𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

000. Whale Fall

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

Third year, New Year's.

(Somewhere in the distance, a police scanner is throwing out numbers, names, addresses, the monotonous voice riddled with static as the snowstorm ravages the city. They've found the bloated corpse of a TA—missing its heart, liver and pancreas—floating face-down in the community swimming pool for several days, with signs of lividity in the teeth and gums. The lead detective crouches over the body, hauled onto a sheet for the field autopsy. He eyes the puncture wounds, as though someone had gored through the flesh with their own fingers. Messy, but surgically precise. Someone with intimate anatomical knowledge.

"Mcleod?" he spits through the thick, caterpillar moustache that'd crawled over his upper lip. "How many counts toward serial killing?"

Mcleod, the secondary shivering in his Angharad PD windbreaker and gloves, grumbles something under his steaming breath. What's that? Oh. Three within a period of over a month.

"Whoever this guy is," the lead detective says, his cigarette smoke-mottled voice solemn, "he's not slowing down.")

          HIM:     You, um... (quietly mortified, apologetic.) You've got blood on your shirt.

In the thirty-something minutes since you sat down at this table, this is the first time your deskmate has spoken. You have your wired earphones in, connected to your laptop upon which you are watching a video vivisecting the process of a whale fall. His eyes are averted, but you know they're a fascinating blue, the blue of innocence, of something soft and young, robin's egg blue, in contrast with your own eyes that you inherited from your mother, along with her penchant for avoidance and the hypothermic, glacial blue of her stare.

You do not look down at your low-cut top, the first shirt you pulled off the floor of your bedroom, the long sleeves like a second skin around your slender arms, the squarish neckline showing just a hint of your cleavage, and there, the crimson stain striving against white cotton a glowing beacon begging for someone to notice; it smells of copper and deodorant, stiff against your chest. You keep one earbud in, the Youtube documentary still playing.

          YOU:     (flippant.) Should've seen the other guy.

          HIM:     You know it's against campus policy, right? You're not allowed to kill on university grounds.

          YOU:     So report me, then. Not like anyone's going to believe you. I've been walking around like this for days. You're the only one who's said anything. Props.

          HIM:     Yeah, I can tell. (brows furrowed, backpedals.) Why?

          YOU:     Does the blood bother you?

          HIM:     I don't mean to be rude but I can't pinpoint...

What you are, he means to say in less crude terms, but there's an apology in his voice before he can utter the word, something he's used to doing, or something he's been forced to do his entire life, a long, endless trail of sorrys like footprints in the wet sand. The fact of what you are is inherently innocuous, and the curiosity is valid, of course, but he thinks it's offensive to speak of you like this, to dissect your heritage, halfway between here and there but never quite anywhere. In the minds of many, you're either one thing or you're not, something Other or something not. Nothing exists beyond the bounds of this binary, which is to say how can you be half of each and somehow, simultaneously, both? This confusion seems to snag on the forefront of their minds, Schrödinger's blasphemous, greedy half-thing with a foot in two worlds. You've done this dance before.

          YOU:     (scoffing, scathing.) My father was born in Macau before he was reborn in North Berwick. And my mother is a white woman, maybe Norse. Does that help?

         HIM:     No, that's not... (blushing furiously, running his finger up and down the thin, metallic chain around his neck, a nervous habit.) I didn't mean it like that. Look, I'm a... a wolf. Usually I can sense what species of monstrosity some people are. Your scent is confusing, is all I mean to say. The blood doesn't really help with forming my hypothesis either.

Though his voice is small, the words come out of his mouth in all the wrong shapes, and the apology is still there, lodged in his oesophagus. He winces, clearing his throat in a fashion that indicates he has a superhuman awareness of the sounds he's making.

You take a good look at him in the half-light slanting through the only window in Angharad University's library, situated in the back corner between the gothic fiction and the biographies no one came looking for. Underneath all the mottled scars ravaging the alabaster skin of his face lies something deeply unloved, something that doesn't know how to reach for the light without flinching from it for fear of being seen.

Whatever beauty might've been there once has been immolated, mutilated beyond recognition, and the intensity of the mauling spoke to a violent, punishing intentionality. As though sensing your storm-lashed gaze tracing over his face, he readjusts his hood, the shadows swallowing up his features, a retreat into obscurity. Only his lambent eyes, reflecting the light in the dark, pierce through the silhouette.

         YOU:     You mean to ask how I was born? How I'm half-human, half-siren? I am half the product of something miraculous that happened but shouldn't have. (a pensive, peeved pause.) And I bet nobody's ever had to ask you what you are, full-wolf. That's all that you've ever been. I bet you've never had to ask yourself where you belonged, either.

Versed in the language of subservience, he bows his head and looks down at his computer, his notebook scrawled with equations and mathematical formulas that look like hieroglyphics to you. Mechanical engineering, he'll explain in time, the apology scribbled in the margins of his tone. The idea of building something with one's hands from scratch sounds compensatory. It is a career in practicality. The world needs people who can create from scratch and in exactitude the things that make society turn, who can restore functionality, who can build a refrigerator or make a car run. The world has no need for more marine biologists. You do not tell him this, because you do not know how to apologise for anything.

          HIM:     Sorry. (how blinding, the apology finally spat out and now swallowed back down as if to internalise his misgivings, how sorry, how viciously tender.)

          YOU:     Yeah. (arms crossed over your chest, leant back in your chair, you narrow your eyes at him.)

The desk between the two of you yawns wider, his hunched figure swallowed by the black hoodie growing smaller like the wrong end of a telescope. Werewolves, as you come to know, are pack creatures, social animals who thrive in numbers and teeth. Rarely would you ever find one alone on purpose, but you'd found him—this mauled creature so, so sorry for the monster he drags within like an ugly shadow shackled to his ankles—with his back to the wall, sequestered in the back of the library on this fine weekend midnight, nowhere else he'd rather be but buried in his books.

When you'd approached him, his pale eyes took on a strange, lambent sheen before fading back into their watery blue. When you pulled out the chair opposite him, the legs scratching against the floor, he recoiled as though you'd slapped him across the face. You'd rather not relive the awkward stumbling toward this conversation of your Otherness.

At the moment, though, he's trying not to stare at the stain on your cleavage, but you get the sense that his quietly shameful attempts are more directed toward the blood. In sum, he's not a lecher. You have a radar for these things, knowing men inside-out. Which is also how the blood got on your shirt.

          HIM:     Sorry.

You wish he would shut up.

He gives the strings of his hoodie a sharp tug, cinching the hood around his face. Devoured by dark fabric, only his eyes peer back at you. The tail end of a silver scar slithers over his brow bone and over his eyelid, which you just now notice droops at the outer corner in a tragic, languid way.

          YOU:     You look funny like that.

          HIM:     (a grin in his voice.) I scare off less people this way.

          YOU:     I'm the one with the bloodstain, and you're the one people are afraid of?

          HIM:     Sor— (he blinks, not sure what he's apologising for.) I'm Colt.

          YOU:     Alessia. (tilts head.) You're not going to report me?

          HIM:     Would anyone believe me? (eyes crinkling at the edges, the barest imprint of a soft smile.)

          YOU:     I doubt it. (the same smile, echoed back.)

You probably shouldn't be talking about this so openly in the university's only library. Hundreds of thousands of students—both human and not—percolate through its doors, dwindling in the odd hours of the night. Granted, past midnight, a handful of stragglers remain, caught in the trawling net of self-wound stress over finals, papers, projects. At peak exam season, the library, open twenty-four-hours during the academic year, is packed wall-to-wall with an infestation of students. You glance around. New year's. Everyone's gone home for the holidays, to celebrate with their families, to take refuge in a home where the heating can be dialled up to full blast and no one has to take responsibility or foot the egregious bill.

Winter, slow to let go of Angharad, sends flecks of white snow fluttering through the air, pelting the window pane, the cold glass an eye looking over the blanketed courtyard, empty.

You are the only two people left on campus.

You are the only two people who can't go home for a reason neither of you have the heart to hold.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

HELLO!!!!! I'm so excited to start on this book which is very character-centric. (There's a smidge of a plot, I'll admit, but aside from that, it's a character study on two lonely people - one avoidant and one anxious for the fact.) But first, here's a little sneak peek into how Alessia and Colt met before we dive into how they fell apart.