Thank you's to these scrumptious redcurrant puddings: GlaresThatKill, Guest, Momochan77, PippinSqueaks, BlackDove WhiteDove, Guest, Guest, studentloans, Anya Ishikawa, read a rainbow, ClosetCase, GreenLilly, CaspianOfTheSea, Alkitty, sarge1130, Riley-Cooper123, tamago-ya, luffys, Guest, KooraX, boba girl, Emerald Gaze, Lucy Jacob, and seras1991!
Can I just say I fucking love it when you guys use fruits as linguistic intensifiers in your comments! It just amuses me to no end. I don't curse in fruits in real life (yet), but I feel like that day is very close. The amazing arielta on tumblr has translated Methyl Nitrate Pineapples into Italian! Please check it out, Italian-speakers! You can find the link on my profile and my tumblr ohpineapples.
—
methyl nitrate pineapples
hypothesis #25
something that finds you, darling
—
In the solitary taiga of Lunetuktu, a certain chemist was crunching through the undergrowth. This was a land inhabited by frolicking jackrabbits, herds of bison, and quick foxes, emerging in green from winter's teeth. Elk trudged like sentinels through the evergreen forest, beneath the shadow of an icy caldera.
"Pineapples, pineapples, pineapples…"
Blue jays flew away in alarm.
"Mangoes, f-fruitcakes, overly r-ripe brown avocados!"
Trudging out of the thick spruce trees brushing up against the sky, she found herself atop a cliff. Dark green hills spread unbroken for miles around her. Twigs poked out of her hair.
"Slimy durians!" Sophie slapped her sweaty cheeks. "WHERE AM I?"
—
"If you're going out, do something for me."
Sophie wrinkled her nose when Anko related his errand. "Bring back red berries?"
"It's a crimson sun, right?" He spread his hands over his chest, approximating the size. "Fisher Tiger's mark. His looks like shit. And it takes time to brew ink. Stocked up on seaweed alcohol and palm bark ash at the ocean market, now all's I need is dye."
Well, well, well… Inner Sophie chuckled, tapping a dastardly finger against her brow. Coming to me in a time of need. How easily you reveal yourself, Anko! You simpleton, falling for my conniving ways as I cement my place as a valued comrade aboard this ship! To you, I am what the sacred legends call… FRIEND!
"Since a feeble boy like you is so desperate for my help, I shall elegantly—"
Anko tossed a baby mushi at her. "Get crackin', errand girl."
—
So here's the thing. She wasn't really lost.
Lost was a bit of stretch, actually. Lost meant you had no measureable idea where you were, and that was the complete opposite of Sophie, who knew exactly where she was. In a forest. Surrounded by trees. See? Exact.
"I am not lost," Sophie told the baby snail with the swaggering voice of irrational self-confidence. "I'm just a bit, a tad if you will, geographically challenged at the moment. And I'm most certainly not going to humiliate myself by dragging my crew to find me. Because why would they need to find me? I am not lost."
The snail snored at her in unspoken but tacit agreement.
Heavy mist rolled over the hills. The forest of jack pines and white spruce was deep, and dark, and smelled like winterfrost. Some years ago, the Marines attempted to turn the island of Lunetuktu into a stronghold. She read about it; they'd been in the middle of constructing a fortress before they were run off by the cold and beasts pissed at the humans trying to muscle onto their land.
Lunetuktu had ten harsh years of winter and one month of spring. Wasn't worth settling, they decided. The soil's too hard and the elks are too horny, so let's skedaddle, boys, said the Gorosei, stroking their long white beards.
Fortunately, the Hearts landed during this vernal month. So here she was, not-lost, kicking the trees she passed by out of frustration and muffling her yelps her pain. It was a vicious cycle.
It didn't help either that Sophie was out by herself, which meant all she had to entertain herself were her own thoughts. And most of those thoughts were spent burying the ones about Law and where he went off to train or angstily ponder his childhood trauma or some combination of I-don't-actually-care-shut-up.
(A few of them slipped out, like water off a cup. Droplets.)
"He's a friend—my closest friend. He's a teammate. He tried to stick poison in me. He's got a rotten mouth and ten million tons of baggage, and I'd have to be stupid to actually fall in…"
Messy and chaotic and disorganized and she hated, hated, hated—
"I'd have to be insane," she spat, mouth burning like she tasted the filthiest curse in humankind. "I'd have to be a total sucker."
She resumed stomping.
"Besides, I may implode if I ever try to kiss anyone. Aaaargh! Why am I thinking of that!? Has my descent into piracy turned me into a la-la-lascivious reprobate!? …I know, I know, I'm twenty and I've never been kissed. It's not my fault this knowledge has been kept from me behind a bolted door! Was your father an overprotective marine who told you temptation was the d-de-devil's gateway drug into eternal damnation? I thought not!"
The snail snored, tiny black feelers bobbing up and down.
She flapped her hands in the air, trying to drive away the fog. She could barely see a foot in front of herself. What a terrible spot to unload her frustrations about people she might not ever kiss in her life through the artform of aggressive screaming! But she was going to try anyway!
"NOTHING IS WRONG! I'M NOT LOST! EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTRO—"
She fell off a cliff.
Sophie plummeted through the fog. Wind screamed in her ears and her stomach flew into her throat, choking—she tasted her heart between her teeth, her fingers grasping towards another horizon—
Her first thought was of, inexplicably, how alive birds must feel.
Her second was, wow, that's useless.
Her body crashed against the rocks, and kept falling. NOT THE FACE, NOT THE—OW—OW—OW—branches lashed across her cheeks, her ankle cracked against a tree trunk, and the ground rushed up to meet—
Thud.
She landed on something… fleshy, the impact shuddering up her spine. Painfully and with much stifled groaning, she blindly patted herself on the face, sure there had been a pop somewhere, and ah, hm, that was definitely something moving underneath her.
She had either crushed a person or a very large bag of wriggly cats.
Jostling, it tossed Sophie onto her stomach, which was quite violent for a large bag of cats. "AGHH," she voiced to express her disapproval, half her face smothered in grass. The side of her pant leg felt wet, and she knew without looking down that her baby mushi had reached an early expiration. Off-kilter and dazed, she reached for the guns strapped to her belt—
Something cold and metallic pressed against the back of her skull. The click of a flintlock's safety.
And a low, rough voice, "Don't move, boy."
As far as she knew, large bags of cats didn't speak… or hold guns… unless Sophie was missing a very important update…
A foot kicked her unceremoniously over onto her back. Her eyes flew open, pupils dilated, hair tumbling across her forehead. She angrily blew the curls off her face, bloody nose running across her cheeks, glaring up—
The man holding the gun stilled.
A dark purple cape, patterned with swirling designs. Grey hair, cut to broad shoulders. A cigarette between lips. And an X-shaped scar across the side of his face. A face she'd seen countless times, on one of the older, yellowing bounty posters in G-13's mess hall—back when his hair was long and black, tied in a loose ponytail.
"Pineapples," Sophie said with hushed, nasally reverence, "you got old."
Benn Beckman, first mate of the Red Hair Pirates, swore and lowered his shotgun.
—
"Beckman! Weren't you gonna round up some game?"
"We thought you'd find us a stag, but you caught a little doe instead!"
"I d-didn't know this wa-was your island! Let m-me go, you overripe moldy banana smelling like butthole—"
Beneath a huge stone archway, a large pirate crew was lounging in hammocks and cooking over a big campfire. The rest of the whatever building it was meant to be had fallen into ruin; a semi-circle of the surrounding dilapidated walls were adorned by tattered Marine flags. Abandoned, half-finished stone towers rose up over the forest.
Somehow, the fall only left her with a bloody nose and skinned elbows. Over the campsite, a high cliff was half-hidden by the fog. She probably fell from there, but it also seemed ludicrous because the impact would've shattered half a dozen bones in her body. She was even certain her ankle had snapped.
Yet Sophie's working leg kicked against a passing stone wall as she struggled. The action drew even more attention to the fact that she was a good two feet from the ground, dangling by Benn Beckman's hand on the back of her suit as he held her up like a stray kitten.
"You, you undi-di-dignified brute! Unhand me and face me in mo-mor-mortal combat like a real pirate!"
Beckman raised her even higher so he could look her in the eye. "Is that what you want, lass?"
"I'M FRAGILE," she screamed back.
"She's from a rookie crew," he told the other Red Hair Pirates. "They're parked on the other side of the island. Damn near knocked me flat."
"I told you, it was an accident! I slipped!" Blood dripped down her chin. When Benn Beckman reached over to wipe it away, she tried to bite his hand.
He shook her by the suit. "Feral thing."
She kicked his knee for aggrieved emphasis. "And I said s-sorry for calling you old!"
"What was that, Beckman?" hooted a large man in a striped shirt, biting into a chunk of meat. Wait, she knew that face. Lucky Roux.
The heat of Beckman's narrowed gaze zeroed in on his captive.
"…I have to pee," she said in a tiny voice.
He dropped her with a brusque scoff and she landed in a half-crouch, pulling out two flintlocks, fresh from Toa Sang Bay. The Red Hair Pirates grinned over their rum and card games. No one even bothered to draw a sword.
BANGBANG
Before her fingers put the barest pressure on the triggers, the guns burst apart in her hands.
A muscled brown arm, resting over the side of a hammock, lowered a smoking pistol.
Did that sleeping guy just, she thought blankly, smoking metal bits crumbling through her fingers, shoot two bullets simultaneously inside the barrels of my guns?
She lunged for another gun—a dirty, oddly-shaped rifle, leaning against a tree. It was long and heavy, bolt-action, triple-barreled with a scope on the top—the weirdest rifle she'd ever held but now was not the time to fangirl! She aimed a warning shot over their heads and pulled the trigger.
Click. Smoke fizzled from the barrels. …Hang fire? A muffinfudgin' dud!?
"Haven't you been fixin' that rifle for, what, ten years now?" chortled Lucky Roux. "Eh, Yasopp?"
The man in the hammock used his pistol to lift the bandana over his eyes. Dusty-yellow locs spilled over his drowsy gaze.
"I told you, she's a sour thing," retorted the most famed marksman on the Grand Line, Yasopp the Chaser. "More venom than sugar."
Sophie raised the rifle like a bat, white-knuckled. Anko! This is all your fault!
"What's the rush?" a pirate laughed over his cards—wait, that was Rockstar, wasn't it!? "Don't you wanna meet our famous captain?"
"I'd rather kill myself to get it over with! They say R-R-Red-Haired Shanks is a d-demon whose grin splits his face ear-to-ear!"
"A rather dramatic lie, I must say."
Sophie froze.
"The lass hasn't seen you drunk," Beckman murmured as he lit a cigarette.
A deep, warm chuckle. "Who's this interrupting our vacation on this lovely island?"
Sandals scuffing against the forest floor. The whip of a black cloak. The gentle clack of a sword against leg.
"Though I have to say, this does a certain loveliness to the visage."
A large, tanned hand clapped her shoulder. Her knees knocked against each other like matchsticks. Sophie looked up.
The sunlight that had been faint and dim this entire overcast day suddenly brightened, like a light turning on. The warm glow shone through the leafy canopy, a spotlight focusing over an open white shirt and whiskery, honey-brown cheeks. The shadow leaned forward, tilting his head, and the speckled sunlight caught on one thing that turned everything else into meaningless confetti.
That hair, that scarlet hair. Vermillion. Like strawberries, or apples. A whole bunch of other adjectives flew across her mind that all meant the same thing—
Red-Haired Shanks, one of the Four Emperors of the New World, grinned down at her.
(Her brain jotted down, smells like an ocean breeze, sun, and sword-metal.)
The Emperor evaluated her face. "She's hurt."
"Fell from high up," Beckman said.
"As angels do." His eyes twinkled at her. Sophie didn't know if she found that charming or terrifying. She was leaning towards the latter, and yet heat flooded her face and her shoulders climbed to her ears in bashfulness—
"Looked more like a dehydrated corpse to me," the first mate said around his cigarette.
Red-Haired Shanks clasped Sophie 'round the shoulders, laughing. She impulsively grabbed his cloak for balance—and felt an empty space where his left arm should've been. That's right, Red Hair is—
He stuck his hundred-watt grin right in her face. "Anyone who manages to knock my first mate off his feet deserves a drink! Let's get you fixed up, canary."
And her heart shot through her throat at hearing Nellie's nickname from an Emperor.
She must've died somewhere in the forest because this. This wasn't real. The bark of the log dug into the back of her legs, she was squeezing Yasopp the Chaser's rifle in a death grip. The air inside her mouth tasted cold even as her face felt like it about to burst like an overheated balloon.
Had she accidentally ingested a poisonous mushroom and was now experiencing a lucid fever dream? That was the only explanation as Red-Haired Shanks talked at her, sitting beside her with his solid and mostly-whole body, his voice inaudible in her ears as she stared back, trying to process. This wasn't real.
"Boss, you'll make the lass faint!" Rockstar shouted, and the pirates joined in with raucous laughter.
Get ahold of yourself, you stupid salmonberry! For the love of god, at least ACT coherent! Sophie smacked her face with the butt of the rifle, and stared back, horrified, at the bewildered look on Shanks' face.
"This isn't real," she said, blood running freely down her nose.
"Did she break her brain on you, Beckman?" Shanks asked, inspecting her. "Was it his pecs? I keep saying they're too large."
"Y-you just—can't be real. I mean…" She took in his plain, open shirt and tropical-printed pants. "Y-you look so shabby for an Emperor."
Shanks gaped. "Haven't you heard most successful people are thrifty?" he retorted sensitively.
A cloth swiped against her forehead. Sophie hissed and pinned a gaze of profound outrage upon Benn Beckman.
"Hold still."
"Your hands smell like blood," she informed.
"You're brawny for a woman," he gruffly returned.
"I bet you enjoyed tossing me around."
"And you got a mouth."
Yes, she did, and she used it to stick her tongue out.
"Oh?" Shanks' smile was practically feline. "Beckman, what did you do to the poor girl?"
He was bestowed a stony glare. "Be useful and pass me the tape."
Shanks did. "By the way," he said, "how is that old terror, Ixchel Ursa? Still alive?"
Sophie sat straight. "Y-yes, sir," ah, good to know Hippo's etiquette lectures were in peak condition, "we didn't—the Heart Pirates didn't destroy Machinastein, despite what the papers say."
"Of course not, Ursa would've obliterated your captain with a snap of her finger. Ah, we go way back. She's known me since I was a greenhorn."
That did not surprise Sophie at all. "Then—then y-you know what happened…"
A shadow crossed Shanks' face. She watched, enraptured, the transformation from weird, jovial stranger to a pirate legend bearing the title of Emperor. "I offered to raise my flag on Machinastein, but Ursa always said she wanted her country to exist on their own terms. She never wanted to be someone else's territory. In any case, I was too late."
"Don't be hard yourself, Emperor-san. People do what they have to, to survive." Sophie shrugged inelegantly. "And if President Ursa were here, she'd clobber you around the ears and say you're fifty years too young for her to need your help."
Shanks laughed, then seemed almost taken aback at his own reaction. "She would indeed."
"Is that what brought you to P-Pa-Paradise?"
The edge of his left brow twitched, where three long scars cut down his face. "And other business. Now, then," Shanks glanced up at the sky, "you should be off, canary, before those clouds get any bigger."
She came to the conclusion that Red Hair was a highly knowledgeable individual. She'd grown up on the stories of how he out-smarted entire Marine fleets. How she'd hear Lettidore fume about that no-good Red Hair as Hippo pointed at the newspaper and said, "See? This is what happens when you don't eat your vegetables. You grow up to be a pirate." She'd eaten all her beansprouts and eggplants that night (not knowing it wouldn't help her one bit).
"C-could I just… ask one question?"
"Go ahead. What is it, One Piece, Laugh Tale, Gold Roger?" His smile stopped reaching his eyes. "I've heard it all before, from a thousand rookies like you."
She cupped her chin, fingers twisting. I'll just say this really fast and hope I never bump into Red-Haired Shanks again.
"What does it mean," Sophie mumbled into her hands, "to be in love?"
Silence settled over the glade.
An oncoming earthquake, a tsunami wave on the crest of crashing down—
Broken by Red Hair's uproarious laughter. The booming sound echoed over the woods. Birds took flight, showering the air with leaves.
"Excellent, excellent!" he crowed, slapping his leg with a grin so brilliant Sophie had to squint. "What an excellent question!"
"Of course, he's gettin' carried away by a young thing already," Yasopp said.
"Who am I to refuse such an earnest pirate?" Shanks harrumphed at his crew. He scooted closer to Sophie. "I left a woman a long time ago, on a port in East Blue. Her eyes shone like emeralds and her soft caresses set my very soul on fire—"
"Am I remembering Makino hitting him with a broom or sweeping him out with the rest of the trash?" Beckman asked his crewmates.
Shanks pressed his cheek flush against Sophie's ("Eep!"), holding his good arm up like envisioning the title of his magnus opus in the air. "Love, my dear, is torturous and tyrannical. It shakes you down to your core, robs you of all senses, and leaves you bereft in the middle of the sea, balls out, naked and whimpering."
"That sounds h-horrific," she gasped.
"It is! It's an absolute horror! Yet love is what brings us all to the sea."
"A sultry embrace on a cold night," Yasopp joined in with a crooked grin.
"It punches your teeth out and you keep begging for more," Lucky Roux proclaimed. Beckman rubbed his forehead.
"Love for treasure, love for companionship, love for life…" Red-Haired Shanks sighed, "ah, that's the stuff that gets my blood pumping! What we do for love, how we see ourselves so clearly in the depths of love's despair, how we discover more about ourselves in the act of connecting with someone else…"
Now her thoughts were running in terrified little circles around themselves. She extricated herself from Red Hair's charming grip. "Right, thank you, that was completely unhelpful, I should escape, I mean, leave now—"
Rain burst from the sky, drenching the forest in a downpour.
Sophie stared.
Shanks patted her cheerfully on the back. "Stay for a while, there's enough sake to go around!"
Anko, she thought without remorse, I'll kill you for this.
—
"Dude, why do you keep sneezing?" Shachi asked.
Anko sniffled and wiped his hand on his shirt. "Been happening all day. Must be the chill."
—
"You'll want fireweed berries." Lucky Roux grinned, fixing his goggles. He looked younger than any of them, even though Sophie knew logically he had to be at least in his thirties. He was soft and round, plump as a pillow. "They grow at the rim of the caldera. Bright, burning red things, they are. They'll dye anything red."
Sophie calculated the distance to the mountaintop barely visible in the fog. Every hypothetical number made her groan.
She turned to her other red situation.
The steady pitter-patter of rain drummed around the camp. Beneath the sheltering canopy of trees, the great and terrible Red-Haired Shanks… was whittling a piece of wood and humming a whimsical ballad to himself. Oceans parted in the wake of his ship. Islands trembled before his might.
Once again, Sophie couldn't help but think, as she watched Shanks yelp as he accidentally poked himself with his carving knife, This can't be right…
She lifted a metal rod she was heating up in the campfire. She had scrounged it up in the ruins of the half-built Marine towers. The tip was glowing white, burning hot. She took it back to where she'd fieldstripped and laid out Yasopp's rifle on the grass in a neatly arranged square.
"So, Lovebird," the cheerfully asymmetric pirate called. "What brought on a question like that?"
"I've… never been in love before, I think." She carefully dabbed a tiny glop of hot metal on the cracked bolt. "I mean, I've loved people before. I just—it's hard for me to—it's all just too messy. I need more information."
"To do what with?"
"To learn how to die with my dignity in-intact!" The idea of love was always useless or boring, silly or not worth her time; a sign of fragility to seek love from someone else when you could love yourself just fine. It just never properly fit her. Her edges were too jagged for that. Too strange. No one in their right mind would—
Would, Sophie thought, would what? Be so stupid as to feel those same things towards me? How disgusting.
"My kingdom to be a lovesick rookie again," Shanks hummed.
"I'm not. I'm not. He's my captain, for pineapple's sake." With hands and collarbones and a voice that made her want to throw herself into the ocean while screaming free me from this cage of mortifying emotion! "And he tried to kill me."
"Oh, dear."
"But then he helped me hide a body, so I forgave him."
"Murder is superb for team-building," Shanks agreed.
"And he's from North Blue. I hear those people are total emotional shipwrecks."
"My first mate's from North Blue." Shanks pointed at Beckman.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Sophie said sympathetically.
The Emperor laughed so hard he fell out of his hammock.
After some digging, she found a dusty crate filled with ammunition and gun-cleaning supplies. Leftovers from the Marines' attempt at building a base on Lunetuktu. Thank you, World Government, for your pathological creed of manifest destiny. They really did her a solid today.
Her curls were piled in an unruly bun, boiler suit tied around her waist and her cropped black long-sleeve shirt—with a not-so-subtle berry patch—rolled up to the elbows. Lacquer thinner and powder solvent to clean all the individual parts, then oiling the discolored stock and smoothing out the rusted hammer. The work was calming. She normally discarded guns as soon as they were useless, so it was nice to flex her muscle memory on repairing one of these babies.
Beckman was watching from the moss-covered fallen log, smoking his cigarette. Probably making sure she wasn't going to tackle him to the ground butt-first again.
"What a day, Beckman. You get knocked on your ass by Goldilocks here, I get my gun stolen." With a swish of his star-patterned cape, Yasopp swung his legs down beside the first mate, who shook his head with a weary sigh. He flashed a proud grin at Sophie. "How's it feel to hold a rifle that belongs to the magnificent Yasopp?"
She fumbled with the metal parts, anxiously aware of how inept she must seem. "F-fine. Um, thank you."
Yasopp watched her for another moment. "My boy talked like you. You know, you're… the way you…"
"…Stutter?"
"Mm. Wonder if he's still got it."
Here she was, making conversation about speech disorders with Yasopp the Chaser. This might as well happen. "How old is he? Sometimes kids grow out of it. Sometimes it's st-stress-induced." Like mine.
"He's… well… ah, shit." His handsome face screwed up in a grimace. "He should be around your age. Maybe younger. Probably younger."
"Probably," Sophie repeated.
"I left my village a long time ago. Can't bring a kid along, you know? Ain't safe out here."
She thought of that nameless boy, growing up without a dad not because he died, but because he left to become the greatest sniper in the world. A casualty of his father's dream. Yasopp the Chaser was Hippo at a bar, his head in his hands, saying helplessly, it's just how it goes.
She stood up, swinging the rifle over her back, testing out the strap. "No, especially not if you're onboard Red-Haired Shanks' ship, one of the strongest pirates in this age."
Yasopp's mouth parted slightly.
"See," Beckman said to him, waving at her with his cigarette, "now that was a swift killing."
"Best stay here for the night, canary." Shanks was laying down on the grass, playing his wooden flute. "In the light, by the fire."
Beneath the pirates' low, meandering voices, she heard the howl of wolves from deep in the woods.
She had her grenades, and reasonable confidence in trekking through the forest alone. "I won't get lost. I'm heading up that mountain, and I can make it by morning. Besides, there's nothing in that forest scarier than a Yonkou." Or a feathery pink Warlord, or a CP5 chief hell-bent on hunting me down…
Shanks rolled his long, limber body around, resting a smile on his palm. "Would you like to test that theory?"
—
Adjusting the rifle over her back, Sophie made a good ten seconds out of the pirates' camp before she stopped and said, "What exactly is happening right now."
"Can't have a lass wandering the forest by herself." Red-Haired Shanks.
"Can't have my captain wandering the forest with a lass by himself." Benn Beckman.
"You stole my rifle." Yasopp the Chaser.
"You broke my guns," Sophie snapped over her shoulder, then muttered, "Don't wanna keep a deadbeat's rusty leftovers, anyway."
"You—!"
"I haven't seen anyone destroy you emotionally since Banchina." Shanks patted Yasopp. "She'd be proud."
She stopped after reaching past a line of trees, staring down a roaring river that was far too wide to cross, the water-level rising from snowmelt. "Maybe there's a way around further upstream."
"What for?" Shanks asked.
"Eh?"
And then she was flying over the river, screaming bloody pineapples and hanging on his shoulders for dear life.
"Ah, how rude of me, I should've asked your permission," he realized in midair.
"Please k-keep your eyes f-fo-forward!"
Red-Haired Shanks did not ask. He just did. And with a bottle of ale in his hand, he didn't seem to get hungover; he just got more drunk. This pirate, who threw parties for Shichibukai and once lingered in a certain village in East Blue for a year, found the concept of 'hurry' to be anathema.
The perfume of rum and gin wafted after Shanks as they got waylaid by a long, meandering herd of bison. He played his flute to two elk bulls clashing in the wide meadows, and then, to Sophie's bewilderment, they were riding those elk bulls through the woods, Yasopp and Shanks hollering, Beckman smoking a cigarette with his arms crossed as she sat behind him, nervously clutching his cape. And even though animals hated her because they smelled the murder and anxiety, they only tried to kick her head once in Shanks' presence.
Do it for Hai Xing, she kept reminding herself, cutting through the tangled undergrowth with her knife. For the beautiful starfish of a man who never lost an opportunity to remind her she was going to die gruesomely, and for the butt-ugly sun on his chest!
"What a beautiful evening." Shanks was striding over stones across a flowing creek. "Aren't you relaxed, canary?"
Sophie was viciously swatting away moths with the rifle. "I am! Perfectly! Relaxed! Hey, I have a great idea. Why don't you launch me at the top of the mountain? Throw me up there and I'll be on my m-m-merry way!"
"What's the rush? Worried your crew will leave you behind?"
Sophie stopped, a World Government ship sailing away from Vira flashing through her mind. Then she said, "Nah, they like me too much."
Shanks grinned. "Alright, then what's on top of that mountain?"
"Fireweed berries. My friend, um… he tried fixing the Hoof on his chest—" she was focusing on counting the rocks as she crossed the river, "—to turn it into Fisher Tiger's sun. Long story short, I need to bring back something that dyes red."
She had an uncomfortable feeling that all three Red Hair Pirates were looking at her.
"Don't hurry through life, rookie," Shanks said warmly. "There's no point to being a pirate if you never pay attention to how beautiful your surroundings are."
"I pay attention… I pay so much attention to the closest exits and po-potential improvised weapons…"
Splashing up the riverbank, they arrived at a lovely little woodland clearing.
It was filled with graves.
The magenta curtain of sunset swept the wooden markers, once preserved in ice and newly melted on the onset of warmer weather. Decomposed white-blue uniforms were covered in timidly blooming flowers. Beckman and Yasopp were treading through without a glance, but—she stopped. She had to stop.
Here lies the Lunetuktu Marine Base, said the largest wooden marker, tied with a ragged grey flag with the sigil of a blue gull.
There were dozens, resting against each other, cramped-like, washed crimson in the fading light. Marine graves, carved with names, the empty uniforms half-buried in the soil, bodies long gone. Sent by the World Government to settle Lunetuktu. Died somewhere in the ten years of winter, before ever seeing the one month of spring.
"Ah, I'm starving," Shanks announced, making her flinch. An owl hooted in the trees.
Yasopp was already walking off. Sophie scrambled after him.
—
"Right, then, here's the secret," Yasopp said, and she was quite sure he was the type who enjoyed showing off, which was exactly what she expected from someone who tattooed his own name on his bicep. "Those sword-brains can have their Grade Whatevers. Guns have a voice, too."
Sophie had to jog to keep up, his long strides easily outmatching her own.
"I can tell by the way you hold that rifle," he went on, taking his musket off his back—geez, how many guns did he own? "You shoot like an amateur. There's no dance in you, no life, no feeling."
"I'm not a marksman," she said defensively.
His dark eyes shifted and Sophie was wracked by a sharp shiver, a roach in the presence of—
"Then you got no business holding that."
She stubbornly hugged her stolen rifle. "It still needs fixing." He was Yasopp of the Red Hair Pirates; what did it matter if a roach took something from his trash?
"Taste the wind, see?" He pointed through the thick trees. "Watch how the earth curves in its rotation. Account for the angle, the sunlight. Count the moments. The aim, the distance. Breathe with it. True marksmanship is an art form. An exercise in perfect timing and control, in decision and perception. You can blow through steel. You can shoot a grain of rice in half. A gun has many songs, if you listen close."
Sophie scoffed quietly, digging her foot in the dirt. Yasopp stuck his hands on his hips. She shrugged.
"No, no," he said, "go on."
"A gun isn't like a sword. Nobody needs a bullet to cut a grain of rice. Plant one in the cerebellum, watch something die. It gets the job done."
He tapped his foot, squinting at her.
"That," he said gruffly, "is excellent form. Points for you."
Oh, yay. She loved points.
"Romanticize too much and your aim dulls. You cease to respect the kill. Let the loudest song be death." Yasopp stood straight with his musket, the greatest marksman on the Grand Line. He closed one eye, and gently exhaled.
Sophie watched. She didn't blink once.
On their way back, Yasopp lugged a caribou triple his size. "Seems like you know how to handle guns," he conceded, not even slightly out of breath with a huge animal on his back, "but you don't understand what it means to carrying someone else's. You're carrying the weight of their history. It ain't properly your own."
Her hands, her life, her chemical children, her small life in one fortress, one laboratory. Everything had always belonged to someone else.
"Maybe I'm used to it. Maybe I'm just cleaning her. Takes more effort to raise a kid, I hear, but probably not as much." She smiled. "Mangos, I love deadbeat dads. I love making your faces turn that color."
"You ain't funny, Goldielocks."
"Yes, I am. Like all artists, I am underappreciated in my time. I'll die, then you'll see."
"Rookies, always tryin' to be the next posthumous genius. Your generation has more death wishes than the ocean has salt," Yasopp grumbled, and they were quiet for a while. Sophie didn't have the heart to tell him how right he was. "If you ever bump into Usopp on the ocean, tell him his pops is thinking of him."
Oh, that poor kid. "Do it yourself. You're his father."
"I got no right to say it."
"You're the greatest sniper ever, aren't you? What could you be afraid of?"
"Shit, you got a sore way with words."
"That's the nicest way anyone's told me to shut up."
Yasopp threw his head back in a loud, sudden laugh, his braids dancing around his face. Hippo laughed like that. How surreal.
She faced forward. "Tell me more about your boy. Usopp, right?"
"He's a true adventurer, followin' in my footsteps. A little yellow in the belly, sure, but that's what I love about the kid. And oh, how he could draw. Takes after his mother in every way. If her an' I ever had another kid, I always thought they'd…" Yasopp knuckled the top of Sophie's head, laughing at her yellow curls and tawny complexion. "Damn! They'd look a little like you, mouthy brat!"
"Ugh, don't be weird! I already have a dad."
"And disappointing one kid is enough for me."
Sophie evaluated his face. "Now that you mention it, did you ever cheat on your wife twenty years ago?"
"I have one love of my life, only one! Banchina, can you believe this brat?" Yasopp huffed at the air, and she was beginning to consider that every Red Hair Pirate was a little bit bonkers.
—
There was a lovely scar where Shanks' left arm should've been. Easily added ten percent to his overall appeal.
Sophie only knew this because he'd been wading in the river, and came splashing over, wiping uselessly at himself with his black cloak. What a fascinating, gorgeous stump. Were those teeth indentations? Was it Kaidou, Big Mom?
He grinned upon noticing her quick glances, and waved at the harsh scar that consumed half his dripping chest. "Curious?"
"No. Clothe yourself, you ginger minx." She went back to repairing the rifle, holding the screws between her teeth as she scraped out gunk from the bore with her knife.
They made a fire on the riverbank, right next to the graveyard. The Emperor's pirate crew was camped in the ruins of a Marine fortress; she supposed this wasn't that much worse, blasphemy-wise.
"Now then," Shanks pulled out a bottle of sake from his cloak, "shall we have a proper party?"
Her eyes popped open. "No, no, none for me!"
Fresh meat sizzled over the fire.
Ten minutes later, she was cackling in Shanks' ear, "And did you know, I grew up on stories where you had horns! And cloven feet! And threw l-l-l-le-e-cherous orgies to the dismay of virgins everywhere!"
"I'm disappointed in those rumors!" he hollered back, words slurring. "They always forget about my demonic tail!"
She wiped her greasy mouth. "But you said you had a girl. You said you left her in East Blue."
"My moon and stars." Shanks tipped his head back, that famous red hair falling across his eyes. "Around her, I couldn't even walk in straight lines."
She felt a rush of drunken anger. Were all Red Hair Pirates secretly lamers? "Why'd ya have go an' leave? Why not stay?"
He exhaled, the sweetness of rice wine on his breath. "The ocean sings her siren call, and we're the fools who obey it."
She wasn't enough, Sophie was about to say. You loved her, but she wasn't enough for you, so you left, and I hope to god she isn't waiting. But I also know how to leave people behind. Does that make me a real pirate? But she also didn't know anything about love in the first place, so she clambered over Beckman and left the campfire circle for fresh air.
As Shanks and Yasopp sang a bawdy song, arm-in-arm, Sophie walked aimlessly around the glade. She picked flowers and arranged them according to color beneath the largest wooden grave. When winter came again, they would disappear under the snow for another ten years.
Not much from a traitor, but she hoped they liked pretty flowers.
It was nighttime-cold, shadows thickening in the dusk. Frogs croaked and bugs hummed in the river shallows.
"We could be a serpent devouring itself," she said absentmindedly, noticing a caterpillar crawling over her wrist. "The cycle continues and everything keeps happening again. The same mistakes forever. But one day, the story has to end."
The voices on the other side of the fire trailed off. Shadows flickered across her impassive face, over the soft ridge of her nose.
"When another Pirate King appears, the Government will take it as an excuse to bomb the living mangos out of everyone. More wars will come. I think the ocean will survive whatever we do to it. This planet will survive." She set the caterpillar between the flowers, wondering if it'd be able to fly away before winter. "But we won't."
"Scholar?" Shanks asked.
Sophie scratched her cheek, smearing dirt across her cheekbone. "Scientist."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, "Where'd you say you're from?"
"The—the ocean." Teach's laughter rang in her ears. Even orphans like us might find our history in the history of the world. Shanks's gaze was searing, like he was trying to dredge the ugly truth out. "Okay, fine. I can't give an honest reply. I b-burned my home down."
The hand lifting the sake cup halted in mid-air.
"So if you asked someone without a home in blood or country where she's from, th-that'd be a rather difficult question."
"No home but the ocean," Shanks said quietly, and for a moment he didn't seem drunk at all. "The ocean treats her children well. You can be sure of that."
It had to be true if an Emperor said it, right?
But she was starting to wonder if the status Emperor, much like a Marine Admiral, truly meant anything at all. What was power if not another word for corruption?
A chilly breeze rustled through the clearing, breaking whatever brief spell that had taken over her when she stood beside those marine graves. Sophie moved back to the campfire and shivered, looking longingly at Shanks' cloak. She cleared her throat.
"Don't talk to me, it's cold." The Emperor buried himself deeper into his cloak, a tuft of red poking out.
Darkness covered her vision. Startled, Sophie yanked the dark purple cape off her head and blinked at the swirly patterns. When she looked up, Beckman was already reclining back under his tree.
Scratching the bandage he plopped on her forehead hours earlier, she wrapped his thick cape tighter around herself. She went back to repairing the rifle next to the wooden graves of the family she once belonged to, with the scent of cedar and cigarette smoke around her.
—
"I said I was going to reach the top by morning. No time to sleep." As though she'd ever let herself to be that vulnerable around a Yonkou crew, anyway. Sophie fixed his swirly-patterned cape around herself, rifle snug on her back. "If I hike for five hours, they can probably catch up in ten minutes, right?"
Behind them, Shanks and Yasopp were snoring loudly by the fire.
"Maybe fifteen." Beckman started walking with her, a huge shadow between slants of moonlight. "I felt like some air."
If she didn't know better, she would've thought he still felt a little bad for almost shooting her in the face.
Benn Beckman, an old-time gentleman. Who knew.
From her belt pocket, she took out a long glass tube and popped off the top, holding it up like a torch. Floating specks of light appeared inside the tube, casting a soft green glow.
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. "A Fruit?"
"Luciferin that activates when in contact with air." She raised her eyebrows, grinning slightly. "Science."
She struck out with the light of her fireflies, frosty dead leaves crunching underfoot. It wasn't long before the terrain shifted steeper and the woods grew thicker. They walked, and walked, and walked, until finally Sophie had to pause, breathing hard in the cold, thin air.
"Just a m-moment," she panted, resting her hands on her knees.
"Take your time." He pulled out a cigarette and struck his lighter repeatedly.
Watching him for a moment, she fished out her lighter. "Trade you."
After a slight pause, Beckman reached out. He lit two cigarettes with her lighter and handed back the fare. She wanted so badly to say, We used to eat our meals together! Well, I used to eat my meals and your bounty poster would be sitting across from me. We built a great rapport, you(r photo) and I.
Instead, she stuck the cigarette in her mouth, looking up. "Shanks-san said he had a girl in East Blue. Yasopp-san's got a wife. And you?"
"An old man like me has left many ports behind. But such is life."
Grey-haired, skin everywhere, scars everywhere, dark eyes creased with crow's feet that had seen things she couldn't imagine, broad hands that felt heated flesh in the dim light of wherever men go at night and done things she only dreamed of. She wondered if this was envy. She wondered if it was attraction.
"Any of it stay with you? A memory, a smile or touch?"
He breathed out smoke. "Even I remember what it's like to be a rookie."
She looked up, batting her eyes. "What century was this?"
Beckman trudged onward. Sophie followed with a cheeky grin, admiring the span of his shoulders.
The higher they walked, leafy vegetation fell away into rocks and ice. Snow-clad hills cascaded down in curtains of white, trees tipped with ivory like cupcake icing. Crisp, clean, sharp, her ears and nose tinged pink, eyes watering from the chill. Beckman strode ahead, his powerful body carving a path through the snow as she stumbled behind him, trying to step in the much larger, taller man's heavy footprints.
They passed under a whale skeleton lodged in a crevasse and she ran her hands along the glacier-blue bones, imagining the icicles chiming like a harpsichord. It was a little harder to walk by the frozen ruins of mountain huts, ragged Marine flags flying high. Old ghosts left behind.
"G-13 is a big fortress for a small thing like you to destroy."
"Yes, well—"
She tripped and face-planted in snow.
"Flowers on marine graves," Beckman said idly. "Then the way you talked about your home sounded familiar. There was news a while back about a Government traitor that burned down G-13. My captain should've been calling you a seagull rather than a canary."
Sophie lurched upright, shaking herself off like a dog. Of all the conniving old men she could've met…
"13th Branch. The Devil's Dozen. Hexheads. We crossed paths with a number of yours over the years. Boys gassed up on poison steroids, bleeding mercury."
Any second now, mortars would start firing again and the force would knock her against the wall of the trench, her face blackened with soot as she sutured a marine's sliced-open stomach, intestines steaming in the crackling thunder air. Behind her was a radio man screaming into his mushi, Alpha Tango to Alpha Minor! We're boxed in! We need reinforcem—Strangways, down!
"Ah," Sophie said, her hand gasped around a smoke grenade on the back of her belt. "Is this, um, a roundabout way of saying you'd like to kill me? Because, um, I may have some disagreements a-about that."
Before he could say a word, eyes glowed from the trees. Growling. Licking fangs.
Her hand dropped the grenade.
Any second now, whole chunks of earth would blow that radio man to bits and throw her into the air like a rag doll. Somewhere, a G-13 Captain shot himself with a syringe of pure adrenaline that would stop his heart in a matter of hours and bellowed, Are we taking this lying down!? Who are we!? Hexheads! Alpha Company! We're blitzing! Light the fuckers up!
Beckman's cape snapped around her legs as she burst through the white smoke, snow exploding behind her feet.
She swung the rifle off her back, hastily making sure the bolt-action was properly fixed in and jerked the handle back. She went through cheap flintlocks like candy, but this gun felt different. A good weight, not too light, not too heavy.
"Here we go, beautiful," Sophie muttered, and fired a warning shot. The blast bit like poison. More venom than sugar, but it sang so sweet.
The wolves surrounded her in a snarling circle. Seven, eight, twelve—
Then they sprung away with a fearful yip. Two of them collapsed, foaming at the mouth. The rest ran off, whining and howling, up a snowy hill.
Whatever Beckman did, he didn't have to fire a single shot.
"Cool your head," he rumbled, coming up behind her. "Those marines didn't die alone here, in the winter."
Something else appeared behind the wolves.
It stood up at the slope of the caldera, a stark silhouette. Fog rolled off its back from the difference in temperature in the chilly air and its blood. The strange beast with huge ram horns whirling around its head, jagged white lichen growing from its chin like a beard, smiled at them with the face of a woman. It was beautiful.
Sophie closed one eye, aiming.
Beckman held his hand out. "She isn't one of them," he said to the creature. "They're long gone. Winter will soon come, and few will step on your island again."
She tapped the trigger, breath streaming out in white fog as she glared into those iridescent pools that might've been eyes. Her teeth gnawed against her bottom lip, considering blowing apart this thing that might be evidence of a God she no longer believed in. Any second now, she'd charge into the barrage, screaming herself crazy, unafraid to die because she was already dead. Not a person, not human; a single-minded marine, a kamikaze hexhead machine—
Sophie lowered the rifle.
"Please," she said, because time and living could change so much, "if you can, watch over their graves."
It gave them another ineffable smile and vanished into the deep woods.
—
Fireweed berries grew from red flowers that coiled up from the caldera's volcanic soil, in the aftermath of forest fires and ancient eruptions.
In the snow, they stood out like bloody handprints. Red in the taiga.
Sophie fell to her knees, stuffing berries in her pocket. Up on the high, windy cliff, she could see where the Polar Tang was anchored; it was right below her vantage point on the mountain. She'd get home by breakfast.
"Did you think I'd try to kill that beast?" she asked the pirate smoking a cigarette by the edge. "Is that why you walked up here with me? Or—or did you think I'd die?"
"Yeah." He said yeah like a badass, clipped and rough. He flicked some ash into the wind. "But you surprised me."
She looked at him for a moment longer, the high wind blowing her curls across her forehead.
"You can ask. Ask what my crew's seen in New World. Ask why, with all our might, the World Government still exists."
Sophie thought about that.
Were old men truly wise, or did they seem that way because young women like her gave them that pedestal?
She motioned for him to bend down and took off his cape. "I don't see a reason to. I won't even know if what you say is right, so I'll figure it out on my own. I'm pretty clever and I'll be cleverer than you one day, when I'm also a hunky senior citizen leaving mistresses behind on ports everywhere."
A noise left his throat: deep and rumbling, warm like apple cider. Benn Beckman was laughing. In the huge expanse of sky over Lunetuktu, with sun-beaten wrinkles and long grey hair and small silver earrings. Could all stoic North Blue boys laugh like that?
She smoothed out the cape on his shoulders until they were wrinkle-free and perfect. "But since you insist, I'll ask you one thing. Humor a rookie. What in the name of all that is strange and unholy is love?"
A grin curled loosely across his scarred face. "Something that finds you, darlin'."
Sophie tipped her head, her gaze zaffre-blue, alchemically dark.
She didn't want to be afraid anymore. She wanted to transmute herself again and again, over and over, until she reached—
With her hands still around his shoulders, Sophie kissed him.
He tasted like her favorite brand of cigarettes. She kissed him on his grizzled mouth because she had never kissed anyone before. Because he was going to forget about her in a day, because she imagined too many conversations with his bounty poster as she sat alone in the cafeteria of G-13, but mostly, she kissed him because she wanted to.
She jerked back, triumphant and flustered as Beckman gripped her arms with a sharp exhale. She didn't combust. She didn't feel any different. Her heart was hammering in her chest, like when she'd get so anxious it physically hurt, but now it was a weird, good sort of hurt. It was the hurt she lately felt around Law, and that was some kind of a revelation. Beckman wasn't pudding, and Nellie would probably scream at her, but then maybe she'd laugh with her, too.
"I got boots older than you," he growled in a lecturing sort of way, which was all sorts of thrilling.
"Beckman!"
Sophie peered around him. She didn't know an Emperor's jaw could swing open so wide.
"You—you wily rascal!" Shanks hollered from the bottom of the hill, hands cupped around his mouth. "You casanova, you!"
"I did just join my own pirate crew, and you are a touch too old for me," Sophie breezed, patting him on the chest. Those were stunning pectorals. "Maybe we'll give it a decade or two."
Beckman lifted her chin with the point of his shotgun. "Fly back to your captain, lass."
A wide, toothy beam curled over the barrel. "I like you, too, Benn Beckman," she declared, and scampered off.
"Oi! That's my gun!" Yasopp raced after her, pulling out his pistol.
"I'm borrowing it until you talk to your son again!" Sophie waved in the crosshairs. "I'll take real good care of her, Greatest Sniper-san!"
A gunshot blasted. She shrieked, turning tail and sprinting away.
Yasopp stuck his pistol back in his belt. He had missed her by yards. "Suits her better, anyway. It's a height issue. Actually, I'm glad it's off my hands. Never liked that rifle very much, you know. What?"
"Can I just say," Shanks said, "I can't believe you all thought I'd be the one carried away by a young woman."
Purloined rifle beating against her back and her pockets stuffed with berries, Sophie ran as fast as she could before the Red Hair Pirates committed to the fun morning sport of rookie-hunting. What she didn't yet know was that they were returning to the New World, or that newspapers afterward would sound the alarm of Red Hair and Whitebeard Meeting! She didn't yet know that the two Yonkou were arguing over a certain son of Edward Newgate's who refused to heed all warnings about going after his exiled brother, and that the world was hurtling towards a stranger ocean.
She tripped once down the mountain, laughing wildly to herself, and kept running toward the yellow ship on the horizon because everything was still fresh snow and sunrise hues.
—
With the fireweed berries, Anko's brew matched the hot red of the Adventurer's sun, fuming bloody as a sailor's dawn. And when Hai Xing went outside to throw a net for the morning catch, in his rolled-up pants with a fresh tattoo on his bare chest, Shachi hollered and the rest of the crew followed suit, crowding around him, embracing him, all loud, all quiet—but that was all old news.
They did a quick sail around the island, but by then the Red Force had disappeared. The crew wanted to strangle her. Sophie got it; they'd been pirates for so much longer, they spent decades idolizing the Yonkou whereas when she was six, she was drawing stick-figures of Red-Haired Shanks swinging from the gallows in crayon.
It was cool and everything, but she was so tired of being around sweaty, hairy men all the time. The other Hearts did not take this well as they barraged her with questions about Red-Haired Shanks and his cloven feet and lascivious orgies and crew of cannibals who ate freshly cooked toddlers for breakfast, seasoned with the eyeballs of their enemies.
"Out of all of us, an ex-marine was the one to meet Red Hair?" Penguin snapped. "Bullshit. I call total bullshit."
"World Government scientist. And it wasn't that exciting. I just landed on Benn Beckman and almost crushed him to death."
"Fuck you!" Penguin spat, then hugged her, rested his head on her shoulder for a long moment, and whispered, "Benn Beckman touched this shoulder. Fuck you."
"Our crew is much more symmetrical, anyway," she argued, and received half a dozen salty pirates hollering, "Shut up, Sophie!"
A shower and many (eye-rolling) apologies later, Sophie was sitting atop the upper deck's railing and considering her stolen rifle.
"I'm not going to be the world's next greatest sniper," she told it, holding it tenderly. "You'll probably be wasted on me. But I fixed and polished you, and I won't ever leave you in the shadows to rust. How's that sound, Arsenic?"
Sunlight winked off the triple barrels.
Law was impressed she stole a rifle from Yasopp the Chaser's trash. Or as Sophie liked to call it, philanthropic recycling. After she retold her tale (save for a few details), he said, "They really didn't hurt you?"
She sucked in her bottom lip, tonguing the spot that had pressed against Benn Beckman's mouth. "Nothing happened. It turns out Red Hair isn't the type to set islands on fire, you know, unlike Donquixote Doflamingo."
Law was looking out into the ocean. He felt far away.
She knocked her arm against his. "And you? What shenanigans were you up to?"
"Meditated under a waterfall until I realized it was pointless and I was close to getting hypothermia," he said, looking at her properly, and the tightness in her chest eased. "Bepo got in a fight with a gang of bears."
"They were too coordinated! It was a mafia!" Bepo called distantly from below.
"Red Hair was very impressed by your pirate repertoire," Sophie confided, patting Law on the arm.
"Fuck off. You're full of shit."
"They knew your crew's name." She relished the way he stiffened, the awkward tension of his mouth. It was so rare to see his control slip.
"Our crew," he grunted, and hit her lightly on the back before going off to prepare the sub to set off again.
The whole crew were gathered around the lower deck. Hai Xing was in the middle, Fisher Tiger's sun on his lean chest, and for once, he didn't seem to be in a rush to stand in a corner and predict ways there all going to die. He had something to show off. Something to be proud of.
Sophie peeled off her gloves. Pink, brown, burned art on her hands. She considered for a moment—no, they were so disfigured it'd be worthless to try to cover it. And she didn't really want to. These were hands that got her through G-13, through Vira, through everything.
She stuck the gloves back in her pocket, and peered inside the control room.
Anko was cleaning up bottles of ink with old newspaper—crossword puzzle section, of course. He looked up when he saw her shadow. "Looks good, don't it?" he said with a proud tilt of his mouth. "That's one badass sun."
"Better than good. Incredible. You could start your own business; you're a great artist."
He did a double take. "Nah. Shut the fuck up. You fucking think it's ugly, don't you? Asshole."
"Mangos, I'm getting sick of you guys saying that to me! It's beautiful, you crazy coconut. You matched Fisher Tiger's exact sun. My compulsive need for perfection is impressed."
"Okay," Anko said after a beat, scratching the back of his head. "Right, so, what d'ya want?"
"…Got any leftover ink?"
When she told him what she wanted on her skin, Anko motioned for her to sit down. "Let's go over some fuckin' rules. No soaking in water until it heals. Short showers only. And for shit's sake, don't itch."
He took out a long piece of bamboo. Her eyes widened. "Is that three needles on a stick?"
"Hold on." He added two more needles to the bundle and waggled his tongue at her. "Now I'm ready to pop your tattoo cherry."
Sophie slapped him on principle. "Anko. Listen to me. I'm trusting you with permanent ink on my body."
"Yeah," he laughed, his arms covered with ocean waves of blue and grinning, "wouldn't it be hilarious if I fucked up?"
—
On their way to St. Poplar, Anko alerted the submarine as Aqua Laguna passed over them. There was only the slightest blip on the radar as they descended deep to avoid the currents.
After a long, dearly-needed sleep, she got to the mess after the other pirates already began their morning chores. Sophie poured herself a cup of coffee, the last glorious cup in the pot before someone (not her) made a fresh batch, and was about to reach for the milk when Law shuffled in.
"Ah, damn," he rasped, taking sight of the empty coffee pot.
"Take mine," Sophie said. They blinked at each other.
She slid the cup over, deliberately casual. Still black sludge, just how he liked it.
Their fingers brushed, and electricity raced up into her chest.
He glanced down at her ungloved hands. He didn't say anything, but there a slight grin when he went to rummage through the fridge.
She leaned on the counter, tapping the new ink on the inside of her wrists, over her collection of burns. On her left, in neat, thin black, was a XIII; on her right, a wispy wine-red outline of a heart. Sophie kept a neutral expression, but internally frowned at herself as she contemplated her actions.
Sure, she took a bullet for him (sort of, on accident). That was nothing. But to give Law the last cup of coffee?
…Oh.
She bent over on the counter with a pained grimace, like she was experiencing an ulcer. She already performed the kissing experiment. She didn't need to be feeling things anymore. Unless—
Oh, pineapples.
She was an idiot. A total sucker. She was undoubtedly the stupidest chemist alive.
When he walked behind her, his hands casually brushed against the top of her back so she wouldn't stumble into him. For a split-second she felt the heat of him against her back. Since when had they started doing that? When had she started to expect it? When had it started to delight her?
She wondered if wanting to kiss and touch Law was going to be the worst side effect of being in love with him.
And then she wondered how many people he had kissed and touched before. She wondered if he would ever love her, when that sounded so inconvenient—and she wondered why the thought of someone loving her made her terrified.
It was a whole lot of wondering, when all she wanted right now was to eat breakfast next to him.
"You have that look on your face," he remarked, "like you're trying to mentally grind my bones to powder."
"That's a little narcissistic," she scoffed, grabbing the empty pot and the coffee beans on the shelf. "I hardly ever think about you, Law-san."
There was a special hell for liars and suckers and the unlucky pineapples who desperately ignored the obvious. Sophie reflected upon this as she basked in the ungodly neon glow of the brothel that was St. Poplar's entrance to the black market, once again questioning her life choices.
to be continued
trivia
lunetuktu: lune = moon for the constant winter, tuktu = caribou in inuktitut (an inuit language of canada); based on the yukon.
fireweed: is a real flower! they grow after forest fires, and they're also the floral emblem of the yukon.
the god: highkey inspired by the forest spirit in princess mononoke. file under mysteries about the one piece world that will remain unexplained.
arsenic: arsenic is number thirty-three in the periodic table. (because triple barrels, haha wordplay.) etymological origins in the middle persian zarnik (gold-colored), from the old iranian zarna (golden).