Title: On the Ocean Blue
Written By: NikoArtagnan
Genre: Fantasy/Friendship/Adventure
Rating: T, will eventually go to M
Summary: An outcast from Earth is flung headfirst into a hostile, unforgiving world, and finds themselves tagging along with a very particular crew of misfit pirates, and the boy who wants to be the King of them all. But this isn't the world of One Piece you thought you knew, and there are terrible things lurking in the shadows...
Chapter-Specific Warnings: Gore, blood, torture, Kelly is a sadistic manipulator, poor Sanji
Author's Notes: So I stopped by the fanfiction Hanley - which is the main inspiration for this fic - and I discovered it had been updated! I'm so excited! AHHHHHHHHHH!
Chapter Six:
Like a Balloon in a Perfectly Windy Sky
-…Her world is pain. Pure, unrelenting, agony. There is a disgustingly wet sound each time the whip lands, cracking against the ground-meat flesh of her back and making the rest of her involuntarily convulse. Tiny shudders continuously wrack her limbs, and there's blood everywhere.
Hands reach from the crowd, groping, desperate to reach the blood pooling on the wooden planks below her knees. Voices are frenzied, loud, petulant, moaning a terrifying and sickening mantra to the men and women who carefully, methodically, ceremoniously, bring each whip down on her shoulders, set it aside, and pick up another.
"Feed us, feed us, feed us, feed us," they cry.
Animalistic roars of rage and heartbreak come from a cage at the peripheral of her vision.
The world and all its colors are starting to turn a dismal gray, like the ending of some TV show, but's not really a TV show that's ending, it's her own damned life, and oh God, she's going to die. She's going to die, and these bastards will kill Gin and Shere.
She doesn't want to die, not after she's fought so hard and for so long to live. She wants to go home, to her family. But she's not going to get that chance, because she is dying.
As her vision narrows, there's a scream.
Her head struggles to rise as panic jolts new life through her veins.
A woman stands just beyond the crowd, chest heaving, face slicked with sweat. She's beautiful, even with the fear darkening her sapphire-blue eyes, and the heat of the sun frizzing her waist-length blonde hair.
"Stop this!" she cries when she catches her breath. There are tears filming her eyes.
Oh God, what is she doing? The panic is raw-red and clawing its way out of her belly through her bloody throat.
"This isn't right! She doesn't deserve to die just so we can have a prosperous harvest. She's done so much for all of us. We don't need quarts of blood when one drop of it keeps our fields healthy for years! We don't need to drain her dry when she willingly uses her magic to keep pirates, bandits, sickness, and wild animals away from us! She's saved so many of us, and this is how we repay her?!"
There is silence.
"Please, Daddy…I love her," the woman whispers.
There is more silence, several thrumming, tension-filled seconds that feel like hours. Then the manbehind her sighs and says three words that send an ice-cold spike of fear through her spine.
"She is forsaken."
Terror blanches the blonde-haired woman's face to a sickly snow-white. The crowd turns, eyes alight with a deep, awful hunger.
Somehow, her tortured throat finds the air to scream.
"MINA!"
And the crowd leaps forwards as one as the blonde turns to flee…-
Consciousness came swiftly, like a baseball bat smashed into her sternum, and was just as unwelcome. She shot upright, chest heaving, back aching with the vestiges of the nightmare and remembered pain.
There was a burning in her chest, and ache in the space behind her jaw, and horrible stinging in her eyes. She fucking hurt. She hurt all over.
The pain forced a tiny sob from her throat, and she felt arms curl around her waist, pulling her flush against a lean, pale body, even as a warm body curled around her back.
"Oh, Mistress…" Gin whispered, his human hands stroking through her unbound hair.
"We have you, Mama," the furry body spooning her aching back whispered, Shere Khan's voice light and sleepy, but soft with love.
Kelly, overcome with grief and pain, buried her face in Gin's neck and wept silently.
They made a strange picture, the three of them tangled together on a bed that barely fit one adult and two cats, the black haired and silver-eyed man, the sweat-soaked woman crying into his shoulder like a baby, and the full-grown tiger resting against her back.
Through the porthole on the far wall, the moon shone like it was burning.
DATE:
MY LOCATION:
PLACE:
Mina, Mina, Mina, Mina, Mina, Mina, Mina.
I miss you so much.
I love you.
(At the bottom of the page, there is an intricate ink drawing of a young woman reclining on a bed, smiling at the viewer, her curvaceous body covered only by a light sheet. She is looking at the viewer with lustrous, hooded eyes, her light hair spilling over her naked shoulders.
The drawing is spotted and smudged with tears.)
The sky was a perfect robin's egg blue, with nary a cloud to be seen for miles. The sun's blazing warmth was cut by the wonderful, sea-salted breeze that was a gift from the ocean. The ocean itself was a pristine sheet of unbroken sapphire for miles. It was a goddamn gorgeous day.
Kelly yawned, resting back against the ropes attaching to the white railing. She was sitting on the upper deck (or whatever it was called. Ship vernacular still eluded her grasp like a particularly ornery greased pig), watching as Vivi explained the nature of the ocean surrounding Reverse Mountain to Luffy and Zoro.
"This is the most difficult sea in all of the world to navigate," Vivi said solemnly. "We must be on our guard at all times."
"Hey, dumbasses! Come have a round of my Special Drink!" Sanji called out. Luffy leapt to the lower deck with a shriek of delight, Zoro close on his heels.
Vivi watched them with a scowl knotting a line between her eyebrows, getting progressively more and more annoyed as the boys chattered about fishing lines, then started cheering Carue on as he slurped down several glasses of the blue-green drink.
The door behind Vivi opened, and Nami stepped out, carrying two gracefully designed glasses of the beverage. It was obvious that these two glasses Sanji prepared especially for the women, because Kelly had never before seen such a high level of design go into two drinks.
"How can they be so calm?!" Vivi blurted, smacking a hand against the railing as she looked down at the laughing boys.
"Just let them be. If a storm comes, they know what to do," Nami said with a smile, holding a glass out to the blue-haired woman. "They don't want to die, either."
"I suppose…" Vivi sighed. "But it doesn't look like they're even trying to be alert…"
Kelly looked down at the boys as they cackled over Carue, flailing on his back with a very obvious brain-freeze headache. 'Dumbass bird,' Kelly thought with affection.
Carue had taken to Kelly very quickly and it was a mutual sort of thing, which had surprised pretty much everyone on the ship. Kelly really didn't see what was so confusing about it. She liked animals. Hadn't that been made unequivocally clear by the way she doted on Shere Khan and Gin?
(-…And after all, they didn't know that it was the monkeys that came to her aid when she was trapped in a castle where the residents moaned with hunger as her blood dripped to the floor, their faces twisting in ways no human's ever could, or that it was the sparrows that brought her the slavers' keys as she sat shaking in a cage two times too small, or that it was the whale sharks that bore her tired, aching body to the next island while monsters stalked her every movement, or that it was the tigers who became the only thing close to a family she had in this fucked up world. It was the animals who lived for her, protected her, died for her, and she loved them as much as they loved her…-)
Kelly looked at Vivi and Nami and realized that Sanji hadn't given one of the drinks to her. She looked down and realized the tray was empty beside him.
Then the blond man looked up at her and fucking smirked, that little shit, and the amusement, arousal, and grief-…Mina's little smile was touched at the edges with mischievous glee and mockery, as Kelly flailed and swore and tried to find an article of clothing that hadn't been turned all pink and frilly…-that tore through her was like a firestorm, searing through her veins before she could stamp it down and out.
'That little fucker,' Kelly thought, fighting the urge to growl. She had been feeling thirsty for a while, and had taken it for granted that she too would get a glass of that delicious looking beverage.
'Is that the sort of game you wanna play, boy-o? Oh, bring it the fuck on.' If anyone could see the way Kelly was smiling in her own head, it would have sent them running screaming in the opposite direction, perhaps to the nearest psychiatrist or mental health expert. There was a predatory sort of anticipation in her veins, one that both surprised her and didn't, all at the same time. To certain challenges, this had always been her default state.
Everything from poker to how to prepare pancakes (courtesy of Dad) to fighting for her life and learning how to skim across the waves with the magic rumbling in her veins, Kelly took to with a single-minded intensity that was just about the most contradictory thing in her entire personality. Things she could truly find a passion for, things she liked, people she liked, she fought for ferociously.
Usually, when someone threw down the gauntlet in front of her, it was child's play to ignore it or to redirect it somewhere else. She felt easiest with a smile and laugh, leaning back and letting the wind run through her hair, listening to the world pass her by and enjoying it as much as she possibly could.
But sometimes she couldn't. Sometimes things wouldn't let her be content. Sometimes things just got to her.
And that little smirk of Sanji's got to her in ways she didn't want to touch with a ten-foot-pole.
She caught sight of Vivi taking a long drink from her glass and a thoroughly awful idea spawned in her head like a rabid zombie plot bunny. She nearly crowed with laughter.
"Hey, cook-san, didn't you bring me one of your drinks?" She called to the blond man, managing to interject a note of a pout in her voice. She saw Nami raise an eyebrow at the side of her vision – perhaps she should have been worried how well that girl knew her, but she could do that later. "You're such a meanie," she all but whined, and blond man smirked at her again.
"You want some cheese with that whine, shithead?" he asked, standing up from his crouch in one slow, smooth movement that made something inside her shiver and tighten with anticipation all at once.
"Tsk, so mean…oh well. I do want to try it, though, it looks delicious. But if you're going to hoard it I guess I'll have to find another way." She stuck her tongue in her cheek. "Oh, Vivi-chan!" She said turning to the princess just as she took another drink. She stepped in close, plucking the empty glass from her fingers and sitting it on the railing.
As she cupped the princess's neck in her hand and leaned in, she saw Nami's eyes go huge with shock, and she kissed Vivi on the lips.
Kelly knew how to kiss and she knew how to kiss very well. Back home, she'd been the sort of girl who researched the subject, practiced as often as she could with whomever she could convince to do it, wash, rinse, repeat. She still had no honest clue why on earth she did, as she had never been too fond of people in general, but it was a fairly useful skill, to be able to kiss someone into wide-eyed, trembly-legged silence.
Mina had stared at her for at least five minutes, eyes blown huge with shock and arousal after they'd parted from their first kiss, just like Vivi was doing right now, and it was a testament to Kelly's herculean self-control that she didn't let a single emotion but quiet amusement show on her face.
A sound that vaguely resembled a teapot boiling over erupted from behind her, and Kelly felt that little demon inside her mind cackle like a fucking lunatic as she turned, placing a firm hand on the small of Vivi's back to keep her from toppling over.
Luffy was laughing his ass off, Usopp's eyes were as big as Vivi's, Nami was giggling helplessly, Zoro was chuckling into his drink, Carue looked confused, and Sanji…
Sanji's face had reached a level of fuchsia that Kelly had no idea humans were even capable of turning until now.
"My compliments to the chef," she said with an utterly unashamed smirk, flicking her tongue out over her lips, tasting the remnants of the drink (blueberry, kiwi, and some sort of sweet alcohol), and the strawberry chapstick Vivi used. It mingled together quite well on her tongue.
"P-p-p-p-p-p-pervert! Shitty perverted bastard!" Sanji shrieked so fast the words tripped over one another. It was the most amusing thing she had been able to witness in a very, very long time.
"What's wrong, cook-san?" She asked, layering her voice in enough innocence to tranquilize a bull elephant. "I just wanted a taste of your Special Drink, after all, since you were going to be greedy about things."
She nudged Vivi to the side just in time to dodge the shining loafer-clad foot that tried to knock her head off. She laughed, a low, easy sound, and something inside her eased up, just a little.
"Really, cook-san!" She protested, batting aside the kicks she couldn't slip-slide around with a silent Kami-e. "This is a little excessive, don't you think?"
"How dare you act so familiarly to a princess!" he bellowed at her.
His face was a thing of utter beauty. The ugly fuchsia had faded, replaced with spots of bright red high in his cheekbones and a look of intense fury in his eyes that did a better job of knocking the air from her lungs than any of his kicks could. A vein pulsed in the gleaming column of white that was his neck, and she wondered how big his eyes would get if she stepped in and bit hard enough to bruise that perfect white skin.
His lips were furrowed, pursed, his teeth gritted, and she wondered vaguely how it would feel to kiss those lips, what their taste would be. How she could etch her own furrows into his brow, make him snarl and moan with pain and fear, oh it was so easy to imagine…
She was about ready to step into his guard and return some blows of her own – just to see the way his face would contort when she smashed her fist into his solar plexus – when Nami screamed "What the hell is that?!" and the world went dark.
They all looked up just in time to see the enormous dolphin go flying overhead. It was easily a couple hundred times bigger than the regular-sized version, and the ship promptly exploded into action.
Kelly thought it was rather cute, to be honest. After all, she'd swum with Sea Kings, an overgrown dolphin didn't bug her too much.
Even as she let Nami and Luffy's orders flow over her ears, following them on autopilot, she watched Sanji out of the corner of her eye, finally beginning to recognize that awful thing snarling in her chest, the thing that wanted to bend the blond cook in all directions to see what would make him break. It was a volatile mixture of pitch-black hate and…and something else. Something that she instinctively shied away from as though it were a rabid zombie clown, mentally drop-kicking it into a lock-box in the very far regions of her mind.
She had enough problems as it was without having to think exactly why she wanted to bend Sanji over a table and fuck him senseless.
Well, she always did, but now it was even more so.
…
…God damn it there was something wrong with her.
"So this is Little Garden…" Kelly said, looking around, leaning back against the railing, her arms folded over her chest. "A wee bit of false advertising, don't you think?" she asked Nami with a chuckle.
The orange-haired woman sighed. "It's not as cute as its name at all," she agreed, looking around at the jungle surrounding them on either side.
Unlike the others, Kelly knew exactly what lived here, so she wasn't nearly as shocked at the colossal size of their surroundings.
It was a tropical forest, wild and lush, bursting with colorful flora and the sounds of fauna, steamy and hot and increasingly humid, but supersized. The trees were stories high above their heads, and the plants she could see were enormous as well – insanely colored flowers bigger in width that she was tall, vines bigger than her body snaking around the trunks of trees, thickly dense grass that rose waist high in several places.
The noise was immense, the jungle practically bursting at the seams with roars, howls, animal's cries of every sound and pitch, the crunch of plants underneath paw and foot, the rustling of wind through the dense trees, and it buffeted Kelly's senses from all sides until she dimmed her hearing to manageable levels.
Gin had his paws over his ears, curled around her shoulders, and Shere Khan was tucked into the front pocket of Kelly's oversized jacket, leaving only her head peeking out.
"This is unexplored t-territory," Usopp wibbled, his knees shaking. "An unexplored jungle!"
Kelly rolled her eyes. Cowardly fool.
"We must be careful," Vivi said. "I'm still worried about what Miss All-Sunday said…"
"Does this mean there's going to be monsters?!" Usopp cried.
"Who cares?" Luffy called out, eyes agog as he stared at the jungle around them.
"W-Well, let's just go to the next island and not worry about this one, then."
"Dude, we gotta let the Log Pose lock into this island before we go anywhere," Kelly said with a yawn.
"We also need to stock up on provisions," Sanji said. "We didn't get a chance to stock up at the last town."
Kelly yawned again – she certainly hadn't had what you could call a restful night - and hoisted herself up onto the railing, swinging her cargo pant clad legs out over the river.
"Oi, Gin," she said in a voice pitched too low for any of the humans to hear. "You doing all right?" She rubbed the space between the cat's ears and he sighed.
"I'm fine, Mistress," he said in an equally soft voice. "This place gives me a bit of a headache."
"I know what you mean," Kelly said wryly. "A wee bit crowded, wouldn't you say?" She herself greatly preferred the wide open spaces of the ocean, where there was just clear blue water for miles above, below and around her.
"Sugei," Shere whispered from the belly pocket. "Mama, it's just like home!"
It did indeed look a lot like Toratega Island, and for a brief moment Kelly felt a pang in her heart. Toratega had become the closest thing to a home and it had been the one place she had always been safe from Daemons.
...Well, there had been Aratuck, but she hadn't exactly been safe there, now had she?
She closed her eyes as her back spasmed with pain, blocking everything else out until she could breathe normally again.
She turned around when Nami cried "What is that?!"
Diving towards Sanji's back was an enormous dinosaur bird, with blue-green feathers, a purple crest, tennis-racket size claws, and at least a thirty foot wingspan. Sanji had obviously heard the beating of wings, and didn't bother to turn around.
"It's just some ordinary bird, Nami-san," he said with a cheerful smile. "And this is just an ordinary jungle. Nothing to worry about."
"Yo, Blondie, you might wanna try telling the bird that," Kelly said, and pointed at the bird when he gave her a confused look. Nami and Usopp ran away, screaming, as the enormous thing got closer.
"Er, wha-" Sanji began, turning around. He dropped to the deck just in time, cursing, and the bird zoomed over his head with a hair-splitting, blood-curdling shriek. Feathers sprayed everywhere.
"What the HELL was that, you SHITTY BIRD?!" The blonde man bellowed, while Kelly threw her head back and roared with laughter. He turned on her, still growling, when a thunderous explosion rocked the ship, and a foul-smelling dust darkened parts of the sky.
"That's nothing you hear in a normal jungle," Nami whispered.
"That's a volcano!" Usopp yelled, well on his way to a mental breakdown by the looks of it.
There was a fearsome roar from the right side of the river, and a simply enormous tiger emerged from the treeline, yellow-green eyes glowing with what Kelly can tell was pain and encroaching death, but what Nami and Usopp must assume was hunger, because immediately both navigator and sniper were at either side of her, clinging and trembling in fright.
She rolled her eyes and patted them both on the head.
"Nami-san, you can hold onto me if the tiger frightens-"
"No."
"…Heh."
"WHAT WAS THAT, YOU PERVERTED SCOUNDREL-"
It followed their ship's path for a few minutes, before the stink of death enveloped it completely, and Kelly quickly pushed Shere's head back into the pocket with a sharp, mental order as the tiger collapsed, the coppery-sweet stink of blood making the Magus grind her teeth.
Nami ran back to the other railing closest to where the tiger had dropped, and stared at it.
"What, what happened to it? This isn't normal. How can the King of the Jungle collapse in a puddle of its own blood?" she asked.
"Then it's decided!" Usopp said. "We won't be stopping on this island, let's just go to the next one."
"We'll just sit here and wait until the Log Pose to set before we continue," Nami said, sweat beading her brow.
"Yes!"
"Then we'll get out of here as fast as possible."
"Yes!"
Kelly quickly ducked back inside to make a quick change. She wasn't going to pass up the chance to explore Little Garden, but she would need something a little bit more weather appropriate.
She slipped on her jacket, and quickly checked to make sure everything was in its place.
The clothes she now wore were all but covered in spells – magical symbols woven into the very fabric of the clothing in some cases – to allow for air flow, ease of movement, comfort, and to hide the fact that she was indeed a woman.
It was annoying, but extremely necessary, as Kelly had found out in the past years on the run.
"So, you're going?" Gin asked as he leapt onto her shoulders again.
"Of course. Shere-chan, do you want to come?" She asked the cat on the bed.
The cub shot up. "I can come?" She asked excitedly, and Kelly laughed.
"Of course you can come, sweetheart," she said, and the cub began bouncing around, giggling, and Kelly had to bite her lip and scoop the tigress up into her arms before she had a heart attack from the influx of utter cute.
Gin laughed as Shere reached up and lightly butted her face against his, a gesture he readily returned.
Kelly smiled and buried her face in Shere's fur, breathing steadily, feeling warm and loved and loving in return. The bond between Magus and Familiar(s) was perhaps the one good thing she'd gotten out of all this mess. It was the concrete, unshaking, bone-marrow-deep knowledge that she had others in this big, cold, lonely world who loved her, would die for her, and better yet, would live for her.
It had gotten her through more than one cold and lonely night where her back was pressed to the wall or tree or whatever surface of whatever place she'd been hiding, praying for the sun to rise so she could make a break for the ocean and get to safety.
"I love you guys, you know that?" She whispered, tucking Shere into the belly pocket of her jacket.
Gin's purr rumbled through her spine, and Shere's through her belly, and all was right in her world.
"Yosh," she said, cracking her knuckles. "Let's go explore this fucking prehistoric jungle."
Because if she didn't, when she got home, Alexwould slap her upside the head. Because who in their right mind passed up a chance to explore a prehistoric forest? Especially when they were strong enough to take everything in said forest on and live.
-…"And this is an Alamosaurus, an herbivorous dinosaur, found in the US, it's the only Late Cretaceous sauropod that has been found in North America, don't you know, and this is Allosaurus, from the Late Jurassic Period. Did you know the teeth of Allosaurus were 5 to 10 centimeters long and curved backwards to prevent prey from escaping…?"
Alex is bouncing. Literally bouncing, and it's starting to scare her somewhat. Beth just chortles, hooks an arm through hers, and smiles at the boy who's running his fingers over the air in front of each dinosaur display.
"Down, boy-o, you're scaring Kelly. Remember she's never seen you like this before?" Beth chides without any real heat, and Alex blanches.
"Er, sorry."
It takes a beat for her brain to reengage, but she laughs and shakes her head. "Dude, you've gone with me to anime conventions, you know how I get. No need to be sorry about geeking out about something you love, I do it all the time. Christ, Lex, we've been best friends for years, how come I didn't know this about you?" she demands, going to stand next to him as he looks up at the Allosaurus bone model.
He shrugs. "We never really got a chance to talk about it. My dad hated it. Said it was a pussy habit-" and god, she has never hated Jim Oblensky more than she does in this moment right now – "And I just didn't…" His ears are red and his eyes are dark, and Kelly restrains the urge to start swearing.
She is so glad that fucktard excuse of a man is dead, and a look at Beth reveals the thought is mutual. Another look passes between the two of them, and they promptly loop their arms around each of his.
"C'mon, Alex," Beth says with a smile. "Why don't you tell us more about this Wallosaurus thing?"
"Yeah," Kelly chimes in just a beat after her. "Did you say it was from the Jurassic Park Period, or something?"
They're deliberately butchering the things he's told them, things they know, but it's worth for the smile that quirks his lips up again and the spark that lights his eyes. They spend the rest of the day walking around the museum, ooh-ing and aw-ing at everything Alex told them, glaring at the old ladies and suburban parents who've obviously decided the three of them are some degenerate perverted threesome, and pigging out in the food court.
It's a very, very good day…-