"I told you from the beginning, she would choose me over you at any time. Isn't that incredibly sad when you think about it?" She began, her voice dripping with jealousy she had kept hidden for who knew how long.
"She got to live a life I had always wanted for myself, a life that should have been mine. But because I came out of the womb first—just minutes before her—I was hit with all of this crushing responsibility, this burden I never asked for but could never escape. I would have stood by your side no matter what happened, through anything life threw at us. Yet she is so pathetically blind to the obvious fact that the pictures I sent to you from your phone could easily be found in her own phone if she bothered to look."
She said all of this with a bitter smile that didn't reach her eyes, a smile that spoke of years of jealousy and pain festering beneath the surface.
It had been an arranged marriage between their families. Shocking, right? The idea that people in the modern day and age were still practicing something so archaic and old-school seemed absurd.
But their two families had been close for generations, bound by traditions and secrets that went far deeper than simple friendship. While his family possessed and guarded their mysterious devil fruit, passing it down through the bloodline like a cursed inheritance, his wife's family had something else.
Still, although it was technically an arranged marriage decided by their parents when they were young, he and his wife had naturally fallen deeply in love long before they even knew about the arrangement their families had made.
They had met as teenagers, connected instantly, and built a genuine relationship. So when the arrangement was finally revealed to them, they had absolutely no resistance to the idea at all. It felt like destiny rather than obligation.
"What do you want from me?" He asked through gritted teeth, his voice strained and barely controlled. He was genuinely unsure if he could control himself and his violent impulses any longer, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
"Nothing at all, actually. I just wanted to see you one last time before my death comes for me." She said with an unsettling calmness.
"Your family has its devil fruit. Our family has a parallel tradition—we're all about sacrificing the eldest child to maintain our power. I will be handed over to the gods very soon, offered up in a ritual sacrifice. If I don't gain the gods' approval during the ceremony, my soul would be completely erased from existence. But if I somehow manage to gain their approval and survive, then I can make one wish for anything I desire."
She said all of this with a light, almost serene smile that seemed completely at odds with the gravity of what she was describing. Despite his overwhelming hatred and anger, he found himself somewhat interested in all of this new information since… well, this was genuinely the first time he had ever heard about any of it. His wife had never mentioned her family's dark traditions. But his burning hatred for this woman and this moment quickly overcame any curiosity he might have felt.
"Don't hate me forever for what I've done. I was only doing this for your sake, whether you can see that now or not. Life and fate would have eventually pushed you to eat that devil fruit no matter what. That's how these things work—destiny always finds a way. I simply did it for you, for my sister's future, and for your children's fate. I intervened because fate would have inevitably made you want to eat that fruit anyway. I would rather it be through my sister's stupidity and anger—something that can potentially be fixed and forgiven—than through a genuinely traumatic event that could actually take anyone's life."
She said this while getting up to leave, preparing to walk away from the destruction she'd caused.
"Call your mother tonight and ask her about all of this. She knows exactly what I'm talking about." She added, looking back at him with something that might have been pity.
"You always thought the devil fruits and such were nothing but crazy talk from superstitious old people. You never paid real attention to the family histories and warnings. Well, you would see going forward how fate actively works to manipulate events and push you toward eating that fruit. No matter how desperately you try to escape it or run away, fate is a chain that binds us all. Maybe it was even fate itself that made my sister so easily believe my fabricated evidence without questioning it."
She took a deep breath before delivering her final words. "I genuinely wish you the best in whatever comes next for you."
With those parting words hanging in the air between them, she walked up to him slowly, closing the distance. She didn't care at all that he looked like he could violently hit her at any moment, that his entire body was tensed with barely restrained rage. She showed no fear whatsoever.
"Sadly, you have to eat the thing willingly or else I would have just tricked you to eat it, and since only you could see… quickly eat it, the longer you take, the more bad luck you would endure." She said softly, her voice barely above a whisper as her gaze shifted away from his face. She looked to the side with an expression of concern, something in her peripheral vision apparently catching her attention. This caused him to instinctively look over in the same direction, following her line of sight, but he saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in the empty space she was staring at.
Confused and suspicious, he looked back towards her, only for her lips to suddenly press against his in an unexpected kiss. The contact was brief but shocking, completely catching him off guard.
He instantly wanted to push her away with all his strength, to reject this violation. But she was shockingly faster than he could have ever anticipated, her reflexes impossibly quick. She easily dodged his hands while gracefully touching her own lips with her fingertips, as if savoring the stolen moment.
"A bit selfish of me, but I always wanted to know what it was like to kiss you ever since I saw you two making out… now I have no regrets. Don't forget to eat the fruit; if you kill yourself, it will move on to your children." With those final haunting words delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, she turned and left without looking back. She left him standing there alone, burning with an overwhelming rage that had nowhere to go, his entire body trembling with impotent fury and disgust…
She wasn't wrong about what would follow. He indeed was hit with the absolute worst streak of luck imaginable over the following few brutal months, as if the universe itself had turned against him. Even as he destroyed and threw the devil fruit into the deepest part of the ocean in a desperate attempt to be rid of it forever, it would always mysteriously reappear before him within hours, sitting innocently on his table or nightstand. The curse couldn't be escaped so easily.
He tried desperately to have someone else eat it, thinking perhaps he could pass this burden to another person and break the cycle. But no one else could see a single thing when he showed them the fruit. To everyone else, his hands appeared completely empty, and they looked at him like he was losing his mind.
Before he knew it, his life had completely fallen apart in every possible way. His wife took absolutely everything in the divorce proceedings, the judge ruling in her favor on every single point.
He found himself legally obligated to pay her pretty much every penny he made through garnished wages, leaving him with barely enough to survive. He was forced to move into this run-down apartment building in a dangerous neighborhood, the only place he could afford. His spirit was utterly crushed as he discovered with growing horror that he couldn't escape fate's carefully laid plan, no matter how hard he fought or how clever he tried to be.
Flashback End
He looked away from the view outside the grimy window, tearing his gaze from the streets below, and looked instead at the devil fruit which was slowly reforming and materializing in front of him once again.
The pale white surface gradually became solid and real. By now, several months had passed, and his ex-wife's twin sister had died in whatever ritual sacrifice her family had performed. She had sent a letter to him that arrived a few days after her death had been confirmed, a final message from beyond the grave. In it, she warned him explicitly not to take his own life in despair, for that would only make his suffering infinitely worse and doom his children to the same fate.
"You won." He said softly, his voice hollow and defeated as he reached out with a trembling hand and picked up the devil fruit, feeling its strange texture against his palm.
How dare he have ever tried to fight back against fate itself? His ex-wife's twin sister might have truly helped him and shown him mercy by getting his children and wife away from him before fate could target them. Who knew what terrible tragedy could have happened if they had remained close to him? Perhaps they would have died in some accident meant to break him completely.
He looked at the fruit carefully, holding it up to examine it in the dim light. The pale surface showed a soft glow emanating from within, almost like it was genuinely happy and satisfied that he had finally given up resisting its call.
He looked at it for some time in silence, his mind thinking back through everything that had happened—the manipulation, the divorce, the poverty, the isolation. For deep down in his heart, he knew with absolute certainty that if he ate this devil fruit right now, he would die instantly upon swallowing it.