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danwhobrowses · 4 years

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Why Tashigi Deserves More Respect

I really gotta remember these other things I plan on writing XD Often I get reminded though by people around me criticizing something I realise ‘that’s a little misunderstood’ and then get compelled to write about it. For today we’re looking at the female Marine of One Piece, Tashigi. Now before we start, I want to make a point that Tashigi is still an underused character brimming with potential that Oda seems to shy a lot from. Oda can still sincerely do a lot more with her and I for one have been disappointed by her lack of use in Stampede and lack of appearance in Wano. However, I get a lot of people who feel that Tashigi is ‘useless’, and I’m going to say that this isn’t really the case.

Argument 1: Her Battles

Of course, a lot of strength regarding a character comes with their ability to come out victorious. It can harm any character in a show to constantly be on the losing side of a fight and it does hurt Tashigi (and Smoker) a lot that they do end up that way. While I would love Tashigi to have her first clean win since those guys in Loguetown I’d like to remind you that Tashigi’s fights do have a bit of defense to them, let’s look at all of Tashigi’s named opponents

Zoro (Loguetown) - We always knew that Zoro was winning this, while she was bested by Zoro the purpose of the story wasn’t ever going to be Tashigi being stronger, instead this was Zoro having to confront her similarities with Kuina in personality rather than skill.

Nico Robin/Miss All Sunday (Alabasta) - While Tashigi was unable to even strike Robin back in Alabasta, Robin’s devil fruit allowed her to be perfect for such a situation. A trained and deadly assassin, Tashigi’s physical confrontation was never going to succeed, but what was key to this battle was Tashigi’s realization in regards to the failure of Justice. In the end she had to rely on Luffy to defeat the Pirates the WG had assigned to maintain the balance.

Luffy (Marineford/Punk Hazard) - Luffy and Tashigi briefly crossed paths in Marineford, Luffy swiftly dodged her but again, Tashigi was never going to defeat Luffy and was merely a doorway to put Smoker and Luffy into a fight. It’s also worth reminding that Tashigi must’ve been capable enough to hold her own against Whitebeard’s lesser forces, since she was uninjured from Marineford. They also crossed at Punk Hazard, but then they were both weakened by being in unfamiliar bodies, something which Luffy even acknowledges.

Trafalgar Law (Punk Hazard) - as pictured above, Tashigi’s defeat to Law was another gateway for Smoker to enter the fight, but this one had more purpose in showing Tashigi’s willpower, which we will get to. As you can tell, there’s a theme: Tashigi would never have beaten Law in terms of the narrative, why do we hold it against Tashigi that she lost to the guy who later did this?

Ceasar Clown (Punk Hazard) - while listed as a fight, she fell the same way as Robin and Franky due to his DF being unrevealed, again this being a gateway to sell that Ceasar had a danger to him, I wouldn’t actually count it as a fight.

Vergo (Punk Hazard) - the Donquixote spy is one of Doflamingo’s deadliest subordinates. The original Corazon, Tashigi’s conflict with Vergo brought Sanji into the fight and once again highlighted to Tashigi the corruption within the Marines themselves. Like Law (and the next), we can’t be too harsh on Tashigi losing to Vergo, the guy easily fended off Sanji to the point of almost breaking Sanji’s leg, he also was able to beat Smoker

Monet (Punk Hazard) - Monet is a mixed one, because Zoro quickly defeats her she was quickly overshadowed by the fact that she struggled to even get on the offensive, broadening the gap between them. But, I’d like to remind everyone that Monet was able to force Luffy into fleeing their battle and was handling Robin, Nami and Chopper at once. Tashigi hadn’t completely lost either, I would bet that she’d fight without an arm, maybe not successfully but she would, and she got the finishing blow on Monet - her second offensive attack against Monet put her away and while technically this doesn’t count as a W for Tashigi she did not technically lose in this fight either

As you can see, while it’s easy to say that ‘Tashigi never wins her fights, so she’s weak’ it really undermines the opposition she willingly puts herself against. Narratively there’d be no reason for Tashigi to win these fights, doing so would lead to confusion and disbelief (for instance, would you have seen Luffy beating Kaido solo back in Bakura Town? No, obviously). Tashigi is still strong, she’s able to survive the Grand Line, easily deflect cannon fire with her sword and use Haki, the latter cannot be said for Main Characters like Nami, Chopper, Franky, Carrot and somehow Robin (like girl you spent 2 years with the Revolutionaries, where’s your Haki?). While we would love a win to validate this, Oda always puts her against an opponent that would be difficult for her to win against, and we thus mistake her inability to win as weakness. So that leads to another argument. Argument 2: Tashigi always punches above her weight While this is very much true, One Piece has often told us that being the strongest doesn’t always mean that you will win. Consider 90% of Nami and Usopp’s wins, Luffy’s wins over Crocodile, Enel, Lucci, Magellan, Cracker and Katakuri, the weak may not be able to choose how they die but that doesn’t mean that the strong can either. I’d also like to argue that Tashigi’s motive on fighting strong opponents is not because she feels that she is stronger, she fights them because they are the enemy that needs to be stopped, her motives are pure in her pursuit of justice just as the Straw Hats fight stronger opponents because it fulfills a just cause such as saving Alabasta, their crewmates, people who had their shadows stolen, Camie, Fishman Island, the Punk Hazard children, Dressrosa, Zou or Wano. Tashigi really gets criticized for it because it doesn’t yield the results it does for major characters, often needing help to get the victory. In that I wanna point out a harsh truth as well; Goku - the people many anime fans will compare power scales against - almost never beats the main villain on his own in DBZ or DBS. Freeza - required damage from Krillin, Gohan, Vegeta and Piccolo before the win, and he didn’t finish him off, Cell - tags out to Gohan, who also needs Vegeta’s help to win, Buu - needs Vegeta’s help via fusion and a full power recharge by the Dragon Balls, Beerus - he lost, Golden Freeza - he got jumped by Sorbet and needed Whis’ rewind, Hit - he gave up, Fused Zamasu - lost, and needed Zeno to wipe him out, Jiren - needed Freeza and 17′s help and Vegeta’s energy and finally Broly - needed fusion. So maybe, if even Son Goku cannot win on his own, we can cut Tashigi a little bit of slack given that she’s not even a main character.

Argument 3: ‘She does nothing’ I don’t really like this insinuation. Often Smoker and Tashigi are the ones that pick up the mess after all the enemies are defeated, but for some reason that equates to ‘doing nothing’. I think because people see Tashigi as interchangeable with any other character she is thus useless because she is not mandatory. However, Tashigi’s role is much more complex than that.

Even if she’s not strong enough to fight the biggest fishes in the pond, she still manages to grow and prove her worth. If Tashigi was replaced with any generic marine captain a lot of what happened would be different. It was Tashigi who identified Wado Ichimonji and Sandai Kitetsu for Zoro, Tashigi who (albeit reluctantly) directed Luffy to Crocodile, Tashigi who kept the Straw Hats safe from arrest in Alabasta, Tashigi who convinced Smoker that he needed to swallow his pride and side with Law and Luffy to stop Ceasar and it was Tashigi who convinced Nami to entrust the Punk Hazard children to them. Through her experiences she also cultivates her own unique sense of Justice. While she follows Smoker’s doctrine of ‘A Pirate will always be a Pirate’ and that the Shichibukai system and the World Government as a whole is flawed, she has also learned for herself that there are times that pride must be set aside, in a way Tashigi’s sense of Justice has become a combination of Smoker’s and Fujitora’s: in order to rebuild justice, the navy itself must become strong enough to not depend on pirates, but pride cannot supersede the greater good. In addition, implying she does nothing also implies that she doesn’t practice her own sense of justice either. She stepped in on Zoro twice to protect her men from harm, before even arriving at Punk Hazard we learned that she had a good relationship with the parents who had their children kidnapped as they asked specifically for her which in turn led her to personally strive to reunite the children with their parents and she even protected the truth of Vergo from G-5 so that they didn’t feel betrayed and demoralized. Of the things Tashigi does, nothing is not one of them, she displays compassion, fairness and determination in definitive moments. Argument 3: She’s too hung up on her Feminism

So, one of the major dynamics of Tashigi and Zoro is her misconception that Zoro wouldn’t cut her because she was a woman, a belief that women have to prove themselves more to be seen as strong against men being one of the beliefs she shares with Zoro’s childhood rival Kuina. While it can be a tad irksome that she’d hang onto this with Zoro, until Monet Zoro never actually demonstrated the contrary to her. This is mainly a complaint by hindsight, we only dislike the opinion because we’ve seen Zoro more than Tashigi has, and she’s not 100% wrong, Zoro himself has been a bit of a traditionalist, in Skypeia he angrily chastised Enel for attacking Robin since she was a woman, and he only does step in on Monet to save Tashigi - not even finishing her off despite being very capable of doing so. Outside of Zoro, Tashigi’s feelings that she gets treated differently due to her gender is proven and reflected in how G-5 treat her with little authority, only really listening to her because she’s pretty. You can’t be too hard on Tashigi given that she is constantly faced with this truth on a daily basis, and her desire to be seen for her strength and skills are still an amicable one, it’s worth noting that even Law recognized that her mentality and warrior’s spirit was far greater than he swordsmanship, but he only thought this internally. In Tashigi’s case it would help her confidence to be given validation, and not in the condescending way Zoro usually talks to people. While it can be annoying that she immediately thinks that she’s being treated differently because she’s a woman, this also shows that she wants to be treated as an equal; if she is defeated in combat she wants to be cut to preserve her honour, it is the mentality all Great Samurai have, including Zoro. Oda does something with Tashigi he rarely does with any woman in One Piece in making her less sexualised and body-confident to reflect her goal of being recognized by her spirit and actions rather than her appearance, but he also makes that complex for the character which in a way this is most important for.

Argument 4: She’s not a good Rival for Zoro

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Tashigi’s character is that she is meant to be Zoro’s rival, in a similar manner to how Smoker and Luffy are embroiled in a Garp/Roger-esque cat and mouse chase. Because of this, people expect Tashigi to advance at a similar scale to Zoro to keep him on his toes, to make sure that he doesn’t end up complacent in his strive to become the World’s Greatest Swordsman. Her former likeness to Kuina also adds to this misconception, since because Kuina was Zoro’s rival with the same goal and always stronger than Zoro himself, Tashigi must be similar.

But this is not why Tashigi and Zoro are always put together. Tashigi is not Zoro’s rival, no other character we’ve met has the same goal as Zoro, and this keeps his story free to develop with different challenges. Tashigi’s pursuit of strength is not for the same reasons as Zoro, she doesn’t want to be the World’s Greatest Swordsperson, she only wants to protect the sanctity of the Meito and keep them out of unworthy hands. Her pursuit of Zoro was both because he dishonoured her in their fight and so she could claim Wado Ichimonji. In the New World however we don’t see that as much from Tashigi, even when she sees Shusui she doesn’t make a point to declare taking it from him because he’s unworthy (like Kin’emon would later do), this is because she does acknowledge his strength and worthiness of using these Meito, her personal conflict now though is to be seen as worthy to him as a swordsperson rather than a pirate to a marine. In reality, Tashigi is instead Zoro’s and Kuina’s foil. She is similar in looks and perspective to Kuina but different in everything else from clumsiness, skill and ambition, the fact that Zoro struggles to handle this leads to the two becoming entwined in their respective journeys. No person gets under Zoro’s skin like Tashigi does, even to a point where he was reluctant to even be in eyeshot of her - how many people have you seen Roronoa Zoro hide from? They are each other’s foil because they are both stubborn people out to prove something but put on two different sides that conflict. That is the true purpose of their dynamic, their confrontations expose one another and show places where they can still grow and I still feel that we haven’t scratched the surface of this relationship.

Argument 5: She’s not Important

A combination of the earlier arguments, Tashigi gets a lot of flack because people think she’s not important enough as a character to have the screentime she gets. While it’s not hard to see why people feel that, it usually comes with people giving up on the idea that there’s a greater plan for her. It may just be me, but I am reluctant to believe that Tashigi appears in several forms of merchandise including calendars, games (as NPCs, Bosses, Supports or playable characters) and even figurines and not have a purpose in the greater scope of the story, do we really expect that from Oda? I doubt that very much! Granted, Wano would’ve been a perfect placement for her to push herself given the views on women in the country and it being the homeland of famous Meito. And yes, she could’ve had a much greater role in Stampede given how well they managed Smoker in it. We are allowed to be disappointed by this, but the fact that Tashigi has remained as consistent in presence as she has been in the show does hint at a bigger role, even if it’s being that wave of revolutionizing the Marines with Coby and Fujitora, her own origins or finally proving herself to the audience and to Zoro, Tashigi is not done and thus she is still important. “Just because they say a bird cannot fly, doesn’t mean that it never will” - Oda SBS 17 on Tashigi and Kuina’s names being named after flightless birds So, Why does Tashigi deserve more Respect? Tashigi as a character is one of Oda’s more subtle progressions. In contrast to Zoro who we see grow, we don’t see how Tashigi gets from A to B, we can also contrast to Coby whose rise becomes as magnificent as his puberty that Tashigi’s growth is much less abrupt and more steady, we see her struggles more than we do Coby where his successes are only heard in passing. Tashigi can also act as the ‘normal person’ in the marines, we compare her to Zoro in strength because she uses a sword but we never give her the benefit of the doubt that Roronoa Zoro is a bloody superhuman, plus not everyone has the great luxury of being trained by Dracule Mihawk for 2 years...furthermore, her challenges against Devil Fruit users are always filled with good intentions and strong willpower, but still self-doubt and shame, if anything Tashigi is one of the most human characters of One Piece for this reason; she learns, she suffers, she grows and she does it all without the luxury of Shonen perks such as superhuman power or endurance. Also she is a good person, she has a strong sense of morality and will, an altruistic desire and even in the situation she gets put in she makes a step that leads to the plot going in a positive direction. And for a character that has been in as many arcs as she has, there is still so much potential left to be untapped that fans are still after 2 decades eager to see from her.

Tashigi is a strong, valiant and just person, who is still really powerful if people stop trying to compare her to the likes of Luffy, Law and Zoro. Even when she fails she picks herself up and can still come out with a small victory from protecting innocents, arresting criminals and escorting children to get help. She is a lot stronger than people give her credit for and it’s for that she deserves respect.

#one piece #tashigi #zoro #roronoa zoro #kuina #shimotsuki kuina #smoker #smoker one piece #monkey d luffy #monet #ceasar clown #vergo #nico robin #trafalgar law #I may be a teeny bit biased because I ship her and zoro but I know I'm not alone with people liking her but hoping for more #I trust you oda

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trellwords · 8 years

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wip amnesty from (mostly) years ago; 9000 words, law/luffy, monet/law, law & bonney, would-be psychological horror that never got around to it

Bonney said, "But it was a victory."

"A pyrrhic one," bit out Law, and in the window's reflection Monet saw him finish his drink and reach for the bottle, take a swig straight from it instead of pouring himself another. "My whole life, Bonney."

Monet was the first to wake when Penguin rapped her knuckles on the door. Law was only stirring beside her when she called, “Yes, Penguin,” just loud enough to hear outside, and received the following report:

“Land in sight of the scouting submersible, ma'am. Perhaps an hour out from our position.”

“Very well,” said Monet, and, “we’ll be right out.” Then, before she forgot: “The weather?”

“Snowing,” said Penguin, and left, rubber boots ringing in the hallway.

Beside her, Law rolled over and scrubbed a hand over his face, leaving it pressed over his eyes. “I almost wish land had waited until daybreak,” he murmured.

Monet smiled, teased: “Having a good dream?”

“No,” said Law, “no dreams,” and Monet understood: for both of them, the only good dreams were none at all, dreamless nights a respite from fouler things.

They rose slowly, by their standard—Monet had seen Law jump out of bed and be ready to charge out almost instantly, sword and hat and clothes summoned from the closet with the blink of an eye. Not so today. While he brushed his teeth in the next room Monet tied back her hair and dug out warmer clothes, a sideways vest made to fit over her wings; once Law returned, long coat donned and covering him right down to the ankle, he stopped beside her and fastened the latches, silent.

“Lucky, don’t you think?” she said, while he worked. “Landfall before your birthday. Maybe you’ll be able to celebrate somewhere, after all.” It would be his twenty-ninth.

Law said, “I don’t mean to,” and she felt his fingers pause before moving onto the next latch, could feel his frown. “It’s very strange,” he said, “birthdays being something other than a countdown.”

She did not ask, still? said only, “Good strange?”

“I don’t know,” said Law, and finished the last latch, tying a knot at the end. She flexed her wings; the vest sat snug but not so tight she couldn’t move, and she nodded at him, satisfied.

Law stepped back. Monet, struck suddenly by the lack of reciprocity—his own coat was steadfastly utilitarian, nothing to fasten at all—reached over and tucked an errant tuft of his hair back behind his ear.

They trekked out onto deck together. It was cold enough in the hall outside their quarters for Law’s breath to mist the air (Monet’s never did, no matter how the temperature dropped). When they stepped out past the airlock she heard him exhale, hard: cold enough to burn inside one’s nose.

Icicles hung from the hatch.

Penguin met them just outside. So long out at sea, the Heart Pirates didn’t work hard to hide their faces, and with the girl’s hat pushed back Monet could see that her wide nose had gone red from the cold. “Captain,” Penguin said, as soon as Law was within sight at Monet’s shoulder: “Shachi’s on the transponder from the submersible, if you’d like the details.”

“Yes,” said Law, and followed Penguin to the command chamber, boots crunching over the layer of frost and snow that had already deposited itself over the surface of the deck. Monet detoured to the commissary, pausing only to tap Law on the shoulder and say, “Coffee,” getting a nod in return.

By the time she rejoined them in the control room—humming with low-key excitement borne of expectation, manned by two members of the crew and Bepo, who hovered like a nervous iceberg in the corner while Law craned over charts spread on the central table—the transponder was already on, and she could hear Shachi’s tinny voice: “Very large landmass, captain. The log pose could take weeks to set.”

She saw Law drum his fingers against the table edge. Monet knew he didn’t like the thought of being stuck anywhere so long, suspected he liked the thought of being dragged to bars by the crew to celebrate his birthday even less.

Aloud, he said, “That’s fine.”

“On my way back to the ship, captain,” said Shachi, and Monet leaned over Law’s shoulder to see the transponder snail seated on the table blink sluggishly in the candlelight. Transponders didn’t do well in harsh weather. “Over and out.”

Bepo, who had been silent with an intensity that was only one degree of separation from loud, spoke up the moment the snail cut the connection. “I’m concerned about navigating the coastline while above the water level, captain! Shachi’s report about the terrain—”

Law said shortly, “Use your better judgement. Landfall can wait until day,” and strode back out onto the deck.

She caught up to him at the starboard bow, looking out at where the black water was lit by the searchlights peering out of the hull. She didn’t ask before pressing the second mug of coffee she’d procured into his hands, only drank from her own and said, “Not enough sleep, or misgivings?”

“Both,” said Law lowly, but drank the coffee. “Neither being unusual.”

This much was true. Monet offered, “Look at it this way. Any longer without shore leave and half the crew would be out of their minds.” She didn’t add, those that haven’t lost them already. It had been two months since the last island, nothing but open sea and sudden storms; Penguin was running a betting pool for the boxing ring the crew ran in the hold, and she and Law spent so many nights at poker that Monet very nearly thought only in terms of suits.

“You’re right,” said Law, but the line of his shoulders didn’t grow less tense.

Monet stood beside him at the railing and waited, eyes trained on the same brightly lit patch of rushing water past the bow, land still too far out to see in the pitch dark beyond.

It was her third year sailing with the Heart Pirates, not quite four since she’d met Law.

When he’d walked off the Thousand Sunny she had gone with him, and when they departed Zou she was aboard his ship; and just like that, without discussion, without deliberation, she was one of them.

Or maybe not one of them, exactly, because when she’d come aboard Law had left the door to his quarters open, and she had followed him in. There she’d stayed, someone outside his crew but still at his side. They’d accepted her quickly enough at his say-so, though for a long time she felt among them a sort of awe that refused to abate; a stranger so close to their distant captain, close enough to share his bed, for all that none of them had ever so much as crossed the threshold of his quarters.

He’d given her heart back, after Dressrosa. It was a gesture of trust greater than the one that so baffled his crew: it had been his leverage, his safety, something to put them on equal ground. Without it in his grasp he was an easy target, and she’d said so.

Law had said only, “He’s dead,” and Monet hadn’t needed a subject to know what he meant.

She’d given him his heart back then, too, while they were still onboard the Sunny. What he did with it she didn’t know, but his heartbeat never did return.

Six months later he’d tried to kill himself.

She had been the one to catch him, and there was something the crew didn’t know all over again: she’d barged in while he leaned over the sink with a knife, taken it out of his hands and gripped his wrists until he was shaking and she was shaking worse. “He’s dead but he’s not gone,” he’d said, voice all wrong and gasping, and she’d understood that, too, wished that she hadn’t.

Monet had said neither are we, and we have to outlast him, even now, stayed with him. In the years since Law hadn’t tried again, but she knew Dressrosa plagued him, haunted every step: he still shuddered and cried out in his sleep, and when she woke at night from troubled dreams often as not he was already wide awake, arms wrapped around himself and breathing ragged.

He’d saved her on Punk Hazard; that night when she’d grabbed the knife away she had saved him, and it was only then she felt that they were truly even.

What they were beyond even—

What they were beyond the superficial she didn’t care to define. He did not love her, she believed that much; but he trusted her more than she thought he trusted almost anyone else except the boy with the straw hat, the one that would be pirate king and the one that they’d left years and leagues of sea behind.

(He missed Strawhat achingly, she knew; knew also that it was him that Law loved, unreservedly and completely, right up to I would kill and die for you, thought that anyone who had ever seen Law look at Luffy knew it, too.)

She did not begrudge him for it; what Law had with Strawhat was something separate from what he had with her. It was her Law spent every night with—every day, too—and it was Strawhat that he’d follow to the end of the earth without thinking, pulled along as surely as though by gravity.

Not mutually exclusive, these things; and not so narrow her view so as to believe anyone’s heart only capable of one form of love, and towards only one single target.

[missing sections]

2: whiskey is god’s way of telling us he loves us and wants us to be happy

Had she been anyone else, Monet would have hurried back from the bathhouse in the face of the frigid outdoors, doubly cold after the water's heat; snow was still falling, thicker than before, icy wind kicking up the occasional flurry.

As she was not anyone else, however, she stood outside and savored the frozen wind, far preferable to water and stifling heat both, less likely as it was to melt her away altogether.

Eventually she got together the willpower to trek back inside and pushed her way through the back door of the inn. The din that had overwhelmed the inside before she'd left had died down, and the light coming through the door leading into the commons was dim; evidently the party had come to an end, or else changed venue.

She was almost in the commons when she heard the two remaining voices.

"When we were out there, at the docks," Bonney was saying, "you said y'weren't interested in the One Piece. That really true?"

There was a pause, and then Law's low voice in answer, hoarse with—something. "I meant what I said."

"Why?" Bonney was blunt, and Monet felt suddenly very aware she was eavesdropping, for all that there were few enough secrets between Law and herself. Making her presence known now, though, seemed a worse crime than listening in; an intrusion that would halt something important, stop dead something Law maybe needed to say.

For the space of a second she considered ducking back outside, but then Law spoke again and she froze instead, rooted by foul curiosity, listening.

"It wasn't my goal, even to begin with."

From where she stood Monet could see the two of them reflected in a window in the far side of the room. They were sitting at the empty bar, Bonney hulking, Law—hunched, oddly small next to this giant, doubly so low over his glass. (That was a surprise, too: Law rarely drank, something Monet thought stemmed from a combination of paranoia and doctor's sensibility, more the former than the latter.)

"Now," he continued, voice even quieter than before, so much so that Monet strained to hear, "now there's not even a reason to keep going, except that it's what the crew wants, except that he'll be there." His voice went strange and pained at the end, and Monet realized that he was drunk, or else near it; that an admission about the would-be pirate king escaped him so easily was sign enough of that.

"'He', repeated Bonney. It didn't take her long to guess, for all their years of separation: "Your boy with the straw hat. The one you allied with, years ago?"

"Yes," said Law, not quite slurring, "oh, yes."

There was a brief silence, and the slam of a glass against the counter; in the window, Monet saw Bonney join him in this strange unspoken toast, no name given mention.

When she'd finished off her glass Bonney picked up the bottle nearby and poured the contents into her glass without looking at the label, topped off the drink in Law's hands. "What happened to you?"

There was a horrible sort of noise, and Monet realized Law was laughing. Bonney overrode him with, "Really. You didn't use to be like this. What happened?"

"Did you read the papers?" Law asked, when he'd ceased wheezing. "After Strawhat took down Joker, after what we did on Dressrosa."

Bonney snorted. "I was busy. What everyone else was doing didn't matter so much. I only heard about the revolution by word of mouth, later."

"Good," Law said firmly, drank again. "They wrote a lot of shit about me. Lies and things I didn't want anyone to know, all sorts of things to explain our attack on the Donquixote family. Suffice it to say that what happened there, on Dressrosa, it was . . . "

"A lot," supplied Bonney, dryly, though Monet didn't think she was laughing.

"It was everything I'd worked for," Law said. "My whole life, everything, that was supposed to be the end of it."

Bonney said, "But it was a victory."

"So you accomplished what you wanted," Bonney parsed this, "but it didn't make you happy, just took away your purpose?"

Law tipped back the bottle again, said lowly, "I tried to kill myself, after. Twice. Because Joker couldn't finish the job. Because Strawhat stopped him."

"Jesus," Bonney hissed.

"So," said Law, "so. Since then . . . "

"And snow girl," said Bonney, "what about her? What's her place in this? Are you . . . ?"

Monet went even more still, knew she shouldn't be here ever more surely but couldn't budge, stayed at the doorway. Law said, "She is a bastion, and a partner. I'm grateful for her presence, immensely so, but we aren't . . . anything."

"Strawhat," said Bonney, evidently sure at last. "You're in love with Strawhat."

In the reflection, Law lowered his head against the table, didn't answer. The silence stretched, deep enough that Monet thought they might hear the beating of her heart.

"How long has it been?" Bonney said finally. Her voice was surprisingly soft, more careful than Monet would have expected from her boisterous demeanor.

Monet hardly heard him when he said, "Three years," barely more than a sigh.

Bonney let out a low whistle, said, "Not until Raftel, huh."

"I got lucky," Law said, "I was lucky, meeting him again in the New World. Only time I've been lucky."

"Not likely to be lucky again," Bonney understood.

"No.”

Bonney drank. After a while, she said, "When I first met you I thought you were a gloomy bastard with a scathing wit. Remember, you lobbed a grenade into a World Government base—"

"Smoke grenade," mumbled Law, but Bonney went on,

"Whatever. What ‘m saying is, you grinned after you did it. I miss that version of you."

Law's muted reply was no less bitter for the alcohol. "So sorry to disappoint you."

"I didn't mean it like that," said Bonney, and Monet wondered how else it could possibly be meant. "Just that it isn't fair, Dressrosa taking so much away from you. And that—surely like you've still got it in there, somewhere."

“It was a mask, Bonney. When I met you I was spending nights in the corner of my quarters, armed and hiding, sure Joker was going to be there any moment, sure he would capture me and torture me until he couldn’t do it anymore without killing me, start again when he could be sure I wouldn’t die . . . ” Law was slumped against the table still, curled around the bottle, talking into his sleeve.

Monet’s heart clenched with how raw the admission was, a statement without derision towards what he used to think; a truth, his truth, certain of what he would have endured.

It was dauntingly familiar, so like her own fears and her own knowledge of what Joker did to traitors. Betraying the family, that eschewed all mercy, no chance of forgiveness.

Joker had explained it to her, once, casually, as though it hardly even deserved an aside. His family was his body, he’d said, and any act against it like necrosis in the limbs, amputation his one and only choice. No return from such a surgical removal, not for anyone.

And if Monet had been his left hand, his operative—and she had seen what he’d done to operatives that so much as failed him in a task, even with unfaltering loyalty—then what he would have done to his designated successor . . .

Had done, she reminded herself. In a contracted time frame, perhaps, but all the same, hours of agony on Dressrosa and years of their echo. Law hadn’t ever told her about it, not really, not anything more than she could have guessed from the scars he hid under long sleeves and high collars, from the spasms in his right hand that so vexed him.

In the reflection in the window, Bonney threw her arm around Law’s shoulders, half-hugged him as best she could from where he was seated. It very nearly hid him under her fur cloak, and she said, “That’s impressive, you know that? Holding together after whatever it was he did to you. Pulling together a crew like yours, doing all those things you did.”

“Didn’t do anything,” Law said, “not what I had to, not . . . ”

“Bullshit,” Bonney said. “That bloody-minded ostrich would’ve never gone down without you, right? And all those idiots out drinking to your health in their damn matching boiler suits, I know what you did for them, too.”

Law made an indeterminate noise. Bonney went on,

“Strawhat. You saved him, too. I watched the whole thing, you know, your stupid mad stunt at Marineford—doctor’s orders in the middle of five armies, out of nowhere.”

“I know,” moaned Law, “I know, I know, I don’t know why he forgave me.”

Bonney said, “What?”

“Saved him,” said Law, “him, one, there were two of them, I con—“ the alcohol doing its work, “con, condemned him to surviving alone. Cruel of me.”

Bonney straightened, left him clinging to the bottle. “You’d have rather they died together if you couldn’t have both? When what you want—“

“What I want,” Law interrupted, “not what he asked for. The things I did, no matter that I didn’t know why I did them then, in the end they were selfish. Greedy, monstrously so.”

“If he doesn’t see it that way,” Bonney said, “and I’ll be damned if he does, then you did a good thing. No matter who you did it for.”

“He forgave me,” Law sighed, like he hadn’t heard. “I never forgave him, but he forgave me. Fool.”

“The point is,” Bonney said, louder, “You’re not a monster and you’re not a waste. An idiot, yes, and a prick, and a lawless heathen, but not—not any of those things you said. Hear me?”

There was a pause, and Monet held her breath—thought thank god, thank god that someone has willing to talk to had finally said so. She prayed he wasn’t so drunk he’d forget it, prayed it would get through and stick.

In the room, Law said levelly, “If I spend the last hours of my birthday sobbing into my whiskey, Bonney, I’ll kill you.”

Bonney’s sudden bark of laughter broke the tension that had built with the conversation’s progression, eased something between them. “Maybe you should. The first part, not the killing.”

“I don’t know why I let you talk me into drinking with you at all.”

“‘Cause you miss me,” said Bonney with confidence. “And ‘cause no one can keep everything in, all the time, without telling ‘nyone or even crying into their whiskey.”

Law didn’t look up, but his words were light enough. “I’ll be sure to tell that to tomorrow’s hangover.”

“Do,” Bonney said. “Whatever keeps you from trying to scatter me into pieces.”

“There’s an idea,” Law said darkly. “I’ll try to remember that, too.”

“Told you you still had a sense of humor in there somewhere,” grunted Bonney.

At length the two of them got up and bid each other good night, Law staggering blearily up the stairs—nearly pitching over—and Bonney out the inn’s front door, leaving the lights in the commons to die out on their own. Monet stayed in the doorway until she was sure they were gone and Law asleep, still guilty for listening in for all that she was glad she hadn’t interrupted; then she, too, followed up the stairs.

3: you throw a rock in the air, you’re bound to hit someone guilty

Law was still asleep when she woke the next day; when she got out of bed he only cracked open one eye, mumbled “Not getting up,” and turned over, away from her and the window’s pale light.

Monet took this to mean that the hangover was just as bad as he’d predicted; she left him to it, only pausing to close the curtains before she crept out the door.

[missing sections]

Monet tapped on the door to announce her return, said, “It’s only me,” and pushed her way in when she heard an affirmative noise. (She always waited and always announced, even if she hadn’t been gone long; all these years later and Law still wasn’t any less hair-trigger wary, wasn’t any less likely to have his weapon drawn and ready if anyone barged through the door unannounced.)

He was awake and changing into clean clothes when she came in, seated on the edge of the bed with his long legs kicked all the way out, his boots—he’d slept in them, his coat too—thrown uncarefully aside. Monet asked, “Feeling better?”

“Something like,” mumbled Law, and pulled the shirt he’d been wearing since the day before up over his head.

She stopped, her gaze drawn helplessly to the grisly mess of scars that started at his stomach and trailed upward. That he was willing to do this with her there was surely a sign of how worn-out he was as much as it was of the time they’d spent together; so much of his energy was spent intently concealing the marks he’d carried ever since Dressrosa. Ever since those few bloody hours, which she knew so little about and which haunted him so deeply.

There were the imperfectly round marks of bullet wounds there, half a dozen at least; and scars where something sharp had been driven through his chest again and again above those, marring the pattern of the heart-shaped tattoo. Coarse jagged scar tissue stood out on the whole of his right shoulder, the worst of the damage and the most poorly-healed; and lower, on both wrists, less obvious but no less chilling, faint rings where restraints or shackles would have been. Where he must have tried uselessly to twist and pull free with such desperation that he’d torn all the way through the skin, and kept going.

Monet didn’t want to think about that.

Only two scars were ones that he’d gained by of his own will, two thin horizontal lines on his chest from the surgery he’d done to himself before they’d ever met. They hadn’t talked about those, either, but she thought he didn’t despise them like he did the others; they at least were a sign of something he’d wanted and got, something he’d done and not something that had been done to him.

Law tossed the old shirt aside, and she looked quickly away. For all that he let her be in the same room it felt like a breach of something unspoken to stare; she knew full well he didn’t want her thinking of the source of his injuries anymore than she did.

She busied herself with stoking the weak fire in the hearth instead, pushing fresh logs into the fireplace while he finished dressing behind her. After a minute, still crouching next to the fireplace with eyes fixed on the flames, she said, “I need to tell you something. To apologize.”

There was the sound of him resettling. After a moment, he said, “What is it.”

Monet took a deep breath, stood and turned to him. He was leaned back, braced on both arms, expression tired. “Yesterday,” she said, “last night, I listened in while you and Bonney were talking. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and I’m sorry. I don’t—I know it was wrong of me.”

For a long moment he didn’t move. Then he pulled his knees up against his chest and grasped his ankles, looked away. Said only, “I see.”

That stung. She hadn’t expected him to forgive her so easily, of course, but the guilt that had been clinging to her since the night didn’t ease; that he wouldn’t look at her now—

“It feels like,” Law said lowly, studying something in the corner of the room, “all my secrets get passed around before I’ve even had a chance to say them.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, stupidly, thought again of how profoundly it had shaken him when the papers had written about him in the wake of Dressrosa. And then, knowing she was digging herself deeper but unable to refrain: “For what it’s worth, everything Bonney said to you—I think she was right.”

[incomplete]

He gasped under her—he always did—watched the ceiling and didn’t say anything at all, only breathed faster when she touched him, ran her hands over ribs and sharp hip bones. No matter how many times they did this he was tense, jolting every time she lifted her hands and touched him elsewhere, yet insistent if she stopped. It’s all right, keep going, please.

(And she worried, because for all he said it never seemed to her as though he wanted. When they’d spoken about it frankly he’d said I would never do anything I did not choose to do, and Monet had wondered whether she was right in seeing a difference there, between choosing and wanting, between saying it was so and feeling it—

But they kept finding themselves here, and he didn’t avoid it, didn’t resent her. Just remained distant, whether it was him touching her or her touching him. Like the motions of it didn’t matter. Like the end was all that counted, not the means, no matter how uncomfortable for him they might be—and Monet understood that, hadn’t ever expected anything deeper. If she did it to forget herself then surely so did he, and it was only fair she let him. Took the chemical rush and let the rest go.)

This night was no different. No more intimacy to it than there had been the very first time, the terms they’d come to in the beginning unchanged, the two of them this close and no closer. And if she’d grown to want more she only had herself to blame for having started it; and if this was what she’d got then she’d keep it. Better than nothing, better than ending it.

She didn’t ask for what she knew he couldn’t give. Didn’t blame him, either, because the ache that had settled in her heart over the years wasn’t his doing, only her own.

And she wondered, later, when he was panting harshly above her shoulder, head cast back against the bed; who he was thinking of, if he was thinking at all; and whether there was any chance at all that she entered into his thoughts, taken as they were with the man that she knew he loved.

“Explain,” Law said, flatly, “how it is that two of my senior crew ended up in critical condition by what I am reliably told was your doing. Truthfully. In order.”

The three pirates standing middle of their inn room that morning shifted uncomfortably and exchanged glances. None of them met Law’s gaze; Monet, who was well-used to subzero temperatures and wouldn’t have noticed if hoar frost had been forming on her person, could have sworn she felt the temperature in the room drop down to arctic.

“The sooner you start talking, the sooner I might get started,” Law suggested. Started patching them up, he meant.

The most alarmingly battered-looking of the three looked tempted. Two young men and one woman, they were all newbies, recruited on recent islands to bolster their numbers for the raid they’d carried out on a naval base directly on their route. The woman—nearer a girl, Monet thought her name might have been Rae—was holding her awkwardly against her side and boasted several impressive bruises; the worse-off of the two men was holding his bloodied left hand in his other and standing with all his weight to one side. The last looked to have nothing broken, though his bruises were no less vivid.

All of them stayed intently blank-faced. Only the girl struck Monet as more defiant than guilty-scared.

Law’s voice became, if anything, still more toneless. “The last one to speak can find their own way off this island.”

This drew forth a response. All three spoke at once; Monet supposed being stranded on a backwater didn’t hold much appeal for newly-minted pirates hot-headed enough to sign on for a World Government raid. With all three speaking over each other, though—

Law said, “Stop,” which silenced them better than Monet might have expected, had she not seen dozens of crew members wither under his glower. Pinning the less-battered young man with a look, he said, “You, start talking. Your name is Dion?”

The one identified looked startled, said, “Yes, captain,” gave one last awkward look to his compatriots (carefully avoided by both) and began, “We were out drinking . . . ”

Beside her, Law breathed, “I never would have guessed,” so low she didn’t think any of the others could have heard.

“There were maybe twenty of us, and some of Captain Bonney’s guys,” Dion went on. We went down to the alehouse on the south side of the harbor. Someone told us the booze there was better than the swill they’ve got up here.”

Law, who had become intimately acquainted with said swill and spent the subsequent day nursing the hangover it bestowed, neglected to comment.

“Turned out the place was the favored watering hole of the local government dogs. From the marine outpost they’ve got over in the next port, I guess. Dragging their rotten hides down the road to somewhere their officers can’t see ‘em fucking around.” Monet frowned; Law absorbed this without change in expression, save perhaps that the furrow between his brows grew deeper.

When Dion didn’t immediately resume his story, Law said, “I don’t intend to take ‘pirates and navy, it happens’ as an answer.”

“Why not?” burst out Rae, from behind Dion. Law looked over to her in surprise, and she added fiercely, “They had it coming. You know they did, Captain, just for putting on the damn uniform, you hate them too, you’ve got to understand, you know you’d’ve done the same—“

“Don’t presume to know what I would’ve done. Tell me what happened,” Law cut her off.

“They were talking about the news,” Rae said. She was red in the face with this sudden anger; Monet was impressed with how well she’d hidden it before, no more than a clenched jaw to suggest it. “About how they’d put down another rebellion, killed the people and burnt the slum they’d been forced to live into the ground with everyone left still inside. Talking about it and laughing, toasting to the Red Dog for doing such a good job, like they’re not deck scum the Celestial Dragons would slaughter just as gladly if they weren’t so useful.”

Law said, very quietly, “And?”

“I got Dion and Toj together,” the third man’s name at last, Monet noticed in passing, “and told those bilge rats exactly what I thought of them and their navy, and that I’ve killed enough of them to know they’re no different on the inside than any of us lowlives.”

“You started it, then.”

Toj and Dion spoke at the same time. “I hit one of them with a chair,” Toj admitted, and, “I spat in one of their drinks,” said Dion.

“And everyone else, all of ours,” Law said, “they just joined you.”

“Not exactly,” said Dion.

“Penguin and Shachi,” Rae again, the first time she’d sounded the least contrite and not merely furious, “they tried to stop it and haul us out of there.”

“They hit Shachi from behind while she was trying to keep one of the other marines off me,” said Dion. “Penguin got up in the—I guess he was the leader, ‘cause he talked the most—face and tried to get him to get him to back down, said we were just trashed, that it wasn’t worth it. He hit her over the head with a full bottle.”

Monet, who had seen the head injury when she’d accompanied Law down to the submarine medbay to take care of the worst hurt, winced.

Rae said, “By then everyone else had got into it, too. ‘Cause they knew we were right, and for what the scum did to Penguin and Shachi.”

Law digested this. At last he said, “What you did was very, very stupid.”

“It was necessary!” Rae snapped back. “Shachi and Penguin shouldn’t even have gotten involved, and they shouldn’t have turned their backs on—“

“Shut up,” Law snarled, and there was that anger his flat affect had hidden, a flicker of that absolute fury licking the surface. “They tried to keep you from starting an incident near a marine base, an incident that announces us here after what we did, puts all of us in the crosshairs. You endangered the crew. They tried to run damage control.”

“But we could take them!” Rae tried to protest, but Law bulldozed over this:

“But not a fleet, when they report to HQ that we’re moored here and damn near everyone on shore leave. You didn’t think, and you got better pirates than you hurt. And if the marines get their reinforcements here before we leave, the number of people you got hurt’ll be a lot higher than that.”

Monet would have expected another rebuttal from Rae, another biting reply. Instead, Rae clenched her teeth and grit out, “Fine. You want to leave me on this rock, leave me.”

“I damn well should,” Law said. “But no. You’re confined to crew quarters, and your share of the loot from the next battle is void.”

Looking to the other two, “Same for the both of you, for being stupid enough to help in starting this.”

“Yes, Captain,” said Dion, and Toj nodded vigorously.

“Your injuries, now.” Law motioned them to come closer.

And despite his anger, despite everything, Monet watched as he spent a better part of an hour patching these members of his crew back together. Realigning and sealing their fractured bones with his power, disinfecting surface injuries with more conventional medicine, bracing that which needed to keep still even in the wake of his supernatural surgery. Dion and Toj ducked out quickly, after; Rae followed without so much as looking back, just shut the door with a slam.

The moment they were gone Law bent his head down into his hands, his shoulders sinking. Monet—not having wanted to interrupt the interrogation, that was between captain and subordinate, she was neither—said with concern, “Are you all right?”

“What I am,” Law said, and he didn’t sound angry anymore, just tired; the kind of drained and bone-deep tired that clung to him more often than it should, these days, all the more so when he’d been using his ability. “What I am is a hypocrite, all the way down.”

“You did a good job. Even a pirate crew needs discipline, pulling a stunt like that.”

“What she said,” and she saw Law work his fingers into the thick of his hair with anxious frustration, “about what I would’ve done, about how I would’ve acted, she was right. At her age I would’ve done the very same and worse, taunted those marines into a fight no matter who got caught in the crossfire because I was angry and I didn’t care what happened to me, because I couldn’t see past my own pain to anyone else.”

This was rather more words than he tended to say about himself, and Monet nudged him in the shoulder with a wing. “But you wouldn’t now. Everyone hates their past self, that doesn’t make you wrong to berate someone for doing the same thing. Better she learn now.”

“If I hadn’t made a promise, I might have. If I didn’t owe a debt to this crew that I have to repay, I might have.”

Monet’s heart sank. She knew better than anyone he didn’t just mean starting a fight; knew, too, that the promise and the debt were to different people, though she suspected that to him the promise was just as much of a debt.

Law lifted his head, tipped it back the way people did when they were trying to hold back tears, only he wasn’t, never had any to spare. After a while, he said, “We need to get everyone back onboard by tomorrow. Cut shore leave short.”

“They won’t be happy,” Monet echoed his unhappy resignation aloud. “They needed this.”

“Yes,” said Law, and stood, unfolding himself from the hunch he’d fallen into his full height, made imposing by the harsh lines of long, high-collared coat.

He left without saying anything more. This time the door closed in silence; more final than Rae’s slam, Monet thought, a period that didn’t invite anything further.

She sighed, and wondered if she ought to try the local swill, too.

They started their organized retreat—not quite a rout, so long as marine reinforcements hadn’t yet arrived, Monet thought—the next day, rounding up crew members around town.Everyone they could get ahold of was told to find anyone else they knew the whereabouts of and bring them back to the ship, too; Bonney’s pirates rapidly got roped into the same.

No one wanted to be there when the marines arrived, whether or not they were the cause of the call.

Law and Monet spent the morning making their way from pub to pub for the search. No one was happy about their long-awaited shore leave being cut short; still, most of them complied without complaint. Law was bleakly flat in being the bearer of bad news, his demeanor not inviting argument.

By the afternoon, when the process was well under way and largely out of their hands, the missing figure in the picture was clear. They were walking back to their inn when Law said, “I’m concerned that no one’s seen Bonney.”

None of Bonney’s crew had heard from her since the night she’d spent drinking with Law. “Me too,” Monet admitted, “though she can certainly take care of herself.”

“Yes,” said Law, trudging intently through the street’s dense snow, “but if she was reckless—or targeted—“

“You think it might be something to do with yesterday’s fight?”

“I don’t know. If she never got back to her ship that night . . .” Law trailed off, frowning.

Monet, who knew by now how his mind worked, said, “Don’t you dare start blaming yourself for her choices. That’s not how responsibility works.”

Law looked momentarily startled, glancing over his shoulder at her, then said: “No. You’re right.”

“What do we do,” Monet said, after they’d made their way out from the snowed-in side-street and onto a busy main road. Here the foot traffic from the harbor to the uptown had melted the snow and left filthy slush, instead, all of it running into overflowing gutters. Monet had to pause while they stood aside to let someone pass, trying to keep themselves to the high part of the road. “If Bonney doesn’t show by tonight. Her crew needs to get out of here, too.”

Law scowled. “We leave,” he said. “We put the crew first, and we leave.”

Monet’s heart sank at the dreaded answer. She thought to say something—try and ease the bitter set of his shoulders—but didn’t, opened her mouth and shut it again. There wasn’t, after all, anything she could say that he wouldn’t have already told himself.

That night the headcount put nearly the entire crew on the ship or at the inn where Law and Monet were still staying. They’d considered going back to the ship themselves, but decided to remain so as to direct the stragglers; those that had been staying at the inn beforehand were also allowed to remain and enjoy one last night in real beds rather than hammocks, to provide numbers.

Law was restless, in his particular way where the frustration with inaction went straight through unsettled jittering and back around into motionless brooding. While Monet went to the commons for dinner he stayed in their room and glowered at nothing; he hadn’t budged by the time she came back. She left him to it for upwards of an hour, went out again and spoke to everyone who’d gone looking for the crew still remaining, added two to their headcount.

When he still hadn’t moved when she returned, she made her decision and pushed back a chair to sit down across from him at the table by the fireplace. “Talk to me?” she said, hopefully.

He looked up from where his gaze had been fixed on the fire. Didn’t speak right away; looked away again, and finally pushed out, “This feels like—a moment laden with the future. Like what I choose to do now I might regret for a very long time.”

“Leaving,” Monet guessed. “You’re still worried about Bonney.”

Law looked up at her. “I don’t have a lot of friends,” he said bluntly.

“Can count them on one hand,” she agreed.

“Not enough to be careless about keeping them,” Law said. “If I leave now and I don’t see her again, that would be . . . but abandoning the crew might be just as foul.”

“You’ve left the crew alone before,” Monet said.

Law winced, said, “Not a decision that holds up to scrutiny.”

“That’s not the point,” Monet said, “the point is, they were fine, and they’ll be fine now. Send them under the waves and we can rendezvous with them when we find her.”

“If we find her,” said Law darkly. For a moment he didn’t say anything else; then he rapped his knuckles against the table and said, “All right. Tomorrow I’ll send them out and you and I can start asking around town whether anyone’s seen her.”

Monet felt gladdened, for all that she’d been ready to go with his decision before. “We’ll find her,” she said, mustering an assurance she didn’t quite feel. “She’s tough—she’ll have held out.”

“I hope so,” said Law.

They left it at that.

Both pirate crews cast off in the morning, nothing so dramatic as Law and Monet waving farewell to speed them on.

Predawn fog clung to the Heart Pirates’ ship when they pulled up the anchor and left, announcing their exit from the half-moon harbor over transponder. They would wait at a distance from the island, hidden deep underwater while Law and Monet searched for Bonney; both parties would check in periodically, to make sure everyone was still safe and unsighted by the marines.

Three days, Law had said firmly, that’s how long it’ll take for reinforcements to arrive. We won’t be longer than that.

They began their search in earnest once the sun rose, though the sky remained gray and the fog didn’t thin. Even on the busiest streets the figures of passerby looked faceless and ghostlike, failing to resolve into anyone they might recognize until they were very nearly face-to-face. Monet thought it bad luck, but supposed it mattered little enough; wherever Bonney was, she wouldn’t be found by chance happenstance in the streets.

The bars and the inn houses were their first target. Tracking down anyone that worked there regular or worked nights, asking how to get ahold of those who weren’t on shift, Bonney’s description repeated again and again; all of it fruitless. No one at the inn where she’d stayed had seen her since the night she’d gone drinking with Law. No one at the surrounding watering holes had, either—nor heard or seen any sign of a struggle, no clues to her whereabouts at all.

The open market came next, muddy and crowded despite the weather, fishermen hawking their wares at double the volume to make up for the way the soupish haze in the air dampened the sound. Law’s boots sank inches into the ground. No one here had seen or heard from her either, nor noticed any more on-duty marines than the usual few that came down from the base over the hill.

It was, Monet thought with deep irony, as though Jewelry Bonney had vanished into thin air—a scenario that seemed all the more likely the more time they spent wandering through the unabating mist. When they paused at midday, having combed the bazaar and everyone that came with it and stopped at its dockside terminus to eat, Law voiced similar frustration: “It shouldn’t be so easy to lose a giant.”

Monet, leaning against the low fence that served to mark off where the market ended and the docks began, grunted agreement. She was chewing her way through something fried and fishlike, bought from the last vendor they’d questioned; Law had turned away any thought of lunch, whether from nerves or habit she wasn’t sure. Once she had swallowed, she said, “Docks next. Then what?”

“Knock on the marines’ front door and ask if they’ve got her?” Law suggested, blackly. “I’d hoped we’d have found some sign, by now, something to at least tell us if we’re even looking in the right place.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” said Monet, as hopefully as she could manage. Nothing, she was discovering, drained one’s morale as quickly as slogging through bog-like streets to ask questions that lead nowhere.

Law scowled at her and looked away, towards the docks. More quietly, he said, “It’s worse to think that it might’ve been something stupid. Not a retaliation by the marines or a thought-out capture but a robbery—how much did she drink, while I . . . ?”

Monet chewed and swallowed the last of her food. “Didn’t we decide,” she said, unwilling to let him pursue this train of thought even now, “that you can’t be held responsible for her actions? Never mind the actions of some unknown assailant.”

This time Law only sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. Rolled his shoulders, shifting his scabbarded sword from one to the other, and said, “Let’s get on with it.”

Monet tossed the paper she’d been eating from aside into the muck, and they started on their way down to the pier.

By the time they finished their interrogations at the docks it was growing dark and still colder. The dockworkers had proven as uninformative as everyone at the inns and the bars and the market, and damn near anywhere else in between; Law’s mood, already poor to begin with, had soured further into a dark, dense silence by the time they made it to the moorings furthest from where Bonney’s ship had been.

At this end there were only fishing boats, local ones, nothing commercial. Law glowered at them, expecting disappointment. Monet only barely kept her expression neutral but felt no less drained, couldn’t help but wonder if it was worth the bother. Their inn room beckoned, with all its luxuries of rest and food and much less mud.

Only one man appeared to be present, tying up a boat that hardly deserved to be called a dinghy. Monet looked at Law, whose return look said, last one, and raised her voice to call out, “Excuse me, sir!’

The man that looked up at them was wrapped in so many layers that it was near-impossible to make out his face. Peering out from between fur collar and a hat that covered his ears and most of the rest of his features, he watched them approach and said, warily, “What do you want?”

“We’re looking for a friend of ours,” said Law from beside Monet, not quite keeping the accumulated growl out of his voice. “She went missing two nights ago on the way back to her inn. We want to know if you saw her, or saw anything suspicious.” He gave Bonney’s description, tersely.

The fisherman listened to this, and said, “Ain’t seen her or heard nothin’.” Monet, who had been hoping, in the way that one did when coming to the end of one’s options—wasn’t the very last place one looked supposed to be the one that yielded results, in every story?—felt her heart sink.

Law started to turn away. He’d cut any attempt at thank you out of his conversation some hours ago, when the fog had at last begun to clear only to be replaced by a needling frozen wind. Monet opened her mouth to say it herself, in an attempt to cling to civility, when the man added, “Disappeared at night, you said?”

And maybe Law wasn’t immune to that desire to believe in life being akin to a story, because he stopped, turned back and said, “Yes. Have you remembered something?”

“Not like you’re hopin’,” said the man, “but you oughta know. People disappear off the docks all the time, come nightfall—one or two a month, more’n drunk sailors fallin’ ’n’ drownin’ accounts for.” And there was that awful possibility that they’d been trying to avoid so much as thinking about; death by stupidity or accident instead of capture by design.

“What do you mean,” Law said. He walked the few steps he’d distanced himself from the fisherman and confronted him, looming. “What are you talking about, spit it out.”

“Law,” said Monet, worried that now when someone had something to say at last Law would scare them into reticence. He ignored her, but at least he wasn’t fisting his hands in the man’s collar yet—though maybe that was more a consequence of not knowing where to grab, given the layers of furs and oiled leathers.

The fisherman, apparently unperturbed by Law leaning over him, said, “Some of us in this town, those of us that’ve been ‘ere long enough, figure there’s something livin’ on this coast. Something that’ll pull anyone out on the docks late at night into the water. To drown ‘em or eat ‘em, who knows, but—there’s an awful lot of disappearances just ‘ere, and some’ll swear they’ve seen strange things movin’ in the low tide on the beach out past the end of town.”

There was a beat, and Law said flatly, “You can’t be serious.” Monet saw his free hand flex at his side. “‘Something’? No description, nothing, just ‘something’, and I’m supposed to believe in it?”

“Not enough local flavor for you?” said the fisherman. “You got any better leads?” And, answering his own question, “Wouldn’t be askin’ me if you did.”

Law stared at him. Monet could just about hear the gears in his head turning. Waited with morbid curiosity to see whether he’d fall on the side of last-ditch, fuck-it acquiescence or on the side of anger, not knowing which she felt more of herself.

Then he said, “Where’s this beach?”

The fisherman gave them directions.

They decided not to make that trek last night, too tired and cold and reasoning that it’d be too dark to see anything in the tides, anyway. Slogging back to the inn in the dark was a near-silent affair, and it wasn’t until they could see the inn house not far down the road that Law spoke. “It occurred to me,” he said, “that not all pirates are human. Not all bandits, either.”

Monet said, “What?” too tired to follow.

“Renegade mermen,” Law clarified. “Suppose they’ve got a base underwater, and rob anyone unfortunate enough to be alone on the docks at night—‘fell in ice water drunk’ is a good a cover as any, and there must be plenty of fools with coin in their pockets going between their ships and the taverns.”

“Oh,” said Monet, digesting this preternaturally practical notion in the face of her own thoughts. Her mind had been manufacturing the kind of fantastical monsters that featured in any sailor’s stories, sirens and kelpies and who knew what else. “That’s possible.”

“I’ll call Bepo and arrange for them to start searching the coastline for an underwater hideout in the morning,” said Law. They were approaching the inn, now, and looking at him in the light of the lanterns at the gate she thought he seemed less wreathed in gloom now that they had a lead, even a weak one. “With the submersible. You and I will try the beach, in the event that it really is something more sinister. Cover our bases.”

“And if neither search yields anything?” Monet said, wrenched back into practicality. Three days.

Law smiled mirthlessly. “Then,” he said, “we go and visit the marines.”

And pushed through the gate into the inn courtyard without saying anything more.

[scrap from a later scene]

#an APPALLING AMOUNT OF TEXT for a fic that was never once good #one piece #trafalgar law #harpy monet #lawlu #wip amnesty #fic

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