suit of cups | x

The Devil.

That's what Hawkins thought when Kaidou stood in the crater he left on Kid's base.

"And did you have any such reminders? Warnings?"

Curious how he drew so many cards every day, but one pull from years ago shot to the surface of his memory.

It wasn't very fair, now that Hawkins had seen Kaidou's son and appreciated the horns were ogre, not infernal, but tarot was a book of archetypes embedded in his mind from adolescence. You embodied pages and queens, Strength and the Sun depending on the day, while he was a knight or a king, often the Fool or now, the Hermit.

You'd say something rational, historical. That the Devil in his deck had some literary forebear, that he wasn't anything to fear. But Hawkins was always a bit more literal than you. He saw Kaidou doublefisting gourds of sake, and the card's traditional definition of hedonism and indulgence walked before him, roaring about Eustass Kid and Straw Hat.

"Because you're known for your excesses."

Hawkins doesn't mind the Land of Wano. He hasn't had so much rice since he left home, left your family's hearth. That curious bleeding heart of yours wouldn't stand for it, though, at whose expense Hawkins and the Beasts Pirates ate so well. Your ancestral land was somewhere to the south of here, on the equator that sliced the Grand Line into wedges. Wano's borders, in practice, were only closed to the World Government, and Wanoan pirates weren't as rare as Kozuki Oden would make them seem, some even traversing the Calm Belt to Kano's shores. But they were part of the reason your great grandparents' generation risked the Calm Belt themselves: piracy between non-affiliated nations was no one's problem.

Hawkins didn't have much empathy to spare when he was more worried about his crew. He stored Faust's Vivre Card in his pauldron and yours in a pocket sewn into the inside of his every shirt. Faust's was a recent addition since Hawkins entered this alliance, a pit stop made before docking at Kid's base to watch the broadcast from Punk Hazard. Hawkins instructed Faust that at the first sign of trouble, the Mink was to manhandle as many of the men back onto the Grudge Dolph as possible and disembark immediately, leaving their captain behind. While Kid's subordinates went through a cavalcade of horrors, Hawkins had the dubious comfort of seeing his vice captain's Vivre Card wax and wane and wobble in circles as they tried to navigate the New World.

Don't come. Don't rescue me.

This was it for him.

At night, he set these scraps of paper on the floor by his futon and fell asleep watching them twitch and spark. Yours was torn in half, half on the Grudge Dolph. If Faust had any sense, he'd find you and tell you what happened to your captain; if he had any luck, you'd navigate them back to the North Blue yourself. Your Vivre Card was almost always whole, only singed at the edges with periodic exhaustion that healed over with a night's sleep, he assumed, and it always pointed west toward the Red Line.

The first year without you was hell.

They had no democratic way to use your bed besides letting your office-room become a sort of second sick bay or a guest room. You left a copy of your log there; you'd always kept parallel notes and charts, which was only sensible archival practice, but Hawkins couldn't help but think you anticipated leaving from the very start.

Irrational as it was, Hawkins looked for you everywhere, on his ship, in his cards, on land, as if you'd follow them like rumors about your fortunetelling claimed: that you weren't a pirate yourself, but a spectre on his trail. Hawkins' Witch. Spectre was more right, the way you haunted him.

That rumor didn't follow him to the New World, replaced by a reputation for brutality. In some ways, he was free: from your judgment, or more like your pain, your cursed empathy. After dismembering those pirates at Foodvalten, Hawkins was tense, waiting for you to bear down on him, but you didn't. And the silence ached.

Hawkins missed having another reader aboard. Most of the crew knew, at least, the Major Arcana, but Faust's knowledge of the Minor Arcana was rudimentary at best, and the Mink didn't care for divination, more taken with astronomy and the phases of the moon, nature and its cycles. You would counter his interpretations entirely, or pull from one of your own decks with insights he'd never think of, that he disagreed with, your stubborn way of shuffling only uprights.

And he missed you in his bed. Sex was a tertiary interest to the sound of your breathing, the scent of your perfume after a shower, your fingers idly combing through his hair, and knowing you were safe as you could be for the night, in his arms.

Hawkins doesn't often think the women of Wano resemble you. Their culture was too distinct, and Wano's climate too variable for that to be the case. Your skin was darker, your eyes infinitesimally rounder, and your hair had more texture. Beyond rice, the cuisine wasn't quite like your family's, either, so he felt like a guest in the wrong house.

The children made him think of you, though. How none of them stuck out, how alien you were to your North Blue village. Hawkins supposed the equivalent would be himself growing up here, or your homeland. He knew he was alien here, all the Beasts Pirates were, and you'd disapprove for the same reason you'd shook your head over headlines about Alabasta: "Pirates aren't imperialists. We're not supposed to stay on land, much less rule it."

Somewhere between the stars and the sea, you cultivated quite the political vocabulary. He would have attributed it to arguing with those Marine cadets you met while he was gone, but now he saw the conditions of a World Government non-affiliate and thought, with some irony, it was a wonder you were a pirate and not a revolutionary. Hawkins was grateful you chose the former, if only for a while.

Speaking of Marines, X Drake sometimes got in a friendly mood, usually if he had a bit of sake. Hawkins knew it was loneliness rather than fondness, missing his transparently obvious brothers-in-arms in the Navy, and Hawkins was the closest thing he had to a peer as a new addition to the Beasts Pirates.

Hawkins indulged in one drink. It was your birthday, and he hoped you were having one, too.

"What about you, Hawkins? Got anyone waiting for you?"

He regretted it already.

"Come on. Pretty boy. Some women are into that."

Hawkins' lip curled at what he knew Drake meant as a compliment, but smarted from childhood. "You're drunk."

"Oh? So there's a woman? I remember—" Drake hiccuped. "Your crew was all men. A girl at home? Or that witch?"

He said it facetiously, and Hawkins was glad to know the Navy wasn't interested enough to pursue you.

"I'm leaving."

"Don't you want to make it out? Get back to her?" Drake called after him.

Idiot. Awful spy.

Kizaru all but blew the Zoan user's cover at Sabaody. Hawkins tried to discern his allegiance only to be led in circles by the Seven of Cups, the Five of Swords, and the Moon. It all screamed not to trust the other Supernova.

Hawkins didn't trust anyone outside his crew, not Kid or Apoo for a single second of that alliance. (Of course his crew always includes you.) What possessed him to enter it, anyway? The fraternity of Sabaody two years prior? That was certainly Apoo's angle. Did Hawkins really think they or he stood a chance against Red-Haired? Kid lost to him once already. Why Red-Haired? Because he was one of the younger yonkou? Now that Hawkins made regularly contact with Kaidou, he laughed at the idea.

If Kaidou was the Devil, Red-Haired must be the Emperor. Big Mom was a grotesque sort of Empress, the Taurean goddess's logical extreme. And something about Blackbeard lying in wait all those years was like the Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man heals himself before returning from limbo, stronger and more ambitious than before, but Hawkins isn't like Teach. So he takes the hand he was dealt and returns to Kuri, thinking of you.

"Captain."

You didn't need to announce yourself as you stepped in the shower behind him. He smiled to himself, not turning around but stooping slightly for you to comb conditioner through his hair. You made a fond, exaggerated noise of annoyance.

"You're welcome."

"Thank you," he said, and he tried not to audibly react to your touch.

"How have you managed without me?"

You meant the years of only being crewmates, but Hawkins revisits these moments from your too-brief reunion like they're burn scars.

You didn't mean to be cruel. You were hurting, and he could help. But he looked at your empty room, or a gap in his wardrobe that he knew you were responsible for, and cursed you. How dare you remind him what he missed. How dare you dangle a dream he'd forgotten and then run away.

There's public bathhouses in Wano, mixed-gender, and Hawkins imagines walking into one with you, even as crewmates, not even touching each other, and any man or woman who coveted you would see the distinctive black cross between your shoulders, as large as the one at his throat and know you belonged to him first.

The thought of you moving on made him ill, moreso than whoever you slept with when he first traveled the North Blue, moreso than the one-night stands you sometimes had after you broke up. It meant he really was suspended here, and the world spun on while he didn't, Wano didn't, clutched as it was in its shogunate and Kaidou's claws.

The other Headliners made frequent visits to the Flower Capital's hanamichi, and Hawkins saw how young some of the geisha and maiko were outside these tea houses and became possessed by your bleeding heart. He wondered what you'd say. It wasn't necessarily sex work, and these women and girls could be as well-educated as you. It more reminded him how you called tarot a party trick; that an astrological reading was a kind of show; that you must have also used your beauty to draw clients. What did you say about your career reading cards in port cities? "It helps to be exotic."

The way some of the Beasts Pirates looked at the geisha reminded him of the leers he tried to shield you from, physically with the breadth of his body or forcefully with his Devil Fruit. You tolerated it depending on your intimacy at the moment, and welcomed it more before you left. To some degree, you hid in him, the new you who'd killed, the new you who'd survived.

He told himself you were happy, you were walking in the light, you were safe.

Hawkins didn't need to draw a single card to know Straw Hat's landing in Wano marked a major change.

When he tried calculating the younger pirate's chances of surviving Akainu, he drew several confounding spreads, and no matter how he shuffled the same two Major Arcana cropped up: Death and the Sun. Back then, Hawkins discerned Death signified Trafalgar Law, and the Sun came from Jinbe, First Son of the Sea's crew, the two men that fled Marineford with the injured Straw Hat.

But.

Every few mornings since your birthday, Hawkins pulled Death.

Where Straw Hat was lately, the Surgeon of Death was surely near. But Hawkins wasn't that naive. Something was ending: Hawkins' life, the Kurozumi clan, the shogunate, Wano's isolation, something.

Your cards were almost pedestrian. The Ace of Cups. The Two of Swords. The King of Coins. A choice, a new chance, presented by an older person, an earth sign. Hawkins didn't go around asking people's birth dates like you did. He didn't know Kaidou's, he didn't know Kid's or Apoo's, Drake's or any of his fellow Headliners'. He knew his crew's because you kept track.

Hitokiri Kamazo, he thought ironically as he looked at the Two of Swords.

The early morning before Himatsuri, your Vivre Card looks brand new, like it wasn't haphazardly torn but sold in a half sheet. It damn near glows in the darkness of Hawkins' room. Was it possible to become more alive? Only you could.

He wonders if you even look at his, and knows you must, at least every few days. You were too soft not to. He wonders if it reacts to his lost Straw Dolls, or Trafalgar bisecting him, and he wants to explain himself. You'd scold him or punch him over it, but hug him, always grateful for a false alarm.

Or maybe you were complete because you were without him, because you'd forgotten him. In that case, he can sail to Onigashima with a clear conscience. He'll serve, like the Hermit ought to, alone and without complaint.