Chapter Text
Colin Bridgerton is just the right side of tipsy one night on his extended trip to the outskirts of Crete. Earlier that night, he discovered a dusty old crate full of vintage reds in the basement of the seaside cottage he’s renting, and he figured no harm could come from cracking one open and enjoying a little vino on the beach.
He’s been on the island for a few weeks now and has really been enjoying his time so far. He’s a writer and photographer for a London-based magazine and mostly focuses on travel-related content for them. He only just started earning money for his wanderlust lifestyle that he adopted upon dropping out of uni back in ’58, much to his eldest brother’s dismay. He isn’t exactly earning a fortune, but it’s enough to keep him comfortable. And, more importantly in his view, it keeps him feeling fulfilled and generally happy most days.
Colin’s here in the rural stretches of Crete to do a piece on modern life in a place with deep, ancient roots. It’s remote and hard to get to, though, so its ruins aren’t overrun by tourists like the sites on the continent often are. This part of the island really makes one feel like they could get lost and stumble on a little piece of historical significance that might not even be in any textbooks.
Today, he spent several hours hiking through the hills and exploring getting just that kind of lost. Colin didn’t stumble upon any fossils or ancient artifacts, but he did get a great sense for the flora and fauna of this hot, beachy little slice of paradise.
After a long day out in the sun and preparing himself a nice dinner, he’s getting some much needed relaxation sprawled out on the beach. It’s late, nearly midnight, and the breeze blowing from the Mediterranean Sea in the distance has cooled everything down nicely. Still, though, he finds himself itching to take a dip in the even cooler waters ahead of him.
Colin loves to swim, and he’s always had an affinity for the water. If his mother is to be believed, she had to assign him an individual nanny in his toddler years. Apparently, he had a penchant for sneaking off and launching himself headfirst into the pond when they were at Aubrey Hall or even the fountain in the garden at Bridgerton House too. She said she wouldn’t much have minded if he knew at all at that point how to swim or even float properly.
At 24, though, Colin can more than sufficiently float and swim properly. He’s been doing laps in the sea each morning, but he skipped it today to get an early start on his hiking expedition. Now feels like the perfect moment to get in the water—a delightful way to end his day the way he’s normally been starting them.
He doesn’t bother going back into the cottage to change into a pair of trunks. This stretch of beach is about as isolated as one can get on this island. He just deposits his wine glass on the patio, disrobes entirely, and starts trudging through the sand towards the sea calling out to him.
The water is cool and welcoming when he dives in, quickly dunking all the way under and pushing his hair back from his forehead on his way back up. He takes a second just to look out at the vast darkness ahead, the way the moonlight glistens ever so beautifully along the shifting, rolling waves. It’s these kind of moments that he wishes his camera could capture, but he’ll have to use his words instead in the article that accompanies the photos the magazine will publish.
Colin decides to go ahead out a little deeper after a while and start swimming those laps he missed out on this morning. He knows that perhaps it’s not the wisest decision in the world (swimming out into deep water, in the middle of the night, and while pleasantly drunk off red wine), but he’ll be fine. He’s a strong swimmer after all, and the sea is calm tonight.
He’s done about five or so laps back and forth across the stretch of beach that disappears into the cliffs when suddenly he feels a sharp stinging sensation on his thigh. Colin swallows a mouthful of water in his attempt to right himself, so he’s sputtering and coughing as he puts together the fact that he was just stung by a rather large jellyfish.
The pain is intense and blooming quickly. He’s been stung by one before, but it’s never hurt quite so badly as this. He knows he needs to get back to shore, so he does his best to start swimming back to at least the area where he can stand upright again and wade his way back in.
Colin’s thigh is positively throbbing, though, and suddenly that calm water he was basking in is starting to feel a little more choppy. He’s swimming and he’s swimming, but it doesn’t really feel like he’s getting anywhere at the same time.
He’s trying not to panic, but the hot, stabbing pain on his leg is quite distracting, and he doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to make it back to the beach if he keeps going at it like this. He does his best to clear his mind and focus on his breathing, ignore the sting, and stop fighting against the water. Use the current. Let it guide him. Quite literally, go with the flow.
The problem with that approach is that the “flow” of the sea is not guiding him back in the direction he wants to go. It’s taking him further and further to the left—to those jagged cliffs and the rocky terrain that swallows up the beach.
Maybe it’ll be alright, he tells himself. He’ll be able to find a safe spot to rest for a bit and regain his composure and his strength to make it back to his cottage. Maybe the rocks aren’t quite as sharp and dangerous as they appear either. Maybe he can just walk back.
Colin’s head is starting to feel a little fuzzy as he gets closer and closer. He wonders vaguely if the jellyfish that stung him is particularly poisonous. Perhaps this is how he’ll go out. It’s certainly not the way he pictured it—alone, splayed out on some jagged rocks, and naked as the day he was born. Anthony will be so disappointed in him.
He manages to stay awake as he’s approaching that rough bit of land, and does his best to grab ahold of something and pull himself out. It’s no use, though. He’s too weak to resist the drag of the sea and everything on the rocks is too slippery. Instead, he’s being taken into a hidden little cove that disappears into the side of one of those cliffs.
A cave, he muses to himself blearily as he’s drifting further and further inside. It’s dark, even darker than the open sea outside. Out there, he had the moonlight. Now, there’s only a tiny strip that filters in through the mouth opening up into the cavern.
Colin bumps up against something solid after a moment, and he lifts a hand out of the water and holds on. It’s a ledge of some sort he realizes, and based on the texture of the surface his palm is pressed against, it’s covered in some sort of thick, goopy seaweed. It seems almost like it’s layered with interwoven tendrils firmly keeping it all in place.
He ignores the unpleasant sensation of having a fistful of algae and instead uses it to his advantage. He holds on tight and focuses all his strength on getting his body up and out of the water enough so that he can essentially just roll onto the ledge. It works, and just a second later, he finds himself on his back and pulling in deep breaths of air as he finally feels a wave of security blanket over him for the first time since he was stung.
Colin can’t see much of anything, but he doesn’t need to get a good look at his leg to know that it’s definitely red and inflamed. As much as he’s still feeling a little woozy and out of it, the pain is still burning sharply and coming through clear in his mind.
He lets his head fall back for a moment and takes a deep, slow breath in. This is alright, he tells himself. He’s okay. Maybe he just needs to lie here and rest for a while. He can gather his strength and hopefully wait for the intensity of the sting to diminish before he gets back in the sea and starts trying to head back to his little lonely cottage.
He lets his eyes flutter shut then and his last thoughts before he drifts off entirely are a string of words playing on a loop.
Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.
When Colin comes to, he’s deeply, deeply confused for a split second before reality slaps him across the face. Everything is decidedly not okay.
The bed of seaweed he passed out atop of is properly encasing him now. He’s covered in the stuff, with thick, heavy strands of it draped all over his limbs and effectively pinning him to the rocks.
The second he realizes where he is and that something isn’t right, Colin starts thrashing and trying to pull his arms and legs free. It’s not making a lick of difference, though, and he’s struck by the same sensation he had out in the water earlier after he got stung—when he was swimming and swimming and not getting anywhere.
This doesn’t make any sense, he tells himself as he keeps trying to wrestle his limbs free and fall into the apparent safety of the water he came up here to escape earlier. Even if he had somehow sunk deep into the pile of seaweed on the ledge in his sleep, he should be able to easily get himself out. It’s just seaweed after all. It’s not like it’s alive in some capacity.
It certainly feels alive, though, as Colin continues making absolutely no progress in getting off that algae-covered stone slab. If anything, it feels like it starts pulling him down harder and encasing him even more in response to all his moving. But that’s not possible, right? There’s no sort of seaweed that would seek to trap him like this.
Suddenly, though, he can feel the wet, sticky vines that have been holding him down start to move in a different way. He can just make out in the strip of light from outside the cave the way some of it seems to be lifted in the air and hovering above his body.
What in all hell is going on? This makes absolutely no sense at all. None of this should be happening. It can’t be happening.
The thick tendril of seaweed is all of a sudden right by his throat and he panics that it’s going to wrap around him there. He’s going to be strangled to death by a plant. If Anthony would have been disappointed in him dying from a jellyfish sting out on the rocks, he’s going to go positively nuclear over this kind of demise instead.
Colin cannot go down without a fight, though—even if he doesn’t entirely understand what it is he’s fighting against. He summons the strength to thrash about even harder, and he opens his mouth and lets out a loud shout for assistance.
“Help! Help me! Somebody! Help!”
He knows it’s likely futile—that it’s after midnight and he’s in the middle of nowhere. But he has to try. He has to do something.
“Help! He—”
His words on his second attempt to scream are cut off then. He’s being smothered by that seaweed dangling above him, and it’s shoving its way into his mouth and going deeper and deeper in an instant.
Colin is gagging and choking and trying to get this disgusting, salty, slimy thing out of his mouth, but it’s just as useless as his arms and legs trying to wriggle free too. It only expands and settles in deeper with his every attempt to get away from it.
He loses consciousness after a few seconds. Before he blacks out entirely, though, the last thing he registers is a thick, viscous sort of substance sluicing down his throat and settling somewhere in his stomach.
Hot. Why is everything so hot?
These are Colin Bridgerton’s thoughts immediately upon waking and opening his eyes next. He blinks in confusion, his arm lifting to his face to cover his eyes and block out the sun. The move, however, only prompts him to grimace and sputter as he’s met with a face full of sand.
He’s on the beach, he realizes as he eases himself up into a seated position and squints at his surroundings. He’s on the beach, entirely naked, and has absolutely no idea how he got here.
His mind races as he takes a few deep breaths and tries to get his bearings. Last night is a blur, but he’s pretty certain something very, very strange happened. Yes, he recalls imbibing a little too much red wine and then foolishly going out for a late night swim. But he cannot shake the feeling that something is off. That he did not just pass out drunk on the beach after skinny dipping under the influence and come to this morning. His body feels oddly heavy and achy, indicating that he endured something more physically taxing than that.
Colin forces himself up onto his feet after continuing to spiral for a few minutes. The sky is full of bright sunshine, and he is still just sitting entirely alone on the beach without a stitch of clothing. Sure, he has not seen anyone come by here in the nearly weeks that he has been staying at the cottage in Crete. That does not mean someone could not happen upon him today, though.
After heading inside, showering, and dressing in fresh clothing, he convinces himself that nothing is amiss. He must have been more intoxicated than he believed last night. Or perhaps he hit his head. He decides he is lucky that something truly sinister didn’t happen to him. He decides that he’s fortunate to have woken up safely on the beach out in front of his cottage and maybe to have woken up at all.
Over the days that follow, Colin tries to put that night from his mind. He resumes his efforts to photograph and document life on the island for humans, animals, and plants alike. He does a fairly good job of staying focused on these tasks—in the light of day at least.
Nighttime is a very different story. He has been having the oddest nightmares—ones that make no sense to him. Everything moves in flashes and it’s all dark colors, wet things touching him, and the sensation of sinking. He awakes after each dream shooting up into a seated position and gasping for air. In those quiet, tense moments while he tries to calm down and remind himself it was only a nightmare, Colin finds it difficult to ignore the notion he feels deep in his bones that something is wrong with this little stretch of beach, with his quaint cottage, and with the majestic sea in the distance.
With that in mind, he spends one morning reviewing his film and his journals and determines that he has more than enough content to submit to his editors to satisfy them. He figures that everything will return to normal with his dreams and his nights once he leaves this place. He will go home to London for the first time in many, many months. He will stay in his childhood bedroom, spend time with his family, and perhaps even pay a visit to Penelope at school.
As Colin makes arrangements to leave and to give up his cottage a few weeks early, the strangest thing starts happening to him. He finds that there are essentially two warring sides of his mind. On the one hand, he is desperate to go home and is growing slightly frightened of this place and something he fears he experienced but cannot recall that lost night on the beach. On the other, though, it feels impossible to physically leave this place. He feels unfinished, that there is more he must accomplish here in Crete before he can justify returning to England.
Colin’s existing in this sort of agonizing state of limbo being pulled in different directions for weeks. He doesn’t understand what’s going on with him, why he can’t seem to make a decision either way—to stay or to go. He starts to worry that it’s a sign of some bout of insanity that has overtaken him of late. That perhaps he’s spent too much time alone this past year and he has been steadily losing his grip on reality without noticing it.
He starts multiple letters to his family trying to express his concern and discuss these strange feelings he is having. Each one ends up tossed in the fire burning in the living room at night, though. They sound utterly mad, and he cannot find the right words to describe his state of being these days anyway.
Funnily enough, the only letter he gets through entirely is one he pens to Penelope. He sits down at the dining table and writes to her at the end of the strangest day in a long string of strange days. He’s spent the entirety of it feeling antsy and uncomfortable. His skin itches and his stomach aches constantly. It feels as if he’s nervous about some looming event, but he has absolutely nothing planned in the near future to be stressing in this manner.
Somehow, after gazing out the window and staring at the full moon steadily rising in the sky, Colin finds the words to describe how he is thinking and feeling lately. He attributes it to the fact that he is writing this particular letter to Pen, to one of his dearest friends, and the person who he always has felt most comfortable discussing his fears and anxieties with. Pen has a unique way of making him feel seen, of making him feel like enough—two things that he historically has struggled with greatly being the third son with two dominating and effusive older brothers and also with being one of eight siblings more generally. He never has these concerns with Pen, though. He always likes talking to her about problems big and small, but also about happier topics too. The longer he’s spent traveling this past year, the more he’s missed seeing her and having discussions with her in-person. The more he’s missed her smiling, cherubic face, her coppery hair, and her shockingly blue eyes.
Reading back the letter he just wrote to his friend, Colin feels better than he has all day. In fact, he feels better than he has all month. It’s been about thirty days of at least a simmering feeling of being unsettled since that night he went for a swim, and this is the first time he truly feels settled once more. Something akin to relief seems to swell within him too, and with that relief comes confidence. He hasn’t gone mad, he tells himself. He is only a little lonely perhaps—missing his family, yes, but also missing Pen.
That renewed confidence manifests in a strange way once the clock strikes midnight and he rises to his feet. He has been avoiding the sea altogether lately. He completely abandoned swimming and has only viewed the water from the safe distance of his patio.
It all feels rather silly now, though. The Mediterranean is gorgeous, and he is so lucky to be staying in a place such as this where he can appreciate its splendor up close and without anyone nearby to disturb him.
It is for that reason that Colin starts to make his way outside for yet another night swim. He assures himself that there is nothing to worry about this time as he has not had a drop of alcohol in weeks. Whatever happened that night he was in his cups was an outlier, he’s decided. Avoiding the sea and the opportunity to submerge himself in its cool, calming waters is very ridiculous and a wrong that must be righted immediately.
The moment he steps into the wake of the gentle waves crashing against the shoreline, Colin smiles to himself and lets out a sigh of relief. The water feels amazing on his skin, instantly soothing that odd itching he’d been contending with all day and dispelling his stomach ache too. The deeper he goes, the more wonderful the sensation, and soon he is treading water at a depth above his head and dunking under to wet his face too.
He twists his neck a bit and tilts his gaze up to look at the bright, full moon hanging in the sky above him. What a glorious sight, he muses. What a glorious, perfect sight.
Just as he’s waxing poetic over the moon and feeling on top of the world, all that hopeful and optimistic wonder washes away in an instant. Colin is suddenly sinking down into the water, his head dunking under, and being dragged down to a great depth by some unseen force. He struggles and he thrashes, doing his best to use his arms to bring him back to the surface again, but it’s all for naught. Something, seemingly nothing, however, is pulling him down relentlessly.
It takes only a few moments for him to start to panic in earnest. He’s losing air quickly in his attempts to break free, and he knows that he doesn’t have much time left that he can remain under water without more oxygen. He’s drowning, he realizes in horror. He’s going to die.
With that notion flooding his consciousness, he’s strangely brought back to that last full moon a month prior—to the way the sea came to life after he was stung by the jellyfish and he was swept into the cave. To collapsing in an exhausted, addled puddle on the rocks. To being smothered and strangled by the algae. To feeling something shift and transform inside him.
Colin cannot believe he’s here again. That he’s on the brink of death a second time here in the normally tranquil seas of Crete. He laments that, though he’s traveled all over the world, there is still so much he hasn’t seen—so much he hasn’t done.
Strangely, though, the regret that burns brightest is born from thoughts and feelings he hasn’t even fully processed or given name to yet. He thinks about his letter to Penelope left sitting on the kitchen table. She’s never going to get it. She’ll never truly know what happened to him here in Crete.
His friend Penelope. Sweet, smart, beautiful Pen. The girl he’s known since he was a child. The girl he perhaps secretly wondered if someday they may end up together. He realizes then, as he struggles to stay alert and alive with so little air left in his lungs, that he’s been waiting for her. She’s still got a year of university left, and Colin wanted her to figure out what it is she wants to be in the world. He’s so proud of everything she’s accomplished academically but also in breaking free from some of the chains imposed upon her by her upbringing, by her family who never truly understood nor embraced the gift that she is to this world.
But now it’s too late. He’s waited too long. He’s dying and he never even got a chance to kiss her, to hold her, to tell her how he really feels, to ask her if maybe someday she could feel the same.
With that final, desperate thought, everything suddenly goes black. Colin thinks it’s over then—that this engulfing totality of darkness is what it means to be dead.
Just when he seems to settle on the concept and begin the process of accepting it to be true, everything changes. His lungs are no longer burning. The water is no longer dark. Everything is… well again.
A tiny bubble of hope rises within his chest and he thinks maybe he was wrong. Maybe he is not dead after all and there is a chance for him to act on all those regrets that ran through his mind at the end. Maybe he is going to rise to the surface of the water, scrap the letter he originally wrote to Pen, and start a new one. Maybe he will write her a much, much longer one when he gets back to the cottage and warms himself up.
Colin goes to lift his hand to place it on his forehead in wonder, but he is very confusingly smacked in the face with something bumpy and strange. It is only then that he looks down in the water and takes in the sight of himself for the first time since it felt like he stopped drowning. Eyes flying open wide, he lets out a muffled, blood-curdling scream into the water at what he spies in the place where his own body should be. Just one word comes into focus, and a voice shouts it out desperately in Colin Bridgerton’s head.
Monster…