He couldn't hear anything anymore, his eyes slowly slipping shut as his body gave up trying to break the surface. He was so tired suddenly without the ability to breathe and the will to fight the water's growing emersion ebbed away more and more.
Black started to filter in from the corners of his eyes and his arms and legs were too heavy to keep pushing himself up. His whole body hit the bottom of the pool gently, lungs now akin to dishrags that his mother used to use at the sink while he was a kid, rung out and unable to absorb anything, much less oxygen that was nowhere to be found under the water's surface.
He should be terrified. He should be still panicking and fighting and oh god, what about the others? They were so fucked, holy shit-
But there was nothing, only calm at the imminent thought of he was going to drown to death.
He just closed his eyes fully and let it take him, grabbing him by the arms and dragging him up, up, up-
The water suddenly released its grip on him and his back made contact with the sand-covered floor of the cave, a heavy weight pressing against his chest. Is this what death felt like?
It took him a moment to realize that no, it wasn't death, but it was someone's hands pressing against his chest in a familiar motion. Was that...CPR?
With a gasp that didn't feel real, Ryan opened his still cloudy eyes and shot up before turning to his side and vomiting up at least a litre of water from his abused body, the noise of voices in his waterlogged ears becoming louder and louder as he struggled to see around him.
He registered TJ, looking rattled as all get out at the mouth of the crawlspace, on the phone with only what he could assume was emergency services and Matt sitting against the cave wall soaking wet (did he...jump in and save him?), but the most reliving sight was brought to him with a grounding hand on his back, making him turn from where he was blowing watery debris onto the sand to see Shane, looking white as a ghost and worried, but grinning at him once he met his eyes.
"Wow buddy, talk about swimming with the fishes, you really went there!"
Was he actually kidding!? "You're joking." Ryan seethed, despite his lungs feeling like they would explode thanks to their new oxygen-absorbing abilities. "I fell in a fucking pool in the middle of a cave with a tide coming in and almost drowned and you're fucking joking about it!?"
Everyone suddenly went silent and Shane, well, Shane had the audacity to look stricken.
Fucking asshole.
Ryan hissed, feeling the cold suddenly come into his skin and looked up. It was a lot darker than it had been when he'd entered the cave. A lot longer than 5 minutes.
"Here, man." Someone, sounding like TJ, gave him a jacket and he took it willingly, wrapping it around himself to warm up. "Looks like you bumped your head when you fell as well, we'll have to go to an emergency place and get it looked it. It's a big one."
Now that he mentioned it, his head hurt a hell of a lot more than someone who had just been starved of oxygen for a while. When he reached back and his fingers came away with rosy red blood, he winced, swallowing. "Yeah, good idea."
My god, what the fuck had happened while he was in that cursed fucking pool?
He stared at the pool from where he was sat, propped up against a rock. It was as normal as ever. Unassuming, like when he'd first entered the cave. Or at least as unassuming, strange and now, fucking terrifying as any underground magical "mermaid" pond could be.
There was now no glowing water. No glowing rocks. Nothing like Ryan had experienced.
Maybe he'd just hit his head too hard and imagined it? Maybe he was just hallucinating thanks to the same action? God, he didn't know and being a believer (normally anyway), that made him uncomfortable. /Very/ uncomfortable.
"Hey." The same hand fell to his back and he begrudgingly looked at his co-host.
Shane tried to smile, but it fell to the wayside. "Do you think you can get up and walk? TJ's called an ambulance to come pick us up and they can't access the cave."
Ryan took a breath in, head throbbing, before nodding. "Yeah, just help me the hell up. They might as well cut all my limbs off and make me a starfish while they fix my head."
Hearing Shane pause and then quietly chuckle against his back was enough to make him forgive him for earlier, but only just.
The trip to the hospital was thankfully uneventful, though Ryan did end up going back to their hotel at midnight (they wanted to keep an eye on him for a couple of hours) pretty drugged up thanks to some awesome painkillers and 7 stitches in his head.
Shane thankfully, didn't feel the need to joke about anything else and despite the concerns of the crew, both men went to bed in their shared room without much complaint given that now they had said cave footage (sans Ryan's missing GoPro), they would be flying back to California most likely later that afternoon or tomorrow, depending on planes.
While Shane seemed to sleep rather easily, the same type of sleep hadn't managed to reach Ryan, no matter how many painkillers he had shoved into him.
It wasn't the pain that kept him awake though. He'd had this...feeling. Swimming (ha, swimming) underneath all the numbness and fear that he'd felt earlier. He couldn't explain it.
It was this...weird blended emotional storm of uneasiness and anxiety. Yearning and restlessness. His whole mental state feeling like it was in turmoil. Like he wanted to desperately tear out of his own skin and just...he didn't know what else.
Shaking his head internally, he just closed his eyes again and desperately tried to will away the image of the open ocean and the flashes of light in the corners of his eyes from his mind, sleep finally dragging him away to rest.