#buggy opla

[ravennaart]

Viendo otra vez mi adicción OPLA. Viendo al hombre que me tiene loca 🩷🫶

[potingus573]

Look guys. When I say that Buggy is hot, it doesn't mean that I want to do unspeakable things to him. Hell, I don't want to touch him at all. I just want to watch him being a menace while admiring his looks.

[inkmonster21]

A Song for the Clown

Buggy x Princess!Reader

Series Masterlist

After waking from another dream of the faceless blue-eyed prince, you descend into the bright palace in the morning only to watch fantasy step into daylight.

4. A Prince at Dawn

Your dream Prince was always clearest just before waking.

Not a face. Never a face.

Only the shape of someone standing at the edge of a shoreline washed in silver-blue light, the sea moving around his boots in slow, shining ribbons as if the tide itself had come to listen. Broad shoulders. A figure held in stillness rather than motion. And eyes.

Ocean blue.

Not merely blue in color, but blue in feeling. Deep water. Distance. Something bright beneath something fathomless.

In the dream, he looked at you as though he knew you.

As though he had crossed some impossible stretch of world to do it.

You never heard him speak. You never reached him before waking. But the look of him lingered every time, strange and bittersweet, enough to leave your heart full and aching in equal measure.

When your eyes opened, the dream thinned slowly in the gold of morning.

Sunlight poured through the gauze curtains in long, warm bands. The sea beyond your balcony doors flashed pale beneath the early sky. Somewhere in the palace, bells were already chiming the first cheerful hour, and farther down, through open windows and climbing gardens and waking corridors, the day's music had begun.

A maid in the eastern wing was singing while beating dust from rugs.

Two footmen below your balcony carried baskets of flowers in a neat back-and-forth harmony about ribbon lengths and chapel vases.

From the kitchens came the unmistakable rising chorus of breakfast preparations, all butter and bright voices and the scent of fresh bread drifting upward with the sea air.

You lay still a moment longer, one hand resting lightly over your ribs, your sigh soft enough that only the morning itself heard it.

Bittersweet.

That was the word for dreams that gave more hope than comfort.

A gentle knock sounded at your door, followed by the familiar voice of one of your attendants.

"Your Highness? May we come in?"

"Yes, of course."

The room bloomed into movement almost at once.

Curtains drawn wider. Water set out. Brushes, ribbons, linen, fresh flowers for the dressing table. The women attending you had long ago learned how to move around your mornings with a rhythm that felt less like interruption and more like continuation, as if waking you simply changed the tempo of a song already in progress.

One of them smiled as she crossed to the open balcony doors. "The roses opened early."

"They often do after warm nights," you murmured, sitting up.

Another came to help with your hair. "You are smiling."

You touched your cheek in mild surprise. "Am I?"

"A little," she said. "As though you woke from something pleasant."

You hesitated just long enough for her to notice.

"Pleasant enough," you said at last. "Though not entirely."

"Oh, dear," she said, instantly invested. "What sort of dream was it?"

"The sort that never finish properly," you answered, allowing her to help you from the bed. "Which feels very inconsiderate of them."

That won a soft laugh from the room.

The morning carried you along after that.

You bathed in rose-scented water while the women beside the screen sang about lavender sachets and a baker's daughter newly betrothed. Your hair was brushed until it fell in a shining sheet down your back. A dress was chosen in pale cream with the faintest wash of blue through the skirts, as soft as sea foam when it caught the light. One attendant fastened a string of tiny pearls at your wrists while another tucked fresh blossoms near the combs at your temples.

By the time you stepped out onto the upper balcony to cross toward the family breakfast room, you had fallen fully into the effortless rhythm that belonged only to mornings in your kingdom.

Flower girls below looked up and waved.

A pair of blue birds alighted on the stone rail just long enough to chirp insistently at you until you laughed and greeted them back.

The corridors smelled of citrus polish and fresh lilies. Servants moved in bright, tidy patterns. Somewhere farther off, your younger brother could be heard objecting in strong terms to a tutor who believed boots should be cleaned before geography.

Everything was radiant.

Everything was exactly as it ought to be.

And yet the dream clung to you in one quiet corner of your heart, blue-eyed and unfinished.

By the time you entered the breakfast court, the room was already alive.

Long windows stood open to the gardens. Sunlight warmed the white-and-gold tiles beneath your slippers. Platters of fruit and pastries gleamed among polished silver and flower arrangements so fresh they still held dew in their petals. Your parents were already there, your father with coffee in hand and your mother speaking softly to one of the musicians posted near the terrace doors.

The Straw Hats were present too, each of them looking as though your kingdom had done something slightly unreasonable to them all over again.

Luffy was midway through discovering that sugared citrus rolls were apparently one of life's great truths. Zoro sat with the expression of a man prepared to endure whatever came next so long as it ended eventually. Nami looked awake, observant, and half ready to stop a disaster no one else had noticed yet. Usopp had the air of someone who had accepted that this island intended to be theatrical at him until he left. Sanji, upon seeing you, visibly forgot how to breathe for a very brief but noticeable beat.

Your brother, who had already escaped whatever battle had been taking place with the geography tutor, beamed the moment you appeared.

"You're late," he informed you.

"It is breakfast," you said, kissing the top of his head as you passed. "Not war."

He considered this. "It could be."

"That is a terrible philosophy to begin the day with," your mother said mildly.

Your father looked up from his coffee and smiled. "You seem happy this morning."

"I am," you said, settling into your place. "I had a peculiar dream."

Your brother sat up at once. "Was it dramatic?"

"Yes."

"Did someone die?"

"No."

"That is less dramatic."

You laughed and reached for your tea. "I shall try to improve next time."

Luffy grinned around a mouthful of pastry. "Was it about pirates?"

"No," you said. "Though I suspect that would have been dramatically sufficient for my brother."

"I would have liked it," he said.

Your mother studied you over the rim of her cup. "A peculiar dream?"

You nodded once, then looked away toward the open terrace where morning had gone very bright indeed.

"There was a man," you admitted.

Your brother gasped so loudly even Zoro glanced over.

"A man," he repeated, scandalized and delighted.

"Do not behave as though your sister has invented the concept," your father said.

"But she dreamed one."

"I did," you said, smiling despite yourself. "Only I never saw his face."

"Then what was the point of him?" your brother demanded.

"The point," your mother said smoothly, "was likely not for your entertainment."

That ought to have ended the matter, but the dream had put such a soft, aching fullness in you that it wanted shape, and shape in your kingdom usually became song.

The musicians near the terrace had noticed it too.

They always did.

Something in your expression must have shifted, some inward turn of longing softened by light, because one of them lifted her lute and touched the first tentative phrase to the strings as gently as if asking permission rather than assuming it.

Your father sighed with amused inevitability.

Your mother smiled into her tea.

Zoro closed his eyes for one long second as though accepting a burden the world had chosen for him personally.

And you, unable and unwilling to keep the feeling inside your chest where it had begun, laughed softly and rose from your chair.

The room brightened at once.

Not literally, perhaps. Only in the way rooms do when joy enters them openly.

You stepped out from the table and let the first breath of melody settle into you before you sang.

"I saw him where the sea meets morning

Where silver light and tide agree

He had no face for me to carry

Only blue eyes looking back at me

And though the dream was far from finished

And though I woke before his name

My heart came back a little altered

As if it had not woken quite the same

If love is out there, let it find me

If fate is kind, then let it start

Not with a crown or polished glory

But with the truth inside a heart"

The breakfast room stilled around you for half a beat, then opened.

That was how it always happened here. A song never stayed only yours for long. Not because anyone sought to steal it, but because feeling asked to be answered when heard clearly enough.

From the terrace, the musicians joined.

From the corridor beyond, two attendants carrying flowers took up the harmony without breaking stride.

Even the maids near the sideboard smiled as they slipped into the chorus like women stepping into a current they knew by instinct.

"Let him come on wind or water

Let him come by chance or kiss

Let him know me by my laughter

Let him know me first by this

That I have kept a place within me

Tender, hopeful, bright, and true

And if he finds it, let him cherish

All the dream I've carried through"

Luffy lit up immediately.

"This is great," he declared, which would have been a terrible interruption anywhere else and somehow only became part of the atmosphere here.

You turned in a slow little circle, your skirts catching sunlight as the rhythm gathered warmth.

Zoro muttered, exactly as expected, "She's singing... again."

"Of course I am," you sang back, smiling at him.

He looked briefly offended that you had folded his complaint into the moment so easily.

Nami tried very hard not to look entertained.

You reached a hand toward her from where you stood between the table and the terrace, your eyes bright with invitation. "Come now. Only the chorus."

"No," she said at once.

You made a tiny pleading gesture.

Nami shook her head harder. "No. Um, no. Still not doing that."

That, naturally, made your brother laugh himself breathless.

Sanji did not wait to be asked.

The instant your song turned brighter and opened into fuller rhythm, he was beside you as though summoned by the heavens for one extremely specific purpose. He took your hand with reverent delight and whirled you through a neat turn that set the sleeves of your dress floating behind you like pale banners.

The room applauded on the beat.

Usopp, sitting up straighter and straighter with every passing second, looked around in fascinated wonder. "Everything looks so choreographed."

"It's not," Nami said.

"It should be."

By then even the guards at the far arch had joined the harmony under their breath, and your brother was drumming both hands on the breakfast table in enthusiastic ruin of all table manners.

You laughed and let the song carry higher.

"I do not need a tale already written

Nor borrowed vows or borrowed bliss

I want the kind of love that listens

And seals itself in one true kiss

A kiss that does not fade by morning

A touch that does not turn to mist

A heart that sees me, not the story

That is the love for which I wish"

The room answered you, the palace answered you, and because the windows stood open, so too did the gardens beyond.

Children in the lower courtyard caught the refrain and sang it upward.

A gardener by the fountain joined with a deep, warm voice that carried better than anyone would have expected.

From somewhere below, bells took up a bright little pattern as if they too had been waiting for the chance.

"For a love that comes in honesty

Needs no gilded, borrowed guise

It knows itself in quiet wonder

In steady hands and open eyes

So if he comes, let him come gently

Let him come with truth, not art

And I shall know him when he finds me

By the answering in my heart"

By the final refrain, the whole breakfast court had become precisely the sort of glorious, ridiculous, wholehearted fairytale scene outsiders could scarcely be expected to believe.

Luffy was singing what he thought was the melody and having the time of his life.

Usopp had somehow found the beat well enough to clap along with dramatic commitment.

Sanji twirled you once more on the last line with all the joy of a man who would later think of this moment while staring soulfully into middle distance.

Zoro looked like he would rather be thrown overboard than confess he was smiling, but the traitorous edge of it had happened anyway.

And Nami, arms crossed, mouth fighting amusement, watched the whole thing like a woman standing half inside a dream she did not trust and half inside one she could not help enjoying.

When the last note faded, the room broke exactly as such moments always broke.

Into laughter.

Into applause.

You sank back into your chair breathless and glowing, laughter still soft in your chest. The dream that had woken bittersweet in you felt brighter now, if no more finished.

For a few wonderful moments after, the meal became pleasantly unruly.

Luffy resumed eating as if singing had merely sharpened his appetite. Your brother insisted Sanji had danced very well for someone who had looked on the verge of fainting when you first rose. Sanji denied faintness with all the dignity available to a man who had absolutely looked on the verge of fainting. Usopp argued that with very little effort the whole breakfast sequence could be staged for larger crowds. Zoro drank more tea and acted as though none of this had touched him at all.

It was Nami who found the quiet in the middle of it.

She waited until the laughter had softened and the others were occupied again, then leaned slightly nearer across the table.

"Can I ask you something?"

You looked toward her at once. "Of course."

She glanced briefly toward the open terrace, as if making sure no one else was listening too closely. "All you want is to marry a prince?"

The question caught you just enough that your fingers still on the handle of your cup.

Nami's gaze did not waver. "Or do you simply want real, honest love?"

For one moment, all the music in the room seemed to recede behind the thought.

It was such a simple question.

Such a good one.

And somehow, one you had never separated cleanly for yourself.

You smiled, though there was thoughtful softness in it now. "I do not know that I have ever imagined one without the other."

Nami rested one elbow against the table. "That's not really an answer, Princess."

"No," you admitted. "I suppose it is not."

You looked down into your tea where the light from the window turned the surface gold.

"I think," you said slowly, "that I have always believed the person meant for me would feel... princely, whether or not he wore a crown."

Nami watched you carefully.

"Not only beautiful," you went on. "Or grand. I do not mean that. I mean..." You searched for the shape of it. "Safe in the way old songs make safety sound. Noble in feeling. Like something one need not fear."

Nami's expression softened, but only a little. "And if he wasn't?"

You looked up at her then, honest enough that it made something in her chest tighten despite herself.

"I do not know," you said.

That was the truth of it.

You still could not separate those ideas. Not fully. Not yet.

True love, you'd always imagined, would arrived wrapped in grace and beauty and certainty. The heart of it mattered most, yes, but you had never needed to imagine love coming in any shape less lovely than the songs had promised.

Before Nami could answer, movement stirred at the far edge of the terrace.

A palace runner came at speed through the eastern arch, flanked by one harbor page so flushed with haste he looked as though he had outrun the wind itself. They stopped at the threshold just long enough to bow.

"Your Majesties," the runner said, breathless and bright with urgency. "A royal ship has made harbor."

The room stilled.

Not dramatically at first.

Only in the natural way a room stills when unexpected information falls into it and everyone reaches for understanding at once.

Your father set down his cup. "Whose colors?"

"The harbor master believes them noble, sir, though the outer banner was partly furled in the approach. The ship requests formal greeting and claims urgent but honorable intent."

Your mother exchanged a look with the king.

Your brother sat straight up in delight. "A prince!"

"No one said prince," your father replied.

"But it could be."

"It could be many things."

Already, however, the palace was shifting around the news.

Attendants at the sideboard had turned to one another in bright whispers. Somewhere beyond the breakfast room doors, the information had begun to travel the way all exciting news did in your kingdom, swiftly and with embellishment blooming at the edges almost before it reached the next corridor.

A royal ship.

Just after your song.

Just after a breakfast full of true love and dreams and answering hearts.

The timing alone was enough to make half the palace feel the touch of fate.

You did not leap to obsession. That was not in you.

But you did feel the curious little turn of wonder inside your chest.

A royal visitor, unexpected and arriving on the heels of a dream and a song, had the shape of something storybooks would absolutely dare to call a sign.

Your mother saw the look in your face and smiled despite herself.

Your father, who looked more cautious, rose from his chair. "We will receive them properly."

Your brother made a noise of triumph that suggested the next hour might be the most exciting of his life.

You stood too, pulse a little quicker now, though whether from curiosity, anticipation, or nothing more than the palace's sudden energy, you could not yet have said.

The Straw Hats rose with varying degrees of interest and skepticism.

Luffy looked delighted by the possibility of something happening.

Usopp looked as though he might explode from narrative satisfaction.

Sanji, despite all previous loyalties declared at breakfast, looked politely but unmistakably alarmed on your behalf.

Nami's face had gone still in that careful way it did when instinct began tugging at her before evidence had arrived.

And Zoro, watching the room sharpen around the idea of nobility and timing and fate, looked like a man who already disliked how neatly the pieces seemed prepared.

The palace moved quickly after that.

Servants peeled away to carry messages. Doors opened. Orders were given. Somewhere below, the bells at the harbor tower sounded the sequence reserved for honored arrival.

You went to your chambers just long enough to let your attendants smooth your hair and straighten the line of your sleeves, not because you were vain, but because royal courtesy demanded welcome answer welcome. By the time you descended again to the harbor court overlook, the whole morning had tilted into the kind of bright, arranged inevitability that made events feel less lived than staged.

Below, beyond the palace gardens and the white sweep of the harbor stair, the ship had come fully into view.

It was lovely.

That, perhaps, was the first trouble.

Not merely fine, or well-kept, or respectable. Lovely in a way that seemed very aware of being looked at. Its paintwork gleamed. Its pennant lines were newly crisp. Its noble colors caught sunlight without a wrinkle out of place. Every visible detail felt chosen for effect.

The crew lining the deck looked presentable enough at a glance.

Too presentable, perhaps.

Nami's eyes narrowed almost immediately.

She noticed the bearing first. Not quite wrong, but wrong enough. Men trying very hard to stand like noble escorts rather than sailors used to less elegant work. She noticed the ship's markings too, where one crest along the side looked as though it had been painted over and corrected not very long ago. The polish on the railings was almost aggressive. The arrangement of the visible officers felt intentional in the way stage pictures felt intentional.

Beside her, Zoro crossed his arms.

"What?" Usopp whispered, half eager and half wary.

Nami did not answer yet.

Because at that moment, he appeared.

The prince descended from the gangplank as though the world had been built in sections solely to frame him well. He was handsome, but not accidentally so. Everything about him looked considered. His coat fitted him perfectly. His gloves were pale and immaculate. His hair had the kind of artful disorder that took effort to produce. Even the angle at which he lifted his head seemed designed to catch admiration cleanly and hold it.

He knew how to arrive.

That was obvious at once.

He paused at the foot of the dock, not too long, only long enough for the moment to gather around him, then looked up toward the receiving court where you stood with your parents.

His eyes found you immediately.

Not your father, though he was king.

Not your mother, though she held the unmistakable grace of a queen.

You.

The court felt it as one body.

The little inhale.

The shift.

The first bright gasp of what if from those already half inclined toward romance.

For one instant even you forgot to move.

He looked almost startled by the sight of you.

Almost moved.

And if there was calculation in it, it was so elegantly hidden most people would never have known to seek it.

When he reached the upper court, he bowed first to the king and queen with all proper ceremony, then turned to you with the sort of reverence that made old ladies in the back immediately decide destiny had entered the harbor.

"Your Majesties," he said, voice warm and polished and beautifully pitched to carry without strain. "Your Highness."

There was the faintest pause before that last title, as though it had touched him more than he had expected.

Your father welcomed him formally and requested his name and business.

The prince gave them with practiced ease. He named a noble house from another islanded kingdom, offered apologies for the unannounced nature of his arrival, and spoke of hearing songs of your kingdom for years before finally choosing to see whether beauty such as that could truly exist beyond rumor.

It was well done.

Too well done, Nami thought.

You stepped a little nearer as introductions turned from formal to personal. The morning wind moved lightly through the harbor court, carrying salt and flowers and the distant sound of the city below already buzzing with the news.

The prince looked at you as though still a little dazed by what he had found.

"I had thought the songs exaggerated," he said.

Your brother made a pleased little sound, because this was exactly the sort of thing one hoped a prince would say in stories.

You smiled, a little startled and a little warmed despite yourself. "That would hardly be unusual. Songs often are."

"Not enough, in this case."

The line was simple. Beautifully placed. Just humble enough to feel genuine, just admiring enough to land.

Nami noticed, with growing dislike, how quickly he had found your kingdom's emotional language.

Not flattery alone.

Beauty. Wonder. Destiny. He was speaking in the very terms this place trusted most.

"And the music," he continued, glancing out over the lower terraces where even now a fountain-side trio had begun improvising something inspired by his arrival. "I confess I did not understand, until I heard it myself this morning from the water. It felt less like hearing a kingdom and more like approaching a heartbeat."

That line went through the assembled court like sunshine through glass.

You could not help it. Your expression softened.

"It is very dear to us," you said.

"So I see."

Too quickly, Nami thought.

He was asking questions already, slipping them between admiration with elegant precision.

How long had the island's singing custom held?

Was it true that certain royal songs were restricted to the queen's line?

Did your people always greet honored guests musically, or only on feast days?

What significance did the bell sequences from the harbor carry?

All of it delivered with enough charm to sound fascinated rather than probing.

But Nami heard the speed in it.

Saw the way his interest sharpened at custom, lineage, ritual.

And she did not like it.

You, meanwhile, were trying not to feel absurdly aware of how the whole morning had shifted around him.

The dream. The breakfast song. The arrival. The look on his face when he first saw you.

It was all arranged too perfectly to trust entirely, and yet your heart, raised on stories no less than songs, could not help leaning toward the possibility of it.

Then he smiled, and the wrongness went very quiet under the ease of it.

"I heard something else from the harbor," he said.

You tilted your head. "Oh?"

"A voice from above the water." His gaze held yours. "A song about waiting for love with honesty and open eyes."

Your pulse gave one surprised beat.

Behind you, Nami went very still.

Sanji's jaw tightened.

Usopp looked as though reality itself had decided to become accommodating.

The prince stepped a fraction closer, not enough to breach decorum, only enough to let the moment feel more singular than public.

"You sang," he said, and there was wonder in it so beautifully measured you could not tell whether it had been rehearsed or not.

"I did."

He looked at you another second, then something like recognition crossed his face.

"You're the fairest maid I've ever met," he said softly. "You were made..."

For one suspended, impossible beat, the line hung there.

Not because you had planned to answer.

Not because anyone told you to.

But because the shape of the phrase was so familiar, so perfectly aligned with the way your kingdom's songs bent toward completion, that the answer rose from you before thought could stop it.

"...to finish your duet."

The court melted.

There was truly no other phrase for it.

You heard the breath leave the ladies nearest the rail. Saw your brother's eyes go huge with delighted horror. Felt your mother's stillness sharpen beside you and your father's attention shift from pleasant courtesy to something more alert.

Then the prince, without looking away from you, took the line and sang it.

Not badly.

Not approximately.

Properly.

"Since first I heard your morning song

The sea has felt less wide

As if some hand I'd never held

Had called me to this tide"

And because every instinct in you had been raised to answer music offered sincerely, you did.

"I dreamed of eyes I could not name

Of someone not yet known

And now you stand where dream meets day

As if my heart has flown"

His voice joined yours easily, too easily, the harmony settling between you with the eerie smoothness of something fitting itself into place.

"How strange the road that brings two hearts

To one bright harbor kiss

How swift the world can turn and say

Behold, remember this"

Around you, the court had gone rapt.

Your mother's hand had found the edge of the balustrade and held there.

Your father wore the expression of a man who knew romance could be genuine and still disliked surprise inside his own palace.

Your brother looked ready to die from happiness and be honored by the opportunity.

Luffy understood only that something important had happened and leaned into it with wide-eyed delight.

Usopp was having what could only be described as a spiritual experience.

Sanji understood at once why you were affected, which made it much worse.

Zoro thought, with immediate certainty, that it was too neat.

And Nami's suspicion hardened into something real and cold.

Because the duet was beautiful, yes.

But beauty was not the same thing as truth.

And fate had never been this perfectly timed.

Still, for one dangerous instant, standing there in morning light with the whole kingdom holding its breath around you, you believed your world might actually have answered.

Not fully.

Not foolishly.

But enough to be shaken by it.

When the final note faded, the silence that followed was not empty. It was full. Charged. Waiting.

Then the sound came all at once.

A rushing murmur through the court.

A delighted stir.

The first breathless whispers of fate, of sign, of surely, of after all.

The prince bowed his head slightly, not to the crowd, but to you.

"I beg forgiveness if I have presumed," he said, and the humility in it was measured so well it would have taken a crueler person than you to doubt it immediately. "Only it seemed, for one moment, that the island itself had asked for an answer."

You could not think of anything sensible to say.

That alone unsettled you.

You, who were rarely at a loss for honest feeling, suddenly had too many feelings at once.

Your mother rescued the moment before the court could turn it into open prophecy. Hospitality was extended. The prince and his select officers would be received properly. Refreshments would be served. Rooms made ready if needed.

But he looked only at you when he answered.

"I would be honored," he said. Then, after the briefest pause, with a warmth that reached exactly the places it should have, "If Your Highness would permit it, I should like very much to spend the day in your company. There are some meetings one feels ought not be delayed by politeness pretending they are ordinary."

The court nearly sighed as one.

Nami's expression sharpened.

Zoro looked away and muttered something that sounded like a curse.

Sanji stepped half forward, then stopped himself with visible effort.

Luffy only grinned, sensing the shape of the excitement without naming it.

And you, standing at the center of a morning that had somehow gone from dream to song to arrival in the space of a few sunlit hours, felt your pulse flutter hard enough to hear.

Openhearted.

Startled.

Overwhelmed.

Not yet obsessed.

Only shaken by the terrifying possibility that the world might, in fact, know exactly how to arrange itself when it wanted to be believed.

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[inkmonster21]

A Song for the Clown

Buggy x Princess!Reader

Series Masterlist

As the Straw Hats spend a golden day exploring your singing kingdom and growing closer to you, a private conversation about love and an unexpected message from the harbor hint that the life you have always dreamed of may finally be on its way.

3. A Kingdom in Chorus

Morning came bright and generous over the island, all gold light on tiled roofs and sea-glass shimmer beyond the cliffs.

The palace had a different sound in daylight after guests had slept within it. Less formal, more alive. Bells from the lower city drifted up in cheerful intervals. Somewhere along the east wing a maid sang to herself while shaking linens over a balcony rail. In the kitchens below, someone had already begun a bread song strong enough to carry through three floors of stone and make Luffy appear in the breakfast room before anyone else with his hair only half behaving and his grin fully restored.

By the time the rest of the Straw Hats had assembled, the morning had become one of those island mornings that seemed impossible not to trust. The air was warm without heaviness. The gardens flashed with dew. Your brother had already asked three questions before sitting down and then continued asking them once seated, none of which prevented him from eating with determined focus.

You arrived a few minutes later in a dress the color of pale buttercups, your sleeves loose and light enough to stir whenever you moved. Two tiny blue birds followed shamelessly enough that one of the footmen did not even blink when they landed on the back of a chair near your place at the table.

Sanji looked at the birds, then at you, then at the ceiling as though appealing to powers greater than himself.

"Good morning," you said warmly, and because you meant it, the entire table seemed to believe it.

Luffy waved from behind an unreasonable quantity of pastries. "Morning."

"Did you sleep well?" you asked, settling into your chair.

Usopp placed one hand dramatically over his chest. "Like a man born for luxury."

Zoro grunted into his tea.

Nami smiled despite herself. "Better than expected."

"That is a relief." You glanced to Zoro. "And you?"

He looked faintly offended at being asked directly. "Fine."

You tilted your head with that clear-eyed way of yours. "You are frowning at the silverware as if it insulted your honor."

Usopp choked on his drink laughing.

Sanji made a small wounded sound because you were funny without trying to be, which he seemed to find deeply unfair.

Even Zoro's mouth twitched before he caught it and took another swallow of tea as if that might erase the moment.

"I thought," you said, pleased by the way the morning was already beginning, "that if you have no pressing plans, I might show you more of the city today. Yesterday was all a bit hurried, and there are lovely places beyond the palace that I think you would enjoy."

"Yes," Luffy said immediately.

Nami glanced at him. "You do not even know what she was going to suggest."

"She said lovely places."

"That is not a plan."

"It's a good one."

You laughed softly. "I shall try to make it worthy of such confidence."

So after breakfast, with your brother reluctantly surrendered to his tutor under repeated promises that pirates would still exist later, you led them down into the city again.

In the clear light of morning, the kingdom seemed even more devoted to song than it had the day before. The early market was already in full bloom. Flower sellers arranged their wares in neat bands of color and sang recommendations to passing customers. Fishmongers compared catches in rolling harmony that somehow made scales and eels sound elegant. Children weaving between the stalls carried fragments of half-finished melodies the way other children carried string or marbles.

The farther you walked, the more obvious it became that you were not simply recognized.

You were known.

A cheesemonger called out to ask whether the queen's cough had fully disappeared with the last rains. A seamstress paused in pinning a hem just to tell you her sister's new baby was finally sleeping through the night. A gardener from the lower terraces proudly presented the first climbing rose of the season and looked nearly tearful when you admired it as though it were priceless.

You remembered names.

You remembered sorrows.

You remembered that the baker's wife had been worried about her mother's leg, that the little boy by the ribbon cart hated arithmetic, that the old cobbler had once lost a cat for two days and still talked about the reunion like resurrection.

Nothing about it was performed. You did not greet people the way one tosses flowers from a parade carriage. You greeted them as though they mattered because they did.

Luffy liked that immediately.

He wandered only half a step from you most of the morning, not because he understood all the reasons the kingdom loved you, but because joy recognized joy in itself. He accepted samples from smiling vendors without embarrassment, laughed whenever children tugged at his sleeves to ask whether pirate ships truly smelled like storms, and at one point joined a line of boys hauling baskets just because they were singing while doing it and that seemed reason enough.

Nami watched everything.

Trade routes painted on crates. Port markings. Coin exchanged in open hands. Who bowed and who only smiled. Which merchants looked prosperous and which looked merely comfortable. She noticed, too, the way your presence altered those transactions. Not through command. Through ease. People relaxed around you. Faces opened. Worry loosened.

Zoro noticed different things.

He noticed that the city guard was too ceremonial around the upper squares and too thin near the eastern alleyways. He noticed routes that would be difficult to defend and gates that looked beautiful but not particularly practical under real strain. He noticed that a kingdom this soft in appearance might be more vulnerable than it knew.

Usopp flourished.

He treated every square like a stage waiting to be properly used. By the time you reached the fountain quarter, he had somehow acquired an audience of children and one old man with a basket of pears who listened with approving fascination as Usopp embellished a story about sea fog, cannon fire, and a heroic leap that almost certainly had never happened in the way he described it.

Sanji adored you with such consistency it had become part of the weather.

He carried things before anyone could ask. He offered his arm over uneven steps you did not need help crossing. He reacted to every smile from you as though awarded a medal in a private war no one else had agreed was happening. Yet for all the extravagance of it, there was harmless warmth under the devotion that made it difficult to mind.

By late morning, the market had opened fully into the broad central square where musicians often gathered. A woman at a cider stand sang out a greeting the moment she saw you and offered cups to the whole group before Nami could even ask the price.

You thanked her, then turned as a sudden sharp sound broke through the easy rhythm of the square.

A horse had shied near the northern lane.

Not badly. Not enough to send anyone into true alarm. But enough that the cart it had been hitched to tilted awkwardly and its owner looked one bad second away from panic himself. The gelding's eyes were wide. Its breath came fast. Somewhere behind it, a dropped tray of copper pots still rolled and clanged against the stones, which could not have helped.

You were moving before anyone else quite realized you had left their side.

"Easy," you murmured, one hand lifting as you approached.

The owner began at once. "Your Highness, forgive me, he does not usually..."

"It's all right," you said, and the gentleness in it calmed him almost as quickly as the horse.

You did not sing words.

You only stepped into the horse's line of sight and began humming, low and steady, one hand held just far enough forward to let him choose the distance between you. The melody was simple. Barely more than breath given shape. The horse's ears flicked. His nostrils widened once. Then again.

The whole square seemed to quiet by instinct.

You took another slow step, still humming.

The horse's head lowered a fraction.

The owner exhaled shakily.

By the time your fingers brushed the side of the gelding's neck, the tremor had gone from his muscles. He blew a long breath through his nose and leaned into your touch with the relieved, almost embarrassed look of an animal realizing too late that fear had made a fool of him.

"There now," you whispered. "There is no shame in being startled."

Luffy watched with open delight. "That's cool."

"It is," Usopp agreed, in a quieter voice than usual.

Sanji looked as if the horse had personally wronged him by receiving such tenderness first.

Nami, however, was not watching only the animal.

She was watching the square.

The way shoulders had lowered.

The way two women near the fountain had gone from tense to smiling without seeming aware of it.

The way even the horse's owner looked more soothed than he had any right to after such a small fright.

She glanced at you, then at the people nearest you, and a thought moved behind her eyes and stayed there.

Zoro crossed his arms. "Does that happen every time?"

You looked back at him over the horse's mane. "Not every time."

"That wasn't really an answer."

You smiled faintly. "No. I suppose not."

But you did not elaborate, and he let it go for now, perhaps because the horse had already settled fully and perhaps because the answer he would have liked was unlikely to arrive wrapped in practical language.

By noon, the square had decided it wanted celebration.

It never took much.

Someone started with a fiddle phrase under the colonnade. Someone else answered on flute. A pair of old ladies near the bread stall exchanged one knowing look and began a chorus line so fast it was obvious this had happened before. A flower girl laughed and pointed straight at you, then sang the first teasing verse with shameless conviction.

"Someday soon the bells will ring

For our bright and golden-hearted thing

For the princess with the morning smile

Who has waited with such a long while"

The square caught at once.

Vendors leaned into it. Children clapped in time. A butcher's apprentice, clearly delighted by his own audacity, added the next line from across the lane.

"She will meet him by the sea, perhaps

Or in silk beneath the chapel lamps

And he'll lose his breath and lose his name

When she turns and smiles his way the same"

You laughed, one hand over your mouth, though there was color warming your cheeks already.

"Oh, no," Nami said under her breath.

"Oh, yes," Usopp breathed, thrilled.

Luffy grinned. "Sing!"

"I am not singing," Nami replied.

"You should," you said brightly, already being drawn into the circle by three determined women and one child who took your hand like this was obvious. "It is only a little square song."

"No," Nami said. "No, absolutely not."

Sanji, of course, had no such reservations.

He stepped into the circle the moment you glanced his way, hand over heart, smile devastatingly sincere. "Princess, I would be honored."

"I thought you might," you said, laughing.

Zoro stayed exactly where he was, suffering in visible silence.

The song gathered shape around you, not polished, not rehearsed, but alive in the charmingly chaotic way all local favorites were. You moved with the ease of someone raised in communal rhythm, letting the circle pull you along without trying to lead too hard.

"What sort of prince will steal her sleep

What sort of vow will he dare keep

Will he come with roses, ships, or rain

Will he sing her heart awake again"

Sanji took your hand and spun you neatly through one turn, looking scandalously pleased with himself.

"If he has wit and if he has grace

And if delight lives in his face

Then let him come and let him see

What wonder waits beneath this tree"

Usopp committed with offensive speed.

He jumped in on the next refrain like he had spent his whole life preparing for exactly this kind of public spectacle.

"He'll need courage, that much is true

To stand before a girl like you

With all the island watching near

And not collapse from love or fear"

Luffy shouted half the melody and none of the correct harmony and had an excellent time doing it.

By then even people from adjoining lanes had drifted over to watch, clapping and laughing as though this were the sort of thing one could rely on from a market day blessed by weather and mood alike.

You were laughing too hard now to hide it, but not with embarrassment. More with the helpless delight of someone being gently teased by people she loved and seeing no reason not to enjoy it.

Nami stood just outside the circle with her arms crossed, trying not to smile and failing in small, irritated flashes.

At one point you reached toward her from the turning line. "Come along."

"No."

"Only one verse."

"No."

"Surely one cannot be so very frightening."

"I am not afraid," she said.

"Then you are being stubborn."

"I am protecting my dignity."

You laughed again and let yourself be spun away before the argument could continue.

Zoro, from where he stood, muttered, "This is worse than torture."

"You're free to leave," Nami told him.

He did not.

That was the telling thing.

He stayed through the entire ridiculous number, scowling at the sun and the singers and the obvious possibility that if he remained long enough someone would try to drag him in too.

They did not, mostly because your attention had already gone back to the rhythm of it and because the square was reaching its last bright refrain.

"When her heart is ready, love will know

How to find her where the wildflowers grow

And the day it comes, we'll all agree

The whole wide world should hear the key"

When the song ended, the applause was immediate and affectionate and wholly unnecessary. You bowed anyway with a little curving grace that turned the motion into something radiant instead of merely practiced. Sanji bowed more deeply, because of course he did. Usopp accepted the reaction as though acclaim had always been his proper setting. Luffy looked delighted beyond reason.

Nami waited until the square had thinned and the walk resumed before she spoke.

It happened a little later, when the market roads gave way to a quieter garden path that overlooked the sea. The others had drifted ahead. Luffy chasing the promise of sweets from a lower stall. Usopp mid-story. Sanji hovering nearby but tactful enough, for once, to notice you and Nami were talking and not interrupt.

Nami's voice was lighter than the seriousness of her question. "Do you really believe all that?"

You looked toward her. "True love?"

"The idea of it." She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear, gaze moving from you to the cliffside beyond. "That you will know that quickly. That you'll just feel it and be right."

You did not answer immediately.

That was one of the things she had begun to notice about you. You did not speak thoughtlessly. Sincerely, yes. Quickly when delighted, yes. But when something mattered, you let it settle before you offered it voice.

"I do not think it is always quick," you said at last. "Only that some things are felt before they are understood."

Nami glanced at you sideways. "And that sounds lovely... It just also sounds dangerous."

"Perhaps it is both."

She studied you a moment. "You've never really been outside this kingdom."

"No."

"You've never had someone lie to you and make it sound like devotion."

The question was not cruel, but it had enough edge to make the sea wind between you feel cooler for one passing second.

You shook your head. "Not in that way."

Nami softened a little. "Then how can you be so sure?"

You looked out over the water, where sunlight flashed white off the waves below.

"I think," you said carefully, "because there are truths that arrive in the heart before the mind has finished naming them. Fear does. Grief does. Joy does. Why should love be less immediate simply because people speak of it badly?"

Nami had no quick answer to that.

You laughed softly. "I only mean that if such a grand thing happened, I do not think my heart would mistake itself for very long."

Nami looked unconvinced, but not dismissive. That was the important thing.

"You speak as though your heart has been very well educated."

"In some ways." You glanced toward her, the honesty in your face impossible to miss. "In others, perhaps not at all."

That tugged at her more than she liked.

She respected your heart. That was the trouble. If you had been silly, vain, shallow, or empty-headed, it would have been easier to roll her eyes and leave it there. But you were none of those things. You were simply untested in a world where not everything arrived clothed in good intention.

"I just wouldn't want someone to use that certainty against you," she said, quieter now.

You reached over and touched her hand briefly, the gesture so warm and matter-of-fact that she almost startled. "That is very kind of you, Nami."

Nami huffed lightly. "Do not make me sound nicer than I am."

"I do not know how."

This time Nami actually laughed.

By evening, the island settled into that hour between brightness and dusk when everything seemed touched by gentler magic. The heat eased. The bells rang lower and softer. Birds folded themselves into trees. Lanterns had not yet been lit, but the palace windows were beginning to catch sunset in long bands of peach and gold.

You stood on the western terrace overlooking the lower gardens when your mother found you.

The sea stretched beyond the cliffs in molten color. Below, the palace grounds moved in quiet preparation for supper. Somewhere farther down a gardener sang to himself while coiling hose through the rose paths.

"You seemed to have a wonderful time today," your mother said, coming to stand beside you.

"I did."

She folded her hands together lightly against the stone rail. "The strangers from the sea suit you better than I expected."

You smiled. "They are very strange."

"I gathered as much."

"But good strange."

Your mother looked at you, and because she was your mother, she saw the rest of it easily enough.

"You look thoughtful."

You let out a soft breath through your nose. "I suppose I am."

"About pirates?"

You laughed quietly. "No. Though they are very interesting."

"About what, then?"

The sunset was nearly gone now, leaving the sea darkening by degrees. You watched it a moment before answering.

"I have always felt as though I am waiting for something, someone," you admitted.

Her expression did not change, but her attention sharpened in that careful maternal way you had known all your life.

"Not because I am unhappy," you added. "I am not. I love my life. I love our home. I only..." You searched for it. "There are moments lately when everything feels on the edge of becoming something else."

Your mother's hand settled over yours where it rested on the stone.

"That can be a difficult feeling," she said softly.

"Yes."

"And an exciting one."

You smiled without looking at her. "I thought perhaps it must mean my true love is near."

At that, she laughed under her breath, affectionate and helpless all at once.

"Sweetheart."

"You see? Even you think I am ridiculous."

"Never." She squeezed your hand. "Only wonderfully yourself."

That pleased you enough to lean gently against her shoulder for one brief moment like a much younger girl.

The peace of it lasted until footsteps approached across the terrace behind you.

A palace runner bowed the instant he reached you, one hand over his chest as he steadied his breath.

"Your Majesties," he said. "A message from the harbor."

Your mother straightened.

"What is it?" she asked.

The runner lifted his head. "An unexpected royal vessel approaches by morning tide. Their banners are not yet fully clear in the fading light, but the harbor master believes they sail under noble colors."

You and your mother exchanged a look.

Not alarm.

Not yet.

Only curiosity.

Below the cliffs, beyond the last bands of sunset, the sea had already begun to darken around the path of something drawing near.

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[inkmonster21]

A Song for the Clown

Buggy x Princess!Reader

Series Masterlist

When the Straw Hats arrive at a breathtaking island where music weaves through every corner of daily life, they are welcomed into a song-blessed kingdom by a warm, wondrous princess whose beauty, kindness, and quiet magic enchant them all before anyone realizes how fragile such brightness can be.

2. The Island That Sings

The first thing the Straw Hats noticed was not the island itself.

It was the music.

It drifted over the water in soft, bright ribbons, carried by the sea wind before the shoreline had fully revealed itself. Not one voice. Many. Layered and overlapping in a way that ought to have sounded chaotic and instead felt somehow impossibly neat, as though the island itself had decided to greet the morning in harmony.

Luffy perked up at once from where he had been leaning over the rail, half watching the water and half inventing some new reason to bother Usopp.

"Do you hear that?" he said, grinning. "That sounds fun."

"It sounds suspicious," Zoro muttered without opening his eyes.

He was seated near the mast with one arm folded over his chest and the other braced against the wood, trying to maintain the sort of rest he never quite managed when the crew was in motion and something strange loomed ahead. The music seemed to annoy him on principle.

Nami stepped up beside Luffy and shaded her eyes with one hand as the ship cut through the glittering morning water. "That is definitely a town," she said. "Or a festival. Or a cult."

Usopp, who had been quietly hoping for an island full of normal things for once, brightened immediately instead. "A festival sounds better," he declared. "A rich festival. A rich, peaceful, very generous festival full of people who admire heroic pirates."

Sanji lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly through a smile that had already gone dreamy. "If that is a romantic kingdom, I hope they know how to appreciate beauty properly."

Zoro cracked one eye open just enough to look annoyed at the sound of his voice. "You haven't even seen it yet."

"I don't have to," Sanji replied, offended by the implication. "I can feel it, moss head."

Luffy laughed and climbed higher onto the rail despite Nami's immediate look of warning. "Maybe they sing everything."

"Real people don't do that, Luffy" Nami said.

The island emerged slowly after that, first as softened shapes through sea haze, then as color, then as something so absurdly lovely that all five of them went quiet for at least a moment.

The cliffs rose in dark stone veined with green, and above them sat a kingdom that looked less built than imagined. Towers caught the sunlight and threw it back in warm gold. Balconies curved from pale walls draped in flowering vines. Bell towers gleamed. Terraced gardens spilled color down toward the harbor. Banners snapped in sea wind. White birds circled the highest points in loose, shining spirals.

It looked like the sort of place one expected to find inside a story told beside firelight, not on an actual charted island with actual taxes and roads and people who presumably still had to wash dishes.

Usopp stared. "Oh, come on."

Luffy laughed harder. "It does look fun."

"It looks fake and expensive," Nami corrected, though there was wonder in her voice despite herself.

Sanji pressed a hand over his heart. "I knew it."

Zoro finally stood and looked out properly, then sighed the way a man sighs when the world insists on becoming more irritatingly elaborate than necessary. "I hate it already."

The closer they came to harbor, the clearer the music grew.

Not ceremonial now. Everyday.

Someone was singing from the docks, and someone else answered. Somewhere farther in, a chorus rose and fell over a pattern of hand claps. A bell chimed twice. Children's voices darted through the rest like birds.

Luffy bounced on his feet. "Let's go! Let’s go!”

"We are going," Nami said dryly. "That's how docking works."

By the time they stepped off the ship, it had become clear that yes, this island really did sing everything.

Dock workers moved crates in coordinated lines while calling instructions in cheerful harmony.

"Lift to the left and mind the rope,

Mind the rope and clear the lane,

Mind your backs and stack it straight,

Or we'll be hauling it twice again."

A merchant just beyond them held up strings of polished shells and sang the price to a laughing young couple who sang their bargaining right back at him.

Two guards at the harbor gate, polished and upright in uniforms trimmed with gold braid, greeted arrivals not with a barked challenge but with a pleasant duet that included the weather, a reminder not to block the main thoroughfare, and a recommendation for the best sweet buns near the western square.

Children raced past them in a blur of sun-browned limbs and ribbons, breathlessly singing gossip to one another about fresh fish, a baker's dropped tart, and the arrival of a ship full of pirates.

Usopp turned in a slow circle, one hand pressed to his chest as though steadying himself against sheer delight. "This," he said, awed, "is incredible."

Zoro rubbed a hand over his face. "They're singing the directions."

"They are singing the directions," Nami confirmed, eyes flicking everywhere at once.

Luffy had already started grinning back at people like he had lived here his whole life. "I like this place."

Sanji, meanwhile, looked one soft breeze away from proposing to the island itself.

A woman balancing two baskets of flowers on her hips paused near them long enough to give them a bright smile. "You've arrived on a fine morning," she sang lightly, then laughed when Usopp visibly startled at being addressed in tune. "The princess is in the upper gardens. There's quite a bustle today."

"Princess?" Sanji repeated at once, all composure gone.

The woman nodded toward the palace high above. "Her Highness is helping prepare arrangements for tonight's celebration. If you follow the garden stair, someone will guide you."

Luffy's eyes widened. "There's a celebration too?"

"There is always something to celebrate here," the woman said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.

Zoro muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Of course there is."

Still, they followed.

The climb toward the palace carried them through an island that seemed determined to outdo itself at every turn. Streets curved around fountains lined in pale stone and blue tile. Flower boxes spilled from windows. Shop signs were painted in elegant looping hands and decorated with ribbons or little bells that chimed whenever the sea breeze turned mischievous. Even the old men mending fishing nets in the shade did so to a low, tuneful murmur that might have been conversation or might have been habit.

The higher they went, the greener it became. Garden paths opened between walls of climbing roses and cypress shade. Birds skimmed low over fountains. Somewhere nearby came the sound of a clear, feminine voice threading through the air so naturally that it seemed less like singing and more like another form of breathing.

Luffy tilted his head. "That's nice."

"That," Sanji said faintly, "is an angel."

Nami rolled her eyes, but only halfway. The voice was lovely. There was no sense pretending otherwise. It rose warm and bright through the morning, weaving around the sound of water and the rustle of leaves. By the time they followed it into the upper royal gardens, even Zoro had stopped complaining long enough to look.

You were standing in the middle of a wide, sunlit terrace dressed in something soft and flowing that moved with the breeze like flower petals caught in water. Baskets of cut flowers sat all around you. Two attendants worked nearby with ribbons and garlands. Birds clustered shamelessly around the stone fountain at your side, and every now and then, at a little tilt of your hand or a change in melody, one fluttered up carrying a loose strand of ivy or a trailing ribbon to where you seemed to want it placed.

Usopp blinked. "Oh, no."

Nami glanced at him. "What does that mean?"

"That means," he whispered, scandalized, "she has birds helping with floral arrangements."

She did.

A tiny white bird hopped to the edge of a half-finished arrangement and nudged a trailing flower stem into place with such solemn purpose that Luffy laughed out loud.

You looked up then, the song breaking off into delighted surprise rather than alarm.

For one suspended beat, you simply looked at them.

At the very obvious pirates in travel-worn clothes, standing in the middle of your immaculate garden with salt still in their hair and curiosity all over their faces.

Then your entire expression brightened.

"Oh," you said, stepping forward at once. "You must be the ones from the harbor."

Luffy pointed at himself. "We're pirates."

Your smile widened, as though that were marvelous news rather than cause for concern. "Oh, my goodness. Well, you must have tales."

That, more than anything else, seemed to undo them.

Luffy liked you instantly. That much showed in how quickly he laughed and stepped nearer, looking around the terrace like he had stumbled into exactly the right kind of adventure.

Zoro's expression settled somewhere between suspicion and resignation. You were clearly too nice, which in his experience usually meant someone else nearby was dangerous.

Nami noticed, at once and with some concern, how utterly open your face was. No fear. No guarded diplomacy. Just straightforward delight.

Usopp looked dazzled enough to forget to be dramatic about it.

Sanji was, for all practical purposes, dead where he stood.

You clasped your hands lightly before you, eyes moving over them all with warm interest. "I am very glad you came up. The harbor gets crowded this time of morning, and the lower market tends to become rather impossible whenever festival ribbons are being hung. Was the climb dreadful? You look as though you've come a fair way."

"Not dreadful," Luffy said.

"Charming," Sanji managed.

Nami gave him a look, then stepped forward with more composure. "We did not realize we were arriving in the middle of... all this."

You laughed softly and glanced around the garden as if seeing it fresh through their eyes. "Yes. It can be a little much at first, I think."

"A little?" Zoro echoed.

You turned toward him, unoffended and faintly amused. "Oh. You prefer quieter places."

He folded his arms. "I prefer places where directions aren't sung at me."

That earned a brighter laugh from you than the line perhaps deserved. "I am terribly sorry. That must have been very overwhelming."

"It was weird," Luffy said helpfully.

"Yes," Nami added, "it was."

You seemed pleased rather than embarrassed. "I suppose it would be."

A pair of birds fluttered down toward the basket at your side, one carrying a loose ribbon end. You took it without breaking conversation, tied it neatly around a cluster of pale blooms, and offered the bird a grateful little nod before it zipped back toward the fountain.

Sanji made a strangled sort of sound.

You glanced at him with immediate concern. "Are you unwell?"

He pressed a hand to his chest. "No, princess. Merely struck by beauty in several forms at once."

Nami muttered, "Of course."

You smiled at him kindly, either missing or graciously ignoring the full depth of his nonsense. "That is a very poetic way to suffer."

Usopp, encouraged by the complete absence of fear, puffed himself up a little. "Well. We are not just any pirates. We are, in fact, a rather famous crew."

"Oh?" You turned to him with exactly the same sincere attention you had given everyone else, which only made him stand straighter. "How wonderful."

Nami looked at you carefully. "You are really not concerned that five strangers just walked into your gardens and announced they're pirates?"

You considered that for half a second. "Should I be?"

"Yes," Zoro said.

"No," Luffy said at the same time.

You tilted your head, studying them all in that curious, emotionally direct way that seemed to unsettle people whether they wanted it to or not. "You do not feel like a danger," you said simply.

Nami almost asked what that meant, then stopped. There was no coyness in you. No attempt to be mysterious. You had simply said what you meant.

One of your attendants approached with a length of ribbon and a look that suggested she had been trying not to interrupt. "Your Highness, the western arch still needs trailing blooms."

"Oh, of course." You turned back toward the half-finished arrangements. "Would you excuse me just one moment?"

You crossed to the arch with airy quickness, and before any of them had quite decided whether to wait politely or look around too much, you began humming again. The melody was light and nimble. Three birds launched themselves from the fountain rim at once and fluttered up toward the arch. One tugged at ivy. Another settled with absurd concentration on the stone edge and pecked at a ribbon loop. A third simply chirped at you until you laughed and adjusted a white blossom half an inch to the left.

Usopp stared. "This is the greatest island in the world."

"She's singing... everything," Zoro muttered.

You looked back over your shoulder, having clearly heard him. "Would you like to join?"

"No."

The answer came from both Zoro and Nami at once.

You blinked, then smiled. "Very well."

Nami crossed her arms. "That was never going to happen."

"I thought it worth asking." You finished the arrangement, stepped back, and looked genuinely pleased with it. Then, without the slightest shift in warmth, you turned fully back toward the crew. "You must come to the palace."

Sanji nearly combusted. "We must?"

"Yes, of course." You looked faintly puzzled that this might be in doubt. "You are visitors. And pirates. Which is much more interesting than most visitors. It would be unkind not to welcome you properly."

Nami opened her mouth, probably to object on principle or at least insist they not impose, but Luffy beat her to it.

"Okay," he said immediately.

You laughed. "Splendid."

And just like that, it was decided.

You dismissed your attendants with instructions to finish the last two garlands as you led the Straw Hats down the winding garden path toward the inner palace. The route took them along a terrace edged with flowering stone urns and low sun-warmed walls where lizards darted in and out of shadow.

You asked questions almost at once.

Not suspicious ones. Eager ones.

"What is it like to sleep at sea when the weather turns rough?"

"Have you truly seen sea kings?"

"Is it very frightening, the first time you leave an island behind and can no longer see land?"

"Do pirates really choose one another as family, or is that only in dramatic stories told by people who have never met one?"

Luffy answered most readily, though not always in ways that made practical sense.

"It's fun," he said of storms.

"Yes," he said of sea kings, with obvious satisfaction.

"No," he said to fear, then paused. "Well. Sometimes. But then it gets fun again."

Usopp interrupted often, broadening every story in proportion to how entertained you looked. By the third wild exaggeration, you had begun laughing into your hand with such open delight that he became even more determined to impress you.

Sanji offered smoother versions of things when he could, especially where danger might upset you, though this was complicated by the fact that you did not seem nearly as delicate as your setting suggested.

Nami, once she realized your curiosity was genuine and not empty politeness, found herself answering more than intended. You asked about maps and currents and ports beyond your island, and there was something in the way you listened that made truth easier to give.

Zoro said the least, which did not seem to bother you. Once, when the path curved toward a dramatic overlook and everyone else stopped for a breath to take in the sea flashing below, you glanced toward him and said gently, "You are tired."

He frowned. "What?"

"You are," you repeated. "You carry it like someone pretending it weighs nothing."

Luffy snorted, “she got you, Zoro.”

Zoro looked vaguely offended by having been perceived against his will. "I'm fine."

You accepted that with a small nod that suggested very clearly that you did not believe him. "If you say so."

That was somehow worse.

As you moved through the cityward paths below the palace walls, people greeted you constantly.

A baker bowed from his doorway and offered you sugared pastries wrapped in paper without asking payment.

A little girl with a ribbon half-undone in her hair ran up just to show you a daisy crown she had made, then gasped happily when you crouched to admire it as though it were a jewel.

An elderly woman selling embroidery thread caught your hand, kissed your knuckles, and told you your mother must come hear the chapel choir before the next feast day because old Tomas had finally learned not to drag behind the altos.

You knew them all.

Not as a royal performance. Truly.

You asked after sore knees and sons at sea and a sister's new baby. You noticed when someone looked weary. You paused when a stable pony tied near the lower lane flicked its ears and stamped in nervous agitation, stepping close enough to run your hand down its neck while murmuring a few soft lines under your breath until it quieted.

Nami watched that carefully.

You loved your kingdom. That much was plain in every bright answer and every easy smile. But there was another thing there too, something that revealed itself only in the kinds of questions you asked when the sea opened into view between buildings or when Usopp described strange islands full of giant insects and impossible weather.

You were curious.

Not discontent. Not trapped. But curious in a way that suggested some small part of you had always wondered what lay beyond songs already known by heart.

The palace came fully into view at the end of the upper path, and even after seeing it from the harbor, the Straw Hats slowed.

It rose above them in warm stone and flowering terraces, all elegant towers and bell arches and high windows catching the day. Bridges linked one wing to another over garden courts. Fountains flashed beneath cypress shade. Long banners spilled from the balconies in colors that moved like watercolor in the wind.

Usopp made a tiny, reverent noise.

Luffy grinned. "Your house is big."

You laughed. "Yes. It can be rather inconvenient, actually."

At the main entrance, attendants descended into immediate, hushed chaos the moment they saw you arrive with pirates.

They did not scream.

They did not faint.

But they did begin fussing in a way that suggested years of training were the only thing standing between order and a very elegant panic.

"Your Highness," one said, recovering first. "We were not informed..."

"No," you agreed cheerfully. "I forgot to inform anyone."

That appeared to pain him.

"These are my guests," you continued, with the simple confidence of someone entirely accustomed to being obeyed in matters of hospitality. "Please see that rooms are prepared and that something substantial is sent out. They've had a sea journey."

Luffy lit up. "Food?"

"Yes," you said, delighted by the speed of his response. "A great deal of it, I should think."

That was when a smaller voice somewhere deeper in the hall shouted, with all the force of delighted scandal, "Pirates?"

Your younger brother appeared like a launched projectile.

He could not have been more excited if someone had rolled a cannon directly into the entry hall and announced it was for his personal use. He all but skidded to a stop in front of the crew, eyes enormous and bright.

"Actual pirates?" he demanded.

You smiled at once. "Yes, darling."

He looked at Luffy, then Zoro's swords, then Usopp in a way that made Usopp straighten instinctively, then back again. "Have you fought sea monsters? Have you stolen treasure? Have you ever been in a storm so big you thought the ship would split in half?"

"Yes," Luffy said.

"Yes," Usopp said.

"Yes," Nami said.

"Maybe," Zoro said.

Sanji leaned down with gallant patience. "Some of us have also survived worse things, like bad cooking and appalling manners."

Your brother gasped as though he had discovered a new favorite subject. "Can I ask more later?"

"You may ask some later," you corrected gently, touching his shoulder. "If you allow them time to breathe first."

He accepted that with the dramatic suffering of little brothers everywhere, then immediately turned back to stare at them with open worship.

The warmth of it softened the space at once.

Palace servants hurried off with instructions. One page was dispatched to inform the king and queen that their daughter had brought pirates into the palace and apparently intended to keep them for dinner. Another attendant, after one long blink at Zoro's swords and Luffy's sandals and the general state of all of them, quietly offered to have bathing rooms readied.

That led to the next great upheaval.

The Straw Hats, who had been through many strange experiences, were not entirely prepared for the speed and efficiency with which palace hospitality descended on them.

Within the hour they had been shown into guest chambers with carved screens, washed linen, polished copper basins, and windows overlooking the sea. Clothes suitable for temporary comfort were brought, though not all of them fit perfectly, which pleased Luffy immensely and offended Zoro on principle. Platters of food arrived in quantities that would have impressed even a less food-motivated captain. There was fresh fruit, warm bread, honey cakes, roasted meats, cheeses, sugared figs, spiced potatoes, chilled citrus water, and at least three desserts Luffy began eating before anyone could identify them.

"I love this island," he announced through a mouthful of pastry.

Sanji, scrubbed, groomed, and emotionally flourishing in a borrowed shirt that somehow made him look even more theatrical, looked around the guest salon like a man who had been personally rewarded by the universe. "This," he said, "is civilization."

Zoro, cleaned up but no happier for it, leaned awkwardly against a carved pillar and muttered, "I liked it better when I smelled like the ship."

"That is a terrible thing to admit," Nami said.

Usopp, who had decided he looked especially heroic against embroidered cushions, spread himself out as if born to luxury. "Some men," he said loftily, helping himself to more fruit, "adapt beautifully to elevated circumstances."

Nami remained observant even while eating. She watched the servants. The layout. The way guards moved. The deference the entire palace showed when your name was mentioned. She noticed how careful the hospitality was without becoming cold. Nothing about this place felt flimsy, despite all the flowers and song. It was simply... committed to beauty in a way she had never seen before.

When you rejoined them later, changed from your garden dress into something a touch more formal but no less soft and graceful, conversation in the room paused without meaning to.

You noticed it at once and smiled with a kind of almost shy brightness. "Oh. I hope they have not overwhelmed you."

Luffy lifted a hand from the middle of another plate. "No. This is great!”

"That is reassuring."

You led them on through the palace before evening dinner, taking obvious pleasure not in display, but in meaning.

This was the eastern music hall, where the court choirs practiced on feast days and where your mother still favored the acoustics in winter. These balconies overlooked the sea bells, which sounded differently depending on the wind. That was the old shrine passage, where sailors' families left ribbons for safe return. Here were the portrait galleries, though you spent less time on the biggest royal paintings than on the little details hidden around them, like the tiny dog painted at one queen's slippers because she had refused to sit without him.

The animal courtyard delighted Luffy and your brother equally. White doves strutted between stone planters. Palace cats occupied every warm ledge as though by divine right. A pair of rescued deer from the hillside groves flicked their ears at your approach, then came forward without hesitation when you held out your hand.

Usopp stared, once again feeling the need to revise his understanding of what qualified as a normal kingdom.

You pointed out beauty first, always. Never wealth.

Not this stone because it was rare, but because it changed color after rain.

Not this balcony because dignitaries admired it, but because at sunset the whole western sea turned the palace gold.

Not this music room because it was grand, but because your brother once hid in the harp alcove there after breaking a ceremonial cup and cried until you found him.

You noticed their reactions as readily as you noticed the palace itself.

When Zoro's patience frayed, you shortened explanations.

When Luffy drifted toward food or animals, you let him.

When Nami paused longest by maps and trade murals, you answered her practical questions instead of reciting family legend.

When Sanji admired the kitchen, you smiled as though his delight made perfect sense.

There was a sacred wing beyond the older western corridor, quieter than the rest and set behind carved doors inlaid with shell and silver. As you passed, one of the attendants nearby instinctively lowered his voice, and even your brother straightened a little from habit.

Usopp, predictably, noticed at once. "What's in there?"

You slowed, glancing toward the doors.

For the first time that day, your expression shifted into something a little more thoughtful.

"Old inheritance chambers," you said. "Or rather, records leading to them and old songs. Supposedly cursed. There is an offshore chamber tied to the queen's line. Very old. Full of stories people half believe and half embroider beyond reason."

"Treasure," Luffy said immediately.

"I suppose," you admitted, amused. "And history. And old enchantment, if one trusts court tradition."

Nami's eyes sharpened.

"It may only be opened by a royal voice of the queen's line," you went on. "It has not been opened since my brother was born."

"Why?" Usopp asked.

You lifted one shoulder lightly. "There has been no need. Such things are not meant to be disturbed simply because one is curious."

Luffy looked unconvinced by this philosophy.

Your brother, who had apparently heard every version of this story available to children under ten, tugged at Zoro's sleeve. "There's a hidden sea way too," he stage-whispered. "And old crowns and jewels and songs and magic, and wishes blessed by the first singers!”

You looked down at him fondly. "Some of that isn’t true."

"All of it is true."

"Half of what you know comes from kitchen gossip."

"The kitchen knows things."

Sanji looked pleased at the young to be king, “got something going for him.”

Zoro, against his better judgment, huffed something that might almost have been a laugh.

Your brother noticed at once and beamed at him as though he had just achieved a major diplomatic victory. The two of them would not have made sense to anyone else. Your brother full of questions and unspent energy, Zoro all rough silence and reluctant tolerance. Yet something in your brother's earnestness seemed to pull the sharpest edge from him, if only by a fraction.

By the time dinner was announced, the palace no longer felt like a museum viewed by outsiders. It felt lived in.

The dining hall glowed in evening light and candle flame, long windows open to sea breeze and the distant call of bells from the lower city. Your parents entered not with great theatrical ceremony, but with the settled ease of people who belonged not only to the room, but to one another.

Your mother's presence was calm in the way still water is calm, melodic even before she spoke. Something about her made the very air feel more ordered. Your father carried warmth and authority together, the former no less real than the latter. He kissed your brow as he passed your chair before taking his own seat, and your mother laid a hand for one instant against your shoulder as though she could not help touching you in passing.

The Straw Hats, whether or not they cared about royalty in general, understood at once what kind of family this was.

Your father welcomed them properly, gratitude and curiosity balanced together. Your mother did likewise, her gaze moving over each of them with the sort of attentiveness that suggested she had inherited at least part of the kingdom's emotional instinct long before the miracle ever deepened it.

Dinner moved warmly. There was laughter. There was Luffy discovering at least four favorite dishes in quick succession. There was your brother interrupting repeatedly to ask if pirates truly swung from rigging with knives in their teeth and whether all swordsmen were as grumpy as Zoro looked.

At some point the conversation turned, naturally, toward the kingdom's songs.

"It is difficult not to notice," Nami said, careful in her phrasing.

Your father smiled. "So we've been told by nearly everyone who arrives from elsewhere."

Your brother sat up straighter at once. "Tell them!”

"Do not order your father at table," your mother said mildly.

"But you should tell them…”

The king laughed. "Very well."

And so the story was retold, not as public legend, but as family memory.

Not everything. The island knew the broad version. Here, at the table, there were smaller truths in it.

The dimness of the queen's chambers.

The fact that your father had not slept properly for weeks.

The way the palace went so quiet he could hear the chapel candles popping in their cups.

The bowl of broth in candlelight.

The queen interrupting softly once or twice with, "It was not nearly so graceful as your father likes to make it sound," or "I did not laugh beautifully, I croaked at him and frightened the physician."

Your father corrected her with affectionate indignation.

Your brother interrupted to ask whether the fruit really glowed, whether the birds at your birth were all white, whether the physician truly cried, and whether he himself had also been miraculous in any way.

"You were loud," you told him.

He looked delighted by this.

When your mother spoke of the first days after her healing, her voice lowered unconsciously, and even the servants passing at the edges of the room seemed to listen.

"It did not feel dangerous," she said quietly. "Only strange. Beautifully strange. A frightened mare in the lower stables settled when I sang to her, and one of the kitchen mice fell asleep before I had finished the second verse of a winter hymn. By then everyone had already decided fate had looked kindly upon us."

"And then she was born," your father said, looking at you in that way he still sometimes did, as though astonishment had merely learned better manners with time.

Your mother smiled. "And the birds came."

Luffy paused with food halfway to his mouth. "Birds came when she was born?"

"At the windows," the queen said. "As though they had been invited."

Sanji looked like he might choose that moment to perish beautifully.

Nami understood then with sharp, practical clarity that you were not only a beloved princess in a singing kingdom. You were the heart of a story this place had organized itself around. Miracle child. Song-touched daughter. Living continuation of the thing that had changed them all.

Usopp, for once, did not immediately dramatize it. He simply stared at you with renewed awe.

Zoro looked at you differently too, though he would rather have swallowed one of the decorative candles than admit it.

Even Luffy, uncomplicated as he was, seemed to grasp something important. Not the politics of it. Not the symbolism. Just that this island loved you with the force of memory.

By the time dinner gave way to evening, the palace had shifted into celebration.

Lanterns were lit all through the gardens and lower terraces, so that warm gold and soft pink gleamed among hedges, archways, and flowering trees. Musicians gathered in the courtyard. People drifted in from the city below. It did not feel like a rigid court event. It felt alive. Open. As though joy itself had been invited.

You moved through it as though born to light.

Lantern glow softened your features. Your dress caught the evening breeze. Birds settled into the high trees while strings and flutes threaded through the air. Children ran laughing between tables. Old couples danced with the serenity of people who had been practicing love for decades.

Sanji did, in fact, get his twirl.

He had been hovering in helpless admiration at the edge of one circle dance when you approached with laughter already in your eyes and held out your hand.

"Surely," you said, "you did not come all this way only to watch."

He stared at your hand as though it had been extended from paradise itself. "Princess..."

"Oh, dear," you said softly, amused. "Have I frightened you after all?"

"No," he breathed, then took your hand at once.

You spun him through two graceful turns before he recovered enough to do more than follow. By then the onlookers were clapping in time, and Luffy had joined another part of the dance line with absolute sincerity and no skill whatsoever.

Usopp adapted to the theatricality almost offensively fast. Within minutes he had a circle of children enthralled by some revised and highly flattering account of sea battles. Your brother sat nearest, hanging onto every word. Nami remained watchful even while smiling now and then despite herself, her eyes moving from celebration to shadows and back again as if she could not quite shake the habit of caution even in a place so bright.

Zoro lingered at the edge with a cup in hand, looking as though he had accepted this was happening to him and saw no point resisting any further.

The kingdom glowed around you.

Music, lanterns, sea wind, laughter.

Beauty enough to make a person careless, if they were not paying attention.

And for one perfect evening, no one had reason yet to believe that anything in all that brightness could possibly go wrong.

Leave a “TAG ME” down below to officially join the crew!

[inkmonster21]

A Song for the Clown

Buggy x Princess!Reader

Series Masterlist

A miraculous Princess born from a song-blessed royal line grows up beloved by her kingdom and quietly yearning for a true, soul-deep love, only for her hopeful morning hymn to be interrupted by the arrival of unfamiliar ships on the horizon.

1. The First Song

There was a time before every baker sang the morning bread.

Before shepherd boys harmonized over sunlit hills.

Before fishermen called to one another in tidy, lilting phrases that seemed to rise from the sea itself and return again on the wind.

Before nurses hummed sick children to sleep and found their fevers broken by dawn.

Before brides crossed polished chapel floors to choruses gathered from balconies and gardens and the stone lips of old fountains.

The island had always loved music. That much the oldest songs agreed upon.

Long before the miracle, there had been fiddles in the square at midsummer, bells rung from the high palace towers on feast days, and mothers who crooned lullabies over wooden cradles while moonlight silvered the curtains and the sea breathed against the cliffs below.

But there had been a before.

The oldest songs remembered it.

They remembered a kingdom that was beautiful, yes, but ordinary in the way all beautiful things believe themselves to be until touched by wonder. They remembered market days full of laughter rather than chorus. They remembered prayers spoken plainly instead of lifted in tune. They remembered a palace of pale stone and flowering terraces where music was cherished, not yet woven into the bones of everyday life.

The palace itself stood high above the sea, built from rose-gold rock that caught the morning sun and held it lovingly. Its towers reached like graceful fingers into the sky. Its bell chambers overlooked white gulls and green water. Balconies curved from its sides like the petals of some great cliffside bloom. Ivy wandered across sun-warmed walls. Gardens spilled down in tiers, fragrant with jasmine, climbing roses, moonflowers, and herbs kept by palace stewards in long, careful rows. Far below, waves crashed against the black line of the cliff in a rhythm older than the kingdom itself.

The people used to say the palace had always looked as though it were waiting for something.

No one knew, then, that it had been waiting for you.

The year everything changed began in fear.

Your mother, the queen, had been carrying her first child through a mild and honey-bright spring. The kingdom rejoiced early and often, because the royal line had long been beloved, and your parents were more than merely respected. They were loved. Your father was the sort of king who remembered names. Your mother was the sort of queen who listened to answers rather than only questions. Their marriage had been happy in the quiet, practical, deeply rooted way that made old ladies sigh fondly and servants smile when they passed one another in corridors.

They had wanted you long before they knew whether you would be a daughter or a son.

That was spoken of less often than the miracle, but it was true all the same.

You were wanted before you were wondrous.

At first the queen's illness seemed small enough to deny.

A little weariness. A little dizziness. A morning when she could not keep down her tea and laughed it off with one hand over her mouth and the other folded over the swell of her belly. Then came the paleness. The trembling. Long afternoons spent abed. Nights of fever that left the sheets damp and the physicians grave.

By the time the orange trees in the lower garden began to bloom, the laughter had gone from the palace entirely.

The corridors grew hushed.

Footsteps softened against the stone as though noise itself might do harm. Servants spoke in murmurs. Ministers forgot how to disguise worry. Candles burned in chapels from dawn until the deep of night. The queen's musicians, once a gentle constant in the solar outside her chambers, fell silent one by one until even that small comfort vanished.

The physicians tried everything known to them.

Tinctures bitter enough to sting the tongue.

Steamed herbs set in bowls beside the bed.

Compresses steeped in lavender and willow bark.

Broths, infusions, prayers, consultations sent for by ship from neighboring islands and distant ports.

Nothing held.

Nothing changed the dreadful rhythm of it.

Some days she seemed a little improved, only to worsen by nightfall. Some nights the fever came down and hope rose for an hour or two, then collapsed by morning. The palace began to live by those false dawns and cruel evenings. The fear settled into the stone.

Your father seldom left her side.

He sat beside her bed with one hand wrapped around hers and the other spread over the coverlet where the shape of you lay hidden beneath linen and silk. Courtiers were turned away with increasing frequency. State matters stacked on writing desks untouched for hours. He read to her when she could bear listening. He spoke to you through her skin as though perhaps, if the child within could hear her father's voice, she might choose stubbornness over sorrow.

When the physicians finally began speaking in the sort of careful tones that only mean one thing, the king stood so abruptly his chair struck the floor behind him.

No one forgot that sound.

Not the footman by the door.

Not the lady's maid twisting her hands in the hall.

Not the royal physician, who lowered his eyes as though shame might soften truth.

Your father looked at your mother, pale against her pillows and damp-haired with fever, and something in his face changed forever.

Not love. That remained.

Not fear. That had already come.

It was helplessness that vanished. Helplessness and patience.

He kissed her forehead, held her face with both hands, and told her, with a steadiness that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than reason, that this would not be the end of her story.

Then he began chasing impossible things.

There were tales in the oldest harbors of fruits that should not exist.

Fruits that twisted the sea's own logic. Fruits that gave strange gifts and stranger prices. Sailors told such stories over drink and cards and storm lanterns, and sensible people smiled at them the way one smiles at the moon reflected in a puddle. Lovely to look at, not to be trusted. Still, the songs preserved them. Songs remembered what records ignored. Somewhere in those half-myths and water-worn verses, your father found mention of a rare fruit whispered of in older tongues as though it were less produce than relic. A fruit holding the spirit of song itself. A fruit found once in a generation, or never. A fruit said to answer grief with voice.

No one at court could tell him whether it was real.

No one could tell him whether it was a blessing, a curse, or simply a sailor's lie dressed in melody.

He went anyway.

He sailed with a chosen crew and too little sleep. He crossed waters known for hungry weather and worse tempers. He followed rumors from trading ports and shrines built into sea caves and half-forgotten maps bought from men with broken teeth and suspicious eyes. He listened to old women in coastal markets who sang fragments instead of speaking them. He paid for stories with gold, with favors, with royal authority, and at least once, if the palace legends were to be believed, with the jeweled clasp from his own cloak because the woman holding the tale wanted proof that he loved what he claimed to be seeking.

There were storms.

There were days the sea ran white and hard as torn cloth.

There were nights when men later swore they heard music where no musician stood, thin and sorrowful over black water.

The story changed depending on who told it. In some versions he found the fruit in the keeping of a hermit who lived among bell towers on a forgotten island. In others he won it from a pirate captain in a game no decent king should have sat down to play. A few singers insisted he followed a flock of impossible white birds through a storm and found it hanging from a tree rooted in rock at the center of the sea.

The one thing every version agreed upon was this.

He came back with something no one in the kingdom had ever seen before.

The fruit was carried into the palace wrapped in linen the color of cream. It was not large, but it held the eye with a peculiar insistence. Its skin curved in unnatural whorls, delicate and tight as if shaped by a careful hand rather than grown. Its color shifted under candlelight, at once pearl-pale and faintly flushed, like the inside of a shell turned toward dawn. Even those who did not believe in miracles lowered their voices near it.

The kitchens were cleared.

The queen's private physician, the royal herb-wife, and the oldest abbess from the sea chapel stood together while the king unwrapped the cloth with fingers that had not stopped shaking since the ship made harbor.

Every candle seemed brighter that night and yet the room felt suspended in hush.

No one knew if it was truly a devil fruit. No one knew if cooking it would destroy the thing they hoped to preserve. No one knew if it would heal, harm, or do nothing at all.

They only knew the queen was slipping further from them with every hour, and that hopelessness had become more frightening than risk.

So the fruit was cut.

Its scent was strange. Not sweet. Not bitter. Something floral and salt-sharp, like rain striking warm stone in a rose garden. The flesh was simmered into broth with cleansing herbs and clear stock and a prayer that passed through every set of lips in that room in one form or another, even if some prayed to saints and others to the old sea and one desperate king to nothing more refined than please.

When the bowl was carried to your mother's bedchamber, everyone breathed as though the entire kingdom had only one set of lungs between them.

The queen could barely lift her head.

Your father sat beside her and cradled the bowl while the physician helped her drink. One swallow. A pause. Another. A third. The room waited.

Nothing happened at first.

No burst of light. No celestial bell. No neatly sung miracle.

Then your mother exhaled.

The sound was soft enough that later storytellers ruined it by making it grand. It was not grand. It was small. It was tired. It was real.

Her breathing eased.

The terrible tension in her brow loosened.

The physician touched her wrist, then stared down at his own fingers as if he did not trust them. The herb-wife stepped closer. Your father whispered her name only once.

By dawn, the fever had broken.

By noon, the queen had color in her face.

By evening, she asked for water and then for bread and then, when the king wept openly into the bed linens and tried very hard to pretend he was not, she laughed weakly and called him impossible.

The miracle did not arrive like lightning.

It arrived like relief.

The kingdom rang its bells until gulls erupted from the cliffs in white spirals.

Candles blazed from windows all across the capital. People knelt in squares and hugged strangers and sang every hymn they knew whether or not they knew it well. Children were lifted onto shoulders to hear the news shouted from balcony to balcony. Fishermen lit lanterns in their moorings that night, so that the harbor glowed like a basin of stars.

And after the queen's recovery, the music began.

At first it was small enough to ignore.

A humming nurse who found a fretful infant asleep before the second verse.

A palace mare, prone to nervous stamping, lowering her head the moment the queen passed her hand over its neck and sang beneath her breath.

A tense council meeting eased by a single absent tune murmured while your mother poured tea.

Songs carrying oddly far down long corridors, their notes clear as glass all the way from the upper drawing rooms to the kitchens below.

Then came the gardens.

It was said the roses had always been healthy, but after the queen's healing they climbed faster, flowered fuller, and opened toward her voice as sunflowers do toward light. Whether this was true or a kingdom's fond exaggeration depended entirely on whether one asked a botanist or a gardener, and no gardener of that palace would ever call it coincidence.

Children in the nursery slept easier when she sang.

Stablehands began sending for the queen when frightened animals would not settle.

Women in labor asked for the old palace lullabies because they swore the sound of them made courage easier to hold.

No one thought of danger.

No one spoke of cost.

Blessing was the only word anyone had.

The old fruit's spirit, they whispered, remained in the royal line.

And then you were born.

The day of your birth arrived under pearl-colored skies and a sea so calm the lower fountains seemed louder than the surf below the cliffs. The queen labored long, but not in terror. The king still went pale enough to frighten everyone around him, though he was ordered out more than once and refused every time. The physician, who had once spoken in carefully grave tones over your mother's bed, looked as though he had aged ten years and then found them restored in a single afternoon.

When at last you came into the world, small and furious and gloriously alive, your mother wept before anyone had even properly wrapped you.

Your father did not fare much better.

The nurse placed you in his arms only after your mother had held you first, kissed your damp brow, and looked at your face with the peculiar astonishment of a woman who has suffered and survived long enough to see joy made flesh. The king stared at you as if he had never understood prayer until that moment. His whole mouth trembled before he smiled.

Then you cried.

The room changed.

Nurses would later swear the sound rose in perfect interval. The physician said nothing for years and then, when pressed near the end of his life, only admitted that he had once heard a famed soprano in a foreign capital and your first cry had reminded him of that same impossible brightness. One handmaid fainted outright. Another burst into tears. The queen laughed wetly through her own crying and reached for you again.

At the windows, birds gathered.

No one had opened them. The curtains only stirred with sea wind. Yet pale gulls, green-winged finches from the lower gardens, and three tiny sunbirds no one could remember ever seeing so high against the palace glass had crowded the ledges as though summoned.

The queen saw them.

Then she saw you.

And in the soft, exhausted hush that followed, she understood before anyone dared put words to it.

The miracle had not ended with her.

You were named with all the ceremony due a firstborn princess, bells ringing and courtyards garlanded and the city hung with ribbons. But within the palace, in private speech and fond glances and the way old women touched their fingertips to their mouths after looking upon you, another name bloomed first.

Blessing.

You sang before you spoke.

This was perhaps not literally true. You made all the ordinary noises of infancy, wailed when hungry, babbled at shadows and lanterns and the absurd fascination of your own fingers. But the first sounds that resembled intention came in notes rather than words. Rising little hums. Repeated melodic phrases. Tiny bursts of tune that made nurses stop in the middle of folding swaddling cloths just to listen.

When you were hardly more than a year old, birds had taken to gathering on your nursery balcony every morning. Doves cooed from the rail. Finches fluttered against the climbing jasmine. Once, to the queen's horrified delight, a fox from the lower orchard somehow found its way through three levels of terraced gardens and into the nursery court, where it sat beneath the open arch as docile as a hound while you sang nonsense at it from your blanket.

Palace staff did not always know what to do with you.

A kitchen maid cried the first time you toddled into the servants' courtyard, pointed solemnly at the cat asleep in the wash of afternoon sunlight, and sang so sweetly that the old creature rose at once and came winding around your ankles like worship made fur. A footman who had been at the palace since your father's coronation once went down on one knee simply because you had patted his face after catching him weeping over a letter from home and told him, in slurred half-words, not sad.

You were raised in tenderness and wonder so complete it almost became weather.

Your mother taught you posture as soon as you were old enough to squirm resentfully through lessons. Shoulders soft. Spine long. Breath low and deep. Again. Again. She taught you scales not as punishment, but as heritage. She placed your small hand over her own ribs to feel how breath moved before sound. She laughed when you tried to imitate her too seriously. She kissed your temple when you grew tired. She told you, over and over, that a voice was not only for performance. It was for comfort. For courage. For truth.

Your father watched much of this from doorways and garden benches and the edges of rehearsal rooms, as though he had long ago accepted he would never stop being half-afraid the miracle might be taken back.

Even after you had grown sturdy, even after the physicians declared you perfectly healthy and your mother strong, something in him remained reverent in the face of your existence. He did not smother you. He was too wise for that. But there was always a note in him, quiet and unmistakable, that suggested he still sometimes woke in the dark remembering a palace gone silent and a future he could not bear.

He loved you with gratitude sharpened by almost-loss.

You were never allowed to believe you were ordinary.

Not in arrogance. Never that.

Simply in fact.

Ordinary girls did not sing before speaking. Ordinary girls did not have songbirds fluttering after them through herb gardens. Ordinary girls did not soothe skittish foals by pressing sticky toddler hands to velvet noses and humming in solemn concentration. Ordinary girls did not make seasoned housekeepers dab tears from their eyes over nursery rhymes because the notes sounded like home and summer and every kindness they had ever nearly forgotten.

By the time you were three, there were palace guards who smiled without realizing it when you passed.

By five, you had developed the alarming habit of wandering into kitchen gardens and emerging with rabbits, ducks, or once an aggressively self-important goose marching behind you in dignified formation.

By seven, your mother had stopped pretending surprise when she found you seated cross-legged beneath the magnolia trees with children of the staff around your lap and two palace hounds asleep against your skirts while you sang them all into stillness.

Then your brother was born, and your heart discovered a new shape.

He arrived years after you, healthy, loud, and immediately determined to have opinions on everything. The kingdom rejoiced again, more bells, more flowers, more wine poured in the square. He was heir by law and custom, the boy who would one day become king. No one watched you for jealousy because there was none to find.

The first time they placed him in your arms, you stared down at his red little face and his furious fists and announced, with the gravity of a child making sacred promises, that you would teach him every song you knew.

You adored him instantly.

He toddled after you from the first moment he could manage balance enough to make it anyone's problem. He wanted to go where you went. Touch what you touched. Hold the ribbons you wore and the flowers you gathered and the toy instruments given to him by doting ladies who had no idea they were arming a menace. He cried if you left the nursery without kissing his hair. He learned to fall asleep best when your voice was the last thing he heard.

You sang him through fevers.

You tucked him behind your skirts when large dogs or stranger faces made him shy.

You defended him, gently but firmly, when tutors complained that he daydreamed through mathematics or spent too long escaping lessons to chase dragonflies near the fountain court.

He idolized you with the fierce, uncomplicated devotion younger brothers have always managed best.

If anyone asked whether you minded that he would inherit what you would not, you looked at them as though they had proposed something very silly indeed. He was your brother. You were proud of him. He was quick-hearted and bright, all appetite and sunlight and occasional chaos. The crown in his future had nothing to do with the love in your own.

You had no hunger for the throne.

You had hunger only for connection.

As you grew, the kingdom learned to love not merely the miracle of you, but the person.

You were not kept away in perfumed rooms to become ornamental. Your mother would not allow it, and your father had married too practical a queen to expect obedience in such a thing. So you were taught history and etiquette and statecraft enough to understand the shape of the island that held you. But you were also allowed, even encouraged, to move among your people.

You knew the bakers by name.

You knew which gardener favored white lilies over the red ones and which seamstress had a daughter prone to bad dreams.

You knew the widow in the lower market who always said she was managing beautifully and never once convinced you of it.

You knew which stable boy pretended bravery when thunder rolled overhead and which kitchen maid went pink with flustered delight every time the blacksmith's apprentice found reasons to linger by the side gate.

You noticed sadness before titles.

You noticed loneliness before protocol.

By adolescence, you had become something almost impossible to separate from the kingdom's idea of itself.

At spring festivals you sang in flower-strung pavilions while children danced barefoot over the grass.

At harvest feasts you moved through long market streets in floating gowns with baskets of ribboned fruit and hands always reaching toward yours.

At winter chapels you knelt with candlelight trembling gold across your face while whole crowds softened at the first rise of your voice.

And still there was never vanity in you.

How could there be, when all beauty had always seemed to you like something meant to be shared rather than hoarded? You loved lovely things because they eased people. Flowering trees over worn stone. Bells over sea fog. Embroidery catching afternoon light. Fresh bread steam curling up in market squares. A horse calmed. A child comforted. A lonely person smiling despite themselves because someone had noticed.

Your dresses were often soft things, made to move with wind and step alike, trailing ribbons or sleeves that caught the air so gracefully people laughed and claimed no fabric in the kingdom obeyed gravity properly when draped over you. You never thought much of this. You only wanted to feel the day around you. Sun. Breeze. The brush of flowers against your calves as you cut through the gardens too quickly for attendants to keep up.

The kingdom loved you easily.

That was the quiet ache beneath everything, though you did not yet know to call it one.

You knew, in the abstract, that your voice affected people. You saw it in their faces. In how grief loosened a little after you spoke. In how rooms gentled around you. In how animals trusted you with impossible speed. But because you had never lived another life, never been anything but yourself, you did not yet fully understand what it might mean to be adored in ways no one could neatly untangle.

You only knew you wanted to be good with what had been given to you.

And as you grew older, the shape of your longing began to shift.

Once it had been enough to be daughter, sister, princess, blessing.

Then came the age of court talk.

Not unpleasantly at first. Only glances traded a bit more knowingly over tea. Ladies choosing songs of courtship more often in your hearing. Older women in the embroidery rooms sighing with fond certainty that some poor young man, wherever he was, had no idea what awaited him when fate finally had the good sense to deliver him to your door.

The songs of your kingdom were full of love.

Not all of them, of course. There were songs of loss and storms and saints and fishermen and stubborn goats and heroic queens and terrible recipes passed down through generations that should never have survived on melody alone. But the love songs were the ones that reached deepest into the walls. The ones everyone seemed to know by heart. Songs of recognition. Of devotion. Of hands finding one another after great distance. Of eyes meeting and understanding immediately what the rest of life had been waiting to say.

You did not long for romance because others expected it.

You longed for it because you believed in it.

Not in the silly, careless way of girls who liked the sound of their own fantasies more than the people inside them. You believed in love because you had been raised among examples of it. In your parents' easy tenderness. In the way your father still looked for your mother first when entering a room. In how she reached to straighten his collar without breaking conversation. In how your brother ran to you both indiscriminately when frightened, certain he would be held by whoever got there first.

Love, to you, was not performance.

It was meaning.

One warm afternoon, while the sea flashed silver beyond the lower terraces and bees moved lazily through the lavender beds, your mother found you sitting in the western balcony garden with your skirts spread in a circle around you and three little birds hopping shamelessly close to your slippers.

"You are thinking too hard," she observed, lowering herself gracefully onto the stone bench opposite you.

You looked up from where you had been tracing the edge of a fountain basin with one finger. "Am I?"

"A little." She smiled. "It is all over your face."

You leaned back on your hands, sunlight turning the fountain mist gold between you. "Everyone keeps speaking as though I am on the verge of being handed to destiny in a ribbon."

"That does sound tiresome."

You laughed softly. "It is not tiresome, precisely. Only strange. They all look so pleased when they talk about it. As though they know something I have not yet been told."

Your mother tilted her head. "And what do you think?"

You considered, because you always did when asked something real.

"I think," you said slowly, "that I should like to love very much."

Her expression softened at once.

"I do not mean merely marry," you went on. "That is not the same thing at all. I should like to love in a way that feels true. In a way that feels..." You searched for it, then smiled faintly. "Recognizable, perhaps. As though some part of me had been waiting for it without knowing that was what it was doing."

The queen was quiet a moment, listening to the little fountain splash and the distant bells lower in the city.

"I think," she said at last, "that there is nothing foolish in hoping for something sincere."

You looked down at your hands. "Do you think I shall know it when it comes?"

"Oh, sweetheart." She reached across the little space between you and touched your cheek. "I think you shall know many things when they come. But love may not look exactly the way your songs promise. Even when songs mean well."

You smiled at that, though your eyes grew thoughtful again. "Still, I should like it very much if there were songs."

Your mother laughed then, bright and helpless. "Yes. I suspected as much."

"Only not false ones."

"No," she agreed. "Never false ones."

You leaned into her hand for one brief moment, then looked back out over the terrace where the sea wind moved through the climbing roses.

"I do not think I am desperate," you said after a while. "Only ready to believe in something beautiful if it should happen."

"That is a kinder state than desperation," your mother replied. "And a braver one."

You held those words close.

By the time dawn came the next day, the hope in you felt so light and alive it needed sound.

The palace gardens below the eastern balcony had always been your favorite place to greet morning. The first sunlight touched them gently there, filtering through pale leaves and climbing blooms, turning dew into chains of tiny stars across the hedges. Doves nested near the bell tower. The sea was visible between two cypress lines, blue and endless and breathing. Gardeners moved like courteous ghosts in the distance, gathering cut flowers into baskets for chapels and breakfast tables. The whole world, for one fragile hour, felt newly made.

You stepped into it dressed in something soft and flowing, skirts pale as petals, sleeves whispering around your arms whenever you lifted your hands. Two attendants followed only far enough to know where you meant to stand. After that they knew better than to interrupt. Already people had begun to gather. A few gardeners. A cook's daughter with flour on her wrist. Stable boys passing along the lower path. A pair of elderly ladies from the chapel walk. Then more, drawn as they always were when your voice took on that bright, gathering certainty.

You smiled because you could not help it.

The first notes came as naturally as breath.

"Somewhere beneath the silver dawn

Beyond the bells and blue

There waits a heart I have not known

Yet somehow always knew

A hand I have not learned to hold

A face I've never missed

Still all my days have turned toward one

Impossible, tender wish

I dream of lips that speak with truth

And eyes that do not hide

A love that feels like stepping home

With wonder as my guide

Oh, when I find the one for me

The world will surely sing

For every quiet hope I've kept

Will open up its wings"

By then the lower path had filled. The gardeners straightened. Children leaned over stone rails. One of the chapel ladies laughed through tears already gathering in her eyes because some people had no defense at all against morning and music together.

The kingdom answered as it always did, not because they had rehearsed it, but because this was how love lived here. In joining. In echo. In shared belief.

"She dreams of truth in waking light

Of tenderness and grace

Of meeting not a borrowed smile

But one remembered face

She keeps her hope as others keep

A candle through the night

And all the island knows her heart

Will know its own delight"

You turned as you sang, smiling down at them, your voice lifting higher, stronger, not a performance now but a declaration made bright enough for everyone to hear.

"When he comes, let him come with kindness

Let him come with open eyes

Let him come with honest laughter

Not with polished, pretty lies

Let him know the song inside me

Let him hear it and not flee

Let him choose me in the daylight

As I would choose him gladly

Then I'll give my heart its answer

Then I'll name the wish I've kept

Then I'll kiss him with my whole soul

And trust the love I've dreamt"

The people below joined again, fuller now, with bells beginning somewhere above and birds startling from hedges to wheel through the clear morning air.

"She has kept a golden hope alive

She has worn it soft and true

And the day her waiting heart is found

The sky will break in blue

For a love that comes in honesty

Is worth the years before

And the heart that waits with gentleness

Is richer to the core"

You laughed lightly in the middle of the verse because little girls near the fountain had begun trying to spin in time with the rhythm and one of them promptly stumbled into a bush and came up giggling with leaves in her hair. Even that found its place in the song. Even that felt like joy made visible.

So the final refrain rose, and this time the whole garden carried it.

"I'll know him by the peace he brings

By truth within his kiss

By how the world grows kind and clear

Inside a moment's bliss

And if he comes by road or sea

By fate or answered prayer

I'll meet him with an open heart

And know that love is there"

The last note lingered.

Birds settled along the balcony rail in a neat, impossible row.

The fountain splashed.

The sea wind curled through jasmine and rose and fresh-cut stems.

For one suspended heartbeat, the whole kingdom seemed to glow with the certainty of itself.

Then footsteps sounded at the far end of the terrace.

A harbor runner, breathless and flushed, paused at the edge of the gathered crowd and bowed deeply, one hand pressed over his chest as he caught enough breath to speak.

"Your Highness," he said, voice still rough with haste and wonder. "Ships are approaching from the eastern pass."

You turned toward him, sunlight at your back.

Not alarmed.

Only curious.

Below the cliffs, beyond the glittering line of the harbor, unfamiliar sails had just begun to break across the morning sea.

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[inkmonster21]

You were supposed to marry a prince. Instead, on the morning of your wedding, you were kidnapped from your fairytale kingdom and stolen out to sea before the vows could be spoken. Raised in a land devoted to song, where your voice carries old magic tied to your bloodline, you have spent your whole life believing love would arrive beautifully, cleanly, and exactly on time. But when a clown pirate captain hijacks the ship carrying you away, everything you thought you knew about destiny begins to unravel. Buggy is loud, vain, dangerous, impossible, and nothing like the man you were meant to love. He is also the one who sees you when the music stops.

1. The First Song

2. The Island That Sings

3. A Kingdom in Chorus

4. A Prince at Dawn

5. Courtship in a Day

6. Before the Bells

7. No Princely Rescues (Part 1)

7. No Princely Rescues (Part 2)

8. Thirty Million to Start

9. A Princess and A Menace

10. The Things You Name in the Dark

11. Birds, Rats, and Bad Judgment

12. A Terrible Idea

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Read on Ao3

The Vibe

[potingus573]

Another homemade meme from yours truly. Didn't think someone did this before, until I searched shi on Pinterest.