Drown

Characters: Penguin, Law, Shachi, Bepo. Rating: T. Warnings: minor injury, drowning.

They'd got too confident. With the news that Doflamingo had finally left North Blue to go on to bigger and better things in the Grand Line, they'd stopped hiding and started acting a little more like pirates. You'd have thought that Penguin and Shachi, at least, would have remembered that there were always bigger fish around, but with Doflamingo their only focus for the past three years, they'd long since stopped seeing other pirate crews as a credible threat.

Hence Penguin's current situation.

"Listen kid," the clearly-drunk man spat in his face, saliva landing unpleasantly on his cheek. His breath stank, and it took everything Penguin had not to recoil in disgust. "Playing pirates is all well and good, but you've gotta do it at home, where you can run to Mummy once the day's done. Leave the real pirating to those that know what they're doing."

Penguin spat back in his face, grinning triumphantly when he scored a direct hit to his aggressor's eye. The vicious backhand he got was worth it, even giving him an additional liquid to spit, which he did, admiring how the crimson made it look like the man was crying blood.

"You punk!" one of the man's companions roared, kicking him solidly in the back. His hands shackled behind him, Penguin failed to keep his balance and crashed down onto his side. From the corresponding pain in his arm, he'd at the least pulled a muscle in all the chaos.

He hadn't been looking for trouble, per say. It had been his turn to do the supply run, while Law browsed the town for medical whatsits (the captain might have been teaching them basic nursing, but that didn't mean he understood half the jargon the younger teen spouted). Shachi and Bepo had been left behind to guard the Polar Tang. He'd thought – they'd all thought – that he could handle a small bit of trouble if it arose, but he'd failed to realise the drunk pirates were out of his league until it was too late. His shopping was long since ruined, trampled into the ground by muddied boots, and he knew he would be sporting a beautiful black eye the next morning, to say nothing of the bruised bones and cuts he'd suffered when the assholes revealed they weren't averse to using a knife on an unarmed kid.

Penguin figured he should probably start arming himself, if he was going to be trounced that easily by a group of drunkards. Of course, that relied on him getting himself out of his current situation without irreversible damage. The crude yet effective cuffs on his wrists were proving to be quite the problem, the locks out of reach to pick.

A rough hand grabbed his arm – the one with the probably damaged muscle, the bastard – and began to drag him down the cobbled street, towards the harbour.

"I'll show you what happens to disrespectful brats," the drunk pirate declared as Penguin bit back as many noises of pain as he could. They stopped at the end of the wharf; Penguin could see the grey of the Polar Tang at the other end of the harbour, recognisable only by its unusual shape. At that distance, Shachi and Bepo wouldn't be able to see him, and they weren't stupid enough to interfere with random fights. On the plus side, the Polar Tang wasn't that far… if, as he suspected, he got thrown into the water then he could just swim for it, leaving the pirates none the wiser.

That plan went out the window the moment his ankle was grabbed, hoisting his leg up and overbalancing him, leaving him suspended by the grip on his ankle.

"You think you can swim for it, little water bird?" His hat fell from his head to land on the boards below him. Of course the drunkard had read what it said, because he clearly wasn't so intoxicated he wasn't aware of his surroundings. Penguin cursed silently again, and tried to lash out with his foot as he felt something heavy clamp around his captive ankle. "Let's see how well penguins swim with their wings clipped, shall we?"

He barely had time to take a breath, storing as much air in his lungs as he could before he was flying through the air, helpless against gravity as he crashed into the surface of the water and sank like a stone.

He dimly heard someone scream his name as the water closed above his head, and looked up at the surface to see the distorted view of his captain throwing himself at the drunk pirates, short sword in one hand and a blue Room expanding from the other.

The water was Penguin's playground. He could cut through the waves as easily as Law's Amputate sliced through flesh, finding comfort and solace in the way the water moved against his skin.

Not this time.

He writhed, fighting against the cuffs binding his wrists together tightly behind his back, but the water hadn't weakened them at all, and his injured shoulder cried out in protest as he tried to manipulate it to get his bound hands in front of him to no avail. A problem, but not an insurmountable one. Penguin refused to panic. He'd swum without using his hands before. It was harder, but not impossible.

Swimming with his hands bound behind his back, a shoulder in agony, and lead weights tied to his ankle was outside of even Penguin's ability, he discovered in horror as his attempts to kick towards the surface were thwarted by the weight. With his arms behind his back, he couldn't manipulate himself to tug them off, so he renewed his efforts to move them over his head, gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder. A dislocation was better than death.

He'd managed to claim a decent amount of air just before being dunked, but it wasn't infinite. As he sank lower and lower, dragged down by his weighted ankle, the bubbles escaping from his mouth were increasing in number. His time was running out rapidly, and the exertion and agony he was putting himself through to try and contort his body into a position he could use to swim was wasting more air than he'd have liked.

It might have been smarter to let himself sink limply, preserving his air for as long as possible, but Penguin had no delusions about rescue. While Law had seen him sink, his captain couldn't swim and wasn't stupid enough to think his devil fruit would suddenly forget it hated him in light of Penguin's drowning. The Polar Tang was the other end of the harbour, and Law had been too busy fighting to call for Bepo or Shachi. Quick calculations told Penguin that his air wouldn't hold out long enough for one of the two to find him.

A particularly rough twist of his shoulder had him involuntarily crying out in pain, air rushing out of his mouth all at once before the water began to rush in. A rookie mistake, he cursed himself even as he tried to close his mouth to the invading water. His air was out now, and it would be seconds, not minutes, before the pressure forced him to gulp, drawing water into his lungs faster than Law could make a Room.

The harbour was deep – they'd chosen it for that exact reason – and the light was beginning to fade. It could also be the lack of air clouding his eyesight, Penguin realised as the pressure got too much for his jaw and lungs, wrenching his mouth open in search of air that was nowhere to be found.

As the water rushed in and his sight dimmed, he thought he saw a dark shape in the water, heading straight for him.

A whale? was his last, delirious, thought.

His eyes snapped open suddenly as he retched, water expelling itself violently from his mouth before he shuddered, pained lungs labouring to draw in the precious air between coughs that felt as if his respiratory system had decided his body was a dead weight and was seeking freedom from its limp confines.

"Oh, thank god," he heard someone breathe, fingers carefully dragging through his hair.

It was then that the hard surface beneath his side registered, and the sweet sweet oxygen filling his aching lungs.

He wasn't in the water any more.

His eyes didn't want to open, but Penguin fought them until they begrudgingly gave in. An orange blob floated in front of his face. Odd. He forced a slow blink, and then another, watching as it began to gain definition.

Shachi. A dripping wet, very worried Shachi. Oops.

"Is he awake?" That was Law's voice, strained and oddly choked up. "Penguin, can you hear me?" A familiar spotted hat forced its way into his view, and he gave a weak grin, his eyes finally focusing enough to take in the scene presented to him. Behind Law and Shachi was an arm. Just one, singular arm. It wasn't attached to anything at all. Beside it was a head, which seemed to be screaming profanities. Penguin hadn't even noticed, but the sight was satisfying. The drunk pirate still had that trickle of blood falling from his eye. "Penguin?"

Law sounded in pain, so Penguin returned his attention to him. He didn't look injured, but his eyes were red and slightly puffy. It didn't look right.

"Sorry," he finally rasped, feeling like he'd swallowed sandpaper and washed it down with an impressive dose of metal filings. "I lost the shopping."

"Who cares about the shopping, you dumbass!" Shachi erupted, the fingers in his hair tightening. Penguin didn't have the energy to wince. "Don't you dare scare us like that ever again, you hear me?"

Penguin grinned again, closing his eyes to a sharp call of his name from Law.

"Lemme sleep," he slurred, too exhausted from his ordeal to bother with proper diction. "'M okay, promise," he added as a small hand rested on his shoulder lightly. The action reminded him of his aching shoulder, and he let out a groan of protest, which devolved into further coughing.

"No, you're not," Law said sternly, sounding as if he'd entered his 'doctor mode', as the rest of them liked to call it. "Shachi, help me." There was a grunt of acknowledgement, and Penguin felt himself being manoeuvred to his feet, arms wrapping around him from both sides. Feeling utterly boneless, Penguin slumped forwards, almost dragging them back to the ground with him.

"Watch it," Shachi complained, but it lacked his usual bite as Penguin felt him readjust his grip.

"Penguin, you need to stay awake until we get back to the Tang," Law told him. "You can sleep there, I promise."

He let out a sound that was supposed to be acknowledgement as he felt them pull him along, although it sounded like a drunken slur, and tried to persuade his legs to cooperate with limited success.

He made it as far as Bepo, who sounded like he'd jumped off the submarine as soon as they were close enough, before he couldn't fight any more, collapsing into warm fluffy arms.

"Close enough, I suppose," he heard Law sigh as Bepo lifted him easily to carry him the rest of the way, before he knew no more.

A muse given to me by a friend who puts up with my headcanon ramblings at stupid times of the night, because what character better to almost-drown than the most confident swimmer in the group? I may well write a companion piece to this later, because there's so much I couldn't put in from Penguin's PoV.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari