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“I’m flattered, sweetheart, but I didn’t order this.” Rayleigh’s smile stretches, distorting to a flat grimace as he gestures at the drink. There’s a beat of consideration; he drinks it anyway, tossing his head back as he lifts the bottle. South Blue, something nostalgic about it, and high proof—not a gesture of courtship he’d expect from a pretty barmaid.
“Not from me, geezer.” She tosses her wrist twice, flicking her thumb toward the other end of the bar, at which sits—ah, a handsome young man…? He’s not particularly tall, slight of build and silhouetted sleekly by a pirate’s cloak. He sports the human equivalent of a brilliant tailfeather; sleek red hair to the nape, glistening like arterial spray around the hidden edge of a coarse, slender jaw. Again, nostalgic, vaguely stomach-turning.
Still, Rayleigh contemplates it for a bit, long enough for the drink to dry his tongue, before scoffing again. The sound is good-natured, but it's a bad night, something in the air heavy, the clouds astir in idle competition, and, even retired, it makes him bristle. Any excuse these days is good enough.
He drops one sole to the floor, off to turn the lad down, but he's gone. Curious, but not too disturbing—at least until he materializes at the barstool beside him. Rayleigh turns.
He has no time to be disgruntled for being caught out.
“Hey, grandma, little early to be tossing it back, mm?”
There’s a smile on his mouth, but his eyes are a bit glassy, translating a touch of insincerity. That red hair, soft and well-greased; that slender jaw, grown long and handsome, scattered with auburn hair; that dimple he's had since he was two years old and walked straight into the unsheathed dagger hanging off Taro's hip; that eyebrow Buggy had nicked in a party trick: In it every greater and worse thing he's been. The scar over his eye is new to living color, always printed grainy and indistinct, as if still bleeding. Shanks.
He’s—well, not sloshed, exactly, but a little tipsy—and it’s that, that strange, ill-worn misery, slumping off his hands and pooling around his feet like a father’s coat, that makes Rayleigh reach for him. He catches him by the back of his head—hatless, he recognizes, the weight of that loss carried in the joints of his trembling fingers.
He breathes his name, and a hand comes up to stroke through that hair. It’s still silken to the touch, sifting through the fingers the same way it had when he was a boy, unsure of its length and part, and Rayleigh had worked it to lather as he sat bare-shouldered in the soaking tub. (Only, of course, after he and Buggy had hauled the thing onto the deck and scrubbed it of scum.)
That familiarity, that memory of unbidden laughter and cresting sunlight stings, just a touch, makes him draw him close, stroke against his crown slower, as if unbelieving. He was never highly affectionate with the boy, and isn't quite sure if he regrets it now. Still, he's happy to hold him, to feel him broad and sturdy, lean and giving like an olive switch.
“It’s me…” He nods, a little breathless, a little wondrous. Small, almost, even though he’s got a goatee rasping into the hollow beneath Rayleigh's Adam's apple. Shanks draws closer in revelrous gratitude, that same sort of unbelieving. Both of them in marvel at being permitted by the other. “I’ve made it back to you, Vice.”
In that single word, that stroke of Vice , there's recognition: Shanks for all his newness, will always honor the way that Rayleigh sees him, and feels himself the same. Once a cabin boy, once a son , he still carries their captain. Rayleigh swallows then, shifting his hands to grip at his biceps. (Now, in the touch, there’s no self-consciousness, no trepidation; their bodies learn faster than their minds.) One of those biceps is slender, atrophied, the musculature straining in a thick thread that rises beneath the thumb. The left. His sword arm. He presses against it, firm, and Shanks' collar jumps beneath the skin. "Not whole, it seems."
“You want the story?” he asks, not for himself, but for Rayleigh’s consideration, still detecting in him that flinch, the wince that betrays unending ache.
Without embarrassment, Rayleigh appreciates the gesture. He taps his temple against Shanks’ breastbone, before withdrawing. “As much as you’ll lend, I guess.”
“Hmm…” a spark, having discovered something clever, “Call it a gamble, then! For the future.” Rayleigh understands the first vice well enough, seeing it trotted out on his behalf, but the latter half is dubious to him, unfocused when the future sits before him clear and freckled, bronze-skinned and drink-flushed. Young, and brazen, but not without his shrewdness; he wonders how Shanks had picked up his reputation, and how long he spent lingering, shivery and ill-aimed, in preparation for their meeting. Bronze-skinned, drink-flushed : Long enough that he had drank over it.
Rayleigh takes a long breath, quelling the uncharacteristic want to apologize stirring in him. Shanks, losing his momentum as he takes in the appraisal, the indecipherable expression moving through Rayleigh’s face, prepares to endure castigation. His mouth wavers, and he seems to want for a drink once more. That fouling vice they share, but it does no good to mention it.
He’s proud of him, still, and looks at him with a simmer of warmth, unwanting expectation there. He’s a fine pirate, and, by his bearing, one of the few with the privilege of being a good man. “You don't make a good doorkeeper, boy."
Don’t give up on yourself quite yet.
"Who says I'm just keeping ?" His mouth becomes strange, enigmatic, and the fall of his hair so alike to the shade of a hat brim, and—Rayleigh, for all the pride that swells him, that makes his palms itch with building heat, becomes heavy with fealty. Perhaps neither of them are really suited for it. The bar is loud, but he can hear that peculiar click, the turning of gears in their minds, some respective absent calculation overtaking their reunion.
Reality falls in. Shanks catches the mood, dispels it with a cheer and a twinkling eye, “You should come see my ship! Let’s get out on the water, Vice!”
“Ahh, I couldn’t…” Rayleigh scratches his cheek. He is sincerely intrigued to see the boy’s ship, charmed by the impressions he’s received through newspaper clippings, the vague inspirations he’s pulled from Elbaf’s galleys.
“Come on, I hear you’re the best coating tech around here!” He reaches up with one arm, tucking Rayleigh, now, to his clavicle. He hadn’t spared a word for his profession either—generous way to call it, but it’s his trade, by now—and it makes Rayleigh’s breathing come thinner, slower by his throat. He doesn’t want to look at Shanks’ face, knowing what he’ll see there; that shrewdness, fear-touched and desperately qualified, and still, that unsheltered misery.
He draws back, oddly sick of the embrace, and shakes his head in resignation, feigning weakness to the puffery. “Don’t expect a discount from me, boy,” he says, fully intending to leave the man not a beri lighter. In return, Shanks waves the bartender over, fishing a wad of bills from his pocket, counting them idly, then stopping, dropping the whole stack against the counter.
"Should cover the bill for the geezer, yeah?"
The bartender whistles, "And about half the tab."
Good-naturedly, Shanks whistles back, waggling his brows.
Rayleigh tosses his head back to laugh—succeeds in it, Shanks squeezing his shoulder in sympathy to his gaiety. Perhaps a beri or two lighter, then. Damn, did he miss this kid.
There’s presence behind him, then, not just the nearness of a body, but a body, with deliberateness, making itself known; another putter of good natured-chagrin. This is the second time he’s been snuck up on this evening.
“Captain, don’t harass the locals.” Rayleigh’s head tilts, watching the man—dark-haired, low-voiced, sultry and subtle with self-assurance in movement—sidle up to Shanks' side and rest his temple against his shoulder. There's a cigarillo perched between his teeth, lit end warming the skin by his throat, limning the strands of beard and the bronze of his skin to glow. Smoke to fire; his first mate, undoubtedly.
“I think they don’t mind if we take this one, Beck, he seems like a real menace.” As he speaks, this Beck rolls his eyes, reaching for his captain’s hand—drifted instantly to his upper thigh, moving over the contour of his body with some visible flutter of nerves, a self-soothing and revelry of closeness—to place it neatly back against his hip. Rayleigh recognizes the gesture—having been on the receiving end of that gratitude, that thanks, for being, and being here , by Roger’s own hand—and, through his distant longing, smiles.
Their eyes meet, then, and the man’s thin brows lift, his posture straightening. ”Ah. Silvers Rayleigh. The .”
He leaves off any epithets, for which Rayleigh is infinitely grateful. There's regard in his look, some depth of shrewdness that makes Rayleigh shiver; not for fear, or awe, but that strange, hindbrain sensation of one's nose inches from still water, seeing silhouette. Soul. Shanks had always known how to pick ‘em, it seems.
“It’s a real pleasure.” He doesn’t extend his hand, but he pauses, offering a nod of acknowledgement. “I’m assuming your name’s not Beck.” It'd work as endearment, perhaps, if Shanks was ever any good at coming up with flattering nicknames, always chopping and garbling to leave one with the impression he'd simply forgotten.
“Likewise, sir." Rayleigh's lips quirk again, a touch higher and brighter. He doesn't seem like the type to sir someone he doesn't know, not on name and notoriety alone. He sees the same. "Beckman, call me Benn. I don’t need to apologize for the captain’s trouble to you, I suppose.”
“No, it’s my apology to give, really.” Rayleigh laughs, and Shanks knocks his head against Beckman’s shoulder, the brat. Still, he doesn’t retreat, opening his knees and inclining his posture Rayleigh’s way. Comfortable, between the two of them; A man among family, clearly.
“Yeah, raised a real menace, didn’t you?” Beckman banters easily, tossing that cigarillo again. Raised…?
Shanks ribs right back. “Hey, only I get to pester the old man, Beck!”
Seeing him now, smiling and warm faced, unlooping his arm from Beckman’s side so he can offer a polite hand to help Rayleigh from his seat, he can nearly suppose that he did.
As they leave the bar, the daylight is just beginning to die, and fall away beneath the shelf of the horizon. Soon, it will begin to drip and slink, the ocean beyond colored like a pool of wine, like blood, maybe. But for now, the beyond is blue, and the sun is living.
Shanks turns to him, awe and revelation in his lips. “You know…”
No more misery, now, just unfettered eagerness, tannin-warm, iron-rich, sweet in all its maturity. He smiles, broadly, and hugely, like—well, not like Roger, quite, and not like Rayleigh, either.
He says: Rayleigh, I was so surprised! In the East Blue, that kid’s saying the exact same thing as Captain Roger! Those exact same words.
Rayleigh, in that bare, living moment, is glad to be alive.