inbox ▣ saltburnt

[redforce]

WELCOME TO THE SALTBURNT NETWORK

USERNAME:
SHANKS

text ❖ audio ❖ video

Comments

[kobes]

[Truthfully, at this point Koby doesn’t know anymore how much of Shanks’s gravitas, his magnetic force is because of who he is, what he can do, and how much has been forged in blood and ice and snow, honed by the way that callused, scarred hand – pressed now to Koby’s frenetic, thrumming heartbeat – can make everything else in every world just disappear into delirious bliss. But he listens, he looks up with eyes huge and haunted and desperate, he clings to those words because he can’t feel them anymore, hadn’t realized how much he’d come to depend on the tease of crimson at the edges of his mind, like a hand settled on the back of his neck, fingers carding through his hair, lips pressed to the notch of his spine when he’s curled in bed. Without it, it’s like he’s forgotten how to walk, how to swim, like every instinct’s been blunted, and every time he struggles to the surface to breathe, he swallows seawater instead. Koby wonders, briefly, if this is what Luffy feels like, in the ocean. If it unmakes him like this.

Thoughtless and wild and still barely able to catch his breath, Koby presses closer, both hands curled into Shanks’s shirt, so tight he can feel his fingers trembling, he can almost hear the creak of his knuckles as he clutches tight and tries to stem the flow of mindless fear. A thought, a recollection – ”I can’t – I need – can you –” stumbling over the words, the request numbed like everything else, like his feet inside the heavy boots, like his hands as he reaches and tugs the spill of silky fur out from where it’s kept, tucked beneath his coat, warm over his shoulders, and the pelt moves like liquid and catches the firelight, speckles and spots of pink-on-pink, and Shanks doesn’t question, doesn’t hesitate, just holds out his hand for the sealskin to fall into, moving of it’s own accord, because that’s what it wants, because it’s Koby’s soul made tangible, because it’s the part of him that longs to be clasped closed, draped across someone’s lap, petted a couple times with careful, callused fingers, the effect of it rippling across his still-damp skin as the fear vanishes, as the weight of this world and their own is shifted off Koby for a few minutes, just a little while, just enough for him to catch his breath.

It’s a memory he knows, he’s had it before, of the times in the village where Shanks or Nami – or even Bee, tiny careful hands snow-kissed, serious voice telling him you need to rest, Mister Koby, and Koby laughing wearily as he tucks the sealskin around her skinny little shoulders and asks her to watch it for him – had held the pelt for a bit, let Koby slip into that strange, hazy, peaceful state he couldn’t get to any other way. He longs for that now, near-pathologically, for someone to turn off his mind, make it stop spiraling. He craves it so hard it tastes like blood in his mouth and there, suddenly, a flicker of something from those last days in that other world, from the time that bleeds all together into a litany of keep them safe, keep them warm, keep them fed, something that Koby’s kept locked away carefully for months now:

Shanks puts his hand on Koby’s shoulder, bloody scratches over his arm, voice just as firm, just as gentle, just as unflinching as it is now, and he says, “I should’ve asked you a lot sooner, Koby. But I’m asking you now.”

It’s gone, almost as quickly as it arrives, and Koby’s left shivering in it’s wake, something, something coming back to him, something essential, something cataclysmic, something that had brought him here, to this place, to this new nightmarish bliss. Something that tastes like his name on Shanks’s tongue, his soul in Shanks’s grasp.

Do you trust me? he asks, and Koby’s already nodding before the sentence is over. He’s nodding, he’s thinking of snow and ice and fur and water. He’s nodding and he’s pleading with Shanks to understand what he wants, what he needs in that moment.] Yes. Always.