#buggy jeff ward

[rvnclyd]

process

[inkmonster21]

A Song for the Clown

Buggy x Princess!Reader

Series Masterlist

Cornered by a storm and unable to hide from each other any longer, you and Buggy finally confess that your kiss meant everything.

15. It Did

The ship had become impossible.

Not because it was louder than before. Not because the men were worse or the deck filthier or the sea crueler. Because Buggy had decided avoiding you was a strategy.

A bad one. A transparent one. And yet irritatingly effective all the same.

For two days he had been nowhere and everywhere at once. His voice still carried through the ship. His temper still struck sparks off the crew. His orders still cracked across deck and corridor with all the theatrical sharpness that made men obey before thinking. But when you came up the stairs, he found reason to go down. When you stood at the rail, he was suddenly needed at the helm. When you crossed the lower corridor, he was somehow already gone around the bend with his coat snapping behind him like a personal insult.

It would have been almost funny if it had not felt so awful.

Because after the quiet in your cabin, after the conversation with no song at all, after the proof of him staying, the distance did not feel like simple stubbornness.

It felt like fear.

His, not yours.

That should have satisfied you more than it did.

Instead it made your whole body restless.

By the time the storm rolled in, you were so frayed by silence and half-presence and everything still unsaid between you that the first smell of rain in the air felt almost like relief.

The sky had gone strange by late afternoon.

Not fully dark. Only wrong around the edges. Clouds thickening low and fast, turning the sea a harder color. Wind growing sharper. Sails adjusted twice in half an hour. Mohji shouting at two men in the rigging while Cabaji muttered something about cursed weather and cursed timing and cursed captains who insisted on both.

You went above anyway.

Of course you did.

The deck felt alive in storms in a way it never did in calm. Dangerous, yes. But honest. Every rope mattered. Every shouted order mattered. The sea stopped pretending to be pretty and became itself.

You stood near the stern rail in a cloak tied badly against the wind and watched the first sheet of rain blur the horizon into silver-gray.

Lightning flashed somewhere far off. Then thunder, low and rolling.

Buggy found you there and looked immediately furious, "What are you doing?"

You turned into the wind, hair already escaping damp and wild around your face, "Observing."

"No!”

He was on you in three strides, coat snapping, hat gone because the weather had apparently stolen even that from him. Rain had darkened the blue at his temples and made the paint around his eyes look sharper somehow, more dangerous. The whole of him was storm-touched and unhappy about everything.

"You’ve ridiculous! You're going below!”

"I am perfectly all right, Captain.”

He leaned closer, voice dropping to cut through the wind and the rising slap of rain against deck. "This isn't a garden terrace, Princess. Go to your room."

You folded your arms. "Do not order me about as though I'm a parcel."

"You are absolutely a parcel right now!”

"That is not flattering."

"It's not meant to be."

He reached for your elbow. You caught his wrist before he could complete the insult of steering you like luggage.

The contact stopped both of you. Rain ran down his knuckles and over yours.

"Buggy."

Something in your voice made him still.

Maybe it was the use of his name. Maybe it was the fact that you had not let go. Maybe it was simply the storm stripping everything extra from the moment until only the truth felt worth speaking.

He glanced toward the hatch below, then back at you, jaw tight, "This is not the time."

"Yes, it is."

Lightning flashed again, brighter now, and for one hard white second the whole deck stood in strange silver light.

You looked at him and knew suddenly, with the awful certainty that only arrives when one is already standing at the edge of a thing, that you would not let him evade you anymore.

Not after the avoidance. Not after the silence. Not after the kiss that had split your heart in half and then left you to wonder whether you had imagined its truth.

Rain thickened. The deck lurched under a harder shift of sea.

Buggy tried once more. "Below. Now."

You shook your head.

"No. I refuse."

His eyes narrowed. "Oh! Don’t start this shit with me in a fucking storm!”

"Then perhaps you should have stopped avoiding me in fair weather."

That hit. You saw it.

He made a sharp, exasperated sound and yanked you toward the lee side of the deck under the narrow overhang near the stern cabin where the rain still reached but less violently. The space was small. Close. Wooden walls at your back. Storm at your side. His body too near in front of you.

"Fine," he snapped. "Talk.”

You took one breath. Another.

The storm raged around the ship. Men shouted. Sails strained. Thunder rolled again, closer. But inside this little slice of battered shelter, the world had narrowed to him and the rain running down his face and the fact that your heart would not be quiet.

"The kiss meant something. At least for me."

Buggy's expression changed instantly. Not softened. Not even fully hardened. It was worse than either.

Exposed.

He looked at you as though you had reached under his coat and put a hand directly against some injury not yet scarred over.

"Listen Princess—"

"No!” Your voice shook once and then steadied because it had to. "You do not get to dodge this again."

"That is not what I'm doing."

"It is exactly what you are doing."

Rain blew in harder. The cloak at your shoulders fluttered back and slapped wetly against the wall. He glanced once toward the deck as though genuinely considering escape even now.

You stepped closer before he could choose it.

"I am not asking for a song," you said. "Nor a pretty lie. I should rather be hurt by the truth than spared by a lie. Respect is due."

The words landed cleanly between you.

He went very still. There was no easy line left now. No mockery sharp enough to survive that. No clever cruelty to fling and laugh off after. You had cut through all of that with one bright, terrible sentence and left only the thing itself.

Buggy swallowed. Hard enough that you saw it.

The storm boomed around the ship. He said nothing. His mouth opened once, then shut again. One hand braced against the wall beside your shoulder without his seeming to know he had moved it there.

You looked at him and refused to look away.

At last he said, rough and low and very unlike himself, "You think I don't know that?”

You blinked.

His laugh came out broken around the edges, "Of course it meant something, and not just for you."

The words hit you with so much force that for a second the deck itself seemed to vanish beneath you.

Buggy looked furious now. Not at you. At the confession. At the fact that it existed at all.

"I have been really trying hard not to know it," he said. "So forgive me for not making this easy."

A breath left you that might have been relief if relief had teeth.

"You were cruel."

"I can be."

"You lied."

"I do that."

He looked down at you then with the storm light catching in his eyes, those impossible striking blue eyes, and all the swagger seemed to peel off him for one raw second at a time.

"You kissed me," you said, softer now, because the truth had shifted the room and your own anger with it, "as though it mattered."

His voice dropped almost to nothing.

"It did."

That was it. The whole thing. Not a speech. Not a flourish. Not a pirate's counterfeit version of tenderness.

Just that.

It did.

Your hand rose before you could think better of it. Not to his face this time. To his throat, just above the open collar of his coat where rain had dampened the skin there dark and warm and achingly human. Your fingers rested lightly. He sucked in a breath so sharp it was almost a hiss.

Neither of you moved for one impossible beat. Then two. Then Buggy lowered his head and kissed you again.

Entirely differently. No witnesses. No inspector. No lie to sell. No survival excuse.

This one was chosen.

You felt the difference instantly.

He kissed you slower at first, as though he was still giving himself one last chance to stop and had already decided not to take it. His hand found your face, cupping your jaw with a care so at odds with the man himself it nearly undid you. He kissed you as if he was learning something from your mouth that he had not known he wanted to know.

You answered him just as deliberately. No shock this time. No accidental surrender.

Choice.

Your fingers curled against his throat. His thumb brushed your cheek once, once more. Rain tapped and ran all around, the storm making a world for the two of you that belonged to no one else for those few wild moments.

Then it deepened. Buggy made a low sound against your mouth when you rose into him, one hand sliding from your face to your waist and drawing you closer until the wall at your back and his body in front of you left no room for uncertainty at all.

This kiss had heat in it from the first, but now the tenderness sharpened into something fiercer. He took control the way he did everything else, instinctively and with dangerous confidence, turning his head and angling your mouth beneath his until your breath caught and the world narrowed down again to pressure and warmth and the way he seemed to know exactly how to ruin you for anything softer.

And you liked it. That was perhaps the most startling revelation of all.

The roughness. The command in his hand at your waist. The way his mouth could go from careful to hungry in the span of a breath. The fact that none of it frightened you, not truly. It only made your whole body wake in bright, impossible little waves.

Your hand slid from his throat into his damp hair peeking out from the bandana. Buggy shuddered. Actually shuddered.

Then kissed you deeper for it, one knee nudging between yours as the ship rocked and thunder cracked so close this time it made the cabin wall vibrate behind your shoulders.

There was no denial left in it now. No trick. No performance. Only desire.

Chosen and mutual and far too real to survive explanation.

When the kiss finally broke, it did not break cleanly.

It unraveled.

His mouth left yours by inches. Your breath chased his before you could stop it. His forehead came down to yours for one dizzy second, then lifted again. The hand at your waist remained there as though it had forgotten any reason to leave.

You were both breathing too hard.

The storm still raged.

Men shouted somewhere beyond the overhang. Someone cursed about a line on the port side. The whole ship went on being a ship while your world had narrowed into something so intimate it made the rest of it feel almost absurd.

Buggy looked at you. Really looked.

Rain had dampened your lashes. Your mouth was swollen from him. Your fingers still clung lightly in his hair as if you had not yet remembered to let go.

The recognition that moved through you then was almost dazed.

This had happened. You had chosen it. He had chosen it.

No story had arranged this for you. No kingdom had sung its approval. No music had softened the air or persuaded either of you into feeling what was not already there.

Just this.

His hand left your waist only to catch your wrist instead, gentler than the movement should have been. His thumb pressed once over the pulse there like he was checking whether you were as wrecked as he felt.

You might have laughed at the expression on his face if your own body did not feel as though it belonged half to the storm and half to him.

Your name left his mouth like trouble and surrender together.

Not princess. Not sweetheart. Not ransom.

Your name.

And nothing in all your imagined fairytales had prepared you for how much that hurt in the loveliest, most dangerous way.

He did not move away.

That was the first thing.

He stayed.

Close enough that your breath still mingled. Close enough that the hand at your wrist and the one braced beside your shoulder kept you folded inside the small, impossible shape of the moment.

You looked at him.

At the way the rain had dampened the blue near his eyes. At the red of his painted mouth, no longer neat. At the little roughness in his breathing that told you the storm was not the only thing affecting him.

And because you were still yourself even here, still the kind of woman who reached toward wonder rather than away from it, your hand rose.

Buggy watched it come. He did not stop you.

Your fingertips touched the smeared edge of the paint first, very lightly, just at the corner of his mouth where your lips had softened the line. The blue around one eye had smudged too, leaving him looking even more dangerous and somehow more vulnerable for the imperfection of it.

You traced it with fascinated care.

Buggy's throat moved. "That," he said, voice lower now, roughened by kissing and whatever else this was becoming, "is a terrible idea."

You smiled softly. "It is already far too late for good ideas."

That made the corner of his mouth twitch.

You followed the line of paint up, across his cheekbone, and then to the little crossbones tattoo on his forehead, the mark sitting black and neat against damp skin and bright hair. Your finger traced the edge of it with the same patient curiosity you had once given the painted saints in palace chapels or the carved lions at your father's hall.

Buggy closed his eyes for one traitorous second.

No one had ever touched him like this. Not with wonder. Not with care that was not trying to take something or flatter something or use something.

You were simply... looking.

And touching what you found because you wanted to know it better. That, more than the kissing, nearly undid him.

"It suits you," you murmured.

His eyes opened again at once. "What does."

"All of it."

He made a quiet, skeptical sound.

You looked at the tattoo once more. "The paint. The whole terrible dramatic arrangement."

Buggy barked the faintest laugh. "Terrible?”

"Yes," you said. "Very."

Then, before either of you could quite predict it, your fingers drifted lower.

To his nose.

You paused there only half a beat, looking at it with that same bright, maddeningly sincere curiosity that had been wrecking him for days now.

Buggy saw the thought hit you. Saw the question form.

He knew exactly what you were wondering and, for the first time since meeting you, looked visibly embarrassed by anticipation of the answer.

You touched the red lightly.

Then blinked. Your thumb brushed again, more carefully this time.

Buggy's whole face changed. Not into anger.

Into defense. "It's real," he said at once, too quickly, too sharp.

You looked up, startled by the vehemence, "I did not say otherwise."

"You were checking."

"I was curious."

He leaned back half an inch, which was not retreat, only enough to give himself room for offense. "Everyone always thinks it's fake at first, then they realize it’s not. That’s just worse."

The line came out harder than he meant it to.

You saw that at once.

Saw too the old bruise underneath it, the one connected to laughter and mockery and all the bright humiliations that had built whole rooms inside him over the years.

Your expression softened immediately.

"Oh."

Buggy's jaw tightened. "Yeah. Oh."

The storm cracked close outside, lightning whitening the little shelter for a second, but neither of you looked away from the other.

"I am sorry," you said quietly.

He shrugged one shoulder with ugly carelessness. "Don't be. It's not exactly a tragedy."

You touched his nose again. This time not to check. Just to touch.

The reaction that ran through him was absurdly visible. He went still all over.

You smiled then, small and warm and utterly unguarded. "I think it is cute."

Buggy stared at you as though you had just confessed to licking lightning for pleasure.

"What?”

You did not even flinch.

"I think it is cute," you repeated. "And rather dear, actually."

He looked scandalized.

Properly scandalized.

"You can't say shit like that."

"Why not?"

"Because—" He actually stopped there, as if the answer was too obvious to require language and then realized, dealing with you, that obvious things often required very specific language indeed. "Because it's my face!”

"Yes."

"That’s not how that works."

"How does it work, then?"

"You're supposed to be unsettled. Or intimidated. Or at the very least confused in a less... affectionate direction."

You laughed, and the sound of it in the little storm-dark space made his hands tighten on you again before he could help it.

"That seems terribly limiting."

Buggy stared another second, then looked away with a muttered curse that sounded like it had been dragged out of him by force.

You were getting attached. That truth sat quietly in you now, no longer deniable.

In the way your hand lingered at his face. In the way your mouth kept wanting to smile when he got flustered enough to sound meaner. In the way your heart, battered and suspicious and still bruised by the prince and the loss of all that old certainty, nevertheless kept softening toward this impossible, painted, sharp-edged man as though it had found a path around your better judgment and no longer felt obliged to explain itself.

Buggy felt that too.

Not in neat emotional language. Never that.

He felt it as overwhelm.

As heat. As want. As the terrifying sweetness of being looked at and found delightful where he had expected, all his life, to be at best tolerated and at worst laughed at first.

And worse than that, he loved it.

Loved the way you said cute with your whole heart in the word, as if it did not diminish him at all. Loved the soft little line between your brows when you thought you had hurt him. Loved the confidence in you when you decided what was lovely and refused to be argued out of it.

He was in terrible trouble.

So naturally he kissed you again.

More because language had failed him entirely than because he had any control left worth speaking of.

His hand slid from your wrist to the back of your neck, his mouth finding yours with a low, frustrated sort of urgency that said he'd had enough of being examined like some marvelous, wounded thing and would rather deal with the consequences by kissing you until he could think again.

You answered him instantly.

No hesitance now.

No shock.

Just warmth and desire and the quiet certainty that whatever this was, it belonged to both of you.

The kisses came easier after that.

Not gentler, necessarily. Though there was tenderness in them, yes. More that the pauses disappeared. Your hand remained at his face, thumb skimming the edge of his smeared mouth paint between kisses, then drifting up again to the little tattoo on his forehead as if you could not stop learning him by touch now that you had been given leave.

Buggy made another rough little sound when you did that, half warning and half surrender.

"Do you know," you murmured against the corner of his mouth, "that you become very dramatic when embarrassed?”

His eyes flashed open. "I'm not embarrassed!”

"You absolutely are."

"That's slander."

"It is observation."

Then you kissed him before he could retaliate properly, which pleased you more than it should have.

Buggy, meanwhile, was rapidly reaching the point where coherent thought had become a rumor.

His hands had found your waist again. Then your back. Then the line of your shoulder where the damp fabric clung. He liked how you fit against him. Liked how you rose into his kisses instead of shrinking from them. Liked that your curiosity had not gone away just because desire had arrived. You still touched him as if you meant to know him. Which was wildly unfair and dangerously effective and entirely your fault.

He kissed the corner of your mouth once, then the line of your jaw with less polish than intention, and felt you shiver.

That nearly undid him.

You laughed softly under your breath at the sensation and caught at his collar with both hands now.

"Buggy."

He liked his name in your mouth too much.

No one should have that much power simply by saying five letters with warmth.

So he kissed you harder for it, because again, panic in Buggy always came out sideways.

The shout from the deck above split the moment like an axe.

"Captain!"

Both of you froze.

Buggy's head dropped to your shoulder with a sound of profound disgust.

The voice came again, louder this time over the storm and the deck noise and whatever fresh disaster the crew had found to become.

"Captain!"

He muttered something that would have made your mother cross herself.

You had the sudden absurd urge to laugh.

He lifted his head and looked at you with all the bright irritation of a man being dragged bodily back into the world when he had just decided the world could wait.

"This ship," he said, "is full of the worst freaks alive."

You smiled, still warm and breathless and very much not ready to let him go. "You do employ them."

"That doesn't mean I approve of them."

Another shout.

This one from Cabaji.

Buggy closed his eyes briefly like a man asking the heavens whether murder might count as leadership under the right circumstances.

Then he peeled himself away.

Slowly.

Reluctantly enough that the separation felt almost intimate in its own right. His hands slid from your waist with clear unwillingness. Yours lingered one beat too long at his collar before falling away.

He stepped back half a pace and looked at you.

Your hair damp from rain and his hands. Your mouth kissed soft. Your cheeks flushed. One hand still half raised as if you had not yet caught up to the fact that he was no longer in immediate reach.

Buggy looked slightly wrecked by the sight.

Good.

You were feeling much the same.

He pointed at you then, one gloved finger coming up with all the authority he could gather back around himself.

It would have been more intimidating if he did not still look kissed senseless.

"Don't," he said.

You blinked. "Don't what?"

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Apparently there were too many possibilities to choose from.

So he narrowed it down badly. "Do anything."

That made you laugh after all.

He looked offended by the sound and even more offended by how much he clearly liked hearing it.

"Just… Stay here," he ordered. "Don’t follow me! Don’t decide this is the perfect moment to have another emotional revelation. Do not get kidnapped by weather. I'm serious!”

"That was very nearly a proper goodbye."

"It was a threat."

"Mm."

Buggy pointed again, harder this time, because the first had not adequately restored his dignity. "I mean it!”

"And I am taking you very seriously."

He gave you one last look. A look full of trouble and want and the obvious fact that leaving you in that little storm shelter was costing him more than he preferred.

Then he turned and vanished back into captainhood, barking halfway up the stairs before he'd even fully reached the deck.

You stood there in the charged quiet he left behind, mouth still smiling, heart still racing, and thought very clearly that this had all become extraordinarily dangerous.

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[iwillbefamousonedayipromise]

One piece life action buggy is so unnecessarily preatty...

They didn't need to call Jeff Ward for him