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It was quiet.
It was always quiet.
You’d think after almost two decades something would have moved in, he mused, shifting his weight from his left leg to his right, readjusting the strap of his rifle to sit more comfortably on his shoulder. Sure, the Marines would have shot any creature trying to move out of the city limits on sight, because the top brass were unwilling to take chances, but there wasn’t even any birdsong, or the trill of insects during the summertime. Like the entire country was frozen in time.
And maybe it was. He wasn’t old enough to remember when Flevance burned, but he was from the North, same as everyone else in his platoon. No one guarded the remnants of the White City except those born in the same waters as its dead, and he’d always wondered if that’s because the fear of Amber Lead was still alive and well among those old enough to remember the days of the plague, or because the North had a well-deserved reputation for caring for their own, and they had demanded the right.
Even if the people of Flevance had been eaten from the inside out by their own land, and destroyed by their own neighbors, they had still been people of the North Blue. If the South was the sea of passion, if the East a bastion of peace, and the West a land of secrets and subterfuge, then the North Blue was the sea of memories. They did not forget.
They did not forgive.
He sighed, fidgeting with the straps of the standard-issue gas mask where they were digging into his scalp. He’d been here five months out of a six-month deployment, and the quiet was beginning to get to him. Too much time spent in his own head, where his thoughts were left to ramble around and notice things that he would have much rather remained ignorant to.
Things like how the smell of smoke lingered, even all these years later, and how it smelled like no smoke or fire he’d smelled before in his nineteen years. There was no gentle woodsmoke here, nor the harsher smell of a foundry or even the heady scent of incense, of things burned in memoriam, of offerings to hungry ghosts.
No, the smell here stung, acrid and aggressive, even behind the mask. It clung to clothes, and skin, and stuck in your throat, and no amount of water or liquor ever seemed to make it go away entirely. On some level, he knew that he’d never be entirely free of this scent until long after he’d left this place. Not until he’d stripped himself and scoured his skin clean, and even then, the brain was a funny thing, and he suspected the phantoms of these memories would follow him longer yet.
But his leaving was still a month or so away, and while he had entertained himself in the past with thoughts of where he might be stationed after this rookie posting was finished, he was still on the job here, and that meant that his focus should be too. There was no excuse for doing a bad job in a place so empty, after all. Commanding officers didn’t care that you only ever saw familiar faces out here, that no one else would make it to the gates of the city, and even if there had been someone out there crazy enough to want to visit the White City, there was a Marine blockade two leagues out from the port in every direction you could sail.
It was why they were all spread out, why he usually went days without seeing anyone else from his platoon outside of mealtimes, and even then, there weren’t many of them stationed here to start with, only a token skeleton crew manning the garrison, keeping watch for ghosts.
It was why, when he strolled back to the gatehouse as the sun was beginning to set, intending to report another day of no concern in the duty log, he didn’t see anything strange about how empty it was. All he wanted to do was rack his kit, grab a quick dinner and then maybe spend his precious free time before lights out with a book and a glass or two of something strong.
There was nothing to suggest anything at all might have been amiss, right up until the point he felt an electric hum pass through the air, and the barrel of a gun pressed itself between his shoulder blades, held by a person who was definitively not there a second before.
He stiffens reflexively but does not call out. It’s almost certain, at this time of the day, that no one is close enough to hear him if he yells, and he very much doubts he can do anything about someone capable of appearing out of thin air. They haven’t killed him yet, which he supposes is a good sign, because maybe it means he escapes this encounter so long as he doesn’t do anything monumentally dumb.
“Smart man,” murmurs a voice behind him, and suddenly there is movement in his periphery, which slowly turns into a man with shaggy red hair and coveralls, a strange black and white hat, and sunglasses, despite the increasing darkness. The gun at his back hasn’t moved, which means there are at least two adversaries, and he’s suddenly very glad he didn’t try escaping.
Redhead perches on the edge of a nearby table and gives him a long look.
“Here’s how this is going to go,” Redhead says, and his tone is casual, almost friendly. As if this was a business deal among equals instead of a hostage situation. “You’re just gonna sit here with us for a few minutes until our Captain finishes his business, and then we’ll be out of your hair. Easy as pie. No one gets hurt. Agreed?” His smile is sharp in the low light, a warning that belies the tone of his words.
A captain? Pirates then, because this man is no Marine. He gives Redhead a quick once-over, looking for any form of identifying mark that might tell him exactly who he is dealing with, and finds a small patch on his coveralls, right over the heart. It’s circular, and the center looks vaguely like a face of some sort, but it’s too small to make out any more details from this distance, not in this light.
Belatedly, he realizes that Redhead is waiting for an answer, and he nods his head slowly. He knows this is not a fight he will win, not with his rifle stowed neatly in its rack, not-so-conveniently behind the person holding a gun to his back. The person who is now pushing him forward, and before he can protest, he’s been directed to sit down in a chair, and he lets himself breathe the smallest of breaths as the weight of the gun disappears from his back.
The man with the gun is dressed the same as Redhead, except he seems to have forgone sunglasses in favor of an extra strange hat that has a tiny penguin sitting on top, and the word ‘PENGUIN’ rather redundantly stitched across the front. The symbol on his coveralls is in clear view though, a fixed skeletal grin with struts radiating out in a circle, and then there’s a tickle in the back of his head that is desperately trying to remind him of something, as if he’s missing something important.
“Just so you know,” the second man says, and his accent matches Redhead’s, some backcountry drawl from way up north where it snows nine months of the year, “we’re leaving something really important behind.”
“Sentimental, if you will,” chimes in Redhead.
Penguin-hat continues. “Something we’d be real upset to hear went missing after we went through all this trouble to haul it here.” His eyes narrow. “If you get my meaning.”
His confusion must have shown on his face, as he’s thinking why bring something precious to a dead, poisoned country guarded by Marines because Redhead takes pity on him.
“Look, we’re not gonna tell you what it is, because you’ll see it soon enough, but it means a lot to Captain, and that means it means a lot to us” and there’s a stress on that final word that promises more than just Penguin-hat and me and we would tear down the world to make our Captain happy and he finds that he does not, in fact, want to test these strange pirates and their mysterious leader.
The alarm bells in his head won’t stop ringing.
“Anyway,” Redhead continues. “It’s nothing that’ll hurt you or anyone else here. Sure, it’ll put a whole bunch of egg on some folks’ faces—that’s part of the idea—but if they’re smart they’ll leave well enough alone. Don’t know that they actually will, but it’s nice to dream.” He shrugs, as if to say sorry, out of my hands, can’t be blamed for your people’s stupid decisions.
“Oh yeah, there’s no way,” Penguin-hat mutters under his breath, before continuing with the threat. “And you can and should tell your commanding officers this, because this is your only warning: we hear Captain’s gift has been removed or defaced or anything else…untoward…and we’ll just consider this entire country forfeit. We’ll haul ourselves all the way back from the New World to personally rip this place out of World Government control, violently, and with prejudice.”
“We’ve never had a territory before,” Redhead chuckles. “That’s how you know you’ve made it, right? Should be exciting.”
“Cathartic, one might even say.” Penguin-hat’s drawls, idly thumbing the hammer of the pistol in his hands.
The conversation sounds like good-natured teasing, but both men are looking at him with undisguised hostility, and he suddenly feels very small in his chair. New World pirates in the North Blue, what are the chances? Crews from the Blues that survive the transition to the Grand Line almost never return to their home waters by choice, let alone a crew that’s made it to the New World.
But who else would be able to just casually ignore a naval blockade? Because the ships could not have possibly seen them, not if there were no alarms going off. Communications would have received a den-den mushi call with plenty of time to react, if that were the case.
He chooses not to indulge the possibility that the blockade has simply been destroyed.
The alarm bells ring louder.
Then there’s the electric hum again, and this time he sees the world turn ever so slightly blue. Redhead gives him a grin that is more a baring of teeth than a smile, Penguin-Hat a flat stare that’s both a threat and a promise, and suddenly they are gone, replaced by a pair of random wooden crates that could have come from anywhere.
He sits there for a beat or two or ten, trying to listen for an alarm or a cry or something but the night is quiet and the only thing he can hear is the sound of his heartbeat and his breathing as his body struggles to regain some sort of equilibrium.
And then he is off, running from the gatehouse, rifle and gas mask forgotten, and he doesn’t need to go far to find the mysterious ‘gift’ that his captors had been referring to.
Just beyond the main gates of the ruined city had been a wide thoroughfare, paved with cobblestones that must have once shone white but now bore the scorch marks of long extinguished flames, and right in the center of that emptiness now sat a monument, in three pieces.
He feels a thrill of panic race up his spine at his immediate thought; that the structure in front of him is made from Amber Lead, so bright white and shining as it is in the shadows of twilight, but his eyes catch familiar striations, and he can feel his shoulders relax as he realizes that it is simply white marble, such as one might find in statuary.
Or a tombstone.
The monument is a triptych of words, and he recognizes the languages on the two outer panels: the official standardized versions of the languages of the World Government member nations and the North Blue, respectively. There is clear intent here: the words written on each panel are identical save for what language they are written in, which means these words are meant to be read and understood by as many people as possible.
The third language, carved into the larger central panel, is familiar to him, and yet not. He recognizes Northern grammar and sentence structure, and even several familiar words, just with unfamiliar tweaks and tenses applied. But there’s clearly a separate root grounding this language, and he can’t tell what it is supposed to be until he turns to the panel written in Northern—his first and best language—and realizes halfway through that the central panel must be written in Flevish.
This is not a place of honor
This is a place of betrayal
Now we do not even lie beneath our own soil
We are ashes upon a bloody wind
No memorials to our memory
Only a cautionary tale
Told by the betrayers
Who were supposed to be our protectors
This is not a place of honor
This is a place to remember
The greed of institutions
Who chose profit before their people
And deemed our deaths acceptable
Who stood apart when the fire and the guns arrived
And called us monsters
As they took aim
This is not a place of honor
We were Flevance, the White City
We are now a warning
That we bid you remember.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He knows they will move it.
How can they not? Everything about the strange monument is a condemnation, an accusation, a finger pointed right at the heart of the established narrative of this place. Even out here, where no civilian or reporter would dare to tread, bored soldiers would gossip about the only interesting thing to happen in months, and there would be no containing it.
He has no illusions about the infallibility of governments or people, and no idea what the actual truth of the situation was, but the World Government has never liked to be challenged, and the monument is the equivalent of a slap to the face. Even if the words carved into the marble are entirely false—and he has a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that that is not the case—they still represent a pushback of the established order, and the World Government will not accept that.
It turns out he hadn’t been the only person to encounter the intruders—another member of the platoon had been given a similar talk by a mountain of a man and a woman with dark hair and darker eyes. Still others had been blocked from entering the main courtyard where the monument had appeared by a motley assortment of similarly stern pirates, all dressed in those same coveralls.
No one had seen the mysterious captain.
It is not until he overhears the garrison commander shouting into a snail connected to headquarters, and he hears the name “Heart Pirates” that the alarm bells in his head make sense. He feels ice slip into the pit of his stomach and kicks himself for not recognizing the jolly roger at the same time as he thanks every power on the seas that he hadn’t, because they’d made a point of slipping in quietly and staying unnoticed, and he wouldn’t bank on the recognition contributing to his increased lifespan.
Marine rookies were always given a crash course on which pirates were not worth challenging without serious backup, on the off chance that some of their recruits were from the ass end of civilization or couldn’t be bothered to read a newspaper. A fellow enlistee had cheerfully dubbed the list “Names To Run Away From Really Fast,” and considering the names on it—Emperors, the former Warlords, three-quarters of the so-called Worst Generation—the title was accurate.
The Hearts were on that list; had been for a while already when he’d enlisted. So, he remembers being curious as to why the information on their well-known captain was, well...incomplete.
Captain: Trafalgar Law
Sea of Origin: North Blue
Country of Origin: Unknown
The only unknown on the list, oddly fitting for a crew with a reputation for not being prone to spectacle except when they clearly were and it had always stuck weird with him that the Marines could be missing such a straightforward piece of information. A man who’d been a Warlord and in theory would have been vetted to high heaven at some point in the process. A man whose origins were still, somehow, an enigma.
Like him and his crew had popped fully formed out of the North Blue, flashy yellow submarine that can just ignore an entire naval blockade and all.
He has a theory, and he hates it. Hates how impossible and yet terribly plausible it seems the longer he thinks about it, hates the implications and the consequences of it. He wants to ignore the fact that the ruins of Flevance are a weird place to make some sort of statement without a certain level of personal investment in the dead city. Wants to stop thinking about the monument and how the words on it are grief and mourning and bitterness, and that only living memory could fuel that level of sustained anger.
And he thinks very long and very hard about what could cause this particular New World pirate crew to sail all the way back to their home sea, to this place in particular, and of the looks on the faces of the two men he met, and the venom in their speech, and fervently prays that his assignment will be up before they get around to moving the monument, because he has never felt so strongly about anything as he does the knowledge that the promised retribution would come, and that they would not be ready for it.
Because the people of the North Blue do not forget.
And they do not forgive.