Archive of Our Own

The thing about sailing in a submarine for almost a decade that Sora, Warrior of the Sea can’t teach you is that when you aren’t on shift doing your work, with the constant knowledge that if you fuck it up you’ll all die to add that zest that makes life worth living, you end up with a lot of tedious monotony that requires constant breaking lest everyone involved end up insane. The obvious rebuttal to that is that all of the Heart Pirates are already insane, but the captain being the only crazy person on this ship is somewhere between a load-bearing fantasy and a cherished in-joke. So they’ve all got a lot of practice coming up with ways to entertain themselves.

All of that practice ends up being necessary when they go to wait on Zou for a long while. Captain was a cagey bastard when senior crew tried to ferret out how long he’d be away, which means Shachi’s had to play cagey bastard to the rest of the crew, which means a betting pool immediately sprang up that this would take anywhere from two weeks to two years.

(“So what’s the timeline before we should mutiny and go get him anyway?” Penguin had asked Jean Bart, once the spread of bets had been assembled. He’d have asked Bepo, who understood Law on a level unavailable to mere humans and unexplainable by science, except that exact phenomenon meant Bepo was also the captain’s biggest enabler and might very well be who they end up needing to mutiny against.

Jean Bart, who had experience with desperate decisions and stupid captaining choices both, had given this full consideration and then said “Five months.”

Penguin counted it off and marked it on the calendar with a frowny face. Shachi purchased supplies accordingly. Ikkaku mapped out an engine upgrade schedule to accommodate it. None of them told Bepo.)

They dropped Captain off on Punk Hazard and then let Bepo set the course for Zou. Submarine navigation is always hard and weird and weirdly hard, even before you add Grand Line Nonsense into the calculations (and Bepo does, he’s got a whole section on charts for it next to the inertial navigation system logs, Shachi doodles little sea monsters in it sometimes and gets yelled at for it), but getting to Zou is the kind of navigation trick Bepo just has to apologize for because he can’t explain it. It’s four weeks of sailing away from Punk Hazard, and the routine of the ship under way (three watches, daily drills, taco night) is so normal that half the time they can almost forget Captain isn’t losing himself in a research spiral or passed out somewhere. Penguin ends up knocking on Law’s door in a sleep-deprived haze after hearing the den-den mushi ring on Shachi’s watch, which is extra stupid because Law himself is the one on the line when Penguin remembers himself and trudges back to the bridge.

Once they’re on Zou, though.

The first, eh, day or so, they’re busy with moving in. Finding a place to tie up, ringing the Welcome Bell, watching Bepo get nuzzled half to death and then having the rest of the minks descend on them, sitting up and getting drunk with Bepo and a big cat named Pedro after finding out that the brother Bepo’s been looking for since before Penguin and Shachi even met him died years ago. The whole crew toasts his memory. Pedro tells them a bunch of stories. Some other minks who knew the guy sit in. It’s not quite a proper North Blue wake, but it’s something, and if Bepo’s too cried-out to help move the next day none of them are going to blame him.

The minks have given them some huts in the forest to crash in, after a chat with the day and night leaders where they stressed the importance of discretion. Penguin and Shachi did some delicate explaining to try to make it sound less like they were a walking group of liabilities. Because, okay, they were here because they kind of were, but only for their captain when they were going up against a guy who had something so hateful and bonkers and personal with Law that a box with a non-beating heart inside and Joker’s symbol on the outside had showed up on the Tang’s docking quay on Kalon about a month after Captain made Warlord status. They’d only been docked there for a day.

(Law had stared at the box for a solid twenty minutes, vanished into the island for a few hours, and told them that when things kicked into gear they needed to be out of Doflamingo’s reach the next morning. They’d argued, but not for long.)

Point is, they weren’t going to be a problem for Zou, could they crash here for an indefinite period of time without the minks spreading that around too much pretty please. Penguin had come equipped for bribery via medical supplies, but the kings of Zou are pretty solid guys and agree without hesitation, which means they get to offer clinical checkups as a thank-you instead.

None of them are as good at surgery as Captain but you don’t sail on the Polar Tang without learning medical basics, if only because right after sitting on waxed paper to slide down the hallways when the sub’s tipping up or down, it’s the easiest form of entertainment on board. They’ve got more than enough knowledge between them to start up a clinic and still swap out on a basis that means everyone gets some vacation time. So Penguin gets another few days of stimulation out of setting that up, and the first inrush of curious minks, before he has enough free time to just go wandering.

He was looking forward to the wandering and everything. Zou’s a wicked cool place, between the old architecture and the killer views and the pebbly-skin ground. And the mink ladies love his hat. This was supposed to be a chill, fun day of distracting himself from all of the many things he could potentially panic about.

So when he notices that he’s breathing way harder than a climb up onto the ridge of Zunesha’s back should cause, and that all the hair on the back of his neck is standing up, and that every time he glances up at the sky he ends up flinching—well, he muscles through it and takes it like a man and handles it super well, because he came out here to have a good time and he’s not going to let some stupid anxiety get the better of him.

Just kidding. He gets out from under the sky and ducks from tree to tree all the way back to the huts and hides himself inside one with his cap pulled down over his eyes because ha ha fuck. That’s. That’s new. Add that to the list of things Sora, Warrior of the Sea can’t teach you about living in a submarine for almost a decade.

2 - start a band

Music nights have been banned on the Tang since day seventeen, when Shachi and Penguin came back from a supply run with a tuba and had about half an hour of trying to get it to work before Bepo crumpled it up and hurled it off the ship. He apologized for it after, but Law still made the rule. It’s damn near impossible to soundproof a submarine effectively, and running at depth means someone has to be awake at all times, which means someone’s asleep at all times, which means silence is both an ironclad and golden rule. Slamming a door gets you a month’s worth of dish duty, which only seems like an unfair punishment until it’s your turn to be jolted irreversibly awake after only getting three hours of sleep.

But not only are they on an island now, they’re mostly all on the same sleep schedule. Uni leads an expedition into the city and comes back with a selection of instruments. Penguin dibses a violin, chasing memories that are more fact than feeling of his father playing jigs by the hearth in between fishing trips.

They are not, even in the most generous sense of the word, good. They are, in fact, objectively very bad. But they sure are having a good time. So is Penguin, as long as he stays under a roof during jam sessions.

Penguin tells absolutely no one about his new little ‘the sky is going to eat me’ problem, by the way. Obviously.

On the one hand, they’d all kind of get it—the first daily rain-ruption had everyone going from peacefully drinking and drunk to fully awake, on their feet, immediately, because they’ve all had it drummed into them that hearing water spattering means something’s-fucked-all-hands-on-deck-now.

On the other hand, they’d all managed to sheepishly laugh that little kerfuffle off, and that approach seems to be beyond Penguin’s present capabilities. He doesn’t want to ruin the cool competent third mate image he’s worked so hard to cultivate with most of the crew, and Bepo and Shachi have enough to worry about right now. Penguin is supposed to be the steady one. Unflappable, ha-ha, bird joke. His brain misfiring like a piston (or some other engine thing he’s been spoiled enough to forget after years of having real mechanics onboard, not just four North Blue boys doing their best with spit and duct tape) is way, way, way down the priority list.

Especially because it’s such a stupid fucking problem to have, too. Penguin knows what trauma and phobias look like on both personal and professional levels. No one actually gets to be called a member of the Heart Pirates until they’ve survived a week underwater without panicking, and sometimes getting them there is a process. Hakugan used to faint at the sight of blood. Hell, Penguin had to get over having nightmares about the smell of gunpowder the first year he and Shachi moved in with Wolf. But he got over it, is the point, and now he shares a ship with crew members who escaped fucking slavery with a whole slew of unwanted psychological souvenirs, and he’s supposed to wander in whining about how there’s too much air outside? Fuck that. He’ll fix it himself.

3 - pose workshopping

“So I had an idea,” Shachi says, unprompted, while they’re organizing the blood bank.

Penguin squints at him. “Did you run this by Bepo already?” He asks less because they’ve outsourced their collective moral code to the polar bear, and more because part of becoming an adult is learning how to recognize the strengths and weaknesses within your friend group, and the fact remains that despite him being hypothetically more carnivorous than the rest of them, Bepo has the best track record for not resorting to even a little bit of violence when he’s bored.

“It’s fine,” Shachi says, which is not a ‘yes.’ “Listen. We need to come up with a cool crew pose and practice so we can do it on command when Captain gets back.”

“…Yes,” Penguin agrees fervently, after taking a couple of seconds for the image to properly fix itself in his brain. Just because they know why Law left them behind doesn’t mean they can’t embarrass the hell out of him for doing it.

Fixing the thing himself isn’t like…going so great. Unforch.

He’s trying to work nice and slow and steady about it, taking lots of deep breaths and doing a little bit at a time. Finding larger and larger clearings. Sitting around and imagining himself on the Tang’s deck, under the open sky, in the middle of the ocean. He likes the ocean. The idea’s nice, when he thinks about it.

The reality of walking into the open, out from under the cover of trees, with no nice safe ocean to go dive into and cover himself up with, fucking sucks. He’s doing it all by himself, see: this isn’t Bepo and Shachi’s fucking problem, which means he has no distraction from all of the thoughts that spiral down to absolutely consume him.

He’ll take a book or something, sit out in the open, convince himself he’s fine, and then totally fail to focus because he can feel how there’s nothing above him, he can feel absolutely positively entirely sure that if he takes one more step, even with his nose in Sora Volume 25, he’s just going to—he doesn’t even know. Get squished. Get blown away. Get swallowed up by nothingness, get smothered by the air. It’s nebulous and impossible to pin down and so fucking stupid.

It takes a week of trying and failing to get a handle on his new phobia before Penguin works his way through the five stages of grief and arrives at acceptance. This is just his life now. Sucks to suck. He’ll just make sure no one ever finds out and adjust everything about his lifestyle accordingly and no one will be the wiser and everything will be fine.

His first chance to try out this new, winning strategy is when he almost ends up pulled along in the excitement of the crew one night before realizing that they’re going to watch a meteor shower. An activity that requires getting out in the open. Staring at the sky. Thinking about the universe and how big it is and how many things are moving in it all the time. Nope, no thank you, not tonight.

He hides his eyes under his hat even more than usual and pleads a migraine to get out of it. His eyes hate him enough that it’s not the first time this has happened, so he manages to get away scot-free. Ish.

“I’ll go with you,” Ikkaku says, before everyone else has even finished chorusing their goodbyes. It’s almost too fast. Shit. Does she know?

They stroll back from the kitchen hut to the sleeping huts almost too slowly. Under the trees most of the way. There’s one patch where a fallen tree has left moonlight shining down on the path.

Penguin glances over at Ikkaku to try and ferret out if she’ll notice him avoiding it, which is how he notices her avoiding it, which is how he ends up walking into a tree.

“Fuck!”

“Peng!”

He’s rubbing at his bashed nose and too distracted to stop Ikkaku from grabbing his shoulders and physically holding him upright, steering towards the door of the closest hut.

“Dumbass, you’re supposed to tell us it’s getting bad before you start falling over.”

His attempt to valiantly defend himself by declaring that he’s fine crashes right into his sudden realization that oh, her too, and he did just whack his head so what ends up coming out of his mouth is “You didn’t!”

“What? Sit down, idiot.”

Penguin does not sit down, Penguin wrestles for control of his limbs and manages to bonk one hand onto her hat. “Sky’s bad, right?”

He can feel her freeze, and her fingers digging almost painfully into his arm, and he shouldn’t sound so gleeful about it, really. It tracks when he thinks about it. Ikkaku spends more time crawling around corners and down crevices than any of them. She lives in the engine. Half the time her bunk is just on top of one of the torpedos so she can monitor some finicky upgrade or just get some space from the common corridors. She knows the Tang better than anyone other than Wolf, who built the damn thing, and at this point she could maybe give him a run for his money on building another one. Not that they’re going to be replacing the sub anytime soon.

“Shut up. You don’t know shit. You’re concussed. And you have a migraine.”

“No I don’t, I just said that because I’m scared of the outside now,” Penguin says, deciding he might as well come clean before she reaches for a wrench and he actually does wind up concussed. “Too much air in the air, feel like you’re going to get squashed, right?”

Her hand gets way tighter for a second, and then relaxes, much to the relief of his bicep.

“I feel like I’m going to get blown away on a dive,” she mutters, finally. “I know we’re not diving, I know we’re fine, but I feel like—” She shudders. “Whatever. Forget it. It’s fine. I just have to stick it out till we go back on the ship.”

And the first thing that falls out of Penguin’s mouth, probably because he did just hit his head, is “What are you going to do if we can’t go back?”

It isn’t until after the words make it out of his mouth that it clicks that oh. Okay. That’s the issue.

He can feel Ikkaku flinch under his hand. That’s the question they’ve all avoided asking, on purpose, since before Punk Hazard. They’ve made a timeline for when they’ll go get their captain back, but they haven’t—no one has wanted to ask what they do if he’s gone somewhere they can’t reach him.

Penguin has been following Law for a decade now. The kid, back when he was a kid, saved his and Shachi’s lives twice over: fixing them up after a bad accident, and getting them off their tiny home island that was suffocating them slowly. He’s the main reason the Heart Pirates have made it this far on the Grand Line and they all know it—they’re no slouches, but they're specialists, not New World monsters. Not Devil Fruit users, either. They might keep sailing together, but without their captain at the center, at the head of the spear hurtling them forward, their lives will never be the same. There’s no going back to normal. Just hurtling, ungrounded, through an empty void of now what?

“Fuck,” Penguin says.

Ikkaku’s hands come up and circle his wrist, tugging it away from her head.

“Fuck you,” she says, without heat. “Where’d Shachi hide the booze?”

4 - board games

Some Dumb Game had been Hakugan’s invention.

It had started on a particularly boring two-week stretch between islands with a deck of cards, a Hounds and Hares mat they’d lost all the pieces for, and half of the extremely crudely carved chess set Penguin had made as part of physical rehab for his hand dexterity, after his arm got blown off and Law put it back on. The game’s grown since then. There’s a whole official rule set kept on a shitty notebook that lives in the games box in the canteen and just keeps getting longer, but at the same time there are only three rules, and they’re the same ones they started with.

One, you have to use something from every board game in the box every time you set it up. Two, you can’t get rid of any existing rules, you just have to make new rules to stack on top of them. Three, if you can get the captain frustrated enough to start yelling, you win automatically. No one’s actually told Captain about that last one.

Honestly, not having him here to complain takes a little bit of the fun out of it, even with the new funky playing pieces they picked up at their last stop before Zou to add into the rules. Penguin is playing a round with Clione and Bepo and Hakugan when the suggestion comes up.

“Hey, these look kind of like those fruits that grow out west of here,” Bepo says, fiddling with one of the pieces.

“Don’t eat it,” Penguin says, reflexively.

“I’m not going to eat it!” Bepo complains, entirely too offended for a guy who has in fact eaten less edible shit for stupider reasons. “I’m just saying. They look alike!”

“Hm,” says Hakugan, with a tone of voice that promises either a very good or a very bad idea. “How much of this do you think we could recreate as like….life-size.”

They all look at each other, and then down at the surface of the table, which has roughly fifty little things and three boards spread out on it.

“That would be crazy,” Clione points out. “And really big.”

“Yeah,” Penguin agrees.

They sit there for another ten seconds before Clione says “We could probably draw the game board with paint—” and the dam breaks and they’re all standing up and spitballing ideas at once.

Shachi hides a bottle of vodka under his socks, which is probably against the bro code for Penguin to 1. reveal the existence of and 2. consume half of himself. However, and consider this carefully: shit happens.

They get through about half of what’s left in the bottle before Penguin makes the mistake of opening his mouth again. “So what are we going to do about it?”

“Fuck you,” Ikkaku says, again, into the hat she’s pulled down over her face. A little tautologous, but hard to argue with.

“Fuck you,” Penguin says back, because if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, that’s the pirate way. And then, before this can turn into any more of a recursive loop, adds, “Come on. We’re better than this, right?”

“Are we?” she asks, mournfully.

It’s both a depressed and depressing question, which means Penguin gets to make a loud bzzt sound with his mouth. “Sorry, too much mope in that sentence.” He flops forward off the bunk in a controlled fall and bundles Ikkaku up in a hug that pins her arms to her sides. “Time for you to go to gloom jail till you say something nicer.”

“Hey!” Ikkaku vaguely tries swatting at him, without much progress. “You can’t gloom-jail me! I’m not Captain!”

“Sound like him,” Penguin accuses. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I’m telling Shach to make orange sauce.” The Captain spends the most time in gloom jail because of, well, who he is as a person, but anyone who’s obviously just spiraling down into a funk is fair game. Reaching a concerning threshold of ‘depressed bastard’ isn't exactly an exclusive club. “C’mon. You know the drill.”

Ikkaku makes a frustrated noise. “Give me the vodka back.”

“No vodka for inmates.”

“I fucking hate you.”

“Sure.”

She makes a noise at the back of her throat that sounds kind of like Jean Bart gargling rock salt, and then says, “We’re better than this,” like the phrase killed her dogs.

“Hell yeah, parole for good behavior,” Penguin says, and loosens his grip to grab the bottle. She doesn’t take the chance to elbow her way out, so he’ll call this another successful rehabilitation of a guilty culprit.

“If you wanna fix it, you make a plan,” she says, shuffling over to lie on her back.

That’s basically agreeing to go along with his plan. Which would be great if he had a plan. He fails to grab the bottle twice, so she rolls upright and yanks it off the bed. Oh, hey, he has a plan. Or an idea, at least.

“I bet I can get over it faster than you can,” he says.

Ikkaku lets her head fall forward, scrunching her chin against her chest. “What.”

“The agoraphobia,” he says, and saying that when drunk is a feat he wants bragging rights on. “I bet I can get over it faster than you can.”

She squints at him. Takes a swig of vodka. Sets the bottle down. Sticks out her hand.

“Fuck you,” she says, and they shake on it.

5 - improvised miniature golf x-treme

“So what is this?” Wanda the mink asks, examining the golf club that’s really just a couple sticks with delusions of grandeur.

“Golf,” Jean Bart says with a straight face. They play this where he’s from, apparently.

“Miniature golf,” Uni elaborates, because they had to scale it down.

“Improvised miniature golf,” Hakugan corrects, huffy, because they started sulking when no one wanted to come up with a rulebook and they haven’t stopped yet.

“X-treme,” Shachi adds, because he likes participating. Penguin elbows him, subtly.

Wanda looks over the spread of sticks on the ground that have been only vaguely secured to Zunesha’s epidermis. There’s about six different ways to go from where she’s standing. The holes are vaguely indicated by little colorful leaves, not to be confused with the other little colorful leaves that fell onto the course while they were in the process of making it. The balls are spare hip replacement joints.

“And this is…training?” asks their unfortunate, unsuspecting first victim.

“Sure,” Penguin says, because isn’t all of life training when you think about it, really.

Step one of competitive agoraphobia exposure therapy is—

Well, step one is getting over the hangover without letting Shachi catch on that they stole his booze. Step two is wandering out into the woods and double-dog-daring each other to walk across clearings and then having back-to-back panic attacks. Literally. Sat on the ground, wedged in between tree roots, leaning on each other to try and drown in the sensation of being not alone.

“Have I said fuck you yet?” Ikkaku asks, when her breathing has slowed down to a normal pace again. “Because, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, fuck you.”

Penguin fists his hands in his boiler suit to make them stop shaking and answers in between gulped breaths. “You mentioned, once or twice, yeah.”

“Good.” She tips her head back hard, knocking against his skull hard enough to hurt. “This isn’t working.”

Penguin looks up at where the trees are, so far away that he’s still antsy and itchy, and yet….he’s still breathing. Ikkaku hasn’t gotten sucked away into nothingness. “It’s working a little.”

“Okay, but it sucks almost worse than just dealing with it does,” Ikkaku says. “I want a new plan.”

Penguin unclenches his fists. Clenches them again. Like simulating a heartbeat, contract, expand. “We could talk about it.”

“I hate this plan already,” Ikkaku says, but she doesn't sound hateful, just resigned. Gottem.

“Me first it is,” Penguin says. “I always figured if I lost my head it’d be the other way around. Claustrophobia.” He still remembers Swallow Island, in those worst years of his life between when his parents died and when some scrawny waif chucked him into the sky and the world rewrote itself. Yeah, there was the existential suffocation of being trapped on a small island where everyone knew them and no one liked them, but there was plenty of time spent in very physically tight quarters too. Cramming into the little back closet with Shachi. Digging holes in the snow to sleep in, after they got kicked out, before they scrounged together their hut. They’d been bad at structural integrity then, and more than once they’d woken up when the snow collapsed in on them and made it feel like all the air was gone. “I hate getting stuck, y’know?”

Ikkaku, who damn near blackmailed them to get them to let her on the Tang and off her own childhood island, sighs. “Yeah. I know.”

“And we’re not alone,” Penguin adds. “I know we’ve got the crew. I know no one’s going anywhere.” That had been an option, before they went to Zou. Law made it clear. He didn’t know if he’d be coming back and he didn’t want anyone to wait for him who had better places to be. They’d all chosen to stay because fuck you, Surgeon of Death, you don’t get to help people build a life they want and then suggest they don’t know what they’re doing. The Tang is home for all of them. “I know it’s not forever and we’ll go back, so it’s just.” Just his dumbass depressed bastard of a captain, his little brother in all the ways that matter, going off alone to change the world. Penguin doesn’t have any kind of lofty ambitions on that scale. His dream hasn’t really changed since the day his parents died. Build a home and find people to laugh in it with him. The rest of the world isn’t his business. “I’m just sorry it’s…different now.” It feels pathetically inadequate, but dramatic monologues aren’t his thing anyway. That’s good enough, right? Ikki’s turn.

It takes long enough that he considers poking her again, and ends up being very glad he didn’t when she says, “I feel so fucking useless.”

It’s more angry than mopey, and also if he tries to enforce gloom jail on her right now she might actually stab him with a screwdriver. He shuts up and listens.

“The Tang’s at the bottom of the elephant. I can’t get any work done. I don’t have anything to do here. No one needs me.”

Penguin remembers getting to Zou and finishing unpacking, at which point Ikkaku had announced that she was taking a vacation and if anyone bothered her she’d bite them before sleeping for twenty-six hours straight. Which. Fair. None of them had begrudged her that. It had made them disinclined to rope her into shenanigans. He doesn’t think reminding her of it is going to help any more than gloom jail would.

“And I don’t—I didn’t make any of this.” She waves one hand to indicate the forest in general. “I don’t know how it works, I can’t fix it, and I know that’s the point. I know everyone lives like this all the time, and it’s such a stupid thing to be upset about!”

“Well,” Penguin says, after waiting to see if she’ll come out with anything else. “We all know this crew is full of dumbasses. So if you’re going to be stupid, might as well be here.”

It makes her laugh, which is a win, even if the laugh sounds suspiciously wet.

Penguin pulls away and rolls to his feet, looking around. It is better. The anxiety. Maybe if they can just stop thinking about it for a while, that will be better still.

“I’ve got another plan,” he says.

Ikkaku isn’t even looking at him. “Oh, really?”

He pokes her shoulder. “Tag. You’re it.”

He gets a three second head-start while she processes that before she takes off running after him, cursing him out all the way. He’s too busy laughing and dodging tree roots for the sky to scare him now.

6 - submarine deep cleaning spare body part sorting

The trip down to the Tang is part sneaky reassurance for Ikkaku, part necessary maintenance, part giving everyone something to do, and mostly taking advantage of the fact that it’s empty and they can do the kind of chemical deep clean that’s basically never possible at depth. And also they can get rid of a lot of junk, either directly handing it off to the minks or seeing if their merchants can do anything with it.

To that end, they open up every single door, chest, and locker on the sub—except Captain’s office, because there’s no way that ends well—and empty them out. Penguin’s factored in getting sidetracked by what they unearth and figures they’ll be able to stay on schedule.

And then they find the locker where they forgot they’ve been keeping all the spare body parts.

“So is this a spleen or a gallbladder?” Shachi asks, holding the small squishy organ in question up. The advantage of Law’s method of organ harvesting is that everything stays in a nice self-contained little wrapper, no smell or anything, which makes it nice and easy to yank just about anything and tuck it away. He can even put some kind of cryo-stasis-whatever on it so they don’t even need the person in question to be alive.

The disadvantages of Law’s method of organ harvesting are numerous. Mainly that they have more unidentified squishy bits than they know what to do with.

“Gallbladder,” Bepo says, after squinting at the propped-open medical textbook. “Can someone who has this kind of finger tell me what hand these are supposed to go on?” He’s managed to get the box of assorted fingers arranged in order of size, but they don’t really have any spare hands lying around for him to compare to. Penguin offers his non-dominant hand to the cause and keeps writing out labels.

“Okay, that’s all the large intestines, I think.” They might be his least favorite organ. Not even stasis can keep them from wiggling.

“Oh, hey, we do still have a heart!” Uni says, from where he’s very carefully emptying the locker. “I thought we gave all of these to the Navy. It's not the creepy Joker-one, right?"

“No, that one was left out too long, no good for transplants. We didn't give this one to the Navy because it wasn’t beating anymore,” Shachi says absently. “Still preserved though. Emergencies."

Penguin scoops up a new label for the box Bepo’s passing him and writes RH F2, for the right-handed index fingers. They have six of them. And, okay, he realizes this isn’t exactly a normal thing for literally anyone else in the world, he’s not that far gone, but it’s normal enough that—

“Do you think this is why none of us can get a date?” he wonders out loud.

Talking helps. Tag helps. Picking up a psych textbook while they’re checking on the Tang and actually using the exercises in it helps a *lot.* Eventually, they’re fine with clearings and basically anywhere in the woods, which means it’s time for a new challenge.

“This is fine,” Ikkaku says as they stare out at the open ground in between the forest and the city. “This is fine, right?”

“Totally fine,” Penguin says, projecting a confidence he does not actually feel. “We got this, right?”

“Right,” Ikkaku says, still staring.

“You want to do this,” he reminds her.

“Right.”

They’re going back to the instrument stall Uni told them about, because Ikkaku missed the initial round of distribution and has been just pretending it doesn’t bother her. Combining that with the next step in fixing their shit is a good way to fluff out the ‘reward’ side of the risk-reward scenario, which according to the textbook is a good thing.

Penguin gives her another five seconds, and then before he can lose his own nerve, stuffs his hands in the pocket of his boiler suit and starts strolling out into the open air.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, places to do, things to be, better keep up!” he goads.

She makes a frustrated kind of growl and stomps out, steel-toed boots scuffing the grass decisively.

It’s not nearly as easy as he makes it look. The hair on the back of his neck is still standing up, and he still has to pay a lot of attention to keeping his breathing slow and steady, and the sky presses down just enough to make him uncomfortable. But he tells himself that he just has to hold out longer than Ikkaku. He can’t run for it until she does. He kind of really hopes she doesn’t.

From the way she keeps stealing glances at him every few feet, he’s pretty sure she’s thinking the same thing.

If neither of them is going to break first, then they don’t have to break at all. Funny how that works.

7 - start a second, cooler band

“I can’t take it anymore!” Clione declares, dramatically. “I’m being artistically stifled.”

“Telling you to play something besides cowbell isn’t stifling,” Bepo complains. “If anything, I’m pushing you to expand your artistic horizons.”

“No, he’s right!” Jean Bart says. “Why do we live in this world, if not to make music from the deepest expressions of our souls? Why do we create, if not for the unbridled joy of sound in motion? What does any pursuit of art mean if it is not free to be as it wishes? In these trying times, we must seek joy wherever we can find it, especially in the absurd and mundane, and the potential for those aspects of life to be turned to a higher purpose—”

He goes on like that for a few minutes. Good at stirring speeches, this guy—Penguin would suspect it’s a captain thing if their own captain wasn’t so abysmally bad at it. There’s more than a few glassy eyes when he concludes his eloquent plea. Hakugan sniffles behind his mask.

“I’m still not giving it back,” Bepo says, heartlessly, and receives a chorus of boos in return.

So that’s how they end up with two bands.

They’ve been on Zou just over a month when Ikkaku nudges him awake before sunrise. Yet another thing Sora can’t teach you about living on a submarine for a decade is that you grow hypersensitive to someone whispering your name, right next to you, very softly. Especially when it’s the person most often in charge of the engines keeping you alive.

Penguin’s eyes snap open immediately in the kind of deep-dark he’s used to only getting 4,000 meters down. “Time izzit?” he mumbles, soft enough to hopefully not wake Shachi on the other side of the room.

“Four AM,” Ikkaku hisses. “Come on.”

He yanks on his shoes and hat and follows her, stumbling, outside of the hut and into the forest, towards the wall.

There’s the gate access towards the tail, but there’s stairs up at a bunch of different points, including not too far from where the Heart Pirates have been staying.

The wall is tall, but climbable, and when they make it to the top Penguin only hesitates for a few seconds before stepping out into the open air.

The dark makes it hard to tell, but it feels like they can see for miles up here. It’s a clear night, the stars beginning to fade, the moon already set. The wind’s blowing up off the ocean with a faint whiff of salt and elephant.

It occurs to Penguin that this is the highest elevation he’s ever been at in his life.

“What’s going on?” He rubs a little more crusty sleep out of his eyes and squints at his surroundings. “Why are we up here?"

“Wanted to show you something.” She leans against the balustrade and points over the water, and eternally obliging, Penguin looks. Nothing’s there. “Hang on a minute, it’s coming."

It’s not hard to guess what, with the way the sky’s lightening to bleary grey a bit at a time. It’s a nice morning, though, cool and quiet and fresh, and so Penguin stands around and pinches himself whenever sleep starts to creep back in.

Dawn breaks like an egg. One little sliver of sun peeks up over the horizon, spilling colors out a little at a time, until the whole sky is split open. The light hides nothing, and it’s a cloudless morning. You can see for miles—what feels like a limitless, wide-open space, the ocean too far below them to really exist as anything other than a smear of blue.

Penguin takes a deep breath, and then another, feeling something settle. He’s still nervous, a little, but he’s not afraid anymore. How about that.

“Wow,” he mumbles.

“Yeah.”

“I’m a genius.”

“Excuse me?” The dreamy tone drops off Ikkaku’s voice like greased butter. “This was my idea.”

“Yeah, but it was my plan to get us fixed,” Penguin says, with the satisfaction of a man who’s right, which isn’t something he often gets credit for being on this crew, so he has to make sure to give it to himself.

“Yeah, well, you said you could do it faster than I could, and I was up here yesterday,” she informs him. “So you’re wrong, and I win.”

“I was busy!” Penguin protests, because yesterday he worked a clinic shift and then went to both band jam sessions and then ran a pose-practicing thing with the crew to make sure they all know exactly what to do when they see Law again. “I’m a busy guy! My schedule’s full!”

“I still did it first,” she says, decisively. “So I win the bet.”

Penguin remembers making that bet. Or rather, he remembers saying he did, but—“We didn’t bet anything.”

“Well, damn,” Ikkaku says, after clearly scouring her own memory. “Fine. I’ll get you next time.”

Penguin snorts. “Look, Ikki, I love you, but if I can help it, this kind of vacation is never happening ever again.”

“Oh, come on,” she says, like she wasn’t crying in frustration a few weeks ago. “It hasn’t been that bad.”

He thinks about music nights, and planning a pose straight out of Sora with Bepo and Shachi, and Jean Bart’s speeches on behalf of Clione’s cowbell, and the miniature golf course that got washed away because they hadn’t realized it was in the path of a rain-ruption. He thinks about sparring with the minks, and seeing Bepo get better at his Sulong form, and running the rest of the crew through combat basics just one more time, keep going, don’t you want to learn this? He thinks about his dumbass mopey captain out to seize his life back from the bogeyman that’s been haunting him since before Penguin ever knew him, and what it takes to go chasing down the root of a fear so you can beat it to death with a rock. Law’s supposed to call again tonight. Penguin should make sure he’s there when Bepo picks up, so he can try to tell a joke that’ll make the captain smile, at least, and just let him know—they haven’t broken. He better not either.

“Nah,” Penguin agrees, leaning into the new and different day. “It hasn’t been all that bad.”