Ship Shots 2024

please take me home | Corazon X Shanks

Death is not impartial; it is a lesson Shanks learned young, raised as a pirate aboard the most infamous crew in history. He has seen it far too many times to count—the loss of light in a person's eyes, how they grow foggy and become distant, telling of when a soul crosses the last bridge. Death is common—it's to be expected, and yet, with each new soul swiped by the rapacious hands of death, it steals Shanks' breath along with it.

He has watched slow deaths, the sickness as it sprouts and blossoms like a deadly flower and consumes, like the most dangerous predator. Despite rumours, his late captain was only a man, and men fall too. Shanks has experienced the death of friendships; once strong and unbendable, unweathered by the treacherous, roaring waves of the Grandline—snap like the thin ice of a freshly formed winter. It's slow until it is fast and they are saying goodbye for what feels like the last time—the finality of it is damning, just the same as the thunder overhead and the rain that splatters and pools at his feet. Lougetown was sable that day, teeming with thinly concealed grief and eternal unsaid words.

Death comes in many forms, all of which Shanks is intimately familiar with.

Yet, when the news reaches him it steals Shanks' breath away, just the same as the first time he watched the life seep from a body, by his hand. A part of him feels that same guilt whirl to life and churn with the dread, as words wash over him and slip right off. It's difficult to process—no, that isn't quite right. He understands the meaning—the shakiness in the voice as his subordinate reports and the way he averts his gaze, like that helps deliver the information. Like it helps anything.

A word, maybe, escapes his mouth—it's gutted, and far too garbled to be comprehensible. "Where?" It doesn't feel real, nor does the air upon his skin feel grounding. The water is rocking the ship, turbulent waves crashing against the side, attempting to pull him from his mind. It does not work.

"Sir—" he coughs, "Chief." He amends, and a distant part of Shanks recalls he is a recruit. Idly, he wonders why Beckman is not delivering the news, but he hardly comprehends the thought that is buried beneath heaps of sand, falling and falling deeper into a pit, where Shanks can no longer reach it. "What do you mean?"

There is a fog draped along Shanks' mind, heavy and damp like a humid morning. His fists clench, unconscious and—perhaps sensing the shift in Shanks' attitude—the man takes a weary step back. "Where is he?" The edge to his voice is palpable; it's easy to forget he is an Emperor until his voice turns rigid, preparing for an inevitable battle. His subordinate shakes in his boots as he gulps, brown hair swaying slightly with the abrupt shift in the wind.

"The North Blue, Sir... Chief. Minion Island."

Shanks frowns. "Set a course for Minion Island." The man before him blanches, a gasp escaping his gaping mouth.

"But, Chief, that's—too far—" Shanks, returning somewhat to the present but not entirely enough to be aware of the deadly glare he levels at his crewmember, raises an eyebrow. That's all that is needed as the man scurries off to carry and spread his order. With his absence, Shanks does not soften, but his shoulders do untense—alone, with his thoughts.

Alone, in more ways than one, it would seem.

-

It takes too long to travel the distance between him and his lover, but as he steps off the Red Force and onto the ground, the snow giving beneath him with a dull crunch, something in Shanks' chest cracks as reality washes over him. Lately, his thoughts have felt as though he was wading through muddy waters. The sludge clinging onto him for dear life as he earnestly searches for a lighthouse amidst the expansive black of the sky, but in the absence of light and everything Shanks cherished, there was nothing but a fog and the nauseating feeling of numbness. Numbness, if it can be counted as a feeling, carves a hole in his heart, carefully splitting at the seams that bind his already fractured organ together until there is nothing but remnants of what once was.