as leviathans
.
.
.
I wanted a metamorphosis,
a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer.
I wanted the earth to open up,
to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn.
I wanted to see the city buried
fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
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.
.
He still dreams of Gerry, even now. Thinks of him with the stitches in his chest, cold inside the morgue, or even worse. His mouth wide open and stronger than anything, up to his eyeballs in their father's blood. Victor wakes up in a cold sweat, and the wolves howl just beyond the border, the sound mixed in with the constant ticking of the clock tower.
Sometimes Victor thinks they're living in the dark ages, but no one has any records of before, so. So it goes.
Storybrooke, exact location unknown. Somewhere in the North, he's certain, close to the coast. The ocean's salt spray clinging heavily to the air and great, metallic ships leaving the harbor, glittering in the sun.
He works at the genhosp, one of only five qualified doctors in a town of almost four hundred, and the only one trained in surgery. He handles what the other doctors can't treat and what the Party members can't touch. Being excommunicated has side effects.
"Dr. Whale!" He appears often, like an unwelcome vision, Dr. Hopper. Victor isn't surprised so much as annoyed, as it happens every other week. Hopper is a nervous man by nature, with large, bright eyes and twitching hands. He clutches tightly to a stack of papers as he scurries over to Victor. "I was wondering if you could take on some of the mals today, just get them into the new system. I'll assign them later to the others, I know that's not your area, but with Moreau out sick—"
"It's fine," he says smoothly, taking the folders from his shaking fingers. Hopper isn't a member either, but for reasons other than a lack of citizenship. That itself is cause enough to be nervous. He gives what he hopes is an encouraging smile to the other man, but he can't tell whether he succeeded or not. "It's a slow day, anyway."
Hopper nods his thanks before running off again, stuttering out hesitant commands to the nurses on staff.
Victor sighs, skimming his fingers along the sides of the folders. Inventory days are always awful.
"Please state your name for the record," Victor recites dully, tapping the screen to begin the recording. The red lights twitch eerily around her face, tiny crimson bulbs tracking the smallest motions of her mouth, following every dilation of her large, black pupils. "Now that the recording has begun, I ask that you remain as detailed and truthful as possible."
"I've done this before, you know," the woman huffs, settling more fully into the cold, chrome chair. "I know the drill."
"Please, miss, it's standard procedure."
She sighs again, flicking her hair over her shoulder. Her ears, he notices suddenly, are pointed. "Ruby Lucas, mal-phys, symptoms moderate. What happened to Jekyll?"
"He's dead." Victor watches idly as Ruby's pupils shrink suddenly, the red lights buzzing as her eyes change. "Could you explain your condition in as much detail as possible?"
"Elongation of the nails," she stutters, working to conceal the surprise from her face, "pointed ears and abnormally sharp teeth. Yellow irises. Those are the external ones. How did he die?"
"Killed himself. Any internal afflictions?" Her eyes, he realizes as he flicks his gaze back to study the recording, are gold.
"Enhanced vision and sense of smell. Increased speed and strength. Jekyll already had all of this down." She glares at him, as if blaming him for the problem. "Why did he kill himself?"
He sighs, finally diverting his attention from the screen. The red lights still hover uncertainly around her features, and she looks unearthly, her pale skin, her dark hair, her yellow eyes. She looks like she'll eat him alive. "Drones were coming. Jekyll was a mal-psych, apparently. Someone found out and reported him. Now, can we continue with the examination?"
Ruby is silent for a moment, considering the information. Victor can remember the newspaper articles, the research, the trials, the money and the money and the money. Mal-psychs always were the most insidious, the hardest to detect, the hardest to control.
Finally, she nods, and her eyes darken. The red lights hum approvingly.
Things flood. Information is lost, artifacts ruined, houses destroyed, sometimes towns. Record systems are rebuilt from scratch every few years to prevent water damage, or worse. There are stories, myths really, of times when the world was a desert, a wasteland, but he can't quite imagine it. Everything is water or ice or salt-heavy air.
London was worse, he knows. The weather there was unpredictable, even before the Flood, and he can remember days spent in the upper floors of their house, the water roaring outside. His father's eyes on his brother. Gerhardt, my brave little boy. My little soldier.
(Gerry had their father's heart in his mouth, up to his eyeballs in blood. The money and the money and the money.)
Victor doesn't miss London. He drinks anything but water, nowadays.
Ruby works at the diner. He saw her around, even before she showed up in his office with clawed hands and yellow eyes and questions about a dead man. He knew she was a mal, the scarring over her wrist enough indication of the fact. Sometimes the trackers don't go in easy, not if the kid is too young to understand and they've run low on anesthesia. The Mills kid was the same way. Victor spent hours getting the blood out from under his fingernails.
"More coffee?" Ruby cocks her hip, snapping her bubblegum as she waits for a reply. The scar on her arm is tough and tangled, like the branches of a tree. Her lips are painted red.
He shakes his head. "I've got work in thirty." The bells chime, as if verifying his story, and the wolves howl. No one notices, though, and he wonders if they've filtered it out, like they've filtered out the drones waiting at the end of every street and the constant, pounding ticking of the clock.
She shrugs. "Suit yourself, Doc."
He considers correcting her on his name, but it's useless, at this point. No one ever seems to remember.
The rain crashes against the window, the lightning flashing angrily. His father is dead, in a heap on the hardwood floors.
Gerry stands and slouches uncertainly to his brother. "Viiiiictor."
"What did you do?" he asks.
Wakes up screaming.
Names have origins, he knows. They were lost along with everything else, swallowed up in the Flood, passed from mouth to mouth at the bottom of the ocean. Some of them are easy enough, the colors, like gold or red, the animals, like whales or crickets.
Mary Margaret Blanchard's name is unclear. Her blood red lips and soot black hair and skin so white you can see through it in patches, watch the blood pump the color blue through her wrists if you hold them to the light. She's sleeping with David Nolan, but no one talks about it because people actually like Nolan, and Party members aren't meant for goddamn mutants, not even the mal-skins, not even the pretty ones.
The drones catch up to them one day in the spring. The color of their blood against the streets is as red as her open mouth, and the flowers bloom like bruises in the trees.
Ruby scares him sometimes, even when she's not trying. There's something awful in the way that she moves, a lupine quality to the way she grins over the counter at him, too sharp, too many teeth. Now that he's seen her in the glow of the red lights, her eyes seem unsettling more than alluring. Like she could devour him.
"What're you doing here, anyway? In Storybrooke?" She says it in an off-hand way, but she's too casual about the delivery. She wants to know too much. Her eyes glitter in the fluorescent lights, beautifully and terribly.
He swirls the vodka around in his glass and considers, before figuring the story won't do him any damage, least of all with her. Letting go of information is dangerous, but she's a mal-phys and there's little chance she's going to use anything against him. "I'm from London. Took a boat here. The rest is history."
He hates few things more than he hates that that particular phrase survived. The rest is never history. History doesn't exist in a world without papers or systems that don't break down or permanent places to live. The rhapsodes sing in bars until they drown. The Aeneid died out a few years ago, but the Iliad lives on. Things flood. The money and the money and the money.
Ruby laughs, and her yellow eyes flash. For a moment, she looks angry, she looks rail-thin and desperate and hungry. Her hands are claws and her teeth are knives. "The rest is never history," she says, smiling, teeth gleaming. "And we're closing up, Doc."
"Victor," he corrects abruptly. "My name is Victor."
She turns, considering, before striding over to him and holding out her hand. "Alright," she finally says. "I'm Ruby. Nice to meet you."
He smiles. "Likewise."
Killian Jones is in the waiting room of the genhosp, his chest torn near his ribs.
"Hooks," he explains when he stumbles uncertainly toward Victor, his good hand running with blood, "awful little fuckers."
Killian is one of those men you should never know very well, that mothers warn their daughters about, with his leather jackets and black eyes and the angry set of his jaw and the hook replacing his left hand, all of it screaming danger. A mal-psych, the bright blue letter psi tattooed on his neck, unlike the black sigma that was on Mary Margaret's collarbone or the red phi on Ruby's ankle.
Victor likes him well enough. His accent reminds him too much of home, sometimes.
"An accident on the ship," he supplies later, when he's not actively bleeding. "Bloody idiots. I'll be fine in a few minutes."
"You're staying overnight, alright? I don't want to have to drag you back here, I've got better things to do."
Killian smirks, apparently thinking it over. "Fine. We don't have to travel for a few days, still, maybe it'd be best to rest up for a bit."
"Oh," Victor says, glancing up from the red screen as the lights flicker over the wound, assessing the healing. "Are you headed back to the West?"
"Only sort of," he admits quietly. "They're officially kicking me out. I'm just getting my things, and then I'm never to return." Killian sighs. "Bastards." The lights hum softly, his skin glowing red, shining off the metal curve of his hook.
Victor drinks, most of the time. Whiskey or straight vodka, like the kind they use at work when they've run out of antiseptic. He's perfected the art of operating while buzzed. Don't touch what you're not supposed to. Don't cut too deep. Don't fuck up.
Henry Mills is a mal-psych, and when he turns ten he gets the standard blue psi inked onto his skin, on his upper arm. Dr. Hopper holds his hand like it matters and Mayor Mills glares through the whole ordeal. Compliance is key. Mary Margaret and David were still looking at each other when they were shot in the streets. Gerry with their father's heart in his mouth.
The money and the money and the money.
(Don't cut too deep, he reminds himself as he stands over a body laid to waste on the table. Don't fuck up.)
Killian runs, but no one is really surprised. There are stories, the rhapsodes sing, of places that not even the floodwaters can reach. A ship that could withstand even the worst storm. Killian always was a great sailor, with salt in the cuts on his arms and terrible eyes.
One of the techs at the genhosp, a pretty little thing with big, blue eyes and a perfect smile, leaves at the same time, but no one seems to make the connection. Aurora's skin is unblemished and pale, her deceased husband was a soldier for the Party, and the lines of her body seem tired, her eyes so blank and sad.
Victor hopes, but he doesn't dare believe.
"What happened to you?"
There's blood on his clothing. He didn't even bother to change out of his scrubs before ordering his first drink, and he cradles his tumbler with some kind of desperation.
Victor laughs. "Isn't mine."
Ruby's eyes are too unearthly. He downs the drink and stutters his way home.
The winter. The waves freeze, sometimes mid-crash over the shore. Gold's men are slowly chipping the ice away from the sides of buildings, from the roofs of houses. One day, Victor goes to work, and there are only four doctors in a town of four hundred, and only one trained surgeon.
"We're recruiting from the Mainland," Moreau tells him in a hushed whisper. "We'll have someone else in a few weeks. Pipt's got the mals until then."
No one mentions Hopper after that, and most people let him slip unnoticed, into the rest of history. Any records of him wash away in a few weeks, with the next storm. With his blood in some gutter on the edge of town, though no one notices that either.
The wolves howl just beyond the border.
There's a line of mals down the hallway in the east wing of the genhosp, and he walks past them, growing more uncomfortable with every deformed body, every angry glare. Jefferson's eyes, bright and unnaturally green, and he laughs, his hands clamped tight over his wrist.
"Almost tea time!" he shouts excitedly as Victor passes him. He lifts his hands from his wrist and checks the red tattoo like a clock. When he grins, his teeth are sharp. "Almost!"
The rest are silent, and it weighs on the atmosphere, heavy and oppressive. He's nearly out of the way, almost in the clear, when a hand with bright red nails clutches his arm. He looks down, noticing the tips of her fingers, sharp and pale, the nail polish almost covering the hard claws.
"Victor!" Ruby smiles at him, her gold eyes flashing. "Didn't expect to see you all the way over here."
He attempts to smile in return, but he can't tell if he succeeds. "This is my territory, actually. You'll move back to the west wing once we find another psychiatrist."
She frowns slightly, but doesn't ask about Hopper. Victor thinks maybe she doesn't want to know, this time. "Well," she says, drawing the word out into two syllables, "once I'm done with this I was thinking we should go get something to eat. This line's gonna take forever, and I'm sick of food at the diner."
He hesitates. "Well," he begins, about to make up some excuse, but his answer is cut short by another one of Jefferson's high-pitched laughs. Instead, he finds himself saying, "Yeah, okay. I'm sick of the food here, too. My shift's done at eight."
"Great, I'll see you then!" Ruby smiles again, and the lights shine off of her sharp, white teeth.
The waves knock out the houses closest to the coast, and twenty die. The Mayor relays this information in thirty seconds and moves onto mal tagging policy without a moment of time lost.
The rest is never history, Victor reminds himself in a white building at the highest point in town. The floodwaters never reach high enough to knock it down, though sometimes he wishes they would.
"Why aren't you miserable?" he asks Ruby. He feels drunk, which hardly ever happens with him, and she looks beautiful in an awful, otherworldly way that makes him hate her, just for a moment. For making him want her.
(It's different in the Far West. You'll be a Party member in five years, Elizabeth had told on the docks. Elizabeth had hated him for what he did to them all, and he had loved her, hadn't he? You'll do whatever it takes, and then you'll come back home to complete your work.)
"I should be, I guess," Ruby mutters. She stretches her legs out on his couch, and the rainwater beats against the windows. Sometimes Victor is happy he didn't lose his license, happy he chose leaving the West, because then he'd be at the bottom of the hill, dead or waterlogged or spirited away like Hopper or Jekyll or any number of Problem Citizens. "I just figure, if I'm going to die, I might as well be as happy as possible before then."
"Who says you're going to die?" he says stupidly, and she laughs.
"It doesn't need saying, Doc," she replies swiftly, stealing the bottle from his hands. "Might as well live while we can, don't you think?"
(Elizabeth had glared at him. What did you do?)
He nods. "Yeah, I do."
"We were crossing the border," she tells him on another night, in another voice. "Mom was running and I was running and they caught up. Got her in the head. Me, they gave a warning shot. Sent back home to Granny, early tattoo and house farther down the hill. All very polite."
She makes a gun with her thumb and forefinger, the claws seeming to grow momentarily, and points her hand at Victor. "Boom," she says, and mimes pulling the trigger.
He wonders sometimes if Elizabeth sold her ring. It was a large diamond, nearly impossible to get in London, and she had loved it. When he got the grant money for his experiment, they celebrated with a lavish engagement party.
A year later, his father was spread out on the dining room floor, and Gerry was up to his elbows in blood, covering the blue tattoo on his forearm.
"Test subject unable to withstand neurological pressure," Victor had recited dully into his mic. "Hypothesis disproven. Formula unable to cure maladies of psychosis."
Gerhardt groaned from behind a locked door. "Viiiictor."
A gunshot to the head, and a ship to the Far West. Storybrooke, exact location unknown. Salt-heavy air and a girl with golden eyes. The records of his failed experiment gone in less than a month, burned to ash instead of ruined by water. His father burned, his brother swept along in a current.
The memories remain, but he supposes one fine morning, they'll wash away too.
"Gerhardt," he murmurs. "My brother. Volunteered himself for testing." Victor laughs, and even to his ears it's terrible. "He was a mal-psych, obsessed with curing himself. I thought I had a formula to fix him."
"What did you do?" Ruby asks.
(What did you do? his father asked, and he asked, and Elizabeth asked.
Unless the symptoms are obvious, they tell you in medschool, mal-psychs are extremely difficult to diagnose, and their pathologies are even harder to control. Use caution when handling them.
What they don't tell you in medschool: it's extremely easy to fake a mal-psych diagnosis, and extremely easy to convince someone they have it. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time near the wrong Party member and—)
He smiles. "I made him worse."
Jefferson should be a mal-psych, by most people's standards, but that's not what they teach in medschool. Mals are born with the condition. Any side effects are handled accordingly. Those driven insane during their lifetime stay in their previous category. Handled accordingly.
Sometimes, when almost everyone is gone for the day, Victor can hear him laughing in the psychward. He huddles in the corner of his room, knees to his chest and head flung back, a thick, tangled scar sliced across the side of his neck. He's either going to die in that room, or he'll escape, tear out the tracker with his own fingers and skip town. He could do it, if he tried, but sometimes Victor thinks he likes the cage. Maybe one day, he won't.
In the next room, big, blue eyes staring at him from a window when he passes, the girl they all call the beauty threading her fingers between the bars.
"Let me out," she whispers pitifully, reaching her hand to him as far as it can go. "Help me."
Victor can see the black tattoo snaking up her neck, the rope-like scar on her wrist. Watches the light shine through her skin.
Gold sells magic. Most people used to have no use for it, preferred the buzzing red lights searching and fixing and humming around their bodies, but every once in a while, people found that they didn't mind healing themselves at a price, no matter how awful it was. Gold would smile, hand over a bottle, and wait for when he needed them.
When the Flood first began, when the dams broke and cities tumbled to the ground, people started to turn to magic again. Men like Gold became gods. Wizards stopped being a party joke and instead became prophets, messiahs, the only ones with the answers. Men like Victor moved up the hill, hoped they had enough antiseptic for the week, and prayed the waves couldn't reach them.
Gold appears every once in a while in the genhosp, never for himself. He disappears swiftly and quietly to the psychward and doesn't leave until visiting hours are over. Victor never asks who he is there for. He doesn't really want to know.
"I'm cutting you off," Ruby tells him. It's dark, and the storms have finally died down. An old man dead on his table, and a young man who introduced himself as August cried as if he were a little boy again. "You need to go home, get some sleep."
"Only if you're there," he says to her and smiles because this comes easy to him, the flirtation, the crude remarks. They're easier.
There's something like pity in her eyes when she pries the glass from his fingers. "Victor," she says, and it's a warning.
"Ruby," he replies, eyes roaming over her angular features, the lines of her face looking sharp enough to cut him.
And they're friends, he thinks, as much as anyone can be in the end-times, so instead of yelling at him, she rolls her eyes and sighs and suppresses a smirk.
"Here," she mutters, crossing the table to tug him to his feet. "Let me help you."
The beauty is gone, one morning. Pipt checks up on her at eight, as he does every day, but a half-hour later she's vanished, the door swung open, blood on the ground and her tracker in the middle of the red puddle, smashed to bits. The drones are sweeping the genhosp, but every person swears up and down they haven't seen her.
Two hours later, the search is over and they move on, because she's a mal-skin anyway, not dangerous, and if she dies, she dies, and the problem solves itself.
(All magic comes with a price, Gold reminded him in London, as his arm grew back in a grotesque display. Mine is, you owe me a favor. Do we have a deal?)
Gold leaves, too, one day in the spring, and minutes later, as if he had planned it, all evidence of him, the shop, his records, the bottles piled neatly on the shelves, are ruined in a flood and thrown away.
"Gerry," he screams, and he knows that he's dreaming, but it feels real and terrible anyway.
His brother lurches toward him, his chest stitched up and their father's heart in his hands. He opens his mouth to reply, but blood pours out.
Lower down the hill, houses are rebuilt. People desperate for shelter move back in them and wait for the blade to fall on their necks. They wait, silently and dutifully.
(Things fall apart, the rhapsodes sing, reciting Yeats from memory as best they can. The center cannot hold.)
"I'm sorry," he says to Ruby, because he's drunk and lonely and so goddamn tired. Sleep couldn't cure him anymore, he thinks. "I'm sorry about all of it, alright?"
Then, because it's her, she shrugs, nudges him with her shoulder. Her eyes don't seem frightening anymore, when the color shines like gold coins in the light. "Alright," she agrees.
His room is dark, and he and Ruby are laying side by side in the darkness, not moving, not speaking. Almost afraid to breathe. Outside, the lightning flashes, illuminating the room momentarily, brighter than the watery sun, and the shadows of them dance along the wall as if they were alive.
"Do you think you could ever leave?" he asks her, and he knows the question is rhetorical, maybe. He would never actually do it, he thinks. Not with the drones and the wolves and the ticking of the clock tower.
"I don't know," Ruby says in reply, and her voice is serious, considering. "Where would we go?"
("And so the Trojans buried Hector," the rhapsode sings solemnly. "Breaker of horses.")
He kisses her on a whim, because she's kind and beautiful. Because he hasn't done what he's wanted to do in so long, and he feels so goddamn tired.
"Are you happy?" he asks her, almost desperate, the words soft against her skin. "Are you happy?"
She shakes her head, some of her dark hair falling against his shoulder. The sensation makes him shiver, makes something in him reach his hands to her waist and his mouth to her neck. "No," she admits.
"Do you want to be?"
The rain stops in the early morning, and some of the water recedes, flowing back to the ocean. The clock tower chimes, and somewhere beyond the border of the town, the wolves howl. He, for the first time, wonders if it's from victory or sorrow.
"Are you ready?" She has her hair tied up, her eyes flashing gold in the pale light, her belongings carried on her back.
Below is Storybrooke, exact location unknown. Somewhere in the North. The ships glittering in the harbor and the air laden with sea-salt.
Victor nods. "Ready," he says, giving the town one last glance before he looks to the forest far up the hill. He breathes out slowly, something unknotting itself behind his ribs. Her hand is small in his when she threads their fingers together.
She smiles at him. "Okay."
They walk together as the day breaks, the sun beginning to rise over the black water.