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The waves lap against the shore as they’ve always done, racing up against the pale rocks and bursting into bright foam before pulling back to run at them again. Grains of crystalline sand float, caught, in the tide as it rolls in and out along the beach, forever dragged back and forth by a force so vastly beyond their control that the very comparison is laughable. One day the tide will devour this boulder of an island and leave no trace. Well, Stan says ‘one day’, but really it’s happening right now, with each joyful crash of spray, with each gentle roll of the tide.
A figure sits cross-legged in the white sand just at the very apex of where the tide can reach, Ford’s head lying in its lap.
Ford’s hair is stiff with salt and shot with grey that wasn’t there before, a beard that doesn’t suit him sporting the same wintry hue. The tide tugs at his limbs and weights down his clothing with each race inland, eager to wrap him up and drag him down. No matter how many times it batters against him, his eyes never open. Save for the way the tide toys with his limbs, sets them drifting like seaweed or arranges them as though he is a doll, Ford doesn’t move at all.
The click of a cocked pistol behind its head doesn’t provoke any reaction from the figure sitting cross-legged on the beach. The salt wind tosses its curls (dark, this time, and almost subdued, falling in tight spirals down its back), but otherwise it is as still as the man lying in its lap.
“Let me guess, you want your brother back?”
Ford’s lips have not moved, and Stanley, holding the pistol to the figure’s head, knows he hasn’t spoken. The voice must be coming from the figure sitting on the beach, but somehow it doesn’t sound like it could have come out of anything that looks so human. It sounds like surf and wind, seabirds and the creak of sails. It sounds like the ocean given voice.
The silence flows in around the little tableau like the tide, laps at their heels before draining away again.
The voice is flat, this time, the sharp, short slap of choppy waves against the hull. “You know what happened to him as well as I do.”
Stanley adjusts his grip on the pistol. “All I know’s those kids stabbed the heart this idiot somehow survived cutting out of his own chest. Far as I know, anything that can live without a heart ain’t gonna be too slowed down by a pocketknife through the organ in question."
"If you think he was without a heart then you’re stupider than he was.” The figure sitting in the sand moves, for the first time, too fluid to be really human, and tenderly brushes a lock of Ford’s overgrown hair away from Ford’s weather-lined face. “He loved me, you know that?”
“Lots of people love you,” Stan snaps.
“Not like he did.” The figure half-turns, one golden eye shining out from under its tangle of curls to transfix Stan like a sword thrust. “Can you honestly say you love my wild moods, Stanley Pines? Love storms that cut you to the bone and then freeze your marrow? Love waves that try to crush you just because you’re there?”
Stan shifts, but before he can say a word, the figure sitting in the sand raises a hand, one finger raised. “Can you honestly say it’s me you love, and not your own strength when it pulls you through alive?”
Stan frowns.
“Like I said. Sailors are selfish. But he loved me.” The figure turns its back on Stan and the pistol he holds trained on its head again. There’s something almost like frustration in its voice, now, more of a seagull croak. “He loved me so much he’d happily let me kill him if it would amuse me for a moment. Is that why he cut his heart out? You think he didn’t care, but really, he just didn’t care about you.”
“Thanks,” Stan forces through gritted teeth, his finger straining against the trigger.
“You know that won’t do any good,” the figure on the beach says, without so much as looking back at Stanley. “Besides, your powder’s wet.”
Stan lets the pistol drop into the sand. The thump it makes landing is soft, unsatisfying.
“You want your brother back, Stanley?” the figure in the sand says, and tilts its head back, back, too far back, until both gold-coin eyes stare into Stan’s, upside down under the biggest, broadest, whitest grin Stan has ever seen on a humanoid face. Stan takes a stumbling step backwards, and that smile grows wider.
“We had a deal,” the ocean says and there’s barely any pretence of it having a human voice now. The surf pounds against the rocks surrounding the beach, the rush and roar of water shaping itself into words. “Ten years. One thousand souls. Eternal life. I don’t break deals.” It laughs - the scrape and creak of a mainmast about to fall - and adds, “Unless I can get something out of it!”
“You’re askin’ me to -”
The ocean’s smile vanishes. “I know a thing or two about death, Stanley Pines! Trust me, this is the best deal you’re gonna get!”
Stan’s pistol lies, useless, in a small soft crater in the sand at his feet. Around him, surrounding the island, stretching out as far as the eye can see or the mind fathom, slatey water the colour of the gravestones in the little churchyard on the bluffs mutters and shivers and waits.
“The best you’re going to get, you mean,” Stan says slowly.
The ocean frowns. Somewhere overhead, a cloud must have passed between the island and the sun. Stan shivers in the chill of it, but he doesn’t move.
“You just want him breathing and worshipping you again, and you think you can sucker me into doing the heavy lifting for you. And you call sailors selfish.” Stan crouches, picks his pistol up out of the sand and carefully taps it off, ignoring the look of frozen outrage on the ocean’s face.
“So you’ll let him lie dead rather than have him alive and happy with me! Wow, you’re more vicious than I gave you credit for!”
Stan sticks his pistol through his belt, wobbles on one foot as he pulls off his boot and tips out a steady stream of sand to join its cousins on the beach. “You remember giving me that jar of dirt?”
“How could I forget.” The voice is the flat hollow of tide slapping against the underside of a dock, but it regains some of its buoyancy when it says, “I still can’t believe you fell for that!”
Stan hums, a non-answer. “Oh, it was obviously a scam. Didn’t give it back, though, did I.”
The ocean frowns again, but this time any malice in its expression is replaced by confusion. “What?”
Stan shrugs, tugging his boot back on and pulling off the other to pour another desert out onto the beach. “I’m just saying, it’s you who’d be making him immortal anyway, isn’t it? That thousand souls thing, how’d you come up with that figure anyway? Sheesh. They mighta unbound you from your bones, but you sure stayed bound in your head.”
The ocean gives Stan a flat look, and Stan reflects that, if there’s one thing an ocean should be good at, it’s looking flat.
“You’re saying I’m conning myself,” it says, after a moment, and its voice is more human than tidal.
“I’m saying -” Stan flips down his eyepatch to cover his right eye, then switches it over to his left with a wink. “Your magic, your rules. Savvy?”
The ocean turns back to Ford, and goes still again, a thoughtful sort of quiet descending over the beach, broken only by the murmur of the tide.
Stan watches for a while, to see if it does anything interesting. The wind ruffles the ocean’s curls, and the tide tugs at Ford’s boots. After what feels like an eternity, a small whitish-grey crab tumbles out of the ocean’s sleeve, extends little legs and big claws, and skitters down into the surf.
Stan pulls his other boot on and starts the trudge back across the island to his ship. The smile that sneaks across his face feels hard-earned.
Behind him, around him, the surf booms, the tide hisses, the sand crunches. Stan’s heard enough mythology - lived enough of it, to tell the truth - to know not to look back.