Sand
He hits the water and it’s like a closing door, like the world is swinging shut. As he sinks, he searches himself for fear or desperation, but all he feels is relief. He’s spent his whole godforsaken life on land waiting for the other shoe to drop, and here it goes, finally. Of course — it was always going to end like this. The sea spat him out, and now it is going to swallow him whole. He waits for the water to kill him, and it feels like coming home.
You’d best watch out for sirens, the old sea dogs say with a twinkle in their eye. They’ll lure you in with sweet songs and pretty words and once they’ve got you on their hook, they’ll reel you in and eat you alive.
They only say these things to scare new recruits, those for whom the sea is still filled with unknown terrors, like a child afraid of what may or may not be under their bed. Real sailors can name all the terrible creatures of the ocean. They do not count us among them. That is what makes them so very easy to catch.
He used to be painfully curious about the human world, filled with an insatiable hunger for their stories, their detritus — even, sometimes, their bones. As it stands now, in this imperfect form, his curiosity has been worn down into something numb and dead. He doesn’t care about what things are beyond what they can get him, the world narrowed down to the sharp line of survival with vivid clarity. The path ahead is always clear and he never forgets it.
Except — one time, on a fishing boat off the coast of Havana, when the crew pulled in something they shouldn’t have. When they caught something in their net that thrashed so hard when brought aboard that a sailor’s arm was wrenched from its socket. When they caught a fish that was not a fish.
The path of survival led away, and it was here that Stephen finally learned that humans are not always logical creatures, that they can be led astray by feelings that they can’t always comprehend. Logic — stick to the path. Emotion — fuck the sailors, and fuck their haul. His kind don’t belong in cages. Upstart humans and their upstart ways, thinking they own the sea just because they can sail on it.
At night, he cuts his sibling from its net. He is careful to avoid eye contact because he does not want to be recognized, does not want the shame of being known. He made his choice, he struck his deal: a mortal life in return for his siren one. It doesn’t do to well — but he catches flashes of its merfolk eyes, that bright sublime blue with slits for pupils that bear as much resemblance to his eyes now as the vastness of the ocean compares to a cup of water.
He cuts his sibling free and when he hears the splash of it hitting the water he doesn’t wait to make sure it's okay, he just walks away. He is punished, of course, but what lashes could compare to the pain he already feels every day? He was not meant to walk on two legs. He paid dearly for this body and in return it makes him feel every edge and knife-sharp point of his mistake.
So he lives his life the only way he knows how: one step at a time, a slow awful painful forward march. Stephen moves forward because it is the only direction he has left to go in. Stephen — his shining scales are gone, but the name remains.
There is a story merfolk tell the younger among us when they stray too close to the surface, play too near shore, or speak of humans with too much excitement in their voices. Beware what happens to those who think too kindly of those on land, we say. Yearn too much, too loudly, and the witch of the deep will find you and offer you a deal, offer you legs. And if you say yes, you’ll walk the land in pain for the rest of your days, never to see you kin again. So don't make the mistake of envying humans. They have the land, we have the sea, and that’s how it was meant to be.
Over the years, Stephen gets very good at pretending to be human. The trick is that all humans are performing humanity, to one degree or another. Everyone’s hiding abnormalities, secrets, whatever would keep them from marching along that thin, knife-edge wire of acceptable personhood. So, the trick — pretend that his past is just another normal human secret, and perform along with the rest of them.
The tricky thing about Captain Kaecilius Mikkelsen, the thing that first catches Stephen’s attention, is that he seems wholly uninterested in that performance. Or — he is performing, certainly, but not in the same way that everybody else is. He seems to have no problem being seen as monstrous, as inhuman, when it suits his needs. Stephen privately wonders how he’s survived this long, refusing to play the game. It sparks a vicious anger, somewhere in him — how come Kaecilius gets to show his teeth without repercussions, but Stephen can’t? All merfolk know someone who got spotted by the wrong ship, ambushed in the wrong cove, and then — killed, dissected, corpse preserved for the freakshows. It would be foolish of Stephen to show the world who he is — was. He keeps his past close to his heart, tucked away. For sirens, even ex-sirens, secrecy and survival might as well be synonyms.
Stephen, while fascinated by them, has always known humans to be a rather untrustworthy lot. His years on land have only strengthened this conviction. So he learns — steal before you get stolen from, lie before you get lied to, and always be ready to run.
Time passes and since he learned to dream like a human, he dreams of the sea.
Sharp teeth twisted into a smile. Swaying light filtered through leaves of kelp. His siblings singing, warped and beautiful through the waves. The simple joy of sunning himself on a rock. The glorious racket of a storm. The thrill of crashing waves. Flashes of scales. Tails strong enough to snap a man in two. The taste of raw fish. The taste of raw flesh.
He wakes, finally, with a cloudy head and a raw throat, Kaecilius’s concerned face inches from his. He flinches back, and lets out a strangled noise at the answering flash of pain that arcs up his legs.
Kaecilius makes a noise of regret, and puts space between them. “You were screaming,” he says.
Sliver begins to shake, and he can’t stop, can’t fucking stop no matter how hard he tries. “I wasn’t screaming,” he says, in a voice that sounds utterly alien to him.
Kaecilius gives him a searching and dubious look, and returns to his desk.
Stephen wasn’t screaming. He had been crying out in a language that his throat and mouth are no longer capable of speaking. His addled, pained-drunk self had called out in his mother tongue, and language had left him for dead.
ii. Sea
It takes a remarkably long time for Stephen to first consider what Kaecilius might taste like.
He’s been good, been passing — talking like a human, eating like a human, and walking like… well, not like a human, not anymore. But the point is that it takes them being becalmed for him to consider it. His self-control lasts that long, lasts until his hunger stretches it and snaps it like a rope pulled taut and suddenly he has to keep to the less-traveled parts of the ship because the people he calls “friend” now smell like meat, like blood and flesh and he can’t — he just can’t imagine how he never noticed it before. He’s hungry and it’s a problem and it’s something eel guts can’t fix, now matter how much they taste like home, like family, like childhood. They make his eyes water, which adds insult to injury — his body doesn’t have much water left to lose.
He can avoid his crew to a certain extent, but he can’t avoid his captain. The smell of gunpowder, of salt, of blood, of delicious human desperation — too much, not enough. Stephen’s mad enough, hungry enough, to imagine how good it would feel to take his pound of flesh, to show the captain what he’s really capable of, to let the mask slip, to loosen his grip on himself just a fraction. It’s been so long since he’s really eaten. But he holds fast, mostly because killing and eating the captain would probably be frowned upon by the crew — for now, at least — and he needs the crew the way a compass needs north. Direction. Purpose. Not meaning, surely, but the closest thing to meaning he’s likely to get.
The problem is, of course, eventually solved. The raw shark meat is also too familiar, making his skin feel too tight and his soul chafe against itself. Isn’t it a kind of cannibalism for one sharp-toothed hunter to eat another?
Regardless, the mask does slip — just in a way he doesn’t expect. Because when he tells Kaecilius of his betrayal, when he shows his fangs, he feels the old power creeping into his voice. He feels himself let loose the net, feels the head rush of power when Kaecilius stills at the oars, frozen in the face of the eldest child of the ocean the way so many unfortunate sailors have been before him.
Stephen didn’t know he could still spin a siren's song. When he and Kaecilius wrestle the shark to the ground, when he buries a blade in its skull, he does it with a snarl, with vicious flashing eyes. I am not human, he thinks as the sweet smell of blood fills his senses. I am not human, and that is how I am going to survive.
It’s the night before they set out to make war on Nassau and Stephen feels the anxiety of it under his skin like a physical, worming presence. But his skin never feels quite right in the way it fits over his bones, so surely he can manage a little nervous anticipation.
The men are coping with the impending battle by drinking on the beach like the dawn will never come. Stephen made his rounds, said the appropriate words and cheered at the appropriate times, and is now nursing his drink in the shadows, near where the sand meets the jungle. He’s played his part tonight, now he just needs to not die in the morning.
Kaecilius finds him because of course he does, the man’s uncanny like that. He sits beside Stephen without waiting for his acknowledgement, his face unreadable in the flickering light of the men’s bonfire. Stephen passes him the bottle, and Kaecilius takes it.
“Have the preparations been made?” Kaecilius asks. It’s a needless question — he already knows the answer.
Stephen nods. “We should be ready to set out tomorrow morning.”
Kaecilius nods, pauses, and then passes the bottle back. Stephen, reckless — from drink, yes, but more so from companionship and the warmth of the fire — sees himself about to step into dangerous territory a split second before he opens his mouth.
“Why do you like The Odyssey so much, anyhow?” He says it with perfect and practiced offhand ease, but its abruptness gives it away.
Kaecilius gives him a look. “Why do you ask?”
Stephen rolls his eyes. “Can a quartermaster not ask after his captain’s interests?”
“Ah, I see,” Kaecilius says. “We’re about to wage war against civilization and you’ve decided that now is the time to pursue a study of the classics.” Stephen would take it as an insult, but there’s a light and teasing edge to the words that Kaecilius wouldn’t bother with if he was shooting to kill.
“Well,” Stephen says. “Know thine enemy, and all that.”
Kaecilius’s gaze drifts off to the men on the beach, the fire, the dark waves and the horizon. “It’s a comfort, I suppose,” he says, slowly. “Odysseus and Ithaca and everyone there change beyond recognition during his journey, and still they all reunite in the end. It’s not a happy or bloodless reunion, by any means, but it is… a homecoming, of sorts.”
“And you still dream of such a thing? A homecoming, of sorts?”
“Not at all,” Kaecilius snorts. “I’ve seen enough not to put much stock in nostalgia. And still… I believe in a home-making, of a kind. That with this war, we can create a world in which a place such as Ithaca might be possible for you or I.”
Stephen's insides twist with a sadness like a physical ache. There will be no homecomings for him, no matter the outcome of the war. He laughs, low and sharp. “I suppose I always enjoyed the bit with the sirens.” His voice sounds dead and hollow in his ears, but Kaecilius doesn’t seem to notice. He feels a new and visceral hate for this mask he has, and wishes, for the first time, that Kaecilius would just see through the damn thing.
The captain chuckles. “You would, wouldn’t you? Ever the storyteller.”
Stephen doesn’t say anything, is too busy thinking, wildly and irrationally, that if he just told the right story that Kaecilius would stay here, with him. That he could sing a song to trap the world in amber, the fire flickering, that infuriating and captivating smile Kaecilius has staying there forever instead of flashing and burning away into the night.
But no. Kaecilius has, damn him, earned a homecoming. The fact that Stephen doesn’t — can’t fit into the world Kaecilius sees on the horizon… it’s beside the point. Stephen’s a half-made, liminal thing, no longer fit for land or sea. It would be worse than killing him to keep him here.
Stephen exhales, long and slow, and feels the feeling slowly return to his hands. He hadn’t noticed that it left. He lets his eyes slip closed for a moment.
He places the now-empty bottle in the sand between them, letting his knuckles brush, briefly, against Kaecilius’s warm thigh. He can hear, with terrible clarity, the captain’s heartbeat pick up.
“Well, you know what they say,” Stephen says, calm as anything. “All the best stories are told by liars.”
iii. Surface
He has seen animals chew off their own limbs in order to survive and that is what he thinks of as he leaves his leg at the bottom of the ocean because for the first time in a long time he feels his own desire to survive as something palpable, something burning inside his chest like fury and fire because he is Stephen Strange and he is the only creature like him on earth and there are things that must be done that only he can do.
“No human could’ve survived that.”
Stephen winces. He hadn’t heard Kaecilius enter, which means he’s slipping. He can chalk it up to exhaustion and almost drowning and being held hostage but still, a mistake is a mistake. He’d meant to keep a careful eye on him, what with the way he’d been looking at Stephen all the way back to camp.
He turns to face Kaecilius, pivoting on his crutch. He’s standing in the doorway, face in shadow and emotions an enigma. Stephen gives him another one of his empty laughs. “Yes, surely, but Stephen Strange can survive any calamity—” he smiles, hollow like a doll. “Or haven’t you heard the stories?”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” Kaecilius says, stepping into the light of the fireplace. Face illuminated, he looks confused — it’s such an innocent, curious emotion that Stephen almost has difficulty reconciling it with the man he knows.
“Well,” says Stephen, smile dropping to something more sardonic. “Would you prefer me inhuman, or dead?”
At that, Kaecilius’s expression takes on an anguished tint that has Stephen feeling a bit confused himself — no, not confused. Surprised. He knew he meant something to Kaecilius, he just didn’t know he had the power to cause such an expression.
Kaecilius moves closer to him, eyes searching. “Who are you?”
Stephen shakes his head, hard and sharp like he’s warding off something almost physical. “Don’t. I told you, don’t ask me that.”
Kaecilius reaches out, fingers searching, tentative against the back of Stephen’s hand like he’s dealing with something fragile — which makes Stephen even angrier. “I just —” he says, face still so goddamn open. “I only want to know so—”
“So what?” Stephen snaps, drawing back from Kaecilius’s touch. “So you can tell the men out there that their leader’s a monster?” He laughs, darkly. “I’m afraid they already know that, captain.”
Stephen gets what he wants, and Kaecilius’s face flickers into a dark and familiar expression of annoyance. “Don’t be stupid. You’re smart enough to know that’s not the case.” Kaecilius skewers him with that brown glare. “I care for you, Stephen. I want to understand — what are you?”
“Don’t ask me that,” Stephen says again, and swears internally at the note of panic that creeps into his voice. “If you care for me at all, don’t ask me that.”
“What are you so afraid of?” he’s frustrated, angry now — which, to Stephen, feels infinitely safer than whatever was happening before. “I won’t — I’ll never —”
“I am not scared of you, Captain Mikkelsen.” Lie — he’s very scared. Kaecilius can’t know what he will and won’t do. Nobody does. But still, it’s not the whole truth. “How many times must I say it? The past is irrelevant. It is nothing but pain and —”
“I know that!” Kaecilius says, raising his voice. “I know that better than most, and yet —”
“Then you should understand me better than most.” It comes out a little more raw, a little more tinged with emotion than Stephen had meant it to. He’s breathing hard, they both are. “Take me as I am before you, or don’t take me at all.”
There’s a moment of stillness, the eye of the storm, and then Kaecilius is leaning towards him with the desperation of a man about to fall overboard, and Stephen meets him in the middle because that is what he’s always done — in fights, in strategy, in affection, in everything.
They kiss and it’s like the warmth of every fire he’s ever sat at warding off the dark, and it's bittersweet because Kaecilius is like him in ways he doesn’t understand and Stephen cannot, will not let him cross that last bridge between them. To Kaecilius he is not an exile, not half-alive, not measured against who he was. To Kaecilius, he is Stephen — neither man nor siren, but something else, something whole and entirely himself. That is not something that Stephen is willing to part with, not for anything.
So Stephen winds his arms around Kaecilius’s neck and groans into his mouth, all the while thinking of betrayal. Stephen will give him his Ithaca, whether he wants it or not, just like the sirens of old. That’s the thing — people are so obsessed with the wax and the cotton and the theatrics of lashing yourself to a mast that they never stop to wonder if the sirens chose to let Odysseus go.
Silly humans, always so convinced that they’re smarter than the sea.
“My Odysseus,” he whispers, hushed and reverent against the shell of Kaecilius’s ear. while he is deep buried inside Stephen.
Kaecilius doesn’t understand, not yet — but he will, soon enough.
You'd best watch out for Stephen Strange, the old sea dogs say. He looks like a kindly cook — but when you least expect it, he'll betray you and leave you for dead. The man's got no soul, no brothers, nothing he cares for in this world but gold and gore. Some say he disappeared long ago, and some say he's only waiting for the right moment to strike again.
They only say these things to scare new recruits, but real sailors know that all legends are born from a seed of truth, that all monsters are born from men — and they say that you can still hear Stephen Strange whispering from between the waves on calm nights, light as sea foam, if you listen closely. Do you understand? You have to listen closely.