Diver

[warcode]

The first thing he remembered was water.

Later, he would dream about the lake and the drowning (he must have been drowning, looking up at the wavering light so far above his head, feeling himself pulled down and down and down into the clinging darkness). Later he would dream about things that didn't make any sense, flashes of disconnected images that must have been from his life before. But his first real tangible memory was water. The sound of wavelets lapping at the stones around him (so different from the crash of ocean waves, he knew instinctively), and the ebb and flow of cool water across his bare skin. The movement of shore grass against his torso. The sticking grains of sand and grit encrusted to his cheek. Being cold. Being wet. Being alive.

Washing up on shore, he was later informed by television, was a romantic sort of thing. It happened to shipwreck survivors and action heroes, people lost in storms and those that jumped off the tops of cliffs into waterfalls, and it almost always symbolized a miraculous rescue. It was the custom, he learned, to become deliriously happy when one realized one was still alive, and to jump up and leap about and cheer, and to kiss the ground out of sheer relief.

He did none of these things upon his waking. He lay on the shore, half in and half out of the water, hurting in every way there was to hurt. He felt hollowed out, sucked empty, every organ replaced by a cold damp ache that pulsed in time with his breathing. Part of him understood that he ought to try to move.

Instead he closed his eyes against the light, despite the cold and the wet and the pain threading through him like wires, and went back to sleep.

When he opened his eyes next it was because he thought he heard someone calling his name in the distance. He blinked once, twice, sand and gravel scraping against his cheek as he raised his head. A burning started in his gut and he began to push himself up without thought, digging his fingers into wet sliding gravel and then the slightly warmer muck of the bank, weeds catching at him, hauling himself forward instinctively because he needed to, he needed to move, he needed to answer. His ears rang and his eyes watered. He crawled from the water like the first fish born with limbs, ungraceful and writhing on his belly and gulping air, blind from the brightness of the sun, driven onward inch by inch by something inside of him that he didn't understand.

He made it a grand total of four feet from the water's edge before collapsing, the sunwarm shore grass cradling him, dry and ticklish against his flesh. It stank like all shores do, a rich churn of warm mud and fish and wet vegetation, and there was a shorebird's nest in his line of sight when he let his cheek fall against the ground, too exhausted to hold his head up any longer. The eggs were brown and speckled, and shockingly tiny, and he was swept with the urge to cradle them in his hands and protect them.

The voice shouting distantly to him, if it had even been a voice at all, stopped. A bird called. The long dry grasses slid against each other and rustled in the wind, and the waves continued to whisper over gravel and sand. He curled into himself next to the nest full of eggs, knees drawn up and shoulders hunched, arms crossed over his chest, his mind full of strange hazy thoughts of arched wings and hot sunlight, of being small and sheltered

(of sheltering something smaller than himself, two bodies tucked in at his sides breathing slow and deep, their fragile warmth safe underneath his fingertips)

and kept safe.

A day passed, perhaps. A week. Sunlight and shadows inched across his skin, and he cracked his eyes every now and then to see the bright stare of the mother shorebird sitting on her nest, head cocked as she watched him suspiciously, the eggs all but invisible underneath her downy belly. The sight made him smile.

She was gone by the time he finally forced himself to his feet,