The Little Mermaid and the Sea Witch (2/3)

Sooo...this is out of hand and I've decided to add a GIANT climax to this. I'm going to try and get it up tonight, but here's part 2! Sorry for getting Triton's name wrong...I think I called him Trident in the first piece!

Enjoy!

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Triton, that stupid fuck, actually moves to curse his own daughter. He comes to Ursula’s dwelling late into the evening, seething, carrying the necessary ingredients for the spell he wants. His white hair--an old sign of magic granted to him by the trident he carries--writhes around his head.

“She needs to know that the surface isn’t where she belongs,” he hisses. He slams rusting ore and eel innards down onto the table. “She needs to learn that there is nothing but pain and heartbreak up there.”

“Dear, I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Ursual drawls. She’s wearing her red lipstick and has her own white hair spiked up like a sea urchin. Triton likes her to look like a bigger villain than he is. She frowns down at the red haze the eel innards are leaking into the water.  “Slow down.”

“My youngest daughter,” Triton says. He slams a fist onto Ursula’s table, sending bits of herbs floating to the floor. “She’s fallen in love with some human she saved from a sinking ship. Ariel’s always been the most spontaneous of her sisters.”

This man is an idiot, Ursula thinks. She keeps her face bored,  but feels an eyebrow twitch. How little did this man know about Ariel that he could believe she’d fall in love with a man in the space of an hour? “You have so many daughters, old man. Isn’t Aurora your youngest?”

“She’ll come here,” Triton says, ignoring Ursula’s question. She knows he doesn’t have a daughter named Aurora, but isn’t sure if he does. He has a tendency to forget the names of his family. He tugs at his beard. “I’ve implanted the silly idea that she must go to the surface and find him. She’ll come here for legs. I want you--I want you to give them to her.”

Ursula freezes. This is going way too close to plan. “Are you sure you don’t want me to just curse her to stay in the water?”

Triton shakes his head. “No, no, she’ll hate me then. I need you to grant her her deepest wish, but make it hurt. I want every step she takes on land to be agony.” He draws out firecoral from his belt and tosses it onto the table.  “I want--I want you to make sure she is in so much pain that she can’t even speak to the man she calls her beloved.” He stops there, panting from the force of his outburst.

“Huh,” Ursula says into the ensuing silence. Fire coral isn’t necessary for a curse of transformation. Triton’s an even shittier parent than she thought. It drives a cold spike of fear through Ursula. What else has he done to Ariel if he’s willing to do this? But this is all part of Ariel’s plan and Ursula needs to do her part. “I can do that. But what’s in it for me?”

“Oh,” Triton says darkly, “you’ll be rewarded, sea witch. Don’t doubt that.”

Ursula, of course, doubts it a lot. That’s why she’s going to make sure she’s rewarded.

With Ariel.

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“So far, so good,” Ariel says, voice tight with pain. The water is churning outside the cave, lightning crashing far, far above, Titon’s gift in this play. Ariel is gasping in Ursula’s arm as her throat burns with magic. “Fins, what did you put in this thing?”

“Only what was necessary,” Ursula says grimly. She pulls Ariel’s red hair away from her forehead and presses a kiss directly over the furrow in her brow. “Bear with it, love. It’ll be over soon.”

“Bitch fuck,” Ariel says. Her voice is already growing weaker, its power fueling the curse. It’s the price this particular spell calls for, but it’s not irreversible. Her voice will return in a few weeks. “Mother of pearl. Ursula, I love you, but what the fuck.”

Ursula winces as Ariel’s nails dig into her arm. She’s got thicker skin than mermaids, but that doesn’t mean Ariel doesn’t get dangerously close to breaking skin. “Every spell comes with a cost, even the ones I don’t add anything to. If it makes you feel better, this pain will fade. Your father wanted me to make it last the whole two weeks.”

“Yeah, not making me feel better,” Ariel says. Her voice is barely a whisper, but the lines of pain around her eyes are fading. Her beautiful green tail is almost gone, already split in two with the beginnings of toes at the end.  “How long until I need to be on the surface?”

“Not long.” Ursula’s only worked this curse once before and it went very different than this. That recipient hadn’t had as strong of a voice as Ariel and the transformation had gone a lot slower. They’d been able to breathe underwater five minutes after their fin turned. “I can feel your father’s spies outside. You better go while you still have the energy to make a show.”

Ha, Ariel says. She looks surprised when her voice doesn’t come out, then shrugs and switches to sign. “I’ve been training for this for years.”

Ursula throws the little mermaid out of her cave before Triton’s spies can see her laughing.

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The plan is to make the humans do all the dirty work. The humans don’t know that they’re going to be doing all the dirty work, but Ariel says it doesn’t matter. Prince Eric, apparently, wouldn’t understand it anyway.

Ariel goes to the surface and does a lot of naked flailing around. She nearly crushes Sebastien with her butt and then manages to kick that little Flounder thing. The bird Ariel calls her “informant” coaches the former mermaid into standing and, reluctantly dressing.

Ursula watches all this from her cave, biting her nails down to the quick as the scene shifts deep within her crystal ball. She can see Triton’s hand in the rough surf that bombards Ariel into the beach and she just knows he’s going to be watching close for the next week. Ariel says that’s fine, that she’s accounted for her father’s spying, but Ursula isn't as convinced as she’d like to be.

Triton is dangerous as long as he’s alive. Her own parents learned that the hard way, banished to seas far beyond what Ursula knows. They lost their home, their kingdom and their daughter because Triton is greedy and dangerous.

Ursula’s learned from them. She bows her head to the evil king when she has to, fills his orders when she must, and keeps quiet when she works against him. He thinks her cowed, like her parents, tentacles knotted together in fear. He thinks her a willing sea witch under his thumb.

Well, she is a sea witch. He’s got one thing right.

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Triton visits Ursula three days into the curse. Ariel still doesn’t have her voice back and is using the opportunity to pretend to be an idiot. She’s been ignoring Sebastien’s pointed warnings and advice and going on dates with the Prince.

(Ursula knows it’s part of the plan, but it still burns to see them sitting together, the Prince grinning, Ariel giggling. She wants to be beside Ariel. Her.)

“She should be back by now,” Triton snarls. He’s towering over Ursula, eyes flaming bright with rage. “You did something. You did the curse wrong.”

Ursula is lounging against one of her eels, eating snails as slowly as possible. The shells crunch in her mouth, the sound cracking against the walls of her cave. “She’s your daughter, Triton. Maybe she inherited your strength.”

Triton looks pleased for a moment before the rage returns. He likes his strength being acknowledged, hates the idea of his daughter having any part of it. “The pain should be unbearable and yet she’s making doe eyes at that human. Go fix it.”

“What?” Ursula asks incredulously. She drops the snail in her hand. “Go fix it? Do you mean you want me to go curse her more?” 

That’s not part of the plan.

“Can you?” Triton asks, interested. He knows fuck all about magic, every scrap of control coming from the trident he stole from Ursula’s family. He’s a monstrous being of power without the years of training her people used to go through to make a clamshell glow.

“No,” Ursula says. She runs a hand through her short hair. “Magic can’t be laid over magic.” She knows, she’s tried to overwrite Triton’s curse on her a hundred times already. “But,” Ursula says slowly. She’s thinking about Ariel and the Prince on the rowboat, Sebastien urging them to break the curse. She’s thinking about how much she hates this cave, hates how she feels like a crab on a lead all the time. She’s thinking a lot like Ariel.  “But,” she says, “I could make her feel like she’s been cursed again. If I go there, I can affect her directly. I can relay your wishes right away.”

And it’s a sign of how many years it’s been since Triton defeated her parents that he doesn’t hesitate. If he remembered the power of her people, how little they needed to circumvent a compulsion, he would smite her for suggesting she leave the bounds of his kingdom, out of his reach.

But Triton thinks his reach is much further than it actually is.Triton thinks himself strong.

Triton doesn’t remember so he says, “Yes! Exactly.Go teach my daughter why she should never have made a deal with a sea witch and not with me. Punish her for daring to venture out of the safety of my realm. Make her regret.”

Ursula doesn’t need her sea witch persona to smile at him. Her lips curl up and her eyelids half-close and the water around her turns murky with power. “Of course, sire. I hear you.”

Triton is used to being heard. He is used to being obeyed.

He does not know that those are two very different things.