Lance's first thought as his mind came back into focus was, Am I dead? His second thought, No, I can't be. My chest hurts way too much for me to be dead.

Blinking tired, stinging eyes open, Lance's vision was still very much out of focus. Everything was too bright. Too blurry. The brunet let out a groan and tried to shift his body slightly. He could feel the old, splintering wood of the pier underneath his back and shoulder. He must have been laying on his side because, even though he couldn't really see it, the world seemed like it was titled on its axis.

Cursing low under his breath, Lance attempted to sit up. His arms felt like jelly. After what seemed like at least four unsuccessful attempts, Lance pushed himself up into a sitting position. He put a hand to his head and let out a breath. His lungs felt like they were on fire.

How did I get back on the pier? he wondered, trying to blink the fogginess from his eyes. I was...I was drowning? Wasn't I?

"You know, this little trinket is, like, the most idiotic reason to throw your life away."

Yelping at the sudden voice, Lance clambered backwards and looked around quickly, trying to find the source. It took at least two rounds before his eyes landed on someone at the edge of the pier, head resting on one arm as they twirled a key-chain, Lance's key-chain around their finger. As the brunet's eyes finally focused, his jaw dropped.

Not only was this random person the definition of attractive with almond shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and perfectly shaped lips that were pulled up in a smirk, all framed by silken, raven locks, but he...he was also...he had…

"Is that a tail?" Lance squeaked out, cerulean eyes wide as he attempted to take in the sight before him. Flicking in and out of the water lazily, disrupting the natural flow of the waves only just, was indeed a mermaid's tail, covered in iridescent crimson scales. Lance found himself entranced, the droplets of water that were spread over it glinting in the afternoon sun.

A snort pulled his attention away from the tail and back to the mermaid's face. "Well, what the hell else would it be?"

Blinking at the aggression in the words, Lance drew his brows together and titled his head.

"Okay, I've got to be hallucinating," the brunet muttered, eyes sliding to stare at the tail again. There was no way that this was real. It just wasn't possible. How could there really be a mythical creature in front of him right now? It was true that he'd hoped it would be real before, but with the memory of the water filling his lungs still on the forefront, he just wanted it to be a dream.

Lance sputtered as water was suddenly thrown at his face with such force that it almost knocked him onto his back. As he wiped the salty liquid from his eyes, he saw one dark brow quirked up on the mermaid's face, the smirk from before still present.

"What about now, lover boy? Still think its a dream?"

Lover boy? Turning his head away slightly, wariness creeping into his expression, Lance leaned forward and reached a hand out. The water in the face had been a good tactic, but he couldn't be totally sure until he touched the being before him. The tips of his fingers brushed against the mermaid's soft cheek, the skin still slightly damp, as if he had still been in the water until just recently. Okay, so maybe it's real.

Lance yanked his hand back before shoving it under his leg. He hadn't even asked if he could touch the mermaid or not. Like...how rude could you be? Clearing his throat, Lance kept his eyes locked on a spot somewhere to the left of where the mermaid's tail was. "So, uh. Do you know how I got back up here? I, uh, I was..." He wasn't sure what had happened. One moment he had been giving up on living, on surviving, and the next he was back up on the pier as if nothing had happened.

"Duh, I put you there?"

Eyes flying towards the mermaid's face again, Lance let out a choked sound. "W-what?"

The raven-haired mermaid rolled his eyes, and something about them drew a memory from Lance's mind. Grey orbs that glowed purple while a song surrounded him. Was that a hallucination? Something his mind conjured up as the lack of oxygen overtook him?

Letting go of the pier, the mermaid sunk back down into the water, getting his hair wet before he came back up. He then proceeded to swim in lazy circles in front of Lance, the sun shimmering over his skin and the scales of his tail as he did so.

"I was down by my rock, just minding my own business when you just show up and at first, I was just gonna let you drown, 'cause, like, it was your own stupidity that brought you down there," the ravenette explained, lifting his hand to spin that key-chain around his finger again.

"Hey, can I-?"

"But I decided, you know what? It would be rude to just leave you there, so I helped. Gave you some air and flopped you back outta the water. You're welcome, by the way."

Narrowing his eyes at the interruption, Lance stared at the way the water rippled around the mermaid's form, only barely displacing the waves as he gracefully swung his tail through the water. The brunet had a feeling that he wasn't going to get the metal trinket back anytime soon, so he resigned himself to sliding further towards the edge of the pier. Dipping his feet back into the water, he tried to formulate a coherent thought, his brain still muddled after the ordeal.

"Why have I never seen you before?"

Carding a hand through his dark hair, the mermaid quirked an eyebrow once again. "Do you really think that I would just let a random human see me?" the mermaid asked in favor of answering the question.

Lance opened and closed his mouth a few times, heat rising in his cheeks. He turned his eyes towards a spot down near his feet and muttered, "You did yesterday."

The soft sloshing of the saltwater around the mermaid stopped suddenly and the mermaid's raven-haired head popped up in between Lance's feet. Leaning back slightly, Lance kept his eyes firmly planted on the water and not those pretty grey eyes that had once glowed purple. "What do you mean?" the mermaid asked, tilting his head to the side. The expression on his face held such innocent confusion, that Lance was tempted to poke at the creature's cheeks. He managed to hold back the urge, but only just.

"You jumped in yesterday afternoon. You turned into a mermaid right in front of my eyes. I thought mermaids couldn't exist out of the water?"

The innocent expression turned to an annoyed, deadpan kind of look and suddenly, the mermaid swiped his tail swiftly through the water, propelling him up. The raven-haired creature thrust his hands out and pushed back against Lance's shoulders. The brunet's back collided with the hard wood of the pier and his head cracked against it.

Lifting a hand to rub at the growing sore spot on the back of his head, Lance groaned and stared at the mermaid that was now laying on top of him, the crimson of his scales glimmering in the light. The mermaid slapped his hands on the pier on either side Lance's head.

"I'm not a mermaid! I'm a Siren! Si-Ren!"

Siren? Lance had heard that term before, but wasn't it used to describe those awful creatures that dragged sailors to their deaths?

"Well, aren't they the same thing?" Lance wondered, not at all discontent with the heavy warmth of the creature above him.

The mer—no, the Siren let out a strangled sound and rolled off of Lance, throwing up his hands. "Of course not!"

Vaguely wondering why the sudden absence of the Siren's warmth upset him, Lance sat up and looked down at the way those raven locks splayed out around his head. The Siren's hands were covering his face now, and the brunet noticed that he wore a red stone on a leather cord wrapped around his wrist. Was that the source of that red that I'd seen yesterday and earlier? Shoving the thought into the metaphorical folder for topics addressed at another time, Lance pulled his legs up and crossed them. "So, what's the difference?"

The Siren slid his hands from his face and focused his cesious eyes on Lance. At the sudden intensity of the look, Lance felt a weird shiver creep up his spine. "The difference?" the ravenette repeated, his voice dropping several octaves. He held a hand out and motioned for Lance to help him sit up. The brunet was tempted to ignore it, so he could see the Siren struggle, but opted for being nice. Pulling the other into a sitting position, Lance lifted his eyebrows, urging the raven-haired creature to continue. "The difference is that a Siren could kill you with their bare hands." He paused and leaned forward, suddenly so close that their noses could almost touch. "I could kill you with my bare hands," he hissed, grey eyes sparking.

"Okay? And?" Lance was determined to not show any fear in front of the Siren. He had no doubt in his mind that the creature could kill him, but that didn't mean that he was gonna spur the guy on.

"And what?"

"And what about mermaids?"

Rolling those cesious eyes, the Siren lifted his hand again and spun Lance's key-chain around his finger once more. Lance was a little surprised that he was still holding onto it. "Mermaids," the Siren spat, as if he hated the word and it was like poison in his mouth, "Are pretty and innocent and were born as mermaids, and they don't exist. All those stories about mermaids are literally just stupid knock offs of what we really are." He paused and looked out at the ocean, the annoyed expression on his face fading into something contemplative. "We aren't innocent and full of happiness. We're just lost. We're lost and want our lives back, to be human again. We were made to kill, to take human lives and turn them into Sirens. We aren't...innocent."

As he spoke, the Siren's voice got softer, more filled with emotion. Something in Lance screamed at him to reach out and comfort this creature, but he wasn't sure if the Siren would let him.

Instead, the brunet reached out and ruffled the other's raven hair, causing him to swat at Lance's hands and emit several whiny, exasperated noises.

"Dude! Not cool!"

A smirk tugged at the corners of Lance's mouth as he took his hands away. The Siren's hair was now thoroughly mussed, strands sticking up in awkward intervals. "You sound pretty innocent to me," Lance said, a chuckle painting his voice in a positive light, hoping that it would make the Siren feel a little less...whatever he was at this moment. "At least, I refuse to believe that someone without any innocence would save the life of a complete stranger."

The more Lance thought about it, and believe you me, he was thinking about it harder than he'd ever thought about anything in his entire life, the more this entire ordeal sounded like that scene from the Little Mermaid. Well, the Disney version anyway. It almost seemed as if this Siren was Ariel and Lance was Prince Eric. The entire idea brought a bubble of almost manic laughter up his throat.

The Siren next to him angled his face away, a skeptical look rising in his face. "You're really weird, you know that?"

Lance blinked, that laughter bubbling up again to completely spill from his lips. His hand rose to scratch at the back of his head. "Yeah, my friends tell me that a lot!" he chuckled, then winced as his fingers brushed against the knot that was forming at the back of his head from when the Siren knocked him over earlier. "Ouch. That's gonna be a nasty bump tomorrow," he murmured, squinting against the throbbing in his skull.

"Shit, are you okay?" The Siren suddenly surged forward, his hands sliding into Lance's hair as if to check the wound for himself. Lance felt an urge to scramble backwards, to get as far away from this creature that had only minutes before threatened to murder him except, that's not really how it went. However, the urge flew right out the proverbial window as soon as Lance saw the worry in those beautiful grey eyes that were so unlike any he'd seen in his life.

There was light in them, a type of life that Lance had only ever seen once before, in eyes that were so different than the ones in front of him now. Their blue hues intermingled with a strange shade of pink, all because of a weird mutation. The ones in front of him now were full of life, but also seemed just as lifeless. There was a desire for it, but no such life existed in their slate colored depths.

"You still alive in there?"

Lance's body shook as his mind came out of his thoughts, focusing not on the contradictory nature of those eyes and instead on the look of concern that colored the Siren's face. "Uhm. I. Just. Yes. Yeah, I'm…" The teen's staggering words came to a stop, and something glinting in the sunlight caught his eye. The keychain.

It was still held tightly in the raven-haired Siren's hand, but it now rested against the splintered wood beneath the two of them, having taken his hands away from Lance's head while the brunet had been lost in his thoughts. Lance had been so set on getting it back earlier, but the longer he wanted the creature play with it, flaunt it in front of the brunet, the less he really wanted it back. You were supposed to drop it in the ocean anyway. Isn't that what she wanted? It was, but up until this point, Lance hadn't thought about honoring her wish.

The Siren dropped his concerned gaze from Lance's face down to the keychain as well. He blew out a puff of annoyed air and crossed his arms, taking the small, metal owl from Lance's sight. "Alright, what is it with this thing, huh?"

Lance blinked and slowly brought his eyes back up to meet his companion's. "Wha-?"

Words getting cut off as the ravenette dangled the keychain in front of Lance's nose, Lance leaned back slightly.

"This!" the creature blurted, shaking it. "What is it with you and this stupid little trinket? First you almost drown yourself because of it, and now you won't stop staring at it." Using his opposite hand, the Siren poked Lance between his eyebrows. "What. Is. It?" Each word fell on another jab of the Siren's finger.

"It…" Lance took a breath and brushed that painful finger from his face. "It belongs...belonged...to a friend of mine." Cerulean eyes turned to the side, not wanting to see those eyes that were so like hers but so different. Maybe they were the reason that, despite the implication that this creature could kill him and the fact that he shouldn't exist, Lance felt so comfortable with the Siren, as if they had known each other for as long as they'd lived. Of course, that was impossible; logically, Lance knew that his mind was just trying to make a connection because of that soul-deep feeling of loss that persisted after her death.

"Belonged as in?" the Siren urged, wrist rolling as if to say, any day now.

Lance winced again, watching as a breeze picked up and shifted the creature's now air dried hair over his forehead. The strands danced and circled around the Siren's ears, and it seemed similar to the way hair moved in the water. To be honest, the brunet had always loved watching the sway of hair through the ocean waves, had spent far too many hours watching as the sea and the sun had filtered through her hair. And all the while, as the memories he had tried to keep away resurfaced as strongly as if he had seen it just the day before, Lance couldn't get over the fact of how much he missed her. Her voice, her smile, everything. All the memories succeeded in doing was make Lance feel even more lonely than he had before he came here.

"She died."

The statement seemed to take the creature aback, and he leaned away from Lance as if the brunet had struck him. "Oh." That was it. That was all the Siren said as he hugged his arms over his middle and looked out at the ocean again, those slate-like eyes becoming stormy, filled with several emotions that Lance wasn't sure he could decipher without the ravenette telling him. Even when he spoke, the Siren kept those eyes away, seemingly content to stare at the endlessness of the sea. He seemed...lonely all of a sudden, as if Lance's confession had taken something from him.

After several minutes, the Siren's lips parted, a stuttered breath filtering between them. "I'm...I'm sorry," he said, putting emphasis on the words, which gave the brunet the impression that he felt particularly responsible for what Lance was feeling. Which, again, Lance knew was completely absurd, because this Siren could have had nothing to do with her death. She hadn't drowned, so this creature couldn't have been responsible. Almost cryptically, the Siren suddenly continued, "That must be why your heart is blue."

"What?" My heart is blue? What the hell does that mean? Clarifying, the brunet questioned, "What do you mean by that?"

The Siren winced, as if he hadn't meant to say anything in the first place, as if Lance wasn't supposed to know the color of his heart, or whatever the raven-haired creature had said. "It's...nothing. Really." However, from the Siren's body language, the way his body had stiffened and was now angled away from Lance, it clearly was anything but nothing. The teen felt the need to push, to figure out what the creature had meant, but logically, he knew that that wasn't going to help. So instead, he pursed his lips and sighed.

"Welp," Lance blurted, sitting straight and throwing a smirk at the creature, pretending that none of this had seemed weird in any shape or form. "That's okay. It's probably a big Siren secret and a measly human like me has no right to that information."

A strangled chuckle drew from the raven-haired creature's throat, and he wiped the guilty look from his face. It was very quickly replaced by that same smirk that Lance had first seen when he had woken up earlier. "You're goddamn right, you've got no right." Something flashed in his eyes then, and he rested his palms against the pier once more, leaving forward to stick his nose close to Lance's nose, so close that they were almost touching. "Unless you'd like to trade places and become a Siren, and then I can tell you aaalll about it."

The teen could tell that the Siren was only half joking, that he had every intention of turning Lance into a Siren, if only Lance agreed.

"Uhm, no thanks," said Lance, scratching at his cheek. He put a mildly concerned-for-his-own-wellbeing look on his face and continued, "As much as I love the ocean, I don't think I'd like to become a creature that can only exist in it."

A raven brow quirked in amusement. "That's the only reason you don't want to become a Siren?"

"Apart from not wanting to drag people to their deaths at the bottom of the sea, yep."

Laughter barked from the Siren, and the creature leaned back to flop against the pier, shaking as each laugh ripped through him. Lance watched in silence as tears sprang to the creature's eyes, all the while trying to speak through his laughter. It wasn't working, and even the Siren seemed to realize that, because he stopped trying.

"You...you've been watching too many movies!" the ravenette finally managed to blurt out once his laughter had faded someone. "That's not how it works, you know!"

"How am I supposed to know that?" Lance countered, leaning forward to loom over the amused Siren. "Until yesterday, I didn't even know you existed."

The giggles that had been a constant for the last few minutes came to a halt, and the creature seemed to have a dawning realizing. "Shit, you're right! My bad!"

Now, it was Lance's turn to laugh. For a being that was supposed to be murderous in it's seduction of the weak willed, this Siren sure seemed a little...less than all there. The teen found himself smiling fondly down at the creature, a little bit of that loneliness that had consumed him fade.

But just as he was about to pick on the Siren some more, there was an earth shattering clap of thunder above them. Both the human and the Siren jumped at the sound, and Lance found confusion being written across his features. Where only minutes before there had been soft, cloudless skies, now thick, angry storm clouds were spreading above them. "What in the hell? It's not supposed to rain today," Lance muttered as he watched the storm roll in.

The Siren suddenly jolted upright, a look of panic darkening his eyes as he almost headbutted Lance in the nose. "I have to go," he blurted, throwing out his hands to push the confused brunet away from him. If it hadn't been for the hands that Lance still had against the sun-bleached boards of the pier, he would have toppled over backwards into the water.

"What? Why all of a sudden?"

Raven hair flew as the creature shook his head quickly, shifting back away from Lance. "I just-" He slipped off into the water suddenly, tail throwing up a plume of saltwater in its wake as he pushed himself further away from the pier.

"Wait!" Lance called, scrambling to the edge and gripping at its splintered surface. "What about my keychain!"

"I have to go now!" the Siren yelled, looking back over his shoulder. "I'm being called and if I don't go now, it'll only get worse!" The ravenette glanced up at the growing storm as he spoke, and the wind ripped at Lance's only slightly damp clothing.

"But-"

"NO!" The yell was accompanied by a burst of water that soaked Lance through once again. The Siren looked on in apology as the tide suddenly pulled outwards. "Listen! Come back tomorrow, and I'll give it to you then! But right now I have to go."

The waves grew choppy, and the pier pitched to the side, almost sending Lance off the edge once more. "Wh-what time!?" he questioned, lamely, knowing that the Siren wouldn't be able to give him an actual time. But if the brunet was being honest, he didn't really want the creature to leave, to take away a little bit of the warmth that Lance had gained just by him being there.

"Tomorrow morning! That's all I can tell you!"

And then raven tresses ducked beneath the waves with nothing more than a slap of a crimson scaled tail against the surface of the water. The Siren was gone and Lance watched on in terrified fascination as the storm followed him out to sea, leaving the brunet as alone as he truly felt.