Disclaimer: One Piece not mine.
Summary: Pirates and Princesses are not so different. Vivi says goodbye. Alabasta arc spoilers.
Desert Storm
Because I love my country, she cries, and she knows Luffy would understand. Pirates and Princesses are not so different.
Vivi loves Alabasta for all its lurid beauty and tempestuous flights of whimsy. Sunsets that transform tides of sand into a sea of liquid flame. The hush before skies split open with torrential rain. The fury and the beauty of Alabasta are one and the same.
When Vivi watched Pell's great wings strain and ripple, carrying danger further and further away, she knew that she would never outlive this moment. Everything Alabasta was, and could still be, captured in so stark a frame – the single fleck dissolving into endless blue. This, she'd whispered to herself as the blue exploded into light and ash, is why I love my country. This is why I must save her.
Perhaps all princesses are born with the same devotion, Vivi does not know. But if anyone can understand, it is this extraordinary boy, his extraordinary crew. What she would give up in an instant for Alabasta, they would in an instant for each other. They know what it is to love mindlessly, without a care for self or reason.
So Vivi raises her arm into the air and laughs through her tears, because this moment, too, is one she'll always carry with her. An old-fashioned pirate ship, bearing a cheerfully billowing Jolly Roger and the six reasons she would be proud to call herself a pirate.
She wishes there had been more time to repay even a shred of what she owes. To tell them that they were her one answered prayer, her miracle. When next they meet, she will remove her crown and be just plain Vivi, who is glad to see her nakama again.
-end-