2019-06-17 - Dreams of Water

ROSENBLATT POOL, IFFEY ROAD SPORTS CENTRE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY, UNITED KINGDOM
THREE DAYS AGO

Green eyes shot with gold took a long quiet look at the lengthy stretch of crystal-blue water in front of her, before she rolled her shoulders and hunched over, her fingers brushing against the clear, polished surface of her toes. Winding up her internal clock, Isabella Reede took a deep breath, then launched herself off the edge of the board.

The university's pool was a relatively new addition, at least in contrast with its long, storied history, and while it was open for the use of the student body, those who commanded the campus' operations had elected to open it to the public. It would be easy for anyone to assume that with such an arrangement, the facility would be guaranteed to be teeming with bodies at all hours of the day. But it was a Friday night, well into the dinner hour, and if there was anything she learned after so many years in Academia, students of all stripes took the start of the weekend very seriously.

The sound of her body plunging deep into the water echoed along the building's empty pathways, rippling water slapping against ceramic. It didn't take long for her to realize something was wrong, however; the familiar taste of chlorine had given way to salt, and the pale tiles that usually waited for her below had vanished, devoid of color other than endless and rapidly darkening blue. Her outstretched hands touched the infinitely colder waters of the Mesopelagic Zone as current and pressure slowed her descent, though she continued to sink, her body gradually drawn away past the sunlight depths and into the chilly embrace of the twilight.

Her heart leapt into her throat. After all of her years of experience exploring the ocean, different bodies of water, she knew what it meant, what she was seeing, and it was impossible. Impossible without equipment. Impossible without...

"All my life, I Dreamt of water."

She watched the line of the older woman's shoulders shift, her dark eyes taking in the kaleidoscope of color and revelry outside antiquated windows. Chords spilled freely onto the streets, horns and piano keys working in concert and carrying the rest of the block with the resulting, audible burst of improvisation and creativity - the energies that kept New Orleans beating like an excited heart throughout the year.

"Even when it was Sid's, there was always..." Her voice trailed off. "I've been trying not to, but it's hard."

"You're a Reede. All Reedes Dream of water." The older woman turned to look at her, her smile wan but genuinely meant. "Even your father, and he doesn't have it."

"How do I stop them?" she asked. "I don't want them anymore, Mom. It's not the same. It'll never be the same without..." Her hand reached out, fingers lacing into the cuff of her mother's sleeve. "Show me how. Please."

Her voice broke at the last.

"Please."

Irene Reede turned her head, her stare slowly lifting to meet her daughter's eyes. The beauty that she had in her youth still remained, however faint - a faded photograph stamped upon flesh and bone, and despite the careful, neutral, inscrutable facade, it made her seem sad, somehow.

"I don't think I can."

"Why?"

Her mother's eyes crinkled at the corners. She looked even sadder, still.

"Because you're from my line, too."

Something moved within the depths.

Field work was often dangerous and under the water, even moreso. There was no room for recklessness beneath the surface, no room for panic and once her senses were twigged to it, she wasted no time acting. She curled her body to right herself, bent her knees and kicked upwards. Her arms sliced forward and stroked into the current, drifting at an angle to keep her ascent gradual. It had been years - years since she had any Dreams, long enough that she had managed to convince herself that despite her mother's words, she had taught herself not to have them anymore, somehow.

She was wrong.

But everything that she had managed to learn, the experiences she collected as a child, came flooding back, hammering into her skull while blood rushed into her ears. The risks here were just as real as the other side, and while that still didn't explain how she was still managing to move despite having plunged at least six hundred and fifty feet, she couldn't take the chance. She was alone here. She could die here, if she wasn't dead already. Barotrauma, decompression sickness. Nitrogen narcosis - she remembered her bewilderment while her father explained to her how people could actually hallucinate underwater as nitrogen build-up slowly poisoned the body from within.

Every cell and nerve in her screamed at her to move faster, in a situation where she knew she absolutely couldn't.

I have to get back to the Sunlight Zone.

She continued to drift upwards, to the point where the dark, blue abyss was striated with bands of aqua and turquoise. Her right arm pushed forward, fingertips reaching for it.

The dark suddenly came alive. Tendrils wrought from liquid shadow shot from underneath the layer of ocean from which she had been trying to escape, winding around her ankles, splitting into thinner, viscous webs that quickly clambered up her kicking legs. They spread over her skin in obsidian filaments, and tightened, and tugged.

Green eyes widened as she felt them. As she looked down and saw them. Her lips parted, her wordless scream dissolving into bubbles. She pulled. She fought.

Wake up, Izzy.

She kicked all the more fiercely, but they tightened their hold, breaking capillaries under her skin. Her senses started to swim, the trapped air within her lungs growing toxic. Her eyes started to roll at the back of her head, feeling her strength leave her and her body growing slack.

Wake up, Isabella!

The tendrils loosened their hold, sensing her surrender. Slowly, they started pulling her back into the Twilight Zone.

WAKE UP!

Her eyes snapped open, kicking sharply, bubbles trailing behind her as she lunged upwards, driving her hands through the boundary between darkness and light....

....Isabella's wet, brown-haired head broke through the glassy surface of the pool, heaving water from her mouth and taking several, desperate gulps of air. Frantic hands scrambled for the edge, only to be seized by a pair of strong, insistent hands from above. She cried out and thrashed while she was dragged out of the water, her body hitting the floor on her side.

"Easy, lass, I'm trying to help you!"

"Wh...what..." she sputtered, her hand pushing water and hair from her eyes in an effort to clear them. "...are you doing here...?"

The blurry veil parted to reveal a stocky young man in a white polo shirt and track pants, his shock of vibrant red hair the only spot of color she can identify under the glare of harsh lights. His staff ID swung from a cord around his neck. As more details started to regain their crystal clarity, she stared at him silently once his freckled, flat expression came into view.

"It's Kent," he told her, still relatively nonplussed despite the way she was acting. "I work here, remember?"

"...right," Isabella said after a long pause. "...hi, Kent."

"Hi." Yanking the towel hanging off his shoulders, he draped it across her own. "Here, you hold onto that while I call the campus medics. What the hell happened?"

"Uh...leg cramps?"

Kent turned his attention to her legs, his skeptical expression draining away once he did. "Jesus Christ."

It was the shock in his tone that lifted her head. Isabella followed his stare and the angry, red bands that curled up over both her ankles and calves, and the unmistakable black-and-purple mottling of burgeoning bruises.

~ ~

The Radcliffe Infirmary was located just a few blocks away from the Ashmolean Museum, a place she knew well. It was a familiar building, but she never had any cause to visit it until today.

The room set aside for her was just as white and sterile as any other recovery room in any hospital situated in any developed country. Shifting uncomfortably on the bed, she tugged at the blue scrubs that had been loaned to her, her swimsuit and goggles carefully packed in a plastic ziplock bag on the chair beside it. The wait was almost interminable, impatience gnawing at her belly; while she was sore, she didn't think there was a need to keep her there overnight, and she had already made her protests known vociferously.

Planting the heel of her foot on the edge of her bed, she drew up the leg of her scrubs, her fingertips brushing over the tender skin she found there. The bruises started to fade, the telltale tingle of the ability drawing goosebumps over her sunkissed complexion. She jerked her hand away upon seeing it and sensing it work, tugging her scrubs back down.

A knock on her door drew her attention completely before it swung open. Tension bled out of her spine upon seeing who it was that came to call.

Doctor Richard Langston, the university's Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art, was a man pushing into his sixties, but somehow retained the brisk movement and manner of someone who wasn't about to take his well-earned spryness for granted, bolstered by years of travel and need to keep up with the physical demands of his career. He was the very image of the gentleman adventurer in the field, and the proper professor whenever he was on campus. His face was lined, the color and texture of tanned leather, and set with intelligent gray eyes framed by cropped white hair that was always neatly combed back. He wore khakis, almost always without fail, with a button down shirt tucked into a sweater vest and all within a tweed jacket, no matter the season.

Isabella groaned, her hand pressing against her face. "I can't believe they called you," she said, in lieu of a proper greeting.

"Well," Langston replied, good humor suffusing his features. "I am listed as your emergency contact."

"I told them I was fine!"

"And your legs?"

"Probably an allergic reaction to something I ate."

"May I?" The older man paused, and when Isabella nodded, he shifted the ziplock bag sideways to take up the chair next to her bed. His gray eyes swung to her face, scrutinizing it carefully.

His protege returned his stare levelly, but after a few minutes, it was her who broke it first. Lips parted in a heavy exhale, her fingers reaching to scrub against the bridge of her nose.

"You've often told me in the past that you could swim before you could walk," Langston continued gently. "Especially after the Antikythera expedition, I believe that was no exaggeration. So what happened, Isabella?"

Isabella's lips pressed together in a thin line, but at the sight of the professor's look of open concern, she slowly took a breath. Both hands lifted to rub her face, her body drawing up further on the bed. Her back eased against the pillows piled up against the wall behind the mattress.

"...I've been tired," she said after a few moments. "It's my first grant application, after all, and I know how competitive it is. I wanted it perfect - you know how I work, and I haven't been getting a lot of sleep. And when I do sleep, I haven't been sleeping well. I thought...I thought that the exercise would help."

Guilt curdled in her stomach; the necessities of deception were things she had grown to appreciate ever since she was sent away from Gray Harbor, but to subject Langston to them didn't sit well with her, like forcing a puzzle piece into a space not meant for it. Not that her explanation was completely false, but that was always the trick to a good lie - to introduce just enough truth for it to be convincing.

"It was my fault."

"What?" Isabella pulled back from her reverie, her startled look falling on her mentor. "How is-- Richard, no, it's-- "

His weather-beaten hand lifted in an effort to stay the rest of her words. "I should have tried a little harder to convince you to take a break after you completed your master's thesis," he continued. "Everyone takes a breather, Isabella, usually after the master's program is over and before the doctorate program begins. It isn't as if jumping into it once the former was over is unheard of...but there is such a thing as burnout."

"I-- "

"Have you thought about what I asked you?" Langston pressed. "The GMEC project."

Isabella fell silent, her fingers absently picking on the drab, blue fabric by her knee, pursing her lips and recalling fully what the suggestion entailed. To put her formal coursework on hold. To fulfill her lecture hours elsewhere. To pick up all her books, documents and data, stuff them and the rest of her relatively transient life into a bag and move, for a time, back to Gray Harbor, Washington and unearth one of its secrets.

To return home. To slip back into the place that pulled, and yanked, and clawed at her from vaguely remembered dreams and sepia-toned memories, the unwanted spectres of the things she had tried her best to cast off and forget for ten years, and all in the name of choosing a life - a good life - without them.

"Wouldn't you need me here?" she wondered, posing the question instead of giving him a definitive answer. "The conference is in two months and your next article's far from complete. I still need to check the citations, and I think the presentation would be more effective if we switched the order of the arguments-- "

"Nothing that we can't coordinate remotely, I'm sure," Langston interjected. "There's the ridiculous timezone difference to consider, but late hours, I believe, are a professional's curse."

She shook her head once. "I don't know, Richard," she told him quietly, her eyes dropping to her bent knee and the glint of her clear polish. "There's too much to do here."

"Yes. But nothing that can't wait."

Langston leaned forward, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Take the opportunity, Izzy." His tone was encouraging. "A change of scenery, spend some time with your parents. How long has it been since you've seen them? Turn your mind to something else other than the grant. There aren't many things that are more exciting than a treasure hunt in our business, after all."

Her skepticism must be visible, for the professor couldn't help but smile, and gave her a warm squeeze.

"Going home might do you some good," he stressed. "And who knows what you'll find there?"

That's precisely the problem, Isabella thought.

But she kept that to herself, allowing the faint quirk of a smile to lie for her.