A/N:
No Fucking in this one guys. Don't get your hopes up.
_________________________
I forgot to ask if he could take it back. The tail, I mean. And the breathing under water and the webbed fingers.
It would've saved me a lot of worry the rest of the nights filming at the dock. I stayed far away from the water, hiding with my ass in the sand like a dog with its tail between its legs.
"Ms. Kestrel," Madame Karpe said multiple times over the days, "you wanna come over here and adjust this?"
I did, begrudgingly, and tip-toed across the rotten wood. I was annoyed that the dress on the lead STILL wasn't right. Her cup size was ever-changing, her waistline was aways either too low in an unflattering way or so high it shielded the cleavage she specifically requested I keep out so it could flap in the wind.
I spent more time adjusting her clothing then I did sewing the male lead's entire wardrobe. And, of course, that was MY fault. I couldn't exactly look her in the face and say, "Please ma'am, stop having a human body that bloats or loses its water weight or has tits that fluctuate or takes shallow breaths and then deep breaths, or anything at all really."
That wouldn't be right. And honestly it would make ME look like I wasn't skilled enough to put clothes on an ACTUAL human. People changed, their bodies changed day-by-day, only I was seriously struggling trying to keep up with hers.
It was the exhaustion. And my focus on everything else outside of class. I decided on the last day to take the high road and admit my incompetency.
"I'm sorry, Madame Karpe," I started off with an apology because I knew she'd appreciate it, "But I really can't keep up with this. I was wondering if I could take Byrtie as an assistant. I could really use the help."
Byrtie was the only other seamstress on set and the role was going to go to her before I applied. Then she went to hair and makeup with the other stylists.
She was as good as me, maybe even better at conceptualisation.
I was absolute tits and dicks at getting my ideas across, but somehow they always came through by the end. That's what won me the spot: the finished product. The very thing I was flunking at now. It was a wonder that Madame Karpe didn't demote me on the spot.
Instead she waved me off with a finger, barely paying any mind at all to my question. Byrtie walked over, and she explained it all for me. How I needed help, and she should've offered in the first place.
I apologized as soon as Madame Karpe walked away, "I didn't think to ask for help until now. Usually I can handle stressful situations like this, but recently it's been a bit too much."
She smiled and shook her head, "No, no, it's alrigh'. There's no harm in asking for help."
It was a gut punch to be true. I'd always thought I wanted to be a seamstress by myself during production season because that's what my mom did. The weight of the world of theater was on her shoulders, and I thought she liked it that way.
I realized then what should've been obvious. She never asked for help. She never wanted to burden others. She always suffered in silence and waited out the storm, hoping eventually the end product would come through and the stress would have been worth it.
While Byrtie kneeled beside me in the sand and adjusted the female lead's bustier for the third time, I directed the makeup department for the look we were going for on the male lead. Byrtie talked profusely about her life in the Irish theater before she transferred here.
While most of it was sentimentality about the brother she left behind and the drunken father that spent most of his nights at the bar since their mother died, something else she said struck a chord.
"Seeing too many murúch, you know, it takes a toll on you. You don't know what's real, what's fake, if you're going crazy, if you're sleeping or awake. I was beginning to think that'd I was the one who'd seen them."
"Murúch?" I asked.
She nodded with a hum, "Oh yeah. Little fish creatures. Selkies, merrow-- murúch. Sad little creatures those merrow. Selkies are at least happy to be here."
I didn't understand.
I still couldn't understand.
I was home now. And I was alone. And I hadn't heard, seen, nor spoken to Féilim in days. I knew he was real and what was happening was real, as I wasn't creative enough to figmentize this shit in my own brain.
But I still didn't understand. I knew about the war and Iyael, but it all seemed so far away. I knew it was REAL, I just didn't know how it could be. Everything I'd ever learned about the natural world was false, or, at least, was only the half-truth.
I sat on my sofabed in front of my laptop with my head in my hands. I had so many questions. And I needed to understand this with my own mind, without having Féilim force it.
I typed, "Merrow" into the search bar. And then "Selkies". I was given brief histories and myths and accounts. And I couldn't believe how similar it was. How people had known of their existences for years and years, all over the world, and, yet, it had been brushed off as nothing more than hogwash from a simpler, more superstitious time.
I tried to read it all from the context that it was true, that it was an actual textbook reading based in fact. I looked at movies and tv shows and documentaries that were CGI the whole way through, and I pretended as if it was actual mermaids and sirens they'd managed to capture on film.
None of my research ever told me about humans being able to stop turning into sirens, it only told me about sirens returning to the water or growing legs when they were dry.
How could I be the only one? How had nobody ever heard of this before?
I reached for my phone before I could stop myself, "Waverly, get over here this instant."
"Thanks for picking me up from jail, by the way." She sounded like she was taking a deep drag off her cigarette.
"You said your boyfriend was going to bail you out."
She snorted, "Well, he bailed."
"Okay... I'm sorry... Now... Come over, we've got serious discoveries amiss."
She arrived not twenty minutes later in a crop top that forced her F cup right up to her collarbone, as well as a high-low cheetah print skirt with a hot pink safety skirt underneath that grasped onto her thighs adoringly.
"Is this for the project in Iyaeli?"
My head snapped up as I clicked "Rent" on the streaming service.
"In what?" My eyes were bugging out of my head, as Heath trailed in behind her with a case of beer in his burly arms and a pack of smokes tucked behind his ear.
"Our language class?" Heath raised an eyebrow, "Which we have to pass? In order to get a language credit? So that we can graduate?"
I hummed and looked down at the ground. Maybe I should've actually gone to some of our classes. Or at least looked at our schedules.
"Well, no," I sighed and ran to the kitchen just as the microwave dinged. "We're watching a movie."
The popcorn was hot and dripping and melted the M&Ms that I poured over it as soon as they made contact.
They didn't even complain as we all sat down, and I pressed play. Aquamarine illuminated the dark room. And I wished that Féilim was as pretty as her when he was half-fish. He resembled what I can only describe as the offspring between an axolotl, a tarantula, and an electric eel.
Aside from the changing fingernails and shimmery, slimy tail, it was totally and utterly false.
I knew nothing about it though. I couldn't even say that for certain. Maybe I needed Féilim to break it down for me, after all.
As the credits rolled, Waverly demanded a cigarette as rectification, and Heath scratched at his mullet in disappointment.
"I don't get it," he grumbled, "Raymond wasn't even cute. Aquamarine had more romantic tension with Hailey than literally anyone else on screen."
Waverly nodded, "Or with the creepy guy... Leonard... If you discount the age difference."
_____________________
A/N:
Imagine thinking Aquamarine (2006) was an actual scientific study. Anyways.
My fucking tumblr got terminated today because I was back on my toxic bullshit and I'm back in my toxic ways. Like SORRY. If I want to hurt myself and my mental health, that should be MY decision. This is literally the first time I've ever had an account get deleted, and it was my first one. The one I've had since I was 13. So almost 10 years guys 😓😓😓 I'm devastated.
Plus my writing account was on there and I had SOOOO many aesthetics that I poured my whole bussy into. God hates me.
xoxo,
handmaiden of Venus
venus_in_fleurs