Part 6: A white world

Chapter 5/5: ...And frozen mountains

Zoro was once again comfortably warm all the way down to his toes, even though the work-out hadn't been enough for him to break into sweat, it had been good enough. Disappointing, but good enough. He still needed to train, he realized. The snow was much softer than he'd thought, making his attacks slower than normal as he couldn't kick off without the ground giving underneath him. He should find somewhere else with soft footing so that he could adjust his fighting stance accordingly in the future.

People, civilians, stood around, having watched the brief fight. Now they looked at each other, and then started forward, shouting that someone was buried under the snow. Usopp and Vivi also threw themselves at the snow, digging vigorously. Zoro stepped aside. The desperation on everyone's faces told him now wasn't the right time to ask to be filled in. The soldiers Zoro had been fighting were pulled aside and tied to the top of a pointy roof. Curiously, there were a number of people moving about dressed in those long, plastic coats that were buttoned or tied behind their backs, facemasks, hairnets, dark glasses and rubber gloves. They were surreptitiously checking both the soldiers Zoro had beaten and treating their injuries, as well as seeming to scan any of the civilians who were all avoiding them.

"W-we found him!"

"Dalton-san!"

People abandoned their digging and rushed forward. The man they'd dug up was pierced by heavy arrows with green feathers. Zoro frowned. Had he missed a fight? He couldn't help but send Usopp a betrayed look for having a fight without him.

"No…" the cry came from a woman, covering her mouth as shock and despair coloured her features. Her and everyone else's. Zoro picked up a low voice bent over the unearthed man.

"We were too late… his heart… stopped."

"He's not dead. Let us see to him."

The people in the odd clothing stepped forward, and now Zoro finally realized what they were and thought the situation had lost its urgent edge enough for him to finally ask.

"Aren't those doctors? I thought that guy from before said there was only one here?"

"I don't know?" Vivi said, uncertain.

"They… were maybe on Wapol's ship? Enemy doctors?" Usopp suggested.

"Isshi-20!?"

"How can we trust you?! You sold yourselves to serve Wapol!"

"DO AS WE SAY OR HE'LL DIE!"

The one who shouted was a short doctor at the front, but they were held back. All around the doctors took off their masks and glasses, revealing aged faces and determined eyes.

"We sold our services to Wapol, yes," said a man with a face full of grey moustaches. "But we did it to serve the country and you, not him. A dead doctor can't heal anyone at all. So please. Let us treat Dalton-kun."

It was an affectionate way of address, one that spoke of a bond most of the villagers didn't have with him. To them Dalton was an authoritative figure. Certainly not a boy…

The shouting doctor from before tore free and pushed his way through to the fallen man. "The longer you hesitate the higher the risk of losing him! Hang in there, Dalton-kun."

Zoro looked encouragingly at Usopp. "What's going on here?"

"Oh, right. Well, I have to make a few guesses but based on what I know…"

The wall of rock before Ruffy was so high she couldn't see the top. It wasn't perfectly sleek, but neither did it have any outcroppings large enough to allow a moment of rest on her way up.

Nami was a too hot weight at her back, tied securely and breathing against Ruffy's neck. But there was nothing to tie Sanji to her, and he wouldn't wake up. Ruffy knew exactly nothing about taking care of someone who was sick or injured. There had never been a single time in her life where she had found herself in charge of somebody else's care. It had always been the other way around. Her mother, Makino, the chief, even Dadan and the bandits. But there was a doctor at the top of this mountain, and they could help. Ruffy just had to climb, and do so with both Sanji and Nami.

Shodai was tied to Ruffy's belt, but it wasn't long enough to reach around Sanji too, and she couldn't leave the katana behind.

In the end, Ruffy lay her cook over her knees face down and took his jacket in between her teeth and determinedly started climbing. It was awkward, but worked. She just had to mind the angle, not reach for any holds that would tilt her off centre.

The wind blew, carrying snowflakes that struck like needles. Ruffy hadn't taken her own jacket back on, opting to give it to Nami as an extra layer of protection against this merciless cold.

Her arms were already red, her fingers white.

Time stretched on. Light was odd in this world, the light dark or grey at all times at odd intervals, the sunlight rarely able to penetrate the clouds. Ruffy was just wondering if night wars arriving when it got brighter, still grey, which erased the shadows.

She misjudged the distance to a rock, hung her and her nakamas' weight on a nail, and watched it come off.

She felt gravity grab for her like a monster from the abyss wanting to tear her down.

Without thinking she struck both fingers and toes into the cliff to stop her fall.

Her blood warmed her fingers and toes for a second as it started flowing freely. Ruffy held onto the mountain and glanced down. She couldn't see the ground, whatever monster she thought she'd sensed behind her was imaginary.

'Close,' she thought.

'Close is a miss.'

The words came from long ago. Waves of dark hair, a freckled nose and thick eyebrows.

'Close is still a loss. You can only win if you actually win. Crying won't change that.'

Breathing in air so cold it chilled her from within, Ruffy took a new hold of Sanji's clothes and started upwards with a single-minded determination to make it all the way up. She will only find a doctor once she finds a doctor.

Lapins are fierce opponents. Their agility and strength aside, it's their intelligence that makes them so formidable. Wapol, Chess and Kuromarimo are held up for several hours. The damn beasts somehow knew from the very beginning to not get stuck inside Wapol's mouth, and the concealing technique they liked to use to become invisible in the snowy landscape had no effect on beasts who could use it themselves. After almost three hours Wapol and his henchmen had only managed to take down half the pack of Lapins.

"Why are they still attacking!" Wapol roared, outraged and sore after several lapin kicks.

They had removed themselves from the village and hung around a fence that appeared to stand upside down. Probably something the avalanche had brought along, and Usopp had explained what happened.

From what Zoro understood, the ruler of the land had fled with his soldiers because a powerful pirate had attacked, and the king had also taken every doctor in the land with him save for one who Ruffy was currently searching for. But currently they didn't know if the doctor was even home or not. Besides that they had been taken care of by a man named Dalton, whom they had dug out from the snow and was now getting treatment from the doctors that had come back with the former king, who also happened to be the pirate who had ambushed them yesterday.

Zoro didn't consider himself dumb, but that was as much information as he was able to take in, even though the play-pretend pirate king…? The king who play-pretended pirate? Yes, that sounded better. Still didn't make sense.

"We should go after them!"

Vivi was pacing around, and Zoro was starting to wonder about the girl's blood pressure. Ever since they picked her up she'd been either high-strung, nervous, anxious or running around. Regardless of how little Zoro knew about health and care even he could tell Vivi's constant state of stress was bad for her.

"No, we shouldn't," Usopp argued firmly, and Zoro was once again amazed at how good this kid was at lying. He knew Usopp well enough to know he too was worried about Nami, and thoroughly terrified of absolutely anything under the label of "monster", but Ruffy and the idiot cook were with her. Zoro was also almost at a hundred per cent certain all three of them were perfectly fine. If Nami wasn't, then for sure Zoro would have felt Ruffy's reaction through their bond. Usopp too.

"But the avalanche! If they were caught up in that… and if the doctor isn't home… and Wapol went after them!"

"Vivi, you need to stop worrying. Nami, Dalton and Alabasta on top of it. You can't take responsibility for everything and everyone around you. Besides, Ruffy is with Nami and… well, I think I'd know if something happened."

"Huh? How?"

"Ruffy has connected her heart to ours," Zoro explained. "An emotional bond."

"She has…? But what if…?"

"What if Ruffy was gone? Then we wouldn't feel her anymore." Zoro closed his eyes and searched his heart. With some experimentation and past experience, he'd learnt how to feel around for Ruffy. When she was close she was like warm waves, but right now she was just a trickle, or a river far away. "I can still feel her."

"Mee too," Usopp said, but he sounded surprised, like he'd never actually thought of it. "I think she's… calm?"

"Probably?" Zoro said as he cast a glance towards where he thought Ruffy was, and she was quite high up.

"No, focused," Usopp suddenly determined, his gaze also following his link with Ruffy. "She's almost reached the top of the mountain."

"Really? How can you tell?" Vivi asked tentatively.

"Like I said: connected hearts."

"Oh… does that mean, she can feel… what you feel too? Even Nami-san?"

"Of course," Usopp said before looking at the princess. He fell silent, his lips thinning as though he waited for something.

Zoro frowned at the way the princess bit her lip, lowered her head and squirmed in place. He'd already told Vivi that they were Ruffy's crew, but it was like she couldn't comprehend someone other than herself could care about others as fiercely as she did.

"I trust Ruffy," Usopp suddenly said and bore his gaze into Vivi's with a grin that was almost provocative. "So Nami will be fine. Those doctors Wapol brought obviously care about Dalton, and I trust that. Everyone does what they can where they can. It's not wrong to trust others, Vivi."

The princess's face was a mask of surprise, but also a flash of recognition. Zoro was fairly sure someone else had told Vivi the exact same thing before.

Her face relaxed, and once again Zoro had to hand it to Usopp. Even though he didn't want to go after Ruffy simply because he was scared of monsters, he had actually managed to make Vivi less worried.

"You are right. Everything will be all right."

Ruffy didn't know if she was dreaming or awake. She couldn't feel her body, but her arms stretched above her, pulling her up, up. Always up. She'd lost all sense of time.

'Doctor.'

The word echoed around in her brain, writing itself on the mountain overhead, a finish line she couldn't see yet but was somewhere above.

'Doctor.'

Her arms stretched up and pulled her weight without feeling it. Nami's heart was behind her, numb and distant. Sanji's heart was in her lap, far away despite how she called for him.

Maybe she was dreaming after all? Maybe that's why she couldn't feel anything.

'Doctor.'

If she really was dreaming, she had Nami and Sanji with her, and she didn't want to wake up. If she fell, she knew she'd probably wake, and on the other side there was nothing.

'Doctor.'

So she had to keep climbing. No matter what she couldn't afford to wake up, return to a world where Aki was dead, Almen had sacrificed himself to let her escape, and Sun was captured. This dream was better. She was climbing a mountain up to heaven because she had friends here that were worth it.

One arm reached up and… stopped. Ruffy blinked. Her eyelashes had frozen some time ago, making her partially blind. But her hand couldn't reach up.

She lowered it and searched for a lower hold and tried with the other arm. It disappeared.

'Snow.' The appearance of a new solid thought almost startled her. And then the oddest thing happened. Her hand reappeared, fingers hooked over stone. She reached up with her other hand and saw the white part to reveal the wall she was climbing. She must be near heaven then.

'Doctor!' she thought with renewed strength and kept crawling upwards.

The smell of blood had lured him out an hour ago. Other than birds, no other living beings besides himself and Doctorine ever came up here, so at first he'd thought there was a wounded bird. But he couldn't find any. The scent remained, blowing up from below and growing stronger. Along with something sweeter, like infection.

He waited nervously. If he smelled blood it meant someone was wounded and needed help, but if it came from below… it couldn't mean someone was actually climbing the mountain… could it?

There had been an avalanche earlier, but they happened from time to time. Most people living here knew how to protect themselves from them. Doctorine had already gone down the mountain today, and injuries weren't illnesses. Most of the people had taught themselves how to treat scratches, broken bones and colds, and however skilled she was, Doctorine was still only one person, she couldn't take care of them all.

A sound reached him. An unfamiliar, astonishing sound. He ran inside.

"Doctorine! Someone… I think someone is climbing the mountain!"

"Climbing?" the woman asked, looking up from the cabinet she was organizing. "This mountain is almost five thousand meters high. How can anyone be dumb enough to climb it?"

"I've smelled blood for a while, and something else on them. I think they're reaching the edge soon."

Closing the cabinet the doctor followed her little companion outside. There, right at the edge, sat a person. They couldn't sit there! The snow was weak around the edges!

So he ran forward. There were actually three of them, one laying immobile before the first two who were tied together.

"Doctor."

The word was weak, coming from such a small girl he thought she would break if he touched her. But he still gently scooped her up, her and the person tied to her.

The snow gave and fell right where they had been a second ago.

"What have we here," Doctorine started as she took in the three patients.

He untied the two girls. The little one had severe frostbite, her skin almost black, and having the person tied to her removed caused a gasp and powerful shiver to run through her.

"How is this brat dressed in this weather! Does she want to die?" Doctorine huffed without real heat. After all, it was obvious to both of them. This little girl had climbed the mountain, five thousand meters, carrying the other two. "Chopper, what's your diagnosis?"

"Frostbite and external bleeding," he said about the girl before moving to the male. "He's bled a lot, the wounds still haven't closed properly." He opened his clothes and felt over the still body. "Six ribs broken and spine cracked. Can I treat him?"

"But this girl has it bad. She's dying," Doctorine said as she picked the last person up into her arms. "Chopper, prepare some phenicol, inotropic and tetracyclines."

"She has an infection?"

"Yes, and she didn't get it from this island."

The girl, the climber, suddenly reached out. "Doc… doctor…"

Doctorine looked down at her. He was used to the woman's unshakeable calm, her overwhelming confidence. It was rare to see her solemn.

"Don't worry, I'll save them. Both of them. You have my word."

The girl blinked, and he could feel it. She placed her faith in Doctorine and him and closed her eyes.