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In all the years that had passed since she'd last set foot in Mariejois, her utter disgust for it hasn't faded at all.
She hates everything about this place.
The buildings, built off the back of slave labor and professional architects given the choice between aiding in the construction or dying, are all impossibly clean at all times and showing no sign of wear from either time or the elements, appearing more like giant dollhouses than places where people are supposed to live.
The streets, excellently paved and gleaming in the sunlight only because it gets routinely cleaned every hour to help the familiar reddish-brown stains of blood be removed quickly; whether they were from where a slave had been killed or had taken too long in getting their impatient master to their intended destination and been summarily punished was anyone's guess.
The people here were already self-explanatory, but even their clothing was irritating to look at; the Celestial Dragons spared no expense in dressing as lavishly and outlandishly as possible, taking such pride in appearing as different from their lowly human guests and nasty little slaves as possible. It was likely done in some vain, meaningless attempt to look superior, but they looked so stupid in those get-ups that the sight of them pissed her off on principle.
The air itself, already thin from the high altitude the city was built at, was further stifled by the cloying scent of perfumes permeating every inch of the city to try and cover up the reek of human blood and waste from the slave quarters.
Even the damn sunlight had a strange filtered, artificial quality to it, as if one too many of the Celestial Dragons had complained about it's brightness and their eager little toadies had designed some sort of shield to protect their precious masters from the horrors of sunburn and bright lights shining through the window first thing in the morning.
It was all so pathetic, and irritating, and so, so stupid; she should be completely used to this by now.
She'd known enough Celestial Dragons in her long, long life to know how most of them worked; if there was one thing she most certainly did not miss about the drudgery of a life of royalty, it was the random 'visits' and pointless inspections she'd been forced to host whenever a Celestial Dragon had gotten bored of the high life and decided to plague the Sorbet Kingdom with their presence.
But if there was one, single thing that she appreciated very, very much about this stinking hellhole at this exact moment, it was the fact that the precious Nobles were so goddamn paranoid that they always had their bodyguards around them at all times, and therefore there were no patrols wandering around the streets outside their living quarters at the moment.
Which was a nice, lucky break for her right now, because it gave her plenty of time to sit with her back against a wall so she could take some much needed deep, calming breaths.
He was there.
He'd been right there, right in front of her, close enough for her to run up and touch him for the first time in years, and she couldn't do anything.
She'd run right past him, infiltrated the living quarters like she was supposed to, and she'd left him behind.
She'd left him, and he was broken like a toy, shooting sparks and twitching unnaturally and leaking oil like a great big machine, crawling on all fours like an animal and getting beaten with all manner of weapons, and he hadn't said a word, hadn't reacted to any of it. Hadn't glared in defiance like the stubborn little shit he was, like he had when she'd caught him sneaking about in the castle back home and she'd had to lecture him once again on the dignities of a prince that she'd never fully believed in in the first place.
(He hadn't believed in them, either, and maybe if he had he wouldn't have ended up this way.
If she'd just accepted her old lessons, swallowed her discomfort, disciplined him a bit more, convinced him royalty really were better than the commoners; perhaps they never would have ended up here.
But what-ifs were pointless, here and now.)
He hadn't even looked her way, when he'd long ago proven time and time again that his Observation Haki could pick up on her presence better than anyone else in the world.
She'd seen his suffering firsthand and she'd ran past it, because doing something right there in the middle of the bridge would have ruined the entire plan but sea and storms who cared about the damned plan?!
He was her boy, and he'd been falling apart right in front of her, and she'd done nothing, and she couldn't breathe.
Tears clouded her vision so much they spilled over without her permission, painting a trail across her face and ruining the make-up she'd had to wear because royalty demanded it even when she was a wrinkled old crone, but she clamped her lips shut, refusing to give voice to her grief, lest a Noble and one of his guards be close enough to hear.
'Unforgivable!' she thought, scrubbing the tears from her face angrily, her frustration nearly making her violent. 'Dirty bastards, the whole lot of them! How dare they?!'
But of course they dared.
They didn't give a damn about anything, never would, would never relinquish the hold they had on what remained of Bartholomew Kuma, which was exactly why she was here.
She could only hope that everything else was going according to schedule, or else there was the danger of her rage tipping over the boiling point.
She had no idea if she could just walk away if she saw him like that again.
Whether she did or not, Saint Roswald and his worthless spawn were going to die. She didn't really care about subtlety at this point; it was going to happen, somehow, before she got out of here.
Hell, the others probably wouldn't even care at this point.
Though, perhaps the new kid, the blonde -- the new Chief of Staff, apparently; was Dragon losing his mind or just getting desperate?! -- might care a bit, but considering the sickened look on his face she'd caught a glimpse of when they first got here, he probably wouldn't say anything against it.
Probably.
If he really cared enough to kick up a fuss about it, he'd likely give it up once he saw what had been done to Kuma.
But the kid's opinion on killing Celestial Dragons didn't matter very much right now; if he and the others even wanted to stand a chance of fulfilling their part, she had to stop crying and move, dammit.
With a final, heaving breath, the woman known to most of the world as Jewelry Bonney stood from her hiding place and started moving.
This city and everyone and everything in it still made her sick.
It would truly be a pleasure to finally wipe this stain off of every map in the world.
And it would be nice to free all the slaves and show the World Government exactly what its people thought of their 'justice', but honestly, all of those perfectly honorable, selfless ideals were all just happy byproducts of her real mission.
She's not planning on toppling an empire to save the world and all the ingrates living in it.
She's toppling an empire to save her son, and she would happily die trying to make that happen.