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The shichibukai are (nominally) a part of the Marines. This is common knowledge, something anyone on the street would look at you askance for not already knowing.
What's less well-understood about this outside the ranks is the way this actually shakes out in practice.
That's true of a lot of things about this job, Coby's found.
Pirates, frozen bounties or not, don't tend to get on with Marines. The shichibukai, as a rule, act more like very tenuous allies or bounty hunters than anything else, and the general advice among the rank and file is to stay out of their way whenever possible.
But encountering or even working with them isn't always avoidable. Though it varies from warlord to warlord, some number of joint ops are a standard part of the package, and as a marine it's almost inevitable that you'll end up on at least one at some point in your career.
Gossip keeps the sails filled, and gossiping about the warlords in particular is even encouraged, simply because running into one without knowing the tips and tricks for how to survive each of them can very easily turn into a diplomatic incident.
The safest warlords to work with, it's generally agreed, were Jinbei and Kuma, at least prior to the defection of the former and… Whatever happened to the latter.
(People who ask too many questions about that tend to disappear.)
The new warlord, Trafalgar Law, has taken their place as the favorite to deal with. For all that he's terrifying and a blatant sadist, he's apparently also relatively professional and only attacks people who actually provoke him. (And even then goes for dismemberment over death)
Given the only other warlord who can be trusted not to randomly kill people is Buggy, who has a hair-trigger temper and a tendency to evaporate the moment a situation gets risky enough to make dealing with a warlord worth it in the first place, no amount of creepiness is enough to prevent Trafalgar from being the safest to encounter by default.
Mihawk is reportedly a nightmare to actually cooperate with, but simple enough to handle by simply staying out of his way and trying not to annoy him. The issue with him is that he doesn't even pretend to care if his attacks cause collateral damage to nearby Marines. He's easier to treat as more of a roaming natural disaster than a person, really - if you see him coming, the best strategy is to either run or hunker down and pray you don't end up in his way.
Boa Hancock hates all men and is only marginally less dangerous to everyone else. A lot of recruits will fantasize about running into her, but the veterans tell a different story. None contest her being as beautiful as the rumors say, but her personality apparently isn't worth it, and she doesn't hesitate to kill anyone who annoys her.
Of the current lineup, rumours say the Pirate Empress only escapes being the most terrifying to encounter because of Donquixote Doflamingo.
And whatever happens on joint ops with him is so bad people are scared to even talk about it. Any time he's come up in Coby's attempts to get advice for surviving any shichibukai run-ins, the person he was talking to would edge around the subject like they were scared he might be listening. The only advice he's heard for surviving an encounter with Doflamingo is to keep his head down and hope he's not noticed.
Scary. The kind of scary that's so bad they don't even haze rookies with it, which is almost worse because it means it's not just horror stories to scare new recruits, it's real, genuine fear to so much as say the man's name in case it makes him notice you.
Coby heard a rumor once, from one of the rare people brave or stupid enough to flout the unofficial gag order, that the reason no one knows what Doflamingo does to Marines who annoy him is because they just… Disappear.
And not the kind of disappearing that everyone knows is a synonym for Cipher Pol or similar entities quietly disposing of someone. The story instead painted an even more chilling picture - a captain finding a wedding photo in her wallet of her and a man she swore she'd never seen before in her life, reacting with shock when reminded about the ring still on her finger.
A lieutenant sending an official inquiry about why his ship had been without a captain for several years, only for HQ to respond that their records said he had a captain - who not one man on the ship had ever heard of. Who, according to the subsequent investigation, no one had ever heard of, despite her showing up in numerous records.
A janitor entering a set of unassigned vice admiral quarters to prepare them for a new occupant and finding a log of dozens of similar incidents, looking for any pattern they could find and eventually discovering that every last one of those mysterious nonexistent people were recorded either going near Dressrosa or speaking poorly of Doflamingo. An ensign finding a letter with the former story enclosed, written as if to a dear friend, signed with a name she didn't recognize.
It's the kind of story that Coby would slot in with the usual horror stories passed around the barracks after a long day… if only he could recall who told it to him.
Scary!!! Actual nightmare fuel!! If he ever has to talk to Doflamingo he'll probably faint!!!
Anyway, all this to say -
When the Kuja Pirates' flag appears on the horizon, Coby is less than thrilled. Glad it's not the only warlord who manages to be even scarier, but not thrilled.
Normally if something like this happened, he'd trust that Garp would keep him and Helmeppo safe from whoever they happened to run into. Or- not totally safe, maybe, but that he'd fish them out if they were ever in real danger. If it was life-threatening, at least. And he was paying attention.
That sounds really bad actually. Coby greatly respects and admires and only slightly maybe sort of deeply fears his mentor, he swears.
But really. For all that Garp's teaching can be very… sink or swim, Coby really does trust him to step in when it's truly necessary, even if Garp's definition of "necessary" is well past the threshold where Coby would be convinced of his imminent demise.
Problem is, Garp isn't here. Or Helmeppo, for that matter.
In the wake of Coby's imminent promotion to captain being confirmed, he's been assigned to spend the next few months rotating between different crews to get a broader understanding of how they normally operate.
Apparently the usual rotation period is shorter, but since Coby's only ever worked under one superior and the man in question is Garp the Fist, HQ must have decided it was in everyone's best interest to expose Coby to as many mitigating influences as possible before giving him a ship of his own.
He's actually glad they did, because working with different crews has made him realize that the way Garp runs his ship is actually even more against regulation than he'd thought. There's so much taken for granted as standard practice on these other crews that's totally new to him!
So it's been really valuable as an educational experience and as a chance to get to know the people he might end up working with after he's promoted, but it also means he can't rely on having the hero of the Marines around to bail him out of trouble.
Which means running into Boa Hancock right now is scary!! He was at Marineford! He was unconscious or halfway out of his mind from his absolutely terrible first time unlocking observation haki for most of it, but he was there! And he saw enough of the Snake Princess to know that if she decides she feels like killing everyone on this ship today, there is absolutely fuck all he could do to stop her!
The ship immediately kicks into a frenzy as everyone tries to prepare for an unexpected run-in with a warlord, and Coby is swept into it along with the rest of the crew.
There's an overwhelming mood of mixed dread and elation as they scramble. On the one hand, she's a terrifying pirate who would think nothing of killing them if they offended her. On the other hand, she's Boa Hancock, the most beautiful woman in the world, someone it's almost weird to not have fantasized about meeting at some point.
Coby is slowly getting better at separating his own feelings from the ones around him, but it's hard when everyone is feeling the same things about the same topic like this, especially when the feelings in question are so intense. He does his best to remember the meditation exercises he's learned.
By the time the ships meet and the gangplank is extended, he still hasn't quite untangled it, but when he isn't sure what he's feeling, "anxious" is generally a safe assumption.
When Boa Hancock makes her appearance, striding confidently from the bowels of her ship into the light, the whole crew's hearts seem to skip a beat in tandem.
Coby himself isn't an exception to that. This isn't like Marineford, where she was barely a speck in the distance and he was too distracted trying to stay alive to pay attention to whether she lived up to her reputation or not. She's right there, only a gangplank away, actively looking in his general direction with that famously imperious glare.
It's immediately easy to understand why they call her the most beautiful woman in the entire world. No one else even comes close. She's beautiful in a way that almost denies humanity, impossible to see as a person among people when everything about her screams that she must be something else, something greater.
Coby looks at her and momentarily understands why people believe in gods.
He watches enraptured along with everyone else as she speaks with the captain, who is flushed and stuttering agreement to her demands without even seeming to really hear them. He'd be inclined to feel judgemental of that, but he's reasonably sure he couldn't quote back a single word she's spoken if there were a gun to his head.
That's… Not good, actually.
The brief spike of anxiety knocks him out of alignment with the feelings of the rest of the crew long enough for Coby to viciously pinch the inside of his arm, grounding him enough to stop drowning in the combined lust of everyone on board.
The feelings that are actually his own are still overwhelming, but not to such an extent that he's incapable of doing anything but looking at her and- oh please say he didn't- ahhh thank god- metaphorically drooling.
Her eyes snap to his, probably in response to the sudden movement, and he pinches again even harder.
It's only a moment before she looks away again, thankfully, and after that he's able to keep himself mostly focused for the rest of her one-sided discussion with the captain.
If they were lucky (though it's hard, this close to her, to let the rational part of his brain remind him that being near her is a bad thing) this would just be a brief chance encounter for a bounty handoff or something of the like.
They aren't lucky.
To call this a joint op would imply that it's an official assignment from HQ rather than the captain blindly agreeing to anything she says out of a combination of fear and adoration, but regardless of the reason, Boa Hancock has decided they're going to help her with something and refusal isn't an option.
Specifically, she wants their cooperation in taking down a slave ring.
She doesn't say it outright, but as Coby works on getting himself under control enough to properly read between the lines, he gets the impression that she's using them as a smokescreen to make it look like this is an officially sanctioned operation so that the perpetrators can't be quietly pardoned without causing a massive scandal.
One of the things Coby didn't know before becoming a Marine: Officially, slavery is illegal. Unofficially, it's alive and well and the organization he works for has a vested interest in ensuring it stays that way.
It's nauseating to put together the facts of the situation and realize that the likely reason Boa Hancock is speaking so vaguely about the specifics of the situation is that she thinks she needs to trick them into helping. Even worse that she's probably right.
Sometimes, Coby really hates this job.
But now isn't the time to revisit that particular moral dilemma, so he takes a deep breath and adds another item to the list of reasons he wants to become fleet admiral someday and change the Marines into the force for justice he knows they have the potential to be if he can just find and uproot all the sources of the deep-seated corruption that only seems to grow worse the more he looks for it.
The operation itself is simple, thankfully. The slave ring is barely a few hours away, close enough he's pretty sure Boa Hancock just grabbed the first Marine ship she could find, and she seems to mostly just want them present as decoration while she and her crew do the actual work.
Probably because she doesn't trust them not to sabotage things. He's just going to compartmentalize the question of how valid that concern is for now. He can unpack that later!
He has dedicated brainstorming time every night to contemplate how he can work to be a good person in the Marines without losing all upward mobility and possibly getting quietly murdered! It's a problem he runs into a lot! He's going to change this organization from the inside if it kills him but the whole getting killed thing would make that kind of difficult to do so he has to be subtle until he's strong enough to survive retaliation!
It feels a little like being back on Alvida's ship sometimes, performing support of things he hates because speaking his mind won't get him anywhere other than dead. He's determined to be smart instead of cowardly this time. To only bide his time as long as it gets him closer to being able to finally stand up and tell Akainu where he can shove it.
Well. To do that again. He still has no idea how he survived Marineford, honestly.
When they reach their destination, Boa Hancock demands that the captain offer someone to guard her during the conflict.
Well. "Guard." He doubts much actual guarding will be involved, given that no one on this ship ranks above captain and Coby is pretty sure he's the only one on board who even has haki.
She seems to be angling for the captain himself, but in a move that demonstrates a pretty admirable degree of self-awareness of the man's inability to keep his composure near her, it's Coby who ends up awkwardly approaching her to jealous looks from the rest of the crew.
Her beauty is even more powerful up close, and Coby focuses on his anxiety and nausea about the circumstances in an effort to not make a complete fool of himself and also maybe die.
Digging his nails into the back of his thigh isn't enough to stop him from squeaking a little when she turns to him with an appraising glare, but he manages not to trip over his own feet walking over, so he counts it as half a victory.
One of those terrifying eyebrows raises in a perfectly sculpted expression of wordless inquiry, causing Coby's well-trained response to primal terror to kick in as he immediately snaps into a textbook perfect salute and says, "Sir! Lieutenant Coby reporting for duty, sir!"
By the time he realizes that's definitely not what he's supposed to call her it's too late and it's already all the way out of his mouth. He quickly clamps the traitorous orifice shut and tries to look like he did any of that on purpose instead of acting on sheer instinct.
For some reason, it makes Boa Hancock stop looking at him like poop on the bottom of her shoe.
Instead, she looks at him like a bug she's deciding whether or not to squash. Which is. Technically an upgrade?
Oh, he's so totally going to die.
Finally, she turns that electric gaze away to glance dismissively at the captain and hmph decisively. "He'll suffice."
A few crew members' wills seem to finally fail them at that, and three men clamor forward, all proclaiming that surely, they'd be better choices to protect her. (As if she needs it??)
Standing this close, even the tight control Boa Hancock has over her haki isn't enough to stop Coby's uncontrollable and unfortunately very strong observation from picking up the spike of absolute disgust she feels.
Nor can he avoid feeling, under it, a sense of exhausted resignation. One that, once he notices it, seems to underlie everything else in her.
Cautiously trailing her away from the (hopefully temporarily) petrified crew, he contemplates that feeling. Without his inconveniently overpowered empathy he'd never have noticed a thing under her unimpeachable demeanor and the distraction of her beauty, but now that he's paying attention, she feels… Lonely.
Coby puts aside his libido for a second and makes himself really look at her.
Not at Boa Hancock, the most beautiful woman in the world, the untouchable beauty who could arouse even a stone, but at Boa Hancock the person.
He thinks about what it would be like to live like that. To have everyone he met falling over themselves to please him not because of anything about his actual personality, but because of something he had no control over. To be fawned over and adored and lusted after by the whole world. To be seen as an idol, an icon, an ideal…
But never as a person.
"I don't recall giving you permission to look at me." She says haughtily, and Coby carefully turns his gaze away.
"Apologies, sir."
It's still really not what he should probably be calling her, but she responds the same way as last time in what he now recognizes as a brief instant of relief. Like she was expecting him to say something she would dislike and was thrown off by him instead saying something she… doesn't actively like, he thinks, but feels more neutral toward?
Either way, he takes it as a sign to stick with the address, technically correct or not.
She feels something between expectance and surprise at his response. His current survival strategy is to do exactly what she tells him to and try not to annoy her, so he stays silent even as the weight of her attention on him makes him increasingly anxious.
Eventually, she says, "Your expression was odd. You stopped being in awe of me."
The way she says it, it's like she's saying he suddenly turned green or grew a foot taller. Like him looking at her with anything but blind attraction is as inconceivable as the nearest pig growing wings and taking to the skies.
Describing it like that, it makes it sound like Coby is saying he offended her ego, but the emotion behind it isn't upset, for all that her tone would imply it. Instead, it's that same feeling of startled relief.
"Apologies, sir." He says again. "It was unprofessional of me to look at you that way."
The sound she makes is one of absolute disbelief. "Men don't care to be professional with me. You fall at my feet and worship and make pigs of yourselves for an instant of my regard, because I am beautiful."
Her tone is so universally haughty and cold that without haki he would miss the bitterness of the words entirely.
A statement like that should be a monument to absolute egoism. From anyone else in the world, it would be.
But Coby's observation lets him see the truth of it. It's not a statement of how she thinks the world should be, it's an unadorned account of her lived experience, and she doesn't like it.
It took literally sensing her emotions to get Coby to realize she's a person. Before that, he looked at her the same way everyone else did without sparing a second thought to anything about her past the way she affected him.
He feels terrible. How could he do that? How could everyone do that?
"That sounds so lonely." He says. Then his brain catches up to his mouth and he flushes. "Uh. That was out of line. Sorry- uh, apologies, I mean. Again. Sir."
He's going to die, she's going to get mad and kill him and no one on his current crew likes him enough to find his body because they're all jealous that the captain thought he was least likely to say something stupid that would make Boa Hancock want him dead and his trust was completely misplaced because Coby is a human disaster who cannot control his big stupid mouth.
Hopefully Garp is nice enough to tell Luffy. Luffy probably won't put flowers on his empty grave but maybe he'll feel a little sad?
Coby doesn't want that, actually, Luffy should never have to be sad, and oh god he's literally grieving his brother right now why would Coby even rate a mention compared to that, how did he forget about that that's so selfish, maybe he'll deserve it after all when Boa Hancock-
Says, "Apologies seem to be the only manner of speech you know."
Oh thank god, she's not mad at him.
"Apolo- Um." He probably shouldn't do it again, should he. "I don't want to offend you, sir. That's all."
With a hmph and a disdainful glance, she says, "Of course you don't. None of you ever do."
He feels so terrible oh god this poor woman.
With herculean effort, he keeps his mouth closed and doesn't say anything that might give away his thoughts on that deeply tragic statement. Unfortunately, like many efforts Coby has made in his life, it goes entirely unappreciated.
"What is that expression for?" She demands.
Coby is going to die and it is going to be completely his own fault. "...Permission to speak freely, sir?"
That is definitely irritation, oh boy. It is not nearly warm enough on this island to justify how sweaty he is. At least if he dies he won't have to deal with getting the smell out of his uniform. Again.
She says the word "Granted." with the distinct inflection that she will absolutely kill him if she doesn't like it. Fun! He is having a great and awesome day and this is fine.
That's a lie he's not fine he's never been fine a single day in his entire life but especially not this one. "I just realized… Um, if I were you I'd probably hate it. Everyone always looking at you as a thing to want, instead of a person. It's not fair to you."
She stops walking. He jerks to an abrupt halt of his own to keep from bumping into her.
Boa Hancock turns to fully face him for the first time in the conversation, and her expression is… The imperious chill has dropped away entirely. All that's left is flat shock.
Without that haughtiness, she looks oddly young. He could almost mistake them for being the same age, like this.
Her voice comes out subdued, the absence of her typical superior affect creating just as startling an effect as the look on her face. "You are the only person who has ever said that to me."
His heart twists. "I'm sorry, sir. That's- You don't deserve to be treated like that. I don't know how you stand it."
"How could I do anything but? It is the price of being in the world. I must stand it, if I am to stand at all." There's a distant look in her eyes as she repeats her common refrain, "Because I am beautiful."
She pronounces it like a death sentence.