Fanofkrauserreblogs

Thunder to the rain… he’s fun to draw

He is older now, happy birthday!

Enjoy all the cigars

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Hahaha, in a way, that would indeed be the case! :D And I wrote it mostly from the perspective of the reader. I just… like it more like that. The ending is partly from his perspective, too, though, as compromise.

I uh… did get quite carried away writing this scenario. xP

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Warning!: Hints of NSFW Below! Mentions of torture.

Shiryu of the Rain

You don’t know how his obsession with you started. Only that it began the way some storms do: from a clear sky, with no warning you would have believed until the first raindrop hits your skin. At first there was only that faint, prickling sense of pressure in the air. The kind sailors swear they can taste in the air before thunder arrives. You told yourself it was nothing. You told yourself you were simply tired.

One moment you had glimpsed him from a distance on a New World island, only weeks after word spread that they had brutally passed through what could only be Fishman Island. The port had been loud with reunion and rumor, gulls screaming over crates of fruit and coil-rope, locals hawking charms against sea kings and worse. You were halfway between stalls when the crowd suddenly thinned.

For a moment, he stood there like a landmark that had not existed the day before.

Then, he had approached like a man out for a stroll, not a vicious predator, his officer’s cap shadowing the wide bridge of his nose. A cigar burned at the corner of his broad mouth, fat and patient, the ember pulsing like a tiny warning light. When he inhaled, the smoke did not drift so much as settle, clinging to him the way damp rain clings to stone.

"Directions," he’d rumbled to you, like it was an ordinary thing to order, like you were some innkeeper instead of a total stranger. His voice had the dry scrape of a whetstone, unhurried, almost bored, as though he had already decided the very shape of the answer.

You had answered too quickly once he clarified he was looking for the local weapon smith. Your mouth moved before your mind caught up, and the moment you realized you were giving him anything at all, you tried to take it back. You turned. You cut the conversation off.

That was when his visible eye pinned you, and that grin arrived in full.

Not warm. Not friendly. Not even particularly pleased. It looked like curiosity sharpened into something usable. A metaphorical blade being tested with the soft caress of a thumb. His cigar bobbed with the movement of his thick lips, and for a heartbeat you thought he might chuckle, but the sound never came.

You remember the way your skin tightened, as if the air had dropped ten degrees. You remember the weight of him, even from a step away, the sense that his shadow wasn’t made by the sun at all, but by his own choice.

Every time you reached back for the memory, your body answered first: a cold shiver, the kind that starts between the ribs and spreads like black ink. His shadow swallowing yours. That one eye peering down at you as if you were a sentence he suddenly intended to finish, a name he suddenly intended to underline. Lazy, gritty words curling into your ear, smoke and dark amusement braided together, and beneath it something worse, something almost intimate, as if he’d recognized you in a way you hadn’t agreed to as you walked away.

After that, rumors became your weather forecast.

They drifted from dock to dock, town to town, salted by frightened whispers: Shiryu of the Rain had suddenly left the Blackbeard crew. Not dismissed, but gone, like a door ripped clean off its hinges. He had killed another crew mate on his way out, quick and final, leaving only blood on the deck. Betrayed them like he had betrayed the very Impel Down uniform he still wore, as if loyalty was just another title he got bored of carrying.

Then nothing.

No updates. No new sightings. His relatively new bounty stayed the same on every poster, frozen in time as if the world had decided he’d stopped moving as soon as he'd escaped Impel Down.

But you soon knew better.

It began small.

A shape at the edge of a crowd that was much too tall to belong there. You would turn your head and catch only the afterimage of a monstrous height, the suggestion of broad shoulders vanishing behind a sailcloth awning or a tall stack of barrels.

An innkeeper who swore they didn’t allow smoking, while the corridor outside your room smelled of cigar anyway. Not just smoke, but the particular, heavy, bitter sweetness of a particular brand, the kind that clung to curtains and hair and breath. Some nights you would find the scent pooling under your door like spilled liquor.

Small things became wrong things.

A tavern boy delivering your meal would hesitate and say, confused, that someone had already paid for it when you tried to.

A mirror in a shop window would catch the street behind you, and for one blink you’d see a tall blur where no one stood when you looked back.

Footsteps that never followed you directly, always a street behind.

You started changing your route for no reason you could admit.

Turning left when you meant to go right.

Crossing bridges twice.

Circling markets until the smells of fish and citrus and sweat made you nauseous.

You began checking shadows for seams, your Haki probing the air.

You told yourself it was paranoia. You told yourself you were imagining it. You told yourself the Grand Line was a place that taught people to see monsters in every cloud.

And then you would hear a lighter strike somewhere out of sight, near a place it shouldn’t be expected. Or you’d catch the faintest flick of ember in the dark.

You kept moving, Haki awakening further inside of you.

Paradise was supposed to feel like a step back into daylight. A return to calmer seas you understood and a loosening of the New World’s clenched fist around your wrist. Instead it felt like walking deeper into a hallway you didn’t remember entering, the walls subtly narrowing, the air growing too still. The islands were calmer and brighter, the routes more familiar, the Marines even more visible, and yet none of it mattered. A corridor is a corridor, no matter how well it’s lit.

And then, you saw him again.

In the middle of the night. A quiet street on an island close to Marineford with streetlamps alight. Shiryu stood in the open without needing to hide. A large silhouette that made the street feel suddenly much smaller.

His grin was sharper than you remembered.

The deep lines around his mouth and beneath his visible eye looked carved rather than aged, replaced with something heavier. His gloved hand rested on the sheath of his nodachi, gripping it too tight for a casual encounter, as if his own restraint delighted him.

Smoke drifted from his cigar in slow coils, unhurried as a tide, and the air tasted like burnt bitter sweetness and danger. Even the light seemed to be turning syrupy around him.

For a second you couldn’t hear the sea.

Not the usual hush of waves against stone, not the distant creak of rigging, not even a drunk’s laugh leaking from some late-open doorway. The street held its breath, and so did you, as if the world had learned what you already knew: sound was a luxury you couldn’t afford.

That was when it clicked, clean and brutal.

Not a theory. Not a fear. A fact, dropping into place with the heavy weight of sea stone.

This wasn’t at all a coincidence.

This wasn’t the Grand Line playing tricks on you.

All those little wrongs, all those near-misses and half-glimpses, that one meal paid for and the footsteps that followed yours, weren’t your mind playing tricks on you, or the imagined hunger for patterns. They were a trail laid with intention, as neat as a clean cut.

Whatever he had become after leaving Blackbeard, whatever debt or desire or sickness had taken root in him, it had patiently fastened to you like a barbed hook. Not a rope you could slip free of nor a chain you could break by force. A hook you only noticed once it was in too deep.

And he had followed that hook.

He’d reeled himself along your wake the way sharks follow blood and the way storms follow warm water, letting you think you had distance when you only had delay.

All the way back. Past the islands that tried to look harmless in daylight.

Past patrol flags and safe, busy harbors and every lie you told yourself about being lost in a crowd.

All the way into the first half of the Grand Line.

Now he was here, close enough that you could see the pale gleam of his eye in the streetlight, close enough to make your skin prickle as if even his own shadow had teeth. Close enough that you could hear the faint scrape of his thumb along the sheath. A private, careful sound.

As if he were counting down.

Not to a strike.

To the moment you finally understood you were the thing he’d finally chosen to keep.

But you didn’t accept that.

Not after he had clearly shadowed you for weeks, letting you feel his attention like a wet cloak as he studied you from afar, until it soaked into your routine and made even simple choices feel rehearsed for someone else’s amusement. And all the while, you knew, deep down, that he was forced to work this way. Forced to keep his distance and watch instead of striking sooner, because you’d made it impossible for a wanted man like him to get close without risk. You were always in ports and islands much too busy for a scene, always along Marine patrol routes, always under the watchful eyes of white blue uniforms and crowds, so he watched and waited and learned how to haunt the margins, becoming the quiet threat in every busy place.

As such, not after the way he’d appeared in half a dozen ports without ever truly being *seen,* as if he could fold himself into the world’s blind spots and step out again when he got bored.

And not after tonight.

He had chosen a street with only one real exit. He had deliberately picked an hour when the streetlamps were dimmed low and the sea fog could turn distances into lies. He had decided to stand where the light made him taller, broader and pretty much unavoidable.

He had held himself with the casual patience of a man who believed time belonged only to him.

You watched his hand tighten on his long sword’s sheath further like the weapon was a promise he could cash in whenever he pleased.

The brown leather creaked under his grip.

His thumb slowly traced the edge of the guard once, almost reverently. It was intimate in the wrong direction, like he was touching you through the idea of his blade.

Your mind tried to assemble options...

Bargain. Bluff. Lie. Silence. Scream...

Your body refused to cooperate.

It moved before your thoughts could argue, before fear could partly turn into politeness, before anything in you could make the mistake of letting him talk. There are moments when survival is not a decision but an instinct that kicks your legs out from under you and replaces them with flight.

You ran.

The first stride felt like betrayal to the air itself, as if the street had expected you to stand there and be reasonable, to play your part in whatever scene he’d set. Streetlight smeared into streaks as you tore past it, gold becoming lines, shadows already becoming traps. The stones beneath your shoes were slick with sea mist, and each footfall skidded just enough to threaten disaster. Your breath tore at your throat in ragged pulls, too loud, too alive.

You waited for the scrape of pursuit. The thud of heavy boots.

It came.

Just not the way your fear expected.

No pounding. No loud clatter of a big man forced into haste.

Only a soft, wrong hush behind you, like the street had been wiped clean. Like something enormous had learned how to move the way smoke moves: without announcing itself.

The silence wasn’t absence.

It was pressure.

It was the knowledge that he was close enough to follow and disciplined enough not to let you hear it.

That was worse.

You rounded a corner hard enough to bruise your shoulder on the wall and, in the same motion, folded your presence inward.

Long ago, you had learned to let your Haki bloom when you needed it. You hadn’t practiced the opposite. Masking it felt like trying to hold smoke in your fist. But panic is a teacher that doesn’t accept excuses, and the fear of his gaze on your back made you sharp in ways training never had.

You swallowed your own light.

You forced your awareness to go quiet. You pulled it down into your bones and locked it there, biting down on the instinct to flare and look for him through this sixth sense. For a few precious heartbeats, you were only a running body. Just another shadow on a street full of shadows.

And still the street behind you stayed… wrong.

A bead of condensation slid down your cheek as if the air had shifted. The fog eddied in a slow spiral at ankle-height, disturbed by a step that made no sound. Somewhere, so close it felt personal, cigar smoke threaded into your breath.

When you glanced back from the mouth of the alley, you saw the square.

He hadn’t stayed where you’d left him.

The place he’d occupied was empty, light lying there like shed skin.

Then, at the far end of the street you had ran out of in a loop, an enormous silhouette slid through the fog, silent as a direct contradiction to his massive bulk. His eye caught the light for a heartbeat. The ember of his cigar winked.

And the signature grin, even at that distance, looked like it was aimed straight towards you, even with his body aimed sideways.

The slow rise of his broad chest was almost imperceptible, as if he’d trained himself to waste nothing, not air, not motion, not attention. The streetlights painted his trench- and overcoat in pale stripes that shifted when the fog moved, making him look sliced into pieces of light and shadow and then put back together wrong. For a heartbeat you thought you could see the prison kanji ghosting into view on the white cloth, and the thought of it made your tongue go dry.

Smoke curled from his cigar in lazy ribbons, but it didn’t drift away like normal smoke. It lingered around his face, hovering near his mouth as if it belonged there, as if it had found a home. When he exhaled, the air thickened. The street tasted of burnt leaf and salt and something metallic, like a coin held too long between teeth.

He watched you from the corner of his eye the same way a man watches a door he knows will eventually open.

The look he gave you, one filled with a distinct kind of certainty, made your blood run cold.

It wasn’t anger.

It wasn’t even irritation.

It was raw lust and anticipation intertwined, stripped of pretense, as if your sudden flight had pleased him more than your potential obedience ever could. There was hunger in it, but also calculation, the calm appetite of a predator that enjoys the very shape of pursuit. His chest then suddenly rose with heavy, ragged breaths that didn’t match his posture the longer you watched him, and the ember of his cigar glowed brighter with each quickened drag, like he was feeding something inside himself. The glow lit the heavy lines beneath his eyelid for an instant, deepening them into grooves, as if desire had been carving him for years instead of anything else.

You realized, sickly, that he was listening to you. Not to your footsteps. To your heartbeat. To the tremor in your breath. To the tiny betrayals your body offered even when your mind tried to stay hard and focused.

Then he smiled wider.

Not the sharp grin from before.

Something slower.

Something that widened by degrees.

Something that said: Run. I want you to.

You didn’t wait to hear what words he’d actually planned.

You slipped into the docks like a whisper, keeping to the dark seams between warehouses, letting the stink of tar and salt cover you. A Marine patrol passed close enough that you could hear the jingle of their gear and the wet slap of their boots. You didn’t think. You stole what you needed the way desperate people steal air.

A cloak from a line where uniforms hung to dry.

A Marine cap shoved low.

A ledger pouch snatched from an unattended crate.

A name you heard shouted once and repeated under your breath until it sounded like it belonged to you.

By the time you reached the gangplank of the anchored vessel, you were an exhausted Marine clerk with pruned lips and a hunched posture, staring at the boards like you’d spent your whole life learning how not to be seen.

The ship was busy, lanterns bobbing, men calling orders. Your heart tried to leap out of your chest and throw itself into the sea.

You climbed anyway.

A guard stopped you. You held up the pouch. You let your face look bored, offended, tired. You made yourself small.

He waved you through.

Only once you were swallowed by the ship’s belly did you let yourself breathe, and even then it came out wrong, too shallow, like your lungs didn’t trust air anymore.

You learned who the vessel belonged to from a whispered argument on the deck above.

A respected Vice Admiral.

Not just any flag to hide beneath, but one that carried more weight than usual. The kind of name that made dockside workers keep their hands visible and their smiles polite.

Luck, for once, had reached down and grabbed your collar.

You told yourself that meant you were safe.

But safety has a sound.

It sounds like certainty.

And all you heard was the sea.

That same night, when the ship pulled away from the island and the lights of shore thinned into stars, you found a place to sit where you wouldn’t be noticed and stared at your hands until they stopped shaking. Not the dramatic kind of shaking you could explain away as cold, but a fine tremor that made your fingers look like they belonged to someone else. You kept flexing them, opening and closing your fists, as if you could convince your body it had done the right thing.

The deck above thudded with footsteps and routine. Men laughed too loudly. Someone sang half a shanty and forgot the rest. The ship’s lanterns swayed with the waves, casting moving cages of light across the bulkheads.

You told yourself: he is not here.

You also told yourself: he cannot be.

The cigar smell lingered.

It shouldn’t have.

The wind had been wrong for it. The distance too far. The air too clean, too salted, to carry something so specific all the way from a misty street you’d clearly left far behind.

And yet you kept catching it, faint as a memory, sharp as a warning, threading through the ship’s ordinary smells of rope, sweat and gunpowder. It would arrive in small waves, like the sea itself was exhaling it through the cracks. One breath, nothing. The next, burnt leaf and that distinct bitter sweetness that didn’t belong to any Marine aboard.

Every time it touched your nose, your heart reacted before your mind, sprinting ahead like it wanted to escape your ribs. Your muscles would clench, readying for impact that never came. Your eyes would dart to shadows you hadn’t even noticed a second earlier.

You started cataloguing sounds.

The groan of timber.

The scrape of a bucket.

The whisper of crude canvas.

You tried to find the one thing that would prove he was near, and the worst part was realizing you wouldn’t hear it if he didn’t want you to.

In the weeks that followed, being bounced from island to island, it haunted you.

Sleep became a hostile negotiation. You would drift off for minutes at a time and snap awake, heart hammering, certain you had felt someone standing over you. The hairs on your arms lifted as if someone’s gaze had weight, as if attention could press down like a hand. You would sit up too fast, scanning corners that held nothing but stacked crates and sleeping bodies, and still you’d feel foolish relief when you confirmed it.

Sometimes you would wake with the taste of smoke in your mouth, as if you’d been breathing it in all night.

Sometimes you’d swear you heard the scrape of a lighter, then realize it was only the ship’s lantern wick catching, a tiny crackle that made your throat tighten anyway.

You swallowed down bile and told yourself, again and again, that a ship full of Marines was not a place a man like Shiryu could ever possibly reach. You leaned on rank and rules the way drowning people lean on driftwood. Vice Admiral. Patrol routes. Armed men in every corridor. The world’s most official kind of safety.

But dread doesn’t respect uniforms.

Then someone would light a cigar on deck.

Not even his brand. Not even his size. Just some Marine grunt with a cheap stick and a lazy boredom, flicking flame against tobacco as if the night itself was harmless.

And your body would revolt.

Your pulse would spike so hard your vision would spot, black pinpricks blooming at the edges. Your breath would hitch. Your hands would go cold. For a heartbeat you’d be back at the edge of that square, streetlight syrupy, fog thick, his visible eye catching the glow.

You learned to hate smoke.

You learned to hate the sound of a lighter.

You learned to hate lantern-light, because it made every shadow look like it was hiding a shape tall enough to fill a damned castle gate.

You learned to hate how your own instincts betrayed you by keeping him alive inside your nerves, replaying him for you like a prayer you never agreed to learn. And the worst lesson of all was this: Even when you were surrounded by Marines, even when the sea stretched empty in every direction, your fear still acted like it could smell him coming.

When the vessel finally docked and you slipped away under your borrowed name, you didn’t look back at the sea. You didn’t want to imagine him standing somewhere beyond sight, smiling at the wake.

You ran anyway.

For another month you moved like a guilty thought.

New inns. New islands. New routes taken at the last possible minute. You changed the way you tied your hair. You continued to sleep in bursts, light as a bird, waking at the smallest shift in air.

At first, luck stayed with you.

A sudden storm that kept ships from sailing.

A Marine checkpoint that turned away strangers and made you blend into the crowd.

A ferry captain too drunk to remember faces.

You started to believe, cautiously, that the square on a well-populated island near Marineford had been the end of it. That he’d gotten the message in whatever language even monsters understood.

You let yourself imagine how he must have turned distant. Morbid in the way he was said to be morbid, with his distinct brand of violence. You pictured him growing bored, the way men like him grew bored, appetite burning hot for a moment and then collapsing into ash. You pictured him redirecting that hunger toward easier targets, toward any other woman who wasn’t you.

You tried to make that thought a shelter.

Some nights you even slept for longer than an hour.

Some mornings you managed to drink your tea without checking every reflection.

And then, on an ordinary morning that should have been forgettable, his name found you again in ink.

The tavern was loud in that harmless way places get when they are trying to prove they’re safe. Dice on wood. A woman laughing too hard at a sailor’s story. The smell of fried fish and cheap citrus rum. You’d chosen a corner table facing the door, as usual, with your back to a wall that couldn’t surprise you.

You were halfway through breakfast when a newspaper, damp at the edges, slapped down on the table beside your plate.

You hadn’t bought it.

You hadn’t asked for it.

"It was already on my tray," the young man who delivered it insisted, voice rising. "I just… I thought you wanted to read it." His fingers smelled faintly of ink and salt.

You stared at the paper as if it might move.

The headline was about a scuffle.

A pirate crew.

The same one you’d tangled with before a long while ago, just after you first came across the former Head Jailer of Impel Down.

Their name sat there in bold type like a curse you had tried to scrub off your tongue and failed. You remembered the captain’s nasty smirk. The way his men had circled. The cheap swagger that always came before trouble.

Coincidence, you tried to tell yourself. The Grand Line loved to braid lives together until you couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. It loved to make patterns out of accidents, to turn every encounter into a knot.

You forced yourself to read anyway.

Your eyes tracked the lines. Your stomach tightened with every sentence.

But the details in the article made your stomach churn.

Bodies found in a gruesome state.

Not simply dead.

Dismemberment.

Displayed.

Deep-set cuts so clean the writer compared them to butcher’s work. The description lingered on the precision like it was something admirable, like neatness made horror more acceptable. You could almost see it, the blade doing what a blade does best in this world; turning flesh into evidence of skill.

The captain tortured and beheaded after a short fight.

Not a quick end. Not a mercy. An ending performed slowly enough to feel like a message.

Your fork clattered against the plate.

The sound was too loud. A few heads turned. Someone muttered. You didn’t apologize. Your hand hovered over the newspaper and then pulled back, as if the page might suddenly catch flame.

Because you knew what those cuts meant.

You didn’t need a name printed in the article. You didn’t need the witnesses’ shaky guesses or the editor’s careful wording. The shape of the violence was... familiar. The restraint in it. The deliberate cruelty paired with surgical control.

You read the headline again.

Not because you missed a word, but because your mind kept trying to turn it into something else. A misprint. A different crew. A different kind of story. The letters sat there anyway, fat and black and smug.

The tavern’s noise dulled, not because it changed, but because your attention stopped paying it rent. Dice still clicked. Someone still laughed. A mug still hit the counter with a satisfied thud. All of it drifted farther away until the only thing that felt close was the newspaper near your fingertips.

And the quiet inside you answered with a certainty that felt like a blade laid flat against your throat.

This wasn’t a scuffle.

Not a messy brawl. Not a bar fight that spilled into an alley. Not a clash of drunk egos and dull knives.

This was a reminder.

A lesson written in flesh, delivered by courier, folded neatly into morning routine.

And he had chosen that crew, of all crews, because you would notice.

Because you had history with them. Because their name would catch your attention. Because the Grand Line is full of violence, but not all violence has his personal handwriting.

You could still remember that captain’s face: all swagger and loose hands and cheap threats, the kind of man who thought fear was the only language worth speaking. He had leaned too close when he talked, breath sour with rum, fingers too casual about where they landed. He’d smiled at you like you were a purchase he was negotiating.

You had punched him once, hard enough to split his lip.

The memory came back in painful clarity. The shock of impact down your arm. The taste of copper in the air. The brief silence when even his crew paused, surprised that anyone would dare. Then the captain had laughed through the blood like it was the first clash to a cruelty he planned to finish later, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

You’d gotten away that time after punching them back down.

You’d told yourself you had won.

Now the newspaper told you what winning actually looked like when Shiryu decided to participate.

No one deserved what the article described.

Not even the pirate captain.

Not the kind of ending that turned a human being into parts, arranged by someone who cared more about clean lines than human limits. The cruelty was the obvious thing, but it was the control that made your stomach heave. Anyone could kill. Only a certain kind of person would take the time to make it this precise.

Your fingers found and tightened on the edge of the page until it creased.

You became aware, suddenly, of how your body was reacting without asking you.

Your shoulders had crept up toward your ears.

Your jaw ached from clenching.

Your skin felt too thin, as if the room’s air could bruise you now.

You sat very still, feeling the room tilt, as if the tavern had been built on a deck and the sea had started to roll beneath it, too. You didn’t want to move. By now, movement felt like permission. Like noise. The kind of thing a seasoned hunter could still track.

The ink on the page blurred as your eyes tried to refuse it, the letters swimming, regrouping, becoming shapes rather than meaning. You blinked hard and they snapped back into place, obedient and horrible.

Across the room, someone coughed. A chair scraped. A man said something about rain.

It all sounded unreal.

Because in the back of your mind, like a match striking in the dark, a thought arrived with perfect, sick certainty.

Shiryu… hadn’t forgotten.

He was answering you.

Not with words.

With a demonstration.

With proof that he could reach into your life and squeeze until you looked up again.

You could almost see him doing it again, that calm posture paired with ragged hunger, cigar ember brightening with each drag. You could almost feel the motion of his thumb along his sword's sheath.

And the worst part was how easily your imagination supplied details.

How readily your fear filled in the blanks.

How quickly your brain tried to solve the puzzle of where he was now.

And somewhere out there, beyond the bright lies of Paradise, the air smelled faintly of cigar smoke, as if the sea itself had started carrying his breath again.

As if every breeze that touched your face could be a message.

As if the distance between you was only something he allowed.

And you were right.

You had been right in the way people are right about storms at sea: not because they can see the lightning yet, but because their skin remembers what pressure feels like.

You’d told yourself you were a ghost now. You’d learned to hide your entire existence so well that even your habits felt like contraband. You paid under borrowed names. You spoke less. You stayed in the loudest inns, took the busiest ferries, walked in the fattest crowds where faces blended into a single moving organism.

It should have worked.

In any normal life, it would have.

But Shiryu did not need posters or gossip to keep you on his mind. He didn’t need a news article with your face somehow stamped into it. He only needed the idea of you, the memory of you turning away, the taste of your refusal.

That idea followed you.

And four months into running, when this all started, you found yourself in Carnivale, the main city of San Faldo.

San Faldo sat in the Sea Train Zone like a rivet in iron, a crucial piece of the network that stitched over a dozen islands together in the latter half of the Grand Line. Tracks cut clean lines through the sea. Whistles and bell-clangs punctuated the air at regular intervals, the sound carrying across docks and rooftops like a heartbeat you couldn’t ignore. People came and went with the train schedules, pouring into the city in bright streams, then draining away again, replaced by new faces before you could ever learn the old ones.

It was, by any sane measure, the perfect place to vanish.

A Spring Island sitting under a huge iron deposit, San Faldo smelled faintly of warm metal when the sun hit the stone. The streets held that particular sweetness of thawing earth, and when the wind shifted, you caught hints of coal smoke and salt and oil from the rail yards. The ground felt steady in the way islands built on industry do.

But San Faldo had another pulse.

Circus.

Carnivale looked less like a city and more like a celebration that had decided to become permanent. There were as many circus tents as there were buildings, canvas peaks rising between rooftops, striped awnings flaring like bright wounds in the sunlight. Laughter dominated the atmosphere, children and adults alike letting it spill out of them in loud, careless bursts. Music drifted from somewhere on every street, horns and drums and clapping hands, the rhythm changing corner by corner.

Posters and billboards lined almost every surface.

A trapeze artist momentarily froze mid-flight.

A lion rendered with teeth too white to be real as it roared proudly.

A ringmaster’s grin promising marvels with one hand and true skill with the other.

Some of the posters overlapped, pasted over older shows, layers of paper turning the walls into a history of performances no one had bothered to remove. The ink smelled fresh in places, sharp and new, and old in others, sun-baked into something brittle.

You let yourself breathe.

You’d chosen Carnivale on purpose. Not because you loved crowds, but because you needed them. You needed the noise and the faces and the constant motion to keep your thoughts from getting too quiet. Quiet gave your fear room to stand up.

A soft smile lifted the corners of your lips as you passed a small crowd gathered around a performer in a patched coat. He raised his bare hands, palms open, fingers spread wide to show emptiness. A child beside you made a sound of pure disbelief, a bright little gasp that didn’t know how to be skeptical yet.

The performer closed his hands.

Opened them.

A pigeon burst upward from between his fingers like it had been hiding in the air itself, wings beating frantic joy into the sunlight. The crowd erupted into applause. The child laughed so hard they hiccupped. For a moment, something in your chest loosened, as if your body had remembered that not every surprise had to be a threat.

Then the scent hit your nose.

Dark. Bitter.

The same kind Shiryu likes to smoke.

It arrived like a hand closing around the back of your neck, gentle and absolute. It didn’t belong with the sweet pastries and popcorn and spring-warm air. It cut through Carnivale’s sugar-brightness with blunt confidence.

Your smile died on your mouth.

Instinctively, you pulled your hood closer over your head, fabric rasping against your cheek. Your fingers shook once, betraying you, and you forced them still. You told your shoulders to relax. You told your breath to slow. You told your face to look like a person who hadn’t just been stabbed by a memory.

You turned your head slowly.

Eyes boring over the heads of passersby, scanning the way you’d learned to scan: not for faces, but for shapes. For the wrong height. For the way crowds subtly rearranged around something they didn’t want to notice.

A swordsman like him could not blend in easily.

Even among carnival tents and tall signposts, three and a half meters of man should have been obvious.

You searched anyway.

There were clowns on stilts wobbling past in exaggerated strides. There were acrobats weaving through foot traffic with unnatural grace, carrying poles and hoops and props that flashed in the sun. There was a man on a ladder repainting a billboard, his brush dripping red. There were dockworkers with shoulders like barrels, sailors with duffel bags, tourists with wide eyes.

But you didn’t see him.

Not the officer cap.

Not the pale gleam of his eye.

Not the wrong stillness of his monstrous posture cloaked by a white, distinct overcoat.

Your heart thundered once, hard enough to hurt, and then hesitated when you found the source.

An older man stood at a street corner under a faded poster of a fire-breather, his back half-turned to the crowd. He was smoking a fat cigar, holding it with the practiced ease of someone who’d been doing it for decades. The cigar was thick, glossy, quite expensive.

Same brand.

Exact same smell.

Relief tried to seep into you.

It felt like stepping onto a plank that might hold.

Your lungs took a fuller breath. Your pulse slowed, a fraction. You told yourself that cigar smoke was cigar smoke, that you were letting your fear paint everything in his colors again.

But the scent was too familiar.

And as you watched, the older man exhaled slowly, and the smoke didn’t drift away into the carnival air the way it should have.

It lingered.

It coiled.

The crowd flowed around the man without touching him, a subtle avoidance that had nothing to do with politeness. A child tugged their mother’s sleeve to cross the street early. A vendor angled their cart a little wider, giving the corner more space than it needed.

Your stomach tightened.

You told yourself it was nothing.

You told yourself, again, that it was only smoke.

And then, beneath the music and laughter, you felt it.

Pressure.

A presence not in front of you, but near. Something that didn’t need to be seen to be there. Something that understood crowds the way sharks understand schools of fish. Not as protection, but as cover.

The older man lifted the cigar again.

The ember glowed.

For the briefest instant, in the reflection of that tiny orange light, you saw a different silhouette in the shop window behind him, taller than anyone nearby.

Not a clean outline, not a figure you could point to and accuse, but a presence that distorted the glass around it. The reflection seemed to stretch, as if the world had to make room. A shoulder line too broad. Several heads too high. A stillness that didn’t match the carnival’s constant motion.

The ember winked again.

The crowd’s noise was still there, the music and laughter and clapping hands, but right at that corner the sound felt muffled, as if the air had thickened. Your skin prickled, not with cold, but with the instinct that something huge was close and choosing to be quiet.

Then the window caught only circus colors again.

Bright stripes. Painted smiles. A trapeze poster fluttering at the edge of the frame. The reflection reset itself so neatly it made your teeth ache, like a trick done too clean.

And yet the cigar smoke did not reset.

The smell of it, dark and bitter, threaded itself into your next breath like a promise. It slid under your hood and into your throat, familiar enough to make your stomach turn.  It was his flavor of warning, the same heavy leaf that had stalked your nights and haunted your sleep, the same burnt bitter-sweetness that always arrived right before your fear did.

Carnivale kept laughing.

A child squealed at another magic trick. Someone shouted for candied apples. A clown bowed extravagantly to applause.

The sea train whistles kept calling, long and metallic, slicing through the city at intervals that should have felt comforting, official, structured. A timetable. A system. A promise that things here ran on rails. On escape.

And you stood in the middle of it, suddenly aware that in a city built for spectacle, the most dangerous thing was the performance you couldn’t see.

You ignored the twinge in your stomach anyway.

You had to.

If you let every flare of fear steer you, you’d never move again. You forced your feet to keep their pace, forced your gaze to stop snagging on reflections, forced your shoulders to look loose beneath your cloak. You became a person who belonged in Carnivale, just another hooded traveler drawn in by noise, color and impressive showmanship.

Behind you, the crowd swallowed the corner whole.

A juggler’s pins flashed like knives in the sun. A pair of lovers squeezed past you, laughing. Somewhere nearby, a drumline began to thump a rhythm that made the ground feel alive. The older man with the cigar remained where he was, smoke curling upward as if it had nowhere else to go.

You didn’t see the peculiar movement in the backdrop.

A shift too large to be wind.

A massive figure sliding between tents the way a ship’s shadow slides over water, half-hidden by canvas and passing bodies. Just a ripple in the scene, disguised by spectacle. The kind of movement your eyes were trained to catch, and yet somehow you missed it, because you’d subconsciously decided the threat had to be obvious to be truly real.

Carnivale soon punished that decision.

Half an hour later, you rounded a corner where the street narrowed between two tents and the air changed.

The day was still present, but the light had started to tilt. The sun dropped low behind the city’s iron bones. The laughter around you softened, not disappearing, just thinning as families drifted towards their hotels and residences and vendors began to fold their stalls. Colorful lanterns were being lit one by one, their glow warm and deceptive.

That was when the alarm bell rang.

Not a literal bell.

The bell inside you.

A hard, sudden chime at the border of your Observation Haki, like a fingertip pressed against the edge of your awareness. You’d been keeping your Haki low, a cautious simmer rather than a flare, but even at that restrained level you felt it: a presence brushing the perimeter and then retreating, testing how far it could reach without being named.

It was dark.

Hot.

Familiar.

Deliberate.

The kind of presence that didn’t drift through a crowd by accident.

Your breath snagged.

Your body froze for the briefest moment, the way prey freezes when it realizes the grass behind it swayed. Every muscle went tight. Every thought tried to talk at once.

Don’t.

Don’t look back.

If you looked back, you’d give him your fear. If you looked back, you’d confirm his pleasure. If you looked back, you’d lose the one advantage you still had: motion.

But panic took over, as it did before.

You bolted.

Your sudden speed startled the people around you. A woman yelped as you cut past her. A man cursed as you bumped his shoulder. Someone dropped a bag of sweet nuts, and the little pellets scattered across the stones like tiny bones.

You didn’t apologize.

You didn’t slow.

As you ran, you folded your presence inward again.

You forced your Haki down into your bones, into your teeth, into the marrow of your ribs. You swallowed it like a light you couldn’t afford to show. The effort burned. It felt like trying to stop your own heartbeat by will alone, but you did it because the alternative was being found.

You darted through a tent.

Canvas swallowed you in striped darkness, the air inside smelling of sawdust and sweat and old perfume. A line of empty chairs made a crooked aisle. Streamers brushed your hood. Someone backstage shouted, startled, and you heard the clatter of a prop stand tipping.

You burst out the other side into an alleyway.

Narrow.

Wet.

Quiet enough that your breathing sounded obscene.

You ran a few more steps and then, all at once, the understanding landed.

You had become predictable.

Not in the obvious ways. Not in your habits, your fake names, your routes.

In your instincts.

You always chose indirect paths when you wanted to reach something important. You always arrived at the last possible second, because you believed half-hearted urgency made you less traceable. You always trusted that the crowd and the noise would buy you time, in the end.

You had chosen this route for the Sea Train for the same reason you chose everything now.

Not because it was fastest.

Because it was crowded.

Because it touched Marine eyes and official schedules and the illusion of order.

To slip in late.

To buy time.

To win it.

You had convinced yourself that arriving at the last possible second made you harder to catch, that it turned pursuit into guesswork, that it made your life less like a direct trail and more like a series of disappearances.

But Shiryu knew.

By now, of course he did.

He didn’t need to know, nor hear your real name to know your pattern. He didn’t need your face. He didn’t need a picture or a witness statement. He only needed to watch you long enough to understand what you reached for when fear tightened around your throat.

He didn’t need a map when he could predict the very shape of your fear.

The Sea Train ran on rails, on timetables, on whistles and bells. People trusted it because it was loud and official. You trusted it for the same reason.

He trusted it too.

Not as shelter.

As a funnel.

You felt the truth of it in the sudden, sick clarity that comes right before impact.

You smelled it first.

His scent.

Not the general haze of tobacco that drifted through ports and taverns, but the exact, bitter leaf that always came with him, dark and wrong in this narrow, wet alley. It slid into your lungs like a hand into a pocket. It reached you a heartbeat before the rest of reality caught up.

It wasn’t just smell.

It was a warning your body had been trained to obey.

A second before disaster struck.

A massive, brown and dark-blue arm appeared out of nowhere and hooked around your waist.

No footstep.

No shadow crossing in front of you.

Just the sudden certainty of contact, like you’d been grabbed by the night itself.

The world snapped tight.

His grip knocked the air from your body in one brutal squeeze, your lungs collapsing into a silent, panicked gasp. Your feet left the ground so fast your stomach lurched, every organ inside you shifting as if gravity had been rewritten. Before you could even register what direction you were being pulled to, that same arm curled around your back in a swift, practiced movement and turned you into him, hauling you chest-first against his body with a brutal, intimate efficiency.

The hold was too efficient.

Too familiar to his body.

As if he’d imagined this exact angle, this exact leverage, enough times that his muscles had memorized it.

He lifted you nearly two meters off the stones.

Your shoes kicked empty air.

Your toes searched for the ground and found only space, only the awful freedom of being weightless in someone else’s arm. Your cloak snagged against nothing, hood fallen off. The alley’s damp air rushed past your face, cold and thin compared to the heat pressed to your torso.

Your hands scrabbled for purchase on fabric that wasn’t there, fingers grasping at emptiness, then slipping over his sleeves- over smooth leather that gave you no grip.

The first thing you truly felt was the thick leather under your palms, dark and smooth, the surface of his trench coat, hard as a shield and just as uncaring. The texture beneath your fingers was tight and deliberate, the kind made to survive salt air, Impel Down’s prison corridors and blade nicks without giving. It didn’t flex when you pushed against it. It simply was, an answer in unyielding material form.

The second thing you felt was the sheer heat of him behind it, the contained furnace of a body that didn’t need to rush to be powerful. It bled through the leather in a way that made no sense, like he carried his own climate with him. Your chest was pinned to his chest, sternum to muscle, the contact too close to deny, too steady to fight with panic alone. He held you there as if it was the point, as if he could keep you pressed to him for hours and never tire of it.

You tried to inhale.

Your chest refused.

Not because your lungs were empty, but because his arm had decided the shape your ribs were allowed to have. Each breath scraped at the inside of you, shallow and humiliating. Panic swelled anyway, slick and immediate, filling the space air couldn’t reach.

You tried to twist in order to be able to try and properly fight him off.

His hold didn’t budge at all.

You shoved at the leather with both hands, tried to lever yourself away, tried to find an angle where bone could slip past muscle instead. You got nothing but the blunt truth of monstrous strength. He wasn’t squeezing harder. He didn’t need to. He was simply holding you the way the sea holds a drowning person: with indifference.

You could feel him in the hard plane of his chest against yours, in the way the dark blue leather between you warmed further and then stopped mattering. In the way your heartbeat stumbled when it finally realized whose breath it was being forced to share space with.

Then he stepped.

Not into the alley.

Away from it.

No jerk. No stumble. Just a single smooth retreat, dragging you out of public view with the ease of someone plucking a coin from a pocket. He moved like he’d rehearsed the path, like he already knew where the crowd’s sight lines ended and where the canvas would swallow sound.

The world changed the moment you crossed that threshold.

The alley’s damp echo vanished.

The carnival’s laughter dulled.

Even the music blurred, as if the tent fabric filtered it into something distant and unreal.

He took you behind the nearest tent, into a narrow corner where the canvas met a wooden support beam, where ropes were knotted thick and tight and the ground was packed down by countless feet. You caught a flash of bright pattern on the cloth, stars and stripes and painted smiles, and the cheerful design made the fear even worse.

He trapped you between the heavy, colorful fabric and himself.

The tent fluttered close, damp from evening air, smelling faintly of dye and sawdust. It gave just enough to remind you it was there, just enough to make you aware of how little space you had.

His body pressed in even closer.

You could feel the breadth of him in every contact point: the wall of his chest in front of you, the iron curve of his bulky arm cinched around your middle, the solidity of his hips stepping in so you couldn’t drop down or slide. You were held upright by his strength alone, like a puppet with its strings cut, except the arm holding you up was far too real.

And somewhere near your ear, you felt the faint brush of his breath.

Hot.

Ragged.

Smelling of bitter smoke.

It came in slow exhalations, measured, as if he was savoring the fact that you couldn’t get away from it. The scent didn’t just touch your nose, it crawled under your tongue, settled at the back of your throat, branded itself into the moment.

Behind the tent, the world had turned into muffled color, rope and shadow, and Shiryu’s grip became the only rule that mattered. The cheerful stars and stripes hung behind you like a gaudy mural; his chest pressed warm and solid into yours, close enough that your ribs could not decide whether to fight or fold.

Instinct drove your hands further up.

You braced them against his wide shoulders during that last smooth retreat, slipping beneath the edge of his overcoat without meaning to, fingers finding fabric and then weight. The epaulettes were heavy on top your trembling hands, stiff rectangles that didn’t shift under pressure. Gold-thread details scraped faintly against the back of your hands as your grip tightened.

You finally lifted your head.

Your wide eyes locked onto the single eye visible beneath the bill of his officer’s cap.

Close up, it was worse.

From a distance, his height and stillness made him feel like... an untouchable landmark. Here, held in the corner outside of a tent like illegal contraband, you could see the small things that made him terrifying: the way his eyelid hung heavy, half-lowered as if he was always mid-thought; the deep lines carved beneath it; the unreadable ease in his gaze.

The aviator flaps of his cap shifted slightly when he tilted his head.

Your breath shuddered out.

And then your mind snagged on something that made no sense.

There’s… no cigar.

No ember.

No sweet-bitter smoke visibly curling between you.

It was such a small absence that it took a heartbeat to matter. The realization landed like a coin dropped into deep water, quiet and cold.

You tried to twist away from his chest again, to create even a bit of distance.

The attempt was pathetic in practice, all elbow and shoulder and frantic leverage, because he’d set your balance the second he grabbed you and lifted you up with but one arm. You could feel his breath shift against your face when you moved, like the air itself had to negotiate with him.

His arm loosened, than cinched tighter again around your middle, a hard band at your waist that did not crush, did not bruise, only decided. The pressure wasn’t just restraint. It was placement. It was him choosing where you existed.

You swallowed.

The motion was too loud in your own throat.

He watched it.

His eye tracked it the way a poised blade tracks a throat. Not hungry exactly, but attentive, as if he was studying how fear moved through you, how it made your body betray you in small, honest ways.

You tried to make a sound.

Your mouth opened momentarily on a breath that wanted to be a sound. One last warning, one final plea. Anything that could break the spell. You’d screamed before, in battle and in laughter and even in terror, your voice always ready. But here, pinned and held and contained, any form of sound stuck, strangled by panic.

Nothing came out.

But Shiryu wasn’t interested in waiting for your voice.

He closed the last distance between you in a single, inevitable motion, seizing your mouth with his. Hard, overwhelming and unyielding in every sense of these words, and the sharp certainty of his will pressed fully against yours.

His lips claimed you with rough confidence. Hungry, urgent and full with a wild, restrained violence. He didn’t simply kiss; he took with a near-bruising pressure, the bitter taste of tobacco overwhelming you.

His teeth found you just as quickly, nipping at the seam of your mouth and then pressing in deeper, as though tasting resistance was as important as tasting you.

Every motion was precise, yet untamed. A physical language that spoke of things unspoken and desires unchained.

His breath was heavy with the memory of recent tobacco, a bitter tang, and beneath it all the low, simmering heat that thrummed from his core- the patient heat of a predator that never doubted this moment. Your own breath became his, your gasp lost and swallowed the instant it formed, for the kiss only grew fiercer. You felt a deep, guttural rumble vibrating up from his chest, a growl barely contained, pouring into you.

Instinct made you try to turn your head away, desperate for air, for any fragment of space, for the illusion of control. You twisted, but his grip at your waist tightened in perfect counterpoint, holding you fast. He was faster still, meeting your retreat with a sharp, playful nip to your lower lip that bordered on punishment and reward at once.

He lingered there, the edge of a smirk pressed into the kiss, savoring your defiance as if it made your surrender sweeter. Wicked pleasure flickered through every pressed point of contact as he dragged your lower lip gently between his teeth, slowly, deliberately, and enough to make you shudder. For a moment he paused, letting go just long enough for you to snatch a ragged, shaky breath, your pulse thundering wildly in the narrow space between you. But even that moment of mercy was an illusion, because before you could draw a true breath, his teeth found your lip again, pulling you right back under, trapping you in the relentless rhythm of his hunger. Every second was stretched, spun out with the confidence of a man who had all the time in the world and every intent of making you feel every tick of it.

By the time you finally broke free; panting, lips tingling heavily, every thought scattered like leaves in a gale, every sound you’d wanted to make had been stolen from you, leaving only shuddering breaths and the echo of his touch. The silence between you wasn’t merely the absence of words anymore; it was a live current, crackling with everything he’d taken and all the intent he hadn’t yet revealed. It hovered in the air, thick and charged, a space where nothing could hide and everything felt dangerously unfinished. In that hush, you realized you weren’t simply breathless. You were changed. Remade in the wake of his will, the memory of his mouth lingering in every nerve he’d touched.

Shiryu leaned in yet again.

This time, with the same disciplined patience he’d used to follow you through crowds without being heard. His face came close enough that you could feel the heat of his breath ghosting across your tingling lips, close enough that your skin tried to recoil on its own.

You instinctively jerked your head to the side, refusing him even the direction of your fear, refusing him the simple satisfaction of another straight line. But even in your attempt at defiance, you felt how he absorbed it. As a challenge, not a denial. His hand at the side of your waist did not tighten in anger but adjusted with an easy, predatory confidence, shifting you just enough that your protest became another note in his orchestrated scene. You could feel the faintest tremor of amusement through his chest where it pressed to yours, as if your resistance pleased him more than your surrender ever could.

Then, a faint sound left him.

Not laughter.

It was a low, rough vibration, like a chuckle swallowed before it could become noise. It rumbled through his chest and into yours. It was a sound you felt before you heard, a resonance that seemed to vibrate through the space between your ribs and echo down your spine, more animal than man.

He shifted again, barely a change in stance, a subtle adjustment of weight that moved your body further up against his as if you were attached. His body made the rules and you could only obey, your balance not your own. His presence enveloped you, commanding every inch of space, so close you could almost feel the brutal pulse in his broad neck, the warmth of his breath against your jaw, the scent of old tobacco clinging to his collar.

He stopped a hair’s breadth away from the side of your jaw, close to your ear. He let you feel the threat of it, the heavy anticipation, the power of something yet to happen.

Let you imagine what more he could do. Let you feel the weight of your own imagination, your mind running ahead and bruising itself against the hard, cold wall of possibility.

The worst part was realizing he didn’t need to act, or say anything at all, for you to suffer. He only had to suggest. His presence, his stillness, his ability to draw out a single moment into a lifetime of anticipation. It all became a unique kind of violence. An invasion of everything you thought you could hide from him.

Your hands tightened below his trench coat’s lapels, gripping for the edges of his overcoat as if they were rails keeping you from falling. The fabric bunched under your fists. Your knuckles whitened. It was the only thing you could do to anchor yourself, to keep from dissolving under the pressure of his patience, his nearness, his unspoken promises, the monstrous willpower hidden beneath.

Every shared heartbeat became a question he refused to answer, a plea that he savored by denying.

You managed to drag in a breath.

It came out shaky, uneven, more like a gasp muffled in your own throat than a breath meant for speaking. You felt the movement vibrate through your whole body, your chest pressed so close to his, every small inhale became something he could register, like a message telegraphed by muscle and bone. Even your ribs protested the constriction, caught between your need for air and the steel certainty of his hold.

His eye narrowed by the slightest degree, catching the moment your breath stuttered and cataloguing it with a frightening, calm interest. He studied you in fractions, as if the tension in your jaw, the way your shoulders locked, the way your hands trembled below the stiff epaulettes, were pieces of a puzzle he was committed to solving.

And then he moved, so quickly and smoothly the tent fabric behind you didn’t even dare to rustle. There was no wasted motion, no show of force. Just that precise shift of his weight and body, guiding you exactly where he wanted you.

He dipped his head down toward the left side of your neck, not with tenderness, but with purpose. His intent hung between you, weighty and electric, thicker than the air around the canvas backdrop. You felt every detail of the moment, the way his jutted jaw moved beneath rough skin, the subtle tilt of his cap as his focus narrowed on you and only you.

Not kissing.

Not biting.

Hovering.

The space between you shrank further to a knife’s edge. The brim of his peaked cap turned away from you, still shielding most of his face and turning your vision into a collage of shadow and the crisp edges of his uniform. But you didn’t need to see his mouth. You could feel his presence looming larger with every second, the threat and hunger coiling beneath the measured calm of his breathing.

You felt the warmth of his breath skimming the delicate skin at your throat, every exhale igniting a cold fire across your nerves. Your pulse betrayed you, fluttering in frantic, visible motion just beneath your skin, an offering he didn’t need to claim outright to savor.

A wide grin, you realized, was curving into place.

You couldn’t see it.

You could feel it, as tangible as the weight of his bulky arm around your waist, as undeniable as the pressure of his body holding you captive.

His mouth migrated.

His breath then washed over the hollow of your throat, not a predator in a rush, but one savoring every instinctive response you couldn’t hide.

Too close. So close you could sense the faint, ghostly drag of air as his mouth hovered exactly at your Adam’s apple.

You opened your mouth again, desperate to force sound through your panic, to do anything but submit to this silence.

He didn’t let you.

His lips didn’t touch you here.

He didn’t need them to.

Instead, the faint scrape of his teeth grazed the air at the very core of your throat- closer, closer, so close your skin remembered what teeth were meant to do, even before pain or pleasure. Not a bite. Not a kiss. It was the lightest contact, a predator’s measurement. The cold calculation of a beast who knows exactly where the scream is born, and exactly how to unmake the sound in your throat.

The world shrank to that point of contact.

You went completely still, every muscle locking in place, not by choice but by instinct, the kind of fear that doesn’t let you move even if you want to.

Your breath caught, trapped halfway in, unable to escape past the threat at your throat.

Your entire body stiffened, suddenly too aware of how fragile skin is when a man like him chooses to demonstrate.

The two of you stayed frozen, your silence no longer a choice, but a condition he’d now applied.

Suddenly, somewhere beyond the other side of the tent, fireworks cracked open the sky.

A sharp bloom of light bled over the canvas, turning the top of the bright fabric into glowing wounds for a second, then fading. People out of sight cheered, their joy a muffled roar. Another firework went up, and the air vibrated with it.

Inside your corner of cloth and rope, you shook.

The air in that hidden alcove felt thick and strange, charged with every sound and scent you were no longer able to filter. The tent wall, just a few feet behind, remained merely a backdrop. A barrier that kept the world oblivious to what was happening within arm’s reach. You could hear the fireworks beyond, their celebratory booms echoing through the canvas, punctuated by laughter and cheers and the crackle of fire. But here, inside this confined space, none of that joy could reach you. Here, everything was filtered through the tension of his grip and the reality of his presence, pressed against you like a fate you hadn’t chosen.

Shiryu’s mouth drifted again, not to claim, but to savor. The tip of his wide-bridged nose brushed your jawline, and his lips hovered just above your pulse point, drinking in the way you trembled, the way your skin had long since flushed. He let a slow exhale ghost over the bend of your neck. The breath was hot, humid and full of bitter tobacco and the sharp undertone of something much darker. Your heartbeat fluttered like a trapped bird against the bars of its cage, desperate to fly, but knowing every exit had been closed.

That was when you truly felt it.

A deep rumble of satisfaction, not in his throat, but in his chest, pressed flush against yours. Like before, it began as a subtle vibration- barely more than a breath or a tremor, but here, it grew, rolling through his ribcage and into your own body, where your bones picked up its resonance. It was not just a sound, but a physical thing: something that demanded your nerves listen, that made your body acknowledge what your mind already feared.

It vibrated through the fabric of your clothes, through the fragile web of willpower you’d managed to maintain until now. You could not tell what it was, only that it was for you, and that he wanted you to know it.

A slow, granite chuckle followed, so low it was almost inaudible, a scrape of satisfaction born from the heart of a mountain. It built slowly, rolling from deep inside him, as if he enjoyed not only your fear, but the moment you surrendered to it. The sound curled up your spine and sank icy teeth into the back of your neck, forcing your body to shudder again despite your best efforts to hold still.

As if he liked the way this fear lived in you. As if every flinch, every shallow breath, every shiver was another confession you could not hide. As if he liked the way you tried to fight it, your resistance only making your defeat more interesting. His arm at your waist tightened fractionally, his thumb brushing a line along your side, a motion so calm it almost felt like comfort, but the context made it a silent promise that you would not be going anywhere. Especially not after you'd suddenly ran away from him all those months ago. 

But...

Tears came before you could stop them.

First, your vision blurred- the world between his cap and the rope-shadow behind him becoming watery and unreal. Then one hot line trailed down your cheek, burning in the cool air, followed by another and another, each one carving a path of salt and surrender. The first tear slid all the way down, catching on his uniform, darkening the midnight blue with a perfect, glistening dot. Then another. You blinked, but they kept coming, unstoppable, proof that your body had reached its limit for pretending this was survivable by will alone.

They fell because you had tried so hard to be silent, to be clever, to be untouchable. But the noise outside was celebrating, and inside you were being held in a quiet corner like a secret no one would now ever know. You were hidden in plain sight, the world exploding in joy while you collapsed in his arm, every little tremor and sob pressed tight between your bodies.

Your hands slipped from their perch, sliding down from below the stiff lapels of his overcoat, then tightened again, gripping the edges harder- knuckles aching, fingers trembling, not to pull him closer, but to keep yourself upright, to keep yourself from falling apart completely.

You waited for him to enjoy it.

To punish it.

To turn your tears into another game.

Instead, his movements went still.

The pressure at your waist didn’t loosen, but it didn’t tighten either. It simply remained.

His eye flicked over you, studying you from the corner of that heavy lid. He took you in the way a tactician studies a map: not lingering on the obvious, but noting the subtle shifts- the tremor in your breath, the way your shoulders rose and failed to settle, the wet shine at your lashes you hadn’t been able to stop. Something unreadable passed through his gaze, quick as a shadow crossing sunlight. Not softness. Not mercy.

Just… recalculation.

As if the story in his head had reached a line he hadn’t expected. The pause stretched, elastic and awful, long enough for your own heartbeat to grow loud in your ears, long enough for your tears to cool where they clung to your skin.

The fireworks at the other side cracked even louder.

Light pulsed through the sky above in brief, harsh blooms. Red, green, blue, white, orange, purple. Each flash outlining the hard angles of his uniform, the brim of his officer’s peaked cap, the unmoving line of his big jaw. The crowd beyond erupted into another wave of cheers, a sound so full of joy it felt unreal here, muffled and distant.

Your breath trembled.

You tried to steady it.

You failed. Hiccupping.

Finally, finally, he spoke.

Low.

Certain.

Surprisingly neutral.

“You don't get it…”

These simple words weren’t a threat the way you expected. There was no sadistic heat in them, no sharpened edge meant to cut.

They were a calm verdict.

A statement of fact, delivered with the same level-headed certainty one might use to name the weather or read the tide. Not cruel. Not kind, either. Simply true, in his estimation.

He let out a slow sigh, warm against your cheek, the sound carrying more meaning than the sentence itself. It felt like the release of a held breath and like a decision settling firmly into place.

Then the signature grin returned. Not fully visible, but unmistakable in the shape of his breath, in the subtle tilt of his head and in the way his chest rose with contained amusement. It wasn’t triumphant. It was patient.

At the other side, Carnivale kept applauding the sky, fireworks still bursting and fading in rapid celebration.

On this side, you were still pressed to him, tears still falling down your skin, the memory of his nearness lingering against your mouth and at your throat like an afterimage.

His left hand had never let go of Raiu. The long blade still slung close near his hip. As he moved, you felt the weapon shift with him, the cool, silent mass of the sword shadowing every motion, the guard brushing your thigh. His gloved finger slipped free from the sheath just long enough to trace the outside of your arm, the gesture impossibly controlled and even more terrifying for it. The bare skin underneath your cloak recoiled from the chill of the dark-brown leather, instinctively reading the hidden intention in every gentle, testing touch. He traced the line from your elbow to your shoulder, slow and deliberate, almost as if weighing the limits of your endurance- curious how much you would shiver, how much you would yield, and exactly how much resistance he’d have to respect instead.

The contact was impossibly precise. A message pressed into your nerves: You belong to me. Even the smallest, softest motion he made seemed to contain an unspoken message. A promise of both restraint and possession at the same time. A boundary tested, and never forgotten.

You could feel his dark amusement grow and return in full as he straightened his head back up. His smoky, grated voice curled down from above. “But you’ll come to see it… in time…”

With that same finger, he reached up and pulled your fallen hood back over your head, slow and almost tender, the gesture more than just a concealment. It was a signal- a dark, wordless respect for your breaking point. It was a veil drawn not to hide you from him, but to help you shelter what little of yourself you still needed to keep safe. An acknowledgment that he’d taken what he needed, and was willing; at least in this instant, to give you the dignity of retreat. Then his right arm shifted around your waist, pulling you so completely against his chest that the difference in size became impossible to ignore. His presence dwarfed you- his trench coat, his breath, the iron certainty of his large body holding you firm, making you disappear against him in the gloom behind the tent.

Despite the looming threat, despite the clear savagery humming at the edges of his stillness, you felt a strange boundary to his touch. Even in this moment of complete dominance, there was a selfish kind of respect in the way he handled you. He didn’t force more. He simply held you there, letting the echoes of what he’d already taken speak for him. What he needed. What he would demand in due time. But not now. Not after you broke down within the shelter of his arm instead. After he saw, in the rawness of your tears, the unmistakable edge of terror and grief, where he’d actually hoped for true submission and reluctant desire after a short bout of fear.

In that silent collapse, he realized his natural boldness had been too much, too soon. That the shivering feelings running in you were not the reluctant heat or confused hunger he’d fantasized about, but something colder, shaken, and wounded instead.

And so, for the first time, something subtle shifted behind his heavy gaze- a realization, perhaps even a twisted form of care. The unbearable heat he’d initially intended to share with you in this hidden corner of Carnivale was postponed, not abandoned, and with a slow, almost morbid clarity, he understood that chasing you across the Grand Line had done more damage than he’d wanted. Even if he needed to work this way to stay out of the Marines’ and the World Government’s radar. Still, for now, restraint replaced carnal desire, and he begrudgingly let the moment pass, darkly aware that the line between hunter and protector was suddenly thinner than he had ever guessed. 

In hindsight, this indicates that, to Shiryu, the hunt is actually far from over. This moment- this first, fragile surrender, was now just the prelude, not at all the ending, to the grand chase.

After all, in his mind, the end goal was never just heat and pleasure alone. It was something richer, something more rare. He wanted a mutual understanding that could only grow in the space between predator and prey, in the collision of dominance and obedience. He wanted to teach you the care and protection only a monster could offer, the kind of love a man like him could give- fierce, total, loyal and inescapable, in exchange for a surrender that wasn’t just physical, but absolute in both body and soul.

When he moved again, it was to guide you away from the tent, your body pulled impossibly close against his as he walked, your quiet sobs muffled against the broad surface of his chest.

Another dark chuckle rolled out of him, less cruel now, a sound almost pleased. Not as much the noise of sadism, but more so a deeper confirmation: that you finally understood that running would never save you from him. That this, your current shattering, was your enlightenment to this fact, and being humbled by it. And beneath the grief, maybe… just maybe… a crack in the wall you’d built.

Such good character design thank you for spoiling us @thepipiuw

. Blood warning .

[ID in alt text]

"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.

You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

Extras/cropped versions under the cut