(no subject)
Title: Island
Author: commallama
Table: 3
Prompt: Writer's Choice: Crash
Claim: Fandom; One Piece
Characters: Lyon, Shanks
Fandom: One Piece
Rated: PG-13
Warnings: Just mild swearing. I just figured I'd rate it PG-13 to be safe.
Summary: Left with the problem of a boat with a hole in its side in the subzero waters surrounding an icecap of an island, Lyon is skeptical that he and Shanks are even going to make it to their first destination as independent pirates.
Disclaimer: I don't own Shanks, nor do I own Buggy or One Piece itself; I do, however, own Lyon, and I also own the mentioned character Janx.
A/N: This is basically the first chapter of a three-or-four chapter mini-fic that I'll be writing within prompt table 3, I think. It'll jump around a lot, since not everything is going to be in perfect chronological order. It's more or less going to all be oneshots and mini-fics. That's all ^_^
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Why people so often seemed to resort to kicking as a means of waking him, Lyon would never understand. Silvers had done so quite often back on Roger’s ship, his older brother had when they were both still living at home, and now his co-captain of the ridiculously small dinghy they were floating across the Grand Line in was doing just the same.
“Come on, get up, there’s an island!” The importance of this sentence didn’t really sink in as Lyon, still half-asleep, opened his eyes to glare at the redhead. He then closed them and rolled over. He was kicked again. “Get up!”
“Stop kicking me and I might…” he grumbled, but sat up anyway-now that he was fully awake, there was no way he would be getting back to sleep, not with the way the wind blowing off of the hunks of ice floating in the water around them was biting at his arms and face.
Shanks shrugged. “You weren’t waking up any other way. I was going to upend a jarful of water over your head, but I figured you might freeze to death. Looks like the Log Posse was pointing us towards a winter island.”
Lyon rubbed his eyes as he checked the bulbous instrument strapped to his own wrist, like some strange sort of compass. It was pointing straight at the bow of the small dinghy, and looming in the distance was what appeared to be a large, white, flat glob sticking out of the ocean. Though it might have only been an optical illusion because of their distance from the island, it appeared that the water closer to the island consisted of more ice than it did liquid.
It suddenly struck Lyon why he had been awoken in such an unorthodox manner.
“There’s an island there…”
Sighing, Shanks sat down heavily in the dinghy, one hand clutching his hat to the top of his head so the wind wouldn’t blow it away, the other covering his eyes and forehead. That hand fell to his side as he looked pointedly over at Lyon. “Really, I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Give me a break, I just woke u-ah!” He caught his own hat in midair before it could escape very far on the heavy wind. “Just woke up,” he finished. He crossed his arms, keeping his battered old leather tricorne clutched in his right hand. “It’s freezing out here…”
“Yeah, and I wouldn’t suggest using your devil fruit power to get us to the island faster, either. Not with all this ice. So wake me up when we get there.”
“Sure, yeah, I’ll-wait a second!” Shanks had already stretched out across the bottom of the dinghy, hands behind his head and hat over his face, leaving Lyon very little room to even sit down. Shanks lifted his hat from his face and raised an eyebrow in inquiry. “If I can’t sleep, then neither can you!”
“Yes I can. We’ve been sleeping in shifts the whole time. Now it’s my shift. Good night.”
“Night?”
“Well, evening. Good luck with the cold tonight.” He let his hat fall back down and moved his hand behind his head again. “Me, I’ll be on a beach in Jaya by then.”
Once again, Lyon found himself glaring at Shanks.
Shanks, his co-captain, his only decent friend for the past couple years since Lyon had stumbled onto Gol D. Roger’s ship and been shanghaied into an apprenticeship. It had really been nothing to complain about. The Oro Jackson was a good ship, a sturdy ship, with a good crew and plenty of space. Roger had been a great captain, up until his death, up until he left all of his crew alone to fend for themselves. Some had gone off to form their own crews. Among these were indeed Shanks and Lyon. They had agreed to travel together to start with, but as neither would agree to forgo the title of captain, they would separate eventually as they both gathered crewmembers, become rivals as well as friends.
The same couldn’t be said for some of Lyon’s other fellow apprentices. Buggy, for one-Lyon had never had too many problems with Buggy personally, mostly because Buggy was too busy having problems with Shanks. The two of them hadn’t ever gotten along and it was doubtful that they would now. Shanks had offered Buggy a place aboard his own crew before he and Lyon had left Loguetown following their captain’s execution, in an attempt to calm the waters between the two of them. Buggy had declined and gone off on his own.
Then, there was Janx. Just thinking of the name made Lyon’s stomach turn, his fists clench as he looked out at the island the boat was steadily creeping towards. Janx was the very reason they were stuck in this little dinghy. Lyon and Shanks had managed to pilfer a good bit of money in Loguetown, enough to purchase a small ship-all they would need for a little while. Just a small caravel vessel with a couple dinghies… and now all they had was one of the dinghies. While they had been gathering money, Janx had been gathering a small crew, with whom he commandeered their ship and tossed them a dinghy after throwing them overboard. It had been less an act of grace and more to humiliate them further. That was just how Janx worked. He wasn’t happy with his inhumanity unless he could add insult to every injury.
For Lyon, finding a new ship was important for more than one reason. There was of course convenience-one dinghy didn’t offer much room for two teenage pirate captains, and certainly no extra room for food or other supplies. But, first and foremost, it was to be rid of this insult he was currently stuck within, the shabby wooden insult that was sloshing about in the water and seeming to go absolutely nowhere at lightning speed, the insult that kept smacking into the large blocks of ice floating in the subzero water.
That very same insult had just sprung a leak in its side from crashing into one of those blocks of ice.
“Shit!” He stuffed the only thing in his hand into the hole to stop some of the water flow-his hat. His heart stopped for a moment. “Sh-shit!” He pulled his hat back from the hole and wrung it out to the best of his abilities-just the little bit of salt water on his hands already had him feeling weaker-and began searching around for something else.
There wasn’t anything-the dinghy was too damned small for there to be anything else, so there wasn’t. There was Shanks, but-actually, Lyon thought to himself, that might work. In a very careful maneuver, Lyon rolled his co-captain over to the side of the boat the hole was on, and sat on the opposite side himself. This did seem to stop the flow of water into the ship-that is, until the undoubtedly freezing waters caused Shanks to awake with a jolt and a few profanities.
“What the hell-dammit!” He sprung straight up, hand reflexively straightening his hat as he did. He looked around the dinghy, at the hole, at Lyon, gawking. “What the hell did you do?!” he yelled lividly.
“I didn’t do anything, the boat did it! I can’t exactly tell it not to slam into all the damned ice cubes, can I?! Have we got anything to plug up the hole?” Shanks looked pointedly at the soggy leather tricorne clutched in Lyon’s hand. “No.”
“Then we don’t. Looks like you already tried anyway.”
Lyon gave a humorless laugh. “Reflex.” He looked at the hole again. “So… we’re going to die. Out here. In the middle of nowhere. Before we even reach our first island.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen. Here.” Shanks had picked up a jar off of the floor of the boat and was holding it out to Lyon. Lyon stared blankly at the thing, then gave Shanks a look of general perplexity. How a jar was going to get them out of their current situation was beyond him. “You bail, I’ll row. It’ll buy us a little time, at least.”
“Then what?”
“Well… the clumps of ice are getting bigger.”
Lyon looked around the ship, only to discover that Shanks was correct. There were a few sheets of ice floating around that were nearly as large as their boat. Nevertheless, it wasn’t quite clicking what this had to do with anything. There was a slight inkling there in his mind of what they could potentially do, but if Shanks was thinking along the same desperate lines as Lyon, then it really only reinforced the fact that they were doomed. They were likely still miles from the island, and without so much as the crumby boat that was steadily sinking beneath them, they had very little hope of reaching that island.
“So,” Shanks continued, “once we lose the boat, we save the oars and move over to one of the sheets of ice-”
“We are going to die!” Lyon groaned, falling backwards onto the floor of the boat in helpless dismay. This proved to be a horrible idea, as the bottom of the dinghy was already covered in an icy layer of water. He groaned again as he managed to pick himself up, his clothes now soaked in salt water. That meant no using devil fruit abilities to get out of this mess; he could feel the seawater draining him already. Sighing, he did all he could do-scooped up a jarful of water and dumped it out of the boat. “Even if we don’t drown trying to get onto one of those blocks, we’re going to die of hypothermia or pneumonia.”
“Or you’ll die when I throw you overboard to take some weight off the boat. Stop being a drama queen and bail.”
“I am, I am…” Lyon sighed and dumped another jarful of water out of the boat. “Wish we could just power our way out as far as we can go until this stupid excuse for a boat falls apart the rest of the way…"
Shanks was quiet for a long moment-his rowing grew slower and gradually came to a stop over a few silent seconds of pondering. “Why can’t we?” he asked slowly, “I’m actually not totally against that idea. Not like it’s going to last any longer if we try to save it anyway…”
“Because I happen to be covered in water. Water drains power from devil fruit users, remember?” Another jarful of water out of the boat. The jar felt as though it was getting. “You’ll be lucky if I manage to keep bailing for more than another five minutes.”
“Ah, that…” Shanks sighed and continued rowing. “Now you see why I didn’t eat that devil fruit Buggy ended up getting before you showed up. In case anything like this ever happened.”
“I didn’t mean to eat mine…”
“That sort of makes it worse.”
Lyon gave a heavy sigh and dumped another jarful of water out of the boat. It was coming in faster than he could bail now, and it was all he could do just to hold the jar up. Devil fruits… certainly, Shanks had a good view about it. Pirates were a seafaring people. They were pirates. Therefore, being unable to swim, being unable to be touched by water without becoming weaker, it wasn’t a particularly easy handicap to deal with. Intolerance of water, even with the bonus of special powers that could potentially help a pirate in the long run, was simply illogical for pirates. There were plenty of pirates who had purposely consumed devil fruits, plenty of famous ones, plenty of powerful ones-but this wasn’t what Shanks wanted. Shanks was after the glory of becoming number one with nothing but his own skill.
This hadn’t been exactly what Lyon wanted, either. His devil fruit had been consumed while lost on a deserted island and starving, following a brief scuffle with a seagull. He had devoured the thing ravenously, hadn’t even noticed how horrible it had actually tasted until he had finished it. Not until later had he realized that he was able to control the direction and the intensity of the wind, even become the wind if he so chose. That had indeed been a strange day, but the fruit had assisted him nevertheless-he had been utterly unable to fight when he left to become a pirate, but that devil fruit made him a fearsome opponent nevertheless.
The only drawback, as was proven when Lyon dropped the rather small glass jar because it just felt much, much too heavy, was the intolerance to water that devil fruits bestowed upon the wielders of their power. Shanks looked back when Lyon dropped it, and Lyon shook his head. He stopped rowing and looked around, then stood up and tossed the oars onto a nearby sheet of ice.
“Now, then?” Lyon asked.
The redhead shrugged. “Now’s as good a time as any.”
Shanks stood, climbed onto the very edge of the dinghy, and jumped over to the sheet of ice. He stumbled and slid a bit when he landed on it, but managed to stop himself from sliding off the other end by falling flat on his face. Lyon used the edge of the boat to pick himself up and managed to get on the edge-he didn’t feel quite as weak up here, now only wearing damp clothes rather than sitting down in a boat full of water nearly up to his waist. He took his leap over to the sheet of ice and fell over immediately when he reached it, catching himself on his hands. Shanks was just sitting back up and looking around. He picked up an oar and looked at the water.
“You know, this one might actually be a little too big to do any rowing on… but…” He looked ahead. “There’re a few more close by that we could probably reach. And they’re only packed closer together up further, it looks like.”
Lyon looked out ahead, and was fairly sure he was following Shanks’ train of thought correctly. “We’re going ice hopping, aren’t we?” Shanks grinned. “Looks like we’re going ice hopping.” Shanks tossed the oars back into the boat. “What if we get stuck at a dead end?”
“There’s got to be some path that leads to the island. It looks kinda like the ice might form into a solid sheet around it, and that doesn’t look that far off from us. Probably a mile at the most.”
“A mile of ice hopping.” Lyon sighed, then tried standing on the sheet they were on-his boots had a brief scuffle with the slippery surface before surrendering, and he fell-quite hard-on his tailbone. “You know, when I left my island two years ago, I said to myself, ‘The first thing I want to do when I become a great pirate captain is go ice hopping for a mile to get to an island that’s probably totally unpopulated.’ No joke.”
“That’s funny,” Shanks said, managing to stand without slipping and falling. “Ice hopping was first on my list too. Just as a warning,” he added, taking his hat off as he managed to find decent footing, “if you fall in, you’d better figure out how to ignore your devil fruit pretty fast, because I don’t think I’ll even be able to come back for you.”
“I’ll be coming back to haunt your ship when I drown.”
“A ghost ship? Cool. I’ll have to hold you to that.” Shanks moved from the edge of the icy surface carefully, sliding the bottoms of his sandals slowly backwards across the ice rather than attempting to lift his feet to walk. “See ya on the island. Or not.”
And with that, he took off at a run and managed to keep enough of his footing to jump over to the next sheet of ice. It lurched threateningly, and so did Lyon’s stomach as he watched it. Shanks managed to catch himself on his hands and didn’t slide off. Lyon wondered if he would be so lucky. By the time he managed to stand up, Shanks was already two ice blocks away. Lyon sighed.
Stay there and definitely freeze to death, or jump across and either survive or drown. At least the second option involved a word like “survive.” He backed up very cautiously, then, with a running start and closed eyes, took the ridiculously dangerous leap.
His feet landed on a solid surface, and he opened his eyes.
Then his feet slid out from underneath him.
Apparently Shanks had been watching, as he heard laughter a short distance away. Then he called out, “You get better footing without your shoes, you just have to be willing to risk frostbite!”
A few missing toes, perhaps a foot, a shin at the most, was better than death by drowing. He could get a peg if he did lose a shin. Peg-legs were definitely in style in pirate culture-if culture was even the proper term. Lyon sat up and immediately began wrenching off his boots. He stood once they were off-it was freezing, but at least he could stand. He shook a bit of water off of his battered tricorne, straightened it out, and placed it back on his head. One block of ice, probably one hundred or so more to go. He picked up his boots and ran for the next one.
Yes, this was exactly what he thought he would be doing with his life once he was a fully-fledged captain-jumping across blocks of ice to get to an undoubtedly unpopulated island. Lyon couldn’t imagine what sort of idiots would want to live in a place like this. If he was indeed correct and there was no one there, then their chances of getting a new boat were pretty slim. Nonexistent, even. More nonexistent than the common sense of anyone who would choose to live in a place like this.
What a lovely day this was turning out to be.