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Rouge grows alongside flowers and trees, with sun on her skin and adventure in her bones.
She loves the land—loves it so much she would die for it, die to protect her favorite bush smattered with blooming red hibiscus, die to smell the jasmine vine crawling up her childhood home, and die for that orange tree that shaded her shoulders and filled her belly for many, many summers.She’s fourteen when she realizes she would kill for it, too.
A horrible bunch of piss-smelling pirates set foot on Baterilla when she’s running errands for her mother, and they guffaw and sneer.She has a bad feeling.
The feeling gets worse when she heard screaming from the markets, and nosy thing she is, Rouge runs with abandon, her chores forgotten. She fumbles her way through a crowd, and can only grit her teeth as her eyes behold blood smearing the threshold of the sole bakery on the island of Baterilla.
A man with yellow, tobacco stained teeth pulls Cedar Gill out of her own shop by her hair.
The old woman doesn’t make a sound, and iron red spills from her mouth, scratches on her elbows and knees. There’s a metallic scent in the air.
Rouge is a gentle child—she had learned to treat things tenderly and with care when she crushed a rabbit to death in her arms when she was five. She had cried and cried, and her mother tried to soothe her tears, but Rouge had been inconsolable. Rouge learned early that she was too strong for her own good.Rouge doesn’t feel gentle now. She doesn’t feel like she should be cradling anything, or ghosting her fingers over glasses so they wouldn’t burst right in her hands if she held it too tightly.
Rouge knows anger. She’s been angry plenty.
But now, Rouge knows rage.
Rouge steps out of the crowd, and the pirate barks something at her, but she doesn’t hear him as she reaches up to his hair—lice ridden and disgusting as it is—and slams him temple into the cobblestone ground.
Cedar Gil is limp, unmoving next to Rouge, and she gives the pirate’s head another stomp.“Were you all just gonna watch?” Her voice echoes over a silent crowd as she gathers Cedar Gill in her arms. She feels the old woman breath shallowly. “Were you just gonna watch him kill ‘er?”Rouge turns abruptly, her feet trudging her down the street, people parting for her, whispering at her, and she finds herself at the little clinic that was barely two hundred yards away from Cedar Gill’s bakery.
She’s known Ronan Clare for her whole life. She’s known that clinic her whole life. Every soul on Baterilla knew.
She doesn’t understand how the butcher and the florist, and all the merchants she’s known since she was a child could watch their favorite baker beaten and humiliated in her own home—she lived in that bakery—and just stand there. Doing nothing.
“Rouge?” Clare’s voice snaps her out of whatever reverie Rouge had found herself in. “Rouge, bring her in the back please.”
Rouge does as she’s told, because she didn’t know what to do otherwise. Cedar Gill is in good hands, in a bed, ointment being spread over her wounds.
Rouge steals a letter opener from Clare’s desk as she walks out. She shoves it in her pocket.
Baterilla doesn’t feel safe anymore. Doesn’t feel like sunshine and doesn’t smell like hibiscus.
It smells like iron.
She wanders back on the street, drifting back to the bakery, where the crowd had dispersed, but the pirate was still there, skull cracked, unmoving.
Rouge stands over him, her head cocked.
“Oi. Girl.”Rouge turns. She has to look up, but its an unfamiliar face, with gold teeth, and hoop earrings. “Who did this?”“I did.” She says, without a hint of hesitation.
Eyebrows raise. There’s a gaggle of pirates behind him.
“No shit?”“Yeah.”They’re still. So still. “Ya know, girlie, that’s ma first mate.” He grins wickedly. “Ya bashed his head in. Wanna join?”His offer makes her blood run hot—not cold, it should have ran cold—but there’s that anger again, that latent rage hiding just under her skin, and Rouge finds that a second passes, and the man is clutching a jagged and gaping slash on his neck.Rouge is holding a bloody letter opener.The pirates behind him let out a battle cry.
She’s grateful that it’s a small crew.Someone must have heard the commotion, because some time later, Rouge isn’t sure when, a group of Marines turn the corner and she makes eye contact with with, with ten fallen men around her, letter opener still in hand.
One of them steps forward. She recognizes him, of course, Captain Harding, and he gives her a once over.
“Rouge.” He sounds like he’s disappointed.She lifts her chin, her lips drawn thin. “Don’t the posters always say Dead or Alive?”He grimaces. “I suppose they do.”Her eyes slide over the the warm bodies. “They got bounties?”Harding’s fingers tap against his thigh. “They do. Not much as far as bounties go, but it’s few hundred thousand all together, I’d reckon.”“I want it.” Rouge drops the letter opener, and uses the back of her palms to wipe the blood off her face. “Momma and Papa’ve been strugglin’ for a while with money.”“Give us a week.” Harding motions with his hand and his men go about collecting bodies and checking pulses. “We’ll need to have the coin shipped from an island with a bigger treasury.” He hesitates, still looking over to blood-stained appearance. “You want me to register ya?”“On what?” Rouge is wiping her palms on the back of her dress.He shrugs. “The Bounty Hunter Registry.”
Rouge blinks. She glances once more at the bloody cobblestone, and recalls the rage that dizzied her head.She wonders if she wants a life like that.
She also knew that she could never go back to being the Rouge that was gentle and even-keeled and always held her tongue. She’s gotten a taste for a justice all her own, one that relished in hearing heavy breaths blink out of existence, and she could never go back to just watching.“Yeah. Put me on it.”Rouge walks home, soaking, and draws stares the whole way.
There’s little more than a whispering spring shower when her feet leave the earth of her beloved home.
Rouge had made enemies. The enemies aren’t her hibiscus bushes, nor her sweet orange tree, nor even the jasmine vine—she loved them all the same. People, however, are less kind than the comforts of her childhood.
After Rouge tastes first blood, the island folk treated her differently. Hesitantly. They smacked their dry lips every time she went on errands, and whenever a pirate crew rolled through, low-ranking and vile, they’d be dead within the day.
No one thanks her for it. That part makes her glad, at least, because it wasn’t something she deserved to be thanked for. When they start spitting on her and scalping her family, however, claiming a blood-fee, she knows her people aren’t hers anymore.
Baterilla’s never had a blood-fee. It wasn’t their custom. There wasn’t a tradition of charging extra to do business with the
sullen and dirty hands of killers and their kin.Her mother and father still had treated her kindly; her mother brushed her hair, and sang her favorite songs in the kitchen; her father still made her paper flowers and wrote poems for her to read. They loved her the same, blood and all. It keeps a part of Rouge whole, unmarred, unstained by the blood that she knew she could never cleanse herself of.
But they can only do so much.
Rouge looks out to the sea, a blue sky expanding over its horizon, as ocean spray buffets her face, and she turns back to see her home crawl into the distance.
She never had wanted to leave—she would have been perfectly happy for her whole life to stay on that island and live as everyone else. Her hands say differently. The ever-present wrath in her gut squirms.Bounty Hunters don’t have families. They don’t have homes, nor do they have people they love. She learns this from an old-timer, in the West Blue Bounty Hunter Guild, in a shitty little bar in Loguetown.
“I forget what my real name used to be.” He said, nose pink with drunkenness. “Maybe it was a nice name. I think it was. But you have to leave all that behind, girl. You can’t remember anyone or anything once you live this life. It’s always the next kill and the next reward. Whoever I was before I decided to live this way—he’s long gone. You haven’t done that yet. That makes you a sitting duck. A woman who has something to lose. You never want to have things you can lose when you’re dealing with pirates. They’ll take everything—life and all.”She tries to take his advice to heart.
The registry entry for Portgas D. Rouge changes to Quint.
She likes playing cards, and gambling the memories of her old life away. Her heart never beats as fast as when she as a royal flush in her hands, and all her chips out on the table. Poker is a tricky game—one where fortune rules, and she believes wholeheartedly that she could see her own life right before her eyes whenever a game of poker was underway.
She has a name that’s not her own, but she never forgets her original one.
Rouge is always hibiscus red and no one could change that—not ever her.There’s no forgetting when she is reminded with every head collected, every officer who notes her viciousness, and every heave of her hand as she scrubbed stained clothes.
She’s sixteen, almost seventeen, in Paradise, and alone on her ship.
She learns everything there is about being a sailor. Log poses and maps and wind charts and sail rigging and anchoring and ship mooring.
Rouge calls herself by her name in her whispers, as she ties knots, all on her lonesome.
She’s sure this isn’t what the old man meant. She’s sure she needs to erase herself, but can never manage the heart to do it when she’s braving the blue on her lonesome.
The only thing she has is her name.
“Oi!”Rouge’s head turns.
She’s wipes blood off her brass-knuckles, and flicks it off her short sword, it soaring through the air in a curve and splattering against the ground.
“Gold Roger.” She greets with ease, knowing his face from the bounties she had long ago memorized.
He’s older than her. Twenty-nine and always grinning, a straw hat on his head, and an open pink vest, showing his bare chest.
Rouge is twenty and a killer.
Gold stands far off, his little crew crowded behind him. His face conveys some sort of gratitude. She’s sure he wouldn’t be grateful for long.
“Thanks! I was gonna beat him up myself, but you did it for me!” His smile falls, slightly. “He tried to kill my navigator, you see.”Rouge clicks her tongue, and pulls the man—Brownfoot Rory, 40,000,000 beri—by his hair.
Gold tilts his head. “What are you—“Rouge cuts Brownfoot’s head off in one motion, his blood pouring out. She clicked her tongue again.
She thought he had already been dead. Unfortunately, for her clothes, he was not. He was now, at any rate.
Gold’s jaw hangs low, and Silvers Rayleigh steps forward.
“Bounty Hunter Quint.” Rouge doesn’t respond to the sharp address, and pulls a burlap sack off her hip and tosses the wide-eyed sconce in it.
She returns to the man’s body, rifling through pockets and stealing money and weapons. Rouge was a thorough hunter—she took every part of a person. Jewelry, gold teeth, cherished and ornaments trinkets almost every man she’d ever killed had in their possession. She realizes early that humans are sentimental things. Maybe even more than she thought. Rouge missed her hibiscus, and it seemed as though everyone had something they missed.Silvers grunts as he nudges Gold, whose mouth is open. “We should get out of here, Roger.”Rouge barely spares them a glance, as she floats past them, bloody sack in hand. “Cause trouble, and I’ll kill you.” It’s effortless, really. Rouge didn’t kill people for no reason. She was never that kind of hunter, and she kept up with the news. She had journals filled to the brim with misdeeds and slave associations, of pillages and razings.
The Roger Pirates are in very few of them—Gold himself was something of a hero for many islands, a bane upon the World Government for setting people free.There’s nothing for Rouge to indict him with. No reason for her to slit his throat.Gold clears his throat. She cranes her head back only slightly to give him her attention, stopping in her tracks. “You wanna drink with us?”Silvers hisses at him, and Rouge cocks her head, the most flabbergasted she’s been in years.“I don’t have time for your games, Gold.” Rouge squared her eyes forward, but a hand catches her arm.
“I’m serious.” Gold says, all teeth. “And it’s Gol D. For the record.”Rouge’s skin pricked with goosebumps, Gold’s dark eyes shining amber in the Paradise sunbeams.
She’s never met another person with that name. That initial. She was told as a child it was for fey and fleeting things in the world, and her mother would never divulge more than that.
“It means many things, my love.” Her mother had said. “Destiny, death, desolation, dawn—and many things more. It means something different for every person who bears it—and yet, it also is the same.”
Rouge never liked the cryptic answers her mother gave her.“You’re not serious.” Rouge shrugs her arm from his grasp.“Next time!” His voice calls.
Rouge doesn’t answer him, stalking her way to her ship, and setting sail for the nearest Marine base.
She scrubs the place where his flesh had touched hers, rubbing it an angry red, but she can’t get the sensation of his warm palms off of her.
Gol is serious.More so than Rouge could have ever conceived.She meets him again far too soon—the ocean is a big place, after all, and she really shouldn’t be seeing his face only three months after theirs first encounter.It’s just her luck that she has a head in her hand, and blood on her chest when they catch eyes in port, as she’s just about to step onto the dock to leave.“Quint!”
He’s running.
Rouge sweats, and clamors over herself, jumping over mooring ropes and chains as she scrambles to her vessel.She feels him as he collides into her back, planting them both face down into briny wood. Rouge growls.“Get off me, Gol.”
He shifts on top of her, and Rouge flips to her back. She’s horrified to see him straddling her waist, palms on the ground framing her shoulders.
He’s too close. Much too close.“You remembered.” He laughs, their noses nearly touching. “My name.”
Rouge didn’t need that clarification. She feels the heat the pools into her cheeks, crawling across to her ears. “Get off.” She could easily punt him off, without a second thought, but the warmth of his skin and his smile makes her hesitate.“Wow.” He breathes, the exhale tickling her chin. “I didn’t know people could blush like that.”Rouge yanks a knee up, and thrusts it into his gut. He grunts, thrown right off of her, but hits the ground guffawing.“You’re strong!”
She ignores him, dusting off her clothes, but only succeeding the covering her hands with red. “Shit.” Rouge bites her lip. “Fuck this.” She promptly bends down and wipes her hands off on Gol’s blue vest, smirking as he squawks.
“I like this vest!” The pout on his lips makes Rouge’s stomach do a summersault. “It’s such a fucking pain to wash blood out of!”Rouge couldn’t be less sympathetic. All her clothes were black for a damn good reason.“Shouldn’t have tackled me then, bitch.” Gol chokes slightly, and Rouge relishes it.He gains his bearings again quickly, and tilts his chin up. “Let’s get a drink.”Her eyes roll.“Absolutely not.”“Oh, com’on!” Fingers curl around her palm, and she hisses, goosebumps curling down her body once more.Fuck.She wrenches his hand away, cradling her knuckles to her chest. “Don’t fucking touch me.”Gol blinks owlishly. He reaches again.
“Are you deaf, asswipe?” A snarl pulls across her face, but he snatches her hand again, pulling, the sack laden with a bloody head thumping against her thigh. She tries once again to pull away, but his grip is surprisingly—unfortunately—tight.She digs her heels into the wood of the dock, but she’s helpless.“We’re gonna get drinks.” Gol tells her. Rouge starts suspecting the man had never accepted a no in his entire life.“Fuck that.” Rouge wants a shower. Not a drink. She wants to be far, far away from Gol D. Roger, far away from his white grin and grabby hands.He gets them to a bar.
Rouge is livid.“Two cosmos.” He chirps cheerily, and the bartender pulls a face.“Fuck you. We don’t have Cointreau. Where the hell do you think we are? Marijoa?”Gol takes it in stride. “It’s good to ask. Vodka cranberries, then.”The man cleans a glass and turns with a huff.Rouge juts a lip out, elbows on the bar top. “The fucks a cosmo?”“Fruity drink. Sour and sweet.” His lips quirk with an impish smile.Rouge knows the heat crawling across her face, and abruptly snaps her head to look up at the ceiling.“And Can-trow?”Gol’s fingers tap the stained wood incessantly. “Orange liqueur. We’d get it in my hometown—lots of imports from the West Blue. They have the best oranges.”Rouge’s throat constricts ever so slightly. “Is that so?”
The warmth dies in the apples of her face, and her nose dips back down, tilting ever so slightly in Gol’s direction.“Yeah.” His eyes wander from the shelves of liquor to her face.The bartender deposits two red cocktails in front of Rouge and Gol respectively, and Gol waves a hand. “Tab.”The man grunts, going back to cleaning glasses and taking orders.Rouge allows herself to grasp at the burning frustration buzzing in her head, and she knocks the drink back in one swoop. The glass clinks against the counter, and the empty vessel sweats with condensation. “Another.” She calls to the bartender, who bobs his head in acknowledgement.Gol matches her. He waves for more.“Two can play at that game, Red.” He quips, and they both slam the next round.Rouge bristles, the alcohol already going to her head. “Don’t fucking call me that.”His cackles indicate Gol doesn’t give a singular shit about Rouge’s opinions, and he leans into her. “Stop blushin’, then maybe.” He smirks at her, cunning, devious, the incarnation of a hellion.Another round slides down their throats. Rouge suddenly has a cigarette in her hand, and she’s extending her secret stash out to Gol, who snatched one up.She lights them up, and more libations flow.They get totally fucking wasted.After her tenth vodka cranberry, she starts thinking that Gol was a rather good drinking buddy.
Somewhere after her twentieth—or maybe it was the thirtieth, she didn’t know—drink she’s struck by how positively drunk she is.Her head falls onto Gol’s shoulder, and he takes it as the last call for their little rendezvous.
Gol throws money down, and has her arm sling across his shoulder.He’s not doing much better.They stumble through barely lit streets, laughing—Rouge hasn’t laughed in years—and he talks her ear off about his adventures on the Grandline. She shares a few of her own, and he slurs out encouragement, even as they trip and fall flat on their asses.Gol doesn’t remember where his ship is—which is ridiculous, there was one port on Fuuza Island—and Rouge is too hammered to think bringing him back to her ship is a very bad idea.She knows Gol is warm and bright, and that she wants to stay in his orbit just a bit longer before she’d have to be sober and shed him off like an old skin.They fumble into her sleeping quarters.Rouge’s mind is humming as she pulls him into soft sheets, and he laughs sloppily as her head rests on his chest, an arm holding his waist in an embrace. He folds her close, hands tracing circles into the place just between her shoulder blades.“Why’d ya brin’me ‘ere?” His voice his drowsy and heavy with intoxication. Rouge’s eyes are a burden, are shut closed, and she presses herself closer.“I dunno.” She murmurs into his vest. She breathes in metal, iron, a scent so familiar to her—“Cool.” Gol’s hand drifts into her short blond hair, carding it through his fingers, and Rouge sighs, tasting the liquor that lingered on her tongue. “Join m’crew.”“Nah.” Rouge is drunk, not stupid.
“Meannnn.” He whines.
“Shuddap.” Rouge shifts, a leg over his, half her body sprawled atop him, chin on his chest, their eyes meeting. “M’ship, m’rules.”Gol isn’t really there. His are are cloudy and shiny in the way that means he’s fallen right of the edge of hoping to remember anything tomorrow. At least, that’s what Rouge thinks it means. She’s not really sure herself, doesn’t know if she’ll remember any of this, if it’s all impulse, or if it means something more than that.“Pretty.” His lips ghost. Rouge’s drunk little heart stutters as the pad of his thumb caresses her freckles. “Ya look lik’ya wearin’ rouge.”Rouge slaps the side of his face lightly, her hand trailing down to grasp his chin.
“Ya fuck.” Gol laughs, and she can feel the vibrations in his chest. “Why d’ya say that?”“Y’er a fuckin’ idiot. I dunno. Ya pretty.” His head lulls to the side and he pinches her cheek with a wide grin. “So red.”Rouge’s head falls back to his breathing sternum.
Soft snores flit into the air like little fairies. Rouges doesn’t know if she’s more inebriated by the liquor in her veins or by the warmth of his skin. Her body is light and leaden, every movement is so easy, yet so difficult, and her mind’s all fog, but she sees everything perfectly.She raises her head, her hooded eyes flickering over the warm man in her bed, and she presses a kiss to his sleeping mouth.Sleep takes Rouge quickly after that, Gol’s breath dragging her deeper and deeper into its blissful depths.Rouge’s body is thrumming, and she wakes up knowing she still had a buzz going on in her head, but it didn’t feel so nice when mixed with the pounding headache.She rolls, barely containing her horror at Gol’s sleeping face, and she scrambles off her bed, colliding quite inelegantly with the floor.“Fuck.” She groans, face down, smacking her hand on the wood beneath her. “Fuckin’ shit! Bitch ass what the fuck—“A groan emanates from her bed, and Rouge freezes.“Red, pipe the fuck down, would you? It’s hangover central here, fuck.” The bed creaks, and Rouge bites her lip. “Why are you on the floor?”Rouge is a bit hysterical. More than a bit.“Get out.” She squeaks, and it’s not as threatening as she’d like it to be. “Get the fuck off my ship right now.”“Aw, don’t be like that, Red.” Gol’s standing over her, extending a hand that is promptly smacked away.“Get out. I know you don’t hear anything with those fucking ears of yours, but I’ll kill you right now if you don’t get your ass as far away from me as possible.” Rouge’s stomach turns. It was impossible for her to fuck up so badly.
She gets wasted, brings a pirate back to her ship, invites him into her bed, and he has the fucking audacity to still be there in the morning. Rouge thinks her head might actually explode.“Shit.” Gol throws his hands up in mock surrender. “I’ll go.” His eyes twinkled, which Rouge does not like. “But we’ll get drinks again. You’re fun, Red. I’ll get you to join my crew sooner or later.”“No more fucking drinks, ever, get out!” A shoe goes flying as Gol is high-tailing it through the door with guffaws filling the air and disappearing just as quickly.Rouge has never raised anchor so quickly in her life.Rouge avoids the Roger Pirates like the plague.She gets quite good at it. It only takes her unwavering dedication to the News Coo, and a healthy suspicion to avoid every island that felt like it could have any semblance of adventure. Dreary towns and run-down ports are the only things that fill Rouge’s vision for seven years.Even then, it’s a boring, humdrum life.Rouge isn’t made for it.She needs color, wind, and sound to fill her senses and push her onwards. She’s a tactile creature, always grabbing at things that were too shiny and interesting for her own good.More heads roll from Rouge’s swords, and she gets a reputation. For her gambling, for her drinking, for the blood on her hands.
Bloody Quint.
It seemed like whoever was responsible for epithets on the seas were uninspired fucks. Go figure.Rouge has no room to talk, honestly. She was just as uninspired; roaming to and fro shitty islands on the Grandline, poaching no-names and the occasional Rookie when she could.What Rouge wouldn’t give for a good fight.This is why, against her better judgment, Rouge hoists her sails to the New World. She wants more. More life, more death, more blood—something.Certainly, she has a rough start. She has to stop for a year on Fukujin Island to get an old acquaintance of her’s to teach her the basics of both Observation and Armament Haki—she also acquires a keen hatred for the cold.
Fukujin was a haze of fire and smoke that was so thick that Rouge could only ever see five feet in front of her—her teacher, Dick, the oldest bounty hunter on the seas, told her it was the perfect island to learn Haki on.
He certainly wasn’t wrong.
With the volcano constantly spiting magma and shooting out ash and dust, Rouge acquires a good number of burn scars before she learns to dodge them.
When Dick is content with her progress, Rouge hurries off, seeing sights Paradise could never dream of, taking heads that required all her skill, and for the first time, she truly believes that she was meant to be sailing the seas. Her eyes are full, her ears are buzzing, and there’s more blood, but she’s never been happier.
In Dressrosa, the moment her feet hit the earth, she can hear laughter and screams and moans all mixing together in a horribly symphony.
It’s a country that is just like any other—it has it’s good points, and many bad ones.
Her first encounter with the locals goes terribly—the moment she had made it past the port, she had been accused of seducing a woman’s husband, and said woman attempting to shank her on the spot. It’s laughable. Rouge levels a wake of unconscious women behind her,
The city of Carta, despite its abundance of vindictive lovers, is shaded by towering forests, and every break in the canopy held blooming and radiant flowers.
Rouge can smile freely—she had no targets, no meeting. She runs through Carta until there are no more buildings, no more tree houses, no more bridges linking hanging houses from tree to tree. She’s alone, the forest all her own, and she climbs trees, picks flowers, and makes flower crowns, and tucks stems with blooming petals all over her body, anywhere she could.
The forest ends, eventually. It cracks open, breaking wide, revealing a vast plain, with plateaus in the distance. Rouge’s feet don’t stop—they can’t.
There’s so much to look at, so many places to go, and Rouge runs towards the first plateau, her fingers making contact with brown rock, pulling and clawing all the way to the top. As soon as she pulls her head over the edge, her body quickly following. She doesn’t bother standing up. She lays near the edge, heaving, and laughter bubbles up from her chest as she fists the yellow flowers towering over her.
The smell is light, sweet, overwhelming. Rouge melts into the ground, and a part of her wishes that she could stay there forever, die, decay, and wishes her corpse could be covered with those flowers and bloom.
Her ears suddenly return to her, and she can hear merry making from the other side of the plateau, faint, but still echoing across the yellow ocean.
Rouge pulls herself to her stomach, and propped on her elbows, her head peaks over the petals, straining her eyes.
Her eyes meet another’s, across the plateau, and she’s fucked.
“Red!”
She’s fucked.
Rouge flails, her feet slipping over the edge, and she tries to scramble down, as fast as she can, but Gol has her hand and is pulling her back over just as soon as her feet catch the first foothold.
He sweeps her into an embrace.
Rouge kicks him in the balls.
The satisfaction she acquires is ineffable.
“I’m leaving.” She announces, but Gol grabs her ankle, even with tears in his eyes and a hand clutching his family jewels.
He looks different. His chest is thicker, and his hands are bigger—he’s grown out a horrible handlebar mustache, and obviously can’t be bothered to shave the stubble on his chin. Rouge wrinkles her nose, and growls.“Let go—“His fingers clutch onto more tightly, not hard enough to leave bruises, but hard enough for Rouge to be warranted in losing her temper, even more so when he interrupts—“Cute.”Rouge’s brain stutters to a complete stop. Her mouth opens and closes, but her tongue can form no words. Sweat drips down her neck almost immediately, and her hair clings to her face.
A fist draws back, and she nails Gol right on his nose, the crack of his bridge reverberating all the way up her arm. His head flies back, knocking right into the ground, and she hears shouts from his crew.
“Can you not hit me?” Gol groans from his bed of yellow flowers.
“You—“ Rouge clutches her heart, eyes wide, more perturbed than she’s been in her entire life. “—bitch!”He laughs, hands on his stomach, positively rolling. Blood drips down his lip, into his mustache, but he doesn’t seem to care much.
“Red!” He points rather rudely at her face. “I made ya blush, again!”“Shut up! Fuck, just—“ Rouge’s hands fly to her face, covering as much as she can. “Consider me gone!”Gol jumps to his feet, his crew quickly approaching. “But you just got here!”“Roger!” Silvers roars, and Rouge promptly flies over the edge of plateau, and screams the whole ride down.
She hits the earth with a dull thud—she hears Gol’s laughter growing closer and closer. Rouge shrieks as he lands next to her—on his feet like a fucking cat—and she’s off like a rocket.
“Red!”
He’s chasing her. Rouge doesn’t know why she can’t just kill the bastard and be done with him forever.
“Stop fucking following me!” Rouge wails over her shoulder.
“Last time that happened, I didn’t see you for eight years!” He crows behind her, gaining ground and generally causing Rouge terror like she’s never felt.
She screeches as a jerk at her collar levels her to the ground, and Gol throws her over his shoulder. She launches an elbow into his temple, and he hisses before pinching her side unnecessarily hard.
“That hurts!” She howls in his face, teeth gnashing as she goes to bite whatever is closest to her, but he fucking licks her cheek and Rouge’s brain explodes.
“Did you—““Yeah.” Gold picks his nose. “Calm the fuck.”“What the FUCK!” Rouge flounders until Gol can’t hold onto her any longer, and when her back is covered in sticks and dirt, she rubs saliva off her face, and tries to comprehend the insanity she’d found herself in.
“You good?” Gol settles on his haunches.She’s so tempted to punch his bloody nose once more.
“No.”His face wrinkles. “You’re not hurt, though.”“That’s not what I meant.” She grinds, lashing out with a fist and swinging at air as Gol pulls back. “I’m avoiding you. I don’t like you, so get the hell away.”He sniffs. “You like me.”“I don’t.” Rouge jerks her nose in the air, trying to be haughty, but she knows she’s doing an awful job.
“You kissed me.” Gol plops on his ass with crossed legs. “That night. I wasn’t asleep.”Rouge is not prepared for this.
“I didn’t.”“You did.”“I didn’t.”“You’re blushing.” Gol grins. “You’re a bad liar, you know that, Red?”She can’t even muster up the courage the hurl abuses at him. Rouge pulls her knees to her chest, and averts her eyes, and prays that he’d just leave.
“Just join my crew.” He says it like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “I like you.”“You don’t mean that.” Rouge mumbles, not bothering to look at him.
She knows he means it.
“I’m not joining your crew. I’m a bounty hunter. I can’t.”“You can.” Gol crossed his arms, pouting petulantly at her. “Then, you can kiss me again.”Gol is going to kill her.
“I’m not—“ There’s a lump in her throat. “—gonna kiss you again. I was drunk. It was a lapse of judgment, clearly. There’s plenty of whores for you to get your fix, Gol. Leave me be.”“None as pretty as you, Red.” Someone should have told her that Gol D. Roger was a sweet-talker. She’d read plenty about the Roger Pirates, but everyone failed to mention the fact that the buffoon’s actually charming. “Besides, I don’t fuck. Tried it once or twice, and it was pretty boring. You’re not boring.”“Low fucking bar.” She spits, and he shrugs his shoulders.
“I dunno about that.”
More cryptic shit. It’s like he knows something she doesn’t. Rouge still hates cryptic shit, even after all these years.“What do you want from me?” Rouge’s hands drag the dirt around her. “I’ve got nothing for you.”His head cocks to the side, his infuriating mustache bobbing along with it. “A kiss?”“Do you ever fucking listen?”“I don’t listen to boring shit.”“I hate you.” She watches as his eyebrow raises.
“So no kiss?”Rouge sneers, “The day I kiss you sober is the day the world ends, Gol. Specifically, your world.”“So prickly.” Gol scoots closer. “You know, you were less prickly when I was in your bed.”Her mouth gapes open. “Are you trying to seduce me?”Gol chuckles, scooting even closer. “Is it working?”“No.” Rouge’s eyes dart away.
“You’re blushing.” He sings, their knees now touching. “Hey, look at me, Red.”“No.” She needs to be stubborn. Rouge doesn’t know what she’ll do if she’s not.
She’s been running for a reason.
“Red.” Her hair stands on end, his voice sinking into her flesh, and her eyes jerk back to him, meeting molten silver. “Stop it.”She loathes how he sees her. How he knows her. She doesn’t know him, not in the slightest, but his eyes peer right beneath her skin and dig out every whispering desire she’s ever had.There’s dirt on her palms, wedged under her nails, and she’s hesitant.
Gol isn’t a patient man. She’s come to learn that. He gets what he wants, when he wants it. But he’s there, waiting, buzzing, his leg twitching like he can barely contain himself.
Her palms smear damp earth on his cheek. His stubble pricks the crackles in her hands.
“I—“ Her lips are heavy, and there’s cotton in her throat. “—I can’t. I can’t. I—I’m sorry. I gotta go. I gotta—““Do what you want.” Gol snaps, but it’s not harsh. It’s not biting, but it sounds like an order. “Fucking do what you want, Red. None of this hemming and hawing shit. “It should be easy. Rouge does what she wants. She’s always done what she wants. She thinks she does. She’s convinced herself.
The feeling of Gol’s cracked lips on her’s tells her differently.