Thank you to all my readers for all of your support and for sticking with the story! I know my updates are a little few and far between but hopefully you'll think the story line is as worth the time as I do ^^ Special thanks to one of my followers for reminding me that there are people wanting to read this story until the end. And thus, I give you chapter 8! Enjoy!

Chapter 24

A Brush with Death? The Fluttering Swordswoman is Alive!

Ari opens her eyes and the sight of the palace ballroom greets her once again. To her surprise, the ballroom is intact and untouched by her devil fruit powers. She glances over to the flute in her hands and hesitantly puts it back down on the floor where she found it.

"I wish I could be a flutist again," she sighs and gazes longingly at the instrument by her feet. She forces herself to walk back to the side of the stage where the lights are to turn the stage lights off. She accidentally turns the ballroom lights on instead. She panics for a moment, thinking that with even more lights on she might attract some unwanted attention upon herself. Zoro already suspects the Fluttering Swordswoman is alive, let's hope that no one else does. She's about to turn back and try to figure out which switches she needs to flip, when she notices someone in the ballroom. She intakes a sharp gasp and is both relieved and terrified that the person isn't standing. They're lying face down right where the door to the foyer is. He's not… moving. Her heart pounds in her ears and her eyes stay wide-open, unable to close to what she's done. She leaps off the stage haphazardly and races across the ballroom. She bullets through the maid's door at the back of the room and speeds through the tiny hallway as fast as her feet will carry her. She goes through the lounge and finally lands by the front door. She flings open the double doors and barrels through the village until she finally arrives at her and Marguerite's cottage. Ari runs through the door then to her room, passing Marguerite on her way there. Ari slams her door shut and slides down it. She tucks her knees up against her chest and bows her head in between them, taking long, deep breaths. Not again, not again, not again, not again. Tears form in her eyes and she lets them fall down her face one after the other until they're less like raindrops and more like a storm. I did this, I did this, I killed him, I killed him. Ari no longer tries to quiet her sobs as they burst out of her in waves. The sounds come racking out of her chest, shaking her entire body with it. Her fingernails dig into her palms, drawing blood that seeps under her fingernails. His blood is on my hands, his blood is on my hands, his blood is on my hands.

Suddenly, there's a knock on her door. Ari freezes. They've found me out.

But the only voice that pipes up from the other side is her friend, Marguerite's, "Ari, are you okay in there?"

Ari doesn't answer, terrified that a sob will come out instead of words. Even more terrified that the truth will. Ari doesn't hear anything else from the other side of the door and sighs in relief, thinking that Marguerite has gone on to do other things. Ari's proved wrong when there's a sort of sliding sound on the other side and a shadow remains through the slit under the door.

"Did that swordsman do something?"

Ari chokes on another sob at the mention of Zoro. The man that was lying there… in the doorway of the ballroom… was a Strawhat.

Nami walks along the palace stairs on her way to the kitchen. Maybe I can coerce Sanji into making a snack for me! There's a maid dusting off the stairwell and Nami coughs up dust, giving the maid her best glare. The maid shrinks away and hurries back up the stairs and into the east wing to continue on with her duties. Nami smirks, satisfied with her own threatening element.

Zoro's also on his way downstairs on the stairwell next to Nami's, but not to ask the cook for anything, of course.

Nami finally gets down to the foyer when she spots Brooke doing one of his weird angle things. That's strange. I've never seen him do one-hundred-and-eighty degrees before. Then, it hits her: He's not just doing that to catch a glimpse of my panties is he?! "Brooke, you pervert!" She clobbers him on the head. "How dare you think you can catch a look at my underwear like that!" Brooke instantly shoots up to a stand and Nami realizes that it's unlikely he would catch a glimpse of her panties with his face down. But what else would Brooke be doing lying face down in the doorway to the ballroom? "What were you doing face-down in the doorway, anyway?"

Zoro continues on his way, disregarding the strange antics of his crewmates, when Brooke's explanation catches his ear, "I was going to play, but then I heard a flutist and it tugged on my heart strings! Or it would if I had any heartstrings to tug on yohohoho. I could feel my soul soaring again!"

"So you…"

"It was such a beautiful note to match such a lovely woman. I couldn't handle the combination and I fainted," he elaborates, gesturing poetically with his hands. "I wonder if she would let me see her-"

"Grow up!" Nami clobbers him again.

The Fluttering Swordswoman… it has to be her! "Brooke! What exactly did you see?!" Zoro growls and picks the skeleton up by his collar.

"Zoro, come on, leave the poor guy alone. He just saw a musician, that's all." Nami waves it away with her hand.

"No, that wasn't any ordinary musician!" Zoro retorts. "I'll ask again: what did you see?"

Brooke puts his hands up as a token of truce and replies, "Sadly, I didn't get much of a glimpse of the woman, Zoro-san. All I remember was seeing brown hair."

The Fluttering Swordswoman is a brunette. But I already knew that from her wanted poster! Damn. But she was here. That settles it. She is definitely a maid. "Did you see where she went?"

"My eyes couldn't see since I was passed out. Though I suppose I don't have any eyes to see with, yohohoho."

Damn.

"Zoro, what's this about, anyway? She's just a flutist, what's the big deal?" Nami crosses her arms over her chest. Zoro doesn't even care about music. What the hell is going on?

Zoro ignores Nami and races into the auditorium, foolishly hoping that the Fluttering Swordswoman is still there. All he sees is an empty ballroom, but he decides to check it out more thoroughly by getting a better view up on stage. These are the same stairs she walked on. There's a flute that's been discarded by the microphone and looks to be an amazonian flute based on the snake engravings. He carefully picks it up and inspects it, but he doesn't find anything that would help lead him to the Fluttering Swordswoman. Defeated, he sets the flute back down where he found it. He's heads back to climb off stage to share his findings with Robin, when he sees an item of discarded clothing left by the light switches. A cardigan. It looks like something any amazonian would wear and quite possibly might be one of the many clothes that Nami has, so he just leaves it be.

XXX

Marguerite sits there on the other side of Ari's door for quite some time. Marguerite slides her hand under the door and feels Ari's hand on hers.

"I killed someone."

Marguerite's eyes open wide at Ari's sentence.

"I played for the first time in five years and I killed someone." Ari sobs from the other side of the door and Marguerite squeezes her friend's hand tighter. "Marguerite, the reason I never told you," Ari sniffles, "why I was having nightmares and what they were about is because… because… I'm not Ari. That was just the name my parents gave me."

Marguerite furrows her brow.

"My name is Flutter," Ari whispers. "I am the Fluttering Swordswoman."