I'm Poison, an artist, occasional writer and a vampire (jk) from Andalusia, Spain.
There's some things you may wanna know about me:
♰₊˚ My pronouns are she/her.
♰₊˚ I'm 20 years old.
♰₊˚ Virgo is my zodiac sign.
♰₊˚ My Instagram account is @ illust.poison (that's where I mostly post from)
♰₊˚ My COMMISSIONS are OPEN (fanfic and drawings)
♰₊˚ FANDOMS & INTERESTS: One Piece, Final Fantasy, visual-kei, JRPGs, Pokémon, gothic lolita fashion, j-fashion, The World ends with You, Scott Pilgrim, Diabolik Lovers, Monster High, witchcraft community, metal music
(and a HUGE etcetera but I'm not willing to write the whole Bible here so just look at my reblogs lol)
♰₊˚ DNI: right-wing, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, pedophilia, AI "artists", etc.
♰₊˚ 🔞 I do post smut and kinky content. If you're sensitive towards this kind of content, be at your own risk.
* If you're a minor and still consume my content, I'm not someone to judge (I once was there), but please remember Tumblr is not a source of sexual education😭
♰₊˚ English is not my mother tongue so please be nice if I commit some grammatical mistakes or whatever.
Pls write more Sabrina and Croc but in another life ;-; the people (me) want to see more of the diva
Anyway brilliant ending ty for the pain but in a serious note you are amazing 😻💗
Maybe i will write some post-timeskip stuff...
i have big plans for sabrina (involving the straw hats!!) in my head but i wasn't sure if i should make a fanfic out of it or just keep it as a fantasy in my head hahsha
anyways tysm your words mean the world to me😭😭😭 I'm so glad you liked the ending
Author's note: I’m afraid this story has come to an end. All I have to say is that I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has accompanied me on this journey. The messages and comments I’ve received about The Jackpot Queen have touched my heart and given me so much encouragement to continue this story. I apologise for the delay, but I wanted to give this story a proper ending. Thank you my dear readers <3 I hope you enjoy the final chaper of this fic.
My One Piece writing masterlist! Check for part thirteen and the rest!
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Never in her wildest dreams did she think she would be dragging Crocodile by one massive, leather-booted leg while emitting an endless volley of breathless grunts and curses.
My beloved Rina.
The truth is that I never waited for someone like you to appear in my life, and that's actually what fascinates me most about it.
Now I can't think of a future without you.
As long it's under my hand, I won't let anything hurt you again. I won't let anything make you cry again. I won't let anyone trample on you again.
No matter what I have to do. No matter who I have to kill.
The kingdom that once turned its back on you will be yours if you become mine.
You will be the brightest star of these lands.
I will make you the Queen of Alabasta.
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When Sabrina first started dating Crocodile, she knew where she was getting herself into. She had expected a whirlwind of a relationship—one defined by difficulties, passionate good times, and devastatingly bad times, giving the kind of man she got involved with. Yet, of all the scenarios she had mentally prepared herself for since that fateful night a year and a half ago—the night they had formalized their 'thing'—this was an absurdity that defied all imagination.
"Son of a... fucking... bitch," Sabrina wheezed. "What do you even eat? Bricks?"
Crocodile was heavy—terrifyingly heavy. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, given that the man loomed well over two meters tall and was built like a damn fortress, but maniouvering his unconscious
body was another nightmare entirely. Sweat beaded at her hairline, her muscles burning as she slowly managed to drag him toward her destination: the Sea-Prism Stone reinforced cell concealed within the architecture of his office.
After a few minutes that seemed like two centuries, once she finally hauled his massive frame to the threshold of the cell door, her next mission was quite obvious: finding the keys.
Straightening her sore spine, she marched over to his desk. If those keys had to be anywhere, they would be tucked safely inside one of his drawers.
But what she found there affected her worse than the effort of carrying his unconscious body.
Crocodile prided himself on being a calculating, organized, and consummate professional. However, one could not say the same after seeing the state of his drawers.
Disorganized papers, pens jumbled together that had run out of ink twenty years ago, empty wrappers, dust bunnies the size of small animals…
And he had the nerve to call her messy? To lecture her about leaving her shoes on the floor or not dusting her shelving? What an audacity.
With a frustrated growl, Sabrina began pulling the drawers out of their tracks one by one, embarking on what felt like the most pathetic treasure hunt of her whole life, ruthlessly scattering their contents across the floor.
"Damn it, where did this idiot put the key?"
Only one single drawer remained unemptied at the very bottom. If the key wasn't in this one, her whole plan would completely fall apart, leaving her stranded in a mess of her own making. Steeling her resolve, Sabrina gripped the handles and yanked hard, tilting the drawer completely over to dump its contents.
As a cascade of old ledger books hit the floor, a distinct, sharp metallic clinking echoed through the room, indicating a small object had just fallen out. But right alongside it, tumbling softly onto a pile of crumpled parchment, was a small, square velvet case.
What is that?
The case was delicate, wrapped in a beautiful, deep blue velvet that felt entirely out of place amidst that mess. Sabrina didn't know what it was, but inexplicably, an immense curiosity took a hold of her chest. Her fingers, still trembling and coated in a thin layer of dust, reached down and lifted the small box into her hands.
When she clicked the small latch and popped the lid open, what she saw inside shook her heart like a hurricane, stealing the very air from her lungs. She didn't hesitate for a single second; she knew exactly what it was the moment her eyes locked onto it.
A ring. Perhaps the most breathtakingly beautiful piece of jewelry she had ever laid eyes on. Crafted from thick, flawless gold, a stunning green emerald delicately crowned the center that was surrounded by a glittering frame of slightly smaller diamonds.
There was no room for denial, no alternate explanation to soften the blow.
That was an engagement ring.
All pieces of the past few weeks started to fall into place in a way that bordered on agressive. Crocodile’s strangely eager, almost anxious demeanor over the last few days. That special, intimate date he had been so determined to arrange last week, refusing to let any business interfere with it. And, most brutally of all, those words he had told to her just a few days ago, when everything around her began to crumble:
"We'll be happy together after this. I promise."
All of it now made sense.
The realization hit her like a cannonball to the gut. As if her body were about to collapse, her hands shook so violently that the box nearly slipped from her fingers. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird, feeling as though it was going to literally jump straight out of her chest. A hot, stinging tear spilled over her lashes, followed by another, and another, tracing burning paths down her cheeks as Sabrina felt everything inside her shatter into a thousand pieces all over again.
No, no, no... please, god, no.
A broken sob tore from her throat. Clutching the case against her sternum as if it could somehow hold herself together, she wept without restraint, her tears splashing directly onto the flawless face of the emerald.
He was going to propose?
Perhaps that was one of the things Sabrina had secretly been most looking forward to since they started dating, however much she, given her facade of free and unattached woman, was ashamed to admit it.
To say that Sabrina had never daydreamed about her hypothetical wedding with Crocodile would have been a total lie. She imagined him kneeling with that flushed face and that typical, flustered, frown of his, asking her to be his wife with words he had had to pre-calculate, at least, one hundred times beforehand. Of course, she imagined herself in a designer cascading white dress, her makeup flawless, her manicure and hair perfectly styled, her throat adorned with jewels that matched the grandeur of her fiancé's status. Perhaps in some palatial estate in one of the oases of Alubarna, surrounded by luxury, decor, and music, like a dreamlike setting where she would take the hand of the man she loved.
She had thoroughly considered every microscopic detail: from the guests to the catering, even the honeymoon. Sabaody! Surely Sabaody would be a great place for a getaway.
But none of that mattered anymore.
All of that once seemed like a fantasy treasured in her heart, but now... Damn. Now this only made everything harder.
"Why..." she whimpered, her voice cracking into a desperate, choked whisper. "Why did you have to do this now, you idiot? Why now?"
Her fingers fumbled as she slipped the golden band onto her finger, where it slid home with a precision that hurted, before pressing her ringed hand desperately against her chest.
Her desperate crying had turned almost into screams of pain.
I'm sorry.
It was through this blur of grief and saltwater that her eyes caught the cold glint of the iron key resting a mere few centimeters away on the rug.
Forcing a ragged, unstable breath into her lungs, Sabrina reached out with a leaden hand and picked it up.
It was then that, immediately afterwards, exerting every ounce of her remaining physical strength, she unlocked the Sea-Prism Stone door and began the grueling process of hauling Crocodile's unconscious body across the threshold.
And, meanwhile, a single phrase escaped Sabrina's lips again and again, as if it were a mantra.
"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry, Crocodile... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..."
Collapsing onto her knees to bring herself completely to his level on the floor, she reached out with trembling hands to cradle his rough, scarred face. Her thumbs traced the line of the horizontal scar spanning his features, a mark she had studied, observed, and closely memorized over countless silent nights. A a scar that, for the rest of the world, inspired an immediate unease, intimidation and respect; yet, within her, it had awakened an inexplicable fascination from the very first moment she laid eyes on it. Fascination with the story that scar carried behind it. Fascination with the complex, dangerous man who bore it.
Sabrina knew it was too late to think about "what if"s. Too too late to fantasize about what might have been if life had perhaps tilted a little more in their favor. Too late to stretch her hand out toward a stolen future by his side.
At the end of the day, perhaps love wasn't meant for pirates. Perhaps she had been too foolish to believe she could simply run away from her past and start over. Perhaps she had been too foolish to think that she deserved to be happy.
However, she was aware that every minute with him, however fleeting, had given her a happiness she wouldn't trade for anything in the world. And that was precisely why Sabrina was more than willing to separate from him forever, to march directly into her own execution and die, if it meant that he could continue to live.
And, in turn, while her profound love for him gripped her like an enormous iron anchor, chaining her to the floor and threatening to prevent her from moving at all, Sabrina also knew that this time was the last time she would ever look upon his face.
Her golden eyes devoured every stark contour of his face as though she were attempting to permanently brand his likeness into the deepest corners of her memory until her fate choked her.
After a few seconds, the only movement her numb body allowed her to make was to lean in and place a soft, almost ethereal kiss on his lips. A kiss that tasted bitterly of farewell, sweet with devotion, and heavy with guilt.
Rising to her feet on limbs in a profound silence that was only broken by one more "I'm sorry", she stepped backward out of the enclosure and swung the reinforced door shut and walked away.
Sleeping peacefully, safe, with nothing that could endanger him.
That was the last time Sabrina ever saw Crocodile.
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Sabrina left Crocodile’s office with her head down, shoulders hunched, walking down the dimly lit corridor, each step heavier than the last.
That's why she didn’t see the guard until she nearly collided with him.
"Miss Sabrina?" the guard questioned as he looked down at her with a mix of surprise and mild confusion, steadying her with a gentle hand on her arm. "Where are you going at this hour? I thought you were staying with Sir Crocodile tonight."
Sabrina didn’t even meet his gaze. Her voice came out flat, exhausted. “We had a fight.”
Again? he thought, but wisely kept his mouth shut. If those two had fought, the last thing he wanted was to walk into the aftermath of Crocodile’s foul temper. He simply nodded and stepped aside, letting her pass without another word.
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When she reached her apartment, Sabrina closed the door behind her and leaned against it for a long moment, eyes closed, breathing shakily.
Her first impulse was to go into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face over and over again, watching the smudged mascara run down her cheeks like black tears, scrubbing away the evidence of her prior breakdown.
And once the icy water had woken her up, Sabrina went to the living room to get her leather purse, packing the absolute essentials into it—among which were a lipstick, her silver flask (now refilled with liquor), and a cigarrette box.
Once the bag was zipped, her hands finally stilled. She lifted her left one, letting her eyes rest on the magnificent ring catching the faint moonlight filtering through the window pane. She instinctively sketched a painful smile across her face, tracing the edge of her grief.
"At least I'll die married," a ghost of a joke left her lips.
Now, all that remained was wait for dawn to come.
The suspense felt like torture, making her nerves fray until she could hear the hammering of her own pulse in her ears. That was why, unable to pace the floorboards any longer, Sabrina sank onto the sofa, her hands clasping tightly in her lap as her gaze traced the contours of her apartment.
She couldn't help but wonder how much that small but luxurious apartment in the heart of Alabasta's 'Sin City' had changed in meaning for her.
For five long years of total solitude, this apartment had been nothing more than a lonely mausoleum decorated with gold and satin in all colors. Surrounded by luxuries and expensive trinkets, as if the opulence was a desperate try to fill the void left behind by the death of her former crew. As if somehow that isolation and debauchery could numb the pain. She had lived like a specter, refusing to establish a single connection with another human soul beyond the purely superficial—until Crocodile appeared in her life.
He had breathed life into these dead walls as the only person to whom Sabrina had opened her doors after the death of the people who meant everything to her. Now, in every single corner where her eyes fell, Sabrina could visualize a different vivid memory playing out before her.
On the very sofa where she sat, she could clearly see him settled in as he so frequently did on those lazy afternoons where the sun shone most scorchingly. She could see the phantom smoke rising from his cigar, his shirt half-open to the desert breeze that slipped in through the window and his shoes discarded on the rug. She remembered how he would casually tilt his head toward her shoulder, a silent command for Sabrina to gently run her fingers through his hair—something he truly loved, but would rather die than ever ask for out loud.
Her eyes drifted to the entryway, and a faint, watery chuckle escaped her. There, in the doorway, she could practically hear his irritated voice complaining about the mess. Her gaze snagged on the broom leaning against the wall, recalling those times when the Shichibukai, utterly pushed to his limits by a stray layer of dust, had snatched the broom himself and furiously swept her floorboards with his only hand while delivering the most severe lecture ever known to mankind.
And at the small table nestled right next to the balcony, she remembered those sun-washed mornings after they had spent the night tangled together, drinking coffee while lazily playing cards, speaking of absolutely nothing and everything at the same time.
All those beautiful memories rushed forward to embrace her soul with a profound sweetness and warmth—yet, paradoxically, nothing in the world seemed more terrible, more painful to her. To have finally, after years submerged in a well of nihilism, found a reason to live... only to be forced to give up life itself.
After hours lost in her own thoughts, the sun was rising over the desert.
Her time was up.
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The first rays of dawn painted the eastern horizon in soft pinks and golds as Sabrina stood alone at the Rainbase gate. A carriage approached from the east, wheels crunching softly against the san, until horses slowed to a stop, when a man stepped out.
He was elegantly dressed—no longer in the nondescript Rain Dinners guard uniform, but in a tailored blue suit and a flowing travel cloak whose hood he lowered with a flourish, and his long, platinum-blond hair cascaded like a waterfall over his shoulders.
"Here I am," she said quietly.
A slow, profoundly smug smirk pulled at the corner of his lips.
“Wow. Deep down, I thought you weren’t even going to bother coming,” Barton mocked. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
Without waiting for his invitation, Sabrina stepped past him, climbing into the plush, shadowy interior of the carriage. "I don't even have the will to fight back anymore."
Barton followed closely behind, the door closing with a heavy snap that signaled the beginning of their long journey toward the bustling city of Rashida.
For a while, the only sound was the steady rhythm of the horses’ hooves and the creak of the carriage wheels.
Sabrina settled back into the leather cushions and reached into the inside of her purse. She produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes and tapped one out, sliding it between her lips.
"Does this bother you?" she asked casually, gesturing with the silver lighter.
Barton raised an eyebrow, his expression guarded as he watched her. "Not at all."
The lighter sparked, casting a fleeting, orange glow over her face before she took a long, deep drag.
"I don't even know why I'm asking you," she said as the smoke escaped her mouth. "You used to smoke three times as much as me when we were crewmates."
"I quitted," he replied flatly.
Sabrina took another slow puff, her golden eyes narrowing as she finally exhaled it with a chuckle. "I didn't know guilt could make a man quit smoking."
"I feel absolutely no guilt for what happened," the man spat. "Regret is for the weak. It was the smartest thing I could have done given the circumstances, and I did it to survive. I was never like all of you. I refused to be condemned like the rest of the crew just to pursuit a senseless dream."
"Then why?"
"Why what?" he repeated, his jaw tightening.
"Why are you doing all of this now?" Sabrina pressed, leaning forward, the tip of her cigarette glowing a fierce, angry orange in the dimness. "What do you get out of this? You escaped the purge six years ago. You had a clean slate."
Barton remained silent for a few long seconds, settling deeper into the carriage seat. He exhaled slowly and rested his face in his fist. “Can I have a cigarette?” he asked without looking her in the eye.
Skeptical, Sabrina raised an eyebrow, and, without a word, she handed the pack and the silver lighter to him.
"It's not as clean as you think," he started, whispering through the haze of tobacco. "But once all this is over, and you're finally erased, I can finally start over. My history is promised to be permanently erased from the Marine database. And I can go far away from here. Maybe get married. Build a proper home. Live a life where I don't have to look over my shoulder every time a shadow moves."
Sabrina couldn't help it; a sharp, cynical chuckle escaped her throat.
"So that's your dream, huh?" she said. "Playing house too."
Barton frowned slightly. “I just want to leave the past behind and be happy. And you, Karina… you are my ticket to happiness.”
"Happiness," Sabrina repeated, staring at the glowing ash of her cigarette. "I've already given up trying. That's exactly why I'm here."
A deathly silence forged of smoke descended upon the cabin. They sat in absolute stillness, yet, as Barton drew another tense puff, his gaze drifted down from her face, now snagging upon the gleaming emerald ring adorning the very hand with which she held her cigarette.
"Such a pretty ring."
"Thanks," Sabrina serenely responded. "Turns out he was planning to marry me."
Barton froze mid-inhale, his cigarette hovering millimeters from his lips. "How did you manage to keep him out of this?" he then asked out of genuine intrigue.
"I drugged him," a serene smile sketched across her lips.
Taken entirely by surprise, the man blinked once, twice, then burst into a dry laughter that rattled the glass panes of the carriage. He shook his head, his long blond hair swaying as his laughter subsided into a dark, mocking grin. Yet, Sabrina's calm smile remained intact.
"You truly are a monster," Barton said, shaking his head in a mix of horror and warped admiration. "And you say that like it's the most normal thing in the world."
He then turned his eyes towards the endless desert roll by outside the window, the morning sun now fully illuminating the vast, empty sands of the wide arid valley before them. He took one final puff of his cigarette before tossing the butt out the window slit.
“And you were always the smart one,” Sabrina replied instantly, her voice smooth, cutting through his nostalgia like a razor through silk. “Too smart for your own good. You could have been something truly great with us, an unforgettable name on a bounty poster. Instead, you chose to be a coward.”
“Karina. I never hated you, you know,” he said finally, his voice carrying a rare, fragile weight of sincerity. “You were always one of the good ones. With real guts. Brave. Loyal. Maybe too loyal for your own good.”
Barton’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t deny it. “Maybe. But cowards survive. Heroes die young.”
Sabrina looked at him for a long, unblinking moment.
“It was a good life, though. A life worth dying for,” she said quietly, her gaze finally lowering. “But I guess my candle was meant to burn at both ends."
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Where am I?
Crocodile awoke to a soft, tender warmth that felt alien to the heavy pressure against his chest. But before he could process how he had ended up in his own bed just last night, his eyes, which had been scanning the room, fixed almost instinctively on a single spot.
Actually, he hadn't needed to look at her to feel her presence. Her honeyed perfume and sweet laughter filled the room. Sitting beside him on the edge of the mattress, bathed in the radiant, ethereal blue light that leaked through the curtains of the suite, staring down at him, her lips curved into a lazy smile, was her.
"Rina...?" he muttered, though his voice still sounded thick with sleep.
"Good morning, sleeping beauty."
A sudden spike of agitation pierced through his chest, a phantom coldness that made him sit up abruptly, his sharp eyes frantically scanning the room once more. In that moment, Sabrina’s smile wavered, a hint of genuine concern flitting across her features as she leaned closer. She reached out, her hand resting gently against his bare shoulder.
"Hey... are you okay?" she then asked. "I woke up a little before you, and you were grunting and muttering things in your sleep."
Crocodile took a few deep breaths, running his right hand through his disheveled hair, trying to ground himself. A nightmare? Had he truly just clawed his way out of a nightmare? The memories of the terror were already evaporating like mist, leaving behind only a profound sense of relief.
Yes, that was it. That nightmare had been nothing more than a trick of his mind. There was no danger lurking in the dark. There was no shadow coming to tear her away from him. No ghosts from the past and no setbacks that could threaten them.
Everything was perfectly under his control. As it was meant to be.
"I just... I think I had a really bad dream," he conceded, letting out a small, tired laugh that seem to loose itself the very knot of tension between his shoulders.
With a soft, melodic giggle, Sabrina leaned in and hugged him playfully, draping her arms around his massive neck. "That is because of stress. I knew it," she chided, nuzzling her cheek against his jaw. "Stubborn, silly Croccy... always so stressed out with your evil Warlord conspiracy stuff. At your age, stress is very bad," she teased, only gaining a slightly annoyed Pardon? from Crocodile's side. "Your heart is going to give out one of these days if you don't learn how to relax."
"I have told you a thousand times not to call me like that. And I'm not old," Crocodile grumbled in response, trying to sound annoyed but ending up being betrayed by the involuntary smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Deep down, certain warmth was blooming in his chest; he found himself enjoying her irreverent attitude, infinitely grateful that the terror lingering in the back of his mind was merely the residue of a sleeping mind.
"Besides," Sabrina continued, completely ignoring his complaint with an airy wave of her hand as she straightened up. She slid gracefully out of the tangled silk sheets, walking over to the bedside table to drape a silk robe over her shoulders. "We have far more things to worry about today. For example, the guest list!"
Crocodile raised a thick eyebrow, shifting against the pillows. "The guest list?"
"For the wedding, Crocodile!" Sabrina exclaimed, turning around with a theatrical gasp, and then, she raised her left hand high, her right index finger pointing emphatically at the enormous, gleaming emerald ring that adorned her ring finger. "God, wake up! What planet are you on right now? You proposed to me a week ago, and we haven't even started on the guest list, let alone choosing the colors for the decorations!"
The wedding.
So it was true. It was not a cruel illusion or a feverish dream. He had actually done it; he got his shit together and asked the woman he was utterly obsessed with to be his wife—and, what seemed even more unbelievable, she had said yes. At that very moment, a sudden heat flooded the Shichibukai's cheeks, coloring his scarred face a reddish tone as a genuine, enraptured smile broke across his face while his eyes were entirely intoxicated by the sight of her in a expression of pure wonder comparable to that of a child.
In return, feeling cornered and embarrassed by his gaze, she fiercely blushed too. Sabrina quickly turned her face away, adopting a highly thoughtful expression as she tapped her chin with her finger after roughly clearing her throat. "Hmm, but before we even stop to think about the guests... perhaps we should consider the venue. Alubarna! Yes, a estate in Alubarna will be perfect. Somewhere luxurious; none of those tacky Rainbase places where they hold those fake weddings. Oh, and the dress! I need a expensive, custom-made laced dress, and just mountains of jewelry... and—OH! WHAT ON EARTH DO I DO ABOUT THE BOUQUET?! My allergy!"
Crocodile simply found himself watching her ramble, his eyes tracking her as she swept through the entire emotional spectrum within the span of a single monologue. That was when he couldn't feel himself as other than lucky; he felt a profound sense of awe, a lingering disbelief that this vibrant, chaotic creature was soon to marry him. That a woman like her, as devastating as a tidal wave and as unpredictable as a roulette wheel, had decided to accompany him until the end of his days.
Interrupting her frantic pacing, Crocodile spoke her name, his voice low and commanding, yet dripping with tenderness. "Rina. Come here."
Sabrina paused mid-sentence, looking over her shoulder with a pout before sauntering back to the bed. Crocodile swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, and, as she stepped into his space, he gently wrapped his arms around her slender waist, pulling her flush against his chest. He was holding her tightly—tenderly, desperately—burying his face directly into her torso, inhaling the intoxicating scent of her skin as if he could merge with her flesh.
And Sabrina hugged him back without hesitation, her fingers threading through his obsidian hair, which hung loose and messy around his face, entirely devoid of the flawless slicked-back style he usually wore.
"Well, it seems someone is exceptionally clingy today," she joked.
Crocodile raised his gaze, his sharp pupils locking directly onto Sabrina's gleaming golden eyes. "I can't believe you said yes."
The woman simply let out a soft, breathless chuckle in response. "Why wouldn't I, you silly?"
It was just then when Sabrina then leaned down, cupping his face with both of her hands, her palms warm and soft against his cold skin, her thumbs gently stroking the line of his scar. At the contact, Crocodile’s heart began to race, a frantic, thumping rhythm that vibrated through his ribs, unable to prevent the blush on his cheeks from deepening.
"You're my everything, Crocodile," she said. "You're the only man I want to share the rest of my days with until the day we're buried together."
She leaned closer, the distance between them disappearing until he could feel the ghost of her breath against his skin. Her lips were mere millimeters from his own, almost touching, whispering directly against his mouth.
"I love you."
In that exact moment, Crocodile’s heart stopped dead in his chest.
The warmth in the room suddenly curdled. Something about the voice Sabrina had used to utter those three words was wrong—it was out of place, stripped of its usual melody, replaced by a hollow solemnity that chilled him to the marrow of his bones. It wasn't the sound of a happy bride.
A violent instinct flared within his gut, screaming that he had heard those exact words with that exact tone of voice before, like a lethal and bitter déjà vu that threatened to choke him.
When the Warlord looked back up into Sabrina’s eyes, the light behind them seemed to begin to fracture.
The calm that reigned in the room until just a few seconds ago vanished. The happiness evaporated into nothingness. A suffocating pressure seized his lungs, making him feel as though the very oxygen had been sucked from the suite.
I love you.
"Wha... what?" he murmured, his heart suddenly accelerating into a frantic, panicked sprint. His breathing became ragged, shallow, and consumed by an unholy wave of anxiety, as if an invisible, iron hand had suddenly clamped down around his throat, crushing his windpipe.
Before his eyes, the luxurious suite began to grotesquely mutate into something he could only describe as a nightmare. The serene blue light filtering through the aquarium glass turned a violent, arterial red. The heavy oil paintings on the walls tore away from their frames, slamming into the ground with deafening cracks. The crystal lamps shattered in a synchronized explosion of glass and sparks.
And the woman held in his arms—the radiant, untameable gambler he was madly in love with—began to decay.
Slowly, horrifically, her skin turned a sickly ash-white. Dark, bruising bloomed around her neck, and her sunset coloured eyes rolled back, losing their light to become flat, glassy, lifeless. The living woman he had been embracing just a heartbeat prior had transformed into a mangled, bloody corpse, offering him absolutely no response as her head lolled lifelessly against his shoulder.
Crocodile tried to scream. He wanted to rip his throat open, to shake her, to scream her name until his lungs bled, but his vocal cords were completely paralyzed.
The words "I love you" echoed over and over and over again in his skull.
Rina.
He was hyperventilating, his chest heaving in violent, useless spasms as the phantom hand squeezed tighter.
Rina, please.
His heart battered against his ribs with such force it felt as though it would burst through his chest.
Say something. Rina. Please.
The urge to weep, to cry in pure despair clawed at his mind, but his physical form remained frozen.
And when Crocodile thought that the burning torment that was consuming him was going to finish him off, the true horror occurred before his eyes: the cold, dead body of Sabrina began to disintegrate within his grasp, and her flesh dissolved into a dry, fine powder, transforming from a corpse into a pile of blood-red sand that slipped effortlessly through his fingers no matter how hard he tried to hold her, piling onto the ruined bedsheets until there was nothing left of her but dust.
No.
No. No. No. No. No.
Sabrina was gone forever. Not a trace of her remained beyond that amorphous, unrecognizable mound of volatile, slippery sand.
He had lost her forever. He hadn't been able to protect her.
"KARINA!!"
At the very microsecond his mind finally found the strength to rip a scream of absolute desperation from his lungs, Crocodile’s eyes snapped wide open.
He woke up once and for all, gasping for air as if he had been drowning in the depths of the sea itself.
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Crocodile’s pupils darted across the space, tracking the vertical shadows that cut his field of vision into narrow strips. Iron. No—not iron. The dull, dark sheen of the metal bars reflecting the dim lamps of his office was unmistakable.
Sea-Prism Stone.
And while the outside of the cage was out of his reach, he noticed something even more terrifying, yet obvious.
Sabrina had indeed disappeared.
In an instant, like the snap of a steel trap, every single piece of the puzzle fell into an alignment.
In fact, and he should have known it before, she had planned everything. Sabrina had planned everything down to the smallest detail to drug him and lock him in that cell.
Crocodile couldn't have been more sorry for not trusting his sixth sense when it warned him that she was up to something.
“No…” he rasped, voice breaking into something that felt almost foreign to him. “Rina… what the fuck did you do?”
His gaze surged past the bars, locking onto the grand clock standing against the wall directly across the room. The golden pendulum swung with a mocking, rhythmic tick-tick-tick, and when his eyes found the hands, his heartbeat seemed to stop for a microsecond.
It was well into the morning.
Rashida. The execution. If the transport had left at dawn, she was already there, or mere minutes away from being publicly murdered without any chance for him to stop it.
“KARINA!” he roared, voice echoing through the empty office, slamming his hook furiously against the Sea-Prism Stone bars. “KARINA, OPEN THIS FUCKING CAGE RIGHT NOW!”
No answer.
“DON’T YOU DARE DIE ON ME, YOU STUBBORN BITCH! I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU LEAVE ME HERE I’LL BURN THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD TO FIND YOU!”
However, his body's reaction was instantaneous and devastating. The moment his flesh and the gold of his hook made contact with the concentrated energy of the sea, a weakness surged through his veins, invading him like a parasite as a wave of dizziness blurred his vision.
But Crocodile couldn't care less about his nausea or his trembling knees at that moment—he threw himself against the bars again, shoulder first, ignoring the sharp pain that bloomed across his body, trying in vain to use his body as a battering ram to knock down the cage.
“ROBIN!” he shouted, voice raw and desperate. “NICO ROBIN! GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW! OPEN THIS CAGE!”
Only silence answered him.
“MR. 1!” he then tried again, slamming his fist against the bars until his knuckles bled. “MR. 1! ANYONE! SOMEONE GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
And again, no response. No footsteps. No one coming to his aid. Only the continuous sound of the clock across the room. The minutes bled away, carrying the woman be loved closer and closer to the grave.
Pain flared across his now bleeding hand, but he welcomed it—anything to feel something other than this helpless terror.
But there was nothing he could do. He was trapped, helpless, cornered.
Feeling that he had no other option but to surrender, Crocodile fell to his knees, his hand and hook sliding down the bars. Tears of pure rage and frustration burned in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall.
“Please…” he whispered, forehead pressed against the cold bars, defeated. “Please… don’t do this to me."
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The streets were packed with people—a restless sea of bodies pressing against one another shoulder-to-shoulder under the blistering heat of the mid-morning sun, voices rising in a chaotic murmur. Through the small window, Sabrina could see the crowds gathered around the central square, where a wooden platform had been hastily erected. Banners bearing the World Government’s insignia fluttered overhead, and Marines in crisp uniforms maintained order with stern expressions and raised rifles.
A mocking smile touched her lips, though the light didn't quite reach her eyes. "Well, look at that. Is all of this because of me?"
"You know how it is," Barton replied. "News travels fast. It seems the city has already gotten around that Viper Karina has finally been dragged out of the hole."
"I guess I can't help it then," she said, letting out a sharp, genuine laugh that echoed strangely in the confined space. "I'm a star."
Barton’s blond brow furrowed, a flash of genuine, irritated bewilderment crossing his handsome features as he leaned forward. "Do you find your execution a comedy?"
Sabrina simply shrugged and smiled.
The carriage pushed slowly through the throng, the driver shouting for people to clear the way. It finally came to a stop near a small, fortified building behind the execution platform—a staging area for the condemned, no doubt.
Right after the vehicle stopped, Barton exhaled a long, heavy breath and turned his eyes to her. "We have officially arrived. The hand-off is coordinated within the hour."
Sabrina gave a single, slow nod.
“After you, old friend,” Barton said, gesturing toward the building’s entrance.
"Wait," Sabrina interrupted, her hand extending to gently touch his forearm.
Before he could question her, she leaned down, rummaging through the contents of her until her fingers finally locked onto the cold, smooth contours of her silver flask.
Barton's eyes narrowed, his hand instantly tightening on the door frame. "What on earth are you doing now?
Before answering him, Sabrina took a long, deep sip, the liquor burning down her throat.
"Come on," she said, as she roughly dried her wet lips with the sleeve of her blouse. "At least let a girl have one final, decent drink before dying."
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Crocodile felt like he had descended to madness.
"There has to be a way... Come on..."
He collapsed backward against the stone floor, his breath coming in shallow, frantic wheezes as the parasitic energy of the Kairoseki violently flooded his nervous system. His vision was a chaotic blur of dark static and spinning shadows; his stomach churned with a sickening vertigo that threatened to drop him into unconsciousness.
But he couldn't surrender. Not now.
Karina.
The thought of her name ignited a fresh, terrifying surge of adrenaline that temporarily overrode the sea's crushing lethargy. He forced his massive, leaden limbs to lift him once more, dragging his bleeding frame up until he was standing, his dark eyes wide and wild with a desperation that no living soul had ever seen across his face.
In his manic state, his right hand blindly searched his pockets, his fingers frantically brushing past his empty cigar case until they struck a small, sharp object tucked into the interior lining of his vest. He pulled it out. It was a ornate silver fountain pen.
Without thinking about it twice, he jammed the fine steel nib of the pen into the keyhole of the door, twisting it. "Turn... turn, you bastard... turn!"
SNAP.
The delicate nib sheared off inside the lock, rendering the mechanism entirely useless.
Crocodile froze. He stared at the broken pen in his hand for a fraction of a second and then, he screamed.
He screamed with all the force and fury his lungs would allow, a raw, lacerating roar that tore at his vocal cords until the taste of copper flooded his mouth. He screamed with frustration, with rage, with grief, consumed by a feeling of hopelessness that was making him loose his mind. It was a sound that did not belong to a human being.
Directly right after, Crocodile threw the pen across the cell with a vicious snap of his wrist, where it shattered against the back wall.
"Fuck," he murmured. "Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. FUCK!"
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The noise of the crowd now swelled like a living thing. Thousands of voices rising in a restless murmur, a mix of morbid curiosity, old grudges, and the thrill of spectacle. Guards in crisp Marine uniforms immediately surrounded the carriage, their expressions stern and professional.
As Sabrina stepped out, two of them moved forward without hesitation. One produced a pair of heavy Kairoseki handcuffs, snapping them around her wrists with a cold, metallic click.
Sabrina looked down at the metal with a faint, wry smile. “Handcuffs? Really? You flatter me. I didn’t know I was that dangerous.”
The guard didn’t respond, but Barton let out a short, dry laugh as he stepped out behind her. He took her arm roughly, leading her toward the wooden stairs that ascended to the execution platform. Sabrina walked with her head high, forcing a calm, almost serene smile onto her face.
The moment her heels hit the sun-baked stones of the plaza, the undulating drone of the crowd spiked into a deafening roar. Thousands of pairs of eyes locked onto her. The sea of people pressed against the barricades, milling about, their voices rising in a chorus that rippled across the square like a plague.
"Look at her... is that really the strategist of the Oasis Pirates?" a humble man muttered near the front, his hand resting on the hilt of his cutlass as he stared in utter disbelief.
"It's Viper Karina!"
"It can't be," a local merchant whispered back, shielding her eyes from the glare. "How can they be the same person? The Oasis Pirates were slaughtered six years ago. How is that even possible? And that hair... Didn't she had long, red hair?"
"Six years in hiding changes a person," an old woman hissed, eyes fixed on her. "But those gold eyes... you can’t mistake those eyes. That’s Viper Karina, alright. It's no wonder she fooled all of Alabasta for so long, making us believe she was dead. She's a clever witch, after all."
The whispers followed them like a current, growing louder as they approached the platform. Sabrina kept her head high, the smile never leaving her lips, even as her heart beat a slow, heavy rhythm in her chest, each thump a reminder that this was the end of the road.
Barton hauled her to the base of the execution platform and positioned her in the center, facing the crowd, then stepped back slightly, his hand resting on the pistol at his hip. Standing before the breathless, packed square, he raised his voice, a cold, booming authority ringing out over the sea of heads.
"Citizens of Alabasta, by order of the jurisdiction of these lands, the woman before you stands condemned!" Barton shouted. "Viper Karina, remaining remnant of the Oasis Pirates, you stand accused of piracy upon the grand seas, of conspiring against the monarchy of Alabasta, and of proscription under the laws of the World Government!"
A collective breath caught in the throat of the crowd.
Grabbing her upper arm in an iron grip, he then proceeded to drag her up the creaking, skeletal steps of the execution platform.
The crowd below was a blur of faces—some horrified, some excited, some simply stunned into silence. She took a slow, steady breath, letting the weight of the moment settle over her like a shroud.
This is it, she thought. The final act.
Every step up those creaking wooden stairs had felt heavier than the last, as if the world itself was trying to slow her down, to give her one more moment to turn back. But there was no turning back. Not anymore.
As she climbed the steps one by one, the morning breeze whipping around her, Sabrina felt her entire life unfold before her eyes like the pages of a well-worn book. A life marked by misfortunes and, at the same time, miracles. A life full of ups and downs, adventures that had taken her across treacherous seas, tears shed in hidden corners of ships, and smiles shared among old sailors' songs with the only family she had ever known.
She thought of Seth—his booming laugh, his unyielding belief in a better Alabasta, the connection they had, as if they shared the same blood, and the first time he appeared in her life as nothing more than a naive and pathetic 20-year-old who shook her whole world. She thought of the Oasis Pirates—her brothers and sisters in arms, the ones who had fought beside her through storms and battles and long nights of uncertainty. May, Kino, Garnet, Ballantain... She thought of the quiet moments between raids, when they would sit together on the deck under starlit skies, sharing stories and dreams that now felt like echoes from another lifetime.
She had seen the wonders of the Grand Line. She had tasted the fierce, intoxicating flavor of freedom. And above all else, she was profoundly, immensely grateful that she had been gifted with a life worth remembering. Grateful that she could bid goodbye to this cruel world having truly known what it meant to love, and to be loved in return.
And then, inevitably, her thoughts turned to Crocodile.
The man that somehow became her anchor. The man who had seen the broken pieces of her and chosen to love them anyway. The man who was willing to put a ring on her finger. The man who once gave her existance a purpose again.
She knew leaving him was the hardest part, and that knowledge didn't prevent her heart from ache with a pain deeper than any physical wound. But Sabrina knew too that she couldn’t let gim throw everything away for her. Not when she finally understood what it meant to love someone more than her own survival.
She had given up trying to live for herself long ago.
The flame had burned down to the wick. Living without her crew had been a purgatory; living now, knowing the danger she would bring to his doorstep, made no sense to her anymore. But dying for him… that felt like the only right ending for her.
She was ready to rest.
Perhaps it was meant to be that way. Perhaps the right thing to do was to use the life Seth sacrificed for to save someone else's.
Maybe it was simply time. Perhaps the universe was finally allowing her to reunite with her crewmates, to sail whatever phantom sea awaited them on the other side. Her time had come, and Sabrina found a beautiful, poetic solace in the fact that her death was not in vain.
When they finally reached the flat, sun-bleached top of the platform, a single tear slipped down her cheek, but she smiled wider, lifting her chin toward the crowd.
As she tilted her head back, her golden Ankh earrings—the ancient symbol of immortality, Seth’s final legacy, the sacred memory of her fallen crewmates—jingled softly against the wind. The melodic, metallic chime rose above the dull whisper of the crowd, a clear, beautiful sound that felt less like a lament and more like a proud, triumphant farewell.
She closed her eyes for a brief moment.
Seth. Guys.
The gold flashed one last time in the morning light.
I'm coming home. I'll see you very soon.
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Crocodile stared at the swinging brass pendulum of the clock, his vision blurred by a rising, hot sting in his eyes. A blinding agony flared directly behind his chest, a spasm so sharp and visceral that his hand flew to his waistcoat, his fingers clawing into the fine silk over his ribs. It felt like his heart was tearing itself apart.
The room began to spin, the edges of his consciousness curling into a violent, throbbing dark. In the crucible of his torment, his mind rejected the Kairoseki bars around him and conjured her.
Sabrina. Karina. Rina. That was everything he could think about.
He saw her. He saw the brilliant, mocking curve of her lips. He could hear the melody of her laughter that made him feel only they existed. He could see the sharp, unyielding gold of her eyes, the specific way her raven hair gleamed against the moonlight, the intoxicating scent of her perfume that seemed to coat the very fabric of his soul.
The terror of a future devoid of those things, the certainty that he would never again feel the weight of her leaning against his shoulder or hear her call his name, burned through his chest like molten iron.
"Please..." he choked out, his voice cracking into a ragged, pathetic whisper that died against the stone floor as he fell once more to his knees, his head hanging low, completely consumed by the ghost of her in his mind. "This has to be a nightmare... Don't leave me... Rina..."
And when his eyelids snapped open, what he saw suggested that he was anywhere but his office cell.
“It’s a phenomenon that occurs when you reach a certain mastery of the Observation Haki.”
Something unnamed stirred in Crocodile’s chest. Something that transcended distance and time.
He could not move his arms; he could not feel his hook. Instead, his vision was tethered to a higher vantage point, looking out through a pair of eyes that were not his own, yet were more familiar to him than his own reflection.
“Maybe one day you’ll awaken it too.”
All he saw was an immense sea of a cruel, heartless audience, thousands of faces turned toward the execution platform like spectators at a gladiatorial show.
Journalists crowded together like vultures over a carcass, their cameras clicking frantically, capturing what the state would call the most important event of the decade. And Crocodile was reduced to a mute, invisible spectator trapped behind the glass of her eyes.
From somewhere behind her left shoulder, he heard Barton’s voice—smooth, cold, cruel. For the first time throughout the time he had been relentlessly searching for him to give him a hunt, through Sabrina’s sideward glance, the Warlord saw the face of the bastard who was tearing his life apart.
Frustration. Rage. Killer instinct. The emotions that cascaded through Crocodile’s consciousness at that moment could only be described as a psychological volcano. He wanted to scream at him, to turn the very air in that man's lungs to dust, to plunge his gold hook through the wretch's throat until his spine snapped.
But he had no body. He could only feel the tight pressure within Sabrina’s chest as she took a deep, grounding breath as she turned her head back toward the crowd.
She held her breath for a few seconds, and then, Sabrina opened her mouth and let out a piercing, raw scream that cut through the background noise, silencing the entire audience below her like a thunderclap.
"CROCODIIIIILE, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"
The square fell into a dead, stunned silence. The journalists stopped their writing mid-stroke; the guards blinked in absolute bewilderment. Behind her, Barton raised a blond eyebrow, his lips parting in speechless confusion.
"Crocodile?" a voice in the front row muttered. "Did she say Sir Crocodile?"
"What does the Hero have to do with this?"
Deep within the silent corners of her mind, Sabrina smiled—a sharp, venomous spark of satisfaction that only Crocodile could perceive.
"YOU TRICKED ME!" Sabrina roared again, her voice cracking with an impeccably feigned, theatrical agony that sounded like a woman completely destroyed by a lover's ultimate betrayal. She stomped her boot against the splintered timber of the platform, her bound hands shaking as she thrust them toward the crowd. "YOU ABSOLUTE PIECE OF SHIT, YOU BETRAYED ME! I THOUGHT WE HAD SOMETHING AND YOU SOLD ME TO THE MARINES!"
"The fuck are you playing at...?" Barton muttered under his breath, his voice almost entirely inaudible beneath the rising storm of the crowd's reaction, his grip tightening on the handle of the pistol.
Sabrina didn't turn around. Her lips barely moved as she dropped her voice to a razor-thin whisper that only Barton—and the phantom consciousness of Crocodile—could hear. "I don't trust you for a single second. So I am making sure he remains untouched."
Barton merely let out a sharp, irritated tsk, though he didn't lower the weapon.
Below the gallows, the crowd erupted into a frantic, chaotic storm of murmurs.
"Betrayed? What does she mean, he sold her out?"
"Was it Sir Crocodile who hunted down Viper Karina? Was he the one who orchestrated her capture?"
"No doubt about it! The Warlord must have discovered her identity and turned her over to protect the peace of the kingdom!"
The journalists in the square went into a frantic, manic frenzy. The flashbulbs of their cameras exploded in a rapid, blinding sequence of white light, capturing every line of Sabrina's manufactured despair.
"I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR ME WHEREVER YOU ARE, YOU DAMN GOVERNMENT LAPDOG!" she shrieked, her body trembling as she gave the performance of her life. "I HATE YOU! DO YOU HEAR ME, CROCODILE?! SEE YOU IN HELL, BASTARD!"
Why are you doing this? Stop this. Stop this, please.
Below the platform, the thousands of citizens began to chant, their voices rising in a celebratory roar that echoed across the streets of Rashida.
I have to get out of here. I have to save you.
"God save the Hero of Alabasta!"
They were cheering his name. They were calling him a savior, a legendary guardian of the peace who had delivered justice to Alabasta by purging the ghost of the Oasis Pirates.
But inside the cell, and inside the phantom space of her mind, Crocodile was completely falling apart. The irony was a violent blade twisting inside his gut. The praise of the masses was a burning acid in his veins. He was being hailed as a savior for her death, crowned a hero for the very slaughter he would have destroyed a continent to prevent.
This can't be happening.
He could feel the steady, powerful thud of Sabrina’s heart against his own spiritual perception. He could feel the absolute, unyielding depth of her burning love for him.
Something like that, something as fierce and passionate as what tied her to him, could only be called devotion. A devotion so immense that she was willing to distort her own memory, to die branded as a fooled, pathetic criminal, just to ensure his empire remained standing.
This is for the best. This way, you'll be safe.
However, seeing the horror before him, Crocodile could only plead silently, uselessly, as if he somehow was begging for a miracle that wasn't coming.
And the frenzied mass just kept cheering him on.
"Crocodile! Crocodile! Crocodile!"
No. Please, no. Rina, don't do this to me.
Fed up with the bizarre spectacle displayed before him, Barton stepped forward, his face dark with annoyance as he pressed the cold muzzle of the flintlock directly against the center of her chest, his finger slowly tightening over the curved iron trigger.
Sabrina looked out over the sea of faces that were booing her form and cheering the name of her lover, and her lips parted into a wide, triumphant curve.
If sacrificing myself means that you'll be safe...
No. No. No. NO!
"Goodbye, old friend," Barton declared softly.
...then I'll die with the brightest smile this damned kingdom has ever seen.
No. Don't abandon me! RINA!
I love you, Crocodile.
And at that exact microsecond, a single deafening gunshot cut through the entirety of the background noise.
Everything he saw through those golden eyes went pitch black.
When Crocodile’s consciousness collided back into his own body, he instinctively slammed his right hand against his chest, feeling a real, physical agony rip through his sternum, a searing, localized wound so intense it felt as though he were the one who had received a bullet directly through the heart.
But he didn't roar.
He didn't slam his heavy gold hook against the bars, nor did he curse the heavens. The manic rage that had been keeping him upright completely evaporated, leaving behind a hollow shell.
All he could do was letting out a sharp, almost inaudible gasp.
She's dead.
Then, the tears he had been holding back all this time began to stream down his face, one after the other. They cut silent, hot tracks through the dust and dried blood on his cheeks, spilling over the horizontal scar that spanned his features, dripping onto the cold stone floor.
He clutched his chest harder, nails digging into his skin through his shirt, as if the physical pain could somehow drown out the deeper, soul-shattering one. But it couldn’t. Nothing could.
She's gone.
Forever.
And Crocodile was reduced to nothing but a broken, crying man on his knees.
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Unexpectedly, the wooden double doors of the office burst open.
Miss All Sunday entered with a stack of reports tucked under one arm and her usual calm, almost bored expression on her face.
“Mr. 0,” she began, flipping through a page without looking up. "No news about the situation. I think everything is under control for—"
The words withered in her throat. The documents in her hand slipped from her fingers, scattering like dead leaves across the floor as her dark eyes finally adjusted to the dimness, locking onto the front of the security cage.
"Mr. 0...!" she exclaimed, her voice rising in alarm. "What on earth are you doing in there?!"
Crocodile did not answer.
He remained perfectly motionless on his knees, petrified in his sorrow. His head was bowed as the tears continuing to fall down his cheeks.
Startled into action, Miss All Sunday frantically searched her pockets for the spare key she always carried, a possession that only she, by virtue of her absolute authority as the vice president of Baroque Works, carried apart from the Warlord himself.
Her fingers finally closed around the cold Sea-Prism Stone, and she rushed to the cell door, unlocking it with trembling hands
The moment the door swung open, Crocodile didn’t even push her aside.
Without a sound, his massive form instantly dissolved, transforming into winding rivers of dry sand, swiftly whipping through the air with a hiss. It swept past Robin, the sheer draft throwing her back against the desk, leaving the womancompletely bewildered, unsettled, and gasping for air in the sudden vacuum of the empty office.
The sand moved like thousands of sabers slicing through the wind, possessing a fleeting, monstrous nature that felt capable of cutting through time and memory itself. In that state, his consciousness wasgone. There was no man there; he was a mind completely consumed by a fractured reality, out of any mortal control. His flesh had surrendered entirely to the furious element of the wasteland. The roaring currents of sand swept like a tidal wave through the lavish corridors of the Rain Dinners, shattering the reinforced glass, tearing the velvet tapestries from the walls, and bursting through the grand casino thresholds.
It erupted out into the sun-drenched streets of Rainbase and began to violently tear down awnings, smash market stalls, and crack the stone foundations of the city.
Anyone who crossed paths with that supernatural phenomenon did not see the pristine, intimidating silhouette of the Shichibukai. There was only a force of nature.
It was a living sandstorm.
The entity that once was Sir Crocodile drew ever closer to the northern outskirts of the city. He crossed dunes, ruins, hills, and oases. He crossed the currents of the Sandora River in a single leap of blinding dust, his unhinged rage spreading out across the territory until his whole being became one with the entire desert. He was the desert. He was the localized calamity of sand, a roaring, screaming vanguard of doom that was rapidly closing the distance to the city of Rashida.
Hours passed in a blur of friction and heat, until the living tempest finally descended upon the borders of the city. But when the sand parted to peer into the square, there was no one left. The execution was over. The stage was empty.
There was not a single trace of that wretched, sniveling coward who had torn Sabrina’s life away from the world. And far worse, there was no trace of her body. Not a single scrap of her dress, no drop of her blood left untrampled, not even a corpse for him to kneel beside, to gather into his arms, or to whisper a final, desperate goodbye to.
The world had taken her, slaughtered her, and cleaned the slate before he could even arrive.
Because of that, the sandstorm grew into a monstrous, localized apocalypse, an immense and vengeful whirlwind that rose into the sky until it blotted out the midday sun entirely. It descended upon the limestone city of Rashida with a crushing weight, completely reducing everything in its wake to ashes and dust.
The tempest ignored the sudden, startled cries of despair that began to echo through the streets.
It ignored the structural integrity of the buildings as they collapsed inward, turning centuries of architecture into fine powder. The vortex tore through the markets, the homes, the squares, indifferently taking the lives of thousands of innocent citizens with it. Blood spilled into the swirling grit, instantly drying into dark, brown crusts; screams of agony and desperate cries rose from men, women, and children alike, only to be instantly choked out by the suffocating, heavy mass of the invading earth.
They all succumbed, blindly and helplessly, to the sheer calamity that was the Shichibukai’s unhinged wrath and bottomless despair.
No one saw Sir Crocodile. No one among the few who managed to glimpse the fringes of that living hell could have ever pointed a finger of blame toward a man.
Because there was no man there.
Within an hour, the entire city of Rashida had been swallowed up by the sand, buried under fifty feet of shifting dunes. It was wiped off the grand map of Alabasta forever, as if it had never been more than a mirage conjured by the heat.
And the next morning, after the dawn of a new day, the only thing the newspapers said about the sudden tragedy was that an unprecedented sandstorm had been solely to blame.
Rashida disappeared forever.
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This is a story about masks. This is a story about two liars.
In a world as unfair as the one in which she lived, future was an uncertain prospect that could always be snatched away.
Life is nothing more than a game of roulette for someone trapped in the constant uncertainty of tomorrow. Someone whose very existence was a sin to some, and the only salvation for a certain man.
There is only one place where this cruel reality can be forgotten for a moment. Where truth vanishes beneath the masquerades of fools brave enough to entrust their souls to pure chance, holding a dead man's hand.
In the grand casino of life, the house didn't win.
He had played all his cards. And that was what she did too.
But there was no more aces to play.
Until the very end, she was the only gambler in the world capable of taking everything he had.
She had won once again. And the winner takes it all.
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I will lay this kingdom to waste until not even the ashes remain.
CWs: smut, anal sex (male receiving), pegging, masturbation, oral sex (male receiving), use of toys, Crocodile going to a sex shop.
WORDCOUNT: ~5400 words
Author's note: This side story came to my mind as a joke, initially. But I posted a tweet in which I said "what if I write Crocodile getting fucked by a strap-on?" and my oomfs said: do it. And I didn't need further encouragement to do it, in fact. This was the most bizarre and funny thing I've ever written. This is my little gift before the final chapter (which definitely will make you want to kill me). Enjoy!
My One Piece writing masterlist! Check for the rest of the parts!
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"But Crocodile...!"
"I said no."
Neither of them could tell how long they had been arguing over that stupid thing. It had easily been half an hour of Sabrina relentlessly begging him. Crocodile, for his part, had done nothing but give her curt, growled "no"s with an expression so thunderous it would have sent lesser men running for their lives.
"But my birthday is tomorrow!" she insisted, thrusting the offending object forward with both hands, gripping it like a trophy, refusing to back down even an inch.
Crocodile grimaced in open disgust with his arms crossed over his broad chest. "As if I gave a single fuck."
Naturally, he actually did give a fuck. Of course, he had been planning her birthday for weeks: that overpriced fur coat she'd been longing for for months, a diamond choker more expensive than a ship, a private dinner consisting of all of her favourite dishes, perhaps even a night where he would indulge her in every filthy way she usually begged for. But this? This was not on the list.
He should have foreseen it, really.
Sabrina had been dropping increasingly obvious hints for months. The casual way she would slap his ass when he walked past her at her living room. The way she’d squeeze his backside while they were kissing—and more than just kissing—while moving her hand dangerously close to a certain entrance. Her more and more frequent comments about the perfect, round shape of his buttocks.
She was obsessed with his butt.
That was why he wasn’t truly surprised when she showed up in his office carrying a suspicious bag from one of the darkest, most disreputable stalls in the bazaar.
Lube. Scented candles. And that ridiculous, enormous strap-on that seemed to mock him with its very existence.
"Listen, I do not have time for this," he said, turning his back to her with a dismissive wave of his good hand. "I’ve got actual work to do. Important work. Unlike whatever depraved fantasy you’ve cooked up this time."
"Oh my," Sabrina purred, stepping closer until she was pressed against his back, the strap-on still in her hand. "Is the great Hero of Alabasta afraid of using his own back door?"
The word afraid made his eye twitch immediately.
It wasn't that he was unfamiliar with the mechanics of what she was proposing. In truth, Crocodile had already experimented being penetrated—but it had been a lifetime ago. In his old life, long before this masculine body, for logistical reasons he was usually the one who received. Never anally, though.
But now, the mere concept of it felt lke an insult to his pride.
Sabrina circled him slowly, still holding the strap-on like it was the most innocent thing in the world. “Just think about it,” she coaxed, voice dropping into that flirtatious tone she knew drove him crazy. “It doesn’t have to be submissive. It’s just me giving you pleasure, like always. Only this time you can let go of all those stupid boundaries and actually submit without any pressure. Just letting me take your body.”
Crocodile turned around slightly, glaring at her. Sabrina’s face was lit up with a bright, mischievous smile as she gripped the toy tighter.
“I don’t know why you’re so damn obsessed with this,” he said.
The woman stepped even closer, pressing herself against his side, her free hand sliding boldly down to squeeze his hip. “Because I want all of you, Crocodile,” she whispered against his ear, voice husky. "I bet you’d look so pretty taking it for me. And I want to see what happens. All that power… just letting me have control for once."
He could feel heat rising in his body despite himself, his pride warring with the undeniable spark of curiosity her words ignited.
For a fleeting second, Crocodile’s gaze locked onto hers, his pupils dilating as his mind involuntarily flashed an image of her—flushed, dominant, forcing his thighs open and making him moan without any restraint, thrusting into him while fondling his member.
But no. Never. He would never agree.
He let out a sharp, mocking snort, forcefully tearing his eyes away from her and snatching his heavy fur-trimmed coat from the back of his armchair.
“Nice try, Rina,” he rumbled, his voice recovering its cold, unyielding authority as he slung the coat over his massive shoulders. He didn't look at the velvet pouch again. “But the answer is still no. I am leaving for the casino floor to take care of some affairs. If I stay in this office a moment longer, your ridiculous delusions might actually give me a headache.”
“But Croccyyyy~”
“We are done discussing this,” he commanded, his golden hook cutting a sharp arc through the air to silence her. He strode toward the oak doors of his office and paused at the threshold, his hand resting on the brass knob as he cast one final, warning glare back over his shoulder. “Lock the door when you leave. And put that thing back in whatever gutter you dug it out of. It's never happening.”
Finally he stepped out into the hallway and slammed the heavy door shut behind him, leaving her alone in the quiet, empty room.
The audacity of that woman.
But as Crocodile strode down the carpeted corridors of Rain Dinners, the cold, professional detachment he usually wore like armor failed to settle over his mind.
He was furious, yes. His pride was fiercely bristling at her insolence. Yet, beneath the layers of his legendary stubbornness, a persistent ember had been struck.
His mind—traitorous as always when it came to her—kept replaying her words.
I bet you’d look so pretty taking it for me.
He growled under his breath, running a hand through his hair.
Stubborn little brat…
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The next day Sabrina woke to the insistent chime of her doorbell, the sound cutting through the quiet morning haze of her apartment. She groaned, rolling over in bed before dragging herself to the door, still in an oversized shirt she 'borrowed' from Crocodile months ago—and he definitely wasn't getting back.
When she opened it, a small procession of elegantly dressed staff from Rain Dinners stood waiting with warm smiles. They were carrying an absurd mountain of glossy boxes, bags with expensive brand logos, and a massive silver tray holding a luxury breakfast buffet of fresh berries, pastries, and her favorite chocolate desserts.
“It’s from Sir Crocodile, miss,” one of the messengers said politely, bowing slightly.
Once the small army completed their rapid, military-grade delivery and scurried away, Sabrina’s face lit up as she read the note attached to the largest box:
“Happy birthday, my queen. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be with you this morning. But we’ll see each other this evening. Enjoy your day until then. — C.”
"Well, aren't we being a proper gentleman today?" she murmured to the empty room, popping a raspberry into her mouth.
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By early afternoon, Sabrina had dressed in one of her finest emerald gowns and sauntered into the grand, bustling floor of Rain Dinners, determined to spend the day the best way she knew how: bleeding the house tables dry.
Standing near the central columns, looking as immovable and intimidating as a steel statue, was Daz Bones. His sharp eyes were scanning the gambling floor with his usual deadpan stare when Sabrina practically glided into his line of sight, her golden eyes gleaming with mischief.
"Don't you know what day it is?" she asked, leaning against the marble railing beside him.
Daz didn't blink. His expression remained lacking of emotion. "Halloween?"
"No, silly! Oh, wait. It is," Sabrina chuckled, swatting his arm playfully. "BUT IT'S ALSO MY BIRTHDAY!"
Before he could react, she grabbed both of his large, metallic hands and started spinning around with him in an absurd, impromptu dance. The man who could turn his entire body into blades looked utterly mortified as he was yanked in circles.
“Miss Sabrina,” he grunted, trying to maintain some shred of dignity while being twirled like a reluctant dance partner, “this is highly undignified.”
“Live a little, Mr. 1!” she laughed, still spinning him. “You’re contractually obligated to be nice to me today!”
"Happy... birthday, Miss Sabrina," he grunted, carefully anchoring his feet to the floor before she could spin him into a blackjack table.
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To say Crocodile had gone overboard was an understatement. The entire casino had practically been transformed into a fairytale palace dedicated solely to her. Everywhere she walked, pit bosses and dealers looked at her as if their survival depended on fulfilling her every whim (it actually did).
The jazz music she liked so much could be heard in every corner of the place. Free chips appeared at every table she approached. Bartenders offered her favorite cocktails with knowing smiles.
One particularly bold bartender leaned in as he slid her a drink. “On behalf of Sir Crocodile, Miss Sabrina. Although he said to tell you…” The man cleared his throat and did a surprisingly accurate impression of Crocodile’s deep, grumpy voice: “‘Don’t overdo it with the drinking. I need you to be conscious this evening.’”
Sabrina burst out laughing. “Tell him I make no such promises!”
That day, Crocodile had put great care into everything to ensure that everyone treated the woman he loved like royalty.
Sabrina felt like an absolute princess.
And, as if on cue, the heavy doors of the executive level swung open, and her own prince finally walked down the grand, sweeping central staircase of the Rain Dinners.
Crocodile looked devastating, dressed elegantly in a sharp, tailored three-piece suit that Sabrina had personally badgered him into buying during one of their shopping trips together, with a fine dark fur coat hanging from his shoulders.
"Happy birthday, Rina," he murmured as he approached, leaning down to catch her lips in a sweet, surprisingly tender kiss that ignored the hundreds of eyes watching them.
"You're late," she teased against his lips, though she immediately wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him into a tight, almost suffocating hug that made the fabric of his coat rustle.
"I'm sorry I missed the morning," he rumbled with difficulty, since Sabrina was making him short of breath. "There was a... complicated operation with the Whiskey Peak agents and I had a lot of work to do."
"I'll forgive you because the gifts were absolutely ridiculous," she whispered into his ear, squeezing him one last time before pulling back. "If you keep spoiling me like this, I’m going to expect a private island next year."
Crocodile raised an eyebrow, a faint smirk playing on his lips. “Keep behaving and I might consider it."
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They dined together that in absolute privacy within the VIP lounge, seated before the massive, subterranean glass walls of the bananawani aquariums, surrounded by a lavish banquet of her favorite dishes.
And after dinner, of course, came dessert.
As expected from them, even since their way on the elevator they already were devouring each other's mouths with mutual urgency. In the blink of an eye, when they arrived at Crocodile's private suite, not even a minute had passed when clothes were shed in a frantic trail across the floor as they stumbled toward the bed, hands roaming, breaths mingling.
Crocodile was gripping her ass possessively as he pulled her on top of him, making her straddle his lap, grinding down against the growing hardness she could already feel straining beneath his underwear.
In response, Sabrina slid her hand down to palm him firmly through his remaining underwear, stroking the thick length of his cock.
“Naughty girl,” he rasped between kisses, his large hand sliding up to cup one of her breasts through the fabric, thumb brushing over her nipple until it hardened and drawing a gasp from her lips.
Crocodile buried his face in the soft crook of her neck, his breath hitching as his hand slid down, forcing two thick fingers into the waistband of her panties.
Between muffled moans and the wet sound of Sabrina's kisses on his neck, Crocodile’s breath hitched against her ear.
“I’ve been… considering what you said yesterday.”
Sabrina froze instantly, and then sat up completely straight on his lap.
"Wait, what?" Sabrina gasped, her voice cracking slightly in her utter disbelief.
The man closed his eyes for a tortuous second, a heavy, deeply pained sigh escaping his lips. "Do not make me repeat myself," he growled, refusing to look her in the eye as if that would hide in the slightest his deeply flushed face. "You heard what I said."
“Oh my god,” she laughed, voice dripping with glee. “The big bad Warlord of the Desert is actually letting me peg him? What has made you change your mind?"
What had really happened earlier that day was something Crocodile would take to his grave.
The idea that he had been busy with Baroque Works bureaucracy all morning was only a half-truth. Yes, he had dealt with the irritating blunders of his Whiskey Peak agents, but by noon, a completely different mission had consumed his attention. Sabrina’s wicked proposal had haunted him since yesterday, tempting him far more than he cared to admit.
That's why, driven by an insatiable curiosity, Crocodile refused to be uninformed before such affairs, and the Warlord set out into the crowded, sprawling labyrinth of the Rainbase bazaar.
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Earlier that afternoon...
It had taken him an infuriatingly long time to locate the source. He had navigated crowded, dusty alleys and bypassed hundreds of mundane fruit and textile stalls until, finally, tucked into the deepest, most disreputable corner of a shadowed alleyway, he spotted it: a discreet stall draped in a dark purple tent.
It has to be this gutter, Crocodile thought.
Crocodile aggressively swept the curtain aside and stepped into the dim, incense-heavy interior. The stall was overflowing with all kinds of erotic items and naughty lingerie: from the most absurdly large dildos and whips, handcuffs and lubricants, to the most delicate lace panties. The merchant behind the counter—a slender, highly effeminate man wearing silk robes and heavily lined eyes—startled violently, dropping a feathered fan.
It took the vendor less than a second to recognize the massive frame, the legendary golden hook, and the prominent horizontal facial scar.
"Oh, my heavens," he squeaked, his voice pitching high before he quickly smoothed down his robes, a sweet, thoroughly flirtatious smile spreading across his face. "Sir Crocodile! The great hero himself... to what do I owe the absolute pleasure of such a... magnificent presence in my humble little boutique?"
Crocodile cleared his throat roughly, his posture rigid as iron. He hated this already. He felt an overwhelming urge to turn the entire alleyway into a giant sand trap, but he forced his pride down.
"Cut the crap," Crocodile snapped, his voice a harsh, curt friction. "A woman... came in here the other day, right?"
"Yes, a very beautiful, very energetic woman, indeed," the smaller man said. "Your partner, isn't it? What a lovely lady she is."
Crocodile arched a brow. "How do you know that?"
"Why are you so surprised, sir?" the salesman said, gently covering his mouth with a delicate, manicured hand as he let out a soft, gossiping chuckle. "Everyone knows about Lady Sabrina and you. Don't you read the gossip magazines?"
As the strange man chuckled, the Warlord felt a vein on his temple throb.
"Listen," Crocodile cut him. "The thing is... She bought a... a specific apparatus. A harness. And a..." He paused, the words practically choking him. He coughed roughly into his fist, before vaguely and aggressively pointing his index finger toward one of the dildos that were on display to his right. "You know."
The salesman blinked, his eyes tracking Crocodile’s deeply flushed face. A slow, deeply amused realization dawned on the vendor.
"A what, sir?" The man asked deliberately, with a look that inspired everything but obliviousness.
The Shichibukai gritted his teeth as the blush on his face deepened. A wave of anger washed over him. That bastard knew exactly what he meant, but he was just playing with him.
"Don't play around. You already know what I mean," Crocodile insisted, his patience running out.
"But I have a lot of different items in display, sweetheart," the salesman countered. "You'll have to be more specific."
Exhaling the deepest and most desperate sigh of his entire life, Crocodile remained silent for a couple of seconds, questioning every life choice that had led him to this situation.
"A COCK," he finally yelled, completely out of patience. "A RUBBER COCK."
In response, trying not to burst out laughing, the vendor picked up his feathered fan, tapping it playfully against his own chin. "Ahhh... the leather lined, ten-inch model? With the double-bulbed base? Don't tell me..." He gasped dramatically, leaning closer, his eyes sparkling with mischief. "Our beloved national hero is going to be... hosting tonight?"
"Watch your mouth, you piece of garbage," Crocodile growled, his golden hook snapping forward with a lethal schwing to press its razor-sharp tip directly beneath the salesman's chin. The flush on his face burned even hotter. "You will answer my questions, or I will slit your throat. I need to know... how it works. The safety. How does one ensure... it won't hurt?"
Despite the golden hook at his throat, the salesman seemed more thrilled than terrified, entirely charmed by the Warlord's aggressive bashfulness.
"Oh, you rugged men, always so impatient," the vendor cooed, gently using one manicured finger to nudge the golden hook a millimeter away. "Relax, darling. If you're going to take a lady's sword, you need preparation. More specifically, lubrication. Oceans of it. Preferably my premium, scented silicone blend."
The vendor reached beneath the counter, pulling out a large crystal bottle and sliding it forward.
"She already bought one of those," Crocodile said while glaring at it.
"Oh well then, the other thing you need is, of course, relaxation," the salesman continued, waving his hands elegantly. "You have to breathe, big guy. You're far too tense, and if you clench up like a vault, your lovely queen won't even get past the castle gates. You need to stretch the muscles beforehand. Use your fingers. Or better yet, let her use hers to open you up slowly, piece by piece, until you're completely soft for her. Let her take total control. When she wears the harness, she is the King, and you are her loyal subject."
Crocodile’s eye twitched violently.
"Subject? I am a Warlord of the Sea," he ground out through clenched teeth, his fist slamming onto the wooden counter with enough force to crack the varnish. "I do not 'submit' for anyone."
"Oh, but you will," the salesman teased, giving him a sly, knowing wink that pushed Crocodile right over the edge. "In fact, the bigger and tougher they are, the louder they moan when that sweet little spot inside gets hit. Have you ever had your prostate stimulated, Sir Crocodile? It will completely ruin regular sex for you, I promise. You'll be begging her to—"
"Silence!" Crocodile roared. "If a single word about this leaves this tent, I will turn you into a dehydrated corpse. Understood?"
"My lips are sealed," the vendor answered, pressing his hands together in a mock prayer, though he was biting his lower lip to hide the massive laughter bubbling up in his throat. "Is there anything else I can help you with, sir? Perhaps some lingerie to surprise your girl? I have a wonderful sale on crotchless numbers."
"Nothing more," Crocodile finally ground out.
Then, turning on his heel, the Warlord had stormed out of the purple tent, his heart hammering against his ribs in a way it hadn't in decade.
Inside the tent, the salesman watched the purple curtain sway in the Warlord's wake, letting out a heavy, dramatic sigh as he picked up his feathered fan.
"Such a shame," the vendor said to himself. "I bet a pair of latex boxers with lace garters would have looked divine on him."
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Back in the present, the sudden silence of the bedroom was broken only by the sound of Sabrina’s triumphant, melodic laughter.
"I am a Warlord of the Sea," the man then growled, outgripping her hips with a bruising force, his large hand digging into her skin to anchor her completely to him. "I am not afraid of anything, least of all you. And besides... I am only doing this to finally keep your damn mouth shut."
In response, she just chuckled, then leaned down to kiss his lips deeply, tasting the lingering warmth of his mouth. "Okay, okay, siree. No need to get rough. I'll go easy on you."
"You carry the harness and the lube?"
Her smile widened into something thoroughly devious. "Absolutely."
A long, defeated sigh escaped his lips. At this point, he wasn't even surprised by her preparedness, and when he watched Sabrina reqch over into her purse on the nightstand, pulling out the small, clear bottle, he knew his fate was already sealed.
"Use your fingers first," he commanded, even if any trace left of authority in him had vanished.
She gave a slightly intrigued look. "It seems someone has informed himself."
In response, Crocodile simply avoided her gaze, raising his voice to disguise his embarrassment. "Just shut up and use. your. fingers."
She flipped the cap, pouring a generous, slick stream of the fluid directly onto her fingers. "If at any point you're in pain, or you want to stop, just let me know, okay? If something doesn't feel right, or if it's too much, just say..."
"Don't you dare 'safe-word' me," he cut her off fiercely.
Sabrina chuckled softly and then shifted her weight, placing herself strategically between his thick, muscular legs. She began caressing him gently, her non-lubed hand reaching down his boxers to slide them down his thighs, making his rock-hard member spring free, thick and throbbing violently in the cool air of the room.
She didn't hesitate to wrap her fingers around his length, stroking him firmly from base to head, watching his dark eyes dilate with arousal.
Slowly, her slick hand ventured lower, her wet fingers traveling beneath his heavy testicles, gliding over the sensitive skin of his perineum until they reached his tight, unblemished entrance. She began stroking the puckered skin, her thumb and index finger making slow, smooth circles, applying a gentle, teasing pressure that sent a visible shudder racking through his body.
Crocodile let out a whimper, his head tossing back against the pillows, and that only made Sabrina smirk with triumph, her golden eyes darkened with lust as she thoroughly enjoyed the raw, helpless reaction of the Warlord beneath her.
"My, my, aren't we liking this already?" she commented, her fingers slicking his entrance until it glistened in the amber candlelight.
"Shut... up," he rasped, his thick fingers clenching into the silk sheets until the fabric threatened to rip.
"I'm going to be gentle... for now."
And when she aligned the tip of her lubricated index with his tight ring of muscle and pushed inward, Crocodile whimpered loudly, his entire body going rigid as stone.
He felt full. Stretched. Like an invasion of his body, a foreign sensation he hadn't felt in ages.
And it was only just a finger.
With a relentlessly but slow in-and-out pace, she continued fingering him, curling her digit, watching in fascination as his massive cock throbbed furiously, getting even harder and leaking a thick drop of pre-cum without her even touching it.
It was quite the view. A sight, indeed, so irresistible that made Sabrina’s mouth water. Unable to fight the temptation, she leaned down, her lips parting as she wrapped her mouth completely around the thick head of his member.
"W—Wider..." he muttered, trying not to moan in the process. "D-don't you... dare bite..."
Shut up, I've done this a thousand times. And you always love it, she wanted to say, though she was silenced by the length of him, as she began to lick him with a wet, swirling motion of her tongue. To heighten his torment, she smoothly slid a second finger deep into his heat.
The double stimulation was driving him completely mad. A loud moan tore from his throat, unrestrainedly, as he couldn't help but grip her raven hair and push her deeper.
"Rina... Fu—uuck—" Crocodile choked out, his voice breaking as his hips instinctively hitched off the mattress, bucking upward into her mouth and fingers as the friction hit his prostate. "Don't... stop. Please... Don't..."
He had never felt anything like this in his entire life; the intensity of being simultaneously filled and sucked was an overwhelming, torturous ecstasy that was taking control over him. He tried to speak, to reclaim his dominance, but his words were entirely ruined by a succession of helpless gasps.
Sabrina then pulled her mouth off his cock with a loud, wet pop, her lips glistening with his fluids as her own breath came in ragged, heated gasps. She relished the absolute sensation of power over him, knowing that she alone held the reins to this terrifying beast, reducing him to a shaking, vocal mess on a mattress. She could feel his internal walls pulsing frantically around her two fingers, tight and twitching, fully stretched and beautifully soft just for her. And, above all, she found out that really turned her on.
"Just as I imagined," Sabrina teased wickedly, her voice a breathless hum as she leaned close to his ear, her fingers stretching him open a fraction wider. "Like a good boy, moaning my name and submitting to me. Are you ready for the real birthday present, Crocodile?"
"Just... do it, damn you..." Crocodile growled, a desperate, breathless sob mingling with his moan as his head thrashed against the pillows, his entire body slick with a fine sheen of sweat. "Just do it... and shut the fuck up for a little..."
Knowing he was perfectly prepared, Sabrina slowly, carefully withdrew her fingers, drawing a long, whining gasp from his parted lips. She reached to the side of the bed, her hands wrapping around the leather straps of the harness. As she buckled the heavy leather securely around her hips, the formidable ten-inch textured shaft bounced against her thigh.
Crocodile stared blankly at the absurd, towering sight before him, his breath caught in his throat. That enormous dildo was almost intimidating, even for someone of his great proportions. To say the least, seeing her petite frame adorned with that huge thing was... picturesque.
"Ready to take my cock, handsome?" Sabrina asked, her voice dripping with a wide grin.
"DON'T SAY THAT!" he yelled in response as a furious blush painted his scarred face a dark, violent crimson.
Sabrina merely chuckled after his expectable protest, as if she hadn't literally said that on purpose. Pouring another viscous stream of lubricant down the length of the shaft, she stepped over him on the mattress, her knees forcing his legs open once more. Slowly, with surprising gentleness, she aligned the heavy bulbous tip of the dildo against his entrance, while simultaneously wrapping her free hand around his rock-hard, leaking member, stroking in order to soothe the incoming stretching sensation with pleasure.
The moment the head of the toy began to force its way, Crocodile let out a loud, strangled gasp, as Sabrina pushed deeper, inch by painstaking inch, her hips driving forward until the leather backing of the harness slammed flush against his heavy buttocks.
And then, after a few minutes of delicacy, the real show began.
In and out. In and out.
Thrusts becoming harder. Faster. Rougher.
"Good boy. You're taking it so well. I may give you a prize for it."
"Shut the hell up... you sadistic little shit!" he snarled through clenched teeth, though the insult was instantly robbed of any weight when his prostate was struck dead-on by the her dildo, forcing a high-pitched, helpless whine from his lips. His head thrashed frantically against the pillows.
Sabrina’s amusement was only fueled by his desperate, foul-mouthed defiance. All the while, her hand never stopped furiously masturbating him, and she leaned down, watching the chaotic, messy mechanics of their bodies intertwining.
"Oh, so this is what it looks like when you do it," she said, tilting her head to watch his abdominal muscles ripple and seize with every deep stroke she delivered.
"I'll... I'll kill you for this, Rina... ah, fuck... please, harder—!"
Sabrina was savoring every passing second of his undoing because seeing her stubborn, grumpy boyfriend surrender to her whim was the most delicious, intoxicating victory she had ever tasted. She hit his sweet spot repeatedly, her thrusts locking into a fierce, merciless tempo that sent a frantic sequence of heavy, guttural groans echoing off the bedroom walls.
The pleasure was becoming unbearable, a volatile, suffocating heat that short-circuited his very core.
The relieving pressure he so longed for was about to arrive.
He was close.
Very close...
So close that, suddenly, the tension snapped entirely.
He came with a deafening cry—easily the loudest, most earth-shattering moan of his entire life. The orgasm hit his body like a shockwave that caused his back to violently arch off the mattress, as thick, torrential ropes of cum erupted from his member. He came a lot—like a fucking lot—the white hot fluid painting his own stomach, her hands, and the surrounding sheets in a spectacular, unending release that seemed to defy the very laws of physics.
Then, the ringing silence of the room returned, broken only by the heavy, ragged sound of his breathing.
It was at that moment that Crocodile began to process what had just happened.
What the actual fuck.
For a long, quiet moment, they just stared blankly at each other. Both of them were wide-eyed, completely stunned, and quietly processing the fact that a creature like him was physically capable of producing sounds like that. Crocodile cleared his throat roughly, his dignity completely crushed in the wake of the awkward silence, while Sabrina blinked, a sudden, hilariously stunned expression replacing her previous smugness.
"Well," Sabrina finally whispered, her voice cracking slightly as she looked down at the massive mess. "Happy birthday to me."
Crocodile dragged his unmarred hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose, refusing to look her in the eye.
"We're never talking about this again."
With a triumphant smirk breaking across her face, she knew she didn't need him to admit his defeat. That outrageous orgasm had been loud enough to wake the dead, and the sheer volume of his release spoke far more than his stubborn pride ever could.
She knew he had liked it. In fact, he had liked it much more than he would ever, ever dare admit out loud. And for Sabrina, that was more than enough satisfaction.
In the weeks and months that followed that unforgettable October night, Crocodile held fast to his armor. If anyone had ever suggested to the fearsome Shichibukai of Alabasta that he enjoyed the sensation of being pegged, that person would have found themselves turned into a mummy. Yet, the barrier had been breached.
From that day on, the practice subtly wove its way into their sex life, always initiated under the guise of Crocodile's 'perfectly calculated' excuses.
"It's a special occasion," he would growl out. Or, more frequently, he would directly pin her against his desk, his large hand gripping her jaw as he muttered, "I'm only doing this just to make you shut your damn mouth."
Sabrina never argued. She simply sketched her wicked smile and reached for the lube bottle.
Because his façade would never allow him to do otherwise, it only happened occasionally. But whenever it did happen, it drove Crocodile absolutely crazy. The intoxicating contrast of his massive body riding his beloved’s silicone cock, or losing his mind as she aggressively sucked his length while stretching him open with her fingers, were some vices he couldn't shake.
Often, even when they were locked in missionary position, with his colossal frame pinning her to the mattress and filling her completely, Sabrina would slide her fingers inside his hole while he was fucking her.
Of course, if she ever asked him about it afterward while they lay tangled in the ruined sheets, the most Crocodile would ever concede was a dismissive, gruff mumble:
"It's not that terrible."
Ultimately, it was a delicious secret that belonged solely to them. A scandalous boundary that no one else in the world would ever know.
Sir Crocodile, the Hero of Alabasta, who enjoyed being pegged by his girlfriend's strap-on.
CWs: angst, suggestive, not smut but descriptions of sexual intercourse, chemical submission, alcohol.
WORDCOUNT: +10000 words
Author's note: I think you're gonna kill me for this one lmao. Btw, I'll write one more side story! It's going to be quite short (smut, btw). It's about Sabrina's birthday, and I was practically forced to write it because of my Twitter moots' encouragement HASHAGAHAHA. Little spoiler: the pegging train will arrive into station very soon.
My One Piece writing masterlist! Check for part twelve and the rest!
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Girl I want to die with you
In each others arms
If this time was the last time
Could I hold you, hold you
Hold you all life long?
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Ever since that morning when she had slipped away from his bed, Sabrina had been a ghost. Three entire days had bled away, and her prolonged absence started to threaten Crocodile's sanity.
Now, it was the fourth day, with only three days left on the countdown.
And to make matters infinitely worse, today she had completely vanished from the grid. The previous days, she had at least picked up his calls, saying something like, "I don't really feel like talking. But I'm fine." Today? Not even that anymore.
"Fuck!" Crocodile suddenly snarled, violently slamming the receiver down against the shell of the Den Den Mushi. The poor creature whimpered, pulling its eyes entirely inside its shell as the heavy brass cracked against the wood. "She still doesn't answer. What the hell is wrong with her? Does she really think she can just disappear in a moment like this?!"
From the other side of the office, Nico Robin—Miss All Sunday—sat quietly in her usual leather armchair, a closed dossier resting on her lap as she watched him, her expression entirely unreadable.
He's lost his mind.
The exhaustive investigation against Cain Barton had consumed the entire organization. In those forty-eight hours, the entirety of the Millions and Billions had been mobilized across the kingdom—the largest, most aggressive manhunt in Baroque Works' history. Crocodile had pulled his heavy hitters off their designated sectors; even Mr. 5, Miss Valentine, and his most trusted, lethal enforcer, Mr. 1 (and, of course, his partner, Miss Doublefinger), were currently combing the back alleys and border towns.
Spinning on his heel, his dark eyes burning with a volatile, unhinged malice, Crocodile directed his furious attention to his vice-president. "Any news, Miss All Sunday?"
"I'm afraid there is still no sign of him, Mr. 0," she responded. "He vanished from the casino complex without even resigning. The Billions agents have combed every tavern, alleyway, and black-market safehouse near Rainbase or Alubarna, and they haven't been able to find a single trace. He may have already fled to another city entirely."
All he could respond was a let out a curse under his breath, his temper snapping entirely. Not content with that, his rage led him to slam his massive right fist onto the mahogany desk, the sheer force of the blow splintering the polished wood.
Meanwhile, the reaction of his loyal vice-president was quite diferent, as a small, entirely inappropriate smirk played at the corner of her lips. "Not very intelligent of him," she joked smoothly, her voice dripping with her trademark dark humor. "He could have at least collected his severance pay."
Silence.
The room temperature seemed to drop instantly. Apparently, he did not take the joke well.
A murderous glare darted from his pupils and pierced Robin's eyes, a sandstorm bursting inside of him that seemed like he could dry the very moisture out of the air. He stepped out from behind the desk and approached her fast and smooth like a hunter, and, before she could even adjust her posture, Crocodile violently raised his gleaming golden hook, bringing the lethal, curved steel dangerously close to her throat.
"Do you find this amusing?" he hissed as he towered over her. "Do you think a cockroach like you has the right to make such a tasteless joke at a moment like this? I wouldn't hesitate to kill you right now if I wanted, Nico Robin."
The way he pronounced her name seemed like a reminder of the bounty on her head and the power he held over her existence. Robin took a few slow, cautious steps back, her eyes narrowing, letting out a soft, faint tsk through her teeth, her chest tightening slightly against the oppressive weight of his bloodlust. However, the woman refused to show true intimidation.
“She would have laughed at the joke,” Robin thought dryly.
But she kept the thought safely locked behind her teeth.
"May I remind you," Crocodile continued, taking a step further, the tip of his hook practically humming against the bare skin of her neck, "that it was you who hired that miserable piece of shit that now is threatening the future queen of this kingdom? I have plenty of reasons to turn you into a pile of dust right now, so watch what you say."
The edge of the hook moved even closer to the delicate line of her neck, threatening to sink into her skin.
Miss All Sunday maintained her absolute composure, though a single, cold drop of sweat ran slowly down her cheek.
"It wouldn't be very wise of you to wipe the key piece of your intelligence network off the map if you want to resolve this situation, Mr. 0 Crocodile," she replied calmly, her voice a steady anchor against his storm.
Crocodile opened his mouth to roar another threat, but the words died in his throat. His jaw clutched until the bone ached. There was nothing he could say, and, as much as he hated it, she was right. She was the most valuable, irreplaceable pawn on his board, and destroying her out of petty, terrified spite would only seal Sabrina's death warrant. He let out a heavy, defeated sigh, lowering his hook and stepping back into the shadows of the desk.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Keep looking. Dig deeper. I want every informant, every contact, every whisper about Barton. I don’t care what it costs.”
Now released, she just quietly adjusted the collar of her coat, watching him closely. It was as if he was completely possessed, driven mad by an obsession that violated the very essence of him.
But it was no wonder. Robin knew firsthand what that woman meant to him. She had witnessed the Shichibukai's devotion to that lady and knew better than anyone that she was his weak point.
That crossroads simply had to be painful for him.
Frustrated, Crocodile aggressively tore his eyes away from Robin. He strode back to his desk, his large fingers trembling slightly from the sheer force of his suppressed adrenaline. He reached out for the battered Den Den Mushi once more, grabbing the speaker to make a sixth, desperate attempt.
He dialed the numbers with a violent finality, preparing himself for another empty, maddening silence.
Purupurupurupuru...
And, as the snail gave its mechanical ring, Crocodile held his breath, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Click.
Almost like a miracle, the snail’s features suddenly transformed, its little clay face sketching a cheerful smile. The line was open.
"Heeello? Who's theere?"
The small Den Den Mushi on Crocodile’s desk suddenly mimicked a dynamic tilt of its head, as the light, sing-song greeting drifted through the line. Sabrina sounded completely oblivious to the catastrophic storm brewing on the other end, her tone so dizzyingly playful it felt entirely surreal given the circumstances.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY 'WHO'S THERE?'? WHO DO YOU THINK IS THERE? I'VE BEEN CALLING THE WHOLE DAY, FOR FUCK'S SAKE."
Sabrina winced slightly but kept her tone light and teasing. “Oh, my big scary boyfriend sounds so grumpy today. Have you run out of tobacco or what?"
“Don’t you dare joke right now!” he snarled through the speaker. “You disappear from my sight without an explanation, push me away for seventy-two hours, ignore my calls, and now you’re acting like everything’s fine? I’ve been losing my mind worrying about you! Do you think this is a game?!"
But he abruptly cut himself off, as his sharp ears picked up a strange, chaotic symphony from the background of Sabrina's call—the loud shouting of merchants, the clinking of coins, and the general, bustling hubbub of a crowded public space.
"What the hell is that noise, Rina? Where are you?"
"Oh, this?" Sabrina replied airily, the sound of her rustling through a paper bag echoing over the wire. "I'm just at the market running some errands, you dummie. I ran out of my favorite kohl, and I needed some spices, tea, fresh fruit… the usual. Maybe I'll end up buying some overpriced perfume too. You know that spending lifts my spirits."
"The market?! A psychopath is threatening to drag you to an execution platform in four days and your out shopping for fucking EYELINER AND TEA? Three days ago, you had a psychological breakdown in my arms! You were weeping, terrified, looking like the world was ending! And because of that, I tried to give you your space! No matter if I walked all the way to your house to check on you, only for you to slam the door in my face, I still respected your space. And now you are wandering around a bazaar acting like everything is completely fine?!"
Sabrina’s lips twitched with a tired, almost fond smile despite the ache in her chest. She could hear the genuine concern beneath his anger. It made her heart twist, but she kept her voice light
“Wow, someone’s in a mood,” she teased.
Crocodile let out a frustrated growl. “This isn’t funny, damn it! I’m serious. Come home. Now. We need to talk about this. We need to—”
Click.
The Den Den Mushi’s eyes snapped shut. The line went completely dead. She had hung up on him.
A heavy, unholy silence descended upon the room. Robin slowly covered her mouth with a hand, her shoulders trembling with a suppressed, highly amused silent laugh.
"Did she... did that insolent harpy just cut my transmission?" Crocodile whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying blend of shock and volcanic rage. He slammed the receiver down so hard the desk leg splintered further. "I swear to God! If Barton doesn't kill her on the seventh day, I am going to do it first!"
The truth, however, was far detached from the playful facade Sabrina had just spun over the wire.
Ever since she had left Crocodile's bed two days prior, she had been drowning in a suffocating swamp of depression and anxiety. When she had initially returned to her flat, her heart had stopped upon finding the "little gift" she had found. Slipped quietly beneath her front door sat a pristine note. The handwriting was unmistakable:
"On the seventh day, we will meet in front of the Rainbase gate at dawn. Don't try anything funny."
No signaturee was needed. Furthermore, the letter had confirmed another of her absolute worst fears: he knew exactly where she lived.
The discovery had entirely paralyzed her. Sabrina had spent those three days trapped inside her flat in a completely decrepit state, barely eating, crying until her chest ached, desperately trying to map out alternative strategies to escape the noose.
Millions of 'What if's' had swirled in her head.
But every single simulation led to total failure.
Due to the mental exhaustion, Sabrina had found herself completely unable to leave her apartment or spend any time with Crocodile. Even when he had unexpectedly shown up at her house, standing on her porch out of genuine concern for her well-being, she had rejected him, turning him away because she simply lacked the energy to pretend everything was okay. And she refused to break down in front of him again either.
Despite everything, deep down, Sabrina knew perfectly well that she wasn't doing things right with her boyfriend.
Because of that, she had forced the tears to dry. She had decided to play smart.
By noon of this third day, she finally felt a spark of her old strength return. Putting on a brave face, she stepped out into the world, finally ready to to resume 'civilized life', to get dressed up, tidy up the house a bit, do the shopping and not let bad moods paralyze her life.
And perhaps she would compensate the Shichibukai for having behaved that way towards him...
Now, she stood deep within the vibrant labyrinth of the market, carrying a lot of bags, stopped before a humble stall that sold herbs of all kinds. The older merchant woman behind the counter observed Sabrina with an expression of pure astonishment; the lady's elegant, pristine appearance looked somehow out of place amidst the dusty, sweat-soaked atmosphere of the common bazaar.
"A-Achoo!" Sabrina sneezed softly, slightly overwhelmed by the dense, scent of the floral infusions radiating from the wooden bins. Because the blooms were entirely dried and pressed, her usual allergies weren't triggered into a full-blown attack—it was nothing but a minor annoyance.
The old merchant woman smiled warmly, wiping her hands on her faded apron. “Can I help you, young lady?”
"Yes, please," Sabrina replied, offering a warm, perfectly serene smile. "I'll take some black mint tea, dried thornapples and a few vanilla pods. And... are those coffee beans from the South Blue?"
"Nothing more and nothing less than that, Miss."
Sabrina’s smile softened into something genuinely happy. That was Crocodile's favorite coffee—the specific blend he refused to live without. It had become a sacred ritual for them; on the mornings after she stayed with him, they would always share a fresh pot, talking peacefully about nothing at all in the quiet dawn while exchanging lingering stares and soft smiles.
"Wonderful. Add a bag of that, please," she finally said.
As the woman turned to gather the items, Sabrina's sharp golden eyes swept across the wooden counter, landing on a specific jar of crushed, dark purple roots. Her gaze lingered on it for a heavy, calculated second. "Oh, and... give me a pouch of that herb as well."
The old woman froze, turning around slowly. Her eyes narrowed with deep caution. "It's kind of strong, young lady. Even the authorities have debated whether or not to ban it from the markets. You sure you know what you’re getting?"
Sabrina nodded with a smile. “I already know, madam. I’ve had some trouble sleeping recently. I need something that actually works.”
The woman studied her for a moment, then shrugged and began measuring out the herbs. “Well... Consume it responsibly, dear."
Sabrina took the bag with her stuff, paid the woman, and calmly disappeared into the swirling crowd.
As she walked away, the cheerful mask she had worn for Crocodile slipped completely. Her shoulders sagged. Her steps grew heavier.
She had three days left.
════ ☆ °.⋆༺ 𓋹 ༻⋆.° ☆ ════
Another day passed amidst the agonizing countdown that felt like a noose tightening around the week.
Another day without knowing absolutely nothing about Sabrina.
Inside the walls of his headquarters, Crocodile had officially lost his mind.
He had barely slept. All he could care about was to solve that situation as quick as possible.
But whatever was going on with Sabrina wasn't exactly helping.
That woman was getting on his absolute last nerve, and his desire to confront her had turned into a burning obsession. Why was the reason of such a childish behaviour? Crocodile didn't know. And as much as he wanted to understand what was going on inside of her head, he was unable to do so.
As the anxious Warlord stormed across the marble floor of his office, his mind was conjuring the lecture he would give her the moment he saw her.
Who the hell does she think she is, playing hide-and-seek while that man's blade hangs over our heads?
Meanwhile, entirely detached from the Warlord’s brewing volcanic eruption, Sabrina was taking her sweet time at her apartment.
The entire afternoon had consisted of her meticulously doing her makeup, drawing her sharp eyeliner with an unbothered precision, before slipping into a gown she knew Crocodile lost his shit for. It was a stunning mid-length dress of rich emerald silk that hugged her curves, featuring a modest high neck and ornamental satin detailing that would shimmer under the casino's opulent lighting.
Balanced in her arms was a heavy silver tray, the contents of which had kept her trapped in her kitchen for the entire morning. A slightly wicked smirk crossed her lips as she adjusted her grip. This ridiculous 'housewife roleplay' was exhausting, but Sabrina, just thinking about the look on his face when he saw it, knew it was going to be totally worth it.
By the time evening bled across the Alabastian sky, casting long, violet shadows over the neon lights of Rainbase, Sabrina finally arrived at the Rain Dinners casino.
Approaching the executive elevator, as soon as she was just about to step into it, a familiar, smooth voice stopped her in her tracks.
“Wait for me.”
The slender and elegant figure slipped inside with graceful ease, offering Sabrina a warm, knowing smile.
"Well, look who has decided to return from the ether," Robin greeted her smoothly, stepping into the carriage as the doors slid shut, continuing their descent to the second basement.
"Hi, Sundae!" Sabrina greeted back, a bright, easy smile instantly snapping onto her face.
The nickname had stuck a while ago. In fact, Sabrina had ridiculous, unauthorized nicknames for practically all of the Baroque Works agents she had ever met—Mr. 1 (who she met most often, right after Miss All Sunday) was 'Cue ball', Miss Valentine was 'Limoncella', and Mr. 5 was 'the Booger Guy'. Crocodile, of course, loathed the habit, which only made Sabrina do it more.
Miss All Sunday's blue eyes swept down Sabrina's outfit, a knowing, amused glint flickering within them. "What a lovely dress you've perched yourself in today."
Sabrina grinned, doing a little spin. “Pretty, isn't it? I call it the 'Apology Dress' for a reason."
Robin chuckled, falling into step beside her as they walked down the corridor. “Do I even want to know the reason?”
"Maybe not. But I'll just say last time I wore it, the apology lasted until four in the morning, and he completely forgot why he was mad at me in the first place."
In response, Robin immediately held up a hand, a look of comical, mock-horror crossing her face as she laughed. "Please, stop right there. I'm begging."
"Fine, fine! Selective censorship from now on," Sabrina giggled, though her smile faltered slightly as the elevator clicked past the final guest floors. She lowered her voice, leaning in closer to Robin. "But seriously... tell me the truth. Is the bossy-boss very angry?"
Robin said nothing, but the instantaneous shift in her expression gave Sabrina all the information she needed. She made a deliberate, highly expressive face—her eyebrows shooting up as she skewed her mouth in a universal look of you have no fucking idea. It was more than answer enough.
Sabrina let out a defeated groan, burying her nose slightly against the rim of the tray. "Man," she sighed, "he's going to kill me. I’ve been such an avoidant little shit these last few days, and he’s probably rehearsing the world’s longest lecture right now."
The woman chuckled softly at the comment, but as her laughter subsided, her sharp eyes drifted downward, focusing entirely on the heavy silver cloche Sabrina was balancing. "And what are you carrying in there?"
"It's a surprise!" Sabrina responded instantly, snapping her posture back up and placing her index finger over her lips with a bright smile.
Suddenly, once they reached the second basement level, the elevator gave a soft, mechanical chime, doors beginning to slide open, revealing the quiet, heavily carpeted executive corridor.
But just as Sabrina prepared to step out, Robin moved with such a fluid, terrifyingly silent grace that made Sabrina unable to even notice her path had been blocked by the vice-president.
When Robin spoke against her ear, her voice still sounded perfectly calm and friendly, but beneath the surface, Sabrina sensed a current that was as cold and sharp as steel.
"I know exactly what you're up to."
The silence that followed felt like a knife against Sabrina's throat.
However, as the unparalleled gambler she was, her expression had become an unwavering, perfect poker face. She played the fool perfectly, tilting her head back to offer Robin a sweet, utterly oblivious smile, even though beneath her ribs, her heart had stopped completely, cold dread flooding her veins.
"Me?" she murmured airily, her voice smooth as glass. "I don't know what you're talking about, Sundae."
Silence stretched between them, thick and unyielding, as Robin stared deep into her golden eyes, searching for the crack in the facade. Finally, the taller woman slowly withdrew her hand, her expression returning to that of the elegant, unreadable Miss All Sunday.
Without another word, Robin turned and walked down the corridor toward the massive mahogany entrance of the office.
She pushed the door open just wide enough to peek her head inside, her voice dripping with a playful, secret amusement. "Mr. 0? You've got a visitor."
"I told you I am not accepting any—" Crocodile began, his voice rising in irritation as he sat behind his mountain of paperwork, but he cut himself off the moment Sabrina stepped into the room, the green silk of her dress rustling softly.
After whispering "Good luck" in Sabrina's ear, the vice-president of Baroque Works disappeared into the corners of the hallway.
Crocodile’s jaw locked. He immediately tried to summon the furious, world-ending lecture he had spent all morning planning in his head. He tried—really tried—to look annoyed, his eyes narrowing into sharp slits, although the sight of her wasn't making things very easy. "Look who's finally deigned to show up," he muttered.
Sabrina took a few steps further into the room, holding the silver tray tightly against her chest. She giggled nervously, her eyes tracking the rigid, tense posture of the man across the room. "Hi."
"What is that?" he snapped. He abruptly looked away from her, aggressively grabbing a leather-bound ledger and flipping through the pages, feigning a professional disinterest.
It was a total lie. The moment she had walked through that door, his heart had begun to hammer violently against his ribs, a heavy, pounding rhythm of pure relief. It had been so damn long since he had seen her face, and the sight of her in that emerald dress completely scrambled his ability to think straight. But he refused to let her see him soften.
"Tiramisu," Sabrina said simply.
It hit him like a dog whistle.
His hand froze over the paperwork as his eyes snapped back up, his pupils dilating by a fraction of a millimeter as the scent of coffee and mascarpone finally drifted across the desk. It was his absolute favorite dessert, a vice he rarely permitted himself but fiercely coveted.
Seeing the instantaneous shift in his posture, Sabrina couldn’t help but laugh, the musical sound cutting through the thick layer of tension in the room. "Made of that South Blue coffee you like so much, too. So don't you dare find fault with it."
Crocodile tried to stand firm, but the hopeful, almost childlike gleam that suddenly ignited in the dark depths of his eyes betrayed him.
"I'm sorry for being such a bitch. I needed time alone to think and... organize my thoughts. But that wasn't the way. It wasn't fair for you," Sabrina apologized gently, her voice softening as she stepped closer. She extended the heavy tray toward him like a peace offering. "Forgive me? Pretty please?"
Crocodile stared at the silver cover, then up at her beautiful, expectant smile. He forced his expression to harden again, setting aside his pen but refusing to take the fork. "Well... I guess I can taste some later. Right now, I'm a little busy."
Sabrina didn't seem deterred in the slightest. "Oh, you always say you're busy."
With an entirely unbothered grace, she set the silver tray down directly on top of a pile of tax ledgers, slid herself backward, and sat right on the edge of his mahogany desk, swinging her legs lightly.
Crocodile leaned back in his leather chair, crossing his massive arms over his chest. "We need to talk, Rina. This little disappearing act of yours... it's pushing me to the absolute brink. Do you have any idea what the last days have been like?"
"I can imagine you've been a little grumpy," she murmured, adjusting one of her gold earrings casually.
"Grumpy?" Crocodile’s voice rose like an edge cutting through the air. "I mobilized the entire organisation. Every single agent from the Millions to the highest Officer Agents are combing the desert. Mr. 1, Miss Doublefinger, Mr. 2... they are all on the dirt. And yet, there is still no clue about Barton. The bastard has completely erased his footprint from Rainbase. And I am running blind, the clock is ticking down to the seventh day, and I've had zero news about you in three days. I guess I'm grumpy, yes."
He braced himself for her to shrink back, to panic, or to break down over the mention of her past tormentor.
Instead, Sabrina just tilted her head, her expression entirely serene, almost breezy as she dusted a imaginary speck of flour from her knee. "Well that sounds very like him. You would expect a rat to hide. But honestly, Crocodile, you're stressing yourself out over nothing. Everything is going to be solved anyway."
Crocodile froze. He stared at her, completely taken by surprise. "What did you just say?" he muttered, his brow furrowing in deep bewilderment. "Are you listening to yourself? We're talking about the very man that got your crew killed and whose name gave you a panick attack, and now you're acting like it's a minor inconvenience."
"Because I've realised that's what it is," Sabrina explained smoothly, leaning slightly forward. "These past days, I've just been sitting in my apartment, thinking about the whole situation. And I finally concluded that there’s no point in dwelling on it or making myself miserable. It wastes energy."
He frowned instinctively.
"You've been acting strange as hell," he reproached, his voice harsh, as his left eyebrow raised with skepticism. "I don't believe you for a second. You'd better not be plotting anything."
Faced with her boyfriend's distrust and disbelief, Sabrina couldn't stop her heart from racing, but she couldn't let him see that weakness. What she needed to do at that moment was anything but transmit insecurity to him.
Therefore, Sabrina reached out, her fingers gently brushing against his hand, And her eyes fixed deeply on his with utter solemnity. “I'm not, Crocodile. You know I've never lied to you before," she said. "It's just that I've got faith in you. No matter what happens, I know you’ll find a way to deal with him. You always do. We' ll do together."
Crocodile let out a groan in response, nodding his head stiffly as he pulled his hand back, though his gaze remained fiercely locked onto hers. "I envy that childlike optimism of yours."
"Oh, don't be like that," Sabrina chipped in cheerfully. Suddenly, she leaned across the desk, her arms wrapping securely around his massive neck. "Besides, how can I possibly be intimidated? I have my dearest, strongest boyfriend in the world to protect me!"
As she threw herself into the hug, she shifted her weight on the desk, completely unbothered by the loud, tragic crinkle of paper beneath her.
"Rina—" Crocodile choked out, his hands automatically coming up to steady her waist out of sheer instinct. Then, his eyes dropped to the paperwork beneath her hips. "You're crumping the reports with your ass."
"They're just papers! You can print more!" she laughed into his neck, squeezing him tighter.
Under normal circumstances, anyone who dared touch his desk—let alone ruin his paperwork—would have been dried into a pile of dust before they could draw another breath. However, while he found her sudden, bubbly attitude odd, almost bizarre given the sheer terror she had felt days prior, he was simply too exhausted and too drained by the agony of her absence to even complain.
All he could bring himself to care about right now was the physical reality of her presence. She was here. She was within arm's reach. He could see her, touch her, keep her under his eye.
With a heavy, trembling sigh, Crocodile finally dropped his defenses. He buried his massive right hand deep into his dark hair, a desperate gesture of pure exhaustion that he would never allow anyone else in the world to witness.
Suddenly, Sabrina's cheerful facade softened, a deep warmth bleeding into her expression as she pulled back just enough to look down into his tired face. She reached up, gently cupping his scarred cheek with her soft hand, her voice dropping into a tender, yet firm 'worried-lecture' tone.
"Look at you," she whispered, her thumb tracing the rough skin beneath his eye. "You're so tired, Croc. You should rest a little."
Crocodile slowly raised his head, the heavy hand that had been buried in his dark hair dropping back to the desk. He looked up at her with a thoroughly undone gaze—the most vulnerable, raw, and unshielded he had looked in ages.
He then locked his tired eyes onto hers, his voice turning serious but serene.
"Karina."
She froze.
"I need to make sure we're on the same line."
Sabrina swallowed the lump of sudden panic rising in her throat, forcing her posture to remain steady as she sat on the edge of the desk. "I'm all ears," she responded, her voice dropping its breezy cadence, matching his solemnity.
"I know you don't want this," Crocodile began, his gravelly voice remarkably steady despite the exhaustion rolling off him. "But, In case we run out of options, I need you to be aware of our only alternatives."
Sabrina swallowed hard, her golfen eyes wide as she watched his face, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
"If by the seventh day we haven't figured out any strategy to solve this, there are only two options," Crocodile stated firmly, leaning in closer to her. "If we find Barton, I will kill him myself and face whatever consequences follow. I will confront any government agent investigating my status, cipher pol or otherwise."
Sabrina’s mouth fell slightly agape, completely speechless, the breath knocked entirely out of her. Her mind raced, paralyzed by the sheer weight of his words; stating that he would blow his cover, risk his hard-earned Shichibukai title, and wage a physical war against the World Government just to protect her.
But before she could even formulate a protest, Crocodile continued, his gaze drilling straight into her soul.
"The other option is... We'll run away together."
Run away? Was he serious?
The way he said that hinted that he was but, how on Earth did he intend to run away? To where?
All Sabrina could do in response was staring at him, her lips trembling as she tried to comprehend the sheer scale of what he was offering. "But... but you'll lose everything you've built here," she whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of her disbelief. "Baroque Works, Operation Utopia, your dream, your status... you'll lose everything."
"It doesn't matter anymore," Crocodile replied instantly, without a single shred of hesitation or regret in his voice.
But...
"I don't care what the future holds if I can share it with you."
A profound, heavy silence fell between them, wrapping around the desk like a thick blanket. Sabrina stared down at his restless, intense gaze, utterly captivated and deeply shaken by the magnitude of his devotion. The man who had spent his entire life rejecting vulnerability, the man who valued power and ambition above all human contact, was willingly offering to throw it all into the sea just to keep her breathing.
Because, once again, that man had left his armor behind for her.
"What I need is for you to trust me no matter what."
Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was sorrow. But all she knew was that some sort of concern, like a wave, crashed over her, and she slowly nodded, offering a gentle, soft smile as she leaned down toward him.
"I trust you," she assured softly.
But deep down, it was a lie.
Deep down, she had already made her choice.
Sabrina was unable to reveal the truth to him, to tell Crocodile about the letter she had found that morning on the door, about the inevitability of her fate.
But right now, looking at his broken, desperate face, shattering his hope seemed more bitter than anyting else. She didn't know where she found the strength to pull herself together, but she offered him the best and warmest of smiles.
Even if it was just a mask.
Leaning in, Sabrina gently pressed her lips against his scarred cheek, lingering for a long, sweet moment to soothe the tension in his skin.
When she finally pulled away, she paused for a beat, her eyes gleaming with a sudden, mischievous light as she brought both of her index fingers up to the corners of his lips.
"Worrying won't solve anything. You need to smile a little bit!" She then said, suddenly pressing her fingers upwards and forcing a really awkward grin on his mouth.
"Don't you ever dare to do that again in your miserable life, or else..." he began to complain, or at least, as best he could while his lips remained motionless, forced into a smile by her fingertips.
She then released him.
"Or else what? Will you lock me in that giant cage you have back there?" She scoffed in response, leaning back just enough to point to the distant Kairoseki cage that was indeed located at the back of the Shichibukai's office.
Sabrina had complained repeatedly about how out of place that monstruosity was with the room's decor. But he couldn't happen to care less.
Deciding that he had endured enough torture, Sabrina finally placed a tender kiss on the scarred bridge of his nose.
Crocodile let out a low, tired sigh as she pulled back, the rough corner of his mouth twitching slightly. "You're being sweet on purpose to make me calm down. But neither that nor the 'Apology Dress' are gonna work this time, by the way," he murmured quietly, his eyes drifting down to the green silk before looking back up at her. "I'm still mad."
"That's why I brought the 'Apology Tiramisu' too," she countered with a radiant smile, her fingers lifting the silver cloche, revealing the flawless, cocoa-dusted dessert. "Come on. Have some."
Instead of handing him the fork, Sabrina took a delicate bite-sized portion herself. Right after, she leaned forward and gently guided the silver fork to his lips.
The moment the flavor hit his tongue, Crocodile’s entire face lit up with the joy of a child.
"Is it good?" Sabrina asked, her voice dropping into a tender, melodic hum as she watched his reaction with a soft, knowing smile.
"It's fucking delicious," Crocodile growled out, a rare swear of satisfaction escaping his lips. "I love it."
"Thank god," she said. "If that hadn't worked, I would have been left with no other ways to make you forgive me."
"I didn't say I've forgiven you yet."
"You sound like you already did."
As he took the second bite, Crocodile's heart was suddenly filled with so much tenderness that he felt a physical tightening in his throat, feeling like he might cry, although no tears fell from his hardened eyes.
In that fleeting, golden moment, surrounded by the crumpled papers and the dim lamplight, Crocodile felt an unshakeable, profound truth settle into his bones: everything that actually mattered in this miserable, chaotic world was right here in this room with him. It was just him, and the woman he loved more than his own ambition. Every single thing that threatened to destroy their peace seemed to evaporate into nothingness, locked outside the office doors.
He couldn't help but smile as he licked his lips, savouring the remnants of that dessert that tasted just like a lover's kiss.
"Hey Rina, aren't you going to try it?" Crocodile then asked, his eyes darting from the remaining layers of the tiramisu from the tray up to her face, a rare, teasing smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. "I mean it, it's pretty good. I'm even surprised a walking disaster like you knows how to use a kitchen."
Sabrina waved a hand dismissively, her laughter bubbling out, light and entirely unbothered. "Oh, I'm fine. I already ate half the mascarpone straight from the mixing bowl while I was preparing it. Quality control, you know."
Crocodile let out a low, genuine laugh that crinkled the edges of his horizontal scar. Why of course, he thought.
After he finished the last bite, the man reached into his pocket and produced one of his thick cigars. Once he had delicately placed it between his lips, Crocodile lit it with one of the matches he kept in his desk drawer.
“You’re impossible,” he murmured while letting out a cloud of smoke, traving the elegant line of her dress with a gaze that seemed to suggest everything but innocence. “Disappearing for days, making me worry myself absolutely sick, and then showing up looking like that with my favorite dessert. What am I supposed to do with you?”
As a response, Sabrina leaned in closer, her smile turning wicked and mischievous. She slid off the edge of the desk, her knees brushing against his thighs as she parted his legs, straddling him, letting him feel the warmth of her breath against his lips.
Right after, the woman reached out and gently plucked the cigar from between his fingers, and then, she brought it to her own mouth, wrapping her lips around the exact spot his had been, and took a slow puff from it without taking her eyes off his pupils for a single second.
And, of course, Crocodile was far from immune to what he was seeing, to her lips barely a breath away, to the smoke being exhaled directly from her mouth against his. His body betrayed him; a deep burning sensation took hold of him, heat pooling low in his stomach.
“Love me anyway?” she then whispered with a voice that feigned innocence but completely lacked it, as the hazed curled between them.
Crocodile let out a tired, fond laugh, low and rough in his chest. He licked his lips slowly, tasting the faint trace of smoke and her own scent. His hook wrapped around her waist, pulling her fully onto his lap.
“You little thief,” he rasped, eyes half-lidded as he watched her. “Stealing my cigar, stealing my sanity…”
The Shichibukai then tried to reach for the cigar with his good hand. However, she was faster, and, with a playful giggle, grabbed his hand with her free one, intentionally pressing it firmly against the bare skin of her thigh.
"Ah, ah, ah," Sabrina hummed.
At the same time, Crocodile's fingers instinctively flexed against her softness.
"Come on," he grumbled, pathetically failing at hiding his arousal. "Give it back."
“I don’t think so,” Sabrina murmured, leaning in close enough to brush her nose against his. She smiled against his lips, shifting her weight deliberately, pressing herself against the growing hardness she could already feel beneath her.
That green dress did very little to create a barrier between the delicate fabric of her underwear and the tent she was sitting on, and that was all the incentive Sabrina needed to keep outplaying him.
“I think you actually prefer to smoke this way," she said sweetly.
With a teasing little tap, she guided the cigar back between his lips.
“Come on, take a puff."
Before inhaling the tobacco and taking a drag, Crocodle kept his lips still for a second, he observed Sabrina's lips intently, analyzing that damned, twisted, red lipstick-stained smile, while his flesh hand on her thigh began to move.
Slowly... tortuously slowly... his large palm slid upward.
Closer and closer to her warm inner thigh.
Sliding beneath the hem of her dress.
Making Sabrina's body involuntarily twitch against his groin.
“Brat,” he rasped, but there was no real heat in the complaint. He then deigned to take a drag, inhaling deeply before exhaling a thick cloud directly against her slightly parted lips, the smoke obscuring her vision for a split second. "You keep this up, and I’m going to strip that dress right off your body with my bare teeth."
His fingers continued their ascent until they reached her underwear, slightly caressing the border of her panties.
Sabrina shivered, and the dampness between her thighs was becoming impossible to hide from Crocodile's fingers, which were slowly approaching her sensitive areas.
Consequently, he felt another subtle, helpless shudder of her hips, causing his erection to throb, growing even harder, pressing mercilessly against her.
"Thought you said the dress wasn't gonna work this time," Sabrina gasped out, her playful confidence wavering for a fraction of a second.
"Someone's got to teach you a lesson if you don't behave yourself."
His fingers began to stroke her through the damp, thin fabric of her underwear. As a soft moan escaped her throat, Sabrina blindly pressed the cigar back to his lips, letting him smoke to keep his mouth occupied to not to hear another cocky teasing comment from him.
Suddenly, her own hand darted downward. Her fingers wrapped firmly around his crotch, gripping the throbbing length of his cock that felt as though it were about to burst through the zipper of his pants as Crocodle miserably failed to retain a muffled moan.
"I'd like to see you try."
That was the spark that lit his fuse. Crocodile didn't think twice; after his hand snatched the cigar and crushed the glowing ember ruthlessly into the crystal ashtray on his desk, he decided he already had enough teasing.
With a rapid and smooth motion, before she could even tell, Sabrina had been pinned against the table amidst a pile of disorganized and crumpled papers that didn't seem to matter to its owner anymore.
Because, of course, said owner was already devouring her mouth in a kiss that was deep, messy and tasting of smoke.
“I must warn you,” he rasped as he broke the kiss for a moment, frantically trying to undo his zipper in a desperate and clumsy movement that didn't even try to hide his eagerness, “don’t expect me at my finest performance. I’m tired as hell.”
Sabrina let out a soft, breathless laugh.
“You always say that,” she whispered, her voice trembling with anticipation. “And you always end up leaving my legs shaking anyway.”
Not even two seconds had passed since Sabrina said that when Crocodile's mouth crashed against hers once more, and the woman succumbed into the embrace, her body physically aching for his touch, her hands clawing at the muscles of his back with a wild, almost frantic urgency.
After a while, Sabrina's green dress had been left discarded in some forgotten corner of the floor, to which later, between a heated whirlwind of foreplay, was added some of her lover's clothes.
That night, on the chaotic stage that was the surface of his desk, what began as something wild and harsh transformed into a burning manifestation of the longing and devotion they felt for each other. That night, they made love in a way that felt entirely different from the usual nights they spent together.
Crocodile whispered her name like a prayer, over and over as his hips thrusted into her heathen, slick walls, burying his face in her neck as if he wanted to become one with her so the world could never separate them.
"Please, never leave my side. Never."
While their heartbeats seemed to synchronize amidst sighs, moans, and furtive declarations of love, Sabrina's eyes never left his, as if she, under the fear of never being able to see it again, wanted to memorize the light behind his pupils, the desperate gaze of a man hopelessly in love, with which only he looked at her. It was as if every touch of her lips, every sweaty, hot body-on-body piece of friction, carried the terrible knowledge that this might be the last time she felt him like this—warm, alive, hers.
That night when they made love was perhaps one of the best ones of their lives. And that night when they made love was like a physical poetry that felt dangerously like a farewell as well.
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Before they knew it, the sixth day had arrived.
Only one day remained. One single, merciless day that would decide everything.
Sabrina had left his headquarters that morning despite Crocodile’s insistent protests. He had wanted her to stay at Rain Dinners, where he could keep her within arm’s reach, but she had refused with that stubborn, gentle smile of hers, claiming she had chores to attend to in her apartment. An explanation, of course, Crocodile hadn't quite understood.
What chores? What could be more important than staying safe under his direct protection, especially with a blade pointed directly at her throat? Yet, he hadn't forced her. He had been with her long enough to realize that if Sabrina set her mind on something, not even one of his sermons could stop her. She was, without a doubt, the most stubborn woman he had ever met.
Still, the unease gnawed at him all morning.
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Thus, on the morning of the sixth day, Sabrina found herself back in the quiet solitude of her own apartment, and immediately got to work.
A wave of guilt washed over her as her gaze fell upon the glass jar resting on the counter of her kitchen. Inside were those strange, dubiously legal herbs she had bought at the market, left to macerate in isolation.
During her previous life as a pirate, the absence of a proper ship doctor had forced her to take care of her companions' health as best she could, a necessity that quickly turned her passing interest in herbal medicine into expertise. Sabrina was, by all accounts, a poison expert. She knew a great deal about them; enemies had tried to poison Seth hundreds of times to collect his bounty, and through those trials, she had learned to distinguish almost any toxin just by analyzing its symptoms, its odor, its texture, and the context of its deployment.
And that knowledge had already saved Crocodile once. Unfortunately, he had never fully learned the lesson from the time Doflamingo tried to poison his wine glass.
With trembling fingers, she unscrewed the lid and poured the damp leaves into a stone mortar. She stared down at them silently for a few silent moments, her face contorting into a grimace of anguish, her hand freezing over the pestle.
This will make you stay put and don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong.
The moment she brought the pestle down, starting to grind the herbs, a sharp sorrow took hold of her chest. Sabrina hated lying to him. She hated having to resort to a coward's trick, hated the reality that keeping him safe meant betraying the trust he had placed in her, knowing the kind of man Crocodile was and the terrible skeleton in the cupboard that the subject of trust had turned out to be for him throughout his entire life.
She ground and ground, the stone scraping heavily against stone, and as the dark leaves turned to paste, she fought a losing battle to hold back her tears. Perhaps it was the acidic, biting fumes released by the crushed pulp that stung her eyes, or perhaps, deep down, it was that she knew of the suffering Crocodile would face when he woke to find her gone.
Sabrina wiped the tears away angrily with the back of her hand, but more followed. The guilt was suffocating. She had sworn to him that she trusted him and told him everything would be okay. And now she was preparing the very thing that would render him helpless while she walked toward her own execution.
She hated herself in that moment. She hated herself for hiding Barton’s letter, and for allowing herself to fall into the blackmailer's trap.
But looking at the dark residue in the bowl, she knew there was no other option.
This was her battle. Not his.
When she finally poured the clear extract of the sedative herbs into the silver flask she always carried in her purse, the click of the cap signaled the point of no return.
By the time she left her apartment that afternoon, heading back to Rain Dinners, no one would have guessed the storm raging inside her.
She was smiling.
She had to.
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That same afternoon, Sabrina returned to Crocodile’s office carrying an outward calm that felt like the most elaborate lie she had ever told.
Meanwhile, the Shichibukai was visibly stressed, leaning over his desk with his face resting in the palm of his hand. But after she had remarked wih that honeyed, persuasive tone of hers that he desperately needed to relax, a heavy silence settled over the room.
That's why Crocodile now found himself staring absent-mindedly at the mahogany surface of his desk, his eyes fixed on the old chessboard he had pulled from one of the drawers. His thoughts were drifting as his pupils focused on a single chess piece, a finely carved black knight, its stylized horse head caught in a white square. Crocodile secretly wishing that the terrors of the coming dawn could be managed so easily: cornered, isolated, and confined to a single coordinate on a wooden board.
On the other side, Sabrina had drifted across the room, settling in the far corner of the office where his luxurious liquor collection was housed in a pristine glass display case.
"It's strange that we haven't played chess yet," she said, her slender fingers wrapping around the neck of a delicate crystal bottle, the amber liquid inside catching the dim light. "Isn't that like a super cliché for people like us?"
Crocodile let out a tired sigh, not lifting his gaze from the knight piece he was staring at, inspiring a certain weariness. “Everything around us is strange these days,” he muttered. “So why not?”
At that exact moment, shielded by the angles of the display case and the shadows of the corner, Sabrina’s hands began to tremble. She reached into her cleavage, her fingers brushing past the edge of her bodice to retrieve the small, hidden silver flask. Ensuring her back remained a perfect barrier against his line of sight, she uncapped it and, with a violent knot twisting tightly in her stomach, she poured the clear, sedative extract directly into the glass on the left.
“You seem very stressed,” she said, turning around with both glasses in hand. Reaching the desk, she deliberately extended her left hand, offering Crocodile the liquor. “Come on, have a drink. It might help you relax.”
"What's this?" he asked, swirling the amber liquid slightly, watching the heavy legs of the alcohol coat the crystal.
“Bourbon,” Sabrina replied with a mischievous half-smile, walking towards her own chair and taking a sip of her glass. “Doesn’t it bring back memories?”
He paused, the glass hovering just beneath his nose. He remembered. Of course he remembered. That fateful, chaotic night more than a year ago had been utterly impossible to erase from his mind. The night that revealed how much of a wimp he was for her. The night he had to carry her like an unconscious burden back to her apartment, the (self-proclaimed) most fearsome of the Seven Warlords of the Sea reduced to a charity nurse. The night he finally had to admit the things Sabrina awakened within him.
"Of course it does," he said, offering her a genuine, teasing smile as he leaned back in his chair. "Because of that cursed brew, you had a spectacular, alcohol-induced coma right on top of me, if I recall correctly. Just as you were about to kiss me, no less."
"Oh, please. You were the one who was about to kiss me," Sabrina shot back quickly, adjusting the hem of her skirt as she crossed her legs.
“Are we going to have the same argument again?” Crocodile asked, chuckling as he raised the glass to his lips.
Sabrina laughed brightly at his response as she leaned forward over the chessboard.
"Have we come here to fight, or have we come here to play?"
With a teasing smile, Sabrina moved first, advancing her king’s pawn two squares forward with a delicate flick of her fingers.
“You must know I’m very good at chess, madam,” he teased back, savouring the feigned honorific with irony, raising a sharp eyebrow.
She just leaned back in her chair. “Are you sure? Because I think I’m gonna kick your ass. Come on, move.”
Crocodile chuckled, the low sound rumbling in his chest. He mirrored her move, pushing his own king’s pawn forward. “Your confidence is adorable. Misplaced, but adorable.”
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The game unfolded with quiet intensity. Sabrina developed her knights toward the center, aggressive and fluid. Crocodile responded by controlling key central squares while keeping his king safe behind a solid pawn structure.
As they played, the Warlord's expression shifted, the faint amusement that had briefly crossed his features dissolving entirely as he observed her, thoughtful and preparing to move the next piece.
He leaned forward, placing both forearms flat on the edge of the mahogany desk as he observed her, thoughtful and preparing to move the next piece.
“Tomorrow is the day,” he said.
The words fell between them like an arrow of solid ice.
Sabrina felt a cold spike pierce her chest, a physical ache that threatened to shatter her composure, but she forced her hand to remain perfectly steady. She reached out, her slender fingers brushing against an ivory pawn, and, with a quiet click against the wood, she slid it forward two squares.
“I know,” she finally dared to murmur softly.
Crocodile's response was to move a jet-black pawn.
“The plans are set,” he continued. “You’ll stay safe here tonight. Under my guard, behind my walls. We will wait for whatever crap he's intending to do. Then, I will personally take care of him while you stay right here, untouched.”
Sabrina remained silent for a couple of seconds, and looked down at the board again, her mind spinning, the cold silver flask hidden against her chest suddenly feeling like a block of ice against her skin. She reached out, moving another pawn, her throat tightening so fiercely it threatened to choke her.
“And what if things aren't that easy, Crocodile?” she asked, her voice laced with a genuine fragility she couldn't quite mask. “You don't know what he's capable of. You don't know how he thinks.”
Crocodile didn't hesitate and reached out and aggressively advanced a black knight.
“I don't give a single fuck about what he's capable of,” he growled, his voice so thick chest seemed to rise and fall with an eagerness bordering on aggression.
After letting out a heavy, controlled sigh as he realized the mere mention of that wretched traitor was actively unraveling his temper, he paused. Crocodile cleared his throat, forcing his features back into calm. "I know he gave you a seven-day deadline," he continued. "But did he tell you anything about an exact time? A specific meeting point? Anything helpful at all?"
Not being able to tell him the truth was killing her.
If she confessed that there was in fact a meeting point, the Rainbase gate, she knew exactly what he would do. She knew how dangerously impulsive, how ruthless he became when her life was the currency on the table. Crocodile was a calamity incarnate who wouldn't hesitate to reduce the entire city to sand driven by rage.
Her hand hovered over the board for a couple of seconds.
“No,” she said.
Finally, she moved a white rook in response.
She had to lie. It didn't matter how much it hurt. It didn't matter that just last night, feeling the warmth and scent of his body against hers, she had sworn to him that she trusted him with her life.
“He didn't say anything else. He's just coming after me, i guess. He wants to corner me here.”
And above all, she couldn't help but feel like a complete idiot. She shouldn't have told Crocodile any of this in the first place. He shouldn't have known about Barton and what happened six days ago in the basement. But it was too late. Because of her own weakness, because of having crumbled in his arms, she now had to lie to the face of the only man she could call hers.
"I understand," he muttered.
Crocodile studied her face for a long, tortuous beat, searching for any fracture in her facade. Finding none, he finally leaned back, apparently satisfied by her steady gaze. He picked up his glass, taking a slow, deep sip of the liquor.
Sabrina secretly squeezed her hands into tight fists beneath the edge of the desk, her nails digging so hard into her palms that she almost broke the skin.
Drink it, she thought desperately, a chaotic mix of horror and relief flooding her veins. Please, just drink it.
“He's just a rat,” Crocodile said under his breath, setting the glass down with a heavy thud before reaching out to slide a bishop across the diagonal.
“He’s always been like that,” Sabrina agreed, her voice sounding distant even to her own ears.
In contrast then, forcing a bright, sudden spark into her eyes, she leaned back and let out a soft, melodious chuckle.
“Hey, you know what? I'm sick of talking about such depressing stuff,” she said. “That scum doesn’t deserve all this attention from us. Let's talk about something a little more cheerful!”
“Sure,” a fond, half-lidded look returned to his eyes. “What do you want to talk about?"
“Hmmm, let me think...” Sabrina tapped a manicured finger against her chin, tilting her head with an expertly crafted look of innocence. She reached forward, her hand moving a white knight with a swift, elegant flourish. “Oh, I know! Hey, Crocodile... do you remember the first time we met?”
He reached out with his unmarred hand, his long fingers wrapping around a black rook and moving it forward to counter her flank.
“How could I forget?” he rasped, a genuine thread of amusement coloring his gravelly voice. “You left my casino penniless and I almost had a heart attack right then and there because of some charming lady's fault. I hadn’t suffered such financial losses in years... and you know, I had to ‘take care of you’ myself.”
"But admit it..." the woman started, sketching a mischievous smile as she fixed her golden eyes on him. "I was the prettiest hostage that had ever arrived at this shady den of yours."
"Oh, when you were tied to that chair and provoking me, the last thing I cared about was how pretty you are. I couldn't stop thinking about how unsufferable you were."
Sabrina broke into a genuine, bright laugh that echoed against the high ceilings of the office. She immediately moved another piece, advancing her queen’s pawn to squeeze his defense.
“I still don't know how,” she teased, “but that flirting strategy of literally kidnapping me somehow ended up working out for you. Congratulations, Sir Crocodile.”
“You must be the woman with the biggest case of Stockholm syndrome in human history,” Crocodile retorted dryly.
"Or maybe I just have a peculiar taste in men."
After letting out a chuckle, the man picked up his glass again, taking another deep, unhurried sip of the bourbon, while his eyes remained fixed on the chessboard, calculating his next tactical move. Sabrina rested her cheek against her palm, her elbow propped on the desk, and when her gaze rested on him, an agonizing, acrid sensation teared at her throat.
He looks just like a dream.
He looked so magnificent in the dim light, so invincible, and the thought that she was actively slipping him into a forced slumber made her chest ache with a violent, physical pain.
He's my man. And I'm going to to leave him with a wound that will never heal.
His expression turned deeply thoughtful, as his lips, moist, slightly redden,—lips that Sabrina had kissed a thousand times and now couldn't stop looking at with a silent melancholy—lingered on the crystal rim of the glass for a second before he finally set it back down. He slid a black pawn forward one square, clearing his throat.
“Your turn."
“What did you think of me at that exact moment?” Sabrina demanded.
She didn't even pause to calculate. She didn't need time to think. The moment his hand left the black pawn, her own fingers darted across the board, moving her white bishop with terrifying speed and precision, which ate one of Crocodile's key defensive pawns.
He remained completely still. But the fact he was genuinely stumped was undeniable, his brow furrowing and his hand resting on his chin as he tried to find a way to proceed without losing his entire left flank.
“Damn. You've made it difficult for me, my lady.”
“Answer my question,” Sabrina demanded softly, her golden eyes unyielding as she watched him struggle with the trap she had set on the board, and the one she was setting in reality.
Finally, accepting the loss of the position, he moved a minor pawn to shore up his king’s safety. He withdrew his hand, his fingers tapping a quick, rhythmic beat against the wood as he finally raised his head to meet her gaze once more.
“You scared the absolute hell out of me,” he admitted. “And that realization only lightened up my curiosity about you even more.”
“Scared?” the woman repeated, arching an eyebrow, a genuinely intrigued, half-amused smile playing on her lips. “How interesting.”
Crocodile let out a low, rumbling chuckle, leaning back slightly as Sabrina tilted her head.
“Because you are unpredictable,” he explained, his sharp eyes locking onto hers. “When I met you, that's what caught my attention about you the most. Not in a million years would I have expected a woman like you to show not a hint of intimidation towards me, or to propose a game of poker as if her own life were nothing more than a handful of Berries. And I certainly never expected you to laugh in my face and completely beat me up. You’re a wild card, Rina. You’re completely out of my predictions. And to a man like me, that is terrifying.”
“But yet, here you are,” she whispered, leaning closer across the desk.
“Because you being scary as fuck is exactly what I like the most about you.”
“Not gonna lie. Whenever you look at me,” Sabrina added, her voice laced with a bittersweet melancholy she could no longer hide, “it always feels like you're looking at a puzzle you're desperately trying to solve.”
“And the more time passes, the more I realize I’ll never be able to fully solve you,” Crocodile said. “I never know what awaits me when I'm with you. I never know what to expect from one day to the next. But I know it's worth it. I like that you defy my logic.“
At that moment, he was about to add something more, as his pupils rested on her tender expression, but Crocodile's lips suddenly went silent.
What's this?
A sudden, unexpected wave of heavy warmth rolled over his chest; a thick, slightly disorienting feeling that seemed to dull the sharp edges of his perception. His eyelids felt strangely heavy for a fleeting microsecond, but Crocodile subtly shook his head, dismissing the sensation as mere exhaustion, the accumulated, brutal stress of a week spent hunting that bastard.
Exhaustion. Yes. It had to be that.
Deciding that the best way to clear the fog was to shock his system, he picked up the crystal glass, took another deep, deliberate sip of his drink, and cleared his throat roughly before returning his focus to the game.
“That day... the day we met... you made me realize something important, Rina,” he said, his gaze drifting back up to her face, observing the woman in front of him with such devotion that he couldn't help but to bring a smile to his lips. “You made me realize that there is something in this world I actually like even more than winning.”
Sabrina’s breath hitched, her eyes shimmering in the dim light. “And what is that?”
“Losing,” he confessed. “Losing to you.”
However, suddenly, as if a divine illumination had pierced his head like an arrow, Crocodile saw the gap in her defense. He managed to catch the intricate, aggressive trap she was actively building with her knight and her queen, but with a ruthless, sweeping motion of his black rook, his large hand came down, clearing her advancing white pawn right off the board.
“But not this time, doll,” Crocodile added, a large, triumphant, and teasing smile breaking across his scarred face as he looked up at her flushed features. “Because tonight, I'm going to beat the crap out of you.” He chuckled, gesturing to the board with his golden hook. “Your turn.”
Sabrina's response was letting out a dramatic, feigned gasp, a bright spark of mock indignation flashing in her eyes.
“Oh, you son of a bitch!” she chirped. “You are definitely sleeping on the couch tonight.”
“For being good at chess?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re a harsh dictator, darling,” Crocodile murmured, his tone shifting, slowing down as it became heavy with an old, deeply buried curiosity. He leaned forward, resting his chin back against his hand, his hooded eyes locking onto hers. “And you're asking all the questions tonight. What about you? What were your thoughts about me the very first time we met? When I had you tied to that chair in this very office, threatening to end your life?”
Sabrina’s fingers froze, hovering a mere millimeter above the smooth, polished wood of her white knight.
“I saw a monster,” she whispered softly.
Crocodile’s dark eyes opened just a fraction wider in genuine surprise, his drumming fingers halting against the mahogany.
“An intriguing, beautiful monster,” Sabrina continued, finally wrapping her fingers around her piece, but not moving it yet. “I saw adventure in you, Crocodile. A spark I honestly thought I had given up on six years ago when I "died". But the moment I got into trouble with you, I didn’t feel fear. I felt a challenge. I felt alive again. Playing with you every night meant everything I thought I'd given up on. Being your rival gave me back my will to live. And I wanted to see... I wanted to see just how far I could take you.”
He didn't know what to say at that moment, but his eyes, filled with pure intoxication by her charms, expressed the hurricane that had stirred his heart.
Crocodile didn't really like compliments. He thought they were a waste of time; anyone could say a few nice things to him. After all, he was the "Hero of Alabasta," he was used to it. But Sabrina's candid confessions always took him by surprise. That was far more devastating than any compliment. Much more important to him.
He tried—really tried—to reply and somehow hide how flustered he was at that moment, slightly parting his lips, his hand instinctively hovering over the board to calculate his next move. But suddenly, something fractured inside of him.
A violent throb detonated behind his temples. Crocodile winced, his hand abandoning the pieces entirely to press his thick fingers against his forehead. Sabrina’s stomach violently dropped. She swallowed hard, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, but her flawless poker face remained entirely unchanged.
“Fuck,” he then rasped after he remained motionless for a long, agonizing beat, his head drooping as a strange heaviness began to settle behind his eyes.
“Are you okay?” his girlfriend asked. The worry in her voice was entirely real, even as she sat perfectly aware of the exact chemical warfare taking place inside his blood.
“It’s just that...” Crocodile started to explain, violently shaking his head in a bid to clear the fog rolling into his brain. “My head hurts, somehow. I don't know, it must be the tiredness. Never mind.”
Sabrina found herself unable to look him in the eye.
Just from sheer willpower, Crocodile forced his hand back down to the board. Refusing to show weakness, he gripped his black queen and slid her across the wood, blind to the tactical error he was making, driven only by the urge to finish the game before his senses failed him. The move was aggressive, cornering her white king into a seemingly inescapable trap.
“You want to know how far you have taken me?”
Across the table, the woman remained deathly silent, her lips trembling as she stared at the board.
“I would go as far as necessary,” the Warlord said, his hand gripping the edge of the desk just to stay upright. “just to ensure that yours will be the face I see when I wake up for the rest of my life and mine will be the only name you'll scream at night.”
He leaned closer, the darkness encroaching on the periphery of his vision, his pulse hammering like a war drum in his ears. The poison was dragging him under, but his soul was fighting it with a feral, possessive fury.
“I would kill for you, Rina,” he vowed.
Her vision was blurring with a sudden, uncontrollable rush of hot tears that she refused to let fall. Her lungs felt short of air as an invisible hand seemed to strangle her throat. She reached down, her small hand hovering over her last remaining active piece: the white knight he had overlooked in his single-minded pursuit of her king.
What am I gonna do now?
“And I would die for you,” she whispered back.
Somewhat puzzled by her unexpected reply, a sentence that felt surprisingly serious, he blinked. “What…?”
But Sabrina didn't give him time to understand.
With a movement that was swift, elegant, and entirely merciless, her fingers gripped the white knight. She bypassed his aggressive front lines, sliding the piece through the single, fatal breach his blinded vision had failed to protect. The ivory horse landed with a sharp, definitive crack right beside his black king.
His head suddenly throbbed again, and this time was more painful.
Fuck, my head... Again....
The trap snapped shut. The board was solved.
Checkmate.
"Crocodile," Sabrina called his name as she remained still, but her eyes burned with tears that were about to fall. Her pupils stared at him while she forced a painful smile.
Karina, what have you done...?
A terrifying realization sparked in the dying embers of his consciousness. He tried to lift his hand, to reach across the wood, to grab her, to demand answers from the puzzle he would now never solve. But his muscles refused to obey. His body felt like lead, his limbs entirely disconnected from his commands as the sedative pulled him down into the black abyss.
At that very moment, the man's body slumped onto the board with a heavy thud. The carefully placed chess pieces scattered in every direction, falling like a waterfall of black and white across the wooden table and onto the floorboards.
The empty glass of bourbon followed, breaking into a thousand pieces that seemed to gleam like a diamond rain.
Crocodile tried to move once more, but it was impossible. As he tried in vain to fight against the sedative, he managed to lift his eyelids once more, desperate to meet her gaze.
And as everything began to dissolve around him, leaving only the memory of her golden eyes, she parted her lips one last time.
Hiii!!! Sorry for being so inactive, life's been hell lately and finals won't leave me alone😭😭
Take me out of this hellish university
I will post the next The Jackpot Queen chapter tonight!!! Not the final chapter BUT the next after this one will be the final one for sure! (this time it's true i swear it)
Idk if i should write another side story since lately this fic has been receiving a lot of love!! Idk, maybe if I have enough time after my exams?
Anyways, here you have a silly Sabrina and Crocodile sketch
CWs: angst, explicit violence, obstetric violence, descriptions of pregnancy in a very gory way, themes of disphoria, transmasc Crocodile, implied doomed dragodile.
WORDCOUNT: ~7300 words
Author's note: IMPORTANT! This chapter explores some of Crocodile’s backstory (unofficial, mostly based on my speculations and popular theories), establishing him as a trans man. If you don’t like the “Crocodad” theory (I refuse to call it “Crocomom”), I suggest that you skip this chapter. As a cis person, I’ve tried my best to portray a topic as raw as this one. I hope I haven’t been disrespectful. That said, I hope you enjoy the chapter!
ALSO, SLIGHT CHANGE: I've decided to change the place in which Sabrina was ordered to be executed. The place is the non-canon city of Rashida. This has already been corrected in the previous chapter.
My One Piece writing masterlist! Check for part eleven and the rest!
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At first, that name only seemed like a faint déjà vu that echoed inside his head for a few seconds that felt too long. It was no surprise, since he was used to easily forget the names of the people he just found unimportant. Crocodile found himself frowning, his eyes narrowing as he mentally shifted through the vast ledger of his associates, enemies, and subordinates.
Cain Barton? Who the hell was called like that?
Not one of his financial assessors. Not one of his waiters. Not one of his croupiers.
However, his mind suddenly started to put the pieces together, dragging a specific memory out from the shadows of a year ago.
It was the next morning after Sabrina and him slept together for the first time. He remembered the tortuous, endless appointment with his vice-president he was forced to attend to right after, and, of course, the reasons of such. Between some of the issues discussed there, one of the main setbacks was the sudden resignation of one of his trusted casino guards. Crocodile had been mildly irritated by the insolence; however, Miss All Sunday, impeccable as always, had already come up with a replacement.
"Don't worry. The resignation has already been accounted for. I have appointed a man called Cain Barton, his resume is impressive."
The memory hit Crocodile squarely in the chest like a physical fist. The realization unraveled behind his eyes with blinding clarity. He remembered him now. He remembered the man who had stood at the periphery of his casino for an entire year.
Before he could even utter a single word, Sabrina added a sentence that turned the air in the room into liquid lead. "It's the traitor who betrayed us six years ago."
Crocodile froze. The idea of having a rat like that infiltrate in his own casino, his house, right in front of his nose gave nausea to him. To say he was frustrated fell drastically short of the rage brewing beneath his skin.
"Barton?! It's him?! Why the hell didn't you ever tell me the name of the man who let your whole crew die!?"
Sabrina flinched at the volume, but the sheer desperation of her panic drove her to snap back. "I don't know! You didn't ask!"
The sheer irony of the situation threatened to choke him. Crocodile brought his hand up, aggressively slapping his own face in a gesture of profound, self-directed fury.
Right after, he felt almost forced to take the heaviest sigh of his life just to not yell and said:
"Okay, just... Tell me. Tell me everything that happened."
Sabrina took a shaky breath and began to speak. Her voice trembled at first, but grew steadier as she forced the words out.
"Well, so... He... He told me you were waiting at the second basement hallway and..." She managed to start, trying to remain calm even if remembering the event felt as painful as stepping on a nail. "He grabbed my hair and pushed me into the floor and he... he..."
The more Sabrina's testimony unfolded, the more Crocodile's face contorted into an expression of raw, utter horror. Something was taking hold of him. Something acrid, painful, burning.
"He's been looking after me for a whole year. He wants my bounty."
As the narrative continued, Crocodile’s expression shifted from frustration to a terrifying, murderous malice.
"He grabbed my wrists and pinned me."
The urge to kill was an addictive heat in his blood.
"He gave me one week, Crocodile. One week to turn myself in publicly in Rashida. If I don’t… it'll be worse.”
Crocodile remained dead silent for a long moment, his sharp pupils burning with a barely contained rage that threatened to tear the room apart.
"He touched you," he hissed, the words sliding out of his mouth like venom. Suddenly, his sand-logia powers flared involuntarily, particles of dust drifting off his coat like smoke. "That miserable stood in my house, under my payroll, and put his filthy hands on you."
Sabrina was instantly startled to see him react with such unhinged hostility. He was out of control, and she knew him too well to know where it was headed.
"Crocodile," she muttered, startled, but he didn't seem to listen to her.
"I'll skin him alive until he begs for death," he murmured, his voice sounding like the one of a man possessed.
"Crocodile, listen to me."
"I don't care whatever bullshit he has dared to threaten you with. I allowed this scum to breathe my air, to look at you... to touch you? No. He dies tonight. By my hand."
"ENOUGH! You don't understand a single shit!" Sabrina finally exclaimed, throwing herself forward and grabbing his massive, scarred coat, her touch the only thing capable of solidifying his sand back into flesh. "Talk sense! It’s not that easy. Killing Barton right now won't solve this!"
His eyes met hers, and for a second he came to his senses, as if the urge to kill had momentarily faded within him.
"And why is that? When I see a problem, I erase the problem."
"You have to trust me. He’s thought of everything," she explained. "He said that if I tried to flee or say anything, he would open his mouth. Barton knows about us, Crocodile. It's too obvious. And to make matters worse, he has connections in the World Government, so if he turns up dead out of nowhere, his associates will launch an investigation against you, since he worked at your casino. I'll be executed anyway and you’ll lose everything. Your position. Your empire. Alabasta. Operation Utopia. Everything you’ve built. Even your own life."
Crocodile fell silent, the sand completely receding into his broad frame, leaving him looking uncharacteristically stranded.
To be neutralized by such dirty, nasty blackmail felt sickening to him.
Desperately, he pulled her closer.
“I don’t care about any of that if it means losing you,” he rasped. “You’re the only thing that matters. The woman I want to—”
He almost said it. The final word almost escaped his lips. However, his voice broked and the sentence died in his throat.
No, it was not the moment for it. There was something more important to solve before any corny confession.
Sabrina started crying again, softer this time, her face pressed against his chest.
“It’s all my fault,” she whispered, voice muffled and broken. “Every time I find a place to belong… every time I let myself be happy… some disgrace occurs. I attract disaster. I shouldn’t have survived that day. I drag everyone I love to doom. Seth… the crew… and now you. If you hadn't met me, you would be safe. It’s all my fault…”
Crocodile was struck with a sudden, profound horror. Hearing the woman he loved voice such wretched, heartbreaking self-loathing was a torment worse than any blade.
Suddenly, the Warlord dropped to his knees before her, throwing his arms around her slight frame. He pulled her flush against his face, his golden hook resting harmlessly over her waist while his right holded her with a ferocious, protective desperation.
“Stop,” he said fiercely, voice rough with the acrimony blooming in his chest. “I won't tolerate you to say that. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me in my miserable life. You hear me?”
After a long, quiet interval of shared breathing, Crocodile leaned back just enough to look into her golden eyes, his gaze steady and focused. "I am not going to make any dangerous moves," he promised, his voice regaining its calculated, reassuring weight. "I trust your judgment. If the bastard wants a game of chess, I’ll play it. But I swear to you, I will make sure everything is going to be okay. And after this is over... Everything will be peaceful. We'll be safe. We’ll be happy together."
Sabrina didn't answer immediately; she merely nodded, though the fierce, golden light that usually occupied her gaze remained dull, completely extinguished by the shadow of her impending doom.
Desperate to maintain the illusion that everything was under control, Crocodile began to rapidly suggest a string of alternative strategies, his mind racing to find a solutio. "If it’s money what that scum wants, I have more wealth accumulated in the vaults of this casino than he could spend in three lifetimes. Bribing him is a non-issue for me. Your life doesn't have a price tag."
The woman, though she had stopped crying, merely looked at him with a serious, hollow expression. She knew Barton. She knew his psychotic, wicked nature; a bribe would not extinguish his fire. It would only fuel it, transforming their lives into an endless, cyclical nightmare of extortion that would eventually end in a blade to the throat anyway.
"No," she said softly, her voice flat. "Money won't satisfy him for long. It will only tighten the leash."
The man's jaw tightened, but he quickly pivoted, refusing to let the despair win. "Fine. Then we play it smart. Without attacking him directly, and without doing anything that could look suspicious to his lookouts, I can order the elite Baroque Works intelligence agents to begin an off-the-books investigation. We will trace his movements from the past year, find his weak spots, isolate his contacts, and build a flawless counter-strategy. At the very least, we will locate his current safehouse."
"Yes," she whispered, her shoulders dropping slightly. "That... we can do that. It’s a good idea."
"Seven days, right?" Crocodile asked, his eyes narrowing slightly as the strategist within him began to map the board.
"Yes. Seven days."
"Then we have time," he said, though the words felt like ash in his mouth.
Crocodile finally sighed, burying his face into the fabric of her blouse, holding back all of the raw emotions the whole situation just provoked him.
He held her. He held her with all of his might, intoxicating himself with her scent as if any moment could be the last time he would have the chance to drown himself in her presence.
But no. There would be no last time. He was going to save her.
He was going to protect her.
“I’m so tired…” she whispered at last, voice hoarse and small, barely audible against the fabric of his shirt. “I just… I want to call it a day. Please.”
Without uttering a single syllable, understanding that further tactical dissection would only fracture her remaining sanity, he guided her gently into the adjacent private quarters.
That night, they retreated beneath the heavy covers of his king-sized bed, laying together in the dark, tightly cuddling, while Crocodile wrapped his massive right arm and the heavy, blunt curve of his golden hook around her waist, trapping her, surrounding her, as if his arms could protect her from anything that dared to harm her again. Crocodile wished that simply holding her in his arms would be enough. His fingers twitched instinctively against her hip, driven by an almost pathological, uncontrollable urge to shield her from the world. But he also knew that Sabrina was not a woman with an easy past, nor was this an enemy that could be easily dissolved.
Within minutes, she fell asleep quickly from pure physical and emotional exhaustion. However, sleeping became a difficult task for the Desert King that night.
Long after Sabrina’s breathing had dropped into the slow cadence of slumber, he still laid awake, staring at the ceiling, the weight of her body against his both a comfort and a torment. Every rise and fall of her chest reminded him how fragile this peace was, how easily it could be shattered. He closed his eyes, trying to force sleep to come, but his mind refused to rest. It kept circling back to her tear-streaked face, the terror in her eyes when he had touched her wrist.
The truth is, he was terrified. Although he had tried to feign absolute confidence and acted as if every single variable were under his control, an unholy anxiety now clawed at his throat. Long gone was the mask of the calculator chairman he was, leaving behind a man consumed by an uncontrollable, primal urge to protect her, even as the horrific prospect of his own helplessness haunted his thoughts.
How was he supposed to deal with an enemy like that, if dealing with him directly inevitably implied the death of his lover? And moreover, how could have him let something like this happen?
He couldn't fail again. Weakness was a sin he could never, under any circumstances, forgive himself for.
He would not lose Sabrina.
Not her.
Not this time.
Yet even as he made that silent vow, doubt gnawed at him. What if he couldn’t find a way out of the check-mate?
The only thing he knew was that the story could not repeat itself.
Eventually, as the agonizingly slow hours began to bleed into the early vanguard of dawn, his exhaustion grew heavy enough to drug his hyper-vigilant mind, and that night, Crocodile dreamed about the past.
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This is a story of a woman without a name. This is a story of a rebirth.
In a world where dreams are nothing but fantasies that lead poor souls to death, there is only one sanctuary for those those whom life gives the tortuous lesson of reality. Where where rookies leave with their hearts in a thousand pieces, where the 'Romantic Pirate' dies.
There’s only one place: hidden behind a scar that never stops hurting, buried in lies and beneath a truth that must never come to light.
This is the story of Sir Crocodile.
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The day Gol D. Roger was executed, I witnessed it with my own eyes.
He laughed. That man stood on the scaffold with a smile wider than the sea itself, as if death were nothing more than another adventure.
The day the King of the Pirates was executed, something shifted inside of me.
At that time I didn’t know how to put a name to what I felt. It wasn’t admiration. It wasn’t inspiration. It was hunger. A raw, aching hunger for something greater than the endless cycle of rebellion and suppression the Revolutionary Army preached. If there was something I was sure as hell about back then, it was that I wasn’t like the others there. I never had been.
My clashes with my comrades didn’t start that day, but the gap between us widened into a chasm the moment the Great Pirate Era was born.
After all, before I became a revolutionary, I had been a pirate.
However, I couldn’t simply leave and set sail in search of the Pirate King’s treasure that very day. My affairs in the army still had a long way to go, since I happened to be a sub-commander. But some years after returning from Loguetown to Baltigo—two years of time wasted uselessly—something happened that made me realize my time was running out.
That godforsaken parasite growing inside my own flesh was my countdown. If I wanted to pursue my dream, I had to do it now.
I had to go hunt the One Piece before my own biology betrayed me.
Ivankov was one of the few people who was aware of my condition.
I remember the last night I saw him before I took off; the smell of medical alcohol and damp earth in the infirmary of the base. I had been pushing myself through a grueling, brutal combat drill, desperately trying to induce enough physical damage, enough internal bleeding, to force my body to eject the unwanted guest. I had stripped my shirt off, my knuckles split and bleeding against a heavy iron-wood training post, my breathing a ragged, furious wheeze.
But the physical exhaustion wasn't the worst of it. It was my own skin.
Every time I caught my reflection, I felt utterly disgusted. The 'parasite' was already rewriting my anatomy against my will. My breasts were growing, becoming heavy and swollen, straining against the tightly wound linen sheets I used to flatten my chest. It felt like a joke. It felt like psychological horror.
I was trapped inside a foreign, alien vessel that was betraying my identity by the hour. With each passing day, that creature inside me took a piece of what 'me' was.
"Stop this madness at once!" Ivankov had shrieked, as he slammed the heavy iron door shut behind him. He marched across the room, his fishnet-clad arm swinging out to violently catch my wrist. "You are two months along, you foolish girl! You think that if you continue to force yourself this way, you will just have a miscarriage. But no, darling, it's not that easy. It's your own life which is at stake, you idiot. If something bad happens, it's not just your piracy business that's over forever; your heartbeat will be over too."
"Then let it!" I snarled, my voice cracking with a desperation I had never allowed another human being to hear. I clenched my fists, staring down at my still-flat stomach with a hatred that tasted like copper. "You don't understand. We are witnessing a historic moment, the birth of an era, and I am supposed to sit here and watch my body turn into something I don't even recognize? It’s a leech. It’s destroying my goddamn dream before I can even buy a ship!"
A tense and painful silence settled between us. I knew Ivankov understood me, but he could never support something as reckless as that.
“Iva, I'm sailing,” I said, voice low. "I’m leaving Baltigo by tomorrow."
"And the father?" he asked quietly, his eyes searching mine for a truth I had already resolved to take to my grave. "Are you even going to tell him?"
"Some random guy at a port. It was a mistake. A stupid, drunken mistake."
It was the greatest lie I had ever told. But letting him know the father was the very architect of the shadow we were standing in would had only made the things more complicated. And I couldn't afford complications.
Ivankov sighed, running a hand through his wild hair.
“Then go. But promise me one thing; if you need help, if things go wrong… come back. I’ll be here.”
But before I could slip into the docks and steal away into the dark, I had one final debt to settle. I had to face the commander himself.
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Dragon didn’t look up when I walked into the war room. He stood with his back to me, and I didn't salute.
"I’m leaving."
He remained perfectly still for three long seconds. Then, slowly, he turned his head. Those dark, severe eyes—capable of making even the most fearsome Marine tremble—locked onto mine. There was no surprise in his face.
“You’re really doing it,” he said, voice low. “Leaving the Army. Leaving… us.”
"I was never truly one of you. I told you that from the beginning. I’m a pirate. And I'm going to become the Queen of them all before this 'parasite' you've put in my body stops me from achieving my dream.”
Dragon stepped closer. For a moment, I saw something almost like regret in his eyes.
Actually, I never knew what kind of regret his gaze reflected. Perhaps regret for those nights we shared under the same sheets, driven by the desperate longing for warmth of two broken people who had never truly known it. Perhaps regret for the bitter, sharp-edged way things turned out between us later, as our ideals tore us apart. Regret for what could have been. I don't know. I'll never know.
“You’re carrying my child,” he said quietly. “And you’re willing to throw your life away chasing a dream that has killed better people than you.”
"I'd rather die trying to become who I was meant to be than living a life chained."
He stared at me for a long time. Then, almost too softly, he asked:
“And if I asked you to stay?”
For a couple of seconds, a knot formed in my stomach, rendering me unable to respond. But although my heart burned and ached with a deep sorrow that even I refused to name, I mustered the courage to say a few last words to him before leaving the room:
“I would still leave.”
He reached out, as if to touch my shoulder, but stopped himself. His hand hovered in the air between us before falling back to his side.
I turned away from him, heart pounding, refusing to let him see the tears burning in my eyes.
That was the last time I saw Dragon as the woman I used to be.
Our story ended there.
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I got used to the title of "Captain" easily.
My crew of deserters and outlaws and I made a name for ourselves a few months after I left. My crewmates, whom I trusted blindly.
And among them was her.
Sharp-tongued, quick-witted, with eyes like gleaming sapphires and a laugh that could light the night itself. She was my right hand and navigator. We became inseparable.
While my body spent those first few months acting like a battleground, she was the only one allowed near my quarters. She was the one who helped me tighten the linen when my own hands shook from rage. She was the one who stood on the quarterdeck and barked orders to the men so I could retreat into the corners when the morning sickness threatened to bring me to my knees.
Neither Gardenia nor I ever dared to say that we weren't just captain and first mate. Perhaps, if things hadn't ended this way, something would have changed.
I'll never know.
By the time we hit Sabaody Archipelago, our names were already echoing through the taverns of the Grand Line. The New World awaited us.
Rumors spread like wildfire through the archipelago: an Eternal Pose leading directly to Laugh Tale, the island where the One Piece was said to be hidden. A spark then lit my heart on fire.
But of course, I wasn't the only naive soul who had set her sights on that promise of a throne. Of course not. In Sabaody, where the most fearsome pirate crews on the entire Grand Line roamed freely like children in a park, and every bloodthirsty monster with a hull was already charting a course for that coordinate.
But I couldn't let anyone get ahead of me.
"We're sailing."
Gardenia stared at me across the deck, meeting my hungry, desperate eyes, not seeing a woman five months pregnant but the power-hungry pirate that lived inside of me.
"Yes, captain."
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What we didn't know is that the nameless island would turn into a meat grinder.
The New World didn't welcome us precisely.
By the time our hull scraped the sand, cannon fire chewed the coastline to splinters, and the mud was a thick, sucking soup of blood and seawater.
I fought like a woman possessed, driving my blade through anyone who blocked the path to the central valley where the Pose was rumored to be. Multiple crews clashed in a chaotic free-for-all. I was blind to the tactical layout, deaf to the warnings of my own men. I only saw the crown. My dream, closest as ever.
The Eternal Pose was going to be mine. I had to be the one who became king.
The One Piece had to be mine.
And because of my arrogance, the net closed around us.
A shadow fell over our vanguard—a monstrous, suffocating presence that made the air feel like liquid iron. Out of the smoke stepped one of the most fearsome men I've ever seen. A beast, a former comrade of the legendary Gol D. Roger. And precisely for that reason, his presence seemed an insult to my ambition.
That scum was called Douglas Bullet. And he was the man that took her from me.
His iron fist tore through her insides, and all I could do was pick up her dying body from the ground in my arms.
"Gardenia... Gardenia, look at me," I choked out, my voice cracking, the hard, ruthless mask I had built entirely dissolving. I reached out to press my hands against her wound, but the blood just kept slipping through my fingers. "Don't you dare close your eyes. I'm getting you out of here."
To my horror, Gardenia closed her eyes and never opened them again.
And that was the exact moment I hated myself.
I hated my body and the parasite that had turned me into a burden of flesh and altered hormones. A slow, weak burden, incapable of protecting the one he most wanted to protect.
I stood up from her corpse, my vision blurred by smoke and tears, and charged blindly toward the center of the valley where the final players had gathered.
But I was already too late.
There he was. The white giant. The strongest man in the world.
If someone had asked me back then, I would have said I wanted to be like him. I wanted that absolute, unshakeable sovereignty. But now I'd say he was the embodiment of my worst nightmares.
His presence alone was as powerful as an earthquake.
He was none other than Edward Newgate, Whitebeard.
He held the key to the end of the world in his palm, and he looked down at it with nothing but grim disappointment.
"The world is not prepared for what lies at the end of this path," Whitebeard’s voice boomed, a rumble that shook the very foundation of the island.
And then, everything I had sacrificed—the Revolutionary Army, my sanity, the absolute loathing I felt for the flesh on my bones, the life of the only woman who had ever truly trusted me—it was all destroyed in a single flex of that old man's hand.
Whitebeard crushed the Eternal Pose.
And that's why, at that moment, I didn't feel tiny in the face of the gigantic figure that was his. I ignored my weakness. I ignored the five-month-old scourge growing inside me and I lashed out against that titan.
I wanted to tear his throat out. I wanted to make him bleed for what he had stolen from me.
However, our confrontation was not a battle. Our confrontation was the execution of my pride.
That man didn't even drop the surrealistically gigantic weapon that was his bisento. As I reached the apex, his left hand shot forward; a movement so deceptively fast it defied his massive bulk. His fist, wrapped in the volatile, translucent sphere of his Quake Quake fruit powers, caught me squarely in the torso.
The shockwave detonated directly against my abdomen, and I felt the air left my lungs in a violent spray of blood. The tightly wound linen binder around my chest snapped under the sheer pressure, the fabric tearing open to expose the very curves I had spent months trying to destroy.
And that, although degrading, was not the worst humiliation.
I was lifted off my feet, my ribs cracking like dry twigs as the vibration rippled through my internal organs, directly striking the womb. A sickening, terrifying pain bloomed deep within my core, a sensation that told me the parasite was being torn from its foundations.
The fact that I didn't have a miscarriage at that time was a miracle of nature.
And just before I could hit the ground, Whitebeard swung his bisento in a tight, merciless arc.
The black blade of the polearm caught me across the face, carving a deep, horizontal trench from my right ear to my left cheek, slicing right through the bridge of my nose. Blood erupted from the wound, blinding me instantly, and in the same fluid motion, the edge of the steel came down across my left wrist, severing my hand from the arm in a clean, agonizing flash of steel.
I screamed. God knows how screamed. My screams of pain could be heard from the farthest reaches of the sky.
I fell into the mud at his feet, a broken, mutilated creature.
Whitebeard stood over me, the tip of his bisento resting mere inches from my throat. He looked down at my ruined face, his eyes filled with a heavy, disappointing pity that hurt worse than the loss of my hand.
And it was there, with that giant towering before me in all its magnificence, when I stopped to contemplate the panorama that surrounded me.
There was only silence.
The blood of a thousand rookies who had believed Roger’s final words was splitted everywhere.
My comrades had been horribly defeated, and I had been so blinded by my dreams that I was unable to protect them.
"If you want to protect something, then do it right."
His words, which seemed to have read the deep lament of my heart, were seared into my mind.
I lay there in the mud as the storms raged around me, clutching my bleeding stomach with my remaining hand, listening to the distant sound of Whitebeard's crew disposing to sail away.
I didn't die—my spite wouldn't allow it—but the woman I once was died on that ridge. I dragged myself into the shadows of the rocks, leaving a trail of blood and broken dreams behind me, running from the ultimate humiliation of the era.
That day I learned I wouldn't hate someone more than that man. But what I also learned was that dreams are nothing more than embellished death sentences.
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The boat with which I managed to escape from that hell was nothing more than a splintered coffin taking on water.
I lay flat on my back in the bilge, painting the wood with the dark, sluggish blood pouring from the stump of my left arm. I had used a piece of frayed hemp rigging to tie a crude tourniquet above the raw bone, crushing the flesh until the pulsing slowed to a thick, painful drip, but the rot was already setting in.
However, the physical mutilation was a distant, secondary horror to the violent revolution taking place within my own belly.
The escape back to Baltigo took me long enough for the parasite to start warning me that it was the time.
For three days of aimless drifting under a cloud-choked sky, the womb had been a furnace of agonizing contractions, a feral, tearing pressure that felt as though a beast were trying to claw its way out through my hip bones. My body was giving up.
I had no choice but to disembark as best I could on the first island I found, but I didn't even make it into the tree line.
I felt as if someone grabbed my body and ripped it in two. The worst kind of agony I had ever suffered. My hips shifted and tore, my internal organs burned.
There was no doctor, no hand to hold. There was only me, the howling wind, and the screams that no one else would hear.
Blood, thick and dark, pooled beneath my thighs, steaming slightly in the freezing night air. I could feel the tearing of my own flesh, the horrific, unyielding pressure as the child’s skull forced its way through a passage that my mind desperately rejected. I wanted to close my legs and crush it. I wanted to let the tide wash over my hips and drown us both in the foam. The temptation to simply lie back, close my eyes, and let the hemorrhage take me was a sweet, seductive siren song.
But as the child finally slipped from my ruined body after hours of suffering, a pathetic, wet choke echoed through the lull of the storm. It wasn't dead. Despite the shockwave, despite the salt water and the trauma, the thing was breathing, and it happened to be a boy. It lay between my knees, a slick, purple mass of mucus and blood, its tiny limbs twitching feebly against the cold.
That baby semed to be as much as a warrior as me.
I hated it. I loathed the very sight of its squalling, fragile form. But I could not leave it to freeze. If I let it die here, then Whitebeard was right. If I let it die, then I was nothing but a weak, incompetent fool who couldn't even protect the consequences of her own mistakes.
With trembling, clumsy fingers, I reached down with my remaining hand. I used my teeth to gnaw through the thick, rubbery cord, then scooped the weight of the infant against my shivering chest, pulling the remnants of my soaked captain’s coat around its body.
"We are going to survive, 'parasite,' you hear me?"
The return to Baltigo was a blur of fever dreams and delirium. I don't remember the ships I stole or the currents I navigated; I only remember the rhythm of the child’s breathing against my ribs and the increasing stench of my own dying flesh.
What I only remember was collapsing against the hidden iron door of Ivankov’s private laboratory once I reached the island, using the heel of my boot to strike the metal three times before my vision went entirely white.
Iva's eyes, when he saw me, only reflected a tenth of the horror I had suffered. And rightly so.
The proud, arrogant rookie who had sailed out of that same island months ago was completely unrecognizable. I was decrepit, a living corpse.
"M-My God..." Ivankov whispered, the signature theatricality completely draining from his voice. He dropped to his knees, his hands shaking as he reached for me. "Darling... what has happened to you? What did they do?"
But his breath caught in his throat, a high, terrified gasp escaping his lips as his gaze drifted to the bundle tucked under my right arm. A small, round head covered in downy black hair poked through the stained wool, its wide eyes staring blankly up at the cavern ceiling.
"You... you had it," the okama rasped, his hands flying to his mouth as tears pricked the corners of his eyes. "Alone... in the wild... you actually brought it into the world..."
I shoved the child into his chest with my remaining hand, my fingers instantly losing their grip as my body finally gave out. "Take it. Before I drop it."
For the next twelve hours, the laboratory was a chamber of torture. Ivankov worked in absolute, frantic secrecy, his advanced medical knowledge the only thing keeping the reaper from crossing the threshold, as always. I hated having to admit it, but he knew I would trust that guy with my life no matter what.
To my horror, he had to amputate another three inches of my left arm to clear the rot, sawing through the bone without anesthesia because my liver couldn't handle the sedation. Great, a disability. Just what I wanted.
He cleansed the trench on my face, pouring raw alcohol over the exposed nerves before driving coarse, black sutures through my flesh to hold the bridge of my nose together. I didn't scream. I bit down on a leather strap until my gums bled, my eyes locked onto the stone ceiling, my mind detaching itself from the meat of my body. After giving birth in such a gruesome way, I think I could have endured any kind of pain. It didn't matter anymore.
When the needles finally stopped, the worst operation began: my dissection.
I told Iva everything that happened. After all, who else in the world could I have told? He had to know.
I explained my humiliation, my regret, my loss, my pain, about Whitebeard, about Gardenia, and in that cold, sanitized laboratory, I felt like the most miserable person in the world. Ivankov looked at me with pity. But I hated to be seen that way.
I lay on the steel operating table, wrapped in clean, dry bandages, the metallic tang of blood still heavy in the back of my throat. And when I rolled my head to the side, staring at the small, cracked mirror hanging over the washbasin, the creature looking back at me was an abomination. A scarred, one-handed freak with the hollowed-out eyes of a ghost.
"I hate her," I rasped, my remaining fingers clawing at the edge of the operating table. "I hate the woman in that glass. She is an inept, pathetic fool who let her stupid dreams make her reckless. She led her comrades to their deaths. She let an old man pity her. If the world finds out that the sub-commander of the Revolutionary Army, that the pirate who claimed she would conquer the sea, was just a weak, bleeding bitch who whimpered in the mud... I will die of the shame alone."
I turned my eyes back to Ivankov, my gaze burning with a terrifying, unhinged ferocity. "No one can ever know, Iva. Do you hear me? The woman who sailed from this port is dead. The New World killed her. I want her buried. I want her name erased from every ledger, every manifest, every memory. I prefer that Dragon and the rest of the army believe I am rotting at the bottom of the sea."
"And what on earth do you intend to do?"
"I don't want to be the woman I see on that mirror," I said, leaning up from the table, my teeth bared in a snarl that pulled at my fresh facial stitches. "I want a body that cannot be impregnated. I want a strong body that cannot be branded by the world’s pity. I want to be someone else. You have the power, Iva."
Ivankov could only part his lips slightly, letting out a gasp. "What...?"
"Make me a man."
He looked at me for a long, agonizing moment, searching for any trace of the friend he had known, but he found nothing but an empty, scorched desert. "The Emporio Otoko Hormone... it changes the body, yes. It re-writes the DNA. But it cannot erase the scars in your mind, darling. It is a heavy burden to carry a lie that deep."
"I said, make me a man."
Recognizing that my spirit would completely implode if he refused, Ivankov slowly stood up. Suddenly, through his striking red gloves, sharp nails bristled like needles, releasing a pinkish liquid that shimmered with the gleam of the lamplight near the stretcher.
"And the child?" he then asked, his hand hovering over my carotid. "What of the boy?"
I didn't look toward the cradle in the corner where the infant lay sleeping. "Take him to Dragon, I'm sure he'll know what to do with the baby. Tell him it's an orphan you found abandoned in a basket or something. But I can't be with the child, Iva. I can't take care of him, and he deserves at least not to die."
Ivankov let out a long, heavy sigh that sounded like the deflation of a balloon.
"May God have mercy on whatever you become, darling," he whispered.
At that very moment, he dug his nails deeply deep into my neck. The execution of my old self came right after.
The reaction was instantaneous. I screamed. It was a sound that didn't belong to a human being, a raw, bubbling shriek that tore through the stone walls of the laboratory.
It felt as if my cells were melting and reforming. I felt my bone density thickening, my shoulders broadening with a sudden, agonizing snapping sound as the skeletal framework rearranged itself. The internal organs shifted, the remnants of my reproductive tract withering away into nothingness as a surge of foreign, aggressive testosterone flooded my nervous system.
My chest flattened violently, the swelling tissue collapsing as the pectorals hardened into a broad, unyielding wall of muscle. It felt as though I was being skinned alive from the inside out, my nerve endings scorched by a purple tide of chemical re-authoring.
My voice cords thickened and split, the high pitch of my agony dropping in real-time, morphing from a woman's shriek into a deep, vibrating, bestial roar that rattled the glassware on the shelves.
However, when the fire finally burned itself out, I stopped feeling like I was dying and I felt like I had been reborn.
The laboratory was dead silent. I lay on the iron table, my skin slick with a cold, oily sweat, breathing heavily. But the breath didn't rattle in my chest anymore. It came from deep within a broad, powerful torso.
Slowly, I pushed myself up. The leverage was entirely different: I was taller, harder, more muscular.
And when I finally deigned to get up in search of a mirror, an ecstatic smile spread across my face, almost as wide as the scar drawn on the bridge of my nose.
A man stood there, right before my eyes.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Sharp-jawed. Between my legs, the absence of what had once been there felt like the most profound relief I had ever known.
This was me.
Not the woman who had failed her crew. Not the woman who had let herself become weak. Not the woman who had carried a child she never wanted.
This was me.
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I left Baltigo that same night.
I didn’t say goodbye to anyone except Ivankov. He stood at the hidden dock, watching me with a mixture of sorrow and reluctant acceptance as I boarded a small, fast ship I had prepared in secret.
There were no tears left between us. I never looked back.
Ivankov had done his part, and thanks to it, from that day forward, I was him.
The man whose name everyone would pronounce with terror.
The man who would never let himself be trampled on again.
The man who would never again trust in the childlike fragility of dreams.
The man who would protect what was his, properly this time.
Sir Crocodile was born.
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The next morning, Crocodile woke with an acrimonious taste in his mouth.
Those memories were a still-raw wound in his mind. A wound he had tried to cover up and bury in the deepest recesses of that desert. But, however much he might have wanted to pretend otherwise, some cuts did not heal simply with the passage of time, as could have been the case with the transverse scar on his face.
Seeking the grounding comfort of her presence to banish the lingering ghosts, he then heavily rolled over in the bed.
His voice came out in a tired, raspy murmur, rough from the restless night.
"G'morning Ri—"
But the words died abruptly on his lips.
As he extended his right arm across the mattress to pull Sabrina against his chest, his hand met nothing but the cold, smooth expanse of empty linen. A sharp pang of unease twisted in his chest, as he didn't find her familiar warmth waiting for him, the rhythmic rise and fall of her breathing, nor her fragrance of lavender and vanilla to cut through the stale taste of his nightmare.
“Where the hell…?” he muttered, running a hand through his dark hair after sitting up abruptly, the movement sharp and ungraceful for a man of his usual composure.
Crocodile scanned the dim, quiet bedroom, his sharp eyes darting everywhere, as if deep down a part of him hoped she was playing hide-and-seek somewhere in his suite. However, his search ceased when his gaze landed on the nightstand, where a small piece of paper had been placed.
“I was in a hurry and didn’t want to wake you. I’ll call you later.”
He crumpled the note in his fist, the paper creaking under the pressure.
The worry gnawed at him, sharper than any blade. He knew her too well, and Sabrina wasn't exactly an early bird, let alone a woman to slip away into the morning without a word. Something was eating at her; something she was trying to carry alone.
And that terrified him more than any enemy he ever had.
Because if she was pulling away now, when her life was on the line, it could only mean one thing:
CWs: angst, explicit violence, descriptions of ptsd episode, descriptions of panic attack, fluff.
WORDCOUNT: ~9000 words
Author's note: Sorry for the delay in uploading the new chapter, I've been extremely busy with exams oof (fuck uni fuck finals). I only could write during my bus rides. I hope you like this chapter!! Crocodile was really silly in this one I love him.
My One Piece writing masterlist! Check for part ten and the rest!
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The gods may throw a dice
Their minds as cold as ice
And someone way down here
Loses someone dear
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Sir Crocodile was in one of his moods.
Not the usual calculated coldness he wore like armor; this was something sharper, more volatile. Employees scurried through the corridors like frightened mice, whispering nervously whenever they passed his office. Orders were barked with unusual frequency. The head chef had already been reduced to tears after the third complaint about the menu for tonight’s private dinner.
But the worst part was suffered by the poor employee who dared to decorate the VIP room with floral arrangements, only to be threatened by Crocodile with being turned into a dehydrated corpse."The miss is allergic to flowers, you brainless, irresponsible cockroach," he had told him.
No one understood what was driving the Warlord’s obsessive, suffocating perfectionism. No one dared ask why the boss was acting like this, but everyone was praying they would survive him.
In truth, Crocodile himself barely understood the storm raging inside his chest.
Needing a respite from his own frustration, he retreated to his private office on the upper floors, slamming the heavy mahogany door shut behind him. There, the velvet box sat on his desk like a live grenade. He picked it up for the seventh time that hour, opening it to stare at the ring inside.
It was… tacky. Obnoxiously so.
A massive central emerald surrounded by a chaotic halo of diamonds and smaller emeralds, set in a heavy gold ornamental cameo. This wasn't like that oversized one he'd once lent her (and which she’d thrown in his face after he’d behaved like an absolute asshole). No, this one was going to be entirely hers, made to measure, crafted just for the woman he was head over heels for.
Crocodile hated it on sight. But he knew—with grim certainty—that Sabrina would lose her mind over it. She loved loud, ridiculous things. And for once, he wanted to give her something loud and ridiculous.
While still staring at that crime against the concept of jewelry, he couldn't stop thinking about that specific conversation. His heart felt oddly heavy, compressed by a strange, foreign weight that the grand architecture of his ambition had never prepared him for.
It had happened months ago, on a peaceful Wednesday evening in that very office. The desert wind had died down, leaving the night still, and they had spent hours playing cards and gossiping about unimportant things. Sabrina was leaning back, a delicate trail of cigarette smoke curling around her fingers, while Crocodile filled the space between them with the rich, heavy haze of his cigar.
"Hey, Crocodile," she had murmured, her voice laced with a lazy, cat-like curiosity. "How many people have you actually been with before? Be honest."
Crocodile had paused mid-inhale, his hand freezing over his cards as the smoke trailed out of his nose in two thin, gray lines like exhaust. "What kind of an absurd question is that?"
"A perfectly normal one for a couple of degenerates like us," she had chirped, leaning her chin on her hand, a mischievous glint in her eyes. "Come on. Give me a ballpark estimate. Or shall I make my own theories?"
His response was letting out a low, amused chuckle, the gravel in his throat vibrating pleasantly, and then he had dropped his cards onto the felt. "And what are your theories, if I may ask, madam?"
“Well,” she had said, her tone shifting into that mock-intellectual cadence she used whenever she was about to say something entirely inappropriate. "Either an absolute whore amount or a nun number."
“Is that the only choice I get?” He had murmured, leaning back into his leather chair, his golden hook catching the lamplight. He had let the silence stretch for a moment, enjoying the way she leaned in, waiting for the verdict. “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but… In my entire life? I highly doubt the total amount reaches ten.”
"Ten," she had echoed softly, her teasing smile softening into something more intrigued. "That's very little for someone who's already in his forties."
“Let me be clear,” he had started, his voice dropping into a firmer, more defensive register, though the corner of his mouth remained tipped upward. “We both know it is not because I have lacked the opportunity. But I had other priorities."
“And those ten?” she had asked, her fingers leaving the cards entirely now, her gaze locked onto his with an intensity that made the air between them feel thick. “Were you ever… serious about any of them?"
Crocodile had looked down at his cigar, the tip a brilliant, burning orange. “Not really. Perhaps just once, decades ago. There was someone I met when I was younger and naïve. But it ended exactly how you would expect a pirate's first romance to end. Bloody and with a lesson learned.”
A brief, bitter expression had crossed the Warlord's features—a faint, pained shadow that suggested the memory, though dead and buried, still left an odd taste in his mouth. He raised his eyes back to hers, his gaze sharpening with a familiar, competitive heat as he deflected the vulnerability. "And what about you? Have you been in a proper relationship before?"
Sabrina had let out a dramatic, melodic sigh, tossing her head back with a flourish. “As you may suspect, darling, I am an incredibly sought-after lady. Yeah, I’ve had a few little love affairs before," she had explained. "Some dashing bandit over here, some bounty hunter who forgot he was supposed to capture me over there… and, of course, I had my adventures right here in your dear casino before we officially met."
Crocodile raised a judgemental eyebrow.
"Though they never lasted long enough to actually matter," she continued. "Nothing serious. Pirates don't exactly do 'serious.' We fuck, we fight, we sail away."
He had leaned forward, a wicked smirk spreading across his scarred face. “Whore.”
Without a second of hesitation, she had kicked his shin beneath the mahogany table.
“HEY! You bastard," Sabrina had chirped. "At least I had my fun. Meanwhile, you've spent your whole existance being a monk until I came along and revolutionized your sex life. You're welcome, by the way.”
Crocodile laughed out loud then—a rich, genuine sound that rarely echoed outside these four walls. "Seriously, though," he continued, leaning forward on his elbows. "Nothing serious? Not even a classic, tragic 'true romance story' inside the cabins of the Oasis Pirates? You know what they say: closeness breeds affection."
"Hell no," Sabrina said instantly, her face softening into a fond, nostalgic smile that always accompanied the mention of her old life. "The crew… they were family, Croc. Seth, the guys… It would have been totally twisted.
"Not even… what was his name? The one with the bandana. Your shipwright." Crocodile tilted his head, his eyes narrowing slightly as he dragged up the memory.
"You mean Kino?"
"Kino. That was it. I saw his bounty poster many years ago. Gotta say it, the boy was handsome."
The woman let out a loud, horrified gasp, covering her face with her hands. "Goodness, absolutely not! Kino? That would have been like fucking my cousin!"
They had laughed together then, the ease of the conversation settling over the office like a familiar, warm blanket, stripping away the blood-soaked history that usually followed them both.
"So," he then murmured, his laughter dying down into a warm, lingering hum as he looked at her across the table. "It seems we are both absolute rookies with this…"
"Yeah," Sabrina had agreed, her voice soft as she leaned back against the cushions, staring down at her cards with a lopsided, affectionate smile. "Very clumsy rookies."
She went quiet for a moment, the silence between them growing heavy, charged with an unspoken weight. Sabrina looked up, her gaze locking onto his through her lashes. The teasing facade was completely gone now, leaving behind a raw, sudden vulnerability that made Crocodile’s chest tighten.
"You know, at first, compromise scared the hell out of me," she had whispered, looking up at him through her lashes, her vulnerability sudden and sharp. "The idea of it. And yet here I am, playing cards with the man I say goodnight to every night.
"Are you getting sentimental on me, Rina? I thought you were a hardened ex-pirate," the Warlord had teased, unable to resist the urge to poke her armor just a bit.
"Shut up and listen, I'm trying to be profound," she had groaned, though a faint blush had crept up her neck. "Having a boyfriend is all fun and games," Sabrina continued, a small, breathless laugh escaping her lips as she traced a pattern on the wood of the table. "It's easy to share a bed and get pretty to go on dates. But, eventually, there comes a definitive point when things get more… serious. Years ago, if you had told me I'd consider chaining myself to a person that way, I would have laughed in your face."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah," Sabrina had reached out, her small hand sliding across the mahogany table until her fingers gently brushed against his powerful, scarred wrist. Her voice was a soft, steady vow in the quiet room."But now… looking at you? I wouldn't mind chaining myself to you for the rest of my miserable days."
That conversation had never left him. Every time he looked at her, every time she laughed at him, every time she chose to stay despite all his flaws—those words echoed in his mind.
Chaining myself to you.
Crocodile blinked, the warm amber light of the memory fading back into the harsh, cold reality of his empty office.
“Damn it all,” he growled to himself, stopping in front of the glass of the Bananawanis' tank, observing its reflection with a knot in its stomach.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of his office, in the reinforced Kairouseki-lined cell built into the far wall of the room, a prisoner sat huddled in the corner—one of his own former Baroque Works agents, a mid-level Billion whose name Crocodile hadn’t bothered remembering. The man had made the fatal mistake of discovering Mr. 0’s true identity. He had been sobbing quietly for the past hour.
Crocodile ignored him.
He cleared his throat, straightened his posture, and began practicing again—for the seventh time.
“Karina… Rina.” He frowned, reformulating. “No— Karina.”
He took a breath.
"I never thought I’d want this. Commitment. Marriage. But I do. I want you. And if you want me… well. Take the damn ring."
Clearly frustrated with himself, his immediate self-response was a click of his tongue. "Fuck. No."
Then, from the dark cell, a muffled, tearful sob broke the silence. "I… I don't wanna die… Please, have mer—"
Crocodile shot the prisoner a withering glare and interrupted him. “Quiet, you’re distracting me. You're gonna die slowly anyway so shut your mouth.”
The man whimpered and pressed himself tighter against the wall. Crocodile paused, rubbing the bridge of his nose where a headache was beginning to bloom, then took another deep breath.
"Karina. From the moment you walked back into my life, you’ve done nothing but complicate it. You challenge me. You infuriate me. You’re stubborn, chaotic, impossible… yet—” He stopped, jaw tightening. “I feel like the luckiest man in Alabasta every single day I wake up next to you. I love you. So, marry me or I'll—"
He stopped dead in his tracks, groaning aloud.
"Damn, no. Still too agressive. I cannot threaten her into marrying me."
Frustrated, he decided to go all out. He did something he had only ever done once before in his entire life, at the most shameful and painful moment of his life, and only before that woman: kneeling down.
Leaning his weight on his knee while gripping the small velvet box tightly in his calloused hand, he looked onto an imaginary Sabrina and recited:
"Listen to me, you chaotic little menace. I love you. You make me… feel things I never thought I’d feel again. I've realized that the Utopia I aspire to is meaningless without you by my side. So let me be a king alongside his queen. Forever.”
Silence.
Then, from the depths of the Seastone cell, a tiny, trembling, utterly horrified whisper cut through the air. “…Are you really practicing a marriage proposal… while I’m chained in here?”
Crocodile finally turned, sharp eyes narrowing dangerously at the terrified man. “Yes. And you’re ruining the mood.”
The prisoner looked like he wanted to melt into the floor.
"Hmm. Maybe it was too soft?" the Warlord muttered to himself, rising from his knee and brushing a speck of dust from his trousers.
The poor man in the cell whimpered again, tears streaming down his face. “I won't say anything… Sir… I have a wife… two children… please…”
"And I'm trying to have a wife too so stop wasting time babbling about your miserable life, would you mind?"
Crocodile snapped the box shut and placed it on the desk at his left before exhaling sharply, running his hand through his dark hair. His usual confidence was cracking at the edges. He was nervous—genuinely nervous—and it infuriated him.
“Oh god. What if she says no?” he muttered, half to himself, half to the unfortunate audience of one. “She’s stubborn. What if she laughs? She always laughs at me when I try to be romantic…”
The prisoner, desperate to survive and recognizing a bizarre, delusional window of opportunity, tried to flatter his executioner through his tears. “She… she’ll say yes, Boss! Definitely! You’re Sir Crocodile! Who on earth would say no to you?”
The Warlord shot him a withering glare. “You clearly don’t know her.”
The scene had turned entirely Dantesque— Crocodile pacing again around the room, oversharing with the condemned man like he was a reluctant therapist.
"A leash over her neck? Never. She will never be mine. She belongs to no one. She simply decides who she's most interested in bothering, and it seems she has chosen me as her victim," Crocodile explained. "She’s chaos incarnate. A walking disaster in heels. But when she smiles at me…” He stopped, jaw tightening. “When she smiles at me like I hung the fucking moon, I forget I ever wanted to rule this kingdom.”
As he spoke, an unusually sweet, uncharacteristic smile touched the Warlord's lips. His sharp eyes shone with a sudden, fierce excitement, unable to help but imagine her actual reaction tonight—the pure joy in her gaze, the beautiful, crimson curve of her lips when she finally saw the ring. His heart was beating powerfully against his ribs, a volatile mix of raw nerves and the frantic butterflies that simply thinking about her caused him.
The unlucky hostage whimpered again, temporarily distracted from his doom by the sudden warmth radiating from the terrifying Warlord. “She sounds… wonderful, sir.”
“I just… want her to be happy,” he muttered. “I want her to stay. I want her to choose me."
The Warlord stopped. He turned his head slowly, looking at the man with a subtle, warm smile. For a split second, the prisoner thought he had won him over.
"You think she'll say yes?"
"Y-Yes, sir! Absolutely! Any woman would be insane to turn down a man of your stature! She’ll definitely say yes, I'm certain of it! You sound incredibly… romantic! Just let me go, and I'll—"
"Nice try," he interrupted, the curve of his smirk turning wicked. "But you know too much. You're still dying in an hour."
Before the prisoner could let out another wail of despair, the heavy mechanical lock of the office door clicked. The door swung open, and a muscular man, tall as a pillar, wearing a suit and with a shaved head, strode into the room, his massive, imposing figure instantly filling the entryway. He stopped in his tracks, his sharp, unblinking eyes darting from his boss—who was standing by his desk, unusually flustered and quickly adjusting his vest—to the weeping, broken mess of a man shivering in the corner of the cell.
Mr. 1 paused, one eyebrow twitching slightly. “…Should I come back later, Mr. 0?”
"No," Crocodile snapped, a bit too quickly. "Get in here and close the door. I don't have all day."
Mr. 1 obeyed without question, the heavy door sealing behind him with a low thud. He glanced once more at the weeping prisoner, then back to his boss.
“I’ve taken care of everything you asked for,” he reported in his usual calm, professional tone. "Miss Doublefinger and I have made sure that our 'guest's' gossip has not reached third parties. So I am ready to fulfill my task and take care of the prisoner, as you demanded."
The prisioner gasped in tremor.
Crocodile nodded curtly and waved his hand dismissively, but his mind was clearly elsewhere, then walked back to his desk, picking up the velvet box and turning it over in his fingers.
Mr. 1 observed him for a moment, then added with the faintest hint of dry amusement in his voice: “You look nervous, sir.”
“I am not nervous,” Crocodile snapped immediately, his golden eyes flashing with a sudden, defensive fire. He glared at his top assassin as if daring him to challenge the statement.
Mr. 1 didn't blink. He simply stood there, an immovable wall of compliance.
"…I’m fucking terrified," the Warlord finally muttered under his breath.
A rare, small smile—something almost resembling human warmth—tugged at the corner of Mr. 1’s severe mouth.“She’s going to say yes, you know.”
However, before Crocodile could respond, the prisoner in the cell suddenly interrupted through his tears, desperate to win favor:
“I-I told him the same thing!" The prisoner yelled, desperately pressing his face against the Sea-Prism stone bars, tears smudging the dirt on his cheeks. "I'm telling you, Boss, she's going to love it! You two are going to be so happy!"
Crocodile’s smile vanished instantly. He turned a deadpan, thoroughly unimpressed glare toward the cell. Then, the man reached into his trousers pocket, pulling out a heavy iron ring of keys, and tossed them carelessly across the room. Mr. 1 caught them mid-air with a flawless, metallic snap of his hand.
"Take care of him, Mr. 1," the Warlord rumbled. "And make it clean. I don't want any mess tonight."
"Understood."
He scooped up the velvet box, safely tucking it into the right pocket of his trousers. He took a few steps toward the door, but paused, his heavy boots coming to a halt just outside the shadow of the cage. He turned back slowly, a sinister, mocking smirk curling the edge of his lips. He looked down at the hostage one last time.
"Too bad you're going to die tonight," Crocodile murmured, his voice dripping with a cruel, dark satisfaction. "You won't get to see how incredible she looks in white."
Without waiting for a response, the Warlord swept out of the room, his heavy coat billowing behind him. The heavy mahogany door slammed shut, completely cutting off the sudden, renewed torrent of screams and pathetic whimpers that erupted from the cell behind him.
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Perched with practiced elegance upon a high, plush leather stool at one of Rain Dinners’ secondary bars, she lazily swirled a colorful piña colada, watching the condensation drip down the glass to pool on the polished mahogany. Around her, the madness of the crème of Alabasta hummed in a symphonic blur of sensory overload; wealthy merchants from Alubarna argued over card values, the slot machines offered a hypnotic chorus of electronic chirps, and the dry, rhythmic clatter of plastic chips being shuffled filled the room like white noise.
Though she sat entirely alone amidst the crowd, a serene, almost lazy calm enveloped her. Crocodile had explicitly warned her earlier that he would be swallowed by agonizingly dry Baroque Works logistics for the better part of the evening, strictly instructing her to amuse herself until he could break away. And of course, she was more than content to bide her time, nursing her drink and taking a quiet, observational pleasure in the desperation of the gamblers.
This peaceful equilibrium was shattered, however, when the ambient light was suddenly blocked by a towering shadow.
He had appeared literally out of nowhere. Despite her sharp instincts—honed by years of survival on the treacherous currents of the Grand Line—she had neither heard a footfall nor sensed the displacement of air that usually accompanied a physical presence.
The man's imposing silhouette was framed by the stark, dark uniform of the casino's elite security. A cascade of long, striking platinum blonde hair fell in immaculate strands over his shoulders. His gaze was entirely obscured behind a pair of deeply dark, polarized sunglasses, which caught and fractured the neon hues of the roulette wheels. Because of the heavy shadows of the lounge and the opacity of his eyewear, Sabrina found herself unable to discern his facial features properly, recognizing only the sharp, rigid line of his jaw.
"Miss Sabrina," the guard murmured, his posture bowing just a fraction to strike a perfect balance between deference and authority. "Sir Crocodile has personally asked me to locate you. He wants you to await his arrival at the second basement corridor, as he is currently wrapping up his private affairs."
Sabrina paused mid-sip, lowering her straw as a faint, skeptical line creased her brow. "The basement corridor?" she echoed, her voice laced with a lazy amusement that didn't quite mask her confusion. "Well, that’s a new twist, even for him. Usually, the big man prefers to come and pick me up personally, or summon me directly at his office."
The guard did not waver under her scrutiny; instead, his hidden gaze remained fixed precisely on her face, his hands clasping formally behind his back. "The Boss was really specific on the matter, miss. He stated that the main office is currently compromised by... administrative clutter. He felt the lower levels would provide a far more suitable, undisturbed environment."
Slid off the barstool, she smoothed down the fabric of her skirt and hoisted her small handbag over her shoulder. "Fine, then. I'll head down myself. I know the layout of those service tunnels better than half the staff anyway."
As she made a move to bypass him toward the secure employee exit, the platinum-haired guard smoothly shifted his weight, subtly threading himself back into her path with an unyielding politeness. "Allow me to escort you down, miss."
"Oh, it's really not necessary, sweetheart," Sabrina chirped, offering him a brilliant, dismissive flash of a smile as she attempted to wave him off. "I appreciate the chivalry, truly, but I'm a big girl. I can reach the basement without a chaperone. So go back to watching the high-rollers; I'm sure someone's trying to slip a card up their sleeve at the blackjack table."
"I must insist, Miss Sabrina," the guard stated, his voice firming up just a fraction, carrying an underlying gravity that caused her to pause in her tracks. "Sir Crocodile explicitly told me to accompany you. Today is a particularly hectic day on the floor, and considering the overall... complicated social climate within the city limits lately, he demanded that I ensure your absolute safety until you are in his presence."
She actively searched his posture for any hidden spike of malice, any telltale tremor of deceit, but the man remained entirely impenetrable. For a fleeting second, the sheer perfection of his blankness felt strange, but as she processed his words, a fond, slightly exasperated warmth took over her suspicion. It made total sense. Alabasta had been a powder keg lately, and this protective chauvinism was exactly the kind of suffocating caution she expected from Crocodile when he was stressed out.
"God, he really is a control freak when he's under pressure, isn't he?" she groaned playfully, rolling her eyes with a lopsided smile. "Alright, you win. Lead the way."
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The basement hallway stretched out before them like a hollow concrete vault, illuminated only by a series of flickering, low-wattage fluorescent bulbs fixed to the ceiling that looked as though they might snap into total darkness at any given second.
The only sound filling the narrow corridor was the rhythmic, coordinated click of their footsteps echoing off the stone.
Sabrina walked slightly ahead, her heels striking the floor with a steady, casual cadence. Behind her, the guard matched her pace with a heavy, military precision. It was a flawless, synchronized rhythm...until it wasn't.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the heavy thud of the combat boots behind her began to fall out of sync. The distance between them stretched. The footsteps slowed, dragging against the concrete, before dying out entirely.
Silence collapsed over the hallway.
Sabrina stopped. She stood frozen for a beat, her back still turned to the towering figure, a strange, cold prickle of alarm flaring up the back of her neck. She looked around at the damp, empty corridor, her brow furrowing in deep confusion.
"Hey," she said, her voice laced with a sharp, puzzled edge as she began to shift her weight to glance over her shoulder. "Are you sure this is where Crocodile said he wanted to meet me? I don't kno—"
"This charade is over," a voice cut her off.
It wasn't the polite, carefully modulated baritone the guard had used at the bar. It was rougher, deeper, carrying an undercurrent of venomous familiarity that made her blood run entirely cold.
Before the final syllable could even echo off the concrete, the air behind her violently displaced. A savage, blinding rush of movement tore through the shadows. A massive, gloved fist swung directly for the back of her head, aiming to crush her skull against the wall.
But Sabrina’s instincts didn't fail her. Even without being able to read his aura, her battle-honed reflexes tore into action. Sensing the lethal intent a millisecond before impact, she dropped her weight, spinning fluidly to the left as the fist whistled through the empty air where her head had been, colliding with the concrete wall with a sickening, cracking force that showered the floor with dust.
She let out a sharp, ragged gasp, her heart violently hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
"What the hell do you think you're—!"
Enraged, the shock instantly morphing into lethal adrenaline, Sabrina countered without hesitation. She drove her heel forward in a vicious, blindingly fast kick aimed squarely at the guard's ribs. But whoever this man was, he wasn't a standard casino lackey. With terrifying, flawless speed, he twisted his torso, the fabric of his uniform whistling as he dodged her strike by a fraction of an inch.
Before she could chamber another strike, a heavy hand shot out of the gloom.
Fingers twisted brutally into her hair, gripping the strands with a cruel, unyielding force that made her vision white out with a flash of agony. With a savage, downward heave, the man ruthlessly threw her to the ground.
Sabrina hit the hard floor with a breath-robbing thud, a sharp whimpering cry escaping her lips as her handbag slid away across the floor. Pain flared through her shoulder and scalp, her breathing ragged, her eyes wide with absolute disbelief.
The towering figure stood directly over her, casting a massive, inescapable shadow across her trembling form. Slowly, deliberately, the man raised his free hand to the brim of his face. He snatched the deeply dark, polarized sunglasses from his nose and tossed them aside, clattering against the stone.
Sabrina looked up, and the words caught in her throat, choking her.
Staring down at her with a twisted, triumphant sneer were a pair of eyes she never thought she would see again. The platinum hair, the sharp, rigid jaw, the unmistakable, malicious arrogance etched into every line of his face.
No. It can't be.
"Long time no see, Karina," the man murmured, a cold, sickeningly familiar smirk carving into his weathered face.
Cain Barton.
It was as though a dam had breached within her skull. A sudden, suffocating horror gripped her throat, seizing her lungs until the cool basement air turned to solid lead. Looking up into those striking, slate-gray eyes, the flickering fluorescent light above morphed into the blazing, merciless sun of a day she had spent six years trying to drown in vices and denial.
Suddenly, she wasn’t the elegant, untouchable woman lounging at the poker tables of Rain Dinners. She was twenty-seven again. And Nanohana was burning.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! They're here!
It was a sensory assault. The white-hot, coarse sand of the harbor, stained a deep red with the blood of a hundred nameless souls.
I can't see...! I can't see anything... Help!
Marines and pirates alike were swallowed up by the war.
Run, for god's sake, RUN!
The acrid smell of burning flesh, a scent that still made her vomit to this day.
Someone please help me!
The guttural roar of the cannons, and that wet, sickening sound of steel parting skin. The screams of her crewmates, voices she had loved, voices she had memorized over shared rations and starlit nights, reverberated inside her ears, loud and agonizingly clear.
My legs...! Karina, help! Where are my legs!?
That was May. May, who used to play the concertina on the deck. She had only been nineteen. Sabrina remembered staring down at the dark, smoking void where the girl's lower half used to be, her fingers clawing desperately into the strategist's trousers, begging for a salvation she didn't possess.
Karina!
She saw Seth. Brilliant, fiercely protective Auguste Seth, the captain who had sworn to give Alabasta its sky back. At the very verge of his death again, thrusting his gold Ankh earrings into her bloodstained trembling palm.
Promise me you’ll carry them. That our memory will breath through you.
The memory cut off, leaving a raw, bleeding gap in her chest, right where the scar of the sword wound that was supposed to have killed her that day was located. Now, the monster who had engineered that slaughter was standing right in front of her, breathing the same air. Sabrina felt entirely weak, terrified, her breath coming in shallow hitches as an acute panic attack locked her muscles in place.
Barton’s gaze flicked downward, landing precisely on the gold ornaments dangling from her ears. "Nice earrings," he spat with a sadistic, sharp smile. "They suit you better than him."
"You..." Sabrina’s voice was a pathetic, shattered rasp, forcing her hands against the concrete, pushing her weight back until her spine slammed against the cold wall. "You... you were supposed to be dead. There was no way... no way you escaped. Everyone died that day."
He let out a low, gravelly chuckle, a sound entirely devoid of human empathy, as he slowly rolled his sleeves up his thick forearms. "Die?" the man repeated, tilting his head with a look of supreme, patronizing amusement. "Of course I escaped. It wouldn't have been very smart of me to accompany the rest of you idiots to your own graves, now would it? Not after the absolute fortune the World Government was quietly offering for your collective heads."
"You... traitor," Sabrina spat, her voice trembling violently with a volatile mixture of terror and burning rage. She forced herself up onto her knees, her fingernails digging so deeply into her palms that she nearly broke the skin, using the pain to anchor her wandering mind. "You betrayed them. You betrayed the people who literally pulled you out of the gutter! Seth was the only idiot in the world who would have put his neck on the line for you when you were nothing more than a penniless thug, and yet you sold him out as if he were nothing more than a walking bounty? I never trusted you one bit, but we were your family. And because of you, now they’re all..."
"And look where that 'family' dynamic got them," Barton interrupted her smoothly, his gray eyes flashing with a cold, calculating brilliance. "Buried beneath the sand, entirely despised by the country they were trying so desperately to save."
An agonizing sting burned deep within her insides, choking out her next breath. She remained silent, her bared teeth locking together as she stared at the floor. The worst part—the part that truly broke her down inside—was that she was entirely unable to refute what he said.
It was the ugly, bleeding truth. Alabasta had never taken the Oasis Pirates seriously. The citizens had looked at them with suspicion; the royal guard had hunted them; and in the end, the world had simply moved on without them, labeling them villains in the daily papers. But was that fair? Did they really deserve to be slaughtered like cattle just because they dared to hope for something better?
"Let's be realistic, Karina. The Oasis Pirates were doomed from the start. You all honestly believed you could save this miserable, dried-up kingdom. You thought you could solve the drought, play the heroes, and sail off into the sunset. It was a pathetic fantasy. I merely did the smartest thing a man in my position could do: I recognized a sinking ship and I switched sides before it pulled me under."
He took a slow step forward, his heavy boots clicking with terrifying deliberation on the stone.
"Don't look at me like that, I was just securing my future. Since that day in Nanohana, I’ve been operating as a government-sponsored bounty hunter. I made the right connections. I scratch the backs of certain entities—Cipher Pol, to name one—and they keep my pockets heavy and my record clean." He gestured down at his Rain Dinners uniform with a sharp, mocking grin. "Which brings us to my current assignment. Do you like the outfit? I think I've got used to the uniform after a year."
Sabrina's heart skipped a beat as she stared at him in horror. "A year...?"
“I’ve been working here for over a year,” he continued, as if they were having a casual conversation, enjoying the sheer disbelief on her face. “Right under your nose. And you never noticed. Not once.”
Sabrina’s jaw dropped; her lips parted, but she couldn’t utter a single sound. A whole year, and she had been utterly blind to it. How had she not realized? If there was one thing in this miserable world she prided herself on, one thing she trusted implicitly to keep her alive, it was her sharp, calculating powers of observation. And now, at this very moment, her greatest strength had been exposed as a complete failure.
But as the initial shock reeled back, the cold, clinical truth of it settled in. It was hardly surprising. Barton had been a feared, high-tier pirate in his own right before the betrayal; he was a man who understood how to blend into the background, how to mask his presence entirely. It was no shock that he had managed to hone his Haki during their years apart, sharpening it into a perfect shroud that her own perception simply couldn't pierce.
"An old associate of mine that worked at Rain Dinners tipped me off a while back. Said they spotted a woman who might well be linked in some way to my old crew around the grand casino of Rainbase. Piercing, golden gaze, like that of a viper. Ankh earrings, just like the Oasis' captain. Imagine my delight when I confirmed it was you. And not only were you alive, but you were actively associating with Sir Crocodile himself."
The moment Barton voiced the Shichibukai's name, Sabrina's entire expression startled. A sharp, involuntary gasp escaped her lips, her hand instinctively moving toward her chest. Barton’s eyes gleamed, a slow, wicked smile spreading across his face as he easily detected the sudden sentimentality that the name awakened within her.
"Why?" Sabrina asked, her voice a fragile, desperate whisper as she stared at him. "If you knew I was here... why wait a year? Why do this now?"
Barton’s smile widened, turning thoroughly dark and sadistic. He tilted his head, studying her pale face with a twisted sense of affection. "Think of it as my last gift to you. After all, we were once crewmates, weren't we? I wanted to let you live out that little fantasy of yours just a bit longer. Playing house with the so-called 'Hero of Alabasta' and dressing up as the glamorous lady you always dreamed of being."
“Gift?” she hissed, voice breaking. “You call this a gift?"
"Well, it also has been a 'gift' for me. Waiting allowed me to be thorough. Come on, you were once a formidable strategist, Karina. If I struck too early, you would have slipped through my fingers. So, I waited. I watched. I gathered evidence, documented your routines, and developed a strategy so airtight that you couldn't possibly wiggle out of it."
Barton then began to pace around her, his heavy steps ticking like a countdown clock. "But really, Karina... I have to say, I'm surprised. A Shichibukai? A government lapdog? Out of all the men in this world, couldn't you have gotten yourself another boyfriend? Seth would be absolutely furious with you if he could see you now."
The mention of her former captain tore through her like a hot blade. The fragile boundary holding back her rage shattered entirely.
"Shut your mouth, you piece of shit!" Sabrina screamed. The raw volume of her voice erupted violently off the narrow concrete walls, cracking under the weight of her grief. She scrambled to her feet with a sudden, explosive burst of adrenaline, her eyes burning with a feral, dangerous light that completely replaced her fear. "You don't get to say his name!"
Blinded by pure fury, Sabrina didn't hesitate, throwing her entire weight into a vicious, blindingly fast roundhouse kick aimed directly at Barton's stomach.
But Barton was entirely prepared. Expecting the emotional outburst, he reacted with a superhuman speed, ducking beneath the arc of her heel, the wind of her kick whistling harmlessly over his platinum hair. Before she could recover her balance, his large hands shot forward like iron vices.
He grabbed her wrists with a brutal, crushing grip, completely cutting off her circulation.
Right afterwards, the man slammed her violently against the concrete wall. The impact knocked the wind from her lungs, a sharp gasp escaping her lips as her head lightly clipped the stone. Barton leaned his massive frame heavily against her, pinning her wrists firmly on either side of her head, locking her completely in place.
Sabrina was trapped. Defenceless. Encaged.
Powerless and unable to do anything.
Again.
Unable to move, rage consumed her. A rage that manifested in her eyes as unshed tears.
"What do you want from me now, Barton?" she rasped. "You took my only friends, you took my will to live, you took everything! What else is there left for you to steal from me?"
A laugh. A macabre, deep, and sepulchral laugh filled the emptiness of the dark corridor. A laugh that tormented the woman's ears like a sound ripped from her own nightmares, utterly devoid of mercy. The laugh of a monster.
"I want you to turn yourself in," he purred, his voice smooth and entirely lacking of remorse. "Your bounty was a masterpiece six years ago, so imagine what it must be worth now. The double? No, the tenfold! If they discover you're alive, and that I am the one delivering your head, the payout will ensure I never have to work ever again."
Sabrina swallowed the lump of glass in her throat.
She let escape a harsh laugh and forced her chin up, trying desperately to summon the phantom of her usual razor-sharp confidence, though her voice still shook violently. "You're an idiot, Barton," she spat, her eyes flashing with a desperate defiance. "You think you've trapped me? You’re so fucking wrong. If Crocodile finds out what you’re plotting, if he catches so much as a whisper of you touching me... Hah! Oh man, you don't know him. He will tear you apart limb by limb and feed whatever is left to the Bananawanis."
However, Sabrina's threat did not intimidate him at all. If anything, it only seemed to sweeten his triumph.
"Oh, I'm surely aware of what Sir Crocodile is capable of," Barton murmured, as he loosened his grip on her wrists just a fraction, not to free her, but to lean in until his breath hot against her ear. "But let me lay out the board for you, strategist."
Sabrina glared at him, her chest heaving as she swallowed the bitter sarcasm with which he had spat her old title.
"If you dare to tell Crocodile, or if you try to run away like a coward, the consequences no longer fall solely on you. The moment I open my mouth and prove that Sir Crocodile has been knowingly harboring and sleeping with a high-tier, classified outlaw, his status is gone. The World Government will brand him a traitor, strip his Shichibukai immunity, and give him a 'one-way vacation' straight to Enies Lobby."
Her heart stopped, a cold, paralyzing dread washing over her.
"And don't think your dear boyfriend can just eliminate me to solve the problem," Barton continued, his smile turning profoundly sadistic. "If I suddenly vanish, or if I turn up as a dehydrated corpse, my associates have strict orders to immediately launch an intensive federal investigation into Rain Dinners. No matter which piece you move, Karina, Crocodile falls. If you tell him, he falls. If you fight, he falls. If you try to save yourself, you sentence him to a grave next to yours."
The logic snapped into place like the jaws of a bear trap. It was flawless. It was cruel. She was a shield turned into a weapon against the only man who had ever made her feel safe again.
But that safety was futile. The only person who had given her back her will to live was now her weakness. It wasn't just her facing her past anymore. Now he was in the same target too.
No... not again. Please, God, not him.
A broken, ragged sob tore from her chest. Her strength entirely dissolved, and her head slumped back against the stone wall as tears streamed uncontrollably down her face, pooling at her jawline.
"Why?" she wept, looking at him with a gaze completely shattered by grief. "Why do you always have to destroy everything I love? Is it really worth that much? First Seth, the crew... and now him? Why can't you just let me rebuild my life?"
"In this world, Karina, there are only two kinds of people: allies and enemies," he explained coldly. "You're a pirate. I'm not anymore. And that makes us enemies."
Barton stared at her tears with the detached curiosity of a scientist dissecting a bug. He let go of her wrists entirely, stepping back and smoothing down the lapels of his dark security uniform as if he had just finished a routine business transaction.
"You know, I’m a reasonable man. We shared a ship once, after all," he replied coldly as he reached down, picking up his discarded sunglasses from the floor, wiping a speck of concrete dust from the frame before slipping them back over his hidden eyes. "So, I’m going to give you a week. Seven days to wrap up your little affairs, say your proper goodbyes, and make up your mind. You will surrender to me voluntarily, march out of this casino quietly, put on the heavy irons, and allow yourself to be transported to a public execution in the platform of Rashida as an example to the rest of the Alabasta. If you do that... Crocodile remains untouched. Play your cards right, strategist."
Sabrina slid down the wall, her knees giving out as she sat curled on the cold basement floor. She buried her face in her hands, her frame wracked with silent, violent weeping. The gold Ankh earrings in her palm felt heavy, burning against her skin like molten lead.
Barton turned on his heel, his heavy combat boots crunching softly against the debris on the floor. He took a few steps down the darkened, flickering hallway, his platinum hair catching the last glints of the dying fluorescent light. Just before he reached the heavy service door, he paused, casting a backward glance over his shoulder. A cruel, mockery of a smile played on his rigid jaw.
"Well, Miss Sabrina," Barton called out smoothly, his voice echoing through the damp corridor with terrifying normalcy. "Don't make Sir Crocodile wait too long. He's down in the VIP lounge, and we both know how much he hates it when things don't go according to his schedule."
The silence of the basement returned, thick and suffocating, interrupted only by the sound of Sabrina’s broken, uncontrollable sobbing.
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A short while later, having had enough time to wipe away her smudged mascara and touch up her make-up, Sabrina took the elevator to the third basement. When she stepped into the private lounge, the meticulous level of detail Crocodile had poured into the room nearly brought her to her knees. Soft, golden lighting bathed the room in a warm glow. Scented candles—vanilla and lavender, exactly like the ones Sabrina kept in her apartment—flickered gently on the table and side consoles. The air carried a delicate, comforting fragrance. No flowers anywhere. Crocodile had made sure of that. The table was set with fine crystal and silverware, presenting an exquisite seafood pasta dish that would make anyone's mouth water just looking at it, accompanied by the rosé wine that Sabrina loved so much.
Everything was flawless. A sanctuary engineered by a tyrant who, for her sake, had learned how to be gentle.
Across from her, Crocodile sat with his shoulders squared, trying to appear calm. His heart, however, was pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat. The Warlord’s large hand was buried deep within his trousers pocket, his thumb tracing the soft velvet corners of the ring box.
Just pull it out and say it, his inner voice commanded to himself. It's just a damn question, nothing more.
However, on the opposite side of the table, the woman he was intending to pop the question up to was entirely somewhere else. Her fork was idly pushing a single piece of shrimp around her plate. She hadn't taken more than two bites.
Think, Karina, think! There has to be a blind spot. If I try to outmaneuver them and fail, Crocodile pays the price. I’m a noose around his neck.
This is all my fault.
Whoever approaches me, gets dragged into the doom.
The silence stretched between them, thicker than usual. Sensing the drop in the atmosphere, Crocodile cleared his throat, pulling his hand away from his pocket to rest his elbow on the table. He forced a small smile to his lips.
“The food… is it good?" The Warlord asked, gesturing vaguely with his golden hook toward her plate. "I had the chef prepare your favorite. You know, you’d been going on and on about wanting to eat pasta for a whole week, so… As you wish, my lady."
Sabrina didn't answer immediately, as her eyes remained locked on her plate. Two seconds passed. Three.
Suddenly realizing the lapse, she snapped her head up, a bright, dazzling, hollow smile instantly plastering itself across her face. "Oh! Yes, of course, Croc," she chirped, her voice a fraction too high, too performed. "It’s divine. You know me, give me a plate of seafood pasta and I’m usually a happy woman."
She took a small bite, chewing mechanically, her golden eyes completely devoid of their usual spark.
The ring inside Crocodile’s pocket was completely forgotten at that moment. No, it wasn’t the right time.
Something was definitely wrong. Under normal circumstances, Sabrina would be chattering away like a parrot, gossiping about the snobbish rabble upstairs, laughing at his expense, and devouring her favorite meal without a single shred of modesty or restraint. She wouldn't be picking at her food. She wouldn't be staring through him as if he were a pane of glass.
The heavy hint of suspicion and sudden, deep-seated worry settled into his chest. He lowered his glass, his expression shifting from a nervous lover to a man who knew every micro-expression of the woman across from him.
"You're barely touching it," Crocodile murmured, his voice dropping into a low, rumbling register. "Rina. Look at me. You've been quiet all evening. Is everything alright?"
"What? Yeah, totally," she lied smoothly, waving a dismissive hand as she forced another empty chuckle. She wouldn't look him in the eye. She couldn't. If she looked too deeply into those, she would break, and the truth would spill out, sentencing him to ruin. "I'm just... a little tired, honestly. It’s been a long day. Don't worry about it."
Crocodile didn't buy it for a single millisecond. He knew her better than anyone alive; he knew the exact cadence of her genuine exhaustion, and this wasn't it.
"If you're tired, we can end this right now," Crocodile said, his voice softening with profound concern as he began to push his chair back. "The dinner can wait. We can go straight to bed so you can get some sleep."
He rose from his seat, leaning down her, his eyes scanning her face, searching for the anomaly—until his gaze dropped to her arms.
Beneath the soft, amber light of the candles, the delicate skin of her wrists was distinctly, angrily discolored. A pair of faint, swollen red marks encircled her flesh, looking stark and raw against her pale skin.
"What is this?" he rumbled, reaching down to gently, carefully close his large hand around her left wrist. He didn't use force; it was the soft, reverent grip he only ever used with her, intending to lift her hand to inspect the injury. "What happened? How did you manage to bruise your—"
But the moment Crocodile’s fingers closed, something inside Sabrina snapped.
For a split second, she wasn’t in the warm, candlelit VIP lounge anymore.
He's got me. I can't move. I can't breathe.
She was back in that cold, dimly lit basement corridor. Barton’s iron grip crushing her wrists, pinning her against the wall. She wasn't looking at her boyfriend, but the man who was the author of her ruin.
Her chest seized. Her vision blurred. A raw, broken sound tore from her throat.
“No. No, no, no, no—” she gasped. With an explosive, instinctual burst of adrenaline, she violently shoved Crocodile away from her, yanking her wrist away so hard she nearly knocked over her glass. Her chair scraped loudly against the floor as she shoved herself back. “Don’t— please don’t—”
Crocodile stumbled back a half-step, his boots gripping the floor as his arms dropped to his sides. He was nothing but stunned, shocked, confused. His sharp eyes were wide, staring at her in complete disbelief, his mind unable to process why the woman who fell asleep in his arms every night had just looked at him with that raw, foreign terror. "Rina...?"
But she couldn't hear him.
Her breathing shattered into rapid, shallow, agonizing gasps—her lungs seizing as if the air had literally turned to poison. Her chest heaved violently, her ribs aching under the strain of air that refused to settle in her lungs.
"I'm sorry..." she choked out, her voice a ragged, breathless weep as she began to rock back and forth, her fingernails digging into her scalp. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"Rina?!" he barked, his voice cracking with shock.
"I... I am sorry I survived...."
The Warlord felt helpless in a way he had never experienced before. Yes, he had seen her have anxiety attacks before. He had woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of her gasping for breath, her skin soaked in cold sweat from nightmares of her past that came without warning, and he had learned how to sit by her side in the dark until the tremors subsided. But he had never, in all their time together, seen her react with such inexplicable, violent horror. Never triggered by something as simple, as innocent, as him touching her wrist.
"Look at me. I'm here," Crocodile dropped to his knees, his heavy frame hitting the floorboards with a dull thud, as he tried to reach for her, his hand and hook hovering over her shaking shoulders, completely terrified that touching her would make it worse. "Talk to me. What happened today?"
Seeing her in that heartbreaking state ignited a savage, protective fury in his soul. Someone had touched her. Someone dared to harm what he treasured most.
"Who did this to you?" Crocodile growled, his golden eyes flashing with a lethal, murderous light. He reached out, his grip tightening on her shoulders as he tried to stabilize her rocking form, desperate for a name, a target, a bloodline to obliterate. "Name. Give me a name, or I swear to God I will dismantle this entire kingdom brick by brick until I find them myself."
“I can’t...!” she wept, her voice fracturing into a high, pathetic sob as she tried to pull away from his grip, her eyes wide and glassy, staring through him rather than at him. “I can’t tell you... I can’t...! You’ll do something stupid... You’ll get yourself killed—!”
"Look at me! I am not going to die! Tell me who—!"
But the moment the harshness left his mouth, he saw the expression in her eyes. She didn't look at him like he was her savior. For a single, agonizing millisecond, she looked at him with the exact same terror she would show an executioner. His roughness wasn't helping, but merely reinforcing the walls of her cage.
A profound, sickening wave of guilt washed over the Warlord.
Slowly, deliberately, Crocodile tossed aside his fury. He discarded the lethal bloodlust, the protective arrogance, and the violent instincts. He relaxed his grip on her shoulders, his flesh hand softening until it was barely brushing her skin.
Sabrina began to breathe more steadily then, though her gaze still reflected a deep, hollow despair.
At that moment, she slowly returned to reality. Her pupils recognized his; her senses recognized exactly who the person in front of her was. Sabrina saw only the man she trusted most in the world, her only true anchor to life, completely consumed with concern for her.
This should never have happened, she thought bitterly. This has to be a nightmare.
Seeing those sharp eyes staring at her with pure, protective agony, Sabrina felt herself breaking completely inside.
If I stay, I ruin him. If I run, I ruin him.
Crocodile exhaled shakily. He moved closer, carefully pulling her into his arms when she didn’t flinch away, holding her tightly against his chest, his hand resting protectively on the back of her head, fingers threading gently through her hair.
"I'm sorry. I'm not going to force you. You don't have to tell me anything tonight. Just breathe."
For several long, agonizing minutes, the only sound in the room was the erratic hitching of her breath against his chest. But slowly, beneath the warm pressure of his embrace, the logic of the trap began to recede from her immediate senses. The smell of blood gave way to the scented candles. The screaming in her ears faded.
The seven-day countdown was still ticking. But in the quiet safety of his arms, the sheer isolation of the secret became too heavy to bear alone.
If there was anyone she had to tell, it was him.
She pulled her head back just a fraction, her golden eyes swollen, rimmed with red, and entirely stripped of their usual fire as she looked up into his scarred face.
“He’s back, Crocodile…” she whispered, her voice a fragile, shattered thread that barely carried across the space between them. “He’s back.”
“Who is back?”
Sabrina swallowed the metallic taste of fear, her fingers tightening against his chest.
