Day 24 of a Halloween challenge I did over on AO3. I thought you guys might like it!
No one was ever supposed to see him like this.
Never. No one knew, except for the captain and that was exactly how Buggy had wanted to keep it. Captain Roger knew, that was how he'd found him in the first place. Crouched on bloodied tiles, people screaming all around him and he, a tiny scrap of a thing then so strong and so weak at once and Captain Roger took one look at a nightmare and laughed with joy, no fear or mockery.
He laughed, and laughed and Buggy wanted to cry. Weep tears for a sound he'd never heard before, one that cut him to the bone and opened his chest to something he'd never known.
He followed him on the ship, a long shadow and whenever they made to land he vanished off the boat again.
When they got Shanks, a bright boy with hair that flashed like fire in the sunlight and eyes that had the same spark as the captains Buggy knew things would change. If only because Shanks Looked at him. The others, they knew he was there. He was family, they would fight for him, they would bleed for him and he for them but it was different. It was different with Shanks because Shanks had a way of staring at Buggy like he was tracing the lines of an unravelling sweater.
For months, almost a year he'd been able to slip away into the shadows of the docks, vanish into the shadows and find someone to make scream. The longer they were at sea the more horror he left in his wake and the fast he left the ship.
So fast, this time, he got sloppy. He messed up. He knew that as soon as he heard a soft, trembling, "Buggy?" from the doorway.
He sat on a table. Multiple limbs were clinging to the slick surface of the granite and a web spread out behind him. A dozen eyes rolled away from the children screaming on the floor and steady pulses of green energy pulling towards him in thick ropes to the light that shone in from the door way.
Black eyes stared right at him, confused and weary and a sword was in hand.
Buggy felt the change. It twisted his limbs from eight to four, his morphed his face from mandibles to a mouth. The thick black carapace that had covered his squishy insides switched outwards, willing out with skin while the hardness of bones stuck themselves inside the new muscles. Ropey, bulging arms. He was tall, standing a shadow as features flashed across his face. The web fell across his face in thin crimson veil.
Terror, so different from the fear of children seeing a giant spider, hit him like a train. He breathed it in, dragged the sustenance into his lungs and filled his belly off of Shanks. Buggy consumed it voraciously, taking a step towards the suddenly so small boy before him.
Shanks was a teenager. He was strong. Buggy had seen him fight off men three times his size and cut down pirates that would make grown folk shit themselves.
Before Buggy, though, he suddenly seemed so small. Tiny and helpless, a child, a human rather than a pirate and one of Rogers' crew.
His small voice cracked into a trembling soprano.
"Dad?"
Buggy spat Shanks' distress out of his mouth and breathed in harsh air. He fell to his knees, overwhelmed with his suddenly sated hunger and the punch of guilt and mourning that turned his full belly. The red hair vanished and short fells of blue too its place. The spot of red, which was always there no matter what his form took, appeared in his peripherals.
Shanks stared at him, shaking from head to toe. There were tears pricked in his eyes.
"What are you?" he asked.
Bucky didn't respond. He didn't know the answer. He didn't know how to apologize. His only response was anger.
"You shouldn't have followed me!" he screamed. Shanks, Shanks actually shrunk back. Buggy felt like he'd fallen into a frozen ocean. "Never do that again!"
Buggy stumbled to his feet and fled, leaving Shanks on the ground beneath him.