Chapter Text
The sky was spitting rain when Penguin finally managed to struggle upward through foggy layers of groggy unconsciousness and pry his eyes open. He immediately regretted it. Heavy droplets of rain water slammed into his face and streamed downward in rivulets, taking layers of sea salt that had dried on his skin straight into his stinging eyes.
He cursed, his hoarse voice grating on his tender vocal chords. The wet sand beneath his face plopped into his mouth in soggy clumps, grit between his teeth, rubbed his already sore throat even more raw.
What the hell happened?
It came back in bits and pieces while he struggled to collect himself and remember how to move his body-- the fight with Blackbeard, the swelling triumph as his crew came within inches of beating another emperor of the sea, only for the scourge of the Grandline to win with a dirty trick.
Penguin still couldn’t shake the memory from his head-- Shachi, dragged from the ocean-- the place where he was the most powerful-- limp and dripping sea water, then deposited straight into Blackbeard’s waiting hands. His screams of agony. Law dropping Kikoku, still unsheathed and glowing, into the sand and lifting his hands in unconditional surrender. The fleshy thuds as Penguin’s captain willingly accepted blow after blow from Blackbeard’s overpowered crew without so much as a sound. His last words had been the sharp command for the crew to stand down and flee, tossed over his shoulder just before the beating began.
They didn’t flee. Of course they didn’t. Instead, they’d all done their best to make him proud, to not make a sound themselves while they were savagely beaten by laughing, sneering pirates who only laughed harder the longer their victims stood and accepted the punishing blows without fighting back. But they couldn’t keep quiet for long.
Ikkaku’s strangled, choked off screams would linger in Penguin’s dreams for a long time, accompanied by the sound of Uni’s whimpers. Jean Bart lasted the longest, hardened by decades of horrific abuse and slavery at the hands of the Celestial Dragons, but in the end, even he had fallen with a smothered cry.
But not Law. Even as his legs gave out and he toppled to the ground, he remained perfectly silent. If Penguin didn’t know any better, he would have thought his Captain had used his tribute ability, the one adopted from the man who had saved him as a child, to quiet his own cries of pain. But Penguin did know better, and therefore had no doubt that Law was simply too stubborn to give Blackbeard the satisfaction.
Not that it had mattered in the end. They’d all ended up tossed in the sea, too weak to save themselves, drowning while they watched their beloved Polar Tang spiral into the depths of her watery grave, bent and broken beyond repair.
Now Penguin was here on this foreign beach with no idea where his crew or his captain were, if any of them had even survived.
He pushed himself up onto trembling arms, spitting sand and vomiting up mouthfuls of the seawater that still lingered in his stomach and lungs. There would be time to philosophize and mourn later. For now, he needed to figure out where the fuck he’d landed.
He made it to his knees before his spinning head threatened to send him back onto his face if he tried to push himself any further, but that was a good enough vantage point to examine his surroundings, for all the good that did him.
It was just sand. Sand as far as he could see until the water-logged brown field of desolation collided with the distant smudge of dark cliffs on the horizon. Sand, sand, sand, and--
Penguin froze, twisted back to the area he’d just scanned, eyes roving the sloping dunes, furiously blinking back a haze of rainwater.
There!
A shock of red hair. A slumped body clothed in a ragged jumpsuit. Not far from that, a black and white hat laying in the sand, as limp and crumpled as the man it belonged to, and a broken pair of sunglasses.
“Shachi…” Penguin scrambled to his feet, ignoring the throb of pain in his head and the way his legs wobbled beneath him. “Shachi!”
He dropped to his knees beside his crewmate, tripping and stumbling across the sand just to reach his side. “Please, please, please…”
His cold, wet fingers fumbled across equally cold skin, heart plummeting into depths darker than the deepest trench in the seas.
No…
Then he felt it, slow and sluggish, but still there -- the steady throb of Shachi’s pulse beating away just beneath the solid line of his jaw.
Alive. For now.
Penguin leaned up and squinted through the thick curtain of water toward the hills waiting at the end of a plain of sand that rushed endlessly onward. It was an impossible distance in this condition, even if he was only carrying his own weight. He could already feel his weakened legs ache in protest.
He looked back down at Shachi, rain water dripping off the end of his nose and spattering across the redhead’s bruised, swollen face. If Penguin closed his eyes, he could still hear the punishing blows that caused each wound, could count them like they’d been tattooed on his own body.
There was no choice. There never had been.
“Right… Come on, Shach.” He rummaged around in the front of his jumpsuit and was pleased to find that his spare hat, though soaked through with both salt and freshwater and coated in a thick film of wet sand, was still tucked right where he kept it in case of emergencies. He jammed it onto his head then tucked Shachi’s hat and broken sunglasses in its place and turned so his back was to his best friend’s limp body.
“Keep fucking telling you to cut back on the junk food,” he grunted as he shifted Shachi so one limp arm was draped over his shoulder and one limp leg was draped over the other. “If I die of exhaustion saving your fat ass, I’m going to haunt you so hard you piss yourself in fear every time you see a cupcake. Alright, here we go, dude. Ready? 1… 2… 3…!”
He heaved and rocked to his knees, then his feet. Even exhausted, half-drowned ( still drowning in this fucking rain), the movement may have wracked his whole body with screaming agony, but it was smooth, fluid, almost second nature.
“Law, wherever you are,” he muttered like a prayer, taking a single, shaky step forward. “If I make it out of this, I swear I will never again complain about spending our free days in port doing dry-land medic drills on the beach.”
A lie, and he and Imaginary Law both knew it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still soothe his guilty conscience to tell it.
He took another step, his boot sinking into wet sand, then another, and another. With the added weight on his shoulders and the drag from the weak terrain, his calves were burning before he’d gone a full yard. He kept his head down and drove forward anyway, knowing full well that if he looked up at the number of yards still remaining, if he remembered just how uncertain the chances were that he’d even find help where he was going, he’d drop to his knees and give up where he was.
“We’re alright, Shach,” he whispered. “You hear me? Law and Beps and all the others are waiting for us, so we gotta survive, okay? We’re gonna survive. You’re-- You’re gonna survive.”
For just a moment, the water streaming down his cheeks seemed too hot and too salty to be rain.
The deluge finally let up right about the time Penguin’s foot squished down into thick, wet mud and he realized that he’d been walking across a grassy salt marsh for quite some time. Little insects and tiny, silvery fish darted away from the cloudy water flooding in around his boot, their scales flashing in the thin rays of sunlight that stabbed through the thinning clouds.
Penguin tipped his face to the warming light and shifted Shachi across his burning shoulders with a huff, too weary down to the tiniest threads of his nerves to even breathe a relieved curse. He trudged forward, step after step, heedless of the roots and tendrils of grass he had to tear through with each one.
The sunlight became a curse just as quickly as it had been a relief, beating relentlessly on his sweat-soaked face until he was sure the flesh was boiling from his cheeks. He could taste salt on his cracked, stinging lips again and laughed at the delirious thought that at least when he was roasted through, he’d be well seasoned for the local scavengers.
He couldn’t say how much time had passed when the shadow of the dark hills finally crossed over his face and his feet hit solid ground-- a packed dirt road riddled with holes and bumps and puddles, but blissfully hard and stable beneath his shuffling feet. He’d hoped that the shade would bring some relief from the heat and burning aches rippling through his muscles, but no matter how long the shadows stretched, no matter how far the sun set, his body temperature never seemed to get any lower, not even when the chill evening air swept over his clammy skin and made his teeth chatter with a violence that made them feel like porcelain, seconds from shattering.
I’m running a fever, he realized through a dizzy fog.
Probably pneumonia from the near drowning, judging by the heavy weight that had settled on his chest, making every breath feel like a fight to the death in a way that was a little more literal than he cared to admit.
He could still feel Shachi’s shallow breathing against the back of his neck, but the red head hadn’t so much as stirred since they started moving. If Penguin didn’t find some sign of civilization and fast, they’d both have survived an encounter with Blackbeard only to die alone on some desolate, godforsaken island in the middle of the Grand Line as nameless, forgotten pirates from a crew that flashed too hot and bright and died out too fast to make it into the history books.
No. Penguin grit his teeth and drove onward, forcing his screaming legs to keep going, keep moving forward, even if it was uphill, even if the now-dry sand in his boots and his jumpsuit were rubbing his skin raw, even if he had to spend his last breath carrying Shachi up an entire goddamn mountain…
He wasn’t going to fail him like that. Not Shachi. Not the man who had been with him through every fight, every failure, every near death experience, and knew every one of Penguin’s deepest, darkest secrets, but still stuck by his side without question.
Well, he knew most of Penguin’s secrets, anyway. There were still those few big ones, the ones he’d meant to confess on so many occasions, but they were so huge and heavy they stuck like boulders in his throat and refused to be shaken loose, not even when he had intentionally gotten himself near blackout drunk to try and pry them out.
“I’ll tell you,” he rasped, dragging them both inch by inch up the hill. “I’ll tell you everything, Shachi, I promise. Every last thing. Just stay with me. Just be there to hear it, you asshole. You hear me? I didn’t-- I didn’t fucking drag you all this way just so you could-- so you could--”
The last rays of the sun slipped beyond the horizon and the world tipped. It wasn’t until Penguin met the ground face first and felt Shachi go rolling over his shoulders and down his back, that he realized it wasn’t the world tipping. It was him.
No…
He dragged himself back up to all fours. Shachi’s lifeless shadow lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the hill.
“No!”
He had to start over. He had to get to the bottom and start. All. Over. Again.
He lifted his hand, reached forward into the darkness. He would do it. He’d crawl if he had to. He’d drag Shachi up behind him using nothing but his teeth.
His hand met nothing but empty air. The horizon rocked violently sideways again, then spun. Penguin tumbled and rolled, bouncing off the road with pained cries. By the time he came to a stop, he could no longer tell which way was up. His entire body was a throbbing, aching lump of bruises and shredded, exhausted muscle. He tried to get his arms under himself, to get back up, but they flopped like noodles and dropped lifelessly into the mud with a squelch that was going to make a really shitty eulogy for his rotting corpse.
He could see Shachi a few feet away. He was right there. If he could just get to him…
He dragged himself the remaining distance, his body a six ton weight dragging behind him. He flopped over Shachi, splayed his hand across his chest.
Still breathing, but so slow. Too slow. The sound rattled in Shachi’s lungs. Penguin could hear it when his head thudded onto his chest, too heavy to hold up anymore.
“S-- sorry, Sh--Shach--”
He tried to say it first, then tried to whisper it, but the words wouldn’t work their way free of his cold, chattering lips.
“I-- s-- should… told you--”
Now his eyelids felt as heavy as his head. As his heart. Darkness swelled around the edges of his vision, blotting out the swollen, bruised remains of the twilight sky and Shachi’s face. Through the last slit of light, Penguin looked up toward the top of the hill-- toward the place he somehow knew he could have found salvation for the both of them if he’d only been stronger-- and saw a golden orb of light bobbing and floating in the darkness.
Tylwyth teg?
No, a lantern.
Penguin let his eyes fall shut and channeled the last of the strength he’d been using to hold them open into his voice instead. “Help… Down here… We’re-- Help…”
Too quiet. Too tired. Too dark. Too cold and burning hot all at the same time. It was too much.
“Help,” he whispered one last time, then gave up at last.
Something stirred beneath his muddy cheek.
“Pen?”
Faintly, he heard Shachi’s raspy voice call his name again. “Penguin!”
But it was too late.