Murder

Characters: Law, Shachi, Penguin, Bepo. Rating: T. Warnings: Blood, character death

Law looked down at the four currently unconscious prisoners they'd inadvertently taken alongside their new ship, and sighed. They'd been incredibly useful, telling him both everything there was to know about the submarine – apparently it was supposed to be called Wave Slicer, but Law was far happier with their own choice of Polar Tang – and proving valuable test subjects for his new technique, which he'd called Amputate.

Now, however, they'd outlived their usefulness, and it was time to evict them. From the way Penguin and Shachi were hovering behind him, he realised they thought they were going to actually let them go. Alive. Law shook his head, glancing the other side to Bepo, whose countenance suggested that, despite being younger, he had a far better understanding of the situation.

"Dispose of them," he ordered the three, stepping back to watch what they'd do. Predictably, Penguin and Shachi went to drag the prisoners off of their tables, and out of the room. Law stopped them with a raised hand. "What are you doing?"

"Dis… posing of them..?" Penguin hedged, his voice going high at the end that had nothing to do with the fact that his voice was in the middle of pubescent breaking and everything to do with the fact that he was very clearly nervous. Beside him, Shachi nodded uncertainly.

"So that they can go and report everything about us to the nearest authority?" Law demanded, crossing his arms. They shared an uncertain glance, and Law wanted to scream. He'd let the tag-alongs follow him because they had potential, but if they were this squeamish then they would be worse than useless, a liability. Determined to get the point across, he grabbed a knife from his waistband and jammed it straight through the heart of the nearest prisoner before slitting his throat to make absolutely certain that he was dead.

He offered the knife, handle-first, to Penguin, drawing a second one for Shachi, and the colour drained from their faces, leaving them a pasty white.

"It's them or us," he told them, scowling as Shachi fumbled the weapon and it fell to the ground. No-one moved to pick it up. "If you don't kill them, you're off the ship at the next island. I won't have crewmates that endanger us." With their determination to follow him, he'd thought that would be enough to override their useless conscience.

He was proved wrong when the bloodied knife Penguin shakily held fell to the ground with a clatter and the two high-tailed it out of the room. Realising what that meant, that the two older boys that he had dangerously started getting attached to would be abandoning him, he slid to the floor, wrapping his arms around his knees. He was going to be left alone again, punished for his inability to keep his emotions under control by losing Penguin and Shachi so soon after he found them, and it was going to be entirely his fault.

A wet gurgle startled him out of his self-pity, and he looked up to see Bepo's left paw stained with red. The second of the four prisoners was no longer breathing, his throat slashed, and he stared at the mink cub in hopeful disbelief.

"You…"

"Kill or be killed," Bepo murmured, sliding down to join Law on the floor. "I understand how to survive, captain." There was something messed up about the whole situation, the youngest two capable of ending a life in a flash while the older two didn't understand how to place the worth of their own lives above those of others'.

They stayed like that, on the floor with their hands stained with the blood of their victims, for several minutes before Law begrudgingly moved, gesturing for Bepo to help him with moving the dead bodies out of their clean submarine.

Their small size meant the task took a long time, and by the time they'd thrown the two corpses overboard and returned to the infirmary, Penguin and Shachi had returned. Law held up a hand for Bepo to halt, and they waited just outside the door, out of sight of the other two, to see what would happen.

"I can't," Penguin sobbed, the clattering of metal falling to the ground accompanying his shaking voice. A scrabble, a stumble, another sob, and he cursed. "If I… I'll be just… l-like them." Law didn't know who 'they' were, not privy to their life before they'd met him. He supposed it made sense they had hadn't had a life filled with happiness, otherwise they would never have left their home to follow him.

"Y-yeah," Shachi's quiet voice, shaking but not quite tearful, agreed. "But… we… we swore we'd kill them, i-if we ever saw them ag-again." There was an intake of breath, or maybe both of them in unison – Law couldn't tell. "I-if we can't do this, then L-Law's r-right. We'd be b-better off going back!" Shachi's voice rose, ending in a shrill scream as there was the unmistakable sound of a blade puncturing flesh.

The prisoner woke with a scream, and Law winced. It hadn't been an instant kill.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it," Shachi chanted erratically, accompanied by the sound of the blade's stabs and the victim's screams. Penguin's sobs could be heard in the background, and Law looked at Bepo, who glanced at him briefly before finding the floor more interesting. The decision was his own then, and he squared his shoulders before edging in.

He hadn't heard Penguin move over Shachi's frenzied screaming and stabbing, which was still ongoing, but there was a knife buried in the throat of the fourth and final prisoner. Penguin himself was on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees and staring blindly at Shachi, who seemed incapable of silencing his own victim.

Joining the ginger's side, Law decided to end his torment and gripped his wrist gently, guiding the last strike straight to the heart and finally killing the prisoner before letting Shachi slump to the floor alongside Penguin. Recognising that the two were at their limit, he gestured for Bepo to dispose of the bodies while he sat in front of them, waiting for them to calm enough to look at him.

They seemed to be getting worse, not better, and Law dimly recalled lessons of shock treatment from the days before everything went wrong, reaching for blankets to wrap around the pair of them.

"I'm sorry," he apologised to the sounds of broken sobbing, belatedly realising he'd pushed them too far, too soon. They weren't cut out to be killers, and while he'd feared that their first kills would have been on the battlefield, potentially crippling them in an uncontrolled environment that would result in their own death, seeing the aftermath in an controlled environment wasn't much better.

At least their first kills hadn't got them killed, he consoled himself as he wrapped his arms around the two larger boys as best he could and pulled them in for a show of affection he hadn't realised he was still capable of.

"I'm sorry."

Oops. With Law's past and consequent general lack of empathy at this point, there was no way everything was going to be smooth sailing right from the start... He was only trying to help, he just went about it all wrong.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari