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As the singing of several of Tsuru’s drunken colleagues fades down the hall and around the corner, she breathes a sigh of relief. No need to shut her office door tonight. With the New Year in a few days, and everyone trading around their holiday shifts, everyone pretends they expect the same amount of work to be done but no one really does, which means no one bothers Tsuru about it or gets something in to her at the last minute. And with fewer people around, the base is quiet, and she can finally put her head down and get some work done—failing any emergencies, of course. And last year had been completely uneventful, after all, so perhaps Tsuru should expect the familiar, brazen thunder of footsteps down the hall and the way her door slams the rest of the way open.
“Tsuru-chan!”
Garp, filling up the entirety of the door frame, is clutching a terrified-looking dendenmushi in one hand and a ring of keys in the other.
“Yes?” says Tsuru.
Knowing Garp, this disturbance could run the gamut from a fresh piece of gossip (not urgent at all) to being out of crackers (urgent only in that Garp will complain and be irritable until they stock up) to an actual, urgent threat.
“They’ve just sighted the Roger Pirates—almost sunk one of our ships half a day from here. Come on! We have to get them.”
Tsuru sighs. Well, she’d been looking forward to having the paperwork done, not actually doing it, and at the holidays the Roger Pirates might be off their guard (or, at least, they might suspect less of a pursuit—they’ll know that if Garp is on duty, he’ll be after them, but they may not expect another vice-admiral to come with him).
“Meet me at the docks,” Garp says, reading her expression (correctly, Tsuru will concede) as assent, and hurrying off without another word.
Garp can make half a day into a few hours with his lug and the way he rides ships hard, but he’ll probably be asleep for part of the journey and Bogard will probably be doing his own work, so there will be time for Tsuru to make some progress on her work. She grabs a pile and tucks it into a briefcase, and glances around the office for anything else she might need. Her dendenmushi is dozing in its flower pot; she can borrow Garp’s if need be. And he’ll bring food, and the ship will have first aid supplies. Straightening her tie, Tsuru makes her way out and into the corridor, locking the office door behind her.
When she reaches the docks, standing next to Garp in front of a small ship is not Bogard but Sengoku (properly, Tsuru should use his brand-new title, but Garp flat-out refuses, under the excuse that he’ll make Fleet Admiral in no time so there’s no need to remember it, and none of their superiors are around).
“Seeking permission from the Admiral?” Tsuru says.
“I don’t need permission,” Garp says. “Sengoku’s coming, too.”
Sengoku looks a bit put-out at Garp speaking for him, or as put-out as he ever looks.
“Do you think I have nothing better to do?”
“What’s better than catching pirates together?” says Garp.
Sengoku doesn’t reply, but follows Garp onboard the ship, and Tsuru follows.
“Where’s Bogard?” says Tsuru.
“Off for the holiday,” says Garp. “I think he said something about seeing his sister.”
Garp’s key ring chimes at his waist as he heads up to the ship’s wheel. An admiral and two vice-admirals versus the worst pirates on the ocean—it’ll be an interesting match, that’s for sure. Tsuru settles in with her files; she’d better get some of it done while she can.
Garp’s charts show the route off to a winter island surrounded by dormant volcanoes. It’s a good hiding place from the inexperienced (or especially volcano-wary), and Tsuru wonders if it’s a trap or a plant. With a bigger boat, it ought to be difficult to navigate through the volcanoes and the shallow sea, out of the normal range of abilities for most Marines. Garp could do it, with his luck and intuition, but are the Roger Pirates counting on him doing the steering himself? Or perhaps Roger, as competitive in the same odd way as Garp, is trying to force Garp into showing off his skills that way.
Tsuru can’t say she knows the man well enough to predict him; he is often capricious and random, anyway (or it seems that way to her, but perhaps she hasn’t studied him hard enough to know, exactly, but even Garp’s knowledge and intuition are not always enough). But as they approach the volcanoes, looming like massive guards in the earliest morning light, the atmosphere seems too quiet. Tsuru knows definitively that it’s not like the Roger Pirates to hide, lying in wait to ambush them; they prefer direct confrontations. They wouldn’t all be asleep, would they?
The ship glides on, Sengoku at the wheel—coming in as slowly as they are, they don’t need to navigate the water with luck and finesse. Tsuru signs another form, not finished with as much as she’d like to be, but tucks the rest away in her bag. Garp heaves a giant snore across from her. The weight of his boots threatens to tip the table. If it does, that should wake him up, Tsuru decides (well, it’ll be that or the cold).
The boat hits the sand about twenty meters from the shore. The tide is rising, pushing the boat in as much as it will go, but the anchor will hold it through its highest point when they row in on the dinghy. There’s still no sign of the pirates, or of anyone—what looks to be the remains of a campfire, and a few scattered objects (litter, disgusting) have been left on the beach, but it doesn’t look fresh enough to have been used yesterday.
They row in relative silence, but for the wash of the waves in its constant rhythm, and the occasional sound of a far-off seagull. Nothing emerges from the rows of dunes beyond the beach, or from the forest beyond that; no ships or anchors or buoys suddenly show themselves. If this is a trap, it’s a good one, and it sets Tsuru a little on edge. She hunches her shoulders, hands tightening in her pockets. Sengoku pretends not to notice, continuing to row forward, and Garp is too focused on scanning the shore to look at her. The bitter air bites Tsuru’s cheeks; it’s just cold enough to sting but not so cold she’s numb yet, even after they step ashore and the wind increases its focus, as if it’s only now decided that they’re really serious about this.
Most of the objects on the shore are not litter but pieces of driftwood and large bones from some sort of creature, picked clean by humans or scavengers or some combination (or perhaps having washed ashore from the depths of the ocean). Overhead, a gull circles; underneath its occasional cries, the twitters of sparrows can be heard from the forest, but still no humans. By the remains of the fire are footprints, most of which lead down to the sea, and what looks to be a large hamper with a card tucked into the top. The edge flutters in the wind, but the card is lodged firmly in place, as if carefully positioned. Garp strides forward to look at it, and a few steps out, he stops and folds his arms as if looking at a particularly confusing situation that he’s about to give up on.
“That card’s got my name on it.”
Tsuru focuses her haki; she can tell that Sengoku, next to her, is doing the same. There’s nothing malevolent that she can sense, only the ordinary qualities that it ought to have (and not the amount that would add up to a suspicious disguise).
“Here,” says Tsuru, and she steps forward.
“It’s mine—” Garp says, but he realizes what she’s about to do.
Tsuru crouches next to it, the end of her tie falling forward and dragging on the ground. She gathers her hands and moves them toward the hamper, and then, once she touches them, closes her eyes and begins to scrub. She can feel nothing washing from it aside from the normal, physical things (dirt, grease, bird shit); her doubt that this particular band of pirates would imbue this particular object with a curse is growing to a certainty that they wouldn’t.
“I think it’s fine,” Tsuru says. “But you should read the card.”
Garp snatches it off the hamper and tears it open; his eyes narrow as gradually as inlets that turn into rivers that turn into streams as he reads through the message. It is for him; Tsuru is curious as to the contents but it is not hers to pry into.
“What the hell,” says Garp, running a hand over his hair and handing the card to Sengoku.
As he moves to open the hamper, Tsuru stands; her knees creak. She’s not old; one of the other vice-admirals had told her last week that she was in the prime of her youth, but she’s also not as young as she once was. Her body is sore; her hair is brittle; it takes her longer to stand up—perhaps she needs to ramp up her exercise. Absently, she scrubs the dirty end of her tie with her palm as she makes her way over to Sengoku, and he turns the card so she can read it.
Garp (and companions):
Roger says he’s sorry we couldn’t wait for you, and it would have been nice to close the year out with a good old-fashioned fight. We had planned on giving this to you as a consolation prize when we inevitably escaped from you.
Tsuru rolls her eyes.
The food in here was given to us, so feel free to eat with a clear conscience. (Or not, if your justice doesn’t permit you to.) Happy New Year.
It’s unsigned, but it must be from one of the other members of Roger's crew.
“That damn Rayleigh,” says Sengoku—and now that he says it, Tsuru recognizes the handwriting, the even spacing of the letters on the page as in the ship’s log that Garp had managed to take from the Roger Pirates’ ship a few years back.
“Well,” says Garp. “Some of this will probably spoil.”
It’s almost uncharacteristic for him to hesitate to eat, especially when he’s already been given permission. But despite the assurances (and how Garp, though he’ll never admit it, has some level of trust in Roger and his word) and Tsuru’s touch, it’s still something from a pirate, and if truly given to them, had been bestowed for something that was likely extralegal at the least.
But—although citizens may be misguided or short-sighted to give hampers of food to wealthy pirates, it’s because the government and the Marines have failed to protect and serve them properly. And that’s another thing they’re not supposed to admit they ever do, and is easy to hide from as an officer drowning in dark offices and busywork, and why Garp will never accept the rank of admiral (and why Tsuru will never be offered it in the first place).
A sparrow lands on Sengoku’s shoulder. He can lie or glance away from the truth well enough, but he’s still trying his best; in some ways they’re all equally as honest as each other. But Sengoku’s honesty comes in a form more palatable to the Fleet Admiral and the Celestial Dragons than Tsuru’s, and Garp’s is less glaring when his accomplishments speak with all the gravity of a giant star. Sengoku pets the sparrow’s head with his index finger; another alights beside it. Garp pulls out a few bags of crackers and a hunk of cheese, and then a bottle of wine.
“Should we be doing this while we’re on duty?” says Tsuru.
Sengoku checks his watch. “Technically, your shifts just ended. And I’ve received no calls, though if there’s nothing else on this island, we really ought to be getting back to the ship.”
The wind picks up, pinning one arm of Sengoku’s coat to his front, over his actual arm. The sparrows flutter into the air, deciding not to stay for crumbs of food apparently. Garp exhales, his breath still hanging in the air as he shoves a chunk of cheese into his open mouth.
As Garp nudges the ship through one of the wider openings, Tsuru hears a sound that her body interprets as gunfire for half a second before she realizes. Against the still-dark northwest sky, the light of a ship of some sort is shining, and above it, fireworks.
It’s a day early for that, isn’t it? Tsuru is about to uncork the wine, when the ship leans to the left and the bottle nearly falls off the table. In front of her, Garp seems to have spotted something.
“It’s them,” he says. “The Roger Pirates.”
Another set of fireworks goes off, reds and pinks and whites in some indiscernible design that might make more sense when viewed from that ship’s deck.
“Today’s that guy’s birthday,” says Garp. “Come on, let’s give him a present.”
Tsuru sets the wine back in the hamper and heads for the sails. If they’re going to catch the pirates, they’re going to need all the help they can get from the wind.