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The island Baltigo glittered blinding-bright under an immense blue sky. Squinting against the shine of it, Robin could just make out dunes and dunes in that white, edged with sheer, tumbling cliffs of pure quartz. A beautiful place, really, as much as she could see it. The helmsman of the ship she rode on traced a practiced path around dunes and boulders to a hidden little inlet, reportedly the only access to Baltigo’s secret interior.
As they navigated perilously close to the cliffs, they were stopped multiple times to exchange signals and passwords Robin committed to practiced memory without really thinking about it. She was able to tell immediately when each set of sentries spotted her, because a flurry of words started up, a flurry of eyes turned her way, curious, and a flurry of messenger crows took flight towards headquarters.
She considered heading belowdecks, but, well, that would make eavesdropping so much more of an inconvenience. And she understood the value of a symbol, even if she didn’t particularly appreciate being one.
As they headed inland, the quartz took on a faint pink tinge for awhile, and then faded through yellows and oranges until it arrived back at brilliant white, like snow or like salt or like ash. For a moment, she paused to wonder what would have to burn to cover an entire island in ash like that, until she realized the end of the thought and traded curiosity for bitter reminiscence.
At the end of this journey she would meet another man with the name D: her captain’s father, the Revolutionary Dragon.
They docked.
One of the crewmembers, obsequious and admiring, came to get her from her perch at the bow near where Luffy would always sit on the figurehead, and lead her past more sentries and a whole collection of curious off-duty non-sentries. She was showing Robin through the vast, opaque front gates when a young man about Zoro or Sanji’s age with a jagged burn scar across half his face came running up, hair mussed under a blue hat and out of breath.
“Nico Robin,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” she said, her face flat.
“I’ll take our guest from here,” said the young man to Robin’s escort. The escort didn’t argue, although she looked disappointed for a moment before another young revolutionary ran up, a young woman with auburn hair who looked only a bit more put-together than the young man.
Immediately, the young woman said, to the general crowd: “Sorry about Sabo. He— you had to be here. Long story. Don’t bother.” She made a face at Robin’s escort until the escort fumblingly accepted the young woman’s apology and backed off in confusion. Then she turned to the young man. “Is that Nico Robin? Don’t answer, of course it is.” She stuck her tongue out. “Wow, Sabo, you sure work fast!”
“Shut up, Koala,” said the young man, with about as much malice as Zoro when Chopper disturbed his naps.
“Only when you do!” the young woman shot back. Robin muffled laughter.
The young man raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you helping Hack out with his Fishman Karate students in, uh, five minutes ago?”
“You’re the worst,’” said the young woman, turning to leave. “Who went and made you Chief of Staff anyways?”
“Dragon, maybe?” asked the young man.
“Like I said, the worst!”
“That’s Koala,” explained the young man, once he remembered Robin was there and he was tugging her into one of the fortress’s empty rooms in the wake of the young woman’s passage. He shooed away the onlookers, slumped in a chair. “If you hadn’t gathered, I’m Sabo, the Chief of Staff. Koala’s my partner in, uh, most things. Crime especially though.” He smiled. There was an edge of bleakness to it. “And you’re Nico Robin. Archaeologist of the Straw Hat Pirates.”
“I am,” said Robin, trying to get a measure of him now that he was still. He had called her by her right title, at least — that was a point in his favor.
The room she had let him pull her into was some sort of training room, various equipment on the walls illuminated by the slivers of fading sunlight that filtered through high, slitted windows. And the way the Chief of Staff looked at her as she assessed her surroundings was different than how the revolutionaries had been looking at her up to this point, admiration and a sort of worshipful awe. His face was nothing so simple, and yet far simpler — a sort of raw, desperate need she could almost recognize.
Other concerns: he was tense, clearly capable and trained for combat, although she could see no trace of a weapon on him and the way he sat left him completely open. For some reason, he trusted her.
“You want something from me,” concluded Robin. “What do you want?”
“You’re much blunter than I’d imagined you to be,” said the Chief of Staff.
Well, Luffy rubbed off on a person after lengthy enough exposure. “You of all people should know that things are almost always not as they appear.”
“Point taken,” said the Chief of Staff. He lifted his hat, ran a hand through his hair, and sighed gustily. “You were right. I do want something from you. It’s…” he paused, looking uncertain, “probably not anything like what you’re thinking, though.”
Robin just stared at him in silence, perfectly composed, until he got the message and kept talking.
“It’s a personal favor, actually,” said the Chief of Staff, “so I wouldn’t blame you ignoring me, but please, at least hear me out.”
Robin raised an eyebrow. Clearly, the Revolutionary Dragon didn’t prize the ability to get straight to the point in his officers.
The Chief of Staff fidgeted a little more under her gaze, and then said, all in a rush: “Lu. Straw Hat Luffy, Monkey D Luffy, whatever,” and now he had Robin’s attention, “Luffy, he’s— he's my little brother.”
She knew about Ace. Of course she’d known about Ace, for all she joined after his brief visit. Once the first six Straw Hats had put Crocodile and Alabasta behind them to some extent or another, they remembered a whole other drama Robin hadn’t been witness to, and she was immediately regaled with stories about Luffy’s even-more-of-a-monster brother. Intermittently, they questioned her about Fire-Fist Ace’s reputation, and she was treated to the repeated reminder that the crew who toppled Crocodile’s budding empire were almost shockingly provincial in their knowledge.
“He never mentioned you,” she said. But then, reportedly he had never mentioned Ace, either, before they met in person. She would have to approach this situation cautiously.
“‘Course he didn’t, the close-mouthed little shit,” said the Chief of Staff, with a deeply-felt and remarkably familiar frustrated fondness. “He never bothers, bothered, bothers to mention anything important, even though he never stops talking either. I’ve met three generations of the Monkey D family now, and I’m more and more convinced it’s hereditary. Ace at least kept his secrets on purpose.” The Chief of Staff wrinkled his nose, bright and animated, and then all in a motion his face dropped. “And look where that got him, huh? Dying without even knowing I wasn’t dead to meet him in the afterlife. Look where that got us!”
He stood up and then sat right back down again, restless. Robin watched silently, evaluating.
“I s’pose there’s really no reason for you to believe me, huh?”
“No,” said Robin, even though she had accumulated several such reasons. “Perhaps if you explain the lack of a Revolutionary presence at Marineford?”
“Ivankov was there,” protested the Chief of Staff, but there was no heat in it.
Robin raised an eyebrow. No retaliation about her own lack of presence, and the Revolutionaries had known where to find her. Interesting.
The Chief of Staff stared back at her for a short moment, and then wilted like an unwatered begonia. “I'd forgot,” he admitted finally. “I don't know how much Luffy told you about his childhood.” Absolutely nothing. “But, when me an’ Ace were ten or eleven, I think eleven, there was an... incident, and I lost my memory. I forgot about them.” He let out a long, frustrated breath from between his teeth. “Dragon took me in and gave me a purpose — me an’ Ace an’ Luffy adopted each other, see, so Dragon didn't know we were brothers although Shitty Gramps did — and I was happy, and doing good work, and all along my brothers thought I was dead.”
There was something terribly self-loathing in his tone and his mannerisms, the way he spat the word dead like he was cursing the Five Seas and Mariejois beside. Robin decided that she believed him.
“I remembered when I saw Ace's body in the newspaper,” he added flatly. “And Luffy all alone in the world.”
Robin eyed him for a moment, all the energy gone out of him like Chopper after a fight. She pulled up a chair, and said, sitting down, “So, what did you want from me?”
The Chief of Staff's face didn't change. “It's terribly selfish of me, given I wasn't even there for—”
“You want to hear about Luffy,” said Robin. It wasn’t a hard guess.
He went through five different expressions in an instant, and then whispered, “Yes.”
Robin smiled at him, just a little bit. “Don't worry about selfish, then; Luffy's worse than anyone about that.”
The Chief of Staff made a kind of choked-up, muffled laugh. “The best kind of selfish, though.”
“Of course,” said Robin. She shut her eyes against the soft watercolor of sunset splashed across floor and skin and hair. “He refused to let me die, when all my dreams were dead. We were in a tomb, you know, when I was arguing for that.” She laughed bitterly. “It would have been thematically appropriate.” She heard the Chief of Staff shift in his chair, blinked open an eye on the ceiling to see him put one hand to his hat. “He didn’t let me, though, and I considered it a wrong done to me. And then at Enies Lobby, he stopped refusing to let me die, and told me I had to live.”
He was silent long enough that she opened her eyes. The Chief of Staff had his hat in his lap now, and he was staring at it with the sort of intensity Robin reserved for ancient riddles and Luffy reserved for impossible situations.
“I can tell you many things about my captain, Chief of Staff of the Revolutionary Army, but that story is at the center of it all.” Robin folded her hands together. “I would burn the world for him. This is your final reminder that I am here on his orders, and not for your cause.” She levelled a gaze at him. “You can expect my cooperation, but I am not a part of your Army, nor to I owe allegiance to your leader.”
Slowly, he looked up at her, face raw like he was holding back tears. He said, “Thank you.”
“Oh,” said Robin.
“I failed to be there for him, but I was wrong when I said he was alone, too. You, with those eyes like banked embers…” He swallowed. “Thank you, for doing what I couldn’t.”
Robin looked over him again, all the blues and yellows of him faded in the last wash of sunset, his hair mussed and the skin around his eyes streaked with exhaustion.
“There is nowhere I could be than on his ship,” she said.
But she wasn’t on his ship, and it would be two years before she would see the Thousand Sunny again.
She was a historian. Monkey D Luffy would be Pirate King, and his journeys were of historical note.
She was his friend, and the man sitting across from her, fraying with grief and guilt, was his brother.
“Perhaps, Sabo, I ought to tell you the story of when we went to the sky.”