\.Void./

you're compromised by the siren. the thing behind the glass at work, that you never even hear the tapping of, because you have to wear three layers of headphones in order to even interact with her. and so you're out at the beach, trying to wander into the ocean in a misguided subconscious understanding that the ocean is where sirens are supposed to be, and so you'll find the siren out there.

you won't, though. she's in a tank in the lab, the rainbow, oil-slick, diaphanous and glittering thing that she is, crooning to nobody about nothing. you won't find her in the ocean.

and so you wring your clothes out and wander home through the streets, and collapse into bed to spend the latter half of your weekend recovering from nearly drowning to death. your nipples hurt from the salt water, which you suppose is somewhat gender affirming, if nothing else.

but pretty soon you're in front of her tank, time melting away like ice against the warm of the tide as you think about her. you're trying to pin down how she compromised you, how she crawled inside of your head and made you need her.

you look, and she's tapping on the glass of the tank. you tilt your head slightly. no, it couldn't be, right?

you reach out, and press your hand to the inch thick glass, and for the barest second, you swear you can feel something tingling.

lllast week. last week lllllllast week. you, had, because you'd thought she was sleeping, because you'd thought that everyone was looking the other way, you had pressed your body against the glass of her tank, and you had felt that exact same horrible wonderful tingling.

it's like the prickling behind your eyes when you're drowning, like the pressure in your chest from having inhaled to dive under and not being able to let the air out for fear of letting it all out. you wish you were on the other side of the glass.

she regards you with glittering, bioluminescing eyes, and you feel like you can breathe for a second, and you scamper from the lab with fear in your heart.

you wish you had ended up on the other side of the glass.

days come and go, and you begin to understand the feeling she's inspired in you as less metaphor and more literal. it's like you're underwater when you aren't in her presence, even though you aren't hearing her song at any point of the process. just the glittering refraction of her light through the water of her tank is enough for you now, and you take every excuse you can to spend time around her even as your colleagues grow concerned for you.

colleagues? you have colleagues. it's hard to envision anything to this story outside of her, and the ocean, and you, and obsession. you have colleagues though, and they reccommend that you spend less time around her.

so you don't have colleagues. you ignore them.

and when you spend time apart from her, you can feel your chest grow tighter and tighter. heavier and heavier, the slow pressure of a held breath. your throat feels tight too, like you're waiting to breathe until you can see her lights. your head gets light and warm, and the need to breathe crawls up from your lungs into your throat and into your head. it's like having somebody cover your mouth when you want to stop holding your breath, and having them smile down at you with amusement and delight when they do. it's horrible. it's wonderful. you are scared.

and then you're in the room with her tank again, staring blankly into her glittering lights after everyone else has long since gone to bed, and everything is okay again.

and then you're having to be without her again, and it's like you can't breathe all over again, like you had never even gotten a break, like air is poison to you now in every single way. you feel like you're going to fall over. you're lightheaded. you can't cum when you fucking masturbate and you can't do anything but think of the siren, think about wanting to kiss the siren, about how warm the ocean is, and how cold it is out here with all this air on your skin, and how nice it would be to be held by her, and how lonely it is as a marine cryptozoologist, and....

you're in the room with her tank. she is gleaming a resplendent blue and yellow, bright and oscillating in an irregular strobe that paints the whole room with the color of the ocean on a sunny day. the irregularly shimmering blue of warm reef shallows.

and you're stripping off your labcoat, because you're thinking of how cold and heavy it would feel on your body as you sank into the water, and you're climbing up the ladder that nobody is supposed to climb without protective electric prods, and protective noise-cancelling headphones, and a mild-deathwish.

you're climbing it naked, with love in your eyes and laced through your brain like seawater dripping through ill-fit planks.

below you, the siren shines like the sun.

you let one foot dangle into the water and then another, the water like static against your skin as you slip in. contrary to what you and your idiotic colleagues used to believe would happen, the siren does not surge up to grab you by the calf and tear you apart piecewise. she instead paddles up between your legs, and places her hands on your hips, her frills and fronds twitching as they leave the water. she's clearly not pleased to have her head above the water, her gills flaring and puffing as she holds you by the hips, but she holds you despite the discomfort. you can't help but feel like it means something.

and you realize as she begins to sing that it did mean something, because she hadn't sang until you had come this close. like she had been reserving her cruelest weapon for when she was sure that you couldn't handle it, for when you were well and truly committed to the point of being so broken that it didn't really matter either way.

she sings.

you taste something on your tongue that makes you drool like it's sour. it isn't sour- it's pleasant, so pleasant that it's unbearable. but the closest thing you can think of as you begin to drool is 'sour,' and the reaction that citric acid evokes.

you can no longer think so analytically as you listen further.

she sounds like your childhood crush coming back into your life and telling you that they had been thinking of you again, and wanted to be a part of your dating life. she sounds like the first time you'd ever gone on a really good date. she sounds like having the back of your neck scratched by someone with well-manicured nails, she sounds like the goosebumps you get when you hear a song you know is about to become your favorite for the rest of your life. she sounds like love and truth and light and the sea and you need her and you need more and you're

you're in the water. it is so warm you could sleep.

she curls the strobing rainbow ribbons of her taffeta fronds around your body, and you lose consciousness as her song echoes through the water so strongly that you feel pleasure through every single part of your body, all the way to the back of your throat.

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the next day, your co-workers come into the lab, and don their double-layer of noise-cancelling earplugs. they enter the lab that has soundproofed walls, wearing their sound-dampening hazmat suits. they move over to the siren tank.

there are two sirens now, swirling in lazy, spiraling patterns and giggling silently behind the glass.

the dampening effect of their hazmat suit's anti-hypnotic glass is no longer strong enough to resist two sirens working in concert.

you and your perfect love are escorted, personally, back to the ocean by the co-workers you once called worthless.