notes: title is a direct quote (well, as direct as it can be considered after being translated to english) from chapter 507, when rayleigh says of roger:「あいつはな、万物の声を聞けた」―roughly, "that man, he could hear the voice of all things." a statement which to this day hasn't really been explained, much to my continued frustration/anticipation (frustricipation?). it has, however, shown itself to be a major plot point, yet another curious characteristic of roger's "inherited will" as exhibited in luffy. which…is hella cool, is all i'm saying.
warning(s): vague-ish depictions of violence/death, maybe? nothing worse than what's shown in canon, though. this piece is pretty fuckin' g-rated, tbh.
"You want to live, and be somebody
You want to give and be wanted
You want to forgive and not be forgotten
You want to reach the end
You want to live
Your way of living"
– Cat Power, "Nothin' But Time"
『聞く』– kiku – listen.
The ocean's all the same to everyone. It can mean a million different things to a million different people, sure, but in the end there's no real difference between them. Danger, mystery, power, freedom; it's all just a bunch of feelings people stuff inside the same depths and miles and spaces in-between anchorages. Luffy knows this. He doesn't know how he knows―he doesn't remember learning it, and no one ever taught him. It's just something that's always been the truth.
He spends a lot of time on the seashore, because it's the only thing in his life that doesn't make him feel all stupid and confused when he thinks about it. He clings to that certainty as though it could keep him from drowning.
But after he eats his Devil Fruit and gets his Hat, he stops going down to the shore for what seems like a long time. Maybe he's just too busy, up on Mt. Columbo. Or maybe it's too painful, at first, with the jagged memory of Shanks facing down the Lord of the Coast and the feeling of being pulled into the darkness by fear and by water. Either way, for all the distance, he never stops watching it. Dreaming about it, about his ship and his crew and the smell of salt and the wind in his face and everything he'll do when he's set himself free.
And then Ace and Sabo come into his life and all at once, he learns what it means to have friends. Then, later, what it means to have brothers.
None of the other kids liked him much, back down in the village. He was dumb and annoying and weird and a whole bunch of ugly things they spat in his face and a whole bunch more they whispered behind his back. But now that he has so many people who call him by his name, it's almost surprising how easy it is for him to forget what it feels like to be lonely. Ace and Sabo had to forget, too, he knows. They told him so; they were alone before they found each other, in one way or another, and the thing about being alone and being lonely is that it's always better to forget about it as soon as you're not anymore. Loneliness is such a heavy thing to carry around, and it was never worth it for any of them to hold on to that sort of memory once it lost its place in their lives.
Instead, he leaves that space open to brighter things. But what he gets in return is…something else.
The first time it happens, he's on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The sky up above is as blue as what's down below, and a silence is gnawing at the edge of the daylight, the kind that only comes around on the precipice of a thunderstorm. There's nothing on the breeze, or if there is, it doesn't carry. And yet: "Oi. What…is that?"
"What's what?" Asks Sabo, raising his head from where he's been washing the blood off of his pipe with a dishrag. "What's going on?"
"That sound!" Luffy explains, as though it weren't obvious.
Sabo turns to look at Ace, raising an eyebrow. He gets only an equally puzzled shrug in return.
"Well, I don't hear anything." Ace chimes in, at the same time that Sabo asks, "What's it sound like?"
Luffy frowns. "You guys really can't hear any―wait, wait, there it is again! Shh." He waves his hands, gesturing nebulously towards the distance. "There."
Ace shakes his head, brow furrowed in worry. "There's no sound, Luffy. 'S just the wind or whatever." Then he adds: "Are you feeling okay…wait, did you eat one of those weird mushrooms again? 'Cause Sabo and I told you―"
"I'm fine!" Luffy cuts him off, exasperated. "It's…that, that muttering! Like a voice, or something." He throws his arms up in frustration. Matching both the dubious looks they've fixed on him with a glare, he stomps his foot. "I'm serious."
"Yeah, seriously crazy." Ace murmurs, rolling his eyes. Then, he placates, "Just leave it alone, little brother. There's nothing there."
When Luffy's face begins to twist up in dismay, and he makes with his left foot forward like he's still gunning to get the last word, Sabo decides it's time for some damage control. "Maybe we should head back for today, you guys." He suggests hesitantly. "It's been a busy morning, I think we're all pretty tired."
Sabo stands, motioning for them to follow. Ace lets out a long-suffering sigh, and Luffy's shoulders hunch, but they both trail after him without complaint because they know he's right.
It won't be the end of it, not by a long shot, but for the time being the three of them are able to put aside the strangeness of the evening for a well-deserved rest. Luffy is out like a light before his head even hits the pillow, but all throughout the night he wrestles with that whisper curling in his ears.
The sound of it never stops calling out to him, after that. A voice: howling, spitting, splitting, taking on new forms as it goes. On and on and on, even after he starts going down to the beaches again. Even after he wades back into the shallowest waters, without fear or pretense, and laughs when the strength drains from his blood. For years, it whorls around him while he sleeps and trails after him while he wakes. Sometimes, he even tries to get other people to listen. He tells them it's right there, it's so loud, it's saying something, yes, really, are you deaf, are you stupid?
But no one else can hear it quite like he can.
『負う』– ou – carry.
The Hat is too big.
He holds it in place by the brim; otherwise, it slips down over his eyes and blinds him. The first week saw him running around―as Dadan would put it―like a chicken with its head cut off, too excited to spare a thought for when he could or couldn't see. But after one too many incidents involving a tree branch, a giant toad, and an unsuspecting crock of stew, Makino wove in a length of string to let it hang around his neck instead. Still, he continues to wear it on his head more often than not.
Garp doesn't like it. Luffy knows this because his grandpa tells him so at every chance he gets. He eyes the Hat with unguarded trepidation, with a spark of recognition, even, and there's so much about this whole thing that Luffy's got no way of understanding. Garp goes on and on about how he'll shape up to be a great Marine, "even with that damned hat," but for some reason he can never quite bring himself to take it away. He just looks on, says stuff like no grandson of mine and ties him to balloons as though the fear can make him change his mind.
Sometimes he worries, too. He tells Luffy about how dangerous the life of a pirate can be, how treacherous, how terrible. He tries to convince him that his dreams are wrong, that his future is nothing more than a choice that someone else can make. That pirates live a life of savagery and senselessness, and that he somehow deserves better. But the thing is―
("You shouldn't use your gun for threats," Shanks had said, and that's how Luffy watched a man get his brains blown out for the first time. When the bandit's skull caved in it was like everything stopped existing save for the echo of the shot still ringing in his ears. In his awe he'd forgotten all about the world beyond, obscured by the feeling of what it meant to be strong, to have power…to take away someone else's life.)
―Luffy gets―
(He had been so certain he was going to die in that moment, cast off into the unforgiving sea by an unforgiving hand, torn between being swallowed by the water and swallowed by the beast looming up above him. Then Shanks came back around to drive the terror out of his heart and guard him for all his weakness and that's when Luffy learned what it meant to make a sacrifice in someone else's name.)
―that it's dangerous. But so are the Marines. So is anything worth doing, really. He tells his grandfather as much and gets nothing but a knock to the head for his troubles. He barely feels it; nothing Garp says or does can make him forget what he already knows. About danger. About dreaming. About being free.
("This hat is my gift to you.")
He can't forget, not any of it, and so he lets memory be his driver. Monkey D. Luffy has a promise to keep―to keep with him, always. The Hat may be too big for now, but worse than that, without it he is too small. It's all he can do, to bear the weight without being weighted down. So he wears it, and so he is strong. Strong, because he knows exactly what he wants. Getting there is only a matter of time; until then, he'll make every second count.
『信じる』– shinjiru – trust.
"Where're you gonna go?"
Luffy turns to face his brother when he asks it. He's holds his gaze with a familiar spark, shared at point-blank range while they huddle together against the wall of their treehouse. They're spending their last night together up there―maybe it's just for old time's sake, or maybe it's so they won't have to listen to Dadan pretending not to cry―and everything else below the shaded sky is so quiet that even the air stands still between their breaths.
"Wherever." Ace answers honestly. He's not too concerned with landmarks and destinations; more than anything, he's just gunning for a chance to create himself in his own image, his own name. To sail under a Jolly Roger is serious business, and he understands far better than most what kind of person it will make him out to be, no matter who he is. "As far out as there is, I guess. And then further out than that, 'til everyone knows my name." His voice pitches softer on the last part, but he smiles as he says it.
Luffy mirrors his smile back at him, but doesn't respond. He doesn't have to. They both know it's all that Ace has ever wanted, in the end―not to become his father's antithesis, or to take on an identity as anyone else, but to reclaim what already belongs to him. To exist on his own terms, forgetting whatever verisimilitudes can be drawn from his linage, whatever sins his father carried that have weighed on his mind for longer than his own memories. After spending so much of his childhood dreaming of nothing, of Nothing, of even his own death…that was the first thing he'd ever dared to dream of for real. Even now, having grown into so many more, it's still the one he fixes above all others.
His introspection doesn't last, of course. Luffy can only stay silent for so long. "D'you think you'll get a bounty on your head? Like Shanks?" He asks, eyes wide with something akin to hero-worship. Ace can't help but notice how distinctly fourteen he looks, in that moment.
He slings an arm around Luffy's shoulder, ruffling his hair. "I'd damn well better. Or else my hard work'd be all for nothing, eh?"
"Shishishi…yeah, I guess." He pauses, as if he's waiting for something―waiting, or listening. He closes his eyes. "But make sure when they know your name, it's the right one."
And just like that, whatever response Ace might've had before catches in his throat. He swallows it down, and asks instead: "What're you talking about?" It's not really like he's expecting Luffy to answer; doubts that he really understands the weight of his own words, more often than not. Still, their echo resounds and leaves him feeling strangely at a loss, struggling to grasp the truth of the matter where it all seems so simple to the boy who speaks it.
In the shadow of the night, Luffy's eyes reflect the dregs of starlight when he opens them, looking up at his older brother. Briefly, in consideration of the question―and then they slip shut again.
"You'll see." He says, and Ace believes him.
『憧る』– akugaru – wander. [1]
When he is four years old, a deep and sudden winter sweeps over the village. It's a foreign thing to Dawn Island's natural spring climate, the offswing of some hurricane to the west that stirs up strange weather in seas below and skies above. It is also the first time that Luffy's ever seen anything of snow.
Palms pressed up against the window in the back room of Partys Bar, he voices his wonder to Makino at how easily the clouds are falling out of the the sky. Although she pleads with him to wait inside until his grandfather returns from the market to pick him up, Luffy is hardly able to keep himself away from the "mystery rain" for even a minute after it begins to fall, and throws open the door the second her back is turned to explore the grounded nimbuses with his hands and feet.
About half a week in, it gets so cold that the duck pond freezes over. He notices how the stirring of the glassy flow turns opaque and solid almost overnight, and it's such a big change to see in this constant along the same path he winds through town so often. It doesn't take long, of course, for his curiosity to get the better of him, coaxing him to slip away from his snow-angels and hot cocoa to examine the strange phenomenon up close. Of course, nature is full of inexplicable illusions (like cloud-rain!), and by that logic there's really only one way for him to know for certain that what he sees is the whole truth. So, he tries to walk on water.
It doesn't work.
The ice is thin and veiny, and snaps apart quickly under the press of his feet. He screams, just once, before his mouth is lost below the floes―the rescue that follows is little more than a swampy mess of a recollection that he can never quite manage to grasp. He ends up bedridden with chills for the next few days, voice broken up from the residual ache of how the water had caught and swollen in his lungs when he had tried to breath beneath it. Makino frets and flitters about the halls with teas and blankets and soothing words; Garp calls him a stupid brat but his hands shake and he barely ever leaves Luffy's bedside. It's a strange and disorienting experience, the first time he's ever known any kind of sickness (a sickness he will not remember). That span of days is spent in a haze muffled with cotton and steeped in boiling oil.
The doctor says that the fever is trying to fry his brain, same as the water tried to steal his breath and the numbness tried to eat his skin. It's not all bad, though. When he sleeps, often it's as though he's taken on the greatest legends of the high seas and played them out beneath his eyelids. Furious, fantastical things too alien for him to comprehend for all they take root in his core as though they're his own memories. He wakes from these more dead-tired than he'd been before, body thrumming with a useless, raw energy not entirely his own and bones aching as though he'd fought those bruising battles in the flesh with a sword in his hand and a weight on his head.
The dreams where he's fighting, at least, can be fun in the moment, in all the ways that he is still young enough to imagine himself the hero of every story he's ever heard. But there are others still that tear into him like nightmares before they even fall away at all. Dreams that have him chasing after an edge of the tide on foreign shores or cutting up against the waves at the helm of a foreign ship―dreams where he completes himself only to let go of everything all at once. He is always left wandering through their empty spaces in the aftermath, when he wakes up with his cheeks wet and his eyes stinging, not knowing any of the things he is supposed to know.
Soon enough, the fever breaks. He opens his eyes and nothing has changed; still, he carries all this dreaming like he does with everything else, because he's left too much behind to pretend it's all the same.
『受け継ぐ』– uketsugu – inherit.
The irony of it is that he's born at sea.
Taking his first breath on very nearly the same beat as his mother takes her last, the baby comes out screaming mad and covered in blood. But in spite of all the hemorrhaging and trauma of the birthing process, the doctor is quick to give him a clean bill of health. "A strong young thing," she calls him. "Got a real pair of lungs on 'im, too."
They wash him in a water basin and wipe him down with cloth soaked in antiseptic. The birth had been premature, and the attending crew―traveling on a relatively small and inconspicuous vessel compared to the Army flagship―had been quite unequipped for the delivery, in spite of the doctor's best efforts to improvise. Unfortunately, the lack of proper medical resources had cost the bearer of Dragon's child her life. But not for nothing, in the outcome. The boy, although little more than a squalling knot of limbs and joints with no sense of self, is quite obviously worthy of the bloodline he bears.
He looks the child in the eyes, just once. It is enough; he knows the Will when he sees it.
Monkey D. Luffy. He says it aloud, on record, and sure of himself as he's ever been in its declaration.
They bury Luffy's mother like they would any good sailor, weighted down and devoured. One of many loyal soldiers and many lovers to the captain of the Revolutionary Army, she'd had no real friends or family ties to tangle with, thank the stars. Dragon had scarcely known her well enough for mourning―although he'd kept her close throughout the pregnancy out of duty and respect―and it's common enough for women to be killed in childbirth so that in the end he feels no weight of death on his shoulders. Her son is all that she leaves behind, but he will not remember her. She, the life from which he inherited his own. The name he'll take on will make her nameless.
In the week that follows, Dragon refuses any offers to hold his child. Now more than ever, he cannot afford to become too attached. As soon as the baby is better suited for long-distance travel, he'll be handing Luffy over to his grandfather for safekeeping. As it stands now, Garp is not even aware of his grandson's existence yet, but Dragon has little doubt that his father will seize the opportunity without a second thought. Another chance to accomplish his goal of raising a proper heir to the family name would be too perfect to pass up. He had, after all, fallen so short with his son; done well to instill great and ambitious ideals of justice and the greater good, but failed spectacularly to do the same for law itself. An imbalance that had cost him dearly, for all his posturing and foolishly unconditional love, that he'd managed to make an enemy of his own child.
And yet, Dragon is almost certain that his own history is doomed to repeat itself in his sucessor. Looking now at the squirming fixture of a child lying on the table beside him, he cannot even begin to imagine how this boy could grow up to be someone who'd bend to any rule of law besides his own.
"Hmph. Well, the old man can have his legacy if he dares."
『なる』– naru – become.
The boat is barely even a boat. A parting gift from the fishmonger Gyoru, the old dinghy smells strongly of fish guts and salt-rot and looks like little more than a warped pile of wooden bones. Still, it's all his and his alone. Laying eyes on it must be like love at first sight, Luffy thinks. The sort of thing that Ace had once tried to explain to him when he'd turned thirteen, or that Makino gushes over on Friday nights after she's had too much white wine―all that stuff he knows he'll never understand for real, not the way they mean it. But there's something of it here, for certain.
His eyes track how the rickety frame leans into the tides, bracing himself on the edge with wild laughter and almost capsizing in the process. Luffy has never counted the inability to swim among his regrets―of which he has none―but he wonders all the same at how easy it could be to end his life on just one slip up, one missed beat. It's not a fearful kind of wonder, though; he's been ready for any outcome ever since he figured out how he wanted to live. Because what should it matter, if the path he carves out leads him to his death? He knows what he's giving up, what he's risking, just as well as what he's got to gain.
He stretches his fists over his head in triumph even as the people on the shoreline crumple into pinpricks, feeling his balance shift along the axis of the waves. He's starting to get the hang of his sea legs now, maybe, and it's…nice. The voice is stronger, out here in the thick of it all, but he doesn't really mind the chatter. It's a clean sort of racket, that feels as natural as the sound of his own name.
Today, Luffy is seventeen; a man, grown into his strength. He wears the Hat on his head like it was made for him. Fearlessly, and with the all of his heart. Because after so many years spent training and dreaming and listening, there's nothing left to hold him back. And so when he looks to the ocean, towards the future, he does not see a gamble or a great unknown or a watery grave.
He sees his kingdom.
[1] no, 憧る is not a misspelling of 憧れる, but rather an archaic verb from the heian period used in reference to the old mythos of the "living ghost" 生霊 (ikiryō), and more specifically describes the act of the soul exiting the body to wander in the living world on its own. neat, huh?
end notes: y'know, i actually wrote the shell of this about three years ago, before losing it to the demands of real life and the nethers of my google drive. i didn't keep much of what i'd done in the original after digging it back up, other than the title.
that being said, feel free to comment with any questions, observations, rants, corrections, etc. feedback is always appreciated! :)
well, anyway. hope you enjoyed this…whatever it is.