[Fic] Our Shining Seas of London
Title: Our Shining Seas of London
Rating: G
Genre: Mood piece, drama, SF, purple prose, sparkles, experimental
Words: ~2000
Summary: Above an ocean full of glowing jellyfish and dolphins that fly like birds, two young men named Arthur and Alfred lived in a little cottage. Sometimes, at night, they go to London : a beautiful coral reef where they walk on water and watch the sharks swim beneath their feet.
Alfred mostly slept throughout the day, when the sun was bright and the sea was warm and filled with flocks of jellyfish. It was not as if he didn't want to see it for himself, the sight of a thousand translucent umbrella-like coelenterates tumbling their way toward the sun and the plankton-filled water. Arthur had told him often enough about the things to know that they were beautiful, but when Arthur himself said they should save their energies for the night, he was not inclined to disagree. He was the strongest boy, after all, and his job was the most important.
So while Arthur stayed in his library and shuffled through the maze of old books brittle with salt, Alfred would crash down on his bed, pull down the whale-shape ceiling floats and winched off the skylights. Arthur had made it so that his ceiling would glow like stars when it was dark; he didn't know how, though it could be with those precious jars of glow-jellies that Scott sometimes left for them when he visited. If he wasn't sleepy, Alfred would look at those green and yellow stars and counted them, remember their positions and their numbers on the navigational maps, the names Arthur called out for them when they were on the seas. He vaguely recalled that there might have been other things associated with these stars, stories perhaps, but if he had heard them he must have been so young that he couldn't remember very well. Maybe they had other names, too, names that he could only vaguely remember, in a world that seemed so far away.
He would wake just at nightfall, which was customary, and when he went out to the boat Arthur would already be there with his glow lamp. The boat would already be prepped up, too, all its oars and sealings in place and stocked with the jars of coral-worms that they could use to bait more glowfish if they ran out. They would say nothing together in these moments; Alfred would turn his gaze onto the night sky and the the wispy phosphorescent plumes in the distance, the sign of dolphins turning in their sleep. Arthur would step next to him and undoes the clasps on his robes, checked the bandages on his chest in a manner more fitting for a man praying at God's altar. Only when he was done, when he was satisfied that none of the wrappings were too old and that the unguent applied to them was still greasy to his fingertips, Arthur would step away, smile, and move on to the boat. He would attach the glow lamp to the post at the stern, and only then would Alfred move in after him and free the boat from its mooring. And this is when they would start talking, him with the paddles and Arthur with the metallic maps that contained the numbers and names of the stars.
"I hope you had a nice sleep?" he would say, adjusting the wheels and gears on the device and squinting at the horizon for a comparison point.
Alfred always slept well, even though he always wondered if Arthur ever slept, and so he always answered, "Of course I did, Arthur."
His brother would smile in that odd way that seemed both satisfied and disappointed, and he would ask next, "Did you dream of anything?"
And Alfred would shake his head and say, "No, I didn't dream of anything."
This was mostly true, of course. Most days, his sleep was quiet and black, as if he had just turned into stone for a few hours and only remembered how to breath again once the sun sets and the sea below his room was filled with the murmurs of nocturnal clams. He told himself it was like a kind of magic, like the stories in the books he sneaked out of the libraries when Arthur was not looking, that he had just turned into something inanimate and every day re-learned how to come back to life. It was a nice thing to feel. It made the days when he did dream unsettling. As if he had stepped into somebody else's shoes, somebody else's skin, and was only torn back to reality simply because there was a shadow in the back of his eyes clawing and screaming for him to do so.
He didn't tell Arthur because it felt wrong, and because he wasn't a child anymore. He would've told Arthur if he asked, though, because he always did, but Arthur always just laughed and said, "I see."
What they talked about next would depend on what happened in Arthur's day. Sometimes he would say that Scott or Mattie came by and dropped in a few presents, jars of different jellies and cages full of fish that sang and flew. Sometimes it would be about the odd things he read that days, little unimportant facts that he thought Alfred might find interesting, like how the scientists measured the currents of the ocean, the migratory patterns of extincted birds or the evolution of the poisonous blue-winged sea slug and how they hunted their prey. At the same time he would check the directions on his metal map and refill the glow lamp with new fish, if necessary, and when they reached somewhere in the middle of the sea Arthur would start to call out the names of the stars.
If he said, "Barney," that was the one on the left of the constellation that looked like a crab. If he said "Frost," that was the one with the tiny red star hiding next to it like the mole on the face of the cage-merchant. If he said "London," that was the one glowing somewhat sullenly in the middle of a nebula, a grumpy man muttering something among the dust of his cremated cousins, and Alfred liked London the best because that meant the destination was somewhere he wanted to go. Most of the other places, he would just steer to an empty spot on the sea, throw in the anchor, and he would wait as Arthur jumped in and disappeared to look for the fish. When the destination is named by the star called 'London', it meant Arthur would stand up on the boat, give him that slightly shy, slightly challenging smile that he had grown so fond of in recent years, and he would extend a hand for him to take.
Alfred would take that hand, and they would jump into the water together.
The place marked by the star called London was a strange place, unlike any other spot on the sea. According to Arthur it had something they called 'magnetic field anomaly', which neither of them understood very well. Whatever it was, it made London wondrous. Here was the one place where Alfred could step out of the both as long as he held Arthur's hand, where he would wish and wish and Arthur would sing his song in the voice of the whale flocks, and they would sink to their ankles and no more. It was like a shallow sea with a glass bottom, and because Arthur always chose to take them there on nights where the shining plankton would pass through it in their migrations, the shallow sea became something unearthly and beautiful. They would wade their way across the calm waves, the water under their feet lit by the blue and green and red light of a thousand different microscopic plants, and it would be so bright that they could see the swarms of little fish and manta rays gathering from below. Sometimes they even saw herds of rainbow-finned sharks, their eyes watching these curious creatures who treaded the surface of the water as if they were the larvae of giant mosquitoes. And even more wondrous were the coral reefs. Unlike the reefs near their cottage, where the rocks grew in the shapes of twisted bushes and fans which turned red and gold and green, the coral here were as tall as kelp forests, and they were all white. They were mostly rectangular with porous holes where the fish and the rays soared to and fro, but some were rounded, some were dome-like, and some had triangular tips that had fallen in.
"Do you know where we are, Alfred?" Arthur would ask, and his voice would be exceedingly kind.
And he would snort and make a pouty face and look at Arthur and say, "Of course I know, we're in London."
He never knew why Arthur always chuckled when he said that. Not the sort of chuckle he heard when they talked about a particularly amazing fish they'd caught, not the sort of chuckle he heard when he pestered him to talk about the distant islands in the sky. It was soft and warm and full of longing and it was meant for someone who wasn't Alfred, which made him sad in ways he could not describe.
That was the one thing he didn't like about their trips, but it would end quickly enough for him not to care. Arthur would grab his hand and they would run across the surface of the ocean, free as a flight of dolphins, and eventually they would laugh together. He liked Arthur when they did this, it felt like he had given up once again something that weighed heavily on him, something that always haunted the inner skin beneath his face when he read the books back home. It was nice, and he often wished Arthur could be like this always.
And the best thing about London was, when they reached home only mere moments before daybreak, Alfred would go to sleep. And then he would dream. Not the dreams he sometimes had, where he was someone else shouting into a crowd of people who could not hear, people with no faces. Not the dreams where he was himself, trapped in a drowning place where voices screamed at him with words of no meaning. No, whenever he went to London, he would dream of wonderful things. He would dream of walking in the coral reefs he saw, all white and shining in the glow of the rays and the swordfish, and he could breathe water as if it was air. He would walk in the corals and between them, and there would be that rare and precious green grass under his feet and trees whose blossoms filled the air with sweetness. He would see other people, people who were smiling much like Arthur could. He would walk in these places and listen as they sang lullabies to shining schools of fish and he would know, for some reason, that they were his. There were corals which, though they seemed to have sunken in the nights when he was awake, were put back together in their right places in the days when he slept. Giant reefs that arranged themselves in the shape of a pentagon, beautifully sculpted white reefs shaped like a dome where the king of the sea lived. He would walk into this, the white domed building decorated with a piece of cloth full of stars, and the king of the sea would rise and smile and say, Alfred, I've been waiting for you.
On days like this he would wake up late, simply because the dream was so wonderful. He would not know it was night until Arthur knocked on his door, lantern in hand, and asked if he slept well that day.
"Of course I did, Arthur."
"Did you dream of anything?"
Alfred would open his mouth and choked on his tongue upon saying, Yes, I dreamed of London, I dreamed of the white house where the sea-king lived and it was beautiful. Instead he would say nothing. Nothing, because Arthur would look at him so sadly, so expectantly, that he could not break his heart by saying he just dreamed of a coral reef in the sea.
So he would end up saying, always, " No, I didn't dream of anything, Arthur. Thank you for waking me."
The truth was he didn't want to be awake.
The other truth was, when he said this Arthur would come over and wrap his arms around him and changed the bandages on the wounds over his chest, and he would bury his face in his hair and say, "Remember, Alfred, that I will always love you."
And he would smile and wrap his own arms around Arthur's back, and feel that he wanted nothing more than to be awake, to be living, in their little cottage on the sea.
.
.
.
.
Note : If I've failed to make it obvious, the premise is this : the world is flooded over, Waterworld styled. (Yes, it's a terrible movie, I know.) Ocean life has evolved in strange and exciting ways. The nations have managed to survive, however, thanks to pockets of their people living here and there on the planet itself and much of their citizens re-establishing themselves on space stations ('islands in the sky') and the moon. Though most of them decided to go to space, a few remained on Earth, and a few still came down to visit every once in a while. Arthur remained on Earth to take care of Alfred, who received a mortal wound of an unspecified nature before the world's end, and they live in a cottage not far from Washington DC, in order to take care of Alfred's wounds. He calls it London because he wants Alfred to remember himself and argue back that his DC is totally not London, dammit, but Alfred never really does. THE END.
Rating: G
Genre: Mood piece, drama, SF, purple prose, sparkles, experimental
Words: ~2000
Summary: Above an ocean full of glowing jellyfish and dolphins that fly like birds, two young men named Arthur and Alfred lived in a little cottage. Sometimes, at night, they go to London : a beautiful coral reef where they walk on water and watch the sharks swim beneath their feet.
Alfred mostly slept throughout the day, when the sun was bright and the sea was warm and filled with flocks of jellyfish. It was not as if he didn't want to see it for himself, the sight of a thousand translucent umbrella-like coelenterates tumbling their way toward the sun and the plankton-filled water. Arthur had told him often enough about the things to know that they were beautiful, but when Arthur himself said they should save their energies for the night, he was not inclined to disagree. He was the strongest boy, after all, and his job was the most important.
So while Arthur stayed in his library and shuffled through the maze of old books brittle with salt, Alfred would crash down on his bed, pull down the whale-shape ceiling floats and winched off the skylights. Arthur had made it so that his ceiling would glow like stars when it was dark; he didn't know how, though it could be with those precious jars of glow-jellies that Scott sometimes left for them when he visited. If he wasn't sleepy, Alfred would look at those green and yellow stars and counted them, remember their positions and their numbers on the navigational maps, the names Arthur called out for them when they were on the seas. He vaguely recalled that there might have been other things associated with these stars, stories perhaps, but if he had heard them he must have been so young that he couldn't remember very well. Maybe they had other names, too, names that he could only vaguely remember, in a world that seemed so far away.
He would wake just at nightfall, which was customary, and when he went out to the boat Arthur would already be there with his glow lamp. The boat would already be prepped up, too, all its oars and sealings in place and stocked with the jars of coral-worms that they could use to bait more glowfish if they ran out. They would say nothing together in these moments; Alfred would turn his gaze onto the night sky and the the wispy phosphorescent plumes in the distance, the sign of dolphins turning in their sleep. Arthur would step next to him and undoes the clasps on his robes, checked the bandages on his chest in a manner more fitting for a man praying at God's altar. Only when he was done, when he was satisfied that none of the wrappings were too old and that the unguent applied to them was still greasy to his fingertips, Arthur would step away, smile, and move on to the boat. He would attach the glow lamp to the post at the stern, and only then would Alfred move in after him and free the boat from its mooring. And this is when they would start talking, him with the paddles and Arthur with the metallic maps that contained the numbers and names of the stars.
"I hope you had a nice sleep?" he would say, adjusting the wheels and gears on the device and squinting at the horizon for a comparison point.
Alfred always slept well, even though he always wondered if Arthur ever slept, and so he always answered, "Of course I did, Arthur."
His brother would smile in that odd way that seemed both satisfied and disappointed, and he would ask next, "Did you dream of anything?"
And Alfred would shake his head and say, "No, I didn't dream of anything."
This was mostly true, of course. Most days, his sleep was quiet and black, as if he had just turned into stone for a few hours and only remembered how to breath again once the sun sets and the sea below his room was filled with the murmurs of nocturnal clams. He told himself it was like a kind of magic, like the stories in the books he sneaked out of the libraries when Arthur was not looking, that he had just turned into something inanimate and every day re-learned how to come back to life. It was a nice thing to feel. It made the days when he did dream unsettling. As if he had stepped into somebody else's shoes, somebody else's skin, and was only torn back to reality simply because there was a shadow in the back of his eyes clawing and screaming for him to do so.
He didn't tell Arthur because it felt wrong, and because he wasn't a child anymore. He would've told Arthur if he asked, though, because he always did, but Arthur always just laughed and said, "I see."
What they talked about next would depend on what happened in Arthur's day. Sometimes he would say that Scott or Mattie came by and dropped in a few presents, jars of different jellies and cages full of fish that sang and flew. Sometimes it would be about the odd things he read that days, little unimportant facts that he thought Alfred might find interesting, like how the scientists measured the currents of the ocean, the migratory patterns of extincted birds or the evolution of the poisonous blue-winged sea slug and how they hunted their prey. At the same time he would check the directions on his metal map and refill the glow lamp with new fish, if necessary, and when they reached somewhere in the middle of the sea Arthur would start to call out the names of the stars.
If he said, "Barney," that was the one on the left of the constellation that looked like a crab. If he said "Frost," that was the one with the tiny red star hiding next to it like the mole on the face of the cage-merchant. If he said "London," that was the one glowing somewhat sullenly in the middle of a nebula, a grumpy man muttering something among the dust of his cremated cousins, and Alfred liked London the best because that meant the destination was somewhere he wanted to go. Most of the other places, he would just steer to an empty spot on the sea, throw in the anchor, and he would wait as Arthur jumped in and disappeared to look for the fish. When the destination is named by the star called 'London', it meant Arthur would stand up on the boat, give him that slightly shy, slightly challenging smile that he had grown so fond of in recent years, and he would extend a hand for him to take.
Alfred would take that hand, and they would jump into the water together.
The place marked by the star called London was a strange place, unlike any other spot on the sea. According to Arthur it had something they called 'magnetic field anomaly', which neither of them understood very well. Whatever it was, it made London wondrous. Here was the one place where Alfred could step out of the both as long as he held Arthur's hand, where he would wish and wish and Arthur would sing his song in the voice of the whale flocks, and they would sink to their ankles and no more. It was like a shallow sea with a glass bottom, and because Arthur always chose to take them there on nights where the shining plankton would pass through it in their migrations, the shallow sea became something unearthly and beautiful. They would wade their way across the calm waves, the water under their feet lit by the blue and green and red light of a thousand different microscopic plants, and it would be so bright that they could see the swarms of little fish and manta rays gathering from below. Sometimes they even saw herds of rainbow-finned sharks, their eyes watching these curious creatures who treaded the surface of the water as if they were the larvae of giant mosquitoes. And even more wondrous were the coral reefs. Unlike the reefs near their cottage, where the rocks grew in the shapes of twisted bushes and fans which turned red and gold and green, the coral here were as tall as kelp forests, and they were all white. They were mostly rectangular with porous holes where the fish and the rays soared to and fro, but some were rounded, some were dome-like, and some had triangular tips that had fallen in.
"Do you know where we are, Alfred?" Arthur would ask, and his voice would be exceedingly kind.
And he would snort and make a pouty face and look at Arthur and say, "Of course I know, we're in London."
He never knew why Arthur always chuckled when he said that. Not the sort of chuckle he heard when they talked about a particularly amazing fish they'd caught, not the sort of chuckle he heard when he pestered him to talk about the distant islands in the sky. It was soft and warm and full of longing and it was meant for someone who wasn't Alfred, which made him sad in ways he could not describe.
That was the one thing he didn't like about their trips, but it would end quickly enough for him not to care. Arthur would grab his hand and they would run across the surface of the ocean, free as a flight of dolphins, and eventually they would laugh together. He liked Arthur when they did this, it felt like he had given up once again something that weighed heavily on him, something that always haunted the inner skin beneath his face when he read the books back home. It was nice, and he often wished Arthur could be like this always.
And the best thing about London was, when they reached home only mere moments before daybreak, Alfred would go to sleep. And then he would dream. Not the dreams he sometimes had, where he was someone else shouting into a crowd of people who could not hear, people with no faces. Not the dreams where he was himself, trapped in a drowning place where voices screamed at him with words of no meaning. No, whenever he went to London, he would dream of wonderful things. He would dream of walking in the coral reefs he saw, all white and shining in the glow of the rays and the swordfish, and he could breathe water as if it was air. He would walk in the corals and between them, and there would be that rare and precious green grass under his feet and trees whose blossoms filled the air with sweetness. He would see other people, people who were smiling much like Arthur could. He would walk in these places and listen as they sang lullabies to shining schools of fish and he would know, for some reason, that they were his. There were corals which, though they seemed to have sunken in the nights when he was awake, were put back together in their right places in the days when he slept. Giant reefs that arranged themselves in the shape of a pentagon, beautifully sculpted white reefs shaped like a dome where the king of the sea lived. He would walk into this, the white domed building decorated with a piece of cloth full of stars, and the king of the sea would rise and smile and say, Alfred, I've been waiting for you.
On days like this he would wake up late, simply because the dream was so wonderful. He would not know it was night until Arthur knocked on his door, lantern in hand, and asked if he slept well that day.
"Of course I did, Arthur."
"Did you dream of anything?"
Alfred would open his mouth and choked on his tongue upon saying, Yes, I dreamed of London, I dreamed of the white house where the sea-king lived and it was beautiful. Instead he would say nothing. Nothing, because Arthur would look at him so sadly, so expectantly, that he could not break his heart by saying he just dreamed of a coral reef in the sea.
So he would end up saying, always, " No, I didn't dream of anything, Arthur. Thank you for waking me."
The truth was he didn't want to be awake.
The other truth was, when he said this Arthur would come over and wrap his arms around him and changed the bandages on the wounds over his chest, and he would bury his face in his hair and say, "Remember, Alfred, that I will always love you."
And he would smile and wrap his own arms around Arthur's back, and feel that he wanted nothing more than to be awake, to be living, in their little cottage on the sea.
.
.
.
.
Note : If I've failed to make it obvious, the premise is this : the world is flooded over, Waterworld styled. (Yes, it's a terrible movie, I know.) Ocean life has evolved in strange and exciting ways. The nations have managed to survive, however, thanks to pockets of their people living here and there on the planet itself and much of their citizens re-establishing themselves on space stations ('islands in the sky') and the moon. Though most of them decided to go to space, a few remained on Earth, and a few still came down to visit every once in a while. Arthur remained on Earth to take care of Alfred, who received a mortal wound of an unspecified nature before the world's end, and they live in a cottage not far from Washington DC, in order to take care of Alfred's wounds. He calls it London because he wants Alfred to remember himself and argue back that his DC is totally not London, dammit, but Alfred never really does. THE END.