Chapter 4
Witch
Tim woke up to familiar dry slithering he didn't want to identify—a sound that had followed him up from some restless dream. A sound that, if only for just a little longer, he wanted to forget. He didn't know how long he'd been out, but long enough that his clothes had dried. His chest ached. If he looked, he was sure there would be bruises outlining his ribs in thick lines—bruises that dreams couldn't leave. When he inhaled, chest expanding, he could still feel an echo rubbing along those bruised tracks. Not the hazy remnants of a dream lingering past its expiration, but the more substantial caress of reality. It was still there.
Opening his eyes then was like plunging back into the nightmare. He wasn't lying safe on his own bed under a familiar ceiling; he was lying in a bed of green foliage, coiled over and around him, wrapped up through the rafters. It wasn't constrictively tight, enfolding him more like a thick blanket, but the vines wove in and out between his arms and torso in such a way that he was still as good as trapped. He could feel them, shifting intermittently around his legs, catching in his hair.
A thousand living ropes.
There were little ones, finer than a pencil, pushed up under his sleeves, hugging the contours of his shoulder blades, and running up under his shorts to curl against his inner thighs. Tim stiffened at the invasion, and immediately wished he hadn't, because they all shifted to adjust, curling contentedly into their new positions. He could feel them stretch like fingers through his hair and under his jaw, sprawled along his ribs and spine, before settling again. It tickled worse than Dick writing across his back, but he hurriedly suppressed the tremors lest he start it up all over again.
Ivy noticed the movement.
"You should've stayed asleep. You might have enjoyed your stay more."
Tim doubted he would ever enjoy his stay again, unconscious or not. He released a slow breath as he forced himself to relax into the tangle that held him, forced himself to accept the ropy embrace for the time being.
"What did you do to Jason?" Slowly, he turned his hand over, running fingers along one of the vines there, exploring its length, the tightness of its weave against the others. It shivered a little, and he wondered if he could coax it apart just enough to let his hand through, closer to his pocket and the little pill bottle he could still feel pressed against his thigh.
"I just gave him a little kiss." She pouted. "Like the other children. There's a reason, you know, your friends avoid the land. Becoming human means aging like one." Her fingers sprawled against the glass aquarium she was working on, face lifted in longing. "It's been so long… so many years…"
"I wouldn't have pegged you a day over twenty." His fingertips scraped the fabric of his shorts, hampered by the little fingerling vines that had curled curiously round and round his knuckles.
"Yes, well, there's always someone willing to help a lady—some cute child wandering in unwittingly, some adorable boy wanting to know more about merfolk." She stood up then, turning to him fully. "Maybe they'll come for you and we'll all get what we want, or maybe they won't…" her smile said this was equally appealing, "and you'll bloom for me most spectacularly. It's really a shame you didn't get that second mark. Still, I bet you'd taste like the sea." Her fingers were on his lips, pressing hungrily, and she leaned closer, down over him, green gaze rapt to his mouth, to the trace of her fingers there. Tim swallowed, heart picking up a beat. Was she going to kiss him? Now? He was still caught, bound inescapably in vines, still unable to reach the bottle in his pocket, tauntingly out of reach.
The thrum of his heart, high and fast, was time running out. He had to distract her, remind her of what she really wanted.
"You shouldn't…" He licked his lips, no more than a dart of his tongue, but it caught the tips of her fingers, made her hum appreciatively.
"Hm?" She was so close now, a hair's breadth away. A whisper.
"Shouldn't you wait? To see if anyone comes?"
She laughed breathily—he could feel it, the little huffs of air.
"Aren't you the clever one. Don't worry, I doubt they'll decide they don't want you just because you lose a few weeks."
She moved her hand to cup his chin, brushing the fingerlings that had curled contentedly under his jaw. Their lips brushed.
Tim flinched, breath hitching, and then…
"Get away from him, witch." The words were a low growl from the door. Tim couldn't see. His heart was still hammering. Above him, Ivy paused, murmuring a sigh that feathered across his face.
"Mm, what rude visitors." She stood up, pulling away, and at last Tim could see.
"Give me back my son!" Jack stood in the doorway, feet apart, blunt-nosed revolver leveled at Ivy.
It was the boy beside him Tim hadn't expected: tall, well-built, and naked except for Jack's coat wrapped around his waist. There was a very familiar knife gripped firmly in one hand. If that hadn't been enough, Tim would have recognized that shock of white amid pitch-black hair anywhere.
Jason.
Jason had come for him. As a human. On legs. With Jack.
Tim wasn't sure which part of that he found hardest to believe: the fact that his water-dwelling friend could apparently walk around on land like anyone else whenever he wanted, the fact he'd bothered coming to save the one who'd tried to kill him, or the fact he was with Jack, who had previously been intent on ridding the bay of his kind. But then, looking at Ivy, maybe it was just that they finally had a common enemy, and Tim had to admit he'd never seen Dick or Jason completely out of the water.
If he had any doubts that he wasn't starting to hallucinate, Ivy dispelled them.
"Mr. Drake. I wondered how long you could remain so blissfully ignorant. And you brought a water rat." She glanced at Jason. "Breaking rules, are we?"
"Ivy…" Jack warned. She sighed, reaching out to stroke the vines holding Tim down.
"Tim's currently playing hostage for me, I simply couldn't bear to see him go."
"He's coming home with me."
"Don't pretend you care about him. You didn't even know he's been coming to see me for years. I thought you called yourself his father."
Jack looked briefly furious and then pained. His mouth worked, unable to deny Ivy's barb.
"Don't listen to her!" Tim called, and Jack's haunted blue eyes met his across the room.
"Tim, are you alright?"
"I'm fine. Watch out for–" But at that point one of the vines binding him wrapped around his mouth, effectively gagging him.
Jack wasn't stupid, but he didn't know Ivy's tricks, didn't completely understand what he was dealing with. One of the vines swung down and snapped around the end of the gun. Jack jerked back, startled, and the gun fired up into the ceiling. As if that was some sort of signal, the walls and rafters came alive with the slither and dry rattle of vines, all twisting their way toward the pair standing in the doorway. Even the ones wrapped around Tim rattled and shook, and he squirmed as the little ones—the ones coiled against his inner thighs and snug against the contours of his abdomen—wriggled agitatedly.
"Now look, you've gone and upset my babies." Ivy reached out to pet a few of the smaller tendrils hovering near her as if for reassurance. "You really shouldn't have come here, Mr. Drake."
Jason sliced cleanly through the first several vines that came at him, wielding the knife with a deftness Tim wouldn't have expected of someone who spent all his time underwater. The still-twitching tendrils fell to the floor forgotten. Jack, on the other hand, had come expecting to deal with a human, witch aside, not with a nest of overgrown foliage. With the gun wrested away from him, the vines quickly snapped at his arms, doubling and redoubling their grip, tangling him up quickly. More wrapped around his throat, pulling him up on his toes in a chokehold.
Tim tried to shout, to cry out to the man he might never get to apologize to, but his words were lost in the flora pulled tight across his mouth, cutting sharply into the corners. Biting down only coated his tongue with plant sap and caused the vine to pull tighter.
Jason spared a second to cut through the ones that were trying to choke Jack, and Tim breathed a sigh of relief when his father gasped in air, still stuck, but alive. Wonderfully alive.
Ivy snarled and a few of the thicker vines, the ones wrapped around Tim, unwound to go after the threat. It wasn't enough to free him by far, but it left little gaps in his bindings, just enough to fit his hand through. There was his pocket—he could feel the way his nails snagged on the fold of fabric. He pushed under it, reaching.
In the doorway, Jason stomped on a fingerling snaking across the floor, trying to trip him up. He wasn't losing ground, but he wasn't gaining any either, and Ivy's vines seemed endless.
"Why don't you stop hacking up my babies and give up on your futile rescue attempt?" Ivy asked.
"Fork over the kid and we'll call it even," Jason replied, even as he hacked through a few more.
Tim's fingers finally hit the familiar plastic cap of the bottle, and he quickly hooked two fingers under it, working it up into his hand. Then it was just a matter of pinching the cap open one-handed.
Ivy's attention was still on the door, on the boy slashing away at her precious plants. She didn't see him carefully wiggling his arm free of the loosening vines, nor lifting the bottle above his head—the pill bottle he'd filled with weed killer from the tool shed where they stored the gardening supplies.
He meant to pour it on the vines, to rid himself of the rest of his bindings, but just as it started to tip, one of them knocked it out of his hand. It tumbled through the air, spilling its contents in a wide arc. Watching it spill, the inevitable tilt of the future flickered before Tim's eyes: Jason, knife stripped from his grasp, pulled to his knees by the vines binding his arms, and Jack, broken on the floor, and his own impending demise. He saw it all.
Then the poison hit Ivy.
There was a moment of perfect surprise, her eyes flung wide.
Then she started shrieking.
Tim had never heard such a piercing shriek. She jerked backward, stumbling into one of the tables. Water sloshed from several of the aquariums. Her hands flew to cover her face, hair falling in a thick curtain. Even the vines drew back toward her protectively.
Around the room, everything stood frozen—Jason, panting by the door, knife still raised, and Jack, tied up but watching. Tim, too, could only stare, frozen in place by those inhuman shrieks. Then slowly, shaking hands drew away from her face and clenched tight. She jerked toward him, snarling through a fall of red locks, and finally he could see her face, the way the skin had blackened into a ruined mask.
"You!" At the venomous snarl, time lurched forward again and Tim started struggling, twisting and heaving at his bindings, filled with a blinding sense of his own imminent demise as she stalked forward. But under her withering glare, the vines constricted crushingly tight, drawing lines of blood where they cut into his skin. For a minute he thought they would keep tightening until he broke, snapped like matchsticks under the pressure, but Ivy snatched him close by the front of his shirt, ruined mouth mashing roughly against his. It was deafening, the rush in his ears louder than the wind howling down the points during a storm. Any shout of surprise was drowned by the maelstrom, swallowed by the woman devouring him from the inside out.
Tim was close enough that he could see every inch of blackened skin marring that eternally young face, and it might have been an hallucination—his head was reeling—but there was less of it than before. She kissed him, drawing him in, and the withered black patch melted away. Little bits of ruined skin flaked off and smoothed across flawless cheekbones, the bridge of a nose.
Jack had called her old, but Tim had only ever seen her young and beautiful. He thought now he understood why. All those children who'd disappeared over the years, the ones the townsfolk said had been called into the sea; he was beginning to understand what had really happened to them. They'd been used, like this, by this woman.
Once before he recalled a similar kiss, one that had left him dizzy and drunk, unconscious for hours, but it had lasted no more than a handful of seconds. This was different. She wasn't going to stop this time. He wasn't going to fall asleep for hours and wake up the next day.
He wasn't going to wake up at all.
And all the while his blood ran down living, green ropes and dripped from little ivy leaves.
His limbs felt heavy, lined with lead, everything dragging him down, but even that was distant, nothing more than the pitiful concerns of a physical body. Everything there was, everything that mattered, was consumed with that kiss, licking at the inside of his skull, bleeding him dry. If there was anything outside of that—people shouting, confusion—it was lost in the ringing in his ears, in the fog clouding his vision. There were little black holes in the world, bits of cold flame eating away at the edges.
Then, distantly, he felt Ivy's grip on him jerk. She gasped and staggered back, breaking the kiss. There was something metallic-sharp protruding from her chest, and dazed as he was, it took Tim a second to recognize the tip of Jason's knife. Even as he watched, it disappeared, jerked free of its cage of tissue and bone, only to reappear, stabbing up through her back. Ivy's eyes were wide with surprise, mouth wrapped around an endless "oh" as she staggered again. There were only a few spots of black left on her face, like smudged mascara. Her fingers were still clasped in his shirt, but Jason's rough hands were there suddenly, pulling him free, jerking the twitching vines away. Without that support, he collapsed—a marionette without strings. Jason must have caught him, because the expected slap of the wood floor never came.
There was a dull thud anyway, and it took him a moment to realize it was Ivy falling into the still-twitching remains of the vines dying on the ground.
"Don't you dare die on me." The words didn't mean anything, but the fog cleared for a moment, enough to make out the face above him. He was lying rag-doll limp in Jason's arms, pressed protectively against the older boy's chest.
Jason started to lift him up, and then Jack was there, blocking the light, all worry and concern.
"Tim, son, talk to me." Large hands wrapped through his fingers, squeezing more desperately when he only stared dimly up at them. "Tim…"
"I'm taking him to Bruce."
"No! You're not taking my son from me. Not again."
"He needs to come with me."
"He needs to go to a hospital!" Practical Jack, trying to take back control over the situation—the control he'd been slowly losing for years without realizing. Now, on the verge of losing everything, maybe he just needed to believe there was still something he could do to fix things.
"Your hospitals don't know jack about this."
"What would a merman know about–"
"From what I hear," Jason pressed, angry, "you've already done a bang-up job letting your fear and regret drive your son away. Are you really going to let it kill him too?" It was the sort of reproach that normally would have had Jack up in arms, but these weren't normal circumstances, and there was more than his pride at stake. The tension stretched thin, eking away until all that remained was the desperation.
"She… All she did was kiss him."
"And it nearly killed him." Jason was pitiless. "What's it going to be?"
"Take…" Jack's voice hitched and he swallowed brokenly. "Take care of him. Keep my son alive." There was another thud—this time it was the thud of knees hitting the floor. It was a hollow sound, defeated, the sound of a man losing everything he had.
Jason didn't even look back.
Ivy's cabin loomed behind them, falling away through the trees. The salty night air hit Tim, the same breeze that carried the memory of the sea through his open window every night, lulling him to sleep. The fog came back then, thick and heavy across his vision, and he let himself drift.
He must have drifted further than he thought, because he came back to rude shaking and an obnoxiously loud voice in his ear.
"Breathe! Kid, breathe!" It was Jason yelling at him with words, real words. Yes, the swearing that followed was definitely Jason. The older boy must have slapped him, because there was sharp stinging suddenly up and down the left side of his face. But that was all—no worse than the stinging gashes still dripping red blood where the vines had bitten deep. His vision rocked sideways with the force of the slap, but he felt largely numb. It wasn't until Jason pressed a kiss to his shoulder, practically bit him, that the shock snapped him awake, and it was worse than the first time. So much worse. The bitter ice of the thing licked his bones. He arched back in Jason's grip, gasping, head back, sucking in air. The convulsion nearly dunked his head under water, and it was only then he realized they'd reached the bay, realized that Jason was in fact holding him afloat between the swells.
"You have to make a choice. You have to tell me you want this."
"Sorry." Tim tried to focus on the green eyes above him through the fog, tried to sort through the noise in his head. "Didn't mean… hurt Dick."
"I know. He knows. It was an accident. It doesn't matter." Jason shook him. "What do you want me to do?" The water lapped at his sides soothingly.
"Take me with you."
"Good kid." Then a wet hand wrapped around his mouth and nose and there was water pressing in around him, the light of the surface growing dimmer and dimmer. He couldn't tell how long they were like that, but long enough that he lost any sense of direction, drifting in and out with the shifting light that was always out of reach. If he thought about it, it couldn't have been too long, because he couldn't have held his breath that long. But there was a second mark on his other shoulder now, Jason's mark, and maybe that had something to do with it.
At some point his eyes slid shut, the patterns above him having long since blended into one gray blur, lolled off by the gentle sway of currents and the heart beating in the chest next to him. Maybe he would have stayed that way, drifting in darkness, but someone shook him sharply, probably Jason. It jolted him back to semi-awareness, groggy and disgruntled and acutely aware of the ache in his lungs, longing for air too long denied. He grasped weakly at the hand covering his mouth and nose, trying to pull it away, to breathe.
It didn't budge, but new, stronger arms wrapped around him suddenly, lifting him from Jason's hold, displacing him. Someone broader, sturdier, a dark shadow over him he could barely make out. He tried to clear his head, to make out the figure above him, cradling him, lips parting around soundless words, but the need for air was straining at his consciousness—a high, desperate crescendo clamoring for his concentration—and in comparison, everything else was a black and white, silent movie.
Finally, the hand wrapped around his face slid away, but before he could inhale any seawater, someone's mouth covered his, crushingly tight. Someone's lips caught his own, fierce, pulling the air from his lungs, stripping him of the last dredges of oxygen. He gasped up into the kiss, desperate, lungs burning, but there was no air in it, no air anywhere. He might have convulsed, because the arms around him were bars, holding him down, thicker than Dick's or Jason's. It was like drowning. It was like dying. The shadows tore themselves into black strips and drifted out of focus.
Author Notes: Too tired to even reread this before posting to make sure nothing got messed up during the upload, or catch any last minute bugs. Hopefully there aren't any. Unfortunately, (for reasons not explained here) I needed permission from another author to post my other story and (due to life complications) she got back to me too late to post on Halloween or even by the end of that week. So I'm going to hold onto that one until Riptide is finished. Speaking of which, the last chapter is supposed to be due on Thanksgiving, and I won't be here. Won't even have internet access. So it's going to be late.
I considered that the merfolk in this world might have silver-tinted lips, like the marks, but ultimately set the idea aside. Another idea that got set aside: Jack's death. I initially intended to hold closer to the original storyline and let Jack die—a plot point that would have left Tim in the hands of our dear merfamily permanently, but in the midst of writing I realized that killing him served no real purpose. No lessons were learned, no problems were solved, and I don't really believe in pointless character deaths. He uh, he needed some character growth.
More importantly, because this fic is from Tim's point of view, there's a scene he didn't get to see in which Jack comes down to the shore looking for Tim (having finally realized he'd snuck off), only to run into a naked Jason (and I'm sure that just did wonders for his impression of merfolk). I'm sure it was quite the amusing meeting too, with Jason trying to avoid gunshots and Jack demanding to know what he'd done with Tim.
There's a Hocus Pocus moment in here somewhere when Ivy prolongs her own youth by "sucking the life out of little children!" *evil cackle*
Next Time: Tim's about to learn more about the merfolk than he ever wanted, and Jack never thought he'd have to adjust his family views quite like this.
