secondlina:

katlay:

nympheline:

katlay:

While at work recently I had to draw The Little Mermaid a whole bunch, and it made me really want to see a healthy, inter-species relationship with a mermaid and a human. No body modification necessary! 

Now I’m not sick! And I can finally draw! I went a little…overboard…

It takes them less than a minute to taste each other’s names. Kit pokes herself in the chest and says her name underwater, then surfaces and says it again. The mermaid’s finned ears wiggle a bit when Kit submerges her head—is that puzzlement? annoyance? amusement?—and she reproduces the burble and click of Kit’s name slowly, her ears fluttering as she does so. Kit decides it’s concentration, and almost at the same moment realises that they might never share the vocabulary to confirm that.

The mermaid pokes her own chest with one long finger. Her digits are as green as the rest of her, tipped with dull grey nails, and clearly unwebbed. Kit peers a little more closely; does the mermaid have fingerprints? She does. The patterns swirl dark and delicate over her rubbery palms, each line a deep evergreen against the celadon skin.

The mermaid gurgles and whistles and gurgles again. Kit looks at her face, which looks as if it’s… receding, as if it’s tightening somehow. Her musculature, and her control thereof, is clearly superior; even if Kit could wiggle her ears, she could never manipulate her face that way. The mermaid gnashes her teeth and points to herself again. She opens her mouth slowly, pointedly, as if teaching a young one to yawn, and waits. 

Kit gurgles, whistles, gurgles. Or she tries. But how does a human whistle underwater? She doesn’t, is the long and short of it. She purses her lips and blows a bubble of precious air outward in a sound that is nothing like the trilling chirp that sits in the middle of the mermaid’s name; and the listening mermaid, previously miffed at her companion’s preoccupation with something as mundane as hands (something that they both have, after all) clutches her rounded belly and rolls and rolls and rolls in the water in paroxysms of mirth, clicking and chirping and burbling all the while.

Kit goes up for air while she waits.

The mermaid tugs once, twice at Kit’s fatter fingers, and Kit ducks her head back down. The mermaid presses both hands downward, palms parallel to the sand and looks intently at Kit. Wait. Stay. Then she darts away, her tail a garnet flash in the murky waves.

She’s holding a shell when she returns, a milky nautilus with stripes of blood brown. She presses her fingers to its surface, then to her own, and says her name again.

“Shell?” Kit asks, tracing a stripe. “Your name is Shell?” 

The mermaid flips the nautilus over in one palm and swirls the fingers of her other hand over its pearly innards. She mimes a creature swimming into it, then drops it entirely and cups her hands together to make a cave. 

Kit watches, utterly baffled.

The mermaid blows out a bubble of air, sharp and short, and cups Kit’s hands together. Again, she turns her hand into a small creature, swims it into the harbour of Kit’s palms, and lays it inside, folding Kit’s right hand over so that their hands are layered and locked together.

“Safety,” Kit realises. “Your name means a place of safety. A… haven.” She looks at the mermaid, who is smiling shyly with her short teeth, and when Kit comes up for air, Haven keeps hold of one hand and goes with her.

SOMEONE WROTE FIC FOR THEM I CAN’T BELIEVE IT.

Welp, this is the cutest thing. Everyone else go home.