Ship In A Bottle || South Park Pirate AU

Fifteen

In which the bottle reforms, fragile and misshapen.

Kyle was held captive inside the navigation room. It had hardly felt spacious before, but now it was positively suffocating. Claustrophobia soaked into his veins, so that every time he looked away, and then looked back again, the walls had inched a little closer together, jostling him into a tighter and tighter ball, curled up in the corner, still sobbing.

He had been shoved in here with nothing more than a chamber pot and a dark look, so he had no other place to sleep but on the cold hard floor. He recalled his first night on board, tucked up like sardines with the other pirates in a cosy little cabin. Nothing about this was cosy. It was just small, and silent, and lonely. When his crying had petered off, he rolled onto his side and stared into the pitch black, trying to summon the memory of his crewmates' gentle snoring. It was a futile attempt to lull himself into unconsciousness.

Not my crewmates, he thought to himself. He wasn't one of them anymore. Maybe Stan was right, and he never truly had been.

He wanted to fall asleep before he started crying again but did not succeed. The last thing he tasted before he dropped off was a tear as it tricked into his mouth. It tasted like the sea.

Even sleep did not alleviate him from his anxieties. His dreams were complicated, and made no sense – which were, in his opinion, the worst sort. In the longest of the sequence, he was a little, leatherbound book, lost and forgotten in a dusty dark corner, so old and so worn that even his title had faded. He was abruptly scooped up by a pair of disembodied hands. They tried to open him, and he was overcome by a sudden surge of panic that he stuck fast and clamped his covers together. The hands tugged, and tugged, until finally he was wrenched open, and all his guts and entrails tumbled out onto the floor, with a nasty splat.

And then somehow, through the hazy nonsense of dream logic, Kyle became the hands, and the organs belonged to Stan, who was propped up against the wall with his limbs mutilated and his ribcage torn apart, face shrouded in shadows. If Kyle could just fit everything back into place, then Stan would be alright again. Only, he couldn't, because bits were missing. No right kidney, no right lung, no right leg. He paced about, looking for the absent pieces, until he felt something squelch beneath his bare feet. He looked down and saw that he'd just flattened some pulsing organ. It gave a few feeble beats, and then deflated. Kyle had just begun the impossible task of reinflating it with short, sharp puffs of breath, when he woke up. It wouldn't have worked anyway – there was a hole in it.

He blinked. The inside of his mouth tasted metallic, and when he touched his face, he found he had been crying in his sleep, too. Resentment flared. None of that was real, and Dream Stan didn't deserve a single teardrop of Kyle's. Neither did Real Stan, too. Kyle longed to go back to sleep, just to stomp on the rest of his insides too. But his heart was racing too much to settle back down again.

Kyle sighed, and sat up. He pressed his back against the wall and rubbed his eyes. The room was still dark, but the light coming through the cracks between the door and the wall meant that the sun had already risen. He wondered glumly if he would ever get a chance to feel the sun on his face again, or if he'd be left in here to rot. But then he realised that if he ever left this room then he'd have to face the crew, and he dreaded that above all else.

It was hard to tell how long he sat there until someone came. Long enough to grow hungry, and desperately thirsty. The clunk of the padlock outside seemed both the quietist and the loudest thing he'd ever heard in his life. He wasn't sure who he hoped was on the other side, but when Craig entered, he was struck by a vague sense of disappointment. She didn't seem too pleased, either.