Rating: (PG-13)
Fandom: Boa versus Python/Thoughtcrimes
Main Characters/Pairing: Brendan/Emmett, Brendan/Freya
Summary: Emmett is something out of a fairy tale himself; he's Naga, which is basically a mermaid with a snake bottom instead of the fish parts. And like the little mermaid, he has left everything behind for someone who'll never understand what a sacrifice it has been.
Warnings: bad!fic?
AN: Naturally inspired by the little mermaid challenge, and a sequel to Sliding Scales. Well. Sorry?
Mermaids Are Dead Anyway
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away.
A lot of stories start with these words; good stories, sometimes. Bad ones, too, and of course most of them are just mediocre. Still, once upon a time, words forever associated with fairy tales. And ask anyone on the street, and they will tell you that fairy tales are about love and happily ever after, which just goes to show that they know nothing at all.
Take the little mermaid, for example. It's about love, granted, but it's pain and desperation and death, and it ends with tears. The old fairy tales are like that. Blood and pain and a good dose of reality.
Emmett is something out of a fairy tale himself; he's Naga, which is basically a mermaid with a snake bottom instead of the fish parts. And like the little mermaid, he has left everything behind for someone who'll never understand what a sacrifice it has been.
Brendan can hardly be called a prince, although he's rakish and courageous and one of the good guys. But after only knowing him for a week – and kissing and orgasms and god, how he had missed that – Emmett had willingly abandoned the work of a lifetime, had left his brethren, had left Betty, to follow Brendan to a city filled with too many people, where every breath was like a stab to the lungs because of all the poison that hung in the air. But he had honestly thought that it would be worth it.
Obviously Emmett, too, doesn't know anything at all.
As for his happily ever after, well. Let's just say that after watching Brendan gradually fall in love with his slender, black-haired – female, his mind whispers, human – partner, it doesn't seem all that likely. They still have sex, sure, and Emmett isn't above desperately clinging to it, but it's not the same without... feeling. Oh, Brendan cares for him, sure, just... just not in the right way.
And then one day, naturally, it's over.
It would be so easy for Freya to have an accident involving anything from lizards to earthworms, because Naga are powerful like that. So temptingly easy, and then Emmett would get to offer love and comfort to his devastated prince, and to whisper-tell him a lot of things, but still nothing about what he is, what he has done.
Emmett has learned, though, that temptation hardly ever leads to something good; at least this he has learned, and so he smiles, and wishes them the best of luck, and gets ready to leave even though he has nothing to return to.
Once upon a time, there lived a Naga who fell in love with a man. And no harm will ever come to either Brendan or Freya that can be prevented by the hidden bite of a snake, or by the fatal mishap that can be caused by the sudden appearance of a gecko. It's Emmett's gift to happily ever after.
He thinks he might be what they call a good person for this. It doesn't make him feel any better.
~~~
Um, yeah, weird again. I really don't know how that keeps happening.