#They were on the SAME ISLAND THEY COULDVE BUMPED INTO EACH OTHER ON THE WAY OUT

[cryptvokeeper]

my brain must be wired to spin a roulette wheel of what One Piece character to rotate around in there because today it was fucking X Drake of all people. like I am just putting the fact that he was also on minion island in a jar and shaking it.

Like. Hes gotta know right. Hes GOT to have seen a picture on Sengoku’s desk or some shit and been like “hold on is that the dude that robbed my dad?” He’s GOTTA have heard reports of a rising pirate captain with the op-op fruit and been like “HOLD ON IS THAT THE FRUIT THE FLEET ADMIRALS DEAD SON STOLE FROM MY DAD???”

Like!!! Surely he must!!!

[rrrawrf-writes]

stuff i wrote at work 7.2

tarquin straight up offs a dude, and kk Freaks Out About It

7.1 here

“There you are.” Unlike Keo, Tarquin didn’t seem all that worse for wear. He was hardly even winded, whereas Keo was still out of breath, rubbing at the painful, dark bruise on his stomach.

Keeping the rope spell active wasn’t help Keo feel any less exhausted, either. A chain link fence cut the alley in two; Keo had used his spell to lash the man to it, and a steady, dull burning sensation fizzed underneath his skin as time wore on. He relaxed, minutely, as Tarquin returned, eyeing the man with interest. Duly impressed, he added, “I can’t believe you actually caught one.”

Keo rolled his eyes at the condescending tone.

“I didn’t know what to do with him,” he told the prince, dropping onto an overturned trash can. “Thought maybe you’d want to - to ask him questions, or something.”

This had been an information-gathering mission, after all. Tarquin grinned maliciously. His tattoos were hidden underneath his long sleeves, but he rubbed his arms as if he itched to let loose a few spells. Keo eyed him almost as warily as he watched the man he had captured.

“I’d love to,” said Tarquin, pulling a small flashlight from his pocket. Their prisoner glared as Tarquin stepped forward, shifting against the magic that held him. He squinted as Tarquin shone the flashlight in his face.

The prince went very still. Frowning, Keo moved up next to him, and watched the two other men stare at each other.

Tarquin’s hand snapped out, grabbing the man by the chin and pushing his face to the side. A column of scarred X’s, cut into his skin, marched neat and orderly down the side of his neck.

“You bastard,” Tarquin breathed. He stepped back, bumping into Keo, and roughly elbowed the islander out of the way. Before Keo could protest, Tarquin produced a handgun from the small of his back.

Then he shot the man dead.

Keo flinched, clapping his hands over his ears as Tarquin fired once, twice. And then he fired three more times. A pause, and then five more shots, until the body of the man was barely recognizable as such anymore.

Keo stared at the bloody wreck, and then turned his horrified gaze to Tarquin. “What was that!”

Tarquin holstered his gun. “Let’s go.”

“What?”

“I said, time to go,” Tarquin snarled, grabbing Keo’s arm. He started dragging him back towards the street.

“You just shot him!” Keo’s voice cracked as he looked over his shoulder. The sight of the man’s bullet-riddled body made him want to vomit. “In cold blood!”

“I did,” Tarquin said, supremely satisfied. “Bastard even deserved it.”

“Wait wait wait -” Keo pulled back against Tarquin’s grip. “You can’t - You can’t just do that -”

Tarquin shot him a look full of exasperation and impatience. “We don’t have time for this, K’lohei. Someone will have heard.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before shooting a man to death!”

Tarquin rounded on him furiously. “I told you, he deserved it. That man was a cold-blooded murderer -”

Keo, feeling more bold than smart, interrupted. “Well, apparently so are you.”

Tarquin froze, sucking in a sharp breath. A chill ran down Keo’s back; he instinctively reached for his summoning inkspell on his belly as the look on Tarquin’s face turned contemptuous and lethal.

The prince growled out a curse, grabbing Keo’s shirt and shoving him against the wall. Both prince and islander flinched a second later, as their blood-oaths reminded them of the covenant they had made. Tarquin let go of Keo; Keo dropped his hand away from his inkspells.

Tarquin closed his eyes and let out a short, angry huff.

“That,” he said, his voice little more than a low hiss, “was Antoin Retzing. He has a body count in the hundreds. I’m not about to let scum like that just walk around free.”

Keo tried to sidle away from Tarquin, but even if the prince was no longer dragging him around by his shirt, he had Keo well and truly pinned against a rough brick wall, in between pools of light from the streetlamps.

“How,” he started, and then both men froze at the sound of distant shouting. A moment later, once it quieted, Keo repeated, “How do you know that was him?”

He’d never heard of Antoin Retzing before, and if the man was as terrible as Tarquin said, he felt like he should have known something. Tarquin curled his lip.

He gestured to the side of his own neck. “You saw those scars? The X marks? That used to be Retzing’s way of tracking all the people he killed, until he blew up the Oldhome Bridge.”

Keo’s eyes widened, but before he could say anything else, they heard police sirens. Cursing, Tarquin grabbed his arm - gentler, this time - and towed Keo down another alley. They moved for several blocks before they came to a stop.

“That - the Spring Solstice bombing, that was him?” Keo asked, leaning against a warehouse wall to catch his breath. Tarquin kept an eye on the mouth of their new alley hiding place and gave one curt nod. “But - how do you know?”

“I run a damn spy network, K’lohei,” Tarquin snapped. “Of course I know.”

Keo wasn’t so sure he was convinced. Maybe Tarquin knew Retzing was the bomber, sure, but: “Even - Even if that was him, you can’t just go around executing people.”

“Why not?” Tarquin frowned at Keo, crossing his arms. “I knew who he was. He would’ve killed you if he had the chance, K’lohei, why are you so upset about this?”

Keo, remembering the fight, shuddered. “Because - Because he should’ve gone to trial, Tarquin! It wasn’t fair to just kill someone like that, we couldve, I dunno, handed him over to the police.”

Tarquin stared at him in disbelief. “Handed him over to the police,” he repeated.

“You can’t just kill people without a reason.”

“I don’t need a lesson on justice from a car thief and a smuggler,” Tarquin snapped.

“You need them from someone!” Keo lifted his chin at Tarquin’s glare. “That wasn’t right.”

Tarquin snorted and rolled his eyes. “So you’d, what, have us take a mass murderer to Borza’s police and write them a little note saying ‘hey, caught you a murderer, we can’t tell you any evidence but he’s totally the Solstice Bomber’?”

Keo pounced on that. “So you can’t prove that was him?”

Tarquin gave him a look. Then, frustrated, he tossed his hands in the air. “Fine. Fine, you know what? Let’s go ahead and put on this charade.”

They were in a quiet meeting of three alleys. Tarquin abruptly dropped his disguise spell; the freckles vanished from his face, and the reddish color leached from his hair, leaving it nearly white underneath the watery light of a bulb on a warehouse wall. His eyes, once again their original green, gleamed at Keo as he drew himself up. His clothes were shabby and ill-fitting, but never before had Keo believed so fervently that he was speaking with a prince of royal blood.

“I, Prince Tarquin, of Port au Fois and the Kamean Empire,” he sent Keo a challenging look, and the islander had to bite his tongue, “present for consideration the following eyewitness evidence:

“In 1083, I witnessed the deceased trap an Outlander family, a father and his children, in a cellar and throw two grenades inside. In the same year, I myself fought the deceased, witnessing the scars on his neck. In 1085, I watched a video of the deceased planting the bombs on the supports of the Oldhome Bridge during the Spring Solstice celebration in Callegos. This evidence I present with full and honest intent to bring his crimes to light.”

The last sentence was the same phrasing Keo had heard in his own trial, but the cold fury Tarquin delivered it with stunned him almost as much as the listing of crimes. Keo looked anxiously over his shoulder, feeling as trapped as when Antoin had pinned him down. Tarquin continued.

“The evidence is considered,” he declared, “and I, Prince Tarquin, sentence -”

“You don’t have the right,” Keo said, his mouth moving before his brain could catch up. Tarquin pinned him with an icy look.

“I,” he said, low and dangerous, “have every right, as a prince of my country, and of your own, and I sentence Antoin Retzing to immediate execution. Are you happy now?”

Keo was not, but he wilted under Tarquin’s glare. After a moment, Tarquin scoffed and jabbed a thumb at the end of the alley, where a dark red four-door waited for them. “Get in the damn car, K’lohei.”