Work Text:
This must be a dream. Shanks doesn’t remember how he got where he is, or where it is at all. It’s a ship; that much is clear, but it’s a ship he’s never been on. It’s not the Oro Jackson or the ship they’d had before that that he and Buggy pretend to remember better than they do. But the important thing is that it must be a dream, and--what was it that Gaban had been spouting about lucid dreaming that Rayleigh had told him was stupid? Maybe it wasn’t, but Shanks doesn’t remember most of it, anyway.
His legs feel too long, but maybe that’s the way of things on this ship; he looks down and the ground is too far away. His left arm won’t move; his left sleeve is empty. Whose body is this? Some unknown adult? The sword at his waist is unfamiliar, and his right hand feels strange on the hilt. Maybe he should be freaking out about all of this, but it’s all a dream, right?
“Stop spacing out.”
The voice is harsh, strange, and familiar all at once; Shanks finds himself looking straight at Buggy’s floating head--the face belongs to someone as old as Rayleigh at least, but he’d known those eyes anywhere--and, well, that nose too. Buggy’s hair is long, tied into a ponytail; there is stubble on his chin, crude-looking makeup on his face. Buggy clicks his tongue, and Shanks shifts his weight on his feet.
Before he can say anything, he blinks, and there is darkness around him. The creak of floorboards, the familiar sound in the cabin of the Oro Jackson , a crack of light from the door, someone getting up. The change of watch. It’s still a while before dawn, only darkness from the porthole, no moon tonight. Shanks rolls over, holds out his hands. Both of them are there. And on the hammock next to him, Buggy is snoring with his arms outstretched, face scrubbed clean, hair barely long enough to fall into his eyes. It was a weird dream, but only a dream. Too bad he hadn’t been able to do something cool, like fly or break his body apart like Buggy.
He should tell Buggy, but in the morning; he’s not going to wake up the whole cabin and get yelled at. There will be time when they’re swabbing the decks tomorrow, only there isn’t, because Shanks only dimly remembers that he’d had a dream at all the next time he wakes up.
It all comes flooding back the next time he dreams of it. He is on the same ship, same sword at his waist. He is tall again; his arm is gone again. There’s a ring on his right hand, glinting in the sun, thick and gold. Shanks has never been one for jewelry, but it doesn’t feel too tight or too loose, or even too strange. There’s a drink on the railing, what looks like ale. Shanks assumes it’s his (right, if he’s an adult, then no one’s here to tell him he’s too young to drink).
The water here looks like it does where they are now, clear and sparkling, so few islands at the end of the Grand Line, so little pollution, only sun and water and sky so blue it hurts, bluer than Buggy’s hair. Is Buggy here, too? Shanks glances back behind him.
This ship is small; the only ones on board might be him and Buggy, leaning against the wall of the cabin. They certainly don’t have a big crew; unless the ship somehow extends deep below the water like an iceberg there’s no way they could fit. (The next time Shanks sees Tom, he’ll ask if that’s possible; maybe it is. If anyone can make a ship like that, Tom could.) Buggy has a mug of his own, in his left hand, floating near his mouth. There’s much less makeup on his face now, and Shanks isn’t sure if seeing Buggy like this, all of his face visible but clearly much older, is stranger than seeing Buggy with an older face hidden behind the paint. There’s a ring on Buggy’s left hand, and Shanks glances back down to his own hand. They’re the same.
“You’re acting weird again,” Buggy says, and even more than the face, it’s the voice that jolts Shanks. “Don’t tell me you’re regretting not going to that island before.”
Where are they headed? If it’s not the end of the line, where could they not have gone before? Shanks doesn’t reply; he’s not sure he’ll be able to cope with hearing a strange voice from his own throat. Buggy is still looking at him, not like he does when he’s annoyed, or pretending to be annoyed, or when he’s suspicious; there’s a softness to his face. It’s not the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes, or the older face; it’s a different kind of softness that Shanks can’t place. He looks back to his hand, a question forming halfway in his mind—
And then Shanks wakes with a sharp pain in his knee. Buggy’s detached foot has somehow managed to kick him. Shanks tosses it back at Buggy’s hammock, where it lands on the pillow next to his head, turned the other way. He lies on his side, looking at Buggy, mostly just a lump in the darkness. Maybe Buggy will look completely different at that age. Maybe he’ll be bald. Maybe he’ll have a mustache to rival Roger’s. Maybe he and Shanks will have a giant, magnificent ship, and maybe they’ll sail to every island on the Grand Line, and Shanks will grip a rifle with both hands.
This time, Shanks remembers the dream all too well in the morning, but he can’t find the words to say anything about it.
The rain comes down in buckets, soaking through Shanks’s hat into his hair. He clutches the hat, suddenly afraid of it disintegrating, suddenly afraid of losing it. There is nothing, now, that is not painful to think about. Roger, executed, shouting to the world about whatever was on that island, that island that he and Buggy had never gone to. He thinks again about the second dream, the smell of the sea, the clear sky, Buggy asking him about regrets.
Buggy won’t go with him, and he won’t go with Buggy; Buggy has since disappeared through the throngs of people, even the bright blue of his hair vanishing in the foggy air. Shanks holds tighter to his hat. To say it’s all he has left of all those years with the Roger pirates, and Roger himself, would be incorrect, disrespectful to Roger’s memory and to all the things he’d done and learned, but it’s all he can hold onto. All, tangible, that he has of Roger, not Roger the King of the Pirates, but Roger, his captain, his family. And by extension, all he has left of Buggy.
Dreams aren’t real. That dream wasn’t real, but the pirate dream is, and he’s going to do his damn best to go to that island, by himself if he has to. He’d promised Buggy they’d go together, though; he intends to keep that promise if he can, if he can find Buggy and drag him along, but you can’t force someone else’s will. Roger had told him that. Shanks half-sobs, and pushes the hat lower on his forehead; even with the rain his tears are obvious.
Shanks doesn’t forget about the dreams per se; they’re still in his memory, but filed away. He can’t really remember, though, what the ship had looked like, what Buggy’s face had looked like, whether the scars on his face had hurt, whether he’d had them at all, what exactly the sword he’d carried had felt like on his belt.
The night after he loses his arm, he remembers because he’s there again. The body he sees attached to him matches his, the shape of his calves and the sandals on his feet, the sword, the empty sleeve, the small scar on his right hand that he hadn’t noticed before but knows to look for now. He raises his hand to his face, over his eyes; the scars are there, the skin warped on three lines. (At least they don’t hurt, whenever this is, and neither does his shoulder.) There’s no hat on his head, though, and that ring is still on his finger, and the association isn’t one that takes him a while to work out this time.
He hasn’t seen Buggy since Loguetown. This Buggy looks older than he should, so whenever this is, it’s still probably some time in the future. But even if they were to meet tomorrow, it’s impossible to imagine Buggy going anywhere with him, let alone marrying him. And--Shanks has studiously tried not to think about Buggy at all since they’d parted, and it’s never really occurred to him to think of Buggy as a romantic prospect rather than a friend or a brother. It never had way back when; they’d both had their fair share of trying (and occasionally succeeding) to sneak off with apprentices on other boats to make out in a closet.
Him and Buggy, not only together again, but married. On a boat that is still unfamiliar. Shanks looks up. There’s no jolly roger on the sail, no attached flag, no insignia whatsoever. He doesn’t see Buggy this time, though.
“Buggy!” he calls, and then, there he is in the doorway.
It’s been so goddamn long. Putting aside the pieces of the situation that he can’t quite fit together, it’s so good to see Buggy’s face again, as half-familiar as this older version of him is.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Shanks says.
Buggy scowls. “You could help me do the dishes, you know.”
“Sure, sure,” Shanks says, and he crosses the distance to Buggy in a couple of seconds.
Buggy grabs him by his shirt on the way by, and Shanks wills himself awake before their lips connect. His face is hot; his shoulder aches. He’s in an inn on land, and Buggy is nowhere to be found.
He’s not sure why he wouldn’t want to kiss Buggy--it’s weird to not kiss your husband, but Buggy isn’t his husband, can’t even really be called his friend now. But will he be, someday? Shanks thinks again of the sword, of his body. There’s no way he could have known. Though, hadn’t Mihawk said something about using haki to see the future once? There’s no way Shanks had enough latent skill as a teenager to use it like that, right? But, visions or not, if Buggy’s going to be his husband one day--or even if he isn’t--wouldn’t it be better to kiss him in the real world first? Even thinking the sentence in his head, he’s not sure it makes sense. Chalk it up to half-sleep and pain, maybe.
What about the hat? What about Luffy? Maybe he’d dreamed of Buggy again because of Luffy and the fruit jogging that part of his memory. But that’s not quite it, right? If only, this time, he could roll over and stare at Buggy’s back again.
It’s years before Shanks sees Rayleigh again, and it's strange to see him so old, even though he’d always seemed impossibly old. (When Shanks says as much, Rayleigh looks as if he’s going to box his ears like he’s ten again, but he doesn’t.) They talk about their lives, and what they know of some of the old crew, but Shanks avoids bringing up Buggy and Rayleigh just doesn’t.
Soon, they reach the topic of haki, though. When Shanks asks him about using it to see years into the future, Rayleigh laughs.
“I’ve never heard of more than a couple of seconds. But there are a lot of things I thought were impossible before I saw them happen, so I suppose it’s not out of the question. Why?”
“I’ve been having these dreams,” Shanks says, and doesn’t elaborate.
“Well, you’re pretty observant,” says Rayleigh. “Sometimes that lets us see a likely course of action. Or maybe it’s something you want?”
“I’m not sure,” says Shanks. “Some of it’s happened already. The rest of it seems unlikely at most.”
Rayleigh smiles. “Are you the type of man to let probability get in your way?”
Shanks isn’t, but that’s about convincing someone to join his crew, or entering a fight he shouldn’t be able to win, though--aren’t both of those sort of applicable here? Buggy is always the exception to the rule, though.
“If you don’t want it to happen, you have the power to change it,” says Rayleigh. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. Here.”
He refills Shanks’s glass with something stronger. Shanks raises it, thinking back to that earlier dream, so many years earlier, and the mug of ale on the railing. Waking up to Rayleigh, closer in age then to him now than he is now to himself then.
“Have you heard from Buggy?”
“I’ve seen his wanted poster,” says Rayleigh. “He’s up to no good, as usual.”
“Well,” says Shanks, glass still raised in his hand. “To no good, then.”
Rayleigh’s eyes don’t leave Shanks’s as he downs the contents of his glass. It’s as if he sees through Shanks’s prevarications, as he always has. But he doesn’t push further. After all, neither Shanks nor Buggy is his responsibility anymore, and Shanks is an adult. As Rayleigh says, he’s got the power to change things. It’s his own responsibility to do something, if he’s going to do anything.
Seeing Buggy again at Marineford, after all those years, lights up something inside of Shanks like a fuse on one of Buggy’s fireworks. Buggy is still exactly the same, impulsive and aggressive and greedy, simple and easily-distracted, complaining as much as his breath will allow him (and, when they were young, it had only caused Rayleigh to try and give him so many chores he couldn’t complain, which had never worked for very long). And in all the destruction, all the terrible loss, so succinctly put by that one young Marine, Shanks can’t not have a little hope, a little bit of selfish happiness. He’s a pirate, not a saint, though.
But he’s able to find Buggy and grab him for a while afterwards, drag him away as he’s making stupid promises to his crew, and forget about Whitebeard and Luffy and everything else for a while. It’s a little like the years are falling away and they’re teenagers again, teasing each other, shit-talking, trying to out-drink each other until they’re both a little tipsy. It’s loud at the bar, and Buggy leans in close to talk to him, though his voice is already loud, and he’s close enough to kiss in real life. Maybe Shanks is only thinking about that because of those dreams, or maybe it’s a mix of that with latent feelings that the dreams pushed him towards, and now he can’t deny. He thinks about Buggy leaning in under the moonlight to whisper something stupid, years ago, their hands a splinter’s width away on the deck railing, his cap pulled snugly over his ears.
Shanks knows himself too well to think he can trick himself into feeling something that he doesn’t want to, or doesn’t really. This is a mess of leftover anger and sadness and nostalgia, sure, but Buggy, like this, is plenty attractive. The long hair suits him, and so does the open shirt, and so does the lazy smirk, finally, that he’s been working on since he was about nine. His eyelashes were always long, but now they look lovely, enticing. He could ask Buggy if he wants to run away and get married now, but he’d be jumping the gun; Buggy would laugh it off or yell at him, and he doesn’t even know if he wants it. Or if Buggy would, but his eyes keep straying to Shanks’s mouth, so maybe he does.
Buggy’s a coward, but Shanks isn’t, except he doesn’t let himself make the move. He falls asleep in an unfamiliar bed, alone, and has another dream.
Buggy, dream-Buggy, husband-Buggy, not-much-older-than-now-Buggy, is asleep on his bare chest. They’re lying on the deck of that boat, under a gibbous moon. It’s so bright Shanks has to close his eyes. His hand is woven through Buggy’s soft hair, and there’s a mark from Buggy’s lipstick on Shanks’s chest.A strand of hair catches on Shanks’s wedding ring, but he untangles it before he wakes up Buggy. Shanks wants this; he feels it deep in his chest. Right now, almost as much as he wants anything else, he wants to wake up to this, to have chosen differently.
When he goes to talk to Buggy in the morning, he’s gone; he and his crew have set sail. The chance has evaporated, and yet--Shanks thinks, again, of Buggy looking at his mouth, leaning in when he hadn’t had to. Of himself, not calling Buggy’s bluff.
“It might be easier if we went after the One Piece ourselves,” Beckman says. “Not easier, but--it might make things simpler. We could head off Teach.”
Shanks thumbs over the side of his scar. “We could.”
“We’re going to have to confront someone,” Beckman continues.
“Would you rather him? Or Kaidou or Big Mom?” Shanks says. “Teach is going to go after them—”
“And he’ll steal their fruit powers if he wins.”
“You think he will?” says Shanks.
“You think he won’t?” says Beckman.
Shanks shrugs. He’ll need the Poneglyphs, but he doesn’t know anyone who can read them, and he doesn’t remember the way there even roughly; he hadn’t been paying close enough attention. Buggy has a memory for that kind of thing, and it’s actually surprising that he hasn’t gone after the One Piece himself. Maybe he knows he’s not strong enough, but the promise of more treasure and great glory ought to be irresistible to him, regardless of his current status as Shichibukai.
Waiting, and not contacting Buggy, won’t accomplish anything. It just makes it more likely that Teach, or Kaidou, or Big Mom, or someone else, will grow their power to an undeniable level. But there are also other matters at stake, like the Reverie, like the new generation of pirates, Luffy among them, pushing at the boundaries. Things will come to a head soon, in some way. But he can afford to wait some more, and then go and find Buggy--because, vision or no, marriage or no, he intends to fulfill the promise he’d made years ago. They’ll go to that island and reach the end of the Grand Line together.
Shanks knows about the disbanding of the Shichibukai before it happens, but he’s not expecting Buggy to come straight into his territory. He’s not looking for a fight, and he’s not looking to join Shanks’s crew (his own crew has been severely diminished, down to a handful, a lion and his tamer, an acrobat, a woman with a mace larger than both of her arms put together, and a few others). It’s small enough that they’d all fit on Shanks’s boat if they were to join, but friends, rivals, crewmates, or anything else, for now Buggy is welcome here.
Beckman and Yasopp voice their doubts loudly, but Shanks ignores them. They’ll come around when they all have a drink, he decides, and they do, laying down their aggression in favor of swapping stories and tapping mugs together.
Buggy ends up discussing ballistics with Yasopp, enough to change his opinion to a much more positive one, apparently, but when Yasopp gets distracted by Buggy’s lion performing tricks, Buggy sits down next to Shanks, close enough to touch, as close as they used to sit and stand when they were young. He looks like he wants to say something, and his eyes keep darting back to Shanks’s mouth. Shanks decides to tease him a bit.
“Do I have something on my face?”
“Yeah, there’s rice.”
Shanks raises his hand to his mouth to wipe it away, if it’s actually there, but Buggy’s hand gets there first, flicking the rice away and then grabbing Shanks’s hand. He’s wearing gloves, but his fingers fit, interlocking, between Shanks’s, and then Buggy’s mouth is on his. Shanks smiles into the kiss--Buggy had preempted his plan, taken the leap before him. Buggy wants this as much as he does. He’s not a great flirt, but Shanks can say the same about himself, and, well, it worked.
(“I can’t believe that worked,” Buggy says, later. “You’re really easy.”
“Only for you,” Shanks says, and that turns the rest of Buggy’s face as bright red as his nose.)
Since they’ve been together, Shanks hasn’t had another vision, if that’s what they were. Maybe he doesn’t need them, if he’s got the real Buggy right here with him, and the timeline lines up. They’re not married yet, not going to that island yet, but that’s a matter of time and preparation. Still, as they fall asleep, he wonders if he will, again, or if any of the events will come to pass as they had in the dream, or if they’ll be different, or if he remembers how they were exactly enough to recreate them if he wants to.
“I used to have dreams about us being married,” Shanks says.
Buggy’s grip stiffens around his waist, noticeably, and then relaxes a bit. Shanks rolls half-over to look at Buggy’s face; it’s fixed in his usual annoyed expression, but a little surprised.
“Yeah, me, too,” Buggy says.
Shanks blinks. He’d been expecting something about how that’s a shitty proposal if it is one, or chastisement for bringing up the topic when he’s trying to sleep.
“It’s not like that’s the reason I wanted to get together with you,” Buggy says.
“Aww, Buggy,” Shanks croons, snuggling closer.
Buggy kicks his foot. “Thinking about you when I didn’t want to was annoying. But I don’t know.”
“It’s not the reason for me, either,” says Shanks.
“Obviously,” says Buggy. “I’ve never met anyone as contrarian as you.”
“You’re the contrarian,” says Shanks.
Buggy sighs, exaggerated and drawn-out. “I better get a real proposal.”
“Yeah,” says Shanks. “It’ll be flashy.”
“You’re mocking me,” Buggy grumbles, but he winds his arm tighter around Shanks’s waist.