Fractured Fairytales: The Little Mermaid

[Ianthe Thalasa]

 The ocean was vast, and there were still parts unexplored by the humans, parts that held within them glorious creatures of all manner. One such creature was a Mer girl of a youthful age - that age where curiosity overtook common sense, and that age which suggested that she knew more than those of her kind twice her age and beyond. A teen, for all intents and purposes. Specifically, the teenage daughter of King Aegaeon, and while he had many children, she was clearly the pearl of her father's eye. And at that very moment, she was exhibiting her superior knowledge by doing exactly what she had been asked (told) not to do: exploring.

It was dark in the tropical warm waters of the Caribbean, and Ianthe had been in her own secret cavern with all of the various treasures she had collected, arranging them neatly on shelves by category (by her specification, anyways). She had just returned from the wreckage of one of the strange vessels that humans dwelled upon, a "Galleon" as she had been told by a particularly knowledgeable crab, when a loud noise caught her attention. She left the comfort of her small abode to investigate, only to find that the night sky above the water was ablaze in a rainbow of colour - and sound.

She swam to the surface to see the rainbow in person, only to duck back under to avoid being showered by smoldering chunks of (wood?). What could this be? she wondered silently to herself, emerging once again and this time much more aware of where the hot pieces were raining down. She located the source easily once she took her eyes from skyward to the horizon - another Galleon, this one much larger and considerably more in-tact. The rainbow starbursts were coming from the side of it, launching into the air with a trail of sparks behind them before exploding into the wondrous vision that had attracted her in the first place.

She could hear more besides the percussion of the fireworks now that she was paying attention: laughter, music, the clanking of tankards that held within them festive drink. She trailed behind the ship at a safe distance for a while, but her curious urges got the better of her eventually, and she shot forth with a burst of speed, grabbing on to a large piece of wood protruding out from the side. She hoisted herself up and peered overboard, large violet eyes focused on the celebration taking place on the deck. Humans. She'd never, ever been so close to them before. She fixated on one that looked to be her own age, taking in his dark curls with a hushed gasp. He was handsome, much more so than the Mer boys she had met in court.

He was leaning against the railing of the ship, so close she could almost touch him. She had to stop herself, startling for a moment when he abruptly turned away and called out to the others. For a moment, her heart nearly stopped - had he seen her? But no, he was merely joining in to the conversation already at hand - something about a homecoming party? She didn't quite understand - their accents were strange, lilting almost, nothing like she had ever heard before. She knew that she should go, but she just couldn't resist a few more moments. More than likely, after she departed, she would swim back home and the boy would never be seen again.

Against her better judgment, she told herself she was okay - just this once. 

[Robert Triton]

There were plenty of areas that had yet to be explored by humans, but they were working on it.  Mostly.  Right now, they were more of the mindset to celebrate what they'd already accomplished, and with Robert's return to the open ocean with the crew, they were guaranteed to make more headway.  That he'd brought with him the funding and necessary permissions to venture into the areas they were interested in only made his 'welcome back' party more awesome.  They'd gotten new toys, necessary repairs on their ship, and the chance to dive down and explore some of the most interesting (and untouched) galleon shipwrecks known to man.  It was damn impressive.

What was also impressive was someone sneaking fireworks out there, and setting them off without alerting the whole crew, most of whom shouted and laughed over the sudden explosion of light and color above them.  Robert personally hoped that whoever was handling the flammables wasn't drinking, but there was a small group of them who'd promised not to, not including himself.  He was still probably sticking with just one, if only because it was supposed to be his 'party' and he was apparently not allowed to completely refuse the offers of a beer, but as long as he had one in his hand, he figured he was fine.

"Oy!  Get your ass away from that rail and have another beer!  Homecoming party or not, we're not fishin' you out of the black tonight!"

It seemed he was wrong, however, as he was leaning on the railing looking out over the water with said beer in hand when someone called out to him, and he shouted his response back with a laugh and a rude gesture with his body half-turned.  "Not everyone's a lush like you, Murph!  I'm not gonna fall in!"

Of course, he didn't understand that the redhead trying to draw him away from the railing wasn't human, or that he might have some insight into a subject that Robert had no knowledge on.  Robert just liked the water, and he liked being on it.  He was damn well going to enjoy his beer right where he was, and he turned back to the water to prove it.  He wasn't paying quite enough attention to notice their stowaway immediately, but he glanced in that direction, squinting in the dark with the impression that there'd been some kind of movement above the water.  Murphy hadn't been wrong to call it the 'black', as it was almost impossible to see past the line that the light exposed, and his night vision was wrecked by the lights behind him. 

[Ianthe Thalasa]

 Ianthe was holding her breath - literally - but it was mostly because the man, whose name she didn't know, was staring down about a few inches past where she was hiding. She was pressed against the side of the ship, frozen in her spot with her head tipped up at him. There were shadows concealing her, for the most part, but as the boat hit a particularly aggressive wave, her hair that she'd loosely wrapped in a bun to keep out of her face, unwound and tumbled down over her shoulders. It wouldn't have been such a big deal under any circumstance except for this particular one, and it was simply that while the man (the drop dead gorgeous man) turned back around so that the railing was to his chest, he took to gazing down into what was nothing but darkness and waves and the occasional jumping fish here or there, what he would plainly notice would be a flash of rich, ruby/fuchsia.

She thought maybe he hadn't at first, and closed her eyes, trying to pretend that if she didn't see him, he didn't see her. Then, of course, she opened her eyes again and realized that he was now leaning over the railing. And looking right at her. Right at her. His beautiful brown eyes were wide with shock, and the bottle in his hand fell, rolling across the deck and dropping into the ocean next to Ianthe. She knew she needed to do the same thing, but she just couldn't bring herself to. They stayed like that, eyes locked, until someone came up from behind him and slapped him on the back.

"Hey! We're about to start prepping. Radio just said a storm is picking up, so save the star gazing for a few minutes, huh?" the female said. She smiled, vivid aqua eyes near-sparkling. She turned around as someone called to her. Ianthe couldn't hear much, but she saw the woman nod and the man mutter, "Sure, Daph," before she disappeared from view.

"Are you... real?" he whispered, looking back at Ianthe.

"Please don't tell," she said quickly. She let go of the perch she was sitting on and fell the distance into the water, landing in it without a noise. Below the surface, she felt like puking. How could she have been seen? She just SAT there like an idiot! What had she said? Please don't tell? Brilliant. She sank slowly down to the shelf, watching as schools of fish shot by her.

Storm coming storm storm coming the hive mind sang to her, greeting as they passed.

She looked back up, the fireworks having ceased and the surface like inky glass so far above her. The boat was certainly big enough to withstand a storm - or it looked like it, anyways. Then again, what did she know about boats, really?

[Robert Triton]

Leaning over the railing to see better almost didn't seem like it was going to accomplish much of anything, considering how still everything except the water splashing up against the side of the boat was, but then, there it was.  There she was, since it was unmistakeably a 'she' that he was looking at, and he'd be ashamed to admit that he was gawking like a freshman with braces while the senior and head cheerleader actually noticed him.  There was eye contact, and his bottle slid from his fingers and off the side of the boat without him even noticing it was gone, his eyes wide and his lips parted like there was something he needed to say, even if the words wouldn't come.

He furthered embarrassed himself, once Daphne stepped up beside him and broke what had almost become a shocked staring contest with necessary information about an approaching storm, by ending his fight with his brain for a bit of logical thinking with a stupid question.  Seriously?  'Are you real?'  Was that the best he could come up with?  Probably, actually.  She was beautiful, she was exotic, she was actually paying attention to him, and she absolutely, positively had a fish tail.  A mermaid. Seriously?  Had he been drugged?  He'd only had one drink, so it wasn't the beer.  Maybe he was coming down with something?

She asked him not to tell, which he supposed sounded like a legitimate response on some level, and pretty much would have continued to stare if she hadn't let go and fallen to the water.  He reached like he might stop her, hissing a protest at her, but what was he going to do?  Jump over the rail after her?  Hang on and hold her up?  Not a chance, even if she was real, which he was doubting.  If there was a decent storm coming, he had to help secure their equipment, but he was definitely going to be sleeping through it, otherwise.  Whatever was wrong with him, he needed to go sleep it off, or something.

"What's wrong, dude?  You look all...something.  I'd say 'pale', but you're always pale.  Clear?  Slender-pale?" their equipment tech, a usually funny guy by the name of Jason, cut in.  Robert stared at him, blinking back the vision of the mermaid, and shook his head.

"What's 'slender-pale'?"

"You've never heard of Slenderman?  Holy crap, I have something to show you after we're done with storm prep."

"Do I even want to know?"

"Yes.  Yes, you do.  Your life will be richer for it."

As it turned out, there was nothing about Slenderman that made Robert's life 'richer', but it sure as hell took his mind off of the mermaid for a little while.  By the time he was on his bed in his small quarters trying to brush up on the history of the ships they were looking to find and explore, he'd mostly convinced himself that the mermaid was a figment of his imagination caused by beer, jet lag and not enough sleep.  That was his best guess, and considering how quickly he nodded off over his work, the 'not enough sleep' part was probably pretty legitimate, though he wasn't getting a full night's.  He'd barely been out an hour before the storm really hit its full-on rage moments, and then the ship was up and down over massive waves that eventually just started thrashing it about.  He woke up as he was thrown from his bed, and that was when the fun started.  The lights kicked off and after a few seconds in the dark, the emergencies kicked on.

"Fuck."

[Ianthe Thalasa]

 Robert wasn't the only one who'd woken up as they'd been tossed - except, Daphne hadn't been sleeping. She'd been below deck with everyone else, but on the other side of the ship in the navigation room. The storm was fucking with their equipment big-time - she didn't know why, because they weren't, like, in the Bermuda Triangle or anything (quite the opposite - they were way south and east, complete on the other side of Cuba and blocked by the Caribbean Islands. In fact, the last time she'd checked, they were about 400 miles to the east of Barbados, where a small hub of their research center was.

She woke up as her chair swung her back with the rough rise and fall of the boat, and yelled as her feet kicked up, sending her on her side before she had a chance to shoot back and launch over the doorway into the hall beyond (and below, by the orientation of the boat). As it rocked again, she jumped up, ignoring the ache in her arm from where she landed. She ran to the controls as the boat leveled out, then grabbed on to the bar below the console to hang on as it went full tilt behind her again. She grabbed, with her hurting arm, the com.

"All hands, all hands, at your stations!" she cried.

The first person to rush in was their tech genius, Jason, and Murphy right behind him. The tall Irishman immediately took control of the boat, setting everything to manual and trying to do his best to keep it in a straight path. "What happened?" he demanded, immediately nodding for Jason to go for the equipment that was obviously going batshit. "What the fuck is our radar doing?" he asked, looking over at Daphne.

"We fucked up, guys," she said, her voice laden with desperation and fear. "I don't know how, but our nav was off, and it's been off for a few hours now. The last time I checked it, I told you we should be there by morning? We thought we were only about 400 from our center, then. Now? We're more like 700, and that's generous. Every piece on that console is telling me something different," she said, gritting her teeth as she rolled the sleeve of her button-down up to observe her arm. She'd scraped it against something when she fell, and little fuzz from her shirt clung to the severe-looking raspberry, which was bleeding (but not gushing).

"Bottom line?" Murphy asked, bending at his knees to stop himself from sliding around as the ship rocked. He had a good enough grip on the wheel that he wasn't going anywhere.

Daphne swallowed. "Bottom line is that I don't know where we are right now. If this is correct, we're so far off our course that we're closer to Aruba than Barbados, and I can't even say if that's true. My weather equipment can't tell me how big the storm is, where the eye is, or how fast it's moving. Everything is on the fritz." She paused, then took a deep breath. "We're sailing blind, guys."

The rest of the crew was making their way around the ship, but Jason was still concentrating on something flashing on the screen. "Daphne, there's something coming at us," he said, his voice terse. "It's - "

And that was the last thing he got out before they felt what seemed like a bomb going off in the center of the ship. A surge of water rushed into the room from somewhere unknown, and all three of them yelled as they tried to find something to grab on to. Instantly, they were up-ended, and Daphne was flat against the console on her stomach, staring down the long corridor - and about 100 feet beyond, the angry ocean below. It felt like a scary carnival ride, and she closed her eyes, ignoring the salt water as it burned them, hoping when she opened them it would all be over. When she did, though, it was still happening.

Then there was another impact, and she felt herself slide forward. Now having no friction due to the water rushing around, she skittered across the console and down, hand thrusting out to grab the doorway before she fell into the black water below them. She looked below her, trying to see if she could swing herself down into a lower level, but it was useless - her hand slipped, and with a short, terrified scream, she disappeared into the darkness and the ocean swallowed her whole.

Right about this time, Ianthe, who had a lengthy debate on whether to go back to the boat to see how it fared in the hurricane, was coming up on the entire situation. Apparently they had run right into a massive rock formation that jutted out like a monolith, surrounding a small island that wasn't significant enough otherwise to appear on maps. It took Ianthe a moment to realize what was happening when she saw something floating down into the water ahead of them. It was a human - and utterly limp.

Oh no!, she thought, her mind firstly moving to the handsome man she'd seen only hours before. She shot over to the body like a rocket, only to realize upon scooping it up that it wasn't him at all - it wasn't even a he. It was a woman, the same woman from the ship before, and with relief, Ianthe looked into her bright aqua eyes, preparing for her obvious shock and thrashing that would soon follow - and realized that the woman was already dead. Ianthe closed her eyes sadly, her smile fading, and slowly released her into the waves. If she had been there quicker, perhaps -

No time to think about that now. She realized that if she didn't try to act quickly, everyone else who ended up in the water was going to drown, too. She wished that her Mer friends were more open to helping people than she was, but she couldn't think of anyone to call to help her. She took a breath and steeled herself, avoiding pieces of the ship as they crashed around her. It was now completely split in half by the rock formation, and any minute now, there would be people for her to save.

The first came in the form of a man that had long, dark hair (almost as long as hers), and wore it in strange thick rolls. His skin was dark, like the people she saw on the islands. With one arm, she swam at a quick speed towards the edge of the island, which wasn't but a few hundred feet away. She dumped him off, satisfied when she heard him coughing, and took back into the water like a garnet flash.

[Robert Triton]

Baptiste was lucky, having gotten Ianthe's help when he did, however hardy he was; he'd realized quickly how fucked they were and jumped off the ship before he was trapped inside.  That left him with a hell of a time staying on the surface and not being splattered against the ship or the rocks, or sucked down after the thing, but it also gave him a fighting chance for shore up until someone grabbed hold of him and helped him along.

Murphy, salty dog that he was, had gotten saddled with Jason when he reached for Daphne and somehow missed, which left him with a struggle on his hands getting a grasp on something and yanking them out into the hallway and up.  He saw a flash in the distance of movement and hoped it was something from the room and not Daphne that disappeared down that hallway out of reach, but there was no air and he had a desperate young man practically clinging to him as he pulled them along.  They broke the surface in the hallway with the water level quickly rising, and he had to give Jason a good, hard shove the get him climbing towards a door out onto one of the decks.  It worked, and got the both standing on the outside wall, which was where Jason hesitated.

"Oh, God, we're not gonna make it.  It's just gonna suck us back down, Murph," the kid moaned, breathing more labored from the fight for oxygen than the veteran diver, but he nudged Jason, anyway.

"Quit bitchin', we're gonna be fine.  We jump, then deep breath just before we hit, okay?  It'll try to drag you down, just keep kicking for the surface and shore.  Stay close, on three.  One, two, three!"  Surprisingly, he didn't push Jason before three, but that was mostly so that the kid actually got a good breath on the way down.  When he'd said, 'stay close', he hadn't exactly meant for Jason to hang onto him and not let go, which was an issue when they finally kicked free of the sinking vessel to make the surface, since Jason didn't want to be shoved off to swim on his own, and he was practically drowning his older friend. 

Somehow, in the mess of things, he actually found the surface with his flailing crew member in tow, and it took a good left hook to stop Jason from freaking out long enough for Murphy to get them rolling in the direction of the shoreline.  Robert didn't have Murphy or Baptiste's luck, it seemed, because his end of the ship went down while the others were still being tossed around.  Sucks to be the guy who got first break, apparently, though being on the bridge really hadn't helped Daphne all that much.

Robert tried to think logically about the ship layout and his current situation, but it was hard when the ship was flooded around him and his chances at oxygen were getting slimmer each second, and that wasn't counted the way the whole structure rocked and pitched with deep, thunderous booms over and over.  He didn't know that they'd been smashed into the rocks along an island that they shouldn't have been anywhere near, or that the ocean just kept grinding them against the same obstacles. 

All he knew was that if he didn't find an opening and the surface immediately, he was going to drown, which was what made finding the door to the deck where they'd all been laughing and drinking a mixed blessing.  He could see through the window, looking up, but trying to get the door open with all that pressure was near impossible without leverage.  He had to fight to hang onto a doorway while random shit being carried along by the water smacked into him so that he could kick at the door, and even that seemed almost like it wouldn't work.

Amazingly, the thing finally squealed open, the sound echoing strangely through the turbulent, roaring waters, but he only really had the ability to wonder at it at about that moment.  That he noticed it at all was amazing, but that was just more of a sign that he was failing.  He was out of air, and even getting the door open, he had a long way to the surface and the sinking boat seemed certain to continue dragging him down with its suction.  He was normally a strong swimmer, and he was fighting now because it was literally sink or swim, but his lungs were nearing their panicked limit as he kicked and paddled furiously.  He was still too far from the surface of the water when his lungs gave out and the inevitable desperate gasp for air occurred.  Obviously, all he got was water, which impeded his progress in a very bad way.  He wasn't going to make it.

[Ianthe Thalasa]

 Ianthe had finally gotten the stones to hit the actual wreckage of the ship once it was fully submerged, though she still maintained a healthy fear of being crushed to death when the compartments buckled under the extreme pressure at the ocean floor - where they were eventually going to end up. Oh no, oh no, oh no, she thought to herself, much like a mantra. She couldn't find him!

Finally she wizened up a little, catching some nearby fish. She told them to go into the boat and report back to her - her telepathy could reach a decent distance, though it was in no way like the King, who could reach all his people. Tell me where he is, she demanded. Or I will eat every last one of you. And with that, she bared her teeth at the tiny fish, showing that she absolutely would do it. They shot away from her like little rockets, crawling the flooded compartments quickly. Their size was ideal for this sort of thing, since they could clear rooms without having to bother with obstacles like furniture or falling metal.

Found him found him up top hurry hurry, she heard them all call in their collective voices. She swam as fast as she could (Mer could move at a good klick, roughly 80 in fact [about 50 miles an hour, which was fucking fast]) until she spotted a body suspended in the water. Unlike the other, though, this one had only just stopped moving, as told to her by the fish as she came alongside it.

Man kick and kick and then stop. We go away now, NO EAT, they informed her, turning tail and vanishing back to the depths.

Ianthe had her hands full, then, literally - she wrapped her arms around Robert and went for the surface as quickly as she could. She ended up a ways down the beach of the small island (which was maybe only a half-mile in diameter, with a little forest and that was it), not that being out of sight would have mattered since the storm was still going, although considerably less bad then it had been. She threw him down on the sand, hard, and scrambled up next to him. She'd never done CPR on a person before, only seen laminated copies adrift from a plane crash years before, but she still remembered how the pictures went. Unfortunately for Robert, Mer were strong, so he would probably sustain some broken ribs before this was over.

He began coughing and sputtering, and Ianthe yanked him forward to sit him up, promptly backing away as he leaned his head between his knees and threw up generous amounts of sea water. She pointed upward on the beach. "Your friends are that way," she told him, knowing that he was barely coherent. "I have to go." But she didn't.

[Robert Triton]

The fish were correct in their information, since he really had only just stopped kicking for the surface, but that didn't make it any less horrible to experience on his end.  Drowning hurt, and that was being topped off by the impact of a speeding torpedo smacking into him and rushing him to shore, throwing him down on the sand and then giving him the most aggressive amateur CPR that anyone could boast; all of this after being pitched around his room and then the inside of the boat before it flooded.  Suffice to say, he was pretty damn battered for his violent awakening, which consisted of being forced into a sitting position despite the cry that tried to escape him over broken ribs being jolted.

That attempt at a shout only propelled the expulsion of the water from his lungs harder, so he had a rough few minutes of yacking and gagging on saltwater, which burned as much coming out as it had going in.  He was pretty damn miserable when the water stopped coming and breathing became his prime objective, and every damn inhale and exhale burned throughout his entire torso, it seemed.  Broken ribs, man.

On some level, he'd heard what she said, though he glanced her way dumbly at about the same time that he collapsed backwards into the shallow water and sand, which only made him shout again because, damn it, that hurt.  It was about the time his eyes cracked open and he saw scales that her face clicked in his mind, and then he was pushing himself back up to a halfway-upright position on his elbow.  He sure as hell wasn't at full thinking and reasoning capacity, but he stared blatantly at that tail, then looked to her like none of it made sense.  He was obviously delirious, it was pain, stress and lack of oxygen to his brain for a few moments, not a mermaid.  A mermaid who'd saved him, yanked him out of the ocean and given him air when he needed it.  He was alive because of her.

"Why?" he asked, his voice rough and abused, and though it likely sounded like he was asking why she had to go (that was part of it), there was also the question in his mind about why she'd saved him.  Why care?  People died in the sea all the time.  Brain to mouth filter, not working, though his manners seemed to be.  "Thank you."

[Ianthe Thalasa]

 Ianthe felt like she knew why he asked why. It wasn't to be rude, but it was simply just wondering why they mattered to her at all. Obviously, they were two totally different creatures - and since she was technically not supposed to exist, or so she'd been told, she was fairly certain that he probably had some ill-begotten notion that pretty much everything hated humans as a whole. Well, it wasn't so ill-begotten, anyways - most Mer did, considering things like the vortex of trash and pollution, but not all of them were like that. Some of them even supported "coming out", but... it was a very small few.

"I don't know," she said, talking loudly to be heard over the storm. She paused for a second as she turned to leave, looking back at him. "I'm sorry about your friend. She was gone by the time I got to her." She nodded. "If you take your friends to the center of the island, you may find enough growth to offer you shelter. The storm will last a few more hours, but the worst of it has passed. Don't go back to the wreckage, though. It's too unstable. It belongs to the ocean, now."

The way she said it sounded almost ominous, as though that was their price for sailing through the way they had. She didn't mean it that way, though - Ianthe had no idea about any of their shit malfunctioning, and the only person that really did was dead. Well, Jason and Murphy to a lesser extent, but not at all like what their navigator had been watching. At any rate, she turned and left, wriggling back into the water. Her tail flipped above for just a second, the colours all purples and pinks and reds - and then she was gone.

She swam away at a quick pace, not eager to be smashed against the outlaying reef by the waves. Once she was in deeper water she slowed down, releasing a sigh that bubbled away. Eventually, someone would find them, probably within a day or so. She shouldn't go back and check on them. She hadn't even gotten his name! Not that it would have mattered, since - well, obvious reasons.

[Robert Triton]

She answered his question with what was something of a non-answer, though it rang true through the harsh wind and rain - that, and he was far too hurt and worn out to put too much more into the wondering.  He nodded at the response, and then focused in on what she was telling him, trying to absorb it all when his mind and body were more than willing to claim 'nap time' and be done for a little while.  The idea of going off to find his friends and then move to the center of the island sounded utterly exhausting, but he nodded some more, determined to do whatever it took to survive.

Of course, if it was possible to make it work without all that, he might do that, as well.  He didn't know that, even as the mermaid was giving him instructions, his friends were already seeking shelter from the storm at Murphy's insistence, or that Daphne was dead, which made the apology about his friend all the more cryptic.  She pulled off mysterious and ominous very well.

"Thank you!" he shouted after her, not really sure what else to say as she took off, though as he choked on the words, he wondered if perhaps asking for her name might have been a good idea.  Real charmer he was, but it probably didn't even matter; if she was actually real and had more than a passing interest in him at this point, she was still a mermaid, and therefore waaaaay beyond his level of 'it's complicated'.  Not even something he had to worry about.

Getting further up the shore was, however, and it took a few tries to get up with the waves breaking at his feet and the tide coming in, but staying wasn't an option.  He'd be pulled out to sea all over again before the storm was through, and she was right about needing shelter.  With the way his chest was aching from the abuse his ribs had taken, he wasn't sure how far he was moving, but once he was on his feet, he just worked on putting one foot in front of the other.  In the sand, that was easier said than done, but he managed.

Kind of.  Heading down the beach on his own was a quiet process simply because he'd gone through enough without screaming himself hoarse, and he lucked out that Murphy opted to have someone watching the beach while they took turns napping and trying to recover; they were missing people, and he didn't want to be gone when those people came looking.

For that exact reason, Robert's stumble through the sand and the way he was clutching at his ribs and nearly doubled over against the rain and wind was not only noticed, but Muphy jumped up and gestured Baptiste to come with him to get their formerly lost researcher.  Judging from the relief and exhaustion obvious when the redhead reached the man, the help was appreciated.  That was good, since Baptiste didn't ask before moving to gingerly assist.

"Didn't expect you, of all people, wandering down the beach.  You okay?" Murphy asked him, looking concerned, but refraining from asking for the moment.

"Good enough, just want to get out of the rain," he returned, and Murph snorted, but nodded and picked up the pace.  They didn't have great shelter, but it'd do for the time being, and Robert happily took advantage of it for a fucking nap right off the bat.  Recovery time.