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It’s breathing heavy, on its side on the beach, when Nova finds it.
She doesn’t know why she’s out here. She doesn’t like the beach, can’t stand the sound of the ocean during the day, much less at night. The salt in the air dries out her mouth, cracks her lips. If she closes her eyes, she can feel the way the land beneath her feet wavers from its gentle balance in the waves. She can hear their tails, churning, waiting. All her life, they’ve been waiting for her to misstep. To fall in.
She thinks it’s some kind of joke from the universe, some kind of nasty fucking spit in the face of everything she’s ever felt, ever hated. The beach is perfect, clean, lit well under the moonlight. It’s impossibly ideal, for a busy beach in LA. It’s almost peaceful, but it’s all shattered, all ruined, all by the-
Shark on the beach.
It is beached, in every sense of the word. It looks like it’s gasping for air, or water, or whatever it needs, to the extent that it seems almost human to her, in a way the rest of them never, ever were. Nova knows there’s no soul in those creatures. Nova knows there’s nothing behind their beady fucking eyes. Knows there’s only blood in their yellow, pointed teeth.
This one is wrong, in that way. Nova thinks there could be something caged in those ribs. That’s wrong, she knows. That can’t be right. It’s manipulating her.
But it’s looking at her, pitifully. Like it’s begging her for salvation.
Nova won’t hear it. Nobody listened to her cry, until she couldn’t even whisper out of her broken lips. Nobody heard Jenny Lynn's plea.
She’s got the pocketknife that she keeps on her keys. She pops it off the keychain, and it glints in the ocean. Her hand is shaking enough that it takes a few tries to open. She’s the one at the advantage, this time. Everything is red. She’s smiling.
The shark looks genuinely afraid, when she stalks up. When she raises the knife, in both of her hands. When she positions herself over it. She’s shaking, and it’s the anticipation. It’s the thought that, maybe, this is a gift. A lucky break.
Its blood is hot, and thick , and Nova can feel the ridges of its skin against the sides of her fingers. She tears, and tears, and tears are in her eyes and she is so very afraid, and the shark’s mouth opens and closes, like it's trying to cry out, and it can’t quite manage to do it.
And it’s drowning, in the cradle of the earth, inches from its life and liberty, and Nova is between it and its salvation, and she will be the last pain it ever feels. This shark, all sharks, it doesn’t matter. Nova thinks, as long as she keeps sawing under its chin, she will eventually bleed it like a stuck pig with a knife to its throat.
She can taste it, now, or maybe she can smell it, or maybe its blood has made it to her mouth. It’s up her legs, clouding her senses. It drips over her scar, that aches in a way it hasn’t in years. The products of her fury run down her thighs, into the sand. Nova feels clean, in a way she hasn’t in a decade. She feels new.
And she looks the thing in the eyes, wants to see it as it dies, and she knows that blue. She’s never seen that look in his eyes, but they’re his eyes, and she knows it, and she rockets back, feeling colder than she’s ever felt, even on that raft at the end of her life. Even now, where she can still feel the little girl in the cold forever.
That’s- not right. Not true. It can’t be right, or true, because it doesn’t make sense. Sharks don’t have Fin’s eyes. Fin can’t be a shark.
And yet, the longer Nova looks at the bleeding, gasping shark, writhing and choking on air, the more she is sure, in her gut, that that shark is Fin.
Nova’s killed him.
She springs back into motion in that moment, a sob on her lips. She pulls off her button down, dripping already with blood, and presses it to this thing’s throat. She can’t breathe. She can’t think. All she knows is the stench of his blood, and the way she can feel his heart pumping in it. She reaches out, and her nails are digging into his skin, and his massive jaws open in a soundless wail, and she’s holding the wound closed with her fingers, and it’s not working-
“Please,” Nova sobs. “Please, not him too. Not him too.”
The shark’s- Fin’s- teeth close gently around her wrist, not enough to hurt. It’s remarkable self control from the killing machine that these creatures usually are. She stares at it, and she thinks maybe it’s crying, too. She doesn’t know how to save him. She’s killed Fin, too.
She doesn’t know how long she’s on that beach, holding the wound closed. The bleeding won’t stop. She’s got her arms around Fin’s head, now, holding his fin. His skin is silky under her hands, soft in the ways she didn’t know a shark could be. She’s gentle, petting him like a dying animal, the same way she’d killed him.
Fin’s eyes pierce her with more surety than his teeth ever would.
She squeezes him, then, and pushes.
She can’t get traction against the sand, and the waves push him back. It feels like it takes her years to move him an inch, but once she gets him far enough, the waves tug them both back into the sea.
She goes with him, holding onto Fin as they’re both pulled deeper, pulled under. As he begins to thrash, and she can feel the shark pressed against her, and she goes, under the water, and it’s red against her eyelids, and she’s not quite sure anymore where Nova ends and Jenny Lynn begins.
Nova doesn’t know how she wakes up in her bed the next morning. She’s nearly convinced it was all an odd, uncomfortable dream, except her hair is tangled together in sections caked with salt, and her shoes are very carefully set by the door. It’s worse than any hangover she’s ever had. She can’t stop seeing Fin’s eyes in that creature.
Her alarm goes off. She’ll go to work today, and she’ll see that Fin is alright, unharmed, as ungodly chipper as he always is come morning.
Her shower that morning is long. She can’t see the stain anymore. The red of her arms is her skin, scrubbed raw. The blood is gone, but she can still feel it. She’s frayed, fractured. Wrong, in a different way than she always is, wrong in the wrong way entirely.
When Nova arrives at work, shawl pulled over her bikini, she knows she won’t get away with it. As soon as she makes it to the bar, she expects to have been interrogated over the bags under her eyes. But Fin isn’t there, and neither is Baz. He’s always there before her- Frankly, she thinks he sleeps under the bar. She doesn't have any evidence to prove it, but she has no evidence in any other direction either.
The door was unlocked, though, and the door to the back is ajar. The light filters through in the cool, cloudy morning. Nova’s hand slips into her shorts pocket, grasping her pocket knife. She’s not equipped to deal with a robbery this morning. She can hear low voices from ahead.
“...going to tell me the truth?” It’s Baz. She’s never met anyone else in Los Angeles with an Australian accent, despite his claims that he’s in a support group for transplants. She knows the way his voice dips, the way he holds his vowels. She’d know it in her sleep.
“I told you, I-” Fin. Frustrated. Nova creeps closer to the door, as quietly as her strappy sandals will allow.
“Stop,” Baz snaps. Nova can see him, now, but not Fin. There’s a worried furrow in Baz’s brow, a softness to his eyes that contrasts his sharp tone. He’s gentle. He’s… afraid. “I wasn’t born yesterday, mate. If you won’t fess up, fine. Just…”
“I’m alright,” Fin says, and it’s slow, emphatic and empathetic and easy, like it’s natural for him to sound this way, tired and gentle in a way Nova has never known him quite to be. “I would tell you if I wasn’t, you know.”
“I hope so,” Baz sighs. “You know I-”
“Yeah,” Fin says, and it sounds like the end of the conversation. Nova manages to get closer still, manages to angle so she can see into the door. Baz’s hand reaches out, covers Fin’s face. Nearly comes to rest on his cheek, doesn’t quite. Aborts the action. Looks crestfallen about it.
Pulls it back. Nova’s stomach leaps to her throat, threatens to dispel just the acid she has in her esophagus. It’s all she has to give, but she has to give something. She has to give up whatever she can, for forgiveness or for mercy or for whatever she could ask for, this many sins deep.
Fin’s throat is wrapped tightly, taped haphazardly closed by a mountain of gauze so thick it looks like a turtleneck. Still, in his stress, there is pink encroaching on the center. Nova looks down, tries not to give away her position with a wrench, catches her open pocket knife in her peripheral.
The blade is wiped clean, but in the creases, the little gaps between the knife and mechanism, she can see a thick brown layer, like a highlighter. It may as well be glowing with how obvious it seems to her gaze.
When she looks back at Fin, she doesn’t feel the joy, the light to her life that he’s always brought. It’s faint, and it pales in comparison, and Nova disgusts herself, but at her core, Jenny Lynn reverts to the only two feelings she has left: Fear, and hatred.