Chapter Text
Small hands clenched at her finger, sharp cries in the dark night.
The waves were almost pitch black as they crashed against the shore- ebbing and flowing- small tendrils of inky water washing onto white sand.
The baby started crying again and she was quick to shush him, carding a hand through his fluffy black hair and pressing a kiss to his forehead. Brilliant turquoise eyes blinked up at her.
"It's alright, baby." She whispered, voice cracking a little at the end. "You'll be okay."
It was a stone-cold lie, but she figured the baby wouldn't press her on it. Sea foam washed over her toes. She smiled and turned to look at the ocean, the moon reflected beautifully by the water below. She could feel it now, an irresistible pull that mirrored the waves. For every step back- uncertainty guiding her to land- there was a push forward. It swelled in her, an inexplicable need that bubbled up in her chest and sent her surging closer to the ocean. She felt like the tide was pulling her in along with the water, like she was one of them.
Clutching her pelt at her side- the only way for her to truly soothe this ache- she gently set her baby down on the soft sand.
"Abbaba?" His hands grabbed at the air, demanding to be picked right back up. When she didn't immediately oblige he stumbled forward, crawling towards her with a damningly confused expression.
He toddled closer to her, stumbled on a rock, and collapsed to the floor with a comically bewildered expression.
She managed a wet laugh, "Mind the rocks, baby. Mind the rocks."
Distantly she heard a shout, the sound of feet thundering down steps, hinges rattling as if someone slammed a door. Her breath caught in her throat. Her pulse quickened despite herself.
She didn't have much time before he caught her. She could imagine all too easily what would happen next: her pelt ripped from her grasp, his broken voice: I need you to stay.
The footsteps grew increasingly louder. She didn't look back towards her child, sitting in the sand.
She rushed to pull the pelt over herself. Her curly black hair tumbled down her shoulders like a waterfall. Wind snatched tightly coiled curls and sent the ocean's spray wild as she stumbled further into the waves.
Someone shouted her name, the tide swallowing the sound.
Behind her a small tearful hiccup, her half-selkie baby, grasping his own pelt in tiny hands.
"Ababba? Abba?"
She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood and pulled the pelt completely over her. The sea rushed to meet her, silvery waves enveloping her body, a comforting warmth spreading from the tips of her fins to her tail.
It felt like coming home for the first time in forever.
Left on the sand, small hands clenching and unclenching on a deep brown seal pelt, the half-selkie watched as his mother disappeared beneath the waves.
—
Max thought his plan was flawless. It was not.
He watched now as children screamed and ran in every direction, smoke rising from the bus he'd crashed into a nearby pine tree. It curled through the branches and clawed towards the sky, police sirens wailing nearby.
"Max!" David shouted, his eyes nearly popping out of his head with shock. "What did you do ?"
He was supposed to have enough time to sprint away from the scene, effectively distracting David and Gwen long enough for him to make a break for it. It was supposed to give him enough time to tear apart this godforsaken camp and find his pelt.
Instead, David had practically teleported in front of him the second he jumped off the bus.
"We were so close!" Max growled, dragging a hand through his hair. Distantly, he remembered his mother doing the same thing to calm him. He stamped his foot on the floor and kicked, sending a spray of dirt towards Gwen and David.
Gwen had the foresight to expect some form of retaliation and stepped back to avoid getting dirt on her legs. David was not so lucky, he sighed and gently plucked an earthworm off his foot.
"Well, in hindsight," Neil interjected, "none of us really know how to drive."
Gwen shook her head. "Yeah, honestly Max, how far did you expect to make it?"
"What were you thinking?" David asked, kneeling down to Max's level.
On his left, Nikki shrugged with an easygoing smile. "I'm gonna be real, I just always wanted to drive a bus."
"Guess we're stuck here ." Neil spat the last word like it was acid on his tongue.
In all honesty, they were probably going to end up stuck here to begin with considering Max hadn't actually been planning to escape. The bus crash was meant to be nothing more than a distraction at best, or at least an attempt to put some distance between him and the counselors. The last thing he needed was for David to know he was here for the sole purpose of stealing from Cameron Campbell.
David practically worshiped the con-man, and to Max's immense ire, had absolutely no clue about Campbell's shady nature. It would probably be bad if David figured his whole "thievery" thing out.
In Max's defense on that part, the pelt was his first.
After his mother ran away the rules got stricter and stricter. No going out after dark, no taking the pelt from where his father had hidden it, no ocean unless he was there to make sure Max couldn't just swim away.
" For your safety, of course. See what happened to your mother." His fingernails dug into the pelt held just beyond Max's reach, "She couldn't control herself. You wouldn't be able to either."
Five year old Max had cried, rubbing his skin where it stung. He felt every damn thing that his pelt felt, he made a small hurt sound when his father pinched it harder. He hadn't understood back then what his father meant.
All he knew was the deep insatiable desire to be in the sea.
The ravenous longing clawed in his chest and he knew, deep in his bones, that he would be safe just as long as he had his pelt.
Selkies need their pelts to transform, to cut through the water as seals. Selkies need the ocean like a bird needs the air- and just how a bird cannot live without its wings- a selkie cannot live without their pelt.
The second Max turned nine years old his father took his pelt, sold it, and felt consoled in the fact that his son could never leave him now. After that Max got sick. Very, very sick. It wasn't so much as physical as it was mentally. He couldn't sleep, hardly ate, stared blankly at the wall as he fought the urge to stumble into the ocean.
Max heard the stories of what happened to selkies who lost their pelt.
The craving for the ocean and the inability to quench it drove them mad, many of them drowned themselves in a futile attempt to feel closer to the waves. Some of them lost themselves in a desperate search to find their pelt. Few, though, found peace in it. Learned to live with the ache in their chest, starved it until it was nothing but a meek remnant of what it once was.
That was what Max's father hoped for his son. That in time he would get over it and maybe forgive him for the pain he put the child through.
Max called bullshit.
He knew above anything else that he needed his pelt. There wasn't one fucking thing in this world that could stand in his way.
The first thing he did when his pelt was gone was mope. The second thing he did was scheme.
He went through his father's receipts, phone records, trash- looking for anything that could provide some clue as to where his pelt was- and managed to find a tossed out phone bill: three calls made to (xxx) xxx-xxxx two days before his pelt was sold. The timing seemed awfully coincidental to Max. He called the number, and scribbled down the name. ("Hello, this is Sara Gardner, how can I help you? Hello? He-)
Max took to the real estate corner of the internet to find the house listed under her name. He went through her trash too, and found a digitally printed receipt for a train ticket to Sleepy Peak- some random town in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
After a little digging Max found out she was merely handing the pelt off to some rich asshole. A quick google search of his name revealed that Cameron Campbell- apparently the prime Minister of Thailand?- owned a summer camp right next to his vacation home.
It only took a little begging followed by guilt tripping to convince his father that perhaps his son could go to a summer camp, there was no harm in it after all, it's not like he had a pelt to run away with, and maybe the money he got from Max's coat would make a nice vacation to Miami.
Max made sure Miami was mentioned in the conversation. The mental image of his father- a man deeply disturbed by reptiles- in the iguana capital of the U.S was an image too sweet to pass up. Revenge was a dish best served cold, it seemed.
This led Max to his current predicament. Getting away from David for five seconds to go and look for his pelt was quickly proving to be an impossible task.
The man was unnaturally fast and attentive, nearly everywhere Max went he was followed by the red-haired freak. After being labeled a "flight risk" by the co-counselor Gwen, it got increasingly harder to get some time to himself. Max had hoped, however, that the arrival of new campers would make it easier to distract David.
It partially worked, within barely an hour of meeting Nikki and Neil the two had already signed themselves up for whatever escapades Max managed to whip up, ensuring a level of ease with distracting David.
The man in question donned his cheerful lecture voice and said, "Well kids, I hope we all learned something today."
"Oh, no. I hope you learned, David-" Max's face broke into a wicked grin, "-I hope you learned that before today, you only had one little bastard to deal with, but now you've got three."
Gwen dragged a hand over her face and sighed deeply.
Max threw his arms around Nikki and Neil, "Let's go, guys. I'll take you to our tent."
Nikki whooped and cheered, shouting: "This is gonna be awesome!"
"This is gonna be awful." Neil and Gwen said at the same time, though they rounded the corner before either of them could hear the other.
"It'll be fine, Neil." Max reassured. "There's plenty of time to plan a badass escape attempt. We have all summer, after all."
The boy sighed and kicked a root half-buried in the dirt. "I was supposed to be at a nice, air-conditioned, science camp- not some lame-ass excuse for daycare."
"I'm happy as long as I'm not with the Flower Scouts." Nikki shuddered and shot a glare in the general direction of the girls camp. "Those girls look all nice and pretty but they're mean. "
Max gave Nikki a side-eye and decided to change the subject
"Our tent is over here." Max gestured to the one as far away from the other campers as possible. "Now there's only two cots so-"
"I CALL THE FLOOR!" Nikki screamed and lunged towards the opening, throwing herself under Max's cot and patting the ground. " Ohhhh yeah, some nice dirt here. Good quality."
Neil wrinkled his nose and delicately placed his suitcase at the foot of the other cot. "It's not very big."
"Oooh a worm!" Nikki crowed, looking up and dangling it over her mouth. "aaahhhhh."
Neil meticulously began sweeping the dirt away from his side of the tent. "I can put the test tubes here, the calculator here, hmm the nitrogen tank here…"
"Okay," Nikki said, holding her hands up as if in surrender. "Dibs on all the beetles, but , I'm sure we can strike a deal over the spiders."
Max sighed. This was going to be a long summer.