Chapter Text
Marco started running as soon as he saw the crying kid stumble toward him out of the treeline. He wore a red t-shirt and blue jorts, as described by his distraught guardian, and was frantically gesturing down the trail. Marco pulled the walkie-talkie off his belt as he sprinted forward, the soles of his boots slipping over wet gravel. "Hey, this is Marco! I found the kid," he said. "We're on the Windmill Trail, by the rock scramble. There's a landslide warning out, I'll bring him back ASAP."
'Copy that,' Kingdew replied. 'I'll call off the search.'
"Mister," Luffy wailed, his whole face a mess of snot and tears, "please! You gotta help him!"
Marco pulled the boy under the cover of a few trees, out of the rain and farther away from the rocky cliffside. "Help who?" he asked urgently as he knelt down in front of him. "Is someone with you?"
"A man said he was looking for me," Luffy cried, shivering all over and wet from the rain. His lips were on the verge of turning blue, and his arms were cold when Marco rubbed them to soothe him. There were scrapes all over his arms and legs, but he looked alert. "But then a rock fell! He pushed me away and—"
"Luffy," Marco said, ignoring the pit of dread that settled in his gut, "My name is Marco. I'm gonna help both of you, okay? But you gotta stay calm. Can you take me to him?"
He scrambled upright as Luffy broke out of his hold and ran around the bend of the trail. Visibility was poor in the rain, and Marco yelled for him to slow down before he slipped down a hill and went missing again.
"He's here!" Luffy yelled back, and when Marco caught up to him he saw a boulder as tall as himself and just as wide sitting in the middle of the trail. One side of it was covered in mud and debris, and Luffy was motioning around to its other side. "I think he needs help."
Marco internally hoped that he wasn't about to find someone's head split open under the rock, and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw a man lying prone on the ground, mostly uncrushed. As he drew closer, he saw the man's left arm disappear from just above the elbow under a blunt edge of the rock, and blood pooling below it. He was bleeding from a nasty cut on his temple that led into his hair, but seemed to be breathing when Marco shrugged his backpack off his shoulders and knelt down.
His bright red hair looked familiar; Marco didn't talk to many people while the search-and-rescue team was being assembled and dispatched, but this man was one of the dozen or so volunteers who were available to help when Luffy's guardian, a woman called Dadan, burst into the Rangers outpost with two other boys in tow saying that a third one had wandered off and couldn't be found. Her phone didn't have a signal in the mountains, and it had taken them about half an hour to return to the trailhead and the ranger's office.
By then, she estimated that Luffy had been missing for about thirty-five minutes; that was two hours ago. About an hour into the search, it had begun to rain. Marco was pretty far from the site of disappearance, which meant the boy had moved fast.
The man blinked awake while Marco took his vitals, though his pupils were dilated to different sizes when Marco shined a light into his eyes. "Hey," he slurred, "is the kid alright? Is he hurt?"
"He's fine," Marco said. "I'm gonna get him somewhere safe, and then I'll come back and take care of you, okay? Just stay put."
The guy managed a sound that almost passed for a laugh, then groaned in pain. He might have said Dick, but it was jumbled into all the other sounds he'd let out. Marco cleared the gravel from below his cheek, and gently lowered his head back to the dirt.
"Luffy," Marco said to the boy, lifting a bag of equipment that had been thrown just a little ways off the trail, "come with me."
He led the boy back into the trees and under a dense canopy that kept the rain off him, where a few trunks might protect him if another rock came crashing down the cliffside. "Can you help him?" Luffy asked, his voice shaky. "His arm..."
"Luffy," Marco said, "I'm gonna leave his bag with you, and you're gonna stay with it. You're gonna stay right here, where I can see you, and you're not gonna move a single inch, okay?"
Luffy nodded.
"And you're gonna get hypothermia if you leave your clothes on, so you should take them off."
Luffy narrowed his eyes at him. "Dadan said if any adult tells me to take off my clothes," he said, "I should call the police."
Marco, his jacket already half-shrugged off his shoulders, paused. "Well," he said, "most of the time, yes. Do that. But your clothes are really wet, and if you get sick because you're too cold, then that nice man under the rock will be really sad."
The boy bit his lip, but he obediently stripped out of his t-shirt and shorts to stand shivering in his underwear. He didn't resist when Marco wrapped his jacket around his shoulders and zippered it all the way up, huddling into the material that was still warm from Marco's body. It reached all the way down to his calves. "Thanks, mister."
"You're very welcome," Marco told him, and then directed him to sit near the bag of equipment beside a fallen log. Luffy folded his legs up into the jacket, and wrapped his arms around them. "Help is on the way," Marco said. "Just make sure you don't wander off again, okay?"
He waited for an affirmative before he whipped the walkie-talkie off his belt and sprinted back to the man who had saved Luffy's life.
"Got a volunteer down," he said. "Hit in a rockslide, he's trapped under a boulder from the elbow down. How fast can we get a chopper out here?"
'Fuck,' Kingdew answered succinctly. 'Not fast, Marco, visibility is bad but I'll dispatch one and get back to you. Closest van is twenty minutes out from the Windmill scramble, and we're not gonna get a bird in before then. You got your bag?'
"Yeah, I've got things handled here. Will keep you updated on the situation."
'Then we'll be with you ASAP.'
Marco dropped the walkie-talkie instead of clipping it back to his belt. "I'm Marco," he said, pressing his warm palm to the other volunteer's cheek to get his attention, "and I'm gonna help you. What's your name?"
"Shanks," the man muttered breathlessly.
"Good to meet you, Shanks. Can you tell me how long you've been here?"
"Time's it?"
"Seventeen-twenty."
"Twenty minutes," Shanks said.
Marco exhaled slowly through his nose. He dug a pair of scissors out of his bag and cut away Shanks's sleeve at the elbow, pushing the material up as far as he could. The flesh around his elbow was already discolored, and it was nearly flattened beneath the stone. An obvious crush injury, and the joint was shattered. After twenty minutes, there was no saving that limb.
"Shanks," Marco said softly, "there's a landslide warning in this area, and I need to move you. This rock is probably six tons."
"Fuck," Shanks said. "My arm?"
"It's been twenty minutes. Our chances of salvaging it even if we get the rock off are pretty low. Your best bet right now is—"
"127 Hours type shit?" he asked with a crooked grin.
Marco took it as a good sign that Shanks could still joke around in his condition. "I've got the equipment to amputate your arm above the elbow," he said.
Shanks looked up at him and even with the concerningly mismatched dilation of his pupils there was a calm conviction in his gaze. "Do it."
Marco pulled a tourniquet out of his bag and fit it carefully around Shanks's upper arm a few inches above where it was caught under the rock. "Can you feel this?" he asked as he tightened the tourniquet, turning the windlass one-handed while he kept his other on Shanks's neck, three fingers pressed to his rapid, thready pulse.
Shanks couldn't feel anything but a deep, constant, all-encompassing pressure on his arm, radiating out to his entire left side. "No," he groaned.
"Alright. Don't look."
The amputation was quick; Marco wasn't new to working in the field. He snapped a clean scalpel blade to the handle he pulled out of his kit and cut through the soft tissue of Shanks's upper arm in one clean circle, down to the bone. Shanks grit his teeth and screwed his eyes shut, grimacing as Marco looped a wire saw around what remained of his humerus. It buzzed and vibrated against the bone as Marco pulled it back and forth, and eventually Shanks felt his arm loosen from the boulder.
The tourniquet held, and Marco gently picked Shanks up to move him out of the rain near to where Luffy sat, where the boy was still balled up in his jacket.
"Is he okay?" Luffy asked, voice small and watery. He hiccupped, still snotty-nosed and teary-eyed and smearing it all over the collar of the jacket as Marco brought Shanks over to the fallen log. He laid the man perpendicularly to the log, with his head facing away and feet propped up on the rotting wood. Marco returned for his backpack and the walkie-talkie next, and updated Kingdew while he returned to Shanks.
"I'm gonna be fine," Shanks was saying to Luffy, and he kept his voice remarkably level for what had just been done to him. "Marco took real good care of me, see? I'll be okay." Luffy cried harder at that, as soon as he laid eyes on the tourniquet and the remains of Shanks's arm, but the redhead wasn't deterred. "Thanks for bringing him here," he said. "You did great, you saved my life."
He had a soft, low voice that instantly put the kid at ease. What Marco could see of Shanks's face beneath the dirt was calm, and his mouth seemed to just naturally settle into a lopsided, playful smile even though his brows were furrowed with pain.
He shivered as Marco dressed the open wound on what was left of his arm, but he was wearing waterproof outer clothes that wouldn't sap his body heat, so at least no one would have to strip him. Marco took four reusable gel heat packs out of his bag, snapped the metal chips in them to start the reaction, and tucked them around Shanks's core while the injured man watched him.
"So," Shanks said conversationally while Marco retrieved a space blanket from his kit, "you just run around the woods with bone saws and scalpels, Marco?"
Marco pulled the edges of the mylar blanket around Shanks's body and under him, overlapping the edges so no heat could escape and send him further into shock.
"I'm here for the Park Medics training program," Marco answered, pulling a wad of gauze out of his bag, wetting it with water from a bottle, and cleaning the cut on Shanks's temple. He didn't want to suture it up without disinfecting it first, especially with that quantity of mud on his face, but he could at least stop the bleeding until help arrived. "We always go into the field with a kit."
"You're a doctor," Shanks said, surprised. Quietly to himself: "Well, I shouldn't be surprised... just my luck I lost my arm in front of a hot guy."
Marco decided not to tell him he'd said that out loud, as it would be unfair to tease a man with a severe concussion, but he felt himself flush right up to his ears and thanked the universe for the rain and darkness making it hard for them to see each other properly.
Shanks shifted in place, turning his head to watch Luffy for a few seconds before he moved his gaze to Marco, who had nothing but a t-shirt after he'd given his jacket to the kid. "Hey," he said, "I've got another space blanket in my pack. Outer pocket on the left. Hand-warmers, too."
Marco went for the goods without hesitation. "Thanks," he said, tearing open the blanket's packaging to wrap the material around himself. "I'm gonna help myself, then."
He opened a few packs of the handwarmers too, and handed some to Luffy. The kid was already nodding off, exhausted and terrified after the day he'd had, but he was still bundled up and warm so Marco didn't sweat it.
As much as he wanted a nap too, Marco knew he'd have to keep Shanks awake until they could get a scan of his head. "Were you just gonna let any stranger saw off your arm, Shanks?" he asked, settling down beside the other man. The mylar crinkled noisily around him.
"Did I have a choice?" Shanks laughed. "Besides, you looked like you knew what you were doing."
"What do you do?"
"Oh I'm... a photographer." Shanks took a moment to be relieved that he hadn't brought his camera or his photography equipment with him on the search like he'd originally planned; they would've cost him a small fortune to replace. "I was around 'cause the Parks Service wanted some stills for their new ad campaign. Then I heard there was a search-and-rescue going on, and I had time to kill."
"Wait," said Marco, "Figarland Shanks?"
"Hey, you know me?"
"Outside of the multiple award-winning documentaries?" Marco scratched the back of his neck. "My brother's mentioned you. He goes climbing sometimes with Dracule Mihawk."
Shanks blinked up at him. "No way! Who's your brother?"
"Edward Vista."
"Solid guy." Shanks slurred. "I go way back with Mihawk, so any friend of his is a buddy of mine."
Marco didn't say that Vista, who had a tendency to take things too seriously, had a much less generous opinion of Shanks. He had described Shanks as 'a man of immense skill and talent, with the attitude of a layabout'. Vista always disliked people before he got to know them though, so Marco rarely took his early impressions seriously.
He was more preoccupied with the knowledge that Shanks was a world-renowned landscape photographer. He captured breathtaking, high-altitude shots of the world's highest peaks and the men who summitted them, because he was usually climbing those treacherous mountains right along with them. And Marco had just removed his arm.
That would be a lawsuit for the books if Shanks were the vindictive type. Marco didn't think he was, but he's been wrong before.
Shanks laid in contemplative silence for a few seconds, then he startled, wriggling in place a bit as he tried to pull his arm up and realized it was trapped against his side because he'd been wrapped like a burrito. "Wait," he yelped, "so you're Edward Marco?"
"Oh. Yeah."
Shanks squinted at him. "I thought you were here for a training program."
Technically, Marco thought, that was true.
"To teach it," Marco said. "My other brother's the park supervisor, so I'm here as a favor to him. You probably met him at the SAR rendezvous point earlier, Kingdew."
"There sure are a lot of you," Shanks mused.
Edward Newgate owned a vast, multinational conglomerate that did everything from parts manufacturing for tech companies to hospital management. It wasn't by design; he'd simply invested in so many various wildly successful projects over the years every time a good friend asked for help that in the last decade he'd ended up one of the richest men on the planet by sheer luck, once all those investments came to fruition. He was also a serial adopter of orphans.
That was, incidentally, how Marco found himself the assistant director of Sphinx Central Hospital, one of the biggest and most advanced institutions in the world for emergency medicine and oncology, at thirty-four years old.
Their competitors called the Moby Dick Corporation 'Nepotism Inc.' when they were feeling uncharitable (which was always), even though Newgate held his children to higher standards than he did anyone else. Even so, the company stayed successful and largely free of legal trouble or controversy. Edward Newgate had a pristine reputation; he always kept his word and donated generously to charities and causes the world over. When he couldn't legally render assistance to those who needed it, he'd do it illegally and no law enforcement in the world had ever been able to build a case against him.
"Sixteen of us were officially adopted," Marco said, "and there's a couple hundred employees of the MDC who call Edward Newgate 'Pops'." He watched Shanks's face closely as the other man's eyes slipped shut, and squeezed his ankle to wake him back up. "What about you?" he asked. "Any siblings?"
"I was uh, a foster." Shanks had a feeling that would endear him to Marco, and cracked an eye open to catch the gentle smile on his face. "Never actually adopted, but the family treated me like I was. There was another kid who lived with us for a while, but I haven't heard from him in ages."
"That's too bad," Marco said, trying to imagine what it would be like to lose contact with any of his brothers. They were a close-knit family, and just the idea of it made his heart hurt.
"'M sure he's fine," Shanks sighed.
The conversation tapered off after a while, but Marco did end up helping Shanks pull his arm out from under the blanket, and he squeezed his hand every few minutes to prompt a squeeze back. That was the compromise he'd allowed to let Shanks rest a bit, instead of forcing him to talk until they were located.
"I'm sorry I couldn't save your arm," Marco said after they'd been waiting for about ten minutes. "I know you need it for work."
"'S just an arm. I'm glad the kid is okay." He squeezed Marco's hand, where it was still held in his, and Marco squeezed it back.
Luffy was fast asleep, the top half of his body draped over Marco's lap and his legs folded up inside the jacket. Marco thought about contacting Kingdew again to ask where the hell he was, but decided against it; he knew the situation, and was scrambling to get them out. Calling would only delay him, and if he needed more information he'd contact Marco himself.
"Do you have anyone I can call for you?" Marco asked instead, extracting his hand from Shanks's.
"Yeah, please."
Marco dialed the number that Shanks rattled off, and held the phone by his ear while it rang. When no one picked up, Shanks blew an annoyed breath through his lips. "Text him," he said. "Beck doesn't pick up numbers he doesn't know. He's my partner."
Marco didn't let himself feel disappointed to hear that, and pulled up his messenger instead. Shanks asked me to text you, he wrote. He found the missing kid, we'll be at the Little Garden Trauma Center soon.
'Beck' called back immediately. Marco swiped to answer, and handed over his phone.
"Don't be mad," was the first thing Shanks said. "I'm fine, I promise, I'm with a doctor right now." He winked at Marco, who rolled his eyes. "You don't need to come pick me up, I don't think they'd let you ride along anyway. Yeah. I'll meet you at the hospital. It's no big deal. Honest," Shanks said, smiling crookedly at the faces Marco was making. "Yeah. Yeah, drive safe."
"He's gonna be so mad," Marco said as he hung up.
"He's used to it," Shanks said airily. "One time I tumbled off a three-hundred foot cliff in Alabasta and had to get airlifted to a hospital. Sixty stitches in my back."
"Were you saving a kid then too?" Marco asked, feeling a pang of sympathy for this poor man who had to deal with Shanks falling off Alabastan cliffs.
"Nah. Just got too close to the edge and the ground gave out."
That was when Marco heard the crunch of gravel, and saw lights through the trees as a van trundled around the bend of the trail. "That's your ride," Marco said, shrugging out of his space blanket and picking Luffy up, along with his sopping clothes. "I'm gonna get the kid loaded up, and we'll bring a stretcher over. I'll ride with you to the hospital."
Shanks made an affirmative sound, and waited patiently.
"Where's your damn jacket," was the first thing Thatch said when Marco came up to him, even though he could see the kid clearly in his arms. He made room for Kingdew to take Luffy and buckle him into the passenger seat of the van, and shrugged out of his own jacket to wrap Marco into it instead. "Sit in the back and warm up, we'll get Mr. Hero loaded."
Marco had only known Shanks for half an hour, but he knew if Thatch let him hear that title, the man would be insufferable about it. Kingdew came back with a stretcher, and he and Thatch marched to where Marco indicated.
Marco was in the back of the van for about three minutes when they returned, and Thatch and Shanks were already chatting up a storm. Thatch had Marco's bag on one shoulder, and Kingdew had Shanks's. Their used space blankets were rolled up into a ball and stuffed under the strap securing Shanks's legs to the stretcher.
"Man," Thatch was saying as he loaded Shanks into the back of the van and settled him in, "that shot you took of Drum's annual cherry blossom fireworks, I've got it framed on my wall. It's freakin' breathtaking."
"I didn't know you owned Barbablanca," Shanks gushed in return, "I go there all the time!"
Marco exchanged a look with Kingdew as the latter climbed into the driver's seat, equal parts affectionate and horrified. Oh no, was the silent message that passed between them, there's two.