SOL INVICTUS
Chapter Two: The Start of Something Great
"Bye-bye, Makino, Mayor and the rest! I'm setting off, everyone!"
Luffy stood alone in her little fishing boat, waving madly at the collection of villagers on the dock as she pushed off. She could see the tip of Dogra's turban peeking out from behind a wall a little ways away and grinned, glad that the Dadan Family had come to see her off, hidden though they were.
"Setting off to be a pirate, what would Garp-san say?" the Mayor hollered, even though he had been the one to give her the fishing boat in the first place. Luffy laughed at him.
"Gramps can say whatever he wants. I've already decided!" She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, "Goodbye Foosha village! I'm off to be the Pirate King!"
"Good luck, Luffy!" came the responding cheer. She smiled and sat down and began to plan her course. Unlike the original Luffy, she had not dismissed the offer of a small boat in lieu of a dinghy, since she preferred to have more space for her supplies. Her stomach required a frightening amount of food and she didn't fancy being hungry out at sea, after all.
This also meant that she couldn't allow herself to be sucked into that huge whirlpool, because then what would happen to her precious meat? So, even though her navigational skills were subpar at best, she would at least try her best to plot her route.
"Let's see..." According to the map, the island where Alvida was hiding out was to the east of Foosha Village. The compass was currently pointing away from Foosha, so that meant she had to turn the ship to the... right.
Luffy stared at the sails attached to the only mast, confused. How were you supposed to turn directions with these things? It had something to do with the rudder and the wind, she knew. And if she wasn't mistaken, the process also seemed to involve some very manly grunting and a bit of shouting. Luffy squinted at the sails for a moment longer before she gave that up as a lost cause and turned to the large paddles instead. She might as well turn the boat the right way and hope for the best.
The moment she managed to get the boat to point somewhere vaguely easterly, a strong wind began to blow in from the west, pushing her forward. According to the compass, she was going straight to Goat Island.
"Wow!" she said, laughing. "It really pays off to be me."
So Luffy settled down, grabbed a box of beef jerky, and waited.
In a shocking turn of events, it turned out that the ability to wait was not one of Luffy's many talents.
In the short time it had taken her to reach her destination, she had gotten so bored that she'd decided to test exactly how far she could stretch by wrapping herself around the mast several times over. This resulted in a knot of limbs so complex that she couldn't differentiate her left foot from her right, and she couldn't hope to explain how her head had ended up resting on top of her knees wrong-side down.
This, she realized as she tried to untangle her body, had probably not been a good idea.
A little alarmed at the sight of the tiny island slipping slowly past her boat, Luffy shot her only freed limb out to a sturdy looking tree and pulled, trying to anchor onto shore before her boat drifted away. A grin took her face when she felt the bottom of the bow sliding over grainy sand and vegetation, although this soon fell into a grimace upon hearing the first of a series of sharp cracks. Luffy stretched her neck out as best she could to peer worriedly over the ship's railing.
Her own boat was fine, to her relief, but a closer look revealed something a bit more worrying: floating by alongside her boat, bobbing with the ocean currents, were planks of wood and splintered pieces of debris. Was that—
It was. Luffy gaped as she watched the remnants of Coby's makeshift dinghy coffin drift off. There was nothing much to be said, really, other than that the boy was pitifully unlucky. What were the chances that she'd arrive at this tiny island at the exact location he'd hidden his boat, entangled in such a situation that made it impossible for her to check the shore before having to physically drag herself onto it? She would have felt very sorry for him if she hadn't come here specifically to meet him.
The hull of her own boat hadn't so much as gained a scratch at the impact, though. What a hardy little ship, she thought cheerfully to herself.
Unfortunately, the tree being gripped by Luffy's toes was not so robust. One last tug and the timber snapped right in half, and Luffy only barely managed to let go of it before the entire thing came flying at her face. Her leg whipped back to her and the force of its return unraveled the rest of her body from the mast. The resultant momentum sent her sailing through the air, luckily in the direction of the island rather than into the ocean.
Luffy laughed as the wind carried her along, loud and carefree and exhilarated. The breeze whipped at her clothing, and she had to keep a hand on her hat to keep it from flying off, but there was something thrilling about flying without knowing when or where she would land.
When gravity finally decided it missed her too much to let her be, she was brought crashing through a flimsy wooden roof in a meteoric descent to earth. Fortunately, her none-too-gentle landing was broken by something plump and squishy.
"Ow!" cried her unfortunate new cushion. "What the fuck?"
Luffy looked up. With great delight, she realized that she had landed exactly where she wanted to be: next to a terrified Coby being accosted by two scruffy looking men.
She peered down at the groaning mass of flesh under her, still laying dazed on the floor. Make that three.
"An intruder!" the man with lanky blond hair roared, leveling a sword at her. "How'd you get onto this island? Coby, you pink haired little shit, did you do this?"
Coby's attempts to stutter out a negative went unheard, buried under the noise of Luffy's general existence. Presently, this included the happy exclamation, "Woah, I flew! Did you see that, Coby?"
The expression on the boy's face at this could best be described as horror stricken. One of the thugs barked, "So you did sneak her in. Don't you know what Lady Alvida'll say when she sees?"
"N-no, I didn't!" Coby whimpered.
"Oh yeah? Then how'd she know your name?"
"You said it right in front of me," Luffy pointed out, highly amused.
There was no arguing with this. Goon Two glared first at Luffy and then at his cackling comrade, shaking his sabre in both of their general directions as if unsure who he was more disgruntled by.
It was at this point that the grunt still being crushed under her finally managed to collect his wits around him and shove her off. Luffy carelessly allowed herself to spill onto the ground, and then sat up with her legs crossed while the thug leapt to his feet.
"You bitch!" Goon Three hollered, with great volume. His chest heaved with effort as his hand fumbled for the cutlass at his waist. "I'll kill you!"
"Wait," said Goon One, putting an arm out in front of the frothingly furious Goon Three. "That'd be such a waste of a pretty face, don't you think? We won't have many other chances like this."
Luffy, still sitting on the ground, blinked round brown eyes at the three men as they loomed over her, their eyes drawn to the voluptuous view peeking over her red vest. Coby, clearly uncomfortable with the situation, somehow managed to pick enough pieces of his courage up from the ground to protest, "H-hey, I don't think that's such a good idea — Lady Alvida will be very angry if she f-f-finds out..."
"Just because you go around licking the captain's shoes, doesn't mean we have to. Just keep your mouth shut, and maybe we'll let you have the scraps when we're done," said Goon Two. The three of them shared a villainous chortle and began to close in on Luffy, one of the thugs idly kicking Coby to the side when he tried to interfere.
"Just sit still, little girl. I still have to pay you back for what you just did to me." Good Three leered at her and made a grab for her hat, looking as if he meant to toss it aside.
When she saw that the man's grubby fingers were a hair's breath from the rim of her treasure, Luffy's gaze went sharp, and she swiftly reared away from him. The thug's hand met only empty air.
"Hey you," Luffy said, suddenly rising to her feet in a single fluid motion. Her hat cast heavy shadows on her face as a slow, predatory grin spread over her teeth. She tilted her head back to reveal wickedly gleaming eyes. "Don't touch the hat."
"Okay there, Coby?" asked the girl. She turned to beam openly at him, all of her white teeth on sunny display.
"Y-you beat them!" he exclaimed. The fight had finished so quickly that he had almost missed it; without warning, the girl had lashed out, once, twice, and that was enough to bring all three men to a wordless faint, their ugly faces smashed into the dirt.
Coby gaped, amazed, at this strange girl who had come flying out of nowhere with nothing to herald her arrival but the straw hat on her head and a face-splitting grin. Anyone would agree that she didn't look like much at first glance — or at least not much of a fighter, anyway. She was so small and skinny that it seemed like her limbs would break with one careless swing, and her large doe eyes gave her an innocent kind of charm that simply didn't suit violence; she looked too air-headed, too pretty, too weak.
But then you looked at her again, when her eyes flashed with promise, when she laid waste to the men who had tormented you for the last two years, bare hands against swords, and you could no longer ignore the lean, corded muscle layering her exposed arms and legs, the scritch-scratch of scars along her knuckles, the confident set to her spine and shoulders, the wicked quirk to her mouth that appeared at a challenge. Despite how she looked, this was a warrior — a real one, not like those thugs on Alvida's ship.
"It's nothing to get so worked up over," she told him with a blink, her smile giving way to a stern face. "Anyway, I didn't like the way they were kicking you around."
"Thank you," he said, touched. No one had bothered themselves over his well-being for a long time now. It wasn't much — anyone from his home village would have agreed with her — but human decency was hard to come by on a pirate ship, especially one run by Iron Mace Alvida. Speaking of... "You'd better get out of here before Lady Alvida sees you. She's much stronger than these guys, she might even kill you!" After all, Alvida detested any woman more beautiful than herself, and this girl was far more than that. Indeed, she was the antithesis of the pirate captain, and that would surely piss Alvida off.
"Hmm..." the girl replied thoughtlessly. She wasn't paying him any mind, instead peering into the stacked crates with great interest. "Hey, are these vegetables?"
"Ye—no, listen! It's Iron Mace Alvida. You're in big danger if you stay here; you have to get off this island. I don't know how you got here, but I— I— I can give you a way out!"
She gave Coby a look that clearly spelt out her doubts on his intelligence. "If I go, what about you?"
"Huh?"
"How are you going to explain them?" the girl asked, gesturing at the men lying comatose on the ground with a careless wave of her hand.
"O-oh," Coby said, faltering. Actually, he hadn't thought about that. But though the thought of a punishment beating made him quiver in his shoes, he still managed to tell her, "We don't both need to face her. It's better if I do it alone, since she'll probably spare my life but she'll definitely kill you. I've already given up on escaping anyway; there's no point in me trying."
"You were thinking of escaping?" she said, blinking at him. "Huh... yeah, you do look too wimpy to be in a pirate crew."
He slumped forward at this. "It's true. I got roped into her crew by mistake," Coby confessed morosely. He looked at his feet. "I— I'll never forget that fateful day two years ago... I just wanted to go fishing, and instead, I stepped foot on a pirate ship...!"
"You're an idiot, aren't you?" she commented cheerfully, draping herself against a tall stack of crates and going up on her toes to peer into another box.
"Urk..." That was a piercing thing to say to someone who prided himself on intelligence, if absolutely nothing else. Coby was probably the smartest person in the Alvida Pirates; even the captain had said that if not for his vast knowledge of the sea, he'd be dead meat already. A backhanded compliment perhaps, but he took what he could from whatever was available, lest he spiral into further depression. "How did you get on this island, miss?"
"I sailed here, of course. Ah, my boat crashed through this coffin-looking thing while I was bringing it to shore. Do you know what that was?"
No way. Surely she wasn't talking about—
"Did it have two square paddles?!"
"Hm," she looked up from the box and tapped a finger to her bottom lip. "Yup. I'm pretty sure I saw those floating by."
"Ah," Coby groaned and slumped even further, looking almost like he was about to cry. All his hard work, gone in an instant. Even though he wouldn't have used the boat, it still hurt to think about. "That was mine... Sorry, I guess I can't help you get away. But if you still have your boat you should be fine."
"That was yours? It looked like a little kid got hold of a bunch of wood and started hammering."
Coby dropped to the ground in miserable defeat. "I spent two years making that."
"You don't look too upset for someone who's had years worth of effort being ruined," the girl noted, her arm stuck halfway into a pile of carrots. "What was it for, anyway?"
"I was going to escape in it. But then I keep thinking about what would happen to me if Alvida catches me and I..." Coby shivered and held himself. "I couldn't do it! It's impossible, it's just impossible!"
"Ah-ha! So you're gutless, on top of being stupid and clumsy and wimpy," she laughed, looking back to her searching. "You won't make a good companion to the future king of pirates."
"King of pirates…?"
"Yup." Her grin grew, larger than should have been humanly possible, her eyes squeezed into upturned crescents from the size of it. "I'm going to be Pirate King, you know!"
"You're what? Don't you know what that means!?"
As Coby went on and on about the difficulties of becoming Pirate King – like she didn't know all that already, honestly – Luffy turned to consider the crates of food surrounding her.
Lettuce, lettuce, where is the lettuce...
Crispy vegetables were a bit of a guilty pleasure for her. She loved salad and everything that went into them; tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, onions, cucumbers… There wasn't all that much to be ashamed of, it was just that Ace and Sabo had always made fun of her whenever they saw her eating one – something about it being a girly thing to do – so she had learned to do it in secret. It had become such a habit to hide her love affair with vegetables that even after Ace had set sail for the greater seas Luffy had continued to tuck herself away when snacking on them.
She patiently tried to wait out Coby's tirade by peeling off a dewy green leaf from a head of cabbage and nibbling on it, only to have that patience snapped when he finally said, "It's impossible! You'll die! You'll never be able to do it, never, never, never—!"
He was stopped by a fist coming down on his head.
Luffy angled her hands on her hips and stared down at Coby, her expression serious. "Why should death stop me? What's so scary about dying? More than that, it's scarier to have died without having lived life at all. What the point of living if you waste it doing things you regret?" she said, a snap in her words if not in her voice.
Without conscious thought, her hand reached up to pull her straw hat from her head. Luffy gazed at it, her eyes fond and distant. After having been put into his shoes, she could understand why the original Luffy had always done this when talking about his hopes and dreams. There was something about this hat… It called to mind endless seas and open skies and bright, bright red hair and a certain kind of yearning, a strange, wonderful ache deep within her heart.
"I don't have a death wish, Coby. I'm not suicidal or anything. I don't want to die. But I've already set my heart on my goal, so I'll just live every day to the fullest until I get there. Even if the chance of me becoming Pirate King is only a billionth of a percent, even if I die in the middle of the journey, I don't mind. At least I tried, right? And you know, maybe I'm being full of myself, but... I believe I can do it."
She believed Monkey D. Luffy could do it.
It was the same thing, in the end.
"Then!" Coby hollered. Luffy glanced at the suddenly fired up boy with large eyes and a small smile. "Do you… do you think I can join the marines? We'll become enemies, but it's been my dream since childhood; I want to be a marine and protect people and fight bad guys! Do you think I can do it?"
"I dunno," she said. She cocked her head to the side and stared straight into his wide-open eyes. "What do you think?"
"I-I think… I can do it. I'm really gonna be a marine! I'll get away from this rotten place even if I have to risk my life to do it, and I'll become a marine and then I'll capture Alvida and put her away for good—!"
Without warning, a large, spinning object came crashing into the roof of the little shed. Luffy immediately shoved Coby to the ground and shielded him with her body as debris rained down on the two of them. "Who's gonna put who away, brat?!"
"AH! A—Alvida-sama!" Coby yelped beside Luffy's ear. She winced and rolled off of him, plopping herself onto her bottom while the boy tried to do his utter best to melt into the ground.
"You little shit! I thought you were slacking off but you were actually plotting escape," Alvida roared, stomping towards the half-destroyed shack. Her gaze fell on Luffy and she stopped in place, her face twisting into a ferociously ugly scowl. "Who's this chit? A bounty hunter? Ha!" she scoffed, giving Luffy a thorough once over. Apparently deciding that Luffy was not nearly a threat, Alvida dismissed her and continued, "You know full well that only Demon Beast Roronoa Zoro would be a match for me, not some weak little girl like this. So, I'll give you one chance to repent. Who's the fairest on the seas, Coby?"
The boy scraped himself to his knees and kowtowed to the larger captain, a nervous giggle escaping his mouth. "W-well, of course it's—"
Luffy grabbed Coby by the scruff of his shirt and abruptly stood up, physically lifting him to his feet as she did so. "And here I was, thinking that you wouldn't be such so darn ugly if you just lost a bit of weight. There's nothing to be done for a bad personality."
"WHAT!?"
Alvida and the motley collection of pirates behind her gaped stupidly at Luffy, who just cocked her head and smiled. She knew exactly who this was, but she had to give her new friend a chance to prove his guts, so she said, "Who's this tough-looking old biddy, Coby?"
"Holy sh—"
"She just..."
"No way!"
Coby sweated furiously as he shook Luffy by her shoulders. "You have to take that back! Alvida-sama is— Alvida-sama... is..." The two of them met eyes, and she smiled knowingly at him. Coby blinked rapidly and then his brows furrowed with determination. He turned to his ex-captain, his fists clenched and tears in his eyes, and shouted, "Alvida is... the ugliest old hag of all!"
The large form of Alvida loomed dangerously over them both, but Luffy just threw her head back and laughed.
"You piece of shit!" Alvida screamed, throwing back her iron mace for a vicious swing.
"WAAAAAH!" Coby screamed, cowering under his hands.
Luffy tipped back her hat to hang at her neck as she launched herself in front of her new friend. "You're great, Coby. Good for you!"
Her face twisted with malice, Alvida swung her mace violently down on Luffy's head. Everyone present winced in anticipation of the girl's assuredly gruesome death. Coby squeezed his eyes shut. The mace smashed into its target with all the force Iron Mace Alvida had in her body.
But when Luffy received the full brunt of the blow without a single flinch, with her ever present smile still on her lips, Alvida's expression loosened with shock. "Impossible!" she cried. "No one survives the iron mace! Who the hell are you?"
Funny that it took this long for anyone to ask. Luffy's grin stretched wider, and she announced, "My name is Luffy. And — " her arm reared back, her only visible eye gleaming. "I'm the one who'll be Pirate King!"
A single Pistol, and Alvida was out for the count, her cronies quivering in fear at the sight. As they panicked over her apparent inhuman characteristics, Luffy glared at them and demanded, "Give us all your meat and vegetables!" After all, she'd already cut through half of her food supplies in the day it took to get here, and it wasn't like she didn't already have a boat. To Coby, she smiled and said, "Let's get you to the closest marine base, huh? You're gonna be joining them, after all."
Coby stared up at her, tears streaming down his face, and grinned back.
Coby couldn't believe this sudden turn of events. Who was this girl, this Luffy? She had blown in like a tempest, decimating everything he'd built up over the past two years, only to replace it with something better, so much better. She shone from the force of her conviction, almost too much for human eyes to bear. She was impossible and wonderful and wanted to recruit Roronoa Zoro — wait, what?
"You're talking crazy again! That guy's a beast, a demon! It'll never happen."
"Hmm... Nope. I've already decided. He's joining my crew. He's going to be my first mate, you know?"
"You can't just decide that kind of thing all on your own!"
She was also selfish and bullheaded and had absolutely no common sense. This would be a long couple of days.
Notes —
Not much change, yet. Think of two straight lines on a graph, separated by only a few degrees of difference. At the point of intersection, the two lines seem to be almost the same. As you trace backwards, you will see that the two have very separate origins. As you go farther, the distance between those lines becomes distinct and steadily greater. This chapter is the point of intersection.
Next chapter involves the first genderbending. It's not who you think.
(Edited August 2018: i cleaned the chapter up and did a bunch of editing. it's a bit better, and also takes itself even less seriously than before.)