Archive of Our Own

There was silence on the other side of the phone for a very long time, long enough that Vice-admiral Monkey D. Garp bent to check on his Den Den Mushi; it looked healthy enough, however, so he frowned. 

The voice came when began to open his mouth to ask: who are you, scoundrel? Why do you have access to this number? 

“I need your help, father.”

He froze. That voice-

“Dragon-”

“Come to Foosha Village as soon as you can.”

Garp’s head spinned. He steadied himself against his oaken desk. A thousand questions roared in his mind: what’s going on? Why would you need my help, the help of a marine? Why haven’t you called me in over ten years? You’ve called me father for the first time since you were seventeen. Did you notice that, Dragon? I heard you called me father. 

“What are you doing in the East Blue?” he settled for. 

“Father,” he interrupted. Again. Again. “Please, come quickly.”

And then the line died. 

His ship cut through the waves like an arrow, humming under his feet with enormous power. He considered it, all the technological and economic effort of the marines bent into this: speed, dizzying speed so that he may reach the island a day faster, an hour faster even. 

When he’d announced he would set out, merely ten minutes after the call, Sengoku had offered a warship. 

“Why would you take that?” he asked, deliberately arching an eyebrow as he pointed at his ship. “It’s more uncomfortable, slower, and it has less fire-power.”

What a delicate game Sengoku had made of worrying about him, as if he hadn’t known Garp could have sailed the New World on nothing more than a raft. He was digging for information, then; gauging if Garp would tell him, probing to see how deeply he wanted to hide.  

He smirked. Let him ask, then. 

“It’s smaller,” Garp replied. Less manpower. Less prying eyes. 

Sengoku hummed in consideration. On another day, Garp would have waited for him to sign off on him using the ship – to humor him, and because he owed him for several messes from back in the Roger days. But he wouldn’t, now. Dragon had called him. He needed to leave. 

Sengoku seemed to read the determination in his eyes and understand the urgency. Before Garp turned, he put out his hand. 

“Safe travels, Vice-admiral.”

So polite, so correct. He nodded his head in what he called acquiescence and Garp called defeat. He roared with laughter, surrounding the Admiral’s hand with both of his in warm greetings. 

“I’ll bring you pastries,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”

And so he’d taken the smaller ship – the slower ship, the uncomfortable ship –, which was maneuvered by a dozen men instead of several hundred, unlike those massive behemoths of wood and steel they used as warships now. Garp didn’t trust them. You could not feel the rocking of the sea when you sailed one of those. It was unnatural, wrong. 

He settled on the bow of the ship, munching distractedly on soba boro cookies, and Dragon’s words filled his mind once more. I need your help, father. He blinked, undecided whether to clear his head or hold onto that raspy, half-remembered voice. 

The last time he’d called him father had been the day he had decided not to join the Marines. He had looked at him from across his room, barely sixteen years old, still in the marine headquarters, still in his cadet uniform, with his eyes blazing and his fists closed tightly.

“This is a rotten place, father, can’t you see it?” he had asked. His determination burned so brightly. Garp remembered, through the rage, feeling so incredibly proud. “It corrupts everything it touches, every country and every sea. It’s corrupting you .”

He hadn’t understood. Garp had tried to explain it – the savagery of the pirates, the world of barbarism that awaited outside of the thin line the marines had drawn around the islands and their people, how it would all crumble if their iron fist loosened its grip on the ocean even for a moment.

He remembered fighting. He remembered Dragon, cheeks dry, calling him Vice-admiral, calling him monster, calling him Garp – but not father, never father again. 

Fuck. The soba boro wasn’t enough. He needed meat.

He wouldn’t think about it, or about the day Dragon had left without a backwards glance, or about the decade of silence in-between. He wouldn’t think about how when he’d spoken on the phone, asking for help, he had wanted to ask who it was. 

That voice, bereft of its haughtiness and conceit, wrecked with something unnamed, had sounded strange to his ears. If he could admit this to himself he’d find that he hadn’t, for a split second, recognized his own son. 

****

“What are you doing?” 

Miss Akane’s piercing scream startled him, and it was only through years of rigorous training that Dragon held fast onto the small bundle in his hands. 

“What?”

“That is no way to hold a little babe! You must always support its head. Here, let me. Put your hand here. Feel it?”

Dragon nodded. Miss Akane looked at him with such stern disappointment in her eyes that he was almost compelled to apologize. He let her hand guide his, closing it around the baby’s round and frighteningly soft head. 

“See?” she reprimanded. “Their heads are not fully formed yet. You must support it yourself.”

Their heads- what?

She cooed, ignoring Dragon’s distress and brightly grinning down at the child. 

“And what’s the little creature’s name?” she asked. 

Dragon looked down at the baby’s peacefully sleeping form. What an absurdly small thing it was, unimaginably fragile. And it was his son. He tried to hold onto that thought and give it a shape that stuck into his brain to no avail: his son. His child.  

As Dragon held him, he hiccuped and smiled in his sleep. Miss Akane sighed in delight, tickling his belly lightly. 

“Luffy,” he said. “His name is Luffy.”

“Well, Luffy,” she said with a smile. Unaware, the child slept on. “Welcome to this humble island.”

Wailing pierced through the night like an arrow. Dragon sat up with a start, summoning his power and coating his body in Haki. He closed his eyes, pushing his awareness outwards, and listened.

Nothing. 

Oh.

He scrambled to his feet, approaching the cradle where Luffy turned over and over, unrestful. His face was torn with insistent sobbing, wet with tears and snot and he twisted on and on as if in pain.

“Hey,” Dragon murmured. He rocked the cradle, hoping to quiet the child. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. Come on.”

The baby cried again and Dragon gritted his teeth, irritated, uncomfortable, bending to pick him up with wide and useless hands. 

He thought of his people hiding underground, beneath the wrathful eye of the government. They would be asking for him right now, covering Ivankov in increasingly urgent questions. Is he detained, they would wonder, or is he undercover? Do you know when he’ll return? Then other, smaller voices would ask, almost shyly to make it a possibility by speaking it out loud: has he forsaken us? 

No, Ivankov would say, no and no, impatient morons. Trust him. He’s never failed you. 

But Ivankov would wonder, too. 

Luffy looked up at him from within his arms, uncertain and unsteady here as they’d never been in battle. He was all eyes, wide and wet and full of meaning, as if he was trying to tell him something that eluded Dragon, just ever so slightly out of his reach.

Father , he guessed – the thought sent a shiver down his spine and he corrected himself. Dragon, I am hungry.

“Are you hungry?” he asked the screaming child, moving to the kitchen and reaching for the cold feeding bottle. Miss Akame had brought what she had believed to be enough to last them a week, but Luffy went through them at an alarming rate; he’d need to venture into the town soon. 

He tapped his feet impatiently as the flames began to boil the water, thinking of her instructions. 

“Try it yourself first every single time,” she told him, staring at him with a severity that seemed to say: this is important, mess anything else up but this. “The last thing you want to do is burn your baby’s mouth. It is very sensible at this early stage.”

One of his commanders had had a child two years ago, a beautiful daughter with her same dark hair and dark eyes. She had shown her to him with joyful tears running down her cheeks and had said: this child will live in the future we create, Dragon. She will reap the liberty we sow. These eyes will open into a brighter world. 

She will, he had replied, clasping her arm with his hands and squeezing tightly, feeling her delight enter his bones and warm them, like a furnace deep inside the center of his soul. 

She had died soon afterwards, after one of their hideouts had been raided by the marines. Her comrades had given her child to an orphanage in the West Blue and he’d never heard of her again, nor her dark eyes. 

He was startled now to realize he didn’t remember the child’s name. 

He put Luffy’s mouth to the feeding bottle and he watched him suck greedily, his face scrunched up in concentration. He almost seemed angry that it had taken so long. 

Dragon chuckled. 

“Alright, that’s enough,” he said after a while. “To bed with you.”

Luffy grumbled, looking as if his mouth would open to complain, but all he did was yawn and put his thumb to his mouth, sucking on it in patent disappointment. 

He really had inherited his eyes.

Miss Akane, by virtue of skill or age, had become the midwife of the town. Women visited, often under the warm sunlight and, other times, during nighttime, cloaked in darkness and shame. Dragon remembered her from his childhood, younger and sturdier but just as stern, only slightly taller than now, with her toiling back and fingers bent under the weight of the years. 

She had always smelled of herbs and oils and had donned beige aprons as she moved around the marketplace feeling the vegetables one by one, picking them with the utmost care. He remembered how the kids were equally awed and terrified of her and how they had gathered, always twenty steps behind her, to watch her. 

“She’s a witch!” they said, and the parents rushed to quiet them, as disquieted by her presence as the children themselves. 

Garp had always liked her. She brought food over sometimes and he launched himself upon it, famished as if he hadn’t eaten in several months, only belatedly remembering to make space for Dragon over the pot. 

“How’s your father these days?” Miss Akane asked several days later when she came over to check on Luffy. 

Dragon shrugged. He had taken under his wing a new pet that shot uncommonly fast up the ranks of the marines, or so his informants had told him. He was named Kuzan. 

“He adores the Vice-admiral,” they had said, “or at least he seems to. He can barely stay away from him. Garp has to push him away to get breathing space.”

He was powerful, they had told him, perhaps powerful enough to rival Garp himself. 

“And the Vice-admiral? Is he close to this Kuzan?”

The response had been uncertain there, unsure. Garp, they said, did not seem to grant him any special treatment; if anything, he was harder on him than on others, more unforgiving. 

“He’s just like always,” Dragon replied. Miss Akane shot him a knowing look that made him squirm, uncomfortable. “There’s not much change to him.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. There was something purposeful about her voice. “He was always a kind enough man.”

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

She looked down at the baby who, looking fascinated, reached out and grabbed her hair, pulling on it. 

“Oh, you’re a little rascal, aren’t you?” she murmured at him, tickling his legs lightly. 

Then the baby laughed and Dragon felt his stomach drop. It was a gorgeous thing, that laughter; powerful, booming inside the kitchen like a drum, like sunlight. Pure joy.

Dragon looked down at the laughing child, spellbound.

“May I hold him?” he asked before he realized he had spoken.

Miss Akane said nothing as she handed the child to him. He put it against his chest, breathless, as he laughed and laughed and laughed. 

My son, Dragon murmured, and the thought was like lightning striking him where he stood, real and tangible and electrical as it had been an empty whisper before, an echoing word that carried no meaning, only sound. My son. This is my son. 

****

Dragon remembered his first execution. He had been a child, little more than twelve, and his father’s career had been stellar, moving faster and faster. 

He had caught a pirate, extricated him from a remote island in Paradise in which he had attempted to hide from the eyes of the marines. There had been nothing surgical about it, nothing precise – there had rained fire on the island until it had drowned on it.

Hasty gallows were built on the pirate’s hometown, all the way towards the heart of the South Blue.

“Why go there?” Dragon had asked, still clad back then in the Marine uniform. “Why not execute him here, where we caught him?”

“For morale,” they’d told him.

Morale, he’d come to understand, meant a lesson – to him, to others who might dream of setting sail, to those curious enough to wonder about the end of the ocean and, especially, to the prisoner’s family and town and childhood teachers and the street vendors who may have known their names. 

This, morale shouted from up high, is what happens when you defy the Government, this is what awaits the courageous: oblivion and death.

The prisoner had begged all the way to the town square. 

“I’ll repent! I’ll repent!” he shouted. Dragon thought his ragged screams would make his ears bleed. “I’ll join the Marines! I’ll hunt pirates too. I know lots of ‘em, their hiding places, their ships… I can be useful. Yes! I can be useful!”

Laughter erupted among the Marines – mechanical, vicious. Sideway glances were shot from one comrade to the other, saying: can you believe this guy? Out here pretending he can be like us, when he is no more than a filthy pirate?

Piracy is in the blood, his father had told him once. It ferments in the heart. 

“All dogs bark when their time comes,” said a second-year, “no matter how high the bounty.”

He leaned towards Dragon to whisper this in his ear. He remembered shivering. 

“Order!” their commander screamed. 

The Marines quieted but for a few stray snickers carrying echoes of their mockery. 

Dragon remembered it like a nightmare, a childhood dream that had hid into his subconscious and nested there; a dream that had rotten and decayed, whose stench reached him all across the years.

He recalled the people in the crowd, although they morphed each time he thought of that day into twisted resemblances of the people he knew. Sometimes he himself was up there, hung up like a prize in the gallows and glancing down at his comrades who looked fearful, distraught, their despairing hands brought up to their faces. Sometimes he saw his good and faithful Ivankov, tears streaming down his face as he watched, cloaked, amongst the sparse bystanders. 

Often, he saw his father, arms crossed over his torso, his face as severe as the day he had abandoned him and Marineford for good. 

He recalled the blades glistening under the sun as they fell and the dripping blood, staining the cobblestones red, drop by drop. He thought of the body, headless, falling limply in a splash of gore and a woman – his wife, he assumed – passing out onto the ground. He remembered the hands that carried her into the shadows, away from the cheering Marines. 

He remembered it all like an omen.

When he dreamed of it now, he heard a piercing scream among the crowd, wailing uncontrollably, like a child’s. 

****

Garp thought, as he often did, of Sengoku. Or, more specifically, about the child he had taken in. A spindly thing, really – thin and raggedy and scared of his own shadow like a street cat. He could barely recall hearing a single word from the kid, who half-hid beyond Sengoku’s frame when Garp entered the room. 

“Come on, Rosi,” Sengoku murmured. “You must greet this man.”

His rough voice turned soft, like velvet, when he spoke to the child. Garp, although he would never admit it, liked listening to it very much. 

He had never gotten all the details, but he knew Sengoku had rescued him, more or less unblemished, from a terrible crew. They dealt in unsavory business, even for pirates – paid hits and extortions and blackmailing ties to local figureheads abounded in their record. He may have lost his father to it, somehow, or so he seemed to recall. 

The child, however, had taken to the Marines like a lifeline. He trained constantly and in stubborn silence, never mingling with others and never straying far from his savior and Sengoku looked at him with a mixture of amazement and wonder and a little grief. 

He thought, then, of Dragon – all eyes and unruly hair, unruly soul. He had been a curious child once, and had thrown himself at the world with all the determination of the sun coasting over the horizon each day. He seemed to be fixated with everything, following the changing whims of his curiosity with almost zeal. Garp had found it hard to understand. Even now, the memory of his son sitting on his knee, directing a ceaseless whirlwind of questions at him, made him feel dizzy.

He had been sweet, loving. He thought of the child that sat upon his knees in his office, reaching up at him with tearful eyes and small, round hands and tried to reconcile it with the man staring at him from the newspaper: all sharp angles and bones, angry, cold, dreadful. 

“Dad!” that child protested in his memory, all of those years ago. His lower lip quivered with his words and he sniffled, valiantly adopting a calm expression. “Can I go with you? I’ve been training a lot.”

Garp’s laughter was like thunder. 

“Soon enough, Dragon.”

“When?”

“As soon as you reach fourteen, you’ll be able to join the Marines.”

The child’s face darkened in concentration before exploding in indignation to his father’s amusement. “In six years? But that’s a lot!”

His curiosity had morphed over time, growing bitter and poisoned. Anger had grown within him more and more until he had become sullen, twitchy and he’d sounded as if he was trapped, as if the uniform smothered him and he struggled, in vain, to get some air. 

And then he had left. And Garp had forgotten the things he had shouted at his son right in the middle of Marineford’s harbor, but not the tone – nor the anger, the heartbreak, the venom in that once-child’s eyes that he could barely recognize. They echoed, even now, in his ears at night, before bed, and he grunted and closed his eyes and clung to sleep like a lifeline. 

He hadn’t seen him ever since and he had kept precious little to remember him by — some clothing, a pair of shoes and a photograph that he hadn’t looked at in years of Dragon in his first day on the Academy, blinding white uniform donned with thumping pride, a rifle on his shoulder and his chin held high, staring forwards, barely containing his smile. 

****

“Marching, marching goes the man,” Dragon mumbled, exhausted. “Running, running, gun in hand.”

His head dropped and he straightened, startled. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding onto the cradle where his son wailed for dear life, rocking the wooden structure back and forth. Luffy was a sweet thing, really, but come on now.

“Come on, Luffy,” Dragon begged, desperate. 

Luffy’s crying remained unchanged although, as if he was challenging him, he did crack an eye open, staring at him in curiosity. 

“Tumbling, tumbling down the hill,” he kept singing under his breath, “goes the soldier, shoots and kills.”

His voice sounded strange to his ears, changed – coated in dripping exhaustion from three consecutive near sleepless nights, yes, but something else. For all his virtues, Dragon had never been excessively fond of music; rhythm seemed to elude him and he found no joy or abandon in dancing. Always too tense for it, Ivankov said when he scolded him for standing to the side, half-statue and half-man, as his comrades descended into ecstasy as soon as someone brought out a lute. 

His people, it’d turned out, were excessively fond of music. They seemed, sometimes, to live for it. Instruments were everywhere in Baltigo and music often resounded across its white halls; during lunchtime, during training, during battle, all throughout it they always sang. 

He stared at Luffy and found, sitting placidly within his heart, their music. He sang it to him as he’d never sang it before, and his voice became bright, unburdened, liquid gold. 

His son calmed down ever so slightly, word by out-of-tune word becoming spellbound. 

When he put his hand out, Luffy reached towards them as if he understood him. Bring me closer, father, he seemed to say, put me against your chest.

Dragon did, shivering to the touch with that warm, almost unnaturally soft skin. Were all children like this? Made of glass, dazzling like trapped sunlight? 

Perhaps this was why his friend had cried when her dark-eyed darling had been born – this joy, singular and asphyxiating, radiant; this sudden understanding, like a single burst of brilliance that illuminated everything and then vanished, a moment later, leaving nothing but the intuition of shapes in the shadows. 

His father would be arriving soon, he imagined; he had called him nearly sixteen days ago. It was meant to be a twenty-day trip but he would, no doubt, bend the ocean into submission and force it to obey his will. 

His hands trembled when he brushed Luffy’s hair back. 

The child had stopped crying, appeased by his father’s half-murmured intonations and the feeding bottle he’d warmed, expertly now, muscle memory carrying him through the simplest of things – the bath, the feeding, the rocking of the cradle all throughout the night.

He wondered how long it would take his body to forget.

“Are you comfortable?” Dragon whispered to him, watching his wide eyes droop, nestled against his chest. 

The sins of the world weighed too heavily upon his shoulders. He’d seen too much grief, embedded deeply into the ocean, into the land itself, like poison that dripped all the way from the Red Line into the world. He’d seen husbands forced to abandon their newlywed wives because a passing Celestial Dragon had grown fanciful of them, children who stayed up at night and called for their mother who would not return because she had perished in the Government mines. He had seen wars unnumbered, fought by soldiers who could barely name the flag they fired under. 

He’d seen violence, eternal and all-encompassing violence, enough to embitter him, enough to rip him from his cushioning comforts and send him, reeling, into the world.

“You need to enjoy yourself,” Ivankov told him often. “You won’t bring down the world by frowning alone.”

But how could he? How could anyone?

Luffy made a noise, wordless, from within his arms – cheeky, somehow. He chuckled, awed at his weightless joy, at the levity that flooded his chest, alien enough to startle him. 

Dawn met him on his rocking chair still, looking downwards, half-asleep, at his son. 

****

He hesitated with his hand an inch away from the door. He pictured a dozen cloaked revolutionaries, armed to the teeth, hiding in the corners of the humble house. Would his son be among them? Would he see him?

He shook his head, annoyed at himself, at this brief and uncharacteristic burst of cowardice, this faltering of the knees that overtook him, here, now, a second away from his son who was, for all his faults, honest enough not to strike at him from the shadows. 

Not like a few rascals forty years his younger could land a blow on him anyway. 

He opened the door more forcefully, perhaps, than he should have. A shadow moved quickly inside, retreating like spooked prey. He blinked, growing accustomed to the light and saw strong arms crossed in zealous protection over a small, bundled up thing; he saw teeth, gritted in threat and hair, long, so long – longer than he’d ever seen in his youth, longer than in any poster he’d ever kept. 

“Dragon,” he greeted. “It’s been a long time.”

The shadow relaxed and from it, stepping forwards, emerged a man. 

His son’s face had been stern when he had left him, cold beyond his age but it had retained some of its roundness, youthful fat had stuck stubbornly to brown cheeks in which only peach fuzz had dared to grow. It had been foolish to think he wouldn’t have changed after so many years. 

Chiseled cheekbones sunken in agitation and a sharp, menacing jawline defined the face of his son. He saw traces of himself here and there: the crooked nose bridge and the dark skin and the way in which the corner of his eyes fell. Sengoku had called it endearing, once, many years ago, too young and too drunk; in his son, Garp saw it as sorrowful. 

“You’ve changed,” he said, even though perhaps he shouldn’t have. 

“And you haven’t changed at all,” the other man replied. Then, deliberately, he added: “father.”

Silence hung between them. Garp wondered why he’d been called, unable to ask it – in case it was something he didn’t want to hear, in case there was nothing and Dragon left, losing himself once more to the years. 

Dragon walked forwards and, he noticed, his arms remained crossed protectively, clutching the blanket to him with excruciating tenderness – not a blanket, then, he guessed, watching those strong arms, dangerous arms who had taken many lives move with the utmost care. 

A baby’s sleeping face emerged from the bundle – brown-skinned, with enormous eyes and a round bright face that lit up the room, snoring ever so slightly and way too noisily for a child that size.

“A child,” he murmured, breathless. 

“A son,” Dragon replied. 

“And the mother?” 

His son shook his head as if to brush the question off. 

“Gone,” he said. “Unimportant.”

Dragon seemed to him so lonely all of a sudden, standing with his child in the middle of the room, his head almost brushing the ceiling. 

“He looks just like you,” Garp said – to be kind in the only clumsy way he knew and to fill the silence and because it was heart-wrenchingly true. 

“I need you to take care of him,” the other replied. He looked everywhere, anywhere, but down at the child. 

“Why me?”

“Because nobody else would do it,” he said, “and because you saved Gol D. Roger’s child and I thought you might extend the same mercy to your son.”

Garp thought of Ace, bursting in cheerful laughter every time he saw him, all that rotten blood coursing through his veins – blood that killed and plundered, such violent blood in such a wonderful, bright child. Perhaps he could use a brother, someone who had inherited righteousness from him; someone to keep him strong, keep him brave later on, when the fire roared within him and he needed a reminder of who he was. 

Plus the child really did look just like Dragon. Putting his hands out, receiving him, holding him, he felt thirty years younger, hot-headed and beastly and proud and dissolving into tears at the sight of his firstborn and only son. 

He had been so beautiful, so innocent. 

“What’s his name?” he asked in a low voice. 

“Luffy,” Dragon answered. 

Monkey D. Luffy. Garp tested the name on his tongue and nodded. Yes. Yes, it would do. 

“So you’ll take him?” Dragon asked. His voice was tight, something unspoken weighing heavily upon it. 

“I’ll take him.”

Dragon looked at him, his eyes piercing under his long hair, under his tattooed skin and Garp fought the need to squirm beneath his gaze, to slither out of its treacherous hold that squeezed and pressured until something came, unbidden, out of him: regret, shame, apologies. 

But he had nothing to apologize for and his son had betrayed him, had betrayed justice. 

They teetered unsteadily on that thread, woven between them by Luffy, still asleep and now in Garp’s arms; the last lifeline that united them and which they both hesitated to cut. 

I wish to hear you call me father once more, Garp thought, sorrowful. 

His arms tightened around the child, his son’s last precious gift to him, and Dragon went to take a step back, towards his few possessions in the house and then towards the door. 

Luffy’s hand was closed, stubbornly, around a strand of his father’s hair. Dragon froze. 

Garp saw his mask of cold conceit crack as a flash of anguish glimmered in his eyes and a wave of affection so powerful it threatened to topple him flooded his chest. His son was there, his dear only son who needed him, who had called him, who hesitated now, with one foot already on his fate and only half of himself in the present, looking down at this baby who wore his handsome face. 

He put a hand on Dragon’s shoulder, heavy and steady like an anchor. 

I never thought my heart would break, Dragon’s face said, looking down in tremulous sorrow at his son’s sleeping frame.

It is excruciating to let go of a son, Garp solid hand replied, tightening his grip on Dragon’s shoulder. But look at me, my dearest; here I am. 

Fatherhood, Garp had figured long ago, was like a necrosis of the heart. 

“I’ll take good care of him,” he told his son with his voice rough because perhaps he needed to hear it and because he needed to say anything to make the parting easier – anything but I love you, anything but raise your own son as my grandson, anything but why must you leave again, always, always?

Dragon nodded and, as quickly as it had shattered, the mask slipped over his features once more, clouding them. 

Garp kept looking down at Luffy as Dragon moved around him, as the door opened and then, several hesitating seconds later, closed again; as his steps sounded lighter and lighter on the road outside until there was silence, only silence, but for their breaths and the steady sound of his heart. 

Luffy slept on, unaware that he’d just lost something he would never get back. Perhaps, if Garp did things right, he might never even miss it at all. 

He wouldn’t take this kid with him to the heart of the Marines that had so irreparably taken his son from him, no. He would be raised here, under this sun, on this ocean, and he would train and grow as a normal child, and his heart would yearn to join the Marines and his grandfather, to stand at his side and wear his uniform proudly. He would ask him about his father one day, lounging in his own office, already halfway into becoming an Admiral and Garp would say: he was a good man, kid; a good man who made mistakes. It’s a good thing that you could fix them. 

“Alright, kiddo,” he said. “Let’s go.”