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“What’s its name?” Luffy asks, poking at the bird. In retaliation, its heavy wings blow a thunderous gust of air at him with thick, whip-wicked flaps. Robin soothes it with two fingers running down its neck.
“His name is Orion,” she introduces. “I do hope you don’t mind. The two of us are a package deal.”
On the contrary, Luffy’s eyes sparkle, huge and excited, smile stretched wide. “Cool, another crewmate! A bird crewmate. I’ve never had that before!”
“I wouldn’t imagine you did,” she responds. He’s such a sweet, simple child. Robin will grow to love him, she knows, with enough time. She already dreads the day she’ll have to abandon him.
“Luffy, a bird can’t be your crewmate,” Nami scolds, looking over her shoulder at them from her place at the helm.
“Why not? Chopper’s on our crew!”
“I’m not a bird,” Chopper whines. “I’m a doctor! But it’ll be nice to have another animal friend on board.” His ears wriggle, adorably.
“Heya, Orion! Wanna help make me Pirate King?” Luffy asks. The bird looks at him sideways, head tilted. “I’m gonna take that as a yes! What about you? You have any dreams?”
Robin runs a hand along his feathers, watching Orion closely. He shuffles closer to her, talons pinching her shoulder even over the calluses she’s earned from carrying him this way for so long. Then he lets out a soft chittering sound.
“What’s that?”
Chopper gasps, eyes wet. “Oh, that’s so nice!”
“What— what is it?” Luffy looks between Orion and Chopper, head snapping back and forth.
“He said his dream is to help Robin go home. Is it super far, Robin? Can we visit?
“It’s not quite so simple,” she tells Chopper. “But that’s kind of you to offer.” Orion shifts on her shoulder, running his beak through her hair. Robin’s fingers hold still on his feathers. She speaks to him, her companion of decades, and asks, “Is that right, sweet boy?”
Ee-chup, he vocalizes in reply. Likely a yes.
Robin felt Orion hatch in her palms. The warm egg cracking apart to reveal a fleshy, hideous thing underneath. Pink skin stretched so thin over needle-wide bones tangled over each other. Naked and vulnerable, cheeping awkwardly. She loved him from the second she saw him.
These were the things her mother left her: a suitcase, a backpack half-full with clothes and half with worn, dog-eared, paperback books of a reading level too high for her age, and a speckled black-over-white egg twice the size of a chicken’s. A nephew of Nasr, Robin learned from her uncle, his own falcon resting idly on his shoulder while Robin set the egg in the incubator beside her cousin’s own. Nasr is Nico Olvia’s falcon, broodmate of her uncle’s Zephyr. They look identical, apparently. Heads deep brown like chocolate, thin gold rings for irises, and mottling on the chin like a splatter of dirt. Robin spent her childhood watching Zephyr watch her from his perch, beady-eyed and wary. The falcon did not like her very much.
Orion took much longer to hatch than her cousin’s egg ever did, but Robin was not worried nor jealous. Everyday after she finished her chores, she would sit and read her books aloud to him, washed-pale under the light of the incubator’s warm glow. Patience was a virtue she had in spades. Robin’s whole life was spent waiting for her mother as a girl, then waiting for death as a woman.
Robin named Orion for a constellation, once he finally hatched. The hunter, visible from all sides of the Grand and Red lines. Olvia would look up at the same stars as her and know Orion too.
In the years leading up to the tragedy, Robin would tuck Orion away, featherless and young, so small he could fit neatly into her pocket, and bring him with her to study. She’d read tomes upon tomes, thick archaeological textbooks, all while petting his head with one finger sprouted from his own back. The other children thought her powers were disturbing and creepy, but Orion never minded. It was all the same to him. As time went on and he grew stronger, he would chase after the bullies for her. Peck their hands and heads when they threw stones at her, squawking angrily, wings flared in intimidation. Then the bullies’ own companion birds would swoop at him with a vengeance, and being the runty little thing he was, Orion would shriek and cower, hiding behind Robin’s back in fear.
They were a little family, the two of them. Motherless and loveless but for each other.
Later, during Ohara’s demise, he tugged her by the back of her shirt with his talons and urged her to run. All the falcons seemed to have a preternatural awareness of what was going on, then. Uneasy for days before, as though sensing misfortune on the wind. You couldn’t go one step into town without seeing the birds all flutter from rooftop to rooftop, stuttering in jagged little steps on their perches.
When everything went up in flames, artillery and grenadiers and explosions, flames rising like pillars into the sky, the birds flew high; cawing and squawking, diving low like bullets in desperation to try and save their companions, getting shot, dropping dead with thuds onto the bloody, muddied earth. Wingtips twitching, beady eyes glassy. Feathers splattered red with the blood of birds and humans alike. Still more escaped. They flew northwards, southwards, crying out for those fallen. Aquiline grief so loud against the whipping wind it grated the ears of anyone nearby, piercing eardrums as they flew for miles and miles away to the next islands, ships, ports, wherever they came to, spreading word of Ohara’s demise to ears who could never understand.
Robin read in The Expansive Encyclopedia of Animal Rearing Nations, Second Edition about the importance of falconry for various cultures. It’s most easily assumed that the practice evolved out of a need for help with hunting, as that’s what it’s often been used for. Hunting dogs, horses, and birds of prey were all tamed for such reasons. But the thing about humans is they are clever, and creative, and thrive on connection— the connection between an Oharan and their companion bird goes deeper than blood. You are gifted an egg at a young age, hatch and raise your bird yourself, and spend the rest of your life together. Oharan falcons live so long it’s as though they were tailor-made to bond to their human counterparts. Falconry on this island is not the same as it is for others.
Robin asked Clover about it once.
“Of course it’s unnatural,” he told her, twirling a quill between his fingers, flinging ink everywhere. “Birds aren’t meant to live this long, my dear. But the conditions of evolution on Ohara are different.
“We adapted together, the two of us, man and bird in symbiosis, twining so tightly as to be embedded together. They would die without us.” He told her that so solemnly, eyes steady and serious, quill suddenly caught still in his hand, that it startled her. The intensity of it. The certainty. Orion would die without her. She must live for him.
Twenty years later and counting, Clover continues to be proven wrong. The people of Ohara are dead but their falcons live on. Robin wonders now if he told her that due to a dogmatic, near-religious belief in the sacred bond between man and bird, or if he was just giving her something to live for.
That’s beside the point. The truth is that if falconry existed in the archaeological record for necessity and as sport, then Ohara used it for neither. Long gone were the times of needing to hunt game, for cattle was raised easily across the island. Sport hunting as a tradition had been eradicated for centuries in favor of studies. The mind was the highest priority above anything bodily. Still, the husbandry of birds of prey persisted. They soared in the skies above terracotta roofs with feathers ruffled from saltspray, flying loose and spiraling around each other in competition, death dances as they plummeted together and raced against each other, wild animals the lot of them, before returning home to perch on the windowsills of their owner’s houses. They were plucked and preened, groomed to a shine, beaks and talons oiled; the feathertips of their wings were dyed pretty colors for festivals, showcasing ownership and companionship, treated with more love and affection than even some people ever were.
Other islands raised domesticated cats and dogs, Robin learned on the run. The poor things would have been snatched away into the skies and torn apart, in her homeland, so it’s good no one had much of a taste for those sorts of pets back in Ohara, but she can understand why other nations love them so.
She took in a stray cat once, when she was fifteen and working on a pirate ship that looped out of the Grand Line and back into the West Blue. It was a scraggly little thing, overly thin and limping, with a short, matted coat of tawny fur. Orion never liked it much. He circled overhead when it was near, eyeing it judgmentally whenever he landed beside her, beak still wet with whatever fresh kill he made for his meal that day.
“Don’t be like that,” she cooed, sprouting a hand from the wall to pet his wings. “It’s a pitiable little thing, isn’t it? Begging for just a scrap of affection?”
Orion cawed in distaste.
“Be that way,” Robin told him. “Just don’t eat it.”
Orion never did, but the poor thing died anyway. Caught ill on the same ship it stowed away on, flees or disease, or maybe from the clip in its tail, no matter how carefully Robin took care of it. Robin never told the captain of the vessel about it before, sure he would tell her to throw the mangey thing overboard, but he soon discovered it dead in her room and he kicked her out the very same day. Something about bringing disease onto the ship. Didn’t matter. Robin never cared for this particular crew much anyway. It wasn’t difficult to leave.
Orion perched on her shoulder and buried his face into her hair, his way of comforting her. As she sat there on the docks that night, nothing but creaky ships and ocean all around them, she cried.
She shouldn’t have. She wasn’t particularly attached to the cat. Never gave it a name. But she sat there crying as Orion softly chirped into her hair, staring at the muddy residue on her hands from when she buried the dead cat’s body further up the island in the roots of a deciduous tree with fat, yellow-brown leaves the same shade as its fur. What point was there, in trying to love something when it would just be torn away again? When every new friend she tried to make, when every new family or crew that took her in, always rammed straight into their demise?
“Thank you,” she sniffled, running her fingers through Orion’s feathers. He made a soft creaking sound. “You were always right. It’ll be just the two of us from now on. Okay, sweet boy? Just you and me.”
She sees others, sometimes. Ghosts of home. Oharan falcons soaring across the sky, escaped from the great tragedy that took their companions and families with it.
They’re unmistakable. The stout beaks, curved inwards with a sense of shyness or modesty so as to never be able to harm their handlers but still sharp enough to kill prey; and the plumage, so brilliantly thick and colored russet, chestnut, or charcoal where the joints of their wings connect to their bodies, backs so dark, fading down neatly into pure white at their wingtips.
When she was younger the wingtips would still have color on them. Faded dye from the festivals back home. What used to be crimson faded to pink, or sapphire faded to a blue so pale it looked as though the bird was disappearing into the sky. The older she gets the more the color fades. Nowadays, Orion is the only Oharan falcon with brightly dyed feathers that exists in the world.
She wonders, sometimes, if the ghosts she sees flying around are birds she recognizes. Remnants of people she recognizes.
Is that one, with the orange tip to its beak and black rectrices, old lady Fara’s? From down the street, who baked bread with her knobby knuckles, arthritis stiffening the joints and making her drop your change. And that bird with the spots of white on the back of its wings, splotched like clouds, that one must have been Dr. Bella’s from the library, the woman who sat Robin on her knee as a child and read picture books to her instead of nonfiction, even when she could have just as easily understood an academic journal.
She’s likely wrong, she knows. There is no way of telling which bird truly belonged to who. This is simply her way of remembering. Keeping those people alive for once day longer, in her memory, as she watches their birds pinwheel through the sky with Orion, with another Oharan falcon for the first time months, years, decades.
Robin has made her peace with dying; Orion has not.
She sits with a puncture wound through her stomach, bleeding all over the coarse golden sand, content to be buried alive beside a poneglyph, a king, and her ex-partner in crime. Craving the death to come. Peace at last.
Through the thick strata of sand and rock above them, Orion cries. He screeches overhead, frantic, agonized, circling above and searching for her. Where is she, he must be thinking. Where is my stupid girl? He’s so terrified, Robin can tell. She has an eye and an ear sprouted on the rock above the earth, just within the reaches of her powers this far belowground. I’m sorry, she wants to tell him. I’m sorry you too have to be orphaned by me, just as the rest of your brethren were by Ohara. But she wants to die here so desperately. Orion is old enough now to live on his own.
And then the audacious teenager who punched Crocodile so hard he blacked out starts pulling the lot of them out, saving them all from certain death, and all of a sudden Robin is alive above ground. Not dead at all.
Orion comes down like a bullet from the sky, spotting her quickly. He lands atop her bare shoulder, talons tight and sharp against her skin, and she hisses in pain from both the sting of claws and the impact of the landing reverberating through her body, through the puncture wound. He buries his face into her hair. Orion trembles and whines, making rumbling little noises and cheeps that make him sound so young again. Like he’s just a hatchling in her palm again. Robin suddenly feels a sickening lurch in her gut.
They would die without us.
How could she forget?
“I’m so sorry, sweet boy,” she tells him, trying to keep her tears at bay. Voice breaking as she comforts him, petting his wings. “I’m so, so sorry.”
When she stows away on the Straw Hats’ ship she has Orion perch atop the pillar of their crow’s nest, waiting until she shows herself. It’s a miracle the children don’t spot him until then. They’re a lively bunch, from what she can see from her spying eyes. It’s endearing.
After they show themselves and the crew grows marginally accustomed to them, they settle into a new normal.
Robin thinks often of the doctor’s translation of Orion’s dream. He said his dream is to help Robin go home. Does Orion want to return home himself? To Ohara? That will never be possible. She doesn’t know the extent to which he possesses cognition; if he has the capacity to understand Ohara is destroyed and will never exist again. Sometimes it feels as though he’s another person right there with her. Full of complex thoughts and empathy.
“Do you miss them?” Robin asks him one day, taking the nightwatch so the others can sleep.
They’re still wary of her— reasonable. She would be wary of herself too. But it’s little things like offering to stay up late when the others are exhausted that build trust in a crew, Robin knows. Has firsthand experience with, considering the dozens of new organizations she joined in her lifetime. This song and dance is a familiar, rote routine by now.
Orion sits with her, cozied low in her lap and nesting in the blanket she brought up, something he does so rarely. He doesn’t answer her, of course.
“You never had any friends out there,” Robin reminds him softly. “The other falcons hated you. I imagine they picked it up from their owners’ hatred of me.”
Orion’s feathers rustle softly in the wind. His charcoal back looks like ink, rippling liquid in the night. The tips of his wings, faded now from the deep purple she dyed him with last month, are ghostly in the starlight.
“There’s nothing left for you there,” she tries to convince him. Herself. “What good does it do, thinking of it so often? Home is dead. We have to make do.”
She sighs. Looks up at the stars, drawing her blanket closer around herself. “What are we even living for?” she asks herself, joyless and exhausted. “Each other? What a miserable, perpetual cycle.” She still wants to die, a bit. But Luffy won’t let her; that’s why she forced herself upon this crew. Orion needs her. Luffy won’t let her die. Simple.
“Lovely little bird,” she sighs, “you will never bring me home.”
In the aftermath of the Agua Laguna, returned from Ennies Lobby with a new lease on life, Robin finds a familiar face in the sky.
At first she thinks it’s Zephyr seated on the edge of a roof glimmering with salt. But she saw Zephyr die with her own two eyes, shot from the sky just to fall before her on the path out to sea. She almost stepped on him. Dead eyes trained on her one last time in distaste. Blood creeping up his breast.
Nasr, she realizes. Her mother’s companion bird.
“What’s wrong?” Chopper asks her, half-monster-half-human arms laden with groceries the same as hers are. The two of them are walking back from a last-minute shopping trip to fill up the Sunny’s pantry, before they set sail tomorrow.
“I think I might know him,” Robin says simply, watching Orion caw in greeting and spiral up, wings flapping ecstatically, meeting Nasr up on the roof. The older bird looks back to him, movements slow and tired. Aged, perhaps. So unlike the fierce, protective thing that wouldn’t leave her mother’s side until the very last second, dodging bullets with precise, easy movements.
“Oh! Do you want to talk to him?” Chopper asks, ears wiggling, smiling toothily. “I can help translate!”
Robin is skeptical of how well a conversation between a human and a bird can really go, even with a liaison between them. She understands Orion like the back of her hand, of course, clever boy that he is, but she’s been with him since birth. Nasr is about as much a stranger to her as her mother was.
“What are they saying?” she asks instead, nodding up at the two now languidly flying together, running concentric circles side by side in the sky. They’re cawing in turn and over each other in that secret language of theirs. Something like a conversation.
“Orion’s telling the older one about you,” Chopper says. Whatever that means.
Robin squints up at them, the sun white and pale, burning her eyes. They’re twin shadows from here. Massive wingspans casting clouds onto the cobbled stone below. Then Orion tips and plummets, wings tucked in tight like a missile, before pulling out again and swinging up. Robin sprouts an arm from her shoulder just in time for him to land on it. Without her leather hawking gloves his talons pinch and break skin, but she’s never minded bleeding from her devil fruit limbs for him. Nasr sweeps down behind him, taking a perch instead on the gutter of a nearby roof. He tilts his head at her, watching. Orion caws again.
“He’s showing you off,” Chopper tells her, then thumps a hand against his chest with imitation pride. “Like, ‘look who I raised! Isn’t that cool!’”
“I was the one who raised you, you little egoist,” Robin teases. She sprouts yet another hand to scritch him under the chin. Then, she looks up to where Nasr is perched and sprouts an arm beside him on the gutter, to his startled fear, and scritches him on his mud-splatter chin feathers as well.
How long has it been since anyone has done that for him?
“Would he like to come with us?” Robin asks, suddenly teary-eyed. Overwhelmed with emotion, at this last living remnant of her mother. “I’m sure Captain wouldn’t mind, I could convince him—”
Nasr squawks, shaking out his feathers so violently her devil fruit arm wilts.
“He wants to stay here,” Chopper tells her, voice small. “He says he wants to die here.”
Her arm explodes into a shower of drooping flower petals. Nasr shakes himself again, freeing himself from the petals and letting them scatter in the wind. He’s an old bird, now. If Robin’s mother was alive she’d be around 60. Oharan falcons live long lives, but without their companions this age is already a burden on them. Nasr’s joints creak, aching with longing to join her mother’s bones in the earth.
They return to the Sunny that day with Orion and no one else beside him.
“What are you doing?” Usopp asks her, peeking over her shoulder. In his arms are a sketchbook and his own set of paints. On her table are a few bowls with small piles of color. Orion stands proud on his wooden perch beside them.
“It’s the first full moon of the year,” Robin tells him. “The date of a festival to usher in good luck for the rest of the year. An Oharan tradition, though also prevalent among some other islands within the southern quadrant of the West Blue.”
“And you’re painting Orion because of that?”
“What else would I do?”
Robin picked up the ground limestone powder and dried paints from the last island they stopped on. It isn’t quite the same as the colored powders they used back on Ohara, but it’s close enough. She hasn’t refreshed Orion’s wings in a long while, with the chaos of their adventures, and it’s clear how eager he is for it now with his excited cooing. She rubs the colors into Orion’s wings carefully so she doesn’t hurt him, gentle fingers spreading the fine powder neatly against his feathers. There's no pattern or tradition to follow, with this. It’s just whatever you’d like. Robin rubs red into one wing for Luffy and pink into the other for Chopper, and edges green along the outside ends of his wings for Orion himself.
“Such a handsome boy,” she coos, scratching him under the chin with another finger. Orion preens, proud and pleased, chest puffed out in arrogance. Fully deserved, considering how lovely he is.
A knock rings out on the workshop's door, followed swiftly by Sanji coming through with trays in both hands. He grins at them and sets the trays onto the table end opposite of where Orion’s perch is. “A pre-lunch snack, if you’re peckish.” He gestures to the tray piled high with sweet pastries, then picks up the floral teapot to pour a cup with flourish. “And for the lovely Robin. How is it?” he asks eagerly, once she takes a sip. “I tried adding some cardamom to the tea this time so it’s less cinnamon-y. Is it more like traditional Oharan tea, now?”
Robin grants him a gentle smile. “It’s perfect. Thank you, Sanji. You’re wonderful.”
Sanji swoons at her praise, one hand clutching his heart while another holds tight to the table edge to keep himself upright. Usopp rolls his eyes behind him. Orion caws, flapping his wings with such a territorial gusto that Sanji’s hair becomes completely disheveled. The bird shuffles closer to Robin, eyeing Sanji with anger. Always so jealous.
“Oh, can it you overgrown chicken,” Sanji snaps, stepping out of the way of a pluck aimed right at him; attempted murder. He pulls a bit of dried fish from his pocket and tosses it to Orion, who leaps up to catch it. Orion settles back onto his perch to tear into with relish.
“Not even a thanks from you,” Sanji grumbles. “Ungrateful bird.”
It’s a superficial comment. Robin is not offended. In truth, Orion is deeply grateful to them all, which is precisely why he cries and panics so devastatingly a few days later as all their friends disappear before their very eyes. Robin watches him circle through the sky and drop like a bullet towards them and wonders if he sees what she sees. The destruction of Ohara. The loss of everything they hold dear, all over again. It is only at the last minute that he shoots towards her and tugs on her shirt collar, the same as he did when she was a child, only this time it is to no avail. Robin does not escape, no matter how Orion tries to save her. Bartholomew Kuma sends her away, and Orion with her.
The revolutionary army is kind to them. They aren’t required to do much as they wait, although Robin volunteers her knowledge where she can. Anything in return for their veterinarian nursing Orion out of the near-frostbitten state the cold of Tequila Wolf put him into. The people of Baltigo are kind, so bird and woman alike have grown fond of them.
Orion has particularly grown fond of a young woman named Koala, who runs her nails through his featherbeds just so when she visits. He is preening under her attention now, while Robin transcribes a tome in the library, when the door bursts open.
Ahiru stands at the door, her hair a ribbon behind her as she strides into the room. Robin looks up from work, Orion from his preening, and Koala from her assistance of said preening. Ahiru sets a single hand on Koala’s shoulder and says, “Sabo’s returned.”
Love ignites a person like a flame. Koala’s entire demeanor brightens in excitement. Her cheeks flush prettily and her eyes glitter. “Sabo’s here? Right now? But he—”
“He came back early. Go on, now. He should be out of the debriefing soon.”
Koala runs out without a second to waste.
Robin has never seen Sabo, the second in command of the army, but she knows plenty about him. There’s Dragon’s own description of his competence, Ahiru’s staunch admiration, and Koala’s personal fondness. There is also the certainty Robin has gained over the past month that the man is her captain’s second brother, from the conversations she’s overheard with her spying ears. The complex as a whole doesn’t seem to know, but Dragon and Koala certainly do. Robin figures it’s in her best interest to thank him for caring about Luffy, for the years she couldn’t.
Robin takes Orion with her on a flight behind the building, intending to delay her greeting to make sure Koala has the time to properly reunite with the man first. Instead her passage takes her directly into his line of sight.
He’s standing at the chalky cliffside behind the complex, white waves crashing against the limestone in a froth of white. His pale hair whips in the wind around him. A top hat is held in his gloved hands. He looks nothing like Luffy, nor what she’s seen of Fire Fist Ace in the news. He turns when she nears and offers her a tired smile. “Nico Robin. A pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.” He flips his tophat back onto his head and holds his hand out to shake, which she takes.
“Likewise. Thank you for being Luffy’s brother when we weren’t there.”
His eyes widen the slightest, surprise at her knowledge perhaps, before his smile quirks into something brighter. “No, thank you for being his family when I couldn’t be there for him. The past few years have been… complicated.”
“I’m not looking for an excuse,” Robin tells him honestly. “It wouldn’t be my place. And though this is also not my place… I’m surprised to find you here.”
“A moment or two away from the action can be nice. You seem like someone who can appreciate that.”
Robin smiles at him, amused. Most people would assume that about her, yes, first impressions biased by her dark demeanor. But Robin’s happiest moments have always been those surrounded by the loudness of the people she loves; by their boisterous laughing and cawing.
“Koala is looking for you,” she tells him.
“Is she?” Sabo’s eyes soften. He turns to gaze back over the sea, face poised in such a way that she can no longer see the mangled burn scar that marks half his face. For all she heard of him, no one ever brought that detail up. Robin wonders what caused it. What Koala and the others think of it. She can hazard a guess as to how Sabo feels about it.
“Pretty bird, by the way,” Sabo compliments, smiling at Orion on her shoulder. As though he understands, Orion puffs up, chest held out in pride. “They look a bit like Athena.”
“Athena?”
Sabo nods, taking one leather glove off and tucking it into his pocket. He makes a circle with his thumb and index finger and holds his hand up to his lips, letting out a sharp, loud whistle. “She came around Baltigo a few years ago,” he explains as a distant shadow in the sky draws closer to them. Sure enough, an Oharan falcon swoops down beside them, landing neatly on the arm Sabo’s raised for her to perch on. He digs a bit of dried meat from his breast pocket and feeds it to her, then tosses another Orion’s way.
“She’s a clever girl. It’s almost supernatural—“
“She’s not Athena,” Robin interrupts, which is incredibly rude of her, but she can’t stop speaking. She doesn’t know how she missed this bird in her entire month here. “Her name is Loukya. I know her, she… she was Professor Clover’s.”
“As in, the Professor Clover?” Sabo asks, eyes wide.
“The one and only. I’d recognize her in a heartbeat. She raised me just as much as he did.”
Not that Clover was ever a parent to her, but he was always there in a way that no one else ever was. No one other than Loukya, that is.
Robin watches the old bird sit on Sabo’s arm, chewing through the dried meat slower than ever before. Her golden beak is worn and nicked more than Robin remembers, as is the rest of her body. A thin scar has gouged out one of her black eyes entirely, the area a mottling of pink flesh and small, round feathers. Her wings are the most massive Robin has ever seen but also the most mangled, flight feathers sticking every which way, a few even missing; the poor bird is ancient. Clover is dead. She should be too. And yet she persists, perhaps 90 years old by now and still aging.
“Her flight was crooked,” Robin says, voice small. “Up in the air.”
“She has arthritis,” Sabo tells her. “The vets are doing their best but… there’s not much left to do but give her painkillers on the rare occasion she lets herself be caught.”
There’s a presence in the distance, past the sound of all this wind. Footsteps come thudding around the complex. Loukya flies, slowly flapping high into the sky, watching as Sabo takes off without another word. His boots skid along the earth and send dust flying up. When Koala crashes into him he holds her in his arms and kisses her like they have no audience.
Robin isn’t looking. She is staring instead at the sluggishly cartwheeling creature up in the sky and thinking of how far this bird has come for her. Loukya is here to die, perhaps, with a people Clover was so fond of. Or she is here because Robin and Orion are here. Because the two chicks she raised have grown into their adulthood with a new set of plumage and a flock to call family, and she needed to see them.
Robin knows it is cruel but all she can think at this moment is: you must live. No matter that Clover is dead, no matter that Ohara is gone, you must live.
Loukya looks back at her and seems to agree.
Robin lives. Loukya does not.
The day the great creature dies, Robin rubs gold along the edges of Orion’s wings. Drenches him in the color until he is a shining thing. Black from head to back with molten feathers the color of the sun. He flies and flies up into the night sky, past dusk then twilight then high noon of the moon. Concentric circles and mourning cries. Aquiline grief is such an ear splitting thing.
Two years later, Robin returns to the Sabaody Archipelago with Orion circling above her. He flies round and round, searching for their crewmates. For their family. He does not rest until the last one is accounted for, everyone on the Sunny in a less than orderly fashion. They depart in their home at sea for a new adventure, Orion snug on her shoulder, chest puffed out in pride at all their crewmates’ compliments on his newly dyed and groomed feathers.
As they watch the ocean floor pass along under them, descending further and further into sapphire darkness, Robin scritches Orion under the chin. They linger together just the two of them, at the railing. Orion perched on the talon-scratched wood and Robin with both arms folded against it.
Two more devil fruit arms sprout along the railing to pet along Orion’s wings, a medley of colors dyed in her excitement to reunite with everyone. “Sweet boy, are you happy?” she asks him. “Your dream came true.”
Orion’s dream was never to bring Robin to Ohara again. It was to find her a new home, somewhere she belonged. Somewhere she could be happy; where they both could be happy together. Somewhere she didn’t want to die.
Ee-chup, he vocalizes in reply.
Yes.