#once tiny sanji gets Prison Fit it's all over for you bozos

[oh-dameron]

Noodling on an "Oops! Back In Time!" story idea where the Straw Hats sail through a Grand Line anomaly or whatever and wake up as they were about thirteen years in the past.

Robin is seventeen, still on the run in West Blue. She'd wake up, run down the list of her nakama to decide who needs help first: Franky and Jimbe are grown men already, they're fine, they can handle themselves. The East Blue crew are all little kids. To the best of her knowledge the tragedies that shaped their lives haven't happened yet and won't for a while. They're safe for now.

Chopper is a baby reindeer, probably hasn't eaten his fruit yet. Brook is currently unreachable to her, without a ship or a crew, but Franky is right there in Water 7 with a fleet of battleships that he needs to get rid of before they can be used to frame Tom. Maybe she can assume he'll take care of it.

Sanji is still in Germa kingdom. He's not safe at all.

Robin, who only looks seventeen, pulls out her mad skills as a spy and top-tier pirate and member of the actual Revolutionary Army and hustles to North Blue in record time, snapping necks and serving cunt the whole way. She infiltrates the fuck out of Germa 66 and is on the palace flagship before you can say Security Clearance. Robin's not stupid enough to dangle the poneglyphs or the Ancient Weapons in front of Judge: that's a carrot he would never stop chasing. No, she claims to have details of Vegapunk and Caesar's work on artificial devil fruits, counting on spite to get her through. It does. Robin was at Punk Hazard and Dressrosa and Wano: she knows enough details to make it plausible, and she's a trained academic to boot. She can make it sound right, even if it's not her field, even if it's made-up nonsense that will hopefully have Judge chasing his own tail for years.

Meanwhile, every night she's sending eyes and ears all over the palace looking for the missing third prince. Officially, the kingdom is still in mourning for the double tragedy of losing their Queen and one of the princes in quick succession. Robin cannot find any trace of grief in Judge or his remaining children, even when she's invited to dine with the royal family (there are still two empty chairs at the table, and she's ushered into one of them as though it was nothing. Luckily, she's had decades of keeping calm in the face of casual brutality to perfectly hone her poker face).

It doesn't take her long to find the stairs going down, down into the dark. And there's a dungeon at the bottom, a barred cell containing an eight-year old child who looks so much smaller than his brothers. He's covered in bruises and there's a metal horror wrapped around his head and casual brutality be damned, there are two wolves inside Robin right now and one of them wants to sit down and weep and the other one wants to snap Judge's neck and then tear this castle down brick by brick. Except. Tiny Sanji is doing a one-handed handstand in the middle of his cell. It's a bit wobbly, and he tumbles off-balance when he sees her, but there's nothing wobbly about the smile on the little she can see of his face when he runs to her.

"Robin-chwan!" he chirps, hugging her through the bars. "I knew I couldn't be the only one who came back! I'm so lucky to be rescued by such a dashing lady!" He peers at her through the helmet, eyes huge and blue and earnest. "You got here so fast! Who else is with you? Are you OK?"

And it's just so Sanji, who knows as well as she does where the rest of the crew is-better, probably-to think that she'd go to anyone else before coming here. As though his problems could wait while everyone else is taken care of first.

"Now that I've found you I'm quite alright, Sanji. The crew is just you and me for now, but I'm sure we'll soon change that."

He does a little spin of delight at having her all to himself, and it's the simple glee of a small child spending time with a favourite person. Robin smiles, and retrieves the keys, and holds his tiny hand all of the way out of the castle as he chatters about how amazing she is and who they'll go to find next. They sail away, leaving the palace in flames behind them.