chapter six
earlier
When Beck was 13 years old, he watched his grandfather die.
It wasn't particularly tragic - Beck hardly knew the man, only that he often drank himself into a stupor, and that his parents wanted to keep him and his older sister away from that kind of negative influence.
Still, he was his grandfather, and watching anybody die wasn't easy, especially when they were blood.
Dementia had taken hold of him early on in his life, and its hold had gradually tightened over the years. Beck's family had known that it was coming for a long time before his mother got the call to return to Canada to say their goodbyes.
It was agonizingly slow, drawn out over the course of months. It was awful to witness, planting a deep seeded fear of growing old somewhere in his brain. Beck did not want to die like that: helpless, without a clue of what anything was or who anybody was, not even himself.
This, Beck thought as he rose from a crouch, a semi-bloated dead body of a man in the brush and ruins at his feet - this was something else entirely. It wasn't the first dead body he'd seen since the water receded (human or animal, for that matter) and likely wouldn't be the last, and Beck felt sick every time. These deaths were quick: entire lives snuffed out in mere minutes, without warning.
Somehow, Beck thought that, in it's own way, dying so suddenly might have been worse.
"Are - are they…?"
"Yeah," Beck said, drawing in a breath that felt too short. He could feel a rattle in his chest, and the air that left him, left him as a wheeze. He peered over his shoulder, only to see Cat staring back at him with wide, uncertain eyes. "C'mon, we have to keep going, find somewhere higher up. Just don't - don't look at it, okay?"
Even from the slight distance, he could see Cat swallow. "...Okay."
They'd found each other sometime after the second surge hit. Beck couldn't say with certainty how long he was pulled along the current for, trying desperately to hold onto anything to keep himself afloat, until he saw her. Clinging for dear life to the trunk of an upright palm tree, there was Cat, blood as red as her hair seeping from a cut above her right eyebrow.
He'd fought against the current in order to get to her, but it was mostly in vain. Cat - perhaps unwisely, but strictly out of desperation to not be left alone - pushed herself from the tree and met him a little less than halfway. They drifted along together, clutching one another, until they found an uprooted tree floating along the choppy waters. They held onto that for what felt like an hour before the high water finally receded back into the ocean.
There was no sign of any of the others. Not Robbie or Tori, who he figured were safe. Not André.
Not even Jade, who had been in his arms when the tsunami hit.
But there was Cat.
She was mostly okay, if not a little banged up, but still Beck kept a watchful eye on her. There were dark circular bruises all along the ridges of her neck and down her spine, and sometime during the second wave, something had hit the side of her face. It cut a decent sized gash into her forehead, just above her eyebrow and near her hairline, and a vessel had burst around the iris of her eye, a ring of blood red and hints of yellow.
She was limping, too, unable to keep pressure on her left ankle for very long, if at all. He was supporting her as best as he could through the wreckage, and although it should have been a crime for her to weigh as little as she did, Beck could feel still the strain on his body getting to him with every step.
He was tired, and he was sure his ribs were broken, and a gash on his bicep had yet to stop bleeding. Every fiber of his being was telling him to stop, to slow down, to just rest. But Beck pushed those thoughts away and forced himself to keep going. He needed to get them somewhere safe, preferably somewhere higher up, in case the aftershocks produced another wave and they got caught in the crossfire of it again. He didn't think that he would make it out alive if that were to happen. His body was too beaten down and weak.
And, he needed to find Jade.
Jade was all that mattered, all that he cared about, and he couldn't find her if he was dead.
"Beck, look," said Cat, pulling him from a daze as they lumbered along. She was pointing toward something to the far left of them, a dash of hope washing across her once solemn face. "Will that work?"
He followed her gaze to find a large tree centered among the destruction, with heavy branches that he knew, even just from one glance, were suitable for climbing. It was high up enough that if another wave had come, both Beck and Cat would be relatively safe at that height, and relatively safe was really all that he could ask for.
"That's perfect, C," Beck said. His arm tenderly held up his middle, his ribs aching with every shuddering breath. There was a sharp throbbing in his chest, a heaviness that constricted the amount of air he could inhale, and he was beginning to feel dizzy. Still, he ran a hand through his damp hair, pushing it back from his eyes, and helped Cat walk along. Every sound or shudder of the earth made him nervous. "Good eye."
Cat limped along beside him and, save for a small smile, said nothing. She'd been relatively quiet since he'd found her - crying mostly, and saying very little other than her concerns about their friends. Beck knew that she was scared and worried about them, he was too, but couldn't help but find the uncharacteristic silence somewhat worrisome.
He loved Cat, like she was his little sister. He just hoped that all of this wasn't going to break her.
When they were somewhat closer to the tree, a good fifteen feet away, he broke that silence. "It's gonna be kinda difficult climbing up there with your ankle all banged up," he said, clearing his throat. His chest was feeling tighter by the minute. "You're pretty light, so I'm gonna lift you up on my shoulders and-"
He broke off as his lungs seized with a guttural sounding cough. Before Beck could even try to draw in a breath of air, saltwater pushed its way up his throat, and he keeled over, one arm curling around his abdomen, to cough it up into his hand. When he opened his eyes, a burning pain radiating through his chest, blood had splattered over his palm, dark and blackish, his fingers slick with it.
Beck straightened, and cursed under his breath when Cat gasped at the blood over his hand. She'd moved in front of him, a tiny hand holding onto one of his arms. "Are you okay?" She asked, brown eyes wide.
"Yeah, I'm good," Beck was quick to reassure her, noticing the rising panic building in her eyes. His voice came out hoarse, as if rubbed against sandpaper. He wiped his palm against his board shorts, a bit shakily; he suddenly felt very lightheaded "I just swallowed a lot of water, and other stuff. I'm alright."
There was a pause. Cat, frowning, still hadn't let go of his arm. "Are you sure you're okay? You're all sweaty and pale. Maybe we should take a break, or something?"
"I'm fine," Beck insisted, though he knew it was in vain. He could tell without looking at her that Cat was unconvinced by his lie - he was a fantastic actor, true, but she had always had the weird ability to figure things out before anybody else, somehow managing to be one of the most perceptive among them all.
"No you're not!" She huffed, clearly becoming more upset. "Stop being so stubborn!"
"Cat, we don't have time for a break right now," Beck said, a little breathlessly. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. "We need to get up that tree until a rescue team finds us, okay? We're not safe on the ground if another wave comes. We can't look for the other's if we..." He shook his head and opened his eyes - and the world was spinning around him. "...If we're…"
"Beck?"
His balance faltered. Beck stumbled back a step, only vaguely aware of Cat calling out to him. "I need...to look for Jade," he managed to get out, his head reeling. "I need - Jade."
And then it all went black.
.
.
The moment Beck fell, his body landing with a thud half in the sludge and half on a pile of palm leaves and debris, Cat rushed to his side as fast as her ankle would allow.
She knew he wasn't okay!
"No no no," She pleaded, patting at his cheeks in a failed attempt to wake him. "Oh no, oh God. Come on, Beck! Please wake up! You can't just leave me alone!"
Yet Beck was unmoving, like in a peaceful sleep; his chest rising and falling with each short, wheezing breath he took. At least, she thought, he was still breathing. Cat worried her bottom lip between her teeth and tasted salt and blood. He needed to get to a hospital, but there was no possible way she could get him there all on her own.
But she could get him to that tree.
She rose, a tad unsteadily, from her knees and glanced over her shoulder. It wasn't so far away, she supposed, though she couldn't imagine it would be easy to get him anywhere. "Okay, Cat, you can do this," she told herself, maneuvering herself carefully around her friend.
Cat hooked both arms beneath his, bodily hauling his upper-half from the muck. It dripped from his hair and his skin was slippery with it. She was small and not very strong, she knew that much, and Beck was heavier than he looked. The added weight on her bad ankle sent a jolt of white hot pain up her entire leg that left tears in her eyes. Still, Cat grit her teeth in determination and, using all the strength she could muster within her, began to drag her friend toward the tree in question.
He had helped her earlier. The least that she could do was attempt to return the favor.
She didn't want to think about how she would get him up that tree when she knew she couldn't even get herself up there, not with her ankle swollen and discolored the way it was. She would deal with that when the time came.
She didn't get him very far, maybe a five or six feet back, before her ankle finally gave out beneath her - aggravated from the pressure. Cat cried out and stumbled backward, into the shallow mire of debris and sand and ocean water. Beck's head lolled over the crook of her elbow but still he did not regain consciousness.
Cat took a moment to breathe through the pain and calm the storm of her thoughts. There were too many of them, coming to her all at once - but she knew one thing for certain: she wasn't safe here. Beck wasn't safe here.
She took another deep, steadying breath through her nose, and held Beck in her arms as if he'd fade away if she let him go. Her eyes stung from fresh tears and the dirty salt water and her own blood, and she squinted up against the harsh sunlight.
The sky was cloudless, and the air was still. The breeze had gone as the ocean water receded, and there was no relief from the harsh warmth of the sun.
Cat loved the sun. She did most things: the world was as beautiful and as easy to love as it was frightening and sometimes infuriating. It made her feel calm and reminded her of having fun with her friends at the beaches of Los Angeles, of blooming flowers and bumblebees and honey, of André's smile and Sam's hair. But looking up at the sun now, she felt nothing of the sort. It seemed wrong for the sky to look so beautiful, for the weather to be so perfect, when hundreds - thousands - of lives have just been destroyed in a matter of minutes.
She tried to imagine André's smile, but couldn't conjure up an image. It hurt to think about him, to think about Jade, the people she loved, when she didn't know if either of them were alright. She desperately hoped that they were; she hoped that they were together. She had been alone until she saw Beck - and that had been a previously unimaginable type of scary.
Like the sky, everything around her seemed so still in comparison to the chaos when the waves had hit. Cat really didn't know what she expected to happen afterwards - rescue teams, maybe news and paramedic helicopters. But now everything seemed to have fallen quiet, save for the groans of wrecked buildings and cars and the occasional caw of the seagulls that flew overhead. She thought it might be a good thing that they had returned, though. They'd all left when the first wave had come.
It gave her a small comfort, and a small inkling of hope that maybe they would be okay where they were.
Cat felt more exhausted now than terrified, the adrenaline slowly expelling from her system like the way water trickled. Her entire body ached as if she'd been hit by a bus or ran into by a very large footballer, and there was a ringing in her ears that hadn't stopped since she surfaced the water.
She sniffed and glanced down at her left leg, which was outstretched in the shallow sludge in front of her. Cat had broken enough bones in her lifetime to know that her ankle hadn't fractured and was likely only sprained, but the purple discoloration and swelling set a nervous pit in her stomach. She could move it still, but it hurt to, and she couldn't apply any pressure on it without being brought to tears.
It hadn't been that bad before. She thought she might have made it worse when she tried to drag Beck to the tree.
She wasn't sure how long she sat there for, singing softly to herself and an unconscious Beck, before she heard them: small collective of voices coming from her right, too far to be heard as anything but incoherent babble. Cat's heart leapt - they hadn't seen anybody since the water had receded. Mindful of her friend, Cat twisted to the source of the voices: three dark-skinned men, wearing nothing but pants rolled up their knees, calling out to whoever would listen. Even as they grew closer, Cat couldn't understand whatever it was that they were saying. It was evident that they were locals.
Her breath rushed from her lungs in a half-sob, half-laugh of relief. "Hey!" She yelled, waving her arm in the air to catch their attention. Her own voice was slightly hoarse, impaired from all the saltwater she'd accidentally inhaled, and cracked as she yelled. She had to clear her throat before calling out to them again; loud enough that their heads turned all at once, loud enough that they yelled back at her, trudging through the sludge and wreckage to get to her.
Beck did not wake, even as the strangers took him from her arms and helped her to her feet.
"Please," she cried, even though she knew it was likely they couldn't understand her. She pointed to Beck with the hand that wasn't clutching the strangers arm, to his broken down and beaten body. "You have to help my friend. Please, please, he needs help!"
The man helping support her weight glanced from her, to Beck, and seemed to understand. He said something to his companions, and one of them moved to press his fingers against the side of Beck's throat, feeling for a pulse. He spoke in rapid Thai to the other, and although Cat considered herself good at reading facial expressions, she could not gauge what they could have possibly been saying.
Together, the two men picked Beck up by his legs and beneath his arms, beginning to trek back the way they had come. Cat gasped when she heard Beck groan and cough, jostled by the sudden movements - though one look at him told her that he wasn't truly aware of what was happening or his surroundings.
His groaning and delirious and incomprehensible muttering to himself continued for the duration of the walk.
The men brought them to a small village not far off, just up a hill and out of reach from the waves destruction. The village, at first glance, consisted of huts made of bamboo, settled in a vast field of dirt road and luscious woodland; the locals - men and women of varying ages - were plentiful but scattered around, carrying containers or water and clothing and tending to tourists who must have fled there for safety.
Almost immediately, Cat was surrounded by a group of older women.
One of the ladies provided her with a loose fitting t-shirt to cover herself with, as she was still in just her bikini top and shorts, and another helped wipe the blood and grime from her face with wet cloth. They were speaking softly to her, although she couldn't understand - but Cat wasn't paying much attention to them. After pulling the shirt over her head, she had turned to watch as a group of boys helped lift a delirious Beck onto a wooden door, carrying him to the back of a rundown pick-up truck.
The older woman helping clean her face took her by the shoulders then, and gently turned her chin with a bony finger. She had the kindest eyes Cat had ever seen. "Hospital," she said simply, with a firm and determined nod and botched English. "Hospital."
"Thank you," Cat breathed, and allowed the woman to wipe away her falling tears and pull her into her arms. "Thank you."
The world was frightening, that much was proven. But, as Cat let herself and Beck be cared for by absolute strangers, she knew she had been right all along: it was beautiful, too, and so incredibly easy to love.
I'm so torn between puckentine and candre for this fic so I'm not going to explicitly state chose either one but I will say this: Y'ALL CAN PRY PANSEXUAL (or bisexual) CAT VALENTINE FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS. thanks for coming to my tedtalk
anyway if you're still around, thanks for being super patient with me and my horrible uploading schedule. hopefully this extra long (and slightly rushed) chapter with the answers you've been waiting for makes up for it! much love! xx
like usual - please leave a review with your thoughts! I don't want to be That Person, but lack of reviews is incredibly demotivating and honestly makes me consider abandoning this fic.
ps. idk if you guys have noticed, but I tend to write Cat's personality like how she was portrayed in season 1 and 2 in all of my writings and now that she's 18 and graduated in this story I write her a little more matured. I hope that I'm still doing her character some justice!