Spiraling Over Complicated Fictional Men @notesfromthemirror - Tumblr Blog

Hiii, medea here 🧍🏽

Could you do famous pirate captain!varka x siren!reader?

For more context, reader is a mermaid that lives in a very dangerous part of the sea so no humans can go and bother her, but lately it got so dangerous not even small fishes (reader's main food) are appearing in the area so she's starting to get desesperated, until she hears a pirate ship and thanks to the hunger she decides to go against her morals of not eating humans because now she has to survive, so she starts singing and instead of a totally brainwashed pirate she finds a (totally lucid) snak of a man aka varka

The Captain and the Siren (Varka x Reader)

Synopsis: The death-waters have always been dangerous. For weeks, you survive alone among the black rocks and shipwrecks, until a passing ship offers you something far more dangerous than food: kindness.

Captain Varka is searching for a lost family sword hidden somewhere beneath the sea. You know the waters better than any map ever could.

What begins as a simple bargain slowly becomes something neither of you expected: shared stories, dangerous waters, old wounds, impossible hopes... and a reason to keep coming back.

A/N: Hi again Medea! :) First of all: thank you again for sending me this idea all those months ago. 💙 And second: I am sorry this took me so long. I already told you this before, but I absolutely adore this concept for Varka. So naturally this became much longer than originally intended. :D I hope you enjoy what it turned into and that it was worth the wait.

And to everyone else: If you enjoy adventure stories, pirates, mermaids, slow burn tension, sea legends, emotional conversations, and Varka being entirely too Varka for his own good, then I hope you’ll enjoy this little journey as well. 🌊

Tags: Slow Burn. Female Reader. Pirate AU. Pirate Captain!Varka. Mermaid!Reader. Siren!Reader. Adventure Romance. Tension. Mutual Pining. Banter. Emotional Vulnerability. Existential Questions. Found Understanding. Fantasy Adventure. Sea Legends. Lore. Hopeful Ending.

Word count: 14095

⋆ ✦ ⋆

The hunger changes you.

You don’t notice it at first: the slow narrowing of the world down to a single, screaming need. The waters that once teemed with silver have gone empty. The currents that brought you food have shifted, turned strange and cold, driven away by something deeper in the dark that even you don’t want to think about.

You’ve stopped counting in days and started counting in absences. No fish. No food. Nothing but the ache hollowing you out from the inside, sharpening every instinct into something feral.

You live here precisely because no one comes. The waters around the black rocks are death to ships. Jagged stone beneath the surface, currents that drag vessels down, a reputation steeped in centuries of wreckage.

You chose this place for its emptiness. Its safety. You never thought it might starve you. So when you hear the ship, you don’t think. You sing.

You haven’t done this in years. Decades, maybe.

You swore you wouldn’t. Swore that whatever you are, you wouldn’t be that. Wouldn’t lure sailors to the rocks, wouldn’t feast on the drowned, wouldn’t become the monster the stories warned about.

But the hunger doesn’t care about your morals. The hunger only knows that the ship means food, and the song means the ship will come to you.

So you sing. And the song that pours out of you is everything you are—loss and loneliness and the desperate need to simply survive—and you feel it land, feel the ship begin to turn toward the rocks.

You rise from the water, ready, and find a man at the railing looking directly at you. Awake.

That stops you cold.

He should be entranced. They all are. You can see the rest of them behind him, swaying, glassy-eyed, caught in the current of your voice. The song doesn’t fail. It can’t fail. It reaches into the deepest part of a person and pulls.

But this man is watching you with clear blue eyes and an expression of frank, unhurried interest, like you’re a curiosity he’s decided to examine rather than a horror dragging him to his death.

And you find yourself looking back.

He’s tall. Broad through the shoulders in a way that speaks of someone who works, who fights, who doesn’t simply give orders from behind a desk. Blond hair, longer than a soldier’s, pulled back from his face but loose enough that the sea wind tugs strands of it free.

A dark coat hangs open over a white shirt left carelessly half-unbuttoned, sleeves pushed up corded forearms. He is wearing black trousers, worn leather belt, boots built for decks and danger. There’s teal in the trim of the coat, deep as the deeper water, and a wide-brimmed hat that shadows his eyes without hiding them.

He looks like the sea itself decided to put on a man’s shape. And he looks entirely unbothered.

You should be the dangerous one here. You’re the one who lures. Who drowns. Who sends the silver bones of ships to rest in the dark.

So why is it your pulse that’s racing?

He leans his forearms on the railing, entirely too comfortable for a man who should be drowning. “That’s quite a voice,” he says.

You bare your teeth.

His eyebrows rise. Not in fear, in something closer to delight.

“Easy,” he says. “I’m not steering toward your rocks. Though I’ll admit you nearly had my whole crew doing it for me.” He glances back at his men, frowns, then raises his voice into something that cracks like a whip. “Wake up. All of you. Now.”

Something in the command cuts clean through the song. His men shake themselves, blink, look around in dawning horror at how close they’ve drifted to the black stone.

“Hard to port,” he says, calm as anything. “Bring us about.”

They scramble to obey. And they obey fast, the way men move for someone they trust with their lives.

And he turns back to you like none of it was urgent at all.

You stare at him, chest heaving, song dying in your throat.

He’s still affected—you can see it now that you’re looking. There is a tension in his jaw. A faint roughness to his breathing. The song touched him. He simply refused to let it take him, the way a man might plant his feet against a current strong enough to drown him.

That should be impossible.

“How,” you demand. Your voice cracks, unused for anything but the song. “The song should have—you should be—”

“Drowning?” He says it mildly. “Mm. I felt it. Don’t mistake me—” His gaze sharpens, and for half a second something flickers there, something that says the song reached him more than he’ll admit. “It’s a beautiful thing, what you do. I just happen to be very difficult to move once I’ve decided where I’m standing.” A faint smile. “Stubbornness has its uses.”

You don’t know what to do with any of this. You’ve never been seen before. Only obeyed, or feared, or fled.

This man is doing none of those things.

He’s just looking at you with those clear blue eyes. And you, traitorously, can’t stop looking back.

His expression shifts. The amusement doesn’t leave entirely, but something else moves underneath it. “You’re starving,” he says.

It isn’t a question.

You hiss at him, pride flaring even now. “I don’t need—”

“When did you last eat?”

“That’s not—”

“It’s a simple question.”

You don’t answer. Can’t. The shame is worse than the hunger, somehow. Being seen like this, reduced to this, by a human who should be afraid of you and instead is looking at you like you’re a problem he intends to solve.

He straightens, then turns to one of his crew. “The catch from this morning. Bring it up.”

You go very still. You expect a trick. You watch, wary and coiled, as a crew member hauls up a netted bundle. Fish, fresh, silver-bright and gleaming in the morning light. More than you’ve seen in weeks. The smell of it hits you and your whole body shudders with want.

The captain takes the net and crosses to the railing. “Come closer,” he says.

“So you can spear me?” Your voice is venom. “I’m not a fool.”

“If I wanted you dead, I’d have let you keep singing and put an arrow through your throat while you worked.” He says it without heat, a simple fact. “I don’t. So.” He holds out the net over the water. “Come and eat.”

You hesitate. Every instinct screams that this is wrong, that humans don’t help, that kindness is a hook with bait on it, but the hunger wins.

You dart forward, fast and ready to flee, and snatch the net from his hand. He lets it go easily. He doesn’t strike. He just watches as you tear into the fish with a desperation you can’t be ashamed of, can’t do anything about except eat.

He says nothing while you do.

When you finally surface again, he’s still there. He is leaning on the railing. “Better?” he asks.

You stare at him. “Why,” you manage.

“Why what?”

“Why would you do that?” Your voice shakes despite yourself. “You should have killed me. Or run. Humans always—”

“I’m not most humans.” He says it simply. “And I don’t kill starving things that sing like the whole ocean is grieving.” Something gentler settles in his face. “That wasn’t a hunting song. Not really. That was something else.”

You don’t have words. No one has ever heard it.

His name is Varka. He gives it freely, which surprises you.

“You’re not afraid I’ll use it?” you ask.

“Should I be?”

“Names matter. To things like me.”

“Mm.” He considers this, head tilting. “Then it seems only fair I’ve given you mine.” He nods at you. “And yours?”

You almost don’t tell him. Then you do.

He repeats it once, and something about the way he says it, like it’s worth saying correctly, makes your chest ache in a way the hunger never did.

“Suits you,” he says.

“You don’t even know me.”

“No,” he agrees easily. “But I know what it’s like to hear a name and feel it fits. Yours does.” He says it without weight, like it costs him nothing, and then moves on before you can decide whether to be flustered or furious. “You’ve been out here a long time, I think. Alone.”

“How would you know that?”

“The song.” His eyes are steady. “It wasn’t a hunting song. Not really. Hunger drove it, maybe, but underneath—” He pauses, choosing words. “That was the sound of something that’s been alone too long. I’ve heard grief before. I know its shape.”

You go very still. No one has ever heard it. You change the subject because you have to. “What are you, then? You sail under no banner I recognize.”

“A privateer.” A wry tilt of his mouth. “Sanctioned. Papers and all. Which makes me a pirate the way a sword is a letter-opener—technically accurate and entirely beside the point.” He gestures at the death-waters around you, the black rocks, the wreck-strewn deep. “I sail where honest men won’t. Through places like this.”

“And what is it you’re looking for? No one comes to the death-waters for nothing.”

Something flickers across his face. “A sword,” Varka says.

You blink. “A sword.”

“An old one. Lost a long time ago, in a wreck somewhere in these waters.” He says it lightly, but you hear the weight underneath, the thing he’s not saying. “A family blade. My father carried it. His father before him.” A pause. “It went down with a ship I wasn’t on. I’ve spent longer than I’d like to admit chasing where it fell.”

“It matters to you,” you say slowly. “More than a sword should.”

He looks at you. A little startled, like he didn’t expect to be read so easily. “Mm,” he admits. “More than I tend to say out loud.”

The honesty sits between you, unexpected and warm.

You find yourself studying him: the longer hair tugged loose by the wind, the open collar, the way he holds himself even at rest like something coiled and ready.

There’s the easy confidence of a man used to being followed. But underneath it, in the way he spoke about the sword, something quieter. Something that grieves.

You understand grief. “There are many wrecks here,” you say, before you can think better of it. “The rocks take ships. Always have. I know where most of them lie—which deeps hold what, which currents guard which bones.” You lift your chin. “Better than any map you’ll find.”

His whole attention sharpens onto you. “You’d know where my father’s ship went down.”

“I’d know where to start looking.” You hold his gaze. “These are my waters. I know them the way you know your own hands.”

For a long moment he simply looks at you, weighing something. “Why would you help me?”

It’s a fair question. You don’t entirely have an answer.

Because you fed me when you could have killed me. Because you said my name like it mattered. Because you’re the first thing in years that’s looked at me and seen something other than a monster.

“Because I want something in return,” you say instead, which is also true. “A deal.”

A slow smile. “Go on.”

“I’ll help you find your wrecks. Tell you which waters hide what.” You hold his gaze. “And in return you keep bringing the catch. Until the fish return to these waters.”

“And the singing?” he asks. “The luring sailors to their deaths?”

You lift your chin. “I haven’t done it in many years. Today was—” The shame again. “I was desperate. I won’t, if I don’t have to. I never wanted to be that.”

Varka studies you for a long moment, then nods. “Then we have a deal.”

He extends his hand down toward the water. You look at it. At him. At the strange impossible warmth of a human offering his hand to a thing the stories call a monster.

You reach up. His grip is warm and careful, and when your hand meets his, something passes between you that has nothing to do with sirens or captains or swords.

— ✦ —

The first days are not easy.

The deal is struck, but a deal is just words, and your body doesn’t trust words. It trusts the hunger, which has ruled you for weeks, which doesn’t simply vanish because a stubborn captain promised to feed you.

And the death-waters don’t make it simple. Storms roll through, days of them, churning the sea so violently that the ship has to run before the wind, leaving the stretch of water you know.

You lose them. You spend two days, three, fighting currents and searching, the hunger creeping back with every hour, sharpening you down again into that feral, narrow thing you hate being.

When you finally find the ship, you’re past thinking. You’re not reaching for the song, not eyeing the crew, nothing like that. It’s simpler and worse than that: you’re on edge, every nerve scraped raw, the desperation back in your blood like a fever.

And then you see Varka at the railing. And something in you goes wild. You don’t decide to move. You surge up out of the water fast and high, almost onto the deck itself, close enough that the nearest crewman shouts and stumbles back.

“Whoa.” Varka’s hand comes up, palm out. “Easy.”

You snarl at him, teeth bared, the sound tearing out of you before you can stop it, and then you catch yourself. Catch the wild thing by the throat and drag it back down, chest heaving, horrified at yourself, sinking back toward the water with your pulse roaring.

“I—” Your voice is wrecked. “The storms. I couldn’t find you. I haven’t—” You can’t finish.

Varka doesn’t flinch. That’s the thing that undoes you.

A creature of the death-waters just came at his deck with bared teeth, and he hasn’t reached for a blade, hasn’t done anything but watch you with those clear blue eyes and that infuriating, impossible calm.

“The catch is already up,” Varka says, like nothing happened. He nods to the net waiting at the rail. “Figured you’d be hungry, wherever you’d got to. Eat.”

You don’t have the pride left to refuse. You take the fish and you eat with a desperation you can’t hide and can’t be ashamed of, and the whole time you’re aware of him watching with a kind of intent, arrested fascination.

When the worst of it passes, you finally meet his eyes.

He’s still watching.

“You shouldn’t stare like that,” you say roughly. “I nearly attacked you a moment ago.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t look away. “You didn’t, though. You stopped.” A pause, something thoughtful in it. “That can’t have been easy. Hungry as you were.”

You don’t know what to say to that. No one has ever given you credit for the stopping. “You’re a reasonable man,” you manage. “By all accounts. Reasonable men don’t lean closer to the thing that just bared its teeth at them.”

A faint, wry curve of his mouth, aimed more at himself than you.

“No,” Varka agrees. “They don’t.” He still doesn’t move back. “I’ve been told my judgment occasionally takes the night off.”

And there is that current under everything again, that thing neither of you will name, pulling at you both even now, even like this, even with your hands still trembling and your pride in tatters.

You make yourself look away first.

The silence stretches. Varka is still watching you with that arrested, against-his-better-judgment intentness, and you can't stand it.

“Why are you still helping me?” you ask. It comes out sharper than you mean. Still half-feral, still raw. “You’ve fed me for days. You don’t have to. The deal would hold without the kindness.”

“The deal’s the deal." He says it easily enough. “You guide my charts, I keep your belly full. Fair trade.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Something flickers behind his eyes. “I help people who need it,” he says. “Always have. Doesn’t much matter to me whether they walk on two legs or—” a glance at the water “—don’t. Someone’s starving in front of me, I feed them. That’s not complicated.”

You bristle, the wild thing rising again. “I don’t need your charity.”

“Good thing it isn’t charity, then.”

That stops you. “It isn’t?”

“No.” He’s blunt, and there’s an edge to his voice you don’t yet have a name for. “Charity is something you give and might forget. I haven’t forgotten a single conversation we’ve had. I think about the things you tell me. I look forward to—” He stops himself. “It isn’t charity. Don’t insult us both by calling it that.”

You don’t know what to do with the honesty. So you do what you always do. You go prickly. “You shouldn’t get attached to a thing like me,” you mutter. “It never ends well. For the human.”

Varka doesn’t reply. Instead, he looks at you with an expression you can’t decipher.

It’s getting dark. You hadn’t noticed until now. The sun has gone down behind the rocks, the water turning to ink, the first stars surfacing overhead.

And in the dimness something shifts in the way Varka is looking at you. “You glow a little,” he says quietly. “In the dark. Did you know that?”

You go still. No one has ever told you that. No one has ever been close enough, or unafraid enough, to notice.

For a moment you just look at each other across the dark water, and the silence is so charged it’s hard to breathe.

“Still,” he says, leaning back, “you’re remarkably aversive for someone who keeps coming back.”

You hiss before you can help it. “Can you blame me?”

“Mm.” He tilts his head. “Can you blame humans? For being careful? The stories about your kind aren’t gentle.”

“Yes,” you snap. “Exactly. The stories.” The bitterness surprises even you. “Everyone knows the stories. Everyone’s so sure they know what we are. Drowners. Devourers. Monsters with pretty voices.” You bare your teeth. “No one ever wonders if the stories are wrong. No one ever asks. They just decide, and reach for the harpoon.” You look away. “Most of my kind never touched a human in their lives. But it’s easier to believe the song than the silence.”

Varka is quiet a moment. “That,” he says, “is the most human complaint I’ve ever heard.”

You glare at him.

He studies you a moment longer. Something thoughtful working behind his eyes. “I’ll admit,” he says slowly, “I didn’t expect it. Your kind. The—” he gestures, searching for the word “—the feeling. The bitterness, just now. The way you talk about being misjudged like it actually wounds you.” He pauses. “It’s almost human.”

You go still.

“I wouldn’t know,” you say, quieter than before. “I have no comparison. I don’t know what humans feel. I only know what I feel.” You look away. “Maybe it’s the same. Maybe it isn’t. No one’s ever asked me before, so I’ve never had to wonder.”

Varka is quiet. Then, almost in passing, offhand, like he’s only just realized it himself, he says: “Mm. Maybe they’re not so different. The core of it.”

He turns the thought over. “Hunger. Loneliness. Wanting to be more than what people decided you are. Wanting—” he stops, then continues “—wanting to survive, and not be hated for it.” His eyes flick to you. “That’s why I keep feeding you, if you must know. It isn’t pity. I just don’t see much difference between a starving siren and a starving anything else. A thing that wants to live isn’t a monster for wanting it.”

The honesty unspools something in your chest you’d rather keep wound tight. So you reach for the old armor. Dry. Defensive.

“You should be careful with that thought,” you say. “There are stories about us too, you know. Our own kind tells them.”

You trail your fingers through the dark water. “That the first sirens weren’t born in the sea at all. That we were human, once—centuries ago. Cursed. Drowned and remade into something that sings instead of speaks, that hungers instead of loves.”

A bitter little laugh escapes you. “If the stories are true, then everything I feel is just a human heart that never stopped beating. Twisted up. Made sharper. More—” you search for it “—more. We feel too much and too hard, the old songs say. It’s why we’re dangerous. Why getting close to us is a bad idea.” You meet his eyes, daring him.

For a moment Varka doesn’t answer. He’s processing it, filing it away somewhere, the way he files the shape of a coastline or the set of a sail.

“Noted,” is all he says. “Dangerous creature. Feels too much.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “I’ll add it to the list.”

You hiss at him, and the moment passes, but the words sit in the water between you, planted, waiting.

Human once. We could be again, some small buried part of you doesn’t quite let itself say. You bury it with the rest.

And then Varka moves. Fast and sudden. Not a real strike, you realize that even as it happens, but your body doesn’t know the difference. The wild thing surges up, instinct screaming threat, and the old memories claw at the edges of your mind.

You hiss, recoiling, teeth bared, every nerve alight, and then he stops. Hands up. Calm. “Easy,” he says. “Just showing you something.”

“What,” you spit, “could you possibly—”

“That’s a feint.” He says it like an instructor. “You read the motion, not the intent. You committed to the dodge before you knew if it was real. A clever opponent would’ve used that. Would’ve drawn the reaction, struck where you weren’t.” He nods at you. “You’re fast. But you’re all instinct. No reading. Same thing I told my crew this morning.” A beat. “If you ever do have to defend yourself against something with hands and a blade—you’ll want to know that.”

You stare at him. The fury drains, replaced by grudging interest. Because he’s right. And no one has ever bothered to teach you anything but fear.

“I don’t need lessons from a human,” you say. But there’s no venom in it now.

“No?”

“No.” And then, because the prickly pride demands it, because you want, fiercely, for him to understand that you are not the helpless starving thing he keeps feeding: “Watch.”

You lift a hand from the water. And you call, just a little. The sea answers: a current curling up at your command, lifting a rope of water into the air, coiling it around your wrist like a living thing before you let it fall back with a slap against the hull. The ship rocks, gentle, at your whim.

Varka’s eyebrows climb.

“The sea listens to me,” you tell him, and you can’t quite keep the satisfaction out of it. “That’s what your stories never mention. We don’t drown sailors with our hands. When the sea listens—” you let the water curl once more, then still it “—we don’t need to.”

He’s gone very quiet, looking at you with something new now. Something closer to awe. “...Remind me,” he says slowly, “never to make an enemy of you.”

“Try your best,” you say, a smile creeping up on your face.

It startles a laugh out of him. And just like that, something between you has changed. The wild thing has settled. The wariness, on both sides, has cracked a little further open. You showed him a piece of what you are, and he didn’t reach for a weapon. He marveled.

You find that you want to tell him things, now. So you do.

“I heard something,” you say, the prickliness gone soft at the edges. “While I was lost in the storms. Passed close to a trade route, a fishing village. Sailors talk.”

You drag the conversation back to something safe, something transactional, something that isn’t the way he’s looking at you right now. “There’s word of a wreck off the northern shoals. Old. Carried something valuable down with it, they say. Might be nothing. Might be worth your charts.”

It works. Mostly. His attention sharpens onto the information, the captain surfacing over the man.

But not entirely. Because even as he asks his questions—where, how old, what the sailors claimed—there’s a part of his gaze that hasn’t left you. That’s still turning something over. Still, against all his better judgment, interested.

You tell yourself you don’t notice.

— ✦ —

The days that follow settle into something you don’t have a name for.

The deal holds. Each morning the catch comes over the railing. Fish, fresh and silver and plentiful, more than enough to dull the screaming hunger down to something you’d almost forgotten existed: an ordinary appetite, easily fed.

Your strength returns. The hollow in your cheeks fills. You stop counting time in absences.

Sometimes it’s Varka who brings the catch.

Sometimes it isn’t. There’s a sharp-eyed first mate too. He’s blue-haired, perpetually amused, and calls you the captain’s mermaid in a tone that makes you want to drag him under purely on principle. He hands the net down with a grin and a comment you don’t dignify with a response.

You decide you don’t like him. You decide this several times, mostly because he keeps looking like he knows something you don’t.

And sometimes there are no words at all. The fish come down, you take them, the ship moves on to chart another stretch of wreck-strewn water you’ve marked for them. A transaction. Nothing more.

Except it never stays nothing more for long. Because Varka talks to you. Not always but often enough that you start, traitorously, to look for it.

You also learn the ship’s name. The Dandelion’s Flight.

It’s a strange name for a pirate’s vessel. The flag that snaps above her mast is a single dandelion seed-head scattering on the wind, white against deep teal. But the longer you know Varka, the more it makes sense.

Varka is never quite the same twice.

Some days he’s easy, almost teasing, leaning on the railing with that open-collared confidence, drawing the wild out of you just to watch it spark. “Careful,” he’ll say when you snap at him. “Bare your teeth at me like that and I’ll start thinking you like the company.”

And you’ll hiss something cutting back, and he’ll laugh brightly like your sharpness is a gift rather than a threat.

One morning you arrive to find the deck in motion. Sparring. The crew paired off across the boards, blades flashing in the early light. Varka is in the middle of it with his coat discarded and his sleeves shoved up, drilling them the way you’d drill anything you intended to keep alive.

You stay low in the water and watch. You can’t help it.

Because this is different from the captain who leans on railings and teases. This is the man underneath the ease. He moves through his crew correcting a grip here, a stance there, then takes on two of them at once just to prove a point, and disarms them both without ever quite seeming to hurry.

There’s no glory-seeking in it. No showing off. Just a man who has decided his people will come home alive, and intends to make sure of it.

The white shirt clings to him with sweat by the end. You become aware that you’ve been staring for some time. That your tail has gone still in the water. That something warm and inconvenient has settled low in your chest.

Varka catches you looking. “Enjoying the view?” he calls, not even winded.

You sink immediately to your eyes, glaring over the waterline. His laugh follows you down.

Other days he’s serious, stern, even, the weight of command settling over him, the privateer-captain who’s responsible for every life on his deck. On those days he asks careful questions about the waters ahead, the currents, the hidden rocks, and listens to your answers with a focus so complete it makes your scales prickle.

And some days he’s simply wondering and quiet, watching the water like it holds answers. Asking you things no human has ever asked. What it’s like beneath the waves. Whether you remember being anything other than what you are. Whether you’re lonely.

(You never answer that last one. Varka never pushes. But he asks again, another day, gentle as the tide.)

You’re meant to be the dangerous one. Instead you find yourself surfacing earlier each morning. You’re lingering longer each evening, memorizing the different shapes of him and being unable to decide which unsettles you most.

“You’re staring,” Varka says one evening, not looking up from the rope he’s coiling.

“I’m assessing a threat.”

“Mm. And?”

“The threat is irritating.”

That earns you the laugh again. You tell yourself you don’t swim a little higher in the water to hear it better.

(You’re a liar.)

— ✦ —

The ship is not your whole world. It only feels that way, lately.

When you’re not trailing Varka’s hull, you do what you’ve always done. What you did for all the long years before a stubborn captain sailed into your waters and refused to drown. You roam.

You drift along shorelines at dusk, close enough to watch the lights come on in distant windows.

You explore the caves that honeycomb the black rocks, cool and dark and full of the small glowing things that live where the light can’t reach. You follow the great slow currents out past the death-waters and back again, mapping the sea the way you’ve always mapped it.

And you visit the wrecks. There are so many. Centuries of them, scattered across the deep. Ships the rocks took, ships the storms took, ships that simply vanished and came to rest here in the dark. You know them the way you know your own scales.

You drift through their broken hulls, past the coral that’s reclaimed them, and sometimes you find things. A name carved into a beam. Cargo that survived the drowning. Charts gone soft with seawater but not yet illegible. The small persistent evidence of who a ship was before the sea unmade it.

You never used to care what any of it meant. Now you find yourself lingering. You’re reading names, noting which wrecks are old enough, deep enough, the right shape to maybe be the one a certain captain is looking for. You catch yourself memorizing details to bring back to him, as if his quest has somehow become a thing you carry too.

In one of the deeper wrecks—an old merchant vessel, half-swallowed by coral—you find a strongbox that the sea hasn’t quite managed to ruin.

Inside you find jewelry. Tarnished but fine. Rings, a chain, a brooch worked in silver. And a belt, the leather somehow preserved, the buckle heavy and well-made.

You tell yourself it’s practical. The sea will only ruin them, given time, and a pirate—a privateer—surely has use for such things. It’s nothing. A scrap of the deal, perhaps. Repayment for all the fish.

You very carefully do not think about the fact that you noticed, days ago, that Varka’s own belt is worn nearly through at the buckle. That you found yourself looking at this one and thinking of him.

You don’t usually take things. You take these. You don’t examine why.

— ✦ —

You are not the only one of your kind in these seas. There are others. Scattered and rare. Sirens don’t gather. You don’t build, don’t share, don’t keep each other company the way humans crowd their warm little ports.

You drift through the vast dark alone and cross paths so seldom that years can pass between sightings. It’s simply what you are. What you’ve always been.

You tell yourself you prefer it.

You meet one of them while roaming the cold currents north of the death-waters. Another like you, rising pale and luminous out of the deep, regarding you with eyes that hold nothing you recognize.

You greet her, in the old wordless way your kind speak.

She answers strangely. Distant. As though something in you reads wrong to her. She looks at you the way you imagine humans look at you: warily, like you’re not quite the thing you’re supposed to be.

When you find yourself asking after the warmer waters, the inhabited places, the ships—she recoils, faintly. As if the question itself is a kind of sickness.

You linger near them, she seems to say, without saying. Why?

You don’t have an answer she’d understand.

The exchange leaves you unsettled, lost in a way you can’t name. A sense that you’ve drifted somewhere your own kind can’t follow, and that the distance is in you, not the water. That you’ve become a stranger to the only beings who share your shape.

You shake it off. You keep roaming. But the feeling lingers, cold at your edges: the dawning suspicion that you don’t quite belong anywhere. Not among humans, who fear you. Not among your own kind, who find you wrong.

You bury that, too. (You’re getting good at burying things.)

You don’t understand it. That’s the part that unsettles you most. It would be easier if you could explain it. If you could tell yourself it’s only the deal: fish for information, a fair trade, nothing more.

But the deal doesn’t explain why you swim a little faster on your way back to the ship. Why you find yourself wanting Varka to find his sword. Why the thought of him sailing north and not coming back sits in your chest like a stone.

Humans have never been kind to you. You remember that much. Short, sharp memories that surface unbidden in the dark. Nets and spears and faces twisted with fear and hatred. A harpoon that grazed your side once and left a scar that aches in cold water still. The certainty, learned early and learned hard, that to them you are only ever a monster, a danger, a thing to be killed before it kills.

That’s why you came to the death-waters. To be left alone. To stop being hunted.

And then a captain fed you when he could have killed you, and said your name like it mattered, and leaned closer when you bared your teeth instead of reaching for a blade. And something you’d sealed away a very long time ago has started, quietly, to crack open.

There’s an older memory, too. Vaguer. From so long ago you can’t be sure it’s real and not something you dreamed. Warmth. A shore. A voice that wasn’t afraid. Hands that didn’t reach to hurt. A feeling you don’t have a word for anymore because you’ve gone so long without it.

You don’t know what it was. A kindness, maybe, before the world taught you to expect cruelty. A memory from before you understood what you were and what that meant.

You’d buried it. It was easier not to remember that humans could be gentle, easier to believe they were all nets and spears, because then the loneliness of the death-waters felt like safety instead of exile.

But Varka keeps cracking the seal. And the old memory keeps drifting up through the dark, insistent, like something rising toward light. And this memory is turning into this new feeling you have no proper explanation for.

You tell yourself it changes nothing. You’re a siren. He’s a human captain. He’ll find his sword and sail away and the death-waters will close over the strange interlude like water closing over a stone.

That’s how it has to be. You tell yourself this, alone in the cool dark of a drowned ship, running your fingers over a name carved into salt-soft wood.

Then you memorize the name—just in case it’s useful to him—and turn back toward the surface. Toward the ship. Toward him.

— ✦ —

The next time you reach the ship, you wait until the deck is empty. Then you rise just enough to set them on the boards near the rail—the jewelry in a small bright heap, the belt coiled beside it—and you sink back down before anyone can see.

You don’t mean to be there when he finds them. You are anyway, lurking in the dark water, telling yourself you’re only passing by.

Varka comes up at dawn. He stops, looks down at the small pile of salvage on his deck. He picks up the chain, turns it in the early light, then scans the water, and finds you immediately. “Yours?” he asks.

You bristle on instinct. “I found them. In a wreck. They’d only rot down there.” Your reply is defensive, too fast. “You’re a pirate. I assumed you’d want them. Treasure. Isn’t that the whole point of your kind?”

Something crosses his face.

“That’s not what we do,” he says. Mild, but firm. “Not really. We run cargo the honest ships won’t risk. Clear waters of the things that prey on them—you’ve seen that part. Carry word between ports that don’t trust anyone official.”

He sets the chain down. “Treasure’s nice when we find it. I won’t pretend otherwise. But we’re not the story, either. We don’t sink ships for baubles. Most of what the songs say about pirates is about as true as what they say about sirens.”

The parallel lands. You hadn’t expected it.

“Still.” His voice softens. “It’s a kind thing. Thank you.”

You’re already retreating, oddly stung. Because he glanced at the jewelry when he said treasure’s nice, set it aside, and you read it as I don’t need your gesture. The wild prickly part of you decides he’s humoring you.

“It’s nothing,” you say, distant now. “Do what you like with it.”

And you slip beneath the surface before he can answer.

— ✦ —

It’s an ordinary morning when you notice. Varka’s at the rail, sleeves shoved up, going over charts, and around his waist, holding everything in place, is a belt with a heavy, well-made buckle. Not his old one, worn through at the clasp. Yours. The one you left.

He’s wearing it. Has been, you realize, for who knows how long because it’s already softening to the shape of him, already his.

Something turns over in your chest. Warm and entirely unwelcome.

Varka catches you staring. He glances down at the belt, then back at you.

“Mine gave out,” he says. “This one’s better made. Seemed a waste to leave it in a box on my deck.” And then, quieter, with the ghost of a smile: “The jewelry I gave to the crew to trade at the next port. Didn’t think you carved it up out of a wreck for me to hang baubles off myself.” His eyes hold yours. “But the belt I kept. Use something every day, you don’t forget where it came from.”

You don’t have a single thing to say. Varka goes back to his charts like he hasn’t just undone you completely.

You sink lower in the water, watching the way the buckle catches the light at his hip, and feel the odd warm thing settle deeper. The understanding, unwanted and undeniable, that he chose to keep the piece of you he’d use. The practical one. The one that stays close.

You tell yourself it means nothing. (You really are getting tired of lying to yourself.)

— ✦ —

The rhythm changes, as rhythms do.

You range wider now. The storms have passed and the silver has begun creeping back into the death-waters. Small schools at first, then larger, the sea slowly remembering how to feed you.

You find new grounds, too: a cold trench to the east thick with fish, a kelp forest where the currents herd them into easy reach. You don’t go hungry the way you did.

Which means, some mornings, you simply drop the day’s findings on the deck and go. A wordless transaction, the deal humming along in the background of two lives that have their own business to attend to.

Varka has his charts, his lead to chase, his crew to drill. You have your wrecks, your wandering, the wide dark sea that’s always been yours.

You’re each doing your own thing. It’s only that your own things keep, somehow, bringing you back to the same stretch of water.

— ✦ —

You don’t always follow the ship. But you’ve started swimming closer to the inhabited places than you used to. The harbors, the trade-islands, the lantern-lit docks where humans gather.

You tell yourself it’s for intel. Sailors talk, and talk is currency now, something to bring back to a certain captain. But the truth is murkier than that. Some part of you has started to like it. The warmth of it. The music that drifts out over the water. The strange, bright, fragile life of people who don’t know a siren is listening from the dark.

You don’t examine that feeling too closely.

So when the Dandelion’s Flight puts in at a trade-island to restock, you drift in after her, keeping to the deep water beyond the docks, watching the lights.

It’s a rough place. Privateers and honest sailors and the occasional overdressed nobleman, all crammed into taverns that spill noise and lamplight onto the water.

You hear a brawl break out in one of them: shouting, breaking glass, the ordinary violence of too much drink and too little sense. Nothing remarkable. The crew of the Dandelion’s Flight drifts to a quieter tavern down the quay, and you settle in to wait and listen.

It’s much later when you see him.

Varka. Alone. He is moving fast down the dock. Not the easy, unhurried stride you know, but something tight and furious, shoulders rigid, a bottle hanging forgotten from one hand.

He is not drunk. You can tell that much even from the water. But he is not steady, either. Tipped just enough that whatever’s burning in him has slipped the leash he keeps it on.

You’ve never seen him like this.

He reaches the end of the dock and stops. He stands there breathing hard, staring out at the black water like it’s done him a personal wrong. And then he grabs an empty barrel from the dockside and hurls it into the sea.

You’re so startled you nearly give yourself away.

Because this is Varka. The man who didn’t flinch when you bared your teeth, who is, by every account you’ve gathered, the most maddeningly composed person to ever sail these waters. And here he is, on an empty dock at night, throwing barrels into the ocean like a furious boy.

You’re fascinated. You’re a little shocked. You call out before you can think better of it. "You know, most people just yell. The barrel seems excessive.”

He whirls toward your voice. For a moment he just stares at you. And there’s no warmth in it, none of the easy interest you’ve grown used to. Just raw, unguarded anger, looking for somewhere to land.

“What,” he says, low and sharp, “is it to you?”

You bristle. “I happen to live in the thing you’re throwing your tantrum into.”

“Then move.” He turns away. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Clearly.” You surge closer, stung. “What’s wrong with you? You’re not—you’re never like this."

“You don’t know what I’m like.” His voice is cold. “We’ve known each other a couple of weeks. Don’t pretend you’ve got me figured out.”

That lands harder than it should.

“Fine.” You bare your teeth at him, the wild thing rising. "Throw your barrels. Drown your bottle. Sulk on a dock like the whole sea owes you something. I don’t care.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“Because—” You don’t have an answer, and that infuriates you more. "Because you’re being an idiot, and someone should tell you!”

“You’re infuriating.” Varka rounds on you fully now, and there’s something almost desperate under the anger. “You know that? You appear out of nowhere, you nearly capsize my ship, you save it again, you sing like the whole ocean is grieving, and now you won’t even let a man be angry in peace—”

“You sound like you’ve got plenty of practice not being angry!” you snap back. "Maybe that’s the problem!”

The words hang there. And just like that you both stop.

Varka drags in a breath and lets it out slow. You watch him visibly take hold of the fury and force it back down.

“You’re right,” he says finally, rough. “That wasn’t fair. None of that was about you.”

You’re still coiled, still stung, but the calm in him pulls the wild out of you too. “No,” you agree, quieter. “It wasn’t.”

A long silence folllows. The water laps at the dock. And then—because the moment is too heavy and you don’t know what else to do with it—you tilt your head and say, dry as you can manage:

"Well. If you intend to pollute the ocean, you should know I might have a say in the matter. Territorial rights. The barrel’s an act of war.”

Varka blinks. For a heartbeat he just looks at you, thrown completely off his stride. Then something in his face breaks. A startled, helpless huff of something that’s almost a laugh. “An act of war,” he repeats.

“I’m prepared to escalate.”

He sits down heavily on the edge of the dock, then scrubs a hand over his face. And for the first time since you spotted him, the rigid set of his shoulders eases. “You,” he says, “are unbelievable.”

“You’ve mentioned.” You drift closer, settling in the water below where he sits. “What happened in there?”

He’s quiet for a long moment.

You think he won’t answer.

“There was a man in the first tavern. Someone I knew, a long time ago—back when my father was still alive.” He turns the bottle slowly in his hands, not drinking. “He had something that belonged to my family. An old piece. The family sigil’s on it—a wolf.” A flash of bitterness. “Don’t know how he came by it. Stole it, most likely. Picked it up cheap when the household was broken up and sold off, after.” He doesn’t say after what. “Either way. He had no right to it. So I took it back.”

“That’s what angered you? Getting it back?”

“No.” His jaw tightens. “What angered me was what he said. About my father. Casual. Like he had any right to the man’s name.” He stops. “I don’t lose my temper. Not like that. Haven’t in years. But he said it so carelessly, and I just—”

He doesn’t finish.

You understand more than he knows. The way an old grief can sit quiet for years and then surface all at once, wild and ungovernable, at the smallest careless word.

Varka talks, after that. Not easily. But the night is dark and the anger has burned down to embers and maybe there’s something about a creature who lives outside the human world that makes it easier to say things he’s never said on his own deck.

He tells you about his father. The wolf sigil, generations old. The sword, the one he’s chasing through the death-waters, that his father carried and his grandfather before him. How it went down with a ship Varka wasn’t on, and how some part of him has never stopped trying to bring it back up.

He tells you about the household that was broken and sold. The pieces of his family scattered to careless hands like the one in the tavern. How the Dandelion’s Flight and her freedom-flag are the life he built after and how the sword is the one piece of before he refuses to let the sea keep.

“It’s not really about the sword,” Varka admits, somewhere near the end. It’s the most honest thing he’s said all night. “It’s about not letting them take everything. Keeping one thing that was his. That was ours.” A pause. “Stubbornness has its uses.”

The words strike something in you. He said that once before, standing at the rail of his ship while your song tried to drag him toward the rocks.

Back then you’d thought it arrogance. Confidence, perhaps. The sort of easy certainty that seemed woven into him. Now you hear something else in it. Devotion.

You think of the names you’ve read carved into salt-soft wood. The wrecks you’ve started searching with new eyes.

The anger’s burned all the way down now. What’s left is quieter. Looser. Varka turns the bottle in his hands, looks at you, sidelong. “Can I ask you something?”

“You will regardless.”

“Mm. True.” A pause. “That anger. The kind that makes you bare your teeth—the way you did on my deck.” He’s watching you carefully now. “That’s not all instinct. There really is something under it. A person, feeling something. Same as I was, in that tavern.”

You tense. “We’ve already talked about this.”

“Easy.” He lifts a hand, softer than usual. “I’m only trying to figure something out. No need to go defensive on me again.”

And then Varka goes quiet. But it’s not the angry quiet from before.

It’s something else. Something you can feel, even through the dark water. An aura coming off him that isn’t fury, that’s rawer than fury, almost wild at the edges. The same untamed thing that lives in you, surfacing in him.

He doesn’t say anything. He just shifts and leans forward where he sits on the edge of the dock. Closer.

Close enough that if you rose even a little, you’d be near enough to feel the warmth of him, to count the new salt-dried strands of hair against his jaw.

Close enough that something in the air goes taut and humming and dangerous.

And then his hand comes up. The backs of his fingers brush along your cheek, warm and impossibly gentle for a man who hurls barrels into the sea.

You go utterly still.

Varka is not looking at your eyes anymore. He’s looking at where he’s touching you, with an expression you’ve never seen on him. Unguarded and almost lost.

His hand lingers. The whole world narrows to the warmth of it.

You don’t know what breaks it. A shout from a distant tavern. The slap of a wave against the pilings. Something. But you feel the moment he comes back to himself, feel his hand still against your cheek as he realizes he’s doing it.

You break first. You’re sinking back, sending yourself gliding off through the dark water along the line of the dock. Retreating. Your heart is pounding for reasons that have nothing to do with hunger or fear.

Behind you, Varka laughs, warm and amused at your escape. “Hey,” he calls after you, and there’s a tipsy ease in it, an unguarded fondness he’d never let slip sober. “Come back here.”

You slow and glance over your shoulder.

He’s still sitting at the dock’s edge, lit by the harbor lanterns, watching you with that raw open look he hasn’t bothered to put away. “You should never leave good company behind,” he says.

It’s a small thing. A throwaway line. The kind of thing a man says when he’s had a little too much and forgotten to be careful.

But you hear what’s underneath it.

I like having you here.

I don’t want you to go.

You—you specifically—are good company.

I’d rather sit on a cold dock with a siren than be anywhere else tonight.

He doesn’t say any of that.

He thinks about something else, too. You can see it move across his face, there and gone, the thought he doesn’t voice and won’t act on. His eyes drop, just once, to your mouth. Then back up.

He doesn’t move. He’s too disciplined, even now, even tipsy. Even with the wild thing loose in him.

But you felt it. The almost.

And the worst part, the part you carry back into the deep water that night, turning it over, is that you wanted him to do it. Whatever it was. You wanted it so much it frightened you.

Cursed things feel too much, the old songs say.

You’re beginning to understand what they meant.

You drift back toward Varka anyway, closer than before. Because good company goes both ways, and you’re done pretending otherwise tonight.

“You’re maudlin when you drink,” you inform him.

“I’m more direct when I drink.” He settles back, the moment banked but not gone. “There’s a difference.”

“I’ll find it,” you say then. And you mean it. “Your sword. I know these waters. If it’s down there, I’ll find where it fell.”

He looks at you for a long moment. “Why?” he asks. “Why would you care about a dead man’s sword?”

You don’t have an answer. Or you have one, and you’re not ready to say it. “Territorial rights,” you settle on. “Can’t have you cluttering my sea with your unfinished business.”

He huffs that almost-laugh again. “Right,” he says. “Territorial rights.”

You continue talking after that. And above the dock, the dandelion flag stirs in the night wind while you and Varka sit in the dark and let one more wall come quietly down.

— ✦ —

One evening you surface to find the crew gathered on the deck. They are just sitting. A lantern is lit between them, the day’s labor is done, the ship rest at gentle anchor in waters you’ve assured them are safe.

And they’re trading stories. The first mate is in the middle of one that has half the crew groaning and the other half laughing, and Varka is leaning back against the mast with the loose ease of a man entirely at home.

You hover at the edge of the lantern-light, uncertain.

He sees you and lifts a hand. An invitation.

You drift closer. For a while you only listen. They tell stories of ports you’ve never seen, storms they’ve survived, a tavern brawl that grows more impossible with each retelling. It’s strange and warm and utterly human, this circle of light on the dark water, and you find yourself aching at the edge of it in a way that has nothing to do with hunger.

“You’re quiet,” Varka observes eventually. The crew has drifted off in twos and threes. It’s only the two of you now, the lantern burning low. “Sirens don’t tell stories?”

“Sirens don’t usually have an audience that wants to stay near them.”

He huffs a laugh. “Fair.”

You hesitate. Then, because the night is soft and the warmth has loosened something in you: “We did once. Long ago. Before the stories made us monsters.”

You look out at the dark water. “I’ve seen things, you know. It isn’t all hunger and drowning men. I’ve watched whales sing to each other across an entire ocean. Swum beneath ice so clear the moon shone straight through it. Found a city, once, sunk so long ago the coral had made it beautiful again.”

You sigh softly. “My life hasn’t only been this. This empty place. The fear I put in people’s faces. There was wonder, too. I have to remind myself of that, sometimes.”

Varka has gone very still, listening. “Tell me,” he says.

So you do. You tell him about the whales and the ice and the drowned coral city, and he listens completely like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

“Are they all like you?” Varka asks, somewhere in the warm lantern-lit quiet. “Your kind. Do they all see the things you’ve seen? Sing the way you do?”

You’re quiet a moment. “No,” you say finally. “We’re not alike. Not really.” You think of the pale stranger in the cold current, the wrongness in her eyes. “We don’t gather. We don’t talk, much. And the ones I’ve met—they don’t—”

You search for it. “They don’t wonder. About any of it. The ships. The shores. The lives up here in the light.” You look away. “I met one not long ago. She looked at me like I was something broken. Because I linger near the human places. Because I’m curious.” Your voice wavers. “I don’t think I’m like the rest of them. I never have been. I just didn’t have a word for it until she looked at me that way.”

Varka is watching you across the low flame. And he doesn’t say I’m sorry, or that’s sad, or any of the soft useless things a person might. He just looks at you and says: “Well. I knew that from the start.”

You blink. “Knew what?”

“That you weren’t like the stories. Like anything I’d heard.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “First time I saw you, the whole crew was halfway over the rail and you were singing the saddest thing I’d ever heard, and I thought—that’s not a monster’s song.” He pauses. “You were something else. Something I hadn’t met before.” His voice goes quieter. “Unique. I knew it before I knew your name.”

The fire pops. The water laps the hull. And you sit there in the dark, the creature who belongs nowhere, looking at the one person in any world who’s ever made you feel like not belonging might be the same thing as being special.

You don’t have a word for that, either. But for once, you don’t want to bury it. So you keep talking.

At some point, Varka tells you stories too. And your conversation carries on naturally. Quieter than all the other times, and yet charged with something that makes your skin tingle.

Somewhere in the middle of it you both seem to realize, at the same moment, what’s actually happening.

You stop mid-sentence. He notices the same instant.

“This is strange,” you say slowly.

“Mm.” He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “I was just thinking that.”

“You’re a human captain trading stories with a creature you’re supposed to fear.”

“And you’re a siren who saved a ship instead of sinking it.” He shakes his head, something rueful and warm in his expression. “I’ve sailed a long time. Seen most of what these seas have to offer. I never once imagined I’d spend my evenings talking to one of the death-waters’ own like she was—” He reconsiders the word. “Like an old friend. Or, actually, like—” He stops.

Your heart does the painful, bright thing again.

“Every day out here brings something I didn’t expect,” he goes on, quieter, looking at you and not the water. “I thought I was past being surprised by the sea.” He pauses. “Apparently not.”

He doesn’t say you. You both hear it anyway, sitting there in the lantern-light, neither of you willing to name the thing that’s so plainly settling between you.

“Don’t make it strange,” you finally manage.

His mouth curves. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” But he’s still looking at you like you’re the most unexpected and fascinating thing he’s found in all his years at sea.

And you’re still letting him.

— ✦ —

The shift happens quietly. You find a wreck off the northern shoals. The one the sailors whispered about. The one you went looking for after that night on the dock.

An old warship, deep and broken, its hold long since claimed by the dark. And in it, half-buried in silt and the bones of the sea, a chest bearing a sigil you’ve come to know better than you’d like to admit.

A wolf.

You don’t open it. You know what it means.

You bring Varka the location the next morning, and you watch his face change as he understands what you’re telling him.

“That’s it,” he says quietly. “That’s where she went down. My father’s ship.” His hand tightens on the rail. “You found it.”

“I found where,” you correct. “The recovery’s yours. It’s deep, and the currents are bad, and you’ll need divers and time and a great deal of luck.” You pause. “But yes. I found it.”

He looks at you for a long moment.

And you both feel the thing settling between you, unspoken.

The deal is complete.

You guided his charts. You found his sword, or near enough. He fed you through the lean weeks until the sea remembered how to feed you itself. Both halves fulfilled.

Both of you free, now, to go your separate ways—him north to raise a dead man’s blade from the deep, you back to the wide dark solitude that was your whole world before a dandelion flag sailed into it.

That’s how a deal ends. That’s how it’s supposed to end. Neither of you says a word about it.

Instead, you keep coming back.

The reasons get thinner. You don’t need the fish. You tell him about the eastern trench, the kelp forest, and Varka stops sending the catch up as often, and it changes nothing. You come anyway.

Varka doesn’t need your charts—he has his bearings now, his crew already preparing for the long haul north—and still he lingers at the rail when you surface. Still he saves the day’s small stories to tell you, still his eyes find you in the dark water before you’ve even called out.

You’re both pretending not to notice that the thing holding you together has quietly dissolved. That whatever keeps bringing you back now isn’t a bargain. It’s just want.

— ✦ —

The wind is wild the day you almost don’t stop. You’re only swimming a wide arc through the choppy water on your way somewhere else, the sea restless and white-capped, the Dandelion’s Flight riding hard at anchor with most of her crew below decks, sheltering from the gusts.

Most of her crew. Not her captain.

Varka’s up near the wheel.

You slow without deciding to.

He’s training. Alone. He’s just moving, for himself, the way you’d almost forgotten a body could move when no one’s watching it. A slow, deliberate sequence of strikes and turns against nothing but the wind, sleeves gone, shirt half-open and snapping around him, the muscle of his back and shoulders working as he flows from one form to the next.

The deck pitches under him. The gale tears at his hair. And he moves with it, using the roll of the ship, letting the wind be part of the dance instead of an enemy.

You forget, entirely, where you were going. You watch far too long before you find your voice. And when you do, it comes out sharper than you mean, because being caught staring makes you defensive even with yourself.

“You do know the wind’s wild today?” you call up. “Or are you too absorbed in whatever that is to notice the sea’s trying to throw you off your own deck?”

Varka doesn’t stop mid-form, exactly. He just turns and looks back at you over his shoulder, hair whipping, a grin breaking across his face. “I’m a captain on a ship,” he says, “who, once in a while, helps out sirens, as it seems.” The grin sharpens. “I can assure you—I thrive in the wild.”

And he holds your gaze when he says it.

You are, for one humiliating moment, completely stunned. Because of the way he tosses those words at you, daring and bright. No one has ever spoken to you so freely.

It does something to you. Something unraveling.

Before the prickly part can stop you, you say: “Careful, Captain. The sea’s thrown wilder things than you off their feet.” You pause. “I’d know. I’ve been most of them.”

Varka blinks. Then he makes a delighted sound. “Did you just make a joke?”

Heat rushes up your neck. “The wind must’ve been whispering things to you.”

“No. No, that was definitely—” he’s grinning so wide now it’s infuriating “—that was a joke. From the fearsome siren of the death-waters. I’m honored.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“Of course not.”

And then, because you can’t let him have the last word, you give your tail a single sharp flick beneath the surface and throw a sheet of water up the hull, a wild glittering arc of it that catches Varka square across the chest.

He staggers back a step, soaked, laughing, head thrown back, the sound of it ringing out over the wind.

“That’s for the harpoon comment I’m sure you were thinking,” you inform him primly.

“I wasn’t!”

“You were.”

“I—” He wipes water from his face, still grinning. “Mm. I might’ve been.”

You’re both laughing now like neither of you has ever been dangerous a day in your lives.

It doesn’t fit. That’s the thought that surfaces through the laughter, sudden and unsettling. This doesn’t fit. None of this fits. You’re a creature of the deep and he’s a man of the surface and the world has spent centuries insisting you’re meant to drown each other.

And here you are, soaking him through on a wild bright afternoon, more at ease than you’ve been in longer than you remember, possibly your entire existence.

You catch the same realization moving across his face, the laughter fading into something more careful. Both of you are suddenly aware of how natural this was. How little either of you reached for it. How neither of you is remotely prepared for whatever’s happening here.

“I should go,” you say.

“Probably,” he says although his voice suggests otherwise.

Neither of you moves.

The wind howls. The waves crash. And you stay a moment longer than you should, two wild things blinking at each other across the rail, apparently equally confused and equally unwilling to be the first to leave. Then you slip under, finally, your heart doing the inconvenient thing again.

Behind you, faint over the gale, you hear him say to no one in particular: “Huh.”

You understand the feeling completely.

— ✦ —

In the spaces between, alone in the deep, you’ve started looking for something of your own.

You tell yourself it’s idle curiosity. You’re a liar. You admitted this to yourself by now.

You seek out the old places. The drowned shrines, the ancient wrecks, the rare cold currents where the eldest things drift. You’re chasing the lore you threw at Varka that night like armor: human once. Cursed. Drowned and remade.

You want to know if it’s true. You want to know if the old songs say anything about the curse running the other way.

You even seek out the pale stranger again who looked at you like you were broken. You ask her, in the wordless way, whether the stories are real. Whether a siren can become what she was before.

She recoils from the question like it burns.

Why, she seems to say, horror and something like pity in it, would you ever want to be something so small? So mortal? So easily drowned?

You don’t have an answer she’d understand. But you have one.

You just keep it to yourself, the way you keep the buckle-light at his hip and the almost on the dock and the sound of him saying good company. A small, fierce, impossible hope, gathered in the dark and guarded like a pearl.

Human once, you think, drifting back toward a ship you have no practical reason left to visit. Maybe human again.

You don’t know if it’s possible. You’ve decided to find out.

— ✦ —

You should have known the death-waters wouldn’t let it stay so simple. They never give anything freely.

The storm comes from the south, faster than any storm should.

You feel the pressure dropping, the currents turning frantic, the deep going cold and wrong in a way that prickles every instinct you have. The sea you’ve lived in your whole life suddenly feels like a stranger.

You’ve felt this before, only once, a long time ago, when you first came to these waters and learned why even other monsters avoid them.

“Varka.” You surge up against the hull, voice cutting through the rising wind. “Varka!”

He’s at the railing in an instant, reading your face. “What is it?”

“You have to get out of these waters. Now. Whatever’s coming—”

The sea answers before you can finish. The water erupts.

A tentacle the width of a mast breaks the surface fifty yards out, streaming black water, suckers the size of shields catching the storm-light. Then another. Then another. Rising and rising until they blot out the horizon, until the thing beneath them lifts a bulk so vast the swells it pushes nearly capsize the ship on their own.

A kraken.

Old. Enormous. Woken from the deep by the storm, or by hunger, or by nothing at all but the ancient cruelty of the death-waters.

The crew doesn’t panic.

That’s the first thing that strikes you, even through your own terror. They don’t panic, because he doesn’t. Varka’s voice rises over the storm, hard and clear and absolutely steady, and his men move, fast and certain, because their captain has not for one instant looked like a man who expects to die.

“Hard to starboard! Get us out of its reach! Loose the deck cannons—aim for the eyes, nothing else will matter!”

He fights.

And now you understand the legend of him, the famous captain who sails where others won’t. He’s everywhere at once, hauling a man back from a sweeping tentacle, putting his own blade through a limb thick as a tree, shouting orders that turn chaos into something almost like a dance.

The cannons roar. The kraken shrieks—a sound that shakes the water in your bones.

For a moment, you almost believe he’ll win.

He’s that good. That fearless. That impossibly, brilliantly alive in the middle of something that should be his death.

But the kraken is the sea’s own child, and the sea does not lose in its own house.

A tentacle catches the mainmast and pulls. Timber screams. The ship lists hard, taking on water, and you see Varka go down, just long enough for your heart to stop, before he’s up again, blood at his temple, dragging a half-conscious crewman toward the rail.

And you realize, with terrible clarity, that fearless is not the same as invincible.

That he is going to die here. That all of them are.

Unless.

You promised yourself you wouldn’t sing again. Not the luring song. Not anything that used what you are as a weapon. But this is something older.

You dive into the heart of the churning dark where the kraken’s bulk hangs vast and ancient and you open your throat and you sing.

To the sea itself.

You sing the death-waters the way you’ve never let yourself sing them. Every rock and current and bone you’ve memorized in your long loneliness.

Every secret of this drowned and dangerous place, pouring it all into a song that isn’t a lure or a threat but a command, because these are your waters, this terrible empty place that starved you and sheltered you, and it will listen.

The currents answer. The sea turns.

You feel the kraken’s confusion as the water itself seems to push against it, as the storm bends, as the deep that birthed the creature now seems to call it home.

You sing of darkness and depth and the cold quiet far below where ancient things belong. You make it a lullaby, you make it a tide, you make it irresistible.

The kraken stills. Then, slowly, it sinks. Down. And down. And gone. The storm breaks apart above you like it was never there.

You surface, gasping, spent, the song having taken more than you knew you had to give.

The sea is calm.

Varka is staring at you like he’s never seen you before. “Out there,” he says, and his voice isn’t quite steady, “that was not luring.”

“No.”

“You commanded the sea.”

“I told you. It listens to me sometimes.” You hold his gaze. “When it matters enough.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, taking you in—the exhaustion, the way the song has hollowed you out again, the fact that you spent yourself completely to save a ship of humans you have every reason to fear.

“You saved us,” he says quietly.

“I’m aware.”

“You could have let the sea take us and gone back to your peace.”

“I’m aware of that too.”

The look on his face is anything but strange. It’s wonder. He’s quiet for a moment. “Thank you,” he says.

You only find gratitude, plain and warm. You don’t know what to do with it.

The Dandelion’s Flight is hurt. Badly but not dead.

The kraken took the mainmast halfway down. The rigging hangs in ruin and there’s a breach below the waterline where a tentacle caved the hull. She’s taking water. Under any other circumstances she’d be following the kraken down into the dark.

But the sea is glass now. Still as a held breath, because you’re holding it. You’re keeping the currents gentle, the swells low, the water that should be flooding her hold pressing in slow instead of fast. You bought them the calm. The calm is the only reason she floats.

“She’ll sink if we stay out here,” Varka says, bloodied and soaked, already doing the grim arithmetic of a captain counting his losses. “We need land. Somewhere to beach her, patch the hull—”

“East,” you say. “There’s an island. Half a day, no more, if you run with the current.” You’re already moving, already certain. “Sheltered cove on the leeward side. Shallow enough to beach her, calm enough to work. I’ll guide you through the rocks.” You smile. “And I’ll keep the sea quiet the whole way. She won’t go down. Not while I’m under her.”

He looks at you. “Then lead,” he says.

So you do.

It’s slow, careful work: a wounded ship limping east through waters you smooth ahead of her like a hand pressing wrinkles from cloth.

You swim beneath her keel the whole way, singing the currents soft, easing her over the worst of the shoals. When the hull groans and the water gains, you press the sea back and buy them another mile.

By the time the island rises green out of the haze, you’re exhausted in a way the kraken-song alone didn’t manage. But she floats.

You bring them into the sheltered cove as the light goes gold, and the crew runs her gently aground on the pale sand, and the Dandelion’s Flight settles at last. Broken but whole enough.

Alive. Like her captain. Like you.

They make camp on the crescent of beach.

The repairs will take days. You hear them tallying it that first evening, around the fire: timber to cut, the hull to patch, a jury-rig for the mast until they can make a proper port. Days of work before the Dandelion’s Flight can sail again.

You tell yourself you’re only staying to be sure the cove stays calm.

You’re still a liar. But the lie buys you days, and you’ve learned to be grateful for what the sea gives.

— ✦ —

You shouldn’t come back. You know this.

You should slip back into the deep and let Varka sail away and forget the strange days when a starving siren and a stubborn captain made a deal in death-waters.

That would be the sensible thing. You’ve never been good at sensible.

So you come back. The night before he’s meant to leave, you swim to the little island and find him already there, sitting on the sand, looking out at the water, as if he’d been waiting. As if he knew.

“You came,” he says.

“Apparently.”

His mouth quirks. “I’m glad.”

You settle in the shallows near him, close enough now that closeness has stopped being frightening. The moon lays a silver road across the water. The fish have started coming back—you noticed it days ago, the silver returning to the dark, the hunger finally easing.

Varka notices you noticing. “The waters are recovering,” he says.

“They are.”

“So you’ll be alright. After I’m gone.”

You don’t answer right away. Because alright isn’t the same as unchanged, and you don’t know how to explain that the empty dark felt different before it had a stubborn human leaning over a railing in it.

“There are stories,” you say instead. “Old ones. About my kind. That under the right circumstances—rare ones—we can become something else. Walk on land. Lose the song. Trade the sea for—” You stop.

He’s watching you very closely now. “For?” he prompts.

“I don’t know if they’re true.” You look away. “Probably not. Just stories sailors tell.”

“Mm.” He’s quiet for a long moment. “I’ve found that stories sailors tell are wrong about as often as they’re right.” He looks back at the water. “Which is to say—not always wrong.”

Your heart does something painful. “You have a sword to find,” you say.

“I do.”

“North, then. Past the rocks,” you say. “Once she sails again. To raise your father’s sword from the deep.”

“North.” He nods, watching the firelight on the water. “It’ll take time. A proper crew, a proper port to refit. But yes. I’ll have it. Finally.”

“And after?” The question lands softer than you mean it.

He goes quiet. For long enough that you think he won’t answer. When he does, there’s something in his voice you haven’t heard before. Not the captain. Not even the man who opened up on the dock. Something younger. More uncertain.

“I don’t know,” Varka admits. “I’ve never let myself think past it.” A rueful breath. “That’s the truth of it. There’s always been a next thing—a next mission, a next stretch of water, a next piece of my family to pull back from wherever it scattered to. The sword was always the end of the road. I never bothered imagining what’s beyond it, because the road never ran out before.” He turns the thought over. “It’s about to. And I find I don’t know what I want.”

“You must want something.”

“Mm.” A long pause. Then, quietly, like a confession, he adds: “There’s a place. I read about it once, years ago—an old account, half legend. An island, far past the charted waters. They say the wind there never stops singing and the whole sky goes green with light at night, and that no flag has ever flown over it because no one’s ever stayed long enough to plant one.”

His mouth curves, almost embarrassed. “A free place. Beholden to no one. I used to think about sailing there just to see it. To stand somewhere no one’s ever told me what I’m supposed to be.” He shakes his head. “Foolish. A captain’s daydream.”

“It’s not foolish,” you say.

He glances at you.

“It sounds like the most honest thing you’ve ever wanted,” you go on. “More than the sword. The sword is for him—your father. The blood. The past.” You hold his gaze. “But that island. That’s for you.”

Something moves across his face. Like you’ve named a thing he didn’t have words for himself.

“Maybe it is,” he says slowly. “Maybe that’s where the sea leads us, after. Find the sword. Settle the past.” His eyes find yours in the dark. “And then go looking for a place that’s only mine. That I chose.” Quieter. “I think I’d like that. Having something I chose, for once. Sailing toward something instead of back to something.”

The fire crackles. The unspoken thing sits between you, warm and enormous.

Would you come, Varka doesn’t ask. Would you be part of the something I choose.

I don’t know if I can, you don’t answer. But I’m trying to find out. I’m trying to make myself into something that could.

Neither of you says it. But the dream is out in the open now, and it hangs there like a horizon you might both, someday, sail toward.

“When you find it,” you say instead, “the singing-wind island. You’ll have to tell me if it’s real.”

“You could come and see for yourself,” Varka says lightly.

“Maybe,” you whisper. “Maybe I will.”

It feels like a door.

The horizon suddenly feels less distant than it did a moment ago. And for the first time in longer than you can remember, you want to give something freely. “Sit,” you tell him. “And listen.”

Varka raises an eyebrow but obeys, settling back on the wet sand.

You take a breath. And you sing. Something you haven’t let yourself sing in years, something with no purpose at all except its own beauty. Just a song.

The kind your kind sang once, long ago, before the stories made monsters of you. When sirens sang simply because the world was vast and strange and worth singing to.

You sing the moon on the water and the silver returning to the deep. You sing a stubborn man at a railing who refused to drown. You sing the small impossible warmth of being seen.

It’s not a weapon. It’s a gift.

When you finish, the night is very quiet.

Varka hasn’t moved. He’s watching you with an expression you’ve never seen on him. Something raw.

“That,” he says softly, “was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It wasn’t meant to do anything.” Your voice is unsteady. “I just wanted you to hear it. Before you go. The way it’s supposed to sound. When it isn’t trying to hurt anyone.”

“I know.” He hasn’t looked away. “That’s what makes it beautiful.”

The space between you has gone very small.

“You’ll forget it,” you say. “Out there. Chasing your sword. Looking for that island. The sea’s a big place and I’m just—”

“I won’t forget it.” Quiet. Certain. The same voice that turned chaos into order on a dying deck. “I’ve spent my whole life sailing toward things. Glory. Duty. A blade at the bottom of the sea.” He pauses. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to sail back to something before.”

Your heart does something painful and bright. “That could take a long time,” you whisper.

“It could.”

“You’d come back anyway.”

“I’d come back anyway.” No hesitation. “I’m told I’m difficult to move once I’ve made up my mind.”

Varka reaches out, slow, giving you every chance to pull away. You don’t.

His hand finds yours in the shallows. Warm and careful, the way it was the first time. But this time his fingers close around yours, and he pulls gently, leaving you all the room in the world to refuse.

You don’t.

You let him draw you up out of the water, up the slope of wet sand to where he sits, until you’re tucked against him, your back to his chest.

His arms come around you, and he holds you there, in the place where the sea meets the land, where neither of you quite belongs and both of you somehow fit.

The water laps around you both. You feel the sea wicking up through his shirt where you’re pressed against him, the cold of it, the wet.

Varka doesn’t shift away. He doesn’t try to keep some dry part of himself clear of you. He just holds you, and lets the sea soak him through.

You nuzzle closer and press your cheek against his chest, over the steady drum of his heart, and feel his arms tighten in answer. His chin comes to rest atop your head. And you stay like that, both of you looking out at the silver road the moon lays across the dark water.

The waves come and go. And the sea holds the two of you gently in its shallows, patient as the tide, for as long as the moment can last.

He’s warm against the cold water. You’re cool against his warmth.

And in the place where you meet, something settles that neither of you has the words for.

It isn’t a promise spoken aloud. But then, the sea carries some things farther than words ever could. And for now that’s enough.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. :) I had entirely too many ideas for this concept, which is probably obvious by now. Somewhere along the way this stopped being “the pirate Varka fic” and turned into a story about loneliness, belonging, sea legends, impossible hopes, and two stubborn people who kept finding reasons to come back.

There are still a lot of unexplored waters out there for them (and for me). For now, though, I wanted to leave them here. :) Thank you for sailing with me. I hope you enjoyed the fic.💙

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