Author: Aeryan

Rating: T

Characters: Syrena and Philip Swift, with mentions of Blackbeard, Jack Sparrow, and Tamara.

Summary: What a story they would make, a wisp of a fairytale made of tears and scales.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything, obviously, and no copyright infringement is intended as this is for pure entertainment.

AN: *Edit* I rewrote this, so tell me if you like this version or the original better. Also, I want to point out that this is based on the possibility that the whole 'if you kiss a mermaid you can breathe underwater' thing is a floke.

When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." and we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad.

-Neil Gaiman, Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days

He knew from the moment he saw her that he was damned. Her hair draped her face and her eyes were scared like those of a fawn, wide and pleading, as they told him let me go, let me go. God, she was the loveliest thing he had ever seen. The blood pooled around her fin, scarlet ink writhing against her coral scales as he lifted his knife to let her release her.

But it was already too late.

His lips would taste like dried sea salt and sweat, she decided, holding his face in her hands. There was a deep yearning clawing at the back of her throat, and her mouth felt suddenly dry as she felt the pulsating sensation of his blood running in his veins beneath her fingertips. In that moment all she wanted was a bite. A small one, just a taste of his man flesh to sate the hunger, to keep the need at bay. She could show him how dim the sun shined at the bottom of the pond where the water was black and cold, and she could let his pain fade away as they painted the current in red. There were hungers in life you could only deny for so long and she couldn't remember that last time she had fed.

Philip, Philip.

His name was foreign on her lips, feeling as if it did not belong there. He was sickly sweet, and the color of his eyes created a sky she had never seen before, one beautiful and blue and iridescent like the inside of a shell. She almost felt like smiling. What a story they would make, a wisp of a fairytale made of tears and scale. To him, she was Syrena.

Syrena was beautiful; his very own Melusina of yore in their twisted story crafted by pirates and mutiny. She was gentle and scared, as lovely as the sea that had born her, and did not know the iron tang of blood on her tongue. Philip—sweet and pure Philip Swift—did not know her. And how could her ever love her if he knew nothing about her? Her sisters were liars, enchantresses spun from the darkest desires of a man's soul, and she was not sure if she was any different. Every denied whimsy, every hunger not sated was bottled up and threaded through their bones, tied like sea shells in their hair as they sang above the waves. For him, she was willing to suck the marrow from her bones and start again.

She wanted to love him, truly. Syrena wanted to love Philip Swift and be loved in return with such ardor that she would never be able to doubt it. She wanted to forget ever take a bite of human flesh, to erase any memory of the bones gathered on the sea floor where they took what was left of the bodies after they ate their fill. She wanted to forget herself. Perhaps then she would be able to become the Syrena he had painted in his head with sweet words and a bated touch.

There was a story her sisters would tell to warn the little ones of men. No one knew the name of the mermaid of the tale for names were given by men and this one had never come back to tell it. She had fallen in love with a mortal she had saved from the waves, the tale went, but had no voice of her own to tell him with. So she swam him to shore, to his ivory kingdom above the sea and danced through her pain for him instead. Her feet bled as she painted the happy ending she desired across the floor and he told her he loved her like no other, but when the man married another she drove a dagger through her chest. They were not meant to love humans, her sisters said as they smiled and licked their fingers clean. We write their ends with their blood, we take them to the depths, and show them the beauty of the moon beneath the water.

She was so hungry that her head span, and it made her think of Tamara. Tamara who had been named by a man the first time she saw a ship. She would have dragged him under with sweet nothings and Philip would have loved her more than anything for it. Who was Syrena? Syrena was no queen and had been the nameless runt who hadn't had the heart to let the fleshling die crushed beneath the debris.

You will come with us this time, sweet, and may chance you will catch one for yourself. When was the last time you ate? You look weak. Come with us, come with us…

"Forgive me."

She wanted to store his words in a pretty little box and keep them forever, shelved in her heart and engraved onto her skin with those pretty little feathers humans used. Her hands slipped around the back of his neck and his eyes were like the stars and the ocean and the sky all at once. Philip's lips were chapped and broken against her own, but the feeling the came with them was so very sweet and she felt a part of herself dying with them. She couldn't describe it. This boy—this man—was lighting a trail of fire with his fingertips across her skin, mapping it as if it were his own, and she was letting him. He had cared for her, clothed her, named her…

He had come back for her.

He wanted to wrap his arms around her and keep her safe, but she was stuck in a chamber of glass and he was a prisoner. She could have been his Snow White and Philip wondered if that meant that he was her prince, the one to wake her with true love's kiss. He could see her gasping and writhing in her coffin, and he would remind himself of the mermaids and their songs and the way they had torn men as if they were nothing. Mermaids don't have eternal souls, mermaids turn into sea foam, a voice whispered. They were forsaken by God. Yet when she fixed her gaze on him, he was lost again. She made him doubt everything.

Her eyes still pleaded to him and he found himself wanting to answer.

The water was cold and numbing, just as she thought it would be, and it pushed against them as the pressure rose. It was her turn to set him free, she realized. She couldn't save him; a mermaid's kiss did not grant a man a pair of lungs able to breathe underwater. But by Philip's God she would try.

Syrena swam as fast she could, her coral scales glinting and refracting like tiny kaleidoscopes in the water. She had to hurry. His face was cold and his hands colder still, his breathing so faint she could scarcely feel it, but she had to do it. The only way she knew how to save him was to ruin him. His wounds were leaving red rivulets that trailed behind them and he would die from them if she didn't do this now. Syrena had never felt such desperation and this, she finally understood, was it meant to be human. Her heart—small, silly beating thing that it was—could have flown out of her chest.

The Fountain was collapsing in on itself, the ancient rocks splitting and crumbling like fallen warriors in a battlefield. She could hear the noise of it echoing in the water, stone clashing against earth before she reached the surface. When she pulled Philip out of the pool, his eyes were firmly shut and he was barely breathing and she could feel her eyes burning for different reasons than before. She wouldn't let herself cry, she was stronger than that. Syrena was going to be his strength now, just as he had been hers, and she was finally going to do something right in her life. She wouldn't let this hunger—this thing that was screaming in her head and dragging its claws across her heart, trying to shred it as her throat dried and her teeth grew sharper—get the best of her.

There were dead men scattered like ants everywhere, young and old, but none were what she needed. They had to be alive for it would not work if their life's blood was spilled on the ground instead of flowing of through their heart. As she slowly dried, her scales dug themselves inside her skin like tiny knives and a pair legs were left in their wake, and it hurt to walk. They were long and smooth, but the ground felt like a raging fire beneath the soles of her feet. Syrena fell, unable to keep her balance and her nails buried themselves into the moist dirt as she hissed from the waves of pain that rang through her body. Again, again, her mind chanted, again until I can. Yet she kept falling and Phillip kept on dying and it hurt so much. What was she going to do? She was too weak and of the sea, not of the land that birthed treacherous men whose legs were useless in the waters of the Caribbean. But I'm not in the sea, I'm not in the sea…

Syrena needed a man and she needed to walk.

Her legs were shaky and she could only sustain herself for a few quick steps at a time so she had to drag herself when she fell. Syrena ignored the taste of dirt and moss in her mouth and accepted that this was as close to walking as she could get. As she moved around she would put her ear against the chests of the fallen, just to make sure they were dead, but mermaids could smell death and she had not forgotten that. This entire place reeked of it.

"There is nothing to forgive, you silly man," she found herself muttering as she searched like a scavenger, speaking as if Philip was there next to her. The words were very warm, and they settled over her like Philip's shirt. "You saved me."

The chalices were in front of a pile of bone and cloth, and Syrena immediately knew that the pirate had done what she asked of him. She took them and dragged herself to the broken fountain, her skin burning an angry red as dirt and grass and rock scrapped her flesh, and she let the small drops slither into the chalices. Everything around her was gray and dark, and the air smelled like death and damp earth as the place continued to crash to the ground. All she needed as a man now, but Syrena could find none. They were all dead and she cursed everything and everyone she knew because there was no way she could simply let Philip die. She would not let them take him from her. Syrena would first let the entire world burn till it was nothing but smoke and ash, flames engulfing the land and ripping it apart until they were the only ones left standing in the dried desserts that had once been seas.

She would do anything for him.

Syrena. Her name would be Syrena.

When he named her, the mermaid's eyes widened and filled with something he couldn't hope to understand. The only thing he could grasp as he draped his dirty white shirt over her thin frame was that he wanted her to keep gazing at him in that same manner for the rest of his life. Her hair smelt like the ocean and it stuck to his chest as he carried her, but she hardly looked at him anymore and he wasn't sure what to do.

Later, they tied her to a post and forced her to either shed a tear or die, and he felt himself breaking inside. It was his fault that she was here and now she would die. Her life would shrivel up in the sun and he would be left alone, her underwater green eyes haunting him for the rest of his pitiful life. The knife was sharp against his throat and he saw the way she almost seemed to flinch, but they both knew she would not cry. Her eyes held such anger that he knew Syrena would not give her tears to them. For a moment he thought everything would be alright.

Then he felt something pierce his skin.

The moment Syrena found a breathing man, the earth slipped from beneath her feet. He was one of Blackbeard's, scruffy and tan with rings of dirt around his neck and hair that stunk like the seven seas, but none of that mattered. He was alive and he would save Philip. Syrena pressed the chalice to her cheek and found she was already crying. She pressed the palm of her hand against her cheek and let out a choked laugh, bitter at the trouble a single tear had caused. Syrena remembered her sisters, tied to post and wasting away before they were reduced to skeletons because of the endless greed of men. They had not deserved to die like that. Not in her eyes, never in her eyes.

Her tears slid into the chalice slowly and the muscle of her calves burned as she tried to run towards Philip, her feet on fire. Syrena fell, careless as she had been, and her heart almost stopped from the fear of having spilt the water of the Fountain of Youth mixed with her tears. She placed the chalices before Philip, counting her stars, and made her way back to the ragged man in his tattered clothes before dragging him back with her.

I can save him, I told him I could.

He might come to hate her for the cost at which she would restore his life, but it was a price she was willing to pay.

Syrena forced the water down the throat of the half-dead man, feeling life already slipping from his wounds. She wasn't sure what she felt then, knowing what she what she did, but she placed Philip in her lap and pressed the chalice of life to his lips regardless of her doubts. The liquid slid down his throat and his wounds began to heal, flesh weaving itself across his stomach and veins stitching themselves back together. His breathing steadied and the man beside him—the one whose name they would never know—turned to bone.

Philip was half-delirious when he opened his eyes, his eyes wide once the realization of what Syrena had done washed over him. The water of the ruins had torn a man apart so that Philip could breathe using the life he had once had, and she didn't know what to tell him. Her grasp on human emotion was poor at best and she knew didn't know how to comfort him, how to tell him that despite this he would still be received in the arms of his God.

"Shhh," she whispered softly, her accent thick. "You will okay now, that is all that matters."

I love you. I did this for us and I'm sorry and I love you, I love you, I love you…

Syrena stroked his face gently as she muttered against his temple, smoothing his hair before she kissed his lips. "It is you turn to forgive me."

When she rose from the water, her hair flowing around her like the darkest quicksilver, he knew everything might just be alright. She had come back just like he had come for her and in that moment he knew he loved her. He loved Syrena with her odd, smooth voice and her dusky eyes that told him a million things he wanted to know as she gazed at him with that one look that was seared into his mind. That fierce yet fearful look that had enough love to make him believe in fairy tales gave him all the strength he needed for what was to come.

If Syrena spurned him, Philip decided, it would be would accept anything as long as it was from her. But he wanted her forgiveness for letting her get captured, for unleashing all of this.

"Ask." Her words were soft as she gazed up at him, her lips parted.

"Forgive me."

And she did.

"Tears of sorrow, never. Mermaids be too tough for that. But tears of joy…"