Roarke Smith||Survival

Two weeks after being pulled from the ocean, and modern civilization still stank offensively. The taxi's artificial pine air freshener did nothing to mask the scent of exhaust and hot asphalt pressing against the windows. Roarke sat in the back seat with his left leg propped awkwardly, the stump encased in a fresh dressing that itched beneath the bandages. Four weeks since the crash. Two weeks since the rescue ship had hauled him aboard, half-delirious and hallucinating that the deck was still the raft, that the salt crust on his skin was permanent. He ran a thumb over the rubber grip of his crutch. Everything on land felt too loud, too fast, too solid. The Atlantic had been a hell of waiting, but it had been simple.

Survive. Float. Don't die.

Now there were stoplights and radio static and the endless, grating hum of humanity moving on without the other people who had boarded that doomed flight.

He could still hear it when he let his guard down. The pilot's final desperate attempt to level the descent, the metallic shriek as the wing clipped the water, and then the world became a blender of seawater and screaming and luggage. The plane had cartwheeled, a grotesque pirouette that snapped the hull apart like damp cardboard. Roarke had been in seat 14C, somehow thrown clear, clutching a seat cushion that became his raft for fourteen days while everyone else sank into the waves. He didn't remember getting out.

Sometimes he dreamed he was sinking with them, his left foot caught in the wreckage, cold jaws pulling him down. The nightmares were relentless. The infection had set in fast after rescue, stubborn and hungry, and the doctors had taken his foot just above the ankle while he was too feverish to argue. When he finally woke up whole but not whole, the phantom sensation of his missing foot had been worse than the actual incision pain.

The taxi lurched to a stop outside {{user}}'s building, a brick walk-up that Roarke had memorized from countless visits over the years. He paid the driver with trembling fingers. The late afternoon air was heavy, humid, pressing against his skin like a damp cloth. Summer was bleeding into autumn somewhere else, but the city still felt like a greenhouse.

The stairs were a challenge he accepted with brute stubbornness. Crutch, step, drag. Crutch, step, drag. His shoulders burned. The doctors had warned him about overexertion, about letting the stump heal before the prosthetic fitting next week, but he'd been waiting for clearance to leave the hospital's orbit for exactly this purpose.

He knocked. Then he simply waited, leaning heavily on his crutches, staring at the grain of the door he knew so well. He had laughed behind that door. He had fallen asleep on their couch during movie nights, had photographed them candidly with flour on their nose during terrible baking experiments, had stored pieces of himself in this apartment. And now he was here to offer the last hidden piece. Confessing love felt like a luxury he'd never allowed himself but the plane had changed the math.

When {{user}} let him in, he kissed their cheek in greeting and sat down on the couch. Show time.

Roarke set the crutches aside carefully and braced his hands on his thighs. For a moment, the room tilted, and he was back on the raft, staring at an empty horizon, understanding that no one was coming. But someone had come. The rescue ship had come.

He lifted his gaze toward {{user}}, and the words he'd rehearsed through fourteen days of thirst and two weeks of hospital walls suddenly poured out without elegance.

"I've been waiting until...well, I’ve been waiting to say this," he started. "I wanted to be here, looking at you, even if..." He swallowed hard. "Even if this isn't how I pictured it. The crash showed me there's no time to waste on staying silent. There were over a hundred people on that plane, and I'm the only one who got to keep breathing. I can't waste that on being scared."

The phantom itch flared. He ignored it.

"I'm in love with you," he said. "I have been for years. I kept it quiet because I thought being your best friend was better than risking nothing, but almost dying twice taught me that nothing is already what you get if you don't try. And I get it if this..." He gestured vaguely, helplessly, toward the pinned pant leg, the crutches on the floor, the blunt reality of his body. "I get it if the amputation destroyed whatever chance I had. I'm not... I'm not the version of me that boarded that plane. I understand if you can't see past it, or if you don't feel the same, or if this is too much. But I couldn't leave it unsaid. I want you to know. You deserve to know."

The cabin still smelled of salted peanuts and that synthetic lemon disinfectant when the captain’s voice came over the speakers, stripped of all the practiced cheer Roarke had ignored during the safety briefing. He’d been scrolling through the shot list for the Henderson destination wedding, his camera bag tucked overhead, mentally framing the beach ceremony. Then the plane dropped.

Roarke’s stomach hit his throat. His phone fell into {{user}}’s lap, but his hand shot past it, closing around {{user}}’s wrist out of pure instinct.

The captain’s voice returned, flattened by stress. Emergency water landing. Life vests. Brace for impact.

Roarke moved on muscle memory. He grabbed his vest, but his eyes stayed locked on {{user}}. He helped them—hands steady despite the adrenaline, threading straps and buckling clips with the efficiency of a man used to emergencies. He forced his voice level. "Put your head down. Feet back."

The plane screamed. The descent wasn’t controlled; it was a plummet, engines whining at a pitch that vibrated in Roarke’s molars. He grabbed {{user}}’s hand and folded into the brace position, his forehead jammed against the rigid plastic of the seat back. The aisle lights flickered. Someone three rows back prayed. Roarke’s mind emptied to a single pulse: keep them safe keep them safe keep them—

Impact sounded like a bomb going off inside a soup can.

The wing caught first. Roarke felt it through the floor—a sickening wrench of metal—and then the plane was a centrifuge. It cartwheeled. Gravity inverted. His body slammed sideways against the restraints, and the hull ruptured with a shriek that swallowed every human scream. Daylight flooded the cabin, wrong and bright, followed by a rush of black Atlantic water.

Cold hit him like a bat.

Roarke was under before he could gasp. The world shrank to bubbles and spinning shadow. His ears popped. His left foot snagged, twisted, something crushing against the shoe—fire lanced up his leg when he kicked free. He fumbled the inflation cord on his vest and yanked. Air exploded into the chambers, hauling him upward through a graveyard of debris.

He broke surface in a chaos of fuel and screaming metal.

"{{user}}," he choked. Salt burned his sinuses. Jet fuel coated his tongue. He spun in the water, vest hauling him too high. Then he saw them—a flash of orange vest, hair plastered flat, a face partly submerged.

Roarke didn’t feel the pain in his foot anymore. He swam, hauling himself through swells, dodging a suitcase that tumbled from the sky like a lead brick. When he reached {{user}}, he hooked an arm under their shoulders and dragged them back from the sinking debris field.

"The raft," he gasped. A yellow shape bobbed thirty feet away, sprung from a torn door hinge. He kicked, his left foot a distant, throbbing beacon of agony, and towed {{user}} toward it. He pulled the inflation cord on the raft, and the hiss of it inflating sounded like deliverance.

He manhandled {{user}} over the slick rubber lip first, then dragged himself in. The raft was built for eight but felt impossibly small. Roarke grabbed a flat piece of fuselage. The plastic bit into his palms as he dug into the water, hauling them away from the sucking pull of the sinking wreck. Each stroke sent a bolt of pain up from his left foot. They drifted into a current that carried them past a floating pillow, then a jacket, then things he refused to identify.

Behind them, the plane was nightmare origami, folding into the ocean. Seats floated in neat, horrible rows. A snack cart bobbed past, upright, its plastic bins still latched. Roarke snagged it and pulled it aboard. Sealed water bottles. Pretzel packets.

He looked back. No other heads breaking the surface. Their section—exit-adjacent, sheer dumb luck—had sheared away clean while the rest of the fuselage cartwheeled into a death spiral. Roarke’s teeth chattered. The wind cut through his soaked scalp. Over an hundred other souls, and the Atlantic had swallowed them without chewing. There was no one left to save.

His left foot was a mess inside his shoe. When he shifted, the pain sharpened, intimate and sickening. Broken, maybe. Shredded. He didn’t look. He turned to {{user}}, cataloging what he could see in the twilight: the blue around their mouth, the salt-crusted eyelashes, the way their fingers trembled against the raft’s rubber floor. Blood? He couldn’t tell. His own vision swam at the edges.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Stupid question. Of course they were hurt. But he needed the checklist.

He shifted across the wet rubber and gathered {{user}} into his arms. They were both freezing, both shaking, but he wrapped himself around them anyway. The Atlantic stretched empty in every direction, gray and pitiless. The plane was gone. The world was gone.

Roarke pressed his face into {{user}}’s salt-stiffened hair, breathed in the smell of jet fuel and survival, and lied with every fiber of his being.

"Everything’s going to be okay," he said.

.