Archive of Our Own ^beta

I.

Portgas D. Rouge is born on a ship that ferries all the lost and fearful across the ocean. The Captain rescues her pregnant mother from her own drowning ship, the wares slowly sinking into the maw of a storm, but the Portgas matriarch steps on board, already in the throes of labor. The crew runs around, the doctor is called forth, and like every D. before her, Rouge comes into the world screaming.

It is then that the Captain takes a proper look at her mother and baby Rouge.

“Oh,” says the Captain, their face splitting into a grin. “It’s one of you again! Have you come to stay with me as your predecessors?”

Rouge’s mother smiles back, just a little wild and feral, a beast bound into human form. She’s bled onto the wood of the ship; it’s a vow that only needs a promise.

“If you’ll have me, Captain. I’d be glad to serve.”

The Captain laughs and leans over the Portgas matriarch. They cup her face and kiss her forehead. “Sleep now, my child. Tomorrow, you shall serve me.”

Rouge’s screaming quiets down as her mother is sent to sleep.

II.

The first time Rouge sails on her own, she nearly starves and gets a mean case of scurvy. She feels absolutely miserable and looks appropriately terrible. Nobody told her that sailing on her own is this much work, and when she complains about it in the tavern, the old sailors laugh at her.

“What kind of landlocked sprout are you?” one of the traders calls as he hands her his portion of the dinner, watching in fascination as Rouge swallows it down. The mountain of cutlery next to Rouge only keeps growing, as do the bets placed on her.

“Who’re you calling landlocked!?” Rouge shouts between bites. “I’m ship-born and raised. My mother Captain took good care of me!”

“Aye!” come the calls further back. “Nobody ever doubt a good mother or a good Captain.”

“All the best are both!” Someone else agrees.

“Unless your name’s Charlotte Linlin!”

“Don’t compare Big Mom to Mother Sea. Get your sacrilege out of here!”

The merchants are a loud and unruly bunch until it comes to settling the bets made on Rouge’s back. Her belly is finally full, and the traders are vicious in collecting the money made. The winner is the matriarch of the clan. She keeps her gray hair in a tight braid, wears dark boots that reach her knees, and has a skirt the color of the sky. Despite her short stature, at least two heads shorter than Rouge, she still evokes the presence of one not to be trifled with. Her sailors groan and laugh as if they should have known that she’d win.

“How’d you know?” asks the man that had kept on pushing his food at Rouge.

The merchant captain huffs. “Did none of you listen when the lass introduced herself? Portgas D. Rouge! As if I’d ever bet against a D.”

Rouge perks up. “Have you ever met another D.?”

“Haven’t you, lass?”

Rouge shakes her head. Before this week, she hasn’t ever even stepped foot on land. Her mother Captain had provided well and Rouge loves the sea. There’s never been a reason to leave before her sixteenth year; thus, she’s only ever met crew on the open seas.

“One day, you will,” the merchant Captain says. “Say, have you got any plan on where you’re heading next?”

“I haven’t even got the ship,” Rouge replies sheepishly. “Mine wasn’t much and I had to barter it for doctor and room.”

“Then come with us, Portgas. I promise we’ll make it worth your while.”

III.

Once she’s with the merchants, Rouge has no troubles at all. She knows how a ship is run and how to run on a ship. Her first steps were on her mother Captain’s deck and she trusts that her last will be as well. Rouge helps with the cargo, the food, the trade deals, and the pirates too.

Her merchant Captain likes her well and teaches her all the trade tricks. Soon Rouge can handle herself in any harbor, apparently living up to her name.

“Portgas, port-makers, home-builders,” the merchant Captain says. “Your lot has always had a talent for that.”

Rouge soaks up all she can and speaks the tongue of the people they meet, fluently switching between the rough barbs of the North and the sweet drawl of the south.

She’s a child of the sea, comfortable in all her roles, charming when needed, and bloodthirsty when the situation demands it. Versatile like a chameleon changing colors, but she never does it for survival, merely for entertainment.

And yet something lacks.

IV.

Once, just once, Rouge proves to be less understanding than expected.

Thick fog surrounds the ship, and everyone is on deck, holding their light, so they do not go missing and hopefully catch any approaching vessel in the distance. The smell of gunpowder and blood is heavy, this battlefield far from old.

The merchant Captain looks down in the water where broken wood drifts past them.

“Everyone, keep sharp!” she shouts. “We don’t know who else might be hiding in here.”

Rouge sits on the railing, her lantern in her lap, when she makes out a ship in the distance. Distrust holds on to her for only a moment, then she recognizes it. Excited, she leans forward to call out when her merchant Captain grabs her from behind and puts a hand over her mouth.

“Don’t!” she hisses. “This is not a ship whose attention we want. We have our lanterns to ward them off.”

The first mate stumbles over to them, looks in the same direction, and promptly begins to curse. “Is that the ship of Mother Sea?”

“Aye,” says the merchant Captain. “We mustn’t let her know we’re lost. You heard that, lass? Do not call out to Mother Sea. She’ll keep you on her ship and never let you settle anywhere.”

When Rouge finally manages to free herself, she gets to her feet again, utterly confused. “But why?”

The merchant Captain snorts. “She is a mother and mothers always know best. If she thinks of you as her own, and all we sea-fairing folk are, then she will want us in her care, on her ship. Make no mistake, Mother Sea didn’t sink the ship here, but if there were any survivors, they’re part of her crew now.”

Rouge scowls, knowing better because her mother Captain let her go, and all the crew they had ever gained had been happy to stay, but she keeps quiet instead.

V.

Eventually, Rouge leaves the merchants. They want to travel the same route home and Rouge wants to see more of the world. The Grand Line is a new challenge, but not one that keeps her down for long. The islands she seas are all so very different, fascinating, but Rouge never stays long. She gets queasy when she doesn’t have the hard wood of a ship beneath her feet.

On one such occasion, she finally meets a D.

He’s taller than her and so loud that Rouge thinks he’s laughing just to prove that he still can.

And much like her, while everyone strays into the port, he stays on the ship.

“Pirate Captain!” Rouge calls from her ship. “Say, why don’t you go into the city?”

He blinks down at her as if he has to comprehend that it was her shouting at him, then he grins back. He smiles just like Rouge, her mother Captain, and all her happiest memories.

“Don’t you know who I am?”

Rouge snorts. “Should I? Tell me of your adventures, pirate Captain!”

The man laughs again but jumps down from his own ship to land on her small boat. Close up, he seems even taller, but there’s something she can’t shake.

Like recognizes like, comes to mind.

“Huh,” says the pirate Captain. “You’re an odd one. Whose flag are you sailing under?”

“Only that of my mother Captain,” Rouge replies. “And you?”

“None but my own!” he replies indignantly. “But if you ask who I bargained for, I might have an answer for you.”

They talk until the pirate Captain is dragged back by his first mate and two unruly children. By then, he’s told Rouge many of his adventures. Unlike all the other stories she’s heard before, his ring true and mighty and important.

They feel like her mother Captain’s coat on her shoulders.

She watches as the pirate Captain and his crew departs, then flees in a wholly different direction. Far out in the open sea, Rouge lets go of the helm and sinks to the floor. This boat is made out of white elder and she knows that her eye color matches it perfectly. Like pearls, teardrops fall onto the surface.

“Mother,” Rouge cries, finally understanding the longing, the heaviness of her heart, the starvation in her stomach. “Take me home.”

None of the islands she’s been on are worth this separation, this homesickness. She’d left the ship at sixteen because her mother’s pledge had been her own alone and Rouge a tagalong. She’s seen all she’d wanted of the world, and now she wants home.

The sea doesn’t take her.

It feels like a lesson.

VI.

Rouge’s always been reckless so it cannot be said that she is becoming even more reckless, but much like a fish suddenly realizing they’re stranded on a sandbank and can’t get back into the ocean, she becomes desperate.

She chases storms and deaths, catastrophes that would leave survivors that might draw out her mother. When that doesn’t work, she tries her hand at drawing maps and building ships, but nothing she ever does draws the right attention.

Her mother had made it to the ship, so why can’t Rouge return home? They are nearly the same age, only Rouge isn’t—

Oh.

VII.

Rouge only has one parent. Her mother Captain is all Rouge had ever known. There’s never been another one in the picture or even mentioned. She had wondered about it when she made stops at islands where it was best not to be too pretty, but she senses that this isn’t the answer she is seeking.

There has to be purpose, intention.

And the right parent, Rouge supposed.

IX.

Rouge followed chaos for the longest time and chaos naturally follows Ds. and thus, she’s had more conversations with the pirate Captain than anyone else who isn’t his crew.

“You can call me Roger, you know?” the pirate Captain tells her, but Rouge refuses. She will call him what he is until that ceases.

Funnily, it happens sooner rather than later.

“Your bargain finally caught up with you?” she asks him when he pays for her groceries. She hasn’t been in South Blue in a while, and on these far remote and small islands, she finds shrines to her mother Captain that feel like home.

“Something like that,” he laughs. He’s surprisingly cheerful, probably made his peace with it or he’d still be her pirate Captain. “Has your search for your mother Captain been successful?”

“Something like that,” she replies in deadpan.

Still, they trek back to her ship because Roger starts throwing up sand, startling the merchant Rouge had charmed into giving her a discount, and Rouge misses home. Like all the times before, they trade stories, only this time Rouge is the one talking the most. Roger’s voice can’t quite keep up after his fit.

X.

They don’t love each other, or at least not how they’re supposed to. Roger pines after his first mate, and Rouge has never cared for any love that isn’t familial.

The love they do feel for each other is the practical kind, of shared comfort and fears, dreams and wishes.

Roger’s bargain is fulfilled but uncompleted, and Rouge’s homesickness threatens to devour her.

There’s love in helping each other cope with that too.

XI.

Roger’s execution fills the papers as Rouge puts flowers, lights, and paper ships in the ocean. She’s never had a friend like him and she doubts she’ll ever have one again, which bears recognition. A prayer or two are for his grieving family and one for herself, then Rouge sets out again.

She travels with merchants again, still her favorite people on all waters. The cargo is sorted and sold until Rouge’s feet finally swell after months, and her stomach makes it hard to carry anything. She thanks her mother Captain for all her blessings and has many tearful goodbyes when she leaves the merchants to go home.

XII.

Portgas D. Ace is born on a ship that ferries all the lost and fearful across the ocean. The Captain rescues his pregnant mother from her own drowning ship, the maps and coins slowly sinking into the maw of a storm, but the Portgas matriarch steps on board, already in the throes of labor. The crew runs around, the doctor is called forth, and like every D. before him, Ace comes into the world screaming.

It is then that the Captain takes a proper look at his mother and baby Ace.

“Hello,” says the Captain, smiling lovingly. “I’ve missed you, my dear. Have you come to stay with me as your predecessors?”

Ace’s mother smiles back through the tears, her soft sobbing echoing in the chamber. She took her first steps on the wood of the ship, and it’s a vow that only needs a promise.

“If you’ll have me, Captain. I’d be glad to serve.”

The Captain laughs and leans over the Portgas matriarch. She cups her face and kisses her forehead. “Sleep now, my child. Tomorrow, you shall sleep in a bed one last time, and then you shall serve me.”

Ace’s screaming quiets down as his mother is sent to sleep.

XIII.

“We’re her family. We’ll take her home,” the midwife tells Garp.

In his arms, Ace sleeps soundly, entirely unaware of his mother’s demise.

Garp doesn’t stay for Rouge’s last breath. He promised to protect Ace, and so he will, rushing to make up lies, excuses, and an alibi so watertight that no sea king tooth could break through it.

He’s not there to witness the presumed midwife carry Rouge back to her ship, the place she was born and the place she will walk on last, all bargains fulfilled, finally allowed to return home.

XIV

Mother Sea opens her eyes, dark as the Adam wood beneath her feet.

She sets sail.