Chapter Text
Come gather, children, settle down
For I've a tale to tell
Of the Pirate King, old Roger Gold
The devil clawed straight from Hell.
You may have heard his name before,
I see you're all nodding at me,
Well, listen close and hold these thoughts of
Terror, of plundering at sea.
Roger stood above them all,
A man of such fearsome wit
Who sailed to Raftel, now promised land
With his gang of vulgar misfits.
He threw the world to panic, chaos
With promise of the One Piece,
Now reigns - thank god! - a calmer time
Brought only by the decease.
But rest not, my little ones,
For Roger's soul still roams!
If you play up, you misbehave,
He'll pluck you from your homes!
A pirate's life is vain and bereft,
They have no love in their hearts,
They take the wicked, vile and cruel
The stupid, but not the smart.
So fill your heads with knowledge, all,
Let me witness great things from you
So each and every child I see
Avoids joining a pirate crew!
You wouldn't want to tarr your name
With sin so ripe and bare,
So knuckle down forthwith and learn
Else you'll be the pirate's heir!
For years ago, precious lambs
There was rumor of a child,
A child whose mother was never found
Neither at sea, sand, mountains, glen wild.
But search they did, they checked all due
Each woman with him may have been –
Was she ever real? Did Roger pass along
His genes with a woman unseen?
Alas – we know not! We can only but hope
That a monster lives not among we,
Else the slaying, the blood, will have all been for naught
If it escaped and allowed to live free!
A grand adventure, it was supposed to be.
One that he had dreamt of endlessly since the moment he had opened Brag Men, a book roughly shoved into his chest as a child by the man who would unwittingly set him on his way later in life. Not the way that the man in question wanted, mind; quite the opposite, in fact.
A grand adventure. Like in the adventure books he had poured over endlessly in his youth and well into his teens before and beyond Brag Men – books that he had been forced into hiding when he was deemed too old to still be reading them. Children’s books, they had been called. Stuff of fancy to enchant young minds and engage their imagination. To help children cultivate a mind that was sharp, witty, and bright. Not to be believed in past the age of puberty; certainly not to be handled like sacred text and secretly stashed under the bed of a medical student many years later, crammed between tomes of anatomy and beginner’s radiology.
He liked to dream. It had been a gift when starting out in life. Yes, he could remember well how the other children would join him in his make-believe games of witches and wizards, of heroes and villains, of bad, evil pirates and good, brave marines. How, when he joined his first school at the tender age of four, the name Roger had been hissed like a dirty fungus that had taken root between teachers and pupils alike, cementing the name of the late pirate king into innocent, delicate minds as something wrong.
Roger had always been the baddie of the games. Whoever was picked to play Roger was the class’s odd one out of the week. Funny, really, how children went through cycles of favor, how they would so easily pick and choose and reconcile with whoever they weren’t interested in week to week to day. How when, one miserable, heart-breaking week, he had been singled out to play Roger during recess.
Like the others – like a good little boy, always filling his role well, he was quick to boast when Father drew doubtful – he chased his classmates, fingers curled like claws and growling fiercely. When he caught someone, they became a pirate with him, mind warped and misguided by the fearsome pirate king, and they, too, would chase and hunt down their pitiful prey.
Still, though, it had moved him to tears in the privacy of his bedroom each night of that week, sobbing into his pillow in silence, shoulders shaking and stomach cramping with the effort of remaining undetected. I’m not a pirate, the small boy of five had whimpered into his sodden pillow, into his palms, I’m not bad. I’m not weak.
Not a pirate, no. Never a pirate.
And yet that little boy had grown up with a love for the sea in his heart, with the desire to venture out and away like the brave explorers in his books. They were distinctly different to pirates, he was apt to firmly remind himself on occasion. These people were brave, striking out on their own with a thirst for knowledge and a need to see the world set firmly in their minds and hearts. Pirates? Oh, pirates set sail for riches, for glory, and for power. Pirates were like Roger, the evil man who had given all normal adventurers a bad reputation, had, since his death, turned their names into laughing stocks. Why, even simple fishermen at the port could no longer work without at least one snide comment here and there, locals loudly debating whether or not they were about to fall victim to the pull of gold and silver.
But not he. Not he.
He craved – he yearned – for the cry of the gulls. For beaches stretching further than the eye could see, for lands he could scarcely understand and ways of life that made little to no sense.
And for all of this – above all else, the most imperative – was to achieve this life completely alone.
Well, he had succeeded, in a manner of speaking.
He had certainly, undoubtedly, set sail on his own, like his much-admired adventurer who had penned Brag Men. He had begun his new life just as he had painstakingly planned, and just as he had waited and debated and stressed and worried over. He had even armed himself with a notebook solely for this journey, one bound in soft leather and treated with something expensive that would prevent the sea air from damaging it too much, so as to become the next grand adventurer of the East Blue. He would document his findings, his discoveries, just like the author of his Bible, and he would have the time of his life doing so.
Because this was what life was about. This was what he had dreamed of for as long as he could remember. The push to act had finally come in the form of bad grades, in his father threatening to outright disown him if he didn’t do better, live up to his brother’s achievements, and get himself up to standards so high he could never hope to reach them.
Not to worry. He had turned the tables on him, had been the one doing the disowning. Hah! Not so clever now, are you, Father?
A brand-new beginning. A chance to be himself rather than what his family expected of him. No more was he to be the boy hiding in the shadows of an elder brother, nor the boy who cowered in fear of a father who had never loved him. He had cast it all aside four days ago, had run and escaped and refused to look back. All gone – name, status, occupation, and expectations. A chance at freedom; a chance to become who he knew he was supposed to be.
… The only trouble was that – and it was becoming a more pressing matter with every hour, in fact –he was stranded, he was without food or water, and he was definitely, without debate, dying.
So perhaps the grand adventure wasn’t off to the flying start that he had hoped and planned for.
But still, all things considered, death via a combination of starvation, dehydration, and hallucinating that the bleached skeleton beside him was talking to him were far preferable to killing himself under the pressures of becoming a doctor like his father and brother.
He was never going to be a doctor. He was himself, and himself only.
Whoever he was anymore, of course.