Title - The Will to Live
By - c2t2
Warnings - Body horror, injury
Summary - The Sea Train destroyed his body. This is how Franky survived.
Notes - More can be found at my squizbee livejournal
The Will To Live
by c2t2
Franky's ruined body was thrown from the tracks as the Sea Train roared past, unhindered by his attempts to stop it.
He landed in the sea – facing upward, so he did not immediately drown.
Franky floated, and for a while contemplated whether he should simply die. It would be so easy; he could feel himself dying already. But he'd always had a powerful will to live, so after thinking for a minute he decided he would live. He even knew where to go and he knew what to do. He knew how to do it. By sheer coincidence, he had been working on a whimsical hobby in his spare time. That whimsy could save him. He had always been lucky as well as stubborn.
First, he needed to get to the nearby shore. It was possible. Franky had always been talented in water, had taken naturally to swimming, and in the last few years he had learned everything there was to know about buoyancy.
It was hideously painful to draw breath, but he ignored pain and began to swallow gulps of air, not just into his lungs, where it would soon be expelled, but into his stomach, to help himself stay afloat. His stomach didn't seem too damaged, or at least his abdominal cavity still intact enough that he didn't lose the air. Maybe he would still be able to eat like a normal person if he survived.
He began to swim.
Well, not swim exactly. It would be a stretch to call what he was doing swimming. Weak, fluttering motions from the few parts of him that he could still move. Something about the motions popped his dislocated shoulders back into place, causing his eyes to water at the excruciating surge of additional pain on top of the constant grinding of other broken bones. At least his arms moved a little more easily after that.
He was glad there were no sharks. His Fishman master with the help of some of the more aggressive yagara had driven away sharks for miles around the island. This was also lucky for Franky. Even though, as best he could tell, the ends of his bones hadn't broken through the skin, blood ran from his crushed nose and foamed out of his mouth from so much trauma. If there had been sharks anywhere near Water 7, he would have no chance to reach shore before they were drawn to the scent of his blood.
Thankfully, the sharks hadn't yet discovered they could return.
The water made him nearly weightless, enabling his feeble movement, so when Franky finally washed up in the shallows of Scrap Island, he was presented with a dilemma.
He was too broken to move and work on land. Yet his means of survival was on this island, strewn among the other things he had tinkered with over the years.
He paused, pondered his predicament, and looked around (as best he could) with an engineer's eye. The shore was strewn with scrap metal in various stages of oxidation. He already knew that, of course, but now he thought of a way to use it to his advantage.
He needed to find a piece of rebar, a sharp-ended fragment – it had to be in or near the water so he could reach it, and close to the right length, and sharp enough for what he needed.
First he had to turn over so he could see.
He started by turning his head. He gritted his teeth as the whiplashed muscles seized up, but compared to the rest of his body, the pain fit right in. If his neck had broken badly enough to risk his spinal cord, then he was doomed anyway, so he would proceed as if the bones were still whole.
He turned his head and rolled to his side. He was still floating on the surface, and cranked his neck back when he needed to breathe. Ignoring the pain this caused was easy compared to the truly broken parts of him. He 'swam' weakly along the shore, searching for what he needed.
He found a wickedly-pointed length of rebar after only a few minutes of searching. (He had always been lucky after all.) Even though his forearms were too broken to support any weight, the soft tissue that held his flesh together still had some tensile strength. He could grab the rebar with rapidly numbing fingers and haul it as near to shore as he could get it, relying on the skin and muscle not to tear apart and let his hand drift away. Now that he had his rebar, he aimed his fluttery movements to take his body to shore. In a minute, a wave washed up on the shore and beached him. Now he used gravity as his tool. He had to be careful not to let his weight and movements cave in his broken ribs and destroy something he couldn't fix, as he used his neck and teeth to shove the rebar into the sand at an angle. He finally lifted his relatively intact humerus, dragging its limp and dangling forearm, and after a few tries managed to place his palm on the sharp end of the rebar, then Franky leaned his weight into it. His broken bones could not carry him out of the water, but he used the sharpness of the metal's end and the gravity of his weight to drive the sharpened rebar into his arm, pushing all the way to the elbow. This length of iron would act as a makeshift bone. It was unsanitary as hell, but he was not concerned with infection or poisoning his limbs.
He would not be using them much longer.
His arms were ruined, but a short time ago, he had entertained a short-lived obsession.
Biomechanics.
In a fit of teenage foolishness, he'd dreamed of producing some kind of android/robot hybrid as a replacement body for a human brain. The parts he'd built were already calibrated to his biology, since no one else ever agreed to be test subjects, (those wusses). Franky had dreamed of a way to be even more super than he was already. A battle-mech, to transfer his head onto once he got it right. His master had laughed and laughed when he'd told the Fishman about his project.
His inventions had a strong metal shell to protect the technology. Wires for nerves. Pistons and pulleys for muscles and tendons. Palms and fingers were covered in sensitive pressure-recognition touchscreens that he'd salvaged from electronics others had thrown away. High-sensitivity bubble levels provided balance and proprioception.
But Franky's enthusiasm had faded once he learned there was a lot more to a body than the ability to move and feel. His creations were not ready for anything remotely like a brain transfer. After much frustration he'd managed a cola-based power source to run some of the weapons, but even that could only supplement the digestive system, and even such a minor achievement had been so difficult he might never figure out a way to completely replace most of the other organ systems.
Still, he had a few finished parts lying around. Weaponized arms, mechanical legs, an abdominal mini-fridge that powered the weapons with cola... His face would have to remain ruined for now, but with camera technology as advanced as it was, replacing his eye should be a piece of cake.
It should be easier now that he had one working limb. He needed a few more lengths of rebar, to temporarily replace his other bones, so he could reach the place he stored his inventions.
Then Franky would begin to rebuild himself.