Work Text:
Daphne was born in the water.
No, seriously. Her mom was going through some sort of new-age phase and she got a midwife who doubled as the neighborhood witch, complete with a crooked nose and warts and everything. She got it into Daphne’s mother’s head that the water was good for the baby–the tides, or something–and in the weeks leading up to Daphne’s birth, her mom spent more time in the ocean than she did on land.
And so, Daphne was born in the water. Sometimes she thinks she’s made out of it. She knows that the average human body is 65% water, but Daphne thinks she might be more than that. Sometimes she floats on her back for hours, well into the night, and she thinks one day she might just never get out again.
Daphne swims the way most people walk, or sleep, or breathe. Like it’s just another part of existence. Sometimes she’ll wake up as the sun rises over the ocean, still bobbing in the shallows, nightgown like a second skin, and she’ll realize she’s been floating all night.
“You can’t live your life in the water,” her father teases, and Daphne is completely serious when she says “Watch me.”
Yia Yia is the only one that understands the way Daphne loves the water. Like it’s an organ, or a limb. She loves it in the mindless way that you love the different parts of you. It’s where she thinks and sleeps best. When Daphne thinks about her future, it’s in shades of green and blue, with sunlight filtering through above her.
Yia Yia is peeling potatoes when Daphne stops by her cottage, on the walk back from school. She’s taking morning classes, only because her mother made her. Yia Yia’s kitchen is filled with leeks and bay leaves drying from a clothesline, and root vegetables shedding soil where they roll. It smells like earth, and autumn. Yia Yia is always covered in dirt and weeds from her garden. Sometimes Daphne thinks she sprouted up from the ground, the way that Daphne came from the water.
“Yasas, little laurel tree,” Yia Yia says, as Daphne drops her bags to the floor.
When she was younger, Yia Yia would wear an enormous sun hat and lotion that smelled like flowers and she would drag her creaky knees down to the beach to watch Daphne play in the ocean. Daphne would splash with her sisters until they lost interest, and sing made-up dolphin songs that bloomed in her head, and every time she looked back to the shore, Yia Yia would be watching.
I’m a mermaid princess, she’d call, making a crown of seaweed to knot in her hair.
Of course you are, Yia Yia told her. The most beautiful and gracious princess to ever rule over the ocean.
I’m a sea monster, Daphne said, splashing furiously, creating her own private monsoon.
A fearsome creature, Yia Yia agreed. The rest of the sea kingdom have nightmares about you.
I’m a whirlpool, Daphne decided, spinning around and around and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t get dizzy.
You will swallow passing ships and spit them back out, splintered and broken beyond repair, Yia Yia said wisely. Yia Yia always knew what to say.
She’d say My Daphne, my little laurel tree, you are what the ocean dreams about.
“Daphne,” her mother would chide, shading her eyes with carefully manicured fingers, her stomach firm from pliates and glistening just so with the perfect amount of summer sweat. “Come out of the water! You’re going to look like a prune!”
Prunes are good for you, Yia Yia said, but Daphne’s mother ignored her. She may have been Daphne’s godmother, but her mom had given up the new-age fascination for tai chi and kale.
But when she wasn’t looking, Yia Yia would tuck Daphne’s blankets up to her chin, and tell her old stories about ocean women, who came out of the water and wore skins that weren’t theirs, and had scales down their legs and gills like a fish. Women with teeth sharp like fangs, that could bite through bone like toothpicks.
I want to be like them, Daphne told her. Tell me how to do it.
You have to swim, Yia Yia said. Faster and harder and longer than you’ve ever swum before. You have to swim until you can’t move any further, until you can’t see the shore. Swim to the middle of the ocean, and then they’ll find you, and you’ll never have to leave the water again.
It’s been years since those childhood stories, but Daphne still dreams about drowning. But in her dreams, she never drowns to die. She drowns to be reborn.
Today, she clears a small bit of counter from carrots and loose dirt, and slides herself up. Yia Yia peels her vegetables expertly, a flash of silver blade and worn, weathered fingers.
“Tell me about the dragons again,” she says, nudging Yia Yia’s old lady hip with the toe of her sneaker.
Yia Yia grunts, playing at disinterest. “You’re getting too old for stories.”
“You’re never too old for stories,” Daphne counters, and she doesn’t miss Yia Yia’s smile, the hint of delight gone just as quickly.
“Deep in the belly of the earth, dragons hatch from eggs as big as mountains. That’s what makes the ground shake and move underneath us. They breathe fire, and light volcanoes like matches, sending lava and smoke from their lungs.”
“I wish I was a dragon,” Daphne hums, hopelessly out of tune, a gene passed down from her mother.
“Every girl has a dragon inside her,” Yia Yia says. “That fire you feel building up in your chest, sometimes? That’s your dragon, trying to get out. That’s why you can never be still.”
Daphne loves Yia Yia the way she loves the smell of salt, and a cool breeze in summer, but she isn’t a little girl anymore. When she was younger, she snuck out on a full moon night, because everyone knows that full moons make things special, and she tried to swim to the middle of the ocean. She swam and she swam until her legs burned and her fingers went numb and she couldn’t keep her head above the surface.
In the morning, she woke up on the shore, carried in with the tide like driftwood, aching and shivering and emptier than she’d ever felt before. She’d tried to find the ocean women, she’d followed all of Yia Yia’s rules, but the water didn’t want her. The water sent her home, and Daphne realized that sometimes it doesn’t matter how badly you want something. Sometimes the stories just aren’t true.
But she still likes to hear them.
Daphne nudges Yia Yia again with her shoe. “Tell me about the river horses,” she says, and Yia Yia does.
Daphne is sitting underwater in the school swimming pool, when Apollo taps her shoulder.
She lets the water drip into her eyes when she opens them, and finds him looking at her with the kind of smile that worries a line of little knots into her small intestine. It’s the kind of smile that most people want to wear on their skin, the one that Apollo uses like a master key that fits in every lock. Daphne tightens her lips like a vault.
“What were you doing?” he asks, and even his voice sounds like a melody. Apollo is the sort of boy that everyone likes before they know him, and then they like him even more.
Daphne frowns. His smile widens. “Thinking,” she says, honest. “I think best underwater.”
“That’s cool,” he says, and she’s not sure she believes him. “Hey, Dionysus is having a party tonight. You wanna come?”
Daphne glances around the room. While before its emptiness had felt like sanctuary, now it feels suspicious. “Where’s your sister?” Artemis and Apollo are joined at the hip, until Apollo breaks off to go hook up with a frat boy in a closet, or something. In the doorway, she sees the tell-tale pink tuft of Eros’ head, ducking out around the corner.
Very suspicious.
“She’ll be at the party too,” he assures her. “So, will you come?”
“I’ll think about it,” Daphne tells him, because she gets the feeling that he won’t take no for an answer.
Apollo beams and his whole mouth becomes a sun that makes her want to orbit around it. It’s a peculiar sort of charm that makes her lightheaded. “Good,” he says. “That’s good. I’ll see you there.”
Daphne stutters a nod and sinks back to the tiled pool floor, to clear her head in the chlorine.
She isn’t an idiot. Daphne’s had six classes with Apollo, and he’s never given her so much as a first glance before now. And, beyond his penchant for nude modeling and illicit blow jobs, Apollo is known for one very specific thing: he can never back down from a challenge.
Daphne knows what she looks like: nineteen year old virgin whose only friend is the old neighborhood witch. Skin roughened by saline, hair constantly tangled and wet, eyes too deep to be anything but disconcerting. She catches attention in all the worst ways, like the ink stain on an otherwise white wall that you can’t help but look at.
Part of her, the smallest part, the one that sometimes wishes she looked more like her mother, thinks maybe I should just let him win. She thinks about his mouth, shaped like a bow just asking to be untied. She thinks about his hands, soft and paint-stained, and how he hadn’t even touched her but she could just tell he was warm.
The rest of her thinks over my dead body, and she means it.
Stilbe walks in on Daphne getting dressed for the party, and she pauses to stare at her, the most dressed up she’s ever been.
It isn’t much, still. A million pearls wouldn’t be able to hide the strangeness of Daphne–but she’s combed her hair out and threaded it with water lilies, which certainly doesn’t hurt.
“Are you going to a wedding?” Stilbe asks, and then frowns, because she’s trying to work out who Daphne might know that she doesn’t.
“Dionysus is throwing a party,” Daphne tells her. “Apollo asked me to go.”
Stilbe’s mouth drops open in a very satisfying way, and Daphne has to bite back a smile. She still doesn’t like Apollo, and she has every intention of telling him exactly where he can stuff his own head, but. It is nice to be noticed for once, even if it’s not in a way she would choose.
“Apollo asked you?” Stilbe asks, mouth drooping into a pout. Still in that young age between woman and girl, she’s fancied herself in love with Apollo for some time now. He’s tall and good-looking and well-liked, which is all that really matters to Stilbe.
“If I don’t come home, now you’ll know where to search for my dead body,” Daphne makes a face, and her sister looks unimpressed with her.
“Right,” she says, flat, “I’m sure that’s what’ll have happened if you don’t come home.” She rolls her eyes outrageously before marching off, stepping a little harsher than necessary.
Apollo didn’t tell Daphne where the party was being held, but he didn’t need to. Everyone knows that if Dionysus is throwing a party, it’s in the little patch of woods behind his breakfast diner. There’s a clearing with a fire pit dug into the earth, surrounded by chunks of tree like crude stools, and someone’s dragged out an enormous metal trash can lined with plastic, and filled it with something that smells like rubbing alcohol and diesel.
The woods are filled with people and music, an equal amount of both. Some are dancing, writhing in a way that makes Daphne’s skin itch when she looks at them. Some are perched on tree stools or milling about with friends. Almost everyone is drunk on whatever mystery garbage juice Dionysus mixed up.
Daphne is considering trying just a little, when a hand, heavy and warm, lays itself on her shoulder. It fits like it belongs there, and the thought makes her want to run.
“Hey! You made it!”
She turns to find Apollo beaming down at her, looking comfortable in an old sweatshirt. She’s not sure he’s ever not covered in paint. There’s a smudge of purple on the bridge of his nose, and she can see just a hint of green behind his ear lobe.
He hands her a plastic cup, and the smell makes her eyes water. She already feels hungover and she hasn’t even had a sip yet.
“S’good!” Apollo tells her, and she definitely does not believe him.
But, it is a party, and Daphne’s never been to anything more than the fancy brunches her mother likes to throw, where she invites other rich important housewives so they can gossip over quail.
Daphne’s heard of Dionysus’s midnight bashes in the woods. How sometimes the cops get called because neighbors hear howling, like wolves. Daphne’s heard the morning after stories in class, or from her sister Menippe, before she got married and moved out of town.
Daphne’s never gotten to experience it herself–not the strange hypnotic dancing, or the electronic music blasting through her veins, or the disgusting garbage punch.
One drink probably won’t hurt her.
Apollo cheers as the alcohol shoots like fire down her throat, like she’s swallowing the dragon’s breath, to burn her from the inside out. After that, he leads her to the middle of the fray, the dance floor–if it can be called that–and she lets him drape his arms around her, strong and just as warm as she thought they’d be.
Daphne has never danced before but as it turns out, it’s a lot like swimming. She picks it up fast.
She isn’t sure how much later it is, when Apollo says he’s going to fetch them more drinks, shouting to be heard over the music, and Daphne loses him to the web of tangled bodies. She’s all wrapped up in his sweatshirt and the smell of him, because she’d gotten cold. It falls down to her knees, swallowing her up in a wave of gray cotton.
Someone tugs on the hood, hard, choking her a little. Daphne whirls around to find Artemis glaring up at her, breathing smoke out from her nostrils, what’s left of a cigarette dangling neatly from her hand. She takes Daphne by the wrist and drags her out to the edge of the tree line, where the light from the fire grows dim and the music grows quiet. All at once, Daphne can hear herself think again, and she isn’t ready for the sound.
“What’s going on?” she asks, mouth dry from the liquor. Where is Apollo with their drinks? She thinks he might have gotten lost. She’s not sure she wants to go find him.
“My brother can be a real jackass,” Artemis says, stomping the filter into the ground like she has a grudge against it. Even in her thick-heeled tall boots, she’s still a great deal shorter than Daphne, but she manages to feel tall in a way that no one else can.
Daphne blinks down at her. She’s not convinced Artemis has only one head. “What?”
“Apollo,” Artemis says, as if she has more than just one brother, and has to clarify. “Jackass,” she says again. “He never says no to a dare. Even when it’s shitty.”
Daphne feels her thoughts shifting around like magnetic letters on a fridge, the kind she learned to spell with. They’re moving into an order that might make sense to her blurry, frazzled mind. “I’m the dare?”
Artemis lights up another cigarette that she had stashed in her bra, and nods. “Yeah,” she sighs, exhaling. The smoke smells like peppermint. “He and Eros were being shitheads, you know, bragging about their abilities or whatever, and Apollo just had to win–he always has to win, you know, it’s infuriating–anyway, basically he said he could get anyone into bed with him, and so Eros dared him to get you. Which brings us to,” Artemis waves her cigarette around in a circle. “Here. You.”
“Me,” Daphne agrees. Her thoughts have settled but her stomach is rioting. She’s going to throw up.
She must have said it out loud, because Artemis makes a face. “Just as long as you don’t hurl on my shoes.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Daphne promises, and doubles over into the bushes. Artemis waits for her to finish, quietly smoking and looking bored. Finally, Daphne straightens up, wiping her mouth on Apollo’s sleeve. “Why are you telling me?” she asks. “He’s your brother.”
“He may be my brother, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a jackass sometimes,” she says, looking irritated. “I love him, but seriously. What the fuck.” She eyes Daphne up and down critically. “If I leave you alone, you aren’t gonna kill yourself, are you? Because that’s happened before, and it’s a pain.”
Daphne shakes her head, and that’s all the reassurance Artemis needs. “Good.” She walks back into the mayhem, and Daphne watches her go. Now that she’s on the sidelines, she can see what the party really looks like–nothing but drunks stumbling in and out of each other, dancing sloppily or kissing sloppily or trying to do both at once. Dionysus is near the fire, trying to do a handstand on one of the stools. It’s only a matter of time before someone catches on fire, or starts a brawl. Daphne turns and stumbles home.
When she wakes up, her brain feels like it’s expanded and hardened and is slowly starting to thaw. “I am never drinking again,” she grumbles, and her father laughs, sliding her a drink that turns out to be raw egg. When she gags a little, he laughs at that too. She thinks he’s just excited to finally have something in common. He’s never been able to handle his liquor either.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he tells her. “Menippe started sneaking out to parties when she was sixteen. I used to wait down by the well when she tried to sneak back in. I’d jump out and she’d scream. Nearly gave her a heart attack every time.”
“Yeah well, don’t get used to it,” Daphne tells him. “Just once was enough for me.”
Her father seems unconvinced. “That’s what she said after her first hangover too. Just wait; you’ll get over it.” For a moment, he grows vaguely serious. “Just remember to be safe, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Dad, you have four children by four different wives.”
He blinks. “On second thought, maybe you’re right. I’ve always wanted a recluse for a daughter. You can look after me in my old age.”
Daphne thought she’d be able to avoid Apollo. They don’t share any classes this semester, and she hardly even sees him in the halls. He seems to prefer afternoon classes, most likely so he can sleep off the nights before, which is just fine by Daphne. As long as she cuts through the courtyard, she should be fine.
Or, she should have been.
Apollo corners her outside the library. There’s a little alleyway between that building and the gym, and Daphne was planning to use it as a short cut. By the time she rounded the side, it was too late; he was waiting for her.
“You disappeared last night,” he pouts, voice slithering down Daphne’s spine and making her shiver. He’s caught both her wrists, hands loose but not too loose; if she struggles, he’ll only tighten his grip.
Apollo walks them back until he has her pressed up against the wall, cold on her skin, while he burns where he touches her, so hot it’s uncomfortable. It takes everything she has not to wince.
“I had to go home,” she lies. “I didn’t feel good. I think the punch made me sick.”
“Poor thing,” Apollo says, singing the words. His charm is different now; gone is the boyish warmth, replaced by a heat that feels dangerous and makes her want to run.
“I’m just going to try sleeping it off after school,” Daphne tries, giving herself an alibi for later, just in case he tries to get her to follow him home or something.
But Apollo just smiles, showing off those blinding teeth. “Do you still have my sweatshirt?”
Daphne closes her eyes to swallow a scream. She’d taken it off and tossed it to the corner of her room as soon as she got home; she didn’t want to look at it. But now he has a reason, he’s planted a little seed, an invitation into her home. He probably planned it.
“Yes,” she sighs. “I can bring it to you tomorrow.”
“Don’t,” he says, leaning forward so that his teeth graze against the skin of her neck, just barely. Just a hint of something else. “I want you to keep wearing it.”
He kisses her, sharp and sudden, and then he’s gone. Daphne stands there with her head against the wall. She can still feel his mouth on hers like a bruise.
She goes to the pool in a daze, waits until she’s fully submerged before letting out a scream that leaves her feeling ripped open.
She knows now, there’s no avoiding this. Apollo never turns down a dare, and he never loses. He always has to win, always has to be right. Even his sister said so.
Daphne looks at her wrists and sees scorch marks like a brand around them, where he held her still. She doesn’t know if they’ll ever wash off.
He wants a challenge. That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? So she’ll give him one.
Daphne is not a fighter. She’s never been. Menippe was the loud one, the fiery one, the one made of shades of red like roses and sunsets and blood. Daphne is all water. Daphne doesn’t go through the things in her way. She goes around them.
She goes to Yia Yia.
“Apollo has his heart set on getting me into his bed,” Daphne tells her, the second she’s stepped through the door. Yia Yia is bowling a pot full of sea on the stove, separating the salt from the water. “He won’t stop if I say no,” she adds, and Yia Yia sets her sieve down.
“I see,” she hums, looking thoughtful. Daphne knows better than to speak, when Yia Yia looks like that. She looks like the world is turning inside her head, and if anyone interrupts her, they might knock it off its axis.
Finally, she points up at a line of herbs drying over the sink basin. “Fetch me those laurel leaves.”
Daphne unclips them and carries them over, watching as Yia Yia expertly starts to string them together, as if the leaves themselves were thread. She gestures for Daphne to turn and duck her head, which she does, and then Yia Yia’s gnarled fingers are in her hair, braiding the leaves into a crown for her.
She finishes, and pulls back. “You will be the most beautiful and gracious queen to ever rule over the ocean.”
Daphne feels her heart sink. “Yia Yia, I’m serious. Your stories won’t help this time.”
Yia Yia’s mouth becomes a pomegranate, spoiled and sharp. “When has the water ever failed you?”
“When I was little,” Daphne says. “I did what you told me. I tried to swim out to the middle, to be with the ocean women. But I just washed back in with the tide.”
“They weren’t ready for you yet,” Yia Yia says, stubborn. “But they are, now. They will be.” She reaches into the pocket of her apron and pulls out two seeds. They’re dry and hollow-looking, like corpses of the plants they once were. Miscarriages. “Just one should do the trick,” she tells her. “But take the other, just in case. If you ever want to come back again.”
“What are they?” Daphne asks, studying them closer. They look like less than nothing. Not worth a second glance.
“Protection. Magic. Roads.”
“Roads?”
Yia Yia shrugs, turning back to her saltwater. “Anything can be a road, if it can be traveled.”
Daphne leaves with the crown, the seeds, and the riddle, and hikes back home to pack. If her godmother can’t help her, she’ll just have to run. She’ll be a river, cutting its own course as it goes.
Stilbe finds her as she’s leaving, back filled with supplies and tugged over her shoulder, Apollo’s stained sweatshirt draped over one arm.
“You’re leaving?” Stilbe asks, but her eyes stick to that sweatshirt. “Is that Apollo’s?” Daphne only hesitates for a moment, before thrusting it at her.
“Do me a favor and give it back to him?”
Stilbe takes it gingerly with both hands, and Daphne is sure that she’s never going to let it go. “When will you be back?” Because of course she’s coming back. Daphne isn’t like Menippe, gone the moment her feet touched the earth, or Stilbe, longing for everything she could never have.
“I’m not sure,” she says, and wraps an arm around her sister before she can second guess it. They’ve never been close, but she might never see her again, and while she can live with that, she’d rather leave on a high note.
The sun is low in the sky like an anchor when Daphne makes it down the incline her house rests on like a crown. The laurel leaves are still twined through her hair, and they rustle with every step she takes.
“Going somewhere?”
Daphne freezes in place as Apollo steps out from behind the jagged rocks that grow from the beach like stone trees. He was waiting for her–for how long? Since he left her outside the library, trying to catch her breath? Did he follow her from Yia Yia’s? Has he been following her for days?
She feels his eyes on her bag, taking in the extra weight load. “That doesn’t look like just a weekend trip.” She meets his eyes for just one second, just enough to see the sun burning inside them, and then she runs.
Running on sand is always difficult, but Daphne was raised on the ocean. She has years built up, of running and rolling and sleeping in sand, and while Apollo stumbles she soars towards the water, getting closer with every breath.
He wades in after her, but Daphne knows these waters like she knows her own mind, her own veins and heartbeat. Apollo stands waist-deep in the ocean, searching for her, while Daphne dives deep under the surface, to wait him out.
An average person would have no choice but to break the surface for air after thirty seconds. But nothing about Daphne is average, when it comes to the sea. And Yia Yia was right; the water has never failed her.
Under the surface of the ocean, Daphne feels the water move around her, threading through her hair, framing her, moving away from her mouth like an invitation. She dropped her bags when she was running; she has nothing but her clothes, and her crown, and the two seeds in her pocket.
The water moves away like an offering. Go ahead, it tells her. Do it.
Apollo’s voice is muffled by the water. Above the surface, he’s calling her name, still hungry, still burning.
Daphne pulls the first seed from her pocket, and slips it in between her lips. It tastes like salt, and old earth. She swallows, and the water sighs.
She feels the world begin to shift, not around her, but inside her. Her veins turn to sap, slow and sticky. Her skin becomes hard and solid, worn smooth by the water. Her eyes sink even deeper into her skin, as her bones become a hollow shell that lifts her through the water. Her hair braids into leaves and then becomes leaves, and even though she can’t see or hear or feel, Daphne knows exactly what she looks like.
My little laurel tree. She wonders if Yia Yia knew, when her mother named her, and if she smiled at the joke.
Apollo, disheartened by the loss of his prize, wanders back to shore where he finds a pretty girl waiting with his sweatshirt.
But Daphne is gone by then, drifted out to see, thoughts drifting somewhere between time and atmosphere, and she’s not sure if this is how all trees feel, but it’s certainly enlightening.
And then suddenly her mind is wrenched back into her body all at once, as something around her begins to hatch. No, she begins to hatch. The shell is the tree, and she is inside it.
The darkness in front of her falls away, the wood split in two and peeled back, and Daphne is faced with the most beautiful girl she’s ever seen. Her skin is all at once scaled and pearl-slick, with briny hair in a green-blue cloud. She looks at Daphne with lidless, almost see-through eyes, and Daphne looks back.
When she smiles, rows of sharp fangs glisten in greeting.
Yasas, says the ocean woman, words somewhere between curiosity and joy. We have been waiting.
Yasas, Daphne says, and when she reaches a hand up to her throat, she feels ribbons of gills. I’m home.