Prologue
The Captain stood on the foremost deck examining the sea, occasionally his thoughts were interrupted by the commotion behind him. Finally, his nerves could take no more of it that day.
"Ben! Will you please grab your students and take them to their studies!" Captain Shanks roared through clenched teeth his demands to his first mate without even turning around to face him.
Ben just nodded, his black hair pulled back into a pony-tail at the base of his neck waving in the calm ocean breeze as he did so; he then walked over to the fight involving a young girl named Shadow and the look-out in training, Portgas D. Trace, another young pirate.
"Alright you two, break it up," Ben spoke sarcastically standing beside them, his hands resting on his belt. Neither Trace nor Shadow listening, they continued their rough-housing about the deck. "That's enough you two, it's really time to stop now," he said after about 3 more minutes but once again Ben went unnoticed and the punches kept flying through the ocean air of salty gusts.
Ben, usually an expressionless character of a pirate, was beginning to loose his patience, which didn't happen very often, "That's it. I said you're done. Now cut it out!" Ben commanded the still scuffling youngsters lifting them off the deck by their shirt collars, one in each of his giant weathered hands. Suddenly Trace, who was unwilling to stop, raised his arms in the air and slid out of his baggy blood spotted shirt back on to the wood of the deck.
"What's the matter, Red? Can't get free? Oh wait my bad, you can't because you're a girl. Sorry I must have forgotten," Trace mocked Shadow still struggling to free herself from Ben's tight grip on her shirt as Ben to began to snicker a little letting the smile return to his face. "You're so pathetic!" Trace blurted out between his bursts of teasing laughter.
"I'll show you pathetic, you big headed weakling!" she barked back in self-defense, her anger coming to a boil. "Ben, come on, put me down so I can whoop him!"
Ben, instead of answering her, reached down letting Trace's forgotten shirt slip to the deck and grabbed Trace by the back of his belt and hoisted him up under his arm.
"Ha, Tracie! Now who's the pathetic weakling?" she boasted, giggling in a pleased tone.
"Aw, shut-up," Trace snapped menacingly then added, "or I'll make you!"
Ben sighed peacefully carrying them off to their studies below deck in the ship's galley.
Moments later Trace and Shadow were sitting across from one another examining the bandages and aloe Ben had forcefully placed on their wounds and broses. Ben was standing at the end of the brown wooden table they were sitting at and was glaring at them to start the writing assignment he had given them to practice their calligraphy. So they both started the paper uneager to do so with quills in hand.
"You know… this is all your fault…Tracie," Shadow whispered not even looking up from her work in hopes that Ben, who had now sat down at another table near by reading and lighting up a cigarette, wouldn't notice her taunting Trace.
"Yeah, right. You started the fight," Trace whispered his defense.
"But you're the one who wanted to race," she breathed, "and beside you were the sore loser. I was just defending myself from you, hot head."
"That isn't what happened and you know it," said Trace quietly as he stopped writing to glare back at Shadow who gave no notice to him any longer but to give her rebuttals.
"You got your story and I got mine," she said unconcerned.
"As soon as we're free from these so called studies, I'm going to finish teaching you a real lesson," he spat back in a low roar.
"Always have to have the last word don't you?"
"Yes. Yes I do."
Time passes and that evening
"Man the Sails! Tie down the barrels! The rest of you start bailing!" Shanks barked as he started to climb the main mast himself with a rope coil over his shoulder, "Shadow secure all lifelines!"
"Aye-Aye Capt'!" she replied as she continued to check and secure the ropes tied to a series of pegs encircling the main mast. After finding pegs with coils of rope still hanging on them, she began rushing towards those about the ship that were foolish enough to forget to tie on their lifeline. "Hey Trace! Catch!"
Trace, climbing one of the rope ladders of the main sails, swiftly snatched the end of the rope from the air and quickly wrapped the old woven cord around his waist and gave it a firm sailors' twist knot.
Soon everybody was tightly secured to a lifeline, rushing about the deck just as before as the monstrous waves tossed the ship around like a hacky-sack on a trampoline that was in use.
"You need an extra pair of hands, Trace?!" Shadow yelled as she grabbed a spare coil catching up to him on the rope ladder.
"Sure, help me tie down the main sails!" he shouted down to her against the hailing winds rushing across him causing his breaths to come much harder as he began to straddle the mast shaft. Shadow only nodded as she came up the ladder and then out across the beam he was riding, clinging tightly to the ropes around the wooden limb that held the fleshy sail as she went. Once she reached him they quickly began hulling up the sail into a bundle against the shaft to be able to tie it down.
"Hey, the tie rope snapped do you have another one?" he bellowed over the wind that was clawing at them, to Shadow who sad only five feet away.
"Yeah, this one's new and besides I noticed earlier that the ropes were beginning to fray so I thought it might come in handy! Here, you take this end!" she shouted sliding the rope off her shoulder handing him one of the ends and he began to wrap it around the sail and shaft replacing the one that had snapped as she waited to tie the knot.
Suddenly a giant wave struck the galleon before he could even wrap it around the sails once causing him to loose his balance and he fell from the mast shaft. Trace shouted in shock as he was flung from his perch; at that same instant he heard Shadow yelp with pain as the coil that they were using to secure the sail raced around her wrist and arm; finally she recaptured the fleeing rope in her hand again causing the rope to give a loud twang as it held him in the air for he still held the other end. "Trace!' she shrieked noticing the disappearance of her friend and looked wildly around below her until she found him suspended between flapping mast and raging sea. Trace gazed up at her as he tried to figure out exactly what had happened that had left him hanging by the end of a rope and his snapping lifeline that held his waist painfully but gratefully above the ocean.
"Trace, are you all right? You didn't snap in half did ya?" Shadow smiled as she yelled to him trying to hide her pain with humor and a brave face, "Anything broken?"
"Nothing broken but my pride!" he bellowed back sharing her courage, "Think you can pull me back up?"
Shadow answered positively but added in a joke about his weight in the process and continued by telling him not to go any where. Trace made a lame rebuttal as he began wrapping the non-lifeline braided rope around his wrist and through his hand for an extra tether to fasten him to the ship as he swung helplessly only feet above the surface of the hungry waves.
Shadow swiftly began pulling whole heartedly at the rope around her wrist that connected them, trying to bring her best friend back to the safety of the bouncing ship.
Then unexpectedly another wave crashed cross the ship and ripped at Trace and his rapidly fraying lifeline and pulled at the one bound to her already raw wrist and his red'ing one.
But her thought's never touched on the fact the rope was rubbing the flesh from her arm but was totally focused on Trace's safety. "Trace! Oh crap hang in there buddy!" The words flew from her lips while she clung fiercely to the ropes taking his lifeline in her other hand leaning back using her weight to try to help her hold on; as the wave cleared the galleon and the young boy, she hoped to hell that he hadn't been torn away by it. The rain was quickly intensifying and Shadow had to strain her eyes through the sheets of water droplets rushing past her and over her body like many icy cold needles to look towards the end of the rope and to her relief Trace still hung there but how much more could he or the ropes take. She quickly strained with every muscle in her being into the act of pulling him back to her when a loud cracking snap reached her ears and his lifeline flew up to her without effort and without Trace and she quickly lost her balance at the sudden weight displacement and difference the ropes now held. She was flung, face stomach and chest into the shaft with such force that she thought her left shoulder was going to pop out of it's socket as she reached out desperately gasping at anything that would stand strong against the weight that was yanking her body from her perch, but she refused to let go of the last line that connected her to Trace.
And she soon began praying, "Oh God, no please! Don't take him from me!" Hesitantly she looked down the rope to check on his condition which caused another prayer to slip past her lips as she watched Trace swing suspended in air, totally unconscious. "Trace!" she yelled desperately trying to wake him, "What am I going to do! Oh, Trace you dumb-bell, Wake-up! Please!"
Yet he hung there helplessly unable to hear her pleading cries as they were carried away by the wind and rain, pleading cries that were never to be answered or heard again.
She looked up slowly as she trying ineffectively to pull him and her self back up when she saw another wave coming closer and closer, a wave bigger than all the ones before it, time was short, but she soon realized she couldn't bring him back in before it hit. She had to make a life changing decision and fast or soon it would be far too late to do anything at all.
The last words she muttered that night were only words of concern for Trace.
"Trace we promised each other the day we left your home town, that we'd never let anyone beat us. Why should a wave be any different? I refuse to lose you do this trivial storm but what can I do?"
The wave ripped across the ship filling her mouth with water as she tried to yell.