metallic
Written for August Fic Challenge 2023, Prompt: Resonance. Established Relationship. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!
It's not exactly a superpower, the way Munder works with metal, but it is something more than human. He's attuned to it all in a way that few others are, and it's what makes him so damn good at his job. And so, the second he steps aboard the Antonia Graza, he feels it. Something is wrong. Very, very wrong with this ship. Every shade of wrong. He can feel it screaming out to him in the metalwork – something rotten, creeping and insidious, that infects it all.
He calls it out damn near immediately. They've only just gotten on board, just taking a quick look around to see how bad things are, to see if there's even a chance of salvaging the derelict ship.
He's on lead, with Dodge, Epps, and Murphy trailing him through the once-elegant hallways in search of the helm.
He feels something in the way his footfalls feel on the metal below that's not quite right.
So, without a thought he stops, reaches out to block Dodge from advancing. "It's not stable," he tells the others. "Must be rusted out or something."
And, because they are his crew, and they know how he is with metal, they take his word for it. He's saved them from stepping through rusted out floors on more than one occasion in their time together.
But Ferriman's voice crackles over the radio when they say they're coming back. He insists they try.
Just to prove the point, Munder shifts another few inches forward and he feels it give, almost too easily, underfoot. A hole opens up and nearly swallows him down, would have, if not for Dodge's iron grip on his arm.
"I told you so," he grumbles when he's back on debatably solid footing.
They find another way around.
They dive the next morning. He, Dodge, and Epps suit up in their SCUBA gear and jump in and the water of the Bering Strait is always frigid as fuck, but something about this is different, too. Like the cold is pulling him in, pulling him down.
But he does his job all the same.
And what they find is… surprising.
This ship has been adrift for decades with zero maintenance and zero control. There should be more problems than what they find. The slow, progressively worsening damage from the nearby rocks should have allowed the seawater to deteriorate the hull over the months it's been caught in the currents here and yet the rust inside is minimal compared to what it should be. It's still a problem, of course, but not nearly as much of one as it should be.
So they surface, and when the crew starts making plans he agrees that it is fixable even if he does not necessarily agree that they should actually fix it, his skin crawling with the feeling that something about this ship just isn't right and that it would be better off on the bottom of the ocean regardless of the paycheck bringing it in would net them.
He feels it again when they head back aboard to do some final recon. It's just he and Dodge this time, split off from the others, wandering through flooded passageways down to check the bulkheads for any additional problems.
"You okay?" Dodge asks him when he catches Munder staring at another suspect bit of flooring.
"Of course," he lies, "Why?"
"You've been acting weird since we found this hunk of junk. Not like you."
"I don't like it," he admits, "Something about it is just… off."
With a shrug, Dodge claps him on the shoulder, "I'll take your word for it," he declares.
He reaches out, a desperate grip on Dodge's shoulder, eyes saying all the things they can't when they're on a mission. "Just be careful, yeah?"
Dodge nods, serious, and steps around the area he'd noticed Munder so fixated on. "Yeah."
This is all so fucked.
There are bodies on the ship. To be fair, the old ones are not that alarming – something had certainly gone wrong back when the ship was initially lost – but the new ones are much more so. Other salvagers who tried and failed to do what they are doing right now.
There is also a fuckton of gold on the ship. Which seems like it should solve all their problems – take the gold, leave the ship, go home and make bank.
Except the Arctic Warrior has exploded, taking Santos with her, nearly taking him, too. It is not lost on him that their home away from home blew up the second they'd agreed to take the gold and abandon ship. And now they're all stranded on the Graza as it draws ever closer to the rocks that will finally take her down.
Unless they fix her.
And all Munder can think about is how wrong the metal feels. The weird echo-y reverberations of it all. The too sharp metallic tang in the air everywhere, like every piece of it is fresh off the forge. Even the gold had seemed unreal.
He doesn't trust any of it.
Doesn't trust the metal cans they find in the galley enough to eat from them. Doesn't trust the tools he finds aboard the ship enough to use them. Doesn't trust a single step he takes or any door he passes through. He sits up all night while the others wander merrily around this cursed ship like its some Disney Cruise; only Dodge sticks with him.
Fuck this place.
Greer's dead.
Murphy's insane.
Ferriman and Epps keep wandering off, the former mumbling about gold and the latter about ghosts and all Munder can do is wonder what the ever loving fuck is going on here on this cursed ship and how the hell he and Dodge ended up the only sane ones. He wants off, he wants out. But out means fixing the damage, so he begrudgingly goes below with Dodge and Epps and patches it up because that's what he does. He welds the tear in the hull and it goes suspiciously well given how messed up the situation is. Shitty tools, shitty conditions, not enough crew, not enough sleep and it all goes just god damn swimmingly.
No way.
This metal should not be so easy to work.
This is the kind of metal that should put up a fight.
He's just waiting for something to go wrong.
So when something grinds to a metallic halt below the surface, one of their pumps sputtering out, he obliges when his instincts tell him not to risk it. One pump is good enough for now. He herds Dodge out of the room before he notices the problem, the two of them wandering up to the main deck to watch as they only just barely clear the rocks. Right as they pass by, the ship is rocked by a mighty explosion that makes the one on the Warrior look like a puny firecracker.
The shockwave rips through the ship, and he and Dodge both lose their footing as it washes over them, ears ringing and balance thrown off.
"What the fuck-!?" Dodge demands, his voice sounds far away and tinny.
Munder clings to him, unwilling to lose track of the other man as the ship bucks and rolls as it breaks apart below them, the metal screeching as its shredded apart. Strangely, it feels different now. The metal below his feet feels steady and solid despite the blast. The bow lurches upward as it breaks free from the stern, and with no other choice, he grabs hold of Dodge and pulls him over the edge as it crashes back down again. They need to get clear and get to some sort of make-shift raft.
Hitting the water feels like landing on concrete, but it's a dive he's already made once on this nightmare venture. He comes up, sputtering and already half-frozen and finds Dodge surfacing nearby.
"Come on," he calls out, paddling towards some hunk of wooden debris that looks big enough to hold them both. He wrangles himself aboard and drags Dodge up beside him, the two of them huddled together and heaving for breath as the ship sinks below the surface.
Then, alarmingly, a bunch of glowing orbs start to surface, rising up and up and up, odd ghostly forms that disappear into the northern lights above before it all goes dark.
"What," Dodge says, "the fuck was that?"
"I'd say that's probably why the ship seemed weird," he hazards to guess, wondering at the sight before him. He doesn't entirely know what he'd been looking at – ghosts? Souls? A trick of the light? Blast-induced hallucination? But he's sure that this was the reason the metal felt so damn haunted.
He's just glad they won't be among the ones haunting it.