Warning: There is swearing.
Words: 507
Disclaimer: I don't own Jaws. I have a jaw, but that's totally different.
My exact prompt for this was, "Hooper and Brody go out at night and Brody's drunk and Hooper gets freaked out because of the wreck. Comfort fic and maybe some shenanigans." But then this turned out to be the least comforting thing ever... and totally gen. So there you go. Consider it a deleted scene.
Un-beta'd. Let me know if you spot any dumb grammatical errors or verb tense issues or anything.
Accident
Shit. Fuck. Hooper hauls himself half out of the water, face mask already gone and water dripping in his eyes. The lights on the side of the boat under the waterline make it look, from above, like he's crawling out of radioactive pea soup – Brody is just relieved that it isn't red.
"What happened?" Brody scrambles closer to the side to give him a hand up, but Hooper is already pulling himself up and flopping gracelessly on the deck. "What happened!"
Hooper blinks at him, wincing, and sits up. "I, I found a…" He raises a shaking hand and seems surprised to realize there isn't anything in it. His arm drops back down to his side. "Shit," he hisses, leaning his head back against the side of the boat. "I had an accident."
"A what?" Brody is going to be really pissed if Hooper just scared the crap out of him for something stupid.
"I had a tooth, right here in my fucking hand, and I dropped it." He holds up his thumb and forefinger now, about two or three inches apart. "It was this big. Shit…"
Brody thinks back to the shark books he's been looking over for the couple of few weeks, trying to figure out how big the jaws to match a tooth that size would have to be. The only answer he can come up with is big. If Hooper's right, this is very bad. Is Hooper right? Christ, he must be, he's an expert… "Why'd you drop it?" Brody demands, losing a bit of his slur to the adrenaline. He feels like lose his stomach contents, too, in a minute. "What did you drop it for?!"
No one on the island is going to take 'it was this big' seriously.
Shivering, Hooper glances up at him and then away. "Who did you say the boat belonged to?"
"Ben Gardner, why—"
"I think I found him." Hooper's voice suddenly becomes stronger, as though he knows that this is something he's going to have to be very, very clear about. "He popped out of the hull at me like Jack out of his box. So we've… we've got another victim."
For a moment, Brody just stares. At Hooper, at the wreck floating beside them, at the white deck of Hooper's expensive boat. Then he sits down heavily next to the other man, ignoring the fact that his life jacket is riding up and nearly choking him.
"Two," he says, just as heavily. "I think he had some high school kid for a deckhand."
They sit there for a long time before tying up the other boat and towing it in to the harbor. Without that tooth, all they can do is pray that the Mayor will take this seriously – but they know that if you can write off the mangled pieces of a young woman washing up on the beach you can write off a torn-up boat, no problem.
Until at least one more person dies, their hands are pretty damn well tied.