i. the bird and the sea

From where Shanks lays on the deck, his head propped up with his arm awkwardly tucked under his neck, he can watch the open porthole window catch the firelight. The glass reflects the fire and turns into a flat disk of pale rosy orange. In the dark, it looks like a midnight sun rising and sinking with the rock of the ship over the waves.

Miss Rouge likes to keep the window open to her quarters. She likes to keep the door open too, but Rayleigh is leaning against it. So Shanks waits among wet softwood and rotting ropes to listen.

"I know you want to stay," his captain speaks.

"And do what?" Miss Rouge replies. Her voice is as soft as the whispers of her dress against the wind. "I don't belong on a ship."

Shanks nods to himself in agreement. The day Captain Roger brought her aboard, there was a small ripple spread throughout the crew, murmurs and questions not dared to be uttered above deck. She asked for nothing, and was given the captain's quarters. She was given treasure, which she returned, and kept only what she personally took. She was welcome among the crew for her good nature and sweet voice, but it was clear she was not a pirate despite the twine-tied dagger around her neck.

The only gifts she received with grace were red flowers with crimped petals from Captain Roger.

"You don't belong on a ship," his captain repeats, his voice thick like Shanks knows he doesn't believe in what he is saying.

"You don't belong on a ship, but you belong by my side," says Captain Roger.

There is a pause, filled with the rush of the waves against the hull; the silence of voices is never real silence out here.

"I belong to myself. I want to be by your side. But not everyone can follow their wants."

"Why?"

"Because you are the sea, and I am a bird," Miss Rouge says. "And birds fly over the sea, and live by the sea. But they nest on land."

ii. the arrival

The woman behind the bar is the only person to not drive him and his crew out of town. She lifts her face with a smile in the patch of sun that stretches from her swinging doors, standing behind the bar, letting the foaming tankard she holds overflow onto her hand.

Shanks thinks of seafoam on her wrists instead of beer when she says, "Welcome to Party's Bar."

The first night he pays for his drinks in advance, dropping a fistfull of gold onto the bar. He leans against the countertop as if trying to climb over it, and Ben pulls him back, tugging on his shirt collar and gripping his shoulder. Shanks never had time for lovesickness in his teens, but twenty-seven doesn't seem too late a start. Not when the bartender laughs at everything and asks to be introduced to his entire crew.

He doesn't remember the end of the night, but knows when he wakes that he did deserve the nausea swimming in his stomach and the desert dryness on his tongue. Before he can ask his men if he has anything to be ashamed of, he sits up, and hears gold in his pocket.

He pulls out the exact change the bartender slipped back to him, winking in his palm.

With what charm he can gather with his hangover, he walks back to town alone with the intent of leaving the gold on her bar again. He walks back with full pockets and stomach, and the gift of her name on his mouth.

iii. the departure

The first year passes and Makino agrees to step around the bar to dance with him before the crew leaves with no promises of return. The room is drowning in noise and heat, the air thick with humidity and voices that sing off-key to the songs pounded out on the piano under the fingers of his musician. He is drunk but feels drunker, always does at a party, where there is never enough to drink and never enough to say.

But tonight, her slim, pale fingers are cold when they lay across his palm. For once, there is satisfaction in one partner to dance with.

"I've never danced like this before," she shouts to him over the noise, and he loves the way she leans close to his ear.

He ducks his head and presses their cheeks together. She should blush, if she had any sense of shame, but instead she laughs, because her sense of humor is the only bad sense she has.

"It's because you've never danced with me," he says.

She lifts her face up to laugh, stepping away from him to keep twirling around the room, bumping into his crew packed into the bar. He wonders if the seals darting through schools of silver knife fish feel like they do now.

He dances her out of the bar as the song dies, and in the pool of amber light sweeping the ground before her door, he stumbles down on one knee while holding her hand.

He smiles when, of course, she laughs.

"Makino," he starts, and he marvels at the way she filled him up with her name months ago. Even with his clumsy way of spilling it from his lips, he has never run out of it. He will name her the best bartender in East Blue.

"Shanks," she says.

"Come sail with me," he says, and takes her hand in both his own. She laughs again, already shaking her head.

"What would I do?" she asks.

He smiles because his heart isn't in it, because he isn't drunk enough for this.

"You would get my crew drunk, of course," he boasts. "You already do that here, but imagine what we could pay you with on the Grand Line. Do you remember those feathers I got you? Or those flat pearls? Or the flakes of gold I put in those pepper shakers?"

Her shoulders rise with the breath she takes, and her amusement exhales with it, replaced with bittersweetness in her black eyes. She is kind, and her thumb smooths over the back of his hand as she remembers their distance.

"Yes, I remember. And I remember I returned them all to you."

"Because you don't want trouble with the Marines, I understand, I do," he jokes, because jokes will make her stop looking at him like that, and maybe she won't pity him if he calls it a joke. "But all the riches of the world could be yours! You could make drinks out of fruits you've never seen, learn to distill alcohol yourself! Get me drunker than I've ever been before!"

Makino laughs. She places her other hand over his own and squeezes, smiling when he squeezes back.

"I think we should go back to the party," she says.

He sighs, and he loves her. He stands up and tugs a hand free to brush his knee clean of dirt, leaving his left hand captured between her own. She presses the first fleeting kiss between them on his knuckles, and she tugs him back inside.

iv. the bird and the tree

Ten years later, he staggers against her doorframe with awe. He can't read maps, and has no faith in things staying where they should anymore, not when the end of a war claws at the hem of his coat. The only constant is the world's inconsistency.

But Makino is standing behind her bar, face tilted up towards the sun as it streams in at his back, an overflowing tankard in one hand.

The shock of a decade does nothing to her. She smiles and says, "Welcome back."

It takes a day for the question to fall out, because he has learned some patience in the time he has gone and come back an old man. She shifts her head against the pillow to make sure he can see her smile.

"I don't want to go with you," she says. "I want you, but not the sea."

His laugh is weak and splintering.

"Why stay? Have you met better customers than me and my crew?" he teases.

"No," she says. "But it's not in my nature."

"Nature belongs to the birds," he says, waving his hand dismissively under the blanket.

Her smile spreads wider, and because he is a pirate, it isn't enough to satisfy him. He needs more than her smiles.

"Nature belongs to itself," she says, then puckers her mouth thoughtfully. "Though, if I were nature, I suppose I would be a tree."

"And what does that make me?" he asks, brushing his nose against hers.

"A bird," she says. "Because you migrate away and no one knows why, but you always come back."

v. the sun and the sea

Luffy is ablaze with joy when he rushes to Shanks' deck, standing there with the straw hat in his hands, holding it out to Shanks and spitting words like bullets out of his mouth. It hurts to look at him, at the broadness of his shoulders and the scar on his chest. He is topped off with a smile that is trying to combat tears like the sun shining through rain clouds.

The two ships are tied together once they meet out on the Grand Line, and Shanks steps from the deck of his ship onto the Thousand Sunny, to find trees beneath her sails.

They are short, with limbs that twist toward the sky in a mad, dizzying rush for the afternoon sun overhead. The leaves are thick, shining like hot green oil, with dozens of mimics of the orange sun weighing down the branches with all their bountiful weight. They sway with the roll of the waves, and Shanks wonders if the roots dig into the deck.

"Luffy," Shanks says, and Luffy's unending chatter stops. "What are those?"

"Mikan trees," Luffy says as utter fact, sending a rush to Shanks' heart. He realizes for the first time that the rumors are true, that miracles and impossibilities become real with the boy's word.

"They're Nami's. Wanna meet her?"

"Of course," Shanks says with a smile, and finds himself dragged to a girl that was not a part of Luffy's landing party.

She smiles, in a glittering way, all exuberance and brilliance flooding her eyes like light skipping across water when Luffy calls her name. Her voice has a soft whine to it, like she wants something every time she speaks. With the rough skin under the blue-black ink of her tattoo, her wrists adorned in gold and fingers shining with jewels, she is unlike any other woman he's ever seen.

She introduces herself not as the captain's wife, or an uprooted bartender, but as the navigator.

"Navigator?" Shanks repeats. "How did Luffy ever convince such a lovely woman to join an idiot like him?"

She laughs, and so does Luffy, harder and longer than his joke deserves, before her lips peel back in a smile that could rob the world of everything it has.

"He needed me," she says, her eyes flickering to her captain, who still whispers laughter at his side. "He can't go anywhere without me."

"So you could stop the future king of the pirates in his tracks?" Shanks teases.

"I could," she says, nodding, her voice thick with the same conviction Luffy always has. "But I won't. We're pirates, so we have to keep sailing."

Shanks watches with jealousy dulled by time and pride as she smiles at her captain, and her captain is lucky enough to smile back.