Mermaid.

chương 4

Shinichirou

He lets out a yawn, vividly annoyed and offended as his servants come to the room and help him dress and sit on his desk. Shinichirou is a grown man, not a bumbling toddler, and yet his parents insist on him being taken care of as if he doesn’t know how to shit and piss properly. He’s given up on arguing with them, fully aware that they don’t give a single damn about anything he says.
The king and the queen are acting like a pair of caring parents, Shinichirou knows. He also knows that it’s just another part of their role on the political stage. They don’t give a fuck about him as a living person, a child conceived by the integration of his seeds inside her womb. The amount of fucks they give is solely about him as an heir, the one to take the leftover of their kingdom at their curtain calls.

They have reasons to act out, nonetheless. He almost died on the shore out there, but Shinichirou would argue that it wasn’t so serious of an incident. He rowed the boat through the rocks and was flipped over, he fell into the water, some random dude who happened to be there at that time saved him and brought him to the rock so the people in the castle could see him.

All of them took place almost two days ago, and everyone around Shinichirou still acts like he's vulnerable enough to be startled at the softest crackle of the wind.

For all it’s worth, what Shinichirou hates, even more than his own life, is being perceived as if fragility is his only personality, which is exactly what people are doing to him. He escaped death once, he should be praised like a hero for that, and yet he’s a victim. It’s not difficult to follow their path of thinking – to them, getting exposed to death is a horrible experience, and they assume the same from him. It’s sad, though, to be reminded of the same truth that’s been biting on his arse.

He tries to divert himself from it, only to jump into another problem. The one who saved him there. Their existence leaves a huge question in his head that Shinichirou doesn’t know how to answer, and he’s a hell of someone who never leaves a question hanging. He knows for sure that there wasn’t anyone on the shore the second he sank into the water – even if there were, they wouldn’t have made it to him in time. 

It means that whoever it was, they came from under the water, which, he can tell, is even harder to explain. What kind of person stayed under the water at that specific time to save him? Why were they even there? What were they doing? Are they a diver? And what on Earth do they even have anything to do with fish scales?

The most evocative memory that bothers Shinichirou’s head is indeed the feeling of fish scales, right beneath the human skin, as his fingers glided through them in his subconsciousness. Of course, it could be a work of his imagination, his broken mind due to the sudden attack of the water – Shinichirou wasn’t exactly awake then – but his instinct tells him otherwise. He knows, by sheer hunch, that it was real.

It was either a human with a fish close to them, or a human and a fish. Both of those scenarios fail to convince him. He closes his eyes and groans, his fingers move swiftly to his side, like an attempt to recreate what happened. He remembers choking and coughing, he remembers the saltiness of seawater on his tongue, and he remembers his body aching. Then comes the person. The tips of his fingers were running across their skin, it was colder than any human he ever came into contact with. He goes lower, and–

“Your Highness,” like a tornado that hits his recreation, every image, feeling, sense, and void that’s been squirming around his head is blown away. Shinichirou cracks open one of his eyes at the buzz killer that bombarded his thoughts, only to be met with an unwavering face.

“Get the fuck lost,” he mumbles, seeing his tutor finally there as if nothing happened, after sending him off to the arguably worst trip of his life.