the siren's call | felix lee

viii.

"Go to hell, you monster!" you cried, and you ran away, stumbling over your own feet. Felix reached out for you as you ran, his heart breaking in two as he heard your loud wails echoing off the rocky cliffs.
"Damn it, Felix," he muttered to himself, angry tears forming in his eyes. "You just had to use your song on them?" He smacked his palm against his forehead roughly, wincing as it collided with his skull. "You're an idiot."

He swam as quickly as he could with his healing tail down the shore, struggling a little in the shallow water. He managed to catch a quick glimpse of you as you sprinted up the beach and onto the path leading away from the sands, and he watched helplessly as you disappeared from his sight. Biting his lip regretfully, he dove back under the water as his throat closed up, panic setting in. "They're never going to come back," he murmured to himself, hands tugging at his long blonde hair, "you fucked everything up. They're gone." He felt his gills pulsing rapidly as he tried to take long, deep breaths, small bubbles forming as he exhaled through his mouth. His surroundings seemed blurrier by the second, and he sank to the sea floor slowly, hands clasped over his eyes as he resisted the urge to scratch them out.

He stayed there, crumpled, for a long time. It was completely dark when he finally resurfaced, the saltwater mixing with his tears, hiding them from the world above the water. He stared up at the full, fat moon, lifting his hands out of the water to try and cup it in his palms. The moon reminded him of you. Beautiful, bright, and dazzling. He hated it. The stars winked at him, and he felt a rush of irrational anger, slapping the surface of the black waves. He watched the ripples appear and then disappear, the water becoming eerily still once again. He raised his gaze to look back to the beach, which was of course, still empty. Everything was dark, dark, dark.

Felix hated it. He sunk back under the water slowly, keeping his eyes trained to the shore where he thought you just might appear, but you did not.
For the next six days, he stayed close to the beach, more often than not sleeping and playing in the cave where you had stitched him up. He eventually removed his bandages, nothing left but a few long, rippled scars that would eventually fade and be hidden by re-growing scales. They already were in the process of re-growing, now that he looked at it closer. Small purple nubs were beginning to poke out of the pink, puckered lines, rough to the touch as he ran his fingers over them. They had grown significantly over the week that he spent away from you.

Several times he pondered going home and revealing to his family where he had actually been. They would be angry with him for lying, but only for a short while, and they would surely fawn over him and his new scars. But then someone would walk along the shore, either to collect water from the freshwater pools on the edge of the beach or to admire the water, and every thought Felix had about going back home was replaced with memories of you.
On the seventh day of your absence, the world grew colder, and Felix felt the oncoming winter more than ever without you by his side to keep him warm. Of course, cold water never bothered Felix much anyways, seeing as he lived down in the depths of the ocean, but he swore the water was colder than anything he had ever experienced in his decades of being alive. He frowned to himself, trying to recall a year where he felt this cold and alone, and he squinted a little at a fuzzy memory, another year where he had lost someone. Someone that reminded him very much of you. Or did you remind him of her?

The girl that he was thinking of, he could not recall her name, nor her face. But her kindly ways, her laughter that reminded him of gentle bells ringing, her slightly awkward way of hesitating before telling him something, they all reminded him oddly of you, even if the two of you were quite different in several other ways. He remembered how she hated her family and wanted to escape, and how he had made the same offer to her.

The only difference was that she agreed.

Felix cemented that one memory into his brain, gritting his teeth as he made the impossible decision for you. He would get you the poisoned knife. And you would kill your family to join him.