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: Foul language, gore, implied forced pregnancy, slavery, misogynistic slurs, mentions of past rape, other unpleasant things
Author's Notes: This is a violent chapter, yo. Proceed with caution.
Chapter Nine:
There Are Dark Things In This World
"GET HER!"
She can feel the mob-lust thickening the air as she runs and it almost steals the breath straight from her lungs, so rotten and wretched a stench it is. She staggers and screams as an arrow enters her shoulder, driving her forward and pinning her to a fallen sheet of wood resting against a building.
The panic is now a jittery dance of bile and shock in her throat, and she sobs, curling her left hand around the shaft and yanking it free. Blood splatters everywhere and the howl that leaves her throat is a truly unholy one, even as she incinerates the arrow with a quick spell.
"SHE'S OVER HERE!" She whips around, the few strands of dark hair she hadn't shorn almost to the skull falling in her face. She moans in pain and fear, and digs around in the leather satchel strapped to her waist, pulling a small bundle of dark hair tied by a silver ribbon. She thanks whatever God might be listening that her teacher – rest in peace, Donno-sensei – taught her how to do this.
As her magic races to heal the wound left behind by the poisoned barb, she scoops up blood with the hair-bundle and waits. Soon, a man appears at the mouth of the alley, eyes dilated, mouth slightly slack. The fear rages in her blood, but so does anger and shame.
"You killed the son of a God, bitch," he slurs, eyes alight with madness and lust, fingers gripping the air as though he's gouging bruises into her flesh.
"Your child was a monster," she hisses, remembering days of being fat, bloated, the thing that gestated in her belly, sucking reams of magic from her as she screamed in the night, chained to her bed by slavishly adoring men and women who stroked her belly. "And you are no God."
His eyes burn as his humanity is wrenched from him and he loses control of his body to the thing that lives within. He lets out this feral shrieking noise. She can see the Daemon that lives beneath his skin, with coal-green skin and eyes that flicker like the heart of dying fires, disjointed limbs and a gaping mouth filled with teeth.
"YoU wIll sUbmit…" It whispers to her, smiling almost charismatically, leering through the flesh sack it took as a disguise.
"Sanguinem igni!" She screams in reply, tossing the blood-soaked bundle of hair at him, followed by a magical sign sketched in the air with fire. She closes her eyes as a blaze of light rocks the alley, and the thing screams as the blood fire scooped from her veins slowly incinerates it.
She turns, eyes still closed, and runs for her life for the umpteenth time since she landed on this in this wretched world.
She is standing in an immense clearing, drenched in blood. Her fingers shake with fear and pain. Her magic is so low, so drained from days of torture and feedings by those…those monsters that she doesn't know if she can fight the scouts that have come for her.
But she must.
There is a wolf standing beside her, tall and silver-furred, pressing its immense flank against her side, sending warmth and strength through her bones.
"Are you ready?" she asks the wolf in a voice strong and hard and spiced at the edges with an accent from the Deep South. The wolf looks up at her and nods.
Her teachers have told her that in the first few weeks of becoming a Familiar, it took animals and spirits a long while to be able to communicate verbally, but that was okay. She can feel the wolf in her very heart. It is as though a part of her soul that she hadn't even known was lost had been returned, she was whole.
She will never go back. Not to the castles of those monsters, where only pain and torture and a long, drawn out death awaits. She shudders and the air shudders with her.
She has never been the strong one. She is small and slim and weak – a weakling, her father always said – even with the training from her teachers.
But she will be strong now, and she will find her friends. She knows they're out there, that they were brought to this crazy world like her.
Chittering, awful noises come from the woods surrounding her and fear fills her heart and lungs.
"mAgUs BlOoD…" something that could never be called human whispers in the tree line.
And the earth shakes beneath her feet.
The pain has faded away to a dull, throbbing pulse radiating through her bones. Her knees aches with cold from hours spent kneeling on the stone floor, weighed down by the hundreds of fine-linked, dark red chains that burn deeply into her dark skin whenever she dares to do more than breathe.
There is a fierce clanging on the metal bars of the dungeon's door. She doesn't bother to look up, lost in the faces of a family she has not seen in so long, of a friend she had lost, and a man she loves.
"Ey, Magus bitch!" One of the guards assigned to watch her says, ugly hate and an even uglier leer in his voice. "Wake the fuck up, you're going to see the Council."
"Enough." The new voice makes her freeze from shock and slowly, slowly she raises her head as the cage door opens and a man wearing a Marine's long, white coat over her shoulders – a man she knows very, very well, from both this life and the one before – steps inside, the top of his head brushing the ceiling of her tiny cage.
Somehow, she finds the strength to speak, even with her throat as dry and cracked as it had become.
"Y…you f…ucking…traitor…" she gasps out.
"I was thrown out," the man says.
"Shheee…she cried…o…over you…"
The man's eyes are cold.
"And since she made you her heir, I doubt she was too heartbroken."
If she had the strength she would have snarled.
"Y…you…wer…her son…sh…ee…loved you…Kuzan," she whispers.
The Admiral doesn't respond, only beckons to the men he's brought with them, and she is dragged out into the blinding light beyond the walls that were the only thing she had known for months…
They think she's an ordinary slave. That her powers are the result of a Devil Fruit. She is prized, prized for her power and her muscles and her purple eyes. Her 'masters" are very, very fond of her.
She keeps her head down, takes the beatings and other horrors her "masters" dole out, and waits – patiently, she is good at being patient – for her chance to strike. If it had just been her, she could have escaped months ago. But she can't help the sympathy that has grown within her for the rest of these trodden down, almost broken people. She will help them escape too.
And she plans.
She thanks God that Isono didn't just teach her control of her Magic, but how to survive in a world full of people like the Tennryubito – how to smile submissively out of one side of her mouth while plotting death and destruction with the other. It's ironic, that the half-breed Isono – daughter of a filthy Daemon and the Magus he raped to death – taught her more than proper magus teachers ever could.
She thinks about a girl with dark eyes and a mastery for stage craft, thinks about the girl who taught her everything she knows about acting, and she thinks that she would have been very proud of her student, with how easily she plays the fat fools.
She plans and she schemes and she waits.
The whip slices down, cracking into her unclothed back with vicious cruelty, splattering blood. She grits her teeth and lets the anger fester in her belly, cold and hard and bitter. Her magic is dormant, kept silent by her implacable will, but it waits too. She smiles in her own mind, and waits for the day she will let every ounce of her anger turn loose upon her captors.
In this life – and the one before – she knows well the name Tiger Fisher, and the destruction he wrought upon the cursed Mariejois.
But she will not be as merciful as him. She will only stop her vengeance once the streets run red with the blood of the corrupted, and the whole world realizes their folly in protecting these monsters in human skin.
And may the Gods have mercy on whoever tries to get in her way.
The world burns. She almost trips over her own feet, the screams of the dead and the dying in her ears, but she keeps upright and herds the children towards the lifeboats as fast as she can, forcing herself to focus only on the boat waiting ahead and the women who are already on it.
She will not think about the all too real possibility that only she, the children, and the fifty or so on the boat will be only the only ones who will survive this night, only a hundred people out of a population of a thousand who have any chance of living until sunrise, and that sparse chance is slowly decreasing by each minute.
She hears a shriek behind her, a sound no human could ever make, and she will have a panic attack later, later when she does not have almost twenty younglings to protect.
"To the ship!" she screams. "Run, run, run!" The children pick up the pace, the eldest ones hauling the stragglers into their arms and racing to the women on the ship who hold out their arms, yelling encouragements.
She flings the first child onto the ship, into a dark-skinned woman's arms, and repeats the gesture over and over again, not caring about where the children land, as long as they are on the ship, as long as they have some sort of safety. It is only when the ship is full, she leaps back onto the beach, signaling to the Sea Kings who will take the ship somewhere safe.
"Where the hell are you going?" A man with wild green hair and fur on his neck roars at her as the ship pulls out into deeper ocean, his panicked voice bracketed by the cries of the children and others on board.
She does not reply, only sends a mental order to the Kings to get as far away from the island as possible and she turns just in time to see thing erupt from the woods. Legs fifteen feet tall support a squat brown body with a mouth that takes up more than half of the thing's torso.
It screeches to see its prey vanish, mouth full of bloody teeth and the remains of her friends, and focuses its fury on her. Her pretty brown eyes narrow with rage and her belly tenses with fear.
And she does not know if she will survive the night.
She does not know who she is. Her Master says she is one person, the Head Magus of his Family, and his lover, the mother of his beloved son, whom he rescued after her family died. He curls his fingers in her light red hair and pulls her close, kissing her as though he will never let her go.
She is not stupid enough to tell him about the dreams, about the dreams where she is more than just the one she is now. She is smart enough to realize that for all his caresses and soft words and burning passion, she still wears a collar about her neck and her wrists, a collar that binds every ounce of her to him, a collar that does not permit disobedience, even in her dreams.
And something snarls in her chest, rumbling in discontent like her Magic does when her Master uses it for his own ends, uses it to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. He does not permit her to find anything about the family she lost, and his eyes flash menacingly when she dares to push the subject too far.
She sits upon the highest point of the castle she lives in with her Master's Family, and looks out over a city sprawled wide, a city she knows as well as she knows her own heart, and something aches in her chest.
A voice whispers "Mistress?" A scaly head pushes itself underneath her hand and tucks itself by her side.
"I had another dream," she says.
Another dream where there is no collar on her neck and wrists, another dream where she is sister and daughter and mother and wife, another dream where she lived in a world beyond this with a man and woman who took her from the streets and made her their own and the dark-eyed sister/brother who welcomes her with open arms, another dream where the restless anger and subconscious fury in her chest has been calmed by a dark haired man with a sword at his side, by the baby girl she holds in her arms.
"I had another dream," she says again, but tears burn in her eyes and a nameless, inarticulate longing fills her chest until she could scream from the frustration and anguish.
She does not know who she is, and how she wishes she did.
The moon casts its silvery light upon the opulently decadent city where her Master is beloved by all, where she is treated as a Queen, but is – in reality - nothing more than a gilded cage, where not even her Magic is allowed to be free.
She weeps into her hands and knows she will never be free.
Kelly Lewis jerked from sleep with a gasp of shock, knocking Gin off the bed and Shere into the wall as she flailed for balance and comprehension.
She stared blankly up at the wooden ceiling of her room in the Going Merry, chest heaving, her hair sweat-soaked and sticking to her skin. She breathed in and out as slowly as she could manage.
"Mistress?" Gin asked, pulling himself back onto the bed, while Shere clambered under Kelly's arm and snuggled in her lap, looking just as worried as her male counterpart. "Mistress, was it another nightmare?"
Kelly, still breathing slowly, mind desperately trying to right itself in reality, placed her hands on her face, her hips, her belly, and her legs. She drew back the sleeve of the tunic she slept in, and ran her fingers over the silver-blue scales on the outside of her arm.
"Mama?" Shere asked, placing one paw on the Magus's chest. "Mama, what's wrong?"
Kelly curled her fingers through Shere's fur, and did the same for Gin with her other hand, pulling him against her bare thigh. There was silence for a few moments, the Familiars waiting on tenterhooks for their Mistress to speak.
Then Kelly leaned back against the headboard with a sigh.
"Nightmare," she confirmed. But something in her face kept Gin from going for the Dreamless Sleep potions in the Infinity Sack just yet. She sighed again and wiped the sweat from her eyes.
"Nightmares," she corrected herself quietly. "I had nightmares…but they…" she stopped, feeling for the words as though she was trying to convince herself of the words. "I had nightmares, but they weren't…mine." She looked frankly bewildered by the idea.
Gin went still.
"Why would I have nightmares that didn't belong to me?" Kelly said, the question aimed more at herself, even as exhaustion made her words slur and her eyes close, and she dropped back into sleep.
Gin pressed a human hand to her forehead and whispered a few words, sparkles of silver light into vanishing behind the Magus's closed eyes. The woman went limp completely after the sparkles vanished, her mouth slack, her head lolling, completely relaxed in a way she hadn't been able to afford to be since Toratega.
"Gin!" Shere hissed. "What are you doing-?"
He gave her a foreboding look.
"She needs her sleep. So do you, Shere Khan."
"But-!"
He sent her another glare, this one so fearsome it froze the protest in her throat.
"Sleep."
The moon was full, blinding in its blaze of light.
Gin curled up on the railing of the ship, watching the sea with cold eyes. If he had been able to find a private place he would have indulged in a furious temper fit, but there were no places on this ship where one could be truly by themselves.
So he contented himself with glaring at the water lapping at the sides of the ship's hull.
Things were happening too fast for his comfort, and too soon. How many others had been brought here? How many more lives would She ruin?
The Gods only knew how badly She had ruined his Mistress's life so far.
Gin sighed, and stared up at the moon.
"What is the meaning of all of this?" He asked the sphere of light. "What plans does fate have for us? And for my Mistress?"
The moon did not answer. It never did.