New Gen Fic with Little Luffy and Makino: Hope is A Plate of Bacon and Eggs
Rating: Gen
SFW
Word count: 11918
Relationship: Mankino and Luffy
Timeline: Pre-canon
Fluff and Hurt/Comfort
Status: Complete
A seventeen-year-old Makino has a little thief running under the tables of her Bar. Scuttling like a rat, the little boy arrives every evening when the Party's Bar is fully crowded and helps himself to table scraps. She doesn't know his name, age or where he came from, but something is endearing about this little boy in dirty clothes and unruly hair that makes her want to reach out to him. Yet she dares not and watches from a distance as he shoves his greedy mouth and burns his tongue with her baked potatoes.
In a world where everyone practices the philosophy of each on their own, can overlooking the little boy's crime be considered kindness or disinterest?
Well, Makino is about to find out what her action means to the little boy.
Makino doesn’t remember when the little boy arrived at her bar for the first time. One evening, when the bar was full of rowdy men sunburnt at the sea, she noticed the boy. He was there, like a stray kitten sitting under the dark corners of the cheap wooden tables. Even if Makino wouldn’t admit it out loud ever, there was something magnetic about the little child. He was as ordinary as any other kid who ran the streets of Windmill Village.
Light brown skin sunburnt further to resemble the colour of terracotta, a mop of unruly jet raven hair covering his cute as a button face. Large eyes, expressive eyes, and a little sharp nose. Features common to most little boys in the region. The things that caught the bartender’s eye were how he was dressed.
A formerly white t-shirt, soiled by dirt and blue shorts with ripped and torn edges. And his choice of footwear was interesting. Flipflops were not rare, but straw ones were.
If, twenty-one years later, people asked her anything about her first meeting with the kid who would become the Pirate King, she wouldn’t recall the details of his appearance or what he did.
All she would remember was that one day he was just there, when her bar was clamouring with customers. He was there like he had always belonged to this world of the under tables. Her little thief.
Though the day she noticed him, she saw it all, a little too vividly.
The skinny kid was crawling under the tables of the most drunken patrons and gladly helping himself from their unguarded plates. At first, Makino assumed he was one of the bastard children of the pirates that frequented her establishment.
The planet was vast, and the number of reckless humans vaster. It was not an uncommon sight on Blue Star to find children accompanying pirates as chore boys and apprentices. If there was one profession that believed in hands-on training, it was the pirates. They were active recruiters of orphans that no place to call home.
For a brief while, the kid’s dirty white shirt with blue borders made her wonder if he belonged to some Marine ship. Marines were no better when it came to recruiting orphans and abandoned children. Though they preferred a little older children than the thief under her table. Children who could do chores, read a bit and fend for themselves when time called for would be found accompanying Marine ships; some lucky ones who had potential were prepared in advance to train as cadets in the future. Those unlucky would be dropped off at children’s homes around the world after they served their purposes.
There was a saying among the civilians, every ship that departed a port always left its imprint behind. Marines were no better than Pirates or Bandits when it came to siring off-springs, as well as creating more orphans around the world. Parentless and abandoned children were plenty, and Makino’s heart wept for them.
So Makino wondered if he was one of those abandoned thrice children who ran away from some Children’s home in the Capital of Goa, which was on the other side of the mountains.
The inability to help them riddled her soul. Though she was barely an adult herself, she felt a failure at not being able to help little kids in need. Because in her heart she knew, if she was abandoned by the entire world without a single hand offering her help, she wouldn’t have made it to the ripe age of 17.
Then she recalled the words of her grandmother: if she couldn’t help them all, she could at least help one. Thus, Makino continued serving her patrons without giving the little boy’s little crimes another thought, the first night she saw him.
The faces of the patrons changed every night, but the child remained the same. Sometimes he was shabbier than on other days, and sometimes he looked like an injured puppy with bruised hands and knees. His modus operandi remained the same. Visit during the peak hour just after 7 pm, when the highest paying and most intoxicated crowd arrives. Find the stinkiest and drunkest group to sit under their tables for an hour or two, picking whatever food he could grab, then scamper off when no one was looking.
Other than Makino, no one was looking at him. Her bar was small, but it was designed to give her multiple vantage points from her bar counter and the kitchen behind. As the place used to be her grandmother’s drawing room, where she loved hosting her similarly ancient friends, Makino wanted to keep some parts of her hosting skills alive in spirit. She took a few loans and rearranged the guest room to look like a Bar and lived behind the two rooms hidden after the kitchen.
So from every corner of her establishment, Makino could see the little boy when others couldn’t.
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Hope is A Plate of Bacon and Eggs
