Sorry for the extended wait. Explanation and details about further updates in the A/N.
Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece.
"Get up."
Nao pants, indignantly meeting the Vice Admiral's unforgiving gaze with a glare of her own. Her ribs ache—hell, her entire body aches—and her coughs being triggered by his icey devil fruit aren't doing anything to alleviate the pain.
"You're a sociopath," she accuses, though she knows he's only using a fraction of his energy to get her up to par. (To be fair, though, she'd end up being called a sociopath a thousand times over after this ordeal.)
"If you can't even move out of the way of a single icicle, you're going to get skewered on the battlefield," he drones, looking bored with her lack of progress. "Shouldn't you have had some grasp on your devil fruit by now?"
"It's been a week!" she snaps, voice raised a pitch higher to show her aggravation. She had thought that she was in for a rather easy few years of stagnancy, but Kuzan was hellbent on proving her assumptions wrong. "I don't even know what my devil fruit is."
He quirks an eyebrow, falling back into a casual stance to signify that their training is done. "Did you not bother to read its description in the book?"
She nearly falls over in exasperation. "That nonsense isn't even interpretable!"
And to her, it isn't. Regardless of how long she's been living in this world, there really is a limit to how much crazy crap she can wrap her head around. There's a lot of things that she's been forced to swallow, but the nonsensical descriptions of a supernatural-esque fruit from another world isn't one of them. (This world is still, even after a decade of burrowing her own place in it, fucking weird.)
"A child could make sense of it."
"Well, it's a damn shame that I'm not a kid," she retorts, brushing off unseen dirt from her body as she gets up to move in closer to the the new psychopath that's taken over Rayleigh's role in her life.
He looks at her, clearly amused, and quickly moves his hand towards her.
Nao flinches, moving back but knowing full well that she has no chance of dodging that attack. (This, she swears, is really fuckin' unfair—what kind of godly adult uses his abilities to beat down a kid?) Surprisingly, though, another blow to her body doesn't come. Instead, a light smack is heard throughout the room, and what comes out of it is just a barely-seen red mark on her forehead.
Did he just—
"What the fuck," she says aloud, not exactly meaning to voice her thoughts in such a crude manner, but can anyone really blame her when motherfuckin' Kuzan just smacked her forehead?
"You're a kid," he speaks flatly, "but you'll improve if you keep up the training with me."
Nao huffs, not sure whether to let the contact slide or protest against it. Letting it slide would be the mature thing to do, but she'd be damned before she lets someone who'd barely be older than her had she survived the first time around treat her like an invalid.
"You're an adult, but you'll lose the stick up your ass if you keep up the conversation with me," she bites back, giving him a dead stare.
It's a hell of a way to talk to a man that could probably destroy half of the world on a whim, but banter has always been the quickest way to whittle a place inside someone's heart. Incredibly enough, it works—Kuzan exhales air in what Nao decides to take as his own way of showing his amusement.
"See, you're already laughing! If god allows for it, maybe you'll even, dare I say it, give me some kind of praise for miraculously putting up with these icebergs being thrown at me day after day!" Nao's voice sounds as sweet as honey, but Kuzan shakes his head.
"Now you're asking for a bit too much there, brat. If you wanna complain to someone, complain to the blond idiot that decided to leave you in my care." He's grumbling in his own haughty way, but he does so with good humor, and Nao is certain that she's already starting to dig her own place into the now-Vice-Admiral's life.
It isn't exactly how she thought her plan would go, but it's nonetheless working out in its own screwed up way.
"Rosinante might be clumsy, but I'm pretty sure he would've at least tried to have explained to me what the hell this damn devil fruit does. Maybe if I knew what it did, I'd be able to not get my ass kicked by blocks of ice," Nao speaks pointedly.
Kuzan sighs. There's no way for him to escape his role as her impromptu teacher now.
"It's teleportation, sort of. For someone at your skill level, that's all you really need to know. You're displacing something with another something, but there has to be some sort of exchange going on. You won't be able to just appear out of thin air, but I've no idea what it is you'd have to exchange." He shrugs. "It's your devil fruit, figure it out yourself."
Nao straightens her back, no longer in a defensive stance to ward away Kuzan's attacks. This is something she has to think about—something she needs to understand before she can give Fate a metaphorical ass-kicking. The fruit isn't a fraud or anything—her unwanted teleportation with Rosinante and Ace in tow had proved that—but she still hasn't got a clue as to what could've been exchanged for that short distance covered.
Why there? Why that exact spot and not, per se, the ship's deck, or maybe even Garp's office—places she's much more familiar with compared to the cargo hold. There had to have been something that made it so that she was brought to that specific spot, but what? Perhaps being able to fully visualize the area held a helping hand towards bringing the unsuspecting trio to that spot, but it sure as hell didn't explain what it was that was exchanged for them to be there in the first place.
And then it clicks.
The injuries she had sustained—the amount of her own blood pooling on the wooden planks beneath their feet—it all left something tangible for her to exchange herself with.
She wraps her hand around her forearm, digging her nails deep into her own skin. Flinching as the blood begins to seep out, she holds her arm out, pouring the thick liquid a couple of feet away from her.
Kuzan looks at her curiously, but raises no questions.
"Throw another attack at me—a small one," she requests, and Kuzan finally reaches the same conclusion as she had.
"Don't go haunting me if your head gets blown off."
Nao cracks a crooked smile. "No promises."
In a flash, a branch of ice shoots its way towards her, going nowhere near the speed that Nao is fully aware that Kuzan can reach. It still, of course, is absolutely lethal, but this is exactly what she needs. The blood pumping through her veins, the fear nearly striking her down by its own right—this is what has driven her from the very start.
She ignores the ensured death rushing at her at a fifty miles per hour, instead focusing every bit of her energy on intensely staring at the puddle of blood a few feet away, willing herself to move, move move!
The ice barely pierces her chest, drawing out no more than a single droplet of blood before she finds herself sprawled on the floor, drenching her training clothes in the blood that had dripped out of her arm only moments before. It might have taken a hell of a while, and she might've still landed in a position that would, at most, momentarily postpone her death in a battle, but she still did it nonetheless.
"Boo-yah!" she shouts joyously, not giving a damn about how her 'successful' attempt at using her devil fruit would probably be considered anything but helpful in quite literally any other situation.
"You ended up with a slit wrist, an uncleanable shirt, and a landing that would still get you killed either way," Kuzan snorts.
"Doesn't change the fact that I still fuckin' did that!" she replies back, unable to wipe the dumb smile off of her face.
For a moment, she is so overjoyed that she almost forgets her purpose for trying so damn hard to get stronger. Changing the Fate of world? Messing with whatever God controls such strange, screwed up destinies—all of it had meant jack shit to her for a fraction of a second, and then it all comes crashing back down.
She throws a glance at the frozen attack that had still hit her regardless of her semi-successful attempt at wielding her devil fruit as something that could be used defensively. It's frozen in place, both literally and figuratively, and a pang of annoyance hits her harder than the icicle apparently would ever have.
"You stopped your attack," she states matter-of-factly.
"I'd rather not owe the blond another favor for screwing up this one," Kuzan answers a question that she never even asked, but they both know it's an excuse.
"You're underestimating me." Now it's an accusation.
He raises his hands defensively. "Me? Underestimating you, a random brat that Garp picked up on his travels who, thus far, has only just barely been able to stay alive against the normal attacks that I've thrown at her? Why, I'd never."
Nao flushes, both embarrassed over her past fumbles and of her slight overestimation of herself. Regardless, though, she refuses to take the verbal attack silently. "I'm not an ideal student, but you're not exactly the ideal teacher yourself, y'know."
"Yeah, yeah, at the very least, we know you're not completely incompetent," he drawls. "Hurry up and get changed, I was supposed to be in Sengoku's office ages ago."
He turns around, leaving without her. His hand shoots up in a short wave of goodbye, but he doesn't bother to look back to see if she sees the small gesture.
Nao gives his receding figure a flat stare. This apathetic buffoon is one of the marine's greatest assets. This guy. The thought of such a lazy man being held up to such incredibly prestigious standards is almost laughable, but she knows all too well what he's truly capable of, and for that she keeps her snarky comments to a minimum.
Finally alone, though, she takes the time needed to change as an opportunity to reflect on the past week or so she's spent freeloading at the motherfucking Marine Headquarters. Here she is, getting trained by a guy who'd eventually play a huge role in killing the little kid she'd just promised to help out, and she's still handling it without having a complete mental breakdown.
Now that's what she'd called a fuckin' accomplishment.
Reaching the bathroom that she's spent far too many hours cleaning blood up in recently, she takes a moment to really look at herself in the mirror. She doesn't worry about anyone walking in on her—even the almighty marines faltered when it came down to figuring out how to treat an adolescent female. On her first day training with Kuzan, one of the marines had walked in on her bandaging up in the bathroom after, and since then the entire goddamned base has steered clear of the area for at least two hours after their training session is done.
As ridiculous as their fear of her is, now she is grateful for it. Privacy is a rare thing to have in a place filled with so much classified information.
Her reflection looks back at her as she sterilizes the miniscule wound created in her chest, and she looks on at it in wonder.
This is her.
This black-haired brat with porcelain skin and all too dainty limbs (a byproduct of being a courtesan's daughter) is her. Choppy hair pulled up into a messy ponytail, black bangs that are just barely revealing sharp, hazel eyes that stare harshly at whatever the universe throws her way.
This is her.
Adorning a uniform she had once perhaps hated as a child staring into a TV screen. Adorning a uniform she had once even despised as she watched the same uniforms appear on the backs of men that had burned down the first home she had come to know in this life.
This is her.
Standing in the middle of the marine base's bathroom, next to a run-down, wooden stall that might have once been painted a bright shade of white, detailed with stripes the very same color as the marine's signature ocean-blue.
Holy shit. Her breathing hastens, her face pales.
This is he—
"Now what's got Kuzan's brat all worked up?"
Her eyes flick up, no longer looking at her own reflection, but rather at the reflection of the man standing behind her.
Sakazuki Akainu.
Akainu, the devil (to me and all other Ace lovers out there) has entered the stage!
I'm so sorry for taking so long to update. I'm not gonna lie, this has been the roughest couple weeks of my life. I won't give details, but I was recently a victim of assault and have been trying recuperate from that. I will continue to update this fic, but can't promise as frequent updates as I used to do. I normally wouldn't reveal such a personal event in my life to you guys, but as my readers, I feel you have the right to know specifically why I've had a hard time writing as of late.
Thank you for your patience.
I put a lot into writing this chapter. I hope you guys enjoy! If you did, please leave a review! Right now, your words bring me more joy than you can imagine.
Have a great day!