Story Title:
The Reckoning
Prologue:
Origins
Summary:
"Roger, what the hell?" She sighed, after five long years, and very much expecting a happy, wholesome reunion. "I get the notorious pirate thing, I do, really, but is breaking my deck in half as a hello really necessary?" ...The little bastard had the nerve to look embarrassed.
Warnings:
Some language here and there but nothing too bad really.
Author's Note:
This is my first fan fiction for One Piece, so I hope I'm not doing anything that's too common around here with this OC or whatever.
Anyway, I sincerely hope you enjoy my writing.
L D
"It's like the whole world-everything we knew and had ever known-was suddenly collapsing in on itself at the same exact moment in every inch of space and time and there was nothing that we could do about it. I couldn't breathe, no one could, and the air was so thick and suffocating and horrible that the world was drowning us in our own misery. There was smoke and fire and there was nothing we would have ever been able to do to stop it-nothing, nothing, nothing at all-and my life was going up in flames, quite literally before my very eyes.
It hadn't always been like that though. In fact, everything that had ever happened to me before then had been so very perfect-even if I hadn't known that-up until that moment.
I'm not being sentimental. In comparison to the ash and fumes and screaming, anything would have been perfect. This is plain and simple honesty speaking.
I wasn't a very good child, and I could have been better, and that will haunt me for the rest of my life, but I also refuse to have regrets. I will never forsake my life to wallow in my tears, my heartache. I vowed that the day my village was ravaged to the ground. I swore to my little brother that I would take care of him until the day I die.
That is where our story begins I suppose; not that day, no, that comes a bit later, but with my brother, whom you are most certainly well aware of.
His name was Roger.
You might know him as Gol D. Roger, the Pirate King."
Piques D. Anne was running for her life.
Not that it was very uncommon, just a real annoyance to the people who wanted her dead. Mostly because the mongrel of a girl could run faster than all the men chasing her combined, and was very much not in need of dying, thus resulting in Anne becoming so well versed in Lougetown nuances that, if she wanted, she could stay hidden and well fed for up to two months; possibly more. Anne knew what shopkeepers could afford sparing scrapes, the best hidden alleyways, and most importantly, she had the ferry schedule memorized.
That was the chief bit there, the ferry, because if she couldn't get back to her proper island, the proper Polestar island that is, her grandfather would have a fit.
Anyway, Anne was running for her life. She wasn't too terrible concerned about it. Which might sound strange, but it really wasn't, because while she was being chased by a group of thugs, she was laughing, their spoils jingling in her pockets all the while. Also, the ferry was leaving in exactly two minutes. Just enough time for her to get on and leave her pursuers cursing at the dock, wondering where she'd gone.
They certainly weren't too bright.
Anne laughed and laughed and maybe she was just a little bit crazy, but that didn't matter at the second.
All that mattered was that she had won and that those wretched criminals got what was coming to them. In the end, that's all that was important to Anne anyway when she made her rounds around Loguetown.
She took a sharp right, into an alleyway that had been abandoned for years, and rushed atop a mountain of garbage likely for the homeless and street rats. Anne made quick work of climbing on top of the roof of Tao-san, the baker, and tiptoed over to the box she had nailed to the back of his house.
She had little things like this all over town, nothing unusual. Just somewhere to switch out clothes, should she get into trouble (which was often). She jerked a black cloak out of the box, and set the sun hat she had been wearing inside in it gently. The exchange only took a few seconds at the most, and then she was gone, walking to the ferry, her hood up and a grin on her face.
Not five seconds after she stepped on the boat, the captain announced its departure, and the seven year old absolutely delighted in watching her victims run right past the dock, cursing, completely oblivious to her presence just a few meters out into the sea.
She laughs and the waves chortle with her, crashing against the ferry in chaotic harmony.
These are her idyllic days, running and laughing and being a cloud in the wind.
She spends far too much time wondering why her father is such a deadbeat.
Sure, the moment Anne had taken her first breath was the same moment her mother (one Piques Manoa) took her last, but she finds that, in her pragmatic little mind, to be irrelevant. Of course, if she had the choice, she would want her mother to be alive and well, but that wasn't how it was. Anne would be grateful with the cards she had been dealt with-that she had been dealt any cards at all-and she would decide her own way with these cards.
She sat at the table of her grandparents' little cottage on the small island Juro, in the even smaller village of Tanju. She does most of her pondering in the early days at this table, with her grandparents sneaking worried looks at her every now and then, and it is at this table that Anne decides that there is no such thing as destiny or fate. There was an end, that was somewhat inevitable, but not set in stone. There were choices, while not compulsory, that were dictated by right and wrong.
Fate and Destiny and words like it were just excuses for someone not willing to understand that they had real power over what was done in the world around them.
Anne would not attribute her mother's death to fate or her father's cowardice to destiny.
Those were only unfortunate circumstances and bad decisions, she knew. People were too stubborn for some force like destiny or fate or whatever to sweep them along in its current.
When she was seven, none of this was as nearly thought out as it is now (now being a long while from then), but the idea had been there since forever. She would be sixty years old, greying, and dying, and even then, this notion would not leave her mind.
And looking back, she realizes that that choice made her.
Not fate, nor destiny, but her. She had made herself, and while it may seem paradoxical, it's honestly like that for everyone.
People make themselves and others.
No one or thing else.
It is at her grandparents' table that Anne knows how she will live and die; and that it is her choice, and no one else's.
She is seven years old and gearing up to take on the world, even if she doesn't know what for yet.
All that she is aware of is this permanent chill against her skin and rage burning in her bones towards Heaven knows what and Anne needs something to take it out on.
That something just so happened to be criminals.
Who could honestly blame her, really?
She sells her wares (more accurately, the things she's stolen from the bottom feeders and criminals of Lougetown) along the street with a smile on her face. Money is hard to come by in Juro for farmers like Gol D. Jeremiah and Gol Judith, and Anne only wants to fatten up their savings, for their retirement of course.
She operates her business on the shady side of town, opposite of the boutiques and farmer's markets where her grandparents struggled to sell their produce.
There are plenty of questionable looking people, and even more disreputable bars and Anne's seen her father more than once on those streets, with a girl on his arm and booze in his hand.
She doesn't care.
So, Anne sells the swords and knives and guns she's stolen over the years, and she knows her stuff.
She'll rack up money faster than all the black markets combined can manage, and soon, when she walks down those streets, she will pit the fear of God into those scoundrels that called that dump home.
But that isn't now: she's still a smudge of dirt against the filthy backdrop of stained buildings and booze bottles littering the ground. She's lucky if one pirate stops to buy a gun; even luckier if a frantic fugitive buys all her stock of knives while on the run from marines.
Anne saves her money, and spends nothing.
She's got sticky fingers, and they would take her to the very top of the food chain if it killed her. (Which it would not, by the way. She wouldn't be dying until a very, very long time.)
And so Anne continues on, making a cushy little savings account for her grandparents in the process, which she hides under her bed, and discovering why the Gol family put their strength to farming and nothing else.
She socked some guy in the face and broke his nose, teeth, and eye sockets. A right hook to a thief's jaw left it unsalvageable. A frustrated swipe at a wall ended with her staring at a shrieking man in the shower holding a rubber duck.
Apparently monstrous strength ran in the family. Except her father, which was strange.
Her grandpa said it had to do with him not "possessing the Will". Whatever that meant.
There is little seven year old Piques D. Anne hasn't done in terms of business, and what surprises her more is that there is still so much to experience.
So, running from the marines was definitely a new experience.
Anne turned, while still running, to throw a nasty glare at the uniformed sailor. His face was twisted into the most horrible scowl (but not the worst she had ever seen), and he waved his sword in the are as if to emphasize the death threats being thrown her way.
And there were certainly plenty of those leaving his mouth, don't get her wrong.
Some background might be necessary.
Anne had wanted some new items for her cart.
Marine pistols were very shiny and the wood was impeccable and the kind that hardly ever got jammed, which meant she could charge a good 900 beli more for, 1,200 if she could steal it from a marine who'd made a name for himself.
Which is why she decided to nab it from the most feared marine in all of the Polestar Islands: Captain Nottingham Isedore Jerald.
He was big on cracking down on the common criminal and black market dealer and most especially pirates. Somehow pirates were becoming the main focus of the newly minted "Marines" (which was only named that a tender 150 years old that coming summer despite the actual government organization itself being as old at the World Government itself) and while the raids dwindled those in the military felt their ego boost, and thus heads began to swell. Captain Nottingham in particular.
He was a righteous bastard in Anne's opinion, always speaking to everyone as if he had never done wrong, and Anne wasn't some genius, but she wasn't an idiot either. She knew there was no such thing as an infallible human being-the very combination of words was contradictory to everything it meant to be human in the first place.
Which was why Nottingham was her target.
And also why he was chasing her.
It was fun, no doubt, but the strange looks she received while flying down the street were ones that she could go without. Nottingham screamed, and she laughed.
"You shitty little street brat!" He'd belch out at the top of his lungs.
"Fuckin' marine can't even keep track of 'is guns!" Anne would cackle on back, well aware that if her grandparents ever heard her utter the beginning of that sentence she'd be six feet under.
This was how most of the chases between the two of them went. She would run and run and run and he would holler after her, red faced and tail between legs when he decided to give up. Which was often.
Nottingham wasn't the only marine she terrorized; no, the entirety of the Marine base felt her wrath that spring (and would continue feeling it for many more years), and no one was safe from the holy terror that had no name. They started calling her, "The Gremlin".
It was catchy.
Anne liked it.
It stuck.
There were other stories, more adventures, and too many on the run situations to count past her eighth year and into her ninth.
But her tenth was definitely the most notable, by far, because that was the year Roger came.
So yeah.
I don't really have much to say, only that I hope you like it enough to review or fav or whatever I guess.
I appreciated constructive criticism, so if you have anything you guys think I could improve on, I'd be glad to hear it.
Questions are welcomed.
L D