Chapter Text
“I can explain,” Wilbur starts, very quickly realising that he can’t.
“What the fuck,” repeats Eret. She’s staring, eyes cold and confused, feeling for her bag on the sand with her free arm but unwilling to take her eyes off of Wilbur and the sirens.
“They’re not - they’re not dangerous. I promise you. There’s no need to… just, please don’t call the police.”
“The - Wilbur,” she hisses, “I nearly died. You nearly died.”
“But I was fine! We were fine, you don’t -”
“How are you being this - this - ” She throws her arms up in frustration, “I’m not worried about me! I’m worried about - look, my brother comes out here all the time with his friends. How on earth can I just - just - stand by when I know he’s in danger, now, every time he comes to the coast? When I know that any of the hundreds of tourists that come every summer are in danger of being drowned!?”
“Look - please, Eret, listen to me, it’s not that -”
“Clearly,” she says, slinging her bag back across her shoulder and fidgeting with her phone in her other hand. “You’ve been… I - I don’t know. Something’s… they’ve done something to you.”
“They’re just singing, Eret. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s not like they -”
“Hang on, I’m sorry, singing? Like… a siren song? They’re sirens?”
“I guess! Not like there’s - some sort of mythical taxonomy for them, is there? Listen, I don’t know, but you need to understand that they’re not bad creatures, they’re my friends, they’re just -”
“I get it,” Eret steps back, “I get it. Alright. Yeah. You got siren song-ed, you got brainwashed, and now you want to protect these things. Did you even see how sharp their teeth were?”
“They don’t eat people,” Wilbur throws out, feeling it fail to land even as he says it. Eret will not be convinced - not now. Not after she was so close to… well, can he even blame her?
“I’m gonna get the hell out of here, Will, and I’d suggest you come with me. It’s not safe to stick around here.”
“No - well, it wasn’t, but it’s - Eret - ah, shit.”
She’s gone, vaulting back over the rocks and storming back down the beach, before he has the chance to try again. As far as he can see, she’s staring down at her phone, waiting for the moment she’s far enough away from the bay (from the sirens’ influence? The magic?) that it turns back on.
And then…
Wilbur’s not sure what she’s going to do when her phone turns back on.
He has a sickening sense he’s very close to finding out.
So he doesn’t go home. He sits in the chippies by the shoreline for an hour or so, sipping a quickly-cooling cup of subpar tea and picking at a saveloy; he wanders around a couple of tat shops and looks at overpriced shells and art for tourists until he probably looks as shattered on the outside as he feels on the inside, and when he’s sick even of that he goes and sits on the rocks - not the big ones, not the piles of slate and shale he’s used to clambering across, but the pebbles that make up the body of Brighton Beach, the brown-and-grey rocks that hurt his arse to sit on but which don’t really present much of an alternative, not now, not as the sun’s going down already, because it’s been a good few hours and the clouds are starting to crowd in.
He realises, belatedly, that maybe it would be a good idea to turn on mobile data; he can’t be fully in the loop with whatever Eret’s decided to do unless he has the ability to check the breaking news. Or something. Honestly, he’s just been hoping Eret will call him, but he’s now recognising that that was never really a likely outcome. This, though - this should improve his odds of keeping up with them.
It’s not a news article that greets him, though. Of all things, it’s a LinkedIn popup, that backdates itself by a few hours, from someone called Liam Hbomb. The name is only familiar by a vague memory - of someone having said it, once, maybe at a work party or something - that he can’t place. Not that he goes to work parties. Maybe it was cubicle chatter.
He only really does that with one person, though.
It reads simply enough - it’s just a phone number. His OS has been helpful enough to highlight it so all he needs to do is click, click again, and he’ll be talking to… this must be Eret’s friend, right? There can’t be anybody else. Occam’s Razor - the option with the fewest leaps of logic. Shave away all improbabilities.
There’s still a hesitance, though. As silly as it might be, part of him wants to close the popup, let it slide, work this out on his own merits. He knows he should take advantage of this help.
(His heart tries to argue that maybe, if he doesn’t call, all this will go away and he’ll be back to status quo.)
But reason powers through, and with dread already sinking deep into the pits of his gut, Wilbur clicks and clicks again.
Two rings deep, a stranger’s voice greets him. American. He knows an awful lot of them. “Hello?”
“This is Wilbur Soot, you - I got your number? Off LinkedIn, you sent me -”
“Oh. Yeah. You know Eret Kingsley, right?”
“I do.”
“Do you know what the hell they were talking about when they called the coastguard today?”
“No,” he lies immediately, “What did they say?”
“They just - mentioned you. And something living off the coast. Something dangerous, they didn’t specify, we’re sending a team out, but they seemed kinda scared by that idea, so I just wanted to check in if I could and find out if there was any -”
Wilbur checked out a few seconds ago, and he’s barely focusing, hands beginning to tremor, as he interrupts, “We just went walking. There’s no danger out here.”
“Eret said they nearly drowned.”
“They just - stumbled, went the wrong way off the rocks.You know how it is.” He hates to lie so much, but he hates far more the idea of a threat to the sirens.
“Okay, well… the Captain said we’re sending a team anyway,” says Hbomb. Wilbur notices he can’t feel his fingers. Several hours of sitting out on Brighton Beach in the encroaching dusk will do that to a person.
“Right,” he forces out.
It’s not even like Hbomb is being particularly menacing - he’s just stating the facts. He’s as concerned as Eret is, Wilbur supposes. They’ve both got the perfectly noble goal of making sure the coastline is safe for people like him. But the sentiment still stands as a reminder that Wilbur’s idea of protecting the coastline does not match up with the plans that everybody else seems to be concocting the moment they find out about the sirens. And Hbomb’s words are a cold confirmation of what he knew was inevitable.
That the sirens are in danger.
“Wilbur?” Hbomb prompts on the other end of the line. Wilbur realises that he must have been saying something else; he didn’t hear what. He doesn’t particularly care at this point.
“Hbomb,” Wilbur replies, voice spilling ahead of his spiralling thoughts, “I need a favour. Please.”
“What’s up?”
“Can you - can you at least delay the investigation to tomorrow morning? I just need time to - to, er - to make sure I know what happened to Eret for sure. If there is something happening, I don’t want it to get any of your coworkers in trouble, right?”
“It’s our job, Wilbur. You’re just a civilian. We can handle this far better than you could.”
“Trust me.” You can’t handle it at all. You’ll probably all drown.
Hbomb is silent for a long moment. Wilbur thinks he might hear the scratching sound of pencil on paper, or maybe he’s just fidgeting as he thinks his request over. A sigh, and then… “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, H,” he responds, quieter than he means to be, and hangs up.
The moment the call blinks out - and Wilbur is left sitting on the rocks with the sun’s final beams of the day washing upon his face, the sea slow-moving and silent beyond him - there’s a momentary feeling of timelessness, of isolation, before reality kicks in. He’s got to warn the sirens. (And Wilbur trained himself out of his hypochondria a long time ago, trained himself to stop thinking of all the worst possible diseases that he might have caught based off a cough or a sore arm, but that old catastrophizing thought pattern comes back to him now, comes crashing in to tell him every horrible thing that might be happening to his inhuman friends right now, or going to happen, experiments and torture and claustrophobic captivity and -)
He has a text. His phone is still on silent, so it flashes up innocently. The number’s still unsaved.
Sorry dude. I asked but cap says they already did a sweep like an hour ago. Nothing I can do. Whatever they found is probably gonna be in the warehouse if you want me to let you in there tho
Cold floods his veins. He’s too late. He was always too late.
Bolstered by an urgency that he doesn’t think he’s rivalled before, panic he can barely breathe through, thoughts racing at the speed of - of something really bloody fast, okay - he starts running for the bay. Maybe they didn’t get them all! Maybe they didn’t get anything! Maybe things are fine, he tries and fails to convince himself. The few scattered beachgoers (tourists and locals, he can’t tell the difference right now) that see him sprinting for the rocks, skidding over unhelpful pebble formations that have been shaped by people’s feet all day and digging up the roots of native flora with his carelessly placed steps, and then nobody sees him at all, once he’s rounded the corner of the coast enough.
Please, he find himself pleading, into the gold light of dusk melting into that fine line between ocean and sky, please let them be safe.
The water is calm and steady when he arrives, but not still. Wilbur’s heart pangs.
“Tommy?” he calls, throat tightened to a pinhole, lungs tight against his ribcage, fingers yellow with cold. “Phil?”
His brain, searching for patterns, picks a whistle out of the wind. His head darts down to meet his greeter, only to find dead air and the drift of the bubbles on the shoreline. Trick of - of the sound. Damn it.
It’s not impossible that they’re just hiding. But even as he heaves and falls to his hands and knees to search the water’s murky depths, which is growing ever harder as the dark creeps in, and he’s too late, he was always too late, he should have done this earlier; even as he scans desperately for those familiar shadows, those dark shapes beneath the surface, for his friends… Even as he seeks, that probability shrinks under his shaking hands. Occam’s Razor.
Please. Eyes pressed close. Hands fisted. Wilbur’s forehead hits the sand.
There is no ripple, no bubbles, no dark shape rising to the surface from beneath. Simply the constant thrum of the tide, and the feeling of the world collapsing around him.
They’re not here.
And he knows it’s his fault for getting here too late - he should have turned on his data so much earlier, he thinks bitterly, and moves to find out how long ago the message came through, and then lets a frustrated screamed-sob rip from his throat when he remembers that his phone won’t work in the bay, will it, that’s what brings the sirens out here, the safety from…
Does that make sense?
Or is it their magic, their presence, that makes the bay safe and not the other way around?
He fumbles to pull the phone out and check, simple curiosity overriding his emotions for a moment, and that’s when he hears the clicking coming from the edge of the rocks. Click click. Hello.
His head snaps across to face Phil, looking back at him with a distressed expression that probably matches Wilbur’s own. Rippling concentric circles are the only disturbance on the otherwise stock-still water. There’s magic in the bay yet - and although he’s not sure which way round it works, he doesn’t think it matters right now. There’s more important things to worry about.
“Where’s Tommy?” he blurts, the little siren’s wide blue eyes and playful grin the first thing on his mind. He hopes beyond hope that the little gremlin’s okay, that he’s just hiding at Phil’s waist or clinging to his tail, shy like he never has been, but maybe with such a shake-up…
Phil whistles at him, pulling a hand out of the water, gesturing like Wilbur knows what it means, and he realises - as if Phil could even begin to actually explain what happened. Their language barrier isn’t going away that easily; the siren is going to have to work on signals and suggestions alone.
So is Wilbur. “Do you have him?” he asks, making a movement like he’s cradling a child or something. “Any of them?” Three fingers raised.
But the siren just keeps staring. He croons out something sorrowful and slides a hand across the night air. Cut-throat, maybe? Are they dead? Or does Phil just mean nothing left?
“Are they okay?” He can’t signal that like he would with a human, can he? The okay-hand symbol can’t be universal. Wilbur wrings at his hands and, eventually, settles on putting his hands together over a pocket of air and seeking Phil’s gaze. Something whole.
Phil cuts the air again and cups empty palms. Broken. Nothing.
All gone, then.
Wilbur’s throat clogs. He’s left with nothing else to say, or try and say - nothing he can offer a grieving father of three, if that’s really what Phil is. He wishes, now, that they’d tried harder to learn each other’s tongues before it was too late. Because the truth of this, the understanding that he’s too late, is painfully constrictive, stifling, stunning.
Because Tommy’s actually gone. Because Niki and Fundy are gone too. Because everyone’s gone except Phil, except not for long, because if the coastguard come back and find Phil then he’ll be gone too, and if he can’t hide from them, then…
Then.
Phil is still staring up at him, having dipped a little deeper into the water. It’s just his eyes that float on the surface like an alligator in a kids’ TV show now. He’s watching, waiting, for something to happen. Maybe he’s waiting to pounce.
Wilbur stands up.
“Right,” he says, and pretends there is no quiver in his voice. “How do you feel about taking a little swim down the shore to where I can actually get you…”
He trails off, the mental plan he’s just begun constructing in real time running into a significant obstacle. He needs a car.
The answer to that conundrum, though, is pretty simple; click click dial, once he’s far enough away from Phil that his phone gets any signal, and he can give it a try.
“Hbomb - I’ve got a new favour to ask for. You’re going to have to get very cool with a lot of information very quickly.”