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You brought a dead man home that day. You bore the weight of him on shoulders held askew with exhaustion, carried him on fractured tibia, a shattered concertina of ribs; you broken, and him bleeding, him limp with exsanguination, charnel stink and quick, shallow breath, a strange and boneless shape in the bloodwarm light. And if his weight had grown heavier with each struggling step, you’d only blamed yourself for your own frailty.
And you’d talked, because it was the thing to do, wasn’t it, when someone was on the edge of consciousness; because you were nervous, and ashamed, and horrified, and if you didn’t talk the scent of his blood would stick to the inside to your throat, weigh down your tongue, and you would never be able to talk again. You’d talked, and the low huff of his laughter had reassured you, weak as it was, because dying men didn’t laugh, they didn’t roll their eyes at tired old jabs pulled from the archives of your memory just to fill the silence.
(It’s just like you, you’d said, smirking to hide the strain in your eyes, and fuck, you’d needed a cigarette so badly, you’d needed to smoke your lungs raw, to get the last fucking word.
You’d felt the hitch of his ribs. A low sound, like gasping for air.
Fuck you, he’d muttered, and you’d felt better, then; you’d felt like maybe everything was going to be all right after all.)
You’d climbed the hill together. The soft drag of tired feet, graceful somehow in your agony, the weight of him solid and familiar; an air of ruin as tangible as the slow grind of rib against rib, as though a man like him could be ruined. You’d paused at the apex, where pale sun reached spindly fingers through the trees, the first warmth you’d felt in days, and there was home, just down the hill; there was home, and it was shaped like your nakama, and your fingers slid halfway down his forearm in all that blood but you’d squeezed anyway. Look, you’d said, wearing your relief in the bright of your smile, everyone’s waiting for you, and you’d looked down at him, and he was already gone.
####
You accumulate unpaid debts like years of life. A price you pay in pieces of yourself, flensed and cauterised and parcelled with terrible care.
(you always were such a conscientious butcher)
Someday, you will have no more left to give.
####
The sun had already dragged itself over the lip of the horizon when you woke in the courtyard and realised he wasn’t there.
Nothing happened, he said. Nothing happened, and the stink of iron was bright in the back of your throat, the feral scent of adrenaline, and it was only your reflexes – on autopilot, and acute, still, in spite of your exhaustion, your broken bones – that stopped him from crashing to the ground. Collapsing heavy into your arms. It wasn’t the first time you’d seen him pass out, but never like this; fever-hot and helpless and empty, somehow, like hollowed-out concrete, and you’d struggled to keep the both of you upright, cursing violently through clenched teeth.
You’d be angry, later. You’d stare up at the infirmary ceiling while Chopper set your oblique shinbone, and you’d list your many grievances as though they might ever be settled. As though a dead man could argue the difference.
You’d be angry later, but in that moment all you felt was a thick and cloying terror, unfamiliar as love, as being loved, and your eyes had been stark and white and staring, and all you knew was blood, and blood, and blood.
####
The thing is, he’d always won. Of course he had; he was the demon of the East Blue, and you were a wholly inadequate tangle of emotions tied in knots by your own history; all long, awkward bones wrapped in too-thin skin, and you could fight, you could fight just fine thank you very fucking much, but the lie you told was that you were more than a weapon, and the lie he told was that he was nothing but.
(you set yourself ablaze to hide the ashes inside you, and it works every goddamn time)
He was complete, in a way you never were, never will be. A self-contained soul; a shell formed around the pearl of his ambition, beautiful in his monstrosity. Lionheart and dragon strength and pride, vast and stubborn as the heavens. The fragile pieces of you for all of him. It was a simple choice, really.
####
It ends like this: on the crescent of the hill, holding him slant against you; desperate hands pressed to rapidly cooling skin, waiting for the stutter-start of his heartbeat, the heave of his ribs as his breath returned, and when had the geography of his body become so familiar?
(he’d never have chosen to die in your arms, and it fucking killed you that the joke wasn’t funny)
You’d buried your face in the hollow of his shoulder. Murmured against his skin, sick and desperate and furious, an aborted half-grief blinked back and swallowed: Not like this. Not now. Fuck you. Oh, fuck you, fuck you. Your heart was an ugly little fist clenched tight, beating so hard and so loud that for a moment, you could almost pretend it was his.
####
You throw yourself away too easily, he’d said once. Peeling back scorched bandages; reading the livid pattern of your skin like petroglyphs carved into rock, and you’d let him, too tired to argue.
You weren’t even there, you’d replied, and he’d frowned, followed the strange flourish of a scar along the knife-edge of your ribs with a blunt forefinger; doubled back on a whim, ignorant of the way you’d shivered, like the prelude to electrocution. You’d wondered if he could smell it on you, still. Ozone and burnt air and one last, defiant cigarette.
(you’d only learned to fear death after cheating it over and over)
Yeah, he’d said, turning your bandaged wrist in his hands, gentle in his curiosity, like he might break you. And you’d hated him for it, a little; you didn’t know how to parse him like this, hadn’t realised he’d spoke other dialects than violence. But I know you.
####
An incomplete list of Grievances, in no particular order:
- you abdicated your responsibility as first mate the moment you stopped breathing
- you left no clear instructions on what to do with your shitty swords
- what are we supposed to do without you
- your blood is never coming out of my shirt
- just who the fuck do you think you are anyway you egotistical prick
- I made my choice
- I made my choice, shithead
(hold still. This is going to hurt.)
- anyway, you never even became the world’s greatest
- that fucking coffin freak is still out there floating around and you’re dead, you are fucking dead
- are you happy now?
(Sanji? Are you okay?)
- you wouldn’t change it, would you
- even if you could
- even if I begged you
- fucking asshole
(Sanji…?)
- are you happy now?
####
The chatter of the courtyard, like a dawn chorus; the hubbub of the newly woken, kissed by sunlight for the first time in years, and the concatenation of their voices washed over you as waves on the shore. A numb and fractal sound. Acquired language forgotten, usurped by the rolling vowels of your childhood, which you’d chewed to pieces, spat out in bold refusal, no language of mine.
It wasn’t until Robin spoke – clear and calm, and you didn’t know when she’d taken your hands, didn’t know when you’d folded to the floor like something empty, something devoid of itself – that you assembled the syllables into something familiar, placed the sentiment in the hollow cavity of your chest and held it there for a time, willing your wounds to staunch.
She said, you did everything you could.
A beautiful lie, that.
####
You build stories around things you experience fleetingly, or not at all. Like when you were young, and you hadn’t yet killed a man, or kissed a girl, and it didn’t seem to matter that you could only come back from one of those things.
Your romanticism trades in inevitability. Someday, you will crush a man’s throat with the heel of your boot, watch with clinical dispassion as he chokes on his own fluids. Someday, you will be loved. Someday, you will be dead. It’s all the same. It's all the same.
####
Nothing happened.
Tessellating the words in the drugged half-dark that passes now for sleep; distant howl of fissured bones like the inexorable shift of tectonic plates, and you were no more used to being so profoundly wounded than you were missing him, but you were learning new things all the time, weren’t you?
Nothing happened, and which was the more precious lie? Robin’s eyes, stark and midday blue, and silence all around like an inheld breath; and even in neardeath he'd protected you, still, the way you had a long time ago, when you’d barely known him; you spitting blood and seawater, him wrapped in scarlet bandages, in stolen shirt, formidable in your synchronicity, a debt passed infinitely back and forth.
(30 seconds, he’d said, staggering bloodied to his feet, that’s all I got, and it was enough, it was always enough.)
When the sun comes up, you will drag yourself sleepless and aching to the galley, and you will roll up your sleeves, and you will feed the
(remaining)
ones you love, like you always do.
####
You’ve got a long way to go, he’d told you once, in a rare moment of honesty, and you’d scowled, because it was easier than admitting he was right.
Fuck would you know. Muttered into the rim of your glass. Never did get the hang of holding your fucking liquor, no matter how much shit he gave you for it, no matter how many times he carried your drunk ass back to the ship, held your hair back as you puked pure rum over the taffrail
(which was fair recompense for all the times you’d led him home like a sheep gone astray, but)
He’d shrugged, philosophical. Sharp night air; brittle shimmer of distant stars, of ice crystallising on eyelashes. A few days out of Drum Island; the metal plate caging your spine sat uneasy beneath the skin, and he’d admonished you for that too, called you reckless, as though he hadn’t trudged through knee-deep snow with ankles hanging on by threads you’d sewn, the fucking idiot
(and it aches, doesn’t it, to look at it in retrospect and realise that you were the same person in different skin, that you were each half a heart except his knew how to beat)
S’alright, he’d said, settling a thoughtless hand in the small of your back, and by the time you’d remembered to snarl his palm was already warm and pleasant, the ache diminishing. You try too hard, is all. Feels kinda like…
A pause. Black water reflected in the dark of his eyes, distant as the ocean floor. Drawing lazy circles around your half-healed scar with an aimless thumb, leaching heat into your chilled skin, and you’d wondered how he was so warm all the fucking time, even in this climate. Like what? you’d ventured, with apprehension.
I don’t know. Like an apology, maybe. And then, blinking slow, as though seeing you for the first time: What are you sorry for?
A punch to the mouth would’ve felt better. You’d stood stiffly, snatching up both glasses. His hand fell to his side, like he’d never even thought about touching you. This is why you fight, you’d thought, stalking back to the galley; this is why you chew pieces from one another, grinning with redwhite teeth, this is why you bite and tear and bruise, your body a knife, and he wearing your scars as eagerly as a kiss. This is why you float in semiconsciousness on a ship so far from home, turning the sawblade of his words intently in the soft tangle of your guts. A kind of pain you know intimately. A kind of pain you understand.
You want to stop bleeding everywhere, but you can’t.
####
Nothing happened.
(a blistered rock in the middle of the ocean, dying slow)
You did everything you could.
(you carry them in your heart, don’t you? they showed you kindness and in return you love them, you feed them, you kill for them, you die for them. all in silence. this is the kind of animal you are.)
What are you sorry for?
For failing, over and over. For everything. For all of it. Always.
####
When at last the sun does rise, you abandon the pretence of sleep. Slip out of bed, pulling on the clothes Nami left for you: soft things, devoid of your usual neat margins, your sharp edges. A hoodie you don’t remember owning. The ache of bandaged ribs, strange and distorted, fumbling in the dim light for the cigarettes Chopper forbade you to smoke.
You shamble up to the deck, sucking down nicotine. Stiff on splinted leg, squinting in too-bright light, and Robin is there, regarding you with such awful softness that when she murmurs he’s alive, you think, for a moment, that she’s talking about you.
####
The little doctor tries to bar you from the infirmary, firm in his conviction – you both need rest, he insists, as though you could, as though you’re not terrified that this fragile illusion will burst the moment he turns you away – but after a long moment of internal conflict, he relents.
The infirmary is dark. Silent. It does not smell of death, but you’ve been fooled before. He’s a still and swaddled shape in the far corner. Pale bandages. Clean skin. Empty cigarette packet crumpled in your fist. You’ve never been a coward, but you can barely bring yourself to breathe. Losing him once was enough, and hope is a serrated thing, it is the thing with teeth.
The air shifts, soft as the end of the world.
Cook, he says, and it’s not even your fucking name, but you choke on your own throat all the same.
####
I felt him die, you’d told her, terse in your incredulity. I. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t do anything, in the end.
She’d smiled like she knew all the world’s secrets, all that was and all that ever would be.
I think, she’d said, he just doesn’t know how to die.
####
The weight of his hand in your hair. Slow curl of fingers, stuttering, like they’ve forgotten how to move. You could fall asleep like this. Foldout chair, tired head pillowed in the crook of your arms, on the mattress beside him. Watching the way his muscles move beneath the skin. A distant hunger, even now. An animal kind of love.
You say: Don’t tell me you got lost on the way to the fucking afterlife.
He huffs in amusement. Fuck you, he says, and you’ve been here before, haven’t you? On the crescent of the hill, where his life had slipped through your fingers. Where you'd let him go.
You press your face into the bed. Grief, savage and glassy in the back of your throat. You feel threadbare. Unravelling in the cavern of his palm.
Don’t let that be the last thing you ever say to me, you tell him, sounding flayed.
You of all people don’t get to lecture me about last words, he replies, with something like finality. Light fingers at your nape, steady now. Thumb idling at the cord of your neck, the rapid flutter of your pulse. You’ve been here before, too. The glint of his sword in the sunlight, of wolfish teeth. Blood on the deck, maybe yours, maybe his. Go on, you think, distant; go on, make it quick, but he cradles the back of your skull like something precious, kills you slowly instead, in tender increments.