If there's any reassuring thought she can cling to, it's that eating a devil fruit doesn't turn your soul into an anchor.
She's not sure exactly why. According to her previous (and ever-murkier) knowledge, devil fruits have the capability to alter their users (consumers?) at a molecular level. The fact that whatever property turns the users into 'anchors' - turns the entirety of the sea against them, more like - doesn't do the same to the user's soul is…
Reassuring.
Still, she thinks mutinously. How is it fair that Ilirya can frolic in the water while I'm stuck on the shore?
The chilly days of pre-spring have come and gone. The sun beats down overhead, the sky blue and cloudless, soaking into her like light shed off a heatlamp.
And she does feel a bit like a lizard, actually.
Ilirya is an otter, cutting through the small eddies of the narrow river with ease. Here, where the current moves slow, the river itself is glassy, almost entirely free of whitewater (good for swimming, bad for devil fruit users), deep enough that none of their feet touch the bottom if they try to stand. The bank is rocky, too, not muddy, which does wonders for the water quality. Deeper in the forest, most of the rivers have banks of mud and a fast-moving riverflow, so they had to be choosy.
She sighs, eyes drifting shut, enjoying the sun on her back and the calming wash of the shallow water. When was the last time she'd gone swimming? Her dip in the bay with Luffy, she thinks. If you can even call that a swim, daring rescue by Shanks notwithstanding.
She can hear the shouts and taunts, just as familiar and reassuring as the sunshine. Sabo and Ace are properly paddling around - slicing through the river like freshwater eels, movements practiced and strong - and Luffy is perched precariously on Ran's back, his dæmon in the form of a massive hippopotamus, Luffy himself shouting encouragements as Sabo tries to dunk Ace under the water.
Valentine is belly-down in the shallows (pebbles, thankfully, not mud), drowsy and lazily indolent with the warm sun beating on her shoulders and legs.
She's got her old blue pair of shorts and one of her ratty tank tops on, boots and socks discarded on the far bank. She's considering running back to the hideout without them on, honestly, and damn the consequences. There's nothing worse than the feeling of wet socks.
She wiggles her bare toes in the clear water.
The fronts of her shirt and shorts are soaked through, drifting gently in the shallows, fabric rucked up to her ribs, but it's nice. Her back is dry, sunwarmed, and her toes are pointing towards the riverbank. A lovely arrangement.
...As if on cue, Ran sinks deeper into the river, Luffy lets out a yelp, and a small wave floods towards her.
She makes a dissatisfied grumbling noise as - cold! - water splashes over her face, eyes scrunching shut. "Raaaan," she calls out, ominous. The bottom half of her bangs are soaked, now, plastered to her cheeks.
(She's just grateful that the rest of her hair is up - clumsily done and long as it took her, she did it herself - coiled and pinned out of harm's way. And she's happy that her kerchief is on the far bank with her socks and shoes.
Knowing the baffling tendency for things to go awry whenever all four of them are in the same place, she made the necessary call.)
"Sorry!" Ran shouts back, girlish and cheerful, rising back out of the water, massive, round, and hugely mahogany in color, wiggling a little as Luffy clings to her back, and Luffy laughs, full of joy. (Perched on Ran, he's got the size and the tenacity of an ant on a log.)
She squinches her eyes open, still narrowed to keep the water (relatively clean, but still) out of her eyes.
With a roving gaze, she manages to catch sight of Halia - a massive rainbow trout chasing Ilirya around the pools of clear, deep water - and Rels, a caiman with shiny eyes just peeping above the waterline.
She drifts (figuratively, not literally), made warmly sleepy by the submersion and the sun. She's stupidly vulnerable right now, on her belly and weaponless in the water, but she trusts the boys (Sabo and Ace, at least) to keep half an eye out for danger. That, and she trusts her budding observation haki to sense if anyone with ill-intent comes close.
Speaking of. Ace and Sabo are swimming closer to her, hints of blue and orange. She can't detect anything beyond the vague feeling of their presences, tuning out the soft murmur of their voices and the sloshing as they move through the water, and the feeling of them ever-nearer - proximity is an easy thing to detect, interestingly, especially when someone's in active motion - makes her crack an eyelid open-
She gasps as they seize her wrists and yank.
The gasp morphs into a shriek as she's submerged, panic-
Ace and Sabo catch her, easily holding her, weight made weightless by the water, and her belly lurches in fear as she clings to the nearest pair of bare shoulders she can reach, mind going fuzzy and muzzled. She hears the sound of laughter, though as she fails to make any audible sounds of hilarious panic, she hears it trail off into low, tentative questions. Concern. She wheezes, coughing as she inhales a spray of river water sent flying by her thrashing, and she chokes, fingers digging into the bare flesh of whoever the hell's to her right.
"-ey, you alright? Val?"
"Fuck you guys," she wheezes, clinging onto (who she now recognizes as) Sabo with a death grip, holding on for dear life. She's reassuringly surrounded and buoyed by the drenched and gangly limbs of the both of them, and she knows they won't let her drown, but just. "Fuck you forever."
"Huh." Ace grabs her under the arms, hauls her towards him through the sloshing water (Sabo lets go of her easily, traitor) and slings her onto his back like a wet kitten. Or luggage. She wheezes. "You're just like Luffy when he gets in the bath."
Wasn't there a better way to test this? she wants to say, maybe with an incredulous eyebrow raise and a sarcastic bite to the words, but all that comes out is a pathetic hnrgh. She uses the little agency left in her arms to coil them tight around Ace's shoulders, winding them around his neck in what vaguely amounts to a chokehold, twitching her legs tighter around his waist from where he's got his hands loosely curled under her thighs, holding her up in the suspended weightlessness of the water.
She's stable. She's submerged, but stable.
…And now that the panic of near-drowning has left her, she can sort of see what they were going for. Practical joke or not, though, she's pissed.
"You'll both pay for this," she enunciates slowly, head fuzzy, knowing that they'd never let her drown (she trusts them with her life and more, after all), but that retaliation is simply necessary. She can't let a challenge like this go unpunished.
Ace snorts in laughter, and Sabo grins. "Alright, wet noodle," Ace murmurs, and she chokes on another shriek as he starts wading deeper into the water.
Well, that's fast-forwarding.
Real life does not conveniently skip ahead a couple of months to when she has the slightest idea of what she's doing, no siree. Life is frustratingly linear, atrociously difficult, and as she lives it day-by-day, her problems are inescapable and nigh insurmountable, not solved-
Anyways.
Life gets back to the new normal. Hunting, again, and cooking a lot of their own meals over the fire, mostly, massive megafauna taken down with utter ease in a group of four.
(Valentine is incredibly grateful for Makino's constant no-strings-attached supply of fruits and vegetables whenever they sneak back for brief stops in the village or else she's pretty sure they'd all have scurvy.)
(And eventually, they start hunting in pairs of two, challenging themselves with the vicious restriction of less overwhelming numbers, but that comes later. For now, they're just happy to hunt together again.)
She laments her merely serviceable cooking skills. She's absorbed the bare minimum from simple observation - Makino is a fantastic cook (though her baking is only passable) and it's impossible not to learn something from so many hours in the kitchen, asking questions whenever the fancy strikes her - but she's afraid that most of her knowledge comes from Before, even fuzzy and instinctual as it is. Knowledge enough to be aware that for passable cooking, all you really need is attentiveness, the bare minimum of knowledge, and a good head on your shoulders.
That, and a willingness to learn and improve. But then again, that goes for pretty much everything.
(She's not sure she can claim any common sense, but she's got the rest.)
They liberate a huge frying pan from Dadan (a much more palatable move than taking anything from Makino's kitchen), and Valentine tends to use it more often than not when they're not just roasting their catch over the fire on a spit. (Which has its own merits, to be entirely honest. Any bite of juicy, freshly fire-roasted meat tends to be delicious, even with the gaminess of everything they catch around here.)
Ace, surprisingly, takes well to cooking, expression twisting into relaxed neutrality as he watches the rice or potatoes (or whatever variety of the filling basics that they've taken from Dadan) sizzling in the pan, poking at it with the spatula (again, liberated from Dadan, because the first time they tried this, Luffy enthusiastically went to stir the potatoes with a branch scooped off the ground and despite her lunging attempts, she failed to stop him and- well, things imploded, the way they usually do when she can't manage to cut Luffy off at the pass).
Ace has got all of Luffy's enthusiasm translated into a more intent interest (he likes to eat, he likes food, therefore: creating his own food is a good idea) and none of Luffy's utterly disastrous recklessness around anything and everything cooking-related, though he burns his eager fingers (and undercooks the meat) plenty of times before he begrudgingly learns his lesson. Ace is impatient, but he's got a good head for tactics, which translates strangely fine to cooking. He'll never be winning any awards, but by the time he hits adulthood, Valentine's reasonably sure he'll be able to properly feed himself without being poisoned.
...She doesn't want to think about Luffy anywhere near uncooked food.
Sabo doesn't have much of an instinct for cooking, but he always ends up being pretty good at whatever he puts his mind to. He has zero intuitive grasp of how to season and sear things (whatever he made at first was either ludicrously under or oversalted - sprinkled with rock salt stolen from the massive storeroom barrel at Dadan's - and unevenly cooked, bloodily raw and charred in turns), but as time goes on, Sabo applies himself with persistent determination (as he does with all things), and his acute desire to learn dictates that eventually he develops a serviceable schema for seasoning and basic cooking methods. He, like Ace, won't ever be a master chef - maybe especially won't be a master chef - but he won't burn the meat. (Often.) That's the most important thing.
Valentine resolves to get her promised cooking lessons from Makino as soon as it's safe to be back in the village for extended periods of time. She's the best out of the three, but that's really not saying much.
It takes them a couple days to start sparring again.
Valentine's the one to bring it up. The rest of the boys seem… not reluctant, exactly (and Luffy is enthusiastic about getting stronger as ever), but the general mood doesn't radiate overt excitement (even for Ace, who's usually pumped about anything and everything involved with sparring and competition). For the past couple days back, they've been hunting and lazing around, all of them a little clingier than normal.
She doesn't regret that, but it's time to start again.
Thankfully, their sessions in the grassy clearing under the sunshine don't seem any different from before. Although, of course, Valentine is still frustratingly behind Ace and Sabo in terms of ability. She knows it, really, but after everything, she'd think that-
Well, it doesn't matter what she'd think. And anyways, she has improved. In the space of just a few days, which is a bit too ridiculous to stand thinking about if she focuses on it for too long, because she remembers killing Porchemy and fighting Bluejam for her and Ace's lives and Luffy's safety for over an hour, and-
They slot back into a comfortable rhythm with each other, bantering and quiet and comfortable taunts, and in a breathtaking moment of clarity, it almost brings tears to her eyes. This is what she was fighting for. After it all, she was afraid she'd never feel it again, not the same way.
(And it's not the same, but isn't that a good thing? Everybody's a different person from day to day, and Valentine can't even imagine who she'll be in a month, a year, a decade.
She can't cling to who she was. Down that path lies dark truths.)
To her disgruntled irritation, whatever the hell her new sense is - maybe Observation Haki, she can't think of any other option, at least none that aren't extraordinarily troubling - it doesn't do her any good in spars. The rush of combat pushes all sense of tinted flickers from her mind, jarring and all-consuming, and honestly, what's the point of spending time trying to focus on where people are, anyways? She knows exactly where they are. Right in front of her.
So, her fledgling sense of Observation is useless in a fight. Great.
She still can't win against Ace or Sabo (neither of which are going easy on her, which is a relief, after everything that happened), but she knows she's improving. Fighting with people above her level pulls at her abilities hard, teaches her through blood and sweat exactly when to duck, when to punch, precisely the (twitch of the hand and the narrowing of the eyes-) tells people give when they're about to go for your gut, your head, your side. Theory is all well and good, but in a hand-to-hand brawl, the only thing that works for her are habits and knowledge beaten into her, writ into her muscles from a thousand fights. She strives constantly to improve, to learn, picking apart Ace and Sabo's maneuvers and peppering them with questions after her inevitable defeat, and though the latter two are somewhat taken aback by her exacting enthusiasm, they're pushed just a bit farther by her, too. She has no idea where they'd be otherwise (has no point of reference for their abilities other than vague senses and impressions), but she can feel them all growing and improving step by difficult step. Luffy included.
Luffy is similarly serious about getting better, though he shows it differently than her. He's always strove to become strong (strong, stronger, strongest), but he starts doubling down on his devil fruit training, teaching himself to use it through determination alone.
Speaking of.
The day after they start sparring again, she slips away from the group - throws an I'll be back later over her shoulder - and heads towards the clover meadow.
The weather is less lovely, today, overcast and chilly without the sun to ward off the cold. The morning had been cooler, so she still has her long sleeved shirt on (a bit disgruntled she can't wear her new crimson sleeveless top, but whatever, she still has the kerchief and the shorts), and the meadow is sedate, quiet, clover rustling in the breeze.
She settles in the center of the field of clover, crosslegged, hands resting on her knees. She closes her eyes.
"Can you go to the edge of your limits?" Valentine murmurs to Ilirya.
Wordlessly, Ilirya complies.
He traces his way to the edge of the meadow, slowly, and in the first moment she feels that pull - somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet away - her observation snaps back into her head like a rubber band.
"Stop," she calls out, calm, brisk, and Ilirya stills.
She can feel it. The 'pull.'
Whenever a dæmon travels too far, their human starts to feel it. Supposedly, it's the same for dæmons, too. A distracting, insistent sense of separation, a desire to reconnect, a creeping tendril of uneasiness. Come back to me. Come back.
But this is good. This is necessary.
"Stay right there," she says, and slowly, laboriously, her senses reach out again.
It's almost harder to do it on purpose, but the keen edge of discomfort brought by Ilirya's separation makes her senses reach just that much farther, hungry to feel, to touch, to reconnect. Before, when she was doing it without noticing, it was entirely random and natural, bursts of insight integrated so seamlessly with her constantly-running train of thought that she didn't even realize she was developing Observation Haki until she was describing the damn thing out loud. Now, it's like grasping for a consistent, shifting harmony, Ilirya - far away enough to feel distinct, a bubble of life, a spark - an odd echo of shifting sensation and color that she can only describe as… familiar.
Me.
A bead of sweat trickles down her nape, mind hazy.
It's like… when you first start to harmonize, it happens in bursts. At least it did for her. That intuitive leap, that reach, feeling the otherizing tang of the harmony falling into reality, understated and reassuring as a hand slipping into yours- that comes way, way later. Years later. Right now, hitting the right frequency is still a temporary and incredible thing, resonance passing perfect like ships in the night, beautiful and fleeting. Right now, it's-
Hard. So hard. There's that nagging sense of reaching and not quite grasping, feeling around clumsily in a dark, ever-shifting room she's yet to come to know where the answers change every half-second and she hasn't even realized the bare bones minimum, the question being asked. It's frustrating and discouraging, and she doesn't have anyone to say whether she's doing it right or wrong.
She's not sure there even is a right and a wrong, when it comes to this, to be fair - maybe 'right' is just what works and 'wrong' is what doesn't - but comparing observation haki to harmonizing works for her. She's always loved to sing (right?), though she doesn't really… do it, here. She's not one to sing in the shower (bath, in this case), not one to even sing aloud without music carrying the tune unless she's truly, ridiculously happy, so she doesn't often get the chance.
(That's a bit depressing to think about.)
Makino does. Her mom's voice is beautiful, melodic and lilting like a songbird, and it sends a pang through her heart that aches with fierce sorrow. Reminders. Kind or cruel, the world is unapologetic about those.
Valentine has inherited it. (Echoes upon echoes.) She's used to the sound of her own voice, now, but singing aloud and hearing a different lofty soprano used to make her throat choke up and her melodies go offkey.
(Luffy loves it when Makino sings, closes his eyes and smiles happily whenever she does. Makino used to sing them lullabies as they snuggled up to her, when they were little, one of the rare times when Luffy would be still and silent, utterly content. He'd stay talkative and wiggly during the story, excited, but as soon as Makino would start to hum, he'd go quiet, eyes glittering and wide in the dark.
He loves music.
He loves when Valentine sings, too, though she usually only does it when they're sleepy and cuddling and she knows he won't ask her any questions about it.)
None of the boys really share her predisposition, though they can all at least carry a basic tune. Ace's voice is surprisingly nice, while Sabo's is… not pitchy (that's the best she can say) and Luffy is much the same in that respect.
...What the hell was she trying to do, again?
Right. She furrows her brow in determination, exhales in a sigh. Observation haki.
Ace asks her a question.
It's offhand, barely audible over the noise of Luffy pestering Sabo nearby, the smell of cooking python mingling mouthwateringly with the aromatic sizzle of sunny-side-up snake eggs in the frying pan, and-
The juice of the meat, strung up on the spit directly over the cast iron pan, drips a steady drizzle of sizzling liquid flavor onto the eggs below. This was, she thinks, saliva flooding her mouth and stomach grumbling its eager complaints, a very good idea. Thank you, brain.
"What would you say to me and Sabo and Luffy becoming brothers?"
Valentine blinks.
She glances up, spatula in hand, to the crouching figure of Ace, just behind her, tugging gently on one of her bangs to get her attention, his eyes shadowed and his brows furrowed.
(Ever since she's started wearing kerchiefs, he's been oddly persistent about pulling her hair.)
"What would I… say to it?" Valentine repeats blankly, eyes following the movement as Ace lets her hair slip out of his (relatively clean, thank the heavens) fingers. Ilirya pokes his head out of her shirt, and - seeing Rels in the shape of a colorful salamander on Ace's shoulder - shifts to a red-throated anole, slipping out of her collar and scurrying down her arm to leap to Ace's forearm, scrambling up to his shoulder to harass his dæmon, brazen as you please.
Ace's eyes dart to the playfighting dæmons for only a moment, arms crossed over his knees, mouth downturned in a frown, before he nods tightly.
Oh, she thinks dizzily, lips parting. He's asking me if it's okay. He's worried.
"Nothing would make me happier," she says, honest, and smiles at the startled, triumphant, almost savage grin that breaks over his face.
(She pretends to stay asleep as Ace shakes Luffy and Sabo awake.
It's the dead of night, the witching hour, but the night is balmy and the breezes are gentle, tugging at the blankets, always whispering as they sleep in the treetops. She stays pliant and unresisting as rubbery limbs are extracted from where they tangle with hers, and Ace quiets Luffy's loud what-? with a hissing shhhh, clapping a hand over his mouth, already reaching for Sabo.
(The inky blanket of darkness gives the air a dreamy, unreal quality, especially so while she keeps her eyes closed and pretends.)
She drifts back out of unconsciousness again when they haul themselves onto the platform an unknown stretch of blurry time later, feeling as much as hearing their riotous smiles and poorly stifled giggles and the shifting weight of their dæmons (shh, you're gonna wake Val up!), flooding back into the tallest-tower open air common room of their hideout as they settle around her and slip under the blankets smelling of salt and blood and growing things. She feels her eyelid twitch as Luffy wiggles under the plush, warm comforter tucked around her and snuggles against her, arms stretching to wrap around her torso as he nuzzles the cold tip of his nose into her neck.
She keeps her breathing even and her eyes closed as she feels the quiet thumps of movement and shifting blankets around her, someone else slipping under and settling on her other side - shades of blue, hints of happy, familiar, Sabo - with their back to her side and their scratchy curls pillowing on her bicep, sighing contentedly.
She can't help her small smile at Ace's familiar litany of quiet grumbles as he searches for a spot, but by then, she's already falling back asleep.)
As if he even had to ask.
She very carefully does not remark on their mirrored cut-up palms, the following morning. All she does is rouse Ace and Sabo with handfuls of ice cold water to the face bright and early, cackling at their bleary-eyed curses, scrambling down the tree to escape.
(...Come to think of it, that may have been the catalyst for the summer swimming prank.)
She leaves the roll of bandages in plain sight.
(Luffy is the only one who escapes her tricks. He can take it, to be sure, but she has a soft spot for him. What's the harm in indulging it?)
Sleeping piled all together isn't always restful.
"Ace," Valentine groans, slurring her words into Luffy's hair. "Stop… moving."
Ace, whose arm is slung across her torso, face pressed into his pillow and facedown on his belly, gives her a muffled hgrk in response.
She's holding Luffy in her arms, the big spoon to his little spoon (at least someone can sleep through the whole night, even if he sleep-murmurs like nobody's business and drools like a leaky faucet), her back to Ace and Sabo, warm and toasty under the blankets. A little too warm and toasty, honestly, but it's not summer yet, and the pinnacle of spring gives the nights a lovely, warm cast.
And then Sabo - from Ace's other side - wakes up with a slurred whazzat, and Ace gives another muffled hgrk as he contorts to his right, grabs the nearest warm body (in this case, Valentine) and yanks.
She emits a muffled wheeze as the breath is knocked out of her (fucking hell but their strength is getting ridiculous), face falling in preemptive dismay as Luffy faceplants onto the blanket.
God dammit, she wants to say, except she really is tired, sleep thickening her tongue beyond eloquence and even simple speech. Luffy's face screws up in the precursor to a wail - she's seen him wake up and launch straight into tears often enough to know the signs - so she reaches, pulling him closer and dragging him across the scant inches of blanketed floor to snuggle back in her arms.
Luffy quiets, settles, and Valentine's expression sours. She's trapped now, immobilized between two lethal snugglers, but-
Ace, she thinks darkly. You are so gonna get it tomorrow.
She's humming a tune.
It's the first time she's been happy enough, relaxed enough, to sing, since… since she pulled the trigger. Everything's actually - really, honestly - fine, and there's no immediate looming threat to worry about, nothing that threatens to take her family away. Improving constantly is hard, and her devil fruit defies all known theories on what it could possibly do (brainstorm sessions with Sabo, held up in the lofty common room of the treehouse, just the two of them, start with endless possibilities and end with we have no idea for the nth time), but she's still got the opportunity to simply meander back from the river, basket full of washed clothes in hand. Ilirya's flitting iridescent-winged and fleeting along the spring flowers blooming off the side of the path, and her eyes flutter closed as she hums, warm, golden sunlight beaming down on her face as it filters through the trees.
It's lovely. Carefree moments to enjoy the sunshine and the clean air really are, truly, a priceless treasure. Not something to be taken for granted.
Sing, little hummingbird, hum no more / you have the ears of the flowers in bloom...
She hums, melodic and resonant, and on the bloom, she feels something catch.
The sustained note builds in her throat, her mouth, lips closed, and she feels it bounce.
Faster than she can even blink, it fills her mouth like syrup, and her lips part-
The blast explodes out like a starburst. A thunderclap of sound roars through the clearing - D-sharp, she thinks dizzily - and in a moment, it's gone.
She drops the laundry.
(I won't have my melodies / echoing off of these stone walls-)
"Hey, Luffy."
"Mm?"
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Mmhm." Luffy swallows his mouthful of food with a gulp, puffed-out hamster cheeks and all, and stares at her expectantly. "Whazzit, Vally?"
Myergh. Not her favorite nickname. "Just a quick question." She gestures at Ran - currently a raccoon scrabbling for scraps on the ground, so much like her person that it's almost absurd - pointedly. "Is Ran made of rubber, too?"
Luffy, who's already stuffed another huge bite of charred buffalo into his mouth (Sabo cooked today), speaks through his full mouthful. "Yah."
"...Good to know," she says, mind whirring, suspicion confirmed. She rises from her seat in the rocky dirt, giving Luffy an absent pat on the head as she passes him in her purposeful strides further into the forest. She passes a chatting Sabo and Ace, tosses an offhand be back soon over her shoulder. "Thanks, Luffy."
Ilirya perches on her shoulder, hawkshape, talons digging into her flesh, but she barely feels it.
(He might say where are you going, but she's already gone.)
"Condor's hokey," Luffy says seriously, and Valentine's forehead hits the table in front of her with a loud smack.
"Luffy," Ace says, condescending, "it's conjuror's hokey."
Valentine emits a half-scream/half-groan aloud, yanking a pillow from the floor beside her knee and shoving it over her head in an attempt to drown the both of them out.
"Conqueror's Haki, idiots," Sabo says, but she can hear the laughter in his voice. He's laughing at her, dammit.
"You're killing me," she groans pitifully. "You really are. You're killing the only Valentine on Dawn Island. I'm endangered-"
Luffy shouts something, words strung together because he's blurring mid-tackle, knocking the breath out of her as the pillow goes flying (it smacks Ace in the forehead with a squawk) and as her head hits the floorboards and the sound of Sabo's laughter floods her ears, her expression of dismay only deepens, worsens.
I give up, she thinks, despairing, staring blankly at the wooden slats of the wall, Luffy yelling in her ear all the while.
I'm never coming to the river again, she thinks to herself grumpily, stomping out of the shallows, dripping water.
She ignores Sabo's laughing shouts and Ace's unrestrained, hysterical cackling. Luffy, the little traitor, is giggling too.
(The fact that hippopotamuses can even grin like that should be illegal.)
"Never again!" she shouts, not looking back, unwinding her soaking fishtail and wringing it out like a wet towel.
River water floods from her hair in a deluge.
She stares, disgruntled, at the whole water-dark length of it, clutching it in her hands, eyebrow twitching as the boys' laughter only increases in volume.
Never again, she vows.
(In the spring, Sabo turns eleven. Luffy turns eight.
She gets Sabo a book on the real history of nobility in Goa - complete contraband, of course, but she has her sources - and arranges for Makino to make enough blueberry pies to feed an army.
She struggles with what to get Luffy. Beyond his attachment to his strawhat, Luffy's not a materialistic person. He easily (and unerringly) recognizes other people's attachments - especially to important objects - but he has little to none of those attachments himself.
So she gets him a book.
What's this, he asks loudly, curious and expectant, holding it out in front of his face like one might hold a kitten to inspect, and she tells him.
Physics of rubber, she tells him, giving him a pat on the head. Don't worry, I'll help you read it. We can figure it out together.
The book is tattered and worn, the cover a simple deep blue, clearly patched together from new materials to hide its contents. The body of the work is undated, printing details lost to time, titled simply a comprehensive overview of rubber and like materials in scrawling, handwritten script on the inside cover, the body of the text neatly printed and littered with notes scribbled in the margins.
Had to pull on some heavy connections to get this one, Simmons had told her, handing it over, the whole, the incongruous simplicity of it belied by the incredible, impossible lengths she'd gone to get it. It's from a bygone era. It's the most valuable thing I've ever gotten you, by far. A long drag from his cigarette. I'm sure you'll make it up to me.
She does. And it is, of course, worth it.)
She wakes up so fast that she misses the transition from sleep to wakefulness.
She's simply conscious, eyes wide open, tensing imperceptibly at the hand coming towards her-
And as soon as she tenses, she relaxes.
Just Sabo.
"Val," he whispers, hand making contact with her shoulder, rough from callouses but gentle as it can be. "Vee, wake up!"
Her eyes crack open and she shifts her lazy gaze to his silhouetted form, sitting up and still surrounded by blankets, staring out at the open half-walls and into the night. She focuses on Sabo - and the curled up form of Luffy, clearly recently pushed off of him, with the way Luffy's still clinging to Sabo's extended hand and forearm - blinking sleepily at yet another new nickname.
"Whazzit," she manages. Ace, throwing off heat like a furnace and plastered to her back, shifts and grumbles in his sleep.
"Look," Sabo whispers, pointing, and she does.
Her eyes widen.
This high up, they have an unfettered view of the forest, the sky. The open walls of their treehouse let the cold air in, but they let in the nighttime sounds, too, the rustling leaves and the starlight. And raining down-
Meteors, burning up in the atmosphere, trailing light and fire, burning into nothing before they hit the earth.
The velvety black sky is lit up like fireworks, unearthly and beautiful. It looks like the stars themselves are falling from the heavens, painfully lovely, and her lips part, breathless, awed, struck silent by the sheer beauty of it.
"A meteor shower." She's smiling slow and wonderous, feeling bubbling in her chest like champagne, and even as she speaks she's already extracting herself from the clingy limbs of Ace, skillful and practiced as she shakes him awake and pulls the snoozing form of Luffy into her arms.
She stands effortlessly, shedding the blankets and Ace's protesting grumbles and grasping hands, absently categorizing the feeling of Luffy easily latching onto her, Sabo tracing his way out from the warm haven of their blankets out to the deck.
She's struck, as she stands, by the sight of Sabo, his silhouette against the meteor shower.
Luffy's rousing gradually, more and more conscious, as she piggybacks him across the floor and outside, bare feet padding silently across the soft blankets and the sanded-smoothness of the planks. She steps onto the deck, the cold air hitting her like a punch, and-
She looks up.
"Wake up, Luffy-Lu," she murmurs, eyes bright.
"Vally, s'too early… five more min'ts…"
Quiet energy twinges, sparks, pensive and subdued. (Content.) "If you wake up, you can see something amazing."
She cuts her gaze to the side, tracing the murmured, sleep-rough words to Ace, standing a couple feet away on their precarious deck and looking up, up to the falling meteors, the stars.
Valentine doesn't love heights but the deck seems different under the night sky, stable and unmoored all at once. The canopy sits below them, rustling, the darkness and the night sounds lit up by the rain of meteors overhead, the glow throwing everything into flickering, irregular radiance, sporadic and harsh but incredibly beautiful. There's nothing around them but the open air, their fortress to their backs, and this high above the world it feels as if they're under cresting, frothing waves, breathing clean cold water in an ocean of falling stars.
Her gaze lingers on Ace's wild hair and bright eyes, the serene lines of his face, made soft and glowing in the starlight, before she turns her eyes skyward yet again.
"Thanks for waking us up, Sabo," she murmurs, leaning to bump her shoulder against his. Sabo's pale hair is painted almost white, his eyes dark and fathomless as they glance to her face, flickering over the silver, unearthly ring in her irises before flitting back up to the stars.
Their dæmons are still inside, fluffy and soft, curled up together amid the blankets.
"Whoa," Luffy whispers, awake at last, and then - for the first time in a long time - he goes completely, utterly quiet.
Valentine's on edge.
She's not sure if there's pressure in the air, or if the animals are acting strangely, or what the hell is off. All she knows is that she knows. Something is nagging at her, whispering, making her tilt her head consideringly as she reaches-
Therefore, she's not as surprised as she should be when her awareness spikes and Garp crashes through the trees, knocks their prey (a medium-sized snarling tiger) unconscious with a single punch over the head, and turns towards them.
"Shit," Sabo says. Alarmed, but not particularly inspired.
"Fuck," Ace adds, with more feeling, and Luffy parrots him enthusiastically.
Valentine sighs. She considers dropping the pipe in her hand (still the same one Ace gave her for her birthday, good quality holding up over months of wear and tear) to the ground, but thinks that'd be a tad too dramatic.
"Hello, Garp," she offers diplomatically, not a tinge of her felt bitterness in her voice, nodding in the direction of the hulking, gray-haired, hibiscus-patterned shirt clad disaster incarnate.
(Despite her bravado, Ilirya shifts from a snarling fox with flattened ears to a silent coral snake, slithering across the jungle floor to curl up her leg and slip under her shirt.)
"Kiddos," Garp bellows, flash stepping closer, the sheer force of his presence making her blink. "Who's ready to be a marine?"
Cue the chorus of dismay.
(Ace is eyeing Garp warily, no doubt expecting him to lash out with a 'fist of love' at any moment, but Valentine is well aware that this old dog is well and truly muzzled, courtesy of Makino.)
Garp steps forward, grinning, and she blinks curiously as he gives her a literal double take, attention skating right past her before snapping back to focus on her eyes.
Then she nearly bites her tongue because Garp is in front of her, a scant foot away, kneeling, casting a shadow with his hulking form and peering closely.
"...Where'd you get those peepers, kid?" Garp's brow is furrowed, eyes narrowed, and - in times like these, at least - Valentine can clearly see the Luffy in him, 'cause it looks like he's thinking hard enough that steam might start venting outta his ears at any minute now.
"I ate a devil fruit," Valentine offers warily, not quite confident enough to take a step back.
The boys are silent, tensed and ready to run, wary, dæmons clinging to arms and shoulders. (Garp's St. Bernard whuffs, tail wagging, but none of them are reassured.)
A split second after she speaks, Garp's face clears as if his 'thinking expression' had never been. (Valentine pictures someone sweeping the entire contents of a desk onto the floor with a mighty windmilling of the arms and a thunderous crash.) "Alrighty then," Garp says, cheerful, straightening up to his (ridiculous) height. "Marine training!"
(It's not a question.)
"Garp-san," Valentine says quietly.
It's drizzling lightly, warm summer rain. It trickles down her skin, dampening her kerchief from dark green to near-black, magnolia leaves slick with water.
"I've told you a thousand times, brat. Call me jii-chan." Garp's voice is gruff, matter-of-fact and insistent in that way he has.
(Despite herself, she can't hate him.
She wonders if Luffy and Ace and Sabo and- her? If they're the only remaining family he has. Excepting, of course, Monkey D. Dragon, his estranged, revolutionary son.
The most wanted man in the world, enemy number one of every marine that sails the seas.
Who does he have, in the closing chapters of his long, long life? Did he have a wife?
No wonder he wants them to join the navy. If they take any other path, every time they come face-to-face, they'll stand on opposing sides.)
The rain patters on the leaves, the rocky soil. They might have to go inside, soon. (Garp in their hideout, good god. She doesn't think she can picture it. Or that she wants to.)
Ace and Sabo are sparring at the moment, but Garp has them all rotating through different match-ups, and between all the spouted marine propaganda - which he lets loose in a truly sickening deluge - and the shouts of encouragement, he's been dispensing snippets of actually helpful combat advice. Which is an unexpected, though pleasant, surprise.
(Luffy is practicing his gomu gomu no…! pistols, determinedly and fueled entirely by the desire to prove Garp wrong, because - while Valentine only winced sympathetically when he did it - Garp laughed uproariously at Luffy's first demonstration of his progress, and that's gotta hurt.
Inaccurate or not, Luffy still punches hard enough to shake the branches of the tree he's colliding with, over and over, splintering the trunk by inches. Once Luffy fixes his aim and develops a sense for precision, Valentine knows those punches are gonna hurt.
'Garp the Fist.' One of his many monikers, yes, but it comes from somewhere. Figures it runs in the family.)
"Ojii-san," Valentine allows, ignoring the startled look Garp levels in her direction.
(Old as he is, different and changed by the world, in some ways, Garp is just like Luffy. His expression is an open book.)
"I've developed what I believe to be Observation Haki," she says. "I'd like your opinion, if you can give it to me."
Garp's eyebrows fly up as he guffaws, uproarious, ever-expressive. Over the sound of the rain, his laughter doesn't trail into quiet. It cuts off abruptly and he scoffs, the bark of noise making her jolt, biting her cheek with nerves.
"Don't mess with me, kid," Garp rumbles, traces of laughter lingering on his smile-prone face. "I didn't take you as the mischievous type. How did you even learn that word, anyways? It's not a toy to be playing around with."
"I'm not playing around," Valentine says.
She closes her eyes.
Her senses shift, tuning to another channel, reaching further into the metaphysical, and-
Holy shit. Garp's presence is huge.
Luffy and Ace and Sabo are like sparks. Whispers. She attributed that to her own fledgling haki sense, honed over months of sessions in the meadow, now, improving by inches, not thinking that-
Garp's aura is like a miniature sun. So bright, shedding power and light, radiant and destructive. It's a bit creaky, closer to a waning star (don't think about it-) than a young supernova, but it's utterly, incomprehensibly powerful.
"Holy fuck," she says aloud.
Her eyes fly open and Garp is looking at her intently.
Brow furrowed, mouth downturned in a frown. Garp has salt and pepper hair, even if his beard is dark, still, and he's getting older, weaker, waning, but she is now fully aware of the power that lays within his mountainous frame. For some reason, she's been thinking of him as an annoyance to endure - he used to hit Luffy, he's from the marines, he's never here - but now-
Her perspective has just been shoved into dizzying awareness. This man could destroy this whole island, if he wanted. He could shatter the ground beneath their feet. He could.
"An observation prodigy, huh?" Garp mutters, barely audible, narrowed eyes trained on her face. There's a sheen of something over his eyes, not visible but entirely visible, and with a jolt she realizes that he's turned his attention to her, his own haki focusing the full weight of its burning breadth to her spark, her fleeting, watchful eyes.
His St. Bernard is doing it, too, her usual energy absent and concentrated, pressed keen and razor sharp. She's eerily still, tail unwagging, staring straight at Valentine's chest, where - under her shirt - Ilirya is curled up.
Valentine is speechless. Even with her eyes open, she strains to keep her haki sense actively engaged; she looks towards him, unsure of what her own expression even is, and she can see the power haloing around him, wavering like a heat haze.
She blinks and it's gone.
"How do you know about this?" Garp says, and he's deadly serious. Frowning, for once, and it looks just as frightening and ominous on him as it looks on Luffy, the rarely-seen crackle of an oncoming storm, except Garp really is a natural disaster in the shape of a man, Luffy's potential filled and honed and changed over a lifetime of battle.
She is more than slightly off-kilter. "It just… woke up," she says. "Though I'm pretty sure it was my devil fruit," she adds, honest, the truth bent but not broken, twisted and uncertain. It's not a lie, right? She really has been thinking that the timing can't be a coincidence. "Nobody told me, or anything. I just…" She trails off mutely, shrugs hopelessly, taps her forefinger to her temple. "Know."
Garp looks at her, the expression on his face matching the look in his eyes and both fleeting, utterly indescribable. "Nobody's been teaching you?"
"No," she says. Truth. "I've been working on it on my own."
"You haven't seen anyone with red hair recently, have you?" Garp says, and-
Ah.
"No," she confirms, a trickle of relief tracing over her face with the droplets of rain, gentle and barely felt. She watches Garp's expression relax. Not recently. "Not unless you count Mrs. Horton, in the village, and her hair is more of an auburn…"
Not that I'd sell out Shanks even if he had been here. Shanks, teaching us about haki on Dawn Island… what a wild story that would be. She's not quite relaxed enough for a smile to play over her lips, but her neutral frown lightens, smooths out. Not mine, unfortunately.
"You'll be a marine," Garp says gruffly, a non-sequitur, patting her on the back several times in quick succession. She barely manages not to get knocked entirely off her seat on the log, the force of even a gentle pat barrelling through her. His handspan is bigger than the width of her back, and the power within it is staggering, entirely separate from the haki that he must be able to wield with near-mastery, and-
(Garp accepting her knowledge of haki (not just the power, the name) coming from her - to his knowledge - still-unnamed devil fruit is too good to be true. She knows Garp isn't stupid, and though he can be a little dim at times, surely he isn't overlooking this, right? No, he was so serious when he asked if she'd learned it from anyone.
Why is he letting it go?
Well, she thinks, bracing herself for her follow-up, galvanizing, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?)
"Can you teach me? Us?" she amends, speaking quickly. Talk before you lose your nerve. "About haki?"
Garp chortles, and in the space of a heartbeat it breaks into full blown laughter, echoing over the rain and the sound of Luffy's mantra, Sabo and Ace's familiar soundtrack of combat, the quiet sounds of the forest in the rain. "Do you really think you kiddos could unlock it? You're good, for brats, but you're not that good. Plus…" he looks at her. "What makes you think you rebellious brats even have the-" and he says something too unique to be translatable, here- "to learn?"
(Determination, you could say, but that wouldn't be quite true. Chutzpah is better, a word from her roots, that something, determination and resolve and heart all in one.)
"You said I was an observation prodigy," she murmurs, circumventing his challenge, curious.
"Comes along every once in a while," Garp grunts, begrudging, challenge fading from his eyes, hands settling on his knees. He sighs, weary, as his joints pop, and in that moment, he looks every single one of his years.
"Kids with Conqueror's. Armament. Kids with hard childhoods, usually, natural ability pushed to unlocking early… if they're trained, their power can be some of the best."
Valentine doesn't react to the mention of conqueror's, of armament, staring ahead at the boys, the warmly familiar form of Ilirya curling in shifting scales under her shirt.
"I got armament when I was seven. Hell of a story…" He laughs, but his good humor fades immediately, sours. "Course, that damn red-hair was one, too. From the second he set foot on that hellbound ship, that piano-key goatee first mate turned him into a weapon… a nine-year old spitfire with a smile just like that damn captain, knocking down trained marines…" Garp grits his teeth and sighs, distant, eyes lost in memories. "'Course, you don't have to unlock haki early to get good at using it. Didn't unlock my own observation 'til I was in my thirties! Another hell of a story." He shoots her a sidelong glance. "You still listening, pipsqueak?"
"To every word."
Garp chuffs, pleased despite himself, grumbling. "Right, well. It's dangerous, is what I'm saying. Even if you managed to unlock observation on your own, that ain't proof you can get the rest. And that's t'say nothin' about those other brats. The day my airheaded grandson unlocks haki…" He scoffs. "He's gotta learn to throw a good right hook, first."
Garp isn't entirely wrong.
She turns, looks him in the eye. Her resolve sharpens, eyes glittering, hands clenched into fists on her knees.
She won't lie.
"I don't know what I can do," she starts carefully, tentative and rawly honest. "I wasn't even- I wasn't even sure what I've been feeling is haki. But I want to know… I want to know how to be better at it." She inhales, eyes shuttering shut for a beat, opening again, gaze firm. "You never know if you don't at least try, right? If you'd teach me…"
She bows her head.
"I promise that if you'd honor me with your teachings, I'd do my absolute best, and… I'd use everything you taught me to try and do good. I'd never use it to be selfish, cruel, or cowardly. And if I did make things bad, I'd- I'd make up for it. I'd make it right." She blinks at the ground, head hazy. Where did that come from?
Apparently, what she's said is funny, because that startles a raucous laugh out of Garp. Uproarious, as all his laughs are, fullbodied. She jerks her head up out of her shallow bow, startled, as he quakes like a mountain range with the force of his guffaws.
"...For good, huh?" He wipes away a tear of mirth, and she reddens. "You've really got your mom in ya. That little speech was all Makino, right there."
She swallows and looks away.
"If you can show me that you really mean that," he says, "I'll teach you, kid." Garp's voice is firm, oddly serious in a way she hasn't heard from him before. She looks out to Luffy, determinedly punching the tree again and again (so different from the beginning, even if the silvery scars across his knuckles haven't quite faded, skin split open from pushing too far too fast-) and growing, improving, even as she watches, hands resilient and knuckles dusted with bruises, not blood. And then to Sabo and Ace, lashing out with flurries of punches and kicks, rough brawling honed like blades from pushing against each other, improving and growing like weeds, tenacious, perpetuating, life sparking determined and strong.
Her heart is full of feeling, but the empty spaces echo, still.
"And even if I did happen to teach you, you couldn't expect quick results," Garp huffs, scratching at his cheek as if he can't believe he's even agreeing. "Stuff like this takes years, and I can't stick around."
She nods, accepting.
She knows.
His voice is gruff. "You'll be a fine marine. Do good, huh…?" Garp laughs again, but it's quieter, and he looks tired as he runs a massive palm over his beard. What he says next is barely audible. "Haven't heard that one in a while."
She doesn't thank him.
(Thank god Garp doesn't try to lecture them on the theory of haki.
She can just imagine Luffy's childish, impatient tone - Val already told us about this, petulant, pouting - and the suspicious stare Garp would shoot her immediately thereafter.
Yeah, she's glad Garp is more of a kinetic teacher.)
"How are you all, just, vaguely disastrous? I was gone for an hour."
She can't keep the incredulity out of her voice, staring at the wrecked interior of their hideout. Most of the really important stuff is intact - the sake cups hanging on the wall in a small bit of stolen fisherman's net, the chests full of clothes, their reservoir - but the table is smashed, the blankets are torn, and the pillows are gone or exploded, shedding feathers everywhere. Even the rug is stained and ripped, a huge patch of brownish red (is that blood?) marring the woven surface.
She levels a flat stare at Sabo.
"Wha- I don't-" Sabo splutters, visibly wilting. "I'm- you're- there's- there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this."
"Oh yeah?" Her expression doesn't change.
"It was Garp," Ace says flatly, arms crossed and expression in what she likes to (privately) call his 'neutral frowny face.' "He just left for today to go back to the village. He's staying at Makino's." Ace's voice holds a hint of the not insignificant sense of incredulous betrayal he must be feeling. "Sabo pulled the stupidest move of the century-"
…And as the whole rest of the story comes out - Luffy chiming in with wildly inaccurate additions every couple seconds, Sabo looking more and more harrowed as each condemning fact makes its own dramatic debut - Valentine can't do anything but sigh.
"Renovation time?" Sabo sidles up to her cajolingly, slinging an arm around her shoulder and rubbing at the tense muscle of her bicep, carefully avoiding putting pressure on his bruises or her own. The warmth and weight of him makes her harrumph, and she turns her face away from him, but she's softening.
(When she's really pissed, people touching her only makes her angrier. But when she's cooling down, a little bit of cuddle tends to bring her down all the way. He is sorry, after all, and he did say it…
It's difficult to tell exactly when touch will make her angry and when it'll make it easier, but Sabo can read her like a book and he ruthlessly exploits it. Bastard.)
Valentine sighs, rubbing her temples with her thumbs. She ignores Luffy's cheer in the background, Ace and Sabo's relieved grins. "Alright. Renovations."
One 'game' that Garp plays - one that they've all begrudgingly come to enjoy, over multiple visits, beyond the reflexive terror, not that they'd admit it - is 'chase.'
Chase involves the four of them running like hell, obviously, while Garp chases them down. Lacking any corporal-punishment rights, he seizes his chosen victim and tosses them into the nearest river when (not if) he catches them. (Excluding Luffy, of course, for obvious reasons.) If they're far away from any rivers (or other bodies of water) when he grabs them, then it's a practice in futile escape attempts as Garp makes his way over to the nearest one. And Garp always knows the location of the nearest one.
(She very carefully does not think of anything from the past when she's tucked under the unforgiving weight of a beefy arm, struggling.)
Valentine - who has become abruptly unable not to notice Garp - has resultantly become proportionally better at Chase. It's every man for himself, in this game, half-competition of who can go the longest without getting caught and half a battle of wits as they sprint through the jungle, pulling on knowledge of shortcuts and surrounding hazards and terrain, and though she's worked together with Sabo or Luffy more than once when she comes across them - she's not heartless, after all - this game isn't a game about retaliation. It's a game about running.
Needless to say, Valentine forgets about her devil fruit until Garp's seized her in his inescapable, stupidly massive hands.
"Wait!" she yells, struggling, Ilirya shifting like mad and lunging at Garp's St. Bernard dæmon with fangs, talons, claws. (Is it Valentine's imagination, or is the dog deflecting Ilirya's attacks with contemptuous ease?) Panic chokes her throat, makes her fumble her words. "Don't- I can't-"
The rest of her sentence is swallowed by a shriek as she goes flying, arcing through the air, flailing as wind rushes past her face-
She hits the frothing surface of the river with a splash.
All she can think is I can't die here, I won't, but she's fully under and she can't breathe and she can't move at all, and horror rises in her ears as the world goes muffled, she can't breathe, she can't breathe, where's Ilirya, where's her dæmon-
Something seizes her.
She breaks the surface of the water with a greedy gulp of riverwater and air, a gasp, a wrenching cough. A hand bigger than her torso has got a hold on her arm, anchoring, immovable.
She realizes, absently, that water at drowning-height for her is still standing-height for Garp. Also, she can't stop coughing. "I gotcha," Garp says, maybe, or that could just be the water in her ears.
"Forgot," he offers her gruffly, pounding at her back with one massive hand. It very definitively is not helping her cough up a lung. "Won't happen again."
Ilirya curls around her arm, reassuring, and well, he almost killed her, but he made up for it immediately after, so she figures it's even.
Time passes. Garp leaves. They're all happy to see him go.
(Except in the corners of their hearts where they aren't, not at all.)
Sabo's missing front tooth grows back in.
They're all in varying stages of tooth-losing, which is a phase that Valentine isn't fond of revisiting, but she musters through it. As she remembers doing, as soon as any of her teeth start to feel wiggly - an odd, alien sensation, but she can roll with it - she pokes at it with her tongue and worries it back and forth absently, savoring the odd metallic taste of blood in her mouth, ruthlessly yanking it out, eventually, when it feels loose.
The first time she loses patience and yanks out a tooth, it's on the hunt. Sabo, hearing her muffled curse, like her mouth is full, glances behind himself absently-
He yelps at the fountain of blood pouring down her chin.
"Val, what?" Sabo's voice goes high pitched and squeaky, and then Luffy looks (and so does Ace) and it's a whole thing. It's like none of them have ever yanked out a tooth before.
...Apparently, Ace and Sabo just let theirs fall out on their own. Weirdoes.
Luffy hasn't lost any of his yet, but after seeing Valentine with her face all bloody from pulling one of hers out, he's morbidly excited. Go figure.
Nobody grows rice here (something about the climate being too dry?), but the whole of Goa gets a lot of it imported, mostly for consumption by the common folk in Foosha and other outlying villages because it's so cheap. And there's a huge barrel of it in Dadan's storeroom, which means-
She nudges Luffy's hand away with the back of the spoon. "S'not done, Lu."
"But it smells so gooood," Luffy whines, arms snapping back to his sides like rubber bands, and it does. He's not wrong.
(She keeps a gentle touch with Luffy.
It's half-Makino's doing and half-hers, gentle reprimands and soft words in the place of violence and punishment, but she greatly prefers it. Now, when she wants Luffy to listen - because it's important - all she has to do is let him know with the cast of her eyes, the lilt of her voice, her hands.
And the thing is- Luffy has got such a high emotional intelligence that that's all he needs! Luffy doesn't need to be hit to know that whatever he's done is wrong or bad, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.
...Which means that if he keeps doing whatever thing he's doing even when your body language tells him to stop, then he's ignoring you. Boy, that'll be fun to deal with later.)
The rice smells so good, this time around, because instead of using river water (boiled to kill germs and microorganisms, but still, doesn't do much for flavor) they're using chicken stock. And by 'they' she means she. She's the one who got the extra soup broth from Makino, after all, though she employed Ace's help to lug the whole pot of it back to the forest.
It's been cooking away for a while, and the proportions of liquid to rice have been eyeballed, but that's fine. If she fucks it up she can say it's a risotto and none of them will know the difference.
"Heya, Val. Why d'ya got those flowers on the table?"
"I like 'em."
"Why?"
"Cause they're pretty and they smell nice, Luffy," she says patiently, reaching over and plucking a posy out of the bowl. The bowl itself was a gift, of course, from-
"They smell nice?" Luffy looks curious, scrambles over to the table and shoves his nose into the blooms.
Valentine doesn't bother stifling her smile.
"I guess they're alright. Better than trash! But meat smells better. Do y'think-"
"You can't eat the flowers, Luffy."
Luffy's cheeks puff out and his lips purse in a moue of confusion. "Then what's the point of them?"
Valentine smiles ruefully, stroking at the petals.
"I think they're pretty. That's all."
"Why? All the colors? But you got all those colors, too. You don't need the flowers."
That startles a genuine laugh out of her. Her mirthful peal of laughter rings out over the trees, the faraway birds winging off into the distance, the leaves rustling in the canopy.
"I like flowers a lot, Luffy," she says, grinning. "Plenty of them have colors I don't have, anyways. And even if they didn't…" A mischievous smile curls over her lips. "You and Ace have the same hair color. Does that mean we should only keep one of you?"
"No!" Luffy yelps, a look of almost comical dismay breaking over his face. "No way!"
Valentine laughs again.
"Was it a good thing?" Ace says. "That I was born?"
"You know," Valentine murmurs, staring at the sky, "Sometimes, I ask the same question about myself."
Ace's head whips to the side, staring at her incredulously from where he lays, hands pillowed behind his head. "What? You?"
The clover meadow is peaceful, sun bakingly hot, the vast expanse blue and cloudless, and-
She laughs humorlessly, keeping her eyes skywards. "Surprising, right? You'd never think so. I try so hard, train so I can be strong and stay alive…"
She trails off, staring into the blue. She can feel Ace's eyes on her, feel the weight behind his words, nonchalantly delivered and entirely, heartbreakingly meant, a non-sequitur from their earlier, peaceful ramblings.
"It's not so often anymore," she says, "but I used to ask myself all the time if it was really a good thing that I'm here. Maybe ASLV would be better without me, you know? ASL instead." She smiles, a wry quirk of the lips.
"That's so damn stupid," Ace says, voice hoarse and clear and laced with the fierce whipcrack of lightning. "We wouldn't be- we wouldn't be us without you."
"No," she agrees easily. "You'd all be different. But it may be better that way."
"Like hell," he says, "like hell. I can't even- that's so stupid. If you weren't here, then Sabo would be- and Luffy would- and I-"
He's stumbling over his words, uncharacteristic. "I can't even picture it. How it'd be if- if you weren't here." He reaches over to clasp her wrist, eyes intent on her face, even as she looks towards the sky.
Rels and Ilirya are curled off to the side, a cat and a fox.
"Then how," she says, "do you think I feel when you ask me that question?"
She turns to look at him slowly, cheek pillowing on the clover, expression melancholy and thoughtful as she looks into his wide eyes. His hand burns, on her wrist.
"I can't give you the answer I think you're looking for, Ace. Do you wanna know the truth?"
She smiles softly, unyielding, hand twitching out of his grasp, curling up to twine her fingers with his. His grip, at first, is slack, eyes dark and startled, but a heartbeat passes and he's gripping her hand almost bruisingly tight.
"I love you," she says simply. "I'll always be glad you were born. I'd kill to keep you alive, and I don't know what I'd do without you in my life. I…" she fails to swallow the knot thickening her throat. "I can't tell you to keep looking for the answer. Because… I'm selfish, and this is my answer. The only answer I'll ever be able to give you."
She focuses on the sky in his eyes, the stormclouds, deep and unfathomable. She looks past his stunned expression and into the core of it, his emotion, his sorrow and uncertainty, burning orange and toxic like poison, like fire.
"Yes. I think it's a good thing you were born."
"Did you ever want to talk about it?" she says to him, one day.
"Hm?"
"What your parents did to you."
Sabo pauses.
The smallest hitch in his movements gives him away. A moment later, he's scrubbing the shirt like nothing's wrong - one of Ace's tank tops - and gazing into the gently churning whitewater of the river, expression neutral.
"I don't see the point."
Her movements are even, efficient and practiced, methodical as she scrubs at one of Luffy's shirts. Sabo's movements are a little rougher, unused to doing laundry as he is, but he's managing.
"There's always a point. Talking about things is how we process them."
"I don't see how."
"It's just talking out loud. It's the same for everything, you know. That's why I kept trying to figure out my devil fruit with you. Talking helped me think about it."
"Well, maybe I don't want to think about it."
He stops scrubbing.
Good timing. He'd been washing the same spot for almost a minute. Any longer and he might've worn a hole in it.
"Why?"
"What's the point?" He doesn't stand, doesn't leave, but he looks, abruptly, like he wants to.
Sabo is not a person who runs away from people, or his problems. But even this…
It's never fun to start. Starting is the worst part.
"I'm always okay to listen," she says to him, soft. She starts rinsing Luffy's shirt, dunking it in the moving water and letting the suds wash away. "It doesn't burden me at all to hear about what happened. If it helped you at all, it'd make me happy."
"Why don't you talk to me, then?"
Sabo is scrubbing at the next shirt.
She considers it.
(The water keeps flowing. Never stopping, never stilling. Isn't that how it goes?)
"Did I ever tell you about how I killed Porchemy?" she asks, knowing the answer.
"...No." Sabo's voice is quiet.
"He wanted my hair," she says, hands deft and unfaltering as she folds, leaning to put the shirt in the 'clean' basket. "And he was taking me somewhere so he could get it. This was after you got taken. I'd been suffocated, but that type of unconsciousness doesn't last long when you can get air back immediately after, so I woke up while he was carrying me off."
Sabo is silent.
"I pretended to be unconscious while I planned. I didn't have my pipe, or any of you guys… just Ilirya. I think it was the first time since I met Luffy that I had been truly, actually alone."
She grabs a new shirt and starts to scrub.
"I surprised him. I used Ilirya's power to outmaneuver him. I only punched him once, you know. After that, I stole his pistol."
She pauses.
"I didn't shoot him right away," she says, soft. "I didn't want to."
She swallows.
I didn't want to.
A beat.
"But I did. He said-" he'd torture and kill Luffy, then me, make Ace watch- "-some things I won't repeat. And I couldn't let them happen. I wasn't strong enough to let him live, so I killed him."
(The squeals of a pig, splattered blood and brain and bone and a ruined face, a soul falling into golden dust, the hiss of rain fading into eternity-)
"And that's that," she finishes softly, rinsing off the next shirt.
Sabo speaks.
(I think, until then, she doesn't say, I didn't know the price of being alone.
I know better now, exactly what to do. So I never have to pay it.)
"How are you doing that?"
"Hm?" Valentine is panting and sweating, still on-guard. Ace won't try to take her out while they're talking, or anything, but he's fast enough that she can't afford to relax, even for a conversation. "Wha?"
"You keep moving before I swing." Ace's eyes are narrowed, shrewd, perceptive. "And it's not just this time! It's been happening for a couple weeks. I swing but you're already moving out of the way."
"Oh," Valentine says, because oh.
Oh.
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Notes:
So many notes...! Such a long chapter, too. I hope y'all enjoyed. I've had it written and posted on ao3 for a while (Echoes has a lot more readers there, oddly enough), but with such kind and anticipatory reviews here, I had to go ahead and format it for posting here as well. :)
I'm on hiatus for now (not sure exactly how long), because this is the last chapter before a timeskip!
That being said, onto the actual notes. :V
-the song Val is humming is titled (fittingly) 'Hum' by Clara C. The yt link to the song is embedded in the ao3 chapter, but I couldn't make the formatting work here. :/
-the note for 'bloom' in the original version of Hum is not actually D-sharp. If I'm not mistaken, it's something from a G chord! (could be wrong tho, I don't have perfect pitch ^^;)
-'Think About It' by American Authors is the anthem for this whole arc! (I can't quote the fitting lyrics in order to entice you into listening to it, or else I'd be quoting the whole song. It may or may not be your style, but damn is it fitting!)
-If you're at all curious (which I'm sure you're not, it's just a small detail), Ilirya's preferred 'long-furred cat' form is a Norwegian Forest Cat/Ragdoll mix. Both of which are fitting for a number of reasons. The coloration varies!
-Aaaand, if you recognized the moniker 'oncoming storm' and Val's little speech to Garp, that's because it's a poorly hidden Doctor Who reference! I wanted to pay homage, just for fun. :)
This chapter is dedicated to all you wonderful reviewers. :D
(Y'all really did inspire me to get off my ass and format this chapter for posting here, so I'm being entirely honest...! :'D)
It'll be a while 'til next time, but I hope you enjoy the chapter. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kind reviews!
I'll see you after the time skip. :)