Chapter 8 – On the Nature of Children: A Contemplative Interlude With Smoker

The recruit trainers at Headquarters could have taught the Fops something; you don't put large windows in a first floor bathroom.

Smoker looked around his secluded corner of the Fop estate and deemed it secure enough to camp out at until the party was over. He would be safe from that Georgialee harpy, whoever she was and on top of that, Headquarters couldn't accuse him of disobeying orders. He was at the cotillion; he just wasn't in the cotillion.

Smoker picked up his jacket from the marble bench and began searching his breast pocket for two more cigars. He wondered if the groomsmen and his private were around somewhere. They were probably in the middle of a poker game, the lucky bastards.

His search yielded a single cigar. There wouldn't be another one until he got back to the ship unless he was willing to return to the mansion and hunt down a servant. He'd have to go back there someday since Tashigi was still inside, so he decided to enjoy it. What else was he going to do out here?

When he looked up, there was a kid was standing in front of him, clutching a blanket and solemnly sucking its thumb. Smoker was impressed. It had snuck up on him.

'It' was at the larval stage of child development where children were easily mistaken for either a girl or a boy unless dressed appropriately as one or the other. Since it wasdark and the child was wearing the ambiguous uniform of yellow pajamas, it was impossible to tell. He hoped that it was a girl. If it was boy, then he was going to spend the majority of his early childhood getting the snot kicked out of him for having hair that long and curly.

The kid was eyeballing him so Smoker eyeballed the kid back. They did this for a few, intensely silent moments.

Smoker broke first. "What are you doing?"

The kid shrugged, making a crab-like hunch with its body since it wouldn't loosen its death grip on its blanket.

"Do you want something?"

The kid solemnly shook its head from side to side, twisting its body to keep its thumb in its mouth.

"Taste good?"

It slowly moved its gaze south of Smoker's nose.

So now brats were health critics? "Just like candy, kid," Smoker said darkly.

The kid looked up at him hopefully.

"I didn't mean… I don't have any."

Hell. It was starting to leak. Why'd he mention candy of all things? Smoker thought fast and used a diversion tactic. The silent tears stopped as it watched smoke pour out and around Smoker's cuffs.

The kid started climbing up on the bench to get a closer look at the clouds that were slowly seeping from Smoker's dress shirt. He didn't help it because he'd seen where kids could get to. When the Marines weren't cleaning pirates out of Loguetown, they had been responding to requests from parents to get kids off roofs, out of bell towers, and down from trees. Sure enough, a few moments later, it was sitting next to him – quite a feat since it hadn't let go of its blanket or taken its thumb out of its mouth.

Smoker stepped the entertainment up a notch and formed the shapeless clouds into a long snaky dragon that was attacked by a hazy knight on a white horse. The thumb sucking and blanket death grip continued, but the kid was entranced, just like Smoker knew it would be.

Kids were easy to deal with once you realized one important fact. Regardless of where they were from or who their parents were, every child was born with a crude, simple morality that boiled down to: "I want it, I want it now, give it to me now, or I will do something horrible."

In other words, kids were pirates.

Most of them hadn't eaten a Devil Fruit or learned how to use bladed weapons (though their teeth were damn sharp) and when they did 'something horrible,' it was only as bad as little Billy having a temper tantrum or hitting Susie in the head with a building block. You could always put them in a playpen if they got out of line. But just because they were small didn't mean they weren't opportunistic hell-raisers who would try to get away with whatever they could, whenever they could.

A kid's pre-set morality was divided eighty percent pirate/twenty percent law-abiding citizen. Society existed so that the cumulative pressure of repeated dressing-downs such as "Learn to share," "Be kind to animals," and "No, you cannot wear your underpants on your head in public" would balance the two sides out. But that method's success rate was crap; there were plenty of pirates sailing around.

Smoker had decided the best way to curb future pirate tendencies would be to let kids get it out of their system when they were young. After all, he'd never had any rules when he was a kid and it hadn't done him any harm - just like it wouldn't kill little Billy if he had a piece of candy between meals or stayed up past his bedtime. Maybe then little Billy wouldn't grow up feeling the need to wreak havoc on the open ocean as William the Butcher, Scourge of East Blue.

If that meant forking out a few berii for ice cream or using his powers for non-Marine business, then that was fine with him. It was his duty to help kids overcome their instinctive pirate-ness. Just like he had.

And if he did his duty exceptionally well, he thought, there would be more Marines in the next generation. Headquarters always needed new recruits. But not recruits that were like Brandnew. Or like that two-ton moron Nelson either. In fact, kids shouldn't grow up to be like any officer he knew.

He didn't include himself in that list. After all, it was obvious that the world would be a much better place if there were more people in it like him.