Chapter 33 Hello, Lover
Riley
After their encounter with the fish swarm, their progress slowed to a crawl.
Or at least it felt like it. They kept going, hugging the relative safety of the wall, and Riley kept clutching Calla’s hand.
Thinking of Sable. They had to get to her.
Because she really fucking missed her, and if all of this was for nothing, Riley was pretty sure she would die of a broken heart, Calla or no Calla.
Sable had been the first to show her she was worth something.
That she didn’t need to give anything in return for being loved.
That she didn’t even need to change. Sable had seen her exactly as she was and still decided she was worth protecting with her life, and that was worth more than Riley could ever express.
The witch, the visions, the pain, they were nothing against the one moment of complete acceptance she’d felt that night, laying beside Sable in her bed.
Was it the same for Calla? She wished she’d thought to ask about how Sable had captured her heart–how she’d strung the captain along so completely that she would risk her crew and her life and her ship just for the hope of finding her.
Maybe Calla would tell her once this was over. Maybe they would tell her together, about how they met, about how they’d become so hopelessly loyal to each other even with Calla’s walls of pure ice high around her.
For now, they swam, and swam, and swam, until Riley was long past exhausted.
Her gaze kept flitting to the surrounding darkness like a prey cornered, but nothing jumped out at them.
Just the blobs of jellyfish floating peacefully in the distance.
She’d heard they could stop one’s heart with just a touch.
Riley didn’t want to find out whether that was true.
It felt like they’d been swimming for days.
Her stomach roiled with anxiety as thoughts of what they might find once they finally reached the bottom assaulted her.
Bones, already picked clean. Sable alive, but choking her last ragged breath, clutching at her throat.
Or worse, absolutely nothing. A lifetime of not knowing.
Bile rose in Riley’s throat, but she pushed it down, focused on the burn of her muscles, because whatever she was feeling right now? It was of no consequence.
All that mattered was finding Sable, and Riley would not let her doubts and dread take over and slow them down–again. She wouldn’t. Every moment mattered.
Probably.
When her brain went numb with seeing the same expanse of darkness never, ever letting up, when she felt outside of her own body with tiredness and her limbs only twitched forward thanks to mere momentum, the ground came into view.
Riley felt Calla’s full-body shudder through their joined hands, and she sensed the cause in her own bones.
They had reached the bottom.
The deepest point of the ocean.
And yet she did not see Sable.
Just sand, and the rocky wall, and the ever-looming darkness. Riley was ready to weep seeing the nothingness that greeted them.
Calla barely paused, though. They stopped for just a breath, and then she was tugging them forward again, guided by something Riley couldn’t see or hear or feel. If Calla didn’t falter, Riley wouldn’t either. She followed.
And then she saw–signs of life. A rock upturned. The freshly picked skeleton of a fish. A slow-morphing change in scenery, a shadow blacker than the rest. A cavern?
Riley’s heart raced in her throat as they made for it, and she nearly didn’t let herself hope until they were crossing the threshold, and then they were not swimming anymore but falling.
The stumble onto the rock below knocked the water out of her lungs. She gasped, and it was not water but air. She nearly choked on it, before she remembered it was air that belonged in her lungs and her throat and not water, then she breathed it in greedily, standing on shaky legs.
Calla recovered faster than she did.
Riley followed her gaze to a figure sitting on a boulder against the far wall of the cave. “Sable,” she breathed out.
Sable’s head snapped in their direction and–she scoffed.
“Huh,” Sable said. “This might be your best try to date. They look so real. You must really be getting desperate.” Her tone was mocking, and she did not spare Riley or Calla a second glance.
She looked instead to the other side of the cavern, where the Heart of the Abyss lay discarded on the floor among the rest of the rocks, as if it were no better or more interesting than them.
“Bad news for you, though. I’m not going anywhere. ”
Riley and Calla exchanged a worried glance.
Sable was talking back to the Heart?
Riley stumbled a step closer, trying really hard to ignore the twisting ache in her chest. “Sable?” she tried again, more subdued.
If Sable really thought they were an apparition, an attempt of the Heart to trick her, then it would make convincing her of anything pretty fucking hard.
Riley knew what it was like to doubt her own mind.
She knew all too well. “We’re… we’re real? ”
What was meant to be a statement came out as a question, and Sable scoffed again.
“I’m a little disappointed, you know? If you really are trying, you could’ve thought it through a bit better.
What is this?” Sable flung an arm towards Riley and Calla, barely even looking at them.
“If you wanted me to believe this shit, then you should’ve known better than showing me Riley.
She couldn’t have possibly survived all the way down here, even if Calla could’ve. ”
It was Riley who scoffed this time. “Maybe you’re underestimating me.”
Sable looked at her then. Really looked. Her features twitched in a flash of something–pain or recognition or both–there and gone. Sable shook her head. A jerk of a movement, as if shaking off a bothersome fly. “You’re not real.”
“We’re real, Sable.” It was Calla talking this time. “And this, whatever it is you think you’re doing, is unnecessary. You shouldn’t have run away.”
Before the words were fully out of Calla’s lips, Riley knew it had been the wrong thing to say. Sable’s features hardened, and she looked away again. A confirmation of what Riley already knew.
Riley reached out to Calla’s hand and gave it a squeeze, silently asking for the lead here.
She remembered how, months ago, Calla had claimed to know Sable better than she did.
And she’d been right. But Riley had also been right.
They’d both been right, just in different ways, and Riley felt like her way might be more fitting at this very moment.
Because instead of Calla’s walls crumbling at the sight of Sable, like they should’ve?
They were fully up again instead. Stupidly.
Maybe by instinct. Riley recognized it by the rigid set to her shoulders, the tension in her jaw, the way Calla looked at her for a long moment, eyes cold and searching, before she nodded her assent. Even that was stiff.
Riley couldn’t focus on whatever was going on in Calla’s head right now, though. She breathed out, letting go of her hand to slowly, carefully, approach Sable.
With both Calla’s and Sable’s eyes on her, Riley closed the distance and crouched next to Sable, holding her hand out silently.
Her butchered hand. She remembered the way they both seemed to gravitate toward each other’s wounds.
Riley, always caressing Sable’s scarred cheek.
Sable, holding onto Riley’s maimed hand, stroking the scarred skin of her back as if the ugly parts of her were to be cherished and acknowledged, not hidden and ashamed of.
“Take my hand,” Riley said. “Touch me. You know I’m real.”
Sable stared at her, full of conflict. Her lips pressed together. The muscles in her jaw twitched. Her shoulders went taut. Like she was scared to find out this was not a trick of the mind.
But Sable had always faced fear head-on.
She was brave like that. So Riley wasn’t surprised when eventually she reached out, her warm, calloused palm sliding against Riley’s.
Tentative and gentle at first. Then, as their fingers locked, Sable’s eyes snapped to hers.
Her hand clutched on tight. Before she knew it, Riley was being hauled to her feet and into a crushing embrace.
Relief hit her like a blow to the gut. Riley let herself feel it.
She let herself be swept into the hug and sank into it, taking shaky, gasping mouthfuls of Sable’s scent.
Sun-warmed leather and smoke. Still the same as she remembered.
This was it. They’d made it. They were here.
They found Sable, and fuck, she’d missed her, and feeling Sable’s strong arms around her made her feel safer, more complete, than she’d ever–
“You shouldn’t be here,” Sable murmured, low and muffled as her mouth pressed against Riley’s wet locks of hair. Then, clearer, with the shift of her head lifting, “Neither of you should be here.” But she didn’t let Riley go.
Riley felt the prickle of Calla’s eyes on her back. “As far as I know, you’re not the one giving the orders here, first mate,” Calla said. Her voice was velvet smooth and teasing, but there was no mistaking the steel beneath.
Sable scoffed. Riley just about stopped herself from doing the same.
Then those strong arms let her go, and the heat of Sable’s body against hers was replaced by the still, chill air of the cave.
Riley shivered at the emptiness. She took a step back too, and bumped into Calla as she did so, who didn’t bother moving out of the way.
That unyielding presence felt… possessive.
Distantly, Riley wondered if this was going to be an issue.
It was one thing for Calla to accept Riley also being Sable’s while Sable wasn’t around, but now that she was seeing it–
No, there were bigger problems right now.