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one-sunny · 2 months ago

Note

Hello!

Could I request the first time Ace, Law and Zoro get a kiss on the cheek from the crush?

Maybe reader just went away after ?

Thank you !

A Kiss on the Cheek

hi there! thanks for the request, this was such a cute prompt and so different from the angst I usually end up writing (:

Masterlist

♤ Ace ♤

The Second Division Commander held a certain level of cockiness that his crew has lovingly grown to ignore. Everyone was aware that Ace was too good of a guy to focus on the occasional attitude, and some were aware of the facade that this actually was.

You fell into the latter of the mix.

So when Ace returns from a month long mission, greasy hair and dirty skin, presenting you with a particular item that you had been searching for at any and all stops along the grand line, there was an expected level of smugness about him. Ace grins at you as he holds out the bag, watching close as you inspect it, a smile breaking out on your face.

“Ace, this is amazing, where did you find it?”

And of course, you’re met with a long winded tale that a few of the others join in on listening to. But Ace can never stop himself from teasing you, akin to the little boy on a playground, pulling on his crush’s pigtails. Along the way, he throws in a few teasing jabs about how desperate you were for this particular item. About how unlucky you have been. About how he saved you from a life long search.

“Looks like Ace is fishing for some kinda reward.” Marco smirks, nudging your arm.

“Nah, nothing like that.” Ace tips his head back with a laugh. Though you don’t miss the playful look he first throws you. “Maybe some recognition.”

“Or a pat on the back.” Thatch teases.

“Maybe even a kiss on the cheek.” Marco adds on with a sly grin.

Ace flushes at this, coughing as he tries to fumble a retort to all their teasing. The script flipped far too fast for his liking. “No, I just-“

“Oh, maybe you guys are right.” There’s a teasing smile on your lips. “Ace did save me from, what was it, decades of searching?”

“I believe it was a life long search.” Izou corrects.

You snap your fingers to point at him, “Right. Life long.”

Ace nervously rubs the back of his neck, the facade effectively shattered by the other commanders. “You know i’m just messing around with you-“

But you step forwards before Ace can even realize, one hand cupping his jaw while you plant your lips on his cheek. Ace freezes up at this, feeling his body burning hotter than the inferno he already is, as the commanders around him howl with laughter.

He can pick up your giggles among this, even as you fade from the crowd and simply waltz away. Leaving him with a fluttering in his chest and red ears. Your eyes lock as you spare him a glance over your shoulder, your playful smile pulling a bashful grin to his lips.

And this sparks a whole new round of teasing the young Commander.

࿔ Law ࿔

“What’s for lunch!” A loud voice echoes through the walls of the polar tang as crew members begin to file into the kitchen, crowding around the table with bright grins and high energy. Law follows along with the pack, eyes cast around the kitchen to land on your form working to finalize something on a large tray.

“Sandwiches!” Your bright voice booms as you carry a platter over and place it in the middle of the table.

Your bright and cheery tone was something that could always lighten Law’s mood, but his nose scrunches at the food being served. He should be thankful for your generosity, always providing for his crew and catering to everyone’s individual needs, but that alone meant that you should already know. Did Law mean that little to you? Using the one food that he loathed? A pang of hurt runs through him at the very thought.

“Oh, stop sulking, Captain.” You bump the man’s shoulder as you trail back to the kitchen to gather up something else.

Law attempts to steel his face as he follows right behind you. “You, uh, you know that-“

“That you don’t like bread. That you loathe it actually. It’s a hate crime to your taste buds.” You offer with a cheeky grin, leaning against the counter beside of him, tilting in a little bit closer to him than necessary. If it was anyone else, Law would have certainly protested how close you were. “Course I know that, Cap.” A shiver shoots down Law’s spine at those words so close to his ear. “But the bread was about to go bad and I don’t like wasting food.”

He attempted to bite his tongue and hold back his protests. “So what am I-“

“Mind helping out?” You’re moving away before he can protest further. And as you look back over your shoulder at him, you’re able to see the Surgeon of Death himself pouting at you. Holding back your smile requires great effort as you nod your head in effort to call him over.

With a huff, Law moves over to your side to grab a tray of the dreaded lunch. Instead, what you offer out to him is a small plate of three onigiri, perfectly prepared. Your eyebrows are raised as you hold the plate out to him and that annoyingly cute smile is on your face.

“There’s your lunch, Captain, specially made.”

Law hesitantly takes it from your hand with greater difficulty meeting your eye than he would like to admit. He can feel the heat creeping up his collar under your watchful eye and nervously tugs at his hat to cover more of his face.

“Now, stop pouting at me, or your crew might just think you have a soft spot.” And with that teasing tone in your voice, you move to walk past him, stopping only briefly to brush your lips over his already blushing cheeks. “And don’t forget that I’m here to take care of ya, Law.”

His entire body bristles as you waltz back to the crew with another tray in hand. He is thankful that they were all preoccupied by the meal you so thoughtful prepared for them and completely unaware of the flood of emotions evident on Law’s flushed face. As his eyes fall to the plate in hand, warmth floods through his entire being and he is almost certain his heart skipped a beat.

You were certainly going to be the death of your Captain.

ᯤ Zoro ᯤ

The attack absolutely would have killed you. The distance. The power. The injuries you have already sustained. Had they made contact, you would have died.

But then he appeared out of nowhere.

There wasn’t time to strike before the blow was dealt. He coughed up blood, took a deep breath, and then he moved to take them out. No thoughts behind the action. Just pure rage. Far more aggressive than the man usually was in such a fight.

Now, you both sit collapsed against the railing of the Sunny. Sweaty and beat up, but alive.

“Zoro.” You mumble, unsure if the man was still awake by your side. He grunts in response, eyes closed and hand resting over his swords. “You didn’t have to do that, you know?”

“Do what?”

“Take the hit.” Your focus is solely on a loose string on your pants, pinching at it to avoid looking in his direction. “I could have��” Words trail off. “I would have been okay in the end.”

Zoro is quiet for a long, lingering moment. “I didn’t want to take the chance.”

“I’m strong, Zoro, I can handle-“

“I don’t care.” The man huffs out, eye opening to level on you. To an outsider, there was an angered heat in his gaze, but you knew better. This particular look actually held a certain softness that was entirely rare. “Until I get strong enough to stop an attack like that, I’ll take it every time to make sure…” He trails off, the determination dying on his tongue. “To make sure the crew is safe.”

“The crew.” You echo quietly.

“Yeah, well.” Zoro mutters as his eye closes, head falling back against the railings. “You should still go to Chopper, you took a beating.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re-“ Zoro bites his tongue at your stubbornness. He certainly believed you should be checked out, but he knew that this sentiment would only be thrown back into his face. Yet he couldn’t help but worry about you. “Fine, then just get some rest.”

You hum lowly, “Fine. I’ll go rest.”

Zoro hears movement from his side, believing this to be your retreating form, until he senses your presence closing in on him. His eye snaps open just in time to catch you leaning in to press your lips to his grimy cheek. Soft. Delicate. Warmth blooming in his chest.

His breath catches in his throat at the fleeting moment and before he can even process what had just happened, you were gone. Zoro clenched his jaw in an effort to stamp down the smile that threatens to break out.

A simple confirmation. He would always take the hit for you.

#my first zoro piece lets gooooo #i love that directionally challenged man #roronoa zoro one shot #roronoa zoro x reader #portgas d ace x reader #portgas ace x reader #trafalgar law x reader #trafalgar d law x reader #one-fics #header: flowers in a vase (p. renoir)

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chiropteracupola · 8 months ago

Text

"What Grows on the Oak," 2024.

it's the time of year, once more, for an original spooky story!

The oak trees lie across the hills like low smoke, soft and near, and the road dips down into the valley, as inviting as any road has ever been, but the girl on the bench of the buggy on the hilltop makes no move to follow it.

Rose looks out down the road and over the hills, and taps her fingers beside her on the bench. It’s a quiet enough afternoon that there’s little other sound but the high thin sound of insects, and the wind in the long grass, and Rose’s fingers, tapping. The horse, still in harness, looks up and flicks its ear, as if in protest at the sound, and Rose sighs and forces her hand still.

There is a girl in the nearest tree, Rose notices — the fact of it is idly categorized, without true interest. All the same, the light is catching in her hair, dashing shadows over her face as she sits draped across the curve of a branch, and Rose cannot look away from her.

The Fosters, at whose door Rose waits, have no daughter — no children but the one still-toddling son, who Rose remembers as a colicky, twitchy boy. Besides, this girl looks nothing like Mr Foster and his wife, for her hair stands out about her head like a bundle of mistletoe, pale as sun-worn wood. She is, perhaps, their hired girl. Rose is struck by envy, suddenly, that the Fosters’ hired girl had the time to shinny up a tree in the last light of evening, and still would be paid for her work…

Rose sighs, leaning her chin on her hand. Perhaps it is enough for her to be her father’s driver, and to have bed and board in his house — perhaps some day there will be money for school again, in San Francisco or even out east. And perhaps it is not enough, and perhaps there will not ever be.

“Hello, doctor’s driver,” says a voice at Rose’s elbow. Rose yelps in surprise, then turns. It is the girl with the mistletoe hair — dry moss hair — hair like a cloudy day in August.

“No, you’re his daughter, are you not?” asks the Fosters’ hired girl, and Rose nods. “Miss del Llano, that’d make you.”

“Just Rose, please.” She’ll be Miss some other day — not now, in her too-short skirts and with her plait hanging over her shoulder.

“May I come up?” asks the girl.

“Surely,” says Rose, and the girl has swung herself into Rose’s father’s accustomed seat in a fluttering of pale skirts.

“Your father is the doctor — what does he do here? “He is a leech, then? A bloodletter?”

“Don’t be silly, he’s not medieval!”

“Hm-mm, I shall believe you when you prove it me,” says the girl, laughing, and leans her chin on her hand to make herself Rose’s mirror. Side by side they sit for a while, and the dark gathers in across the hills until oaks and grassland alike are made one mass of shadow. Somewhere in the trees beyond the road, a horned owl utters its deep, melancholy cry out into the dusk.

“If ghosts had telephones, I should think they’d sound rather like that,” says Rose, the early chill of after-sunset driving her quite easily to a morbid sort of cheer.

“How the times change,” says the girl, with an odd, but not entirely unhappy, look in her eyes. “No, my dear; ghosts use the same telephones as you and I, as you well know.” Rose does not know, well or otherwise, much at all about ghosts, so she nods, and feels a little more of the girl’s weight settle on her shoulder.

“You have very cold hands,” says Rose, and the girl from the oak tree smiles and taps at Rose’s cheek with clammy fingers.

“I always have, I’m afraid.”

“It’s no bother, really.” And so they sit and watch the sky, the falling-dusk and the distant fog that creeps over the hills, until there’s light, sharp as a door opening.

Rose turns, and it is only Dr del Llano, leaving his patient with his hat in his hand. She turns back, and the Fosters’ hired girl is gone.

“How is Mrs. Foster,” Rose asks, without any particular feeling in her voice, and her father shakes his head in reply. But the road down into the valley, where lies the town, is before them, and Rose is pleased enough at the journeying that she asks no further questions.

It’s in the hills and on the road that Rose meets, again, with the oak tree girl, the mistletoe girl, the girl with hands like marble in the shade. Once again, Rose is waiting for her father while he attends a patient, and, lazing in the sun, Rose has pushed the sleeves of her shirtwaist up to her elbows.

And then the girl is there again, with her shock of cobweb hair moving, ever so faintly, in a breeze that doesn’t seem to reach as far as the buggy-seat.

“Hello, my pretty-lovely,” says the girl, putting her hand out to the horse still in its traces. Though usually affectionate, the horse puts back its ears and pulls its head away.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” says Rose, half-laughing. “Save your sweet words for someone who wants them, all the same.”

“Has she a name, then?”

“Other than Morgan, for what she is? Not at all,” Rose replies. Neither she nor her father have ever thought of one, for all that they’re fond of the hardworking little mare. “And have you a name, then?” For she’s remembered, now, that her oak-tree girl had never told her of it.

“I’m called Saro,” says the girl, and again swings herself up beside Rose. “What does your father do here, my Rose?”

“Oh, I oughtn’t say,” and Saro looks back at her with a stare of please? and Rose laughs and says anyway. She shouldn’t gossip, but she leans in close anyway, and whispers that “Old Man Lucas has got the clap, and him a widower these ten years!” Saro’s mouth twitches at the corners — she can’t hide her laugh for long, and it bursts, bright, out from her.

“I shall tell, I shall tell!” says she, and Rose coughs on her own laugh with a still-merry “Don’t!”

“You’ll have to catch me and make me, first!” and Saro leaps down from the buggy and runs, her skirts, her hair a flash of white in the golden-dry grass. And Rose, her spirits raised beyond what a grown girl such as herself should permit, follows. She’s less fleet-footed than Saro, earthbound still, stumbling on furrows in the land, catching her heels in ground-squirrel burrows.

Saro, she’s sure, is holding back for her benefit — letting herself be caught. And Rose does catch her, knocking her off her feet and into the grass. Saro’s laughing-merry still, her hair stuck full of grass-seed and foxtails. Close-to, Rose can see the freckles that dapple her cheeks and nose, the squint of her dark eyes when she smiles. Saro flicks Rose’s cheek, the snap of her fingers like a prickle of frost, and Rose lies there in the dusty field, entirely lost.

But Saro’s on her feet again before Rose can blink, before Rose can reach out to her, and Rose is standing, blinking in the sunlight, stumbling back to the buggy as she dusts bits of dry grass from her skirt. She buttons the sleeves of her shirtwaist again, the cuffs of which don’t quite come to her wrists anymore, and laughs when her father hands her up into her seat like a lady.

“The best whip I ever had,” he says, perfectly straight-faced.

“Gee-up!” says Rose, holding the reins in one hand and imagining herself perched atop a stagecoach. But even for all her imaginings, she’s as good a driver as her father says, and draws the horse into a gentle trot to see them home. It’s hill and dale down into the valley, hill and dale again like a song, and in the inner slopes lie trees in amid the dust-golden grasses of summer. Beneath the sparse, spreading branches, it is suddenly cooler, then warmer again, as the horse steps evenly onward and back into the sun.

“That’s mistletoe, you know,” says Dr del Llano, as he’s said a thousand times before, and points up at the gray-green mass that clings among the summer-sparse branches of an oak.

“Isn’t that for Christmastime?” asks Rose.

“It’s an odd thing we bring it in for the Nativity,” muses her father, still looking back at the tree as they pass it by. “Poison, that — and it chokes the life out of the oak tree, too. Not a kindly thing, mistletoe, but we hang it up with the flor de Nochebuena all the same…”

He doesn’t speak after that, but sings instead, an out-of-season hymn of sons newborn and deaths already foretold. If the verse telling of tombs ought to be grim, Dr del Llano doesn’t make it so, and so the story of gloom and gravity is nothing but a blithe eventuality, predicted all light-hearted by a man very certain of the truth of it.

Mrs. Foster dies soon after. Rose sits in the church as the priest says the first of the masses for her, the first of seven that her widower has paid for. She waits at the door while her father makes conversation — how she wishes he would hurry up! But the doctor in his black coat and the priest in his cassock are two crows alike, and so she is there in the doorway until her father says ‘good-by, Padre’ and comes to join her. Rose hardly has the time to shut her hymnal closed over the catalog tucked inside before he bustles past her, eager now to be on his way.

“Damned quiet place now that the mine’s shut up,” he says on the walk home, and Rose nods, though she does not remember the mine-town as her father does. She knows that there is no more coal to be had here and no more sand, and that with the mine has gone much of her father’s custom. Without black-lung and burns and broken bones, there is far less for a doctor to do in these hills.

But there is no other doctor than Juan Soto del Llano, with his limping step and his rosary about his neck and his rattletrap of a horse-drawn buggy with his only daughter to drive it, so he goes on as he has, and mends up broken bones and offers fever-cures to farmers and their wives, and to the valley townsfolk nearer home.

Henry Freeman is twenty-two, the bright young son of a new-money farmer. He is sickening for something, he is grey-faced and cold and his eyes do not focus.

Dr del Llano is at his door with hat in hand — money passes from the elder Mr. Freeman’s worn hand into his, and the doctor closes the older man’s hand over the coins. Out on the bench of the buggy, Rose scoffs and shakes her head. The fog-touched night is cold even through her coat, and she shivers involuntarily.

“He oughn’t to do such things,” she says, to no one but herself. But all the same, Rose turns her head, and Saro is there beside her, smiling.

“What oughtn’t he do?” asks Saro, with the questioning merriment in her voice that Rose has come to like so well.

“He doesn’t ask for payment, when it’s hill sickness,” and, seeing Saro’s quirk of the mouth, the way the question lurks in her well-dark eyes, Rose continues. “Father doesn’t know what it is, still, and he can’t mend it. It cannot be consumption, for it doesn’t settle in the lungs, but all the same — it is as if something is drawing out the life from them, every one.”

“So your Henry Freeman shall die, then,” says Saro, blunt.

“Don’t—“ says Rose, and stops, cold. “Who are you?” she asks, and looks Saro in the eyes, the brown of them so dark that Rose can barely find her own reflection. And the girl with the mistletoe hair reaches out, and pulls her hand across the golden curve of the hill as if she is stroking the grass that lies like dry cowhide on the ground.

“You know my name, doctor’s daughter, is that not enough?”

“Saro—“ Footsteps, and Rose’s head turns without her willing it. Doctor del Llano still has his sleeves rolled up, the edges wet from scrubbing. He doesn’t let them down again as he drags on his coat, hauling himself up to the buggy-seat as if held down by a great weight.

“Father—“ says Rose, and looks to Saro beside her, but even as she turns back, Saro is gone again.

“I’ll not talk of it,” he says, and hauls his bag into the buggy. It might well weigh as much as all the world. Rose huffs, and pulls her arms against her chest, and sets them on the road again.

And so it goes, over and over again — the Misses Hayward, unmarried, a few years older than Rose herself — Martin Foster, only three — the widow Ruiz, whose husband died down the mine before Rose was born. All of them greying, cold, dying quick. There is sickness in the hills, and it is sickness that the doctor cannot cure, and Rose — Rose finds that she barely cares. She stands in the church, once more, at Lillie Hayward’s funeral, and cannot look at the coffin, but only turns her head to search for wild light hair among the townsfolk in the pews.

But Saro doesn’t come to town; that’s not the place for her, Rose knows. How could she stay anywhere else but where the wind drags the points of oak leaves down the sky, where the tall grass parts under her hands like water?

So life goes on as it did before — the spiders building their webs across the age-grey clapboards of the doctor’s house by the old mine, the oak leaves stuck by their prickling edges to the drying wash, Rose’s father singing softly in his parents’ Spanish as he stocks his black bag at his desk in the front-room.

Rose leans against the desk, chipping at the varnish with her fingernails. In concession to the afternoon heat, the eastward window is flung open, and the thinnest breeze flicks at the pages of the last Sears catalog laid idly within her reach. She has begun to resent the sun — she closes her eyes, hunting darkness for darkness’s sake, and thinks of Saro in her white skirts, standing candle-slender in the dusk between the hills, Saro’s hands that are always cold, pressed softly against Rose’s face, her neck, her chest.

Telephone, its jangling sound sharp in the late-summer quiet — her father’s soft noises of questioning and assent — the practiced movements of putting harness to the horse. But for all that the interruption is sharp, there’s a pleased rise in Rose’s heart nonetheless, for if she is lucky, she will see Saro on the road.

She reins in the horse when her father tells her so, and hands him his bag as he jumps from the buggy — once he’s gone, Rose allows herself a secret smile. It’s early in the evening now, with the light all golden, her father’s horse with its dark mane a-gleaming in the last of the sun. Rose has a flask of coffee with her, brewed black as her father’s coat. She drinks most of it, hot and bitter, never mind that it had been meant to be shared. It doesn’t keep her awake — she drowses, head on her arms, and feels a breeze like soft hands stroke along her neck.

Today she has a headache. Her face is hot, even with her collar unbuttoned and her hat laid aside in her father’s seat. The day is warm, and the air tastes of dust, hot and dry in Rose’s throat. Saro’s hand on her cheek is as sweet and cold as anything Rose has ever snuck from the ice-house. Saro’s mouth against her neck is a cool draught.

“My dear sweet Rose,” says Saro, quiet, with only the barest hint of her usual merriment. “You’ve been ever so patient, even while I took my time with others.”

“Mm,” says Rose, and lets the weight of her body press up against Saro’s cold frame. Perhaps — perhaps that cold could leach the heavy heat from her head, the feverish blur from her eyes.

Saro’s fingers are at the buttons of Rose’s shirtwaist, now, the full breadth of her hand an ice-print on Rose’s chest. Saro from the oak tree, Saro with her hair like mistletoe. The hills rise golden around them, the wind rushing in Rose’s ears without touching her skin.

“May I?”

“Please,” says Rose, at the last, and lets Saro draw away the last of her living warmth.

#em writes stuff #oc time again hehe #oak savanna vampire #AND LO! AS PROMISED! EM HALLOWEEN STORY 3!#in the tradition of the very first round of em halloween story this is written for benjhawkins and pentecostwaite's spooky season challenge #except that. this took Two Years whoops.#(this was supposed to be last year's but it wasn't Working so I finished rat piper instead)#bit of attribution for the header-image -- 3/4 are from the california academy of sciences #(and public domain as part of the uc berkeley calphotos project! yay!)#and the fourth is of some relatives of mine (my gram's cousins iirc; and to put it as she would) 'standing there like the grapes of wrath'#some of the concepts of the story itself are also based on the experiences of some relatives (not those ones though)#[lying on the floor] CALIFORNIAAAA

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