:)

But when he saw you, standing strong, wielding your blade and Haki, taking down foes with a swiftness he found as mesmerizing as the ocean wind itself. Fierce in battle, yet gentle when chosen so. Shanks had watched you with harbored fondness and a kind smile, noticeable to all except for the one person he was gawking at, as if they were his entire world.

Beckman scolded him, and Yasopp screamed in panic when Shanks almost lost his other arm because he was distracted. Shanks could care less, though. Especially when he was admiring your cunning form as you-

Wait.

You were so focused, a Marine took advantage, striking in your blind spot before you could even prevent it.. And he was stuck. Physically? No. He could’ve moved, run, saved you. But he froze in shock.

It was like time slowed, like a clock in the distant began to slowly tick down the seconds.. "No.." The strike, the scream, and the downfall of everyone around them when his Conquerors' Haki was released.

Benn had grabbed you as quickly as he could and rushed you toward the ship. Hongo met him on deck and quickly began bandaging all the damage. Shanks? His carefree demeanor, which was normally ingrained in him, was gone. He slowly walked onto the deck, absent-minded until he locked eyes with your limp body.

Eyes fluttering and a sad whimper every time Hongo applied a disinfectant to your gash. That's when he locked in. Crouching beside their worried doctor, he had taken your hand in his, squeezing and muttering. "You'll be okay.. It's okay.. Come on now, sweetheart." That's also what he was telling himself right now in his bed.

Mind aching with pangs of longing, guilt, and worry. He couldn't rest. Not yet. That's when the strained groan came, and the creak of his bed. Shanks had pushed himself upwards and sat up, shifting to the edge of his bed and tugging on a proper shirt and boots, he warily exited his quarters with the stealth of a cat sneaking toward the cream. He didn't want to hear Benn's mouth if he caught him sneaking through the ship, "Captain's rest", "tip-top shape", blah, blah, blah..

It took less than five minutes for Shanks to reach the medbay. When he arrived, he carefully pawed the door open and peered his head through the crack. To his luck, Hongo had gone to his quarters. All that was left was.. You. Heavily breathing in what was most likely discomfort. Sweat beading at your forehead and a disgruntled look on your weary face. "Hey, sweetheart, you.."

Maybe he should let you rest. Maybe he should turn tail and stop himself from getting all mushy. But it was too late. "H-Huh?.." A quiet grunt and a questioning grumble came from your lips. Bleary vision, taking in the sight of a redhead standing in the doorway like an awkward toddler who just threw up.

"Captain?.."

"Yes. It's me."

He hastily replied, entering the medbay and gently closing the door behind him, then he stepped toward you. His eyes softened as he took a seat on the edge of the examination table. "Sorry for coming so late, I just.." How was he supposed to explain he couldn't catch a wink of sleep just because he was worrying himself into insomnia?

"I couldn't sleep. Not after all of that. I.. I was worried." "I am worried." He corrected, his only hand coming up to shyly scratch at the back of his neck. Sure, he admitted silly things like missing you, looking for you, or just enjoying the time he spent bugging you. But.. Worrying was a step forward. It showed he cared to a deeper level. One that was almost embarrassing if Shanks had a radar for embarrassing. But, normally, he didn't-

"Worried? About me?.." A low rasp of surprise left your mouth at his revelation. Shanks didn't worry. Not about much, or you. He had faith in you.. And yet, here he was, pouting at you with an honest look, a worry-wart who had a heart full of yearning would give. That caused a laugh to escape you.It was a bit painful, you clutched your stomach and lay your head back on your pillow, but you smiled. It felt nice to know Shanks cared.

"It's okay.. You don't have to worry. I'm fine-"

"I want to worry." His interjection was firm. Honest. And his expression was serious to match, as if he was saying 'don't object' with his thin lips and furrowed brows. "Let me worry."

He grumbled at you with the sudden angst of a teenager. And suddenly, he began to move, nudging you to subtly shift so he could lie beside you. It seemed like an odd request, but you couldn't object, especially when it didn't fully seem like a request.. He laid down beside you. Still. Silent. His eyes fixated on the ceiling, and thoughts ran through his mind.

Eventually, whether you both noticed or not, your hands ended up intertwined. Holding hands with your captain, huh.. Odd thing that most pirates wouldn't say, but for some reason it felt right.

His thumb rubbed over your knuckles, a rhythmic pattern, something soothing to both of you..

This was nice. In a bout of exhaustion and comfort, your head lulled against his. Shanks said nothing. But his head returned the favor.

Now, he didn't have to worry.

He just had to lie here and embrace what he wanted for so long.

You looked toward the large curtains and ran your fingers over his arm. “Mm I didn’t close the curtains last night and you haven’t moved enough for me to do it since then.”

He frowned, opening his eyes for a second to look at where he was lying. He shifted his weight to free his arms but didn’t move off you. “Oh, sorry. Makes sense why I had good dreams then.”

You brushed hair away from his cheek. “What did you dream about?”

“Don’t remember,” he mumbled. “But it was nicer than usual.”

With the conversation from yesterday, you truly weren’t surprised that he’d been tired enough to not move for hours on end. He still looked faintly bleary-eyed as he picked his head up, leaning forward only slightly to press his lips to yours.

The kiss was lazy and warm, still half in the realm of dreams, and Ace leaned closer, tongue pressing into your mouth with an addictive indulgence. You hummed in response, free hand continuing to brush through his hair.

He shifted further over you, heat saturating through his skin and you let him; your legs tangled in the blankets and him in equal measure.

His hand moved under your top, hesitant for a second, and then bolder when you allowed it. The touch shouldn't have felt so novel after everything that had happened recently but warmth still curled low in your stomach. He traced patterns against your skin, creeping over your stomach and then moving higher still until his palm brushed over your ribs. You hummed, pleased, against his mouth and that seemed to destroy any uncertainty in him, the kiss turning burning. 

For a second, you tilted your head away to catch your breath. Brief thoughts flashed through your mind of how ridiculous this would look from the outside but your lips were still tingling and Ace was trailing attention over your throat, then sliding lower along your body, and you found you couldn’t be bothered too much.

He nipped at your hip bone and you jumped, making him laugh. You caught his jaw before he could sneak further down and pulled him back up for another kiss. Your nails ran over his ribs and he made a soft groaning sound that pooled deep in your chest.

You shifted your hand higher, slipping over his shoulders when he suddenly hissed with pain, jolting away from your touch.

Panic laced through you like a knife. “Are you okay?”

Ace tried to give you a lop-sided smile that didn’t quite work. “Yeah fine. Sorry. Don’t know why that hurt so much.”

He rolled his shoulder and you took the second to glance over him toward his back. You’d remembered about the big injury – how could you forget it – but there was other damage there you couldn’t quite make out.

“I must have brushed against something,” you said, lightly kissing his cheek in apology. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said, moving back toward you for an open-mouthed kiss you returned only briefly.

He adjusted closer, seemingly wanting to continue, but you broke the kiss early and slipped out from under him. You hadn’t really looked over his body to map out where the worst damage was but now, you let yourself gaze over his back to find what you’d touched in case you’d made it worse.

His shoulders grew tight the second you were behind him but he didn’t turn. He just brought his legs forward to sit and let you look.

The morning light spilled over his back, catching every mark in unfortunate detail. Bruises bloomed dark beneath sun-bronzed skin, ugly shadows that climbed from his shoulder toward his neck. Undoubtedly what you’d touched accidentally.

They crept further down, darkening against the deep scratches and deeper cuts that marred what remained of his enormous tattoo. Fire had burned straight through most of it but some of it had escaped untouched. You sighed and leaned down to press a kiss on one of the undamaged edges.

Ace startled slightly, turning his head to see what you were doing.

“I want to see this tattoo properly,” you said.

He grinned and flexed his shoulders forward though that didn’t really show the tattoo off well anymore. “It’s cool right? I sat still for hours to get it done.”

You kissed the side of his ribs where the tattoo curved around untouched. The smell of burnt flesh caught at the back of your throat, stubborn and unpleasant beneath the familiar warmth of his skin. It should have made you pull away.

Instead, you pressed another kiss there and felt him laugh beneath your mouth.

“You can show it to me when you’re back. I'm sorry for hurting you.”

“It’s not that bad,” he muttered, clearly annoyed. “I just forgot about it. I don’t understand why they’re still sticking around when I have my fire.”

“It’s probably because they played a part in your death,” you told him. “So they’re stuck even if your fruit is present.”

He groaned and flung himself over, twisting onto his back to stare at the ceiling. “It’s annoying.”

You kissed his jaw, tickling your fingers very carefully over his chest. “We can continue in a month,” you promised. “When the ritual works.”

Ace huffed. “That’s too long.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine waiting,” you teased. “And it’ll probably feel much better when you’re not in pain.”

“It’s not even painful anymore. Just tiring.”

Something in your chest ached at that. You brushed the hair from his eyes and kissed his nose. “Soon. I’ve been trying something this morning actually. Theoretically, I don’t need all the chalk to use my fruit but it makes it more focused. If I’m going to lose the fruit anyway, I may as well try force it, right?”

“So, you could just give me things?”

“Or thin the barrier enough to send them through without a whole ordeal,” you said.

He propped himself up on his elbows. “Are you sure you’re okay with getting rid of the fruit entirely? Thought you liked having it.”

“I do,” you said. “But the initial reason I ate the thing is long gone.”

“Why’d you do it?”

You smiled, a little forlornly. “Because I thought I could see somebody who was gone. But that’s not how the fruit works and they had already moved on.”

Ace frowned. “That sucks. So, if you bring me back then…”

“That was many years ago. Losing the power changes nothing now but I am going to practise a few things.”

He stared at you and then smiled, the simplest expression that melted you. “Okay,” he said. “As long as your practise has nothing to do with my injuries.”

You reached out to lightly touch the bruise on his cheek. “Not even this one?”

He batted your hand away immediately. “No. That one hurts too much.”

“Then what about this one so I can kiss you more?” Your hand drifted over to his mouth, brushing against the split lip.

His breath stuttered slightly before he answered. “No.”

“Pity.” You leaned in to kiss him sweetly. “Then I suppose I’m resigned to just trying to get pieces of paper to touch you.”

Ace stared after you as you got up and you looked back at him, stretching slightly. “Something wrong?”

“Just thinking,” he said and he sat up fully.

Your gaze lingered on the injury in his chest. That was definitely going to be the biggest problem. If his devil fruit didn’t heal him fast enough… maybe you should consider getting somebody else involved. A regular doctor wouldn’t do much but Ace had mentioned something not too long ago about Marco having healing powers, hadn’t he?

“Sorry,” he said.

You blinked. “What for?”

“You were staring at it,” he said. “I know it’s not pretty but – ”

“Oh no,” you said, firmly shaking your head. “I was thinking about how we can deal with that when you come back. But I don’t know why your fruit allowed you to get so injured in the first place.”

Ace relaxed a little more at your words, smiling loosely. “If you stare this much now, you’re going to like it when I’m all healed.”

You rolled your eyes playfully. “We’ll have to see,” you huffed. “Marco’s healing powers appeared pretty strong. Maybe we should ask him if he’d be able to be there in case…”

“He would, if you told him what you’re going to do.”

“Then I will.”

Ace swung his legs off the bed and rolled his shoulders. “You really think this will work? This whole coming back to life thing?”

“I do.”

“You said you could die.”

You shrugged. “There’s always a chance for that. This is worth it.”

He laughed. “When I first met you, you told me you weren’t going to travel too far for a ghost. Now you're bringing one back to life?”

You stepped closer to him, tilting his head up to you to kiss him again. That was an addictive sensation. “It’s your fault for being so charming.” You ran your fingers over his cheeks to nudge the hair away from his face. “At least you’ll be free of the tether once you’re back too. You can go wherever you want without worrying.”

“You’re going to come with me though, right?” he asked, leaning into the touch. “I don’t want to do the normal thing.”

“Normal thing?”

Ace grinned. “That pirates do. Where I go exploring and leave you sitting somewhere waiting. You should come with me. We can do things together.”

You hummed. “Well, once you’re alive, you’ll have more options than just me.”

Even though you were mostly teasing, the idea stung worse than you cared to admit. You could probably handle it if that was what it came to. Probably… actually, not at all. Losing those bright eyes would cut deep.

Luckily for you, Ace was wholly uninterested in entertaining your worries. “Why would I want that?” he huffed. “What, after all this? Not happening.”

You laughed and kissed his forehead. “Thank you,” you said. “You’re very distracting, do you know that? I can’t get any work done if I keep wanting to touch you.”

“You could touch me in other ways if you want.”

“I will. In a month.”

He groaned and fell back on the bed.

It didn’t take you long to find Robin when you left. It turned out, she was recovering from some injuries of her own but you still found her in the library, happy to discuss your fruit and what she knew of it. It was a lot of what you knew but some things caught you by surprise.

She paged through the journal when you offered it to her. “It’s not an easy fruit to study,” she said. “Especially as it can expend itself. Most of the books I remember were quite clinical about it.”

“And it won’t regrow until the user dies, even if expended,” you acknowledged.

“How did you stumble across it?”

“I paid. A lot.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve heard there’s a black market of fruits out there but I’m surprised the world government didn’t go after this one.”

“It’s too random,” you said. “Unreliable. Most people see no use in it because you can’t even choose which ghost gets bound to you and even if awoken, well, not everybody is lucky enough to find a spirit they want to use it on.”

“You’ve got good luck then,” Ace said from where he’d sprawled over the table, having fallen asleep not too long ago.

“I do,” you told him.

Robin tapped at a spot on the page. “The same space as the death is going to be difficult.”

“Really? Of the two, I think it’s the easiest.”

“What’s the second requirement?”

You grimaced and gestured for her to turn the page. “I need the same space and the source.”

“Which would require you to be within touching distance of an admiral.”

Ace lifted his head, frowning. “What?”

“Technically his devil fruit,” you said. “His magma will be enough. Which is not impossible to find if we can wait for a fight.”

“Though the admirals are rarely called out to begin with,” Robin mused.

You glanced towards Ace, nervous for a second as to how he might respond. He was staring into the side of your head and you waited to reassure when he instead smiled lazily, clearly pleased with your attention.

“I can start a few fires,” he suggested. “Maybe they’ll think somebody else got the fruit and come looking?”

“Maybe,” you admitted. “But I don’t think that’s admiral-worthy.”

He shrugged and summoned a small flame between his fingers that Robin immediately looked at. “I can make it pretty big,” he said. “But I need some motivation to do so. I work best for kisses and food.”

You laughed and nudged his hand, and the fire, away from your books. “Very distracting today,” you reiterated.

“Your fault.”

“Why’s Ace causing fires?”

Sabo’s voice caused you to turn your head toward him. He looked exhausted but he perched himself at the table with an easy smile.

“Because he’s bored,” you said.

Ace grumbled something and dropped his head back to the table. You looked fondly toward him and he smiled in response.

“I was thinking of returning to Sphinx Island,” you said to Sabo. “We might need a healer for Ace and I’ve been told the phoenix phoenix fruit is particularly strong.”

“Oh, yes, I can organise you a ship for that. Can he be healed now?”

“No,” Ace grumbled. “He also keeps having his attention stolen.”

You laughed and made a small ball of paper, flicking it toward him because the entire conversation had been about him to begin with. But it didn’t pass through him. It bounced off his arm and rolled across the table.

You stared at it for a second. Wait –

“Hey, that worked!” Ace said. “Nice!”

Your momentary satisfaction was cut off because Sabo’s head snapped to the side so quickly that it looked like he broke his neck. “Did Ace – did Ace just talk?”

Ace sat up straight. “You heard me?”

Sabo didn’t respond to the question. He looked at you and then back toward Ace. “I swear I just heard him shout something.”

“I heard it too,” Robin said, closing the book in front of her. “Clear as a bell.”

“Can they hear me?”

You looked between them but they didn’t respond to Ace’s question and then you looked down at the piece of paper. To send something, you had to thin the boundary between life and death… But things could cross the other way. You had to wonder...

“Alright,” you said. “Well, I didn’t know I could do that.”

Sabo’s expression was brimming with a mix of excitement and grief. “Can you do it again?”

“Let’s see.”

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It – he – descended in front of you as he returned from his flight. Blue fire unfurled against the afternoon sky, each beat of his wings shedding sparks that vanished before they could touch the deck. For a moment he seemed too bright for the world around him, flames painting the white sails in flickering shades of sapphire before the fire retreated and the man was left behind.

You leaned against the railing to watch.

Marco smiled at you like he always did when he caught your gaze. “I’m not sure I like the look in your eyes, yoi.”

You rested a hand playfully against your chest. “What do you mean? I’m just waiting for our captors to return.”

“You’re not our prisoners.”

“Well…”

Ace was certainly not planning on leaving until he succeeded in that ridiculous goal of his and the Spade Pirates had little hope of helping him. Prisoners by chain, no, but circumstance had locked you onto this enormous ship for the foreseeable future.

“You are free to leave,” Marco said and he sounded as though he meant to be reassuring. “But you’ll have to talk to Ace first.”

You shrugged and hopped onto the railing, balancing yourself precariously above it. “I don’t think he’d even notice if I did. But Ace aside, I didn’t know the tori tori fruit had a phoenix variant.”

His smile turned into something prouder at your words. “It does. It’s far from common.”

“It’s remarkable,” you admitted and he definitely wasn’t immune to the praise though he tried to appear blasé about it.

“So I’ve heard.”

The days dragged on and Ace came no closer to murdering Whitebeard. Not even Deuce could really speak to him about it, so trapped in his own head, but you found entertainment in other ways. Most of which eventually ended in watching Marco as he moved around the Moby Dick.

It was an obscenely large ship. Stupidly so, some would say. The Moby Dick felt less like a vessel and more like a floating town. Corridors branched into stairwells and storage rooms that seemed to multiply overnight and more than once you'd walked with complete confidence only to realise you had absolutely no idea where you were. At this point, you trusted your ability to navigate unfamiliar islands more than your ability to navigate the ship.

You stuck to the one path you’d memorised between the general crew quarters and the deck and he was often there too, moving around and offering orders to not only his division but the others too.

He was never quite alone. No sooner had he stepped away from one group and he would be drawn to another like a stag amongst his herd.

They all trusted him. They listened when he talked, raised their heads the second he said their names, and brought every problem to him, regardless of if it was something he was in charge of managing or not.

And he transformed often too. At least once a day, you’d see blue feathers take to the sky, startling bright as he soared around.

Every time you saw it, something old stirred awake inside you. Your eyes tracked him automatically, measuring distance before you realised what you were doing. The height he favoured. How quickly he could gain altitude. Habits learned over years of hunting settled into place before common sense could remind you that you were retired.

Deuce looked at you as though you were crazy when you asked him about Marco the one day. Who else would you talk to? You knew nobody in the actual crew and Deuce had somehow found himself helping out in the first division.

“His bounty is insane,” Deuce said with his voice a bare whisper as though Marco could listen through the walls. “It’s one of the highest I’ve ever seen.”

“You should go through the papers more,” you told him.

It was high. Very much so. But you enjoyed teasing Deuce more than you liked admitting anything to him.

“Everybody on this ship is insane,” he continued. “All of the division commanders are crazy and their captain, even while quite sick, is ridiculously strong. I don’t know what Ace is thinking.”

“He’s up for the challenge,” you said. “It’s a tempting one.”

Deuce’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about? You don’t mean…”

“He’s a phoenix,” you said. “Do you have any idea how difficult that would be to catch? A bird made of fire?”

“You can’t be serious.”

You waved your hand. “No, no. Never. Well… maybe.”

He stared at you for a second and then shook his head. “Please don’t start doing the same thing as Ace. At least he has a devil fruit so he won’t die immediately!”

“Rude. Also, I’m more tempted now.”

“Be untempted.”

“That’s not a word,” you said with a small laugh. “And come on, you don’t even know what I’m implying! I could be saying that I want to sleep with him and that’s the challenge.”

“Don’t do that either?”

You held your hands up in surrender. “Okay. Okay.”

“Thank you.”

“No promises though.”

The conversation ended there, mainly because you were certain Deuce was about to declare you clinically insane. He left, muttering under his breath about his friends’ questionable decisions and you laughed before you settled back against the wall, thinking.

You were mostly teasing.

If you weren’t retired, it would have been the hunt of a lifetime. He was the rarest bird in the world, surrounded by the most competent pirates on the seas. You didn’t have a chance of ever succeeding and yet…

You walked into the dining hall late one evening to find him healing Ace, blue flames creeping along your captain’s arms as he grumbled about the sea water. He had a towel thrown over his hair that he wasn’t touching and there was a new hole in the side of the ship. You stuck your head through to stare at the churning black ocean below you.

Huh. The healing was interesting though. Ace could recover on his own if he hadn’t wound up in the ocean but it seemed Marco’s flames ignored those problems.

“Most people are more polite when they’re staring, yoi,” Marco said.

You hummed and leaned against the wall, feeling a slight jolt of adrenaline when the wood behind you creaked warily. “If you’re less interesting, I’ll stare less.”

He chuckled and stood and Ace immediately pulled the towel off and threw it to the side. “Are my abilities really so entertaining to you?”

“They are. If you can heal that much, you’re functionally immortal, aren’t you?”

“That’s not something I try to think about too often,” Marco said.

You couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to know about the limitations of his own powers but then again, he could just not be telling you. It would make sense, albeit being a bit more frustrating, if that was the case.

“Why are you so curious? Are you not feeling well?”

“Nope, I’m just peachy,” you said. “Though… I was considering twisting my ankle to see how well those flames work.”

He shook his head. “If you decide to do that, yoi, I’ll be sure to let your own crewmates patch you up then. Doesn’t seem like too serious of an injury.”

You clicked your tongue. “It’s rather uncalled of for you to foil my plans like that.”

“The unfortunate part is I wouldn’t put it past you to actually do so,” he said. “All things considered, your group is quite bold when it comes to plans.”

You glanced toward Ace who was definitely sulking but he hadn’t stormed off so you imagined part of him was curious enough about this situation. When you looked back to Marco, his smile was patient.

“Is a broken bone serious enough?”

He adjusted his glasses and laughed. “I don’t think I’m going to answer that.”

“What about poison?”

“You know, every time I talk to somebody about my fruit, I get the same one or two questions,” he said. “So, I’ll give you the answer to those and no more.”

“Okay,” you said. “What are my questions?”

“What does it feel like to fly and do the flames hurt?”

You rolled your eyes. What useless questions to ask him about. Plenty of creatures could fly; the only thing about that that changed anything was it would make him slightly harder to catch with any kind of ground-based trap.

“Boring,” you said.

He chuckled. “I don’t like when you smile like that, yoi.”

“Aw, that’s not very nice. That could just be how I smile.”

“No, I’ve seen you smile normally once,” he said. “It looks less like you were planning on stabbing me. Tomorrow, I want you to speak to Haruta by the way. I hear from Deuce that your navigation skills are decent enough.”

Oh, that was two bits of bait you could bite at. You certainly hadn’t agreed to join their crew (though at this point, almost every Spade Pirate had in some form or another) so why would you assist with navigation? But then there was the other bait and that one felt far more fun to take.

“Stabbing?” you said. “Never. That’s boorish and would get blood on your pretty feathers.”

“You do seem quite fond of them. I’ll inform them about the arrangements.”

You watched him leave the dining hall. A breeze whipped through it, tugging at your clothing from the broken wall. “I think,” you said to Ace. “That you might be able to get him by just burning through all their supplies to repair the damage you’re doing to the ship.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’ll get the old man eventually. Everybody has a weakness.”

You hummed, eyes flicking to the door where Marco had left through. “They do. Though granted, I think your body might give up before you find it.”

He rolled his eyes. “Not a chance.”

Arguing with Ace was rather like ramming your head into a wall. Completely ineffective and very likely to give you a headache. It was why you avoided it at any point in time and settled for considering your own plans.

“You interested in him?”

You blinked, looking back at your captain. Former captain? You weren’t sure on the terminology currently. “Maybe.”

“Figures. You’re staring at him like you looked at that deer-thing we saw a few islands back. And you always say you’re done hunting things.”

You sighed. “I am. I’m retired.”

“You hunted the deer thing.”

“We would have starved if I didn’t. I wouldn’t get anything out of trying to catch a mythical creature like him,” you said. “He’s also not exactly an animal, I’m sure you’ve noticed and I try not to kill people unless they really piss me off.”

Ace shrugged and grabbed the towel again, roughly dragging it over his hair. “You can just catch him, right? You don’t have to kill him.”

You hummed. That you had.

You most certainly had.

You ended up quite liking the Moby Dick’s map room where Haruta set you up with a few maps they’d found. It was a phenomenally sized space, right at the bow of the ship and it held enough information for you to never run out of things to look at. The experimental morning bled into the afternoon and then into the next week as you learned how they navigated such an enormous ship through the traitorous waters of the Grand Line.

And you were helpful enough to them too.

Several of the uninhabited islands they had on their maps contained little information and you’d flitted around them enough to know the names and the weather patterns there. It was surprisingly fun.

It should have been enough to occupy your attention but you couldn’t concentrate for too long before a flash of blue flicked past the windows.

You stared after it, tapping your nails on the map.

There was no point in staring after him like this. You were retired, you had no buyer and no possible chance of catching him. But you still… part of you wanted the proof that you could have. If you wanted to.

“You look like you’re plotting,” Haruta said. “Which is what Marco wanted me to look out for.”

“I am,” you admitted.

“Right. At least you’re honest about it.”

The twelfth division commander didn’t seem far too suspicious of you. Either that or they liked the way you worked well enough to not bother too much about it.

You started focusing a little more when you saw Marco now, watching whenever he took to the sky and vaguely wishing you had a better idea of his manoeuvrability but he rarely transformed fully, always maintaining a half transformation.

One evening he landed in front of you and you smiled, aware that your staring had been a bit more intense than usual.

“Have you considered yoi, finding an alternative form of entertainment?”

You tilted your head to see the last flickers of his feathers disappear into the sky. “No, I’m quite alright. Is that the fastest you can fly or do you move quicker when fully transformed?”

He sighed. “My full transformation is more aerodynamic.”

“I see.”

That would honestly pose a problem if you did want to catch him. Though honestly, your odds of encouraging a full transformation from him would probably be low. The few you had met with zoan fruits didn’t much like becoming full creatures often – only using their true forms in moments of desperation.

You sincerely doubted you’d see him fully transform. But that was fine, it meant you could focus on the speed he currently wielded.

Seas, you should stop focusing so hard on this.

“Alright,” Marco said and you snapped out of it. He stepped closer to where you were leaning against the railing, arms crossed over his chest. “As flattering as this has been, I’d like to know what plan you’ve been coming up with.”

You found you didn’t quite mind this proximity, tilting your head up slightly to look at him. “I’m considering a plan,” you said. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to do it yet but don’t worry, I’ll let you know when I do.”

He looked far too confident, lazy smirk firmly in place. “Whatever idea it is, I can’t help but feel it’s not going to work out the way you want it to.”

“There’s a very, very small chance.”

“You going to help Ace out yoi?”

“Absolutely not. I don’t have a death wish.”

Marco leaned in, close enough now that your world narrowed to just him; sounds of the ocean and the ship disappearing around you. “Then what is it?”

It was as though he could see your challenge. And was taking you up on it.

“Do you know what I was doing before Ace found me?” you asked.

Marco raised an eyebrow. “Given the nature of the rest of his crew, I guess a street rat. Or perhaps a stowaway?”

You smiled. “I was retired.”

That tripped him for a second and you felt his gaze dip over you before he scoffed. “You’re nowhere near old enough for that, yoi.”

“No,” you admitted. “But I was that good at my job. Made more than enough beri that I could go back home right now and never think about it again. The sort of treasure all pirates want, no?”

“A bounty hunter?”

“Close,” you said, raising your hand to rest it flat against his chest. You rather liked the tattoo it bore, edges hidden by the vest and you pushed the cloth to the side just a little to look at it better.

He didn’t move away from the touch. “Then?”

You leaned in until you were a breath away from him. “I was a hunter. I caught the rarest and prettiest things my buyers wanted. Creatures they told me were impossible to catch until I found them. What can I say, those beautiful wings of yours seem to have stirred up some old ideas.”

For a second, he stayed perfectly still and when he responded, he didn’t shift away. “Really? You think you could hunt me?”

“I am still retired,” you said. “No interest in selling you off but for a challenge alone, I think I’d have a shot.”

“You’re as overconfident as your captain, yoi.”

But he was still close.

“Up for a game, phoenix?”

He seemed to think about it and then, faster than you could blink, he grabbed the wrist you had against his chest and dragged you forward until his lips were against your ear. “I could be tempted. But it’s only fair that I have a chance to hunt too.”

That caught your attention. You turned your head toward him, confident smile dragging over your lips. “I’m not really the prey type.”

“Neither am I.”

Tags: @miwn8 ; @aceincase ; @chaeisrichnow ; @mollys--stuff

You gave him a look and he poured you a second cup of tea to clutch as a lifeline. He was enjoying this.

“You’re confusing everyone,” he told you. “Nobody knows what to believe anymore. From what I’ve heard, there are rumours abounding between every division.”

“Am I your personal source of entertainment now?” you asked.

“Very much so.”

“Izou,” you said, your voice a soft whine.

He shrugged. “Consider it payment.”

You refused to ask him what it was for because you already knew the answer and he would definitely say it in the middle of the dining hall. Wasn’t he meant to be your friend and not enjoy your torment?

You shrunk further against his side. “Can’t you let a woman hide from gossip in peace?”

He took the opportunity to immediately lean down, his lips brushing against your ear as he whispered, “No. You started all these rumours, you can deal with everybody wanting to know more.”

The brush of his voice so close to your ear sent a shiver through your spine but you didn’t move, sure as you were that every person in the entire dining room had seen this.

Izou straightened and you shot him a withering look. “You’re going to make your captain throw me off this ship.”

“On the contrary, Pops is finding this very entertaining too.”

“Then I’ll leave early by myself.”

“You will do no such thing.”

“Izou – ”

Before you could complain about how bossy he was being, he caught your jaw. You stilled immediately, heart screeching to a halt as his fingers brushed over the lines of your face. He tilted your head back very pointedly.

“If you wanted a place to hide, you chose the wrong person. I’m quite invested in making sure nobody forgets the obvious because of all this new information running about.”

You blinked, your mind wiped clear for a second as you thought he might kiss you again. Something you really wouldn’t have minded at that moment. But whatever expression you made must have been what he was looking for because he immediately released you.

To be fair, you had known he wasn’t going to ignore the bouncing rumours but you hadn’t quite guessed he’d become this blatant about refuting them.

“You’re cruel,” you managed after a second.

“I am.”

You got halfway through your meal before you finally got a reprieve in the form of Namur who, clearly unbothered by the strange situation, approached you with an offer.

“There’s a small island on the horizon,” he said. “Thought you might want to take the opportunity to see the reefs. It might not be the greatest views but I remembered you asked after about it.”

“Absolutely,” you said, eternally grateful for the interruption to what would have otherwise been a day of constant attention. “When do we arrive?”

“Around an hour. Will you join us Izou?”

“No,” Izou said simply. “I have a long list of problems to handle today. Though I’m certain you can find somebody to join if you’re seeking additional company.”

You thanked Namur and he left and you couldn’t help but breathe a small sigh of relief. That also gave you another reason to avoid your problems for a bit longer. Not forever but a small break would be nice.

Especially given the absolute terror you called your closest friend who rose elegantly beside you. Izou leaned in as though to whisper something and you tilted your head toward him only for him to instead, press a kiss very pointedly where your shoulder met your neck. You jolted in surprise, spinning on him with wide eyes.

“Enjoy yourself,” he said. “It’ll be good for you to get some fresh air.”

You grumbled slightly as he left, torn between the embarrassment of being seen and just how much you had liked the contact. You liked it a little less though when, an hour later, Namur pointed out the very obvious lipstick mark on your throat.

You’d walked through the entire ship and not even noticed…

At least, by the time you pulled yourself up onto your small boat, lounging back against the edge with water droplets still cool against your skin, most of your worries felt very far away. Not far enough away that you couldn’t see the Moby Dick, motionless where she anchored, but distant enough to ignore for the time being.

The island she waited near was a small, uninhabited one that most of the second division had taken the opportunity to scout. Most being an important distinction because your small, one-person boat was quite crowded thanks to their commander.

Ace’s legs bumped into your own, his hat pulled over his eyes but his grin broad. The heat was much appreciated with your limbs still heavy and aching from the salt water.

“The reefs are fantastic,” you said to Namur.

He nodded, floating with his head just above the surface. “They are a little barren of life in this area,” he said. “If you want to see larger schools, we can move further along the coast. I think the ships have disturbed most of them.”

Ace’s skiff probably hadn’t helped with its loud arrival but you didn’t mind.

Though as much as you wished you could try further, you knew you didn’t quite have the energy for it. Only a few short minutes in the ocean and your body was exhausted, skin perpetually chilled. Even with Namur doing most of the work in supporting you through the reefs, you couldn’t head down again.

“Might have to try another day,” you said. “I think I’m done.”

“Too cold?” Ace asked. “Cause I can warm you up if you need?”

“Too tired,” you said, countering his eager grin with a look.

Namur nodded toward the beach. “Perhaps a rest then. I don’t think you’ll need to return to the ship soon.”

“Probably not,” you agreed.

Namur remained on the reefs to swim while you took your small boat over to the island, grateful for the option to rest before you returned. Most of the commanders were far too observant for their own good and would quickly recognise the unnatural tiredness bothering you. How Ace had missed it…

Well actually, watching where Ace’s eyes went before he looked away when you’d been in the water, you could guess how he’d missed it.

Your legs shook slightly but you could brush that off as struggling through the sand, and you nodded in greeting to the rest of the second division when you arrived. They’d clearly finished their scouting as most had gathered in small groups around the beach, laughing and eating.

Ace checked in with everybody before he found his way over to the more isolated spot you’d chosen, just at the edge of the beach beside a few driftwood logs. Close enough that you could see the division but far enough for them to struggle to listen in.

“We basically got a free beach trip,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

“How lucky,” you said.

He sat atop the log you were leaning against, leg brushing your side in a way that was definitely purposeful.

“You can go socialise,” you told him. “I’m just going to be relaxing over here.”

“I want to keep you company,” he said. “You not feeling like talking to anybody?”

“Not really. Besides, I might feature in enough of the gossip that I’d ruin conversation by going closer.”

He laughed and that basically confirmed it. “Yeah, it’s been a lot today.”

“Doesn’t bother you?” you asked.

“Nope. I’m getting further ahead,” he said. “I should show you what I’ve got so far. I’ve had to change a few things but I’ve now got six bets to me so…”

“Thatch moved up?”

He nodded. “Obviously but Rakuyo had the original betting log so he dug it out for me. You’ll never guess who Pops has money on.”

You laughed. “You’re taking this very seriously.”

“Hey, it’s interesting! Apparently, the main reason most people didn’t bet on Thatch was because his own bet is on Izou.”

That caught your attention enough that you tilted your head up to Ace. “What?”

“Right?!”

“That’s stupid,” you muttered.

Ace shrugged. “I put all my money on myself, by the way. Don’t suppose you want to bet?”

You shook your head, not wanting to imagine how poorly that would go. A small shiver ran down your spine and you breathed out softly through your nose. There was still sea water covering your skin.

“You cold?”

“A little,” you admitted.

Ace dropped from the log next to you, holding out his hands for your own. “Come on. You know you want to.”

You rolled your eyes but slipped your hands into his own. He immediately wrapped his palms around you, warmth rolling through him. It was undeniably nice and you leaned closer without thinking, enjoying the heat he offered.

“Is it helping?”

“It is,” you admitted.

“You still don’t look too happy,” Ace muttered. “Is there something I can do?”

You smiled, considering what you could say, before deciding that there really was no reason to hide things from him. Lowering your voice, you whispered, “Want to know a secret?”

He frowned. “Uh, sure?”

“It’s not the cold,” you admitted. “But you and I share a similar dislike for the ocean.”

“Like a – ”

“Exactly.”

Excitement erupted from him. “Really?!”

You pulled a hand free and pressed your finger to his lips, causing a bright red blush to colour his cheeks. “Secret,” you reminded him. “Remember.”

He caught your wrist, leaning in closer. “Okay, okay. But which one?”

You winked.

“No, come on,” he protested. “Please. You have to tell me!”

“Have to?” you repeated. “Certainly not but… I might consider it. If I was a little warmer.”

Ace missed the tease slightly because he took it as an indication that he should start making you a small fire rather than moving closer. You didn’t bother correcting him, finding it sweet enough when he immediately jumped up to grab various branches and pile them high in front of you before he sparked it alight.

You stretched your legs out toward it, pleased by the warmth creeping through your skin.

“Your fruit’s quite useful,” you commented. “I rather like it.”

He beamed. “It’s amazing,” he said. “And I can do some pretty cool stuff with it. Want to see?”

“Go ahead.”

He raised his hand lazily drawing circles of small flame in the air before he flicked his fingers up and the flame danced, stretching and twisting as he concentrated. The edges came together and a tiny ship bobbed gently above his palm, sails flickering with the orange light.

“Aw,” you said, leaning forward to watch it. “That’s so cute!”

“Right? Okay, watch this one.”

The next little flame shape was a tiny flower that disappeared quicker than it was meant to if his expression said anything about it. Several members of the division had caught onto the showboating and cheered loudly at the replacement flower he made.

The praise clearly sparked something because he was on his feet in a second, flames rolling along his arms as the air warmed.

Fire spiralled around him in bright ribbons of orange and you watched, head propped up by your elbow as he sent it higher, beautiful dancing colours twisting through the air and forming a small tornado of warmth.

He brought them all together, clearly trying to force a shape that wasn’t quite working and you laughed softly to yourself, enjoying the pride in his expression.

Big sparks shot off it, forming an almost firework-like display above you and you watched in mild awe as the colours danced over the sky.

You clapped and his grin widened, eyes focused only on you.

The flames came together to form a small bird that shot into the sky, climbing higher before it made direct connection with the top of a palm tree.

“Oh, shit.”

You couldn’t help but laugh as the fronds erupted into flames and the second division cheered as though that had been part of the plan to begin with. Ace looked toward you, bashfully rubbing the back of his neck.

“That meant to happen?” you asked.

“Yeah, obviously.”

The flames licked at the top of the tree and you all watched it, knowing full well that there would be no chance of putting it out.

Ace was still grinning though and you were too when the warmth around the beach changed.

A shadow swept over the sand and the laughter faltered as everybody looked up. Blue flames spread across the sky as the enormous phoenix banked overhead, gold and sapphire feathers catching in the sunlight as he descended.

The entire beach disappeared beneath the brilliance of his wings; far brighter than any fire Ace had summoned.

“Oh, come on,” Ace muttered.

Marco landed in a pillar of blue flame not far from where you sat. You had to fight not to let your admiration show on your face. It didn’t matter how many times you saw him transform; it never became less awe-inspiring.

There was silence for a second as Marco looked around with a very carefully composed expression, gaze lingering on the burning tree.

“Did you really need to fly over here?” you asked, trying to break the silence before it suffocated you. “Surely there are enough boats.”

He looked at you, eyes deathly cold. “It’s faster. Are you aware that just because you finish a scouting mission early, it doesn’t give you a reason to spend the afternoon setting fire to islands?”

“It’s one tree,” Ace defended.

“I had a scouting mission?” you asked. “Nobody told me.”

“I wasn’t speaking to you.”

The coolness in Marco’s tone was getting your back up even though you were nervous about this argument. You already knew where this was going.

“Well, the tree’s my fault anyway,” you said, getting to your feet. “I was getting Ace to show off for me.”

“Hey,” Ace said. “That’s not true.”

“I don’t particularly care about blame,” Marco said, his attention locked on you. “I already know the reason for it. It’s a common thread amongst all the problems on the ship currently.”

“All is a generous word. I had nothing to do with the canon that went overboard two days ago.”

Ace was moving and you shot him a look. He stopped, seemingly confused but you weren’t going to let whatever issue Marco had with you get redirected toward him. Again.

Marco crossed his arms. “Fine,” he said. “If you want to discuss the problems you’re causing, we certainly can. When Pops told you to fix the problem with Thatch, he didn’t mean to make everything else worse.”

“I fixed what he asked for. Dinner last night was excellent.”

“That is not the way he meant for you to do it.”

“He didn’t exactly specify.”

Marco glanced briefly at Ace who still looked very confused. “Do you really think this is a game?” he asked. “It’s only a matter of time before everybody hears about it and then what? Or are you not thinking about who gets hurt when this falls apart?”

“Hears about what?” Ace asked.

“I kissed Thatch,” you said. “Yesterday.”

Marco’s jaw tightened, his attention immediately snapping toward Ace who looked a little confounded about you telling him.

“Everybody knows that,” he said. “Blenheim and Fossa were talking about it this morning at breakfast.”

You nodded. “Yeah, I noticed.”

For a few beats, Marco genuinely seemed confused by this turn of events. He stared at Ace before he looked back at you and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Ace, do you not realise, that this isn’t some kind of race you can win?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“She’s going to leave anyway. Once her business with Pops is done, she’s gone again with no guarantee of coming back.” He met your gaze directly. “With all these years that have gone by, she’s never even considered staying. Why would that change now?”

You didn’t say anything.

“So, do you really want to waste your time and potentially ruin your relationships with Thatch and Izou over something temporary at best.”

Ace frowned at Marco and then he seemed to realise something, the grin on his face far too broad for this kind of discussion. “Oh,” he said. “I get it.”

“It’s the same conversation as always,” you said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve had to listen to this. If Thatch and Izou didn’t want to be around me, they wouldn’t be and I’m certain it’s the same for Ace.”

“You manufacture their interest,” Marco countered.

“Excuse me?”

“Is kissing Thatch not a way of trying to keep him interested?”

“No,” you snapped, offended. “I don’t need to do things like that to keep people interested in me. I kissed Thatch because I wanted to and because he asked.”

“You truly expect me to believe that a woman who won’t trust people enough to mention why she visits would kiss somebody just because they asked?”

“Is that really so hard to believe?”

Ace snorted and you looked at him, confused and mildly annoyed by whatever he was finding so funny. He stepped closer and threw an arm lazily over your shoulders, completely interrupting your train of thought with his sudden proximity. A challenge burned behind his eyes as he looked toward Marco.

Oh, there was no possible way this was ending well.

“Hello?” you said, raising an eyebrow at Ace.

He beamed at you. “Hey, I think I figured out the problem.”

“Ace, yoi…” Marco said. “We are in the middle of a conversation.”

“Which problem?” you asked.

“This one.”

And Ace leaned in to kiss you.

Somebody down the beach choked. You made a surprised sound against his mouth, almost moving away for a second. You stopped yourself, enjoying the sensation enough to not want to stop it yet.

There was a second of silence and then Marco erupted. A massive phoenix took to the sky in an explosion of blue and gold, feathers painting the sky like stars as he soared back to the ship.

Ace moved away and laughed. “He’s so jealous.”

You looked toward the ship and almost groaned. Fuck that was not going to end well. For a second, guilt hit harder than embarrassment.

“He’s going to kill me,” you said. “I think you just signed my death certificate. Why did you do that?”

“Because you know, I thought Pops was crazy for putting money on Marco but now I realised he’s not wrong. He came over here just to show off and complain that other people get to kiss you.”

“Pops – I mean, Whitebeard, put money on Marco?” you repeated. “Has he… has he met Marco?”

Ace dropped back onto the ground and shrugged, clearly entirely unaware of the trouble he’d just started. A pit of dread curled around in your stomach but you sighed and shook it from your mind for now. He and Izou were as bad as each other.

Though you had to admit, you rather liked Ace’s way of interrupting arguments.

You didn’t even bother pretending to keep distance, sitting down next to him and curling against Ace’s arm to chase away the last of the chills from the ocean.

You only realised you fell asleep against him when you woke up to heavy footsteps against the sand. Ace snored loudly above you, his head rested atop your own and arm tight around your waist.

“Come on lovebirds,” Teach said with a grin, his shadow falling over both of you. “Time to head back to the ship.”

Ace yawned and squeezed you once before he stood, a lazy stretch to his limbs that showed he was only really half awake. “Okay,” he grumbled. “I’ll take Striker back. See you there?”

“Unless they drown me on the way,” you said.

“They wouldn’t.” Ace grinned as he set off and you watched him for a second before trying to shake more sleep from your head.

Teach laughed loudly, his head thrown back and his voice booming across the sand. “Thought somebody already tried it earlier. You showed up here looking like a drowned kitten.”

“You seen many of those, Teach?” you asked.

“Eh, one or two. Gotta say, I was quite surprised. I didn’t think you would be the ocean type, if you catch what I’m meaning.”

You paused, giving him a curious look. “Really?”

“Guess I was wrong,” he said with a shrug. “But I had a thought you might have eaten something funny once upon a time.”

For a second, you considered mentioning it. You’d already told Ace and it wasn’t really a secret but… but something deep in the back of your mind whispered to be more careful with information like that.

“What made you think that?” you said. “Honestly, I can’t tell who’s a user most of the time.”

“Nah, it’s easy. People get a strange feel when they eat one of those things,” Teach commented and he said it as though it was obvious.

You chuckled. “Suppose so. Would you eat one? If you found it?”

“Depends on the one. Last thing you want is to become some kind of insect.”

You snorted at the idea and he brayed with laughter. You brushed the sand from your clothes and hummed, wondering if you could choose your fruit, if you had known before you bit into it, would you still have done so.

“But you could also learn how to fly,” you said, looking toward the Moby Dick. “He’s an ass but that fruit is something else.”

Teach chuckled, quieter now. “It is. Not the best but strong enough though if you want it, you’d have to kill him for it. Given his mood with you, can’t imagine you’d be too opposed. Might even bring some peace to the ship for once.”

It was a strange joke. You huffed slightly and shook your head. “Wouldn’t be worth the effort. Besides, he regenerates.”

Teach hummed, his smile easy. “Nah, that’s easy to deal with. We can trade favours and you can borrow some of the sea stone I’ve got.”

You laughed it off at the time but as you sailed back toward the ship, his words lingered heavier than they should have. They followed you through dinner until late into the night; brought images with flashes of blood and blue flames snuffed out. Your stomach flipped painfully with each one even though you knew you were being ridiculous.

Marco was the second strongest member of this crew. He couldn’t even get hurt, let alone die.

Right?

After far too many hours of not sleeping, you gave up and made your way through the silent commanders’ quarters, passing endless rooms until you found the right one and knocked twice.

Thatch was very confused when he pulled it open and for a second, his half-asleep appearance managed to knock worry from your mind. You’d never really seen him like this before, shirtless and with his hair down, hanging in his face.

It suited him more than you cared to admit.

“Darlin,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Far too late to be awake,” you admitted. “But I can’t sleep.”

“Oh.”

He stepped aside and you slipped into the room, yawning into the back of your hand. His lanterns were burned out, the room plunged into darkness the second he closed the door and dropped back into his bed.

If you were more awake, you might have considered it more but as it was, the promise of sleep was far better than sitting and wondering.

Thatch immediately tucked you into his chest the second you lay down; his chin rested atop your head. He was ridiculously warm. You curled against him, cheek tickled faintly by the hair on his chest as he moved the blanket over your shoulders.

“Why’re you awake?” he mumbled.

“Don’t know.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t believe you but Thatch never pushed. He just brought you closer, his arms tight enough that sleep caught up quicker than you could have thought it would. You didn’t even realise you’d fallen asleep until he moved next to you and you tightened your grip as best you could, feeling as though no time had passed at all.

He sighed, a hand running over your hair. “Sugar, I have prep to do.”

“It’s like one in the morning,” you muttered.

“It’s five,” he corrected. “But sounds like you at least got some sleep.”

You shuffled closer as though you could keep him there for longer. “You can let them starve, it’s okay. They know how to fish.”

He chuckled and squeezed you tighter. “You should warn a man before you come crawling into his bed in the night,” he said. “I might melt the next time.”

“Mm.”

“But I still need to get up.”

You grumbled under your breath as he got up, swung his legs off the bed and left you lying a space that felt far too big. You watched him get ready with one eye open, contemplating how you could best tempt him back.

You probably shouldn’t be spending the night in his quarters if you wanted people to stop whispering but on the other hand…

“If you want to stay here, you can go back to sleep,” he said. “I won’t kick you out.”

“If you’re going to leave, you may as well kick me out. It’s the same thing.”

He shook his head and leaned down to press a kiss to the top of your head. His hair tickled your nose. “Spoiled,” he said. “Do you want to talk about why you came in here?”

“It’s stupid.”

“Not if it’s keeping you from sleeping.”

You rubbed at your eyes and sat up a bit more. “Is the crew allowed to keep sea stone on the ship? Like with so many devil fruit users and all.”

“Sea stone?” Thatch repeated. “Why’re you worried about that?”

“I’m just wondering.”

He brushed his hair back and up. “It’s not against the rules, there’s just no real point. Don’t know why anybody would want to when we’ve got a bunch of users aboard. We’re family. We look out for each other.”

“Mm,” you mumbled. “Okay.”

“Is that really what kept you up last night?”

“In a way.”

“You worried for Ace? I know he can get under skins but – ”

You shook your head immediately; Ace hadn’t even been a consideration for you. “Not for him.”

“Then…?”

Marco didn’t seem like the best worry right now and you honestly felt stupid saying it. So, you went with the much easier option. If you’d already told Ace, you saw little purpose in keeping it from Thatch.

“For me,” you said.

Thatch froze, his coat half buttoned up as he stared at you. “For you?” he repeated.

“Mm.”

“Sugar?”

“It’s meant to be a secret,” you said with a shush. “Cause I didn’t want people knowing but oh well. Just don’t tell anybody.”

He sat down at the edge of the bed, running his hand over your shoulders. “You have one and you never told us? You could have fallen over the railing and nobody would have known.”

“Namur knows. Whitebeard said he had to be told way back.”

“Okay,” Thatch said. “I feel like we should talk about this again when you’re more awake. Can we?”

“If you want to.”

He smiled and pressed another kiss to the side of your head but it lingered, almost as though he was lost in thought. “Sleep,” he said. “And don’t worry yourself about things like that. Devil fruit or not, you’re safe.”

“I know,” you said. “That’s why I came here.”

That perhaps you had imagined the kiss that could have been. The way the blanket had slipped from your knees as broad hands found you instead. They had been warm and certain, trembling only slightly, even now he half expected the moment to be snatched out from under him.

His ordinarily scholarly, lecture-prone voice had gone soft and reverent. Lowered into something you’d only ever heard him use for old magic and older grief. Like he were speaking inside a sacred confessional rather than your sitting room, which still smelled faintly of plum jam and poor decisions.

Gale Dekarios had, in fact, declared himself in the quietest, most devastating voice known to mortal or god. And then he had smiled afterward, as if he’d done something charming rather than emotionally catastrophic. It was the same insufferable little smile he probably wore the day he reached into the Weave and decided he could simply hold a piece of a goddess in his hands. Look how well that had gone.

You had paced until nightfall, contemplating exile with alarming sincerity.

You wondered whether anyone would truly notice if you relocated to Amn and adopted a modest, anonymous life under a borrowed surname. You weighed the practicalities of never seeing him again. It would be inconvenient, you decided, but survivable. The way an amputation is survivable. You had even stood at your window like some lovesick poet, which was galling, because that was his role. He had no business making you audience for it.

You lay awake the better part of the night, too. Staring at the ceiling, replaying it, hating, with great precision, exactly how warm his hands had been.

By the next morning, you had reassembled a workable scaffold of rationality. Because by every sensible account, by all the laws of probability and self-preservation, it simply had not happened.

It was a dream. Surely.

A very vivid, very humiliating dream.

You would not mention it. You would not acknowledge it. Rather, you would let the entire incident drift quietly into that strange and ever-expanding category of Things Gale Does When Overstimulated By Emotions And Blankets: a list that already included the goat incident, the firework incident, and at least one regrettable sonnet about the death of the universe.

If the knowing look your neighbor gave you as she handed over the morning’s eggs wasn’t enough to condemn you back to an uncertain hell, then Gale himself remained ever adept at casting Misty Step straight into your morning before you could so much as protest.

Even as you sat down with a fresh cup of tea, resolve firm, spine straight, mind settled into deliberate and fortified denial, the door opened.

Not knocked, but just opened.

Because Gale still possessed the spare key you had lent him “temporarily” during a plumbing disaster some four weeks prior, and had apparently never seen fit to surrender it. You suspected he considered the matter a binding magical contract.

“Good morning!” he called brightly, his voice brimming with entirely unwarranted cheer. “I brought breakfast.”

You turned slowly, like a lone survivor turning toward the sea after an enemy vessel had sunk their ship and sailed merrily on.

Gale stood in your kitchen doorway, balancing a tray with careful dexterity. On it sat fresh buns, still warm. Sliced fruit arranged with wholly unnecessary aesthetic intention. Eggs steaming gently from the bowl, and two mismatched mugs.

One of them was your favorite. From your cabinet. How in the shit had he—

Oh. Right.

Wizards.

“I made your favorite,” he said, stepping fully inside like nothing whatsoever had shifted the night before. As though he’d not made the planes themselves tilt on your couch with his tongue. 

You stared at him in stunned silence.

He pretended it was all par for the course, steadily ignoring your scandalized looks with the practiced serenity of a man who had once weathered the displeasure of a goddess and lived. He set the food down on the table without disturbing a single drop of what was sure to be a phenomenal cup of tea, because of course it would be. The bastard could not even make a mediocre cup of tea. It would be balanced and fragrant and steeped to precisely the right strength, and you resented it deeply.

You looked down at the food. Then back up at his face.

“We are pretending that last night did not happen,” you said at last.

He grinned, mild as morning. “Pretending what did not happen?”

He said it casually. The way a man might speak while concealing a live smokepowder bomb beneath the table, all innocence and impeccable posture.

More staring. Blood stung your face and the tips of your ears. Was he honestly going to make you say it aloud?

He smiled and lifted his tea.

Yes. Yes, he was.

You took a deep breath, centering your entire being, drawing on reserves of composure you did not strictly possess.

“The snuggling, Gale.” You said it stiltedly, turning away from the food to count your own fingers. “The declaration. The emotional guillotine you lowered onto my life as though it were a pleasant embroidery suggestion.”

He tilted his head slightly, like you had clarified a fine point of academic interest. And damn him, didn’t he look handsome doing it. The morning light was being entirely too generous with the gray at his temples.

“Ah. You mean when I told you I am in love with you?” he said after a moment, like it was nothing. Like he was confirming the weather.

You flinched outright.

“That. Yes.” You took a breath. “That exact thing.”

He paused a moment.

“I did not think it required repetition,” he said, entirely reasonable, as he began adding honey to the tea. A careful, measured drizzle, because the man could not so much as sweeten a cup without precision.

“You cannot simply say something like that and then arrive with breakfast!” you burst out. “That is psychological warfare!”

He paused, considering this with genuine scholarly seriousness, the spoon hovering midair.

“I brought strawberry jam as well,” he offered. “It softens it into merely an upfront assault. Potentially a little unpleasant, but entirely survivable.”

You made a strangled sound.

He continued arranging the plates with infuriating calm. Sleeves rolled to the forearm, hair still faintly tousled from sleep. He looked, in every respect, like a man who had confessed life-altering devotion to an old friend and then enjoyed an excellent and untroubled night’s rest. You wanted to throw the strawberry jam at him.

“You fled,” he observed gently. Not accusatory. Simply factual, the way one notes a result in a margin. “I assumed you required time to process.”

“I required oxygen.”

“Entirely understandable. I, too, require such on occasion.” He set the spoon down. “Though I confess I have found breathing markedly easier since last night.”

Fucking fantastic for him. You specifically felt like he had thrown you into an olive press.

“And now you are just—what is this?” You gestured wildly at the spread on the table. “Courtship? Siege tactics? Nutritional manipulation?”

He considered the question again, as if it deserved real deliberation.

“It is a friendly breakfast,” he said. Then, after a beat, “Nothing prickly or unwanted.”

You stared at him. He met your gaze steadily, all warmth and braided together in a way that made upset genuinely difficult to sustain.

“I am not retracting it,” he said softly. “If that is what you were wondering.” The levity thinned, leaving only sincerity in its place. “I meant what I said.”

Your pulse stumbled. You pointed weakly at the fruit bowl, like it had personally betrayed you. “You cannot soften a declaration of mad love with citrus.”

“Counterpoint,” he replied mildly. “Citrus is extremely disarming. But I did mean it, notwithstanding your truly marvelous ability to evade my every attempt to woo you.”

You stood. Paced and considered, with some seriousness, launching a pear at his stupid, beautiful face.

“You… actually meant it?”

He blinked at you, calm as a summer pond.

“Very much,” he said simply. “But if I push, you’ll run. Much like a wild horse—though your mane is truly without comparison.”

Your throat closed, and you pressed your fingers to your temples. “That’s… almost sweet. And downright manipulative, to bring up horses when you know full well I love them.”

“It’s adoration,” he corrected, winking. “Manipulative would have been bringing croissants and a horse.”

You must be crazy for him to permit such sass. Madly, in fact, in a way that made your knees weak and your brain itch and your better judgment file for early retirement.

You dropped back into your chair.

“So what,” you muttered. “You’re just going to hang around until I admit I want you?”

“That was, broadly, the plan.” He sounded rather pleased with it, too.

“And if I never say it?”

He smiled and went on slicing bread like a man wholly unconcerned with your mental well-being. “Then I shall have many excellent breakfasts in fine company. I have laid siege to far less worthy strongholds for far worse fare. This one, I am content to wait out.”

You made a noise that should not exist outside a battlefield.

You knew better than to let Gale in. Physically. Metaphorically. Meta-physically, given his history. You should have painted it across the front of your apron as a daily reminder. NO WIZARDS ALLOWED. Particularly those who had once carried a small piece of the divine in their chest and somehow emerged from the experience even more insufferably charming.

“I hope you trip on your own genius and fall face-first into your mother’s jam,” you said sharply as he pulled out a chair for you.

“That is fair,” he said warmly, easing it beneath you with a gentleman’s care that you found personally offensive. “But if I do, I trust you’ll catch me.”

And you would. Because he was Gale, and there had not been a single day in your life you’d successfully denied that man once he deployed those big brown doe eyes. When he turned their full force on you, when his smile unfolded slowly, and his fingers brushed yours over the bread basket, you knew with grim clarity that you were standing in dangerous territory with no spell prepared and no exit at your back.

So you let him stay for breakfast.

And then lunch.

And then, somehow, dinner.

As a matter of fact, it was not until you were four glasses deep into something fruity and bubbling, laughing at a story about a Baldur’s Gate tadpole and a wheel of cheese that should not have been funny but absolutely was, that you realized you had, in fact, royally, catastrophically fucked up.

And in doing so, proved Gale’s insufferable little theory entirely correct.

You liked him back.

And like most terrible decisions, the addition of wine did not exactly improve your judgment on the matter.

Gale was no casual wine drinker. He bought and brought only the better vintages, the kind that did not bite so much as hum, warm and slow in your chest, making your limbs feel pleasantly ungoverned and your tongue looser than was strictly wise. You suspected he knew precisely what he was doing. You suspected he knew you did not entirely mind.

You shared the bottle in your kitchen, laughing over old spellbook disasters and the time Gale had accidentally summoned a sentient napkin that promptly tried to unionize your pantry.

“We should have let it negotiate,” you said, giggling into your cup.

“You refused to meet its demands,” Gale replied with mock indignation, one hand pressed to his chest. “I was merely the arcane catalyst. The blood, as they say, is on your hands. And the breadbox.”

Somewhere between the second glass and the last, his fingers brushed yours on the rim of your cup. And did not move. The warmth of them sat there, patient, asking nothing.

You didn’t pull away.

Later, with the fire dying low and shadows curling soft around the corners of the room, he had helped you put the dishes away, sleeves pushed up, drying each one with the gravity of a man cataloging relics while making bad jokes about Magic Missiles. You were laughing the loose, unguarded hysteria you’d been rationing around him for weeks. And then you turned and bumped square into him at the counter.

He didn’t move.

He stayed, near enough that the warmth of him bled through the space between you. His hand rose, and his fingers turned your chin gently up to him.

This time, you noted with a distant sort of alarm, there was no blanket to blame.

Your heart jumped.

“Why did you come back, Gale?” you said, quieter than before, your voice wavering at the edges. Despite all his flaws, Gale was not an unfair man. If this were not serious, if you named the fear aloud, he would leave. “I… I don’t want to be a stop on your way back to the Weave. I can’t do that again.”

He tilted his chin down, deliberate, ensuring your eyes met his and stayed.

“You were never a stop, my love.” His voice had dropped into that low, reverent register again, the one with no cleverness left in it. “It took losing everything to understand what mattered most. You were always my final destination. My home. Forgive me for letting you doubt it for so long.”

Warmth filled you from crown to sole, flooding finger to toe with a comfort deeper than any hearth or sauna. How he always knew precisely what to say both perplexed and enthralled you. The man had argued theology with a goddess and somehow saved his most devastating words for you, in your kitchen, smelling of dish soap and plum.

You swallowed hard as his thumb came to rest against your bottom lip, his pupils blowing wide and dark in the low light.

He took a half-step closer.

“If I kissed you right now,” he asked gently, “would you stop me?”

You meant to say yes. You truly, genuinely did.

Instead, you fisted the front of his robes in both hands and kissed him like you had been waiting years to do it because you had.

It was clumsy. Rushed and breathless, all teeth and apology, like a backlog of unspoken years finally forcing its way out of both your mouths at once. You pulled him down with you onto the couch, hands tangling in fabric, hearts hammering like you were being chased by gods again. Only this time, you were not running from anything.

This time, for once, you had caught exactly what you wanted.

Clothes came off in fits and starts, in fumbling reverence, each layer surrendered like an argument he was finally too tired to win. He whispered your name against your skin like a question. Like a spell. Like it might answer every hollow ache that had been carved into his chest in all the years he’d spent reaching for the wrong kind of light.

You did not let yourself think.

You simply let it happen.

After, you lay curled against him in the firelight’s last embers, your breath still uneven, his hand trailing sluggishly, absently up and down the length of your spine. You hated how natural it felt. How profoundly, dangerously safe, like something the world had carved out and set aside for you alone.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” you mumbled into his shoulder.

“Probably not,” he agreed easily, pressing a kiss to your hair. “But I do not regret it. Not for a moment.”

You did.

Not because it was him. But because it was emphatically not nothing. And that terrified you down to the marrow.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” you added, the words flimsy as a paper shield held up against an oncoming tide.

“No,” he said, gently, far too gently. “Of course not.”

But he held you like it meant everything. Like you were the one fragile and precious thing he had carried out of the rubble of his old life, the single bargain that had ever been worth the striking.

And you, stupidly, traitorously, let him.

You let yourself memorize it. The phantom heat of his mouth still ghosting along your collarbone. The slow, deliberate slide of warmth through your veins, slow as a man who had decided, at long last, that he had nowhere else in all the planes he would rather be.

You woke up in pieces.

Blanket tangled around one leg, pillow halfway off the bed, mouth dry, and your brain already flooding with bright, full-bodied panic before your eyes had even properly opened.

Sunlight spilled lazily across the room, golden and unbothered, catching on your clothes where they lay scattered across the floorboards. Scattered. Damning. A breadcrumb trail of poor judgment leading straight from the doorway to the bed. Your throat tightened. You did not need to look at the other side of the mattress to know it was empty. The cooling warmth still lingering in the sheets, the faint indent in the second pillow, told you everything you needed and dreaded.

He’d gotten up early.

Of course, he had. Gale was always a morning person, the insufferable bastard, no doubt already downstairs arranging fruit at flattering angles and steeping something fragrant, humming to himself like a man who had not, the night prior, comprehensively dismantled your every defense.

You sat up slowly, dragging the sheet over your chest as though it might protect your dignity, your sanity, your entire fragile sense of self. It could not. Linen had never once won a war.

“No,” you mumbled to the empty room. “No, no, no. Bad. Terrible. An entire thesis of bad decisions, with footnotes. Peer-reviewed.”

Your robe was on the floor, crumpled and out of reach. His robe was closer, pooled in deep blue near the foot of the bed. You snatched it up and pulled it round your shoulders before you could think better of it.

Then you paused.

And, against every instinct of self-preservation you possessed, you sniffed it.

“Damn it,” you whispered.

Because it smelled like him. Warm and faintly spiced, cinnamon and old parchment and something underneath that was just Gale, the scent that had been ghosting through your kitchen for weeks now and curling, uninvited, into the soft animal part of your brain. Comforting. Steadying.

Utterly, comprehensively devastating.

Then you dropped it as if it had bitten you. Like it was cursed, as if holding it one second longer might bind you to something you were not nearly drunk enough, this early, to survive.

You stumbled out into the hallway, fully intending to bolt. To slip out the back, scale the garden wall if you had to, and find yourself a time mage willing to erase the last twelve hours for any price they named. Surely someone in Waterdeep dabbled. You’d heard worse rumors about the Blackstaff.

But then you smelled bread.

And eggs.

And something that might have been cinnamon.

Your stomach, that traitor, that absolute collaborator, growled in open rebellion against the rest of you.

You rounded the corner like a soul being marched to its sentencing, sheet still clutched to your chest, praying with what little faith you had left that he wasn’t actually—

He was.

In your kitchen. Barefoot on your cold floorboards, dark hair damp and curling from a recent rinse, sleeves shoved up past his forearms. He stood over the stove stirring something in a pan with the easy, proprietary calm of a man who lived there. Who had always lived there.

He didn’t turn around. You suspected he’d felt you the moment you crossed the threshold, the way he always seemed to, some maddening sensitivity tuned permanently to you.

“Good morning, my love,” he said, calm as a still pond. “I wasn’t certain how you take your eggs this morning, so I made both.”

A pause. You could hear the smile in it.

“It seemed prudent to cover all eventualities. I find I prefer not to gamble where you are concerned.”

You stared at him. 

Was breakfast some manner of coercive enchantment he’d picked up in Baldur’s Gate, along with whatever else had put those new lines at the corners of his eyes? Some long-rest hospitality charm, lethal at close range?

He looked like a painting—a hallucination. The worst dream you had ever, treacherously, wanted to keep having.

“You’re cooking. Again.”

“Indeed.”

“In my kitchen.”

“Where the eggs live, yes.” He gave the pan a thoughtful turn. “It is, broadly speaking, a normal thing for a person to do.”

He glanced over his shoulder at you, and Gods, it was unfair. His hair curled soft and damp against his jaw, stupidly, criminally perfect, like the man had been assembled in some celestial workshop specifically to undo you over a skillet.

“It can be a regular thing, in fact,” he added, mild as anything. “If you want it to be.”

You made a sound like you were being strangled by the collar of the robe. Yours? His? You had genuinely lost track. The lines between your belongings, your dignity, and your resolve had all blurred sometime around the second glass.

“We are not talking about it,” you announced, arms folding tight across the bunched fabric.

“…About the eggs?”

“About last night.”

“Ah.” He turned back to the pan, entirely unruffled, sliding the eggs onto a waiting plate with a flourish that was frankly excessive for breakfast. “No discussion of emotionally significant events. Repression over a hot meal. Very healthy. The bards will sing of it for ages.”

You nearly gasped aloud.

“Are you making jokes?”

“I am making toast.” He held up a single golden slice with a wholly unreasonable degree of confidence, like he was presenting evidence before a magistrate. “I thought you might prefer something neutral. In tone and texture both.”

You sank into the nearest chair. Not voluntarily so much as structurally. Your legs simply filed their resignation, and you collapsed into the seat like a puppet with its strings shorn.

He set a plate before you as though he had not, mere hours ago, thoroughly razed your entire psychological landscape to bedrock.

“We do not have to talk about it,” he said gently, all the playfulness draining away to leave something careful and kind in its place. “Not now. Not if you don’t want to. I am in no hurry. I have learned, recently, the value of patience. As a matter of fact—”

And he kept speaking, that warm and even voice rolling on. Something about a letter that had arrived by courier two days past. Something about—of all things— a great bear of a druid writing from the Reithwin lands with some trouble or other about a blighted grove and a soil that would not take to new growth, and would Gale consider lending his expertise on the residual Weave-rot for a tenday, no longer, he’d be back before the next full moon—

His words grew fuzzy at the edges, dissolving into a pleasant, meaningless hum. None of it registered. None of it could. Because beneath the easy current of his voice, your mind had snagged hard on a single jagged word and would not let go.

Back. He’d said back. But all you heard was the leaving.

Gale was, once again, leaving.

Leaving. After confessing he loved you, after unraveling you on your own couch and holding you through the night like you were the one precious thing he’d wanted?

And now he’d be off, surely, back to romance and adventure and whatever grand glittering purpose called louder than you ever had. A grove. A druid. A whole green world out there that needed the famous Gale Dekarios more than your small kitchen ever could. Had this entire thing been a ploy? A clever wizard’s contingency, neatly cast, ensuring he would always have a soft bed and a friendly face waiting in Waterdeep whenever the wider world spat him back out?

You did not hear the tenday. You did not hear the no longer, nor the before the next full moon. You heard only the shape of a door closing, the same as it had closed two years ago.

You stared down at the eggs. The eggs, both varieties, stared loyally back, offering no counsel whatsoever.

“No.”

It slipped out before you could stop it.

His brow furrowed faintly. “No…?”

And then, like a torrent of cowardly water finding the first crack in the dam, all your fears rushed out at once, shaping themselves into words you could not seem to stop. Angry words. Hurt ones. Words for every time he hadn’t seemed to care, dredged up whole and barbed from years you’d told yourself were long buried. For the morning the tower went dark and the door sealed, and he simply was not there anymore. For Mystra, who had held his devotion when you could not. For Baldur’s Gate, for the road, for all the distant glittering things that had always, always been enough to pull him away from Waterdeep and from you. For every season you had waited, and he had never once come.

“To all of it. To—this. Whatever it is. Or could be. Or might have been.” You swallowed hard against the gravel rising in your throat. “It can’t happen. I don’t—I can’t—want it. You always leave.”

They were words meant to wound. A pressurized lance of everything you’d swallowed down for years, bound to burst eventually and choosing now, of all moments, to do it. Choosing the precise instant you were most raw and undefended, because that meant, surely, that he was too. If you were going to bleed for him, then by all the gods, he could bleed a little with you.

You hated the way his expression didn’t fall. Didn’t crack.

He didn’t do anything at all, except go very, very still. Like he had rehearsed a blow enough times that it no longer surprises him when it lands. Like he had expected it. Like he had been quietly bracing for it since the very moment he first confessed to you on your couch.

And there in your kitchen, surrounded by toast and lingering heat and too many things unsaid, you looked Gale Dekarios in the eye and told him you didn’t want him.

Which was a lie.

A lie, because to say yes meant accepting the truth that frightened you far more than any goddess ever could: that Gale might love you genuinely, completely, with his whole reassembled heart, and still, one ordinary morning, find something greater glittering on the horizon and go to it. As he always did. As he always had. Love had never been the thing in question. Staying was.

“It… it didn’t mean anything,” you tried. The words came out threadbare and false, and you both heard it. “So just leave.”

“If that’s what you wish,” he said smoothly, without missing a beat. 

And that was it.

He didn’t plead. He didn’t bargain or argue or marshal one of his thousand clever rebuttals. He simply nodded, once, and stepped back, as if retreating from you was the courteous thing to do after setting fire to his own hopes and standing politely in the smoke.

But his hand lingered a breath too long on your shoulder as he passed you your cup. The warmth of it sank straight through the borrowed robe and settled somewhere beneath your ribs. And when you glanced up at him, his eyes were not smooth at all. There was nothing easy in them.

They were aching. Openly, nakedly aching, in a way the rest of his careful composure had been built specifically to conceal.

“I’ll be out of your hair in a moment,” he added, quieter now, drawing his hand back like the motion cost him something dear. “I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye. I’ve done that to you once already. I find I haven’t the stomach to do it twice.”

“You’re not going to argue? You’re just… leaving?”

Your voice slipped its moorings entirely on the word. He was simply going to unravel you down to your very ether, leave you wrecked and warm in his borrowed robe, and then walk out the door again? What about the grand confession? The rain-soaked rehearsals of courage, baking for hours for the woman he proposed to love? The promise pressed into your hair not eight hours past?

Had he lied? Or worse, far worse—had you, with one small and cowardly word, simply taken him at it?

Was that something he’d picked up on his travels, too? This terrible new grace, this willingness to let a thing go the moment it asked to be let go?

He paused. Just for a moment, one hand resting on the back of the chair.

“You said it didn’t mean anything,” he said simply.

Your stomach dropped clean through the floorboards.

You looked down at the eggs. Picked up your fork and realized, distantly, that you couldn’t taste a single damn bite.

“Right,” you said, stabbing aimlessly at the yolk. “Because it doesn’t.”

“Of course,” he said.

The silence afterward wasn’t awkward. It was worse than awkward. It was kind. Gentle and final and entirely without blame, the silence of a man honoring your wishes precisely as you’d stated them, the cruelest thing he could possibly have done.

And that was unbearable.

You didn’t shout. You didn’t cry, or flail, or hurl an accusation across the kitchen. You just… stopped. Went still and small and quiet over a plate of two kinds of eggs made by a man who hadn’t wanted to gamble where you were concerned.

“I’ll give you space,” he added softly. “Take care of yourself.”

And then he gathered his cloak, and he left. The door clicked shut behind him with that same brittle, well-mannered finality his tower wards had hummed with two years ago.

And you, brilliant catastrophe that you were, sat alone at your kitchen table in his abandoned robe, surrounded by cooling toast and the wreckage of your own stupid pride, and whispered to the empty room:

“…Shit.”

After the last one-sided argument you’d flung at his back, the one that ended with you’re going to go to her, Gale, you always do, he had not returned for two whole years.

And that time, you hadn’t even slept with him first.

You stared at the door he’d closed so gently behind him. Two years for sharp words alone. You did the grim arithmetic and found you hadn’t the courage to guess what this one had bought you. Sharp words, a cutting disappointment, and the unmistakable sound of a woman taking a man at the worst thing he’d offered to believe about himself.

No. You doubted, with a cold and sinking certainty, that he’d return at all after this.

Good to his word, Gale disappeared.

You didn’t see him for weeks.

Not at the market, where the elven apothecary still set aside dewspice he never came to collect. Not on the rain-slicked streets where he’d once stood like a tragic poet outside your gate. Not even in the long shadow of the tower he’d spent months rebuilding by his own two hands, stone by stone, rune by rune, for a wizard’s future wife.

Not that you looked.

(You looked.)

He didn’t write. Didn’t send word through Mira or his mother or some overburdened courier. Didn’t hover at the edges of your evenings or appear, uninvited and beaming, with a tray of breakfast and a key he’d never returned. The spare key, you noticed, had been left on the kitchen table that final morning. You hadn’t seen him set it down.

And gods, you hated it. Because it meant he had listened. That he had truly heard you, every cowardly word, and taken your no and magicked it gently into the shape of a boundary. The cleanest, kindest spell he’d ever cast.

And now he was respecting it. Completely. Without complaint or campaign or a single clever attempt to argue his way back through your door.

Which hurt, somehow, more than any rebuttal in all his vast and footnoted arsenal ever could have.

So what was a woman to do?

You cleaned. That was what you did.

Because you needed to punish something, and your home was nearest to hand, and there was a grim and penitent satisfaction in scrubbing until your knuckles ached. Better than sitting still. Sitting still left room for thinking, and thinking led, every single time, down the same well-trod road to a plate of two kinds of eggs and a door clicking shut.

So you cleaned. Floors, shelves, the windows that looked out onto the gate where he’d once stood in the rain. You beat the rugs within an inch of their lives. You scoured the kettle. You did not, under any circumstances, wash the robe that still hung over the back of your bedroom chair, because washing it would mean losing the cinnamon and old parchment, and you weren’t ready to examine why that mattered.

You were washing down the counters now, muttering darkly to no one when vertigo hit you hard.

You gripped the counter’s edge. Shut your eyes. Waited for it to pass.

It had been happening more often this past week. The swimming head, the strange new weariness that no amount of sleep seemed to touch. You’d blamed the grief at first, then the cleaning, then the simple fact that you hadn’t managed a full meal in days. The smell of the morning’s tea had turned your stomach so sharply you’d had to set it aside untouched, which was absurd, you loved that tea, it was the one he always brought—

You stopped scrubbing.

Slowly, against every screaming instinct of self-preservation, you began counting backward. The weeks since the market. Since the breakfast. Since the night with the wine and the dish soap and the couch.

Since your last moon’s blood, which should have come and gone by now and had, you realized with a cold and dawning horror, hadn’t come at all.

“…Oh,” you said to the empty kitchen, very quietly. “That can’t be right.”

Surely not. You hadn’t eaten, and were extremely stressed out and—that was all it was. A body running on spite and stale bread, denied anything resembling a proper meal since he’d walked out the door. Of course, you were lightheaded. You’d have to be a fool not to be. You wrung out the cloth and resolved, very firmly, to eat something. Later. Once the counters were spotless and your hands stopped shaking.

You were still angry about the whole humiliating business, frankly. Yesterday, a perfectly ordinary walk to clear your head had ended with you swaying on your feet outside the apothecary, the world going soft and silver at its edges, your hand flung out for a wall that wasn’t there.

Mira, your eternally nosy friend and neighbor, had materialized like she’d been summoned. She’d pressed a small corked tonic into your hands, looked you up and down with those entirely too-perceptive eyes of hers, and said something truly offensive about iron levels and a woman’s instincts and the way you’ve gone off your tea, dear, that’s a distinct sort of speaking.

You ignored the teasing, every barbed and knowing word of it. You went home.

And you most certainly did not think about what she’d meant. Nor about how she’d taken to asking, every single day with that sly tilt of her head, and where’s the handsome wizard got to, then? As though she had some standing claim to him. As though the comings and goings of Gale Dekarios were neighborhood business, posted and public, and not the precise wound you were currently dismantling your home in order to avoid.

You did not think about any of it.

Instead, you stared at the bathroom shelf for the better part of an hour.

At the little stoppered vials lined up there. At the herbs Mira swore by, the ones any midwife in Waterdeep could read like a ledger. At the small, simple charm a hedge-witch could work in under a minute, the one that glowed soft and gold for a yes and stayed dark for a no. The sort they sold to hedge-witches and merchants’ wives, to whores and lovesick girls alike. Just in case.

You picked it up. Set it down. Picked it up again.

The counter was suddenly the only thing holding you up.

“…Oh, shit.”

You didn’t want to drink it. Didn’t want to know.

But your hands moved anyway, uncorking, mixing, steeping the way the instructions had long since worn into common knowledge. Some part of you had already decided. Some part of you had known, you suspected, since the morning the tea turned your stomach.

And when the color turned—a soft, unmistakable blush of light that bloomed across the surface like a rose unfurling in fast-forward—your knees buckled.

You sat down hard on the cold bathroom floor, staring. The little vial was still cradled in both hands, glowing its gentle, ruinous gold.

One word echoed through your skull.

“No.”

But this was not the same kind of no you’d flung at Gale across a plate of eggs. That one had been armor, cold and deliberate, a door you’d shut on purpose.

This one was wet. Frantic. Denial curling in on itself like a flame guttering in a draft.

Because no meant it was real. It meant that night hadn’t vanished cleanly into silence and stale toast the way you’d ordered it to. It meant you may very soon be living with a consequence that had his crooked smile and his too-clever eyes, maybe your own miserable stubbornness, and every conceivable power to undo the whole careful fortress you had spent years building specifically to keep yourself from being left again.

A baby.

His baby. Conceived on a couch in a borrowed robe, by a man currently a tenday’s ride away tending some druid’s blighted grove, who did not know, who had no earthly idea, who had walked out your door believing it hadn’t meant anything because you had looked him in the eye and told him so.

You pressed the heel of your hand to your mouth and laughed, once, a small broken sound that wasn’t a laugh at all.

“…Shit,” you whispered, for what felt like the hundredth time that month.

You couldn’t claim to be a wizard’s wife. That title belonged to some imagined future woman, the lucky soul Gale had carved his runes for, the one his tower would hold.

But it looked like you may just end up being a wizard’s baby momma.

You let your head fall back against the cool plaster of the wall and stared up at the ceiling, the little vial still glowing its soft, traitorous gold in your lap, and started, helplessly, to laugh again. The kind of laugh that lived right next door to crying and shared a wall with hysteria.

Of all the outcomes. Of all the careful walls you’d built. You’d told the man no. You’d held the line, kept your dignity, protected your stupid, fragile heart from being left a third time—

And your own treacherous body had gone and signed the contract anyway, in ink that glowed.

Because of course, of course. The man couldn’t simply brew a mediocre cup of tea, couldn’t stand in the rain without looking poetic about it, couldn’t leave a single thing he touched unchanged or unremarkable. Why on every plane would his contribution to this be any less aggravatingly potent? The favored of Mystra had apparently overachieved straight through every precaution you’d half-heartedly told yourself you’d taken.

You dropped your face into your hands and groaned into your palms.

“Fucking wizards,” you said to the empty room, with great and bitter feeling. “And their magical bloody sperm.”

You were doing fine. Truly.

You had a plan. A good plan. An airtight, lovingly detailed, entirely sustainable plan:

One. Avoid Gale.

Two. Pretend nothing whatsoever had happened.

Three. Under no circumstances, in this life or any of the others, bring up the minor footnote that you were now pregnant with his child following a single wine-drenched, emotionally catastrophic snuggle-turned-nightstand.

Four. Smile vaguely. Lie a little. Lie a lot, if pressed.

Five. Die peacefully, of old age, secret intact, surrounded by herbs and dignity.

A perfect plan. Flawless. Not a single load-bearing flaw in the whole magnificent structure.

Except, of course, that your friends were wolves in the polite clothing of society. Sharp-eyed and patient and far too fond of you for your own comfort. And you, unfortunately, had gone and committed the cardinal error of being visibly, conspicuously weird for well over seventy-two consecutive hours.

That was all it took.

It started, as these things invariably did, with Mira.

You were helping her rearrange her market stall, hauling baskets and stacking crates, when she paused mid-lift, a bundle of greens forgotten in her arms, and said with devastating casualness—

“So. When were you going to tell me you’re pregnant?”

You dropped a crate of radishes. They scattered everywhere, rolling across the cobbles like tiny fleeing witnesses.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re sweating,” she said, squinting at you the way she might eye a suspicious soup. “Suspiciously sweaty and faint. You haven’t insulted a single soul in three days. You cried over a pear on Tuesday. A perfectly ordinary pear. And you haven’t complained about Gale’s hair once, not once, which frankly is how I knew something was properly wrong.” She crossed her arms. “You’re obviously not well.”

You stammered, dropping to gather radishes with far more urgency than the radishes required. “That’s not—those are not symptoms, Mira, those are—moods—”

“I’ve seen sheep with more convincing poker faces,” she said flatly, unmoved. “And they’re pregnant. ’Tis the season.” She tilted her head, eyes narrowing with the slow, dreadful satisfaction of a hunter watching the snare draw tight. “So. The handsome wizard, was it?”

You deflected. You lied. You said maybe your gut was simply doing strange things, and maybe she ought to mind her own business, and maybe she should stop comparing you to livestock like some sort of barnyard oracle.

She didn’t press. That was the worst of it. She let it go entirely, returned to her greens, humming a little tune.

But she smiled the whole while. The slow, sure smile of a demon who had already placed a private wager on your due date and felt very good about her odds.

You told yourself you’d gotten away with it.

You had not gotten away with it.

Later that week, during dinner with two other friends—the calm ones, you’d reasoned, the no-drama ones, the safe harbor in which to simply be a person eating a meal—you reached across the table for a second helping of fruit salad—and paused. Hand hovering over the bowl.

Three weeks ago, you’d have sooner eaten the tablecloth than a second serving of fruit. Now your mouth was watering over a bowl of melon as if it owed you back rent with interest.

Across the table, two pairs of eyes lifted from their plates in perfect, ominous unison. Like wolves scenting a limping deer. Like accountants finding an irregularity.

A fork rose, and tapped slowly, theatrically against the rim of a wine cup. Clink. Clink. Clink. Calling the tribunal to order.

“…So,” said Tamsin, with the terrible gentleness one reserves for the recently bereaved and the about-to-be-interrogated. “You. And Gale.”

Your fork hovered midair, melon trembling on the tines. “There is no me and Gale.”

“Sure, there isn’t.”

“There isn’t.”

“Of course not.” Tamsin nodded sagely. “Except you’ve drifted about like a blessed temple maiden all week, gone soft and dewy and suspiciously pleasant, and Mira swears on her mother’s grave she caught you eating pickled cabbage straight from the jar at six bells in the morning. Standing at your own window. In his robe.”

“It was cold,” you said. “The robe was nearest.”

“It is the height of summer.”

You stabbed a cube of melon and ate it out of sheer spite.

“Maybe,” you tried, with the doomed dignity of a general defending a fortress that has already, quietly, been set alight from within, “I simply have strange cravings. People have cravings. It is a known phenomenon. Entirely unremarkable.”

“And maybe we’re all gibbering idiots,” muttered Brenna, who had not looked up from buttering her bread but was clearly enjoying herself enormously. “But unfortunately for you, we are not. We are, in fact, three of the cleverest women in this district, and you have the conspiratorial instincts of a startled goose.”

“You’re all rats,” you hissed.

“Smart rats,” Mira corrected serenely, swirling her wine with the unbothered ease of a woman holding a winning hand. “Excellent rats. The finest rats your sad little secret could have hoped to be discovered by. And I’ll have you know we’ve already begun planning the baby shower.”

You choked on the melon. “The—what—”

“A tower theme,” she continued, undeterred, ticking points off on her fingers. “Very on the nose, I grant you, but the people want what they want. Little cakes shaped like spellbooks. A tressym made of spun sugar. Brenna thinks we ought to hire a bard, but Brenna is, as we’ve established, a romantic and a fool.

“I think a bard would be tasteful—”

“Nobody asked, Brenna.”

“I HAVEN’T EVEN TOLD HIM YET—”

The words tore out of you before your brain could lunge across the table and strangle them in the cradle.

Dead, ringing, total silence. 

The silence that follows a badly miscast spell, in the breathless half-second before everyone present realizes the ceiling is, as a matter of fact, about to come down on all their heads.

Three forks went still. Three faces turned.

And then, into that perfect catastrophic hush, soft and slow and absolutely incandescent with delight, Mira set down her cup and breathed:

“Oh. No.” Her hand rose to her chest like she was witnessing a miracle. “You haven’t even told him?”

The table did not so much erupt as detonate.

Brenna shrieked. Tamsin slammed both palms flat on the wood hard enough to rattle the cutlery, demanding dates, demanding details, demanding to know which night and whose couch and whether it was true about wizards. Mira simply leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and regarded you with the radiant, insufferable satisfaction of a woman whose every last suspicion had just been confirmed in a single, glorious, self-inflicted blow.

“To the Hells with the cabbage,” she declared over the din. “Just wait till his mum hears!”

Gale did not mean to be gone for three months.

He really didn’t.

Halsin had needed help. Nothing world-ending, for once in Gale’s life. Merely a series of stubborn forest blights, several displaced and irritable nature spirits, and one brief but genuinely harrowing territorial dispute with an owlbear commune that had taken a philosophical objection to the new irrigation runes. Important work, certainly. Worthy work. Enough to tug at his sense of duty, and, if he were honest with himself, somewhere around the second month, enough to distract him from the soft, persistent ache of your absence that had followed him all the way east like a faithful and miserable dog.

He’d thought: She needs time.

He’d thought: Better to let her breathe. Let her forget the way I looked at her in the firelight. The things I said. The things I meant.

He’d thought, eyeing Tara (the increasingly nosy tressym that had adopted his mother’s roofline): And whatever you do, do not act suspicious, and do not breathe a word of it to the flying cat, or it’ll start stalking her windows and the whole of Waterdeep will know my business by the day’s end.

He’d thought: I’ll come back when I’m less… obvious about it.

This last had proven optimistic. Three months of moss and moonlight had done precisely nothing to make him less obvious. If anything, he’d composed four letters he hadn’t sent and one sonnet he’d burned out of mercy for the world.

So when he finally arrived back at the family estate, mud on his boots, cloak half-wrinkled, soul still faintly humming with the green hush of distant forests, he expected a warm meal, a long bath, and a quiet evening to plan his approach with the care it deserved.

Gale stepped through the gates of the Dekarios estate just after sunrise, the early light catching the rooftop spires and gilding them gold, as though the city itself were quietly relieved to have him home. He was bone-tired and smelled faintly of pine and regret, and he was thinking, mostly, about precisely which tea he’d brew before sitting down to write you a letter. Something soft. Apologetic. Measured.

Romantic Reintegration Plan, Phase Two.

Respectful and understated. No grand gestures, nothing that might spook his wild horse of a bride-in-waiting. Perhaps, he allowed himself, with scones.

He had it all so beautifully, so reasonably planned.

He made it precisely three steps inside the front hall before the house staff scattered like panicked goblins before a drawn blade. A maid took one look at him, went pale, and vanished through a side door. The butler developed an urgent and previously unmentioned interest in a far corridor. Somewhere, a teacup was set down with suspicious haste.

Gale slowed. Frowned. This was not the homecoming of a beloved son. This was the silence that fell over a battlefield in the half-breath before the catapults loosed.

Then he heard it.

Click.

The unmistakable, crisp report of his mother’s heel meeting marble with intent.

He turned.

Lady Amalthea Dekarios stood at the top of the grand staircase, arms folded, spine straight as a tower rune, expression carved from glacial ice three ages old. She did not descend at once. She simply looked down at him and let the silence do its work, the way only a mother of a magical prodigy who has survived adolescent heartbreaks, arcane disasters, and at least one regrettable infatuation involving a harpist truly can.

The grand matron of magical social graces, five-time fundraiser chair for the Waterdeep Historic Alchemy Restoration Guild, was wearing her battle pearls.

Gale’s blood ran cold.

Not the everyday pearls or the second-best strand reserved for guild luncheons and the intimidation of city officials. The battle pearls. The ones she had worn to confront his headmaster, to bury her own mother, and to inform a visiting Calishite ambassador exactly what she thought of his trade tariffs. The pearls came out for war and for funerals alone, and as far as Gale could see, nobody had died.

But the notion of a pleasant evening fled. The bath fled. The scones fled, weeping, into the night.

What Gale got instead was his mother, descending now stair by deliberate stair into the front hall, advancing upon him like a storm cloud given leave at last to break, her eyes alight with the terrible, all-knowing fire of maternal omniscience.

“Gale Dekarios,” she said. Just his name. It landed like a verdict.

He summoned his most disarming smile, the one that had talked him out of detentions and into restricted laboratories. “…Hello, Mother. You look radiant. Have you done something with the—”

“You stay right there.” A breath. Then, rising with magnificent, terrible momentum: “Just where have you BEEN?”

“Ah.” He set down his satchel very slowly, as one does around a creature deciding whether to charge. “Forests. Mostly. Trees, broadly. Halsin had a small situation with a blight, and then a slightly larger situation with an owlbear, and you know how one thing leads rather inevitably to the next—”

“Three months, Gale.”

“It was a very involved owlbear.”

Her glare was so fearsome, he genuinely, briefly wondered whether his mother had taken up the study of death magic in his absence. There was something distinctly necromantic in the way she was looking at him, calculating precisely how much more useful he’d be as a reanimated and obedient corpse.

“You have exactly five seconds to explain yourself,” she said crisply.

“…For what, precisely?” Gale asked, with the caution of a man defusing something delicate and unstable.

She advanced upon him like a general crossing a field she had already won. “Three months, Gale. Three. Do you know how long that is in Waterdeep gossip hours? Decades. Whole dynasties have risen and fallen. I have had three separate neighbors bring me congratulations fruit.”

He looked utterly, helplessly lost. “Congratulations—for what?”

She threw a pear at him.

It bounced off his shoulder with a soft and dignified thunk, like divine judgment delivered by way of produce.

“For disappearing,” she said, “while your beloved parades about Waterdeep with the precise and unmistakable glow of a woman who is mysteriously and romantically pregnant, and whose child’s father is apparently too emotionally stunted to be present for any of it.”

Gale blinked. Once—Twice. The satchel slid from his nerveless fingers and hit the marble.

“I—what—who?”

She descended the final stairs with elegant, terrible fury, battle pearls gleaming. “Your girl, Gale. The one you have been sighing over like a tragic Byronic stanza since you were fourteen years of age!”

A pause, for breath, and for maximum devastation.

“That girl, Gale. She is with child. And you have been negotiating property disputes with owlbears? I raised you better. I raised you, on occasion, at considerable personal expense.”

Gale’s ears turned pink.

“I was helping Halsin. There were urgent druidic matters of genuine ecological consequence—” He stopped. Something in the sentence caught up with him a half-beat behind everyone else, as it so often did. “—Did you say the love of my life is expecting?”

“And now there are urgent domestic matters!” she barked, sailing straight past him. “There is gossip, Gale. There are rumors. I had a man at the grocer’s congratulate me on my forthcoming grandchild over the radishes, and do you know what I was forced to say?”

“…Thank you?” he offered weakly.

“I said, ‘Yes, she’ll make a stunning daughter-in-law the moment my son returns from spiritually composting in a bog.’” She flung the word like a second pear. “I improvised, Gale. I am sixty-three years old, and I was improvising paternity over root vegetables.”

Gale made a helpless, drowning sort of noise.

She was circling him now. Pacing. Monologuing like a bard nursing a decade-old vendetta and a full house. “Do you know how humiliating it is to field romantic inquiries about you from nobles who have never once had the privilege of being incinerated by one of your spells? To smile and nod while the actual mother of your actual child fends off an entire district’s worth of scandal armed with nothing but polite smiles and a mysterious and unrelenting craving for melon slices?”

Gale froze where he stood.

His voice broke clean in half on the inhale. “She’s—she’s pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“She’s… with child?”

“With your disaster-wizard spawn, yes, Gale, keep up!”

He made a noise. A strangled, faintly religious noise, the sort a man makes at the foot of an altar. His face drained to parchment-white. Then, with no apparent transition, it flooded a deep and helpless red.

His mother stopped pacing. She turned and looked at him the way one regards the single dumbest man ever to draw breath on the Material Plane, a man who had brushed against godhood and could not perform basic arithmetic.

“Yes, Gale,” she said, slow and merciless. “And unless she is incubating some rogue magical construct purely out of spite for you, it is yours.”

He went motionless.

The breath left his body like a spell gone wrong, the backlash of something vast he’d cast without meaning to.

Then he twitched, hard, like he was rebooting his soul after a bad backlash of fireball.

“I have to go.”

“Oh, now you have to go?”

“I gave her space—”

“You gave her abandonment! She has been swanning about town trying to look casual while glowing like a divine candle and muttering your name at fruit!”

“I didn’t know—she never wrote—”

“She owes you nothing, you goose-hearted tragedy bard! You fled the morning after and left her to pretend it was all perfectly fine while you played at emotional exile with mushrooms and moon druids!”

Gale dragged a hand through his hair, already halfway to the door, satchel forgotten on the marble.

“Do you think she’ll even speak to me?”

“No,” she said flatly. “But you’re going anyway.”

“And if she doesn’t forgive me?”

“Then you will court her until she does. Properly, this time.”

He stopped, one hand on the doorframe. “…That isn’t how forgiveness—”

“I want a daughter-in-law, Gale! A clever one! One who looks at you as though you are a man and not a walking novella on self-sabotage! DO NOT WASTE THIS.”

“Yes, Mother,” he mumbled, flinching as a fresh pear sailed past his ear with alarming precision and burst against the doorframe.

“And bring her flowers! Real ones, Gale, not enchanted ones, she will know the difference, and so will I! And if you make her weep so much as once more, I swear on Mystra’s abandoned corset, I will hex your kneecaps clean off and donate them to the Restoration Guild!”

Gale half-stumbled out onto the front steps, gripping the banister like it alone anchored his entire reeling life to the earth.

“I’m GOING!”