Chapter Text
Marco
Something itches beneath his tattoo as he dissects the new (temporary, he might say a little adamantly if questioned by a curious crewmate) addition to the Whitebeard pirates.
His arrival was an almost comical one, with him crashing one of their parties late at night to use them as a shield against any patrolling marines on sea, or so he says.
That alone would’ve raised a few alarms for Marco, but even with his Devil fruit burning through the copious amounts of alcohol his siblings had forced into his pitcher, the night was still hazy and dim enough that not many people would have cared.
The dark, fire lit beach was the perfect grounds to grab a jug and blend in. And blend in he did, at least at first.
He must’ve been desperate, well, desperate enough to mingle with a Yonko’s crew, even with half of the village present for some unknown reason that flew right past Marco’s head when Vista tried explaining in a drunken slur of words.
He managed to catch something about cabbages and the name of the local fisherman’s daughter, rendered almost intelligible, that Marco had to make him repeat three times before understanding.
Then the swordsman had stumbled sideways into a bush, and Marco felt lazy enough to leave him to his drunken hubris, only dragging him out onto the sand so there wouldn’t be another panicked, hungover morning search for a missing crewmate.
The blond was a little too delicate-looking for his grand story of sailing on the seas, a little too shifty when questioned about his home, and just a little too charming for him to let his guard down.
But Pops liked him, even drank with him for a while before getting distracted by one of his other sons getting into a loud but lighthearted scuffle with the dark haired girl the boy brought with him.
Marco didn’t catch much of the actual fight, if you could even call it one, with how one-sided it was (the girl won, obviously). Apparently, the girl was a sore loser, especially at cards, and especially at the drunken cheating Thatch liked to pull when he was particularly tipsy.
The girls were fine, and quickly growing on the crew, as Marco notes. They were like a litter of cats, hissing at every offered hand while everyone cooed at their cuteness.
Even Izou, who took the longest to warm up to new recruits, practically took the girls under his wing from the moment he laid eyes on them. Much to both of the blonds’ surprise, that is.
Even so, with his solid bond with the girls, there is still something Marco just can’t quite put his finger on.
Maybe it was a similar aversion to their pasts, the girls and him. Or something of that guilt that people barely notice about the boy, even with it hanging off every word he says.
Though he can distrust the glorified stowaway all he wants, he’ll always trust Pop’s judgment of character, no matter if he was an enemy, or a…
Again, that feeling of deja vu and an itching at the tongue for a name just out of his mind’s reach. He was certain that he had seen him, or someone who looked like him, before. When, he wasn’t so sure.
Though the dream-like haze that surrounded that memory was the largest hint yet, the part that was locked away and forgotten, back when he was still caged, back when he hadn’t yet been set free by a warm hand and a thunder for a guffaw.
It was just the irritating smoothness to the skin that had rarely seen the roughness of the wind-salt, a certain glimmer of the seams in the cloth that revealed a hidden truth behind the new passenger’s shy bluster, something sinister behind the light dancing footsteps of his gait, as if he were more used to dancing than walking.
Even that air of arrogance he tried so desperately to conceal when he laughed, that innocent haughtiness of how he holds himself. Exposing more than he would’ve thought to these veterans at sea, where one wrong step can mean the nothingness of Davy Jones’ locker. And Marco has seen too much of the world’s cruelty to be deceived by the false skin the boy was wearing as tightly as he drew his cloak around himself in the coldness of night.
But in the same logic, Pops had seen much more than he would ever, and maybe there was something else buried deeper under his skin that Marco just refused to see, an ugly part of himself clawing at the monsters he’d faced from the past, but the reflexive dislike was quickly swallowed after the approval of his captain.
Even so, the way the boy handles the girls speaks more for his values than he himself expresses, and there is something genuine behind every smile, every word directed at them, even if there was always a tinge of something sour following at the end of it.
He wasn’t sure what, but it felt a lot like guilt (he was too familiar with it to ever forget what it tastes like in his mouth).
Marco didn’t need to like someone to accept them into the fold.
He was a pirate after all, and maybe there is a little cruelty in that.