Deep As The Sea
"Oh, Neville," Luna says sadly, looking at the ring he is holding out to her with a nervously hopeful look. "I want to say yes, but it wouldn't be fair. You don't know everything, you see."
For a moment he looks crushed, then he sets his jaw stubbornly. "I love you, Luna, no matter what you'll say."
"Even if," she says wistfully, "even if I'm not - quite - human?" She takes a deep breath and - seems to shiver, and Neville can feel something sliding away in the air between them.
His vision blurs, and when it clears the Luna standing in front of him is - different. Her eyes are even larger, and when he steps closer, he can see the shimmers on her cheeks and forehead are from - scales. Hundreds of small translucent scales. More scales and gills are on her neck, and when he stares mutely she holds out a hand to him: a hand with elongated webbed fingers, and delicate sharp nails in an odd teal-turquoise color.
Her smile is tentative when he puts his hand in hers. Weakly he smiles back and lets her draw him down to the edge of the lake. Vaguely he recalls stories of sirens who lure men into the water to kill them, but he keeps his eyes fixed on hers, and follows her into the water. He will trust her and prove his love - or he will die for love. He won't have it any other way, though he hopes it's the former, rather than the latter.
The water is cold, and he almost swallows a gulp of water in shock when he submerges. But then she is there, wrapping around him. Her skin is greenish-white underwater and he watches entranced as her gills flutter and bubbles escape from her mouth. Her ears are pointed and webbed, too, and her toes are long and tapered like a frog's; her movements underwater are graceful and ethereal.
I love you, he tries to say, but it comes out in bubbles - he, at least, is only human, and too human to remember spells with Luna's surreal beauty entrancing him.
Her smile is understanding, and then she places her hands - with her strange webbed fingers - on his face and pulls him in for a kiss. It makes the cold water feel warm suddenly, fills him with heat and love and need, and when he pulls away for air he is shocked to realize he is breathing water without drowning.
"It won't last long," Luna tells him, her voice warped in a musical way. The sound carries differently under water, some notes flattened and others lengthened. "Just long enough to show you what I am. What I can do. What you pledge yourself to."
"Luna," he whispers, wrapping his arms around her and groaning when she presses against him eagerly, willingly, and his need is trapped between them. He can breathe water but has none of her easy maneuverability in the lake, but she pulls him deeper, sings to him of her species, of her heritage, her magic, water swirling around him.
"I love you," he says again, and his voice carries through the water in strange eddies and swirls. She laughs and swims circles around him, hair twisting around him, her fingers helping him remove the soggy clothing that drags him down, away from her. The water feels even stranger against his bare skin, and his groan when she touches his arousal, her fingers only slightly warmer than the water, is swept away by the lake's currents.
"I love you," he says, when she coaxes him to explore her body in an underwater hollow, and his fingers caress the silky but hard scales on her skin, and the contrasting softness of her breasts, her hair. Her nipples, too, are blueish green, and he finds it erotic and beautiful in a fae kind of way. She arches when he touches them, and guides the warmth of his mouth to suck and tease with his tongue, her long nails combing gently through his hair.
"I love you," he says, when he trembles with need, and she finally spreads her legs and straddles him. They both cry out when he pulls her down onto his erection, sheathing himself in her body, and the movements of their passion send waves through her underwater home. Her skin is cold, but she is warm and tight and welcoming where their bodies join, and he pulls her tightly to him, kisses her and fucks her under water, tells her with his hands and mouth and need that he will love her, all of her, scales and gills and all, and cries out her name when he comes, water rushing and roaring in his ears.
Afterwards, sated and content, they drift in the current; her feet move lazily, turning them in a slow circle in the water, and he pets her hair and marvels at the flutter of gills against his skin, the strange harmony of soft silky skin and hard shimmering scales. "I love you," he tells her, when he can feel the magic wearing off, and he knows he will soon need to breathe air again, can feel the weight of water pressing in on him. "Only you, Luna."
She laughs and smiles again - he wonders if it's something about fae creatures, to laugh so often - and draws him upwards, back towards the surface and the air his human lungs need. Her webbed hands and feet propel him rapidly when he struggles to swim, struggles to breathe, the spell fading too fast, and her hands lift his head out of the water when he would slide under again.
"I love you," he says yet again, when they've resurfaced, and he's drawn in a lungful of air after coughing out water. The effort of expelling a large quantity of lakewater leaves his lungs feeling raw and waterlogged, but he'll do it again in a heartbeat - every day, if she wants him to. "Please, Luna, tell me you love me too?"
Her smile is wide and radiant - and mischievous. "I do love you, Neville. I said yes when I showed you what I was, and yes when I took you underwater, and yes when I rode you to completion. Yes, I will marry you - but can you love two?"
His confusion prompts her to add, "Mercreatures are very fertile - we might just have a little one to love, this time next year. Perhaps I should have said that first?"
Her laughter rings out over the lake as she helps her husband-to-be stumble to shore.