Woohyun’s not allowed on land. He had died in the ocean and became something that he didn’t believe existed—a mermaid. At first, he thought he was dreaming. He couldn’t possible have a tail. His feet were probably tucked in somewhere in that giant tail connected to his body. It took him a few hours to realize that it wasn’t a dream, and that he actually had a tail. He found out soon after that he could breathe underwater, and that he could, in fact, not leave the water. He had to constantly be touching water, or his skin would start to burn, and he’d dry up.

            The first time he tried to leave the water was because he thought that if he were to go on land, he’d get his legs back. However, things didn’t work out the way he wanted them to. The minute his tail was out of the water, he started to feel as if fire was traveling through his blood and veins. He immediately pushed himself, using his arms, back into the water, the same way he had gotten out of it.

            As time passed by, Woohyun learned to accept his fate, even though he really didn’t have a clue why he was a mermaid. He didn’t have much memory about his past. He didn’t know he had drowned himself in the very lake he was now “living” in.

            It was a pretty, turquoise blue lake. It was a vast area with sand, forest, and cabins surrounding it. On one side was where Woohyun’s family had all lived, but enough time had passed by that the generation of people Woohyun knew had all passed away. It had been a couple of hundred years, but Woohyun wasn’t able to tell time anyway. All he knew was that he’d been a mermaid for a very long time. He also knew that he was very lonely.

            Though people have stopped swimming in the lake—some idiot had spotted Woohyun with some algae in his hair and claimed that there was a monster in the lake—Woohyun noticed that someone still waded their feet in the lake from the other side, the other side of the lake where he hadn’t really been before. He knew that there was someone there every once in a while, because the calm lake would suddenly have a bunch of ripples. He couldn’t sense anyone in the water other than the fishes, but he could sense that someone, a human, was near the water.

            On that unexplored side of the lake was a cabin that the Lee family rented every once in a while. In the family was a little son that found comfort in the water. The boy definitely never found much comfort in his family.

            The first time Woohyun sees Sungyeol, Sungyeol was five years old. Sungyeol was staring at the lake and let his feet hover over the water with his little blue shoes beside him. Woohyun’s fascinated at the human, and he wondered why such a young child would be left alone.

            The boy came for about two weeks every three months, and since Woohyun didn’t age, he continued to watch Sungyeol as Sungyeol aged. When Sungyeol first noticed Woohyun, he was about seven years old, but Woohyun didn’t realize that he’d been caught, and that now, as Woohyun watched Sungyeol, Sungyeol watched Woohyun.

            When Sungyeol was eight, Woohyun realized that the young boy wasn’t as happy as he once was. He didn’t smile that much anymore and he always came with a frown and kicked angrily at the lake, as if the lake had done something wrong to him. Sungyeol had thrashed his feet in the water again before he had felt another presence with him. He knew that the mystical creature he had seen before was watching him again, and he tried to smile, but he just ended up looking more pitiful than he was before. He sighed, lightly moving his feet in the water now.

            His mother never came on the trips to the cabin anymore, because his father insisted that he wanted some alone time with Sungyeol to do “manly” things like fishing and camping outside, but that never happened. His dad came up to the countryside by the lake to go to club and casinos and cheat on his wife. He left Sungyeol multiple times with his uncle who physically and verbally abused Sungyeol, throwing things at him when he was drunk and calling Sungyeol an ugly, little queer.  As a small child, the betrayal hurt, and getting beat by someone who was supposed to take care of him hurt too. He grew up surrounded with deceit as his uncle told his father that he was clumsy and that he fell often, causing the bruises, and as his father told his mother that the fishing trips went well but he kept tripping over rocks as they went hunting.

            Sungyeol was sad whenever he was forced to go to the countryside, but he always smiled when he managed to escape to the lake. The beautiful mermaid in the water makes him smile, and watching the mermaid as he swims away from him is a little amusing to him because the mermaid doesn’t know that he had seen him.

            When he’s 15, Sungyeol hears Woohyun sing for the first time. Sungyeol just got his first black eye from his uncle, and he had run to the lake in the middle of the night. He was about to start crying because life just wasn’t fair, but he suddenly heard something he thought of as heavenly. He sneaked off into a small area of the lake surrounded mostly by the trees, and he spotted Woohyun again. He sat by one of the trees, listening to the mermaid sing. The boy eventually fell asleep, but Woohyun didn’t notice that the boy was there until a while later. He didn’t realize that Sungyeol had been watching him, but he still stayed as close to Sungyeol as he could until he saw the boy stir awake. By the time Sungyeol had opened his eyes, Woohyun was already swimming away.

            Two years later, Sungyeol is now how old Woohyun was when he had died, and Sungyeol’s parents had killed themselves. Sungyeol’s mother had found out about the “fishing trips”, and Sungyeol’s father found out about his “clumsiness”. They had both felt so terrible that they had left the one person they should’ve cared about the most, and Sungyeol was absolutely devastated.

            He had run to the lake, searching for the mermaid. He didn’t care anymore if he wasn’t supposed to let the mermaid know that Sungyeol knew about him, because all he wanted now was for someone to talk to him or sing to him and let him know that things were going to be alright. He tried to call for the mermaid, but never having figured out its name, he ended up sitting by the tree he sat at when he first heard Woohyun sing and waited. Time passed, and every single bad thought that Sungyeol had creeped up to him, and Sungyeol started to cry.

            Hearing the cries, Woohyun started to swim to where the noise was, wondering why he hadn’t sensed someone coming near the lake. He noticed Sungyeol and immediately felt like he wanted to help him. There was something so familiar about Sungyeol, and Woohyun felt something pulling him towards him, so Woohyun makes the decision to push himself out of the water and touch Sungyeol, wiping away his tears. He decided that since he could stay alive as long as his tail was partly in the water, he could ride the little ripples that come back and forth on the sand and get close enough to show Sungyeol that he was there for him, but just as he touches Sungyeol, time stopped for Woohyun and he understood why he was so drawn to Sungyeol. However, time didn’t stop for anyone else and the small wave that was keeping him alive had drawn back into the water, and Woohyun dried up immediately.

            Sungyeol looked up and was horrified by the sight in front of him. The mermaid was no longer alive, and the mermaid, suddenly, wasn’t a mermaid anymore. He was a human with legs, but he smelled terribly of a dead person. He stared at Woohyun, and he felt tears escaping from his eyes, realizing that the mermaid had killed itself trying to comfort him, and he takes the once-mermaid into his hands. They both entered the water, and Sungyeol used Woohyun’s body as deadweight to drown himself with the un-aging mermaid he had been watching for about half of his life.

            Just as Sungyeol took his last breath though, there was a bright light just as he died, but even though he had killed himself in water, he doesn’t become a mermaid like Woohyun did. He wakes up to Woohyun’s light, and a blue light telling them that they were to be reborn into angels now, because they were the soul mates that found each other.