#yes im starting another fic even tho i have like 12 im working on rn

[rewritingthestars]

Ive been watching a lot of horror movies about mermaids and got inspired to write mermaid neil aus so have the first part of the chapter

Warnings- graphic descriptions of violence and murder

Humanity doesn’t belong in the ocean. That’s what Neil’s parents taught him.

In the depths of the abyss only the ruthless survive. The darkness is endless and the predators are vast. You kill and you eat and you hide and keep moving forward until something more dangerous gets the better of you. Humanity has no place in a sea of monsters, no place in primal savagery.

Neil grows up and watches his parents lure and drown and skin humans alive. His mother teaches him how to sing and change his features to theirs, and his father teaches him how to rip out the thorax to get to the heart.

You are an animal first, and a person second. His father once told him, Never forget that you are separate from them.

Neil knows what a mask feels like, knows his face and hands and voice are only a masquerade, only a ploy, only a cover of what lies underneath. He is nothing more than blood thirst and instincts and clever adaptations to trick creatures above to their death. Mermaids aren’t people, they’re animals, cold and emotionless and cruel. They care only for prey, for food, for shelter, for survival. They are not humans, just the monsters that were made in their image.

And yet.

His mother taught him their language through the songs. Their words are strange and the sounds are too loud when spoken but they have a meaning to them that he can’t seem to get across in the chirps and hums of his native tongue. When he was younger his mother would sometimes let him swim just beyond the shoreline, and he’d watch as they danced and laughed and sang around bright flames the color of the sun. When he first lures a sailor to his fate, the expression on his face churns Neil’s stomach and his last breath breaks something deep inside.

Just before 12 moons of 12 moons pass his father tears the chords from his mother’s throat and eats her heart still beating. Neil wonders if all monsters feel the gut retching agony of losing a mother or if there’s something wrong with him.

Older but not much wiser, Neil sings and lures and murders for his clan, for his father, for his own survival, and pretends the hollow feeling inside of him is from an empty stomach and not of the misery that comes with being a killer.

-----

If Andrew had a choice whatsoever in his life, being a fisherman would not be his first. Or his second. Or his third. Possibly his fifth, right after falling off the side of a building.

But Andrew is fairly use to not getting the things he chooses, if he is given choices at all.

“Minyard!�� Wymack yells, for the eighth time today, and Andrew makes a point to look like he’s been doing absolutely nothing, which isn’t too hard considering he is.

“Which one?” Andrew says, pointlessly. It’s never the other one, but it always succeeds in making Wymack’s face all the more redder.

“Don’t fuck with me you damn midget, get your ass over to the other deckhands and help them get the fish out of the net!” He shouts out, rain pulling his hair sideways and fish scales covering his life jacket.

Andrew hasn’t slept for more than four hours in the last twenty four hours and has been overhauling net after net for the last ten hours and the last thing he wants to do is look at another damn fish, which is rather hard considering the piles and piles of twitching fish that litter the deck’s boards. The rain has only gotten worse since the morning, pounding down with the viciousness of bears, wind blowing it in a way that nearly throws Andrew overboard, waves smashing into the boat to the point that it’s at a constant forty five degree tilt each time it rocks back.

If it wasn’t raining to the point of danger and if Andrew wasn’t in a place of potentially getting hit in the face with a jellyfish he’d look to the sky with all the disdain and annoyance he could muster. As it is he looks to the floorboards for pity and finds only a flopping fish on top of its brethren.

“Fuck.” Andrew says, but it’s lost in the rain and Kevin’s loud panicked shouts of district lines.

-----

Neil isn’t suppose to be this close to the surface. His father would punish him for this, his mother would kill him for this, but the skies are clear for the first time in months and the stars and galaxies so far away are finally clear up above. Neil likes to look at them, stare at them, tremble in the wake of knowing that the ocean isn’t the only place filled with darkness.

Neil has no excuse for being this close to a boat, this close to sailors. If Neil was more like his father he’d get the rest of his clan and sink the ship to the bottoms of the sea. If neil was more like his mother he’d go back to the cove his father has staked out and never speak of what he saw again. But Neil is neither his father nor his mother and instead treads in the shadows of the waters and peers up in hopes of a glimpse at the life above.

Sailors don’t come this far out anymore. It’s been moons since the last ship came through, a storm following its wake and tipping the boat over, dooming the survivors to a fate worse than drowning or hypothermia. Neil had silently wished that none would come after but Neil should know better by now that wishes are meaningless.

“What are you waiting for Junior?” He jolts, the sounds of her voice ricketing up his spine and constricting his throat. Lola swims next to him and grins, all of her sharp razor teeth out, her eyes covered by her second lid. “Well? Did you really think you could take an entire ship for yourself? Or were you thinking of some else all together, hm?” She laughs then, irritatedly high pitched squeals that pierced his ears and make him wince.

“I was just assessing the situation. It’s not usual to get ships this far out.” Neil says, hoping to play off the deep rooted fear she causes him.

Lola opens her black lids to roll her eyes, something she learned from her last victim. “Gods you’re just like your mother, if you won’t start it I will.” With that she breaks the surface and screams.

“Help! Help me please! Help!” She cries, splashing around like she’s struggling. “Down here, please hurry!”

It takes a few minutes of her act before someone above notices and shouts, a series of lights and people scrambling up above, and Neil feels his heart plummet as one of them unfastens a liferaft and makes to lower it into the water. Three humans are on it as they get closer. It’s not a lot but it’ll be enough. Lola must have alerted the rest of the clan because Neil can see the others start to surround the main ship.

Lola goes under with a shout before the humans can reach her and she gives Neil a wide grin, her skin darkening gray and her mouth widening. “You’re up Junior.” She says, grabbing his arm harshly to move him upward.

Neil lets himself break the surface, startling the men looking over their life raft for Lola.

“Wha-” One of them starts to say but Neil doesn’t waste time before shushing him, moving to the edge of the raft with the smile his mother taught him to wear.

“You’re far from home aren’t you? How lonely you must be.” Neil says softly, reciting the words he’s said thousands of times before. “Would you like to spend the night with me?”

The humans are already under the spell of his voice, their eyes glazed over, leaning towards him subconsciously. Neil traces the arm of the man closest to him, feeling the odd hair of it and the way it makes the human shiver. Neil looks up from under his eyelashes. “Do you want to kiss me?” The man nods mouth gaped and moving closer to his. Neil pulls back as he goes forward until the man’s face is underwater and Neil unhinges his jaw and bites his neck open. There’s a muted gurgling sound as the man struggles against him and shouts above from his comrades but Neil can already hear Romero and his father pull the others down. Neil feels for the bone that connects the neck and snaps it, pushin the slightly twitching body downwards towards Lola who snatches it and immediately digs her teeth into the body’s chest.

Neil sinks down and his father, with a mouthful of gore gives him a look that speaks danger if he does not comply. Above the water, lights and panicked yells indicate the rest of the humans looking for their crewmates and Neil steels his face and goes above the surface once more, letting out a shaky breath before opening his mouth and sings.

-----

It does not take long, after that, for the rest of the crew to go down screaming.

-----