It’s based off this amazing fanart I found off Pinterest (no clue who the artist is):
pairing: Merfolk!Cardan x Pirate!Jude
a/n: I haven’t wrote a fic since I was about 13 years old, so the grammar could be shit in this since I didn’t check. Also, this ideas been living in me head for the last few days and I have had no sleep because of it. Also sorry it’s so short
The legends said you had to use a net weighted with black stones, and Jude had spent most of her life dismissing legends, but she was practical enough to pack the stones anyway.
A collector in the Port had offered enough gold to keep her crew fed and her ship seaworthy through two winters. Bring me one alive, he'd said. Jude had taken his coin and spent the voyage trying not to think too hard about what one referred to.
It was Vivienne who spotted the disturbance first — a flash of something beneath the surface, iridescent and deeply wrong — and Jude gave the order to cast the net before she'd fully decided she was ready to, partially from excitement, but mainly from the urge to get it over with.
The net came over the railing and hit the deck, and nothing could have prepared her for it. His tail alone was longer than she was tall, dark-scaled and powerful enough to crack the planks and send two of her crew stumbling. She put her boot on the net and made herself look at him directly, because looking away felt like the more dangerous option.
His eyes were the colour of deep water before weather turned. They fixed on her with an intelligence and a fury that she hadn't fully anticipated, even knowing what she was hunting. She had expected something more animal. Something easier.
Her heart was doing something loud and unhelpful. She kept her face still.
"Release me," he said, and his voice resonated strangely, layered in a way that seemed to bypass her ears entirely, and she felt the pull of it like a current she had to consciously lean against.it was beautiful and haunting all at once.
"No," she said, and was relieved to hear herself sound even.
He shifted his attention to her crew, cataloguing them the way you catalogued a problem you intended to solve, and then back to her. "Release me now and I'll see your ship safely to whatever port you're headed. You have my word." His voice dropped, quieter, more deliberate. "You don't want to do this. Let me go."
"Rope," said Jude over her shoulder. "And the barrel."
He fought them the whole time, which she had expected, and it was awful in a way she filed away to not think about until later. It took most of her crew and a great deal of cursing to get him secured, and the barrel was, as it turned out, nowhere near large enough — it had seemed plenty big when they'd loaded it empty into the hold, and considerably less so now, with him folded into it up to the chest, his tail draped over the side in a way that would have been almost comical if his expression weren't quite so murderous. Water sloshed over the deck with every roll of the ship. His bound arms were braced against the rim and his dark eyes tracked her across the deck with a patience that felt, somehow, more threatening than the struggling had.
She made herself hold his gaze for a moment before she turned away, because she was the captain and her crew was watching and that was what captains did.
Then she went below, to her cabin, and sat down on the edge of her bunk and put her face in her hands.
Her hands were shaking. She let them, since there was nobody here to see it.
One alive, the collector had said, as though it were simple. She stared at the floor and listened to the water against the hull and thought about the way his voice had pulled at something beneath her ribs, and thought about his eyes following her, patient and dark, over the rim of a whiskey barrel with his tail hanging off the side, and thought about the two winters of gold that made all of it worth it and was becoming, with every passing minute, considerably harder to hold onto.
She pressed her hands flat against her knees and made them still.
Above her the ship creaked onward, and she sat in the dark of her cabin and did not think about what was on deck, and mostly failed.
