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SHANKS

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Shanks.

[that's all he can manage, fingers shaking, chest aching, but he means: tell me i'm wrong, tell me i'm wrong, please, please, please.]

( it isn't the text notification that wakes him, but the aching echo of near-panic in his chest — the tremble of a presence he knows more intimately than anyone but set, like a wilting carnation in the harshness of winter. without thinking, he reaches for that presence, a beam of sunlight breaking through the clouds, an enveloping warmth that says i'm here.

only, there's something missing. blue sky over calm seas gone gray, empty — and it's then that shanks understands, through the fog of drowsiness, what exactly has happened. he drags his hand over his face, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, fumbles for his phone on the nightstand. )

I'm sorry, Koby.

( he doesn't need to say he's gone. koby already knows. he's felt it, just as shanks has. and that feeling never lies. but rather than let koby wallow in that grief a room away, with no one, shanks crosses through their shared en suite to the bedroom koby now occupies alone — and before koby can say anything, shanks pulls him close to his chest, pressing a soothing kiss to his head. )

Let it all out, cadet. I've got you. I'm right here.

[he says let it all out, offers a safe place to land, somewhere to crumble, to collapse, but koby can't -- move, can't breathe, standing in the middle of the room in his pajamas, fluffy-haired and sleepy-eyed.

and shanks pulls him close and koby's dry-eyed, frozen, not resisting but not reacting either, letting himself be pulled close, tucked in the protective circle of shanks's arm. and he stands there, absolutely still, and if shanks wasn't privy to his emotions, the wave of sorrow and loss and grief that's drowning koby where he stands, it'd seem like he didn't feel anything at all.

but he does. hurt and hurt and hurt, bleeding out of him without a single attempt to stop it, without the control koby's practiced daily for over a year. after a long moment there's a soft clunk as he drops his phone to the floor, as he reaches up with that hand and curls it into shanks's shirt.

he still doesn't cry, though. he doesn't make a sound.]

( koby stands, rigid against shanks' chest, and across the room shanks can almost hear the echo of boots on the cobblestone street of loguetown, feel the rain soaking through his clothes, the sting of buggy's anger across his palm. he's been here before, he knows this place. he's lived in this place for decades, treading water with no hope of rescue, his only reprieve the receding of the tide.

set is that reprieve, for him. but can a man always on the verge of drowning save another? is shanks even capable of being that reprieve for koby or will he inadvertently drag koby down with him?

no, maybe this is his chance to be the person he wishes he'd had after buggy left and he was lost and alone and unsure of his place in the world. maybe he can spare koby the worst of it, simply by being present and aware. petting the back of koby's head: )

I know it hurts. ( more than anything. more than the scar on his face, more than the loss of his arm. because a broken heart never heals, not really, not when the shards of that relationship continue to cut and cut and cut and never stop, only become less frequent. ) I'm not going anywhere, Koby. I'll stay as long as you need.

[it feels like a humming, living, breathing thing inside his ribs, the hurt, the loss, the realization that it wasn't an accident or a fluke, that he woke up and reached out half-asleep and found nothing but empty sheets, and that's how it'll be for the rest of his time here, every day at saltburnt spent reaching, reaching, and then one day he'll wake up back in the barracks and --

-- and. as long as you need, and koby jerks backwards and his bone-dry eyes flood abruptly, sharply, because:] Don't. Promise that.

[because shanks doesn't know, koby doesn't know, none of them know, it could be someone else tomorrow, it could be koby himself, and he'll go back to a world where shanks, nami, sanji don't know who he is, where he's a footnote in luffy's story, where he's their enemy and.

he steps away, shaking his head, breath hitching, rattling, not even feeling the streak of tears down one cheek, the other, a silent, hopeless sort of crying. koby tucks in on himself, head going back and forth, back and forth. his chest aches so much he feels like it'll splinter, shatter, crack him open, any minute, and he looks up at shanks with raw, naked, ugly pain in his face, his eyes.] You can't -- promise me that.

[and he shouldn't, because shanks loves someone who's still here, still in the other room, and considering this could all end any instant, koby's taking up time, taking up space, taking up attention and love and promises that he wants with every ragged beat of his snapped-open heart, but he shouldn't. because shanks built something beautiful, happy, safe here, and if koby touches it, he'll ruin that too. he takes another step away, curls in on himself, shoulders hunched, head low, and there's suddenly no difference between koby now and koby years earlier, cowardly cabin boy suffocating himself on his own wanting, his own muzzled dreams, his own heart's desire.]

( koby flinches away like a feral animal, like he had when he'd been injured and barely human, and shanks had to put up with the biting and the scratching and the groaning barks of a wounded seal just to get close. it's not so different now, really, koby barking at him pointedly; or the scared, hopeless, strangled gasps caught in his throat, still desperately trying not to cry. gently, shanks steps forward, closing the distance between them, reaching out slowly so not to spook him. )

No, you're right. I can't promise that. ( set could vanish tomorrow, koby could, any of them could. and those left behind would have to find a way to live with that. so he presses the warmth of his palm against koby's cheek: steady, firm, sure. ) But pushing me away won't make you feel less ... scared, miserable, angry — and it won't make you feel less guilty, either.

( speaking from experience. the only thing he'd felt in those days and months and years after loguetown was empty. hollowed out, adrift. he'd turned to the bottle, like rayleigh always had when roger's illness flared up, because he never knew another way to ease the pain. he is his father's son, after all. but koby isn't. they don't have to walk the same path. shanks doesn't want that for him. it's a long, dark, lonely path — even surrounded by friends and crew and family, it's lonely. never alone, but never whole.

brushing a tear from koby's cheek, he slides his hand down to the slope of koby's shoulder, guides him back to the bed, to sit — and as shanks kneels between koby's legs, he pulls one of koby's hands free, squeezes it to his chest, his gaze soft but unwavering, following each of koby's unfocused glances intently. his voice remains calm, soothing, but no less commanding when he says: )

Look at me. You told me you wanted more. As much as you can have of me, for as long as you can have it. Has that changed? ( lifting his hand to koby's neck, drawing their foreheads together: ) Because I still love you, Koby, and I'm still here — and I want you to listen to your own advice. You can't control the future. You can't control what's already come to pass. You can only hold onto what you have right now as tight as you can and cherish the time you're given.

Can you do that? Stay here, with me, in this moment, in this place that gave us more time — and feel whatever you need to feel. You won't scare me off. You won't break me. You're safe and you're not alone. Say it with me, cadet.

[it’s interesting, perhaps, how the number of people koby’s lashed out towards (desperate, backed-into-a-corner, a frightened sort of anger with no real venom behind it) has remained so small, even after the last several months, after the commune, after the death that had left the inescapable proof circled nooselike around his throat. if he has to think about it, the ones who’d taken the brunt of it are the two in the neighboring suite, shown the bared-teeth desperation of someone so mind-numbingly scared that nothing else seems to register.

maybe it’s because there’s no real way he could push them away – not set, who’s seen the ugliest, rawest shape of koby’s anger, shameless in the depth of a wintry night, unveiled in all it’s cowering, snarling force. not shanks, who sees that same snarling covering a wound so deep koby’s sure there’s nothing left, and doesn’t recoil, doesn’t flinch, not for a moment. and it’d be easier to be angry, but just like the month before, the second shanks touches him – unflinching, unafraid – there’s no room left for anger.

whatever savagery koby’s managed to summon up in that moment drains out of him at the firm, callused warmth of shanks’s hand on his face, cradling the tear-streaked curve of his cheek, prompting all the fight to slip away as easily as the sun beneath the horizon, a blazing ball of fire and rage gone, vanished, inevitably. and what’s left – all those things, misery, hurt, guilt. if he’d been awake, if he’d been watchful, if he’d said or done or been something, someone different, would it have changed things? would he, could he have kept quentin from vanishing?

koby sits on the edge of the bed, mute, motionless, wanting to resist the crashing wave of all those awful emotions, but completely powerless, now as always. and – it registers after a long moment that shanks has kneeled, no less imposing for it, still easily face-to-face, even bowed as he is, and there isn’t a version of koby that exists who can refuse any command in that calm, lilting voice – look at me and those hollowed-out, nakedly hurting eyes flick up, fix on shanks’s, unblinking. has that changed, and koby shakes his head once, shaky, because – no. because even though it’d hurt less if he wanted less, he can’t close himself off now, not without severing the most vital parts of who he is.

because what he’d never said aloud is that this part of him that dares to love someone he isn’t allowed to keep – it was there before saltburnt, before the village, before the snow and the winter and the wild-thing instincts that had taken over his mind and body. that koby didn’t even need to know shanks to have everything about him changed by the stories of who he was – not the pirates i know, luffy had said, radiating warmth, light, loyalty and honor, spinning a web of possibility that koby the cabin boy, koby the miserable, wretched, cowardly shell of a person had taken in and knotted around his shivery bones to keep them upright, because if there was a person who could be kind and good and brave and fearless, who could sail under a flag that had meant nothing but misery and make it mean something else – how could that not sustain a boy who didn’t believe in heroes anymore? how could he not anchor himself to that in a way that rippled across universes, through time, to this moment, this miserable, aching, devastating undoing, this howling void of emptiness that hisses your love has never, will never be enough – snarls it, howls it, tries to undo and unmake and fails, fails, fails?

because i still love you and i’m still here, and if that’s not enough, what is? koby has already learned to love someone before he’s even met them – he’ll learn to love them after they go. he’ll learn because the alternative is making his own words into lies, flimsy falsehoods that crumble when tried in the fire. he’ll learn because the alternative is letting go of everyone else he loves because he’s too damn scared of waking up in a world where they don’t exist. shanks presses their foreheads together, and koby’s hands slip up, instinctive, familiar, resting on either side of shanks’s face, eyes closed, thumb tracing the tail of the scars that tug that smile slightly askew, every time shanks offers it.

and he keeps offering it, it and a promise he can make, for this moment and the next and the next and the next, two years of moments that should never have existed in the first place. because there’s a world they’re both burdened and beholden to, a path they’ll both need to take, and when koby steps foot on it again, it’ll be as someone who doesn’t remember being loved by anyone.

but he remembers now. he’s unmade and remade by it, and he remembers, and it hurts worse than anything he can imagine, but he stays in it. he stays, eyes closed, breath shaky, tears on his face and in his voice when he repeats:] I’m here. I’m – not alone. [not yet, not yet.] I won’t – scare you off. [it lilts at the end, just a little, a question – are you sure, are you sure.]

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