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“Oh,” Ikkaku says, going a little red and ducking her head, hair falling in a curtain around her face. “This isn’t - this isn’t the room you showed me to earlier, is it? Oh, Blues, have I just walked into someone else’s - I’m so sorry -”
“No, no,” Law says. He’s leaning against one of the metal walls in the hallway of the submarine, flanked on either side by the other members of the crew. The bear and the redhead to his left, the other to his right. He looks a little softer than he had when she’d met him, the others with slight smiles on their faces. “This is the room we showed you. Shachi and Penguin wanted to make it… homier for you. They wanted to make you feel more comfortable here.”
It’s hard to know how she should react to that. The consideration is a little overwhelming, even though they haven’t done that much, and she takes a cautious step into what Law had declared as her quarters earlier that day. They aren’t so generic as they had been then, bright-coloured sheets making one of the bunks neatly, what looks to be a knitted blanket folded on top, some clothes that she doubts will fit her properly tucked onto another, folded, clearly intended for her. She isn’t sure why they’ve done this - and, again, it isn’t much, it isn’t much at all, but if Law’s words had been honest, they’ve succeeded. It does feel warmer. More like it could be safe, somewhere she can let her guard down at least a little.
“Oh,” Ikkaku says. “I… thank you?”
“Don’t thank us,” the one she thinks is Shachi says. “It’s - hard. It’s hard to start over somewhere new, especially with people who are total fuckin’ strangers, so I thought… I thought, what would make me comfortable, and tried that. If you don’t like it, that’s fine.”
“We’ll be stopping at a different island soon, anyway,” Penguin says, identifiable by the name embroidered across the front of his hat. “Restocking supplies, getting Law a new scarf ‘cause his body temperature never stays the same, getting Bepo some more maps…”
Ikkaku thinks about how she’d stepped onto the submarine with nothing but the clothes on her back, following the offer of her life back from a gangly teenage boy, too-pale and with bloodied hands from where he was cleaning up the cuts on one of his companion’s hands. She thinks about how he’d seen the long-healed scar of a burn at the base of her neck and only bitten his lip for a few seconds before offering her a place on his ship, if only to get away.
“Take a minute to clean up,” Law says, quiet and right behind her. He doesn’t touch her, which she’s grateful for, but drums his knuckles twice on the wall and smiles when she looks at him. “You can do - whatever you like. Go for a walk, have a nap… I’ll come and let you know when Penguin finishes cooking dinner, okay?”
“Okay,” Ikkaku echoes, and finds herself alone again.
There are other things left for her that she hadn’t realised were there, at first. A few books sit tucked below the pillow - all three in Northern even though she knows full well she’d heard the bear speaking Grand with Law earlier - as well as a copy of one of the Sora comics, which she hasn’t seen for years. She picks one out, strips out of her clothes in favour of the borrowed ones, ignores the white bundle of fabric that she assumes are spare bedsheets, wraps the blanket around her shoulders and sits with her back against the bunk, content to read until Law comes back.
The engines hum beneath and around her, air and water in the pipes, the creaking of the ship seeming to echo off of every surface. It isn’t quite unsettling, just different. It doesn’t feel unnatural and the makeup of the ship is, if nothing else, familiar. Metal is metal, hydraulics and pipes and valves are what they are; all the same. She knows these. Being surrounded by those on this ship - this ship that she’s a guest on - does do some in the way of aiding her in relaxing, just slightly. That the small group who found her and dragged her to safety are the crew of a submarine feels like a grand, cosmic joke, offering her at least temporary sanctuary around things she knows well. Ikkaku has always found complex engines and hissing pipework to be easily-understood, something she’s been working with since she was deemed old enough to do so without being likely to immediately burn herself.
She was right about the clothes not fitting properly, but she finds she doesn’t care. The sweater is soft, is warm, and the trousers are loose and airy linen that counters it nicely. The blanket is knitted, and a nice weight around her shoulders, something comforting to focus on as she begins reading what she thinks is a story of forests and magic. It’s - nice. It’s easy to lose herself in, if nothing else, and Ikkaku finds that she’s genuinely surprised when Law knocks on the door.
“Knock-knock,” he says. “I thought you might have gone to look around. Is - ah, are the clothes alright? We could find you some that fit better, but we were waiting to do laundry, ‘cause nobody likes doing it.”
“They’re fine,” Ikkaku says. “A little big, yeah, but it’s… fine.”
She hates, a little bit, how soft her voice is. It’s a betrayal of the fear and anxiety in her, that lives in her chest; the uneasiness she has at the whole situation. Borne from the knowledge that the other people on this ship already know each other, are familiar with one another in deeply intimate ways - she’s barely been around them for half a day, and she can already tell - Ikkaku has a deep discomfort settling into every inch of her, residing in her bones, her blood. Every space between her ribs is filled with whispers of outsider, different, out of place, and they’re harder to ignore than she’d like them to be.
Law turns to face her and it’s then that she realises she’s fallen out of step, her feet faltering as she gets lost in her own thoughts. His gaze is startling in its intensity, although that’s something she’d started to notice earlier on, but there’s a scrutiny that comes with his eyes being fixed on her that she can’t say she likes.
“Ikkaku,” he says, “what’s bothering you?”
How to explain it, she wonders. Where to even start.
“It’s all different,” she says. Embarrassingly, it comes out all in a rush, like it’s been waiting to escape her for her whole life. “It’s - this is weird, right? It isn’t just me that feels like this is weird?”
“I mean, I think it’d be weird if you didn’t think that,” Law says, deadpan enough that it’s obviously a joke - a fact that startles a laugh out of her, audibly nervous. “I know we didn’t get much of a chance for… introductions, earlier, but I thought - well. You didn’t want to be there, and I couldn’t just leave you. You’re not under any obligation to stay with us, or join the crew, but I saw I could help you, that I could… that I could give you a choice. Y’know?”
It hadn’t been much of a choice.
Stay and stagnate like everyone else she’d grown up around, like the brothers who’d had so much promise before it had all been beaten back down; or go with a stranger where there might be a chance for something more. Something different.
It hadn’t been much of a choice at all. As if she would turn it down.
Law gestures and she follows again, dropping into the offered seat beside Penguin’s hat where it sits on the table, the man - the boy - busy with ladling things into bowls. His hair falls into his face, a little, and Shachi takes his sunglasses off as a bowl is set in front of him. The bear, Bepo, sits quietly, but wraps one of his broad arms around Law’s shoulders when he leans into his side. Ikkaku thinks that they move like a family, and feels slightly sick to her stomach. She suddenly doesn’t feel as though she wants to eat, despite the ache of hunger she’d felt when she’d caught the smell of the food, despite how the bowl in front of her does look good.
Law closes his eyes and ducks his head for a few moments before he lifts it again, picking up his spoon at a nudge from Bepo. Ikkaku picks hers up too, looking down at the bowl, the chunks of pink fish that float in the broth, alongside vegetables and melted butter. It looks delicious.
She puts her spoon down.
“It isn’t poisoned,” Penguin says. “Ow,” he says right after, and Ikkaku assumes that Shachi must have kicked him below the table, out of sight.
“Stop being idiots for two seconds,” Law says, rolling his eyes. “Ikkaku. You said you worked at the docks?”
“Yeah,” she says. “For a couple years, since my oldest brother joined the Marines and the second-oldest ran off with some pirate crew to get himself killed. Started working and keeping inventory for the ships and the mechanics just to keep some extra food on the table, but some of the others down the docks thought I was smart - one of ‘em noticed I was miserable and wanted to give me something to do, I think - and they taught me how to fix things. Ships. Machines. Whatever.” She looks down at her hands, and curls her fingers into fists before she relaxes them. “The owner didn’t like that he had a girl working on ships, but he only found out ‘cause he was giving me shit for some records I didn’t even write. He said it was bad luck for me to be doing that work, said that my family only had a daughter ‘cause they were… I don’t know, he probably said they were cursed. Told me to leave and not come crawling back to him, because he didn’t have no place for uppity little bitches. Then came the… well, you know. That. Then you.”
Her impression of the man isn’t very good, isn’t funny even before she dances around where Law found her, but Shachi snorts anyway, promptly covering his mouth and wiping it on his sleeve.
“Were you good?” Law asks.
“I was brilliant.” It’s a brag, sure, but it’s true. Penguin laughs now, and Law leans back into Bepo’s side with a smug little grin. “Hell, I was the best.”
“We need an engineer,” Law says, “a mechanic. We could probably get by, but if you’re the best, that’s what I want on my crew.”
Ikkaku picks her spoon back up, spins it idly between her fingers as she looks back down at the bowl. She can’t see her own reflection in the broth, thank the seas, because she doesn’t want to see whatever would be present on her face. She takes a deep breath, and looks up at Law.
“When do I start?” Ikkaku asks, and takes a spoonful of fish from the bowl with a grin