Uh… Hullo?
…
Yeah, okay, now that we all know that I suck at introductions, let's move on from the awkward part. From the summary you already vaguely know what this is about, so I won't repeat myself.
But I'm going to warn you now. I want to try and explore the psychological consequences that come with being dumped into a world that you always thought of as fictional. So obviously, angst will be a big thing (also because I can't seem to write anything without putting angst in it, so even if I love some fanfics on the same trope that treat it entirely as a joke, I just cannot write something like that).
There will also be a lot of fluffy friendship feelings and hugs, though -I don't think my sanity can take 100% angst. Plus I love happy feels. And there will also be humour (at least I think it counts as such, but we don't all have the same sense of humour so maybe you won't like it). But for the first few chapters especially, angst will be more heavy.
This is rated M for language, angst, and violence for now.
Updating schedule: I can't really give you anything precise, because I don't want to put myself under pressure to write when I'm not always in the mood, or give you false hopes and disappoint you in the end. Classes will start again in two weeks for me, and last semester I was working like 10 hours a day, which admittedly doesn't leave that much time for writing since I have other things to do (like, you know, eating and sleeping and watching the last episode of One Piece and reading other fanfictions).
So yeah. It'll come when it'll come. Just so you know, though, I have like five other chapters that just need editing -since I know that my muse isn't really a regular visitor. So I can at least guarantee you that the next update won't be in a year.
Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece, so anything that you see in this fic and that you can recognise as belonging to One Piece is not mine. If I did own it, I wouldn't have to write fanfiction. Duh.
Anyway. Unnecessarily long rant aside, here is the prologue.
Part One - Dive|rgence
PROLOGUE
I was having a dream but
then I realised that
I can't wake up
and
it is a nightmare
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
With a deep breath of slightly salty air, she lets her consciousness resurface and wakefulness wash over her, like the waves she can hear crashing lazily on the sand, not too far away.
She shuffles, feet digging clumsily into the sun-heated sand.
"Good nap?"
The voice of her mother is the last nudge her groggy mind needs, and with a sleepy, vaguely affirmative hum, she raises her head from where it rests on her crossed arms.
… And promptly groans in discomfort as her eyes are assaulted by the harsh light of the sun, still high in the sky -her sudden nap was probably shorter than she first thought.
Slowly, she sits up, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands once she has checked they are free of sand.
Now that would be a pain in the neck.
Ah, better.
"Want to go for a swim?"
She rolls her shoulders and cracks her neck to rouse her body from its nap-induced stiffness, tongue roaming through her mouth in an attempt to relieve it of its dryness and fuzziness. She loves the beach, but taking a nap on the beach in the middle of a summer day… Well, there are enough downsides to make her think twice about doing it again.
An affirmative answer is on her lips (she is pretty sweaty) before she stops. Her half-functioning brain finally realises that the humming noise in her ears isn't just the ocean.
It's people.
As in, A Lot of People.
Way more than there was when she fell asleep.
Ugh.
She stares at the clusters of people playing, talking and swimming in the sea.
A gaggle of children run by her with their swimming ring, laughing and screaming and squealing as they race each other towards the foam-capped waves.
She winces.
Hesitantly, she gestures towards a pile of rocks and boulders that she knows hide a small creek.
"I'll just… go over there."
She rises to her feet hurriedly, but even with her back turned she can feel her mother rolling her eyes heavenwards (okay, the exasperated sigh is kind of a hint, too).
Annnnnd there goes her good mood.
She sighs as she heads for the rocks. This summer is the last occasion to spend time with her family before she moves out for her first year of college (enough time to forget what is to come, to relax fully without that little part of herself already thinking about leaving and unknown and lost and not alone but so, so lonely-). And after spending all summer with them, she wants to avoid being a source of conflict and disappointment when she won't see them for a long time (not really).
She should have just said yes and sucked it up.
But even as the thought burns bitterly in her mind and guilt churns in her gut, her shoulders slacken in relief, tension melting at the sight of her temporary swimming spot. Two other people chose to come there too, but they are far away enough that she can barely distinguish their features.
She hurries her steps, suddenly giddy to be in the sea again and feel the water glide along her skin like liquid silk.
As she jumps down from the last rock, she spots an obviously abandoned plastic bag, filled with empty food wrappings.
The thought filters through her mind that she should probably pick it up and throw it away properly, stringing along memories of classes she attended, TV programs she watched and books she read.
Vague, washed-out disgust courses through her at the thought of whoever took the time to collect all their trash but not to actually put it in the damn bin.
And then it all sinks in the whirlpool of apathetic emptiness within her, and she walks past the pile of trash (distantly acknowledging that she isn't any better).
She enters the water in a few steps, and dives in almost silently, a sigh escaping her mouth. She swims around for a bit, before turning on her back and letting herself float.
Green seaweed passes her by and gets tangled in her left hand. She closes her thumb on it, feeling its thin, wet softness with small, slow strokes.
Water laps at her ears, loud and tranquil, drowning most background noise until she is alone at sea.
(It is soothing, terrifying and exhilarating all at once.)
Her long hair is like an anchor pulling her down, heavy with the weight of the sea. She has to wash it anyway, so she decided there is no harm in letting it soak in salty water on top of it.
She takes a deep breath and, one by one, lets her muscles relax slowly, until she is sinking, the water closing above her face, blurring her sight of the sun.
She waves her limbs lazily to keep herself afloat not too far from the surface, and watches the bubbles she releases little by little fly upwards.
The rest of the world disappears.
She closes her eyes, lips tilted up in quiet contentment.
And then...
Something hits her smack dab in the forehead.
Her eyes snap open, and she gasps out a mouthful of air in surprise, instinctively hurling herself up.
She breaks through the surface (-it took too long, what-) and greedily sucks in air, impatiently pushing hair out of her face as she looks down.
Her eyes were crying against the sting of sea water, but she is pretty sure she was just hit by someone. It did feel like another skull smashing against hers just now, too -not that she has a lot of experience with that particular occurrence.
Except, no one is resurfacing next to her.
With a curse, she fills her mouth with air again, and dives.
Luckily, or as much as one can be in these cirumstances, she manages to spot them quickly, and hurriedly swims over to what she discovers is a barely moving boy of about her age.
She grabs a hold of him (-too light, he's too light for his build, this doesn't make sense-) and proceeds to haul the both of them upwards again.
Except, when she does reach the surface, she realises four things at once.
One, she is in the middle of the ocean, with no sign of land in any direction.
(-but it isn't possible-)
Two, there is a small rowing boat not far from them, something that by all accounts belongs in a museum.
Three, the boy she is holding looks familiar (the kind of familiar that turns her stomach and spine to hard, cold ice, that numbs everything in shades of incredulity and disbelief because it shouldn't exist-).
And four, he isn't breathing.
A mangled whimper crawls up her throat and dies on her lips.
Her breath stutters.
Her movements falter.
And then her mind goes blank with lucid terror, only focused on hearing the sound of breathing again (-even though she shouldn't hear it, she knows-).
As she drags the limp body on the boat and clambers in herself, her panicked mind runs blindly through the memories of her first-aid optional course in first year of high school.
(In her mind it feels like three years ago. In her body, it feels like three eternities, limbs unable to remember the position they took, the speed they used, the strength they applied-)
Hands trembling, tongue licking salty drops off her lips again and again (if they are tears or sea water, she does not know), she gets into position and starts pumping, counting under her breath.
The only thought that goes through her as she leans forward is, absurdly enough, something along the lines of seriously, when I said I missed having someone to kiss, this was so not what I had in mind. But she opens her mouth anyway, covers his lips with her own, and exhales.
(and there is no response, no movement, no warmth, no nothing, and it's so wrong, even though he is-)
Pump. Exhale. Repeat.
Once. Twice. Three times.
A choked sob, wrapped in the broken shards of a senseless litany she cannot even hear, squeezes past her throat -her throat that is clogged with unshed tears and silent despair.
She feels his body contract before he actually coughs, and flings herself back, almost falling into the ocean again.
As the boy (-she can't bring herself to think his name, let alone say it-) proceeds to cough out the water, and probably his lungs too, her heartbeat slows down from 'argh, too many feelings in here, let's just run away' to 'I think I'm gonna be allergic to consciousness in about two minutes'. She finally focuses on her surroundings.
But they are just as she first saw them through the haze of panic and the water in her eyes.
Just as she fears.
She and… the other occupant of the boat are the only people as far as she can see, floating aimlessly on the molten glass mirror of the sea, under the barely lighter blue of the similarly boundless sky.
Being lost at sea with no idea how to get back home -or how you got there in the first place- is neither soothing nor exhilarating.
It's just plain terrifying.
She looks down helplessly-
and lurches forward to grip the railing of the boat with a gasp. It sounds like a whimper of desperate denial being strangled by her throat but somehow wrenching itself forcefully out of her mouth.
Because there, on the surface of the sea, undisturbed by the wind or the movement of the boat, is what is supposed to be her reflection.
Except it isn't.
Cannot be.
But when she moves her arm to bring it in her field of vision, it moves too, and so she finds herself staring uncomprehendingly at the pearly, nearly translucent, the-sun-what's-that-never-heard-of-it white of her skin.
(Her heartbeat drowns out the world in a way that makes her want to silence it forever.)
She inherited her skin from her mother's side, and it has never been that pale, even when she's sick, and certainly not in the middle of summer when she tans so easily.
She rubs another foreign-looking hand on the arm (-not her arm, it just cannot be hers-), and feels the contact.
Almost unconsciously, she clamps down viciously, nails digging frantically into the skin.
Ow.
… Fuck.
Absently, she reaches for a strand of hair, faintly hoping in the back of her rapidly numbing mind (-she wonders if this is what going into shock feels like-) that it was just the colour or the sky reflected in the sea that-
Nope.
Her usual straight strands of thin, luxurious, chocolate-brown hair -the one feature of her face she has always loved- have become thick, straggly curls, coloured an absurd ocean blue that should not, under any circumstance, be natural.
Except it seems to be the case.
And when she gives a tug she feels it, so it can only be hers (-but it doesn't make sense, cannot make sense-).
She gives a harsher tug just in case.
(It hurts, but not as much as the jolt of realisation somewhere around her heart that sends cracks rippling through her sense of self.)
She wants to cry hysterically, but the only sound that comes out of her mouth is a breath of laughter (although it is definitely hysterical).
A loud, hoarse cry of relief makes her tense as she is abruptly reminded that she isn't alone on the boat.
(Or is she?
Is this all a dream? An illusion born from her -in that case more disturbed than she thought- imagination?
...
She doesn't know which would be worse.)
Slowly, mechanically, she turns towards the boy, who throws his arms in the air, in victory or celebration she doesn't know -but if it is the former it is severely misplaced.
"I'm alive!"
She blinks sluggishly.
The boy blinks back, and suddenly beams like the sun on the first day of summer holidays, when it just so happens to also be your birthday.
Amazingly enough, she manages to resist the urge to cover her eyes from what would probably be a serious case of megawatt smile-induced blindness.
And then he opens his mouth, wider and wider and wider, like a black hole that sucks in all her hopes. And she wants, yearns, needs -so badly, to look away, ignore him a little longer, tell herself this isn't true, isn't happening -just a little longer.
(Even if, just under the surface, she already knows.)
But she can't look away, like you can never look away from something horryfingly fascinating, whether it is the meeting of two people that would either make the world go sunshine and candies or kaboom, or a ball careening towards you through the air that you know is going to land straight in your face, and the only thing you can think is ohhell, except in this case her brain seems stuck on nonononono-
And then he talks.
"Aaaaah, that was close! Thanks for saving me!"
She…
Faints.
So… as you can probably tell, this is going to be a LONG fic. Not just because I start at the very beginning of the series, but also because this is a prologue, so a lot shorter than the following chapters, which gives you an idea of their average length considering that this is already 2,000 words long.
I'm sorry if the writing is a bit confusing, but it's 80% on purpose because well, she's in shock, and her brain is kind of scrambling with the abrupt change of scenery, which I think is quite legitimate. The remaining 20% can be blamed on my tendency to make really long sentences and go on tangents in the middle of long sentences.
On another note, Ocean blue (RAL 5020) is actually a lot darker (and has more green) than I thought. And somehow, I always felt like Luffy's rubber body would be a lot lighter than a normal human body. I might be totally wrong though.
Also, I never understood some SI-OC insert fics where the character is like 'oh my god this is so weird i could swear that i know this person/place/chicken from somewhere, but i really can't tell that IT'S THE MAIN CHARACTER FROM MY FAVOURITE ANIME OF ALL TIME! YOU KNOW, THE ONE I'VE WATCHED SEVEN TIMES IN THE LAST THREE MONTHS'. Like, are you for real? (The chicken is just me getting carried away btw. If there's a fic like that, I never read it.)
Thank you for reading!