Chapter 3: Doffy & Rosi
The rise of their little gang was hardly meteoric, but there was no way Trebol could be unsatisfied with the abrupt change in his circumstances since his last night chained in the clerk’s office. Proper sleep, in a real bed. Good, nourishing food that was hardly ever rotten. As much water– and even wine– as he could drink. And power, humble as it might be. Power to kill those who hurt him, to take what they refused to give freely to the less fortunate.
He was living the twisted life of a scoundrel– yes, absolutely. But if the heroes were the wealthy nobles who took what they wanted; used and enslaved and ground down the rest— if the heroes were the marines who kept the boot of the few firmly on the neck of the many— he wanted no part of that. Let them call the escaped slave their vile captivity had crippled ‘evil’. He wanted no part in beauty, nobility, or goodness. He’d happily be the villain in their tale. He delighted in it, even.
Trebol spent much of his time scheming and plotting new villainies– new ways to enrich himself and his compatriots, to better their lives and ruin the day of those who reviled them. His plans were growing more complex as he slowly built up a network of contacts among the wayward underbelly of the cities and islands of the North Blue.
Networking, it seemed, was as important a skill as reading was— and unfortunately it wasn’t one where he truly shined. Trebol knew that a more charismatic man than himself– one with a more beautiful face, one without a pigeon chest and a permanent cough– might easily be able to make more and better contacts, and to rise higher— or perhaps sink lower— into the devious criminal underworld.
But Trebol made do. His scheming and schmoozing, limited as it might be, had already laid their hands on a few more devil fruits all in less than a year. Every time he had one in his hands, comparing it with the glossary of the encyclopedia he both cursed his luck and thanked his lucky stars. Glue! Well, it wasn’t as if he’d been blessed by the gods. He was a thief, and his power was stolen. He’d take what he could, and keep making do.
One of the first devil fruits they’d gotten their hands on had gone almost immediately to one of the boys, Darger. The other boy, Trebol had seen a great potential in with the mysterious power of armament haki and he decided that it was important that they wait until they had a fruit for him that complimented those abilities.
Diamante might have chided him at first for his decision to save the boys and bring them into the fold, but Trebol was sure that he’d come around by now. They’d been impressive– strong, and determined and fierce– when they’d found them, and now, only months and a little training and guidance later, they were true assets. Both of them seemed to have taken to the life like fish taking to water. Trebol was rather proud of them, and proud of his hand in guiding them.
They were even calling themselves Pica and Corazon occasionally. It had started with Diamante teaching them cards, and Darger– Pica– noticing that Trebol and Diamante’s names corresponded with the card suits.
“There are four of us, too,” Pica had said quietly. “So it fits.”
Trebol was delighted. To him, it felt more like they were becoming something he’d never had– a family.
There was movement with his relationship with Diamante as well.
Trebol and he had gotten quite a bit closer, though they didn’t discuss it. It was the sort of thing that wasn’t publicly talked about, even among criminals. But Dia lingered closer to him now when they talked, and didn’t mind when Trebol put a hand around his shoulder. Every now and then they shared a bed in one of their brief hideouts, and after Trebol had noticed Dia’s frustration, lent one another a hand in taking care of it.
“We could buy some girls for a while, you know,” Diamante had said another night later on, when they were deep into a third bottle of wine, and Darger and Vergo were asleep in the other room.
“Hey, hey, you can do what you want,” Trebol shrugged, not liking the way his stomach knotted at the idea. “But personally I don’t need another lingering disease.”
Dia grimaced and drained his cup. “They’re not all like that, you know, Tre.”
“Sure,” Trebol shrugged. “Good women are expensive, and they talk about men behind their backs.”
In the clerk’s shop, Trebol had overheard a lot of loose women talking about their men, and none of their words had been very kind. Limp. Disgusting. Smelly. And those had been handsome and well off men. Trebol shuddered to think about the kind of things that a lady of the night might say about him after her work was done.
Diamante sighed and poured another slough of wine into his cup. “I hate it when you’re right, Tre.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he smiled apologetically, and sipped his own drink. He hesitated to offer, but, “If you want, I can use my mouth on you, and you can imagine it’s a girl.”
Dia sputtered and turned red in a way that amused Trebol. He tended to forget the couple of years between then, but red eared, Diamante seemed very young all of a sudden, despite his talk of buying women.
He chuckled. “Sorry, sorry,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Forget I said anything.”
“No, that wasn’t–” Diamante stammered. “That’s something you can do?”
Trebol pushed away dark thoughts of his former master, the clerk. Maybe one day, they’d go back and he’d kill him.
“I wouldn’t mind doing it to you,” Trebol admitted. It was true. Diamante was handsome. His partner. He’d saved him from his enslavement. He wouldn’t mind at all.
Later, Diamante had told him, “Imagining a woman would have been a insult to your work”, and Trebol had been embarrassed how pleased he was to hear it.
The four of them stayed mobile. Trebol felt like that was the key to their success. Build contacts, take in scores, gather leads, and never stay in one place long enough for the authorities to bother getting off their asses to go after you. A month was the longest they stayed on one island or one area of a city– usually less.
He’d been tempted to stay longer in the heart of the capital.
Business was booming. They were doing good trade with a certain pawn shop that was a fence for stolen goods and an absolute haven of criminal gossip. They’d gotten their hands on two devil fruits already that month. One had been connected with a buyer at a high price, and one had finally been suitable for Vergo.
Then Trebol had gotten a call from the fence. Some pirate had come to sell a devil fruit, but it was out of the fence’s price range. It made Trebol proud to be a buyer of greater worth than the shopkeeper. He let the man arrange a meeting, for a small fee, and the gang went.
He’d even come ready to negotiate. To buy with the hope of selling later to a less desperate buyer at a better price. There was good money in that.
Oh but then the pirate had been rude.
Trebol, Diamante, Pica and Corazon fled the capital that night in their rather handsome new sailing craft— with their gold, and their things, and their new devil fruit— and leaving behind a basement full of drowned and stuck and mangled and diced and very rude dead pirates, and one unfortunate fence.
The authorities weren’t going to like the scale of the murder, even if it was only society’s unwanted. It was time to go.
“You know there’s an island at the tip of the archipelago where supposedly someone built a new mansion just a couple of years ago,” Diamante said as he adjusted the sails. “Might be something interesting going on around there.”
“Well, well!” Trebol grinned as the night sea air blew the stench of blood away from them. “That sounds very promising. Why don’t we go and have a look for ourselves.”
They were at sea for a few days before reaching the island, and tied up the ship on a rocky beach. Like many of the islands in the North Blue, a dark, greasy cloud of smoke loomed over the southern shore of this one blotting out the moon. Whatever wealthy people might live in a mansion on this island, it was clear that they did not live nearby. After Trebol and Diamante had secured their treasure the four of them headed towards a town with with high, forbidding walls, and a ramshackle appearance even in the darkness.
For Vergo, the trip to the island had been exciting— the promise of a new and interesting devil fruit to sell hung in the air as he’d practiced his haki on the deck of the ship with Dia and Tre’s instruction. Sure, every now and again his memory got away from him and he found himself wandering the ship trying to puzzle out details he already knew— but the thought of what might happen on the island always brought his attention right back.
He hadn’t exactly expected the bloodbath that’d erupted, ending in the chaos of combat and the testing of his new skills against deadly opponents who dropped one by one in the dingy basement, but that was fine.
They’d killed before, by now.
What Vergo didn’t like here was the smog. The smoggy little town brought back memories of the orphanage nestled in the depths of a factory town, and the brutal life inside it.
“…it’s gross here” he muttered darkly, chomping on a piece of bread.
“Doesn’t look like a party town, that’s for sure,” Diamante agreed as they passed the open gates of the town. “It’s quiet.”
“It’s very quiet,” Trebol agreed.
Even Vergo noticed it. There seemed to be no one in the street at all. It wouldn’t be that unusual in the evening, but the doors of some of the small houses stood open and unattended.
That was odd…he was pretty sure. Leaving doors open liked that probably meant it was really safe, or the people were really stupid…
Or that something was wrong.
“There’s something weird about it.” He finally said.
They had made it almost to the center of the small, dingy town now.
“I think something’s wrong,” Pica said.
“Yeah, no shit,” Diamante huffed, “We should get out of here before—”
“Shh!” Trebol hissed. As they all went silent Vergo realized that he could hear screaming.
Vergo winced and grabbed onto the edge of Trebol’s coat. “I think someone’s…screaming…”
His thoughts skipped again, and without another word he ran through the street towards the sound with a furrow of his brow.
Screaming took him back to the orphanage for a moment, with the thought that whatever kid was crying out needed help before the Madame came back and punished them even more.
“Hey, hey, Vergo!”
But Vergo was too deep in the call of the moment to hear Trebol, or realize that the others were chasing after him as he ran. The screaming didn’t stop. It got louder and louder as he ran toward it. And as he ran, he realized the heavy smell in the air wasn’t just fog but smoke from fire as well.
He chased the screams all the way to a clearing behind the houses, right up against the rough town wall. He nearly tripped over the first body he reached, but there were more.
Vergo saw a whole crowd of people all collapsed in the dirt with weapons around them and torches burning out on the ground.
Flames licked the town wall, and above them, three figures bound to it. One of them was screaming.
He stopped dead, his eyes wide behind his sunglasses as he stared up at the town wall in stunned silence. He reached down to grab a sword.
Whoever this was, they had to be cut down, right?
The others had caught up to him. Pica stood beside him staring wide eyed up at the scene, while Trebol was coughing and catching his breath.
Diamante toed one of the unconscious people on the ground with his boot. “What the fuck happened here?”
The screaming broke abruptly off into sobbing.
“Dunno…” Vergo murmured before he kicked a torch out of the way and hurried towards the wall. “but I’m cuttin’ that guy down…give me a lift.”
“Hold on, hold on, of course we’ll cut them down!” Trebol coughed again, but a moment later the fires were out, smothered under glue, and Diamante (who had been rifling through pockets) was helping Vergo reach the captives on the wall.
Two of them were kids about Vergo’s age, and one was an old man. The old man and one of the boys were limp like the crowd on the ground, but the other boy– the first one Vergo reached– was sobbing and thrashing. There was an arrow sticking out of his eye.
Vergo raised the sword and carefully cut the bindings holding him there, moving to catch him before he jolted with a soft hiss.
“Bad place to take an arrow…” he murmured to himself.
The boy who fell into his arms looked at him with his one good eye, his face burned all over. “You helped me? Get my brother!”
And then he was dead weight in his arms, and Diamante had to catch both of them. While they got him down, Trebol and Pica worked together to get the other two.
“Did he say anything?” Trebol asked after they were all down.
“He said I helped him..and asked us to get his brother.” Vergo reported dutifully as he set the boy down with a frown, looking with worry at his eye.
“…should we pull it out…?”
“Let me see him,” Trebol murmured. “I’m not doctor, but…”
As Trebol leaned over the boy, Pica grabbed Vergo’s shoulder.
“They’re waking up.”
“Huh??” Vergo looked around them at the crowd.
Around them, the bodies on the ground were starting to stir, as if waking from a heavy slumber.
Diamante– who had the large body of the older man over his shoulder. “Shit. What’s the play, Tre?”
Vergo saw that Trebol had taken the arrow from the boy’s eye and wrapped his face in a crude bandage of cloth he recognized from his shirt.
“We get out now and think about the rest later,” Trebol said. “Vergo, can you help me carry him? Darger, can you carry the other?”
“We’re taking them?” Diamante huffed. “Alright, let’s fucking go.”
In the confusion of the crowd waking up, the four of them managed to slip away into the night and back to the outskirts of the town.
Vergo hurried along, helping Trebol carry the wounded boy away, all the while sneaking glances at him with a furrow of his brow.
What had happened to him? How had those people been knocked out? Why were they strung up like that to begin with? His thoughts were spiraling around his head, lost in the maze of his disordered thinking.
He didn’t say a word as they ran.
With no question of being able to get all the way back to the ship with three wounded people Trebol forced the door of what seemed to be an abandoned shack at the edge of town.
They laid the boy and the two others carefully out on the floor of the shack. Diamante immediately pulled Trebol aside to bicker with him. Vergo’s head was swimming too much to hear what Dia said to begin with, but Trebol’s answer he heard.
“Look at the man’s clothes, Dia. They’re ruined, but it’s some of the most expensive clothing I’ve ever seen. We could get a reward for this.”
“Or put to the torch too,” Dia hissed, cutting through the static in Vergo’s head. “That was a mob on the ground out there.”
“And aren’t you curious how they got like that?”
Pica scooted closer to Vergo and grabbed for his hand.
Vergo…Corazon… grabbed Pica’s hand tightly as he looked down at the injured boy with him. “Who is he?”
“I donno,” Pica said quietly, squeezing his hand. “He was screaming when you rescued him. … he’s really pretty.”
It was true. Somewhere, in the blood and the burns and the muck and the grime and the hollow look of starvation that he knew too well, the injured boy was very pretty.
That’s right. He had rescued him.
“He is really pretty,” Corazon knelt next to him with a frown. “Too pretty for a town like this.”
He bit his lip…he was glad that he’d saved the stranger…though he wished he’d come a little earlier.
–
The mood was tense in the shack for a while. Trebol bandaged the injured people with cloth that Diamante had made, and then Dia had gone out to ‘eavesdrop and ask around’. He was back before any of them woke up, but only just.
As he and Trebol were discussing what he’d found out, Vergo watched the boy he’d rescued stir and shift, his hand moving up to clutch at his injured eye.
“Mornin’.” he said in a low murmur, leaning on his hand. It was still late at night, he realized too late. “You’re finally awake.”
For a moment the boy looked like a panicked animal, his one blue eye wide with terror, or even madness. But then it eased, with a rasping breath.
“Where am I? My brother—”
“He’s here,” Trebol said, clearing his throat as he came over.
The others lingered back, Trebol looming over while Vergo knelt beside the boy.
“We got you out of there before the people on the ground woke up.” Vergo clarified, staring at him through his tinted lenses.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Trebol asked.
The boy regarded them with suspicion. “You weren’t with them, right? That’s why you don’t know.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Trebol nodded. “We weren’t there. We came along and rescued you. So you can tell us.”
The boy was clutching his eye, and scowled. “They were torturing us. I couldn’t take it any more. I started shouting at them and–”
“Doffy?” a small, raspy voice cut through.
“Rosi! Are you alright?”
The other boy had woken up. And a moment after that so did the man who proved to be their father.
The fascinating boy– Doffy– went silent as soon as his father woke, only clinging hands with his brother, his face hard and angry.
This frustrated Trebol to no end, especially when the father made it clear that while he was ‘grateful for their help’ he wanted nothing further to do with the four of them, and urged them to leave. Oh he was very polite about it— terribly polite— and he couched it in terms of being afraid for Trebol and his crew’s safety, but Trebol could tell. He could tell by the way the man looked at their clothes, and their faces, and the weapons they carried openly that he had made a judgment.
Trebol didn’t bother to argue. He was very good at understanding when he wasn’t wanted. So much for his soft heart, right?
Still, the boy… little Doffy, with his strength and the fierce look in his one eye, and the strange thing that he had said about the crowd– what had he been about to say?– something about him entranced Trebol.
And it seemed that Doffy felt the connection too, because he turned to look at him as they went to leave– still silent and angry– and Trebol couldn’t just leave.
He had to know. He had to know if he was right.
Trebol gave the boy a reassuring smile. “Hey, hey. Good luck, alright? If you’re still here in a couple of days we’ll come around to check on you, just in case.”
And the father stammered that it wasn’t necessary, and the other boy– Rosi– turned his gaze away, but Doffy held Trebol’s gaze and almost imperceptibly nodded, and Trebol knew that the boy knew that that message was for him alone.
The four of them crept quietly back to the ship, leaving the little shack alone in the darkness. Trebol felt sick to himself to leave the boy like that, but if little Doffy had survived what he had, if he could do what he seemed to be able to do, well…
Anyway, Trebol could tell that Diamante was mad at him, and just itching for the chance to say ‘I told you so’.
He gave him that chance when they were back on the ship– larger than their first one, with multiple small divided rooms in its belly– and they sent Darger and Vergo to go wash up and have something to eat.
Trebol let himself down heavily into a chair and waved his hand. “Hey, hey go on then, I know what you’re going to say. Go ahead and say it.”
Diamante wrenched the cork from a bottle of wine and took a long drink from it, before he offered it to Trebol, who took it gladly and greedily.
Dia slipped his arm around Trebol’s shoulders. “You said it, Tre. You know what I’m going to say.”
He let his head rest against the other man’s arm and sighed. “You’re going to say I need to stop trying to help people.”
“Basically, yeah,” Dia agreed. The two of them traded the bottle back and forth, taking sips from it. “I’m glad I freed you, you know? Hell, I’m glad we saved Pica and Corazon, too. But it’s not always going to work out like that.”
“Oh trust me. Trust me, I know.” He stared off at the hull of the little ship and took another long drink from the bottle which was already mostly empty. “I wasn’t even going to go near the scene, but Corazon took off running like that.”
“He sure fucking did,” Dia grumbled. “But you’re the one who had us haul them off. What were you gonna do if the mob woke up faster?”
“Kill them, probably,” Trebol admitted.
“Kill a whole town for a couple of people you didn’t even know. Tre, for a planner you are very fucking impulsive sometimes.”
Trebol scowled and turned away as he fought a coughing fit, and muttered his ‘excuse mes’.
“They were torturing children, Dia. I don’t like to see it in front of me. It offends me.”
“I don’t get a thrill out of it either, Tre,” Dia assured him, leaning on him more heavily as he took the bottle back and finished it. “but those weren’t exactly normal kids.”
Trebol sat up a little. “You saw it in him, too?”
“Huh?” Diamante’s brow furrowed.
Trebol let him explain what he’d heard when eavesdropping on the mob after the rescue. They talked for a long while. When Trebol went to bed that night, hours later, curled around Dia in the narrow ship’s bunk his mind was restlessly occupied with Celestial Dragons, and the origin of power, and the divine rights of kings.
Trebol wondered— what would have become of him if he had never been a slave. Was there some great destiny from which he had been cruelly torn? Could he now, with his freedom, claw some measure of it back?
What about the destiny of a child who was born to be a king?