If Happy Ever After Did Exist

Chapter 1

If happy ever after did exist,

I would still be holding you like this.

All these fairytales are full of shit,

One more fucking love song,

I’ll be sick.

See, this, this right here, this is the reason why Yuzuki absolutely never wanted to fall in love. Ever.

Right in front of her is the woman who started this whole thing - Her Serene Majesty, the Queen Yukari - and the rather gaudy, generically attractive man who she guesses to be the woman's new King. The man who claimed to be the one who the now-Queen had been waiting for all along, the one who saved her from drowning - the man who was the reason why Yuzuki no longer had an elder brother.

Ah, Ryousuke, her elder brother, prince of the seven seas. Lost to love and loss and heartbreak, now nothing more than seafoam over the waves of the ocean. Yuzuki remembers how she had enchanted shorn-off strands of her own flaxen-yellow hair, used her own budding magic to fashion it into the dagger that would've spilled the princess' blood and returned her brother's magnificent, golden-scaled fish tail. Remembers her brother taking the blade from her hands with trembling, reverent fingers, how she had swum away then, with a spring to her motions because after that day her brother will return, that woman will be forgotten, and they would be fine. They are family and they would be all right.

Only for her heart - the one that many a gossiping mermaid had said was actually made of stone - to shatter as she saw her brother, the only family she had left, fling himself off the edge of the Princess' ship, choosing the woman's life over his own.

At that moment - as well as all the other moments that followed - Yuzuki wishes her heart actually was made out of stone. It would've made things easier.

It would be but the work of a moment for her to kill the royal family, as well as everyone else in attendance, especially when considering the spellbound look on everyone’s faces as they took her in – from her shapely, human-esque upper body, to the tentacles that were barely hidden by the constricting skirts of her gown, and the dark, sinister aura everywhere else in between.

She didn’t always have the dark mass of tentacles she now used as legs, no. Yuzuki used to have a beautiful tail – evenly-scaled and sunshine-golden-hued, like the one her brother gave up for the sake of love. A fish tail fit for nothing less than the finest of royalty, for the prince and princess of the seven seas.

But the waters no longer have a Prince. They no longer have a Princess, either.

The only thing left is her, Yuzuki, Queen of the Ocean Deep, the most fearsome and forbidding being from here to either of the Poles, a master of dark magic, the fallen Ryousuke’s little sister, and everyone else’s greatest nightmare.

“Your...Majesty,” Queen Yukari breaths, haltingly, her hands gripping the arms of her throne so tightly the knuckles have grown white. Does she see the resemblance? Yuzuki fervently hopes she does. “You must be...Queen Yuzuki.”

“What a nice little party you’ve gotten here, Your Highness.” Yuzuki smiles, with a serenity as cutting as the blade should’ve been against Princess Yukari’s heart. “Royalty, nobility, the gentry – oh, how cute! Even the swine, too!”

As she says this she fixes her insensitively innocent look the direction of the other throne – this Maeno-something who took the love that was meant to be her brother’s and acquired it for himself. He is worse than swine and worse than the unknown and what Yuzuki wants to do, what she really wants to do, is to skin him alive and slice him into fish food as he screamed for the mercy she would never give him, the mercy he never gave the mute blond who loved a Princess more than life itself. But she cannot do it – not with the white magic mistresses at his side, stealing glances at Yuzuki and whispering to themselves.