(A/N) Hey'all, I'm back with another anthology of sorts. Real life happened and the initial ideas I had for "Bleeding Out" sorta flew away. I'm still trying to find them from the dark recesses of my slightly-still-programmed-to-finals-exams mind, so for now please enjoy this story (of sorts) that I originally published in my tumblr account. I tweaked it a bit into a more story-like format.
USOPP'S SKETCHBOOK
Before leaving his island, Usopp packed a sketchbook he had been using since he was a child into his knapsack. It contains drawings of his favorite places of his hometown; sketches of the boys and Kaya, and some of his late attempts to remember his mom's face. He kept it in under his pillow in his bunk during the first few weeks of his journey, browsing it's dog-eared pages whenever homesickness kicked in. Nowadays, though, he seldom flips through it well-thumbed pages.
Before his wanted poster was published, Usopp would always take the time to sketch pictures of the places they visited, people they met, his rowdy crew mates and just about anything he thinks she and the boys would like. He sends some of them to Kaya with a few written captions on the margins to describe what he couldn't put into drawing. Sometimes, Nami's letters to Nojiko would accompany his own.
Kaya would smile fondly at each one and laugh softly at his side notes. She would show his works to the boys before keeping them in a box in her bedside table. His sketches may come at irregular intervals, sometimes with a month or week in between, but she doesn't mind and looks forward to each one anyway.
One day, the three boys came running into her house`waving a handful of newly released wanted posters and a newspaper, babbling about a sniper king, long noses and masks. Kaya had to wait a full minute for them to calm down. Together they went through the articles featuring the historic event, not paying any mind to their neighbors' mocking disbelief and patronizing laughter. Merry helped her frame the Strawhats' posters in her study.
Meanwhile, Usopp (didn't completely stop but) became more cautious of sending his stuff to Kaya after their wanted posters came out. At first he stopped mailing to her all together. But then he realized that having a wanted poster in which his face was concealed by a mask did have its advantages. Kaya received another batch of his sketches a week after his "face" roamed the seas. Nami started sending her mail in his name (after seeing how a much more exposed and incriminating her poster was compared to Usopp's)
Usopp never sent letters to Kaya, only sketches with a maximum of one to five sentences of side notes at most, as he preferred to tell her and the boys his stories (both fiction and non-fiction) in person for maximum effect. He never got any letters from Kaya, seeing as how erratic and unexpected their course through the Grandline was and how it seldom leaves any room for mail sending (much to his and Nami's annoyance)
Kaya does write him letters though, the boys did too. She kept them in a drawer in her study after realizing that she had no way of getting them. She continues to write letters to him for each sketch she receives containing her reactions and stories about what was happening in the village and such.
During the two year forced separation (courtesy of Kuma), he completely stopped sending sketches. Kaya feared the worst.
Usopp, after receiving his captain's hidden message and settling down in his training routine in his man-eating "flower" island, designed a make-shift sketchpad. The first thing he drew was his crew mates. At first he couldn't remember how they looked like smiling -the picture of their horrified faces were imprinted into his mind- and he panicked. He laid down their features as soon as he got those disturbing images out of the way, secretly fearing he would forget them if he didn't.
He kept on drawing all he could remember of their adventures for hours til he used up all his homemade pages. He did this in a starved, possessed manner, as if he was intent of purging their desperate faces that haunted his dreams, charcoal branch flying desperately across the pages. He drew Kaya, Merry, the boys and his mom somewhere near the end.
Calibri';"When he came to trust Hercules-san, he would regal his mentor with tales of their adventures, sometimes with the help of his papers or a stick prodding pictures in the ground.
His 3D2Y sketchbook gained more pages each day and when he finally ran out of memories to solidify on paper, he started documenting the plants and animals in the island and trying (keyword: "trying") to chart the living ravenous island for Chopper and Nami. Sometimes illustrations of elaborate traps and fridge-raid-with-a-rubber-boy-and-reindeer-plans would find their way into his sketchbook.
His art materials were all improvised, from his paint to his brushes to his paper, with whatever the hell he finds acceptable in the island (such as berries, animal parts, etc). He hit the jackpot a couple of times when the island managed to lure a number of gigantic squid and gargantuan octopus. His leaf paper tasted black ink for weeks.
When he left his "home" of two years and was finally reunited with his friends aboard the Sunny, he slid his sketchbooks -plural, because tree vines could only bind so much pages - into his part of the bookshelf in the library, beside his dusty books of weapons and explosives.
Robin was the first to discover it one night while she was browsing the familliar spines of her tomes. Their thickness, which rivaled that of her own history books, and the unusual appearance of their spines, as they were bound in vine, caught her attention. Her heart warmed at what she saw. She stayed up til the sun was high, something that she seldom did for books that leaned heavily on illustrations, marveling his works and smiling at his captions.
The next day, the drawing book was coincidentally left open on the library table. The sketchbook was open at a page that bears a fully-colored illustration of the crew enjoying a lazy day aboard the Sunny just as Luffy rocketed in with a stolen piece of meat, a murderous cook screaming murder from down below. The young captain actually forgot about his piece of meat - for a second at least - in favor of staring at the beautifully rendered picture on the table. The archaeologist, who happened to be reading by a nearby window, told him who she thinks is the maker.
With stars alight in his eyes and the beloved grin on his face wider than usual, Luffy went off to find his best friend, carrying the sketchbook under his arm reverently.
Usopp, who was sprawled on his stomach on the lawn whilst telling a star-struck Chopper one of his impromptu tales, looked up to find his captain with an unusually content and knowing smile on his face. His audience soon grew, as every inhabitant of the ship came over to reminisce with them through his carefully laid-out memories (even Sanji sat down on the grass after delivering the ladies' afternoon confections).
"The sketchbook had a special place in the library from then on and though nobody ever says anything, Usopp knew that every once in a while, some of them would thumb through its hand-made pages.
After the whole Dressrosa adventure and a new epithet was bestowed upon the sniper, Usopp couldn't send anymore of his sketches back home. His not too worried though as he grins sheepishly at the wanted poster on his hand.
Years later, when everything's done and the Strawhats are doing their rounds through their hometowns and after the automatic impromptu merrymaking in his non-believer-of-a-village, Usopp didn't have to ask as Kaya showed him all the sketches she had kept. (He couldn't even remember he sent some of those to her). Before they left, Kaya handed her the box of letters she and the boys had kept over the years and told him that he should hurry up and return for the next batch.
(A/N) None of my stories are beta-ed, so please feel free to point out anything that looks grammatically-off. Don't worry, I don't bite. Also your reviews are greatly appreciated. /p