This story is written on Fanfiction dot net and published there only. Anybody reading this story on other websites is reading unauthorised copies. Please read this story on Fanfiction dot net where I can see reviews and hit-counts, which tell me how much people are enjoying my work so I can be encouraged to go on writing.

This is a sort-of sequel to Unintended Consequences, which I have been working on ever since I finished UC and has turned into a sprawling monster of a story despite my being barely a third of the way into it. However I do have most of my first arc written, so I'm publishing so my readers can see what I've been up to. I do suggest reading Unintended Consequences first though, as the story will make little sense otherwise.

This is all beta'd by the intrepid InsaneScriptist, without whom I would never have gotten as far as I have!

Lost

Dozens of ships' crews vanished every year within the Florian Triangle and had been doing so for as long as anyone could remember. Dracule 'Fox' Lisska, Angel of Death and the King's Assassin, would have quite happily lived out her life without ever finding out why. However it was not to be: panting, she flicked ichor from her Kairoseki blade as behind her the giant tiger that was her animated sea chest growled threateningly at the mountain-sized monsters looming over her small vessel. In her mind both her husbands swore as they rushed through the duties holding them elsewhere so they could join her in fending off this new threat, one which the whole world had been ignorant of until now and was all the more disturbing for its uncertainty.

Fox had sailed through the Triangle hundreds of times and never seen these things before, but she suspected they were why entire crews vanished on a depressingly regular basis; ships would drift around without a crew, or even the smallest sign of what had happened to the crew. They had come across her suddenly a little while earlier, appearing literally out of nowhere in a way that was profoundly disturbing to someone as brilliant with Kenbunshoku Haki as Fox was. She had retaliated of course and had managed to wound one of the creatures, but even with a Supreme-Grade sword, Busoshoku Haki and the so-called Power of Destruction she had barely made a dent in the being. It was… frustrating.

There was a deep, slow moaning sigh like a faint breeze tugging at a slack sail and another of the creatures bent down towards her. Fox's eyes narrowed and she resheathed her sword, one braid snaking out to anchor herself against her living sea chest as she shifted into an iaido stance. Whatever these things were they were tough, but nothing alive can survive without a head and whatever else they were, they were living. Anything that lives can be killed. She drew on her Devil Fruit Ability as the massive entity loomed ever closer, a faint shadow like a pale void wrapping around her hands and sword.

As she drew her blade and lunged the creature breathed out with a wail and suddenly Fox was falling backwards through the deck of her little ship, sword in one hand and her sea chest dragged along by her hair, even as the panicked shouts of her husbands rang in her mind and her children's distress shook her heart before being abruptly cut off.

Blackness, pressure and utter isolation gripped her and she knew no more.

The island of Baterilla in South Blue was a place of peace, beauty and warmth. Winter did not touch it save in the most subtle of ways, Sunlight caressed it without fail every day and those who dwelt there lived frugal but contented lives far from political unrest or the whims of the ruling class. It did not even have its own government beyond an elected mayor, falling under the ruling of the Briss Kingdom. Said kingdom's government generally did not bother with such a small, peaceful place so lacking in valuable resources other than to collect taxes. This island was the home of Portgas D. Rouge, who was waiting patiently for her lover's return from the Grand Line even as she scoured the newspapers for tales of his most recent adventures. She knew he was dying, knew this was his last voyage and from her reading in the past few years she was certain it had proved to be everything Roger had hoped for. He was the Pirate King and soon he would be coming back to her.

Rouge couldn't really understand why the World Government got so worked up about Roger. True he was monstrously strong and had a dreadful temper, but he was at heart a cheerful innocent who loved his freedom more than anything else in the whole world. Even her, but Rouge didn't mind that; she was a D too and she knew all about the importance of dreams.

She'd been a rather odd child: her father had worried about her aimlessness, saying it wasn't right for a Portgas to be so lacking in drive. Rouge hadn't minded his nagging, saying she would find it when she found the right dream for her. So she had drifted through schooling, kept house for her father and started politely turning down prospective suitors when a pirate ship dropped anchor in the bay and the crew rolled into the bars up and down the waterfront while the first mate bought supplies and oversaw them being loaded on board. Rouge had gone down to watch and in the instant she set eyes on the captain she had known that this was the man for her: her dream, her ambition was to become this man's lover and bear him a child.

Rouge didn't care that she was barely eighteen and twenty years Gol D. Roger's junior; she went straight for the kill and her chosen target didn't put up much of a fight. Instead he charmed her, told her magnificent stories of the Grand Line and was utterly delighted by her comments and questions. When he finally left he promised to return, which he actually did much to her father's surprise. Not just the once either: he came back again and again, though there were often years between visits.

But the last time he'd come to see her, just six months after her father's death, he'd confessed that he'd come down with an illness that was killing him and asked if she would mind him using up his final years to truly conquer the Grand Line. Rouge had agreed on the condition that once he had succeeded he come back to her and spend what time remained afterwards at her side. So Roger had left and for the past three years Rouge had been following his exploits through the newspapers, though she read the reports with a healthy dose of scepticism. She'd started noticing the bias in the years after first meeting her lover and since then become unavoidably cynical about the doings of the Gorosei and Marines.

As she folded the papers and put them away the calm of the early morning was disturbed by an earth-shaking crunch that made the windows of her home rattle in their frames and set all the birds shrieking. Curious, Rouge stepped outside and headed towards the disturbance, which was marked by a rising column of dust and sand. It seemed something had just crashed into the shore.

Rouge frowned down at the girl laying on the bed in one of her many spare rooms. She hadn't been expecting to find a person in the wide, four-foot-deep crater situated under the cloud of dust, let alone a still living one with a sheathed sword gripped in one hand and a massive sea chest embedded in the ground next to her. The hair was also unusual: what kind of parents let their daughter grow their hair until it was three times her height? Or perhaps it was culturally expected for young women to have such long hair where she was from; Roger had certainly told her tales of stranger things on the Grand Line.

However Rouge's main concern was that despite not being seriously injured, the girl had only woken three times in the past four days and each time had done nothing but weep, scream and cry out for people she clearly feared to be dead. Rouge had managed to get the girl to drink, but food just made her vomit and the woman feared the startlingly tall child who treated her sword like a favourite soft toy would waste away from grief and lack of food.

"Who are you?"

Rouge blinked, looking down at red-ringed eyes as golden as those of an osprey staring at her from a thin, angular face with pale skin stretched over prominent cheekbones and a very sharp, straight nose. Her guest looked young for all she was over six feet tall and well past puberty; the Baterilla native had decided she probably wasn't any older than fourteen considering the smoothness of her skin and the slight rawness of her features. An early bloomer most likely.

"My name is Portgas D. Rouge," the strawberry blonde told the girl. "You are in my home on Baterilla."

Angular blonde eyebrows dipped and the girl's brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Baterilla?" she repeated faintly after a short pause.

"Who might you be?" Rouge asked kindly.

Golden eyes refocused on her face. "I am Fox," her guest said simply.

"No surname?"

Fox glanced at her warily. "Not one I care to mention."

So her guest was either a runaway from a wealthy background or had pirate relatives who had made her family name infamous. Rouge could tell now that Fox was a trained combatant, as even sitting in bed she moved a bit like Roger did: deliberation and strength underpinning everything no matter how trivial.

"You are welcome to stay with me as long as you wish," Rouge said generously, deciding this was the best thing to do. This girl was clearly all alone in the world judging by her sorrow and besides that she was interesting in a way that Rouge had only seen before in her lover. Fox had depth and undercurrents despite her youth and it would be interesting to see what came to light during her stay. Baterilla was increasingly boring in Roger's absence and she rather wanted to know what her lover would make of the girl when he returned.

The girl smiled a little bleakly. "Thank-you for the honour you do me, Portgas D. Rouge," she murmured with a reserved politeness that suggested a very strict and affluent upbringing. "I will do my best to prove myself worthy of it."

Fox liked Portgas D. Rouge very much. Part of it was that the woman was the mother of her darling Kajin, but the strawberry blonde also had a quiet but highly entertaining sense of humour, a sharp mind and was naturally very personable. Half the town's unmarried men had crushes on her and she was regularly proposed to, though she turned them all down.

It had taken Fox six days to determine exactly when she was, time she spent wandering around the town like a ghost, stealing newspapers and shamelessly eavesdropping on all kinds of different people. She didn't think she was in the past; it was more likely this was an alternate dimension of some kind like Dr Vegapunk had mentioned once as a theoretical mathematics exercise while she was in hearing range. Something along the lines of everything happening somewhere and different choices spawning different futures occurring concurrently; she hadn't paid much attention as she hadn't believed the world worked like that. Being proved wrong was a surprise, but one she could live with.

More troubling was that she was on Baterilla in the January of the year of Gol D. Roger's execution, which was a very bad place for a woman to be. She had no intention of getting caught up in the purges so she never ventured out of Rouge's very beautiful and large home without calling up her Colour of Concealment so strongly the townsfolk never noticed her properly. As Rouge was also rather solitary she hadn't noticed this yet, but Fox was sure she would in time. Her Hothead had always been sharp as a knife and he certainly hadn't got that from his father if Spitfire was anything to go by. Becoming Spadille had further honed that sharpness as he had become more patient and willing to wait, plot and scheme before obliterating an enemy.

Fox had no idea how her Kajin's mother had managed to both hide and prolong her pregnancy without detrimentally affecting him, but she intended to stay at least until the child of the current Pirate King –a child that wasn't even conceived yet– was born. She wasn't even sure the baby would be a boy –this was not her own past after all– but Rouge was the only connection she had to her Kajin in this painfully similar yet alien environment so she would not stray far from the younger woman in what little time the strawberry blonde had left.

In her first two months on Baterilla Fox did not waste her time: she practiced with Zanchou and with haki as she had not done in almost a decade, honing her edge to razor sharpness and letting the intense activity soothe the painful wounds in her mind. She had not had her Kajin and Asura torn from her mind as her former nakama had been, but despite the bonds still existing she couldn't feel anything from them. Her other bonds were tight and aching in a way that spoke of terrible grief and unspeakable distance and she mourned for her children, her nakama and those other friends and relatives she had left behind. Marco in particular would be devastated: she had promised she would be there for him when the last of his brothers passed away and now she couldn't be.

No, she refused to accept that. She had promised and 'Fox' Lisska, wife of Edward D. Spadille and Roronoa Zoro, daughter of Dracule Mihawk and granddaughter of Silvers Rayleigh, did not break her promises. The Florian Triangle was the reason she was here, so that meant it was also the key to getting back. Those ties to home and family were not broken, which meant they still existed in some way, shape or form and bonds always brought people together. If she was thrown out of the world again those bonds would tighten and drag her home.

It was a strange ambition, but she would do her best to see it through as soon as she had determined what had happened to her husbands. They hadn't been left behind, but neither were they here. In fact, they didn't seem to be anywhere. So she would wait and see, find out more about this slightly distorted double of her own home and look after Rouge until she gave birth, which may or may not prove fatal to the woman in question depending on whether what was wrong with her at that point in time was something Fox could fix. Then she'd decide what to do next based on what she'd managed to learn in that time.

In the beginning of March Gol D. Roger walked down the hillside and into Rouge's house through the back door while Fox was preparing the dinner.

"Hello! Who are you?" he asked with a cheerful deep voice that accompanied a presence that reminded the blonde assassin so much of her own Captain and King that it was physically painful.

"I'm Fox; Rouge is in the sun room," she said calmly, letting her pain wash through her without affecting her voice or body language. It was however in vain: Roger was just as observant as Luffy had eventually become where emotional pain was concerned.

"Are you alright?" He asked, genuine concern colouring both his tone and his presence. Fox turned her head and smiled a little sadly.

"Not really, but I will be in time," she assured him. "I lost everyone I cared about but Rouge is looking after me now."

"That's a shame," Roger commiserated without an ounce of pity, "but I'm sure your nakama wouldn't want you to be unhappy. Do you know where Rouge is?"

Fox smiled more genuinely this time. So, so like her own King. "The sun room," she repeated. "Dinner will be in about an hour."

After Roger arrived Fox was able to get away more often, frequently leaving the island altogether to acquire funds, resources and get a feel for the politics and local black market of the surrounding area. Her sea chest contained a lot of very useful stuff and wouldn't open for anyone incapable of using haki to pick locks as it had no keyhole, was made of Adam Wood and had the hinges on the inside. To most people it was just a very heavy rectangular wooden cuboid, but it contained copies of all of Fox' previous Logbooks plus her current original and what few of her possessions were not easily replaced. This included maps, Suiatsu the Sea Stone wakizashi Zoro had forged for her, a few small photo albums and a variety of odds and ends including some of her children's milk teeth. It also contained a few changes of clothes, her sewing and medical kits, a mixed stash of other weapons and money. Fox was wary of using the money as she had looked at what was currently in use and deduced her wad of beli would not be useable for another thirty years at least due to the serial numbers. This was why she was visiting nearby islands and robbing people blind.

Fox couldn't help liking Roger, for all he reminded her so much of her Captain it hurt. Perhaps this was how Grandpa Ray had felt when he met Luffy; it seemed likely. He had more of a temper than Luffy –she could sense it lurking under the surface– though he was better at remembering names, so his stories were rather more coherent. The blonde assassin was willing to listen to any number of the Pirate King's adventures when she was actually in the house and Roger was perfectly happy to tell her his entire life story starting back when he'd been twenty and first met Rayleigh. Fox paid attention, wrote them all down afterwards before going to bed and compared them to the stories she'd cajoled out of her grandpa over the years. The gist was much the same, but each storyteller remembered different bits and focused on different things. Fox intended to blend the corresponding stories together and write them up in a book of tales that would hopefully tempt a black-market publisher somewhere into parting with a small fortune. She'd done just that a decade after Luffy made it to the top, writing his journey from Dawn Island in East Blue to Raftel in the New World from her own notes and the stories she'd picked up from both crew and various friends. Listening to Roger meant she'd also acquired a bit of humorous blackmail on both Rayleigh and Shanks which she would hopefully get a chance to use; she refused to contemplate the possibility of being stuck here forever.

Fox noticed Rouge's pregnancy long before the woman herself did; it appeared on her senses about halfway through the first week of May. Fox surreptitiously examined her strawberry blonde host while helping with the laundry and determined that the not-quite-embryo was male and definitely identical to the Ace she remembered from before Marineford. She also did what she could to invisibly boost Rouge's health: the younger woman needed all the help she could get. When six weeks later Rouge noticed herself and told Roger, Fox was dragged out of the study she'd been given as her own private space and hugged by a cheerfully roaring Pirate King who really needed another twenty people to share his enthusiasm with. Fox was strongly reminded of Garp in that moment and hugged him back, offering her congratulations. Roger then put her down and gave her a sly look.

"But you knew already, didn't you Fox-chan?"

Fox shrugged; she could no more lie to this man than she could to her own captain. "It wasn't my news to share," she said lightly.

"You know I'm dying, don't you Fox-chan?"

The blonde nodded, her looped braids swinging. "It is obvious to me," she agreed. There wasn't anything she could do about it either, sadly. Not unless she wanted to torture him with the pain prolonging his life would cause. Killing him would be kinder, as would letting him get executed if he chose that route.

Roger looked thoughtful. "Would you stay with Rouge until the baby's born? I'd like her to have someone strong to protect her after I'm gone."

Fox considered his request and what it would really mean to her. A proper Contract, but a dangerous one considering what she knew was coming.

"I will promise to protect your lover until she has given birth to her child on the condition that you do not mention my existence or presence here to anyone," she said finally. "I work better from the shadows and it will be easier for me to do my job if nobody realises I exist."

"Like the townsfolk don't know you exist?" Ah, so he had noticed.

"That's right," Fox agreed, waiting for his decision.

"I can agree to that," Roger said easily. "I won't mention you at all."

"And I will protect Portgas D. Rouge from any and all external harm that comes her way until she has given birth," Fox concluded, the statement settling the ground under her feet in a way nothing else ever managed to save her beloved husbands and children. She had purpose again; eighteen long months of it. She would have to move quickly in order to be prepared for the siege.

Fox sat on the roof of one of the buildings edging the main square in Loguetown, watching the crowd and the execution stand as above her head the sky grew darker and more ominous and the minutes slowly ticked forwards. From her perch at the back of the square, right next to the road leading back to the docks, she could pick out a great many different pirates watching the stand upon which Roger was kneeling, his trademark grin firmly in place. There was Moriah, Mihawk –looking impossibly young and far too much like her own second son had at the same age– Crocodile, Doflamingo, Beckman –she hadn't known he'd been here– Buggy, Shanks and, right at the back and not far from the building she had staked out, Monkey D. Dragon. She couldn't see any faces from where she was sitting but she didn't need to: her Devil Fruit enabled her to recognise people by their unique life-sign and even though some of those were not exactly as she remembered them being –Crocodile for one was yet to eat his own Devil Fruit– they were similar enough. Shanks in particular was painfully familiar; Mihawk on the other hand was more muted, narrow and closed off in a way she'd never known him to be in her own world, which made her feel a little melancholy.

This Mihawk might never be a father, would never help raise a part-mermaid daughter and wouldn't retire to train his grandchildren in the way of the sword after losing his title to a worthy successor. He wouldn't hand over the famous black sword Yoru to his oldest granddaughter and then watch with a faint, dry smile as she shook the very foundations of the world in the pursuit of her dream.

So she watched as Roger gave his final words and the skies opened, washing his blood across the stand and towards the ground as the crowd cheered madly, all fired up by the Pirate King's last challenge. Fox did not cheer; instead she wept for an unborn child who would never meet his father, for her own lost family whom she finally recognised she might never see again, for the tens of thousands who would die as a result of the World Government's determination to cover up the happenings of the Void Century and the nobility's ridiculous obsession with power and control.

Shanks ambled alone through the streets of Loguetown after his former captain's execution, the rain soaking through his clothes and dripping through the weave of his hat. It was like the sky was crying. Buggy hadn't wanted to join him as part of his crew, which meant the redhead would have to start from scratch. East Blue was known as the weakest sea, but Shanks was sure there were a few worthwhile people here and there: this was the sea his captain had been born to. In fact, this was his captain's home town. A strange thought indeed, as Shanks had always believed Roger to be a child of the Grand Line as it was the only place that could even attempt to keep up with the man.

A scuffle and a shout penetrated through the steady patter of rainfall and the teenage pirate turned just in time to see a tall girl about his own age with very long hair lay out two thugs who had clearly been attempting to mug her. Another five men stepped forwards to get back at the very cute blonde in a completely sodden dress who had just sent their buddies into dreamland, but Shanks couldn't just stand by and watch such an unfair fight so he waded into the fray. Less than a minute later Shanks and the girl were the only two still standing so the pirate turned and smiled at her, holding out a hand.

"Hi there!" he said cheerfully, tipping his hat backwards so the rain stopped dripping off the brim onto his face. "I'm Shanks; who might you be?"

The blonde smiled back, the expression far more wry and melancholy than it had any right to be. "I'm Fox. Thanks for your help." She really was very pretty and not just because her dress was white and clinging to her body in a positively indecent manner. He'd never seen anybody anywhere with hair that long before and she had truly stunning eyes.

"Are you going to be alright?" the redhead asked solicitously. "Can I escort you home or something? You're absolutely soaked."

"So are you," the girl pointed out amicably, seemingly not bothered by the show she was giving him, "and I'm afraid home is a very, very long way away." She sighed, her brow briefly furrowing in a way Shanks knew from experience meant she was in some kind of pain. "So far away I can't get back."

"You're alone?" Shanks knew what that was like; he was alone too now. "What about family? Friends?" His former crew were still his friends and he knew that if he ever needed it he could go to them and they'd probably help him, not that he ever intended to do so.

Fox closed her eyes and tilted her head back so the rain could fall directly on her face. "There is nobody in the whole world who considers me to be either a friend or a member of their family," she said simply, "and you are one of just two people alive who know my name."

Oh. Ouch. Shanks couldn't even contemplate how horrible that would be. To have nobody know you, nobody who cared for you, nobody to share the wonders of life with or remember you when you were gone? That was hell right there. And yes, Fox was crying: he could see the tears welling up despite the raindrops streaming down her face. He couldn't leave her here like that.

"Come on Fox-chan, there's got to be a decent bar open somewhere around here," he said, wrapping an arm around her waist and noticing as he did that she was several inches taller than he was. "You'll feel better once you've dried off a bit and had a drink."

She snorted, opening her eyes a crack to glance at him sideways. "A date, Shanks-kun? Isn't this a bit sudden? We have only just met." Her tone was dry but playful and she didn't seem at all opposed to the idea, so the redhead grinned at her.

"Well it isn't every day I rescue beautiful women from vicious thugs, you know," he teased, leading the way back towards the establishment he remembered passing earlier.

"Rescue? I think I was doing pretty well by myself," Fox countered, poking him in the ribs. "I could have taken them all out easily."

"But such a lovely lady as yourself shouldn't have to!" Shanks declared with another wide grin, waving his free hand extravagantly. His companion rolled her eyes but didn't try to make him to let go of her; in fact she leaned into him slightly as they walked up the road under the pounding rain. Shanks considered that to be very promising indeed.

Three days later Fox was sitting on another roof, this one belonging to Baterilla's only church. Below her Marines dashed hither and thither and screams rang out in the air all around her as women and children were slaughtered and men were killed for attempting to protect their wives. Rouge was safe at home, a corset the blonde assassin had fashioned for her pressing the baby bump back within her body so it did not show through the younger woman's dress. Wearing such an item was terribly damaging to Rouge's own body as her internal organs would be under even greater pressure as the pregnancy progressed, but Fox knew that the only thing Rouge cared about right now was her baby's survival and the amber-eyed D would cheerfully damn herself for her child's sake.

Rouge had remained safe thus far as nobody knew about her affair with the late Pirate King and she had no close friends whom she trusted with her condition. The loose, high-waisted gowns she favoured also concealed her growing belly, so when the Marines had arrived early that morning they had overlooked her.

As she sat invisibly on the church roof Fox pressed a hand to her own flat belly, savouring the wonderful feeling of new life that was blooming there. Morally speaking, having sex with Shanks had been completely wrong of her; he was fifteen and she was over three times that for all she had stopped aging completely before she even reached twenty thanks to her own Devil Fruit. However she couldn't bring herself to feel even a single iota of shame. She had always loved Shanks, probably would always love Shanks and it had been so wonderful to see that Shanks was just as charming and improbably deep in this world as he had been in her own that she hadn't been able to resist the invitation to spend the night with him in a room above the bar he'd taken her to. Now she carried his unborn child within her and even though Baterilla was currently the last place in the world a pregnant woman should be, she had confidence in her ability to both defend Rouge and protect her own child.

Not being entirely sure how long the siege would last, Fox intended to slow her own pregnancy down a little in the hope that she would be able to give birth once her contract was up. If that proved impossible, well, she had tried and haki would ensure her baby remained unnoticed by the Marines. She could safely delay her own pregnancy by two months at the most, which would lead to her giving birth eleven months after conceiving. If everything went as it had in her own world Ace would be born another four months later. Further delay to her own pregnancy would only reduce her ability to protect Rouge and cause her Devil Fruit to kick in, which would be even more dangerous to her baby as there was a good change that a deeper connection would form between them, which carried a risk of the assassin accidentally imposing her own will and personality on the infant's developing mind, or so she suspected from her experience of previous connections.

Fox smiled, lightly dropping down from her perch and slipping between the buildings on her way back to Rouge, the spark in her belly burning brightly to her senses. She wasn't alone anymore.

"The Government are sure to trace all of my activities in this last year: they'll find her and they'll kill her! But a child who is yet to be born bares no sin Garp! The two of us have nearly killed each-other so many times Garp… We're like old pals now, aren't we?! I trust you as much as I'd trust my own crewmates! Protect my child!"

Monkey D. Garp hadn't promised Gol D. Roger anything, but the man's words to him concerning his lover and child lingered. He had not been sent to Baterilla until a bit over a year after the execution, when the Government lockdown was lifted and he was required to ensure the actions of the Marine forces in the pursuit of Justice did not provoke further unrest in the populace. Part of him believed it likely that Roger's lover was already dead, but the rest of him was certain that a woman who loved and was loved by such a powerful man had to be cunning and capable enough to keep herself from being noticed.

Part of his duties involved visiting the locals, so the greying Vice-Admiral did so and it saddened him to see so few women and no children under the age of four. There were also very few young men, most of them having died protecting their wives and lovers. Grandparents watched him cautiously as older children hid behind their remaining relatives and cried silently, too afraid to even make a sound. Garp never stayed longer than he had to and bitterly resented having been given this duty. What had happened on this island wasn't justice; Roger had been right to say that children were born without sin. No child deserved to suffer as these wide-eyed, broken youngsters had.

The last house he visited during his four-week stay was that of a woman called Portgas D. Rouge, whose father had been rather well off and left her perfectly able to support herself. She was single and lived alone with just an elderly maid and an aging butler for company, both of whom had served her family all their lives. Garp was of the opinion she was a fairly likely candidate for being the lover of the Pirate King all things considered, but she had survived the purges which made it unlikely.

"Monkey D. Garp."

The Vice-Admiral spun around to face the speaker. It was a tall, slim blonde woman with ridiculously long hair wearing a bleached white shirt and hakama in the Wano style, except no Wano native would ever wear the colour of death so openly. She was too still, too poised and too confident, standing there with a hand resting on the hilt of the larger blade of a white wrapped daisho pair shoved though the right side of her white obi.

"Who are you?" Garp hadn't seen her, which was strange but not impossible, but he hadn't sensed her either which was worrying considering how proficient he was with haki. She'd literally appeared out of nowhere.

"I am Fox," the woman said evenly, looking up to meet his eyes and surprising him with the hawk-like golden orbs that stared holes in his skull. Was this woman related to the swordsman who had just started to make a name for himself last year, Dracule 'Hawk-Eye' Mihawk?

"What brings you here?" Fox asked him. Garp got the distinct impression she knew exactly what he'd been doing in town; it wasn't like he'd made a secret of it. He also realised that Roger was a sneaky old bastard who was causing him headaches even from beyond the grave. This woman had to be why Roger had been so damn certain his lover would live to give birth to his child.

"Roger asked me to protect his child."

"Will you?"

Garp paused. What the hell; why not? After everything he'd seen on Baterilla he couldn't deny a child the right to live. "Yes."

Fox turned and walked past him, opening the front door with the hand not resting on the hilt of her sword. "Do come inside, Vice-Admiral. Rouge went into labour late this morning and I really need to be there to ensure her heart doesn't give out before she finally gives birth."

Garp hurried after the incredibly dangerous woman Roger had dug up on some remote island somewhere to protect his lover and idly wondered how old she was. Not as old as he was certainly, but she was definitely older than the eighteen she appeared to be. No child had that cool aura of acceptance around them, the understanding of death and the willingness to kill regardless. Was she a similar age to his son, perhaps? She could plausibly be twenty-five… she had one of those ageless faces some women did.

Rouge panted harshly and leaned heavily against Fox, who was kneeling behind the pale and sweating pregnant woman on the bed and giving her something to brace herself against. Portgas D. Rouge had systematically ruined her own health over the past year keeping her pregnancy hidden and delaying birth, so despite Fox's constant care and subtle use of power she didn't have much time left.

"Push," Fox urged her, the assassin's Ability working in Rouge's body to ease the birth along more smoothly and monitoring the health of the baby. She had initially hoped she might be able to prevent this world's Ace from being orphaned, but Rouge had put her body under such strain that –even if giving birth didn't kill her– half her internal organs were getting to the point of being irreversibly damaged and Fox had already had to kill off numerous incipient cancerous growths in the interests of keeping her patient as healthy as possible. Most of those minute tumours had been located in her torso and would have put her health under further pressure despite being mostly benign. Fox believed those growths to be a further sign that Rouge had worn her body out to the point that it had stopped functioning properly and the assassin honestly believed that she would be better off dying sooner rather than later; the complications of liver and kidney failure were just nasty and it could take days to die of it.

Rouge pushed, the aging maid caught the large and very healthy baby boy and Fox swiftly cut herself off from her patient before sliding off the bed to take the baby, wash it, dry it and wrap it in a warm blanket.

"It's a boy," she told Rouge, turning with the baby in her arms as the newborn opened his mouth and screamed his outrage to the world. Fox couldn't blame him; she'd been emoting with him for the past year and the outside world was a far cry from the comfort and safety of the womb. She held out the bundle of baby and blanket for Rouge to take.

Rouge took a deep, hoarse breath. "If it's a girl, then Anne," she rasped, "and if it's a boy, Ace. That's the name he chose-" she took another harsh breath, "-for this child. Gol D. Ace is the name of our child." She slumped forwards, shuddering as Ace screamed.

"Rouge!" the maid shouted anxiously, hurrying forwards as Fox swiftly retrieved Ace from the dying woman's slackening grasp and adjusted her shirt so she could lift the baby to her breast. Her own son was four months old and nowhere near weaned so she had no shortage of milk to share. Ace cries quickly stopped as he suckled and she murmured gently to him, wrapping the Colour of Concealment lightly around them both as she used her Ability to reconnect with him. He did recognise her, but it had taken him a while to get past his new situation to connect her physical presence and scent to the voice he had heard so many times and the trickle of foreign emotion and affection that had occasionally touched him.

"Fox?"

The blonde assassin turned at once, shedding the haki concealing her as she met Rouge's eyes. "Yes Rouge?"

"Fox, take care of Ace for me?" Rouge asked weakly, leaning heavily on the maid as the pool of bright blood haemorrhaging onto the mattress beneath her grew larger. "Please, raise him as you own son. I know… know you love him like I do."

"Portgas D. Rouge, I will raise your son and love him as my own," Fox promised, her fingers gently stroking the damp black strands covering the top of Ace's head. "No harm will come to him so long as he is in my care."

Rouge smiled. "Thank-you," she breathed, then collapsed completely. Fox ignored the commotion this raised, leaving the room with baby Ace still cradled against her chest. She would miss Rouge terribly as the woman had become a friend, but Ace needed her just as much as her own son did and she would have to find a safe place to raise them both. Blaze was a gorgeous little charmer with his father's smile and his dark hair was showing strands of scarlet that suggested he'd have hair as red as Shanks' own before long. Fox was going to have to find somewhere quiet and secluded to raise her boys, well off the beaten track and moderately safe. A deserted island would be all of those things, but her sons would need human interaction in order to properly grow. Unfortunately, showing up in an out-of-the-way village with two babies and no husband was just asking for trouble.

Entering the nursery where her son was sleeping Fox draped a rag over her shoulder, gently burped baby Ace and then tucked him into the cradle beside her son. Both babies were much the same size, which meant she could pass them off as fraternal twins. Good. She set about finishing the packing she'd started when Garp had first arrived on the island; she'd not expected Rouge to give Ace to her and had intended to quietly leave with Blaze as soon as her Contract with Roger was up. All things considered though she was much happier with the idea of Ace being raised by her than the thought of this baby going through a childhood like the one her Kajin had experienced. His memories on that subject had been… educational.

"Fox."

The assassin turned, placing herself between the Vice-Admiral and the cradle. The greying Marine glanced past her and his eyes widened.

"Another baby?! How?"

"Blaze is my son," Fox said, "and I am very, very good at hiding myself from others' notice. Nobody outside this house has ever seen me so my pregnancy was never brought to the Marines' attention."

Garp frowned but nodded, accepting her words. "Where are you going to go?" he asked.

Fox shrugged. "Anywhere. Nowhere. Somewhere a very long way away from here. North Blue maybe?"

"You don't have family you could stay with?"

Fox snorted. "You are now one of four living people who know my name. My son's father and Rouge's servants make up the other three. I know I have blood family out there somewhere but they don't even know I exist and I certainly won't approach them while I have two babies to care for. I have no idea where my son's father is either, not that the man even knows he has a child."

Garp frowned again, looking rather like Luffy did when he was thinking too hard. Then he smiled. "Come with me! I promised Roger I'd protect his child and this way I can keep that promise. I'll take you to my home village in East Blue and you can raise both boys there."

Fox considered it. It would work. It also meant she could keep an eye on this world's Luffy when he was eventually born. Plus, Shanks had shown up there in her own world when Luffy was six. That might not happen here, but it was as good a chance as any and she did need to tell the redhead he was a father sooner or later. While mermaid traditions held that if a man didn't ask a past lover about possible children then he wasn't interested in whether or not she'd had any, Fox had grown up around Shanks. The one in this world seemed almost completely identical and she knew her Shanks would have wanted to be told. She wondered if she could get the redhead to faint; Beckman had been rather gleeful about retelling the story of how his captain had blacked out when her own father had forced him to face the possibility of having children or maybe even grandchildren.

She bowed. "Thank-you for your care; I would be honoured to accept."

Garp laughed. "None of that please! You're a strong, capable woman and I'm sure you'll raise my little grandson into a fine Marine!"

Fox raised an eyebrow and loosened up a little. "Marine? Vice-Admiral, you have no idea who I am or what I do for a living. What makes you think I'd raise the boys to be Marines when there are so many other productive things they could be doing?" She paused. "And if Ace is your grandson, does that make me your daughter or your daughter-in-law?"

Garp laughed again and slapped her on the back hard; haki reinforcement prevented her from stumbling. "I'd be proud to call you my daughter, Fox!"

Fox smiled dryly. "Well, I could do worse," she muttered.

When Fox had agreed to let Garp take her to his home village, she hadn't expected to find Dragon still living there. Then again, Fuusha was where Luffy had been born so she should have expected it really. She also hadn't expected Garp to introduce them to the locals as 'my daughter Fox and her sons!' which instantly got the local rumour mill grinding and the next day everyone was talking about how Garp had brought home his illegitimate daughter and her twin sons to live in his house. By the end of the week six different versions of who she was, who her mother had been and who her children's father was were doing the rounds; Fox personally liked the one which cast her mother as a princess, her husband –recently deceased– as a Marine Captain and her sons as heirs to a throne somewhere and being raised in Fuusha to protect them from assassins.

Garp hadn't stuck around to enjoy the fallout of his bringing home a young, single woman with two baby sons; instead he'd visited his own son the following day, had a very loud and violent argument with Dragon –who Fox thought looked very young and grumpy without the tattoo and habitual smirk she was used to seeing on his face– then sailed off again. Fox hadn't seen him off, being busy settling into the large, traditional house belonging to the Monkey family and caring for her sons. She'd managed to get the Vice-Admiral to see things her way during the voyage and he'd entered them in the village records as 'Blaze and Ace, sons of Fox' with a birth date of November the first, precisely halfway between the boys' actual birthdays. Considering Ace was rather large for a three-week-old and about the same weight as Blaze who was nearly five months old, it was easy to pass them off as three-month-old twins. Garp had added her to the registry as his adopted daughter, which hadn't stopped the rumours going around that he was her biological father. Rather it added to them –once a few bright sparks had the idea of consulting the registry– so that her father became a colleague of Garp's, a noble or even an old enemy.

Fox had long since decided that in order to fit herself properly into her respective families' history she would have to pass herself off as her Grandpa Ray's daughter. Fitting herself into her father's family would have been trickier, but she'd actually managed to wheedle a bit of family history out of said father after Zoro took his title and he retired from the Shichibukai. He'd told her about an aunt who'd disgraced herself by having an affair with somebody when he was four. Officially she and the child had both died during the birth, but Mihawk had suspected the baby had actually been gotten rid of. The assassin had investigated for herself and determined that the missing child had been female and had indeed been gotten rid of: her great-aunt's scorned husband had sold the newborn at an underground market as an indentured servant who would be cared and provided for until the age of four, after which she would have to spend the next ten years paying back her 'master' for his expenses. Fox had tracked the contract and determined that the baby girl had been relatively lucky: she'd died of illness aged three. Now stuck in an alternate past however Fox intended to steal the child's identity and claim that the man who had bought her had faked her death, sold her contract on and that she had been trained as a child assassin by her new owner. That would account for her extensive education and combat skills, as well as her stealth.

She'd already given Garp the bare bones of this fiction, leading him to believe that Roger had killed her owners towards the end of his last voyage, 'confiscated' her and later taken her with him to Baterilla so she could look after Rouge. The Vice-Admiral never asked if she knew who her parents were and she never volunteered the information; Silvers Rayleigh was considered a very current menace and Garp had never been very good at keeping secrets.

Fox's first visitor in her new home was a teenage girl with green-lit black hair carrying a covered basket of hot food. The girl introduced herself as Makino and explained that her mother had sent her since Fox was probably too busy with the babies to cook. Fox had to admit that caring for two babies at once without anybody else to help her was a bit more effort than she'd been expecting –Ace in particular required constant attention– and accepted the food with heartfelt thanks. Makino was then invited inside and shown the babies. The teenager noticed that Blaze's hair was going red, cooed over how adorable they both were and left ten minutes later to spread the news around the village; Makino was the daughter of the owner of Fuusha Village's only bar. As expected the blonde got more visitors in the following weeks, most of them women bringing food and various necessaries for the care of infants. Fox was grateful, polite and when they inevitably asked after the children's father she would sigh, mention that she was married but that she didn't even know if he was still alive. It bothered her sometimes that her connections to Spadille and Zoro remained dark and empty, present but unusable. Mostly in the evenings after a hard day keeping house, tending the vegetable patch and hunting in the woods while caring for two increasingly active babies, as it was then that she missed their presence the most.

Blaze and Ace were both completely weaned by their shared official birthday, crawling not long after and by the time Ace was eighteen months old he was toddling everywhere, still unsteady on his feet but extremely fast moving. Fox had taken to wearing her hair in two braids and using it to stop her boys from getting away from her, which both children found completely wonderful. Sometimes they ran away from her just so as to be snatched up into the air and carried back to her side by a nineteen-foot, haki-animated braid as they crowed and squealed in glee.

Fox still didn't quite belong in Fuusha village, but Dragon's delightfully vivacious wife was the closest thing she had to a friend and the younger woman –who firmly believed herself to be older than Fox– visited almost every day to help keep house and chat. Dragon was often away, apparently working but Fox knew better. She'd never known exactly when the Revolutionary Army got going but that was certainly what Dragon was busy setting up; she wondered if he'd met Kuma or Ivankov yet. Fox found it mildly amusing that while Garp was convinced she was at least twenty-six like his own son, the villagers of Fuusha had completely independently decided she was not yet eighteen. This fitted with the age Rouge had thought she was, as the strawberry blonde had congratulated her on turning fifteen shortly before Roger's execution then a year later bought her a present just after Blaze was born to celebrate her being sixteen. The assassin hadn't protested the assumption; the younger people thought she was the better. Not aging became a problem when the people around you realised you were supposed to be in your mid-forties but looked the same age as your grown-up children and Fox was actually going to be fifty-four just after Blaze turned two, making her technically only five months younger than this world's Whitebeard. Not that she looked it.

Dragon she had barely seen at all, leading the villagers to mutter that Garp's son was angry at his father bringing home a bastard child and installing her in the family home. Fox knew that wasn't the problem; Dragon had moved out well before Fox even arrived in order to distance himself from his Marine father. The problem was that Dragon thought Fox had some kind of connection to the Marines and so stayed away to avoid the risk of discovery and arrest. The young revolutionary had more brains than his father and eventual son combined and could tell she was both powerful and very dangerous. Thinking about it, Dragon probably thought Fox was associated with Marine Intelligence and took her presence as a sign that his father was taking issue with his views on the World Government. Fox would have liked to disabuse him of such a ridiculous notion but he never gave her a chance to do so and having two energetic and increasingly wilful toddlers to keep in line –Ace was already showing signs of a desperate need for anger management– meant she couldn't hunt him down for a private chat. So she kept her head down, trained in private, raised her sons, kept in touch with a number of reliable if not exactly trustworthy people by letter-case and occasionally parted with partial copies of various maps in exchange for generous amounts of money. Not that she told anyone that the maps she sold were partial copies; the very existence of most of the islands she left off was currently unknown and she wanted to keep it that way for a while longer.

Shortly after her sons' official third birthday Dragon's wife announced her pregnancy and Fox started to get a bit worried about her non-existent relationship with her 'brother'. She had experienced herself the perils of giving birth to the firstborn child of a D: it had been a very near thing and had she not eaten the Devil Fruit she had it might well have killed her. She'd investigated afterwards and found out that women who married Ds very frequently died in childbirth or shortly after unless they were Ds themselves, Rouge being an exception considering she'd deliberately ruined her health delaying Ace' birth. It had sent Spadille into a depressed, guilt-ridden and paranoid tizzy for months and he had later gone out of his way to learn how to adjust his body temperature so he couldn't get her pregnant again. It had taken her five years to get him to stop doing it and in the end she'd had to enlist help and call in debts from a variety of different people in order to distract him sufficiently that he forgot to keep it going for enough time for her to conceive again. He'd been utterly horrified afterwards and had fussed over her dreadfully in between going out and killing things –and any number of people– to work off his nerves during the following nine months, but the pregnancy had gone swimmingly and she'd given birth without any problem at all.

Fox had guessed that it was the Will of D –which the firstborn was the heir to– that presented the problem rather than anything inherent to the genetics of the father, but considering that Garp, Dragon, Spitfire and Luffy had all grown up without mothers it wasn't really something she could test. In fact, investigation proved she was the only wife or lover of a D who hadn't died providing said D with an heir that the Sea Network could find. Luffy had not liked hearing that and had immediately enlisted her, Chopper and Law to prevent his own wife from dying as a result of her recent pregnancy. They'd succeeded, but it really had taken all of their efforts to do so. Law had taken her research away afterwards and spent the next three years trying to work out what the Will of D actually was but had eventually published their joint findings and set the matter aside. Fox suspected that he just didn't want to admit the problem was more mystical than physical and therefore not medically fixable. As Law was a D himself, admitting that had probably been difficult, moreso when he didn't know which of his parents he had inherited the 'D' from.

As her sister-in-law's pregnancy progressed and Dragon stubbornly kept his distance, Fox began to fear that she'd lose yet another friend to childbirth: her idiot brother certainly wasn't going to let her anywhere near his wife while the sweet, round-faced woman was giving birth.

Despite Dragon's continued aloof behaviour and stubborn refusal to even talk to her, as soon as Fox sensed that his wife was starting to go into labour she asked Makino to babysit, grabbed her medical kit and hurried across town to see if she could help. However she had barely got in the door when Dragon noticed her and caught her by the arm.

"Fox-san, what brings you here?" he asked politely but coldly.

Fox wanted to hit him over the head with her bag and tell him to stop being a fool, but did not. Her friend's life was on the line. "I have medical experience," she said calmly, "and your wife is my friend, so I thought I should be here for the birth."

"The midwife and the doctor are here already, Fox-san," Dragon replied, face impassive. "Your assistance is unnecessary."

Fox snapped. She could handle Dragon being an idiot –it was no skin off her nose– but his condemning his wife to almost certain death out of needless paranoia was another matter entirely. Not that Dragon knew that was the likely outcome of his latest decision. Unfortunately however she couldn't just barge in regardless as he'd try to stop her and things would get messy. So she took a deep breath, swallowed her temper and slapped her idiot adoptive sibling hard across the face. With haki.

"You, Monkey D. Dragon," she said dangerously as the man slowly raised a hand to the red, smarting mark on his cheek in total disbelief, "are twice the fool your father ever was." Then she turned on her heel and marched out before she did anything she would later regret.

After sending Makino home Fox stayed in and played with her sons. Both were getting very good at the stretching exercises, tumbling tricks, basic combat stances and other games she was teaching them to improve their balance and hand-eye coordination and keep them busy. It was still a bit early for proper training but Ace was regulating his strength better and Blaze was showing unusually sharp reflexes that needed cultivating. Both boys also loved being read to, whether it was tales of adventure from the book on Roger's voyages that she'd recently finished or details of the strange and wonderful islands on the Grand Line and their inhabitants. The blonde assassin deliberately reduced the range of her Colour of Observation to just beyond the boundaries of the house, not wanting to feel what was going on in the village when she wasn't allowed to help.

Evening came, she tucked both boys into bed and once they were asleep she sat at the kitchen table with her latest letters and set about answering them, enclosing money so that her contacts would not feel taken advantage of. She had released the letter-cases out the back door and was writing in her Log Book when she sensed Dragon outside the door, feeling like he'd had a hole ripped through him. Setting her pen aside, Fox walked to the front door and opened it to her foster-brother, stepping aside so he could come into the house.

Dragon walked inside, his feet carrying him into the main room where he came to a stop seemingly without noticing. Fox followed him, noting his heavy tread and vacant stare. He looked like a man in dire need of a shoulder to cry on, but considering he didn't trust her that far she'd have to settle for giving him alcohol. With this in mind she retrieved a bottle of good rum, poured him a shot and wordlessly handed it over. Dragon accepted the glass and downed it, then coughed as it hit his throat.

"What?" he muttered, blinking and returning to himself a little.

"Dragon, talk to me," Fox said firmly, looking him in the eye as her haki brushed over the bundle tucked in the crook of his arm. However young and unformed, Luffy's presence was unique.

Dragon focused on her briefly then bowed his head. "My wife is dead," he rasped, "and I… my son… Luffy… "

Luffy chose this moment to wake and decide he was hungry, screaming his displeasure. Fox swiftly channelled her Devil Fruit Ability through her torso to produce the right hormones and kicked her mammary glands into high gear; this she could deal with. Firmly she lifted the screaming baby out of Dragon's arms and rocked him close, humming absently as she loosened her shirt both to accommodate her abrupt increase in bust size and to allow the newborn to feed. A minute later Luffy was fully occupied and Dragon was staring at her like he'd never seen her before.

"How is that possible?" he asked. Since he was actually paying attention to her rather than allowing grief to consume him, Fox answered in the interests of keeping him distracted.

"I'm a Devil Fruit User: my Ability gives me considerable control over my body." Not to the extent that Emporio Ivankov could manipulate his body, but the Okama King's occasional assistance over the years had considerably expanded Fox' range of useful skills. The ability to breastfeed at the drop of a hat had come in very handy any number of times, not all of them involving babies. "Do you want me to care for your son for you?"

Dragon looked at her. Really looked, rather than just seeing what he thought was there. "Who are you?" he asked after a pause. "And what are you?"

Fox met his eyes. "I am Silvers Fox and I am a mother and an assassin, though I've done all manner of other things in the past as well."

Dragon's jaw actually dropped slightly. "Silvers Fox?" he repeated.

"No, our father doesn't know," Fox answered the implied question, "and I'd prefer it remain that way. I like living, he can't keep a secret to save his life and Sengoku would probably try to kill me, which would get messy considering there are children involved and I have no intention of dying any time soon."

"Assassin?"

Fox shrugged. "I was raised and trained as one. I can't be anything else."

Dragon nodded, the unfocused look in his eyes suggesting deep thought. "Are you really married?" he asked next.

"Yes. I haven't heard a peep out of my husbands in over five years though." Fox didn't really care that she'd just as good as told her adopted brother that she'd been with a man who wasn't either of her husbands in the time since they'd been separated.

"Husbands?" Dragon looked slightly bemused.

"We're a trio."

"Ah." Another thoughtful pause. "So whose sons are your boys?"

"I think plausible deniability is your friend on that one," Fox warned him. "They are my sons and I'd rather not have to kill my own brother for giving the game away, especially when he's got so many other more productive things he could be doing with his time rather than pry into my private life."

Dragon's lips curled up into a faint smile. "Very well little sister. Take care of my son for me."

"I know you won't be staying but please write and at least try to visit," Fox said as Dragon turned to leave. "There is a dire shortage of intelligent conversation around here and I'd like to get a more accurate account of what's going on in the world than what the newspaper reports."

Dragon turned. "You know?" he asked, startled.

Fox inclined her head. "I know and I don't care either way; you're a D so foolish idealism is par the course."

"Foolish?" Dragon sounded very displeased at having his dream called that, so Fox explained her word choice.

"It's a ridiculously big dream, don't you think? Just as unrealistic as Gol D. Roger's was."

Dragon caught the subtext and grinned. "Well if I am twice the fool my father is, little sister, then I may as well be twice as foolish." He vanished out the door and out of sight.

Fox sighed, shifting Luffy in her arms and burping him before he could fall asleep. "Well, you're not going to be my captain this time around," she told the drowsy infant quietly, "but as your mother I'm going to do my very best to ensure you still make it to your dream even without me by your side."

Luffy dropped off to sleep, a tiny bubble of snot emerging from his nose. Fox giggled and went looking for a cradle to tuck him into; at least she'd kept all the older boys' baby clothes…

Edited for grammer -thanks for pointing that out InsaneScriptist- 18.7.15