I really need some Roger CJ with us first meeting with Rocks Pirates or Garp! 😭🙏🏽just a word
"Roger! Your boyfriend is portside!"
Your call was met with a series of loud jeers as the crew passed the news down toward the captain's cabin, each voice a little more gleeful than the last.
Gol D. Roger was an exceptionally astonishing pirate and an equally astonishing husband, and he had never once let you down in all the time since he had saved your life and folded you into his crew of misfits. However, when it came to the matter of his previous entanglements, if you had known you would be spending your marriage competing against a husky vice-admiral, you might well have thought twice about coming aboard at all. Because it turned out that your husband, for all his grandeur, became especially and stupidly competitive the moment a particular man's ship turned up.
Roger did not waste so much as five seconds before he appeared beside you.
"Sweetheart, I'm begging you," he said, reaching up to adjust his straw hat as his free hand settled warm against the small of your back. "Please stay inside when the navy is on my ass. And stop treating that asshole Garp like a romantic rival. You are literally carrying my child."
You pursed your lips, one hand drifting to the swell of your belly. "What am I supposed to think? He's chased your flag for weeks now, and the two of you clash nonstop the second you're in the same water. I may be that sweet thing in your bed," you went on, tilting your head with the particular sweetness you reserved for winding him up, "but clearly he's got reason enough to think you'll come running the moment he calls."
Roger, for all that he knew perfectly well you were only teasing him, could not help but rise to it anyway.
His jaw set. The grin stayed, because the grin always stayed, but something underneath it went taut and boyish and faintly outraged, the look of a man whose honor had been impugned in a way he found personally intolerable.
"Come running," he repeated, as if the phrase itself had wounded him. His hand pressed a little firmer against your back, drawing you in against his side, staking a claim you had never once questioned. "Sweetheart. I don't come running for just anyone. He chases. There is a difference, and it is an important one."
"An enormous difference." He said it with the grave conviction of a lawyer defending a point of law. "He follows my flag across three seas because he's a sad little marine, and because he's jealous that I have my freedom and still managed to keep my dutifully stolen noble lady-love."
You looked up at him, grinning, and his own grin widened to match.
"How noble of him," you said. "And how debauched of you. Are you telling me you're stringing the poor man along?"
Roger winked. "I simply allow myself to be found, occasionally, because it would be cruel to deprive the man of his life's purpose."
He bent his head closer, and his voice dropped into something considerably more smug.
"You, on the other hand, I would burn the whole Grand Line down to get back to. So if we are ranking who holds my attention, sweetheart, I would suggest you are being deeply unfair to yourself—Now, if you would kindly return to my cabin, to my bed, I'll come back to you the moment I've blasted a hole in Garp's ship."
