It was Shanks who found the odd stowaway that was somehow able to hide from their Haki. Normally they would have been discovered within a few hours and forcibly sent back.
He didn't just let anyone on his ship or in his crew after all.
Shanks pulled up the scruffy young woman with such fire and passion in her eyes that he mentally dubbed her Spitfire long before he bothered to find out what she was doing on his ship.
By the time he reached the deck, most of the crew was already there.
"Seems we have a stowaway aboard," he said with good humor.
He didn't know what it was, but something told him that things weren't going to be the same very soon. And it was centered around the girl.
"How did you get on board and stay hidden for so long?" demanded Benn.
"Your security sucks," she said flatly, with an accent that sent alarm bells in Shanks' mind. It was one he hadn't heard in so long that he almost forgot what it sounded like.
"Still doesn't explain why you snuck aboard a known pirate's ship," said Shanks.
"I'm looking for someone. The marines are too annoying to deal with and I may have pissed off a few of the higher ups the last time I ran into them trying to find him," she said bluntly.
"What did you do to piss them off?" asked Yasopp.
"...I may have sunk two boats and punched a vice-admiral in the balls when they wouldn't tell me what I wanted to know," she said quietly.
"...You sunk a marine's ship. How?" asked Shanks.
"I did a lot of damage to the keel. I know I heard something in the ship break when I pointed that cannon straight down," she replied.
That got a round of good-humored laughter from the crew.
"So who is it you're looking for?" asked Benn.
"I'm looking for a man named Alexander Shanks. My mother mentioned her half-brother in one of her journals and said he left to explore some island that's only available once every five years and he never bothered to come back. However he was able to send a few letters back, so she knew he had found something there to his liking because he became a cabin boy on a pirate ship."
Shanks went absolutely stiff at the name "Alexander".
Benn noticed the reaction, so he decided to confirm something.
"We're going to need something else to go on besides a name."
She reached into her bag to pull out a battered old journal. Inside it was a sketch of a boy about thirteen or so with a familiar carefree grin and short cropped hair. The picture was done in plain pencil, so it was difficult to tell what the boy's hair and and eye color was, but for a sketch it was rather well done.
"I know it's been a few decades but I was hoping this would point me in the right direction. According to the journal I found he has the same red hair my mother did with darker eyes and a love of old weaponry, particularly swords like cutlasses. It didn't surprise mum in the least when he opted to ditch his boring job to become a pirate," she said.
Benn looked from the girl's red hair, and then to his captain who was looking rather pale the second she mentioned the name. Then there was the sketch she had...if one aged it up a few decades and added a scar or two, it would look like a younger version of Shanks.
Hell, even the last name was the same and no one really knew what the captain's original one was. He just went by Red Haired Shanks!
Finally Shanks spoke.
"Your mother's name wouldn't happen to be Lily Evans, would it?" he asked carefully.
The girl turned to look with him, her eyes a painfully familiar shade of green. It was almost like looking at a younger version of Lily, with a few tweaks.
"You knew my mother?"
Shanks did the only sensible thing he could. He fainted at the fact his niece had somehow managed to find the island and from there track him down.
Benn snorted.
"Someone please tell me we caught that expression of his on camera! There's no way in hell we're letting the captain live down the fact he fainted like that!"
Seeing the confusion in the girl's eyes, Benn took her aside.
"Do you have any way to test for a blood relation? The only one available is in the hands of the marines and it's really expensive to get one done."
"I can do it in under three hours. I made sure to bring it with me, but it's only good for one use. It's how I knew he was still alive... I took it before and from there tracked the journals down to find out who he was."
"What do you need?"
"Hair would work, but a blood sample would work best. Blood would insure that no mistakes are made," she said promptly.
Benn made a note to get a sample from Shanks. From the way his captain was acting he was fairly sure the girl before him really was his niece.
Most of the crew was watching with interest as the girl took out a vial of something that didn't smell very nice at all, and a piece of parchment. She added a little bit of blood into the vial before carefully pouring it on the parchment...which immediately began scrawling names and lines to show how they were related.
By the end of it, only a few of those names would be a bright bloody red...the majority of it was a dark color that looked closer to dried blood.
"The brighter colors indicates they're still alive. The darker ones mean they're no longer with us," she explained. "The ones at the very top are all the current ones...the original one could go a lot further."
There were less than a handful of 'living' names.
The crew only had interest in two names. Namely the one belonging to their captain (who knew his full name was Alexander Richard Shanks?) and the one most likely to belong to the girl in front of them.
"Alexander Richard Shanks?" said Benn smirking.
"Alexander after the great conqueror who took over a good chunk of the known world in order to discover what the sea at the other end of it looked like, and Richard after another king who's nickname was the Lionheart," said a familiar voice. Shanks walked into view. "My dad was a history teacher and he thought that by naming me after two famous kings I might one day grow up to do great deeds of my own. I was always more interested in pirates."
"Wait...you were named after Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionheart, who most people only remember because of his connection to Robin Hood?" she said incredulous.
Shanks grinned at her. Then he peered at the paper and snorted.
"I take it your father was a fan of constellations. I know it was a tradition in my step-mother's family to name the girls after flowers."
Because right there on the parchment was the name Larkspur Corona Potter-Black. Shanks never particularly liked Petunia, who was always so pissy about the fact Shanks and Lily had inherited magic from their father when she didn't.
"So I take it she really is your niece then?" asked Yasopp.
"Looks like it," said Shanks.
Something told him he needed to have a long talk with Lark about why she tracked him down in the first place. Girls her age would never go to the lengths he knew would have to be taken just to find an uncle they never met, never mind the fact that Lily would have almost certainly come with her.
Shanks was in a rather somber mood when Mihawk finally found him. He mostly came to warn him that there was a young lady looking for him.
He just assumed that she was trying to claim Shanks as her father, considering she had red hair.
"So I take it that the girl found you then. It seems your indiscretions have caught up to you," said Mihawk blandly.
Shanks shot him a glare that could have melted steel, it was that bad. Mihawk raised an eyebrow at it.
"She's not my daughter," said Shanks.
"Considering the photo I have of her, I highly doubt that," said Mihawk. He had only seen that particular shade of red on one other, and he was right in front of him.
"She's my niece."
Mihawk stopped dead.
"Your...niece?"
"I had a half sister," said Shanks. Mihawk noted the past tense and kept quiet. "Apparently my sister married some Noble, and when their daughter came of age the idiots in charge thought to marry her off simply because she's the last of the family."
"So instead she tracked down the one relative who couldn't care less about the Nobles in the hopes that you would protect her from the idiots," said Mihawk, making a general guess.
Shanks nodded.
"What are you going to do?" asked Mihawk.
Shanks was silent, and unfortunately stone cold sober. Somehow he doubted getting drunk would help things this time.
"I'm going to let her join the crew. I'm literally the only family she has left, and after hearing even a fraction of how bad things have gotten back in our home island there's no way I'm going to let those idiots use her again," said Shanks.
Just hearing how close he had come to losing his niece because that damn old man had tricked her into acting as a martyr pissed him off...and at the same time terrified him to his core.
Lark wasn't even eighteen yet, and yet instead of a normal life she had been forced to act as a child soldier and lost almost every shred of innocence she had long before she started to take lives. It infuriated him that Dumbledore had allowed such a thing to happen to a child...no, from what Lark had said he had almost outright encouraged it.
There was no way Shanks was going to let those magic-damn sheep that made up the English magical enclave hurt his little Spitfire ever again. Even if it meant turning her into a pirate like him.
Mihawk noticed the mixed reactions in the crew. On one hand, Shanks still had family who was more than accepting of his lifestyle and had managed to track him down, amusingly enough.
On the other hand, Shanks was upset that his favorite sister had been dead for over a decade and that his niece had suffered through hell and back because of an old man who should have protected her. Worse, that the girl's reaction to the news she had found her family was to avoid him.
Shanks swore if he ever saw Petunia again he was going to kill her. It wasn't like she was blood kin after all and to hurt a girl who had done nothing wrong other than to be born to a bad time pissed him off.
It was bad enough Roger's own son had to go through hell simply because of who his father was, and worse, believed that he was a monster because of the World Government.
Shanks didn't know if introducing Lark to Ace would help the two of them, or make things worse.
Right now he had to focus on rebuilding his niece back into the happy woman she should have been, rather than the jaded soldier who had lost any reason to live for herself.
Even if he had only one arm, Shanks still managed to hug Lark tightly. Because of her ingrained reactions to being touched, he made very sure she saw him coming and what he was planning to do first.
It only took one look at Lark for Mihawk to confirm Shank's claim that she was his niece. There were far too similarities between them, though something had robbed her of the expressions he saw on normal civilians. This was someone who had killed before and would not hesitate to do so again if necessary. She wouldn't enjoy it, but there would be no hesitation.
He could only wonder if she was half as good a swordsman as her uncle was. And what sort of ripples it would make once word spread Shanks had blood family on his ship.
Somehow he doubted that anyone who tried to take the girl captive to use against Shanks would last long...and that it wouldn't be the Red Haired crew that did most of the damage, if half the things he heard about her antics while tracking Shanks down was even remotely true.
Shanks eyed the storm on the horizon with glee. Lark had brought not one, but three brooms with her and he had been dying to fly ever since she brought them out. Especially the spare Firebolt. It had been far too long since he had a chance to properly fly above the clouds during a raging storm.
He could trust his men to keep the ship intact...for now he wanted to fly.
The insane and wild laughter of the two red heads could be heard all the way on the ship, most of whom were still in shock that a cleaning tool could do something like that.
Shanks whooped with glee as he went into a perfect dive, nearly giving Benn a heart attack at the near miss with the roaring waves...worse, his niece was right there with him looking just as gleeful.
Though if he was enjoying his long overdue chance at flying, it was nothing compared to the amount of howling he did when Lark managed to slip a bit of polyjuice into everyone's drinks one morning...roughly fifteen minutes before a Marine ship appeared and came to challenge them.
Lark was cackling like a madwoman at the horrified shock on the marine's faces, finding a ship full of Shanks all perfectly happy to turn their ire onto someone who wouldn't make their captain murderous if harmed.
Shanks could already hear the horrified sound of Mihawk when he got the photos of that incident. They made very sure to leave a few survivors to spread the tale of what happened.
(Though it was almost as funny the day Shanks found out his niece was a metamorphamagus... the sightings of Shanks on opposite sides of the ship for two full days driving the crew crazy was hilarious, and Shanks choked on his rum when Lark turned into him.)