Not made for anything, but loosely inspired by the "misunderstanding" prompt at OP_300. Frobin shipping ahead.
A Little Assurance
Robin sits up and pulls the blanket around herself, more out of the faint chill of cooling sweat than any form of modesty. They've dropped that long ago. Almost since from the beginning, though perhaps, not that soon. The light from the aquarium casts the room in faint blue curls of light, and she stares a moment into its depths. A rainbow eel glides on some invisible current and shimmering through flecks of moonlight, and she reflects on the moment of the irony of appreciating the beauty of something you're going to eat later. Franky rests on the floor at her feet, his chin resting on his huge mechanical hands. There's really no room for him elsewhere and he takes up enough space as it is, filling the room with the faint smell of metal and ever present hint of cola. There is sweat, too, now, and other scents, uncommon these days but welcome for the most part.
On impulse she rests her feet on his back, feeling the warm flesh and the curve of his spine, and absently presses her heels into the muscles there, not corded with steel for all his wanting them to be. Franky groans in appreciation, not too loudly, but heartfelt just the same. He can be subtle when he wants to be. He can even be, dare she think it, quiet.
"You're a goddess, Nico Robin," he mutters to the unforgiving floorboards he'd planed and laid himself with his much smaller (than now anyway) hands. She smiles.
"And you're a cyborg." Hands blossomed from his back like wings work at the muscles on his neck and shoulders and she can feel the heat there and also the change in sensation as flesh begins to overlay metal, the hidden rivets of Franky's body.
"Would you change this if you could?" she asks, drumming her heels absently and lightly against his back, the one that he had come with, the spine that had stretched and knotted of its own accord as he'd grown, flesh and blood and bone.
"Of course I would. I'm a self made man."
A stupid pun and she drums her heel a little to hard for that, making him grunt. But also because as much as it's a joke, it's true. And one day he will. Will he still be Franky if he is steel and wire rather than flesh and blood? Of course. But it's as if whatever part of him there used to be is being meticulously cut away to make room for something new, something self created, until the only part of his past that remained was inside his own head. History disappearing has always set her teeth on edge, even if it's his own and his right to do with it what he wants.
"When you do, I want your spine," she says, running a blossomed hand down his back, feeling the bumps and ridges as she goes, and the marks that she so recently put there, still heated and raw. Franky chuckles, a noise that vibrates (and echoes) through him.
"You're sadistic," he says, but pleasantly, as he sits up, ruining her perch. She rests her legs instead on his shoulder, high enough, even seated below her, to be mildly uncomfortable, but she does anyway, crossing her legs at the ankle and watching his gaze slide from her face to where the blanket is threatening to slip away.
"And you're masochistic," she says, pulling the blanket back up to reign in his attention. "That makes us well suited, ne?"
"I just have a great pain tolerance," he says with a grin and she can see his pride swelling like a balloon behind his eyes.
"Not everywhere," she says with a smile, just watch that balloon deflate, just a hair. "And I still want your spine if you're not using it," she says, moving her foot to press a toe against his nose, cycling through the hair variations that don't seem to make much use other than that they are fun and make his head look less like a tiny pebble on top of a boulder.
"You can make it into a bookshelf for me," she adds. He grabs her ankle gently, with the smaller hand coming from the larger one, metallic yes, but also controlled, a precision with human intent behind every nuance of pressure. He looks at her, his eyes serious in the blue of the aquarium.
"You can rebuild the ship all you like, Nico Robin, but you can't replace the keel," he says, understanding as he always does, somehow in the depths of his cola saturated brain, just what she was asking.
"See that you don't." Because she's already laid claim to it. It is her job to preserve history, after all, even if it lies unseen behind a mass of moving parts that have no business being on a human. But a cyborg is a different story. He grins, as if catching that, too, somehow, and kisses the arch of her foot. It tickles and for a moment she's caught between pulling her foot away or playfully kicking him in the face. She votes for the former since it's almost dawn and a bleary eyed navigator will be levering herself out of bed. Not that Robin particularly cares if Nami knows, but secrets are so much more fun. She pulls her leg and he lets her go. She stands and pulls on her night clothes, aware of him watching, getting ideas—for the future, of course. He knows a goodbye when he sees one.
"Oi," he says when she's at the door. "What to do I get?" Another half joke. An important question. She turns, halfway, shaking her hair over her shoulders in a single smooth movement to give him a shadowed look, a faint smile— and leaves without answering because that is a woman's prerogative. Especially since, as to the answer, she really doesn't know.
Outside the deck is warm under her feet and the sky is star washed in the faint tired way of an incoming dawn. The air is mild still but with the undertone of a bite that suggests a winter island, or at least a late autumn one. Sanji, still a little bleary eyed it seems, but steady as always, comes from out of the boy's cabin and gives her a surprised look.
"Oh, Robin-chan, you're awake," he says.
"No I'm not," she tells him, knowing that, even though he doesn't believe her, he won't contradict her either. It was so easy on this ship. Too easy. Wonderfully easy. She enters her room, deftly dodges the pillow tossed by Nami, mostly still asleep and goes to her own bed. She clutches the pillow and sleeps easily, dreaming of bookshelves made of strong white bone.