Work Text:
There’s a tiger on the mountain.
It’s the sort of thing to say that gets a laugh out of everyone, those who don’t live quite so close to the woods, the fishermen and merchants, the first time they hear the story. Of course, they’ll chuckle, of course there are tigers on the mountain. Everyone knows there’s tigers on the mountain.
No, no, the barmaid will correct them with a gentle smile and laughing eyes, amused by their quick dismissal rather than angry. Not that kind of tiger. This, she’ll say as she slides another tankard down the bar, in the rhythm of a tale told many times over until it’s worn smooth as a riverbed rock, is the king of tigers.
He’s the guardian of the mountain, she says, the protector of the forest, and he has no mercy for those who anger him. He’s lean and deadly, with claws as long as swords and sharp enough to disembowel a human with just a twitch, and on occasion if he so chooses, he can remove his tiger skin and walk as a man. You’ll never know just who he is, unless you see his eyes- his irises darkest green, and pupils narrow oblong like the cat he is.
The fishermen and merchants will laugh again at this, for the most part, though that night as they stumble out of the bar a couple of them will cast uneasy looks at the mountain, forbidding and dark, towering against the night sky, and perhaps they will hurry back to their ships a little faster than normal, their heads ducked just a little lower.
And at the bar, a little boy with a straw hat kicks his feet and listens.
The way Luffy meets the tiger is- first, he gets lost.
It’s not the first time it happens, nor will it be the last. The mountain is big and dense with undergrowth that’s easy to trip over and tumble through and vanish from sight completely in moments, and Luffy isn’t quite as clever on his feet as his brothers, not yet.
All it takes is a root, buried under the thick carpet of last fall’s rotting leaves, and then he’s tumbling off the path at a curve and rolling down a hill, banging knees and elbows on bark and half-buried stones and dirt still solid from the winter. The world blurs into a drunken spiral, the sky reduced to a blue smear only patchily visible beyond the spiralling treetop canopy, and he laughs at the sight.
His brothers won’t notice he’s gone for a little while yet, preoccupied as they are with racing each other, and it’ll take them even longer to find where he’s gotten to- but they will notice, and they will find him, he never has any doubt of that. There’s nothing to fear here, not for him, not on this mountain.
He’s still laughing when he eventually tumbles to a halt at the edge of a small clearing, landing with an impact that drives the air and laughter alike from his lungs with a soft oof.
He picks himself up, poking at the spots on his knees and elbows that would be blotchy-bruised come morning if he was anybody else, and looks around. He’s not in a place he knows, which isn’t too surprising- he and his brothers run wild all across the mountain, always exploring, and yet it always seems he’s finding new places, new clearings and fallen trees and berry patches and caves. Sometimes it feels like he could explore this mountain his entire life and never find all its secrets.
(Not that he’s going to, of course. He has so many more interesting places to explore than this one mountain on this one island. But this will do, for now.)
The clearing is drenched in sun, the opening in the canopy allowing light to pour down unimpeded, and the ground is scattered with wide low slabs of rock, light grey and smooth, flat faces pointed skywards, most likely the remnants of some long-ago rockslide.
And on one of those rocks in the center of the clearing, sprawled across the sun-baked stone and drinking up the warmth, there’s a tiger. It’s lying on its side, white belly exposed, tail dangling to the grass below and twitching now and again. It looks like it’s sleeping, or even dreaming. It’s not particularly big, as Dawn Island’s tigers go, but something about it catches Luffy’s attention anyways.
Maybe it's the fact that it only has one eye. The other is crossed out with a slashing scar, cutting through the fur, mangling the eyelid and leaving a sliver of cloudy white just barely visible beneath it as the tiger dozes.
Luffy takes a step forward, and gravel crunches under his sandal. The sound isn't particularly loud, practically indistinguishable against the background noise of birdsong and foliage ruffling in the breeze, but it's enough.
The tiger wakes.
One eye, black on dark green, focuses on him, and makes direct, piercing eye contact. There’s a spark of attention, of intelligence there that he’s never seen in a tiger’s eyes before, and it captures his interest immediately. It tips its head a little to one side.
“Hi!” Luffy says, bouncing forward-
And then the tiger bolts, crossing to the far side of the clearing in less time than it takes to blink.
Luffy yelps in shock. “Wait!” he yells, trying to run after it, stumbling over his sandals in his haste and crashing to the gravel. “Wait up! I’m not gonna hurt you!”
By the time he bounces back to his feet and reaches the center of the clearing, the big flat rock where the tiger had been sunning itself is long vacant. There's not even a rustle in the bushes left to indicate which way it had fled.
But there is a scrap of cloth.
It's a green so dark it looks almost black, roughly rectangular, torn in places and frayed around the edges. Luffy reaches out and picks it up, and finds it stiff with dirt and sand, and maybe blood.
Weird thing for a tiger to have. He wonders if it came off of somebody it ate.
“Hey! Mister Tiger?” he calls, trying to project his voice as far as he can into the woods all around, waving the scrap of cloth in the air. “You forgot your bandana!”
There’s a rustling off to one side of the clearing, and he whips around, hopeful- but it’s not the tiger that pushes its struggling, cursing way through the bushes. It’s Sabo, who only needs one look into the clearing to sigh with relief and roll his eyes, pushing his hat up with his free hand.
“I found him!” he calls over his shoulder, and a moment later Ace is shoving through the underground at his side and sprinting across the clearing to grab Luffy roughly by the shoulders and look him up and down with narrowed eyes.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” he demands, as Sabo walks up to them at a more leisurely pace, snickering under his breath and stretching his arms over his head.
Luffy giggles. “Nope! Not at all. Hey, Ace, Sabo, you ever seen a tiger with green eyes?” He thinks for a second and then corrects, “Well, one eye.”
Ace blinks, looking bewildered- and kind of angry, but he always looks kind of angry. “Huh?”
“Dark green!” Luffy clarifies helpfully.
“All the tigers I’ve ever seen had kinda brown eyes,” Sabo supplies, leaning around Ace’s shoulder. “How come?”
“There was one here!” Luffy says, throwing out his arms at his sides to demonstrate. “A big one, and it only had one eye, and it had a big scar over the other eye, like this,” he says, winking his left eye exaggeratedly and dragging a finger down over it, “and it was dark green! And I wanted to get closer but it ran away.”
“It ran away?” Ace says incredulously. “From you?”
“Hey!” Luffy protests at the clear disbelief, even as Sabo cackles with laughter. “It did!”
“Bullshit, you’re about as intimidating as a chipmunk, a tiger would eat you for breakfast-”
Sabo reaches out to ruffle Luffy’s hair idly, plucking out the twigs and leaves still tangled in it from his tumble down the hill. “Maybe it was hurt,” he suggests. “From whatever took that eye.”
Luffy huffs, slightly appeased by having at least one brother listening to him. “Maybe,” he concedes, crossing his arms. Rough fabric scratches against his bare skin, and he remembers all of a sudden that he’s still holding the bandana. “Ah! Right!”
He excitedly shoves the fistful of dark fabric up right in front of Ace’s face, close enough that his brother’s eyes cross a little trying to focus on it. “What the hell is that?”
“I dunno!” Luffy admits cheerfully. “But the tiger left it!”
Ace blinks, snatches the bandana from his hand and pulls the crumpled fabric taut, a few flakes of something dark- dried blood?- drifting to the ground as he does so. “Weird,” he says. “Maybe it ate someone, an’ this got stuck in its teeth or something?”
“It’s not really ripped, though,” Sabo points out. “You’d think if it got chewed through by a tiger it would be a lot more torn up.”
Ace snorts and raises his eyebrows. “There’s a lotta blood on it. Where else’d it be from? A store?”
“Good point,” Sabo admits. “Either way, though, finders keepers, Luffy,” he says, plucking the bandana from Ace’s hands and tossing it back to him. “Yours now!”
Luffy lights up. “Yeah!” he says, then hesitates. “But what if the tiger wants it back?”
“Lunch,” Ace says, hefting his pipe over his shoulder. “An’ speakin’ of which, c’mon. We had to sidetrack our hunting trip to come find your dumb ass, and I’m hungry.”
Luffy starts to tie the bandana around his head, remembers his hat is in the way, and compromises by tying it around his arm instead, pulling the knot tight with his teeth. That feels more right, he thinks. It doesn’t belong on his head.
Then he’s running after his brothers, hungry for lunch and adventure alike, and the bandana is quickly forgotten.
The second time he meets the tiger is three years later, and it’s because of the blood.
They haven’t gone near Grey Terminal much since the fire. There’s people living there again, of course, creeping like frightened shadows with new wariness between the burned-out, twisted heaps, and Luffy’s sure there’s still hidden treasures to be found beneath those piles of garbage, but it doesn’t feel right. Not after… everything.
He and Ace are ranging closer than usual this day, though, not on purpose, but because there have been deer down there lately, and the last winter was a rough one, so finding food has been harder in recent weeks. It’s right near the edge of the forest, only a few meters from where the treeline opens up, that Luffy steps in something wet that squelches a little under his sandal and stops. Looks down.
It’s a narrow trickle of dark red, running out of the bushes, down from a low rise of hill masked from view by the thick mass of trees and bushes. He reaches down to stick a finger in it, and it’s still a little warm.
Something’s bleeding bad, just out of sight, and it’s not even a second of consideration after reaching that conclusion that he’s shoving his way into the underbrush and scrambling up the little rise.
The little patch of grass at the top of the rise is small, ringed in by trees and soaked in blood.
And in the center of it is a tiger trying to chew its own leg off.
It’s going about the ugly task with almost unnervingly silent determination, back twisted awkwardly to bite at where its injured hind leg is locked in the pitted steel jaws of a bear trap. Its white fur is dyed red and rusty brown, and its teeth are smeared with its own blood as it digs them into its own fur and muscle and gnaws.
It has one dark green eye.
As soon as Luffy stumbles out of the bushes, the tiger’s head snaps up and it snarls, wild and defensive, baring bloodied fangs in a clear threat. The teeth of the trap are dug deep into its leg, and it certainly can’t run, but it’s still plenty capable of attack, and even without words the ultimatum is clear. Either Luffy runs away, or the tiger pounces.
Running away has never, ever been in Luffy’s nature, though, and neither has standing still and waiting to be attacked, so he does neither. Instead, he points at the trap, unfazed and unafraid, and says, “I can open that for you!”
The growling cuts off, and the tiger gives him an almost human look of bafflement.
“I can fight you too, if that’s what you want,” Luffy adds, dropping himself down to sit next to the trap and start to poke at it, less than a foot away from the tiger’s maw. “But after! It wouldn’t be fair right now.”
The tiger makes a huffing noise, but makes no move to attack, though he can feel it staring watchfully at him as he reaches out to fumble with the steel paddles on their side of the trap. As soon as he touches the ugly metal thing, it shifts a little, digging deeper into the already savaged flesh, and the tiger growls again, instinctively trying to pull away.
“Hold still!” Luffy says, and reaches out to bonk the tiger lightly on the head the same way Ace does to him when he’s being stupid. “You’re gonna hurt it worse!”
The tiger does actually settle at that, staring at him in a way that looks almost taken aback, and Luffy has to laugh.
He starts searching for the release paddles again. The steel is dark and dented with age already, and slick and wet with blood, and he only ever heard how to do this third-hand, but he’s sure he remembers.
“Sabo taught me how to do this!” he tells the tiger as he feels his way across the jagged, slippery metal. He sees it tilt its head a little out of the corner of his eye, and takes it as license to continue. “He’s- he was my big brother. Well, one of ‘em. Well, really Dadan taught Ace so he could steal game outta the traps the people in the dump used to set up sometimes- guess that’s what this is, huh?- an’ then Ace taught Sabo, an’ then Sabo taught me. I’d teach you, too, ‘cept you don’t have hands.”
The tiger huffs again at this, and it sounds almost like a laugh. Luffy laughs too, bright and cheerful. “But I guess it’d be pretty dumb of you to get caught in one of these again, huh?”
The tiger growls, but it doesn’t sound threatening this time, so Luffy just laughs harder.
Finally, he finds the paddles and shoves down on them with all his strength, leaning his entire body weight down onto the creaky metal contraption. The bear trap eases open with an agonizing creak, the teeth sliding free of the tiger’s damaged leg. As soon as they’re out, the tiger yanks its leg free of the trap’s maw, pulling the injured appendage close and examining it.
It doesn’t look good, even Luffy can see that- the damage from the trap itself was minimal compared to what the tiger did to itself in its attempts to escape. But the tiger is picking itself up again, despite an inability to put any weight on its leg, so the pain must not be as bad as it looks. If they had something to bandage it with-
“Oh!” Luffy says aloud, and tugs the old, ragged bandana free of his arm. “I forgot! This is yours, isn’t it?”
The tiger stares at him, one-eyed, but it doesn’t move when Luffy carefully folds the bandana in half and wraps it around its injured leg. “Don’ worry, it’s clean! Well… cleanish. Makino came ‘round a couple days ago and had us wash all our clothes cause she’s worried we’ll get fleas or somethin’. So it’s not all full’a dirt and blood, at least.”
He’s never been good at moderation, but he tries to be gentle as he pulls the makeshift bandage tight and knots the ends together, and he guesses it must not hurt too much, because the tiger barely twitches at the pressure. The relentless trickle and drip of blood ceases immediately, vanishing into the dark cloth instead of falling to the jungle floor, and Luffy grins up at the tiger triumphantly.
“There!” he says. “See, toldya I could help.”
The tiger huffs out a breath, the breeze of it ruffling Luffy’s hair across his forehead, and Luffy giggles and reaches up to scratch behind its ears. Its fur is short, slightly rough, and soft. The tiger doesn’t make any move to bite him, this time, and Luffy tallies that up as a triumph.
“D’you have a name?” he asks, glancing up. The tiger looks back down at him, and Luffy grins. “I could give you one! ‘s weird just calling you ‘the tiger.’ There’s lots of tigers on the island.”
The tiger only snorts, then knocks its head gently against Luffy’s before standing up again. It steps carefully down on its injured leg a few times, visibly testing its weight, but the makeshift bandage stays in place.
“Oi! Luffy!” Ace’s voice calls from somewhere nearby, and then a bit quieter, “Fuck, where’d he go…”
“Ah!” Luffy says, startling to attention. “I forgot about Ace! He’s gonna be mad…”
The tiger makes that huffing sound again, and the more Luffy hears it, the more it’s coming to sound like laughter. It knocks against him with its head again, shoving him gently back in the direction of Ace’s voice.
Luffy laughs. “I’m going!” he reassures it, and scratches it one last time on the ear before hurrying out back through the bushes onto the path.
“Ace!” he yells. “‘M over here!”
He hears a heavy sigh of exasperated relief somewhere nearby, and less than a minute later Ace is shoving his way back onto the path as well, ducking under a low branch draped with vines and mumbling irritably under his breath.
“God, dumbass, you need to stop wan-” he cuts himself off abruptly as he straightens up, voice all of a sudden spiking in volume as he yells, “Why are you covered in blood?”
Luffy blinks. “Huh?”
He looks down at himself, and- oh, that’s right, his hands and forearms are all smeared with the tiger’s blood, slowly drying into rusty brown, and his shirt is spotted with it. He looks back up again with a reassuring grin. “Don’t worry! It’s not mine!”
If possible, Ace actually looks even more distressed by this. “Then whose is it?”
“Oh, the tiger’s.”
“The what?”
“The tiger!” Luffy says, throwing his hands out at his sides to express the animal’s size. “The big one with the one eye, remember, from a long time ago, I told you about it? Oh, but don’t worry, I think he’s fine now too. I gave him his bandana back!”
“His-” Ace echoes, glancing automatically over at his bare upper arm, where the torn bandana has been intermittently tied for the past couple years. “Okay, wait, no, stop, start over. What the fuck?”
The third time he meets the tiger is a few years later again, and it happens much the same way as the first, which is almost fitting, because in a way it’s also the first time he really meets it. It’s the same story- a clumsy stumble, a stone sticking up out of the path, a tumbling fall.
The only difference is that this time, it’s not an enjoyable roll down a hill that greets him. It’s a steep, sharp fall directly down a sheer drop that ends in a narrow, fast-running mountain stream. The water is freezing, and deceptively deep. And this time, he’s alone- Ace at sea, Sabo gone. Nobody to come looking for him.
And Luffy can’t swim.
He sinks like a stone, unable to even claw uselessly against the current as the autumn cold of the water saps the strength and energy from his body with vicious speed. He tries to gasp in a last breath of air before his head goes under, but he’s not fast enough, and inhales a mouthful of water instead, sending him spluttering and choking.
The urge to inhale claws at his chest, and he tries to bring a hand to cover his face to block his airways, but his hands don’t want to obey him, the paralysis that always accompanies submersion turning them to lead. The rocks that line the stream are slick and sharp, and he’s moving too fast, and there’s nothing to get a grip on.
He has a lot to do, still. It would be kind of disappointing, if he died before even leaving Dawn Island.
He hits a protruding rock with an impact that forces him to gasp, except there’s no air to gasp at, and water floods his throat.
His vision is going dark and his heart is pounding wild and offbeat in his ears and he’s drowning- when all of a sudden a rough hand closes around the neck of his shirt, and he’s being hauled bodily up and back, against the relentlessly battering flow of the current.
A second later his head breaks the surface, and he sucks in a desperate breath immediately, gasping and hacking out the water in his mouth and nose. The world is still swimming around him, his head and vision blurry from the lack of oxygen, and cold exhaustion still clinging to his limbs.
“Jeez,” a voice he doesn’t know says, low and a little rough and somehow familiar. “You need to be more careful.”
Luffy coughs out another mouthful of water and tries to twist around to see who’s holding him, but his head is heavy and doesn’t really want to move. Whoever’s holding him sighs, and readjusts their grip so Luffy is slumped against their chest, propped up by two careful arms. It’s warm, and feels safe, and he can hear their heartbeat, steady and rhythmic, right beside his ear.
His head is still fuzzy and he’s still tired and cold all over, but he’s safe now, he knows deep down in his bones, so he lets his eyes slip shut, and drifts into unconsciousness.
When he wakes up, he’s in a cave. The sunlight spilling in through the entrance is sunset orange, and the rock beneath his fingers is cold but there’s a heap of ragged blankets piled on top of him, keeping him warm. From where he’s lying, eyes bleary and half-open, he can see other odds and ends scattered here and there across the stone floor- what looks like a pile of clothes, some skins, and three sheathed swords propped against one wall.
He groans, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand, and sits up with a massive yawn.
“Good, you’re awake,” someone says, and his head immediately snaps around to the other side of the cave.
There’s a teenager sitting there, leaning back against the stone wall, watching him with an unreadable expression. His tanned skin is striped with slashes of darker pigment, and his bright green hair stands out like a shock in the darkness of the cave. His clothes, plain white shirt and black pants, are dirty and stained, and covered in the tell-tale stitch-scars of repeated damage and repair. There’s a bandana tied around one of his arms, and an ugly scar wrapped around one of his ankles.
He’s missing an eye.
“Thought you might die,” the teenager continues matter-of-factly. “Wasn’t sure how much water got in your lungs.”
Luffy rubs his throat absently at the reminder, still a little sore from coughing up water, and takes a deep breath to make sure. “Nope, I’m okay!” he reassures the stranger with a grin. “You pulled me out, right? Thanks! Who’re you?”
“Zoro,” the teenager says. “And don't worry about it. I owed you one, is all.”
Luffy blinks. “Huh? But I’ve never met you before.” Then he frowns, and tips his head to the side, like looking at a different angle might make the pictures slide into place, because there is something familiar, something about the rumble in Zoro’s voice and the scar cutting across his eye socket. “Have I?”
Zoro just grins, and his teeth are sharper than they should be. The setting sunlight spilling in through the cave mouth catches on his one intact eye, turning it from black to deepest green, cut through the center with a cat’s-eye pupil.
Luffy’s mouth drops open. “Oh,” he says, and then, “Oh!”
And then he’s kicking off the rest of the ratty blankets and scrambling across the rough stone floor of the cave until he’s practically in Zoro’s lap, staring up at him in wonder. Zoro leans back a little bit, looking faintly alarmed by the sudden proximity, and Luffy has to laugh.
“You’re the tiger!” Luffy says. “Hi!”
Zoro snorts a little, and that sound is familiar, too. “Hey,” he says, looking amused.
“That’s so cool!” Luffy says, eyes big and starry. “Howsit work? Are you like a werewolf? Are there other tigers on this mountain that’re like you?”
“Dunno, not really, not anymore,” Zoro answers in order, counting the questions off on his fingers. “I’ve got family out there somewhere, but they’re all out on the ocean doing their own thing. Tigers are supposed to roam, y’know?”
“But you’re here,” Luffy points out. “You’ve been here for a long time, right? I think I used to hear stories about you in town.”
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
Zoro shrugs a little. “Waiting for something. Dunno what.”
Luffy’s grin starts to grow, and continues to grow until Zoro starts looking slightly worried. “Are you okay, uh- hey, what’s your name?”
“I’m Luffy!” Luffy says. “Zoro, you ever thought about being a pirate?”
Zoro’s eyebrows go up. “Can’t say I ever thought about it,” he says, leaning back against the cave wall with his hands behind his head, but it’s clear he’s listening, and Luffy’s grin widens even further.
“Well,” Luffy says, “I’m gonna be king of the pirates. You should come with me! Join my crew!”
“King of the pirates? You?” Zoro echoes, and he sounds disbelieving, but he doesn’t laugh. “You’re like, twelve.”
“Hey! I’m fourteen! And I’m gonna get bigger! And stronger, too!” Luffy says, nodding once, hard, to emphasize the point. “I’m gonna set sail when I’m seventeen. And I’m gonna need a crew! So you should come!”
“Hm,” Zoro says, but he doesn’t say no. “I’ll think about it.”
Luffy grins. “You will?”
“Yeah, maybe. Could be fun.”
“It will!” Luffy says, throwing his arms up. “We can sail around the whole world! You gotta be on my crew, you’re so cool-”
“Okay, okay,” Zoro says, but Luffy knows he doesn’t imagine the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I said I’d think about it. Calm down. You should probably head back down the mountain, you know. It’s startin’ to get dark. Don’t you have people who’ll be worried about you?”
Luffy shrugs a little. “Not really! There’s Dadan, but she doesn’t really worry too much about me anymore anyways.”
Zoro tips his head a little, and the movement is so catlike it makes Luffy snicker a little. “Don’t you have brothers or something? I thought… you mentioned, last time-”
“Ah, yeah,” Luffy says, and his smile shrinks just a little before reappearing. “They’re not here anymore. But it’s okay, really! I made a deal with them, and in a coupla years I’m gonna go out to sea just like they did!”
“Huh,” Zoro says, leaning back. “So nobody’s looking after you?”
“Hey! I don’t need anybody to look after me!” Luffy protests. “I’m strong! An’ I’m hard to hurt, too.”
“You nearly died, like, three hours ago,” Zoro points out.
“But I didn’t!” Luffy says, poking him in the chest with a finger. “Cause you fished me out, right! So, see, I do have somebody looking after me!”
“That’s not-” Zoro starts, and then sighs and shakes his head, smiling a little. “Never mind.” He glances out the mouth of the cave at the setting sun. “...It’s getting kind of late to climb down the mountain safely,” he says. “If you don’t have anybody waiting for you… I guess you could stay up here tonight.”
Luffy beams.
“Luffy,” Makino says, “aren’t you going to set off?”
Luffy grins up at her from his little dinghy, where it’s bobbing gently in the water just off of Foosha’s single wharf. The ocean spreads all across the horizon, wide and inviting and promising untold adventures, and he can barely sit still for how excited he is, but- “I can’t yet! I’m waiting.”
“Waiting?” Makino asks. “What for?”
Luffy tells her honestly, “A crewmate!”
She smiles a little, fond as always, and says, “I think you’ll have to go to sea for that first, Luffy.”
“Nope!” Luffy says, folding his arms definitively. “He’s coming. I’m sure. He said he just needed to pack his stuff up.”
“Who is?” Makino asks, looking baffled, and just then there’s a commotion from the back of the little crowd of villagers who’ve come to see him off, and Luffy grins fit to rival the sun.
Zoro shoulders his way through the stunned townsfolk to the end of the dock, bandana around his arm and scar around his ankle, and a battered bag slung over one shoulder. Luffy grins up at him and tells him cheerfully, “You’re late!”
Zoro shrugs a little. “Got lost.”
Luffy laughs up at him, bright and fearless. “You’re not very smart, are you? Haven’t you lived here, like, forever?”
“Hey!” Zoro snaps, but there’s no real heat behind it, and he drops his bag down into the boat anyways before jumping in after it. “I don’t want to hear that from you.”
Luffy just laughs again, and then, dark eyes flashing with excitement, says, “Ready to set sail, Zoro?”
Zoro meets his stare dead-on and grins, big and feral and barely human at all, and says, “Absolutely, captain.”