Midnight Snack
Cw: animal death
The depths of the Caribbean sea at night flashed with glittery scales and peripheral shadows. Here, a plump eel peering out of its scarlet reef. There, a barracuda lurking with its jaws ready to snap. Fleshy options, toothy and toothsome, but not enough of a fight when Bond could use his too-human hands to snap their spines.
He broke for air, his naked flesh goosebumping in the moonlight, and then swam deeper, hunger gnawing at his guts. He’d turned down Felix’s dinner invitation for this. No steak poivre avec frites would do when this mood came upon him, no jerk chicken or pasta tagliatelle.
He needed salt. Blood. Life between his jaws.
There—a curl of tentacles—he snapped his eyes down and met the gaze of a massive octopus, half his weight, its thick arms flexing like ship-ropes.
His lungs tightened in his chest. He’d used up half his air supply; could he risk surfacing? But even as he thought it, Bond was already lunging forward, his hands digging behind the head at the rubbery mantle that caged the octopus’s three hearts inside a wall of muscle.
Quick as a con artist, the octopus had its arms locked around Bond’s limbs, its suckers groping at skin pockmarked with bullet wounds. It squeezed and pulled, wrenching at Bond’s arms and legs; its two primary kill methods were tearing until its prey ripped apart or constricting until it ran out of air.
Bond didn’t have a knife with him, so those were his primary kill methods, too.
With one hand still in a white-knuckle grip around the slipping and flexing mantle, he sank his teeth into the rubbery flesh of the octopus’s head, digging in with his incisors. It needn’t be much, just—there. A tear that he forced the fingers of his free hand into, ripping deeper and wider, the octopus’s blue blood seeping into the water as it writhed.
The octopus gave a bone-crunching squeeze around his knees; Bond retaliated by burrowing his fingers into its innards, twisting and clutching at the wounded flesh.
His vision began to dim at the edges. His lungs pulsed in his chest with the need to exhale, inhale. He bent his head and tore at the octopus again with his teeth, first bouncing off the plasticky flesh and then gnawing, scraping, ripping until he had another gash to grab at.
That second one did it. Bond rooted around in the two holes while the octopus contorted around him, its tentacles unfurling and trying to propel itself away.
No. That wouldn’t do. Bond was hungry.
He kicked his way to the surface and brought the heaving, squirming mass with him to the top of the sea. The octopus’s arms flexed weakly around Bond’s body. Panting, he gripped tight with both hands and ripped as hard as he could, clawing and tearing until the muscle of the mantle finally breached, the vital organs pierced and crushed beneath his fingers.
Blue octopus blood dripped down his face and hands. He smiled at his catch and licked the bits of heart-flesh off his nails.
Wooden creaking drew his gaze upward, and when he looked to the right, Felix’s little dinghy drifted next to him. He must have been tracking Bond’s heart rate monitor. “Looks like good eating,” Felix said, casual, as though he often found his fellow retirees naked and gnawing at wild cephalopods.
Bond heaved the octopus on board and clambered up behind it. “Just a little midnight snack,” he said.
Felix snorted. “Long as you don’t die for a snack, you can eat anything you want. Cook me some when we get home, and I’ll go out with you next time.”
Bond hungered, sometimes, for the sea. For his teeth around something squirming, living, salty. Right now, though, sated by the blood in his mouth, he’d rather have a fire on the beach, Felix roasting octopus on a stick, the crackle of flame and the murmur of stories from their past lives.
Sometimes Bond needed a midnight snack. But for the meals that kept him among the living, he needed Felix.
