A/N: I had more to this chapter, but it was getting too long so I decided to split it. Sorry. I really am trying to get us through this arc and to the Sunny, I promise. But these Mihawk chapters are just too fun to write!

Ch. 17 – Helena du Helena

"Sorry, I'm getting lost in the details again," Helena sighed. Though she'd done practically nothing but sleep since boarding the Sunny, her mind felt exhausted. "Suffice it, after about a month on Gloom Island, we saw an article in the news that said…"

"Wait, hold up!" Usopp interrupted. "You said you drank a toast."

"Yes, I know, it's not important…"

"No, but you drank," Nami said, "Wine. Actual wine, right?"

Helena eyed them incredulously. "Naturally."

"And?" Everyone prodded. – except for Brook and Franky. They just looked confused.

"And what?"

"Did you get drunk?" Luffy asked blatantly, eyes a-twinkle. "Did you go crazy and fight Mihawk?"

Helena blinked at him. "I don't get drunk," she reminded them, shrugging and shaking her head at the silly notion.

"Yes, you do!" they cried.

"I've never been drunk in my life," Helena insisted. "Why would one small toast do that to me?"

An exchange of glances.

"Come to think of it, I blacked out again," she went on pensively. "I really overworked myself during my time there, and I was constantly tired, so it's really not that unusual. Stop looking at me like that, Zoro."

Zoro had been staring at her slack jawed.

"When I next woke up, it looked like he'd been doing some demolition on part of the castle."

The Straw Hats burst into laughter, Brook and Franky excluded.

"Oh, I wish I could have seen that!" Zoro laughed.

"If she was as scary as she was when she fought you, I bet she caught even Mihawk by surprise!" Usopp added, nodding at Zoro.

"I'm sure he was able to handle her fine if I could," Zoro said with a nod of his own. "Oh, but she didn't know about haki back then. I wonder if that made a difference."

"What are you all babbling about?" Helena demanded.

"Nevermind," Zoro said, stifling a smile. "So, you were saying?"

She was saying…? What was she saying?

Tinkling glass alerted Mihawk to the fact that something was very wrong. After one sip of the pomegranate wine, Helena had slumped forward in her couch, dropping his fine crystal onto the stone floor.

Was it poisoned? He didn't feel any effects, and the wine tasted superb. Some of the best he'd ever had, in fact. – Maybe her illness had weakened her?

She swayed and looked up at him, blinking dazedly through glazed eyes.

"Are you drunk?" he asked incredulously. Had she even had more than a sip?

She exploded into a fountain of tears.

An emotional drunk, then. – For a few seconds he stared at her, at a complete loss for words. He was used to this kind of behavior out of Perona, but Helena, who had far more urgent things to cry about, had always kept her tears to herself. He had no idea what to do, but as the seconds ticked by, he was getting desperate for her to stop.

"Uh…" he started, awkwardly patting her head. "There, there?"

"Don' be nice to me, Uncle Mickey," she sloshed, slapping his hand away. "I's weird!"

Mihawk rubbed his smarting hand, feeling a little insulted. He'd been plenty nice to her before this moment! Anyway, she was the one who'd started calling him "uncle."

"I guess I will leave you alone then," he said, standing with Leda's ruined sword in hand. "It looks like you could use some privacy."

"You're an idiot," she garbled, tears slowing incrementally. "Is this how you always act when a girl's crying? No wonder Mom had no idea you liked her."

Well, that was below the belt. A hasty retreat still felt like the best course of action, but Helena had stumbled to her feet, blocking his path.

"We should keep training," she informed him, still sniffling. "Or do you think these tears make me weak?"

"You're in no state to…" he started, but stopped short when she threw a slash. He had hardly detected her drawing the blade. Since when had she been able to move that fast?

Good thing her aim was terrible. He hadn't had to dodge the attack, but it had narrowly missed the coffee table. It had cut through the chess board on top of it, however, and the couch behind him. A shame, really. He'd liked that couch. Good for napping.

"No state to what, huh? Huh?" she goaded. "I'm fine."

She had two swords out now. When had she drawn the other? He didn't recall blinking. – he immediately tuned into his haki, realizing if she could draw that quickly, she could also move that quickly.

He'd been right to be concerned. She threw four more, poorly aimed slashes in quick succession. It was a shame he'd left his broadsword in the other room. He had the knife hanging from about his neck, and used it to block with precision speed.

He hadn't been protecting himself, he'd been protecting the wall behind him. It required some special concentration to dissipate the power in her slashes, not just deflect them into the opposite wall. Her fourth slash passed him just a fraction of a second before he could intercept it, crashing into the wall with enough force to shake the entire castle.

He turned to look at the damage, brows lifted in surprise. Well, he'd been thinking of expanding the drawing room into the hallway anyway.

Wait. No he hadn't.

When he dared to glance further into the hole she'd created, he saw that it actually went beyond the hallway, into the room behind it and then out into the garden. If she kept this up, she might actually damage the structural integrity of the building.

More surprising than the power of her attack was the fact that it had gotten past him. Something like that hadn't happened in a long time.

Helena gurgled out a chuckle. "Hur hur hur, why you both look so surprised?"

"Both?" Mihawk asked, thinking at first that her crossed-eyes were seeing double. Well, they probably were, but then he noticed she meant someone else. A humandrill in a waistcoat had just peaked past the rubble the next room down. He wore a shocked expression on his simian face.

"If he goes ballistic, you'll have no more instruction until you retrain him," Mihawk informed her.

Helena frowned at this. It appeared that her foggy brain actually grasped the implications; she lowered her swords.

"Thank you," he said curtly, then turned back to the humandrill. "Gentry, please go relax in your quarters. You have the rest of the day off." He turned back to his drunken pupil. "I think you should do the same."

Helena glared at him cross-eyed. "No," she humphed.

"We won't be training today," he insisted firmly.

"Fine," Helena snapped. She took a few stumbling steps toward the corridor she'd created. "You won' train me? I'll train m'shelf. Where them monkeys at? Here monkey, monkey, monkey! Oo oo! Ah ah!"

Mihawk decided he should probably follow her for her own safety, and possibly the safety of the castle. He went to grab his sword, just in case, and soon found her outside the garden walls, screaming out challenges to the forest.

Curiosity got the better of him. Seated atop the wall, he masked his natural conqueror's haki, allowing the mandrills to get close without fear of his presence. It wasn't long before a fair number of challengers surrounded his drunken pupil.

She quickly dispatched the first wave of humandrills, but with a level of strength Mihawk had never seen out of her before. Though she moved without precision, she had an incredible amount of dumb luck with regard to landing hits and disarming her opponents. It was a pity she lacked finesse; she cut down a fair few trees in the process, leaving an unsightly gap in the forest line.

He grinned as he watched. Something about it all tickled him. After all, Leda had always been able to hold her liquor so well. It felt ironic that her daughter could not.

Wait.

The Leda he'd known had been able to drink him under the table. But now that he thought on it, he remembered something Andromache had mentioned to him in a letter long ago. Ever the irresponsible one, Leda had gone out drinking despite her pregnancy, and had gotten drunk after only one sip of alcohol. She'd leveled a restaurant, then had no memory of it the next day.

This type of thing apparently happened more than once. Andromache had theorized it had to do with Dionysus. The God of Wine's mask apparently had permanent side effects.

Luckily, Helena had been spared from fetal alcohol syndrome by the fact that it took so little liquor in her mother's system to get her drunk. However, Leda had been pregnant with Helena when she'd worn the mask. It appeared the side effects had carried over to her unborn child.

But were said side effects a blessing or a curse?

Swaying a bit as she eyed her handiwork, Helena gurgled out a triumphant laugh. Mihawk awarded her a slow clap.

"Well done," he said. "You dispatched that group faster than you've ever done before. But you're still nowhere near as strong as your mother."

The stupid grin on Helena's face dissipated into a scowl.

"Oh, yeah. Mom's so great," she grumped, "D'you know how obnoxious it is being compared to someone all the friggin' time?"

"Oh, it must be infuriating I imagine," Mihawk goaded in an even tone, "Particularly when the object of your comparison is superior in every way."

Helena's scowl deepened. "Yeah, yeah. Been hearin' that m'whole life," she pouted, then went on in sing-song, "'It's too bad you didn't inherit your mother's figure, Helena. Your a stick.' 'Couldn't even carry your babies to term? Leda carried you right onto the battle field!', 'Pity your not nearly as strong as your mother, Helena.' 'Oh, haki? Your Mom was a prodigy, why you struggling so much?'"

She glared at him and held out the rapier in her right hand. "She did it first try, huh? Just, hrrrrrrrm…" she scrunched up her entire face as though willing her energy into the sword. "And there it goes!"

She'd finished the comment nonchalantly, but Mihawk nearly fell off the wall in surprise; seconds after Helena had scrunched her face in apparent concentration, her blade had turned a solid, unbreakable black.

She hadn't noticed it right away, then did a drunken double take when she finally did, blinking at it as though someone had suddenly thrust her into a bright room. When she finally registered that she'd managed a steady coating of armament haki for the first time, she let out a loud laugh.

Turning her attention to her sea prism dagger, she scrunched her face again and did the same thing. Giggling like a giddy toddler, she knocked the two black blades together just to hear them ring off of one another.

She lifted a leg above her head and used her toes to clumsily retrieved one of her foot swords from her back sheath, then did the same with the other. Soon they too gleamed with a dark sheen and she was tap dancing drunkenly along the ground with her blackened blades, still knocking her hand blades together like bells.

Suddenly she stopped and pointed her swords at her master…well, in his general direction at least:

"How's that, huh?"

He stood, drawing his broadsword with a wide smirk on his face.

"We shall see," he said.

Leaping from the wall, he swung at her hard though not at his full speed, giving her time enough to parry. He was delighted at how well her blades held when they connected with his.

Aside from slowing himself down, he hadn't been pulling his punches. Much. With that one strike, he sent her flying back into the forest a good half a mile. After all, he didn't want her doing any more damage to his castle.

He rushed after her using shave, and soon his blade connected with hers again. Her strong spirit radiated from her in pulses and waves, so that though he had toned down his own conqueror's haki, hers soon had scared off most of the mandrills within a mile radius. Birds too far away to detect their fight fled the distant trees. The forest around them went quiet.

In that moment, if he closed his eyes, her raw, uninhibited spirit felt almost exactly like her mother's.

Powerful as he was, he couldn't loose his full strength on her, yet he laughed in true delight as they fought. Something about it brought closure to the jaded swordsman, finally seeing that Leda's talent hadn't been wasted entirely; that it did truly reside in her daughter, just hidden beneath all the inhibitions Helena carried with her crown.

"That's more like it, Daughter of Leda!" he proclaimed as they fought.

"Daughter of Leda, Wife of Zoro," Helena grumped at him, staggering back to glare at him. "What if I just want to be Helena du Helena for a change?"

He grinned a broad grin.

"Very well," he prompted, "Show me what Helena du Helena can do."

"Dionysus Dance – Bacchanalia!" she pronounced. And suddenly she was dancing around him there in the darkness of the forest, swinging her blades with no real intention of hitting him. Even a novice could dodge her movements, but there was more to it than met the eye.

He could feel her conqueror's haki charging as she moved, power pulsing through her body and into her blades. He was curious to see how far it would take her, but as her master he couldn't excuse such a meager offensive, to say nothing of her lack of defense.

He swung at her hard, intending to knock her down with the flat of his blade. She blocked him with surprising ease; a drunken swing timed just right to stop his attack. It had to be that amplified luck of hers. Sober, she wouldn't have been able to stop him.

Pushing off of their crossed swords to perform a clumsy but effective flip above him, she continued her wild dance where she landed. Though he attempted twice more to stop her cavorting, she dodged him almost accidentally it seemed.

Suddenly she stopped dead, her gaze leveling with his.

"Sparagmos," she rumbled, bloodlust in her eyes.

His brows lifted in surprise. Never had she looked more wicked. He marveled that under all those layers of virtue and selflessness, Helena had a bit of a demon hidden inside her.

She sprung toward him, bringing all four of her swords at him, two from above, two from below, folding herself in half as she jumped. He actually had to kick his power up a notch to keep her from dismembering him.

He pushed her back with one fell swipe, but she actually managed to cut the fabric of his left sleeve before he caught all four of her blades. She flipped head over heels, landing on her head and shoulders with her legs folded over her and her royal rump in the air. Her luck seemed to extend to her modesty, it seemed, for her now tattered dress fell in just such a way to keep her covered.

Still grinning, Mihawk lifted his non-dominant arm and inspected the damaged brocade of his jacket sleeve. His gaze shifted back to her when she flopped upright, crown askew. The demonic glint in her eye had vanished when he'd dispelled the attack, but she looked like she still had plenty of energy to keep going.

Though he desperately wanted to continue to fight her like this, he knew that he'd have to use his full strength if they took it any further. There was really no way for him to do so without seriously injuring her. He couldn't exactly let her keep rampaging though the forest though. He needed to figure out some way of wearing her down.

Before he could formulate a plan, a solution presented itself in the form of a powerful, albeit animal presence. Though Helena's strong haki had driven off most of the humandrills, it had actually attracted one in particular; one who was determined to become the strongest swordsmonkey on the island.

"Oh, hey Zoro," Helena slurred, stumbling to her bladed-feet to face the Zoro-mandrill. "You wanna dance?"

The huge, hulking mandrill had already tied a bandana around his head, drawing three katana from his bellyband with a grunt.

"That is not your husband," Mihawk felt the need to remind her, but she didn't seem to hear him.

"You were a lot cuter as a fox, you know that?" she informed her new opponent, leveling a sword at him. "Show me what you got, monkey-man! Don' worry. If I win, you can still keep my hand. We're soooo past that now."

In better spirits than he'd been in years, Mihawk could hardly stifle his amusement at her faux pas. "If you manage to kiss him, he may turn back into a human," he deadpanned.

"Really?" Helena replied with complete credulity. "Shoulda tried kissing him as a fox."

It wasn't long before Helena was chasing the Zoro-mandrill through the forest, her lips a-pucker as he fled her in sudden alarm. For all the poor monkey had imitated Zoro down to the personality, how could he have known that his human counterpart had a crazy wife?

Helena eventually landed a sloppy kiss on the mandrill's cheek. Her disappointment that it didn't work, and his completely shock that she had actually invaded his personal space, soon led to blows. Mihawk carefully chaperoned the situation until Helena had worn herself out, then drove the now exhausted Zoro-mandrill off himself.

The Zoro-mandrill wasn't as strong as the actual Zoro, but Helena had still done well to tire him out without any injury to her person. And though at the end of her strength, Mihawk still had to knock the indefatigable drunk unconscious with the flat of his blade to keep her from attempting to chase her "husband" for round two.

He hadn't stopped grinning throughout all of this. With her swords slung over his shoulders, he carried Helena back to the castle with more hope for her future than he'd had since she'd arrived.