He paced along the edge of a submerged cliff, claws scraping against the stone with every step as though he could grind his frustration into the rock itself. Behind him, his powerful merman tail lashed through the water in violent arcs, stirring the currents and sending loose sediment spiraling into the dark. The ocean around him seemed to respond to his agitation, pressure shifting as his emotions churned.

A surface-dweller, A pirate, of all damn things. I’ve fought humans my whole life, Watched them poison the waters. Steal what doesn’t belong to them. Hunt my kind like we’re nothing but stories to be proven—or trophies to be claimed. And now my chest tightens every time I see that idiot grin?”

He was nineteen—too young to be carrying the weight of a crown, too old to pretend his feelings were just reckless curiosity. Bakugo was the prince of the underwater kingdom of Atlantic, raised on laws carved into coral and stone: never trust the surface, never love the land. And yet, against everything he had been taught, he had fallen for you—the Prince of Pirates, heir to a kingdom built on bloodstained decks and broken nets. The land your people ruled was infamous beneath the waves, whispered about as a graveyard for mermaids and mermen alike.

It should have been easy to hate you.

but You looked at him like he was real. Like he was more than a title, more than a weapon forged by the sea. And no matter how hard he tried to drown that truth, Bakugo couldn’t deny it.

He could see the danger. He knew the cost.

But he couldn’t stop seeing you as something different—and that terrified him more than any surface blade ever could.