Work Text:
The moments after Larkin's body vanishes beneath orange-illuminated waves can only be described as numb.
It's not that Tom is unaware of his surroundings. He can feel the water that has soaked into his socks and shoes to curl, frigid, around his toes. He can feel the air --- on the colder side of Floridian warmth --- gusting through the once-starched fabric of his now-rumpled uniform. He can even hear voices approaching and questions being asked and even the precise words of those questions. It is merely that he cannot process the stimuli --- cannot rationalise them into anything more --- cannot immediately do anything but turn and watch his fate approach in the form of two familiar silhouetted figures and their mounting concerns.
"Mariel," he says eventually, with relief akin to a wanderer in the desert stumbling across an oasis. "Russ," he manages, too, before the guilt clogs his throat again and cuts him off. His voice is hollow even to his own ears, but he does not try again, even as he doubts that the others could hear him over the sound of crashing waves swallowing his words. (Perhaps that's best. Perhaps it would be better for everyone if his words weren't the only thing swallowed by the waves. Perhaps it would be better if he were to vanish into those salt-spray depths and, this time, not return at all.)
"Tom, what happened?" Russell's voice is sharp enough to cut through the waves without difficulty, and even the knowledge that his aggravation is born of worry more than it is actual fury does nothing to assuage the feeling it instils: a heavy cocktail of dread and guilt and earnest regret and maybe, possibly, the barest hint of visceral fear. It's not the first time Russ has asked the question --- not the first time worry-darkened eyes have lingered on the blood staining white cloth dark in the moonlight and shifted, accusing, to search Tom's face --- but it is, somehow, as if Tom were hearing it for the first time again, for repetition has not diminished its potency at all. "Is that your blood?"
Tom has not forgotten the blood --- Larkin's blood --- for he cannot fathom a way to do so. It is too present for that, too noticeable. It sits heavy on his skin, on his hands (in more ways than just the literal); it sets his shirt clinging with every struggling breath. In some places, it has already begun to dry, and this doesn't help because the textures are too distinct but not different enough: wet and drying and tacky and itchy and slick and caked-on and oozing and cracking and-- There. Terrifying, undeniably there.
And yet, for all he has not been able to forget the blood, Russell's words prompt him to look down again, to regard the blood anew. To consider, with horror dulled by what must be shock, the carnage strewn across his uniform. To remember what it means --- what has happened --- what he has allowed to happen. To feel, once again, how heavy such a light burden can be, as it pulls him down, down, down--
"--om?"
He blinks, dully, owlishly, and tries to process. He has moved, somehow --- has ended up kneeling in the shallow water, pants already sodden, knees digging into soft sand --- but he does not remember the journey, just as he does not remember Mariel approaching to take his hand or Russell to help keep him upright. He does not recall beginning to cry either, yet saltwater seeps in trails down his cheeks in a way he knows is not caused by the sea, for all his eyes burn similarly.
"Tom!" Mariel is the one calling his name, and he hears her, this time. However many times she has called it before, he cannot begin to guess, but it must have been quite a few, for her clinical calm can't quite conceal the worry in her eyes and her next words don't address Tom at all. "I don't see any injuries," she says instead, head turned towards Russell as he watches the water around them. "I don't think--"
A very uncharacteristic lack of control shakes Tom's head without him knowing he'd decided to. (It's the stress, probably. A natural human response to the events of the last minutes, days, hours, only uncanny at all because there's not been anything human about Tom in almost a decade, come August. An amalgamation of Szura's uprising and Mariel's kidnapping and a family held hostage and a life --- Larkin's life --- bleeding out in his arms as he made a decision he had no right to make--) "It's not mine." Guilt rises again, sapping the breath from lungs not collapsing in the wake of a bullet, setting panic thundering through veins not spilling blood with every passing second. (The sole survivor, he'd been, in the wake of his plane crash. The only one to make it out --- the only one still breathing --- the one left nearly unblemished in the wake of catastrophe so all-consuming that it was a miracle for him to escape with only a channel carved into his chest. That Tom Underlay had died in the crash was irrelevant; Tom Underlay was still there after, a ghost haunting his own skin.) "I'm fine." (He was always fine. Always alive. Always there. Fine in the wake of Grace's death. Fine after watching Mariel vanish into the water as Eve hit. Fine now, with Larkin dead or dying or changed and a very different storm about to hit.)
Russell stops staring at the water, dropping the gun arm Tom hadn't noticed he'd raised towards the waves in favour of leaning closer. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah." Tom nods --- this one intentional --- and straightens. Starts pulling himself shakily, wearily, to his feet, even as exhaustion tries to pull him back down, because it's what he should do. What he has to do. (What right has he to collapse now? In many ways, he's as much responsible for what happened to Larkin as the kid with the gun; he deserves to face the music. Deserves to tell Russell what happened and invite his recriminations, to tell Mariel and bear her judgement. Even if he weren't, he has no time for this anyway, not with the town in turmoil and Szura's actions inviting the very same public eye he's been trying so hard to deflect, so he has to get up, has to get moving, has to act fine because he is fine. He is. He has to be.) "I'm fine."
They stand with him, and Mariel's hand almost burns where it rests against his forearm. He relishes in it as much as he hates it --- can't bear for her to let go and yet dreads the moment she will --- and his eyes find that point easily, even as she frets. "Take your time, Tom, don't rush--"
He nods, once, as reassuring as he can manage. Smiles, as best he can, and rests his hand overtop hers. "I'm good, Mare." A gentle squeeze of her hand. "I'm good." (She doesn't seem to notice that he doesn't drop the hand after, and, selfishly, he's glad of it. Lets himself enjoy the undeserved reprieve for the few moments it'll last.)
Russell looks between the two of them, conflicted hesitation warring with the tension that hasn't left him since their arrival on the beach, and it is a very tentative attempt at interjection that follows. "Tom--"
"It's Larkin, Russ." No doubt, there is a better way to deliver the news, but he can't devise it --- can't get the halting, juddering mechanisms of a brain gone staticky to work quite right --- and so he does what he can. Focuses on getting it out quick rather than subtle. "She was shot--"
"What?" Russell falters, visibly, and Tom watches it happen. Watches the news hit. Hears it drain the strength from his voice in time to the blood draining from his face. "How?"
"They got into the house somehow, with guns." Mariel's hand falters against his, expression stricken as her other hand lifts to cover her mouth, and Tom's stomach twists to feel it, to see it. (He can't blame her for the reaction, but he isn't sure he can withstand her understanding --- her condemnation --- her further revulsion.) He drops his hand instead, on his terms, and pretends he doesn't feel the bitter chill her absence instils. "Jesse's friends, I think; I'd charged one of them after Lewis's attack. The kids were upstairs--"
Russell comes back to himself for a moment. Jolts, almost, just for a second. "The kids--"
"They're fine, Russ. Everyone else is fine." That his voice breaks on the word else is irrelevant. "They're with Lewis and Dave. At my house. I--" He pauses. Considers. (What worth is an I promise now? How much worth can his word hold now?) Amends. "They're fine." A breath. "The gun wasn't even meant to go off. It was..." His half-chuckle is bitter and wry and self-deprecating because what else is there to say? "It was an accident. Bad luck."
"Then Larkin..." Russell pauses. Flicks his eyes down to the blood on Tom's shirt and then looks back up again. "She's... Is she de--" The word shatters as much as Russell seems to be, broken edges glinting in the moonlight and snagging against the chill air. "Is she dead?"
"No. I don't--" Tom shakes his head. Hopes he won't be proved a liar. Darts a glance out to sea instead, wishing --- foolishly, impossibly --- for answers to wash up with the next spray of sea foam. "I don't think so."
A blink and Russell's eyes narrow. Dart out after Tom's own and then slide back. "What did you do?"
"I didn't have a choice." The words taste like a lie on his tongue: sea salt and coppery blood and the ephemeral weight of a life lost. "She was dying. Homestead Memorial was too far away." The words are as much plea as fact, and, for all he knows that Russell has a right to be upset --- for all he has acknowledged this and braced for it and accepted it --- he can't help at least trying. "There was only one way to save her--"
It's Mariel who finishes the thought, who voices what Tom has done. "The water." He can't read her voice --- can't be sure what she's thinking, how she's feeling --- but neither can he bring himself to look. (He remembers her revulsion when she found out herself. Their arguments after. The way she'd hated him for what he'd done to her, inadvertently or otherwise. How they almost hadn't been able to recover.) "You took her to the water." (It's not a question.)
He answers anyway. "Yeah." Nods. Lets his head hang, after, a criminal in the dock awaiting a sentence, a penitent waiting for the judgement he knows will come. "I did."
The punch is... perhaps not unexpected, but somehow still shocking, and it drives him back to his knees before he's fully processed what's happened. He feels it keenly --- Russell's fist cracking against his face with force enough that Tom could feel skin breaking as it landed, warm pain lancing outwards and radiating along his cheek --- and yet, in the moments immediately after, there's a distance between him and that feeling. An impartiality. A numbness.
The salt water before him ripples as blood drips into it once more, staining the murky surface dark red, and it is then that he thinks to lift a hand, to feel for where, precisely, it's come from. It's not his cheek (though the skin has split there, somehow) for it bleeds too sluggishly, just as it cannot be explained by the taste of blood in his mouth from the impact jarring his teeth against his own flesh. Rather, it is, he thinks, his nose, unrecovered from their spat in the woods, for it aches when he touches it and his fingertips come away bloody.
Perhaps, in another world, he'd care. As it is, he kneels and he waits.
He can hear voices, distantly: a conversation he only slightly follows. ("Russell, what the hell are you doing?" "He-- Larkin-- Our baby-- I don't-- How could he--" "Now is not the time. Take a breath. Now, Russell.") For all the words are spoken within arm's reach, they sound impossibly far away, soft --- fittingly and terribly --- beneath the sound of the waves around them. Each splash rings in his ears, loud and crashing and violent in the way of howling gales and storming seas even though the water is nowhere near so wild, and he lets his mind drift with them. Sinks into them. Floats, almost.
Mariel breaks through the static, as only she can. She stands before him, her hand cool as it gently cups his cheek, a balm against stinging skin, and he can hardly breathe to see her. Just... waits, still kneeling. Presses into her palm before he can stop himself, eyes closing against the world as if she can save him, can fix this, even as he knows she can't. Lets himself take selfish, shameful comfort in the swipe of her thumb as it wicks away tears he still can't stop.
"Tom," she says eventually, and his eyes open of their own accord, simply because she called. "How long ago?"
It takes multiple attempts before his voice works enough to answer, and it crackles in his throat when he finally manages it. "Just now."
Mariel nods, as if she'd expected the answer. "Then we won't find out whether it worked for a few days, will we?"
"No," Tom manages, and the word --- the answer --- scrapes him out just to say. Pulls his eyes out to sea again, along the path carved by Larkin and the creature ferrying her. Pulls his thoughts there too, into the depths behind her. (What would it take for him to disappear for good? For better? It was only a few hours ago that he'd watched Eli smirk through five shots to the chest and two glancing blows, and Tom can already feel his cheek healing itself: skin knitting neatly back together, just as his gunshot wounds had healed preternaturally quickly, just as his injury from the plane had been less fatal than it should have been. It won’t be easy.) It's tempting to consider: just walking out past the shallows and sinking beneath the waves. Swimming out further and further and just staying. (Is he even capable of drowning now? Perhaps this has been taken too, with everything else that vanished in the wake of their crash. Perhaps he should try to find out anyway. Kira would be fine with Mariel and Russell --- his relationship with her is strained on a good day, and she'd be well taken care of --- and his plans for a well-integrated hybrid community have been sabotaged anyway. Perhaps it would be best for... for everyone--)
He doesn't realise that he's listing forward until Russell's voice rings out again, still raw-edged with grief and breaking under the weight of Larkin's absence but somehow strong all the same. "Tom!"
"I'm sorry," he says, but he's not apologising for the motion and he thinks they know it. Mariel's hand has slid from his cheek to his shoulder, and he feels her fingers press through his shirt, solid and reassuring and painful for all she's so, so careful. (More careful than she should be with him. More careful than he deserves.) And, as if a dam has opened, the words keep flowing, spilling out like blood and seeping into the air like a spreading stain. A litany of apologies and Russ and Mariel and aborted explanations that can't make it past his teeth.
Russell's eyes are glassy as he kneels down beside Tom, though he has somehow managed not to break down. Perhaps he is simply too shocked: too devastated for such a plebeian expression of grief, too bowled-over to cry. Perhaps he is too angry for either. Or perhaps --- as he lifts a hand of his own, as Tom braces for what will happen when it lands and fails to withstand the gentleness with which it settles against his other shoulder --- he is simply too kind. "There was no other way?" he asks, and his words quiver as he speaks them but there's certainty there all the same, of a sort Tom cannot believe he has earned. "This was... This was the only way?"
Tom nods, or tries to, and stumbles over an attempt at explaining. Whatever fear or adrenaline or guilt or denial has driven him thus far --- has set his skin buzzing with the need to just make this right somehow --- it is waning now, ebbing away like the tide around them until all he has to hold onto are the facts of the matter. "Her lung was collapsing. We couldn't-- I couldn't--" He can't bring himself to finish the sentence. Can't entirely believe that it's true. (He hadn't been able to think of anything else at the time, but what if he'd missed something? What if he'd acted too hastily, stolen a life under the guise of saving it?) "I'm sorry--"
"It's not your fault."
The desire to believe the words is strong; the knowledge that they're not true is stronger. (He'd given up his gun the moment he was asked, had gone along with the demands made of him, and all in an attempt to keep the situation safe, but... Well. That clearly hadn't worked. What if he'd made a move sooner? Kept his gun? Not interfered with the kid's aim at all? He'd told Russ weeks ago --- there was no room for true altruism in evolution --- but he'd let Russell's naivete infect him. Had tried to save the kid, even though he'd been involved with his would-be killer. Had failed Larkin in the process.)
"Do you hear me, Tom?" Russell is frowning, even more than usual; Tom can see it out of the corner of his eye. Can't look at Russell head-on. "It's not. You did what you could. I believe that."
Tom's cheek twinges, almost in response. (They're pretty words, but not true. Whatever his stupid, foolish kindness may say, Russell knows as well as Tom does that the guilt lies with him. That, whatever he's managed to do, he could have done more.) "Okay, Russell." (The words sound like the lie they are.)
"I mean it, Tom. I shouldn't have--" He breaks off. Swallows, with an audible hitch to it. Gestures feebly towards Tom himself. Stutters again, and restarts. "I don't know how this is gonna work out. How it'll affect the... The baby--" He looks pained just to say it --- stricken, even, with his breaths coming too hard, too fast --- but he pushes through anyway. "But she'd have... She'd have died. Otherwise. You did what you could." Tom nods along. Can't stop himself from acknowledging that Russell talks like he's trying to convince himself more than he does like he's convincing Tom. "She's got a chance now."
Mariel nods, satisfied, above both of them, and Tom isn't so out of it as to miss what that means: she's told Russell to recant and he's obliged. At another moment, he might have bristled at being coddled by Russell of all people --- might have made a fuss about the lie --- but now he can't bring himself to say anything. Just sits through the words and reminds himself that they're pretty lies.
"Tom," Mariel says again, and he looks up. She's gorgeous like this: features limned by moonlight and hair shifting gently in the breeze, eyes kind for all they're grim, lips tilted into a sad sort of smile. She takes his breath away, and he barely notices the absence. "It's okay."
It's not and he knows it's not, but the words hit him anyway, as much absolution as permission to let go of his desperate attempts at wholeness. He's been working at it for so long, trying to keep the shattered fragments of himself cobbled together into some semblance of a person, and now he's just... tired. Exhausted, really. He's been fraying since Eve touched down, weeks ago, and the hits have kept coming in its wake, eroding away whatever stability he's managed to find and preventing him from building more, until all that remains is a shaky grasp on control that has never served him well enough and a splintered family thoroughly dashed upon the rocks.
No doubt, this is why the words land so dramatically, so viscerally, though what matters is only that they do. (In another life, perhaps the hows and whys of his emotions would matter to him, if only as a way of better controlling them; now, he processes them only vaguely.) Instead, he simply crumples. Hunches in on himself, his breathing as erratic as Russell's but half so audible, and doesn't resist as Mariel kneels to fold him into a hug. Her hand finds his hair, combs through the longer strands and tangles into the curls at the nape of his neck, and the fact that she carries it with all the staggering, tender patience of those two words --- it's okay --- does nothing to help him compose himself. Might even hurt his efforts because she so easily offers acceptance and understanding that he cannot even fathom deserving.
Instead, he breaks. Falls into her embrace completely with nothing more than the press of her lips against the crown of his head as precipitant. Clutches at her like the lifeline she's always been and tries not to drown, not to lose himself. "Mariel--"
"Shh, Tom, it's alright." Another pass of her hand through his hair. "It's all going to be okay."
"I'm sorry," he tries, but he no longer knows what he's apologising for. All of it, maybe --- trying to show Mariel the lights and losing her to them instead, trusting Eli, losing Larkin, changing Larkin --- or maybe just this conversation and his inability to keep himself together. Possibly even both. "I'm so sorry--"
"It's okay." She's smiling softly as she says it, that same small, sad thing she'd offered earlier, and he wishes he could see it even as he hates its melancholy. (Makes his peace with not seeing it because he can feel it instead, pressed into his hair with her consolation.) "It's not your fault."
"But--"
Russell hasn't moved since he stopped talking, but he speaks now. Agrees with her. "It's not." He shifts closer, the motion sending a gentle splash of water over Tom's legs, onto Mariel's shirt, but they're all drenched enough not to care, and the move brings him close enough to join their little huddle. He's close enough now that Tom can feel him shaking, hands quivering even as one settles overtop Tom's own in a squeeze of reassurance that inspires a spike of regret and guilt, his face gone pale in the moonlight with shocked grief yet unprocessed. "You hear me, Tom? It's not."
He nods, though he could not truly say whether it's an agreement or a rebuttal. (It might technically be both. Perhaps he is taking the easy way out, taking advantage of their... what, naivete? Generosity? Both? He's never been a good man --- not like Russell is, anyway: veritably brimming with righteous passion and strict morality --- and he has done far worse than accepting unearned forgiveness for a situation that most assuredly is his fault. They wouldn't forgive him so readily if they really knew... but they already have and he's just the right shade of morally grey to let them.) His other arm --- the one not still desperately clutching Mariel --- shifts without him really telling it to, hand repositioning around Russell's in a way that he resolves not to think about beyond the short-term comfort it provides, and he'd overthink the gesture if he weren't too tired for that.
Besides, it's hard to miss the fact that Russell's as in need of the gesture as Tom. Maybe more so, judging by the force he uses in turn; his knuckles turn white from the pressure and Tom's hand aches along with them. (Tom doesn't react to it, and not least because it's something to hold on to. Grounding, that's the word: a port in the storm. Relieving, because at least this is a penance he can perform.) "She's gonna make it," Russell says, though he doesn't sound as sure as the words suggest. (Even so, his eyes are kind --- a warm kind of brown, even with the pale moonlight doing its best to bleach them --- and, though his smile is strained at the edges, it is real. Open. Tom's.) "She is. I know it."
Mariel nods. "She will. She's a fighter. For you, and the kids, and the baby. She'll make it."
"And when--" (If.) "--she does?" It slips from Tom before he can think about it, before he can question whether it's even wise. He still has time to worry about it, to think about all the ways it could go wrong and all the bad memories it could dredge up, but any attempt at backtracking might well make it worse. "What then?" he asks, and he keeps his voice as hearty as he can manage in spite of the exhaustion rapidly replacing his previous numb dissociation. (In spite, too, of his memories, his knowledge about hybrids more widely. The way Mariel had hated and feared her change in equal measure. The way Russ and the rest of their family had feared her, too. The fact that reintegration was usually only successful for those with good support networks.)
A press of Mariel's hand, accompanied by a smile that he can never quite believe is for him. (It's not exactly bright, but it catches the starlight well enough to almost qualify and she looks downright ethereal in their light. It is fond, and reassuring, and calm, and beautiful in a way he cannot do justice with words alone, cannot capture in art, cannot repay with anything short of adoration.) "You helped me through it. And the rest of the survivor group." She's taken Russell's hand too, at some point in all this --- has turned their already-close huddle into something enigmatically more intimate --- and she rallies them both in turn. "We'll do the same for her."
Russell nods. "We will."
Tom wouldn't usually believe their assurances, not with how they've viewed hybrids in the past, not with his own brand of cynicism-tinged pragmatism guiding him. Wants to believe them anyway, and even more so when they look his way like that: part encouragement, part caution, part plea, part care, part confidence. And so, in the end, he nods too. "Okay."
"Okay," Mariel echoes, glad, a nod of her own joining theirs in the three-way pact into which they've stumbled, and then she turns to look out at the sea. Continues tracing patterns against Tom's hand --- no doubt Russell's too --- as she regards the waves crashing before them. "It's beautiful," she says, eyes fixed on the horizon.
"Yes," Tom agrees, looking no further than the beach. (No further than their joined hands.) "It is."