Once Upon A Time (A Drarry FanFiction Collection)

Chapter Two

   Once he plunged under the waves though, an odd sense of calm wrapped around him. He did not flail or struggle to try and push back up through the churning surf, and although his lungs burned he did not choke or cough in a vain attempt to find air. Being at sea lead a man to fantasise morbidly about what drowning must surely feel like, and even in his disoriented state, Harry knew this was not what he had imagined.

He drifted down, his eyes closed against the water, nothing to see but the blackness of the salty waters under the night's sky in any instance. His life had been short and mostly miserable, squirming for freedom from under one thumb or another. Was it such a shock that his release should be so peaceful?

That peace was shattered as hands suddenly seized his shoulders. His eyes flew open despite the sting of the sea, in time to make out a blurry form as lips were pressed to his own, forcing air down his throat, filling his lungs like sunlight spilling out from curtains yanked aside in summer.

Harry inhaled, gasping, not understanding as he still felt and tasted the water in his mouth and through his nose, but yet at the same time air coursed through his chest and the burning was soothed immediately. He coughed and spluttered, blinking as his eyes too changed through some unknown force, and he found the sea was not so dark as he had before assumed. In fact, he wondered if he had ever seen so well in his life; his eyes had always been weak and in need of spectacles, but of course such luxuries were a mere dream for lowly street urchins.

Before him swam a creature of such beauty Harry momentarily forgot his plight, or his body's miraculous new skills. He had heard of the sirens, women of extreme beauty who would lure men to their deaths with ethereal song. Women who were of human flesh but amphibious in nature, half person, half sea-creature. This, however, was no woman at all.

"Breathe," urged the young man, hands still on Harry's shoulders as he steered them to take shelter in a fissure nestled in an outcrop of sharp looking rocks jutting from the seabed blew. "Let the spell take its hold."

He spoke the words from his mouth, but Harry more felt them resonating through his skull, as if they were his own thoughts. "Spell?" he asked in return, finding he too could speak in this strange manner. The man smiled, and Harry felt, even through all these unnatural events, his heart tug.

His rescuer was as a man should be through his chest and arms and face. His body was mostly exposed, showing pale skin and lean muscles draped in strips of hessian, bolted together with shell and coral. Such garb must have been more for show than warmth – and it was at this thought Harry realised he too was no longer suffering from the iciness of the waters either. Logic suggested maybe his impending doom had caused a fit of madness as he drew his last few breaths, however Harry decided he would rather believe in this dream world instead.

For it surely must have been a dream, with this talk of magic and spells from a man who, below the waist, bore a magnificent tail of silver that matched his wide, concerned eyes. The scales blended into the human skin with a dappling effect, and as he turned at an angle to steady them in the rocks, a ridge of fins could be seen that ran along the back of the tail, a larger one where the fish met the man, then smaller again up his spine until they dwindled at the nape of his neck. Upon a closer look, the silver had a green sheen to it, reflecting in the light whose source Harry couldn't be certain of.

To finish off the portrait were locks of fine, white blond hair that slipped through the water as they came to a final halt in the alcove of the rocks, and an angled face with enthralling features that displayed nothing but concern for Harry's well being.

"I'm alive?" he said to the creature, and was rewarded with a dazzling and bashful smile.

"Yes," he admitted. "It would appear so."