Title: Promises
Fandom: The Little Mermaid
Rating: PG-13/T
Length: 1,613 words
Content notes: This fic does not show Eric/Ariel in a positive light, or Prince Eric in a positive light at all.
Summary:
Disclaimer: All characters mentioned within belong to Disney, not the author.



She sat at the edge of the seashore, listening to the cry of the seagulls, all of whom she had once called by name and considered her friends. Only Scuttle still talked to her, and too often now, she could not understand a single word he squawked. She knew her friend spoke clearer language than the humans with whom she was now surrounded on a daily basis, but somehow, her human, mortal ears were rapidly losing the ability to understand him.

She had already lost that connection with Flounder. She hardly ever saw him anymore. She missed the days they had spent together, searching for treasure, swimming in races, and just being friends. She missed holding his little flippers in her hands, missed seeing him look at her with such complete and utter trust and adoration. She missed him.

Ariel sighed and moved her legs restlessly in the water. The perfectly clear, blue liquid splashed around her. The tide was coming in. She'd be completely soaked soon, but she didn't care, not about that at least. She wanted to be wet. She wanted to be wet from head to toe. She wanted to be engulfed in water but not be sitting or standing in it. She wanted to swim in it again not with her human legs but with the tail that had been rightfully hers up until the time she had decreed that she no longer wanted it.

Ariel sighed again and drew her knees up to her not to pull away from the water -- no, never again would she make that mistake --, but just so that she could wrap her arms around her long, gangly, and painfully mortal legs and huddle more closely together like the terrified, almost sobbing ball she was on this rock, her rock. This was the place where she had come often to watch the human world, but now she came to here to watch the world that had once been hers and never should have stopped belonging to her. It wouldn't have, either, if she hadn't been so foolish.

She closed her eyes against the tears that welled therein as she remembered the day she had made the fatal decision that had eventually led to this, the ruining of her life. Her father had tried to warn her. He had told her that he feared she would come to regret this day. She, of all mermaids, knew that one of her father's many gifts was prophesy. She should have listened to him. She should have known he had been right.

But she hadn't. She had been too blinded to listen to him. To make matters worse, it wasn't love that had blinded her. She had been convinced that she was in love at the time, but she hadn't loved Eric. She hadn't even known what love was back then, and had barely known the man to whom she had been wed. But he was a human, and that had been all she'd thought she'd needed to know.

The grass is always greener on the other side. She remembered reading that somewhere in one of the many, many books in the royal library. She hadn't understood it at the time, but now she did. The grass wasn't exactly the green stuff upon which humans trampled. She snorted in derision, remembering how she'd once thought the two leggers to be so graceful and now, knowing from experience, that they were anything but. Why, she'd had her human feet stepped on more times than she could count, and she'd never once had her tail trod on by accident!

Life on the surface wasn't graceful. It was rude and noisy, painful and bothersome, with duties that never ceased and a Prince who wanted to sit on his fleshy, human behind and be waited upon. He had servants for that, but yet, more often than not, it was for Ariel whom he called. He expected her to rub his feet, fluff his pillows, and do truly disgusting things in bed. He liked to have her wait on him, even while he had a whole palace of servants to do the things he asked of her. She knew it wasn't right, but she wouldn't have cared if every courtier in the palace went to her husband's bed, as long as she never had to look at him naked again!

Even now, in the brisk warmth of daylight, she shuddered at the mere thought. The grass was always greener on the other side until you got there and you realized that what you had had in the beginning was far better than anything that would come after. Ariel sighed yet again as she mused over how backward it all was. Human girls wanted to be mermaids -- hundreds had asked her, with proverbial stars in their big eyes, what it was like --, but she had been the only mermaid to want to be a human.

She had been a fool. She wishes now, with all her heart, that her father hadn't let her go. There have been times, over the years, that she's thought he didn't truly love her and that was why he released her to this gruelsome surface world, but she's wise enough now, having had a daughter of her own, to know he actually sacrificed her for love. She would never have stopped asking to be with Eric, never have stopped begging to be human, not even when he'd made her understand, point blank, that doing so would mean giving up her entire family, including him.

She closes her blue eyes against her tears that rise like the surf now crashing against her rock. She remembers all of them as vividly as if she'd just been with them yesterday. Her sisters might have teased her mercilessly, but the friends she'd had had been truer and more loyal than any human being will ever be. Sebastian, Flounder, and Scuttle had loved her so greatly that they would have done anything for her, but her father had loved her even more. He had made the greatest sacrifice in hopes that she would somehow find happiness in a world he'd known she didn't belong, but his fears had been right. She'll never be happy here.

She belongs in the water. She belongs splashing underwater with her own tail. She belongs swimming through the crystal blue lagoons of her homeland. She belongs dancing with fish and chattering with gulls. She belongs with her friends, with her family. She belongs with him.

Ariel gasps, her eyes flutter open. Through her tears, in the far off distance, she sees a silhouette towering above the shoreline, and she knows. She knows, though she can not see him for the gathering shadows of the evening, that her father is still looking over her. He still loves her.

She wants, with all her heart, to cry out to him. She wants to beg him to lift this curse, to take her home with him, to give her back all that she never appreciated until it was too late. She wants to feel his arms wrap around her again in a hug. She wants to hear him call her his little girl. She wants to hear him tell her how much he loves her.

Tears flow down Ariel's cheeks as she stands on legs that wobble again for a moment. There's not a single bit of her that wants to go to the palace to which she knows she must return. Everything in her, every single fiber, is screaming to go home, to dive into that water and keep swimming, keep swimming until her lungs burn and her human body gives out and her father at last has to give her back her mermaid form or watch her die. She wants to be back with him, to be back amongst all those who truly love her.

But she can't. A promise is a promise. He made her promise she wouldn't return. He made her vow, thinking, she's sure now, that she wouldn't do it, that she would never ask for her tail back again or her life as a Princess of Atlantica and his daughter, in order to be with the human she claimed to love, but whom he knew she didn't. She'd seen the sorrow and horror in his eyes when she'd accepted his terms. He hadn't wanted to do it, but he had given her his word.

And she gave him hers. She covers her mouth to keep her sobs from echoing out over the ocean to him now and runs back to the palace and the humans waiting there to hide once more amongst a people with whom she will never belong. She doesn't know that her cries are still heard all throughout the ocean. She doesn't know that Flounder, Scuttle, and little Sebastian all cry when they hear her sobs, or that even her father, wise, noble, and strong as he is, sobs along with her.

She doesn't know she left him hovering there in the ocean, one hand held out to her, the other gripping his glowing trident, and every fiber of his being hoping, aching, and wishing that his little girl would just ask to come home again. King Triton has never broken a promise, but for his daughter, he would. For his daughter, he would do anything, even watch her grow gray and old and die, still a human, still grieving for their world and family that should still and will always be hers, too, all because she wouldn't break her promise to him.

The End