It's been awhile, folks, but here I am back with another short story featuring our favourite old guard Marines and their adorable (and very precocious) children (I'm looking at you, Dragon). Dragon isn't appearing this chapter, but as you've likely guessed already, a certain other Marine kid is!

I hope you'll enjoy this new entry!

Of Marines, Mishaps and Monsters

Summary: For some inexplicable reason that none of them could fathom, little Rosinante was clearly terrified of Garp, and Sengoku wanted to know why.

Vice Admiral Sengoku's brow furrowed with some perplexity as he turned over his observations from the past week in his mind, attention temporarily wandering from the paperwork laid out in front of him. There'd been something that had caught his interest lately, something which had been affording him a fair bit of confusion.

And it was of course, as many matters had been lately, related to the young boy Sengoku had taken in around half a year ago.

A fond smile lifted Sengoku's face at thought of the child who he was fast coming to view as a son. Rosinante was by nature and past experience shy and rather skittish, but as time went by he'd quickly warmed towards Sengoku and seemed to have gotten quite comfortable around Tsuru as well.

Now Garp, on the other hand… That was the root of the problem.

It had been almost six months since they'd been introduced, but Rosinante still showed no signs of relaxing around the older man. Sure his old friend was loud and boisterous in a way that may be intimidating to a young boy, but certainly not, Sengoku thought, to the degree that Rosinante regularly exhibited. Indeed, there were times that Sengoku might even describe the child as being quite terrified of the Rear Admiral.

He'd brought up the matter both with Tsuru and with Garp himself, but neither of them had any more clue than Sengoku about the matter. At first he'd suspected that Garp had done or said something tactless to the boy, but his old friend swore through heaven and earth and the stormy seas that he could remember nothing of that sort. Which wasn't that solid of a reassurance, honestly, given his friend's notoriously patchy memory, but Sengoku decided to accept it for the time being barring further evidence.

The answer finally came one day quite by surprise, and it wasn't at all what Sengoku had been expecting.

As had become their regular routine in recent weeks, Rosinante had been diligently ferrying paperwork between Sengoku and Tsuru's offices. The boy had been eager to help in any way he could and they'd finally decided to officially enlist him into the Marines as a Chore Boy, running small errands around Marine HQ. (They'd long learnt not to give him errands involving anything breakable though, after a close shave with a box of tone dials, a loose floorboard and a large packet of okaki. The tone dials had thankfully survived the encounter through merit of Tsuru's fast reflexes alone; to Sengoku's dismay, his beloved okaki had not.)

Paperwork, the least hazardous option they could think of, had henceforth been decreed to be the only thing Rosinante was allowed to be put in charge of until further probationary notice. Which ought to have been a reasonable safeguard to ward off disaster, but Rosinante being Rosinante, the boy still somehow managed that day to trip over absolute nothing two steps into Sengoku's office, drop all the papers over the floor, bowl into Sengoku's desk so hard it skidded a few inches and upturn the recently refilled inkwell all over himself and half of the paperwork.

Sengoku sighed, massaging his temples with one hand to keep his exasperation at bay. "Rosi-"

Garp chose that very moment to walk into the office, crunching merrily on a packet of rice crackers.

Head snapping up, Rosinante took one horrified glance at the Rear Admiral through ink-soaked bangs and straight out burst into tears.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" the boy babbled in a shaky voice pitched high with panic, barely coherent through his sniffling sobs. "I'm sorry, Sengoku-san, please don't feed me to the D!"

Sengoku and Garp traded a completely baffled look over the child's head. Having a bit of tact for once, or perhaps just feeling ill-equipped to dealt with a crying child, Garp silently backed out of the office and closed the door behind him, leaving them a bit of privacy.

Sengoku walked around his desk, carefully avoiding the larger patches of spilled ink as he crouched down in front of the boy.

"Rosinante? Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? Why would I feed you to the, erm, D?"

The boy looked up at him a little apprehensively, as if wondering why he was even asking about it when it ought to be common knowledge, before finally saying in a small voice, "T-The elders back when I was s-small always said that bad children would be eaten by the D."

"D?" Sengoku had to clarify, to make sure he was getting this right. "Like Monkey D Garp?"

Rosinante nodded glumly, clearly struggling to reel in his sniffles.

Sengoku had wondered before, about the strange initial in his friend's name; an initial shared, among others, with a certain up-and-coming pirate named Gol D Roger who was fast gaining notoriety with how he'd been making waves wherever he went. He'd asked Garp about it once, but the other man had no idea about its source, just that it had been passed down through generations in his family. This new piece of information that he had just receive, a child's fairy tale though it appeared to be at first glance, made Sengoku wonder if the mysterious initial was perhaps a topic worth looking into again, especially if it had something to do with Mariejois.

But that was a matter for later. For the time being, he first had a few misunderstandings to clear.

"Rear Admiral Garp won't eat you," Sengoku began carefully, but any further reassurances that he might have managed to think up was cut off by a loud guffaw from the doorway that made both of them jump in surprise.

"Bwahahaha! A skinny little thing like you won't be very tasty anyway."

Sengoku sighed heavily. His friend was just making things worse. "Garp…"

Unheeding of Sengoku's warning glare, the D bearer plopped down cross-legged next to them. Rosinante flinched a little at the action, like a small deer discovering that it was being watched by a predator, but valiantly didn't move away beyond that. Sengoku felt proud, and he saw a hint of approval in Garp's grin as well before his face turned uncharacteristically serious and thoughtful.

"So those guys up there have got you thinking that us D's are the big, scary monsters, have they? Well I don't know if they're completely wrong on that count, there's always been a fair bit of trouble that seems to follow us like a magnet. But other than that, I don't think we're any different. I'm just a human, same as you."

Those words stirred a bittersweet nostalgia in Rosinante. "But I am human. I have always been." His father had said those words, back in those far off days before Rosinante had known anything about the world.

A large calloused hand came up to ruffle his hair, the sensation unexpected but not unwelcome. Garp's palm came away sticky with black ink though, and Rosinante finally cracked a smile at the older man's comical look of dismay at both that and the stains that had soaked into his Marine-issue white slacks.

Sengoku's voice cut wryly through their newly relaxed mood. "I think a certain few of us need to take a good long bath. Why don't you go first, Rosinante? You can come back to help me with clean-up later."

Blushing, the boy nodded quickly with another stammered apology and scampered away leaving black footprints on his wake that made Sengoku shake his head with fond exasperation. Honestly, what was he going to do with that boy... There was another matter though. The Vice Admiral glanced back to raise an eyebrow at his friend, slightly amused but also impressed. "And you, since when have you been such a philosopher?"

"Bwahahaha, you and Tsuru-chan must be rubbing off on me. I'm not sure where I got all that from myself."

Sengoku shook his head again, laughter in his eyes, as the carefree man ambled out of the room, ink stains and all. Now that the whole fiasco was finally over and done with, he turned back to his office to continue his work. Or no, it wasn't quite done, was it? There was still the aftermath to deal with, and Sengoku felt a familiar headache returning as he looked around at the mess around him with a frown.

"Now what am I going to do with all this..."

As always, reviews are very much appreciated, and if you have any requests about characters, interactions or scenarios you'd like to see from this drabble series, drop a note as well and I'll see if I get any inspiration for it!

Till next time!