Hey there! Sorry for not posting in a while! Not making excuses or anything, just a bit lazy. Working on two big ones that are both about two thousand words each. So, look forward to that! This one shot The Wife is more of a general kind of fic. This is how Garp met his wife/Dragon's mother.
By the way: there's a poll on my profile! You get the pick which genre is the next chapter!
He met her when they were just fourteen years-old and two years after Garp had lost his entire world. His parents had died and his two sworn brothers had died. He was at his lowest and had tunnel vision of blood, pain, death, and revenge.
No one approached the teenager with a dark past and abnormal strength. Woop Slap, the most respected of the teenagers, warned many of him. He was dark and strange and was trouble. No self respecting citizen should ever go near him.
But Kamiki D. Hera wasn't normal.
Sure, she looked normal with her small and feminine figure. Her soft chocolate brown hair cascaded down in waves to her back and her glistening obsidian eyes had the spark that every normal child had. Her eyes told of an innocence that had yet to be tainted by the cruel world. And if she stayed in Dawn Island for the rest of her life, she would most likely always keep that innocence. Thing was, Hera wasn't born on Dawn Island. No, she was one of many families that had migrated to Dawn Island after the invasion.
Her grandmother and her father were both originally from Dawn Island. The passing of her grandmother was sad but Hera had never known her so it wasn't as traumatizing. Her father had decided to move the family, his wife and two children, to Dawn Island. Hera liked the view on Quill Island, an island where passenger ships stopped by frequently, and was disappointed to leave. She liked seeing the different people and species that came to the island, telling of fantastical islands on the Grandline and her happy-go-lucky friends. The move was hard, but Hera stayed optimistic.
Going to Dawn Island, Hera became best friends with Shira and Mauve, two young girls that were also pulled away from their own lives. Hera was from the West Blue, Shira the North, and Mauve the South. Together, they had found each other in East Blue. They understood Hera's heartbreak and pain on a personal level.
They liked to play ball and braid each others hair.
They went to school together along with Woop Slap who was two years older than them but was still in some of their classes due to the small school size. Hera had been in school for more than a year before she had finally met Garp.
Garp didn't attend school and there was really no one that could force him to. He could read and write well enough to get by. He didn't have the social skills to fit in well with the other school children. Either way, he would have skipped the classes to train in the forest of Dawn. There were more important things than school.
But Mayor Pardi, had lured the sixteen year-old into attending school with the promise of free meat if he attended at least 60% of all classes and passed with at least a C average.
This wouldn't have even been good enough for the regular children to go to the next grade level since they needed an attendance of at least 85% but considering Garp wasn't even attending before, it was better than nothing.
Hera remembered seeing an intimidating man that stayed in the background of the classroom, staring out the window and towards the sea. He would be brooding and Hera wasn't ever sure what he was thinking, was probably never going to know. This was a teenage boy of secrets that Hera wanted to discover.
The most astounding thing was that every test they had, he got the minimum percentage to get a C. He never went a day more or less than necessary. Others thought Garp was dumb for only getting Cs but Hera knew he was smart. He probably knew all of the material but had calculated to see how many he needed to get right to get the minimum C.
Hera wanted to know the man and so, she started to follow him around after school. Shira and Mauve would help her by filling out some of her homework while she was off watching him.
Sometimes Garp would go around, tossing trees and crushing rocks with his bare hands. Other times, he would just be meditating and Hera had no idea that Garp could look so… she wasn't sure how to describe it. He wasn't at peace yet he wasn't fully concentrated. It was as if he was trying to train and yet something kept invading his mind. He would constantly swim and run all the time, casually jogging backwards up Mount Corvo to see the setting sun. Going down the mountain, he would grab a sturdy piece of park and let gravity pull him down, sliding down at a rapid pace with the smooth movements of right, right, left, right to avoid large bumps.
Garp was something else and yet Hera felt like Garp was holding back. One time, Hera had caught Garp throw a punch and stopping before he actually hit the boulder, only for the force of his punch to crumble the boulder to dust. After that impressive display of power, Hera saw Garp tense before forcing himself to relax. He continued to punch boulders but he actually hit them this time and they didn't turn to dust like before. No, the boulders turned into pebbles.
When Garp turned seventeen, he set out to sea to Shell Town, the island closest with a Marine Base. Everyone found it odd yet fitting that Monkey D. Garp would become a Marine. Though he didn't fit in well with others and didn't listen to authority, he had his own brand of justice and was strong.
"I hope you succeed," Hera told him, blushing as she handed him her soft lavender handkerchief that had her initials stitched in a royal blue.
"Thank you," Garp said in his stoic voice. He looked at the gift in mild confusion but accepted it, nonetheless.
And just like that, Garp was off to become a Marine and Hera wouldn't see him for the next nine years, not until after the Canon Pirates had fallen.