Behold the production power of me being on holiday XD
Warning: To those for whom the angst was a bit much in the last chapter, this is another carriage of The Angst Train, because I wanted to get it all out of the way. So if you want, you can wait until next chapter and read the fun&fluff right after the angst of this one. Your choice ^^
To narra: I am in awe of your reading speed, really. Reading everything in just two days is just wow. Also it makes me very happy that you liked it this much as a writer, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy it!
Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece, so anything that you see in this fic and that you can recognise as belonging to One Piece is not mine. If I did own it, I wouldn't have to write fanfiction. Duh. Also, I don't own the picture.
Part One - Dive|rgence
TWENTY-ONE
The ground was dirt and rotting hearts
the sky red and the air ashes
My body broken and my mind spent
And your smile a living proof of the only victory worth fighting for
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"Vivi-sa… ma-"
Elynna stares down at the half-conscious man sprawled face first against the flat stone of the roof at her feet.
She blinks once, just in case there's any remaining tears tricking her vision, but her eyes are dry.
(painfully so)
She thought that using the roofs to move around would be safer and allow her to not be spotted, but Alabasta has some really strange birds.
And when she says birds, she means it literally, because the man in question either has a very weird fashion style, or those are actual feathers under his clothes.
She sighs, and crouches down to press a firm palm along his spine, just between his shoulder blades.
The man freezes in the realisation that he's not alone.
"Don't move so much. I'm pretty sure you have at least a few dislocated bones. You won't be of much help to the Princess in your state."
Stiffly, he turns his head so his cheek lays flat against the roof and he can look up at her.
His eye widens as it stops on the stolen Baroque Works pendant that slipped from her shirt.
"You-"
He starts struggling all over again with his limbs like a broken puppet, and with a click of her tongue she presses down harder, shoving him down into the stone surface under them and tilting one knee further down to block the hand closest to her from moving.
"Wow, calm the fuck down. I stole that pendant to infiltrate Crocodile's HQ. But I guess that if you're aware of what Baroque Works has done, you must be one of the higher-ranked officials who read Vivi-san's letter, right?"
She waits a few seconds until she's sure that he's calmed down to lighten the weight she's placed over him.
His silence is more confused than anything, now, but she doesn't bother answering his unasked questions.
"I hope they teach you to reset bones in the army, because I haven't gotten to that yet, and we're kind of in a hurry-"
"Why should I… trust you?" He cuts her off gruffly, lips pulling down in a wince as his voice travels too close to painful areas on the way to his mouth. "You have one of their pendants, a Marine uniform, and… you pretend to be with those pirates who are helping Vivi-sama. How… am I supposed to recognise your truths from your lies?"
She looks down at him for a moment, and smiles.
"Why should it matter? I need your help to get somewhere as fast as I can, and you need mine to patch yourself up as fast as you can. Don't you think that mutual need is enough for a simple exchange like this? The clock is ticking, you know."
He glares up at her for a handful of long seconds, much less threatening than he probably aims to be with the way the small, fragile heaves of his lungs are fluttering under the press of her hands.
Then he closes his eyes, and starts rattling off medical instructions.
She's moving on to his second knee when the wind starts blowing harder, and she looks up to see a thin column of twisting sandstorm dancing between sky and desert, so close to the city it can only come from a human hand.
"What are you looking a-"
She pushes hard with the palm of her hand.
He screams.
"I-" He pants, teeth grinding down on the belt of his scabbard that they used to keep his tongue safe. "I told you to give a countdown!"
Can they fight a sandstorm?
She shouldn't have left them.
She would be useless against a sandstorm, but at least there would be no 'what if' twisting her stomach into knots painful enough to make it hard to breathe.
Why wasn't she strong enough to at least bury everything that happened, just long enough to deal with what is the most important?
She's so-
She smiles, and hates that it doesn't feel strange over the clench of her teeth.
"What for? Isn't it better if you don't have the time to tense up? Cheer up, mister, we've just found where Crocodile is, so the Princess is probably not far either. If we do this fast enough, we might have a chance to catch up to them!"
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
They don't catch up to them.
When they arrive, neither Crocodile nor his King's daughter are here.
Pell winces as he lands, the contact singing painfully through his sensitive bones.
But ignoring it is easy when the very person who prevented him from saving his dear Princess is standing just a few feet away from him.
"You… Where is Vivi-sama?"
The woman lets go of the straw hat she was holding, turning around to look at him with the same confident grace she had when she dislocated his bones.
"Oh, you're awake." She notes with a smile, like she doesn't have a hand in the gauntness that has made the faces of the people he was supposed to protect sharp like a scream for help, or in the lines of stress and grief that have settled deep in the still-childish face of his Princess since he last saw her.
Then the phantasmal blue of her eyes slides to the side and settles on where his temporary ally landed when she slid off his back.
Silence settles, heavy with the heat of the desert as both women stare at each other.
On one side, thin lips and pale eyes that smile indulgently like an all-knowing sage finding amusement in the ignorance of others.
On the other, dark, unblinking eyes as silent as black glass, the tilt of her chin and the bland set of her mouth smooth like the marble statue of a god looking down on the insignificant flailing of human beings despite the plumpness of her flesh.
Both identical in how they give nothing away.
Back in human form, Pell tenses, and takes a step away, because there's just no way these two can be enemies.
There's no hostility, no harmful intention.
Just amused curiostiy and pensive consideration.
So when the younger female walks forward, Pell flexes his knees, waiting for the moment they both turn to attack him, cursing himself for trusting an enemy with his wounds when he knows nothing of her capabilit-
The girl walks past the other woman, and kneels by the side of a body Pell notices only then.
The woman smiles back at him.
"Don't be so tense, now. You'll hurt yourself again. The Princess has already gone ahead to Alubarna, and she's perfectly safe thanks to her gallant knight over here," she eventually answers with a wave of her hand towards the two others.
The next moment, she's stepping on a F-Wani and disappearing into a cloud of sand.
He's left to stare at the horizon with the knowledge that he's not in any state to catch up throbbing in his bones.
"Hey. If you don't have anything else to do, lend me a hand."
He stays still for a long moment that stretches and snaps before can bring himself to move.
(time for hope to leave his chest with his breath, time for him to decide to keep going anyway)
If the gaping hole in the boy's stomach and all the blood dyeing his skin red and sinking into the greedy coffin of the sand weren't enough, the simple fact that he's still alive at all is enough for Pell to gape.
"Who- Who is he?"
"The only person I trust to beat Crocodile's face in by the end of today."
He throws an incredulous look at the girl, but she's not looking at him, and if she feels his disbelief she doesn't ackowledge it.
"In his state?"
The shrug of her shoulders looks almost like a scoff.
"What does it matter to someone who doesn't fear death?"
His mouth clicks shut, gaze settling on her hands as they work to clean the wound. They're steady, as if they don't belong to the face twisted with the same desperation he's seen too often on the faces of parents, siblings, lovers and friends in the last few years.
(Her cheeks are dyed red too, with tears instead of blood
both have become too familiar a sight in the country he couldn't protect.
But a promise to take down the one responsible coming from someone dyed in red sounds even truer than words written on a letter.)
Then he notices that the boy's fists are still clenched and his jaw is still set even though he's unconscious, and he sighs.
"What should I do?"
"Take the money in my bag. We're going to need meat and water. A lot of it."
"... Uh?"
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Luffy doesn't know how long he blacks out.
When he wakes up again, there's a long moment where he can only hear his blood rattling in his chest and air whistling through his stomach, can only feel the pain stuck in his lungs because it's too big to fit in his mouth, impossible to scream out-
(for a long moment he's alone with his failure and his broken promise that it would be fine
it's almost painful enough to forget the hole like burning coal in his belly that narrows the world down to ithurtsithurtsithurts-)
The world is blurry and half-shrouded in black, and so he only sees a vaguely human shape somewhere above him.
But the feel of the hand on his chest is so clear, so stiched into the fabric of his memory from all the times it raked through his hair and down his back-
He doesn't need his sight to know.
"-nn," he hacks out, garbled and whimpering around a mouthful of blood and the burning scrape of his intestines against the rapidly cooling air of the desert.
His blood is screaming too loud in his ears to make out the words, but it's her voice that answers, he's sure of it-
(Except it's all still printed all over his eyelids,
the way he was clutching at her one moment and she was real, and the next she just
wasn't.
It's not enough to hear her voice.
He doesn't care what his blood is trying to scream, he just wants to hear her breathe so he can be sure that her chest is rising and falling in the way it wasn't when she was lying there, still and buried underwater and out of reach-
He just wants to see her look at him and smile, the way she couldn't when she came back still half-locked in the arms of the nightmare she saw.)
So he blinks until the black and the dry crust of salt from his own tears fall away, and his eyes settle on his First Mate, who doesn't notice, all her focus set on his wound.
There's worry nestled snugly between her eyesbrows and a quiet kind of urgency pulling her lips into a frown like a heart wrenched into breaking.
But she's blinking, so she must be alive, right?
He blinks again when black creeps around the corner of his vision again.
Even frowning hurts, but he can't help himself once he notices the line of red branded onto the thin skin under her eyes.
He latches onto the anger that gives him something else to focus on, helps him to extricate the words from the pain and out of his mouth.
"Who… made you cry?"
Her eyes are on him before he pants out all the words, and the tension that made her shoulders hike up and her features all hard suddenly melts, leaving her all soft and warm and relieved.
(It's a bit like getting one of her hugs without being touched, and it makes his own shoulders loosen even though there's still a black hole of loud fire that hisses and claws and burns away at his flesh.)
"I don't know."
"...So I-" He coughs, throat loosening and spine touching back against the ground when she cups his jaw to gently turn his head so he can spit out some blood instead of choking on it. "I have to… beat up everyone in the world?"
Just the thought of all the movement that will require is enough to make him throb.
(But if she just gives him time to take a nap, he'll do it.)
Her lips twitch, hand sliding up over his skin to stroke through his hair before she goes back to her task, eyes and hands and attention leaving his face.
"You don't need to." She says eventually. "Just… Promise me that you'll give me some time to prepare if you ever decide to leave me?"
Luffy frowns up at the sky, and imagines very hard that her doubts are a physical thing and that he's putting his fist through them.
He doesn't know where she went or what she saw there, but he knows that it hurt enough that she didn't notice she almost broke her hands against the ground (like her hands were useless to fight against whoever made her like this-), and he knows what he wants.
So he opens his mouth, jaw settling into the determination of his decision, and he promises.
"I won't leave you, ever."
And then he clenches his teeth against the pain and reaches up with one hand even though it feels like kicking himself through the stomach, snatching at her collar with weak fingers.
She follows the tug until her forehead is pressed against his and he's sure that she's breathing because the air that leaves her mouth is filtering through his.
"So promise... that you won't- you won't leave me either."
Promise that my hands won't ever close on nothing again when I reach out for you.
They're so close that her eyelashes almost interlace with his when she closes her eyes, and he can't tell whether the tear gliding down his cheek comes from his eyes or fell down from hers.
Her lips slip into a smile too small to show her usual dimples, like a shaky breath of hope that can't be heard because someone might hear and snuff it out.
"I won't leave you as long as you want me."
He almost draws her back when she leans away, just to make her say it again, without any condition that screams I don't believe in forevers, but Ann isn't Ann if she isn't stupidly cautious, so he lets it go.
(It's not like it changes anything, because he won't change his mind about her.)
"Wet sand… make the best… sandcastles." He huffs out, squeezing a bit more voice past the dulling pain if only to see pleased approval make her smile widen into something fuller as she reaches out to ruffle his hair again.
"Yeah. Good job, Captain."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"Go see Hebi as soon as you can, alright? I've barely had the time to patch you up properly, and there's too many fragile organs where he stabbed you-"
Luffy's laughter is as loud as usual even if most of it is sliced into pieces by the wind.
"Don't worry so much, Ann! I've got enough blood and meat to kick his ass, this time!" He screams over the racing wind as he adjusts the barrel of water Pell brought back from town.
She scowls back at him.
"That's not what I'm talking about. Go find Hebi when you're done. If you die after you've kicked his ass because you keep thinking you're in top shape, I'll write 'Lived stupidly and died twice as stupidly' on your grave."
"Hey! That's mean!"
"But true. Don't be an idiot and I won't have to be mean."
"Fine, fine!"
He laughs again as he flops back into her, causing her grip to tighten on Pell's feathers.
It doesn't take much longer for them to be in sight of Alubarna, and Luffy frowns, leaning forward with squinting eyes just as Pell's voice rumbles under them.
"Why is there a sandstorm in Alubarna?"
Elynna winces as the howling crowd of hundred of people fighting slams into her like a wall.
"Crocodile. Looks like Vivi-san came closer to stopping the rebellion than I thought she would."
Pell rides on higher winds to not be noticed, making it impossible to see much of what is going on the ground through the dirt and the sound floating over everything like a thick, whirling shadow.
(it does nothing to silence the screams,
to silence the love and the hate and the fear and the pain,
-all the whywhywhys-
as they chase each other and die out
louder than the wind and more blinding than the sun.
War is a scream
around her and inside her,
and she thinks that if she takes a piece of it with her, it will take a long time for her to remember what silence sounds like.)
She leans forward into Luffy's back to look over his shoulder as they reach the palace.
Pell places himself back to the sun, out of sight of everyone as they grasp the situation.
At the same time as the royal soldier's body jerks forward, Luffy's eyes latch onto where Vivi is dangling in the air at the mercy of Crocodile's grip on her throat.
Elynna scowls, too, but her sight is trained on the person on the other side of the gate leading to the terrace where Crocodile and Miss All Sunday are.
They started fiddling with something as soon as they looked up, and if they're about to attack when their window of opportunity to save Vivi is so tight…
She sits up on her knees to keep her balance, reaching up to check that her hairtie is still holding up.
She breathes out, harsh and forceful like she does everytime she's about to step onto the stage for a performance, trying to expel the doubts and replace them with music and muscle memory and thoughtless focus.
"Ann?"
"Looks like someone is planning to ruin your entrance. Say hi to the others for me, 'kay? I'm sure they did a good job."
There's a beat of silence where she doesn't dare look at him.
"Okay! See ya!"
"Good luck, Elynna." Pell adds.
She looks back with a smile to give her crewmate a high five and a nod to the older man.
"See ya, Captain. And don't worry about Crocodile's possible backup plans in case he loses. I have my own in the works."
Her prospective opponent looks down, and she launches herself off Pell.
The wind roars like a waterfall, and it feels as if she's left her stomach clutching at the soldier's feathers, but fear doesn't have the time to catch up to her.
Her opponent looks up with just enough time for their eyes to widen as her thighs clamp around their head.
She sends all the strength of her momentum to the side, hard enough to make them stumble, and then lets her weight fall until she's hanging upside down from their shoulders and releasing her grip just in time to send them flying above her.
She rolls to a stand, knees already loosened to movemovemove-
A coughing fit interrupts her brain's adrenaline drive and she blinks.
With the long-sleeved, high collared gown that reaches their feet, she can't even tell their gender, but they're definitely a Baroque Works' agent given the symbol printed over the black fabric that covers their shoulder.
The way they're still bent over and coughing their lungs out makes her almost doubt it, but when she takes a step forward in the hope of just knocking them out and being done with it, she only gets to see a small, dark blur flashing in the sunlight before she instinctively throws herself out of the way.
Definitely a Baroque Works agent.
And if they've followed Crocodile and Miss All Sunday all the way here, probably a high-ranked one, too.
She groans.
She can already tell that they're going to be a pain to deal with considering they can still wear black in this country while she's already sweating buckets just standing there.
It's a ridiculous amount of black, too.
The whole gown is black, the sleek hair that almost covers their left eye and is cut precisely at their jaw is black, the lines of ink tattooed over the shaved side of their skull are black.
Like, dude.
Emo much?
"I'm gonna kill you." They hiss through heaving breaths.
She cocks a brow.
"Sorry? That's not how I was thinking of getting someone's head between my thighs either, to be honest."
Somehow, they manage to choke on their own spit even more loudly than the first time around.
Note to self: add inuendos to offensive arsenal.
Although it doesn't work quite long enough to catch them off-guard with her next move.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"Sorry, I lost to this guy once. But this time I'll win." Luffy announces, loud enough over all the bickering going on to get everyone's attention.
Chopper looks up for a moment from where he's trying his best to patch up Zoro after leaving Nami's foot in the care of Vivi.
"Yeah, yeah. Hurry up with it, Captain." Zoro huffs.
"If you can't win, who can?"
Somehow, the way their voices all merge together to say this (to believe this) makes it almost possible for Chopper to forget the war all around them and the insidious sand seeping into minds and bodies alike.
He wonders if that's what Doctor Hiluluk meant when he answered his question on what life as a pirate was like.
It's not something you can explain, Chopper. Just something you can feel. But if I had to say, pirate life tastes like freedom. The freedom to do whatever you want, with no King to tell you what you can and what you can't do.
"Ah! Ann also says hi, and that you've done a great job."
The words unfurl in the circle of their little group, like a hand on their back and settling down the weight of the day when coming back home.
Chopper watches something come loose in the faces of those who entered Rain Dinners and came out with one person less and shoulders drawn a few notches tighter.
"Say that first, dumbass! We don't care that you lost!" Zoro and Sanji bark simultaneously, before glaring at each other.
Their Captain's shishishi is almost lost through the air as he rockets himself up towards Crocodile.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Definitely a pain to deal with.
Elynna collapses back against the wall of the garden she slipped into, breathing too loud in the sunshine peace of it.
She smiles, acrid like the gunpowder drifting into the air from the plaza.
It's like even Alubarna's palace is telling her that her efforts are futile.
(Not that she disagrees.)
She blocks her breath in her mouth so that there's no place for sound, clamps her teeth on it, and reaches a hand to pull out the needle stabbing into the back of her knee.
Then she stuffs it into one of her backpack's pockets and hides the bag in a cluster of bushes, just in case they end up losing all their needles and looking for the ones they already threw.
She can't go around fighting with the added weight when her opponent is this good at hitting pressure points.
She doesn't even know how long it will take before she can move her leg properly instead of manipulating it with her hands like a dead weight.
If Crocodile's agent didn't feel this confident (or as playfully sadistic as their Boss), she would already be done for.
And it's not even the worst part.
Because she can probably evade most needles and redirect the others away from their original aim.
But how is she supposed to do that when they can control the speed at which she moves?
She doesn't even know how their powers work, except for three things.
One, they can't slow her down if they don't see her, considering that she can move normally since she put the wall between the two of them -except for her leg.
Two, when she kicked a few pebbles at them in the hope of regaining her normal speed, the pebbles did slow down mid-air, but she was still just as slow. So it applies to everything they see, not just what they look at.
Three, the needles are probably made from sea stone, because their speed certainly isn't slowed.
If she had a partner to attack them from behind, or someone specialised in long-distance attacks like Usopp (because there must be spatial limits to this power if it's based on vision), she could work out a plan, but-
On her own?
When she's only any good in close or middle-range combat?
When she's still reeling and her hands are still shaking like they haven't since that one fight she got out of alive and whole all on her own, and Zoro looked at her with that pleased smirk he usually only gives to worthy opponents?
When a lack of control over events has always left her feeling too hot and too tight to house her own anxiety?
(When the idea of losing control of her body again
-like when her mouth spoke a language she didn't know and her hands wrote on their own
like when she laid there, her greatest wish and biggest regret screaming and reaching for her while she could do nothing-
sounds as if all that makes her Elynna and Chloé -her flesh and her mind and everything in between- are being ripped out and away?
sounds like emptiness.
sounds a bit too close to what she imagines dying to feel like.
Thinking of dying while still being alive makes her cold in Alabasta's desert.)
But there are people who trust her to do this.
If she wants to be able to look Luffy in the eyes after failing, she needs a good enough excuse to give to her own mind when it asks who died and made you think you could stand beside them when you've always known you don't have what it takes to be great?
Something like there wasn't enough blood left in me to keep standing up.
Her leg bends, finally responding to the nervous impulse of her brain, and she slips into a crouch.
She places the wireless earphones she took from her bag in her ears and covers them with her hair, just in case the music does make her body move faster on instinct.
Then she twists her wrists to dislodge her fans out of their holsters, slashing them open so she has more surface to redirect needles with.
Because if her movements can only be slowed down but not stopped, then she can at least avoid her pressure points being hit.
But goddamnit, dancing slowly has never been her strong suit.
The music in her ears is just loud enough to hear the agent call out to her without understanding what is being said, so she just fixes her eyes on their hands and waits.
The sluggishness snatches her in the middle of a breath like a slave collar around her throat.
It's hard.
She's not as used to dodging small weapons as she is fists and katanas, and she can barely blink because the motion would take too long and make her miss too many things.
But she rolls out of the way of the first needle.
Brushes off a second with the blade of her fan.
Dodges a third.
Four.
Five.
Seven.
Ten.
Twenty.
The ringing of needles against war fans is the only sound in the silence hovering over the garden like a guillotine.
Her opponent can't even be called that with how bored they look.
She doesn't think she's ever felt this humiliated.
(Because not trying things with high stakes just in case she fails has always been her way of protecting her fragile, off-kilter pride.)
She doesn't think she's ever felt this weak.
(Because she never even tried to fight in any way as Chloé, vague self-pity easier than a potential disappointment.
Because she always had someone at her back or other things to deal with as Elynna.)
She has no opportunity to strike and no momentum to give any strength to her hits even if she did.
She can't even blame the agent for having enough and suddenly slowing her down some more while throwing three needles at the same time, even as her entire right side becomes more numb than distant and she collapses on her side.
"I don't know why you guys got involved in this, but you should have surrendered from the start. Fighters like you stand no chance against me." They comment with a gruff kind of contempt as they come to a stop next to her body.
Hazily, she thinks the voice sounds more feminine than she expected as it filters through her slightly jostled earphones.
She blinks, sluggish and wet as she breathes past the ghost of the voices she heard the last time she felt this disconnected from her every bone and muscle.
"Right? Thought the same…" She slurs.
The agent raises a brow like Elynna is a strange animal in a zoo and she's wondering how Mother Nature even came up with something like this.
That's when Elynna realises that only the top of her body is in the agent's field of vision.
Not her left hand, splayed open just shy of the woman's foot.
"Why did you… get involved… anyway?" She pants with a woozy smile as her fingers twitch to reaffirm their hold on her fan.
Her question is met with a sneer.
"None of your fucking business. People like you can't understand what it's like to want a place where you can exist, anyway."
She blinks.
Thinks of her priviledged little life and how she can't remember being confronted with any intolerance for who she is.
Her smile widens.
"Guess so. Not sure a country built on deception and destruction will do the job, though."
And then the blade of her fan slices through the flesh and tendon of the woman's calf.
There's a howl, raucous and tattered and wild like the winds that blew through the ruins of Erumalu, and Elynna scrambles to her feet as best as she can with two limbs still half-numb, desperate to getawaygetawaygetaway, before-
She collapses again.
For a moment she doesn't understand.
And then her heart beats, so slow that she feels it echo in her chest like a ghost.
And then her lungs expand, so slow that she feels every millimetre of air that disappears between the ground and her expanding chest.
Too slow.
(That's when she learns that having only her movements slow down meant that the woman was being nice.
She's not being nice anymore.)
Black bubbles are already floating across her vision.
She's dying.
The blood is moving too slow in her veins with too little oxygen and she's dying.
She can barely feel her legs and her arms anymore, and her chest hurts like someone is playing at piling weights of lead on it to see how long it takes before her ribcage gives away and her organs splatter all over the grass under the pressure.
Her body is so heavy it's like it has sunk into the ground (into its grave) and left her hovering over it, weightless and deliriously confused.
She's dying, and her jumbled thoughts struggle to remember what it means and whether it's important.
(She's dying, and it feels so easy.)
Until she's not dying anymore.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Air rushes in so fast the whole world spins, hard enough for everything in her to lurch painfully in an attempt to twist on itself and follow.
She still can't make sense of what she's seeing or remember how she got here when something smashes down on what she thinks is her hand and something else buries itself into what is probably her gut.
She shrieks.
She's sure she does, even if she can't recognise her own voice (like she couldn't recognise her skin or her eyes once), not with all the pain cowering there that startles it into a high-pitched, whimpering plea and comes this close to making her throat break.
As it is, she coughs out blood on her next breath.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
She remembers everything when the agent leaves her with a pained huff and a last, enraged grind of her heel on fingers that have already snapped.
Leaves her to drool out the blood frothing in her mouth because spitting or coughing it out jostles her bruised organs and cracked ribs too much.
Leaving her with a quiet, quiet mind that-
gives up.
She's had enough.
Why should she get up?
This isn't her.
(But who is she, this girl who has lost a body and some weakness and too many people no matter how many others she has found?)
She's never tried to speak up or fight for others even metaphorically before, because speaking up means standing out and she just wants to float through life quietly and die quietly.
Just another meaningless life among all the others.
Why do so many people even try to make life about something more than just… life?
(You're born,
-you don't ask to-
you live,
-more or less easily depending on things that have little to do with what you want and your efforts to achieve it-
and then you die
-and maybe something after that, but she hopes not, because life is already enough work as it is.)
Why should she have some big ambition that requires more hardship and more courage to overcome them than her body can hold? How is it going to make this long journey more bearable?
Her lips tilt up into a smile, shaky and rickety and drugged up on the pain.
Helping people?
Sure.
But not like this.
Not if it means tearing herself to pieces down to her core until she has no will and no substance left, all for people she doesn't know. Not if it means that she has to get out of her little privileged bubble of the white, middle-class girl from a tolerant and mostly happy family and suffer along with those who don't get this privilege.
That's too hard.
That's asking more effort and kindness than what she can give, no matter what most people think when they see the quiet, polite girl who can't say no (who can't be bothered to if it means fighting over something petty like who does what part of the group homework and what dessert should we take) and who behaves the same towards just about everyone, even people she doesn't like (even people she doesn't like haven't done much harm to her because she lives in a nice neighbourhood in a not-too-big town; it's nothing worth caring about and even though their faces sometimes stay because of her good memory, the feelings slip away fleetingly like rain off the window of a speeding train).
She doesn't want to hurt anymore.
She doesn't care about this country.
(not really, because caring about everyone would mean suffering for everyone who suffers,
and there's not enough of her heart and compassion to go around the world)
So what if they fail and the war goes on?
It's just another war.
Just another stupid thing that humans never stop doing no matter how much they hate it.
Even if they stop this one, it will do nothing for the dozens of other wars and the thousands of other souls suffering.
(the thousands of other souls who don't need war to suffer)
So what's the point?
The war against war is one that can only end when everyone is dead.
(maybe)
She can fight to survive (like she did in most of the fights she got in because of her decision to stay), but Crocodile's goon isn't even trying to kill her anymore.
She can fight because she's angry and she wants others to hurt (like she did in Rain's village or when she stumbled upon that boy being bullied a few islands back, and got angry for him and all the others that she never knew of but that maybe she could have helped without losing anything if she was this strong before), but she's too tired and too full of pain to be angry-
The voice is barely loud enough to latch onto her consciousness as it drifts aimlessly in the acidic bitterness that keeps eating at it.
"Guess I'll take care of that Straw-Hat brat now. Tch, the Boss is probably done with him, anyway."
And she remembers that there's no need to think about all this, because-
None of this matters.
The war itself doesn't even matter, because whether or not there is a war, her nakama want to be here.
And that's just it.
Unless she wants to be utterly alone, she has to make concessions, has to give something that matches someone else's expectations to be able to stay at their side, just like they have to give her something.
There might not be any meaning to existing, but she likes happiness as much as the next person, and she's not quite ready to go yet, or quite sure that she can find someone else to love and be loved by if she stays down, so if her nakama need her to keep going in exchange for their presence in her life, well…
Her flesh might not agree at the moment, but she knows that this kind of pain has a much shorter lifespan than the happiness they give.
It's a trade in her favour, really.
Winning doesn't matter either.
She just needs to keep one idiot off her Captain's back.
Whether she does it by taking hits or dishing them out doesn't matter.
She breathes, shallow but still tight with pain.
(But she used to go about her day feeling like this everytime the protective haze of the painkillers would start to fray away.
She just has to force her body into remembering.)
She doesn't move immediately, savouring the dulling of the hot throbs radiating through her in her immobility.
If she can just find a way to distract herself from the pain-
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"oé-"
"Chloé!"
She looks up from her book, blinking curiously at the half-fond and half-annoyed frown of her dad.
"Yeah?"
"We're going home, it's getting late."
She blinks again, shredding the last dreamy remnants of the hazy, imaginary world floating in her head.
"Oh, okay."
Closing her book, she slips it carefully in the tote bag her mom lended her before hopping off the sofa she huddled into when the adults' party really started.
She's still too small for the bag not to brush against the floor when she walks, so she takes it with both arms, like she does with the plushie that she's kept in her bed for the nights when the air between her arms and her chest feels like emptiness.
"You good?"
Her dad calls back over his shoulder.
"Yes, dad." She answers obediently with a sleepy yawn as she bends down to put on her shoes.
"We didn't bother you too much with the noise, sweetheart?" Her mom's friend asks with a smile as she ruffles her hair gently.
"Uh?"
She feels her mom's presence behind her even before she chuckles and picks her up in her arms.
"Don't worry about it. Chloé is a worrywart, but once she's focused on something she's barely aware of what's going on around her. You can't imagine the number of times I had to call her name repeatedly because she had her nose stuck in her book. She didn't even notice how noisy her class group was until Christmas break when she was getting tired because of the school hours."
"Now that you say it… Well, be glad that she's also the more cautious of the two, because if she was like Nina on that point, she'd probably end up reading in the street and walking into something or someone."
"I know, I know. Oh, do you remember Christiane? We met her briefly when-"
It's four in the morning and Chloé is nine years old.
She falls asleep.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Just like that.
Just like how she barely winced when a gash in her hand was being stitched close without anaesthesia because Naomi was distracting her with a conversation she doesn't remember.
She doesn't know if this body's higher abilities will help her or hinder her-
She doesn't have a book or a friend to focus on, but-
She has someone who just broke a few of her bones right there, and she really, really wants to return the favour.
So she closes her eyes and breathes, until the sound of her breath and her heart and her pain is just an afterthought that shadows the sound of boots thumping against the ground.
One moment she's focused and about to move, throwing all her attention towards the sound of another breath pattern to try and stay focused.
The next, she's being pushed or maybe pulled, and the pool of focus she was just touching with her fingers closes over her head, cool and liquid and muffling, leaving the awareness of her pain behind like water pushing out air with the intensity of it.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Charlie grunts as they adjust the makeshift bandage around their calf, already soaked through with blood with the few steps it took them to limp back to the main path.
Maybe beating up that pirate before taking care of the wound wasn't such a good idea.
Now that the rageful rush of their blood has settled into a slower pace, they're more tempted to slam their own head against the wall for letting the woman have a go at them when they're so much stronger in the first place.
(And their gut twists with something sour like self-disgust as they think of their foot cracking down on her ribs two, three, four times even though she's already not moving-)
If there's one thing Charlie doesn't like about their boss, it's the way he keeps kicking people when they're down, literally and figuratively.
(the way it makes him laugh-)
That's not the kind of person they want to become.
They don't even want to fight in the first place.
(But they want to shut their mouth and accept the world even less, and they've learned to place themselves above others.
No one else is going to do it.)
They huff as they reach for the scroll hidden inside their thawb, rolling it open to check that the ink of the melody written there isn't smudged.
Goddamn Devil Fruit.
They were a kid coming back from a treasure hunt and eager to show the result to the other kids of the village. If those damn neighbours didn't try to steal it while telling them that they would understand when they're older, they wouldn't have eaten it.
Who the fuck even had the idea to create the Saifu Saifu no Mi?!
They're not even the right person for it with how shitty their memory is, to the point that they have to write down the melody to be able to use it properly.
Fucking Curse ruins their life and doesn't even have anything positive to show for it.
But they can at least make sure that it won't happen to anyone else, that anyone who finds themseves with these powers without asking to can come to this Ideal Nation and be safe, can come and be sure that they won't be used as a tool for their powers when they want nothing to do with the battlefield.
Even if Charlie has to let themselves be used.
(Someone who has never been chased after and out of the island they were born in and any other close enough to know by heart because their own parents want to burn the Curse of the Sea out of them so they can access the afterlife-
-even if it costs them their life-
Someone who has never lived through this can't understand what it felt like when Crocodile looked at Charlie and said I don't care whether you use your powers or not once we have seized the throne.
When he said that they could set up their own Ministry to investigate the traffic of enslaved Devil Fruit Users and save every single one of them and that he would give the money to reinsert them in society once they're recovered instead of recruiting them in his future army
Someone who has always felt safe in the place where they sleep
can never
understand)
It's not like they're enjoying the sound of all those people killing each other on the plaza either.
(It sounds like a mix of their mother wailing because she sees no other choice but to kill them now that the Curse is in their veins and that would-be slave -n°719- who snapped during the auction and slaughtered a good chunk of the audience before he was put down like a rabid dog
imitations of barking sounds and mad, mad giggles creaking together like a sinking ship groaning under its own weight-)
But they didn't have to fight.
It was just a King being replaced by another, and all the damage they caused under the disguise of the Army was taken care of by the Boss as the hero, right?
"Whatever," they grunt, because they've spent enough time wallowing in Mr. 2's wine cellar the day before. "Guess I'll take care of that Straw-Hat brat now. Tch, the Boss is probably done with him, anyway."
They barely take ten steps towards the gate before the scuffing noise of shoes against dirt path makes them turn around.
No way.
They whirl around, and the pirate is right there, stepping out of the garden, half lying against the archway leading to it like she can't even support her own weight.
"You've got to be kidding me." Charlie groans with a sigh.
They thought the girl had some common sense and would stay down, damnit.
She did better at avoiding their needles than most people they used their power on, but she clearly had no actual trick up her sleeves to be any kind of threat, and-
They frown.
There's goosebumps all over their skin, cold and wet like they just took a cold shower with their clothes on, and they almost take a step back as the dark, inky blue of the pirate's eyes settle on them, fixed and dilated and not quite present.
(or maybe present too much)
Charlie scowls, shaking off the uneasiness and letting the melody trickle through their mind once again.
This'll be done in one minute tops, anyway. She doesn't even seem able to stand properl-
The pirate staggers, and rights herself up.
Except it's too fast.
Too fast, and completely out of beat with the melody playing through Charlie's mind.
Something is not right.
It doesn't matter that she's barely conscious or how insane her focus is, their Devil Fruit works on people's bodies.
It shouldn't matter what their mind wants.
The pirate takes a step forward, and Charlie scowls harder as they switch to the other, even slower melody, and play it loud enough to give themselves a migraine, pouring enough power to soak through the girl's skin.
The realisation only becomes substantial in their mind when the pirate slugs them across the face.
Their powers aren't working.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Miles away from Alabasta, a man with skin like sun-tanned leather and hair like salt and foam spits out his coffee.
"Ah, dear me." He sighs in obvious disappointment at himself as he puts down the cup, shaking the hand that was holding it once to throw most of the coffee that dripped on it before he reaches out for the pile of small, square napkins.
"What the hell, old man." His partner sneers in disgust from the opposite seat.
"Don't talk to me like that, kid. Besides, you would have done the same if you were drinking coffee. Where did Mother go to find someone who can Shield even before their Initiation?" The man complains without much heat, more focused on trying to clean his vest of tweed with a vaguely incredulous frown.
His travelling companion scoffs.
"Don't get so worked up. Right now they're just pouring everything out without any technique. They'll run out of steam soon enough with barely any damage to show for it."
The man sighs despondently at his failed attempt to salvage his brand new clothes, but the line of his mouth is serious when he looks up.
"You're right about that, of course, but if this is a measure of their potential…" He sighs again. "Ahhh, I hope they'll at least be a bit less… chaotic."
"Are you pickin' a fight with me?"
"Sit back down. This is the only Sea Train in the world. I'm not having you destroy this treasure because of a temper tantrum."
The younger passenger sits back down with a huff, tongue clicking in annoyance.
"Why did She even call on someone else?" The man mutters, turning back to his musings. "We're basically covering all our bases already-"
"Isn't it obvious? Things are changing, enough that the balance between the Three Great Powers is getting more tense, and it's already a miracle that it lasted this long. Even the old fart must feel it. Better have too many people than not enough if things are going to get messy."
The older man's brow twitches at the insult.
"... Speaking of new people, do you have any idea what that signal was a few hours ago?"
"... Nah." The younger of the duo grouches, frustration lining the grinding of teeth that echoes between them. "Pretty sure it was the same presence, and we're not supposed to get two newbies anyway."
The man hums in agreement.
"Well, no use worrying about it now. Help me get out of here, I need to wash my hands. And wipe that smirk off your face, kid. You know that you can't go after the 'newbie' as long as they haven't passed the Initiation. Honestly, what have I done to be surrounded by crazy people with crazy powers-"
His partner grumbles but complies, sliding out of the booth to drive the wheelchair where the older man is sitting towards the washroom.
What a load of bullshit.
As if they aren't coming back from a mission where the old man wiped an entire artificial island off the map all by himself.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"You rely too much on your Devil Fruit," Mr. 2 told Charlie, even before he chose them as his First Mate. "The stakes of Zero-chan's plan are high. Someone will probably try to stop it at some point even if they don't really know what's going on, and even without this we might end up facing a strong opponent. If someone manages to prevent you from using your power… I know you don't like fighting, but you should be careful."
Charlie is pretty sure that their Captain didn't mean prevent you from using it quite this way, though.
They stumble back, throat too tight for all the air their lungs are begging for.
It seemed so obvious and easy to deal with when that damn pirate was slow-dodging Charlie's needles, her movements all weird and unlike any fighting style they ever saw before, but so clean and smooth it was like reading a book.
But at a normal speed, even slowed by her injuries?
They can't read her.
There's too many feints, too many movements that change shape at the last moment, as if she's adapting to Charlie's own moves and barely even knows herself what she's doing even while her limbs are already moving into the next position.
Usually, they can recognise who they can't mess with and just don't get involved in a goddamn fight. They can't even remember the last time they faced someone who dealt them this much damage.
They curse under their panting breath as the girl closes the distance between them, eyes fluttering between all her limbs to try and guess which one will move to hit them.
She cocks back her right arm, good hand clenched into a fist.
Charlie leans back to dodge.
Her first misses their face and keeps going, curled too tightly and too close to her own body to really be aiming for Charlie in the first place, and instead the momentum sends her into a spin.
They see the roundhouse kick coming only when her heel is already hitting their face and bringing their skull down to smash against the ground.
Charlie's entire head rings with pain like there's a bomb going off inside of it, unable to say where their head stops and the ground begins as if it has already exploded.
They blink bleary eyes open what feels like hours after to see that the pirate is still not moving, head tilted to the side as if she has all the time in the world to figure out what to do with them.
(and their defeat is stretching over the planes of her face like a painted mask
It's in the poised brutality lining the set of her mouth and the fixed intensity of her eyes, nonchalant in their prudent observation for any kind of threat.)
The noise that escapes their mouth is torn half-way between a whimper and a growl as their fingers scratch into the dirt for any kind of hold because they are not going down like this-
Their other hand reaches for the last needle in one of the folds of their thawb, thrusting forward almost blindly with the vicious, guttural sound of last chances, batting away the leg keeping them down against the ground with their free hand to surge upward.
The pirate reaches out, and the needle pierces through her bad hand before it can reach her stomach, her messed up fingers closing around Charlie's clenched fist, hold made weak by pain and blood and held up only by the two fingers that aren't broken.
But it lasts long enough for her other palm to snap against their outstrecthed arm and bend their elbow inside out with a crunch.
Charlie's mind cracks into black at the same time, and they faint before they even see or feel the pirate collapse over them barely two seconds after.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
The world expands as abruptly as it narrowed down, and the immediate rush of information knocks Elynna back to the ground, winded and struggling to compute her surroundings.
Suddenly the sound of her opponent's breathing is but a whisper under the scream of war, and she has to clamp down on a shuddering sob as it wracks through her dislocated body.
She can't move.
Her left hand is twitching eratically like its nerves can't process the pain, and every breath is whistling searingly through the cracks of her ribs, the bruises on and under her skin like bright spots of pain in her mind, eclipsing most of her thoughts before they can reach their end.
Everything feels so heavy, as if she's a puppet with limbs of white hot lead whose strings have been cut.
"Guess I'll take care of that Straw-Hat brat now. Tsk, the Boss is probably done with him, anyway."
She screws her eyes shut with a half-hearted, sobbing sigh.
(she just wants to sleep,
just wants to stop, someone make it stop, please-
it
H U R T S)
She moves, dragging herself to the backpack she dropped by the archway.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
She's barely conscious enough by the time she stumbles past the gate to recognise the dried out corpse spread on the sand of the wrecked terrace as her Captain.
Without a wall to hold herself somewhat standing, she falls to her knees and crawls up to him, almost hitting herself in the nose with how much her good hand shakes, drenched in fear and pain and sheer exhaustion as she works open her flask with her teeth to dump on Luffy all the water she put in it just in case before leaving for Alubarna.
His breath wheezes into existence, but it's too weak.
(and his eyes still won't open and his flesh is still too thin-)
The urgency only muddles her half-way gone mind some more, and she's left staring uncomprehendingly at her dying Captain until water splashes down all over them out of nowhere.
The impact is enough to knock her forward with how weak she is, and only Luffy's loud intake of breath keeps her grip on reality tight enough to stay awake.
A few seconds after, arms tighten around her as hands turn her over gently so she can look up at his face.
Luffy looks down at her, brow furrowed with something almost stern in its worry as his eyes rove over her, lips pulled down by displeasure.
But when his big, round eyes come back to hers, he smiles.
"That was close!"
His voice echoes in her head, a ghost of a day when the boy holding her was like a nightmare.
Now she rakes in what little energy she has to tilt her lips up at him in a tiny smile.
He beams, wider and sunnier if possible.
"You did good, Ann."
She blinks, both to refocus her vision and convey her confusion.
Her brain isn't quite up for conversation.
He pouts at her unvoiced how would you know? with a look that says duh, it's a dumb question, dummy.
"'Cause it's you!"
Then he looks up, head whipping around until he perks up and unwinds an arm from around her to stretch it towards what turns out to be his hat.
Blearily, she watches him stare at the frayed string of his treasure, worry and hesitation lining his forehead and shadowing his eyes.
With a sharp, hurtful inhale, she heaves her good hand up just high enough to snatch the brim of the hat with weak fingers.
He pauses at the faint tug to look back at her.
She blinks.
I'll keep it safe.
Luffy stares at her for a moment, and then settles the hat carefully over the ragged heave of her chest with another beaming smile, like warming her skin will soothe the breath rattling inside her lungs in hitched whimpers.
"Just wait here and rest, okay? I'll bring help after I'm done with Croc!" He says like both tasks are just another item on the grocery list.
It sounds a bit absurd in her ears, but he believes in it, so it's enough for her to weakly and clumsily pat his hair in silent agreement when he bends down to nuzzle a cheek against hers, her lips breathing a ghost of a kiss on his other cheek because she doesn't have the strength to do much more.
The smack of his own kiss on her cheek is loud enough for two anyway.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Her eyelids become too heavy not long after the afterimage of his warmth leaves her, and her eyes slowly blink close.
She finds herself alone in the dark, war pouring in her ears and filling her head, scream upon scream upon betrayals and lies and despair.
The tears come again after that, slow like agony and so very quiet, all the more terrible in their silent, dreadful loneliness.
She doesn't quite know why she cries, body already too numb and distant to feel any pain.
But she does.
And unconsciousness creeps in between each slow glide of a tear, slow and quiet and just a bit lonely save for the echo of warmth and the promise of laughter cradled beneath her hand and covering her heart.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Gotta stay consistent with chapter twenty, am I right?
Although this got real bloody real fast ^^' Something bugs me about this fight scene, but I can't find what, so I decided to just come back to it later lol
The gown that Charlie is wearing is a thawb, which is what the Bedouin people wear in the desert, if my source is correct.
saifu (採譜) = writing a melody on a musical score (you'll get more info next chapter!)
No, Robin and Elynna do not have telepathic conversations. I've just decided that they're going to get along swimmingly and be disturbingly alike in all the ways that make Usopp lose his mind XD
Question of the day: On a scale of 1 to 100.000, how much did you enjoy the implications of that very obvious piece of foreshadowing for Elynna's future power-up?
Next up: The comeback of the more positive stuff. You have no idea what kind of things are floating around in my head right now (and on my google doc, yes, already). It's gonna be GLORIOUS *insert mad cackling there*