etching the feeling of his arms around her into her memory.
She would not go with him, but neither would she forget. She would remember him until the day the seas emptied and the last of the whales disappeared. She would remember his taste and smell, she would remember the warmth of his skin beneath her fingers. She would look at his gifts and trinkets and remember his voice and the stories he told of far off places.
As long as the sun and moon illuminated the waves, she would remember him, and she would love him, and he would never truly be gone.