Arc 1 - Romance Dawn
Chapter 1 - Say you're best when no one can see (I still don't know what I'm doing)
Song - ThisKidsNotAlright by AWOLNATION
Y'know, for someone from Maine, I'd never actually spent a huge amount of time on the ocean - any nautical adventures had been the odd fishing trips meant to last part of a day at most, nothing like a cruise or a proper journey from a defined Point A to Point B where I actually had to do that much with… ropes and knots and all that jazz. There was no huge need for navigational skills or sea legs beyond 'don't fall off the boat or sink it' in my skill set at any point in my life.
And yet, here I was. A week into a trip by boat, trying to get to an island I actually knew the name of, with - well, maybe that timer reset sometime around when I ended up on a different boat. By sneaking. Because there'd been a pirate attack and I knew my One Piece well enough to recognize the Miss Love Duck on sight - even if she was a little different to what I was expecting.
Still. Between that and Koby - who actually looked a lot more like a teenager than the vague chibi of the early anime in the glance I'd caught before hiding in the shadows of the figurehead's feathers -, I was pretty sure that I was where I wanted to be.
"Liar!" Alvida yelled, apparently as the captain of the boat I'd been on told her something she didn't like. What it could have been, I had no chance of making out but-
I flinched as the man's protests were cut off by a rather wet crunch.
"Koby! Clean up this mess!"
…well, maybe I was where I wanted to be so long as I wasn't caught by the wrong pirate first.
A brief review of events might help contextualize things, yeah?
My name was once Mercy Pierce DeWitt. I was a fairly normal college student, making my way through my first year of med school by bartending - funny that you could do that at nineteen even if it wasn't legal for you to drink for another few years, but it was working out… maybe not great, because the family drama between Dad and Grandpa was eternal and the whole 'gender' conversation finally getting mixed into that had only made it worse, but… school and working was fine.
I was free and as in control over my life as I could be, able to dabble in my interests - the current round of Big Three anime were all hitting high points, I was grown-up enough to eat ice cream for breakfast if I wanted and go to cons by the same merit, and everything else -, and doing fairly well with my education and personal life… well, beyond the mental exhaustion and stress of the background noise of my family life imploding. What wasn't fine about it?
And then suddenly… it wasn't fine. Because a thing happened. Don't ask me what it was, beyond 'I woke up here with a hangover and half of my worldly possessions dumped into an old school New England lobster boat'. Thankfully, hanging out with Grandpa had taught me enough about the things to not panic.
I guess it wasn't all bad though. On the first day I was here, I ended up needing to pee really really badly, and in my rush to go like normal I got myself wet and quickly realized that I had been afforded a complete change from what I had to what I wanted. In the words of Joseph Joestar, Niiiiice.
Two weeks later and the reveal that this was the world of One Piece - less flat, more vibrant, and stuffed with so much stuff it made my head spin, but with just enough familiar markers to recognize it for what it was once I had the chance - later, and I'm Mercy D. Witt. The 'gender' conversation never comes up - and never has to, because whatever brought me here gave me a little bonus gift that nobody will ever know about unless I tell them - and I am…
Free?
Yeah, that's the word. I am unchained, unstoppable, and only as slow as I let my fears make me.
And I've got no use for 'slow'.
Even if learning to go standing up still isn't second nature to me.
It was easier than it really should have been, not getting caught. I'd waited in that shadowed gap between wooden feathers and wooden hell, keeping my breathing shallow for… hours, as I waited for the sun to set and the after-action party to brew to just the right level…
And then I simply climbed from one spot beneath notice to another - dark clothes against shadowed rafters didn't stand out, especially if people weren't looking to find something out of place… and double especially when they were loaded up on the kind of rum you picked up on clearance from the supermarket, only to find out that you'd still paid too much.
Yeah. They were not looking to be sober tonight. These guys were going to be the better part of useless for hours.
Plenty of time to…
A small trickle of sweat ran down my neck as I realized the exact size and shape of the hole in my plan, complete with straw hat.
…hope that Luffy shows up?
Fuck.
Koby was a naturally anxious person by this point in his life, but he would argue anyone that tried to say that it was wrong to get worried about a mysterious thumping noise in the middle of the night.
He'd had been in the galley cleaning Alvida's duck head mace with a toothbrush when it had started. It hadn't been his toothbrush, but the one that Alvida thought was his. A small bit of rebellion - or was it mutiny? -, but he figured that she wouldn't really care about that nuance so long as her weapons were spotlessly clean and she thought he was miserable enough.
It also helped that it was one of the few things he was pretty sure he wouldn't be caught on. Alvida did hate him, but it wasn't the kind of hate that demanded she make time to go over everything he did with a magnifying glass - only part of it.
But that was completely unrelated to the knocking noise, he'd remember later halfway through telling Garp about it. It was-
A week or so down the road, Garp interrupts Koby's retelling as the boy starts to get distracted, stammering off into a spiral about a detail that should be going somewhere other than an anxiety attack.
"It was what you were doing before everything went to shit," he says, guiding the boy back to the point. "I get it. You had a terrible time whilst on Alvida's crew. Point made. Now, get back to the part where Monkey D. Luffy and that… other boy came in."
He's almost certain the boy wasn't a spy - not made of quite the right kind of fiber, in terms of both cageness and willingness to deceive - but he's been wrong before, so he'll just… observe for a while more. Get more accurate measures from different angles.
And maybe wring a little more information out of the little guy while he's at it.
The knocking was coming out of a barrel - one that had been brought aboard after the battle. Koby had handled it part of the way, actually, and figured that a barrel that full of herring was enough for Alvida not to be angry with him.
Well, it'd turned out that there had been no herring - just an older boy in a straw hat, who'd moved very quickly to get his hand over Koby's mouth before he could start screaming.
He'd been very careful about it though. Koby would grant him that. Alvida had always shut him up with a slap or a punch.
Still, it hadn't stopped Koby from laying into a litany of, "please don't kill me, please don't kill me-" the minute the stranger lowered his hand.
"Hey, hey, I'm not gonna kill you," the barrel boy said. "I just need you to be quiet."
Somehow, against the advice voice in the back of his head that said he needed to stay on guard, Koby relaxed. He could be quiet. Quiet wasn't hard or… or something like asking him to clean up gore.
Quiet was-
"First thing's first- do you have any food here?" the barrel boy asked, wandering away.
Koby immediately froze in place again, all ideas of calm disappearing in a flash. "...what? You're looking for food… on a pirate ship? Are you crazy?" he hissed, forgetting all about 'quiet'.
"Crazy hungry. I haven't eaten in like, a day," Barrel Boy explained, catching a bucket as he knocked into it before he turned around to start poking at the supplies, making a disgusted face at the smell of a bottle's contents. "I mean, there were a few herring still in there after I climbed in, but that was ages ago and honestly I was starting to get sick of the smell. So maybe something not-herring? Pirate ship would have things that aren't herring…"
"How about an apple?" another voice asked before a green Granny Smith came Barrel Boy's way, followed by a figure in a dark suit dropping from the ceiling.
Barrel Boy grinned as he caught it. "Thanks. Are you part of this crew?"
"He is very much not," Koby said, trying not to follow the sinking feeling in his stomach to the floor. Two? Two stowaways? Even if they were nice - nice so far -, there was no way that this was going to turn out well… "Alvida's going to kill me…"
"Nope. I'm Mercy D. Witt," the boy from the ceiling said. "I am looking for a crew to join though."
"Interesting. I'm Monkey D. Luffy," Barrel Boy - Luffy, now - said as he crunched into his apple, before talking again through the mush. "And you're not supposed to be here either? How's that happen?"
Two mystery pirates then. Great. Just what Koby needed. At least bounty hunters ran the chance of not being murderous scum.
Witt grinned. "I snuck on board during the attack. Started on the outside of the ship, waited for things to calm down a bit, climbed around to one of the portholes on the other side, and then slipped through and started hanging out in the rafters. Amazing how many people just… don't look up," Witt said, carefully ambling through the space. "Admittedly, it wasn't my original plan, but stuff happens and it's not like this is worse than what would have happened if I'd gotten caught at the start. That Alvida is real murder happy with that mace of hers."
Yes, and she'd turn that mace on Koby if she caught onto the fact that Koby hadn't reported these two right away. Even if he had no way of knowing about them earlier, it'd still be his fault somehow… "You're both way, way too casual to know what you're doing. This is-"
"Alvida's pirate ship, the Miss Love Duck," Witt answered. "I know. And you're too careful - otherwise you probably wouldn't be stuck here, would you, Koby?" As Koby tried to swallow down the abrupt stab of pain at that, Witt shrugged. "I suppose that means we're both wrong. But I'm wrong with style!"
Koby noted that, despite the use of jazz hands and the emphasis, Witt still had made a point not to actually raise his voice beyond a stage whisper.
"Hey, enough of that," Luffy said, stepping in. "No bullying. It's not cool."
"Alright, sorry," Witt said, stepping back with his hands up. "My bad. I'm just saying - if it sucks, why not leave?"
"Because there's…" Koby swallowed. "Because I'm afraid. Because right now, even if I'm unhappy, I know what happens if I obey. And that's that I won't die."
"...and that's it?" Luffy asked. "Living in a cage? That's no life at all."
It wasn't. Koby wasn't even going to try arguing that it was. There was no gilt on the bars to make it even possible to pretend that his situation was anything other than slavery. Just because there wasn't a collar around his neck didn't mean he was free.
"You should chase your dream, even if it means running away," Luffy continued. "If I'd done what I was told, I would have never left my village to go find the One Piece…"
Koby stopped short. "You… you're going after that? The Pirate King's treasure?"
Luffy grinned. "Why not?"
"Because every pirate out there is after it," Koby hissed.
"Well, except for the quitters," Witt corrected. "You wouldn't believe how many washouts there are…"
"And that makes it any better? You're just… two guys, talking about taking on the Pirate's Graveyard like it's nothing," Koby snapped, before catching himself. "There's Sea Kings, hundred foot waves, monsters of every kind-"
"And their mothers as well," Witt countered, looking upwards as a low snarling rumble came through the boards above.
Luffy looked up as well. "Is that… is that one of the Sea Kings?" he asked, sounding excited.
"No, that's Alvida snoring," Koby said, his annoyance with the casual disregard for basic safety quickly evaporating once he realized what that sound meant. "...which means that if you want to get out of here, you're never going to get a better chance."
Called it, I didn't say as we stepped around the bodies littered across the deck. Nobody drank that kind of rum for the taste, after all, and functionally, there was no difference between the deck of the Miss Love Duck right now and the main living space of a party frat. Nobody there actually wanted to be conscious, so they'd done everything they could to get away from it, making it very, very unlikely that anyone would notice our passing.
It was a bit anticlimactic, actually. This was One Piece, where was the Gum Gum Pistol to put a neat little punctuation mark on the story? We needed combat, excitement-
"We're going to need one of these," Luffy said confidently as he grabbed an oar that had ended up on deck for some reason, right before he spun around to smack it into the ship's bell.
Immediately, the sound of two dozen people half of their way into a monster hangover waking up replaced the quiet creaks of a ship soundly asleep.
Aaand there we were; the mess I'd been waiting for.
I immediately kicked a man in the head as he tried to push himself to his feet before turning to nail another in the nethers. There was something to be said about kicking a man while he was down but… I was a pirate, they were pirates. 'Fighting fair' wasn't really on the menu, was it-?
I paused as I realized that nobody else was fighting yet. Just… waiting. Wait, was I screwing something up?
Heavy footsteps made their way up the stairs to the deck we were on.
"You brought bounty hunters on board my ship, Koby?" Alvida snapped as she took her hat from one of her crew.
Ah. The pre-combat dialogue. My bad.
"Technically speaking, he was trying to get us off-board," I said helpfully, even as Luffy chimed in with, "Not a bounty hunter!"
"Well, maybe not professional ones," Alvida allowed with a snort. "Too scrawny. Who the hell even are you?"
I couldn't help but grin. Here it was - he was going to say The Thing.
"I'm Monkey D. Luffy-"
"Never heard of you."
"-and I'm going to be King of the Pirates!"
Oh, it was so good actually hearing him say it.
Alvida, for her part, laughed. "Oh, you must be new around here, boy, because whoooo is the most powerful pirate on these seas?" she asked as she turned around, holding her hand up to her ear as if she were a pro-wrestler who'd just put out the first part of her standard 'call and response'.
I blinked as Alvida's crew chorused her name back at her. Powerful? I mean, yeah, this Alvida wasn't bad to look at but- this kind of script change was weird. Not bad but… weird.
Koby, for his part, was silent.
And Alvida, by the way she'd slammed her mace down against the deck, had definitely noticed. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you, Koby," she said before tilting her head to the side. "Who's the most powerful pirate on the seas?"
Koby's mouth opened and closed silently.
"Answer me, you little-"
"Oh, were you asking me?" I said, stepping in. "I thought it was Whitebeard. You could also be talking about… um. Kaido? Maybe Big Mom?" I wasn't overly familiar with what they actually were beyond being on Whitebeard's level somehow. "Or are you talking local? Cause then it's probably Arlong-"
"Raaaah!"
I jumped back out of the way of Alvida's enraged swing. "I mean, sure, I get fluffing yourself up!" I chatted back. "But damn girl, you gotta be realistic. Nobody's the best anything right out of East Blue! You gotta swing at the big leagues!"
"Well, I mean, Koby did say she wasn't that smart, on top of being mean-" Luffy said, taking his own turn to step out of the line of fire. "Like, how would one little guy like that sneak two people on board a ship in the middle of the sea? But there she is, acting like it's his fault-"
He swung the oar around to push Koby down before Alvida's mace could take off his head.
"And she's still going for him first! Do you think she's just stubborn or a coward, Witt?" Luffy asked. "Cause I'm pretty sure it takes at least one of those to keep going after the smaller guy who doesn't want to fight."
Alvida snarled as she tried again to land a hit, this time putting enough power into her swing to spin her around from inertia. Unfortunately - or not? Given that nobody really wanted to get hit by that big spiked mace, after all -, it was still slow enough that everyone could step out of range without that much effort.
On the second go though - Luffy did a quick backflip out of the way, leaving the attack to take out one of Alvida's men.
"Woo!" Luffy said. "Now that's more like-"
A member of Alvida's crew shot him.
There was a pause, a picosecond of stunned silence…
And in that perfect silence, I could hear the distinct sound of stretching rubber right before the bullet came back at full speed, punching through the glass of an unluckily placed lantern before it disappeared forever into the night.
There was also a small fire, but that wasn't a 'me' problem yet.
For anyone that missed that, the big stretch and bend that Luffy did to dodge Alvida's next swing was more than enough to establish 'no, that really did happen, this man ain't natural'.
I couldn't help the shudder of excitement trilling through my veins. Oh, we were really in business now.
"What kind of a monster are you?" Alvida asked, finally off her game for the first time.
Luffy grinned. "The stretchy kind," he said, right before he stretched out his arms and pulled himself into the rigging, climbing around like his namesake before sliding down to lean against the ship's wheel. "Well? Aren't you coming to get me?"
Alvida roared as she charged at him again, swinging blindly at probably the… second or third most important thing on her boat, just because Luffy was standing behind it.
He was not standing behind it when she reduced the wheel to splinters and the lantern on it into a miniature firebomb, however.
"That's not good!" I announced as we clustered back around Koby again, just in case the drunks around us hadn't yet processed that 'Fire Bad'. "Gee, Alvida, what ever could the Miss Love Duck have done to deserve such abuse?"
Alvida screamed with wordless rage at the spreading flames before turning on Koby. "YOU! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!" she roared as she went to slam the boy with her mace.
Luffy stepped in, catching it with his head, forcing Alvida back as her mace rebounded.
"That's enough," he said, adjusting the brim before stretching his arm back - further and further away in a move so iconic I would have known it even if I was deaf, blind, and asleep.
"GUM GUM!" Luffy announced, right as he released the attack. "PISTOL!"
Alvida had just enough time to start screaming before she flew into the blackness of the night.
Luffy turned to the crew. "Anyone else got a problem with Koby?" he asked, dead serious.
There was a collective shaking of heads and scattered murmurs of 'no', 'nuh uh', 'nope', and 'not me', with even a few adding on a 'sir' without even an iota of hesitation.
The seriousness evaporated. "Good," Luffy said, picking up the oar he'd dropped during the fight and throwing it to me. "We're taking the boat. And we need enough food for three people to handle… oh, a three day journey? That sounds about right. Maybe make it a week, just to be sure…"
"You're taking me along?" Koby asked.
"I mean, you got any reason to stay?" I pointed out.
Koby didn't seem to have much argument with that.
"...so what happens next?" Koby asked as we rowed away from Alvida's ship, the burning husk still visible in the far background even as night turned to day.
I was pretty sure the remaining crew had gotten off of it. Pretty sure.
"The Grand Line, obviously," Luffy said.
"Do you know how to get there?" Koby asked. "Do you even have a map? A navigator?
Luffy stopped, taking a moment to pick at his nose. "...hm. Okay, so-"
As Alvida's ship burned behind us - the sound of an explosion probably a sign that the fire had finally reached the powder stores - and Luffy launched into a brief overview of his incredibly barebones and actively changing plan to become King of the Pirates, I couldn't help but smile.
My plan had gone off perfectly.
Author's Notes:
Yes, Witt is back! After ten years and a shitmillion failed rewrite attempts over the course of them - this chapter fought me bad but it finally came out decent. Thank you, Live Action One Piece for reigniting my passion for the fandom, and my co-writer for helping grease the wheels and get over the humps of the project.
There will be a bit of a delay between this chapter and the next (partially because of the 'it keeps fighting me' bit but also because of scheduling matters IRL and other projects I'm behind on) but I will make sure it's up to scratch before it's released.
My current plans for the tone + vibe of this verison: more serious and grounded, more planning, and more thoughtfulness, though I'll try to keep as much as possible from the original story because - well, it wouldn't really be much of a rewrite if it threw everything out and kept only the names, would it? I'm a very different person than I was at 19-20, when I wrote the OG Witt, but that doesn't mean that the me of then didn't write something worth enjoying - even ten years and several other projects on, Witt and Witticism is by far the most popular Anything I've ever done, with over a third of a million hits on FFnet alone (and it was just over a quarter of a million when I started on this version of the rewrite).
Yes, Witt is explicitly transgender this time, since a handful of reviews on the old fic were confused and between the concrete details of the old fic and some subtext 2013 me put in without thinking, it was kinda like '...oh yeah, if this person is happier as their new gender after a magic genderswap, that's probably pretty high key for being trans'. The magical sex change still holds though.
Witt's knowledge of One Piece taps out at Chapter 727/Episode 620 (ex: the day of Witt and Witticism's original upload - November 11, 2013). This means that his context for both Big Mom and Kaido are extremely limited, he doesn't know that Sabo survived (though I know that there were theories before 2013), and he has absolutely no context for Sanji's other backstory.
That's the general theme I have w/ the 'real world' characters/Outsiders - their knowledge of One Piece is limited to when they were transferred over. This is largely based on when I made the characters/first posted their stories, but there's a few exceptions to the rule that will crop up in both this side of the story and Shuffle Odyssey eventually, though they'll be more plot relevant on that side.
The world is a mix of the Anime, Manga, video games, and Live Action adaptations of One Piece, with a bit of original stuff to act as glue. Yes, that means filler + movies sometimes like the original, but this time I'm an infinitely more not annoying adult writing this. This fic will run parallel to Story L for a number of chapters before Story L ends and Laine jumps to this fic.
Witt's boat was a Friendship or Muscongus bay lobster sloop, as a parallel to Laine/Raine's sailboat/Galway Hooker hybrid. This is Entirely Irrelevant to the story even if it might come up in the Raine timeline, but it was part of the research process so you get to know this too.