3This is part of a series that I'm doing for all the major Princesses. I do not own The Little Mermaid, Disney, or any of the characters. The writing is my own.
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"And that's the thing about giving your heart away
You never know when you'll see you're missing a piece
Until you find out too little, too late
You didn't notice that you were bleeding."
-Jessa Anderson, Giving Your Heart Away
Sometimes when Eric woke up there would be sand in the sheets, and the smell of ocean water on her pillow, and he would know that last night she had gone to the ocean. What she did there he didn't know. He never followed her, or stopped her, and they never discussed it. He would simply get dressed, and signal for a maid to come clean it up.
He could never admit it to anyone else but himself, but there were nights when he woke up, and she wouldn't be there, and his brain would whisper to him this time she's not coming back. This time she went into the water and swam too deep, and now she's not coming back.
But the next morning she would be sitting at the breakfast table, red hair wild and untamed, and he would feel foolish, or even like he had betrayed her. No one could blame her for missing home now and then. So long as she always came back, murmuring that she loved him, his name ever on her lips, then what did it matter?
But still, sometimes, he felt her gaze look past him and not at him, and he would realize that she was staring out the window to the ocean, and that right now she might be with him in body, but her heart was somewhere else. Whether or not she realized it or wanted it to be. He discussed it once with Mac, who quietly listened as he tossed nets out into the water.
"I sometimes wonder if she thinks she made a mistake. If she thinks she should never have come to love me."
Mac cocked his head, a slight crease folding between his brows. "I think you're misreading it."
"What else could it be?" Eric snapped, despair lacing his words. "She never talks about it. We never talk about it. She says she loves me. I know she does. But sometimes I get this feeling, this suspicion that she wants to go back to the water. That she wants to go back…"
"Home?"
Silence surrounded them.
"You're forgetting something, lad." Mac squinted his eyes and looked out over the water, avoiding meeting Eric's gaze. "She isn't human. She has legs. Her father gave her legs. But her very core still belongs to the sea, and I imagine that it pulls at her sometimes. You can't tell me that if you had a fish tail and you were living under the water that you wouldn't sometimes surface to catch at least one breath of clean air."
Eric mulled this over. After minute he simply nodded.
The waves rocked back and forth, and in their rhythm he heard the voice of the ocean. Always torn, it whispered. Never whole.
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Ariel wondered if this was what betrayal felt like. She wondered if Eric ever saw the way she looked at the ocean, like it could swallow her up entirely, like she wouldn't care if it did. But then she would hear a voice, a gesture, and her heart would slowly beat out his name like it was the only name she ever knew.
And she would turn around like she had never seen the beauty of the sun glinting off the waves, like she never felt the longing of the waves at night, or the stormy surging of a moody riptide. And she wouldn't look back.
One day she could tell something had changed in him. He had stopped staring with worry, stopped looking out after her through the window like he didn't know if he should go to her or stay. He smiled, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered that he finally understood, and she loved him even more for it.
When they grew old, he stoop shouldered and wrinkled, her hair grey, it came time. She felt it in her bones. The end was slowly creeping up on them, and the idea of lying underneath soil, imprisoned by the earth made her heart curl and turn to smoke.
She told him so one evening, with the light dying around them while he held her hand. A wistful smile flickered across his face. "We've made a great life, haven't we? We've been happy. You've made me happy."
"I can say the same, love," she whispered, her voice feeling heavier than it had in years.
"It's something you've always missed, hasn't it?"
She didn't answer, only squeezed his hand.
"I understand. And I think it's the right thing."
That night an old woman stepped her feet into the water, and slid underneath the glossy surface. She did look back, just once, to see a man in the window, his shape cut out by the dying candlelight in his room. She smiled briefly, and then she was no more.
He never saw her again.
He knew she had loved him, but he also knew that the ocean had called. And it had said come home.
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