Chapter Text
“We won’t get another chance like this again, Tsuru. Sure, I’m not thrilled about having to let a defector profit off this endeavor, but if Doflamingo knows about the trade, it’ll be the best opportunity we ever get to trap him. A true menace will be off the seas, and maybe then Rosinante will know some peace for once in his adult life.”
Tsuru turned her last conversation with Sengoku over in her mind for the umpteenth time that day. On the surface, it seemed like a reasonable proposition. Barrels’ defection and subsequent acquisition of one of the world’s most sought-after devil fruits was a blow, but retrieving it would appease Kong and all the assholes he answered to for a time if they were lucky, and there was a good chance Barrels would just use the money to retire and fade into obscurity, his stain on the service records allowed to be forgotten by the public.
More to the point, they’d finally get their hands on Doflamingo, after years of him giving them—and her specifically—the slip. The ticking time bomb that he represented would be defused, and Rosinante could be recalled, to put his talents to better use in ways that were not quite as soul-destroying. The kid might have grown to be as tall as a tree and very capable in his own right, but Tsuru still remembered the shy little boy with the mop of blond hair that used to nap in her office when Sengoku was busy.
She hadn’t seen him since this whole mess of an undercover operation had started—at least, not in any capacity to acknowledge their mutual history—but she knew from Sengoku how much it was wearing on him. Not that she found that idea terribly surprising, but she’d held her tongue regarding her own opinions of sending Rosinante into such a den of vipers. That had been a conversation between father and son, and she knew it had been a fraught one.
It’d be nice to see Rosinante back at some level of peace again. Sengoku too, for that matter. He was as professional as always, but Tsuru had known him for a long time, and he’d never slept as easy these past few years. With Rosinante coming home, maybe that would finally change for the better.
Still, even with all the optimistic outlooks for the immediate future, she still couldn’t shake the fact that something was wrong. And that was what had her here, at the bow of her ship as it approached the cluster of three islands where the trade was supposed to go down.
Tsuru had long ago learned to pay attention when her intuition was telling her something. It had saved her life, and others, more times than she could count, and in her opinion, served her better than most of her other skills. Most marines depended too heavily on Observation haki when they had it, but while useful, it did nothing in situations like this, when they were too far out from the actual action to predict things in real time. Sengoku was a fair hand with it himself, but he was tied to a desk most days and hadn’t been in the field for a while. Garp…well—Garp was Garp. He had his own style.
But Sengoku, for all his foresight, was clearly blind to the possibility of bad surprises in this particular instance. Tsuru knew he wanted his son back—he’d been stressed about this particular assignment since Rosinante had demanded he be assigned it—and he’d been especially concerned about how cagey the boy had been these last six months. At this point, he just wanted Rosinante to come home, and Doflamingo’s capture would ensure that. Sengoku desperately wanted everything to go off flawlessly, so he couldn’t countenance a scenario where that didn’t happen.
But too many things didn’t seem to add up when looked at in the broader context. How had Doflamingo known about the trade for the Ope-Ope no Mi in the first place? Only a handful of officers who’d carried Barrels’ message to the upper brass had any direct knowledge of the trade, and the movement of troops into the North Blue to ensure its retrieval had been cited in paperwork as a training maneuver. They’d been careful, so how did Doflamingo of all people learn about it?
More to the point, how was Rosinante involved in all this? He’d ‘taken a break’ from being with the Donquixote Pirates for the last six months, for no reason that had been adequately explained to her, so why had Doflamingo bothered informing him about the operation? Was Rosinante important to the trade somehow? Sengoku had implied Rosinante had known about the deal before he’d called for an update, but it hadn’t sounded to Tsuru that he had any idea as to why either.
Rosinante was, on Sengoku’s own instructions, supposed to be staying clear until the Donquixote Pirates were finished being mopped up, so in theory it should be a moot point. But all these loose ends had her on edge; lack of information got more people killed than anything else, and Doflamingo was not the sort to pull his punches if he saw an opening. But the operation was already past the point of no return, so at this point all she could do was follow the plan and hope it worked just as it was designed to.
But even so, she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something.
“Vice Admiral?” She can hear one of her younger officers snap to attention behind her. “We’ve received word from the relay ships that the Numancia Flamingo has been spotted off the east coast of Minion Island.”
That’s wrong. “Intelligence indicated they were headed for Rubeck,” she replies. Something’s off. But what?
A shuffle of papers behind her. Probably reviewing the manifests. “Reports say that Barrels’ ship has not departed Minion for Rubeck either. There is a note that a commotion was sighted through the glass outside his base of operations not too long ago. Is it possible that they were delayed, and Doflamingo got sick of waiting?”
No. After years of chasing Doflamingo, Tsuru figured she knew his psyche better than most. He had a temper, and a god complex, and he’d certainly be making sure whomever made him wait paid a price down the line, but he was patient. Everything was planned, and he wouldn’t risk such an important prize as the Ope-Ope no Mi by jumping the gun.
“Set a course for Minion. Full sail,” Tsuru snaps out, deciding to indulge her paranoia at least this little bit. “I want to know the second we have more information.”
“Ma’am!”
As the officer scurries away to relay her orders, Tsuru takes one last look out across the water before turning and making for the bridge and whatever comes after.
Let me be wrong, she thinks. Let this just be nerves. Let all this go off without a hitch, so I can laugh at my anxiety when the operation is finished, and no one has to know I had any doubts.
But that feeling of trepidation dogs her footsteps the entire way back, and Tsuru still can’t help but wonder what crucial thing they’d all missed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As soon as the cage of very familiar strings comes down across the entire island, Tsuru knows that her intuition had been right once again.
Really, it had been even before that, when they’d approached the shore out of sight of Doflamingo’s ship only to find a redheaded teenager running full tilt towards them, panicked and out of breath, only for the strings to slam into the ground right behind him.
It’d been even more of a shock to find out she knew this boy: Barrels’ son, who she remembered as a cheerful little child, full of excitement and hero-worship for his father. Not this skinny, underfed waif with hollow eyes, half-grown and awkward with adolescence. There had been a lot of speculation about what had happened to the boy—Dorry? Drake, that was it—after Barrels had gone rogue, but Tsuru could tell with just a glance that none of it had been good.
Her ladies were already busily bundling him up in something warm and hustling him towards the infirmary, and Tsuru would have left them to it if not for the words he blurted out right before she turned away.
“It all happened so fast! The lights went out, and there were a bunch of explosions in the house, but they didn’t make any sound at all! And there was this guy—I think it was a guy anyway?—tall and dressed in black. He went right for dad, took the fruit I think. That’s when I ran. Dunno what the strings are about.” He snaps to attention then, in a sloppy imitation of a proper Marine salute. “Ma’am! Ma’ams, I mean.”
No sound at all.
Tall, and dressed in black.
The missing piece falls into place.
“Oh, you little shit,” she breathes. “When I find you, your father is going to have to save you from me.”
“Ma’am?” the boatswain says in confusion. It’s enough to snap her back to the here and now.
“I want everyone non-critical to the operation of this ship on the shore now!” she shouts, sending her ladies scurrying every which way. Normally, she didn’t need to raise her voice to be obeyed; she didn’t suffer inefficiency on her ship, and the alacrity with which they responded showed that they were aware what sort of emergency her doing so heralded. “There’s one of our own in the line of fire out there, and I want him found!”
“What about the Donquixote Pirates?” one of them shouts back. Tsuru bites a sharp retort back; technically, they were still their targets. It was a reasonable question.
“Sail the ship around to box the Numancia Flamingo in,” she decides. “And if you see any of the officers, fire at will, but do not give chase if they manage to out speed us. A life hangs in the balance.”
Because what else could it be, if Rosinante had the Ope-Ope no Mi in hand? Tsuru didn’t know why he’d taken it, but the second Doflamingo knew he had it, and Rosinante refused to hand it over? He was dead.
In a snap decision, Tsuru grabs two of her best medics. With the clear conflict the island was embroiled in, and Rosinante’s own penchant for getting injured at the worst times, Tsuru wanted to make sure she had that support if and when they found him. It was still possible he’d managed to escape before the strings had come down, but Tsuru wasn’t willing to bank on blind optimism right now. Blind optimism got people killed.
“Hand the boy off to an ensign,” she directs curtly, nodding in Drake’s direction. “And bring your weapons and your kits. I want you prepared for anything.” She grabs the ratlines on the starboard side, preparing to debark. If she was right, their time frame was measured in minutes.
They’d only been on the beach for five minutes when the strings surrounding the island begin to recede, and the familiar sound of her ship’s cannons start echoing around the cliff face that separated them from where the Numancia Flamingo had made anchor. Tsuru bites back a curse. That was far sooner than she’d been hoping; if there were targets to fire on, that meant they were either on or returning to the ship. Which implied that whatever it was they had been doing on the island, they had finished.
They’re quick enough to round the bluff before the Numancia Flamingo pulls up her anchor, but not quick enough to catch the Donquixote Pirates on the sand. Tsuru still watches though, looking for any clue as to what had happened on the island. None of the faces she normally sees in her reports look injured, or like they’d been involved in a fight, but that doesn’t necessarily tell her anything useful.
She can see Doflamingo on the deck, and he’s pissed. She’d expect him to be at least a little cocky if he’d gotten his way, even in the face of her cannons, but there’s no evidence of that now, and on top of that his crew is far more rattled seeming than they normally are. The small girl-child is in tears. So, things went poorly for them.
There’s no sign of Rosinante, which could be good or bad. The pessimist in Tsuru leans towards bad, if only because of the degree of anger Doflamingo seems to be displaying. Rosinante had reported that he placed a lot of value on his perceived loyalty to him, so now the question was this: was Doflamingo angry simply because he’d been betrayed? Or because of what, in his mind, he’d found necessary to do in the face of that betrayal?
“Half of you, lock down this beach. The Donquixote Pirates might still get away, but I don’t want to give them more avenues of escape than absolutely necessary. The rest of you, with me.” She points inland, where a line of tracks is clearly visible in the snow. “I want to see exactly what they were up to here.”
Part of her cringes at the likelihood that she is giving up the best chance they have of capturing some or all of the quarry she’s been pursuing for nigh on half a decade now, but her damn intuition is still acting up. Something is still off here, and she can tell deep in her bones that if she doesn’t listen, she’ll regret it. There might be consequences for her personally if they get away, but she’ll eat those when and if they become necessary. Her service record would speak for itself, and she can live with being wrong about what conclusions her suspicions are leading her to.
Unfortunately, she’s validated almost before they’ve gone a quarter mile, when her Observation haki picks up a very familiar, very weak signature, and Tsuru feels her heart drop into her stomach.
She breaks off into a run, trusting her subordinates to follow, grasping tight to the weak thread of will and existence that’s threatening to stutter out like a bloodhound following a trail.
Don’t you dare. If there was ever a time to be stubborn, do it now!
She rounds the corner of a run-down wall, only to find exactly what she hadn’t wanted to see: the broken and bloodied body of a young man whom Tsuru had spent as much time with as she had her own granddaughter.
“Oh, Rosinante,” she breathes. “What did you do?”
It’s a horrific sight, the young man spread-eagled in the snow ringed in a pool of his own blood, an unfired but loaded and cocked pistol lying nearby. The cluster of bullet wounds in his torso are erratic, but noticeably the result of a close-range assault. The clinical, logical part of her brain tells her that that reflected an emotional assailant, that this attack was a crime of the moment, not a planned assassination.
The other half of her mind is imagining what she could do to Doflamingo if she got her hands on him.
By some stroke of providence, two of the ladies who had followed her up here were her those same medics she’d insisted on bringing along earlier, and like the rest of her crew, they were skilled, no-nonsense women. Tsuru didn’t have to say a thing before they were on Rosinante, shouting for assistance from the remainder of the crew for support.
Tsuru moves woodenly out of their way, breathing evenly to keep her mask of control firmly in place. She makes note of the location, the way the blood spatters on the snow, even the marks in the earth near the wall that indicated several boxes or chests had been here not long ago. Had the Ope-Ope no Mi been in one of those? Was Doflamingo’s rage at having shot his brother enough to mask the clear victory obtaining such a devil fruit would be, or had he missed out on that as well? And in that case, where was it?
“Vice Admiral?” One of the medics approaches, her face a mask of professionalism. Good. If Tsuru is going to hear bad news, at least there will be no waffling or wailing on behalf of her troops. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and he’s been injured in several critical areas. He’ll definitely die if we leave him here but moving him might have the same effect in the long run. Him surviving…it’d be a miracle.”
“We have to try,” she says firmly. “I would never be able to look his father in the face again if I didn’t.” Or myself.
“Ma’am?” the medic asks, clearly confused, and Tsuru has to take a moment to center herself. Right; these women wouldn’t know Rosinante as anything other than Doflamingo’s second-in-command. Their concern would be whether or not saving the man could be used as leverage with a notorious pirate crew, or if his information would be worth the expenditure of resources.
She makes sure her voice is level before answering. “That is the adopted son of Admiral Sengoku, a Navy Intelligence asset and a Commander in his own right. If that’s not enough incentive, then know that he likely has critical information on what went down here today, information that could have far-flung consequences if he passes before he can report it.”
Blessedly, she does not have to elaborate any further, because the woman’s eyes widen and her mouth drops open, before snapping back to a mask of professionalism. “Understood,” she says curtly, and pivots back to help her crewmates with the triage.
Tsuru turns back towards the shore, watching as the Numancia Flamingo manages to set her sails to catch the wind and maneuver out of the blockade. Dimly, she can hear the medics behind her yelling into their snails to prepare the infirmary for a severe trauma case and to send runners with a support stretcher large enough to accommodate Rosinante’s frame. She does not allow herself to dwell on her quarry’s escape yet again; with the Donquixote Pirates in the wind, Rosinante is what she needs to focus on now.
All in all, it only takes a few minutes to get Rosinante situated on the stretcher, his wounds provisionally wrapped and packed with fresh snow to slow the blood flow in hopes of preventing a bleed out before they could operate on him. Then her crew is marching back through the snow at double time, the fastest they could reasonably go without jostling the body they carried too much.
“Set a course for Marineford, full sail,” she snaps as soon as her feet hit the deck. “The most direct route possible. I don’t care if it takes us through the Calm Belt or not.” Briefly, she wishes for one of those prototype ships the scientists were so proud of, with the seastone embedded in the hull, but that didn’t change her directive. She’d fought sea kings before; she’d do it again if necessary. “I will be in my cabin. I want updates on his condition every ten minutes on the dot.”
And I will pray that when I call Sengoku, it’s to report a miracle, and not a death.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The call reaches him at his desk, and for once Sengoku is glad that Garp has chosen now of all times to be a bother: it means that when the news comes that Tsuru’s ship has docked, he feels no compunction about interrupting their conversation to make a beeline for the trauma wing of Marineford’s hospital, Garp on his heels.
Her first call had come nearly a week ago, as he was reviewing reports on the newest batch of officer trainees for potential promotions and transfers. It was normally a task he took very seriously; the best marines were those who were well-rounded, and he made his assignments with that intent in mind, sanding the rough edges off the most promising recruits so as to allow them to flourish.
All those careful considerations had gone out the window the moment he heard Tsuru’s report.
She hadn’t been able to tell him much, but the details had been horrific. Tsuru was never the sort to spare a thought for feelings in the face of necessary information, and that information was bleak. She’d called every few hours with an update since then, and every time Sengoku had been convinced that the next one would carry news that his son had been lost.
Sengoku had gone over what little she’d been able to give him in the way of intelligence on the situation with a fine-toothed comb, but he was still no closer to figuring out why Rosinante had made such a rash decision. Why go after the fruit like that, when all he had to do was keep away? It didn’t make sense.
The fact that he might never have the chance to hear Rosinante’s reasoning from his own mouth hurt far more than the mystery of his actions did.
He’s clearly been expected, because two medical aides are waiting for him outside the double doors into the surgical theatre, shoulders set like they’re expecting a fight.
“Move aside,” he says brusquely, banking on the authority he normally does not like—or usually has—to use.
“With respect, Admiral,” the older of the two interjects. “The doctors have requested you remain out here for the time being. The patient is in critical condition and has been for an extended period of time, and all of their focus is required to perform the necessary procedures. They do not have time to talk right now.”
“I do not need them to talk,” Sengoku says crisply, moving to push past them regardless of the warning. “I simply wish to confirm the state of the soldier in there for myself.”
“Admiral—"
“Let them do their job, Sengoku. I didn’t rush all the way here for you to just mess this all up at the eleventh hour.”
Tsuru looks tired, her normally pristine blouse rumpled under her jacket, and her bun trailing tired-looking wisps that frame her face. It was a level of exhaustion that Sengoku had only seen on her a handful of times. That more than anything spoke to him of just how hard the past week had been for her as well.
“He was stable when I handed him over,” she says, cutting right to the heart of the matter. “Say what you will about your boy, but he has the constitution of a horse. You’re lucky I had more than the basic complement of medical supplies on my ship, and that we had enough matches to his blood type on my ship to keep up the necessary blood transfusions. My infirmary is tapped out, though; I’ll need a full restock before I go back out. Between him and the other boy, the girls had their hands full on the way back.”
Sengoku is too focused on the details of Rosinante’s condition to care overmuch about anything else right now, so it’s Garp who asks the necessary question: “Boy? What boy?”
“Barrels’ kid. My crew found him fleeing from whatever chaos Rosinante had caused on Minion. He’s how we knew he was in the area in the first place. He’s malnourished and twitchy, and at some point Barrels fed him a monster of a devil fruit. He’s been swearing up and down that he wants to enlist, and despite how scrawny he looks he is old enough, but you might want to keep an eye on him. You know how some of the officers might react considering his background. Short-sighted idiots.”
She sighs and steps forward, lowering her voice so that no one else in the hallway aside from herself, Garp and Sengoku could hear her words. “Look, Sengoku, I need to go make my report to Kong before anything else happens, but you should know there is some information that doesn’t line up, beyond what I told you over the snail. I’m going to do my best to gloss over the specifics, but Kong is going to want to know how Doflamingo figured out about the trade, and he’s going to want to know why I let him get away. Do not,” she warns, holding up a finger, “let this shake you in a place where word can get back to him. He's always thought you were too personally attached to Rosinante, and he’s deeply annoyed that you’re the clear front-runner to replace him someday.”
“It’s not like I was the one who told Rosinante about the deal,” Sengoku growls. “They can’t blame me for this.”
“I know that, and you know that, and in a perfect world that’s an acceptable answer for the brass, but you and I both know that this world is far from perfect,” Tsuru responds bluntly. “Now; you are not a doctor, or any kind of medical specialist. But you are a strategist, and a damn fine politician when your head’s screwed on straight. Use that. Because the second that boy opens his eyes, seas willing, the intelligence corps and internal affairs are going to be all over him.” She sighs. “I wish I could be more help, Sengoku, but we’re missing too much information, and all the answers we need are trapped inside your boy’s head.”
“Don’t say that,” Sengoku chides. “You brought him back. If you hadn’t listened to your own intuition, I—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to; they all know what would have happened. Rosinante dead in the snow in the middle of nowhere, likely to only be discovered well after the fact, with no help and no support, killed for the simple crime of trying to make a difference.
“Yes, well,” Tsuru says, patting him on the arm. He doesn’t need her to say any more. Of the three of them, only Garp had ever had any ease in expressing his feelings. “Tell me when the doctors know more?”
“Of course,” he says quietly, and then watches as she walks away without another word, before turning and sitting down in one of the rickety chairs sitting outside the doors he’s been barred from passing through for the time being. Because Tsuru is right; he’s not a doctor. He just has to hope Marineford’s best will be enough.
Garp, who almost certainly has other things he needed to be doing, sits down heavily in the chair next to him.
“You gonna be okay?”
Sengoku’s first instinct is to snap at his oldest friend, before the thankfully still-functioning logical part of his brain reigns him in. No, of course he’s not okay. He’d been against Rosinante going on this mission from the very beginning, for exactly this reason.
“I don’t know what to do next, Garp” he says instead. “Doflamingo’s in the wind, and any useful information we might have is locked inside Rosinante’s brain. There are so many questions, and almost no answers. Even I can’t plan in the absence of good intelligence, Garp. What am I supposed to do now, when it doesn’t feel like there’s a logical path forward?”
“You do just what Tsuru said,” Garp replies, simple and assured as ever. “Your job. And, when the time comes to properly confront the bastard who did this, whether she finally ropes him in or something else happens, you make damn well sure he knows what’s coming to him and why. Don’t got the intelligence? Well, work on getting it. Take what rest you need and come back swinging twice as hard.” He slams a fist into his other hand to drive home his point.
“Worst thing you can do is sit there and wallow. That doesn’t do Rosinante any good. Doesn’t do anyone else any good either, not yourself and not any of the people Doflamingo’s out there terrorizing. And if you need someone to visit a little justice on the scrawny chicken, let me know. Me and the boys would be happy to take a little detour from our normal duties to vacation in the North Blue.”
A threat of violence is pretty much exactly the sort of thing Sengoku expects when Garp tries to be helpful, but that doesn’t make the offer any less genuine. “Thank you,” he says honestly. “I will keep that in mind. For now, though, I think I need to take a moment. To just…think.”
“Reasonable. But don’t think too long. Someone else might get to him first, and then you’d miss out on all the fun.”
“Garp.”
Later, Sengoku sits by Rosinante’s bedside, watching the slow rise and fall of his son’s chest as he lies in the hospital bed, as dead to the world as he had been when he’d arrived, and wonders if he’d missed something, during their increasingly spare conversations these last six months, that should have clued him in to something being wrong.
When Rosinante had mentioned taking a leave of absence from the Donquixote Pirates, Sengoku hadn’t thought too much of it. He’d seemed increasingly concerned during their calls, agitated and tired, and a break seemed like exactly what he needed to reorient himself. He’d been undercover for almost four years at that point; if anything, it was overdue.
And while he couldn’t exactly come home during his break, he could have easily begged off time with his brother by claiming he was chasing a lead or working on making a connection that would be beneficial to Doflamingo. Hell, it was possible Doflamingo had known about the Ope Ope no Mi for some time, and Rosinante had made chasing information about it his excuse. It painted a very poor picture about the holes in marine intelligence, but it would make sense.
But what had he actually been doing on Minion? Sengoku had requested a copy of Tsuru’s official report as soon as Marineford’s clerks had gotten their hands on it, and she hadn’t been kidding. Several things did not add up, and the only answer to that enigma might never wake up.
And that was a very real possibility. Tsuru’s crew had done what they could, but they were only trained in field medicine for the most part, with the exception of her chief medic, whom Sengoku owed a great deal of thanks and perhaps a promotion. Perhaps Rosinante would have had a better chance if there had been a dedicated surgeon, but most people with that level of medical training tended to avoid enlisting, with so much of their time and energy devoted to their craft. And the islands of that area of the North Blue didn’t have much in the way of medical services to begin with, so any attempts in finding a doctor on land would likely have ended in tragedy.
As it was, Marineford’s best doctors and surgeons had worked on him for hours, and there were still further procedures that needed doing once he’d stabilized some more. But the lead doctor on Rosinante’s case had been grim, and the list of injuries and physical traumas Sengoku had been given beggared the imagination. He’d seen graphic battlefield injuries that were less serious than this.
In the end, it was the cold temperatures and Rosinante’s own size that had saved him. If he’d been even slightly smaller, the same spread of bullet wounds would have obliterated most of his major organs. As it was, he’d need at least one transplant, maybe two, liver and kidney function being propped up by machines and a potent cocktail of drugs. To say nothing of the therapy that would need to follow.
If they even got that far.
There were concerns about brain death, the doctor had said. Although scans that had been taken of his brain and spinal cord had come back with no immediate cause for panic, the longer he stayed unconscious, the more likely it was that he wouldn’t wake up. That would almost be worse, Sengoku thinks; to lose him to a long, slow fall into oblivion.
At some point someone—Tsuru’s crew or the doctors here, he didn’t know—had cleaned the lingering makeup of Rosinante’s disguise off his face, and he couldn’t help but notice how very young his son looked, lying there with nothing to hide behind, pale as a sheet and his hair trimmed back. The hospital gown did little to obscure his injuries, both new and old, and it painted a grim picture; the image of youth bearing the scars of a lifetime.
“Was this worth it?” he whispers to his unresponsive son. “Going after Doflamingo? You were so adamant about bringing him down yourself. It was all you could think about, when his name started making the rounds in the papers. I saw it all, you know. The late nights, the obsession. The uptick in how many cigarettes you purchased from the commissary.”
It had gotten so bad that Sengoku had received complaints from Rosinante’s commanding officer on the last mission he’d undertaken. Tired, unfocused, easily distracted and strung out, the man had privately related to Sengoku. Not like his normal quality of service at all.
That had been what had prompted Sengoku to agree to the undercover operation in the end: the fear that Rosinante’s obsession with brother would get him killed indirectly. At least while on assignment, Sengoku had had a direct line to him, and in those early days Rosinante had never been sharper. He’d never been happy about the arrangement, but over time, he’d come to accept it as something his son needed to do.
That’s what made his recent actions all the more confusing.
“You know, you never told me what you called your own brand of justice,” Sengoku muses. “Is that what prompted you to do this? What did you see, what did you learn out there that became more important than the most important task you ever gave yourself?”
His only answer is the hiss of a ventilator, and the beeping of machinery.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is almost another full six months later when Sengoku is called back to the trauma wing for a very different reason.
“—woke up this morning unexpectedly,” the doctor rambles on as Sengoku listens with only half an ear, striding down the hallway with enough speed that the shorter man has to jog to keep up. “He’s very weak, but he’s disoriented and fighting further care. We were hoping you—”
“Understood,” Sengoku snaps. He does not have the time to explain Rosinante’s lingering trauma to this man. All Rosinante would have registered was his inability to move, and that would have brought up far too many memories. Memories that Sengoku had spent years helping his son overcome, but never completely forget.
At the end of the hallway is a door that Sengoku has become quite familiar with, and he takes the briefest of moments to collect himself before opening it to reveal the equally familiar room on the other side. He does not know what exactly he’s going to see, but for the first time in a long while, he begins to feel a spark of hope.
When he does enter the room, it takes all of his mental discipline to keep from crying.
Rosinante looks a fright, his muscles wasted from disuse and bones stark against paper-thin skin. He doesn’t seem to have the strength to do much more than raise his head, but he’s still got a shaky arm extended to fend off the very concerned aide by his bedside.
His eyes, when they make contact with Sengoku’s, are unfocused and feverish, and wild with panic. The aide is babbling something that is clearly meant to be soothing, but Sengoku elects to ignore him in favor of focusing on the only important person in the room: his son.
“Rosinante,” he says, holding his gaze as best he can and speaking in the calmest tone he can muster, even as his heart wants to scream out its relief. “Rosi. It’s me. There are no enemies here. You’re fine. You’re safe.”
Slowly—too slowly—recognition seeps back into Rosinante’s eyes, and the adrenaline he’d clearly been experiencing wears off, causing him to sag back fully into bed, exhausted by even that little exertion.
He opens his mouth as if to say something, but no words come out, only a faint hiss of aspirated breath. Sengoku grabs a glass of water from the nearby side table, where he knew it always sat. He’d memorized the exact layout of this room well over the past few months.
The time it takes Rosinante to swallow even half of the water in the glass is agonizing. Sengoku sits there silently the whole time, biting back joy and concern both. That’s not what Rosinante needs right now.
When Rosinante indicates he’s finished and Sengoku takes the glass back, he’s gratified to see far more clarity in his son’s eyes. The fears about brain damage had never gone away, especially not with the amount of time Rosinante had remained unresponsive, and perhaps this was still the wishes of a hopeful father, but that look gave him more hope for his son’s recovery than anything he’d seen yet.
Rosinante opens his mouth again, and it might be creaky from disuse and far weaker than he’d wish it, but Sengoku finally gets to hear his son’s voice for the first time in half a year.
“Where’s Law?”