Chapter 25:
The streets of Rainbase had emptied fully by this point.
The Black Pearl's crew moved through the abandoned avenues at a jog, William's tails lashing behind him in agitated rhythm, the storm above Rain Dinners crackling brighter with every block they covered.
They rounded the final corner into the central plaza, and Vivi gasped. "Oh," she breathed, one hand pressed flat against her chest. "Oh no."
Rain Dinners was gone.
Or rather, what had been Rain Dinners, Crocodile's glittering palace of green felt tables and gold-veined marble, the casino that had bled Alabasta dry one rigged hand at a time, now resembled the aftermath of an artillery strike.
Through the broken skeleton of what used to be the casino floor, two pillars of opposing force tore at each other in violent clashes.
One was a storm. A furious black-and-blue funnel of compressed cloud and white-hot lightning, lashing through the air, each strike leaving scorch marks across stone and sand.
The other was sand. A churning tempest, swallowing each lightning bolt and reforming around the assault, then lancing back in spear-shaped concentrations that hissed where they struck.
A thunderclap rolled across the plaza loud enough to rattle the windows of buildings two streets over. The storm pillar punched forward, the sand pillar collapsed sideways to dodge, and somewhere in the wreckage a slot machine exploded with a tinny, undignified ding.
Robin laughed pleasantly, hands folded behind her back as though they had stopped to admire a particularly impressive sunset rather than the active demolition of a Warlord's headquarters. "Our captain is quite good at breaking things," she said. Her smile was sharp at the edges. "I do hope Crocodile is enjoying watching his legacy disappear. He worked so very hard for it."
"That was Crocodile's place," Pearl said, head tilted in genuine consideration. Her black wings flexed slightly behind her as she studied the destruction. "And Crocodile was your partner. Were you not supposed to be sad?"
Robin's smile did not waver, but something flickered behind her eyes, gone almost before William's enhanced senses could register it.
"He was my employer," she corrected, her tone light and pleasant in the way a knife was light and pleasant. "Not my partner. And he would have killed me the moment my usefulness ran out. That sort of arrangement does not exactly invite mourning."
William's ears flattened against his skull. A low hiss slipped out of him before he could think to stop it, his upper lip curling back from his teeth, his tails snapping rigid behind him.
Robin turned her head and saw it. Saw him, bristling like an actual cat that had just heard someone speak about hurting one of his own.
She gave him a small, genuine smile, the kind she did not hand out often. "Easy, William," she murmured. "He is not getting near me again."
William's hiss faded into a low, displeased rumble in his chest, but his tails uncoiled slightly. He nodded once.
Robin's smile widened by a fraction. They are mine, she thought, with something she had not allowed herself to feel in a very long time. And I am theirs.
Nami caught the exchange out of the corner of her eye and rolled her eyes hard enough to risk injury. "Oh, for the love of— focus, both of you, our captain is fighting a Warlord!"
"I am extremely focused," Robin said serenely.
"You are extremely something," Nami muttered.
Kuina, who had been standing slightly apart from the group with one hand still resting on Wado Ichimonji's hilt, was staring up at the storm pillar with an expression of escalating bewilderment. Her brows knit. Her head tilted. She watched another lightning bolt the size of a ship's mast carve a glowing scar across the casino's collapsing roof and then forked sideways to chase a streamer of sand.
"Where," she said slowly, "is the storm coming from?"
Nami glanced at her, distracted. "That's Lucy. Obviously."
"That—" Kuina blinked. She gestured vaguely at the entire sky, which had gone the color of a bruise. "THAT IS LUCY?"
"Yes."
"MONKEY D. LUCY?"
"Yes."
"MY CAPTAIN?"
Nami's jaw twitched at ‘my captain’, but she let it pass. "Yes, Kuina, your captain, our captain, the captain, can we please—"
"How," Kuina said, with the careful, measured tone of someone holding onto their last shred of sanity with both hands, "is her rubber Devil Fruit doing all of that?"
Everyone stopped. Even Pearl, whose attention had been drifting toward a particularly interesting piece of falling debris, turned her head.
Nami pinched the bridge of her nose. "Lucy," she said, in the patient voice one used with very small children and very confused adults, "has not had her rubber Devil Fruit since Loguetown."
Kuina stared at her.
Kuina kept staring at her.
"What…?" Kuina said.
"She lost it."
"HOW DOES ONE LOSE A DEVIL FRUIT POWER!?"
"She got decapitated."
Kuina's hand left her sword hilt entirely. It came up to press against her forehead. "She got WHAT!?"
"Decapitated," William supplied helpfully, and then immediately wished he had not, because Kuina's eyes shifted to him with the kind of slow, deliberate motion that suggested he had just become the focus of her remaining sanity. "By a clown," he added, somehow making it worse.
"By Buggy the Clown," Nami clarified.
"On Gold Roger's execution platform," William said.
Vivi, who had been mostly preoccupied with the destruction of her national landmarks, glanced sideways and added quietly, "I was not present for that part, but I understand it was very dramatic."
Kuina's eye twitched.
"And then," Nami continued, gesturing at William with the air of a tour guide presenting an exhibit, "he shoved a Logia Devil Fruit down her severed throat and the lightning brought her back to life with new storm powers instead of rubber ones. That is the captain you are looking at currently disassembling a Warlord."
A very, very long silence.
Above them, another thunderclap split the sky. A chunk of marble the size of a wagon wheel sailed lazily overhead and crashed into the fountain three buildings down.
"I see," Kuina said carefully. "I see. Yes. That is. Yes..." She lowered her hand from her forehead. "I am going to need someone to explain several things to me," she said, "in the order they happened, slowly, with a drink in my hand."
"Get in line," Nami muttered.
It was at exactly this moment that the laughter started. It came from somewhere above them, a booming, full-bellied laugh that rolled across the plaza like its own kind of thunder. The kind of laugh that announced its owner before the owner ever touched the ground.
William's ears snapped upright. Every hair on his tails stood on end at once. His pupils dilated, then narrowed to slits. Oh no, no, no, not yet, not now—
He looked up.
A shape was falling out of the sky.
A very large shape.
It was coming down fast and at the kind of angle that suggested its owner had simply stepped off something high and let gravity handle the rest, which was, technically, exactly what had happened.
Behind it streamed two smaller shapes, one of which was screaming and one of which was making a noise that sounded distinctly like someone trying very hard not to vomit at altitude.
The shape hit the cobblestones directly in front of William with the force of a small artillery shell.
The plaza cracked. A circular spiderweb of fractured stone radiated outward from the point of impact in a perfect ring.
Dust geysered up around them. Nami staggered. Vivi shrieked. Robin's hand shot out and caught Vivi's elbow before she could fall. Pearl's wings flared on instinct, blocking debris from spraying into the group. Kuina had her sword half-drawn before her brain caught up with her hands.
When the dust cleared, William was staring directly into a chest the size of a wine barrel. His eyes traveled up.
And up.
And up.
Vice Admiral Monkey D. Garp grinned down at him from beneath an absolutely magnificent set of bushy eyebrows, dog mask pushed back on his head, white Marine coat fluttering behind him in the storm wind. Tucked under his left arm, kicking furiously, was a very small, very furry, very angry reindeer doctor in Brain Point form. Tucked under his right arm, looking distinctly green around the gills, was a pink-haired young Marine in glasses who appeared to be trying to decide whether to scream, faint, or be sick.
"LET ME DOWN, YOU BASTARD!" Chopper howled, hooves scrabbling uselessly at the air. "I HAVE TO HELP MY CAPTAIN! LET ME DOWN RIGHT NOW—"
"Ugh," Koby moaned, "Mr. Garp, please, don't move so fast, I almost puked at least twice on the way down, I think I might still—"
Garp threw his head back and laughed even louder. "BWAHAHAHA! Well well WELL!" he boomed, eyes crinkling as he swept his grin across the assembled crew. "Look at you all! You must be my granddaughter's crewmates!"
The silence that followed was the silence of five very different ‘people’ each independently realizing that the situation they were currently in had just become significantly more complicated.
Nami's mouth opened and closed silently.
Vivi made a small, polite noise that might have been a curtsy if her body had not forgotten how to move.
Robin's eyebrows lifted in genuine, unguarded surprise. A rare enough expression on her that William, even mid-existential-crisis, mentally noted it.
William, for his part, was staring up at the most physically dangerous human being in any timeline he had ever heard of, the man who had personally fought Gold Roger to a standstill, the man whose name made Fleet Admirals consider retirement, the man whose granddaughter William was currently in a romantic relationship with and his very first coherent thought was:
I am going to die here if he finds out the things I’ve done with Lucy….
Chopper, who had finally wriggled free of Garp's grip, dropped to the cracked cobblestones and immediately tried to bolt past William toward Rain Dinners. “This old bastard stopped me from trying to help Lucy! No one’s gonna stop me now!”
William's hand shot out on pure reflex and caught him by one furry shoulder. "It’s to dangerous," William said, eyes still locked on Garp.
"BUT—"
"Its too dangerous to jump into that kind of fight, Chopper."
Chopper sulked.
Garp's grin somehow widened.
"Oh ho?" he rumbled, and his dark eyes settled on William with the laser focus of a man who had just identified a very specific point of interest. He shifted Koby gently to the cobblestones, where the young Marine immediately sat down hard, removed his glasses, and put his head between his knees. "Not bad, Panther Prince…" Garp rumbled, drawing the title out with a grin that suggested he had read the bounty poster very recently and found it personally hilarious. "Not bad at all. I can sense it on you, you know. You're starting to learn Haki. Same as my granddaughter."
William's tails, which had been twitching in agitated counter-rhythm to his heartbeat, went very still. He held them still by sheer force of will, the way one might hold one's breath at the edge of a cliff. He did not want this man, of all men, to read nervousness off his body language like a posted notice.
"She and I have been practicing," William said. His voice came out steadier than he had any right to expect. "When we have free time."
“That’s how it should be. Lazy hands make weak warriors.” Garp's grin did not move. His eyes, however, did. Garp's gaze drifted past William, and his expression froze.
His eyes had landed on Pearl.
Pearl tilted her head at Garp. Her dark, void-pupiled eyes blinked once, slowly.
Garp groaned.
"Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me," he said, dragging a massive hand down his face. "My granddaughter actually recruited a Lunarian." He shook his head. He shook it again, harder, as though he could perhaps dislodge the sight of Pearl from his memory by force of motion. When that did not work, he straightened, planted both hands on his hips, and addressed the cloudless patch of sky directly above the storm pillar with the air of a man making a formal announcement to the universe. "The World Government," he declared, loud enough that Koby flinched and put his glasses back on, "is going to lose their entire collective mind when they find out about this. The Five Elders are going to have strokes. Sengoku is going to retire. I am going to have to attend more meetings." He let that statement hang in the air a moment. Then he turned crisply, and pointed at Pearl with one thick finger. "I did not see you here," he said firmly.
Pearl blinked again. “Huh?”
"KOBY!" Garp barked.
Koby, still seated on the cobblestones with his head between his knees, jerked upright so fast he nearly fell over backward. "Y-Yes, Vice Admiral!"
"You didn't see her either."
"I didn't see who, sir?"
"Good lad!"
Koby slumped back over his knees and made a small, dignified noise of suffering.
Pearl's careful smile widened by a fraction. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but sensed he had done her some kind of favor regardless. She gave Garp a small, gracious nod.
"What," Nami said flatly, "is a Lunarian?" She had her hands on her hips. Her sea stone bo staff was tucked through her belt at an angle that suggested she had not entirely ruled out using it again in the next several minutes. Her expression was the expression of a woman who had already had several explanations today she had not asked for and was rapidly losing patience for more. "And who the fuck," she added, "are you supposed to be?"
William made a small choked sound. He leaned sideways, very subtly, and dropped his voice into the lowest register he could manage without it actually becoming a hiss. "Nami," he whispered, "that is Vice Admiral Garp. The Hero of the Marines. He fought Gold Roger to a standstill. He is. He is Lucy's grandfather."
Nami's eyes flicked sideways at him.
Then they flicked forward at Garp.
Then they flicked back at William.
Then forward again.
Then they widened, by slow degrees, as each piece of the sentence William had just whispered landed in sequence in her brain.
The color drained from her face. "...Oh," she said, very quietly. "Oh, okay." She took a small step back. She tucked an orange strand of hair behind her ear. "Why," she muttered, mostly to herself, "does Lucy never tell me these things. I am supposed to be the first mate. I am supposed to be the one who knows things. I am the one who has to plan around things. And of course, of course, my best friend and captain, the future Pirate Queen, and the bane of my budget, is the granddaughter of the Hero of the Marines! Of course she is. Why the fuck not!? Why not? Why not just throw that in too!? While we're at it!" She drew a long, controlled breath through her nose.
Garp, who had been watching this entire process with the delighted attention of a man enjoying a particularly good piece of theater, threw his head back and laughed so hard his coat fluttered. "BWAHAHAHA! I like this one!" he boomed, pointing at Nami with a grin that crinkled his entire face. "That's the right instinct, girl, you hold onto that one!"
"Thank you, sir," Nami said faintly.
"Lucy probably forgot to mention me!" Garp added cheerfully. "She does that. Selective memory, that girl. Gets it from her father—"
He stopped. The grin did not vanish, exactly, but it adjusted. Slid into a slightly different expression, one that did not invite follow-up questions.
"—from her father's side of the family," he finished smoothly. "Anyway."
William filed that away with the practiced quickness of a man who had been doing exactly this kind of filing since he arrived in this world. Don't react. Don't acknowledge. He just almost said Dragon. Don't react.
His tails twitched once. He clamped them still again.
It was at exactly this moment that Rain Dinners decided to contribute to the conversation.
A crack tore across the plaza, louder than any of the previous clashes, enough that William's ears flattened against his skull on pure reflex. The storm pillar inside the ruined casino lit white-blue from within, sand and cloud collapsing inward in a single concussive flash.
And something came hurtling out of the wreckage at a low, flat trajectory, traveling fast enough that the air around it screamed.
William's enhanced vision caught the shape almost instantly.
It was coming directly at Vivi!
Vivi, who had been silently watching the destruction of her country's most notorious casino with a mixture of grim satisfaction and personal heartbreak, did not even have time to lift her rifle. Her eyes widened. Her breath caught. Her hand started to move, far too slowly, toward the strap on her shoulder.
William was already moving.
He stepped in front of her without thought, planting himself between Vivi and the incoming projectile in a single fluid motion that his Nekomata body executed before his brain had finished registering the threat.
His right hand snapped up. Purple flame bloomed around his knuckles, hot and hungry, and on top of it—uneven, patchy, but there—a thin, dark sheen settled over his fist. Armament Haki.
He pivoted his hips. He drove his weight forward. He punched. His fist met the incoming shape with a crunch that William felt all the way up through his shoulder.
Sir Crocodile, Warlord of the Sea, the architect of Alabasta's slow strangulation, made a noise that was not entirely dignified. Something between a wet grunt and a wheeze. His Logia body, already destabilized from whatever Lucy had done to him inside the casino, did not have time to turn to sand around the impact. The Haki saw to that.
He blasted backward off William's fist, trailing sand and bloody cigar ash, and crashed through the second-story shutters of an empty merchant's building across the plaza with a splintering crash that took out most of an interior wall.
A small cloud of dust puffed out of the broken window.
Silence settled over the plaza.
William stood with his fist still extended, smoke curling off his knuckles, his tails fluffed out to roughly twice their normal volume behind him. He blinked once. Then twice. He brought his fist slowly down in front of his face and stared at it, turning his hand over, watching the last embers of purple fire flicker out across his fingers.
A slow, slightly dazed smile spread across his face. "I just punched Crocodile," he said, to no one in particular.
He looked at his fist.
He looked at the broken window across the plaza.
He looked at his fist again.
"I just punched Crocodile," he repeated, with a kind of wonder.
Behind him, Vivi made a small, breathless sound that was not entirely a word. Her hand found the back of his jacket and fisted into the fabric, not pulling, just holding.
Garp let out a low, appreciative whistle.
"Huh," he said. "Not bad at all, Panther Prince."
"WHERE THE HELL DID THAT BASTARD FLY OFF TO!?" The voice came from inside the ruins of Rain Dinners, indignant and entirely too cheerful, echoing out across the plaza on the back of one last rolling thunderclap.
A heartbeat later a black storm cloud the size of a barrel boiled up out of the casino's collapsed roof, and Lucy came riding it through the air with her straw hat hanging down her back by its cord and her dark hair sticking up in every direction from static charge.
She flew over the plaza, cloud dispersing under her sandals, and landed in a small thunderclap of displaced air directly in front of her crew.
Her hat settled crooked on her head. There was a soot smudge across one cheek and what appeared to be a scrap of green felt from a gaming table stuck to her shoulder. Her knuckles were faintly steaming.
She looked at William.
She looked at Nami.
She looked at Pearl.
She looked at Kuina?
She looked at Robin.
She looked at Vivi.
She looked at Chopper.
She looked at Koby, who was still seated on the cobblestones and had just slowly removed his glasses again at the sight of her.
She looked at her grandfather.
"Oh," Lucy said brightly. "Hi everyone? What are you all doing here?"
"THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY TO ME, LUCY!?" Garp barked, throwing his head back with another booming laugh that rattled loose dust from the cracked cobblestones around his crater.
Lucy's eyes narrowed beneath the brim of her crooked straw hat.
The air around her sandals puckered. A small, almost invisible compression of wind gathered beneath her heels, just a tiny, focused gust, the kind of thing that should not have been able to propel a person any meaningful distance.
It propelled her across the plaza in a heartbeat.
She crossed the distance to her grandfather like a thrown punch given legs, dark hair whipping behind her, one fist drawn back and crackling with the white-blue arc of contained lightning.
"STORM PUNCH!"
The punch landed squarely against Garp's open palm. He had moved exactly one hand to catch her. Nothing else. His stance had not shifted. His other arm had not even uncrossed.
The shockwave detonated outward from the point of contact in a perfect ring. The cracked cobblestones at their feet cracked further. The dust around Garp's boots puffed up and outward in a circular wave.
Loose debris from the ruined casino across the plaza skittered another foot in every direction.
Nami's hair whipped sideways across her face. Vivi staggered half a step and caught herself on William's arm. The shutters of the merchant's building that Crocodile had recently been redecorating banged against their hinges.
Garp did not move.
The Vice Admiral grinned down at his granddaughter over their locked fist and palm, and laughed again.
"Bwahahaha! Now what was that all about, brat?"
Lucy disengaged with a small huff, dropping back onto her heels and shaking out her hand. The storm cloud around her knuckles dissipated into a few stray sparks.
"I've been wanting to punch you for weeks now," she grumbled, glaring up at him from beneath her hat. Her lower lip pushed out. "You punched me in the head so many times when I was little, you old bastard. You gave me brain damage. Actual brain damage. It was only because William gave me another Devil Fruit that I'm getting smart again. Smarter. Whatever. It's still your fault!"
The laugh died in Garp's throat.
For perhaps the first time since he had dropped out of the sky, the grin slid off his face. His mouth opened, then closed. His eyes moved across Lucy's face with an expression William had not expected from him.
Regret.
It was a small thing, and it did not stay long, but it was there.
Garp's shoulders shifted. He lifted his hand—the one that had just casually absorbed a Logia-powered Haki-laced punch from his granddaughter without effort—and ran it through his short hair, scratching at the back of his head with the awkwardness of a man who had just been told a joke had landed badly years after he had told it.
"...Ah," he said. “Sorry about that…”
His granddaughter had already lost interest in him.
Lucy turned away from Garp mid-thought, the matter apparently filed and dealt with by the simple act of having said it out loud, and skipped over to William with her hands clasped behind her back and a grin sliding back into place. She bounced up onto the balls of her feet when she reached him, rocking forward with the energy of someone who had been having a great day and was about to make it better.
Up close, William's enhanced vision caught the details her cheerful expression was trying to hide. A thin red scratch ran across her jaw. A bruise was already darkening along the side of her neck. The knuckles of her right hand, the same hand that had just punched Garp, were scraped raw. There was a long, thin abrasion along her left forearm where something hot and sharp had clipped her.
Crocodile knew Haki. Of course he did. Rusty, probably, after years of relying on his Logia body to settle most problems, but real. Real enough to draw blood from a Storm Logia who did not yet fully know how to layer her own Haki defensively.
Lucy did not seem bothered by any of it. She grinned up at William. "I'm winning," she announced.
"I noticed," William said, and a slow grin worked its way across his face despite everything. Despite Garp, despite Crocodile, despite Kuina. "You just sent Crocodile flying. And then I punched him through a building."
Lucy's eyes went very round. "You punched him too? Isn’t punching a warlord awesome!?"
"It sure is!"
Lucy leaned up onto her toes, fisted both her small hands gently into the front of his jacket, and kissed him. It was not the kind of charged, possessive kiss Nami had landed on him in the street a few minutes ago. It was something softer. A quiet, deliberate, I-am-proud-of-you kiss.
She held it for perhaps two heartbeats. Then she settled back onto her heels, gave him a small, pleased smile, and let go of his jacket.
Behind her, Garp made a sound.
It was not, technically, a coherent sound. It was the sound of a Vice Admiral, a Marine Hero, a man who had stood opposite the Pirate King on multiple occasions without flinching, attempting to inhale air that had abruptly become solid. He choked. He coughed. His hand came up automatically to his chest in the universal gesture of something has gone wrong inside my body.
Beside him, Koby made a strangled noise that started out high and pinched and tapered into something closer to a wheeze. He was looking at Lucy and William with the expression of a young Marine who had just watched his crush kiss someone out of nowhere…
Lucy ignored all of this. "I'm almost done here, everyone!" she called brightly, hopping back a step and clapping her hands together once. Her grin widened. Her cheeks were a little flushed, but William could not have said whether that was the kiss or the fight or simply Lucy being Lucy. "You can all watch me kick Crocodile's ass!" She turned on her heel and marched across the plaza toward the merchant's building with the broken second-story shutters. "HEY!" she yelled at the building, cupping both hands around her mouth. "Stop playing possum and get up already! I'M NOT DONE WITH YOU!"
Vivi made a small, choked sound. And then, before Vivi entirely realized she was doing it, the gasp turned into a laugh. She bent slightly at the waist, one hand still over her mouth, the other gripping the strap of her rifle, and she laughed at the absolute, breathtaking audacity of the small, dark-haired girl in a straw hat currently yelling at a Warlord of the Sea to come back out of the building she had been punched through so the fight could continue.
She could not believe it.
She could not believe she was about to watch Crocodile lose. In person. With her own eyes. After three years. After everything!
Her hand came down from her mouth and pressed flat against her chest, just over her heart, as if she needed to physically hold something in place.
Beside her, Robin's eyes had widened by a fraction. This girl, Robin thought, very quietly, in the back of her own head, is going to do it.
She had spent her entire adult life calculating which crew would be useful, which would be expendable, which would buy her another year of life and access to the history she was hunting. She had attached herself to monsters and tyrants and warlords because the calculation had always come out the same: nobody else would take her.
And now, she had walked aboard a haunted pirate ship captained by a girl who had been decapitated and rebuilt, kissed a cat boy who had sucked poison out of her chest with no expectation of reward, made a mermaid laugh, watched a navigator beat a Marine captain unconscious in the street out of sheer irritation, and was, at this very moment, standing in the open beside a Vice Admiral who had quietly decided not to see her as well.
I have made, Robin realized with a small, dangerous warmth, the best decision of my extremely dangerous life.
Kuina, standing slightly apart from the rest of them with Wado Ichimonji's sheath braced against her hip, was not having the same realization. Her brow was furrowed. She drew a long, slow breath through her nose.
Yep, I have no idea what the fuck is going on…
She glanced sideways and down.
Chopper, still in Brain Point, was standing beside her with his little hooves planted and his tiny face set in the same fierce expression he had been wearing since he had charged after Lucy.
Kuina exhaled slowly. "At least you're still the same," she muttered, mostly to herself.
Chopper glanced up at her, blinked, and gave her a small, distracted, reflexive nod, the way one might acknowledge a familiar comment from a longtime crewmate without entirely registering what they had said.
Then his ears flicked. He frowned. He looked at her properly. "...Wait, do I know you?"
"Apparently not," Kuina sighed. She returned her gaze to the chaos in front of her. The rest of the crew was waiting for the fight to restart. But something was missing, Kuina just realized. Her brow furrowed deeper. Where, she thought, with the slow, careful confusion of a woman whose map of the world had been redrawn while she slept, is Usopp? And where, for that matter, is that pervert chef? Sanji?
She did not say either question out loud. There was, she was beginning to suspect, an answer she was not going to like, and she had decided several minutes ago that she was not asking any more questions until somebody put a drink in her hand.
Across the plaza, the merchant's building shuddered.
A long, slow groan of settling timber rolled out of the broken second-story window. Dust puffed. A piece of shutter clattered to the cobblestones.
And then, very slowly, very deliberately, a hooked hand emerged from the shadows of the broken window and gripped the splintered frame.
Crocodile emerged from the rubble of the merchant's building one slow movement at a time.
He hauled himself up onto the splintered windowsill with his hook, dragging the rest of his body after it like a man who refused, on principle, to be carried out by debris of his own making. The shadows of the broken interior peeled back from him. His long fur-collared coat fluttered out behind him in a slow ripple, the hem ragged where it had caught on broken wood, one shoulder seam ripped clean through. The lining was scorched where Lucy's lightning had nicked him on the way out.
He looked, William noted with a quiet, internal holy shit, like a man who had been having an extremely bad afternoon.
Crocodile's eyes had locked onto Lucy the second he cleared the window frame, and they did not move.
They did not flicker sideways, not even once, to register the small army of witnesses arranged in a loose half-circle across the plaza.
He did not see Robin.
He did not see Vivi.
And he most certainly, most certainly, did not see Vice Admiral Monkey D. Garp.
If Crocodile had noticed Garp the Warlord of the Sea probably would have turned to sand and kept on going without stopping for breath until he hit a different ocean…
But Crocodile was past noticing anything anymore.
His gaze was fixed on the small girl in the straw hat who had not stopped grinning at him since he had pulled himself out of the building.
"You," he rasped. His voice was rough, lower than usual. He took one slow step forward. His coat dragged. "You little brat. You have ruined everything."
She tilted her head and planted her hands on her hips with the air of a girl who had been waiting for him to start whining.
"Years," Crocodile bit out. "Years of planning. Operatives in every city. Three years of carefully cultivated drought. An entire population primed for collapse. A rebellion army marching exactly when I told it to march. A casino that printed money. A throne—" his hook came up, jabbed once at the sky, "—a throne about to fall into my lap. And you. You. You and your circus of a crew strolled into my country and broke it all in three days." His shoulders shook with the force of the inhale. "How dare you," he snarled. "How dare you ruin my plans, you stupid, reckless, insignificant little—"
Lucy's grin dropped. "You," Lucy said, very quietly, "are the one who made Vivi cry first." The temperature of the plaza dropped two degrees. "You ruined her kingdom. You starved her people. You made her live a lie for two years just so you could steal her dad's chair!?" Lucy's chin tilted up. Her hat shadow slid back. Her dark eyes caught the flicker of distant lightning, and for just a second they reflected blue-white instead of brown. "You're getting exactly what you deserve, you scaly bastard!"
A long, slow silence stretched across the plaza.
In the back of his head, somewhere very deep beneath two decades of cultivated rage and ambition, Crocodile of the Seven Warlords of the Sea, the man who had stood across a battlefield from Whitebeard himself and lived to retire to a desert kingdom, came to a very tired, very honest conclusion.
Arguing with this girl was pointless. He had met kings he could manipulate. He had met admirals he could outmaneuver. He had met assassins he could buy and pirates he could break. He had spent his entire adult career navigating the egos of dangerous men with the patience of a surgeon, finding their pressure points, twisting the right words into the right wounds, watching them turn into useful tools.
In all of it, in all of it, he had never once met a creature as relentlessly, monumentally, insultingly stubborn as the small girl in the straw hat currently informing him of his moral failings on top of his own demolished casino.
His patience snapped. His body turned to sand.
Crocodile's claw, the one polished metal cap on his right hand that he wore for show, had uncapped mid-motion. The decorative gold housing had peeled back like the casing of a hidden weapon, and what was revealed beneath it was not a claw at all.
It was a syringe.
Lucy did not seem to have noticed. A column of dark cloud condensed around her in a single instant, her body dissolving sideways into a streak of black and blue-white that blurred forward across the plaza to meet Crocodile's sand stream head-on.
Two Logia bodies, two intangible streaks of focused element, closing on each other in a converging line that should have passed straight through each other and ended in a draw.
It would have. Except neither of them was planning to phase.
Crocodile's reforming arm—the one with the syringe—solidified a half-instant before contact, a thin, coat of dark Armament Haki sliding down the length of the needle. He drove it forward in a vicious overhand stab aimed at the center of Lucy's chest.
Lucy's storm body reformed at exactly the same moment. Her right arm came up. Her fist clenched. And her knuckles turned white. White with heat. Static danced down her bare arm, gathering, compressing, condensing into the white-hot core of her knuckles.
This was a new signature move she had been waiting to try out.
"Try this on for size!" Lucy declared. She drove her fist forward. "RAILGUN IMPACT!"
The world whip-cracked.
The syringe shattered before he could even try to use it.
Lucy's fist continued through the ruined claw and buried itself in Crocodile's chest.
The Warlord of the Sea wheezed. His Logia body tried, on instinct, to dissolve out of the impact and failed.
Lucy's Haki had pinned the flesh in place for the duration of the strike, and had given the lightning somewhere to go.
The discharge rippled through Crocodile's body in a single full-skeleton convulsion.
He should have gone flying. He did not go flying. His boots scraped backward across the cobblestones in two long, ugly furrows, dragging through stone that crumbled beneath the friction. His body bent backward over the impact point. He skidded to a stop perhaps fifteen feet from where he had started, hunched, panting, sand swirling around his feet.
And then he straightened. Slowly. Deliberately. "This," he rasped, "isn't fucking over. I am not. Going. To lose."
The air around his functional left hand began to dry out. Then the sand under his coat lifted, peeled outward, coiled around his forearm in a slow, gathering spiral. The spiral tightened. The spiral accelerated until it formed a small tornado of raging sand.
"SABLES BLOW!" Crocodile roared.
He drove his fist forward.
The tornado launched off the front of his knuckles in a screaming horizontal column, narrower than any sandstorm had a right to be, and it slammed into Lucy at point-blank range.
Lucy's storm body absorbed the worst of it—the cloud beneath her skin reformed in a flash, the sand passing through her shoulders and torso in a hissing rush of grit—but the force of it, the directional kinetic force of a Haki-driven Sables Blow at point-blank range, was not the kind of thing a Logia body could phase through.
She caught it in the chest. Her sandals left the cobblestones. She rocketed backward across the plaza.
She did not land. Halfway through, her trajectory reversed.
A black storm cloud detonated beneath her sandals in a focused pop, and Lucy was no longer flying backward. She was launching herself forward, kicking off her own thunderhead, the recoil shooting her back across the plaza toward Crocodile faster than she had been moving when he had hit her.
Crocodile barely had time to bring his arm back up.
Her fist met his guard in a crack of lightning and sand. He turned his hip into it, sand peeling off his shoulder in a defensive whorl, Haki sliding down his forearm in a thicker line than before. He drove a hook strike at her ribs.
She blurred sideways into cloud, reformed at his flank, drove a knee into his side.
He turned to sand around the knee, reformed at her shoulder, snapped the hook down toward her neck.
She caught it on the back of her forearm with a sharp white-blue arc of contained electricity that sent his hand jerking sideways.
He brought the sand-coated fist back in.
She ducked under it. She came up under his guard. She drove a Storm Punch into his stomach.
He turned sand, reformed, slammed the side of his hook against her temple.
She turned cloud, reformed, kicked off the air, and came at him from above.
Sand and storm cloud and white-blue lightning and dark Haki and a long fur-collared coat and a straw hat on a cord. Two Logia bodies that had stopped pretending phasing was going to save them.
Two fighters who had decided, by mutual furious agreement, that the only acceptable conclusion to this was whichever one of them was still standing when the other one stopped.
William, watching from the safe side of the cracked cobblestones with Vivi's hand still fisted in the back of his jacket and Nami's shoulder pressed against his arm and Robin's calm presence at his other side and Pearl's wings half-raised behind all of them, felt his tails lash once, twice, in agitated counter-rhythm to the clashes.
Behind him, Garp let out a low, appreciative whistle through his teeth. "Hoh," the Vice Admiral said quietly, mostly to himself. "Atta girl."
Lucy and Crocodile kept clashing.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Storm met sand in the center of Rainbase with enough force to turn the plaza into a war zone. Every collision punched cracks through the cobblestones. Every dodge sent chunks of broken stone and casino debris spinning through the air. Every time Crocodile dissolved into sand, Lucy chased him as cloud and lightning. Every time Lucy reformed to strike, Crocodile met her with hook, fist, sand blade, or storm-eating desert wind.
Their bodies blurred in and out of shape, flesh becoming element and element becoming flesh in violent flashes of timing and instinct.
Crocodile’s coat snapped around him like a torn war banner, the fur collar ragged and smoking from multiple lightning burns.
Lucy’s straw hat stayed around her neck by sheer miracle and a very stubborn cord, bouncing against her back each time she kicked herself through the air on a burst of storm cloud.
Crocodile drove a sand-coated fist toward her face.
Lucy ducked under it, her hair lifting from static, and drove her elbow into his ribs.
He grunted, turned half to sand, and lashed his mangled hook toward her throat.
She twisted into a cloud, reformed at his side, and kicked him hard enough in the knee to make the joint buckle.
Crocodile snarled and released a burst of sand from the ground beneath her feet.
Lucy shot upward on a dark cloud, flipped once in the air, and came down with both fists wreathed in lightning.
Crocodile crossed his arms above his head and caught the blow.
The plaza shook.
A window somewhere down the street gave up, cracked, and collapsed inward with a sad little tinkle of glass.
Lucy grinned down at him through the sparks. Crocodile glared up at her through the sand.
Neither of them looked away.
Lucy’s breath was starting to come harder now. Her shoulders ached. Her knuckles hurt. One side of her jaw throbbed where Crocodile’s fist had clipped her earlier, and her ribs were beginning to complain in a way she usually associated with Garp training sessions and extremely bad ideas.
This was the most intense fight she had ever been in.
Buggy had killed her before she could really fight back. Smoker had been tricky, but once she figured out his jitte, he had gone down. Mr. 5 had been annoying. Wapol had been stupid. Blackbeard had been scary, but Ace had been with her then.
Crocodile was different. Crocodile was strong. He was mean and slippery and clever and hit like someone who had spent years learning exactly where to put pain so it would stay. He knew Haki. He knew how to fight Logias. He knew how to make every inch of the battlefield part of his body, every grain of sand a weapon, every dry breath a warning.
Lucy loved it.
She hated him. She really, really hated him. He had hurt Vivi. He had hurt Vivi’s country. He had made people hungry and thirsty and sad just because he wanted a chair.
But the fight itself? The fight made something in Lucy’s blood sing.
Her grin stretched wider. She could not be Pirate Queen if she could not beat one stinky Warlord!
That was just obvious.
A dark spiral of sand tore toward her from below. Lucy punched it apart with a crackling Storm Punch and skidded backward across the plaza, sandals scraping stone. She landed in front of the loose half-circle of her crew, only for a heartbeat, but long enough.
“COME ON, LUCY!” William shouted, both hands cupped around his mouth, red ears standing straight up and tails lashing behind him. “KICK HIS ASS!”
“Stop letting the old sandbag monologue and hit him harder!” Nami yelled right after him, sea stone staff braced in one hand, orange hair whipping around her face in the storm wind.
Lucy’s heart did something fluttery.
William was watching her.
Nami was watching her.
Vivi was watching with tears in her eyes and her hands clenched around her rifle. Robin stood beside her, smiling that sharp, secret smile that meant she had already decided Crocodile’s suffering was educational. Chopper was practically vibrating with worry. Pearl’s black wings were half-spread like she wanted to shield all of them and kill everything at the same time. There was also a swordswoman there, watching Lucy as well and cheering, but Lucy didn’t recognize her.
It didn’t matter. Lucy had people cheering for her.
She glanced past Crocodile for a second, toward the ruined streets beyond him.
No one was cheering for him. Not one person. His agents had run. His casino workers had fled. His Baroque Works officers had abandoned the battlefield or gotten beaten down in the streets. His whole crew, if he even thought of them that way, had left him standing alone in the wreckage of the kingdom he had tried to steal.
Lucy’s grin faded by a little. That is kind of sad.
Crocodile saw it. He saw the shift in her face. Saw the tiny softening around her eyes. Saw pity, of all things, land on him from the brat who had broken his casino, bloodied his mouth, humiliated him in front of witnesses, and refused to understand the scale of what he had built.
For one brief, disbelieving second, Sir Crocodile had no idea what was happening inside the crazy girl’s head.
Then he understood just enough to be insulted. His face twisted. “How dare you,” Crocodile snarled.
Lucy blinked.
The sand around his feet began to rise. “How dare you look at me like that?” he demanded, voice climbing from rasp to roar. The air dried around him so violently that the moisture vanished from nearby broken stone, leaving pale cracks crawling across the surface. “How dare you judge me? How dare you look down on me?”
Lucy’s expression went blank with confusion. “I’m not very tall,” she said. “I can’t look down on you…”
Crocodile’s eye twitched.
Nami slapped a hand over her face.
Garp’s shoulders started shaking with silent, catastrophic laughter.
Crocodile did not laugh. “I am Sir Crocodile,” he roared, sand spiraling faster and faster around him. “I am the man who will conquer this nation, seize its ancient weapon, and use it to crush every fool who ever thought himself above me!” His hook lifted, gleaming gold beneath the storm-dark sky. “Alabasta was the beginning. The world was next. I was going to build power no Marine, no Emperor, no rotting old legend could take from me!” His eyes burned. “I am the man who will stand above this age! I will conquer this nation and then the world! I will be the King of the Pirates!”
The pity vanished from Lucy’s face. Completely. Her eyes narrowed under the brim of her hat. The clouds above Rainbase went silent.
For half a heartbeat, there was no thunder. No wind. No crackling lightning. The entire plaza seemed to hold its breath around her.
Then Lucy stepped forward. “That’s not happening,” she said.
Crocodile’s sand surged.
Lucy’s fists clenched. “I’m going to be the Pirate Queen!”
Crocodile screamed and thrust both arms forward.
Two sand tornadoes erupted from either side of him, twisting together into a massive horizontal cyclone that tore chunks from the plaza as it came. Cobblestones ripped up and joined the storm. Broken casino chips, splintered wood, marble dust, shattered glass, and dry desert grit all became part of the attack. It roared toward Lucy like the desert itself had opened its mouth to swallow her.
Lucy planted her feet.
“Lucy!” Vivi cried.
William took one involuntary step forward. His protective instincts flaring no matter how much he believed in her.
Nami’s hand snapped out and grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t,” she said with her eyes fixed on Lucy. “We have to trust her to win!”
So that’s what William did. He stood there with Nami gripping his sleeve and watched the fight reach its apex.
Lucy punched the sandstorm. Not with one fist. With both.
Her arms turned white-hot from fingertip to elbow, glowing so brightly the bones beneath her skin flashed in sharp silhouette for an instant. Storm cloud condensed around her shoulders and poured down her arms like black smoke. Electricity screamed along her knuckles.
Lucy screamed over the roar of the sand.
“RAILGUN IMPACT—”
She punched.
The first blow detonated against the center of the cyclone and split it open.
“—STORM BARRAGE!”
And then she vanished into motion. Her fists became thunder. There was no rhythm at first. It was Lucy, pure and furious and joyful and impossibly stubborn, throwing every ounce of strength, storm, lightning, Haki, and will she had into the space between herself and Crocodile.
One punch tore through the sandstorm and caught Crocodile in the shoulder.
Another hit his ribs before he could reform.
Another slammed under his guard and snapped his head back.
Crocodile tried to dissolve.
Lucy hit the sand itself with Haki and lightning, forcing him back into shape with a crackling explosion that made his teeth click together.
He lifted his ruined hook.
She knocked it aside.
He tried to raise a sand wall.
She punched through it.
He tried to step back.
She followed.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The barrage drove him across the plaza one brutal impact at a time. Lucy’s fists hammered into him faster than his body could decide whether it was sand or flesh. Each strike released a compressed thunderclap. Each thunderclap shook dust from the ruins. Each impact forced Crocodile farther backward, boots carving trenches through stone, coat whipping around him, blood and sand spraying from his mouth.
He blocked the first three.
He endured the next five.
He tried to counter on the ninth.
Lucy broke his guard on the tenth.
After that, there was no defense.
Only lightning. Only storm. Only the small girl in the straw hat roaring her dream into the face of the man who had tried to bury an entire kingdom under his own ambition.
Her left buried itself in his stomach.
Her right cracked across his jaw.
Her left hit his chest.
Her right hit his face.
Her arms blurred white-blue.
Crocodile staggered. For one instant, he was still upright. For one instant, Sir Crocodile of the Seven Warlords of the Sea looked down at Monkey D. Lucy with an expression that was no longer rage.
It was disbelief.
Lucy drew both fists back. Storm clouds condensed behind her shoulders like wings. The plaza flashed white.
“RAILGUN DOUBLE IMPACT!”
Both fists drove forward together. The blow hit Crocodile square in the chest.
Crocodile’s body folded around the impact. His eyes went wide. Sand burst from his back in a plume, not as an attack, not as a defense, but as his Logia body failing to process the sheer force that had just been driven through it.
Then he left the ground. He flew backward across the plaza, limp before he hit anything.
He crashed down directly in front of Vivi. The impact threw up a puff of dust around her boots.
Vivi yelped and stumbled back, rifle coming up on instinct, her eyes wide and wet as Crocodile rolled once across the cobblestones and came to a stop at her feet.
Silence fell.
Crocodile did not move.
His coat lay torn around him. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, dark against the dust on his face. His chest rose once, shallowly, then again.
He was alive of course, the Straw Hats weren’t killers, but he was unconscious.
He was defeated.
Vivi stared down at him. For three years, that man had been a shadow over every dry well, every starving village, every family torn between king and rebellion. He had been smoke behind rumors, sand beneath betrayal, the hidden hand tightening around her father’s throat and her kingdom’s heart. He had been too powerful to accuse, too beloved to expose, too careful to catch.
And now he was lying unconscious at her feet because a girl in a straw hat had punched him until his ambition stopped moving.
Vivi’s rifle lowered. Her lips parted. Tears gathered fast and spilled before she could stop them.
“He’s…” Her voice broke. She swallowed hard, both hands shaking around the rifle strap. “He’s beaten.”
Robin watched Crocodile’s still body with an expression that did not fit neatly into any one feeling. Satisfaction, perhaps. Relief. Vindication.
Nami exhaled so loudly it was almost a laugh. Her hand tightened around William’s sleeve, and only then did she seem to realize she had been holding him back the entire time.
William’s ears stood straight up. His mouth hung open slightly. His tails were fluffed to absurd proportions behind him.
Garp stared at Lucy with something bright and fierce in his eyes.
Lucy stood in the center of the cracked plaza, arms still glowing faintly, tiny sparks crawling over her raw knuckles.
For a second, she simply stared at Crocodile.
Then her face split into a huge, exhausted grin. “I did it!” Lucy cheered, throwing both arms straight up. “I beat the stinky Warlord!”
The storm clouds above Rainbase answered with one last triumphant roll of thunder.
Then Lucy blinked. Her smile wobbled. “Huh,” she mumbled. “I’m kinda tired.” Her knees gave out.
““LUCY!”” William and Nami shouted at the same time.
Lucy collapsed backward before either of them could reach her. She hit the cobblestones flat on her back, arms spread, hat sliding half off her head.
Then Lucy snored. Loudly. A tiny spark popped off her nose and vanished.
Nami stopped mid-sprint, stared down at her captain, and slowly dragged both hands down her face.
William crouched beside Lucy, checked her breathing, heard the steady thump of her heart, and let out a shaky laugh. “She’s asleep.”
Chopper burst into tears immediately. “That idiot! You can’t just win against a Warlord and take a nap in the street!”
Garp threw his head back and laughed so hard the cracked plaza trembled beneath his boots. “BWAHAHAHAHA!” he roared, wiping at one eye. “That’s my granddaughter!”
They found a building three streets away from the ruins of Rain Dinners that was, by some miracle, empty, intact, and only mildly insulted by the chaos outside.
It had probably been an upscale lounge before Crocodile’s casino had turned the surrounding district into a playground for gamblers with too much money and not enough sense.
Lucy was asleep on the longest couch, sprawled flat on her back with one arm hanging off the side and her straw hat resting crookedly over her face. Every few breaths, a tiny spark popped from her hair and vanished into the air with a soft crackle.
Chopper stood on a stool beside her in Brain Point, medical bag open at his hooves, brow furrowed in deep professional concentration. He dabbed ointment over the bruises along Lucy’s jaw and neck, muttering under his breath the entire time. “Idiot captain,” he grumbled, though his little hooves were gentle. “Stupid reckless captain. You can’t just fight a Warlord, pass out in the street, and expect your doctor not to worry, you bastard.”
Lucy snored.
Chopper huffed, peeled a strip of bandage from a roll, and wrapped it around a shallow cut on her forearm. “Don’t snore at me while I’m treating you!”
Lucy snored louder.
Nami, standing beside William near the couch, crossed her arms and stared down at their unconscious captain. “How bad is it?”
Chopper leaned close to Lucy’s face, lifted one eyelid, checked her pupil, then pressed a stethoscope to her chest. He listened, frowned, moved it, listened again, and finally nodded with the stern authority of a doctor who was very small, very furry, and absolutely not to be argued with.
“She’s fine,” he announced. “Bruises, cuts, some mild, probably several strained muscles, and extreme exhaustion. Her body used too much energy too fast, especially with the Haki stuff. But nothing is broken. No internal bleeding. No serious dehydration.” His eyes narrowed at Lucy. “She is just tired because she is a stupid idiot who fought until her body forced her to stop.”
William let out a breath he had not realized he had been holding. His shoulders dropped. His ears, which had been standing rigidly upright since Lucy collapsed, finally softened. One of his tails curled around his own leg in relief while the other flicked toward Nami without conscious thought.
Nami caught the motion from the corner of her eye. Her stern expression loosened.
For half a heartbeat, they simply looked at each other. Just the shared, quiet relief of two people who had both watched the girl they loved collapse after defeating one of the most dangerous men in the world.
Nami smiled first.
William smiled back.
Then Nami reached over and squeezed his hand once before letting go.
Across the room, Vivi stood with both hands clasped tightly in front of her chest. Her gaze had not left Lucy since they carried her inside. The princess’s face was pale beneath the dust and desert heat, her blue hair escaping its scarf in messy strands around her cheeks.
“I’m glad,” Vivi whispered. “I’m so glad.” Her voice trembled. She pressed her fingers tighter together. “If she had been badly hurt because of me…”
“She would have been furious if you said that where she could hear,” Robin said.
Vivi turned toward her.
Robin leaned against the wall near the shuttered window, arms folded, expression composed in the way that meant she was thinking more than she intended to show. “Lucy did not fight Crocodile because you made her,” Robin continued. “She fought him because she decided he needed to be punched. Our captain does not appear to have much patience for guilt when someone she likes is suffering.”
Vivi blinked.
Robin’s mouth curved slightly. “Trying to take responsibility for her choices will only confuse her. Or make her hungry. I have not yet determined which reaction is more likely.”
In the corner of the room, Vice Admiral Garp finished tying Crocodile up. Crocodile was bound from shoulders to ankles in thick rope pulled so tight that even unconscious, even limp, even stripped of momentum and dignity, he looked personally offended by the workmanship.
Crocodile’s hook had been removed and placed on a table several feet away. His coat was torn. His face was bruised. His breathing was steady but rough.
Garp gave the final knot a sharp tug. The rope creaked. Crocodile did not wake.
“There,” Garp said cheerfully, rising to his full, ridiculous height. “That oughta hold him until I get him somewhere with proper chains.”
Everyone in the room went still.
Even Chopper paused with a bandage half-wrapped around Lucy’s wrist.
Garp looked down at the unconscious Warlord with a grin that had too many teeth in it to be comforting. “I’ll take this guy back to headquarters,” he said. “After that, it’s straight to Impel Down for him. Warlord or not, starting a civil war, trying to steal a kingdom, and hiding an entire criminal organization under the World Government’s nose is gonna make for one ugly report.”
Nami’s eyes narrowed. “You’re arresting him?”
“Sure am.”
“For real?”
Garp snorted. “What, you think I carry around rope as a hobby?”
Technically, that was just some random rope we found in the rubble…
William did not say that out loud.
Vivi stared at Crocodile’s bound body. There should have been triumph in her face. Satisfaction. Maybe even joy. Instead, there was only the stunned, hollow relief of someone who had been bracing against a door for years and had just watched the thing on the other side stop pushing. “He’s really going to prison,” she whispered.
Garp’s grin faded just a little. “If I have anything to say about it.” Then his eyes lifted.
The room inhaled.
Garp’s gaze moved across them one by one.
Nami stiffened.
Vivi swallowed.
Pearl’s wings shifted behind her.
Robin did not move at all.
That was how William knew she was afraid.
Garp’s eyes landed on her.
The air in the room changed.
Nico Robin, Devil Child, archaeologist of Ohara, survivor, fugitive, woman with a seventy-nine-million-berry bounty and twenty years of betrayal carved into her instincts, looked back at the Hero of the Marines with a calm expression and a body held perfectly still.
William moved before he decided to. He placed himself directly between Garp and Robin, purple fire flickering once across his fingers before he forced it down. His ears flattened, not from fear this time, but warning. Both tails lifted behind him, twisting with tension.
Nami’s head snapped toward him.
Robin’s eyes widened.
For a brief, stupid, noble, catastrophically dangerous second, William D. Sparrow stood between Nico Robin and Monkey D. Garp as if his body could actually mean something against that kind of power.
Garp stared at him.
The room waited.
Then the old Marine grinned. “Bwahahaha,” he said, softer than before but no less amused. “That’s a good look on you, boy. Real men don’t hesitate to protect what’s there. You’re the kind of man I don’t mind sticking with my granddaughter…”
William gaped at those final words. Was that really approval!?
Garp looked past William, directly at Robin. Then at Pearl. Then up at the ceiling, as though addressing some invisible clerk from Marine Headquarters who might be taking notes. “I didn’t see no Lunarian,” Garp declared.
Pearl blinked slowly.
Garp’s eyes shifted back to Robin. “And I sure as hell didn’t see Nico Robin.”
Robin’s composure cracked. Only a little. Only enough for William, who stood close enough to hear the almost invisible hitch in her breathing, to notice.
Garp bent, grabbed Crocodile by the ropes, and slung the unconscious Warlord over one shoulder as easily as a sack of flour. Crocodile’s head lolled against the back of Garp’s coat. “Tell my granddaughter not to get too comfortable,” Garp said, heading for the door. “I’ll be seeing her again soon.”
Nami, who had regained enough of herself to be suspicious of any gift offered by any Marine, crossed her arms. “Is that a threat?”
Garp paused in the doorway. He looked back over his shoulder. His grin came back full force. “It’s family,” he said. Then he left. The floorboards creaked under his boots as he carried Crocodile out into the street, whistling like he was taking out the trash rather than dragging a defeated Warlord toward the most secure prison in the world.
For a moment, everyone simply stood there.
Koby was the only Marine left in the room. The young cadet looked toward the door Garp had exited through. Then toward Lucy. Then toward William. His face tightened. He took one step toward the door. Stopped. Turned back. His hands clenched into fists at his sides.
William noticed that Koby had the same look in his eyes that people got right before they said something extremely sincere and extremely embarrassing.
The pink-haired Marine lifted one trembling finger and pointed it directly at William. “YOU!”
William blinked. “Me?”
“YOU!”
William’s tails twisted together in immediate confusion.
Koby’s voice wobbled once, then steadied through sheer force of will. “A pirate like you is not good enough for a girl like Lucy!”
Nami’s eyebrows shot upward.
Robin’s lips parted slightly.
Vivi made a tiny sound that might have been surprise or the beginning of a laugh.
Pearl leaned forward with visible interest, as though humans had just begun a new mating ritual she needed to document.
William stared. “What…?”
Koby’s face went red, but he did not back down. “She is incredible! She’s brave and strong and free and—and she shines when she fights! She’s reckless and loud and technically a criminal, but she saved me once and I—” His voice cracked. He coughed, adjusted his glasses with shaking dignity, and tried again. “I am going to get much stronger. Strong enough to stand beside Vice Admiral Garp. Strong enough to become a real Marine.”
William’s ears slowly angled sideways.
Koby pointed harder, as though finger intensity might make his declaration less mortifying. “And then I’m going to catch you,” Koby declared. “AND I’M GOING TO TAKE LUCY FROM YOU!”
The room froze again. From the couch, Lucy snored.
Koby’s face turned an even brighter shade of red. “N-Not like— I mean— as a Marine! I’ll arrest you! Properly! And then Lucy will see that I’m stronger and more dependable and—”
“KOBY!” Garp’s voice thundered from outside. “STOP CONFESSING TO THE PIRATES AND MOVE YOUR ASS!”
Koby went rigid. “Yes, Vice Admiral…” he squeaked. He spun toward the door, nearly tripped over his own feet, caught himself on the frame, and then looked back one last time at William with all the tragic intensity of a teenage boy who had decided romance and law enforcement were basically the same career path. “This isn’t over, Panther Prince!”
Then he fled. His footsteps rapidly disappeared down the street after Garp.
William remained where he was. His ears were half-flat. His tails had twisted together behind him into a confused red knot.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “What the fuck was that about?” he asked the room in general.
Nami covered her mouth with one hand, shoulders shaking. Then the laugh broke through anyway, completely merciless. “Oh, baby,” she said, walking up beside him. “That was beautiful.”
“It was not beautiful. It was confusing.”
“It seems,” Nami said, rising on her toes, “like our cute catboy has some competition.”
William turned slowly to look at her. “From KOBY?” The fuck!?
Nami kissed his cheek. Very deliberately. Very sweetly. Very much in full view of everyone still in the room. “Apparently,” she said.
William stared at her in betrayal. “You are enjoying this.”
“I am enjoying this so much!”
Robin’s hand covered her smile. “It was a rather earnest challenge of love....”
Vivi nodded, though her cheeks had gone pink.
Pearl looked thoughtful. “Should William defeat the pink Marine in courtship combat now, or is that scheduled for later?”
“No,” William said immediately.
Nami laughed harder.
Before the conversation could spiral any further into whatever horrifying social structure Pearl had just invented, a door at the back of the lounge swung open.
Kuina emerged. She had Wado Ichimonji at her hip, dust in her blue hair, a scowl on her face, and a large bottle gripped firmly in one hand. The bottle was nearly as long as her forearm.
She lifted it. “I found a stash of alcohol,” Kuina announced.
Nami’s eyes sharpened. “Where?”
“In the room with the fancy shelves and the locked cabinet.”
“You broke into the locked cabinet? That’s supposed to be MY thing!”
Kuina stared at her flatly for that comment. Even if this Nami was strange, and kissing catboys, it was still Nami after all. Kuina pulled the cork out with her teeth, spat it onto a nearby table, and took a long, aggressive gulp.
It was sake. Good sake. Kuina swallowed, exhaled through her nose, and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Then she looked at the room. Kuina lifted the bottle again and pointed with it. “Now,” she said, voice flat with exhaustion, “can someone please explain to me what the fuck is going on?” She took another large gulp. Lowered the bottle. Then narrowed her eyes at William, Nami, and sleeping Lucy. “Oh,” Kuina added. “And why did Nami and Lucy both kiss the same guy?”
The room went very quiet.
Chopper looked up from Lucy’s bandages, blinked once, and said, “Human romance is really complicated.”
Lucy, still asleep, mumbled into her hat.
“William’s squishy…” Then she rolled onto her side and resumed snoring.
Kuina stared at her captain. Then at the bottle in her hand. Then at the room. She lifted the sake again. “I am going to need more of this,” she declared.
XXX