Chapter Text
The first story she ever heard was a lie.
She knew that now—now that she was old enough to sharpen her own knives and boil seawater just right so it didn’t kill you if you drank it slow. But at the time, when she was only six and still had baby teeth and dreams that didn’t end in blood, it sounded like magic.
"Your mama was a sea goddess," the man said, flicking a gold coin into the air and catching it without looking. "She rode in on a whale, naked as the moon, and tamed the storm with a kiss."
She’d believed him. Hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, her "father"—and she used that word loosely, like how pirates used the word "friend" for people they hadn’t stabbed yet —was piss drunk when he said it. Half his teeth were missing, and the ones left looked like they’d been through a bar fight with a meat cleaver. He smelled like piss, rum, and regret. Which meant he was probably telling the truth about something… just not the important parts.
She was hiding under a broken barrel when she heard the real story.
They were docked in some no-name port town off the Grand Line, laying low after a failed raid. She wasn’t supposed to be awake. Definitely wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping. But the shouting had woken her. That and the blood—fresh, sticky, and seeping through the cracks above her bunk. Someone had gotten gutted topside. Again.
"She begged, y'know?" a voice slurred. It was old Toothless again. "Had the babe in her arms, cryin'. Said she was just passin' through. We told her—this here’s pirate waters. No passin' through. You pass under ."
They all laughed. The kind of laugh that curdled in the back of your throat and tasted like bile.
"Cap said she was pretty, so he let her live long enough to scream."
The girl didn’t cry.
Not then.
Not when they said the babe was "useful" for bargaining. Not when they joked about how loud her mama could scream. Not even when the memory of that coin flickered in her mind—gold, glinting, and fake.
She just… filed it away.
Like a story.
Like something to be rewritten later.
That night, she crawled back into her hammock and stared at the rotted ceiling beams. She didn’t sleep. Didn’t move. Didn’t breathe too loud.
And the next morning, when Toothless tried to ruffle her hair like a father might, she bit his fucking finger off.
The screaming didn’t bother her. Not anymore.
By the time she was ten, she knew the pitch and tone of every death rattle aboard the Scourge . She could tell if a man had been stabbed, shot, or strangled just by the way he screamed. She could mimic it, too—for fun, or to freak out the newer deckhands.
She was useful now.
"Oi, Story," someone barked at her once. The name stuck.
They didn’t call her girl or brat anymore. Just Story. Because that’s what she told. Because that’s what she was . Lies wrapped in laughter and half-truths that kept you alive longer than you should’ve been.
The cap’n liked her. Said she had a tongue sharper than his cutlass and balls bigger than the cook’s stew pot. She learned fast that the real way to a pirate’s respect wasn’t through brute strength—it was through bullshit.
"Make ‘em laugh," Cap had said. "Or make ‘em weep. Just don’t let ‘em ignore you."
So she talked. Spun tales that weren’t quite true but weren’t lies either. Said she had sea monster blood. That her mama cursed the crew with her last breath. That her eyes were made from melted sky-stone and her bones could float on lava.
Some of them believed her. Some just liked the way she said it.
But none of them ever looked at her like she was small again.
The first time she killed a man, he was trying to prove she was lying.
She’d said she could split a throat with a slingshot from ten paces.
He called her bluff.
She didn’t miss.
She stood over his body, blood still bubbling in his neck, and smiled with teeth that hadn’t fallen out in years. "Told you."
They gave her his boots. His bunk. His cut of the loot.
The boots didn’t fit. She kept them anyway.
She didn’t remember her real name.
Sometimes she thought she might have made it up, too.
But she remembered her mother’s eyes. Big, warm, and brown like the muddy shallows near shore. She remembered soft fingers running through her curls. She remembered the smell of sea-salt and honeyed ginger and the sound of a voice that hummed lullabies with too many verses.
She remembered what love felt like.
And what it sounded like when it was taken.
The thing about stories is they can grow teeth. The more you tell ‘em, the more they bite back.
And somewhere between the slingshot and the slander, the girl with the melted-sky eyes started to believe her own tales.
Started to wonder if maybe her blood was cursed.
Maybe she was born of a sea goddess and a storm.
Maybe the only way to survive this world was to become something more dangerous than the monsters in it.
She liked that idea.
She liked it a lot.
So when the Navy ship pulled up on their portside and called for surrender, she didn’t flinch.
She stepped forward, cocked her slingshot, and told them a story.
About a girl with no name.
Who lied so beautifully, even Death paused to listen.
And then she let the shot fly.