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On their way down the Grand Line towards the mysterious final island, the Roger Pirates stopped at my bar on Sabaody. When they walked in, I frankly couldn’t believe my eyes. Rayleigh, who I had known for many years by then, looked like a shell of his usual self. I had always known him to be full of vigor; aloof in personality, of course, but with an ever-present hum of energy and joy. That’s what he’d been like the last time I saw him, only a few years earlier. Now, he looked like he’d aged a decade.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as soon as he sat down at the bar with Roger.
“Nothing,” he answered, as expected. He wasn’t the kind of man who ever asked for help or pity. He would have rather died than admit a weakness to anyone—other than Roger, that is.
Roger, though, was always an open book, and so I immediately turned to him for an explanation. He gave it to me—the simple fact that they’d discovered he had a terminal illness a few years ago, and that he was going to be dead by the end of this year. When he said the word ‘dead,’ I saw Rayleigh flinch out of the corner of my eye, and instantly, my heart was broken for him. I’d known a lot of people over the years, both as a bartender and as a pirate, and in all my life I had never known anyone so devoted to another as Silvers Rayleigh was to Gol D. Roger. I couldn’t even fathom his pain.
That night, for better or for worse, I got a demonstration of Roger’s illness. A few hours in, when the rest of their crew was plastered, the three of us were in the middle of conversation when Roger suddenly hunched over and coughed lightly into his fist. It was obvious that he was restraining a cough of much greater magnitude, and the guilty look he threw over his shoulder at his crew made it obvious that he was holding back so as not to frighten them. Instantly, Rayleigh was on his feet.
“Shakky, I don’t want to impose, but is there anywhere private we could go?” he asked with serious urgency, hauling Roger to his feet, too, with a commanding grip on his arm.
I only needed one glance at the intense strain on Roger’s face. Without a word, I beckoned them behind the bar and through the doorway which led to the stairs going up to my second-floor apartment. Roger got about halfway up them before he fell to his knees and began coughing. It was truly terrifying to listen to—I had heard more agreeable noises coming out of tuberculosis victims. Rayleigh kneeled at his side and rubbed his back as it was happening, a picture of comfort and strength even though I knew it must have been unspeakable torture for him to hear Roger suffering so greatly.
“There’s gonna be blood,” Rayleigh warned me as the coughing turned from dry and wheezy to wet-sounding. That he knew with certainty what the outcome of the coughing fit would be…. That he’d witnessed it enough times to recognize a pattern….
I rushed the rest of the way up the stairs to my kitchen, retrieved a bucket, and filled it with water and a rag. By the time I returned to my guests, Roger had finished coughing, and blood was splattered up the stairs in front of him.
“Christ,” I muttered, about to start scrubbing when Rayleigh stopped me.
“It’s not over. He’s gonna have a full-body muscle cramp, and then he’s gonna pass out,” he explained quickly, throwing one of Roger’s arms over his shoulders and dragging him to his feet. “I’ll clean all of this up once it’s over, don’t worry about it. You shouldn’t have to touch all that.”
As if I, an empress and pirate captain, had never seen blood before. Rayleigh could be a hopeless gentleman sometimes.
He managed to get Roger to the top of the stairs before the muscle cramps set in. He sat Roger down and began roughly massaging his back to soothe some of the cramps, but they really were everywhere—I could see the muscles clenching and squirming under the skin of Roger’s arms and legs. It only lasted about two or three minutes, but it looked like agony. Roger was quite literally the strongest man alive, and he was in visible, excruciating pain. When the cramps subsided, he was left completely drained—instantly, his entire body relaxed and went limp, and he slouched hard against Rayleigh, eyes fluttering closed.
“Damn,” Roger panted. “That was a nasty one. Sorry about your stairs, Shakky.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I can’t wait to tell all my future guests that that is, in fact, the Pirate King’s blood on my hardwood floors. They’ll be so excited.”
Roger laughed, but Rayleigh didn’t even hear me. He was kneeling behind Roger, arms around him, stroking his chest in soothing motions.
“Shakky, is it okay if he sleeps on your floor for a while? He can’t stay awake very long after these episodes. It’ll only be a couple hours.”
“For god’s sake, Silvers Rayleigh.”
I made him help Roger up and then I led them to my spare bedroom. Rayleigh protested, but I wouldn’t hear it—I shoved them over to the bed and made Roger lie down.
“I’ll wash the bedding after,” Rayleigh had the utter gall to say.
“Please shut up and just let someone help you for once in your life, you enormous fool.”
I left them for a few minutes then to go and scrub the stairs (blood stains fast, and I wanted to beat Rayleigh to it). When I came back, I stopped short in the doorway. Rayleigh was sitting on the edge of the bed, gently stroking Roger’s hair away from his face. Roger wasn’t quite asleep yet, though he was visibly exhausted—he was enjoying Rayleigh’s soothing touches with a serene smile.
“First night back in Sabaody and you ruined a lady’s floorboards,” Rayleigh murmured. “You asshole.”
Roger grinned. “Your bedside manner is as good as ever.”
“Would you prefer it if I started sobbing every time this happened? I can do that.”
“No,” Roger frowned. “Keep calling me names. That’s good.”
“Alright, cocksucker.”
Roger laughed, raspy but bright.
“Go to sleep already, dumbo,” Rayleigh continued.
“Whatever you say, dickhead.”
And with those tender words of affection, Roger drifted off to sleep. Rayleigh kept petting him a while longer, the most gentle and loving strokes of his hand over Roger’s hair and cheek. Reverent. I had seen the brute strength in those hands numerous times before, powerful enough to rival Roger himself, and it was oddly hypnotizing to see them used for such exquisite tenderness. Rayleigh could snap a man’s spine with his bare hands if he wanted to—but for Roger, he became something else, something unbelievably gentle and nurturing.
While Roger napped, we spoke quietly in my living room.
“How long has he been like this?” I asked.
“About four years now,” Rayleigh answered, carefully measured and emotionless. “It’s been getting worse this year.”
“And it’ll keep getting worse ‘til the bitter end?”
He nodded solemnly, taking a swig of the whiskey I had brought him.
I didn’t say I was sorry. Everybody hates hearing that when they’re in pain. Really, there was nothing I could say, nothing at all. Instead, I just sat beside him in companionable silence, punctuated only by the swish of the whiskey in our glasses. I thought about his devotion to Roger, the complete selflessness of it, the hugeness that was Silvers Rayleigh’s love. The fact that, after thirty years together, he could and would endure the pain of watching Roger suffer in order to hold him through it, and stroke his hair out of his face, and even crack jokes at his bedside to make him laugh. I couldn’t even imagine what Roger must have done in some past life to deserve it. For a brief moment, I was jealous—who wouldn’t be? Don’t we all wish we were loved by someone like Rayleigh?
After he finished his whiskey, Rayleigh apologized again for imposing and offered to wash the dishes, and I smacked him upside the head. Then he disappeared into the spare bedroom. I let the two of them be.
In the morning, I cracked the door to check and make sure nobody had died of any additional fits in the night. I found them tangled up around each other, snoring quite loudly. Roger was sprawled on his back and Rayleigh was half on top of him, an arm and a leg thrown over him. Roger’s left hand was tangled in Rayleigh’s hair, and he was drooling on Rayleigh’s forehead. Soft with sleep and comfort, Rayleigh’s face looked just a little less weathered than before, buried where it was in Roger’s chest hair.
Surely their crew was missing them by now, worrying where they’d gone, but I just didn’t have the heart to wake them. Rayleigh, the iron-fisted leader that he was, usually never allowed himself any slip-ups in protocol, and so his abandonment of the crew without a word of explanation to anyone the previous night was really telling of his mental state. Because I knew that he needed it just as much as Roger, I let them sleep late into the morning.