Chapter 12: You're Out Of Touch

Check the Author's Notes at the end for answers regarding fic situation + the long gap in update + the nasty anon reviews + how things are going.

A week later, just as the day approached noon, Holliday was just about done compiling his notes - or, at least, ones that he'd be passing on to his superiors.

It wasn't about Raine the potential Outsider - though she had a place in there as a point of interest, it was worded carefully enough not to give away her identity - or the history of the island as taken by the last person that could be considered a longtime inhabitant; those were personal pet projects where he could theorize to his heart's content.

These ones were a grab-bag of facts and rumor, organized by date and subject and the sometimes-nebulous threads of connection between them, detailing the eternally shifting nature of alliance and rivalry in the various criminal groups in West Blue… or at least the ones that he could learn about in Ravenspurn.

Truly, if he was in the position of being the only spy responsible for covering West Blue's underworld with the tacit expectation of bringing in absolutely everything possible, he'd be writing more than just one novel a month - it'd be an entire encyclopedia set, riddled with bullet holes and burn marks from every person who took exception to being noticed in such ways by the Revolutionaries.

Not that he didn't get shot at occasionally in his current position, but he liked to think that once or twice a month with the odd storm of lead every six to seven months was a reasonable amount for his age.

A loud yelp of excitement saw both his and Marshalsea's heads jerk up from their respective reading - one last review of the notes for Holliday and an astoundingly explicit romance novella for Marshalsea - to its source.

"Freedom!" the 'face' of the Twenny Fish Biker Gang yelled, dropping to her knees on the main floor of the Dead Admiral as she threw her hands upwards. "Finally! SWEET RELEASE."

Marshalsea made a sound of annoyance before going back to her book. "Oh, those idiots."

"They finally clear their tab?"

"Fuck no. Zahlia probably lost more money trying to teach them manners than it would have taken to just replace everything they broke. They just managed to use up all of her patience."

That was no small task, but considering what Holliday had seen of them at different points, he could believe that the Twenny Fish outfit would be the ones to manage it. They weren't one of the more vicious outfits available in West Blue, but they certainly had that combination of 'loud' and 'eccentric' that made them easy to either love or hate and even that kind of love could get worn down very quickly if you were the one cleaning up after them.

Thankfully, that wasn't his problem to deal with, beyond adding the development of them leaving in his collected notes.

"So what was the new deal you cut with them?" Marshalsea asked as Zahlia cleared the staircase to join them at her grandmother's favored table.

"I gave them until sundown to get out of town and a three-month ban on coming back. I'm hoping one of them has a long enough memory to hold onto that detail for at least two - Bommy said something about Port Gothame and the underground fighting rings there, so that should keep them distracted for a while," Zahlia said, sitting down heavily, a cold bottle of beer already collecting condensation in her hand. She pressed it against her forehead. "Doesn't do a damn thing for my headache right now, but I'm sure I'll appreciate the peace by next week."

Holliday wished he had the same privilege - unfortunately, he'd gotten a message only yesterday from Oberon that he'd be coming into town 'soon', which meant headaches of another kind while he put up his fellow Revolutionary.

Honestly, there were times where he wished that he got assigned to the North Army instead. Morley had too much of a taste for drawing the loud eccentrics under hir banner… well, whenever they weren't already part of Ivankov's entourage, inside or outside of the prison that ve could probably leave at any given time if ve really wanted to.

…then again, it was still Impel Down, secret floor or not.

Marshalsea laughed. "If you're really lucky, they'll run on the wrong side of the Syndicate and you'll never have to worry about them again."

Holliday clicked his tongue. "I thought the Syndicate were mostly into smuggling?"

While he didn't normally spend time in or around the Ilusia Kingdom, he had been involved with operations in Gothame enough to know the name of the organization that defined the country almost as much as its nobility did.

"You know how it is with the mafias in West Blue; they might say they specialize in one thing or another, but they're all good at making and moving bodies," the old pirate said, waving away the idea. "Besides, with that Bege mowing down the leadership of all the big players around here like they're his lawn, there's enough of a power vacuum for tempt even that group into expanding operations past their usual comfort zone."

True. The Underworld was defined by the dynamics of power and almost entirely on the basis of getting more of it. "Got all that from reading my notes?"

"And the newspapers, seasoned with a little personal experience," Marshalsea said with a shrug. "I probably don't know who's under the masks now, but the Curlew I knew back in the day was always a sneaky bitch looking to get more of what he already had. This is definitely something he'd've jumped on and I wouldn't expect whoever he picked to be the next one to be that much different."

Hm. It'd definitely be something to note - outside character witnesses for any of the 'faces' of the Syndicate were rare enough, even if they were only qualified to speak on the previous wearers.

The fact that it was another look into a history barely anyone outside of the organization concerned with it was a small - small, the spy insisted to himself - bonus to a historian thirsty to learn something new.

"Tell me about the Syndicate of yesteryear then," Holliday said, cracking open a fresh notebook.

Being a night owl was better in a world with internet.

This wasn't a new observation, but it'd been further driven into my head by the week spent on bedrest as I quickly ran out of the books Meryl had supplied me - paperback lesbian porn could only last so long, apparently - life without the wide world of the interwebs was… unpleasant. Especially without my ADHD meds curbing my need to go-go-go get stimulation right now.

I wanted my wikis, my internet chat rooms, my creative writing boards, my fanfiction! My drawing tablet and the infinite potential of colors contained within my art programs!

But 'wanting' didn't just magically make 'having' happen.

So I had to find something else to do before I ended up chewing on the furniture.

"I'll help you clean up," I declared to Meryl, making the girl jump up in place from where she was sitting. "Even if it's just reorganizing things. I can manage that."

"You should still be-"

"I'm fine, Meryl. A little stiff, but that's not unusual. Just gotta keep up with my stretches and I'll be as limber as I ever get." I gave a twist at the waist as demonstration, finding myself pleased by the lack of popping noises, even if my muscles weren't particularly happy with me at the moment.

I wasn't generally good at keeping up with my physical therapy exercises, but circumstances had forced familiarity with the benefits of doing that. My meds helped more, but I didn't have those right now.

…maybe I should have brought that up to the doctor I was regularly checking in with, I realized as I started to move to the most important room in the house to keep clean - the kitchen.

And, upon walking in, I wasn't at all surprised by its condition.

True, the place had backslid a bit in the time I'd been down for the count, gathering dishes in the sink and a sense of mild panic in the placement of things on the counter, like the various pots, boxes, and bowls had been juggled and then dumped to move onto something that was right on the verge of catching fire, but on the other hand, I wasn't seeing or smelling anything that seemed like it needed an exorcism either.

Meryl wilted as I turned my attention back to her, her fingers twisting around each other nervously.

"I let it get bad again," she murmured.

"It's not that bad." Seriously, it was just a hair under normal for what I'd have my kitchen, barring the foodstuff being outside of the proven secure-from-mice cupboards. "And it happens."

"I shouldn't have let it get this bad in the first place-"

"It happens, Meryl," I said, cutting her off as I swept a bit of flour dust off of the counter and onto the floor to get cleaned up later with a broom. "It's not great that it did, especially if it makes you sick, but it's not always something you can avoid. Not all of us are built to be constantly cleaning, even when we're at our best."

I certainly never was.

"If it makes you feel better, you probably have more of your life together than I could have managed at your age," I offered as I switched to the sink, pulling out the dirty dishes to sit to the side while I got the main thing cleaned up. Sinks were always attracting nasty shit in my experience, so it was best to deal with it first before relying on it to help clean anything else. "Hell, you're doing better than I did when…"
My sentence stuttered off as I realized what I'd been about to say. Instead of continuing, I threw my attention into applying elbow grease to the brush I was attacking the sink with.

"When what?" Meryl asked.

…well. I wanted to try open communication with her. I owed her the effort.

I took a deep breath.

"My grandmother died… not too long before I came here," I finally got out. "It wasn't sudden or a surprise, but it was… an adjustment."

An adjustment to silence, to being alone and adrift without the woman who had been the one fixed positive point of my entire existence for as long as I'd had it.

"There were a lot of responsibilities with that. Taking care of the funeral, paying bills and taxes, sorting out paperwork… and some stuff got pushed to the side. Laundry, cooking…" I set down the brush as I looked down at scrubbed steel, shining just bright enough to reflect a hazy picture of myself. "Making sure the sink was clean."

It'd been the calcification of the knowledge that I'd known beforehand for years - that it'd been easier taking care of my grandmother than it was taking care of myself. Making things better for her had been a joy, a way to express my love for her through acts of service.

Taking care of myself hadn't been the same thing at all. It'd likely only been thanks to a few family friends that I hadn't just laid down and starved myself to death during the first two weeks after, and even then I'd stuttered between lethargic shut-downs and pointless activity, working at anything but the problems I should have been dealing with.

There were probably piles of her clothes still left at home that I hadn't touched, despite months of talking about taking them to Goodwill.

"Aunt Brenda hasn't been gone for even a year yet… and, and sometimes it still feels like it was just yesterday," Meryl said, breaking the awkward silence I'd let build. She sounded like her heart was on the verge of breaking. "Like she's going to just come back through the door and everything will be alright again."

"Yeah, it's like that." I'd had dreams about that. About my grandma coming back to haunt me, even. Pain free, happy, and bringing a warmth back to the house that I hadn't fully realized was gone without her.

And then I'd wake up and the house would be just… empty again.

Not warm, not cold, just… nothing.

Meryl sniffled. "How long has it been for you?"

"Eight months." And fifteen days, if you shortchanged a few hours difference. Not that I was keeping count.
"And you're just… fine?"

"No." That was a little too harsh. I pulled back my emotions a hair, letting the tension run out of me in a long exhale. "I'm not fine, but… I'm better. And you shouldn't measure yourself against me. Grief isn't a process that has a strict expiration date or a… clean stage-by-stage process. You'll make progress and backslide and force yourself through bottlenecks and sometimes put off processing things for ages. And it's different for everyone you lose."

My grandma had been old, riddled with cancer, and in near constant agony. For her, it'd been a waiting game over the course of two weeks, visiting the hospital and then the hospice to sit next to her for an hour or so at a time, even if she couldn't appreciate that through her medicated sleep. For her, death was a release.

My grandpa's death had been the same - not cancer, but Alzheimer's, sanding away a vibrant, sharp-tongued jokester until my memory only supplied the picture of a doddering old man who fumbled his way through the same three stories like a broken record and spent more time asleep than awake.

For most other people, though, it was abrupt. Like a phone call cut halfway through a sentence or a conversation ending with a pause held too long, it was the unannounced arrival of a present absence where there used to be a person - the worst was when it happened while you weren't looking. The ones that only came to your attention weeks or years too late to do anything but wonder how you could have missed something that important.

Something hot and wet traced down my face without warning. I pushed my sunglasses up to wipe away the tears. Wasn't the time for that.

"I'll make some tea," Meryl said, bringing me back to the present. "If you want to take a break."

"…yeah, that's probably a good idea."

I made my way to the sitting room, bare feet skirting over cool stone as I took a seat near the fireplace.

It only took a short amount of time for Meryl to return, two mugs of tea already throwing the faint smell of spice into the air.

"I think it's your turn to do the talking, Meryl," I said, taking my mug and taking a test sip. Still couldn't quite get over that Meryl had one of the few teas I actually enjoyed. The fact that she'd added the touch of milk and honey needed to make it perfect for my taste didn't go unnoticed. "I've dominated too much of this conversation."

"A-alright."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"I don't even know where to start," Meryl confessed, turning her mug around in her hands.

"The beginning's usually good."

There was a minute of silence as Meryl gathered herself.

And then she began to tell her story.

"I don't really remember my other parents, but Aunt Brenda was always there. My whole life, she was always looking out for me, teaching me everything grandfather couldn't. How to read, how to tell the weather, how to use my power," she said, flexing her power to draw a small bird from one of the pictures on the wall to her hand. She reached up to rub at an awkward place on her shoulder. "She even taught me how to fight the way they did on her home island, since I could make a bird big enough to carry me, even if I don't think I'm good enough to be called a 'sky knight'."

One of the Sky Islands? Huh. That was interesting. "Skypeia?"

Meryl waved the bird away, sending it back to its frame. "Birka, I think she said."

Oh. Oh no.

Meryl, not catching my reaction - because I knew Birka was gone - as being out of place for the conversation, continued talking. "She was… the pillar of my world. The strongest person I could imagine. I couldn't imagine her ever losing to anyone or anything."

"And then she got sick."

"It happened fast. Aunt Brenda was fine one day and then by the next week, she… she could barely get out of bed." There was a pause and the intake of a rattling breath. "I did what I could to take care of her, but I didn't… I didn't try to get anyone else to help. Not for three days. And then Doctor Livesley couldn't do anything and…"

She stopped talking to wipe the start of tears away from her eyes.

"They had to destroy her body. To keep the disease from spreading. They kept me under observation for a while after, but I guess I got lucky and didn't catch whatever it was she'd gotten."

Meryl fell quiet for a moment, biting her lip as she clearly weighed if the next thing she was about to say should be shared or not. "Sometimes, I wish I had. Maybe dying would have been better than living and messing things up for everyone still here."

Now that was a thought I could both understand and absolutely not allow to take root in her mind. "Hey. If not for you being alive, I probably wouldn't be alive right now either," I pointed out. "Do you think anyone else in this town would have been in the right place to notice my boat and then been the right kind of person helped the random stranger inside? I'm not exactly a prize, but I like to think that saving my life's worth something."

Meryl stared at me for a long time before a lopsided smile - still on the verge of tears, but in a way that felt infinitely less miserable than where she'd been a second ago. "I guess it is."

"So, besides wandering around outside and rescuing damsels in distress," I said, trying to get the conversation moving again. "What else have you been doing? Going through your aunt's things?"

I mean, the lesbian porn had to come from somewhere…

"No. I… I haven't felt right doing it," Meryl said. Her fingers twisted around in her lap awkwardly. "Mostly, I've been working - flag design down at Allardyce's depot."

Oh, right, that job that had called her away a few times between my appointments with Shelley. "That busy a job?"

Meryl shrugged. "Not really. It's regular enough, but most crews have their own flags that they don't need help making. But I'm good at it and my powers don't let colors fade or run, so that's a big appeal for some people, and it's just… easier to work there than stay home and…"

She trailed off.

"The worst part… hasn't been feeling too heavy to get out of bed and take care of the house. It was… crying so hard and for so long that it hurt. Not being able to eat because I was so miserable. In the first month, I threw myself into work every single day I could stand to move just so I wouldn't have to think about it. It's the only thing I've kept up with. I think I've made more money in the last year than I have the rest of my life, but it wasn't about that. It was just about… having something to focus on. To have a reason to get out of bed."

Meryl did a quick count on her hands.

"I'm… I think I've got over a million Beri in pure profit from eight months of work."

I had almost no idea of what that meant in monetary terms I could comprehend, but… "That's a pretty big number."

"Yeah."

"And you're going in again to work today?" At Meryl's nod, I considered the idea that had impulsively popped into my mind and decided it was actually a great idea. "Alright, I'll come with. Help you out a little."

"-what?" Meryl asked, seemingly caught off guard. "Are you sure you can do that? With your back?"

"Well, maybe not any heavy lifting, if that would be on the table," I added quickly, twisting my back a little as I stood up and enjoying the satisfying pop that came with the movement. "But I don't feel like I'm about to come apart at the seams just from moving around and it's better than going stir-crazy around here on my lonesome. And having an extra artist on hand won't hurt anything, even if I don't have your powers or your exact skillset."

"…well, if you say so." Meryl said before grabbing my kitten and plopping her into my hoodie. "And you should take this with you, just in case. I still don't trust it, but it was a big help getting Doctor Shimon to you on Stonecutter, so I guess it's not entirely evil."

"She's just a regular little cat and even if she wasn't, you don't have any cattle for her to curse in the first place," I said with a small laugh as the creature in question rubbed her face up against the patch of skin under my ear. "But I suppose the only way that I'll stop you calling her an 'it' is if I give her a proper name. I'm thinking… Jeanne."

"Why that?"

I smiled as I glanced down at the little black kitten on my shoulder. "One of my grandmother's precious people was named that. And I believe in names given in honor of kindness."

The newly named Jeanne purred, apparently pleased with my pick.

"C'mon," Meryl said, catching my attention as I fastened my scarf around my neck, careful not to catch Jeanne up in it. "The town only calms down for a little while around noon and Allardyce's shop is on the other side of it."

On the way to Allerdyce's shop - right on the seafront, naturally enough for the nature of the business -, we stopped by Shelley's office, Meryl waiting outside while I went in to check on the doctor.

As I'd come to expect from previous visits and Shelley's flexible schedule, it was empty, except for a couple patients sleeping off their surgeries in a side room.

Shelley himself was sitting at the desk in his main examination area with a sort of languid energy that I knew myself from the dull times spent at home in front of my computer - thoughts wandering without any clear direction as a problem that refused to be solved at sat like a rock at the forefront of your mind, the desire to get something done quietly driving you crazy the whole time.

For me, the usual suspect was the process of writing - chapters of story left to gather dust over the course of months as I banged my head against the skeleton of an outline with no ideas on how to fill the gaps required to actually spin the story and update the damn fic already, but I doubted that the surgeon-slash-optometrist-slash-vet-slash-whatever the next person to walk in needed was doing anything as simple as fanfiction.

Still, it was close enough to make me preemptively sympathetic. "Doin' alright there, Doc?"

"Oh, well enough," he said, pulling away from the object of his frustration. "I was just thinking about you, actually."

For anyone else, that could be bad. For a doctor and someone I tentatively considered a friend? I didn't quite have the same worry - follow ups and check-ins were good things there. "Not anything too serious, I hope."

"Serious enough," Shelley said, spinning his chair to face me head on. "I'd like to discuss options for your back."

That took me off guard. "What?"

The surgeon gestured vaguely at the diagrams on his desk, an invitation to step forward and look that I took gingerly.

Delicate sketches of a human spine with notes scribbled on in a much harsher marker were interspersed with technical drawings and walls of scrabbled text that would take time and concentration for anyone other than the original writer to parse out.

"I obviously need to take X-rays to get a more formal accounting of what needs correction and how to approach reconstruction," Shelley rattled off, sliding into shop talk easily. "But based on what I've seen and heard so far, there's nothing that's completely beyond my abilities to correct. Mostly a matter of time, resources, and-"

I cut him off. "That's not what I meant. Why are you doing this?" I asked, gesturing at all the papers. Were some of those order forms? How much money had he already sunk into this?

Shelley stared at me. I couldn't pin down if his current expression was exasperation, absolute judgment, or the simple absolute confusion of being presented with an idea completely alien to one's sensibilities. "Why wouldn't I?"

Why wouldn't he? I had a thousand and one horror stories from my world that would illustrate exactly why in excruciating detail. Surgeries like this, if they even existed, were expensive and almost impossible to get if you were poor and unconnected… which I very much was. Shelley had never struck me as the kind of doctor who would deny treatment for 'not being in enough pain', but there was one solid wall of undeniable fact still in the way.

"Because I don't have the money-"

"I wouldn't ask you to pay for it."

"You can't just waste resources like this on someone like-"

Shelley leveled a Look at me that made me cut my protests short. "Giving aid to someone who needs it is never a 'waste'. Just because you can survive your current quality of life doesn't mean you should have to."

The words were like a punch to the chest, knocking the wind and all of the protests out of me.

"I know there are doctors who only care about fame and influence and how much they get paid. I am not one of them," he continued. "Raine, you are in need of care. I am capable of giving it. Just because someone told you that you didn't 'deserve' help doesn't mean that you should spend the rest of your life in pain… or that any effort or resource spent in making you well is wasted."

For the second time today, I felt the hot salt burn of tears threatening to spill. This time, however, there was a laugh threatening to explode behind it.

Almost thirty years around 'good', 'god-fearing' Christians content to simply let 'inconveniences' like domestic abuse coast on by because it was 'inconvenient' or 'unbecoming' to get involved in someone else's 'family matter'. All of the 'friends' who thought it was funny to step on my PTSD triggers and see how far they could get me to bend before dropping me as 'uncool' and 'immature', no matter how hard I tried to meet their impossible standards and be the perfect whatever they wanted.

And barely a month of living in a pirate town got me the offer of having what had been called 'unfixable' fixed for nothing at all.

And coming from one of my own characters too.

There was something hideously funny about that. All of those people insisting that 'God would fix me if I just prayed hard enough' or that 'I just needed to grow up' and it was a man made in my own image by my own hand when I was at my most 'immature' who was going to fix me.

"And that's why you're a good doctor, Doctor Shimon Shelley," I said, swiping my eyes clear. "Better than any I've had before."

Shelley looked away, a faint blush tinting the grey pallor of his skin, something that was most noticeable on his ear. If not for that splash of color, there would have been no other tell of his emotions shifting at all. "And you are a good… patient. I'd hate to lose you."

Oh, so he was a kuudere. Cute.

"We can talk about those X-rays the next time we see each other," I said, hands vaguely miming the path I'd be taking to the door as I got ready to vamoose. "I promised Meryl my help this afternoon, so…"

"Oh, I almost forgot." Shelley lifted up a few bottles, rattling them. "Your medication."

My brain briefly experienced a 404 error. "My medication?"

"Yes, someone brought over your old prescriptions last week. There was a little bit of a difficulty finding a match for your antidepressants, but I was able to get one with a fairly similar composition from a chemist I know a few islands over," Shelley said as he pressed the bottles in my hands. "You probably are familiar with the process; if there are any adverse reactions-"

"-I'm to come in immediately to talk about you about it, not quit cold turkey," I finished, looking at the bottles with faint wonder, a warm sensation bubbling up in my chest.

I hadn't been expecting this. Not that I was going to complain, because I liked my body behaving itself and that required a steady schedule of chemical intervention, but…

I paused as I reached the door to the outside, hand resting on the handle as I prepared to rejoin Meryl. "Thank you."

The corner of Shelley's good eye crinkled slightly - the one tease of a smile on his otherwise stoic face, still carrying the light rosy color of that earlier blush. "You're very welcome."

Meryl looked at me as I joined her, Jeanne purring away happily on my shoulder. "You look… happy? Like, really happy."

I realized the involuntary pulling sensation in my face hadn't quit yet. "Oh, yes. I am. Looks weird, doesn't it?"

Meryl held up her hands to stop that train of thought. "No, I like it. Grandfather says that uncommon smiles are uncommon treasures."

"Is that a nice way of saying my smile is lopsided?"

"No!"

"Hhhehehhehheh!" I couldn't help laughing, the wheezing, rasping noise of it startling Meryl. It wasn't a loud laugh, necessarily, but it was always one that caught people off guard the first time they heard it. "Hehhehhhehehhh!"

"What kind of laugh is that?"

I snickered again. "Muttley, I've had some people call it."

Jeanne made a chirping noise that almost sounded like a laugh itself.

"What's a 'Muttley'?" Meryl asked.

"A dastardly dog belonging to an even more dastardly dick," I answered vaguely before casting my eyes upward towards a sign. 'Rope and Canvas Depot'. "Is this the place?"

Meryl jumped, eyes scrambling around for a moment. "Oh! Yes! I should introduce you to Allardyce. She's a bit strange looking, for someone not used to non-standard humans, but she's very nice once you get to know her."

Meryl was right, there was something uncanny about looking at an otherwise normal looking older woman who just happened to have the neck proportions of a giraffe but staring - or asking how a member of the Snakeneck Tribe ended up in West Blue - would have been rude.

The feeling of 'wrongness' evaporated quickly though as soon as I started interacting with Allardyce though - for all she was physically built differently, she had the familiar essence of an older cool aunt, the kind of person who came to family cookie day with a grin and left after we'd finished up with the rum balls... and after she'd finished up turning the last of the dough for that into a dubiously accurate-to-life cock and balls.

God, I missed Aunt Angie. But if Allardyce - 'Call me Al, sweetie' - was anything like her, barring the healthy dollop of Southern charm, the experience of knowing her promised to be fun.

"So you're an artist like Meryl, huh?" the woman said, studying me through eyes crinkled by her smile. "Must be interesting, getting to chat about that. I don't have the hand for it myself, beyond knowing what dyes are good to keep their color against sun and salt."

"My skill set is probably a bit different than hers, but I figured I should help her out a bit." And feel a little less like a freeloader in the process.

"Why bless your heart," she said, leaving me to wonder if that was a genuine blessing or the Southern kind - the accent made it ambiguous - and then if I was reading too much into a four word statement. "Well, I've probably spent enough time jawing at you. You kids just let me know if you need anything."

Holliday had a feeling he was missing something. Not just with Raine the outsider, but with everything he'd been following as of late. The history of the island, the activity of Marines in this part of West Blue - it'd been quiet, but not the kind of quiet that inspired reassurance -, and a dozen other things he'd figure out a name for likely just in time for something important to fall apart.

But for now, there was one thing he could ask about and probably get an answer for.

He tromped up to Marshalsea's table, sitting down with his notebook. "What else can you tell me about the Dacey family?"

"It depends; are you asking me as Holliday the spy or as Orsin the historian?" Marshalsea asked, eyeing him carefully.

The spy sighed. "...Orsin. Even if I keep having to remind you to use my alias. Calling me Orsin is asking for nothing but trouble."

"It's good to be reminded of who you really are. I've seen too many people lose themselves in their own legends… especially when those legends are of their own making," the old pirate said, waving off any thoughts of operational security. "And, personally, Orsin's a much more interesting person to me than Holliday, even if you keep trying to bury him."

Holliday looked away into the fireplace - not as blazing as it would be come night, but still lit to chase away the light chill of Ravenser's climate. "He was careless - he didn't think about the consequences of his actions, his dreams. He's better off buried, so I can do what's needed to make up for my- his mistakes."

"Love," Marshalsea said, breaking into a rare gentle tone. "You can't bury someone's true spirit, even if you kill 'em. You can break their heart and confidence, at least for a while, but dreams and spirit…? Hah. They're not so easy to put down. You should know - if you didn't have yours, you wouldn't still be fighting."

Holliday didn't have much to say to that.

They sat in silence for a while before Marshalsea shifted in her seat and slowly stood up.

"Look, if you really want to have some sort of historical bone to chew on, I've got some books stored up in my room - scrapbooks and the like," she said. "It's limited, but it'll help dust off my memories so I can tell you as much as I still know about the Daceys and anything else."

Almost immediately, we ran into a customer with a problem that was all too familiar - the complete lack of any communicable ideas to go with the desire to have something made.

"...ma'am, you have to pick something," Meryl said, thirty minutes into a discussion that had managed to go nowhere and then make four loops of the place. "You can't just say 'skull' and just expect that to work. You haven't even given us an angle to work with."

The woman, a very solidly built lady who was about half the surface level stereotypes about Russians packed into a cranberry-colored fur coat, looked confused. "Why not? Is pirate symbol."

The captain's cohort nodded in agreement, cementing my initial assessment of this group being more meat and potatoes than 'great intellectual discussion' types.

Meryl looked like she was about to pass a kidney stone dealing with this guy. "Almost every pirate's symbol. You at least need to…to put your hat or facial hair or something unique on it."

"Why? I don't have facial hair."

Jesus Horatio Christ on a pogo stick.

"Because it means nothing," I said, jamming a finger into the rough sketch, which, at this point, was more eraser streaks than anything else. "You have a basic image, one that does say 'pirate', I'll grant you that much, but you've stripped it of any personality that could say anything else. It has no ties to you or to anything beyond its most basic form as a white skull on a black flag. You can shout your name to the heavens, but this flag presents nothing. It's cardboard against the ocean waves - unimportant and easily washed away by the tides of time."

"Make the skull… red?"

Fuck it. "You know what? Fine. Red skull." I thought for a moment, studying the customer's face. She had a strong bone structure and nice hair, but nothing that really stood out as unique except - ah, that little dot right under the corner of her lip. "And we'll stick your beauty mark on it too. Those are always fun."

Meryl picked over the rough a bit as I offered what little I was comfortable suggesting before we turned it around for the customer to look at.

This went on three more times, prying another barely helpful guideline out from the captain with each attempt, before thankfully getting a nod of approval.

It wasn't an easy process getting there, but the clean finish made up for the initial frustration.

Hopefully, the rest of the day's work would go better.

It took about ten minutes for Marshalsea to return from her room with a decent pile of scrapbooks and photo albums. "Took a little bit to find these - buried them pretty deep in the closet. Probably didn't want to dig into the memories too much - it's not my usual way of doing things.."

She paused, thinking.

"Speakin' of that - where did I leave off the last time you asked about the island?" Marshalsea asked. "I think I mentioned that they had their own language and the general state of the island before… this, right?"

"You did," Holliday confirmed. "A people with a thousand year history, wiped out by plague about…"
"Bout seventeen years ago was when it finally ended, I think, though it'd been running for about eight or ten before then," Marshalsea said, thinking it over. "Easy enough to get glossed over, given that this is a pretty obscure corner of West Blue - when it comes down to some slow disease that mostly just affected some backwater nobodies, you know it's just not going to get the headline so long as there's something flashier going on somewhere else."

"Unfortunately, yes."

Marshalsea sighed. "Thinkin' about it, Brenda was probably the last victim of the plague to die. She didn't go from the infection like some of them, but she never got over what it did to her lungs."

That was an unfortunately familiar story for a lot of the mercy missions the Revolutionaries took - they could give a malnourished kingdom medical aid beyond what even the wealthiest of the world could afford, but there was often some kind of permanent damage done. "Was that one of the things that pushed you to retire? Brenda's health?"

"Nah, that didn't happen until later. Most of it was getting chewed up by Benbow - I might have come out of that fight in better shape than he did, given that I'm still alive to talk about it, but… well, between the injuries I took and the fact that none of my surviving crew were getting any younger either, I had to make a decision. And I decided to pull a Roger and retire gracefully at my peak."

"Most people now would have a very different idea of what 'pulling a Roger' would entail."

"Hah. Probably. But he was an odd duck - not a bad one, but weird all the same. Made you want to be better, to match his boldness," Marshalsea said. "I'd swear the world lost a bit of luster the moment they executed him, like the sun just refused to shine as bright as it used to. Or maybe that's just what happens when you live in a grey place like this."

Orsin was reminded of what it'd been like the moment that he'd found out the Government had caught onto his research, almost twenty four years ago. The color had run out of the world too, but instead of darkening, it'd leached out, almost instantly as the terrified realization had set in.

But it didn't go dark until he'd seen those fears properly realized, watching his home island burn, because of a project he'd refused to let die.

The fire, for all it'd consumed that day, was cold.

"I know the feeling," Orsin said quietly.

A minute of silence passed before Holliday - Orsin tucked safely behind the mask - found the words to speak again.

Unfortunately, my hopes were soundly and thoroughly dashed.

The next guy to stand out was… slimy. Not physically, no. If anything, he looked normal. Just a douchey looking white guy in his mid-to-late twenties, with the kind of middlingly ordinary face generous relatives might have argued as 'handsome', dressed in button up shirt and cargo shorts, and confident as anything in his right to exist, but it was his expression that told me he was going to be the pain in the ass customer of the day, which wasn't disproven by his opening statement.

"So, this works with me telling you what I want, right? And you have to do it."

That was not a confidence inducing opener. "Within reason."

"Well, so long as you want to get paid…" he said, spreading out a stack of beri that went way beyond what any appointment would have been expected to run. "You'll be doing what I say."

So many alarm bells. But sometimes you had to deal with unpleasant people to get through the day, and being an annoying jerk wasn't exactly a capital offense… at least for most people. I doubted that anyone that crossed a proper pirate or one of the more trigger happy Marines tended to survive long with that kind of attitude.

But me? I was just regular, so murder wasn't an option. "Were you going to describe what kind of flag you wanted or were you just interested in wasting our time?"

The guy described it, expression smug and self-satisfied and growing even more so as Meryl - and me, probably, even if I was better at controlling my expression - started looking more and more disturbed by the, quite frankly, obscene and utterly vile idea being thrown in front of us.

What he wanted wasn't a flag. Hell, he didn't even want porn, even if that was the basic shape of his request, between the absolutely rancid specifics. What he wanted was to make someone he didn't think had the ability to fight back suffer.

Unfortunately for him, the internet had both set my bar for squick years ago via shock sites and schmuck bait, even before it'd started preparing me on how to deal with trolls.

"We're not doing it," I said, breaking out the voice I reserved for scam callers and telemarketers.

The douche spread the beri in his hand out before gently fanning himself with the bills. "My money says otherwise."

"Nope. That's not how this works."

The smug facade cracked as the money crumpled in his fist. "What do you mean, that's not how it works?! This is a business, I give you money and you have to do what I want! That's exactly how it works!"

He shoved his fist out, waving the crinkled bills around as if they'd change my mind. The fact that I could now tell that there was something very… off about their texture - either counterfeit on a subpar paper or legit bills covered with something that'd gone crunchy - made me sure that turning this guy down was the right call.

"Nope. You've been misinformed. We, as the service providers, have the right to refuse service and we say 'no sale'," I said, switching from the flat disapproval of the voice for dealing with telemarketers to a cheery one that was based on listening to them. "Cause being asked to draw hardcore pornography that touches on every kneejerk taboo topic a common flatworm could cook up if it had no other hobbies to occupy its monocellular brain is an offer we're just gonna have to turn down, no matter how good the money is."

I then plastered on the fakest smile I could muster. "Of course, that's an insult to flatworms - their brains are actually something remarkable in practice, which is more than I can really say for you. So kindly take your unpleasant self and your dirty money and leave, sir."

"F-fuck you, bitch!"

I dropped the smile and the tone entirely as I rose to my feet. "And that ain't gonna do it either. Now, get out before you get thrown out."

He ran, taking his money with him. It was a smart choice, based on what he knew - even if I was a stick, he didn't know anything about me except that I was done with his shit and had a chair in my hand.

"Was that a good idea?" Meryl asked, watching the door sway on its hinge. "It was good money."

"Maybe. But would it have been worth the cost?" I sighed as I sat down again. "Meryl, there's a saying where I come from; it's called 'don't feed the trolls'. And that guy was a troll - just a person out to feed on the misery of other living beings. Interacting with them only gives them what they want and if they get a reaction out of you, as far as they're concerned, they've won. So, the only way to win isn't only not to play, but to deny them the game entirely."

I took a moment to consider another part of the equation. "That's not to say that I didn't want to hurt him, because that'd be lying. And I genuinely hope that he dies, painfully, preferably in a fire, ideally in a way that gives him at least a minute to appreciate how pointless and pitiful his existence really is. But it ain't my job to make that happen."

Photos were easier to deal with, mostly because if Holliday saw anything familiar in them, it was the familiarity of fame and not anything personal.

"I thought you were exaggerating when you said you knew all these people," he said, looking over the bevy of pictures, newspaper clippings, and wanted posters, many faded and yellowed by age.

"Hey! I was hot shit back in the day - and everyone that wasn't an absolute bastard was down to party under the right conditions," Marshalsea said, pointing at a group picture that had a number of former and current big name pirates - Gol D. Roger included - cavorting around… along with one distinctly misplaced Hero of the Marines, caught at the precise moment of stuffing his face with half a dozen donuts. "Though Garp plays by his own weird set of rules."
"Now, that part, I've definitely believe," Holliday agreed before turning to page to see a Skyperson, wings spread out behind him as he posed with a much younger Brenda, dominating the page, along with a few other pictures of Brenda with other winged people who shared the same yellow makeup, right down to the style. "Who's this?"

"Ah. Brenda's old man. Skyknight from Birka. Met him exactly… twice, I think. First time when I got Brenda to join my crew, second when we picked up her little sister. Was supposed to be a regular visit, but we ended up crossing another pirate's raid - the old man got killed in the action and her sister didn't have any reason to stay, so she joined us for a while." She made a face as she looked down at a picture of Brenda and another Birkan woman with similar features, but paler, curlier hair and dark freckles speckled across her face under the yellow makeup. "Almost wish I hadn't let Peregrine on the boat, but it meant a lot to Brenda at the time."

Holliday looked up. "What was wrong with her? Bad crewmate?"
Marshalsea bit her lip. "...not necessarily 'bad'. She did her job and she wasn't bad at it, but… you know the difference between 'someone you work with' and 'nakama'?"

"Yes." The first you could survive, the second you could trust your life with. It was a vital, sometimes fatal, distinction when one spent one's life under threat of death or worse at the hands of the World Government.

"She never made an effort to jump from the first to the second. Honestly, I'm not even sure she liked her own sister, because fuck if she gave a shit about-" Marshalsea cut herself off, breathing hard for a moment as she calmed herself down. "Look. I'm not claiming to be Mother of the Year material, 'cause I wasn't, but Peregrine ditched Meryl almost as soon as she was born, 'cause she 'didn't like the way the kid came out', which I never did to any of my kids."

Surprised, Holliday looked at the picture again. It wasn't a strong resemblance - Meryl Dacey had no wings -, but now that he was looking for it, he could see Meryl Dacey in the woman's eyes and mouth… and yes, the freckles were there as well. The stronger resemblance, however, was to Enda Dacey.

Holliday raised an eyebrow. "I was under the impression that Brenda and Enda were the ones in a relationship."

"So was I, given that I was the one that saw them married, but I was told that the details 'weren't my business', so I kept my nose out of it," Marshalsea said, crossing her arms. "Well, beyond threatening to gut Peregrine if she ever had the brilliant idea to come back to the island and drive that poor kid to tears again, but I figured anyone that upsets a five year old that badly over wearing a set of pretend wings deserves some kind of ass-whoopin'."

"Absolutely," Holliday said, a bit more of Orsin's anger leaking out into his tone than intended. "What a terrible thing to-"

"Aw, that activated your daddy instincts."

Holliday blushed, pulling down his hat to cover his face. "I just agree with you on the response."

"Of course you do. Like you wouldn't have loved to ventilate anyone who bullied your lil nerd baby for anything she could or couldn't do," Marshalsea said affectionately. "You're a good man. Would have been a good father too if the world were kinder."

As Holliday hid his blush behind his hat, Orsin wished he could believe that.

Thankfully, the last customers of the day were actual customers. They were also familiar faces, which meant the chances of them doing something scammy was low, even if I wasn't quite sure how they were supposed to have this kind of money while supposedly working off their debt to Zahlia.

Unfortunately, that's where the thanks ran out.

"There's nothing wrong with complex designs, but a flag is really not the place for it," Meryl said diplomatically, as she looked down at the rough drawing that the Twenny Fish Biker Gang had brought in. "This is just too much. We need to simple it down."

More like start over from the beginning, I thought as I looked at it. The 'rough' was a scrawl of colors and styles that looked like a small squad of kindergartners had been fighting over the right to color on this particular sheet of paper, leaving the 'result' something that frankly looked more like a cartoon explosion at a cosplay convention than a pirate flag. Only a handful of elements could really be seen clearly out of the mess - a crescent moon curving through a storm of scrawls, a smile of sharp teeth grinning from near the middle, a fish tail leaking out into a relatively untouched corner -, but their context was impossible to follow thanks to the rest of the chaos.

"And who are you to tell me what to do, kid?" Boma said, slamming her hand down on the table.

"Personally, I'm the idiot who cut myself on that particular pig sticker a couple hundred times trying to draw comics, you -," I said, cutting myself off before reeling my temper back in.

Irritation was a quick cure for anxiety - and excessive good manners -, but it often stirred up more problems than it could solve if you didn't keep it in hand.

"Look," I tried again, bringing my tone down to something calmer and more conversational. "You can have your cake and eat it, but there's a limit to how many things you can put in or on one before it's just a mess on a plate - pick what you think is most important to your theme and please stop yelling at Meryl for stating facts."

There was a bit of arguing within the group at that, mostly from Boma who apparently had a 'vision' for the group's presentation that the rest didn't seem to be all that interested in, but eventually, once we settled on taking one suggestion from each member, the image started to pull together rather painlessly.

A front facing skull with horns like Darea, Mimzy's goggles, a sharp toothed grin based on the large fish they rode as transport, and a bit of flashy fire detailing coming from exhaust pipes behind the main skull - because said fish were also motorbikes, which made perfect sense, since this was One Piece - threw in the color and energy that Chiell had wanted as part of the image.

Boma, despite looking like she wanted to argue, apparently couldn't find an actual point to criticize. "Suppose it looks pretty good," she admitted mulishly as she picked up the flag and its duplicates, throwing down the money on the table.

Meryl quickly took it, counting the bills. "Uh, you overpai-"

"I paid exactly as much as I meant to!" Boma snapped as she and the other girls made for the door.

A moment passed in silence before I sighed. "Think I'm at my quota for socializing today, I think."

"Yeah," Meryl agreed before raising her voice. "We're closing up for the day, Aunty Al!"
"Alright, sweetie!"

Between the two of us, clean up was quick work, and it was only a few minutes before we were walking back towards the Dead Admiral along the dock.

The Barking Hare, thankfully, didn't seem to be in port right now, but there was a small squadron of large fish, easily around ten feet long and outfitted with saddles and, because this was the world of One Piece, motorcycle handles and exhausts pipes.

"Heyoo!" Mimzy called, waggled her fingers at me with a slightly flirty smile, which grew wider as I awkwardly waved back.

"Already headed out?" I asked.

"Yep! We got told to fuck off and never come back!" Mimzy announced brightly. "Or at least not come back until summer!"

Ah. So that's how the debt issue was resolved; because Zahlia cut her losses instead of waiting to get paid off. Probably a better plan than waiting for the group to magically stop causing problems and start making reliable money.

"Stop jawing and let's get going - we only have until sundown to get out!" Boma yelled.

"Well, take care of yourselves then," I called back.

Mimzy laughed as she gunned her apparently functional accelerator. "Where's the fun in that?"

There was a huge burst of noise and seaspray as the group blasted out of the port, their fishy mounts hitting high speed as efficiently as jetskis, which quickly carried them towards the horizon and the sun slowly dipping its way under it.

Despite the group now easily being four hundred feet away from the dock, I could still hear them yelling.

"Is it weird that they're that loud?" Meryl asked.

I shrugged. "I mean, pirates are loud, biker gangs are loud - I don't really imagine a group that's both ending up quieter than either," I said as we watched the fish and their riders plow off through the waves, the sounds of hooting and hollering slowly fading away. "At least dinner at the Dead Admiral will be-"

"Peaceful?" Meryl sounded doubtful.

…yeah, it was still a pirate bar in a pirate town in One Piece, after all. 'Peaceful' wasn't really the word for it, not for long anyway. "You're right, probably not."

Holliday looked over his notebook. He'd gotten a bit too engrossed in his conversation with Marshalsea, leaving his notes to meander and peter out around the time that the personal anecdotes began to truly live up to the 'personal' part of the name, so there wasn't a lot to show for his conversation in print.

Mentally though? Well, he was doing as well as could be expected after discussions about love and loss and what it was like to be a parent in a world that was not always kind to children.

So, naturally, he was hoping for a distraction. One that, he was somewhat pleased to note, was likely available in the Outsider making her way up the stairs with Meryl Dacey beside her.

It was a bit odd, looking at the pair - after looking for resemblances to others in the Dacey girl's face, Holliday could have sworn he was seeing parallels between her and Raine now; probably the sign of thinking too long about the photographs earlier, but perhaps that was a trail he could follow on the Outsider's part of things, a possible trail between the Dacey family and whatever people Raine had sprung from.

"You keep treating us like this," Raine told Marshalsea as she sat down with her plate of fried fish and french fries. "And people might get to talking."

"Oh, they're always talking about me, kid. Part and parcel of being one of the most interesting people on the island," Marshalsea replied. "Best thing you can do is give them a good reason to talk rather than none at all."

"Hah. So I guess that just leaves suffering then," the young woman said dryly as she began to pick at her meal. "I miss steak. And chicken."

"I've never had either," Meryl said.

"You haven't lived until you've had a pan fried steak - little bit of cheyenne pepper, bit of garlic salt, a good sauce…"

"Is beef common where you're from, Miss Raine?" Holliday asked.

Raine blinked at him, leaving Holliday to realize that he hadn't actually had any meaningful first-person interaction with the girl since her arrival. "Yeah. Grew up on a beef farm, actually."

"Ah." …perhaps he needed another question that'd get something closer to a helpful answer. "Would that be anywhere I know?"

It wasn't a subtle approach, but…

"Probably not. Ass end of nowhere little town," Raine answered, turning back to her meal.

Holliday tried again. "There must be something interesting about it?"

She took a moment to think about it. "There's about thirteen churches for different denominations of the same religion in the area and exactly one bar - two, I guess, if you count the party store," she said. "My grandma always said the ratio should have been closer than that, so that's kind of weird."

"Your grandma's sensible," Marshalsea agreed, raising her glass and draining it. "As for something insensible; you got anything going tonight, kid?"

"No. Why?"

"Fight me."

At Raine's incredulous expression, Marshalsea relented. "Not for real, kid. I know you're not anywhere near my punching weight, even if I am old as shit now, but between you and your sword, I'll admit I'm curious. Best way to indulge that curiosity is to trade a few swings, do a bit of the old dance. Nothing serious."

"I'd better hope so," Raine said, her eyes still almost wide enough to show from behind her tinted glasses. "No Conqueror's Haki?"

…how did Raine know about that? The very existence of Haki was one of those things that was Grand Line knowledge - not even Grand Line knowledge, but New World knowledge. How would an outsider know…?

Marshalsea, huffed. "Why the fuck would I do that? That's for clearing a room, not having fun."

"Do I get to keep my limbs?"

"Wasn't planning on taking them off."

"...fine, I'll do it," Raine said. "But not in here."

"Well no shit. I'm not pissing off Zahlia for that," Marshalsea said, standing up and walking over to one of the swords pinning Admiral Benbow's coat to the wall. She pulled it free, inspecting the edge for a moment before deeming it satisfactory. "Like any good fight; we're taking it outside."

I couldn't lie; I was anxious for the fight, bouncing up and down on the gravel as I tried to get my head in the game. I wasn't too tired, despite the work with Meryl, and I had my sword, so it wasn't like there was a lot of prep to do beyond the psychological angle.

Like most kids from the ass-end of Nowhere, America, I'd never trained for katana outside of poorly imitating anime, often against whatever innocent foliage looked particularly choppable in the backyard.

But, thanks to one extremely short-lived Wushu course, I had trained for dao. Not well and in a very short time frame further split by the fan, spear, and calligraphy parts of the curriculum, but there was enough there to give me an idea of how I was going to approach this, even if my sword was longer, straighter, and heavier than the wooden dao I'd used as a kid.

If nothing else, I'd come away from this fight with the pleasure of having made Marshalsea blink as I shouldered my blade, guard cupped in the palm of my hand, hilt slid down between my first and second fingers while the spine of the blade rested against the length of my arm.

"Please pardon any weakness in my technique," I said as I gave as deep a bow as I dared with my back before sliding into a ready stance, the old footwork coming back to me as naturally as breathing. "It's been a while since I've used any of these skills."

Marshalsea laughed, spinning her own sword in hand. "That's what I should be saying, kid."

Even before the first exchange for blows, I could already see the gulf between our skills.

I was disabled white trash from a small town, barely graced with a public school gym's idea of what a long term karate class entailed and a week's worth of a Wushu course that had probably mostly been the elderly instructor indulging an eight year old's desire to spin more for his own entertainment than anything else in between the actual lessons for my much older classmates. My battered joints had about as much flow as setting concrete and I could probably rely on my body to hold up to two, maybe three minutes of constant high level exertion tops before it started falling apart.

Marshalsea, on the other hand, was a life-long pirate who'd probably killed more people than I'd eaten meals. It didn't matter that she was old and fat and more than a little chewed up by the life she'd lived; she moved like she expected the world to step out of her way- and the best part of that was, I could feel it doing just that, right down to the molecules in the air.

How could I feel it? Because the molecules in me wanted to follow that trend.

And as Marshalsea finally moved to take her first swing - telegraphed and not nearly as strong as she could have made it, if she'd been New World material -, I let them, sliding almost smoothly out of the way of her blade.

"I didn't call you out here to play Keep Away, kid!" Marshalsea said as I lost a chunk of hair to her next swing, her movements speeding up just enough to remind me that I was here at and for her pleasure.

Alright, she wanted a change of pace, I'd give her a change of pace.

I twisted my wrist around, letting my blade fall into a more conventional grip before I thrust as hard and fast as I could, aiming at her center of mass, but keeping enough of my stance to pull back at the last second if-

Any thoughts of pulling back at the last second were thrown aside as Marshalsea held up her sword, parrying my attack like a passing breeze. "Is that the best you can do?"

I switched back to my first grip, snapping out a kick - that, she sidestepped with a bit more effort - before dropping into a low stance that my knees immediately hated as I calculated my next chain of moves.

Shoulder sword, snap kick, palm thrust with free hand, then use energy to bring sword around at full force -

"I did say that it's been a while for me," I said before launching into that chain of moves with an ease I hadn't expected.

Twenty years since Wushu, fifteen since my last martial arts class in general, eleven since buying this sword - none of those were great numbers, in terms of gathering dust, and neither was the number zero when it came to real fights with live steel.

But for all the dust, the muscle memory was there, even easier to slip into than riding a bike, and for all that 'live steel' had never been a feature, I did know my way around a real knock-down drag-out fight and how to take a hit if needed.

So the only trick now was not to die doing any of that.

"Now that's more like it - fighting like it's a full contact sport!" Marshalsea whooped as she ducked the heel of my palm and sent my slash skidding across the surface of her blade, which she almost immediately twisted around into an attack of her own. "You're fast for a kid with a bad back."

"You should- see me when I'm- properly medicated," I managed to shoot back as I parried Marshalsea's strike, steel skidding against steel at an angle that kept it far away from my precious intestines.

Did not want to perforate those. Bad way to die, if my Westerns taught me right.

I slid back, twisting my sword around in a slight flourish before I ducked into a full body spin, already expecting the strike I was winding up for to get blocked.

It was.

But that just meant there was a clean, sword-free route open for me to kick her, the inertia from that spin still on hand-

Only to abruptly disappear as my foot met something as solid as rock.

"Almost got me there," Marshalsea said, smiling as she squeezed the sole of my boot hard enough to deform the sole. "But you don't kick nearly as hard as Zeff used to."

Shit, shit shit shit shit.

I tried to twist out of her grip, but she had me locked down.

"If you were anywhere else, this would be the part where I'd show you how a real kick works," the old pirate said, not offering so much as a twitch to show that she was exerting any kind of effort. "But Dr. Shimon's threatened to break my replacement hip if I break you."

That reassurance wasn't doing a whole lot for the cold sweat running down my spine right now. "Haah-how considerate."

Marshalsea's smile turned a degree too cloying to be comforting. "That doesn't mean I'm gonna let you get away with being this sloppy scott free though."

I had just enough time to think 'Fuck' before she kicked me - not hard enough to break anything, but enough to send me flying a short distance, ragdolling over the packed dirt and gravel for almost three whole full body rotations, dropping my sword along the way.

Oof. Yeah, I was gonna feel that for a while. Along with all the joints that hadn't been expecting me to break out any roundhouse kicks today.

But I didn't have time to think about tomorrow's aches and bruises as I barely managed to duck out of the way of Marshalsea's blade, scrambling on all fours back towards where my sword lay. Maintaining combat distance didn't count for much here and I couldn't rely on time to be on my side long enough to cook up some sort of deep plan. I only just had time for A B and C and not that many details to go between-

A gouge sliced itself into the earth in front of me, sending me skittering to the side as Marshalsea whipped out air pressure slices, apparently for the fucking fun of it.

That's what I got for putting space between us, I guess; a tease at what Grand Line level swordsmanship entailed.

Okay, so we were sticking to one step plans then. Step One: get my sword back.

On instinct, I twisted away from the next slice, the barest whisper and rise of the hairs on the back of my neck all the warning I got before the earth parted like butter.

Right. I was really hoping she wasn't going to go this hard for the rest of the fight. I might not have been as bad at this as I thought I was going to be going in, but I wasn't that good and I really was not liking not having my sword in hand right now.

"If you don't get moving on your own, I'm gonna start making you dance where you are, kid," Marshalsea called out.

Yeah, fuck that. I couldn't cut a good enough jig to come out of a storm of flying slashes with my toes intact.

I ran, throwing myself into the first and hopefully only combat roll of my life as another invisible ranged attack cut through the air where my head would have been, thankfully falling next to my sword in the process, the hilt immediately chasing away a lot of my uncertainty the moment it was back in my hand.

Alright, I had my sword back, now what?

'Don't die?' a part of me suggested.

Yes, but that was standard operating procedure, we needed details. An idea. A plan-

Without time to think, I ran at Marshalsea, twisting my sword to deflect a thrust that probably would have probably punched out my entire left lung if Marshalsea had been really aiming to kill. On reflex - you didn't just stop to admire the daisies in a real fight -, I stepped forward, ignoring the screech of steel-on-steel in favor of driving my fist into her solar plexus.

There was a small sound. Half of a surprised exhale. And then, the sensation of something very sharp very close to my neck grabbed my entire attention.

"Now that was a good shot, kid." Marshalsea said. "Not afraid to punch an old lady now?"

I pushed away the cold sensation of death hanging right next to my neck. "We both know that you could be clowning me a lot harder than you are right now." I replied.

For all my body was busted and my limbs were trembling from exertion already, I had enough lingering farm kid strength to know that landing that punch in that place on anyone from my world that wasn't some kind of professional fighter would have gotten a little more than just a slightly hard exhale.

"That's true - I could have done a lot worse than dust you up and knock you around," Marshalsea agreed, looking down at my arm, still braced against her torso despite the punch being long landed and the painfully visible tremor running through it. "Not sure that you got much more to throw at me though."

"I'm not even sure if I have enough to walk back to Meryl's," I admitted.

"Then we'll call it a draw - we both got a good hit on each other, so that's close enough to even as it matters," Marshalsea said, lowering the tip of her sword from my neck, turning it around in her hand to a resting position effortlessly

Immediately, I let go of my muscles, collapsing to the ground, not caring about the pain of impact. God, I was going to be so fucking sore tomorrow. Ice baths and heat pads preserve me. "Thanks for not making me look like a total incompetent."

Marshalsea smirked. "Who said you were? You're not bad - you obviously never had no proper sword training, least not beyond the barest basics of whatever style you were using there, but I'd eat Holliday's nicest hat if you didn't have some sort of fighting background at some point."

I smiled from my place on the ground. "Footwork gave me away, didn't it?"

"Yep. Nobody controls their legs like that 'less they were taught to think about it and then trained until they stopped thinkin' about it," she said, gesturing vaguely at my feet. "You even hold yourself like that when you're casual - they might call that 'natural posture' in the art, but ain't no human born that came out moving like that."

That was a pretty good assessment. Footwork and stances had been the most consistent drill in martial arts class and hard for even the sloppiest teacher to fuck up beyond repair - and for all the problems at my class, the teacher hadn't been out-and-out terrible.

Marshalsea didn't stop there though. "Course, your approach didn't hurt either. A confident idiot would have just tried attacking me straight on without any thought to protecting themselves, while an unconfident one would have stuck with defense and never committed to anything. You fought smarter than either. Mixed up defensive action with decisiveness. Always the sign of someone who knows what it means to be in a serious fight."

I closed my eyes, letting my head fall back into the dust. "Hah. That's something at least."

Something tickled at the back of my mind, getting me to open my eyes again.

With the strength left in my arm, I lifted my sword up above my head, admiring the black blade and all the colors it carried along its blunted edge.

Marshalsea had said the name would come to me, hadn't she?

"Your name is Murasame, isn't it?"

The sword - being a sword - said nothing, but I could have sworn that the last lingering sense of unbalance I could feel in it disappeared.

Or maybe that was just what it felt like to pass out from exhaustion.

Marshalsea settled heavily into her chair, resting her sword - an old partner that hadn't seen that much action in years - across the table. "That was a fun fight."

"Really?" Holliday asked. "You didn't even break a sweat."

"Ain't a lot that would make me do that at this point," Marshalsea said with a shrug. "But watching that kid in action… I know there was something interesting hiding under that unassuming surface. And damn, did she give me a hell of a peek."

Holliday waited.

"Physically? Nothing to write home about, even if her technique was sound," the old pirate decided without any malice or hesitation. "But her spirit? Completely different story. That kid was barely standing by the end - hell, I think that she was ready to fall apart almost halfway through-, but there wasn't a second where she'd actually given up in that fight, which is more than I can say for a lot of people I've met over the years."

Marshalsea grinned. "And I can't say that her skills weren't interesting, either. Those sword skills weren't the best I'd ever seen, but I'd rate her higher than most Marines they throw the rank of private at."

Holliday gave her a look over his cup of tea. "That's not actually saying that much in practice."

"Ain't that the truth?" Marshalsea laughed. "The rest, though? Oh, that sort of stuff takes time to internalize. Years, even. You were looking at what used to be a dedicated martial artist earlier, the kind that you get out of places like Kano from the look of it. The kid probably tapped out before getting anywhere close to expert-level, but she wasn't no year one washout. You don't get that kind of footwork from those types."

Holliday waited for the rest of her assessment.

"What?" Marshalsea asked.

"You're leaving out something."

"Am I? Of course I am. That kind of gossip's in bad taste, even if I don't know the full facts of it." Marshalsea smiled. "But you remember what I said about spirit, earlier?"

"That it's damn hard to kill?"

"Yep. And that kid's proof of it. We've talked about what it takes to fuck someone up that badly physically, yeah? And, even if I don't have the details, I can tell you that kid's got issues," Marshalsea said, pointing at her head. "Like a mail order magazine. But none of that mattered during the fight. Hell, she was barely standing by the end of it, but she wasn't gonna fall over until the fight was over. Pure willpower, that. That probably ain't anything a doctor'd like to see on a patient, but for someone like me? It's good potential."
"Potential for what?"

Marshalsea smiled, not answering until she finished her drink. "Lots of things, Orsin. You'll probably end up seeing some of 'em sooner or later. With kids like that, you always do."

Author's Notes

Okay update. Fast explain: Me - not dead. Co-writer - also not dead. Fic - wasn't dead, just sleeping, shh.

Longer explain - my grandmother, for whom I was already a full time caregiver as of 2016, got cancer that we found out about in 2020. She had surgery which removed a large amount of it in early 2021 and went through what we assumed was a fully successful radiation treatment to deal with the rest that finished up in the fall.

The assumption was wrong.

The cancer came back inside a few months and metastasized through multiple organ systems and by the time we caught it, it was too late to do anything beyond put my grandmother on the best pain meds we could and put her in hospice care for what time she had left. She died in February.

Taking care of a relative solo for several years, even for the time she was in relatively good health, was a huge tax on my time and energy, leaving me very little to put towards my creative works - not to say that I wasn't trying, but it wasn't flowing as strongly as it would have under better conditions. That only intensified during the cancer treatments and in the most recent months where I effectively was on call 24/7 as her caretaker, and then those energies had to be redirected to funeral arrangements. Currently, I am still in the process of dealing with cleaning up her home and adjusting to my new state of normal, but more of my time and mind is free to write and create.

My grandmother was 85. Her passing was not a surprise, as she had other health complications which made it clear she probably wasn't going to live to see 90, and as much could be prepared for as possible, but it's still a big blow adjusting to her absence, as she was a very important person in my life, which came into the writing of this chapter of the fic. Originally, this part of the story wasn't going to be as focused on grieving as it became, but I can't say that the catharsis is unwelcome.

Marshalsea was originally written as an homage to another loved one; my grandma's best friend and one of the coolest ladies I've ever had the privilege to meet, who passed a few months before I started publishing this story - but she will also serve as an homage to my grandma.

Co-Writer's notes:

Actually another reason for the gap was because I asked for a break months and months ago so I wouldn't feel sick of working on the project, I've been mentally ready to return to it for months but Nvzblgrrl was having trouble for longer than I have.

I've also been busy helping keep her mentally well throughout the grieving process because I'm an anchor for her as a friend to hold onto. I've also gone thru some worrying personal physical developments this year but none of those have caused me any trouble with helping write this so they're not important for here.

Meryl's reaction to Brenda's death is based on my own to one of my closest friends passing away from cancer extremely fast in early 2020, just so there were two differing views on the situation since me and Nvz process things differently. Also, fuck cancer.

Here's to hoping the next few chapters I already have outlined the plots for come in a reasonable time after this!

With regards to Captain Hey C'Mon in the reviews on FFnet -

Yes, despite this guy being under anon, I do know who the hate reviewer is thanks to his timing + writing style (ex: bad) - it's a guy from a One Piece forum I'm in and, yes, he's just as charming to deal with there. His hobbies are Marine Luffy, Gotta Catch 'Em All harem fics, IKEA erotica, projection screen protagonists, demanding stimuli that fits those criteria, gatekeeping, arguing any response that people give him to his own questions that doesn't serve the previously listed things, and toeing as close to the line of the Forum Rules as he possibly can before playing hopscotch with them.

What's his favorite forum rule to break? It's literally written as 'Don't Be A Dick'. That easy. And, as you see from his behavior, he fails it. Hard.

What did I do to piss him off? Oh, it was three things.

1. I asked him to drop a shipping conversation that had already been hashed out three pages before (and then about five pages before that and six pages before that…), was going nowhere (again), and was also beginning to toe very close to the rule about No NSFW on the board.

2. I told him to stop trying to chase people out of the thread for things like 'trying to get back into One Piece after a long personal hiatus', 'coming up with AUs that didn't allow Marine INO Luffy to fuck every single conventionally attractive woman in the setting (ex: having Luffy be genetically related to any of them)', and 'writing OC centric stories'.

3. I liked the comment of someone (specifically, one of the people he'd previously harassed) who finally snapped and told him to shut up and fuck off with his negative attitude if he couldn't bring anything other than it to the thread.

Oh, and I did the first two in the thread itself rather than do it in DMs.

After that, he commented on my profile about how 'calling him out in public was unnecessary' and that he 'wasn't trying to be the bad guy' and that 'it was the other person's fault', while passively aggressively saying that he'd stop.

I replied that it clearly wasn't the other person being the problem since this was the third person he'd done this to, but I'd take improved behavior as a win because that's all I wanted.

And immediately after that, the first hate review came in on ffnet, calling this story 'pathetic' and me a 'selfish, prudish, unimaginative bitch', complete with completely misplaced interrobang. I watched the timestamps on it.

(He later deleted the message on my profile, but I screencapped it for my own records of the BS.)

I handed that, and the following message telling me that I 'should try to be a little less worthless in my writing' and should kill my 'retarded and slutty' self, over to the mods but I doubt that they did much more than give him a warning, given that the worst of his behavior was under anon on another site outside of their purview, and that he's been in the thread with slightly (by which I mean, at least smart enough not to call people slurs or tell them to kill themselves under his own handle) toned down behavior.

That was last year (while I was working on this chapter - stuff's been going on and writing has been a Process.) I have left those reviews in place simply because, well, the evidence speaks to itself.

Since then, things were quiet on the hatemail front until he finally pissed off what felt like every other person still alive in the thread via whaling about his narrow set of interests Yet Again. After a whole line of people told him to shut up and pick a different song than the one he'd been singing for the last four years, one of the people he harassed last year outright snapped on him that just because he had an opinion doesn't mean that it's not ill-conceived or worth dragging out every single time he appeared in the thread fishing for Marine Luffy Harem fic or bitching about people's ideas/recommendations not fitting with his Marine Luffy Harem vision.

I hadn't really commented during the whole debacle, having opted to mostly pretend this guy doesn't exist after the initial run of suicide bait + contradictory insults + taking shit to the mods (who did nothing that I could see), but I was one of two people to like that post, which apparently was enough for the guy to pop onto one of my fic accounts (AO3 this time, so I was actually able to delete the shit review as soon as it came in) to tell me that I was a 'worthless excuse for a human being'.

Yeah, he's just. Generally not subtle.

Anyway, that was the point where he publicly announced he was leaving the thread and the entire website for good, which lasted all of a month (though he's stayed out of the thread, so That's Something), and I'm pretty sure that every time he so much as gets indigestion now, he's decides to pop over to my AO3 or FFnet to leave more hateful revie- no, I can't even call them reviews, because that would imply that he reads anything in the minute long spans between me pissing him off and him pressing send on his latest spleen venting 'comments'.

(The latest was actually telling my co-writer that I'm 'a genuine asshole' who 'doesn't deserve to be called a writer at all'. From the guy who told me to kill myself because I told him to stop both being a jerk and gatekeeping the One Piece fanfic brainstorming thread.)

I am going to leave his preferred handle out of this, though anyone who knows me from the Spacebattles One Piece brainstorming and rec thread probably can guess as to who exactly I'm talking about. A part of me longs to be the one bringing awareness of his horseshit to the general public because I'm a big believer in 'Fuck Around And Find Out', that's just a hair too far for an issue as small as this, even if he does have more than three strikes against him now. The internet drama llama is a tempting ride, but generally stirs up more shit than it's worth in the long run.

Anyway, there's that explain done. Now onto the actually pertinent Author's Notes.

Realized that I didn't make a distinction as to which Sky Island Brenda was from in earlier talk about her, though it was made fairly overt in art I've done of her (since it's fairly easy to distinguish the different sky-peoples by their wings types). Made that explicit in the text here, along with a refresh/expansion on Brenda's family situation and how she's related to Meryl.

Also Orsin backstory stuff - again, mostly a refresh, but a little bit of expansion in the details of it.

Party Store - Michigan term for Liquor stores. You can also get pop + snacks + lotto tickets there and sometimes pizza or hotdogs if they got enough room for them.

Murasame - Autumn Rain

Martial Arts talk time!

Reasons why the Wushu instructor didn't clamp down on the spinning - wushu is mostly a performance martial art these days and Spinning Good is a big part of it. Spinning Bad loses you points though.

IRL, I did learn spear (qiang), dao, fan, a bit of unarmed work (a lot more time spent in the air and snappier action than the much more practical, stripped down karate course I was in), and calligraphy over the course of a week long Wushu course at one of the big colleges in my state - the one I did the best with was spear and yes, the expert teaching the group seemed to like focusing on me. I was a very cringe 8 year old but I think the enthusiasm went over well with the old man.

Most American Karate courses, or at least the network that the one I was in was part of (Young Champions), are going to be focused on self-defense before offense. You'd learn a few kicks and punches, but most of the focus is going to be on breaking holds + grips, redirecting force, how to block (there's a right and wrong side of your forearm for it), and how to break falls (I was not good at this one and my back did not like the extra time spent being thrown at the training mat, lmao), along with a lot of directions on the philosophy of how to appropriately use your skills. More showy/complex moves + weapons courses are going to be for high level students participating in competition, which isn't really open to most students who aren't in the 'advanced' category (ex: orange-red-brown-black belts in the system used w/ my course).

I dropped out around the end of the intermediate rank (purple was my last belt) to focus on school and to better try to manage life stresses (might have worked better if I wasn't living in the same house as most of them), but I don't regret the time I spent in it.

Shizentai - natural posture. Pretty much the first thing that'll be trained into you in most martial arts classes is keeping your feet spaced to match your shoulders as your 'neutral' stance and it becomes second nature. I didn't think it was that weird of a thing to do, but I've dealt with enough people that insisted on walking with their feet practically scraping each other despite constantly having balance issues thanks to that that my assumption has been soundly disproven.

Horse stance is a bitch to train for (murder on the thighs + knees), back stance (basically, your feet are arranged in a sort of 'L' formation) is weird to internalize because of the weight distribution being 70% percent on the back leg as a default + a lot of training focusing on maintaining as perfect balance as possible while launching kicks from that angle, forward stance is another weird animal because it's got the same uncanny uneven weight distribution mixed with horse's hell on the knees/thighs but also it's like doing lunges and then having to freeze at the lowest part.