Chapter 00 - Prologue

Edited: 11/8/2017

Original: 4/5/2016

AN: Ok, I know I promised the Fall of 2017 for the next update but I'm essentially rewriting this whole fic from the start. December 1st (ish) 2017 is pretty damn close (meaning not close at all...I'm so sorry!). Blame major life upheaval and a damn near month long head cold. Big deviations start about a quarter of the way through this new rendition. Hopefully you enjoy the new and improved Riyo!

ONE TIME BLANKET FIC WARNINGS

**There are potential triggers in this fic for thoughts of suicide, various psychiatric conditions including dissociative disorder, depression, and self harm, heterosexual relationships, gay relationships, asexual characters (my Luffy will always be asexual), general angst, canon divergence, abrupt pirate marriage, violence and gore, explicit language and likely pretty explicit hanky panky of all flavors and varieties, and whatever the hell else happens as I come up with it.**

Today...today was a terrible day. Being scheduled for execution could do that, with the whole dying thing and all.

It would be a worse than terrible day if she hadn't already been dying before they locked her up; but that dying was slow going and she probably would have had a few more months in her even after starving herself.

Well, if the marines hadn't starved her on top of her starving herself and she hadn't been slowly losing her shit on top of the multiple personalities having a civil war in her head.

[You have been much more manic than usual. The blackouts have been fun.]

Yeah, thanks for the reminder, she told the beast. At least she had managed to lock down the Other in her mind. The blackouts were more frequent, though, the beast was right about that. The mental wall holding back the Other wouldn't hold much longer.

{Holding, hold, held, barricade, delay, belay, begrudge, betray…}

The hissed words cut at her mind through the Other's clawing at that same mental wall.

Shut up, she snapped back internally.

They were starving. Her brain couldn't think of any better comeback without food.

[Sooooo hungry. Feed them, feeeeed thhhheeeemmmm.]

"And that is why we're starving and locked in a cell," she hissed out and then coughed painfully at the strain on her dry throat. "Your whining."

Mouth was dry. Thirsty.

[Caged them. Locked them from the sea. Want to go home.]

{Caged.}

Scratchscritchscritchscritch.

The small whimper and frisson of afraidhungrycoldlost was genuine. As much as the beast could be an asshole, and the Other even worse, they were all still her-them-us. The beast was the piece with the most basic needs and understandings. She shushed it, crooning to it in her mind to calm it.

She ignored the scratching from the Other. That part was not basic or simple.

All in all, this was a series of bad to terrible. She supposed deciding who to blame-herself or the beast or the world or these marines or a mix of all of the above-wasn't of too much concern when the end result would be, "Dead."

The word was a broken whisper. Her life was a whisper. A whimper. There would be no going out with a bang.

She wanted to hear someone's voice besides the mocking of the marines before the end of her pitifully short life (by her species' records). She had lived through the impossible, and for what? They hadn't even come close to a Sigma. One would smell tasty, one would intrigue, but they were all wrong, wrong-wrong-wrong.

[Wrong, wrong, wrong. He's there. The Sigma is there. Find the Sigma that is more Sigma than any other Sigma has been Sigma. Why won't you find him?]

Scritchscritchtatscritchscratch.

Because we're a mess, she growled back. You push and push but you don't tell me where or how and I'm too fucking broken to find him myself. She sighed. What could we offer him, anyway? We can't keep ourselves functioning, let alone someone else. We have no pit. We are a ghost in this age. How would we protect a Sigma?

Why wish for the sky when they had no wings. They could only crawl in the mud and watch their broken dream.

She shut out the beast's keening frustration, equivalent to shoving it in its room and closing the door. She ignored the muffled growling from it and moved out of her mind to take stock of her body.

Stiff. Cold. Hungry. Weak. Exactly the same as the last hour's check.

Riyo readjusted her back against the concrete wall of her cell where she had propped herself up. The damp cold bled into her bones until she only knew the bitter edges of the chill cutting surgical sharp into her skin. It dug a little deeper as her thoughts acknowledged it, mercilessly excising every memory of warmth she threw up in defense. It destroyed her from the outside in as surely as her body ate itself from the inside out.

It was all topsy-turvy with the ins and outs and shadows and tangles and haze inside their head. No food, no family, just the memories of the waves and the wind for years. All the memories to keep them company.

She was lonely. They were so lonely.

[Alone.]

Scritchscratchscritchtat.

All of them were being so alone together.

Ironic that the marines that held her had no idea they could keep their hands clean of her blood by leaving her in this cell with the cold for another half day. She wasn't strong enough anymore to fight the chill off, and it was an achilles heel that only a remaining handful of people in the world knew. She wouldn't provide the information to these men by begging for the sun one last time.

She would never beg again.

[A boiling pot of seawater to dump over their head. That sounded lovely right now.]

Shut up.

Memories of warmth were fleeting, faded shadows even before that asshat threw her in here. It was like she had been buried in ice for months...decades. So many years of wandering. The sea was her freedom, the tides were the breeze on her skin, but what was freedom when it came with that kind of cost?

Scratchtatscratchscritch.

The ocean could be a cold place when your entire purpose in life was gone. When your mind was splintered and broken and the jagged edges drew blood everywhere you turned.

Then they always pushed at the wall, the voices mocked and laughed and beckoned and whined for attention and notice and time. She had all the time in the world and none at all.

The darktwistedfuryhatefrenzy part did not scream. No, it scratched and scritched behind the wall, every minute of every hour that scritchscritchtatscratch to be set free.

Her guard was always up because the wall couldn't fall, she couldn't let them out, and it hurt so much to hold them back and the scratching never stopped-

She bit her arm viciously, canines extended to puncture through the reflexive armor of scales that flowed up. If an enemy couldn't surprise the scales, she had no hope to get the drop on them. Clever little bastards they were.

[Their scales. Part of them. Can't get rid of them-us-you.]

Scratchscratchscratch.

Shut. Up.

Only a sea queen could fight a sea queen on even ground. Sea queens were nature's tanks, pinnacles of destruction and defense. Anyone else would need a hefty dose of haki to amp them to a sea queen's level. And that was only for the chance to step onto the playing field.

Only her own teeth and claws could fight her scales now.

She hit the flesh underneath to taste her own blood.

She held it for seconds-minutes. She pulled back and licked her lips for the barest copper taste. She noted how sluggish the blood was to drift to the surface of the deep punctures.

Her arms were decorated with half healed wounds.

She kept getting caught in the memories and voices and the scratchscratchscritchtatscratch.

She let her mind drift to nothing but gray. The drifting was better than the cold outside and the crazy inside; it was far better than the memories.

So many years alone. The beast chuffed in response, finally listening to her request to keep its thoughts to itself.

The beast was unbridled instinct. It was restless and ruffled as much as it was listless and exhausted. The normally vivacious personality was a caricature of itself.

It was disorienting to her exhausted mind.

The beast was her devilish angel to lead her to all of the fun, to find her what escapes she had left and let her revel in what she could for the remainder of her horribly long life.

Her happy-time buddy couldn't be caving to the inevitable because then what was Riyo supposed to lean on?

How was she supposed to forget?

She couldn't dredge up enough anything to poke at the thought.

10 days in a cell and it was the highlight of the last two decades of her life. That said a lot about her life, huh?

She let her mind drift from that line of thinking.

She tried to float in the gray but the cold kept cutting into the mediocrity. Cold was her own personal version of hell-the joy of being sort-of-kind-of cold-blooded and outside her natural habitat.

The dim lighting, the mold, and the stale air that was cloyingly thick in her sensitive nose and tasted faintly of rotten fish and wet dust didn't bother her as much as the incessant cold.

Cold concrete at her back, cold metal against her skin, cold bars holding her in, cold words an icy chill in her mind and ears.

Cold blood pumping sluggishly through cold hearts. Cold air being sucked into her lungs and misted back out.

Cold.

It had been cold since they took their pit from them. So cold since they were shattered. Colder since they were left behind because the world was too stupid to understand, too arrogant to believe, too-

She ripped into her other arm with thick claws, extended barely enough to clear her fingertips.

Weak.

When the pain wasn't enough she smashed her wound-riddled arm into the thick chains wrapped around her legs.

She pressed the stinging cuts to the freezing metal.

She let out a nearly subvocal growl at the sudden prickle of deadened nerves.

Her enhanced senses were stuck on the feeling of icy skin and stiff joints even as they were dulled by the lack of food and warmth. The metal cage in front of her dimmed. Dancing black fuzz filled her vision for a few seconds as she fought to stay conscious.

She drifted through the gray half conscious.

She was brought back from the blankness by the sound of clomping boots. The guard was taking his rounds.

She didn't know how much time had passed.

She faded in and out and then a man in that hated uniform was standing in front of the cell. The sight of the marine insignia made her want to change and rage and rip this island and its marine base down to the bedrock.

The marine tapped the hilt of the sheathed sword at his hip against the metal bars.

[Foolish, blind blue-white snack,] the beast grumbled.

Yes, she could eat him. Not much of a meal but it would be better than none. But she had made that promise to herself to stop eating sentient species a few years back.

She watched and counted each taptinktap.

3

She may have made an exception to the rule if she wasn't so weak.

But as always, instinct won over revenge.

Her canines receded. Her claws were sheathed. She was harmless and weak and helpless and broken. The ploy was as natural as sea and sand.

[Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.]

The beast chuff-purred-snorted in laughter at its own joke.

8

"Did you bite yourself again? Scratch? Fucking pyscho. You should be happy we're putting you out of your misery, really. We won't bandage it."

She huffed a laugh to herself. The joke was kind of funny.

13

"You're not even listening," the marine went on. "Well we both know what happened last time we went in there trying to help. That's why you have all your pretty iron jewelry now. And five men are in the infirmary. Jonson's arm won't ever heal right from that break, you know."

22

The guard laughed himself. "Never liked Jonson anyway."

She stared a little over his left shoulder.

"Whole lot of crazy in that little package. Whole lotta crazy."

He walked on, tapping that sword handle on each metal bar as he passed.

Tinktaptink to go with the scritchtatscratchtatscritch in her head.

24

25

26

27

28

The whole world wanted to strip what sanity she tried to claw together. Death by a thousand murmurs and whispers and sounds.

She wanted to dig her fingers into her brain.

Rip out her eardrums.

Shove her head into quicksand.

Anything to make it stop.

She took a shallow, rattling breath in and let her mind drift again.

She was reaching her limit for how long she could go between meals.

Hunting for food herself had become too much of a chore months ago.

She had went to this island to grab a few bites from an unsuspecting street vendor. That's when she had the altercation that led to her incarceration.

[Heh, that kinda rhymed.]

Sharp teeth grinned at the air, extended again with the guard gone.

The marines wouldn't feed her after the second day. They tried to move her away from the door. They tried to move her which meant they tried to touch her.

No one touched her. Not unless they were pit.

She drifted.

Her body was giving out against her will. Her system would go into somnum whether she liked it or not. She doubted she'd wake up again once that happened. As human as she appeared there was no one around for hundreds or even thousands of miles who even knew she was a different species.

There was no one who would know she wasn't another animal when her body slipped into her smallest true form to conserve calories for healing.

She'd eat anything too stupid or too slow to run away, regardless of its size or sentience. The beast was first and foremost in that form and it was driven by pure instinct. It would be a shit show if she lived long enough to make it into the healing sleep.

Her mind seized up on the last thought. How long since there was family who would make sure her beast didn't eat some poor idiot? Or would protect her in her weakened state?

The beast could still do a lot of damage if it had to in somnum, but she was at her weakest in the sleep. Completely reliant on someone else to survive.

She drifted away from the spiraling thoughts.

She wasn't suicidal, not really. She liked living; living was nice.

Living without purpose was not nice. Living without a purpose was hard and it required energy and thought and planning and she didn't know if she could do that anymore.

Sea queens were made for purpose. They had been forced to adapt or die. They had adapted and were made now to follow their chosen family. Live for their family; die for their family.

There were clear lines of protect for the pit and kill for any enemy that dared come near their family. Sea queens were perfect oceanic predators, top of the food chain.

But they were...

She was-

She drifted.

She was, as all sea queens were, possessive, tactile, aggressive, territorial, greedy, and loyal.

{Addict. Coward. Unstable. Weak. Failure. Abomination.}

She recoiled from the sibilant voice.

Her head cracked against the concrete behind her. The dull ache pulsed in time to the scratching.

Why did it never stop its scritchscritchtatscratch'ing, even when it deigned to speak?

Go away, go away, go away.

The Other laughed. And scratched and scritched.

The beast was quiet as it shrunk in their mind from the Other.

The beast was afraid of the monster behind the wall.

They couldn't let the Other out/in, can't ever let it free or the rest come and the voices and the memories and-

She drifted away from the Other's wall in her mind. They had wandered too close.

She floated in the gray.

A human baby could have all of their basic needs for sleep and food met, but if they were denied physical affection they could die from touch starvation.

It wasn't so unexpected for another species to feel the same. Sea queens needed to ground themselves in family.

[Aren't different. We feel, we bleed, we hurt. They made us hurt, they-]

Shut up, shut up, shut up!

[It hurts. It hurts! Why did they make us hurt? Our sisters-]

She locked the beast away. She fled from the looming wall. She drifted.

Everyone and everything was breakable to her. In her prime she was a force to rival giants and titanic sea kings. She was the apex ocean predator in a world defined by the seas.

She could stop fighting the madness. She could give in. Stop thinking. Stop remembering the past.

She could live in the present. She could fight and hunt and destroy and forget about the pain.

It would be so easy to rip and tear and lose herself in the adrenaline of a hunt and the hot blood of a kill.

Only a handful of people in the New World would have a chance against her. They could try to cage her again; they could try to kill her.

She would crush them beneath her feet. Feel their bones snap between her teeth. Revel in their screams, soar on their fear-

She drifted away from the imagery with a shuddering breath. It was too tempting a thought to let her humanity go. Stubborness had kept her wandering the seas for the last 20 years. She wasn't going to give in now.

[They're dying-dying around us. Can you hear the screaming? Can't you hear the screaming? Weak. You're weak. Why can't you save them?]

The words were an old ache. A bruise that never healed.

She could never save them.

Riyo locked the beast down. It needed some time to come back from their past while she thought about the present. It freaked out when it started to remember too much.

With nothing but the scratching left to interrupt her, something she had learned to tune out, she took a deep breath and then released it slowly.

She had no idea how she ended up floating in the middle of the East Blue. It was another memory lapse, much longer than anything she'd experienced before.

She clearly remembered wandering an isolated island in Paradise on the Grand Line. When she woke again there was endless water, consuming darkness, gleeful scritchscratchscritchscritch'ing, and barbed loneliness clawing inside her mind as she floated on the waves.

This had been the nearest island. Best she could figure, she had blacked out and then been lost at sea for over two weeks.

At least she was about 60% sure it had been two weeks.

And lost was relative when she lived in the sea. Misplaced then? Time and people and places blurred together too easily anymore.

The Marines here were executing her this afternoon on the grounds of some trumped up charges of some kind. She didn't really care for the details.

Bunch of sheeple. This is why it was so hard to find a real pit among the humans. They were all so easily cowed. Ignorant and weak and pathetic, relying on their World Government and their marines for their protection. Those pompous, inbred, self-righteous pigs could care less about their people. The Marines were as corrupt as they were useless. None of the humans she's had the unpleasantness to meet so far could stand in the shadow of even one member of her first family.

A pit was strong; they were understanding and dedicated and honest and honorable. A pit stood together, stronger as a whole than any single part.

A family.

Until life spit your happiness into your face and burned your world at your feet.

She pulled from her mind to check her body again.

She shifted her stiff legs, the chains digging into her skin and adding to the dark bruising.

It didn't hurt any more. She was too numb from the cold.

Her body was already in the first stages of somnum. It was shutting down nerves and motor functions, dulling the edges of the world around her and providing a fuzzy cocoon to think her scattered thoughts.

She was pretending she didn't know she was well on her way to dead.

She might not even make the scheduled execution. Bad form to be late to your own death, wasn't it?

She couldn't remember what the proper dying etiquette would be so she thought of the sea.

She could barely remember the soothing warmth of underwater vents in the blackness of the sea floor. The nourishment of what was a toxic environment for most other living things. She thought of the play of sunlight on coral, the flash of too-bright scales, and the thrill of a sea king hunt.

She couldn't even remember the locations to all of her hoards of shinies ferreted away in underwater caves.

She couldn't ever forget the feel of curling through the water, flying through liquid like a bird through the air.

She dug claws into the feeling of safety and pride she could only know surrounded by the contentment of her family and the happy laughter of her pit.

She drifted into her mind.

It was ironically fitting that after everything she had lived through for the last three and a half centuries it was a bunch of no-name, idiot marines in the weakest damn Blue who would be ending her. They didn't even know who the hell she was or how very much the World Government would have paid for her head.

She laughed. The sound was startling, rusty and weak, but she didn't stop.

It was all funny. Her life. Her death. Someone had to appreciate how fucked she was.

Her bounty poster had never been updated after the Break, which is a large part of the reason no one recognized her-she wasn't human in that picture. It wasn't even a real picture, just a barely there shadow of her True Change beneath the waves. She had grown larger since then.

[Old Beta made them come back and everything was jagged and backwards and broken and wrong. Always wrong without Alpha.]

She sucked in a breath as the beast slipped through the door. The jolt of missinglonelybrokenfailurewrong was a physical ache that resonated at a layer even deeper than the cold.

She used the last of her energy to resurrect shields (as much as she could call them shields in her state) around herself-Riyo-and separate from the monsters in her mind.

She ignored the deep, mocking laugh at the attempt. Dry leaves and dead trees and dusty rocks rolling against the intangible barrier, emphasized by the scratchscratchscratchscratch that the Other never stopped.

She was Riyo. She was not her beast. She was not her past. She was not the Other.

She was alive. She was a survivor.

She was dying in this cage. She was losing what little sanity she had left.

She needed a miracle and she didn't deserve one.

The beast keened in her mind. There was nothing but sadness and bitterness and pain in the sound. Pain and resignation.

The beast was a creature of freedom and pride, hedonism and self-gratification...and it felt nothing at her captivity and disgrace now. The beast was simply going through the motions and that scared her more than anything else.

They were already a fractured psyche. Her conscious beast was too close to the surface. The chaos of the broken parts of the Other were locked behind a construct of pure will and survival, scritchscratchscritch'ing at a mental wall so absolute after 20 something years it was as much conscious work to hold as it was to keep her hearts beating.

They were too broken.

She was tired.

The wall in her mind shook as the Other rose. It still had life in it.

Claws tinkscratchshinktinkscritch'ed down the wall in unbreaking sweeps, faster and faster and faster. Teeth snapped and snarled and bit.

It hated being caged far more than the human, and hated the human for allowing them to be caged.

The Other snarled at her beast, hated the beast as weak and mindless and free when it was not.

She knew its anger. Riyo hated not caring they were caged, and hated the beast for fighting for every breath they continued to claim, and hated the beast and the Other and even Ray for making her live when it had been her right to die that day.

She was a captive to her dying body as surely as the bars in front of her.

[Let us die. Why won't they let us die. Can't you hear us screaming? Make it stop.]

Scritchscratchsnarlsnapshink, faster and faster against the wall.

What was freedom or a cage when you weren't really living anyway?