Chapter Text
The death of a king ought to lead to something grand.
Roger had parted from the mortal realm with zero regrets regarding his legacy. He had carved his name into the bones of history, said his silent goodbyes to his loyal boys and left his heart in Baterilla with the woman who held it. It was a noble end. He was prepared for whatever grand hall awaited a man who had conquered the seas.
Unfortunately, the universe was petty.
As his spirit drifted in the quiet darkness, Roger realised where he had gone wrong.
It wasn’t the battles, the stolen treasure or breaking into forbidden territories. No, his ultimate transgression—the singular, unforgivable stain on his soul—had been his stubborn refusal to shave off his moustache before his final journey.
Shanks had practically begged him on his knees, holding up a pair of shears with trembling hands, while Buggy had declared it an insult to proper pirate aesthetics. Roger had merely flexed his eyebrows and told them to respect the majestic foliage. The universe, it seemed, took aesthetics very seriously. Punishment came swiftly.
Roger dragged himself back into consciousness on a creaky cot smelling faintly of brine. He didn’t feel like himself at all. He possessed two absurdly soft, heavy mounds nestled right against his sternum, an alarming lack of broad back muscle, a pair of strangely delicate, high-arched feet and a low centre of gravity—all stuffed tightly into a faded linen tunic. Wandering over to a dusty mirror, he stared at a face that was emphatically not his: narrow jaw, raven-black tresses falling past slender shoulders and a cheekful of sun-kissed freckles.
The grand Pirate King blinked.
He became a bloody woman.
“Thanks for the holidays, Senny! You’re a saint, truly!”
“Get back here, Garp! I swear on my life, if you step on that ship, I will court-martial you myself! That was an illegal requisition form written on a crumpled biscuit wrapper!”
Garp didn’t even bother turning around. He simply chewed louder, spraying rice cracker dust over the tiles of the corridor as he strolled away. Sengoku’s screams were just background noise at this point, like seagulls or cannon fire.
He had lied through his teeth, faked a dozen official reports and physically barred the door until the Fleet Admiral cracked under the pressure. It was unprofessional and necessary, but nothing in the world was keeping Garp on this island. But the moment he stepped onto his warship and stared out toward the East Blue, the smile fell from his face, leaving behind the worn, tired eyes of a man burdened by an impossible promise.
Ace was turning four soon. A boy who should have had the world handed to him on a silver platter, hidden away like a dirty secret among mountain bandits. Garp comforted himself with the thought that keeping the boy alive was victory enough, but every time he looked at those fierce, dark eyes, the lie tasted like ash.
On Garp’s last visit, he had caught the boy sitting by the edge of the woods, quietly watching a village family down below. He still remembered the look in Ace’s eyes as a little kid laughed, pulled along between a mother and a father. Ace hadn’t said a word, but the silence had gutted Garp.
So that was it. For Ace’s fourth birthday, Garp was going to give the boy the truth about his parents. He’d sit the kid down and spell it right out: his dad was a loud, scatter-brained idiot who spent his whole life wandering around lost at sea, and his mum was a hopeless romantic who had a terrible habit of letting that same idiot talk her into outrageous nonsense. They were foolish, impractical people who got themselves into far too much trouble, but they had loved Ace enough to leave him in safe hands.
Garp hesitated for a second.
Was that really the right way to frame it? To tell a four-year-old that the people who gave him life loved him fiercely, yet had to vanish before he could even form a memory of them?
Bah! Garp shook his head, clearing the sappy thought away. A bit of tough love never killed anyone! What doesn’t break a boy only makes him stronger. Ace needed to toughen up anyway—it would build character, and maybe, just maybe, it would finally inspire the brat to join the Marines like his old man. Besides, Roger and Rouge were probably up in the clouds right now, weeping tears of gratitude that Garp was taking such good care of their son.
“Vice Admiral!” an aide called, trotting up with a helm report. “We are cleared to cast off for the mountain territory. Do we head straight out to deep water?”
“Hold on a minute,” Garp said, tossing a stray rice cracker wrapper over his shoulder. “We’re taking a detour into the port town first. Have to grab a box of wooden toys for my grandson, or he’ll bite my ankles.”
A month into this bizarre second life, Roger had arrived at a realisation: the world was extraordinarily tedious when you weren’t a seven-foot-tall pirate titan. In his previous life, problems were solved with a laugh and a swing of a cutlass. In this body, however, he had spent thirty days discovering that women were expected to navigate a labyrinth of polite nods, unsolicited advice and condescending shopkeepers. If he had still been a man, he’d have smashed through these daily annoyances in five minutes flat.
He sighed, arranging a display of painted toy battleships in the window of a shop in a pleasant East Blue port. He knew he was in the East—the calm waters and mild breeze were dead giveaways—but the exact island remained a frustrating mystery for now. He wiped down the counter, still trying to make sense of the girl he had become. Her name was Ramana. Just Ramana. No family name, no childhood memories floating in the back of her head and no tragic backstories waiting in the wings.
A completely empty shell that Roger had somehow won the right to occupy.
He didn’t even own the floorboards he was sweeping. The toy shop belonged to a local merchant, and Ramana was simply the quiet girl who ran the register. Roger had only figured this out by deploying a hopelessly flimsy excuse about a severe head injury to his chatty landlady. The woman had practically talked his ear off, filling in every blank about Ramana’s solitary existence while Roger nodded along, pretending to remember a life that had never belonged to him.
Right now, he was dying of curiosity.
What had become of his men after they disbanded? Rayleigh, Shanks, Buggy, and the rest of his wild crew—where were they now? And most importantly, Rouge. Was she safe? Had she given birth to their child without complications? Was their little one growing up healthy and strong? Had Garp actually kept his bloody promise to protect them, just as he had sworn in that grim prison cell? Roger burned to know, but details like that were impossible to find in a sleepy backwater town.
What he did know, however, was public knowledge—easily scavenged from town archives, library papers and the dusty stack of old newspapers Ramana had kept under her bed. He knew about his own execution in Loguetown. He knew his final speech on the scaffold had set the world ablaze, igniting a wild Great Pirate Era and driving thousands of greenhorns to the seas, which had in turn forced the World Government into an absolute frenzy of crackdowns. But the real treasure had been on the local Marine notice board just yesterday: a freshly pinned wanted poster featuring a familiar, foolish face.
Buggy. His little Bugs! A captain of his own crew!
Roger had beamed with such ridiculous, bursting pride that his landlady had teased him for looking like a smitten schoolgirl. The moment was promptly ruined, however, when two local drunken fools mistook his bright smile for an invitation, stepping up to flirt and lay unwelcome hands on his shoulders. Roger had politely knocked them out—a “knockout” in his book meaning he kicked them so hard between the legs that their future bloodlines were permanently erased. A handy outcome, given that his strength was slowly returning to this small frame day by day as he secretly trained in the woods.
Perhaps Buggy was the key. If Roger wanted to trace the remnants of his old life, tracking down his former bug-nosed apprentice was as good a starting point as any.
From the local Marine bulletins, Roger had gathered quite a bit about Buggy’s recent exploits. The Marine was treating him like a major nuisance, though Roger took that with a grain of salt. The East Blue was notoriously known as the gentlest, weakest sea, meaning the local Marines panicked over anyone with a decent bounty. The reports claimed Captain Buggy was terrorising peaceful coastal towns, blasting villages with specialised cannons and plundering whatever he pleased.
Roger’s brow furrowed as he automatically accepted payment from a waiting shopper.
He couldn’t reconcile the reports with the boy he had raised on the Oro Jackson. Yes, Buggy loved treasure more than life itself, but outright slaughtering innocents? Unlikely. There was bound to be a grand misunderstanding behind it all. After all, the World Government’s propaganda machine was infamous for exaggerating a pirate’s cruelty just to justify their own failures.
“Umm... miss?”
“Huh?” Roger snapped his head up.
The customer—a local mother—flinched slightly under his intense gaze, offering an anxious, polite smile. “It’s perfectly fine! Really! You don’t have to wrap the toy! Just hand me the wooden horse and a sheet of paper, I’m happy to wrap it myself!”
Roger glanced down at his hands and froze. The lovely pastel paper he was supposed to be neatly folding had been utterly obliterated. It was a twisted, mangled knot of crushed paper, smothered under half a roll of sticky tape, looking as though a sea beast had chewed it up and spat it out onto the counter. It turned out that conquering the Grand Line was child’s play compared to delicate gift-wrapping, and whatever muscle memory Ramana’s body possessed was no match for Roger’s heavy-handed pirate habits.
Roger scratched the back of his neck, letting out a sheepish chuckle. “Ah! Ha! Good eye! I was just... testing the durability of the paper! Yours to keep, madam!”
He gave a cheerful wave as the woman snatched up her toy and bolted for the door, the small brass bell jingling frantically above her as she made her grand escape. He honestly had no idea how he could possibly look intimidating in a frame this small, but he wasn’t about to complain.
Truth be told, Roger had zero identity crisis over waking up as a woman. He had no shame, no existential dread and certainly no embarrassment about the shift itself. If anything, his only real worry was whether he was treating this borrowed body with proper respect.
Being a pirate his whole life meant his understanding of womanhood had been fairly limited, but he had loved Rouge with every fibre of his soul. Watching her daily routines back in Baterilla had at least taught him the mechanics of getting into undergarments properly and dressing like a civilised human being—though he still grumbled daily about how absurdly complicated female clothing was.
And, well, there had also been his little harmless crush on Shakky back in the day. Ah, Shakky. He wondered how she was doing, and whether she and Rayleigh had finally stopped dancing around each other. You’d have to be blinder than a sea monster not to notice how utterly fixated she had been on Rayleigh.
Roger sighed, running a hand through his dark locks. His main struggle lately was the bloody hair. He had briefly considered chopping it all off, but the thought of Rouge’s long, silky, strawberry-blonde waves stayed his hand. Keeping his hair long felt like holding onto a tiny piece of her—a gentle reminder that made him feel as if she were still standing right beside him.
Jingle-ling.
The front door swung open, the bell chiming merrily.
“Hello! Welcome to—” Roger started automatically, turning toward the entrance with a polite smile, only for the words to die instantly in his throat. His eyes widened in sheer disbelief, and he slammed both hands onto the wooden counter.
“YOU?!”