Chapter Text
Through all her life with him, Makino found Luffy a bit strange.
He's always been different and always will be within the invisible walls of the village that surround it like the Red Line separates the Blues — from the very moment he's been thrusted upon her, she knew that clear. She knew it from the way his gaze always shifted from the land to the thin line of the horizon that splits the sky and sea, and from the way his hair sometimes gleamed like gems in the sunlight despite being the darkest coal, and from the way his smile hadn't always reached his eyes when they seemed too knowing and too deep. It was like watching a flower wither away in a shallow cup of water — a pretty, brilliant flower that one would want to keep, but withering all the same.
It almost felt like fate, when a red-haired man appeared on the horizon one day with stories and the same strange, different, glint in his eyes. Luffy bloomed under the backhanded care, finally dropping that thick, bitter shell he put on himself when the village found him unlike them. It felt like a respire, like a breath of fresh air, balm powerful enough to dull the ache the boy no doubt carried for most of his life.
(Then she found Luffy crying in Shanks arms.
He was clutching at his hair, locks mattered and full of seasalt with sand stuck between them in chunks. He was sobbing so hard she couldn't make a single word he was trying to say, if he was saying something at all. Later, when the calm struck and Shanks was nursing one of the stronger brews, the man explained he found the boy on the beach kneeling, screaming in pain. Luffy kept palming his ears, he noted with something faraway in his gaze, like the world was suddenly too loud for him to bear. He didn't even notice when Shanks approached, or the fact that he was more than halfway submerged in the sea. He just kept weeping and shaking with the force of his sobs.
"It almost sounded like he was calling someone," Shanks remarks at last in the silence of the bar. Makino wasn't sure what to make of that information.
(She did not know what to think when the same happened only a week later.))
It lasted for a little over a year, this not-quite peace. The red-haired man came and went, leaving Luffy with gifts of memories that, Makino knew, were worth more than any treasure in existence. The time seemed both so slow and so fast throughout these months, crawling like a lazy snake and then sprinting through life like a predator through bushes.
(Luffy kept coming home with puffy eyes and a runny nose. Shanks kept finding him in different places because of how loud he screamed.)
One day, the man went away and returned with, as he told her, a fruit. She eyed the lock that seemed both brittle and unbreakable, somehow, and decided it was not her business what treasures these pirates bring as long as it goes away with them. She had not noticed when the soft click was swallowed in the festives, nor did she hear a bite so vicious it might as well have been of a man who had not seen food in years. Makino had not noticed anything, as if a veil was put on, as if her awareness was numbed within the celebration of a thing she doesn't even care about that much.
The light steaming from the window was blinding, for a thing that hadn't even reached her eyes.
Everything was a blur of actions from then on, starting with the panicked explanation of what a Devil Fruit was, to Luffy exploding over something she knew very well he understood, to the bandits wrecking havoc, to the-
(Luffy was crying again, but now, it was something more real than the abstract unknown Makino could only theorize about. It was almost a relief, to finally get to understand the thing that might make the boy so sad.)
The man will not return to Dawn after his and his crew's last departure. Luffy had stuck to her heels ever since the news were announced — but, of course, only after receiving the hat. Garp should visit in a month or two, she thinks as she sweeps the floors, and he will probably be displeased with what had become of his grandson. Makino doesn't really understand the fuss about the marines, right or wrong in this topic, and she feels like she should've thought more about it. The bar is packed full today, though, so she can't spend a lot of time daydreaming.
The boy, naturally, clings to her skirt even as she starts to go rounds, collecting clients' orders. Many coo at the little tail trailing behind her, mainly older women with kind eyes and crow feet in the corners. Luffy always giggles at the attention, although he clearly doesn't get what's so fascinating about him to warrant that.
Makino smiles, turning to greet another customer and feels her smile freeze in place.
A man, draped in jewelry and evidently rich, eyes her like she's a vase on an auction for his taking. Other clients, she observes, sit a hefty distance away from him and two of his guards behind his back, throwing looks and shifting uneasily on the stools. His gaze roams over her form, asserting and leering like she's a piece of art or perhaps a meal, and she has a sudden urge to run away.
She pushes Luffy further behind her, despite him already hiding and clutching at her clothes.
(Shanks, a pirate, a lawless cutthroat as is always taught by people of all ages, had never looked at her like that.)
She smiles as wide as her discomfort allows her. "What can I do for you today, sir?"
The man tuts, nauseously playful and inappropriate. "What can you do, little thing?" He says, and even his voice is sweet, like he expects Makino to fall in his lap just from that sentence alone. The people slink away from him even further, even the elder ones finding his presence a great sickness, and it takes her counting from ten to one to not snap at him right there and then.
She was always a patient woman, but even her patience is waning, and he had barely talked.
"I can bring the finest alcohol I have and the best food I can cook, sir."
Something akin to displeasure clouds the man's look.
"Oh?" He clicks his tongue. "Not offering yourself? I'm sure I can give you something better than-" His gaze darts to the boy behind her, looking at the man with wide, almost unseeing eyes, and stays locked there as he sneers, "-one brat."
The guards suddenly brandish the spears, subtly pointing them at her. Makino glares at them with distaste, a frown of her own working its way on her face. She hears more than sees the patrons scrambling in case they need to bolt if this will suddenly turn bloody. Her hand falls on Luffy's head, flicking the straw hat off in silent promise and command, pushing onto it just enough for it to become clear she wants him upstairs and not an inch closer.
He, predictably, does not yield.
(She does not see the way his irises flicker with a reddish ring near his pupils. She does not see how his mouth pulls into an almost overbearing smile. She does not see the way yellows and purpurs of the setting sun that pool inside from the windows skitter toward his form like snakes, like they form something vague just behind his back, vague and angry. She does not see nor feel nor hear any of it, and no other customer seemed to, too.
(The rich man, however, did.))
The man almost runs from her bar as soon as the sudden rush of emotions ebbs away, the confused guards trailing behind like they themselves did not understand the sudden change. Luffy follows them with his eyes, then huffs. He holds her hand as he says in a very, very childishly-serious voice, "He won't come back."
Makino sighs, heavy and weary, "I hope so."
(Three days later the News Coos delivers a paper on the second page of which she reads about an attack on the Celestial Dragon's cargo ship, just west of Dawn Island. It says revolutionaries had seized it, trashed it, killing the staff and the owner. The metal was melted in some places, holes big enough an average human could fit easily though, but the ship itself remained floating on water until it hit land.
The ship was cold, the news remarked, chilled to the freezing temperatures despite being in direct sunlight and heaters aboard working on their maximum capacity. She looks over a picture of the man she saw less than a week ago, alive and arrogant, now dead and covered in a thin layer of frost.
When Makino lifts her head from reading, Luffy is looking at her with that strange glint in his gaze.)