Mother

Characters: Penguin, OC. Rating: K. Warnings: implied minor character death

Law wasn't the only one with a special hat in the crew. Not that many people outside of the Heart Pirates knew that their captain's hat had a special meaning, as it kept changing slightly over the years, but the crew knew and that was all that mattered.

What the crew also knew was that Penguin's hat wasn't some joke present from Shachi just because it said 'penguin'. In fact, it wasn't a present from Shachi at all, nor was it a joke. Many years ago, long before Law had stumbled onto Swallow Island to find a pair of angry teens and scared mink, a woman had spent her evenings sat in front of a blazing fire with a needle in hand.

By her feet, her son would doze, tired out from a day running through the forests with his best friend but too stubborn to go to bed. She would wait for his dozing to turn to sleep as she worked, setting aside her project when he finally passed out for the night and carrying him to his room where he could sleep in comfort.

Sometimes she had both boys, her best friend's little tyke left in her care for a night so the pair of them could make mischief for even longer into the evening while she sat and sewed. A fiery redhead like his mother, and with seemingly limitless energy, the nights Shachi was around Penguin stayed up far later, forgoing his evening routine of curling up by her feet in favour of hyperactive games until the pair dropped where they were.

Other nights Penguin would be gone, the duo fostered onto either Shachi's family or Noona and her husband for the night. Those were the nights she got the most work done, undistracted by a young child edging too close to the fire in his dozing or a hyperactive tag team running all through the house even though it was well past their bedroom.

Eventually, months after she began her project, the hat was finished. That evening, she finalised it by neatly stitching his name across the front – an anti-theft measure, as Shachi did so like to lay claim to Penguin's things and while her son usually let him have them at least for a time it was harder for the ginger to claim something that already had Penguin's name on it.

When she put it on his head the next morning, eyes still full of sleep where he and Shachi had clearly spent more time playing than sleeping at Noona's last night, it slipped down over his eyes, a little too big for him. That was okay; he had plenty of growing left to do, and she'd made it a true winter's hat, one that would stand the elements for several years to come.

Bullets would do what the elements could not, capable of slicing through the fabric. She'd given her child protection from nature, not pirates. It was no helmet, and at the sight of it on what had become a massacre she threw herself forwards, because she hadn't given him anything that could protect him from this, so she'd protect him the only way she could.

Twenty years later, Penguin hummed as he patched the very same hat up again after another patch had started to wear thin. It was more patched-up repairs than original now – the once-vibrant red pompom had turned to a faded pink before eventually disintegrating away into nothing – but it was still the very same hat his mother had spent so many months pouring all her love into.

Would you believe me if I said I intended on light-hearted fluff when I started writing this chapter? Penguin's hat gets its own special history at last - I've been throwing in the very occasional offhand comment about it since chapter 5 (Hat), so it was about time I actually wrote it out fully.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari