Chapter Text
Seokjin didn’t know when it had become a habit for him to visit the surface. He’d always avoided it, listened to what his parents and other merfolk had told him.
‘Stay away from the shore. Don’t peek above the surface. Down here, you’re safe. Up there, you’ll perish.’
Their words weren’t an exaggeration. Seokjin had seen countless of his people disappear. For them to be never seen again.
Yet.
One day, Seokjin had decided to risk a glance. That was when he had spotted him . A man. A human.
He should have turned around, swam away and never looked back. But this man...had simply sat on the beach, holding a strange object in his hands, and when a crab had bumped into him, there was no scream. No anger or shock. No. The man had simply held out his hand letting the crab crawl onto it.
Seokjin’s eyes had widened in wonder when the man even went as far to stroke the crab’s back before releasing it into the sea with a smile on his face. Dimples had appeared then so deep that Seokjin had felt the urge to poke them. He left for home with a smile that day.
Maybe not all humans were bad.
Once he had started to memorize the man’s habit of returning to the beach every second to third day around sunset, the young mermaid found himself returning to the shore time and time again to observe the human. Just like today.
Seokjin was leaning against one of the bigger stones towering above the surface, his pearl coloured tail resting in the lukewarm water. The human had decided to take a nap, or had seemingly fallen asleep with a book on his face. It made Seokjin giggle in delight, but he’d chosen to follow the human’s example and enjoy the slowly setting sun himself.
He had closed his eyes, posture relaxed.
All of a sudden, a gasp reached his ears from up close.
Seokjin snapped his eyes open, his head whirling around to find the source of the noise. He found a pair of dark brown eyes staring right at him from below a fringe of wet hair. Seokjin didn’t dare to move a muscle as he took in the person floating in the water not far from him.
Slowly those dimples he had admired from afar started to appear on the human’s face as he drifted closer to hold onto the rock Seokjin was sitting on.
“Hello, I’m Namjoon. I don’t think we had the pleasure of meeting yet.”