Tangles

The mermaid spends over nine centuries sitting on a rock in the ocean before someone finally speaks to her.

It isn't as if she's bored—she has plenty of things to do while she waits, like dive for shells or play with the sea goat that sometimes comes wandering through—but for the most part she sits on the rock and runs a comb through her crimson hair and tries and tries and tries to get rid of the tangles.

Over and over she works her way through her tresses, but each stroke of the comb only seems to lead to more snarls, more knots, and as she stares out over the sea she heaves sighs of frustration.

Sometimes she loses all patience and hurls the comb into the depths of the ocean.

(It doesn't matter how hard she throws it—the comb always reappears overnight, taunting her, reminding her, and in the morning she starts all over again with patience renewed.)

And then, very suddenly and for no reason at all, one of them talks to her, and everything changes.

His name, she learns later, is Remus Lupin, and he is a Gryffindor who stumbles into the Prefects bathroom at dawn just after a full moon.

She is sound asleep when he arrives, but he jerks on the taps of the bathtub with such force that she is jolted awake. The comb gleams on the rock beside her.

She stares at the boy, watching with mild interest as he strips down to nothing and sinks into the water. His body is coated in fresh scratches and scrapes—the color of the wounds match the hue of her hair, and she wonders idly how much crimson blood is mixing with the bubbles in his bath.

Leaning forward slightly, she rests her chin in her hand and quietly watches as the boy, wincing and gasping, relaxes among the suds. A lock of tangled hair falls across her eyes; she tucks it away behind her ear, shuddering at its rough texture. She reaches for the comb.

The boy in the bathtub tilts his head back and lets his eyes flutter shut.

She drags the comb through her tangles. One…two…three…

Movement under the waves catches her attention—it's the sea goat, galloping around below the surface, waiting for her to come down and scratch his shoulders.

Four…five…six….she'll go, she'll go in a moment, she'll go once her hair is untangled…seven…eight…nine…the sea goat is impatient, but she can't come to play, not yet, not until her hair is sleek and shining and beautiful…ten…eleven…

A little shriek of surprise comes from the bathtub. The mermaid's head snaps up.

"Sorry!" The boy in the bathtub is wide-eyed, his gaze fixed on her. "I, erm, I didn't see you there."

She freezes mid-stroke.

"Erm. I'm Remus. Remus Lupin." He looks terrified.

She tilts her head to one side. Blinks.

"I know I'm not supposed to be here." Remus' lower lip is trembling. "I'm not a Prefect. I'm only a first year. It's just—Professor Dumbledore said I could use this bathroom to clean myself up a bit before I go back to my common room."

She frees the comb from her hair and sets it on her rock.

"Please, don't get me in trouble. I've never done anything like this before. I swear I have the headmaster's permission—"

"It's okay." Her voice cracks, rough and rusted from 900 years of silence. Down below, the sea goat's jaw has dropped. "I won't tell anyone."

Remus' face breaks into a smile. "Thank you."

She gives him a tentative smile in return before palming the comb again. With a flick of her wrist, she is threading it through her hair once more—although she finds that she is focused more on the Gryffindor than on her tresses.

"Are you a real merperson?" Remus asks.

She crinkles her forehead, uncertain.

"I mean—sorry. I know you're just a painting. But are you based on a real merperson?" Remus paddles closer to her. "I've read books about all kinds of dangerous creatures. I thought maybe I'd heard of you."

She shakes her head. "I don't know if I'm real."

She feels real.

The words "just a painting" are foreign, and she does not know what they mean.

"That makes sense," says Remus. "The merpeople I've read about look a bit more…fishy than you."

She glances down at the sea. The sea goat is trying to swim up to her, but his limbs flail uselessly—he wasn't built to rise above the surface, wasn't designed for rocks and air.

(Neither was she, yet here she is.)

"Are you real?" she asks. Her jewel-tone eyes are fixed on Remus again.

He laughs. "Of course I'm real."

She wants to ask about the crimson scratches across his chest and neck—wants to know how he got them, and why, and where, and what the rest of the world looks like, because for 900 years she has been confined to this rock and this bathroom and she has never thought to wonder what life might be like somewhere else.

He leaves, though, before she can figure out how to pose her question.

She yanks the comb through her hair so hard that it breaks.

He comes back a month later, and every month after.

She can always tell when he's coming—she watches the moon rise over her ocean, keeps track of when it seems full. She always tries to keep her hair in order for him, but her combing is useless. At night she dreams of her locks flowing out into the ocean and turning everything crimson, and she wakes with the comb clutched so tightly in her hand that its teeth leave marks in her palm.

She has tried everything to destroy that comb—broken it, thrown it away, fed it to the sea goat, buried it under the sand at the ocean floor—but it reappears on her rock each morning, reminding her over and over that she still has work to do, that her hair is not yet perfect.

He tells her stories, once she's brave enough to ask.

Stories about his friends, his family, his professors, his secrets. He soaks in the tub and talks while she basks on her rock and listens—he brings a new story every time, a new adventure, a new surprise, and each new tale fills her with bitterness, because she doesn't understand why new things happen to him but not to her.

"My friend James is obsessed with my other friend Lily," he says one day. "She wants nothing to do with him, but he can't take a hint. He's going to ask her to be his partner in Potions next term, but I already know she's going to partner up with her other friend, Severus Snape."

She combs and combs and combs and combs—

"You wouldn't believe what happened in Transfiguration last week! Sirius set off a Dungbomb in the hallway and it got Longbottom right in the face!"

—and combs and combs and combs—

"My friends have found out that I'm a—erm, that I come here all banged up each month. I thought they'd be afraid of me, but they aren't. Well, they say they aren't. At any rate, they aren't treating me differently. Yet."

—and combs—

"I've only got two OWLS left, then I'll be off for the summer—oh! Guess what Snape called Lily?"

—and combs—

"Lily and Prongs actually went to Hogsmeade together, can you believe it? Her falling out with Snape must have really done a number on her."

She combs her hair harder and harder, losing more patience with each stroke, and she doesn't know why, but her hair is the key to all of this…if she can just make herself sleek and beautiful and perfect, she'll be able to tumble free of the repetitive hell she's trapped in…she'll finally be able to go somewhere else, do something else…

"I'm leaving."

She looks at him, eyes wide. "Where are you going?"

"Graduating." The boy in the bathtub has, before her eyes, become a man. "I'll be joining the Order of the Phoenix. Working with Dumbledore." His face is bright, excited. "So are Prongs and Padfoot."

She cocks her head to the side. "You won't be back?"

"Not here." He shakes his head. "But it's all right. You'll have plenty of other visitors to keep you company."

No, she won't—nobody talks to her, nobody seems to see her, nobody tells her stories….

"Can't you—" She swallows. "Can't you take me with you?"

He laughs. "You're a painting, remember? You have to stay here, on the wall."

She knits her eyebrows together.

And then it all falls into place: she is a painting on a wall.

She is not real.

She is ink and she is canvas and she remembers being sketched, over 900 years ago, by an artist who drew her with tangles in her hair and a comb in her hand, and she is nothing, she is nothing, she is flawed and imperfect by her very design, and there is nothing anyone can do, nothing, nothing, nothing.

"Are you all right?" he asks.

"Go away."

"What?" He sounds alarmed. "I didn't mean to—"

"Just go!"

He doesn't go, and so she dives off her rock and swims as far as she can, as far as the artist has painted the ocean. There is no life under the water, other than the sea goat—there is nothing but brushstrokes and paint, and the taste of it makes her want to gag.

She waits until she is sure he is gone before she breaks the surface again.

She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes until she sees crimson shapes floating beneath her lids.

She weeps at the color.

He does come back, though.

It's years later—he looks older and frailer, but he appears in the Prefects bathroom in worn teaching robes as soon as the full moon sets.

"Hello." He says the word quietly, tenderly, as if he is afraid to startle her.

Her heart races with an emotion she cannot name. She looks at him, studying his face. There are lines beneath his eyes that weren't there before.

(She knows she does not look any different, and she hates herself for it.)

"It's me," he says. "Remus."

There is a moment—a brief one, but a moment all the same—where she considers telling him she hates him.

(There is a briefer one where she considers telling him she loved him.)

But both moments pass, and the mermaid picks up her comb and drags it through her crimson hair, just as she has for 900 years. "Tell me a story," she says.

With a relieved smile, he does.

Quidditch League, Round 2: Gimme A Sign

Holyhead Harpies, Beater 1

Prompt: Write about a character(s) striving to attain their concept of "perfection"

Word count: 1,822 (Macbook Pages)

Optional Prompts:

6. (colour) crimson [Scorpio]

7. (species) merperson [Aquarius]