Sea Saw
He woke slowly. It was always Virgil's routine to take stock of the world before he stirred himself to any kind of action, working methodically through his mind the detritus of the day before and the demands of the day to come. He noted he was warm enough, or at least, as warm as the IR suit could manage to maintain for him, his face cradled in his arms so that the cold and damp didn't reach it. His back still felt stiff. His feet felt a little less bruised today. The wind had died down, back to normal levels on North Rona Island. They were still in their shelter. Well, no; Gordon wasn't beside him.
That was a good thing, wasn't it? He was angry with him, after all. Gordon had been unforgivably selfish and stupid, conjuring up a deep and justified contempt in Virgil. Hadn't he?
It was strange, this insistence that he should be furious, and yet somehow the charge lacked any kind of substance. That bilious, amorphous anger consuming him last night was gone, only the vague memory of it lingering, a kind of stain in his mind.
There was John and Scott. That was a constant, that gripping worry in his belly. Please be okay, guys. Please just be.
But something else felt different, and the realisation came as such a profound surprise that he held his breath after a sudden intake.
For the first time since they'd reached the island, his head didn't feel as if it were about to split open. The sickening, wicked pain had dulled to a slow thump in the front of his head, and that caused him to at last let out his breath in one long sigh of relief. Everything was easier to cope with when his head wasn't coming off with every heartbeat. He was still tired, an endless exhaustion born of every kind of stress. And his head was still hurting, a pulsing pain in his forehead – but it was a snare drum tap compared to the kettle drums that had pounded in his brain since the crash.
Astonishing how much better he felt, and he didn't dare move in case anything he did changed it.
So, sit-rep recap; feeling better, still on cold, wet Rona, still worried. Still angry? Not quite. But something was still off-balance. Maybe he needed food? Ha. That was the other constant.
He flexed his shoulders slightly, sensing something else missing. Maybe it was just the feel of Gordon's body next to his.
He heard the flap being pushed open, and felt the gust of cold that swept in with it.
"He's awake. Brrr. Icy out there, mud puddle in here."
And that voice tapped into something from the night before, some odd mix of hostility and wretchedness. If he couldn't find it in him to be angry with Gordon, could he be irritated instead? In the face of ongoing worry and pain and awful, relentless bad weather, could he at least allow himself to be driven slowly and surely up the wall by the awful, relentless Gordon-ness of Gordon?
An internal double-take; since when had he thought of Gordon as awful?
"Cold enough for you?"
Virgil groaned. His head stayed buried in his arms, the energy to raise it lost to him.
"Hey, Virge, you'll never guess what the weather is doing."
A grunt.
"Wow. Psychic, huh? Yep, it's raining. I give it 8 out of 10 on the Seattle scale of shittiness, though – there's a few more degrees of force before it hits water jet level."
Virgil stayed silent, in the hope of encouraging the same from his little brother. He needed a moment, just a minute or two, to straighten out the conflicting narratives in his head – the certainty of yesterday against the guilty memory of a very different way of being.
"So – plans for today? A stroll around the park? Lunch by the beach? Trip to Scott's lighthouse improvement program?"
He buried his head further.
"I've been thinking."
Virgil said nothing. To his surprise, Gordon did the same. A full minute went by, then another.
It was more irritating than the babble.
"What?" He raised his head and glared at Gordon, to find Gordon grinning like a shark.
"Aw, there he is. Ain't he cute?"
"Arggh." Virgil flopped back down, his head tilted so he could glare at his brother.
"Yep, I've been thinking. And working. Plan B. Guess what I made in school today."
"Gordon…"
"Hmm?" All innocent and sweet, as if he didn't know he was working on Virgil's last nerve.
"Just – get to the point."
Gordon twisted his face in a parody of thought.
"No, you know what? You don't deserve to know. I think I'm just going to go and do what I'm going to do and you can stay there working on bringing your grump factor to asshole level."
"Then just do it! Just stop being so goddamned annoying!"
"Moi?" Gordon reached down and grabbed at Virgil's shoulder to wriggle it; Virgil flicked his hand away.
"Whoa. Think you need another nap." In one fluid movement Gordon rose from his crouch. The fact he didn't hit his head on the low roof just irritated Virgil more.
"I need – some time. On my own."
"Done. I'll be back in a bit. Hey, look at that." Gordon stuck his head past the emergency blanket door. "Still raining. Who'da thunk it?"
"Goodbye, Gordon."
"I'm going. Off to have fun while you stay there being Grunty Flannel Man. Horizontally. Anyone ever tell you you're just so damned versatile?"
"Fuck off, Gordon."
He could just about hear the smug expression on Gordon's face as he reattached the blanket behind him.
He stayed, head down, his body tense, his mind more than a little confused. He felt as though he'd been following a script, written by someone who didn't know them. What the hell had just happened?
Inside their earthen shelter the sounds from the island were largely muffled. Even the rain didn't strike the blanket door. Virgil drifted in and out of sleep, craving the energy, the drive he knew he once had. After half an hour in the near silence, he sat up and looked morosely towards where Gordon had disappeared.
What the hell was he up to? How much trouble could he get himself into on a deserted island, anyway?
Plenty, his big brother brain told him, and with that, and an untranslatable but readily understood expression of extreme annoyance, he pulled himself from out of their shared sleeping shelter and did the half-crouch walk to the entrance that the low ceiling demanded of him.
And as he did so, something else occurred to him.
Ever since the moment Two hit the water – hell, no, before that. In the cockpit, free-falling, instruments dead. It was ever since those nightmarish seconds as he looked across at his little brother and thought he was going to watch him die. Something had taken hold of him, some kind of overwhelming dread, a sense that everything they did, every moment of striving for survival, of cheating death, was futile. But now, as he was about to set out into the fifth morning on Rona, that heavy cloak of hopelessness had somehow lifted from him. It was the weight of that dread, or lack of it, he'd missed as he lay in the FSB.
That kind of weight would always throw a plane's alignment out of whack.
Maybe, just maybe, he was finding his balance again.
Outside it was raining as Gordon had said, as it had done every day since their arrival. Gusts of stinging, angled rain that never seemed to stop on this godforsaken rock. Wearily he replaced his helmet on his head. Survival 101, maintain body temperature. It was a relief from the attack of water, but the sound of the showers hitting the Perspex in a monotonous drumming brought its own kind of pressure.
There was no sign of Gordon.
Instantly, a tingle of alarm started in the base of his spine.
It was one he immediately squashed; in this rain visibility was limited to less than a hundred metres. But not knowing where his brother was brought an echo of annoyance. It was so irresponsible to wander off, no matter how small the island was. Where the hell was he supposed to start looking for him?
Survival 101 part two; don't waste energy. And yet that was exactly what Gordon would have him do, go looking for him in shitty weather with no clue as to which direction he'd gone…
But then, his inner voice told him, there was likely to be only one place Gordon would go. The nearest access point to the sea was the tiny gully where they'd washed up. If Gordon was doing something unbelievably stupid – oh, come on, why use 'if'? – that was where he'd be.
Grumbling to himself, and hearing the faint echo in the helmet, Virgil stomped south towards the gully.
It was even more exposed as he climbed higher on the hill behind their ruin, before his path dipped downwards again into the depression that lead to the shale and black-pebbled beach. As he got near the point where the rocks allowed for a relatively easy climb downwards, he glanced out to sea, to where the great shifting mass of kelp swayed in the constant currents that swirled about the island. A seal bobbed about near the edge of it, and then one of its limbs lifted up in a straight line and began waving to him.
It wasn't a seal; it was Gordon.
"No!"
He began to barrel downwards but then stopped himself; he could see better from here, exposed to the rain and wind but with a clear view to the kelp bed, sixty metres out to sea.
"Gordon! You stupid, irresponsible – stupid damn stupid idiot!"
Gordon, the lunatic, waved again, and then did the one thing designed to destroy every ounce of Virgil's calm; he disappeared.
Everything in Virgil's body constricted. He made a movement forward and then froze, trapped in a moment of fight or flight when the threat was nowhere near him and there was nothing he could do to counter it anyway.
And that thought was wrong, because the threat was aimed at his very soul. If Gordon disappeared, that would be the end of him, too.
It wasn't the banality of his last words to his brother; how many other people had cause to regret the last thing they'd said to someone they loved? So commonplace, so cruel. That would be a never-ending source of pain, of course it would.
It was the fact that he'd failed, spectacularly, to Keep An Eye On Gordon. That injunction handed to him almost casually, a kind of daily ritual, by first his mother, then his father, and then Scott. It was the undiscussed but always understood ruling parameter of Tracy brother life, that of all of them, it was Gordon who needed a leash, preferably leg-irons, in order to stave off the undertaking of something incredibly mischievous, stupid, dangerous, or all three.
He realised his breathing sounded in his helmet as though he'd climbed a mountain, not a slight incline. All he could do was strain towards the edge of the kelp bed, staring, waiting for the reappearance of the idiotic brother who owned his heart as he'd always done.
Occasionally something would break the surface near the kelp, and that heart would thump. All too often it was simply a wave, curling outward in such a way that it resembled the back of a fish, the stroke of a limb. In his darkest moments, the dorsal of a shark. Minutes went by, and the next flood of fear came as he thought, maybe he was sucked under? Maybe that wasn't a wave of 'look at me being clever', maybe it was 'help me, I'm trapped'?
Work the problem. Gordon could breathe for hours under there. The oxygen tanks he had helped to design, first at WASP, then with Brain's improvements, would scrub the carbon dioxide and recycle the oxygen almost perpetually – or at least, far beyond his foreseeable needs in this scenario. He wouldn't drown.
His suit would maintain homeostasis for many hours, too. So really, Virgil only needed to worry if Gordon was gone for – what, two hours? Three? There would be no need for him to be down there for more than that, would there? He'd be back up sooner than that, right? How long had it been anyway?
Virgil was blessed with a good sense of time, and he estimated half an hour, perhaps forty minutes since Gordon had left the shelter.
There! He peered harder, even as the rain decided to slash more furiously onto his helmet. Something in the kelp bed, surely? Something large and dark, pushing up between two long strands of thick kelp –
And his stomach turned over. In his worst nightmares, this would be front and centre. Maybe it was a dolphin, maybe some kind of large fish? But the hammering in his throat just said one thing, over and over; shark, shark, shark.
That was it. He was going in. No idea what he would do or how it would help, but in a sense, it didn't matter. If Gordon was in trouble then so was he. Simple as that.
He hurried to the head of the gully – and stopped abruptly.
Clambering over the last of the rocks before hooking his foot and pushing up to join him on the turf was Gordon.
Before Virgil's mind could even switch gear from terror to relief, his brother was pushing past him.
"Don't! Not a word." Gordon had some kind of jerry-rigged spear in one hand and two large fish in his other.
"Gordon, you- "
The look on Gordon's face stopped him in his tracks.
"I'm so mad right now."
If he'd wanted, on some level, to see Gordon's cheerfulness brought down just a little, he had it in the set of his brother's mouth, the hardness of those brown eyes. Be careful what you wish for, he thought, but it was a sing-song of pure happiness, almost light-headed as he was with the simple fact that Gordon was on land and out of the water and in front of him and safe. Safe.
That same safe little brother was storming past him, head down, the fish slapping heavily against his leg. Virgil was so wrong-footed it took him a moment before he turned on his heel and started after him, trying to hear what his brother was muttering.
"Stupid. Stupid!"
Well, that was something Virgil could get behind.
"I was so mad at you I forgot the basics of diving. Should have told you where I was, should have told you how long I'd be."
"Wait." Virgil reached forward and grabbed Gordon's arm, only to be abruptly brushed off. "You were mad at me?"
"Yes, I was mad at you, god. Who wouldn't be?"
"Mad at me?"
Gordon stopped. The rain ran down his helmet, making his face wobble in the streams of water.
"Is that so hard to understand? Or, wait, perfect Virgil can be a goddam unrelenting asshole in a confined space for days and still get to claim high moral ground. That how it works?"
"I've been an asshole?"
"Nothing but. Streaming live right from your dumb fundamental orifice."
Gordon stomped away from him again, and Virgil followed.
"I don't care, Gordon. I'm just happy you're okay. There was something in the water that I – "
Gordon whirled again.
"There's always something in the water. Newsflash – we're gonna starve here if we don't get in the water. Can't get at the seals from up top, and those rookeries are gonna be an absolute pain in the butt to climb up to, so yeah. Collecting mussels and spearfishing it is."
"Well, why didn't you talk to me about it?"
"Yeah, I know, already said it was stupid. But you're driving me up the wall, and I – "
Conflicting narratives. Certainty of yesterday, meet confusion of today. "Oh, no. No, you are the one who never shuts up. You're the one who just won't let anything go, who always has to do a happy little song and dance routine over every little thing."
Gordon waved his arms towards him in incredulous anger, which made the fish swing wildly and almost hit him in the face.
"As compared to sitting around wringing your hands every minute of the day? And night, too, god you grind your teeth like nothing on earth. Demented castanets in my ear all night long. And then I get to spend the day with someone who looks like he's about to burst into tears any second, and just because I try to cheer him up, he accuses me of being too fucking happy. Second newsflash – it's not all that easy to stay positive with a wet blanket the size of a Sasquatch sitting on your lap in the dark!"
"Okay. Fine." In some part of his mind, Virgil was aware that they were standing in the rain on top of a tiny islet, arguing. The level of absurdity was off the charts, but it felt so good just to vent the feelings he'd kept tight to himself in the interests of survival. "I guess the fact that Scott could be –"
"Scott could be sitting by the pool with a margarita for all we know!"
"He could be dead!"
They stared at each other, chests heaving, both angry and afraid and unhappy.
"You think I don't know that?"
"Hard to tell with the Happy Gordon Show playing daily."
The rain drummed, unfaltering. Gordon half-turned away from him, staring past him to the gray sea, blowing his breath out.
At last, he shook his head.
"Forget it. Just – here. Figure out some way to cook these, will you?" He threw the fish to Virgil, who caught them easily. "Or dig up some soy sauce, we'll have sushi."
He turned and left Virgil then, and Virgil let him go.
