Work Text:
For a while you sit in silence. The waves crash over the rocks, and the spray crusts salt over your cheeks.
When Thom speaks, his voice is raspy, like tires crunching over gravel.
"In twenty years, Jonny," he tells you, "in fifteen, ten, years, there will be an effort to save the polar bears. The ice caps will melt and the seas will rise. The scientists, conservationists, will ask themselves, what do we do?"
You draw your legs up to your chest, ribs bracketing your knees, and say, I don't know. You want to ask, what does this have to do with us?
"Engineering," Thom says suddenly. "They'll take the last few bears in for engineering. These ones can't survive anymore, so they fuck them up. They give them pointier teeth and huge unblinking eyes. A bigger appetite and a bigger mouth. A better work ethic and sharper claws."
He draws it in the lumpy grains blanketing the shore: a circle, two eyes with slit pupils, a wide, carnivorous grin. It leers at you like there's some great secret, and you bite your lip, flicking your gaze back to Thom, hoping to squirm your way out.
Thom says, "When they release them back, the modified bears will eat everything in the North Pole."
The wind blows your fringe in your face, and you tuck it behind your ear as an afterthought. "That would be awful."
"Oh, yes." Thom smiles, his mood lifting suddenly. With his lips drawn back over his teeth, pointy and asymmetrical, he looks more bear-like than human. "Awful beyond belief. It serves them right, don't you think?"
