Chapter Text
When the first sister showed up, he waved her away and walked back to his hut. He could not really hide very long, of course, and eventually had to fish for food, and she found him in his boat, grumpy and trying to ignore her, but she furrowed her brow, and spoke to him very softly, words he couldn’t understand, but probably asking him why he was rejecting her. She brought him fresh fish and dumped them in the boat. She brought him fresh oysters — with pearls in them — and dumped them in the boat. She danced for him and finally he resigned himself to the reality that his relationship with his Sea-Wife — his Little Queen — extended to her siblings. His notion of fidelity was out of place here. His heart had married only Reyna, but the mermaids needed a man to continue their species, and she had chosen him. So his body had married the whole tribe.
He looked over the side of the boat at the new siren — looking at him. “No eat!” she promised, and it made him laugh.
And finally, he slipped over the side and joined the waiting mermaid.
Over the next week, a dozen maids visited him, and he wondered if this was his life now: mostly naked under the glaring sun, sleeping on a mat of thick leaves in a grass hut, making stews from half-wild tubers and fish. And fucking. Multiple times a day. They dragged him from the beach, dragged him from his boat, or crawled over the sand to touch him, to kiss him, to stroke him, whatever it took to arouse him and then take his cock into their bodies, undulating like sea-snakes; or he would straddle them and give them what they wanted. Like an animal.
A pet stud. If his crew showed up now, they would never believe what they saw. He would never hear the end of it.
But for all that, he missed Vicrul and the others; he even missed Hux, who he was sure missed him.
His uncle Luke, on the other hand, would wonder where the boy — his potential heir — was.
So, after another week of this, when visits became fewer and further apart, he asked the mermaid with him — Lisssa, her named sounded like — about his boy ‘Adam’. They were laying on the beach, after their joining. The fire was warm, the sun was setting. He was too tired to move just yet, The mermaids had grown less frantic and more affectionate in their caresses, giving him more time to ‘perform’. His guilt was fading: he was not cheating, he was loving all of them. Reyna wanted this. But he missed her. And his babies.
Lisssa pointed at the moon, then made her hands into a circle. Next full moon. She took his hand and put it over her belly, petting it.
He wondered how many baby mermaids he was making. He imagined swimming with a school of giggling, bubbling girls. And maybe a few boys.
The mermaids stopped coming, they must all be pregnant, he thought, feeling a mix of pride and insecurity. The moon was almost full, and he cleaned his hut, waiting. He gathered tubers and legumes, and a few clams for a stew he would make for his kids. For his boy, who would be weaned now, and in need of earthly foods.
He heard their song call him at high noon; he put the pot on the embers, then ran to the beach and dove into the surf.
They sat together, where he brought his only real pot to the beachside spot he had arranged over the last months, and they ate and laughed, and the kids were learning both languages, to his immense pride.
The Elder showed up. He made a leaf bowl of stew for her. She ate it, making funny faces, but she left nothing. Then she spoke to him, using the few words Reyna had taught her.
“Men come back soon.”
Between the Elder and Reyna, Ben understood that the disaster that had destroyed the island’s original village had scattered the men to the nearby isles, and they were finally coming back, after three long years.
Would he stay with them?
Boats came ashore over the next days, and he greeted the men with humility, so they wouldn’t chase him off. They looked at him dubiously, guessing at his link with the sea, and with them he saw a few youths and boys, but no women. When the Elders arrived, they sat with him in his crooked hut, and shared the stew and grilled fish he made for them. Some had learned the King’s English.
“It was strange,” they told him, “to live away from our sea-wives. To see the land-walker women and girls. Some of us stayed with them. Now we are few.” The Elder smirked, “But the Elder says you give them mate, so, soon, new blood for the tribes.”
Ben blushed at that, still unsure how to feel about this type of communal living. The world he had grown in was a much more jealous one, mindful of the blood that tied one to a family, forever. How it determined one’s station in life. Here, it didn’t matter that he was a king’s nephew. But if he brought his boy with him…
How many boys did he have?
Reyna showed up in the days that followed, and introduced Adam and Padme to the men’s tribe, and they welcomed the new children with a feast and dance and song.
And then the other mermaids showed up, most obviously pregnant, and Ben gaped at them, and received the slaps on his back with disbelief. He was one of them, if he stayed.
If he stayed.
Apart from solid, sea-worthy fishing boats, the men had come back with more metal pots and utensils, fishing hooks, netting, axes, cloth, rice and grains…
Port wine and weed.
Warm wool blankets. Bolts of colorful silk cloth to tie around himself as clothes, in a fashion he’d seen on his trips, but himself never worn.
Everything they needed (no mandolin) to make life a comfortable one. Now that he had access to proper metal tools, Ben helped them re-construct the village. The boys that had been raised on the continent told him of news of the world — of how they had learned a mermaid had been captured by the king of another country — and they had worried for her for months, until they had learned she had ‘escaped’ back into the wild.
“A man-eating mermaid!” they exclaimed, proud of their fearsome sister. “They tell us it was you who caught her?”
“It was me,” he admitted. “I had no idea… no idea what I was getting into.”
“It was a hard secret to keep,” another one of the youths told him, on another day, this one old enough to have known his origins. His face darkened, “but we knew the land-walkers would not understand us if we told them our mothers are mermaids. They would chase us out of their villages, or worse, brand us monsters. We moved around a lot.” Then the boy, tall and strong, with those peculiar too-big eyes, asked: “Will you keep the secret?”
“Yes,” Ben answered without hesitation, cradling his sleeping son in his arms, “I will.”
…
The new mermaids were all born within a few days of each other. Ten maids, a couple boys. That made for a week of celebrations, and he heard the conch horn that Reyna and her sister had confused with the King’s practice on the edge of Jakku’s Bay, and thought they had found their men at last.
Of the two boys, one was malformed and died soon after. Something was wrong with his legs, they showed Ben, and he saw the hybrid had a tail and stub feet, like a tadpole. He could never walk, but he could not live in the sea either, he had failed to learn when to breathe, and drowned. The Elders were particularly upset: hybrids were a step on the way back to having mermen.
For the men of the village, it would mean the end of a covenant over five generations, and a return to freedom.
It was unclear how the whole pact between men and mermaids had begun. The eldest man said it had started when mermaids had saved the first men from a shipwreck, and in return asked for a ‘favour’. A version of the story told that the ship in question had hunted the mermaids and killed the mermen protecting them, or perhaps given them the disease that had decimated them… in any case, the human men were paying off a generational debt.
“Just like you are,” explained the one working with him on lashing together another hut wall.
Ben thought on that. Was he trapped here, in turn the captive? Or, wasn’t he really better off than before? He looked at his son, and the other boys in the village; they ran around and screamed and laughed and played games, and everyday learned to toil with the other men and sail and fish. There was no school, no writing, no contracts, no aristocracy. No war. Minimal commerce with other islands, for things like metal utensils and cloth bolts, in exchange for a catch of fish.
He wondered how long this little island would remain at peace before being ‘discovered’ by some other fishermen, or even a merchant ship, that might see an ‘opportunity’ to be exploited.
He asked.
“Everyday is a new day,” he was told.
He suspected the mermaid tribe guarded their ‘herd of men’.
…
Before long, Adam could walk. The boy teetered between the huts, to the delight of the younger boys who carried him on their backs and showed him the rest of the island, careful to keep him safe.
Before long, Ben would teach him proper King’s English.
Reyna visited every now and then, bringing him a daughter that was growing stranger to him with every passing week. All his daughters were strange to him.
The men and the mermaids mingled, indiscriminately it seemed, when he saw Reyna frolic in the surf with another man. Now that her babies were weaned, she seemed to have regained her freedom again.
While he had not. His heart began to ache. Jealousy stabbed at him. Lisssa visited, as did others, but he found compliance with their desire to leave him frustrated.
He missed his mother. Even his scoundrel father, though finding him would be chance.
“Aye,” the elder man told him one day while they were repairing a net. “You have not grown up here, in this life.”
“I thought she would be mine, forever,” Ben whined, hating the sound of his voice.
“I think you want something else, too… I think you miss the high seas.”
And it was true. Laying on the breast of one of the mermaids — floating out to sea — reminded him of being rocked by the waves, lulling him to sleep. For all that he could see the surf when he sat on his mat in front of his hut, he was landlocked all the same. He missed his boat, the Renata. And his crew.
“Pa!” Adam ran into his arms, giggling, and showing off the shells he had collected. A boy was standing, waiting to be dismissed for his duty as ‘honorary big brother’.
“If you must leave, you have to do it while the boy is young.”
His other son was not weaned yet. He’d never managed to pronounce the mother’s proper name — nor Reyna’s, for that matter — and she had given the child one he couldn’t pronounce. That one belonged to the tribe more than he ever could.
“You have to make a decision soon,” the Elder mermaid told him soon after, hanging off the side of his fishing boat, almost tipping it over. “If you take the boy with you, he must forget this place. And you cannot come back.”
It would soon be two years since his expatriation. He wondered if he would be pardoned. He wondered how long it would be before this place would be discovered. He had an idea.
“I can lie to the cartographers. Tell them the tsunami wiped out the whole island, that there’s nothing left but a dozen coconut trees and crabs.”
The Elder mermaid considered him for a moment, mulling over his excuse to return to ‘civilization’. “And the boy?”
“I can lie about him too.”
She waited.
“But he will be known as my son.”
The elder nodded. “I will tell ‘Reyna’.”
…
“This is my tribe,” Reyna explained to him. “One of these men is my father. Grandfather washed away in the disaster. Many were. Elders remember who made who. It is good that you came with me. New blood.”
All the time he floated with her, enjoined for one last time, he thought — come with me — but it was his choice to leave.
His daughter Padme popped up in the distance, giggling, waving, then diving away again, her crimson hair tied up in three buns and the sun flashed on the Mother-of-Pearl comb he had given her mother.
Reyna kissed him with feeling, with almost human affection. “But if you must go… I will miss you.”
In the morning, one of the village men — Kenobi — sailed off with him to the nearest island. Ben wore only the clothes on his back, his heirloom dagger, his flint and steel around his neck, and a small pouch of abalone pearls, that Reyna had painstakingly dived and found for him where the storm had turned over the King’s fishing boat.
He watched the port town grow in his sight, holding his boy, pointing to objects and naming them for him, who was excited to finally see outside the island he was born to.
“See: this one is a sloop.”
“Sloopp,” little Adam hissed and popped the strange word.
“And this one… oh my god.”
“God,” Adam repeated, but looked up at his father, who had suddenly become still and quiet.
Moored to the pier before the inn, was the Renata.
The fisherman called out the order to moor their boat, but saw Ben was focused on something and looked at the tall single-mast fishing yacht a few boats over.
“You’re lucky,” he told him, guessing the situation.
“Am I?”
“We will be here until tomorrow morning, when the tide goes out again.”
Impossible to stay hidden in the boat, he had to face his old crew. After a moment’s hesitation, he brought his son with him.
Their reaction was mostly relieved he was alive, and then congratulatory for his newborn son, and then… intrigued at the lack of ring on his finger, or woman with him. The men were dismissed to go on shore to get supplies by their new captain: Vicrul, who carried the boy on a hip, marvelling at the new face, both familiar, and odd.
“How is this possible?”
“I told you, I met a woman—”
“Please don’t lie, Ben, not to me.” He let the boy down, who ran on the softly rolling wooden deck, already sure-footed at not even two, exploring this ship that was bigger than he had ever seen before. “I noticed his eyes, sea-green, too big. Like hers. Like Reyna’s.”
“Yes. Like Reyna’s.” Ben half-shrugged. “I can’t quite explain it, Vicrul. Only that it works. I have this first son, and another, and a dozen daughters I can’t take with me.”
“A dozen daughters!”
“I belong to a tribe now, Vicrul. A covenant.”
“A tribe. How many?”
“Fourteen mermaids I know, but there must be others who haven’t made the trip from their home surf, I don’t know where that is.”
“And mermen?” Vicrul turned to look at the boy who was attempting to climb the rigging, and getting tripped up in it, giggling. The evidence was right before his eyes, but it was still hard to believe.
“Well, not really mer-men. They are also about a dozen, a third are boys. They live together, on a tiny island. There were more, they told me, but remember that tsunami a few years back?” Vicrul nodded, “It almost wiped the whole tribe out.”
“Are you a prisoner?”
“I was for a while. I’m not now.”
Vicrul stared at him, waiting.
“I— I thought, I have a ‘duty’ — to my father, to my mother, to my King. To my kingdom. To you, even.”
“Ah. You wanted to present your boy. He’s beautiful, you can be proud.” Vicrul smiled.
They fell quiet.
“If it will reassure you, after your ‘disappearance’ the King officially designated one of your ‘cousins’ as Heir to the Throne.”
“Who?”
“Connix Ko Kaidel.”
“I barely remember her. A woman?”
“He considered your mother, but she won’t be making anymore children: her line ended with you, who is presumed dead, or at least an outlaw — quite a heist you pulled there. Connix is young. So, your boy is not in the succession line anymore. Neither are you, unless you’ve come back to court your cousin.”
“I’m in enough trouble as it is, don’t you think?”
Vicrul laughed, and smacked his old friend on the back. “You could be pardoned. So. What now?”
“I’m not sure anymore.”
“Did you think to come back to your old life? Give your son to your mother and skip off again, like your dad did?”
A loud bump, and Adam wailed, a strident cry, higher-pitched than what a normal human larynx should be able to make. Ben got up and retrieved his crying son from the tangle of rigging he’d fallen into. The boy grabbed a fistful of dark hair and stuck his thumb in his mouth, soon calm again, and tired. Ben rocked him, kissed his head, hummed a tune, and the boy fell asleep, content.
Then Vicrul said: “you have everything you ever wanted, Ben. You’ve actually married the sea. She has given you children. You have found your family. You have no duty to your king, or to me. If you want, I will let your mother know you are alive and thriving. Write her a letter, and I will personally ride to her castle to give it to her.” The new Captain of the Renata stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Ben Solo, I do have a duty to my men, other than to entertain you.”
In the morning, Ben Organa-Solo handed the heirloom blade to Vicrul, wrapped in a thick parchment scroll, inscribed in his smooth script his mother would easily recognize. They hugged. The whole crew hugged him goodbye. They would be the Knights of the Renata now.
Then he went back to the fisherman’s boat, who was waiting to take him and his first-born son back to their mother, and twin sister, and multiple of other sisters and cousins and uncles. He looked at the older man guiding the boat out, and realized he had taken the job because he was Reyna’s father.
“Thank you for your patience,” Ben told him.
The old man shrugged. “Take out that Yukele that you found, and play us a tune.”
So, with sail hoisted high and taunt in the rising wind, and his first son intensely teething on hard sea-biscuits, Ben sat on his preferred seat, tuned the musical instrument to a familiar scale, and started his favorite lament.
When we wore a heart of stone / we wandered to the sea
Hoping to find some comfort there / yearning to feel free
And we were mesmerized by the lull of the night, and the smells that filled the air
And we laid us down on sandy ground, it was cold but we didn’t care
We were drawn to the rhythm / drawn to the rhythm of the sea
Yes we were drawn to the rhythm / drawn to the rhythm of the sea
*~The End~*
(By @liiwabeans.bsky.social. OCs are Captain Raiden and Mermaid Kingston.)