Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Isuka was born in a tiny, middle-of-nowhere village somewhere in the South Blue. 

As far as ‘tiny’ went, it differed from sea to sea - ‘tiny’ in the Grand Line was considered normal in the West, ‘tiny’ in the West was considered minute in the North, and so on. But, she’s fairly certain that her home would have been called minuscule no matter what ocean; fifty people, not growing or shrinking much past that, on a small tropical island where storms were frequent enough that there were holidays named after them. Some journeyed out, but always came back; it was a village for growing up and getting old, it was a village where the ashes of the dead must have gone several feet deep.

That’s what it was called, little Ashy Village in the South Blue. And that was where she was born - youngest child of three, Passedea Isuka, only daughter of Passedea Loxia, little sister to Passedea Shikui and Passedea Sazai. 

Her hair, as far as she’s aware, is the only trait she shares with her father - a bright, flaming, sunset copper, highlighting her from the rest of her family’s deep purple. But she’s got her mother’s eyes, and her mother’s face, and her mother’s disapproving glare at the neighbourhood mischiefs who liked to steal the flowers Sazai dutifully watered right out of the soil, leaving behind only grimy petals. She’s her mother’s girl, through and through.

They never talked about her father. He was a scoundrel, a thief who only saw values in those things that glittered, who carelessly stole her mother’s heart for a few years and then left her behind with the child in her stomach. She’d pleaded for him to stay, reaching for him up to her knees in the water, the foam breaking about her unsteady form, and he hadn’t even looked back. Good thing Isuka didn’t take after him, then, charmer that he was - she’d grow up steady, she’d grow up different, her ashes would scatter the soil like everybody else’s would. People never left Ashy Village, not permanently.

And, well - everybody else’s ashes did end up scattering the soil, but not for reasons they might think. And, cruelly enough, Isuka’s ashes were the only ones not left behind.

Fire-Fist Ace is a tropical storm through and through, and Isuka hates that she dives right into it instead of running, which would be the sensible thing to do - and she’s supposed to be sensible, right? Marine Ensign Isuka, the ‘reasonable’ one, the ‘rational’ one, the one who keeps the other, more reckless marines out of trouble. The one who doesn’t jump right onto pirate ships - she can’t even call it an ambush at that point, since it’s just her against all the Spades. 

She’s meant to be sensible, like her mother. She’s meant to be the steady one, like the woman who had watched someone she hoped to be her lover vanish into the horizon and rolled up her sleeves through the tears, thought of her two sons waiting at home and the daughter soon to come, and turned her back on any thought of fleeing. What her mother wanted by bestowing her with the name Isuka and who her mother was are totally different, but Isuka is not meant to be the person who runs and runs without purpose; she is her mother’s girl, after all.

So what explanation is there, when she chases after Ace time and time again, finding pockets of time between her regular duties in Paradise to track down the Spades? She doesn’t even take down the regular members of the crew - or, well, they occasionally target her, but Isuka is more than capable of handling multiple opponents at once, and if they don’t try to stab her then she sees no point in stabbing them first. At some point, fighting Ace just becomes a strange pastime, something as routine as washing her hair every week or drinking coffee in the mornings. Her crew, loveable bunch that they are, become used to their ventures, and Isuka is endlessly grateful for the lack of questions; she simply wouldn’t know how to answer.

“Fire-Fist!” she yells from three meters away, and even if the sun casts a glare in her field of vision she can feel the emotion radiating off of him, flint-spark bright, burning like the flames of his fruit. Equally she feels the presences of his crewmates, more muted but easily discernible. 

“Isuka!” he yells back. “You’re just in time! We’re in the middle of this big fight - hey - !”

The feeling of danger is a familiar one to her - a chill down her left arm, the tingle down her spine like prickling heat, and Isuka curses under her breath. Starting at a sprint, she leaps off the deck of her ship and skewers several cannonballs at once, earning admiring shouts from her crew.

Other pirates. Now that she focuses past Ace’s bonfire presence, she can feel the anger and frustration radiating from maybe five meters away, as well as the dimmed, terrified sparks belonging to different people - civilians, maybe - below. Her blood boils.

“Everyone!” she barks, turning to her own crew. “We’re going for those other pirates over there.” She jerks her thumb towards some point past the Spades. 

“But what about Fire-Fist Ace, Ensign?” Kiwi worries. “Wasn’t he your target?”

“He’s not a threat to civilian safety at the moment,” she says, and from any other marine this might be met with skepticism but her crew has known her for years now and they know the strength of her instincts. “Russell, get us closer. Clover, Gallium, Yelena, Kiwi, with me - we’re boarding. Morbidezza and Bel, you two - ”

“Miss Isuka!” Skull yells somewhere past gunshots. “Are you coming? They’re getting reinforcements!”

Isuka resists the temptation to raise a very well-known digit towards the spark of Skull’s presence and finishes, “You two, stay on the ship and man the cannons. And - ” she hesitates for a moment, trying to figure out a good way to say her final request.

“We won’t get anybody but those guys in the crossfire, Ensign,” Bel promises. Isuka nods, unwilling to show her stark relief. 

“Good. Let’s go!”

Wind blows through her hair as she takes a running jump off her ship, tugging insistently at the heavy insignia on her back. Isuka closes her eyes for a moment, counting. Ten, twenty, forty, approaching one hundred. Perfectly manageable. 

Opening her eyes, Isuka plunges her blade straight through the ship’s deck. Wood chips splinter around her blade. A look up at the flag and she recognizes the jolly roger splashed across the black fabric immediately - it’s the Anvil Pirates, infamous for both their captain who provided the namesake, and for their extremely short temperament. 

She inhales, deep, drawing all breath into her lungs so that she can shout - effectively drawing attention to her and her crewmates - “ANVIL PIRATES! You are under arrest!”

Silence drops, broken only by the sound of a bullet splashing harmlessly into water. Isuka yanks her blade out of the wood of the deck and eyes the captain, Brass Anvil, with all the fury the people trapped below-deck deserve. 

Normally, she would say something like Come in peace and nobody will get hurt, or if it’s somebody on the kinder end Explain why you did this then, please. But that grief and panic seeping past the boards that she’s just cut through, like blood oozing from a fresh wound - she looks up at Brass Anvil and decides that this is a case where the full brunt of her anger is perfectly deserved.

So Isuka doesn’t bother with any talk, or any more attention-drawing, than she’s already done. Instead, she charges forwards and as pirates converge on her Isuka lives up to her bestowed moniker through and through.

“Isuka!” Ace yells with glee. His presence is a signal flare without malice, burnt bright around the foes surrounding her. Isuka ducks a swing of a blade and blocks the fire of bullets without turning her head, dancing through the clear path unknowingly laid out at her feet. “We haven’t seen you in forever!”

She refuses, stubbornly, to think about the pink warmth that surrounds him. Bursts of flame shoot over the deck and Isuka sidesteps them without much thought. “Once I arrest these guys, I’m still going after you, Fire-Fist!” she threatens, and tells herself that the distraction of trying to riddle Brass Anvil’s third-in-command, Cumulus, with holes is what makes her threat lose some of its fervour. 

Ace just laughs, infuriating as he always is. “Hey, Anvil!” he shouts. “Still so confident you can take us down?”

Malicious laughter resounds into the air. Alarm shivers down Isuka’s back and she leaps out of the way just before a massive metal hammer slams down, something which would effectively have crushed her had she not noticed.

“You, fire brat, and that tiny marine over there?” Anvil thunders. “Somehow, I think I’ll manage.”

Isuka flushes with indignation, irritation sparking hot and angry beneath her skin. Arguably, compared to Ace (who was always taller than her, but is rapidly starting to outgrow even that) and Anvil himself (absolutely massive), she is tiny. Still, she’s never been good at being condescended to, even if there are times where she knows she has to grit her teeth and just bear it. 

This is not one of those times.

Anvil might be covered in armour, but Isuka is not one to be hindered by something so superficial. Before he can lift it too high, she grabs onto metal edges and yanks herself up, taking advantage of her ‘tiny’ size to dodge the hand that comes swiping for her and jabbing her rapier between the joints of the iron plates guarding Anvil’s wrists, hammering out a series of swift blows that tear through tendons, ligaments, blood vessels and all. 

Anvil howls with fury but Isuka’s hardly done and neither, it seems, is Ace. With a shout, he throws a punch that melts into flames, a massive ball of fire gushing forth. Surprisingly quick, Anvil sidesteps the fire but it chases after him, insistently swirling around armoured calves, heating at iron until the metal starts to melt, sinking into whatever cloth is catching flame beneath. 

“You brat,” Anvil growls. Frissons of danger run down her shoulder, but they’re not for her, they’re for instead -

Isuka throws herself forwards. Tucking her knees into her chest, she puts the whole weight of her body into a thrust that sinks her entire blade into Anvil’s elbow. The heavy coat on her back ripples as Isuka yanks her rapier out and leaps up to drive it back in again, blow after blow sunk in without any mercy. Her last jab catches bone and Isuka digs, twists, shoves until something pops and she knows that she’s dislocated the joint.

“Nice, ‘suka!” Ace yells from below her. From the sounds of it, he’s effectively fused the armour on Anvil’s legs to his skin, and is moving up to his stomach. Isuka takes a few steps back and then drops fully as Ace comes plowing up, rushing the plates on Anvil’s gut - he’s lucky enough to send a few embers skittering between the grooves of the plates, burning at the leather layer beneath. “Where’re you going?”

“To finish your job!” she calls and then, because she can’t help it - “Pirates are always shit at following through!”

Ace’s uproarious laughter is the drumbeat to her blade as she targets Anvil’s ankles, dodging around the stomps he aims her way. Her rapier easily sinks through molten metal, ripping apart tendons and muscle and all the important bits that even someone as huge as Anvil needs to stand upright.

Wood creaks and then snaps, broken beneath the sheer weight of Anvil collapsing. At the same time, metal starts dripping off from Anvil’s gut, iron shining liquid grey beneath the sunlight, hissing and coagulating onto the boards of the deck. 

“I promise to finish this time, then!” Ace shouts over the clash and Isuka watches as he drives his fist right into the weak, steaming metal over Anvil’s gut, easily withstanding the heat that she wouldn’t be able to set foot on. 

Even someone like Anvil, Isuka knows, can’t take the ridiculous amount of pain they’ve already inflicted; Ace’s last blow knocks him out cold. His head tips back with a groan, his legs twitch and go still. Behind her, Kiwi, Clover, and Gallium successfully take out Cumulus and Anvil’s second-in-command, Kit. 

“So, are we gonna get the rest of them then?” Ace asks, over Anvil’s body. 

“We?” Isuka questions, dubious. She ducks a wild punch and retaliates with a sweep of her foot, knocking some random pirate over. A kick to the jaw rends her unconscious. “I don’t recall agreeing to there being a ‘we’, Fire-Fist.”

“Oh, c’mon. We just took down that guy together. Aren’t we a pretty good team?”

Sometimes, Isuka decides, silence is golden. That’s why she leaps onto a different ship and starts attacking the pirates there, instead of replying, hearing familiar laughter and then spotting a familiar blaze. Clover and Kiwi soon join her and they make quick work of the remaining pirates. 

“Where are they, Ensign?” Yelena asks, wiping sweat from her forehead after they finish. Isuka closes her eyes, focusing her attention on the ships around them. Instinct, Draw always called it, and Isuka supposes that was what it was, because she really has no better explanation for how she finds the people below them. 

“In this ship,” she says. “In the one with Anvil’s body. And there’s two in that one to the west.”

She regards her crewmates. Isuka would be perfectly fine searching the ships with the Spades roaming about, but she knows her crewmates won’t feel quite as safe. “Clover, Gallium, you two go through this one. Yelena, Kiwi, west. I’ll take the one with Anvil.”

“Got it, Ensign,” her subordinates chorus. Satisfied, Isuka turns on her heel and makes for where Anvil’s ship is drifting, already being raided by Spades.

She easily cuts through their ranks at this point, most knowing to duck out of her way when she’s walking with a purpose. Isuka descends into the ship, bypassing the kitchens and medical wing and food storage towards an inconspicuous door, one that looks an awful lot like an alcohol cellar. Or, a convenient place to store innocent people stolen from their homes.

The reminder of why she hadn’t hesitated to be so violent sits right in front of her. Isuka fishes in her pocket for a few spare pins and sticks it into the lock, carefully twisting until something resists her motion. She hooks another pin in and probes until she hears a soft click, then starts the process over again. 

The lock doesn’t have many pin tumblers, only four. It’s not long before Isuka can withdraw her impromptu tools and open the door, careful to announce her presence so as not to scare anybody. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

Silence, terrified weighted silence. She wishes now more than ever that she’d been able to land that final blow on Anvil. 

“I’m a marine,” she adds. “I’m here to bring you guys back home.”

That gets a response.

“We’re here!” someone shouts, voice thick and hoarse - probably from tears. “Please come get us!”

Isuka lets the door open fully. Inside huddle five men and women, some not much older than she is. They take a look at her - at the distinctive blue scarf in the collar of her uniform, at the weighted coat of arms sitting on her shoulders - and their faces crumple with relief.

“Thank god,” one breathes. “It’s the marines. They’re here to rescue us!”

Isuka tries for her most comforting smile. “We’re here, don’t worry,” she promises. “We’ll get you all back safe and sound.”

They’ve been cuffed, she sees, not just bound in rope - the Anvil pirates were clearly experienced, and clearly had a decent amount of wealth. The cuffs are good quality, the metal without rust. She pulls out one of her pins and starts picking at the lock, applying pressure above and below until it disengages and the cuffs slide open and off - there’s a gasp from somewhere. 

“Here,” Isuka says, and takes the woman’s wrists into her hands, gently massaging the discoloured flesh until it starts to return to a healthy colour, circulation coming back. “Wait one second, okay? I’m just going to get everybody else out, too.”

As she’s partway through freeing her fourth person, a familiar presence encroaches on her senses. “Hey, Isuka - ” Ace cuts himself off upon seeing what she’s doing. “Woah, there’s people here?”

Somebody gasps in fear. Hurriedly, Isuka rushes to comfort him. “Hey, relax,” she says. “You’re getting out safe, I promise. He’s not going to hurt you.”

To Ace, she flashes a glare - get out of the doorway, you’re tall and ominous and freaking these people out - somehow, he gets the message, because he raises his hands and backs away. People visibly relax and Isuka continues her work.

Last person free, she encourages them to stand, letting them lean on her shoulders when they wobble, and brings everybody out into the hall. Ace is there, though he respectfully gives them space and only approaches her once Russell, Gallium, and Bel are helping the freed men and women onto her ship. “Hey,” he says, coming up to lean on the rail next to her, uncaring of the pirates scattered about unconscious around them. “How’d you know there were people down there?”

Isuka shrugs. “Instinct,” she says.

“Instinct.. ?”

What else? She’s just got a good head on her shoulders, a strong sense for trouble, and the will to stop it. Her mother’s girl, down to the eyes, glare, and all. She adjusts her coat - it really was heavy. It had to be, to stay on while Isuka was fighting.

“I see,” Ace says and then, beaming, declares, “You’re a mind-reader.”

Isuka splutters. “I am not!” she says. “I just have good instincts and I know when there’s trouble. That’s it. I’m still arresting you after all this,” she adds, to divert attention away from whatever Ace is about to say. “Don’t forget that, Fire-Fist.”

“Right now?” he questions, arching a brow, tipping his hat up in a way that she’s seen so many times by now - it shouldn’t still be making her gut swoop. His hair is a mess, tousled black strands framing his face. There’s still some chubbiness to his cheeks, because he’s eighteen though only a few months into it, and that’s starting to fade out in favour of a handsome jawline, but even so the freckles dotting his face give him a boyish look - one that makes him appear younger than her even though it’s the other way around. 

She doesn’t have a right to call him a kid like some of her crewmates joke about, since Isuka turned eighteen only three weeks ago. The highlight strangest part of her birthday had been Ace flinging a parcel at her without explanation and then running, laughing the entire time. 

(There had been a scarf of sorts inside, deep green. It had been unluckily ripped in a fight and she’d used one of the smaller pieces to replace the grip on her sword - the fabric was sturdy, and had held up rather well.)  

“Well, I’m arresting them first,” she says, because Isuka knows her priorities and pirates who kidnap innocent people are worse than pirates like Ace and his crew. “Then I’m coming for you, Fire-Fist.”

He laughs, infuriating man that he is. “Looking forward to it, Ensign,” he winks, as careless as he is carefree, and for a second she has the thought that she can see why the sun would love him so much.

As rapidly as it comes, she banishes it from her head, cheeks starting to tint closer to the colour of her hair, and Isuka turns her back on him to start dragging Anvil pirates onto her ship.

It was not the first time they worked together. Unknowingly, it would be one of the last times, at least for a few years.

Isuka remembers meeting Vice Admiral Draw for the first time, as a little eight-year-old girl bleeding and burnt and covered in soot, breathing shallow and panicked. The air around her is oppressive with its heat, she’s wracked with unfathomable chills and fear as she tries blindly to feel her way out, and out of the burn a cold, icy presence emerges. 

Relief is all she feels when she opens her eyes to the cold and reaches for the source of comfort, of solace from the flames. Isuka grasps onto the edge of a boot (leather, unburnt) and croaks out, “My mom.. My brothers.. Get them… ”

If one man could do it, it would be this man of frozen nothing, voidal. 

“They’re dead, little girl,” the man enunciates, words floating to her like ash on the breeze. “They won’t have survived that collapse.”

Frantically she shakes her head; she knows they’re alive, if only barely, and she’s so exhausted but she needs them to get out. “Please..”

She turns to try and find them, to make her way back and pray the man will follow, but she gets no more than a meter when something goes dead and blank in her chest, like a snuffed-out candle and despair washes over her - they’re dead, they’re dead, of course they’re dead. Who would have survived that collapse?

Isuka was too late.

The cold man steps up. He doesn’t touch her. Instead he drops a man before her and she looks at him and her despair ramps up a few notches. Was this someone he’d tried to rescue?

“This pirate burned down your village,” the man intones, without heart, without feeling. But he’s freezing, and she wants to be anywhere that isn’t hot. “Why are you leaning so close, girl?”

“You’re cold,” Isuka mutters, under her breath, voice hoarse. “Cold and nothing. Better than… fire… ”

She can still feel it, their rage and despair and desperation, crying out to her as their ashes littered the earth. A sob wracks at her chest and she latches onto anger as a foothold, screwing her eyes open - it was this man, this pirate who had taken her home. Isuka snarls out her wordless fury, in lament of her burning home. 

Above her, the man tilts his head, considering. 

“Stand,” he says, and she struggles to, on weak legs and protesting arms. Her hand and arm feels numb, but the skin on her back aches like a gaping wound. “We’re going to my ship.”

“Who are you?” she asks and he regards her, heavy brows and uncaring visage. 

“I’m a marine. Captain Draw.”

And that, then, is how she leaves - not in the way her mother wanted, but as a girl now destined for a title she didn’t think she’d ever have before Ashy Village burnt down, a girl who faces first skepticism and then reluctant curiosity once Draw whispers something into their ear. 

Then surprise, when she ducks a rock - it still clips her shoulder, but she’d known something was coming. Then wonder, when she ducks more and more things. Then calls made and Isuka leaves the South Blue for good, after a few months - just her, the rapier they’d pushed into her hands, and Draw, facing promotion with her as his tagalong.

Good instincts, he tells her, and even though he’s still hollow and icy nothing he’s her saviour, her mentor, she owes him and she’s grateful - so she thanks him and the fresh wound on her cheek pulls, aching, at her skin when she speaks.

The Anvil pirates, whoever they were, had some sort of experience doing this and had more money than others of a like sort she’s encountered. It suggests, to Isuka, clients. So, once her crew has cleaned out all the ships and called for more marines, to pick up the rest of the pirates that won’t fit onto Isuka’s vessel, she goes back into Anvil’s main ship to hunt for evidence. 

The Spades are long gone, and all the captives are resting. Isuka is mostly alone, without anyone to startle or shock around - at least, without anybody she wouldn’t want to startle or shock around - so she gives herself the liberty of kicking in doors and shredding doorframes.

She finds a convenient ledger of financial transactions (and oh, do the numbers make her seethe, so impersonal that she wishes she could set it on fire), and a few letters which, by the looks of it, were meant to be destroyed. Isuka gathers up all the evidence she can, including accounts of various cargo (foodstuffs, water, weaponry, people), and leaves with it all under her arms. A look at the ledger had told her what she needed to know - the Anvil pirates had clients, clients who paid them handsomely for what they sold. 

She blows hair out of her face. Ignoring the other marines milling about, Isuka boards her own ship, posture militant. “Russell!” she calls. “Are we ready to go?”

“We are, Ensign!”

“Good,” Isuka says. Drawing a deep breath into her lungs, Isuka hollers out over the waves: “Permission granted to leave, Captain Tsalm?”

“Granted, Ensign!”

Her room is small, just enough to fit a hammock and a desk not much larger than a vanity, with most of the table space taken up by papers and her lamp. For that reason, as soon as the sails go up and they start making for the home island of their rescued captives, Isuka goes into her quarters and dumps everything she’s gathered onto the floor, spreading it out into something semi-organized.  

The coat is still weighty on her shoulders. Isuka fiddles with the clasp distractedly until she feels it come apart, then she shrugs the whole thing off and sets it onto her hammock. 

When she was still in marine training, Draw had been very stern on educating her about the proper ways to deal with a problem. Evil has layers, he told her. Start at the root when weeding out the problem. High to low. Always go down, and burn everything while doing so.

It was funny that he said that, while he simultaneously felt so cold. Isuka never could get anything more than the barest spark of emotion from him, not when she failed nor when she succeeded. But maybe that was what made him a good marine, that indifference; justice was supposed to be neutral, right? Justice should have judged on action alone. 

She’s never been good at the same disinterest - how can she be, when the feelings of others are so strong? How can she remain cold in the face of grief or harm? Ironically enough, Isuka can only do it in a fight. Danger drowns out the emotion.

From the top, to the bottom. Isuka will never forget that Draw brought her out of Ashy Village, and gave her a new life in the Navy - whatever her role is now, ten years later and ten years away from being that burnt, exhausted child, innocent life has to be in the center of it all. 

Eradicate evil, at all costs, Draw repeated to her. At all costs, girl. At all costs.

He never did refer to her as Isuka, not even after her promotions. He was the only one Isuka let do that, firmly telling others who she met to call her by her name or by her rank - or, if they were people she truly disliked, by her moniker instead. She never felt any hint of condescension or judgment when he looked at her (down, because he was tall and she was small, taller than when she was eight but sometimes even her age seemed to come up short beneath his stare) and called her girl. All she knew from him was that freezing calm, the sort which made everything it touched more brittle.

All she still knows, in fact. 

“From the top down,” she murmurs to herself, leafing through the evidence spread out before her, laying parts of a path. One head of a hydra and it grows back - burn everything while doing so, girl.

Girl.

But she was a girl, then, young and twelve bordering on thirteen. And now Isuka is eighteen, and an Ensign whose job it is to protect people - gone are the days where she needs to be reminded of what is necessary for her to do.

She grabs a spare piece of paper and a pencil and starts writing down names. As much as she’s used to fighting the Spades, Isuka knows deep in her heart that she’s not going to see them for a few months. She has her priorities.

“Ensign? I was wondering… ”

“Clover,” Isuka greets. “Good timing. Come help me sort through all this.”

Clover glances between Isuka - cross-legged on the ground, scabbard not even unbuckled from its place at her hip - and the mess of papers, then very carefully picks her way into a spot.

“Where do I start, Ensign?”

Her mother, Isuka remembers, was close to both of her brothers - but she especially doted on Isuka, being the youngest child, and the only girl at that. Sometimes, while her brothers played or did schoolwork, Isuka would hover close to her mother in the kitchen and wash vegetables and her mother would talk, would tell her stories.

Isuka, have you heard of the great gull that brings the storms?

Isuka, have you heard of the ghost music kingdom, tucked into the mountains?

Look outside, Isuka, the sun is setting. Have you heard of the fox that eats the sun?

Fairytales, she remembers Draw dismissing them as, but privately Isuka keeps telling them to herself when she hears of a storm coming, or when a strange wind blows, or when it’s dusk. And sometimes they were more than fairytales; sometimes, they were real, real places her mother had seen. The kingdom where everybody wore red every other day, the village where the children danced with teacups on their heads - it’s strange, isn’t it, Isuka? But isn’t it curious? I’d love to go there again.

Her mother got that faraway look, in her eyes, when she told her the real tales. If the villagers saw her now, they would wonder where their steady, smart Loxia went - she left once, she nearly got carried away twice, she would never try a third time, would she?

They weren’t wrong. She wouldn’t. But her mother would dream, and the dreams were ones only she and Isuka knew. 

Isuka, she said, as the pot bubbled merrily away. As Isuka, sitting on a rickety chair, determinedly ground up spices in a mortar and pestle. As her mother sat, and watched, and the curtains in their house were never drawn so the sunlight came pouring in. There’s many seas, far beyond our corner of the South Blue. There’s the North, and the West, and the East.

And she used some of the spice powder which had flown out beneath Isuka’s small hands fiercely wielding the mortar, and drew out a little cross. These are the cardinal directions, my dear. North, East, West, and this is us - South.

And she smiled, wistful. The curtains were old, dusty things that they had to beat every year, but they never were replaced. Why bother, when they didn’t even do their job? Her mother never liked blocking out the sun - better for their health, she said, when Shizui asked. But that’s not all. This, here, and she drew a line, a jagged thing, through the middle of the cross. This is the Red Line. And crossing through - another line - is the Grand Line. The greatest, most dangerous sea in the entire world.

Dangerous? Isuka asked, seven and curious, seven and only knowing the world through her mother’s words. She knew danger only from picture books, from frequent storms, and from the wild currents that could drag unwary swimmers away. Like, lots of storms? More than we have?

Oh, so much more dangerous, her mother said. The pot bubbled, and bubbled, and sang wistfully away. Outside, Isuka could hear the muted shouts of her neighbours as they chased after some bug or another, voices blending into background noise. The spices were near fully ground. I’ve never been there. 

Isuka heard what she meant to say. I wish I had.

Oh, her mother. She’d left once, as soon as she turned eighteen, so she told Isuka - she wanted to see the world past the confines of their tiny village. She went around the South Blue, went as far as to think about going to the other Blues as well. Then she found out she was with child, and braved the journey all the way back to Ashy Village to give birth to and raise her first son - wise of her to come back home, where she would be welcomed even after having been gone for so long. Who knows what would have happened to a lone woman with child, outside of their island? 

Then she stayed, for her first son and then her second. Then she met Isuka’s father, and against the best advice of the village wished to travel again - he promised protection, even out there on the seas. Then he left her at shore, and she turned her back on the waves and chose never to follow. 

She’s grown wise, the villagers said - her mother was always the first to warn of storms, and of riptides, and to pull unwary swimmers back to shore before they could be sucked away. She knows danger, now, she knows the risks. Got a good head on her shoulders - her daughter, too. 

Yes, her mother did know danger, and knew not to run headlong into a storm. Age had taught her caution as well as curiosity, and the former was how everybody judged her. Isuka, too, was judged as knowing more, knowing better - knowing how to stop the neighbourhood boys from getting in trouble for theft, or from getting a few cuts from a stray cat. Wise, steady Loxia - smart, careful Isuka. Her brothers ran amuck; she jogged behind, and watched their steps.

But it wasn’t, Isuka remembers, what her mother wanted, and it wasn’t what her mother had named her to be. Still, she’d always been that girl, ever since she knew how to walk. That girl who remained tied to other ideals, who doggedly pursued the trail instead of making her own. That girl was what was needed of Isuka, now - that girl who couldn’t run away. 

No, no Isuka never was good at running. And she wonders sometimes, if it’s her name which is wrong or if it’s she herself which is wrong -

Then again, there’s nobody left to say, is there.

Spruce Island is a paradise, for pirate and marine alike. Or, it would be a paradise if it didn’t make most of its money through illegally hosting auctions for the human market, successfully infuriating Isuka to the point that she has trouble trying to even fake enjoyment of the spa treatment she’s awkwardly receiving, her nails being painted with little white lilies. 

Marines receive no question here, or at least not the ones that don’t ask questions about the other, worse side of the island. Isuka is going to be doing much worse than that fairly soon, which is the reason that she has her sunglasses covering her eyes and is wearing a rather garish sunhat, pulled down to further obscure what she looks like. Her stiffness - likely mistaken for haughtiness, as much as it pains her - and the coat-of-arms on her back will be effective enough deterrents to keep people from getting close enough.

But, truly - she hates Spruce Island. The feel of the people crying out for help, of those laughing with the same glee as children getting new toys - it’s all enough for Isuka to want to jump up, flip over the island and all its stupid beauty with it, to expose the corrupt underbelly. Don’t any of the other people here see? Don’t they know?

Kiwi and Gallium had insisted that she relax and blend in before they ambush the incoming auction, which is why Isuka is getting her nails painted. She truly, truly despises every minute.

“And… you’re all done! Just wait ten minutes to let them dry, now - ”

“Thanks,” Isuka interrupts. She’s itching to get up, to go and move, if only through sunny streets instead of putting her rapier through something. “Appreciate it. Looks nice.”

Fast as she can, she gets up and leaves with a bell chiming in her wake, the heavy weight of her coat stirring up a small breeze behind her every step. People scatter from her warpath and Isuka grits her teeth, tilting her head so that the ridiculously wide brim of her hat casts her face in shadow. She doesn’t mean to be intimidating, really. Some of the people here are genuinely unaware of the worse dealings on Spruce Island, and simply want to have fun.

Some of the people here are aware, and are on Spruce Island for fun anyway. Some of the people here are aware and are on Spruce Island for those worse dealings. And then there’s Isuka and her crew, which technically go in the last category as well.

Blend in. She eyes her nails, flexing her hands and feeling the constraints of the bandage on one. The design is cute, she has to admit. The lilies are surprisingly detailed and well-drawn. Isuka wonders how long it will take before she chips the polish; wielding a sword does not go well with gentleness. Ah, but it’s still kind of pretty - she supposes she’ll let it be, for a while longer.

Isuka checks the sky. The sun is getting closer to its apex; any ‘relaxation’ and ‘blend-in’ time is about over, for her. She needs to be heading for their rendez-vous point, and fast.

Nobody’s following her, she can tell - so Isuka takes a left turn and starts walking as fast and purposeful as she can. Intimidation is another form of acting, and she’s been told that her brand of mission-strut is particularly scary. Isuka was never very good at undercover work, but even then there are certain roles she’s better with than others.

And even if she herself is no expert, Clover’s always had a penchant for theatre.

Yelena is there, out-of-place in her long dress and dyed hair, specially done just for this operation. Russell, Bel, and Gallium flank her, perfectly straight with rifles strapped to their backs like the Navy soldier entourage they’re pretending to be. Clover, carefully dusting more powder onto Yelena’s face, is doing a rather convincing imitation of the supposed simpering assistant. Kiwi and Morbidezza are gone, but that’s to be expected - the two best at infiltration are waiting for the signal, delivered through the carefully hidden baby Den-Den in Yelena’s flowing sleeves.

“There you are!” Clover says once Isuka arrives, the loud click of her boot heels purposefully obvious. “I cannot believe you kept the lady waiting. She should have you punished for this!”

“I was under the impression that this was a vacation island,” Isuka says with the flattest, most monotone and slightly offended delivery she can possibly make. “Are we not meant to be vacationing.”

Clover’s gasp is high-pitched and loud enough to be heard probably on the next island over. She begins, discreetly, to lead them along. People shoot them looks and scurry out of the way; guards spot the disturbance, spot Isuka’s sunhat and Yelena’s dress, and whisper amongst themselves. It’s working, at the very least. “Vacationing? Vacationing?? On this highly important day?!? The lady is looking to acquire some extremely rare goods, possibly even a giant - ”

Now people are looking over with interest, vultures piqued by the thought of good carrion. Isuka channels all her disgust into her next words. “Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Let’s just get over with this.”

“Enough,” Yelena says, loud enough to be heard clearly by their eager audience. For extra emphasis, she clicks her fingers, a short, harsh snap, the (admittedly fake) gold band on her index flashing bright and distracting. Clover affects a rather convincing flinch and backs away, cowed. “I do not appreciate tardiness. Is this the kind of escort the Navy provides?”

Isuka sighs, deep. “Apologies, my lady,” she says, still maintaining as emotionless a delivery as is possible for her. “You will get to the auction in time for your giant.”

“I hear it’s right from Elbaf, out of the wild,” Bel chooses that perfect time to whisper, loud enough to catch one ear and set off another chain of gossip. Isuka, beneath her hat and her march, seethes. 

They’re getting closer, now. Time to see if this charade holds up.

“Ahem!” Clover calls out as soon as they spot people being unloaded, cargo in chains and collars. “My lady would like to look at your merchandise!”

She’s moving fast enough that Isuka is forced to hurry at her fastest possible stride without simultaneously seeming panicked. Clover rather effectively draws attention - though, Isuka thinks that the garish outfits and the hat might also be helping. It’s hard to miss. 

“No can do before the auction, miss,” a guard yells back. “Sorry! Go inside and have a seat, though!”

“This one’s feisty!” another laughs and Isuka’s rage threatens to boil over. All the distress, all the terror, all the exhausted hopelessness - she owes these people their justice and their freedom, and she imagines putting the point of her blade through the smug faces of the slavers and auctioneers.

Clover, once again, lets out a very convincing gasp. Their small crowd is starting to draw looks. “I cannot believe this! My lady is the Duchess of the Half-Note Kingdom - ” a kingdom that Isuka knows was made up - “and she could have your head for this offense!”

Yelena, meanwhile, is tapping her nails on her elbow, the menacing black points of them standing out against iridescent silver fabric. That, and the four marines with very obvious weapons, seems to do something. A few guards hesitate, glancing back and forth, until somebody who is very clearly the leader steps up.

“Listen,” he says, to Clover. “We have to start, okay? We ain’t got time for this.” Behind them, the unloading of people has slowed down to a trickle, but Isuka knows it will halt entirely in a few minutes. “Take your entourage, and your lady, and go into the auction house. Wait.”

Clover puffs up, the stupid fight about to become stupider. “We demand to have an overview of your merchandise!” she snaps. People are looking to them, which means they are looking away from the auction house, which means they aren’t focused on Kiwi and Morbidezza hidden and prepared to sneak about. “My lady has the right - ”

Isuka can tell the exact moment his impatience boils over. 

Still, like everybody else, she pretends to be surprised when he whips out a pistol and aims a shot. Clover shrieks, flailing back and knocking into Isuka as the trigger is pulled, leaving Yelena to be scraped on the cheek by a bullet not meant for her, blood spraying from the shallow graze.

It looks worse than it actually is, Isuka knows. Still, the guards pale. 

All movement ceases as Yelena reaches, slowly, to her cheek and her fingers come back stained red, which she shows off under the light.

“You dare?” Yelena says, soft and dangerous. Then her voice grows abruptly into a performance-worthy shriek. Isuka swears she actually hears a crack in Yelena’s voice as she screams, “How dare you! I am the Duchess of the Half-Note Kingdom! My family spans back generations - ”

Isuka’s turn. She drops Clover, who lands unceremoniously in the grass, and steps up with a hand on the hilt of her rapier. “Alright, buddy,” she says, all her rage finally focused on the very convenient targets before her. “That’s a step too far.”

The leader hesitates, glancing between her and her blade. Then, perhaps he decides that she’s slim enough to not be much of a threat, because he scoffs and levels his pistol at her in turn. “I’d watch what you do next, marine girl.”

“If I were you, I would watch what I do next as well,” Isuka spits and stabs her blade straight through his pistol, skewering it in a smooth move. In her next, she carelessly flings it away - it lands somewhere with a harsh bang. “Attacking a noble and threatening an officer?” The words have no taste in her mouth. She’s really not sure how convincing she can be, playing this role, so Isuka goes for what she does best and barks, “Men!”

“Yes ma’am!” Bel, Gallium, and Russell chorus and step up next to her, forming a strange sort of barrier in front of Yelena and Clover. To disguise her crewmates sending off the signal, Isuka drives all her weight into a fearsome kick that aims the point of her heel towards fleshy stomach and a brawl ensues.

Making a fight flashy is not her expertise. Isuka fights with the purpose of finishing a fight, not with the desire to prolongate it. Still, she does her best here, avoiding spots that would knock somebody out and using her rapier a little less than she would normally. They need to give Kiwi and Morbidezza time, as much time as possible to clear out whoever is inside the auction house, before they start on their role. So Bel’s shots go wide and Gallium uses his rifle more like a staff and Isuka fights a tad bit worse than she’s used to doing.

“Sir!”

The holler cuts through the field. A different guard, in different torn uniform, is running up with panic in his face. “Sir, a marine - ”

He’s panting. “The merchandise, they’re gone, and the auctioneers - !”

A soft thwip and a dart cuts him off. Nevertheless, message received - all eyes turn to Isuka, and her crewmates, and even start regarding Yelena and Clover with suspicion. 

“Girl,” the leader thunders - no ‘marine’ anymore, Isuka notes, with a detached sort of amusement. “Who are you and your bunch?”

Distress, and hope, are starting to emanate in equal parts. Isuka tips her sunglasses up with her index and leverages all the wrath she’s been bottling up in the form of a vicious, bare-eyed glare. “Nailer,” she snarls. “I’m the Nailer and that’s what you get to call me, nothing else. Do you want to know why?”

She doesn’t give him time to respond. She stabs right through his shoulder in a brutal strike. The point of her rapier is rarely dulled; all the blood it finds is absorbed into its workings, and the dripping red helps it gleam beautifully under the sun. “Yelena! Clover!” she shouts above the ensuing yell of pain. “Get to the captives! Bel, Gallium, Russell - shield them!”

“Yes Ensign!” her crew choruses and Isuka plunges her blade into bicep-tricep-elbow, disabling arms and then striking out at legs. The ridiculous hat she flings behind her into the path of some bullets, her sunglasses find their place back on her head and not stuck at her forehead, and finally Isuka feels like herself again, flitting between foes, her blade whistling through the air. 

Once this is over, she decides, she will never go to Spruce Island again. Having fun at a vacation island is clearly not her forte.

Chains fall to the ground in her peripheral. Isuka dodges several bullet-shaped dangers and skewers a hand on her rapier. She twists and ducks and jabs thighs, arms - nonlethal wounds, but enough to knock men over. Alertness fizzles over her right side and Isuka spins, rapier at the ready, to catch in her line of sight a shaky gun barrel trained somewhere in the region of her chest, though by the wobble any bullet fired would pierce her shoulder - if it hit, that was.

Gaudy hat. Gaudy everything. Bruising and blood and fear but also anger. “I’ll shoot!” whoever it is threatens in a quavery voice. “I swear I will, you marines will get in trouble for this - ”

“For what?” Isuka scoffs. “For doing our job and stopping illegal slave-trading?” She stabs into a thumb and twists her blade, ripping through delicate muscles and tendons. The pistol falls and Isuka catches it, engaging the safety lock and flinging it far away. “I don’t think so.”

“Aw, darn, I didn’t think he’d get up from all that,” Morbidezza whispers, sidling up to Isuka. For as long as she’s known him, she’s never heard him use any louder tone. “He’s one of the auctioneers, Ensign.”

An auctioneer? It explains the outfit, she supposes. All the more reason to not listen to any of his words. “You’re an auctioneer, knowingly overseeing the acquisition and sale of living human beings?” Her lip curls with disgust. “Morbidezza, cuff him. He’ll have some very nice information to give us later.”

“With pleasure, Ensign,” Morbidezza breathes.

“You can’t do this!” the auctioneer shrieks as his arms are pulled behind his back and a distinct click sounds. “I already called a superior! He’ll have you fired - ”

Isuka goes still, but not because of anything the auctioneer is saying. Mostly because of who she knows has just arrived, knows because the sweeping chill is unnatural and, no longer warmed by the heat of battle, her bare skin is left all too exposed to his presence.

Goosebumps raise on her shoulders, her back, all the way down her arms and to her hands. She’s freezing, frostbitten beneath the bright sun and sand of Spruce Island. A bead of blood rolls down to the grass from her rapier’s blade.

“Girl,” Draw says and nothing measures up in the face of him, not her skill not her height not even the fact that she’s eighteen. “Put your sword down.”

She lowers it. Lowers it until the tip just slightly hovers over the earth. Movement, behind her; marines have surrounded the place, she can count them all, but Draw’s presence eclipses everybody else. Choked silent, she watches him move to stand facing the tableau, like a spectator - no, like a judge holding court. 

“Vice Admiral!” the auctioneer sputters out. Morbidezza is frozen. Isuka can’t do anything to call him back. “This - this marine, she - ”

“I’ve heard,” Draw states. “Recent reports have indicated as such. Girl, call back your men and leave this island.”

He doesn’t look at her as he gives the order, and maybe that’s what gives her the courage to blurt out -

“What?!”

That gets his gaze on her and Isuka, buoyed by her shock, says, “Vice Admiral - I have to arrest these people! They - ”

“Are to be allowed free,” Draw intones. “You and your crew will leave this island, girl, and bring nobody with you. Anybody you have, you will let go.”

Kiwi shifts. Isuka knows, then, that there are freed captives aboard their ship. 

“We can’t,” Isuka insists. “This is horrible - ” that gets no response, so she tries for a different appeal. “Sir, this is illegal. Human trafficking and selling has been banned for two hundred years - ”

Just cold, just frost. Isuka’s never gotten anything from him, so why should now be different? Draw adjusts the tank on his back, the flamethrower strapped to it. “Listen, girl,” he says, but there is nothing at all in his tone and she feels only a horrible hollowness. “Take your men. Leave. That is an order, girl.”

He spits it out, the way he did when she was a kid and messed up, though nothing at all changes from that void, and only ten years are what let Isuka suppress her flinch. Still, she gathers her strength and tries for one last plea. “At least let me take the people they captured with me. At least let me bring them home - ”

The way he rounds on her - Draw doesn’t strike her, the way she might be by some other Vice Admiral for challenging a direct order so many times, but she’s not sure it would feel much better. As it is, he makes her take a physical step back, losing space to his stature. “Did you not hear what I said? Nobody goes with you but you and your men. Is there anybody on your ship, girl?”

Heart in her throat, Isuka shakes her head. “No, sir,” she chokes out. “No one. All my men are with me.”

He scans her. Stares her down, digging into her skin, her flesh - then he turns tail with a brusque nod. “Good. Take your men. Leave.”

All eyes on her - some triumphant, some pleading, some confused. Isuka swallows. For a moment, she lets herself feel blinding, unfathomable rage towards her mentor and saviour - did he even know, did he even care, how could he look at all the people who were going to be sold and simply tell her to leave them in their fucking chains? 

The gas tank and the flamethrower on his back await any wrong word. 

“Everyone!” she yells and her voice scrapes from her throat with the guilt. “Back to our ship!”

The coat is heavier on her shoulders than ever before. Isuka thinks with no small amount of bitterness that her mother was wrong, in the end, that she’s made a disappointment of her mother’s wishes.

She turns before anybody but her can acknowledge the tears in her eyes and marches off, months of her and her crew’s hard work gone and all those people, the ones not stowed away, abandoned to their future masters.

Isuka remembers being a child under Draw’s tutelage. Two weeks and the wounds she crawled out of Ashy Village with were bandaged and trying to heal, two weeks after they’d tutted at the burn on her hand and said something about its severity, two weeks and she’s in a boat making for the Grand Line. 

She remembers that, then, she quite literally had nothing to her except the clothes on her back. But they weren’t even on her back, and they’d suffered tears and much of the fabric was burnt off, anyway, so Isuka had nothing except for a few scraps of cloth and the words from her new guardian-mentor-saviour that she was worth something, worth that boat and that new stripe Draw bore.

No home, no place, no anchor for herself - Isuka was stuck, so she accepted the Navy shirt they gave her and the Navy shorts and shoes they gave her. She accepted the training sword they gave her, then the real steel blade they gave her. She accepted the blows and the hard lessons and the exhaustion, and accepted it with a dogged determination that gave rise to raises of eyebrows and comments of you’ve got potential, you’ll be something if you stick with us.

Marine training wasn’t fun for adults. It was, Isuka remembers, not much fun as a kid, either. Most of the older cadets didn’t speak to her, since she was a little girl and all that. Draw was a source of cold that didn’t even do anything to soothe the bruises she received when she trained with him and with others. So she grew up with the tutting nurse as her main confidante, and with bandages on her face and her arms, and with the weight of her blade for company. 

She seemed to get injured more often than other cadets, but maybe that was because she seemed to train more often than other cadets, as well. Draw tended to fetch her when she thought she needed more practice, and over time Isuka learned to do it herself. She rarely ever went without a bandage on her face, Isuka recalls - that little spot had even scarred over, a tiny dull dot marring her skin, from how often she’d gotten cut there. It could have been bigger. It wasn’t, the blade tip avoiding all the important fleshy bits, but it was still a little scary even without anything stabbing into her eye.

But that was her, wasn’t it? Girl without a home, without anything but what the Navy gave her, with only her ideals of justice to cling to and the sword she carried about to serve those ideals. Isuka, Draw’s protegé Isuka, future marine Isuka and perhaps more than that because she’s got potential, doesn’t she? She’s smart, she’s got good instincts and a good head on her shoulders. She’s her mother’s girl, still, even if one of those parties is dead.

On the day she gets her cap and her rank, a real rank instead of being a cadet, Isuka stands next to the other soldiers with her back straight even though she only comes up to their shoulders. Her cap is a bit too big for her head and she has to keep pushing it back so that it doesn’t fall into her face, the little scarf beneath the collar of her shirt is tied the best she can though she can’t help but think it looks clumsier than others, and the only familiar thing is her sword. She’s spent years moving from base to base with Draw, and it’s as she’s standing in line facing her new captain that he’s facing his new fleet, having become promoted to Rear Admiral. She yells affirmations with the rest of them, though her voice is far too small for the cries of others. She does work with the rest of them and falls asleep in the cramped cabins and when she looks at the mirror in the tiny bathroom, adjusting her scarf beneath its collar, she can’t help but think that the blue clashes in a way with her thick red hair.

Isuka makes Ensign when she’s fourteen. She gets a crew that same year and infamy three years later. The coat was heavy for normal adults, then, and all the heavier on her smaller frame. It hasn't become lighter in the years, a constant reminder of who she’s made herself to be.

Against my mother’s wishes, a voice loves to whisper when she has that thought; is this what she wanted for her only daughter?

And what can I do about that? Isuka will retort in her head; there are people who need me, and there’s just nowhere for me to go. I have no home to return to but my ship and whatever Navy base they might want to throw me into. 

She really is her mother’s daughter, in the worst ways as well as the best.

In the wake of Draw, and of Ace’s offer, Isuka goes back to her hotel room.

For a moment, she allows herself to dream, to imagine the thing she’d refused herself when she stayed and watched the blurry forms of people who had inexplicably become her friends fade off into the distance. She wonders what it would be like to abandon it all, to run and jump and trust that a hand would catch her reaching one. And then there would be none of her crew, but there would be no coat on her back either, and Isuka bites down onto her tongue until it starts, sluggishly, to bleed.

Stupid, reaching dreams. Stupid everything. Stupid her.

She flops onto the bed - she must be soiling it, but Isuka is too exhausted to care. Her mentor and saviour is the one who burned down her village in pursuit of pirates, she’d just put her rapier through Draw’s shoulder and then hand before all that danger could turn onto Ace - Ace, who was innocent in all this, who Isuka had stupidly dragged into it - and then he’d asked her to follow him, to go with him into the New World.

And she’d grit her hands into fists in order to stop herself from reaching foolishly out and shook her head no, and watched them go then turned her back on the ocean, and her face towards land. 

And she is, in all the worst ways, truly, isn’t she? Every bit of her, like they all said.

The very next day, she packs and leaves - her shore leave is over. She makes as brave a face as she can and doesn’t say anything when she’s reassigned to a different vice admiral.

And Isuka resigns herself to this new knowledge, this new burden, without Ace and his storm there to upend her days.

Chapter Text

Isuka remembers - 

Fire. Children. Terror, theirs and Ace’s and her own. And Draw’s ice-cold indifference, swallowing everything it touched.

She’d wondered, once, when she saw him with his flamethrower, if he could have been the one to burn her village down. She’d dismissed it soon after, because he’d rescued her and you didn’t simply rescue evidence of your guilt. That was basic logic.

But, she realized as she ran for the kids, bracing herself and her tears against the heat, that he simply hadn’t cared about what he did to her home. And neither had he thought to care about how she would feel about him. Cold, unfeeling, hollow nothingness. Had he cared about the slaves? Had he cared about her family? Her mother, and her brothers? Was that why he'd refused to try and rescue them, even when an eight year old pleaded on her knees?

At all costs, girl.

It didn't make him good. It didn't make him just. All he was was indifferent, simply indifferent, even when people suffered around and before him. At all costs, girl - what a load of bullshit. He simply didn't care, couldn't spare anything for innocent lives, and perhaps that was what made him the worst person she'd ever known.

Something in her snapped and fell loose, and as soon as the kids were safe Isuka turned on Draw with a fresh burn on her arm and her rapier flashing, driven forth by the full force of her rage as she sidestepped the blow she instinctively knew was coming, and stabbed right through Draw’s shoulder.

On her nineteenth birthday, Isuka learns about haki.

Vice Admiral Tsuru listens to her awkward explanation about how she fights, about how she knew that there were more people in ambush and knew when to duck to avoid getting shot, and nods gravely. “Haki,” she says, in her unflappable calm, the type of calm that is gentle as a ripple in a puddle and always has Isuka relaxing in her presence. “Looks like you have a strong talent for Observation, Ensign. How were you trained?”

Isuka shifts, remembering how Draw had honed her ‘instincts’. “I got a lot of stuff thrown at me when I was blindfolded and had my ears plugged,” she says. “And threw a lot of stuff at others under the same conditions.”

“Sounds about standard,” Tsuru nods. “You’ve got a good mastery of it, clearly, even if you weren’t aware that you have it. Well, the only other type of haki I can help you with is Armament.” She lays her hand flat on the table, palm down. The entire thing goes shiny-black. Without hesitation, Tsuru grabs a nearby dagger and - to Isuka’s shock - jabs it into her hand.

Or, she tries. Instead, the blade simply clangs right off.

“What?” Isuka gasps. “What is that?”

“Armament,” Tsuru says. “This comes from your spirit, Ensign.”

Isuka watches the light play off the black sheen on Tsuru’s skin. “Spirit?” she asks. “That’s… not very specific.”

“It is what it is,” Tsuru says. The black washes away. “I cannot help you very much with its activation except to say this; you need very strong focus. For me, I concentrate on my sense of calm and certainty.” She looks Isuka in the eye, relaxed and sturdy as bedrock. “You should have no trouble finding your focus, Ensign. From what I can tell, you are a very dedicated girl. Perhaps focus on that.”

Dedication, Isuka thinks a few hours later. Tsuru had given her a list of exercises to do once she was able to awaken it and that sits next to her. Focus on that - dedication.

She’s not sure how well it’s working. Her palm remains stubbornly bare. Isuka tries to summon something tangible to focus on, thinking of the weight of the coat on her back and the built-up scars, but all that makes her think about is what led to her receiving the wounds and quite simply put, it isn’t working. 

She is dedicated to the marines, is the problem. At this point, Isuka really can’t be anything but dedicated - she hasn’t gone through ten now eleven years of both training and service to not be dedicated.

Hasn’t she?

Not for the first time, her thoughts waver. Draw gave her this place and this anchor - she wouldn’t have needed it if he hadn’t burnt her home down. As a marine, she serves justice and ordinary people - as a marine, she lets human traffickers and auctioneers go because her superior officer makes an order. Isuka has saved lives and brought horrible men to justice - at all costs, girl, and if the cost is innocent life then is it even worth it?

She’s heard other marines talking, about arrests they’ve made - she’s heard them laughing, and finding amusement in it all. It’s always an effort to turn away instead of snapping that it’s not a game, and that arresting a hungry girl for stealing is no more noble than kicking a stray cat, and sometimes Isuka doesn’t even succeed in that. Especially not nowadays, with Draw fresh on her mind. 

The stories are closer, now. The stories make her go cold. These are marines, this is what they call justice? Are these truly the people Isuka is meant to serve beside, and feel proud to serve beside?

It’s out of a desire to know that Isuka hunts down Draw’s records. Tsuru raises a brow when she asks but lets her have them without further question, and Isuka spends a day leafing through them. Arrests - high. Collateral damage - she thinks of the singular pirate, and the forty-nine people dead for it, and thinks the number is a bit too low. 

This - this is a person she served, this is the type of person she could be serving. Tsuru is kind, and Isuka hasn’t seen anything from her like what she’s seen from Draw, but she isn’t the only Vice Admiral and her presence alone can’t be possibly redeeming enough. 

But, then again, that question arises; where would she even go to, if not the marines? Except this time an answer arises; wasn’t it obvious?

He was in the New World, after all - the same sea as Isuka. She could take her crew, many of which had been similarly shocked and furious at Draw’s order, and they could go. Go and then what - Isuka’s a pirate, then, goodbye to the Navy as if they’ll just let it happen?

Isuka’s a pirate, like all the pirates she’s arrested, like all those horrible people she’s seen loot and kill and capture? 

The thought of becoming one of them, of doing anything remotely similar - a familiar sort of anger bubbles up in her chest. Isuka’s never been good at indifference, after all, not when there are people around reaching for her (and she knows why, now, knows that it’s not just instinct). She can’t imagine burning down somebody’s home and not caring for the pain it causes, not when she can feel it just as strongly.

That’s what marines are supposed to do, right? Empathize? Feel? Fight for those that deserve it, for those that need it, and be kind for those that need it as well. That’s what is right - no, no that’s what is just.

The anger takes a different tone. Struck by a curious sense of what-if, Isuka focuses all her heart on that anger and tries to imagine it coming out, taking physical form on her body. That rage she had facing Anvil, facing Draw, facing every person who caused unnecessary grief and harm -

At all costs, girl, and her fury bubbles up to new heights and Isuka grits her teeth and lets the feeling wash over the center of her mind, pushing all other thoughts to the side. She’s always been the most focused in a fight, after all, and that’s what she imitates when she curls her fingers loosely into a fist, picturing her hand going black, her knuckles darkening. 

Isuka punches outwards and as light scatters off the sheen on her hand - flickering, but there - and allows herself a smile.

Armament haki needs to be trained through repeated use, and practice - so Isuka grabs the paper and makes for the nearest punching bag, mentally working a new slot into her schedule. Day after day, she wakes up early and trains, battering her fists and her feet against sandbags and then boulders and then metal. It gives her time to think, every morning, and she learns that too - how to maintain her haki while she’s not totally focused on one emotion, how to quickly activate and de-activate it for when she needs to concentrate on something other than being mad. 

Her doing this, her focusing on her belief of justice to use her haki - it’s equally as good as her dedication to the Navy, right? Isuka hammers punches and kicks into iron, carelessly ripping at the scrap metal. She’s supposed to be concentrated on justice, as a marine. In a way, this is dedication, to the cause Isuka is meant to support, as a part of the Navy.

Take your men and leave, girl, and rage floods her but uncertainty comes soon after and Isuka drops her fists, panting. She wipes sweat off her forehead. Early morning means nobody is around, at least, to see her hesitate.

Many marines aren’t all that fond of her, now. Isuka ignores them; anybody who thinks Draw was justified is somebody she doesn’t care to be around. But is this what they serve, then? Justice at the cost of everybody else?

Or not even justice, not even a pretense of it - allowing slavery, and for humans to be sold off, because a sum was paid.

The coat never grows lighter, and it’s weight has never been harder to bear. Isuka fights people at day and her thoughts at all other times and a few days away from twenty she gets promoted for it all.

Her crew is ecstatic at the news. The part where they’re being transferred to the command of different people - not so much.

“Call us,” Kiwi insists. “Write as often as you can.”

“If you ever need us there, we promise we’ll try to come.”

Isuka hugs the people who have been with her for five years straight and swallows down the part of her that wants to say, Run with me. Leave with me. Where we’ll go, I don’t know, and it will be dangerous and the light we’re searching for may never appear - but it will be worth it, it will be so worth it.

Instead, she just squeezes Morbidezza in her arms and says, “Stay safe.”

She’ll need it the most, though, according to Tsuru. Isuka’s headed for the New World.

Isuka remembers Ace - she remembers Ace for a lot of reasons, actually. Him saving her the first time they met, her saving him the third. Him flinging a box at her face and running. Her shoving a package into Deuce’s hands with the tag at the top clearly labeling it for one person. Ace with his hand outstretched, face tilted up into the Sabaody lights bearing wide-eyed hope, and Isuka watching and letting him drift out to wider seas without following.

Sorry, mother.

The moment remains embedded in her head every time she sees Ace in the newspaper, or when she first receives a letter with a flame shoddily pressed into the wax seal. Or when she slides her coat on - the last part of getting up, for her, and lately she’s started putting it off more and more - and feels the weight of her choice settle on her shoulders. 

She’s turned twenty, now. She got a letter a few days later after her birthday, with a little package that contained a (clearly hand-made) charm of a feather, splashed in a rainbow of colours. Isuka didn’t own much, but she scrounged up a safety pin and hung the little charm and hooked it into the collar of one of her shirts. 

The gesture is kind. She wrote back, and wondered what her superiors would do to her if they found out. Or, perhaps, what her fellow marines would do to her if they found out. It’s not as though people aren’t vying for Isuka’s spot, thinking that she’s too weak and too young and too merciful to hold any sort of rank, just a girl filling shoes a size too big.

Justice is cruel without mercy, isn’t it? And as for the other two complaints - Isuka doesn’t bother with them.

(Justice is cruel without mercy, but the Navy isn’t merciful - will anything ever allow it to be? Isuka thinks of Draw, of Ace, and of the position that she finds herself in. She was cruel that day, not disobeying or challenging but marching past, and Draw was cruel as well - they were guilty just like the auctioneers, the guards. What sort of justice was that?)

Isuka remembers Ace too much for her own good, perhaps.

Vice Admiral Garp is the kind of superior Isuka has a hard time getting used to.

His fleet is tiny; the only crew under his command is his own, his two mentees included, with Isuka now joining them. But his ship is absolutely massive, covered in conveyor belts and stacked to the brim with cannonballs. On her first day, he summons her and her alone, and promptly launches a cannonball at her which would have knocked her out had she not gotten a chill so strong she instinctively dropped to the deck. She swears she still has the bruises from her knees hitting the wood.

He’d been quick to determine that she was capable of using haki, both Observation and Armament. Isuka had admitted that her Armament wasn’t the best, to which he’d laughed boisterously and started flinging cannonballs for her to block. 

Isuka has never been more injured, and exhausted. Isuka also doesn’t think she’s ever punched harder, so at least there’s that. 

Under Garp’s command, she finds herself fighting fewer pirates and spending much more time in combat with his other students, Koby and Helmeppo, instead. Both of them are, Isuka finds out quickly, not quite on par with her - then again, she’s been a marine for much longer, and she finds their dedication admirable. Far stronger than her own, at the very least.

They look up to her, she realizes when Koby awkwardly sits next to her at lunch and starts asking about her career. Her entire life, Isuka has been used to being the young one, the little one, the one who looks up to others - and now here are two fresh-faced and pink-cheeked marines, watching her with stars in their eyes when she recounts some old fight or another. It’s strange. In fact, it’s almost uncomfortable.

“When did you join?” he asks, eager. 

Isuka stirs at the food on her plate. “Eight,” she admits. Twelve years past that and she looks at Koby and Helmeppo - the latter is her age, and the former is just barely younger than she is, but they seem like kids in her eyes - and realizes that she really was just a little girl back then. “At eight.”

“Eight?” they chorus, awe or shock or confusion - she doesn’t know which.

“You’re lying,” Helmeppo declares with hilarious certainty. Isuka almost wants to laugh. “No person joins the Navy at eight.”

“She’s not lying,” Garp confirms and they all jump - Isuka swore he was asleep only a second ago. He sits up and wipes his face, then belches. They all wince. He laughs. “Saw her records. Joined at eight, soldier at twelve, ensign at fourteen. Captain at twenty.”

Koby’s eyes are so wide she could fit her hand inside. Isuka chugs her glass of water to avoid looking at them and sets it down, suddenly embarrassed. “Yeah, well - ”

“No wonder you’re so much better than us,” Koby breathes. “Miss, can you teach me?”

“Oi, are you implying that I’m not sufficient as a teacher, brats?” Garp rumbles and they hasten to apologize. In the midst of it all, Isuka gets up and quickly leaves the mess hall.

They love to fight, and to learn to do it. So does Garp. Isuka can’t say she hates combat - it is, after all, what she’s spent most of her life doing. But learning it was not a process she leapt out of bed ready for, like Koby did.

Maybe if Garp found her, she muses, things might be different.

Pirates in the New World are far more dangerous than ones back in Paradise. Koby and Helmeppo don’t do nearly as much fighting as she does - rather, they sit at the sidelines and train their haki watching the fight. Word of the Nailer, with her bright red hair and deadly rapier, crosses out of Paradise and Isuka’s new spot somehow reaches Ace even so far away.

You’re with Garp? he sends her and she writes back, Yes, why? 

Does he ever use his fist of love on you?

Constantly.

Holy shit.

The next letter is a drawing of a bird nursing a comically oversized bruise. It makes Isuka laugh until her stomach hurts, and only when she’s finished wiping tears from her eyes does she realize that she hasn’t laughed in a long, long while.

She misses him, she thinks, and in a burst of fondness sends back a picture of him, drawn mostly from memory, with a similarly oversized heart-shaped bruise. Isuka misses a lot of people, these days. When she looks out at the horizon, the urge to leave and find them always strikes her, and she has to remind herself that she’s sensible, and reasonable, and that the Navy is her home - where else?

(Oh, where else - she hates to think of her mother, now.)

But Koby makes for good company, at least. Koby is younger than her, and looks up to her as an example of a ‘good’ marine, unlike the others he knows as the ‘bad’ marines, and every time she does something to reaffirm that view in his eyes Isuka feels a twist of guilt in her stomach. He doesn’t know the truth, he doesn't know that she’s wavering: that for every act she’s proud of there are those which make her swallow in repressed rage, that there are so many more who would commit unjust acts, and that she’s watched and let them slide, and dammed herself with them. Isuka’s lying and she hasn’t even said a word to do it - how hilarious is that?

“Koby,” she asks one day, as she’s training her Armament haki and as he’s doing pushups. “What kind of marine do you want to be, exactly? Why did you join the Navy?”

Koby looks up at her, panting. “Well, it was kind of just because I was being mistreated by a pirate at first,” he admits, red and sheepish. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized… man, I was a coward!” He goes impossibly redder, but his conviction and determination - she can feel the bright, burning flare of it, determinedly blazing without any wood. “I - I hated her, but I was so scared I couldn’t do anything! And then there was this guy…” He hesitates, and Isuka notes that the caution and worry run deep. A pirate? She nods, signaling for him to go on without further question. “Yeah, this guy! He was brave, and he saved my butt so many times. I… well, I want that courage! And I want to be that guy for others like me. People captured and mistreated by pirates.”

Good, noble reasons. The right reasons, the just reasons. Isuka smiles to herself. “I’m glad,” she says. “You’re a good kid, Koby.”

“... but I’m not a good marine?”

Sharp. He’d be good at Observation, if they ever got around to training him for it. “I don’t know,” she says honestly. “You want to protect people. So do I, really. Not all marines do.”

“N-no, but…” His determination flares even brighter. “I won’t be one of them, I promise! I will protect innocent people, even if it means breaking the rules! They're the ones who matter most!”

He’s the kind of marine who should be making it, she reflects. He’s the kind of marine who should be at the top. Isuka looks at him, seeming impossibly young and hopeful, and can’t help but wish him the best.

She wonders if, by the time he’s in her place (because he’ll make it, she knows this - he’s got the potential like she did, after all), he’ll have the same hesitation and guilt. And if he’s lucky, he won’t, but life isn’t that kind.

Isuka remembers being young and hearing her mother ask her; Do you know what your name means, sweetheart?

No, Isuka said the first time, because she didn’t. She just knew how the syllables sounded, coming off her mother’s tongue, coming off her brothers’ tongues, and rolling in her head. I-su-ka. Soft at the start, with the hard ‘k’ accentuating the end. Isuka.

Crossbill, her mother told her. I named you after the crossbills, Isuka. Do you know what kind of bird that is?

No, because crossbills didn’t visit their little island so of course she didn’t know. And her mother ruffled her hair, so saturated in colour, so different from the rest of her family, and told her:

A nomadic bird, Isuka. Crossbills never stop moving.

Her mother wanted to be a runaway, to travel the seas and never lay down roots. She would have been happy, her and her children and maybe a lover but never a husband - marriage was another tie, and one that she preferred to eschew. She dreamed of doing such when her children got old enough, at first, viewing pregnancy as more of a temporary setback than anything to hinder the way she wanted to live.

Isuka, in all her unexpectedness, ruined that.

Still - her mother never could resent her dear child, her only daughter. She turned her back forever on leaving, to focus on all her children instead, to make a home for them. Yet she named Isuka after the crossbills, and set down a wild dream in the hopes that her sole daughter would pick it up. Isuka, the crossbill, ever free. Isuka, unfettered. Isuka, her second chance, everything she wanted to be and found torn instead from grasping hands. 

Isuka, a marine girl instead, weighed down by the choice she made as an eight year old and the choice she kept, inexplicably, making. Isuka, tied down. Isuka, her mother’s daughter through and through, refusing stubbornly to run and fiercely clinging to that one notion, turning her back on her chance at leaving.

Now, she's twenty. Now she's watched her former mentor betray her, twice, and still hasn't left. Now she's watching others grow up to want to be like her, when they should be wishing for the exact opposite.

Oh, her mother would be so disappointed. Isuka wonders why the longing to run is as heavy as shackles.

Whitebeard Pirates Second Division Commander Portgas D. Ace Arrested, To Be Executed in Two Weeks

It’s a beautiful day. Isuka crumples paper between her fists.

Maybe Garp notices, because he comes to stand next to her, face sober, emotions churning. His hands are massive on the rail. His shoulders are exhaustedly firm, a battered wall holding up against the floods.

“I’m going to visit Impel Down,” he tells her. “You and the brats will be sent back to Headquarters while I’m gone.”

“Can I come with you?” Isuka asks, on wild fleeting impulse. “Sir,” she adds hastily, as if it would help any after she’s already made the request, and Garp just nods.

“What is he for you, sir?” she asks on the boat traveling to the worst prison in the world, and what he doesn’t say is enough. 

Isuka remembers -

That she wouldn’t have become this if not for Draw’s lies. 

That although she doesn’t regret learning to fight, and learning to use her skills in pursuit of defending the innocent, being a marine didn’t make her just.

That the coat on her back was always heavy, and for all the reverence attached to the symbols stitched there it is nothing but dyed threads, in the end - nothing but idolatry, and for so many who wore it their intent was hollow.

That when she asks why she gets a thousand non-answers until they finally admit it, that Ace is the son of infamous Pirate King Gol D. Roger, that they are executing him to put an end to his (cursed, they say, and she has the hardest time not punching them in the face) bloodline. That they will kill a man for being born, and likely doom hundreds more in the crossfire, over something so inexplicably stupid it would be funny if it wasn't staring her in the face.

That her job is to protect innocent people, the best that she can, and this - this cannot be her best. She is better, or she is meant to be better, or she was better, and whatever it is she owes more than what she’s paying, right now.

That her mother had a dream, but was turned to ash at the hands of someone the Navy deemed just, and now here is Isuka hesitating because - why, again? Because she needs somewhere to return to? But she’d been offered somewhere, and she’d declined. 

Chances. She just hopes Ace will reach back, this time, but even if he doesn’t, and she doubts he will - her mind is made up.

Two weeks isn’t much time. Isuka will make do.

She calls all the people she knows, first, and pulls every string and favour she possibly can to get her former crew by her side. She talks to Domino and gets as close as she can to the other woman, and learns in the process that Impel Down has ‘five’ layers but, in truth, there are six.

(“More sake?” Isuka offers, an offer which is accepted. “Six layers? How on earth do you get to the sixth?”

“Oh, it’s simple really,” Domino hiccups, and Isuka clasps her hands and listens.)

They’re sending a Vice Admiral and his fleet to oversee the transfer, she learns - one, Vice Admiral Onigumo, a marine with a good record. They’re keeping Ace on the sixth level, but the transfer will of course have to happen on the first level. 

Isuka isn’t going to break Ace out of Impel Down. She’ll be there, of course, but she won’t be making her move while Ace is inside. It really is such a goddamn stroke of luck that Onigumo is one of the Vice Admirals being called - Yelena is under his command, and though she’s not exactly trusted she’s mostly ignored. Russell tells her that he can arrange to be transferred to Onigumo, as well, which Isuka agrees to immediately.

An entire fleet can’t be handled on their lonesome. How unfortunate that many of the ships will experience rather destructive explosions, and that the cannons will start malfunctioning - some idiot must have messed with the gunpowder. 

And, meanwhile - Gallium, Bel, and Clover make it to Vice Admiral Momonga’s command. Morbidezza sneaks his way into the ranks of Impel Down guards. Kiwi will be on one of the fleets making its way to Marineford, and she’ll happen to slip away. 

And then there’s Isuka. 

She’s capable of picking locks, but nothing her pins can do can beat the speed of a key, and they’ll certainly have Ace in seastone, which won’t break even under the force of her haki. Keys are kept on the Warden, the Vice-Warden, and with Domino. She will notice if they go missing, or if Isuka tries to take them, but with how Isuka is planning it she’ll be too late to do anything once she realizes. 

On the day of transfer, Isuka accompanies Garp to Impel Down but not to level six. Instead, she spars with Domino and laughs at the story the other woman tells her about some particularly irritating prisoners, and thinks about the horrific conditions she’s been told about - starvation, heat, cold, pain. This, here, this prison she’s standing in; this is one shining monument of the Navy’s cruelty, of how little they value life if considered criminal. There are people dead and disintegrated beneath her feet and Domino laughs about shoving prisoners' heads in pots of boiling water, as though it’s just funny. What monstrous things they will let slide, for the sake of justice. 

Domino is sweet, and competent, and Isuka knows she’ll regret the betrayal. Isuka knows she’ll regret doing nothing even more.

“Ah, I have to go,” Domino says through chuckles at last. “Boa Hancock is visiting and I need to be there.”

“Oh - I should leave too, then,” Isuka says, baits, makes to stand up and Domino - as she thought - hurriedly waves her into sitting back down.

“No, stay! Relax a bit. I’ve heard that sailing under the Hero is rather stressful, and the couches here are probably a lot better than anything on a ship.”

She’d rather be in even her old, tiny room than be in any luxury within Impel Down. Nevertheless, Isuka laughs and agrees, and at Domino’s assurance that it’s fine even lies down, stretching out and closing her eyes. She waits for the door to click closed, and for all presences to fade, in order to get up. 

From within a pocket in her coat, Isuka fishes out a baby Den-Den. “Morbidezza?” she whispers. “Where are you?”

“Going down, Captain,” Morbidezza whispers back. The eye stalks blink harshly, and then he breathes, “It’s getting warmer.”

“You’re probably in the right direction, then,” Isuka murmurs. “Keep searching. I’m going to see how I can help you.”

The break room where she is connects to the offices of level one, in Impel Down. Isuka stretches out her senses, straining them as far as she can go. Domino and Magellan and Hannyabal, an approaching trio with one bouncy-bright and stuck to the stony one, trailed by a stately presence. Guards, likely watching the wall of monitors she’d seen, but some too relaxed to be doing much at all. Clearly, they don’t take their jobs seriously.

That might make this a bit easier.

For someone like Isuka, it’s as easy as opening the door. Some look up, but quickly dismiss her when they spot who it is - she even receives a few waves. Isuka waves back, forcing a smile.

“What are you guys doing?” she asks. “Everything quiet?”

“As usual, miss,” one says. “Nothing ever happens in here. I mean, sometimes there’s a riot or whatever, but it clears up fast.”

Looking at the monitor feed - a good chunk of which displays rooms filled with lava, or ice, or desert - Isuka can see why. “Well, you might get some excitement today,” she offers. “Reportedly, Boa Hancock is coming.”

Excitement ripples. “Her? Really?”

“I heard she’s a legendary beauty! Like, super cute!”

“When is she coming?”

“Now.”

“Henry, switch to the lobby feed!” somebody yells. “I don’t care about the prisoners - I want to see Hancock!”

“Yeah, switch to the lobby! Nobody does anything anyway!”

Isuka crosses her arms and watches as a video feed of Boa Hancock is enlarged, stretching out to cover all the other screens. She’s wearing a long, furry cloak that trails down to the ground, and a yellow dress adorned with red frills that clings to the curve of her waist and flows down to her ankles. Her heels click as she walks, and when somebody manages to catch a frame of her face, everybody sighs dreamily.

She is beautiful. Her hair is silky and thick, the pitch black of night. The set of her mouth is soft and her eyes are big and dark. She’s also, undeniably, the stony person moving at the borderline of her senses.

The third, then - who could that be? Isuka eyes the cloak with new curiosity. Somebody is sneaking into Impel Down. Somebody else is planning something.

The video abruptly cuts off when Domino asks Hancock to take off her clothes, which earns a round of disappointed sighs. Reluctantly, people start switching back to the main feed. 

“Damn,” someone says. “I was hoping we’d get to see bare skin.”

“Stupid Den-Dens. They can be so sleepy sometimes.”

“You’d think they’d do their damn jobs.”

This said by a man lounging with a slice of cake - Isuka resolutely ignores them, as she focuses on the bouncy presence which is rapidly leaving. Somebody is actively going down, and going in - for what? For who? 

Well, if she happens to make life a little easier for somebody other than her crewmate, Isuka isn’t going to complain. Discreetly, she checks the door - locked. Hancock and her entourage vanish from Isuka’s senses. She should have time.

Five minutes later and Isuka is ripping all the alarms out of their sockets, leaving the monitors be for the moment, and shushing the Den-Den Mushi on her way out. Hers starts to ring as she’s making her way to the primary communications room.

“Morbidezza?”

“Somebody’s broken into Impel Down, Captain,” Morbidezza gasps. “I heard guards shouting about it.”

Isuka nods. “I know.”

“What do we do?”

“Make their life easy,” Isuka tells him, and hangs up.

Impel Down uses multiple command systems, one for each layer - it ensures that, should one fail, the others won’t be affected. The World Government is willing to spend ludicrous sums on maintaining each, extreme environment, all to keep their prisoners locked in. However, communications all go to and from the top - efficiency, after all, is rather important in a prison, but it has its risks.

She’ll join her crewmate shortly. She will, however, do this one thing first.

The room is in such a tizzy that they don’t even notice when she slips in, unimpeded by neither the lock on the handle nor the guards stationed out front. Isuka slides her pins back into her shorts pocket, closing the door on the sight of the bodies. Her fist goes black and the first people who notice are too late to stop their comrades from dropping like flies.

Isuka grabs every Den-Den she can see in the room, shushing them all. She withdraws her sword and digs into the stone wall, carving out a thick slab to put the snails in. For added security, she piles all the bodies in front, and then sets several tables on top. 

Main lift control is a room guarded by two and manned by one - the last people on the first level. Isuka clears all three out in a few minutes, then calls the secondary lift up. “Morbidezza,” she says, and her Den-Den comes to life. “Floor?”

“Hunting around number three, Captain.”

“I’m coming down for you, then.”

The lift rattles as she rides it down. It’s a short trip to level three, something nicknamed between guards and prisoners alike as “Starvation Hell”. Isuka steps out onto the desiccated bones of people who had died, and knows immediately that she’s going to hate being here.

While Morbidezza isn’t the type for combat, Isuka doesn’t have the same qualms. So, she enters with all the confidence that she shouldn’t have, closing the door with a decisive thunk, and sets about causing as much destruction as she can. Monitors, control panels. People, too, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake. 

“It’s not here, Captain,” Morbidezza says once she reaches him in the storage room. “I think it might be on the floor below us. That’s the Blazing Hell. If they’re going to use his boat… ”

“... it might be as firewood,” Isuka finishes. The Blazing Hell - she’s heard stories. “Alright. Wait for me by the lift.”

“... what? Why?”

“I’m going down to fetch that boat,” Isuka says, turning on her heel. “I’m also going to engage whatever drain system they have down there, if they have one. While I do that, you’ll have to sneak it up and to the first floor. Put it in the main lift control room, and stay there.”

“You’re not going to be safe there,” Morbidezza whispers, voice going scratchy with urgency. “It’s called the Blazing Hell for a reason.”

“Trust me,” Isuka says, and ruffles his hair. “I’ll be just fine. Let’s get moving.”

She rides the lift down with Morbidezza anxiously chewing on his nails. Isuka thinks of all the people who must be suffering, over the pits of fire and boiling blood - of what must have died, to provide that much blood - and allows her rage to suffuse her totally, to narrow her focus until her skin is armoured and black. As soon as the lift hits solid ground, Isuka climbs out and stretches her haki out, looking for a clear path.

“Wait for me,” she instructs, and begins to run. 

Shielded, she sprints through the pits of the blazing hell. Isuka gathers all the strength in her legs and leaps off the edge of one platform, soaring clear through the air and catching the next, stone crumbling beneath her forceful landing. It sizzles behind her as it melts.

Garp had made her - and Koby and Helmeppo, but seeing as Isuka was stronger she’d been put through harsher exercise - endure some truly hellish drills, pushing the limits of her physical capabilities. Now Isuka puts it to use betraying everything she used to stand for, everything she’d slide the coat on her shoulders for and patrol the high seas to do. Now, Isuka knocks prison guards out and wonders what she’ll be called after all this. No way they’ll allow her to keep the moniker of Nailer.

Perhaps she’ll take her own. Her mother wouldn’t want her to be tied down by such a thing, and Isuka certainly won’t be a Navy girl after all that she’s committed.

Morbidezza’s guess was right, she realizes. Isuka hefts the boat up onto her back, and starts to sprint. With no person to report back to, it doesn’t matter anymore if she’s seen by anyone other than prisoners - so she just starts running, taking the most direct route.

“Take it!” she yells, when she sees him waiting, pursued by a small army’s worth of people. Isuka flings the boat at him and doesn’t wait to see if he catches it; the grinding of steel on steel tells her well enough. She’s busy mowing down guard after guard, the coating on her knuckles more than enough to knock out simple grunts as she runs back in. 

Level 4 runs on a massive fire, fed by a stream of firewood coming from the prisoners, and a stream of bodies that also comes from the prisoners. But they can’t just have a huge fire burning without any safety precautions, should something go horribly wrong.

Isuka turns on the sprinklers, and waits to hear the splash of water before smashing in the entire control panel, taking particular joy in destroying the dials controlling the intensity of the heat (who would want to switch it to, of all things, a higher setting?). Then she breaks lift controls on the fourth floor.

“Morbidezza,” she says. “Get to the monitor room for a moment?”

There’s the faintest sounds of movement, and then Morbidezza is saying, “I’m here.”

“Look for one of the jailers,” Isuka instructs. “Blond woman, wears sunglasses and a long coat and this big hat. She has a whip with her.”

A pause. “Found her, I think. She’s headed for the lift on level 6.”

Isuka nods. “Go to main lift control and listen to what is requested, then tell me what floor she’s going to.”

More movement. Isuka waits, and waits, until - “Oh. Uh, 4. Same as you. So is the warden, and the vice-warden, and the pretty lady.”

Ah. 

Well. 

“They probably won’t be coming here,” Isuka reassures. “They’ll be preparing for a transfer, so they’ll probably go to the warden’s office. Thanks, Morbidezza - stay in lift controls for now, okay?”

“... please don’t get poisoned,” Morbidezza breathes and then hangs up. 

“I won’t,” Isuka tells empty air, and slips her Den-Den away. 

She needs those keys. She’ll just have to chance a run-in with the warden, and hope that she comes out of it alive. Closing her eyes, Isuka searches for Domino’s presence - swarming guards, beasts, Domino making her way towards Isuka, Magellan, the intruder backed up by a few others. A fight brews in the air.

She can’t afford to focus on the conflict right now. As much as Isuka might not want whoever else is breaking in to be killed, she needs to prioritize. So, Isuka heads for the same place as Domino, slipping discreetly into the warden’s office and leaning against the wall.

Not much time feels like it passes before Domino’s footsteps become audible. Isuka listens. “Communications are down,” Domino is saying. “Someone else is here, not just Straw-Hat. Start the transfer process immediately and go as fast as you physically can, we can’t afford delays - ”

Shit. Isuka really thought she’d have more time. The door opens and as soon as Domino crosses the threshold Isuka is kicking it closed, the harsh sound jarring.

Domino barely gets a chance to turn around. Isuka lunges, her arms wrapping around Domino’s throat in a strong chokehold, and they go tumbling to the ground. Before she can react, Isuka has her pinned down, grip strong enough that she doesn’t even need haki. Her elbow comes up and then there’s the harsh sound of the point slamming into Domino’s temple, effectively knocking her out.

The Den-Den is still making noise. “Jailer Domino!” someone yells. “Jailer, are you there - ”

Isuka grabs the fallen receiver and hangs up with a firm click.

“Shh,” she instructs the Den-Den, which blinks and obediently dozes off. Satisfied, Isuka plucks the ring of keys off of Domino’s belt and leaves the warden’s office, locking the door for good measure.

“Morbidezza,” she calls as she starts to run, keys in hand and jingling with every movement. “Tell me where the transfer is. What are they doing?”

“They’re already moving, Captain,” Morbidezza whispers. “They’ve requested level one.”

She’ll get there first, she swears. “Stall them. Delay them for as long as you can. As soon as you have to let them up, start moving the boat.”

“Got it.”

Without the heat impeding her, Isuka can easily cut through level four, stabbing anybody who gets in her way. She sprints past beasts and people alike, leading them after her on a mad chase, the keys ringing incessantly in her hands, her hair bouncing with every step and she blows it out of her face. Morbidezza can only keep them out for so long and time is ticking, ticking, ticking. How long does she still have - ?

Danger is frost nipping at her back and Isuka is jumping before she registers that the ground beneath her is melting stone, puddles of foul-smelling poison overtaking where she’d been about to step. All eyes turn to her as the keys jingle and sing and she can see the gears turning in Magellan’s head, the pieces connecting.

Isuka catches eyes on Boa Hancock, standing there, looking furious at being cuffed. Her presence is unshakeable bedrock and mountain and Isuka calls before she can think differently - “Which key unlocks your cuffs?”

Two sets of eyes light up, Hancock’s and who Isuka notes to be Straw-Hat. 

“The largest blue one!” Hancock shouts and Isuka dodges the incoming blasts of poison without thought, coating her feet with haki to run safely up to her newest ally. She scrambles for the blue key and slides it into the lock, twisting until with a click both the cuffs come off - just in time for the horde to come charging up.

“Can you handle them?” Isuka screams over the cacophony.

“I shall!” Hancock yells in return. “Take Luffy and go!”

She catches sight of Straw-Hat, stubbornly holding strong even though half his shirt is melted off. Isuka grabs the boy’s wrist and yanks him into the lift with her. “Morbidezza!” she yells up into the intercom. “Level one!”

His response is inaudible, but the lift grinds up with a groan of steel. Isuka chances a last glance down. Hancock is, quite effectively, handling the fight - as she watches, her black-coated femur comes down with a war cry and Magellan is thrown back like he’s weightless.

“Marine lady!” Straw-Hat yells in her face - she has not yet let go of his wrist. “Let me go! I need to get Ace!”

Isuka fumes. “The transfer is already happening!” she yells right back. “If he were still down there I’d have called for level six!”

“It’s what?!” he says. “Already?”

“Already,” she affirms. “We should get there in time to intercept the process.”

He looks at her dumbly. “What?”

“... we’ll get Fire-Fist. Ace,” she clarifies when the epithet doesn’t seem to ring a bell.

Straw-Hat sighs in relief. “Oh, okay!” he says. “Who’re you, marine lady? You seem nice. How d’you know Ace?”

“Isuka,” she says. “He’s a… ” What is she supposed to say? She thinks of him reaching for her, of her turning her back. Of the fact that she’s now about to be fired for him - it’s funnier, if she just thinks of it as getting fired. “Friend.”

“Oh, you’re one of his crew?”

“What? No,” she says. “I’m a marine. I’m not one of his crew.”

“But you wanna be?”

She hesitates. Straw-Hat is giving her a look that is far too knowing for her taste. “No,” she concludes, hesitant, and then reaffirms to herself, “No.”

“Then what?”

It’s really not that complicated, when she thinks about it. Isuka shrugs, feeling all the weight on her shoulders reluctantly move with her, and finally lets go of Straw-Hat’s wrist. The keys clang. “To see him free. That’s all.”

He tilts his head, as though thinking it over. Or, perhaps, he's thinking her over. It’s what any clever pirate would do, though she doubts he’s doing it because of that. Then he grins and says, “Great! We’ll get him out and then we’ll have a feast!”

Despite herself, she huffs a laugh. “Sure. Why not.” Ace always did love his food - he’d enjoy a feast. “Okay. Feast after this.”

They reach level one. The door opens. Isuka strides out.

“Hey, where’re we going?”

“To get Fire-Fist’s boat. Ace's boat,” she adds, again. It’s strange, to say his name. She finds that she doesn’t mind it. “Listen, Straw-Hat. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll give you the keys and fend off the marines. You need to free Fire - you need to free Ace, take him and the boat, and escape. My crew and I will handle the rest.”

“That sounds dumb!” Straw-Hat argues. “You have to come with us! You said there’d be a feast!”

“Well, have the feast without me, then! It doesn’t matter!”

“Yes it does!”

“No it doesn’t! Morbidezza - thanks. Stick behind us.” She shoves the boat into Straw-Hat’s hands, and he takes it even while shouting at her.

“Yes it does! You’re Ace’s friend, you gotta be there!”

What is she doing? They’re about to go fight a vice admiral, blow up an entire fleet, and potentially break a prisoner out of Impel Down, something that has never happened before in the history of the damn place. And here Isuka is, arguing wholeheartedly with a rookie pirate about the logistics of post-breakout dining. 

She takes a deep breath. It does nothing to soothe her nerves - then again, she quite needs those in order to fight. “Whatever. Fine. We’ll be behind you two. Just - get him, and go.”

His glare is as obstinate as hers, but he says nothing else as they catch sight of the transport party.

“Ace!” Straw-Hat yells. 

“Luffy!” Ace screams back, and his voice sounds weak and hoarse and half-broken and Isuka seethes with levels of fury she’s only ever known at seeing the worst of injustices. 

“Keys, Straw-Hat!” she shouts and shoves them into his hands. 

“Get to Vice Admiral Onigumo!” somebody yells and it’s a race, then, for the opening gates - they’re closer, but Isuka is fast and so is Straw-Hat. She’s caught up to them by the time the first marine has stepped past the threshold and Isuka sinks her blade into someone’s shoulder, blood spraying when she yanks her rapier out.

Straw-Hat, Isuka finds out quickly, fights like a mad bull, with the same level of noise to match it. Between his destruction and her swordplay, they’ve dispatched of the marines by the time they make it halfway on the deck. 

“Russell!” Isuka screams, her throat aching with the force but she knows her crew hears her. “Yelena! Everybody!”

For a moment, there is nothing but the frantic shouts of marines as they converge upon their place. Then, like a miracle, explosions rock the waters and ships start going up in flames.

Grinning wildly with relief, Isuka snatches the boat out of Straw-Hat’s hands. “Free Ace,” she orders and doesn’t wait to see him do it as she runs to the edge of the dock and throws it into the water. “Straw-Hat! Go!”

“No!” he snaps, obstinate as he tows Ace to the boat. “You’re coming with us!”

“I’m not!” she snarls. “So take him and - ”

The dock shudders beneath her feet. Alarm shivers down her shoulders and Isuka spins, bringing her rapier up just in time to stop a saber from running her straight through.

Vice Admiral Onigumo stares down at her, mean black eyes glinting from beneath his helmet. “I recognize you,” he fumes and before her eyes he starts to transform, spindly limbs crawling out from his back and his abdomen inflating - a spider, she realizes. “The Nailer Isuka, Draw’s little prodigy. Did you betray him as well?”

All eight swords are coming for her, suddenly, and Isuka weaves and dodges between the black-coated blades, anger temporarily pushed to the side. She jabs at his arms and legs where she can, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. Onigumo just keeps coming, so fast that it’s a struggle for her and her haki to keep up. 

“Were you planning this the whole time?” Onigumo growls. One blade catches her and she barely manages to shield herself before she’s flung back, flipping to catch herself, heels scraping. Four blades come down onto her lone one and she teeters dangerously, teeth grit. Her breath comes out in pants. “To turn traitor on the Navy? On our justice? Do you realize what you have just done, you goddamn blind little girl?!”

And he - he is the one who is telling her this?

“You have the gall,” Isuka hisses. “You? You are the one accusing me of being unjust?”

Her voice rises to a sonorous roar. Isuka holds her ground and shoves back, beside herself with sheer rage - she swears her vision tints. 

“I know what people like you do!” she screams, venting out the full force of all her suppressed fury. Time after time, she knew it kept happening and why did it take her so long to yell back at their orders, again? Why did it take her so long to just disobey? “I know what you’re like! You’ll burn down a village of innocents to capture one person you deem guilty!”

Her blade sounds, a ringing clash that drowns out even the blood rushing in her ears. Compared to the surge of her emotions, every step in her fight feels absolute, totally certain. She drives it into Onigumo’s arm, into the joint of the elbow. She twists, cruel, grinding, and yanks it out with a snarl. 

“And then you’ll send the pirate here!” Black coats her forearms, her hands, glinting meanly under the sunlight. “To this hell! To suffer through these horrible things! And you sit on your fucking hands when civilians are being stolen from their homes - ”

Screw it all. The scarf in a knot around her collar, the coat constantly weighing on her back, everything the Navy tied her up with because she was a lost girl with nowhere to go -

“Fuck you!” Isuka yells. “Fuck you and fuck Draw and fuck your colleagues, you spineless bastard! You want to call me blind? My sight is the clearest it has ever been!”

Shoulders, legs. Isuka knows all the places to target and she aims for them with a gory vengeance that has others around her flinching. More limbs means more parts to make useless and more useless parts means more ways to trip, to fall into the churning sea tossing about flotsam and bodies. She doesn’t think she has ever been so focused, so certain, in what she is doing.

Chills prickle down her back. Without hesitation, Isuka twists and ducks back and reaches for the clasp of her coat, tearing it open. Her fingers find the edge, fist tight into it, and with all her force she yanks. 

And she flings it directly into the path of Vice Admiral Momonga’s blades, shredding the fabric, the coat of arms, the golden tassels. All of that weight, all of that burden, falls to the ground, soundless and suddenly losing substance without shoulders to bear it, between them.

“That is what I think of you,” Isuka spits. “That is what I think of your justice.”

She lunges before Onigumo can react, her shoulders free and so, so light. She raises her rapier and the tip gleams ebony and she plunges it into his abdomen with a spray of blood, piercing. Momonga is behind her but Isuka knows that Hancock is, too, and her cry echoes with those of hundreds of others, freed prisoners charging out to see the sky and sea. So Isuka tears apart Onigumo’s torso, riddling it with bloody holes and bits of organs, until he cannot be anything save for well and truly dead. 

“Russell!” she calls into the sky, knowing he will hear. “Bel, Gallium - everybody! Take the remaining Navy ships and go!”

“Yes, Captain!” seven voices echo back. Hancock is doing her absolute best to turn Momonga to stone and is succeeding. Isuka leaps forwards to help as crowd on the dock thins out, prisoners rushing to freedom on the current with marines in pursuit. Her blade sinks through shoulders and legs, clearing the path.

“Straw-Hat!” Isuka snaps. “Both of you - leave! Have your feast when you find your crews!”

“No!” two voices yell right back. 

“You’re coming with us!” Straw-Hat insists, an obstinate glow. “You’re Ace’s friend!”

“Isuka!” Ace shouts and his voice is hoarse but he burns so, so bright behind her, free and out at sea. “Come with us!”

She pivots on her heel. He’s holding his hand out, waiting. Ships have already begun to move but they remain stubbornly anchored, refusing to go while she’s still on land. 

“Leave!” Hancock says. “I will handle him!”

Isuka swallows back her words. Ace looks battered. There are nasty bruises on his chest, on his face. She hadn’t seen him while he was imprisoned, too busy plotting his escape - she didn’t know what he’d been through. In her scenarios, she hadn’t thought he’d offer. He’d be long gone, and she would be fighting her way out, but he’d be free and it would be worth it.

Her pants echo in her ears, drowning out the ongoing fight. His grey eyes bore into her own, still with the same hope they'd had two years ago, not at all diminished by her past refusal. Her crew is making their escape, and she's still standing behind, still watching their backs instead of just going.

What is she even leaving behind, at this point? Her rapier is by her side, and her crew will be too, and her ideals are always in her heart. Everything else can burn.

Face to the ocean and back to land, face to the person who had defined years of her life without knowing - Isuka sheathes her blade and, impulsively, impossibly, runs.

He finds her out at sea, and as Ace approaches her boat - a small vessel, enough for her and her crewmates, the flag fluttering at the top splashed with a riot of colours in the shape of a feather - he sees that she’s already turned towards him, watching.

“I can never surprise you,” he says, tipping his hat up to see her in full, and Isuka’s smile is a small, wry, beautiful thing.

“Instinct,” she says, and leaps down to join him in the Striker, her steps light as a bird’s. She wears darker colours now, no longer stuck in the Navy whites and blues but instead dressed in deep browns and royal violets. A single green feather dangles from a silver hoop in her left ear. Isuka the Double-Crosser, as deemed by the Navy; Passedea Isuka, as she proudly goes by, stubbornly refusing any epithet or name but her own. 

She’d been stunning, that day in Impel Down. His heart had leapt up into his throat when he saw the bob of her red hair, the distinctive dance-like movement of her between all those marines, her rapier’s blade flashing. Time had changed her and she fought with a surefooted grace.

She stands taller, now, than three years ago when they were eighteen and barely adults - but so does he, and so Ace easily sweeps her into his arms, snickering when she flails. “Come one, you must have seen that coming,” he teases.

“My haki doesn’t tell me that,” she hisses in return, cheeks going red as she tugs on his hair in retaliation and Ace laughs and laughs, the kind that aches at his stomach. Eventually she drops the anger and starts laughing too, leaning her head on his bicep. Her hair is soft and her gaze just as, deep brown eyes blinking up at him, sweetly affectionate even though they never say it out loud.

It’s his turn to flush, under her simple warmth that his flames can’t emulate, under the gentleness with which she takes off her gloves and touches his shoulder with bare fingers. Goosebumps rise beneath her palm.

“Ace,” she says, and it’s always something to hear his name out of her mouth. She doesn’t spit it out or curse it - she says it with the sort of sweetness he doesn’t deserve, but thinks he wants, now. Thinks that it’s not so bad, to want that sort of thing. 

“Yeah, ‘suka?” he asks, reaching for her forehead and sweeping away a stray lock of hair - she’d normally puff up her cheeks, and try to blow it away, and his heart warms whenever he gets to do it for her. 

“Why is what feels like your entire crew, and that of your brother’s, approaching us?”

He tries for a contrite smile. “Ah, celebration of the day I almost got executed?”

“Ace.”

She’s scowling, but she doesn’t do it for long, just tips her head back and sighs. In moments, the Whitebeard fleet and the Straw Hats converge on their ships, his and hers, and voices are accosting them.

It happened last year as well, he recalls. Whitebeard found them, or rather the entire crew found them, and upon hearing of what Isuka had done forcibly dragged her into their celebration, ending with several (most) commanders calling her their sister. She’d chosen to sail with her own crew, on their own vessel, and had pushed a scrap of paper into Ace’s hands before she left.

Find me, she said. Got it, Fire-Fist?

Aren’t we past epithets at this point?

Find me, Ace. I mean it.

And he’d agreed. Her vivre card stays securely with him at all times, and he knows that his own is always by her side. Now, the piece of paper insistently pulls for her, as if Ace could go anywhere else.

Isuka’s crew, the Crossbills, are already partying with everybody else. They’re the only two on the sidelines. 

So, Ace does the logical thing - he pulls her closer and leaps up onto the Moby Dick, to the cheers of all aboard.