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There’s a demon living in Ronan’s house.
Or that’s what others call him. Ronan doesn’t take it too seriously.
When they meet, Ronan is darning socks for winter, sitting by the window that faces the water. He’s distracted and misses a few stitches, and looks down to unravel them.
When he looks up, there’s a body lying on the sand, motionless as the tide moves it gently.
He throws the socks aside and runs out of the hut.
The scent of blood hits him like a fist, nearly making him double over. The men from his village must’ve harpooned a dozen whales; a whole colony of seals, to make the shore reek like this. It makes his stomach roil.
He claps a hand to his nose as he stumbles down the rocks, kneeling beside the body. He scoops its face from the sand to see if it’s alive.
It’s a man － no, a boy, and his eyelids are fluttering weakly, barely conscious. He’s naked, skin smooth and oddly unblemished. His hair is long and black like the waves, lapping over his breast and hipbones. He’s－
He stirs in Ronan’s lap, and a faint grimace of pain contorts his face. When the tides draw back, Ronan gasps － there’s a curved spearhead driven into his left foot, a pool of blood mottling the sand.
“Hey,” he says gently, nudging his shoulder. “You need to get up. Can you－”
The boy’s eyes fly open, and he shoves Ronan hard in the chest. Ronan falls back onto the sand, and the boy twists away from his hand like it burns him. “Don’t touch me .”
Ronan swallows. “If you don’t let me help you,” he says, carefully, how he talks to all his patients, “that’ll be infected. I can clean and bandage it for you.”
The boy’s breathing erratically, crushing sand in his fists and letting it trickle out between his fingers. “Where’s－can’t have－” He’s straining to see over the waves, scanning the coast in both directions, and Ronan sees he’s working himself into a panic. Suddenly he makes a sound like someone’s struck him and lurches to his feet, but his leg crumples and he falls down again with an open cry of pain.
“Don’t stand－”
He mutters something under his breath, eyes darting. It sounds like - gone .
“What’s gone?”
The boy inhales － one long, deep breath that seems like it scrapes the bottom of the ocean and comes up empty － and his body seizes up, he curls into himself, and faints dead on the sand.
Ronan waits until the numbness in his own limbs thaws, and then hooks an arm under the boy’s shoulders, his head lolling against his chest, and carries him back to the hut.
~
Ronan ends up giving him the bed, after performing some last-minute surgery on the couch. Digging out the spearhead isn’t hard - it hadn’t been one of those cruel barbed ones, thank God - but the blood’s all over the cushions when he’s done. Ronan’s most worried about infection, and applies half a tub of antibiotic cream before bandaging it.
He realizes he’ll have to wake him up to give him a muscle relaxant but can’t stand to see those wide black eyes boring into him, the layers of pain underneath. He resolves to let him sleep the night and deal with...all of this, in the morning.
The boy’s still out cold when Ronan lugs him to the bed in one of his old nightshirts. He leaves the window open when he sees the odd red flush across his neck and chest. Ronan frowns - it’s midsummer, but not overly hot.
He’ll deal with it later. For now, Ronan throws a blanket over his bloodstained couch and slumps down, letting the sound of the surf rock him to sleep.
~
Ronan’s woken up to the sound of panicked tossing and turning － sounds like a wounded animal.
The boy’s sitting up when Ronan comes in, moonlight streaming across his chest. His stomach and shoulders twitch with muscle as he pants, black eyes wild.
“Where am I,” he grits out. “Who are you. Ronan .”
Ronan raises his hands. “I’m a healer. I apprentice in the village infirmaries. I’ll take you to one in the morning-”
“ No .”
Ronan stops. “No?”
The boy’s hands clench in the sheets. His lips contort in shapes that don’t form normal words before he speaks. “No. You can’t take me to the - in- firm -ary. They will kill me.”
“They’re trained to help you. Most of them.” Ronan sighs, rubs his eyes. “Look, it’s early, and…”
The boy turns away, and for a second Ronan thinks he’s given up. But a word cracks from his throat just as Ronan turns to leave.
“I can-” His breaths rattle his chest, like just speaking hurts. “I can help you.”
Ronan stalls in the doorway. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“It will be faster.” The boy’s shoulders are relaxing. “It will work.”
“But…”
They will kill me . It’s nonsense. This boy - with the shock and pain he’s experiencing, he isn’t sensible enough for Ronan to be listening to him.
And it’s so obvious the boy doesn’t want to be here. Even now he’s twitching like the sheets burn him, looking at Ronan with palpable disgust. He’s huddled as far away from him as possible, not looking him in the eyes, too hateful to speak but too scared to run.
(He’s so scared. )
He hated this. Ronan couldn’t imagine why.
But.
“Alright,” he hears himself say. “I have what I need to stitch the wound, but I’ll need to go to town for more antibiotics.”
The boy’s silent for so long Ronan thinks he’s fallen asleep.
“You should have left me there,” he says, like it’s something that doesn’t make Ronan’s heart go cold.
“It’s not bad at all, really. You’ll heal.” He tries to keep his voice steady.
“No,” the boy whispers, curling back into himself. The moonlight paints across his limbs; it’s the only time Ronan’s seen something so beautiful look like chains. “I won’t.”
Wordlessly, Ronan closes the door, and lies awake the next few hours until sunrise.
~
He sets out at dawn, before the boy wakes, and visits the infirmary for tablets to treat tetanus and vitamin supplements. He stops to buy some seal pelts for the winter, and wonders if the men selling them had shot the boy in his bed. The thought makes his words to them colder.
He interns at the village hospices － or used to － and on his way back notes the open doors teeming with people, friends and family crowding the waiting rooms. Midsummer is upon them now. Mani must be up to his neck in patients moaning about the water singing to them. He smiles, not feeling very sorry.
He sees the boy through the bedroom window when he gets back, sitting up in bed, staring at him. Ronan smiles at him, going around the back to the well.
The boy’s fever will likely have lessened over night, but still he draws three full buckets of water, which threaten to spill as he stumbles back down the slope. He sets them on the counter, and goes to store the pelts in the back shed.
He reenters the house, and one of the buckets is on the floor before the bedroom, bone-dry.
~
Evening comes, and the boy comes out. He doesn’t look at Ronan, just grabs his crutch, limps past him and out the door before Ronan can open his mouth. He throws down his book and runs after him.
“God - what are you doing?” he pants, catching up. It’s easy to get in front of him, but between the smell and the empty, dead stare Ronan doesn’t especially want to.
“Water,” the boy says simply. “I said I’d help you.”
“You can’t swim with that foot.”
The boy’s head snaps up, and his body in Ronan’s clothes bristles. “I know .”
“So?”
“I’m just going to go in.” The boy pauses. “Let me.”
Maybe Ronan’s imagining the unspoken plea, but he caves. “If you let me stand here and watch you.”
He nods sharply and strides past. Ronan watches him sink into the black water like a second skin, and treads for minutes, hours. He arches his neck, lips parted, aglow in the last light of day.
Night comes, and the daylight turns to moonlight, cascading over the muscles of his back as he stretches. Ronan opens his mouth but can’t call him back, even when the darkness presses closer. Now, the moonlight doesn’t look so much like chains.
He forces himself to go back inside. The boy’s perfectly safe, he’s sure of that; even if that’s the only thing he’s sure of.
His dreams ripple like moonlight over the waves.
~
From then on the boy goes out every night to soak in the sea, comes back to Ronan fast asleep or on the couch reading. He’s only stayed to watch him come out once. Never again.
Ronan ends up changing his bandages for him, giving him the tablets, cleaning the wound. It’s undeniably better. Incredibly so, actually.
The boy is in pain. As a doctor, Ronan thinks he will recover from the wound but not from whatever else. He doesn’t speak for hours on end, sits at the window staring out at the sea. Curled into himself, shivering.
Ronan tries to talk to him, but learns eventually it’s best for the boy to talk to him.
After one night’s swim and a long day of visits from patients, while Ronan’s changing his bandages, he speaks up.
“They asked you about sea madness. The patients.”
Ronan glances up at him. “Yes. It’s common around now.”
“What is it?”
Soiled bandages loosen around Ronan’s fingers and fall to the floor. “Come Midsummer, men claim to hear the sea singing to them at night. Voices － of beautiful girls, challengers, their parents. They can’t tell dream from reality.” He begins to apply cream, and hands the boy a tablet and a glass of water. The boy gulps it down － always thirsty － and without looking Ronan hands him the bandages to throw away. They move with each other, healer and healing. “It’s the big game hunters, usually. They say there’s a curse.”
The boy’s smiling. “What do they do?”
“They fall for it. They walk in, the tide comes and goes. They go with it.” He finishes with the cream and the boy offers him a hand, helping him to his feet.
“Only the game hunters that die, maybe,” the boy says suddenly, and Ronan frowns.
“They drown themselves.”
“There are others who go. The sick, the elderly, young women…” The boy cocks his head. “Men like you.”
“How do you know?” Ronan had a friend, Rósi,’who’d given herself to the sea a week before her wedding to a town elder. And he’d had patients just disappear into the water one night, before he could tell them there was nothing more he could do.
The boy shrugs, limping for the bedroom. Evening light seems to adore him, catching on his clavicle and the planes of his back. His hair flows behind him like a boatsail. Ronan turns away.
“The water has always been a friend to me.”
It’s been nearly a month now. Ronan isn’t letting him stay for the wound that’s getting impossibly better by the day, it’s for…
Ronan can’t heal him. But he can help him － can give him a friend besides the water. During the next night’s swim, Ronan makes the boy’s bed for him, laying down the thick seal pelts. The smell no longer revolts him.
He goes to sleep that night with a smile on his face, knows the boy will come in and see － be comforted. When he wakes up in the morning, the bedroom is empty, the shore clear, and the boy is nowhere to be found.
Ronan runs up and down the coast for a few kilometers, calling for him - he’d never known his name - before he’s forced to admit defeat.
A strange, hollow feeling settling in his gut, he decides to distract himself with arranging the pelts on the bed. He’ll be sleeping there tonight, and the nights will be growing colder.
He opens the door to the bedroom, and for the second time is flung back with a hand over his nose, cursing.
Like the blood clinging to the beach, the scent of...fish, decomposed, almost rotting, overpowers him the moment he sticks his head in. It blankets the rumpled, sweaty bedsheets, the headboard, even the now-empty glass of water Ronan left on the sidetable last night. And somehow it reminds him of the scent that lingers after a patient’s death, unhealthy, rotting .
(Mab, how sick was the boy?)
He backs out, shutting the door with a bang and doesn’t reopen it. He’ll sleep on the couch.
In the short time he stood there, the pelts had become fouled with the smell - dead, hurt, grieving - and he leaves them there, too.
Void of other options, and the smell sticking to his skin, he decides to go for a swim.
The water’s warm this time of year, black and shallow for a long distance out before the sand drops suddenly into a trench. Many men have fallen prey to these waters, but Ronan’s lived by them his whole life, broke his mother’s heart with a clear conscience when he left home and built his hut here, at the edge of forever.
He strips and leaves his clothes by the beach, sinking into the water as it rushes over him, and gulps in one last breath before diving. He pushes out with his arms and swims further in, setting laps for himself between the black rock jutting out of the water to his right and the sandbar to his left.
As he swims, his mind returns to the first words the boy ever said to him - don’t touch me . When he’d still worked at the infirmary, he’d treated people who only came in when they were close to death, snapped at the nurses, hugged themselves in the corner of waiting rooms and didn’t speak. It was one reason why he’d been almost glad when Mani sent him off on his own - the infirmary didn’t know how to help people who’d been hurt beyond flesh, beyond taking a hand offered to them.
The wound wasn’t fatal. Enough that Ronan couldn’t fathom how the boy managed to leave, but there wasn’t much risk beyond infection.
He swims faster, diving deeper. A cold current encircles his ankle, and the weather’s getting angrier. One of Midsummer’s rainstorms.
But he keeps swimming, not able to rid himself of the boy’s grating voice, his pale chest and his pain. Gods, Ronan wants to help him. But what could he do? He had no standing in this village, little money, no family, not since…
His hands curl into fists, cleaving the water in powerful strokes.
You’re not my son. You can’t be.
The winds above the water begin to rage. Droplets speckle the surface.
...against the gods, against our ways…
Just don’t speak of it. We’ve done so much for you.
The water’s getting colder, and currents rip at Ronan’s waist, pulling him in. He flails for a second, spluttering water.
It’s just too much.
Marry her, Ronan. Is that too much to ask for? Just marry a woman.
His head splits the water, gasping, but the current pulls him back under. He’s fighting to breathe now and the storm’s upon him, he’d been out too long…
Water spills into his lungs, his mother’s venom, his father’s disappointment. He can’t breathe.
Don’t touch me.
He can’t swim. He’s drowning.
Don’t touch me.
An arm slips under his shoulders - wildly he shoves at their chest, but they hold him firm. Through the blood pounding in his ears, he registers they’re moving towards the shore. Pain and simple exhaustion dragging him down, he lets them, head lolling against their chest. (Smooth, strong.) Their heartbeat’s faster than normal, and the healer in him lazily attributes it to exhilaration.
They hold his head above the water, not once faltering, and the waves seem to part for them like a dear friend.
He might as well be riding the back of a whale.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, he only vaguely notices when they break the surface for the last time, his back hitting wet sand. One second, two...and then he jerks up, gasping, water leaving his lungs in a flood as someone’s fingers press into his stomach with cruel, incredible precision that he couldn’t replicate even as a doctor.
He stares into the eyes of his rescuer, panting.
The boy’s hair falls onto Ronan’s shoulders as he leans over him. The look in his eyes is torturously close to uncertain.
“Ro-nan.” The boy says his name slowly. “Are you alright?”
“You-” Ronan stops as coughs rack his chest. A hand settles on his back, steadying him. “You shouldn’t swim with that wound,” he finishes lamely.
The boy’s mouth twists into a maybe-smile. “I was glad to find out I could still swim, without-” He trails off. Ronan stares at him, hazel-gold to sea black, and all of a sudden feels exhausted. The boy looks it; dark bags beneath his eyes and that same starved strain to his chest. But he’s...beautiful. And he came back.
“Let’s go home,” Ronan says. The boy hesitates, then nods, offering a hand to help him to his feet. Ronan notices something else, and his brows furrow.
“The wound, where...”
“It doesn’t matter. When we－” He feels the boy swallow against his chest as he leans against him. “I won’t need those pelts. You can get rid of them.”
Ronan nods absently, breathing in the sea wind and a deeper, wilder musk that clings his very skin. He clings back, and together they begin the walk home.