Chapter Text
It had been a week since the last bottle had been tossed into the sea, and Patrick would be lying if he said he wasn't worried. It was never this long of a wait in between bottles. Had he missed it when he was out doing his job?
No, he'd been there everyday at the time they usually showed up. He just hadn't found one yet.
“While I'm all for this rebellious streak you've got going on, can you please at least do something fun with it?” Brendon said from behind him.
Patrick tore his eyes away from the surface, blinking away the sun spots that had been seared into his eyes. “Not everyone is up for your definition of 'fun', Brendon,” Patrick said. He turned his focus back to the surface, ears straining for the splash of a bottle hitting the water.
Brendon smiled, not bothered by his friend's cold shoulder. “Hey, the dude had cute buns. I just thought they'd look better free of his swimming trunks.”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “And they're worried that it's going to be me who gets us caught,” he said. At least he was staying away from humans and not tearing their clothes off. Not that Brendon actually did it that often, but still.
Brendon dropped his smile, although his joking air was still there. “Well that's because you're just floating here, waiting to get netted. You're not even moving or anything.”
Patrick said nothing. How was he supposed to tell him that he couldn't move because then he might miss the splash of the bottle or the guy from the pier's laughter? That he might not ever have a full song from him if he didn't pick up every bottle he threw. That even though he'd never actually seen the guy, he was completely head over fins for him and the way he wrote about the world.
He swam around in front of Patrick. He grabbed him by the shoulders and swished his dark violet tail through the water, gently slapping at Patrick's own, still tail.
“Seriously, man, what are you doing? This is way too close to the humans to spend so long here,” he said. It was obvious that he wasn't going to let the issue go any time soon, so Patrick sighed blowing out a stream of bubbles at him.
“He hasn't sent a bottle in a week, Brendon. A week. Who knows what's going on with him? Who knows what might have happened,” Patrick said.
Brendon shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe he's out there living his life and not polluting the ocean with glass bottles?”
If Patrick was completely honest with himself, that was almost what he was afraid of. What if this guy, Pete, as he usually signed his letters with, found someone who he wanted to read his lyrics to? Who would sing them back to him like Patrick wanted to do? If he found someone to do that with, would he even bother throwing bottles into the sea like hopeless wishes?
The purple tailed merman could see what he had said had really hurt his friend. He slid his arm around Patrick's shoulders, drifting them down deeper into the water and away from the shore and pier. “Listen, he's probably just busy. It can't be that easy to come up with new lyrics every time he comes to the beach, right? He's probably just going through writer's block or whatever.”
“You think so?” Patrick asked.
Brendon pulled an exaggeratedly serious face as he nodded his head. “Oh yeah, I'm sure. C'mon, Trick, people come to the beach to relax. Having to keep up this steady stream of depressing lyrics must be the exact opposite.”
“Hey,” Patrick said defensively. “They're not all depressing.”
Brendon smiled again. “Oh, they're not? Well, it must just be the way you sing them then,” he teased.
Patrick shoved him off, both of them laughing. They sped around the bottom of the ocean, barely even disturbing the sand on the ocean floor. While Brendon's tail was long and slender and great for sharp turns, Patrick's was shorter and broader, great for quick, powerful strokes. In a straight, fair race a tail like Patrick's would usually win.
“Stop changing directions! You know I can't do that that fast,” Patrick whined. His own, blue tail swished through the water, stirring up some sand in his wake.
A smile was covering Brendon's face, a laugh slipping out. Just as suddenly as it started though, it stopped. His eyes were focused above Patrick, towards the surface.
Patrick swirled around, fear in his heart as to what could be behind him. He feared it might be a human, one who would do him and his friend harm.
Thankfully, it was just a bottle. A bottle that Patrick had been waiting on for a week.
He turned back to look at Brendon, and the two of them made eye contact. In a second a challenge was issued, with the bottle as the main prize.
Patrick swam fast but Brendon was faster. A painful look over took Patrick's face as he chased after Brendon.
“Give it to me,” Patrick said. Even his voice sounded pained.
Brendon paused in his chase. He looked over Patrick, his eyes lingering on Patrick's tail for more than a moment.
“Is your tail okay?” Brendon asked. He shifted the bottle back and forth in his hands, staring at Patrick the whole time. “Shit, it probably wasn't a good idea, making you swim like that.”
A grimace was still on Patrick's face, yet he was waving the idea away. “No, it's fine. Everyone says that I need to exercise it more anyways.”
Brendon didn't seem to be convinced. “Still, if it's hurting,” he trailed off, not knowing how to end it.
“It's scarred Brendon, it's probably always going to hurt,” Patrick said sadly.
He glanced down at his tail, taking in the deep scar running down across the bottom of it, diagonally above his fins. Most days he forgot about the scar, but sometimes when he moved it too much, like the race between him and Brendon, it pulled something inside and caused him intense pain.
“Here,” Brendon said, holding out the bottle to Patrick. He took it thankfully, glad to have something to look forward to.
“But you really should stay away from the shore” Brendon said. He held up his hand to stop Patrick, who had instantly went on the defensive. “At least until you're absolutely better. At this rate, you wouldn't be able to get away from a rowboat.”
Patrick glanced towards the bottle in his hands before floating towards the surface.
“Whoa! Where are you going?” Brendon asked.
Patrick rolled his eyes. “Well I can't open it down here, the pages will get destroyed.”
“Have you heard a word I've said?”
“Not really.”
A few moments later both he and Brendon had reached the surface. The sky was wide open and blue above them, sea birds chirping in the distance. Patrick couldn't help to wonder what the world looked like to them from up there.
Air always felt weird against Patrick's skin. It felt light, yet pressurized. It had just the wrong sort of pressure to it. Hardly any merfolk from his colony ever went above the water anymore, not even to sun themselves on the wide, flat rocks that littered the coast. This was mainly due to the fact that there were more humans hanging around the beaches in recent years. Not to mention the hunters that had even more recently popped up.
Brendon surfaced next to him, his eyes flicking towards the shore and pier a ways off. “This is kind of one of those things I mentioned you needed to stay away from,” he said nervously. He was always a risk taker, yet when it came to the two of them both doing something risky he shut down in a ball of nervous energy.
Patrick ignored him for the moment, instead choosing to focus on getting the bottle open. It was usually pretty hard to do without his improvised bottle opener made from a rock. But that was back home in his cave, and he really couldn't wait until he got back there to open it.
“It's fine I do this all the time,” Patrick said, struggling to open the bottle. The cork was shoved down deep inside the neck, thus making it nearly impossible to get out. “We're far enough away that no one will see out tails but close enough that no one will think that we need help. Like I said, it's fine.”
His friend pulled at his arm, trying to pull him back under the water. “How many times have you done this?” he asked, slight panic in his tone.
Patrick gave him a soft, understanding smile. “Almost every time I get a letter,” Patrick said.
Finally, he popped the cork out, enabling him to pull a single sheet of paper free from the bottle. It was rolled up, as it usually was, with scratchy black ink stretching across the paper.
The letter was short, despite the week it had taken to write. It gave a brief run down of what had happened in his life that week, almost like a diary entry, and only two lines of lyrics scratched at the bottom.
Patrick frowned as he read the letter over. This poor human! His letters always had a touch of sadness and desperation in them, but this letter just seemed to be weighed down in it. The diary entries were usually shorter than the one contained in this letter, with the lyric part of it usually being longer. It just seemed like a strange letter for the human to write.
“What's wrong?” Brendon asked. He'd watched Patrick's smile turn into a frown and his happy vibes melt into a dark cloud.
He shook his head. “It's just... The letter's so sad.”
Brendon snorted. “Dude's throwing messages in bottles into the ocean and doesn't even know that they're being read. Of course they're sad.”
Patrick shook his head. “No. I mean, they're really sad. He's just going through some rough things. Like, his girlfriend and him were fighting and he's just got in a few fights...” Patrick said, eventually trailing off.
Brendon waved his hands in front of Patrick. “Wait a second. You're crushing on not only a human, but a straight, male one?” he asked in disbelief. “Well aren't you a glutton for heartache.”
Patrick sputtered, completely embarrassed. “I never said I was in love with the guy!”
His friend winked. “Neither did I.”
Patrick spluttered again, but Brendon went ahead and cut him off. “Just tell me what lyrics he wrote this time.”
Patrick sighed, knowing he'd lost. He looked down at the lyrics, wondering how they should sound. What tune or rhythm would go well with them? How would “Pete” want them to be sang?
He cycled through some lyrics he had already gotten from past bottles and tried to make some of them fit together. It wouldn't have made sense to just sing two lines to Brendon. That was hardly even worth it or enough to show how much he enjoyed his lyrics.
We're the new face of failure, prettier and younger but not any better off, bulletproof loneliness at best, at best....
Brendon smiled at Patrick's voice. Patrick knew that he wasn't really enchanting him. Not the way he could humans, but Brendon always made him feel better about singing. When they'd been younger, before they had truly discovered how much of a siren Patrick was, he had been the one encouraging Patrick to sing. Even after they discovered that fact, he still encouraged him, helping to find ways Patrick could use his gift.
This was how Patrick became the siren who led people away from his colony of merfolk. If fishermen or hunters or pesky swimmers ever get to close to their home, Patrick would swim out and lead them away until someone gave him the 'all good' and he could turn around and come home. One of their friends, Gabe, usually laughed and pointed out that Patrick was supposed to drown his prey, not confuse them and leave them for the coast guard to find.
Unfortunately, it didn't always go according to plan. There had been many close calls over the years, but none as close as the one that earned him his scar.
He'd been leading a boat of hunters away from his colony, as usual, when one of them broke his spell. He had been an older man, possibly loosing his hearing, and he'd somehow been able to break out of Patrick's song. The first thing he had done once breaking free was shoot off a harpoon. While it didn't sink into Patrick's tail, as intended, it had skimmed it, causing the huge scar and an incredible amount of pain. After that, the group tended to keep Patrick a bit closer to home, not wanting to loose their friend or their protection against the humans.
Patrick sang those lines a few times, changing a few things about it each time, testing and trying things out. He smiled as he sang, bobbing his head up and down and Brendon even joined in for a moment.
Suddenly, Brendon stopped. He jerked his head around, gazing at the pier. Patrick stopped singing, wondering what had caused him to stop and stare. He squinted his eyes but he couldn't see anything. Everything past a certain distance was nothing but a blur.
“Dive, go, go, go, go!” Brendon said, shoving Patrick under water.
The panic in his voice forced Patrick to listen to his younger friend. He barely registered that the letter was soaked and tearing apart in his fingers, and the bottle was missing.
Brendon kept a hand latched onto his arm, dragging him along through the water. Patrick swished his fin faster, ignoring the pain it caused and hoping he could keep caught up with his friend.
Eventually, once Brendon had decided they'd gotten far enough away, he'd let go of Patrick's arm, instead swimming along ahead of him and hoping he was still following.
“What the hell was that?” Patrick asked. He looked at his hands, looking for the letter. When he didn't see it he twisted and twirled in the water, hoping that it was still somehow alright.
“I dropped the letter!” he exclaimed. He turned around, intending to head back and try and find it.
Brendon, however, had other ideas. He grabbed onto Patrick's arm again and refused to let him leave.
“We were seen, Patrick,” Brendon said. “You can't go back for the letter now. Besides, it's probably torn apart by now.”
“We get seen all the time, Brendon. Why did you almost rip my arm out of socket?” Patrick asked.
Brendon crossed his arms. “Are you also heard by humans all the time?”
Patrick furrowed his brows at Brendon. “What are you talking about?”
Brendon waved an arm back to the shore and swished his tail anxiously through the water. “Some guy, black hair, black clothes, was standing on the pier listening to you. Like, looking right at you.” He placed both hands on Patrick's shoulders and shook him, just enough to try and keep his attention. “What were you thinking? Like, you weren't thinking of telling anyone anything specific were you?”
Patrick tried to think. He hadn't really been thinking of anything when he had been singing, just that he hoped “Pete's” life got better. But that wasn't really how siren powers worked. He couldn't just magically wish for things to happen. He had to focus on what he wanted people to do, although he had been known to accidentally enchant random surfers. Usually they just floated around on the surface with their boards for a while before heading back to land.
Patrick just shook his head and shrugged. He couldn't think of a single thing that he possibly could have been thinking about.
The younger of the two looked behind them. It was as if he was making sure that they hadn't been followed, even though it was impossible for a human to travel that fast without a boat.
“I'm sorry,” Brendon said. “I really didn't see him standing there. I guess I should have looked before basically asking you to sing. Especially since I know you can't see that far away.”
“What are you guys doing?” Gabe asked.
Both Brendon and Patrick jumped as if they had just been caught doing something illegal. Although, for all intents and purposes, Patrick sort of had.
“What was that about Patrick singing?” their other friend, Travie, asked.
Patrick gave both of them a nervous smile. “Uh, nothing?” he said hesitantly. He was a terrible liar when it came to important things like this.
Gabe and Travie glanced between each other and then to the other two mermen there. It didn't exactly take a genius to figure out they were hiding something.
“Uh-huh,” Travie said. “So what exactly is that on your hands?”
Patrick looked down and noticed that his hands were stained with ink from Pete's letter. His heart ached as he though about the words that were now lost. If he had the ability to write or anything to write with he might have tried to put them down so he could have them memorized.
“You went for another letter, didn't you?” Gabe asked. He batted his eyelashes at Patrick, clearly in a teasing mood now.
Patrick threw his arms up. “How does everyone know about these letters?” he asked. The only person he had ever talked about them with had been Brendon, yet it seemed as if half their colony knew about them.
“Please, you keep swimming around here like a love sick guppy and you don't think someone's going to notice?” Travie asked.
A red blush spread across his face. He crossed his arms over his bare chest as if that would stop the teasing. He hadn't thought that he'd been that obvious about them, really he hadn't.
“So where is it?” Gabe asked. He swam in a small circle around Patrick, as if he might be hiding it somewhere.
“I dropped it when we were heading over here,” Patrick said reluctantly. He didn't want the others to ask why he had dropped it, because then that would just lead to a discussion about how close they had come to being actually “seen” by a human.
“You dropped it?” Travie asked, doubt clear in his voice. He'd seen the well organized collection of bottles Patrick had “hidden” in the cave he called home. All of them were sealed airtight, tied up in a net inside his home. It sounded unlikely that the siren had just dropped it.
The sadness in Patrick's eyes though, told him that it must have been true. He never looked that sad after getting a letter.
Gabe crossed his arms. It was apparent that he wasn't buying their story. “Where'd you drop it?” Gave asked. “We'll go back and get it. Maybe it's still okay.”
“No!” Patrick and Brendon yelled in unison. They moved to grab Gabe, fear that their friend might be hurt by any humans who had caught Patrick's song.
“Ha!” Gabe pointed at them. “You guys are hiding something.” He elbowed Travie, a smile on his face. “What did you guys do?”
The two younger mermen stuttered around, both flailing around for an answer. It quickly became apparent that they weren't going to be able to find any excuse for their behavior. It would just be easier to tell them the truth and deal with whatever the consequences would be.
“We went too close to the humans,” Patrick said, reluctantly. “We think one of them heard me.”
The teasing smiles on Gabe and Travie's faces slid off in a heartbeat. This was clearly not the answer either one of them had been expecting.
“You were heard?” Travie asked. He swam closer to them, inspecting them. When no injuries were readily noticeable he calmed down. “By who?”
“No one. Just some guy on the pier,” Brendon said. “It wasn't a hunter. He might not have even heard though. I just think he was looking in our direction, not at us.”
His downplay of this situation clearly wasn't helping.
“Dammit, Patrick, that's the third time someone's heard you this month” Travie said. “And Brendon that makes about the eighth time you've been seen.”
Gabe ran a hand through his short hair. He looked back towards the beach, almost as if he was afraid someone might be coming after them. Which he honestly might have been.
“You know those “hunters” or whatever it is they're calling themselves have been coming around here a lot more lately. We can't risk anyone being seen... or heard,” Gabe said.
Patrick hung his head. He really hadn't meant to be heard by anyone, honestly. His voice tended to just come out of him when he read Pete's lyrics, almost like an unstoppable force.
Travie shook his head. “Nothing we can do now I guess,” he said. “But you guys are banned from going to the surface or that close to shore for a while.”
Brendon nodded sadly, as if he were defeated. Everyone knew that he'd be back to doing both of those things in less than a week though.
Patrick, however, was in a panic. If he couldn't even go up to the surface then he wouldn't even be able to read the letters he already had, much less wait for new letters to come. And after that heartbreaking letter, he was certainly ready for another one.
“But the letters,” Patrick started.
“No, Patrick. Forget the letters for a while, okay? It'll probably do your head some good to get away from them for a while anyways,” Travie said. He slung an arm around his friend's shoulders and poked him in his chubby stomach. “I'm sure the rest of the colony will agree with us, too.”
Patrick didn't think he'd be able to last without his letters. They were what he looked forwards to, they were the words he sang to all the tunes he had stuck in his head. What was he supposed to to sing without Pete's lyrics? He was positive that his siren calls would not be nearly as enchanting without them.
He chose to say nothing.