Oh hi there. Guess who can write in word until her laptop gets a new charger? Yes. I can. Booyah. But, anyway, since I haven't posted anything for Finding Nemo ever, and the pizza's cooking I figured why not. I've got ten minutes. Let's see what we can do here/how IC we can get with the incredibly out there plot. But before we first get started, as I usually do when writing a fic, I'll recommend a piece of music to listen too while reading. Don't ask. It seems to happen a lot though. Nonetheless—Dawn Architects by Wax On Radio was my personal choice for this piece.
Disclaimer: I own very little. I do not own or claim to own any copyrighted materials featured in this work of fiction.
The ocean wasn't as pure as it used to be.
It was his dream. He was back in the ocean, after all that time in the Dentist's fish tank. He had gotten his friend's, his comrades out too. But there was a crucial flaw in his plan. They had gotten to the ocean, yes. But they were trapped in the plastic baggies the dentist had put them in. Bloat had tried to poke his way out whenever he was inflated. But all that did was let in the ocean water. Gill was jealous, even for this small taste of the ocean. But Bloat didn't seem to agree—he quickly stated that the ocean tasted…dirty. Gill disagreed immediately, ferociously defending the ocean as if it were a person.
They floated in the ocean for a long while, waiting to see what came next. Multiple plans from Gill failed—much like his previous escape plans. That problem didn't last long though. Soon enough the gulls took notice. Gurgle was the first to get noticed. He shrieked as a gull scooped his bag up in its bill, uttering the shrill cry of 'Mine'. Luckily for him, the bird had clenched the bag too tightly, cutting it just below the tight knot. Gurgle plummeted to the ocean, and immediately a wave of relief washed over the entire party as he appeared unharmed. He stuck around as long as he could before the gulls began to dive again. The process was repeated for everyone—though Bloat had a different idea about being carried off, and inflated, driving a spine into the unclean bird's chest and forcing it to bite down hard enough to cut the plastic.
A more accurate statement though, is that this process was repeated for everyone but Gill himself. He could taste the irony, as he plummeted back to the ocean, realizing that the cut was too high, and that he was stuck now in the bag. Angry, he swam about in erratic little circles, trying to find a way out for a long while. The others stuck around while he did this, offering encouraging little nothings, and on occasion an idea that failed. Gill was trapped. He couldn't let them be held up by his inability to think a plan through.
'Go,' he said to them, watching their fidgeting, 'I'll find a way out. But you go. Explore the ocean!'
He had seemed light-hearted at the time, though this had never been the case. Yet they dispersed, all save for Peach, who could not move. Yet eventually, even she was carried away by the tide. Gill never saw any of them again, though often times he would dream. For a long time, he thought he was doomed to spend the rest of his days in the plastic bag, the tank water growing filthier every day. The idea tormented him. To spend so long, finally achieve his goal of escaping back into the ocean, and have the pure feel of the water separated from him only by the thin plastic of the bag? It was worse than being in the tank. The waves taunted him as they carried him on, drifting. Sometimes, fish would swim just close enough to ponder at his situation, mock him, and turn away. And at first he had cared. After a while though, he stopped caring. He just lay against the side of the bag, fins barely moving to circulate the water and stare straight ahead with the glassy eyes of one who merely wants to be left to his solitude.
At one point in time, he drifted under the dock where Nigel usually overlooked. The pelican, of course, took notice of the lone bag drifting along, and flew down to investigate further. Perched on the edge of the dock with his head bent down, the pelican was surprised to see him. At first, there were congratulations. As the conversation continued though, the light and airy tone of the bird was darkened to a sympathetic one. Nigel brought his bill close, gnawing on the plastic below the knot for a long while, before it was severed, the rough edges drifting lazily about in the water. Ecstatic, Gill immediately took to swimming about—but something bothered him. Though he successfully hid it from Nigel, who made him promise to come back to Sydney to visit every once and a while, Gill was incredibly disheartened.
The pelican left, and again, the old fish was alone. He found difficulty in picking a direction in which to travel, not knowing any locations to go to. Something troubled him as well though, and he could not think properly. He became shockingly aware of his injury, which seemed to slow him down now, though it had never done so in the tank after he had acclimated himself to it. He swam unbalanced now, sometimes dipping far too low for his liking, and never quite going fast enough.
His displeasure over the unknown something stayed with him as he travelled alone though, and he tried to distract himself by thinking of where he had used to live, or what his name had once been. It hadn't always been Gill, of course. He knew that. Or at least he thought he did. He simply couldn't remember anymore. What was his name…?
His inability to remember again made that discomfort become clear. So he stopped thinking about that, and then began to think of his former tankmates. How selfish he had been—now that he paused to think of it, he realized this. They had never known the ocean. They surely hadn't thought about living there until he had planted the idea into their minds. Now they were alone in the unfamiliar blue, where the inhabitants were cruel, their vision was limited by strangely opaque liquid, and the water was—
Gill remembered. He knew now what it was that didn't feel right.
It was the ocean.
The ocean wasn't as he remembered it. No beautiful fronds waving to and fro, no anemone's housing Clown Fish that didn't make anyone laugh, no…no beauty. The water wasn't as…clean as he had thought it to be. Dangers abounded in every direction.
This wasn't the ocean he remembered. He had glamorized it in his mind, when again he dreamt of being back. Swimming about in the currents that swept you about like a ship in a storm. The bright, colorful scenery, swarming with school upon school of fish. No. This wasn't his ocean. This shouldn't have been anyone's ocean.
But he couldn't go back. No one could. He was alone now, in the vastness of the ocean, and the vastness of death, for they were one and the same to him now. His night terror had come to life to stalk him for the rest of his days.
Gill never found the place he longed to be, where the currents swept you about like a ship in a storm, and you giggled voraciously, and the bright scenery was crowded with countless schools of equally diverse and bright fish. He never found the ocean of his dreams, the one he had told his tankmates of. All he found in the ocean was despair and grief. It occurred to him each and every day that remained of his life that there was something wrong. Something that he could never shake from his mind.
The ocean wasn't as pure as it used to be.