Miraculously, everything was exactly where they'd left it. Nestled within the sandy cove, Merry had been sheltered from the elements by sheer cliff and swaying palm trees. The tide had carried off a few of the crates they'd left too close to shore, and the local wildlife had taken some interest in Sanji's supplies, which had long since spoilt. All in all, though, there was surprisingly little damage.

The world was dim when the vortex deposited the five of them on the beach—either early dawn or late dusk. The sun was a glowing ember on the horizon, and the cool breeze felt heavenly on their skin after ages of stale cavern air.

"All right!" Luffy crowed. "Time to eat!" He looked down at the unconscious form in his arms. "Sanji! I want meat!"

Sanji was still unconscious! Chopper automatically turned, but hesitated. After their fun cave adventures, he found himself a little frightened of Luffy, though he couldn't have said why.

"Chopper?" said Luffy.

Chopper nearly fell over; he hadn't thought that anything could catch Luffy's attention once he was thinking about food. Actually, having Luffy's attention while he was hungry wasn't such a good thing. He wasn't picturing roast venison again, was he?

"Weren't you worried about Sanji, Chopper?" Luffy held out their cook's limp form like a meal to be served. Nami turned and stared. Usopp was already threading between the boxes littering the beach, making his way over in case Chopper needed rescue.

"I… How did…" Chopper stammered. He hadn't said anything about being worried, had he? And how was he supposed to explain? I do want to make sure he's all right, but I'm afraid to get close to you. Would you mind putting him down and backing away a few hundred paces? Thanks so much.

"It's obvious," Luffy said, startling Chopper into an undignified stumble. There was a moment when Luffy held Chopper in a perceptive, all-knowing gaze. Then he grinned. "Because you're our doctor, of course!"

The compliment caught Chopper off-guard. "D-Don't say things like that, they don't make me happy!"

"Well anyway, Sanji's getting heavy." Luffy turned on his heel. From behind, he looked ridiculous; Sanji was much taller than Luffy. The way he was carried, his legs dangled to the ground. Chopper wondered if Luffy had been dragging the poor cook the whole way. "I'll bring him back to the Merry. After you're done with him, could you tell him to make me some food?"

Without waiting for a response, Luffy began to walk, singing softly to himself as he went. Chopper's ears were very sensitive, but even so, the only word he could catch of the entire song was "meat". That couldn't have been right.

But this wasn't the time. Chopper politely urged the seagulls off the nearest crate, and lifted the lid. It was filled with rolled-up parchment, each wrapped for protection against the sun and sea.

"Chopper, is everything all right?" Usopp asked as he neared.

"I'm fine!" Chopper looked up guiltily. Over Usopp's shoulder, he could see Nami also looking through crates. "If Nami's looking for her maps, tell her they're in this one."

"Got it." Usopp gave Chopper one last worried look, which Chopper warded off with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He continued trying boxes until he finally found his medical supplies. Relieved that they hadn't been lost or damaged as far as he could tell, he put the lid back on and carried it aboard the ship.

Sanji was lying in the infirmary, but he was already awake and starting to sit up. He blinked at Chopper, as though unsure of what he was seeing. Then, without warning, he exploded. Into hearts.

"NAMI-SWAAAN! Nami-swan is so wonderful when she's forceful!" He leapt out of bed, gave a happy twirl, and skipped towards the door. "Nami-swan can hit me whenever she likes!"

"H-Hold on a moment!" Chopper demanded. Getting between Sanji and the door while he had those hearts in his eyes was probably a suicidal idea, but Chopper did it anyway. Ah, the sacrifices doctors made for their patients.

"Chopper?" Sanji asked, seeming to fall down from whatever ecstasy-filled heaven he'd previous inhabited. "What's the matter?"

"You just got knocked out. I have to make sure you're all right." Chopper firmly directed Sanji back to the bed. "Also, L-L-Lu…" He took a deep, steadying breath. "Also, we're all pretty hungry after that cave, so maybe you could make us some food?"

He busied his hands with thermometers and things even though he was pretty sure being knocked unconscious didn't give one a fever. At least his hands weren't trembling; steady hands were the pride of a doctor.

"Chopper." The bed creaked as Sanji sat down. Chopper pictured him leaning his elbows on his knees, and hoped he wasn't lighting up a cigarette. Oh wait, his lighter had broken. "Chopper," Sanji asked, "what happened?"

Dinner was delicious as always, even served several hours past sunset. Chopper found that his throat was too tight for him to force down food.

Luffy did not appear to have this problem. He was even louder than usual, though perhaps that was because the rest of the crew was uncharacteristically silent. They had been moving crates all night after all, but the Strawhats tended to get only more boisterous when they were tired.

For some reason, Chopper had found himself sitting next to Luffy at the table. He moved his fork uneasily over his plate, making the requisite eating sounds without the actual eating.

"This is delicious, Sanji!" Luffy proclaimed, food flying everywhere, and Sanji looked at him for just a fraction of a second too long before smiling and inclining his head.

"I miss—" Nami began, then shut her mouth suddenly, darting cautious looks around the room to see who had heard. Chopper and Usopp both looked at her horrified. They knew she had been about to say the unthinkable. In fact, everyone in the room knew it, everyone except maybe—

"I miss Zoro and Robin!" Luffy pouted at the occupants of the table, as if they might produce the missing crewmembers if thoroughly convinced.

All that happened was that Chopper fell out of his chair. A rubber hand latched onto his shoulder before he could hit the ground. "Be careful, Chopper," Luffy admonished, pulling the reindeer back up.

Chopper was trembling. He didn't want to, but he was shaking anyway. All he knew was that if Luffy didn't let go of his shoulder soon, something very bad was going to happen, and he didn't want to be responsible for it.

"Chopper," Luffy's voice lowered, uncharacteristically serious as he finished chewing the food in his mouth. This was already a bad sign; at mealtimes, Luffy never let his mouth go empty. "Chopper, are you afraid of me?"

Chopper wasn't going to say anything. He was just going to shake his head and pretend to eat, which was the next best thing to the smiling denials that he couldn't seem to conjure up. He started to shake his head, but the motion turned into a full-body shrug, which turned into a desperate cry of, "Get your hand off of me!"

The kitchen had been quiet before. Now the hush ripped through it like a vacuum. Chopper felt like if he opened his mouth, the words would just fly out of him.

Luffy obliged by taking his hand off Chopper's shoulder. The snap of his arm returning to normal was obscenely loud in the silence. "Chopper—" he began, and Chopper knew it was too late to stop himself.

"Don't even talk to me!" Chopper screamed. "You killed Zoro! You said that you wouldn't leave any of your nakama behind, and then you let him die!" He forgot that the chair was in the way; the only thing he was concerned with was getting to the kitchen door as fast as possible. There was a crash as the chair fell over. He stumbled over it but managed to stay on his feet, and then he was through the door and to freedom.

Behind him he could only hear more stunned silence and then, faintly, "Chopper? Chopper!" There was another crash. Luffy was chasing after him? Chopper's mind was filled with thoughts of escape. The reindeer wanted to flee into the woods. The human wanted to climb as high as he could and curl up inside of something. The human voice won, even though it was the less rational decision in this case. Chopper scurried up to the crow's nest, found himself boxed in, and tucked himself up tightly, hoping that Luffy hadn't seen him.

"Chopper!" The voice was persistent. He wondered why Sanji and the others didn't protect him. Were they on Luffy's side too? But he had shared a brief conversation with Usopp while they were outside moving boxes in the dark, and he knew Usopp was just as shocked as he was by what had happened.

"Chopper!" A hand attached itself to the crow's nest. So much for not being found. For a moment he considered kicking it off, but then Luffy was springing into the air, holding the straw hat firmly to his head. The captain landed lightly on the rim of the crow's nest and perched there, froglike, on all fours. Dimly, Chopper appreciated that Luffy was trying to give him as much space as possible, but then again Luffy could have much more easily done that by staying firmly on the deck below.

He waited for Luffy to say something like, "Found you!" and split into a wide grin. He'd never seen Luffy really angry, but he even half expected to see that rare fury now. Instead, Luffy just hung on, expression serious. Chopper couldn't say later how long Luffy just sat there, looking at him. Chopper tried to glare back furiously at first, to show how much he didn't support his captain's decision. Oddly enough, it was the crescent scar below the eye that forced him to look away. There was a sliver of moon the same shape behind Luffy's head, and Chopper focused on that instead while he tried not to sniffle too obviously.

Luffy waited until Chopper's anger had drained completely before speaking. "After Robin fell in, I decided that there was no way I would leave. We're nakama. Nakama don't leave nakama behind, alone."

"Then why was it okay to leave Zoro?" Chopper demanded, voice pleading rather than angry now, because he could no longer maintain his ire. How had Luffy judged his timing so well? Was it really just instinct, or did he have some secret power of omniscience on top of his Devil's Fruit powers?

"When Zoro gets lost, do we all go after him? We split up. A few of us go looking for him. The others do whatever else needs to be done." Luffy leaned back farther than anyone else could in his position, arms stretching to allow him a full view of the nighttime sky.

Without Luffy's gaze on him, Chopper managed to sit up and wipe his face, barely surprised to find it wet. "Dying isn't like getting lost," Chopper said quietly; his voice felt too fragile to be lifted above a whisper. "Robin… I didn't want to believe she was gone either. But letting Zoro d-die too? That was just too much."

"I won't lose my nakama." Luffy put a hand on his head, as if to check his hat was still there. "I won't lose Robin. I won't lose anyone. If we'd just tried to bust out of that cave after Robin died, we would have lost her. This way we won't lose anyone."

"This way we lose two people," Chopper protested, pounding hooves against the ground in frustration. "You can't come back after you die! Why don't you understand?"

"How much bounty does Death have on its head?" Luffy mused. "Zoro's strong. He's taken out people with huge bounties. He can cut through steel. He can cut through anything. Compared to that, death doesn't stand a chance."

"He can cut through death too?" Awed, Chopper looked up into Luffy's face, and the belief he saw there was so powerful he could feel it too. Then the face split into its trademark grin.

"Say. Have you ever seen Zoro without his shirt?"

"What?!" Chopper sputtered, leaning back. Just when he felt so close to believing in his captain again, Luffy had to say something ridiculous like that. "What does that have to do with anything? I'm his doctor, of course I— What does that have to do with anything?"

"The scar." Luffy put a hand solemnly to his chest, as though he could feel it there, under his vest. "Did you ever ask him how he got it?"

"Um." The truth was, Zoro was a little too scary to ask about things like that. "I always figured it was some sort of battle scar."

"It's a promise," Luffy corrected. If Luffy had been concerned at all previously, his face held no trace of it now. He looked confidently into Chopper's eyes, a picture of beatific contentment and assurance. "It's Zoro's promise to big sword-ossan—and it's his promise to me. Until he becomes the greatest swordsman in the world, Zoro can't lose to anyone—that's what he promised me. You'll think he'll let some octopus stop him?"

Laughing, Luffy stood up, teetering precariously in the wind. "I don't get how you guys can be so worried," he said, and hopped off the crow's nest without a care for the vertical drop. There was a thump below, and Chopper jumped up, the doctor in him panicking over whether it was possible to splint rubber.

Then Luffy's voice wafted up, faint but cheerful as ever: "Oh, hi Nami! You didn't eat all the food, did you?"

"Who would do that but you?!"

"Great!" There was a series of happy bounces, and then the expected, "Saaaaanji, I'm hungry!"

Chopper climbed down slowly, to find Nami waiting at the bottom. She was looking at the log pose on her wrist, but since they were still anchored at shore, Chopper didn't think she was navigating.

They met each other's gaze for a moment. Chopper looked away first.

"He's pretty amazing, isn't he?" Nami said quietly. "Our captain, that is."

Chopper looked up at Nami, surprised.

"How much he trusts that direction-blind muscle-head, I mean." Nami smiled to show that she didn't mean it. Or at least that she didn't think any less of him for it. That much. "If there's a way to come back, of course we know Robin will find it. But Luffy believes in both of them completely. It's not 'if' there's a way. There's no doubt in his mind at all that Robin and Zoro will be back. Like I said, pretty amazing."

Chopper nodded, too ashamed at his earlier outburst to speak.

"I mean, that guy's not normal! When he says he'll do something, he does it. It doesn't even occur to him that other people's words might not be so trustworthy. Zoro says he'll bring Robin back, and Luffy immediately walks away singing."

"That's really something," Chopper agreed, daring to look up at Nami.

"Well, I didn't come out to talk to you about our insane captain." Nami kneeled down to so her eyes were level with Chopper's. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay. We all did." She nodded over her shoulder, where Chopper saw that Sanji and Usopp were waiting, offering their reassuring smiles along with hers.

"I… I… That doesn't make me happy at all, idiots!" Chopper burst out, and ran past them, wiping his eyes for the second time that night, to the sound of laughter. "I couldn't care less that you were worried about me!"

He wasn't sure where he was going, though it seemed a good idea to fall asleep. He stopped when he passed the kitchen, though. The door pushed open at his slightest touch, and he took a hesitant step inside.

The man who was going to be Pirate King looked up, mouth stuffed beyond capacity with meat. "Mmfmm?" A rubber hand stretched protectively over his plate.

Chopper took a deep breath, steeled himself, and said: "I think our nakama will come back too! I think you made the right decision! Luffy."

"Hmm mmfmmm mnnn." Luffy grinned around his meat. Gone was the strangely wise captain from the crow's nest. Chopper hobbled back to dodge the food debris.

"Also, I'm glad for Zoro," Chopper added in a rush. "I'm glad he has someone who believes in him so much!"

He slammed the door before he could get any more food on his fur. With a tremendous sigh, he slid to the ground, resting his back against the cool wood of the Going Merry. He looked up at the moon, tracing the same crescent as Luffy's scar.

"Come back soon, everyone," Chopper whispered into the night, closed his eyes, and smiled.