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Buttons wakes up one night to find that his skin doesn’t fit right.
His back is on the deck—and he knows, somewhere far below, is the ocean, but he can’t feel her. Above him, Olivia beats her wings nervously.
It’s a thin night, and moonrise has scarcely come. The sliver of white glows across the boards as he sits up, but barely enough to illuminate his body.
“You are less and less yourself with every passing day,” Olivia squawks. “Take care.”
He hums back to her, a two-note sonata. The time for caution was decades before or not at all. The sea is a tumultuous lover, and he can no longer disentangle himself from her arms. It is not her fault. She can no more pluck him free than he can find his favorite taste bud.
On another night, he could have asked the moon’s help, as the ocean’s other faithful servant. But tonight, she too is weak.
The ocean is his alone. All she will understand is the symphony. He must rise to the occasion.
The rest of the crew is asleep. It is effortless to glide past them and to the edge of the ship.
He cannot remember the last time he slept. No, he was asleep a moment ago. What he means to say: he cannot remember the last time he breathed.
He gets to his knees, as though it will bring him closer to her grasp. A thousand miles away, a starfish is abandoned by the tide. The Moon is made of razor-sharp dust and the ocean lives in her too, in her darkest corners. Olivia cries.
A day passes or a minute. His sacrifice aches. She whispers in his ear, but she is too hoarse to roar. He is silent, so she can better fill him.
He ought to be closer to her. To fill his ears with seashells and hear her in his skin. It has been a long road, but it always led to this moment.
It’s time to shed his skin. He is no more use to her in this form.
He stands, against the railing, and Olivia comes to settle on his head. She croaks, “There is no difference between death and transformation.”
Olivia has her own reasons for accompanying him then, and he will not question them. He takes one final look at the deck, and all the mortals he has loved. His family will be different tomorrow.
He spreads his arms and faces her. He will consign himself. An eager rush of moonlight falls across him.
Buttons prepares to jump.
“And what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
For a single, perfect moment, he is suspended, weightless, above her mouth. The ocean spray licks his feet, teasingly, and then the half-man pulls Buttons back aboard by his arm.
Buttons turns. How did he forget? He is not alone in his watch. The half-man is a sea creature too—the crew says unicorn, but a figurehead is an icon of the ocean.
He is resplendent. The moonbeam runs her hands through his starlight hair and sets it afire. It glows as only the creature’s reborn leg does.
Hands, they call him, but they ought to have dubbed him Scipio, for his gait is all that need identify him.
“Buttons? You in there?” The half-man waves a hand in front of Buttons’ eyes. “You can’t kill yourself—Bonnet will have a fit.”
“It wasn’t suicide,” Olivia proclaims.
“Thank you for clarifying, Olivia,” Buttons says, because it would be rude not to. “Half-man, have you received penance?”
The half-man sighs and scrubs at his face. He mutters, “Blackbeard’s first mate. Reduced to nattering on about the moon.” Louder, he says, “Haven’t I atoned enough?” He flexes his leg.
It is an unfortuitous night indeed, that he has so misunderstood Buttons. “I do not ask that you give more, o half-man. I ask if you have received.”
Buttons is muddy in the ocean’s gaze. The clouds obscure him tonight, and she is shale-weary. But the half-man will serve as perfect focus.
“If I play along, will you stop trying to commit suicide?” The half-man says.
Buttons will have to apologize to Olivia for his inattention to her corrections, but for now, he merely nods.
“Fine,” the half-man says.
Buttons sinks to his knees again. This is right and proper. This is where she wants him. He places a hand on the half-man’s leg.
It goes through Buttons like a wave breaking across the shore of his mind. For the first time all night, he can hear the lap of the ship’s motion.
There is a ritual to these things. Buttons bends and lays a kiss to the half-man’s whole leg, where it joins with his empty body.
“Oh, what the fuck,” the half-man says, rearing back, and his leg clips Buttons’ face as it passes.
If it was cleansing before, this is smiting. She leaps through him, dancing eagerly through every pain. Transubstantiation is difficult work. He gives unhesitatingly.
“Don’t kiss it,” the half-man snaps. “It’s not—”
“It is,” Buttons insists. “You are a beautiful monster.”
“Kick him again,” Olivia says, and she is now more enthusiastic than forlorn. The ocean sways through them.
The half-man pauses, and his ears are not the part of him that was born again in the sea, but he must hear Olivia for the first time.
He does it.
The half-man is a sea monster, and he is familiar with pain. Once, the sea whispered to Buttons about what she had held the half-man through. The blood and screaming agony that had spattered this wood. The rot death-scent as she had taken her due. And what she had given him in exchange.
That gleaming pain returns to Buttons now, where he kneels. The half-man obeys Olivia and kicks him in the head.
Buttons is sloshed into the waves of his mind. His head flies off his neck and skates backwards across the deck, sliding wildly from side to side. Every impact resonates like a gong. The water crashes in atop.
By the time his head settles back on his shoulders, the waves have closed in above him. The air seems distant and distorted, but the ocean is crystal clear. His blood is dissipating into her in dark clouds.
Buttons can see the half-man’s other side now. He is grimacing, as though he wants to apologize and does not know how. Buttons washes it away with all other mortal concerns.
The half-man’s visible leg has frozen in mid-flight, and Buttons sympathizes. He reaches out, as he would for Olivia’s ruffled feathers, and holds it close.
The half-man jerks again, like he wants to shake Buttons free, but Buttons has learned one lesson from the ocean: how to love through any storm. The half-man spins inside a typhoon, bobbing and dipping, and Buttons anchors him firm.
They both sink under the waves.
The half-man opens his eyes underwater, and Buttons imagines he can see for the first time. The movement of the Earth in her crystalline sphere, and her e’er faithful silver companion around her. Thousands of fathoms below, the ocean pouring forth from her primordial rift at rates that would shatter any vessel in moments. With every curl and wash, she is alive.
“This is a weird fuckin’ dream,” the half-man mutters, but he stops fighting. Instinct alone, he rests his leg on Buttons’, where he is still kneeling.
Buttons’ hair drifts upwards as the water climbs higher above them both. He knows the honor that it represents to be entrusted with the ocean’s sea monster, and dutifully, he dips his head once more.
This time, when Buttons kisses the sea-wrought limb, the half-man does not flinch away. He floats closer instead, angel in the moon-split water, entrusting his weight to Buttons.
The prosthetic is part of it, but it is not the point: when Buttons presses his lips to the rough wood, he commemorates freedom. The new way the half-man swims. The new way the sea bubbles up in his every other footprint.
The half-man worries, because he does not move like he did a decade ago, but neither does Buttons. Such is the nature of growing old. The sea puts her tendrils into the fragile parts of you and helps open them up. Rebuilds them with something different. This is how clams work.
Mr. Hands looks down at himself. It is impossible to love something unchanging.
The wave breaks. Buttons stands. He will make a beautiful seagull.