Chapter Text
Romeo Shot Juliet The Prick
This is entirely selfish folks i'm sorry to tell you. I don’t know my own name but i know that. So I guess i gotta start somewhere so i’m gonna start with squiddles. It’s all based on the old wiki and the whole journalism story involved with that and the other person who was active for a few days and revolutionized it and then vanished but that’s not all right or important or anything i give a shit about to be frank. So I guess what I mean to say is that i’ writing this story for me and I know others could do it better or that canon will destroy it within a couple of updates considering Dirk’s weird blue goo dude with tentacles.
So i’m gonna tell you all the things that happened to the squiddles and how they became horrorterrors, because i know what happened and I need to get it out there. It’ll be outta order though because to be quite honest i don’t give a fuck about them making sense. I want to tell you about the bits that matter to me. So let’s go about this in the traditional fashion.
Once upon a time there was tiny little creatures called squiddles that lived in the ocean blue and grey and green, they lived everywhere in the ocean, From deep trenches that they filled with bright even without light to the arctic seas where narwhals roamed that were older than the sky, from coral reefs inhabitants neck and fin shoulder to dorsal, anywhere there was saltwater there was squiddles. That used to be how it was anyway.
Once upon a time there was tiny little creatures called squiddles that had tentacles and best friends and love in their hearts and memories in their heads. They lived with their friends and their families and their friends that were basically family. They baked bread over deep sea vents and grew seaweed in their windowsills and made their houses out of bright blue coral. It’s considered lucky if you’re a construction worker and you’re blue.
Each group of squiddles, called a tangle, had beliefs and unique culture. Handicraft and memory surviving through the craft of tentacle and sucker, so when they all started dying, when so many of them started dying, they call it the great Forgetting, actually they didn’t call it that but I do so there. Whenever people are living through grand things they don’t give them names like that, ones that imply this is the last death of your species.
Now you probably want to know why they’re dying. It’s not an easy answer but what I’ve got for you is just kinda shitty. I could tell you how their water is getting hotter and killing all their coral. I could tell you about how the water is getting more turbulent and hurricanes are getting worse. I could tell you about the miles of trash and the microplastic filling hatchlings’ gills till they are smothered in color. But that isn’t the part of their deaths I want to tell you about because to be quite frank, it is the boring part, the unfixable part, the one that they were saved from by dying early.
Skipper Plumbthroat was a barrel chested man with a corncob pipe and an addiction to eating on a consistent basis. He looked like Captain Haddock from Rin Tin Tin and like Young Sick Bacchus by Michelangelo. He had ribs that were hung like crystal chandeliers in phantom of the opera, always willing to fall if you convinced them with the proper boot or hand. So if he had access to the internet and knowledge of how anything electric worked ever, he would describe himself as fugly, but really he was a little plain and a little strange.
He had been a poet in his youth. Grown up dockside and dreaming of universities as even his calluses grew calluses. So isn’t it funny how when he went so far into debt and was disowned by his only family, just for a chance at it. It turned out he hated it, he flunked and found himself at the bottom of the bottle at the bar by the docks where he was born because it doubles as a hospital every third Thursday. Now I don’t know about you, but the feeling of being a cog, of being a worker, of going and doing the same thing your father did till you die an unsatisfied death, didn’t set right with me and it didn’t set right with him. But freedom needs money and to grow wealthy you need something to sell.
Now let me tell you about the squiddles, and how they were magic. Let me tell you about how they had the power to heal sickness, to grow plants beyond your wildest imaginings, how they had a song and a spirit. Let me tell you about how, when Plumbthroat remembered the old stories, about vitality and power, it was as if a fortune unraveled itself beneath his hands on the old pockmarked surface of the wooden bar.
How he went to sea in a boat with just him and how when he dragged his next again and again, getting catch after catch, how he stayed long after every other boat was off of the water. How when he finally pulled her out of the water he cheered and danced and swayed. How he cried and hollered like a babe in the spring air stung by a wasp for a first time. How he was crying, joyful so thankful, so close to being free, until he heard her crying too.
Her name was Ortygia and she was so very scared. She’d gotten separated from her tangle and had risen in that net like aphrodite pulled by her hair from the sea. She collected fossils and ancient pieces of metal and stone from the sea floor which she repaired and then sold with all the information she could find on it. Her dream was to work in a museum but you need somewhere permanent to have that kind of job.
And even with everything that happened after, it speaks to the humanity in him, that Plumbthroat on hearing the cries lunged for the net like a man on fire giving a hug to the one that set him on fire. He untangled her and they just stared at each other for a moment, he stuttered out an apology and she daintily accepted. And they just kinda sat there stunned, staring, her cupped in her hands. She was the color a horizon turns at the end of a night shift when you get off and can finally go to sleep, the curve of the world brightening the last thing you see before going below deck.
I could tell you how they grew to love each other as best friends do, how she slept in an old diving helmet beside his berth as she recovered. How she made him laugh and how he taught her card games. The constellations they named and how her favorite was the hunter and how his favorite was the ‘one that carried that water jug thing, names a bitch to rhyme’ and how that made her laugh and almost fall into the sea because at her giggle he had been offended and that offended look had almost made her laugh so hard that she was doing a barrel roll right over the railing and into the foam. But i don’t know if you care about that, so let’s skip the end shall we.
How she couldn’t live on land forever, even if a ship wasn’t really land. And he couldn’t go with her unless it was for a short sad visit that ended up with a floating corpse. How she told him he was leaving and how he was bitter and how he hid it behind a smile and how he let her go with a wave and how she left thinking they were the best of friends still and how he was kicking himself for not getting a tank as if that was the problem.
Years later he would learn that squiddles die if kept in tanks for longer than a few weeks and he wouldn’t connect the dots. Let’s talk about how he saw her next with a beautiful baby in her wake and how he felt so betrayed. How he had a harpoon gun and how easy it was to put pressure on the trigger when he was angry. How squiddles are so small that a harpoon through one basically makes them explode, no not explode, pop like a water balloon full of blood and bone. How she screamed and her son sunk into the depths.
Her son named Plumthroat, because even if you’re best friends some things don’t come up like how you spell your name properly or what brought you out onto the sea at such odd hours in the first place. Why you were pulling your net through this area at this time and all that. And Plumthroat watched his mother die in agony as she was dragged back to the ship and Plumbthroat got no answers cause she was DOA but got a nice fat paycheck.
I suppose none of that matters and I’m dancing around the bush. But Plumbthroat got a taste of money and Plumthroat got a taste of death and both of them had very strong feelings about their respective life changing events. So let me tell you the story from a different beginning. One that will lead somewhere better we hope.