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The wood beneath Xiao’s feet creek worryingly as Xiao moves soundlessly across the worn waterlogged planks of the old pier. The sound of waves crashing against the wooden support beams break the quiet of the night.
Stars twinkle like guiding lights leading Xiao down the walkway as he makes his way down to the end of the path where the old rusted railing stands swaying slightly in the brisk sea breeze.
Xiao approaches the end. His thoughts are a buzz. Voices telling him horrible terrible things.
It’s so loud. It’s been so loud for so long. The voices scream at him, clawing at the inside of his mind. He would give anything just to shut them up, to gain only a moment of peace.
It would be so simple to just hoist himself over the chest height barrier, and toe the edge of the splintered wood. It would be so easy to let it all go, to fall into the black churning abyss below, to let the salty waves crash over him, quiet his suffocating thoughts forever.
Xiao's arms tense to lift himself over the railing, his palms scraping painfully over the rough surface of the guard rail.
This isn’t the first time he’s been here, staring out into the open ocean. He wants to, truly, he wants to, but he won’t, he didn’t yesterday and he won’t today.
The thin tank top he wears does nothing to shield him from the frigid wind that blows through him. He needs to leave before he gets sick. He can’t miss another day at work.
The crash of waves pick up below him; there’s a storm coming. He can smell it in the air. It’s quiet other than the sound of the ocean. Most of the birds must have left before the incoming bad weather.
He begins to move away from the edge, to head back the way he came, down the rickety pier back to his old car that barely runs, back to his empty apartment that constantly smells of smoke despite him never having had a cigarette.
Then he hears it, the most beautiful sound. A song hauntingly beautiful, eerie in the way it resonates in the still air of this moonless night.
It stops Xiao in his tracks, yet the song has him swaying forward pulling him toward the enchanting melody.
He doesn't know when he moves to stand on the other side of the old railing, but his fingers dig painfully into the rusted guards. Xiao's mind is blessedly blank for the first time in forever. His breathing eases, his eyes glaze, his fingers loosen on the railing as his body tilts towards the churning water below. Like a ship out on the open ocean during a storm Xiao is helpless to fight against the push and pull of the waves, of the song pulling him in.
Xiao lets go and falls forward into the abyss.
-
Water washes over Xiao as the current pushes him to and fro. He can barely make out light from the dim pier lights above. His efforts to breathe only result in him swallowing a mouth full of saltwater. He’s never had trouble swimming before, but his limbs feel heavy and the current is strong. Something bumps into him from the side and sends him careening into one of the wooden columns. Slippery hands grasp desperately to hold on, splitters dig into the pads of his fingers.
The waves are unforgiving in their assault. Xiao struggles to keep his head above water as waves crash over him. He gets only what feels like milliseconds of reprieve before another wave slams into him, over and over again, draining most of the strength he has left. His arms burn and he's sure his fingers must be bloody, rubbed raw from the way he's clutching desperately onto the supports.
Another wave crashes into him and his strength fails, sending him plunging back into the dark depths. The ocean drags him down instantly. He reaches blindly for something to anchor him, but his hands grasp at nothing. Is this it? He can't see anything. He can't tell which way is up from down and yet he has the dreadful feeling that he is sinking. Deeper and deeper with each second that he fails to struggle hard enough.
If he'd just try a little harder, fight a little more he could probably pull himself up— but he's so tired. He could sleep here, if he ignored the burn in his lungs, the water rushing in his ears. His eyes shut of their own accord, is there any point trying to reopen them, he couldn't see anything anyway, how would closing his eyes make a difference?
For a second, just one blissful second everything is quiet.
And then an impact to his side, hard enough to knock out whatever air he has left in his lungs. His eyes snap open and somehow he can see, not everything, the water is still suffocatingly dark but—
Within the darkness, there is light in the water, blurred and distorted, but bright. It flickers in and out in some type of pattern, probably there to lure in some poor hypnotized fish. It is difficult to decipher the light’s distance with nothing else around to gauge it. But, the light is steadily brightening as it moves fluidly behind him and out of his field of vision.
Xiao tries to twist his body around so that he can keep the strange light within his sight, but his energy is spent and his limbs are heavy with fatigue. All he can do is sink like a bag of rocks as his vision begins to darken around the edges. Drowning, he thinks, is already a messed up way to die, but being eaten by some mysterious glowstick while drowning must be a new low.
Xiao can see the water around him lighten as the light rapidly approaches. Something shifts behind him, brushing the back of his shirt, causing Xiao to tense as he braces for whatever is about to happen.
Out of every terrible scenario that flashes through his mind the last thing he expects is strong arms hooking around his waist. Claws dig into the soft skin of his stomach and suddenly he’s being moved through the water. The flex of what feels like a powerful tail moves against his legs propelling him through the water. Within seconds his head breaches the surface. With a ragged gasp, he instantly begins coughing up lungs full of water replacing it with blessedly cool ocean air.
Xiao’s body tingles all over, his head spins and he has only a moment to question what hell is holding him before everything goes dark.
He’s here again. The man stands precariously close to the pier's edge only that rickety old rusted railing standing between him and the churning depths below. Venti watches him from beneath the waves, careful to keep his head and glowing braids submerged to avoid being seen.
The man’s hair blows in the wind, tangling prettily around his soft cheeks. His eyes are sharp, piercing, despite the sadness that lingers just under the surface. The red on his eyelids is smudged but still serves to make his eyes pop. Like windows to his soul, those golden eyes are somehow just as enchanting as Venti’s, they’re what first drew Venti in— his eyes, so full of sorrow, but alluring all the same. Sometimes he imagines their gazes meet, though he knows that there’s no way the man would be able to see him through the darkness. He knows the man would've not returned, would have not been standing here so comfortably each night if the stranger had actually caught sight of the creature that watches him so enraptured.
The man is beautiful and Venti wants . It’s almost painful to control the urge to pull— to call the man to himself and watch the man’s eyes glaze over as he falls under Venti’s spell. He wants to hold him, to feel his warm human skin. They live in different worlds but they could be together if only for a moment, they could live in the same world.
But he can’t— he won’t. If Venti lures him, if he drags him down to the depths, then he’d never get to see him again. If he killed his beautiful golden goose to get the egg, then he would never see those captivating eyes, never see those fascinating shifts in his expression as he gazes out at the water that Venti calls home.
Venti has been watching him for weeks. Each night the man stands on the edge and looks out at the ocean longingly. And every night Venti’s resolve grows weaker. It’s getting harder to resist the urge. His teeth ache with the need to sink them into the soft flesh that peeks from beneath his clothes.
The man looks especially distressed tonight, the despair in his eyes consuming, the furrow between his brows etched deeper than usual. Venti could fix that. He could clear his troubled mind, rid him of all of his worries with but a simple song. He should do that, he should help him. The man is obviously hurting and it’s Venti’s duty to help him— he is Venti’s person after all. This is the only reason—he tells himself— why Venti opens his mouth and begins to sing. The effect is instant. The man’s eyes glaze over and he lists forward tilting towards the song. He lifts a leg to push himself over the railing and… Venti should stop. He needs to stop right now! He’d wanted to help ease the man’s pain but this is going too far. The man’s other leg comes to join the other over the railing.
It takes everything in him to stop his song, to fight against his nature, but he manages to cut himself off— if only a moment too late. The man topples over the edge, the waves swallow him immediately. After almost a minute passes without him resurfacing, Venti begins to panic. Diving down he sees the man struggling against the strong current and pushes him into one of the support beams, hoping that he will grab on. He still does not want the man to see him, doesn't want to break the little fantasy that he’s built over the last few weeks. So, as soon as the man manages to pull his head out of the water Venti swims away. Not far enough that he cannot watch over him, but far enough that the man does not notice that he is not alone in the water.
He’s struggling, Venti flinches as each wave slams into him. When the man goes under once again Venti knows he's not going to make it— at least not on his own. Still Venti hesitates. His only rule had always been to never show himself. The man sinks like a rock, descending quickly. Watching him sink to the bottom of the ocean should bring Venti some type of pleasure it’s what he is, he was made to lure these humans to their death, to watch them descend into the depth of no return. He has lured many to their deaths over many many years, but watching this man— his person— be swallowed up by the darkness of the deep brings him only anxiety, a deep-rooted fear that alleviates any of Venti’s uncertainties and pushes him into action.
-
Xiao comes to in bouts of lucidity. His head is pounding a painful rhythm, repeated pulses of pain that leave him delirious. He's not sure if he hit his head on the way up to the surface but he must have some kind of head injury; it's the only way to explain what he's seeing right now.
Glowing turquoise eyes look down at him from above. The eyes are full, large and round, there's intelligence there, he can tell in the way that they study him. It's very pretty, this creature, with its combination of chubby cheeks and big blue eyes. Xiao would be inclined to let his guard down if not for the rows of sharp teeth that peek from behind a pair of plush lips.
He tenses as the creature draws closer. Cool wet fingers, webbed at the joints, reach down to caress the side of his face. They scrape uncomfortably against Xiao's damp skin.
"You…okay?" The words come out light and eerie from the creature's mouth, each word accompanied by a flutter of a pair of gills that he'd only just noticed low on the creature's neck. The sound of its voice is both strange and soothing tinged with an accent that Xiao is certain he has never heard before.
"Okay?" the voice comes again. It really is beautiful. Each word is a note to a song. It has him feeling light-headed, untethered. His head swims and then gives another painful throb. Xiao uses the ache to anchor himself. His head is still swimming as if he had never resurfaced and is still sinking somewhere out in the ocean.
Still, through the ache pounding a consistent rhythm through the base of his skull, Xiao forces himself to speak up. The creature's worried, imploring expression pulling an "I'm okay" from his throat, scratching and stilted. His throat burns terribly and the words trigger another painful coughing fit. Even so, the words as hoarse as they are still serve to bring a smile to the creature's face.
Cute . Xiao's traitorous brain supplies. His smile though fanged is bright almost blindingly so. The smile lights up its entire face, makes its eyes crinkle prettily at the sides and Xiao can't help but be at least slightly endeared.
The creature —most likely a mermaid now that he's thinking about it— flexes his very large tail shifting the sand around it. Xiao's still not sure he's not having some concussion related hallucination. He should probably be freaking out right now but his limbs still feel like led and sadly enough the warmth of the mermaid pressed up against his side is the closest he's gotten to another's touch in a very long time.
Maybe it’s the fact that he’s far more touch starved than he’d thought, or maybe it’s the way the creature looks down at him, with eyes so full of wonder; he can’t remember anyone ever looking at him that way. Xiao has always ever faded into the background, ignored and overlooked, but here he is being seen completely for what feels like the first time since he’d lost everything. He can’t help the way his hand stretches across the distance to cup the creature's petal soft cheek.
Its eyes widen and then shut, leaning into the warmth of Xiao’s hand. The sight has his heart leaping into his throat, fluttering wilding like a bird wanting to be set free. “You saved me,” he whispers into the night. There’s no one out here this late, but Xiao can not bring himself to speak any louder, to break the comforting silence that surrounds them “thank you.”
The creature lets out another sweet coo at Xiao’s thanks before opening its mouth and producing the most beautiful sound Xiao has ever heard. His world narrows down to just him and the beautiful thing looking down at him. The song it sings is mesmerizing, enchanting in the way that it draws all of Xiao’s attention, completely and wholly captivating until all of his worries wash away with the pull of the waves. His head is completely full of the lyricless melody that the creature sings. How could he possibly have anything to worry about when this hymn of the sea is all he’s ever needed. Where Xiao begins and the song ends he could not possibly begin to fathom.
A crack of thunder breaks Xiao out of his spell as the sky finally opens up and pours out the rain that it had been building up. The song cuts off abruptly as the creature tears its eyes away from Xiao to stare worried up at the raging sky. It takes a moment, his mind still foggy, still off in some trance that he longs to return to, but Xiao eventually realizes that lying down in the wet sand with soaked clothes as rain beats down on him is not the best idea. A flash of lightning lights up the night prompting Xiao to finally move away. The whimper that the creature lets out as Xiao removes his hand from its cheek is almost enough to convince him to stay— almost. Sand chafes uncomfortably against his damp skin as he struggles to pick himself up off of the ground. His body aches terribly, he knows he’ll be feeling this in the morning.
He’s beginning to make his way up the beach when that voice the same stops comes once again, stopping him in his track. “Venti” it sings, and when Xiao turns back large blue eyes are staring at him pitifully through the darkness. The creature points to itself and repeats what must be its name. The voice is sad, mournful and he almost turns back then and there, but he needs to leave so instead Xiao points to himself in turn “I’m Xiao.” Finally, the solemn look that had made its way across the mermaid’s face smoothes out and is replaced with that bright smile that had taken Xiao’s breath away the first time. “I’ll be back, tomorrow.”
With a small smile in return, Xiao turns again to make his way up the beach and back to his car. He doesn't turn back again, fearing that if he catches sight of the enchanting thing on the beach he’ll never want to leave. There is a loud slash as he reaches the point where the sand ends, Xiao still does not turn, staring straight ahead all the way to his car.
The streets are empty as Xiao makes his way back to his empty apartment. The windows are down; wind and rain whip around his face tousling his hair and wetting his cheeks. Through the sound of thunder and the howl of the wind, he can still faintly hear the call of the sea.