Chapter Text
Dragon dropped into a crouch before he realized that the figure trundling through the underbrush was one of the ‘rabbits’. A woman, to be precise, with—
A child. With a child.
His stomach churned at the tear-streaks and stricken horror on the child’s face, the grim determination on the woman’s.
Where was the justice in this? Where was the justice in any of this?
One of the infants in his arms burbled softly. Dragon closed his eyes and reminded himself: here. It was here, within him. Within these babies, who would survive today, and not because they were the children of a World Noble.
There was no justice to be found outside of him. None but what he could make with his own two hands.
When he opened his eyes, he realized that the woman had seen him. Her sharp eyes were fixed on his face, mixed fear and calculation. The child was weeping once more, their poofy dark hair grimy and matted with blood or sweat or something else.
Dragon swallowed. He stood up, making no effort to hide the infants in his arms. He tightened his lips at her shock.
“Run,” he told her before she could say anything. Her eyes darted down to his arms. “I’m taking them somewhere safe.”
The shock ebbed, replaced by a canny look. Her own mouth tightened, and she hefted the child in her arms. “Take him, or I’ll scream.”
Fuck. Dragon flinched.
“I’ll scream and draw every beastly man on this island here,” she said with quiet venom, “unless you have the decency to rescue a child despite his foul blood.”
“His foul blood?” no, that didn’t matter, that didn’t—“Don’t scream. I’ll do my best.”
The woman didn’t hesitate, just nodded. “I can carry him until you need a distraction,” she said, so firm and brave, braver than any Marine ever had been, and Dragon felt like a coward in front of her. “Just save my son.”
“I—I will,” Dragon said, despite how he couldn’t promise such a thing, couldn’t even promise that he could save these babies. “What’s his name?”
The woman ducked her head, pressing her chin into the boy’s scalp. “Teach,” she said quietly. “Rocks D. Teach.”
Foul blood. Dragon understood. “I’ll do everything I can to protect him,” he promised the woman. “To get him to his father, if I can.”
Her brows drew together, but she didn’t ask. She just nodded. “Where are we going?”
The woman was fast. Not on the level of a Marine, especially not one like Dragon, but fast and quiet. Teach trembled in her arms but made not a sound, like the babies Dragon carried.
They paused for breath in a little hollow.
“Those are Ada’s children,” the woman said.
She knew them. Dragon exhaled. “Their names?”
“How did you come by them?”
“Their mother,” Dragon replied. “She begged me to take them to someone with a warm heart.”
The woman’s face tightened and she looked away quickly with a scoff. “I told her that man was no good,” she said darkly.
“That man?”
“The tall one with the hair like—” and she made a gesture which froze Dragon down to his bones.
“Saint Figarland Garling?” Dragon asked, horrified. He knew little of Figarland Garling, but what he knew was not good.
(The troops whispered that Figarland Garling had been the one to choose this island for the game. If so—he’d chosen to murder the mother of his children, before the game even started!)
“Is that his name?” Dragon nodded. The woman’s lip curled. “I’d curse his blood but for how it’d fall on the children,” she murmured. “Their names are Shanks and Shamrock. Shanks is the one in yellow, Shamrock in green.”
The babies burbled happily at their names.
“Who are you?” the woman asked, after a moment. “You marine with a conscience, hypocrite to your cause?”
Dragon flinched. “I—Dragon. My name is Dragon. Monkey D. Dragon.”
The woman paused. “D.”
“D,” Dragon agreed, for all that he didn’t understand—and might never understand—the significance of it.
The woman smiled tiredly. “Of course it would be a D,” she said.
Dragon didn't know how to respond to that. “We should move.”
She nodded, took a breath, and scooped up her son again.
Their luck ran out about an hour into the run. Dragon stopped, emptied half his backpack, and tucked Teach into it, shaky hands smoothing down his hair to keep it from poking out.
“You’ll be fine,” he told Teach, firmly. “I won’t let them catch you. Any of you.”
Teach didn’t look entirely convinced, but he nodded and let Dragon close the top of his pack, taking care to make sure it wasn’t sealed airtight.
When he looked up, the woman was teary-eyed but looked firm, looked brave. “Thank you, Dragon,” she whispered. She stepped forward, grasped his cheeks, and tugged him down to kiss his forehead. “Be careful. Do not get caught.”
“I’ll do my best,” Dragon replied, and then all he could do was shoulder his bag and head in the opposite direction from her.
Dragon had not retreated when he was told. He was a dead man walking, but for one thing:
His father was here. He was sure of it. If he got to his father’s ship, he would make it. His father would claim that Dragon had wandered off and been with him, and get his punishment reduced. Dragon was nearly certain.
He was less certain of the fates of the infants in his arms, or the boy trembling against his back.
“Dragon,” said his father, eyes on the children in his arms, ignorant of the boy in his bag. “What is this? Whose children are these?”
Dragon swallowed, internally begged Ada for forgiveness, and gave his father the only answer that would spare them.
Rocks was dead. There was no safe place for Teach in the world.
“I’m sorry,” Dragon whispered as he scribbled Shanks on a slip of paper and thrust it into the infant’s balled-up hand. “I’m sorry,” he told the other one, Shamrock likewise. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, again and again.
The children would go to Figarland Garling, who would raise them to be just like him. Dragon, in the end, had done nothing for the woman who had put all her faith in him.
The thought turned his heart to stone, and Dragon realized what he needed to do.
“One of them,” he said. He hardly recognized his own voice. He turned to his father. “I won’t ask to keep him. But one of them must be saved.”
His father’s face could have been carved from stone. “How do you suggest that? The only people on this island are World Nobles, Marines, and pirates.”
Dragon met his father’s eyes evenly. “You have told me before—”
“No.”
“He could take the child to safety,” Dragon reminded his father. “One to his father, and one to a better fate.”
His father didn’t argue that life with a pirate was a better fate than life as a World Noble. Dragon wondered why that felt more odious, not less, and then reassessed; he knew why, when the screams of the dying still rang in his ears and there was a sense-imprint on his forehead from the lips of a pirate’s now-dead wife.
When there was a child restraining sobs against his spine, desperate in his terror.
“You have made me party to this,” Dragon said, still unable to recognize his voice. “You have—you sent me to this horror. You sent me here.”
“You needed to see it. You needed to understand the bad, despite all the good that the marines do,” said his father.
No. Not his father. Vice-Admiral Garp.
Dragon’s breath came hot and cold, agonizing either way. “You think any good in the world can match the bad in this?” he asked venomously. “Where is the justice in this? In any of this?” he reached down blindly, grabbed one of the infants, and rose to his feet. “You were the one who told me to find my own justice. Here it is. This is my justice. A vow to a dying woman, the life of a—an infant.”
“Dragon…”
“To stop me,” Dragon said in a low voice, “you’ll have to kill me.”
For a moment, there was nothing but tension in the air, thick enough to be cut with a knife. Then fa—Vice-Admiral Garp slumped.
“Fine,” he said. “Go. But don’t be obvious about it.” He sighed gustily. “I’ll bring Saint Figarland Garling his other son.”
Dragon didn’t need telling twice. He ran.
In the end, all he could do was tuck the child—Shanks—in a treasure chest, put it in the path of the Roger Pirates, and hope. They were warm-hearted, though fundamentally selfish, and were retreating in something of one piece.
They could take care of a child. They, Dragon hoped, would take care of a child.
He almost left Teach for them too, but at the last moment froze.
He couldn’t, he realized. Teach had witnessed such a horror, an atrocity against justice—how could Dragon leave him to pirates who wanted nothing but loot from this—this—
This holocaust?
Shanks had no idea. He would be cared-for and never resent his rescuers. Teach would. Teach would hate them.
Dragon squeezed his eyes shut. He’d have to find another way.
He whispered a reassurance to Teach and returned to his father’s ship.
Dragon carried his bag unflinchingly through his superiors reaming him out. He did not give a hint to the child inside. He knelt, apologized, and went to a private room in his father’s ship.
He let Teach out.
Teach was too young to make full sentences. He set a trembling hand on Dragon’s. “Safe?” he whispered.
Dragon shook his head, and felt terrible when Teach’s little face crumpled and he sniffled. “Don’t cry,” he whispered. “I’ll get you somewhere safe.”
It was foolish to say so, but: “I promise.”
Dragon ate half-rations for the entirety of the journey to the next port, feeding Teach as much as he could without malnourishing himself. It was a struggle, a real one, to keep Teach from being discovered, and it couldn’t last.
Which was why Dragon hid Teach in his bag again and got off at the next island, requesting leave time.
It was granted. Apparently many new officers requested leave time or dismissal after witnessing the Native Hunt.
Dragon hated.
Dragon wandered the port as aimlessly as he could, buying children’s clothing that should fit Teach, and then searched until he found a shabby inn of sorts. He got a room, let Teach out, and paid the owner double in exchange for letting Teach stay there unaccompanied, and feeding him, for a few weeks. He promised to let the man keep the money if he came back early.
“Fine, but any longer and he’s on the street,” the owner said, and Dragon felt something cold in his chest.
“It won’t be any longer,” he said frigidly.
“What’s his name?”
“Marshall Teach,” Dragon lied. He forced himself to smile down at Teach. “I’ll be back, okay? Be good for the innkeeper.”
Teach, hand balled in the fabric of Dragon’s odious uniform pants, nodded. “Soon,” he requested.
“As soon as I can,” Dragon promised.
He went back to his father’s ship and he hated. He ate dinner with his father—a full ration, this time—and he hated.
He hated the World Government for doing such things. He hated the Marines for enabling them. He hated himself for being party to it, and hated the world for allowing it to happen, and he hated the innkeeper for being so cold, and he hated the world’s indifference, and—
He wished he’d asked after her name. Teach’s mother. All he knew was that she was Rocks’s wife.
Rocks was dead. Dragon squeezed his eyes shut once he was back in his room.
He’d hated Rocks for the violence he did against the World Government, for his lawless island. Strange, now, that Dragon—couldn’t idolize him, but—
Fuck!
All he could do was protect Teach. That was the only thing he could do.
He was useless.
He got off again several islands later, and returned as quickly as he could to the island where he’d left Teach.
Where he found, to his horror, that the innkeeper had already ejected him.
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” the man protested, though he was pale in the face of Dragon’s building wrath.
“So you put a child onto the street,” Dragon said in a low, cold voice. Hate. Hate, hate, hate. “He’s a toddler.”
“He’s—”
Dragon was uninterested in hearing the man’s justifications. He went on the search for Teach.
It took him half the day to find Teach, who wept openly when he saw Dragon.
“I’m sorry,” Dragon said helplessly. “I won’t leave you alone again.”
Teach sniffled, and Dragon hefted him in his arms.
“I’ll take you somewhere safe,” he promised again. “You’ll be okay.”
“Who is that?”
“I found him turned out on the street.”
“…Dragon.”
“He needed somewhere to go.”
“Dragon, you can’t save the whole world.”
“I need to do something. Anything.”
“You’re a marine—”
“No. I’m not.”
“Dragon—”
“I’m leaving the Marines.”
“Dragon.”
“You can’t stop me. I won’t stay.”
“…fine. At least tell me his name.”
“I’ve named him Teach. As my son, he’s Monkey D. Teach.”
“You’re too young for a son.”
“And those children on God Valley were too young to die.”
“Dra—I. Fine. You’re not going to be rational about this. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Of course, Vice-Admiral.”