Chapter Text
The reef is gray around him, colors muted as the beginning of storm season fills the sky above the ocean with blustery clouds. Sanji swims through the familiar deep ravines between the coral-encrusted formations of ancient volcanic activity, and wonders what this season will send to the sea floor for him. Even in fair weather, the hidden currents between the section of reef are treacherous for land-dwellers’ ships, and during storm season, they don’t always manage to navigate clear of this dangerous patch of seas.
Today, Sanji is the one heading for the dangerous edges of the known. He’s a surface mer, not meant to swim farther than the sunlight can reach, so he rarely has cause to approach the borders of the truly deep waters beyond the reef, but an open-sea mer visiting the Baratie mentioned seeing a shipwreck on their way in a few days ago.
Sanji lets the currents pull him through the maze of narrow spaces between the chunks of shallow reef, startling a few schools of fish idling in the deeper water. The turbulence at the surface is enough to send most inhabitants of the reef into hiding for the day. It makes visibility poor in some places, crashing waves raising detritus and fine bubbles to cloud the water, but Sanji knows the entire length of the reef like the back of his hand, and winds his way to his destination without issue.
Pausing at the outer edge of the reef, Sanji peers out of his safe crevasse, across the empty seabed stretching out below him. It’s deep enough to make him jittery, the volcanic structures the reef has grown on falling away to featureless sand barely visible in today’s poor conditions. On a good day, the true deep starts just within eyeshot of the reef, the continental shelf dropping into depths a mer of Sanji’s build cannot tolerate, but right now, all Sanji can see is that empty expanse of sand fading away in a silty haze.
He lets himself drift out and sink to the bottom, fins twitching as he watches for predators. A few rays fly across the sand, but it’s quiet out here, and every flash of movement makes Sanji think one of the great sharks of the open ocean is coming his way. Out here there’s nowhere to hide, and Sanji’s agility won’t do him much good, but he’s still fast, and the lure of a shipwreck he hasn’t seen before is more than enough to justify the risk.
Sure enough, when he gets out to the very edge of the shelf, it only takes a few minutes of following the current to see the ship. It’s an old one, clearly exposed to the ocean’s force for years if not decades, and judging by the angle of its tilt and the deep scrapes in the seabed around it, the currents have been doing their best to send it on one last adventure into the black. There’s something majestic about the way the ship is perched on the edge, as if waving farewell before vanishing into the deep.
Sanji shakes his head. It’s not so dramatic as all that. A ship this large isn’t going to tip over the edge that quickly, nor is it anything more than a pile of wood and rusting metal at this point; certainly not as romantic as he’s making it out to be. Approaching slowly, Sanji isn’t surprised to see schools of fish clustered around the wreck - they’ll be attracted to anything this large and protected, out here - but there’s no sign of predators to match.
With an excited flick of his tail, Sanji circles the ship, finding the great, ragged hole that must have sent it to the bottom with ease. Apart from that, its structure looks sound, though decay has set in to break down the finer details. The upper railings are cracked and fragile as Sanji swims over them, slipping beneath the broken remains of the main mast as he surveys the deck.
Over the years, Sanji has learned that the most interesting things can be found in the cabins, if a ship has them. Of course a hold full of treasure or trade goods is fun too, and the ship’s galley is always his second-favorite place, but if he can find the captain’s cabin, that’s where Sanji will learn the most about the land dwellers. This ship is what Sanji has come to think of as a classic design, one he can easily imagine himself sailing away to adventure on, with a luxurious cabin at the aft end.
Sanji glides up to the door, his long tail fins dragging on the deck. It’s hanging slightly crooked on its hinges, but they haven’t given in to the corrosion of the salt water yet. The outer layer of the handle flakes and crumbles under his hand, but the door swings open well enough for Sanji to imagine being a land-dweller on this ship, walking in to speak with the captain.
Inside, the cabin is nearly perfectly preserved, with only a thin layer of silt over everything. The glass in the window at the back of the room is intact, though streaked with algae and grime, and Sanji wonders what it was like to sit at the heavy desk in front of it and look out over the ocean disappearing behind the ship as it sailed. The smaller furnishings are toppled and jumbled into a pile in the lowest corner by the tilt of the ship, but some of the captain’s effects are still on the built-in shelves, held in place by careful means designed to keep them safe on the open seas. It continues to work here, beneath them, and Sanji is delighted as he darts over to examine the artifacts. Little metal trinkets he does not know the use of, decorative objects in a dizzying array, and even long, sturdy tubes like Sanji has found only once or twice before, made to preserve important documents. A shiver goes through him as he touches one, unable to keep himself from kicking up silt in his excitement as he wonders if they will still be sealed dry when he gets the chance to open them.
It’s hard to see much detail in the dim light, and Sanji doesn’t have much time today, but this promises to be one of the most exciting shipwrecks he’s ever explored. Leaving the objects on the shelves untouched for now, he turns to the jumble of items across the rest of the room, and startles himself so badly he nearly shoots back through the door.
There’s a skeleton behind the desk. Hardly the first land dweller remains he’s found, but it’s a shock every time. Despite the ravages of time long since removing any trace of flesh, the skeleton is still partially dressed in the rags of an impressive coat, its bones loosely contained by the remaining fabric.
Sanji swims a little closer. Curiously, the skull, which has rolled a little ways away from the bulk of the bones, is still crowned with thick, dark hair. It’s springy under his fingers as Sanji picks the skull up, peering into its empty eye sockets for a long moment before setting it up on the desk.
It rolls off the slanted surface and Sanji dives to catch it, propping a few loose objects around it to keep it in place.
“Sorry,” Sanji tells it. The skull doesn’t answer, but Sanji pats its hair anyway, wondering if the land dweller’s ghost might still be lingering around. “Been down here a while, looks like. Might as well get you off the floor.”
He doesn’t know much about how land dwellers handle their dead, aside from a few harrowing incidents of sailors dropping them overboard, but there’s something rather lonely about leaving the skeleton like this.
“I’ll be back in a day or two,” Sanji says, placing a few more objects on the desk around the skull. “Gotta get back before the shit-geezer complains. But this ship - was it your ship? - is amazing. I can’t wait to see what it can tell me.”
More than the silent skull will, that’s for certain.
~o~
“You came back again,” Zeff grumbles, when Sanji pops down a lava tube into the kitchen. The water in here is always a shade too warm to be comfortable, but it’s the heat coming from the nearly-dormant vents in the deepest corner of the cavern that allows them to create food every mer in the surrounding seas has heard of.
“Of course I came back,” Sanji barks, refusing to be cowed by the glower on the much larger mer’s face. “Shitty old man.”
“Fancy guppy,” Zeff retorts. “You’re late, anyway.”
“Am not!”
“Dining room’s full, and you were, what, gallivanting around flashing your fins for the ladies? I don’t know why I keep you on.”
“You don’t even pay me!” Sanji exclaims.
“I’ll pay you to leave.”
Sanji thwaps Zeff with his tail on the way past, and the big, open-sea mer doesn’t even bother to act like he noticed. Scowling at his back, Sanji goes out to check on the dining room before picking up his tools in the kitchen.
It’s not as full as the damn geezer made it sound, but there are more mers in the wide, pockmarked cavern than is usual at this time of day. Probably because of the weather surface-side; it’s not a very pleasant day to be out swimming, but no one wants to spend more time cooped up at home than they have to, knowing that the storms will force them to soon enough. Sanji serves a few aperitifs, chats up a few pretty reef ladies, and goes back in to help his old man.
Zeff can talk shit all he wants, but Sanji will always come back. His travels around the reef are just a hobby; Sanji isn’t planning on striking out on his own any time soon, no matter how often the shitty geezer threatens to kick him out. Every time he looks at the ruin of Zeff’s tail fins is a reminder of why.
He certainly can’t tell the old mer what he does on his excursions, either, not when it was saving Sanji from some land dwellers’ nets that led to his crippled tail. Sanji should have learned, but he can’t shake the fascination that made him swim so close to those nets in the first place.
“Iva’s coming for brunch tomorrow,” Zeff says, once the dinner rush winds down. “You gonna hang around and be polite this time, guppy?”
“It’s my day off, of course I’m not gonna hang around here,” Sanji retorts.
Zeff huffs and rolls his eyes, but he and Ivankov almost always get together on Sanji’s days off. Sanji thinks it’s some kind of ploy to make sure he enjoys them; Ivankov always seems to know too much about him, things Sanji doesn’t even know himself yet, so he makes himself scarce out on the reef whenever the sea witch is around. Otherwise he probably would spend a lot more of his down time here, trying to help out. Patty and Carne can’t do the work half as well as Sanji can, even discounting what Sanji owes his shitty old man for taking in a hopeless, dreamy kid.
~o~
The wind dies down overnight, a brief respite before the next big blow, leaving the water clearer and brighter as Sanji heads back out to the shipwreck. As he leaves the safety of the reef, he can make out the shadow of the wreck against the abyssal dark of the deeps, backlit by the endless blue of the open ocean.
Touching a few of the unbroken portholes along the side of the hull, Sanji wonders what kind of treasures he’ll find behind them. He’s better prepared today, armed with a few net bags and a glowstone hung around his neck - a gift from Ivankov, one of the rare times Sanji couldn’t avoid them, given with one of those abrasive laughs and an indulgent smile, but Sanji won’t waste the utility of it by refusing the gift. There’s no better way to make sure he can see every nook and cranny of the shadowed shipwrecks he visits.
He starts in the stern cabin again. The skull is right where he left it, sightless eye sockets staring out the dirty window, and on a whim, Sanji tries to scrape some of the algae off the glass. It’s thick on both sides, futile, and he turns an abashed smile on the skull.
“Guess I’ll wipe that side on my way out,” Sanji says with a shrug. “Bet you’re tired of looking at the same patch of ceiling for however long you’ve been down here.”
He feels a little silly talking to what is, at best, an inanimate object, and at worst a very creepy haunted relic, but it’s nice not to feel so alone on one of these adventures. As much as he loves them, shipwrecks can be eerie, so Sanji will take whatever extra cheer he can give himself while the currents make the weakening structure of the wreck creak and moan.
Sifting through the objects on the floor, Sanji rights what furniture has survived, placing the wobbly remains of a chair behind the desk, and a cracked glass oil lamp beside the skull. Most of the rest is destroyed, fabric dissolving under his hands and bits of wood crumbling. A few long pieces might be the frame of a bed, but the rest of it is unrecognizable.
“I guess this was your cabin?” Sanji asks the skull, arraying a few more small artifacts on the desk. “I bet it was beautiful. Hope you don’t mind me taking some stuff; I promise I’ll take good care of all of it.”
Sanji sits up on the corner of the desk, tail trailing across the weathered floor, and examines his haul. A few sealed glass bottles, probably that strange, biting liquid the land dwellers like to drink, several of the delicate metal instruments they use to navigate the seas, a spyglass with only one hairline fracture in the lens, and perhaps most interesting, a long, thin sword. It’s nondescript at first, with an odd handle and no decorations on the round sheath, but the quality is clearly excellent, because the blade shows no signs of damage when Sanji pulls a few inches free.
“We can’t use metal like this,” Sanji tells the skeleton, turning the blade in the light from his glowstone. “No way to smith it. Some mers will use things you land dwellers drop, but my old man won’t stand for it. Volcanic glass is good enough for him; the traditional ways. Wish I could bring him some of the knives I find in your land dwellers’ kitchens, though.”
Picking through the shelves next, Sanji is still most excited by those long tubes - they might hold maps, or pictures of the surface, or pages of that funny land dweller script that Sanji cannot read but treasures anyway. He also finds an odd metal tube he hasn’t seen the like of before, in a hard case lined with decaying fabric, and tucks that in his bag as well. Sanji can never decide what’s more fun - finding things he can identify, or things he can’t. It depends on the day. There’s a hand mirror in the desk drawer, some pretty little vases on the shelves, and, every time Sanji turns around, the bones left jumbled on the floor.
Sanji is hesitant to touch them any more than he has, but it feels worse to leave them there. “Do you mind if I…?” he asks, gesturing at the bones.
The skull does not respond in any way, but the water doesn’t become sharp with sudden chill or anything either, so Sanji figures it’s fine. As gently as possible, he stacks the bones in a neat pile on the chair, chasing down little finger joints and a few loose vertebrae as his disturbance rolls them along the floor.
It’s macabre, maybe, but Sanji feels better afterward.
“I’ve always wanted to talk to a land dweller,” Sanji confesses. “There’s just so much I don’t know. I can only swim so far, but you can sail anywhere you want in your ships.”
Not this ship, not anymore, but the point stands. What would the skeleton be able to tell him, if Sanji asked? Surely this ship has seen wonders he can only imagine.
“Guess I’ll never know,” Sanji mutters, and goes to explore the rest of the wreck.
He doesn’t find any more bodies. It’s strange. Sanji has explored plenty of shipwrecks where there are no remains to be found - the sea doesn’t waste anything, and scavengers do quick work. Sometimes the land dwellers escape before the ship goes down. No, what’s odd is finding only the single skeleton. It creates a more mysterious story than Sanji was expecting.
Swimming belowdecks, Sanji explores storage rooms and the crew quarters, picking up a few objects here and there until he reaches the kitchen, and decides to come back and take his time another day rather than rush. Back up in the stern cabin, he packs up the treasures he’s found so far, making sure everything is secure for the swim back.
“Have you heard of the All Blue?” Sanji asks, adjusting the document tubes so they won’t knock together. “I’m sure it exists. Sometimes, when the currents shift just right, I feel - but I can’t find it like this. Even the shit-geezer had a hard time, trying to travel the open ocean looking for it. But maybe, with maps, and a ship…”
Sanji sighs, resting an elbow on the desk to look the skull in the eyes, his thin, fancy reef-mer tail fins fluttering behind him. “Sounds stupid, doesn’t it. I can’t sail a ship any more than I can cross the open ocean, and I can’t leave my old man, besides.”
After telling the skull he’ll be back later, Sanji does his best to scrape the grime off the outside of a few panes of the cabin’s wide window, and heads back into the reef. He can’t bring his treasures back to the Baratie, but he has plenty of time to put them away somewhere safe instead.
No land dwellers have made the string of low-lying islands that speckle the length of the reef their home for many, many years, but once, they must have been nearly as common as the high-wheeling birds that now nest on some of the larger outcroppings of volcanic rock. Sanji has swum himself nearly aground on as many of the tiny islands as he can get close to, peering at the long-ruined structures that emerge from the vegetation on some of them. Everything the ancient land dwellers left behind is built of the same black stone, broken into rough lengths and meticulously stacked to form walls and buildings, both in and out of the water. It’s like they were trying to expand the size of the islands themselves in places, building their structures out, and out, stacks of those strange, six-sided stones left behind to wall in calm lagoons and create dry surfaces above the tide.
Not far from Sanji’s stretch of the reef, one of the tiny islands still hosts a roughly tiered pyramid of the stuff, one side reaching into the water with implacable permanence, its stones too heavy for even the storm season and the ceaseless tides to shift. At its farthest corner, a partially collapsed tower juts into the surf, and that’s where Sanji keeps his treasures.
Near the base of the tower, a few of the stones have shifted enough for him to wiggle through into the hollow interior. Whenever he can find them in good condition, Sanji wedges flat pieces of ship decks between the stones, creating shelves to hold all his other salvaged relics. Sunlight streams in through the roofless tower, and just above the tideline, there’s a ledge and an opening out onto the rest of the structure that Sanji occasionally hauls himself up onto to admire his hoard.
His makeshift shelves spiral up from the seafloor to well above his head, out of reach in the dry air, where Sanji stores some of his more fragile finds with the help of a long hook he found in a sunken fishing vessel. He’s discovered that certain land dweller goods last much better out of the sea.
Sanji sorts his new treasures away, like with like, bottles of amber liquid clustered on the sand at the bottom of the tower, decorated ceramics on lower shelves, and the long, thin sword above water with a collection of knives. Finally, he hoists himself out of the water with the document tubes, glad of the overgrown vegetation keeping his perch well shaded. It’s not comfortable to stay out of the water for more than a few minutes, but at least Sanji can eke out enough time to examine these if he stays in the shade.
Shaking the seawater off his hands, Sanji carefully unscrews the first tube, and tries not to feel too disappointed. It wasn’t well sealed, and the paper inside is damp, sticking and tearing as he tries to remove it, what scraps he can salvage covered in tiny script, the ink running and smeared. The next one is much the same, a few scraps of soft, bright blue and red ribbon all that survived.
This is how it usually turns out. The land dwellers don’t make anything that can last long in the ocean, but Sanji keeps his hopes up. When he opens the next tube, it’s dry, filled with pictures of things he doesn’t recognize, and the last one makes any amount of searching worth it.
A map, so unlike the mer maps Sanji is used to, but he has taught himself how to make sense of the rare land dweller maps he’s been able to salvage. They cover much greater areas than mer maps; open ocean mer do not make or use them, so the only ones Sanji knows are made by mer like himself, who spend their whole lives on the reef. After a few minutes of careful scrutiny, he finds his reef on the thick paper, marked with a colorful illustration of a sunken ship.
The All Blue might be somewhere on this map. Sanji looks at the major currents the land dwellers know, overlaying them with the deeper currents he knows, and tries to imagine where they might all intersect. His skin is beginning to dry, tight and uncomfortable, and every blink leaves his eyes feeling drier than before, but Sanji is loath to put the map down, even now that he can come back to examine it whenever he wants.
He can’t cross the open ocean, can’t even sit out in the air long enough to plan the route he might take if he could, but a land dweller, with a ship… well, Sanji can dream.
~o~
The next day brings the first powerful storm of the season. It leaves the Baratie nearly empty, all the local mers holed up in their own dens. Even the dining room is filled with turbulence, erratic bursts coming through the wide front entrance, so Sanji and Zeff hunker down in the back. Like any time they’re together, they spend the time bickering, but without the distraction of orders to fill, Sanji is ready to claw his old man’s eyes out within a few hours.
“I can’t believe this,” he snaps, turning away from Zeff’s latest jibe about starting out on his own. “Maybe I will, shit geezer, if this storm ever lets up!”
“Blowing fit to knock the whole reef into the deep,” Zeff grumbles. They both peer into the dining room, where one of the heavy coral tables has just rolled across the floor and crushed a delicate driftwood chair. “Must be even worse surface-side.”
At first, all Sanji wonders is whether there will be more unfortunate ships sunk along the reef once it’s safe to go out. Then he remembers one shipwreck in particular, much more at risk of disappearing into the black than the entirety of the reef. A frisson of anxiety goes through him, and it takes him a moment to realize why it’s more than the disappointment of potentially missing out on looting the rest of the wreck.
It’s only natural for the skeleton in the back cabin to end up in the deepest trenches of the ocean floor. Just a continuation of its lonely adventure, but Sanji doesn’t like the idea of this being the end. He promised that he'd be back. The damn surface storms don’t have the right to make a liar of him, even if Sanji is the only one who would ever know.
He definitely needs more friends his age if he’s this torn up about the inanimate object he’s been talking to. A problem for another time, that.
Zeff is looking at him funny. Sanji is probably making a weird face. Attempting to play it off, he snaps something mostly nonsensical, and the two of them settle into a pattern of periodically needling one another for the duration of the storm.. By the time the ocean settles, Sanji is vibrating with the urge to get out, all the long frills of his fins still swaying like the storm hasn’t stopped.
“Bring this to Iva’s,” Zeff demands.
“I’m -”
“If you’re too restless to stay and do your job, you might as well make yourself useful out there,” his old man interrupts, and Sanji has no excuse not to take the bag from his hands.
The neighborhood around the Baratie is quiet as Sanji swims through it. Most mers are still in their homes, or just peeking out to see what the storm has done to soft-coral gardens and delicate structures. Nothing looks too badly damaged, though Sanji finds a part of his route blocked by a tangle of land dweller net, probably swept off a boat. Making his way up into the shallower reaches of the reef, he sees more detritus and loosened sponges, but no collapsed homes or greater damage. Flustered fish scatter as Sanji swims through the clear channels between the corals.
The sea witch lives in an open hollow lined with more pink corals and sea fans than Sanji has ever seen in one place. He always feels like his eyes are receiving color wrong when he has to visit, and the entire place feels… squishy… under the preponderance of bright sea anemones and the flurries of small fish that live in them. How Ivankov can stand having so many roommates is beyond him.
Besides that, it’s always loud. There are always mers clamoring for Ivankov’s attention, as if they have nothing better to do than solve every petty beauty grievance and fit of jealousy suffered by the local populace. Poor unfortunate souls.
At least no one is hanging around today, and the colors are less blinding than usual, with the overcast skies above the surface keeping the light muted. Sanji darts up the side of the reef, and peers down into the hollow. There’s barely enough space to clear the edge, with the tide going out, and he doesn’t see Ivankov, though that doesn’t mean much.
“Candy-boy~!” their voice calls out, and a large chunk of the pink-frilled wall appears to detach. Ivankov’s shape settles out of the trailing fronds, some of the mottled camouflage coloring they had adopted retreating to darker purples as their skin clears.
Sanji has never met a weirder reef mer. No one knows how much of Ivankov’s camouflage is their natural traits and how much is magic, but they can blend in - or stand out - in any environment.
Usually stand out.
“Delivery,” Sanji says, ready to drop the bag into Iva’s hollow and get out of there as fast as possible.
“What’s your hurry?” Ivankov asks, swimming up to meet him. “Eager to see what the sea might have cast down, hmmm?”
Sanji looks away, unwilling to see the sympathy on Ivankov’s broad face.
“It’s good to be curious, candy,” Ivankov says, patting him on the cheek. “Be safe out there, hee-HAW!”
He doesn’t need Ivankov to tell him that. It’s uncomfortable enough that the witch knows about Sanji’s hobby, let alone seems supportive of it in the odd moments that they catch Sanji away from Zeff. Slipping away, Sanji takes care not to catch his fins on any of the shallow corals, and makes for deeper water.
The silt is thick off the reef again, and Sanji can only hope the shipwreck is still there, as he swims half-blind out to the drop-off. At first, he thinks the wreck is gone, nothing but the jagged edge of the cliff with more silt pouring off into the deep to be seen, but after a few moments of frantic searching, Sanji spots the ship a ways farther along the edge.
It’s listing more severely than ever, pushed right to the limits of balance. Sanji swears he sees it rock, teetering on the edge, and as he swims up to the deck, he sees that the broken mast is missing, swept into the blackness looming off the bow.
In the cabin, the skeleton’s bones are all scattered across the floor again, and Sanji slows, wondering what he should do. All he wanted to do was get here, and now that he has, he realizes that it hasn’t made him feel any better.
“You’d probably rather get it over with,” he mutters, piling the bones back on the chair and wiping grime off the skull. “Eternity in the deep would be a lot more peaceful than getting thrown around by every storm that comes through.”
No response, and Sanji hasn’t managed to convince himself, either. With a sigh, he decides that he might as well finish looting the place before the deep takes it, and swims down into the galley.
While he’s piling sealed jars and unfamiliar tools into his bags, a loud creak echoes through the shipwreck. It’s followed by a sharp snap, startling Sanji into dropping a jar, which rolls along the sloping floor and out of sight. A slow, grinding noise is next, and some of the other debris scattered around begins sliding down, down, down. Like the entire ship is doing.
Sanji blanches, nearly freezing in place before he can get his muscles in order to speed out of the dark bowels of the ship. Once he makes it out, he can see how the bow is tilting down, picking up speed as the ship’s center of gravity shifts, beginning that final dive.
Before he can think it through, Sanji zips into the stern cabin, snatching the skull up from where it’s once again fallen to the floor and hastily scooping the rest of the skeleton into his bags. As he does, a strange moment of weightlessness overtakes him, before the sudden pressure of moving water slams him into the window, and the entire wreck tips off the edge.
Now that it’s going, it’s fast. Sanji catches a glimpse of the cliffs speeding past the window, but he can’t make it back to the door past the momentum of the ship. With no other choice, he slams the side of his tail against the window, breaking some of the panes and knocking a few supports loose. As he claws at the hole, snapping pieces off until it’s large enough to fit through, the darkness outside becomes all but complete.
Hauling himself free, Sanji feels the pull of the ship still trying to drag him down, caught in the suction of its bulk. It buffets him against the cliff, and Sanji clings to an outcropping until the water goes still around him.
Still, and dark. Sanji isn’t sure how far down he’s gotten, and considers dropping his bags to ease the swim back up. But he can’t let go now, not after making the split-second decision to rescue the skeleton along with himself. Instead, he keeps one hand on the cliff, and lets the pull of the extra weight orient him as he swims out of the black.
Sooner than he expects, light returns to the water, and Sanji takes a deep breath, trying to calm his pounding heart. He reaches the top quickly and spends a long moment lying on the ocean floor, peering out over the drop with both hands gripping tightly to the edge. Not even a bubble of trapped air follows him up.