One Piece and its characters belong to Eiichiro Oda. Mirim belongs to TWP.
She had screwed up. Big time. The man in the kitchen was apparently her boyfriend, her boyfriend-turned-fiancée right before the war broke out. His name was Keita and she had scared the living daylights out of him when she pulled her sword on him. She had felt ashamed and confused when he revealed it. Ashamed because she pulled a sword on someone who was apparently close to her and confused because she could find no trace of a lie in his behavior. She was naturally suspicious of marines because she had stayed with pirates for so many months but Keita was not a marine, he was a blacksmith and apparently he had made her sword for her when she became a vice-admiral.
Again, she had been a total bitch. And now she was a bitch who was lost in the Navy HQ.
She groaned and fell against the wall, her admiral uniform heavy on her body. Why was the uniform consisting of a suit and ridiculously large, decorated jacket anyway? It was heavy over her shoulders. She sighed but pushed herself off the wall. What if a soldier passed by and noticed how she acted like a sullen child when she was supposed to be an admiral? Did they not pass as role-models for the rest of the Navy? She turned around the corner and saw a tall man speak to his subordinates who quickly saluted him and left.
'Hey, maybe he knows where my office is?' She walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and shrunk back at the glare he sent her way. This man was old and the glare he sent her way was terrifying. She swallowed quietly before opening her mouth.
"Excuse me sir, could you help me find my office? I'm afraid I'm a bit lost." The glare quickly disappeared and he stuck his hand out.
"Quit the formalities. I am Vice-Admiral Monkey D. Garp. I've heard about you and your amnesia, Shiroi Tori." She blinked but shook his hand nonetheless. At least there was a friendly face in this building. Everyone else had turned to salute her and wait for her to walk past, seemingly very nervous it only made it awkward when she tried to ask them the location of her office. It seemed like no one knew at all.
"It's nice to see a friendly face, Mr. Garp. Since I'm sure you know this place better than me, do you know where my office is?" The man nodded and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "Come with me, youngling, I'll show you the way." It was not a long walk but there were so many twists and turns Mirim quickly found herself lost again. She was tempted to grab a hold of the older man's coat and hold on to it like a child until they were at their destination but kept her hands firmly in her pockets. The mood eased up as Garp began to tell her about the old days when he went out chasing Gold Roger in his days of glory and she found the tales incredibly amusing. She even felt so much at ease with him that she popped a few jokes of her own. Once they had arrived her had offered to help her with her paperwork, to get back into the system which she clearly had forgotten, judging by the way she seemed to stare at the stacks of paper with the expression of a lost child.
A few days into the paperwork Mirim looked up at Garp who was filing the papers into three stacks, the important stack, the somewhat important stack and the not-so-important stack. He was an old man but still a good man. She got a better vibe from him than she had gotten from the admirals and fleet-admiral when she had been brought to Marineford. At least there was something familiar about the old marine and she felt comfortable around him.
"Despite you being older than me my rank is still higher than yours." She snickered and he looked up at her disgruntled. "Why is that, gramps?"
"Watch it kid, you should show some respect to your elders." He waggled a finger back and forth, mock-scolding her and she laughed, at first, before a terrible headache set in.
"Younglings should show respect to their elders." It was Garp's voice in her head, there was no doubt about it but the sentence was differently worded. Was this a memory? She was not sure but she knew that it felt like the back of her head was being stabbed by needles. A giant warm hand landed on her shoulder and she looked up through lidded eyes to see Garp staring down at her worriedly.
"Shiroi Tori, are you alright?" She blinked her eyes, shaking her head a bit to clear it and the pain slowly disappeared.
"It was just a headache." She said with a tiny smile. "You're right Mr. Garp, I'll be depending on you a lot until I get my memories back so please take good care of me." A relieved smile made its way onto Garp's face and he nodded, patting her shoulder. He tried to ignore the fact that she looked so much like her mother, Maya the master thief from East Blue, the woman who had on many occasions sailed with Gol D. Roger. Garp had on more than one occasion battled it out with her as well and having battled with both Mirim and Maya Garp had come to realize one thing.
Mirim was by no means as powerful as her mother had been but Mirim had yet to learn and master all of her powers. Garp feared that if one day, when she finally managed to use her powers again she would remember who she really was and unleash a catastrophe upon Marineford. He had volunteered to keep an eye on the girl until he retired. He somehow felt that it was his responsibility since he had known about the powers being passed down each generation in the Kazemi family. He had never told anyone, just like he had never told anyone about Ace being Roger's son.
He was responsible for Mirim. He would not pass that duty onto anyone else. She had saved his grandsons' life.
He owed her a debt. It was about time he paid up.
He straightened up and looked around in the room, trying to find any hidden den-den mushi. There were none. He leaned down and clasped her shoulder again, tightening his grip and gaining her full attention.
"Watch your back Mirim. Not everything is what it seems here." Her eyebrows scrunched up in confusion but she did not manage to ask him anything as he waved at her and left her office. She was rather stumped as she was left behind and at first she wondered what he had meant but when she noticed she was left with all of the paperwork alone she fell face first into her desk, ignoring the throbbing in her forehead.
"Damn geezer!" How was she supposed to finish all these stacks of paper as tall as her alone? She had subordinates, who seemed to be wary of her for some reason. Had she been a harsh boss? Unforgiving, cruel? Could anyone tell her? Considering Garp's personality she sincerely doubted he would socialize with her if she was such a bad person. The man was rather blunt and sometimes did not know when to shut up, she had learned. Still, she preferred his company over many others, like Akainu. That man rubbed her in all the wrong ways. Aokiji was agreeable enough, at least he did not have such a strict view of how justice should be practiced. Akainu was, in her eyes, barbaric, no better than the pirates he hunted.
To hell with it, she thought. Since she was fresh out of memories of what kind of person she really was she could start anew. Nothing wrong with that.
Which brought her to think about the Whitebeard pirates. Even if it had only been for a short while she had lived a good life with them. They were not as savage as many other pirates which she had read reports about. They had been a merry gathering of men, and nurses, who enjoyed a good party as well as sailing the Grand Line and New World. Actually, at all the islands they had anchored at they had been treated civilized by the people who had the Jolly Roger over their town. Actually, they had seemed like heroes. From many reports Mirim had read and understood that living in the New World was extremely dangerous. Pirates all over the world aimed for the One Piece, which had been announced to be real by Whitebeard himself during the war, and it said itself that pirates would dock at the different islands to restock on supplies or raise a bit of havoc while they were docked.
Her impression of the Whitebeard pirates were that they were not savages. They could be a bit rowdy when they had a party or when they were attacked but they were a merry bunch of men. They did not execute any needless violence. She shook her head and went back to the paperwork.
She had to admit, the civilians of the New World had guts to stay in their homeland and live there, considering the fact that there were so many pirates and a limit to what the Navy could do to help them.
Innocence
Meanwhile, on the New Moby Dick, there had not been a moments rest for the pirates since Mirim had disappeared. While Whitebeard had wanted to rule in the possibility of the girl just taking off on her own as she usually did he could not bet on it. Without her memories she had no inkling as to how to call out her powers. No, the old pirate captain thought, something else had happened. They had to find the girl as soon as possible for he had a bad feeling about this. He had Marco search from the air, Jozu and the rest of the Commanders on foot and the various islands. Ace he kept on the ship, fearing another war. There were few things that frightened Edward Newgate, the list was relatively short but losing his family was at the top of that list.
His crew and allies spread out, searching for the girl and information about her whereabouts and after a week of careful combing of the New World Marco landed on the deck of the New Moby Dick in front of his captain, his expression grim and worrying his comrades.
"Well?" Whitebeard asked, not the most patient as the search had grown longer than he had cared. He wanted the location of his daughter. He wanted to immediately set sail to find her and bring her back to safety and Marco was using too long to gather air in his lungs to calm himself.
"The marine's got her." Marco said gravely. "She's in Marineford."
At the very same time, in the plane between living and dead, the embodiment of four elements stared at the fifth, worry rolling off of them in waves for in the fifth sphere, where there should have been a raging tornado, there was but a soft, cool breeze, and a cluster of memories sealed within.
"This is not good." Mizu said and the others nodded in agreement. This had never happened before, it should not be possible for this to happen but somehow it had. The real Mirim was caught in limbo, her shell wandering aimlessly in the world of the living. The four elements had to quickly find a solution to their predicament for they feared what would happen should this go on for much longer. Air was the element of freedom which could not be tamed. What would happen once the breeze turned into a raging tornado again and be unleashed on the world without having a master to contain it?
There would be chaos, there would be pain and there would most certainly be causalities. What were surely inevitable were a broken bloodline and an age of chaos without an end. That could not be allowed to happen, no matter what.
