[EotB] 054. Bounty (Patreon)

14 years, 11 months, 28 days before Romance Dawn (1524.05.08)

After a few hours of instruction, none of the three had managed to reach the first stage of Life Return, but when bellies began to rumble in hunger, Hancock called an end to the lesson anyway.

Fortunately, no one seemed discouraged by the lack of immediate progress.

It perhaps helped put the difficulty of the discipline into perspective that Hancock’s proficiency was still so low after nearly three years of practice.

That was fine, though. There was no rush.

Judging by how low the sun hung in the sky, it shouldn’t be long until dinner, but Hancock sent her little sisters ahead.

“I need to talk to Gloriosa for a minute,” she explained.

“She was reading in the garden, last I saw her,” Marigold said, pointing toward the back of the building.

Hancock was pleased to see that the few hours of meditation had clearly done her and Sandersonia some good. The tremble was gone from her voice, and her eyes were no longer rimmed red, at least. Giving them a goal to strive for had been a good idea.

“Thanks. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Hancock directed her steps toward the gardens, Salome on her heels.

It was still strange to see her covered in white feathers, though she had found a way to somehow retract her wings, so she at least still looked like a snake.

“Thanks for escorting the girls, back there. Did you meet any trouble?”

“SssSSsss. SsSSSSSSss.”

“I see. Good, then.” It was nice to know her efforts to cause a distraction hadn’t been for naught. “How are you adapting to your Fruit?”

“SsssssSSSSSSSSss SssSSSssSSSSssssss.”

“Hmm. I’m sure you’ll get it down eventually. It’s just a question of practice. And if you really dislike the feathers so much, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to change them with Life Return.”

“SssSs!”

Hancock huffed out a laugh. “Not my fault it’s the solution to so many of life’s problems. But all right, I’ll stop harping on about it. For now.”

Hancock found Gloriosa where Marigold had indicated, seated at the table in the garden, in the shade of the tree Rayleigh had used as a prop to demonstrate the particulars of Internal Destruction.

The woman looked up from her book at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Hancock!” she said, her face brightening. She lowered her book and turned to face her fully. “I thought I sensed you waking up. It’s good to see you up, child. You gave us quite a fright.”

“Sorry. And thank you for all your help.”

Gloriosa waved her hand dismissively. “Bah. I’m always glad to stick it to the World Government.”

Hancock took a seat on the other side of the table. “I was hoping to ask you for some advice on some... delicate topics.”

“Oh?”

It didn’t take long to explain the difficulties she faced addressing Sandersonia and Marigold’s possible trauma.

Gloriosa nodded slowly. “I see, yes. You certainly don’t bring me easy questions, do you? Delicate indeed.” She pursed her lips. “I didn’t notice the girls having any nightmares, last night, but... that might not mean much. Symptoms like those can take a while before they manifest. After such long and extended hardship, the brain becomes locked in a survival mindset, repressing trauma even as it happens. But when they start feeling safe, and their minds finally relax, it might hit them all at once. We’ll have to see how things proceed. Keep an eye out for...” She trailed off and looked up at Hancock. “You didn’t compel them to tell you what they experienced, did you? It’s not something you should force.”

“No. They... apologized for the injuries I suffered rescuing them. I told them that they weren’t to blame for anything, and that with Life Return, I would heal just fine. I told them that they too could eventually erase the marks of their captivity, and I started teaching it to them.”

“Good, good. Yes, that could work. You can’t fix the damage yourself, but giving them the tools to do so... Empowering them. Yes, that’s a good idea, I think.” Gloriosa tucked a stray strand of graying hair behind her ear. “And what about you?”

Hancock blinked. “What about me?”

“How do you feel?”

Hancock rolled her shoulders. “I’m in some amount of pain, admittedly. My hand still hurts a lot. My eye, less so, surprisingly.”

“Ah, yes. About your eyes. You ate a Devil Fruit, didn’t you? Is that why you’re not meeting my gaze anymore?”

“The Love-Love Fruit, I think. I can petrify people by looking into their eyes.”

Unlike Garp, Gloriosa wasn’t immune to Hancock’s Devil Fruit. Her appreciation for Hancock’s beauty was more intellectual than sexual – more in the vein of someone admiring a masterpiece painting – so it shouldn’t be enough to actually turn her to stone without dedicated effort on Hancock’s part, but better be careful nonetheless.

Hancock still had no idea how to turn people back from stone, after all.

“Interesting. We’ll have to talk about that, too, but I mostly meant: how are you doing, mentally? It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it, but I can’t imagine what you went through up there was entirely pleasant. And working for Hoboken...”

Ah.

“I’m fine. Hoboken only did what I allowed him to. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, sure, but neither was it traumatizing.”

Gloriosa’s expression was difficult to decipher. Hancock’s best guess was that she wasn’t entirely convinced Hancock was being truthful, but didn’t want to show it.

Which... Hancock didn’t think she was particularly resistant to trauma, or anything like that. She wasn’t some juggernaut of steel nerves and unshakable willpower. She still shuddered every time she remembered her own death, the sensation of her very soul dissolving in acid.

But this... this whole thing, whether it be letting Hoboken have sex with her, or the sheer mind-boggling number of people she had killed since she set off from Maiden Island, or even being maimed by that Knight of God... Some of it had been – and still was – distasteful or physically painful, and she would have preferred to avoid it, but none of it registered as genuinely traumatizing.

Honestly, Hancock felt like she might actually be more uncomfortable with the fact that someone – probably Gloriosa or Shakuyaku – had bathed her, dressed her wounds, and clothed her while she’d been unconscious, than with anything she’d done with Hoboken. She understood why they’d done it, of course, and was even thankful for the consideration they showed her. It really was nothing but a minor twinge of unease in the back of her mind, nothing worth complaining about, but...

Well, she hadn’t been awake when it happened.

It was all about being in control.

Hancock wasn’t sure she wanted to explain all of that to Gloriosa, though – it would just sound whiny and ungrateful – so she instead said, “I’m not downplaying my mental state so you won’t worry, Gloriosa. I’m fine. In fact, if anything, I’m... victorious. I almost didn’t expect to survive, yet I did. I accomplished pretty much every objective I had set for myself.”

It was setting the city on fire that did it, she was pretty sure.

An off-the-cuff decision, born mostly from spite, that ended up pulling away the bulk of Marie-Joie’s forces who would otherwise have hunted Hancock down. Without this diversion, without the Marine garrison desperately scrambling to contain the flames, Hancock would have faced a fresh, focused, eager opposition. She doubted she would have fared as well as she did.

Hell, forgetting both Garp and the Knight of God, both blatant outliers, just that self-righteous swordswoman who’d hounded Hancock for a while there would have been enough to grind her mission to a bloody halt, if the garrison had had the leisure to dispatch the least backup, or if the fires hadn’t provided a convenient way to distract her from the chase.

Luck, in the end.

And one inspired act of indiscriminate destruction.

Gloriosa chuckled, the doubts melting off her face. “All right, if you say so.” She pushed herself to her feet, planting the tail of her snake staff in the ground, and patted Hancock on the shoulder. “Now, come on. I imagine you must be hungry. Let’s go grab something to eat.”

Together, they headed back inside and joined the others for dinner.

Shakuyaku smiled at Hancock’s entrance. “Ah, Hancock, welcome back. And congratulations. You succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.”

Rayleigh nodded and lifted his flask in greeting. There was a wide, pleased grin on his face. “Quite. Good show. Very good show.”

“Sister, look,” Sandersonia cut in before Hancock could thank them both, and beckoned her closer. “The newspapers arrived while we were in your room. They’re talking about you.”

Hancock blinked. “Are they? That’s... fast.”

Rayleigh chuckled. “Not that fast. You’ve been asleep for a whole day. More than enough time to put a special edition together and send it to all corners of the world.”

A day...?

She must have been even more exhausted than she’d thought, then.

She leaned over Sandersonia’s shoulder and looked at the front page of the newspaper, where a photograph of Marie-Joie in flames took center stage, below the words “ASSAULT ON THE HOLY CITY”, written in bold and capital letters.

“Do they actually mention me?” she asked absently, skimming over the first few paragraphs. “Or are they just talking about the attack in general?”

“Ah, no. They do talk about you personally,” Sandersonia said. “And... there’s this, too.”

She stretched a hand toward Marigold, and their youngest sister obediently handed her a couple of pages she had been silently examining.

When her eyes landed on the first, Hancock found a picture of her face right under the word ‘WANTED’.

“Oh.”

The close-up portrait, printed in color, was at least moderately flattering – though, admittedly, it was hard for any photograph of her to be anything else. On it, her face was grim, a fierce scowl falling over a pair of glowing eyes with inhuman rectangle pupils. Speckles of blood dusted one of her cheeks, but her hair was too clean for the picture to have been snapped after she was showered with an exploding human’s worth of blood, so it must have been taken fairly early in the night.

The fact that Hancock had never noticed even a hint of the mysterious photographer was... concerning. Either they had a stupidly effective telephoto lens – not impossible, in this world of wildly inconsistent technology levels – or their stealth was good enough to fool all of her senses.

Right under the picture was a mention that caught Hancock’s eye for a moment.

‘ONLY ALIVE’

Under that was her name, marked only as ‘HANCOCK’, without epithet or other identifier, as if she was the only individual in the world to be called that. Her last name was also missing, so it looked like her efforts to introduce herself with only her first name had borne fruit.

Good. The less publicly linked her to Boa Sandersonia and Boa Marigold, the better.

And then, at the bottom of the page was the reward for her capture.

890,000,000 Berry.