A few days later, when the ship was sailing smooth and steady beneath a pale midday sky, Nami found herself glancing over at Varin again. He was leaning against the railing, arms crossed over his bare chest, eyes half-lidded against the sun but ever-watchful. The breeze tugged lightly at the ends of his wild black hair, which still hadn't been tamed despite days aboard the ship. He didn't speak much unless prompted, but he was always listening, always observing.
It had been bothering her for days now, ever since they left the frozen shores where they'd found him. She knew the East Blue like the back of her hand—its waters, its islands, its currents. Every smuggler's route and trade wind, every storm path and secret cove. She prided herself on that knowledge. So it stuck in her mind like a thorn that just wouldn't dislodge.
She stepped up beside him, her gaze sliding toward the horizon before she spoke. "That place we found you," she said quietly. "It's not on any map."
Varin didn't turn to look at her, but his eyes shifted slightly, acknowledging her presence. "That doesn't surprise me."
Nami frowned, arms folding across her chest. "Why? I've memorized every inch of the East Blue, and that island—doesn't no shouldn't—exist."
There was a pause. Then Varin let out a low breath, somewhere between amusement and resignation. "That's because it's not technically an island."
Now that caught her attention. She turned her head fully toward him. "What do you mean?"
Varin shifted slightly, finally meeting her eyes. "It's an iceberg. A massive one. Bigger than anything you've probably seen. Not naturally formed either, at least not entirely. It came from the Grand Line."
Nami's brow furrowed. "The Grand Line?" she echoed, her voice quiet but tight with interest. The mention of that sea always brought with it a heavy mixture of caution and curiosity. Anyone from the Grand Line had already seen a world far more chaotic and brutal than the one the East Blue offered.
Varin gave a quiet hum in response, not exactly surprised by her reaction. "I thought it was pretty obvious I'm from there," he said, voice low and unhurried. "Though, if it makes you feel better... The iceberg used to be part of an island. A real one. Land, trees, stone, the works."
Nami raised an eyebrow. "What happened to it?"
"It became a prison," Varin said matter-of-factly. His tone was flat—no bitterness, no heat—just the cold certainty of someone who had already made peace with the horror of it. "Not much to it."
Nami blinked, momentarily thrown off by the simplicity of the answer. "A prison?" she echoed. "You mean your prison…? Why?"
Varin didn't answer at first. The wind tugged gently at the ends of his hair, carrying the scent of salt and sun as the ship rocked steadily beneath them. His gaze stayed fixed on the horizon, far, far away from her eyes.
"Let me have some secrets, aye?" he said at last, voice even, almost detached. "I'll tell you what I'm capable of any day of the week—but not that. Not yet."
Nami's brow furrowed, but she didn't press, not yet.
"It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things," he went on, arms folding across his scarred chest. "Not to you, not to this crew. The past isn't something I'm trying to outrun. It's just… not something I need to unpack for the sake of curiosity. That place, what it did to me—what it turned me into—it's already carved into the way I move, think, and fight. You'll see it eventually. No need for backstory."
There was a pause. The sea stretched endlessly ahead of them, a band of blue and gold, broken only by the faint silhouette of a distant coastline.
"I wasn't imprisoned for stealing bread or being at the wrong place at the wrong time," Varin added quietly. "I wasn't innocent. That's all I'll say."
Something in his tone left no room for further questions, a silent not yet.
Nami looked away, her expression unreadable. She'd spent most of her life hiding her own scars—literal and otherwise—behind smiles and sharp retorts. She understood more than most that some wounds didn't heal with words, and some stories were heavy enough to drown anyone who tried to carry them.
Footsteps approached—light, practiced, deliberate. Sanji leaned against the edge of the cabin's doorway, one hand tucked into his pocket, a cigarette half-burned between his fingers. His eyes weren't the flirtatious blue he usually turned toward Nami, nor the exasperated ones he reserved for Luffy's chaos. Right now, they were sharp, thoughtful, watchful in a way that suggested he'd been there longer than either of them had noticed.
"I was wondering something myself," Sanji said, exhaling a slow curl of smoke into the salt-laced wind. "You were on that iceberg for years, right? Why didn't you eat?"
The question hung there, casual on the surface, but with something deeper beneath it. Curiosity, yes—but also concern. A cook didn't just ask about missed meals; he asked about starvation like a swordsman might ask about wounds.
Varin tilted his head slightly and, to their surprise, gave a short, hearty laugh—rough and genuine, like the bark of an animal amused by a weaker predator. He crossed his arms again, shoulders shaking slightly with mirth.
"Eat?" he repeated, eyes glinting with amusement. "You heard it yourself, that iceberg is from the Grand Line, curly-brow. You know what that means?"
Sanji didn't answer, but he didn't need to.
"It means I might as well have been an ant," Varin continued, voice rich with bitter humor. "That place wasn't just cold. It was alive with things that shouldn't exist. That blizzard snake we ran into could have killed us all, and we wouldn't have even been able to scratch its scales."
He shifted, jaw tightening as memories swirled behind his eyes. "Even then, those rabbit things..." He let out a short, humorless laugh. "If I'd been alone, they would've ripped me to the bone in seconds. No hesitation. Just teeth and muscle and hunger. And that was a smaller horde than usual. I've seen what they can do when they gather in force. It's not something you outrun. Not something you fight, either. You just pray they don't notice you."
He glanced down at the deck, then back up again. "I didn't eat because I didn't feel like it. There was no food. No animals dumb enough to live there long. And I sure as hell wasn't going to chase anything that did. I'm not suicidal."
"But you didn't die," Nami said quietly.
Varin shrugged. "We've been over this. Didn't starve, didn't freeze, didn't fall asleep and drift off into whatever death that kind of cold offers. That's the fruit talking. Fenrir—it's not just about hunger or strength. It's about endurance. Restraint. Being bound and biding time."
He looked at Sanji then, more serious now. "I wasn't surviving. I was waiting."
Sanji's brow furrowed. "Waiting for what?"
Varin stared at the sea, his expression unreadable.
"…For something to change, I suppose," he said finally. "For something to break."
A gust of wind pulled across the deck, scattering a few scraps from Luffy's latest mess of a lunch and catching the end of Varin's long hair. The three stood in silence, the mood heavier than before.
Sanji looked at him for a long moment, then flicked the last of his cigarette over the railing. "Well, if it happens again, you'll have a kitchen," he said, turning to leave. "And someone who actually gives a damn whether you eat. Someone who knows what it's like to go hungry."
As he disappeared below deck, Varin exhaled through his nose—less of a scoff, more like the quiet sigh of a man unused to others giving a damn.
"…Strange crew," he muttered.
Nami smirked beside him. "You're not exactly standard cargo either."
Varin chuckled lowly, silver eyes narrowing at the horizon where Loguetown grew ever closer. "Fair enough."
It wasn't long before Varin stood alone at the railing of the Going Merry, Nami having stormed off—presumably to either kill or beat Luffy. His tall frame cast a long shadow over the deck, motionless against the gentle sway of the ship. The sea beyond stretched out calm and endless, the horizon fading into a pale sky streaked with morning haze. Behind him, the muted sounds of life aboard the ship—Sanji clattering in the galley, Usopp's muffled boasting, Luffy's inevitable bursts of laughter—felt distant, like echoes from a world he wasn't entirely part of.
Sanji's question still echoed in his head, stubborn and quiet.
Why didn't you eat?
A simple thing to ask. Innocent, even. He answered, something not quite a lie but not entirely truthful.
But the memories came anyway.
The first year or so on the ice was nothing but a blur of white and pain, of snow that blinded and wind that screamed. Hunger was immediate, gnawing, omnipresent. He remembered the first few days distinctly—searching, clawing through drifts, hoping for anything remotely edible. A carcass. A shrub. Even moss.
There was nothing.
No trees that weren't harder than stone. They dotted the iceberg like skeletal sentinels—frozen trunks twisted and gnarled, bark darker than coal and just as brittle. At a glance, they might've seemed like salvation: wood for fire, bark for kindling. A chance. But when Varin tried, when he wrapped his fingers around one and snapped off a branch, it splintered like obsidian. The bark cracked beneath his grip but didn't flake—just broke apart in sharp fragments that bit into his skin.
He'd tried chewing it once, out of desperation more than logic. The moment it hit his teeth, the bitter, icy resin inside burned like acid, and the texture was like grinding glass in his mouth. He spat blood and bark into the snow.
No wood. No soil. No stone. Just ancient ice.
He'd thought, once, to start a fire. It had been his first instinct—dry wood, kindling, flame. But the iceberg offered nothing that could burn. Nothing that could hold a spark. The trees were statues. Fossils. Echoes of a time before the cold claimed them.
Even if he had something to burn, he realized quickly that the cold was too absolute. He remembered once pressing his hand to a stone jutting from the ice, only to feel his skin freeze to it in seconds. Even the air seemed to devour warmth like a starving thing. Trying to create heat there felt like trying to light a spark in the vacuum of space.
First, it was snow. Then ice. He packed it down, chewed it slowly. It was like swallowing his own death—cold, wet, useless. He tore frozen fur from long-dead animals he found embedded in the glacier and stuffed it into his mouth, trying to convince himself there might be nutrients left in it.
It was like chewing old rope.
He gnawed on leather—his own boots, the strap from his belt. He bit into frozen bone.
Once, in a particularly dark hour—when his limbs were shaking too hard to move and his breath came in ragged, shallow gulps—he looked down at his own hands and thought:
There's meat here. There's flesh. It's mine, but it's food.
He didn't think of it with drama. There was no desperate scream, no mad frenzy. Just quiet acceptance. It was a logical thought, devoid of panic. The kind that came when the body was too close to breaking and the mind stopped pretending it could save it.
He raised his arm. Sunk his teeth into it.
The pain came first—a dull pressure, then a sharper sting as his enlarged canines—his only truly predatory teeth—broke the skin.
Blood welled, hot and metallic, against his tongue.
But that was all. His teeth couldn't go deeper. His jaw didn't have the strength. His body was too weak to even cannibalize itself.
He sat there afterward, trembling.
Not from shame.
From failure.
Not even his own flesh could sustain him.
Now, standing on a ship sailing toward the Grand Line, with food in the kitchen and warmth in the sun, those memories felt like they belonged to someone else. A ghost of the man he'd been.
But they were his.
They clung to his bones.
He stared at the water, watching the reflection of his silver eyes ripple with the sea. Unblinking. Cold.
No one else on this ship knew what true starvation was. What isolation stripped bare could make someone do. They didn't have to. Though he had a suspicion, Sanji understood, at least somewhat.
That was the point.
He survived that.
Alone.
And yet now he was here, on a ship with strangers who had no idea what he'd been through.
He exhaled slowly, a faint, bitter sound that almost passed for a laugh. "Why didn't I eat?"
Varin gave a low, amused hum, laced with dry mirth.
"Because in the end, the only thing left to eat was myself—and even that didn't work."
For a few minutes longer, Varin stared at his reflection in the passing water, the surface shifting with the gentle sway of the ship. Silver eyes met silver eyes—cold, sharp, and ancient in a way no boy his age should be. For a moment, the ice-laced silence of that drifting prison clawed at the edges of his thoughts again. The hunger. The wind that never stopped howling. The taste of his own blood.
He shook his head once, brisk and final. No use reminiscing.
What's done is done. What survived, survived. He didn't care to dwell on it; no use in adding another chain around his neck by letting the past consume him.
He exhaled through his nose and leaned off the railing, rolling his shoulders with the creak of old scars and tensed muscle. A small smile tugged at one corner of his mouth—not quite soft, not quite sharp. More of a smirk than anything else. Genuine, though. That much he could afford.
And then, without another glance at the sea, he turned toward the inevitable chaos building behind him. The sounds were already escalating: a yelp, a pan rattling, and a sharp "GET BACK HERE!" in a voice Varin had quickly come to recognize as a herald of carnage.
His crew.
His pack.
With a quiet sigh that sounded almost fond, he stepped back into the madness just in time to stop Sanji from turning Usopp into paste for the next meal.
---
The Going Merry creaked gently as it docked at Loguetown, the town of beginnings and endings. The crew gathered on deck, taking in the bustling port filled with merchants, marines, and travelers.
Nami unfurled a parchment, her eyes scanning the list she'd meticulously prepared.
"Alright, everyone," she began, her tone all business. "We need to restock our supplies before heading to the Grand Line. That includes fresh food, medical supplies, ammunition, and navigational charts. And let's not forget—"
"New clothes!" Luffy interjected with a grin.
Nami shot him a look but continued, "Yes, clothes too. But remember, any personal purchases come with a 300% interest rate if you're borrowing from me."
Usopp groaned. "That's daylight robbery!"
"Then don't borrow," Nami replied sweetly.
She turned to Varin, who had been silently observing the exchange.
"Varin, do you need anything?"
He shook his head. "No. I'm good."
Nami raised an eyebrow but didn't press further. "Alright then. Let's split up and meet back here in an hour; it's going to rain soon. Stay out of trouble."
As the crew dispersed into the lively streets of Loguetown, Varin lingered for a moment, his gaze drifting to the distant execution platform—a stark reminder of the town's history. Then, with a quiet sigh, he turned and followed his crewmates into the crowd.
The streets of Loguetown were a cacophony of life—vendors shouting over one another, the clatter of carts on cobblestones, and the ceaseless murmur of the crowd. Varin's ears twitched at the overwhelming noise, his senses assaulted by the unfamiliar hustle. He felt out of place, his instincts screaming at him to retreat to the quiet solitude he was accustomed to.
A low growl rumbled in his throat, barely audible over the din, but enough to make a few passersby glance his way before hastily moving on. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, and focused on the figure ahead. Zoro moved with purpose, seemingly unfazed by the chaos around him.
Varin quickened his pace to catch up, his footsteps light despite his size. He fell into step beside Zoro, who acknowledged him with a simple nod but didn't speak. They moved like two shadows down the bustling street, unbothered by the jostling crowd, yet apart from it all the same. As they walked, the overwhelming din of Loguetown began to blur at the edges. For Varin, it became background noise—something distant, like wind howling against thick glass. He focused instead on the steady rhythm of their steps, the grounding cadence of a companion who didn't expect words.
Eventually, Zoro broke the silence. "You don't like crowds," he observed flatly but not unkindly.
Varin gave a short huff, more air than sound. "You spend years in isolation, and then try to deal with"—he made a vague swing of his hand at the surrounding chaos: street merchants hollering, children darting through gaps, the clang of metal from a nearby forge—"this… all at once."
His lip curled faintly, not quite a sneer, more weary than hostile.
"I get it," Zoro muttered. "Too many voices. Too much motion. Feels like it all wants something from you."
"Or trying to take something," Varin added, voice low, nearly drowned by the crowd. "Noise like this—people like this—it stirs up instincts. Makes you wonder which one's going to try and stick a knife in your back."
Zoro's brow ticked slightly, but he didn't argue. Instead, he glanced sidelong at the taller man. "That the kind of place you were before?"
Varin shrugged. "Didn't have 'places' where I was. Just cold. Hunger. Silence. Nothing that usually talks… unless it wants to kill you." He paused, then added, almost with amusement, "So yes, I suppose I prefer quiet."
Zoro didn't respond right away. He simply nodded again, the weight of that simple acknowledgment carrying more than words might have.
"You adapt, though," Varin went on after a beat, his voice softer, roughened at the edges. "If the pack is loud, you learn how to listen through the noise. But I won't pretend it's easy."
"You've been with us, what, a few days?" Zoro asked. "You call this a pack already?"
"I've fought you," Varin said. "That's enough. Might not mean much to you, but where I come from, one battle like that can bond stronger than blood."
Zoro let that settle before muttering, "Hmph. You sound like someone who's lost a lot of packs."
Zoro let that settle before muttering, "Hmph. You sound like someone who's lost a lot of packs."
Varin's laugh came sharp and sudden—a rough bark that startled a few passersby. It wasn't mocking, nor loud enough to draw true attention, but there was something primal in it, something edged. And still, it was genuine.
"Just one, I suppose," he said, the corner of his mouth quirking with something that might've been humor—or memory. "Guess it wasn't the pack for me after all."
He scratched lightly at the base of his neck, eyes flicking to the sky, as if trying to place a ghost there. His voice, though steady, carried a faint rasp of something old and worn.
"I stayed with them as long as I could. Long enough to believe it mattered. Long enough to be proven wrong." His silver gaze drifted across the bustling street, unfocused. "Some packs don't break because of betrayal. Some just… forget you're part of them."
Zoro said nothing. He didn't need to. His silence wasn't dismissive—it was observant, accepting. The kind a warrior gives when he knows some wounds aren't meant to be exposed, just aired long enough to stop festering.
"But this one…" Varin said, and glanced back toward the way they'd come. Laughter echoed faintly through the din—Luffy's unmistakable cheer, Usopp shouting something absurd, Nami's irritated retort snapping close behind it. "This one's different. They're idiots," he added, a smirk tugging across his scarred mouth. "Loud, reckless, chaotic."
"And?"
"And I think I quite like my new pack."
Zoro's lips curved just slightly—not a smile, but something like approval.
"You sure? You haven't seen what we get up to yet."
"I've seen enough," Varin said.
They walked a few more steps in silence, the sound of their boots crunching against the worn stone of Loguetown's streets mingling with the distant chatter of the crowds. Then Varin glanced sideways, his silver gaze cutting toward Zoro with casual curiosity.
"On the note of seeing," he said, "I saw you take a loan from the greed demon. Why?"
Zoro didn't answer right away. Instead, he reached to his side and drew one of his swords—not to threaten, just to show. The hilt was cracked, the blade gone. A relic bearing the scars of something far more than time.
Another sword followed. Similar damage. Splintered grip. Stripped edge.
"How?" Varin asked, tone quieting to something heavier.
Zoro nodded once. "Dracule Mihawk," he said evenly. "Didn't even draw his real sword at first. Broke two of mine with a dagger. Toyed with me."
There was no shame in his voice—just the kind of simmering resolve that lives in those who lose and survive.
Varin slowed slightly, his brows furrowing, a small hum of surprise slipping past his lips. "You survived that monster?"
The question wasn't rhetorical. It carried weight. Admiration. Genuine disbelief.
Zoro's eyes narrowed a little, measuring him. "You say that like you've met him before."
Varin didn't answer right away. His gaze drifted forward again, sharp and faraway.
The cold had pulled his thoughts elsewhere. For a few steps, he said nothing—no quip, no grin, not even a breath deep enough to invite conversation. Just silence.
Zoro noticed. He didn't press, though his brow furrowed slightly. The swordsman wasn't one to pry—he knew the weight of stories not yet ready to be told. So instead, he shifted the current.
"You use weapons?" Zoro asked, adjusting the wrapped hilts at his side as they walked.
That pulled Varin's attention back. He blinked once, as though shaking off snow from a long-forgotten memory, and looked over at Zoro with a flicker of amusement behind the pale silver of his eyes.
"Besides my claws?" he said, glancing down at his hands—long-fingered, calloused, with nails just a shade too sharp to be normal. "Sure. I've used whatever I had to. Rocks. Bone. Teeth." He flexed his fingers slightly. "But no, I don't carry a blade."
Zoro raised an eyebrow. "Not even a dagger?"
"I had one once," Varin said with a faint shrug. "Lost it. Or broke it. Doesn't matter. Claws don't rust. Don't dull. Don't get knocked out of your grip when you're too tired to clench your fingers."
There was something old and almost bestial in the way he said it—not boastful, just... settled. As though he'd had this conversation before, in a colder place, where survival didn't allow for elegance or pride.
"Besides," he added, half-smirking, "you've seen the teeth."
Zoro gave a short, dry grunt. "Hard to forget."
They walked on a few more paces. The crowd thickened slightly ahead, merchants calling out over crates of spices and seafood, the air filled with the scent of salt and sunbaked stone. But between them, that quiet understanding settled again—two creatures shaped by very different battles, but still forged in fire.
Zoro glanced at him sideways once more, measuring again—but this time, without suspicion.
"You're weird," he said simply.
Varin chuckled. "Takes one to know one."
They walked in silence for a while longer, the din of Loguetown's streets folding around them like a restless sea—shouts from fishmongers, the clatter of wheels against cobblestone, the occasional ring of a distant bell signaling the hour. Despite the crowd, the two of them carved out a quiet space simply by existing within it. Zoro's quiet intensity and Varin's looming, wolfish presence earned them a wide berth. People didn't quite know what to make of them, and maybe that was for the best.
At one point, Zoro slowed and stepped toward a street vendor folding up old charts. The man looked up in alarm, visibly startled until Zoro simply grunted, "Any decent smiths or weapon shops nearby?"
The man blinked rapidly, nodding toward a side street a few rows down. "Two blocks east, left at the old fountain. Can't miss it—called Iron Fang. They do custom hilts."
Zoro gave a curt nod, didn't bother thanking him, and kept walking.
Varin smirked faintly as they continued. "Custom hilts," he echoed, his voice low with amusement. "That sounds expensive. You planning on haggling with that face?"
Zoro didn't look at him. "I don't haggle. If it's worth it, I'll pay."
A few more paces passed in silence, broken only by the wind tugging at signs and cloth canopies above the stalls.
"I used an axe once," Varin said suddenly, the words seemingly pulled from somewhere deeper.
Zoro gave a low grunt. "Huh. Seems like an odd choice. Most people go for reach, finesse. Axes are messy."
Varin's expression flickered—nostalgic, maybe. Maybe something heavier.
"They are," he agreed. "But sometimes mess is what you need. When the goal isn't to win pretty—it's just to survive. Or make sure something else doesn't."
There was no bravado in his voice. Just the kind of matter-of-fact tone that came from firsthand experience. Zoro didn't question it. He knew the sound of truth when he heard it, and that quiet weight behind Varin's words was the kind only earned in blood and bitter winters.
"You still have it?" Zoro asked after a beat, his voice even but laced with genuine curiosity.
Varin gave a slight breath through his nose—almost a laugh—and spread his arms, gesturing at himself with a faint, wry twist of his mouth. The movement drew attention, not that it needed help. He wasn't exactly subtle.
"No shirt. No belts. No sheaths. Just fur, bone, and old scars," Zoro muttered, giving Varin an almost amused sidelong glance. "Right. Guess that answers that."
He scratched his head lazily, eyes scanning a nearby stall cluttered with rusted daggers and cheap trinkets before settling back on Varin. "It's easy to forget, y'know," he said, not quite conversational but not unfriendly either. "You don't really act like someone who… well. Spent—what was it? Years? Alone on some ice trap of an island?"
Varin's smirk faded into something quieter, something unreadable. His arms lowered, and his silver gaze drifted to the cobbled street ahead. The forge clang still echoed down the alleyway in rhythmic pulses—metal striking metal—but it felt far off now, as though submerged under something older and heavier.
"Little over seven," he said after a pause. "But I don't think the years mattered as much as the… silence."
Zoro didn't respond immediately. He understood that kind of silence—not just the absence of noise, but the absence of meaning. Of purpose. Of anyone else's breathing to prove you weren't just a ghost already.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, then jerked his chin forward. "C'mon. If we're gonna be talking about past weapons and isolation trauma, we might as well be doing it somewhere with better steel."
They moved on, the market's noise folding around them like waves around a hull. Zoro's hand tightened on his sword's hilt as they passed a display of finely crafted blades—polished steel gleaming in the sunlight, price tags whispering of gold they didn't have.
"Expensive," he muttered, tone flat.
Varin leaned in, reading the tags. "Half a chest of berries for a sword? Not worth it."
Zoro let out a low chuckle. "Tell me about it."
They rounded a corner, leaving the hustle of stalls behind. But just as they were deep in their thoughts, a sharp shout cut through the air.
They rounded a corner, slipping out of the worst of the noise and into a quieter side street. For a few steps, Varin allowed himself to relax, his broad shoulders dropping slightly, the air cooler here and less saturated with the heat of too many bodies. But the respite was short-lived.
A sharp shout rang out from somewhere ahead—someone yelling, sharp with alarm.
Varin's head turned instinctively toward the sound, muscles coiling, senses sharpening. For a split second, he caught sight of a familiar red vest and straw hat bobbing above the crowd. Luffy. And was that smoke he was following?
Varin blinked. His gaze tracked the smoke's strange curling pattern and the briefest glimpse of a man in a long, pale coat vanishing into the shifting crowd. But before he could piece it together or call out, a movement to his side caught his attention—he turned, expecting to find Zoro still at his side.
But the swordsman was gone.
A frown creased Varin's brow. His silver eyes scanned the crowd, alert and careful. Zoro had vanished with that same ghostlike ease he moved through battlefields—here one moment, gone the next. Not surprising. He had learned quickly that Zoro's sense of direction was non-existent,
Varin stood still for a moment, caught between the instinct to pursue and the dull thrum of frustration. The press of bodies around him was starting to rise again, noise creeping back in like a tide reclaiming lost ground. His ears twitched slightly, jaw tightening as he forced down the low, guttural growl that threatened to bubble up from his throat.
No use.
No point hunting after a swordsman who didn't even know where he was going.
And besides…
Varin looked up at the bustling street. Merchants yelling prices, children laughing and weaving through the crowd, a street performer breathing a narrow stream of fire to cheers and gasps. It wasn't danger that chased him now—it was life. Chaotic, overwhelming, but alive. If he was going to stay with the crew—if he was going to keep traveling with this pack—he had to learn how to move through this noise without baring his teeth at every push and shout.
He sighed and turned down a side road, deeper into the market. The new plan was simple enough: explore, observe, get his bearings, maybe find something interesting or at least tolerable.
There was a street with food stalls, rich with the smell of seared meat and fresh bread that almost made him forget the harsh, metallic tang of raw survival that still clung to his memories. Another corner held a smithy with crude but sturdy blades hung like trophies on display. He paused there, not because he needed a weapon, but because the scent of iron and forge smoke was more familiar than the scent of perfume and baked sweets clogging the air elsewhere.
Children darted past him, shouting something about a marine nearby. A man in a top hat yelled about maps to the Grand Line. An old woman barked at him to move, and he blinked before stepping aside, instinctively tucking his broad frame in.
It was maddening. It was overwhelming. It was… good training.
Varin rolled his shoulders, eyes half-lidded, the remnants of a low snarl softened into something more passive. He kept moving. A little more used to it now than when the day began.
Crowds wouldn't be an excuse. Not for someone like him.
Let them jostle. Let them stare. He'd find a way to walk through the noise without flinching.
Eventually.