The Lowing

Where was Matt?

Where was Matt?

Why wasn’t Matt calling back?

Was he underwater?

How long had he been under?

He only had six minutes in his lungs in this shape—longer obviously than most humans, but it had to have been at least four since they’d gotten out far enough for Foggy to call out for him and the Sister and Foggy couldn’t see the shape of any heads or bodies above or below water.

He called for the Sister again.

She didn’t answer.

“Count,” he told the other two, trying not to panic.

“Count?” Sam repeated.

“JUST COUNT.”

“Woah. Okay, we’re counting.” 

Foggy dropped down under the surface while they counted. He couldn’t count as a seal. The numbers all slid together like liquid.

He kicked away from the other two for a ways and searched around the depths. They were out pretty far from the island. There was the occasional string of deep-sea kelp swaying in the current, dragging the little handfuls of fish that gathered under their leaves back and forth with them, but beyond that, there was nothing.

No significant trails of bubbles.

No dark shapes in the distance.

That was wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong—Foggy couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe.

He broke surface again in human form and searched for the humans. They were a ways off. Steve saw him first and threw up a hand.

Foggy ducked back down and hurried over that way. When he came up by them, Sam told him that it had been nearly two hundred seconds.

Two hundred.

More than three minutes.

No.

No, that couldn’t be right.

“Shit,” he gasped. “Shit, shit, shit.”

They were drowning. Matt was drowning.

“Nelson, what’s going on?” Cap asked seriously.

“I don’t know,” Foggy said with his hair trying to wrap itself around his neck from the current. “But Matt can only hold his breath for six minutes. He hasn’t come up. I can’t find him or the Sister. They aren’t answering me.”

“Franklin!”

All three of their heads turned at the same time.

Foggy could count on his hands the number of times he’d seen Sister Maggie shift into human form in the water itself. She usually waited until land and she often stayed out later or came in earlier than him and any of the others.

Her hair was slick now and it curled around her cheeks even after she tossed it out of her face.

“Sister?” he shouted over the rush of the water.

Steve broke away from their group to meet her and pull her in close enough to talk.

“What’s happened?” Foggy asked her.

“Samuel, we need your help,” Sister Maggie panted. “Give me your hand. Please. He’s dying.”

Sister Maggie took Sam. She told Foggy to take Steve and hurry.

There were no questions asked.

Even through the coat and all the blubber, Foggy’s chest and throat felt ice cold. Steve didn’t need instruction. He caught onto Foggy’s seal neck and let himself be dragged through the water after Sister Maggie’s bubble trail.

As they got closer to where Sister Maggie was taking them, Foggy started to see the little dots of fish.

They gathered around the lingering scent of blood. Waiting.

Fuck.

Matty, no. Not yet. They’d barely even gotten started.

Foggy and Steve didn’t break surface so much as they were hurled by a sudden surging wave up onto a rock heap. It was an island, Foggy realized, shoving himself up and slinging hair and kelp out of his face. There were bodies kneeling ahead. He took no time scrambling to his feet and running over there.

He startled back a few feet away from them.

Sister Maggie and Sam were leaned over the lap of a giant.

A giant in the literal sense of the word. A towering man, eight, maybe nine feet tall with huge shoulders and enormous hands and orange hair pouring down his back. There were gold threads woven in among his braids.

It wasn’t just any giant.

“Manannán mac Lir,” he whispered.

The giant lifted his face. It wasn’t old. It was half-hidden by a beard, but despite that, Foggy could see that it was crossed with pain.

Manannán dropped his eyes sadly back to his lap where his enormous hands were cradling Matt’s body.

Foggy’s breath caught in his throat.

“Matty?” he gasped. “Maidiú? Maidiú?”

Nothing. Matt didn’t gasp or writhe in response to his name.

“Maidiú!” Foggy cried.

Still nothing. Nothing, even from Matt’s mate.

“I’m so sorry, selkie,” Manannán said long and slow. “I’m so sorry.”

There was a broken spear crushed into Matt’s side. The water mixed with the blood and stained his whole torso. It dripped down in slick ribbons from the darkness of his wetsuit.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Foggy shoved forward to get hands on Matt’s face. To press their foreheads together.

His skin was cold. His lips were cold.

Sister Maggie pulled Foggy back and told him quietly to leave Matt be for now. Sam was working. They needed to trust Sam to work. He knew more about human healing than they did.

Foggy wanted to scream.

“You killed him,” he choked out to Manannán instead. “You killed him.”

“It was an accident,” Sister Maggie said.

“You’re defending him?” Foggy asked her, not even angry anymore. Just cold. His chest had gone cold and solid.

“This is his mate,” Sister Maggie said to Manannán. “They’re young.”

“I see that,” Manannán said heavily. He adjusted the huge, rough hand cradling Matt’s shoulders tenderly like he was holding an infant.

Foggy didn’t understand.

Why was everyone just standing here, being silent? Why? Matt was dying. Matt was dying.

“I’m so sorry, selkie-child,” Manannán said to him suddenly.

“What did you do to him?” Foggy demanded.

Manannán’s pain-ridden face crumpled further. Sister Maggie turned Foggy’s way with a warning written on hers.

“It’s no one’s fault,” she said fiercely. “We should have been louder in our warning.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” Foggy snapped.

“He surprised me,” Manannán’s soft heavy voice said. Foggy jerked his face up him again. “He surprised me,” the giant repeated. “I acted too swiftly. Poor boy. He can’t call under the water in this shape.”

No.

No, he couldn’t.

Fuck.

Goddamnit.

FUCK.

“Nelson, breathe,” Sam ordered out of nowhere. His voice startled Foggy and brought him back to himself.

“He’s going to live,” Sam said firmly, “Provided we get the wound clean and get him to a hospital asap.”

“We can’t,” Foggy said. “We’re too far out.”

“Seal something up,” Sam told him.

It wasn’t that easy.

“Can’t you do something?” Foggy snarled at Manannán.

Manannán looked at him with clear eyes the color of the sky at sunset.

“I have done enough,” he said. “I do not expect you to forgive me for my carelessness. But I will take the boy to Tír na nÓg myself on your behalf, selkie. He will be safe there. I will make sure he is safe.”

Foggy and Sister Maggie shouted an immediate negative at the same time. They startled the humans.

“You can’t take him,” Foggy gasped. “He’s mine to take.”

“He isn’t human,” Sister Maggie said over him. “You can’t take him, he can’t stay there.”

Manannán frowned between them.

“What is happening here?” he asked.

“Matt’s my—” Foggy started

“Maidiú has no coat, Manannán,” Sister Maggie interrupted with a set to her brow so deep and firm that Foggy shut up immediately.

Silence, selkie-child, that look said, the adults are talking now.

But Matt was dying, Sister.

“No coat?” Manannán repeated as Sam did something and for the first time, Matt whimpered.

Relief swept through Foggy’s chest and crashed into the wave of panic on the other side at the sound.

“Why has the boy no coat? He is your human child, is he not, selkie?” Manannán asked.

“He is half,” Sister Maggie said fiercely. “He gave his coat away in a moment of foolish, youthful pride. We came to you to ask for a Task to retrieve it.”

Manannán’s brow furrowed and his beard twitched.

“He wants to return to us,” he said.

“Yes,” Sister Maggie said. “His rightful place is among us. If you take him to Tír na nÓg now, he will be trapped there as a human. But he is one of us, Manannán.”

Manannán fell quiet and adjusted Matt slightly to let Sam do whatever it was that he was doing more easily. Sam didn’t acknowledge him. Sam had his work in front of him and he would not be torn from it.

Foggy wished he had that kind of tenacity.

“I understand. My grief for you knows no bounds, selkie,” Manannán said with his face down towards Matt. “But as much as it pains me, I cannot return to him his coat in this moment.”

“We aren’t asking you to,” Sister Maggie said.

Manannán lifted his head her way.

“Your child will die,” he said.

“He will not. He’s tougher than he looks,” Sister Maggie countered. “Like his father.”

“A hero,” Manannán said slowly.

Sister Maggie held his eye.

“Make a deal with me,” she said. “On behalf of my pup, who you have wounded out of carelessness. Give him a task to rejoin his people.”

Manannán sighed heavily.

“Selkie, you know I cannot make deals,” he said.

“You can,” Sister Maggie snapped. “You were once human, and among our people, amends can be made. You’ve taken my pup. I ought to curse you and your foul dogs for the next century and a half. I ought to take the life of one of your descendants in return for the one you have nearly taken from me. But I won’t. I am asking instead that you make a deal with me. Give my child a Task. Before he dies, Manannán.”

“I have no task for selkies,” Manannán said. “I have only tasks for humans. For heroes.”

“I’ll do it.”

Foggy shivered. He and the others looked behind them.

Steve set his jaw. Foggy stopped breathing.

Manannán tilted his giant head to the side. He surveyed Steve.

“You are a hero?” he asked.

“You’re damn right I am,” Steve said, more Brooklyn than ever on an island an entire generation removed from his body.

Manannán frowned.

“You are a hero of the island?” he rephrased.

“Can be,” Steve said as stupid and brave and human as ever.

“I only have—”

“Listen, sir. I talk like an asshole, but my folks are from here. And I’m a hero. What needs to be done?” Steve said.

“You don’t feel a hero,” Manannán observed.

Steve puffed up in insult.

“That ain’t your call to make,” he said. “Gimme Red’s task.”

“I can’t give you someone else’s Task,” Manannán said a bit flatly, understandably though, because Steve was a hulking idiot.

“Give him a task so that we can heal this guy, then,” Sam ordered.

“You heard the man,” Steve said. “I’ve made a deal with the Sister to protect her son. I’ll trade with you for his healing if not his coat.”

Foggy’s heart shuddered. He realized everything had gone still. Gone quiet around them. He looked back to Manannán. His eyes had changed from the yellowish green of sunset to the first line of sunrise. Blue and red, red, red, then pink on the horizon.

“What is your name, human?” he asked.

“Steven Grant Rogers,” Steve said. “Time’s a tickin’, your honor. If you wouldn’t mind?”

Steve. No, honey. This is a sea god.

Just shut up.

“Steven,” Manannán said, suddenly shifting. He slid Matt out of his lap and onto the rock beneath them. Sam went with him.

Manannán stood.

He towered.

The ocean around the rock island began to grow wild.

“It is a good name for you,” Manannán said to Steve. He stepped forward and Steve held his ground with a jaw steady as stone itself.

“You are tied to a hound,” Manannán observed.

“More or less,” Steve said.

“It is fate which has brought us here.”

Steve scoffed.

“Sure, pal. Whatever you want,” he said. “My friend’s dyin’, though. So can we hurry this up?”

Steve, Steve, Steve, no.

Sister Maggie put a hand on Foggy’s arm, demanding silence.

“I am missing a hound from my two,” Manannán said mournfully.

Steve frowned.

“And you…want mine?” he asked. “Sorry, no can do there—”

“No, I don’t want yours,” Manannán said a little indulgently. “But a human has taken one of mine. If you will retrieve it, then I can open a holy well for this selkie.”

A holy well.

Well, shit. Yeah, that would do it.

“Is that good?” Steve asked Foggy and Sister Maggie over his shoulder. They both nodded hurriedly.

“Okay, great,” Steve said. “I’ll do it. I find your dog, you open a well for Red. We have a deal?”

Manannán’s beard twitched again. His eyes started shifting towards dawn. They twinkled a bit and the seas around the island began to die down once again. He turned back towards Foggy and the others.

“You were wise to bring these humans with you,” he told them. He turned, smiling, back to Steve. “It is a deal, Steven. Find my hound. The well has opened. Take the selkie-child to it and let him bathe in the waters until he is healed. Then, selkie, your child may return and in return for my carelessness, I shall discuss with him a Task.”

“You know,” Sam said, petting Matt’s hair absently about forty minutes later, “This probably one of the few times ableism has worked to this guy’s advantage.”

Foggy considered it.

Sam had been violently resistant to putting his patient into water at first, believing that doing so would make him bleed out faster, but he’d given in and trusted Foggy and the Sister. His attempt at humor meant that he was in better spirits.

“You’re not wrong,” Foggy. said.

Matt said nothing. Matt was very busy being vastly unhappy and stuck chest-high in freezing cold brackish well water. He was conscious again, thank god. Conscious if weak and more than a little bleary. He had to conserve all his energy for swearing and shivering and very occasionally asking Sister Maggie why God had forsaken them.

“How do I find a dog in a sea of dogs?” Steve asked himself from the other side of the well.

“You,” Sam said, “Need to stop talking. Every time you talk, we get coerced into another bullshit errand.”

Steve thought about this with the tips of his fingers skirting along the surface of the holy well’s water.

Manannán’s well was hidden in a cave on his stone island. He didn’t take them there. He’d watched them go before being consumed again by the sea. His well was much, much warmer than the sea, thankfully. It was filled with candles with flickering flames and old pottery and sand and shrines chipped into the walls with offerings to the sea gods tucked into them.

A child’s sneaker here. A yo-yo there. A pile of sand and kelp covered chew-toys given by folks who evidently preferred Manannán’s hounds over the man himself there.

Matt shivered in the well among thick ropes of green algae and reeds and duckweed that had no right or reason to be growing such a sunless place. It was like they were sustained by the candle light somehow.

“Okay, how’s this,” Steve said to Sam, “How about from now on, you make the deals?”

“Great idea,” Sam said. “I love that idea. That is the best idea you’ve had in five years.”

Sam decided that, as the new maker of deals and herder of wayward and poorly-behaved Rogerses, they needed to wait until the well-waters had healed Matt enough to remove the spearhead from his side. Matt moaned at the thought. Sam told him he no longer knew how else to help him because all his attempts at first aid had been crushed by a literal giant with a beard and an unhealthy dog-attachment.

So for now, Matt was staying in the well waters. And once he was no longer a pin cushion, they needed to go talk to Manannán again, this time without accidentally tumbling into his space and becoming swiss cheese.

Matt claimed that, in his defense, he hadn’t exactly been able to see the glowing boundary Manannán put up around him under water.

It was a pretty good defense.

“I was ready to sing and everything,” Matt moaned during Foggy’s turn of holding his head and shoulders so that he didn’t slip back into the well water and drown.

“Maybe God didn’t forsake us,” Foggy said. “Maybe this is his way of sparing us greater harm.”

Matt huffed.

“I can sing,” he claimed.

Sister Maggie coughed.

“I can,” Matt growled her way.

“Mm-hm,” Foggy hummed indulgently. “You’re such a good singer.”

Matt pouted. Sam lifted an eyebrow Foggy’s way.

“Imagine a skunk givin’ Elvis a go,” Foggy said.

“Let go, I’m drowning,” Matt decided.

It took about two hours. Matt dozed a lot during them. Foggy didn’t let anyone else have a turn to hold him up. He’d decided that he wasn’t letting Matt go. Ever again.

Ever.

Sister Maggie told him he was being dramatic. Foggy graciously did not point out that he wasn’t the one who’d tried to blackmail a god of the sea.

She and Matt were more similar than either of them would ever admit.

When the two hours were up and Matt’s assailant, the spearhead, could be plucked out of his side, he got to rejoin everyone else on land. Foggy started to take off his coat to let Matt burrow into it for warmth, as he was wont, but Matt just crawled into both it and Foggy’s lap and stayed there for another fifteen minutes or so until he stopped shivering.

Sam thought that that was very cute.

Matt told him to shove it, but his protests were muffled by fur.

“I want to be suffocated in a fur coat, Steven,” Sam told Steve, who’d gotten bored with not having any immediate danger to throw himself into and had started cataloguing all the offerings in the shrines.

“How very 20s of you,” Steve said. “I’ll find you one.”

Round two talking to Manannán out by his stone throne went better, mostly because Manannán’s mood had improved.

Unfortunately, however, this was due to the fact that he had succumbed to the tendency of apparently all giants to coo over selkie pups.

Exhausting.

Matt was fucking done. Foggy was fucking done. Sam and Steve and Sister Maggie had the nerve to giggle at their plight.

“I’m not a seal,” Matt snarled, pushing Manannán’s hands away from squishing his face. “But I will be, if you give me a task. Give me a task.”

Sister Maggie told him to watch his mouth.

Manannán seemed charmed by his cheek.

“It has been years since I’ve met a selkie with such personality,” he told Sister Maggie because apparently Matt and Foggy were children who weren’t allowed to talk to sea gods.

Fucking.

Exhausting.

“He gets it from me,” Sister Maggie said.

Manannán smiled at her.

“They call you ‘Grace,’” he said. “I remember your song. You’ve led the way to Tír na nÓg many a year.”

“I have,”  Sister Maggie said.

“Why did you stop leading?” Manannán asked her. “Your song is so evocative, Grace.”

Sister Maggie pursed her lips and gave Matt a judgmental look. He seemed to sense her irritation and sought her out.

“Ah,” Manannán said. “Our children do change us.”

Matt pointed at himself. Sister Maggie narrowed her eyes and said nothing, but Matt was used to her silences.

“Blame Dad,” Matt said. “I didn’t ask to be born.”

“I see why your boy wishes to return to us,” Manannán continued, flagrantly ignoring Matt.

The humans had begun to get uncomfortable from this. Foggy rolled his eyes at them and shook his head.

It was the way with elders. You got used to it. It would be another couple of decades of not getting caught in a fishing net or slaughtered by humans before the older folk started to realize that Foggy and Matt existed, and then it would probably only be with an ‘ugh, teenagers’ kind of attitude.

Even Sister Maggie was essentially just a really talented teen mom to some of these bigger guys. They only respected her because she’d been picked over and over again by the spirits as a guide to the Otherworld.

“Does he sing?” Manannán asked Sister Maggie.

“He plays,” Sister Maggie said diplomatically. “He’s led once. About two decades years ago.”

Manannán cocked his head.

“So young?” he asked.

Sister Maggie hummed.

“And blind,” she added.

“Very impressive,” Manannán said to Matt. Matt scowled.

“Task,” he demanded.

Manannán petted his head like he was a kitten. Matt twitched in rage.

“It isn’t easy to retrieve a lost selkie pelt,” Manannán said to Sister Maggie.

“We are aware,” Sister Maggie said.

“He must honor the spirits of the island as well as the sea,” Manannán said.

“He honors the sea,” Sister Maggie said. “He will lead again when he has his coat back, we both know this.”

Well, maybe so, but it was news to Matt and Foggy.

“What the fuck?” Matt mouthed Foggy’s way.

Dude. That was what you got for having Sister Maggie as a mom. No one could control that.

Foggy shrugged high enough for him to sense it.

“This is true,” Manannán said. “And I’m sure he will do a great job, yes, selkie-child?”

Matt bared his teeth at him. Manannán laughed and patted his head maybe a touch less gently than he thought he was. Matt went wide-eyed and alarmed from the gesture.

“His Task then must be to the island,” Manannán said. “He must show allegiance and reverence.”

“Tell him this, not me,” Sister Maggie said.

Manannán obliged. He turned and finally, finally addressed Matt.

“I am sorry for the injuries that I caused you out of carelessness, selkie-child,” he said deeply.

Matt immediately became uncomfortable.

“It’s okay,” he mumbled. “Things happen.”

Manannán’s eyes softened.

“They happen to you quite often, don’t they?” he asked.

Matt’s discomfort began to seek new heights; once he found them, he began an abrupt descent into silence.

He nodded.

“I wish I could take back the offense,” Manannán said sincerely, “But your friends are loyal and have done the job for me. You’ve been in these waters before, have you not? You’ve traveled the island?”

Matt set his jaw and nodded once. Firm. Curt.

Atta boy, Matty.  

Manannán approved.

“You are a brave spirit,” he said. “And I can see that you are dedicated. Your Task will not be to the sea for now; our people shall have your service in time. And so instead I task you with honoring the spirits of the island. You’ve met them before, I believe. They helped you as a wee one. Retrace your steps. Repay them for their kindness.”

Matt blinked and cocked his head.

“Is that all?” he asked.

Manannán smiled.

“Do you want more?” he asked.

Matt threw up hands.

“No, sir,” he said. “That is good—great—plenty, actually.”

Manannán laughed like thunder and caught himself right before he slapped Matt on the shoulder.

“You are but young, selkie-child,” he said. “It is good that you came back to us so soon, elsewise your Task might have been more arduous. Now, go. And Steven—I expect my hound to return to this place before you leave this island.”

Steve saluted rather than answering.

Manannán was puzzled. He repeated the action back. Steve flinched.

“Uh. I mean. Yes, sir,” he said.

Manannán nodded.

“Return to your beacon,” he told Sister Maggie. “Your mate sings for you.”

“He better,” Sister Maggie said.

Manannán stood and watched them all as they slid into the water. He waved with swaying long hair and eyes the color of tidepools.

The water was cold out this far, and this time, Matt threw arms around Foggy’s neck. Sam said that, as Chief Decision-Maker of the Cap team, he’d decided that Steve was now going with Sister Maggie on the way back.

“Come now, Stíofan,” Sister Maggie told Steve’s pitiful stare. “It’ll be fun.”

“Go on, then, Steve,” Sam said. “We’ll meet you back at the lighthouse.”