"Zoro, you're acting different."
Zoro cracked an eye open to look at Nami, who knelt by his side as he lay on his back, with his arms behind his head, on the rear deck of the ship. Without the use of words, he did his best to convey his reaction to her statement. She huffed at him, though whether it was for the lack of words in his response or for his response in generl, he had no idea.
"You haven't been yourself," she said, "ever since Alabasta."
That triggered a memory, albeit a vague one, and he frowned minutely, trying to lay hold of the thing that eluded him. Over a month and still he couldn't…
Her next comment pulled him from his thoughts for now. "You're acting different," she insisted earnestly, as though desperate to make him understand her words.
A dispassionate assessment seemed to support her hypothesis, but he didn't see why it was so important. It hardly mattered. Despite what she and Chopper seemed to think, he was fine. There was nothing wrong with him. He wasn't injured. Wasn't that good enough?
Nami moved so that she was sitting on her knees beside him. "Look," she said, pointing. "See that? That's proof." He glanced to his hip, to the single white sword resting beside it. He met her gaze evenly. "You're supposed to you the three-sword style, right?" He responded with a one-shouldered shrug, neither confirming nor denying her statement. She huffed at him again. "You've always used the three-sword style, so why suddenly switch to one sword?"
He thought about her question carefully for a few moments before merely shrugging again. Why did he switch to one sword? He had no real reason for it. At least, none that he could name. There was a reason, he supposed, he just didn't know what it was. It was possible that it should have bothered him, but it didn't. As with most things lately, he just didn't care. This fact seemed to bother her greatly. However, any further dialogue between the two was interrupted when something small and hard hit Zoro in the forehead, causing him to blink, and bounced off, bouncing lightly on the deck and coming to a halt near Nami's knee.
She stared at it. "Huh?" Two slim fingers pinched it and lifted it into the air. "Wood?"
A few seconds later, several more pieces of wood fell onto the ship, closely followed by yet more pieces. They started off small, but as Nami and Zoro both looked up, a plank large enough to be a bench fell toward them. Nami shrieked and dove to the side while Zoro grabbed his sword and rolled in the opposite direction, coming to a stop in a crouch not far away. Another large piece of wood slammed into the deck near him and he looked up. What he saw surprised him, the strongest emotion he'd felt in a while, and, judging by Nami's scream, she was surprised. Or, more appropriately, she was shocked. Similar cries and shouts of alarm answered Nami as a huge deteriorating galleon slammed into the water beside their, by comparison, tiny ship with enough destructive force to cause a tidal wave. Thankfully, however, the sea seemed to have taken pity on them for, while the waves they endured were bad, no tidal wave came.
"Hold on to the ship!" Sanji shouted over the roar of the raging water. "Everybody hang on!"
A skeleton fell from the sky and smacked Usopp full in the face, embracing him with long-dead limbs as its head lolled back with its mouth wide open. The marksman let out an impressively high-pitched scream and flung it away. "B-B-B-Bones!"
Nami's answering shriek was incredibly loud, and its pitch was enough to make Zoro wince. All this noise was becoming too much. "Don't fling them this way!" she wailed, tossing them back at Usopp.
"Bones!"
"Not this way!'
"Stop throwing them back!"
"Stop throwing them here!"
(-)
When it was finally over, Zoro stood and stared impassively with crossed arms at the gigantic wreckage slowly sinking beneath the waves. Somewhere behind him Chopper demanded, "Why did a ship fall out of the sky?!"
"It's impossible!" Usopp shouted. "There's nothing up there!"
"Oh no…" Nami moaned suddenly, pulling Zoro's attention attention back to her.
"What is it, Nami-san?" Sanji asked, stepping up to her side.
"Our Log Pose," she said in a tone of complete despair. "It's broken…"
Sanji frowned. "Broken?" Usopp began crying about how doomed they were.
"Look," Nami invited, pointing at the device on her wrist. "See? It's only pointing up, instead of at the next island like it's supposed to."
"There is an island up there." Zoro's gaze slid to Robin. He didn't exactly know if he trusted her yet, but he acknowledged her obvious intelligence. If anyone would know about these things, it would be her.
"An island?!" Luffy exclaimed, grinning so widely that he face almost seemed like it would be split in two.
Robin nodded with a smile, the sort of mysterious smile that meant she knew a secret. "The Sky Island."
That made Zoro freeze involuntarily. His teeth gritted together so hard it almost hurt, his lips parting just enough to reveal the barest hints of white. "I don't think I believe it," Sanji muttered. "It doesn't make any sense."
"The Log Pose is pointing up," Robin said. "We must never doubt the Log Pose." She looked to Zoro for some reason he couldn't quite figure out. "There is an island up there."
Zoro looked away and gazed into the sky. Yes, it was there. He was sure of it. The only thing he wasn't sure of was why he knew this, and why the name "Sky Island" sounded so familiar.
For the next half an hour, Robin pieced together the skull of the skeleton and looked a brief history of the ship, the St. Briss from some South Blue kingdom. Meanwhile, Luffy and Usopp set out to explore the wreckage of the ship which, according to Robin, had first set sail around 208 years ago. Zoro was uninterested in these affairs and soon became lost in thought, until Luffy and Usopp's cries alerted the crew of the duo's plight. Glancing over, Zoro quickly discovered that the ship had completely sunk… and everyone knew that Luffy couldn't swim. He was about ready to intervene when Sanji swore softly, kicked his shoes off, and dove down into the water to save them.
When the cook pulled the two of them up and before anyone could hit them on the head in reprimand, Luffy exclaimed excitedly,"I did it, everyone! Look what I found!" He extended his arms to normal langth and separated his hands, opening the paper he held in them. For the second time that day, Zoro tensed. In his captain's hands was a complex and highly detailed map of an island surrounded by clouds and with two smaller islands near it. He didn't need to read the name printed in large, bold letters on the upper left hand corner of the map to recognize the place being depicted.
The Sky Island… Skypiea.
Posted 04-23-15.