Work Text:
Cutty Flam builds his first canon on an island full of scrap, a day after his parents kick him off their ship.
He builds it because he’s angry – at his parents, mostly, but also at the world for letting them be parents if they were gonna be so shitty at it – and the sound it makes when he fires it, the heat and noise of the explosion he contained and controlled enough to shoot a metal ball away from him, and not be hurt by it... they go a certain way towards soothing some of his hurt.
Someone behind him lets out an impressed whistle, and he turns to see a very large yellow fishman watching from a few meters away.
“Nice job, kid,” the fishman says, “you build that yourself?”
This first meeting winds up soothing away most of the rest of it, over time.
Tom knows, of course, that his apprentices don’t really get along. It’s obvious that Cutty Flam thinks Iceberg is something of a stick in the mud, and that Iceberg thinks Cutty Flam lacks focus and discipline. Iceberg insists on calling Cutty Flam a “less weird” nickname and in return, Cutty Flam sticks out his tongue and tells Iceberg to loosen up, and frequently this comes to blows.
But they’re both undeniably talented: creative enough to design, diligent enough to build, and showing the beginnings of being patient enough to really craft. They’ll be excellent shipwrights, someday in their bright futures.
So when they argue, he laughs and sets them to sanding down railings or smithing nails or any of the thousand other tiny, boring, incredibly necessary tasks in the process of building a ship.
And when they have managed to get along (or at least not outright insult each other) for an entire workday, he rewards them with stories about the Builder.
Once upon a time, before history was properly recorded, there were three great weapons. One was born of the ocean, and ruled under the waves. One descended from the skies, and ruled over the waves.
The last was built by human hands, following the designs that the Builder had drawn one day to win an argument with the Sun and then promptly lost track of as he moved onto the next project. Such is his way.
Pluton ruled the surface of the waves , and could destroy not only lives but entire islands with its power. Thus, when it was hidden away for good and we who follow the Builder swore we would not recreate such a nightmare unless it was truly needed, when the other weapons again threaten life. This is the only circumstance.
There can be no exceptions, for any good reason invites the sneaking in of a bad one.
Water 7 is the island of shipwrights. The Builder is their patron, and so, in a way, Water 7 is his, and even those on the island who are not themselves shipwrights leave him a little bit of whatever they’ve made: stews and poems and ales and mugs and everything that makes life worth living.
As the sea keeps rising and the raw materials dry up, some wonder (quietly, at first, but gradually louder) whether he’s turned his face away, and what it was that they did wrong.
And, as is the way of these things, the offerings at his shrines dwindle, and people ask less for his blessings and more often curse him when they smash their fingers with a hammer or trip over a plank.
Tom sees this, and shakes his head, and goes back to his drafting late into the nights.
He knows the Builder does not give blessings. The Builder asks that you make them for yourself.
“Death is the only fitting punishment,” the judge declares, and the gathered crowds murmur uneasily.
Shipwrights live to test the boundaries of what is possible. The judge has already admitted that normally a shipwright cannot be punished for who they sell to or what is done with their work; to make the pirate king an exception to this invites other exceptions. They are very aware that an invitation is all that one needs to end up doing terrible things.
(Any good reason invites the sneaking in of a bad one.)
But before anything can happen, Tom speaks.
“Right now,” he says, “I am designing a steam engine paddleship-” and he fills the room with visions of a future marvel, a way to save the island and all of their livelihoods.
The gathered shipwrights listen, intrigued. The marines listen, confused. The judge listens, calculating.
(And, far away and yet very close by, someone else listens, proud.)
Ten years later, when the Puffing Tom runs across the waves for the first time, Iceberg has a few years where everything in the world feels right. They met the deadline. Things are slowly going to turn around for Water 7, and he will be there to not only see it, but to be a part of building it.
Cutty Flam is still building increasingly powerful and strange weapons, which is in a sense worrying but also, strangely, contributes to the feeling that everything will continue as it should.
They spend four more years building connecting lines, and Iceberg leaves little offerings of gears and bolts at the Builder’s shrines, and shakes his head when his brother leaves gunpowder and harpoons.
But then the government spooks come, and they ask for Pluton. And really, nothing after that feels right at all.
Fourteen people die, when the government takes Cutty Flam’s abandoned prototypes (everything that Cutty Flam makes is a prototype, and all of them are abandoned before long in the continued pursuit of something more) and attack in order to find Pluton’s blueprints.
Iceberg only finds out the exact number later. After Kokoro has bandaged his wounds and the two of them have cried on each other for what feels like days but is probably only hours, when one of the neighbors stops by to bring them the news and a pot full of potato soup. The government killed fourteen people, and all for some old pieces of paper.
Sixteen, if you count Tom and Cutty Flam, which only Iceberg and Kokoro ever seem to do.
In the heat of the moment, having been shot at by canons his brother’s own hands had made, all of the screaming he had done seemed important. When you bring a weapon into this world, you have to take some responsibility! It doesn’t matter if you’re the one who pulls the trigger – they still have the power to hurt someone! It was an important lesson Cutty Flam never seemed to learn, and Iceberg had needed to say it.
But as he attends fourteen public funerals and one secret, messy wake with no bodies to bury, the only emotion he can find within himself other than exhaustion is the bitter regret that his last words to his brother were so harsh. They were true, after all.
I am never going to forgive you, as long as I live.
(He’s never going to get the chance.)
I don’t want to build ships anymore! How can I love the ships I’ve made when they’ve hurt the people really important to me? Cutty Flam thinks, as he stares down his mentor’s proudest creation – the very same train driving Tom to his death.
And yet – he isn’t really sure how to stop wanting to build ships. It’s in his bones, he feels like, this desire to keep going until he reaches something... not perfect, but a dream all the same. Something that can reach the very ends of the world, push the boundaries of what a human can make, and do it with pride. With a don.
As the sea train leaves his broken body behind, laid out in pieces on its floating tracks, he silently offers one last prayer.
It is heard.
The Builder has long liked Tom, was pleased he was the one currently keeping charge of the plans that fell into the mortal world, and as Tom added the kids to his company it promised truly endless creative delights. A god’s favor is a terrible thing, so the Builder tries not to have favorites, but the littler one’s obsession with building battleships because he could, to reach increasingly ludicrous goals, was admittedly terribly endearing.
There is nothing he can do for Tom, who lived a life with according to his own sincerely held believes and will die doing the same. Really, there’s nothing he can do for Cutty Flam, either: his is not a power of life or death or anything so squishy as the mortal soul. There’s not even much in his power that has to do with a human body. But it seems like such a terrible waste.
So he takes what’s left, and sets out to see what he can make himself into, in answer to a dead man’s prayer.
It takes a while, in the ways that mortals perceive time.
When his secretary (still new-ish to Galley-La, terrifyingly beautiful, terrifyingly confident, and also just terrifying, not that Iceberg will ever admit that) tells him that someone claiming to be Cutty Flam is here to see him, Iceberg almost breaks his pen in shock.
“-wearing swim trunks-” Kalifa is saying, and he can barely hear her over the blood rushing through his ears.
How dare someone take that name, those mannerisms? Cutty Flam has been dead for four years. Four years that Iceberg has spent building a company up from nothing but will, talent, and a miraculous spat of good hiring luck. Four years that Iceberg has spent pulling Water 7 into the future, one achingly slow step at a time, because he promised Tom’s ghost. Four years that Iceberg has spent coming home to an empty, echoing silence.
“Kick him out,” he tells Kalifa, and only lets his face crumple when the door shuts behind her.
They meet in an abandoned building that used to be a restaurant, about four hundred health code violations and fifteen years ago, and since then has mostly been used for these kinds of secret midnight deals. Iceberg sits, cool as a cucumber, on one of the absolutely disgusting benches left behind, and lets the cyborg yell at him.
And then he yells back, and hands him the blueprints, and names him.
Franky blinks down at his own ineffable handwriting, faithfully copied over onto new paper every few hundred years when the old stuff gets too fragile to keep, bemused. Somewhere far off, whatever tattered scraps of Cutty Flam’s essence he managed to keep attached to what was left of Cutty Flam’s body have a realization and he suddenly finds himself talking, fast and worried.
“What’s gonna happen to you if they come and you don’t have the blueprint?”
Iceberg waves him off, and turns to leave. Something hot and panicky bubbles up as he does, and Franky is yelling now, because how can this man value his life so far beneath a pile of paper? “If you don’t want to hand it over, then burn it!”
“If you had to choose,” Iceberg asks calmly, “would you? You remember the stories Master Tom used to tell us. If the other weapons come back – that thing is needed, to defend against them. The Builder tasked us to carry it, and not build it in any other circumstance.”
I never did , he manages not to say, you lot did that yourselves, built the rules and the protections in all on your own and it’s part of what makes you all so delightful. You could make anything, and instead you make ethics. The gods would never even think of coloring within the lines like that.
And then Iceberg tells him to go, and that he’s glad he’s alive, and Franky is honestly not really sure where mortals store all these emotions all the time. Goodness, should he learn to do that?
Cutty Flam’s dream will take him away from Water 7 some day, but in the meantime there’s no reason to go. He wants to see what it is Iceberg can build here, first.
And so, Iceberg goes back to building himself a company and also a town.
In the meantime, Franky builds himself a family and also a criminal empire.
When Kokoro hears about it, she laughs herself so hoarse that Chimney has to take over the station announcements for the entire rest of the afternoon.