Chapter Text
From The Sea - Dive|rgence
Prologue
The End
I was having a dream but
then I realised that
I can’t wake up
and
it's a nightmare.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
With a deep breath of slightly salty air, she lets her consciousness resurface and wakefulness wash over her, like the waves she can hear crashing lazily on the sand, not too far away.
She shuffles, feet digging clumsily into the sun-heated sand.
“Good nap?”
The voice of her mother is the last nudge her groggy mind needs, and with a sleepy, vaguely affirmative hum, she raises her head from where it rests on her crossed arms.
… And promptly groans in discomfort as her eyes are assaulted by the harsh light of the sun, still high in the sky.
Her sudden nap was probably shorter than she first thought.
Slowly, she sits up, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands once she has checked they are free of sand.
Now that would be a pain in the neck.
Ah, better.
“Want to go for a swim?”
She rolls her shoulders and cracks her neck to rouse her body from its nap-induced stiffness, tongue roaming through her mouth in an attempt to relieve it of its dryness and fuzziness.
She loves the beach, but taking a nap on one in the middle of a summer day…
Well, there are enough downsides to make her think twice about doing it again.
An affirmative answer is on her lips —she is pretty sweaty— before she stops, her half-functioning brain finally realising that the humming noise in her ears isn’t just the ocean.
It’s people.
As in, a lot of people.
Way more than there was when she fell asleep.
Ugh.
She stares at the groups of people playing, talking and swimming in the sea.
A gaggle of children run by her with their swimming ring, laughing and screaming and squealing as they race each other towards the foam-capped waves.
She winces.
Hesitantly, she gestures towards a pile of rocks and boulders that she knows hide a small creek.
“I’ll just… go over there.”
She rises to her feet hurriedly, but even with her back turned she can feel her mother rolling her eyes heavenwards.
Okay, the exasperated sigh is kind of a hint, too.
Annnnnd there goes her good mood.
She sighs as she heads for the rocks.
This summer is the last occasion to spend time with her family before she moves out for her first year of college.
(Enough time to forget what’s to come, to relax all the way to that little part of herself that keeps thinking about leaving,
about the unknown and how lost it will feel,
not about being alone but about having no one close for when it will inevitably feel like being held at the edge of a cliff —breathtaking in an all-too literal way and like the only thing you can do from there is fall or give up and back away.)
After spending all summer with them, she would really rather avoid being a source of conflict and disappointment when she won’t see them for a long time —not really.
She should have just said yes and sucked it up.
But even as the thought burns like guilt in her gut, her shoulders slacken in relief, tension melting at the sight of her temporary swimming spot.
Two other people chose to come there too, but they’re far away enough that she can barely distinguish their features, and it’s enough distance to not count in her book.
She hurries her steps, suddenly in a rush to leave her mistakes on the shore and wash everything else away in the feel of water gliding along her skin like liquid silk.
Jumping down from the last rock, she spots an obviously abandoned plastic bag, filled with empty food wrappings.
She slows down, the thought filtering through her mind that she should probably pick it up and throw it away properly, stringing along memories of classes she attended, TV programs she watched and books she read.
Vague, washed-out disgust weighs down her mouth at the thought of whoever took the time to collect all their trash but not to actually put it in the damn bin.
And then it all sinks to a quiet death under the thought that in the end, it doesn’t really matter, and she walks past the pile of trash.
(Distantly acknowledging that she isn’t any better.)
She enters the water in a few steps, and dives in almost silently, a sigh escaping her mouth in bubbles.
She swims around for a bit, before turning on her back and letting herself float.
Green seaweed passes her by and gets tangled in her left hand.
She closes her thumb on it, feeling its thin, wet softness with slow strokes.
Water laps at her ears, loud and tranquil, drowning most of the background noise until she is alone at sea.
(It is soothing, terrifying and exhilarating all at once.)
Her long hair is an anchor pulling her down, heavy with the weight of the sea. She has to wash it anyway, so she decided there is no harm in letting it soak in salty water on top of it.
Taking a deep breath, she lets her muscles relax slowly one by one, until she is sinking, the water closing above her face, blurring her sight of the sun.
She waves her limbs lazily to keep herself afloat not too far from the surface, and watches the bubbles she releases little by little fly upwards.
The rest of the world disappears.
She closes her eyes to soothe the sting of the salt, her blood beating steadily in her ears and her mind quiet.
And then—
Something hits her smack dab in the forehead.
Her eyes snap open, and she gasps out her last mouthful of air in surprise, instinctively hurling herself upwards.
She breaks through the surface (—it took too long, what—) and greedily sucks in air, impatiently pushing hair out of her face as she looks down.
Her eyes are crying against the sting of sea water, but she's pretty sure she was just hit by someone. It did feel like another skull smashing against hers just now, too —not that she has a lot of experience with that particular occurrence.
But no one is resurfacing next to her.
With a curse, she fills her mouth with air again, and dives.
Luckily, or as much as one can be in these cirumstances, she manages to spot them quickly, and hurriedly swims over to what she discovers is a barely moving boy of about her age.
She grabs a hold of him (—too light, he’s too light for his build, this doesn’t make sense—) and proceeds to haul the both of them back up again.
Except, when she does reach the surface, she realises four things at once.
One, she is in the middle of the ocean, with no sign of land in any direction.
(—but it’s just not possible—)
Two, there is a small rowing boat not far from them, something that by all accounts belongs in a museum.
Three, the boy she is holding looks familiar.
(The kind of familiar that makes her stomach burn like acid and turns her spine to hard, cold ice.
The kind that numbs everything else in shades of incredulity and disbelief, because it shouldn’t exist—)
And four, he isn’t breathing.
A mangled whimper crawls up her throat and dies on her lips.
Her breath stutters.
Her movements falter.
And then her mind goes blank with lucid terror, only focused on hearing the sound of breathing again.
(—even though she shouldn’t hear it, she knows—
Even though hearing it might just turn out to be the worst thing that ever happens to her.
Because right then, she thinks that there would be nothing worse than being alone with a cold corpse she was too late to save and her own thoughts.)
So she drags the limp body on the boat and clambers in herself, her panicked mind running blindly through the memories of her optional first-aid course at the beginning of high school.
(In her mind, it feels like three years ago.
In her body, it feels like three eternities, limbs unable to remember the position they took, the speed they used, the strength they applied and she just knew that ‘you’ll remember it all when it happens’ speech was all bullshit—)
Hands trembling, tongue dry and suffocating and licking salty drops off her lips again and again (if they are tears or sea water, she does not know), she gets into position and starts pumping, counting under her breath over the pace of what might be her own sobs.
The only thought that goes through her as she leans forward is, absurdly enough, something along the lines of seriously, when I said I missed having someone to kiss, this was so not what I had in mind.
But she opens her mouth anyway, covers his lips with her own, and exhales.
(—and there’s no response.
No movement, no warmth, no nothing
and it’s so wrong,
even though he shouldn’t—)
Pump. Exhale. Repeat.
Once. Twice. Three times.
A choked sob, wrapped in the broken shards of a senseless litany she cannot even hear, squeezes past her throat where it’s clogged with the slowly-dawning realisation she never wants to voice into reality and the heart she might just puke.
She feels his body contract before he actually coughs, and flings herself back, almost falling into the ocean again.
As the boy (—the boy whose name she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to hear, doesn’t want to think—) proceeds to cough out any remaining water and probably some of his lungs, her heartbeat slows down from the incoming heart attack she wishes would take her away from whatever the fuck is happening.
She resorts to focusing on her surroundings instead.
It should be better than looking at the boy.
It’s really, really not.
Because the world around her looks just like it did when she first saw it through the haze of panic and the water in her eyes.
Just like she fears.
She and the boy are the only people as far as she can see, floating aimlessly on the molten glass mirror of the sea, under the barely lighter blue of the similarly boundless sky.
Being lost at sea with no idea of how to get back home —or how she even got wherever she is in the first place— is neither soothing nor exhilarating.
It’s just plain terrifying.
She looks down to escape the feeling of the endless expanse of blue stealing all her air right out of her lungs faster than she can breathe it in—
and lurches forward to grip the railing of the boat, a horrible noise that sounds more like a cornered, dying animal than her own voice wrenching itself forcefully out of her mouth.
Because there, on the surface of the sea, barely disturbed by the light breeze or the slight rocking of the boat, is what is supposed to be her reflection.
Except it isn’t.
Cannot be.
But when she moves her arm to bring it in her field of vision, it moves too, and so she finds herself staring uncomprehendingly at the pearly, nearly translucent, the-sun-what’s-that-never-heard-of-it white of her skin.
(Her mind goes an absolute, blank kind of helpless, and her heartbeat drowns out the world in a way that makes her want to silence it forever.)
She inherited her skin from her mother’s side, and it has never been that pale.
Even when she’s sick, and certainly not in the middle of summer when she tans so easily.
She rubs another foreign-looking hand on the arm (—not her arm, it just cannot be hers—), and feels the contact.
There’s no thought when the hand clamps down viciously, the digging of the nails into the skin more frantic than any other response she can muster.
Ow.
… Fuck.
Hair falls from the absolute mess that must be her ponytail and in front of her eyes, brushing against her cheek and real when she grabs it to tug hard enough to hurt and—
Not brown.
Her usual thin strands of straight, luxurious brown hair —the one feature of her face she has always loved— have become thick, loose curls, coloured an absurd ocean blue that should not, under any circumstance, be natural.
Except it seems to be the case.
She gives a harsher tug just in case.
(It hurts harsher, but not as harshly as the jolt of realisation somewhere in her chest that sends cracks rippling through the one thing that should unquestionably be hers and only hers but isn’t.
Not anymore.)
She wants to cry, but the only sound that comes out of her mouth is a breath of laughter.
Because of fucking course.
Why wouldn’t her voice be all skewed and wrong, too?
A loud, hoarse cry of relief makes her tense as she is abruptly reminded that she isn’t alone on the boat.
(Or is she?
Is this all a dream? An illusion?
How is she supposed to know?
How is she supposed to want to know, when the alternative is so much worse and knowing changes nothing given her total ignorance about how to solve either problem?)
Turning to face the boy feels like walking to her own death.
No matter how slowly she does it, it happens anyway.
And when it does, her death is throwing his arms in the air, in victory or celebration she doesn’t know.
Either way, it’s nowhere near the spectrum available to her at the moment.
“I’m alive!”
She blinks sluggishly.
The boy blinks back, and suddenly beams like the sun on the first day of summer holidays, when it just so happens to also be your birthday.
She just stares back, entirely incapable of covering her eyes from what might potentially become a serious case of megawatt smile-induced blindness, the urge to do so barely registering.
And then he opens his mouth, wider and wider and wider, like a black hole that sucks in all her hopes.
He opens his mouth, and she wants, yearns, needs so badly to look away, to ignore him, to tell herself that it’s not true, that it’s not happening.
Just a little longer.
(Even if, just under the surface, she already knows.)
But she can’t, like you can never look away from something horryfingly fascinating, whether it’s a car accident you walk past or a ball careening towards you through the air that you know is going to land straight in your face, and the only thing you can think is ohhell, except in this case her brain seems stuck on nonononono—
And then he talks.
“Aaaaah, that was close! Thanks for saving me!”
She blinks again, and then she—
faints.