prelude : let him drown [NON-COMPETITIVE RP]

She told me that my father died at sea.

Just how he died tended to change by the day, guided by the ebb and flow of her moods-- and if you think a river being able to flow backwards is the limit of what tides can do, then you've obviously never met my mother. Just how brutal his final hours were depended on the day and her whims, on if she got good news from the publisher or the far more likely outcome of yet another rejection letter. There were rarely any days of death being peaceful for Davy Bateson. Sometimes it was a storm that obliterated his boat and him right along with it, other times it was bloodthirsty pirates from Somalia or maybe Ghana... anywhere that sounded exotic to her was good enough fodder. I cringe now, but when I was younger? I ate it all up, let her reduce people I'd never met into props for her purposes-- although they were hardly alone in that exploitation. Her favorite tales of my father's death involved creatures from the deep rising up to slay and consume him for daring to lay with their most beloved of daughters, after all. Whales, sharks, marlins, kelpies, sirens, krakens, merpeople... whether or not they were real didn't mean a damn thing to her. I mean, so long as she could have found a way to make it interesting, I'm sure she would have come up with a way for my father to die by sea cucumber.

...upon further thought, I find it more likely she just kept that particular story to herself instead of scarring my five-year-old brain with it.

"Your father was... mm, he was a very brave man," she told me as she gently ran a washcloth over my arm. It was about the only time she'd have her hair up, when she was giving me a bath-- and even then, there were more than a few dark strands that escaped her barrette. Nothing could ever contain my mother for long, not even if she acquiesced to it. The steam filled the air with the scent of the ocean, hints of sandalwood and the incense I'd only know came from churches when my old religion (Moira Gordon-ism) was no longer in my life. "Even though he knew it meant certain death, he came to my bed for a night of passion while he was on shore leave one night. I never saw him again after he left the next morning." Her lips, so full, pulled themselves in a smile that all but drowned in melancholy. It was the perfect hook to draw me in... and back then?

I didn't know any better, so I bit down just like I was supposed to.

"What happened to him after that?" My gaze turned toward her, eyes large and black as a baby seal's in the candlelit darkness, so desperate to hear more that I could taste it. Whatever she saw was enough to take the sadness from her smile, leaving nothing but happiness in its wake. She was my sun and moon in that moment, and I felt... I felt so lucky to be in her light, to have been carved from legend and sea foam in her likeness. Her hand stroked bare fingers along my cheek.

"Well," she said, "he went back out to sea. He had a spice run to make, if memory serves." The hand bearing the washcloth disappeared beneath the frothy surface of the bathwater, gathering up suds anew to wash my other arm. "Anyway, he was on the night watch one evening when he heard singing... singing that sounded like mine. Rushing over to the railing, he looked down into the waves-- and do you know what he saw?" At my head shaking no, she continued, her voice picking up the cadence it always had when she was spinning one of her yarns. "He saw me staring up at him for an instant before I beckoned him beneath the waves and vanished in a flick of flippers and dark fur... and the fool man followed the unspoken request to join me. He thought that I had come to court him for another night, but unfortunately for him? It was another of our kind, a selkie sister that was jealous of the fun I had with him. She devoured him beneath the waves, denying him the comfort of her seal's skin-- and what would that have done, my little one?"

"It would have, uh... it would have let him breathe?" I tried so hard to not sound like I was guessing, but there's only so much guile a child could have at such a young age. It didn't matter, though, since I was rewarded with the bell-like chiming of her laughter, her own dark eyes lighting up as if the stars within had finally remembered to shine.

"Exactly right, Brenna." Her lips pressed to my scalp, the wet silk of my hair disregarded. "Your father thought that my seal's skin was something he had earned by sharing a bed with me, but he hadn't. No man can ever truly earn the right to own you, so don't ever let one think he deserves it. And if he does anyway..?" Now this one was the test, I'd realize looking back, her way of making sure I was learning what she wanted me to learn and thinking what she wanted me to think. Growing up in her own perfect, twisted image was exactly what she wanted-- and this was the first time she'd directly done something to ensure that was what was happening. The words she wanted me to say tasted like ash even back then, hollow and wrong somehow despite how her smile spread upon hearing me say it. It wouldn't be until I was older that I would understand why.

"Then I... I let him drown."