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Once upon a time, long, long ago, Portgas D. meant royalty. Meant power, meant wealth, meant benevolent rule, hard-fought and hard-won, forged in fire.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, Portgas D. lost all that.
This is not that story.
(This is the end of the line.)
——
Rouge is six and free, a carefree middle child.
Little Blanche, with her chubby cheeks and meaty little mitts, loves her older siblings with all her heart, even if she doesn’t like them touching her toys— hand carved wooden boats that Papa made for them. Their parents dote on her, and worry in hushed voices at night— it’s at this age that Blanche develops a dark look in her eyes when she thinks no one is watching, glaring off into the middle distance.
Rosario, her parents’ accidental first child, chases them around the yard when they steal his books, flailing gracelessly over his own two feet; try as he might, he isn’t athletically inclined like the girls. Blanche and Rouge run down to the docks with him whenever ships come in, watching him haggle for new books from around the world. He regales them all with tales from the Grand Line, enthralled by the world he hasn’t yet seen. He’s older than either of them, almost an adult now.
Rouge scuffles with neighborhood kids, fiery and fierce, laughing off bruises and swinging with wild abandon. There’s a rush through her veins every time, the thrill of the fight calling to something deep and primal in her bones. Free fall in the split second before she flops to the ground, winded, is the best sensation yet.
(The sparkling, burning sun on the horizon calls to them all.)
—
When Rouge is eight, they bury their parents.
It’s Rosario’s idea to move islands, to escape the miasmatic plague funk that hung over their ancestral home. Neither sister disagrees; Blanche doesn’t even protest, instead leaving her wooden boats and taking her brother’s hand.
(Rouge wants to stay on that boat, doesn’t want to disembark, not now, not ever.)
They settle on the other side of South Blue, on a bigger, more anonymous island. Their new dwellings aren’t comfy by any stretch, and Rosario becomes more and more agitated with the world around them each day, raving and ranting about the injustice and the poverty their neighborhood mires and melts into. He disappears for whole days at a time, and they hear stories from across town, that he’s fallen in with agitators and rebels. Blanche isn’t worried, in that serene, childlike way, but Rouge is.
Lacking toys or entertainment, Rouge occupies herself by playing with candles— carefully, deliberately, they live in a wood slumhouse, after all— and watching the flames dance under her gaze. Her street fighting departs from its previous friendly realm— now, she’s trying to survive. Blanche loses three baby teeth by biting into another street rat’s arm. Rosario wades into the scrums, hauling them out by the scruff of their necks, never scolding them. She doesn’t think he wants to scold them.
(They burn Rosario’s books for warmth. The redness in his eyes is a trick of the fire, she thinks.)
—
She loses him too.
For years afterward, she dreams nightmares of Rosario, dangling limp from the scaffold, blithely refusing to give the Marines the satisfaction of even involuntary struggle. Blanche, bonier now, wakes across the room from her terrors, screaming about that smile he’d directed at them, the apology in that bittersweet rictus belied by the blazing fire behind his eyes, the one that hadn’t slid from his face even when his corpse was blue. They’d screamed themselves hoarse that day, held back by Marine privates who regarded them with virulent pity, the pity they saw emblazoned in the eyes of all but the Vice Admiral who ordered the execution.
His comrades swing by occasionally, bringing them food. Rouge nods silently. Blanche’s eyes darken more than ever.
‘A revolt’? Bullshit. They’d barely had twenty men and half as many guns. They were making an example of him, sowing terror among the people. The Vice Admiral had probably been gunning for a promotion.
The younger girl disappears into an apprenticeship under a blacksmith who proclaims her preternatural talent for smithing and her incessant creativity, skills Rouge had never seen before from her little sister. She wonders what goes on in her head, though she’s relieved. Blanche will have a roof over her head and food in her belly. It’s a crass old bounty hunter who finally gives Rouge a job. She’ll take what she can get.
(She ignores the sensation that ties her to her pallet in the mornings when she wakes in the deserted shack, that makes her want to drown herself back into the straw.)
—
Blanche gets married.
It’s a shotgun affair that turns out to be for naught in the fourth month; still, the man stepped up and saddled her baby sister with his Grade-A shit. Truly, Rouge had tried to talk her out of it more times than she can count. Blanche has a successful forge all of her own and pumps out insane creation upon insane creation at the drop of a hat. There’s no need for her to seek refuge or comfort in the arms of this shitstain. He leeches off her for drink money and openly gawks and leers at other women on the street. But her sister doesn’t listen and Rouge instead turns a portrait of his face into a dartboard for knives.
Her sister isn’t the only one with prospects, all of a sudden. Rouge’d bagged a major bounty recently, and now the constable’s office hand-delivers her their latest bounty sheafs. She moves into a bigger apartment, halfway between her little sister’s new house on the outskirts of town, and the center of the city. It’s nice— ‘not a slum’ is a low bar— but every whiff she gets of the briny seawater calls to her, demands that she ship out. She quashes it— when (not if) her sister’s marriage crumbles to ashes, someone needs to be there for Blanche.
That doesn’t stop her from hanging out around the docks, charming bored sailors into teaching her about knots and rigging and boats. She’ll get off the island someday.
Within another two months, Blanche shows up on her doorstep at 2am, half-drained liter of scotch in hand and face red and puffy.
“F-fuck, I’m so sorry, Rougie, I sh-shoulda listened, I’m—“
She rushes forth and engulfs Blanche in a hug, and the waterworks restart.
(They set the cheating fucker’s house on fire using the rest of the scotch. Blanche files divorce paperwork overnight and moves back in with her sister.)
——
Blanche knows too much.
Blanche knows too much and too little all at once, and she hates that it’s subsumed her like this. Hates being the imposter, hates the torrents of conflicted emotion, hates everything but her job and her sister. Hates that she only retains shards, prone to shatter in her grip. Hates that she knows what’s wrong with her and can’t do a damn thing.
Blanche slinks and sinks into alcohol and mania until the day she sees that hat. It’s a bass gong, deep in her eardrums, and it simultaneously explains everything and nothing.
But they have to follow it.
———
Her sister brings more strangers home.
Weekly groceries in hand, she sees her kitchen table papered in incomprehensible blueprints, designs for weapons which she would never fully understand. Blanche stands by—‘proud’ is an understatement— while two the interlopers—rough hewn and elementally criminal—pore over them, agape and impressed.
Her sister sidles over to meet her, dragging them into an adjacent room with hurried, manic whispers, “I found our ticket off this rock!”
Piracy. Rouge can’t say she objects, only that it’s a bizarre new career trajectory, considering they’d decided to become bounty hunters once they’d saved up enough money for a boat. And Blanche wants to build weapons for them, wants to unleash these unholy terrors on the Marines—she had shifted dangerously ideologically close to Rosario in recent years— and her eyes light with such vibrant fire that Rouge has trouble believing that they could ever dim.
But her sister has never been a great judge of character, so Rouge marches back into occupied territory, settles onto her couch, and stares down the Pirates.
The older, blond one looks at her with smidges of condescension and kilos of awe, mostly once the conversation gets going; she’s not sure how she feels about him. It’s the other one, the darker one, the presumptive captain, that captures her interest; he looks at her with the same glint that many men have, but it all disappears once he starts his pitch. The man has enough charisma to kickstart a cult as he talks about dreams and the force of will and were she a weaker person, she would’ve followed him for that alone. But it’s the fire behind his eyes, the one that she sees every time she looks in the mirror, the one that she saw in Rosario’s last moments, the one that her parents both had, the one that her sister blazes in her most manic moments; it’s tame and wild and she knows at once how he gained Blanche’s trust.
Rouge and Blanche become the newest members of the Roger Pirates.
(The blood pounding through her veins sings as they embark on the light craft.)
———
Everything burns.
She never feels it, never, doesn’t even notice it until Blanche shrieks over both a mouthful of fruit and the plans for a repeat-action arm, “You’re on fire!"
And with a glance, her sister’s right; flames dancing harmlessly around and on her, careless of their purpose. It feels rather like a warm blanket than a blazing inferno. Her veins and mind clear of fog, a cleansing of lethargy and that old, painful urge to tumble, to fall.
It’s peace.
Rayleigh rushes for a fire extinguisher, muffled admonishments of Blanche thrown over his shoulder, as her sister spits out the remainder of her mouthful, eyes flashing black, to shout back that it’s not my fault!
Rouge wills the flames gone; she’s left standing in one of many charred circles on a battle-scarred ship. Roger skids to a stop in front of her, drawn in by Rayleigh and Blanche’s bickering.
“Is that a Flame Fruit?” His eyes glitter, grin crinkling the skin around his mouth.
In response, she fires up once more. She’s loathe to turn it off again any time soon.
(Blanche complains loudly and half-jokingly that her Fruit didn’t give her anything as cool. The next time they break into a Marine R&D building, her eyes flash black and the technological structure bends to her whim.
“Okay, this is awesome.”)
—
Their rivals get particularly powerful.
That, of course, doesn’t stop Blanche from eye-fucking the first mate of one such rival upon their first meeting. It’s even worse that he’s reciprocating.
Her sister makes up for it, though, hauling Rayleigh into her workshop afterwards, flashing a particularly complex blueprint at him, and then almost braining him with a welding iron in her excitement; apparently their brief skirmish with those pirates inspired her beyond the mere pale.
She worries; Blanche vibrates with barely-controlled energy and doesn’t hide her alcoholic self-medication, only to crash and spiral, then do it all again. Rouge had seen shades of it before, but never to this same degree. Rayleigh, during one particular trough, tore her away from a dangerously close midnight brush with the edge of the ship.
“I can’t stop it.” He’d heard her choke into the air, “I can’t stop it.”
Blanche stares death in the face and laughs; nothing like Roger’s hearty bark before his eleventh-hour tide changer, nor Rouge’s own defiant adrenaline-boost, but a hollow, dead-eyed rattle, a knowing dare. When they confront her about it, her normal giggle isn’t ever as unsettling.
(Sometimes Rouge too, leans and tumbles, unimpeded.)
—
“Why’d you get a last name?”
“Because I’m the important sister, that’s why.” And as if to emphasize this, Blanche snatches one of Rouge’s strawberries right off her plate, brandishing her own Wanted poster with her other hand. Portgas D. Blanche: The Widowmaker, it says.
Her sister burns it to ash before she can even take a bite. “I’ll bet it’s ‘cause you slept with the photographer.”
Blanche sticks out her tongue but doesn’t protest.
Ray hums thoughtfully, “They probably can’t tell who you are.” He gestures at the living flame on the page; if you look closely, you can see her eyes flashing bright, her teeth glimmering among the reds and oranges. The edges of the image flutter, the heat of her presence too much for the camera’s film. It’s vaguely terrifying. The Fire Sprite, they call her. Identity Unknown.
“I think they got your good side.” Roger laughs not insincerely, winking at her.
—
It’s the name on the island’s landing manifest that makes her freeze.
She glimpses it over Ray’s shoulder as he fills it in (because, per usual, Roger has decided not to care about such mundanities) and it sends a shiver through her whole body. Her eyes drag to the horizon, toward the Marine base set on the hill overlooking the docks. It sits almost innocuously, as if to deflect her scrutiny.
“You good?” Roger appears at her side so quickly that she jumps a foot in the air. “You’re--” and he makes a gesture with one hand that she thinks is supposed to mean “spaced out.”
“I’m good, yeah.”
Looks like the bastard had gotten a promotion after all.
Their stay is blessedly short, only a week, but it permeates her whole mood each day they stay. She spends four days holding herself back from starting fights, and is still darkly ruminating on it days later when the door to their quarters bangs open and Blanche whirls in in a rage.
“Did you see who the commanding--”
“I did.”
“Well, why the fuck haven’t you said anything?! Why are we just sitting here?” Her sister explodes, and it’s in that moment that, under all the rage and the collared violence and the way her sister is tearing through their shared chest of drawers looking for a missing weapon part, that Rouge senses the fear. Her sister is scared of the man who killed Rosario.
“Are you--”
“No!” She snaps. Then, rising from the drawer with the part in hand. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“Well, you don’t care about Rosario!”
It’s a low blow and it’s clearly meant to change the subject, but Rouge has had a terrible week and rises to the bait anyway. “Fuck you!” She snarls back, bringing her voice to a yell. “We’ve got at least three more days here, how the fuck do you think we’re gonna survive if we just run off, half-cocked, killing a Vice Admiral?”
“So we fucking kill him and run!”
Blanche could be a real dumbass sometimes. “You-- We have a crew to think about! They’re not involved in this! They’ll come down on all our heads for his death!”
“I know that!” Her sister snaps, red-faced. She did not know that. “But we can’t leave him alive! Who knows when we’ll get another chance?”
A knock on the door interrupts Rouge’s retort. Without waiting for their reply, the door creaks open to reveal Roger propped against the entryway, not even looking sheepish for eavesdropping.
“Do you mind?” Rouge half-snaps, feeling seconds away from violence. This shouting match hasn’t helped her self control any.
“Sounds like you want to kill the Vice Admiral of the island.” Roger hums, rocking back on his heels. Rouge wants to punch him in his handsome, unabashed face. “Keyes, was it?”
Blanche flinches. Both Rouge and Roger track the movement, but neither remarks on it. “He killed our older brother on trumped-up charges.”
“So it’s revenge, then.” His tone gives away nothing. Ridiculous man.
Rouge adds, “He enjoyed it. Executed Rosario in the town square and laughed as he went blue.”
Blanche spits on the ground in agreement; then, remembering that it’s their shared living quarters, starts trying to wipe away the spit with the underside of her shoe. She mutters something that Rouge is too far away to hear, but Roger starts at it.
“Ah.” A dark look crosses his face.
Time stops. Her sister freezes, like she hadn’t meant to be overheard.
Then, Roger breaks the stillness and continues: “I’ll get the others. Do it tonight so that we can slip away with as little fanfare as possible.” Blanche rushes out past him without another word, clearly heading to her armory. Their captain watches her go, before asking. “Will she be okay?”
“I don’t know.” Rouge responds, truthfully. Blanche hasn’t been okay for a long time.
“Will you be okay?” He turns his gaze on her, searching for something in her face. He seems like he’s trying to convey something meaningful, a shared understanding, maybe about Blanche.
She quirks her lips slightly. “You know I will.” Rouge adds the inflection she uses as they tumble onto the battlefield, easy, prepared to do what they must. Maybe killing Keyes will burn off the excess melancholy that has hung around her like a miasma since they got to this godforsaken island.
All in all, it’s an easy job. He has no seastone and they have no mercy. When the Sunday edition of the paper decries the Pirate King’s slaughter of the Vice Admiral Keyes, they’re only bothered that they don’t get the credit.
(Rouge will remember to her dying day, the rasp in Blanche’s voice as she bashed Keyes’ head into his mahogany desk, his blood coating her fist in his hair: “Remember me?”)
--
At first, it lands not like a cannonball, not like a weapon, unlike anything that had ever phased through her brilliant flames; nor does it filter up through her veins and choke her into silence. It rattles through the darkness of her mind, tugging together sentiment, drawing lines amongst the light until it implodes to swallow any innocence and ignorance that she could’ve assigned to that collective.
Only then does it hit her like the Haki-coated punch she'd had the misfortune to take several weeks ago.
Its timing is insulting to everyone even tangentially involved. It smacks her upside the head on a mundane, otherwise uneventful night, maybe less than an hour before everything goes to shit; before her crossfaded sister silently sprints into oblivion on the almost-deserted top deck, before Roger has to haul Blanche, waterlogged and sobbing, out of the ocean.
No, she has bigger fish to fry.
(“You can’t do shit like that! You can’t!”
“I can’t—“
“Do you think I don’t wish I could do that, sometimes?!?”
“...Rougie?”
“You’re not the only one, don’t you fucking act like it!”)
—
It doesn’t go away. It migrates, crawls amongst her insides, wiggling unpleasantly, unwillingly sentient, roosting by her liver. She second-guesses every moment, every charming wink, every light tap and touch and sparring pin. She transcends flesh into tempered fire; it scalds like her most powerful attacks, and she finds herself scanning battlefields for that hat with more urgency than ever.
She wonders when it’ll end, craving him and despising it in equal measure.
Blanche, reassembled haphazardly with glue and plaster, watches, hawklike, even as every other crew member carefully monitors her (no one else had borne witness to Rouge’s blowup in the infirmary, hours later). She thinks her sister hates and appreciates it at once, but it’s not like she has a choice; no one wants to see Captain that furious with terror again, to see Rouge that panicked, to see Rayleigh that horrified, to see Blanche that listless. Even their cabin boys, usually the first augurs of discontent, take to the task with a gusto she’d only previously seen in their training. It probably makes normalcy a little harder to return to when your comrades are suddenly watching your alcohol intake, but Blanche made her bed; she’d have to get comfy.
“You don’t have to take care of me all the time now. I promise."
“What?”
Blanche shrugs, eyes unreadable under her too-large sunglasses as she lifts her head toward the midday sky. “You practically raised me. God knows I’d probably be dead in a ditch without you.”
You were nearly dead even with me, Rouge wants to spit, but bites it back.
“I know that I’m…” She gestures wordlessly, letting the implications and memories of the past month glide back into the forefront of their minds. “This shit might be hereditary, I think. I thought it was just me, but if you… I don’t remember much of Mom and Dad, and Rosario was always cagey about his emotions.”
“Thought he had to be tough for us.” But now that it’d been thrown into the proverbial aether, she can’t un-see it. Loads of little moments, loads of mornings when it seemed like the lights were on but no one was home. “You might be onto something,” she says after a minute of silence. “Why’d we get the worst family traits?”
Blanche barks humorlessly, then descends into full-on hysterical wheezes, the likes of which Rouge hadn’t heard in at least a month; after a minute, she joins in until the two of them are prone on the deck, clutching their stomachs. Some onlookers are definitely watching her sister, but never her.
“I’ll get better. I’ll try to get better.” Her sister whispers once they’ve stopped.
It sounds like a dream.
——
Life still goes on. The Roger Pirates’ global supremacy is unyielding, unstoppable; stories circulate that their captain is flanked by a living flame. Rouge preens, practically melts into his arms whenever he embraces her, holds on for just the tiniest bit too long. She watches Roger’s back like it’s her own and revels in the way he trusts her, the way he’s awed by her firestorm. She represses her secret, holds it close even as it climbs up her throat from her left ventricle, threatens to escape the only way it knows how. She even lets herself hit freefall sometimes, but always reaches for her flames before she can do any real damage.
It comes to a head when she’s caught off-guard, held down with seastone; for the first time on the battlefield, her flames are extinguished, her true form apparent to the world. Some of the still-standing Marines crow, horrified that such a tiny, young woman wreaks such havoc. The Admiral with the seastone staff bears down on her, blandly apathetic in her defeat. He’s already tossed her Captain aside like tissue paper, and Blanche and Rayleigh are leading their comrades in a raid on the other side of the island; there is no one to save either of them. She hasn’t had to use her knives in so long; she wiggles with all her remaining energy to access one of her holsters without letting him see.
The Admiral bears no grudge; she does. Her fingers close over the hilt of her knife, relishing in its familiar grip only for a moment. The words of her grizzled old mentor echo in her mind from eons past: take the bastard with you.
The bastard goes flying.
A different shadow now; her Captain, ragged and beaten, planting himself between her and the Admiral. “Don’t you dare lay a hand on my comrade.” His voice is brimstone.
Where there is the smell of brimstone, there is fire. Rouge, freed of the seastone bond but still struggling and panting and drained, joins him at his side. It’s right; nothing in the world has felt so right as the feel of him at her side, the holy terror of their combined forces.
When the smoke clears, she and Roger are the only ones conscious, exhausted and almost dead on their feet; neither doesn’t permits themselves to collapse until they make it to the infirmary back on the ship, when Rayleigh is manning the helm with his characteristic steadfast mischevy and Blanche is leading their defense, cackling at their enemy’s paltry offensive.
“Thank you.” She murmurs, gripping his good wrist where he grasps for her. Her heart tries to escape from between her teeth.
“You’re my comrade.” He says like it’s nothing and everything all at once, his face pressed into her hair. “You’re important to me.”
——
It’s not a bang, but a whimper. She wakes up to a sunny day; Rayleigh and Blanche are bickering over a new blueprint, a handful of crewmates testing out their prototypes; Roger finds her on the bow of the ship, soaking in the sun. He’s joined her before, peppering her with ideas and theories and unquestioningly making her laugh.
“I think I love you.” He says, laughing. His eyes are stalwart.
“Oh.” She replies, feeling oddly like she might puke raspberries and rainbows, like her face might split, like her heart might explode. “Oh!”
——
And so life goes on. Rouge and Roger dance deadly over their opponents, unstoppable, undefeatable, indefatigable. They earn their legend, even as Rouge’s name and face remain a mystery, even as Roger transcends from king into god.
Blanche sobers, builds even better weapons than before, even briefly shows the Marines what exactly she can do. That kicks her up a few notches in global esteem, something farther beyond “slutty armorer” She still dallies with the first mate of a rival crew until it’s a dalliance no more, until the two of them have special, custom-made apparatuses to speak over long distances.
(“It’s a security concern, okay? I don’t trust anything I haven’t built myself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m serious!”
“Ray, how long was she on that thing yesterday?”
“Five hours and twenty-two minutes.”
“Oh, you fucking traitor, Ray, I’m gonna kill you!”
“Gotta catch me first!”
“I think it’s cute!”
“Fucking shit, thanks Mom.”)
Blanche seems happier. Rouge feels happier. They all seem happier.
---
Roger breaks the news and breaks them all up. There are tears; Rayleigh cracks jokes about retirement; Blanche sets off to her lover’s ship with a hug for all, grinning all the while. She’s been completely sober for a month, no alcohol, no smokes, nothing.
The pair stake out a small house on an idyll; they live in halcyon paradise for mere months, knowing that the world brews hell outside their doorstep. Roger and the Fire Sprite are sought from all angles. Rayleigh was in the news last week; he picked a fight with an Admiral. One of their cabin boys is already making a splash with a crew. Blanche is a ghost, but Rouge knows precisely where she is; she’s safe. When they realize the news to come, they can entertain the fantasy of their lives only briefly.
After a few months, Roger steps out, set to cause chaos one last time before he expires. He pries her hands off him with only gentle fingers and soft words; apologia for his contribution to her lifelong tragedy, a plea that she might raise their child with only good memories of him.
She understands why he’s doing it— it’s the same energy that once compelled her to follow him, preparing for one last show of defiance, one last act.
It’s not enough to stave off the wave of melancholy that crashes back down on her.
(Rouge cannot rise from her pallet in-transit even before the news breaks. The old lethargy breaks down into the marrow of her bones, melting them.)
——
Rouge disappears into the anonymity of her true face; to the world, she’s a single mother, a refugee. She dreamt once of raising her boy on a ship, briny wind singing around their ears, visiting old comrades and dodging the long-arm of the law. But disturbing rumblings of mass graves and pregnant corpses swim in the ears of those who pay any attention, and even she could not outrun them forever. They would both need to disappear.
It also gives her an idea; in her eighth month, she sends a letter.
Blanche arrives within a month on a tiny backwards island, sailing a skiff of her own design that runs Marine blockades like warm butter. It’s the brightest and happiest Rouge has ever seen her.
That jaunt sours once she hears the plan, desiccates before them as Blanche brings her own fire and rage to bear on her sister, trying its damndest to hide her terror. How dare she consider such a ridiculous plan! How dare she choose the last option first! How dare she sell her own life short when there are so many more possibilities!
(“We’ll say he’s mine,” Blanche snarls, finally. She can’t refute the murderous rumors that have led so many single women around the world to hide their pregnancies. She has seen the corpses, has been physically hauled back by her lover from avenging those strangers, from tearing out the eyes of the perpetrators.
“What?”
“Well, I’ve been a bit of a slut,” she elaborates, her lips wrapping around the words in a wry grin, finally calming somewhat. “I got careless. It was bound to happen. And chances are, when they think of who my lover--”
“He’ll be furious,” But Rouge’s tense muscles are starting to ease as a new path unravels before them, “He’ll probably be half out of his mind with panic and--”
“But he’s not the target of this cull.” Blanche breathes deeply. “He’ll understand, and that’s what’ll matter. C’mon, I love you. It’s my turn to protect you.” She wraps her sister in a warm embrace and tries to convey with mere touch that they’ll be fine.)
On the north side of the island, the siren of a Buster Call rings; they spotted her sister arriving on the island, and they know to use low-tech weapons against her. Not for the first time, Rouge worries about shifting to flame in her state; would it hurt her son?
Her sister stares out the window of the hidey-hole for a moment; expression hardening. “Go to the South port. I’ll distract them and meet you on Baterilla.” And she grins, broad and content.
It’s only on board the last refugee ship from the South port does she realize that the Blanche’s rictus was identical to Rosario’s, long ago and far away. The realization is punctuated by a boom, and an explosion visible from the sea.
The crone squished next to her rubs her back in comfort. Rouge blames her tears on hormones.
(A woman washes ashore miles away, charred and amnesiac.)
——
Baterilla has not changed. The ancestral home has not changed. Rouge waddles about in the house of so many ghosts, in agony with every moment she prolongs the pregnancy. She is so much stronger than her body. Her son will not face the stigma that the Marines seek to saddle him with. Not if she can help it.
A local wise-woman warns her about post-birth melancholy. She wants to scream that it has been her life, has always been her life. She climbs the walls, tries not to go insane. She curses to high heaven the Marines who have made her like this, curses them all, curses the men who executed Rosario and Roger, whose neglect killed her parents, whose violence killed her sister. She was never meant for this cage. She was meant for the sea.
Her parents smile at her from their unmoved portraits. My brave girl, says her father. We’ll see you soon, says her mother. Blanche lives in the slight movements just in the periphery of her vision, in the land over her empty tomb. Rosario’s squawk of outrage echoes in the emptied library. Roger inhabits her dreams, the grinning, jaunty man of his execution photographs.
Garp, that Marine bastard, materializes too. He has the audacity to be real.
She’s prepared to fight, prepared to claw his eyes out, tear him limb from limb; he will not take her baby from her. Instead he presents her with a bag full of baby supplies, and the overdrive of months-past-due hormones sends her into tears. It’s pathetic, really; she’s the unstoppable Fire Sprite, brought to heel by her own decisions.
But he seems to know what he’s doing, carefully explaining that he’d already lived through his late wife’s pregnancy and raised a son, that he’d overturned every stone to find her and take care of her son, fulfilling Roger’s wish. She wonders if he too will die on the business end of a Buster Call, or in a public execution, or even by a plague.
She doesn’t think she’d like that.
——
Twenty months.
Two months after Garp’s arrival.
Eleven months after she lost Blanche.
Twelve months after Roger’s execution.
He’d hurt so much-- so, so much, but she’d be damned if she let a little thing like pain stop her from giving birth, stop her from trading her life for his. With any luck, he’d inherit her spirit and Roger’s good looks, and the family melancholy would die with her.
“His name is Ace.” She murmurs, grasping to hold onto the body of her baby boy, born too large and too late. Garp hovers somewhere on her periphery, having at last been permitted in by the midwife. “Gol D. Ace.”
Portgas D. Rouge is thirty, and her last act is a smile for her newborn son.
(Portgas D. Rouge is dead.)