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Characters: Gloriosa/Elder Nyon
Genre: Romance
Warnings: Crack
Rating: K
#4 - Fate's flower arrangements
By the time the Oro Jackson finds itself in the waters surrounding Amazon Lily, she's been her tribe's empress for almost a decade. She is still wild, vibrant and deadly - the lily Gloriosa. She represents the Kuja's ideals of beauty and strength, as is becoming of their empress. She upholds the law and her people's teachings, is a fierce and fearless warrior and neither her arrow nor her sword ever miss their aim.
This follows that she is completely unprepared and helpless when the love sickness strikes.
Because like every single empress that came before her Gloriosa hasn't got more than a passing knowledge of the male species. Her only advantage is the fact that her intelligence rivals her beauty and strength. Luck is also a deciding factor in her survival. During her fever induced coma, she keeps calling and begging for the one thing that ails her. Her loyal subjects hurry to supply it in abundance, hoping to save her life. It is during one of her rare lucid moments that the dying empress realizes the truth.
And while her peers believe that she is preparing for that final voyage, Gloriosa prepares for something equally dire and final.
Exile.
But she doesn't know where to go, where to search for the man that caught her heart during the skirmishes between his crew and her people and took it with him after they had agreed on a tentative business relationship of sorts. (Because not even Gloriosa could have resisted that man's smile, no matter how infuriating he was.) And so fate and the seaking calf she caught take her to Sabaody Archipelago, where she stays and waits because she doesn't know that he is searching something and has a place to return to. And even when she learns this, she makes no move to follow him, to look for him.
Because she is still a proud Kuja warrior, even in exile, and she has learned about men and love's humiliations.
She will not be humiliated by a man. She has sacrificed enough of her pride leaving her home.
Her love for him never dies but like a severed appendage it turns into something she learns to live with. And to her eternal relief, no other incites her the way he did. She is safe. Healed. Cured. She will live.
When her newfound friends come to visit, they know well enough not to comment on her habit of placing gloriosa and crocuses in a vase together.
Fate's flower arrangements do not require explanations and neither do Gloriosa's.