by the beautiful sea | Chris/Isaac | PG-13

He’s old, and he’s weary, and he thinks with dark amusement that it won’t be long now until his bones begin to creak, and what then?

Chris Argent has become a specialist in understanding the passage of time, and in telling apart all the little ways in which a place can be empty. His house is empty with the choking, claustrophobic emptiness of a place that everybody has abandoned, be it to move on with their lives, or just to move on, somewhere.

He buys a new house, by the sea. It’s just as empty, but it’s smaller, so there aren’t so many places for the memories to gather like dust motes. He doesn’t pack them when he’s moving out, but of course some of them cling, pressed like flowers between the pages of a book.

The beach close to his house is empty, but it’s empty in ways that let Chris breathe, open and infinite. He could walk all his life, and the small rocks under his feet and the steely vastness of the salt-smelling water would never end.

Often, when the sun sets, Chris goes for walks by the sea. It’s dark, and the stars and the moon aren’t quite enough to allow him to see, so his walks often turn into stumbles. That’s why Chris treads very carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He’s a man who, if he were to fall one more time, may very well not be able to pick himself back up.

Chris watches the ground in front of him more than he watches the sea. And maybe that destroys the whole purpose of taking a walk by the sea, but it allows him to notice the pale, lifeless body washed onto the shore.

Chris’s foot slips on the rocks, and he falls to one knee next to the boy – the corpse, he thinks, for surely no living person’s skin should be almost silver in the scarce moonlight – the pain grounding against the onslaught of numbing shock. The boy is luminescent; his eyes are closed, but look swollen nevertheless; and his lips are blue. It’s just his hair that is honey-warm, plastered to his brow.

Chris lets his eyes slide along the sharp, thin lines of the boy’s neck and his torso, over the ribcage that looks like it may collapse if Chris touches it, and down to where the skin of the boy’s waits becomes harder and more shiny, forming small, perfectly-shaped scales. The scales cover a long, muscular tail that ends in a fin. The fin is frayed, and though it isn’t bleeding, it’s oddly darker against the tangle of seaweeds.

Chris lives as far from civilisation as he can, and he doesn’t even have cell phone reception here. He thinks about that in the context of maybe calling the police, but then his eyes refocus on the fin, and the idea gets washed away.

Washed away, like the body will, come the high tide.

Chris is still kneeling over the boy – the mermaid, the siren, the rusalka would all fit, but this one is clearly male, his mythology-schooled mind suggests helpfully – so when his chest moves, up-down-up, and a small breath that is more of a sigh escapes him, Chris notices.

And then he’s pushing his arms under the unconscious – not dead, oh thank god, thank god, not dead – body and hoisting himself up, dragging the boy with him. The mermaid, because Chris decides to just put the proper terminology issue aside – the mermaid is quite heavy, and his skin is parchment-dry. Chris winces as he walks, both from the smarting of his knee and from the metallic sound the scales of the boy’s tail make as they drag over the rocky beach.

The walk back home usually takes Chris about ten minutes. This time, it’s painful three quarters of an hour that leave Chris’s breath a rasping noise, his back and arms a dull ache, and his clothes wet with sweat.

Manoeuvring the doors open and making his way through too-small passages of the house consumes a few more precious minutes, and by the time Chris deposits the mermaid in the bathtub, he thinks he may very well be too late. Later he’ll be surprised at himself that he haven’t thought about what will he do with a dead mermaid.

Now he’s surprised that he’s had enough strength to do this.

Chris plugs up the bathtub, turns on the cold water faucet as far as it will go, and sits on the porcelain edge of the tub. It fills slowly, but the boy is breathing, and as Chris watches, the tail stirs. Chris rolls his shoulders in a vain attempt at getting rid of the tension in his muscles.

He can’t think of anything else he could do, so he just waits. When the water fills up the tub to the point of nearly spilling over the edge, he turns the faucet off, and pokes gingerly at the scrapes and bruises gaining colours on his knee.

When he looks at the mermaid again, the mermaid is looking back. He has wide eyes, very blue and very unblinking, a bit like the sea in their shade, but really, more like the breadths of the sky. Chris stares, transfixed, and the boy makes himself more comfortable, bracing himself on the edge of the bathtub to pull his body into a sitting position, so that more of the tail is in the water.

All through this, he doesn’t break eye-contact with Chris, and Chris doesn’t look away, either. He wants to, but he doesn’t, even as the mermaid’s arms reach out, and his long, cold fingers catch at Chris’s neck and fist into the jacket that he somehow still has on.

The boy tugs him forward, and Chris realises that he wants to pull him in, just like he would pull a person into the sea, to capture and to drown. He goes out of his own free will, lets himself fall, barely even supporting himself against hitting an elbow or a hand on the unforgiving surfaces of the tub.

Two things hit Chris at the same moment: the water, colder than it has any right to be, turning the mare of his bones to ice; and the mermaid’s lips on his, warm, soft, deceitfully human.