Escape

Characters: Ikkaku, Law, Heart Pirates. Rating: T. Warnings: None

Well, this was annoying. She glowered at the bars, and the Marine leering at her through them. Surely the Marines had better things to be doing with their time than chasing down engineers with false credentials and putting them in filthy cells before treating them like eye candy?

Something like hunting down actual pirates, maybe? Or just kissing the arses of whoever had the most money in this town. Ikkaku hadn't got far enough into finding out who, exactly had the deepest pockets in this place. Her fake documents had been sniffed out at the last port, so she'd had to leave a little faster than she'd planned, and somewhere along the way something had slipped out somewhere, because they'd been waiting for her with open arms and clinking handcuffs the moment she'd slipped off the boat.

Now, she was crammed in a cell with several other women, most of whom were either drunk and shouting slurs at their captors, or sitting like her and watching silently, waiting for a chance to escape. It wasn't worth trying to work with any of them; she'd made that mistake the first time she'd been shown the inside of a marine holding cell.

Rookies who offered themselves up as unknowing bait got used as bait. She had the scars to prove it. Now, she was a veteran, wondering which idiotic woman in the cell would try and form an alliance. Who she could use as bait to get out this time.

So far, no-one was showing signs, but there'd be one. There was always one, and it would probably be one of the drunk birds, once they stopped singing and realised their stay wasn't an alcohol-induced hallucination but real. Once sobriety crashed down on them and they became a sobbing mess.

Ikkaku was patient. She could wait.

A commotion drew her attention, leering Marines suddenly making faces that looked less hungry and more wary, and she let herself focus on it, careful not to betray her interest to the casual onlooker. There were some other women doing the same, carefully still looking around, seemingly ignoring the ever-louder ruckus going on somewhere inside the Marine base.

From the men's holding cells, if she didn't miss her guess. She might never have been in this town before, but Marine bases were all the same. Once you'd seen one, you'd seen them all. Past the women's block, across the courtyard, and then it was the men's. A cesspit of testosterone, always filled to bursting with idiots who thought they could openly defy the Marines and get away with it. Pathetic, really.

A blue sheen appeared out of nowhere, then the Marines were screaming in terror, and her curiosity spiked higher. Whatever was going on, it sounded interesting.

Different.

The bars broke. No, they didn't break, they sheered off, as neatly as a knife through butter. They fell, and at once every single woman saw an opportunity.

Pandemonium ruled, and Ikkaku joined it, not so patient that she'd pass by an obvious chance to escape, with so many others spilling out to distract the Marines - Marines who seemed to be in pieces on the ground, beheaded but still screaming.

She'd seen worse. Probably. Maybe.

At least, it was interesting.

But there was nothing for her in this town, her fake papers exposed before she even arrived, and the heady rush of a prison break took over as she leapt over the other women, leaving them in her dust as she dodged what few Marines there were still intact and hurtled for the harbour.

She needed another ship, another passage out of there. It didn't matter who they were or where they were going, as long as it was away and didn't care enough for the law to report her. Stowing away was an option, too. She'd done that before, laid low under the deck of some small fishing skiff until they were far enough from shore that there was nothing they could do about it.

There were no fishing ships in the harbour. Marine, with their white and blue flags flapping self-importantly in the wind, but nothing civilian.

Pirates, blasé enough to glide right in alongside Marines, littered the harbour. There weren't many, but there were enough. The problem came in choosing one to try. Pirate ships weren't like civilian ships. They were dangerous, ruthless and merciless, and often had ridiculous ideas about women and appropriate payments for the voyage.

She had nothing to offer, refused to stoop so low as to sell herself.

The blue sheen came again, a group of young men a similar age to her materialising out of nowhere on the deck of the most amazing ship she'd ever seen.

Metal - and with a kairoseki hull if she wasn't very much mistaken - there was something different about that ship. The engineer in her, the real engineer, not the one hiding behind false credentials, wanted that ship.

Everyone knew there was nothing more dangerous than someone with nothing left to lose. Beriless, reduced to nothing but the clothes on her back and on an island determined to lock her up for the crime of being too poor to get officially registered as an engineer, Ikkaku had nothing to lose.

She barged onto the deck of the ship, homing in on the man the blue sheen had retreated into. The other men - and bear? - were looking at him, to him, and he was obviously the captain, so he was the one she stormed towards, head held high as she met his gaze in a challenge.

He was taller than her, with piercing golden eyes that widened slightly when she approached. Any of the men could have torn her apart then and there, but they didn't. Eyes watched her from all angles, but her eyes stayed fixed on him.

"You broke me out," she told him firmly. It was an educated guess, and even if it were true he hadn't done it on purpose. It was a risk but all she had left were her guts and her instinct. Risks had to be taken.

He didn't dispute the claim. She pushed further.

"If I stay here, I'll end up right back in there. You got me out, so I'm coming with you."

The men started muttering, and one even laughed. The captain didn't join in. Those golden eyes raked her up and down, but it wasn't a leer, wasn't how she was used to men looking at her.

It was more like the way the other women in those cells looked at each other. Calculating. Determining who was useful and who was no more than Marine bait.

"What makes you think I'll let you?"

"You haven't thrown me off yet," she retorted, throwing everything into that gamble. She didn't know this man, this crew, didn't recognise the jolly roger plastered on the side of the ship. Didn't know their reputation.

"Tell me why I shouldn't."

A chance. A glimmer of a ticket off of the island, with its Marines and their grabby hands and blasted holding cells. Ikkaku met his eyes firmly, and made her final gamble.

The ship was magnificent. She'd never seen anything like it, but she was an engineer. She knew technology, knew when she was standing on something incredible, something most engineers could only dream of. This ship, whatever it might be, was an engineering marvel, and her credentials might be fake, but she was a damn good engineer.

"You don't have an engineer that can keep this ship running much longer," she said, half-bluffing, half putting the pieces together from what little of the puzzle she'd seen. "She's old, isn't she?" Too old for these young pirates, unless they'd been pirates since childhood.

She didn't care about their story.

"Old enough to start falling apart. Old enough to need an engineer to keep her running, and you won't find many engineers that can handle a ship like this outside of the Grand Line."

Golden eyes didn't give anything away, but she stood strong anyway.

"I can be that engineer," she said. "Get me off this island and I can repair your ship."

The muttering had silenced while she spoke, but she only had eyes for the captain, and he only had eyes for her. The rest of the crew didn't matter.

Then he looked away, eyes flicking left, then right, and over her head. She didn't turn to see who he was looking at, which members of the crew he was silently communicating with. The decision didn't take long.

"Very well," he said. "You have until we reach the next island. If you're telling the truth, you'll join my crew." His hand flexed, and the blue sheen was back, enveloping the two of them.

Her chest exploded, something erupting out of her and into his hand, driving her to her knees.

The heart in his hand pulsed.

"If you're lying, you'll die."

I honestly can't believe we're at 250 chapters. I've slowed up a lot over the last year (and if you follow me on tumblr you'll know it's because I'm neck-deep in another fandom), but I'm still poking at this from time to time and wow, I never thought this would be anywhere near this big. I still remember thinking it might, maybe, be ten chapters long!

This one was another prompt-sparked one: "adrenaline in a holding cell". Exploring Ikkaku's potential a little further was great fun; I'm not sure when I decided she was an engineer, but apparently she is now! In Tales-verse, at least.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari