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laceykodiak · 4 months ago

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bawling my eyes out at the portrayal of living vs dying. Anyways

peristalsis - vii

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to “lovers.” suicidal resolve. major character death. violent drowning. a reckoning. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

When you’re sure that Johnny’s friends have left, you return to the beach. The wind has died down in the late afternoon; the clouds sit heavy and motionless in the sky.

Night is coming, and it promises to be cold. It hangs in the wary stillness of the air, in the waiting quiet. The seabirds’ calling is absent; the dune crickets’ singing has ended.

He’s there on the sand. Somehow, you knew he would be. Felt it, even before he came into view. He stands by the kayak, almost as if he’s been waiting there for you.

You hold the folded pelt with both hands against your stomach as you approach. The fur is so soft against your palms, your fingers. Cool from having spent a night in the ground.

He looks at it with sharp eyes. Then, up to you, expectantly.

His eyes on you in the cottage bedroom, moonlight shifting in them. Teeth in your neck. The taste of brine in your mouth.

Pearls in your memory. Parting gifts to enjoy, as you come to the close.

“Missed you at the end there, bonnie,” he says, even and purposefully steady. “The boys were glad to meet you.”

He’s known—the whole time. He always has. You don’t know how you know this, but you do.

“I’ve had a nice time with you, Johnny,” you say, when you’re only a few paces away from him. “But I think it’s time for me to go.”

Three days. That’s all it’s been. Nothing much, objectively, to say goodbye to. A good way to end things, truthfully, with the aftertaste of good food still on your tongue, the heat and girth of him still lingering inside you. The etchings of his calluses still fresh on your skin.

A kind ending. A gentle one. Better than you and he deserve.

You hold out the pelt.

He looks at it. Mouth a tight line. Brows low and flat. Then his gaze moves to you.

“Where will you go?” he asks, still steady.

“I’m not sure,” you say. “Maybe—Amsterdam. Does it matter? I don’t know.”

“Just like that,” he says flatly. “After everything.”

You frown. “I was always going to leave, Johnny. Remember? I only booked the place for a month. This is just…earlier.”

Something frenetic buzzes in his posture. The slight lean forward in the way he stands. The angles of his face seem harsher, more pronounced. Eyes dark as wet stone.

“Johnny, just—” you shake the pelt at him, still holding it out. “Just take it, okay?”

He looks at the pelt again, and then back at you.

At it, then you.

It—you—

Johnny lunges.

In one swift surge forward he snaps the pelt from your hands and flings it aside. As it flutters to the ground his hands whip at you, seizing fistfuls of your shirt a half-thought before you realize it, wrenching you forward.

“What the fuck?!” you cry, but then you’re off your feet, falling toward him, arms flailing as you lose your center of balance. You topple into him, and he hooks you beneath the shoulders with the iron bands of his arms, stepping away from the kayak, and only for a moment do you think that maybe he’s going to bring you back to the cottage before he starts dragging you in the opposite direction—

“Johnny, no,” you breathe, as you hear a wave break on the sand,“Johnny, no!”

You start to kick and thrash. You throw yourself against his grasp, dig your heels into the sand, try to find the meat of his forearm with your teeth, but he is resolute. Unstoppable.

You start to scream.

The waves eddy around your feet, rise up to engulf your ankles, your calves, as Johnny roils the water with wide, unfaltering steps, deeper in—

The water closes around your thighs. Your waist.

This is happening. This is really happening—

“Had a month to get to this, bonnie,” says Johnny, over your screaming, rough and harsh and completely unrecognizable. He slings you around to face him, jaw set hard, the muscles in his temples flexing as he clenches his teeth. “But I guess we’re doin’ it now.”

“Johnny,” you plead, “please don’t, Johnny, please—Johnny, no, no, no, no—!”

He clamps his hands on your shoulders and shoves you downward. You claw at him, push against the seabed, but your lover is too strong, immune to your fighting, and you are barely able to inhale before he forces your head below the water.

Frigid cold—it rushes into your ears, through your hair, knife-sharp and paralyzing. Salt flooding the open canals of your nose—

You close your throat. The surface swirls above you, distorting him, rippling and folding in on itself as a wave recedes. Hope waits for the retreating water to expose you, but he has dragged you out too deep, far enough that even the lowest point of the backwash still submerges you.

Seawater, eroding cilia, ramming against the rolled stone of your epiglottis. Burning the film of your corneas.

You reach up, swinging your hands at his face, but the distance of his straightened arms, muscles flexing to hold you down, is too great; you beat at empty air, or collide with the rock-hardness of his shoulders.

Another wave comes in, deepening the surf around you. You kick out, knee upward, wrench against him—you just need him to loosen his grip once, for just one moment, and then you can get away. You try to pry his fingers up, but they may as well have rooted in you.

Lungs pulsing. Throat already fighting to open. Chest heaving, diaphragm beating upward to pull in air. Pain lancing up your chest, unimaginably sharp, head so heavy it might burst—

You throw yourself to one side, kicking against the sand, and physiology subsumes your control. The cost of fighting is breathing. The floodways open—the ocean rushes into your throat—

Salt abrades the walls of your esophagus, claw-slashing downward. Acid bypasses the filters of your alveoli, honeycomb structures collapsing to the pressure, to the spasming of your lungs desperate to send oxygen to the rest of your body. Your diaphragm contracts—your chest convulses to cough, to force water out, only to welcome more of the sea in.

You beat at Johnny’s arms again. All you manage is to throw water against him. He is a sea stack above you. A pillar. Unmovable.

Holding your body against his in the bedroom, frighteningly strong, moving against you like the ocean itself—

The water churns above you with your struggle. You cannot see his face. All you see is the unstable shape of his silhouette, wavering lines distorting the edges as the corners of your vision darken.

More seawater, expanding your chest. Heart stuttering between your lungs, yanking in the last of your oxygenated blood, with nothing to send back out. The weight of your body swells, arms too heavy to hold up. They crash into the water before you force them back up again, searching and unwieldy.

Perception narrows. Him, and you. That’s all.

Sunlight through the window the next morning, rimming him in gold. The heat of his shoulder pressed to yours.

The seawater steals the tears from your eyes, throat convulsing on a sob you cannot make.

Grinning as you shared oysters.

You slap your hands against his arms, clapping your palms to whatever they can find, begging, praying—

Him moving inside you, his warmth, his smell, the weight of his tongue in your mouth. The tug of his hand on your arm.

His smile, his voice, his hand in yours—

Fists like weights holding you down. Fire in your chest. Too full.

Upward—something in you tugging upward.

You want to live. You want to live. You want to live—

It’s done.

Johnny lifts your body from the surf and carries it back to the beach. You fit in his arms as if they were the mold you were cast from.

He knew you would the moment he saw you in the airport. Perfect. You were perfect for him. He saw it in the angles of your body, the way you stood, the emotions moving behind the mask of your face.

He tried to explain it to Price once—the seeing. The knowing.

How he could look straight at his old captain, for instance, and know, without ever hearing the man say a word, that he felt responsible. For everything. For the gunshot. For the months afterword. Even though he hadn’t chosen to discharge Johnny himself, Price saw the mold of his hands in the shape his sergeant’s life had taken.

It’s how he knows Gaz couldn’t see the change in him, because he saw what he wanted to see—his best mate whole and healthy, thriving in a new stage of his life.

It’s how he knows Ghost doesn’t even recognize him anymore. Not really.

And it’s how he knows you’re just like him.

He lays you down on the sand, cradling the back of your head so it settles lightly down. Stretches your legs to rest straight out. He aligns your limp arms with the length of your torso, turning your hands upward so the sand will not cling to your palms.

Beautiful. Even with your face slack. Eyes half-open, unseeing. Mouth parted; seawater dripping from the corners.

Your feet touched the island the same way his did, years ago. Running away. Looking for the end, without really trying to find it. It was in the set of your brows, the tight pull of your mouth against your teeth.

Life had gone in every direction opposite of your intention. And it had left you alone.

Johnny smooths a few stray hairs away from your forehead, and kisses the place between your brows. The little line that has sat between them this whole time is gone, smoothed away. He kisses the bridge of your nose, and then your mouth, and then stands.

It took him a while, back then, to make the decision. It was hours before he woke to find Price watching him, sitting despondent on the sand, tears tracking salty down the older man’s face.

He goes to the place he threw his pelt away and retrieves it, shaking it out. Holding it in his hands assuages the anxiety that has wriggled in the back of his mind since the day he shoved it into the lintel of the croft. He’d known where it was, but survival instinct prevails over logic—for the rest of his life, he will always fear its loss.

It’s a consequence, but not one he’d been unfamiliar with.

And, in the end, preferable to the alternative.

He lowers himself to the sand a little ways away from you, propping his knees up and spreading the pelt across them.

When he had done this—he’d done it alone. It had been close. He almost hadn’t made it.

If he takes up this vigil—if he stays, the whole time, watching you—you’ll make it. It’s not a matter of hope or belief. It’s a matter of knowing.

He knows every time he looks into your eyes. Every time he’s been inside you. Every time your body has risen to meet his touch.

You want to live.

So he sits back. He keeps his eyes on you.

And he waits.

The sky claps you between its palms and hurls you back down the gravity well—

You vomit up the ocean.

Panting, with burning lungs. Closer—everything is much, much closer, loud and bright, and suddenly, individually distinct.

Channels of sound and aroma dance on the wind—sea salt, the smoke of someone’s grill from the village, burning meat, the rolling crash of the incoming tide, birdcall and the gust of beating wings and—and—

And you can sense them all.

A gap in the clouds lets the sunlight touch the earth.

You move on the sand. Turn onto your belly, chest heaving, empty and light. The cove—you’re still in the cove. There’s the path back up to the cottage. There’s the kayak. There’s—

Johnny, riotous, waiting in the crashing waves.

He calls to you: loud, long, triumphant, teeth bared in jubilation.

You cry out. Wordless. If you’d had any words to say, your lips could not shape them.

You’re alive.

It crashes into you. Alive.

You lift your head into the wind coming off the ocean. It caresses your face softly, tenderly, like a mother’s kiss on your cheek.

Johnny suddenly turns from you and darts into the water.

You wail with surprise. A wave rushes up to where you lay, water licking up the fibers of your body. You’re not ready. It’s too soon. Why did he leave you? What’s happening? Why isn’t the water cold?

You clutch at the sand. You can’t find your legs—you can’t stand up. All you can do is crawl, shuffle your ungainly body forward with the clumsiness of a newborn child. You cry out again, trying to convince him to return, to come help you, but if he hears it, he does not come to your aid.

Another wave surges forward; salt water crashes across your face. You flinch away from it, but something nictates over your eyes, shielding them from the burn.

Once you reach the surf, the water cradles your body, buoyancy easing your way. You submerge, finding something to kick with—

And then you’re gliding.

Murky, and blue. Sand clouding in the tide. But comfortable—cool, without being cold. You remember frigidity cutting into your skin only hours earlier, rending you at the seams, unmaking you.

Now, it receives you like an old friend.

Ahead of you, Johnny moves further out. You can feel him, far out in the distance, tiny eddies of water rippling against your cheeks.

He’s not the only thing you can feel. The radius of your awareness vibrates with blips of movement, darting, swaying, dancing, below and above and all around. It shocks you to realize, and you go still, hovering in place, momentarily stunned by how much there is living around you.

Johnny pauses too, ahead of you. Waiting. A lone distinct figure, patient for you to follow.

You shiver with startled wonder, and resume your way toward him.

The coastal shelf slopes downward, falling away. The water gradually clears as overhead, past the surface, the sun sinks in the sky. Warm golden light dyes the sea around you. He leads you on, further and further, until a forest of kelp grows up around you.

In the turquoise, ribbons of twisting green undulate and twirl, feathery and dancing in the windy current. Silvery bubbles trail toward the sunlight, intermingling with tiny schools of glimmering fish that dart and jump between the fronds. Down below you, red and green algae fur valleys of rock, swaying lazily like prairie grass.

It’s beautiful.

Johnny drifts to a stop in the middle of it all, wheeling around to face you. You approach him, coming in close—and it’s almost like approaching the sun, so much that he radiates across your senses.

His dark eyes hold yours the same way they had that day on the beach, and the pendulum swings balanced now between you.

He brushes the side of his face along yours, and with his touch he leads you downward, following the stipes of kelp toward the stone to which their holdfasts grip. The heat of his huge body warms the water that flows in the narrow spaces between your bodies, even as the coolness intensifies the further you dive.

The two of you draw up along the forest floor—and find the myriad little denizens of the sea. You’d known they were there, at the very edge of your senses, and now they bloom into fullness in your attention.

Shrimp perambulate beneath rocky ledges. Crabs walks along the ridge of a huge boulder, like climbing a mountain. And there, further down, snails in their spiral shells, pulling themselves across the sandy grain. Starfish, in shades of red and blue and orange. Anemones, translucent hair streaming.

Tiny lives—insignificant to you, before. Hardly worth your notice. Now, you marvel at them, reeling. You want to cup them all in your palms and bring them up to clutch against your chest.

Something brushes against you.

You look up—Johnny, sliding along your side, curving back in toward you, then looping underneath. He nudges at you, then darts away; you gaze at him, confused, so he comes back in, shunting you with his body, and once again retreats.

Behind him, you catch a turtle fluttering in between the green leaves. Atlantic salmon chasing capelin. An eel peeking out from its cave. Undisturbed by Johnny’s—and your—antics.

He nudges you again, then backs off, looking at you expectantly. Realizing his intentions, you follow—he makes a low clicking sound in his throat, pleased, and jets into the flowing leaves, buffeting you with the wave he leaves in his wake.

You’re shocked only for a moment before the kelp parts for you in your pursuit. Johnny quickly disappears ahead of you, dipping down below the canopy. You feel him rapidly shrink in your awareness, and you propel forward, scanning for telltale splashes of gray and white, arms of green caressing you as you pass.

You close in on him, but suddenly he evades. You follow again, only to find he’s nowhere in view. Then the chase is on: he stays in one place only long enough for you to catch sight of him before he bolts, or wheels around and backtracks to confuse you every time you approach. Teasing, taunting, flaunting the dexterity he has underwater which you have yet to acquire.

Golden shafts of dancing sunlight begin to dim and shorten as he leads you on. Frustration rapidly builds in your chest, buoyed as your lungs press against your ribcage. You need to breathe, even as Johnny becomes no more than a dot of movement in your senses, confounding you at every turn.

Why is he doing this? Why won’t he stay with you? If you surface, you’ll lose him, but the sudden memory of saltwater flooding your chest has you kicking toward the fading daylight. Self-preservation taking its place at the head of your priorities, and you follow it with no longer any second thought.

Above you shifts a mirror of silk.

You rise. Faster as the weight of the sea lessens, your reflection blooming as you approach, closer and closer to the wedge-shaped face, the large, dark eyes—

You swim into yourself and breach the air. Your nostrils open, and you inhale the wind.

You see the twilight bleeding into the day. Clouds moving quickly off as the sun sinks into the horizon.

Where is Johnny?

You can’t sense him anymore—as you knew would happen—and your chest contracts with fear and longing, suddenly believing you’ve seen him for the last time—that he’s left you all alone, to figure out what to do next, with no idea how to live in the skin of this new self you’ve become.

You give a mournful howl. You don’t want to do this alone, you can’t, you thought you wouldn’t have to—

But in the distance, back the long way you came, you hear an answer.

You whirl around, facing the shore, and almost too far away to see, a dark shape rests on the sand.

Your throat convulses with a clumsy breath, and then you dive. The water parts for your body, sliding around you, streaming through your hair. Faster than you expect, the slope of the shelf draws close, and you jet upward, belly meeting the sand, and when the water recedes and you drag yourself back onto the beach, your own weight settling heavy on your bones, you cry out again.

You shake the water from your head, wailing at the top of your lungs, desolate and blind as you blink the salt away, and then there’s a warm body up against yours, weight melding against you, heat reaching out to drive away a coldness you hadn’t felt until you’d surfaced.

You continue crying as Johnny closes his teeth around a hank of your neck and drags himself on top of you, pressing you down into the sand. You shift to let him settle over you, and all of his weight compresses your body—sandwiching you between himself and the earth, pinning you down in one place.

Something in you still wants to fight. To shake him off—to escape. But all you can do is cry. He enters you with no resistance, and you cry more, harder, until your lungs deflate, and then you take a deep breath and start wailing again.

Saltwater streaming down your face, dripping into your own mouth. Your voice hits the cliff walls, rebounds off the stone until the air fills with your weeping. Johnny shifts on top of you, pressing your head down to the sand.

The vessel you have contained yourself within overturns. You cry.

You cry for yourself. You cry for him. You cry for what you’ve done, what you haven’t, and for what you can never undo. Your lament fills your own ears and spills out again, all across the beach, catching in the wind to fly off into the ether, raised to the birds, to the passing clouds overhead.

You cry with despair of never going back. You cry with the terror of Johnny finally rolling off of you, to dart back into the waves, to leave you here alone again. You cry until your throat hurts, stinging and raw—

And Johnny’s hands, strong and warm, edge beneath your pelt and pull you out, still bawling with every drop of shame you’ve carried in your body since the day you realized you hated yourself.

“Shh, shh,” he murmurs, drawing you up into his chest, arms steady and strong around you. “It’s alright now, bonnie, it’s alright. I’m here.”

You cannot respond to him. Your mouth hangs open only to wail your grief. Your body wracks against him, convulsing, involuntary, as you scream with despair and relief and horror and resolve, too much to contain, too overwhelming now to ever split yourself away from.

You find his arms with your shaking hands and grip on tight. He slips the pads of his thumbs beneath your eyes every so often to clear away your tears, and you feel his mouth press against your forehead. You wait for him to drop you. Wait for him to see the mess you’re making and wash his hands of it.

He doesn’t. Every time another sob wracks you, he grips you tighter.

Eventually—when you begin to wonder if it ever could, if this is all you are now, a squalling bundle of fragile skin pebbling in the cold—it passes.

The next time you pause to draw breath, you find nothing more inside you to disgorge. You begin to shake in Johnny’s arms, trembling with exhaustion, whimpering with clenched eyes.

He breathes slowly against you. Calm and even. He strokes your face with gentle fingers, even and patient, as if there’s nothing more in the world he’d rather do.

You find the courage to meet his gaze when your heartbeat steadies, finding the rhythm in Johnny’s chest to match. You see again what you saw that first day, that next night; you know now what you’ve always known, somewhere inside you. Your face is familiar in the reflections of it in his eyes.

His mouth curls gently as he gazes down at you. His eyes dance in yours, corners creasing as he traces the curve of your cheek. Light catches in his pupils.

You see him clearly, as the sun gives way to the evening, and the moon rises over a cloudless night of stars.

epilogue early access

a/n: shoutout to @/gildui for suggesting screenshots for that one section of text. Thank you to @/bi-writes for trying to figure out how i could keep the formatting with tumblr's coding. Please let me know if alt text is necessary. God forbid a text-based website allow for formatting said text.

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