Ocean Song Beneath the Waves
*UPDATED* Chapter 3: Drowning

The seas are calm as she sits overlooking her perch. Gulls fly about, screeching loudly as they sore through the sky and the sound of the gentle waves lapping at the shore almost lull her to sleep. Almost.

Serena shakes her head as she pulls her bag to her and starts digging around inside in search of her calculus textbook. She blows a small raspberry upon pulling the heavy book out of her bag. The last thing she wants to be doing is calculus. Upon opening the page, she grimaces at the sheer amount of numbers on the page.

And of course, her teacher would see fit to assign the class a ridiculous number of problems to do. Serena’s fairly good at math, better than she was in grade school, but despite the ease in which she could solve these problems, looking at them all makes her want to do them less and less.

After five more minutes of staring at the book with pencil and notebook in hand, she tosses everything aside and lies back on the ground. She stares up at the endlessly blue sky with the occasional fluffy white cloud passing into her field of vision.

For a second, she sees an image of her father in the sky, smiling at her like he always does. He tells her to smile more because that’s what her mother loved most, but what’s there to smile about nowadays?

She rolls over onto her side and curls up just a little bit, barely on the cusp of a fetal position. She stares blankly at her cell phone, lying just a few inches away. What she would give for one of her brothers to call and say that her father had come home, but the phone remains still-its screen black. Not a single indication of a call or text coming in.

A small frown tugs at her lips as she rolls back over onto her back and closes her eyes. In the darkness of her eyelids, again, she sees her father. Memories of her childhood springing to mind.

One particular memory sticks out the most amidst the others. She was about…nine in this memory. She had come home from school wanting very much to go to the beach that day. Her father had been sitting at the island looking at something in his hand, but her short stature prevented her from being able to see it. Her brothers had been walking in behind her, not quite as eager as she to run into the house like a hyperactive little dog.

Her father glanced down at her. “Excited today, are we?” He knew what she wanted, always did. It wasn’t that hard considering it was the one thing asked for, but always denied. Even more so after the death of their mother.

Serena’s lips had pulled into a small pout, her gaze explaining all that her father needed to know. He had stared at her for a good ten minutes trying to convey his own feelings to her. But a nine-year-old understood little and was less likely to do anything she’s told.

And he knew that, painfully so as a sigh slipped past his lips. He had turned back to the object in his hand with a forlorn expression.

“Daddy?” She had called quietly. He then released a small chuckle as he slipped the object in his pocket and stood up.

“Alright, alright. But don’t go in the water.”

A bright grin blossomed on her face. “Okay!” She dumped her bag right there on the floor as her father took her hand. Her brothers seemed less enthused by the idea and opted to stay home instead. Caspian was left in charge since he was the oldest and he was fourteen at the time-just having started high school.

She had cheerfully skipped out of the door with her father at her side, eager to get to the ocean for no other reason to stare out at it. Such as it had always been. Even her father couldn’t resist repeating this action every day, though he didn’t take her with him quite as much either.

A drop of water falls onto her face, effectively bringing her forth from her reverie. Serena’s gaze flits up to the sky. More clouds have come and overtaken the sun.

She sits up and looks out into the distance once again. Dark clouds had begun to blow in without her noticing.

“I should probably start heading home,” she murmurs. She doesn’t need her older brothers blowing a fuse if she doesn’t return before the rain starts.

She starts packing everything away in her bag and just as she’s finishing, she gets a text message from Caspian. He’s asking her if she’s on her way home, but before she can type out a reply she hears it.

“Rena…”

A familiar voice that has her subconsciously slipping her phone into her bag. She stands up as she looks around for the source of the voice but sees nothing.

“I’m not going crazy,” she says quietly as she shakes her head and turns away, trying to rationalize what she just heard.

But it comes again. “Rena…”

She turns back to the edge of the cliff, staring out over the sea as if she’ll replace all of her answers there. Yet nothing’s there. So where is this disembodied of her father voice coming from?

“Right here Rena.” A figure appears hovering a few feet away from the edge of the cliff, but she hardly notices. No, all she sees is the father she misses with his arms opened wide like always. A kind smile is on his face as she reaches out a hand to him and slowly starts walking towards him.

He beckons to her, calling her in that gentle baritone that serves to soothe her each time she hears it. Her eyes seem to glaze over as an excited smile overtakes her features. She keeps walking.

“Just a little closer Rena.” His hand reaches further out as if to pull her to him. She’s still not paying attention to the situation in its entirety. All she sees is him, and nothing else seems to matter at this moment.

All it takes is three more steps before her daze is broken. Her father disappears as she quickly realizes that there’s no ground beneath her, and she’s falling!

Serena doesn’t even have the chance to scream before she splashes into the water. It fills her vision and engulfs her ears as the pressure combined with the current drags her down. Everything hurts. Her lungs are crying out for oxygen, making her face turn blue. And no matter how much she kicks, she can’t swim to the surface. It’s as if a dumbbell is attached to her leg, preventing her from rising.

Her hands fly to her throat as she involuntarily takes in a lungful of water through her nose. She’s done for. This is how she’s going to die. Following after a hallucination and stupidly falling into the sea.

Black spots begin to fill her vision as she stares up at the distant light of the sun reflected on the water’s surface. Right before the darkness encompasses her vision, she sees a dark figure hovering over her, but her consciousness slips away from her before she can try to make it out…

Caspian stands idly with his phone to his ear, impatiently tapping his foot upon the hardwood of the floor. However, he quickly scowls and tosses his phone onto the table when it goes straight to voicemail for the fifth time.

“And luck?” Zale casually asks as he languidly lays about the sofa as though nothing’s wrong.

Caspian shakes his head as Rodion stands up from the armchair near the window.

“I’m gonna go look for her,” he declares as he makes for the front door without missing a beat.

“In that?” Zale asks incredulously as he gestures to the raging storm outside. Surely even Rodion wouldn’t be that crazy.

But obviously, Zale thought wrong. Rodion rolls his eyes as he tosses his brother a glare. “Our sister is in that! Why wouldn’t I go out?” There’s a growl in his tone that foretells of the impending instinct to fight that he always seems to give way to.

Zale falls silent for a moment as he sits upright and stares at the dark sky beyond the window. He can’t come up with a proper comeback that’ll knock some sense into his stupid younger brother.

“We don’t know anything for sure. For all we know, Rena could be wandering about somewhere like always,” he rationalizes, though it’s more so to convince himself rather than anyone else.

“Oh yeah, totally. And shell come home and regale us with stories of her lovely walk along the fucking shore!”

Caspian’s fingers twitch as he tries to reign in his own rapidly deteriorating patience. Patience that the siblings consider legendary, but the more time passes the less of that legendary patience remains.

He tries to breathe calmly to keep brash thoughts from overtaking his mind. The last thing this family needs is another hot-blooded brother ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

Finally, he says, “Calm down, both of you.” The room falls silent, but Rodion and Zale continue glaring at one another heatedly.

Arion comes down the stairs right then, seeming to have just woken from a nap. “What’s with all the racket?” He yawns tiredly as his gaze flits about the room in a state of half-asleep.

“How the hell are sleeping through all this?” Zale groans, too astonished to even think of a snappy explanation for his younger brother’s question. The storm outside is so damn loud that it shakes the entire house, and Arion had been sleeping as though there weren’t a violent storm outside ripping the world to pieces.

“Rena’s not back yet and she isn’t answering her damned phone!” Rodion’s hands ball into tight fists as he resists the urge to punch the nearby wall. Even though it looks, oh so tempting.

Arion suddenly seems very much awake. “What do you mean she’s not back yet?”

“Exactly as it fucking sounds! Look, I’m going out to replace her!”

But this time, it’s Caspian to stop him. “And how are you going to do that?” Again, the room is wrapped in silence as Rodion tries to formulate an answer. “If you go out there now, you’re not doing anyone any good, least of all Rena.”

Rodion’s face twists into a scowl. He knows this, but he can’t just sit here and do nothing while his baby sister is out in the middle of that monster raging outside!

“Look Rod, I understand how you feel, I really do. But we need to think rationally about this. We’re useless to her if we go out and get lost in that ourselves. Rena knows how to take care of herself. She’ll be fine for a few hours and when the storm clears, we can go out and look for her.”

Though Rodion is hardly pleased with the idea of sitting around and waiting. He understands that Caspian is right. There’s really nothing they can do until the storm clears up, but he’s worried that the storm may last longer than what Caspian predicts it will. He just doesn’t want to leave Serena alone out in the cold for too long.

When they do replace her, he’s going to make certain that she never goes to the beach again. Even if he has to put her under lock and key. Even if she ends up hating him for the rest of her life, he’ll do what he must to ensure that this never happens again.

They won’t lose her as they had lost their mother all those years ago. They’ll all be together again when this mess is said and done. They’ll replace Serena and replace their father, then everything will be back to the way it was. He’ll make damn certain of that.