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Rosinante doesn’t think too hard about the language he hears every day, until it becomes a problem.
He’s really too young to understand what’s going on in the first place, and that fact does him no favors as he tries to figure out why his brother is suddenly so much angrier, or why Mother and Father go from relaxed to worried to fleeing through the woods with them in the dead of the night. He hears the shouts and screaming behind them, spilling from the mouths of those holding the torches, and he does not understand.
He learns, though; quicker than his brother does, maybe because he doesn’t fight the lessons at every turn. His parents praise him, and if the world outside is cruel and all the words directed at him in this new language he’s learning are spat at him, at least he’s beginning to understand why that is, even if he feels awfully small to have to carry all the hate that gets piled on his little shoulders.
At home though, inside the creaking and drafty four walls of wood that shelter them from the elements and the scorn of their neighbors, the language is still the one he remembers from Before. He doesn’t know if it has a name, has never heard it referred to with one, but it sounds very different than the one he is learning, and kinder, if only because of the words being used.
He likes it less when his mother dies and all her stories and songs and comforting words go with her. Even less, when he has to hear his father beg for their salvation and hear refusal sneered at him in that same language.
Later, when he’s hanging on the wall, he understands enough of the words being screamed at his family to know why these people are so angry. The words of the Celestial Dragons bring only pain and death to the people of the world, they say. Let them, for once, hear the same.
And because, even two years on into this hell, Rosinante is still a child, he does not quite grasp the depth of what is happening in this time and place. But he does wonder that if these people could hear his language as he knows it, in the ways he’s heard it spoken in love and laughter and care, if they would hate it so much.
It’s not a nice thought to think about why they never have.
After, when his brother’s words have grown so angry they swallow him whole, and his father’s voice has been silenced forever, he abandons words in favor of running. And maybe he doesn’t understand the words spoken to him by the big man in the white jacket who takes him out of that nightmare, but they are soft and gentle, and most importantly safe, and right then, that’s all he needs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Garp is big and loud and a D and Rosinante is terrified of him.
He thinks that this must be what those stories meant, when they said a D would gobble you up. Garp smiles too big, all teeth, and Rosinante keeps having vivid visions about being eaten. He also keeps trying to feed him crackers, and for a while, Rosinante is convinced it’s a ploy to fatten him up, because Garp is very, very big and Rosinante is very, very small and probably wouldn’t make much of a meal anyway.
Sengoku assures him that Garp means him no harm, but never calls him harmless, maybe because he knows Rosinante won’t believe him, and maybe because it would be a lie. Garp breaks things—things like doors and walls!—accidentally all the time, and Rosinante can’t remember a time when the maintenance staff of Marineford weren’t up in Sengoku’s office repairing something every week or so, and he’s never sorry about it, and it does nothing to help Rosinante’s urge to flee every time the man appears.
What does eventually help is an unexpectedly calm moment, when he wakes on Sengoku’s office couch where he’d dozed off after dinner, startled into wakefulness by the anxiety that’s always thrumming under his skin. It’s well after moonrise, and in the pale light, lit by a mood that is somehow gentler, something about Garp finally clicks.
Sengoku and Garp sit on the balcony, bottles of alcohol and a plate of snacks between them, and they are just talking. There’s no yelling, no laughter, and Rosinante can barely hear them from his perch on the couch, they’re being so quiet. Garp’s saying something he can’t understand, in a fluid language he’s never heard before, and it sounds so jarringly gentle coming from this man that Rosinante can’t help but listen.
But Sengoku clearly knows what’s being said, because he slaps the other man on the back, and whispers comfort back at his friend, and these words Rosinante does understand, and he learns that Garp has a son, and he’s worried about him, about something he might be about to do, and that the future can scare even the most terrifying of people.
It’s…humanizing.
If Garp’s smile doesn’t seem as scary the next time he offers Rosinante a cracker, and if it gets even impossibly wider when Rosinante actually takes it from him, no one ever comments on it. “I’ve always been human,” his father had said, once upon a time. Maybe that applies to the enemies of the gods as much as it does the gods themselves.
Words are funny like that. They can have a lot of different meanings, he realizes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When Rosinante is eleven, he returns to Mariejois.
It’s not something he wants to do, and clearly not something Sengoku wants to have to subject him too, either. But the Reverie was here, and the presence of the Admirals was requested, though Sengoku mutters about it being nothing more than a show of force, and that he resents being used as window dressing. Marineford is buzzing with preparations like an anthill that had been kicked over, everyone racing to arrange the logistics of escorting, protecting, and supporting fifty different delegates and their entourages from across the seas. Getting the attention of anyone requires loud voices and rank, and that’s only if you’re lucky.
But Rosinante is still shy and small, and with none of the usual suspects he’d feel comfortable leaving him with around the base, all off on business of their own, Sengoku has had to make the hard decision to bring Rosinante with him. Even Garp, whom Rosinante has a much better relationship with these days, and whom would normally be at the very bottom of Sengoku’s list of people he’d want to watch a child, is absent, run off back to his home sea in a show of particularly suspicious timing, as if he were avoiding the entire event.
No one will recognize you, Sengoku promises. It’s been five years. And: I’m so very sorry.
Five years isn’t long enough.
There are still precautions to take. Rosinante is dressed as plainly as possible, so as not to draw attention, and given a name to answer to that is nothing like his own. Most importantly, he is warned never to speak around anyone while they are there, unless it’s Sengoku or one of the aides de camps he’s bringing with him. Even if it’s been years since he’s spoken the language of Mariejois, the accent still lingers, if only just, and Sengoku doesn’t feel like taking chances. There are only two reasons a child might have learned that accent, and neither option is anywhere approaching the concept of ‘good.’
Sengoku is given a little second story apartment for the duration of the Reverie, overlooking a courtyard full of flowers and fountains, and it’s there Rosinante finds himself stuck for the entirety of the summit. He doesn’t mind; just stepping foot on top of the Red Line and hearing all those familiar words spoken in unfamiliar voices had been enough to start him quietly panicking and having a space away from all of that sounds like a great idea. There’s not much to do all day, but that beats having to be outside with everyone else.
But as scared as he might be, he’s always been a curious child, and eventually the sounds of people floating through the balcony windows are too much to ignore. He finds himself wandering closer and closer to listen, until he’s swallowed his fear and crawled right out onto the balcony itself, scrunched down to hide himself from view. It can’t hurt to just listen, he figures, especially if no one knows he’s there, and it’s more interesting than anything else he could be doing right now.
Rosinante spends almost a week like that, huddled up on the balcony behind the railing, peering out through the intricate wrought iron designs at the assembled dignitaries below. It’s almost like a masquerade; no two people looking quite alike, and as they mingle and speak with one another, he watches how they interact, body language just so and at odds with the largely fake smiles plastered on everyone’s faces. He even sees two people talking with their hands, making gestures he does not understand but they clearly do, and wonders at such a wonderful concept, to be able to speak without any sound or accent giving you away.
Hands can have accents too, but he doesn’t learn that until much later.
Dozens of them pass underneath him, whispering to each other in the sheltered shadows beneath his balcony, and Rosinante hears secret conversations he was never supposed to know about, and parses through them using his own limited knowledge of the languages he can hear. A few times, Celestial Dragons stand in the shadows and speak in the language of his childhood, and those are the worst times of all, because he understands all of it and every word makes him understand the people who strung his family up all the better.
Late at night, when Sengoku has been allowed to retire for the day, he relates everything he’s heard and asks questions about everything he didn’t understand. He doesn’t like everything Sengoku explains to him, but his foster father has always been of the mind that if Rosinante is old enough to ask the questions, he is old enough to hear the answers. So Rosinante goes to bed every night, brain whirling and stomach sick with just what sorts of things are transpiring under the mask of finery he sees outside every day and resolves to spare himself the same problem by not listening again.
He always does.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After that, Rosinante resolves to do his very best to never hear his birth language again, at least outside the confines of his own head. He still has those good memories, though they’re hazier now, and the last thing he wants is for them to be replaced entirely by the voices of every other speaker he’s had the displeasure to encounter. It’s selfish, he thinks, to want to keep those memories, when he now knows exactly what the people speaking it are like, but once upon a time, he was one of those people too, so maybe he just can’t be a good person. Not entirely, anyway.
Instead, he decides to pay what he can of his generational debt by being a force for good, and as far as he’s concerned, that means the marines. Sengoku had plucked him out of a horrible place, and that’s the sort of person he wants to be—someone a scared child can look to for safety and an end to pain, if he can.
He’s too young for basic training, according to Sengoku—no matter Garp’s enthusiastic approval and offers to train him—but there are other things he can work on in the meantime, because no learning is useless, and his father praises the advantages of having multiple skills to fall back upon.
Some marines don’t fight much at all, Sengoku says. They use their brains and their knowledge of people and culture, and sometimes that’s more important than any fighting ability to making sure justice is served.
Sengoku has always told him that he loves how unabashedly Rosinante wants to know things, and with this new fire lit in his belly, and the affirmation that he can do good things with what he wants to learn anyway, that want only increases.
He throws himself into perfecting his Grand and Government Standard, because officers in the Marines are required to know both, and Rosinante doesn’t plan on doing anything by halves. When Tsuru is around, he visits her in her office while she’s doing paperwork, because she’ll help him with his Northern and doesn’t laugh at him when he makes silly mistakes, just calmly corrects his grammar, and moves on, never kicking him out like she’d have every right to. Sengoku has a whole wall of books in his private quarters written in the Southern language, even if Rosinante hasn’t heard him speaking it too often, and he spends many days in there with a notebook and pen patiently trying to figure out the words on the paper.
If workbooks for learning the language start populating the familiar shelves of titles Rosinante has long since memorized, he doesn’t say anything, and neither does Sengoku. And if his foster father starts correcting his pronunciation, it only makes him even happier.
He never really gets a handle on Western—he doesn’t know any native speakers and for some reason the marines don’t seem to attract many people from that sea. He knows a fair bit more of Eastern—mostly because of Garp—though almost all of it was absorbed just by existing in the vice admiral’s vicinity. Garp was a purely physical entity and trying to teach a language would not have been something he’d have wrapped his head around easily, though Rosinante is sure he would have tried.
He learns his nameless mother tongue—which actually has a lot of names: Holy Speech, the God’s Tongue, and other such puffed up designations—is what is known as a ‘constructed language,’ and that once upon a time, twenty kings had taken it upon themselves to borrow words and grammar from all over the world to create a new language, cobbled together from stolen heritages and meant to sit above them, by some twisted logic Rosinante can’t really understand. But it explains a little of why languages seem to come so easily to him; he’d been accidentally learning how a lot of them worked since he’d first started learning to speak.
It's better, he decides, to learn the real words from the people who have a true claim to them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When the next Reverie rolls around, he is old enough to be left at home, but the familiar buzzing of Marineford in panic-mode makes his nerves fray terribly, and he spends several days trying and failing to keep out of everyone’s way, trying his best not to think about Celestial Dragons possibly setting foot in his home.
It must have been noticeable, because shortly before the Reverie starts, Garp makes an off-hand mention that he’s coincidentally going to be touring some bases in the North during that time, and that he could use a translator, because Tsuru is busy and his Northern is rudimentary at best, and Rosinante doesn’t even have to try justifying how good his Northern has gotten before Sengoku is giving his permission with a smile.
He spends two weeks having the time of his life. He learns what it’s like to be underestimated, because he’s young and still hasn’t really hit a proper growth spurt, and that the satisfaction of proving his doubters wrong is intoxicating and makes Garp just about split a seam laughing at the soldiers he claims should have known better. It’s rewarding to know he really does have a knack for this sort of work, and when he overhears two officers talking about things they would need to stop doing while there was a vice admiral on base, he slips away quietly, and if the next day those two officers find themselves at the business end of an official investigation, only Garp and Rosinante himself ever know why.
He likes that a lot, doing a good job without drawing attention to himself. He’s never liked being the center of attention, even before he learned all the horrible things about where he’d come from. Most of the people who had raised him were larger than life, and took up space, and he’d despaired at ever being able to match their effectiveness.
But this? This he could do.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just before they leave the North, at the last base on their tour, an officer passes Garp a list of new up and coming threats in the region, and that is the first time he sees the words ‘Donquixote Pirates.’
And suddenly, Rosinante has a new goal.