Chapter Text
Adam wakes up four seconds before the bellow of the third shift alarm. His heart jumps alive before his lungs, like it was anticipating the interruption of his rest. He sucks in a waking gasp mere seconds before the foghorn rattles all two hundred and six bones in his body. The sound travels through the metal walls, rattles against the fabric of his mattress, and buzzes through the stale air hanging inside his bunk. The foghorn stops almost as soon as it starts, but Adam can feel the vibrations dancing across his skin long after the horn’s song has ended.
His first thought upon waking has been the same the past few weeks: how is it fair to have the new guys not only earn their sea legs, but also shift around their normal waking hours to become nocturnal? He wouldn’t wish a graveyard shift on his worst enemy, but here their captain is forcing it on his recruits like a sign-on bonus. But the quick flare of irritation is quickly soothed by a salve of reality. He signed up for this, didn’t he? It’s not like he’s got much of a say in the ship’s methods.
Besides, money’s money, and he’s found it nice to get to do some paid whale watching from time to time.
Adam swings his legs over his bunk. He was assigned a bottom bunk, thankfully. He’s not sure he would survive the sea sickness if he were lying six feet above the floor each night. He rolls his ankles and feels joints pop in greeting, creaking open slowly like the shutters of an old colonial. The chilly metal floor pulls an involuntary hiss from his teeth as he plants his soles to the ground. His feet are freezing, even through the fabric of his socks. He has yet to figure out how to stay warm in their poorly insulated cabin. The chilly December air seems to take pleasure in seeping between the rivets that hold their hull together.
He’s slightly less thankful for his bottom bunk when his roommate swings their legs down over the edge of their bed, only a scant few inches away from a collision with Adam’s eye sockets. His reflexes are just awake enough that he’s able to twist out of the way and avoid any damage.
“Jesus, Moxley,” Adam grumbles. “Gonna give me a fuckin’ black eye one of these days.”
“Not my problem. Move faster next time,” his bunk mate spits back, his gravel-roughened voice only amplified by the thick swamp of sleep still coating his vocal chords.
Adam watches Mox’s legs fall from the bunk above, bare feet plopping on the metal floor with a heavy thud. Adam watches as Mox stretches his large frame from neck to heel, joints screaming with every twist and turn of muscle. The movements remind Adam of a scene from Rocky, one where the titular fighter is preparing for the climax of his story: shaking out his knuckles, locking his shoulders into place, bouncing just the slightest bit on his toes. It’s like he’s psyching himself up in preparation for an eight-round bout. The moves, tellingly, look like second nature for Mox.
“Besides, you’d look nice with a shiner. All pretty an’ purple. I think it’d match your eyes,” Moxley teases over his broad shoulder, tongue just peaking out between his teeth. It reminds Adam of a snake. “We could probably pick one up for you next time we’re on land. Been itchin’ for a bar fight.”
“No, thank you,” Adam says, brushing aside the (compliment?) from Moxley as he pushes himself up from his own bunk. He rolls his shoulders, mirroring Mox, willing the dull ache from his muscles as he tacks on the obvious, “You don’t even drink.”
“Yeah, but I fight,” Mox excuses. “Bar’s the easiest place to get into one.”
“Tempting,” Adam says, feigning interest. “But I’m good.”
Mox scoffs with a grin. “You’re no fun.”
“It’s two in the mornin’. Your expectations are too high if you expect ‘fun’ this close to witching hour,” Adam mumbles, scrubbing a hand down his face. Maybe he wasn’t as awake as he thought. His eyes are already threatening to droop closed on their own accord. Caffeine is now the only thing on his mind.
“C’mon, cowboy. The night is young! Plenty of time left to get into trouble,” Moxley says, punctuating his sentence with a groan and one final, aching stretch. His hands almost reach the ceiling - if he stood on his tiptoes, his fingertips would graze the cool metal surface. Adam briefly wonders if his recent bout of back pain is a result of living in a matchbox for the past few weeks.
“You wouldn’t call this morning?” Adam asks, fighting against a yawn that threatens to unhinge his jaw.
Instead of receiving an answer from Moxley, however, a new pair of stony eyes glares at them from their now open doorway. Adam feels the itch of a stare on his skin before he hears the voice, but it still doesn’t give his sleepy heart enough time to prepare for the second wake-up call.
“I’d call this work, and you’d both better get moving - unless you both want a write-up,” the loud, authoritative voice of their shift supervisor, Joe, suddenly fills the room. His voice is, impressively, almost as loud as the shift change alarm. It rattles Adam’s bones all the same.
“No, sir,” Adam spits immediately, face heating up in anxious shame. This is the one thing he hasn’t gotten used to on the ship yet - how to get yelled at. He feels that tell-tale patter in his chest, his heart jumping like a rabbit as it grapples with the prospect of doing something wrong. So much of what they’ve learned so far on the ship is historical knowledge, little quirks and rules passed down through generations of fishermen, stuff that’s second nature to guys like Joe. Adam, on the other hand, prefers a bit of structure. He doesn’t like this, the overwhelming thought of the unknown. He doesn't do well with guessing what’s right and wrong. Sometimes, if he doesn’t know the answer to the question of ‘what to do?’, he just doesn’t do it at all.
Adam watches wearily as Joe scowls. He notices that Joe’s stare isn’t filled with any anger; instead, it’s more so laced with annoyance. It settles Adam’s anxious heart, but only slightly.
“Get your bitch asses moving then. On the deck in fifteen,” Joe spits at them before turning away, likely to chastise another group of third shifters who are just as slow to start.
“‘No, sir,’” Mox’s voice goes high and nasally, lacing itself with a horrible excuse for a southern accent. His voice switches back to its gravely sway as he makes his way to his haphazardly stacked pile of work clothes, digging through the crumpled pile to pull out the least dirty shirt his hands can find. “How’s his ass taste?”
“How’s his - what?” Adam stutters, muscles finally unpetrifying themselves as he stumbles to his own pile of loosely folded laundry. “Why the hell would I know that?”
“‘Cause, y’know, you’re a kiss ass. You kiss his ass,” Moxley explains, scowling at Adam once they’ve both slipped on fresh work shirts. Adam just stares at him dumbly, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. Moxley just looks at him and sighs, exasperated. “Jesus, your skull’s thick. Do you always take things so literally?”
“I’m not awake enough for sarcasm, sorry,” Adam mumbles, buttoning a pair of jeans he thinks are clean and slipping on his hall shoes. He’ll change into his deck shoes when they suit up, preferably after an extremely early breakfast.
“Fuck a Joe. Let’s get some caffeine in your system, aye, cowboy?” Mox slaps Adam on the back, just on the edge of too hard. Adam yelps at the sting and stumbles forward, nearly falling face-first out of their doorway. Moxley chuckles as he brushes past Adam, who stands awkwardly for a few moments before moving, rubbing his shoulder and shuffling behind Mox as they make their way to the nearly empty mess hall.
They don’t have a lot of time to eat, so Adam makes quick work of the cafeteria line and grabs a plate of lukewarm scrambled eggs and slightly burnt bacon. He makes sure to swing by the coffee pot, debates getting two cups, and settles for one with an illegal amount of sugar and two creams before he makes his way over to Mox’s table.
Adam sees that Mox is joined by some of their fellow third shifters, Orange and Roddy. When Adam arrives, Orange is signing through a story, hands slow and nonchalant. Roddy’s mouth works in tandem to interpret the story for an enraptured Moxley. Mox chuckles over the rim of his coffee mug at a particularly funny anecdote about what Orange’s first shift buddies, Chuck and Trent, got up to last time they were on land.
Adam frees his hands once he sits down at the table, cracking his aching joints one final time once he settles down in his seat. He’s been trying to learn ASL through brute force by chatting with Orange in clumsy signs whenever he can, but Roddy’s always happy to interpret when needed. The cracking of his knuckles now feels equivalent to taking a big breath before a public speech. It helps push the anxious buzz dusting his fingers out, letting slim confidence slip into the space it left behind.
Orange stops his early morning recap to welcome Adam with a slow, “Good morning.”
“Good morning to you too,” Adam signs back, mouth softly whispering the words in tandem, just in case he messes up a sign and Orange has to read his lips. “How’s…clean up?” Adam’s hands stumble over the signs, but he feels better about his stutter when he spots Orange’s soft smile. That smile instills just the littlest bit of confidence back in Adam’s hands. At least he’s willing to try.
Instead of waiting for an answer from Orange, however, Adam spots Roddy’s face as it flashes a sickly shade of green. He speaks before Orange can sign.
“Fucking terrible,” Roddy answers.
“Smells like fish guts,” Orange signs in agreement, face twisting in disgust.
“Even our room smells like it. I feel like we’ve gone nose blind to it,” Roddy sighs. “We don’t smell like fish, do we? You’d tell us if we did, right?”
“Don’t we all?” Mox asks instead, not bothering to quell Roddy’s fears. He waits for Roddy to interpret for him before he tacks on, “We all live with the fishes.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to dig through them,” Orange signs. Roddy tacks on a playful gag at the end of his interpretation for good measure.
“Lucky assholes. What I wouldn’t give to be on pull-in duty,” Roddy spits, but there's no jealousy in his tone. It’s more like a wistful longing for a better future.
“Hey…pull-in’s not much easier,” Adam says, hands struggling for a moment to mirror the sign Roddy used for ‘pull-in.’ “The seawater makes my…hair all…hard.”
“Wear a hat then, dumbass,” Moxley supplies, punctuating his sentence with a loud slurp of coffee. Mox spots Adam’s scowl and continues, “What, pretty little Hollister cowboy doesn’t want his perfect golden curls all briney? Don’t they sell salt-spray stuff for hair? You’re gettin’ it for free, mind you, and you still wanna bitch about it.”
“Rich…coming from you…bald,” Adam spits back, and the whole table erupts in sleepy chuckles.
Just then, a heavy fist knocks on the mess hall doorframe. Its metal thunk catches everyone’s attention besides Orange, who’s notified of the sound only after everyone’s eyes turn to the doorway. The imposing scowl of Joe, somehow, meets all of their eyes at once, like an old Victorian painting whose static eyes still find a way to follow your every move.
Adam knows by that look that breakfast is over, and he eyes his half-empty coffee with pessimism. His senses are still not awake enough to function at one-hundred-percent, but the mantra he’s been living with the past few weeks replays in his head: he doesn’t have much of a choice.
“On the deck in five. We’ve got some extra debrief this morning. I expect you all to be there, say,” Joe scowls at his watch, then back up to the night crew, “two minutes ago. Get your sorry asses moving, pronto!” Joe’s authoritative voice is loud enough to wake the dead, so all of the third shifters scramble up from their chairs and start their march to the gear room. They all make quick work of their uniforms, throwing on their bright orange slickers and tucking their legs into their wading boots, preparing their bodies for the cold December night.
Adam heads out to the deck with the pack, and almost chokes as he sucks in the first breath of frigid night air. The dew in the air is sharp, stark, and shocking in his lungs. His tongue peeks out between his lips to taste it - salt and brine. The taste is almost gritty on Adam’s tongue. The sky above them is near pitch black, and Adam notices with a glance that there isn’t a single star left in the sky. The cloud cover above them sits like a blanket, suffocating and blocking the chilly blue moonlight that usually greets them on third shift. The only light shining on the deck now comes from the clinical spotlights hanging above them. It reminds Adam of an emergency room. Their bright, white hot bulbs shine harshly on Adam’s cheeks, itching his skin and making his eyes water. He quickly looks away from their stare to avoid blinding himself further.
Adam’s eyes turn towards his usual station near the aft-port of the pull-in line. A second shifter is there, leaning casually against the wall, waiting for his chance to escape once Adam comes to take his place. Adam can spot some of the rogue sea spray licking up the side of the ship, dusting the exact spot he’ll be standing in a few minutes. The spotlights hanging above them catch the misty vapors, creating a shimmering cloud that hangs wistfully in the air. It reminds Adam, briefly, of an oasis, but he’s never seen one depicted at night. He’s only seen the bright, warm paintings of bright blue lakes surrounded by yellow, arid deserts. Now, the briny mist dusting his workstation looks like fog, a curtain that further obscures the dark sea surrounding them.
As he watches the salt spray lick against the ship’s walls, coating everything it dares to touch, he wonders if, in the dark of night, the welcoming dew of an oasis can appear more like a veil, shielding prying eyes away from dangers that should remain unseen.
Moxley bumps into his shoulder, tugging Adam free from his misty trance. “Think the sunrise’s gonna be nice this morning? I’m hoping it’s that pinky color it sometimes gets before first shift comes to bitch at us. Reminds me of cotton candy.”
Adam shakes his head, meandering over with the rest of the night shift crowd to center deck. “No way. You never heard the old saying? ‘Pink sky by morning, sailors warning.’ Means we’re likely to get a storm.”
Moxley laughs. “You believe all that wives' tale shit?”
Adam shrugs. He doesn’t care to get into the specifics of his childhood superstitions right now, especially when his brain is barely awake enough to think for itself. “Hasn’t proved me wrong before. Last week, we had rain so bad, we almost got flooded off the deck. Sky was pink that morning.”
“Superstitious much? What, you grew up in Virginia, right? Probably think all those forest monsters are real and shit,” Mox teases, bending down just slightly so his next sentence tickles against Adam’s ear. “Next, you’ll tell me you think the Odyssey’s a true story and sirens are real.”
Adam doesn’t bother to respond to Moxley’s sarcasm. Instead, he pushes Mox away with a bump of his shoulder, huffing in annoyance. He’s only saved from further Moxley-based torment by Joe’s hollering.
“Alright, night shift, captain’s orders tonight,” Joe says after clapping his hands together. It quickly gathers the crew’s attention. “We’re in uncharted waters - har har, laugh all you want, but it’s true. Shit ton of ships have gone lost here, and the few that make it back have some horror stories to tell. We’ve learned that the best way to protect us and protect the ship is to wear some extra PPE tonight. That includes,” Joe trails off for a long moment before he dangles something from his fingers - some stubs attached to a long string. Adam recognizes them in an instant, but he simply listens as Joe continues his explanation.
“Earplugs,” Joe calls. “Usually, we’d chew your asses out for wearing anything on deck, but this is for your safety and the ship's safety, so we’ll be making an exception until we get out of this mess. Any questions?”
Adam feels his tongue itch with suspicion. He wants to ask why. Earplugs? What the hell good would that do? His mind starts to spiral with potential: a crash, no worse, an explosion - or, what if it was monsters? A kraken, a giant squid, or even sirens, just like Mox teased him about? His words were starting to feel like an omen. It’s like he jinxed the entire crew, saying names that he didn’t really understand; names that have power, names that can summon.
Adam almost pinches himself just to wake up from this self-induced nightmare. He hates how his brain can get sometimes, but that’s what growing up just south of Appalachia does to a curious, overactive imagination.
Adam breathes, willing his overly critical heart to settle. His tongue doesn’t want to work - it’s too afraid to speak aloud what’s really bouncing through his skull for fear of being laughed off the starboard side of the ship. Instead, he watches silently as Orange’s hand raises, and it seems that Joe already knows the question that will be coming his way.
“No, Orange, you don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to,” Joe says, voice monotone and clearly annoyed. Orange pumps his hand down in victory once Roddy interprets. “But only Orange. The rest of you fully-hearing dumbasses are required to wear them, or face the wrath of a write-up. Any other dumb questions?”
No other hands raise, so Joe calls them forward. Each crew member grabs a pair of flimsy earplugs from his hands. Adam takes his and slides the cord around his neck, letting the plastic nubs lie limp around his collar bones as he makes his way to his station, where he spots a tired second shifter, Swerve. He greets Adam with a grimace.
“They got you wearing these stupid things too?!” Swerve hollers, likely forgetting how loud he actually sounds because his voice is trapped in his head. Adam nods and smiles, twisting the earplugs in his fingertips just to keep his hands busy.
“What a joke! They won’t even tell us why we need these stupid things!” Swerve tries to grumble, though it’s obviously too loud to count as such.
Adam shrugs, trying to quell the anxiety still racing through his bloodstream. “Why bother? Prolly just an insurance thing or somethin’,” he excuses, speaking louder than he normally would. He takes a moment to peek briefly over the edge of the ship, eyeing the net Swerve was just about to pull in. “Good hauls today?”
Swerve gestures with his hand, a quick flipping ‘so-so.’ “It’s been alright! Definitely gonna be short on quota though!”
“When are we not?” Adam asks, rhetorical and apathetic. It earns a sweet chuckle from Swerve’s lips.
“Right answer!” Swerve says as he slips the net’s rope from its hook, stumbling ever-so-slightly as the weight of the net drags through the choppy sea below. Adam takes the initiative and slips in behind Swerve, grabbing onto the excess slack and giving Swerve a bit more anchor so he can slip the line through their station's pulley system.
“Thanks! Want me to stick around to pull this haul in, or you wanna take the reins?!” Swerve calls over his shoulder once the rope is slotted into place.
Adam shakes his head as he slips the end of the rope through the feeder, switching the winch on briefly so the rope can catch in the gears. “Nah, take it easy. I’m sure the waters weren’t nice to y’all this afternoon,” Adam reassures.
“Y’know, they usually say ‘pink skies by night, sailors delight,’ or whatever the hell! We had a pretty sunset tonight, all pink and purple and shit, but the waters have been bad ever since!” Swerve says.
Adam gets a brief sense of déjà vu; he said the matching warning not even five minutes ago. The contradictory foreshadowing the universe has been subtly giving him makes his stomach flutter with unease. He’s been dancing along the tightrope of superstition all morning. The anxiety he’s been fighting is starting to make his already tired muscles even more sluggish. He silently hopes he’ll get to sleep for a full twenty-four hours after this shift just to give his nervous system a break.
“Yeah, I know the saying,” Adam says in turn, voice soft and introspective.
“Huh?!” Swerve hollers back, face scrunching together in confusion. Right, the earplugs.
“Nothing!” Adam finally yells, shooing Swerve away with a hand. “Go sleep or somethin’. I’ve got this.”
“Not enough coffee this morning, cowboy?!” Swerve asks with a smile, picking up on Adam’s attitude and teasing it further. He doesn’t bother to wait for Adam to answer, however. He just gives Adam one final once-over to make sure he’s awake enough not to topple overboard before waving his own hand in salute and turning on his heels, making his way back to the gear room with the rest of the second shift pack.
As Swerve takes his leave, Adam turns to face the dark, open seas before him. Adam takes another deep, lung-filling breath, letting the sound of the waves crashing against the ship below fill his ears. The seawater still stings his tongue, fills his chest with dew thick enough to coagulate into syrup. A cough threatens to leak free from his mouth, but instead, he swallows, tongue working against the thick chill threatening to seal his throat shut.
It’s a bit of a sensory nightmare, staring out at the static oppressiveness of the inky black sky and hearing the wild, chopping crash of the waves below. He feels the ship sway dangerously loose under his feet, teetering just enough to trigger that anxious twist of fear in his gut.
It feels like the brief second before the drop on a roller coaster; the weightless feeling before gravity comes crashing down into your bones. The feeling repeats almost on a loop - up and down, up and down - over and over and over again. The sway makes Adam feel lightheaded, and that same syrupy dew lining his throat starts to taste like bile.
Adam’s tired thoughts begin to scramble as he fights to swallow the acrid tang itching up his throat. He pleads, begs even - god, please don’t let him get sick, not on a night like tonight, where his skin itches with anxiousness and his bones feel like they’ve been replaced with Pop Rocks and Coke. If he’s got to twist his head down, hang his heavy curls over the edge of the ship, and expel his measly breakfast and a heaping serving of stomach acid not even ten minutes into his shift, he’s not sure he’ll be able to survive the night.
To distract his stomach from emptying its contents, he turns to the winch. He switches the pulley on with a thunk of its heavy switch. The gears whir to life, ticking like a clock as the gears draw the line forward. The rope coils safely into its catch, and he hears the telltale cascade of water slipping through the openings of the net and crashing back into the sea below. Adam knows from his little experience that the process takes about a minute to retract the net close enough to grab, so he stands as solidly as he can - arms crossed, legs spread square with his hips, eyes closely following the coil of the rope just in case something gets snagged.
“Help.”
Adam’s head shakes on its own accord. The winch hasn’t made that sound before. He must be hearing things. Maybe some water found its way into his eardrum, blocking some of the natural ambiance from entering his ears. It’s happened more times than he can count since he’s been on this ship.
“Help!”
God, that’s so weird. Adam smacks the side of his head with his palm, willing the liquid to free from his ear canal. He doesn’t feel the tell-tale warmth of water releasing, however. He just feels the sting on his skin from where his heel smacked his temple.
“‘EFFING HELP ME!”
Adam’s eyes rip up, tearing themselves free from where they were velcroed to the ground. The first thing his stare finds is the net, now hanging dangerously close to the pulley’s stop. Shit, he was supposed to slow it down and pull the rest of the way by hand. He pulls his eyes away from the net briefly to slap the switch to its off position.
With the power off, he no longer hears the whir of the winch. He just hears the chaotic slap of waves, the sound of his own breathing, and something that sounds like crying.
Well, wailing might be a better description.
A twinkling, high-pitched cry is coming from the mass of ocean wildlife trapped in the net. The sound is strained and scared, cracking like a gunshot as another yell shatters through the night.
“HELP! PLEASE HELP ME!”
“Fuck!” Adam hollers, stumbling forward to the net. His heart has never felt more alive. It’s beating like a drum in his chest, shuddering his limbs to life like a bull whip just licked his calves.
His hands scramble against the net’s webbing as his eyes scan frantically against the sea’s surface below. “Man overboard! Man! Overboard!” He calls into the black night, alerting anyone nearby to the emergency. Which, is that what it is? Is one of the other crewmates calling for help? He doesn’t think he recognizes the voice, but he can’t say for sure. Everything’s happening too fast.
Adam twists the net around the pulley, searching for any sign of whatever it is that’s calling for help. His bare hands brush against slimy, squirming fish and brackish seaweed. The frigid seawater leaks its chill into his fingertips, and they start to seize, joints sabotaging themselves as he continues his frantic call, and the wailing cry continues its sinister melody. It’s almost like it’s two voices, two sounds fighting out of one throat, an unnatural chord that mixes the keys of panic and fear. The sound scrapes against Adam’s eardrums like a poorly tuned fiddle.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Adam repeats, tongue going stupid as anxiety begins to take over every sense. Who is it? Who fell over? Roddy? Swerve? Fucking Mox? Or did he fall over? Is Adam overboard, and this is all just one freakish fever dream, one where his life doesn’t flash before his eyes, but his fate does; that helpless feeling of complete hopelessness, forcing him to live his death in real time.
Adam breathes, sucks in sea water, and chokes. Maybe he is drowning. Maybe he is the one overboard. Maybe he’s already dead.
“Help,” a small voice cries into Adam’s palms, and suddenly he knows that he’s alive and well as he stares down at a human face trapped within the net, staring up at him only a scant few inches away.
“Fucking shit!” Adam cries, jumping away like he’d been burned. His waders slip on the water-slicked deck, and he falls, tailbone cracking on the deck with a teeth-clattering thud.
“NO! Please, HELP! You can hear me! I know you can! PLEASE, HELP ME!”
Adam stares in awe as the face in the net speaks, and actually stares at him with dark brown, human eyes. Wet hair crawls along its - his? her? their? - features, lining the planes of their face like vines. Their hair is almost as dark as their eyes, dark and inky as it trails past its - their, fuck - their shoulders, and now Adam can spot that it’s not just a head but a neck, a torso, hands that thread through the net's opening. Those hands shake and claw desperately at the nylon, willing it to open in any way they can.
And Adam doesn’t know how he didn’t see it before. They must have writhed free from the rest of the net’s other contents, because that torso - that looks so natural, that looks human - blends seamlessly into a tail, a literal fucking tail that’s dotted with a blend of blues and greens, a tail that shines bright in the ship's spotlights, reflecting iridescent hues exactly like a fish’s scales would. And that tail - that tail that’s attached to what looks like a human body, god, fuck, Adam’s gonna throw up - thrashes in the net, wild and wet and alive, and Adam’s sure he’s actually just smashed his head open on the deck and he’s dead, because what he’s seeing right now cannot - no, isn’t real.
It can’t be.
It can’t be real, because Adam thinks he’s looking at an actual merperson, writhing and crying in his fishing net.
“Help me, please,” the merperson cries, staring those huge brown eyes right at Adam. Their hands grasp tightly in the net's webbing, so tight that Adam can see the nylon shake under their grip. “I think you can hear me. You called for help, I heard you - I just, please. Please, get me out of here.”
Their eyes lock onto Adam’s. The creature heaves in a breath, breathes in the same air Adam does. The sound rattles up their chest as it works past the cries still caught in their throat. “I won’t come back. I promise. Just let me go,” the creature pleads, voice so quiet that Adam almost doesn’t hear it over the sound of the crashing sea.
Adam swallows a thick and painful gulp that cuts past his tonsils. It’s so full of fear that he almost chokes on it. “What,” he starts, but the sound gets caught in the tight webbing of his larynx. He’s also trapped. He’s also stuck inside a net of abject horror. He gasps, almost drowns, and tries again. Finally, his voice works.
“W-What are you?”
The only sound that surrounds him for a fleeting moment is the loud clap of the waves, icy and shivering, like sand tumbling through an hourglass. They stare at each other, long and fearful, simply watching each other breathe. Neither move, neither flail; they just stare, frozen in place, like they’re both waiting to wake up from a nightmare.
Soon, though, he receives a sob in reply. No words, just another helpless wail. It sounds sickly. It sounds dangerous. Adam imagines it sounds exactly like a siren’s call - and, fuck, maybe that’s a better name for this, this thing, this creature.
A siren. The Odyssey. The name sounds so natural, fits so perfectly; this creature may as well be wearing a name tag with the label ‘siren’ adorned to it. Adam thinks back to Mox’s teasing when they got on the deck, and thinks about how much he’s going to yell at Mox after this nightmare is over. Adam’s never been clairvoyant, but maybe he has a knack for attracting the future, and it just so happened to work through Mox this time, and that must mean -
Fuck, the earplugs, that’s why -
Adam tries to push himself up from the deck, but a pair of warm hands suddenly claps onto his ears. The unfamiliar palms crush against his skull, holding him in place. He yelps out in surprise, and the sound of his own breath is cacophonous in his skull. His own hands reach up to claw at the newly intruding flesh, trying to wrench the hands free from his body, but they refuse to move from their perch, staying painfully tight against his skin.
Adam strains his eyes up to find Orange staring down at him. His eyebrows are almost crossed, knitted in concern as his eyes skate against Adam’s features. Adam almost laughs through the shock; Orange’s reaction is so similar to how his mom would check on him after a fall at the playground - critical, checking every inch of his skin for any bump or bruise. It makes him feel the smallest itch of homesickness through the whirlwind of confusion he now finds himself in.
“Wait!” Adam cries, hoping Orange can read his lips clearly in the frenzy. “Wait, it - they, they need help!” Adam pleads, trying to find footing on the slick deck to kick his legs out and gain enough leverage to pull himself free from Orange’s grasp.
Adam watches as Orange frantically shakes his head, and suddenly, he feels new hands hold onto his ankles. He yelps again, pulls his eyes down to find Mox holding his legs in a vice grip. Adam attempts to push against the hold, and only feels Mox hold down tighter in response. Mox is trying to tell him something, but he feels more than actually hears Mox’s voice. With Orange’s hands crushing his ears, he can’t make out any of the words that are being screamed at him.
“Stop!” Adam cries through the frenzy now surrounding him. The sound of his own voice is so loud. He hopes they can hear him, the someone that’s still writhing in the net. He hopes that they know that something - someone - is trying with all their might to free them from their capture. “Stop, wait, please! I can help!”
Mox is yelling again, and Orange is still shaking his head, frantic and worried. The grip they share on Adam’s body is tight, bruising, and uncomfortable. Adam can feel the headache already inching on - or wait, that may be from his panting. He feels lightheaded. He may be having a panic attack.
Suddenly, Adam feels heavy footfalls run up on the deck beside them. He tries to twist his head to see who approached, but Orange’s grip is like a vice. He has a few inches of movement to watch, helpless, as the new arrival brandishes a utility knife. Their hands shake as they raise the knife, lining it up with the net’s surface.
Adam watches, mouth agape, as the knife slips through the net only inches - no, centimeters away from the siren. Anger bubbles on his tongue. Horror rips up his stomach as he yells, cries, pleads with everything his body has left to muster.
“STOP! You’ll kill them!” Adam screams, and jesus, he’s crying. There’s a fresh burn of tears coating his frozen cheeks. He hasn’t had a panic attack this bad in years. His muscles are tense, lithe, fighting against the cage of Mox and Orange’s hands.
He doesn’t want to watch this; he can’t. This is inhumane. This is insanity.
This isn’t real.
The utility knife jumps through the net’s fibers, ripping away the webbing with a blunt drag of the blade. Adam watches in horror as the knife grazes the siren's cheek. A dark, inky bead of what must be blood eeks free from the fresh cut. Adam feels the responding shriek crash against his chest, the buzzing cry of pain from the siren’s wail shaking the deck he sits upon as he watches the net continue to tear free from the pulley.
“Stop,” Adam says. His chest is too hollow to scream anymore. “Stop it, please.”
Adam watches the knife as it pulls through the nylon, snapping strand after strand until, finally, the weight is too heavy. The contents of the net spill out into the sea below. Adam will never forget the look of terror that laced the siren’s eyes as they stared at him, letting out one final high, pleading wail as they fell from the net’s grasp and into the night.
The splash that sounded once the siren made contact with the seawater boomed through the night air. It was loud enough to find its way through the gaps in Orange’s fingers. It was shattering, like a bullet through a home window, a sharp slap that would be etched on Adam’s brain forever.