Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece
Edit: I've corrected some rather confusing typos I had made. Sorry about that!
Before even an inkling of her protest is heard, Rayleigh and Hachi have already moved to their respective positions—moving with a synchronicity that Nao can only stare in awe at. How could she ever hope to achieve that level of mastery of the seas?
"A ship takes more than two people to sail, Nao."
Nao gives an acknowledging nod at Rayleigh's teasing complaint, now jumping into action to destroy all technology on the ship. The trio might have been a powerhouse due to Rayleigh's presence, but even he couldn't afford a naval fleet chasing at his heels when he had barely recovered from his injury. It was a drastic countermeasure, but a necessary one.
She flinches back, hissing in pain as the pointed end of a copper wire scratches the tip of her finger.
"Here," Rayleigh's booming voice calls her attention once more, and this time it's accompanied by a dangerous game of catch.
Nao barely grabs hold of the knife that is carelessly tossed her way, and once she's determined that she's safely kept all of her limbs, she shoots the Dark King a nasty glare.
"Are you trying to kill me?" she asks in exasperation, though she's well aware of the fact that if that were really his goal, she'd already be dead. (Like, really, really dead. Like deader than dead. Like roadkill on a professional racetrack level dead. Like twice-over dead, both literally and figuratively speaking.)
"I normally wouldn't throw a weapon at a kid, but you're not exactly, y'know…" he trails off, but the sly grin confirms to Nao everything she already knows.
There isn't even the slightest chance of her being wrong—Rayleigh was undoubtedly privy to her most dire secret.
"So, why are we going to Ohara? Did you already plan to go there before we met?" she asks in a feeble attempt at changing the course of their conversation. She did have some plans in mind, yes, but nothing she could have foreseen would have prepared her for deceiving the former Pirate King's right hand. That was, at best, a suicidal endeavor.
He chooses to go along with her intentional change in subject. "In a way, yes. It's a bit of a frivolous journey, but I'm curious as to why I've experienced a weird sense of deja vu."
"Deja vu?" she inquires, brows furrowed to indicate that she was now genuinely invested in where their talk seemed to be headed.
"Are you asking me about what it is, or what I mean by saying it?" He wants to make her beg for the information.
"The latter," she clarifies, teeth gritted.
"It's hard to say, really. I'm going solely on a gut instinct here, but I feel as if I've already heard the news of Ohara before—long before it actually occurred—but the tragedy transpired differently than the papers are reporting. Perhaps I've gone senile, but it's piqued my interest, and since you seem to have no destination set in mind, I figured that could be the first place to travel to. You don't have any objections to it, do you?" His question seems innocuous, but the keen glint in his eyes indicated otherwise.
Nao chooses not to speak against his decision. "No objections at all," she spits through a forcibly bright beam. "I'm excited to travel!"
"Why are you guys acting all weird over here?" Hachi's blunt question comes as a surprise to both of them. He had appeared behind them with little warning, and had somehow managed to catch them both off guard.
Rayleigh was either way too invested in Nao's responses, or had lost his touch. (She'd be fucked if she were right, but Nao would have to bet on the former—there was definitely something unnerving about how he seemed to scrutinize every word that slipped out of her mouth.)
"I-I don't know what you're talking about," Nao stutters, hastily moving away from the two of them to continue to disassemble anything that didn't look completely shattered courtesy of Hachi.
The frequency of those objects is few and far between.
Rayleigh's stare is odd—almost cold—as he observes her sporadic movements. He settles for a short sigh in response to her panicked actions. "I won't be forcing you to spill your secrets, Nao, but trust is generally need between people who sail together."
Nao freezes, and Rayleigh understands that this means he will get no response. He leaves the room, taking Hachi with him by beckoning his hands, and allows Nao to really think about the words he had just spoken.
And think, she does.
She is well aware of how right he is. Trust is essential among people who wished to have a smooth journey together, but she'd have to be out of her mind to reveal something as fictitious sounding as the fact that she was living, breathing proof of Fate being one fucked up individual. She could never expose such a thing—that she is sure of—yet she feels pressured to. Is this what it means to be truly intimidated?
For the few years that she had lived with her 'sisters', she had never once experienced true fear—not including the horror that had consumed her upon being reborn. Yet somehow now, in the presence of Rayleigh, every bit of her that desired to live screamed at her to run far, far away.
But she wouldn't—couldn't. Her plans had already been set into motion.
Rayleigh's rash decision to travel to what remains of Ohara is proof enough that her role in this world could not be minimal. If he remembered the even playing out in a different way, there was no telling how many others had gotten that same 'inkling' that he had gotten. She is, however, certain that she's the only one with a complete memory of all that would occur in this strange world.
Running away would be a waste of Fate's rare kindness—something she has no intentions to do.
Despite this resolve, though, Nao still decides that it'd be wise to stay away from Rayleigh as often as possible. From what little he had seen of her, he had already been able to deduce that she was obscuring information, and had even insinuated that she had been responsible for the strange overlap in his memory. He's not a bad man, but a man who could be bad for her. Her situation was precarious enough as is.
And so, after a full day of avoiding Rayleigh as best as she could while stuck on a ship with him, Nao wakes to find herself curled into a ball, tucked away in some little corner of the operating room. She doesn't remember feeling tired—doesn't even remember falling asleep—yet she had slept for a curiously long amount of time. There's something blatantly wrong with how things had proceeded, but there's little time that she can spend dwelling on it.
Rayleigh clears his throat from the entrance of the room, not even drawing out the slightest hint of alarm from her. Her lack of an appropriate response from his sudden appearance is telling of how alert she is around him. She'd have to be a damn fool not to be, though. (It's a guy nicknamed the fucking Dark King. Who wouldn't be wary of someone with a sketchy name like that?)
"We've landed in Ohara." It's a simple statement, but what it implies for Nao is earth-shattering.
In the original storyline, Ohara had been completely wiped from the map. Everything had been destroyed—from the island's citizens to the land map itself. Rayleigh's words, however, say otherwise.
"But I thought it was—" she stops herself mid-sentence, but it's far too late. She'd made an unfixable blunder.
Rayleigh cocks an eyebrow, looking at her with eyes that urged her to open her mouth. "Was what?" he inquires, yet he gives her no time to actually give a response. "Completely decimated? I thought so too. So tell me, Nao, why exactly are you aware of the very same things that I'm aware of, though those things had never happened?"
"I'm—" She's certain she's about to do it—certain that she's about to disregard end her short-lived attempt at living in secrecy, but the Fate itself seems to intervene.
A loud boom is heard from a no more than a couple hundred meters away, followed by the violent rocking of the ship they had boarded. Nao stumbles forward, scraping her hands on the wooden planks while Rayleigh does not bat an eyelash. She represses a shiver at how unbothered he is—he was too accustomed to the unforgiving nature of the seas.
"Stay here." It's not a suggestion; it's a demand.
Without protest, she complies. Her circumstances may be insane, but she's still perfectly lucid—save for a few psychotic breaks every once in awhile. She squeezes her eyes shut, pressing her back against the corner that she had awoken in. It's not the most efficient way of bracing for an attack, but it's what she can manage in the brief moments she assumes she has to prepare.
She (as she'll often turn out to be, because the Universe preferred making a damn fool out of her over anything else) is wrong.
There is no sound of combat—not even from the supposed enemy's end of the conflict. In fact, the noises that do reach her ear sound like the opposite of what she had immediately assumed. Rayleigh's voice contorts itself into a gleeful shout—one so joyous sounding that Nao ponders if the man had lost his mind.
She waits for a few more minutes, giving herself time to gather enough courage to wander outside. Eventually, she quells the fear inside of her and delicately picks herself off of the floor. The tenseness in her shoulders does not disappear, but she throws away her usual wary approach towards sketchy predicaments.
This divergence from her standard strategy, she decides, is a mistake.
While Rayleigh's concerns had been quelled the moment he stepped outside to identify the potential threat, the terror already instilled in Nao quadruples as she does the same. There's another person on board, but it's not the purple-tone fishman that stands in front of her. The face her eyes settle on shoots a chill down her spine, and she's almost desperate enough to escape that she considered jumping overboard.
It's the Revolutionaries.
And the tattoo that she had once so greatly admired through a television screen now stares her down.
He doesn't notice her quite yet, but simply catching sight of the man sends Nao reeling. She isn't all too sure what her appearance in his life could mean for the universe, but if them meeting somehow rippled through history to stop—or even delay—Luffy's birth, 'screwed' would be an understatement of how absolutely hell-bound the world would be.
She tries to stealthily slip back into the room she had been occupying, but it's too late.
"You've taken to adopting brats, Rayleigh?" Dragon jokes, looking pointedly at the scrawny figure a few yards behind the aforementioned man.
Rayleigh turns to take a look at Nao with an unusual expression on his face. The attention he pays to every movement makes it seem as if he's seeing her for the first time—truly observing every minuscule detail about her to qualify whatever conclusion his mind had reached.
"I don't think brat is quite the right word here, Dragon," Rayleigh speaks in a lighthearted tone, but Nao knows exactly what he's implying.
She's never wanted to sink into the floor so desperately before, and with the attention all focused on her, she thinks she just might. (If a rubber man could exist, she could definitely momentarily transcend the laws of physics.) Unfortunately, instead of allowing her to leave so they could resume their talk, Rayleigh beckons for her to come closer to the two terrifyingly powerful men.
She's practically quaking in her muddied geta sandals. For the first time in the entirety of her two lives, she thinks she'd rather be in a brothel as opposed to the fever dream of a reality that she'd gotten stuck in.
Dragon considers Rayleigh's words carefully, bending over ever so slightly to get a better look at Nao. His face, shockingly, lights up in recognition. "Ah! You're the child my dad keeps referring to as the 'creepy rascal' that Mama-san picked up."
"Dad?" Rayleigh echos, looking taken aback.
Nao hides an amused snort. She can't judge Rayleigh's for his astonishment at the fact that Dragon had a father, though. Sure, it was biologically obvious, but it was too ridiculous to think that such a daunting man could have something so ordinary as a father, much less someone like Garp. Despite how disastrously her encounter with Dragon could go, it was rather humorous that a legend of a man could be related to none other the Navy's own legend of an officer.
The Monkey D. lineage was clearly not one to scoff at.
"You know, vice admiral Garp. If I'm not mistaken, he had a few run ins with that captain of yours, Rayleigh," Dragon confirms the identity of his father, casually mentioning three of the most insanely formidable men in known history.
Rayleigh's eyes practically jump out of his face. "You're that man's son?! And the Navy hasn't removed him from his post?" He is absolutely bewildered at the revelation.
"Oh," Dragon pauses. "Maybe that information was classified."
Now, both Nao and Rayleigh wear mirroring looks of incredulity at the man's carelessness. (Nao finally understands how all three men—Garp, Luffy, and Dragon—are related.)
There is an awkward silence as the two settle on ignoring the man's fickleness.
"Why are you and your men here, Dragon?" Rayleigh asks the question that had been on Nao's mind since she had sighted the man.
She remembers that the Revolutionary Army had searched for Robin for years after the tragic fate of the Ohara scholars, but if she could correctly recall, their hunt hadn't started until long after the incident had passed. Why on earth were they informed of it now?
Dragon looks at Rayleigh in bewilderment. "Don't you know? I thought you brought that girl here solely because of her knowledge of the Ohara incident."
Nao stills, retreating further into herself with every word that spilled out of Dragon's mouth.
"What do you mean?" Rayleigh's question is more of a demand for information than anything.
Dragon doesn't disappoint.
"The Navy caught wind of there being an island of people who could translate those stone oddities around the world—the poneglyphs. A loosely connected associate of mine, Nico Olvia, and her team had been travelling to investigate further into the poneglyphs, but last I heard of them, they had been captured and killed by the marines."
"What does that have to do with Nao?"
"Nao, was it?" Now Dragon bares the same curious face that Rayleigh had had on mere moments before. "You've heard of how she's why every marine in the North Blue flooded to Mama-san's, correct?"
Realization dawns on Rayleigh, but he motions for Dragon to continue. "Yes, go on."
"A witness at a local dango shop had overheard a conversation about Ohara between a marine and a child. They'd blamed it on the child, Nao over here, and had stated that she had been the one to bring up the incident before it occurred. The marines have never been all that great and keeping things confidential, and my men were able to intercept a conversation between Headquarters and a fleet of ships. There's not all that much to it after that. We weren't able to get here in time to stop the initial conflict, but we were able to prevent everything from being destroyed. One of the survivors had already escaped, but the other is with us as of now." Dragon's voice drops to a monotonous tone—one probably used for debriefing his fellow revolutionaries—as he describes the spiral events that had occurred since Nao's slip of the tongue.
"One of?" Nao's voice is urgent as she questions Dragon's choice of wording, interjecting before even Rayleigh could speak.
Dragon regards her with intrigue. "Yes, one of. Nico Robin has somehow slipped through the hands of the marines, which is unfortunate but Jaguar D. Saul, once he's been thawed by my men, is expected to survive, though. It seems that Kuzan's sense of comradery prevented him from landing a killing blow that would've been absolute." Dragon says the last bit with a hint of bitterness.
Nao (if you forget that she was so preoccupied with losing her shit) completely understands why such an action is looked down upon. The marines had no qualms with the slaughter of thousands, but still couldn't deliver the finishing blow to someone who had committed treason? As convenient as Saul's survival is, there is something innately wrong about it.
Nao has no time to fret about the morals of the Navy, though. If a few words blurted out on a whim could do so much to alter the course of history, what on earth would her meeting people like Dragon and Rayleigh do?
"I'm going back inside," she states abruptly, having no desire to stick around.
Neither of the men make an effort, but out of the corner of her eye, she catches Dragon whispering something that—judging by the stare that was locked onto her retreating figure—concerned her.
She suppresses the urge to puke as she finally escapes the suffocating atmosphere.
Without even knowing, her very existence was already rewriting history.
I got the update done in under a week! Woohoo. I hope you guys enjoyed the surprise guest in this chapter. Things are already changing so much!
I noticed kind of a lack of response from you guys, is anything wrong? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story so far, good or bad. :)
Please review if you have the chance!
Have a great day!