Chapter Text
"So Mermaids......are like....Vampires?????"
Out of all the ways that Connor thought he was going to die, drowning was never one of them. He also didn't think he would die twice.
And yet, here he was, slowly and steadily choking to death, first on saltwater, then on air.
It had started a few weeks ago, actually. Connor had been dragged down to a private beach by his rich-but-self-centered-parents. He hadn't gotten along with his family for years now, not his mother, not his father, not even his sister. There was a time when his family had been perfect, when they all loved each other. There had been a time when a family trip to the beach would have been met with joyous shouts from Connor, or his sister Zoe. A time when they would have ran around barefoot with sand between their toes, a time when they would have compared sandcastles and collected seashells and danced around in the waves, laughter echoing off of them like a radio. There was a time when they were happy, but that time is long gone. For some reason, his mother had gotten it in her head that they needed to start acting like a 'proper' family again.
A proper family. Going to the beach wouldn't make them a proper family, it was just another illusion, like the many pretty glass figures his mom kept in her china cabinet. Pretty and PERFECT, what a joke. For all their pretending, this wasn't an issue that a single romp in the sand would fix.
And yet here they were anyway, Connor in his black swim shorts and black tank, and Zoe in her bikini. They couldn't stand each other, so they just stayed as far away as they could without getting screamed at like usual. They never could seem to get along over anything, specifically him and his father. He could already hear Larry start to mumble this and that about the heat, and the grit, and the fact that his son had chosen to wear black even though it was so hot outside. God, everything he did was wrong, wasn’t it? He couldn’t understand why everything just offended his father so much, from his hobbies to his clothes style to his sexuality to his fucking hair, but Larry Murphy would never be satisfied. Connor was not staying around that bullshit any longer. He threw on some sunscreen and started padding out into the ocean. Not that he loved the ocean, quite the opposite actually, but at this point, he'd rather take death-by-Kraken over 'fun family time' for any longer.
And so he swam. And he swam. And he swam on, ignoring his mother calling out to him, because if he had to be here, he was certainly not going to hang around to listen to the inevitable bitching.
He didn't realize how long he'd been swimming until it was too late. He knew he needed to turn back when he started to get tired, but when he did, he realized that he couldn't see land. He stiffened, but then calmed himself, looking up at the clouds and trying to pinpoint where he'd come from. He thought he saw what looked like a tree in the distance, so he started for it at a much more conservative pace.
He was halfway there when he started to cramp. Oh god. It wasn’t death that he was scared of. It was dying this way. He’d been planning to do it on his own terms, in a way he could be in control of it. But this… well. He slowed down, his limbs feeling sluggish, like he was swimming through oil.
He could see land now. It didn’t look like the shore, more like a small island, but…. It was better than nothing. He would have been fine, but as luck would have it, the wind was picking up, and wave after wave began to buffet him. It struck him, suddenly, that he was…scared. He didn’t really want to die, especially like this. He picked up his speed, determined to at least make it to that little strip of land before he lost the rest of his dwindling energy. The wind howled and a wave knocked him back, and the salt was so concentrated he thought he might choke to death right then. There was water everywhere, surrounding him, pushing him down, salt choking the life out of him and blinding his eyes.
His screams couldn’t be heard over the wind, his long hair heavier when it was sick with seawater. It was freezing and yet everything burned all at once, his body convulsing before going rigid with shock. He tried to paddle but his body was heavy, so heavy, and he was sucked down, down, down… He began to lose his vision, so marred by the inky blackness of the water beneath him and the rapidly fading light of the surface, that he could only vaguely remember seeing a webbed hand grab his wrist and yank him before he fully lost consciousness.