The Whale and the Ocean
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This story is still being written, but maybe if I post it, that will sorta encourage me into finishing it? Less polished than my normal output, since I am prioritizing speed over perfection with this one.
CW: Not much. This is honestly a pretty gentle one. Accidental fearplay maybe? Crushed objects? Thalassaphobia? Just too many emotions to fit into one lonely brooding man?
Yeah you heard that right, romance fans, this guy broods, like Darcy!
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CHAPTER 1:
2006
This week was supposed to be all about relaxation, but Adam just couldn’t sleep. He turned over in bed, thinking maybe the vacation home’s unfamiliar mattress was the problem. It was plenty soft, it just wasn’t, his mattress. He found the perfect position, his heavy-textbook-back-injury from when he took AP Calc and AP Physics in the same semester in high school, four years ago now, was soothed by his spine’s perfect alignment against the downy cushion of the mattress. He had to not think about the laptop.
The reality-warping experiment was in May. He had to not think about the laptop, so instead, he thought about that day, and scratched the scar where an ARB (Alternate Reality Beam) hit him on his left hand. It stung at the time. Now, it just constantly itched. The doctor called it stress-caused eczema, and told him to simply stop scratching it.
Adam had received his academic advisor’s A+ grade from that experiment in June. It was now July 7, it was now time to rest. Adam should close his eyes again, now, and he should stop thinking about things that caused his chest to tighten.
It was the time to rest for Adam, maybe, but the department that processed admissions into the Collins Lab at Princeton, where he wanted to get his physics PhD, didn’t rest over the summer. They worked diligently through July and August to process the applications of graduating Princeton seniors like Adam.
He had told himself he’d take his laptop to the Ocean City library tomorrow to check his email. He told himself he would sleep now, and that he wouldn’t do exactly this: rip the phone cord out from the vacation home’s wall phone, shove it into a modem he had brought from home, and connect to his university email at midnight, maybe even waking up his mom, his dad, or his little sister with the modem’s unholy screeching. He wished the vacation home at least had DSL, a quieter connection, like his dorm room, but, beggars can’t be choosers.
He remembered that his mom, dad, and sister were out at a concert for his sister’s favorite band tonight, a forty minute drive away. The home was his. The Internet machine squealed, automatically dialing up a connection at 56k speed. Firefox loaded the university mail page.
“Regarding your application,”
A curt title read in his inbox, from Sasha Rye, the assistant to the head of the Collins Lab.
He swallowed hard. He felt blood rushing to his ears. He moved the trackpad over to the title and clicked the bright blue text.
The email opened.
“Dear Mr. Macy,”
Adam’s throat went dry.
“…decided to deny your admission into this program at this time…”
“What?” he said aloud, standing up.
“Why?” he added, reading the email again and again for anything like a critique of his work or his application. Nothing was explained. The lab apparently didn’t think that they owed him the courtesy of a reason, “why.” They just rejected him like it was nothing.
Like he wasn’t a legacy admission. Like his grandfather wasn’t a famous professor there in the 1960’s.
Like he was doomed to work in some stupid aerospace company making missiles, if he couldn’t get a real foothold in the cut throat world of Ivy-league physics research.Adam was fucked. He had everything going for him in this application, and he still didn’t get in. The walls started closing in. The rushing sound in his ears got louder. He put his laptop down and noticed the ceiling was suddenly close to his head. The fan thwacked him in his skull, and he staggered backwards.
Was the room collapsing? Maybe an earthquake?
He ran toward the back door, which lead directly to the small backyard and the beach beyond. The living room ceiling fell onto his head, and he closed his eyes, bracing for worse. It stopped falling, as though stopped by the – wall? Coughing out plaster dust from a hole in the ceiling his head made, he held his breath, and noticed that the ceiling hadn’t fallen. He had inexplicably shot his head through it, and was now bent forward instinctually. He was growing like in “Alice in Wonderland”. He looked at the coffee table next to him and noticed that the 12-inch-long Wired magazine was the same length as his six-inch-long hand. His boxers were painfully tight. He tore them off, and started crashing against the confines of the ceiling again.
Worried about damaging the house further, he ran out of the back door, and into the yard, at the same time that the rushing sound in his ears turned into a roar. He staggered forward, crashing through the back deck like it was made of wet cardboard, the front of his left foot becoming too wide for the 6-foot-wide sliding door right as he removed it.
He looked around him. The majestic maple tree in the backyard was covering his naked crotch. He was about as tall as the hotel several blocks away to his left. His huge feet filled his family’s backyard.
The backyard, which had a great view of the ocean. Adam didn’t know why this was happening, but he knew that he was now a danger to everyone around him, so he gingerly stepped toward the ocean. He stopped in his tracks, noticing a bonfire between him and the ocean, hearing the tinny sound of a boombox playing rock music beneath him. Adam could see the fire-lit faces of the two dozen or so doll-like people as they stared up at him in horror, and scattered to the left and right, screaming. Someone turned off the radio, and one tiny person stayed behind next to the fire, too shocked to move, before the person with the radio grabbed them by the shoulders, and lead them away.
“I’m – sorry –“ Adam stammered, before he started thinking about what his voice must sound like to the partygoers below. They seemed more interested in fleeing like a flock of birds than in conversing.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he stared, with as much focus as he could, at the sand between him and the waves below, making sure that his walk into the people-and-house-free nothingness of the sea wouldn’t cause any unexpected casualties.
The coast seemed clear. He stepped forward. He heard a sickening crunch, and yelped as what felt like a toothpick pierced his foot. Horrified, he looked at his right foot, and saw the remnants of an empty, crumpled beach chair fall to the ground, and the bottom of an umbrella, whose top was now stuck in his foot like a sharp cocktail umbrella poking through his skin. He removed it, double checked that his footprint in the sand didn’t have a dead body in it, and continued forward to the water, step by stressful step.
The dispersed party crowd had now added some onlookers from the buildings near the shore, and gasps and screams floated up from behind Adam. Adam was burning with curiosity to see how many people had gathered, and if he knew any of them, but he was wise enough to not turn around. He figured a giant naked ass and back was less identifiable than a giant face, so to not be a freak for life, he should hide his face from the increasing crowd, which might have cameras or camcorders in it. Finally, his left foot reached the water, and he began to relax. Nobody would be swimming or fishing out here at night, he could now step more confidently towards the deeps. If he crushed some nocturnal fish in the water, he could live with that.
The sound of the waves crashing to the shore, comparatively soft as they were, still began to drown out the increasing sounds of commotion behind him. The sand was impossibly soft, and he sank in it to the middle of his ankles. For a moment he wondered if he’d sink all the way in, like quick sand, but he stayed upright. It just took lots of effort to move his foot again and again, but eventually, after a few minutes of careful effort, he was up to his waist in the water.
The waves felt interesting, they crashed against his torso like ripples in a swimming pool, but they were constant, driven by the moon’s tides, instead of by somebody doing a cannonball nearby. The constant, but tiny, motion was like a cold hot tub.
This far out, he couldn’t hear anything but the waves, and a faint sound of what may have been distant emergency sirens. The only lights he could see in front of him were those of buoys in the far distance, and a cargo ship near the horizon. He snagged his foot against something, and realized it was a buoy, whose anchor he had begun to drag. The long chain that connected it to the anchor stuck to his leg, feeling like a silver necklace chain. He wondered how much this floating light cost, and tried to put the anchor back where he thought it should go. He wondered who would arrest him for destroying this, if they could.
With how distant the sound of the town was behind him, he wanted to take a peek. He covered his face with his hands, leaving a little crack between the fingers to look through, and he turned around. The town glowed like a dainty model train set, just a little below him now that his head was half as far high to the ground as before. The boardwalk, Ferris wheel, and hotels to his right glowed like Christmas decorations, twinkling in the marine mist.
A bright light launched from the marina to his left. It was a speed boat, its little motor whining like a loud mosquito from this distance. Terrified of any interaction with a person that could lead to a shipwreck, Adam turned around, took a deep breath, and carefully placed his head under the water, managing to submerge his whole body in a sitting position.
The quiet of the water relaxed Adam instantly. Keeping one hand over his nose, he used the other to drag his body along the bottom of the ocean as fast as he could. Given the danger that his kicking legs could pose to a speedboat, he kept them submerged, knees in the ocean floor, crawling along the bottom of the ocean. Eventually he noticed he was deep enough, and out of breath enough, to float neutrally, halfway beneath the waves and the ocean floor.
Floating in the middle of the water column, Adam was surrounded by the dark, cool, endless ocean. It enveloped his naked, overgrown body so naturally, like it was where he belonged.
The ocean was the only thing more powerful than Adam’s unasked-for, destructive, strength. Knowing that it was bigger than him slowed his heart rate. He swam forward a little bit more, and to the left, further from the speedboat’s pier, and realized that he needed air. He flipped around, and faced upward, but he heard a sound in his ears again, and the water pressure above him suddenly started increasing.
He righted himself, touching the bottom of the ocean with his feet, but then noticed that the pressure was even stronger, hurting his ears, and he started kicking madly, swimming towards what he thought was the surface. A buoy light above him got closer and closer, and then further away, paradoxically, even though he knew he was faced towards the surface the whole time. His lungs began to burn, but the water pressure let up, and he started to wonder if he was going to drown in shallow near-shore water that could not have been deeper than his 10-story body. After what felt like eternity, he broached the surface, next to the glowing buoy. The one he ran into a few minutes ago was the size of a golf ball, but this one was almost too wide to wrap his arms around.
From his left, he saw a coast guard boat patrolling the area, much larger than himself. Thinking fast, he covered and uncovered the buoy’s light in a pattern, hoping to get noticed by the boat. They got the gist, and picked him up quickly. Adam was ecstatic to be the right size to sit in the chair in the cabin, and he lied about being drunk, and floating on a now-popped pool toy, to explain his naked night swim, which somehow got him a full mile from the shore. -
@tiny-ivy you had me at Darcy 🤭 I’m curious where you’ll take this!
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@miss-lillipants I read it for the first time last spring. Ashamed it took that long! I was missing out! Girl invented the dark romantic dude that we are all still writing and reading about way back in 1812!
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@tiny-ivy If you haven’t already, have a read of Jane Eyre. It’s a lot messier (for a smaller read too), but Mr Rochester is broody af.
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CHAPTER 2:
Saturday, June 21, 2025
It was the middle of the night, and Jessi Baker was making fantastic time on the Single-Handed Atlantic Cross-The-Pond Race, from Plymouth in England, all the way to Newport, Rhode Island. It was a solo sailing competition, which means she was allowed to use nothing but wind, wits, and her trusty yacht. She knew that first place was impossible, as radio chatter had Mark Halford reaching the finish line earlier today, but she was still hoping for second, third, or fourth place, since she was only at 19 days out, and had about a day left of travel left, if her calculations were right. Mark’s first place run was 18.5 days long. It wasn’t a record, but it was a good time.
It was her first ever solo race, so she tried to give herself a break if she didn’t place high. Just finishing was an accomplishment for someone soloing for the first time. It was weeks at sea alone. It was personally fulfilling like nothing else, to go so far for so long, alone, but it was also grueling.
The sky cracked with lightning, right as Jessi thought of this, like the fates had been listening to her self-satisfaction, and wanted to remind her who’s really in charge of what happens to a mortal human on a tiny white sailboat, surrounded by nothing but the elements.
The stars disappeared from the sky as a sudden stormcloud poured rain down. The waves swelled. The boat rocked every way.
A rogue wave several times taller than the rest smacked into the side of her boat, sending it reeling starboard. She feared for a capsize, but she barely evaded the edge of the water by making a hard turn, before another wave knocked her boat the other way. Righting herself back to safety, her heart pumping, she felt truly alive.
These swells were bigger than she expected based on the weather forecast. She opened her satellite phone and looked at the weather radar again. A dark orange and red squall had appeared out of nowhere, and was pushing her towards an uninhabited island to the west.
She opened her SONAR and saw the rocks of the island getting closer, even though she saw nothing but dark ocean in front of her between the lightning flashes. She tried to steer herself between the squall and the island, and noticed a small light source to her right, what looked like a small house on top of a seaside cliff. That was a nature preserve, not a light house, according to her maps, but she focused on the boat’s path ahead of her. She had to avoid hitting the rocks that surrounded it.
She found what looked like a passage out towards open water and past the squall, and steered the boat towards it. She heard a horrible scraping sound, and her hull hit a rock. Jessi ran to below deck to see the damage, and saw a sharp ridge of granite the length of her leg poking through the hull.
Her heart sank. There goes the race.
Now, race taken care of, she just had to worry about not dying in her first shipwreck. She secured her life vest, grabbed her go-bag, and tried to unlodge the boat from the rock, to see if her trusty boat could stay afloat for just long enough to get closer to the shore while protecting her from personally smashing against the sharp rocks. She managed to shove the craft off by some miracle, and it stayed buoyant for just long enough to smack spectacularly into two distinct pieces right next to a rocky beach. Jessi crawled off the back half of the boat, and scuttered, crab-like, across the slick rocks, stunned, but alive.
She was alive, but she had lost her satellite phone and radio on the boat. Only her regular cell phone was in her go-bag. As soon as she was on solid ground, she turned it on. It had no signal. She considered looking in shallow water for the satellite phone in the morning, if it could survive that long sitting in seawater.
Lightning crashed again, and the thunder rumbled, right on top of it. That squall was right on top of her.
Jessi sat down on a flat rock, just out of the waves’ reach, feeling like a beached whale. The exhaustion of the last 20 days of high-adrenaline racing, topped off with her boat being destroyed, and her being marooned, all hit her at once. She moaned in frustration, and put her head in her hands.
“Are you all right?” a male voice asked from behind her.
Jessi startled, and stood up, turning around, and trying to step backwards. Jessi had been going on 10 hours of sleep over the last 3 days due to the tricky navigation, and hadn’t eaten anything solid in 20 hours, on top of the adrenaline from almost dying, and the equilibrium mess from being in a boat for the last 20 days straight. Her sense of balance reflected all of this. She fell flat on her ass on the wet sand, legs splayed out like a newborn colt, in front of this stranger.
“Oh, my, let me help-“ the stranger said, and walked forward, reaching out his hand. Her manners took over her fear, and she accepted his help automatically, as though it was a perfectly normal thing to run into a man with a New York accent on an uninhabited island off the coast of Newfoundland. His hand was warm, and soft-skinned.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No, thank you!” the man said.
“You’re welcome? For crashing my boat?”
“Of course not! No! You crashed?” he asked, in alarm.
Jessi could only see his outline, with the cloudy sky covering the moonlight, and the only light on the island coming from behind him. But lightning flashed behind her, and for an instant, she could see a bearded man in his late thirties, wearing glasses, with wavy, dark hair going down to his wide shoulders, in a dark duster raincoat. Despite the eerie lighting and musty outfit, an honest compassion shone through his facial expression.
“Yes, it’s over there-“ she pointed behind her, and he turned the beam from his old-fashioned, large metal flashlight that way. A yellowish patch of light illuminated the two halves of her beloved “Albatross.” It was 30 foot long, and it was now a pile of firewood and fiberglass.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said automatically, but she was only now beginning to feel the rising panic attack from the brush with death occupy her mind. She hadn’t had a real anxiety attack in months, she remembered her breathing, and concentrated on what her body felt. A sore leg, a sore arm. Nothing bad. She walked forward, testing her body’s condition, stepping just past the man. She seemed okay.
“This storm won’t get better tonight. Come to my place, you can stay ‘til the morning,” he offered. “I can carry your bag,” he added, stooping down for her heavy go-bag.
This would be a strange place for a bag thief to live, she thought. She allowed the slightly embarrassing act of chivalry without a word. She got weirdly uncomfortable when men held the door for her, it always made her feel a tiny obligation that she didn’t want to owe them, but the act was always done from too polite an intention for her to ever actually bring it up with anyone.
She just wanted to be treated like an equal, instead of like a delicate flower.
“You live here? Is it a lighthouse?” she asked, as they started walking up the cliff towards what she now knew was the same out-of-place house light on a cliff that she had seen from her boat.
“No, though I’ve thought about building a mini one. That’s just my house,” he said, gesturing forward.
His voice had a smooth quality that drifted into the air like incense smoke. Her tongue-tied boyfriend back home would be extremely jealous of it. She loved her boyfriend beside his stutter but… it had been 30 days since she had seen him. He hadn’t even come to the race on launch day, which was a serious disappointment for her.
“You live with your… family?” she guessed wildly.
They had walked a few minutes through the storm, and were now a dozen feet from the seaside home’s side door. The path leading up to the door was lined with some solar-powered LED tiki lights, which cast a faint flickering glow on the man’s face as he turned around, and looked her over, top to bottom, taking her in for what seemed like the first time.
“No, it’s just me. I live alone,” he said, turning around again with a half-sigh.
He opened the door, and put her bag on a side table as soon as he entered, keeping it off the ground. She entered after him, closing the door behind her, and stomped rain off of her sailing boots, both of the people surrounded by wet puddles from outside.
“The name’s Adam Macy, by the way. It is lovely to meet you,” the island man said, half-blushing, shaking her hand.
“Jessi Baker,” she responded, shaking his hand back, smiling while swallowing her fear.
After he showed her to a guest room with an extremely comfortable king-sized bed and light-blocking curtains, they parted ways for the night. Between the exhaustion and the 1000-threadcount-sheets, she slept like a baby, in the cozy house of a complete stranger, on an island that the whole world believed to be uninhabited.
