Current music:

"The Wanderlust" - Flogging Molly

Random fanfics attack!
So I'm watching One Piece again (and Bleach, but never mind that) - I've started over from the beginning of the Arabasta arc, because that's where things start heating up (and because I cry like a baby every time I watch the Drum Island arc >.>). So my fingers started itching, and before I knew it, I was writing a drabble-ish one shot.

I seem to have this almost unhealthy fascination with Nico Robin - and, by extension, Crocodile - since all of my One Piece fics so far (yeah, all three of them) seem to involve her in some way, even if she's not physically on the scene.

"Glory is a bright tragic thing"
- Emily Dickinson

Artificial drought draws moisture from the air until every breath is dry and brittle on her tongue, and Nico Robin wonders when she ceased to be herself. The star-spangled white coat sticks to her, every seam spelling out Miss All-Sunday on skin that no longer sweats. Four years have drummed the name into her bones, four years in this arid country, playing at conspiracy with a killer.

Baroque Works, Operation Utopia, burning ships on distant oceans - it's all just means to her end. The clamour and scrabble of backstabbing politics is the same old song and dance it was the last time around, and the time before that and the time before that, and after twenty years, she knows how it is going to end. The people at the top are, perhaps, a little more dangerous this time (she knows, sure as sunshine and sand and rebellion, that Crocodile will kill her, by hand or poison both - and she's betting it all on a bottle and a knife) and they are playing for something far more precious -

- but this is not Ohara, and she no longer cares. Her country burned - out of sight, out of mind, off the map - twenty years and a lifetime ago, and Robin cannot find it in herself to pity Nefertari Vivi, who got to keep hers longer. Not even when the girl weeps beneath the garish gaudiness of Rain Dinners, all rage and howling desperation in the face of Crocodile's steel-trap grin.

The princess weeps for soldiers and rebels and a country beneath the burned-out desert sky, and Robin stands back, smiles with her eyes closed and thinks of history in unreadable writing. Let this place go to the dogs and the drought and the rebels, and let the palace crumble into dust.

This is not her revolution.







1. Miss All-Sunday is Robin's codename in the criminal organisation Baroque Works, an association of bounty hunters under the leadership of Crocodile/Mr Zero. The most powerful men in the organisation are numbered 0-13, and all of them work in partnership with the most powerful women - Miss All-Sunday/Mr Zero, Miss Doublefinger/Mr One, Mr Two all on his own because he's the frilliest ballerina on this side of the North Pole, Miss Goldenweek/Mr Three, Miss Merry Christmas/Mr Four, Miss Valentine/Mr Five, etc., etc.

2. Operation Utopia is the codename of Crocodile's master plan, which involves the hostile takeover and bloody civil war of the kingdom of Arabasta in a fiendish attempt to claim the ancient weapon Pluton - a weapon that has the power to blow up an entire island in a single shot.

3. Crocodile has the power of the Suna Suna no Mi ("Sand Sand Fruit"), which means that he can turn his body into sand at will, and that he can create sandstorms, quicksand sinkholes and that he can draw all moisture out of anything he touches with his right hand. He uses this power to create an artificial drought in Arabasta, because he's afraid of water. And because he's utterly evil, of course.

4. Since Crocodile can turn into sand, it's impossible to hit him - except when he's soaked with water. Robin keeps a bottle/vial of water in her pocket, along with a knife, in case she ever has to, you know, stab his heart out.


Next up is Franky Ichigo Byakuya whoever I randomly pick. >.>