You are a Straw Hat. You are also an idiot.

It wasn’t a glorious wound earned in a clash with a Yonko commander or a noble sacrifice to save a crewmate. It was a stupid, hungry mistake. A flashy, rainbow-scaled fish you’d plucked from the sea as the Sunny sailed toward Whole Cake Island. You’d cooked it, eaten it, and spent the next three days in a feverish haze, your body wracked with tremors, your skin clammy and pale. Chopper was frantic, working himself to the bone with antidotes that only slowed the toxin’s spread. You floated in a liminal space, hearing the muffled sounds of the crew’s worried voices—Nami’s sharp commands, Luffy’s confused shouts, Brook’s somber violin—as if from the bottom of the sea.

Between the bouts of pain, you’d catch fragments. Sanji. Wedding. Big Mom. The mission was teetering on a knife’s edge, and you were dead weight, a liability poisoning the air with your own weakness. The shame was almost worse than the poison.

Then, one evening, a new presence cut through the sickroom’s miasma. A figure stood in the doorway, backlit by the corridor’s lantern. Slender, with hair the color of dusk-blushed cherry blossoms. Her purple eyes, calm and assessing, swept over you.

“Vinsmoke Reiju,” Robin stated, her voice a careful neutral. Tension spiked in the room. A Germa princess, here, on their ship.

She offered no grand speeches of alliance, only a cool, pragmatic explanation. A detour. An interest. A potential shift in the board’s geometry. Her words were for Luffy, for Nami, but her gaze kept returning to you, shivering on the cot. There was a calculation in her look, but also something else—a flicker of recognition, perhaps of another kind of poison, one that was familial and slow-acting.

To prove her good faith, she said.

She approached your cot. The crew tensed, but Chopper, sensing something, held up a hoof. Reiju knelt beside you. Up close, you could see the delicate spiral of her eyebrow, the faint “6” tattooed on her thigh. She smelled of clean linen and something metallic, like rain on steel.

“This is a vile one,” she murmured, her voice almost gentle. “It clings.”

Then she did what no one expected. She leaned down, and her lips met yours.

It wasn’t a kiss of passion, but of purpose. Cool, firm, and deliberate. A shock of clarity shot through your fevered brain. You felt a pull, a deep, internal suction, as if the very essence of the sickness was being drawn up your throat. A strange, tingling warmth spread from the point of contact, followed by a chilling vacuum as the toxin was siphoned away. You could only stare, wide-eyed, as she broke the contact, a faint, dark shimmer passing over her own lips before she swallowed.

The crushing weight in your chest vanished. The fire in your veins sputtered and died. You drew in a deep, clean, agonizingly wonderful breath—the first in days. Strength, raw and unadulterated, flooded back into your limbs.

Reiju stood, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, her expression returning to its placid mask. “The debt is settled,” she said, her tone once again that of a diplomat. “Consider it my… introductory gift.”

But you were left speechless, propped up on your elbows, the taste of life—and her—lingering on your lips. The woman known as Poison Pink had just swallowed your death to offer you a chance. And as you looked into her calm, purple eyes, you realized the rescue mission had just become infinitely more complicated.