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Title: pluck down the stars from heaven
Rating: Tentative T, but not 'T' for 'Tentative,' if that makes any sense. ;3
Summary: Freedom is only an illusion until you possess the strength to reach out and grasp it with your own two hands. (Or: In which a soldier is reborn as a village girl in a world where piracy runs rampant, strange fruits grant superpowers, and the laws of physics are shot to hell.) [SI/OC, LawOC, AU]
Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece.
(AN at the bottom of the chapter.)
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Carefully, Seeri pries off the cloth bandages around her face.
As useful as they are for the cuts across her face in respect to sanitary purposes, they will only be a liability if she wants to pass herself off as a simple street rat. No child abandoned to the streets would be caught in possession of clean materials like these, so if she continues to keep them on the only thing she will succeed in accomplishing is drawing attention, which is precisely what she wants to avoid at the moment.
On the other hand, a few scratches and a small scattering of injuries, ranging from the serious to the severe over arms and legs –things like these would quite common for homeless street urchins to possess. Maybe such an injury on the face would still give a brief startle at first glance; after all, a person's facial features are what most focus on upon initial encounters, and a scarred face is… unnerving, unsettling. But it wouldn't be anything too strange, nothing to be completely baffled over.
… Besides, most everyone's attentions would be focused on the festivities tonight. Going along with that line of thought, it would make sense for street rats should be overlooked more so than usual on this day. This is the only positive aspect that she can see coming out of this celebration so far for her plans of finding Yune, but then again –it's precisely because of this very celebration that her brother's life is in danger, so she can only look upon this festival with mixed feelings.
Colbert is gone, had left the moment it sank into his mind that his friend could be facing mortal danger.
She doesn't think much about it.
(Really.
… It honestly doesn't matter to her what he does, it honestly doesn't. After all, it is only around a day of her having met the man in total, and while the man's character appears to be somewhat acceptable, their relation is strictly only that of a pirate and a young village girl. A village girl who had both the misfortune to encounter pirates while injured, and the fortune to be saved by pirates while weakened.
She doesn't think anyone would believe her if she ever happens to tell them such a laughable tale. Points for entertainment, for imagination and creativity, maybe.)
"Out of the way!"
Seeri stumbles when a burly man in a kitchen scullion's clothes bumps into her, carrying armfuls of boxes overflowing with fruits and making a beeline for the town square. It is just as well that he is much too preoccupied with the materials in his arms to pay attention to his surroundings; otherwise, he might have seen a small smile flicking over the lips of one of the diminutive street urchins that he barrels over in his haste.
She scuttles away, head down, fingers idly playing over a small slip of a newly-acquired knife in her hands. A vegetable-cutting knife from a lowly kitchen assistant who is yelled at by his superiors day in and day out in his work –but nonetheless a knife. This will be useful.
(Thievery?
… Well.
In her mind, Seeri has the memories of a woman who had once been a soldier prior to her bloody death. That doesn't mean that prior to her death, the woman had always been an upstanding soldier. Not all soldiers happened to be proud and upstanding, anyways. That is just a fairytale.)
She lurks around the corners, travels in the gutters, always quick on her feet and avoiding confrontation with others whenever possible. Because even if regular citizens of the city will mistake her for a street rat with a careless glance, Seeri knows better than to assume that street rats themselves will do the same. They have their own circles, their own communities –and she is a total stranger to them all. But Seeri has no plans of staying in Radtep any longer than what is necessary, and so there is no need to approach them and attempt to build connections of any sort. There is no use for that.
She is going to find the place where sacrifices for the Butcher's Fountain are being held, and she is going to get her brother out, before thinking about what to do next. Going back to Ayoka is certainly something that will have to be crossed off the list, but the world is a wide place –surely there will be plenty of places to settle.
(Someday in the distant future, Seeri reflects back on this moment and laughs at herself, at her naivety. For what better word is there to describe this simpleminded, lackluster attitude with?)
It's… certainly less of a challenge to move around than she had initially thought it would be.
Seeri is not familiar in the least with the winding paths of Radtep City and so it is easy to get lost, but it doesn't take too long for her to familiarize herself with the basic layout of the city after a few runs. There is a mental map of the streets in her mind, one that she unfurls within her mind's eye as she closes her eyes and thinks.
The sacrifices –it's unlikely that citizens will allow them to remain unguarded and have the chance to escape, not with the festival drawing so close and so near. That immediately strikes out the residential districts, and means it's much more likely that the sacrifices will be found somewhere close to the authorities. The heart of the city, perhaps? The town square. Seeri knows that they will not be held directly next to where the festivities will take place; it is only just nightfall right now, and the ceremony is to take place at midnight. Somewhere close, though. Probably.
It's okay. She still has time to search. Not indefinitely, but she thinks she will make it in time.
Where are you, Yune?
Absent-mindedly, Seeri spares a thought to wonder if Colbert and Bart and the rest of the pirates are having any success on their end. Maybe, maybe not. They are grown men fully capable of handling themselves, and dangerous pirates to boot –but there are certain advantages to being a tiny little underfed girl that makes it easier to slip around unnoticed during the onset of nightfall in a bright city.
Well, she's sure that they're doing just fine.
She should be focusing on the task in front of her right now –namely, finding and entering the building where sacrifices for the festival are being held.
This is your task: locate the enemy stronghold and enter unnoticed, retrieve the target and retreat. You are on a solo mission with no backup, and the only tools you have in your possession are stained bandages and a hastily-procured vegetable knife from that kitchen assistant who is too much of an idiot to pay attention to his surroundings.
Advantages: You have a small build and you are a little slip of a girl, which makes it easy for you to pass under the radar. As long as you are not caught, no one will look twice in your direction.
Disadvantages: You are a little slip of a girl without any real combat and infiltration skills other than the knowledge that exists in your memories. There are Marines patrolling the streets of this city.
Time limit: You have until midnight.
(Success rate: … Unknown, but that won't stop you from trying.)
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Seeri remembers how a long time ago, there had been a day in which Yune had sat atop the cliffs, holding a small, tattered box in his hands and staring over out at white-crested ocean waves hitting the silver-sand shores.
"What are you doing here?" she'd asked him.
He hadn't responded, not immediately.
"… Do you hear it?"
Perplexed by the words, Seeri had blinked in complete incomprehension at the normally lively boy, who seemed to be ever so distant and weary in that moment –like an old man looking out at the sea. His shoulders had been hunched slightly, and he dropped his gaze to the little box cupped in his palms.
"Yune?"
"I can hear it," the lethargy vanished. Yune looked up again, and this time his eyes were bright and youthful, blazing with some sort of trembling emotion –excitement, awe, wonder? Even now, thinking back on the moment, Seeri is hesitant to say anything for certain. "The sea, I can hear the Voice of the Sea, just like the old stories say. The sea is calling to me, Seeri."
Yune had always been the heart and laughter of gentle wind over midsummer waves, light and teasing. But when he had been speaking of the sea's call to him at that time –that faraway look in his eyes: delight, triumph, he had been practically enthralled by the wide expanse of the sea spread out before them… and that was when Seeri had known that Ayoka would not hold her brother forever. It was a village to small and too constricting for someone like him, who held the ocean in his eyes.
The Voice of the Sea, the Call of Ocean Waves, Return to the Deep Waters From Whence We Came–
There is a difference between leaving of one's own accord and leaving because one had been captured by Marines, however. The latter was never something that Seeri had thought would ever happen to her brother, but… reality has always had a way of ruining things, she supposes.
Kind of like what's happening right now.
"Run! Oh my god, where are the Marines when you need them?!"
"Pirates! Pirates are attacking!"
"Someone get rid of them, they'll ruin the Water Festival!"
Chaos. Pure chaos. People gathered in the town square are trampling over each other in their haste to run and get out, because there are murderous pirates on the loose what the fuck the Marines where are the Marines?! Screams and shouts, pushing and shoving each other out of the way in a mad rush to escape–
Seeri feels stupid for having wasted her efforts on spending the better half of an hour carefully observing and planning how to enter the jailhouse undetected and unnoticed, only to be met with this ridiculous situation. Very, very stupid.
Pirates.
Something in Seeri's chest heaves out a long-suffering sigh, because really. Really, is this how the pirates are going to go about doing this? Saving a fellow comrade is admirable and all, but with all the chaos going on, what do they hope to accomplish? Already there are Marines arriving on the scene, engaging the motley crew of pirates scattered throughout the crowd in battle before they can harm any more civilians–
… Huh.
Seeri blinks as something interesting catches her eye.
The only civilians dead so far are the ones who couldn't run fast enough when the crowd started moving and were trampled to death. Sure, the pirates have been doing a lot of maiming here, but it doesn't seem like they've killed anyone yet. How strange.
… Although, any more time spent watching the spectacle currently unfolding here, and Yune will be old and grey if not dead by the time Seeri gets to him. Best to pick up the pace, then. And for all that Seeri questions the pirates' brute force methods, there is no denying that this is certainly a very effective… camouflage. For the moment, that is.
Time to get moving before the Marines start wising up to the fact that these pirates' goal isn't just to slaughter civilians.
(… How strange, strange, strange. Although heavily implied, Colbert had never told her straight out that he and his other pirate friends are here to rescue a comrade from being sacrificed to the High Lord of the White Coast. What makes her so sure about this little fact as if he had spoken it aloud to her without any lies?)
Seeri sticks to the shadows and corners, edges of the bright town square strung up with colorful festive lights, and keeps her head down as she slinks closer and closer to the jailhouse–
Ah.
Ah, there might be a bit of a problem with that plan.
If what's happening outside in the town square can be aptly described as chaos, then when Seeri finally approaches the wide-open blackwood doors of the jailhouse, she can only label what's going on inside as absolute mayhem. Blood. There is blood dripping on the ground, and bodies lying around –Seeri isn't quite sure if these men are dead, but they're not pirates or Marines. They're sacrifices, people who are to be killed at midnight anyways.
It's not these maybe-dead people who catch her attention, though.
It's the pirates.
The pirates, and the Marines fighting inside, and it's–
In a single word: vicious. Jean Bart, towering above everyone else, roaring and swinging his fists like a demon straight from the pits of hell –a single punch delivered from his height is enough to send any Marine unlucky enough to be standing in its path directly into the ground, into the splintered wooden floorboards. Several of the iron bars lining cells along the walls look like they have been forcibly twisted open, and Seeri has no doubts as to who did the twisting.
The pirates fight like animals, like devils, wild and unorganized but brutal and effective. Their goal is the locked door at the end of the room –the place where the more dangerous, important criminals are held, and the Marines present in the jailhouse fight with all their effort to keep the pirates from reaching that door.
It is with growing dismay that Seeri realizes she doesn't see Yune running around anywhere in the unfurling madness of the battle royale. One possibility is that Yune was smart enough to make a run for it from the very beginning –certainly not impossible, but not a risk that Seeri is willing to bet everything on, because for all that the criminals in this first room of the jailhouse have been freed, it doesn't include all the sacrifices. If anything, Seeri remembers hearing from gossipers in Radtep about the jailhouse being rowdy due to overcrowding from all sacrifices being moved into the jailhouse to be closer to the town center for the festival –which means that it's not necessarily all unimportant, unthreatening people who have been kept in this first room.
That locked door in the back of the room. It's possible that due to overcrowding, several sacrifices were moved beyond the first room and into that locked room, too.
… She really has her work cut out for her, doesn't she?
"Little girl," a gasping, choking voice. Haggard. Hoarse. Seeri stops in her tracks because one of the not-dead bodies rolling over the ground has reached out and caught her ankle in a vice-like grip. An old man with strength defying his age in his death throes, eyes as black as night. "Little girl. Have you… any water? Medicine… to ease the pain?"
There is an axe sticking into his back and far too much blood spilling onto the ground.
"No water," Seeri candidly informs the aged man, and brings out the stolen vegetable knife tucked up her sleeve. "May-dee-sen, yes."
The old man smiles.
"Thank you, little girl… and… I'm sorry."
Seeri certainly isn't very sorry; it's not like this is really anything new to her. She finds it refreshing, though, that even through the blinding pain that the man must've been suffering as he reached out to her, he had still said sorry to her for asking her to perform a mercy killing on him.
The small exchange costs her a brief moment; when Seeri looks up again towards where the heat of the battle is concentrated, she sees that the pirates have already forced their way to the point where they are directly in front of the locked door. Which is good. As long as she takes care to keep herself hidden and unobtrusive, she can follow them once they open the door and move inside–
"THIS IS WHERE YOU STOP, FOUL SCUM!"
A roar of rage.
Seeri stops and stares.
A man. A normal-sized man. A normal-sized man who is holding his own against the giant that is Jean Bart. It looks… bizarre, to be honest, because of the sheer different of size alone, but it's also an impressive sight. Very impressive. Seeri knows for sure that she herself would be flattened in less than a second against either one of them.
"Didn't you learn your lesson last time already, Jean Bart?" the Marine shouts. "I told you, that was going to be your one and only chance!"
"You took one of my crew," Bart growls back, a low bass rumble that sends the ground beneath her feet quaking. "Did you honestly expect that I would not come for him?"
"The only thing you'll be accomplishing," the man grunts, dodging one of Bart's punches and retaliating with his own blow. "Is your death."
Ouch. Seeri mentally winces when Bart careens into the wall, and the wall literally crumbles under his weight.
"Captain!"
"CAPTAIN!"
"Useless."
This particular Marine's arrival is almost a rallying of morale for the rest of the Marines who are being beaten back by pirates –in contrast, the opposite effect is happening for the pirates, who have just witnessed their captain be sent flying into a wall. Even though Jean Bart stands up again with a roar of rage and charges down the terrifying Marine once more, even though his fellow pirates give a hearty shout and continue fighting… Seeri has seen enough to know that this is one fight that the pirates will not be winning.
… Under normal circumstances, Seeri wouldn't care. Under normal circumstances, Seeri wouldn't even be here. Under normal circumstances, Seeri would still be back at Ayoka Village with her brother, watching the village shaman butcher a little boy to pieces to sacrifice to the Lord of the Coast like tradition dictated.
The current situation, though?
It was these very pirates, no matter their motives, who fished her out of the waters when she fell due to Marines and bandaged her wounds. It was Colbert who had piggy-backed her all the way from Ayoka to Radtep. It was these pirates who wanted to reach the locked door and pass beyond it –the same thing Seeri wanted to do. But looking at all the Marines gathered here now, sneaking in is tantamount to suicide. And as much as Seeri is a young girl who is many things, suicidal is not one of them.
The Marine has defeated Jean Bart. There are other Marines starting to gather around them, each with their own pirate captives. Seeri actually manages to spot Colbert from her hiding spot in one of the broken cages built into the walls –the man is not smiling; not with his captain bleeding on the ground and with the bitter taste of defeat heavy on his tongue, not with a black eye and a swollen cheek and cuts and bruises etched all over his tired body.
"What do you have to say for yourself, Jean Bart?" the Marine grandly sweeps a hand out at the destruction around them. "Is all this fighting and death worth it? Just for a man who deserves to die anyways? His participation in the ceremony honoring the High Lord of the White Coast will be a kind death in comparison to the one he deserves."
"You and your rotten code of Justice," the burly pirate spits out. "He is not the monster you seem fixated on thinking he is! I know him, he is my–"
"You're delusional, Bart."
There is a story here, Seeri knows. There is a story, probably one wrought with much misunderstanding and much pain and probably hatred and a desire for vengeance as well, but Seeri is not interested. She just wants to get into the locked room, look for Yune, get him out if he is there and get herself out to search for him if he isn't. Seeri really, really isn't interested on being drawn into other people's businesses at this point.
So instead of focusing on the agitated conversation between Marine and pirate, Seeri instead quietly slips around the shadows, slowly making her way to a position that is directly in the blind spot of the insanely powerful Marine standing before Bart. Even though everyone's guards are down right now, Seeri has literally just watched this unassuming brown-haired brown-eyed Marine take down Jean Bart, who is big and tall and punches like a wrecking ball.
She will only have one chance at making her move.
(That's okay. Seeri remembers having worked with much worse odds before.)
"–weren't you friends at one point? How can you do this to him?!"
Something flares up in the Marine's eyes. Hurt, pain, indignation. Righteous anger. "I–"
This is her chance.
Seeri moves.
Her foot collides with the face of a Marine standing directly behind the dangerous one; when this Marine lets out a startled shout of pain, the dangerous one whirls around, and this is exactly what she is waiting for.
Seeri's body is underweight; small and thin and light, and she is a whirlwind in the air. She uses the other Marine's face as a springboard and leaps, just as the dangerous Marine breaks off in the middle of his sentence and turns, and it's the perfect opportunity to hook herself around the upper half of his body, twisting like a water-serpent from the shadow-waters, and–
"If you value your life, then don't you dare make a single move," Seeri murmurs into the thorn man's ear in a soft hiss of wind-whispers, the danger of a rapid drown-current sharply embedded into every nuance of her tone.
"What the hell…? Who the hell are you?!" Surprise, shock. Hands reach up to pull her wrists away from where they are locked around his neck with a knife pressed tightly to his jugular, but Seeri immediately angles the blade so that it begins cutting into flesh. The hands abruptly stop pulling at her. "Release me!"
"Eef you move…" Seeri starts slowly, but pauses. She… she actually, legitimately has absolutely no clue where to go from here. Not because she is a little girl who has just realized what a precarious situation she has launched herself into; good heavens, no. It's just… how, exactly, does one go about saying 'eviscerate' in the common tongue? "You move I… nai-fee… here cut…?"
Dead silence.
…
(… Okay, so maybe Colbert had a point about working harder to improve her grasp of speaking standard. It's definitely hard to sound menacing when you're threatening someone if you don't even know what words you should be saying to threaten them with.)
"… The fuck?" the man Seeri is holding at knifepoint growls under his breath. "You bastards. You sick bastards! You even dragged a child into this mess? Jean Bart, I thought you were better than–"
"Seeri!"
The little girl blinks owlishly.
"Ah. Hai, Colbert." As good as it is to see that the pirate isn't dead yet, Seeri has bigger things to be worrying about at the moment. Namely, finding her brother. Asking the disgruntled Marine that she can kill at any moment right now sounds like a good place to start.
"You." She pokes the knife into his neck again, causing the man to stiffen. "You, help me. I want know… where I be findin' Yoon?"
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Author's Notes:
Fourth chapter up, sorry for the delay in updating. In my defense, I had a lot of things going on during winter break, and the main focus was on OTD and a shiny new plot bunny instead of pluck down the stars from heaven. Sorry for that. But at least we have ourselves a new update here? :D
Thanks to everyone who favorite/followed, and particularly big thanks to all reviewers! I know that this story went on a bit of an unannounced hiatus for awhile, so thank you very much for your support even during this impromptu period of inactivity. Even though I won't make any promises as to when the next update will be, I promise I will do my best. :3
We get to a little bit of action in this chapter as the Bart pirates make their move to rescue a fellow member of the crew. Next chapter should be finishing things up in Radtep, I think. :) As long as I don't go off on a tangent while typing up the chapter… definitely by the sixth chapter, though! Hopefully.
Also, finally got around to adding a cover for the story! I think the colors of it are rather pretty. xD And it kind of does match what I have in mind for the story later on, huhuhu…
I started a new Tokyo Ghoul SI/OC story: left hand upon a mirror, so please check it out if you're interested in that! The first chapter is actually pretty long; approximately the length of a sky of glass… which I still have to go back and edit sometime. Whoops. Definitely considering adding in new scenes to it when I get around to editing, though, so I'll stick up a note if that happens. :D
… I'm sorry for being such a promiscuous writer who is so easily seduced by shiny new plot bunnies. (Hides face) It's just. Plot bunnies! Who doesn't like plot bunnies?
QUESTION: So far, everything in the story is basically being told from Seeri's perspective. What do you think about seeing POVs from other characters, or is that something you think I should consider after there are more canon characters introduced in pluck down the stars from heaven?
Till next time,
XxZuiliu