Chapter Text
“You should come with me.”
“Huh?” Buggy squinted down at the fire he was trying to encourage to grow. He had a guest tonight, damn it! Why couldn’t this sad, stupid little flame recognize that and get bigger?! With a sigh of defeat, he peered up at the rich kid talking nonsense at him. “What, where? Did you find a better place to squat?” Not that his current squat was bad, but it was too far from the docks for Buggy’s taste. All the urchins wanted to be near the docks—that’s where the rubes came from, it was home to the easiest pickings and the best ones—so any time Buggy found a decent place it was quickly taken over by one of the kid gangs (or, once, one of the grown-up gangs—now that had been a scary day). None of them ever let Buggy stay, even though he was the one who’d found those squats and made them livable. They didn’t like his attitude, whatever that meant.
“No, I mean you should come with me.” The kid laughed when Buggy frowned at him. “I told you, I’m an apprentice on a pirate ship. You can be one too!”
“A pirate?” Buggy shrunk back from the red-haired madman. “But I don’t know anything about boats, or sword-fighting, or—”
“That’s okay! ‘Apprentices are here to learn,’” the kid said, definitely quoting somebody. “And besides, you already know all the most important things!”
Buggy scowled. Was he being made fun of? Nobody ever thought he knew anything. “Like what?”
The kid started ticking things off on his fingers. “You’re a great swimmer, you run fast, you’re really good with that knife, you know what things are worth on sight, and I had a lot of fun getting away from that shopkeeper with you!”
“That was fun for you?”
“Yeah! Haven’t you been having fun?”
Running wildly across town, hiding in barrels and under docks, shoving their hands over each other’s mouths to keep from being heard, working up such an appetite that the food he’d hoped would last the week had been gone within an hour… fun? Buggy shrugged, feeling weird. “I don’t know. I don’t really think about things like that as ‘fun’ or not… it’s just what I have to do to survive.”
“Well, I don’t know about surviving, but living here doesn’t look like fun. So you should stop living here, and start living with me, as a pirate!” The kid’s grin was so wide it was almost blinding.
Buggy sat down. He didn’t know what to think. All his plans… his hidden little cache of coins, the secret bigger squat he’d been daydreaming about building, the gang he had hoped to start someday… they seemed so small, next to the ocean, and the smile on this kid’s face.
“So? What do you say?”
Buggy smothered the stupid little fire with a fistful of sand, sprung to his feet, and shook the kid’s outstretched hand. “I’m in!”