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Something stirs in the depths of the sea, reverberates. He feels restless. The wind is strong today, whirling up the surface in hiccups of foam. Freddie seeks deeper, towards calmer, darker depths. Something is bound to happen, he feels it instinctively. Near the eastern shore a ship runs aground. Freddie feels it like tiny ripples, the bodies, momentarily warm, engulfed and seized as they sink and grow cold. Mere moments pass before they are devoured.
Far away, a father and his son almost escape. Their wings—mechanical, studied, made of dreams—carry them out over the sea.
A gentle vibration over the surface of the sea. Slowly, he draws nearer until the sky mirrors him, the sun glinting, licking, melting. He sees their shadows, like birds in the sky but bigger, brighter, newborns. Less secure. It's the young one that has called to him, he knows. He whips the surface into foam. The man has a golden head against the white backdrop of the sky — the sun framing him, Freddie thinks. He beckons him closer, purrs and preens for this mere mortal. Gods know he will taste nothing like the others.
The man flaps his wings, once, twice, soars overhead. Freddie watches hungrily, the silhouette against the clear blue sky getting smaller still.
A single feather falls from the sky, drifts on the winds until it touches the surface of the sea. The sun glints in the water, glimmering silver. Drops of beeswax, thin straps of leather, a rain of feathers. The sea rumbles. Freddie watches the figure flap his arms: futility.
The weight of boy just turned man and the pull of gravity, of Freddie’s own desire for human flesh, drops him like sounding lead through the sky and into Freddie’s open mouth. Desire.
*
A warm, insignificant weight sinking in the expanse of deep cold waters, this golden-haired creature. Freddie has seen nothing like him, and as the body starts to grow cold, his curiosity wraps around the mortal like a protective bubble.
Eyes snap open; a calm blue sea, a curious meeting.
“Who are you?” the mortal asks, voice untrembling.
Freddie laughs, a gentle vibration. “I am the sea, darling. Are you not afraid?”
The mortal smiles, tilts his chin. “I have soared,” he says, "what is there to fear?"
"Death," Freddie intones, moving close, "failure. Many will say you were foolish in your ambitions."
“I want more than to be my father's son,” the man speaks. “I am destined for greatness.”
“You are, are you?” Freddie purrs, “and what do you imagine they’ll say about you, young one?”
“I flew.” Blue eyes close and open again. “I have felt the wind under my wings, I have travelled up towards the sun.”
Freddie sneers, suddenly irritated. “And down to the bottom of the sea where you belong.”
The golden hair, darkened by water, flows gently around a pretty face. “I am alive, am I not? I am not in pain.”
Freddie could crush him with the weight of the entire sea, could pull him apart bit by bit. “You are here because I have decided to keep you.”
Rash, stubborn-headed mortal.
“You keep me here and I’ll get what I want,” the mortal says.
Icarus.
Freddie whips the surface into foam. He must protect him against the pressure. “And what is that, darling?”
“My father will tell the tale of me. He will know I almost touched the sun.”
“Had you flown lower I would have eaten you alive,” Freddie tells him.
“He said that, too,” the mortal says with a satisfied look on his face.
“If you believe yourself interesting only by your death, I can spit you out again,” Freddie says.
“Then I will fly again. The sea’s nothing to me.”
Freddie rumbles deep and long. The water turns icy. He has to be careful, knows not the point of which mortals break.
He relaxes his grip, and the man gasps and sputters. “What did you do?”
“Foolish mortal,” Freddie says, “I can crush you to pieces. The gods will never see your body.”
A smile, sudden and blinding. The water clears. “And who will you play with, then?”
“Young things like you fall to their death by the hundreds and get devoured.”
“Must be lonely,” the young man muses. “Everyone you meet destined to die.”
“The whole sea is alive," Freddie tells him, "entire ecosystems live within me.”
Blue eyes take in the landscape around them. When they fix back on Freddie’s shimmering, blending form, he is asked, “can you take the form of men?”
Yes. "I know your name, of course—"
"Of course." An interruption, a pleased smile, pretty features flattered. "May I not know yours?"
"You do not exist, darling," Freddie says, "I shall name you Roger and you may call me Freddie."
"Plain," Roger says.
"You think highly of yourself."
A teasing smile that turns to wonder as Freddie transforms in a shimmering instant. "Is that not what attracted you to me?"
Freddie thinks it over. "Perhaps," he says, "I knew you different from the others."
"I am different," Roger says, "we were supposed to go by ship, you know."
*
It stirs in the depths of the sea once more: restlessness.
Freddie watches his young beau, always drifting towards the light. The great expanse of his waters remain unexplored.
He tells him so in a concerned purr, “don’t you love the sea, darling?”
Roger's chin tilts without concern. The water ripples around them.
He casts his eyes down. "I have been looking for freedom, for eternity."
As if a mortal could ever know eternity.
Freddie wraps around him, tenderly. "What is the sea if not freedom?"
Eyes that once mirrored the colour of the water now turned transparent, the golden hair soaked to dullness.
Restraint.
“Your love for me comes from watching me from afar,” Roger says.
“But I have you here now,” Freddie interrupts. Liar.
“Don’t you see?” It’s a soft whisper, pitying, a mere mortal to an entire sea, “you were my only witness. I wish to live on in stories, to have touched the sun.”
And Freddie understands: He cannot keep alive a resistant thing.
"I reflect the sun," Freddie whispers: futile like the flapping of bare arms, "is that not enough?"
And Roger, this golden-haired mortal, Icarus, he smiles and opens his lungs.
*
As Roger wished his legend spreads: his father escaped and told the tale of his son, named after him the island which became his sanctuary, named the surrounding sea.
Freddie, who saw and wanted and thought he loved, for one brief moment, bears the mark in name and in soul—a golden creature, a myth woven from memory and legend.
And when the sun glitters over the Icarian sea and turns the waves to silver and gold, Freddie remembers a stubborn young thing who flew towards the sun.
*
Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi ? – L’Eternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.
(Arthur Rimbaud, L'Eternité)