#faerylie

Sailor!Fae is part of the Royal Navy and loves her job. She’s nothing special, just a sailor and a soldier, strong and healthy and generally down to earth. Despite being surrounded by sailors on a regular basis she’s not one for superstition and myths so when the ship passes by a cove renowned for shipwrecks caused by siren songs she ignores the crews’ nervous chattering and continues about her work.

Teyla the Grey and her ‘sisters’ are responsible for a huge portion of the shipwrecks. They’re a small group of ethereally beautiful and irresistibly alluring mermaid sirens who use every trick in the book to lure men at sea to their watery (and extremely bloody) graves. Usually they seduce them into the cove with song, stay by their ship occasionally boarding to secure their meals with flirtatious chatter and the occasional sexual act, and then in the dead of night when they’re too drunk or exhausted to fight back, they drag them down to the seabed and devour them.

Luckily for them, most of the Royal Navy is comprised of men as the magic of their songs seem to only work on men.

Unluckily for Teyla she’s not super interested in luring men and although she partakes in the meals her sisters bring home, she rarely boards any ship, only hosts intellectual and subtly flirtatious conversation and never performs any sexual acts. She’s quiet, aggressive and unlike her sisters, kind of wants to just be able to sing for someone and know they love her without her magic.

So of course the ship that Fae is on, a precious cargo of gold and jewellery and gems, spices and herbs, silks and exotic fabrics, is targeted by the siren sisters. They insist that Teyla joins them this time because they want the loot and they’ll need to kill all the men on board. Begrudgingly she joins them, sings with them until the captain has loosed the anchor.

When the men aboard the ship say there’s mermaids in the water, Fae doesn’t believe them and makes a beeline for the navigator and captain, agitated by the sudden change of direction. When she finds them lowering the life boats and looks over she sees, for the first time ever, two of the mermaid sisters and she’s stunned because...how are these real? And then she realises why they’ve stopped and starts to panic. If the stories are real then they’re all in grave danger.

Except there’s beautiful singing and each man aboard seems totally captivated.

Fae’s about to slap one of the crew’s hands away from the lifeboat winch to send the sirens back down but, of course, in true romance style, she catches the dark eyes of a very unenthusiastic looking mermaid and just kind of...pauses.

The siren seems immediately startled and grabs the banister across the side of the boat, pulling herself into a seated position and inquisitively studying the feminine figure before her. This was her first time seeing a human woman in the flesh and she’s all about it.

“What are you doing out here?” Teyla almost gasps, “Is their song...?” “No. Can you get them to stop? I know...about...your lot. Please leave us be.”

There’s no promise not to eat the crew, but Teyla seems to negotiate the length of time she’ll keep her sisters from dragging them all down to their deaths. She says they have no power over Fae and that if she wanted to leave she should take a boat and go now. Her stubborn sense of duty makes her stay, but as she spends more and more days with Teyla, naturally she figures she’s got a bit of a crush on the siren and takes herself and Teyla in a lifeboat to a cave in the cove to discuss what’s going to happen...