Alive

[uglyyomithing.livejournal.com]

Title:: Alive
Rating: PG
Character: Nico Robin
Word Count: 298
Prompt: Parents
Summary: Surviving and being alive are two very different things, and also something that Robin knows all too well.
Author's Note: Why is it that I always write when I should be asleep?

She had been told to live.

An order from mother to daughter which came out as a desperate cry that was almost unheard amid the boom and crash of cannonballs overhead; she had been told to live on, and to live for the future.

An eternity spent apart, a moment reunited, and all that was left from the encounter was the smouldering heap of ash and rubble that was once known as ‘Ohara.’

So many years were spent longing for a family; longing for her mother. Yet in that single moment where she held her hand and actually felt the warmth of her mother’s embrace for the first time – that longing didn’t seem to matter so much. The years of loneliness were all temporarily forgotten as soon as those arms wrapped around her...but then the giant came back, and her mother told him to take her far away.

And he did; Saul took her as far as he could before his own story came to an end.

Then came the small rowboat that was protected by layers of ice, and with that came the years of running, hiding, stealing, hurting, killing, and doing everything she could in order to ensure her survival. Those years couldn’t be counted as living, and they certainly couldn’t have been what her mother had wanted for her.

Only when it had to be shouted from the rooftops, only when they fought for their lives for the sake of saving hers, only when Going Merry came up to rescue them did Nico Robin realize that she was no longer surviving--she was living.

She had been told to live, and so she did.

And part of her – perhaps the slightly more foolish part – liked to think that somehow, her mother knew this as well.