I present to you…
*not-so-suspenseful-but-very-enthusiastic drum rolling*
The beginning of the Water 7/Enies Lobby/Water 7 combo!
My brain has been churning out Ideas since before I finished writing the Davy Back Fight chapter, you will not believe how excited I am for this.
I have outdone myself yet again with the longest chapter so far at 35k words/125 pages. One of these days AO3 and FF will straight up refuse to publish my chapter, but in the meantime good luck I guess lol
Also have an additional gift in the form of a particularly great piece of fanart of Elynna by the (*insert Franky's voice here*) Super Great ekale on ao3! It will shortly become the cover picture of Dive|rgence on FF (as soon as the page to do that works as it should, that is), but here's the link if you want to take a closer look: https: slashslash www dot tumblr dot com slash flamerra/705402860538576896/hi-its-me-again
And because I'm a slowpoke at updating, she/he/they also had the time to do this one (with Luffy as a bonus): https: slashslash www dot tumblr dot com slash flamerra/710566775691132928/a-wild-luffy-appears
Trigger Warning: Elynna has little to no filter when it comes to how far she can push a joke, so her suicidal tendencies and other very serious topics absolutely fall within the domain of things she will joke about. I don't know if this justifies a TW given, well, this fic as a whole, but I figured I'd put it just in case.
Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece, so anything that you see in this fic and that you can recognise as belonging to One Piece is not mine. If I did own it, I wouldn't have to write fanfiction. Duh. Also, I don't own the picture.
Part One - Dive|rgence
TWENTY-NINE
Tell me that you want to leave without tears in your eyes
and maybe I'll think about letting you go with a smile
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"I need help." Elynna announces as she steps into the kitchen of the Merry.
"Of course, Elynna-chan." Sanji immediately answers from where he's working at the stove.
"What for?" Nami follows up, interrupting her conversation with Robin in which the latter was attempting to convince her to sell at least part of their gold to a museum with the argument that a museum might given them more money for it than people who would be interested only in the gold and not in the cultural value of all the objects of art and jewellery said treasure includes.
"To deal with what Hawk told me two days ago." Elynna answers as she sits in the chair opposite to the two other women.
"Okay. What did he say?"
"That he'll only work on believing that he's a good pirate until Elynna-chan admits that she's the best First Mate ever."
Nami stirs her coffee, barely sparing any attention for Sanji's explanation.
"Let's kidnap him and tickle him until he surrenders. I know all his weak spots."
"Tempting offer, but I'd rather turn that petty trap of his around on him."
"You could lie." Robin offers, because all four of them know that Elynna doesn't believe herself to be the best anything.
"I could, but I wouldn't actually sound sincere. Like, at all. And even if I did, this is too important."
"Good. I don't have to smack you, then." Nami sniffs haughtily as she slides the remaining slices of bread towards their First Mate.
"... Maybe I should lie, actually."
"Elynna-chan." Sanji pleads with an embarrassed wince that somehow looks both fond and exasperated, prompting Robin's ever-present smile to widen just a bit.
"Fine, fine. I asked Hebi, and obviously I can't suddenly become a paragon of self-esteem, because I apparently kept all the human characteristics that suck-"
This time Nami is the one who interrupts her with a call of her name, adding a light kick under the table for good measure.
"-but practice makes perfect, so if I make a list of things that make me a good First Mate and go over it every day, I might actually start to believe in the idea somewhat, which would be better than the current situation. Except you can't really call it a list when you have less than five items, so… Any ideas?"
"You're smart." Sanji and Nami tell her at the exact same time.
"Already wrote that one."
"What else did you write? We might as well skip over what you already know."
"That one."
"... And?"
"Just that one."
This time the navigator and the cook are perfectly synchronised in sending her an exasperated look, although Nami's is more on the angry side and Sanji's more on the sad side of the spectrum.
"Why do you think I'm asking for help?" Elynna deadpans in return.
Nami very carefully pushes her plate away, and then slumps over the table so abruptly she might as well be trying to knock herself out.
Sanji takes her empty plate away, features contorted painfully and looking very much tempted to do the same.
Still smiling, Robin observes them, and deduces that this is a conversation that can be led like any other discussion she has ever had with her First Mate.
That is to say, disagreement is allowed as long as you're prepared for an attempt to demolish the arguments supporting it, brutal honesty and cynicism are welcome, and sarcasm as well as biting comments that are this close to being dragged out of the 'playful' category kicking and screaming are pretty much mandatory.
Which makes it a safe conversation to have, unlike the last time Elynna's not-totally-absent-but-still-rather-impressively-high lack of consideration for the worth of her own existence was displayed in front of her so openly.
(That time was raw, bleeding and screaming distress, and all-encompassing like a world dying at its own hand.
It was everything she hasn't allowed herself to be since she survived those first few months of grief and absolute, world-breakingly real loneliness.
-those first few months of betrayals and monstermonstermonster-
It was a mirror, and it wasn't, because the openness, the trust that was so glaringly obvious in the utter lack of effort on Elynna's part to even try to hide any of it-
That-
was unreconciliably, incomprehensibly alien to her.
It was a mirror, but the gap between them couldn't possibly be any wider, any more staggering
-as if hitting the water from high up and feeling it part around her but still impact her face like an insurmontable wall at the same time-
and the shock of it left echoes of half-dreams and possibilities, of what could be if one day she had the courage to cut herself open like this
right in front of their eyes for them to see-)
That time was a revelation on the fact that Nico Robin is distinctly lacking the emotional capacity to deal with others' pain when by dealing she means helping rather than ignoring or ending by way of murdering, and the other in question is someone she lo-
likes.
(loves.)
"I believe that it might help to be more detailed, Miss First Mate. At any rate, it is easier to picture and thus believe in detailed and specific things than vague ideas."
"... Guess so."
"For example, you have a good eye for detail, and you make the effort of gathering general and specific knowledge about the world and current events. Given your quite impressive ability for deduction, it makes you able to analyse complex situations very well. Considering the Captain's tendency to rush into things, it helps to keep us aware of what we might be facing."
The way Sanji looks at the historian verges on adoring, and then he turns to Elynna with a soft, merciless, I have been accumulating all the positive things I have to say about you while waiting for this moment and you will grant it to me by accepting them as facts rather than compliments or else smile.
"I think you should also write something about empathy, Elynna-chan. It's easy to tell you things, because you understand. Accepting someone as your leader is much easier when you know that they care about what your point of view is."
"You're a fast learner, too." Nami adds imperiously.
"... Is that really important to be a good First Mate?"
"Shut up and write. Add strategic use of your jokes while you're at it. You've gotten pretty good at distracting the boys and diffusing tension with those. Well, that, and I just love your jokes in general."
"Your negotiation skills are quite good as well. Or is it management skills?"
"Whatever their name is, I'm pretty sure that shithead of a Captain would have gotten us killed several times by now without them." Sanji grumbles.
"What are you guys playing at?" Luffy asks with a sunny smile as he barges into the room.
"What part of this looks like a game, dumbass?"
"We're listing all the reasons why Lynna is the best First Mate ever."
The rubber boy blinks owlishly at the gathering of his nakama, and then his smile comes back in a flash.
"Your hugs! You have to add something about your hugs!"
"... Okay, you can't tell me that this isn't off-topic-"
"Write it." Luffy orders, eyebrows drawing low over unblinking eyes.
Elynna writes it, sighing long-sufferingly all the while.
Luffy beams with the satisfaction of a job well done, yells out a Sanji, food! in the direction of the cook, and sits down next to her.
The four of them keep at it for the following ten minutes or so, egging their First Mate on any time she so much as slows down in her writing.
They stop not long after Zoro enters to drink some water during the break of his solo training, and leave Elynna to stare down at the list in front of her with the slow, sluggish blink of people who do not understand what they are seeing, down to the most fundamental level.
"This," she says, "does not sound like me at all."
"Obviously." Luffy replies with the confused frown of someone who wonders how the person they're watching can reach such a high level of stupidity. "You're better, since we didn't list everything."
His First Mate does a weird sort of full-body twitch of horrified disgust that would probably look like hackles raising on a cat or a dog, and he laughs, poking her to try and make her do it again.
Letting him have his fill without any reaction, she simply joins her hands in front of her, blank face somehow managing to convey a certain kind of plea.
"Please let me add at least a few faults."
"Nope!" Luffy laughs.
"Hell no." Zoro scoffs, apparently having broadly caught on to what is happening.
"Don't even think about it, Lynna."
"Certainly not, Elynna-chan."
"I'm afraid this would miss the point of the exercise entirely, Miss First Mate."
Elynna stares at them for a moment, and then her forehead hits the edge of the table along with her sigh.
"Goddamnit."
"Stop grumbling about this." Nami admonishes her lightly with a stab of her fork in her direction. "You said yourself that Chopper told you to practice. It'll get better with time."
"I know that, I already did it before. Doesn't mean that I can't complain. Complaining about stuff is my favourite hobby, I'll have you know."
"After hugs!"
"Nah, hugs are my lifeblood."
Zoro rolls his eyes.
"Stop being dramatic."
"And not have you glare at me as often as usual when you look so hot doing it? No chance in hell. Deal with it." She quips as she wraps her hands around her mug of hot chocolate to take in the last of its warmth. "But I guess complaining comes after eating Sanji's food. And napping."
"I'm flattered, Elynna-chan."
"What do you mean, you already did it before?" Nami frowns, cutting through the conversation.
"... I mean that I already did it before? I don't know how else you want me to put it."
The navigator crosses her arms, brown eyes narrowing as she absently flicks away a flamboyant strand of hair that is slightly longer than the others.
"Add details, to start with. And explain to me how you can be that bad at this whole thing if you've already done the same exercise before."
Elynna's gaze stays trained on Nami's eyes for a long moment, and then trails slowly over to the window.
"Never said it was the same exercise."
"... Uh?"
Elynna sighs, forces her eyes back on her crewmates, and leans back in her chair.
"It was pretty much the opposite, in fact, since it was about insults instead of… You know. Nice stuff."
Still poised to refill Robin's cup of tea, Sanji freezes.
Smile faltering just a tad, the older woman's eyes don't leave their First Mate, even as hands bloom over the table to tilt his arms back up and prevent the incoming flood.
"What." Nami hisses flatly, anger drawing her taller as it gathers over her face like darkening clouds.
Luffy blinks, gulps down the omelette he stuffed whole in his mouth, and as usual blurts out everything he thinks.
"Man, you're pretty stupid sometimes, Ann."
"Obviously. Intelligence is multi-dimensional, so I doubt that a lot of people are never stupid. Besides, I was a kid. Kids do stupid things all the time."
"I didn't do that when I was a kid, though."
"That's because you've always been very intelligent in that aspect, silly."
"Oh, I get it! … But why did you do that, though?"
"Because when a kid follows the rules and gets good marks at school, it's usually enough to get a lot of praise, and because people never like someone with a big ego -especially when the someone is a girl. So I figured that if I pointed out my own mistakes to myself often enough to compensate for the praise, it would stop me from becoming too annoying."
Silence.
"Yeah, you're really stupid, Lynn." Zoro scoffs.
"That line is already taken. Find something else."
"You're a fucking dumbass." The swordsman deadpans, receiving a dry look in return.
"A bit lacking in originality, but I guess I should expect it coming from you."
Zoro glares, and Sanji's eyes narrow even as he slides a plate of sweet breakfast foods on the table.
"You better not break another pan handle, cactus face, or you'll be eating stale bread for the next five days."
Nami sighs, annoyance somewhat tempered by the knowledge that this is a problem Elynna doesn't hesitate to talk about this candidly, which she takes as a sign that the other girl has pretty much worked out the emotional mess around it on her own.
Though apparently not well enough to want to solve the problem simply for her own sake, but that's nothing a good verbal lashing won't solv-
Okay.
Maybe not so calm.
"This is such a you way of being stupid that I don't know what to say."
"Well, preferably something else than a variation on my lack of intelligence, given that at least half of the items on the list are about me being smart in one way or another-"
The navigator launches another kick under the table, and Elynna's mouth clicks shut into a wince.
Nami smiles, something sunny and pretty that on her face is pretty much the same thing as a threat in anyone else's mouth.
"Considering the way you speak of it, I take it that you have foregone that particular habit?" Robin inquires.
Elynna turns to her, leaning forward at the same time to swipe a blueberry cupcake off the plate before Luffy's hand can reach it.
"Mostly, yeah. I've been working on correcting it for a few years."
"Good." Nami smiles into the bottom of her mug of coffee. "I guess I can spare you the additional fee for dealing with that, then."
Fingers freezing just shy of a chocolate cupcake that Elynna promptly steals, Luffy casts a wildly confused frown in the direction of his navigator.
"... A fee?" He repeats through the disturbing amount of food that is currently making his cheeks swell to the level of a chipmunk.
Glaring mildly at the spectacle out of habit more than anything else, Sanji sets the plate of bacon on the opposite end of the table from where his Captain in retaliation.
"Yes, a fee. I should definitely get paid for dealing with your idiocy on top of the general stupidity around here. You're supposed to be the smart one, you know."
Very politely, Elynna keeps her mouth shut as she munches on the last bite of her cupcake, staring thoughtfully at the other girl until she swallows and-
"So what level of making out are we talking about here?"
Nami facepalms, torn between laughing and sending another kick under the table.
Zoro shows none of that hesitation, and shoves his First Mate's head down as he passes her by on his way to the door.
A furiously blushing Sanji swears as he avoids sending another plate of crispy bacon to the floor just in time, prompting Luffy to sigh in relief, and then almost shove his First Mate out of her chair in retaliation for coming this close to ruining his favourite breakfast food -and to steal some of the food on her plate.
Robin laughs, soft enough that it might almost go unnoticed if not for the way Sanji's somewhat amused embarrassment relaxes into a contented smile, and Luffy beams in satisfaction at the sound through his efforts to get his hands out of the hold Elynna has on them to keep him from stealing the bacon she put on her plate just for the sake of being petty.
"What? You're the one who has all my money, so-"
"Oi, Lynn. Come out for a sec, I need your help."
The chaos in the room calms down somewhat, and Elynna blinks, before shrugging and getting to her feet.
"Don't worry, Lynna, I'll make sure that you don't forget to work on this every morning!"
"I have no freedom until after lunch anymore, got it."
"Good!"
"Ah, you should avoid talking about this to Mister Sniper, Captain."
"Oh, right." Nami suddenly realises with a snap of her fingers. "Thanks Robin, I almost forgot."
"Of course."
"Huh? Why can't I talk about this to Usopp? He could help!"
"Because it's a secret mission, Sea King." Elynna calls out over her shoulder before Nami can straight up order him to just go along with it or face the threat of bodily harm in retaliation. "I did one with him on Zephrim, remember? He's not part of this one."
"... A secret mission?! So cool! Okay, I won't tell him!"
Nami breathes a sigh of relief as Robin's crystalline eyes glitter with amusement next to her, and then she grabs the last apple in the fruit bowl, turning around to throw it at Elynna with a grin that says thanks for the save.
The other girl catches it with one hand, returns a two fingers salute with the other, and steps out to follow Zoro out on the deck, obligingly joining him to sit cross-legged on his back so as to add a level of difficulty to his push-ups.
It's not particularly rare, so she's not particularly surprised.
What does surprise her is that when Zoro switches to one-armed push-ups, he raises his free hand above his head.
"Show me that." He says simply, still looking at the ground and focusing on his exercise.
She knows him enough to tell that it's an offer more than a demand, and it takes her barely a breath to hand over the sheet of paper, because if anyone will be objective to the point of brutal honesty on their crew, it's him.
If he has no objection to give, then she'll feel a bit more settled into the idea that the words written on this piece of paper are the real her.
Zoro puts the list on the deck so he can read it easily, and then winds his arm back again to grasp lightly at Elynna's calves to make sure that he doesn't move unconsciously to make the exercise easier.
He switches a few minutes later, slinging his other arm across his First Mate's back to loosely span her ribs with his fingers, still silent as he flexes himself up and down while she finishes the apple Nami gave her.
It's only when he's done that he speaks up, lowering himself until he's barely touching the deck.
"You became more than proficient in combat in barely a year, and you're just getting started."
"Uh?"
"Add that."
Elynna considers it as she lets herself fall backwards onto the sun-warmed planks of wood of the Merry, waiting until Zoro flips himself onto his back to throw her legs back over his abdomen.
Then she snatches the sheet of paper back from his hand, bending one leg back towards her to write more easily.
"I became… more than proficient in combat… in barely a year… thanks to the energy… granted to me… by the sight of Fang's muscles-"
Fingers close around the ankle of her other leg with a grip like steel, and she curses as it tightens further, digging into her skin.
Still, she's smirking when she looks at him, and in return she finds herself on the receiving end of a glare that says one of these days I will murder you and enjoy it.
"You better not have written that."
"I didn't."
Zoro clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, fingers slackening around her ankle.
"Though now that you said it, I'm kind of tempted-"
"Don't make me break your leg."
"Kinky."
The look that Zoro directs at the sunny sky above them seems to be utterly done with life in general and her in particular.
"Let's spar."
"What? No. I just spent two hours working with Hawk. We agreed that Tuesday mornings are his mornings-"
"Don't care. That's what you get for mouthing off."
For a moment, she considers giving up on the last shreds of shame left in her to whine at the situation she just put herself into.
But Zoro straightens into a sitting position, throwing her leg off him to get up, and saves her dignity in the process.
"... Ugh. You're lucky I love you."
Her crewmate snorts without even looking at her, clearly more interested in the prospect of beating the shit out of her.
The ingratitude.
And right when he's ruining her well-deserved emotional and physical break, too.
A punch in his face it is.
Nothing like a bit of violence to clear the mind for a good nap.
Except making out, maybe, but she's low-key suicidal, not stupid, so she's not about to provoke him even more.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
It's a nice, sunny morning when Elynna finds herself catching up on some sleep after a night watch shift that cut her night in two and the training session Usopp dragged her into when she barely came out of the one with Zoro, just because he wanted to make sure that she still had her technique 'down pat' even when she was absolutely fucking dead on her goddamn feet.
So obviously, she doesn't particularly appreciate it when the sniper and their Captain start screaming their heads off on the deck.
It's not about some kind of deadly danger, which is good.
But it's about a frog of all things, which is far from an acceptable reason to disturb her sleep as far as she's concerned.
Still, she doesn't deem it worth getting to her feet when sleep is already weighing her down into the bed.
At least, not until the very structure of the ship starts to shake, which makes her frown.
And then she hears a sound that she heard enough times Before to know that it has fuck all to do in the middle of the freaking ocean-
She jumps out of bed and stumbles her way out of her sleep to wrench open the door of the girls' room, leaving it to her crewmates to get out of her way as she rushed to the railing to try and distinguish how close they were from the-
"Move the ship back!"
For a moment, startled eyes look back at her, and then everyone scrambles to do as she says.
They get out of the way just in time to see a train whizz by the Merry's figurehead.
"So cool! What was that?!" Luffy screams over the blaring sound of the train in the distance and Chopper and Usopp's awed comments.
"A… train." Nami answers, voice trailing off almost like a question.
"Huh? But I thought trains were a means of transportation that worked on land?" Chopper interrupts her musings with wide eyes.
Elynna waves a dismissive hand as she flops down into a sitting position, the backlash of the sudden shot of adrenaline leaving her to blink hard against the sudden urge to just fall forward and over the railing.
"If it's impossible, then it will happen. It's the Grand Line effect."
"This sounds awfully close to Murphy's Law, Miss First Mate." Robin comments with a humoured slant to her smile from the sun chair that she hasn't moved to get off of through the whole debacle.
"Meh." Elynna shrugs. "'Impossible' often rhymes with 'impossibly shitty problem', so they're pretty much synonyms."
She waits for the slight dizziness caused by the loud screeching of the passing train to subside, and has almost fallen asleep again by the time she realises that someone is shaking her shoulder.
"What." She gripes as her bleary vision finally focuses on Zoro's face.
He quirks a brow at her attitude but shrugs it off easily.
"We're going to meet the people from the train station. You coming?" He asks, gaze narrowed on the way she can't quite meet his eyes, vision going in and out of focus every time she blinks.
She gives a tiny shake of her head to force a bit of the world around them into her awareness, and blinks again.
High-pitched squeals and the sizzling, loud voice slurring over words makes the corners of her mouth curl with a hint of all-out disgust, and she slants a flat look in the direction of the swordsman.
"Do I look like I want to deal with a damn child? Fuck off." She deadpans without any heat.
This time his eyebrow rises just a bit higher.
"You realise Luffy makes just as much noise on a daily basis, right?"
"Nakama privilege."
"Whatever you say." He rolls his eyes before straightening back into a standing position to get off the ship.
With a yawn wide enough to make her jaw sore, Elynna gets to her feet to go take care of the leftover dirty dishes that Sanji was probably washing when the frog arrived judging from the remaining soap bubbles she glimpsed on the skin of his hands and bared forearms.
She can't just fall asleep when she's the only one on the ship after all, even if the others aren't far.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
She's getting started on the knives and trying very hard to stay awake through it when the door opens, and she tilts her head when she recognises Luffy's footsteps.
She guesses that he's here to take what he calls a snack and that she call a fucking full course meal and then some, so she stays focused on her task, and thus ends up mostly unprepared when a hand grabs her elbow to tug her into turning around.
She blinks curiously, but complies when Luffy presses his hands down on her shoulders firmly, plopping herself down into a cross-legged position right there on the floor without any complaint.
Her Captain crouches down to follow, and tips forward on the tip of his toes to gently knock the slight frown embedded into his forehead against hers.
"We're not far from Water Seven." He says, noting the way muscles tense under his hands at the simple mention of the name.
She closes her eyes.
"Yeah."
He squeezes her shoulders.
"You're our crewmate." He goes on, conviction just as fierce as his voice is quiet.
(No matter what you find out.
No matter what happens.
You're ours.)
She pushes back against his forehead with the faintest of smiles.
"I know. The damn best one you could have, right?"
If there's an undercurrent of mockery in her smile, it's barely there enough to make it tight, and so he grins, a face-splitting, eyes-scrunching smile.
"Yep!"
Then he orders her to get some sleep, nods to himself in satisfaction, and proceeds to get himself a snack-slash-full-course-meal-and-then-some.
Elynna opens her eyes, spots the couch in the living-dining space of the room, and drags herself there to sleep off the physical strain and the sheer stress of all the worrying she's been doing lately.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
When they split up upon docking near the city, Elynna sticks herself to Robin's side before anyone else is done explaining where they're going.
There's nothing strange about it. Chopper is with them, and he sometimes asks for her help to buy medical hebs and provisions, not to mention that it's not rare for her to end up joining the historian in the local bookshop whenever they stop at an island, unless someone from the crew manages to get in trouble.
But maybe she's just too quick to choose compared to how she usually acts, or maybe some of the tension that's been seeping from the beats of her heart and through her veins since the idea of reaching Water Seven has become reality in everyone's mouth is now bleeding through the cover of her skin, because Zoro looks at her for a beat too long, and Nami blinks curious eyes at her back, and Robin's eyes are cautious and heavy against her appreciative smile.
Elynna doesn't respond to any of it, simply falling into step with her two crewmates and starting the conversation by asking them if they're looking for something in particular.
Eventually, Robin looks away from her, and joins the discussion.
It might not quite be trust, or even acceptance, but she'll take it.
At some point, she directs the conversation towards the city they are in, and Robin starts to explain how the city was founded by a Princess who had no right to the throne according to the law of her country but followed the same studies as her brothers in secret, until she was ready to present the results of her training to the Kind, who decided to give her a seemingly impossible challenge to overcome before he would consider changing the law: creating a lasting city in one of the most inhospitable places of the Grand Line, which is swamped by high tides of otherwise unseen intensity about once a year, although they were much less intense at that time than in the present.
In other words, to tame the sea.
They reach Chopper's destination first, but upon seeing their mutual investment in the topic, he tells them to wait outside while he buys all the tools he needs to stock up on.
Elynna nods, gives him a wave, and turns back towards the older woman, leaning against the wall of the shop so she can keep an eye on the people roaming the street.
"So, did that Princess get the throne?"
Robin smiles at her, the amusement in it sharp like an acidic aftertaste sticking to the roof of one's mouth.
"No. Although, as you can see, she overcame her challenge successfully, a King's legitimacy still remains dependent on the support of others, and perhaps especially the nobles. In this case, the nobility was hardly in favour of opening access to the throne to female members of the family, and so they asked for a one-year additional delay."
"To make sure that the resilience of the city wasn't just a one time thing?"
"That's the official argument, yes, though in reality it might have been to buy themselves time to look for a way to discredit the Princess' work -perhaps by looking into how much of the city's design creation she actually took part in."
"Probably." Elynna scoffs under her breath, making Robin's smile twitch a bit higher.
"Well, either way, the delay gave time to the news about the Princess' accomplishments to travel the world and reach an island whose inhabitants follow a very specific religion."
Elynna blinks at the unexpected piece of information, prompting the other woman further with a questioning raise of her eyebrow.
Robin's smile turns indulgent as she registers the shift of Elynna's entire focus on her, and she caves in graciously.
"They worshipped the sea as an all-powerful entity that was the origin of everything in the world. And some members of one of the more radical branches of this religion were absolutely unable to accept the idea of a human being trying to tame the manifestation of their deity."
"So they killed her."
Robin nods.
"Not that it changed much for her Kingdom in itself, given that the Princess was already used as a leading figure by a part of the population that was advocating for change, even before her murder. She just became a martyr instead. Besides, she had foreseen that her city would come under attack -although from people of her own country- so the assassins' attempt to destroy Water Seven after killing her failed. They committed suicide bfore the interrogation could be successful, though, so there's still a lot of debate today on whether they acted truly on their own, according to their beliefs, or if some of the nobles opposing the reform somehow involved them into taking that course of action."
Elynna hums.
"Or it could be the King."
Robin cocks her head on the side as an invitation to continue.
"The longer his daughter stays in her city that doesn't drown -and where people live, the more she's gaining her own legitimacy, with the risk that she straight-up decides to create her own territory there. With potentially a claim to his Kingdom in the long run, especially if his own people were asking for change. Can get real ugly real quick." Elynna concludes with a shrug.
"That's a possibility that has been considered, of course, but we'll probably never know for sure. If both sides are unrelated, there's of course no evidence to prove that they weren't in contact. And if someone did come into contact with the assassins, it was done in secret, which means that circumstantial evidence would be hard to find, let alone conclusive evidence."
"Of course it can't be that easy." Elynna rolls her eyes with a sigh. "Imagine, doing history with enough certainty that it can't be weaponised to hell and back by everyone and their dog. The horror."
"How curious. I would've thought you were exactly the type of person who manipulates the past to suit their needs." Robin laughs softly behind her hand, eyes more warm than disappointed.
"If I was a politician. Which I'm not, because you've got to be a special kind of fucked up that I'm definitely not to want to deal with that shit. Though I can see the strategic appeal."
The older woman's eyes glint, and her smile turns just a bit teasing.
"But of course. Your hands are already so full manipulating the present."
A smirk slowly drags the corners of Elynna's mouth higher, cutting dimples into her cheeks until her teeth show.
"And you're such a bad scholar for finding it funny, Robin. But don't worry. I like bad."
Robin chuckles, the sound strangely soft in contrast to the topic at hand.
"I'll admit, I easily make an exception to the deontology of my profession for anything that involves making fools out of the Marines or the world Government."
For a moment, Elynna's smirk curls into a bit of a pout at the way Robin skips over the second part of her comment, but she shrugs it off easily.
"Oh, I get it. They make fun toys." She says airily instead before curiosity tames the smirk away from her lips as she returns to their first topic of conversation. "Did anything actually change in the Princess' kingdom?"
"Yes. The law was passed, in fact." Robin answered without seeming taken aback in the least by the change in topic. "One of the Princesses managed to get the throne in the following generation and reached out to the leader of Water Seven to honour the accomplishments of her aunt. Economic and cultural exchanges are still very strong between them today, actually. It's because of the protection that comes with it that Water Seven is allowed to have a degree of independence, since the Ashera Kingdom is part of the World Government countries."
Elynna, whose eyes were roaming the street distractedly, suddenly looks back at her, straightening a bit in interest.
Her teeth catch onto her chapped lower lip as she tears off a new patch of skin with a thoughtful hum, but her next question is interrupted before it even comes out of her mouth, their conversation forgotten as a tiny furrow digs a barely perceptible frown between her eyes, which are set on a man crouched down next to the edge of the quay.
A man who, although he's far enough from them to not hear their conversation if he's a normal person of this world, might have perfectly heard them through the distance and the people around them if his sensory abilities are above average.
A man who hasn't moved from his spot for the last two minutes.
Elynna slowly pushes herself off the wall she's leaning against, taking a step forward.
Robin, whose curiosity upon noticing her distraction took on a steely weight when she spotted the diffused rise of tension up the spine of her First Mate, stops short of turning to see what caught her attention.
"Wait here a sec." Elynna whispers as she passes her by.
She stops once she reaches the man, turning sideways to keep her crewmate in her line of vision.
The man, who was fumbling with the reins of a Yagara bull, seems to finally register the shadow that fell over him, and looks up.
"Um… Yes? Can I help you?" He asks with a confused smile.
She doesn't return it.
"No offense, mister, but you're the one who looks like he's having trouble with something."
The man flushes a bit, scratching at the embarrassed red of his cheeks if it can make it disappear.
She doesn't think she's seen him before while they were walking, or that they've been followed at all, but she's not infallible, and his face isn't particularly memorable either.
"Ah, yes… I'm a tourist here, you see, and our guide gave us some free time to visit, so I thought I'd ride one of those to see more things, but I'm not really a knot specialist, and…" He trails off with a wave of his hand towards the complex knot that is keeping the Yagara bull tied to its renting spot.
She stares at him, trying to guess whether or not he's lying, and the man squirms under the scrutiny, glancing around as if to make sure that there's still people around.
"Um, could you… perhaps help me, Miss-"
She doesn't hear him.
Because right then, someone knocks their shoulder into hers.
Hard.
It could be accidental.
Except-
Except there's not that many people around them.
And the stranger doesn't apologise.
Instead, right as he passes her by-
"Traitorous bitch." A low-pitched voice snarls as roughly as the person shoved her.
(And something inside of her lurches upon contact
high and waking and reaching and responding, jostling her breath in her lungs and her consciousness in her body until she's swaying on her own feet.
The familiarity of it is so foreign that it can only be dangerous.)
She barely stops herself from falling into the quay, whirling around just in time to watch the cloaked back of the stranger melt back into the crowd, and promptly leaves the man who is halfway up to his feet and still reaching to help her regain her balance.
She marches back to Robin and doesn't give her the time to do anything more than open her mouth before she stops mere inches away from her, one hand reaching out to press flat against the black leather that covers the older woman's abdomen, pressing her back gently but firmly towards the shop where she can see that Chopper is getting ready to pay for what he purchased.
"Go join Hebi. Don't stay alone."
"But-"
"I mean it, Robin." She cuts her off. Her dark eyes meet Robin's clear, wide ones, and Elynna gives her another tiny shove towards their crewmate, taking the time to force her mouth into a slight smile even as she can feel her answers slipping away from her.
"I'll be back. Promise."
And then she's gone, racing through the streets and slipping between strangers towards where she last saw the owner of the masculine voice disappear.
She doesn't see Robin take a step forward, one hand rising through the widening distance between them to hold her back.
(The way she didn't the last time she let her First Mate leave her with only a strained smile and her hurried departure to remember her by.)
She doesn't see Robin forget her order and stand there staring at her back even after it has disappeared in the crowd.
She doesn't see the strangely dressed man leave Robin his own message.
She doesn't see the blood drain out of Robin's face in response, only to be replaced by the kind of despair that comes to pin you down with the knowledge of absolute defeat.
(So much more quickly than the way happiness slowly seeped into the cold, empty veins of her heart.)
She doesn't see Robin's hand fall back limply to her side.
She doesn't see Chopper come out of the shop and the way his shoulders fall and then tighten with saddened confusion that turns into barely contained panic as he registers the absence of his two crewmates.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"Shit!" Elynna curses aloud between heavy breaths as she finally comes to a stop in yet another alley.
An empty alley.
Because she's lost track of someone who was probably from another world as well.
She bends forward to catch her breath, hands braced on her knees and nails scratching hard against her skin to stave off her frustration as she spits out a series of swear words, slipping into English and then French when it doesn't feel like the Japanese vocabulary is enough to last her the time it takes to come down from her anger-induced adrenaline high.
She straightens up once she doesn't feel like breaking her hand against the closest wall anymore, and lets out a long sigh, weighed down by all the things she strives to push along with the air.
But if there's one thing that she keeps close to her lungs, it's the conclusion she has come to.
(burning hot in a way that makes it hard to think about anything else than failure-)
This was a wrong move, and a stupid decision on her part.
There are others, that much is clear, but it's also quite clear that those she's heard about so far have been here for much longer than her, and seem much more well-informed about whatever is going on with her body.
It's more than likely that they have at least some control over whatever powers come with said body, which she doesn't.
And if she can literally phase through the bars of a cell without any control whatsoever, then it's perfectly within the realm of possibility for the person she was chasing to have gone through walls at some point.
Now that she's lost sight of them, in a city that she doesn't know no less, there's no point looking for them, and she should have realised that before running after them, no matter how desperate she was to get just one of those answers-
Robin should have come first, especially given the potential danger her crewmate is in, and even more so when the other one's opinion of her seemed far from good enough to be willing to answer her questions.
Though that can always be fixed in exchange for their physical and mental integrity-
She slaps herself across the face, not hard enough to leave a mark, and blinks, nodding in satisfaction once her thoughts are jostled back into order.
Robin first, torturing assholes second.
She casts a last look around the alley, and forces herself to turn around, drawing up the memory of the path she took to get there in her mind.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
She doesn't find Robin.
Instead she finds Chopper, still in his four-legged form to allow him the most speed, legs trembling more with panic than actual exertion.
He comes to a screeching stop in front of the shop she left him in after rounding the corner, eyes flitting around the crowd so fast that he probably doesn't register much, because he doesn't actually notice her until she calls out to him.
"Hebi."
"Elynna!"
He dashes to her, shifting into his tiniest form mid-jump, and she scoops him up with one arm while snatching the bags he forgot about with her free hand.
"I'm so sorry I took so long, but there were a lot of people and one of the customers was almost deaf so the staff had to repeat themselves lots and-"
"Hebi." She cuts him off, patting his back. "That wasn't it."
She waits for at least some of the tension in his body to subside before she goes on.
"It was just another-" She stops, vaguely tempted to slap herself again for getting off-track. "You know what? That doesn't matter. Do you know where Robin is? I told her to stay with you."
But the reindeer shakes his head despondently, and she closes her eyes against the feeling of the pit in her stomach that keeps widening and deepening as his words register in her head, as if someone is digging out all the hope she allowed herself to have.
(-all the trust she allowed herself to have in herself and her ability to do this right-)
"No, she was already gone when I came out. I scooted the streets around to find you two, but I didn't see her at all, and I haven't seen her the few times I came back here. Maybe she was just really bored and went back to the ship?"
But even with everything that she knows and that he doesn't, he doesn't sound very convinced of his own theory.
At the very least, not convinced enough that he doesn't go slack in relief in her arms when she tells him that they're going to look for the historian together.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Chopper sits in the Merry's kitchen, biting into the foam of cotton candy Sanji made for him even as fat tears roll slowly down his fur.
Two hours.
They looked for two hours, but found no trace of Robin, even after Sanji joined them.
And given that the cook saw her in the crowd before meeting up with Elynna and him, following a tall figure dressed so strangely he thought it was a disguise for Chopper's human form at first, Chopper can't help the very bad feeling churning in his stomach that whispers cloying words up his spine and into his mind about how Robin is never going to come back to them.
Although, it might not be helped by all the sugar he's been eating since coming back to the Merry.
Which was supposed to help fight the bad feeling.
Sugar is supposed to make you happy, after all.
At least, that was his reason for being so excited to try it, before he became a doctor and learned that, like everything else, sugar was best consumed in small doses.
Still, he can't quite help it, sometimes.
It's not really making things better in this case, though.
(No amount of sugar in the world will ever be worth the careful, feather light way Robin's hands trail over his fur, as if he's something precious she's afraid to break
or how she's been buying more books about old medicine techniques or weapons or recipes, as if she thinks she needs a conversation topic that will interest them in order to talk with him or Zoro or Sanji or Usopp, as if she wants to talk to them but isn't quite sure how
-Luffy and Nami and Elynna are exceptions, because Robin is the first one that Nami drags into her shopping sprees along with, occasionally, Sanji, and Luffy is just absurdly easy to speak with even when you don't know what to say, and Elynna likes reading and learning and history and gruesome jokes-
or even the way she softly, thankfully rejects his help every time he offers to help with the fatigue that darkens the underside of her eyes, and how she never seems to be able to stay long with them when they camp around a fire on deserted islands without sinking into a strange, heavy trance that they can do nothing but wait her out of.)
It doesn't help either that Sanji tends to be a worrywart just like him.
Which is why Chopper decided to camp in the kitchen in the first place, given that he knows the cook tends to smoke much more when he's stressed, and while he knows that there's no point trying to get him to stop, he'd rather try and keep the number of cigarettes from inflating.
Except Sanji went for his go-to stress relief that is usually reserved for milder causes of anxiety than Robin disappearing on them with a weird stranger, and so has been prepping absurd amounts of food for the past hour.
With a frown on his face and an unlit cigarette sitting at the corner of his mouth, granted, but at least the ashtray isn't overflowing.
Something that, just like the fact that he himself is able to remain sitting in his chair instead of running around in full-blown panic, probably has something to do with the presence of the third member of their trio.
Because when they came to the Merry, Elynna left them without a word to march towards her room.
And when Sanji went to follow her, Chopper stopped him, directing him towards the kitchen instead, but the truth was that he was ready to barge into the girls' room within five minutes to be sure that she was okay.
(Because he knew that she probably wasn't.
Sure, the rest of the crew was still there as far as they knew, but having one of their members -even if the only one that Elynna still called by their actual name- disappear on her just a few weeks after she came this close
-so close,
too close-
to ending her own life because she thought she lost them all…
It has to rankle.
They're all still shaken, and even if she does manage to get back from that entirely, he's not quite sure that the lingering trauma of the moment her first life was ripped away from her will ever go away for good, especially given the kind of life they lead now.
So when the door of her room clicks shut, he tells Sanji to give her a few minutes to calm down, but in truth, he expects this.
Having to go to her room.
Having to see her look so small again, so unsure, so crumbled.
Having to see her drained, bitter eyes, because she cannot bear the weight of her own failures when she spins everything bad that befalls their crew into a blame that falls on her shoulders, no matter how much she knows that she can't control everything.
He expects it all, and worse.
He expects to see all their hard work come undone, and to have to convince her to put herself back together all over again.
He expects it, and feels entirely too terrified knowing that, this time, there might not be enough left to keep her together.)
Except Elynna steps into the kitchen just a few moments after the two of them with one of her notebooks in one hand and a pack of lollipops in the other, and settles herself on one side of the table.
She doesn't speak to them, except to decline Sanji's offer to make her a drink.
Instead, she tears off several pages from her notebook that are covered in notes and spreads them out over the table, unwraps one piece of candy, and leans back in her chair.
She's barely moved since then except to lean her elbows on the table and press her palms flat together, eyes scanning through her notes before she took to staring unseeingly at the table, gaze flickering back to the sheets of paper from time to time.
And in some ways, it's almost more reassuring than if Luffy was here with his unending enthusiasm.
Their Captain always knows how to lift their mood and keep their hope going, but seeing their First Mate refuse to give up, especially with a problem like this and even when her notes are written in the one language that they can't read, leaving them in the dark about how much of a plan she has and how solid it is-
It adds a measure of certainty that is different from hope, but keeps their worry from descending into downright panic all the same.
So even if they don't talk, Chopper's tears dry, and then he sets his breathing to match the regular rhythm of Sanji's knife quietly hitting the cutting board, and tries to enjoy his cotton candy a bit more.
He's not exactly calm, but he comes close enough.
Until Nami comes barging into the room to tell them that Usopp is gravely injured after trying to stop some gangsters from stealing their money.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Out of all the islands Elynna has done research on so far, Water Seven is one out of a handful where her work has been the most compulsively meticulous.
It helps that while she only vaguely remembers him, she remembers just enough to be able to make the link between the Franky Family that, according to her intel, rules over the criminals of the Venice-like city, and one of the last members of the Straw Hat Pirates to join the crew.
Needless to say, the fact that she barely remembers him doesn't help to improve her first impression of him as a person instead of a character.
Which is fucking awful.
Because even with all the information Nami gives them about what went down since they split ways as they all gather at the spot where the navigator left their sniper, only to be met with no body but a trail of bloody footprints that they hurry to follow, it doesn't quite prepare her for what she finds.
The trail stops at the entrance of the Franky Family's headquarters.
But before they even reach that spot, they stop.
Inches away from the bloody, broken body of their crewmate that shudders in spasms with every rattling breath.
And still, Usopp pushes on his hands to look up at them as soon as he registers their presence.
She crouches down the moment she spots the faltering strain of his muscles against the gravity and the pain, and presses a hand against his back, gently bringing him back to the ground.
"Don't move, Hawk."
She feels him go slack under her hand, but then he coughs, and through the gurgles of the pain stuck in his throat, he forces himself to rasp out piecemeal words roughened by sobs made wet and thick with blood.
It's all variations of I'm sorry for being so weak.
(So much weaker than you deserve.)
"Shut up." Nami huffs from behind her. "Going after several dozen men when you're alone isn't weakness, it's called being insane, which is a given on this crew. And for your information, most people wouldn't get beaten up, because most people wouldn't have the guts to come here in the first place. So congratulations. You're one step closer to becoming a Giant, I guess."
Usopp's back heaves a silent, choked out sob under her hold, and Elynna looks over her shoulder to find all her crewmates staring at the strangely built house a few paces away from them.
She sees clenched fists and tightened jaws pulling mouths into cutting sneer and darkened eyes burning something rageful, and the violence of their intent is made clear by the sudden, electrifying weight of the air she breathes.
(-how it jolts the blood faster in her veins with adrenaline and something a lot less personal and a lot more brutal-)
And she feels the same.
But she's already made the mistake of focusing on her anger instead of her crewmates once today.
She won't do it twice.
So she stays put, and when Chopper clenches his jaw that much harder and forces himself to kneel by her side, she raises her free hand to stop him.
"... Elynna?"
"I'll take care of him."
They both know she can.
Those are injuries from fists and feet. Elbows and knees, too. But their severity comes more from their number than because they touched a vital point or caused fatal damage on their own.
Still, Chopper's silence is hesitant, and she sighs, letting her hand fall on the thick forearm of his almost-human form.
She can't quite help the way it twitches against the bunching muscles there, itching to curl into a fist or reach for one of the blades hidden under her clothes.
"You take care of them, and I take care of him."
You take care of my anger, and I take care of your worry.
"Deal?"
She can feel the weight of his eyes on her in the silence that follows, and then sees him nod from the corner of her eyes.
"Deal."
He stands back up, and her hand slips away.
"Ready?" Nami calls out.
"Yeah." Luffy says over the crack of his knuckles, and it sounds like an order.
The navigator nods curtly, the end of her staff hitting the ground at her fit, and a bolt of lightning crashes against the door of the colourful building in response, splitting the wood into charred pieces and drawing plenty of raucous noise from its owners.
Nami steps past Elynna, gravel crunching under her heels, and kicks a piece of wood out of their Captain's path before she turns back around, gesturing at the rubber boy to lead the way.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Sanji doesn't stay long before he comes back out to help his First Mate get the newly bandaged -and unconscious- Usopp back to the Merry.
When he steps out of the boys' room after settling his crewmate into his own bed rather than the sniper's hammock, he freezes for a moment as he spots Elynna leaning against the railing with her arms crossed, right next to the plank that leads down to dry land.
He breathes in, a bit too fast, and joins her slowly, stopping just short of entering her personal space.
"Elynna-chan?"
She quirks a brow at him, and then the corners of her lips twitch with faint amusement.
"Don't look so worried, Hermes. I'm just going out to buy a few things, and figured I should tell you to make sure you don't freak out."
"... Oh."
He clears his throat, a bit embarrassed, and this time the curve of her mouth bows into an almost-smile.
"Are you sure you don't want me to go with you?"
"Nah. I'd rather you keep an eye on Hawk. I'm worried about him." She murmurs as her gaze drifts over his shoulder in the direction of the room he just left.
"And I'm worried about you." He frowns, straightening when her eyes snap back to his. "After what happened to Usopp and Rob-"
She places a hand at the top of his sternum, the tips of her fingers barely grazing the spot where his neck meets his shoulder under his collar, and he falls abruptly silent.
"Hermes." She says, interrupting the flustered flickering of his eyes and forcing him to look at her.
The light of the early afternoon ensures that her eyes are more blue than black, but it does nothing to lessen their drowning-like intensity as she steps closer to him and absently starts to undo and redo the knot of his tie that was slightly ruffled and askew from his time in the Franky House.
Sanji focuses all his attention on listening to her voice and not on the rustling of fabric in the warmth of her fingers as it brushes him through his shirt.
"The Franky Family doesn't know I'm in the same crew as Hawk. They have no reason to go after me. And as far as Robin is concerned… That won't happen to me, either."
The words make him frown, and he takes in the lines of her neck and her shoulders.
She's… tense, and worried enough that it shows on the usually smooth skin of her face, even if only slightly.
But it's not the tension he saw when tension was the only thing tight enough to keep her from breaking.
Her breathing is calm, and her shoulders are set and steady, more determined than desperate.
So he nods, hesitantly.
"Okay."
She smiles faintly, straightens his suit jacket, and lowers her hands.
"I'll be back in about an hour."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Elynna steps out of yet another seedy bar with a frustrated click of her tongue, a plastic bag dangling from her wrist with the few articles she bought from the first grocery shop she found after getting off from the Merry.
She could have been back on the ship in ten minutes, but she wanted to try and see if she could find any trace of her missing crewmate in the more… disreputable areas of the city, and she figured she might as well go alone in case the stranger who knocked into her wants to have another go at her.
So far, though, she has nothing to show in either endeavour, and her time limit is almost up, so she starts heading back towards where her crew's ship is docked.
She's pretty sure Usopp isn't going to react well to the news regarding the Merry, anyway, and she'd rather be there for it-
"Hey, sweetheart! You look lonely, wanna have some fun with u-"
"Not interested. Fuck off." She mutters absently without looking away from the ground as she raises her middle finger in the general direction of the voice.
-not to mention that even if she can't find Robin, she remembers her sister mentioning some big mess going down between the government agents and the mayor of Water Seven before the Straw Hats leave to wherever the big fight actually takes place, so she's pretty sure that-
She blinks, coming to an abrupt stop as the part of her brain that was focused on her path registers the presence of someone in front of her who doesn't seem keen on moving out of her way.
She looks up slowly, noting the lack of real muscle mass or weapons before stopping on a smile as oily as the greased back hair that hangs around the face of a boy who looks to be somewhere in his early twenties.
His smile widens, as if he thinks that she's checking him out.
She wonders if he knows how much of a bad idea it is to walk around in those streets with a loose chain around his neck when he obviously doesn't have the capability to stop anyone from strangling him with it.
"Sorry, sorry, did the 'sweetheart' make you angry? I won't use it anymore. Seriously, we're not trying to do anything bad here, we just want someone to go have a drink with us!"
She follows the finger he points to his right to see two other boys waiting against the wall who flash her a smile when she looks.
Different features, same failed bad boy vibes.
The street is empty, with only apartments and no shops or bars, although those are just around the corner.
Not that the people there would come help her.
Either the boy thinks she's an idiot, or he's on a whole other level of idiocy himself.
She looks back at him.
"See? We'll even pay for your order if you wan-"
She sidesteps him, and keeps walking.
She barely takes five steps before the boy is in front of her again, reaching out to shove her backwards.
She lets him, too busy gauging how much time she has left to make her way back to the ship from the position of the sun to listen to whatever is coming out of his mouth.
Then her back meets the wall, and her eyes fall to the three boys who are surrounding her.
The one from before is scowling, now, cheeks flushed as hard as he's gripping her wrist.
"-so now you're going to-"
"Give you some dating advice."
The three boys look at her, bewildered.
"... What?"
"First, when you're asking someone on a date, don't make it look like you're about to murder them -or worse. Second, don't bring third parties unless they're also part of the date. That's just awkward. Third," she goes on as she shoves him away to break his hold on her, "when people say not to give up on your crush, there are still limits to how persistent you can be. You might want to learn something about that."
The boy flushes even harder, lips twisting into an ugly sneer as one of his friends scoffs.
"A crush, she says."
"Has she looked into the mirror lately?" The other one snickers loudly.
She rolls her eyes.
The two boys stop laughing, and the face of one of them goes dark as he shoves the third one aside.
"Move it, bro. I'm done being nice." He growls, before reaching out to snatch her collar and shove her hard against the wall, cocking back one fist. "Think you're funny, bitch-"
"Hey!" A feminine voice calls out.
The three boys look away.
It's a mistake.
She pushes back against the grip on her collar that has gone slack with the distraction, and takes one step forward.
It's more than enough for her knee to reach the boy's crotch.
He screams a loud curse, voice breaking into something high-pitched with the pain as he releases her to bend forward.
She unfolds the leg that is still raised in the air towards the sky, and then brings her foot down on the back of his head, crushing him face-first against the cold, hard ground and sending his knees cracking there in the process.
Another member of the trio takes a step forward, mouth opening to let out something that she doesn't bother registering.
Instead she grinds her foot harder down against the skull of his friend to secure her balance, and shifts the entirety of her weight there, bending forward until her forehead touches just below her knee while her other leg lashes out behind and then above her into an arc that ends with her heel smashing her attacker's nose into a bloody, crunching pulp.
The blow strikes him out cold on the spot, and he collapses on his back right there and then.
The third boy is already running away before she even straightens up and steps off the body of the first one.
"Woah…"
She turns to face the newcomers, and blinks at the two girls standing in front of her, the both of them looking somewhere between awed and gobsmacked.
If not twins, she would bet them to be sisters, at the very least.
The only physical difference between them is that the hair of one of them is curly, while the other has straight hair, at least as far as Elynna can tell with the strange, square-like style they have both chosen.
There's an almost endearing mix of similarity and difference to their outfits, with one of them wearing a bikini top while the other wears a bikini bottom, though they seem to favour different colours.
She takes them in, and then her attention shifts to the man who's coming up behind them.
His entire appearance marks him as a weirdo.
The way he walks in a street like this as if he owns it marks him as a potentially dangerous weirdo.
"Huh."
The man tilts his head on the side as he considers the two boys at her feet.
Or at least that's what it looks like he's doing. It's a bit hard to tell with the sunglasses covering his eyes.
"We were about to come help, but looks like you have it handled. That's one hell of a kick you've got there, Sis."
"Yeah, Sis!" Green Sister perks up. "That was super cool!"
"Great job to you, Sis!" Pink Sister concurs with a bright grin and a thumbs up.
She eyes the massive size of the Franky Family's Boss' forearms as they cross over his broad chest, and then the blue star tattooed on each of them.
"... Thanks." She says eventually.
She stares at him some more, blinking pensively as she takes advantage of having him in front of her for the first time to assess him more thoroughly, now that her first impression of him has gone from pretty damn terrible to something more neutral.
Sure, she's still angry at the extent of Usopp's injuries, especially with how he got hurt over the money that was more important to him than to even Nami given that it was supposed to be used for the Merry.
But the anger is related more to the situation and much less to the people involved in it.
After all, the Franky Family were gangsters, and did what they probably always do.
They saw someone carrying money around and attacked them to take said money, except the someone in question wasn't willing to part with said money so easily, and so they beat him up some more to deter him from trying to get it back again.
Maybe they did take pleasure in hurting her crewmate, but she can't just assume that. It may just as well be based only on practical motives, the same way she usually makes sure to hurt her opponents enough that they'll be out of commission for a while when her crew is involved in a fight.
In itself, the fact that Usopp got beaten up pretty badly tells more about his personality (or rather his tenacity) than it does about those who beat him up in the first place, especially when taking into account the fact that she never actually met them.
Besides, she's pretty sure that the rest of her crew left a good part of the Franky Family in a state probably not much better than Usopp's body.
So she puts aside the memory of the result of her crew's first interaction with Franky's group, and considers everything else she knows instead.
In this city, the Franky Family sits at the top as far as anything crime-related is concerned.
And in this city, the rate of violent crimes that involve civilians is very low, although it should also be taken into consideration that Water Seven's shipwrights build ships for the Marines, and as such benefit from some measure of protection beyond that of most cities.
The Franky Family's headquarters looked pretty homey, too.
And the way the two girls' picked up his way of addressing her immediately and how he hovered behind the both of them felt almost… familial.
Not to mention that he was about to come help her.
Those elements are all quite subjective, but still-
"Know where's the closest police station I can bring these morons to?" She asks, having read somewhere that the independence from the World Government Water Seven benefited from also meant they had to come up with their own security system.
She didn't know everything Robin talked about that morning, but most of it she did hear about before coming here.
She'd never say no to hearing Robin talk about whatever topic she wants, though.
Seriously, the woman can give anyone a voice kink without even trying.
"Yeah. It's pretty far, though." Franky muses.
"And we can't… really come with you, either." Green Sister adds, hesitant and apologetic as her sister nods with a contrite smile.
Right.
Well-known gangsters.
"Ah. 'S alright." She shrugs with a yawn as she nudges aside the head of the one she stepped on, revealing his messed up face and drawing a flinching whimper from his unconscious form. "Guess I can also kill them-"
"Woah, woah, woah! Hold on for a minute, Sis!" The only (conscious) male of their gathering interrupts her with an agitated but somehow still casually authoritative wave of his arms, before he gently pushes the two sisters forward. "You two, go to the bar and call the hospital. Tell them to bring the police, too. Better go to the Blue Wave. That old hag Caterina won't tell on you if someone asks questions."
"You got it, Aniki!"
"Right away, Aniki!"
The two girls spin around, high heels clacking against the cobbled street as they disappear around the corner.
Elynna blinks at their backs.
Try and ensure that two idiotic boys get some form of punishment without involving his subordinates too much?
Not a bad answer, certainly.
Franky watches them leave over his shoulder, and then turns back to her, lifting his sunglasses to stick them in his gravity-defying mop of blue hair.
It leaves his face a lot more open, and even as an almost-smile pulls at the restrained line of his mouth, leaving a bit of a roguish impression, there's still something near… boyish about him, perhaps because of the roundness of his eyes and the thick lower lashes bordering them.
It makes for a strange contrast with his strong, angular features and the iron of what she assumes to be a prosthetic nose.
Somehow, he pulls it off.
"Don't bother with them, we'll take care of it. They should have known better than to break my rules if they were going to fool around on my turf, anyway."
She cocks an eyebrow.
"What's the rule they broke?"
"I don't do sex-related crimes. No exception, and including whatever bullshit these guys were trying to pull." He states flatly, the severe line of his eyebrows pitched low over his eyes. "We even have a deal with the police when it comes to that kind of low-lives."
Would you look at that.
A much better impression than the first one, already.
The slightest sneer twists its way along her lips into a semblance of a smile, baring just a sliver of teeth.
"Tame, but I'll take it."
"... You're pretty hardcore, Sis." He comments after a moment of silent observation.
"And you're…"
She blinks, finally registering something she dismissed at first.
"-not wearing any pants. What the hell, dude. Even Superman has more decency than that."
He only looks puzzled for a moment before his features perk up, somehow making him appear both insulted and eager.
"Hah?! What's that supposed to mean?! I'll have you know that I'm a Man, and I'm as super as anyone can get!"
His voice rolls over the words with as much enthusiasm as Luffy has when he's giving his name and adding his dream to it like it's part of his name.
It makes it easy to let the loudness of him slip around her instead of being overwhelmed by the sudden change.
"No, no. Superman. He's a superhero in a story."
He relaxes a bit at that, letting out a sniff that doesn't sound very impressed.
"Superheroes are boring. They don't survive long in the real world, anyway."
The words are said a bit too firmly to not make them personal.
She concedes the point with a shrug, not about to ask him about it, even if she remembered more about him than she actually does, which is restricted to 'he might join us later' and 'he will hopefully get us a new ship'.
"Good point. Gangsters are pretty fun, and you were willing to help me, so I guess you get all the points there."
That makes him pause, his eyes narrowing a bit as they scan down her form.
"You sure are well-informed, Sis."
She gives him a flat look in response.
"We're living in the Golden Age of Piracy. A tourist who doesn't bother to learn about the places they want to go to and the path to take to get there is a stupid tourist. A stupid tourist is a dead tourist."
He snorts, the impressive breadth of his shoulders lifting with the sound in a way that makes his skin stretch strangely.
After hours spent training with a shirtless Zoro and taking care of his wounds, she notices, but only stashes the information away to puzzle over at another time.
"And? What does this… Superman has over me?"
"He wears tights under his briefs."
There's a pause, before he gives her an incredulous look.
"What kind of weirdo does that?"
She doesn't bother to dignify that with an answer.
Although, when he says it like that, it makes it hard to tell whose outfit is the weirdest.
The conversation slips into awkward silence after that, neither of them bothering to find a new topic of conversation, but it's not long before the two sisters come back, and as soon as they stop at his sides, bracketing Franky and cheerfully informing him that they've done as he asked, he sends her a nod.
"We better get back home, now. You got a place to sleep, Sis?"
"Yeah, it's fine. See you around, I guess."
She turns without another word to start walking again, not particularly keen on being anywhere near the man when he finds out that he's the one who doesn't have a place to sleep.
"Bye, Sis!"
"See you around, Sis!"
She lifts the hand that isn't holding her grocery bag, and gives a wave over her shoulder.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Usopp breathes in, but it feels like choking on the enormity of the words that sit in the air.
"A new-" His voice is stuck in his too dry throat, and he swallows, but the saliva may as well be a rock. "A new ship?"
His voice breaks into an embarrassingly high-pitched sound, but he can't bring himself to care.
This is something that should only happen in one of his nightmares, something he can leave at the door when he wakes up in the morning and exits his room to go back to the reality where it will never happen.
Except his limbs are still aching with the confirmation of his weakness.
(He will let those gangsters throw that truth in his face
-against his skin and his bones-
a hundred times
a thousand times
if it means that this can remain just a nightmare.)
Except Luffy nods.
And it leaves Usopp to stare up at him from where he's kneeling on the floor, the silence pressing down on him like a hand forcing him to keep his head bowed.
"What do you mean, 'a new ship'?! Isn't the Merry part of the crew, too?!"
He can't-
He can't be the only one to think that, right?
He can't be the only one to remember-
(Remember Kaya and Merry's proud smiles as they entrusted the Merry to them
to them, and no one else.
Remember how old it already was and yet how new it seemed, because it was so well taken care of
because it was so loved.
Remember how Kaya and Merry chose to let them take the Merry because they thought that Luffy and his crew were worthy of it.)
But Luffy looks at him, and just presses his lips together, eyebrows furrowed down at him as if to say stop being difficult, Usopp.
The idea makes Usopp grit his teeth and look away.
Worse yet, the others stay silent.
Sure, they look sad.
But they stay silent.
And in his book, that's just not enough.
But this time around, he'll be damned if he stays silent and not enough too.
He will be enough for this, if nothing else.
So he forces himself up to his feet, even if it hurts like hell.
"Usopp-"
He glares at Chopper's attempt to make him take it easy (to make him take this sitting down with his mouth shut-), and the small reindeer falls silent.
Then he turns his glare on Luffy, whose jaw clenches in response, frustration lining his clenching fists.
Usopp sees it, and he remembers what it was like to be scared of the boy in front of him.
But he won't back down.
He won't back down on this.
(He's scared all the time, anyway.)
"So that's it?!" He snaps with a wide, violent fanning gesture of his arm, sweeping away Sanji's attempt to get them to calm down for a minute and stop saying things you don't think. "The Merry is beaten up pretty badly, and that's a good enough reason to abandon one of our crewmates?!"
Luffy glares at him, lips twisting and peeling off his teeth in a snarl.
"The shipwrights we met said-"
"But we don't know them!" Usopp explodes, cutting off his Captain.
He's barely aware of the blood that is seeping through his bandages in some places and the ache that is climbing up his shoulders with every wave of his arms, let alone of the sound of the door opening.
"And they don't know us! They don't know everything we and the Merry already went through! So what if they say that the Merry can't be repaired after just a few minutes of looking at it?! I have been taking care of it for almost a year, and I'm telling you that it can keep carrying us!"
By the time he's done Luffy's shoulders are drawn noticeably tighter, and Usopp doesn't know who made the first move, but now their faces are just a few inches apart.
"Because you think you can make a better decision?! None of us are happy about it, Usopp, but we're getting a new ship, and that's it!"
And before he thinks of it, Usopp scoffs right into his face, angry and bitter and everything else that he usually keeps to himself.
For once, it feels good to have someone he can throw all his inadequacies onto.
He just wishes it isn't the person who encouraged him to get over them in the first place.
But it just goes to show that strong people and him will never really see eye-to-eye.
"Yeah? Well I guess now I know how you treat your nakama. As soon as you think they slow you down, you'll just throw them away, right?"
For a moment, Luffy looks ready to tackle him to the ground, and Usopp braces himself for it.
Braces himself for the fact that he will lose.
He knows that.
But maybe then he'll qualify as damaged goods, too, and he'll be able to stay with the Merry.
(With the friend that he was entrusted with.
With the friend he wants to be worthy of.)
"You know what? If you really hate it that much, then you can-"
There's no warning.
Just the flash of something sailing through the air between their faces as they both jump back on instinct, and then a dull, harsh sound.
When they look, they find the still slightly vibrating hilt of a kukri, more than half of the large, long knife buried into the wood of the wall.
They both gulp, and it sounds loud in the stunned silence that stretches through the space of the room and the seconds that trickle away.
When they turn in the opposite direction, Elynna is standing in the doorway, one hand still half-raised after her throw.
Her face gives nothing away of how she feels about the situation.
"Oh, good." She says simply. "Now that I have your attention…"
Her eyes flicker to the floor at their feet, and then back up to the both of them.
"Sit."
The next moment Luffy plops himself down on the floor, arms and legs crossed as he huffs.
Usopp opens his mouth instead, intent on not letting anyone keep him from standing his ground-
But then her eyes zero in on him, and he falters.
Because she doesn't look angry.
Because she looks at him, and it feels like she knows.
(Like he has already splayed himself open to spill out everything he thinks.
Like it has all already landed in her lap.
Like she has already looked at it all and rested a hand on his shoulder.
-warmth rather than weight, link rather than chain-
Like she has already said It's okay, Hawk. I understand.)
He flinches, words slowing to a stop between his throat and his mouth.
She doesn't blink.
She's still looking at him.
In the end, he shuts his mouth, and sinks down to his knees slowly.
Elynna looks at him for a moment longer, but eventually she walks forward without giving any other reaction.
She steps between them, and keeps walking until she reaches the couch that is pressed against the wall her kukri is wedged into.
She grips the hilt of it, taking out the blade with a tug, and as she turns around to face them again she tucks it back into its scabbard, hidden under the pale purple of her loose tank top and the undyed jean of the three sizes too big shirt she's wearing over it as a jacket.
Then she lets herself fall on the couch and crosses one leg over the other and her arms over her chest, observing them silently.
Usopp is still glaring at the floor near her feet, and he still feels Luffy's anger in the stare that is digging into the side of his face, but somehow the tension emanating from the rest of the room has all but disappeared.
"Alright," Elynna says after a moment. "Let's start with you."
There's a pause, until Usopp looks up and finds her eyes back on him.
His gaze meets hers, and he straightens up unconsciously, unable to look away.
"Do you miss your home, Hawk?" She asks when she finally opens her mouth.
For a moment, he hesitates.
But it doesn't feel like something he can lie to her about.
And if she's getting ready to try and shame him for this, then it will just be another reason why he doesn't have his place here.
So he shrugs, and-
"Yeah, but so what? Don't tell me I'm the only one-"
His mouth snaps shut as horror screeches along the whole length of his suddenly rigid spine.
But it's too late.
I don't know anything about whatever is keeping me away from them. There's nothing I can do, Rain.
I gave up because I'm scared. I gave up because I won't take that risk.
Time and the silence crawl to a stilted, stifling stop, and he cringes under the dangerous intensification of Luffy's glare into physical weight against the side of his skull.
Somewhere on his right, Nami hisses out a furious breath, and he can almost feel Sanji's mouth thinning in disappointment as Zoro's presence shifts just a tiny bit away from the wall he leaned back against when Elynna entered.
(-dips just a tiny bit into violence-)
The only one who doesn't react at all is Elynna.
Her gaze doesn't flinch away from his face, and she just gives a slow, pensive blink.
Calm, instead of hurt.
(It doesn't make him feel any better.
How much time has it taken,
hearing them call their loved ones and knowing that she'll never be able to do the same,
writing the voices of people she will never hear again on paper with her own hands, just to make sure that neither Usopp or any of their crewmates will worry and ask questions and potentially put themselves in danger,
-how many of these letters ended up in the trash because the ink was blotted out by too many tears?-
telling them funny anecdotes about her friends and her family and her home and laughing along with them, even when she knew-
How much time has it taken, before it stopped hurting?
Or worse-
How much time has it taken, before she stopped noticing how much it hurt her?)
"But this-" She says instead with a wave of his hand that encompasses the whole room. "The Merry is an extension of your home, isn't it?"
Usopp flinches, and in the end he's the one who looks away, crossing his arms to hug himself uneasily.
"... Isn't the Merry everyone's home?" He mumbles eventually.
Silence answers him, stiffening as it creeps up his shoulders like rigor mortis.
But he sees Chopper nod frantically from the corner of his eyes, and breathes easier for it, until-
"Not really." His First mate answers bluntly.
His head snaps up, heart in his throat and disbelief in the tears that stick to his eyelashes, but she only shrugs in answer.
"My home is wherever you guys are. Whether it's a ship or a hotel room or a prison cell doesn't really matter to me. Though I'd rather not spend more time than necessary in a prison cell. But if the Merry is important to you, then the Merry is important."
It's not kind. At least, not in the way Usopp would like to hear.
But it's honest.
So he swallows, and responds the same way.
"It's just- This is the last gift I got from Kaya, and she… She and Merry entrusted it to us. We wouldn't have gotten this far without the Merry, and I've been taking care of her since we left-"
He stops, eyes flickering up to hers.
They're blue, dark, and a silent, cool kind of waiting that makes him feel like he can say anything.
(Because it won't change the fact that for her, he's nakama.)
"-and it's just not right for us to leave her here."
Elynna doesn't tell him that he's wrong.
She doesn't tell him that he's right, either.
Instead she just transfers the weight of her gaze to Luffy, and Usopp feels his shoulders sag, as if her attention on him was the only thing keeping him upright against the aches of his wounds now that there's not enough anger to do the job.
Barely two feet away from him, Luffy is still stubbornly scowling at the floor when Elynna calls out to him.
"Captain."
Luffy straightens up, annoyance fading away even if the frown that digs into the skin between his eyes remains.
At the same time, Usopp finds himself wincing at the reminder.
"How many times have you asked the foremen to repair the Merry?"
"... A lot. I told them that we had money and that we could replace that super important part to rebuild the Merry, but they just kept saying that the Merry as we know her won't be able to sail again."
Elynna tilts her head.
"Did they explain in detail why we should get a new ship?"
Luffy opens his mouth, but she stops him with the raise of one hand, gesturing at Nami to explain instead.
The navigator complies, stumbling hesitantly over a few terms, and when she finishes their Captain confirms with a firm nod.
"Alright." Elynna goes on. "How much do you think their word is worth, as foremen?"
Luffy frowns again, but this time it's more thoughtful than angry.
"Everyone said the Galley-La guys from Dock 1 are the best, so that's where we went."
Elynna hums, sinking further into the couch.
"Alright, then. You two are going to go cool down and think about this for a while. If you still insist on fighting after that, I won't stop you. Hermes?"
The cook pushes himself away from the wall he propped one foot against.
"Elynna-chan?"
She waves a hand in Usopp's direction.
"Can you take him to the boys' room?"
"Of course." Sanji smiles as he stops right next to Usopp.
He doesn't offer him a hand to help him stand up.
Usopp doesn't know if it's meant as an insult or not, but he prefers it that way.
"Thank you. Fang-"
"I got it. I'll bring the Captain to yours."
Elynna nods.
"Oh, and one last thing."
Usopp, who is about to step out of the room with Sanji behind him, stops to look over his shoulder and straight at his First Mate.
Her eyes sweep through the distance between where Luffy is still sitting on the floor and the doorway to meet his eyes.
"We're friends, but we're also a crew. That means that we have to follow a certain number of rules, and we can't just disregard them all simply because we're friends. Getting along as friends is one thing. Functioning as a crew is another."
After a moment of silence that makes it clear that she doesn't intend to say anything more, Sanji nudges him in the back, and he turns back around to exit the room.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Once the door closes behind Zoro and Luffy, Elynna lets her head fall against the back of the couch, reaching up to massage the bridge of her nose with a sigh.
Somehow, she's starting to hate Water Seven even more than Alabasta.
They've barely been here for a day, but she already had to deal with the only person she has ever met who might have answers about her presence in this world being an asshole who's only willing to show up to insult her.
If it keeps up, she might just throttle them as soon as she gets her hands on them instead of keeping them alive long enough to ask the questions she wants to ask.
They didn't sound like they would cooperate, anyway, so it won't be a huge loss.
Especially given the fact that they sounded pretty young. Or at least, younger than the man Doctorine talked to her about -or the woman who helped Akane.
Plenty of fish in the sea, and hopefully more amenable than this one.
On top of that, she's pretty sure Robin has made contact with those assholes from CP-whatever.
Which is just another reason to break the neck of the stupid motherfucker she wasted time on when they decided to pay her a visit with probably the worst timing ever, because now she's going to have to deal with the whole clusterfuck that is Enies Lobby when her whole Plan A was based on staying with Robin to try and prevent her from being taken there in the first place.
Well, she never put much faith in plan A to begin with, given Robin's opinion on her place within the crew and the fact that -unless they're straying from the story she knows- they are dealing with a bunch of over-powered government-licensed assassins, but still.
If the motherfucker in question is going to end up as a corpse, she might as well blame them for her problems while she's at it.
And now, she apparently has to deal with some of her crewmates getting into a dangerously tense conflict over a fucking ship.
She blows out a breath, letting her head fall and opening her eyes to stare unseeingly at the ceiling.
Okay.
She raises one hand, finger trailing along the warmed metal of the chain around her neck until she finds the locket that hangs from it.
She traces the faint engravings absently with her fingertips, and slices away the thick layer of confused disdain that still sticks to her mind, doing her best to push it out of her mind.
There's no point obsessing over it.
If she doesn't understand now how Usopp can get so riled up about the Merry, she probably won't understand any time soon, and it doesn't matter.
What matters is that Usopp is getting riled up, which makes the ship's sorry state an issue that must be addressed.
And Usopp seems to consider the Merry as a friend, which means she can follow his reasoning and understand it from a logical point of view, no matter how absurd it seems to her emotionally speaking.
That, in turn, means she can help, and that's the only important thing to her.
But while she predicted that losing the Merry would be a hard blow for him if they actually ended up losing it, she didn't think it would go that far.
Because she's pretty sure that Luffy and Usopp were ready to seriously fight each other when she came in earlier.
Maybe even to the point of putting Usopp's spot in the crew in the balance.
And that's-
On Luffy's part, she's almost certain that he was just too riled up.
Her Captain is possessive about the people he chooses to keep by his side. He's not the type to let any of them go, no matter the circumstances.
She knows that better than anyone.
(Because long before she met him, her sister already told her about a boy who goes to war for his brother, his friend, his nakama,
despite his worn down body, despite the waning beats of his ever burning heart.
Because long after she forgot the exact sound of her sister's voice, she lost herself on an island, and then lost herself further in daydreams of how good it would be to be dead.
It's not the same kind of enemy nor the same kind of war, but he dragged her back home all the same, and spares no effort in making sure that he replaces all the gaps in her head and the cracks in her heart with himself.)
He's not the type to let Usopp go.
Unless Usopp himself makes it clear that he doesn't want to stay anymore.
And when she opened that door, Luffy was angry and frustrated and sad.
But Usopp was more than that.
(He looked furious and desesperate and heartbroken.
He looked tired of fighting and ready to lose where he stood.
He looked like he felt too much and thought too little.
She knows what part of it feels like, at least.
-and for her, sometimes, it feels like it encompasses all her life
it feels like keeling over before going down
it feels like agony before death-
Usopp is not her.
But he could do something irreversible all the same.)
She closes her eyes, and sighs again.
At least her bout of trauma-fueled stupidity from three weeks before is going to benefit Hawk.
That's about the only positive effect of the whole thing.
She's working through various arguments and all the details she remembers noticing about their sniper throughout the last few weeks when she feels the couch dip under someone's weight on her left, prompting her to open her eyes.
Nami, who just collapsed on the couch next to her, lets her body tilt sideways with a loud groan, landing with her head on Elynna's lap before she kicks off her shoes to curl herself onto the sofa.
Slowly, Elynna uncrosses her legs to make it easier on the other girl's neck, and the navigator lets out a hum of appreciation at the gesture.
"You okay?" Elynna inquires as she starts to trail her fingers over her back in nonsensical patterns.
"Now? Yeah." Her best friend mumbles against her thigh. "It's a good thing you were there, though. It was getting-"
She stops.
Breathes.
"It could have been bad."
"I know."
What she doesn't know is whether or not this also happens in her sister's story.
Because if it doesn't, does that mean that somehow, her presence has caused Usopp to-
She scowls at the ceiling, and bites at the inside of her cheek like it's the hot, gleeful twist of sudden anxiety that is churning in her stomach.
This is stupid.
She's not the only thing that matters in the world, damnit.
She can't be responsible for everything.
Besides, this is a moot point.
Whether or not Usopp reached this point in the story doesn't matter, because this isn't a story.
This is life, and she doesn't intend to let it follow the story.
(She doesn't know how it ends.
But she knows it ends without Ignis.
And while she can't promise herself that she will stop that from happening,
she sure as hell can refuse herself the possibility of accepting that it will happen.)
"It could still be bad." She adds, because she doesn't make miracles, especially where two stubborn-to-the-point-of-stupidity boys are concerned.
Eyes closed, Nami blindly curls an arm around herself to reach for where Elynna's hand has settled on her ribs, clasping it between her own hands to cradle the arm to her chest.
Elynna looks down, watching the way the vivid strands of the navigator's hair fall across her face, fluttering with every puff of air that comes out of her mouth.
She raises her free hand, gently raking back the strands behind Nami's ear, absently noticing that they're getting to the length where her best friend usually asks for Usopp to cut her hair.
"I know." Nami breathes, the words fanning across the skin of Elynna's wrist. "It wouldn't be your fault if it happened. They make their own decisions."
"... No. It wouldn't be. But they'll make their own decisions after I will have done my best."
(And even if she still doesn't believe for sure that she's the best First Mate the Straw Hats could ever have, because she's not even the best First Mate she could ever be, can still do better-
Still, when she looks back, she thinks that things could be so much worse, too, that she have done so much less, could have acted when she didn't and be more or less of so many things-
And still.
Despite all that, and if the people she trusts more than she's ever trusted anyone have yet to kick her out, have done so much to keep her where she is-
Then really, she thinks that she can be pretty damn proud of everything she's done.
Of how far she has come.
Of herself, most of all.)
She glances to the right upon registering the sound of hooves against wood, watching as the four-legged form of Chopper approaches them.
And then he reaches them, and plops his head right on top of her knees.
Elynna blinks, distinctly reminded of her grandparents' dog coming to beg for food and affection.
Nami opens her eyes, narrowing a glare in the direction of the fur of Chopper's cheek that barely grazes her nose.
"So you're going to go see them again, right?" He mumbles.
She reaches out to rest her free hand on his forehead, rubbing away the frown that is etched under his fur.
"Yeah. Even if I told them to go cool down, I can't guarantee that they're not riling themselves up in their rooms. 'Sides, it might be easier to talk them down from doing something stupid if they're alone."
Chopper hums, the noise interruped by a sniffle as he settles closer to her, eyes still a bit teary.
"... Usopp isn't going to leave, right?"
She pauses in her ministrations to give him a long look, and then lets her head fall back on the back of the couch as she moves to caress the fur behind his ears.
"You know I can't promise you that."
She feels the muscles of his chest seize against her legs with the wounded noise that escapes him, but Nami reaches out bop him on the nose with a faint scowl.
"Don't waste your tears on boys, Chopper. They don't deserve it."
Elynna snorts.
"What's this? A post break-up girls' night?" She mumbles towards the ceiling.
"Watch it, Lynna. You make an easy target." Nami threatens her with a playful squeeze of the hand she's still holding.
"And you're especially ticklish around your ribs."
"... Don't you dare."
"Leave my hand out of this, then."
"Anyway," Nami goes on with a huff as she looks back at Chopper. "Lynna was right to point out that there's a difference between crewmates and friends."
"... How will that help to keep Usopp from leaving?" The reindeer asks with a confused look.
"It won't. But it means that even if Hawk leaves the crew, we don't have to never see him again. We can stay friends. And by that I mean that we'll harass him via Den Den Mushi."
"... But what if he doesn't answer because he hates us?"
"We'll sic Kaya-san on him." Elynna answers with no hesitation whatsoever.
"... Wow. That's mean."
"Isn't that your kink?"
"Are you trying to seduce me?"
"I don't know. Are you seduced?"
"I'm not answering that."
"I'll take it as a yes."
"Hey! Don't just decide that on your own!" Nami tries to scowl over her laughter as she suddenly twists to send the full force of her glare towards Elynna.
"Ack! Nami! You almost hit me!" Chopper whines.
"Good! You're hogging my space, anyway!"
"I wasn't!"
"For your information, the space you're both talking about is part of my body, so it's technically mine. I hope you're ready to pay the rent, by the way."
Nami laughs.
Chopper gives her a horrified look.
"What?" She asks flatly.
"Is- Is there a disease that makes people swap bodies?"
"... I didn't swap bodies with Rain, Hebi. She just rubbed off on me after all this time."
"Really? Does that mean I'm going to become like this, too?" The reindeer asks with an even more horrified look.
Elynna snorts.
Nami elbows her in the ribs, just a little miffed.
"I take offense to that."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
The door to his room opens, and Usopp looks up, even though he already knows who is coming in.
The door closes again behind his First Mate, who takes one look at him, and leans back against the door.
Silence settles back down between them.
Usopp looks away, and fidgets with the rubber band that somehow found its way in his hands, unsure of what he wants to say or should say, because everything he said and heard has been looping through his mind, but it all draws a blank against the smell of the room around him and the knowledge that he's going to have to tell Kaya and Merry that they chose the wrong people to entrust their ship to.
He's almost forgotten that someone else is in the room with him when Elynna finally speaks up.
"You're not the Merry, Hawk. You know that, right?"
And he flinches, hard, shoulders drawing tighter around him and back curling, as if to try and step back from a blow to the jugular.
Sometimes, he kind of hates that the girl who is standing just a few feet away from him is his First Mate.
How is it that she can somehow always, always tell what is plaguing his thoughts, and yet she went an entire year without him even suspecting that she's grieving her whole life?
Her body.
Her friends.
Her family.
Her safety.
Her innocence, in some ways.
Her humanity, though as far as he's concerned she's much more human than a number of the people he's met since he left his island.
Sure, he could tell that something was wrong with her, something big, even.
Sure, he knows that her self-esteem tends to be wobbly at best.
But when she pushed them to stay in contact with their home and told them that she couldn't?
When she mentioned anecdotes from before she met Luffy?
It never made him stop and think something isn't right. Not in the way his other crewmates did.
Even the way she said she met Luffy, despite its absurdity, never gave him much pause.
Elynna…
Elynna was always just Elynna, to him.
His First Mate.
He never really thought of her before, except to tell himself that if a former, normal civilian can be his First Mate, then he can be on this crew as well.
And now he wonders-
What about Luffy?
Zoro?
Sanji?
Robin?
How much do they hide?
How much do they hurt?
How much do they grieve?
(And it's wrong.
Twisted, and sick, and all kinds of wrong
But he also wonders-
Is this the answer to his question?
Is it because he didn't suffer enough, that he's still this weak?
And he will never ask, of course, because just thinking it makes him want to apologise, to ask for Zoro to beat him up on top of it for good measure, maybe.
But still it eats at him.
Circles in his mind while he's trying to sleep.
Circles in his stomach while he's trying to eat.
The knowledge of his weakness already hurts so much.
How much more does he have to hurt before he'll be rid of it?)
More than he hates how his First Mate can see through him, though, Usopp loves that someone can.
That he doesn't have to use energy explaining things and wondering if she will understand.
(It's so hard, already,
to make himself believe that speaking up does not make him weaker.
But after all, whether the words are thought or spoken, the truth does not change.)
"Maybe not now. But what about the day when I won't be enough?"
"It's a day that can come for everyone, Hawk."
He blinks at the floorboards between his feet.
When he risks a tentative glance her way, he tells himself it's because his back hurts after all this time spent sitting in his hammock all hunched over himself, and not because he looks for reassurance.
(For all the things he wants to hear but can't say to himself.)
She meets his eyes, crouched down to rest her chin on her knees, arms circling her folded legs loosely.
"Do you remember Loguetown?" She tells him, voice a whisper as her eyes slide away from his. "Even Sea King can't entirely control his future, no matter how much he believes that he can and will be the King of Pirates. He can't guarantee that he won't find himself cornered with no way out to take with his own strength. He can't guarantee that his strength will always be enough, because we'll meet so many people who can kill him, or whose abilities are the worst match possible for his. Crocodile destroyed him in their first match, and when he fought Aokiji… Well, I don't think it really counted as a fight for Aokiji in the first place, and in terms of skills, you or Rain would probably do better against him."
That's when Usopp chokes on his own spit, bringing her eyes back to him as his jaw unhinges in shock.
"What did you just-" He swallows, and gapes. "Are you insane?"
She blinks at him, looking a bit taken aback by his reaction.
And then it almost seems like she wants to laugh, which leaves him entirely unprepared for what comes out of her mouth.
"I should think so. Suicidal tendencies aren't usually taken to be a sign of perfect mental stability."
The words startle him so badly he almost falls out of his hammock, mouth opening and closing as he abruptly looks away from her.
(-as if he could blink and she would suddenly look as bitter and fractured and lost as she did
when her screams were breaking her voice and her drenched body looked like she got lost in her own tears
shattering and holding on through it and how it seemed painful enough for her to want to shatter against the rocks down that cliff-)
"What are you-" He stops for a moment, just to swallow the anger that just slipped out, because the only one he should be feeling angry at is whoever brought her so much pain in the first place, or maybe himself for never seeing it.
Being angry at her is just…
It's just wrong.
(It's even more wrong when he knows he's one of the reasons why suicide remained just a thought for her until that stupid seahorse got in the way,
when he knows that if she counts all her reasons, she will still have fingers left over.)
"It's not funny. Don't talk about it like that." He eventually whispers, voice pale with the same fear that thumped so loud in his veins he couldn't even hear himself think when he saw how serious Zoro was about needing to find her.
"Hey."
He blinks, and suddenly there's a light flick in his forehead, prompting him to look up quick enough to give himself a whiplash as he registers the fact that Elynna is now crouching down in front of him.
"I won't joke about it again if it makes you uncomfortable. It's just that you've been tiptoeing around me since it happened, so I figured I would let you know that you can talk about it. It doesn't bother me-" His jaw falls slack again at this, earning him a dry look. "Hawk, stop looking at me like that. Everyone deals in their own way, and it just so happens that apparently, it helps me to dump the bullshit I deal with on you guys and Ignis."
Usopp narrows his eyes further in doubt until it looks like he's squinting.
"Then why do you tell us so little?"
"Because we all deal with a lot of shit compared to the friends I used to have, and the problems I have now are obviously a lot bigger than the problems I used to have. Makes it a bit harder to convince myself that I'm not going to burden you with that stuff, but I'm trying."
Usopp swallows as he looks down at the rubber band stretched between his fingers, suddenly unable to hold her gaze any longer, or the you can try it with me if you want, I'll keep it a secret written there.
Absently, he twists the rubber band into a star-shaped web, before letting it fly off his fingers.
"... Why do you think we'd be better matched against him?" He eventually asks as he keeps his eyes stuck to the place where it landed.
"Well, ignoring the fact that he can change the composition of his body, because we don't know the counter for that-"
"Maybe because there isn't one."
"I doubt any power is that absolute, and I was going to add that seastone probably works. But anyway, you and Rain are a lot more versatile in the possible effects of your attacks, which gives you more chance to effectively counter elemental attacks like his, and you're also long-distance fighters. Against someone as strong and experienced as him, it's definitely a plus over the rest of us, who specialise in close-ranged and hand-to-hand combat-"
"Not you."
She pauses.
"Not you." He repeats. "Anymore."
He pinches his mouth into a thin line when the silence keeps going, and looks back at her.
His First Mate blinks at him slowly.
And then she smiles, a thin little smile that is both thoroughly amused and cuttingly sly.
"Except me." She corrects smoothly. "But my aim will never be as good as yours, so I'm still limited to mid-range attacks. This doesn't change my point. In terms of abilities, I think you and Rain are a better match for Aokiji than the rest of us."
"Sure." He scoffs bitterly. "But for everything else…"
"It's things you can change." She shrugs, waving away his protest. "You reacted as fast as me and Sea King to save Robin. And if you're about to point out that you ran away, it was the smartest thing to do. Even if we fought him all at the same time, we can't beat him at our current level, and thawing Robin out was more important than fighting someone who's out of our league."
His mouth clicks shut, words stolen out of his lungs before he could voice them out, and deflates.
In front of him, Elynna sighs, and suddenly shifts forward until she's balanced on the very tip of her toes, hands reaching out to spread across his cheeks and keep his eyes on hers.
"What are you-"
"You're not the Merry, Hawk. The situation is very different."
"No it's not-"
"It is." She cuts him off firmly. "Because in your case it's about weakness, and even more about your lack of self-esteem, both of which can be improved. But the Merry is dying, Hawk. No one can do anything about that. Not Hebi. Not Sea King. Not even you."
The tears come before he can think to stop them, his throat closing up with something heated like a silenced scream.
His tears trickle over the fingers splayed over his skin, but Elynna doesn't look away from him.
It almost looks like she understands, but she's not crying like he is, doesn't even seem sad about what she just said, eyes blue and dark and flat and so awfully calm and-
Maybe it's because he's embarrassed.
Maybe it's because he wants someone to look like they hate this just as much as he does-
Maybe he's just an awful person.
Whatever the reason is, the words tumble out of his mouth all the same.
"You can only say that because you don't think of the Merry as a friend." He whispers, faint as if he's hearing himself talk from outside his own body, the horror growing as the words keep falling out, like in those nightmares where he keeps yelling as his body to move and it just… doesn't.
Except Elynna doesn't back away, doesn't look away.
Instead she just… smiles.
A bit sad, and a whole lot amused, and-
"Well, that's true. We both know I wouldn't be functioning nearly this well if we were talking about someone I love. But you're cute if you think this is going to stop me from continuing that conversation, sweetheart."
Usopp's mouth drops, and he can't tell if he's more outraged by the audacity she has to use her flirting vocabulary on him in these circumstances or by the ease with which she just glosses over what he said like there isn't even anything to forgive.
…
Probably both.
Definitely both.
"I might not consider the Merry as a friend, but I know you do, and that's exactly why I just told you this. So think about it, okay?"
He nods dumbly.
She flashes him another hint of a smile, patting his cheek affectionately before she places her hands on his knees to push herself back to her feet.
She's almost out of the room, Sanji opening the door to let her out when he calls out her name, and she stops, looking over her shoulder with a raised eyebrow.
"Can I… Can I go out for a bit? I- I can't think in here." He admits thickly.
She considers him for a moment before her eyes roam around the room.
(He doesn't know if she sees what he does.
The noises of the old, beloved, fragile wood of the Merry creaking in places.
The smell of home, and of the sea from yet another leak that has probably opened somewhere during the night.
The scars from all the wounds inflicted on the Merry since she took them all on board, some of which they inflicted upon herthemselves, all of which he wasn't able to heal properly.
He doesn't know, but when she looks back at him, her eyes are soft.
Warm.)
Then she smiles again, the curve of it is mellowed into something slight by the sheer amount of affection that melts from the hollow of it.
It feels like he just got punched in the chest.
"Sure, Hawk. Would you mind if one of us followed you from afar, though? I don't think we can say for sure that the fight with the Franky Family is really over, so I'd rather no one goes out alone. Unless you have another idea to help us make sure you're safe."
… Right.
There's that.
For a moment, the wounds under his bandages throb louder than the wounds in his thoughts, and he shakes his head.
"No. It's fine if someone follows me as long as I have the space to think."
Elynna nods her thanks.
"Hermes?"
"Of course, Elynna-chan. We'll try to be back before night falls."
"Good."
She reaches the door frame, about to step out when her name slips out of his mouth once again.
When she turns around, he swallows.
"Thank you."
I'm sorry.
This time, her smile is more of a grin, and he feels distinctly like the canary that just opened the door to its room and invited the cat inside and then locked the freaking door.
He freezes, narrowing his eyes at his First Mate.
It does absolutely nothing to stop her, and she ignores it like it's a gentle breeze and proceeds to drop the bomb on him.
"No problem, Hawk. Gotta live up to my title of best First Mate ever, right?"
Fine! I'll believe that I'm a good pirate, but only when you admit that you're the best First Mate ever! There!
Usopp gapes.
Elynna's grin turns downright smug with an additional layer of thick satisfaction, and she walks away without a backward glance.
Usopp turns to Sanji, still gaping.
The cook opens the door a bit wider in a silent command to hurry the hell up, and flashes him a closed-eyed smile that says yes, I remember what you told her and no, I won't let you pretend like she didn't sound as if she believed it, so you better make sure you fulfill your end of the bargain.
Mind wiped blank, Usopp lets himself fall backward, only to windmill frantically when he realises he's still sitting in his hammock, and about to fall off it.
Then he does fall off it, and finds himself sprawled on his back, legs still hanging from the hammock and back hurting from the impact.
He stares at the ceiling, and groans.
Shit.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Zoro looks up as soon as Elynna closes the door of the boys' room, and watches her cross the deck silently.
"Did he break anything?" She asks once she stops at his side, eyes stuck to the door of the room where their Captain is.
Zoro's shoulders lift in an amused shrug.
"Didn't check."
"If one of Rain's maps is damaged, I'm blaming it on you." She replies dryly.
"That witch will always blame me over you."
"True."
"I'll just take it out on you tomorrow morning." He retorts with a look that tells her that any attempt at twisting his words into some kind of innuendo will also be retaliated against in the form of additional training exercises.
She snorts.
"Have some respect for your superiors, Fang."
"I do."
She blinks and looks up at him, a bit startled, but he says nothing else.
He doesn't look away either.
Eventually, she flashes him a fleeting but thankful smile, and steps into the girls' room.
Once at the bottom of the stairs, she finds Luffy sprawled over the bed, the same frown he had when he left earlier still etched into his forehead.
He doesn't look away from the ceiling.
Her eyes flicker over the room, but it doesn't seem like he's done anything else than lie there.
Which, in itself, is a pretty bad sign.
She shrugs off the thought, though, and walks up to the bed to let herself fall on her back right next to him.
She lays there, staring at the ceiling and listening to Luffy's breathing as she waits to hear what he might want to say.
It takes almost five minutes before Luffy finally moves, lifting his straw hat off his head to hold it high above his head, his frown deepening the longer he stares at it.
"The Merry is Usopp's treasure." He says suddenly, lips pinched with something like disappointment in himself, and she scowls faintly at the sight before forcing her eyes away with a clench of her jaw.
"Guess so."
He sighs, simmering anger and a defeated realisation all in one.
"I'm gonna apologise to him."
She sighs through her nose, rolls on her side, and props her cheek on her hand to look down at him.
"For what?"
"For getting angry at him when he's losing his treasure." He answers, frowning a bit harder at the ceiling.
"That's stupid." She says, and adds a flick to his forehead for good measure.
He doesn't even bother to act like it hurts him the way he usually does, and turns to face her with a scowl for the first time since she came in.
She can't help the way the nails of the hand supporting her head dig into her skull at being on the receiving end of his genuine irritation, but she thinks back to that moment when the two boys' friendship seemed ready to break apart, as thin as the distance between their readiness to fight each other with a violence of intent that was never there before-
and she forces herself past the cringing anxiety that is clenching around her stomach.
"Why did he make you angry, Sea King? Because he was sad over losing the Merry? Because he didn't want to understand that there's nothing more that you can do about it? Because he said things that hurt you?"
His scowl fades away from his features at that, his body sinking back into the mattress.
"The last two." He eventually huffs.
She hums pensively, gently erasing the last of his frown with a press of her fingers along the lines of it.
"In my opinion, you can apologise for getting angry over his denial. None of us are a hundred percent ready to accept the price we might have to pay as pirates, but Usopp is definitely less ready than you."
He nods, sullen but mostly pensive.
"But as far as the last one is concerned, I think he should be the one apologising, not you."
"He just said it because he was hurt, though."
"And? You also did and said things you didn't mean because you were hurt and angry. I'm not saying he doesn't have a right to be hurt, I'm saying that some of the stuff he said hurt you, which means it matters, so he should address it. Just my opinion, though."
He hums, turning to throw an arm around her and press his face against the curve of her throat.
The corners of her lips twitch at the ticklish feeling of his hair under her chin, but she chases away the reflexive squeal by biting down on her lips, and winds her free arm around his shoulders securely.
"The questions you asked me… Do you think I should have explained that to him?" He mumbles.
"Well, I would say it's always good to explain why you take a decision, especially difficult and important ones like today. But I'm not sure it would have helped, really. When you feel strongly about something, you're less likely to listen to arguments that tell you otherwise. I mean, look at me. Robin clearly remembered me, and there was no reason to think that you would never find your memories again. I'm supposed to be smart, but it didn't keep me from being really stupid and skipping over all of that."
"And trying to leave us." He adds firmly, his hold on her tightening fiercely until there's no space left between them.
"That, too."
He pauses for several heartbeats, and then-
"Did you find something?"
It takes her a moment to understand what he's referring to, and she hums.
"I think I saw another one like me, but I only met them long enough for them to be an asshole."
She can almost feel the way his forehead wrinkles into a frown at the idea.
"We can help you find him." He offers, although it sounds more as if he's offering to give the person in question a beating.
"Nah. This isn't really at the top of my priority list at the moment. I'd rather focus on Hawk and Robin."
"... Alright."
She's started counting his breathing cycles and reached twelve when he speaks again.
"How is Usopp doing?"
Her arm tightens momentarily around his shoulders.
"I don't really know. He's calmed down, though. He went out to think before I came here."
Luffy hums shortly to show her he's listening, and after a few seconds starts to wriggle against her until she obligingly takes off her arm, leaving him free to roll away and off the bed.
Elynna carefully pushes away the hat he took off before going in for a hug, and spreads her limbs over the expanse of the bed, turning to be on her back again.
Her Captain raises a hand to his hair with a jerky, uneasy movement before his eyes light up at the sight of his own treasure.
Once the hat is safely back on his head, he plops himself down into the chair next to the desk that his female crewmates share, casually sending his sandals flying to sit cross-legged.
Then he lets out a heavy sigh, and body sagging forward until his face knocks into said desk.
"I wish we could take the Merry with us on the new ship, but we would need a really big ship for that."
"... Sea King."
"Or we could take some pieces with us!" He perks up, brightening as his own idea and losing his smile as fast as it came before he faceplants into the desk again. "But if we break pieces from the Merry Usopp will just get mad…"
"Sea King, shut up and come here."
He straightens up with an excited smile as he recognises the tone of his First Mate's voice, the firmness there that overlies an edge of anticipation.
He's never been left unsatisfied whenever that tone comes up.
So he swivels in his seat, stretching his arms to reach for her.
Except he only grabs onto her shoulder and her thigh, and so instead they both fly towards each other as he knocks over the chair and yanks her off the bed at the same time.
Only their quick reflexes stop them from actually knocking into each other, but they still hit the floor pretty hard, and Elynna groans out a few choice words at the impact.
"Sorry, Ann!" Her obviously unaffected Captain laughs. "I got exci-"
He squawks as she wrestles him into a headlock, curling a leg around the both of his to stop his flailing.
"Stop talking, and look." She hisses through the pleased smile that digs the first hint of her dimples into her cheeks.
She points at a spot on their ceiling, then at another a few moments later.
He blinks repeatedly, eyes navigating from one to the other.
And then it clicks, his own smile widening into something huge and bright and loud.
He bats away the loose hold she has on him, rolling over to his knees and hovering over her as he looks down into her eyes.
"We can-"
"Yup." She confirms, and now her dimples are clearly there as her smile slips into something of a smirk, matching the smug glint in her eyes.
He beams again, and flops down on her where he proceeds to wrap her in another hug.
"You're the best, Ann!"
"We're the best, you mean." She chuckles in his ear. "You gave me the idea, after all. Hawk is damn lucky to have us."
"Wait, how-"
"First off, get off me. And find me some paper… Not the paper Rain uses for her maps."
Luffy is scrambling to his feet when Zoro opens the door, stepping into the room with a frown.
"What the hell are you guys doing-"
He grunts in surprise, taking a step back when Elynna suddenly crosses the distance between them, launching her arms behind his neck to yank him into a hug as well just for the hell of it, the relief of something finally going somewhat right since the day began whooshing out of her in a short bout of breathless laughter.
The swordsman barely catches himself on the doorframe when Luffy runs up to them, stretching his arms to accommodate his two crewmates as he launches himself against them.
"What the fu-" Zoro sputters at the sudden increase in weight. "Get off me, you-"
Elynna breaks the hug, forcing Luffy to step back in the process, and then firmly pushes her other crewmate into stepping out of the room.
"Alright, celebrations are over. We've got work."
"Sorry, Zoro!" Luffy laughs. "It's a secret mission with just Ann and me!"
And then the door slams into the swordsman's face.
He blinks at it incredulously for a moment, and turns around to stomp away, muttering absurdly high numbers of reps for every exercise he intends to have Elynna do during their next training session.
He might just drag Luffy into it as well, because like hell being his superiors gives them the right to push him around.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
The sun is setting in the place where clouds and sea meet when Usopp comes back, the colour of the sky still a few shades lighter than complete night under the veil of gold of the dying sunlight.
He stops a few feet away from the Merry, and watches his Captain jump down to meet him on equal ground as the rest of their crewmates watch from the railing, Sanji having joined them as soon as they arrived.
Usopp shuffles, feeling the weight of Luffy's eyes on him but unable to meet them.
He spent the whole way back working on scripts of what he wants to say and mumbling bits of it under his breath to try and find what works best, but now that he's here the silence around them seems to crawl into his lungs and steal air and voice alike as his mind blanks out.
It's when he chances a peek, trying to see if his Captain is still angry or not and hoping very strongly for the latter so he can use the knowledge as a crutch to compensate for his slipping courage, that he catches a glimpse of Luffy opening his mouth to talk first.
He doesn't have the time to think of plans or to find the right words.
The only thing he has time for is to make sure his Captain doesn't speak first, whether to say something nice or to kick him out.
So he folds himself into a full-out bow, closes his eyes tight, and opens his mouth.
The words tumble out faster than he can process them or order them, as if his heart is trembling just behind his lips.
"I'm sorry, Captain. I… I already knew that the Merry couldn't… stay with us anymore. I just didn't want to accept it, because she's from home and- and I was supposed to take care of her, but I failed. I failed, and I should have accepted that, instead of putting us all in danger."
He stops, but only silence greets him.
So he takes in a loud breath to break it, and keeps going.
"I know that a Captain can't always have easy decisions to make, and I know that you really like the Merry, too. I was angry and- no, wait. I'm still angry, and I'm still scared and a whole lot of other things, but that's no excuse. I shouldn't have blamed you. Even if I wasn't there, I know you did your best. So I'm sorry I said what I said. I'm the reason why we couldn't save the Merry, so-"
A hand shoves at his head, making him yelp as he stumbles back in an attempt to keep his balance, only to fail and fall on his ass instead.
He sputters at the impact and looks up, but Luffy is still standing at the same spot he was in at the beginning.
Except now he doesn't just look serious, he's frowning.
"I don't accept your apology." He says suddenly, crossing his arms with a mulish scowl.
"... What?"
"It's not your fault we're going to lose the Merry. You did everything you could to not lose the money, so you have no apologies to make about that. And you took care of her as best as you could, but you're our sniper, not our carpenter, Usopp."
Usopp sniffles, but sits up more properly, rubbing the dirt sticking to his sweaty palms on his pants as he gives a slow nod.
Luffy screws his hat further down on his head until it shadows his eyes.
"Even if the Merry is a nakama, I still broke a lot of stuff no matter how many times you told me to be careful, and we got into a lot of fights, too. Kaya and Merry even told us that she was old and not really suited for pirates. It's not really anyone's fault that the Merry can't keep going, so I'm not going to accept your apology for that."
"... I'm still sorry for saying all that awful stuff to you, though."
"And I'm sorry for not being more…" He pauses, brows furrowing in a way that makes it look like he's trying really hard to find the right word and it's kind of hurting his brain. "Patient."
Usopp snorts, the sound wet through the tears he's started to cry.
"You're never patient, dumbass. I wasn't even sure you knew the word until now."
Luffy huffs.
Then he looks up and right into Usopp's eyes.
He's crying, too.
"We have to get a new ship." He tells him.
Usopp closes his eyes, swallows, and opens them again to look at the figurehead of their ship, before meeting his Captain's gaze.
"I know." He says without looking away.
Luffy smiles through his tears, and suddenly his arm stretches through the space between them to hold out a hand.
"Then get back here already, you idiot."
Usopp chuckles wetly, and clasps his hand with his own.
"Don't call The Great Usopp an idiot, idiot."
Nami's contemptuous sniff and muttered men is deftly ignored when Luffy reaches for the railing with his other hand.
Usopp, who was wiping away his tears, freezes upon seeing that, digging his heels into the ground, even knowing how futile it is.
"No. No. Luffy, I'm serious, don't you dare-"
"Shishishishishi!"
The next second they're flying towards the rest of their crew, followed by Usopp's high-pitched shriek.
Nami and Chopper jump in Sanji's arms with a scream of their own, and Elynna and Zoro both step to the side to watch the duo bowl over the others as they all land hard into a pile of limbs that Usopp is -somehow- at the bottom of.
Zoro sends a mocking glance at Sanji for his inability to avoid the combo attack, but the cook is too busy appreciating Nami's hold on him and fussing over her -despite the fact that she's too busy angrily yelling at Luffy to really hear him.
Elynna blinks down at the mess of limbs, and then steps up to her crewmates and lets herself fall into a sprawl on top of them.
"I win."
"We know you're the heaviest, Lynna, you didn't have to prove it!"
"Nami-chan!"
"You don't have to hide it, Rain. I know how much you love being below me."
"Argh!"
"Ow! Not the nails in the leg, Nami! It hurts!"
"See if I care! You deserve it for getting us here in the first place, dumbass!"
"Stop… moving… damnit-" Usopp wheezes.
"Alright," Elynna cuts blandly through the screaming match she initiated, "what do you want to do, boys?"
"Get off… me… to start-"
"Hmm. And after that?" The First Mate prompts as she inspects her nails without moving an inch.
"Get… off."
Elynna smirks, but relents, and watches her crewmates untangle themselves from each other.
"So?" She starts again with a raised eyebrow at Luffy and Usopp.
"Usopp can decide!" Luffy tells them with a broad smile. "He loves the Merry the most, so he can decide."
The sniper slouches when they all turn to look at him, gaze shifting away from theirs with a wince.
"Could we… move most of our things to a hotel or something, and say goodbye to the Merry tomorrow? I don't want to think about packing while we're doing it. It doesn't have to be long or anything, but just-"
"Alright guys! Grab your things, we're moving out!"
"Let me finish, damnit!"
Luffy laughs as he marches towards his room, not paying any attention to the repetitive punches Usopp lands on his shoulder from where he's walking at his side.
Elynna smothers a smile with a roll of her eyes, and turns towards Nami.
"Can you take care of my things?"
"Sure."
"And keep Hermes busy."
"Why?"
"Because he'll try to boss the boys around, Fang will get pissed, and a lot of things will be broken. Also, I need my beauty sleep."
"That-" The navigator blinks, and sighs. "Yeah, fair. What are you going to do?"
"Boss the boys around in his place."
Nami shoves her away lightly with a laugh.
"Have fun!"
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Quite logically, it's hard to find a hotel room for seven people when a number of the townspeople who live in the lower rungs of the city have booked rooms for the duration of the Aqua Laguna.
And that's without mentioning everything they're lugging around.
Of course, that doesn't really matter, because as any self-respecting pirate crew (that includes in its ranks a very tight-fisted treasurer), they simply break into two empty rooms, and after Chopper, Nami and Elynna set down their things, they join their crewmates in their own room.
"I don't like this town." Luffy huffs with a frustrated cross of his arms as soon as they're all gathered around the table. "It looks cool, but there's so many annoying people that we don't have time to have fun."
"... That's just because you beat your personal record of how much time it took you to get us all involved in some kind of mess." Sanji drawls.
Their Captain blinks at him several times, nonplussed.
"... So I'm number one, right?"
The cook rolls his eyes, somehow perfectly synchronised with the sniper in the movement.
"Whatever." Usopp huffs before he turns to Chopper and Elynna. "Where is Robin, anyway? Please tell me she didn't decide to sleep in the bookshop or something."
Sanji winces, catching the way Chopper's entire body slumps downward with the kind of sad resignation that is frail and curdled like shame, and how Elynna's whole countenance turns stony even while her face doesn't move an inch.
"We think she's been kidnapped."
The words run through the rest of the crew like a jolt and a dose of adrenaline, tension jumping through muscles as confusion tightens their faces into apprehension, prompting him to relay what little they know.
He's barely done when Zoro raises a dubious eyebrow with a scoff.
"You just saw her walk around with someone. How do you know that she's been kidnapped? She could just as well have betrayed us. We don't even know anything about her."
"Cut it out, you moron. Robin-chan-"
The growling threat under the thread of Sanji's voice is cut short by the hand that stops him from leaning further forward over the table.
"If this happened right after she joined us, I would tend to agree with you, Fang. As it is now, I don't think she would willingly leave us without a word."
The steely grey of his eyes narrows onto Elynna's face at her words.
Because he barely interacted with the historian on a one-on-one basis, careful to maintain some distance just in case his First Mate got too invested in her own game, and so he knows, in a different way but just as well as she does, that the Nico Robin who joined them is different from the one he greeted with a nod that morning.
(Saw the way she lurched forward against restraints of her own making while Elynna screamed herself to pieces in front of them,
as if she wanted nothing more than to reach out and help and yet had no idea how to.)
But Elynna rarely speaks with that degree of confidence with only psychological analysis to go on.
"You know something."
She stares back at him, and then gazes around the room with a nonchalant shrug, fingertips tapping agains the surface of the wood as her teeth bite into her lower lip.
"I know that it's getting harder for all of you with bounties on your head to not be noticed, that Robin has been highly wanted for longer than most of us have been alive, and that she's not just a random criminal. She's wanted because of what she's capable of."
She pauses then, and on one end of the table Nami frowns as her lips thin into a line made white by the pressure inside, nails digging absently into her left upper arm until her biting grip is released by the shoulder that Usopp gently knocks against hers.
"The World Government, then." Zoro voices, mainly for Luffy's benefit.
Elynna nods.
"Most likely, though I could be wrong. Probably powerful people, too. They'd need at least that to scare Robin into compliance. Otherwise she would just break the neck of whoever made contact with her and dump their body somewhere."
Chopper winces at the rawness of the description, but next to him Nami frowns.
"It might not be just fear, though, right? I know Robin was terrified when we met Aokiji, but I don't think there's a lot of people she reacts that way to, and if I had to guess her reaction had more to do with whatever happened between them than with his rank."
Elynna casts a pensive look her way, but grants the point with a roll of her shoulders.
"Well, you're right about that. In that case, the first possibility I can think of is blackmail."
The word is enough to make Luffy's scowl harden further still, as if he can taste the vicious, toxic treachery of the concept titled by this same word under his tongue.
Zoro's gaze, though, is still trained on Elynna's upper body.
There's tension, but much less than he thought, which makes no sense, because she told him herself that she got at least somewhat attached, and-
"Do you think she could be dead already?"
"No." Luffy decides with the voice of something definitive, but no one looks at him, and even his own eyes stay stuck on the one person he trusts to back up his intuition into tangible possibility.
His First Mate shoots Zoro a look that says don't ask questions you already know the answer to, but indulges him all the same.
"The chances are low. High-ranked people from the World Government and the Marines so far have proved to be dramatic bitches. They're more likely to have her executed with as much flair as they can, or use her knowledge for their own goals. But as I said," she goes on before they're even fully done breathing out the tension of the handful of seconds they spent waiting for her words to come out, "high-ranked, powerful people. We've got a window of opportunity to prevent her potential execution, so don't go wasting it on idiotic moves like with Aokiji."
"... Why does that sound like you won't be there with us?" Nami scowls.
The tapping stops.
Elynna's lip is bleeding when her teeth are fully hidden again.
"Because I won't be. Things to do, plans to implement. You'll be on your own for this one."
Chopper shifts at her words, nose wrinkling with unease at the idea of his First Mate going somewhere alone in the situation they're in.
But then he remembers what happened the last time she acted on her own while they were fighting someone who thought he controlled the world, and how the resulting explosion was enough to wake him up from his wound-induced coma.
So he stays put.
Almost opposite to him, Sanji lights a new cigarette, and thinks of all the sheets of paper blackened with ink that were spread on his kitchen table just a few hours before, frowning faintly even as the weight in his lungs lightens further without waiting for his command -or even her answer.
"How long have you been planning this, Elynna-chan?"
She blinks at him slowly, and shrugs.
(Since I realised that leaving you wasn't an option and that loving you was non-negotiable.)
"I got some info about her background pretty early on, and Aokiji doesn't seem like the type to hand out threats for shits and giggles. I figured shit was bound to hit the fan at some point."
Luffy's face twists strangely at that, as if he's trying to light up the whole damn room simply with the sheer amount of pride that can radiate from his skin and his smile, and somehow slouch forward with all the disappointment of a child getting the exact opposite of what they want for Christmas at the same time.
"So you prepared a secret mission and you're not going to bring me?"
Nami facepalms.
Sanji eyes the ceiling for divine help.
Zoro sighs, and knocks back another jug of sake, clearly having given up on divine help a long time ago.
"Yep." Elynna confirms.
"But I'm the Captain!" Their Captain protests like it's an ultimate argument, which it probably is as far as he's concerned.
"It's a secret mission, but it's a boring one."
This time the disappointment wins, and Luffy gives her a look that clearly conveys how stupid the words that just came out of her mouth are.
"It's a secret mission." He stresses. "With you. It can't be boring, so I'm coming with you."
His First Mate snorts.
"No, you're not. Because it's not your skillset-"
"So? Watching you kick people's ass is fun, too-"
"-and because there will be a whole lot of talking and absolutely no fighting going on. It's all about subtlety."
The rubber boy gapes at her, face striking a perfect middle between mildly disgusted and very horrified, looking distinctly like she's violated all the rules defining what a secret mission can or cannot be.
Then he falls back in his chair, crosses his arms, and pouts.
"Fine. But I want a secret mission."
"Yes, yes. It's a date." Elynna gives in easily, disregarding the punch that Usopp aims at her arm entirely.
Luffy's mouth shifts back into the beaming smile it was originally stretched into under Chopper's vaguely mystified gaze, leaving the reindeer's scientific curiosity to wonder if the rapidity with which his Captain's facial expressions change depending on his mood can actually be weaponised.
"Alright! We're finding Robin tomorrow, guys!"
They all stand up, except for Usopp who sprawls forward over the table, face mashed into the wood as if he wants to fuse with it.
(If he imagines it hard enough, maybe it'll smell like the wood of the Merry, and maybe he'll be able to remember every detail of that scent,
so he can take it away with him and keep a piece of their ship with himself.)
"C'mon, Hawk. I know you're young, but don't sleep in that kind of position."
Usopp sighs, slumping the lines of his upper body just a bit more into the surface of the table.
"I feel old."
"All the more reason to get up and walk the eight tiny little steps to your bed before I ask Hermes to kick you there."
"... Kick people when they're down, why don't you."
"Is that an offer?"
Usopp sighs again, reminiscing the good old days when Elynna was the one who got bullied into joining some of his games with Luffy.
Then he reaches up half-blindly, and takes the hand he saw her extend toward him from the tiny corner of his field of vision that wasn't hidden by his arm.
The world lurches to the side, and he curses, half-tripping to his feet and half-falling out of his chair at the unexpected strength behind the pull of her grip.
An arm winds around his shoulders, and he stumbles into the loose hug of his First Mate, leaning all his weight against her in silent and most likely vain retaliation, arms dangling at his sides stubbornly.
"You did it on purpose, didn't you?" He accuses more than he asks.
"Kind of." She answers without a shred of remorse, the breath brushing against his cheek showing no sign of the slight shake of amusement that resonates from her ribs to his.
He breathes in, and sighs once more.
(The scent of their home lingers over her skin like it does around every one of his crewmates, and she's so much warmer and softer to lean against than plain wood.
The scent will fade away, in time, but everything else will still be there, so at least he won't be left alone in a home that has become just a house the way he was, once.
It should make it easier, right?
It has to make it easier.)
"Do you need help with your plans?" He asks after a minute of quiet, finally returning the hug.
"Yeah, that'd be nice." She hums, arms tightening just a bit. "You know I'm hopeless without you or Robin for that part."
He smiles just the tiniest bit into her shoulder.
"Just tell Nami I'll drop by so she doesn't kill me with a pillow, and I'll come by tomorrow morning."
"Uh huh."
His eyes open, and narrow into a glare at the tresses of her hair brushing faintly against his cheek.
"... Elynna. I'm serious. Tell her."
"Sure."
He resolves then and there to bring some kind of shield with him.
Death by pillow is not the way he wants to go as a proud warrior, please and thank you.
But when he feels her start to step away, his arms stiffen, and her body gives in almost before he can process his own resistance.
She says nothing, and he listens to the beats of their hearts for three breathing cycles before he decides to go for short and direct.
"Thanks." He mumbles.
Okay.
Maybe a bit too short.
"... For helping me today. You really were the best."
He squeezes her waist, and she squeezes back.
"I better be, with all the work I put in for it."
He scoffs, but there's no bite to it.
"Do I get to know what your plan is in exchange for my help?"
"Are you going to ask every time?"
"Great warriors are stubborn warriors. So?"
"Nah. Seeing your face when you find out will be half the fun." She chuckles as she disentangles herself from him.
"... Okay, now I'm worried."
"Night, Hawk."
"Seriously. I just said I'm worried."
She waves over her shoulder, disappearing out of the door with Nami.
"Elynna! Come back here!"
There's a pause, and then-
"There's at least thirteen steps before I reach my bed, you bitch! I demand a refund!"
"Care to repeat that, Usopp?" Sanji's 'I am this close to drop-kicking you into the street through the window' voice drifts out of the room.
"... Luffy's the one who said it."
"Huh? What are we talking about?"
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Upon entering their room, Elynna goes to sit down on the bed, reaching up with a sigh to massage her shoulder and neck where all the weight of the stuff she carried to the hotel and the tension of the day's events cut into her muscles.
"Lynna."
She looks up with a hum, and finds Nami leaning against the wall near the door, arms crossed and a slight frown on her face.
The navigator opens her mouth, and then closes it.
Elynna stays still, silent and waiting.
Nami expels some of the tension keeping her shoulders tight with a forceful sigh, closing her eyes for a moment before looking at her again.
"I know Zoro and Luffy trust you unconditionally to handle yourself, but… Me, Sanji and Chopper, we're worried. Usopp too, probably." She pauses, realises how her words can sound, and winces. "I'm not saying I want you to give up on your plan and stay with us, because I know you took as many precautions as you could, but-"
She shifts on her feet, looking away uneasily for a moment before-
"Promise you'll be fine?"
Elynna watches her for a long moment, and then closes her eyes.
"You know that none of us can promise that given the situation we're in."
Her eyes open, still staring at Nami, and she tilts her head.
"You're worried I'll give up, right?"
"... Not really. We're all here, and I know you know that. But it'll be the first time you'll go off on your own since… Since you got hurt. I guess I'm just anxious. Is this how you feel every time we get into some kind of mess?"
"Pretty much."
"Well, it sucks." Nami concludes with a sniff, and Elynna snorts.
"Don't worry. Habituation is a thing."
The navigator looks at her for a long moment as the remaining tension in her upper body ebbs away in a way she knows means it's only temporary.
Then she pushes herself off the wall, and goes to plop herself down right next to her First Mate, body tilting into her as she leans her head against Elynna's shoulder and wraps herself around her arm.
Elynna takes the weight without flinching, and when she speaks her voice thrums through Nami's blood and around her skull.
"I'll do my damn best to get out alive, though. That I can promise, since you're all here and Robin's happiness can depend on it. Or if you prefer, you can think of it like this: some people are ready to die for what they love or believe in, and I'm ready to live for you."
Nami knows that.
And she knows that it should make her ache for the woman sitting next to her, should make her want to cry, maybe.
On any other day, it just might.
But in that moment-
(-at the end of that day-)
It makes her smile.
"Besides…"
Nami opens eyes she didn't realise she closed, and watches the light catch the locket dangling from the chain that Elynna took out of her tank top.
"I've got something to remember what matters the most this time around."
The words make her smile as she blinks mist away from her eyes and slouches further into her best friend, turning her head slightly to hide the curve of her mouth into the other girl's skin.
"Good. I should find the person who had the presence of mind to give you this and thank them."
"Oh yeah, they deserve to be thanked several times for it. While you're at it, tell them that the blue shirt and white tie ensemble suits them particularly well, would you? My eyes really appreciated that outfit."
Nami's body shakes, unable to help the light-hearted scoff that escapes her.
"Lynna." She says with an undercurrent of laughter running through her voice. "Basically anyone wearing a suit does it for you."
"You're a special case." Her best friend quips with a shrug of her free shoulder.
"So I heard."
"... Does that mean you were trying to seduce me?"
"I don't know about that. Are you seduced?"
"Absolutely. As much as when you're not wearing anything." Elynna smirks, and the dig of Nami's fingers between her ribs entirely fails to deter her from opening her mouth again. "Know what would seduce me even more?"
"No, and I don't particularly need to-"
"You in a suit, proceeding to take off said suit-"
Nami shoves her down on the bed with a laugh, feeling the moment where Elynna's body doesn't budge an inch just before she gives in to the push.
"You're such a pervert."
The smirk widens, and blue black eyes glint as her First Mate hums.
"I love you too."
Nami huffs out another laugh, and lets herself fall on the bed as well.
"Let's stay like this some more. Just until Chopper comes back."
Elynna, who was already sitting back up, glances down at her, and falls back down next to her.
"Okay."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
When morning comes, Usopp and Sanji enter the girls' room where everyone gathered, back from buying everyone's breakfast and saying that people in town are looking for them because they allegedly attacked the mayor.
"How did they even reach that conclusion?!" Nami yells exasperatedly as she throws her hands up. "We were all here during the night! I swear, every time we stop somewhere we end up becoming the villain of some weird rumour."
"Uhhh... It kind of seemed more serious this time." Usopp comments.
The navigator snorts.
"Luffy probably just did something stupid again."
"Hey!"
"We weren't."
Zoro's voice inserts a space of silence in the cacophony of the three others before Sanji can chip in to side with Nami.
"What do you mean 'we weren't'? Speak clearly, I don't understand gorilla language." The cook grumbles.
But Zoro ignores him, and it's enough to suck out the last dredges of good humour from the room.
"We weren't all here last night."
Silence drops, and when Sanji finally speaks up there's nothing half-hearted about the threat in his voice.
"Are you suggesting that Robin-chan actually attacked the mayor right now?"
"Robin wouldn't do that!" Luffy adds on, and in his mouth it sounds less like denial and more like truth.
Zoro shoots him an exasperated glare, clearly not impressed by the forceful response.
"Did you listen to anything of what Lynn told us yesterday? I never said she attacked him willingly, and it's the only lead we have for now anyway."
Luffy blinks.
"Oh." He says, and slumps back in his chair as the defensive anger is snuffed out of him with the outtake of air.
Nami isn't so quick to let go of the misunderstanding, though, even if the amusement in her smile is only slightly less superficial than the cheer it used to carry.
"Don't look so offended, Zoro. You never really trusted her, so it's no wonder they thought you believed it."
The swordsman grits his teeth, his dismissive shrug at odds with the venomous glance he aims at her simpering smile.
"Whatever. There's a difference between being suspicious and being an idiot." He sneers, steamrolling over Sanji's 'could have fooled me'. "Even if we didn't talk about it yesterday, I wouldn't believe Robin did something like that on her own. This kind of upfront attack isn't her thing."
Luffy blinks at him owlishly, and then laughs.
"You really like her, Zoro, right?"
"I'll throttle you, Captain."
"Don't worry, Zoro." Nami adds with a sage nod that does nothing to tamper her mischievous grin. "We really like her too."
"Don't lump me in with you. She's just the least annoying out of all of you idiots."
Chopper looks up at that, startled into frazzled worry by the words.
"I'm annoying?"
"Nah, don't worry Chopper. Zoro loves you." Nami coos.
The swordsman rolls his eyes, but says nothing.
"Anyway!" Usopp almost yells in an attempt to bring the conversation back on topic, huffing in satisfaction when his crewmates quiet down to give him their undivided attention. "I think we should try to find out what this is about. Trust me when I say that there's often some truth to rumours that are believed this widely, so we might get a lead on what happened to Robin-"
"I'll go!" Luffy jumps out of his chair to slap his hands on the table, heedless of how the chair crashes to the ground behind him.
Nami takes one look at the excitement thrumming from him in waves, and promptly announces that she's going with him for damage control.
Starting with making sure that their Captain doesn't actually go down into the streets to walk to their destination when the whole damn town is looking for them.
Ignoring Luffy's resulting pout, Usopp opens his mouth.
"Okay, then I'll-"
"-go move the Merry somewhere else with me." Zoro finishes in his place before stabbing the last piece of his breakfast with his knife and bringing it to his mouth.
The sniper eyes the aggressive motion cautiously, eyebrows furrowing with uncertainty as he tries to figure out what's happening.
"I mean, that's what I was gonna say, but you don't have to-"
"Don't be stupid. We might have attacked their headquarters for retaliation, but that gang can't afford not to react, and you're a prime target. Not to mention that bullshit with the mayor. The Merry has been sitting in plain view with our goddamn flag on it since yesterday, so-"
"Okay, you're coming with me. Don't think I'll pay you to be my bodyguard, though. Nami hasn't agreed to lending me money with an acceptable interest rate since-"
The navigator whacks him upside the head with a huff, before crossing her arms and turning to their cook, dismissing Usopp's loud protests with the ease of practice.
"What about you, Sanji-kun?"
She holds out her cup, and Sanji refills it with some more coffee with a hum.
"Chopper told me he wants to go and see if he can find some information about Robin from the inhabitants. The Franky Family are the only ones who know we're part of the crew, I think, but I'd rather go with him just in case."
"Good call. I'll feel better knowing you're with him."
Sanji smiles, straightening a bit more, and it makes her own smile widen even as she turns her head towards the door of the bedroom-slash-bathroom.
"Lynna!" She calls out, voice raising to reach the other room. "Hurry up, we're leaving soon!"
"You guys go on ahead, I have somewhere to be."
Their First Mate's reply comes out muffled, and Nami's mouth curls into a slight frown of unease that matches the worry lines on Sanji's forehead.
Luffy blinks at them, and then starts laughing, making Nami's face shift into a scowl as Sanji delivers a kick into the rubber boy's chair that almost sends him sprawling on the floor.
"Don't worry, guys! Ann is always scared, so if she says she can do something it means she'll be totally fine!"
"Gee, thanks Captain. Now I feel a lot better." The navigator bites out sarcastically with no real heat even as she settles back down into her seat.
Luffy's smile widens.
"You're welcome!" He beams, before squawking when Sanji sends another kick into his chair.
Neither of them is keen to start an actual fight given the circumstances, however, so they all hurry to finish their breakfast and file out of the room, until only Usopp and Chopper are left.
Glancing at his crewmate, the reindeer hesitates, but Usopp gestures for him to go ahead.
"I'm just waiting for her to call me so I can help her with something."
Chopper stares at him some more, but eventually gives a slow nod and goes to knock at the door, slipping in when Elynna invites him to.
The bedroom is only lit by the grey light of the morning filtering in from the window, and it takes him a moment to adjust to it, eyes scanning the space to find it empty.
He doesn't have the time to wonder where his First Mate went, though, because right then the door of the adjacent bathroom opens, remnants of steam billowing out as she steps into the bedroom, hair twisted into a towel and dressed only in her underwear and what was once one of Zoro's t-shirts -until Luffy and Usopp involved said t-shirt into one of their games with squid ink and fresh paint, that is.
Her eyes flicker over to him, somewhat distant with the distraction of whatever thoughts are flying around in her head.
Chopper takes a deep breath, and dives in headfirst.
"Don't you think it's time you tell the others about your condition?"
Having barely picked up the leather straps to put on her tessen off the desk, Elynna freezes, weapons still dangling slowly from her grip, and turns her head to raise an eyebrow in his direction.
"Why?" She asks, and her voice is mildly curious at best, condescension and stubborn refusal nowhere to be heard.
He breathes a bit easier for it, knowing he's passed the first hurdle of actually broaching the topic, and goes on to face the second -actually convincing her.
"You didn't want to tell them because it's linked to your new body, right? We know about it, now."
By then Elynna has strapped one war fan to the outside of her right forearm and is busy doing the same on her left with the same practiced ease.
Flittingly, he wonders if she actually qualifies as ambidextrous after all the training she has done.
"It wasn't because of that." She tells him calmly. "If I wanted to tell them about this without talking about everything else, I could have just said I was sick and be done with it."
"... Then why didn't you?"
She stays silent, shooting him a look that says he already knows the answer.
He frowns, but it quickly slips out of his mouth.
"You think that they'll think less of you because of it?"
Elynna looks back down to finish her task, and then starts moving around the room to tidy things up.
He frowns deeper, but when he speaks his voice is quieter, softer.
"Elynna... I never thought less of you. And we all know how skilled you are."
With a sigh, his First Mate straightens up from where she was making the bed, and turns back to him.
"They'll still doubt, Hebi."
"No-"
"Yes. Even if it's unconscious, even if it's just a little, it will probably take them seeing me come out fine of a few fights to be able to ignore the thoughts that will nag at them when they learn about it. It's normal."
Chopper looks down, teeth clenching against the idea, but he can't deny that it makes sense.
There is a possibility that the rest of the crew worries, no matter how much they know that their First Mate has been doing more than just fine on her own in battles for months.
Bare feet enter his field of vision, and Elynna crouches down right in front of him, barely reaching his height now that he has taken on his four-legged form to move around more quickly once he'll leave with Sanji.
He looks up into her eyes, and her hand reaches for the fur covering his flank, laying there still and warm.
"They'll doubt, and if I decide to tell them, I'll need to have the time to do it, to explain everything and answer their questions. And they'll need time, too, because even if I didn't lie, I still hid something important from them, so they'll need some time to deal with it. Right now, we don't have that time. Robin is in danger, and whatever we'll have to do to get her back, it probably won't be anywhere close to easy, so we can't afford to add my problems on top of it."
He stares, and she stares back, and eventually he gives a dejected nod.
She smiles faintly, palm trailing through his fur as she stands up.
"I'll think about it when we're back, okay?"
He perks back up a bit at the implied promise, and nods forcefully to promise himself he'll make sure of it before he steps out of the room.
Elynna watches the door close behind him, and bends forward to let her hair free from her towel.
Then she straightens up, and inspects one of the dark brown strands.
"Hawk?"
"Yeah?"
"I think we're good."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Even as they tear off the wig they put on just in case the swordsman or the long-nosed weakling recognised them, Rick winces, bandages scraping and wounds burning under the clothes they put on hurriedly to hide the black of their t-shirt and the hot pink star on it.
Still, the wince quickly shifts into a wide, victorious smile as they reach for a Den Den Mushi.
They might just get to become an actual member of the Franky Family for this, after all.
"Zanbai-san? It's Rick. You said you were looking for the Straw Hats, right? Just saw two of 'em. They were lookin' for a new spot for their ship, so I gave them the address for the Boss' hideout. The one under the bridge."
He pauses as a cacophony of noise quiets to let words ring through, and then smirks.
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Sanji cups a hand around the end of his cigarette to light it, before pocketing his lighter and drawing a first cloud of smoke, forcing himself to draw out as much tension as he can along with it, because his stock of cigarettes is limited, and he doubts he'll get to fill it up any time soon.
It's hard, though, when Robin's words are still churning inside his mind, hot and stifling like panic.
(She was so cold, as she spoke to them.
So cold, and so gentle.
As if leaving them was as simple as joining them, despite everything they lived through together.
As if they didn't matter.
As if he-)
It's hard, but he thought over it again and again, and his gut instinct tells him the cutting, bruising calm she told him and Chopper goodbye with stood on foundations of resignation.
(Of despair.
And it might be an illusion only, might be false hope on his part,
But he already saw it once recently,
-when a girl he didn't know looked at him and all the strangers he woke up with as if they were a whole that she didn't belong with, a girl who told them see you later when really she meant to say goodbye-
too personally and painfully to not remember what it looks like.
And he remembers all the discussions he saw Elynna and Robin have.
The way Robin looked at their First Mate.
At all of his crewmates, in fact.
And so maybe at him, he hopes.
It might be an illusion, or false hope, but Elynna's words support that hope, and they aren't just guesses, because she's Elynna, and because she might be the one who has talked with Robin the most.)
In the end, the only things he told himself to believe from Robin's words are that she found them nicer than she deserves, and that she'll be involved in something by the end of the day that will make things harder for them.
Given that the mayor was already attacked and the whole thing blamed on them, he's pretty sure that only the mayor's death can make things worse.
And more than probably, Robin and whatever asshole forced her hand won't be sticking around once they're done.
So when he and Chopper bumped into Usopp, who was looking for Zoro after the stupid swordsman got lost after they moved the ship, he sent the doctor to find him thanks to his scent and then bring him to Nami and Luffy so he can tell them what happened with Robin.
The situation is bad enough that the stupid gorilla might just use his brain for once, and Nami will be there to fill in the gaps.
Between the two of them and Chopper, they should at least be able to make sure that Luffy understands the possible consequences of whatever he might choose to do.
He stares at the wall for a few seconds.
"We should probably write one, too."
"Yeah. Otherwise Chopper and Nami will get angry."
Sanji hums noncommittally.
"... You don't have to come, you know."
Standing next to him, Usopp turns to give him a flat look.
"Dude, the guys we're up against are clearly bad news, and I'm not even talking about the fact that given what Elynna said, we might just get on the wrong side of the freaking World Government. I'm not letting you go alone."
"How are your injuries?" Sanji inquires in response.
"Not bad enough to prevent me from kicking your ass if you leave me here."
The corner of Sanji's mouth lifts up faintly.
"Let's go, then."
"Alright."
The words come out strangely muffled, causing Sanji to look over his shoulder curiously.
The way his face falls upon seeing his crewmate makes it clear that if he had any less class, he would facepalm.
"What is... this thing." He eventually utters with the slightest sneer.
"A mask. I don't want to have to look over my shoulder every time we get off the Merry because someone might recognise me. Can you imagine? It's like being told you'll never get any holidays. Celebrity is cool, but it's scary."
Sanji considers him quietly with just a slight raise of his visible eyebrow.
"Huh. That's actually pretty smart."
"... I'm just going to ignore the condescension in that statement and take the compliment." Usopp drawls with a long-suffering roll of his eyes, before stuffing a hand into his satchel. "Want one?"
"I'd rather die." Sanji tells him without missing a beat.
"Drama queen."
The blond cook sniffs contemptuously.
"My face is a selling point with the ladies. I have no reason to hide it."
"More like you want to catch up to my level and get your face on a wanted poster."
"It was the back of your head, dumbass."
"Whatever. You're just jealous."
"Shut up and start walking."
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
"So yeah, basically, don't expect me to pick up your calls for… Let's say a few days."
Or never.
Elynna doesn't let the thought come out of herself and into the world, but in the dead silence of the rail company's office room, it seems to bounce off the walls around her.
(She shrugs it off.
She's used to the thought, and used to the action, but in that moment, it feels-
just a bit more difficult.
Just a bit more real, and the thought kind of makes her want to laugh, because today is one of the few days that she knows to be entirely fictional in another world.)
She's the only living being in the entire building, except perhaps for the few animals who can't sense the Aqua Laguna coming and thus haven't evacuated the building the way its human occupants have done.
And the people bustling near the Sea Train, of course.
Although for now there's only some twenty or so Marines loading stuff on the train, along with a few employees from the station who are probably checking the train's condition.
But that's fine.
She made sure to come early after buying as many supplies as she can hide in her pockets precisely so she can watch Robin arrive and know which carriage she will be in, because she knows the importance of the Sea Train, but certainly not the time when it leaves Water Seven.
Also, she needed a quiet spot to try and catch a few hours of sleep, because she doubts she'll get much of it for however long this is going to last, and she'll need as much energy as she can.
Ace hums, making her eyes flicker away from the window she's looking through to glance at the Den Den Mushi of the office, which she borrowed when she realised that the Whitebeard Pirates' Commander wasn't aware of the situation.
"Alright." He says, prompting her to raise an eyebrow at the utter ease with which he speaks the words.
She will never understand how pirates can shrug off a crewmate or a friend going off on their own to throw themselves in a fight as if they're just going to the closest bakery in town to buy a snack.
She might trust her own crewmates' abilities, but it does little against the constant, gnawing anxiety that makes her look for them every chance she gets during a fight to make sure that they're doing alright, or the adrenaline-induced worry that buzzes in her ears and makes her scan them all for injuries before anything else once the world slows down.
Needless to say, the only person in this world that she loves and who isn't her crewmate worries her even more, given that he's not close enough for her to be able to act on her worry.
It is caused half by the one possible future she knows for him and half by the fact that he is a reckless idiot running on anger and exhaustion and the occasional gargantuan meal he somehow manages to finish when his stomach wins over said anger and exhaustion, which doesn't happen nearly as often as she would like.
"Well, at least one of us is somewhat optimistic about how this whole thing will turn out." She eventually drawls, scanning the dock down below again when she perceives some movement from the corner of her eyes.
Although, it might be because she only told him they were going to fight the Marines for one of their crewmates.
It would be pretty difficult explaining how she came to know the Marines in question were bringing Robin to Enies Lobby when they haven't left yet. She wasn't even entirely sure about this particular fact, since she just happened to come across the name during her research and in newspapers. It rang a bell, and at some point she managed to link it to vague memories of her little sister's rambling, but she isn't even entirely sure it's actually the place Robin is being taken to.
All in all, the watered down version she gave him sounded much closer to a skirmish the likes of which someone like the Whitebeard Pirates' Second Division Commander probably experienced a fair number of times.
Her tongue clicks against the roof of her mouth as she realises that the activity below her window is only due to the sheer amount of food that is being loaded aboard the train, and the tension that was climbing up her spine melts away again, locked up muscles struggling to relax as quickly as her mind.
"... Fuck this, I'm so not cut out for this job." She grumbles absently under her breath.
A snicker reminds her that she is, in fact, not alone, and she looks away from the window again to glance down at her temporary means of communication.
"El," Ace starts slowly, as if something very simple is whacking her in the face and she somehow still manages to remain ignorant of it. "You like screwing with people way too much to not be cut out for piracy. Not to mention that you're pretty damn good at it, so you're not just cut out to be a pirate, you're cut out to be a pretty damn good one."
"Yeah, well I would enjoy fucking people over a lot more if all this bullshit wasn't so bad for my heart."
Ace sighs, somehow conveying the roll of his eyes through the sound.
"Do you have a plan?"
Her lips thin into a tight line.
"No."
"No?"
"No. I have three plans, but one of them failed, and I'd rather not have to go with the third one. Then again, if you count all the variations for the second one, I have a bit more than three plans."
An amused sound echoes from the speaker.
"And do you trust me?"
She shoots the snail a curious glance, but shrugs and answers anyway.
"In a fight? Sure."
A dry, exasperated sort of silence spreads in the space between them.
Her lips twitch into a smirk.
"I'm gonna ignore the implications of that, and since I'm nice-"
"Oh, yes, my beloved saviour-"
"Shut up. Just remember that I trust Luffy to handle this, and I trust you to handle him."
It's just words, but they sound firm enough to be facts rather than thoughts, with just enough weight to leave a trace in the world, and the distraction, the ease of the banter overrides the vicious circle of her worries, if only for a moment.
The noise at the back of her mind and the slight but just noticeable enough churn of her stomach don't quite let her enjoy the silence, but her shoulders loosen into a line a bit more settled, and that's better than what any method she tried using since she woke up managed to do.
Her smirk mellows into a smile.
"Well, if the Commander says it…"
"That's the spirit." Ace confirms, leaving no place for any other argument to be made, a wolfish sort of satisfaction hovering at the edges of his smile, before he bites into something and goes on. "So what's the plan?"
"Oh, I'm going to seduce my way into the enemy ranks." She tells him, mild as can be.
Abrupt choking answers her, followed by a furious fit of coughing.
The smile sharpens back into a smirk.
"Were you eating? My bad."
"You knew that!"
"Did I?" She snickers without even trying to sound sincere.
"I hate you."
"That's okay, I always prefer to add a bit of spice in my relationships."
"Do you even have one plan that doesn't involve sex somehow?"
"Yes. My plan to seduce you. The sex will come after it has succeeded."
"Flattered." He drawls, dry as a desert.
"You're welcome."
"That was a lie."
"Too late. You've committed yourself."
He snorts at the false solemnity of her voice, and redirects his attention to the actual topic of their conversation.
"Okay, but what's your plan, really?"
Doing a cursory check of the length of the street down below, she finds no notable change, and turns back around.
"Can't you at least pretend to believe me?"
"Have you heard yourself make a joke?" He shoots back.
"... Okay, point taken."
"So?"
"I'm gonna use up the social capital -and all associated benefits- I've accumulated."
Ace sighs.
"If you wanted to keep it a secret, you could just say it, you know."
"Me? Nah, I just wanted it to sound cool." She denies, betrayed by the barely-there twitching of her lips that stretches the flat shape of her voice.
"Yeah, well it just sounds complicated."
"... I mean, you're kind of a strategic dumbass, so-"
"And you're a total bitch, El."
She huffs out a breath of laughter.
It echoes in the empty room, reflected by glass and stone and wood and steel to come back to her ears again, hollowed out by the stale loneliness of the air that is trapped within the deserted building.
She draws her knees to her chest, and winds her arms around her legs.
"Man," she sighs, letting her head fall back against the wall. "I wish I could hug you right now."
She almost wishes she could call one of her crewmates and somehow integrate them in her plan, but she doesn't have the time to rework it that much, and she just wants to cringe at the idea of any of them trying to fit into the kind of role she'll be playing.
Disaster.
Disaster everywhere.
Except if Nami came, maybe, because she's a good actor.
Better than her, in fact, but-
(But she knows why Rain got so good at it, how much she hated it.
She won't be the reason why her best friend has to drag that talent back up to the surface of her skin again.)
Yup.
Better go lone wolf this time around.
Ace hums on the other side of the line, and even with the white noise of static sizzling along the thread of sound, none of its warmth is lost.
"That, I can get behind." He grins over another bite of his meal.
She scoffs without any heat, and mourns the loss of another target of indecent jokes who has the decency to blush often enough when she throws one in his face.
You're the only one left, Hawk.
Don't you dare leave me high and dry.
"I know." She says tonelessly. "Even my very strong prevalence for touch as a love language might not be able to keep up with how touch-starved you are."
The little snail gapes up at her, utterly outraged.
She blinks, and snaps her fingers in realisation.
"Fuck. The camera. I knew I forgot something."
"I am not-"
"Yes, you are."
Stupid Whitebeard Pirates and their inability to express love through any other mean than beating each other up eighty percent of the time, soulfully deep (and potentially tear-jerking) conversations for the remaining time, and some nice words here and there, rarely enough that she had to threaten to keep calling some of them until they fell dead or went crazy from lack of sleep just to get some messages to write down.
She sighs again.
"Honestly, fuck patriarchy."
"... Are you being serious right now?"
"When I'm complaining about systemic discrimination, you'll find that I'm always serious."
"Sure." He snorts, teasing lilting along his voice playfully. "Got a plan to deal with systemic discrimination, too?"
She shoots a glance at the snail, and snorts.
"I don't have the time or energy to waste on impossible tasks. 'Sides, since I'm not human anymore, it's also not my shit to deal with."
"Uh. Convenient." He huffs, the amusement in his voice mapping the width of his smile in her mind.
She shrugs, unfolding herself to relieve the tickling inside her veins.
"There's got to be some benefits to the whole thing."
"Uh huh. And your third plan? What's it?"
"Guess."
"... You know what, if it's gonna be about seducing someone again, I shouldn't have bothered to ask."
"Good try," she grins. "But even for me that would be really stretching the definition of seducing someone."
"Okay… Now I have to ask. Should I be worried?"
She tilts her head to the right, and the sudden, sharp amusement of her grin edges its curve deeper, darker, into the shadows that pool in the dimples of her cheeks.
"You? Oh no." She half-laughs, voice pitched low and the intoxicating anticipation of actually using the power that weighs in her hands like glittering diamonds curling the words into an almost purr.
The very idea of all that chaos-
She barely keeps the probably vaguely manic bout of laughter in her mouth.
"The Marines, should they force my hand? Hell. Fucking. Yes." She hisses instead, biting into every word as if she can taste the resulting distress from where she's sitting.
The snail blinks up at her almost pensively.
"And you're not gonna use it."
She reins her smile and her anticipation back in, and shrugs.
"Not if I can help it. It's a 'certain incoming death' situation kind of plan."
"Good, cause I'd like to see it. So make sure to get it in the newspapers if you end up using it, at least."
"Because you're a budding sadist?" She smirks.
The snail shoots her a dry look.
"Because now I'm definitely worried, so I'd rather be there when it happens."
That's the plan, Ignis. That's the plan.
Well, one of the plans, anyway.
She glances out of the window like she has been during the last few minutes, and pauses when she notices another group arriving.
They're all dressed in black, except for the figure walking behind them, whose face is covered by the green hood of a long cloak.
"Ignis?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm gonna have to hang up."
"... Sure. And El?"
She hums.
"You can't get a hug if you're dead."
"... I can't believe I'm hearing that from you, but yup, got it. Love ya too."
The snail rolls its eyes at her.
"Sure, that. Now stop laughing and go screw people over, Vice-Captain."
"Will do, Commander." She grins.
She hangs up, dials the number noted down as the office of another branch in the same building to cover the unfamiliar number, and with a cursory glance makes sure that she hasn't forgotten anything.
Checking one last time the carriage in which the green-cloaked silhouette around the same height as Robin is being led into, she steps away from the window, stopping for barely a few seconds in front of the mirror before she marches out of the room, throwing her shoulders back and the too-loud doubts along with it.
"Alright," she breathes in sharply.
Let's get this show on the road.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Seemingly uncaring of the rapidly worsening weather that is now raging behind the walls of the train station, a man leads his wheelchair down the street passing by the entrance, humming tonelessly under his breath as the rain steadily drenches through the thin fabric of his clothes and runs down the crevasses drawn into the skin of his face by age, settling there almost lovingly.
Then the man stops, and looks up at the wall, eyes slowly running over the expanse of it.
Once, and then twice.
The man blinks, and the blue of his eyes swims with something frosty that may just be the effect of the first bolt of lightning that booms over his head reflecting through the raindrops clinging to his eyelashes, marking the beginning of the Aqua Laguna.
"What a shame." The man murmurs to himself. "It seems we just missed each other."
A long moment stretches, filled with the sound of stone crunching against stone in the aftermath of the first wave crashing through the train station, and the man stares at the wall still.
Then he closes his eyes, and leaves just like he has come, disappearing in the darkening streets.
No matter.
It's only a question of time.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
Nami coughs, bending forward to relieve the ache of her race across the rooftops and the rain she's choking on.
(That, and the relief.
The fear.
The absolute, frothing fury-)
Gasping lungs heaving to take in as much air as possible, she straightens up, and screams.
"Luffy! What are you doing there, you absolute dumbass!"
There's a second of silence where only the battering of the rain and the swelling of the sea on the horizon like an incoming thundercloud resonate.
(She might not be from this island, but she doesn't need to have seen more than the first wave back at the train station to know what is about to happen.
She doesn't care for it.
She's a goddamn navigator, one of the best, and she'll be damned if she ever lets a tempest stop her from going where she wants to go.
And right now, she really wants to go shake stupid self-sacrificing tendencies out of her nakama, hug her until that brilliant idiot understands that they're never going to let her go, and then electrocute the assoholes who-)
A voice answers, squishing out from between the walls of two buildings.
"Na-" Luffy coughs, and tries again. "Nami? I'm so glad you're alright! How did you find me?! That leopard guy aimed so well he sent me flying straight through here, and-"
"I don't want to hear it!" She yells through jaws so tight with anger it takes her effort to unclench her teeth and let her voice come through. "While you were here fooling around, these guys took Robin away and left the island! And do you know?! The blackmail Lynna talked about, it was us! Robin sacrificed herself so we could leave this island alive! Right now, they're taking her to a place where they're going to use her, and then they're going to kill her, and she'll die alone thinking that we see her as a traitor-"
She coughs again, this time choking more on the tears and the pain in her throat as her voice breaks under the physical strain and the weight of the memories-
(Robin telling her tales of all sorts of treasures and the meteorological wonders she's seen with her own eyes,
Robin teasing Usopp with Lynna while Zoro looks on and does nothing to help,
Robin stroking Chopper's fur with caution like he's the most precious thing in the world and she's the most dangerous thing in the world,
Robin accepting every gift from Sanji-kun like it's the first,
Robin indulging Luffy's weirdness as if nothing can diminish the respect and admiration she looks at him with, sometimes-
Robin's smile, Robin's laughter, Robin's fear
RobinRobinRobin-
Robin lying to them.
Lying for them.
And if that's the case-
We'll never see each other again after this.
Then she'll make damn sure that this will be a lie, too.)
But she keeps going.
Because she has to.
Just like they have to get Robin back, because they're not the Straw Hat Pirates with only seven people.
"I know that you had doubts! We all did! We were all scared to think that she might have faked everything! But Sanji, Lynna and Usopp are already on the train with Robin, and they're waiting for us, trust us to follow them-"
She knows that, even without having come across the message written in English and bright pink paint on the grey stone of a wall at the entrance of the train station.
I'll be on the train. -E.
Me and Usopp as well, Nami-chan! -S.
"-and so help me, if you don't get the hell out of here right now so we can go get Robin back, I'll-"
The sea roars, rising high enough to drench the sky.
But her Captain roars even louder, and the buildings crumble.
Zoro's voice rings out in her back along the metallic song of one of his katana, and-
She smiles, a smile loud like the first exchange that marks the beginning of a war.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
The lights of Water Seven disappear from the window she's sitting by, and Robin slumps in her seat, elbow coming to rest on the windowsill and forehead falling into her hand.
Is it defeat?
Relief?
She doesn't know.
(Defeat, because she tasted happiness in a way she never quite managed, and she should have known that the world wouldn't let her keep that taste in her mouth unless it decays into something bitter like loss.
Relief, because for once in her life she's done something right, something good, and it will be those who gave her happiness who will benefit from it.
But as far as the prospect of her death is concerned…
Well, maybe it's a little bit of both.
Maybe that's why there's a bit of a smile on her face.)
She thinks of the CP9 members in the second carriage, a prison of human flesh clothed in black but as silent as stones and the steel of the first carriage she is locked in.
In most of the groups that she has joined and destroyed, her life has been like that.
Living with people for long enough that the silence doesn't feel heavy, supported as it is by a stange kind of indulgence for the other's existence that isn't quite enough to qualify as trust.
Close enough to work together mostly seamlessly, and yet never close enough to engage in unnecessary exchanges.
She's lived like this for years.
And yet, looking at the people who brought her here, it all seems so… strange.
Amusing, too, in a sad sort of way.
Because she's the one that this train is driving towards death, but she thinks she might know more about what it means to be alive than any of them.
(It's nowhere near amusing enough to make her laugh.
Because she knows what it means to be alive, and she would prefer to have died before learning about living and loving and everything in between.
It's easier to lose something you never had in the first place.
-she rarely thinks of her mother
but thinks often of the parties her colleagues threw for her birthdays and exam results-
Love is never easy, because with love comes fear and doubt and pain, and so she wonders-
Will Chopper keep that book she bought for him?
Will Usopp abandon his project to replicate that boiling mix of oils and spices she talked to him about into another type of munitions?
Will Nami's anger win over her sadness, and spare her from shedding tears over her betrayal?
Will she be the first member of the Straw Hat Pirates to make Luffy cry?
How many cigarettes will Sanji smoke, once he realises that she's not coming back? Will he regret having started calling her Robin-chan since they met Aokiji?
Will Zoro be even slightly upset, or has he never begun to love her even half as much as she loves him?
Will Elynna blame herself? How many times will she look at the sea or her own blades, and think about things that she cannot do, because the others are still here? Will she ever heal, when the wound left by her blood family still seems to gape so wide?
It feels strange, to allow herself to think their names
-finally-
but to be on death row feels acutely similar to being free.
She's not particularly surprised at the realisation.
She's dreamed about dying and being free many times, after all.)
The sound of the door of the carriage clicking open forces her eyes open, breaking through her absent-minded thoughtfulness.
She doesn't look away from the window and the dark, fitful, terrible blend of sky and sea beyond it.
"Ah. Found you."
Robin jerks, so hard she almost knocks her head against the window.
She looks up, neck twinging painfully at the sudden movement, staring towards the entrance with wide, fearful eyes, because-
(-with love comes fear-)
Because she knows that voice.
The woman standing at the door leans casually against the door frame, arms crossed as if she barges into carriages occupied by highly wanted criminals and guarded by top secret government agency members every day for breakfast.
The casual blandness of her face as she surveys the room, despite the fact that said government agents have suddenly stepped into the room through a door that materialised from thin air, only reinforces the impression.
"I don't know if putting her into the first carriage was the best strategic choice," she goes on as if all the CP9 agents aren't poised to lunge into killing at the drop of a hat, "but it's not my mission, so as long as I don't have to go through other carriages to find you, I'm in. It'd be pretty awkward."
Silence rings loudly, and the agents stay perfectly still.
Perhaps because of the Marine uniform she's wearing under the standard issue, beige raincoat.
But Robin takes her in, and sees the dark brown hair, slightly curlier than usual, damp with rain and hanging free around her face in a way that makes her look more her age than she usually does.
Sees the light but colourful makeup that entirely changes her countenance into someone brighter and easier to approach, that hides the more subtle layer which colours the skin of her face, arms and hands a few shades darker than it normally is.
Sees the oval, frameless glasses.
As a whole, she has never seen her like this, but these are all details that have shown up in previous disguises that the woman worked on with her and Usopp.
There's no coloured contact lenses, and her hair is dyed rather than covered by a wig, because the senses of the people around them are definitely sharper than the average, but it's just another disguise among all the others Robin has seen her take on, and nowhere close to enough to stop her from recognising who is standing there, just a few feet away from her.
"Who are you?"
It's exactly why, when Rob Lucci demands to know the stranger's identity with the flat, hard tone of an order rather than a question, underlaid by a faint bite that says who do you think you are to come here, she-
She can't help how her breath shudders out of her mouth, a failed attempt at choking the panicked sob surging up out of her lungs before it reaches her lips.
(The relief slips out of her with it, leaving only defeat.
They were supposed to be safe.
But if she is here, then everyone is, or will be.
Her happiness will die with her, perhaps even before her
-before her eyes, again-
and she will be helpless to prevent it, again-
Except this time, it will all be her fault, and the defeat only leaves enough energy to think that-
Death cannot come soon enough.
She is so tired.
Of defeat.
Of failure.
Of losing, always, no matter how little or how big and seemingly untouchable she has.
Most of all, of bearing the existence of herself, as she is.)
The eyes of all the CP9 members flicker to her, and see her eyes still stuck on the newcomer, and how she still isn't blinking.
For the first time, the woman at the door meets Robin's eyes with her own, made a blue lighter and almost mischievous by the subtle amount of gold glitter splattered across the vivid green painted over her eyelids.
Blueno takes one step closer, his build enough in itself to make the air seem suddenly scarce in the carriage.
Or maybe it's just because Robin isn't breathing.
And at the same time Blueno moves, Elynna's lips quirk up, the bold, dark red of her lipstick against her still-pale skin making it almost look like a grin.
And then she pushes herself away from the doorframe, and steps toward them.
Forward, instead of far, far away.
Robin feels faint.
The woman bypasses Blueno, who is still waiting for an order from the leader of their group, bypasses all the other agents who stand behind him and keep still, waiting more than curious.
Bypasses their leader, who is sitting just two arms away from Robin.
Robin blinks, and she's standing in front of her.
There's barely enough oxygen in her lungs for her brain to function, as if the air is holding still and silent to see who will attack first.
Who will die first.
Robin looks up, feeling tense enough to break (almost like she did, when she was in that boat and watching everything she ever had to love go up in flames) as she meets her, eyes wide against her glinting ones, horrified gape against a pensive, ever so slight curve.
And then her First Mate bends down, a knee brushing hers when she leans her weight against the edge of the bench, one hand sinking into the plush back of the seats and erasing the black-clothed silhouettes from the corner of her vision as her other hand cups the back of Robin's neck, gently guiding her numb body forward.
(Until there's so little left between them that Robin can feel the heat, the warmth wafting off her skin, and that will go cold all because of her.)
A thumb trails down the line of her throat, light and slow and impossible to dismiss, and Robin swallows, suddenly remembering how to breathe in that moment where her whole world narrows down to the face in front of her.
(In that moment when nothing of what and who is around them and ahead of them registers.)
Elynna smiles, then, tight with tension and danger, wide and wicked almost to the point of laughter and yet softened by what Robin knows will, in the end, lead to both their deaths.
(She should have tried harder, she supposes.
But there's a lot of things to love about her First Mate, and among all those is the fact that she's neither blind nor stupid.
Robin is good at avoiding to feel, but not so much at hiding what she feels once she loses that war.)
When she speaks, her every word leaves the ghost of a kiss on Robin's lips.
"Hi, darling." She says, the slight rasp of her voice so very her and ill-fitting against her current appearance. "Missed me?"
The words are barely spoken before three of the CP9 agents are there, two at her sides and the only woman of the group at her back, each with a finger grazing her and ready to pierce through her flesh like a bullet.
〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭
All hail communication and Elynna's zero tolerance policy regarding the drama that was supposed to unfold in this section. I hope you still liked the Usopp drama, because it was a bitch to write.
It was also pretty hard to decide what to with Elynna during the 'let's trash the Franky House' moment, because it's one of the rare moments where Chopper is on the same line as the Monster Trio so I didn't want to take that away from him, but at the same time I found it weird that they just leave Usopp to bleed there while they beat up people, so in the end I figured she could fill that gap. I hesitated a lot but she'll have other opportunities to be badass. Also Nami is there because she's one angry, feral gal and I love her.
On another note, better get ready for the cliffhangers, people.
It's not often that I get to dish them out, with my habit of covering one arc in one chapter. Now that I have the opportunity, I'm gonna make the most of it.
Headcannon of the day: there was a theater club back on Usopp's island, and its members straight up worshipped him for his makeup/improvisation skills (and obviously his flair for the dramatic).
Now let's talk about Franky. How do you like what little you've seen of him? I'm honestly totally winging it with his character, but I feel like the current 'mafia boss bros' vibe he has going on with Elynna might be good XD
Also I hope you liked the pretty long scene with Ace, because he's probably not gonna be there for some time.
Water 7/Enies Lobby is a height of angst and kickass moments in One Piece, and I want to replicate that to the best of my ability.
For Elynna, it means upping the ante in my efforts to make her the best First Mate ever for the SH.
(The official indicator I measure my success by is obviously, beyond my own satisfaction, how much you guys will like the arc, and the unofficial one is how much she's crush-worthy by the end of a given chapter lol.)
I hope chapter 1/5 is a good introduction to that.
Anyway, thank you as always to all of you who take the time to read my monster chapters, and even more to everyone who takes the time to leave a comment! I hope everything is going good for you 3
P.S.: The lyrics don't entirely fit, but the song Chainsmoking by Jacob Banks made me think of Robin at this point in the anime. Also it's just a really damn good song, so I wanted to share it.