Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a hideous sea creature named Whirl. He was a nasty piece of work, a violent thing that sank ships to feast on sailors. He was ugly to match, scarred and mutilated. He wore his ugliness as a badge and had done so for many years. The only things more hideous were the strange toothy monsters that lived in the sunless depths.
Whirl and his fellow shipwreckers were stalking a fleet's flagship, some great big behemoth that had engaged in a spot of warfare. They knew it was the flagship, on account of the many cannons it carried, the very handsome prince in the purple coat stalking around on deck, and the flag. The wreckers had eaten very well on the unfortunate souls aboard the ships that the fleet had sunk, so they were all feeling quite charitable towards the prince.
Whirl felt a little extra charitable towards the prince because of his stargazing habit during the night, since that provided Whirl with opportunities for princegazing. He was rather handsome for a land creature, tall and rigid and composed no matter how rough the sea got. And cheekbones so sharp that a sufficiently determined individual could cut someone open with them. Sometimes, when he thought he was alone, he'd sing. If one was generous enough with the definition of "sing". Whirl had never heard a more atrocious singing voice in his life, and he was familiar with both whales and seagulls. It was heartening, almost endearing, to know that even pretty people could suck too.
The ship was currently heading back to its home harbour, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that the wreckers would get any more free meals out of it. Still, they'd follow it for a while longer, as it would pass over their old hunting ground in queen Ariel's territory on its way. Whirl clung to the keel like a barnacle, hitching a free ride and allowing himself to doze off a little. Surface-side, the winds had picked up a little, but that was not Whirl's problem.
Whirl woke up to a full-blown storm, people and junk raining down through the sea while his fellow wreckers darted around to catch one last free dinner. Amid the debris, he saw purple where the prince was sinking - with a large gash in his head. The water quickly filled with the taste of blood.
Whirl whipped after him, dodging through the mayhem. He caught the prince and, contrary to the instincts screaming that it was dinner time, he fought towards the surface. The prince was absurdly heavy but miraculously still had life signs when Whirl got him above the waves. Whirl almost dropped him when Springer sprung up right next to him.
"Back off, he's mine!" Whirl shouted.
Springer held up his hands in surrender.
"Fine, fine, plenty others for us. Take his coat off if you're keeping him alive, that's all."
Springer disappeared under the waves again, presumably to inform the others that Whirl might go AWOL because of a mental instability flare-up. With a lot of cursing and wriggling, Whirl managed to peel off the sodden coat without dunking the prince's head under the water more than a few times. He still had life signs, so Whirl assumed that he was okay.
He adjusted his grip on the now much lighter prince. The shore was still far away, but Whirl could see a blinking light in the distance. Hopefully, it was the lighthouse by the nearest harbour. He didn't have anything else to aim by, so he headed in that direction.
Keeping the prince above the surface while the waves tossed them about was tricky business, but at least he had the good grace to stay unconscious. If he'd been awake and flailing about, then the temptation to dunk him underwater on purpose would have been too great. Whirl was fighting enough instincts already.
When Whirl finally - finally! - grasped rocks and sand under his claws, the storm had moved on to bother someone else, and dawn was breaking. His entire body was aching with fatigue, and after hauling the stupid prince above the shoreline, it was tempting to lay down and let himself fry in the sunlight. But frying is for losers, so Whirl rolled his gangly self back into the sea and curled up in the shadow of a few rocks, one ear hole above the waterline.
He woke up some indeterminable time later from some commotion on the beach. Someone had found the prince and alerted a whole shoal of other people, most of whom were swarming the beach, cawing nervously without doing all that much. Well, they weren't eating the prince, and one shortstack was even helping him get upright. Hot Stuff McLardass would be fine.
Right on time, the prince gestured out towards the sea, presumably to explain where his fancy coat had gone or something. The shortstack looked almost right at Whirl for a split second, but then he was distracted when the prince dropped unconscious again.
Whirl saluted with the rudest gesture his mangled hands could produce and swam off towards the depths to contemplate why the fuck he had bothered with all that.
That could have been the end of it.
That should have been the end of it.
It wasn't the end of it.
Instead, Whirl kept swimming back to the shore whenever he could, which was quite often since shipwrecking was a very fluid job that wasn't so much a job as it was wanton destruction and easy kills. Some of the other wreckers grumbled since Drift, their newest recruit, was missing on account of getting hitched to Ratchet, which meant the group was a little on the short side, but they'd live.
He didn't go to the beach other than for a quick check. There was hardly ever anyone there now that there wasn't a royal spectacle to ogle. Instead, he made his way to the harbour, where land people were more likely to gather. He rarely saw the prince, but he caught gossip, and stolen food, by hiding under the docks. Once he figured out how to unseen liberate the land-people of various bottles left near the water, it was a rather pleasant pastime, even if everything in the harbour stank like a whale carcass.
The harbour was a place of smells and noises and constant activity. Sometimes it was a little too much, and somehow Whirl could still never get enough. The air itself was fascinating, so unlike water. It couldn't carry any weight (unless you were a seagull), but it also didn't put up any resistance. Whirl could throw rocks at the seagulls whenever there was no food to steal, to knock them out of the air. And sounds. Sounds sounded weird in the air. Sounds could barely reach anywhere, which was for the best, or he would go deaf from the din, but still. Weird.
As far as prince stalking went, hanging around the harbour was inefficient. It wasn't quite like spying on the prince by the boat, no matter how educational. Finally, he was desperate enough to ask Kup, the oldest of the wreckers and officially retired, for some good old wisdom and guidance.
"Land creatures, huh?" Kup asked, chewing a tightly rolled wad of seaweed.
"Yeah, land creatures. You know, two-legged critters that sometimes pass by in boats, we eat them on the regular. How do I catch one that's on land?"
"You don't."
"Oh, fuck off! They fall down here all the time. There has got to be a way for us to get up there."
Kup scoffed and batted away Whirl's claws when they got too close to his face.
"Yes, and that's called a beaching. Listen, sometimes you see sky creatures fall to the land or into the ocean, but we can't get up on land any more than the land creatures can get up in the sky. Only land creatures can walk on land, and becoming one is not worth the price."
"Hm, I guess there's no point in- what was that you said about becoming a land creature? Someone's done that?"
And that's how Whirl learned about Orion. Well, he'd heard parts of the story as gossip before but had tuned it out for the high quota of romantic nonsense.
Once upon a time, back when Whirl was still young, pre-disfiguration and busy elsewhere, queen Ariel had a somewhat naïve brother by the name of Orion. Orion had been infatuated with the land creature Megatron, a pirate. Megatron had been ever so seductive, trying to lure Orion out of the water, that Orion went well beyond what Megatron intended. He'd gone to a sea witch with few enough moral qualms, and he'd traded sound for legs so that he could live with Megatron on land.
Unfortunately for Orion, that wasn't quite the arrangement Megatron had in mind. Mer flesh is in itself magical and worth quite a neat fortune. Without his tail, Orion was useless to Megatron, and thus he was discarded.
As far as cautionary tales went, Whirl had to admit that it was kind of relevant to his predicament. Legs were objectively stupid things and not something he was eager to get stuck with. He'd seen enough land people drown to know that you couldn't swim for shit with legs, only flail around like an idiot.
On the other claw, it wasn't as if he was some blue-eyed moron getting deceived. He had never even made eye contact with that land prince, so there was no way he was walking into a trap.
No harm in at least running a hypothetical through Pharma, thought Whirl.
That was a slight miscalculation.
"Tell me, Whirl, why do you, of all people, want legs? And don't touch that."
Whirl looked up from where he was inspecting a row of bioluminescent somethings in glass bottles. Trust Pharma to keep exciting stuff in his cave, things just begging to be stolen or broken or both. He intentionally tapped the tip of one claw against the glass.
"You mean why someone would hypothetically want legs, in a completely fictional and in no way related to reality scenario," he tapped the glass in time with the words. Whatever was inside squirmed like a worm, making the light ripple.
"I did not corner the morally questionable niche of sea witchery to answer hypothetical questions. What kind of kink is this about?"
Pharma did look tired, more than he usually did when a wrecker showed up to bug him, and he was likely already ready to cause some serious injury, but Whirl never could resist the urge to push his luck. He clasped his claws together and produced his best mockery of an innocent face.
"Would you believe me if I said I wanted to roll down a grassy hill or dance a waltz?"
He did a little twirl on the spot for good measure.
"No."
Whirl expertly dropped the obviously fake charade in favour of a more believable, more nonchalant one.
"Fine. Some prince on land is royally hot, and I wanna smash. You get my drift?" he waggled his eyebrows for good measure.
Pharma's eyes narrowed, and there was a slight muscle spasm in his face. Come to think of it; he'd been in a bad mood already when Whirl showed up. Maybe someone had died while Whirl was busy in the harbour?
"Oh, I get you alright, I get you. Yeah, I have just the thing you need for that, give me a tic. A magic wand that can transform your tail into legs."
Pharma swam up to a high shelf and pulled out a thin and rather unimpressive stick and several thin shale plates covered in scribbles. Whirl perked up for real this time.
"Oooh, did you steal that from Killmaster? I know Killmaster has one of those, never gotten legs from it, though."
Pharma made a dismissive gesture as he skimmed through the writing.
"No, this is a different wand. Produced in Kimia by Brainstorm and associated lunatics, it runs on - narrative conventions? That has to be a code for something else."
"Cool, cool, so you just wave that thing at me and presto legs, prince-banging time?"
"No," Pharma answered while still consulting the plates, obviously determined to ignore Whirl's very expressive body language. "There has to be some kind of exchange, or it won't work. Since this madness's entire goal is to, and I quote, 'bang' someone, the marriage setting should apply. You're going to die if he isn't interested."
Whirl had not treated his well-being with care for a very long time, and he had flirted with death more than once, but generally, that had been when he'd had a reliable chance of getting some reward proportionate to the risk. Whirl briefly thought back to the kind of "interest" he'd garnered from strangers over the last few years and found that the risk/gain calculation wasn't exactly inspiring confidence.
"That seems like crazy high stakes for a crush. What kind of deadline would I have for making him interested? And how interested-"
"Generally speaking, if he's proposing marriage, you're safe; if he gets hitched to someone else, you're toast. You'll notice when you drop dead. The magic will do that automatically."
"So hypothetically-"
"Language!"
"- if I prevent him from getting attached to someone else, I'll get an infinite deadline?"
Pharma consulted the tablets again.
"I don't see why not. Good luck making that happen, though. Oh, and the death by disinterest clause does not cover the cost of getting legs; you have to give something else too. The last person who gave this a try gave up his eardrums, but you're going to need all the senses that you have." He gave Whirl a critical look from top to tail and back again. "Honestly, I don't think you have all that much worth giving. You don't even have a complete set of eyes. How many kidneys do you have?"
"Dunno, I haven't checked in a while. And for your information, I'm hot stuff. I've seduced lots of people, many of whom did not run away to someone else the moment I got explicit," lied Whirl, a person who during the last few years had indeed scared off all potential partners the moment he showed interest.
Pharma put the tablets down with a sharp clack and smiled much too wide for comfort.
Ah, right. Pharma's old crush Ratchet went and married Drift not long ago. Bad timing. And a poor choice of words too, come to think of it.
"You know what, Whirl, I'm going to do you a favour. Words aren't your strong suit, and all anyone ever cares about is how someone looks, so you're dead anyway."
Whirl lamented whatever attention-deficit idea it was that had placed him in the corner of the cave with Pharma between him and the only exit. He needed a weapon.
"I'm rethinking this leg endeavour; I want a second opinion!" Whirl quipped and threw one of the luminous glass bottles at Pharma.
It made a pathetic slow-motion arc before sinking to the floor with a neat little 'tink'. It hadn’t even reached halfway to Pharma.
Pharma aimed the wand.
"Say bye-bye to your gills bitch."