Sinking Woman || Yandere!Siren X F!Reader

A Word of Warning

When you thought about your grandma, you thought about her hands. You thought of how delicate they were, with a fine netting of gossamer skin connecting each finger.

She was happy to explain how she got them each time you visited her beachside cottage. She would sit you on the kitchen island with a plate full of fresh-baked cookies and tell you the same tale over and over again.

"My mother -your great grandmother- was a selkie, a seal folk! She could change from a seal to a human just by shedding her skin. One day, my father found her sunbathing naked on the shore, stole her seal skin, and compelled her to become his wife. He hid it well but, when I was a little girl, I found it.

"It was mottled but soft as butter in my hands! I didn't know what it was, what she was. I just brought it to her, thinking it might make her smile. She was a very depressed woman, your great grandmother, always staring longingly out onto the open ocean. I never could have guessed that she would shrug it on, transform, and swim quickly away. She never even looked back to see me waving to her from the shore."

Here your grandma had to stop and wipe her weepy eyes with her webbed fingers. "I still miss her... Although, with age, I find myself more sad for her than because of her. She was never herself with me. The sea was her true home. This cottage must have seemed like a cage to her."

Mama said that Grandma was a liar.

Mama said that Grandma's mama left her family, taking nothing but her seal fur coat on the way out the door, and this was all some grand story she made up in her mind to cope.

Mama said that Grandma's webbed fingers and toes were just a birth abnormality that was never corrected. Apparently you were born with them as well, but they were removed when you were still too young to remember the procedure.

You didn't care much for what Mama said.

It was more fun to imagine that you were special, fundamentally other. You could feel for your great grandma. Yearning for the sea defined you as a person. You didn't want reality, you wanted magic.

You wanted to be a pirate, a mermaid, anything other than yourself. You imagined what it would be like to be like this all the time. Breathe in the ocean air daily. Live by no law but your own.

Then summer ended and you went back to live with your parents again, back to school where you were different but not in a good way. You were weird.

Your classmates never liked you. Well, except for one little girl with perfect hair named Jenny. She had been your only friend since you two were in elementary school. She saw you for who, what, you truly were. Special.

Even with Jenny by your side to quell some of your loneliness, you still longed for freedom, for the summer to come and the sea to whisk you away.

Summer after glorious summer past and soon you were a teenager. Then Grandma had a new story to tell you.

"Y/N, you're nearly a woman now. I think it's time that we talked about your grandpa..."

Your mom cut in before she could expound. "Ma! Quit filling her head with fairytales. Dad died from drowning. That's it."

"No! He didn't just drown. He was taken! By a siren. She was insane with jealousy, furious that I wouldn't leave him for her. You heard her song that night, didn't you?"

"I was just a kid. I don't remember anything from that night."

Grandma made a desperate noise in the back of her throat, like a whine, before grabbing hold of your shoulders with both hands. You flinched at how tight her grip was. "Listen, Y/N, you must never reveal to a siren that you can resist their song. They'll want to keep you for themselves, forever. Do you understand me? Do you understands?!"

Mom wrestled you away from her in an instant. "That's enough! You're scaring her."

Later, while Mom was busy doing something else, Grandma pulled you aside and whispered, "Never fall prey to the deep, Y/N. I know you love the sea, but you have to understand She does not love you back, not in any healthy way. Whatever She has to offer is not worth sacrificing your friends and family on land for."

"Okay, Grandma," you told her. How else could you respond to something like that?

"You're a good girl."

You really weren't. Every night you stayed at your grandma's beachside cottage, you would wait until she was asleep to pad out the back porch, down the shore, and into the waves. It was dangerous to go swimming at night, especially without any supervision, but you didn't care.

Take me, you thought to yourself as you welcomed the ocean's chilly embrace. I'm ready to go. I want a life at sea. Take me. SHE held you close and rocked you like a baby, so soothingly you almost fell asleep in Her arms.

Later that year, Grandma died. Not peacefully in her sleep as you always imagined. No... She drowned, just like the grandfather you'd never met. The authorities couldn't tell for sure whether it was intentional or by accident.

Mom was beside herself with grief for months on end. She kept you away from pools, ponds, lakes, and rivers. And especially the sea. Any body of water deeper than your bathtub was forbidden to you, off limits.

You never went back to Grandma's cottage.

Until one day, when you finished your first semester of university with all A's, you begged your mom to let you use Grandma's cottage for spring break. "It'll just be me and Jenny," you promised. "I'll wear that ugly lifejacket you got me the whole time," you promised. "Please, please, please!"

You needled her for weeks, waving your transcript around like a flag...

Until, finally, surprisingly, she agreed.