This fic was born as a response to a challenge issued by Stelra Etnae in her forum: forum / One-Piece-Challenges / 133165 / (without the spaces). You should drop by, it has some very interesting challenges! ^^
Well, on with it!
Rose
"Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you."
By most accounts Fuschia Town was a completely unremarkable place, barely known as a dormitory town for the capital Goa and little else. The inhabitants had never felt any need to build monuments that could be visited while sightseeing, the big fast-food chains had never thought of opening a branch there, there were no big actors or athletes or writers who had been born in Fuschia.
The one thing the town had were inns. Inns, hotels, rental flats. People came and went every day, barely giving any thought at the place they left behind, so caught up they were with their lives, their jobs or their problems.
In one corner of the town, near the thick forest that extended from Fuschia to the Gray Terminal was an old, abandoned inn. It had been a beautiful building at one time, with white walls, red roofs and pebbled entrance, but years of abandonment had turned it into something that seemed to have come out of a horror story.
In front of that run-down house there were two siblings. The elder was a man in his early twenties wearing a bright orange cow-boy hat; the younger was a teen with a small scar under his left eye and brown eyes so dark that they seemed to be black.
Both siblings looked at their inheritance with a calculating look, seizing the weeds several feet tall that hid the gardens and the few remaining glass windows that had turned a sad yellow color.
"This place is falling apart," The elder brother sighed. "Lu, are you sure about this?"
Not bothering to answer that, the younger brother opened the front doors with a sharp tug, smiling as they swung open. Almost like the place was giving him its approval, the single light bulb remaining in the hall lit up, inviting them inside.
Once Monday came, Ace was forced to leave for his job in the capital. He looked a bit suspiciously at his brother, made him promise to call if anything went wrong ("anything at all, doesn't matter what time it is") and, very reluctantly, left him to his own devices.
While no one could accuse Luffy of being the most diligent of workers (or even a proficient one) he was nothing if not motivated. He scrubbed the floors, repainted the walls, removed the weeds, mowed the lawn and fished for bed sheets in the street market.
Eventually, other things began to fall into place.
His brother sent Franky towards the end of the week, a blue haired construction builder from the city, who after claiming how Super lucky they had been to not get the floors collapse over their heads, declared the structure to be safe enough and began rearranging the partitions, replacing the glass panes and repairing the roof and everything that needed fixing by an expert hand. He also fixed Luffy's messes gladly, though the constant trips from Terminal to Fuschia became so frequent that he eventually threatened the owner to occupy a room free of charge if he kept breaking things.
After the tenth destroyed handrail, he never really got around leaving.
The following day, a former classmate of Luffy showed up at the door, weaving a tale that included his last place, five feet tall cockroaches, evil moustached landladies and poor defenseless kittens, and asking if he could please let him stay for a while, he didn't mind working in whatever needed work. Little by little Usopp covered the hallways and the rooms in paintings of the sea and of fantastical creatures and long-nosed adventurers.
Nami came next. For days afterwards no one knew exactly which one had won in the argument that resulted in the orange haired girl's appointment as the chief (sole) accountant, leaving her in charge of the finances of the place, or who had gotten the better part of the deal. Luffy was too much of a free soul to actually care about such things though, and Nami could get good credentials from this, no matter how small the place was, so it worked out.
Three weeks after starting her venture Luffy bumped into a blond cook that had just been sacked from his previous job. It took some negotiation, whining and refused refusals, but in the end he got his chef, who seemed inordinately pleased at living in the same building as Nami. Sanji commandeered the kitchen as his own, kicked out all males present and future from his turf, had Franky replace everything from the sinks ("single bowl, what kind of moron designed this?") to the tiles ("no, I won't have that color in my kitchen") and filled it with all kinds of spices and cooking utensils in some bizarre order that only he could understand.
When the green haired stranger came asking for directions to Shimotsuki (a town about an hour away from Goa… in the completely opposite direction from Fuschia), none knew what to make to him. When they heard about the huge row Zoro had instigated with Helmet-something-or-other, whose father was the owner of the biggest hotel in town, normal people would have classified him as a thug and stayed away from him.
Luffy defended him, punched blondie in the face and gave Zoro one of the rooms in the ground floor as 'security guard' (security against what he didn't say, but the rest let it slide as they were already getting used to his whimsical nature).
Chopper was an unexpected, if welcome surprise. He was a freshman, a medicine student who could not afford the high prices of living in Goa and, desperate for a place to stay in order to prove he could be independent (it had taken him almost running away from home before his adoptive mother, Dr. Kureha, agreed to letting him out of her sight) had accepted to move in permanently and create a small infirmary in his free time in lieu of payment. For now it only had a first-aid kit and a very high amount of bandages, which seemed to vanish as soon as he re-stocked them.
Like Chopper, Robin was not properly a staff member, and it was only a bizarre coincidence that had her moving in before the inn had officially opened. No one knew much about her past, other than the fact that she had moved around the country for several years before settling down on Goa in order to finish her thesis on Poneglyphs and Ancient History. Within a couple of days she had claimed one of the larger living rooms and began the long process of turning it into a decent library. She also got Luffy's permission to reform a room nearby into a study where she could hole herself up to work on her dissertation. In return she was always ready to give a hand, answer some questions or just mother them a bit, so it worked for everyone involved.
Mere days before the 'inauguration' of the latest inn in Fuschia Town, Merry Go got one more addition. He brought with him an old guitar, and examined and tuned the piano that had been decoration the dining room on the ground floor. Soul King Brook (now Simply Brook) had been a well-known pop-star in his time, and quickly fell in love with Merry and her people. He yohoho'ed, made some very bad puns and by dinnertime they all knew he would fit right in.
And finally one day, they were ready to open to business.
The Merry Go was just a small inn of a small town that was not in any way remarkable. But for those people, and some more to come, Merry Go would be the most important of all. Since it was theirs.
"Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."
The Little Prince― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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A/N.: Well, the prompt for this one-shot was, of course, 'Rose'. I'm already working on the next, 'Dream', but as I won't have Internet for a few days it will take a while before it's out ^^. This one was more about creating the setting than anything else, though I admit that I only have a vague outline for the others. Anyway, thanks for reading!
Dream: "You know that place, between sleeping and awake?"
