Chapter Text
She isn’t sure where she is, exactly. When she’d escaped the hold of the ship she’d been imprisoned in for the past… however many months, she hadn’t exactly had time to stop and ask for directions. It’s hot here. Hot and very, very dry. She’s used to being thirsty, but the heat on this island is oppressive. The sun beats down on her relentlessly no matter where she moves, sending rainbow pinpricks of light sparkling off her close-cropped hair and all across the sand.
Well. When she has hair. Sometimes she feels herself go light and fuzzy, and she doesn’t anymore. Not hands or feet or even a head, either. She keeps moving still, somehow –even without legs to run– until they came back. They always do. It’s hard to tell which parts of her are real though. Ever since she’d eaten the fruit that had fallen from that chest and rolled into her cage during the chaos of the firefight her captors had gotten into, everything feels a little like a dream. Like there’s a clear pane of glass between her and the rest of the world and nothing can touch her.
She knows it was all real though. When she’d exploded out of the ship after he tried to hit her, the quartermaster died, and he’d looked at her the whole time. The way his eyes had gone empty was more real than anything she’d ever seen.
It’s taken all of her strength and desperation not to let the rest of the pirates catch up as she flees through the city. Now that she’s left the populated area of the port behind she thinks she can relax a little, though she doesn’t dare stop running. If it were possible, she’d like to find a dark, cool hole somewhere away from the sun and sleep and drink water until she can’t anymore.
It isn’t possible though. The pirates are still looking for her. She can’t quite say how she can still hear them from so far away –especially when her ears and eyes and her everything else keep dissolving away into nothing-but-something– but the pirates have realized she’s left the city by now and have taken to the sands on her tail. They’re fast, but she’s determined. She can’t let them catch her. Not again.
So she runs, or floats as best she can when her body sinks into the breeze, genuinely hopeful for the first time in a long time that she might actually get away. That the rancid-tasting fruit she’d bitten into out of hunger and desperation has finally provided the key to the shackles she’s been trapped with for as long as she can remember. The pirates are close behind her, yes, but once she gains enough distance to properly hide they’ll never find her.
She never expected the desert itself to come alive under her feet.
Without any warning whatsoever, a vicious sandstorm erupts into being on either side of her. Visibility suddenly at zero as the wind screams around her and scrapes at her skin, she skids to a halt too quickly to recover from and slips, tumbling gracelessly down the steep slope of the sand dune she’d been scurrying across before dissolving into nothingness again and huddling as small and still as she can manage at its base, hoping to be overlooked as a stray breeze. Close behind her, her pursuers crest the top of the dune, peer into the wall of swirling sand for any sign of where she’d gone, and then scream.
And keep screaming.
With a strange mixture of horror and vicious pleasure churning in her gut, she watches as the pirates who’ve been chasing her are slowly sucked dry of every last bit of moisture in their bodies by the ravaging desert. They shriek and writhe helplessly as they’re lifted off their feet by the sheer force of the wind, but their feeble struggles do little and less to save themselves. Within minutes they’re all dead: nothing more than so many desiccated corpses dropping stiffly back into the sand.
Then the sandstorm eases, and the desert is once again silent. Like nothing had ever happened.
Stunned by what she’s just witnessed, it’s only then she realizes that she herself has rematerialized without noticing and yet remains somehow untouched by the sandstorm. Hesitantly, she gets back onto her (admittedly wobbly) feet, but almost falls over again when she suddenly finds herself standing mere inches in front of a man.
A man who had most definitely not been there a few seconds ago, but now looms over her like the blade of an enormous sword that could drop and end her life at any moment.
He’s tall and dark-haired, she notes distantly, with a broad and powerful build. His face could have possibly been described as charming, if it weren’t for the thick, ropey scar that bisects it from ear to ear and the sneer twisting his lips around the stub of a smoldering cigar. His left hand has been replaced by a massive golden hook that glints menacingly in the blinding sunlight.
“So you’re the murderous thief these idiots were tearing apart the city looking for,” he drawls, staring her down like she’s nothing more than a bug.
Belatedly, she realizes that she’s terrified.
She tries. She really does try to activate her powers and escape: to pull that gossamer, fluttery feeling over herself that means her body doesn’t exist anymore, and no one can hurt her. She isn’t fast enough though. Or perhaps she’s just too weak and tired to withstand the man’s obvious power. She’s only had her own power for mere hours now, and it isn’t second nature yet. The man scruffs her and lifts her into the air by the back of her shirt for a closer inspection before she can even move.
His hand feels as blisteringly hot and coarse as the sand beneath them. Touching him is painful and she cries out and kicks, but it’s useless.
She isn’t exactly an impressive sight, she knows. Even for a child of seven, she’s obviously underfed and scrawny, which the threadbare rags she’s dressed in do little to hide. She can’t remember the last time she’d been allowed to bathe, and her fingers and toes are still bleeding sluggishly from where her nails have been ripped out. Dangling helplessly in the man’s grip as he hoists her to eye level, it should have been difficult to identify her as anything other than a particularly unfortunate street urchin.
It’s her hair, even as short as it is, that gives her away.
“Interesting devil fruit you have there, Glass girl,” the man comments, the acrid smell of his cigar almost overpowering at this distance. “I’d thought your kind was extinct by now.”
Dizzy from a combination of the scorching heat and despair at being captured again so soon –and by this terrifying sand demon, no less– she can only hang limply in his hand and stare at him with wide eyes. Maybe if she doesn’t move, she thinks desperately, he won’t hurt her.
If anything, the man seems almost amused at her fearful reaction. “What, nothing to say?” he teases.
Frantically, she shakes her head. She’s only been free for a grand total of half an hour, tops. She really doesn’t want to die.
The man’s thin lips purse around his cigar, and his dark eyes bore into her like a drill. “How long were you with those pirates?” he asks.
“I-I don’t know sir,” she croaks, voice cracked from disuse but too afraid to refuse him an answer. “A long time.” She’s been a prisoner of one pirate crew or another for practically her whole life. The ones this man has just killed had taken her as a prize when they’d defeated a rival crew, but they were only the most recent in a long series of captors. She and Mama were free once, she knows, but she has no memories of being that young. She can barely even remember Mama, much less a time where she hadn’t been kept by one greedy bastard or another like some sort of exotic pet.
Until the fruit. Until today. For however long that had lasted.
The man with the hook is definitely a pirate, and she knows with the same certainty that she knows the sun rises in the east that no pirate gives up on a treasure once it’s in his hands. (And as she has always been told, a living member of the Glass Tribe is a rare treasure indeed.)
The man exhales a cloud of pungent smoke in her face, and she tries so hard not to cough that her eyes water. “What did you plan to do if you’d escaped into the desert?” he asks. He seems genuinely curious.
She pauses the panic, a small spark of stubborn defiance taking hold inside her. “I… want to live freely,” she answers tentatively. It isn’t a plan. It’s not even much of an idea, really. Still, that simple desire is all she has, and she wants to curl her body around that dream and shelter it like a sputtering candle in a storm.
The man laughs. It’s not a nice laugh. “Baka,” he chortles. “You’ll be hunted for the rest of your life. There isn’t an island in the whole world where people like us can live freely.”
“People like… us?” she repeats cautiously.
“People with power, or at least the potential,” he explains, smirking at her and tightening his grip painfully as if to remind her how powerless she is at this moment. “People who the world would rather kneel or disappear.”
Dejected, she lowers her gaze and chews on her lower lip, trying not to cry. The man is probably right. To live freely… that’s a foolish dream. Mama believed they would be free one day, but then she died before that could happen. Sure, she escaped today; but look how long she’d lasted, even with the advantage of inhuman powers. All it would take to destroy her newfound freedom would be for just one person to get a good look at her, and she’ll be hunted down and sold again. To stay out of a cage, she’ll have to spend the rest of her life running and hiding and hoping to never be found. The prospect is more feasible now that she’s eaten a devil fruit, but is that kind of life truly any better than the one she’d had before? She doesn’t know.
“Do you know what Utopia is?” the man asks abruptly, shattering her thoughts.
She mouths the strange word to herself, then shakes her head.
The man exhales another cloud of smoke. “It’s a place that could be a home to people like us. A place that we wouldn’t have to hide.”
Her eyes widen. “Does Utopia really exist?” she asks, breathless, because it’s familiar. Utopia isn’t the word she used, but Mama told her about a place like that before, she remembers. A place that was always happy and full of music and laughter, where nobody would try to hurt them. She’d promised they’d go there together one day.
Much to her disappointment, the man shakes his head. “Not yet,” he explains. “Utopia is something that takes blood, tears, and time to build. And help.” That last bit is accompanied by a rather pointed look, and she begins to catch on to what the man wants from her.
It’s strange. Nobody has ever wanted her for anything besides the parts they could cut off of her before. This man though… he wants her help. He wants her help to build something so wonderful she can hardly believe something like that could be real. There’s a part of her that whispers that this must be a trick: that he just wants what everyone else does. Another part makes her glance over at the dried husks of the pirates that previously held her prisoner and whispers that a man this capable and powerful has no use for tricks, and that he could’ve just locked her away in a cage by force if that was what he wanted without bothering with a lie.
She balls her aching hands into determined fists at her side. “If I help you build Utopia, I can live there?” she can’t help but ask, voice thin and quavering. “Freely?”
The man nods. “Work for me and I’ll protect you,” he tells her, his gaze steady and voice confident. “As long as you’re useful, as long as you’re loyal, nobody will cage you. Then, when Operation Utopia is complete, you will have a home.”
A home. She can’t remember ever having something like that, but… she thinks that she might like to.
It’s not like she has anywhere else to go.
Mind made up, she nods. “Then… then I’ll be useful and loyal,” she declares firmly.
The man chuckles and lowers her back down to her feet. She stumbles a bit, but stays upright and looks up at her new employer expectantly.
“From now on, call me Mr. 0,” he instructs her sternly. “Your name will be Miss Arbor Day. Our best work is done in secrecy, so don’t go around introducing yourself as anything else. Welcome to Baroque Works, and to your first day of freedom.”
Miss Arbor Day smiles back up at him. Freedom? She likes the sound of that.