Shanks doesn't know what to say when he sees her sitting at Party Bar, drinking a glass of OJ.
It was his ninth time visiting Dawn Island.
Not once before had he seen her.
Luffy is sitting on her lap, chattering away, and Anne is nodding patiently, sipping at her orange juice. Luffy is holding apple juice in his hand and laughing.
Her eyes look his way she raises an eyebrow.
"Well? Come here tomato boy and tell me about your day."
Tomato boy.
Shanks almost laughed.
He hasn't been called that in ten years, at least.
"Lady Anne," He said genteelly, and she scoffed at him, "It's been too long."
"Seems you got a mouth on you, little tomato. Shut up and be good, you hear?"
He actually did laugh this time and sat down by her. Luffy looked between the two of them curiously.
"You know Shanks, Maçã?"
"Yes. From a long time ago." She grinned at him and faux-whispered: "When he was a brat, he was a cabin-boy on my brother's crew! He was so awful at fighting it was a pity to watch!"
Shanks blushed, "Anne-san, I think that Luffy doesn't need to know that—"
"No way! On Uncle's crew?!" Luffy shouted, his eyes sparkling. "You were on Uncle's crew?!"
Shanks doesn't really know how to respond to that.
He looks down at Luffy, and the way his eyes glisten are the same as Anne's. The same as Roger's.
Shanks bites his lips and sits next to the woman who called his captain brother.
Makino pours him a glass of rum and her eyes are sharp.
They say: "Anne is special to this place."
He looks around the room.
Every Fuchsia native seems to be stabbing him with their eyes, daring him to scheme, to plunder, to finally act as a Pirate should. He sips his rum and laughs.
"Anne-san, I really don't understand how you're able to surprise me every time I see you."
She gives him a side look, threading her finger's through Luffy's hair. The kid looked as though he's about to pass out and drool all over Anne's skirt.
"You really are an idiot, boy. You know nothing about me, of course I'm going to surprise you." The air thickens. Shanks isn't completely sure why.
He feels like he's stepped in a landmine. He senses his crew stiffen, how their eyes trail onto Anne like hawks.
Luffy is snoring and Anne leans forward.
"What have you been doing in my town, Shanks?" Her voice is absolutely venomous, and Shanks gets goosebumps from just looking at her.
He knows that look, that venom, that glare.
They're his captain's (or were they Anne's from the beginning?).
"Makino says you've done no harm, that Luffy loves you, and I'm willing to give you and your crew the benefit of the doubt...but, humor me a bit. Why stop at Dawn Island so frequently, hm?"
Luffy mutters something about meat, and it takes all of Shanks' willpower to not laugh then and there.
"Well..." he strokes his stubble, "The booze is excellent, Makino-san really is very pretty, and Luffy makes me laugh." He tilts his head, considering if he had any other reasons for his visits to Dawn Island.
Anne nods, very politely, and traces the new scar on Luffy's cheek.
Ah.
Shanks flinches.
That was it.
"Look here, Akagami, you see this mark here?"
Shanks gulps. "I see it."
Anne's eyes flash red, and the bar is so quiet.
"Luffy told me how he got it. I understand it's not your fault. I really do. I don't hold it against you. But I'm still outraged. Does that make sense?" She is calm, collected, and terrifying. Shanks really doesn't know how she's related to easy-going Roger at all.
"Yes ma'am."
Anne smiles.
"Good! Not that that's settled," she punches Luffy's cheek and it stretch, stretch, stretches, and Shanks thinks he's about to faint. Luffy wakes up as he cheek snaps back into place, grumbling about "don't do that, Maçã!". "Explain."
Shanks' teeth chatter and Anne actually laughs in his face.
"I'm joking, I'm joking! Makino-chan, get this man another rum!"
Instantly the mood shifted, and gone was the silence, and suddenly the bar was as loud and lively as every.
Anne winks at him, and Luffy his back drinking his juice.
Shanks doesn't think his heart can handle another visit if Monkey D. Anne was going to be there.
"So...Roger gave you his hat?" Anne tells him after the bar is closing down, and Luffy is sleeping in one of the booths, waiting for Anne to carry him home to bed. "Can't say I was expecting that."
Shanks touches the coarse straw on his head, and narrows his eyes.
"Why?" He grins slyly. "Is it really so surprising?"
Anne pursing her lips at him and shakes her head. There is a certain amount of mirth in her eyes that makes Shanks unbearably wary. He thinks Anne is too spry and too sharp for her own good half the time. "I'm assuming he just told you it was his treasure, right?"
Shanks frowns, but nods anyway.
"Yes..." There was no use in asking how. Of course Anne knew.
( "People change, Roger. We haven't seen in her eight years. She's not the same."
Roger laughed right in Raleigh's face.
"Annie knows everything about me! We could be apart for twenty years, not talk, and she'd know just just the look on my face, and how long my beard was. Annie just knows." Roger looks out to the sea wistfully.
"I know people change, but not Annie. She'll always be the same where it counts. Annie knows me and I know Annie. It's as simple as that.")
Anne cradles her face in a hand that was propped up by her elbow. She seems nostalgic in how her eyes glaze over his hat, but Shanks can feel in the pit of his stomach a deep discomfort with the hat, and just like that, the feeling is gone and the levity that was so closely associated with Anne returned.
"That hat is a family heirloom. My great-grandfather wore it; my grandfather; Roger; you." She grins. "You aren't Roger's secret love-child or anything are you? He would only give that hat to family, you know?"
Shanks face is almost as red as his hair as he splutters his booze.
Anne laughs and scoops up Luffy, heading for the door.
"Take good care of it." She winks at him and Shanks gapes at her as the door closes and Ben is looking at him, and Makino his quietly cleaning the bar.
("Take good care of it." Roger says.
Shanks was only nine years old. He had been a member of the Gold Pirates since he was six, and Roger was like a father to him. Roger had picked him out of the gutter and tended to his wounds and gave him a name.
"But, captain—" Shanks is nine, and he isn't as strong as he should be, but his captain is his captain, and it hurt, it felt like something he didn't deserve—
"Take care of it." Roger repeated, pushing the hat farther onto Shanks' head. "It's my treasure."
Shanks felt something caught in his throat.
"I will."
Roger grinned that grin— the grin that the world itself feared—and howled a great bellowing laughter.
"Thatta kid!")
She's there again the next time Shanks visit.
Orange juice in hand, she turns to him and smiles. Next to her is a freckled boy who also has a glass of orange juice that he's nursing.
Luffy is behind the counter, screeching at Makino, who patiently nods at his childish ramblings.
"Anne." Shanks says politely as he sits, waving to Makino for a drink.
"Tomato boy." She nods.
Shanks peers past her to get a better look at the boy.
The child makes eye contact with him, ares, and drinks more juice.
"Ace." She hums. "Introduce yourself."
The boy sneers. "You already said my name. I ain't got anything to introduce."
She rolls her eyes. "Shanks, this is Luffy's cousin, Portgas D. Ace."
"Brother!" Luffy shrieks from behind the counter. "Maçã, we're brothers!"
"Are not!" Ace bursts out, hopping down from the bar.
"Are too!" Luffy retorts, sticking his tongue out for the true essence of childhood nonsense.
Ace reddens and shoots behind the counter, grabbing Luffy's cheeks, "Shut up you brat!"
Anne laughs. "Play nice."
Shanks considers the boy.
"Anne..."
"We don't talk about it." She says abruptly. "So don't."
"Okay." He hummed, nodding at Makino as she placed his rum in front of him. "Anne, you've heard, haven't you?"
"About Ohara? Of course I have. Hard not to."
"I thought so." Shanks swirled his drink. "How's Garp?"
"Don't." She said quietly. "Don't bring him into this."
"I'm just saying, I've heard this about his son, Anne. Your son. Quite the family."
"Shanks, get to the point already."
"I've been thinking hard, Anne. Very hard. I can't help but wonder whose side you're on, is all. The pirates or the marines...you know that this world can't hold out for very much longer..."
"I'm on their side." She nods to the two boys rough housing in the kitchen. "I'm on the side of the truth, Shanks. I'm more concerned about how the world is going to handle my smackdown that it has coming."
He gave her a sidelong grin and she shook her head.
"Get out of here. I know that you're already stocked."
He laughs.
"How'd you know!"
She smiles.
"Call it intuition."
Shanks snorts, and Makino gives him a look before sliding over a mug of ale.
"Didn't peg you as the superstitious type." He mutters around a swig of his booze.
"Ah, raising three kids will do that to you. All of my children had this absurd Haki connection, ridiculous really. Roger as well. One learns to develop her trouble radar early." She sips at her juice. "Let me tell you, Red, I produced some troublesome spawn."
Anne grins like a madwoman, and Shanks shivered.
"Lady Anne, when I met you the first time, I couldn't believe you would were married, much less that you had kids. It's so...domestic for a woman like yourself."
Anne barks out a laugh, turning her torso more in Shanks direction in order to get a proper look at him.
"You saying I can't be a kick ass home maker and adventure the high seas?"
"Not at the same time."
Anne purses her lips, giving the comment some consideration. "I suppose you're right. However—!" She leans in towards him, and Shanks obliged by following suit. "Shanks, you must understand there is a season for everything in this life. At least, this is the understanding I've come to: when I was young, I needed to be wild, and to roam, and to know the world. When I married Garp, everything I had experienced prepared me for that. My life prepared to be a good mother, and a good wife. I don't regret it. In fact, I enjoyed it very much while it lasted."
"Domestic." He chirps churlishly, and Anne rolls her eyes.
"You say that, but I see the way you look at Makino. Give it a decade or so."
Shanks splutters and swats her away.
Anne just laughs.
Shanks lost his arm.
It's not that big a deal.
(It's kinda a big deal.)
Anne looks at him, lying in his medbay, and Shanks feels really stupid.
"It was a sea king." She remarks dryly.
"Indeed."
"You've got Mihawks as your sworn rival and you lose your arm to a fucking sea king in the East Blue?"
Shanks shrinks.
"Idiot. Absolute dolt. Ginger moron." Anne lambasts.
"I got it! Ben's already chewed me out. Cut me some slack here, Lady Anne."
"No slack is to be cut for you. Only a centimeter for saving Luffy. But only a centimeter."
Shanks grumbles.
"Not even two?"
"Not even two." Anne concludes, folding her arms. She appraises him up and down before her mouth opens in a whisper. "Do you really think he's the Dawn Bringer?"
Shanks' head snaps up, eyes wide, his sole hand flying to his sword.
"How do you know about the Dawn Bringer?"
Anne frowns at his vitriol. "You think my brother wouldn't tell be something like that? I had five kids, all of them D's. Of course he would tell me."
"I guess Captain never could keep a secret from you."
"I'm a D. It's not a secret from me at all—it's every D's birthright, whether we're told or not. Whenever I saw Luffy for the first time I knew he was going to change the world—Dawn Bringer or not."
Shanks stills, his hand suddenly very cold.
"Lady Anne, why didn't you stop Roger's execution?" He said lowly, in a whisper. He looked at his palm. "You could have. I know it."
You didn't. Hangs in the air, and it is poisonous.
He hears her breath catch and his eyes drift up.
Anne's face is twisted in sorrow, and tears cling desperately at the corners of her eyes.
"He asked me not to." She murmured back. "He said—he said" her voice cracks, "that his adventures were spent. That his dawn had ended, and I tried to convince him that he could live, at least to see Ace, and he just—I don't even, he couldn't—" she buried her face into her palms.
"I would've died for him." She says clearly. "I would have died for him in a second, less than that, but the damn fool didn't want the world to see the great Gold Roger die from a disease." Her eyes flutter, and tears fall, terribly genuine, heartrendingly so. "He was always a selfish bastard, him."
Shanks swallows loudly.
"He wanted to—"
Anne shakes her head: "No. He just felt like there was no point in dragging out the inevitable." She closed her eyes. "He wouldn't have lived long enough to even see Ace born." She says quietly, scandalously.
Shanks' eyes widen.
"I—" He paused. "I didn't know it was that bad."
"All of his internal organs were failing. His liver and kidneys were on their last leg, and his pancreas was leaking bile into his blood stream: Roger would have been luckily to live two more months with his illness."
"Anne..."
"Of course. Roger had to have the worst luck on earth." Anne threaded her fingers together. "The world rejected him. And even his own body. His legacy is corrupt in every way. Dead wife. Disbanded crew. Struggling son." She pressed her hands to her chin. "But I can't find it in me to resent him for it. Not anymore. I miss him too much for that."
"I get the feeling." Shanks looks up at the ceiling. "You're nothing like him." He says offhandedly.
"I know."
There is a pregnant silence, one that is tense and uncomfortable.
Shanks stares at the woman who shared blood with the strongest man he ever knew.
Her tears have dried, but there was obviously a certain emptiness about her when her thoughts landed on Roger. A cavern that could never be filled.
The tension shifts as Anne clapped her hands together.
"On another note, my husband is coming home soon. I suggest leaving and going to the New World as fast as you can. Once he sees that hat on Luffy's head, he'll be out for blood."
Shanks considered this.
"You may be right."
"I'm rarely wrong."
Shanks sighs.
"I suppose goodbyes are in order?" He hums, standing up.
Anne nods.
"Just for now," she adds quickly. "This isn't goodbye forever, Tomato Boy."
Shanks glances at her, grinned.
"I hope so, Lady Anne."
Shanks is waved off by Fuchsia village, and his crew waits until that are out of distance for every to wail like infants.
Shanks recalls speaking to Roger about the East Blue, and he remembers never believing him when he said it was the best Blue in the world.
Shanks really doesn't doubt it anymore.