The last five days had been surprisingly calm for the newest allies of the Whitebeard pirates.

Jackie and his crew were set to work, cleaning the ship and doing various work around the place. Naturally, him and Eddie had tried to get Elma and Rosa to do the cleaning, but...

"You think we're gonna go around doing the chores here because we're women?!"

And that was how Eddie and Jackie both ended up scrubbing the main deck while Elma and Rosa supervised them, with Elma occasionally kicking them for doing something or the other wrong. "Have a heart, Elma...we're exhausted! It's been almost two hours now!" Eddie cried, and she pulled his long hair in reply. Hard.

"Huh? I don't recall telling you to talk." She whispered, completely ignoring his pained whimpering. "And I don't remember telling you to stop scrubbing, either. Keep going, dammit!" She yelled at Jackie, and he scrubbed faster, his hands screaming in agony.

After almost half an hour more of this torture, Rosa finally managed to convince Elma to let them go. Jackie and Eddie stumbled downstairs, both their bodies aching.

Still, Jackie winked at Eddie. "Well, I know you like girls like her. Were you turned on by her hitting you like that?" Eddie glared at him, but didn't deny it.

As they walked towards their rooms, they saw Whitebeard sitting in the galley, eating with some of the men from his crew. The men...and one particular woman. "Hey, Jackie. Ain't that the captain of the Cotton pirates? One of the Ivory's escort crews?" Jackie looked closer, and saw that it was indeed Sue Cotton, the captain of one of the two other ships escorting Whitebeard's vessel.

She was an elegant figure, wearing a loose black top and a black, knee-length skirt. Her black rubber boots were long enough to cover her calves, and they matched perfectly with the rubber gloves she wore, of the same color. With black hair and black eyes, her pale creamy skin stood out quite a bit, making her seem like some sort of a cross between a demon and an angel.

They hadn't seen the captain of the second ship yet, but they did hear from Brice that he was a very strong captain in his own right.

Their five days on the Ivory had really softened Whitebeard to their eyes. He was a kind man, helpful and yet with a certain presence to him, something that everyone in his crew respected him for. Seeing him eating with a smile on his face, joined by his friends indiscriminately, was something Jackie found remarkable.

As captain, Jackie had been leader of a crew of 32 pirates. It was definitely a pain in the ass to make time for all of them, but he remembered every single one of them perfectly. And Whitebeard? He had almost one hundred people on the Ivory alone.

It really is amazing. I don't even know how large his total fleet is. Eddie tells me it's probably around 150 or 200 ships, but who knows? This is an Ascendant we're talking about. Jackie thought, collapsing onto the small bed in his and Eddie's room.

They had to share rooms since this wasn't exactly their ship, and were forced to sleep together (on different beds of course). Elma and Rosa slept in the room right across hallway, while he was stuck with Eddie. "I can't believe two girls are sleeping together naked in the room right in front of ours."

Eddie groaned and threw a boot at Jackie, who dodged it. "How the hell do you know they sleep naked?" Jackie scratched his head. "I mean, if guys take off their shirts to sleep because of the heat, why wouldn't girls completely undress?" Eddie turned around on his bed and marvelled his captain's stupidity. Though he did make a valid point.

"Oi, you two." They heard Elma's voice from the door, and both of them jumped in fear.

"D-Don't make us d-do any m-more chores! Please!" Jackie stuttered, waving his outstretched hands in front of him. Elma stared at him with a confused expression on her face. "I don't know what you're talking about. Did you do any chores?" She asked, an innocent smile on her face.

Demon! She's a demon!

Elma looked at Jackie seriously. "Listen, I know you don't want to do it but we need to have this talk. What's our plan now? We're not gonna stay on Whitebeard's ship forever, are we?" Eddie looked at Jackie as well. He felt certain Jackie wouldn't want to stay here for too long. He valued freedom over anything else, after all.

"Don't you think Rosa should be here for this talk?" Jackie asked.

"I-I'm right here." A mop of black hair suddenly popped out from behind Elma's back. "Good grief." Elma muttered, and dragged her into the room.

After they shut the door, Jackie started the meeting. "Alright, so as we know, we're headed for an island called Tierra Dorada. It's an island controlled by Spain, so we've got to be careful going around those parts.

Eddie looked slightly unnerved. "Tierra Dorada huh? I've heard rumors that there's some sort of royal scandal going on there. Do we have to go straight towards this right now?" Elma could see his point, but they didn't have a choice at the moment. This was Whitebeard's ship, after all. They needed to live by their rules if they were to live.

"Eddie, I don't think we have a choice. We need supplies and a place to start planning our next moves." Rosa said, and everyone agreed. Their next move would be to stack up on supplies.

Elma still had one thing to wonder about, though. "Can't we steal a ship from Tierra Dorada?" Jackie shook his head. "Not yet. We can't cause a scene in Spanish waters before we get a bigger crew than this. Being part of Whitebeard's crew gives us a lot of protection."

With that, the meeting was over. Rosa and Elma got up and left the room. Jackie noticed Eddie fumbling with something under his pillow. "Hey, what's that?" Eddie looked at him with a somewhat annoyed expression, and revealed a quill and ink bottle from under his pillow. He also conjured a small book from under it.

Jackie narrowed his eyes. "Are you some kind of a magician?" Eddie rolled his eyes and continued writing.

"I'm a doctor, and one who lost all his notes and research in the shipwreck. I need to catch up, fast." Jackie left him to write in the room, and wandered aimlessly to the top deck.

It was bustling as always, with people sitting here and there polishing their swords, reloading pistols or making repairs. Despite this area being around the same place where that horrific storm had occurred just a few days ago, there wasn't a single cloud in the pale blue sky.

"Hey, newbie!" He heard someone yelling at him. To his surprise, it was the normally quiet vice-captain. "What's going on, Leo?" He asked as he jogged across the deck towards him.

Leonardo held up a piece of wood to Jackie. "We found this floating on the water. This is the name of your ship, isn't it?"

Jackie's heart sank as he took it in his hands and read it. He didn't even need to read the words "Cape High" written on the wood to know this belonged to his ship. Just the very texture and rough feel of the wood was familiar enough to know where it had come from.

They had spend two years on that ship. They fought pirates, the English navy, the Spanish navy, and so many other pirates and bandits on that ship. She was the vessel that had helped them take their first steps in the ocean.

"Let's see...how about the Cape High?"

"Huh? Is that because I'm the vice-captain?"

"Like hell! It just sounds cool!"

"Hahahahaha! Whatever you say then, captain! What do you think, Elma?"

He walked away, hardly able to feel his legs. The memories flowed into his head, the sounds and sights he had seen aboard the Black Maria playing in his head over and over again.

"We're gonna find El Dorado for our idiotic captain!" The sound of clinking glasses and laughter, the smell of smoke and roasted fish. The taste of red wine. His first crewmates. Elma, Eddie, and Morgan.

On the slightly elevated poop deck, Whitebeard watched Jackie walk towards the stairs, an empty look in his eyes. Unable to bear it, he called the boy. "Hey! Kid."

Jackie looked up, and was surprised to see Whitebeard crook his finger at him. "Come up here, why don't you. What's that you're holding there?"

Jackie skipped over the two short steps up to the deck and showed Whitebeard the cracked piece of wood. The two of them walked towards the aft end of the ship, where the wind was blowing the hardest. "Black Maria? Was that her name?" He asked gently.

"Sure was. She carried us for the last two years, from the start of my journey to the last point." He said, trying to sound carefree. But Whitebeard grimly noted the look in his eyes. It wasn't the mere emptiness and lack of emotion, it was the darkness in his pupils, how sunken his eyes were.

He put his arm on Jackie's shoulder. "Boy, if I were to lose one member of my crew, just one, I'd be devastated. I'd feel horrible for days afterwards. And I have, believe me. You...you lost everything. Your crew, your ship, your money. Everything." Jackie looked up, an expression of plain hopelessness on his face.

Whitebeard looked back, his own expression stern. "You're trying to hold back your emotions. For the sake of your crew. And I understand that. The captain is the most important man on the ship. The very heart of every ship is it's captain." He turned around, and pointed at the Whitebeard Pirates' flag, which rose well above the rest of the ship, just over the crow's nest on the tallest mast.

"We have to keep a strong front to keep that flag raised high. It's our symbol. But that doesn't mean we aren't human." He locked his eyes on Jackie's, and continued, "It's okay to think to yourself that you were weak. That you couldn't protect or save your crew. But it's wrong to be hung up over that and stay that way!"

Jackie nodded, feeling a lump in his throat. Whitebeard could see the boy was struggling to hold his tears back.

Before Jackie could even think of pulling himself away, Whitebeard lunged forward, and wrapped his right arm around him.

"What have you left? Huh, Jackie?" He asked, thumping his fist on the boy's back.

With his head bowed over Whitebeard's shoulder, Jackie bit his lip, all the frustration and sadness he had experienced overwhelming him. His eyes glistened with tears, as the voices from his past started to wash over him once more.

"Jackie! You got injured again? I told you not to make that jump. You never listen to me..."

"Hey hey...that's my dinner, Jackie. Give that back!"

"Th-Thanks for letting me join your crew, Captain!"

Whitebeard felt something dripping onto his coat. He understood.

Sobbing like a little boy now, Jackie cried for the first time in seventeen years. "I still...I still have my crew!" His trembling voice came through, and Whitebeard patted his head.

"Hell if they aren't there for you. They've always been, since day one. They'll help you carry that burden."

After Jackie had calmed down and wiped the tears, the two of them sat down on the railing over the edge of the top deck, the sparkling blue ocean underneath their feet. "Who were your first crewmates?"

Jackie laughed, and took a sip from a green bottle of Italian wine, a generous gift from Whitebeard. "Elma and Eddie, those two are still here. My first vice-captain is gone, though. He was a pretty famous pirate. Ray "Black" Morgan, they called him. Former captain of the Black Pirates."

At the mention of this name, Whitebeard raised his eyebrows. Jackie was astonished when he suddenly started laughing, and not just a regular old laugh, either. It was a loud, booming laughter that came straight from his belly.

"HAHAHAHAHA! So that's where the brat ended up! I always wondered where he ran off!" He wiped tears off his eyes and grinned. "Never would I have imagined I'd hear about him like this though."

Confused as hell, Jackie took a long sip from the bottle and glanced back at Whitebeard questioningly. "You knew Morgan?"

Whitebeard rubbed his chin and shook his head. "I wouldn't say I knew him. But I did meet him. I think it was about four years ago. We ran into some slaves fighting a small fleet of Dealers. Turned out it was the Black Pirates, those infamous slaves who had formed a pirate crew."

"We knew they weren't warlike, and neither were we. So I decided to help them." His choice of words here interested Jackie. Did he mean he took on the fleet on his own? His curiosity overcame him, and he asked the question.

"Oh? Well the ships were full of small-fry. There were probably three or four ships. I sank em all." Sank three or four ships on his own? What the fuck?

What was most terrifying was how casually he said this. Based on what Morgan had told Jackie about the Dealers, they were slave traders obsessed with making money off black slaves. Each ship usually had at least fifty or sixty men on board. And Whitebeard sank all three? On his own? Just how would he?

"We saved their asses in the end. The ship was full of black slaves. Not just men, either. Women, and even children under the age of five or six. They were terrified of us, but then their captain stepped up, ready to fight us."

Jackie remembered Morgan. He was an insanely muscular, tall man, with short, wavy hair and almost a dozen large scars on his body. He was the first black man Jackie had ever seen, back when he was sixteen years old. He carried around a huge iron sledgehammer almost as long as his body. It wasn't just long either. It was incredibly heavy. Even Jackie, who was fairly strong, could barely lift it with two hands. Morgan lifted it and spun it around in fights as though it was a twig.

"Did you think he was strong?" Jackie asked. Whitebeard nodded, and he was quite impressed. If one of the Ascendants thought Morgan was strong, he really must have been a force to be reckoned with. "His sheer physical strength was amazing. And he couldn't even use Ley properly."

Ley? Jackie had heard about that somewhere, probably from Morgan. "What's Ley?"

Whitebeard looked at Jackie, an expression of surprise on his face. "You don't know what Ley is?" He nodded, confused.

Whitebeard grinned, and waved his hand at him. "Well, I'll tell you after this story. But anyway, Morgan was wary of me. I think he could tell I was strong, so he was trying to test me. He swung that huge hammer of his straight at me, and I had to block that thing with Ley."

"The force behind my sword slamming into his hammer was huge. It caused some damage to his ship's deck, so I had to send my head woodworker over to fix that later. We decided to trust each other in the end, so it worked out okay."

"We spent the next couple of days in a little town off the coast of Italy. What a time we had! We partied, we robbed the rich asshole merchant who stole the water from the citizens of the town for every penny he had, and ran. That kid, Morgan. He was one of the craziest idiots I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. We went our separate ways after the stuff that happened in Italy. But I never forgot him!"

He laughed again, genuine happiness in his eyes. "So he kicked the bucket against Blackbeard, huh? That's the most Morgan way to die, it is!"

Any regular person might have been at least a little offended by this remark. But somehow, Jackie found this to be incredibly funny. Because for almost two years, Morgan had fought alongside him. Not only was he the strongest in the crew, he was also without doubt the least sane.

So he tossed his head up and laughed as well, unaware of a tear in his left eye. Both Whitebeard and Jackie sat there and laughed, marveling at the life of Black Morgan, the slave pirate who knew of no limits.

* * * *

The roaring of the winds simply couldn't drown out the sounds of gunfire and screaming from the two crews.

CLANK! CLINK!

The sounds of swords colliding against each other echoed in the small piece of land, so small it could much rather be described as a big rock in the sea than an island.

"STOP! STOP, REDSHIRE, STOP!" A man's voice rose higher than even the sounds of gunfire and the howling winds. Captain Redshire turned around, and saw the man he had recently rescued from a deserted island descend from his ship.

He was a tall and extremely muscular man, his skin black and covered with scars. He wore black leather pants, and a torn gray scarf wrapped around his neck. The ripped and worn out ends of the scarf waved and rippled behind his back in the fierce winds.

In his huge hand was a gigantic sledgehammer, almost as long as he was tall. His eyes were sharp and hawk-like, and a light stubble of black hair decorated his lined face.

Across the tiny battlefield was a small army of former slaves, with upto fifty or sixty men and even women in number. Leading it was the current captain of the Black Pirates, captain Nkudu.

The man slammed the end of his hammer into the ground with monstrous strength that made the ground shake, and looked at Nkudu. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY CREW, NKUDU?!"

Nkudu narrowed his eyes at the man, and muttered one word.

"Captain."