A siren song

Siren x Human trope, girlxgirl

A girl sits on the beach. She's kneeling on her knees, as if praying to the gods above. Her dress is almost raggedy, covered in sand. She's been there for a while. I like to watch her from behind the rocks. She can't see me or hear me for that fact. But I long to meet her.

Her brown hair is long, almost touching the sand. She likes to wear a bandana, it's red and beige, and pulls her hair out of her face. Her face is blurred, but I know she's stunning. She wouldn't love me. Not truly at least.

The water's turning cold.

I feel it seep into my scales, a familiar, lonely ache. My sisters are already far out, their silver-bell voices weaving the fatal lullaby that draws sailors to their doom. I can feel the vibration of their song through the stone, a sickening, honey-sweet thrum against my skin. I despise that song. I despise the power it gives us—a power built on lies. Men hear it and see a goddess, a dream, a promise of paradise. They follow it, their eyes glazed with a magic that isn't love, and they die loving an illusion.

They never see me.

But this girl. She clouds my mind.

She has been my secret for three moons. At first, she was just a curiosity. A drab-colored creature on the shore, static as a piece of driftwood. But I watched. I am a creature of patience. I learned her.

I learned the precise hour of her arrival, just as the sun bleeds its color into the sea. I learned the way she kneels, a gesture of such profound, quiet waiting it makes my chest ache. I learned the colors of her bandana, red and beige, a flash of warmth against the drab sand.

Now, she is more than a curiosity. She is an obsession.

When I dive deep, into the crushing blackness where the old wrecks lie, I am no longer hunting. I am scavenging. I find a polished piece of sea glass, smooth as a gull's egg, and my first thought is that its color matches the sky in her blurred reflection. I find a string of pearls, milky and ruined, and imagine them tangled in her long brown hair, a stark contrast to her raggidy dress. I hide these treasures in the cleft of my rock, a hoard she will never see.

My sisters' songs are growing hateful to me. Their voices, which sailors deem divine, now sound like shrieks. They sing of power, of hunger, of the endless, cold deep. But my mind is full of the shore. I wonder what the sand feels like when it's dry and warm. I wonder what her hands look like up close. Are they chapped from the wind? Does she feel the cold as I do?

This longing is a sickness. It's a dangerous, foolish, human thing.

"She wouldn't love me," I whisper to the waves. My voice is just a breath, without the magic. "Not truly at least."

She would see the scales, the claws, the teeth. She would see the monster. Or worse, I would give in. I would sing.

That is my greatest fear. That the longing would become so great I would finally call to her. And my voice, my cursed, beautiful voice, would do what it always does. It would strip her of her will. She would come to me, her face slack with that false, enchanted love, and I would be forced to watch her walk into the surf, her eyes seeing only a dream as the water filled her lungs.

To love her is to kill her. And so I am trapped behind my rock, a prisoner of my own nature, watching the one thing in this world I desire.

But tonight, the ache is too much. The compulsion to be seen, truly seen, is a physical weight.

Just one note, I think, a treacherous thought. Not the lure. Just a sound. Just to see her turn. Just to see her face clearly, just once.