Chapter Text
There was a man in the water.
Brad had enough of waiting in line for his turn to go out, had enough of the surfer-bros and surf-tourists invading his local beach.
He’d spent a lot of his leave sporadically searching the coastline close (or thereabouts) to his house in pursuit of a place to surf that wasn’t crowded by out-of-towners, or really people in general.
And maybe there was a reason that the little place he’d found was so isolated. The area was relatively small, hemmed in by rock and away from the road so that it was difficult to access except via a slog by foot while carrying your board. The sand was more sharp pieces and rubble than the soft, sink-your-toes-in stuff on the other beaches.
Brad had visited here before and had dismissed the place initially, too much effort to get to waves that weren’t challenge enough for him.
Erosion and a handful of bad storms had reorganised the sea floor so that a ledge had been made, and now the shallows dropped away into depths with little warning, creating the kind of tricky, large waves that drew Brad’s attention.
Brad wasn’t stupid. He could see the dangers in this area, the risk of being thrown into the rocks that sheltered the place, that created the sea floor here. Not stupid, but he was confident in his abilities enough, and crazy-bold enough, and honestly, fed up with the more popular beaches enough, to give this place a try despite the risk.
He was a Marine after all, it was in his nature to be drawn to danger, and the lure of proving he could overcome it.
He’d come here, a place difficult to access with some of the most inhospitable waves he’d ever seen ready to be made his bitch…
...and there was a man in the water.
He was just kind of… sitting there. Bobbing gently in the sea, dark hair plastered to his head, watching Brad. Or facing him, anyway, it was hard to see the guy when he was so far away, when waves kept popping up and obscuring Brad’s view.
Brad waved an arm, wondering if the guy was in trouble.
The guy wasn’t yelling or waving his arms, he wasn’t staring, silent and wide-eyed, didn’t seem to be climbing an invisible ladder to nowhere as he drowned.
He looked like Brad did when he sat out on his back porch on a warm, comfortable evening with a cold beer and the latest copy of his bike magazine subscription.
Brad lowered his hand, and as he watched, the man cocked his head at him and then casually sank down under the surface.
And didn’t come back up.
Shit.
Shit, shit. The place was so isolated it didn’t have a lifeguard, was the kind of beach that no one visited, that no one even really knew about.
All question of how that guy even got there, what he was doing, vanished when Brad saw him disappear. Was it worth calling someone? The Coast Guard?
The fucking Coast Guard.
Brad could probably do a search and rescue for the guy by himself, but should he? No backup in untried waters with nothing but a surfboard to help?
Yeah, he’d try, and he was going to until he saw that same dark head pop up again far, far away from where it had last been and closer to the outcrop of rock on the left side of the beach. Close enough to nestle among the rocks like he belonged there, like that place wasn’t a death trap.
“Hey, you okay?!” Brad called out, screaming to be heard across the distance and over the sound of the waves.
The man did that weird head tilt at him again, but then his arm was lifting out of the water, his thumb held aloft to show that he was, indeed, okay.
Brad might have called back that the guy was in a dangerous area. He might have called him a dick for going out there to, Brad could only assume, show-off.
But what did Brad care if some stranger wanted to risk his life daring the dark rocks to break his body apart?
How would he react if someone tried to dissuade him from surfing here, if he was out there waiting on the next wave only to be called back by someone who didn’t understand that he needed this, the thrill of risking his life, the razor edge of maybe this time, maybe… and conquering it.
(Or not.
Did he really have anything left to him but this?
The adrenaline thrill of near-death experiences, speeding on his bike, finding the most dangerous surf, pitting himself against nature on dangerous man-made machines and not actually giving a fuck if, maybe, something went wrong.
Just a natural response to being betrayed, to finding that the foundations of his world had a giant crack running through them and now he was sinking.
To being heartbroken.
To being dumped.
It wasn’t suicidal, was it, to try to live but to not really care if you died?)
Brad looked back and the man had gone again.
This time, Brad followed him into the sea.
--
Brad had found a new passion.
Surfing at his new, undiscovered private beach was the challenge he’d needed to take his mind off the fact that his house was empty, that his life’s trajectory hadn’t so much hit a wall as been swatted down by his former fiancee.
Keeping an eye on weather patterns and tide schedules and trying to collate as much data about the place as possible meant that he didn’t have time to think about missing best friends and a bed that was too large, empty deck chairs on the porch and a schedule suddenly wiped clean.
He hadn’t worked this hard to catch a usable wave since he was a beginner, and he loved it. It was like getting into the sport all over again.
He was sunburned and saltburned and covered in grazes from the way the unforgiving sharp sand scraped his bare feet, the rock debris left under the water to snag him, but he actually felt something again.
And in the quiet times, when Brad sat on the uncomfortable beach with his board at his side and watched the waves, he’d occasionally catch a glimpse of the man in the water.
They never spoke to each other; Brad hadn’t offered a word since that first day, and he’d never heard the guy say anything at all.
He was the only other person Brad had ever seen on his part of this beach, and he wasn’t entirely sure how the guy got out there. He never saw a jet ski or boat, and the man had no board.
It was theoretically possible, Brad supposed, to be able to get there by jumping off the cliff edge, but only theoretically possible owing to the very material, real rock that you wouldn’t be able to avoid hitting on the way down.
A swimmer, he supposed, with endurance experience and a thirst for danger that maybe matched Brad’s. Hell, he could even be a Marine too, though Brad didn’t recognise him.
Brad had visited the beach at all hours in his attempt to map the place out, and he’d never caught the man going in or coming out of the water.
It was like he lived there.
He tried not to let the guy throw him, even if the entire mystery was tugging at his need to know; Recon Marines weren’t just idiot adrenaline junkies and thrill seekers, they were also nosy fucks, worse than your average small-town curtain twitching neighbour.
‘He’s no one, it’s nothing. Think about the surf.’ Brad told himself.
--
Brad knew it had been a bad idea for him to try these tricky waves when he was emotional, but he was in denial about being emotional too.
His former fiancee had put up a baby announcement on Facebook, and Brad might be a stupid grunt but he could do basic maths.
He wondered how long they’d been fucking around behind his back for, those few, precious times he’d been able to call home via dodgy satellite link on deployment to find his best friend at their house too.
At the time he’d been relieved that she’d had someone there for her.
He was a fucking moron.
He hadn’t even checked the weather, just thrown his board onto the car and peeled out of his driveway towards the little beach in a kind of fugue state.
He’d crashed through the path he’d been flattening into the little scrub plants that choked the way towards the place, all but threw his board to the ground and started stripping from the shorts and tshirt he’d thrown on over his wetsuit.
He forgot the helmet.
Brad was no idiot, really, he knew better than to try surfing an area with so much rock around without a helmet. It might not ‘look cool’, a vanity that Brad had to admit he fell prey to sometimes, but never if it meant the difference between a mild concussion or traumatic brain injury and death.
Brad was no idiot, but he wasn’t exactly thinking.
He dove into the water, colder here than further south down the coastline, letting the force of the small waves hit him over and over.
He paddled out and sat up, waiting.
He was usually an ambush predator when he did this, waiting for the optimum convergence of conditions for the best waves; he was a trapdoor spider, a mantis, a crocodile, something outside time readying to drop on it’s prey.
Now he was something agitated, pacing, a roiling storm inside that screamed at his muscles to move move move! To rip and tear and scream and all the things stoic, quiet Brad never let out.
For this Brad, good enough was going to be good enough, and he wasn’t even sure if the rising wave he saw even met those conditions, but it was something, and he’d take it.
It was like his brain was being hijacked by some primal, animal self to get through the ache in his chest, taking advantage of the hollow place inside him and making a home for itself there. He didn’t remember paddling over, didn’t remember popping up.
All he knew, for a moment, was the still, silent roar of the water around him, the effortless glide of his board over the surface, the speed and force under his feet.
The feeling, for one moment, of touching fingertips to something perfect and enormous in its indifference, letting him just exist as a thing-
--
He looked up into a dilute-blue sky, void of clouds, of anything really.
His body ached and his hand, when he tried to move it, was caught in something.
Or, had been caught in something, the resistance left and he could bring it up to his aching head.
“I don’t think you should move.”
Shit.
Brad jack-knifed up and then folded back down like a dead leaf when electric pain shot through every nerve and ended smacking him in the head.
He tried turning his head towards the voice this time, and there was the face of the man in the water.
Or, not as the case may be.
Or, actually.
Brad felt down with his hand and caught the lap of the water’s edge coming up around him at about waist height.
He’d been dragged onto the shore, but had barely left the water – strange. Most people would have tried to pull him fully onto dry land.
The stranger was watching him with curious eyes, wow, big, dark eyes like a hungry cat. Short shorn dark hair, yeah, he was pretty sure this was the stranger he shared the beach with.
Only…
“I don’t think you should move, you were bleeding.” The man said again, helpfully.
“Oh.” Brad said, helpfully. “What happened?”
Intel, intel, intel.
“You fell off that board thing and into the rocks, I don’t know if you hit your head, you’re not bleeding there. You were gutted all up your side, I put some medicine on it.”
Intel in little pieces. Little pieces.
“I fell off?”
“Yeah, and you couldn’t, well, I guess you couldn’t swim properly, with, with these.”
Brad felt a finger poke briefly at his thigh and thought ‘what?’
“I’m a Marine, I can swim.” he grumbled, defending himself automatically.
The stranger scoffed. “None of your kind can swim properly.” he said, and then smiled and Brad knew he must have some kind of head injury going on because the man’s teeth looked all pointed and flashed in the sun.
Also, what?
“What are you, Navy?” Brad sniped back, off-put by the man’s confused chuckle.
“What?”
That wasn’t fair, that was Brad’s line.
And also, what the fuck, why was the urge to quip and defend his honour stronger than the need to assess the state of his body?
Fucking Marines, himself very much included.
He tentatively felt down his side to where the burning ache was actually more intense, now that he thought about it, and his hand came into contact with something sticky, some mushy pulp wet down and plastered to his side.
“Don’t touch it!” the stranger chided, whisking Brad’s hand away. “You were cut deep, right through your skin!”
Brad was pretty sure he’d be in a lot more pain if that was the case. It just felt like a graze, but he couldn’t be sure of what his body was telling him right now. Better to err on the side of caution and go slow.
“What did you put on me? You said you had medicine?”
The stranger shrugged, and Brad noticed the sun glinting off the skin of his throat, like he had glitter there.
More evidence of concussion.
“It’s a poultice, I don’t know. Seaweed, silt, bit of this, bit of that. I use it when I get injured. I don’t know what you’d call it.”
Brad wasn’t confident about the sound of that, but if he had been, what was it, ‘gutted’ on the rocks and cut down past his skin, he was sure he would be having much more of a problem if this weird ‘medicine’ stuff wasn’t helping.
“Where’s my board?” He hadn’t used a leash, fuck.
The stranger shrugged again. “The tide took it. I couldn’t manage both of you, you’re huge! It was like towing an elephant seal.”
Brad was going to say something, but the stranger kept going.
He had a fast, restless, almost anxious manner of speech, like he expected to be cut off any minute so had to get out everything he wanted to say while he had the chance.
“I’ll try and find it later. Is it important to you? I’m sorry, I just couldn’t handle the both of you and I thought you’d probably die if I got the board first.”
“No, of course; I’m sorry.” Brad said, realising he’d been a bit rude in pursuit of information. “Thank you. For saving me.”
The stranger grinned again, a little shyly maybe, and Brad was sure now that his teeth were more pointed than they should be, angles where there should be curves.
His hair was drying in the sun and stood up in tufts and spikes held firm by the salt of the seawater.
It reminded Brad a little of seeing the recruits with very long hair getting their buzzcuts; that transition phase after the hairdresser had applied the scissors, but before they’d gone over their work with the razor, all careless lengths and chunky snips.
Brad would need to sit up to properly look him over, but he could see that the man was tattooed, dark ink that looked a little blown out in the shape of stars on his shoulders, script in between them that Brad couldn’t make out.
His eyes were still as dark and wide as Brad had thought they were, something fathomless about them, but something almost naive in there too.
He was watching Brad back with a kind of curious wonder, the same look Brad had seen in the eyes of the boot recruits stepping foot onto foreign land for the very first time.
“I’m Brad.”
Brad’s rescuer tilted his head at him, in that way that Brad had seen him do times before. “I’m Ray.”
There was something a little hesitant when the guy gave his name, but Brad couldn’t begin to guess why.
“Thank you for saving my life, Ray.” Brad said again, the truth of it hitting him suddenly.
Ray looked away, rubbing his hand over his head bashfully, and Brad fought not to do a double take when he saw the webbing between Ray’s fingers.
It wasn’t just a slightly more pronounced type of the webbing between Brad’s own fingers – this was more like the webbing of a frog, Ray’s fingernails long and almost claw-like.
Brad felt a pang of sympathy for the guy, for Ray. Was this why he’d been so hesitant about approaching before? Was this why he seemed so jittery and nervous?
“Could you help me sit up?” He asked, lifting his arm to hold his hand out, steady.
Ray didn’t seem to hesitate now though, reaching out confidently and smoothly pulling Brad upwards into a seated position.
Brad’s ‘thanks’ was lost to speechlessness.
The edge of the tide came up around his hips, but he could still see the way Ray’s bare chest tapered off into a fucking fish tail.