Chapter Text
Garp prided himself on being the type of man that remained unfazed, even in the oddest of circumstances. Being a ‘D’ this wasn’t strange, and in fact he was typically the one unsettling others with his boisterousness and unpredictable whims. But nothing, not even his own unpredictability, could have prepared him for the series of shocking changes that Gol D. Roger’s last request brought to his life. Trust a fellow D to be the only one unpredictable enough to fluster one of their own.
The first change to Garp’s life stowed away on his ship as he was leaving Logue Town after the Pirate King’s execution. Two boys, lost without the man that was more of a father to them than he was their captain. They glared at him with red-rimmed eyes and dripping noses, neither willing to retaliate but defiant all the same. And Garp sighed, seeing in their eyes the pain of a child losing their father. Garp remembered then, when he was younger than they, that time he watched his father walk away, leaving behind a broken child and a dying wife and his world shifted. So he hid them in his cabin, doing his best to keep them hidden as they sailed back to Marineford. Under the guise of a much needed break, Garp took a vacation, sailing away on a smaller ship as his best friend watched from the dock with worry in his gaze. He left them with an old friend on his home island, if she could even be called that, Dadan the Bandit. Dadan and both boys protested the arrangement but Garp just laughed in their faces and sat down to eat. Before he left, he begged the boys to stay hidden with the bandits in their mountain hideout, just until he could figure out how to help them. They agreed with reluctance but Garp left knowing that they would stay, and that was all he needed.
The second change to Garp’s life came in the form of a dying woman and her newborn child. Roger’s child. The child Roger had asked Garp to care for after his death. Him, a marine, entrusted with the child of the man that the institution he worked for hated the most. There was a reason they celebrated the execution of “Gold Roger”. Nonetheless, he went out and found the woman, Hibiscus Rouge, and offered her his help. She had smiled at him, another D to upset his tranquility, and informed him that he should return in nine months. A little over a year after Roger’s death, Garp made his way back to that quiet island in the South Blue, silently in awe of Rouge’s strength that allowed her to push her child’s birth this far back. When he first laid eyes on the babe, covered in blood and other fluids and wailing louder than his little lungs seemed capable of, Garp felt his whole world shift yet again. As he watched Rouge cradle her son close, tears running down her face as she smiled down at the baby and whispered his name, Garp blinked back tears of his own and promised the woman he would protect her son. She died with a smile on her face as her child lay in Garp’s arms, smiling in his sleep.
Wasting no time, the vice-admiral made his way back to Dawn Island and sleepy little Foosha Village, eager to start on his new adventure as a grandfather. In a hut on a mountain, a red-headed woman felt a shiver go down her spine and she went out for a drink in preparation for the trouble she felt was coming.