Saferwaters
Title: Saferwaters
Author: bankrobbery
Words: 5k
Summary: Day 9. Mermaid AU. Nines finds something in his ocean that doesn’t belong. (Reed900)
Nines is farther from home than he should be when he notices the water growing colder, the light from above growing dimmer, and the ocean around him becoming more and more unsettled. There are hollows in the side of the mountain he has yet to investigate, and he’s discovered at least two new sunken structures in a cave not far from here that he hasn’t yet had time to rummage through, but there’s no time for it. There are miles to cover before the storm brewing overhead grows worse and he can’t risk being caught out in the open when the water turns restless and the nocturnal ocean dwellers wake up hungry and agitated. He watches the shifting light, and the way it dances through the water, and tries to calculate his time by the haziness settling into his vision as his eyes adjust to the waning light. The clear shallows are more dangerous, with the lightning above glinting off of his scales in a way that leaves him a glimmering target to anyone on the surface; he is safer the closer he gets to Jericho and the further away he goes from the darkening, murky depths.
Nines always has good intentions - maybe not for others, but always for himself - and he does have every intention of turning around, new discoveries be damned, and heading home. The issue comes when he gets further out into the open, when the storm is still slowly picking up speed, and he hears the telltale shift in the waves of something large cutting through the water.
‘A ship,’ he realizes, and he ignores the dangers of swimming the remaining six hundred feet to the surface to check for sure.
His head breaks above the surface just as another streak of lightning illuminates the sky and sea alike, giving him an unmistakable view of the ship tossing through the waves some distance away. Even from so far away he can hear the voices carrying across the wind, hear the yelling and ruckus from onboard that insinuates trouble, and it’s almost impossible for him to ignore. Ships tend to lose cargo in these waters, especially in the middle of an unexpected storm, and it would be madness to swim home now and ignore the possible supplies that might turn up from this vessel. If he keeps his distance and moves quickly there’s a chance he can grab whatever falls overboard and head back on his way before they’ve even reached the eye of the storm; it’s worth the risk to bring something of worth back, when all of his previous ventures today have left him empty handed.
The world around Nines has always been rippling blue-green glass that stretches from the horizon on the surface to the light-less hollows far beneath. He knows there are those who live on land, those who have always lived on land, but he’s far too young to know of a time when his own people were among them. He is too young to know the struggle of dirt underneath him, crumbling in the wake of the Calamity, and he is too young to know how the world looked before the sea bed opened and the world above it struggled to escape. He knows there was a time when his people weren’t so different than those on the ship that he’s trailing behind, but the world he knows now only gives him remnants of that history in the form of sunken cities and decaying shipwrecks. He finds structures sunk below the sea, echoes of the past long underneath layers of algae, pieces of history swept hundreds of feet below where the sun meets the waves. He learns what he knows from ragged books and torn memoirs in flooded caves, amidst waist-deep water that gathers like tidepools.
The books are records of tragedy, scrawled in fading, hasty handwriting in languages he speaks and in languages he does not. He doesn’t need to know the language to know they all say the same thing: that there was a disaster, a reckoning.
Nines isn’t very far from the ship at all when the first unmistakable sound of something hitting the water resonates to him through the current. The storm overhead has barely just begun, the tremors of rolling thunder still quiet and building slowly, but there’s no telling right away if it’s anything of worth. It’s just as likely that scrap and loose bits of rigging have fallen overboard, or that empty crates have been lugged over to lighten the ship, and he tries not to get his hopes up. He starts towards the sound, but is immediately distracted by another, heavier sound of something dropping from the ship and into the water like lead. It’s what he hears after that stops him momentarily, his fins going still and quiet, as he stops to listen, his ears straining. The sound comes again, after a stretch of silence, above the roar of the storm overhead.
Nines’s ears are accustomed to hearing the climbing bubbles spilling over from air pockets and vents in the ocean floor. His ears hear mourning whale songs from far away and they hear the shifting of crab and shrimp scuttling along superfine sand below. The sound he hears now - a shallow scream waning in the quiet surrender of a splash far overhead – leaves him without any idea what it is. He feels the water disturbed around him by the storm, but also by something else, and he knows something living has fallen into the deeps.
The sudden pull of curiosity is very similar to that he feels while investigating the sprawling ruins of lost civilizations. The excitement in his veins feels as though it is pulling him along the trails of white sand and lines of kelp, every muscle in his body pulled by the irresistible call of the unknown. It is this thrill, this pull, that often takes him from the safety of Jericho and into miles of old debris and petrified life at a stand-still on the bottom of the ocean floor. He can ignore it no more than he can resist it and today it leads him farther out than he should be, into the wide open with naught but green-blue in his peripheral and the storm above. There are no fish here – frightened by his own quick movements and the disturbance from earlier – and it is here that he sees that column of bubbles in the distance that stretch towards the tumultuous surface.
The bubbles scatter and drift upwards in countless numbers, pouring out from a willowy, slender starfish caught in a dozen feet of slow-drifting rope that connects out towards the surface. The starfish, flailing and emitting bubbles like words, sinks down to the ocean floor to rest against the sand; it is anchored there by whatever the rope is connected to – something metallic and cylindrical in shape – and at first Nines thinks it has gotten trapped in whatever debris had fallen overboard. The water is not as deep here as he is used to – less than two hundred feet, perhaps less than a hundred and fifty – and is hazy only from the crashing of waves in the downpour above. He kicks off again, legfins propelling him forward, and he outstretches his arms out at his sides to stop himself in front of the writhing creature, his feet treading water inches above the sandy floor.
From this close it is obviously not a starfish. Its limbs are similar to his own, covered in unmarked tanned skin that looks smooth to the touch, but without fins or webbing or any sort of finesse. The not-starfish is too small, with nearly no muscles toned from swimming, and it’s surprising it’s been able to keep itself afloat at all. It is, Nines realizes, a human.
This isn’t the first time he’s seen a human, but it’s the closest he’s ever been. Trailing after human ships and scavenging human supplies means that skirting around humans has been something he’s grown used to over the years, but he’s avoided having a run-in with any of them until now. Although this is hardly what he would call a confrontation.
There is blood under the human’s nails, and marks along its leg where it has tried to claw itself free from the rope coiled tightly around its ankle; the blood is a beacon Nines doesn’t need so far from the safety of the city patrols. He reaches out to stop the human's frantic movements, his hand circling around a soft wrist, and then its movements jerk in alarm. Wide, brown eyes stare at him through bubbles and haze and for a moment he finds himself caught off guard. Nines stares back into terror-wide eyes, that look back at him in a bizarre mixture of wonder and fear, and marvels for a long moment at the tanned skin underneath his pale hand that looks so out of place underneath a hundred feet of ocean.
The human's mouth opens – in either a cry or a warning – and bubbles flow from its mouth, around Nines's face, and into the open water above them. It pulls away from him in sharp movements and Nines lets it go, skin sliding out of his hand as easily as it had come there, and he watches the bubbles around them rise to the surface. In front of him the human is moving frantically again, one hand around its own ankle and the other at its neck, and the blue of its eyes seems paler, losing lucidity and losing life. Its eyes are glassy, filmed over, and its movement are weak – it will never be able to remove the rope wound so tightly around its limb, let alone make it back to the surface before drowning.
Nines takes in a breath so enormous it tickles his gills until they begin to burn and he receives no resistance when he takes the human’s face in his hands and breathes into its mouth. The human does find remaining strength enough to clutch at his bare shoulders, surprisingly strong fingers curling against the scales scattered across his collar and over his shoulder blades. There are bubbles rising around them when Nines inhales deeply again, oxygen forming in his lungs from the water in his gills, and he pushes it forward again until it passes from his lips. When he moves from breathing air in the ruins to breathing in the waters of the deeps his body adapts like a heartbeat, one smooth transfer from moist air to stark-cold water, but to use both from one breath to another feels like the transition from his fins pushing him through the water and the way he stumbles around haphazardly upon dry land.
He breathes life back into the drowning human until he thinks it safe enough to leave it alone for a moment. It reaches for him for a moment, out of panic more than anything, but Nines is already inspecting the frayed rope wound around its leg. There are indents in its soft skin from the fibers, coiled tight around it like a threatening tentacle. Nines tugs at the length of rope, testing the tension that is pulled so taught he can't worm the claws on his fingertips into the space between where braids meet skin. Tugging does nothing, moves nothing, and he tries for another long minutes before he moves back up to his suffocating observer to breathe air back into its fear-stressed lungs. The human's racing pulse has not calmed and its wide eyes have not settled, but it no longer looks ready to bolt and it floats there, stock-still, and stares back at him patiently with bright eyes.
The next time he pulls himself away and moves back to the ropes it is with his dagger, typically strapped at his side, in hand. There is too little space between skin and rope to work the blade beneath it – and, regardless, Nines doesn't know how fragile a human's skin is when compared to metal. He saws carefully at the rope stretched between the heavy weight sunk into the sand and the caught limb, watching fibers fray and splay beneath each pass of the dagger. The rope is thick and sturdy, not old but well worn and oft-used, and by the time he cuts through the last strand he feels the strain in his elbow. The rope snaps between them in release and the human is flailing its arms again. One of its legs works in tandem with its movements, but the leg previously caught is injured – isn't following directions as easily – and the human is rising towards the surface but at a slug's pace.
Nines slips an arm around its waist, grabbing it carefully underneath one arm, and, kicking off against the white sand, pushes them both towards the surface as quickly as he can. He stops only once, with the rush of water and bubbles around them, to breathe air back into the still-weak body in his grip. There is a torrential storm above them, bearing down upon the sea, but this human can't stay down here. He holds his breath as they break the surface, to give his lungs a chance to remember how to work and his gills a chance to rest, and the human in his grip coughs and sputters the moment there is air available to breathe. It is clinging to his shoulders still, gagging on salt water caught in its throat, and Nines thinks, for a brief moment, that this has all been for naught – that this human is going to die here in the middle of the sea regardless of his efforts – because there is nothing around, no land –
The sky is pitch black and swirling dangerously, but the wind and the sea are both calm in the eye of the storm. The ship from earlier is much closer now, but still at such a distance that he’s not immediately worried about being seen. It is massive in size from this close, with flowing flames of light striking up from it in all directions, and the screaming and yelling from earlier is so loud now that he can hear it easily over the storm. The ship is likely where the human he's holding has come from – there isn't anything else around – but even as Nines watches the ship's sails are torn asunder, and it rocks into the waves like nothing more than a ragged body. Waves are beginning to crash around Nines's head now, lightning striking overhead, and the human's fingers grip tighter around his shoulders.
He turns in one direction, then another, before he sees something in the shadows of the waves that could be something. He hopes it is not jetsam, hopes that it is something viable for a human to survive on, and, with the sea spray and wind in his eyes, he swims towards it. The human breathes ragged, wet breath against his neck the whole way, but is worryingly still.
The 'something' in the distance is a rowboat, small but stable, and it's the first one Nines has seen still afloat and not laying on the ocean floor harboring barnacles and sharks. It could have come from the larger ship, but it is missing oars, and rigging, and is little more than a floating hunk of hollow wood in the middle of the ocean. It is rocking back and forth from the pressure of the waves, but it seems stable enough and, regardless, it is the only viable option he has; the island east of Jericho, the only place he for sure has seen human ships setting sail from, is too far for him to swim with a passenger in the midst of a storm. Nines moves his hand from the human's waist to its back, to curl his claws into the wet cloth there. The hands clinging to him retreat and Nines gives it a spare second to adjust to what is happening before he hauls it up over the side of the tiny boat with one hand. It lands in the bottom with a dull 'thud', the water pooled in the bottom of the boat rippling upon impact. He can't see it from where he's treading water next to the boat, but he hears its gasping breaths clear over the restless storm.
Immediately he is greeted by the sudden rush of intense regret that he had been hoping to avoid. Humans are inherently dangerous and there could have been anything waiting for him on the surface. He’s forgotten years of self preservation in exchange for a few moments of distraction from a fragile skinned creature he doesn’t know for certain is not a danger to him. Despite trailing after them and scavenging their supplies, Nines knows very little about humans at all and what he does know is not good - is not comforting.
'Stupid,' he thinks, and waits another brief moment, debating with himself, before he grabs hold of the side of the boat and pulls himself up high enough to see over. The human is laying on its back, eyes closed and arms lifeless at its side, and its chest is rising and falling slowly, breath ragged through clenched teeth and parted lips. There is a scar across the bridge of its nose that looks old, but the human itself looks young - doesn’t look older than him. Nines stares at it in wonder and thinks, 'And it's still alive.'
He lowers himself back down into the water and waits by the boat, with one hand on its wooden side, while the minutes tick by and the storm grows tired around them. He listens to the sound of quiet breathing in the same between them and feels oddly mesmerized by it. How strange it is that in an endless ocean and depthless sea he somehow found this human still alive and clinging to hope. It is pitiful, and finless, and of no worth in his world of water and sharp currents. It is also oddly beautiful, oddly wondrous in a way that he has no comparison for. Its features are soft, almost delicate, and yet it has survived nonetheless.
Without peril hovering in the direct vicinity he has nothing to distract himself from the panic that curls itself tight in his chest. His hands still tingle unpleasantly and despite that he still yearns to reach out and touch the human again, to feel whether its skin is truly as scaleless and smooth as it had first seemed. He wants to see if he can smudge away the sun-dark of its skin that is such a contrast to the pale of his own; he wants to assure himself that this isn’t a dream, isn’t a hallucination. His heart is beating feverishly against his chest, so loud in his ears that it almost drowns out the sound of the waves.
Nines looks at the wood planks beneath the webbing connecting his fingers and reassures himself that this is real. The wood is not rotting, is not driftwood commandeered by gulls, and it is rough texture under his fingers unlike that which he often finds decaying in the sand on the sea bed. He looks away and then back again, as though reassuring himself he has not imagined the ordeal, but the boat remains under his hand and the human's breathing has begun to even out. The eye of the storm settles around them like an embrace, but he’s vulnerable this far out in the open and he should leave. Except that the human is barely alive and, stupidly, he feels the irrational compulsion to stay.
He casts another look around them, at the span of sea and the settling waves, before sinking beneath the surface to push the boat along in the direction of the only human settlement he knows still sees ships. He’s been closer to it than he ever should have, but has never felt brave enough to climb up the rocky sides of the island and attempt to walk around. His movements are still too unsure, too clumsy, for him to feel safe skirting around the outside of a human city, but he has spent longer than he cares to admit watching the lighthouse’s lamp shine unfailingly out across the ocean.
They are still a good distance from the lighthouse when Nines stops pushing the small boat along. It is maybe too far out to be without paddles, or signal flares, but he’s already put himself in danger coming this close and his muscles tense in protest when he thinks of going any closer. There is smoke rising from the structures on the island, and lights from more than just the lighthouse; they are close enough for the boat to drift the rest of the way on its own, provided the storm waits a little longer until worsening.
‘You’ve had enough bad ideas for one day - just leave,’ he thinks to himself, but he hesitates all the same.
Nines breathes in deeply and pulls himself back up on the side of the boat to look at the human one more time - to make sure that the quiet in its breathing does not mean that it has died on their short journey after he worked so carefully to keep it alive. He finds bright brown eyes staring back at him the moment he peers over the side.
It is still breathing, slowly and deliberately, and it is watching him calmly. Nines feels a prickling on the back of his neck, like an echo from the chill that ran down his spine. His limbs are suddenly stiff, unresponsive, and he's frozen in place staring at this unknown who stares right back, fearless. It swallows thickly, the sound audible, and Nines wants to pull sound from it without bubbles to interfere, without water to dampen the sound, but the nerves he had are suddenly swept away from him in an instant. This creature is weak, and is not dangerous in the middle of the sea where Nines thrives, but it is captivating – is a whale song across the currents he longs to understand. For a fleeting, terrifying moment he feels a tightness clutching his chest that he can neither explain nor ignore.
The human sits up, wet brown locks spilling around its face, and in the same motion Nines pushes himself off against the side of the boat. The small vessel sways in the water with the absence of his weight and he dives back into the safety of the water with his heartbeat in his ears and his pulse in his throat.
************************************
Gavin's eyes open and he wakes in his own bed, alone, with his heart racing in his chest and his eyes dark-blind. His breath comes fast and short. In the back of his throat, in the open, sweat-damp space of skin stretching over thin flesh and the protruding bones of his shoulder blades, a formless fear settles in deep and takes hold: dense; stifling; choking. Across the room, through the cracks between where glass and wood meet, there is the whistling of the wind. He closes his eyes and, although it makes little difference, tries to think of anything to calm the staccato of his heart in his chest.
He thinks of the first whispers of frost scattered across the shoreline, the warmth of the fire in the hearth across the room, and the slow passing of winter days that will eventually lead into the bloom of spring. He thinks of the brisk wind sweeping echoes across the black expanse of sea outside his window; he thinks of the smell of the salty breeze tinged with snowflakes, and he thinks of the quiet inside the lighthouse and the tranquility that lays over it like a cloak. There is a strange, cold burn – a chilling touch – upon his spine that will not cease. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter, tries to empty his mind, and he breathes, and breathes, and breathes.
His breath comes slow, through force; the whistle of it in his throat is sad in the silence of the tiny room. The sound of his breathing is steady, soft, and in time the flutter of his heart against his ribcage slows to match it. Everything steadies, everything calms, and he refuses to feel the chill of fear that claws incessantly at the back of his mind. He focuses so intently upon it, with such conviction, that when next he opens his eyes there is enough light to see by. The moon has paled to the beginnings of dawn, creeping in through curtain-less glass, and he exhales slowly in relief.
It is not the first time he has spent the night in a cold sweat, alone. The nightmares are not so pronounced that they disrupt his sleep to the point of exhaustion; they are not so vivid that he can not will them away, can not will himself back to sleep. He cannot remember the images that woke him, would not be able to describe them in any real detail, and their hold on him feels brittle and silly in the light of morning. He is not a child who needs comfort from dreams.
Although lately he’s not the only one who has been suffering restless sleep. He’s been hearing snippets of conversation nearly every day in the village while purchasing supplies or walking the streets. The float of gossip down from open windows and merchant stalls is unmistakable, is unavoidable, and it spreads like wildfire. The fear has been growing over the winter season, with the absence of warmth and any decent fishing or trading to occupy their minds, and he tries not to become entangled in their folk tales.
The bones that had started all of these rumors had washed ashore less than two weeks ago. They were human bones, picked clean, and it had set the village alight with concerns, with wild stories, and with absurd reasoning. A group of fishermen had found it, had brought the mess of bones and sand back to the village with solemn faces, and they had nothing reasonable to say. The whispers around the village had been loud, like the snap of wind across the water, and they were still speaking words of warning days later when he left the lighthouse for supplies and friendly faces. 'There are monsters in the sea,' the voices say, whisper among themselves, and Gavin thinks them fanatics, easily swayed by legends and myths, even as his heartbeat speeds up and his trips into town become fewer and farther in between
He hears them speak of something in the water that stalks the shores, larger than a man, with teeth sharp enough to rend flesh from bone and claws strong enough to pierce leather. They say a hundred different things, all with or without merit, and there are a dozen men who claim to have laid eyes upon it – none of whom can describe, with any real agreement, what it might look like in the light. The rumors start and spread; those who truly see it, they say, are left as little more than bones on the shore. The rest of the village hears the stories and thinks what they will, but even Gavin feels like his mind has begun playing tricks on him; even Gavin feels as though he can hear something strange shrieking over the pitch black water, just out of reach of the circulating light overhead.
As he lies in bed, with the dawn streaming light in through the window, he swears he hears something over the crash of waves against the rocks. Low, and high, and loud, and soft. He swears he hears a melody in the wind that wasn't there before – or perhaps it is only the wind, only the wind through the cracks in the walls. He stares at the ceiling, at the shadows moving around the room, and wonders if this is how the keepers who came before him drove themselves mad; he wonders if the others were driven mad by listening to stories told by unwise fishermen, who fear their own reflections in the rippling tide. Six months ago he would have told himself that what he hears is nothing, but six months ago he had barely known himself and was still winded by climbing the sets of stairs from his room at the base of the lighthouse to the light above.
There is another wail through the night that is just the wind – just the wind and the water. A shiver races down his spine that he does not examine. He waits for morning, body so tense it aches, and he breathes.
Gavin knows his name, but not where he’s from or how he came to be where he is now. He can recall very little of his childhood, little more than glimpses of a woman’s face and the feel of a man’s strong hands ruffling his hair, but he thinks that perhaps he was happy at one time. Most of what he remembers now is the creak and groan of a ship underneath the weight of powerful waves, the pull of angry and violent voices from all around him, and the indescribable jolt of fear. He had been aboard a ship at sea six months ago - and he can remember that, but cannot remember his place on the ship, whether as a passenger or a deckhand or a stowaway - and it had been two months of bad luck when everything had culminated in the eye of a heavy storm.
There had been a dispute, an argument, and there is nothing so prevalent at sea as the terror filled minds of sailors trapped within their superstitions. He clearly remembers the feeling of isolation over the days before that night, the feeling of angry eyes upon him from morning through evening, and he remembers being dragged onto deck and knowing with certainty that he was going to die.
″Ain't had nothing but bad luck since we took 'im on,″ one of the men had said, and his large fist, curled around his upper arm, had bruised bone and skin alike. The sailors had distrusted him from day one and he hadn't known why then and he certainly doesn't now. They felt threatened by him in a way he cannot explain, threatened by the things he spoke of that they knew nothing about – the things they cannot even begin to fathom. He thinks that knowledge is terrifying to some, and that the unknown is threatening to those who are weak. He thinks that he is different and, perhaps, that had been enough.
Gavin remembers the feeling of cold dread lining his stomach, of the way he could scarcely feel the grip on his own arm for the fear in his mouth, and how he had known nothing he could say would save him. He vividly remembers the shouting, and the screaming, and the chorus of voices all chiming in on the best way to rid themselves of him; he remembers the barbaric and ignorant solutions for erasing their bad luck – of the suggestions to crack his head against the deck, or string him from the sails – and at the time he had thought of nothing but, 'I won't die like this.'
That evening the storm had seemed their greatest enemy, but standing on that deck amongst the crowd of dark faces Gavin had seen another. The sea could not be reasoned with, but neither could the minds of these men. Looking back on that night he realizes, even with the severity of the situation, how mad he had been when the storm had closed in around them a blink of an eye and the winds had begun to pick up again. When the grip on him had released, as the sailors frantically dispersed in an attempt to bring their ship back under control, Gavin had slipped himself free of their watchful eyes and ran against slick planks to a rickety lifeboat he had no business being in. He had hit the latch and thrown himself into it without a moment's hesitation, without another thought, and he had plummeted in the tiny vessel from the ship into the icy cold water waiting below. His memories are hazy at the best of times and he remembers lungfuls of salt water and the piercing cold, but little else aside from being tossed around in the tiny boat by a storm in its first few spasms of anger. He remembers very little aside from the storm pausing for breath, remembers haphazardly attempting to stand in the lifeboat and see anything but the vast ocean around him – and then something had hit his boat, something large and powerful, and it had tipped dangerously to one side and everything had fallen apart.
Gavin remembers being dragged underwater. He remembers thinking he was already dead, only to feel the disturbance in the water near him and then a sharp grip digging into his wrist. There had been the sting of saltwater in her eyes, the blur of everything, and the startling realization that he was no longer alone. 'One of the sailors,' he had thought, but then there had been piercing gray eyes staring at him through the dark, blurry water and he had thought nothing at all. There is a lot that Gavin cannot recall about his life before his journey on the ship, about who he was or how he came to be where he is now, but he remembers those eyes with a startling clarity he can't shake. The fear he had felt had been fleeting, had been brief; his first instinct had been to escape, had been to avoid that creature in the depths who could have thought him an easy meal, but then there had been oxygen past his lips and curious gray eyes watching him in wonder, and he had briefly forgotten this thing in the water with him was something to fear. The creature was not human, but it could have been – had similar bone structure, and features, and seemed to realize he needed air to breathe and had skin that could break. It could have left him there – it gained nothing by helping him – but it hadn't. It had cut the rope that anchored him to the ocean floor and had taken him back to the surface, to allow him to gasp in choking mouthfuls of sea spray and wind.
If he remembers nothing else about his past, Gavin remembers the creature who found him in the middle of the ocean, who found his tiny boat and saved his life. Even now Gavin has dreams of sails torn asunder and a ship rocked like a toy, dreams of waves and lightning crashing over his head, and of ethereal gray eyes through turbulent waters.He had awoke in the bottom of his boat, pulled ashore, to an older fisherman poking him in the ribs with the edge of a walking stick, asking his name and whether or not he could stand.
So it is not that Gavin does not believe there is something inhuman swimming in those waters that the fishermen have seen, but he hesitates to label it 'monster.'
