"Very well, little mermaid, I shall accept your challenge."
"It wasn't a challenge you filthy-"
"I, Alexander vow to make you love me before the spell shall break."
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Neris was a mermaid who was very well aquatinted with regret, they were practically old friends. She had first known regret as a child when she broke her parents favourite vase whilst playing with her sisters. But ripping a friendship apart was not the same as smashing a vase. The vase was fixed by the next day, but Neris feared her and Alexander might never repeat what had been broken.
Their friendship had not been simple, and had been built on afternoons of not total hatred and one night when Neris saw a glimpse into what makes a monster. She had felt - for a fleeting moment - that her and the human prince might have been something for just one night. Something more than the cruel human prince and the wilful mermaid princess.
But reality came knocking and then in a moment of rage Neris had ruined something that was fragile beyond repair. She'd blamed Alexander for crimes she'd told him had no longer mattered only a few nights before.
Even their bond was not quite the same now. If she heard anything from Alexander it was a random unrelated thought or a single flash of emotion. Neris had never thought she would miss the prince's irrational thoughts and his strong desire for sex but she did. (Not the desire for sex so much, if she was being honest.)
Neris had become a creature of regret whilst Alexander had moulded himself into a uncaring but cruel master. He had forbidden Jack from coming down to the docks, threatened him with firing Martha's parents if he disobeyed.
Neris had not spoken with humans in days, and the sting of regret had never stung so much. She'd never thought she would feel upset without human interaction but she missed Jack and Martha and even the guards did not speak to her now.
The worst part of all of these punishments was that Neris could not even blame Alexander for them. If someone she'd trusted in had told her she was their villain, had told her she was exactly like her mother, had refused her apology for wrongs that were regretted and had not even done entirely out of malice or with knowledge, that would hurt Neris and she couldn't imagine how the prince must feel.
Especially since he was such a broken person, it must hurt even more to have someone come in and shatter any shred of hope you'd had.
If hope was a thing with feathers, Neris had just torn them off. Hope would fly no more in Alexander's world, perhaps the pain of her words would cause him to reflect his father eventually.
Or maybe you get to a certain point where it doesn't hurt anymore. The pieces become so tiny that you can't break them anymore,
But that was all just wishful thinking because Neris had been getting random flashes of emotion and not a single one of them had been happy. In fact, if she reached for Alexander through the bond all she got was a aching well of nothingness.
She couldn't help but wonder if that was just all Alexander was now.
No! Neris refused to think of Alexander that way, refused to think of him as irreparable. She had said those things in the heat of the moment, she hadn't meant to destroy him. Maybe she had, but she didn't know.
Had she ripped any emotion from the prince? You would have to have feeling to punish, didn't you?
Or maybe it wasn't punishment. Maybe it was just Alexander trying to make Neris feel exactly how he must have felt at the moment.
Alone. Like a monster.
○
It had been almost two weeks since Neris had last seen Alexander, Jack, Martha or any human for that matter.
She missed them. Neris wouldn't have ever thought she would miss those ridiculous, smelly, hairy beasts but she did. It hurt her to think that Alexander was hurting because of her, and what she'd said.
The amount of times Alexander apologised for what he'd done to her, and the way he'd explained it to her before had made it seem like he'd barely even meant to do what he did. The dress, and the attitude were definitely done knowingly, but Neris knew that the actual capturing had been something Alexander had never thought he would actually do.
He'd never expected for a mermaid to show up in his trap, and Neris could understand how the prince might have just blurted out the binding spell as some sort of reflex. She could forgive the dress and attitude as shock or gaining footing. The side the prince had shown her recently had been so different it had been hard for her to think of him as that arrogant asshole she'd first met.
The arrogant asshole who had somehow figured out how to perform a binding spell. She didn't know how the humans had taught him the spell or how they might have described what it did. Even among the merflok it was something of a mystery, having been banned for its intensity and irreversibility.
The spell may have been cast on Neris, but it's mystery remained, the illegal spell didn't let her get comfortable with it for a moment.
The merfolk may have banned it as an attempt to keep a mer to suffer its claustrophobic thrall, but the merfolk never would have predicted a human using it to bind himself to a mermaid. Humans were too dumb to ever figure out merfolk magic. Neris imagined her family's faces if she told them her situation. By now, they most likely thought her dead or far, far away.
They'd probably held a memorial for her and finished with the mourning rituals. Her sisters hopefully would have moved on from the way Neris had run away from the family just like her mother.
At least, she had not killed anybody doing so, only ruined her family's chances at an alliance with another clan through marriage unless one of her sisters volunteered.
But Neris knew they wouldn't, and until she got back she couldn't imagine what her clan was going through to try and secure an alliance.
Who knew what her sisters would say if they saw her now, mourning the loss of human friendships. They had all sworn off humans after her mother and sister. Neris, if she ever got home would word her story carefully. If her sisters, or even her father, learnt of how much Neris had grown to care for the humans they wouldn't believe her.
Neris, who had invented the pact to swear off humans.
Neris, who now sat underneath the docks, watching the slats above and waiting for shoes belonging to a certain prince to show.
Waiting to be somebody the human prince could whisper the stories of the stars to.
