Disclaimer: All proprietary rights to One Piece belong to Oda.
AN: It is one month into their career as a proper pirate crew with a sturdy ship underneath their feet... and a certain caravel has to be acknowledged in providing said job of making them one, ne? :)
Logue Town – the town of the beginning and the end of an era – was just a speck in the distance, growing smaller and smaller with every meter that the Going Merry moved ahead, towards new sights and adventures. Thankfully, the wind seemed to be in their favour, as were the streams.
Their next goal would be Reverse Mountain, the entrance to the Grand Line.
Usopp's "I-can't-leave-the-Blues-illness" aside, their casting off from Logue Town proved to be a good omen about the start into their career as Grand Line Pirates. One of these days, this crew was going to give him a heart attack, wasn't it? Touching the wood of the main mast tenderly, the sniper-part-time-turned-improvised-shipwright considered the month he'd spent with his nakama.
And it was a month already that had passed by then, wasn't it? He paused in his musings, halting his thoughts. His brows furrowed. Mentally, he counted down the days, aided by the adventures they'd had on every single one of them. Yup. A month had passed. His eyes widened in realisation, before he turned around and headed off to the galley. Usopp had an important job to give to a certain cook of theirs… and then they had to celebrate.
For today was the first monthlyversary of the Going Merry as their faithful ship.
That was an occasion that had to be appropriately handled: he made Sanji bake a cake (with him as an assistant if necessary, goddammit Sanji, don't just do nice things for the only girl on the crew) and roped Nami into providing the necessary motivation for the cake to turn out better than "not half-bad" on the cook's watch by having her anticipate the cake and its taste and tell Sanji exactly that.
(It didn't help that Usopp had to carefully walk over Zoro's legs to get to the pantry for the ingredients, paying diligent attention to exactly where his feet landed, for those new swords were not for show, he knew – and he had no intention of finding out just how sharp they would turn out to be)
(Or that, once Luffy had smelled something brewing in the kitchen, he'd come running and tried to taste-test before even so much as the batter was done and prepared)
(Why was everyone in the kitchen, for heaven's sake?!)
Once all was said and done and the cake ready for consumption, all of them filed out of the kitchen, put a picnic blanket onto the main deck of their ship, close to the mast and with a wonderful view of everything around their current position and Usopp put the cake into their midst (forcefully fending off a certain greedy captain of theirs, with his foot if he had to resort to that).
None of them knew how a ship's monthlyversary was to be celebrated – or even, if an anniversary was possible with a ship like theirs on the Grand Line – but Usopp was adamant that the caravel, as their biggest unofficial crew member, had earned herself one, nonetheless.
As such, Usopp led the well-wishes, "Going Merry, thanks for having been with us for a month already! I hope we can spend a great many days with you still, sturdy wood and all." The faces around him were smiling ones, Usopp thought he'd even been able to catch Nami in the act of wiping a stray tear out of her face – or was that a random spray of sea water that had gotten into her eye? – and they all appeared happy to participate in the celebration.
Glasses clunk together, cheers were spoken, and if, at the end of the day, Usopp thought he saw a little kid in a raincoat sitting on the main mast looking down at them joyfully, surrounded by a yellowish tint and seemingly glowing, a stark contrast to the sun and its colours that was setting in the distance, he wasn't sure if that was his imagination simply going wild because of the special occasion.
AN: *sigh* another 24-day-challenge and another chapter that was written on the day it ought to be published. I really should get my stuff together one of these days and provide a buffer again by writing several chapters in advance... ah well.
On top of that, with this chapter I've put online more than 40k words on AO3, all in the One Piece fandom alone O_o that's a lot of words, that is... *g*
