One Piece x Reader Oneshots (NO REQUESTS)

Predestined (??? x Reader)

Soulmate AU

Everyone is born with a timer on their wrist. From the moment you take your first breath, it starts counting, and the moment those numbers run down to zero is the moment you meet your soulmate. The one person in the world who completes you. Your destiny.

By the time you turned eighteen, you had watched almost all of your peers take to the seas in search of their destined, many of them returning triumphant with wedding plans on the horizon. Some lucky souls found theirs without ever even having to leave home.

You forced down the bubbling jealousy in your throat each time a new couple were united. There was no point in pining. So your soulmate was a little slow, you could wait. The timer on your wrist kept counting, and you kept waiting for the moment that decided your destiny. You could always watch the seconds tick down and know everything would be alright.

Except one day it wasn't.

It was raining that morning. You remembered waking to the sound of it pattering against your window pane. Your pillow was damp and at first you thought it was blood the way it stained the pink pillow red but, with a shock, you realised you had been crying.

You laughed at yourself. How silly to be crying in your sleep. You reached up to rub the tears away when you caught a glimpse of your wrist. Your heart stopped.

Your timer had frozen.

You couldn't breathe. Your room was a vacuum, sucking you in until your head spun and you felt sick to the stomach. When the tears started, you could not stop them. They flowed freely down your cheeks, obscuring your vision and blurring the figures. But you could still see them in your mind's eye, stark black against your skin like a brand.

One year, twenty-eight days, three hours and six seconds.

The village doctor confirmed your worst fears. "Your soulmate has died," he said. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

You had never known grief like this.

It was such a strange feeling – mourning for someone you had never even met. You had no name to carve on a tombstone, no body to bury, no photograph to remember them by. And it hurt. God, did it hurt more than anything you had ever felt. It wasn't the sharp throbbing pain of a broken bone, or the stinging burn from a skinned knee that had, up until now, been the worst you'd endured. It was a deep, hollow ache in your chest that felt like something had been torn out of you, leaving you to bleed out from the ragged edges of the space where it used to be.

You felt broken. Unfixable. Did you even have the capacity to feel love any more, or was that gone too?

And the worst thing was that no one understood. No one in your tiny village had ever known what it felt like. They tried. They tried so hard. But their sympathy could only go so far, and empathy was simply beyond their ability. The smiling faces of couples that walked by taunted you, while the unmoving numbers on your wrist remained as a constant reminder of what you had lost. What would never be.

One day, when the weight of their gazes, so full of pity, became unbearable, you decided you could mourn no longer. You decided it was time to search for answers. You needed closure. Like the others, you left in search of your destined, but there would be no wedding on the horizon for you.

Your searches amounted to little. But on the Grand Line, in the new World, your chase would come to an end.

It had been a long day of chasing leads that only lead to dead ends. An untouched tankard of ale sat on the table before you. The swill was good enough for the pirates you shared the tavern with, but you refused to touch it. Besides, you needed a clear head in the morning if you were to continue your search. This little port town had given you no leads, so it was likely you'd be leaving early tomorrow.