Comments and critiques welcome! I appreciate them all since they help me practice my writing. Thank you to everybody who has left their thoughts so far.

~Swaben

A Black Tie Event

Chapter 1:

The Man With Nine Lives

There was an unsettling rumble.

Another shortly followed.

"Captain!"

The portly pirate's beady eye darted fearfully against the peephole on the most elaborate door of the Bezan Black: one of the most infamous plunderer ships in the East Blue, painted in grievous shades of black, red, and gold. With its kittenish yellow eyes and agape mouth, its feline figurehead was in a perpetual state of surprise, and how fitting that was for the current events.

A thin, dark-haired man lay entirely still inside of the captain's quarters, his body carefully arranged on a large futon adorned with broad, monochromatic stripes. Captain Kuro was at the summit of his harmlessness: entirely, hopelessly, and deeply asleep. His expression was neutral, yet all too serious for a man unawake.

Apparently, the captain of a ship was always the member who deserved the most rest, and unarguably the most respect and unconditionally blind loyalty. At least this was the notion that Kuro of the Black Cat pirates had always held close, and even more so ever since he was destroyed literally and figuratively by a rubber seventeen year old with, in his humble opinion, the brain of a marmoset.

Three months ago, he was returned to his crew and deservedly thrust into a world of pain. When the renewed captain awakened to see the motley faces of his surviving crewmen instead of the high ceiling of a mansion, his first reaction was to scream at them as they huddled close. It was an alarmed yell, filled with shock and anger, with disbelief cutting through its center. The wooden splinters of the deck prickled along his palms as he stumbled himself backwards, and he cringed at the burn of his newly aggravated wounds. He broke down in secrecy that first evening, pure frustration threatening to consume him. It was a scarce and serious occurrence for any trace of emotions to burst through the dam. He stuffed his nose into a paperweight of a book, potentially fantasizing about all of the ways to rip his crewmen apart that very night. It was madness, he thought, that he was back here: it was the start of rock-bottom. The thoughts streamed through him like a raging river, echoing wrong, wrong, wrong into the swirl of a torrential whirlpool. The taste of his shattered goal dug deep like the spiked burr of a weed ever since.

That first night of his reunion with the sea, he convinced himself that he'd rather have been eaten by vultures who mistook him for dead in Syrup Village—he could even have dealt with villagers spitting on him and dragging him through town. At least then he could have bolted into the woods and smuggled himself onto a stray ferry. Of course, this was a dramatic sort of baloney, but Kuro knew himself well, and was notorious for becoming infuriated and inanely self-absorbed on the flip of a coin if his reputation wasn't at stake, contrast to his often inhuman lack of real emotions.

During the first few days of adjustment, nothing seemed worse than his dictatorial obligation to a crew of simple-minded drunkards all over again. Entirely new irritations included freshly scabbing friction wounds, a busted ego that was once inflated beyond rationality, and a ruined suit. He could have thought of far worse fates, but nothing changed the fact that his situation was trying his patience and serving as a reminder of his most elaborate failure. He hated his crew. Whoever had the gall to reinstate his bounty was clever and vengeful, and for a good reason.

He still despised the irony of a child, Straw Hat Luffy, foiling his sinister three-year plot. His moments of introspection regarding the Syrup Town incident didn't matter as much as his irritation towards his blunder—their blunder. To a man who failed to accept his own flaws, everything was at the fault of another person's inevitable stupidity. And so, as the few months passed, he adjusted roughly while hiding an atrocious temper.

His heavy sleep was surely the result of his previous night of drinking absurd amounts of sake and resorting to fierce sleeping pills. It was the nightly finale to ignoring his crew by shutting himself in his quarters to read. Not even a sound as obnoxious as a family of stampeding gorillas could awaken him now, the evidence being clear through the empty bottles of sake rolling and dancing along the table, and the tiny container of anti-insomnia pills jittering upon the nightstand.

"We can't hold 'em! This is...!"

An unpleasant scream sounded outside of his quarters, enough to bust an eardrum, but the thick windows prevented it from projecting all of its intensity. A bright flicker of blood painted the adjacent window, and Kuro remained sleeping contently, caught up in a web of mental flips.

Although normally a composed and calculating man with a freezing heart of ice, Kuro grew to be at the tether of his fortitude, but refused to be tamed when peace was not directly beneath his fingers. It seemed that the Black Captain had reached the cusp of his villainy, and with his downfall he grew world-weary and unwilling to have enthusiasm. His crewmen noticed the change in him, at least on the outside. Their captain was never a man to be so fickle and unambitious. There was something he wanted that he could never receive on the deck of a pirate ship, and they knew it in the way that he spoke, sternly and impatiently, the way that he carried himself, and the way that a rare hint of melancholy could flash in his eyes. Ambiguous and disconnected was his stare, and it was scarcely singular or personal, but it delved into all of them, and he easily regarded them as one collective mass of burdensome space. They talked amongst themselves about how strange, even frightening, it was whenever he exhibited lamentation over the death of his capital goal. His gaze out to sea became detached, and for once an emotion of his was not mysterious or misleading: he would be engulfed in a far-away thought, his face looking otherwise soulless besides an reflective pair of slate grey eyes. It was similar to the way that any of them would silently grieve the loss of someone dearest to the heart, but it was also all too different. The disturbing reality was that Captain Kuro regularly confided not in friendship or in love, but in status and material comforts, and deeply within himself, seeking from others his own narcissistic gains and giving nothing in return but deceit and ruin.

Struggling in the external world, a cacophony of shrieking Black Cats bayed in fright, calling for their captain, but their voices weren't heard. Kuro would always enjoy strategy, but implementing this with his crew now made his head pound and his blood boil. It was as if he were playing chess with pieces that moved across the squares on their own after he aligned them in just the right places.

"Wake him up!"

There was a frenzied pounding on his door: one that remained locked each and every night to preserve the captain's own definition of serenity.

Just the previous evening, he had tossed aside the Straw Hat boy's renewed bounty poster of 100,000,000 Beri, and put it out of his mind, with a strange mixture of scorn and indifference. He remembered when it was a mere thirty million, and when he was undetected by the Marines. Despite how it damaged his pride that a simple boy could doubly outrank him, he considered them better days, though not as great as those spent skulking through a mansion.

"Buchi! Focus! Just break the door and make sure none of them get past us!" Siam's high voice spat, followed by his own tinny squeal as another blade clashed against his own weapon. It made his knobby elbows shake. His tenuous muscles strained beneath his bizarre figure and he was clearly outnumbered after his fair share of blooding.

As the oblivious captain was trapped in that slumber, his wretched dreams fluctuated between egoism and luxury that would make any humble person's lip curl. Suddenly, there was a harsh crunching noise; his door had been broken amongst the clamor, and the two dimorphic men were posed defensively against its shattered opening.

"Got it—got it! Quit dancing around—I'll cover you! Go in, go in, and get him out here before I keel over!" Buchi gestured with his arm to his bony accomplice. Then the fat man shouted, and his unrefined scream was not a façade this time. His massive chest pumped and shriveled from his own scaling exhaustion. "If we fail—if they don't kill us first, he will! Imagine, when a guy like him wakes up and sees that—all of what's happening! We're screwed, Siam!"

A strand of the bespectacled man's hair stirred at the wind flowing into the room, and the sound of the calamity intensified. Despite this, he failed to move much.

"CAPTAIN!" Siam screeched into his ears. He began aggressively pulling at the man's shirt collar and shaking his sluggishly relaxed shoulders in a panicked rage. "CAPTAIN KURO!"

Kuro's response was a hollow breath and a slack-jawed mouth. At this point, Siam would consider himself lucky if he even spotted a trickle of drool.

He frenetically jumped on his bed, and his captain was jounced about like a boneless marionette, nearly being flung onto the floor. He banged pots and pans together, cringing and frantically looking behind him. In desperation, he shattered Kuro's favorite globe, and its ebony pieces twinkled along the deck and crawled into the molded cracks of the boards. It would likely sign his death warrant if the man ever awoke. Siam was about to pull his own hair out, or throw this unconscious man to the Marines himself, or toss his own body to them out of complete and utter resignation.

"Why? Why? This never happens! Never! I swear, I'm gonna..." Siam gasped quietly and his pupils grew wider. Something captured his attention like a dangling string would to a nervous kitten. He hissed as he wielded a brightly colored fruit-knife that he snatched from the nearby table. "I can't take it anymore. If you can't even react to this, then… Then…"

He raised it high above his head, succumbing to a fervent and ritualistic frown. The blade plummeted downwards, though a piece of him intended to stop it millimeters from Kuro's chest. He couldn't bring himself to it. He had attempted mutiny before, but it felt all too rotten. Before he could reach his full swing, his wrist was caught as if the reflex were as simple as tossing in his sleep. His captain's fingers squeezed on it like a lion crushing its fangs into the neck of a gazelle.

Siam shrieked.

He was rendered speechless, save for one tiny and crackling squeak. The stern hand lazily slipped off of him, leaving red grip-marks to vanish on his pasty arm.

The stupefied eccentric nodded, convinced that the Black Captain was possessed and hopeless to sleep forever. He backed away to put the knife in its proper place. He pushed himself into the fray of the outside world again despite his exhaustion, onto the deck that was booming with chaos, the opposition desperately attempting to reach into the very quarters that he was escaping from.

Quietly, in the midst of it all, as if confined in another world, there in Kuro's mind was a still peacefulness. What lay in his judgment was a mixture of past and present, of real and imaginary: the typical dreams of an atypical man.

Little did he know that this morning would be far different than the ones before it.

The loss of his next life was not in the plan.