A/N: Into the Grand Line we go. *Bows*
I do not own One Piece. Only a romantic spirit roused by Oda's grand adventure.
"I had my doubts," Nami said, tossing back her poncho's hood. "But it's a mountain."
"What's that, Nami-san?"
They'd momentarily sequestered themselves in the galley and out of the storm. Sanji leaned against the kitchen counter, ever ready to serve. The other three sat at the table with tea the cook had brewed. Nami normally wouldn't have bothered setting aside time to explain things to them. They only needed to understand her directions, not her reasoning for them.
Except… well, the instance in question warranted an explanation.
"The entrance to the Grand Line," she said. She slapped Buggy's map down on the table. "Is up a mountain."
The announcement prompted fairly appropriate responses of shock and awe from the boys.
Sanji's one visible eye widened and his curled eyebrow rose into his hair.
Luffy, who'd taken the lip of his cup between his teeth, stared at her with large brown eyes, practically broadcasting his thoughts. Where most saw insanity, he saw adventure.
Zoro, head propped in one hand, regarded the navigator with a healthy skepticism. One that, honestly, reflected a bit of how she still felt about it, despite her certainty in her reading of the map.
Nami considered herself an expert on three subjects- cartography, navigation, and money, which covered a lot of bases. Given a real ship, she could pull through virtually any storm. As a thief, she knew cons backward and forward. She could pick out counterfeits, be it beri, product or map, and while Buggy himself might be suspect (for a number of reasons), the map checked out. She knew that much, at least, for certain.
Still, who the hell had ever heard of a ship sailing up a mountain?
Slu~rp.
Usopp… sipped his tea.
"Cool!" Luffy exclaimed, grin taking up half of his face. "It must be a mystery mountain!"
"Even if it is," Zoro said. Apparently, Usopp's absolute non-reaction hadn't thrown off anyone except Nami. "Why do we have to go through an entrance? It's just open water to the south, isn't it? Can't we just sail into the Grand Line from anywhere we want?"
"No!" Luffy yelled, pointing an accusatory finger at the swordsman.
"No!" Usopp seconded. Adamantly. The sniper's gaze, which had been directed out the porthole window, snapped around to Zoro and he shot to his feet. He crossed his arms in an 'X' as though to ward off evil, emphasizing his protest.
Nami silently re-evaluated her theory that the marksman's body naturally produced ice in his bloodstream.
"They're both right," she said. "It's"
"It'd feel all wrong not to go through the entrance!" Luffy argued before Nami could get a word in. She knocked her fist against the moron's thick rubber skull.
"There's a bit more to it than that, Captain!" Usopp said.
At least Nami had one semi-knowledgeable crew mate.
"Hey," Sanji said, stepping up to the window. "The sky just cleared up."
Usopp whipped his head back around. His eyes blew out wide and he bolted out of the galley.
"That's not right," Nami said. "We're supposed to ride out the storm straight through to Reverse Mountain."
The other boys walked outside. Luffy pointed out the storm clouds, which just stopped at some invisible divide in the sky, coinciding with an abrupt cessation of the rough waves they'd been in the midst of moments ago.
Nami loosed a string of invective fit to burn even a seasoned sailor's ears.
"What's wrong?" Luffy asked, entirely too relaxed. "The weather's great here!"
"Hey!"
Usopp lobbed oars at his three much calmer bunkmates. The sniper himself took up a starboard position.
"Help me turn us around!"
He began rowing at an impressive clip, apparently determined to correct Merry's course, singlehanded or otherwise.
Sanji frowned and sidestepped the oar tossed his way.
"I don't take orders from you."
"Do what he says!" Nami snapped.
"Right away, Nami-san~!"
"You two," she yelled, pointing at the swordsman and idiot boy captain. "Lower the sails and then start rowing! We need to get back to that storm!"
Luffy, who'd only blinked at the oar that clattered near his feet, just looked at her.
"Nami," he said slowly, as though she were the idiot. "Don't you know this is a sailing ship?"
"We need wind to sail, dumbass!" She shouted, infuriated by the lackluster response from the crew's two biggest muscle heads. "The air here is dead!"
"Okay," Zoro said. Of the three, only he'd caught the oar thrown at him. "So we're drifting. Why go back to choppy waters? This seems pleasant."
Though Zoro addressed Nami, he tracked Usopp. Zoro seemed more interested in the sniper's response to the situation than the situation itself.
Granted, if Nami hadn't known the reason for Usopp's (immediate) behavior, she also might've been curious. The sniper did not often come off as nervous.
Only, she did know, and the morons she had for crew mates urgently needed to move Merry literally anywhere else!
"Ha. Ha ha."
Usopp interrupted their dialogue with a disturbing, mechanical laugh. One that lasted ten whole, worrying seconds.
"They don't know, Nami."
Despite his neutral tone, the sniper's steadily increasing rowing pace belied his placid countenance.
Nami clenched her teeth. Of course they didn't understand where they were- she'd had to explain scurvy, for fuck's sake!
"You're right, we've drifted. STRAIGHT INTO THE CALM BELT!" She shouted, her expression reminiscent of a shark. She preempted any (stupid, time-consuming) questions by being thorough. "Two seas that border the entire length of the Grand Line, where there's no wind or current!"
"And?" Zoro prompted.
"And," Usopp barked, his oar moving at a feverish pace. "We are sitting on top of a nest for"
Rmmb.
The ocean swelled. The ship rocked and shook. Usopp yanked his oar from the water and backpedaled away from the rail. Nami dove for the mast, clinging to it as Merry rose out of the ocean. The sea fell away from view, replaced by the forehead of a massive creature.
"Sea Kings." Usopp said, voice cracking and a little reedy.
Nami cried a little. Previously, Moomoo had been her only personal experience with sea monsters. Arlong's pet had several tons on the crew's caravel. The smallest of the diverse, titanic creatures surrounding them might have, generously, considered the sea cow an hors d'oeuvre.
Merry itself had been lifted into the air and sat on the huge snout of a prehistoric-looking Sea King. The one silver lining was that none of the creatures, even the one they were sitting on, had noticed them.
"Okay," Usopp said, tone sharp. He stood, his oar retrieved. "The second these guys dive again, we row like a bunch of bastards to get back to the storm. Got it?"
"Aye!" The boys hissed, each of them clutching their own oars. Even Luffy, for all his reckless lack of fear, looked concerned.
A strange, low, vaguely airy sound preceded a rumble that shook the ship. Nami chanced a look down over the railing- the smooth skin beneath the keel wrinkled and hitched.
"Oh shit," Usopp muttered, abandoning his paddle and raising his voice to a yell. "Hang onto something!"
Rah-chaugh!
The Sea King flinched and its head jerked forward, belting out a sneeze that hurt Nami's ears. She barely had time to wrap an arm around the banister before Merry went flying.
Kroosh!
They landed back in the thick of the storm. Everyone splayed out on their backs, relieved.
"Oh good," Luffy said, every bit in earnest. "This is a lot better."
Nami had never before felt grateful to be in the midst of a typhoon.
"That," she said. "Is why we have to go through the mountain entrance. Understand now?"
"Yes ma'am."
Suddenly, Nami jackknifed upright, understanding washing over her.
"I figured it out," she said, more to herself than anything. She cried out. "I figured it out! We do ride up the mountain! It's all about the currents! If the force of a current converges at Reverse Mountain's peak from all four Blues, all we have to do is steer the Merry into the entrance canal, get carried to the top and ride down into the Grand Line!"
She muttered.
"Reverse Mountain's a winter island, so if we miss, we'll break apart against the rocks and the currents will drag us under."
Wonder and awe struck her. Just saying it aloud gave her goosebumps and sent a thrill down her spine. She'd been reminded all over that she'd spent her whole life in just one of the world's six oceans.
"Aha," Luffy said, laughing. "I knew it! It's a mystery mountain!"
A~nd she got to share the experience of the most wondrous sea in the world with a bunch of morons.
'Joy.'
Barking out orders and keeping track of their progress, Nami suppressed a smile.
"We're in!"
Usopp cheered with the rest of his nakama as the Going Merry cleared the archways over the canal. The roaring current below carried the caravel almost forty-five degrees straight up the side of Reverse Mountain. Inwardly, the sniper heaved a small sigh of relief.
He'd managed to spare Merry's whipstaff this go-around.
("We're not turning!"
"The whipstaff's not responding!"
"Pull harder!"
"Any harder and it'll break!")
Usopp had essentially mimed working the whipstaff with Sanji- he just hadn't applied any pressure. Again, he didn't outright lie- Merry's whipstaff would have snapped, and the marksman was determined to prevent as much damage to the caravel as he could. He harbored no delusions that Merry would make it to the New World with them, let alone the end of the Grand Line.
She would, however, survive to see the day they succeeded if he had anything to say about it.
In any case, his acting skills were apparently sufficient to convince his nakama.
The sniper felt decidedly lukewarm about that.
Merry's keel left the rising, racing current beneath her as they came upon the mountain's crest.
"This is the world's greatest ocean!" Luffy yelled in sheer, infectious glee.
As ever, Usopp's captain had a talent for making him forget his worries, even if only for a few minutes. He bounded out of the cabin onto the deck, Sanji at his heels.
The ship seemed to sit suspended in midair. Water from all four Blue's met at the apex, the intersection of the Red Line and the Grand Line. The spray dissipated into a misty shroud that blanketed the mountainside. For a moment, Usopp could imagine the earth and her most mysterious sea stretched out before them, circling the globe. He picture islands of Paradise dotting the expanse of blue waves, each of them teeming with unique flavors of adventure.
Even the driest, most no-nonsense dullard of the Navy would find their romantic spirit roused by such a thought.
The Merry crashed back into the water, descending the channel cascading down the mountain. Usopp laughed, a mad thrill colored by terror and anticipation coursing through him.
He'd made it back.
"BWAAOOH!"
A haunting, distinctly mournful sound brought the sniper's bout of nostalgia to an abrupt end.
'Laboon.'
A profound sadness swept over him, one he had not been prepared for. In his first round, he hadn't been listening to Laboon's cries. Like his crew mates currently were, he'd been fixated on the what of the sound, not the why.
Laboon wailed to the heavens, toward the Red Line. Usopp's sympathy manifested as an almost physical ache.
Only the alarmed reaction of his crew mates brought the sniper out of his misty-eyed trance.
"It's hu~ge!" Luffy exclaimed as the West Blue whale came into view- or rather, once the mist cleared away sufficiently to reveal that the mountain Sanji had noted on their way down was actually a living creature. The lower jaw of a living creature.
Usopp's captain had the right of it. As a rule of thumb, anything massive enough to cause Luffy concern warranted, at minimum, a minor panic attack and immediate retreat. And, while not as 'tall' as some of the Sea Kings in the Calm Belt, Laboon had several hundred tons on most of them. He'd have barely registered a carrack like Thousand Sunny as a toothpick fragment.
"What do we do?! Fight it?" Luffy suggested.
"Are you insane?!"
"But it's blocking the way!"
"There's a gap to the left," Nami shouted, all but flailing her arms. "Turn! Hard to port!"
In the midst of swiping his arm over his eyes, Usopp didn't react to Nami's call to action as quickly as he would have otherwise. Thus, Sanji and Zoro reached the whipstaff before he made it into the galley.
Snap.
The competitive pair's first foray into teamwork, outside of combat, did not end well.
"Are you actually kidding me?!" Usopp barked.
Setting aside his ire for the moment, he ran back out of the cabin and bee-lined for the gun deck. Having worked alongside Franky for a couple years, Usopp had adopted a bit of the carpenter's mentality.
'When the ship's in a pinch, fire the cannons!'
"Luffy, where are you going?!"
Usopp glanced up from the doorway to the gun deck to find his captain vaulting down from the bow, headed in his direction.
Evidently, anyone named Monkey D. Luffy came by such a mentality naturally.
"Which is stronger, Captain," Usopp asked quickly, engaging in another plan to avert the impending collision and spare Merry further pain. He just hoped that Luffy would understand his meaning. "You or a cannon?"
Luffy, whose brain operated most optimally under conditions sometimes mysterious even to Usopp, got a glint in his eye and slingshot himself back up to the bow.
"Nami, stand back!"
Usopp ran to the forward guns.
"We're gonna crash!"
Gomu Gomu no-
The sniper lit the fuse.
Bazooka!
Boom!
Thwam!
He fired. Merry's momentum gradually petered out.
Usopp doubled back outside onto the deck.
Luffy, standing with one foot on either side of the foremost railing on the bow, fell backward as the ship shuddered.
Silence passed for a few seconds. Even Laboon, who could not have possibly felt much from a cannon shot, stopped crying. The ship bumped into the cachalot.
Kreack.
The neck of Merry's figurehead, caught between the wall of Laboon's body and her own weight, snapped. The sheep's head clattered against the wood of the deck.
As the majority of his crew mates scrambled to move the caravel away from danger, Usopp's mind lay elsewhere. He gave Merry a quick, silent apology.
More immediately concerning, though-
"Captain, don't-!"
Thock.
Luffy socked Laboon's one visible eye directly in the giant pupil.
Nami screamed at him, looking damn near tears.
Usopp could relate.
"You broke my special Captain's seat!" Luffy yelled as Laboon finally took notice of the small crew and their ship. "Apologize!"
'We are going to die~!'
Apparently, Usopp had read Luffy's reaction to the Calm Belt quite poorly. The sniper had assumed that the rubber man, who'd been clearly relieved that they could choose the storm over the throng of Sea Kings, had gotten some semblance of sense in his head. Namely, that some things were too damn big to fight.
Certain things, it turned out, were worth the risk of getting eaten. The marksman should have known better than to kid himself- his captain had been lacking sense since day one, and he got worse, not better, as time went on.
"Shaddup, dumbass!"
Zoro and Sanji, unified by the rational fear that Luffy lacked, knocked him over with simultaneous boots to the head.
"Bwaaaooh!"
Not that any of it made a difference to the thousand-foot whale.
Laboon opened his gargantuan jaws.
The ocean, and consequently Merry, poured inside his mouth.
"Are we dreaming?" Sanji wondered aloud, hands fiddling to light a cigarette.
Usopp glanced around. He'd calmed down considerably in the past few minutes. The rush into Laboon's body had ended as abruptly as it started. Luffy had been thrown off the ship into free fall. Things happened too fast for even his captain's impressive reflexes to bring him back to the Merry.
The sniper had confirmed amidst the chaos, thanks to his keen eyes, that the 'anchor' had managed to avoid falling into the sea. Being literally inside a living creature, one with his own 'voice', made detecting a presence outside the body via Haki impossible. Thus Usopp assumed, with some confidence, that his captain would survive to get chewed out by Nami.
Hell, given his mood, the sniper might help.
"I could've sworn we got swallowed by that whale," Zoro said. "How'd we end up outside?"
There were indeed clouds on the apparent horizon. More to the point, they were all staring at a lone little house, on a lone little island, with one lone palm tree and a lone lawn chair.
"Are we hallucinating?" Nami asked no one in particular, confused and unnerved.
Usopp blinked at her.
"Nah," he said, waving his hand back and forth. "We're not dreaming. Not outside, either."
"Okay, Usopp," Nami said snappishly, rounding on the sniper for want of another target for her aggravation. Her outburst drowned out the appearance of another sea creature. "Then explain why there would be an island inside a whale's stomach!"
Usopp stared at a fixed point past Nami.
"Quit ignoring me!" She shouted, lobbing a fist at the sniper's head.
Usopp tilted his head to one side, narrowly avoiding the haphazard haymaker.
"I'm not," he said, pointing behind her. "I'm waiting to see if that old man's gonna harpoon the giant squid."
Zoro, whose hands had moved to his swords on sight of the Sea King, relaxed his stance. Sanji turned a bewildered expression on Usopp, eye darting from the sniper to the swordsman and back. Nami shifted from irritation to disbelief to pale-faced horror. Slowly, she turned her head to look over her shoulder, just in time to watch the monstrous cephalopod get impaled three times over. An old, bespectacled man, (Crocus, Usopp's selectively spotty memory supplied) in a tropical shirt and shorts, appeared from inside the small house. He sported a scar on his left arm and a heavy lower lip that seemed to fix his face in a frown. He hauled the squid's carcass onto the island's shore with no visible strain.
"Hey," Zoro grunted. "Start my Haki training again once we get outta here."
"What the hell's Haki?" Sanji asked, looking between the other three.
"Why is an old man living in our dream?" Nami asked, hugging herself.
'I wonder what Luffy's doing?' Usopp pondered as Crocus, after staring with a chilling gaze at them, sat on the lawn chair and snapped open a newspaper.
Luffy, who'd found a hatch that led inside the whale before he submerged, had questions of his own.
"How come a whale's got tunnels inside him?" He wondered aloud, tilting his head to either side in puzzlement. Setting his curiosity aside, he chose a direction and started exploring.
"You know," Crocus said, folding his paper up and slapping it down on his lap. "It's damn rude of you kids to barge in here and start making demands of me. Why don't you try paying attention? You've been swallowed by a whale, not shipped off on a luxury cruise!"
Such candor came only after the lighthouse keeper had screwed around with the Straw Hats and played shamelessly with their expectations. By being alternatively terrifying with his piercing, stony stare, and utterly benign toward them.
("Hey! Are you gonna answer us, or do you wanna fight?! We've got a cannon, and we'll use it!"
"I'd rather you didn't. Somebody will get killed."
"And… who's that?"
"…"
"…"
"Me."
"Listen, you-!")
A man had to get his kicks where he could, Usopp supposed. Particularly at Crocus' age.
"The exit's over there." He said plainly, pointing at a wide steel door without any preamble.
Evidently, he'd gotten his fill of trolling people for the day.
"'Swallowed by a whale', he says," Nami muttered. "So says our mutual hallucination."
"I think he means it, Nami," Usopp said, tapping her shoulder. "See the clouds around the exit? They're not moving. None of them have since we got here. It's not a dreamscape. It's paint."
The cartographer narrowed her eyes at the inner stomach walls for a second before she snapped her gaze downward in alarm.
"That's stomach acid, not water!" She exclaimed in realization. "We need to leave before our ship dissolves!"
Rmble.
Thoom!
The sea quaked and Merry rocked as everything around them shuddered.
"The hell was that?!" Sanji shouted.
"Laboon," Crocus said, with a sad almost-sigh. "He's at it again."
"Who's at what again?"
"This whale," he said grimly. "Is ramming the Red Line with his head."
Even Usopp, who knew the whale's sad tale, winced in sympathy at hearing it again.
"Those scars on his head," Nami murmured. "I get it now! The old man is killing this poor whale from the inside!"
"Uh," Usopp said, cutting in, somewhat on Crocus' behalf, not that he needed defending. "If he had designs on the whale, why would he take the time to make a steel-bottomed ship in his stomach and paint a mural over everything?"
Nami opened her mouth, finger raised for a counterpoint. She paused. Closed her mouth again, her mask of judgement and righteous anger slipping in the face of the sniper's line of questioning.
"I don't know," she conceded, huffing a bit. "Maybe he's a sadist. A weird sadist."
"Either way," Zoro said. "We should make for the exit- our ship's still adrift in acid."
"I'd rather not spark the whaling debate," Sanji said. "But we don't really owe this guy any favors."
Thoom!
The ship swayed as Laboon struck the Red Line again.
"The 'sadist' just dove into the stomach acid." Usopp noted.
Crocus torpedoed impressively through the acidic sea toward one wall. He made for a ladder beside the giant double doors that served as an exit.
"If he's making tracks," Zoro said. "We better haul ass."
Usopp agreed, though a faint, almost cartoonish whistling sound distracted him.
"You guys hear that?"
Crash.
"AAAAH!"
From another, much smaller door within the main exit, three ballistic figures screamed into view. One, another blatant blank in Usopp's memory, wore a fake crown and an ensemble of a fairly standout suit, one in an unfortunate shade of green.
"Hey, you guys are okay! Great! By the way, save me!"
The second, likely the cause of misfortune befalling the other two, was Luffy. The way his captain mentioned his safety, like an afterthought to his nakama's, made it very difficult to stay mad at him.
Not impossible, just difficult.
And, the third…
"Mr. 9, that's acid beneath us!"
'VIVI!'
Usopp had to bite his tongue to keep from calling out to the desert princess. Acting as though he didn't know her proved even more of a challenge- he tamped down his mouth somehow through sheer will.
One short recovery of a would-be digested pirate captain later, the sniper got to watch perhaps the most inherently kind-hearted girl he knew pretend to be a whaler.
"Mr. 9," she said, more a stage-whisper than the genuine article. "These are pirates!"
"Yes, Miss Wednesday," Mr. 9 (apparently) said. "But surely I can talk us out of danger."
"They do know we can hear them, right?" Zoro asked.
"Poachers!" Crocus shouted from the threshold of the same door he'd run through earlier, which Luffy and the two whalers had flown out of. "I'm not gonna let you kill this whale! Quit pestering us!"
"Who's that?" Luffy asked, cocking his head.
"An old man who lives in the whale." Usopp supplied briefly.
Anyone with any degree of skepticism would have required at least a minute to digest such an odd statement.
"Ah. I see."
Luffy, of course, just nodded.
"We're already inside his stomach, old man!" Mr. 9 said.
He and Vivi pulled out bazookas.
"You can't stop us from blasting a hole in his gut!" Vivi said, her expression malicious and quite convincing.
Usopp rubbed his eyes in semi-disbelief. Vivi's acting skills were pretty impressive- her character contrasted with her real personality like mutual antitheses of the other.
The pair of poachers fired a round each. Crocus threw himself bodily from the platform to intercept them as a live shield.
"You can't stop every shot, old timer!" Mr. 9 taunted. He aimed to fire again while Vivi shifted her sights to the opposite stomach wall, thereby guaranteeing at least one shot would find its mark.
Wham.
A guarantee with a five-foot weakness in the form of Luffy. He stood behind the two flattened whalers, both hands balled into fists.
"They were asking for it." He said.
Usopp side-eyed Sanji, who had been utterly enthralled by Vivi on sight. Not even the flirtatious, chivalrous cook dared to oppose a Luffy mad enough to score dual one-hit KO's.
'Our captain,' Usopp mused. 'Can be scary.'
"Fifty years, huh," Luffy said, lounging with his arms crossed behind his head. "They've sure kept him waiting a long time."
The boy pirate captain referred to Laboon. Shortly after detaining Vivi and her partner, Crocus helped the small crew back outside via the waterway he'd built. The old man told them he'd been a physician once upon a time, though he only treated Laboon anymore.
("Hey, you should be our ship's doctor!"
"Nope.")
Stubborn though he could be, Usopp's captain had an almost frightening insight into people. He never forced anyone to do anything they didn't want to do. Crocus cited his age. Whether Luffy intuited that the old man simply didn't harbor any further romantic aspirations or he just heard solid honesty in his voice, Usopp couldn't say.
The matter didn't come up again, in any case. Rather atypical of the rubber man's usual recruitment methods, which often involved borderline demands on his part, reiterated anywhere between five and umpteen times.
The crew had weighed anchor and settled on one of the Twin Capes at the base of Reverse Mountain. This, of course, only after they'd pitched Laboon's would-be hunters overboard. Usopp felt a slight pang watching Vivi swim away.
"Get real, Luffy," Sanji said, taking a drag of his cigarette. "Fifty years on the Grand Line doesn't happen." He blew out a thin trail of smoke. "They're dead. They're not coming."
The sniper's upper lip curled slightly. He huffed out a breath through his nose and grit his teeth.
"The truth's much crueler than that," Crocus said. "I know from a reliable source that those pirates fled the Grand Line. The weak of heart aren't fit for this ocean."
Usopp seethed and shot to his feet.
He stormed off toward the Going Merry, deaf to the anything else Crocus said and blind to any odd looks he might have received. He clenched his fists, resisting the irrational urge to slug the lighthouse keeper in the nose.
Brook was not dead.
Brook was not a coward.
And Usopp was the only liar among the Straw Hats.
"Your source," he hissed hotly, practically spitting. His boots clomped as he boarded Merry. "Is full of shit."
Upon seeing Merry's broken figurehead, however, most of his anger evaporated into the air like steam and left him feeling disheartened. His traitorous mind recalled the events of the past hour- the previous day, week, the whole month. His inner coward quietly posed the ominous question the sniper had not dared consider for even a second before.
Usopp hadn't really changed much. Sure, things got done differently than in his first round, but the results were the same. And, he thought morosely as he picked up Merry's figurehead, not all of them were favorable. Certain events hadn't been changed at all, even in spite of his efforts.
In his first round, Merry got hurt the exact same way.
In his first round, Brook never saw Laboon again.
'Is fate immutable?'
Merry didn't know what to do.
The distress of her crew begat her own distress.
She'd learned a lot in the preceding weeks, yet as much as Nami's plight had initially confused her, she understood even less of Usopp's. And that bothered her more than she cared to think about, because she'd known him much longer.
He'd told her wonderful stories about the world and their nakama, stories that had proven somewhat prophetic. At times it seemed that knowledge, if indeed he did know the future, burdened him. That, more than anything, she struggled with. She thought that they had much to look forward to and anticipate eagerly.
If so, however, why did Usopp look so sad?
She watched him sit on her deck, fashioning a metal brace for her neck. Merry had fond memories of him working with the wood that became her frame, her hull and her mast. She'd appreciated the attention he paid to the finish.
Clang.
Now, though, every fall of his hammer sounded… lonely.
And Merry felt hurt, because she didn't understand.
Luffy dug around his nostril with his pinky.
He wondered why Usopp stomped off. He looked a little strange- sort of mad. Maybe Crocus' story about Laboon ticked him off.
Or maybe he just had to poop. People sometimes made weird faces when they had to poop.
Luffy kinda thought it was the first one, though.
("Back when I was just a lighthouse keeper, a pirate crew came through the Twin Capes. On their tail, to their surprise, was a baby Island Whale, native to the West Blue. Laboon had followed his friends through Reverse Mountain onto the Grand Line despite their attempts to leave him behind.")
Luffy felt a little angry after hearing Laboon's story, too. The whale might've broken his special seat, but Luffy decided he'd forgive him. The whale seemed cool, too cool to be eaten by those two weirdo poachers.
("They asked me to look after him for a couple years while they traveled the Grand Line. This ocean's too dangerous for a baby. They departed with a promise to return.")
"I've tried telling him the truth several times," Crocus said, sitting on a rock. "Laboon just won't listen. He wails at the mountain every day, like he believes that any second, they'll come sailing through."
Luffy stopped listening and got up. He plodded away from the outcropping near the lighthouse. He watched Laboon, who watched the mountain, calmer than earlier, though still tangibly sad.
The boy captain remembered something his idol told him as a kid.
("Hey, Luffy, quit stuffing your face for a second. I've got something to tell you."
"Nuh-uh! You're just gonna tease me again!"
"Oi, listen, all right?"
"… Mm."
"This's important, Luffy. Promises are never one-sided. It's always between at least two people, even if it's between you and your future self. It's a shared burden. It's meant to be that way."
"…"
"Carrying that by yourself is about the loneliest thing in the world."
"… Whoa."
"… Heh."
"?"
"So be careful making promises 'bout learning to swim, anchor boy!"
"HEY!")
Luffy adjusted his hat. No wonder Laboon cried every day.
He shouldered that burden all alone.
The Straw Hat captain ran to his ship. He had an idea, and he needed Going Merry's mast as an improvised weapon. He rocketed himself onto the deck.
Luffy paused. His hands hovered, ghosting over the main mast.
He sensed… something. A mystery something. A shift, a very faint sense that hit him once his sandals found wood. Not a voice, just a feeling. The sort he'd felt when he saw Nami for the first time on her island. A feeling that she'd been hurt, without knowing how or why.
An instinct.
Luffy nodded to himself. That was the right word.
Clang.
The rubber pirate looked up to the bow. Usopp, holding up his Captain's seat, hammered a sheet of metal around Merry's neck.
"Ah."
Luffy plopped his fist into his palm. Going Merry had already gotten hurt today, so he should think of something else to use.
He eyed a rocky alcove for a second and took off again.
"Oi, Luffy, what the hell are you doing now?"
Usopp looked up from his work at the sound of Zoro's shout.
He nearly dropped his hammer.
Gomu Gomu no-
Luffy, after sprinting up Laboon's side to the whales head, where his scars were fresh and still bleeding, hoisted a jagged boulder overhead and stabbed it into the wound.
Ikebana!
Laboon, naturally, did not take to being assaulted too well.
A short brawl, one nowhere near as one-sided as anyone- well, anyone who didn't know Luffy- might expect, followed. Owing to the rubber properties of his body, Luffy couldn't be much more than rattled by Laboon's attacks. His absurd inherent strength also let him give about as good as he got. The whale himself had mass and stubbornness on his side. Neither party had a clear advantage over the other.
Nami, Zoro, Sanji and Crocus were rather vocal in their bewilderment and alarm. Usopp, by contrast, remained fairly silent. For one, he knew the outcome and his captain's reasons.
"It's a draw!" Luffy declared after one last exchange of blows.
More immediately, though, the sniper just stared at the primary fixture of the crew's ship.
His captain didn't use the main mast.
"I'm pretty tough, ain't I?" Luffy said, grinning as he collected his hat. "We can't call this a match until one of us wins! My crew's gonna travel around the world."
Laboon stared at Luffy.
"Your nakama may be gone, but we're rivals now! When we get back, let's have a rematch! We'll find out once and for all who's stronger."
The whale's giant, wide eyes turned watery.
"It's a promise!"
Even as Laboon sounded off his agreement, Usopp still didn't take his eyes off Merry's mast. He ran his hand along the grain of the wood, heart swelling with potent emotion.
Though he didn't know how he managed it, something had changed.
Minor though it might have been, the sniper decided he'd count it as a victory.
The sniper's lip rolled up into a half-smile. He let his forehead rest against the mast as he curled his fingers closed, knuckles on wood.
Knock. Knock.