Chapter Text
He manages the story in bits and pieces.
First: the sea witch. It turns out that nobody had gotten a good look at the engagement party after her tentacles unfurled, and now everyone wants to hear everything Eric’s witnessed, all the slimy, suckered details. Eric doesn’t want to relive any of it. Least of all the battle they’d waged in the middle of the ocean.
They’d seen it from the shore, billowing up from the sea in great inky clouds. “Like a little hurricane,” Lashana informs him, pressing a mug of tea into his hands. She’d never seen anything like it. They’d thought for sure he wasn’t coming back this time.
And then he did. And it’s a miracle, isn’t it? Their dear, resilient boy. They’ve sat him down in the parlor by the hearth and they’re all clustered around him, Lashana and Grimsby and his mother and half a dozen others who’d helped raise him, rank be damned. Eric has a little plunge of longing for his father. He thinks he might suffocate like this. The tea tastes like nothing.
Nobody mentions Ariel again.
He can’t think of anything else. After the witch had gone down he’d gotten his breath back, gotten his bearings, found a stub of driftwood to cling to keep him afloat, and then — she’d been nowhere. He’d been all alone on the dark sea. It was like none of it had even happened; if it hadn’t been for the shipwreck debris littering the water around him he might’ve thought he’d made the whole thing up. His heart squeezes up his throat even thinking of it now. Had Ariel gone down, too? Sucked into that whirlpool, or smashed to pieces on the rocks, or crushed in a giant fist? Every scenario turns his stomach worse than the last. He finds himself clamping his hands over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut, like he can block out the thought of it.
Once everyone’s been ushered out, the physician looks him over dutifully. He has a concussion, a bruised rib, a touch of hypothermia. His mother frets over him like she hasn’t done since he was a little boy. He’d washed up on the shore like this only a week ago — but he’d been fine then, a little waterlogged, but healthy and unhurt except for the bloodied cut over his eyebrow. That ought to have scarred him for good; instead it had faded to a faint pink line in a matter of days. The doctor hadn’t believed him, and neither had his mother. But Eric knew. It was her — the girl, and her voice.
But there’s no siren song to heal his broken body now, no dark eyes and bright smile to patch up his broken heart. He feels battered and worn and sick. Cold all over, like his heart’s pumping too sluggishly, the blood moving too slow. He thinks dimly that it could stop altogether and he wouldn’t mind either way.
Someone leads him back to his room, and someone bathes him, and someone dresses him in something clean and dry. But everyone must decide that he’s too grown up to be tucked into his bed, so he’s left sitting at the foot of it, alone, staring at what’s left of the fire in the hearth until it flickers down to ash.
Max comes in twice or maybe three times, clever enough to nudge open the door but not to see that Eric’s in no state to play. He bumps his wet nose into Eric’s palm, sits down at his feet, expectant. Eric looks down at him and feels hollowed out. Maybe he really is going mad. Maybe he’s been mad all this time.
Eventually Max wanders back over to the door, ears perking: there’s voices in the hallway beyond. “I know it seems far-fetched, Your Majesty,” Grimsby’s saying, “but to be frank, I hadn’t seen him so happy in years.”
“But look at him now.” His mother’s voice is weary and brittle. “He nearly died today. This — this fantasy, it’s not good for him. Christ, he looks like he’s still dying.”
“It wasn’t a fantasy,” says Grimsby patiently.
“She was a mermaid.”
There’s a pause, then a sigh. “Yes. But what else would you have him do?”
“He could stop running off to sea and risking his neck over that dreamy head of his, for starters…”
“If you’ll forgive me, madam, that hardly seemed a decision of the head.”
“He’s a fool.”
“He’s in love.”
There’s a rustle of skirts as she sits down somewhere, on the steps, maybe. When she speaks again her voice is muffled against her palms. “What am I to do with him, Grimsby?”
Grimsby’s quiet for a long while. Then he says, gently, “Leave him be.”
“He’s hurting.”
“He is. But you can’t save him from everything, my dear.”
“I didn’t want this for him. Anything else. Not this.”
“His heart’s been out at sea since he was a boy. Is it really such a surprise that she is who he fell in love with?”
“Oh, don’t say that.”
“What?”
“That he loves her.”
“Selina. You know as well as I do—”
“He’s still a child,” she blurts, voice breaking.
“No,” says Grimsby, and they’re both right.
Eric hugs his knees to his chest, hides his face against the linen of his trousers. He doesn’t want to hear any more.
Some time later someone’s heels click off down the hallway. Grimsby: Eric’s had twenty-one years to learn his gait. His mother lingers. He shuts his eyes against the darkening room, hoping against hope that he doesn’t know her as well as he does and that she’ll head off to bed — but then the door creaks open. The skirts rustle. “I thought he told you to leave me alone.”
“Eric,” says his mother, soft. “I just want to talk.”
He says nothing, doesn’t look up. The bed dips as she sits down beside him. “Are you all right?”
Eric can’t help the scoff that escapes him. Max has come padding back to them, and Eric busies himself with scratching behind his ears and beneath his chin, nails catching in the knots and tangles in his fur. He needs a trim, a proper brushing; his coat’s overgrown and filthy. Dog duties are Eric’s to tend to, and evidently Eric’s to neglect. He’s grateful for it now. Any excuse not to meet his mother’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him. It sounds foreign on her tongue, uneasy. “I know this is difficult. I know what you’re going through.”
“I really don’t think you do.”
“Grief and heartbreak are a part of life. You can’t outrun them forever. When your father passed—”
“Mum,” he cuts in, “I’m not in the mood for a lecture right now.”
“I wasn’t lecturing, I just…”
He glances over at her as she trails off. She’s untwisted her hair from the elaborate updo she keeps it in, letting it fall loose in its braids around her shoulders. He doesn’t see it like that often anymore. The sight of it is familiar in some deep, distant way, shocks him back for just a second to that feeling of being a child.
And at the same time she looks so tired. Old. She rubs at the bridge of her nose, mumbling, “I’m making a mess of this.”
Eric exhales and sits back up, freeing his fingers from Max’s fur. “It was already a mess.”
“I always feared something like this for you, Eric,” she tells him quietly. “I tried to warn you—”
“Don’t.”
“No one blames you. You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
She thinks he’s a fool. Lovestruck, seduced, and naïve enough to have let it break his heart. It chafes to hear her say it like that — like there was ever something wrong about loving Ariel. Like it was some sort of mistake.
“It wasn’t like that.” It comes out hard and sharp-edged. “It wasn’t — like the stories.”
His mother nods obligingly, though Eric can tell she doesn’t believe him. It was, after all, exactly like the stories. An unsuspecting sailor. A siren song. Why had he thought he could change the ending?
“Did you know?” his mother asks then.
“No.” But then he considers it, what Ariel was like, otherworldly and strange and special. There’d been something about her that was like nothing he’d ever seen; it was what had drawn him to her in the first place. Something extraordinary. So when she’d turned to fin and scale beneath his hands…
“Or — maybe I did, somewhere. I don’t know. I knew she wasn’t… like us.”
She’s watching him in that way that mothers do, like he’s something fragile, her face overfull with concern. Eric itches to shrug it off. “Do you want to tell me about her?”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. I saw your face at the party.”
“I was just…” She breaks off, sighing, and runs her palm over her braids. “I’m sorry, Eric. But what were we supposed to think?”
He pulls his knees back up to his chest and looks away from her. He feels so childish, so small. How can he go on like this? How can there ever be anything else out there for him?
“It’s not like that,” he says again. “You didn’t know her.”
“You only knew her three days—”
“Mother. I love her.”
Her mouth twists. For the first time he sees that her eyes are soft with sorrow.
“I’m sorry,” he goes on, his voice hoarse in his throat, “I wish I didn’t. I wish…”
“Oh, Eric, don’t ever wish a thing like that,” she says. “You have such a good heart, my darling. You love so fiercely.”
If he had a good heart, he thinks, he wouldn’t have lost it to a cheap trick. He would’ve known who’d had it all along, and they wouldn’t be in this mess then. They would just be together.
“But we don’t belong in the ocean,” says his mother. “And its creatures, they don’t belong up here with us.”
“Stop saying it like that,” he snaps. “Like she’s not — like she wasn’t human.”
“She wasn’t, Eric,” his mother tells him gently.
“She’s just a person, Mum. You think she’s some sort of monster. But she’s clever, and kind, and funny, and she’s — she was —”
His breath stutters around it, bitter and hard in his throat. She was.
He doesn’t know what shows on his face, but it’s enough for his mother to wrap her arm around him, draw his head down to her shoulder like they used to do when he was small. “I know, darling,” she murmurs, running her fingers over his hair. “Your first heartbreak is like nothing else.”
“How do you know it’s my first?” he strikes back feebly, though of course she’s right. There’s never been much on for him in the way of romance. Not that she, or anyone else in the palace, would know. The fact is that no one has paid it much attention. Girls mean courtships mean wives, a chain of events that everyone seems to find as difficult to reconcile with their prince as Eric does himself. He tries to picture himself like that — a married man, a grown man, the sort who can take his place on the throne left empty for him. He comes up empty.
He’d been sixteen when his father died, leaving behind a wayward, inattentive boy who nobody trusted to grow up. For a while that was fine: his father’s passing was still too raw, the scar of it too delicate to prod at with the suggestion of a new king. But Eric’s coming of age has stirred up more talk of that empty throne, of heirs, of wives. Shouldn’t you be thinking of settling down? his mother had asked him before the shipwrecked voyage. I’d like to retire in peace.
The sea only became a better refuge after that. A better place to run.
It hardly matters now. He tries to picture himself at a wedding, a faceless woman in white on his arm, and his stomach turns right up his throat.
There had been a moment, twice, when Ariel was here: the night when he’d made to run up to her room to tell her it was her he wanted, and then when she’d spoken his name aloud and he’d realized that it was her, had been her all along. He’d felt everything settle into place then, the future bright and clear and golden against his fingertips. Now he feels his bones cracking under the weight of it. He doesn’t want to marry anyone else. He doesn’t want any of it.
“Because I know you,” says his mother, and he knows then that she can read all of this off his face as easily as it had spun through his mind.
“I don’t know what to do now,” he whispers.
His mother exhales, a weary little thing. Eric realizes that she doesn’t know, either, and that makes it hurt all the worse.
“You know, when I saw you on the shore today,” she says finally, “nearly dead in the surf but so determined — it was just like twenty-one years ago.”
“Mum…”
“You were so very sick then. Everyone feared you wouldn’t make it. But you lived, and then again, and again, every time I thought we’d lost you. Eric, look at me.”
Her fingers brush down the side of his face, and he lets her turn his cheek to meet her eyes. “You’ll be all right. You’re a survivor.”
“I’m not a survivor,” says Eric. “I’m the one who gets saved.”
“And why do you think that is, hm?” His mother’s hand falls from his face, presses flat to his chest, over his heart. “Because of this.”
He looks away from her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it isn’t. Take it from someone who saved you. I looked at you and I just knew.”
If only Ariel hadn’t saved him, that night in the storm. If only she’d let him sink and drown. Then she’d still be home now — unhappy, maybe, but safe and alive, and he wouldn’t feel like his heart’s been torn from his chest and left to rot on the ocean floor. He wouldn’t feel anything at all. That would be preferable, he thinks. That would be just all right.
It’s then that he realizes. “It’s my fault.”
It comes out quiet, hoarse. His mother strokes her fingers through the curls at the back of his head. “What is, darling?”
“That she’s… that she—”
All of a sudden there’s tears burning in his throat, in his eyes. Something cracks inside of him then, the wave cresting, the tide breaking over the dunes. Ariel’s gone. And for what? There was never any chance. He keeps coming back to that, looping round and round in his mind. They never could’ve been together, no matter how many deals she made, how many miles he sailed. Real, and not. Human, and not. His, for a spark of a moment, and then never again.
“I don’t know what to do,” he tells his mother again, and it sounds weak and desperate to his own ears. “I don’t know where she is. I didn’t see…”
He’s trembling too much to finish the sentence. His mum’s fingers are tightening around his shoulder, and when she speaks her voice is tight with tamped-down urgency. “What didn’t you see, love? What happened?”
“I think she’s dead,” he whispers. “I think… I think—”
He’s crying hard now, struggling for breath, tight and thin in his dry throat as the sobs tear through him. The world has become too narrow to breathe in and too vast to bear, the weight of it crushing, bruising the air from his lungs. He curls into himself to get away from it, clutching his knees to his chest, all his body gone tight and tense and rigid like he’s had an electric shock. He’s distantly aware of his mother’s hand on his back, her voice in his ear. But it can’t get through to him, can’t pierce through the static clouding his mind. He’s drowning again, like he did the night he met Ariel, like he was last night when he lost her, and this time he doesn’t fight it, lets himself sink down and down and down, lets the darkness and the silence spill over him, swallow him up. He deserves it, after all. It’s how he was always meant to go.
He doesn’t know how long he lies there and cries. By the time the tears dry up he feels weak and hollow and utterly spent. His mum’s still there, sitting on the bed beside him, stroking over his back and through his hair. He hasn’t had an episode like that in a long while. He hasn’t had one where his mother could see it in far longer.
“Sorry, Mum,” he manages to croak. He doesn’t have the energy to really be embarrassed.
His mother shakes her head, shushing him as she eases the sweaty curls back from his forehead. “I’m sorry it took me so long to listen to you.”
“Wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“Yes, it would have, to me.”
Eric shrugs, listless. He feels too empty to dwell on would-haves, too exhausted to drag himself back there.
“I wish I could tell you the pain isn’t forever,” she murmurs. “But I promise it won’t always hurt like this.”
He wonders if she’s thinking of his father again, of his brothers and sisters she lost before Eric finally had come to her. Part of him doesn’t want this pain to end, doesn’t want to ever not feel this way about Ariel. Part of him wants to suffer for her forever.
But she wouldn’t want that. So he can’t.
He dries his eyes on his sleeve, wipes his cheeks clean of tears. He tells his mother he wants to be left alone. Has to tell her three times. She backs out of his room, begrudging, leaves him with a last stroke of her palm over his hair. He lets her. There’s a piece of him that aches to be cared for. But she’d been wrong, earlier: he’s not a child anymore. It’s not his mother’s hands he wants, not her heart he needs beside his own. Gone for good. Alone once more. He resigns himself to it and closes his eyes.