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It’s a weird delivery location; a little bar on Grove 13, far away from the bustle of the more central islands. The lights are on inside, but she doesn’t see any customers, so she guesses it’s closed.
Kiyomi raps smartly on the door— “Delivery! Grove 37 Wholesalers!”— and no one answers.
She waits ten seconds and tries again. Nothing. She sighs, blows out her cheeks and glares at the door. Her mom has got on her before for just leaving deliveries outside the door when customers don’t answer— Where do you think we live, Mariejois? Those will walk away before you’ve taken two steps back towards the shop!
It’s quiet, when she ducks her way inside, and utterly devoid of business. She guesses the lack of patrons isn’t too surprising when it’s the middle of the day and the place is literally called the Rip-Off Bar.
“Hello? Delivery!” she tries again, pitching her voice up into something that she hopes sounds confident and professional. “Grove 37 Wholesalers!”
There’s no response. Maybe they forgot the delivery was coming? Maybe she can leave the package at the bar. Most of their regular customers have standing instructions about what to do with deliveries if no one is there to recieve them, but she’s never been here before.
She pulls herself up onto a barstool, setting the package down in front of her, and then blinks.
The Strawhats’ wanted posters are all pasted up behind the bar. All of them, not just Captain Luffy and sometimes the Pirate Hunter, like she sees a lot and always privately scorns. They’re all there, right down to Cotton-Candy Lover Chopper. She never sees his wanted poster up anywhere.
And there’s Nami, of course. Her new wanted poster, following the debacle at Dressrosa. She looks beautiful.
“Ah,” comes a voice from behind her, sounding bemused, and Kiyomi jumps so badly she nearly falls off the stool, whirling around. “You like my collection?”
The speaker is a tall woman with a bob of black hair and an hawkish, angular face, a faint smile on her face. It’s impossible to tell if she’s forty or seventy. Kiyomi didn’t hear her enter at all.
“Um.” Kiyomi feels vaguely like she’s been caught doing something wrong. “Delivery? Grove… 37 Wholesalers?”
“Oh, that must be my sake restock,” the woman says, crossing the room to lean against the bar beside her and inspect the label on the package. “Perfect. Thank you, dear. Two thousand beri, wasn’t it?”
It takes a moment for her to find her voice. “Four thousand,” she squeaks.
“That seems awfully expensive,” the woman says, her face perfectly cool, as though the correct price isn’t on the label right in front of her.
…This woman is trying to rip her off!
“It’s on the label,” Kiyomi says, standing up on the stool to make herself taller. “You can pay two thousand if you want, I’ll open the package up and take half the bottles back with me.”
The woman’s eyes widen momentarily, just long enough for Kiyomi to start to want to curl up and die, and then she laughs, sounding delighted. “Fair play! Four thousand it is.” She pulls the correct number of bills out of her pocket without looking.
Oh, so she was ready to pay the whole amount the whole time! Kiyomi scowls.
The woman just chuckles as she hands the bills over. “Don’t take it personally. I try to fleece everyone who comes in here. Matter of personal pride.”
After a moment, she looks back at the posters tacked up behind the bar and her grin fades into a smaller, more genuine smile. “I’m a fan of theirs, you know. Good kids.”
Kiyomi blinks, ire entirely forgotten.
She says, “Really?”
“Mhm. They’ve been here, actually. Helped out a good friend when they first came through here, before all that awful business with the war. I’ve been following their careers very closely ever since.”
“Me too!” Kiyomi says, and immediately feels excruciatingly aware of the obvious overenthusiasm in her voice. “I’m— um. I’m also. A fan. Of them.”
“Oh?”
She flushes, but nods, adjusts her glasses a little self-consciously. Sits back down on her stool, as an afterthought. “I’m— I like Nami a lot. I want to be like her. She seems so pretty and cool and confident and, and—“
“Free,” the woman offers, watching her with sharp eyes.
“Yeah!” Kiyomi agrees, straightening. “Yeah, exactly! I didn’t— I always thought I was never going to get to go anywhere or choose anything in my life,” she says, voice falling a little. “‘Cause that’s not the way the world is, unless you’re strong. But Nami’s not— I mean, she’s like me. She’s not very big or very strong. And she gets to have such wonderful adventures.”
The woman hums. “Well said,” she says. She brings a cigarette to her lips, lights it.
“Um, not a lot of people have all the posters up,” Kiyomi says after a pause. “That’s what I was looking at. Lots of people only put up the most expensive ones. But you’ve got all of them. I do, too.”
The woman’s smile gets a little sharper, and she gives her a conspiratorial look. “Many people are fools, aren’t they? They taunt and preen before the strength they can see, and never spend any time worrying about the strength they can’t, right up until it has a blade to their throat.” She pauses. “Will you be going to sea someday, little one?”
“I— I’d like to,” Kiyomi says. “But I don’t know…” she trails off, feeling somewhat embarrassed of all her fears and indecisions. They all feel very small, in this woman’s presence.
The woman doesn’t seem bothered by her lack of answer. “You’re young yet. Plenty of time to think it over. Though if I may offer some advice… I was born on one of the safest islands in the world. A lush and beautiful place that most travelers never reach. I could have lived there my whole life, secure, and been quite content.”
She takes her cigarette from between her lips, considers its burning end for a moment.
“I left that place behind, and ever since then, I have been in pain and terrible danger more times than I can count,” she says, thoughtfully. “But I would not have traded it for anything.”
She suddenly ruffles Kiyomi’s hair with her free hand, making her squawk, and pushes away from the bar to circle around behind it. “Would you like something to drink? As a tip for your hard work. On the house, which is very rare of me, I’ll have you know. Orange juice? It’s fresh.”
Kiyomi blinks, momentarily entirely derailed. “Where do you get fresh oranges on Sabaody? I thought they couldn’t grow here. The air’s too wet.”
The older greengrocer brother had told her that, actually. He’d taken to ‘keeping an eye out for her’ since the Fan Letter Incident, which was annoying and overbearing and condescending, but not terrible. He knew a lot more about his family’s business than she’d first assumed. Sometimes she wondered if his parents even realized how much he cared about it. He wasn’t very good at talking to people.
“You’re a sharp kid,” the woman says approvingly, turning to the barback fridge to retrieve a glass pitcher. “I’ve just got the one little tree, and I have to keep it inside. I bartered for the sapling with a friend. I think she’d like you.”
She pours a glass of bright orange juice, slides it across the bar. “Here, try it.”
Kiyomi takes a tentative sip, feels her eyes widen.
The woman smiles, propping her chin in her hand and watching her face. “Good, mmm?”
“It’s amazing!” she says, taking a bigger drink. She doesn’t think she’s ever had anything so delicious in her life. “It tastes like sunshine!”
The woman chuckles, low and smoky.
“Come back again sometime, little one,” she says after a moment, eyes dancing. “You caught me on a slow day, but there’s a lot of interesting folks who drop by here now and again, and plenty of them have good stories of the open seas for a listening ear. You never know who might turn up. You might even meet someone who can tell you something else about the Strawhats, hm?”
Kiyomi lights up— then hesitates, feels herself shrink a little in the way she hates to do. “My mom’ll get mad at me if I’m going out all the time,” she mutters. “She wants me to work.”
“Oh, dear,” the woman says, tapping her chin with one long finger. “Do you know, it just occurred to me I’m low on soda water as well. I wonder if there’s any wholesaler around here who could help me out with that?”
Kiyomi stares at her, feels a puzzle piece click into place.
The woman winks. “I don’t normally do favors,” she says. “But for a fellow fan, I think I can make an exception.”