welcoming back from the ocean

[wldnst]

.welcoming back from the ocean
the team disbands, and eames goes undercover as a lobsterman. one day, he shoots a seal. written for this prompt.
notes: title from dar williams' 'the ocean.'
g . 4878 words


It’s been a good season, for lobster. This is what Eames is thinking when he pulls in his pots; it’s morning on the ocean, and mist is rising slowly off the water, but Eames is thinking about the lobster season, which is drawing to a close, and how good it’s been, and the things he has to do now that it’s over. Traps need to be mended, and the buoys could do with another coat of paint.

The mist is at once tenuous and thicker than it should be, but mist, when it’s present, almost always seems thicker than it should be. The trees on the shore are in silhouette, and Eames can make out Blackhead in the distance, but only because he knows what he’s looking for.

It’s more beautiful, today, than when Hopper painted it. But Eames always liked Hopper’s city scenes best; people sitting alone at bars, in apartments. He has a Hopper forgery in his house, a painting of a girl sitting naked in a blue chair by the window. Eleven A.M., is what the original is called.

Hopper’s Maine doesn’t look right, to Eames, because the Maine Eames knows never sits still. Even now the mist is moving, rising slowly, unveiling.

The good thing about the mist is that it means the wind is low, and there’s minimal chop on the water, and so for a moment Eames just sits still in his boat, closes his eyes and feels the slow dawning sunlight on his lids. The seagulls are crowing behind him, hoping for cast offs of sea urchins and bait, and he can hear the water, only barely, underneath their raucous caws.

This is his life, now. He’s a lobsterman with a Hopper forgery puckering against the salt air in his bedroom. He pulls in another pot.

When Eames looks up after pulling in the next pot, there is a seal bobbing in the water, off the stern. Eames can see its round dark head, and it’s close enough for him to see its eyes. It might be watching him.

Eames should really shoot it. Zeke, who Eames apprenticed with, would have shot it--it’s illegal, but laws don’t really work the way they should, out here. Zeke said seals ate lobsters, and though there’s no scientific proof, but science doesn’t really work the way it should here, either. Eames has a rifle on board, but he leaves it where it is.

He pulls up three more traps, all empty. The seal’s still there. It might be closer.

“Fuck off, seal,” Eames says to the seal, not particularly loudly, but it disappears underwater anyway--Eames can see the smooth line of its back, and then it’s gone.

Five traps later, the seal comes back. God; Zeke would call Eames law-abiding and sentimental. Zeke would cuss him into next Sunday.

Eames figures it wouldn’t be so bad if he just shoots off to the side, to scare it. It’s just a harbour seal. There are like a million harbour seals, Marine Mammal Protection Act or no. Eames gets the rifle. He has a muzzleloader, because he likes it, and he doesn’t get in many turf scuffles, anyway.

Eames loads the rifle, and the seal’s still watching him, its eyes big and blank and bovine. So it obviously didn’t understand him when he told it to fuck off, if it doesn’t understand the gun now.

Eames aims slightly to the left of the seal, and shoots.

Several things happen at once: the seal moves slightly to the left, as if it wants to get shot. There is a splash, and the water roils, and somewhere in there there is the sound of a bullet hitting flesh, a sound that is so distant from Eames’ life now but still familiar. That sound is somewhere underneath the sound of water and the krakaws of the seagulls and everything else, but Eames’ ears cut through the layers and hear it, like getting pulled out of a dream by a kick.

Then blood unfurls across the water. Then the seagulls swoop down to investigate.

Then there is a man in the water. Then there is a seal. Then there is a man.

Eames strips down to his pants as quickly as he can, and dives in. It’s frigid, but it’s also June, and he knows where the riptides are and they aren’t here, not badly. He’s always been a strong swimmer, and he reaches the man with only a few strokes. The man is floating limp, and Eames wraps his left arm under the other man’s arms in a tow.

“My skin,” the man croaks, and his voice is thick like honey, like it hasn’t been used in a long time. “Get my skin.”

It’s then that Eames sees it: floating in the water, gleaming like oil. There’s a seagull trying to tug at it, but Eames pulls it back, and it is slick in his fingers and somewhere between wet and dry.

Eames loads the man up over the stern like a lobsterpot, and then clambers up himself, dragging the skin, which is heavy with water.

Then man is completely nude. The man is also Arthur, only with longer hair, damp and stringy around his face like kelp.

Eames quickly pulls on the clothes he’d left on deck, and goes to the cabin to find something for Arthur. He turns up a terrible polyester blanket that stinks of fish and an old Carhartt jacket. He figures that’ll do, and brings them out. He digs up his old first aid kit, too. It feels like he’s going very slow, because half of his brain is still trying to figure out what’s going on, but the half of his brain that understands what’s happening implicitly is going very fast, very fast, and soon enough Eames is kneeling beside Arthur on the deck.

There was a time when Eames would want to see Arthur like this, milky pale limbs exposed to the sun and the sea and the salt, but this is not that time. He averts his eyes when he wraps Arthur in the blanket, and when he looks at Arthur’s chest it’s only to check for blood, to look for the bullet hole he knows must be there.

The bullet hole isn’t there. When he finds it, later, it’s in the skin, perfectly round and in a place he estimates must correspond to a seal’s shoulder, if seals have such things. He would ask Arthur, but Arthur is lying prone on the deck--if Eames hadn’t checked for pulse, he would doubt he was still alive.

Eames carries Arthur and the blanket and the jacket and the skin into the cabin, and sets Arthur in a chair there; he lays the jacket over him, and folds the skin and puts it away where the blanket was, and drives them back to port.

Arthur moves and makes noises in his sleep like he’s dreaming, but Eames knows he doesn’t dream anymore. Eames keeps driving, because for all the first aid tricks he picked up when he was in the dreamshare business (a criminal; he reminds himself; he was a criminal, and not the kind who shoots seals) nothing has quite prepared him for this, and it seems like it’ll be easier to deal with at home.

Eames anchors his boat outside the house, the way he does in the summertime when the storms aren’t bad, and transfers Arthur to the skiff to row to shore, then carries him up the hill.

Eames’ place is protected enough to be habitable year round, so the path from the shore is long and a bit rocky, and Arthur is heavier than Eames expects--those are muscles, Eames reckons, and maybe blubber, if people who are also seals have blubber, compounded by the added weight of the still-damp skin on top, and the stupid polyester blanket that really should’ve stayed on the boat.

Eames makes it, somehow. He lays Arthur out on the couch and goes to the bedroom to find a good quilt, one of the ones Zeke’s wife gave him after he finished his apprenticeship. He swaps the polyester blanket for that, and leaves the seal skin there on the floor, where it’s leaking water all over the hardwood. Eames should care, because the wood will warp, but if Arthur wakes up without the skin Eames isn’t sure what will happen. So he leaves it there.

He makes up a pot of coffee and watches Arthur on the couch, where he seems to be asleep. He watches Arthur and drinks coffee until he confirms there’s nothing he can do to help, and then he leaves.

He leaves the remnants of the coffee on the coffee table in front of the couch with a pile of clothes and a note when he goes, because it’s the last day of the season and he has forty-three more traps to bring in.

When Eames gets back, it’s late afternoon and the wind has picked up; the boats are bobbing merrily and the mist is gone completely. Arthur’s gone, and so is the coffee, and fat spots of water have been dripped on the note on the coffee table, so the ink on Eames’ note has bled.

Eames goes into his bedroom and opens the drawer of his bedside table, and the drawer is empty save for drops of water. Eames tastes them, and they’re salt.

He sits down on the bed and looks at the Hopper forgery, which he made when he was still a forger of the more traditional sort, before he got into dreamsharing. It had taken some work to track it down, but after what happened he wanted it badly, for some reason, so here it is.

What happened was this: Cobb left. Then a few others. New extractors rose up, of course, scrawny sapling extractors that could never be completely trusted. Eames and Arthur stuck together, because between the two of them they could keep an extractor on a leash and make sure everything turned out right. Ariadne and Yusuf joined them more often than not, though Yusuf began to slip over into respectability, and somewhere along the line Ariadne completed her architecture degree and occasionally designed real buildings, the sort that stood still.

The week before Yusuf and Ariadne’s wedding, a job went bad. They made it, they all made it, because they were sharp and quick and they weren’t afraid to push their extractor under the bus. They made it because they were the best.

But they made it just barely, and it became apparent that the feds were nipping at their heels.

So they split up. It had been Eames’ idea, actually; maybe because he was a forger, the idea of sloughing off his identity like dead skin seemed easy, or easier than the alternative. He and Arthur had danced at the wedding, and they had each kissed Ariadne on the cheek, and shaken Yusuf’s hand, and then they took separate planes out of Mombasa and didn’t tell a soul where they were headed.

That wasn’t quite the whole story, though. Half of the second part of the story was missing from Eames’ bedside table, and that was a poker chip with a nick cut in the side. The other half of the second part of the story was in Eames’ pocket, and that was a red die, weighted.

Arthur had given the die to him, when they were putting on their ties before the wedding. He had pressed it into Eames hand and folded his fingers over it, squeezing so hard Eames could feel the angles cutting into his palm.

“Take it,” Arthur had said. “I have something else.”

That was eleven years, two months, and five days ago.

Eames didn’t know what that meant then, though he had a suspicion, now. But Eames had kept the die, had rolled it idly across the kitchen table some nights when he was alone. He had kept his own totem in his pocket, but Arthur’s--Arthur’s he had kept, too. And then he had switched them. He wasn’t sure when, but one day when he was out on the boat he found the die in his pocket, and the poker chip was in his bedside table when he got home, and after that he had never switched back.

And now Arthur had appeared, and he had taken the poker chip.

Arthur and Eames understood each other, to a degree, or they had. They were both good at what they did; they both were paid to know things about other people. They both had an abiding fondness for guns, though Arthur liked his sleek and smooth and Eames like his large, heavy, and capable of doing lasting damage. These weren’t things they discussed, but they were truths that formed the bedrock of their relationship. Maybe the fact that they never discussed them was what made it so easy to splinter apart when the time came.

Out the window, Eames can see spindly pine trees swaying, and he wonders how many times he’s looked at these trees and this forgery and thought of Arthur, and wondered how similar they really were.

Eames is not sure if the seal thing makes them more similar or less.

There’s a knock at the door, and Eames is grateful for the distraction.

It’s Arthur. He’s wearing the clothes Eames laid out for him, the flannel shirt pooling around his hips and the jeans pulled in tight with a belt. His skin is folded over his arm, dripping. He holds up a bundle of fish.

“I got dinner,” says Arthur, and this is the second thing Arthur has said to him in eleven years, two months, and five days. Eames isn’t sure which is weirder: the skin, or the fish.

“You took my poker chip,” Eames says.

“Only because I couldn’t find my die,” Arthur replies, and comes inside. He takes the poker chip out of his pocket and runs it over his fingers.

Eames takes the fish--Atlantic salmon, so apparently the salmon fishermen are right to complain about seals stealing those, especially as they aren’t common this far offshore--and goes to the kitchen to get a pan, a knife and a cutting board, then looks at the bundle of fish uncertainly.

“Do you eat cooked fish?”

“I always did before, didn’t I?” Arthur says, and Eames thinks he might be about to smile.

“So you were always like this?” Eames asks, gesturing towards the skin.

“I could always turn into a seal, you mean?” Arthur asks. “It’s okay to say.”

“So you were always a seal person?”

“Selkie, Eames,” Arthur says gently, looking amused. “Yes, I’ve always been a selkie.”

“So you went undercover as a seal?” Eames asks.

“And you went undercover as a lobsterman.”

“And I went undercover as a lobsterman,” Eames repeats, and begins to fillet the fish. Arthur sets his skin down, now, on the floor where it immediately begins to leak water. And then he sits down at the table, back straight and hands in front of him, and he looks exactly like he always did except he’s wearing Eames’ clothes and apparently he can turn into a seal.

“I shot you,” Eames says as he transfers he salmon to the pan.

“Yes,” Arthur says. “You did.”

“You let me,” Eames continues.

“Yes,” Arthur says. “I did.”

“Why?”

“I needed to check on some things,” Arthur says, and Eames looks at him and then back to the salmon in the pan.

“How did you know I would shoot?” Eames asks.

“Lobstermen usually do. It took longer than I expected, actually. And most don’t carry muzzleloaders. You never would’ve hit me if I hadn’t wanted you to.”

Eames shrugs. “I don’t have too many pots. I don’t usually need the gun. And I don’t usually shoot seals.”

Arthur nods. Eames flips the salmon over, and thinks about how many rules Arthur is the exception to. Quite a few, actually.

“I’m from Maine, you know,” Arthur says. “My family’s Irish immigrants.”

“So did they swim across the sea?” Eames asks.

“Yes, actually,” Arthur says. “Boat passage was too expensive.”

Eames isn’t sure if that’s a joke or not, and it doesn’t seem worth pursuing.

Eames gets out some carrots, chops and boils them, and when the fish is done he splits the carrots and the fish between two plates and brings them to the table, along with salt and pepper and butter.

“Thanks for the fish,” Eames says. “Otherwise I would’ve had to have leftover chowder.”

“Thanks for cooking it,” Arthur replies. “I’m a little out of practice.”

They eat in silence. Arthur pushes the carrots to the side with his fork, but eats all the salmon.

“What were you checking, Arthur?” Eames asks, finally.

Arthur shrugs.

“How long have you been a seal, Arthur?” Eames asks.

“I told you, forever,” Arthur says, but he refuses to make eye contact.

“No,” Eames says. “How long have you been a seal, this time.”

“Eleven years,” says Arthur, and Eames stares at him.

“And you can still talk?”

“That’s what I was checking,” Arthur says.

“Why’d you have me shoot you?” Eames asks, and Arthur looks at him.

“Because,” Arthur says. “I needed a kick. I couldn’t change back.”

“Eleven years,” Eames says. He fishes Arthur’s die out of his pocket, and rolls it across the table a few times.

“It doesn’t feel that long, when you’re a seal,” Arthur says quietly. “Sometimes it feels longer. But mostly--I don’t really know. I’d hang around people sometimes, though, to make sure I could still understand them. Swim along docks, near boats.”

Eames nods.

“Can I stay here for awhile?” Arthur asks.

“Sure,” says Eames.

Eames gives Arthur his twin bed, although Arthur protests. But Eames has been sleeping on the couch alternate nights pretty much forever, because he likes the variety, so it’s not such a big deal.

Arthur helps him mend traps, paint buoys. It goes faster, of course, and in their free time they walk around the island. Sometimes Arthur puts on his seal skin, goes for a swim or catches them fish, and when Arthur strips down on the rocks and wraps the oily thing around him Eames averts his eyes. It just seems politer.

They don’t talk much. Maine has made Eames taciturn; he’s learned to save his words over long winters. Being a seal has probably taught Arthur the same thing. Eames cuts Arthur’s hair one night, and it’s a little sloppy but it’s tidier than it was, closer to what it was before. Eames isn’t sure which is stranger; Arthur with long hair, or Arthur with short hair in jeans and flannel.

Sometimes at night they’ll play cards, or read something from Eames’ meager library.

“You have more money than this,” Arthur says one night. He states it like a fact, because it is.

“So do you,” Eames replies, and Arthur nods. They understand each other, Eames thinks.

“How’d you find me?” Eames asks.

Arthur shrugs.

“I just saw you one day, and followed you a bit, and then I kept it in mind. That if I needed you, you were out by Monhegan.”

Eames nods, and then they go to bed. They’ve taken to swapping the bed and the couch, and it’s Eames’ night in the bed.

Eames asked the island librarian for a book on selkies when Arthur first arrived, and in July it finally comes in from one of the libraries on the mainland. Eames walks out to Blackhead to read it, and when he’s done he lays down in the gold-grass fields overlooking the ocean and thinks about the day he shot the seal who was Arthur. Clouds wisp across the sky, and he falls asleep. Then some hikers come by, talking loudly and looking for seals with their binoculars, and he wakes up and goes home.

When he gets there, Arthur’s sitting on a rock outside whittling something with a penknife.

“I didn’t know you could whittle,” Eames says, and Arthur shrugs.

“I learned when I was a kid,” he says.

“I read a book about selkies today,” Eames says. “They say you seduce fishermen.”

Arthur looks opaque.

“That’s mostly by mistake,” he says.

“Mmm-hmm,” Eames says.

“Do you think I’m trying to seduce you?” Arthur asks.

“If you did,” Eames says, “I promise not to steal your sealskin.”

“That’s nice of you,” Arthur says. “But I'm not as flighty as all that.”

That night Eames sleeps outside on the pine needles because the sky is clear, and he watches the lighthouse light wheel across the sky and wonders what Arthur meant.

It gets hot in August, but just barely. Eames sometimes goes swimming with Arthur; but even Arthur as a human is a better swimmer than he is, quick, smooth and graceful, under the water more often than he’s above. He plays a game where he touches Eames’ ankle, quickly and lightly, and then he swims away and comes up ten or twenty feet out before Eames hardly knows whether it was seaweed or fingers. Eames isn’t sure what the point of the game is, but it makes Arthur grin.

And when Arthur’s a seal, it’s hardly worth swimming with him. He stays under forever, and likes to slap Eames on the ass with his flippers. Which hurts. Sometimes he’ll swim out and come back with a whole gang of other seals, proper seals not selkies, and they’ll all swim around Eames and nudge him with their noses because Arthur tells them it’s okay. Eames learns to recognize Arthur by the spots on his face, by the smooth line of his dark back.

At night, Arthur keeps whittling. He won’t let Eames see, but sometimes he produces finished products; first a whistle, then a little wood oystercatcher with a delicate beak and finely etched feathers. Eames puts the oystercatcher on the mantle above the woodstove, and keeps the whistle in his pocket with Arthur’s totem.

Eames orders supplies on the post boat, and sets up a little easel in the living room so he can paint while Arthur whittles. It’s nice, to have company, even quiet company, just like it was nice to have help with the traps and the buoys. Without Arthur Eames knows he wouldn’t have the time to paint, much less the inclination.

He paints Hopper forgeries, mostly. He’s not sure why. He gives them away to his friends on the island, or sells them to tourists even though it’s probably slightly illegal.

Some nights Eames thinks about asking Arthur how long he’s staying, but Arthur’s presence seems delicate, like it might break if Eames looks at it directly. Arthur never seemed like this before, but before he hadn’t lived as a seal for eleven years, and Eames wasn’t a lobsterman, and before they were always moving in and out of one another’s lives, anyway.

Eames thinks if Arthur leaves now, he won’t come back. So Eames doesn’t talk about it, and he averts his eyes, still, when Arthur shifts from man to seal or back again.

Eames has a dream one night, his first one in a long time. He dreams he is a seal. He doesn’t tell Arthur.

“Do you think anyone’s still looking for us?” Eames asks Arthur in September. “For the dreamsharing?”

“Maybe,” Arthur says. Eames has a PASIV under his bed. Both he and Arthur pretend it isn’t there.

“It’s been eleven years,” Eames says, and he can hear the wonder in his voice.

“Yusuf and Ariadne are okay,” Arthur says, and Eames looks at him sharply.

“I just know some things,” Arthur says. “Cobb’s okay, too.”

“Oh,” Eames says, and wonders how the seal is more up-to-date than he is. Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised, when the seal is Arthur.

“They named their son Eames Arthur,” Arthur says. “Yusuf and Ariadne, I mean.”

Eames nods.

“You aren’t like you were before,” Arthur says. “You talk less.”

“You aren’t like you were before, either.”

“Yeah, I guess,” says Arthur.

“It’s almost lobster season.”

“I’ll stay,” Arthur says.

“You aren’t as flighty as all that,” Eames says.

“Yes,” says Arthur, and the ‘s’ slides off his tongue like water.

Trap Day is the first of October. Arthur is a natural; he takes the traps from the pile and pitches them onto the boat like he’s been doing it his whole life. He goes out with Eames to set the lines, too, and brings his sealskin and tells Eames where the ocean floor is good, where to put them. If the other lobstermen think the new man helping Eames is strange, they don’t say anything, because Eames has always been strange and lobstermen are quiet, anyway.

They are out by Blackhead when Arthur flops his seal body up over the stern, looks at Eames with his big wet eyes, and starts to shift.

Eames doesn’t look away this time, and instead he watches Arthur’s eyes the whole time; as they shrink, as the whites appear around the brown, as they change from round to crescent-shaped and human. It should be strange, but it isn’t.

Arthur smiles at him, standing naked on the deck of the boat wearing only his dimples. Eames smiles back, and goes into the cabin to steer while Arthur gets dressed.

They never slept together, when they were working. Sometimes Eames could feel Arthur watching him while he forged, while he flirted with clients or cried with them or fought with them or was casually intimate with them (that last was when Arthur watched him most of all). Sometimes Eames wondered. But they were professionals, and they needed to splinter apart sometimes, they needed to slough off relationships and identities like dead skin.

They were both very good at their jobs. The best, probably. And Yusuf and Ariadne were the best, probably, too, but Yusuf and Ariadne also straddled the line between dreams and reality more easily, and when they wound up engaged it surprised precisely no one, and everyone knew it would work. Yusuf and Ariadne--they could get away with that. In some ways, they were better at shifting identities than either Eames or Arthur. And Eames was a forger, and Arthur was--this. A selkie.

Eames and Arthur set another line of traps, and then they go home. Eames has some beer in the fridge, to celebrate, and Arthur opens the bottles with his teeth, which is more endearing than it should be, really.

They fall asleep on the couch that night, the both of them, simply by virtue of sitting on the couch until they fall asleep. When Eames wakes up he smells salt and seaweed, and his nose is buried in Arthur’s hair and Arthur is curled into his side.

They get dressed and go out to check the traps.

But after that they start sharing the bed, which is too small for both of them, and Eames places an order and has a bigger one brought in on the post boat. Eames thinks, when the post woman brings it, that she smiles. Eames knows he does.

It gets cold, and Arthur still swims, but only as seal. Eames likes to sit on the rocks by the shore and watch him, at night after they finish with their traps. Eames can always pick Arthur out from the other seals.

It’s November when Eames decides to throw the PASIV into the ocean.

“Arthur,” Eames says when they’re lying in bed. “I’m going to throw the PASIV into the ocean.”

“Eames,” Arthur says. “The ocean floor is littered with shit.”

“So one more thing won’t matter,” Eames says.

“I guess not,” Arthur says, and nuzzles into Eames’ stomach.

“Here’s the thing,” Eames continues. “I kept it because I was waiting for something.”

“A train?” Arthur says quietly, and Eames can feel that they’re both slipping into whispers, slipping into sleep.

“No,” Eames says. “Not that.”

“Oh,” says Arthur, and then they go to sleep.

The next day they bring the PASIV with them on the boat, and when they’re done with the traps Eames drives out as far as he can while still seeing the island.

“What were you waiting for?” asks Arthur, when Eames brings the silver suitcase out of the cabin. Arthur had followed Eames out as a seal, and he’s sitting on the stern naked, dangling his feet in the water, and it seems like he should be cold.

“I didn’t want to give it up,” Eames says. “I didn’t want to give up dreamsharing.”

“But you did,” Arthur says, and he’s looking at Eames very seriously.

“But I held onto just a little bit,” Eames continues, tapping the PASIV.

“Why?” says Arthur, and he sounds a little breathless, though it might be the cold.

“I didn’t want to give up you,” says Eames, and it’s simple as that. “But now you’re here.”

“I’m staying,” says Arthur.

“I know,” says Eames, and dumps the PASIV overboard.

Arthur smiles at him, and he’s wearing nothing but his dimples, and they’re out at sea and for once in his life Eames is in precisely the right place, and he knows exactly what to do.