From The Sea - Dive rgence Chapter 25: Conspiracy, an one piece fanfic

Here's the promised part 2!

… Still a filler, though. 30k words filler, but filler all the same.

A few (teeny tiny) bits of this chapter were inspired by some filler arcs of One Piece, but overall it is my own idea, so if there are plot holes they're most definitely mine XD

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-FOUR

And she watches watches watches

Watches and tries to

understand

Understand why the happiness resonates only with

silence

in her own head

Why their laughter squeezes around her heart

Why their happiness feels hot and acrid in her stomach

Close enough to burn but too far away to warm

Envy is a new taste that overshadows old grief

But she only wants to taste acceptance

(it's the best she could hope for

if she knew what hope was)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Seriously, it's a miracle you haven't lost a finger yet." Usopp sighs as he sits in front of his student and takes the opportunity to work on his bandaging skills.

Chopper made them all sit down for a class on how to bandage various body parts, but he didn't get to practice much, since his Captain dragged him into a contest on who could turn a sleeping Zoro into a mummy the fastest without getting skewered.

"Not everyone is a genius at hand-eye coordination." Elynna shrugs as she holds out her hands, the tiniest pull at the corner of her lips betraying the sting lit on her skin by the disinfectant he wipes her nicked fingers with.

"That's not even something you can be a genius at, stupid." He grumbles as he bends forward over her hands a bit more in an attempt to hide the red of his cheeks.

"Besides," his First Mate goes on like he didn't speak, "it's been a month since we left Alabasta and not even two since you started training me. I know you would have done better in my place, but cut me some slack."

He pinches the skin on the back of the hand he's taking care of for her cheek, but it's half-hearted at best.

He's reasonably sure that he would have almost mastered the skill she wants to learn by now, whereas now that he's upped her training into its final form, Elynna only hits the target around half of the time and has trouble catching her kukris properly, as evidenced by her fingers that are now more often than not bandaged.

And she hasn't even started moving yet.

But it's also true that while his First Mate is not brilliant in the art of throwing blades by any means, she's definitely a hard worker and a fast learner, both mentally and physically.

She might be progressing slower than he would, but she's also progressing much faster than a lot of other people might, probably in great part because she spent more than a decade taking dance classes and practicing the sport on her own in her free time. Dancing is even more different from knife throwing than it is from hand-to-hand combat, but it still involves skills that can be used to pick up what Usopp is teaching her.

If he had to wait for her to develop the muscle mass she has already developed over more than ten years through the practice of an activity that requires her to use all of her muscles in coordination, they wouldn't even have started the actual training.

And if she didn't have the top-notch body awareness she has, she would definitely have one or several fingers missing by now.

The muscles she has and that he so often forgets aren't built for the speed and strength Zoro often nags her to work on, but Usopp doesn't really need her to be faster or stronger than she is now. On the other hand, she's second only to Luffy's freaky powers when it comes to mobility and flexibility, and when she'll actually be able to do what she wants to do with those kukris, it will only make her more dangerous.

For their enemies.

Which means he'll be a whole lot safer.

It's a nice bonus for all the blood and sweat (of Elynna) he's putting into this.

His musings are interrupted by the loud sound of one of their crewmates knocking at the door.

(Some of them used to try and peep on Usopp's training sessions.

After a few overdramatic temper tantrums, they learned.

Which is almost a shame, because he had a lot of fun throwing said tantrums, but-

He will only reveal his pupil when she's at her best, and when he does he will take pictures of everyone else's face and blackmail them with it for the next ten months at the very least.

He will accept nothing else.

…

Except when it comes to Nami, maybe, considering that she has a lot of blackmail material on him.)

"Oi, you two! We've reached an island!" Zoro's voice filters through the door in a tone that tells them to hurry the hell up and move their ass.

Still focused on his task, Usopp gives a vague vocal sign of acknowledgement.

Elynna, who has more practice with bandaging than he does, gives him a nod of approval once he's done, and gets to her feet to put the rest of her clothes back on, since she shed the upper part of her jumpsuit for the duration of her training.

When Usopp has put away all the medical supplies he took out, he turns around, and does a double take, because-

"I definitely saw that in Zoro's part of our closet." He says, cautiously eyeing the cardigan Elynna is putting on over her jumpsuit like the thing is going to jump at him and try to beat him up.

If it belongs to Zoro, it probably can.

"That's because that's where I took it from."

"... Zoro let you borrow some of his clothes?"

She looks over her shoulder even as she twists her hair into a bun at the base of her neck, and gives him a look that tells him that the conclusion he just reached is stupid.

"Hell no. I stole it. But he's never put it on even on Winter Islands, and I figured someone probably put it into his bag for him when he left his hometown, because he's more likely to use bad weather as a prop for training than to put on warm clothes. And since he didn't behead me this morning when he saw me wearing it, he obviously doesn't give a damn."

Usopp stares at her some more, and then moves towards the door with a heavy sigh.

"As long as you don't provoke anyone other than Zoro into beheading you… We have enough problem magnets as it is."

"How rude." His First Mate hums as she follows him out. "I only tease people that much when I know that they like me too much to make me face the consequences."

"Ugh, kill me now…"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

When Elynna and Usopp catch up on their crewmates, they're standing around the knocked out body of what appears to be an official of some sort, and a cloud of dust at the end of the street is the only sign of where their Captain has gone.

"Sorry, Elynna was being clumsy so I had to-" Usopp cuts himself off as he slows to a stop to stare at the man crumpled at his feet. "What happened to him?"

"Luffy ran him over because he's hungry." Nami replies boredly.

Elynna raises a brow at her, waiting for an explanation as to why the navigator isn't presently running after the rubber boy to try and beat him to a pulp.

"He was asking us to pay some kind of harbour tax." Nami answers the silent question with a dismissive wave at the still unconscious man.

"Hm." Elynna says, not bothering to restrain the amusement pooling into the dimples of her cheeks.

"It was a ridiculously high tax."

"Uh huh."

Nami stares at her, then at Sanji's twitching lips, realises that she's being teased, and throws her hands up to the sky before sharply turning on her heel to follow Usopp, Zoro and Chopper.

"Whatever. Let's just go before that idiot eats some poor restaurant owner out of house and home."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

It takes them five minutes to reach the main street, and three more to realise that something is not quite right.

They might have spent some time in a country bursting at the seams with the taste of civil war barely a month before coming here, but they still don't find it exactly normal to see a group of Marines stumble out of a bar in the middle of what should probably be their working hours, obviously drunk and unapologetic about the two kids they bump into hard enough to send them to the ground.

Two mothers rush in to pick up the bawling children whose noisy reaction is clearly annoying one of the Marines more than is safe, and what looks like the bar-restaurant owner runs out of the building with a nervous rictus that is probably supposed to be a service industry smile.

"Ah, gentlemen, please wait a moment-"

"Uh?" Another of the inebriated men grunts. "What d'ya want?!"

The man cowers just a bit more, but stands his ground.

(The line of his spine draws a shape of desperation rather than courage.)

"I- Thank you for gracing my humble restaurant with your presence. However, you haven't told me which means of payment you will use? I need to include this information in my account books, I hope you underst-"

"Payment?" The soldier interrupts him, sneer brutal like a knife slicing through the request. "Why should we pay you when we already do so much to protect you all? If anything, y' should be the one paying us with free meals. 'S not like they're worth much more than that, ain't I right?"

Loud laughter answers him from his companions, still not quite enough to occult the silence of all those standing close enough to hear what is being said, fat with all the food they just took and gave nothing back for.

(Not even appreciation.)

"But- But I still need to pay the tax next week-"

"Then just work more like yours truly, dumbass."

And with that the Marine roughly shoulders the man out of the way.

The people scattered through the street look away, silent in a way that screams.

Elynna scoffs under her breath, and next to her Zoro's lips are turned down under the weight of his disgust, his grip around one of his katana on the tighter side of relaxed, as if he's just itching to sink the blade in someone's flesh -and preferably that of a specific set of someones.

A few steps ahead of them Robin and Luffy look on blank-faced, but Choppers' eyes are wide with shock and Usopp's fists are clenched tight into his trousers' pockets, though not as tight as the lines drawn in Sanji's face by his scowl.

But when the restaurant owner stumbles back with the hit Nami jerks forward, jaw sealed shut by molten anger like she's not with them anymore but back in Cocoyashi, and she wants to-

She's stopped in her tracks by Elynna's hand around hers.

"Not here." The First Mate mutters, low and sharp in her ear. "Do you want to turn the whole street into a battlefield with all the civilians who are still here?"

The navigator's muscles tense tighter still for a moment that feels like a finger on a trigger before she settles, fingers interlacing with Elynna's and squeezing as tight as her heart is choking for these people.

Luffy hums, before suddenly turning to them with a beaming smile.

"Alright! Let's go eat there!"

His crewmates exchange a glance at that, and follow him with a shrug and varying degrees of enthusiasm.

"Sorry. I got angry."

Elynna rolls her eyes, shoulder bumping against the other girl's as they walk behind their crewmates.

"No kidding. None of us liked watching it either, you know."

Her fingers skim along the bone of her lower jaw, like the sight they just witnessed put her teeth on edge with the urge to sink them into the Marines' flesh (until their bones are crunching-) and she's trying to settle the violence thrumming in her mouth.

Nami looks away with a small smile.

"I know."

(She knows how easily Lynna expects the worst from people and situations alike because she thinks it's how the world will hurt less

-as if she can't see all the times others run forward to feel the wind on their face the way she never will, because she's too afraid of the rock she might trip on-

knows how hard she tries to weather everything -good and bad and everything in between- like a rock in the sea, not knowing or caring that it's being worn down bit by bit-

and she almost does it.

Sinks into her feelings instead of letting them surface to her face so she can spit them at the world, until she's the kind of person Nami meets and thinks does she even know right from wrong?

But then there was the smile she sported when she joined them after fighting one of Arlong's closest companions, and the silence she breathed out sitting outside of the cell Nami was standing in like in a separate world.

And Nami thinks that Lynna doesn't quite know how to deal with anger yet.

Perhaps because she never felt so clearly like she could act on the things that really angered her, preferring bittered resignation instead

and so she can't swallow the rage down as if it's water

-just enough taste and colour and substance to notice it and dismiss it-

She's not sure she's right in thinking that this is a good thing.)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

This woman has a bruised wrist.

That one has been drinking and smoking since she arrived.

These men should be a bunch of friends hanging out for lunch, but they look like they're planning a funeral.

Her fingers drum softly against the stained wood of the table, the twitch of her lips hidden by the hand cradling her chin.

As her more talkative crewmates entertain everyone next to them with wildly edited stories of their adventures and keep asking for more food as if they're determined to drown the owner in enough money to pay his taxes ten times over, Elynna watches.

The plate that Sanji gave her is discreetly handed over to Luffy, her stomach still churning with the heavy, cloying viscosity of the human misery she can taste in the air.

Her eyes drift down to the rough knots of the wooden table, and the corner of her mouth twitches again, up instead of down, mockery instead of distate.

Protectors of the people?

What a fucking joke.

But given the number of people needed to create a government, there's bound to be assholes like there is everywhere else, perhaps even more given the power that comes with the authority of leadership.

She knows this, or believes it deep enough (down into the marrow of her bones) for it to feel like knowledge.

Still, she really wants to find those Marines from earlier and do something that involves blood or screams on their part.

She breathes in, and closes her eyes, remembering bones snapping and blood dripping because of her.

(The stench still makes her stomach twist, and the screams still sound too loud in her head, sometimes.

But not the sights.)

Half-killing that Fish-Man didn't really make up for what he did to Nami.

Crushing Crocodile under her heel didn't really make her feel better, perhaps because his face wasn't actually under her foot, or because he was a convenient outlet rather than the main cause of her anger.

Regardless, there's no point in getting angry, even though she thinks it's pretty justified.

If she stretches her time and her attention and her energy between all the people whose situation angers her, she will amount to nothing.

She will change nothing.

And as it happens, she has a man to save and people to take care of.

If she crosses paths with those fuckers in an empty street, though…

"Lynn. We're leaving."

She glances up at Zoro, and nods, getting to her feet to follow him but stopping to let another trio of customers walk out before her.

She's out of the restaurant for all of two seconds before-

"Are you kidding me? Another one already?!"

She barely stops herself from whirling around towards the hissing voice, stepping around a passerby instead and angling her body into the movement so she can catch a glimpse of the person who just talked.

It's more idle curiosity than anything else.

But then her eyes land on a trio of men barely older than herself.

The one with purple hair is staring at her crewmates who are walking ahead of her, and he looks as angry as his voice sounds.

She bends down abruptly, fiddling with the laces of her shoes.

"Quit it, Dem." Another of the three whispers harshly. "We'll get into real trouble if the others hear you. We can't do anything, anyway."

A pause, and then a third voice.

"Let's just go to the beach, alright?"

"... Fine."

Elynna presses her lips together, and straightens up after a few seconds, lengthening her strides to catch up to her crew.

"Ah! Ann, where were you?"

"Got lost in thought," she mumbles.

"Robin wants to look for a library and the boys are heading to the market. Me and Sanji are about to go buy some supplies. Who do you want to come with?" Nami asks as they all prepare to split up.

"I'll just go on a walk, I think. When do we meet back at the ship?"

Her roommate stares at her curiously for a moment, and then shrugs.

"In about an hour?"

She hums.

"See you later, then."

"See you!"

"Don't break anything we can't pay for, Sea King."

"Hey!"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

A year.

Actually, more than that.

Demetri has been looking for more than a year, and he's found nothing.

Left alone on the beach after he told his friends to leave first, he stands there staring at the horizon that shimmers from silvery gold to sea green as the sun passes its highest point, until the waves come to lap at his shoes like a deceptively obedient dog.

He grits his teeth around his unlit cigarette, the sinking sensation of his feet into the newly-wet sand just another reminder of his failure.

But there has to be a clue, something-

Something that can help him put an end to this vicious circle that doesn't make sense anymore.

He has to find a way, and fast.

He can't bear to watch his parents being-

The thought settles onto his shoulders, so physical he expects the soft sand to give up under him.

But it doesn't, and with a harsh sigh and a rough shake of his hand through the dark purple of his hair, he turns away to go back to town, shoving both hands into the pockets of his tights jeans-

only to slip on some stupid pebble barely buried under the sand and fall on his ass.

He gasps out a curse, louder and angrier than it really needs to be, he knows, but goddamnit he just needs one damn thing to go right in his life-

His fist thumps uselessly against the ground, the sound of it dull and bitter in his ears.

When his eyes open again after he's made sure that he's not going to suddenly start crying like a pathetic child, there's a hand held out in front of him.

The size of it is average enough, under the bandages and the plump flesh wrapped around its bone structure.

But there are strange calluses spread over the parts of the palm and fingers that are visible, and the skin is disturbingly white in a way that should only be possible under the light of the moon.

It wasn't this shocking from afar, but it was eyecatching enough that Demetri knows who the hand belongs to, even before his eyes go up to take in the wide sleeve of a cardigan's charcoal grey wool wrapped around an arm and the soft grey-blue linen of the jumpsuit that covers torso and legs down to bare, white feet.

One of the pirates who arrived into town an hour or two before stares back at him, still waiting.

The vague, shallow features of her face only make the blue-black depth of her eyes more magnetic, in a way that makes him more anxious than flustered.

(as if she took a piece of the sky in her, on a night when there was no moon and no stars,

a night silent in the same way that she's not blinking)

If the default expression of the one they called Captain was like the sun reflecting on the sea on a bright summer day, that of the girl in front of him was like a blank sheet with blots of ink that still haven't dried.

(The blank sheet of someone who has nothing to say to the world.)

He reaches out tentatively.

Even with how closely he observed her hand, he's still surprised by how calloused it is.

He pulls himself up to his feet more than she tugs him there, simply leaning back to counterblance the shift of his weight.

"Uh-" He swallows, rolling his shoulders to accommodate the discomfort of knowing that she probably witnessed his round of self-pitying. "Thank you?"

She cocks a brow at him, but Demetri can't tell what it's supposed to mean, or what she's thinking.

"You're welcome."

She turns away from him just like that, crouching down to pick up a scuffed pair of canvas shoes from the ground.

That's when Demetri realises that he's alone on a beach with a pirate.

The pirate in question doesn't look like much, all wide curves and round, soft flesh, but-

He can't help the sudden step he takes away from her.

Except it just makes those unsettling eyes swerve back to him.

"Um… What brought you here, if I may ask? Did you get lost, perhaps?"

"No." She answers after a moment, turning to look at the blurry line of houses in the distance. "I wanted to… look at the town from another angle, let's say."

There's a faint quirk to her lips, but it doesn't quite feel amused or light enough to be a smile, and it doesn't make Demetri feel any better about being here.

"Maybe you should try going up the Tower on the main square, then. They say a wealthy painter had it built so he could make his last masterpiece. Crazy old man, but at least we have one tourist spot for visitors."

"Is that so… Well, there has to be a reason why artists are seen as quirky, right?" The girl hums.

The conversation feels so weirdly normal that he allows himself to relax.

After all, pirates are pretty common nowadays, and he used to help his parents at their restaurant.

He knows what kind of pirates he should steer clear of, and based on this girl's Captain, her crew isn't part of that category.

"Did he finish it? His masterpiece."

"Oh, yes. It's in the Tower, and the staff there can probably give you more information than me. But if you're looking for something else in the city, you can ask me any question. I know it pretty well!"

She finally turns back to him at that, and suddenly Demetri wishes he could stuff the words back in his throat and strangle them there.

In the light of the sun rays, her eyes look more blue than black, more sharp than deep, half-lidded and heavy in a way he first thought made her look like a cat, fat with all the good food it just ate and ready to sleep it off on a sun-heated terrace.

But now, in this angle and in that light, it just looks like she's deliberating whether to incapacitate him temporarily or definitely, and how to hide his body in both cases.

"I have a question, then." She hums, her tone left unchanged, still perfectly pleasant and conversational.

She doesn't look particularly angry either. Doesn't look particularly anything, in fact.

He finds himself taking another step back anyway, and when she speaks her words can almost sound like mild teasing if not for the squirming in his gut telling him to tread very, very carefully.

"On a scale of one to ten, how dangerous is the bullshit everyone here is trying to pull on us?"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Zoro stares.

Then stares some more.

And then he opens his mouth.

"Where the hell did our ship g-"

"Ahhhhhh! My ship!" Luffy screams as the sight of the empty air where the Merry used to be waiting for them registers in his mind. "Who took my ship?! Who is it?! Just come fight me, I'll kick your ass-"

"Be quiet." Nami snaps, her fist bonking him on the head as he passes her by for the third time.

Her Captain hits the ground and stays there, moaning pitifully.

Chopper gulps.

Nami sighs, raking a few strands of hair back behind her ear.

"If anything, I'm surprised that it didn't happen sooner." She comments, having stolen quite a few boats and ships herself.

It's not like it's particularly difficult, as long as there are enough people to man the ship and no security measures in place.

She was careless.

She sighs again, before turning towards the others.

" Alright, guys. We better find the Merry, and before Usopp comes back, or we're dead, so start looking for it."

"Don't be so dramatic." Zoro scoffs with a roll of his eyes.

"I pity you, cactus head. You'll never understand the power of love." Sanji comments with perfectly false sadness.

The swordsman scowls, one of his katana screeching a few inches out of its sheath.

"Hah?! Wanna repeat that, you-"

"Have you gone deaf? I said, start looking for our ship." Nami cuts them off sweetly, feeling something like annoyance twitch along the edge of her smile.

"Yes, Nami-chan!"

"Tch. Fine."

A passerby coming out of his house to do his daily walk thus finds himself suddenly being stared down with varying forms of intensity by five pirates as the only girl of the group beams at him, blindingly pretty, and asks him whether he saw what happened to their ship.

"Ship? You mean the ship with that nice little figurehead?" The elderly man answers with a tremulous voice.

"That's right, sir. Have you seen it?"

"... You didn't pay the harbour tax, did you, young lady?"

Nami's brow furrows softly at the question.

Of course she didn't pay the damn tax.

One of the prime reasons she decided to keep being a pirate even though she didn't need to anymore was the fact that as a criminal she didn't have to pay taxes.

"What does that have to do with what happened to our ship?"

"If you had paid the tax, the Marines would have taken your ship to their protected harbour, even if you are pirates. The local Sea Kings made their nest not far from here a few years ago. Leaving your ship unprotected like this is a guarantee for you to lose it… Well, if you pay the right fee, you might be able to get into contact with the shipwrights from the next island over. They're pretty good, I hear."

And with a last smile as tremulous as his voice, the old man slowly walks past the silent group of pirates with the help of his cane.

Chopper's expression drops abruptly like the sky fell down and bonked him on the head, and next to him Luffy sinks to the ground in a puddle of cold sweat.

"We're dead…"

"Why did you make that man faint before he could explain what the tax was for?!" Chopper shrieks as he shakes his Captain back and forth.

Zoro grabs the small reindeer by the scruff of his neck until he's dangling high above the rubber boy.

"Stop yelling, it won't help."

"What do you think, Nami-chan?" Sanji asks suddenly with a drag of his cigarette, drawing the attention of the three others to the way their navigator frowns as she watches the old man walk away.

"He's lying. When he talked about that Sea King, he was definitely lying."

Chopper perks up at that.

He doesn't need to see the others' reaction to know that Nami's instinct can be trusted when it comes to liars.

"Alright." She sighs in resignation. "We might as well assume that no one on this island is going to help us, so all that's left is to look for the Merry ourselves."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Shit.

Demetri stumbles back again, eyes frantically roaming over the pirate's form to try and detect the weapons she might have brought with her, because she certainly doesn't look like the type to favour hand-to-hand fighting.

He doesn't see anything, but places his hands in the air anyway, heart beating so hard against his ribs he can feel it even without pressing his hand there.

(But he feels the need to anyway, because the organ might just fall out and into his hand-

Because she's still not moving, still staring at him like she's just waiting for him to do the wrong move or say the wrong thing-)

He almost opens his mouth to ask her how the hell she knows even though she hasn't been here for more than a few hours, before he realises that he's still alone with her next to an ocean that would make for a very good grave.

So he switches to another subject.

"W-Wait a minute! I've been trying to dismantle the operation myself, so I can cooperate with you, alright?!"

"... Ah." She blinks. "So there is something going on."

He can't help the nervous bout of laughter that escapes between his clenched teeth.

"What?"

Her mouth doesn't move, but suddenly she almost seems amused.

"Did I scare you? I just wanted to confirm my doubts, so don't worry about me killing you. It would be more of a hassle than anything else."

Demetri scoffs before he can stop himself, fear tasting bitter like anger as it suddenly rushes out of his body.

Does she ever talk to normal people, people whose closest experience of a fight is the clumsy brawls someone occasionally gets into when they've had a bit too much to drink?

Does she not realise how people like her can make cold sweat and hot fear tremble under the skin of people like him when all the weight of their freakishly intense attention falls down on the shoulders of just one person and their words are dancing on the knife's edge of a threat?

"Of course you scared me, you're a bloody pir-" He stops at the sight of her raised eyebrow, hands falling back at his sides as he clears his throat of the heat of adrenaline that is clearly making him more stupid than he can afford. "I mean, I don't mind giving you more information, but I have to go meet my informant in a few minutes, so could we do that aft-"

"Elynna! Stop walking so fast, damnit!" Another member of the same crew yells as he suddenly appears running down the dune of soft sand and straight towards the girl.

Demetri breathes in, and suddenly it doesn't feel like the entire beach is drowning in her presence anymore.

The boy comes to a stop once he reaches them, bending down to catch his breath as he's joined by a woman who seems older than the first, dressed in unassuming pants and an unassuming shirt and an unassuming smile that do little to hide the statuesque beauty of her face or the disturbingly clear blue of her eyes against the olive tone of her skin.

If the desire to fuck off and find the nearest street full of people wasn't still nagging at his stomach, he would almost be tempted to ask whether the two females are related in any way.

Seemingly oblivious to the tense silence between him and the two pirates, the other boy finally straightens back up, and promptly elbows the younger and curvier girl -Elynna?- into the ribs for leaving on her own ("you're supposed to be a dog, not a stray cat") and not telling them anything ("our quota of irresponsible idiots is already through the roof, don't add to it just to preserve your reputation of being The Mysterious One, you're already too cool as it is-").

Said girl weathers the nagging in patient silence and blank-faced indulgence until she suddenly rolls her eyes, slings an arm around his neck, and shuts him up by bringing his face down against her chest where she holds him in a loose chokehold.

Demetri is honestly not sure who chokes the loudest between him and the pirate.

"Subordinates these days…" Elynna drawls nonchalantly, not budging an inch despite her crewmate's flailing until she releases him a few seconds later.

"That's an interesting way to die, though." The dark-skinned pirate smiles, observing with clinical curiosity as her crewmate keeps gaping and blushing, brain apparently fried by the trauma he just experienced.

"And that's just the first step of that particular method. I think I heard something a few years ago about a guy who died during an orgasm."

The boy punches his crewmate in the arm.

She doesn't even blink.

And the other one is still smiling.

"Well, they do say that pleasure in excess is bad for one's health."

"Right?"

What.

Just-

No, seriously.

What the absolute fuck is this?

The younger of the two women gestures at Demetri to start walking, suddenly reminding him that he has an appointment he doesn't want to be late for.

He steps forward dazzedly, and behind him the conversation suddenly shifts to soft murmurs that sound serious enough that he can only presume Elynna is updating her two crewmates on the information he unintentionally offered her.

The change is almost abrupt enough to make him forget that he just discovered what has to be the weirdest pirate crew in existence.

Almost.

He should have known when he saw that Captain of theirs.

It just can't be normal for a human being to stuff that much food in their mouth and still have enough space left to laugh that loudly.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Sanji stops in his tracks on the edge of a random roof, suddenly realising that his cigarette has long gone out.

With a purse of his lips, he flicks it into the closest bin and fishes his pack out of his pocket, pinching a new one between his lips as he retrieves his lighter from inside his jacket.

His first exhale sounds like a frustrated sigh as he cants his head back to let out the smoke, eyes staring at the fraying cloud of it and then at the silhouette of the seagull gliding over a wind current beyond it.

His cigarette freezes in the air where he was raising it to his lips again.

Ah.

"Sanji! What are you doing?! We have to find-"

"Oi, Chopper." He calls out, interrupting the reindeer he followed when they decided to split up (Nami-chan sent him a pointed stare that said to take care of Chopper, who is still pretty new to some things, but Sanji still thinks she can do that just as well, instead of sacrificing herself to the task of handling the two shitheads she's currently with). "Can't you do the same thing you did in Alabasta and ask the animals around here?"

The doctor, who changed form to more easily jumped to the roof so he can try and smell out the Merry (it's not a hopeless endeavour, since that brainless gorilla spends most of his time sweating into the floorboards), gapes down at him.

Then he grins just as suddenly, yelling a great idea! before jumping off in search of the closest animal.

Sanji stays there, smoking some more and trying to imagine how his female crewmates would reward him for coming up with a better idea than just running around and hoping for the best.

A compliment?

A hug, maybe?

Then he remembers the way Elynna was hanging all over Zoro's back just a few days before, watching over his shoulder as Robin thoroughly destroyed him in a game of go, and how she started complaining about why do we never hear anything about an intelligence kink? Now I feel like some kind of freak.

He wisely decides to not entertain that train of thought any further, focusing instead on the fact that the stupid swordsman bluntly told the Elynna that she is a freak, which gave Sanji a very good excuse to beat him up.

By the time Chopper comes back, Sanji is itching for a good fight with whoever stole their ship.

He leads the reindeer in the direction where he spotted (and heard) their three crewmates, and once they are all gathered the doctor goes on to explain that the ship is hidden behind the only mountain of the island, on the shore of a small beach that is only accessible by the sea or the air.

"That's bad." Nami mutters, frowning too hard for Sanji's taste. "If the people here are in on this, we're not going to get their help unless we threaten them into it, or somehow find someone who is willing to help us."

The first option is the only one available, but still they all see the way her mouth twists around the idea as if it stings and scorches the skin of her tongue with how acidic it tastes.

"There's another way." Chopper goes on, still trying to catch his breath as they all turn back to him. "There's no bird or sea animal big enough to take us, but there's a type of mole that dug a passage towards the beach because there's a big population of earthworms that developped in the mountain since humans don't go there often. An old cat led me to a family of them who agreed to let us use it once. They're half as tall as humans and about as wide as Zoro, so we should all be able to reach the beach through there. I don't think you guys will be able to stand, though."

Luffy looks as excited as if he just got told he was going to see dinosaurs again, but Sanji is pretty sure the pronounced scowl tugging Nami's features downwards reflects his own face more or less exactly.

"Usopp is so lucky that I love him…" Nami mutters.

Yeah. Really lucky, Sanji thinks in the privacy of his own mind.

If he loses a good suit in the hours to come, that shithead is going to eat leftovers for at least a week.

"Where are Lynna and the others, anyway? They should've met up with us at the harbour."

Luffy only shrugs in response to the sudden concern that makes their navigator cross her arms in a way that looks a bit too jerky to not be uneasy.

Sanji kicks him in the shin for that, but before he can set out to reassure his crewmate Zoro cuts him off.

"I'm pretty sure both of them followed Lynn. It'll be fine."

And Sanji frowns, because it's true that given their First Mate's 'to be on time is to be late' policy, she wouldn't be missing without a good reason. And it wouldn't be the first time for her to guess the bare bones of the problem they're facing before everyone else, so it's perfectly possible that she chose to make a move first.

But it's rare for her to be this proactive, or to make a move on her own without telling them anything.

And while she's strong, Sanji also knows that her relative strength compared to Marines and criminals alike on the Grand Line is still low as of now.

(And he knows that he can't trust her to be strong in the way that will keep her standing and fighting the way he can trust Nami-chan.

Elynna-chan doesn't need someone stronger to be brought to her knees.

Not when there's already so many things inside of her that can do the job, a hundred times more easily.)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Demetri is nearing the bar where he often holds his weekly meeting when he notices the five men huddled against the filthy wall of the alley, right next to the backdoor he usually uses.

Crap.

He turns around abruptly, about to tell the three pirates behind him to do the same when-

"Dem! 's that you, pal? Don't run away from us, now!"

Double crap.

He turns back around with his best customer smile, and wishes it's the evening, because he can't hide the sweat forming over his forehead or the fear slinking over his face in broad daylight.

"Hey, Jim… Didn't see you there. If you'll excuse me, I've got some business to attend t-"

The sound of breaking glass makes him flinch and freeze and stop breathing all at once, even if it comes from a bottle hitting a wall nowhere near him.

He feels suddenly as dizzy with fear as he would if it was thrown at his face instead.

One of Jim's goons snickers, and the shame creeps over the fear along with his blush.

"You can spare a moment for us, right? If you managed to snatch these two girls, they ain't gonna run away even when they see how much of a wimp you are, since they probably followed you just for your looks. We've known you much longer than them, Dem. Shouldn't ya give us a bit of your time? 'Specially since you went and tried to sell us out to the Marines outside when all we're doing is give people what they want like every other shop. Don't cha think so?" Jim smiles, as oily as his slicked-back hair and appealing as the jagged edges of the broken bottle in his hand.

Demetri's teeth clench, but almost immediately the fear wins over the anger, and he swallows nervously, half-assed plans frantically running through his frazzled mind.

"Hey hey hey! Elynna don't-" A male voice hisses behind him.

"'Scuse me, but we can't really follow him for his good looks if you beat him up." The smaller girl says mildly as she steps up beside Demetri, not quite smiling but blank face mellowed into something slightly more polite. "Can't you just do that later?"

His shoulders slump.

Of course.

What did he expect from a pirate?

Her crewmate moans, and over his shoulder Demetri catches a glance of his hand slapping against his face.

There's a moment of silence, and then howls of laughter punch him in the face, louder and louder as they bounce against the walls.

It stops as abruptly as it began.

"Stay out of this, you dumb bimbo." Jim sneers.

Demetri gulps, and forces himself to step forward again and in front of the girl.

She has no weapon on her, and out of everyone here she's the smallest and the least physically fit.

She might know how to be intimidating, but clearly she nas no chance whatsoever to win against Jim and his men.

"Should I take that as a compliment? A bimbo is usually more attractive than I am, right?"

"No. They're definitely insulting you." The boy named Usopp rebukes her bluntly.

She shrugs.

"I just wanted to make sure, you know, since he's so fucking stupid he felt the need to add 'dumb' when it was already implied in 'bimbo'. At this point, he might've been complimenting me for all I know."

"Oh my god, kill me now." Usopp moans loudly.

"Careful, Mister Sniper. According to Murphy's Law, this might just be the moment where God is listening."

Another pitiful moan follows the other woman's smiling comment.

"You wanna play that game, bitch? Let's play!"

"Well, I wouldn't really call it a game, since there's almost zero chance we're going to lose unless taking highly improbable events into account, but sure. Let's… play." The girl answers, head cocked to the side as she gives them a once over that radiates so much condescension it feels like she's looking down on them instead, even from across the street and with her small stature.

It only riles the men up further.

"Bring that mouthy brat to me!"

"Seriously, Elynna?" Usopp whimpers. "Seriously?!"

But his hands don't shake as they take out a slingshot, unlike the way Demetri's hands clench into trembling fists in front of his chest.

"Do we agree that my attempt at a diplomatic resolution of the conflict was rejected by the other party? I don't want Rain griping about how Sea King's trouble magnet tendencies are rubbing off on me."

The smile of the taller woman -Robin- is creepily soft as she holds out her arms in the form of a cross in front of her chest.

"I am of the same opinion."

Then two hands clench around Demetri's shoulders, and he's swung to the side just as Jim's men reach them.

By the time he regains his balance and whirls back around, there are two crumpled, broken forms at Robin's feet, another one rolling around on the ground with a very, very red face near Usopp, who is aiming in the direction of where Jim is running away, and Elynna is crouching down on the stomach of the last goon like he's a carpet to walk over.

The fact that he can see her thighs flex to keep her balance under the fabric of her jumpsuit makes Demetri realise that the girl might be chubby, but she's very, very fit.

He thinks about her loose clothes, about how she didn't make an effort to pull him up as if he was too heavy for her, about the messy bun her hair is tied into and how it puts a dark halo around her head that makes her face seem smaller and her eyes larger, about the cute dimples of her smile, about the calluses and scar tissue and how they're almost invisible on the white of her hands.

And because he's learned to read people for his job, he knows-

This girl is a lie.

(-a hard truth wrapped in lies just unassuming and interesting enough to not make people want to scratch at the surface and see what lies under

dagger of steel in a sheath of plain wood-)

She's a lie, and the only true thing about her is her eyes.

"I was hoping I wouldn't get into trouble if I followed you, you know." Usopp grumbles as Jim collapses at the end of the street. "Maybe Luffy is rubbing off on you."

"Please." She snorts. "I stepped in because I knew that the strength difference was to our advantage and that there was little to no chance of injury for you or Robin-san, barring some kind of freak occurrence."

"I… didn't know you were this strong. Sorry for getting in the way." Demetri cuts them off.

They both look back at him, and shrug simultaneously.

"Don't sweat it!" The sharpshooter smiles as he nudges his crewmate in the shoulder repeatedly with his foot. "It happens all the time, and it's not like she actively tries to rectify people's first impression of her."

"He's right. I know I don't really look the part." Elynna confirms with a roll of her shoulders that shrugs off Usopp's foot abruptly and forces him to windmill so he doesn't fall backwards. "Besides, I only look strong to you because those guys are at the very bottom of the ladder. On the strength scale of the Grand Line, I probably barely reach the middle."

Usopp rights himself up with a relieved sigh, and then does a double take.

That's when Demetri notices that Elynna is counting up the money she just stole from the pockets of the man she's now standing on.

"Oh, crap. Is Nami rubbing off on you too?"

"I wonder if it's contagious." Robin ponders with the same smile she has been sporting since Demetri met her.

Usopp stares at her, at Elynna, and then shuffles away.

"... Rude. Besides, they probably haven't paid their taxes in forever, so they've got to reinvest some money in the community."

"Yeah, except we're not part of this town, and taxes are paid to the government."

Elynna shoots a smirk at her crewmate over her shoulder.

"I am the government, baby."

Demetri looks away, and puts all his energy into ignoring the burn surging up his neck, because nope-

Nope.

He is so not going to get a crush on the pirate who just picked a fight with people twice her size and won.

He isn't.

"Don't call me that, I'm armed." Usopp brandishes his weapon with a disgusted twist of his lips. "And no, you're not the governm- Wait, you kind of are, but that's beside the point. We're not paying our taxes either."

"... Do you need Hebi to check you for Alzheimer? We saved a fucking Kingdom just a few weeks ago. It's a charity action that should get us complete tax exemption for at least a few years."

"Robin, help me here."

"Well, money can be translated into other material or immaterial advantages, since it only exists to measure and compare the values of a given object."

"I said help me, not her!"

"Looks like you got yourself some cool friends, Demetri!"

The man in question lets out a sigh of relief and makes a beeline for the now opened backdoor, slipping past his friend.

Safe.

"Yo, guys. Thanks for helping him! I was getting worried, since he's usually pretty punctual. Come on in, drinks are on the house!"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

What the hell was he thinking?

It's not safe at all.

"Could you just listen to me?" Demetri groans for what feels like the hundredth time, even though they've only been sitting at the bar counter long enough to get their orders and explain what just happened once. "Jim was just being an asshole as usual. Neither Elynna-san nor Robin-san are a one-night stand-"

"No need to be shy, you know." Reo smirks as he slides the alcohol-free cocktail he just finished preparing in front of Elynna, who stares back blankly when he flashes her a wink. "I wouldn't mind getting those thighs around my face like Jim's henchman did."

"… You know it was a fight, right?" Demetri tries to remind his friend again -once he's done choking on his beer.

"Well, yeah. But what the hell do you think a strangulation kink is for?"

"I like him." Elynna decides, slurping loudly on her drink.

Reo stops at that, and leans abruptly forward over the counter with an even wider smirk, amber eyes gleaming under the shaggy dark brown hair that curl ever so slightly around the square, strong lines of his face.

"You mean, as in like, like me?"

"As in I'd like to punch you in the face to see if you like, like it." The pirate replies without missing a beat.

Demetri buries his face and the blush on it in the cover of his arms.

Yeah.

He really should kill off the shadow of a crush that he can feel heating up his ears right now.

One way or another, it's definitely not going to end well for him.

"I like you too. But I'd like you even more if you had a dick between your legs." Reo teases back with a rumbler of laughter, and Demetri hears the skin of his friend's forearms rub against the counter as he straightens back up and goes back to work.

He's vaguely aware of the way Elynna shrugs next to him.

"Every day brings its share of misfortunes. You have my sympathy."

He waits for a couple of minutes to be sure that the conversation is indeed moving on towards a safer topic to look up from the table, searching for the sniper's eyes for some measure of moral support, since he seems the most likely to give it.

(considering that the creepy woman is still sitting there and smiling)

He frowns when he finds the other pirate staring blankly ahead of himself.

"... Usopp-san?" He calls out a bit worriedly, and then louder again when the boy doesn't answer.

The sniper jumps in his seat, before pulling out an ear plug.

"Is the conversation safe?"

Elynna's mouth is hidden behind the palm of her hand, but Demetri can still see the quivering corners of it and the hints of dimples that make her look her age and almost convince him to forget the drops of dried blood he spots on her knuckles.

"Did you buy ear plugs because of me? I'm honoured."

"Don't be." Her crewmate rebuffs her dryly. "I'm just trying to stop my ears from bleeding with all the filth that comes out of your mouth. Otherwise my brain is going to liquefy before I reach thirty."

The older woman at the end of their line leans forward with a slightly wider, closed-eyed smile that somehow manages to toe the line between creepy and reassuring, regardless of the fact that such a line shouldn't even exist in the first place.

"Don't worry, Mister Sniper. As a pirate, there's a good chance you'll die before that. But…" She tils her head, curiosity painting itself over her face in broad strokes that feel too childish to be false. "How strange. There's no blood coming out of your ears. Or brain matter, actually."

The sharpshooter, who was about to take a sip of his drink, closes his mouth slowly, and puts his glass down just as slowly, before making a blatant show of putting on his ear plugs again.

Elynna, whose shoulders were already quivering, starts snickering loudly, even as she excuses herself and pushes her two crewmates away from the counter to let Demetri talk with his informant.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Lisia doesn't know when it happens.

Or how, really.

One moment she's throwing one of the ship's floorboards that she managed to break away from the deck into the pile they've just started to make, and the next she turns around to go back for another and almost bumps into a girl probably older than her by a few years.

She blinks, stumbling back slightly and about to apologise.

But then she realises that she doesn't recognise the girl.

And she has a very good memory when it comes to faces.

So it can only mean one thing.

This girl is one of the pirates.

The pirates whose ship she's clearly getting ready to take apart.

She spins around, heartbeat too loud in her ears to hear the gasps around her. The white noise in her head takes too much space to think about who and how and why, and what little space is left is occupied by how am I going to escape and what's going to happen to me and Yusuf was right, we wouldn't be here, wouldn't have gone after pirates of all people if they had kept their end of the bargain-

But another unknown face is waiting for her when she turns to run away, silently staring down at the pile of wood pulled out from their ship, and she can't gauge his level of anger with the way his hand is hiding his mouth to hold his cigarette just shy of his lips.

A scream alerts her to the presence of two other pirates further away on her right.

A man is standing over her classmate from primary school, Terrence, who apparently tried to knock out the pirate with a plank of wood.

Now the piece of wood is cut in two at his feet, and a katana is held still, the tip of it poised against Terrence's throat.

Back-to-back with the man, some furry monster that looks like a cross between a human and something else stands, arms crossed and bulging with muscles.

"Oi."

That's when she becomes aware of the last pirate, who's standing on the railing of his ship, the straw hat he's wearing tilted down too far over his face for her to really read his expression.

But she doesn't need to.

Because he's looking down at the part of the railing she and a few others just damaged.

And he sounds angry.

Like she just beat the living daylights out of someone precious to him and he's willing to give it back a hundred times over.

"Which one of you broke the Merry? I'll punch you in the face."

Lisia's knees falter, and she shudders so hard she has to take a step back to find her balance again.

(Because the swordsman's katana looks sharp enough to cut sunlight

and the monster's hands look like they can crush her head so much more easily than she can trust the softness in his features

and the girl's pretty brown eyes are furious like clouds of thunder, the air around her almost crackling with the heat of her anger

and next to it the cool texture of the blond man's silence sounds even more threatening

and even from this distance she doesn't feel safe from the smallest of the males.

Because those are pirates they fucked with.)

If she ever survives this, the first thing she'll do is run to the restaurant they ate at and whose barman neglected to slip drugs in their damn meal to kick said barman's teeth in.

They're just a bunch of kids, he said.

The Captain looks like a dumb brat, he said.

It'll be fine, he said.

That stupid-

A few of the older townspeople throw themselves to their knees almost simultaneously, more experienced than her with unexpected deviations from the plan.

But when she looks for Yusuf, he's still standing silently next to his wife, shoulders tense and frown harsh in his tanned, long face.

So she follows the man who has been her mentor since she started working at the bakery, and stays put.

"Please!" The woman who holds the counter in the local bank cries out, so practiced even Lisia might think it natural by now (maybe because it is). "Please let us have your ship! You saw it, didn't you?! Our life is hell, here! Paying the tax is the only way to be somewhat safe from them, but almost no one can pay it every month! We need enough wood to build a ship big enough for everyone here to escape, and-"

"I don't care!" The straw-hatted boy screams. "If you want a ship then just build one, but don't steal mine!"

Lisia jumps.

"Luffy." The only girl of the group says sharply, the expression on her face more a warning than real anger.

"No!" The boy yells back, glaring down at them from where he's standing. "If they want help, they can ask for it. Now they're just asking for a fight."

If she could find her voice (-her voice hidden in the fog of fear spreading through her-), she would laugh, because a pirate, help?

When even the ones who are supposed to protect them have done only the exact opposite?

"Please… Please help… us?" An older man who often comes to the bakery on early Sunday mornings stutters out.

She gapes.

Does he really think it's going to wo-

"... Fine." The boy huffs after staring down at him for a long moment.

Now she just feels faint.

What is this? Has she fallen into another reality or something?

This can't be happening.

(It's too good to be true.)

And then the pirate who is apparently called Luffy jumps down from his ship, and promptly knocks out the old man who is still holding onto a piece of painted wood from the ship's railing, catching said piece of wood before it can touch the ground.

"That's for breaking the Merry."

So she panics all over again.

It doesn't get any better when Luffy looks straight at her, fingers still curled into a fist.

"You broke it too, right?"

He takes a step towards her.

She scrambles back three, hands waving frantically through the air as she opens her mouth to try and stop what she knows is coming.

She doesn't see the blond man move.

But the next moment he's at the other pirate's side, and his shoe is digging into the boy's side, sending him flying through the air.

She gapes at the resulting flying dust and broken rock.

"Don't even think about hitting the lady!"

"But she broke the Merry too!"

"I don't care!"

The straw-hatted boy stands up from the spot he landed in, arms crossed stubbornly.

"I'm the Captain! I'm the one who decides!"

"Sanji-kun!" The red-haired girl calls out in a simpering voice that somehow sounds threatening instead of ridiculous. "These people are going to need a lot of wood for their boats!"

"Yes, Nami-chan!" The blonde man answers enthusiastically, spinning on his heel to skip towards the forest without a backward glance at the fight that was about to start.

"I'm going to help!" The not-completely-human thing adds cheerily, and Lisia doesn't know if she's more disturbed by the contrast between his seriously cute voice and the rest of him, or by the fact that the idiot over there is the Captain.

"Zoro… What do you think you're doing?"

"Taking a nap. I have no interest in this."

The girl opens her mouth, then closes it, and looks behind her towards her crewmates.

Then she turns back around with a smile, and Lisia finds herself shuddering.

"Okay!"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Usopp sips quietly on his cocktail as they wait for the journalist to be done, sitting at a table in a corner where there's enough light for Robin to read her book but not so much that Elynna can't bury her head in her arms and take a nap.

So he basks in the calm before the storm, because he just knows this is going to be one of those islands where they all end up being dragged in some super dangerous thing that Luffy will call an 'adventure', and that his heart is going to jump out of his chest at least ten times before the end of the day.

It happens on seven islands out of ten (or at least it feels like it), but somehow he's still not used to it.

At least this time Elynna found them a good source of information before shit hits the fan.

(And if they can help the people they saw that morning, all the better.)

Said source of information collapses into the remaining chair, making them all look up to find him looking like he needs at least a dozen shots of the strongest stuff his bartender friend has.

"Still no info." He grits out.

"My condolences," Elynna mutters into the palm of her hand as she props herself on one elbow, but the flat set of her mouth and the smooth lines of her face say Too bad. For you. "But you still owe me the information you do have."

Usopp kicks her in the shin under the table for her callousness, but it's half-hearted at best, because-

(He understands.

Understands that in the same way that seeing people suffer and others make them suffer and hating it drives him forward where fear holds him back,

in the same way, acknowledging but failing to act on this same suffering is a way for Elynna to keep going

because all the broken hearts and the tears that shouldn't be there don't make her angry and brave and hungry to make things right

It just makes it harder to laugh and believe in good things or get out of bed in the morning.

It's not that Elynna doesn't care.

It's that she makes herself not care.)

The civilian glares at his First Mate for all of five seconds before slumping back in his seat.

"Zephrim -the island we're on- is the biggest in the area." He starts, brows wrinkled in a way that shadows his eyes with something like tiredness. "The other islands around are too small to have a magnetic field. That's why the Marines built their local base here a few decades ago."

He pauses, gulps down the last of his beer, and looks around uneasily for a moment before he shifts forward, closer to Usopp and his crewmates.

"Around fifteen years ago, various criminal groups realised that they could settle their business in these small islands and use Eternal Poses to navigate the area."

"But… There's a Marine base right here?" Usopp interrupts him, confused about what the point of all this is.

Elynna said that he was supposed to explain why the whole island population was behaving weirdly. It's not like they could all be criminals, right?

Demetri shakes his head.

"It's too small, and there's not enough people. There were at least four or five organisations. They signed some pact of non-aggression, and they each based themselves on an island so that Zephrim is surrounded. At the time it was still the first years of increased piracy following Gold Roger's death. A supposedly peaceful area like ours got the newbie Marines with less connections and less experience so that the best forces could be focused on more important areas."

Usopp winces, but as much as he's come to dislike the Marines recently (except for that Smoker guy who's pretty alright), strategically, this makes sense.

Especially if the higher ranks weren't made aware of the situation.

"So the Marines came up with another solution with the mayor's help, and they enlisted everyone living on Zephrim to implement it."

Usopp feels the way Elynna shifts into a slightly straighter position next to him, and nudges her in the ribs when she starts biting down on her lower lip to tear off small patches of skin like she usually tends to do when she's deep in thought.

It gives him the creeps just watching it.

Elynna only spares him enough attention to flip him off.

He rolls his eyes, and turns away.

"When outsiders come to the island, and if they don't represent too much of a threat, we ask them to pay a tax that is high enough that most people can't or won't pay. And when they come into town, we… stage a play, where everyone is a victim of the Marines' abuses. Those who can't act or lie well enough go to the visitors' ship with a few Marines. If there are people left they're knocked out, and the Marines take everything of value before the citizens lead the ship away to a secret place. Usually, the ship is broken down into raw materials for the naval industry group based on an island close-by, and all the money we get at the end is used to bribe a few members of the criminal organisations into keeping them away from Zephrim. The visitors get told some lie about how not paying the tax means that you don't get to station your ship in the Marine base like everyone else and that there's a lot of Sea King attacks around the island. Usually, people are too scared by what they saw the Marines do -or what we suggest they can do- and use the shuttle service that brings them to the closest island outside of the area."

"And if they do pay the tax?"

"We take their ship to the Marine base and do nothing." Demetri shrugs. "The tax is more than enough to keep our allies in our pocket."

Elynna hums in consideration.

"There's really no one who has ever been suspicious of that Sea King story?"

Demetri shrugs again, more defeatist than nonchalant.

"As I said, most people don't want to get involved in whatever we make them think is going on, even if they are suspicious. There were a few who insisted, and we told them that we were stealing ships because we needed enough wood to build a big enough ship for everyone and escape from the island. People aren't usually ready to help others if it means giving away something, but it's another story when they have to justify taking back something that looks more precious in our hands than in theirs. And when we take on small but potentially dangerous groups like your crew, we tend to slip them calming drugs we buy from the criminals we bribe to be sure that the Marines can handle them." He pauses suddenly, before flashing them a sheepish smile. "I don't think they did that for you, though. I'm pretty sure they forgot the pirate flag on your mast when they saw what kind of person your Captain is."

"Good." Robin comments idly as she takes a sip of coffee, smile having somehow turned threatening even though it hasn't changed one iota. "I'm curious, though. What reason do you have to oppose this operation? Considering how long it has been running, it seems rather beneficial for you and your family. Is it a matter of morals?"

The journalist seems to hesitate for a moment, but the two women's gaze remain trained on him, not particularly positive or negative.

Eventually, he gives in.

"Not really. I'm not proud of it, but it's not like we literally attack innoncent people. At this point, asking for the Marines' help will probably do us more harm than good, and I doubt the gangs will let us all emigrate. We're making the best of the situation with that plan. The problem… The problem is that the Marines aren't following the plan anymore."

Elynna leans back in her chain, and Robin sets her mug back down.

"How so?"

Demetri leans even closer and speaks even lower, the discrete but anxious sweep of his eyes over the room just another proof that the topic is on the dangerous (and more than likely censored) side of sensitive.

"I've checked. In the last five or six years, the frequency of traps we've set has increased. Almost tripled. Not everything the Marins steal is always used as a bribe, so it was originally decided that any surplus would be redistributed among the populaition. Logically, we should have gotten more money, but… I did some calculations based on what people I know have received, and I'm pretty sure the amount has stagnated, if not decreased." He crosses his arms over the table, bitterness turning the corners of his mouth down and weighing his gaze into staring at the bottom of his glass. "If it was just about money, I wouldn't really care. Our economy's not doing particularly bad. But gang members like Jim have started coming to Zephrim even though the Marines keep telling us the people they bribed are satisfied with the amount we give them, and… And a lot of Marines aren't playing anymore."

No shit, Usopp thinks absently.

Even someone who hasn't spent years staging grand adventures in front of his friends like him can tell that the cowering slump of people's shoulders in Zephrim streets are real.

There's less noise in the pub by now, but Usopp doesn't notice, because the buzzing in his ears is louder than anything else.

He hears the three people sitting at his table, but at the same time not really, because-

"Wait a damn minute."

They all turn to him with varying degrees of startled curiosity.

"Are you telling me that our ship's been taken?"

Demetri winces.

Usopp's stomach contracts into something cold and frozen.

That's…

That's Kaya's ship.

They've taken the ship that Kaya and Merry gave to him and the rest of the crew, the ship that still smells like home after all this time because they still haven't used up all the stock of product to protect the wood against the rain that Merry stored under the deck-

The ship he's been on since the beginning and that he swore to Kaya he was taking care of.

(even though he doesn't know how-)

No one takes the Merry.

His fists clench in the fabric of his pants until he feels his nails dig into his thighs.

"Those bastards…"

A foot nudges him in the shin hard enough to dislodge his grip.

"Cool it, Hawks." Elynna says, her distracted tone wrapped around the harshness of the word to soften it into chiding reassurance. "Do you really think the others haven't already started looking for it?"

"I know," he hisses back. "But-"

But they don't know anything of what the three of them have just learned, and-

He turns abruptly towards the fourth person at their table.

"Where's the place they use to hide the ship?"

But Demetri shakes his head.

"It's only accessible by sea, and the Marines keep all the boats in their harbour, so you need to ask for one from them. Besides, me and a few of my friends have been basically blacklisted from the operation after we asked too many questions to the Marines. Especially me, because I got involved with some low-level gang members to try and get some info, so people don't want to be seen with me. No one who knows the current password to get to the place will accept to give it to me."

Usopp wriggles in his seat and clenches his teeth, limbs aching to move and do something as his fingers latch onto his slingshot to fiddle with the elastic strings of it.

And then he stops.

"I'm not liking that look on your face," Elynna grouches, slumping back over the table like she can avoid his gaze even as it zeroes in on her.

"We can't just do nothing." He glares stubbornly.

They might not always think the same, but in that moment he knows that her mind is following the same reasoning as his.

The others don't know what they know, and they're not going to be subtle in their search for the Merry, so the Marines are definitely going to get involved.

Which means someone has to deal with them if they want to get the Merry back before it's turned into wood chips.

And out of all of them, Elynna has the best chance of doing it quickly and without kicking up too much of a fuss.

"I hate being right." His First Mate mutters in the skin of her crossed arms, squinting up at him somewhat balefully.

He doesn't look away, even as he sees Demetri look at them in turn with a face of complete confusion in the corner of his vision and hears Robin sip on her coffee, patiently waiting to be updated on the part of the conversation that wasn't said aloud -or maybe having already figured it all out.

He keeps staring, and sees the exact moment when his First Mate caves in, muscles uncoiling and body loosening over the table like she wants to lose any ability to stand up, even as she pushes herself away from the table to sit up properly.

(-caves in because he asked,

whether she wants to or not and disregarding the price it might ask of her.

And he wonders

Would she try and burn down the world if someone she loves asked for it and gave her arguments she can agree with?)

She yawns, streches until her spine cracks, and rakes a hand through her hair, half-lidded eyes sweeping between the three of them pensively.

And just like that, Usopp relaxes back in his seat.

"Let's take care of the Marines on our side, then. I'll go first to try and get some intel -and see if we can settle this without bashing everyone's face in." She drawls, turning to the journalist as she lifts her backpack from the ground and moves to her feet. "Got any place around here where I can change clothes?"

The man gapes at her while Usopp and Robin both get up to follow her.

"Wait wait wait… You're going to help us?"

One hand still on the back of her chair, she looks back at him with a raised eyebrow.

"Well, that depends how you define 'helping'. We're going to stop the operation, maybe only the one taking place today, maybe not."

"And you're going to infiltrate the Marines' base for that?" He presses in hushed tones before she can turn around. "Can I come with you?"

Usopp is about to remind him of what he's getting into when Elynna cuts him off.

"... If you want to get paid, you're gonna have to work, Demetri-san."

"I'll help you with whatever you want."

"How foolish." Robin whispers softly next to Usopp, low enough that he's pretty sure he's the only one to hear it if not for the twitch of Elynna's lips.

Or maybe she's just thinking the exact same thing.

She considers the older man for a moment, and then shrugs.

"Feel free, then. Are you looking for something in particular?"

The journalist exchanges a silent conversation with the barman across the room, before gesturing for them to follow him up a set of stairs and into the staff's changing room, checking that no one is there before he closes the door.

"I want to find proof that the Marines are taking some of the money for themselves and abusing their power so that we can take them down legally -and have the Government clean up the gangs while they're at it."

"Isn't that going to cause problems for the inhabitants as well?" Robin asks with a curious tilt of her head.

He hesitates, and then-

"Not if I destroy any evidence of the fact that we entered this partnership willingly."

Robin blinks.

Usopp whistles.

Elynna snorts, dropping her backpack on a bench.

"Alright. Now I like you a lot more."

Her back is turned on the beet red blush that erupts across Demetri's cheeks, but Usopp definitely sees it, and exchanges a vaguely pitying glance with Robin.

Who seems more amused than pitying, really.

If he can blush that easily, the guy is doomed.

"You should be careful, though. You don't have any guarantee that all Marines have done away with the original plan -or that no civilian is colluding with those who have."

Demetri winces at the blunt remark.

And then Elynna promptly and (which is probably the worst) unintentionally breaks the heaviness that just seeped into the silence when she sheds her cardigan and starts undoing the buttons of her jumpsuit.

The door slams behind the journalist once he manages to switch his fried brain back on.

Elynna, who just stepped out of the pool of fabric at her feet to fish the Marine uniform out of her bag, turns around with a puzzled look that would be adorable -if she wasn't in her underwear and her war fans weren't still bound to her forearms.

"Ah. I forgot he was here."

Yeah.

Definitely doomed.

"You sure it's a good idea to take him with us?" Usopp asks, stepping behind her once she's donned the pants and boots to help her put on the harness and kukris she brought while she folds her clothes so Robin can put them back in her bag.

"Eh," Elynna shrugs slightly, eyes focused on her task. "He's been on this case long enough to know what he's doing. Besides, he might be useful."

"As bait, at the very least." Robin smiles.

"Oh, good idea."

He punches his First Mate in the shoulder just in case she can't feel his reproachful look like the historian can, standing opposite to him, and steps away so Elynna can put on the white Marine shirt.

"Alright," She sighs, putting the cap low on her head and cracking her neck to the side once like she's adjusting into the role. "I'll go try this out, you guys hide somewhere near the base to wait for me. Hawk, maybe explain the whole Ryan case to Robin-san in case she needs to know."

"This doesn't count for our bet."

"Sure, sure."

"It sounds like a fascinating story. I'm looking forward to it," Robin chuckles, warm and velvety like her smile. "How will we communicate should things turn out badly, though?"

Elynna jerks a thumb towards her male crewmate.

"Don't worry about that. He's been dying to try out Gadget Number 56 in a real-life situation."

Usopp props one fist on his hip and the other against his heart, standing as tall as he can even though it's not as tall as Robin.

"You can trust me, My Lady!"

Robin laughs softly behind her hand.

"And what does that gadget do?"

The younger woman shrugs.

"No idea, but he said it works, and that it would be perfect for a prison break."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Well. That was quick, Elynna thinks as she docilely lets two Marine soldiers lead her away from the lobby of the Navy base.

She barely had the time to start bullshitting the Marines roaming in the entrance who stopped her on the way in before one of them started screaming bloody murder about how he recognised her.

Guess waltzing in like you own the place doesn't work all the time.

Especially when the people you're trying to fool have pinned your wanted poster on every freaking notice board, vague description or not.

Still…

That doesn't really explain why the officer called in by the soldiers ordered that she be thrown in a cell.

She's pretty sure she saw nothing in the newspapers about how the ex-Marine-turned-vigilante Ryan Alice is actually a pirate.

This really isn't helping their case, though, she muses idly as she takes note of the room where one Marine throws her weapons.

The man takes hold of her arm again, and roughly shoves her forward, the handcuffs biting uncomfortably into her skin when she instinctively tries to throw her hands forward.

Instead she stumbles, before eventually righting herself up, and obediently keeps walking, following the gruff, tense directions the same soldier gives her, his partner silent on her other side.

When they reach the hallway that the Marines call their jailing quarters, only a few of the cells are occupied.

Elynna tries not to assume when she has no proof, but none of the people sitting there look like gangsters, and considering how Demetri described life on Zephrim to be…

Her two watchdogs keep pushing her forward until they reach the very end of the hallway, where the silent one shifts to face her while the other one stands at her back, one arm circling her body to keep her arms pinned to her ribs and his other hand placing a gun right against her temple.

Her breath hitches.

"Alright," Grouchy Golem starts, "we're going to take off those handcuffs, and you're going to put your hands in front of you so we can put them back on. Wouldn't want you going hungry on us because of a silly mistake, ain't that right? So no funny business, you hear?"

She holds still, and grinds down the thin, frantic sarcasm that barely holds back her trepidation and makes her want to roll her eyes, because dude, I saw you staring at my breasts, the hell are you talking to me like I'm a kid for?

"Sir, yes sir."

… Okay, so maybe she doesn't really have it under control, actually.

Grouchy Golem pushes his gun further into her skull, until her neck is bent at a painful angle and the corner of her mouth ticks up with the shadow of a wince.

"Do that again and I'll fuck up your face. Got it?"

She watches the way the other Marine looks down at his shoes, and gives the tiniest nod.

Dodgy Duck it is.

"Good."

She follows Grouchy Golem's instructions, and steps into the cell assigned to her once the handcuffs snap close again.

They leave just like that, and she stands still in her cell until she can't hear their footsteps, and then some more.

Then she bends down to retriveve a small plastic bag filled with matches, generously provided by Usopp and hidden in her shoes.

She walks to the wall opposite to the door, scratches a matchstick aflame on the wall, and hoists herself up on her toes so she can slip the match between the bars of her tiny window, its light the signal they agreed to use on the way here for her to give her location in case she does end up in trouble.

She lets the matchstick burn out almost completely before letting it fall to the ground and lighting another, until she hears the distinctive sound of the small whistle whose copies Usopp gave to Demetri and Robin so they could watch at least three sides of the building and let Elynna know when they received her signal.

She turns back around with a satisfied hum, and watches both matchsticks burn out, spreading their ashes over the ground with her foot.

Then she sits down, and waits.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Ah. So that's why she said she was the government." Robin surmises as she scales the wall after Usopp.

"Got it in one. Where is she?" Usopp asks as he joins their temporary teammate on the roof of a building opposite to the east side of the base.

"Last cell on the left." Demetri answers.

Usopp takes out his binoculars to inspect it, mumbling obscure calculations under his breath.

"What's the next step of the plan?" The journalist inquires after a few seconds.

"Waiting. Elynna said to not do anything for an hour and contact her if she hasn't given any signal by then." Usopp answers absently.

"What? But she's in a cell! What good is waiting going to do?"

"The fewer people on her side the Marines are aware of, the better, in case she needs our help. And if she can get out on her own, it's just as well." Robin explains as she settles as comfortably as possible and takes out a book from her backpack (because of course she does). "Besides, there's also the possibility that some Marines don't agree with what the majority of them are doing. Considering Miss First Mate's current reputation among the Navy, it's likely that these people will contact her when they become aware of her presence. If they exist, of course."

Demetri seems sceptical at that, but settles down to wait without any more comments.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

She doesn't have to wait long.

Barely half an hour has passed when footsteps resonate in the hallway, shadowed only by a few insults and calls for the right to contact a family member.

It's only when Marine-issued boots stop in front of her cell that Elynna looks up to find a soldier.

He came alone, and she doesn't remember seeing him before.

It only makes him more suspicious, and so she stares back at him silently, unwilling to reveal any more than she has to.

Eventually, the man looks down with a sigh, and drops into a cross-legged position.

"Miss Ryan, is it?"

Her hands twitch, the back of her loosely-curled fingers fluttering against the grimy, uneven floor of her cell.

Her eyes roam around the dingy room as she weighs her options and considers the possible implications of those words.

"If that's what you think, why the rude welcoming committe? I'm pretty sure that whether I'm called Ryan Alice or Kaji Ryūko, I'm not considered an enemy of the Marines," she comments idly.

(Like there's no bars between them, crossing into little squares small enough to separate her from everything but air.)

Her eyes stray back to him, and she's careful not to give an actual answer to his rhetorical question.

The Marine considers her for a moment, then the distance between other occupied cells and hers, before he leans forward and lowers his voice.

"Officially, you're here because the description on your wanted poster isn't accurate enough to say for sure that you are Ryan Alice."

Her fingers curl just a bit tighter into half-fists, but she hides the movement by folding her legs until her feet are flat against the ground, ready to flex against it so she can launch herself forward and grab the front of his clothes to slam his skull against the bars-

But the relaxed set of his thin brows over his light brown eyes keeps her still.

"And in reality…?"

"The same reason. But it's not because they want to be sure that you really are someone they can trust. They want to be sure that you really are the woman they should get rid of. Covering up your murder when you're a visitor in a small town and we don't know what you came here for or who you might be in contact with would be difficult, so they don't want to take unnecessary risks."

She blinks, an almost-attempt to give her fear more time to spike.

But apart from the awareness that draws her muscles taut and wires every sound that can reach her ears into her eardrums, that sets out to draw plans and counterplans into the folds of her brain, there's nothing.

(-nothing left of the girl who would be scared if she were here-)

She's dealt with too many harmful actions that she only has a handful of seconds to fend off at best to be scared about this, especially when she's being tipped off beforehand.

(Or maybe she's started to believe in Sea King and everyone else so hard that it all feels like solid ground under her feet

rather than a murmur of a promise fading in the wind or the remnants of a dream made flimsy by wakefulness.)

Besides, she doubts these Marines' assassination attempt will be anywhere close to the subtle complexity of Crocodile's plans.

"And how are you so sure of my identity that you took the risk to come and see me?" She asks in a humming tone, eyes absently scanning his form for any weapon as she waits to know how much leeway she has with her unintended disguise.

The Marine chuckles.

"I was in the same unit as Smoker at the beginning of my career. That guy is a lot smarter than people give him credit for, so I'm not surprised he figured it out before everyone else."

The entire length of her spine kisses the dirty stone of the wall behind her as she breathes in sharply and tries to cover it with a breath of laughter made faint with suprise.

Not surprise that her cover is blown, because she just took advantage of a coincidence without trying to make it foolproof. She knew it was just a matter of time.

Rather, it's surprise at how this man knows, knows that she has never been a Marine, and still sits here unconcerned.

It makes her wonder how much she may have misjudged his abilities.

Can she even handle him?

She stares at the bars of her cell for a short eternity during which her thoughts race through a debate on whether she should keep said bars between her and him as a shield or somehow invite him inside, where her movements won't be hindered by them.

Then the path of her thoughts swerves away to considerations of what exactly is this man doing here, if he knows her real allegiance?

Then again, Smoker is -as far as she knows- one of the Marines who actually stick to his supposed duty of protecting civilians in need, and despite that he doesn't seem much affected by the World Government's black-and-white propaganda.

The identities she used might be a lie, but the results she produced while acting under these names are real, and not against the Marines' official goal.

So it's possible that Smoker wants to offer her a partnership (or blackmail her into it) and that this man is his messenger.

"Figured out what, exactly?" She asks with the best imitation of an amused smile she can come up with in that moment, scrambling for more time to think over possible options and outcomes, pros and cons-

The man blinks, and smiles indulgently.

"No need to worry, Miss Ryan. We dicovered on our own that you're a spy sent undercover in a pirate crew. You won't be punished for divulging confidential information."

…

The fuck?

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Zoro's nap lasts until the fourth ridiculously exaggerated (and loud) compliment that Nami directs at Sanji, after which his competitive streak wins out and he stands up to go cut some trees down.

Which also leads to a lot more noise.

"Are they always like that?" Lisia whispers in wonder.

She's mostly speaking to herself, but the female pirate is close enough to hear her.

"Well, they can be serious when they need to be, but even then they'll probably manage to say or do something stupid unless someone stops them." She answers flippantly, straightening up from her task of tying some trunks together with the ropes Lisia and others usually use to bring their wood harvest back to town.

Lisia eyes her surroundings nervously before looking back at the pirate, the way the older girl is tucking a slightly longer strand of dark red hair behind her ear reminding her to tie up her own, long hair to avoid getting it stuck somewhere. Again.

"Is it... okay to talk about your Captain like that?" She asks cautiously as she throws up her pin-straight, flaxen blonde locks into a bun on the top of her head.

The girl she's learned is called Nami raises an eyebrow at her, and pointedly looks behind her.

She turns around to follow her gaze, and her own settles on where said Captain is enthusiastically demonstrating to the one they call Chopper how to best break a tree with your fists... with the tree that is pretty much guaranteed to fall on the exact spot where their two crewmates are still squabbling (or squabbling again, at this point she's lost track of it).

She looks back at Nami.

"... Okay, I see your point."

She works in silence after that.

(If you can call it silence when the sounds of everyone working surround them and-

"And you! What the hell do you think you're teaching Chopper, you dumbass?!"

"Oi, why are you also kicking me?!"

"Because you're also a dumbass, muscle-for-brain!"

"I'll cut you in two, you stupid Love Cook-"

"I'll still be worth two of you-"

"I'm the Captain, so I can do what I want!"

"As if!")

Eventually, Chopper ends up joining her and Nami, shifting to a tiny, absurdly cute form whose hooves he can apparently use more easily for precise work than the big human hands he had before. A few minutes later, Lisia's mentor brings the boat he's building with his wife next to them and plops down on the sand, bowing in the direction of the two pirates.

"Thank you for your help. I've been trying to find the courage to stop doing this for a long time. My name is Yusuf, and this is my wife Karanfil."

She waves at them with a smile, hands flying through the air to sign a greeting and a I'm sorry you almost lost your ship that her husband translates for her.

"We can repair the damage that was done, so don't worry about it." Nami says, waving off the apology dismissively, and Lisia angles herself towards Karanfil so she can sign the conversation to her, significantly slower than either of her mentors but still proud when the older woman's face softens in understanding. "Besides, our Captain has a tendency to make things look easy no matter how hard it seems to be. You have nothing to be ashamed of."

"... Indeed." Yusuf nods eventually, the lines in his forehead getting deeper as he gives the pirate a long look, before his eyes flicker to Karanfil's fluttering hands.

"She says that you look like you love your ship a lot." Lisia steps in.

"Yeah!" Chopper lights up as he nods eagerly. "Usopp got it from a friend after saving an entire island!"

"Usopp?" Lisia asks even as her eyes flicker cusiously to the smile Nami hides behind her hand.

"One of our crewmates. He went somewhere else with two others, which is a good thing for you, because if he saw you trying to dismantle the Merry he would definitely have been less nice than Luffy."

And she should probably feel threatened, but other groups around them are laughing at the tales Sanji and Luffy are telling about their adventures, so instead the words dissipate into the air before Lisia can feel the weight of them.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"... Are you quite alright, Miss Ryan?"

It's only when the Marine soldier's tentative concern reaches her that she blinks back to awareness, brain still half-stuck in the mush of confused disbelief it dove into when trying to understand how the fuck they reached that conclusion.

"... Sorry," she eventually forces out with a faint laugh that she hopes doesn't sound too much like she's holding back a bout of hysterical laughter. "Just surprised that Captain Smoker guessed… all this. What tipped him off, if I may ask?"

Because she's really, really curious about that.

She smiles, and checks the feeling of it to make sure that it conveys amused interest and not the strong desire she has to laugh in his face.

"Well, from what he told me it was actually something you said to him that gave him a first clue. You told him that maybe he can't find any intel on you because you don't exist. At first he thought you were just dodging the question, but then he realised you match the description of your wanted poster. He dug up some information on your actions in Cocoyashi, and discovered that you were put down as KIA in the records of the guy who used to supervise that area. It's a common tactic for spies recruited by CP1 to go undercover after their official identity records are entirely erased by killing them off with some story or another."

The name is familiar enough to send echoes rippling through her mind.

(echoes of that little girl she glimpsed through the screen from behind the sofa of the living room that she would pass by on her way to the kitchen

-a little girl who cried all the tears in her body and then some more

and how it wasn't enough to extinguish the flames-

She remembers that little girl screaming from the body of the woman she became, and the violence that didn't feel nearly as flat as the screen it was painted on

-but not nearly as loud as blood beating in her ears and bones impacting her flesh-

as a war was fought over this scream and simple, heart-breakingly difficult things like truth, freedom, and greed.)

But it's just off enough that she's pretty sure it's a different governmental branch than the one from her memories.

She files the thought for later perusal, too busy being impressed at the sheer number of misunderstandings that led her here.

Because this was definitely not in her plans.

That being said…

Her lips twitch into an amused smile.

"I had an inkling after meeting him in person, but Captain Smoker really is impressive."

She'd be a fool to not take advantage of this misunderstanding and milk it for all it's worth.

Despite all her shortcomings, she likes to think that foolishness isn't usually one of them.

"He doesn't look like it, right?" The Marine chuckles, eyes crinkling at the corners with the force of his smile.

She hums.

"You're not here on his behalf, though, are you?"

He falls silent as abruptly as his smile disappears.

"... How did you know?"

"I didn't, but you just confirmed it."

He stares at her for a moment and then sighs in defeat.

She snorts.

"I might not know Smoker as well as you do, but I know him enough to say that he probably wouldn't go along with whatever is happening on this island. So what brought you here, Mister Nameless Marine?"

"Allan. The name's Allan." His eyes rove around the hallway in silent hesitation before floating back to her. "I'm afraid it's a bit of a long story if you want to understand everything."

She spreads her hands open in the air between her raised knees.

"It's the only thing I have apart from the clothes on my back at the moment," she lies with a smile, "and since no one has come to see what you're doing, I would guess that you're in charge of the current shift."

Allan smiles hesitantly in confirmation.

Squirms.

Then sighs, and opens his mouth.

"The person in charge of this base is Captain Elkerros. He barely had a few years of experience when he was sent here. But it turned out that the area isn't as…" He pauses, and winces. "As peaceful as the higher-ups think it is. The Captain ended up making a deal with the criminal groups who were threatening the population so as to avoid an open conflict. This entente is mainly based on the bribes the townspeople gather by stealing visitors' ships with our help."

She motions for him to continue when he glances at her hesitantly.

"Don't look at me like that. It's not exactly an uncommon strategy for criminal organisations to demand payment in exchange for protection against a threat that they engineer themselves."

"... Well, you're not wrong about that. And I guess you'll tell me that I should also have expected that some of my colleagues would try to take advantage of this arrangement."

He really should have.

"I guess I didn't want to see it. At first it was just a few of them helping themselves to a bit of extra cash from the money we managed to make with what was stolen. The Captain held them in check, even though he couldn't exactly have them brought to justice since he was the one who came up with the plan to begin with. But then his brother got sick with a rare illness a few years ago, and he ended up using some of the money that wasn't given as a bribe to pay for some medical expenses instead of giving it to the townspeople."

His shoulders slump a bit lower, and she's not quite sure that he's really aware of her presence anymore.

"It just got worse from there, because now the Captain is their accomplice in everything, and he's a good guy, but not brave enough to turn himself in with the lot of them. More of our men are taking money for themselves every year, and we have to increase the number of traps we set for visitors to make sure that we still have enough to pay the agreed price, to the point that almost every outsider who comes is guaranteed to lose their ship. And since we're the ones who take any valuable item from the ship and generally manage the money we get from this… activity, none of the townspeople has serious evidence that they should be getting more money, especially since the mayor got involved two years ago and started increasing taxes on top of it."

"Not that a lot of the citizens are brave enough to speak up, am I right?"

Silence.

And then-

"It was just supposed to be an act."

She stares back unflichingly.

"Clearly, not everyone sees it that way anymore."

"... A few soldiers have also started getting their hands into the drug traffic in the area, and as a result the criminals in charge of it have started coming to the island even though we still pay them." Allan goes on, head bowing so he's not looking at her anymore.

She cranes her head back against the wall, staring at the strokes of light brushed across the ceiling by the sun rays outside.

Silence rings between them and through the bars, like a knife being sharpened.

When she's sure that the heaviness in the air pressing down on her chest is really just in her head, she opens her mouth.

"So you want me to get the civilians out of this mess. Is that it?"

His lips press together into a thin white line as he seems to realise what he's asking of her.

His eyes shift uneasily away from her and he shrugs, like he's trying to rid himself of an uncomfortable weight on his shoulders or a bad taste in his mouth.

The taste of weakness that tells him that he can't do this alone, maybe.

(She wishes she could taste weakness in her mouth enough that he wouldn't be asking this of her.

If she has nothing to do with this, then she can't be held responsible for whatever happens to all these people.

-but isn't inaction a choice with consequences, too?-

She feels sick enough already with the knowledge that as of now she is the only person to have any kind of chance at preserving the flames of a life written to flicker out.)

"Your help would be appreciated." Allan eventually says.

(Of course it would be.

Humans so often want someone else to do what they cannot or do not want to do.

She wonders if Sea King feels like this every time she or someone else asks for his help.

Or are her shoulders just that brittle and her heart this tired?)

"Alright." She sighs, cutting him off even as he perks up and opens his mouth to (probably) thank her. "But I have conditions."

He nods, carefully, almost suspiciously, as if he thinks she's been corrupted by the pirates she infiltrated and is about start asking for insane amounts of money.

She raises her pointer finger, wrist propped on her bent knee.

"Firstly, I have an idea, but considering that we're working on a short time limit, there's not much time to prepare. You'd do well to adjust your expectations of the result accordingly. There's really no guarantee that it will work, and that everyone you want to help will make it out unscathed."

He nods again, something tight sailing across his features fast enough to just be a trick of the light.

Then she raises her middle finger next to the first one.

"Secondly, I'll need a bit of time to converse with my… collaborators."

"I see- Wait, you have collaborators?!"

She tries to keep a straight face.

"How else do you think I managed to hide my identity from my crew for so long and get the resources I needed to pull off what I did?"

(It's not even an actual lie.

If not for her crewmates, she wouldn't be here.

There's only so much she's willing to do and to give for the smiles of people she doesn't know.

Time in a moldy cell and leering glances isn't part of it.)

Understanding dawns on his face even though she answered him with a question, and she pushes the mocking smirk struggling to make it to her lips.

(She wonders if this is how Crocodile felt every time he managed to deceive -and screw over- yet another person.)

She raises a third finger.

"I want guarantees. A guarantee that you are who you say you are, because this might all be a plan to catch me in the act and have a valid reason to get me executed. And a guarantee that you will do your best so that life for the people of this island won't stay the same -or get worse- once I leave."

(She doesn't need this.

Not really.

Only needs to look like she's a fellow Marine who cared enough to rebel against her hierarchy and pass herself off as dead, all to go on a crusade against tyranny all over the world.

But everyone on this island is human, as far as she knows. It's a given that someone will still have a fucked up life, that in a decade at most they'll be facing another crisis of some kind.

Hawk asked her to do this for the townspeople and all the people who love their ship and might come here someday as much as he asked her for the sake of Kaya's gift and keepsake.

Loving kind people is almost as exhausting as being kind.

She still loves him anyway.)

The soldier frowns a bit, nodding slowly as he reaches around his neck.

"That makes sense."

After unclasping it, he holds out a thin chain with a metal plate attached to it through the bars.

"If you didn't see when you were led here, we have to show this to identify ourselves when going to some areas of the base. I'll be going back to my room after this so I won't need to show it to anyone, and I have a spare. If you want to denounce me or if you think that I'm not doing a good enough job after you leave, you can use this."

She takes it with a mental shrug, because even if it doesn't work she gives absolutely zero fuck.

"Is there anything else?"

She twists her lips together.

"No. Just give me an hour to iron out the details and I'll tell you the plan."

He hesitates for a moment before giving a firm nod, reaching into his pocket and throwing the key he takes out through the bars so it lands at her feet.

"Alright. This is the key to your handcuffs. Someone other than me will be in charge of the next shift, which will last forty-five minutes. Be careful."

She listens as the sound of his footsteps fades out, relaxing a bit more against the wall with every echoing step.

She hums, the sound rippling against the walls around her in a way that almost makes it sound like a murmur of laughter.

It really is nice to do business with fools from time to time.

It takes her a few moments to take off the handcuffs, and another to light another matchstick and wave it in front of her barred window as a signal that she wants to exchange a message with her crewmates.

Then she goes to stand in one of the corners of her cell furthest from the window, per Usopp's instructions.

Barely a minute later, a streak of grey flies through the narrow space between the bars and ricochets against the ground.

It's some kind of short arrow like those used for a crossbow.

She walks closer, crouching down to inspect it curiously.

The material is rubbery, almost like a children's toy rather than an actual weapon, though Usopp probably improved its speed and power to increase its range.

There's a small, thin case of metal tied to the arrow, in which she finds two folded sheets of paper.

It's when she lifts the arrow to more easily take out those that she notices the almost invisible thread attached to the other end of the arrow.

She smirks, and reaches for the pen inside her other boot.

"Hawk, you goddamn genius."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"A crossbow? Isn't that a bit dangerous?" Demetri frowns warily as he eyes Usopp's work of genius.

The sharpshooter snorts.

"Please. I told Elynna to stay away from wherever I will shoot it. She's not going to forget or disregard what I say. Unlike Luffy."

"Or Mister Swordsman." Robin adds with mild amusement, still inspecting the gadget Usopp graciously allowed her to take with curious fingers.

"Nah," Usopp rebuts with a shake of his head. "Zoro and Sanji would at least dodge the arrow. Luffy would probably let it hit him because he's too busy fawning over it. That dumbass."

"With good reason, though. This is remarkable work, Mister Sniper."

Said sniper draws himself up a bit taller to try and accommodate the warm feeling tickling the inside of his chest.

"And how is she going to send back her message?" Demetri presses from where he's sitting on his other side.

"She just has to put the arrow on the outer edge of the window and give me the signal we agreed on. Then I can reel back the thing using this." Usopp explains, finger tapping lightly against the button placed on the underside of the crossbow's handle.

It's a few minutes before the slight glow of a flame draws a slow circle in the darkness behind his First Mate's barred window.

Usopp activates the mechanism.

It's a good thing he's sitting down, because otherwise he would definitely fall on his ass with how fast the arrow flies through the air to snap back into place.

Well, it doesn't exactly slide back into its original position, but he was expecting that, and he can just do it manually anyway.

Demetri whistles in admiration next to him, clapping him on the shoulder as Usopp sets out to delicately extirpate Elynna's message from its case.

...

"That bitch. She wrote it in English."

Demetri stares down at the entirely foreign letters with complete befuddlement.

Robin laughs softly.

"Well, it is preferable in the event that the Marines find out what she's up to."

"Still a bitchy move." Usopp moans.

He really sucks at this.

Fortunately for him, he also finds out that despite having joined barely a month ago, Robin is as genius-y at this as he is bad.

He's too busy being grateful to be jealous.

Mostly.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

A few rudimentary boats have already been assembled when one of the men the pirate named Sanji advised to put on watch duty comes stumbling down the rocks he was perched on, landing face first into the sand and starting to scream even before he's gotten back to his feet.

"The Marines! The Marines are coming!"

For a moment everything stops, and under her skin Lisia's blood feels hot and heavy like the sky before a thunderstorm.

Then she scrambles to her feet, pushing Nami and Chopper in front of her.

"Quick, hide behind your ship, we don't have the time to get you anywhere else!"

"What?!" Their Captain exclaims loudly from where he's being dragged in the same direction by Terrence. "No, we can just fight them!"

And saying that he digs his heels into the ground, legs stretching to accommodate Terrence's useless attempt at tugging him away.

"Sanji!" Nami calls over her shoulder.

The cook obligingly kicks his Captain towards the ship.

"You said it was their problem to deal with barely two hours ago, shithead. Just do as they say."

The swordsman follows behind, looking particularly disgruntled that he doesn't get to use his katana on something with red blood.

Lisia doesn't care one bit about that.

Ever since the Marines have started coming to 'check' on their work, they've come as a group of at least twenty people.

No one in town really knows how to fight apart from them.

In other words, even if the pirates did fight them, it would be a bloodbath given the difference in numbers.

"What's this? Did you all become dumb since we last saw each other? Why's that ship still in one piece?"

Yusuf steps forward after a long stretch of silence, shaking off the hesitant hold of his wife on his arm.

"I'm sorry, Lieutnant, but this time I think we should let it go. This is a pirate's ship, and I saw a bounty for two of the crew's members not long ago. They haven't even been drugged. We have more to lose than to win trying to trick these people."

The leader of the group for the day looks back up at his fellow Marines who are still on their ship.

(Even after all this time, she's still not sure whether they use their warships to pay her and the others a visit just because they don't have enough small boats, or if they just enjoy the nervous flickering of everyone's eyes towards the black, gaping mouths of their cannons.)

And then they all laugh.

"Have you seen them, dude? Why would we need to drug them?"

"Getting scared of a bunch of kids, now? Y' should come train with us for a bit!"

"We'll even give you a discount!"

"Yeah, it's been a long time since we haven't had a newbie to haze!"

"Don't worry about security issues… Yusuf, is it? We're the ones who know about it. Just do your job, instead of trying to steal ours."

Something startled and heated runs through all the townspeople standing there, dropping in the air like a rock falling down a dry well.

The incredulity steals their breath away, barely managing to stiffle the anger.

But it's only when she sees Karanfil flinch backward and then forward with wide eyes and parted lips and raised hands that Lisia realises something is about to go very, very wrong.

"I wouldn't need to worry about it if you did your job right."

Silence replaces the laughter, broken only by Terrence's too-loud breathing next to her and the heavy steps the Marine takes towards Yusuf.

"What was that? I don't think I heard you well."

Her stupid mentor squares his shoulders, and her gut twists itself into knots so hard she feels like she ate rocks instead of the leftover, weirdly-shaped bread he made that morning, and open his mouth.

The Marine doesn't wait for him to actually speak to punch him.

Lisia gasps out a scream-

And then realises that it's not Yusuf who got punched.

It's the Marine.

Who just got punched hard enough to be sent crashing into the hull of his ship by a fist that appeared out of nowhere.

Numbly, she follows the line of the arm the fist is attached to.

Further.

And further.

Until she's staring at the darkened, harsher features of Luffy who is still standing all the way next to his ship, and whose arm snaps back to a normal, human length like a rubber band.

What.

The.

Heck.

"Ready your weapons! We're blowing these damn pirates to pieces!"

"What about the civilians, Lieutnant?"

"I don't care whether they live or die! This'll teach them a lesson about trying to stab us in the back!"

"Can we go now?" Zoro's deep voice slashes calmly through the thumping noise of the Marines running around.

It's close enough that Lisia can hear it over the rabbit-like pace of her own heart, and she stops gazing wildly around for some kind of escape to focus on the four pirates who are heading towards the Marines' ship like they're just going on a walk, Nami standing behind them with a long staff of blue metal propped against her shoulder.

"Yeah, yeah." She sighs with a roll of her eyes. "Have fun."

"Huh? What's this?"

"Why is it raining suddenly?"

"Look, it's only raining on our ship!"

"What the hell is happening?!"

"Lieutnant, we can't use the cannons or our rifle like this!"

"Then take your swords and go down there, you morons!"

Lisia gapes up at the circle of dark clouds pouring rain on the warship in the middle of blue, almost cloudless sky.

"You might want to step away to avoid collateral damage, everyone. None of these idiots do things by half." Nami calls out, gesturing for them to come closer to her and away from the ship.

"... Thank you." Yusuf says quietly when he reaches her side.

"Don't sweat it." Sanji mumbles around the cigarette he lights.

"Yosh! Let's go, guys!" Luffy orders with a wide smile and cracking knuckles, receiving an enthusiastic response from Chopper.

The three of them and Zoro jump on the ship easily.

Lisia hears a lot of screams after that, but none come from them.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Dodgy Duck has been replaced by a new face when two soldiers come to take her out of her cell.

The newbie snags the chain of the handcuffs she put back on in his fist, and her fingers curl a bit tighter around the key cradled within her loose fist.

She follows them, eyes on the end of the hallway in front of her.

The door opens to show Allan, whose watch shift is almost finished.

That's when she turns towards Grouchy Golem, tensing all the muscles that she can feel in her body so she can better force them to relax, because bending to the blow will make it hurt at least a tiny bit less.

"You know," she says nonchalantly, "you're not really my type, so if you wanna keep staring below my face you're gonna have to pay. I take payment in cash and in kind, by the w-"

The handle of the dagger that was strapped to his thigh smashes against her jaw, and she lets him.

Lets the force of it send her to the ground.

Lets the steely end of his booted foot slam into her stomach.

"I warned you, you little bitch-"

In the scuffle that follows, Allan hurries forward to drag her away while the third soldier holds his colleague back.

Bending forward as if to check her face, he hides the way his hand closes around hers to take back the handcuffs' key.

Then he tugs her to her feet, hand circling her elbow tightly.

Spitting out a mouthful of blood from the cut in her gum and what looks a lot like a fragment of one of her teeth, she glances up.

His jaw looks too tight and his frown too worried, so she subtly elbows him in the ribs.

If she wanted a shitty actor, she would've asked him to fetch Sea King for her. Seriously...

He responds with an accusatory glance that makes her roll her eyes, because this is exactly how she planned to give him the key back when they got interrupted before he could take the keys back from her earlier, and she told him it would be messy.

He's a Marine, he probably got worse during his training.

"Let me go, I'm going to-"

"That's enough, Collin. You know that journalist brat has been on our asses even more than usual. If he finds out we roughed up a prisoner before even sentencing her, outsider or not, he might just find a way to get it out of the island."

Grouchy Golem glares balefully at her temporary teammate, before roughly shoving his colleague off him and straightening his uniform.

"She insults me again, and she'll deal with her sentence as a fucking corpse." He spits.

Allan sighs, and gestures him towards the door.

"Let's switch places, I'll take her to the interrogation room. I don't want to be dragged into your bullshit."

"Shut it. I don't take orders from you."

He still obeys, though.

Elynna moves to follow after her accomplice silently, tongue roaming through her mouth to find her newly-chipped tooth.

She was curious about whether or not Sea King's story about how he tried to swing himself from a tree branch like he saw monkeys do in the jungle only to end up crashing headfirst into a tree and losing a couple of teeth that he regained by just drinking milk was true or not, but not so curious that she wanted to test it personally.

The movement turns the stinging throb of her jaw into ringing, painful heat as she feels blood trickle down her cheek from the cut opened there by the dagger's fancy handle.

It hurts like a bitch and a half.

But then she remembers months with blurry vision, remembers the worst moments just before she would cave in and walk as normally as she could towards that shelf in the kitchen for some relief, breath and hands shaking.

Those moments when the awareness of her body was limited to what ached and what didn't.

She straightens up, and walks past the glaring Marine at the door without a glance.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Allan eventually leads her into a room where white, raw light makes black spots dance across her vision.

The only piece of furniture is a table, and he makes her sit on the chair that faces away from the one-way glass panel that covers one side of the room.

Then he takes hold of the chain that links her handcuffs, and slips it through the space between the surface of the table and the end of a small, thick hook protruding from the table before pressing down on said hook until it clicks into the corresponding lock fixed to the table, effectively chaining her down but still leaving her enough room to write something if necessary.

With one last look, he turns around and leaves to join the room on the other side of the glass panel.

Left alone with nothing but silence and blinding light, she moves her hands minutely, testing the amount of room she has, the clinking sound of the handcuffs even louder than that of her breathing.

Then she stops, loosely curling her fingers against the cool, hard texture of the table to steady their faint, anxious trembling even as she stares unseeingly down at them, all her attention forcibly focused on her breathing.

(In. Out. In. Out.

But still it scatters under the weight of what ifs and fears and doubts.

In. Out. In. Out.

And her stomach is tight, nauseatingly tight with the knowledge that this isn't like all the other nauseatingly anxious moments when she raced to finish an exam while still wondering if her outline was any good.

She was playing with her life, with Robin's life, with Hawk's life.

She has little skill in leading and barely more experience in strategy.

But she has absolutely zero room to fuck this up.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.)

The door clicks open.

The man who sits down opposite to her is classically beautiful in a Roman statue kind of way, and the smile on his face that says he's aware of it ruins the whole thing.

"Hey there, miss. Sorry you had to go through all that, there was some kind of mix-up. We just have to check your identity, and then we can find you a much better room-"

She blinks.

What the hell is this guy doing?

Is he trying to get her to drop her guard and spill the guts about whether or not she's 'Ryan Alice' so he can choose whether to let her out or put her in a cell- oh, sorry, find her a much better room while they prepare her execution?

By seducing her?

"I'm sorry." She blurts out.

The Marine's smile widens.

"Oh, there's no problem, just give me your name and-"

"I was going to visit the Marine base of this island, but if I had known this was a Marine-themed host bar, I would have chosen other clothes. You seem pretty sensitive on that topic considering where I spent the last few hours. Your sex dungeons are a bit too close to real cells, by the way, you should invest in cleaning them up if you want to get more custo-"

The gaping soldier's brain finally reboots and he jumps to his feet, his face twisted into something very far from a smile and not at all beautiful anymore.

His hands slam against the table loudly.

"Watch your words, Ryan." He hisses lowly. "You're just a brat who had to leave the Marines and play hero to get the attention you wanted instead of getting promoted like everyone else."

She politely refrains from telling him that she 'played hero' for the pleasure of grinding the face of people she despised particularly strongly into the dust, and that her first reaction to the attention it brought her was ew.

Instead she raises an eyebrow.

(And hopes it distracts him from seeing the slow way her fingers curl tighter until her nails print almost-cutting pressure into the skin of her palms, because-

She knew this would be hard, but-

She has a plan, and this man is playing right into it.

He's clearly undestimating her, and he doesn't even know that the people watching them are her allies.

She's also quite sure that in a fight she at least stands a chance, and most likely can beat him.

But regardless of all that, the air filtering through her throat still feels utterly wrong.

Because she's chained to the table.

Because her allies are too far for her to feel their body heat against her back, and the cold crawls up her neck like a voice whispering that she's all alone.

Because the man raving in her face is tall and muscled and loud, his hands large and strong and looking ready to strike her, and his uniform still a synonym of power despite everything.

The realisation of the differences between them hits her like it never really has before, perhaps because she's never been so powerless and alone, so close to what would have happened if she was still that girl in another world, crossing paths with a man this tall and loud and aggressive in the dead of the night.

And in that moment, she feels… very small.

Very small, and very weak.)

"Ryan?"

He scoffs.

"Don't try to fool me. Seriously, who else would bother to come here but the self-righteous bitch who got the dumb idea to blow up the current system just because it has a few bad side-effects?"

If her muscles weren't crawling with tension, she would be the one to scoff.

Why should she give a fuck about the current system or its side-effects as long as it doesn't affect her or the few people she's willing to exhaust herself to protect?

She would have to be an idiot to think that changing the system is anything other than an endless task, or have an unending reserve of energy somewhere inside her to have the guts to keep going anyway.

She just wanted to fuck some people up.

Oh well.

Allan told her she would be brought into an interrogation room so they could try and ascertain her identity (it's not like they could use a picture or ask for help from outside), so she asked him to try and make it so that the task would fall on the most assholish guy available, because those are always more entertaining to hit.

This dude totally fits the bill.

And unless Allan is lying, he's one of the Marines who started embezzling the money right from the start.

She shrugs.

"I don't see the point of this if you're convinced that I'm whoever you're talking about. Can I go back to my cell?"

She's looking away like she's bored, and so she doesn't see anything when he swings his arm to backhand her across the face.

Then again, even if she did see it, she wouldn't have been able to do much.

Her head snaps to the side, and now both sides of her face are burning, the pain of it radiating along the bones of her cheeks and jaw in a way that makes gritting her teeth against the pain particularly counter-productive.

She clenches her legs together instead, feet curled up strangely against each other to resist the impulse that screams at her to cry, whimper, cave in, something-

Don't show anything.

Just a little longer.

"Watch that smartass tongue of yours before I rip it off. You don't need it to do what I need you to do. And once you do that, you can spend all the time you want rotting down there with all the other insects who got in my way." He slides a blank sheet of paper towards her and slams a pen on top of it. "Remember the nice guy who came to pay you a visit and promised to help you? He told us you were here with other people. So you're going to write down their names and descriptions. The more cooperative you are, the more lenient we'll be with you, so think carefully about what you do, yeah?"

It's a bit painful to act surprised, especially since she was the one who told Allan to report all this to his fellow Marines to make sure that they would actually interrogate her instead of convincing each other that she was Ryan Alice and summarily executing her.

It helps that the interrogation room is a lot closer to the entrance compared to her cell, and that it's situated on the west side of the building, where there is a lot more windows and thus a lot more opportunities for Usopp to help than if she tried to escape while Allan was bringing her here.

She looks back at the Marine, and sighs.

"Whatever. Wake me up when you start making sense."

And then she slumps forward, head touching the table and untied hair hiding her handcuffed hands from view.

She barely has the time to close her eyes before a hand seizes her by the hair and wrenches her face back up.

She winces at the sharp pulling sensation that makes her feel like her hair is being torn away from her scalp one by one, leaning her weight forward to try and relieve the burn.

"Now look here-"

She slings the chain of her newly unhooked handcuffs behind his neck, and slams him down against the hook face first.

And then a second time just for the hell of it.

Then she harshly shoves him backwards along with his chair, sending him crashing into the floor.

He stays lying there for a few seconds, swearing as profusely as he is bleeding from his most likely broken nose.

Then he sees her get up and skirt around the table leisurely, and he scrambles to his feet to rush at her with another string of curses that are too distorted by his smashed nose and the blood dripping into his mouth to make much sense.

She sidesteps his furious punch, and kicks him in the shin, hard enough that he trips and starts falling forward.

So she grabs his head, and slams his face onto her rising knee, in the exact same place she hit before.

When her foot touches the floor again, her hands around his skull are the only thing keeping the unconscious Marine off the ground.

And she lets go, blankly watching him crash limply against the ground.

It's satisfying enough that she's almost tempted to wake him up just to hit him again, but she has better things to do than waste her time on some random motherfucker, so she focuses on that instead.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

From behind the one-way glass window, Robin watches the First Mate of her 'crew' (the word sounds closer to 'shield' or 'prey' in her mind, even though she hasn't done anything to hurt them yet-) crouch down to fish for the keys to get out of the interrogation room in the Marine's pockets.

She's still not sure she made a good choice when she sneaked onto their ship.

(But is she still able to make a 'good' choice? A choice good for something else than dreamless survival and her frantic search for what she hopes will put to rest the ghosts in her head that keep her moving when she just wants to stop?)

The Straw Hats are a strange mix of people who are strangely nice for pirates and surprisingly ferocious for newbies.

She's met enough people in her life to say that they will go far, and that they will change the world before allowing the world to change who they are.

(The way she failed to,

because there was no one to remind her of who she was, to love her for who she was.

Except in her nightmares.

But sometimes she looks into the dark, silent eyes of the girl-woman who trails behind the child of the D., and she wonders if she's really alone in this.)

She adjusts her hat, tilting it further down over her face.

It was her idea for one of them to infiltrate the Marine base as support for Elynna who, while strong, could hardly take on a whole battallion of Marines alone.

But she didn't quite expect to be the one to go.

(didn't quite expect to be trusted to go-

Because there's a difference between being deemed entertaining enough to stay on the ship and being deemed trustworthy enough to act as the closest helping hand in the middle of enemy territory, and she's not stupid enough to think that someone like Elynna trusts her wholeheartedly.)

And although Usopp promised that he would help, although Elynna sent back a message in response to their modifications of her plans saying that she would tell her Marine accomplice to not try and see the face of her 'teammates' ('nice enough to do it', she wrote, which in her books probably means 'idiotic enough to do it', Robin has learned), she still feels uneasy, standing so close to the man who let her in through the staff entrance on the agreed time that Elynna conveyed to him.

The man wearing the uniform that still reeks of sizzling flesh in her nose after all these years and whose neck she hasn't broken yet -and won't get to break.

Said man's hand is still poised above the button he used to unclasp the hook that chained Elynna to the table, and he looks a bit nervous, now.

Robin forms a cross with her arms, finding comfort in the gesture that means she's about to leave, even if he won't be a cooling body when she steps out of this room.

"Well, on that note… Thank you for your cooperation."

His head whips around to gape at her.

"Wha-"

One of her arms blooms from the wall behind him and swiftly knocks him out.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Elynna steps out of the room, locking the door behind her, and when she looks to the right Robin is doing the exact same.

She's also alone.

She raises an eyebrow in a silent question even as she catches the key for the handcuffs that the archaeologist throws at her.

"I figured that his loyalty would be less doubted if he was found knocked out, too." Robin answers with a delicate shrug. "Besides, I'm not sure he would have it in him to attack the people he's worked with for so long, so he won't be of much help for the next step of the plan."

Elynna blinks.

And then she smiles.

"I think I'm going to like working with you."

That's when the sound of footsteps echoing each other by the dozen alerts her to the fact that she didn't take care of the small snails stuck to the wall and that are definitely the equivalent of security cameras.

Damn.

She knew she forgot something.

Then again, it's not like she makes a habit of escaping prison cells.

Reaching under her Marine shirt for the kukris crossing against her back that Allan discreetly brought to her in her cell, she takes hold of one and throws it towards the soldiers rounding the corner, hitting one of them in the shoulder.

She's started running even before he cries out, and when she reaches him she slings an arm around his neck and shoulders for support, runs up the nearest wall, and steps on the face of several Marines behind him hard enough to send them to the ground, swinging back around to face her first victim and grabbing her kukri on the way down to twist it into his shoulder until she feels the blade scrape against his bones.

The man lets go of his weapon with a cry.

Her brain is racing to find how best to use her newfound human shield while the remaining Marines are screaming for her to step away and raise her hands in the air when thin arms with olive skin and chewed-up nails blossom across their bodies, and promptly break various bones.

Their screaming makes much less sense after that.

"Uh." Elynna says absently as she pulls out her kukri and uses it to knock out the soldier she's holding on before he can headbutt her. "Definitely gonna love working with you."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Demetri gulps, and then does it again in an attempt to relieve the dryness in his throat.

His heart beats so loudly in his ears it feels like he's stopped breathing.

As it is, he almost forgets to blink, binoculars almost stuck to his eyes with how tight he's pressing them against his vision.

Does this even count as a fight?

He knows that these are normal Marines, soldiers who don't have any extraordinary skill and perhaps haven't even been training properly for the last few years, but-

Isn't the gap between them and a measly trio of pirates too big?

Then again, his teacher had always told him, back when he was learning the ropes as a new journalist.

Quality over quantity.

His fingers tighten some more against the binoculars as if to check one more time that he does have them, because next to him the pirate sniper is crouching, shooting smoke bombs through the limited openings of the windows that randomly appearing hands open for him.

And he hasn't missed once.

Not just that, but his timing is unfailingly perfect, the smoke bomb flying in just as his crewmate opens the window so that no one has the time to stop it, the smoke filling the hallways when the Marines just enter it so that his crewmates have the time to spot their numbers and location without giving the soldiers any time to even see the two women, whose identities the taller one apparently wanted to keep hidden.

And amidst all that he still finds the time to take down some enemies.

At this point, Demetri isn't even sure the guy is human.

But even if Usopp wasn't this good, he doubts the outcome would change much, because watching Robin and Elynna in action makes him realise that up till then he knew who they were, but he didn't understand.

It has never been this clear that the two women he offered his back to when he walked in front of them are pirates, and not nearly as nice as their Captain seems to be.

Each in their own way, they're brutal and ruthless, aiming to fight each man only once.

The older woman barely seems to be in the middle of a battlefield, walking around leisurely, graceful movements of her arms and wrists breaking spines and necks as carelessly as arms before anyone can even come close.

Her disguised crewmate is much more mobile, never stopping in a way that somehow makes it hard to track her movements even though Demetri can't quite understand why. He's pretty sure she hasn't killed anyone yet, but she doesn't make him feel any less uneasy than Robin, considering all the broken limbs she leaves behind and the red trenches her long knives slice into skin and muscles, which will definitely have to be taken care of fast if he really wants to avoid having any more deaths on his conscience.

He watches the two women disappear around a corner, leaving behind the still smoky atmosphere of the floor they just cleared floating above a dozen of motionless bodies.

"Alright!" The sharpshooter exclaims as he jumps to his feet, startling him so badly he almost lets go of the binoculars. "This should be enough. Let's go, the meeting point is at the entrance."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Usopp and Demetri are waiting for them at the entrance when Robin and Elynna step out, the latter sporting a few light bruises and cuts here and there and the former barely looking like she just came out of a fight.

"I didn't think there would be so many of them." Elynna comments idly as she wipes her weapons clean of blood with a stolen Marine scarf.

"Well, it wasn't much of a problem either way." Robin smiles beside her.

The younger girl lets out a vaguely agreeing sound as she throws the soiled piece of fabric over her shoulder negligently, sliding her kukri and tessen back into place.

Fishing a folded sheet of paper out of one of her pockets, she steps forward to hand it to the journalist, making no indication that she notices the way he almost takes a step back, or how he's still staring at the spot where the too-wide sleeve of Ryan Alice's winter uniform shirt have just hidden the bladed fan strapped to her forearm.

"Here, " she says, grabbing his hand to put the paper there and patting him on the shoulder afterwards. "Just in case you need a cover story."

Then she turns around to tell her crewmates to get going.

She catches a glimpse of what looks a bit too much like a grenade and which a feral-looking soldier just threw at them from the other end of the base's lobby at the same moment Demetri opens his mouth to warn them all.

She doesn't think.

The grenade-slash-bomb-slash-whatever-it-is comes bouncing towards her, and she closes the remaining distance to kick it back towards the Marine.

Whose smile freezes into something horrified just before the whole room he's standing in is engulfed into fire and heat.

The blast of the explosion blows the windows into pieces of glass at their feet as they back even further from the gates to avoid the worst of the heat.

Once the initial roar of flames dies down into a fire more steady, they're left to stare at the entrance hall, shredded apart almost beyond recognition.

Robin blinks rapidly to bring more moisture to her suddenly dry eyes.

Demetri gapes.

Usopp facepalms.

"Oops." The First Mate mumbles.

Elynna feels her voice more than she hears it (beating along her heart in her throat, on the cusp of her mouth-), and reaches up to massage the skin and bone just next to her ear, somewhat used to explosions by now but hand still trembling with the sudden realisation of what she just avoided.

She's rather sure that Chopper's medication wouldn't be enough on this one.

She turns back around, eyes settling on Demetri.

"You might want to get started on your search for the documents now. I doubt one explosion will cause a Marine base to collapse, but paper and fire don't really mix well together. Ah, and the Marine who helped us is still stuck next to the interrogation room, so if you see him and don't mind letting him out… Tell him it was a pleasure doing business with him, yeah?"

The journalist doesn't answer, too busy swearing as he rushes into the building.

Elynna blinks at his back, and then shrugs, turning on her heel to catch up with her two crewmates.

"What cover story did you come up with, if I may ask?" Robin inquires curiously.

"Eh, something about how some of the gang members they were bribing wanted more and decided to up their game and attack the base when the Marines refused to cave in. Demetri-san was conveniently close by when he heard the explosion and went to help the injured out of the goodness of his heart. He also coincidentally happens to find whatever proof he ends up finding. With a bit of luck and if he uses it, it might just ruin whatever trust there is between the Marines in question and their accomplices."

Robin hums.

"It is likely to happen. This might just end into a bloodbath if there are already some tensions with the increasing number of criminals coming here."

Elynna smirks in a way that looks vaguely savage.

"Want to make a bet on what the newspapers will say?"

"You're both monsters." Usopp grumbles.

"Thanks." His First Mate replies blandly before switching to another topic. "I hope the others are done with their part, though."

"Right, we gotta check on the Merry! If I knew you were going to take so long I would've left already!"

"So cold."

"Young love is quite one-track minded, right Miss First Mate?" Robin comments, smile gentle even in her teasing.

"Are you talking about his heart or his dick? No, because-" She stops. "Did you just aim a stone at me?"

Usopp shrugs like he can't be any more nonchalant about the whole situation, but his face is definitely red.

"It's fine, you avoided it. And I don't want to hear that kind of comment from you."

"Guess it's fine as long as you avoid my knife, then." Elynna retorts.

"I already told you not to use the skills I taught you on me- Seriously, drop that knife!"

Robin laughs as she follows after them.

The sun rays of the late afternoon sink into her skin along with the loud screams and breathless laughter, and she realises that this is the first time she's helped someone just because she's in the right place at the right moment.

It feels a bit like researching a subject with Ohara's scholars used to feel, or at least how she thinks it felt, in the torn, sullied remains of those dream-like days in her nightmares.

(feels like teamwork,

maybe,

feels as warm as it feels bitter)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

The explosion comes out of nowhere, startling Lisia so bad that she lets go of the rope she was using to tie up the last group of Marines.

And also waking up a few of said Marines.

The abrupt way one of them opens his eyes right in front of her makes her fall on her ass as she scrambles back with a scream.

Before the soldier can do more than utter a few confused words, however, a fist stretches through the air to punch him in the face.

A foot kicks another in the stomach.

A bolt of lightning rains down on another group.

A fourth soldier collapses on his side after being hit by the blunt side of a katana.

Two others knock each other out when two big, slightly furry hands slam their heads together.

And Lisia slaps the last one as hard as she can.

They all promptly resume their nap, giving her enough breathing room to let out a loud, trembling sigh.

"What was that?" The pirate Captain mumbles curiously as he looks up at the direction the booming sound seemed to come from.

"Here!" One of the townspeople cries out, pointing a finger at the thin trail of burnt smoke that is barely visible on the other side of the mountain.

"Hey, isn't that the direction of the Marine base?"

"Could it be Demetri and his friends?"

"Are you crazy? That kid is a journalist, not a member of the Revolutionary Army. Where would he even find a bomb or a grenade or whatever caused this? I say it's probably one of those thugs who've been coming to town."

"What do they think they're doing in our city?! We're paying them to not see their faces, not to have them wreak havoc!"

"Calm down, everyone." Karanfil signs quickly as Yusuf translates her words after drawing the townspeople's attention. "We can go see what this is about, but please don't start a fight if it's the gangs. Our lives are the most important thing."

The inhabitant exchange a series of nods, and quickly start to move to join various boats in small groups.

Lisia moves to follow her mentors, but stops when she sees that the pirates are walking back to their ship.

"Are you coming, too?" She calls out, not quite sure herself why she's asking this.

(She just knows that they make her feel safe the way Marines haven't done in a long time, and probably never will do again.)

The rubber boy stops in the process of climbing the rope ladder to his ship, twisting around to grin at her.

"Nope! This is your island! But we've got some nakama waiting for us in town, so we'll go there with you!"

"This better not be Usopp's fault," the navigator mutters from where she's leaning against the railing, looking positively murderous at the thought. "If I find out he experimented on a bomb in the same room as me, I'm going to stuff it in his mouth and throw him overboard."

"I'll help, Nami-chan!"

"Don't encourage her, idiot."

"Don't give me orders, stupid."

"I wanna fight, too!"

"Shut it!"

"Sorry, Nami-chan."

"Sorry, Nami."

"Tch."

Lisia's shoulders slump under the sleight weight of her disappointment, but still she smiles as she watches the poor reindeer anxiously tiptoe across the deck to skirt around the fuming girl.

They make her feel safe, but she wants to build a safe home for her and her family more than she wants people she can cower behind.

"Come on, Lisia."

"Yeah, I'm coming!" She turns around one last time, and breathes in. "Guys! Thank you for everything!"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Where were you?! We almost lost the Merry!" Luffy screams as soon as his missing crewmates' feet touch the deck.

For once there's no one watching them go, whether waving or swearing at them.

Usopp leans forward, bracing his hands on his knees.

"Just… be glad... that you didn't lose it. I would… definitely... kill you." He pants.

Nami rolls her eyes, before sending Elynna a look.

"How was your stroll?"

A shrug.

"Entertaining."

"... You have blood on your clothes and your face is all messed up."

"Exactly." The First Mate drawls.

Nami stares harder.

"Fine, fine. I'll go take care of it."

"You better." The navigator hisses.

The door clicks shut, and all the attention is left on Usopp's shoulders.

The sharpshooter gulps, feeling Robin's encouraging smile at his back.

At this point, he strongly suspects that her genius brain found a way to eat two Devil Fruits, because she's really not the kind of person who should be able to become invisible this easily.

With a groan, he launches into an actual explanation of what he and his two crewmates were up to while the others were looking for the Merry.

"-and then Elynna had the gall to make us plan her escape in English when the Merry's life was on the line-"

"It was good practice." Robin comments with that easy, soft laugh of hers.

"It was a pain." Usopp corrects her in a grumble.

He notices too late the way Luffy gapes at him indignantly, and so can't avoid his Captain when the rubber boy comes rushing at him to tackle him to the floor.

"Argh! What the hell, Luffy-"

"You bastard! You went on a secret mission without me!"

"What are you even talking ab-"

Zoro watches both boys wrestle each other all over the deck with rising annoyance, but when he looks away to somehow communicate to his First Mate to get them to stop already, he finds that she still isn't back from the bathroom.

Of course she isn't.

He shrugs.

It's not like it matters much to him.

The two dumbasses would probably prefer Elynna's brand of scolding than Nami's, though.

It's too bad that he doesn't care.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Smoker."

The Marine Captain grunts in acknowledgement, and promptly skips over all detestable niceties to get straight to the point.

"What the hell happened?"

By which he means obviously that he wants an explanation on how it took so long for the corruption and abuse of authority to come to light when he knows how much it goes against the values of one of the colleagues he respects the most.

Or at least, he thought he knew.

"I was the only one who both had other Marines outside of the island willing to back me up and enough money to not need to steal any. It took me too long to realise that I should get outside help, and by the time I did I was being monitored 24/7."

Allan sounds tired, like his voice is dragging the weight of all these years of frustration and helplessness along with his words, and it makes Smoker back off, at least for now.

"Well, guess you did get that outside help." He says gruffly instead, the closest he'll come to apologising for his abrupt demand for explanations.

Though even his unconventional view of a Marine's job can't quite make him sincere when calling a bunch of criminals attacking the Marine base because they want more than the bribes they're getting 'help'.

It just so happened that they gave Allan an opportunity to expose his colleagues' action to the higher-ups in the process.

Unexpectedly, though, his former classmate chuckles.

"You can say that again."

Smoker freezes, cigar so close to his mouth he can taste the smoky smell of it in his mouth, and glances down at the little snail that is mimicking Allan's wryly amused face.

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that the base wasn't attacked at random. It was planned."

"... Are you sure of that?" Smoker eventually asks, rubbing a hand over his face in anticipated exhaustion at the idea that the Revolutionary Army might be involved in this.

It would be right up their alley, after all, and from what he heard, that officer of theirs who has been rising up the ranks insanely fast in the last year is just the right type of devious to attack corrupted Marines and blame the whole thing on the criminals said Marines are colluding with in order to create a rift between them and force the rest of the Marines into action at the same time.

"Well, given that I was part of the plan, I'm pretty damn sure."

The dry reply almost makes Smoker choke on the cigar he's about to put into his mouth.

"What?" He hisses.

"A crew arrived in town yesterday morning, and one of them tried to infiltrate the base to gain information disguised as a Marine."

Smoker is about to growl at Allan to stop stalling when it dawns on him that maybe-

Fuck.

"It was the Straw Hats, wasn't it?"

"Got it into one. Miss Ryan confirmed your theory herself, by the way."

Smoker isn't quite sure what to say to that, so he only grunts in response.

He can't tell whether Ryan Alice is an ally or not.

He himself put his principles before what was expected of him in his job more than once, but no matter how much he disagrees with all the politicking and corruption going on in both the Marines and the World Government at large, even he can tell that some kind of institution is necessary to counteract the rise of criminality that came with Gold Roger's death.

If he never met Ryan Alice, he might think that witnessing the Marines' corruption under that Nezumi guy made her some kind of anarchist, or that she's just acting to destroy things she doesn't like without considering the consequences.

But he met the girl who has infiltrated the Straw Hats as their First Mate.

He doesn't know her that well, but she doesn't strike him as enough of an idealist to be an anarchist (especially if she works for Cipher Pol), and her 'Captain' is much more likely to act without thinking than she is.

So either she or her superiors have a plan he can't see yet, which is definitely possible, considering that she either chose to join the Straw Hats by chance or because she somehow understood before everyone else their potential.

Or… She (and her superiors) simply doesn't care about the consequences of her actions, like she's playing with a house of cards and chess pieces instead of the world's political balance and real people -thousands of them.

It wouldn't be too surprising either coming from Cipher Pol.

Whichever the case, he needs to find out fast, because depending on what her goal is, she might end up being more detrimental than beneficial to the society he swore to protect.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Demetri gulps, and then proceeds to very carefully tiptoe away from the office where the conversation he unintentionally eavesdropped on took place.

He's back at the beach when he finally emerges from his own thoughts.

And yet, he still doesn't know what to think.

He only got to know the girl who introduced herself as Elynna for a few hours, but those hours only served to make him more confused, rather than enable him to get an elementary read on her.

He can't tell if she's a Marine, a pirate, or something else entirely.

He can't tell who she works for, if anyone.

He can't tell if she did everything she did just the day before because her crewmate asked her to and she was just being nice, if she had an ulterior motive, if she did it just to stir things up or was just plain bored.

He doesn't even know her name, for God's sake.

With a frustrated groan, he rakes a hand through his hair and harshly exhales all the air in his lungs.

It's fine.

He just finished a big investigation project that was taking up a lot of his time anyway, so he can just start another one.

He only has to find someone who can run a background check on a pirate-slash-maybe-Marine from East Blue.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Did you have to call me while I was taking a nap? And I already know where Teach is going next, I got some info on the last island I stopped at. He must be buying a lot of Eternal Poses to make his path less predictable-"

Elynna rolls her eyes.

She's been calling him around once a week since they left Alabasta, unsure whether doing it more wouldn't garner negative results instead of positive ones, and she's pretty sure he's only answered once with something remotely polite.

"Stop bragging about your tracking skills, Ignis, I have a story to tell. Besides, your sleep schedule is a mess, so I'm doing you a favour. Maybe you'll actually get some semblance of a full night's sleep today."

A strangled noise reaches her.

It sounds definitely offended.

"I'm not bragg-"

"Well you should." She cuts him off again. "Otherwise it feels like I'm the only one of us who knows that you're one of the strongest pirates out there. Besides, if I had more stories about your feats, I'd like you even more -and maybe nag you less about being careful. Not that you're not perfectly good pirate-slash-boyfriend material, mind you. But don't worry, if you start bragging too much, I can drag you back down with us lowly common beings."

"You're not lowl- What even are you-"

She grins, and cuts him off again.

She didn't think this would be so much fun.

"Anyway, can I brag now? We can take turns doing it, it'll be a fun bonding experience. If you can navigate while sleeping, you can navigate while listening to me telling you how I inadvertently pranked the Marines."

A snort.

"... How does that even work?" Ace scoffs on the other end. "You know what? Start talking. You either didn't say enough or you said too much."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"... You did not."

"Yes, yes I did." His little brother's First Mate parrots.

It takes a few seconds for Ace to imagine the scene and Elynna's absolute poker face through it, before he bursts into full-blown laughter.

(It fits like a stranger inside his mouth,

toxic fumes in his lungs being breathed through his blood with guilt hot on its heels.

He thought it would be fine to go see Luffy for just a few days.

Luffy would say hello and goodbye with the same smile, wouldn't chase after him,

and he was so tired of feeling too much and feeling not enough-

-fury like the fire on that night where he had no power on it and it threatened to consume him whole along with everything he knew,

pain like salt on a raw, open wound,

grief a gaping silence at the back of his mind like a nightmare he can't quite remember,

and empty empty empty, too empty to swallow anything else than the ghost of the meals prepared by hands that won't move anymore-

But now he's got a piece of his brother's happiness that won't let go of him

and he's too selfish, not good enough to let go of it,

just like he wasn't able to tell her that he wasn't worth how her gaze lingered on him when he left

the way Teach didn't deserve everything they gave him-)

"I know I set the bar high, but I hope your story is just as funny."

He stops laughing.

Of course she didn't forget. She's not Luffy.

"I don't have a story like that."

He can almost hear her rolls her eyes.

"Come on, Ignis. It's like when you bragged about Sea King, but you're the main character. Easy."

Maybe it will be, once the worth of his life is established as solidly as the firm ground of an island under his feet, rather than intangible like the sea.

"I didn't brag about Luffy, I was mocking him."

"No, you were definitely bragging about how stupidly cute or cutely stupid he is."

He tears a hand through his shaggy, sea salt-crusted hair in an attempt to fight off the embarassed rush of blood to his cheeks.

"That's your interpretation." He grumbles.

"Ugh, stop stalling and start bragging, damnit."

He stays silent for a minute before he opens his mouth again.

He owes her at least this much if he can't bring himself to shove her away.

"… Luffy is a better person than me, though."

"He's a better person than just about everyone, but it doesn't mean that everyone else completely sucks, so your argument is invalid."

"You suck at comforting people, Elynna."

"It depends on the person. But since you're smiling, I don't think I'm doing that bad."

His hand slides down to cover the lower half of his face, and he feels his lips twitch against the skin of his palm.

"… I'm not."

"Whatever floats your boat, darling. Will you just start bragging already, or do I have to make you?"

His lips twitch again.

How did he even end up being threatened into bragging of all things?

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Ah. Your crewmates are doing fine." She says when the conversation winds down.

There's a long silence that Elynna expects because she might not know Ace enough to be sure of why exactly he's not calling his crewmates, but she's familiar with the avoidance tactic.

"That's… good."

She looks down at the heaviness that sinks into the Den Den Mushi's features, at the bitter twist of guilt that turns its lips down, and lets it go.

"Uh huh. Well, catch you later, pretty boy."

A scoff reaches her as the grim shade that stuck to the snail's face is shoved down and away, and Ace's voice sounds like it always does when he speaks again.

"Don't hit Luffy too often, smartass."

"Don't underestimate me. Why would I need to hit him when I can have others do it for me? Besides, it's not like he has any brain cells left to lose."

He barks out a laugh that is cut off when he hangs up on her and leaves her to wonder why has no one worked on that man's virtually non-existent self-esteem because fuck her, now she has just a few months to make him love life enough that he won't pull some self-sacrificial bullshit on her even though she's not sure whether she cares enough about being alive, and no one will believe her or help her with this, but she wants him to live for Sea King, wants him to live for himself, because he looks like he would like to live without that big weight in his stomach telling him that he's everything bad no matter how good he is-

She grabs the nearest book she can find to escape from the shaky, spiralling mass of thoughts pressing against her temples that makes her head feel too full.

When Luffy barges in her room a few minutes later, her eyes still haven't moved from the random page she opened the book at.

Her Captain throws himself on the bed next to her, hip and shoulder knocking against hers in the process.

"Ann! What are you doing?"

She squints down at the book, making a half-hearted effort to actually read the text.

"I'm trying to understand Rain's book."

She's pretty sure it's some explorer's report on the most curious meterological phenomenons on the Grand Line.

"Sounds booooooring!"

She shrugs.

"I wouldn't know, I'm just looking at the pictures at this point."

He makes a curious noise, ducking his head closer so he can look at the book without hindering her vision.

They stay a few minutes like that, but it's not long before his attention strays away from the book.

She sees his head move in the corner of her vision, but ignores him in favour of the hand-drawn pictures in the book until his finger pokes at the strap of her bra next to her shoulder blade.

She stops to look up at him, flat and unimpressed.

But he ignores it, eyebrows furrowing pensively.

"Did you steal Nami's clothes? She's going to hit you."

… Okay, what?

She blinks slowly, and glances down at her bra to find dark blue lace arranged in a floral pattern.

Alright.

Definitely Rain's style, and definitely not hers.

But it doesn't really explain how Luffy arrived at that conclusion, because while she does tend to take off her clothes when the temperature becomes too high compared to what she dressed up for instead of putting on lighter clothes, it's really not part of Nami's habits.

So how does he know what type of underwear their crewmate likes?

…

Why is she even asking, he probably barged in on their navigator in the bathroom at some point and got punched for it hard enough that he remembers whatever she was wearing at the time very well.

"I didn't steal it, I just needed a new one when Rain took me shopping with her in some fancy lingerie store and I didn't feel like looking for a different place. The nerve of you."

Maybe she should have gone to another place, though.

This looks nice, but sports bras are definitely better for someone with her fighting style.

Turning another page of the book, she reaches blindly under the bed for a package that she casually throws next to Luffy's head.

"I did take the time to buy that, though."

Luffy tears happily through the plain packaging wrapped around the object, and she studiously ignores the pout that she can feel being directed at her.

"But Annnnnnn! I don't like books!"

She rolls her eyes.

"No kidding. Just open it, dumbass."

There's a beat of silence before-

"Ohhhhhh! Ann, look, there's that dinosaur that tried to eat me!"

She politely refrains from reminding him that she's the one who bought this book on dinosaurs, so there's no need to shove it in her face like that, thank you very much.

He looks cute, so she keeps her mouth shut and lets him fawn over the hand-drawn dinosaur pictures and the comic storyline with lots of fun facts included.

He cast such a longing look at the Little Garden when they left she almost thought they forgot their entire stock of meat there, until Sanji told her that he spent an unhealthy amount of time on their way to Drum Island whining about dinosaurs.

Her Captain couldn't even remember his birthday when she asked, and didn't seem to care either, probably because he does -and eats- whatever he wants no matter what day it is, but she figures she did a good thing considering the borderline insane giggles that are now coming out of his mouth.

"Ann, velociraptors look so cool, I wanna meet one!"

"No, you really don't. Unless it's dead."

"We should take one on the crew!" He declares brightly, her comment clearly flying way above his head.

"Fuck no."

"Hey, I'm the one who decides!"

"We can't take a dinosaur mascot, especially since Hebi is already filling that role."

"Who said that?!"

"Gold Roger." She lies, entirely straight-faced. "He said that if you take a dinosaur at sea it will end up dying because they can't adapt to all the new environments."

She's about to go on a Robin-worthy tangent about all the gory sufferings the poor dinosaur will go through when Luffy's stubborn frown turns into a disappointed pout.

Do not laugh.

Do. Not. Laugh.

"Fine, but we'll go see the dinosaurs again one day!"

"Yes, yes."

With another giggle he rolls closer to her until it almost feels like there's no shirt between her hip and his stomach with how closely she feels the heat of his skin.

Her nose wrinkles, and she pushes him away.

There's a reason she stripped down this much, damnit.

Luffy dramatically rolls away until he reaches the end of the bed, and then launches himself back towards her, book temporarily abandoned on a pillow.

She valliantly tries to ignore this new game, but gives up when he starts poking her, finger sinking into the plush flesh of her waist.

So every time he rolls back towards her, she obligingly pushes him away again, even though he's the one doing most of the work considering how much (or how little) enthusiasm she's putting into this.

Eventually, though, because the large bed is actually made up of two small ones pushed against each other, Luffy starts rolling towards the edge without noticing that all his moving around has made the bed she isn't on shift away.

He falls straight through the newly formed space between the two beds in a mess of limbs tangled with bedsheets.

"Ack! Ann, help me!"

"What? Sorry, I can't hear you."

"Annnnnn!"

She turns another page.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Um, so yes, Smoker did catch onto the fact that Ryan Alice/Kaji Ryūko and the Straw Hats' First Mate are the same person, but no, he absolutely did not catch onto the fact that her real identity is that of the Straw Hats' First Mate, and not Ryan Alice, who actually did die.

(Got you good on that one, admit it.)

As I and a very dear reviewer were saying, Elynna definitely deserves someone having a crush on her, because being hot is not just about the looks, it's a goddamn lifestyle. Sue me.

(Actually, please don't, I can't afford it.)

I've tried to find some kind of middle ground between explaining what is going on on Zephrim too much and not explaining enough, though I think I might be explaining too much. If you have questions or find some kind of incoherence, though, feel free to point it out!

I hereby solemnly swear that this is the last filler chapter for now and that I'm moving on to Jaya after this ^^'