My thoughts are drowned, and this shipwreck seems sweet to me in this sea.
WHO: Ser Artys Grafton, and his twin sister, Anyah Grafton (deceased) WHEN: 4 years ago WHERE: Aboard a merchant’s ship SUMMARY: Following the death of a loved one, Ser Artys and his sister experience trouble on board their ship.
WORD COUNT: 1,781. I got a little excited writing this one.
OOC NOTES: While I was writing Artys and his backstory, I ended up getting a crazy amount of muse for his storyline, so I decided to write this drabble. It’s a big turning point in Artys’ backstory, and had a big hand in shaping the man he eventually came to be.
TRIGGERS: Death, drowning, fire, general angst
The sickness came for them both, but only Artys survived.
It was autumn when the heavy fever washed over them like a smothering blanket, burning the both of them up from the inside. Only Willas was swallowed whole. He died in the night, so quietly that nobody even noticed until morning.
Artys was still very ill when he and his sister had been forced to leave, near to death himself on those first few days at sea.
His dreams were filled with Willas. The crooked smile and snaggletooth that Artys always found so endearing, the crinkle in his forehead when he was deep in his numbers book, and the way his hands felt when they touched one another beneath warm woolen sheets.
“Water,” Artys rasped, finally awake, and then felt a warm hand pressing a cool ceramic mug to his fingers.
He blinked up at his sister, who was standing above him and not meeting his eyes.
“How long was I out?” He asked tiredly, glancing around.
The worst of this autumn sickness seemed to be gone, he thought while sitting up. And the ship wasn’t rocking quite so badly, now, which helped with the aches. He almost felt like he might make it to the chamber pot in the corner of the room without being sick
Anyah hesitated. He glanced sharply at her.
“Four days,” she told him. “We’ve just passed Belhaven.”
Artys breathed a breath of shock. Four days. “Have… have you been here beside me the whole time?”
Gods, he still felt ill, as if he might dry heave at any second. But at least he no longer felt feverish, merely thirsty, so he supposed that was something. He brought the mug to his lips then, and gulped the entire thing down.
“No,” she said, and Artys blinked, surprised, lifting his head to meet her eyes. “You were doing fine, most of the time. I was doing a lot of thinking, above deck. But that’s not what I want to talk about.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Stop, just let me talk. I’m sorry, Artys. I…” She took a deep breath, and Artys went silent, brows knitting. “I realized while you were sick… I mean… that is to say… I should not have been so hard on you, after Willas… after he died. I know how much you loved him.”
Suddenly, Artys could not meet her gaze. He stared down at the empty mug once more, and wished he hadn’t dranken it so quickly. His mouth was suddenly much more dry than it had been when he had awoken.
“I don’t think you caused his sickness,” Anyah said.
“Don’t say things like that.” He said, colder than he meant to, and his sister flinched. “Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
“I don’t.” She repeated. “I swear that I don’t.”
Artys burst into tears.
He didn’t know how long he sat there on his bed, until his sister moved forward and wrapped her arms around him. Held him there in a warm, tight embrace that he didn’t ever want to leave.
“To be given a second chance at life, only to have it ripped away by disease. Tell me, Anyah, what was ever the point?”
“There was no point.” She murmured, running her fingers through his hair. “Disease takes who it will.”
He felt great gasping tears welling up within him, but still tried to hold them back even as they finally emerged, dripping onto his sister’s shoulder, after he’d been keeping them at bay since the day Willas took his last breath.
When the last cries ended, he was lying in bed in his sister’s arms, the ship rocking slowly around them, and Artys could breathe again. Anyah was looking at him.
“Better?” She asked him, and after another breathless moment, Artys nodded. “Good. Now let’s get you up and out of this bed. You’ve been lying in it for far too long, and you’ve got a musk about you. Saltwater will have to do.”
She climbed out of bed and began to tug at his arms. Though he still felt weak, Artys found himself smiling and doing as he was bid.
A loud clang interrupted his movements.
“What was that?” Anyah asked, looking up at the ceiling.
Without thinking, Artys reached for the pommel of his sword, lying on the floor beside the bed. “I’m sure it was--”
A loud crash reverberated through the hull, sending Artys flying out of the bed. He crashed onto the floor, throwing his arms out to break his fall at the last moment.
He tried to pull himself to his feet. But then the force came again, slamming him down like a rag doll. He was only barely able to see Anyah out of the corner of his eye, hardly faring better.
And then the whole cabin went up in flames.
“Anyah!” Artys screamed, as the fire ravaged the wooden cabin around him, as water lapped at his ankles. He glanced down. The cabin was rapidly filling, even as smoke choked at his lungs, and now it was rising to his calves. His throat closed with terror.
A crackling, breaking sound filled the air, and then the ceiling came down too in a blaze of wooden fire. He cried out in pain, smoke flooding his lungs again, as his back slammed into the ground. He whirled around from the floor, looking for his sister.
“Anyah?” He cried desperately, “Anyah!”
He took another breath, felt more smoke, and saw more flames rapidly surrounding him, though his back felt wet; perhaps from blood, or the sea beneath him, he couldn’t tell.
“Help! Anyah!” He screamed.
Another beam, burning too, fell in front of the door, a wall of fire now dividing him from the rest of the ship. A sinking feeling filled him, and Artys closed his eyes, breathing in deep again as the cabin grew unbearably hot.
They were going to die in here, he thought, horror filling him. They were going to die in one of the worst possible ways that he could imagine, burning alive, trapped like rats in a sinking ship.
He pushed himself onto his knees and craned his neck, still looking for his sister. Then up again onto his feet, stumbling forward through the cabin. It occurred to Artys that everything he owned of worth was now burning in this cabin just now. His clothes, his sword and his sister’s books, the new belt Willas had given him, the last present to him before the sickness came and ripped him away.
He knew these shouldn’t be the thoughts filling his head just now, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
And then he was running, slamming his shoulder into a bit of the cabin wall that was splintered, and still burning. Artys screamed at the fire, even as he knew enough to know he should be conserving his air. Then he slammed again, and let out a groan. Water rushed in even more quickly.
They were underwater. The whole cabin was under water.
“Anyah!” He screamed, and the second half of the name disappeared on his tongue as a wave of water rushed into his mouth. Artys choked, his hands flapping desperately before he disappeared beneath the wave erupting into the cabin to swallow him.
He knew how to swim, of course he did. In cool, still ponds in Amaranth, where one did not have to worry about being dragged away by a current or disappearing beneath waves as large as one’s body.
I am going to die here. We are going to die here, Artys thought horribly. He was going to sink beneath the waves outside Belhaven, and no one would ever know what happened to him. And though Willas was already too dead to mourn or miss him, the thought hurt all the same.
The water was tinted red with the fire above them, but he hardly paid attention to that, felt instead himself being crushed against the floor of the cabin as the water pushed in around him. And then, suddenly, the water reversed direction, sucking him out of the cabin when it should have done no such thing.
He finally saw his sister, in the water near him, but then she too disappeared, as the world around Artys felt heavy, and he found himself screaming again.
They were out of the ship, he realized distantly, though there wasn’t enough air reaching his brain to think more than that. They were out of the ship, still somewhere deep in the sea, and he was going to drown before he ever made it to the surface. And his sister was still floating somewhere too. He could barely remember what happened to the ship, but he turned to stare at it, and watched it burn away, sink, and then the flames were gone like the everyone else on board.
His thoughts of the ship suddenly died away as a figure appeared in the water before him, and he froze, felt air leaving him at the shock.
Because he recognized this unmoving figure.
His eyes went wide. Artys stared at the young woman, floating still in the water, her eyes wide and unseeing. He let out another scream, the last of his air fleeing him at the sight of his sister, pale and drowned in the water before him.
Dead.
Oh gods, Anyah was dead.
Anyah was tangled in the pink gown she had been wearing, and though he doubted she was dead for longer than a few moments, she already seemed unrecognizable.
Artys scrambled back, his limbs suddenly remembering how to move. He coughed, choking on water, because a dozen images were filling his addled mind, of Anyah, throwing her head back and laughing at something Artys said. Anyah, pouring him cups of warm tea. Anyah, teasing Artys in the nights before he first laid with Willas, when none of them knew what to expect from such a love.
Anyah, dead in the water. Suddenly it wasn’t just that he couldn’t breath, but that his lungs were on fire, and if he didn’t--
Artys gasped, and felt cold air burn through his lungs, and cried out at how painful it felt to breathe in now even as he grabbed onto a large piece of wood.
He couldn’t say how long it was that he floated out there, near to dead and maybe wanting to be too.
It could have been minutes or it could have been hours.
The last thing Artys remembered before he blacked out in pain was a pair of strong hands pulling him from the water onto a small fishing boat.