Content. Sated. Enamoured.

Those are the feelings that come over you when you are slowly awakened to his singing voice, serenading softly to your ear. Both the sound of his voice and the trickling sound of water feel so soothing that you let yourself get swayed for a while longer, keeping your eyes closed to savour the feeling still running through your body. It won't be for another while until you come awake once more, slowly opening your eyes this time to take in your surroundings and marvelling at the magical place one last time.

At some time while you were too busy getting frisky to notice your surroundings, the water from the lake had stopped rising. But you are quick to realise that the body of water is still quite high even as time had passed by, leaving only the tall boulders spread around you and the platform where you are lying on standing tall above the surface, and only a small patch of sand left around the opening of the dark tunnel leading to your way out.

Right beside you, Taehyung has his eyes closed, though the soft hums coming from deep inside his throat lets you know that he is awake. He has his arm around you, keeping you to his side while you rest your head on his chest and your palm brushing against his bare stomach.

"I really don't want to move," you whisper to him, making him stop singing and smile. Seeing him so relaxed like this makes you smile as well, even if he cannot see it. After all that heated lovemaking and fucking, you feel not only the calm and sated feeling in your body, but also a delicate warmth fluttering in your chest. It is something that you had never felt before. Not with all the boys or men who had tried to court you in the past.

"Why would you need to move?" you hear him asking, still with a smile on his face and with his eyes closed.

"You don't really expect us to keep lying down here in this cave, do you?"

Taehyung chuckles and opens his eyes to say, "There's nothing wrong with that as long as we're together."

Chuckling at his silliness, you turn away from him and roll your eyes. Against your better judgement, you look around one more time, your gaze falling on the small void on top of the cave this time to notice that there is no change happening in the sunlight which had made its way into the cavern. Still murky grey, still dull, still no change even after you had fallen asleep a few times, and even after the few more times he had taken you in between just to keep you in the state of being putty and foggy.

Even without knowing the time, it is not hard to tell that hours and hours have passed since the time you came into this cave.

"Isn't it supposed to be dark already?" you question this after wondering why it is yet to turn nightfall when it should have been. While your body begins to tense at the realisation, Taehyung remains lax beside you.

"Time doesn't move when you are inside this cave. It stops still, no matter what," he says so nonchalantly without any expression on his face.

You laugh it off, thinking that he is joking with you. Except that the moment you look at him, you see no sign of humour in his eyes, not even a smile on his face to show you that he is only messing with your head.

"You're joking, right?" you ask him, trying to make sure that he is only playing with you. But then a chill grip comes into your chest when he only furrows his brows at you curiously and chuckles softly.

"Why would I be joking?"

The grip in your chest tightens with fear when you realise that he is being serious, and you immediately jump to your feet, staggering a little when the sudden movement makes you feel a bit dizzy. But you manage to balance yourself on your two legs that had turned soft like jelly, swaying for a moment before rushing to find your clothes.

Taehyung has only been watching you while you rush to gather your belongings, but then he grows more alert the moment he notices you dressing up. "What are you doing?"

"I—I'm sorry, but I have to go back," you nervously answer him while looking away. Suddenly, the red flags and the warning signs that you had constantly ignored are flashing through your mind, making it hard for you to overlook them this time. This cave, the odd-looking water that had the same effect as either the strongest wine or Elder Morri's remedy, and him—how his voice seems to make your mind go fuzzy whether when he is singing or talking, when everything about him seems to be synchronised with the cave that always looks like it is breathing, not to mention the sparks you feel when he touches you.

How can you be so stupid?

"What?" he asks you urgently as he jumps to his feet and rushes to your side. His eyes have grown wide while he was watching you put your clothes back on and he is now looking more alarmed when he realises what you were saying to him. "What are you talking about?"

With a deep exhale of breath, you turn to look at him. "I'm not sure how much time has passed, and I know without a doubt that Namjoon is looking for me. I don't want to make him worry," you say to him in the most even-tempered manner possible, only to not alarm him further or to show how panicked you are on the inside as you think about Namjoon.

Is he even still out there?

How much time has actually passed since you were gone?

Something about you mentioning Namjoon's name seems to make Taehyung snap. In place of his shock comes rage, and you watch with wide eyes when he grits his teeth as he gets angrier by the minute. "I told you not to worry about him," he says while seething in anger. His voice lowers that it comes out nearly as a growl, while his whole body is beginning to vibrate.

"I know, but I can't. He's my friend," you try to tell him, feeling incredibly guilty all of a sudden for even thinking about Namjoon or to think about stepping away. But you shouldn't feel guilty. You should feel wary of the possibility that you have been deceived.

Why are you not angry? And why are you feeling so much pain just thinking about leaving him?

"I'll come back to find you. I promise," you find yourself saying, before a lightbulb moment comes crossing your mind. "No, wait. Why don't you come with me? We can go together, get out of this place."

As if he cannot hear you, Taehyung's frown only grows deeper. "You're leaving? You—you can't," he says while shaking his head frantically. "Why are you leaving?" He says this roughly with almost a shout, before he begins rambling to himself while he is still shaking his head, "I don't understand, why is it not working with you?"

The grip of fear in your chest only tightens as you watch him go on like this. He has yet to pull his clothes on, still bare to your eyes with his skin glowing from the bright lake, but the sight only instils more fear within you when he looks not only savage and intimidating in his height and form while looking like he is completely out of it. "Taehyung? Come on, you're scaring me. What are you talking about?"

"You said you wanted to stay with me, right here. You're supposed to stay," he keeps on rambling for a moment before turning back to you again, shouting at you, "You promised me!"

"I—" your words simply fail you as you flinch at his outburst. "I said that I would stay if I could, but—" It takes quite an effort for you to find the right words to say, before you finally tell the truth, "But that's unrealistic. I have to go back. My people are waiting for me. For us. Namjoon is waiting for me right now."

At this, he begins shaking his head again, faster and growing more frantic as he mumbles. "No, no, no—"

The pain that you see in his eyes hurts you so badly that you want nothing more but to reach out and hold him to ease his worries. The emotions are so conflicting that your head spins. "Come with us. Please? Come on, Taehyung," you nervously say while offering your shaking hand for him to take. But as he looks at you again, it is clear that he is too lost in his frantic mind, still looking so aghast and in disbelief. You almost believe that you even catch a few growls slipping out of his throat.

"I can't leave. You can't leave," he keeps rambling on and on, repeating these words while soft growls come out of his rumbling chest.

Reaching out shakily, you gently touch his elbow to get him to look at you so you can help calm him. "Taehyung—"

Instead of calming down, he only snaps.

The moment he lashes out, as he loses control of his anger, everything about him shifts. His eyes are no longer dark, turning golden yellow with irises forming like those belonging to wild animals. His ears sprout with sharp points growing at the tops. But what surprises you the most is the sight of his skin at the sides of his neck which rips open into gills and his teeth sharpening, changing their form as he shouts with a deep, animalistic voice,

"You promised to stay!"

The sudden changes of his facial features and the sound coming out of his mouth are both so horrific, so unexpected that you scream in horror. In your shock, you step away from him, afraid that he might hurt you, only to have your feet slipping over the edge of the platform and sending you tumbling into the water below.

The splash of water follows your fall. Despite being an averagely good swimmer, the shock you had just experienced still feels so great that you find yourself unable to fight it when you go under, drowning deeper, losing your breath almost immediately as you came down while screaming.

Another, and yet bigger splash follows you behind, and Taehyung appears right before you. His gills are moving and pumping as he breathes underwater, his skin is glowing like tiny diamonds spread all over his body. He moves so fast as he wraps his arm around you and begins to pull you up to the surface that you only catch a glimpse of his lower body, moving swiftly and gracefully in the water as he swims towards the shallow water with you still in his hold. He pushes you gently away once you are up, finding yourself no longer drowning but laying on top of the sand.

Breathing heavily, you crawl away from the edge of the lake, doing your best to keep yourself together before you turn around to him again. The moment you do, finally seeing his full form now that you are an arm's length away while Taehyung remains in the shallow water, a gasp is caught in your throat when you see that his legs had changed form, showing you a long fishtail with his scales painted in multiple shades of green. His scales also appear in small blotches, spread unevenly on the small side of his face, a part of his upper chest and arms, all in the same colours. Fins had grown on his lower arms, though you didn't feel any of them when he held you against him as he pulled you up from the deep water.

When you look into his eyes, despite the fact that his irises are now different, you can see that he is hurting. You can see nothing but regret and sadness in his gaze when he returns yours. "______," he calls your name with a deep voice that sounds distorted, no longer speaking with the same melodic voice that you had come to love. Still keeping his tails in the water, Taehyung reaches out to touch your face, whispering your name in a desperate plea, "_______, please."

Slowly, you find yourself leaning into him, before he looks over your shoulder, eyes widening in shock and anger as he shrieks. Once again, you jump backwards while screaming in fear, afraid to get hurt, and that is when you feel something flashing by, flying over your head and landing on his tail.

Taehyung shrieks in pain and jumps back into the water, but not before giving you a sight of an arrow pierced into his scales.

"_______! Stay back!"

Everything becomes a blur at that point as Namjoon appears out of nowhere, shooting a couple more arrows into the water while aiming at Taehyung. Most of them miss him only by mere inches, before Taehyung, in his full siren form, leaps out of the water the moment Namjoon steps into the shallow water to put himself between you and this terrifying-looking creature you had known as Taehyung. Tossing his bow and arrow to the side, Namjoon pulls out his dagger and jumps into the water to follow Taehyung as the siren submerges into the deeper water.

You begin crying, screaming, all while feeling hopeless because you have no idea how to help or how to stop the fight. But most of all, you fear for Taehyung's safety as you watch Namjoon's relentless attack coming to him in rage. You scream out their names, wishing they would stop, hoping that Namjoon would hear you and stop trying to hurt the siren.

The sight of blood seeping through his tail and his glowing skin that you see each time he comes to the surface hurts you on the inside. No matter how terrified he had made you feel, the last thing you ever want is for him to get hurt. For either of them to get hurt.

The fight lasts only for another couple of minutes which almost seem like hours before you feel everything around you shifting. Just like how you had felt the cave pulsing together with Taehyung's voice and the sound of your heartbeat, as Taehyung's rage grows more and more feral, as Namjoon's attack grows more frantic, the cave pulses wildly, the crystals on the walls begin reflecting the lights more frantically, before the lake finally moves, rising and crashing against the rocks.

"Namjoon!" you call out to your friend as a massive wave rises from the deeper side of the cave, from the part of the lake which had been the darkest. Namjoon looks up with a curse flying out of his mouth and he pushes forward, slamming his whole body into Taehyung until the siren is sent flying into the bottom of the waves.

"We have to go, now!" Namjoon shouts at you as he turns around, taking you by the waist and lifting you up from the ground before he starts carrying out of the cavern. Lifted in his arms, you look over his shoulders with horror as you watch the wave rising so high it reaches to the ceiling. Right below it, Taehyung looks at you one last time with a sad smile and a pained look in his eyes before he turns away, letting the wave engulf him and taking him down with it as it settles to calm.

The sight of the siren disappearing in the water becomes the last thing you see before you lose any sight of the hidden chamber as Namjoon carries you further away from it, taking you back towards the world outside.