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Izzy hated this place already. As far as deserted tiny islands went, it wasn’t the worst he’d ever seen, true. There was fresh water, and where there was fresh water there was probably food. All Izzy had left of what he’d been booted off the Revenge with was rum. Thank God for rum.
He sat on the beach, one hand on the pommel of his sword and the other around the neck of a bottle. Fucking Bonnet. Izzy lost one duel, on a technicality, and was banned from the ship. By the man to whom he’d devoted his entire adult life, no less.
Fine. Catch him ever going back. He’d thought of heading to the Republic and seeing what Jackie could do about the whole thing, but ran out of steam (and food) before he got there.
Getting kicked off a ship in the Caribbean wasn’t the worst thing. You were never far from land, even if the land was bullshit, and the weather usually wasn’t too bad, if it was the right time of year. Currently it was, so Izzy planned to make a lean-to tomorrow, and spend tonight drowning his sorrows on the beach.
The water was a perfect blue, and the sand an unbroken line of white. The temperature was perfect, if you weren’t wearing head-to-toe black leather.
Izzy thought again of how much he fucking hated it here as he drank and drank until he passed out.
***
The next morning, Izzy awoke to find a dead fish near his head. Not the world’s most pleasant sight. It hadn’t yet gone off, though, and it was a nice fish, so he washed it off in the ocean and made to start a fire. He had no trouble doing so. He was no slouch, no ponce like Bonnet who’d die here as soon as he landed.
The fish, once cooked, was pretty good. That was the thing about the ocean, Izzy thought. It took, more often than not, but it could also provide.
He spent the rest of the morning constructing his lean-to, which was ready for him when he decided to nap away the afternoon heat. He had not yet taken off any of his clothes, but that time was probably coming. Who was around to see?
***
The next day was hot, and Izzy was down to his drawers before noon. Another fish had greeted him in the morning and he’d been sorely tempted to eat it raw, consequences be damned, rather than starting a fire.
There wasn’t much to do while marooned, unfortunately. Izzy needed to stay occupied, and without pressing tasks he’d invent some. He wove a mat out of palm leaves to sleep on, gathered fruit and organized it by color and size, and tried fishing to no avail.
He slept well on his mat in his lean-to, and woke up to yet another fish.
Days passed that way, Izzy making up things to do and always finding a fish on a rock by the shore near his lean-to in the morning. It was fucking creepy, is what it was. Someone else was clearly here. He explored the island thoroughly, and didn’t find any other habitation or signs of life. Just…fish.
Izzy had a hunch, and for that reason he stayed hidden by the rock where the fish was usually deposited all day and all night. There was someone else here, and he was going to find them. Toward dawn, something moved in the water, and suddenly there was a man emerging halfway from the water with a fish in his hands. The man had — he had — gills?
“What the fuck,” Izzy said, and the man startled.
“Jeez mate,” he said, “I had no idea you were here. Make some noise next time.”
“Have you been leaving me the fish?” Izzy asked, because surely that was what was important in this moment.
“Yeah,” the man said. “You’re welcome.”
“What the fuck are you?” Izzy asked. The man, from what he could see of him, looked mostly human, but for the gills, and he had a suspicion — but equally the suspicion that he’d finally gone mad.
The man hefted himself up onto the rock. Sure enough, his lower body was a fish’s.
“I’m a merman,” he said. “Obviously.”
“Right,” Izzy said. All the times he’d told Ed to shut up about mermaids had, naturally, led to the revelation that Ed was entirely right. Mermaids were real, and Izzy had one helping keep him alive.
“What’s your name?” the merman asked. “Mine’s —” and then he made a string of sounds beyond Izzy’s ability to comprehend or pronounce.
“Izzy. But I’m not going to be able to say yours.”
“That’s fine,” the merman said, “you can call me Frenchie.”
How the fuck a merman got a name like Frenchie, even as a nickname, was a complete mystery to Izzy, but he went with it. Why not, at this point?
“Nice to meet you, Frenchie. Why have you been helping me out?”
“I’m a nice person,” Frenchie said. “And I have a proposition for you.”
“What’s that?” Izzy asked. As far as he knew, mermaids drowned you, or had sex with you and then drowned you. Fuck he hoped it might be the latter. He thought he remembered mermaids taking the form of the type of person you desired most, and Frenchie had certainly done that down to the smallest details, apart from his fish half.
“I’ve got kids,” Frenchie said, which was a weird way to start a proposition. “They need to learn about humans.”
“So, what, they drown me?”
“Not ideally, no,” Frenchie said. “I just want them to know about humans. And they can practice drowning you but I wouldn’t let them do it for real.”
“What do I get?” Izzy asked, ever the pirate.
“I’ll feed you,” Frenchie said, “and you’d get company.”
Izzy wondered what type of company he would get, specifically, were he to accept this proposition. God damn but Frenchie was gorgeous.
“I’ll give you a trial run,” Izzy said. “I’ll do it for three days. If I don’t like it, I’ll leave.”
Frenchie shrugged.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? Three days it is.”
He extended a hand for Izzy to shake. Taking it, Izzy noticed it wasn’t cold and slick as he had expected, but warm and soft. Frenchie’s hands, anyway, were about as human as hands could get.
“So, what, do I meet the kids now, or —”
“Aria! Mizzy!” Frenchie yelled, in English for Izzy’s benefit, presumably, and two little girls popped out of the water. Their hair was curly like their father’s, and their coloration was similar. They were small, maybe about five, Izzy thought. They peered at him with big, dark eyes.
Izzy waved, and the girls kept staring.
“They’re not usually this shy,” Frenchie said. “They’ve never met a human before, though.”
Izzy considered that this was his life, somehow. Meeting mermaid children and failing to make a good impression was a sharp fall from being Blackbeard’s feared first mate, finest swordsman in the Caribbean.
But Izzy did anything with the same perverse determination he did everything.
“Hello,” he said gently to the two children. “How are you doing?”
One pressed her face into her father’s side, but the other looked consideringly at Izzy.
“I’m well,” she said in the strangest voice Izzy had ever heard from a child. “What are you?”
“I’m a human,” Izzy said. “A man.”
“I can tell you’re a man,” she said with considerable scorn. “You’re too small to be a woman.”
Izzy snorted.
“Our women are – really big,” Frenchie clarified. “Aria’s just used to that.”
“Where are your children?” Aria asked. “You’re too old not to have them.”
“I don’t have any,” Izzy said. “Not all of us do.”
“Huh,” Aria said.
“Huh,” Frenchie said. “I didn’t know that. I thought you were like us – though I’ve seen some things. We’ll talk when the girls are asleep, maybe.”
Izzy couldn’t say he looked forward to it.
Aria swam over to him, her movements graceful, and grabbed his wrist. She pulled down hard, seeming disappointed when he didn’t fall into the sea. She pulled at his leg next, and Izzy braced hard so he wouldn’t lose his balance.
“How do I drown people if they won’t get in the water?” she asked.
“Get stronger,” Izzy suggested. “You can’t pull me down.”
“Let her try,” Frenchie wheedled. “Pretend to be weaker. They’re never going to learn if they don’t practice.”
“Fine,” Izzy grunted, and pretended to be weaker.
The little mermaid pulled on his arm again and he let her have the victory, and he went under. As he’d been expecting it, it wasn’t the worst sensation. He held his breath. Aria held his head hard under the water and he thrashed about some to make the scenario more realistic. She kept hold, though, which impressed him. He became desperate to breathe, which meant he had only about a minute left under the water before he inhaled it, but Aria’s hands left his head and he came up, gasping.
“Sorry,” Frenchie said, holding Aria. “She got really into it.”
“That was her first time, then?” Izzy asked.
“It was,” Frenchie said. “They have an instinct for it, the girls. I never did.”
Izzy looked him up and down in between shaking water from his hair.
“I can see that,” he said.
Frenchie made a face at him.
“How long will you need to recover before Mizzy tries?”
“Mizzy?” Izzy asked. “Is that a mermaid name?”
Frenchie puffed out his chest a little.
“It’s a human name,” he said. “Mizzenmast. I heard some men shouting it on a boat once.”
Frenchie was so proud that Izzy couldn’t bring himself to tell him what, exactly, those men had been shouting about.
“Lovely name,” he said. “I’ve never heard that nickname for it before.”
Frenchie preened, and Mizzy looked at him with a little interest for the first time.
“How old are you?” she asked, still clinging to Frenchie’s side.
“I’m fifty-seven,” Izzy said as gently as he could.
“That’s old,” she said.
“It is,” he agreed.
Apparently satisfied with this exchange, Mizzy swam out to meet him, taking his hand and pulling hard. Izzy remembered at the last second that he was supposed to make it easy for her and collapsed like a thrown doll. He noted she held his head under with less enthusiasm than her sister, and let him up on her own.
“Good job,” Frenchie said. “Both of you are doing very well.”
Aria and Mizze beamed. They were really very cute, Izzy thought, if you discounted their frighteningly sharp teeth.
“Say thank you to Izzy,” Frenchie instructed.
“Thank you,” the girls said in creepy unison.
“You’re welcome,” Izzy said.
And at that, the girls swam off to parts unknown.
“Do you let them go off by themselves?” he asked.
“They’re fine as long as they stay near the shore,” he said. “No one lives here, and nothing that could hurt them comes here.”
“Pretty choice location, then.”
“I’d say so,” Frenchie said. “I scouted all over until I found it, when I realized I’d have kids to take care of.”
“When was that?”
“When Matauri asked me to mate with her,” Frenchie said, pulling himself up onto a rock. His tail glistened in the sun.
“Huh,” Izzy said, just for something to say. He had no idea how to comment on the family-raising practices of mermaids.
“You’ve really never mated?” Frenchie asked, idly thwapping his tail on the rock where he sat.
“What?” Izzy asked.
“You don’t have children,” Frenchie clarified. “I thought for sure you would. You’re older, and strong, and you look good. Why wouldn’t you have mated a dozen times?”
“The kind of mating I do doesn’t result in children,” Izzy said, deeply amused. “Two men usually can’t make offspring.”
Frenchie looked at him like he was receiving esoteric knowledge.
“Two men can mate?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve seen them roll around naked together on ships, but I didn’t think that was mating .”
“That’s not the most detailed description of it I’ve ever heard, but yes, that’s more or less how it goes,” Izzy said.
Frenchie was silent, assimilating this new information. His tail still beat against the rock.
“Do you want to mate with me, then?” Frenchie asked, and then reddened. “I didn’t mean to ask you to, just, do you want to? Is half-human enough?”
“You know I would,” he said. “The thing where you look like what I most desire doesn’t hurt.”
Frenchie cocked his head.
“The thing where what? This is just how I look, Izzy.” He grinned, showing a disconcerting amount of teeth. “You like the way I look that much?”
Izzy muttered something that sounded a lot like “fuck off.”
“Oh, you’re blushing,” Frenchie said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you blush. Really I’m flattered.”
Beat, beat, beat went his tail.
“If men mate, do they raise children together?” Frenchie asked. “I know with humans you don’t split up the clutch like we do.”
“They can do, I suppose,” Izzy said. “It’s not common.”
“Is that what you thought I wanted from you?” Frenchie asked. “To take you as my mate and the girls’ other father?”
“We call that a stepfather,” Izzy said. “And no, I thought you wanted to kill me.”
Frenchie flipped his tail, sending an arc of water into the air.
“No, I don’t really go in for that. Girls do — women do, I mean, mostly. I never had much of a thing for bloodshed.”
“So all the mermen are like you? Gentle and kind?”
“Not at all,” Frenchie said. “I’m weird. No one ever thought I’d even mate, not being all soft like I am.”
“How did you, then?”
“She likes that I’m nice,” Frenchie said with a shrug. “Go figure.”
Likes , Izzy noticed, not liked .
“Are you still together?”
Frenchie cocked his head.
“Like husband and wife, you mean? We don’t do that, no. I love her and she loves me but we’ve already spent all the time together we’re ever going to. It’s dangerous to stay around a woman too long, she’ll eat you as soon as look at you.”
“Ah,” Izzy said. “Will the girls eat you when they grow up?”
“Not usually,” Frenchie said. “They know who their dad is. My girls, I mean. Matauri’s girls, yeah, probably.”
Izzy digested this. What a strange arrangement. Practical but rather lonely. Frenchie seemed so happy with his safe island and his daughters; happy and kind, even if the kindness came with a deal attached. Izzy didn’t mind pretending to drown. It was far from the worst duty he’d ever performed.
***
There had been nothing that immediately presented itself to him past his third day of the bargain, so Izzy simply stayed doing what he’d agreed to do.
Aria and Mizzenmast were thrilled by his decision. They liked him very much, hanging off his arms whenever he allowed it and dragging him to his fake watery grave multiple times a day. They had infinite questions for him.
“Where are you from?” Mizzy asked one day.
“Far away,” Izzy told her. “A place called England.”
Mizzy considered this.
“Did you swim here?”
“No, he took a boat, obviously,” Aria said.
“I did at that,” Izzy confirmed. “A series of boats.”
“Why can you swim?” Aria asked. “Many sailors can’t, dad said.”
“I grew up by the water,” he said. “It was just safer to know how.”
“Did you ever wish you were a mermaid?” Mizzy asked.
“I can’t say that I did,” Izzy said. “I wished to be strong.”
They considered this.
“Well,” Mizzy said, “we want to be strong too, so we’re the same.”
And then she took him by the shoulder and pulled as hard as she could.
Holding your breath was easy when you had to do it multiple times a day, Izzy found. The girls were getting better at fake-drowning him, and he was becoming a better victim. Frenchie kept them all fed to a point — mermaids only ate meat, so Izzy supplemented with fruit from the island — and the family as a whole kept Izzy entertained. They were a bit like a pirate crew, really, in that they were ridiculous and rarely easy to teach. They also respected him, much like the crew on the Anne had, once upon a time.
One day, Frenchie stretched his arms above his head, sending drips of water down his body. Izzy looked away.
“Mating season,” Frenchie observed.
“Mm,” Izzy said.
“Dangerous for the girls. Men are a little…wild around now, and they won’t hesitate to kill them and eat them to remove competition for their young.”
“What the fuck?”
Frenchie shrugged.
“Just something that happens,” he said. “It’s why we live where we do. Gotta keep them safe.”
The girls themselves were gamboling a few feet away, playing a game Izzy didn’t understand with a fluidity of movement that still shocked him.
Izzy knew what it was like to worry every day about the safety of people in his care. He didn’t know what it was like when those people were your children (though Ivan definitely came close). He wondered whether it kept Frenchie up at night.
He didn’t ask.
Instead, he sat on the rock next to Frenchie. He’d surrendered to the elements and kept his clothes now under a rock on the island, wearing just his drawers most days. Frenchie was fascinated by this, and asked a lot of questions about underwear and human customs surrounding them. He’d also asked to see Izzy’s dick, and offered to show his own in return, but Izzy declined.
“Do you know how to fight?” Izzy asked Frenchie.
“Nah,” Frenchie said. “I mean, look at me.”
“We’re going to have to teach you.”
“Maybe,” Frenchie said. “Or you could teach the girls.”
And so Izzy found himself giving combat training to five-year-olds.
At least they were mythical five-year-olds.
***
“Do you want to meet the girls’ mom?” Frenchie asked one lazy evening.
“Wouldn’t she eat me?”
“Probably not,” Aria said. “Maybe.”
“Promising, guppy,” Izzy said.
“I don’t remember her,” Mizzy contributed. “I think she’s big and scary.”
“Not at all like your dad,” Izzy said.
“No,” Mizzy said. “Dad isn’t scary at all.”
“Did I just hear that I’m not scary?” Frenchie asked. “I’m very scary, I’ll have you know.”
He made his hands into claws and pulled a face. The girls laughed and even Izzy smiled.
“Not as scary as their mother,” Izzy said.
“Oh,” Frenchie said, “I don’t think she’d eat either of us on sight.”
“Great,” Izzy said.
“No, I mean, the eating thing really only happens if you’re around her long enough, like if she gets hungry.”
“What if she’s hungry when we get there?”
“Nah,” Frenchie said. “She knows how to hunt.”
“Please?” Aria and Mizzy said in creepy unison.
“You can go,” Izzy said. “I’ll hold down the fort.”
Three pairs of eyes looked at him blankly.
“I’ll take care of the island, I mean,” he said.
“Nonsense,” Frenchie said. “You’ve got to come with us. I don’t think she’s ever talked to a human, she’ll be so excited.”
Well, Izzy was going to die one day, one way or another.
“Sure,” he finally said. “Yeah, let’s go see her.”
All three mermaids cheered. Frenchie saw no reason why they couldn’t go that very day, and Izzy couldn’t think of a reason either. The girls were beyond excited, chattering and flitting about. It was a great occasion for them. They talked at length about what they imagined their mother was like, and about the siblings they had who lived with her.
Izzy wasn’t sure how he was going to get to the depths of the fucking ocean, but he figured Frenchie would work it out.
Humiliatingly, Frenchie insisted Izzy ride on his back like a child for the swim to Matauri’s territory.
“You’ll tire out,” he said. “No need to swim when I’m right here.”
“It’s fucking stupid.”
“It’s efficient,” Frenchie insisted.
Frenchie swam on his front and Izzy straddled his waist, grateful he was too mortified to sustain an erection. It was a smooth ride, all told, even if the girls splashed him as much as they possibly could. He was too used to being wet by now to be bothered.
They swam out into the deeper part of the ocean. Frenchie stopped and looked around, apparently in some dilemma.
“Girls,” he said, “you should go back. I can’t keep you safe out here.”
It was a testament to Frenchie’s parenting, Izzy thought, that they did so without complaint.
“Stay by the island!” Frenchie shouted after them.
“We know!” Mizzy replied.
“They’ll be all right,” Izzy told Frenchie. “Safe as houses.”
“Do humans say that?”
“Some do,” Izzy said. “My ma always did.”
“Right,” Frenchie said. “Safe as houses.”
“We can always go another time,” Izzy said. “Or never.”
“No, it’s a good idea. I want you to meet her. The girls will be fine, I know the island is safe. That’s why I picked it.”
“All right,” Izzy said, and held on as Frenchie swam ever further into the ocean.
***
Past where islands were in sight on the horizon, Frenchie stopped. Izzy was very conscious of his human frailty.
“She’s right around here,” Frenchie said. Izzy didn’t ask how he knew.
In one fluid motion, Frenchie flipped Izzy into his arms and held him against his chest, back to front, as he treaded water. It was terrifying, but Frenchie’s arms were strong. Izzy tried to relax in his hold.
“Sorry,” Frenchie said before bringing his teeth down on Izzy’s shoulder.
“What the fuck?” Izzy demanded.
As the water sank down into the sea, Izzy realized what Frenchie was trying to accomplish.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said. “She’s going to eat us.”
“Nah,” Frenchie said. “I have you.”
Izzy did not find this comforting.
All at once, something rose from the deep. Izzy fought an instinctive terror and tried to be still in Frenchie’s arms as Matauri emerged like a sea monster. She was a sea monster, Izzy reminded himself. She drowned ships.
She looked it, too. She was big, bigger than he’d imagined, and muscular, and horrifying in the way that only what you could dredge up from the deepest parts of the sea could ever be.
It didn’t make her any less terrifying when she took Frenchie, and therefore also Izzy, into her arms and squeezed. Fuck , Izzy thought, this is how I die.
She made an unholy screeching sound.
“She doesn’t speak English,” Frenchie said. “I’ll translate. She asked if I brought her a present.”
“Oh, good,” Izzy muttered as Frenchie screeched back to her.
“I’ve told her you’re my friend, you should be fine,” Frenchie said.
Matauri screeched again.
Frenchie blushed.
“She likes you for my mate, she says,” he reported. “Thinks you’d keep me and the girls safe.”
“Tell her I do keep you safe,” Izzy said petulantly.
Frenchie screeched, and Matauri...laughed? That was Izzy’s best guess.
“She thinks you’re funny,” Frenchie said. “I think she likes you.”
Izzy looked at Matauri, or at least the upper half he could see. He wasn’t sure the feeling was mutual, but he certainly respected her. He stayed pressed to Frenchie’s chest as he and the mother of his children had an eerie conversation above his head. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be — assuming she wasn’t going to eat him at some point in the near future.
She bent down toward Izzy, and he resigned himself to his death. Instead, a pair of firm, cold lips pressed his forehead.
“Thank you,” he said.
Frenchie didn’t need to translate.
Matauri smiled, showing more teeth than Izzy knew what to do with, before diving back down to her children and her home.
“That went well!” Frenchie said. “I’m glad you met her.”
“Mm,” Izzy said.
“I know she’s a lot,” Frenchie said, “but she’s important to me. Mother of my children, you know. Good judge of character, too.”
Izzy noted Frenchie hadn’t stopped blushing.
“Glad to know I’m approved to be the girls’ step-mother,” Izzy said.
“No one said that,” Frenchie said. “At worst, she thinks you’d be a good step-father.”
Izzy cracked a smile Frenchie couldn’t see.
“Right, well,” Izzy said. “Let’s get back to the kids.”
“Hang on,” Frenchie said, which was all the warning Izzy got before Frenchie flipped again and somehow set Izzy astride his back at the waist.
The swim back was quiet. Izzy didn’t have anything to say. What had that been about? Why did Frenchie want Izzy to meet Matauri so badly? There was no reason to swim all the way out here and cut into Izzy to do it, was there? Unless…?
The girls didn’t come to meet them, which Izzy had expected. Well, good. They were doing what Frenchie had told them to do and hiding. But they didn’t emerge when Izzy yelled a hello, or when Frenchie demanded they stop fooling around.
“Fuck,” Frenchie said. “Oh, fuck.”
He dropped Izzy at the shore and took off searching for his daughters. For his part, Izzy ran around the island, desperately seeking traces of the girls. There were none, but there had been a ship that put in, that much was very obvious. Izzy’s heart sank.
“I can’t find them,” Frenchie said, popping up in the sea right beside the island.
“No more can I,” Izzy said, “but there’s been a ship here.”
“Fuck,” Frenchie said. “Maybe they didn’t get eaten, then, but if a human took them —”
“If a human took them, we can get them back,” Izzy said confidently. He was scared of [name], sure, but there wasn’t a fucking human being on this earth short of Blackbeard himself that he feared. He could find the girls and he could get them back. He knew he could.
Frenchie was hyperventilating, and his gills were fluttering in a way that was concerning.
“Here,” Izzy said, “stop that.”
He splashed water on Frenchie’s gills and hoped for the best.
“Thanks,” Frenchie said. “I’m fucked. God, I can’t believe I left them here.”
“You thought it was safe,” Izzy said in his most soothing tones. “Someone must have been waiting for us to leave to get at them.”
“You think so?” Frenchie asked. “Then it’s someone who wants them for a reason.”
“Likely so,” Izzy said. “Look, I’m going to go get Matauri and we’ll handle this, all right? You just — you stay here.”
Frenchie’s eyes were full of gratitude, and also tears.
“You’ll get me if you need me?” he asked.
“Of course,” Izzy said. “Right now I need you to rest. The girls need you to rest. Can you?”
Frenchie nodded, breathing more slowly now.
“Yes, I can do that,” he said. “I’ll stay here in case they break free and come back.”
Izzy hardly thought that likely.
“You do that,” Izzy said. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
Frenchie grabbed Izzy’s hand and kissed it.
“Izzy…” he started.
“No time now,” Izzy said. “Save it for when me and the girls are back.”
Even though he felt like an idiot doing it in front of Frenchie, he got in the water and started swimming. He remembered well enough where Matauri lived, and Frenchie wasn’t the only one who could bite hard enough to draw blood.
***
As Izzy bit some flesh away from his fingertip, he realized he had no real way to communicate with Matauri. He’d have to try his best, that’s all.
She rose from the deep looking confused — could she smell that the blood was Izzy’s? Did she wonder why he was back so soon?
Izzy began in the only language he knew.
“Someone took the girls,” he said. “Aria and Mizzenmast. Mizzy. They’re gone, a ship’s been to the island and they’re gone.”
She was watching him, anyway.
“I don’t know where they are,” he said. “I can’t find them, I can’t track them, I don’t know what to do.”
At that she grabbed him and swam off in what seemed like a thoroughly random direction. A few minutes passed and there was a ship on the horizon.
“Oh fuck,” he marveled. “You can track them.”
She nodded, though what that signified he couldn’t say, and he treaded water, making plans.
***
Izzy got on the ship soaking wet and in his smalls. At least he had no dignity and no expectations of life left, and therefore was unperturbed. He punched the nearest man and relieved him of his sword.
“Excuse me?” came a posh voice.
“You have my girls,” Izzy said flatly.
“Your girls?” the man said, delighted. “Are you a merman? I didn’t know you could get legs!”
Izzy went at him with the sword before he had a chance to draw. Immediately the crew around him stepped back — bad look for a captain. Izzy had him at the point of his borrowed blade, and the man was in a panic. There was no way he was going to draw his sword now.
“You can have them,” the man sniveled. “Fine, they’re yours.”
The crew was eerily still as Izzy looked around the deck. There — no doubt gasping for air as they’d been left to dry out — were the girls, tied together at their wrists and tails.
“I need a knife,” Izzy said to himself, and a man pressed one into his hand, to his surprise.
“It’s bad news what Banes is doing,” the man who’d given him a knife said. “Messing with magic.”
“It is,” Izzy said shortly as he sawed through the ropes holding the girls. “I’d get off this boat if I were you.”
The man and most of the rest of the crew hastened to do so.
Izzy chucked the girls over the side, as far out to sea as he could get them, and dove in after them. Their mother was waiting to check them over, speaking in a language Izzy didn’t know but a tone he did, one of worry and reproach.
“She says we’re not allowed out of your sight for the rest of our lives,” Mizzy reported.
“Not your da’s?” Izzy asked.
“No,” Aria said, “she’s definitely talking about you.”
Izzy grinned.
Matauri roughly shoved the girls at Izzy, who took their hands, before swimming under Banes’ ship, which shook and rumbled as if in a storm. Just as the men Izzy had told to get out made it away from the most dangerous zone in their dinghy, Matauri capsized the ship, all on her own.
Banes wouldn’t likely die, but he’d think twice about capturing mermaids again.
***
The swim back to the island was a triumphant one. Mizzy and Aria clung to their mother as Izzy swam as fast as he could beside them. Frenchie was out as far as he dared to be from the land itself, and his face split open with joy when he saw the party returning.
“Oh god,” he said, “thank god.”
The girls’ mother screeched a growl at him, clearly under the impression that this had been his fault.
“No, no, I know,” Frenchie said to her. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
He took the girls in his arms and gave them a squeeze before carefully checking them for injury. Satisfied, he opened his arms to Izzy, who thought why not and accepted the embrace. He drew the line at being looked over, though.
Izzy found himself with a mermaid on each hip as Frenchie and Matauri had a rushed, tense discussion in their native language.
“Thanks for saving us,” Aria said.
“We knew you would,” Mizzy added.
“Oh, you knew I would, did you?”
“Sure,” Mizzy said. “You’re kind of like our second dad, now.”
It wasn’t that Izzy hadn’t known that. It was just that hearing it in Mizzy’s voice unlocked something very soft very deep inside of him. He squeezed both of the girls against himself.
“Yeah, well. Someone had to be.”
The girls both giggled.
“She’s headed back to her kids,” Frenchie said, swimming up beside them. “I’m in trouble, which is kind of fair.”
“And me?” Izzy asked.
“Oh, you’re the hero of the hour,” Frenchie said, twisting a curl of his hair. “She’s very impressed with you.”
“Good,” Izzy said, “because I’m not going anywhere.”
***
Not much later, the girls slept in their favorite lagoon and Izzy and Frenchie sat on an accommodating rock.
“Did you mean it?” Frenchie asked.
Izzy didn’t have to ask for clarification.
“Of course I meant it,” he said. “This is my family now.”
Frenchie blushed.
“If that’s so,” he said, “what are we doing?”
“What do you mean?” Izzy asked.
The merman was fun to torture, after all.
“I think I’m in love with you, Izzy Hands,” Frenchie said softly.
Izzy took his hand and brought it to his lips.
“I’ve come to…have love for you, I think.”
“You think ?”
Frenchie made as if to pull his hand away, but Izzy kept it and kissed it over and over. Then he pulled Frenchie in and kissed his mouth, which tasted of salt and sunshine.
“I think,” he confirmed.
They kissed for a while on that rock as the sun descended, and talked softly, and kissed some more. Frenchie pulled back to peer at Izzy.
“ Is there a way we can mate, anyway?” he asked.
Izzy laughed and splashed him.
“I’m sure we’ll find one.”
***
art by mooncalf809
***