Chapter Text
Three hours.
It had been three long hours of waiting while Chopper worked.
Three hours spent thinking back on every sign they had missed.
Three hours of realizing just how many lies Usopp had told.
Three hours filled with worry, anger, sadness, fear, confusion, and pain.
And through it all, that lingering paranoia—the feeling that danger was still approaching—never truly faded.
Three hours of wondering if Usopp was even going to survive this.
There had been conversations during those hours. Quiet ones. Tense ones.
They talked about why he had hidden it, and while they understood… it still hurt.
It hurt that he hadn’t trusted them enough to tell them. But slowly, painfully, they began to realize it probably hadn’t been about trust at all. It had been fear.
Fear and anxiety. Fear of becoming a burden. Fear of putting the crew in even more danger than they already faced every day.
Just three hours. Yet somehow, in that short amount of time, it felt like everything had shifted.
Then, finally, the door to the cycle room opened.
Chopper stepped out looking utterly exhausted, and tension still tight in his small frame. But he looked calmer than before, and that alone eased some of the suffocating fear hanging over the crew.
He quietly allowed them inside.
The smell of death was no longer as overpowering. It still lingered faintly in the room, but not nearly as strong as before.
Usopp lay unconscious in the nest of blankets, curled tightly into himself. His breathing was uneven and shaky, and even asleep, there were faint signs of pain still etched across his face.
But he was alive. He wasn’t at risk of dying anymore. The relief that swept through the room was immediate and crushing.
Still, Chopper explained that the pain would continue for hours yet. Years of suppressing his heats had badly damaged his body, and there was only so much the doctor could do to ease it now.
There wasn’t a cure for this kind of suffering. Not after so long. The relief remained, but so did the uncertainty.
No one quite knew how to move forward with this information. No one knew exactly how to handle it.
But there was one thing they all knew without question.
They were not abandoning Usopp. He was their crewmate. Their nakama. Their family. Their friend. Their sniper. Nothing about that had changed.
And yet… heavy emotions still lingered in the room.
Zoro, Sanji, and Nami carried the most anger—not truly at Usopp, but at the situation, at the years he had suffered alone.
Chopper and Franky were weighed down by fear, shaken badly by how close things had come.
Robin and Luffy sat in quiet confusion, still trying to fully understand everything they had learned.
And Brook and Jinbei…
The two oldest members of the crew shared a growing anxiety neither of them voiced aloud.
Because both of them had a dangerous, terrifying suspicion forming in the backs of their minds.
And neither wanted to say it first.
Finally, after forcing himself to push past his own anxiety, Jinbei spoke.
“Chopper… have you ever seen any markings on Usopp’s body before?”
The question caught everyone off guard.
It was so unexpected that, for a moment, nobody understood what he was asking.
Chopper blinked in confusion. “Can I ask why?” he questioned cautiously. “That kind of stuff is confidential between a doctor and patient.”
Robin felt a sickening weight settle in her stomach. Because she understood.
After the conversation they as a crew had days earlier, she realized exactly what he was asking—and why.
“Chopper,” she said slowly, “he wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious.”
Maybe it was the tone of her voice. Maybe it was the expressions on Robin, Brook, and Jinbei’s faces.
Whatever it was, Chopper hesitated only briefly before nodding.
“He has a strange tattoo hidden on his upper thigh near his hip,” he admitted quietly. “I asked about it once before, but he just said it was something he got on impulse and changed the subject.”
Brook’s nonexistent stomach twisted painfully. (Yo-ho-ho… Skull joke. Inappropriate timing, perhaps, but humor had always been how he coped. Even now.)
Jinbei continued carefully. “Can you show us what it looks like?”
Still confused, Chopper slowly walked over to Usopp and carefully moved the blanket just enough to reveal the mark.
The room went dead silent.
The tattoo itself wasn’t particularly large, but it was impossible to ignore once seen.
A claw scar had been inked across the skin, detailed vines and plants woven around it to resemble Pop Greens sprouting from the wound. It was well done—beautiful, even.
Undeniably Usopp’s own work. He had always been talented at drawing. But beneath the tattoo… Beneath the carefully placed design…
Was the unmistakable outline of an older mark. A branding mark.
The kind left on someone who had been owned. Sold. Used.
It was not the mark of a Celestial Dragon—but they were far from the only monsters in the world who marked people as property. They were simply the most infamous.
Nami made a quiet, horrified noise, like the air had been punched from her lungs.
She recognized the claw design. She had seen sketches of it before in Usopp’s notebook.
Which meant the tattoo was recent. A recent attempt to cover the mark. The branding itself wasn’t large. Small, even. But old.
But the pain attached to it… That was something Jinbei recognized all too well.
The atmosphere in the room shifted again, heavy emotions intensifying into something far sharper. Anger. Horror. Grief.
None of them had ever felt so sick. And with this discovery came another awful realization.
Another reason why Usopp had hidden the truth. Not just because he was an omega male. But because of that mark.
The mark that now lay hidden beneath ink and vines… yet still remained burned into his skin all the same.
WIP