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He's beautiful. Chansung spots him through some rocks and his breath catches in his throat, comes out in a rush as loud as the crashing waves on the rocks. The siren looks up from where he's been sitting on a low rock, glinting eyes caught on Chansung's.God, he's beautiful."Took you long enough," he mutters, lips pursed, and Chansung knows he's trying not to smile. "I was starting to grow legs here."Chansung snorts and climbs through some rocks, careful not to scrape himself. "Outstanding sense of humor as always, love." He drops on the rock Junho's sitting—he takes most of it with his gigantic and quite dramatic tail—and kisses the corner of his mouth. "Miss me?""Not really," Junho mutters, elbowing him sharply in the side."Liar," Chansung whispers back, and kisses a bare shoulder as he traces the scales of Junho's tail slowly with the pads of his fingers. If he were in human form right now, he thinks, he'd be touching about Junho's right knee. "How long have you been out here anyway?""A couple of hours." Junho scratches the bridge of his nose; it's a bit pink, what with him sitting out under the sun. "Felt stuffy, being inside." He looks over his shoulder back at the house, and there's a pensive look on his face that usually means Chansung's going to have to work hard to get it out of him. It surprises him, then, when Junho says, "Do you think us meeting was fate?"He's still looking back at the house—their house, because it's Junho's as much as it's Chansung's now—and his eyes feel like the ocean spread in front of them. Chansung licks his lips, watches him for a second before staring out to the open sea behind him because it's infinitely easier."You remember how we met?" Junho murmurs. His fingers pick at his scales and the tiny rocks beneath him. He looks away from the house and back at the side of the shore where little waves lap at the sand lazily. "How old were we?""I'd just turned five," Chansung says. He picks at the knees of his jeans, smiling a little. "I came out to the shore to find shells." He remembers his mother's smile from the porch door, remembers her kissing his cheek at the door and saying Find something as beautiful as you, darling, remembers sand sticking to his feet and the bucket he'd brought along with him, the salty smell of the sea thick in his nose and his mouth. He says, "I found you instead." Caught between a couple of boulders and gasping for breath, the tide too high and the current too strong. Chansung had helped him as much as his tiny hands could, had pulled him onto one of the lower rocks and sat with him in silence until Junho'd been done crying. He'd then told him he'd gotten caught in the current, pushed back in the commotion of fishing nets and boat engines.A few days later he'd told Chansung that had been the last time he'd seen his parents. His whole family.Chansung's heard the stories about sirens, about sea creatures, everything in between. Living by the sea comes with a thousand of them. Chansung's learned to pick through them since the moment he saw Junho's bright, technicolor tail caught in between these very same rocks."Do you believe in fate, then," Chansung asks. He runs a thumb over sharp knuckles and waits, the breeze caught in his lungs because Junho is grinning, smile wide and beautiful like the ocean itself.Junho looks back at the sea. He shrugs. Gives Chansung's fingers a firm squeeze. "More every single day," he says, and Chansung's lips twitch up into a smile.