Work Text:
The sea, in the days of Gol D. Roger, was not just a place.
It was a stage that never quite closed, as if the whole world existed suspended somewhere between what is happening and what could still be undone. As if, at any moment, someone could draw the curtain across the sky, snuff out the sun with their hand, gather up the sea like a sheet of blue fabric and leave everything hanging in that precise instant where nothing has yet been decided.
Always blue.
But that is not how Shanks would remember it. He would remember it because, at some point —without knowing when, without knowing how— it stopped being the sea.
And began to look far too much like Buggy.
Because there was a time when life had no name. No direction. No weight. A time that, in another language, would be called ukiyo: the floating world, where everything exists without any promise of permanence and, precisely because of that, becomes unbearably beautiful. Drinking sake on deck, laughing too loudly, letting the hours pass without counting them… living without thinking about the next morning, as if dawn would never demand anything.
That was what Shanks had wanted.
That… and Buggy.
And back then, they did not seem like different things.
Because the sea is still blue now, all these years later, and yet it no longer means the same. Not because the sea has changed, but because he has. Because there are things that do not disappear when they are lost, things that cannot be left behind even when you keep moving forward. They remain. They persist in half-remembered gestures, in silences you can never quite fill, in that absurd —almost unbearable— intuition that if someone forced you to choose, not between glory or wealth, not between the open sky or the story others will tell when you are gone, but between all of that… and a single person, then it would never have been a choice.
It would have been inevitable.
Shanks never wanted greatness. He never wanted the weight of a name destined to linger in other people’s mouths. Even if the world insisted on pointing at him, even if history seemed to lean toward him with cruel patience, what he wanted was something smaller. Simpler. Far harder to hold onto than any legend.
He wanted the red.
He wanted the blue.
He wanted Buggy.
He wanted that blue hair that, even now, he keeps finding in the sea without meaning to, as if the horizon itself insisted on returning it to him in fragments. That red nose —bright, impossible to ignore— that Buggy had hated his whole life and that he had loved without explanation, with a quiet naturalness, the way you love things that never need to be justified to anyone.
He wanted to stay.
On a deck that creaked under the night wind. Wrapped in a blanket that was never enough for two and yet somehow always was. In Buggy’s laughter breaking the stillness of the sea, in his restless hands tangling in his hair as if there were nothing in the world more urgent to do.
Shanks, if they ever made you choose between glory and me...
He never let him finish, because he never did when something mattered. Because he never doubted.
I choose you.
It was a promise. The kind that is spoken lightly, as if the world will never come to collect it. And, with time, it became too large for two young boys who still believed that staying would not cost them anything.
Not because they did not want to.
But because they did not know.
Because the sea does not demand, but the world does.
And Shanks —who had believed he could live without weight, as if everything could remain as light as those nights on deck— did not understand in time that there are destinies you cannot avoid without paying something in return.
Because on nights like this, with the sky full of stars identical to those he once looked at without counting, with a bottle of sake left beside him like the echo of something he no longer quite knows how to repeat, the memories do not come back as ordered scenes. They come back as sensations. The light weight of Buggy against his chest, the way he would settle there without thinking, as if his body chose before his pride; the sound of his breathing when he fell asleep wrapped around him; the clumsy, almost careless kisses he would leave on his face, as if he did not know how to do it any other way.
He remembers that moment too.
I love you, Shanks.
He said it as if it hurt. As if, even then, Buggy already knew he was going to lose him.
Shanks had laughed, not out of mockery, but because he did not know what to do with a happiness that pure. He had lifted him, spun him in the air, ignoring his protests.
BA-BAKA! PUT ME DOWN! OI, I SAID PUT ME DOWN!
As if the entire world had shifted shape in that instant and the only way he knew how to respond was to hold him tighter, closer, as if that alone could be enough. Because Shanks did not want to be the King of the Pirates, nor to find the One Piece. He did not want to be a legend, nor for his name to outlive everything else. Because everything he wanted was already there, in that moment. And he wanted that: that laughter, that feigned anger, that clumsy kiss that always came after, always more honest than Buggy was willing to admit.
He wanted to be a carefree pirate with Buggy.
A pirate without weight. Without worries. Without a story. Without any ambition beyond looking at the sea and knowing that, beside him, there was someone who made everything enough.
But the problem with the sea is that it never stays; and Shanks’s mistake was believing that he could. Because Buggy was not just the blue… he was the place where the blue stopped being infinite and became something closer. Where the horizon stopped being distance and became home.
Now the blue is still there. The sea. The sky. Everything that stretches without limit.
But it is no longer the same.
And sometimes Shanks finds himself staring at the horizon as if he could undo something, as if there were an exact point where everything began to break and it would be enough to return there to fix it. But he cannot. Because there are decisions that do not feel like decisions when they happen, and yet they are the ones that determine everything that comes after. Because there was a day —in Loguetown, or perhaps long before— when their paths stopped being one.
And when the story began to write itself without asking them, when glory stopped being a possibility and became something inevitable, Shanks did not choose the way he had said he would. He chose the only way he could… and that was enough to lose Buggy.
And Shanks —who had always wanted to be free— never truly was again.
Because if someone offered him the choice now, truly, between everything he is and everything he was, the answer would not change. It never would. But it no longer matters. Because there are loves that are never lost. They remain.
Like the red that still burns in memory.
Like the blue that never again was just the sea.
And because, somewhere, in a place where time has not quite finished closing, where the curtain has not yet fully fallen, Shanks is still there, on that deck, under a sky that still asks nothing, with a blanket too small for two… holding the one he never stopped loving.
And the cruelest thing —the only truly cruel thing— is that Buggy never knew. He never knew that, even now, after all these years, if he asked him to leave everything —the sea, his name, his crew, the path that others had already written for him… Shanks would not hesitate.
He would do it.
Without questions.
Without pride.
Without looking back.
As if none of the rest had ever mattered.