I'm currently trying to increase wordage in my chapters; just it'll all end of a cliffhanger. It's really easy to write America, he's so hyper. I can never remember the moves of the one piece characters, so most things might go unnamed. Most fights will be short, since this focuses on plot and humor, not fighting. The reason that this chapter focuses on Canada is because he is best at moving the plot along, and he's close enough to Iggy.

CHAPTER 10 (Robin POV)

"Okay, so I'm fighting you? May the best man win!" Alfred said rather loudly.

"Is he always like this?" I asked Mathew.

"Yep, that's normal. The only time he's not like this is when something bad happens,"

"I guess that he's like Luffy, then,"

"Well, I haven't know Luffy long enough to really compare the two, but I'm pretty sure that Am- I mean Alfred is much more arrogant than Luffy is,"

Wait a second… "What were you going to say?"

"Wh-what do you mean?" He was shaking like a leaf… a maple leaf.

"You were about to call Alfred something else. What was it?" I asked. I knew it was pushy, but I wanted answers. These people were hiding something, and Cap'n was a part of it.

"Now zis iz ze second fight of ze day!" Ludwig broke in. Now I had to wait until he finished. "Let me go over ze rules again: Hit ze painted spot vonce and you vin. No hostage taking and no going out of ze boundries! Ein, zwei, deri, PAINT!"

Zoro dabbed paint onto his chest, while Alfred put it on his left hand. Quite clever, actually.

"BEGIN!"

They went into their fighting stances, Zoro drawing his swords, and Alfred bringing up his fists like a boxer. "I'm coming at you, bro!" Alfred yelled as he charged.

Zoro was ready. "Oni…" -he crossed his arms- "GIRI!" Faster than I could see, he slashed at Alfred. No, wait… he dodged it! "It looks like I underestimated you, Alfred," Zoro picked his swords back up. "This time I'll come at you!" he rushed forward at him, the swords in his hands held in front of him, one at Alfred's neck level, the other diagonal at his chest.

"Nice try…" Alfred leaped through the gaps that the stroke left, and did a recovery roll to Zoro's feet. "But not good enough!" he punched Zoro's chest. Hard. So hard, Zoro crumpled.

"Alfred vins," said Ludwig.

"Wow, you are strong, even if you are a kid!" Luffy appeared out of nowhere, with his chest bandaged.

"Luffy? You're alright!" Ussop exclaimed.

"Ushishi, it turned out that my spleen didn't fall out after all, and Chopper fixed me up!"

"Great, let's go back to town!"

"Gomu Gomu no Rocket!" Luffy stretched his arms and shot forward like a slingshot.

"H-hold on! I forgot to tell you something! Whatever you do, don't let it bleed any more than it-" Chopper yelled, but Luffy already was gone.

"Mathew," I said in the confusion. "You still haven't told me what you were going to say."

"L-let's get back to the inn first,"

"If we do that, then I'll bring Nami."

"You'd tell her anyway, wouldn't you," he said matter-of-factly.

"Yes, I would," I found myself admitting. "But no one can hear us all the way out here."

"Correction, anyone can hear us here. We'll be harder to overhear at the inn," he whispered. Although his voice was no quieter than earlier, the meaning got through.

Later, after the Straw Hat's dinner, in a restaurant…

"So what was it that Robin almost caught you saying?" asked Nami, who had joined us after I told her over dinner.

"I-it was…" he let out a sigh. "His real name,"

"You mean that you guys aren't telling us your real names either?" Nami yelled "I thought that you trusted us! A secret is one thing, but a name was something else entirely!"

He was nervous for a second, and then sighed. "No point in lying to you. None of us gave our real names. We made a pact not to tell anyone our real names, except for our bosses, if the person finds out, or if they need to know. I guess that this qualifies…" I wasn't sure if I had actually found out their secret, or if Mathew thought that I had to know. "My real name is Canada,"

Canada… nope, didn't ring a bell. I looked at Nami, but she didn't know either. "In that case do you know-?"

"I'm sorry; I also promised that I wouldn't tell anyone else's real names without their permission!" he really was sorry, he wasn't just trying to be polite. "And that includes Arthur. Besides, if I told you his name, you'd tell him, wouldn't you,"

I nodded. He had the measure of me within hours of meeting? He was good. "But why don't you want him to know?"

"I do want him to know, I just want him to remember it rather than have it told to him," he said exasperatedly. "Besides, I think that he's remembering something, at the very least. I think that there's something that triggers his memories within each of us, and he'll regain his memories better that way,"

A trigger? "He remembered you when you and Peter came along without really doing anything, but when Antonio attacked him, he remembered him," I began. "What exactly is your relationship with Arthur? You said that you were brothers, right?"

"Not exactly…"

"Are you adopted?" asked Nami.

"Well…" he got out a notebook and a pencil. "It's complicated, but this is how it is. Alfred and I are twins," (he drew two rectangles with designs in them, one with a leaf in the center and the other with stripes and about fifty stars, enclosed them in a circle, and labeled it 'twins'), "and Arthur and Francis are mortal enemies," (he drew two more rectangle,- one with two crosses, and X and a +, and the other with three vertical bars down it-, and drew a line connecting the two saying 'enemies') "whose parents adopted us when we orphaned. Separately."

"What? You were separated?" I gasped. "Why?"

"Because we were distantly related, and there was a legal dispute to whom we would go to. In the end, they decided that we would go with either family. I went with Francis, and Alfred went with Arthur," he looked up. "But they're not related, Francis is on our mother's side, and Arthur is on our father's side. Anyway, it turned out that Francis's family wasn't actually related to us, and I went to live with Alfred and Arthur and his family. It all gets really complicated from there." He sighed.

"Go on, we have a few more days," Nami said.

"Okay then. Arthur's parents died a few days after I got there, so Arthur had to raise us. Years later, Alfred got in a fight with Arthur and…" gave us a depressed look. "He dragged me and Francis into it, and then ran away [1]."

"But then why was he so happy to see him when Cap'n got here?" I asked.

"I didn't finish. That was a couple of years ago, and since then, he moved into his own house. Eventually, Arthur and Francis got in another fight, as usual, and since Arthur had the keys to Alfred's house, he snuck in and stole some stuff from Alfred. Alfred got mad and then they got in a fight, and Alfred dragged me into it again. Eventually, Arthur and I got so fed up that we went to his house and burned it down,"

…What? Mathew, this shy, quiet guy in front of me, burning his own brother's house down? I just couldn't imagine it. "But in that case, who's Diana?"

"She was a street orphan that Alfred picked up. Alfred wasn't in the house at the time, but Diana was…" a look of deep remorse crosses his face.

"But what about the rest of the city?" asked Nami.

"That night, the winds blew the fire to the rest of the city. Luckily, it was a hurricane that night, so it was all put out. Alfred forgave us for that, and we kept in touch [2]."

"You burned his house down… and he forgave you?" asked Nami.

"Well… yeah,"

"What happened then?" I asked.

"Well, Arthur finally acknowledged Alfred as an adult from then on, and he later acknowledged me when I turned eighteen. And that's pretty much it," he concluded.

"What about his relationship with Antonio?" I asked.

"Well, Antonio used to be the strongest out of all of us, and he got into a fight with Arthur while on boats. Arthur managed to beat him, and Antonio sailed into a hurricane,"

"But what does that have to do with the trigger?"

"Well, Antonio was more of a maniac back then, but he's more laid back now. I think that seeing him with his old personality was the trigger."

"But why was he like that in the first place? He was just an ordinary guy when we saw him," said Nami.

"The thing with Antonio is that… he used to live with Lovino, and he's extremely overprotective of him sometimes. And since Arthur turned him into a little kid, he naturally got mad at him,"

"What about Peter?"

"Another distant relative. He moved in between the time Alfred left and I left, and not much really happened from then on. Unless you count the time he moved out. I guess that that's why he remembered him so easily,"

"As for the others…" he said without us asking "well, I'll have to add a few more names. These two people, Roderich and Elizabeta, were a married couple, but they broke up later," (he drew a rectangle with a complicated design with two elaborate crowns) "They broke into Ivan's house," (he started to draw a rectangle with a hook-like design, then erased it and drew a simpler one with three horizontal stripes) "and then Ludwig," (he drew yet another rectangle with three horizontal stripes, and then, realizing that it was similar to Ivan's symbol, shaded the stripes darker) "got into a fight with Bella, Francis, and Michel [3]," (he drew a tri-striped vertical rectangle that he shaded like Ludwig's, and a three striped horizontal one that he shaded slightly, then went on to shade Ivan's similarly. Then, he drew three lines that said 'fight') "All this was because Ivan got into a slight disagreement with Roderich and Elizabeta during a meeting and- [4]" he broke off. "Even if we do have time, I'm not exactly willing to go into every detail. Plus, they didn't actually break into Ivan's house; I got him confused with someone else. [5]"

"Well, I was on the verge of falling asleep, there. Can you get to the point?" Nami said slightly irritably.

"Okay then. Anyway, Ludwig, Roderich, Elizabeta, Feliciano, and Lovino all joined together in a fight between Arthur, Ivan, Francis, and I. Alfred didn't take sides for a while, and eventually joined us." (He drew each of the rectangles in turn, adding a flag similar to Frances', except with a different color scheme,). "We won the fight, and then we got into another one. But I won't bore you with the details, but Elizabeta and Roderich divorced, and Ivan got a new flag." (He drew three more flags, one tri-horizontal with two colors, one tri-color tri-horizontal with a crown design, and the third was the hook design from before.) "Here's the list. It was Ludwig, Feliciano, Lovino, Elizabeta and later Roderich, Kiku, and… never mind, no point in putting in names that you won't recognize. It was them versus Arthur, Francis, me, Yao, Ivan, and later Alfred. We won, in the end," (he drew all the flags, plus two new ones, one with a single dot and one with five stars) "That's all for the fights, at least. Feliciano and Lovino are afraid of Arthur, Kiku is friends with him, Yao hates him and so does Francis, Alfred, Peter, and I have sort of a brotherly relationship, he doesn't like Ivan, and Ludwig and Antonio don't think much of him, in a nutshell."

Something didn't quite add up about his explanation. "You're lying about something, aren't you?"

Nami gave me an incredulous look, while Mathew looked startled. "M-maple! You really noticed!"

"You actually confessed?" exclaimed Nami.

"Well, most of what I said was true… but all the rest has to do with the secret! I promise that I'll tell you when Arthur regains all his memories!"

In the hours that I knew Mathew- or Canada, as he said- I was sure that he was earnest. I knew that he wouldn't go back on his word. "Okay then, it's a promise."

We walked back to the inn in silence. If he couldn't tell us anything, there was no point in talking. When we got to the inn, we tried to creep up, but we were met by a strange sight.

Feliciano was awake. And he was wearing a dress.

THAT'S IT FORCHAPTER 10

[1] Family ties, Canada and France being dragged in- Canada was talking about the French and Indian War for the first part, where Britain got Canada. During the Revolutionary War, America invaded Canada to make life harder for the British, and became France's ally.

[2] Burning D.C., etc.- War of 1812. I already explained this in a previous chapter.

[3] Michel is Luxembourg; I just found the Wikipedia page and picked a random name.

[4] I was trying to write WWI from the nation's point of view, and put it into their terms, but I failed since I had no idea what happened in the first place. But since I liked how the paragraph turned out, I left it at that.

[5] I got WWI information from Wikipedia, but I forgot that Serbia was a country, not a city in Russia. Let's just say that Canada forgot, too…

All those rectangles were flags; I had a hard time describing some of them.