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Gillion was pressed into something warm and soft. He couldn’t tell what, eyes covered by the surface. Strangely, it rose and fell out of sync to his own breathing.
With every inhale he took, his major wound brushed the surface he laid on, sparking pain whenever it made contact. He didn’t have the energy to comprehend where he was; there was no hope for him to try and move from the painful position.
The discomfort thankfully didn’t last long. Something pressed against his shoulders, lifting him up and relocating him in such a way that he no longer scraped his wound against the unknown surface. He appreciated the action, though he couldn’t put it into words.
A mysterious collection of thin, stick-like objects —a hand, he noted after much consideration— dragged through his hair. It caused his hair to spill over itself before it was sorting it back out, letting the strands rest where they belonged. This hand repeated the action a few times before it settled between his shoulder blades.
It hurt, and for a moment he couldn’t recall why before he remembered how everything hurt. Everywhere hurt. He could ignore it but it all hurt and it wouldn’t stop unless he let it stop but if he let it stop then everything would stop and—
Another weight pressed against his leg. The action triggered an intense buzzing sensation that jolted him from his thoughts and encompassed his entire lower body. He could feel a coolness radiating up his body from that point, especially as it reached up to his chest where the pain was strongest. After the weight was removed, he still felt the numbing chill and subtle buzzing.
The hand on his back had shifted to his arm, running along it for a moment before it clipped against the gruesome punctures in his shoulder. The ones that refused to heal and formed a cruel, gorey mockery of shooting stars as the claws raked along his back in the fall. He felt his lips part to release some semblance of a surprised noise. All he could hear was the crashing of waves from below the water.
For a while, Gillion felt paralyzed. Stuck breathing heavily, trying to keep breathing as he laid stomach-down on some uneven surface. He worried if he didn’t focus on where the inhale went, he wouldn’t remember to exhale and start the cycle again.
The paralysis did not fade, but the ocean filling his head did. Its relentless roar gradually dulled into pleasant background noise, instead allowing him to notice a strange splashing noise. He didn't have much time to try and parse out what it was as another new sound made itself known.
“Gill?” A low, soft voice beckoned. With it, the surface he laid on shuddered almost imperceptibly.
Even if his jaw wasn't pressed against his resting place, he doubted he would have responded. Instead, he blinked slowly, trying to understand the formless shapes he saw.
“Gill,” the voice whispered again, “we’re only a few hours away. Are you okay?”
He still couldn't speak. The voice was asking of him things he couldn't do.
“You don’t have to talk,” the voice promised. “Just tap your fingers, I’ll feel it.”
It was difficult to feel his own hand. In a frightening second, he realized how detached his extremities truly were. His arm at one side stretched up past his head to anchor him on something unknown. Once he knew that arm again, twitching his fingers was easy. He didn't have to move them far to hit them against a surface. There, he tap-tap-tapped.
The voice spoke again, shocking him as the words buzzed against his fingertips. He was so distracted by the sensation that he missed everything the voice said. It wasn’t long before it repeated itself.
“Gill, tap once for yes, two for no. Are you okay?”
That sent his hand alight, launching it into a flurry of taps that doubled each instance of one. The surface beneath him lurched in surprise but that didn't restrict the action. The thrill of no no no no no no no.
It stopped like an anchor smashing through wood, the hand on his arm moving to press his hand flat.
“Gill, chill,” the voice ordered before it laughed, making his hand and body jolt with each pushed sound. “God, I feel like such an asshole. Just, maybe don't drum on my neck like that.”
The hand covering his was removed, allowing him a final rebellious double tap.
“Someone's feeling terrible,” a new, surprising voice drawled. It was slightly higher and lighter than the other one, but thicker in a way Gillion could picture so clearly in a dim and odorous space tainted with alcohol.
Gillion tried to move his arm so he could push himself vertical, but it hooked on a mysterious object, stopping it short. He didn't tug. The energy in his movements dropped as soon as he met the resistance.
“Do you wanna move?” The first voice questioned him, a hand settling on his arm once again.
A tap, at first.
Then two, as he recalled the agony of earlier. Earlier what? He didn't know. But it had hurt.
The voice responded again, “Okay, let me know if you want to move.”
One tap. As his finger touched the surface, he heard a wooden knock echo in turn. It locked up his aching body for a moment as he waited for more knocks to follow.
“There isn’t any knocking, Gill.” He didn’t trust the voice at first. It was the voice of deception.
When no knocks came, he loosened up, turning his head to mumble. “Sorry,” he said, addressing the not-liar trustworthy.
“Do you want to talk?” The trustworthy questioned.
Two taps. He felt dimly surprised to hear no loud clunks.
“There’s no knocking. It’s just me and Jay here, Gill. We’re in a rowboat on the way to Featherbrook. Jay’s mom is gonna fix you right up.”
He tapped with no rhythm; there were no more words at his disposal.
“Yeah, Gill. My mom’s great at healing,” the other voice agreed, voice even higher with that same heaviness as before. It sounded like a rope pulled taught, lifting while it strains from impossible weight.
It made Gillion's head hurt to try and understand anything, so he accepted the hazy confusion of everything. The presence beneath him faded into crashing ocean. In turn, the heavy yet light voice did too, plummeting beneath the depths.
Tapping was comforting. His fingers twitched with no rhythm, not even resting when something covered them with warm bumps. The taps meant he wasn’t alone in the vast ocean.
Ocean water smells salty, every so often tainted by the distinct rotting animal. He smelled blood. Worse than decay, blood was so salty and familiar, a staple of the routine he had going.
Waking up to the smell of blood was always the worst. Maybe the burning in his chest was from tearing open a wound during the night. It would explain the blood. He hated blood.
The red clouds choked him when fights went particularly terrible. Edyn cringed when the wounds hadn't closed. He cried when the blood couldn't distract from the knives across his body.
The knives in his chest. The knives in his legs. The knives in his head. The knife on his arm, stabbing in again and again and he was shaking.
“—not real! Gill, come on man, please.”
He was shaking, an arm on his hand- no. A hand on his arm shook him, disturbing the buzzing and pain and causing more in the process.
“You have to tell me when you're falling asleep. I know you don't want to talk, but sleeping is gonna make it worse.”
Dread crawled down his spine like insects. They were biting at his dorsal fin, turning the appendage into an irritating and constant hindrance.
“No bugs,” a voice affirmed. “You're scaring me, man. Can you tap again?”
Beetle, centipedes, flies running down his back. He was shaking again. Not as aggressively as before, but worse off for it with the internal tremors shuddering through him. Something small, but much bigger than the insects, settled on his back, crushing the bugs and ending their march. Something warm draped on top of him, shielding him from everything outside and trapping everything else in.
The quaking subsided. He was whole, melded together by the heat enveloping him. Water dripped down his neck as it ran along his hair and failed to settle in his scalp. He was not underwater. He was on the surface.
“I know you don't like being dry,” someone whispered into his ear, breath blowing against his skin.
A sudden shiver sent more water running in rivulets down his neck. It chilled the warm skin, a shocking contrast to the heat in the rest of his body. More water streamed down his head. It ran along his face like tears, his neck like sweat.
“We’re almost there. Don't give up yet.”
He hadn’t given up anything. Except, maybe his body and entire self. But that was to Chip and Jay, who had saved him and helped him in his time of need and would save and help him once more. He would never give up the companionship he had formed with the two.
“That’s sweet, Gill.” The words vibrated against his shoulder.
It felt odd. Achingly familiar, and yet uncomfortable all at once.
“Sorry,” the words stopped buzzing his skin, “That was my mouth.”
Mouth of what?
He couldn't tell what was up anymore. Heat against his back, heat beneath him. Buzzing in front and yet also above.
“I’m gonna describe what's happening right now, okay?”
He was enamored with the way something in front of him shuddered.
“We are in a rowboat on the water. Jay is at the back, rowing. We're both at the front. I'm sitting with my legs out, and you're on top of me. Jay tossed her jacket over you and I have my arms wrapped around you. Your arm is hooked around my neck.”
He could picture the scene in his mind. The pieces seemed fractured and spread apart, but it made some kind of image that stuck. Him, twisted up in a bundle of fabric above an unidentifiable person with an unidentifiable body and an unidentifiable face. The black ooze stained the cloth. His skin had a sickly pallor.
“Not quite it,” the person warned, a mosaic of a mouth shifting.
His mental picture washed away. Water flowed along his face, making his lip twitch as the cool liquid ran over it. It dripped off from there wherever it didn’t stick and down into an abyss. The water soothed the unpleasant dryness of his scales. He hadn’t been in the water in so long.
He held the distorted image of a person in his mind again, trying to imagine how the water dripped from them and onto him. As far as he knew, only Undersea kin could do something like that. This person was not of the Undersea. He felt inclined to thank them for this. They had no obligation to provide him water nor comfort, he was not their savior.
His lips parted in preparation for speech, but he hesitated. The words wouldn't come.
“You don’t have to say anything, Gill.”
He truly felt that he had to speak up. Something within him smothered the words.
“You’d do the same for me,” the voice comforted.
The tight voice agreed, “And you shouldn’t apologize for this, Gill. I know you and your tendency to blame yourself. None of this is your fault, it’s okay that you need help.”
He didn't have the energy to consider that. He didn't have the energy to even fathom what there was to blame. His mind was trapped in the bottom of a tiny boat amidst a wild ocean.
“Y’know, it is your fault,” a new third voice claimed.
The voice was chipper, words slurring together with this subtle buzzing. It lifted at the ends of words and had a nasal quality so familiar that it burned. Gillion recognized this person. He could not remember why.
“If you weren't such a baby, you wouldn't be here,” the nasal voice berated him. “They should leave you here.”
He didn't know who the voice was talking about. His head was pounding. His lips were dry and cracked as he tried to reply.
“You know you’re going to die, right?” The voice paused to take a mucus-filled inhale. “I'll see you in Hell, buddy. Aren't you excited to see where you left me?”
The heat on his back began to burn.
“It’s only fair that we both die alone, right? I mean, it's your fault I was dragged to Hell. Now it's your fault that you're gonna join me.”
He wanted to scream. Nothing makes sense, nothing makes sense, nothing makes sense. His mouth was moving but he could feel nothing else beyond the heat. He could hear nothing else but the crackling flame. Who was talking to him, who was condemning him, what was his name? When did he die?
There was something pressing on his face. It was cool, damp, and so reminiscent of something and he could not remember but he could hear the nasally voice ranting beside him that it was time for him to join me, join me you failure.
With the pressure on his face, he could feel how his mouth moved rapidly. Out of his control, his lips formed letters and his lungs pushed air and together there were words. They sprinted away like birds taking off as he approached. He knew his mouth understood something he did not. His speech uttered an idea he couldn't comprehend.
Gillion is shaking again, he is being shook, he shakes. He shook. He was shaking. He was shaking. He was being shook. He couldn’t speak in ways that made sense. Time was something for people who hear. Time was something for people who could feel. He was in agony. He was deaf and blind in a world of time as someone who was now timeless.
Gillion was still. Something was happening. It was consistent and present and grounding in that it felt stagnant yet bubbling.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
It was continuous. It was ongoing. It was consistent and unending and brief and eternal and different.
The third voice was gone. The first and second missing. He dreaded the idea that he was alone.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Continuous.
Unending.
Different.
The taps meant he wasn’t alone in the vast ocean.
The taps meant he wasn’t alone in the vast ocean.
The taps meant he wasn’t alone in the vast ocean.
He was not alone. It was vast, but he was not alone.
“I’m sorry, Gill. You're okay. I'm so sorry,” said the first voice.
He was empty, drained of life. He couldn’t think, speak, or move. He was a body, limp and housing such a timid soul. Soon, he would be gone.
Gillion was being moved. His head lurched as he realized that it was beginning to hang limp from his body, rather than resting against something like it had been for several hours. His brain felt nonexistent, as if his skull was hollowed out in an effort to make their travel go quicker. Looking around, it seemed to have worked.
The rowboat had been tied to a relatively short dock, one that looked too tiny to ever suit a vessel even as small as the Big Chipper. A dirt path trailed its way up a hill, a steep and brief incline that blocked all view of the island they had arrived at.
Arms shook his body. A bit rougher than Gillion would’ve liked, the movements disturbed his gaping wound and sent pain burning throughout his entire torso. However, Gillion still turned his head to see who the arms belonged to. It was Chip, whose bare chest was coated in black ooze and pinkened skin from the unrelenting sun. His eyes were narrowed, flicking across Gillion’s face like he was a puzzle, observing him with the same analytics as Jay would.
“You with us?” Chip asked, mouth and voice not lining up. That was normal, by then. Sounds and sights didn’t always match up, but it was merely another aspect of exhausted confusion Gillion was forced to accept.
Gillion nodded, almost accidentally allowing his head to loll as he forgot the loss of an ever present structure behind it. “Where else?” He breathed out, stiff arms blindly moving to try and grab onto Chip’s forearms.
Despite his limited physical capacity, Gillion managed to assist in his rise from the boat. Once standing, his legs shook. He couldn’t really feel them, it was almost like they were full of minnows desperate to escape a tank. Staring down at the numb limbs revealed no sign of the hundred of tiny organisms except the visible tremors.
“Hey Gill, eyes up here for a sec?” Chip called, drawing Gillion’s attention to his face. He had a smudge of something green across his cheek. Or maybe orange? Gillion hadn’t noticed it before.
“You there?” Chip questioned. The smudge disappeared before Gillion’s very eyes. Strange.
Gillion nodded, focusing instead on Chip’s eyes. Brown, and the pattern his iris seemed painted with was so captivating that Gillion was certain he could trail every brushstroke for hours and never be bored.
“Jay’s on the dock. You see her?”
Gillion dragged his gaze to the dock. Sure enough, Jay stood there, slumped with a shocking amount of burden. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to hold it for her. With her, even. He nodded, for Chip, and for her.
“I’m going to hold one of your arms, and you’re going to grab onto hers with the other. Then, the two of us will help pull you out. Okay?”
Gillion didn’t give any confirmation this time, merely loosely letting go of Chip and offering it out to Jay. She startled into action, panic overtaking her prior expression of exhaustion, and grabbed tightly onto Gillion. It was surprisingly difficult to disembark the boat. Gillion’s wound protested every second, his legs didn’t stop shaking, and for all of Chip and Jay’s support, his body felt too weak to move at any pace other than sluggish. Usually, Gillion could launch himself all the way up to the lower deck of the Albatross without even needing a foothold, just water deep enough for the momentum to build up. But then, Gillion was taking minutes just to stand up and take a single step.
Jay grabbed Gillion’s other hand quickly as he finally got all the way onto the dock. He sagged forwards, doing his best to stay standing, using Jay’s hands as a railing rather than a hook in hopes of easing the agonizing tugging on his injury and making it easier to keep going towards their destination. Jay easily supported his arms, elbows bent to help keep him pushing down, holding the rest of him up.
“Good job, Gill,” she complimented, soft and placating. He hated hearing her use that tone. The comfort was withering, just like his life, as it faded more and more towards finality.
Chip was quick to join them on the dock, boat sloshing in the water from the force he used rising from it. He flapped his hands, fingers curling and uncurling as he went through the motions to remove his stiffness. Dimly, Gillion considered how difficult it would be to go through the familiar stretching himself.
“Okay,” Chip began. “We're going to carry you again. If it'll help, you can grab onto me first and then move your arm around Jay.”
Chip sidled beside him, bending down slightly to make it easier for Gillion to wrap his arm around his neck. Gillion drew in a deep breath, trying to get rid of the terrifying feeling that he was going to fall, and quickly swung his arm around Chip’s neck. Chip let out a choked noise of surprise, one hand coming to Gillion’s to hold his wrist and anchor it while the other wrapped around his hip. Jay deftly maneuvered Gilliom’s other arm across her shoulders, mirroring Chip’s hold.
“Let’s get moving,” she declared. “We have a bit of a walk before we reach my mom’s.”
Gillion groaned, unable to stop himself from expressing his discomfort and pain. Echoing him, Chip groaned, albeit dramatically as he held out the noise. Jay sighed out a groan like a petulant scholar who had no time for dealing with whiny children.
“Y’know Gill, you’re like a sack of bricks,” Chip remarked.
Gillion smiled faintly, head dipping forwards. Jay and Chip continued to talk amongst each other, seemingly revitalized into talking now that they were reaching their destination. Gillion couldn’t follow along very well, mainly focused on staying awake and helping Jay and Chip carry him. It was disorienting to be upright and yet not touching the ground, instead lifted by two taller humans who spoke in tongues he couldn’t understand.
He knew they were speaking Common, and he knew he was speaking it with them only moments prior, but it was like his brain had unraveled and everything that was there was no longer there. The humans didn't seem to mind, continuing to walk.