What if the child is a girl? Just to break the cycle further. Because they're both sons
Ohhh a girl yes yes. Cute
I think it would be so important to them to respect their child's autonomy and personhood!
Babies start getting a sense of gender and gender roles around 2-3.
I imagine it going down kinda like this 🥰
The straw hats are visiting Wano again a couple years after Yamato and Ace's baby was born.
Baby Ash is three years old and has been playing with his aunts and uncles on the Thousand Sunny. They are very excited!
Luffy comes galloping in with the toddler on his shoulders and bounces baby along back to the dad. Baby Ash is breathlessly recounting all the day's pirate adventures, all the ways they played pirates with the king of the pirates!!
Baby Ash: Daddy daddy daddies daddies!! I pay wif capn Uncle niper king and Franky make me fwy VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM! Bobin can play all games wit me. Daddy when I gwo up I'm gon be a gwil so I can hit boyth with climb-climba-... Clima... Weahver stick, funder boom!
*baby holds hand up displaying small flash of electricity that might be a tiny lightning bolt if you squint*
Yamato: OH BRAVE AND KIND OFF SPRING IF YOU ARE A GIRL WHO HITS BOYS WITH STICKS THAT SHOOT THUNDER WE WILL ADVENTURE TILL WE FIND THE GRANDEST AND MOST POWERFUL WEATHER POWERED MELEE WEAPON ON THE GRAND LINE!
Ace, swooping baby Ash into his arms: you know baby, that any people of any gender can fight. But baby if you're a girl who is gonna be a weather witch, that's perfect. Whoever you are is perfect, both your dads are so proud of you and all the things you choose to be and do... Nothing will ever change that. Also other daddy's right, we'll get you the best weapon, blow auntie Nami's out of the water. Uncle Sabo fights with a pipe, vhe can teach you You'll be the strongest little girl weather witch on the grand line if that's what you want lil smoky
Ash: no daddy, not lil smoky. Big giwl stwong weahver witch.
Ace: oh my apologies Big strong Girl Weather witch Ash
Ash: YEFF DADDY I THWONG AS UNCEW WUFFY
Yamato and Luffy die laughing
Ace: strong as uncle Luffy huh? Not strong as me, you have already defeated me young weather witch, claim your prize
Baby galloping around pretending to shoot people with lightning and yelling excitedly
Ace, zerberting baby: you sure are!
Nami & Robin are the best Aunties, Ash does indeed grow up to be the strongest on the grandline, eventually she'll be the queen of the pirates 🥳✨🎉
“It isn’t that I enjoy humiliating you. I do, but that’s not why I say things. I tell people things because you won’t. Certain things should come to light and you won’t allow them to so I do it. Because... Maybe if people know the truth about you, about what you’ve done and why, you can start growing beyond that.”
Write me angst, bisch. I wanna suffer. /chinhands.
Fiiine. If it’s pain and suffering that you want…
***
It’s a tiny grave, all things considering, and Eugene is immediately disgusted by how insulting it is.
He doesn’t mean tiny from her hair, so much. It’s not like the seventy-odd foot of locks would cause the undertaker to provide a bigger plot for her (and he’s not naive enough to think they allowed her to keep them down there). It’s more of a symbolical thing, he guesses. Because a girl who was so damn full of life less than a week ago doesn’t deserve to be crammed into such a tiny plot of disturbed earth, today.
Eugene clenches his eyes shut as it bursts unbidden into his mind again. All that sunshine and wholeheartedness. All that eagerness. That boundless joy that she got from kicking over dandelions and swinging from treetops by the roots of her own hair…
And then that singing of hers, distant at first, and then louder. Strong and calm before cracking. Flesh that was hale and healthy, and somehow a little tanned considering her life as a prisoner, suddenly turning clammy and cold and pale. The roots of her gold hair fading, the colour leeching away as her voice became warbled and huskier. Rapunzel was a natural brunette, he recalled her showing him. Not like that - with that little lock behind her ear, and he wondered just how she’d manage to go her entire life without ever cutting it.
A day later and she was gone, so…
It wouldn’t have been a problem anyway, right? Because all that hair glowed and shone and kept her healthy and alive and safe. And then it wasn’t there anymore, and Eugene was sure that even as his own heart pumped harder and the taste of acidic copper left his mouth, her own pulse was growing so slow and still.
The old woman knew right away what was going on. Her mother, right…? What a witch. He had vaguely heard a frail old screaming and yelling and… Something. He didn’t know what happened to her. If there was justice in the world, she had a few moments to know exactly what was going on as she crumbled to dust.
If there was justice, the backstabbing thief would be dead and not the girl who lived exactly eighteen years and half a day.
The smell of some overly sweet plant assaults his nose. Saliva fills his mouth and his stomach churns. Eugene taps his lips, willing the nausea away. His diet has been mostly ale since he watched her face slacken and those massive eyes turn glassy. Since she crumpled like a doll on top of him and stopped moving all together.
At least alcohol had obliterated the memory of having to carry her over his shoulder as he slowly climbed down her tower, where Maximus had been faithfully waiting. It was just a blur, now. A buzz in the back of his skull, interrupted now and again with Hook Hand threatening to “wring his neck” if he didn’t do something-something.
No, he willed the sickness down, replacing it instead with his bitterness over how small and plain and unremarkable Blondie’s grave is. It needed to be bigger and grander. A proper tomb where she could rest in peace. Paintings nearby in tribute for the finest artist Corona never knew it had. Lanterns. Fucking lanterns tied to every bell and statue and tower.
No, no towers. Not even little sculpted ones.
A sob tears through him, and he hates what an ugly crying face he has, and he hates old witches and Stabbington’s, and he hates being alive while she is here in the cold, hard ground, and he hates what a horrible, twisted sense of justice the world had, where it allowed a filthy thief like himself to escape the noose so many times and then punish her for it instead.
“Hey? Y’wanna keep it down? Some of the dead are trying to sleep.”
Eugene hates old grave keepers who look like wrinkled old cypress stumps in baggy coats and moth-eaten hats, too. But he swallowed the biting response he had. Somehow he doesn’t think Blondie would appreciate him using that kind of language.
“Sorry.” It comes without him even trying, and he’s sure he sounds weak in saying it, and he hates that, too.
He just plain doesn’t like the shuffle of feet and extra body so close to him all of a sudden, but there isn’t much he could do about that. Not while his legs refused to move just yet, or there was a very real threat of losing his liquid lunch. And Eugene didn’t care about vomiting, but he doesn’t think she’d appreciate him doing it all over her final resting place.
“You know our Mystery Girl, here?”
Eugene hates that she wasn’t even identified, even as he knew that of course her grave marker is absent. Because how could she possibly be known or recognised? No real family. No identification. Nothing to prove that she ever existed, except for a tower and the massive, gaping, wound-like hole in existence that she left since -
“For a day or two.”
Maybe the human body has this special magic, where it just carries on when everything else has gone and checked out. That would explain a lot of his adventures, really.
“Don’t suppose you know what to call her, do you?”
Blondie, he wants to say. Her name was Blondie, only it was an insult because she wasn’t blonde, she was pure fucking gold, and she painted and danced and read, and she had a pet frog who’s probably fretted to death without her, and-
“Rapunzel.”
Eugene fervently believes now in the magic of carrying on when everything else has given up. Even if he hears it in his own weary voice, he doesn’t quite believe that he has enough in him to carry on and say: “Her name was Rapunzel, and she was a darling young woman.”
Somehow he does, and he manages it without crying.
The old grave keeper nods and hums and does something that Eugene tries not to hate so much, because he’s sure he’s just trying to help out or something. Something old people do before mumbling about time healing wounds, or assuring little orphans that the right people will come along one day. But he’s not having any of it, because it’s complete and utter rot, and he doesn’t feel like having his feelings spared.
“… do I know you from somewhere…?”
Probably does, Eugene thinks. They’ve still got his picture plastered on every other tree and stump and boulder throughout Corona. They’re like paper snowflakes - no two noses on Flynn Rider’s wanted poster are alike.
“No.”
It’s tempting. It’s so tempting to run out of there. He’s spent a week as Eugene Fitzherbert and it sucked. He had a date and was then arrested. Sentenced to death. Launched through the air. And then died, but it didn’t stick, and instead Rapunzel crumpled on top of him.
Eugene is officially a loser, and he can leave him here in the old, forgotten cemetery and waltz out of Corona with that sparkling diamond tiara on his own brushed head of hair. And in mere weeks, Flynn Rider would retire somewhere warm and sunny, and make tropical drinks out of pineapples and coconuts and vodka. Mm. Piña coladas. How fruity!
His mouth goes dry and his blood turns cold, because he’s fairly sure that Blondie would’ve loved them, and he’s awash with a chilly sweat that makes him hate everything anew. He loathes how easily he could see himself stealing her away from that place and taking her into town for them. Detests how he could imagine her nose crinkling up as she swished it around in her mouth. Despises how she’d probably sway and giggle as she got tipsy, but it would be okay, because she’s in no danger of falling over because shoes are dumb, thank you very much.
“No, my name’s Eugene. Fitzherbert.” And Eugene Fitzherbert is a loser, who in a day and half, met the girl and loved the girl and lost the girl. But it’s more than Flynn Rider ever did, because she liked Eugene much more than Flynn. And deep down, he doesn’t believe for one second that he deserves to feel relaxed and content on a beach somewhere. Not while she’s going to be here, alone with the stones and the paupers.
At least Corona’s Boot Hill can see the lanterns when her birthday comes to visit again, next year. And it’s a revelation that makes his eyes squeeze shut, and his nose runs wet, his lungs burn, his legs slump and a fresh wave of wracking sobs shake through his chest, all over again.
Rapunzel wouldn’t want him to hate everything so much, and he’s too exhausted to try. And, yet…
