Ocean Song Beneath the Waves
*UPDATED* Chapter 4: To Breathe Again

As daylight came and all signs of the storm was over, Rodion couldn’t have ran out of the house fast enough. His brothers were hot on his heels as they all broke into a dead sprint for the cliffs. After all, it’s where Serena spends the most of her time when she comes out here.

However, upon getting there, they replace nothing. Nothing save for her personal belongings that she’d never leave behind. Her bookbag lies thoughtlessly on the ground, clearly packed. Obviously, she was preparing to leave but why is she not with it?

A few steps further, Rodion replaces her phone. Dead and thoroughly wet. If they do replace her, then she’s going to kick up one hell of her own phone when she discovers that the thing isn’t functional anymore.

Caspian rummages through her bookbag for any kinds of clues while Zale and Arion walk about the rest of the cliff. The two slowly inch their way down the cliff, and further split up to cover more ground.

Rodion, meanwhile, stares at the phone with an anguished expression on his face. He knows his sister. She wouldn’t just randomly leave all her shit here for anyone to take. Especially her phone.

His gaze flickers over the sea unto the horizon. The waves move about enticingly, as they always have with seagulls darting back and forth in the sky, crying loudly as they do.

He hears Caspian shuffle to his feet and approach. A heavy hand lands on his shoulder, inciting him to look over at its owner.

Caspian’s expression is unreadable, but the worry shines clear in his eyes as the sun does in the sky.

He shakes his head softly. “There wasn’t anything useful to be found in her bag.”

Rodion raises the phone to Caspian’s eye level and shakes it. Droplets of water fly from the phone as he mutters, “She left her phone, and obviously the damn thing’s dead so that’s a dead end.”

Caspian turns back, surveying the cliff once more as though their sister will suddenly pop up out of nowhere.

After five minutes of silence, Arion’s voice fills the air. “Hey! I found something!”

Caspian and Rodion share a look before sprinting down to the area beneath the cliff where Arion chose to search.

Zale arrives before them, silver hair tousled and eyes wild with anticipation.

Arion walks out from the waves. His shorts are soaked, and his hair damp from the ocean mist. His hands are tightly bunched around a piece of cloth.

Rodion squints his eyes in confusion as Caspian takes the cloth from Arion and holds it up.

“It’s a shirt,” Caspian mumbles blankly as he narrows his eyes at Arion in exasperation.

But Zale abruptly speaks up. “That’s not just any shirt dumbass!” He shouts as he snatches it from Caspian to get a good look at it. “Rena was wearing this the other day before she left for school!”

Silence falls over them. The obvious answer hangs heavily in the air like a darkened storm cloud, but they replace it easier to ignore that answer in favor of a dumber one. The one that would make them feel better.

Surely their sister is just running around topless somewhere? That’s a feasible enough answer, right? Arion grimaces.

The silence drags on for about ten minutes as they all stare at the shirt with blank expressions.

Rodion’s choked up voice is the key that breaks the silence. “She’s gone,” he murmurs with tight fists.

Arion quickly shouts, “Don’t say that! Rena’s fine! I know she is!” The blood starts pumping through his ears as his vision briefly blurs every few seconds. That’s the one truth he can’t accept. Their mother is dead, their father missing… No, Rena can’t be gone. She must’ve gotten lost somewhere, and lost her shirt during the storm… The rational side of his brain clearly tells him how much of a joke that is, but the other side clutches on tightly to that silly idea in the hopes that it might become true.

Caspian turns his gaze out over the sea. “If this came in with the tide then…”

Zale roughly pushes his hands through his hair as he drops the shirt to the ground. “She jumped… There’s no other explanation.”

And Rodion’s tempered flared to life. “That’s a load of bull! Why the hell would she have jumped? What possible reason could she have had to do that?” He roars, effectively disrupting the silence of the empty beach.

However, no one answers him, and he’s left to stew in his anger as he clenches and unclenches his hands in an effort to calm down.

Five minutes pass as silence descends upon them once again.

Only until Zale speaks up once more. “I can’t do this. I’m going home, going to bed, and then I’m gonna go out tonight.” He walks off.

Arion shouts after him, “That’s what you’re gonna do? Our sister is missing and you’re just gonna go off sleeping around with whatever wears a skirt?” But Zale keeps walking until he gets to a point where none of their voices will reach him.

Rodion shoves his hands into his jean pockets and stalks off as well.

“Where the hell are you going?” Arion’s blood rushes through him furiously as his anger reaches new highs.

Rodion growls, “None of your damn business!”

“But Rena—”

“Is gone! We don’t know what the hell happened to her, and I don’t care to get the fucking phone call saying that she turned up dead! Now piss off!”

Caspian watches everything play out in silence. Rodion disappears somewhere towards the line of shops, Caspian’s guess leading him to conclude that Rodion is going to indulge in more of his own bad habits again.

He turns his gaze to Arion, who’s breathing heavily with more anger than he knows what to do with.

He begins speaking in a soothing tone. “Calm down Rion. We each deal with grief in our own way. This is just—”

But Arion snaps. “What the hell are we grieving for? She’s not dead! Why are you all so quick to come to that conclusion?”

Caspian looks down, his gaze dark. “Look, I’ll tell the police, but as much as I want to believe that she’s okay, I don’t want to get my hopes up.” He pauses then quietly says, “The last thing we need is to be reminded of how we let mom die.”

At this, Arion falls silent. His hands unclench as he looks down, allowing his damp golden hair to form a curtain over his eyes. There’s nothing he can say to that. No matter how much he wants to. This scenario is a painfully familiar one and it makes him choke up just to think about it. He knows he can’t fault his older brothers for behaving as they did. They each hold onto to their mother’s passing in their own way, not the best of ways, but it’s their own.

Caspian takes a moment to gauge Arion before moving closer and throwing a comforting arm around his shoulders.

“Come on. Let’s go home and calm down for a bit…”

Darkness greets her when her consciousness returns to her. Her immediate thought is that she’s dead, but then she becomes aware of sensations that she probably shouldn’t feel were that the case. She feels sand beneath her skin, and a gentle pressure curving over her body.

She experimentally squeezes her hand, and sure enough she feels sand slip through her fingertips.

However, she replaces that she’s unable to open her eyes. The rest of her body feels heavy and the only movement she’s allowed is the flexing of her fingers.

For a moment, she thinks she hears someone. “—interesting…” But she’s unable to discern the rest of their sentence. She wonders why they don’t help her. That’s normally the first thing a person does when they come across an unconscious person lying on the ground. Yet this person never says anything else, leading her to conjecture that they must’ve left. How rude! They don’t even think to check on her! They simply made a statement and left soon after!

After a moment, Serena simply settles and allows herself to wallow in the comfort of this shallow state of sleep for a while longer.

It feels like an eternity goes by before she’s finally able to open her eyes. What greets her are rather dim surroundings and a distant light. Serena spots something fluttering in the breeze.

But it takes a school of fish darting by for her to realize that there is no breeze. She rapidly sits up with wide eyes. She sees rocky formations on either side of her, and a blanket of sand beneath her with rocks and sea plants. A crab scuttles along beside her, and she immediately rubs at her eyes wishing this to be some kind of strange dream.

Yet when she opens her eyes again, the scene remains, and she briefly spots a few dolphins swimming overhead.

She tries to stand up or something, but her legs feel heavy and her ears feel odd. Instinctively, she places a hand against the side of her head to feel her ears.

“What the hell…?” Her ears don’t feel like her ears. She traces the new length; fingers grazing against a thin material similar to a fish tail and running along something hard. It extends an inch above her head and fans out around the area where her ears should be.

Her body has gone rigid with the realization that something is horribly wrong. The strange weight of her legs incites her to look down at them for the first time.

“What?” She shrieks as her bulging eyes take in the sight of a massive tail covered in amethyst scales with an ivory strip going down the center. The forked fins are predominantly white but fades to purple towards the ruffled ends.

Serena squeezes her eyes tightly shut once again and counts to five before opening them again. Nothing’s changed.

“This can’t be happening… No way in hell!” Full on panic settles over her as she tries to replace a rational explanation for the sudden change.

There is no way on God’s green earth that she has been turned into a damn mermaid. They don’t exist! They’re simply fairy tales that little girls indulge in to escape the bitter sting of reality!

I’m just dreaming, aren’t I? Any minute now, I’ll wake up in my bed with Cas and the others shouting at me from downstairs. She waits a few minutes for the dream to end. But those minutes drag out to the point where she’s certain that she’s been waiting for this “dream” to end for about thirty minutes now. Nothing happens. So, she pinches herself. If she’s dreaming, she shouldn’t feel that right?

“Ouch!” She hisses, having pinched herself a little too hard, but her face abruptly pales not a moment later.

This isn’t a dream. This is cold, unforgiving reality that has seen fit to fuck with her real good this time round.

Now, she just wants to scream. What could she have possibly done to deserve this?

Serena’s face crumples as she struggles to determine whether or not she wants to cry or scream. Doing both might make me feel better, she briefly muses, but instead, she bunches up the sand in her hands and releases a guttural scream that emits bubbles before her face.

Suddenly she becomes aware of something else.

“Oh my god! I’m talking and breathing underwater!” She sobs, belatedly realizing this fact only after the discovery of her tail. Her mind has slowed significantly in catching on these details as she presses her hands into her face and tries to wish all of this messed up shit away.

Of course, things aren’t that simple, and she replaces herself wishing that she had never listened to that voice that called her off the damn cliff.

After another five minutes of panicking, she decides to take deep breaths to calm down and better figure out her situation.

She looks around. Clearly, she’s in a trench which means she’s drifted far from the shores of Andomore since there aren’t any trenches near the beach.

Serena spots some subtle indentation in the rock walls, so at least she can climb out of the trench and attempt to gain a better understanding of where she is.

And in the midst of all this, she realizes something that she probably should’ve noticed much sooner than this.

She stares at herself with wide eyes and a bright red face. Her chest is fully exposed, and all her clothes are gone.

Zale emits a sigh as he emerges from his room, freshly groomed and ready to go out for the night. Upon coming downstairs, however, he nearly trips over a stray bottle of Malibu amongst a few other different empty bottles of alcohol. He kicks a random empty bottle of tequila aside as he follows the trail to the living room to replace Caspian laid out on the couch.

Clearly, he’s got a buzz going for him as he lays there with a bottle of Hornitos in one hand and his phone in the other.

His creamy blonde hair has been tussled into oblivion and his clear blue eyes are bloodshot as they blankly stare at the TV.

Zale stands for about a minute before finally asking, “I take it the police aren’t going to do anything then?”

Caspian doesn’t utter a word, giving Zale all the answer he needs. Of course, the police aren’t going to do anything. Andomore’s police force aren’t too willing to give up their luxurious days of peace to spend their time and energy searching for missing people. Oh no, god forbid they waste their precious time.

Zale continues through the living room, grabbing his keys on the way to the front door.

“I’m heading out. I’ll be back…eventually.” His tone is morbid. Flashes of Serena flit through his mind as he struggles to push them away while walking out the door.

Zale can almost hear her voice in his ears, messing with him or some such nonsense. But what he wouldn’t give to hear her mess with him because at least then, it would mean that she’s still here and just fine. His throat clogs up as his eyes moisten at the mere thought of her.

A growl slips past his lips as he abruptly shoves his keys into the pockets of his blue jeans. He shoves a hand through his already messy silver hair as he shakes his head to rid himself of the memories.

After a minute, Serena fades from his mind, allowing him a brief moment of peace. So, he continues on his way, intent on losing himself for the night in a good time with beautiful women and energetic music. He climbs into the car and drives off into the night.

The music blares loudly with flashing LED lights bathing everything in various colors as Zale leans back in his seat. He whispers in the brunette’s ear on his left causing her to giggle whilst pressing herself against him while the black-haired woman on his right runs her hand up Zale’s chest enticingly.

Meanwhile, Zale’s gaze scans over the crowd, picking out potential nightly companions as he plays with a few strands of the brunette’s hair. He can’t for the life of him remember the names of these women, but he doesn’t have enough thought to really care either way. They’re just two temporary faces in a sea of women that he’ll drown himself in for one night.

It pays to be born with naturally good lucks. Such is the case for them all, but never would he and his brothers let Serena realize that. They’d always been content to allow her to think that boys aren’t interested in her while scaring them off. After all, no one is good enough for their sister.

But the thought of her causes him to grimace as he spots a woman with hair a few shades darker than Serena’s. He had momentarily seen Serena’s face in the woman’s, but the vision vanishes just as quickly. So, he masks the pain and continues the pointless conversation with the two women pressed against him.

His eyes scan the crowds once more. No blondes, he decides as a lovely mane of ginger hair fills his vision. That red head might prove entertaining...