Chapter Text
Therion knew he shouldn’t be outside. Everyone in town knew that when you heard a note pierce through the air, floating on a salty breeze, it was in your best interest to shut yourself inside and lock your door. Hide in your room behind your walls, lest the music of the sea drag you under and shatter you against the rocky ocean bed.
But that was difficult when you didn’t have a house. So he wandered through the quickly emptying streets and wondered if he could stay sane enough to loot the abandoned market stalls.
The song got louder. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. It was terrifying. Therion wasn’t used to admitting things were beautiful. It was haunting, the kind of pitch that he’d hear ring out of opera halls, holding so many notes it had to be inhuman. And this voice was inhuman. It didn’t pause for air. It harmonized with its own echoes. It was beautiful, it was irresistible, and he was a mere human.
But Therion was also a human who had been through this before. It was like a familiar song performed in the tavern; he didn't remember the lyrics, but could hum the tune. So as his eyes flickered to distract his senses, he felt adrenaline build alongside the intoxication. Must be how the people he'd watch get into bar fights felt.
He raised his scarf over his ears (as if it would do much for him) and tried to focus as the shore came into view. It was hard, but made easier by the distinct gold of what was most likely the siren glaring against the ocean's surface. It curled in a way that was psychedelic to Therion's foggy head. Was the siren thin, or was the rest of their body blending in with the water?
At some point he had set foot on sand. The song was so loud it was starting to hurt. The gold coil kept waving. He dug his fingernails into his palms. The combined pain gave him just enough clarity to see the torso of the siren. It had light skin, and dark hair that fell just past its shoulders. Its eyes were blue– which was a fact that told Therion he was far too close.
His legs wouldn't listen, but his head was still screaming. It did not go well with the singing.
Maybe that was a good thing.
Therion didn't know what he sounded like, but his throat strained. What mattered is that it disrupted the perfect control over the atmosphere that the siren had.
He also didn't know how long it took for him to realize the singing stopped. His head never stopped aching, and he was relying on that to keep himself grounded. But when he noticed his eyes stung, and yet he could still see better than before, he almost fell to the ground wheezing for air. Which would have defeated the purpose of having fought so hard to resist.
The siren was staring at him with something Therion could only compare to awe. He did not care to know why. The spell broke, and he forced his body to take a few stumbling steps back.
Then he turned and ran.
--
Therion didn't need the tavern's news bulletin to convince him to avoid the coast. It had taken months for him to feel comfortable on the shoreline again after the first time; who knew how long it'd take now.
The first time.
He was stalking the docks at night, as was habitual for him then. Sometimes good products got left outside– either the inconvenient weight or carelessness– it didn't matter to him.
That night, there was an obtrusively large cage covered with a tarp right at the edge of a pier. Usually used for bulk fishing, but nobody left fish out overnight. Nor an empty cage above water.
Therion approached it and tugged up an edge of the tarp. He was stunned to see a person. Except then he was shocked again to realize it wasn't a person. He couldn't make out many details due to the combined dark of the night and the cage's covering, but it definitely had a tail instead of legs. The human half looked like an average man, if a rugged one, with long hair and tan skin- but the torso faded into the small scales of a shark.
Siren and merpeople sightings were always a big deal; even in a port town they were rare. But he had never heard of one getting caught.
The one in the cage before him had its eyes closed and didn’t react to the movement of the tarp or Therion’s approach. For all he knew, it could be dead from choking on air.
He took out a knife and rung its pommel against the bars. Sits in the flesh of the creature’s throat twitched. It groaned, the first sign that it was truly alive, and pushed its torso just off the ground. It tried to move its tail instinctively, but failed and flinched in pain.
It was definitely injured, then, Therion thought. He waited while it blinked and squinted at him, its green eyes meeting his own.
Finally, it spoke in a hoarse voice, "You're not one o' the men what caught me."
And despite all the questions he wanted to ask, Therion replied, "I'm just passing through."
He didn't have a good reason for picking the lock. Or if he had one, he had long forgotten it now. He should have let the shark get sold and cut apart. He hated that he wasn't sure he meant that.
Therion shakes his head and fishes (hah.) for a different line of thought. Such as the fact sharks don’t usually attack humans. It was the human part of that siren that attacked Therion, and at least that was easier to rationalize. Doesn’t help that he’s scared of the ocean again, though.