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CHORUS LEADER: You would become the wretchedest of women.
IRINA: Then let it be.
Tsai Irina wasn't born without a heart, science told her so.
Truth is, Irina doesn't think she has no room for one, none that the world would allow.
Before Irina is what she is — Heartrender, Wanted Dead or Alive, and a 96 million bounty on her head — Swallowtail was the closest place she considered a home, the furthest memory she could access. It was on Swallowtail that Tsai Lan thrusted the title 'daughter' onto her, and what a wretched thing it was. A mother's love, Irina learned, is the power injected into her veins, dooming her entire existence to heartbeats and synapses. But she'd let Lan do it over and over, create and de-create her body every night because it's all she had known to be a daughter, because it meant spending another day with her sisters not by blood but by bond and gods... how terribly beautiful it was.
All stories have to end, however.
Swallowtail wasn't built in a day, but it burned in one. With it, any semblance of humanity Irina had.
After Swallowtail, Irina's life consists of running. For years, she drifts across the Grand Line in search of her sisters, fighting tooth and nail against Death, and in the stygian depths of the world, uncovers a name.
Joker — the red string that binds them together.
They tell her there's no salvation at the end of that road, but Irina isn't looking for salvation.
What she wants is this: an eye for an eye. Joker took away her heart. In turn, she shall devour his.
The promise of blood has kept her alive all these years, and Irina is content with what she has become, monstrous as the world tells her. Yet there remains an aching, a bruising, this gods-forsaken burden in her chest... Irina thinks it's a perversion, a sickness that must be cured before she is crushed by the weight of it all. She wants to rip it out of her chest and crush it between her fingers, let its teeth become seeds and sprout venus fly-traps for her enemies to be ruined in.
And it doesn't matter if Trafalgar D. Water Law (the man with a mouthful name and a will too heavy to shoulder) says otherwise. He of all people should know what it feels to have your heart forcefully ripped out of your hold, to have a knife cleave out the very essence that makes a human. They are one and the same: with sides that the light does not touch, sides that are made of the same broken parts, sides that they show but reflect differently. That's why she struck the alliance in the first place, to destroy the common denominator between them, not to ask for pity so either he stops looking at her like that (like she's someone worth saving) or she'll have to gouge his eyes out of his skull one day.
