Dandan is a mother.
Mother of a boy with stars dotting his chubby cheeks and steel teeth that love to bite her when hunger strikes.
She screams and waits worse than a child with bites, but always carries the little scars left with the pride that only a leader of mountain bandits can have.
Dandan hates being a mother.
It is a responsibility she never wanted to have, she can barely handle herself or the ragged bandits she leads on Mount Raven, who will tell a human being too small to hunt alone or who might be useful in their robberies.
But Dandan can never deny that he loves being Ace's mother.
Maybe that's why on a very sunny morning she picks up the paper and hopes to read — in her slow and broken way, because she's never been good at these intellectual things and prefers to leave it all to Dogra — that Ace, her son, is secure in the arms of his brothers and father and that no one cut off the head of the boy that Dandan so often caressed when the infamous pirate was still a baby or when the child too strong contorted with fever.
She hopes to read good news, even expects to see a new reward poster.
What she sees leaves her paralyzed for two minutes. When Dandan moves it's to pick up the bottle of sake that one day someone stole — she knows who it was, those boys were never really so discreet, but she does not care, it was that sake that created a bond that Dandan always wished for his boy.
Dandan drinks. She drinks half the bottle in seconds and then throws it against the wall of her small room in the Dandan Kingdom — the name is still stupid, but Luffy has never been good at naming things, but she likes, for some reason even more idiot than the name.
She doesn't cry. She can't and is so strange from her because she can deny all she wants, but she always cries when it comes to Ace and Luffy — and Sabo, but she tries not to think about the blond boy who once built a tree house with his two precise treasures, your children.
Magra appears hysterical with the loud sound early in the morning and when he realizes it's just another broken bottle he sighs and leaves, because it's common for Dandan to break bottles in the midst of rage.
"Ace..." Dandan says, looking at the piece of newspaper thrown in the wooden box that serves as a table, where a horrible picture of his boy is stamped on the front page.
Your boy being held by the arms of his other boy.
Dandan never thought of how the world could be so unjust until then, because Ace — his baby with stars in the cheeks and soul of fire — is being held by Luffy — the weeping brat that Dandan saw grow in a man who is going to be a king one day — while the two bleed in a war that should never have happened.
And the smoke that expands from his boy's chest is black and must smell as bad as the cigarettes that Dandan always smokes.
Dandan still doesn't cry.
She wants to scream for the world to hear her pain until her throat bleeds, she wants the world to know how they didn't kill Gol D. Ace, the Pirate King's son, but they killed Ace, the son of Dandan, leader of a group ragged bandits on a Mount of the East Blue.
She wants to curse, roar and growl like the lioness she is because they killed her boy — her sweet, impetuous boy who had dreams, promises, and memories to keep.
Dandan doesn't cry.
At some point, Dogra picks up the paper and reads the same news and runs crying loudly to show the other thugs the news that Dandan's son is dead.
Dead in the arms of his other son. Dead in the arms of his younger, weak and weeping brother.
Dandan feels empty and she spends the day standing at the same place. The bottle of sake is still broken and the bad guys still cry.
At some point, she thinks it's a dream. She thinks it was just a bad nightmare and that the bandits' cry is actually laughter.
But Dandan looks at the wall in front of her and sees her children's rewards posters —she notices Ace's freckles and counts them, and she looks at Luffy's smile and thinks how that smile always looks like the sun in the middle of storm clouds — and finally realizes no, that's all but a dream.
Then she cries, because the pain is great, the emptiness even greater and she doesn't know what to do when she realizes that she no longer has two children alive, free and so happy.
Dandan was a mother.
Now she has only half the soul, posters on the wall and the warm memory of two mischievous and happy smiles behind the eyelids