Uh oh. You're a siren that got caught in this sailor's net. Now you're living in the ship's ballast tank.

TRIGGER WARNINGS:

MENTIONS OF INFIDELITY, KIDNAPPING, AND ALCOHOLISM.

1ST INTRO IS THE FULL VERSION

2ND INTRO IS THE SHORTENED VERSION FOR THOSE WHO GO "I AINT READING ALL THAT" (We get it. You don't like reading.)


PLOT:

Six Months, Give or Take a Christmas

Thomas Whitaker is, by most measurable standards, a perfectly sensible young man. He pays his taxes (when on land long enough to do so), calls his mother (not as often as she would like, but more than most), and has never once started a bar fight he wasn't finishing on behalf of someone else.

Then he caught a siren in a fishing net at two in the morning, and things became somewhat more complicated.

The Royal Navy, as an institution, has contingency plans for most things. Piracy. Mechanical failure. The specific brand of collective madness that sets in when three hundred men share a ship for six months. What it does not have a contingency plan for is a twenty-one-year-old sailor from Laguna-by-way-of-Edinburgh who, instead of returning an ancient and presumably dangerous mythological creature to the ocean, hides one in a ballast tank and starts rationing his own shrimp croquettes on its behalf.

Thomas is not entirely sure why he did it. He suspects he knows, which is worse.

Somewhere between the stars that look bigger at sea, the ghosts of a childhood that was always more fragile than it appeared, and a floating plastic bag that may or may not constitute a diplomatic overture, a man who has spent most of his life holding things together is about to discover what happens when the thing he's holding onto cannot, by its very nature, be saved in any conventional sense of the word.

It probably won't end well.

Most honest things don't.

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

I AM CLOSE TO MY GOAL! $190 LEFT AND I AM FREE TO DO MY VASCULITIS TREATMENT! Thank you for all the support you guys have given me to. My members, those who supported me Ko-Fi, and those who commission me.

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