The Rook

-.-.-

Chapter One: Because There's Beauty In The Breakdown

-.-.-

It all started with the rook.

“Excuse me,” he interrupted uncertainly, adjusting his glasses with a nervous smile, “Don’t you mean it started with the shipwreck?”

“No, it started with the rook, it all started with the rook! Nothing was wrong before the rook everything was normal dark but normal but the rook made things wrong and he--”

“Calm down! Please.” The psychologist adjusted his glasses again, using the movement to try to surreptitiously wipe sweat from his brow. This patient was new, and he was nervous because of it. His tension wasn’t missed, however. “I believe you. Did the rook come before or after the shipwreck?”

“…After.”

“Tell me about the shipwreck first, then, if you’d please. You can tell me about the rook when you get to… him.”

“Okay. It started with the rook, but before that, the ship went down. I don’t know why it did…” The patient messed with a silver charm bracelet, twirling it around a thin wrist. The psychologist wrote the observation down on his clipboard. “My parents were on the ship. Mom had gotten a lifejacket for herself and for me. I think dad had one, too, but he lost his--maybe he gave it away--he’d do that--”

“Take a deep breath, then continue.”

The order was followed. “Dad was telling us to get to the lifeboats. He was going back, but… I don’t know why. I don’t know why any of that had to happen. Why did it have to happen?! We had just wanted to go on a vacation, and instead--”

-.-.-

Michael Sante was lifted bodily and held out over the edge of the boat. He stared down in terror at the water so far below. The boat lurched and he nearly fell out, but the man helping them into the lifeboat caught him. Heart pounding, he turned back fearfully to where his mother was helping a little girl over the edge.

“Mom.”

One word. One simple word, pathetically called, and that was all the beckoning she needed. Little girl nestled safely into the boat, his mother climbed carefully over the railing and stepped over towards their rescue. The boat behind them lurched again, this time accompanied by a horrible scraping sound. The flames that had been creeping stealthily along before were now rushing to find more fuel. People started screaming--as if they weren’t before.

The world suddenly got a lot quieter as hands firmly covered his ears. Michael looked up, but his head was turned and buried in his mother’s shoulder instead.

“Where’s dad?” he asked, voice muffled by her shirt.

She took her hands off of his ears and instead concentrated on smoothing back his blonde hair from his forehead. “He’ll be coming. He just had to make sure your uncle and aunt were okay.”

The lifeboat hit the water and they started to row away from the sinking ship. Another explosion came, however, and upset the little vessel. Michael’s mother was tipped overboard, inadvertently tugging her son along with her. A couple others were in the water as well, splashing and spluttering. The water wasn’t terribly cold, but it was still hard to breathe in the lifejacket and the sudden shock of it.

Michael turned around, seeing their lifeboat on fire. “Come on, Michael, this way, there’s an island just over there--!” He turned again to where his mother was pointing. The island just over there was far away. Just a speck, really, on the horizon. But with the ship on fire and the lifeboat on fire and people screaming and chaos and everything going wrong, so very wrong, he had to swim--

-.-.-

“Please calm down,” he insisted, almost begged. The patient took a deep breath and tried to stop the hands connected to the jingling, silver charm bracelet from shaking. The psychologist cleared his throat, glanced down at the clipboard, and said softly, “Why don’t we talk about something else right now? You can tell me about the shipwreck later. Tell me about your vacation up until that point.”

“It was… fun. We took a flight to Florida, and that’s where the ship left from. It was really warm and I spent a lot of time on the deck. I hadn’t ever been on a ship before.” The words seemed forced, contrived, mechanical. The patient was still calming down, so the psychologist tried not to dwell on that. “…I had met them on the ship. Tuesday and Mr. Silvermin. I had stood on the railing next to Tuesday when we first left, and we sat at the same table as Mr. Silvermin to eat dinner that night.”

“Tell me about them.” The psychologist hoped the relief didn’t show in his voice to get to a less upsetting topic.

“Mr. Silvermin was always polite. He and my dad talked about business during dinner. He seemed very responsible. Respectable. He tried to take care of us, too, on the island.”

“Tried to?”

“…” The silence was suddenly too thick and too heavy. The psychologist sighed, adjusted his glasses, and scribbled something out on his clipboard. Dark eyes watched him.

“Anything else about him?”

“He had reddish-brown hair and a mustache--”

“About his personality, not his looks. I have seen a photograph of Mr. Silvermin and know what he looks like.” He smiled, trying to reassure his patient. Not that anything could do that, oh no, not after everything that happened. Still, it was worth a shot.

“He’s very smart and tries very hard to do the right thing,” came the perfectly toneless reply. The psychologist frowned.

“I know what you mean by that, but…”

“I… I don’t know what to say about him. I’m sorry that I don’t. I never really interacted much with him, never got to know him very well. I know he’s a businessman, he has a bit of an accent, and he feels responsible for what happened.”

“Do you think he’s responsible for what happened?”

The air in the room got impossibly heavier. The psychologist stood his ground on this one; he had to find out something other than a story for this session. He had to try to fix the damage that had been done, and the first step to that was having the patient admit to certain feelings.

Finally, the answer came in a very small, very meek, “No.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t do anything wrong!”

The psychologist wrote that down. Peeking over the edge of his clipboard, he tried to figure out how to approach the situation once more. “…Tell me about Tuesday now.”

“She… I don’t know about her.”

“You have to know something about her.”

“I don’t.”

“Come now, you don’t have any opinion whatsoever?”

“I… I don’t know what to say about her! She’s--she’s just so--she’s the one who suggested it in the first place!” The shouted words hung in the room as if there’d been an echo. The psychologist didn’t have to write that down; he’d never forget those words or the accompanying expression for as long as he lived.

For the first time, he tried to think of this not as another case, but as the tragedy it really was.

“…Do you not like Tuesday?”

“…She was nice to me. I liked her.”

“That was past tense. Was it meant to be?”

“I… like her. She was kind and told me stories. We would lay on the sand together and she would tell me fairytales and stuff. She tried to tell me the story of Hamlet once, but it didn’t come out very good.”

“So… you liked these stories?”

“Yes. I did.”

“But you still hold bitter feelings?”

“I… A bit… But… She suggested it, so it was her fault, wasn’t it? It was all her fault?” The question ended in a high voice, the patient staring up at his psychologist with eyes that begged for an excuse, any excuse. Any excuse in the world to assuage the guilt and create an answer that could be taken as the gospel truth.

So the psychologist did the only thing he could in that situation without making things irreparably worse. “I thought you said it was all the rook’s fault,” he replied mildly.

His patient’s face fell. It was not the proper answer, not one that had been looked for at any rate, but it was the only one that would ever received from a decent human being.

“…Tell me, how many of you made it to that island?”

“There were four of us. Mr. Silvermin, Tuesday, myself, and my dad.”

The psychologist’s head snapped up in surprise. He hadn’t heard that part before. “Your father? Then… What happened to your father?”

The dull, forced responses were back. “He swam out to save someone who was drowning. He didn’t come back.”

-.-.-

“Dad, don’t, don’t do it! Come back!” Michael pulled on his father’s arm insistently, rapidly nearing tears.

“For God’s sake, man, I’ll do it!” Silvermin protested, walking with them both down to the edge of the beach.

“Don’t worry about me.” He was already kicking off his shoes and taking off his jacket. He turned and smiled at Michael reassuringly, ruffling his hair. “You know I’m a good swimmer, don’t you? I’ll be back in just a minute!”

Michael finally started crying, letting go in favor of wiping the tears away. His father strode away, Silvermin following and hissing things under his breath. Just off the shore, the splashing could be heard getting weaker, the shouting coming in intermittent periods.

“Look! She’s drowning! I’ll be right back!” Michael’s father finally snapped at Silvermin. The red-haired man looked slightly taken aback and did nothing further to try to dissuade him from swimming back out into the ocean. Michael ran towards his father, but he was already wading out into the sea. Silvermin held out an arm and caught the boy, dragging him back so he wouldn’t pursue him.

“Don’t worry, your father will be right back,” he said quietly, watching.

“Dad, come back!”

He didn’t.

-.-.-

“…He was a brave man. He died trying to save another’s life,” the psychologist said quietly.

He expected anger, or bitterness, or perhaps even tears. All he got was, “He didn’t have to go.”

“Would you have let the woman drown?”

“…No. Mr. Silvermin would have went, though! Why couldn’t he have let him go--?!”

“I can’t pretend to know what happened, or his motives. I’m sorry. I’m sure he would have loved nothing more than to return to you, but he had to go out and try to save the woman.”

“…He was hoping it was mom,” the patient said listlessly, staring down at the silver charm bracelet.

“Then can you really blame him?”

“He left me! He left me for a chance--”

“A chance to bring your family back together. Wouldn’t that have been worth it?” He got no reply, but it wasn’t as if he’d been expecting one. He jotted down a few more notes on the situation on his clipboard, and then looked back up at the patient sitting across from him. “…Tell me how the island went before you met the rook.”

-.-.-

“I-I-I--”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay.”

“He-He--”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she murmured, brushing back his hair like his mother had.

It was nearing sundown, and no one else had shown up on the island. His father hadn’t come back, and the woman he’d been trying to save hadn’t appeared, either. It was just the three of them on the island, alone.

Michael was currently being rocked as he cried. The brown-haired girl was doing it, trying to act motherly. He needed it, but it didn’t mean he liked it. Only his mother should be doing this--but if she was, then he wouldn’t be in the situation in the first place…

“Wh-Why did this happen,” he whispered, voice hoarse.

“I don’t know,” she replied softly, rubbing his shoulders. “It’s terrible though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, let’s just go to sleep. It’s getting dark, and maybe they’ll show up in the morning,” she continued in that same quiet, soothing voice.

“I-I know th-they won’t!” he wailed. With that, Michael started crying again, unable to stop himself. He had never cried so much in his life before. Then again, his life just hours before seemed so foreign to him now. He had been happy then.

“You don’t know that, shh. Some people really do show up the next morning. Haven’t you ever seen Titanic? Look at how long they were out there for.”

Standing a little ways away, the businessman cleared his throat. “Bad example,” he remarked. She gave him a look, but soon turned her attention back to Michael.

“Let’s just go to sleep now, since we have nothing else to do. Things will be better in the morning. …Would you like a story?” She smoothed back his hair again, smiling. The silver charm bracelet on her wrist sparkled in the fading light. Michael nodded miserably, sniffling. “Well, let’s see. Once upon a time, there was this dog and a cat. They always, always fought…”

Michael wasn’t sure at what point he fell asleep, but he never did find out what happened to the dog and the cat. He didn’t dream or wake up at all during the night, so the next time he opened his eyes, all he knew was that it was bright out, he was stiff, he was hungry, and he had a headache.

He sat up and propped himself up with an elbow, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. He felt horrible. Unfortunately, he soon remembered why. He sat fully up and started taking deep breaths to try to stop himself from crying. Things would look better in the morning, right? And maybe his parents had shown up in the night!

Michael clambered to his feet, and, after stretching, started to investigate the beach. There was no one in sight, which was saying something, because he could see a lot. The beach spread out on his right and left almost endlessly, and the sea lay in front of him, equally vast. Behind him, however, was the forest.

He started walking towards it, looking for other footprints, but found none. Instead, he found green. There were grasses, ferns, bizarre plants and trees all around. Having lived in Colorado for all of his life, Michael was definitely unprepared for a tropical habitat.

“…if we just climb it--”

“And how do you propose doing that easily?”

Michael turned when he heard voices. They were immediately recognizable as Tuesday and Silvermin, however, dashing any hope he had of seeing his parents again. Just the thought of that brought stinging tears back to his eyes. Wiping them away with his wrist, he clambered through the undergrowth in the direction of the voices. Not too far away, the girl and man were standing under a large palm tree, staring up at it.

Tuesday was the first to notice him, breaking out into a wide smile when she did. “Look! We found coconuts.”

“We just need to get the blasted things down, now…” Silvermin added, mostly to himself.

Michael looked around. A lot of the trees looked like the one in front of them, but now that he was really looking, it seemed as that not all of them had coconuts. “…Why can’t we just climb the tree?” he asked, sniffing.

Tuesday’s smile dimmed a couple watts. “Well, there’s no branches to climb with, for one. And the bark is really rough and scratchy, so whoever climbs it would probably cut themselves pretty badly.”

“I’ve climbed trees before,” Michael said as he stepped closer to the tree. “I’m good at it.”

“Have you ever climbed a palm tree before?” Silvermin asked, nodding at the tree. “They’re a different sort of animal.”

“Tree,” he corrected, patting the trunk. It was pretty rough, but he didn’t think it was too bad. Not that much worse than regular tree bark, anyway. “I could climb this--”

“If you fall, or cut yourself, or hurt yourself, we can’t just go to the hospital,” Tuesday cut in nervously, shifting her weight to her other leg. “That’s what we’re worried about. Even a little cut or scrape could get infected, and then that would be bad.”

“We’ll be able to get to a hospital later, though. When we get rescued.” Michael hadn’t really thought about them being shipwrecked before, or stranded on an apparently deserted island, but it was true. All they could do was wait for someone to come and pick them up and take them back home. So that meant that they were on their own until then… “Do we have gloves or something? If we cover my hands, then I won’t get scraped.”

Tuesday and Silvermin looked at each other. “I don’t have any gloves,” she said as the man shook his head.

“I have my jacket, and that would protect your arms, though. The sleeves should be long enough to cover your hands…” He took off his jacket and held it out for Michael. True to his word, it dwarfed the boy. The sleeves easily covered his hands, and then some. “See? Ingenuity at its finest.”

Michael smiled, the first time in quite awhile. He jumped when Silvermin picked him up, however. “Wha--?”

“It may only be a couple feet, but it’s a boost nonetheless,” he replied briskly, setting him on his shoulders with a grunt. “See if that doesn’t help you.”

“An-And don’t worry, we’ll catch you if you fall!” Tuesday added, circling the trunk anxiously.

After the problem of the rough trunk was solved, however--even if Michael could do nothing but worry about his hands and if he were to get hurt and get infected--getting to the top was easy. He had to hug the tree with one arm while he pried the coconuts off, which was a little difficult at first, but he soon got the hang of it. A couple of the coconuts nearly hit the pair below, too, but even that was easily taken care of as they watched from afar.

“I’m coming back down!” he called. He had gotten all but the two toughest ones off of the tree and figured that that would be enough for some food. At least for a little while. He didn’t know how long they were going to be on the island, but surely it wouldn’t be that long. He wasn’t sure about eating nothing but coconuts for any amount of time.

“Wait! Can you see if you can get a couple of the leaves off as well?” Silvermin shouted back up. He earned two confused looks in response. “Palm leaves can be used for a lot of things. Beds, for starters, and green leaves tend to smoke when burned. We’ll need to start a signal fire at some point today.”

It only took a few moments of wrestling with the leaves, however, for Michael to discover that it would be too hard to get them off of the tree. “I can’t! They’re too tough!”

“It’s fine! We’ll just find ones already on the ground!” Tuesday chirped, beckoning him back down.

After managing to find some bananas as well, the trio settled down on the beach to eat and discuss. Or rather, Silvermin discussed, Tuesday tried to offer some help, and Michael listened. They decided that food and water had to be a priority. They had enough food for the rest of the day, but they only had what liquid was inside the coconuts and seawater for water. (Actually, only the coconut water. Michael had suggested drinking the seawater and was immediately and rather harshly shot down by both of the others.)

Among the three of them, they had very little. The clothes on their backs, Silvermin had an old Swiss army knife that was a little dull and hadn’t been used properly in years, Tuesday had pockets full of gum, candy wrappers, and a cell phone ruined by the seawater, and the lifejackets Michael and Tuesday had had was all that they possessed. Everything else was in the ocean.

“…Buck up! Everything will be alright. We’ll start a fire, make a bit of a shelter, shall we? And before you know it, rescue will be coming and picking us up and we’ll be back to civilization before we know it!” Silvermin exclaimed, clasping his hands together. Tuesday and Michael continued eating their bananas, cheerless and mute. “Alright then… You two stay here, and, er, start building a pit or something along those lines for a fire. I will go see if I can’t find anything else a little further inland. Stay here on the beach, alright?”

“Okay, Mr. Silvermin,” Tuesday replied quietly, glancing back at the trees behind her.

The man traipsed off. Michael watched him go. Tuesday was more focused on her silver charm bracelet. She twisted it a couple times on her wrist, then sighed, setting her hands on her feet as she drew her knees up to her chest.

Michael turned so that he could look at the sparkling water. “…Do people show up on the second day?” he asked after too long of a silence. She looked up at him.

It took her too long to create the necessary reassuring smile for the situation. “Sure, of course they do,” she said. Michael knew better, though; she had told him the truth before she’d even opened her mouth. He blinked a couple times to make sure the tears wouldn’t come again, took another bite of his banana, and continued looking out at the water.