YooHoo! (A One Piece Fan-Fiction)

8. Green tea and Bubble-bath preferences

YooHoo!

- An arbitrary adventure of the nautical variety -

8. Green tea and bubble-bath preferences

"Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?'" 

-Neil Gaiman

"Nureru watashi wa ame..." 

("I am drenched, I am the rain...") 

-Kasane Teto, 'Yoshiwara Lament'

By the time we have finished talking, its six in the morning, and my little dabble in another dimension and staying up for longer than normally necessary is definitely catching up with me, but as I am one of those people that never falls back to sleep once they are awake unless knocked out cold, ill, or sleep deprived for a week, I know that trying to get some rest now would turn out to be absolutely fruitless, not to mention that in just over four hours there is yet another lecture on maritime poetry I'll have to attend.  

So instead, I pad over to the kitchenette and boil the kettle, dropping a mundane tea bag into my mug and mulling over the news my mother has shared with me now after so many years of keeping it to herself. 

I have a father... An actual father... 

Granted he's in a different world altogether, and probably doesn't even know I'm born, or if Mum is okay after all these years- and he might already be married and have kids of his own- or be dead already- 

The kettle flicks off, exhaling a tuft of steam at my nose and distracting me from my sour turning thoughts. I fish the tea bag out of the chunky mug languidly with a spoon, adding a splash of milk from the carton in the fridge and assessing the taste of my brew with a small tentative sip. 

Satisfied, I wander back to my bed, debating whether I should go to the lecture of just' laze about for just this one day. I could always call Gary and ask him to take notes for me... 

Then again, staying in bed all day would be counter-productive, if I'm up already I can certainly manage to get into the lecture, even if I do feel like I've been hit by a truck and hardly conscious. 

Maybe I'm dreaming this all up... I wonder, leaning my cheek on to my palm. 

"OW!" I'd leant on the side of my face where Law had slapped me. At least I know that it was real then... That also means I'm going to have a bruise in the shape of a bucket handle somewhere on my body... 

With nothing else to do, I pick up the Heart Pirates logbook, and begin skimming through it, determined to learn something about the sadist who found me on his submarine.  

From what I can gather, the pages are mainly an illegible scrawl denoting the trials and tribulations of life on the seas, the places they graced with their presence- obscure names of islands I have never heard of in my life ever before, the items they found and pilfered; there were a few scattered diagrams of the panorama, flora and crude doodles of treasure troves. When I came across one entry, a few things fall into perspective; Trafalgar had methodically listed twelve- from what I can fathom from the scrawl, extremely dangerous fellows of which he named the 'Supernova's' . Each had half a page dedicated to them- mainly empty except for the name and a few odd facts, a part from two in particular; Eustass 'Captain' Kid and 'Mugiwara' Monkey D. Luffy.