INSTANT CRUSH: AOT One-shots

Mike » Underwater

m.zacharias ; merfolk!au

UNDERWATER

━━━━

Piercing, light-gray eyes peered straight into your soul as the sun rays trickling through the rippling, blue surface submerged their owner in a glorious deity. Your heart pounded in your chest the longer they gazed back at you, and all your motor functions seemed to go frigid, only your lungs operating as you inhaled long intakes from your oxygen tank in an attempt to pacify your ragged respiration.

You were floating in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, and before you was the most splendid and exquisite creature you'd ever laid eyes on. You batted your eyelids behind your mask to make sure you weren't daydreaming.

The waters were clear, allowing for a perfect view of its traits and figure from the distance. You had heard and read enough to know its nature: a merman. He stared back at you, his stance guarded and his face overlayed with what you could only interpret as immense hatred and resentment. And before you could even register the implications of such a hostile expression, his tail, whose hue matched that of his irises, violently flapped as he whisked towards you, his abrupt and fierce motion leaving a whirl in its wake before your body got brutally impelled backward.

The merman halted a few meters away and observed as the stirred-up waters gradually dissipated to reveal your numb body drowning, the obscure abyss of the ocean slowly absorbing you until you were no longer in sight.

━

You had always loved the ocean. The profound, obscure, and intimidating vastness that made up the majority of the planet and in which the most fascinating and intriguing creatures lived harmoniously had you completely enthralled from an early age, and since you were little, you had known what you wanted to become when you grew up. Years of hard work later, you'd graduated as a coral biologist and had set off for a month-long expedition with your university's research department to explore the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Like the enthusiasts that you all were and not wanting to waste a moment, you had gone diving first thing when you arrived yesterday. You'd strayed away from your group and, later on, were found lying on the beach, unconscious. Memories of how you'd gotten there were non existent, but you remembered him.

Your years of experience had you encountering a variety of creatures, and one couldn't be in your line of work without openness of mind, but even so, the image you had seen had felt too real for it to be only a construct of your imagination. It was too vivid, too detailed and alive, and you could swear that what you had seen was true. But then again, you reminded yourself that merfolk were part of ancient myths and folklore, and that something whose mere existence went against everything scientific couldn't exist. You had chalked up your blacking out to a malfunction in your diving apparel, which was found to be the case after examination, though how'd you ended up ashore remained a mystery you had no time to mull over.

There was so much to see and discover that you had been out by six in the morning the following day, without your diving apparel and clad in only a bathing suit to take a swim in the shallows where you felt you belonged like a fish.

Salted waters absorbed every corner of your weightless body and flooded your chest with pure euphoria. Swirling around, you paddled your feet, your back facing the vast coral reef you drifted above as you beheld the charming, cloudless sky overhead.

Deep underneath the surface where you waded peacefully, a pair of eyes were riveted on you as their possessor stealthily wove between the large stony corals protruding from the bottom, his movements effortlessly in tandem with yours.