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Glaive D. Mikan is born in a storm. (With what she learns, eventually, it almost seems like a cosmic joke.)
She’s born with vibrant, sunshine-yellow curls and emerald green eyes that are just the slightest bit unsettling if you stare at them too long.
She’s born to two humble islanders, a fisherman and his wife, who’s far better at handling finances. (Glaive Sumire used to wield her namesake, back during her pirate days, long behind her. She’d been damn good at it, too.)
(Her husband, Yona, was as scared of her as he was in love.)
She’s born on a small island in the Grand Line, in Paradise, a few weeks after the younger of the boys she will call brothers, with the birthmark all those sharing her initial carry, and her parents are worried. Worried, because that initial spells trouble.
And trouble it brings.
Mikan is four when she eats a strange green apple-shaped fruit covered in swirls that remind her of eyes, four and a half when another storm hits and takes her parents’ fishing boat with it, and five when she meets Them.
It’s the first time her Devil Fruit activates.
She looks at the men who will be Emperors.
She looks at the teens who will survive years of prosecution, all for a captain who shook the world to its core.
She looks at the children who will fight a war before they ever hit puberty.
She looks at two street rats, with red and blue hair, straight and wavy, and thinks well, with my yellow curls, I’ll fit right in. Looks at them and thinks these two, I can trust.
She’s been staring a bit too long, actually, because Blue Waves is waving his hand in front of her face. “Hey! Anyone in there? What’s up with your eyes?”
Mikan blinks twice, and inclines her head. “What about them?”
“They were glowing like flashlights, that’s what.”
“Huh,” Mikan makes, because this is the first time the Yurai Yurai no Mi bothered to activate, but now, at last, the fruit has made itself known in her brain. Fun. It means that eating the thing finally earned her more than an unforgettable taste and an inability to swim. “First time it’s happened to me. Did you guys know Devil Fruits are an actual thing?”
The two boys look at each other, then back at her and shake their heads.
“Well… would you mind if I stuck with you two?”
“Huh?” they chorus, like they can’t quite comprehend why anyone would follow them.
In the end, they don’t mind, even if it takes her learning how to future vision deliberately – just a few moments at a time, not several decades, to prove her worth as someone to fight with them instead of just patching up their wounds as best as she can – which isn’t much.
(Mikan doesn’t realize until far, far later that she’s taught herself a bastardized form of Observation Haki, instead.)
And they’re seven – and Shanks is almost eight, and boy does Red take his big brother duties seriously – when there’s a ship docking at the port. It’s flying a black flag, and the locals are already getting fussy.
Mikan takes one look at it and her eyes burn.
(Doesn’t realize it, but reading the Klabautermann’s Yurai is the first time Mikan has gotten close to reading an object’s history.)
Buggy barely catches his sister before she collapses onto her knees and Shanks is quick to shield them from prying eyes, because his brother is amazing like that, and he can’t do anything but watch as a vision overwhelms his sister for what feels like an eternity even though it can’t be more than a minute, and damn it, but he hates it when this happens, for all that it’s so rare that it might as well be a blue moon lighting up the night sky. (Not that it’s nighttime just yet, but with how quickly time passes on their home island, sunset isn’t far off.)
Because for all that Mikan is strong – seriously, who taught her how to punch and how can he avoid them for the rest of his life – it’s moments like this that make her look so, so fragile, and his sister would probably brain him if he said that aloud, certainly brained Shanks when he expressed a similar sentiment.
Still, her eyes stop glowing, and there’s a grin on Mikan’s face, now, that makes anxiety churn in Buggy’s gut at the same time as Shanks’ eyes light up, because damn it, he knows that look.
“We’re getting on that ship.”
Wait.
The pirate ship?
Oh god, Shanks has the same grin, now, and Buggy’s never going to be able to talk them out of this, is he?
… well. It’s not like he hasn’t felt the call of the Sea himself, before. Buggy has no illusions that the three of them wouldn’t have taken to the Sea, one day.
Still.
They’re not even in their double digits, so forgive him for being a bit, y’know, terrified.
(Buggy already knows he won’t be able to stop them.)
The Roger Pirates are…
Well.
They’re something, alright. They certainly enjoy the free pirate life their captain has carved out for them.
The crew is fairly small, for a pirate crew – only about 30 members, them not included, and almost all of them are incredibly, monstrously strong. Mikan thinks it’s amazing, Buggy thinks it’s terrifying, and Shanks…
Well, Shanks turns out to be one of the monsters, himself.
The day Rayleigh introduces them to Haki is the day after Shanks displayed his Conqueror, the day after the Edd War, the first day of so many nightmares.
Because they’re not even ten, and they weren’t even supposed to be fighting, but it wasn’t like Shiki’s men cared, and when some of them had found the trio, Shanks had seen their weapons and roared and they had collapsed.
So. Haki training.
Rayleigh explains everyone excels in one type of Haki, and while it’s obvious Shanks’ Haki is Haoshoku – Emperors – Haki, it quickly becomes evident that both Mikan and Buggy excel in Observation. Kenbunshoku Haki.
And where Buggy is sensitive to the Voices of other people, thanks to her fruit, the barrier between “Mikan” and “the world” might as well be spun sugar for how easily it breaks.
(Rayleigh isn’t impressed, whenever she collapses from the sheer volume of noise the world brings.
Because it’s not the Voice of All Things, like Roger has, so to him, she has no excuse to be so overwhelmed.
It’s the first time Shanks punches him in the face, and the first time he gets Busoshoku Haki working long enough to land a hit on someone.)
For all that Roger realizes it wasn’t the smartest idea to bring three children on board, he can’t bring himself to regret it. The little Yellow’s eyes had a fire in them that Roger knew meant she’d survive anything the world threw at her. (And, well, she shares that D in his own name. So sue him, he was curious.)
Red, he could tell, would go to the ends of the Earth for them both and Blue, for all that his knees shook, would do the same.
So, no, Roger doesn’t regret it.
It doesn’t mean that he won’t open his cabin and his arms to the little cabin trio, whenever they need it.
(Damn that Shiki. They were children-)
Buggy eats a Devil Fruit.
He wasn’t planning on it, didn’t even realize what it was, first.
But, when he did, he was happy. Because now, maybe, he can at least stand a chance amongst the monsters all around him.
(In another life, he would have raged for the loss of money and treasure. In another life, the Edd War happened when he was 12, and he had sailed for five years, and resigned himself to never being able to stand among his crew as an equal. Not with Shanks, who seemed like a mountain.
This is not that life.)
The Bara Bara no Mi makes him immune to knifes and swords, and at first glance, that’s it.
Mikan and Shanks immediately start helping him find more uses.
(Fuck, but he loves his siblings so much.)
When they meet the Red Arrow Pirates, Mikan’s eyes shine.
(a red moon a flower-that-isn’t arrows
so many arrows
and p a i n -)
She has nightmares for weeks.
The first day of the clash between the Roger Kaizoku and the Shirohige Kaizoku, all three of them stay below deck.
(like that had done anything last time)
The second day, they move to the Crow’s Nest, when Mikan realizes that this may as well be a Davy Back Fight (nobody knows what that is, not yet) and this isn’t Shiki, this time.
On the third day, Kozuki Oden joins their crew. With him come his wife, and two minks that are technically stowaways, and Mikan’s head feels like it’s going to burst.
(What they don’t tell the others is that on the second day, Marco found them in the crow’s nest.)
(He took them to the kitchens, when it became obvious that no, they had not in fact eaten since the fight started.)
(Thatch is amazing for all that Mikan is afraid to look at him, because the Yurai of people like him tend to be terribly depressing. So.)
(Thatch is of course curious, but he doesn’t ask.)
(Because he’s the best.)
On Zou, they find a red Poneglyph. Who is Joy Boy?
It’s the beginning of the last stretch of the road.
(Their captain’s health is failing, and nobody in the crew knows.)
(Nobody but Crocus and Mikan.)
(Of course, Shanks and Buggy had realized already, just off the look on their sister's face.)
In another life, Buggy would have fallen sick just before they reached the final island.
This is not that life.
In this life, they all see Laugh Tale – as their captain names it, after Joy Boy and an old song.
The three children (and they are, they’re only ten) learn.
The crew laughs, when they do. (The children laugh, too, but it’s not laughter, it’s a broken noise that scrapes in their throats like glass and gunpowder.)
(They sleep in their captain’s cabin for weeks.)
(It’s the first time Mikan really, truly regrets taking her brothers onto the Oro Jackson.)
(Because this knowledge, they’ll never forget, not even if they try.)
(Someone needs to keep this story safe.)
(And maybe it shouldn’t be them, shouldn’t be children, but it’s too late for that, now.)
And then Captain dissolves their crew.
And Mikan saw it coming, knew he was dying and knew there was a woman named Portgas D. Rouge in South Blue waiting for her Captain (for her father) and yet…
And yet it hurts. (Tears like acid pouring down their faces, her brothers holding her close because otherwise, all three of them would run after their father Captain, would follow him to their deaths.)
(And they’re only ten, and it is not their time.)
The next two years are hell.
Hell, because the Pirate King (the first, the World’s Yurai whispers excitedly, and the second one will come and D will bring a storm) has made far too many enemies, and all of them see three cabin brats and they see easy targets.
Mikan is pretty sure that her Devil Fruit has Awakened, but she doesn’t dwell on it, because she has to read their own Yurai and the Yurai of the World around them constantly, has to find the battles they can win and dodge the ones they can’t.
(She doesn’t understand why her brothers get more and more angry the longer they don’t get help from their crew.
She’s seen from the start that they won’t, after all, and it’s sad, but Mikan doesn’t understand why it would make someone angry.
Mikan never really saw the point, in being angry.)
Eventually, they find shelter on a winter island in Paradise, with a prickly doctor that teaches Buggy to throw knifes, Mikan how to heal and Shanks how to put on a mask of jovial cheer that can fool people into thinking he’s harmless even when he’s learned swords from the Pirate King.
It’s on Drum Island where the three of them truly, really learn how to fight, not just brawl.
And then, one morning, Mikan wakes up and finds her Captain their father is going to be executed.
Loguetown, that day, is brimming with Yurai. The city, the people… everyone has a story, but there are those who have Yurai, and Mikan has to fight with all she has not to lose herself to the current of history.
Someone asks after the One Piece – of course they do – and they hear their Captain their father’s- voice for the last time, as loud as ever.
Gol D. Roger dies with a smile on his face.
The plaza roars.
And Mikan collapses under the weight of smoke and strings silence and an alliance that would shake the world and a black sword three swords who would shatter it and sand and shadows and a revolution and the straw hat that would conquer them all
Her brothers barely catch her in time.
(Her screams are unnoticed in the crowd’s roar.
Unnoticed in the new era.)
Mikan has a fever for three days and Shanks has never been so scared.
Not even when the Man With The False D had cornered them before Loguetown (scarred them physically, for once), not when they had to run and hide for two years, not when Roger clashed swords with Shiki.
She wakes up on the third day with tears in her eyes, screams in her ears and the word “Baterilla” emblazoned into her mind and they need to leave.
The Marines are everywhere, and the boys think they’re too late.
(Mikan sees, and knows they can’t help with this. They’re twelve. They can’t raise a child by themselves, can’t trust anyone to help them when the entire Marine fleet still wants their heads.
They’ve never been so glad that they don’t have a bounty.)
(
One day, she’ll meet her little brother.
)
Baterilla is fire and heartache and too many graves for too many children (too many mothers) and they flee to the East Blue, to the “weakest sea” (to Captain’s old home).
As if Ohara wasn’t bad enough – and they don’t believe for a second the archaeologists had been trying to take over the world (and anyone who does is an idiot, which turns out to be the entire planet, for the Seas’ sake) – the newspaper reports that for the first time, someone’s broken out of Impel Down.
It’s Shiki.
(Mikan loses track of how many panic attacks she and Buggy accumulate.)
For some reason, this is what sparks Shanks’ resolve to set out to sea again.
Shanks is done with letting his fear control him.
So he sets sail.
(And if he meets his first mate when Beckman brings him down from a panic attack once it really, truly sets in that he’s alone for the first time since he met Buggy, well, it’s not like anyone has to know that.)
(And it isn’t like they ever really lose contact with each other, either. Whoever discovered den-den mushi deserves all the gold in Skypeia.)
The Akagami Kaizoku, in few years, are already making a name for themselves.
In contrast, the Midorinami Kaizoku are a collection of misfits sailing under a jolly roger sporting green tresses of hair and crossed knives instead of bones.
There’s an old term that applies to both crews, however.
“Peace Main”.
(As if the Roger Kaizoku’s Cabin Brats could ever be anything else.)
(As if Red-Blue-Yellow would ever let themselves become the monsters in their nightmares.)