There was nothing calm about drowning.
Every book he ever read where someone drowned always described a moment of calm just before the character slipped out of consciousness, a soft peace as water filled their lungs and pushed the life out of them, a horrible but tranquil final sleep.
Drowning was nothing like that.
Drowning was blind panic and frigid water and trying desperately not to breathe until he choked on an inhale. It was panicking more when breathing meant burning, pain searing through his chest and his head and behind his eyes, his whole body rebelling against the wrongness of it. Drowning was harsh hands holding him down, muffled shouts and frantic splashing. It was fighting as hard as he could and the ralization when his vision started to fade that it wouldn’t be enough. It was bone chilling fear and mindless panic he felt to his core until he couldn’t feel anything anymore. It was going limp seconds before he passed out not because he wanted to but because his limbs had stopped listening to his brain and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Whatever that paralysis was, it wasn’t any sort of calm.
He still has nightmares about it sometimes. When he isn’t lurching awake screaming for Johnny to run or Dally to duck, it’s usually because he’s choking and paralysed, phantom water clogging his mouth and his nose and filling his lungs, leaving him a shivering, gasping mess. Sometimes Soda’s soothing hands feel like Bob’s brushing grip and he leaves bruises trying to get away from someone who has never done anything but the exact opposite of hurting him. Consciousness means breathing again, in the memories and the midnights, but Soda’s worried eyes burn almost as much as his lungs did when he was dying and it's a different kind of drowning, knowing he’s hurting his brother with the well of pain he doesn’t know what to do with.
Sometimes he steps under the shower and he swears that the water knows, that somehow the well carries memories from the fountain and it’s determined to finish what it started, to work it’s way inside him by any means necessary and push everything that makes him Ponyboy Curtis out. Some days he fights it, lurching out of the shower and clawing at his skin until he regains enough of his mind to grab a towel and wipe the sting of the water droplets off of him. Other days he’s tempted to let the shower finish what the fountain couldn’t- but the panic still comes before any sort of peace and if Windrixville proved anything it’s that he is the worst sort of coward.
There was no peace in drowning. It’s a shame then, that he’s been drowning for months now.
Ever since the fountain it feels like the water that was forced into his lungs never really found its way out. Instead it’s a part of him, a little bit of poison that makes it hard to breathe or think or exist. Even in Windrixville, standing in an inferno, on the verge of burning to death, the acrid smoke filling his lungs felt just like water, pushing air from his lungs and the sanity from his head, making it hard to move or fight or think.
There is a weight now to his existence, a constant struggle that comes with drowning with your head above water. Fish on beaches flail and die trying to get back home, and Ponyboy Curtis chokes on air every time he sits down at the breakfast table and his best friend isn’t there to sit beside him.
The whiff of the wrong brand of cigarette feels like it crawls into his lungs and fills them, memories of a hood with a dangerous grin and cold eyes filling him, leaving no room for his tenuous present the doctor called healing. He breathes and breathes and there is no air, no nothing, and he drowns and drowns and drowns without a drop of water in sight. You get tough like me and you don’t get hurt, except he got tough and he is still hurting anyway, gasping for air that doesn’t exist in some diner he didn’t even want to be at, all because Dally’s ghost won’t leave him alone.
He knows his brothers are worried, sees the looks they shoot each other when they think he isn’t watching and hears the low murmurs around corners and through shut doors. It doesn’t matter anyway. They could be shouting right in front of him and he wouldn’t understand a thing. He’s drowning and the water in his ears makes everything muted, keeps his eyes blurry and his thoughts disjointed.
Steve is quieter than he used to be, and Two-bit is louder, and their false cheer is never enough to drag him from the depths. Even his brothers’ gentle hands and softer words are not enough to pull him free from whatever he’s submerged in, cannot push life back into his lungs or pull the clogging veil of unreality from where it’s settled over his senses. Whatever he’s drowning in now, it’s worse than water for all it feels like it, keeps him alive but somehow isn’t air, and burns like fire without any of the smoke.
There’s no calm in drowning. He flails and gasps and chokes and tries, he tries, to claw his way free from the suffocating prison that surrounds him, but when it’s life that’s drowning you, it’s hard to bring life into your lungs without making everything worse.
There’s no calm in drowning, and Ponyboy Curtis has been drowning for months.
He doesn’t know how much longer he can keep fighting. His limbs are starting to go slack. There’s nothing he can do about it.
And this time, Johnny isn’t here to save him.
