Archive of Our Own

Kuzan had struck at Vice-Admiral Monkey D. Garp with all the force he could muster and the full intent to kill. Not only would anything less be stupidly insufficient, but for a Marine like Garp, being an injured prisoner on Blackbeard’s Hachinosu would be worse than death.

But Garp had lived, because he’s the world’s most stubborn idiot, and now he’s an injured prisoner on Blackbeard’s Hachinosu whether he wants to be or not. Kuzan suspects…not.

Unfortunately for Garp, Kuzan’s a pirate now, and selfishness is a perk of the job.

Blackbeard has given Kuzan oversight of the prisoners. Partly, Kuzan knows, it’s an acknowledgement that he’s one of the only people on the island who can actually stand a chance at containing the Vice-Admiral. Partly it’s a scut duty for the new guy. Partly it can be attributed to Blackbeard’s winking implication that abuse of the prisoners under his control will be not only tolerated but expected. Barring the three-eyed Charlotte girl, who Blackbeard still needs something from.

That expectation will, in many ways, make things easier.

Shachi, as the current best fighter on the crew, had put himself between the bars and everyone else in this cell, which means he’s the one who gets the privilege of getting jumpscared by Kuzan.

“You’re the crew of the Surgeon of Death.” The former-marine still-terrifying admiral says it like the fact bores him. Shachi decides he hates him a little bit.

“What of it?” Shachi demands.

“You have medical training to assist your captain, don’t you?” His sunglasses lift towards to the back of the cell, where Clione is pretty visibly wrapped in bandages torn from jumpsuit sleeves. Shachi stands up to break his line of sight.

“Medical training that doesn’t mean shit if we don’t have supplies,” Shachi says, anger seeping through his voice. “You know, bandages? Ointment? Clean water, even?”

The crew got split up into different cells when they were brought to Hachinosu, so Shachi’s only got eyes on Clione, Penguin, Jean Bart, Asari, Ebi, and Iruka. It’s not going great. They all took a beating in the fight and some of them got more than a little drowned in the process, even with Shachi and Penguin on water rescue duty. They’ve got several major injuries—Ebi’s concussed, Penguin’s leg is broken, Jean Bart’s got three bullets in him courtesy of that fuck Van Augr, Asari’s got a nasty cut on his thigh that just barely missed an artery, and Clione is worst off because he got second-degree burns from scalding when the ship blew. Shachi’s not panicking panicking, he’s just overthinking all the filth on every single surface in here and the tropical climate outside and how fucking susceptible burns are to infection and how even if it gets bad enough to amputate, there’s no chance in hell Blackbeard will give them anything they can amputate with.

“Shach,” Penguin says, in a tone of voice that implies Shachi would be taking an elbow to the ribs if Penguin could stand up right now.

Fuck. Okay. Fine. No yelling at the guy who can change whether they live or die.

“Yeah,” Shachi says, sticking a lid on his anger and staring Kuzan down, shades to shades. “We’ve got medical training.” Iruka’s the best nurse on the ship, but Shachi’s not looking over at him where Kuzan can see it.

“There’s a prisoner you’re going to treat for me,” Kuzan tells them. He’s clearly not actually asking.

And, well. Shachi wants to say ‘no way in hell’, but. “If you give us medical supplies. To treat your prisoner and our crew.”

“Fine.”

“And you let me check on the others,” Shachi adds, as long as crazy things are happening.

“Don’t push it,” Kuzan orders, tone literally frosty as his breath puffs cold. Shachi can feel the temperature drop.

“Can I bring help? For your mystery prisoner?” Shachi’s played nurse for Law plenty of times over the years, some more harrowing than others, but it’s not his specialty.

“One person here,” Kuzan says. Shachi tilts his head back, catching Iruka’s gaze. The senior nurse rises slowly from where he’s been keeping watch on Ebi and limps over.

“Show us your patient,” Iruka says, voice sonorous and heavy.

Shachi’s expecting that they’ll have to patch up some poor guy who’s been getting tortured so he can go get tortured some more, which. He’s not going to feel great about doing that, but he’ll do it.

Instead they get escorted to a buff old guy wrapped up in enough chains it looks like he’s in a straitjacket. He’s either grinning or grimacing, or, based on Shachi’s experience with his grouchy captain, grinning to hide that he’s grimacing. Makes sense. From what Shachi can get a glimpse of under the chains, he’s in rough shape, still wearing the battered remnants of a Marine uniform.

“Can we get the chains off?” Shachi asks Kuzan.

“No.” Asshole. “What will you need to treat him?”

“Sterile bandages and antiseptic,” Iruka says, immediately. He’s already kneeling next to the guy, scanning an experienced eye over his injuries and fixing his headband tighter to keep his hair back. The old guy squints at them. “Sir, can you hear me?”

“Damn fool pirate.”

“He can hear you,” Kuzan says, almost unnecessarily.

“Do you know where you are?” Iruka continues his assessment like the professional he is, and when the old man snorts uncooperatively, tells Kuzan, “We might need a suture kit, too, there’s fresh blood. Cotton gauze.” There’s no point asking for painkillers, and they both know it. “Honey?” It’s a cheaper ask than ointment. If they were on the Tang—Shachi’s heart only twists a little bit—there’d be a whole lot more things to ask for, but they’re not and they’ll never be again.

“Some of your ice,” Shachi says. “A bucket of chunks, about yea big.” He measures a circle the size of a lychee nut with his thumb and forefinger. There’s some nasty swelling coming up on the guy’s extremities, and it’ll work as a numbing agent even if they can’t get painkillers.

“Don’t do me any favors, pirate,” the old guy growls, jerking out from under Iruka’s careful prodding as Kuzan moves away. “If I die I die, so—”

In a gross violation of every nursing best practice, Shachi seizes the chains across the other prisoner’s chest and drags him forward till they’re nose to nose.

“Listen up, old man,” he growls back, venting all the anger he can’t show to their jailer. “Right now you staying alive might save my men from dying of necrotic gangrene, so if you die I drag you back from hell. Now shut the fuck up, stay fucking put, and let us treat you, got it?”

The old guy stares at him like a wild boar, all rage and intent, but joke’s on him, Shachi’s been there done that, and he’s seen worse from a hangry Bepo or Law before his coffee. He doesn’t crack, keeping his gaze fixed through his shades and his jaw set.

“Hmph.” The old guy doesn’t look away, but he does settle back and dial down the hostility. Shachi lowers him down and lets Iruka finish.

“Do you know where you are?” Iruka asks again.

“Pirate Island,” the old guy says. “Blackbeard’s prison.”

“And your name?”

“Vice-Admiral Monkey D. Garp.” He bites off every single word with the force of a bullet.

“Ah, fuck,” Shachi grumbles, flashing back on the longest surgery he’s ever helped with and the idiot who punched a hole in their infirmary. “You’re gonna be a worse patient than your grandson, aren’t you.”

The guy’s eyes sharpen in a way that pretty conclusively rules out concussion. “Now how do you know Luffy?”

Penguin would probably make some kind of joke about party planning, but Penguin’s stuck in a cell with a broken leg, so Shachi’s tempted to tell the old guy to fuck off. Iruka doesn’t even pause where he’s checking nerve function on the old guy’s arms and rattles off, “Third-degree magma burns near most vital organs, adverse reactions to four out of five anesthetics, lacerations requiring stitches across 30% of his body and severe contusions everywhere else. Pretty memorable. Oh, and Captain had to literally keep his heart beating with manual pressure at one point because defibrillators don’t work on a guy made of rubber.”

“How do you remember that shit?” Shachi asks him. Iruka’s pulled this trick before but it’s still impressive, especially when Shachi can usually barely hang onto details well enough to write reports an hour afterward.

“It’s a gift,” Iruka says. “Garp, can you feel all your fingers?"

Garp stares at him, and then stares at Shachi, and Shachi can see when he spots the scrap from his boiler suit with their Jolly Roger on it that he turned into an armband when he sacrificed the rest of his top for bandages. “You’re the Heart Pirates.”

“At your service,” Shachi says, only a little bit sarcastically. “Answer the question.”

Surprising from a pirate and downright shocking from a Marine, Kuzan is as good as his word. He brings a couple cratefuls of quality medical supplies, including sealed bandages, and lets them take what they don’t use on Garp back to the cell. Shachi doesn’t trust the ice to be clean enough to put near Clione’s burns, or Asari’s cut, but Penguin whimpers in relief after they pack it in around his splint, and Jean Bart—who always suffers in silence—lets out a slow, quiet breath of relief when Shachi piles it on his bullet wounds.

“We’re probably gonna have to leave those in,” Shachi says, grimly. “Don’t think the assholes in charge of accommodations are going to trust us with forceps or tweezers, and they’re from a rifle, so there’s less risk if we don’t mess with ‘em.”

“It’s fine,” Jean Bart says. “Captain can get them out when we find him.”

Shachi’s hands clench around the bandages he’s wrapping. “Jean Bart...”

Jean Bart gives him a look as steady as his hands ever were on the wheel of the Tang. “Captain can get them out when we find him,” he repeats.

Jean Bart’s not the only Heart who had to survive slavery, but he’s the one who has longest and the only one in this cell. Shachi knows that he doesn’t believe in the illusion of hope or empty promises.

“No body. No Kikoku. No Bepo,” Jean Bart says, levelly. “Blackbeard may think he’s won this round, but Law’s out there. We’ll find him.”

Shachi lowers his head and focuses on tying off the bandages, and because he is cool and powerful and manly and all that shit he doesn’t cry.

Once he’s taken care of Jean Bart, and made sure Ebi’s still waking up, and checked in with Iruka about Clione’s bandages, he goes to sit next to Penguin. Between him and the bars, obviously, but Shachi just wants the comfort of someone he’s known his whole life right now.

“Jean Bart thinks they made it,” he tells Penguin, quietly.

Penguin nods, and Shachi knows he understands the implications. “So. What now?”

It’s a stabilizing kind of familiarity. This is how they roll. Shachi pitches the ideas, and Penguin makes them work. He’s been focused on keeping all of them alive, and on how much their immediate situation sucks, so he hasn’t had time to worry about Law and Bepo and getting out of here.

Now, though…

“Kuzan wanted us to help another prisoner,” Shachi says, still keeping his voice low. “A Marine vice-admiral.” He gives him a quick summary of the interaction, and how Garp seemed almost magnanimous towards them by the end of it. Penguin’s silent and thoughtful when he finishes.

“So,” Penguin says finally. “We saw what happened at Marineford. We know he’s related to Strawhat, which makes it really likely that if we get him out of here we’re gonna get mixed up in more Strawhat nonsense.”

“Yeah,” Shachi says, because that’s about the sum of it.

“Is there any chance Law’ll believe us if we say we forgot.”

The snort that bursts out of Shachi is accidental, ugly, and a huge fucking relief.

The third time Shachi and Iruka check on Garp’s injuries, it’s become clear that while he doesn’t heal quite as fast as his grandson he’s still starting to perk up. Shachi could honestly live with him taking longer to heal, because that gives the crew longer to heal, but whatever. It’s fine. They can work with this.

They discussed how they would probably work with this back in the cell, which is why he can give Iruka a subtle little thumbs-up and keep on checking the wraps on Garp’s broken ribs nonchalantly.

Iruka doesn’t even nod, professional and three-time crew-wide silent improv battle champ that he is, but he does stand up after checking all of Garp’s stitches and tell Kuzan, “We need scissors to get his stitches out.”

Kuzan stares at them, and a delicate little ice shard with a wicked sharp edge sprouts out of the floor. Iruka glances at it and then starts shaking his head. “Won’t work. Too cold, too clumsy, and the skin’s too delicate. There’s gotta be a pair of nail scissors on this island or something.”

“Or a seam ripper,” Shachi volunteers. “Ebi and I used that once.”

“Ebi’s banned from medical for good reason and you know it,” Iruka points out, not even looking at him. “Look, if we don’t get those stitches out, his flesh is going to shred around them as soon as it heals, and it’s going to get infected.”

“Bah!” Garp says. “Like I’d let some puny infection get me.”

Weirdly, this seems to be the thing that makes Kuzan straighten up, casually ice over the entire cell, and—if the shadows outside are any indication—walk away.

Can he eavesdrop through that? Fuck it, if he can he’s been eavesdropping through their ice bucket and it’s already too late. Shachi lifts his head and flicks his fingers to get their patient-slash-fellow-prisoner’s attention.

“Look.” Shachi uses a low voice that won’t carry as far as whispering will, getting to the point. “We wanna get out of here. You wanna get out of here.” He fishes out the spare hairpins he uses to pin his hat on before underwater maneuvers and shoves them into Garp’s cuffs, out of sight. It’s obvious the marine recognizes what he’s been handed, even if the only sign is his eyes getting scrunchier. Weirdly like the captain. “We got nineteen guys to crew a ship with and we’re willing to work with you. Once you feel good enough for a jailbreak, get moving. We’re just down the hall so we’ll keep an ear out and follow your lead.”

“What kind of joke is this, boy?”

Shachi experiences a brief, weird, and frankly unsettling nostalgia for Wolf and Swallow Island. Thank god if they get out of here they only have to hand this guy off to the Marines. “No joke. We need to get out of here or they’re going to try and use us against our captain.” They won’t even need to put out any kind of threat. Trafalgar Dumbass Water Law, Self Sacrificing Idiot of Death, is almost certainly going to throw himself directly back at the pirate stronghold as soon as he can walk, unless Bepo sits on him. Shachi is really hoping Bepo sits on him. “Desperate times, desperate measures, right?” Penguin and him did consider the possibility Garp might also try and use them against their captain, but Marine prisons are easy enough to break out of once you know what you’re doing, and the Heart Pirates know what they’re doing.

“And what the hell do you want an old man like me for?” Garp growls.

“We’re spread across three cells and can’t start shit without a signal. You give us a signal, we get you on a ship.” Ikkaku, Uni, and Hakugan are the rest of senior crew, and they know the contingency for a situation like this is to wait for a signal. It’s a bit of a gamble that there’s at least one of them in each other cell, but literally staying alive is a gamble right now, so Shachi’s just going to play those odds.

Iruka kicks the ice and Shachi takes it as a warning to hiss “Do not fuck us on this, old man,” and get back to looking busy.

The ice melts away in two seconds to reveal Kuzan—famed former Admiral Aokiji, current jailor, widely acknowledged terrifying son of a bitch—standing there holding a pair of tiny nail scissors.

“Those’ll work,” Iruka says and takes them to dunk thoroughly in antiseptic.

Shachi might have to finally own up to that concussion check he’s been avoiding when they make it out of here because it genuinely doesn’t occur to him that Monkey D. Garp—hero of the Marines, nicknamed ‘the Fist,’ direct relative of fucking Straw Hat Luffy—will just. Not wait. And bust out before they’re even back in their cell, the sound of shattering rock and wild laughter audible from two hallways over.

Kuzan just fucking bolts, and Shachi kind of hopes he’s forgotten about them, but when he tries to take a step he discovers that he and Iruka are both now locked in ice up to their knees.

“What the fuck?” Penguin says from inside the cell. “What’s crashing? Someone who can stand up tell me what’s crashing.”

“We made an alliance with an idiot,” Shachi snaps out, already unzipping what’s left of his boiler suit so he can ditch it and his boots in the ice trap and still maybe make it out of here. Iruka’s doing the same. “And ready or not, here we go. Who’s got the pins?”

“Gottem,” Penguin says, and there’s the distant sound of Jean Bart’s chains clanking. He’s the only one the Blackbeard pirates bothered chaining to the wall, and Shachi knows it’s been giving the guy nightmares only because he’s spent the past week hyper-attenuated to everyone in the cell. “Go get the others, we’ll catch up.”

“Ebi—” Iruka starts saying something in that tone that means he has instructions he wants to give.

“’M good,” Ebi’s voice comes out hoarse and whispering, just as Shachi finally wrestles his left leg free of his boot and practically trips out of his boiler suit. “Get.”

He’s definitely not good, but there’s an enemy pirate turning the corner and they still need to get eyes on the rest of their crew. Shachi stumbles out of the ice trap dressed in only his skivvies, sunglasses, and socks—and, of course, his hat—and makes his first priority getting his hands on a sword. He’ll worry about living this down at the same time as he’s free to worry about a concussion check.

Because Hakugan and Uni are fucking champs the other Heart Pirates are already loose when Shachi and Iruka reach the hallway with their cells, but there’s a bad, panicky moment when both sides realize Ikkaku’s not there.

Beluga scrapes together enough of a braincell to just holler her name down a random hallway, and miracle of goddamn miracles she yells back faintly, “Down here!”

It’s further into the complex, so Shachi taps Iruka, Hakugan, and Gar and orders everyone else to get the fuck out of the building and find a boat. There are more guards than expected, so they don’t make it before whoever’s guarding Ikkaku’s cell directly has gone barging into it to try and shut her up. They do get there in time to see Ikki and her cellmate—stranger, brown hair in pigtails—show that guard exactly what kind of mistake he’s made.

“Damn,” Shachi says, thoughtfully, watching Ikkaku purposefully grind her boot into the prone former guard’s ribs as she stomps out over him. “Do we need to kill this guy?”

“No time,” Ikkaku says. “Hey, Ribbons, you coming?” Her cellmate, still white-knuckling the bucket she was using as a weapon, looks up at them slightly wild-eyed. “Yeah, you. Limited-time offer.”

“All offshore that’s going offshore,” Shachi says, and hands Ikkaku the blackjack he got off one of the pirates who got in their way. She slaps it against her other palm with a deeply satisfied look. “C’mon if you’re coming, we gotta go, the old man’s putting up a hell of a fight but he’s still got four broken ribs.”

“What old man?” Ribbons asks, not letting go of the bucket as she follows them out of the cell.

“Might have made an alliance with Garp the Fist,” Shachi says, and breaks into a sprint before any of them can yell at him about it.

Everyone yells at Shachi anyway, and it only gets louder when they manage to reunite with the rest of the crew on the way out of the building. He passes the buck on to Penguin, who’s getting carried along by Jean Bart because of his broken leg, and therefore has the lung capacity to yell back, and focuses on cutting down anyone who gets in their way as they follow the trail of smashy destruction.

The island is in chaos, and it’s late at night, and the whole thing is weirdly reminiscent of Onigashima except their goal is not to get in but to get out as quickly as possible.

There’s a brief delay where Beluga smells something very important, and then once they’ve taken care of that there’s a scramble to take the boat that’s most ready to sail, and Shachi steals Penguin’s boots so he has more than his socks when he runs back into the island with Jean Bart and Ikkaku to find Garp the Fist knee-deep in a fight with Aokiji. Kuzan. Whatever the fuck he’s calling himself these days.

Garp’s laughing like a certain idiot the Heart Pirates first met on Sabaody even though Shachi knows exactly how injured he was before fighting his way across Hachinosu and is pretty sure the old man shouldn’t even be upright right now, maybe not even breathing right now,

“Call it off, Garp,” Kuzan says. “You’re injured. You’re past your prime. You’re done.” Considering that between sentences he has to dodge punches moving almost too fast for Shachi to see, this seems like wishful thinking.

“Never been better!” Garp booms, and proves it by hurling a fallen door that knocks the pirates charging him from behind through a wall.

“On three,” Shachi tells the other Hearts. “One, two—”

Before he can get to three, Kuzan has flickered directly in front of them like some kind of ghost, and Shachi swears and stumbles backwards, tripping in Penguin’s not-quite-right boots. Jean Bart shoves him upright.

“So,” Kuzan says. “Conspiracy.”

“Ha!” Garp charges at him from the side and almost lands a hit, knocking Kuzan back from looming over them. Shachi tries to remember how breathing works. “Like I’d work with filthy pirates! That’s your problem!”

“Can’t we leave him?” Ikkaku asks.

“No,” Shachi says, because they had a deal, because he’s their ticket past any Marine patrols, because two years ago Shachi was on night shift in the infirmary when Strawhat was in and out of consciousness while they tried to figure out a pain med that would actually work on him and the kid started whining for people he knew. Not the names Shachi knew off bounty posters, but his just-dead brother, and strangers, and his Gramps.

They’re not leaving Garp here because when the Hearts couldn’t help their captain through his worst nightmare, this guy’s grandkid got Law back to them alive and smiling, and Shachi’s well aware of how much the world runs on the principle of give and take.

“Right,” Ikkaku says. “Well, we’re still waiting on—”

The explosion of the really-poorly-stored barrels of gunpowder and weird unidentifiable-but-hopefully-noisy gadgets is even bigger and noisier than Shachi could have hoped for. Bless Beluga for smelling it, seriously. And, fingers crossed, the extra trails he and Azarashi split off to lay down to the other ships ready to sail didn’t get disturbed—yep, there they go.

“Now!” Shachi yells, while Kuzan gets visibly distracted by the explosions, and Garp shudders on his feet from the shockwave. Jean Bart grabs him up in a fireman’s carry and they’re off again, one last desperate sprint for their lives.

“Put me down! Leave me! I’m an old man!” Garp yells at them. If he got concussed Iruka’s going to kill him. Or Shachi. The last thing they need is another disoriented Monkey bashing up their ship.

“Yeah, and you’re gonna get older, so suck it up!” Shachi yells at him. He and Ikkaku are on violence duty, but the explosions have thrown truly everything on the island into another level of chaos. There’s yelling about water in the distance, there’s people running towards the big stone skull, there’s people running to check on their own ships—

“Shit,” Shachi says, and runs faster.

They make it there in time to knock a few overzealous pirates who have noticed the Hearts stealing their ship off the dock. Azarashi and Beluga are also coming in late, and Azarashi almost gets knocked off the dock himself before Ikkaku takes a blackjack to the offender.

“Can we get a gangplank?” Shachi yells at the ship, putting himself at the end of the dock, staying between his crew and the rest of the world. “Can we please get a gangplank?”

“Little busy here!” someone yells back from the ship, but there’s a reassuring clatter of wood on stone and thumping feet even as Shachi has to show a couple chumps the error of their ways.

“Shachi, come on!” Penguin yells at him, but this particular chump isn’t taking his lesson well, and he’s got a mace, and Shachi gets the sword up to block between his ribs and Bigass Mace but the blow plus unfamiliar shoes plus half-aborted motion backwards to take the gangplank onto the ship equals him losing his balance, tumbling off the dock and into the water. Sweet, delicious water.

And then, well, then it’s all over but the shouting.

Okay, that’s a tiny bit of wishful thinking—Shachi’s good in the water but he’s nothing like, say, First Son of the Sea Jinbe who could probably swamp these docks, turbocharge the ship, and sail through a whirlpool for an encore without trying too hard. Shachi settles for a couple of targeted water blasts to break the masts of the closest ships, a hard shove with his back against the hull that almost keelhauls him to get them started, and, initially, a plan to swim alongside in case someone gets scrambled to come after them sooner than expected.

That only lasts till Penguin starts trying to climb over the side of the boat with his broken leg, yelling that if Shachi doesn’t come up he’s coming down, and Shachi can tell he’s not bluffing. Penguin doesn’t seem to hear him shouting back up not to be an idiot, so Shachi has to climb up the dangling rope ladder to tell him that face to face, and as soon as he gets to the top of the ladder Iruka grabs him by the shirt and yanks him over onto the deck for a concussion check. Which, since he got got like that, Shachi can admit he probably needs.

“No concussion,” Iruka says, after a thorough walkthrough. “Just stupidity. Sit down.”

While Shachi is protesting that he’s fine, he can still keep an eye on things, he’s got seniority, their head nurse steers him to where Garp the Fist is propped up against the cabin. The guy’s wrapped in new bandages that are alarmingly orange until Shachi realizes they’re made of shredded hammock or sheets or...something.

“Is he dead?” Shachi asks, and whoops, he lost all his adrenaline when he wasn’t looking, his legs are way too wobbly to resist Iruka’s fierce shove on his shoulders.

“Nope,” Iruka says, right before Garp proves it with a snore so loud the door in the wall next to him rattles. “And I already patched him up again, as good as we’re getting unless this ship was somehow delivering high quality surgical supplies. So Penguin says because this was your idea, he’s your problem now.”

“Penguin can’t prove shit,” Shachi says, because Penguin was definitely the first one to say out loud that they should work with fucking Monkey D. Garp. And okay, maybe while Shachi had been telling him about his and Iruka’s little field trip he’d spelled out all the reasons he’d been thinking about on his walk back to the cell and while he was doing first aid on Clione and Jean Bart and Penguin himself for why they should maybe think about trying to get the walking superweapon on their side, no one can prove he actually had the idea first. He didn’t even run it by Bepo.

Fuck, he was doing so good not thinking about Bepo.

“I don’t have time for this,” Iruka says, which is one of those phrases that he shares with Law but where Law uses it to dodge conversations—often truthfully, because he delegates about as well as lobsters tango—Iruka only deploys it when he’s like. Angry angry. “Hey, Ribbons!”

“Yes?” a soft voice asks, and just the one word is so sweet that Shachi genuinely needs a few seconds to connect the voice and silhouette with the same woman he watched use a bucket to help Ikkaku beat a man half to death.

“I need you to watch this idiot for me,” Iruka says. “He needs to stay put till the old man wakes up or I come back and say he can move. If he tries to get up, holler.”

“Where’s Penguin?” Shachi asks, instead of answering this. “I need to talk to him, we gotta—”

“Penguin’s supervising the sails,” Iruka says. “Jean Bart’s got him. I’ve got to go wrap Azarashi’s broken ribs. You talk to the new crew member.”

“The what?” Ribbons asks, and when Iruka’s lantern flashes over her face she looks genuinely scared and confused. Well, it’s been a while since they picked someone up, but it’s not like Shachi’s forgotten the spiel.

“You don’t have to,” Shachi promises, because even if they do find Law before they get her off the ship, he’ll probably be too distracted with making sure the rest of them are still alive to latch onto anyone new. And it’s not like the captain will stop her leaving, even if he does get attached—he’ll just sulk for ages. “We can try to get you on another ship home if you want, wherever home is, but you did us a solid.” Not one he saw, but if Iruka’s saying ‘new crew member’ like a foregone conclusion she must have been pulling her weight while Shachi was distracted. “Sorry, did anyone actually do the introductions part, or—”

“Ikkaku told me who you were, when we were in the cell,” she says, and sits down out of his reach, still holding the bucket between them like a shield. Someone’s gotten the lamps on deck lit and little bits of light occasionally slip across her, throwing a patch of skin or hair or ragged dress into relief. “The Heart Pirates. Your captain is Trafalgar Law.” She hesitated. “She said your captain lost to Blackbeard.”

“Our navigator got away with him,” Shachi says, trying to borrow Jean Bart’s confidence. “Blackbeard was keeping us as insurance. We think.” Their poneglyphs went down with the Tang. Van Augr and a few other pirates came along during the...week? Maybe a week, that they were prisoners, sounding them out about joining Blackbeard’s fleet. That went nowhere fast, obviously.

Right, he’s supposed to be doing the spiel. “We’re the Heart Pirates. We sail under Trafalgar Law. There’s twenty of us, plus the captain. I’d talk about accommodations but who knows what the fuck those are gonna look like, I don’t even know what we’ve got on this ship. We don’t go in for random pillaging and plundering, and we don’t pick fights with other crews or the Marines unless there’s a good chance we’re going to win. We sneak, we steal, we deal in information. We do a lot of medical treatment, for civilians mostly, and for other pirate crews if they can pay and mind their manners.” He blows air out from between his lips. “Gotta be honest. It’s either a really bad or really good time to sign up. We’re gonna have to reorganize a lot.”

Iruka comes by and deposits Gar next to them. Gar’s making a strange wheezing noise. “Water in his lungs. He’s benched too.”

“I gotta—” Gar coughs, wet in a way that makes Shachi’s stomach sink. The fully-human members of the crew aren’t built to survive the dunk in the ocean they’d all gone through. Gar can’t be the only one dealing with this consequence of half-drowning. “The sails—”

“Benched,” Iruka repeats, and is gone again before they can argue.

“Who’s he?” Ribbons asks. “First mate?”

“Nah,” Shachi says. “We don’t really do that.” See: Law, delegating, lobsters, not happening. Shachi and Penguin fight over which one of them is second or third mate sometimes, but that’s not the same thing. “Iruka’s senior nurse, so with the Captain gone, he’s in charge of medical. I’m Shachi, I’m quartermaster.”

“Him and Penguin are in charge,” Gar says, and says it nice and slow and doesn’t gasp, good job Gar. Shachi waggles his hand in the air to indicate for Ribbons’s benefit it’s more complicated than that instead of starting an argument with a guy who doesn’t have the breath for it. “I’m Gar. Kitchens.”

“Kitchens?” Ribbons looks interested at that. “Do you bake? I’m a chocolate specialist.”

“Oh my god, chocolate,” Shachi groans. “I miss chocolate.” It doesn’t grow in Wano and the place hasn’t exactly got a thriving import market for anything besides knockoff devil fruits.

Ribbons seems happy to talk about it, at least till Shachi and Gar’s stomachs start growling.

“Oh, you must be hungry!” she says. “Especially if you were only getting that awful porridge.” They were only getting gruel, actually, porridge would have been an upgrade, but Shachi feels like saying that would be needlessly fishing for sympathy. “Let me go see what I can make.”

Since their main cooks are Clione (severely burned), Gar (benched), Ebi (concussed), and Shachi himself (babysitting a marine, liable to get snitched on if he stands, technically benched), Shachi doesn’t try to argue against it.

“If you’re feeling up to it,” he says. “Just...keep track of what we’ve got?” They have no idea how far it is to the next resupply and Penguin’s in no shape to help him on fishing duty.

“Of course,” Ribbons says, and in the lamplight it looks like she’s blushing, and Shachi once again reminds himself of the guard beaten half to death with a bucket.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Gar, Iruka says he’s not supposed to stand up,” she says, and with that ratting out abandons them to babysit each other. Unfortunately, she’s going to fit in great.

Garp snorts awake not long before dawn. The ship’s finally underway at a steady pace and the panicked shouting has died down as the crew members who still remember how a three-masted ship works have yelled the rest of them into successful maneuvers, so Shachi’s been resting his eyes while he waits for the next thing to go wrong.

“Morning, old man,” he says. “Do me a favor and don’t stand up. You’ve got six broken ribs now and half your wounds reopened.”

“What, this? This is nothing,” Garp grumbles. “Got places to be.”

“Yeah, about that,” Shachi says. “Where’s the nearest Marine base? You held up your end of the deal. We’ll drop you off.”

Garp squints at him. “You were supposed to leave me there.” He runs his fingers gingerly along one of his bandages, checking how well it’s secured, and Shachi tells himself he will not smack the injured elderly. Unless he really deserves it.

“That wasn’t the deal.”

“You’re pirates.”

“We still keep our word,” he snaps, stubbornly, because where the fuck does a Marine get off lecturing him about morals? “I don’t care if I’m scum of the sea and you’re a murderous bastard. I told you we’d get you off the island if you gave us a signal. You did a hell of a lot more than that. We owe you a ride.”

“Hm,” Garp says. “Strikes me, you said the deal was, I give you a signal, you all would get me on a ship.” He scratches at the bandage and this time Shachi smacks his hand away from it. He doesn’t seem to care. “We’re on a ship, so your end of the deal is done—”

“Like hell it is—”

He just talks right over Shachi’s interjection. “—but the way I see it, I still owe you for hauling that brat of mine out of trouble.”

“Like hell you do,” Shachi repeats. The last thing they need is getting any more tangled up with the Marines or the Monkeys.

“Huh.” Garp scratches at his chin this time. There’s some road rash there, mostly healed. Shachi will allow it. “Didn’t see your crew doing much combat on Hachinosu. You brats could use some pointers.”

“On what, throwing ourselves into fights before we’ve healed?” Shachi levers himself up, hissing under his breath as he puts pressure on the wrong part of his rapidly-purpling upper arm and abruptly remembers how little sleep he’s had. “Don’t answer that. Iruka wanted to check your wounds. Stay put.”

“Fussy as an old mother hen,” Garp grumbles. “I’m not dead yet.”

“Unfortunately for the rest of us,” Shachi grumbles back.

Fortunately for the rest of them, Garp is asleep by the time Shachi finds Iruka drowsing in the bunkhouse and drags him and his bowl of what smells like absolutely amazing soup back out. Iruka eyeballs the old man and says sleep is the best thing for him to do right now anyway.

“You too,” he tells him, and scratches at his headband. “Penguin’s got a watch schedule going. You’re on at midmorning.”

“Yay,” Shachi deadpans. “Get Gar fed?”

While Iruka bundles off their crewmate, Shachi looks at where the sun’s crawling over the horizon, sighs, and lies down with his back to the cabin and his hat over his eyes. Might as well sleep while he can.

When Shachi gets up a few hours later, Ribbons has been busy in the kitchen—she hands him a cup of soup, a cup of coffee, and a list of supplies and Shachi would propose on the spot if he didn’t have to go relieve Penguin of duty.

“You’re my favorite person on this ship right now,” he settles for, and bolts outside as fast as he can reasonably go with two drinks to juggle.

Penguin is sitting on a crate near the wheel with his freshly re-splinted leg propped up on another. Jean Bart is steering, occasionally consulting a log pose.

“What are we looking at?” Shachi asks, and only makes the barest effort to cool the soup before dumping half of it down his throat. The burn of hot food honestly feels kind of good after a week of cold-to-lukewarm gruel.

“Well, two options,” Penguin says. “Option one, there’s a log pose for Hachinosu, and some maps. We can probably use that point of reference to get to Wano, or Dressrosa.” Law had mentioned that, on their way to Wano. The Royal Family of Dressrosa owes them a favor or five.

“Option two?”

Penguin checks sight lines on the decks before reaching up and tugging a little scrap of paper out of the secret pocket inside the ear of his hat. BEPO is written across it in familiar handwriting.

It’s singed, and smaller than it was, but it’s whole.

“Shit,” Shachi breathes. “I thought you lost it.”

“Wasn’t about to say anything when the walls had ears,” Penguin said. “So? We got enough supplies to go find our lost boys?”

God, Shachi wants to say yes. He can’t until he actually knows what’s happening, so he makes himself drain the rest of his soup and unfold the paper Ribbons gave him first. Reads through it, does some calculations on how far they can afford to get. It’s better than he was hoping. “We got two weeks of supplies. Three if we put everyone on two meals a day.”

“Still too far to Dressrosa,” Jean Bart rumbles. “And if we don’t get the course to Wano just right, there’s not much else in the area.”

“Captain-chasing it is,” Penguin says, and waves the card at Shachi. “Come take this so I can catch up on my beauty sleep.

The first couple of days they all focus on getting their strength back. Trading shifts off among the most functional crew members, sleeping a lot, eating three meals a day. It helps that Ribbons seems to have a knack for making lots of food at once, and that Clione is doing well enough to sit up and supervise in the kitchen. They stretch the provisions further than Shachi had been expecting, but they’re still on a short timeline for food. That’s their primary problem, followed by the different flavor of New World nonsense that afflicts a sailing ship—they’re used to sea monsters, riptides, and hydrothermal vents, not crazy winds, surging waves, and waterspouts. Their third problem is potential pursuit by the Blackbeard Pirates.

At least the New World problem cancels out the food problem neatly on their fourth day out, when a Sea King tries to take a bite out of them and they don’t have torpedos to fight it off. Much screaming, shouting, et cetera ensue before Garp breaks out of the infirmary and levels the thing with one punch so they can get busy butchering.

“I knew it,” he says later, when Shachi’s elbow deep in guts and already at the end of his rope. “You all need to shape up. You’ve made it this far, but you’re still weak.”

“Mind your own business,” Shachi says and throws more guts over the side. They were attracting sharks. Maybe he could throw the old man to them, since he wouldn’t stay put in the infirmary. Usually with a patient who was this uncooperative, Law would just remove leg privileges, but that option's somewhat beyond them at the moment.

“This is my business! I’m not about to stay in debt to filthy pirates.”

“The filth is also your fault,” Shachi says, covered in blood and viscera and Sea King shit. Which also describes his mood.

Shachi’s not an idiot. He’s well aware the Hearts don’t, like, rank when it comes to powerhouse crews. They’re definitely, not the Strawhats, where every member boasts a bounty, and they don’t compete for them like the Kid pirates do either. When the three strongest captains of their generation went toe-to-toe with Kaido and Big Mom, half of one of the Great World Powers, Law was the only one who didn’t have a member of his crew beside him. The captain, Bepo and Jean Bart are the only ones on the crew who even had a bounty before Wano, and what most people are too dense to see is that when you’ve been sailing on the same crew for over a decade, that takes some serious strategy.

They’re specialists, not slouches, but they avoid getting caught.

Or, well, they used to.

Shachi had never been ashamed of his crew’s status before. He knows exactly where they stand. They couldn’t drive off Jack the Drought, but once the Strawhats had, the Hearts were part of the reason all of the minks still left alive had lived to take the cure Chopper developed, no matter how injured they’d been. Anyone stupid enough to think that doesn’t matter isn’t worth the time Shachi would need to explain it to them.

And then on Wano, Hawkins had caught Shachi and his best friends and used them to bait their captain into a torture chamber. And they’d sworn between themselves they would get stronger, that they wouldn’t let that happen again.

“We’re not that weak,” Shachi says, because they did manage to escape Blackbeard’s prison, even if they needed Garp’s help for the plan they went with. And they really have to get this guy off their ship sooner than later. It’s not safe to call any pirate allies with a Marine onboard who has Observation haki so strong Penguin says he can feel it crackling over his skin even when the old man is asleep.

“You got captured by Blackbeard,” Garp huffs.

“Old man, you also got captured by Blackbeard,” Shachi reminds him, but Garp doesn’t seem to be listening. He really is too much like his idiot grandson sometimes. It’s not good for Shachi’s blood pressure.

“Training starts tomorrow!” Garp booms. “As soon as you get this cooked up into a real meal.”

“Hey, Shach,” Penguin says, two days into their torturous new training regime. “You remember how you said on Wano that we needed to get stronger?”

Shachi groans a vague affirmative from where he’s currently face down on the desk, trying to get his lungs to work.

“I’ve decided this is your fault,” Penguin informs him. “Cosmically.”

“Do you want me to say sorry?” Shachi says. “Because believe me, I’m sorry.”

Penguin sighs and goes back to his current exercise of one-legged squats. His broken leg is balanced precariously on a few boards. He’s been spared the burpees Garp has set the rest of them to, but that hasn’t saved him completely. One of Shachi’s own exercises has been to dive down to the seafloor when they’re over the shallower ridges and bring back buckets of sand for Penguin to punch. Shachi hates this exercise almost as much as he hates that he can feel it working.

Not all of the crew has been suffering like they have. The Hearts are somewhat unusual among pirate crews in the number of noncombatants they sustain. Some of the ones who can fight but usually don’t for practical reasons, like Ikkaku, are taking this chance to get their skills up a bit. Then there’s the ones like Jean Bart, who suffered through a stint as an unwilling gladiator, with personal reasons to never fight again, and like Iruka, who’s just too fucking busy.

Shachi and Penguin have been trading off checking in on everybody in between everything else they’re doing. Usually they’ve got Bepo for backup on emotional monitoring duty, and Shachi misses him badly, not the least because he has a feeling their big personal teddy bear would be just right for approaching Ribbons.

She still hasn’t given them any other name, not even to the people working kitchen duty with her. Clione has suggested that there’s a couple different personalities going on under the hood there, but all of them seem happy to answer to what they’ve been calling her and keep helping in the kitchen. Shachi did ask if she wanted another job but that just provoked a stressed meltdown about them lying about liking her food and trying to get rid of her. He had to back off quick and use all his well-honed wrangling skills to promise that she could stay in the kitchen as long as she wanted if she would just let them know the minute she wanted to leave.

Speaking of, Shachi is stirred out of his face-down pity party for his lungs, they had a good run while it lasted, by the gentle clack of a cup landing next to his face. It turns out to be water spiked with just a little bit of grog, for cleanliness probably, but he only really processes the taste after he’s chugged the whole thing down. Yay water. As soon as he finishes it and gasps, Ribbons refills it from the jug she’s got.

“You’re my favorite person on this ship right now,” Shachi says and chugs half the new cup.

“Hey!” Penguin complains. “Don’t give her my spot! I worked hard for that spot!”

“You got born two houses away,” Shachi says, retreading the old running joke with a comfortable ease.

“And I put a lot of work into that,” Penguin says. “Sixteen hours, my mother was in labor with me,” he tells Ribbons.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ribbons says in her quiet voice, sounding genuinely sympathetic as she pours Penguin his own cup of water. “Did she hold it against you very often?”

It’s such a perfectly earnest question that they both just look at her for a minute.

“...No?” Penguin says. “No. I only know because she used to joke about it. Said it was the start of me never making up my mind.” Shachi remembers that, and he feels about as wistful remembering it as Penguin sounds. They’ve talked about it with Law, once or twice when they were all really drunk, if their parents were actually as good as all of them remember or if they’ve just let themselves forget anything else. Shachi has some fuzzy memories where he can’t figure out if a painful incident happened with his aunt and uncle, with his folks, or in a dream. The answer Penguin and Shachi agree on when they’re hungover is that yes, their parents were good, or losing them to that tsunami when they were kids wouldn’t still hurt so damn much. Law always makes noncommittal noises, but fuck Law sometimes.

“Really?” Ribbons sounds surprised. “Mama was in labor with—one of my brothers—for sixteen hours, and she’s scolded him about it when she wasn’t happy with him.”

“That sucks,” Shachi says.

“Shach,” Penguin says, in a tone of voice that implies Shachi would be taking an elbow to the ribs if Penguin could reach him right now.

“I’m just saying,” Shachi says.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Ribbons says. “Mama was only being a little mean. She didn’t even beat him too bad.”

Penguin and Shachi stare at each other instead of staring at her, because when someone says something that fucked up about their family like it doesn’t even matter, the last thing you want to do is make them feel so self-conscious about it they stop trusting you with the fucked up shit.

“Yeah, that’s better, I guess,” Shachi says.

“Thanks for the water,” Penguin says, and she smiles before heading off with the jug and the stack of cups to those currently suffering Old Man Garp’s training.

“New crewmember, then?” Shachi asks, once she’s out of earshot.

“Do you think we can kill her mom?” Penguin answers. It’s an agreement. She definitely needs a cuddle session with Bepo.

Shachi is contemplating this when Penguin adds “Heads up,” and Shachi just barely rolls out of the way in time to dodge Garp in search of a new target.

“Fist of Learning!” the old man bellows.

“Where is your splint?” Shachi yells back.

They still haven’t caught up to Bepo (and Law, and Law, Law has to be there, Shachi reminds himself) by the time Iruka finally decides that yes, Garp is actually healed, all the bandages can come off and they can all stop shouting themselves hoarse at the old guy about it. Shachi is holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that this means they can finally dump him at a marine base and move on, medical responsibilities discharged, but for the night he’ll settle for the impromptu celebration involving a second Sea King catch. Shachi helped slaughter this one in the water. He’s feeling pretty good about it.

They’re all feeling pretty good. The major injuries are healing well, Bepo’s card is responsive to changes in course in a way that means he must be close, those of them dealing with Old Man Garp’s training regime are starting to adjust. It doesn’t hurt that they’re running lowish on water and the grog ratio in the cups is much higher than it’s been. Shachi still misses his the vodka hidden under his socks that went down with the Tang, but this isn’t half-bad.

Ribbons is a little pink with it, where she’s perched on a barrel, and she tells Shachi in that all-of-a-sudden way of surprisingly talkative drunks, “None of you asked why I was with Blackbeard.”

“Does it matter?” Shachi asks, and Penguin’s elbow digs extra hard into his head where he’s been using Penguin’s good leg as a pillow. Ikkaku’s running night shift, so the two of them are free to flop against each other and get comfortably tipsy.

“Not if you want to be ignorant dummies,” she says. Ah, haughty Ribbons is here tonight. Well, as long as she doesn’t have a bucket to beat them with it’s fine.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Penguin asks. That does seem like a better question.

“Obviously, you fools,” she says, and takes another swig of her grog from the sound of it. “I have a devil fruit.”

“Ooooh,” Shachi and Penguin chorus, mostly just to be assholes.

“That’s cool,” Shachi says, to be nice.

“Sorry it got you grabbed by Blackbeard,” Penguin says, also to be nice.

“What does it do?” Shachi asks, since she seems like she’s in a mood to talk about it.

“It’s the Memo-Memo fruit.” Shachi can hear her heels thumping against the barrel. “I can see other people’s memories and...change them. Take them out, cut them together.”

“Huh,” Shachi says. “That’s cool. Hey, can you edit out my memory of the time I walked in on Clione shaving his pits?”

“Wait, wait, can you take away Beluga’s memory of that bet I owe him?” Penguin asks.

“Ooh, wait,” Shachi says, sitting up with excitement. “Can you grab the old man’s memory of everything since Hachinosu so we can just dump him on an island somewhere?”

“Don’t even try it, brats!” Garp yells from way too close and Shachi practically levitates into the air to reflexively dodge the fist he’s sure is coming. He gets lucky or the old man’s in a good mood or both because there are no further threats or acts of violence unto his person.

“You don’t think it’s weird?” Ribbons demands. She’s flushing when he looks at her. Maybe time to go beg more of a water ration off Clione. “Or—or creepy? Or evil?”

“I mean, it’s a little scary,” Shachi admits. “And I get why Blackbeard would want it, since he’s an evil bastard who collects devil fruits.”

“Thanks for not using it for him, by the way,” Penguin says. “We owe you one.”

“But you just said it was scary!” Ribbons says, sounding agitated.

“Ribbons, our captain has shown me what my kidney looks like up close and personal,” Shachi says. He put it back after, it’s fine. “We’re used to scary. We like scary.”

“What do we look like, cowards?” Penguin asks. “Don’t answer that.”

Ribbons is biting her lip, still flushed, and then she shoves her bangs up over her forehead and glares at them with three eyes. “Scary like this?”

“That’s fucking sick,” Shachi says without thinking. He almost immediately regrets it when her eyes go wide and start tearing up.

“I knew it! You hate it, you hate me—”

“Are you kidding, that’s amazing,” Penguin says. “What’s your aim like? That’s gotta give you a depth perception advantage.”

“I can outshoot anyone on this ship,” she says, sniffling a little. Shachi goes and grabs a handkerchief off Ikkaku and doesn’t manage to get rid of Ikkaku trailing him back to where Penguin is quizzing Ribbons about her experience with targeting systems.

“Are we upgrading the torpedos on our next sub?” Ikkaku asks. “Because I’ve been saying for—oh, hey, you showed them. I told you it’d be fine.”

This seems to be a little much for Ribbons, who bursts into tears, so Shachi hands over the handkerchief and goes to pester Clione for some fresh water.

By the time he gets back, the circle of trust has expanded to everyone else on deck, and everyone does indeed seem fine with it. Not all of them had careers as teenage lab rats while the captain was in his experimental phase but there’s things that you just have to get over when you’re a Heart Pirate. Close quarters. Not seeing the sun for a week and a half. Body horror. There’s even some kind of bargaining happening between Hakugan and Asari over whether or not Asari can have Hakugan’s eye to do something similar once the captain gets back. The confident assumption that Law is coming back makes Shachi’s stomach do a funny little lurch so he presses the water onto Ribbons and steers the conversation towards recounting the crew’s Greatest Hits. It’s an old, favorite topic of conversation, about as well-trodden as his and Penguin’s jokes about growing up together, but they have some exciting new material to integrate after Wano.

Jean Bart and Ikkaku reenact the moment where they had to fish Strawhat out of the ocean, and everyone takes a drink to the memory of the Polar Tang, a brave and noble lady who would save even those idiots who punched holes in her infirmary walls. Except old man Garp, who’s pretending not to sniffle into his drink when Clione bemoans the state Strawhat left his kitchen in.

They segue from there into the rest of the fight on Onigashima. Penguin and Shachi get to take center stage for their eyewitness reporting, since even the other fighters on the crew were mostly holding down the edges to make sure there’d be room to retreat if necessary.

Penguin gets a little moony when he’s describing how the first mate of the Kid pirates took down Hawkins, and it’s not like Shachi doesn’t appreciate that someone gave that torturing, blackmailing, captain-stealing fucker what for, but Penguin’s appreciation seems to be straying more towards the way Killer looks in a tight shirt. Shachi steals the rest of his drink and cuts in to argue that they should talk about the good stuff, the showdown with the Emperors.

Bragging about Law kicking butt is a way better thought than worrying about Law being somewhere only the Sea knows, and there was a gratifying interest in the way the captains fought on the part of the people of Wano. Reports and everything. They’re turning it into some kind of dramatic play and Penguin managed to snaffle a copy of a draft out of the playwright’s bedroom before they left. Shachi and Ebi had been working on memorizing some of the speeches so they could quote them at Law when they wanted to get his goat.

Shachi somehow can’t bring a single one to mind now, but that’s fine, he and Penguin together manage to tell a pretty good story—the roof, the crater, the teamup with Captain Kid (obligatory pause for booing because even those among the crew distracted by impressive pectoral muscles can understand the importance of keeping Fucking Eustass humble), the part where Law extended his sword to the center of the earth and sank Big Mom in a pool of lava, hopefully forever amen.

“Anyway,” Shachi said, after using the pause for cheering to wet his throat. “Jinbe told me that in a power struggle it’ll probably come down to Perospero or Katakuri, and he thought Katakuri wouldn’t care about hunting us down. So cross your fingers, I guess.”

“He wouldn’t,” Ribbons says. She’s very quiet where she’s twining her hair around her fingers, and come to think of it, she’s been quiet for a while. Her eyes blink at them. All three of them. That’s still so fucking cool.

Wait. Even as drunk as he’s suspecting he might be, Shachi can latch on to the problems with that statement. “Wait. Why are you saying that like you know him?”

“Of course I know him. He’s my brother.”

As drunk as he now knows he is, Shachi attempts to latch on to the problems with that statement, and fails utterly.

She smiles at them, all sweet again, and Drunk Shachi considers that sweet Ribbons might be scarier than haughty Ribbons. “I never introduced myself, did I? My name is Charlotte Pudding.”

Cue beat of silence, cue crew uproar, cue Shachi mumbling to Penguin, “Guess we don’t have to kill her mom now.”

The advantage of Penguin’s broken leg is that he’s stuck enough Shachi can actually dodge the elbow Penguin aims at his ribs.

The party keeps going after that, but even Drunk, Off-Duty Shachi has to scrape together enough being reasonable to escort Ribbons—Pudding—to Ikkaku and supervise a serious talk about if she’s sure she wants to be on their ship, if she wants a lift back to her family once they get Bepo, if she wants them to not let Law know who she is (if they find Law, which is, again, something Shachi is not questioning). Pudding hasn’t decided if she wants to join their crew yet, which means she doesn’t have to know that they’ll tell the captain anyway but he would just pretend he didn’t know if she doesn’t want him to. Then again, Law might actually recognize her.

Fortunately for the bonds of trust that are so important to relationships between crew members, even if they’re only potential future crew members, Pudding doesn’t want to stay a secret from their captain. Shachi sends her back to the party with an extra water ration and dangles his upper half over the railing, thinking longingly about how nice it would be to just dunk himself for a while and maybe not come back up till sunrise.

“No swimming after dark,” Ikkaku says, heartlessly. Shachi groans at her. “We don’t have sonar to track you down anymore, idiot. Get lost on your own watch.”

Ugh, but being on watch meant he’ll have to be responsible and shit. Shachi groans again to express his dissatisfaction and watches the moonlight play on the water.

“Did you know?” he asks, eventually. “Who she was?”

“No,” Ikkaku says, and sighs. “I maybe should have. Blackbeard’s goons said something about a Charlotte girl, but I thought it was her first name.”

“Whoops,” Shachi says. He watches the sea go by. “Well. If she really doesn’t want us to know, we’ll wake up tomorrow morning and none of us will remember this happening, right?”

“We lost the fridge list,” Ikkaku says, meditatively. Ah, yes. The long running list of times and reasons Law is not allowed to use his devil fruit on them. An innovation from their first month on the ship, maintained on the same piece of paper, with a second piece taped on when they got up to twelve people.

Fuck. That’s gone gone, isn’t it. They’re never getting it back.

Shachi is cool and manly and all that shit, but he’s also drunk, and he’s realizing that the same sea he loves so much, the same sea that’s saved his life and made him a fighter and given him a life beyond his wildest dreams, has once again swallowed up almost everything else he loves, and he can’t stop the tears from running down his face and falling over the railing to the uncaring water below.

Ikkaku doesn’t say anything. She just leans back on the railing next to him, their upper arms pressed together, letting him pretend he’s crying in private.

“We’ll see her again,” Ikkaku says, and he knows she’s thinking about their ship even before she clarifies, “The Tang. I’ve got a plan.”

Shachi hasn’t even tried to come up with any ideas about getting back to Winner Island, back to where they last saw their sub—hell, even about getting word back to Swallow to get new blueprints from Wolf. He’s been too busy keeping tabs on the crew still with them to really worry about the ones they’ve lost.

“Tell me about it?” he asks, pitifully, and scrubs at his eyes with his borrowed shirtsleeves.

“Not when you’re too drunk to remember any of it.” She grabs him by the shoulder and steers him back to the circle of lamplight. “When we’ve got the captain and Bepo back, yeah?”

That sounds nice. Shachi lets her steer him towards to Penguin, who for some reason is talking to Old Man Garp.

He doesn’t seem to want to be talking to Old Man Garp, because he says, “Oh, Shachi can tell you that,” and makes Shachi sit down in between him and the old guy, pointing at the armband which, at this point, is all that’s left of Shachi’s boiler suit. The Heart Pirates Jolly Roger is smiling out at them, as usual.

“What am I telling?” Shachi asks, after getting distracted staring at the smile for too long.

“What’s with it?” Garp demands. “Not exactly the right sign. You’re Heart Pirates, not Smile Pirates.”

“It’s a whole thing,” Shachi says. “Captain had beef with that pink feathery bastard who took over Dressrosa. The guy who used to have the Heart seat in his setup saved Captain’s life way back when we were all kids, so our crew yoinked the name.”

Garp squints at them, then grabs at Shachi’s arm to get a closer look at the symbol. Shachi punches him in the leg a few times, trying to get his inconsistent armament Haki to activate. “Hey! Back off!”

“North Blue,” Garp says, voice foggy like Wolf’s when he got to reminiscing. “You came out of the North Blue...and your captain was at Dressrosa…”

“What about it?” Shachi demands and finally yanks his arm free. Penguin’s already shuffling his crutches into position to use as blunt weapons.

“Ha!” Garp bellows, loud enough to make everyone on deck flinch. “He’s Roci’s boy! Sengoku, you cagey old bastard!”

Most of the crew turning to look have no idea what he’s talking about, obviously, and easily wave this off as another instance of the old man being nuts and turn back to their drinks when Shachi and Penguin signal that it’s fine.

This is not fine. What the fuck.

“What the hell are you talking about,” Shachi tries, for the sake of it. Law told them about his conversation with Sengoku at Dressrosa, but there was supposed to be only one Marine top brass member with the other side of their captain’s tragic backstory, what the hell, Law.

“Rocinante, and the kid he found and...” Garp shakes his head, laughing his stupid laugh. “Ah, Roci, look at you!” He raises his mug. “Welp. That settles it. I’m staying.”

“The fuck you are,” Shachi says immediately.

“Gotta meet your captain! See what kind of grandson Senny’s picked up—”

“The fuck you will!”

“—see if he can put up any kind of fight—”

“I will throw you off this ship and drown you—”

“—you can try, brat!” Garp bounces to his feet. “How far out are we, anyway?” he asks nobody in particular before bounding off with an ungodly amount of energy to, presumably, harass Ikkaku. Fuck, Shachi’s going to have to deal with that. Unless Penguin can—

“I’m going to go to sleep,” Penguin says, shuffling his crutches into place, and abandoning Shachi to his fate. Shachi isn’t cruel enough to cling to his injured leg to make him stay. “I’m going to go to sleep and maybe then I’ll get to wake up and find out this was a nightmare.”

“Remember how you asked if there’s any chance Law will believe us if we say we forgot the old bastard and Strawhat are related?” Shachi asked

“I have no memory of this conversation,” Penguin says, because they might know each other better than anyone else in the world but that just means Shachi knows exactly what a shithead he is and he doesn’t care. “This was all your idea.”

“You can’t prove shit!” Shachi yells after him. Damn, he’s moving fast on crutches these days. Penguin’s laughter floats back to him over the dark and quieting deck.

Shachi runs his fingers over his Jolly Roger armband for strength and looks around for Iruka. Maybe backup—

Iruka, when Shachi catches his gaze from where he’s sharing lemony water with Ebi, just waves one hand in a malevolent blessing. “No more injuries, not my problem.”

“Thanks,” Shachi says. His tone should be coming out sour. When did he start smiling?

Shachi’s not an idiot. He knows that it took some kind of incredibly lucky break to get them from Blackbeard’s prison to here, sailing under their own power, all still alive and healing. Something in the principle of give and take, something Shachi himself had no control over. But since he’s not an idiot, and he’s a pirate, and selfishness is a perk of the job, he’s going to take this lucky break and fucking run with it. And keep that old man alive, no matter who does or doesn’t want it or what kind of Strawhat nonsense they get dragged into.

Besides. Maybe they’ll get a lucky break again and the captain will believe him when Shachi says they forgot.

Jean Bart lazily salutes Shachi as he climbs the deck to where Garp has started badgering Ikkaku and Ikkaku has started badgering him right back, with surprisingly successful results. Shachi offers his own very lazy salute to the helmsman, remembering his confidence, Captain can take them out when we find him. When they find him.

When, when, when.