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A piercing wail rouses Chip from a dreamless sleep. He rises from the weight of slumber slow and unsteady, blinking a bleary eye towards the soft feeling of rustling figures beside his cot, their movements mired in the ink shadow of the night. And past the sheltering rosewood planks, beyond the tumbling waves pulling at their ship, and over the thundering of a mighty storm, a mournful song rings.
He's both parts nearly asleep and pissed that the word nearly is being shoved into the equation when his prone face gets stepped on by Jay's bony, stinky, nasty foot.
"What the fuck," he works out, rubbing at the dried drool streaking down his mouth with one hand and unsteadily hefting himself up from bed with the other.
Neither Jay nor Gillion answer his entirely reasonable question. Instead, they plod slowly towards the door, each step twined with the other's, thumping against the planks to the rhythm of the song. Generously setting aside his complaints about the miracle of his unbroken nose considering the events of his life so far and Jay's brazen disregard of said miracle, Chip repeats with a twinge more urgency: "What the fuck? "
Again, no response from either of them. Chip reaches out to grab at one of their ankles and it slips right out of his grasp—damn Gillion's eternal moisture—as his crew continues forward without him.
Now that he's snapped fully out of the fog of sleep, the song outside sharpens into sickening clarity.
He can barely hear snatches of the words themselves, but he knows the tune of it by heart: it's every ballad at once, every tragic tale of a lover lost at sea, every soul of a sailor plunged to eternal rest in a saltwater grave.
A gasp stutters up his throat, like the final spasms of a drowning man—a body thrashing around sea's icy fingers clenched around the neck and cutting off the path to vulnerable lungs before saltwater can. He tries to focus on the feeling of grainy wood scraping against his feet and fingers as he stumbles up, his breath still shuddering against the motion of his own body.
He remembers childhood stories of songs like this, songs that would send unsuspecting pirates stumbling soundlessly to their own funeral.
For a long while after Arlin scooped him up from the port, Chip wasn't attuned to the natural rocking of a ship. On especially stormy nights, the constant drum of water on all sides would send him barrelling into Arlin's arms, searching for a single point of steadiness in the vast tumult outside. And sometimes, on nights like these, the boisterous roar of sea shanties and merry cheer would morph into sinister cautionary tales. Sirens with sharp teeth, drowned and spurned souls, endless refrains of sorrow.
The lucky sailors would die not knowing their head was underwater, drifting away to the comfort of a eulogy. The unlucky ones would hear only the ocean crash over them as they sealed their own fate.
Frankly, Chip's pretty sure these legends wouldn't be anywhere close to comforting for any poor pirate child, not just him, and he doesn't really know why the whole crew thought that the scariest nights were the best times to tell them. But maybe they were onto something, considering how he's seemingly the only person in his entire crew to keep his head in the game, despite the tightness of his chest, despite this infectious, inescapable longing.
But it's the sound, isn't it, if only none of them were hearing it—
As the creak of their door creeps through the song, Chip waves his hands about outwards, trying to find the swinging, unlit lantern at the top of their chamber.
"Jay, Gillion, snap the fuck out of it!" he yells fruitlessly, still searching for that damn lantern, still hearing their steady march.
After what feels like an eternity but is, in reality, a scant few seconds, he snatches its metal frame and fumbles open the window. He scoops out a still slightly warm dollop of tallow, jabbing the material into the vague shape of earplugs and sticking them in his ears. The sound and sorrow don't entirely ease, but it's leagues better than where he was before, his breath soothing out into something manageable.
However, this doesn't solve the problem of his two crewmates literally about to walk the plank, and he stumbles out, chasing the shadowed planes of their retreating backs up the ladder to the weather deck. He's immediately drenched with pummeling rain as he once again tries to raise his voice above whatever sort of siren song they're hearing.
"JAY! GILLION!"
Somehow, they both walk forward without a care for the wind that buffets about them, rocking the whole ship backwards. Chip grits his teeth against the cutting cold and presses onward, skidding to a stop right in the middle of their steady path to the stern's railing.
Now, in the scant rays of moonlight breaching through crackling clouds, he can see the gloss covering their eyes. They both look dazed, paradoxically confused yet certain. There's a slackness in Gillion's jaw that shouldn't be there; his shoulders slump down, and a faint smile presses slackly on his mouth, slightly ajar.
Chip snaps his fingers furiously in front of Gillion's face, then decides that the time has long passed for finger-snapping or hand-waving and instead just grabs his stupid strong shoulders with both hands and tries to shake him forcibly into awareness.
"DUDE! This is NOT your destiny!"
Gillion doesn't even twitch a finger at the word 'destiny ', and noticing this neutral, nothing reaction is the most horrifying thing Chip has seen since they started their journey together.
"Of course it is, Chip," Gillion sighs, the faint glisten of incisor broadening into a moonlit shine as he grins, "I've always wanted to start a band…"
Well, Chip should've known he was a lost cause from the beginning. A band. What the hell, sure.
"What are you talking about, man," he protests as Gillion begins to push bodily past him, shoulder checking him without a care, towards the edge of the ship. Jay trails behind him, and he switches his focus to the crewmate that one hundred percent cannot breathe water.
"Jay, what the fuck are you doing!"
He grabs onto her shoulder, then her torso, wrapping his arms around her body and hauling her back as she continues to struggle forward. His feet scrabble for traction on the slick wood; he's so going to get spikes on his damn shoes after this.
"I can play the keys…" she murmurs thoughtfully, stringing together no coherent thought at all. "We'll call it… Jay and the… Ferins."
"Wha– so the Millenium Chipper is a shit name for a boat, everyone hates the Millenium Chipper, but Jay and the Ferins is what you're gonna name your band?" Chip splutters incredulously.
He catches so much flack, and for what? So they can decide to name their ship after a solidly average bird and also have to drag them both back from the brink of death? He's not getting paid enough for this. He's not getting paid at all!
"How are you gonna play your piano after you die, huh? Ever think about that, asshole?"
The glossiness of her gaze doesn't sharpen out into the Jay he's grown to know, not even a bit. Gone is her steadfast sight and piercing aim, replaced by mindless bumbling towards a sea's fatal embrace and an equally doomed band with the worst name known to all humankind. The sight makes him feel a bit queasy, and if the ocean keeps churning like this, he could definitely see himself throwing up his latest meal on Jay. Maybe that would snap her out of it.
Jay frowns, and for the briefest moment, Chip feels a glimmer of hope.
"I mean, I guess you could join our rock n' roll band, if you really wanted to," she sighs reluctantly.
And of course, because why would anything ever go his way!
"Jay! You're going to die," Chip repeats, trying to hold Jay still long enough to shape tallow in his spare hand and push it into her ears without her noticing. "And I am not gonna join your shitty band!"
He's got them rolled out into two pieces and barely a smidge away from one of her ears, so achingly close to success.
But as Jay notices Gillion perched atop the railing, one leg already hooked across the wooden bars, her face suddenly hardens with a steely resolve that should be a comfort. Instead, her unhindered hand drops to her hip, slides into a pocket, and then whips out across Chip's face, her knuckles reinforced by a blinking brass. He yelps and falters away from her, caught entirely off his guard.
"Jay," he coughs out, trying to bring up his arms to catch her next blow, hand instinctively reaching to the aching spot on his cheek sure to mottle and bruise, then bowls over as her fist smashes into his stomach.
"Sorry, Chip," she says, sounding too distant to be apologetic. "See you later."
Through the squalling dark, he watches her casually wave and catch up to Gillion on the bow of the ship, perching beside him.
He tries to find breath somewhere in the salt sprays of water scratching at his throat, still hauling his body forward to where his crew stands, nearly halfway over the side of their ship. Their figures blur together in tandem laughter, delight shaking their frames and slowly pushing them off the edge. If Jay jumps now, she'll be found with lungs swollen like ballooning waterskins, ribs breaking about them, or she won't be found at all. And he's got no doubt Gillion can survive the waters, but can his flesh and bones resist the carve of teeth sharpened to hunt?
Distantly, Chip feels himself saying something now, a futile plea drowned out by the echo of thunder and a siren's call, desperate insults to entice one of them to bite back, just once. In the end, he's too slow to do anything but watch them fall happily over the railing, slipping right past his outstretched hands and into the cutting waves.
Now, beneath the open, pouring sky, torso bent as far as he can manage over the edge of the ship, his friends nowhere in sight, he can hear the lyrics themselves—words that aren't meant to be heard as they are, but are being understood anyway. A home tarnished and bled dry, comfort running thin, but oh, at least she has her sisters, her family. Anything, anything at all, for them. And sat atop a jagged spire of rock, that glistening, beautiful figure, a golden harp laid at her hip.
Chip looks back over his shoulder at the sprawl of the ship they'd earned by saving a whole damn town, at the sails flared out, the dark entrance to the lower decks that lead to a comfortable, warm bed and piles of gold. To steer the ship towards the siren means to fight against the wind, and each angled point of sail would meander him too far away from the people he needs to reach—they'd be dead before he made it halfway there.
He laughs shakily into the storm, convulsive shudders of hysteria that leave him bowed over the railing, his nails splintering through the wood. Of course the second he gets a new crew, they go overboard too. And of course the sky's cracked open and seething, of course the waters are too choppy for him to spot them, of course the wind batters against the sails, pushing him away from Jay and Gillion.
That's fine! Good thing the world knows that he's the perfect pick for this, for finding hemp rope strewn about the deck and lashing it about his body and banister, for hoisting his soggy self over one shaking leg at a time, for being on the wrong side of a ship's fencing.
Maybe if Gillion was the one to break free from the curse, he could've wrestled them away from the edge before they'd even jumped; maybe if Jay was the one jolted awake, she'd spot them before any other hunter could.
But would either of them waver here at the prow? Would either of them really follow the crew?
To hell with the ship, to hell with the storm, and to hell with the siren.
Chip breathes in deep, filling his lungs with precious air for perhaps the final time, and plunges down into the raging sea below.