– Bonney (Some time before Ace’s rescue) –

Just a touch. A single, lengthy touch was all she needed. Was that too much to ask for? All she wanted to do was de-age her father and bring him back to her ship for medical treatment. It wouldn’t fix everything the bastards did to him, not by a long shot. However, if she successfully rescued him, she could at least get started on looking for a cure. But that single touch eluded her.

“Ursus Shock.”

“Gaah!”

Her father’s voice wasn’t supposed to be this apathetic. The pitch was the same, the tonality was the same, but the warmth was missing. It was supposed to be gentle and comforting, the way it had been during happier times. Back when they had still been living together.

“Daddy! This is for you!”

“Oh, did you bake these yourself?”

“Uh-huh, Grandma helped me mix the cookie dough, but I made the shapes all by myself! This is me; this is Grandma and this one is you!”

“It looks…very nice. Thank you, dear. I think I’ll put them over here so I can always look at them.”

“No, you’re supposed to eat them, silly Daddy!”

Back before the troubles started. She had been naïve and innocent then, ignorant of the world. Unaware of the corruption, the scheming, the backroom deals…unaware of the rot that had so deeply infested her home. Little Bonney had known none of that, only interested in flowers and food.

“Look at what I made! Isn’t it pretty?”

“That’s a beautiful crown, Bonney. Much prettier than my own.”

“That’s why I made one for you too! Now we match!”

“So, we do. Do you know what these flowers are called?”

“Yes, Grandma taught me! That’s a cornflower, that’s a daffodil, that’s a…”

Flowers and food, while her Daddy’s kingdom withered and died. Living within a world of rainbows and cotton candy, thanks to her Daddy’s protection and care, unknowing of his struggles and his pains. He had hidden everything from her, not letting her know how hard he fought to reform their kingdom. How hard he fought alone.

“Daddy, are you sick?”

“No, darling. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. I’ll be alright in the morning.”

“Ok, Daddy. Sleep well and have a nice dream!”

“You too, darling.”

None of the nobles had sided with her Daddy. None of his generals, none of the wealthy merchants…not even a single one of his cabinet ministers had supported his reforms. And why should they? They were part of the rot her Daddy’s reforms tried to eradicate. Embezzlement, misappropriation, misuse of power, sham trials, decadence, nepotism, bribery, larceny, perjury, murder, fraud… if you could name it, they committed it on a grand scale. They wrung the kingdom dry.

“Did you have a fight, Daddy?”

“No, darling. The prime minister and I just had a difference in opinion. Nothing for you to worry about. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Oh, can we have a picknick tomorrow?”

“Anything for you, Bonney. Anything for you.”

And when her Daddy tried to change things, they resisted. It was little things at first. Arguments during cabinet meetings, refusal on principle, making excuses. When that didn’t work, they escalated. Work efficiency dropped, documents were misfiled and lost in a warren of boxes, officials increasingly called in sick. Her Daddy didn’t let up. He fired the lazy and incompetent, replacing them with motivated apprentices while bearing an ever increasing workload. A lonely king, toiling night and day to fill the gap left by his senior officials.

“Daddy, can I sleep with you tonight?”

“I’m sorry, Bonney. Daddy is a little busy tonight. Why don’t you sleep with Grandma?”

“But I did that yesterday. And the day before that! I want to sleep with you. Please, Daddy? I had a nightmare.”

“…alright. I’ll just finish up real quick and I’ll be right with you. Did you brush your teeth?”

“Yep! Sparkling white! You promise you’re coming?”

“I promise. Five minutes, ok?”

And slowly, the reforms made progress. Embezzled funds were recovered, stolen property returned, the army resupplied with basic uniforms. The homeless and disenfranchised of the cities were given jobs in construction. Homes were built, water dams constructed, and irrigation systems modernized. Things were looking up.

Then the bastards blew up the dam.

Farms and fields were ruined and thousands were swept away. People looked for someone to blame, and the bastards gave them a target. But smart as they were, no finger was ever pointed at her Daddy. Instead, they laid the blame on the junior officials who had supported the reforms. They were too inexperienced, they said. It was natural that they did shoddy work. No wonder the dam collapsed when subpar building materials were used. Or was it maybe deliberate? Using cheap alternatives to pocket the difference? Perhaps someone should investigate?

One investigation, two vastly differing reports, but the one that reached the public first was theirs. There had been nothing her Daddy could do, as before her Daddy’s investigators could even reach the disaster site, the local news reported that the dam had failed because of poor quality cement. And the public ate it up.

“Why are all those people angry, Daddy?”

“Because they are sad and confused, Bonney.”

“But…you’ll make them happy, right? That’s what you said kings are supposed to do.”

“I’ll certainly try, darling.”

The first public lynching opened the floodgates. One after another, her Daddy’s subordinates disappeared, either resigning of their own accord or being removed forcefully by a violent mob, led and manipulated by a corrupt aristocracy. Her Grandmother later told her, that her Daddy stepped in and took responsibility for the tragic disaster. Uncle Iva called it a mistake, for that had been just the excuse the bastards were looking for. Within weeks, the country was up in arms and a rebel army was marching on the capital.

“Daddy, you’re back! I missed you!”

“Hello darling. I missed you too. I brought cake!”

“Chocolate? My favorite! Thank you, Daddy!”

“Don’t eat it all at once!”

Her Daddy routed them with ease, popping into their headquarters and arresting the ringleaders. With their leadership evaporated, the mob fled to the four winds, carrying ever more exaggerated tales with them. And for his display of might, they began calling him “the Tyrant” Kuma. They tried again, of course. With more and more of their number behind bars, her Daddy had more and more evidence against them and with every hidden cache, every secret bank account found, the more desperate they became. So, they rebelled time and time again, being crushed each time.

Until one day, one of them had an idea.

“Daddy, why are the marines coming?”

“Just a training exercise, Bonney. It’s just a training exercise. Be a good girl for your Grandma while I’m away, ok?”

“Yes, Daddy! Can we have pizza when you come back?”

“Of course! The biggest pizza in the world.”

Her Daddy was strong, but even he couldn’t fight them all on his own, though that didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt them. For three years, he held them off by taking out their officers and sending them packing. Perhaps they were driven by the offer of tripling the kingdom’s tribute or maybe it was the promise of reduced autonomy, but the marines kept coming.

Little by little they gained ground, stepping over the bodies of their fallen in their unrelenting march. Where before they were turned back before they even sighted her home, they started making landfall before being repelled. Then they made a beachhead, took a village or a town before being thrown back into the sea.

Then, he came. The vaunted hero of the marines. The coward. Garp.

“We’re going to visit uncle Iva?”

“I still have some things to take care of, so you’ll be going ahead. Be good for uncle Iva, ok?”

“But you’re coming soon, right?”

“As soon as I can.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Daddy never came. Not even after the days turned into weeks into months…into years. Instead of her father, only rumors of "the Tyrant" Kuma landed on the shores of her new home, one of the most notorious and ruthless pirates to sail the six seas. Uncle Iva refused to let her go searching for him, saying it wasn’t safe. So she had trained and bided her time, until she managed to steal a ship in her quest to find her Daddy.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Kuma, what happened to you over these past several years?”

But now that she finally found him…why was he like this? Why didn’t he recognize her?

Where was her Daddy?

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“Among all the people that I’ve met, my face! No one has forgotten my face in my entire life!”

To anybody who cared to look, Emporio Ivankov’s dismay was clear as day. A physical rain cloud had manifested itself above his wailing form, drenching the monarch in what seemed to be glitter. That atmospheric anomaly must have confused Kuma’s internal sensors because he froze, letting his former comrade bawl his eyes out in peace. Others were not so generous.

“Stop crying and help me fight, damn it!” A prime example being Bonney herself, as she began ruthlessly kicking the king back into a fighting mood. “You’re being pathetic! If you want him to remember you, do something about it!”

Successfully, she might add. For in a fine display of the consequences of an unregulated hormone regimen, Ivankov demonstrated just how quick and radical one’s mood swings could become, going from depressed to fired up within a split second.

“Right, even if you’ve lost your memory, if you can’t remember how scary I am, I’m going to beat it into your body!” he declared. “Be ready for it! Face Spectrum!”

And while Ivankov did his best to obfuscate Kuma’s sensors, Bonney snuck behind her father’s back to lunge at him from the rear, receiving a light tap for her troubles. Cue a scream of pure frustration as she had to claw her way out of her new hole in the ice.

“Fucking damn it! Just stand still and let me touch you!” Not about to let something insignificant like being buried in solid ice stop her, Bonney returned right back swinging. What followed was a furious display of a giant calmly warding off a relatively diminutive girl with tiny Ursus Shocks from his palms, Bonney’s fist literally bouncing off every time she tried to make contact.

“Death Wink!” “Pad Cannon.”

Occasionally Ivankov would chime in to offer covering fire, trying to grant Bonney an opening and Kuma would send the young pirate flying by using his fruit. Then Bonney would be back to begin the song and dance anew. It was around the six or seventh iteration of this, that a very pertinent question arose in her mind.

Why was Kuma going easy on her? Even if by this point in time, he didn’t have any free will nor most of his finely honed instincts left, like the asshole Doflamingo had claimed, this shouldn’t have changed the fact that he was literally and figuratively, heads and shoulders above a mere supernova like Bonney. Blowing her away should have been easy, heck, sending her to the bottom of the sea shouldn’t have taken more than a single touch with his paw pads. Nobody was more familiar with how powerful her Daddy was than she. And with how often Bonney had been blocked by his palms, there had been a lot of touches. None of them long enough for her purposes, but there had been a lot of them.

“Galaxy Wink! My hair!”

The difference was even more obvious if one observed the high number of lasers being fired at Ivankov when compared to Bonney’s zero. Did he remember her? Was her Daddy still in there somewhere, just buried so deep beneath the metal and wiring? How did she get him out?

“I’m going to hug you if it’s the last thing I do!” Another lunge, another miss. Her Daddy really had no business being that nimble when he was that big.

One benefit, if you could call it that, of her Daddy having been turned into a nigh indestructible juggernaut, was the eradication of his sense of self. Ergo, there was no will remaining to manifest in the form of haki. Ergo, the man shouldn’t have seen the attack coming until the interloper was right on top of him.

The man backhanded Eustass Kidd across the face, sending him flying on a collision course with her and resulting in both of them going sprawling on the ice.

“Get the bloody fuck off me, you idiot!” Something that Bonney did not appreciate at all, which she made absolutely clear by how unceremoniously she shoved him aside. “What do you want?”

“The Hyena said that it looked like you could use a hand or two.” Kidd replied, utterly dismissive of her anger.

“…I just saw you get slapped…hard. How much help do you think you’ll be?” Bonney retorted, causing him to frown.

“Considering how you were getting your pretty little arse handed to you before I got here, I’d say better than nothing.” He shrugged as he clambered back on his feet. “What the fuck were you trying to do anyway? I at least tried to hit him. You looked like you were trying to cuddle the oversized teddy bear.”

“And how did that work out for you? Unlike you, I have a plan.” Bonney scowled. “Why are you even here? And what does the Hyena have to do with it?”

“I’m here to beat that walking pile of scrap into a fucking...” Kidd replied, but before he could finish, another voice interjected itself into the conversation.

“You know punk, you could have waited. It’s not like you accomplished anything by rushing ahead.”

Slow and rumbling, a shadow suddenly cast itself across Bonney and her conversational partner. A big shadow.

“Urouge, the mad monk? Why are you here?”

“The midget…that is Bellamy, decided he wanted someone to kidnap your pa. I decided I wanted in.” Urouge grinned, casually revealing to the world that he knew Bonney’s big bad secret, with Kidd looking at her in a new understanding light. “The punk on the other hand made a bet after Bellamy bragged about how he and Law gave Doflamingo a bloody nose.”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you.” Kidd growled but there was little heat in it. Was the infamous Captain Eustass Kidd…embarrassed?

“Kidd fell for the bait; hook, line and sinker like the kid he is. Claimed that if those two could survive against a warlord, he could beat one with one hand tied behind his back.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me! So anyway, Bellamy dared him to prove it and pointed out that the only warlord who could rival Doflamingo was Kuma, so here we are to see if Kidd is the real thing or just a bag of hot air.”

Despite herself, Bonney found herself tearing up a little. Things had been looking very bleak before these two showed up, but with two extra supernovas? They might actually stand a chance.

“I took down dozens of his little clones. I can take down the original. I’d like to see you try something similar.”

Especially Kidd. Even if she had been focused on rescuing her Daddy, she hadn’t been blind to Kidd’s performance against her father’s copies. In terms of a matchup, Kidd was probably the best they had.

“I did something similar to this on Sabaody you know? Just this time I got Pinky and a punk instead of the Lizard and a midget.”

“Who are you calling Pinky, you big lug?”

“I’m calling a pinky, Pinky. What about it? Anyway, you said you had a plan, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. You help Ivankov restrain Kuma so I can touch him.” As soon as she had finished speaking before she was off again, with Kidd hot on her heels.

Urouge followed soon after, but not without getting the final say in.

“Right. Restrain him so you can touch him. Kids have no shame these days…”

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– Bellamy –

Yeah, they’d be fine. Maybe. Pretty sure that Kuma was going easy on Bonney on account of him being her father, so at the very least, she shouldn't die. If he could get Dr. Vegapunk to program him to defend Luffy’s ship until the Straw Hats came back – probably because Luffy was Dragon’s son – he sure as hell was going to have set up something similar for his own daughter.

Not sure how Urouge and Kidd were going to fare, but Ivankov survived against Kuma more or less on his own in canon, so adding some supernovas to the mix couldn’t hurt. I didn't think that they would manage to successfully rescue Kuma, but at least this way I had forged some tentative ties with Bonney. And Kidd I supposed, but the guy was a loose cannon with a couple of springs loose. Potentially useful, but not someone I wanted to have at my back.

Especially not where I was going.

...

Oh, look. Garp woke up.