What Am I Left With? • Monsta X

v. [END]

Hyungwon nodded before remembering the truth-seeker. "Yes," he vocalized, still looking only at Barrymore. "If you fulfill my request, I promise I will lead you to your daughter."

"He speaks the truth," the truth-seeker said, and Barrymore was silent for a long moment, eyes tracing the stones below his feet before he looked up at Hyungwon with cold eyes.

"What do you demand of me?"

--

Hyungwon was thrown in a bare room for several days while Barrymore fulfilled his request. Once a day, a tray with scraps was left near the door to be picked up that night. He didn't much want to eat, but he ate out of necessity. He was of no use to his brothers dead.

Three days later, he was hauled back to the throne room.

"I have done as you asked, although I do not understand why you have asked this of me," Lord Barrymore said, his jaw clenched. As with before, the truth-seeker hovered an arm's length behind him, lurking in pursuit of lies. "I had my men release the sea creatures back to the waters where they were captured. Now you must do your part."

Hyungwon nodded. The two guards from before lingered nearby, but there was no knife to his throat this time. Likely because they knew he was too weak from days of meager scraps to fight back.

"I will lead you to her," Hyungwon said, and the truth-seeker gave a small nod to Barrymore, who turned to glare back at Hyungwon.

"We leave as soon as my men are ready," Barrymore said before narrowing his eyes. "How far will we need to travel?"

Hyungwon met Barrymore's eyes. "Not far, but we will need to travel by sea."

--

Hyungwon was dragged aboard the boat by the rope that bound his hands together and was summarily thrown to the deck. As the sailors boarded, they occasional sent kicks toward his ribs, and Hyungwon curled up in a small attempt to protect himself.

Just for a little while longer, he told himself. He could endure anything for just a little while longer.

He pointed the captain in the correct direction, referencing the position of several stars to provide bearing. The truth-seeker and Lord Barrymore stayed with the captain, the truth-seeker confirming Hyungwon's words before the captain set the course.

Hyungwon wasn't lying, technically. After Lord Barrymore had returned his brothers to the sea, Aurelia – or more accurately, her remains – had traveled with them.

Once the course had been set, the crew largely ignored Hyungwon, and he eventually uncurled himself, wincing slightly before making his way to his feet, leaning against the wall for support. The ship perpetuated a strange motion as it slipped through the water, a different rhythm than Hyungwon had experienced as a creature who'd once slipped through the waters himself. It took a few minutes for him to get ahold of the rhythm, and then he slowly made his way to the front of the vessel, still relying on the wall.

Eventually, he stood at the bow of the ship. For a long moment, he stared straight ahead, watching as the sun crept past the water, securing its rightful place above the horizon.

He turned to look past his shoulder at Lord Barrymore, who was watching him from farther back on the ship, his eyes cold but obscured by a layer of confusion. Hyungwon's request had likely meant nothing to Lord Barrymore. The sirens had only been a shiny new acquisition for him after all; from his perspective, he'd been asked to return one treasure to recover another. A simple transaction, if an unintelligible one. Hyungwon knew his motivations were beyond Barrymore's understanding, and for a brief moment, he felt something like pain for Barrymore, who had set sail to bring his daughter home without the knowledge that his daughter would never return.

They'd both lost their families, and in a way, they were the same.

Hyungwon turned back to face the sun.

But in another way, they would never be the same.

The water was colder than he'd expected after he'd leaned over the edge and pierced the surface of the unforgiving ocean. The water had been cold when he'd been a siren, but that had been a familiar cold, an expected cold. It felt different now; invasive, almost. He felt like he was entering a residence he hadn't been welcomed into, a stranger to his own home. The coldness seeped into his heart.

His arms were still tied behind him, and he sank rapidly, bubbles spewing up from his nose as the air emptied from his lungs. All the colors his eyes had absorbed on the Above were peeled away as he descended, darkness overtaking his sight and robbing him of the only gift his two-leggedness had bestowed upon him.

The water crept into his lungs, poking softly before ripping at him, consuming him. Then it wasn't just the water biting at him; familiar teeth were nipping at his arms and legs. Not the playful taunts of his past but sharp edges sinking into him, claiming him, robbing him of himself, of all that he had left.

The pain was so much more than he'd imaged, and despite the darkness all around him, his eyes could still see Aurelia, her face contorting in pain, the waters muddying with the pink of her blood as it spilt across the water.

Was that happening right now, despite the darkness? Had he, in his final moments, after a lifetime of darkness, created color?

The teeth eating away at him eventually freed the rope from his arms, but he couldn't move them anymore, if anything was left of them at all. Perhaps the darkness was for the best. There had always been parts of him missing, but he'd always been spared the horror of facing them directly. For that, he supposed he owed a debt of gratitude.

But something was wrong. He'd known that the two-leggeds weren't built for water, but it felt like his whole body was collapsing, shrinking in on itself, imploding as all the air was ripped away from him breath by breath. Water was being crammed down his throat, choking him, bruising his lungs.

Something swept over his face, hands but harsher than the soft, vulnerable flesh of two-legged hands. Had he been in his siren form, he probably could have identified which of his brothers it had been, but his two-legged senses were unsharpened. Still, one of his brother's hands traced over the contours of his face, and after a moment, another hand joined his. The pain in Hyungwon's body didn't fade, but he felt the teeth retracting. Or maybe he was just growing numb to the sharp pain in his limbs.

Hands were all over him now, tracing his face, whisking him through the water. The pressure of the water was so great that his two-legged ears had become useless; he wondered if they were talking about him, if they'd recognized the shape of his face as their lost brother even though it had changed a little to accommodate the two-legged breathing mechanisms. That in turn made him wonder how they'd reacted when they'd been released back into the water and headed for the cave only to find it empty, to find him gone, to find Changkyun gone.

Changkyun.

Would Hyungwon turn into sea foam too? He didn't think that happened to two-legged creatures. In a sense, he craved that end, to be returned to the ocean, but he knew that if he were to turn into foam, his two-legged body would disappear, and what would his brothers eat until the next hunt? They had been starving until just recently, and they couldn't be fully recovered just yet; at least in this way, with his final act, he could be of use to them.

And so he would lose his rightful state of death along with everything else he'd chosen to sign away.

As Hyungwon descended into his two-legged death of pain and suffocation, he thought he heard a series of clicks; impossible, given his two-legged hearing, but it sounded like Changkyun's voice.

What is it? the voice that sounded like Changkyun's clicked.

Just feel cold, Hyungwon thought, only in this end-of-life fantasy, he was able to click back in his natural language.

Of course, cold didn't really mean cold; in the deep sea, there was no true concept of warmth. What Hyungwon really meant was that he felt absence in some abstract sense, that he felt alone.

And then Hyungwon himself became the absence.

--

published 05/03/21

2043 words