[One Piece] Deadlock
Title: Deadlock
Topic: Ties
Rating: G (Unless you consider "hell" to be a swear word)
Word Count: 297
Pairing: Kaku ---> Paulie, if that's your poison and you want to see it that way.
Summary: Set in the midst of the CP9 infiltration of Galley-La. Forgive me if the connection to the topic is a bit vague. ^^;
"Paulie-san, show us how to do a handcuff knot again."
"What? Right, this is the last time, pay attention. What? What the hell are you tittering like that for…?"
Kaku observed the gaggle of apprentice shipwrights surrounding Paulie and smiled surreptitiously over the rim of his tea mug. One year into this job and watching the rare occasions where Paulie grudgingly showed trainees the ropes - literally in this case - still proved to be an interesting tea-break spectacle. The foreman could be so easily riled, especially towards the end of the day when he’d smoked himself out of cigars, and sometimes the tiniest sight of Kalifa’s non-existent skirt provoked a rant loud and long enough to be picked up in San Faldo. Kaku sometimes couldn’t help but feel slightly amused about Paulie’s occasional outbursts of unbridled emotion. He was the very reason that watching poker had become a more popular spectator sport in Water 7 than Yagara Bull racing.
"What’s your favourite type of mast Paulie-san? Mine’s the spanker mast."
"Strange choice, you only get those on the larger naval vessels. Hey, why is that so funny?!"
And sometimes, Kaku noted, it seemed a lifetime’s immersion in ship building had left him, at times, almost painfully blind to apprentice innuendo. He knew that such thoughts about Paulie were steps on to a dangerous road of involvement with one’s targets but one tiny part of him, a part that hadn’t yet succumbed to the World Government’s dose of emotional repression, felt ever so slightly envious of the foreman who never had to worry about fully comprehending the subtleties of a target’s words or keeping his feelings under deadlock and key, double-chained and bolted down.
Paulie could never know how he felt. And right to the end, he never did.