(( Hello hello~ This took longer than I would have liked, but here it is finally. I was planning on getting a bunch of reserve chapters and have regular updates like my other two chaptered fics, but I'm impatient with this one xD So here we go~ ))

It was light outside already, giving the hint that Spring was on it's way and that the days would be getting longer; Junmyeon didn't mind much either way, though it was a nice thought that he wouldn't have to walk half way to school before the sun was starting to peek out over the horizon. He offered a wave to Kyuhyun when the other looked up from his mobile, the other giving a smile in return before pushing himself off of the wall he was leaning against so they could walk the rest of the way to their school together as they did every morning. What he wasn't expecting was for his friend to lean closer to him, causing him to lead away and give him a frown.

"Kyuhyun, what are you doing?" he asked as his friend pulled back, looking ahead of them and giving a shrug.

"Something about you seems... different. I thought it might be some kind of cologne, but you don't really smell like anything new," Kyuhyun replied and Junmyeon gave a roll of his eyes.

"Why are you so weird?" Junmyeon asked, the other laughing and giving his shoulder a nudge. Kyuhyun started talking about a new video game he was playing, trying to get the light brown haired male into it as he often did with his online games, and Junmyeon politely declined like any time before.

"Like you're one to talk. What do you even do outside of school if you don't play videogames like a normal teenager?" Kyuhyun teased, Junmyeon opening his mouth, pausing when he heard his name called. He looked over to his left where he saw half of a face framed by long back hair, eyes catching on how the tips of her hair were pink in contrast before he looked back up to what little of her face he could see from how she was standing behind the main gate of the school.

"Hello?" he replied, noticing her cheeks tinting to match the pink of her hair as she stepped out from hiding, one hand behind her back as the other came up to tuck some strands of hair behind her ear.

"I-I have... I have something for you, Junmyeon," she said, her voice so soft he took a couple steps closer to hear her. She had something for him? Why did-

His mental wondering was cut off when the hand that had been behind her back thunked against his chest in a flash before she took off towards the school building and the babydoll pink colored envelop she had slammed into his chest fluttered to the ground as he watched her flee. He frowned, looking down at the letter before kneeling down to pick it up and open it, tensing as he read it. Kyuhyun peeked over his shoulder at it before laughing at the sickly sweet words scrawled down the paper, his hand coming up to give a couple of hard pats to the brunet's back.

"So that's what you do outside of school, you're a secret lady killer~" Kyuhyun laughed, though it came to a slow stop at the wide eyed look that Junmyeon gave him. "What?"

"I have no idea who that was."
 

A few days later he got another letter given to him in the same hectic way and he rolled his eyes at the teasing Kyuhyun started giving him. He started finding a couple more letters slipped into his locker over the week, little bags of sweets on his desk in his homeroom classroom here and there at first but by the end of the month he could place bets on if there would be one that day and win every time.

"Seriously, what is your secret?" Kyuhyun demanded one day while they were waiting for the bell to ring and signal the start of their lunch period. "You've already gone through puberty, so it's not like you suddenly became a hottie overnight and that's why every girl, and not to mention some of the guys, at school is suddenly obsessed with you. You have to be working some angle here, there's just no other explanation." Junmyeon shrugged, digging around in his backpack with a small frown painted onto hips lips.

"Trust me, if I knew I would stop it."

"What? Why?" Kyuhyun demanded, Junmyeon sighing.

"Because I don't like the idea of someone throwing themselves at me, it's off putting. Like I'm the end of some really cruel joke, and that it'll end poorly for me if I accept," he explained before setting his bag back on the hook on the side of his desk. "And with how much thought I've been giving all this, I forgot my lunch," he added flinching when the girl beside him jumped up.

"I'll go get you something from the cafe down the street!" she exclaimed, turning and hurrying off before Junmyeon could try and stop her. He sighed deeply, his head coming to rest on his desk.

"Junmyeon,"

The voice was one he knew all too well, though he often doubted it was what it should have been, and he looked up from the letter in his hands. He met the gaze of a woman with long black hair that swayed around her head like you would imagine it would when one was submerged in water, and he greeted the gentle smile she gave with a large one of his own before he ran into her embrace, sand being displaced by his feet as he did.

"Mom, I got another letter today," he said as he pulled his head back from her chest, her head tilting to the side a little. "I mean, I have class with the guy, but it still seems so strange. I'm nothing special, I'm not one of the popular kids at school so I don't understand why these letters show up. People started following me around to my classes too! Do you know what's going on? Because dad doesn't."

The dark haired woman's smile returned, reaching her eyes with a faint glint before she pulled back from him. She raised her index finger to her lips, stepping back towards the waves crawling up the shore behind her. The waves rose higher and higher, the water reaching her knees before everything faded and he jumped awake to the sound of his alarm.

The brunet opened his eyes slowly, taking a deep breath before sitting up, holding his breath as he stretched then let the breath out slowly. Pushing the covers off he slid his legs over the side on his bed, met with the soft carpet as he stood from his bed and crossed then exited the room. He was half way down the stairs when the sound of a plate clattering against the table reached him and when he got to the bottom step his father looked up from setting the table.

"Morning," Junmyeon greeted, his father giving a nod before making his way into the kitchen as the brunet sat in his usual spot.

"Morning," his father replied, setting a plate of pancakes in the center of the table and ruffling the others hair before he went back to the kitchen to grab a glass of milk for Junmyeon and coffee for himself. He returned and sat across from Junmyeon, sliding the glass of milk to him as Junmyeon took a couple of pancakes and set them on his plate along with some of the scrambled eggs his father had made. The first half of their meal was mostly silent, Mr. Kim noticing as Junmyeon's attention drifted to the photo frames on the wall the table was pushed up against.

"I had a dream about mom again." Mr. Kim smiled almost somberly as he looked back to his plate.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. We were on a beach, but as far as I can remember her and I are always on a beach when she shows up in my dreams," Junmyeon explained, looking over the six photographs. The largest was of his mother, smiling at the camera in a way that reached her eyes, a sun hat was positioned just a few inches above the table, and he remembered when his father had said it was to include his mother in their family dinners. That didn't mask the sorrow in his father's eyes when Junmyeon caught him staring at the photos though.

"We went to the beach when you were little, and they do say that around the age of two is when you start to form memories that last."

"That or its influenced by the picture on the wall that's of all three of us at the beach," Junmyeon pointed out, his father smiling softly and giving a small hum to signal he had heard the other. "Did mom even like the beach?" Mr. Kim paused before looking up at Junmyeon again.

"What makes you ask that?"

"Because of the way she's as far from the water as she can be. And some of the other photos from that day show her looking really sad when she's staring out at the water. None are of her actually in the water, but there's a couple of you playing with me in the water." Mr. Kim looked over the photos, giving a small nod.

"It's not that your mother disliked the beach. It just brought up somber memories of her past," Mr. Kim said, looking over at the frown now pained on Junmyeon's lips. "What brought this up?"

"In my dream, I asked mom if she knew why I was getting a bunch of love letters. She just smiled and then stepped back towards the ocean without a word," Junmyeon said, his eyebrows kitting together when he saw the slight widening of his father's eyes. "Does that mean something to you?" he pressed, his father staring at him for a moment before shaking his head and looking back to his plate.

"Nothing," his father replied, and he opened his mouth to argue when Mr. Kim cut him off. "Don't you have to get ready for school soon?" Junmyeon's frown deepened and he sighed before looking over at the clock, hitting his knee against the table when he jumped up from his seat.

"Crap, if I don't hurry I'm going to be late," he groaned, choking down a few spoonfuls of his eggs, grabbing a pancake and running up the stairs. He was quick in and quick out of his room, grabbing his uniform before stopping in the bathroom. He yanked off his sleep shirt and pants, tossing them in the laundry hamper before stepping into the bath tub.

He paused for a moment, weighing the amount of time he had if he wanted to get to school on time with how long it usually took to wash the way his father had drilled into his head that he was supposed for since as far back as he could remember. He would always take a washcloth and get it wet, damped his skin and then get some body wash and lather it onto the cloth before giving himself a good scrub and he would have to rinse out the wash cloth several times as he cleaned the suds off of himself.

Junmyeon sighed and shook his head, skipping the first step. Once the water from the faucet had warmed up and he put a bucket under the spray he dunked a washcloth inside the warm water as it was filling the bucket up, starting to scrub himself after. A few short minutes later he grabbed the bucked and hoisted it above his head, drenching himself with the water inside.

An odd shiver shot up his spine, then back down and through his legs, which confused him since the water wasn't even remotely cold. He didn't pay attention to his confusion for long though as he heard a crack from his hips, then one from his knees and he reached out to place his hand on the wall for support as his toes went numb and the bucket clattered against the bathroom tile. It felt like the bones in his legs were trying to bend toward the insides of his thighs and he shut his eyes tightly as he heard several other cracks, pain down his thighs where they touched and continuing past his knees. The burning sensation reached his ankles before he toppled backwards, hitting the back of his head against the wall of the shower. He let out a low groan as the burning feeling faded, reaching up to rub his face, his elbow aching as he bent it. Had he hit it on the wall of the bathtub when he had fallen?

Why are my toes still numb-? His thought was cut off as he lowered his hand and opened his eyes, staring dumbly down at himself. There was a glossy shine over the light blue... Well, he wasn't sure what to call whatever was covering his legs at the moment, nor could he remember putting something on over them, and he let out a small laugh, rubbing the sore spot on the back of his head.

"I must have hit the wall pretty hard, because if I didn't know any better, I would say I put on one of those slips performers do to make them look like mermaids," he muttered to himself, reaching to where the light blue scales faded into the skin above his hip bones- freezing when the scales were more sensitive than his skin.

The numb feeling in his toes faded as he tried to bend his feet towards himself, the fin at the end of the tail in place where his legs should have been a darker shade of blue as the rest of the scales, reaching out and grabbing the thin end of it, his smile falling. There was no way his toes would fit into something as thin as this, so why could he feel his fingers brushing against his toes as they rubbed the fin? He slid his hands up the tail, finding himself unable to feel the seam of his legs under the scales, and he sure didn't feel anything when he pressed against his pelvis, the confusion fading out as panic seeped into his stomach and he almost didn't realize that the shriek he heard was his own.

There were faint footsteps that were drowned out as he thrashed around in the tub, trying to push the scales off of himself like a slip that was glued to his skin, and he looked to the door with wide eyes as his father appeared looking almost as alarmed as Junmyeon felt.

"Dad, what's going on?" he asked as slowly as he could, though it was a vain attempt to make himself seem a lot calmer than he actually was. His father stared blankly at him before closing the bathroom door and Junmyeon let out a 'hey!' as his father disappeared from sight. He looked back down at himself, eyes trailing over the way the dark blue of the fin matched several scales scattered across the light blue like freckles and he took a slow breath in hopes of calming his racing heart.

Another useless attempt he reached up, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes, willing the image before him to go away as he counted to ten. When he lowered his hand, the tail was still there, but at least the bathroom door opened again and his father stepped inside. They exchanged a long stare before his father stepped in and shut the lid of the toilet seat and sat on it.

"Are you going to tell me what's going on, or are you just going to stare at my new fish limb?" Junmyeon deadpanned, his father shifting his gaze back to the other's face.

"It's not a fish limb," his father frowned, and Junmyeon felt himself bristle a little.

"Then what is it? And why do you know that isn't what it is?"

"Because your mother was the same way." Junmyeon opened his mouth to continue his stream of questions, the others statement catching his voice in his throat.

"She.... What? I don't remember her having one of these!" Junmyeon argued, pointing an accusatory finger at the tail.

"That's... Where it gets complicated," his father said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand, holding it up when Junmyeon opened his mouth again. "Junmyeon, just calm down and I will answer all of you questions if you give me the chance to," he said, Junmyeon huffing a sign. "First, let's get you back to... Normal? I probably shouldn't use that word."

"Well this isn't what I call normal," Junmyeon grumbled as his father stood, grabbing a towel from under the sink, and offering it to the brunet.

"Try and wrap this around your waist, I'll lift you up," Mr. Kim said and Junmyeon took the towel. His father took ahold of the other, hands under his armpits and be lifted Junmyeon enough for the other to wrap the towel around his waist as instructed, Junmyeon feeling his heart jump at the way his tail flailed a little when he tried to move his legs to try to stand on instinct. His father set him back down once the towel was around his waist, sitting back on the toilet seat.

"How is this supposed to help?" Junmyeon asked, his father shaking his head and running a hand through his hair.

"Because you only change when your lower back gets wet."

"Then why haven't I changed before? I took baths when I was little!"

"That was because your mother was curious if you would be able to change."

"Which brings me back to how did she know about this? What do you mean she was the same way? What am I?"

Junmyeon fired off the questions just before there was another crack and he shut his eyes tightly, preparing himself for the fiery pain he had felt before. He was surprised by the cold sting he felt instead, like someone was dragging a sharp piece of ice down up the center of his tail to split it into two and he curled in on himself as he felt pin pricks scatter all over his legs. When the sensation faded he opened his eyes, his shoulders relaxing when he saw pale flesh over his legs again.

"A siren... Sort of." He looked over at his father again, a deep frown on his face.

"Siren don't have tails like that, mermaids do."

"That's why I said sort of," his father stated and Junmyeon groaned, rubbing his face.

"I'm not going to school today, I just want to go back to bed," he grumbled and his father nodded.

"I'll call you school and tell them you'll be out sick today," Mr. Kim said, standing and offering his hand to Junmyeon who took it and pulled himself to his feet before his father helped him back to his room. "Do you want me to give you some time, or should I come back after I call your school?" he asked as Junmyeon sat on his bed, leaning forward to press his face into his hands.

"I-I need a bit," he stammered, assuming his father had nodded before leaving the room. He didn't look up, even after hearing the click from the door closing, taking several slow deep breaths as he replayed the events that had happened.

A siren? Those weren't real, they were just creatures from myths. The same went for mermaids. The way the tail had thrashed around as he panicked played behind his eyes and he sighed, sitting up only to flop onto his back, rolling over after a few minutes to hug his pillow to his chest.

The click from the door caught his attention and he blinked his eyes open, focusing on the clock on his nightstand. How was it already the middle of the afternoon? He tensed a little, bolting up in bed when he woke up enough to remember it was a school day, and he was about to ask his father why he hadn't woken him up sooner when the events from the morning came crashing back. He slowly rose his gaze to his father's before sighing and moving back up against the wall his bed was pushed against, pulling his pillow back to his chest.

"I think I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be," he mumbled, his father padding his way to the bed and sitting on the edge of it.

"Firstly I'm sure you have questions, and I want to answer them the best I can. I'll fill in anything else after.”

"Why was I never told that mom was a... Whatever she was?"

"Your mother wasn't sure if you would change like that, since you're only half merfolk."

"Because you're not?" he asked and his father shook his head, looking down at his lap.

"No, I'm just human. Your mother got a lot of backlash about that, because her kind learned to never trust humans. It’s because of humans that the sirens and merfolk had to join together and create the mixed race your mother was a part of. They weren't strong enough alone to defend themselves against those who wanted to capture them or kill them out of fear. That's when merfolk developed the skill to look like humans out of the water, and sirens developed different skills with the pitches of their songs." Junmyeon nestled his chin into his pillow as his father spoke, staring at his bed sheet without really seeing it. He was more focused on trying to picture his mother with a tail of her own.

"That's why she looked sad when we went to the beach then? Because she missed her home?" he asked, Mr. Kim hesitating.

"Yes. Your mother became ill from the grief that she felt for about a week not long after you were born. She wanted to introduce you to her sisters and brothers but when she went back to tell them that you had been born, her father was outraged. A merfolk was supposed to stay in the ocean unless they were in pursuit of killing a human. They banished her, saying that being tricked into loving a human could be forgiven, bearing a child with one could not."

"So I'm the reason she couldn't go home?" Junmyeon asked, his father reaching out to lift his chin, noticing just how hurt he seemed at Junmyeon’s question.

"No, no that's not it, please don’t think of it like that," he pleaded. "Your mother knew that being with a human was against the laws of her kind, but she chose to forego that. She hoped that being with me would show that there were good humans in the world, and a couple of years of going back and forth between her world and ours she had you. And she loved you so very much that she threw away her world the instant that they tried to take you from her." Junmyeon frowned as his father's hand lowered from his face.

"Take me from her?" he asked, watching his father bite his lower lip, setting his hand back in his lap.

"A few months after she was banished, a woman came to the door. It wasn't until after that your mother told me she was her own mother. This woman said that she had plead her case to their council, on the grounds that she had been tricked by me further than in love. That I had tricked her into having you because you could be something I used against you to get her to do as I wanted her to. And she begged your mother, telling her that if she killed you in front of the council that she could return home and she would be forgiven." Mr. Kim closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly before he continued.

"Your mother declined, as I'm sure you guessed. Her mother continued to plead, saying she knew it was hard to imagine killing someone she thought she loved, and eventually your mother left her in the doorway, retrieving a knife from the kitchen. As much as I had faith in your mother, there was a moment where I was afraid that she would do as she was told, and I picked you up from the blanket you were laying on and held you close. I'll never forget the look on her mother's face when she turned the knife towards the jewel in her chest. Her mother reached for the knife, but your mother stepped back, demanding she leave else she would shatter the jewel."

"What was so special about the jewel?"

"She never said. She only ever told me that it was a sign of being a hybrid, and that it glowed whenever she sang. You would always giggle when it did and try to reach for it, and she would take a gentle hold of your hand and look at you with such a tender feeling." Junmyeon’s eyebrows knit together, a foggy memory hovering just out of reach.

"I think I remember that. I thought it was a necklace," he said, hand subconsciously coming up to rub the space between his collarbones. "Why don't I have one? If it's a sign of being a hybrid... Shouldn't I?"

"That was the first reason that your mother didn't think you would change. When you were almost two, after hundreds of baths she assumed that you wouldn't, that since you were only half of what she was that it wasn't enough for you to be able to change."

"Looks like that theory is out the window," Junmyeon muttered. "This is a lot to take in at once," he added, feeling like his head was starting to spin.

"I can only imagine what it's like to hear about yourself... it was hard enough believing it about her," Mr. Kim soothed, reaching out to rub the other's back, his hand falling short half way. "I'll answer any other questions that I can whenever you're ready... but I do think that you should take it slow. And the last thing you want to do is let anyone know."

"Like anyone would believe me," Junmyeon scoffed. "And the last thing I want to do is show them," He returned, frowning at the serious expression on his father's face, confused by the contrasting pain in his eyes. "Dad, what aren't you telling me?" he pressed, Mr. Kim turning his focus to his lap.

"Your mother..."

"Yeah, what about mom? This whole conversation has been about her, is there something that I'm missing."

"... Someone found out what she was, and they took her," Mr. Kim finished, and Junmyeon felt like his heart had stopped.