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whirlybirdwhat · 5 years

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Sea of Monsters - Chapter 14

Wow aren’t you guys lucky. Two chapters in Two days!!!

Warnings - The following chapter relates to Marineford. Take caution if need be.

“Garp’s no angel, despite the wings adorning his back and horns atop his head. He cannot do anything - not in the face of Justice.”

Read the entire series on Ao3 for better quality and authors notes! Gen, creepy, featuring all of the Straw Hats, multi-chapter story. (Tag “Ficart” on my blog should also show some fan art for this fic!)

“The East Blue has a different nickname to those in the Grand Line, and those who hail it as home have a few… unique traits.”

Justice - Garp

In the South Blue there is a religion from before the Void Century, that speaks of beings they call ‘angels,’ with beautiful faces and soft, feathered wings. Their faces are sweet, their hands kind, and some scholars on the Grand Line think the religion derived from Sky Island visitors.

In the East Blue, the South Blue’s neighbors across the Grand Line, people (demons) know better.

Angels - the South Blue speaks in hymns, Guardians of Light, Guardians of Gold, Guardians of Souls, Their faces are held high, Guardians of Justice, Please heed our call.

Angels – they say, ignoring the first images in their holy books, images of unholy beast with wheels of fire along their limbs and hands and million black eyes, Pure Beings – pray to them!

Angels, they say, drawing them, unaware of the East Blue’s truth, Righteous, ethereal, with a single pair of eyes.

Garp has never guarded anything well but his job. He has not bent to anyone’s pleas of help, or assisted in a righteous miracle.

He has simply been (Justice.)

(The East Blue knows that winged visitors did not come from the sky but from the darkest heart of the sea.)

To look at him, with the Veil across your eyes, you would see an old but muscled man, gray haired and wild eyed. He would have a laughing grin with perhaps some crumbs in his beard, and a scar across the left side of his face.

A Vice Admiral.

A man with power, but a man all the same.

To look at him without the veil, your eyes might bleed from your head in melted terror, viscous and bloody, mixing with the tears of fear also running down your face.

To take away the Veil is to see bones crackle and shift in a body containing a beast, to see wings sprouting from between his shoulder blades, with feathers sharp and deadly to those he wants to cut. To see horns curled and deadly and colossal atop his head and eyes running along every limb in every space. To see feathers, shift into fur and fire along his back, and terror in every ounce of his being.

If the South Blue could see him, Garp would think they would call him a fallen angel.

His people (The East, the Children of Ocean and the Darkest Blood, religions are so messy when true monsters walk amongst the line between mortal and demonic – between human and hell) call him the King of Beasts.

(Roger, after he earned the title the burning crown above his head indicated, would tease him and call him ‘my fellow majesty’)

(Garp would always attempt to punch him after that.)

Now, he calls himself a failure, a disgrace, as he sits and prepares to watch his grandson die, hoping beyond all hope that his other grandson would save him.

(Oh? Did you think Justice (the angel) was blind, indifferent to the plights and pleads of every soul around her, indifferent to suffering and death and loss?

Or do you think Justice is multi-eyed and weeping, tears at every atrocity she sees as she sits on her knees by the master who calls her, calling his war justice and the death of millions justice

Do you think Justice is a slave to whoever calls her name, forced to be the face of death and despair?

Do you think?

Garp does not think this.

Garp knows this.

Garp knows this because he is Justice, wears it on his back proudly without fail, wears it as his wings are clipped and his many eyes sealed shut because the tears that blurred them stopped him from carrying out the Navy’s (Justice’s) orders.

He is Justice and he is chained to a master he no longer wants, forced to watch a second grandson die and the third near kill himself for nothing.

Justice is not blind - he has a thousand eyes all trained on what he sees, his hands bound by duty to shape the world to those above him.

Justice weeps.)

Upon the platform, Garp stretches a wing that only three present can see over his grandson, the only form of comfort he will let himself have. Ace, eyes watery and wet trails along his cheek (does he know that his tears glow like molten lava?) glances at him.

“Old Man.” Ace grunts, the words sliding past a fang lined mouth.

“Brat.” Garp says, remembering the first time he held his grandson, how his skin was the color of charcoal, how even without the power of his devil fruit he burned with a light no one good put out, how the marks on his back never grew into the wings they thought they would (but that’s okay, because the mark that makes Ace happy is there instead) how the babe had curled a finger and near burned his hand off.

Sengoku watches from the side, unable to see past the Veil but conscious that something not quite there is occurring before his very eyes.

Garp’s 156th eye, located on the back of his head, gives the Fleet Admiral a glare. Garp likes to think Sengoku can feel it.

“I didn’t want this for you, or your brother.” He didn’t want it for Sabo either.

(Death takes and the South Blue says angels can stop it.

Garp hasn’t been able to stop it.)

(Luffy isn’t an angel.)

“I know, Gramps.” There’s something wretched and vulnerable in Ace’s voice, something Garp hasn’t seen before in his eldest grandson since… since ever really.

Garp’s never been one for words, but he hopes the weight of his wing, warm and soft over his grandson, like the guardian he never was, says I love you clear enough.

By Ace’s sobs, it does.

War is hell, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Garp sees his grandson charging toward him, form shifting and mouth bloody, body crooked in a way it hadn’t been for years, and Garp cries.

He watches from the platform as Luffy gets beaten again and again and again, despite the fact that he’s not really quite there, his body dripping in shadow and blood.His grandson is outmatched and starving, eyes alight with some odd inner fire, and that unholy crown above his head is flickering.

Garp lets Luffy punch him.

Luffy’s not crying.

(The King of Beasts had chosen.

And he had chosen wrong.)

(Justice has been chained for far too long)

Garp’s too far away to hear Ace’s last words as he dies, but he can hear Luffy’s scream crystal clear.

(Ace (his grandson is dead.)

Its like a wild animal, horrid and feral and desperate, full of such an overwhelming loss it’s hard to comprehend.

(Garp can.

He knows his grandson.

(It’d rather die than be alone.))

Luffy’s lost, people are screaming, and there are shadows swamping Luffy oh hell can’t anyone save his grandson from himself please-

(The fire above Luffy’s head is gone.)

Four weeks later finds Garp talking with the witch of the mountain outside her hut. There are bones on the ground and alcohol pouring down the witch’s mouth like water.

If one looks closely, one can see little black marks on the wall, the height of a child, a toddler learning how to walk. There are bite marks in the wood, the shape of a human mouth with far too many teeth, and little burns spread throughout the rest of the clearing, the kind coming from something not quite fire but far too hot all the same.

Dadan is the first to speak.

“Ace learned to walk here. Didn’t find out til two weeks later when he walked right up and stole the meat stick from Magra.”

“Heh. Sounds like Ace alright.”

“He was never quite as bad as Luffy though. At least the blond brat had manners.”

They don’t comment on how their voices crack over Ace’s name.

Instead, they lapse back into silence, waiting as the air grows heavy and the night grows dark. The bones on the ground gleam a ghastly white, and the single candle Dadan has lit in the middle is warming only to the witch and the beast.

A beast howls in the distance and the shadows shift, reaching and pulling at any light they can find.

Dadan pops the cork off the bottle to her left and pours sake, blood, and saltwater onto the bones.

(Its tears or water on their cheeks – either way its saltwater.)

The bones erupt in fire.

(Like all things in the East, it consumes. Consumes light, consumes visitors, consumes hell itself. The waters have raged since the death of Ace, and something not quite safe lurks above the East Sea, as if the demons of hell have recognized that Ace (Son of the King) is dead.

Ace never had a crown of fire floating above his head, but the self-made funeral pyre glowed brighter than the hellfire of his father’s body.)

“Rest in peace, Ace.”

(The beasts of the island are still tonight as the King of Beasts mourns for what he could not guard.)

(Oh – what a failure of an angel you are Garp (you were never one to begin with), what a failure of a grandfather, what a mockery of justice you are.)

Garp retires, but Justice still weeps.

(Her children are dead.)

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