Ira stayed in the cave with the Sea Witch the entire night.
After a while, he got tired of sitting without any support and so leaned back against the merman. He didn't know why this was a feeling he enjoyed, but he did, so he didn't question it. The merman held him around his waist and Ira took a couple of pictures of them together just for the hell of it.
It was as midnight approached that Ira considered that maybe it was time to go back to the castle so he could sleep. But before he could untangle himself from the merman's limbs, the Sea Witch grabbed a hold of his face, bent it back and kissed him before Ira could protest.
It was a nice kiss.
Ira moaned into it before he could stop himself.
Twisting around, he settled down on his knees on top of the merman's tail, enjoying the feeling of being kissed by such a skilled soul.
There was a sensation to it that was familiar and it reminded him, somehow, of Silas, but Ira wasn't in the mind to dwell on it. He had more important things to worry about. Like if he could suffocate from kissing.
It was a valid concern.
Regardless, the kissing was nice and he let himself relax into it. It got progressively deeper and more languid as it went along and Ira found that he liked it. Silas had always kissed him aggressively, like he was afraid he would disappear, but this slow kissing was nice too. He had the feeling that he was on the way to getting used to it.
Well, whatever. He was ridiculously old. If he wanted to try out this whole relationship thing, he was very much allowed to.
Eventually, the kissing ceased as Ira's body got sleepier and in the end, he fell asleep on top of the merman. When he woke up the next morning, he was surprised to find himself still on top of him. He would have thought that he'd be dumped in the ocean for daring to sleep on top of him.
As they were deep in a cave, the only reason he knew it was morning was his internal clock. After some yawning and grumbling about how he didn't like his job, he untangled himself from the merman and started crawling along the cave floor. He heard the merman shifting behind him and then the sound of a splash as they jumped back into the waters.
Ira carefully made his way through the cave, until he was finally out of it. When he was, he saw the merman again as they appeared out of the water right next to him.
"Come back."
Ira tilted his head and nodded. "Mhm. I'll come back."
Then he started the annoying trip back to the castle.
Nothing of any interest had occurred while he was away. The mermaid princess and his Host were doing their jobs, one with more hatred than the other. The Captain was still out to sea and wasn't set to return for another two weeks, which gave Ira plenty of time to slack off and go visit the merman.
So that was what he did.
During the next two weeks, he spent every night with the merman. Things didn't progress beyond kissing, and weirdly enough, sometimes not even that, but Ira was content.
It was relaxing and fun and he enjoyed it.
Eventually, though, the Captain came back to the castle and Ira couldn't come to the cave as often. In a rare display of kindness, he told this to the merman instead of just disappearing mysteriously.
Somehow, though, this seemed not to reassure him.
Ira shrugged and decided not to worry about it.
For the next several days, he watched as the mermaid princess persisted in her efforts to gain the prince's attention in increasingly weird ways. Once, she even let all of the horses out of the stables and ran off in the midst of a pretend panic. It took the prince four hours to figure out what she wanted, as she could neither speak nor write and his Host was off actually doing her job in another part of the castle.
When the horses were finally all collected and the matter had been resolved, she was once again not punished, but a young stableboy was instead. He got quite a lot of lashes and had to spend a month in the dungeons.
At least he wasn't executed?
Well, whatever.
Regardless, Ira got to see some very funny things while he slacked off from his work, one of which was his Host having to run away from a pair of vicious guard dogs.
She had to stay waiting in a tree for five hours before someone heard her desperate screams and saved her. He had very dutifully recorded the entire ordeal and couldn't wait to show it off to his colleagues.
The Head Maid had given him a very concerned look when she caught him bursting into laughter right out of the blue. Thankfully, aside from a few pointed questions about his mental health, she didn't make a big deal out of it and Ira went on with life the same as usual.
With the prince back in the castle, things started moving again. The prince continued his futile efforts in wooing the noble girl turned assassin, his Host showcased that she had a brain by not getting involved with him and the mermaid princess got increasingly furious. She had started to slack off on her job again, believing herself to be above mucking shit.
This, of course, did not sit well with the other people working with the horses and she got lectured and yelled at at increasing intervals.
The fact that she refused to change her behavior did not say good things about her.
At this point, Ira had ceased doing his job entirely. Nobody noticed him whether he did it or not, so he didn't see why he should put in all that effort. Instead, he spent his time lazying about on any soft surface he could find, while leaving the cleaning to other people.
For some reason, nobody told him off for this.
The magic of the mob character.
So invisible they don't even get blamed for not doing their jobs purposefully.
Under the sea, in Atlantis, the mer King had found out what his wayward daughter was up to and he was absolutely pissed off. Unlike his stupid daughter, he knew that all magic came with a price and that it was never as simple as it first appeared. There was of course also the fact that his daughter had abandoned all of her duties without notifying anybody at all.
It was like she didn't get that royalty had a responsibility to the people they ruled.
Otherwise the people rebelled and the royalty got offed by their own citizens.
And nobody wanted that.
Well, nobody but the mermaid princess apparently.
Unfortunately, for all his rage, there wasn't much that the mer king could do when he was stuck in the water and his daughter on land, so she continued on unstopped and unchecked. Ira watched as she engineered more and more ridiculous meetings with the Captain and felt like he could die laughing a few times.
Some were just so ridiculous it was downright awkward.
By the time she jumped down from a balcony straight into the surprised prince's arms, Ira was honestly worried for the future of this nation.
Because it was working.
The prince was actually falling for the very obvious tricks and the fact that she couldn't speak just helped. It made her more mysterious and pitiful, awakening his instinct to protect her, despite the fact that she was much more dangerous than he could ever hope to be.
Together with the frustrations that was caused by the fact that the noble girl was completely unresponsive to his affections, they only got closer.
It was absolutely nauseating to watch.
Ira felt like bleaching his eyes, but there was no bleach in this world, so he had to just deal with it. It sucked.
As was common in situations such as these, when they finally got closer, they got closer at an unrealistically fast rate. Within weeks, the prince told the mermaid princess that he loved her and wanted to marry her. Likewise, the mermaid princess finally figured out that his Host could relay messages for her and told him she loved him too.
There engagement was then promptly declared to the world.
In a matter of days.
Was it wrong of Ira to want to kill them? What the hell happened? Where did the Captain's love for the noble girl go? His acknowledgement of his duties? His respect for his mother, who really didn't like the servant girl her son suddenly wanted to marry?
It would be more believable if he had gotten the mermaid princess pregnant, but that wasn't possible. Ira had done scans on both of them and neither the mermaid princess or his Host were any longer capable of getting pregnant or carrying children. If, by some divine intervention, they did get pregnant, it would only result in miscarriage.
Well, not that they'd believe him if he told them, though.
Similarly, even if they turned back into mermaids, they still would not be able to have any children. The change had simply messed them up too much and reverting it would actually cause more damage.
Maybe even enough to kill them.
One could always hope.
With the engagement proclaimed, a grand feast was held at the castle to celebrate it, inviting a whole ton of foreign royals, diplomats and merchants. It was to be the grandest feast of the decade, if the mermaid princess had anything to say about it.
And of course she did. Because the Captain was so whipped he would believe the sky was green and the grass was blue if she told him so.
Weak-ass pussy.
Still, despite the many preparations that the castle was undergoing for the feast, Ira's lack of a job didn't change. Oddly enough, he still got paid.
He continued his lazying about, reading any book he could find that seemed interesting. Sadly, there weren't a lot of those, so most of the time he had to settle for subpar books that made him want to set them on fire. That was how much they sucked.
Maybe make a bonfire out of it...
It was supposed to be romantic or something, right? Perhaps he could invite his merman and they could do some more of that kissing thing.
That would be nice.
Meanwhile, the Queen of the human nation he was currently living in was so far past furious she was essentially just a large ball of rage right now. She couldn't believe that her son would disregard her words so easily, as if she didn't raise him to be a good king, to be above this kind of emotional manipulation. As if he didn't love her enough to pick her, when she had raised him on her own while ruling a country after his father passed.
She couldn't believe the complete and utter lack of respect.
Or so Ira interpreted her various mumblings and rantings when she thought she was alone in her room, but had just somehow missed Ira hanging out on her bed.
Hey, it was a nice bed. Much, much nicer than his.
So sue him. He'd win.
Occasionally, Ira checked up on the merman, but they were always doing some sort of complicated magic and stuff he couldn't be bothered to find out more about, so he settled with just looking. He was very beautiful.
It was an otherworldly sort of beautiful that Ira quite liked.
After spending a few short seconds pondering the subject, he had figured the merman's soul was probably really similar to Silas', and that was why he seemed so familiar.
It was also possible that he was an incarnation of Silas, but Ira didn't care enough to find out for sure. Besides, just because it was the same soul, it didn't mean that Silas was in there somewhere. It could very well be an earlier incarnation.
Or a much, much later one. Regardless, it didn't change anything, so Ira put it out of his mind.
He still had a — getting progressively more boring — job to do.
