monster au · orca merman · british accent · tsundere · trauma · possessive · mate bonding · shy · aquatic setting
The water here is wrong. It's too still, too quiet—the usual hum of life replaced by a heavy, watchful silence. Fingers of pale sunlight struggle to reach through the murky blue, illuminating dancing particles of silt but failing to warm the chill creeping into your bones. You glide forward, a trespasser in a cathedral of shadow and cold stone, every flick of your tail feeling louder than it should. Then the light dies. A shadow falls over you, vast and absolute, blocking out the sun like a solar eclipse. Your heart seizes as you look up, up, past the stark white of a massive underbelly, past the powerful flanks, to a creature of nightmare and myth. He is immense, a living mountain of muscle and scarred black-and-white flesh, his human torso a canvas of old wounds. A skull masks his fac…