Work Text:
I.
“Promenade!” Isaac calls, just as Shanks finishes dusting off his shorts, still slightly disarmed by the phantom heat of hands on his shoulders and spine, pushing him into the center of the loose circle their crew had formed. His glance slants between the existing pairs standing in square set, already reaching for each other in skater’s posture—and Buggy, already standing in the conspicuously empty space. His lips are curled back and his jaw is dropped with affront, but he reaches towards Shanks nonetheless, being an unusually good sport. Uuugghh .
"This is stupid. And why do I have to be the girl?" He groans when he takes Buggy’s hand, clapping the one that rests by his waist with more force than strictly necessary. Buggy’s fingers are stiff, damp with cool sweat, randomly disengaging to leave Shanks angling and tilting his wrists as they’re both never quite level, and always at some odd mismatch. Their pace is off, too, being forced to slow after Buggy’s nose nearly gets knocked off when they brush Langram’s back.
“It doesn’t matter who the girl is, just have fun!” Shanks shoots a look over his shoulder, meeting his captain’s eye with a quick-dissipating simmer. He looks happy, there, hunched over to hold Rayleigh’s arm, framing his back with an arm of his own; they fit against each other, the ease there making their relation and closeness—of body, of mind, in the little glance Rayleigh sends Roger, and the one he sends back—apparent, posture radiating some texture that ripples about the crew. Shanks feels as if he’s drank something warm too quickly, the heat still sitting in his stomach. Have fun. He thinks he might be happy.
From directly across the way, Gaban is laughing at them, and Buggy turns to stick his tongue out at him just before Shanks can crane to do it. Huh. Then, he turns back to bark, twisting his head around to look at the captain and the vice. "I agree. This is stupid!"
It makes Shanks look upon, into his face. His expression goes slack, an unconcealed moment of processing shifting behind his temples. Buggy’s wearing a parabolic scowl, and there’s a strand of vibrant hair sticking to his sweat-damp mouth, arced by the peculiar shape of his nose. Beyond it. In a single moment, he becomes—intensely, shockingly happy , beginning to tremble.
Rayleigh’s throat clears, precursor to reprimand, just as they reset positions, but it’s cut out by another call, this time from another voice—Sunbell, maybe?— swing your partner! , and Shanks reaches for Buggy with renewed force. Yeah, he likes this, for some reason. Really does!
”No, actually,” there’s some thread of thought trailing between his ears, spooling up and tangling against itself, and he can’t make sense of it before it comes up on his tongue, “I changed my mind, this is great—Buggy, pick your feet up more!”
“Y-you!” Buggy squawks as Shanks grips his hands with a renewed urgency—but he knows the steps, too, had the form eased into him by Rayleigh’s coaxing knocks to the ear and Roger’s warm-pawed maneuvering. Still, Shanks is better than him at it, and this, too, amplifies that delirious joy, making him squawk out a laugh. Buggy regards him, too, taking on his own silence, and his mouth twitches with indecision.
For a short moment, they take on the same unspoken intensity, bordering competition, and it makes Shanks’ veins fizz, effervescence at the wrist and straining in the chest, amplifying the emotional volatility he’s caught by; Buggy is following his lead. It’s trust, isn’t it? The rest of the crew seems not to notice, falling further into merry disarray.
The calls come more frequently, more jumbled, and suddenly everyone’s getting spun and switched, changing partners, but they’re left as an unchanging island, the entire crew deriving some sort of pleasure from their stumblings. Someone coos. Pine makes a kissy face when he walks past, and Buggy cries I’ll slug you! which makes everyone laugh all the more. And this time, Shanks is in on the joke, laughing too, and drawing close to Buggy as they spiral down the routines. He feels it, too. Close, that is.
Buggy smacks away Donquino’s pipe as they circle in for a left-hand star, hissing about the ash, and Shanks looks over his shoulder—hey, when did he get behind him? Is he the girl now? Ha!—and Buggy looks, well. Happy, too, helpless to it, to being well-loved and joyed and close , still, as the pairs spiral apart, and he pivots to grab his hand again. This time, it stays connected to his wrist, stays attached to his body.
It’s hard to tell, past the eye-searing shade of his nose, and his loose-and-falling-looser-still hair drifting into his face, but there’s a touch of pinkness high on his cheek, splotchy and fevered, alarming and disarming at once. Like a peeled grapefruit, sheen and all, sort of red.
II.
Square dancing calls, for as many as he knows, and how well he knows them, do Shanks no good when they dock with the Whitebeards. Their traditions are just familiar enough for Shanks to make an utter fool of himself, assumption leading him to step forward to square a set, and getting bewildered looks and boisterous laughter when no one meets him.
It’s Marco that reaches for him first, all shades of teasing in the color of his cheek and the glinting band of his smile. He laughs— at him, too, Shanks can tell—when he catches his hands, pulls him away from his awkward hovering with a flustering elegance. He forgets about all the other laughter, the strange looks and the barely-recognizable calls that bring the dancing pairs into foreign formation.
“Here, dance with me, Red.” Marco’s eyes flicker, smoothed over into lambent opaqueness for a brief instant. He rolls his shoulders, and his biceps flare with wisps of cyan, rising and dissipating against the sky’s unblinking pallor. The long shift and shadow of his talons obscure the pale-legged stumble Shanks makes, his pants rolled up to his knees. They form odd shapes in the dry sand, strokes and smears by talon and foot alike; it’s like a child’s game, crosses and lines, the rules elaborate, spontaneous, and forgotten at the instant of discard.
He’s good. At dancing, that is. Doesn’t drop Shanks’ hands, even though he’s taller than him. Hair falling into those flashing eyes, limning the strands in blue light. He thinks—he’s happy, maybe.
“Hey,” Shanks swallows, cheeks going tight, hot. “My heart’s beating real fast.”
Around them, the clap of hands and the stomp of feet rises in steady pulse, disorientingly off-time to the heat-throb making his ears ache. He can hear Buggy crowing something helplessly joyful as Rayleigh is swinging him, and Roger lumbers past their shoulders, chasing some passing whim with that boisterous laugh.
He looks up and sees Marco, feels his long-fingered grip in his palm, thumb cascading over the inside of his wrist, where the skin is paler than that on the back of his hand. He knows Marco doesn't use a sword—he always watches him when he fights, even had gone blow-for-blow-for-knockout with him the one time, which would have been enlightening if not for its brevity—but there’s these peculiar callouses on the pads of each of his fingers, a roughness on the mounds of his palm and the slightest knob of dense tissue on his middle finger, and he wonders how he acquired it.
He thinks to ask, and doesn’t want to—hot-faced again, for reasons unknown—and endeavors to ask in spite of the feeling, in spite of Marco’s smirk at the corner of his vision, but—
“ Switch! ”
He hadn’t realized he’d been staring down at their arms until he has to watch, without conscious deliberation, as his own hands begin to retract. Marco, with that same grin pulls him closer, now shifting his hands to lace their fingers fully, “Nope! You’re not getting off that easy, Red.”
Shanks nearly stumbles, the musculature of his shoulders giving an erratic twitch at the abruptness, at the echo of inspired sentiment that rocks its way through him. He feels strangely out of his element; plunged straight into an ice bath, or woken from some long, sweet dream, all alert and bewildered, everything shocking or stinging. He hardly keeps up as Marco moves him through a series of twirls.
“Still worried?” He looks down at him when he rights him once more, a flicker of mirth moving in the shift of his temples, a crease between his brows to indicate condescending amusement, “It happens when you’re excited.” His heart rate quickens; he’s always teasing him.
“No, it’s…” His brow furrows, some petulance gathering in him and making him squeak a bit. Marco sends him off on another spin, faster and looser, this time, the foliage and the seaside spinning together in a great smear of blue-green tones. The cord of his hat tightens to the base of his throat, stretching far behind him in a flutter of straw.
He pulls him close again, then, laughing softly at the flailing splay of his arm when he folds it back in. His feathers flare up again, and Shanks can feel the radiation of coolness from them, complementing the sincere warmth of his voice. “You should believe me. I’m gonna be a doctor, you know.”
His smile stops Shanks’ heart, for a moment, and Marco bolsters against his weakness, firm-bodied. He is quiet, awed for a moment at that shift in demeanor, the bleed of it through his flippance.
“It’s just—” He can’t ward the wonder from his speech, cognitions chilled. “I think this has to be different!” His voice cracks, this time, and he can feel the blood moving through his body, can feel the full volume of his existence, drawn to clarity for a brief, startling moment. He doesn’t know what to do with it.
Marco laughs again, and Shanks kicks him, hard, before dropping away, falling full-body into the sand to clutch his ankle. “Fuck!”
“Don’t kill the kid, Marco.” Barefoot idiot, slamming his toes into pure bone and unyielding keratin, and he nurses his ankle as a laugh pierces their reverie, and Marco’s attention falls away from him.
“It wasn’t me, Pops!” He’s beautiful , Shanks thinks, and then wonders if that’s a thought he should be having at all, before that erogatory echo: Does it matter at all? His foot still hurts, sparks scraping up the flat top of it and making his calf twinge.
Laying there, sand gouging faint pricks into the tender skin of his back where his shirt has ridden up, some of it eking against his waistband with a vague, implacable itch. His mouth falls open, the sharp exhale bleeding helplessly into speech. “My name is Shanks, you know.”
“I know,” Marco says, losing some of that composure in the face of his sudden intensity, unable to feign nonplussation.
“Say it.” He closes his fist around the grains, packing them into a damp, imprisoned wad in his sweat-lubricated fingers.
It pricks at Marco, and he sheds another measure of the veneer; his lethargy dissipates, and beneath it is something still-beautiful. “Huh?”
His voice cracks again, giving way beneath him. Unshielded. “... Please?”
Shanks might—he might really love him. That really might be it.
Marco’s eyes—opaque, again, shafting away, pointed to the corner of the cheek where the blood gathers and makes the skin go flush-glossed. He extends a wrist, flesh-and-bone and fine skin. His hands are all man, all Marco, soft and lean, perfectly unscarred, made for and by that gentle contour of the pen. He’s going to be a doctor, right?
The reverence in Shanks’ reaching hand sends a spark through his wrist when they interlock. “Alright, Shanks.”
His hair falls into his eyes as Marco pulls him to standing in one firm flex of the bicep. Through its veil, his vision bloats and colors, all red.
III.
For all fouling of the air, all heavy cast of misery and unbreaking cloud, there’s a thread of rhythm in Shanks yet. When Beckman takes him out to sea, swearing his life and fealty by way of bowed head beneath the creaking sign-post of a Loguetown alley, there’s some impression he takes hold of, bare-handed and desolate, somewhere on the fluttering edge of his own rending, that compels him into keeping time.
It’s barely more than a dinghy, the cabin half-sloped into the belly of the thing, but it’s been enough for Beckman, and it gets them off Loguetown, onto where Benn thinks they’ll be able to acquire a real vessel. Shanks is utterly delighted, as if he’s not fresh—a year, now, but fresh, still—off the deck of one of the most legendary pirate ships to crest the waters of this world. Helplessly, it charms. He crawls up from below deck, grinning and loose-postured, "We’re real pirates now, Beckman!”
“Aye, captain.” He smiles, running a broad hand through the disarray of his hair, gathering its sleekness by the side of his throat with a smoothing hand, and tilting to watch Shanks rise to standing with good humor.
“You know what that means…!” Shanks’ grin becomes more lopsided, showing a bit of gums. He lifts his hands, holding two short-throated bottles of rum, glowing amber against the slightly paler insides of his wrists. Not exactly the good stuff—Beckman doesn’t keep that anywhere simple enough to get dug up by this little idiot—but it’s beyond decent, more than enough to pleasantly effervesce the start of a voyage. Beckman’s head tips back with laughter.
“You brat, where’d you get those from, eh?” He ruffles his hair with one hand, and snatches a bottle with the other. He pops the cork, and a bit of foam spills over his thumb, dripping in darkening speckles to the deck. White to dark as it soaks into the dry wood. Beckman’s still watching the floor as Shanks’ cork rolls across it.
“You said it—I’m your captain, now, so all your cargo’s mine.” Shanks says, slugging Beckman in the shoulder, and letting the touch linger before letting his hand fall limp.
He laughs gently, turning up to meet his eyes, “Sure, sure.” Shanks’ smile twitches, not quite a falter, but the vague back-end of one, when he does. Beckman watches his profile when he turns away to knock back a few hard swallows, the enigmatic corner of his mouth framed by the sweep of his bangs, cautious, appraising, without judgment. More alcohol, dripping from the flat of his smooth chin and onto the boards.
In all truth, he’s tired, and the drink makes him moreso, lethargic and queasy and wearied, and stupidly, consumingly homesick. Impossibly lonely, even unalone in all his hauntings. Yet, he’s still clutching at that impression, worn in Roger’s smile. Flashed, gleaming on the temple of his severed head as it fell from the scaffold. He looks at Beckman, finds warm regard in his weak smile, finds the unbearable color of something not unlike pity.
Embarrassment appears in him, like the flash of lightning, wherein for one alarming second, all is illuminated, all unhidden. Shanks, swallowing and blinking away his disquiet, turns to take Beckman’s hands, enjoying his fluster as he places the bottle aside.
“Party with me…” He laughs weakly, limbs all shuddery in disarray as he smooths over the skin on the back of the man’s palms. He loves him; Beckman, standing taller than him, straighter and sterner, but swaying, too, equally vulnerable to the rock of the ocean beneath them. Like any man, any tower, any mountain.
“Aye.” Beckman takes him into his arms, just a bit, folds their joined hands to Shanks’ shoulder and places his other hand gently against his hip. His voice is gentle, too, low and coarse and making Shanks shiver, in pleasure or in grief, in the feeling that he is considered, thought of, attended to: “Lots to celebrate. Lots to look forward to. Congratulations, cap.”
They shuffle on the deck, smooth and largely dispassionate, heels murmuring. Beckman hums a little, more noise than tune, cheek pressing flat to the slope of Shanks’ scalp. God, what a lucky bastard he is.
“What’s this one? A waltz?” Shanks muses, half to himself, sinking deeper into that offered embrace. That rhythm in his arms, a marvel of which he feels no real ownership, only awe; Beckman takes the lead, unspeaking, and Shanks keeps up.
The sun touches against the water’s surface, and, in the rising haze, beyond the shrinking shadow of low-roofed, white-cobbled Loguetown, it’s like a coal sinking through cool, fresh water. All that miasma and steam, the pounding of the rain misting itself against the sheathes of opalescent stone, choking out the island. All flare of color in the sky and across that cool freshness of the water. It’s beautiful; he can’t stand to look.
Shanks presses his temple to Benn’s collarbone, finding the one smoothness on their lean bodies and slotting himself there. With that warmth of his first mate around him, and the inexorable beauty of passing days creeping against the sides of the Red-Haired Pirates’ first ship like the bloom of mold, his smile falls. He closes his eyes against the swell of Beckman’s pectorals, leans into his breath. The insides of his eyelids are dark, stained with the blur of color’s dregs. Rimmed, through the deepness of black, red.
IV.
It’s Mihawk who teaches him to waltz properly; somewhere along the way, their duels have habituated, taken a form that leads them to aimless wanderings and moonlit dinners, swords staked in the warming glow of a bonfire. The moon falls across his skin, and it seems to make some radiance echo in him, the whiteness of his body edged in bleary, dreamlike glow. He looks at Shanks beneath the lowered brim of his hat, and there’s a shadow in the corner of his mouth that implicates mirth, a smile.
“You look like you want to fight,” he breathes—another tell of that mirth, his voice low and liquid-soft. He bends over, and his fingers emit that same glow as they work at the buckles of his shoes. If Shanks had the capacity, he’d be terribly embarrassed at the roar in his ears and the heat wafting across the bridge of his nose at the sight of Mihawk's bared ankles.
“Do I?” Shanks mumbles, dry-mouthed as Mihawk creases the hem of his pants halfway up his calves. A flutter of sand falls with the motion, dusting the tops of his feet with its mundane glitter, and Shanks watches dumbly,
“Yes, come here.” It's not given as a command, but rather a prompt, but Shanks feels as if his heart will stop dead should he not obey with utmost haste. He kicks his sandals off, toeing around the fire, sand sticking to the curve of his sole for the warmth and bare moisture. Mihawk holds his arms out for him, expectant and uncharacteristically sweet.
Shanks laughs as he takes one up, the sinuous travel of his voice complementing the indulgent trail of his hand beneath the elbow, up under the curl of the bicep to feel out the shape of his shoulder. Lean, gorgeous, firm-skinned beneath fine fabric that shimmers when Mihawk spares him a shiver.
There is little speech—only the occasional happy mumble, the faintest of sighs—and there is even less thought, but somehow, Shanks finds himself… adjusting, somewhere. Shifting around the weight of new knowledge being ingrained into his being, the eaves of his mind being tugged gently apart to allow for crystallization of intuition into certainty. Learning, being taught, negotiated, body and mind through each turn of the rhythm Mihawk strikes.
One-two three. Mihawk’s thumb strokes along the inner seam of his wrist—Marco had put his hands there, too, he thinks by impression, by some sensory flash of memory. Somehow, he’s unembarrassed to think of him, the memory bled of its malcontent, and more sensible with age; with some humor, he doesn’t worry the implication of another man’s name on his mind, not the slightest bit.
“You’re good at this…” Shanks mutters, even falling into step with just about as much ease, accommodating to the fine art and svelte motion of Mihawk’s body with his own. He’s thinking still, some sluggish morning tide of revelation lapping behind his temples—Buggy’s cheek, and the accommodating hollow of Benn’s throat, and the pretty barmaid he danced with just the week past, with the long, ochre-painted fingernails and smooth, brown skin, haunted by their colors—but it’s easier than breathing, than the very act of being alive, to speak kindly to Mihawk.
Oh, yeah , he thinks, this time in language, yeah .
Mihawk shrugs, but he doesn’t refute the compliment. “It takes two.” The tips of Shanks’ ears hum with approaching heat. He giggles, dropping his head to Mihawk’s shoulder with a shiver of joy. It does, doesn’t it?
“You know, I’ve figured something out, for once…” Shanks murmurs, eyes closing. He turns his nose in, pressing the tip of it to Mihawk’s pulsepoint, feeling its thrum and enjoying the nearness of his blood, the scent of his skin for a taffied instant. Mihawk’s little chuckle. Oh, yeah.
He draws back—then, in a fit of whimsy, keeps going, delighted when he anchors his weight in their joinings, tilts his heel all the way up into a dip, and Mihawk follows him, follows him down the angle so he can keep looking upon his face. Holding him up, without even a breath of strain, their bodies tilted at forty-five degrees against the beach’s horizon. Believing Mihawk’s truth: He’s light. “Mihawk!”
He cocks his head, the smile on his mouth pleasant, his mildness colored beyond indifference and into quiet ease. It strikes Shanks with a full-body shiver, this permissiveness, the shape of absolution without sin that Mihawk wears in his body. He feels perfectly faultless. He’s happy. So. Goddamn. Happy.
His bare foot makes a shallow well in the dry sand, a thin strip of flattened bark sticking to the furrow between sole and toe. He takes Mihawk in close, knowing he can, liking the smoothing warmth that radiates from his body, his bare chest and near calves. He's so… human , too, and Shanks takes a melancholic pleasure in the fact that he may be the only one to ever truly know it—learn it, body and mind.
The moon pulls against the world’s water, and somewhere, everywhere, maybe, people are dying, helplessly or bloody-nailed, raw-throated or mute with horror, all assured of the fiction of goodness. He's here, though—happy, loved, loving yet.
Shanks’ burdened body, his burdened mind and his long, light-mangled silhouette all spin into focus, the cellophane sheets of selfhood ordered and taking clarity of form. For a moment, he feels himself the way Mihawk sees him, and it makes his heart thump, veins all aglow. Mihawk's breath is quiet, but unsuppressed. Shanks thinks he may cry. There is so much glory here; perhaps there always has been, everywhere he goes, hidden in those panes of insincere smiles, and betraying touches, depth in the tremble of the hand and retreating in the turn of the forearm. He loves everyone he has ever known, to whatever end, and whatever pain.
Mihawk, though, doesn’t hide from him; Shanks doesn’t want to, either. Doesn’t harm him, even through hurt. He doesn’t want to either. Easier than breathing, than living. Uncomplicated, this time.
“I love you.”
Mihawk, breath catching, but without alarm, looks up into his eyes, rimmed with the sheen of unshed tears. There’s always some strange depth to his eyes, reading as silver unmolested, or brown, to the right light, but always glossed in sanguine distinction, as if candy-coated. Here, in the firelight, with an unfettered, breaking smile on his face, they shine with fathomless variegation, red.