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The moon was full and glowed orange with fire. It was that night again, the decisive night, and a giant with fury in his eyes had struck Mary Geoise like righteous thunder and snapped the seastone shackles around Boa Hancock's arms open.
Her prison had changed. The city that called itself holy had turned ashen grey in the dark. When a breeze came in through the smashed doors of her room, it brought a smell of gunpowder and sounds of chaos from the outside.
It took some time for it to sink in: she was free.
Her arms, light like feathers, sought her sisters. For a moment the three of them held each other, closed their eyes and thought they would swim in that darkness forever. There were no tears, they had none left. But at last, they pushed forward.
That new freedom was dizzying, so were the fumes from outside, the smoke thick from burning houses—slavers' burning houses, nothing to mourn. Fires started by desperate hands, angry hands. Maybe by Fisher Tiger's own. The flames may have looked scary, licking all the way up to the blazing moon, but they were the Gorgon Sisters' friends: they ate away at the city and at the darkness in every corner, leaving their tormentors little place to hide.
The fear, too, started to recede, and only red rage was left. Hancock wasn’t sure she’d feel anything else ever again.
They acted on instinct, they ran. She only stopped to make sure that Sandersonia and Marigold were right behind, or to keep looking over her shoulder for attackers. A few times they rested among the steep stones of the Red Line when their feet blistered and threatened to give up. Hancock was sure that her sisters were strong and able, but they couldn’t risk anything happening that caused them to separate.
This world may’ve been every man for himself, but the three of them counted as one. So had they promised.
“I cannot," it was Sandersonia's voice, " Go without me, sister! If at least one of us makes it out alive…”
All of them would. They had to.
And Hancock had swallowed ash and turned around, hair sticking to the sides of her face.
“No,” she shouted, in the dream and aloud.
The Empress of Amazon Lily opened her eyes.
She sat up against the thumping of her heart. Around her were cushions, the Kuja Pirates’ gorgon skull rising on the tapestry behind her canopy of silk. Reality was still blurry at the edges, but all the emotions she had experienced crept back toward the shadows, where they belonged.
“Salome,” she called. Her companion needed no further cue to curl about her, propping her up. Hancock rested a palm on the scales, their touch like silk, her pulse quieting down as Salome elevated her. Above the sheets, above the dream. The ghosts from her memories were shallow carcasses, small and insubstantial in comparison to the Empress.
The feast table was full. Imperial cutlery of luscious bronze engraved with the serpent’s motifs, the plates bearing a lunch of golden-roasted meat and vegetables decorated with sea salt and salad leaves like peacock feathers. The smell of freshly brewed soup was thick in the room. But Hancock’s plate remained empty.
“Child, you can-nyot leave the food untouched,” said old harsh Nyon, always appearing out of nowhere to mingle with her business.
Hancock had her legs crossed over Salomé’s serpentine folds, her chin rested on a hand. None of the splendid cuisine of the castle was to her liking that day.
A more precise way of putting it would be that her stomach had twisted into a knot of uncertainty, and couldn’t find its appetite anywhere. But that was not the way a queen held herself. She was the leader of the Kuja now, and a pirate captainess back from her first terrible campaign. An icon to be revered and feared, not imperfect, not human.
“An Empress should be free to choose!” she said, rejecting the meal with a harsh handwave. Like a wave of perfume, her disarming beauty worked its wonders on that old nuisance Nyon. “Tell my servants to take it away.”
She examined her nails, a perfect glaze of pink and white, until left alone.
At times, that palace became too big for her, but the counselor always found a way to irritate her. Perhaps because she was the one who knew, who had seen what no one should—a secret she had promised to take to her tomb.
She had spent many hours looking at the stone statues in the court’s treasure room, full generations of Empresses before her. Untouchable queens, strong and serene. Though she was the first one to attack. She had taken the seas, rather than focusing the amazons’ forces on only defense. She had followed the steps of Fisher Tiger and the Sun pirates, demanding attention and fear from the World. That fame of strength and cruelty would wrap them, protect them.
She stood up from her serpentine throne, looking through one of the patterned windows. Amazon Lily was in a state of wait. She mentally leafed through the catalogue of formal dresses she possessed. Settled on plum purple and silver.
Beautiful, glistening like fangs under the moonlight.
She wouldn’t pretend, neither to herself nor anybody, that her goals were selfless. She’d sought some retribution, too. The men she fought with thunderous cannons and arrows through the heart would never be the ones that haunted her, who had etched the dragon’s claw on her back. But she had eighty million bellies’ worth of proof that every last man they’d crossed, pirate or Marine, had an ugliness inside them that made them want to harm. And wherever that existed, she had the advantage.
They called her vain and arrogant. They hated her for the same reason they had once put her in shackles: for being a woman, a beautiful one, who turned their rotten core against them. For showing them who they were. Beasts.
Once, she had been a powerless child, but now she had made a weapon out of her beauty, the sharpest spear plunging right through them where it hurt.
It’s not fair, they cried and pleaded, their comrades turned to stone and sunk in the sea with a plop.
Why, she pointed her accusing finger at them. Is it not?
On her island, Justice and fairness were simple. Follow the law, and you shall be protected. Break the law, and you shall be punished.
Though, if things had functioned here like out in the Government’s world, anything the ruler said should have been honored as justice. If the Celestial Dragons could take slaves and flaunt their holiness and purity, why couldn’t she destroy their ships and drown their men on a whim? She was royal, too, after all.
For the ones on top, there were no unjust acts… but unjust people. It didn’t matter how one behaved, if it was under the right flag.
She decided in favor of piracy. To be a criminal by choice instead of a slave by force; to spit in the face of the law, show the world she could get away with it.
There was just one step left to stand eye-to-eye with her enemy.
“Empress,” a mild-mannered voice called from the entrance, and Salome immediately shifted so that Hancock could face it. There, her big build made small by the opulent gilded doors, stood Cassandra from the castle guard, “Ships from the Marine Headquarters have been sighted at our latitude. I believe they are the party you were in contact with. Are your orders unchanged?”
“Yes,” the Empress Hancock replied, caressing the skull that ornamented Salome’s head, “Escort them to me.”
From her podium, sitting on Salome at the top of a granite stairway, Boa Hancock had a full view of the colosseum. The gradient seats were full, all known faces, the faces of her folk. They admired and respected her: they knew her beauty and strength could attain the impossible.
Far and beyond the circle, over the lush rainforests and beyond the imperial gates of her kingdom, Navy ships had docked. She’d seen them from her spyglass: the sails a meek white except for the ship at the forefront, which was an unusual salmon-pink.
Her dark eyes fixed in the distance, she thought of the first impression Amazon Lily gave. From miles away they would have seen the columns of Amazon Lily flanking her palace. The columns had the abstract shape of a flower, or a ceremonial crown.
It was not enough. Hancock had been toying with the idea of having the nearby mounds of rock sculpted into fanged snakes. A warning, one visible from the seas.
Empress Hancock would have the Navy's representatives led there, into the arena, where the negotiations would follow. For sure, it would be taken as an attack, and not a subtle one, but the Kuja were warriors, and it was hardly worth the time to conceal the tension between them and the so-called "diplomats", Government dogs.
She wanted the theatrics, of course. She wanted her people to see her pact with the Government as anything but a capitulation.
We are proud and honored to offer you the title of Warlord of the Sea… she had torn their first letter to shreds. And she could still not swear, not quite, that she wouldn't lose her temper. Why shouldn’t I? I can get away with it. She drew a tremulous breath through her nose.
Because they came to offer her a title, to legitimize her piracy, in the legal way only their monopoly on justice could manage… She wasn't doing this to become friendly with the World Government. Slimy praise would come, empty promises too. They wanted her favor.
What a gesture, she thinks, as she holds the side of her neck to incline forward, to extend their hand to pirates.
But she needed to show them. From the very beginning, the Navy was to know they were in enemy territory. And only she knew the reason she must do this.
Not another woman of the Kuja tribe. Not ever.
Her thoughts floated back to her past for the first time since early morning. She felt a fist grip her heart.
Back after the escape from Mary Geoise, the Gorgon sisters had been rescued—an action that was considered a crime of the highest order. Fortunately, the pirates who rescued them already had a growing list of atrocities under their name, and it was nothing to add another one. They were fearless.
Shakuyaku. Her black-on-black eyes, too kind to be true. She and her husband Rayleigh, cunning and wise like a fox, had found them crashed into a cove nearing the Sabaody Archipelago—they had taken a broken boat from the Red Line and sailed until they were stranded in the tropical rain—while looking for escaped survivors. They took the three sisters back to their bastion in Sabaody. Hancock hardly remembered anything from the trip. They seemed to appear by magic in that strange haunting jungle, with houses built among the trees that spawned those thick and colorful resin bubbles. She should have been fascinated, the childlike wonder she had once felt while sailing rearing again… but she had been exhausted, at her limit. All her mind had wanted was to rest, to give itself time to stop hurting.
But, even with the comfort of a mattress under her small body, the soft snores of her sisters close, she couldn't afford to rest. Not at first, anyway.
On that first night Boa had laid on her mattress awake, distrusting every creak of the house around her, every distant step, every flicker in the shade. She fully expected the slave traders to knock on the door of that old tavern, or worse even, to have been invited by their alleged saviors, although seeing their faces on bounty posters upon her arrival had quieted that suspicion some.
Still. If she had lost her folk, she at least had her sisters, and it was her duty to protect them.
Then, she told herself she’d just close her eyes for one second, well, for two seconds... And sleep had dragged her away.
She had jerked awake a few times, beat on the mattress to fall asleep again. In these short bouts of consciousness, she started feeling… lighter.
On the next morning, Shakuyaku brought them food and stood at the doorway, only halfway inside.
“Can you talk?” she had asked. Hancock nodded and introduced herself. “Please only answer this if you want to. Do you come from Amazon Lily?”
Her heart skipped a beat. She could feel the words like a wave over her sisters, awakening some hope in their gloom.
“Why so?” Boa asked, her lips dry.
“There’s somebody else living here,” Shakky said, “a woman who once went by the name of Gloriosa. She’s a friend of mine and Ray’s. Does her name tell you anything?”
The name sparked something buried beneath thick, dull layers of memories. It sounded like… home. Following Shakky downstairs with cautious steps, the details came back like candles kindling the dark hallway of her memory: a former Empress, like Boa was destined to be… exiled after she fell sick with the love disease…
Could it be true? she asked herself. But she had learned to be very careful with hope.
She remembered staring at the porcelain cup on a table, a sweet, thick and warm drink fuming from it. And there, sitting next to it, was a small and silver-haired woman, her big eyes and features oddly familiar, recognisable as one of her own.
“A future Empress, sold as a slave,” the tiny woman had shaken her head no, a gesture of grief. “Truly a crime against nature.”
“L-Lady Nyon,” Marigold had said, shy despite her tall stature, “...If you… if you belonged to the Kuja tribe, does this mean you could take us back…?”
“Careful,” Boa Hancock said, snapping at the cautious hope of that tone; she refused to hurt herself more than her past already had. “They say you were exiled, Gloriosa. To be associated with you may cause us more trouble.”
“My crime was only falling ill… through no fault of my own, and it could happen to you too!”
“How do you dare, old woman! It’s a sign of weakness to fall for the diseases of the heart…” Hancock bit her tongue, her grimace dropping at the corners. “...And yet, look at us. We may have survived slavery, but we were caught nonetheless, and our backs were branded with another sign of weakness. We will never be accepted back into Amazon Lily, not if we make it back, for our backs are branded with another sign of weakness. The shame would never leave us.”
They all had been exiled, rejected. Hancock and her sisters, persecuted like pirates in the name of Justice.
Justice… there was none of that in the world.
Shakky had watched, allowing the silence to thicken between them. She, as well as Hancock, saw the silent desperation in Marigold and Sandersonia’s faces, the unwanted resignation in Gloriosa’s.
Dust speckles floated through the sunrays, which shone into this peaceful house. It was all so different. But, well awake under their skin, was still the tension from the years bygone. They would never forget how fast that peace had been yanked from their hands and destroyed.
“Your Highness,” Shakky said, “I don’t know of your laws, or your customs. But if you can’t go back home, there’s always an alternative,” she closed an eye, the smoke a mystical curtain around her. “I heard of people who have organized a resistance against the Government. They see the injustice in the things that were done to you, and many others.”
Boa Hancock took a sharp breath, eyes piercing into the older woman's. “Do you know these people?”
Shakky drew her eyes around the walls of her closed bar, full of bounty posters.
“Not… quite. But I have read about them in the newspapers,” a pause. “They call them criminals. The worst in the four seas, in fact.”
“I believe you, pirate. But what good will it do?” she said, her voice dry of tears. "Why is it my responsibility to solve this injustice? Why must I carry the burden to fix the problems that made me a slave?”
Hancock bit down the next words— having not even begun to heal, she felt unprepared to embark on a crusade. The three sisters needed to save themselves first, and as their leader, she had a duty. Everyone else she would have ever protected was back on Amazon Lily. All she wanted…
“All we want is to go home,” Boa Sandersonia said, a hurried hiss. At that moment, she was Hancock’s voice.
“Understandable,” the former Empress Gloriosa said, and nodded gravely. The resignation lingered in the air, unspoken. But how?
Boa's fingers fiddled with her long hair, so straight it was silken even after so many days wandering. The injustice was threatening to tear at the seams of her calmness. Still, she stood in control.
“Hmm… Maybe,” Shakky started, and when Hancock glanced at her, she turned around from her pacing, the smoke drawing waves as she gestured. “Maybe your people need you more than they need the truth.”
Then, the pirate winked.
The tide of Hancock’s memories grew. Amazon Lily, closer and sharper in the horizon. At the forefront of Elder Nyon's modest ship, still full of carved serpents around the banisters, her sisters had cried plump tears against the wind. Hancock remembered finding some comfort in it, in the way they expressed what she couldn't.
The three of them had squeezed together. She remembered resting her hand on Sandersonia's hair and thinking it was still the color of tropical beach waters.
That had been the first time they sailed in peace since they had been abducted. The first time they could look up freely at the immensity of the sky, no heaviness dragging down on their muscles, the fear… gone.
“Is it wrong to lie, sister?” Marigold asked, and when she pulled away from the embrace, her face was wrinkled with doubt.
“Don’t!” Hancock fervently shook her head, her face heated. “Not once more! We need to do this to protect ourselves!”
“If it means that you are safe, and so are the women of Amazon Lily, of the unspeakable horrors you went through,” Elder Nyon said to the wind. “Then I agree. It’s nyot wrong.”
Boa Hancock clicked her tongue. Of course the old woman would say so. She was coming back from exile thanks to them, and still she talked nonsense.
Because what did it bring, to judge their own morals now. Especially, with the standards of a world that did not care! They were only there thanks to pirates and law breakers, and made the best of where they stood.
No, she thought. There's no right or wrong that matters. The Government had their weapons and she had her own.
All they did, they would get away with!
Sitting on her throne, presiding over the arena, the Empress of Snakes was dressed for the occasion. Plum-purple silk embroidered with silver flowers around the sleeveless top and the high cut of her collar. The folds clung to her waist and cascaded down her hips, flowing swiftly when she crossed her legs over Salome.
Around her, the gradient seats were filled with her tribe. Trusting, curious faces. Their whispers reached her ears, her hearing sharpened by haki.
"I heard that all the people on the outside are barbarians."
"Don't worry. Were anything to happen, the Empress would defend us!"
She slid her eyes across that circle, dove in that sea of praise. Anywhere she looked there was support, there was admiration. For the fearless image of a leader that she projected—no, that she was.
Boa Hancock gulped, fingers to her lips. Cold as stone.
Her avian eyes settled on the imperial ships that came from the south gate, now rebranded as the Kuja Pirates'. They flanked that curious Navy ship with the salmon-pink sails. They docked and entered the hemicycle, crossing the arena's red, geometric walls. Glimpses of the white coats were visible between the hulking frames of her Amazons.
Finally, the party reached the bridge. Her guard split into a formation, and Hancock saw the officer.
Pressed her lips.
A woman.
Boa Hancock stirred in her seat. That was not the face she would have given the Marines. The Navy woman was short and old, her features etched on her skin like stone carvings on oak. She felt Salome's head wave next to her, uncertain, and raised a hand to appease her.
What game is the Navy playing?
"Presenting Commodore Tsuru of the Marine Headquarters," Cassandra spoke, firm knuckles at her sides.
"How despicable!" Hancock sentenced, feeling a hum of support rise from the gradients. "Did they send somebody of a lower rank to negotiate our peace terms?! Ridiculous!"
She punctuated by throwing her body back in a dramatic gesture, with Salome supporting her. Her hands were eloquent, accusing. Her charisma and her beauty were indispensable for her image, so was her ability to command her folk's sympathy.
From the corner of her eye, she saw the women of the Marine party fall for it. Every face in the sunny arena glowed red at once.
All of them, except the old one.
Instead, she waited until the multitude fell to silence, and looked up to the Empress, "I may not be an Admiral, but I am in league with them. They, too, learned from someone," when the laughs of incredulity echoed through the arena, Tsuru ignored them. "How odd to not be taken seriously as a woman here, of all places!"
"Do you dare question me?"
"Lady Empress!" a younger Marine woman said, her compliance pleasing for Hancock's ears. "We were sent here as a sign of respect toward your folk. Amazon Lily is rumored to be an island of women only, and judging from what I see, it seems to be that way."
Respect. What a word to fill their mouths with. Mary Geoise had never shown her anything close to respect.
"Are you sure it's not out of fear?" Hancock hissed. "It was easy to coax the Navy into an alliance, once your options were either to negotiate or perish!"
"And are we here to negotiate, Boa Hancock? Or are we here to be insulted?"
The Empress stood rigid as her legs itched to shift. She knew she should not lose— and letting the argument disturb her would most definitely constitute a loss. That old Marine had Gloriosa's quiet air of strength, and come to think of it, Shakky had been that way, too. Full of a confidence that was unfeigned and unsurprised. There and then, Hancock hated it.
"How would it be if I turned you and all your ladies into stone?" she said, prying for a reaction, propping up her chin up on her hand. "Do you think your Government would care?"
"We are here to prevent wars," Tsuru might as well have been made of stone already, "not to start them."
War. The papers had called Fisher Tiger's assault on the slavers a declaration of war. A series of images flashed behind Boa Hancock's eyes, and for a moment, her scars sung.
The smooth scales under her palms grounded her. She was in power now. If she signed that treaty, she would be untouchable in their own ranks, out of their grasp.
"Not for you, or your Navy," she muttered, but from her throne everybody could hear it. "The World Government will never stop being our enemy. "
Excitement shivered through the multitude.
"Empress, you're so amazing!"
"How do these soldiers dare talk back to her?!"
"Do you think yourself very valiant to say that?" Commodore Tsuru exclaimed. And, for once, her voice shook with some emotion.
"Oh, you will forgive me," Hancock's lip quirked upward. "Let us negotiate our treaty, Commodore of Headquarters."
On that decisive evening, on the Calm Belt, a deadly and vast blue desert, the Snake Empress sealed a pact with the devil. She granted herself peace of mind, assured that no woman in Amazon Lily would ever be shackled again.
To look her oppressor in the eye, to stand even with them. To camouflage as one among their ranks. And to hurt them… as randomly and senselessly as she had been once hurt.
If there was any justice in the world… that was it.