Lost

Characters: Shachi, Penguin. Rating: T. Warnings: Blood, major character injury

Another battle, long and bloody.

It was to be expected, really. The New World took no prisoners and peace was a foreign concept to the sea – especially now, with the Marines closing in under their new bloodhound of a Fleet Admiral and settling their own den in what had long been Pirate territory. They'd taken precautions before making landfall; rather, Law had taken precautions, painstakingly withdrawing all their vital organs from their bodies to safely nestle them away in what had become a vault in the Polar Tang.

Precautions could only do so much, as Shachi realised with a face as white as fresh snow when he couldn't see Penguin any more, at the end of the battle when the Marines were all dead or fled and the only ones still standing were the Heart Pirates, bloodied but triumphant. Penguin wasn't among them.

Shachi wasn't certain who had been the one to send up the cry, the task of identifying the voice of secondary importance to the reason for it, bloodied and battered and not moving.

Not moving.

He forced his tired limbs to move, ignoring the trickle of blood seeping from somewhere under his hat and down to be caught in the upper lashes of his right eye. It couldn't be true; his eyes were playing tricks on him. They did that sometimes. It didn't matter that they'd never given him a hallucination like this before. It had to be a trick. There was no way it could be real.

There was no way that was Penguin, sprawled out in the dirt like a ragdoll without its stuffing. Not covered in so much blood his beige clothes, or what was left of them, were a muddy red. Not pinned to the ground with his own spear through the heart.

Shachi was one of the last to make it to his side, the numbness of disbelief making him slow, as if the air around him had coalesced into sucrose, sticky and clingy. When he finally arrived, Law's Room was already up, his captain kneeling by the body with his hands flying around. He was doing… doing something. Shachi didn't have the mental capacity to decipher what, not when his crowded nakama parted wordlessly for his stumbling form and he got close enough to see that Penguin's eyes were open.

Hope kindled for an instant, before he fell to his knees besides Penguin's body to see that they were glassy and lifeless. He'd seen those eyes before, so many years ago, in the aftermath of the pirate attack and under the protective shield of his mother. His mother had had those eyes, and she'd never moved again.

Now Penguin had those eyes.

He screamed, the noise raw and harsh even to his own numb ears as his voice clawed its way out of his throat in a wordless grief, lunging forwards to throw his body over Penguin's too-still one and pulling it into his arms.

The spear was gone – the rational part of his brain would later realise Law had removed it in his treatment – and the body lolled limply as Shachi clutched it to his chest. His mother had been too heavy for him to shift, leaving him trapped under her cooling body until Noona had pulled him out. He was stronger now, capable of shifting a fully-grown man's dead weight by himself.

But not strong enough, because if he was strong enough he wouldn't be in that situation again, losing the last of his family.

Another scream tore itself from his throat, this time recognisable as Penguin's name as Shachi clutched him closer, heedless of the injuries they had both sustained. His vision was blurred, tears falling without waiting for permission to coat his cheeks in salty water that would dry uncomfortably later.

A soft hand rested on his back, barely noticed and unacknowledged. Others followed suit, their warmth a nauseating contrast to the cooler body in his arms. Another pair floated on the edge of his vision, dancing blurrily through the air in patterns Shachi could never hope to follow, flashes of black ink betraying their identity if he cared enough to expand his mental capacity beyond Penguin.

A broken gasp, the kind punched out by a sudden avalanche of pain, cut through the fog in his mind in a way nothing else had managed and Shachi blinked involuntarily. The action was enough to briefly clear his vision from the waterfall of tears, just in time to see Penguin's eyelids shift, closing for a split second before snapping wide open.

Penguin's eyes were still glassy, but now it was the glassiness of the ocean at dawn, shining bright and damp. It was the look of life, of a fresh beginning, and Shachi stared numbly into them, losing himself in the rejuvenated pools.

The illusion was broken by a barely-there rasp, forced past dry, unmoving lips. The rasp of his name.

It wasn't really his name, the hoarse 'Sha' interrupted by the 'i', but it was close enough to be recognisable, and no matter how broken, how faint, Shachi would know Penguin's voice anywhere.

"Peng...uin…" he choked out in return, watching eyes bright with pain close and renewing his tears as something swelled inside him. Closed eyes were good. Closed eyes were alive. The swelling avalanche – or was it a tsunami; Shachi couldn't tell – crashed over him, burying him in relief and draining all the tension from his body until he was a limp boneless mess.

The last thing he saw was the bloodied lips, pulled into what could almost be called a smile, of his brother before he sank into the swirling darkness, too drained of everything to face the world right then.

I've lost count of how many of you requested Shachi's PoV for Inseparable (chapter 89) - there were a lot! I hope it lived up to your expectations. Will I do a final piece when they wake up again? Who knows. Probably.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari