Work Text:
A membrane, speckled by tiny holes, as smooth as finest silk. Perhaps earrings like hers would suit him well. Cheekbones sat stiff and high, like her and her parents. A thick chin, like Thomas’s, and a forehead pressed like Thomas's too.
The scratch of the pencil was all that broke the calm of the ocean waves. Martha furrowed her eyebrows, her hand cramping from the intensity of her grasp upon it. The door swung open behind her, thumping gently on the wall.
“Martha? What are you up to?” Thomas asked. Surely she must have seemed a madwoman, sitting here surrounded by discarded pieces of paper and half-finished sketches put up upon the wall.
Instead of words, she stood up and took his shoulders, directing him to sit in front of her desk, after which she returned to her sketching. Gracefully, Thomas did not protest, and took his position dutifully.
She continued to draw, that image of the giant siren with the blackened scales burned into her eyes. Every time she closed them, he was there, his roar echoing within her ears, a legendary creature that most weren’t sure existed, save for her now. His muscles and claws promised certain doom for any that opposed him, and yet he held his baby within them with the tenderness of a mother deer. And that expression… Her sketch, rough as it was, had yet to include that scales that coated the siren’s body from head to tailfin, but the shape of the face…
There was a large empty spot where the siren’s eyes should be. It was a detail she had yet to draw well enough, the floor and wastebasket being littered with her failed attempts, but with Thomas gazing upon her, she lifted her pencil. And like a Greek poet seized by a Muse’s power, she began to draw instinctively. Heavy eyebrows like Thomas's father, black sclera, that would be seen as monstrous and demonic to a less keen observer, set with an iris blue like living water like...
She stepped back, and her heart clenched. “Oh, my goodness…”
Thomas sat and waited, his concern evident by his tense lips, and the squeeze of his palm upon his thigh.
Martha ran to her closet, throwing open the doors. She kneeled in front of a dusty old box and rifled through old toys and children’s clothes, before at last she found an old framed photo.
A tear broke upon her eyes. It had been so long since that day, when the boat thrashed underneath the might of a storm, and Bruce, her baby boy, was flung off of it. She remembered the ghostly touch of his hand as she reached out and grasped it. But his hand was wet and cold.
She never forgot his eyes as they shared one last look.
Martha ran back to the desk, where Thomas was standing over the sketch, staring intently at the eyes on the siren.
“It’s not your eyes,” she told him solemnly, before passing over the old photo. Thomas’s eyes flicked between the photo and the sketch, the incredulity on his expression melting into shock, and then horror, and then a profound sadness.
“It can’t be… Is that… is that why you’ve been up all night drawing?”
Martha turned to the clock, which read 7.06. She hadn’t realised the passage of time. “Thomas, he’s out there. He’s been out there, all this time.”
“But how?”
“Perhaps the sea took mercy on him, and saved him.”
“He never came back to us.”
“He never came back to us. Oh God… he has children of his own. That tiny baby on the beach… He’s had a whole life, but he never came back to us.”
Martha came to her feet and went for her coat. Thomas ran after her, not far behind.