Here it is. Not quite as many fishy adventures and definitely not as Finding Nemo-y but it's still merpeople being salty and wet. c: This is also my first RPF ever so. Yay.
--
the smile of water, 1/9
In the deep-water safety of the mermaid's nursery, coddled by soft white sand and the warm arms of mother fish-women, two eggs trembled ceaselessly.
There were a good number of eggs that year, crammed uncomfortably full of guppies ready to be hatched and named and given gifts and decorated with seaweed and pearls and shiny trinkets in the way of the merpeople, as a way to greet them into life.
But only two of them never stopped their unborn guppy flopping. One, his iridescent home the same rich blue that his tail would eventually become, the other an equal red, constantly bumped and crashed together if they were not being held apart.
The others, shades of gold and flax-brown and silver and pink and purple, were a world apart, a world calmer than their restless birthmates.
The women laughed at this and said, in all their deep-water
( ... )
If Michael had ever been offered a choice, had ever seen a way out, he would never have become friends with Ryan Lochte.
But as it was, from the moment they cracked out of their jelly eggs and started to flip and jerk around in the awkward strokes of newborn guppies, they were inseparable.
The way his mother told it, he and Ryan had been close even before they were born. It wasn't surprising; he didn't doubt it with the way mermaids liked to raise the school's guppies together. He just wondered, why him. And why Ryan.
Ryan was the kind of fish-boy who liked to pull others' hair and tease them about their teeth and ears and steal their valuables if they were particularly shiny. He started joking even before he had all his devastatingly sharp teeth, waving his arms and hamming it up for whoever would spare a glance, while Michael in the next maid's arms lay there with a sour look on his face.
By the time they were allowed to swim on their own in the safety of the coral reef nearest to the nursery, Ryan was
( ... )
Ryan grew up to become something of a heartthrob, well-known and well-liked in the fish-people's kingdom. His beauty was obvious from an early age, but as he grew into his tail and his fins and his face, he became something to be coveted. His scales were a rare shade of scarlet, a slap of a color which always announced his presence loudly wherever he went. Not that he seemed to particularly care about being inconspicuous. Ever.
Michael, on the other hand, just. Was. His tail was a fairly plain blue, darker splotches falling down each side of him like spilled paint. The fins on his forearms and back were well-maintained but not extraordinarily elegant like Nathan's or plain large, which was a beauty in itself, like Matt's. He kept his hair free of pearls or bits of metal and liked it short, even though it let huge ears flap free and left him a target for mostly friendly ridicule.
He didn't mind, though, beauty was never stuck in his thoughts, like it was in the rest of his school's.
Ryan had, among his nasty habits, one of mimicking others. When he wasn't being a nuisance to them, at least. That meant he raced whenever Michael did, he conditioned himself to the sport, and eventually built the same stocky muscles, the kind that cut his skin into planes and rippled with power even when he was at rest.
But - Ryan was never quite as fast. He rarely reached the rocks used as distance markers at the same time as Michael. When their friends cheered and screamed for the victor, the name they shouted in unison was never 'Ryan'.
Until, one day, it was.
That morning had been a plain bad one for Michael. He hadn't slept well and his breakfast was a crab with barely any meat to it and his hair was getting too long but he didn't want to put forth the effort to go get it cut.
And then Ryan, with his lopsided smile and long red tail and his flippant, flagrant not-caring, beat him. Beat him. Beat him. At the one thing Michael had going for him, at the one thing
( ... )
Because even though Ryan was a thorn in his fins, he was always there, and always had been. He was there to say "duuuude" when Michael, poking through a freshly sunken ship, had found two humans floating limply in the belly of their flimsy fallen vessel. He was there to curiously examine their two separate tails with odd, useless fins at the end, and he was there to say "man, we gotta go" just before Michael felt the cold, terrible presence of a Great White lurking nearby.
He was the first constant (other than his flesh-and-blood family, his mother and sisters) in Michael's life. He was family; he was as much a part of him as the blood in his veins and the scales on his tail. He was his best friend.
Ryan red-tailed Lochte could beat Michael in races and chatter on and on about the most banal things for hours and rip human artifacts from his hands on the pretense of looking but really just to piss him off, but he could never unendear himself to the one who had always loved him.
There were times when he came awfully close, though.
On one of those occasions, Michael was thinking calm, easy thoughts and enjoying his alone time basking in the few rays of sun that filtered down to the bottom when Ryan kicked up a gust of sand in his face.
"Dude," he said, voice quivering with excitement. It was the tone he always used before he whipped up a giant shitstorm that Michael would have to make right. "Get up, grumpy gills, you gotta come check this out with me!"
"What is 'this' and what would make you think I want to 'check it out' with you?" Michael asked deadpan, not even cracking an eye open. Maybe if he refused to move long enough, Ryan would go find Cullen or Conor or Missy and leave him in blessed peaceful solitude for just one day out of his long-suffering life.
"I can't tell you anything except it's fucking awesome, now come on before I have to drag your sorry tail fin all the way there. You know I will."
"I'd rather not."
Ryan was shaking his head, Michael knew without having to see
( ... )
What was terribly off-putting about him and Ryan, Michael was thinking one day, was that-
Was that there was a him and Ryan at all.
Because lack of choice in the matter aside, Ryan was his total opposite. Michael had laser focus. He didn't spend hours weaving pearls into his hair or obsess over the shininess of each individual butt scale. He wanted to be the greatest swimmer in the ocean and Ryan messed him up and he didn't care and that was scary. But it wasn't new.
Ryan blew bubbles at pretty young mermaids and played with the fin on his left forearm when he was nervous and had an irresistibly smooth, perfect ripple up and down his body when he was intent on swimming.
When they realized they had been fumbling along the line of friends and more-than-friends for years, Ryan had just leaned in and kissed him like he meant it, solid and warm, tail wrapping around Michael's like it was custom-made just for him.
Maybe it was, and in their clueless eggy wisdom, as unborn guppy babies Michael and Ryan had known
( ... )
The thing was, that whatever Ryan thought was 'fucking awesome' was what among the general population of fish-people was considered a Very Bad Thing.
Scuba divers.
They had oily black seal skins and dull metal tanks strapped to their backs and masks on their faces, and the two tails. These people had fins, though, but in bright unnatural neon yellow and green and pink. When Michael caught sight of them, he yanked Ryan back behind a rock lightning-quick and cautiously peered out at the humans only after taking a moment to recover from his momentary heart attack.
"Did you eat a bad eel this morning, dumbass? It's people."
Despite the forced venom in Michael's tone, Ryan had the shit-eating grin on his face that always dropped a rock into Michael's stomach, because it meant he had some sort of stupid plan to make trouble and generally cause massive headaches for everyone who wasn't him.
"Yeah, but man, you know how they usually have those weird flash-boxes? These don't. I watched them for, like, twenty
( ... )
The fact that Ryan didn't make a move to bolt out of Michael's grasp immediately was alarming from the start. The hairs on Michael's arms stood up and he felt a nasty something wake up in his gut- the same cold nasty something that alerted him to the presence of sharks and whales and boats with their silent, deadly nets.
The nasty something was never wrong. Evolution had given merpeople good working gills and streamlined fins and an extraordinary sixth sense for trouble.
It was the exact same sense that Ryan goddamn Lochte liked to ignore, to raise and then dash for the adrenaline, for the thrill of it. By the time Michael realized Ryan was waiting for the humans to float over towards them of their own volition, which they were doing quickly, Ryan spotted it and was off like a minnow scared by a barracuda towards open water, cackling all the way.
"Oh, fuck you, fuck you!" Michael bit out as he flashed away from the rock just as fast, quickly overtaking and tackling Ryan. They erupted in an impromptu
( ... )
So Ryan red-tailed Lochte was beautiful and stupid and absolutely, positively irresistible. So he liked to bother humans and try to squeeze himself in spaces that were obviously too tiny for his double-wide shoulders and stare at his reflection in the shiny silver objects Michael sometimes recovered. So he could beat Michael in the occasional race.
It didn't matter. He was always in motion, just like Michael. They both liked to bang on clams to bother them and catch rides on migrating turtles and make trouble for their sisters. They bothered each other equally and defended the other when inevitable scrapes happened with the other merpeople.
They weren't alike in personality, really, but that was what made it sorta perfect. The knocking, the trembling against one another that had started in their egg lives and never stopped, that was what they both needed. To be bought down to reality, to be sparked to excitement, to be challenged, to be pushed, to be raced, to be loved.
Sorry I didn't comment earlier, I didn't know you'd finished!!
So Ryan red-tailed Lochte was beautiful and stupid and absolutely, positively irresistible.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
When Michael was with Ryan it was like swimming, it was like breathing and combing through the sun-warmed sandy bottom for lost trinkets. It was natural. It was his constant. It just was. It never hadn't been, and it never wouldn't be.
YES YES YES! YES FOREVER
ohmygosh, my heart basically skipped a beat, I was like :DDDDDDD
To express how much awesome all of this is, I would have to quote everything. All the little nuisances their relationship were just so perfect. Love how you built all those mermaid mannerisms so subtly into the dialogue and just into the way you described settings and other mermaids (looking at you Matt and Nathan) and also the amazingness of Ryan winning, that moment was flawless.
--
the smile of water, 1/9
In the deep-water safety of the mermaid's nursery, coddled by soft white sand and the warm arms of mother fish-women, two eggs trembled ceaselessly.
There were a good number of eggs that year, crammed uncomfortably full of guppies ready to be hatched and named and given gifts and decorated with seaweed and pearls and shiny trinkets in the way of the merpeople, as a way to greet them into life.
But only two of them never stopped their unborn guppy flopping. One, his iridescent home the same rich blue that his tail would eventually become, the other an equal red, constantly bumped and crashed together if they were not being held apart.
The others, shades of gold and flax-brown and silver and pink and purple, were a world apart, a world calmer than their restless birthmates.
The women laughed at this and said, in all their deep-water ( ... )
Reply
If Michael had ever been offered a choice, had ever seen a way out, he would never have become friends with Ryan Lochte.
But as it was, from the moment they cracked out of their jelly eggs and started to flip and jerk around in the awkward strokes of newborn guppies, they were inseparable.
The way his mother told it, he and Ryan had been close even before they were born. It wasn't surprising; he didn't doubt it with the way mermaids liked to raise the school's guppies together. He just wondered, why him. And why Ryan.
Ryan was the kind of fish-boy who liked to pull others' hair and tease them about their teeth and ears and steal their valuables if they were particularly shiny. He started joking even before he had all his devastatingly sharp teeth, waving his arms and hamming it up for whoever would spare a glance, while Michael in the next maid's arms lay there with a sour look on his face.
By the time they were allowed to swim on their own in the safety of the coral reef nearest to the nursery, Ryan was ( ... )
Reply
Ryan grew up to become something of a heartthrob, well-known and well-liked in the fish-people's kingdom. His beauty was obvious from an early age, but as he grew into his tail and his fins and his face, he became something to be coveted. His scales were a rare shade of scarlet, a slap of a color which always announced his presence loudly wherever he went. Not that he seemed to particularly care about being inconspicuous. Ever.
Michael, on the other hand, just. Was. His tail was a fairly plain blue, darker splotches falling down each side of him like spilled paint. The fins on his forearms and back were well-maintained but not extraordinarily elegant like Nathan's or plain large, which was a beauty in itself, like Matt's. He kept his hair free of pearls or bits of metal and liked it short, even though it let huge ears flap free and left him a target for mostly friendly ridicule.
He didn't mind, though, beauty was never stuck in his thoughts, like it was in the rest of his school's.
What Michael did have ( ... )
Reply
Until, flash-bang suddenly, he did.
Ryan had, among his nasty habits, one of mimicking others. When he wasn't being a nuisance to them, at least. That meant he raced whenever Michael did, he conditioned himself to the sport, and eventually built the same stocky muscles, the kind that cut his skin into planes and rippled with power even when he was at rest.
But - Ryan was never quite as fast. He rarely reached the rocks used as distance markers at the same time as Michael. When their friends cheered and screamed for the victor, the name they shouted in unison was never 'Ryan'.
Until, one day, it was.
That morning had been a plain bad one for Michael. He hadn't slept well and his breakfast was a crab with barely any meat to it and his hair was getting too long but he didn't want to put forth the effort to go get it cut.
And then Ryan, with his lopsided smile and long red tail and his flippant, flagrant not-caring, beat him. Beat him. Beat him. At the one thing Michael had going for him, at the one thing ( ... )
Reply
Because even though Ryan was a thorn in his fins, he was always there, and always had been. He was there to say "duuuude" when Michael, poking through a freshly sunken ship, had found two humans floating limply in the belly of their flimsy fallen vessel. He was there to curiously examine their two separate tails with odd, useless fins at the end, and he was there to say "man, we gotta go" just before Michael felt the cold, terrible presence of a Great White lurking nearby.
He was the first constant (other than his flesh-and-blood family, his mother and sisters) in Michael's life. He was family; he was as much a part of him as the blood in his veins and the scales on his tail. He was his best friend.
Ryan red-tailed Lochte could beat Michael in races and chatter on and on about the most banal things for hours and rip human artifacts from his hands on the pretense of looking but really just to piss him off, but he could never unendear himself to the one who had always loved him.
Reply
There were times when he came awfully close, though.
On one of those occasions, Michael was thinking calm, easy thoughts and enjoying his alone time basking in the few rays of sun that filtered down to the bottom when Ryan kicked up a gust of sand in his face.
"Dude," he said, voice quivering with excitement. It was the tone he always used before he whipped up a giant shitstorm that Michael would have to make right. "Get up, grumpy gills, you gotta come check this out with me!"
"What is 'this' and what would make you think I want to 'check it out' with you?" Michael asked deadpan, not even cracking an eye open. Maybe if he refused to move long enough, Ryan would go find Cullen or Conor or Missy and leave him in blessed peaceful solitude for just one day out of his long-suffering life.
"I can't tell you anything except it's fucking awesome, now come on before I have to drag your sorry tail fin all the way there. You know I will."
"I'd rather not."
Ryan was shaking his head, Michael knew without having to see ( ... )
Reply
What was terribly off-putting about him and Ryan, Michael was thinking one day, was that-
Was that there was a him and Ryan at all.
Because lack of choice in the matter aside, Ryan was his total opposite. Michael had laser focus. He didn't spend hours weaving pearls into his hair or obsess over the shininess of each individual butt scale. He wanted to be the greatest swimmer in the ocean and Ryan messed him up and he didn't care and that was scary. But it wasn't new.
Ryan blew bubbles at pretty young mermaids and played with the fin on his left forearm when he was nervous and had an irresistibly smooth, perfect ripple up and down his body when he was intent on swimming.
When they realized they had been fumbling along the line of friends and more-than-friends for years, Ryan had just leaned in and kissed him like he meant it, solid and warm, tail wrapping around Michael's like it was custom-made just for him.
Maybe it was, and in their clueless eggy wisdom, as unborn guppy babies Michael and Ryan had known ( ... )
Reply
The thing was, that whatever Ryan thought was 'fucking awesome' was what among the general population of fish-people was considered a Very Bad Thing.
Scuba divers.
They had oily black seal skins and dull metal tanks strapped to their backs and masks on their faces, and the two tails. These people had fins, though, but in bright unnatural neon yellow and green and pink. When Michael caught sight of them, he yanked Ryan back behind a rock lightning-quick and cautiously peered out at the humans only after taking a moment to recover from his momentary heart attack.
"Did you eat a bad eel this morning, dumbass? It's people."
Despite the forced venom in Michael's tone, Ryan had the shit-eating grin on his face that always dropped a rock into Michael's stomach, because it meant he had some sort of stupid plan to make trouble and generally cause massive headaches for everyone who wasn't him.
"Yeah, but man, you know how they usually have those weird flash-boxes? These don't. I watched them for, like, twenty ( ... )
Reply
The fact that Ryan didn't make a move to bolt out of Michael's grasp immediately was alarming from the start. The hairs on Michael's arms stood up and he felt a nasty something wake up in his gut- the same cold nasty something that alerted him to the presence of sharks and whales and boats with their silent, deadly nets.
The nasty something was never wrong. Evolution had given merpeople good working gills and streamlined fins and an extraordinary sixth sense for trouble.
It was the exact same sense that Ryan goddamn Lochte liked to ignore, to raise and then dash for the adrenaline, for the thrill of it. By the time Michael realized Ryan was waiting for the humans to float over towards them of their own volition, which they were doing quickly, Ryan spotted it and was off like a minnow scared by a barracuda towards open water, cackling all the way.
"Oh, fuck you, fuck you!" Michael bit out as he flashed away from the rock just as fast, quickly overtaking and tackling Ryan. They erupted in an impromptu ( ... )
Reply
So Ryan red-tailed Lochte was beautiful and stupid and absolutely, positively irresistible. So he liked to bother humans and try to squeeze himself in spaces that were obviously too tiny for his double-wide shoulders and stare at his reflection in the shiny silver objects Michael sometimes recovered. So he could beat Michael in the occasional race.
It didn't matter. He was always in motion, just like Michael. They both liked to bang on clams to bother them and catch rides on migrating turtles and make trouble for their sisters. They bothered each other equally and defended the other when inevitable scrapes happened with the other merpeople.
They weren't alike in personality, really, but that was what made it sorta perfect. The knocking, the trembling against one another that had started in their egg lives and never stopped, that was what they both needed. To be bought down to reality, to be sparked to excitement, to be challenged, to be pushed, to be raced, to be loved.
When Michael was with Ryan it was ( ... )
Reply
Reply
So Ryan red-tailed Lochte was beautiful and stupid and absolutely, positively irresistible.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
When Michael was with Ryan it was like swimming, it was like breathing and combing through the sun-warmed sandy bottom for lost trinkets. It was natural. It was his constant. It just was. It never hadn't been, and it never wouldn't be.
YES YES YES! YES FOREVER
ohmygosh, my heart basically skipped a beat, I was like :DDDDDDD
ILU 4EVR basically lol
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