Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Luffy has always loved the sea.

(He always will.)

It sang to him, whispered in his ear, loved him back in the way only the sea could, and it made Luffy feel complete.

Whole.

Not so lonely anymore.

Seashells and seaweed, pretty crabs and ocean jewels, beautiful horizons and stories from the depths were his gifts from this unknowing force, and, seven, Luffy did not question it.

Only accepted the sea and all of its love.

Then -

Then Shanks sails into port waving the black flag of freedom above his head.

Then Shanks sails into port, bearing gifts like the sea, but the sea isn’t mad, no because Shanks is it's gift to Luffy, a dream.

Then Shank sails into port bearing a dark treasure in his hull, and nothing is the same 

When Luffy bites into the Gum Gum Fruit, flowers bloom in his lungs, swallowing him whole. He coughs up petals, a rainbow of color, feels them scratch against his throat never ending and never leaving.

Morning glories, scattering across the floor of the bar, white and blood-spotted. An omen. A threat.

(A fate.)

Shanks panics when Luffy coughs up those flowers, panics when the sea gets rougher and tears well up in Luffy’s eyes, panics when blood – so much blood already – drips drips drips onto the ground.

Hanahaki, Shanks whispers, just like the legends, and it’s a guillotine over Luffy’s neck.

They – the villagers, the pirates, the bandits - wonder who this child could love so completely and not be loved back. Luffy is loved, loved by everyone in this village, and by Garp across the sea and by an unknown father who Luffy might not get to know. This boy has so much love, draws people to him like a flame, is the sun in a child’s body. Who could Luffy choose to love not love him back?

They wonder and beg on their knees for Luffy to tell them, but Luffy doesn’t.

Only stares at the sea, and let's white and red petals fall from his mouth.

(The sea hates devil fruit users. And sometimes, there are no exceptions to the rule.)

Chapter Text

Zoro asks the boy in dinghy who he loves so much so that the petals that fall from his mouth are tipped in red.

Luffy laughs, and carries on, a trail of bright sea pink blossoms drifting in the sea behind him.

Zoro thinks he will never know, and settles back, catching Luffy when a coughing fit sends him nearly to the ground, faltering in his footsteps.

(Everything is worse after Luffy falls in the water. He coughs more, stumbles more, sleeps more, its so obvious Zoro notices after two and a half days of being with him.  The people they meet say its just water in the lungs, stirring up those plants…  but Zoro knows why plants grow, and if Luffy is like the sun incarnate then who is to say the saltwater hatred does not act as a nurturer?

Sun and water make life, after all.

Even now, Zoro knows that Luffy has a way of turning the world on its head. Its no surprise he turns life into flowery death.)

He was like this when he wandered into that dusty courtyard. Impossibly strong, as strong as Zoro, stronger even, yet halting and falling backwards into Zoro’s or Coby’s arms, flowers coming out like words. The red of his vest was to cover the blood that spilled from his lips when he laughed too long.

Luffy still laughed.

Shishishi! like petals in the waves.

(He had stolen Zoro in that courtyard, along with his swords and his loyalty. There was an oath sworn between bloody breaths, Zoro swearing death to the man who would dare stand in the way of his dreams.

He knows he won’t have to kill Luffy.

Luffy’s already dying.)

Chapter Text

Nami did not realize what the boy had, at first, until they are in the dinghy and away from Buggy, until Luffy laughs, until she shakes him and flowers pour out of his mouth like a waterfall.  

Milk vetch’s, this time, mixed with sunflowers. She wonders how they even fit in his mouth.

Luffy laughs at her, this small child with bloody lips laughing at her shocked face, and she hits the fourteen-year-old over the head.

“What the fuck, kid.” She says, and Luffy keeps laughing. “What the fuck.”

(He still laughs, but she’ll be the one to rub his back when he can’t stop coughing, when he looks too sad at the sea, and she’ll be the one to bring him tangerine slices far later, to give some fruit in his mouth that he won’t cough up later.

She worries, sometimes, about who could possibly hate Luffy.)

Hanahaki, she wonders, when Luffy rests his head on her shoulders with Arlong’s blood on his knuckles.  Of course, the only thing that could bring her captain – her captain, isn’t that wonderful, she’s so happy when she says that word – bring her captain down, is her captain himself.  

She loves her captain, her captain who calls her his and doesn’t make her feel horrible when he does. He doesn’t have long out on these seas, because of his own heart, and that means he doesn’t have long to reach his dream.

Nami’s his navigator, the best navigator on any sea.

She will wrangle the winds to her command to get him to the end of this sea before his time runs out.

This she swears, even as she curses Luffy out and bans him from the kitchen, and is the only voice of reason on this ship.  

Chapter Text

Usopp knows the tales - long lost lovers, lovers torn apart, lovers who had hatred grow in their hearts - knows it all and recites it by spirit to his followers.

(Did you hear how the king choked on gold roses? Did you know that flowers grow because no one loved the earth back? Did you know?)

Still, he’d never think he see the effects of hanahaki - unrequited love, deep in the soul, felt so intensely that the heart could not help but grow flowers to gain favor - in real life.

(The doctors said his mother died only of a coughing fit, no flowers in her lungs or vines in her veins. Usopp found white and yellow daffodils by the door and never knew his father, so he can’t really say if the doctors were right or not.)

(Usopp always believed the lies people told him when he was a kid. Now, he tells them. Now, he knows the lies the doctor said.)

Luffy, knocking down enemies with only a punch, leaves flowers in his wake. Usopp doesn’t get it, and prays he never will, because Luffy is smaller and younger than he is and so vibrant despite the living plant in his chest. He loves, fiercely, and Usopp already loves him for it.

He invites Usopp out to sea, y’know.

“There’s adventure waiting!” Luffy says, eyes bright, “We can’t miss it! So get on already!”

Usopp gets on, starting the adventure of a lifetime, and tries not to wonder why Luffy is in such a rush to get out to sea.

(Later, he sees him sitting down for an hour, after the floor is covered in daffodils and water willows and blood, and thinks he knows.)

Chapter Text

Sanji, medically, cannot get Hanahaki. Something about his bastard ex-father and his schemes, Sanji wasn’t really paying attention. All he knows is that while he doesn’t have anything the rest of his shitty ex-siblings have, he does definitely have immunity. He would have gotten it by now if he didn’t - so many beautiful ladies!

(That’s not true. It wouldn’t have been the ladies that stole his heart, not now and not before. Sanji loved his father in the way all children do. Judge didn’t love him back. Not. One. Bit.)

Still, he knows the best way to treat hanahaki, calm it, stifle the effects of mythic flower growing in the lungs. A spice here, lots of salt there, some of this and that - a brew to be slurped down and refilled for as long as it takes.  Any good chef knows nutritional health, knows exactly what people need to eat.  Sanji is among the best. Of course, he knows.

The minute the boy walks through the door - throws a cannonball through it, really, - Sanji serves him a brew and some meat and ignores the fact that the boy is getting bloody flower petals over the dirty dishes. They’ll be cleaned by someone else later.

Instead - instead he serves the meal and watches the boy defeat a tyrant while choking on his own love, and wonders what brought a dying kid out to sea.

(In truth, the All Blue stole Sanji’s heart, hidden out there in the world, a dream, a hope, a love.

Sanji doesn’t have the devil’s fruit in his veins though.

Sanji is free.

And the ocean loves him back.)

Chapter Text

Vivi loves this crew, this straw hatted crew.

They are so joyous, in every moment, even when they are facing down enemies. It’s a game to them, but it’s a game they can win.

She would be worried, if not for the way Nami can reign in a storm with one weapon or they way Zoro can cut down an entire town. They are stronger than anyone Vivi knows, strong enough to defeat warlord and tyrants and maybe even gods someday.

And - more than anything else - they care.

Care for each other, care for this ship, care for Vivi and her kingdom and her plea, and care for Luffy.

Luffy, who laughs and wipes blood away from his lips but who still has red stuck to his teeth and camellia petals in his mouth, Luffy, who loves so infinitely he found the one person who could not love him back, Luffy -

Luffy, who looks to the ocean and coughs and coughs and coughs.

He’s fourteen, younger than her, younger than most of this crew and already fading, but he brings them all along anyway.

She’ll make the adventure good for him, they all will.

(She watches, sometimes, as Nami rubs Luffy’s back and gives him tangerines, as Sanji sits and helps Luffy drink warm broths and sweet liquids when he’s coughed for far too long, as Usopp will tell him a story and let Luffy lean tiredly against his shoulder, and not budge when blood goes drip, drip, drip onto Merry’s decks. She’ll watch as Zoro will remain so close to the railing when Luffy is fishing, and not let him fall, a protective guard dog, watching out for evil ocean sprays. She will watch as they will let Luffy sleep in, if he’s been up at night coughing, and how Luffy always has two pairs of watchful eyes on him when he’s at the helm.

She watches herself, then, brushing petals off the deck, proof of Luffy’s over whelming love for the sea, and watches herself curse the waves at night, when Luffy played in the ocean that day on some stranger’s shore and had to be carried back to the Merry.

Vivi loves the ocean, too, you know. All who sail the seas do, in some manner. She can’t ask Luffy to stop loving the blue waters. But she can curse the ocean to stop hating her captain.)

Luffy pulls her forward, to an Island of dinosaurs, and Vivi knows she would follow him anywhere, if he asked.

(He wouldn’t, is the thing, and it makes her love him that much more.)

Chapter Text

Chopper is a reindeer, and reindeer never really belonged to the sea anyway. It doesn’t bother him, being hated by the sea, because he never really loved it in the first place.

It was always an escape, a distant destination, a flag over his head.

Not a love - not like he loved the doctor, or doctrine, or his new crew. No, not a love at all.

In fact, as he takes his captain into the cabin for his first checkup, it’s becoming more like a hate instead.

(Chopper never took an oath never to hurt anybody. Doctrine liked using his antlers as anesthesia too much for that, and Chopper wanted to be a pirate someday.

Pirates fought. Pirates hurt people, maliciously or otherwise.

But never, never did Chopper think he might be drawn to hatred for someone other than Wapol.)

Luffy’s chest flutters weakly beneath his hooves, heart beat skipping in a way that’s only possible, only able to keep him alive, because Chopper’s captain is made of rubber. There’s blood on his lips constantly and a persistent cough echoing after his laughter. He stumbles, sometimes, and gets fatigued at odd times, a shadow of death following in every footstep.

Chopper hates that he’s gotten used to it already.

His new captain is younger than he is, small and tiny, and it’s so weird to see someone with so much authority be so young. Still - none of the crew questions his leadership.

(What could Luffy – the man who saved Chopper, the man who saved Drum, the man who waved a flag not his own but with the same fierceness in his eyes, the man who will be King of the Pirates - be but captain?)

Luffy smiles at him, then, again, when Chopper hesitates far too long on his chest and that stifling, growing feeling hiding within it.

(He’s only dealt with Hanahaki once before, a persistent case that is. Usually the love fades with the flowers and the realization that their love does not love them back.  This case was different, an old woman who refused to stop loving her child that scorned her and burned her house down in the depths of winter.

She died, the night Doctrine and Chopper found her, her deathbed covered in beautiful immortal globe amaranths.

Chopper will burn the world before he lets that happen to his captain.)

“Chopper?” Luffy prompts, bright eyed and curious.

“Ah, sorry Luffy!” Chopper says and tries to move on to the rest of his examination when Luffy grabs his hands.

(They’re warm. His captain isn’t dead yet.)

“Chopper,” He says, like a king to his most loyal knight. “It’s okay.”

The tears well up in Chopper’s eyes anyway. “But -“

You’ll die - maybe in the next three years, if we’re not careful, the next five if we’re lucky. You’ll die and I just met you, and that too short a time to love you as my captain, my friend, my savior -

“It’s okay.” Luffy says again, forcefully, that smile never leaving his face. “That’s why I set out, y’know. So I could be Pirate King! I had to set out now, I couldn’t later. If I die trying on the path to my dream, then everything’s okay. That’s what being a pirate is - chasing your dream! Shishishi!”

King or dead, echoes in Chopper’s brain. King or dead.

Still.

Chopper doesn’t say any more about it, only finishes his examination, giving Luffy a set of drinks to ask from Sanji - juices and a smoothie with every meal, stuff Luffy’s metabolism will devour in an instant - and strict directions to get Chopper if he falls in the ocean, then sends him on his way.

When Luffy bounces out the door, Chopper’s dream has shifted, becoming laser focused and direct.

Chopper is going to cure every illness in the world.

Hanahaki will be the first, and he will do it soon.  

(The Pirate King can’t die before his coronation, after all, no matter how much the ocean hates him.)

Chapter Text

Ace didn’t expect to see Luffy in Alabasta - didn’t expect to see him at all, because Luffy was supposed to be at home at Dawn for the next three years.

Instead, a newspaper flutters down from a News Coo that morning, heralding the bounty of Monkey D. Luffy, and Ace burst into flames.

(Ace used to love the Sea - really, he did. It wasn’t a love like Luffy’s but it was a love all the same, and looking back, maybe it was freedom he loved more than anything else. The chance for an answer, hanging over the horizon.

Then, he met Luffy, who choked on his own breath and smiled so brightly at the thing that hated him, and Ace found he really didn’t care that much for the sea after all.

Because Ace? Ace didn’t love much. He loved Luffy, and Sabo, and his mother, and Makino and though he would never admit it, Gramps and the bandits too. The rest of the world hated him and yet - no flowers ever bloomed in his lungs.

Ace was always loved back. Luffy wasn’t.

And it hurt.)

Deuce had to calm him down, slap him over the head, yell at him, before Ace started making any sense again. When he did, they set out for the next island on the log pose immediately.

They couldn’t go back. Ace was the captain, the star rookie (though Luffy had a starter bounty higher than him what the fuck did he do), and he would not let his crew’s dreams die just because Luffy was an idiot.

So they went forward and arrived in Alabasta after being swept off course by a storm so horrific even the Grand Line residents of the Spades were in awe of it.

(Privately, later, Ace remembers a secret about a dragon, and knows it wasn’t really a storm at all.

Or at least, not one made of cloud and thunder, but flesh and bone and the letter D.)

In Alabasta, the same day he saw the wanted poster with rage still coursing through his veins at the stupidity of his little brother, Ace sees Luffy, unexpectedly, and out of the blue.

Laughing, bright and joyous, and choking in the same breath.

Just the same as when Ace left Dawn, with maybe fuller cheeks and more seaswept hair. Fourteen, and so stupid.

Ace saves him from the Marine, and doesn’t quite shake him in the next moment but its a close thing.

“Luffy!” Ace growls.

“Ace!” Luffy cheers.

And well, that is that before Ace slings Luffy over his shoulder as a volley of bullets follow in their wake.

“What the hell are you doing out here, you idiot? Seventeen! We promised!”

“Shishishi!” Luffy laughs, a few bright orange petals drifting out from the hand covering his mouth. “I couldn’t wait!”

Ace snorts at that. “It’s been five months Luffy. Did you even set off at your birthday?”

“Yep! Snuck out too! I stole Old Man Johnson’s boat, shishishi!”

(Ace remembers Garp walking up to the bandit hut with whining brat with blood on his cheek. Luffy, he had introduced the kid to Dadan. Take care of him for me! Keep him away from the water.

The rest of them had thought it was because of his devil fruit. It wasn’t till Makino visited and explained Luffy’s love, the way he looked out to the horizon and its foamy waters, that they understood.

They didn’t like to let him out after that.

Why accelerate his death, after all.)

Ace snorts again, a familiar smile creeping its way across his face at his brother’s antics. “Yeah?”

“Yeah!”

“Do you even have a crew?” It’s a good question to ask. Luffy is nothing but a miracle worker, even as blood drips from the petals in his mouth. He would be able to make it too the Grand Line on sheer luck, but…

“Of course!” Luffy knows the importance of a good crew. “And a ship! And a duck! And a princess and - “

Ace finally laughs, fullheartedly, at his little brother, because Luffy isn’t dying as he thought, isn’t rushing out to sea in a panic because the last sets of Hanahaki are setting in and -

Maybe the sea might be killing his little brother a little bit more every time he touches sea stone or dips his toes in saltwater but -

Luffy is alive. And both of them will live without regrets.

If Luffy doesn’t regret setting out to sea and letting flowers rot in his chest like an omen of death, then Ace cannot regret it either.

Ace rarely loves, but he has always been loved back.

Luffy loves so much yet it kills him, day by day.

Ace holds his brother in his arms (for the last time? He hopes not) and hands him his vivre card.

“If you need to find me,” he says, “We’ll meet at the pirate’s summit!”

The top - when both of them are big names with bigger bounties, sometime in the future.

Luffy broke one promise to Ace and left early.

Ace will make sure he doesn’t die before he breaks another.

(Don’t be stupid, Ace had told Luffy on that cliffside so long ago. I won’t die. Promise.

Luffy didn’t promise him back, but he said he would be King.

Ace ignores the part about or die trying, and clings to the hope that Luffy will live.)

He leaves Alabasta with bloody roses and plum tree flowers and sand crushed underneath his shoes.

He doesn’t talk about it.

Chapter Text

Robin’s made of flowers, though she has no love in her heart except for the history of the world. They do not choke her lungs but rather stretch out and out and out, wreathing her body in beautiful limbs of mimicry.

She has the Hana Hana Fruit, has eyes and arms and legs blooming like flowers. Petals blossom in their wake, and people see the flowers in her path from the eye in the back of her head and think cursed.

It’s useful for pity, sometimes. So few people know what Hanahaki looks like, that Robin could get away with any trick in the book for a place to rest her head for the night.

Those times are over, now, if only because she turns to bloody hands rather than bloody petals, but she knows the legends still.

Hanahaki, originating first in the latter half of the Grand Line, from an island now under the waves. Drowned, by the people who first loved it and were cursed. Still - the flowers bloomed.

Life-stealing blossoms, some called them, lily carnations, others. The flowers of breath and life and love.

Robin could recite the origins for days, how so many suffered at first by the loves they didn’t know, how the language shifted over time, how cases dwindled and rose and fell into legend.

She could.

But there’s no one to listen, until she meets him on an island of death and sees his truth underneath falling stone.

Monkey D. Luffy is living history, from the D. In his name to the sunny, blood stained smile on his lips. The flowers he leaves behind are a myriad of colors, nothing like Robins, and she is a fool for thinking she could have ever faked this desperate, desperate love.

She meets his truth under crumbling rumble, when he defeats a tyrant made of sand and damns her life in the same breath.

Damns it, by saving her while he coughs out blood and sand and petals.

(Her second sight of him before she learned his truth was when crocodile sent a hook straight through him, and out came blood and water and vines. In the sand pit they were still there, and if not for the sandstorms you could track his path across the ocean.

She wonders if the poison in his lungs killed the plants in there, just a bit.

Then again, they are born of ocean hate so she doubts they will go away that easy.)

She joins his crew then, afterwards, and watches as his truth - his curse, he desperate plea for love, slowly kills him.

(His truth is this - He will not stop even for the flowers in his lungs, even as every sea breath feels like needles, even as he looks to the endless horizon. His truth is this - Luffy knows hate, and Luffy knows love, and can’t tell the difference between the two when it comes to his own part.

His truth, his history, so small compared to hers only 14 years, hurts her, in a way she didn’t expect.)

She tells him she wants to live as the world burns around her, and wonders as Luffy destroys himself to save her and everyone else again, if he’s so reckless because he wants something else to take him before the Ocean’s hatred does.

Chapter Text

Franky saw the pirate king once, in the distance.

It was a quiet thing, a hidden moment that he probably wasn’t supposed to see.

He had been ten, maybe, or younger - cast off by his parents last month, ex-parents really - and he hated pirates then.

Like his ex-parents.

Ugh.

But Gold Roger… he wasn’t the pirate king yet, not when Franky saw him, but he was - without a doubt - a pirate.

The captain’s coat and loud laugh, the joyous grin and billowing shirt, the crew and the magnificent ship being built behind him - Franky could not help but be in awe.

(Roger was a living legend before his title even made its way onto the newspapers, and Franky was not one, not yet. He would be, in a quarter century or so, but not then.

Then, Franky, was small, and Roger was like the sea walking.)

He followed Roger for a bit as the man explored Scrap Isle, watching as Roger’s first mate watched Roger watch the sea.

It was odd, seeing a pirate on land, but it was fun, in a way. Like a secret, like something Franky shouldn’t be allowed to see. Fun.

Until the future king of the pirates started choking on white daisies, and nearly collapsed there in the street.

Franky knew the stories, and he knew the truth, all those years later, when the Pirate King started an era and died in the same lack of breath.

The Pirate King died because of two blades and the force of the government, but only because the Hanahaki didn’t get him first.

Franky has always wondered who did not love the Pirate King Back.

Looking at Luffy, sitting on Franky’s shoulder ever so slightly breathless, a single petal stuck to his cheek as he stares out at the horizon, Franky thinks he knows.

(Franky can fix anything but he can’t fix this. Only give Luffy plenty of opportunities to hide in his workshop when everyone else’s worrying gets too much, and he just needs to cough and cough and cough before falling asleep behind Franky’s back.

He keeps a blanket down there, now, and some juice in the Cola Fridge, just in case Luffy needs something to drink while he’s resting. A broom rests in the corner, ready to sweep up osiers and ash mountains once Franky’s captain’s eyes close in restless sleep at last.

Franky can’t fix this, can’t fix Luffy’s love, not that he thinks he could ever want to, but he can provide shelter.

It’s what a shipwright does, after all - and Franky is Luffy’s shipwright, no matter how many petals he has to brush out of his work space.

He’ll be the shelter for the storm.)

Chapter Text

There is a question rolling of Luffy’s lips that Brook perhaps should have expected. Brook is bones after all, old bones twice lived, and his Captain’s sunshine smile has splashes of red on it when he looks to the horizon.

Yes, it should not have been a surprise. Still, who would not be surprised when your captain, young and bold and bright, asks -

“Brook? What’s it like to die?”

It’s like Brook’s heart stops beating for the second time when he hears that phrase - that damned question.

It’s them, alone, Luffy on the figurehead and Brook behind him, the ever watchful Zoro making sure Luffy did not drown for long, resting a short ways away. It makes sense that Luffy would ask him here, when the sun is setting into the next life.

Brook doesn’t know what to say, only hums a gentle melody, a sailor’s resting song. Luffy shifts his head just so, a single white lily falling from his lips, and a skeletal mouth moves without its soul’s say so.

“I suppose, it is a little bit like coming home.” He says, soft and simple and wondrous, trying to recall the brief moments before his devil fruit stole him back from paradise. “A welcoming… different for every person.”

A soft sigh, and Brook can’t tell if it’s from him or his captain. He’s never talked about death, before, not like this and not with anyone living. What experiences he gets from this crew!

(He wishes, just a bit, that he didn’t have to.)

“I heard a melody there,” And Brook’s soft humming in-between words, the strings stirred into harmony on his violin - it all changes, just a bit, to the grasping lullaby Brook heard something like death sing to him once. “It was beautiful.”

The waves crash softly against the bow of the ship.

“It’s different for everyone?” Luffy asks, just as soft.

“Mhmm. Music is my treasure, the songs I shared with my old crew and that I now share here. Not everyone values it as I do - so why would it be that way afterwards for them? Why would their treasures not await them there?”

Luffy hums, an offbeat repetition of Brook’s death song, and closes his eyes.

“I hope the sea is waiting for me, then.” Brook’s captain says hopefully, as if each word and implication is not another nail in Brook’s coffin. “That would be nice.”

(Brook met Luffy when no flowers stained his lips and excitement urged him onward. Ten minutes later, with the finest meal Brook had ever eaten, his captain had broken off to exhale eight mossy rosebuds from his throat.

Luffy loves, endlessly, yet the one endless horizon for a pirate hates him. A tragedy, it is, truly.)

Brook nods and agrees. “It would be nice, captain. A pirates heaven, yohohoho!”

Luffy smiles and picks six petals from the back of his mouth, and Brook tries to feel as if the world isn’t tearing itself apart in grief.

(Brook doesn’t know if he truly died, if he truly went to the afterlife. If he did, he would have thought his captain, his first captain, Yorki, would have been waiting for him there. Instead, it was more like a dream than a death.

Brook can’t promise his captain that the sea will ever love him again.

It hurts, far more than it should.)

Chapter Text

Two years, Rayleigh tells him on that island where everything is bloody, You have to wait two years.

“Raleigh,” Luffy replies, marigolds sticking to his hands his face his feet his -(chest, pain, so much pain.) “I don’t have two years.”

(He doesn’t. He knows this, that his life has always been an hourglass of ticking time left, and he’s made his peace with it. Iva told him the hormones would take away some of the precious time he had left, and the doctor dude had told him the same. Chopper already scolded him for his Gears, his gears that he used so many times in that war.

It didn’t matter. Luffy could not regret trying to save -

Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it-)

Raleigh looks at him with an apprising eye, and suddenly Luffy remembers Buggy’s words about flowers and Pirate Kings.

“Then,” Raleigh says, finality in his tone, “Your crew dies at Sabaody.”

And, really, the choice is simple in the end.

(Luffy’s never much cared about his own life. He’s always loved others more than he loved himself. He and Ace are were similar, like that.)

Chapter Text

Law had performed the procedure before, mostly on unwilling victims. It was relatively easy - remove the plants from the lungs and the tendrils of vines that creeped through the blood, then - only capable with the Ope-Ope Fruit, remove what counted as ‘love’ in the human body - or non-human body. It isn’t a visible thing, that last one, but it is part of the powers Law possesses.

Side effects include losing all ability to love, and in some cases, feel emotion.

Now, looking at Monkey D. Luffy, laying down and bleeding out on his Operating Table, Law debates doing the procedure. Straw Hat wouldn’t care, afterwards, any love he had for whatever it was shriveling up, but…

(Law remembers.

Law remembers the way Straw Hat punched a man in a god’s robes and spit up blood on the white fabric afterwards. Remembers the way he did not care, even as he stumbled fighting with Law and Eustass. Remembers the way Straw Hat looked to the sea and didn’t look back, and remembers how tiny Straw Hat is, small and fourteen, the youngest Supernova - and pirate captain, really - by far. )

Straw Hat set sail for a reason.

Law removes the flowers - a brief respite for the young captain, easier to operate without them for Law - and leaves Luffy’s love alone.

Jimbe shakes him, afterwards, when Straw Hat is unconscious by Jimbe’s side and his breath lets little petals escape.

“Why didn’t you,” Jimbe asks, pained, red on his fingertips from Straw Hat’s wounds. “Why didn’t you save him?”

Law smirks. “I did.”

Jimbe growls. “You know what I mean.”

He hums then, twisting Kikoku in his grasp. “We’re pirates, Jimbe. We love the sea, no matter who we are. If we don’t… if we don’t feel emotion, like joy, or anger, or victory or grief… If we don’t love, then why do we set sail?”

If pirates didn’t love - love the sea, love their dream, love their crew - then why were they pirates?

Jimbe doesn’t get it, but with the way Straw Hat grips his robe even unconscious, he will soon.

At Amazon Lily, Straw Hat does not ask Law to remove the pain - to remove the love he feels for his brother that tears at him -

(It wasn’t suppose to be him-)

Or to remove Straw Hat’s love for the ocean, the sea.

Instead, he clings tighter to the unbridled affection in his chest and coughs up bouquets and cranberry flowers and wreaths of roses.

Law clears Straw Hat’s body of flowers once more and leaves Amazon Lily, a smirk lacing his lips as even now, he watches Straw Hat draw nearer and nearer to the water.

(After all - he understands dying for those you love.)

Chapter Text

It’s quiet in the galley at night. The waves are gentle outside, the dim light of the lamp casts a soothing orange over everything, and the most rambunctious of their crew are asleep in their bunks.

Often, it is only Sanji in the kitchen at night, finishing up meal prep for tomorrow and smoking away his troubles.

Not tonight.

Tonight, as Sanji finishes putting away pots and pans from this nights dinner, barefoot feet pad their way into the kitchen, soft and simple.

There’s only one person who walks like that - is that light, with that lack of grace, and walks barefoot on Merry’s splintering boards. 

“Luffy,” Sanji sighs, putting the dish he was holding down. “No more meat. Rationing - do you know that word? Rationing?”

But Luffy isn’t yelling. Instead, he slumps into the space between Sanji’s shoulder blades, barely even reaching, and wraps his arms around Sanji. His head shakes a no into Sanji’s back as Sanji carefully freezes, and Sanji suddenly realizes what this is about.

“Luffy?” He asks, softer. “Are you okay?”

Another shake of the head, and Sanji turns around, to capture Luffy in his own arms.

His hat isn’t on, instead resting behind his back, and Sanji is careful to avoid hitting it as he pulls Luffy closer.

A moment more passes, Luffy sinking into Sanji’s arms.

(No red stains his dress shirt, so Sanji takes it as a good sign.)

“…Luffy?” Sanji prompts again, carefully when there is no response.

Luffy hums and mutters something Sanji can’t quite hear, before he finally lifts his head out of Sanji’s shirt. “Chopper said to go to you if I feel to dizzy.”

Ah. He was right.

(Chopper is their newest member, the youngest after Luffy, yet he’s the only one of them who can do anything about the death growing in Luffy’s lungs. And even then it isn’t much. For Hanahaki, the treatments are removal via Ope Ope fruit, requited love or - only working to hold it off - keeping away the source of hate. For a pirate, it’s all impossible.

Chopper tries anyway, and Luffy listens to him. Sanji and Chopper collaborate on meals, the crew makes Luffy rest, everyone making sure that Luffy will live just one more hour.

Sanji’s part is food.)

“Alright. Go sit down, I’ll bring something over.”

Luffy nods again, reluctant to leave Sanji’s warmth but pulling away, and goes to slouch at the table.

Sanji turns and laments his clean kitchen for only a second before getting out the things he needs for a quick meal.

In five minutes of quick yet careful preparation, Sanji is done. He sets a meal down before Luffy, meat that should have been rationed and a glass or two of orange juice, and nods at his captain. Something to refresh him, give him precious vitamins and minerals that his body loses each time he coughs, something to get rid of the dizziness and lightheadedness, something to help calm his captain.

Luffy wastes no time in devouring the meal, and it is then, looking at him, that Sanji realizes his captain is the most selfish person Sanji has ever met.

He scarfs down meal after meal, offers his endless love to his friends, protects them, saves his crew, and is the best captain Sanji could ask for. Yet, in the same breath, Luffy is fourteen and without his entire life ahead of him.

Luffy takes - hearts and souls and dreams - and offers only bloody smiles and flowers in return.

It hurts that Luffy doesn’t seem to take care of himself except in quiet moments like this.

Sanji thinks back to the island before, where Luffy climbed up a mountain and ground his fingers and toes down to the bone, while Sanji was as useless as a sack of bricks. Where Luffy defeated a tyrant as the cold stole breath away from him, and hacked up cherry blossoms as he made them fall from the sky.

Luffy came away bloody and red and hurt. Another injury that he brushed off, another smile laced with pain that he didn’t acknowledge.  Another wound that could have killed their already dying captain.

And Luffy doesn’t care - doesn’t care that with every breath of sea air, every dip in the ocean, every cough and every battle, he’s throwing a bit of his life away, bit by bit. Soon, their captain is going to die because of his own selfish love, and there is nothing Sanji can do about.

Luffy, selfishly selfless.

He always was confusing.

Yet - as Luffy leans into Sanji’s side, meal finished, humming happily, Sanji cannot blame him.

Luffy said he wanted to be Pirate King, and Sanji knows he will be, that Luffy will steal that dream for himself and his crew, and every other hopeful king will simply have to let their dream die.

A selfish dream at his center.

(King or dead, and Sanji won’t believe there’s any other option than King.)

Being selfish is just who Luffy is.

“Hey, better now?” Sanji says, lowly, to the boy leaning into his side. “Less dizzy?”

Luffy nods, sleepily. “And the headache is gone too.”

He hadn’t mentioned that before. Sanji makes a note to tell Chopper in the back of his mind.

Sanji hums again. “Good.” He moves to get up, to clean up his kitchen again, but arms around his waist stop him from moving far.

“Luffy- I need to clean up!” He growls, but when he turns Luffy is fast asleep, snoring already without any blood lining his lips.

Sanji sighs, and slips back into his seat beside his captain, accepting his fate as pillow for the night.

Where’s the moss head when you need him, he thinks, brushing hair out of Luffy’s face and moving his hat to the side, he’s the usual napping partner - only thing he’s good for, really. He snorts at his own joke before lighting cigarette.

Smoke plumes into the air as Sanji lets his eyes fall shut. Luffy is a familiar comfort, wrapped around him and head slipping to Sanji’s lap, and sleep pulls heavy at Sanji’s limbs. When Luffy coughs, twice, Sanji rubs his back in comfort, ignoring the petals covering his shoes. Soon…

Soon Sanji snuffs out his smoke and falls into oblivion as well, dreaming of a day when Luffy is a king without blood on his lips.

(When Sanji wakes, Luffy is still there, quiet and asleep. Blood lines his lips and the bandages around his fingers have come loose in the night, but there’s a smile on Luffy’s face.

Sanji picks narcissus blossoms and laurestines off of his clothes shakes his head.

“Selfish bastard,” he says, smiling, and does not allow himself to think of death.)

Chapter Text

“We had though he would die first,” Sabo says to the quiet. “Luffy, I mean.”

He doesn’t have to specify who We is. By the way Sabo’s eyes trail along the x on Luffy’s chest, the rest of the crew, squashed in this small, Dressrossan building, know exactly who we is.

“Ace was stupid about life, but he wasn’t actively dying or trying to die at least. He would live until he found answers. And I… well I didn’t have any reason to die, and I had my dream and people I wanted to spite. We always thought it would be Luffy.”

Luffy, the crybaby. Luffy, the littlest brother. Luffy, the weakling.

Luffy, with flowers growing inside his chest who choked on heleniums when Sabo first met him. Luffy, who breathed in sea air and breathed out flowers. Luffy, who loved so much it hurt.

Sabo tilts his head back then, conscious of all the eyes around him. Each Straw Hat stares at him pensively, so much older than him, most of them, but still learning.

They all loved his baby brother though. Sabo was thankful.

“Funny,” Sabo’s voice catches oddly. “How Luffy is the only one who didn’t.”

A part of Sabo died in that fire. To Luffy and Ace, he really was dead.

And Ace…

(There’s fire and magma and hell. Sabo swallows the fruit, the will of his brother, and knows that it is only possible because his beloved brother who he never got to see free is six feet under the ground and cold.)

Ace is dead.

“He’s always been surprising like that.”

Luffy lives without regrets. He has to, if he wants to achieve his dream.

Sabo has two regrets, and is glad he has a new dream now.

Zoro, in the corner, nods in agreement as the rest of the crew chuckle. They don’t seem alarmed at Sabo’s shaky words, or the way he’s slowly carding a hand through Luffy’s hair, when only an hour ago he had crushed skulls with it.

Stupid, the rest of the world would call the Straw Hats.

Knowing, Sabo calls them, because they understand death just like he does, and they understand Luffy.

Luffy coughs then, briefly. Flowers and blood spill past his lips, so much more than he did before, seven and fresh flowers in his lungs.

Sabo hesitates. His crew doesn’t.

Usopp tilts Luffy onto his side with just one hand, a hand sprouts to rub circles into Luffy’s back, and Trafalgar Law mutters a quick room and suddenly flowers fall in the trash can beside the bed.

Familiar motions, each one laden with care.

“He won’t die.” Zoro says from the wall, the ever faithful first mate. “We won’t let him.”

Ace had promised Luffy he wouldn’t die.

Sabo doesn’t think this is any different.

And yet…

He looks around at this crew, who look at their captain, younger than all of them by at least three years, with nothing but devotion and love and loyalty, and thinks maybe… maybe he can place some trust in them.

Just a little.

“A kid like him makes a big brother worry. Take care of him for me, okay?”

The Straw Hats nod, his brother shifts in his bed, and Sabo leaves, ignoring the flowers stuck on his coat.

Luffy won’t die. His crew wouldn’t let him, after how many times he made them live.

Hopefully - hopefully it’s enough.

(King or dead, as they say. King or dead.)

Chapter Text

Merry is a ship, and so Merry is faithful. She loves her crew, loves the waves, and loves the way her helm is always facing the horizon. She is a Straw Hat, and she will never abandoned her crew by choice.

She has no choice now, when her planks are breaking and her hull is shattering, when destruction takes her away bit by bit. Her spirit is strong - no Straw Hat would ever falter - but her body is weak.

Her captain, young, bloody, and hers, makes the right decision.

She’s glad, at first. No matter how bad she wants to, she can’t carry them forward. She is only a lamb, meant for paradise and gentle waters.

The waves whisper about lightning islands and sea kings who swallow flightless ships, and Merry knows she cannot compete and keep her crew safe.

Her captain makes the right decision to leave her behind at Water 7.

No one likes it.

(Merry is a lamb, and lambs are made for blood. Her figurehead, her captain’s beloved special seat, is stained with red from when her captain sits there so peacefully. Last night, when he sat and made this decision, he was there with her.

Blood drips down Merry’s face along with white windflower petals. They feel like tears, somehow, and Merry knows it will never come out of her wooden skin.)

Her captain is breaking on the inside. Everyone is.

Yet Usopp - her beloved Usopp, who cares for her so much, who was the first to paint her sails and sit on her deck to embrace the sun, who stuck with her and encourages her and loves her - Usopp, is angry.

(He’s not brave, not yet, and so he hides. Merry wishes she could make him believe that he’s brave enough to face this, that he’s strong, that he’s needed.

It wouldn’t do anything. He needs to learn for himself.

Their captain would never abandon him.)

He lashes out. Luffy lashes back. Both of them cough, cough into the bloody ground of her galley, and Usopp leaves.

(Luffy, you’re going to be the Pirate King, right? Usopp said, blood dripping from his lips like a poor mimicry of Luffy, I don’t have any high ambitions for myself! Looking back, when I first set out to sea, you guys just invited me on your ship! That’s our only connection! There’s no sense in traveling together when we have completely different views!

He was hurtful. Wrong. Merry knew he wanted to be a brave warrior of the sea. But then -

I’m not here to die like you are Luffy! This sea’s not going to be my grave! I’m too cowardly for that! I’m quitting this crew.

The truth hurt.)

There’s a battle in two hours. Her captain lies in her hull, coughing up asphodels in his hammock. He knows the truth that Merry knows, but that just means its too late.

The rest of her crew breaks. Merry breaks. Her captain breaks.

She hates this.

But she can’t stop it. She can only cry.

-

Usopp does not hesitate when the battles comes. Merry knew he wouldn’t. Usopp is smart,  and knows Luffy is stronger than him in terms of strength.

He turns to tricks, dirty tricks, tricks fit for a pirate. Smoke and eggs and fire.Things that cut even Luffy. Then, dangerously, things that Luffy breathes in and can’t breathe out, pepper spray and cases, things that make flowers choke out of Luffy’s throat, even in the middle of a fight.

(The one thing that would bring him down.)

Luffy lands just one blow, in the end, but it's enough.

It’s over.

The outcome everyone knew was coming.

(Merry cries as Luffy slumps to his knees, cries as blood covers the ground, cries as Luffy limps his way back to the ship and barely breathes out it’s heavy - barely breathes at all. Her crew leaves her that night, never to return, and all thats left of her captain is the flowers around her flag and the blood on her floor boards.

Her captain made the right decision. She just wished it didn’t turn out like this.)

Asphodels and windflowers wisp from her deck in the night air and as Usopp’s tears fall to her deck, Merry knows she has abandoned her crew.

Chapter Text

Usopp is the first to do it, surprisingly. Or maybe, its unsurprising given his knack for creativity. He’s on deck, taking up flower brushing duty that day, sweeping off piles of petals that find their ways into the corner of Merry’s cracks, when he stumbles upon an idea.

The petals are cleaner, cleaner than usual, signifying a good day for their captain. Less blood and more petals was always good. (It’d be better if there were none, but Luffy was impossible like that.)

This means, however, that Usopp can do things with them, without dark thoughts creeping in.

Usopp abandons his broom and sits down before a pile, ready to weave.

-

It is an hour later when he figures out how to make a crown without long stems to braid with. He used to do this before, with Kaya on hillsides on better days, but those were only with daisies. 

Now, he weaves crowns of celandines and cosmos’s, cowslips and hyacinths, jasmines and azaleas and bougainvilleas. His captain was happy today, and as Usopp hums beneath his breath, hands working at a steady pace over the quiet of the sea, he is happy too.

With a final twist of a petal, a flower crown emerges of happy yellow and pinks and whites, with only a little bit of dried red at the edges.  It’s good, for a first try.

Usopp puts it on his head, tentatively, and looks in the mirror he has stored in his bag for blinding attacks.

It settles gently over his head, ruffled by the breeze but not blowing away, and Usopp is proud. A flower crown, fit for a king.

Usopp eyes flit to where Luffy is sitting on the figure head, and knows who’s head will next be crowned with flowers.

Alas, he has no more flowers right now.

Maybe there are some -

“Looking for more?”

“AH” Usopp startles at the voice, whipping around. “Nami! Robin!”

There she is, their navigator taking a break from the helm and holding a pile of flowers - some bloody, and some not. Next to her, Robin holds more, as well with a bowl of water, red drifting through it and dried petals in several more of her hands.

“Fufufufu!” Robin chuckles, her eyes lighting up as Usopp settles back down. “We thought we could lend a hand to your endeavors, Longnose.” A hand pops up to adjust the crown on Usopp’s head, and something in his shoulders relaxes at that.

He smiles, sitting back down and gesturing for the others to do so. They have flower crowns to weave before their Captain turns from that endless horizon, and Usopp knows he’ll want everyone to have one.

(Their captain is selfish like that, coughing up blood and flowers to share with his crew. Its an odd kind of selfish, but Usopp loves him anyway.)

-

Zoro drifts over at some point,  nodding to them then going to sleep by the figurehead, the ever watchful first mate. Sanji appears with snacks and hands able to weave flowers faster than the rest of them once Usopp shows him how. Chopper weaves celandines and cosmos’s and roses with a surgeons precision, and soon, each of them is wearing a flower crown adorned with small bits of blood on their heads.

“A bit morbid,” Chuckles Robin, but there is glee on her face, softly hidden, as she accepts a pink and purple blossoming crown. “Our captain, giving us his blood to wear…”

“Robinnnn,” Whines Chopper next to her, pulling at her pant legs. “I washed them the best I could! Petals tear very easily!”

Sanji places a hand on his head, patting it twice. “And you did good, Chopper. There’s a lot less than when we started.”

“You bastard! That doesn’t make me happy!”

But he’s right. The flowers float gently in their hair, even stained with remnants of blood they are beautiful,  and the puddles Luffy chokes up aren’t there, not anymore.

Everyone has a smile on their face, and Usopp is proud of what he made out of this death omen.

Now, all that’s left is to give one to Luffy.

A crown, fit for a king. One created wholly by him, shaped by his friend’s hands. Usopp thinks he would be more excited by the poeticness of it if he’d thought Luffy would have cared.

His captain has time for action and stories and world-turning phrases. Not some poetry Usopp doesn’t care about.

Besides - this crown, laden with every flower near perfect condition they could find, clean and beautiful, fit to the brim and wide enough to fit around Luffy’s hat like a true crown - is perfect.

And -

“SHIT!” Zoro cries from the bow, and then there is splashing and coughing and calling before their captain is pulled up on deck.

30 seconds, Usopp thinks, belatedly, as Luffy is wrapped in towels and scolded with a single glare by a soaking wet Zoro. Faster save time than before. Good.

It doesn’t take long for Luffy to start coughing, Zoro rubbing gentle circles on his back as buttercups fall to the deck. But, it also doesn’t take long for him to look up, coughing fit over, and see his crew, and their lovely, lovely crowns made by their captain’s blood.

Luffy’s eyes grow wide and there is joy there, unmistakeable joy as he laughs. “Shishishi! You guys look great! Can I have one?”

He doesn’t even finish his question before Zoro pushes his hat over his eyes and Nami places the crown on Luffy’s hat.

“Of course, captain,” she says, smiling, terribly fond of this brat, and Usopp wonders if his voice gets like that when he talks to Luffy sometimes.

Luffy laughs, again, pushing his hat up and looking at all of them with such love it hurts. He doesn’t even look at the crown, trusting his crew made it beautiful for him, and turns to the pile of flowers they still have left, lying on the ground, and the ones he just coughed up.

“I want to make one too!” He says, and it’s not and order but his crew treats it as one. “For Merry!”

“Aye, Captain!” They chorus, settling down around him. Merry deserves one, their beloved lamb ship.

She’ll look beautiful decorated in blossoms instead of blood, Usopp thinks.

Together, their crew cleans and weaves and shapes flowers into a crown big enough for their ship, some hands helping (everyone besides -) and others not (Zoro (sleeping,) and Luffy (Luffy.)). There is laughter and cheer, even when Luffy breaks to cough and slumps into Usopp’s side for the briefest of moments. They have dinner, out there, weaving a crown of flowers, before she is finally finished.

Beautiful, bloody, and a crown fit for a king.

When Luffy does the honors of placing it on Merry’s head, a king crowning a lamb, Usopp knows Merry is the prettiest ship of them all.

(Later that night, when Luffy is slumped into Usopp’s side during the night watch Luffy interrupted, Usopp learns a secret.

“My brothers and I used to make flower crowns,” Luffy mumbles, uncharacteristically quiet and half asleep. “Makino showed us how.”

“Yeah?” Usopp prompts as he adjusts the blanket covering them. Brothers? Usopp only knew Ace but… he didn’t know Ace till he saved all their asses. It’s no wonder Luffy would have more, terrifying, family.

“Mmhm. It was nice. Thanks for doing it again… Usopp… You’re the.. best..” Luffy’s words slur before dropping off entirely, a smile still on his face as he huddles up next to Usopp.

The flower crown is still on his hat, and Usopp adjusts it a little, ever so slightly.

“You’re welcome, Captain.” He says, dropping his head to rest atop Luffy’s. “You’re welcome.”

He doesn’t whisper to Luffy that he’d follow him to the ends of the Earth if he could, if he wasn’t such a coward, but he thinks Luffy knows that anyway.

His captain is great like that.

Always.)

Chapter Text

Hancock loves Luffy, with the love of a hurricane, a tyrant, an empress. Its indisputable, undeniable, passionate and bright and there.

Luffy says he doesn’t love her back, doesn’t turn to stone when he looks at her beauty and doesn’t falter when she looks at him.

Yet - no flowers bloom in Hancock’s lungs. No vines choke her throat and no dianthuses grip her chest in sickness.

She is beautiful, unbloodied, and perfect still.

She loves Luffy entirely and completely, and she has no hanahaki, unlike her love.

This means, of course, that Luffy loves her back, doesn’t it?

This is what Hancock tells herself when Luffy is bandaged and weeping and flowering before her, and what she tells herself when Luffy isn’t stone or falling at her feet.

Love, she thinks, he loves me!

Granny Nyon shakes her head as Hancock fawns over Luffy who is choking on meat and blossoms before her.

Stupid girl, stupid empress who didn’t understand her own emotions.

The feeling was not love. The feeling was friendship, but Hancock had never experienced it before, and jumped to the only obvious conclusion.

Romantic Love.

Sigh.

(Luffy loves Hancock, just as completely as she loves him, in the way that he loves all his friends and the ocean itself. Luffy knows friendship.  This is friendship - the way Hancock went to Impel Down and the way Hancock rubbed his back when he choked on Lilies and the way she went to war for him. It’s what he would do, for anyone of his friends, his crew, his family.

So of course, its friendship. What else could it be?)

Chapter Text

At Water 7, Garp holds his grandson close and very carefully does not cry.

Luffy is here, smaller than Garp remembers, bloody and bandaged, but he is alive.

When Garp heard that his grandson set out to sea, he had expected to find Luffy buried under immortal flowers, a death at sea grown in petals.

Luffy was supposed to be safe at Dawn, damnit.

Instead, his grandson is a pirate who has just successfully declared war on the world government and razed Enies Lobby to the ground.

Luffy coughs in his hold, from where Garp has him held tight against his chest, and little petals flutter out, staining the white of his uniform red.

He doesn’t drop Luffy. He’s used to this - ever since Luffy ate that blasted fruit, blood is as commonplace as the scent of flowers in the air, now.

Where was he, in this conversation?

Ah. Right.

“FIST OF LOVE!” And his grandson goes crashing to the floor, choking out roses in his path.

“AGH! WHAT THE FUCK, GRAMPS!” Luffy yells, holding his head. Garp smirks at the way the pirates in the room tense, each of them going for their weapons, even the weakest among them. Luffy picked out a good crew. But they can’t save him from this.

(No one could save Luffy, really. Garp tried. Ace tried. Sabo tried. Dadan and the bandits and Makino tried. They all failed. Luffy just loved too fiercely.

That’s the D in him, Garp thinks sometimes. Even at fourteen Luffy is too stubborn for his own good.)

“I TRAINED YOU TO BE A MARINE!”

“AND I ALWAYS TOLD YOU I WAS GONNA BE A PIRATE!”

“YOU WERE SUPPOSE TO STAY ON DAWN, YOU FOOL. AWAY FROM THE SEA!”

“NEVER!”

Garp does not let the tears fall. Luffy was supposed to be in the mountains, away from all this water, away from death in liquid form, letting his love fade and drift away, so that he had a chance to live.

Instead, his grandson invites death with open arms and enjoys his life out at sea, dying with every choking breath.

“THIS IS ALL THAT DAMN RED-HAIRED BASTARD’S FAULT ISN’T IT! HIM AND THAT SHITTY FRUIT!”

“SHANKS SAVED MY LIFE!” Luffy lashes back at him, blood on his lips contorting his face into a red snarl. Garp has never seen him so pissed. His voice cracks as he continues. “DON’T YOU DARE TALK SHIT ABOUT HIM!”

“HE’S KILLED YOU LUFFY!” And Garp knows everyone is watching this family spat but since when has he cared about that. There are flowers in Luffy’s wanted poster, and blood on his teeth. Everyone knows anyway. “IF YOU HADN’T EATEN THAT DAMN FRUIT THAT HE BROUGHT - “

“THEN I’D STILL BE HERE!” Luffy pulls on his hat and stands tall, though he is the shortest person in the room by far. His voice drops. “I’m the man who’s going to be King of the Pirates, Gramps.”

Garp knows.

He knows.

But all he has ever wanted is for his grandsons to be safe.

As Luffy chokes on flowers and Ace goes missing in Whitebeard territory halfway cross the world, Garp knows everything he has raised is born into death.

Chapter Text

Ruskaina… Ruskaina hurts.

No matter how Rayleigh steadies him, no matter how much stronger he gets, no matter how much joy he finds with the animals -

The island - the two years - terrifies Luffy more than anything else.

He chokes so often on this island. In his sleep, by the water, in training, in quiet moments. So much more than before.

His chest hurts. Inside and out. Rayleigh has to stop him from scratching at his chest sometimes, trying to get the flowers out, trying to get the pain out, trying to burn and bloody his grief like his love did to him.

There are moments, when he is sitting alone, that he thinks he will he die on this island, far more than anywhere else.

What do you have left? Jimbe had asked him, and Luffy counted nine people who weren’t on this island, and a tenth who was held deep in his heart.

Luffy coughs, again, begonias and loneliness dripping out as he stares at the horizon.

Two more years.

He just has to survive two more years.

(Impel Down ripped from him ten. His gears rip from him ten more with every use gone too far.

His love, more than anything, is the last blow.

All that stands between him and the soft embrace of death is his own stubborn pride.)

He must survive because the reason he set out at fourteen was so he didn’t have to die alone.

Luffy doesn’t want to die on Ruskaina.

(It terrifies him.)

Chapter Text

When Whitebeard sees a boy clothed in blood fall from the sky at Marineford his first thought is -

Where is this boy’s father?

His second thought, as the boy hits the ground with a crash of bloody blossoms and gore is - I want to be his father.

He’s always had a penchant for sweeping up young angry men in his arms. It’s what he tried to do for Ace. What he wanted to do, before the marines stole him. This boy, falling from the sky, with rage and fury in his veins, is the angriest child Whitebeard has ever seen.

His third thought, as the boy turns to look at him is, who could ever dare shelter this storm.

This boy does not want a father. He does not need one, even as he stands so small next to Whitebeard, so thin and brittle and shaking.  

There’s fury in his eyes and war on his lips in white yarrow flowers as Monkey D. Luffy tells Whitebeard a truth that rattles the earth.

“MY NAME IS MONKEY D. LUFFY - AND IM THE MAN WHO WILL BE KING OF THE PIRATES!”

A breath - a single flower slipping from the lips, so spattered in blood that Whitebeard could not name its color if he tried - and a continuation.

"AND IM GOING TO SAVE ACE!”

Whitebeard is so happy that his not-quite-son has a brother such as this.

(Even as Whitebeard is dying.

Even as Ace is dying.

Even as Luffy is dying.

After all, Whitebeard knows kings. They love things impossibly, like the wind loves the sea and the sun loves the moon.

Luffy will always love Ace.

Even if it kills him.)

Chapter Text

Mihawk saw the boy choke on saltwater and blossoms before, on a restaurant at the sea. It is an entirely different experience to see him choke on blood and thorns in the middle of a war.

He wonders, sometimes, if Shanks’ bet will live to see the throne he claims.

(When Shanks is drunk on his shoulder, mumbling about little boys and deadly fruits, my faults, and wish I didn’t's,  he doesn’t think he will.)

Monkey D. Luffy is young and dying, a supernova burning out in a series of fleeting moments.

 Yet –

He is powerful, earning the loyalty of a thousand men who will be dead come sundown and of men more powerful than Luffy will ever live to be. Dangerous, the ability to sway the tides when the ocean hates your soul. Deadly, the ability to draw dying men to the side of a dying boy.

(Children of the sea do not go down easy – they will fight, and when they rally like a tsunami… Smart souls know to stay out of the way.)

Mihawk is intrigued even as he aims to cut Straw Hat down. It’s a perfect hit, arcing through the air, and only the stronger folks would be able to -

Ah.

A dodge.

The boy dodged it. Had he unlocked observation haki?

There’s coughing ringing out from the battlefield.

Ah.

(So many surprising observations from this tiny, tiny child.)

He didn’t. He had only stumbled from the flowers that tore him apart from the inside, the love that killed him daily.

Mihawk does not take another chance.

(He does not wish to challenge the sea.)

He will leave Shanks’s bet to his own fate, and leave flowers at the grave when the time comes.

(Luffy stumbles across the battlefield, his path clear by the petals in his wake. His fingers are cut by the many times he has fallen, and there is more blood on him from his chest than the sailors he has cast away and killed.

He breathes in smoke and debris and ash, and breath out petals and thorns, and vines. Every breath is choked yet still - still Mihawk hears him cry out in a wave of conqueror’s will.

ACE! YOU’RE THE ONLY BROTHER I HAVE LEFT!

An impossibility, Straw Hat is. Perhaps there will be no grave flowers after all.)

Chapter Text

At Marineford, Luffy can’t breathe.

(That’s normal. He usually can’t.)

Every breath is a choke on ash and soot and the screams of the bloody dying, every exhale blossoms and plum tree blossoms and thorns, choking him with the love of a brother requited and a world hated.

It’s not like before.

 Before, he choked on victory, on the sweet spray of the sea, his friends nearby to rub his back when it goes on for so long. It hurts but it was a hurt he knows.

Marineford isn’t.

Marineford is hell.

He keeps falling, Impel Down’s rage sapping at his strength even now, he’s fighting, fighting fighting, and he can’t die here he can’t but it would be so easy just to sleep, just for a second, he’ so tired -

Luffy coughs and falls, dodging a sword strike from the man his swordsman will one day kill, and keeps going.

(He wonders if Zoro’s okay.

He doesn’t think about how Luffy failed him.)

On this Battlefield, when he fell from the sky, the ocean had tilted - now, Luffy can’t feel her and her hate, only screaming, rushing, powerful rage from everyone around him.

Its so much and his head hurts, and everyone’s so much bigger and stronger than him but he can’t stop because -

Ace.

Ace his big brother who kicked the sea when he realized who hated Luffy. Ace, his big brother, who would rub his back and ruffle his hair, and give him piggy back rides when Luffy coughed too long. Ace, who with Sabo made him flower crowns out of his curse and gave him his second crown.  Ace, his big brother.

Ace, the only brother he has left.

Ace, the only one he has left -

(Between him and the sea and eternal loneliness - )

Ace can’t die.

He can’t.

(But then he does, and Luffy can’t breathe even if he wanted to.)

Chapter Text

The flowers on the Captain’s grave are colorful. Bright. Growing exactly where they shouldn’t.

They are kind of like the Pirate King himself, Shanks notes, as he stands beside the earth and looks at the scaffold towering above it.

No marine had said where the pirate king would be buried - they did it in the middle of the night, so that no pirate would worship his grave.

(Ha. As if any pirate valued a dead body. No - what pirates valued, what they worshipped, was the stage of a king.

The marines had given it to them. The era that Roger created was never getting it back.)

Shanks still knew where it was, by the flowers that bloomed.

They buried him where he died, under six feet of concrete, under a meadow of blossoms shrinking up from the cracks.

Beautiful, some people called it, an omen, others.

Tragic, the few people who knew the truth behind coughing flowers said.

Shanks knew the truth.

Shanks wasn’t one of the people who thought it was tragic.

Shanks, fifteen and crying, thought it was the greatest thing Roger ever did.

(Did you ever achieve your dream? Shanks had asked Roger before he left.

Not yet, Roger had said, dying, as Shanks sobbed.)

Roger had always loved different from everyone else - loved the sea, loved the world, loved the people, in a way only a king could, in a way that said Mine in a way that said chaos overrun. He had always dreamed more fiercely than anyone else, asking each person in his beloved crew-

Do you want to turn the world upside down?

In his dying breath, Roger did it.

(In his death, the world still didn’t love him back.

But that’s alright.

Roger didn’t need it.)

His grave, covered in spiraeas and osmundas, and a thousand other flowers Shanks never learned the name for, was proof of a that.

(A dream.)

The era, sweeping the world by storm by one man’s words, was proof of that.

(A dream.)

Shanks turned from his captain’s, his father’s grave, and, still crying, looked to the world turned upside down that Roger created.

(Twelve years later, rubbing the back of a coughing seven-year-old, Shanks will wonder what era Luffy will create -

And what colors his grave will bloom.)

Chapter Text

Luffy dies with a smile on his face and flowers on his lips, and all Zoro can think is -

No -

Not yet -

He hasn’t-

(It's been so short, their time together, half of it fighting, the other half cradling Luffy and saying Breathe and another half (because these things come in threes) the best life Zoro has ever lived before. It’s too short, for a kid like Luffy, to short to sail with the king, too short for anything -)

Luffy can’t be dead.

He can’t be.

But Luffy smiles, and shouts their names and Sorry in the same breath, and he is.

Lightning crashes down, and perhaps it is mercy that Luffy doesn’t die to the ocean but rather to the sky.

A mercy that Luffy isn’t killed by the thing he loves most in the world.

Flowers explode from the execution stage, a flurry of reds and whites and bloods, pink and yellow mandevillas raining from the sky, and as the storm pours down, Zoro stands still.

His captain - his captain just - No -

Something ugly curls inside Zoro’s chest and wreathes outward around the swords clutched in his hands.

Luffy -

He wonders why he’s not crying.

Maybe it’s the shock.

(Maybe it’s because Luffy deserves more than sadness for an end they all knew was coming, and never thought he would be mourned. Death, eventual, a fact to the future King.

…

Former, future king.

An oath breaks in Zoro’s chest.)

A cigarette hits the ground next to him, Sanji shaking in the corner of his eye. A pained name escapes his lips, a Luffy, cracked and broken.

He’s dead.

Luffy is -

“Shishishi! I’m alive! Lucky!”

So fucking dead, Zoro is going to kill him.

Something settles in Zoro’s chest, something like relief and a vow unbroken.

Luffy has always been impossible.

Even in the face of death.

“Do you believe in god?” Sanji asks, next to him, as they run, and Zoro calls him stupid.

Why would he, when it is clear men (Luffy-) make their own fate?

(Later, when Luffy naps in Zoro’s shadow, finally dry from the rain with blood on his lips from being struck by lightning, Zoro will wonder why he ever thought Luffy would die by anyone’s hand but his own hearts.)

Chapter Text

Robin’s captain is small as he lays his head on her shoulder. He’s only fourteen, but sometimes Robin has forgotten that, watching him face off warlords, and gods, and her innermost demons given form.

The glare in his eye and the furrow to his brow, the way of the sea about it - in the midst of battle, short as he is, he never seems anything less than a legend.

(She loves him for it, and loves all the ways he is not history in the making. He’s Luffy, and there is nothing Robin would change about it.)

He lays his head on her shoulder and it barely has any weight. Still, she adjusts so he can slump into her side, easily coming to rest underneath her shoulder as his hair tickles her chin.

Luffy gives a soft giggle, a shishishi! That for the first time in days is not laden with petals.

It’s a good thing, that after declaring war against the world a few days ago, he is not choking.

Robin adjusts the bandages laden across his body with multiples of the same caring hands, ruffling his hair as she does so to hear another one of those precious laughs.

(Up there, standing on a ledge like a sacrifice to the sea, she had never thought she would hear that laugh again, nor see that smile.

Now, Nico Robin, archeologist of the Straw Hat pirates, will never let it go.)

“Captain,” She hums, relishing in the idea of being a part of this crew again, “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

Luffy shakes his head into her shoulder. “Mmmh. Not tired enough. I’m boreeeddd.”

She doubts he wasn’t tired enough. It took most of his energy to even walk across the room to slump into her space, buckbeans trailing in his wake.

The boredom she can see.

“Robin?” He turns his eyes up to her, pleading, “Can you tell me a story?”

She never got to tell stories before she climbed aboard this ship.

“Of course, Captain. What would you like to hear?” A hand blooms behind them, scratching Luffy’s head in soothing circles as a chain of other hands blossoms and brings over heavy blankets to warm her shivering captain.

Luffy doesn’t even take a moment to think, only humming softly. “An adventure one! On the sea!”

It’s funny (it’s not) how all of Luffy’s favorite tales are just their daily lives, without the weight of flowers in his chest.

“Alright then. Would you like to hear the story of Rouge the Sea Shaker?”

A nod, and a teenager half her height, sinking into her side.

And so Robin begins, voice smooth and quiet in the soft noise of their temporary home at Galley La. “In the beginning, before the age of pirates, was an age of Tyrants, when warriors sailed across the sea… Among them was Rouge, sweeping with golden hair and golden sword…”

It is only a minute before Luffy is sleeping by her side, but Robin takes comfort that for once, there are no flowers on his lips, and only a single flower in the hair of a pirate empress long past.

Chapter Text

Water 7 is behind them.

Ennies Lobby is behind them.

Sunny (not Merry - Merry’s gone) is underneath Usopp’s feet, secure and feeling like it could be home by the time their next adventure takes off.

So why -

Why does Usopp feel like he’s going to topple overboard at any minute with the way Nami stares at him?

It’s only the both of them on deck, Nami tending to her tangerine trees and Usopp carefully putting together some more stars, when Nami sets a basket of fruit down, heavy, right next to him.

“After you fought,” Nami begins, and Usopp doesn’t even wonder who you is referring to, “Luffy couldn’t stop coughing.”

His heart constricts.

Luffy -

“Chopper tried to give him something for it but Luffy wouldn’t accept it. He just - he just sat there, on the roof, and coughed until,” Nami’s voice is choking up, the way it always does when they talk about their fourteen-year-old captain and his love for the sea. “Until he stopped breathing for a moment. There were so many Marigolds, Usopp.”

Usopp knows.

He saw them sticking to the underneath of Sanji’s shoes when he kicked the doors of the Sea Train down. He knows.

“Chopper said it was only partly because of - of y’know.”

Usopp, telling his captain that he didn’t want to die, that he didn’t want to watch him walk the line between king or dead, that he was a coward, and all those hateful words that came out of his mouth like poison.

He knew. He knows.

“It was - it was more because of the gases in your stars. All of them.”

That - that gives Usopp a pause and he looks up to Nami, sitting beside him, his eyes wide and hers red but staring firmly at him.

The gases - ?

Oh.

When his mother was sick, the doctors told him to stop playing with the fumes that made up his paint pellets. With Kaya, there was never supposed to be any smoking in the house, nor any bad fires.

Luffy is sick too.

The lungs are fragile things.

“Oh,” He says, dumbly, staring at the stars in his hands. Oh.

A pause.

“Usopp,” Nami’s voice is sturdier than before when she says his name, calling his eyes back to her. “I love you. You’re part of this crew. And I’m not mad at you - not anymore. I’m just - I’m happy you're back but… Please. Don’t use the stars with fumes when Luffy’s fighting, okay?”

Nami only ever says please to pretty women or to manipulate people into getting what she wants.

Here, it’s none of those things.

Here, it's Nami begging for a chance at a few more years with the man - with the teen, Luffy’s only fourteen - who took on the world for them.

As if Usopp would say no.

“Of course, Nami. I… I love you too. And I love Luffy,” His eyes water but he doesn’t avoid her gaze. “I don’t want to hurt you all ever again.”

(His captain is going to die one day, out on these waters. Usopp hadn’t lied when he said that in their fight.

He won’t let it be because of him.)

Nami smiles, bright and big, and hugs him tight. “Thanks, Usopp.”

She sweeps the petals that have been blown onto her tangerines away, and offers him one.

He takes it.

“Three hundred Berri please!”

“Namiiiii!”

The ship steadies beneath his feet, and yeah, the Sunny is feeling like home again, with his crew by his side and familiar patterns marking their days with joy.

(That night, Usopp drags Chopper down to Usopp’s Workshop, and asks him to help test the toxicity of the fumes of his new stars.

Water 7 is never going to happen again.

He doesn’t think he could stand it if Luffy coughed up more marigolds for him again.)

Chapter Text

Luffy leans his head on Nami’s shoulder as she draws her maps. He is the only one who has ever dared to do so.

The only one she lets do so.

(Well. She would let Nojiko and Bellemere and Zoro and Robin and Usopp and the rest of her merry crew, but they haven’t asked, so the privilege belongs to Luffy and Luffy alone.

A lot of things do.

The future king is funny like that.)

He barely comes up to her shoulder, standing, and now his head, bare of the hat now resting between his shoulder blades, barely tilts against her matching scar and twisting tangerine tattoo. When he coughs, he’s so careful, in a way he usually isn’t, to make sure blood and compass flowers petals do not fall across the table.

Do not fall across her maps, her dreams.

(Luffy’s priorities are almost exactly right, then, if not for the fact that he himself should be higher on the list.)

She could not quite name when it started - perhaps after Drum, when Luffy shuddered in his sleep and woke to find company with the crew he almost lost, and found Nami, tired, mapping the island she was almost too sick to see.

Perhaps it continued, with the way Luffy would look at the empty spaces Nami hasn’t filled yet, with something like doubt in his eyes.

Not for Nami, not if she could ever map it - Luffy has faith in his crew and their dreams.

He wouldn’t have picked them otherwise.

No.

This doubt to see if he will make it, to those empty spots in the sea, to the island at the end of it all.

It hurts, sometimes, so Nami draws him in closer and sits him on the side of her tattoo, closest to home, and tells him all about these empty spaces as she writes islands into existence.

And this, captain, is where New World Rumors say gold is hidden -

A Skull island? Cool! We gotta go there!

And we will, captain. We will.

Luffy will live to see the sunrise on Raftel, whether he believes he will or not. She promises this, just as steady and as sure as the kid leaning against her shoulder.

Chapter Text

“Breathe in.”

The boy in front of him does.

“Breathe out.”

The boy in front of him barely does, his chest shaking, a cough itching out of his throat. There’s a rattling in there, around his lungs, like something petal-soft blooming at the bottom.

Crocus frowns, lines etching across his face in ways they hadn’t since his captain’s time.

When Shank’s had crossed back over Reverse Mountain, he hadn’t believed it.

He said the same thing Roger said! Shanks had grinned, chattering to Crocus like he was still an apprentice and not an emperor in the making. I can’t wait to tell Rayleigh - imagine his face!

A boy, like their captain? Like the man who looked at the world and decided to turn it upside down as he breathed his last? Like the man who smiled like thunder and fought like the devil? Like the man who valued adventure and his friends over anything else?

Like Roger who- 

“I want to be - “

Well.

There really was no describing what Roger’s dream was.

No one else was like him.

(No one else coughed flowers as he fought gods, tyrants, the sea itself. No one else laugh and let the petals fall, let his body weaken as he made one last - not quite desperate - reach for the end.

No one else coughed flowers on the execution stage, and let them fly with the wind like a challenge to the world.)

But Monkey D. Luffy sits on a bench before Crocus with a grin smeared in blood and the sun high behind him, and well -

Crocus can almost believe it.

The kid fought an island whale. Crocus can’t remember Roger doing that.

(The kid smiled as he did it, and painted a straw hat (if poorly) on Laboon’s head, matching his own. Its Roger’s hat, he knows. It makes him smile whenever he looks at Laboon.

The straw hat - always a promise.)

The kid choked as he did it. Crocus does remember Roger doing that.

“No doctors on the crew?” He directs his question to the navigator, who stands idly by their captain as Crocus runs through the checkup they had requested.

The navigator - Nami, he believes her name is - shakes her head. “No. Just me - and I’m not particularly good at medicine either, not for the injuries these idiots get and - well.” She waves her hand at the petals fluttering around the ground, swept up by the sea breeze. “You know.”

He knows.

Crocus turns back to the kid, who’s eyes are chasing after seagulls flying around Laboon rather than the person currently giving him an exam. Crocus bonks him on the head to get his attention. “Hey! Brat!”

Luffy looks over and cocks his head, giggling slightly. “Shishishi! Flower Man!”

Crocus gives him a look. “When did you first start having symptoms?”

(He already knows the answer.)

“After I ate my devil fruit!”

(Shanks came back over the Red Line, regret in every feature and hat no longer adorning his head.)

“And when was that?”

(Still…)

“Ah! When I was seven.”

Crocus nods. He’s fourteen then, now. Still young and baby faced, not even old enough to be let into bars. “How often would you say your chest hurts?”

The kid goes quiet and still at that, shifting a glance at his crew who haven’t stopped glancing over like a mother wolf over her young since Crocus started this whole exam. “… Every day.”

“And your throat?”

“I dunno.”

Crocus gives him another look. Too bad the kids seems to be the only one unfazed by it and bursts out laughing.

(It’s just another similarity to Roger, who laughed when Crocus glared at him, even as he lay bedridden and sick.)

Nami, thankfully, cuts in. “He gets worse after he falls into the sea and we can’t fish him out right away-“

“Hey!”

“Luffy! Quiet! Anyway - He gets worse then, and after a rough fight. We haven’t had too many storms yet, but I’m guessing them too.” Nami finishes, giving Luffy her own look as he brushes petals from his face.

Luffy is… He’s like Roger, in all the ways that might matter. He seems to be chasing something bigger than himself, with friends and freedom and adventure held before all else. He has a dream and a curse and a smile - but he’s not like Roger.

Crocus knows this as fact, now.

(Roger asked him to leave Laboon. Luffy would never do that.)

(Roger’s illness never fluctuated. Just got worse and worse as his poor reputation soared higher into infamy. Steady and horrible and unable to be cured. Luffy’s is like the tide, like the thing he loves above all else. Always changing.)

It means he can’t do much for him.

Luffy isn’t going to listen to him, so he turns to Nami. “Keep him dry when you can, and keep to liquids after a dip in the ocean. Get your chef to cook foods to help with blood loss, and try to find a doctor when you can.”

Nami nods, serious and stern as Luffy protests that they need to find a musician first.

Crocus will leave them to it. He’s had enough of chasing after musicians and cures for now.

Instead, he watches them leave, watches Luffy laugh and wave and smile like Crocus’s captain did before him. A crown of straw adorns his head and the bright red does well to hide the blood stains. He’s only fourteen, but he’s already managed to put together a crew that will rival any other.

Crocus is oddly proud.

“Heh. That boy…”

(As Luffy’s crew boards his ship, Crocus pulls him away for a moment.

“Kid,” he says, sternly, because this is Shanks’ bet and this kid is strong. “You’ve got three years - less if you keep setting out like this.” He’s made these estimates enough time with Roger, even if he fell to the blade in the end. He knows what he’s doing.

Luffy looks up at him, and clutches at his tank. “I know.”

The last pirate to come through here - a Portgas D. Ace - had only been 17. The rookies just keep getting younger but - there’s a desperation in Luffy’s eyes. A knowing. A steadiness in the face of his death.

There’s a pause before Luffy grins brighter and younger than Roger ever had. “But I’m the man who will become King of the Pirates! I can’t stop now!”

Of course.)

Luffy sails off, and the flowers in the water hail victory rather than death.

Crocus has always liked crocuses.

Chapter Text

When Luffy was six, he never thought that he would get used to being carried. Being carried was for little kids. Luffy was a man!

Then he ate a fruit.

Then he started blooming.

(Then he started dying.)

And suddenly, his legs couldn’t hold him up as he doubled over, and Shanks hands never strayed from his back throughout the night, and Luffy was wrapped in arms that seemed to never want to let him go.

(And - honestly? Luffy never wanted to leave. The one embrace he always seeks hated him now, hates him now, and at least Shanks’ was warm and smelled like the sea breeze.)

He got used to the way Shanks would sweep him up into his arms when he came in from port. He got used to the way Makino would hold him when he could barely hold himself, the way she would wipe away the blood on his lips with the edge of her apron. He got used to the way Gramps would carry him across the island, red staining his coat, and how every time Gramps greeted him at the docks he would hug him as if it were his last.

Now, at sea, he is still used to the way people help him stand when he is weak.

(It’s just another thing he needs at sea - he can’t navigate, or cook, or shoot, or cut or breathe - he needs his crew to do that for him. It’s what a crew is anyway. People who love you.)

He learns the cradle of all his crewmates arms, the way that Zoro is strong and lifts him with ease, callouses rough as they brush flowers from his shirt, how they are always there after a battle has Luffy falling on some random deck on the Sunny. He learns the way that Sanji’s hands are softer than Zoro’s even though his arms are almost as strong, how Franky is always able to make metal feel like a pillow just for him, how Chopper always checks his pulse before he lifts and how Robin feels like a hundred hugs at once. He learns the stumbling lift Usopp gives him, as he takes him from the ground, and how Nami will order someone else to do it, but is always the first to pull his head into her lap. He learns the way bone feels like soft flesh when Brook knows he must give comfort to his captain, and the way Sunny carries them to new adventures

(His crew cares.

They care so much.)

People carry him, after he coughs to long, and maybe it should have always felt like he was weak but -

Ace had carried him.

And Ace made him feel strong.

(The first time Luffy had met Ace, Ace had hated him. Then - they became friends. Then - they became brothers. And suddenly, Ace outstretched a hand to him, and rubbed his back, and it was a sharing of strength.

Ace would carry him up the mountain, not caring if blood or flowers splattered his skin. Ace would carry him up the treehouse, when he took a dive in the waters and coughed for too long. Ace would be there when no one else was (everyone always left-), and it wasn’t because Luffy was weak, or dying, or not ready for the world.

It was because Luffy was Ace’s little brother.

And Ace was his.)

He’ll always remember that.

(His crew carries him because they are crew.

Luffy is used to being loved like that, now, used to being loved in the sharing of strength and support.)

But now -

Now-

Luffy is carrying Ace.

Ace is bloody, and slowly losing warmth and oh -

This isn’t strength, not anymore.

This is death.

Luffy screams, and wishes he was never carried at all.

Chapter Text

Makino used to keep a vase of hibiscuses at the bar. Pretty and pink, they brought life to her little workplace, when the day was slow and it was only her behind the counter.

A gift, from a woman long ago, a woman who Makino had only seen once, tall and beautiful and sorrowful.

(“Keep them safe for me,” She had told Makino, pressing the flowers into her hand.)

They used to stay on the edge of her counter, never wilting, never drooping, vibrant and constant. Every day, when she first opened the bar, Makino used to brush her fingers over the petals.

They were always soft.

Hanahaki flowers, Makino knew they were, from their immortality and beauty. They were a rare sight here in the East, but then again, the mysterious woman wasn’t from the East.

(She strolled into the bar to watch the Pirate King die on the Den Den against the wall. Makino’s mother had covered her eyes as the swords plunged into Roger’s heart, but she will never forget the way the woman gasped, as if she herself had been stabbed.

No one who loved the Pirate King was from the East. The East was too quiet for that, too ordinary, despite the Pirate King being birthed from his deathbed’s very shores.)

A treasure, Makino had thought the flowers as.

Luffy liked them too, always reaching for them when he saw them, playing with them, their petals invincible to even his rough child’s hands. Makino braided them into his hair sometimes to match hers, when he went too long without a cut.

(When the woman had stepped into the bar, her freckled face was framed in flowers. They were threaded into her hair, like little declarations of love, pink and passionate, just as shining as her golden locks.

When the Pirate King died, she took them out. She gave all but one to Makino.

Keep them safe for me. She had said, and so Makino did.)

They had always put them back in the end, the bar feeling too empty without the presence of the flowers

(And make sure they are able to see the world, alright? The woman had asked, sincerely, eyes watering and dripping down onto the flowers. A bar is a good place for that.)

They used to always face the bar, hanahaki petals gleaming in a silver vase.

Not anymore.

Now, Makino buries the flowers in her closest as she listens to Luffy choke into his idol’s arms in the guest bedroom next door.

Hanahaki, she curses, tears rolling down her cheeks, Why did I ever think it was beautiful? Why? WHY!?

Luffy had eaten that fruit, that simple, simple fruit sitting right next to the flowers. He had eaten and choked and cried, flowers blooming in his lungs and Makino had never felt so much rage and terror in her life.

The flowers get buried where they can no longer see the sea or the sun or the world, and Makino is breaking a promise but Makino is not a pirate.

Her loved ones mean more to her than some stranger’s flowers.

(The woman had threaded a flower through her hair as well, and she was kind, and she had led Makino through tide pools and held her hand, and acted more as a mother to her than her own mother did in all of Makino’s eight years.

Rouge, she had called herself, and tapped Makino’s nose, but it’s a secret!

Makino had laughed at the woman with flowers in her hair, who wasn’t much of a stranger at all, and loved her just a little, then.)

She knew Luffy loved the ocean. She knew it.

He would always look out and play in the waters and smile when the sea breeze hit his cheeks.

When he was tinier then now, he would ask Can we go to the beach today? Every day, rain or shine, and always went no matter the danger.

The sea was his own.

And now, the ocean hated him.

Hanahaki - unrequited love.

Luffy would never stop loving.

Luffy would die.

Makino trembles there, staring into the dark closet, and sobs.

(Luffy is not her child. But he clutched her finger like she was a lifeline when he was just a babe,  and she was the one to bandage his bruises and scrapes, she was the one to show him the ocean for the first time.

He was her child in every way that counted.)

Luffy was going to die.

She slams the closet door shut, and does not think about all the immortal flowers that will soon have to be swept out the door of the Party Bar.

She doesn’t.

(Later, Luffy says I’m going to become King of the Pirates! With blood smeared across his lips, and Makino wonders what the Pirate King looked like when he choked up the hibiscuses in her closet.

Because really - who else could love that fiercely, but the man who would be king?)

She brushes the tears out of her eyes, after a minute, and sweeps into Luffy’s temporary room with the force of an avenging angel.

Luffy is there on the bed, held in Shank’s arms, both of them bloodied, and Luffy’s face a grimace of pain. Shanks has an armed wrapped around Luffy, one hand buried into his hair and one rubbing soothing circles into Luffy’s back. He’s murmuring, quiet and soft, as Luffy says It hurts -

And Shanks looks at Makino, and her tears are reflected in his.

They sit together, holding a child who loved so fiercely he was hated, and do not think about the future they will not have together.

Luffy is going to die.

How could she have thought that those flowers were beautiful?

(The woman had left with a single flower in her hair and her face towards the rising sun. A hand rested gentle on her stomach as her freckles danced across her cheeks, feet soft and sure across the sand.

Farewell, she had said to Makino, and it was the last time Makino had ever saw her. Thank you.

She had been the most wonderful person Makino had ever met.)

How could she?

-

Luffy disappears to the mountain, and comes back with two brothers and only a few petals stuck to his clothes.

Makino almost cries there, again, because she knows Ace’s face.

She knows it.

Portgas D. Ace, he says, and Makino trembles. Luffy’s my little brother!

She hears Rouge, and It’s a secret, and remembers the way the woman placed her hands on her stomach.

Oh, Makino thinks, oh.

That night she digs the flowers out of her closet.

They are still perfect. Still pristine. But as Makino sets them out on the bar again, facing the world, they perk up a little more.

She’s not a pirate. She keeps promises but not all the time.

She feels sad that she broke this one.

-

There are twenty hibiscuses in the jar on the bar counter. Makino gives one to Ace before he sets sail, and tells him, keep this safe for me, so very soft, and make sure it’s able to see the world, alright? A pirate ship is a good place for that.

There are tears in his eyes as he threads the flower carefully into his hat. He looks happy, Makino thinks, he looks proud.

He looks like Rouge should have, trodding off into that rising sun, victorious and free.

That night, Makino threads her own flower into her hair, and awaits the first bounty of Portgas D. Ace.

-

Ace dies.

Ace dies and it hurts.

Ace dies, and Makino didn’t keep them safe, but he had a flower in his hair as he died, according to the pictures.

There are flowers on his grave.

Ace was loved.

They won’t last long.

She digs herself out of her tears, and as Luffy rings in a new era, she sends a bouquet of hibiscuses to Shanks, for her child’s, Rouge’s child’s grave.

One remains in her hair.

(Just like Rouge.

Keep this safe for me, and make sure it’s able to see the world, alright? A bar is a good place for that.)

She brushes it, every day, petals still soft even after almost 20 years, and does not cry.

-

When her child is born, his hands play with the hibiscus stems just like Luffy did.

It makes her smile.

(Her child will always be loved back.)

Chapter Text

Luffy’s crew wanted to skip Fishman Island, Jimbe knows. They wanted to use a coup de burst and shoot over the Red Line, wanted to make modification after modification to their beloved ship for Luffy’s sake. Franky had been working on it - with Rayleigh’s help, Nami’s new weather techniques, and the bubbles of Sabaody - they might have been able to do it. Anything to keep Luffy from going into the water and being submerged in his killer.

Yet - Luffy had said No.

And Jimbe knows it was for him.

It sparks a warmth in his chest, a quiet pain, a quiet love, a knowledge that this boy - still a boy, only sixteen and yet carrying an era on his back (or rather his head) - would do anything for him. It threatens to overtake Jimbe if he is not careful.

And, well -

He’s sick of being careful.

Soon, he tells Luffy, who seems to drown on land with every step, Soon, once my responsibilities are gone, will I join you.

Soon, he tells Luffy, and it’s like a knife to the chest.

Luffy had come down to the bottom of the sea, and happily smiled as the sea pressed around him, her presence hateful and dark and burning in a way no ocean should be. He laughs as he watches Sea Kings swim by, laughs as he sticks his hands out of bubbles and lets the harmful water dribble over his skin, laughs as he coughs and coughs and coughs.

(There are rarely flowers at the sea floor.

Luffy is a man of miracles, the children say, picking up the petals left behind and decorating their new straw hats.)

It’s killing Luffy to be down here with Jimbe. It’s killing Luffy, who shouldn’t have survived those two years more, not with what Iva did, and not with what Trafalgar Law said.

(The children say he is a man of miracles, and the adults brush it off as another way to say hero, but Jimbe watched this boy at fourteen fight through hell and win.

Luffy is a man of miracles.

This, to Jimbe, is fact.)

Luffy leans on Jimbe’s side at the party, small at sixteen and out of breath already, but he’s strong. He’s sixteen now, two years wiser, and he’s been back for perhaps two days and already he has taken out Pacifistas and enemies that have threatened their kingdom for years. They call his generation Supernovas. Jimbe knows he’ll be much more.

“Jimbe!” Luffy cries, tipping over into Jimbe’s lap to stare up at his face. He’s tiny next to Jimbe, barely reaching his waist when they stand. Yet - his fists can destroy gods. “This parties fun!”

“It is courteous of King Neptune to throw it!”

“Shishishi! I guess! But, Jimbe!” Luffy looks at him more seriously now, hunk of sea king flesh put away for a minute. “You gotta -“

He starts coughing, air hardly going into his lungs as flowers spill out across his lips. Jimbe startles, panicked for a moment, then realizes all Straw Hat eyes are on him, wary for their captain.

Jimbe doesn’t hesitate.

He sweeps Luffy up, making him sit up-right rather than laying down, and rubs steady circles into his back. The party goes on around them, the hero shielded between Jimbe’s robe covered arms. Slowly, Luffy stops coughing.

Bluebell’s and chrysanthemums fall between them.  Jimbe moves to sweep them away, but Luffy snaps out a hand and gathers them into his arms.

His fingers begin weaving - in and out and in and out. Jimbe watches in silence as a bloody, flowery shape begins to form in Luffy’s hands.

(As he does so, Luffy’s head leans to rest against Jimbe’s chest, right over the mark of the red sun.)

A crown.

Luffy’s making a crown.

Jimbe’s mouth opens in shock as a rubbery hand stretches and places it ever so gently upon his head.

“There!” Luffy decrees, smiling.

It’s all Jimbe can do to choke out a “Thank you, Luffy.”

Luffy laughs again, and then turns serious once more. “Jimbe! You gotta promise me you’ll come up with us, so we can party there too! You gotta join my crew!”

Jimbe chuckles, bright and soft. “Of course, Luffy.”

“Soon,” The boy in his lap stresses, and under the shadow of his hat Jimbe can see desperation in his eyes.

He remembers the words of the surgeon, muttered to Rayleigh as he came up from the sea.

He’s in rough shape. It’ll be lucky if he makes it another year.

For every other pirate chasing the crown, it was a race to see who could reach the end first. For Luffy, it was a race to see if he could live to see it.

And -

(Nami speaks to him in a forest under the sea, of how Luffy took down Arlong. His speech there, how he needed Nami as his navigator, and Sanji as his cook. Usopp tells him a grand tale of a little lamb, and how Luffy takes his crew back to him, no matter the cost.)

-If he could do it with his crew.

Hey Jimbe! You gotta join my crew!

Jimbe will be a part of that - is a part of that in Luffy’s eyes.

Everything strikes into sudden clarity.

“Luffy,” He says, calm, measured. “Soon.”

He does not say before you die. He does not say while you are still alive. Luffy does not care about death.

Only his crew.

(Jimbe will not leave him to die alone.)

Luffy keeps on looking at Jimbe, steady and serious, before breaking into joy. “Shishishi! Alright!”

A hand snakes up to adjust Jimbe’s crown, and suddenly Luffy is off with a Gum Gum Rocket, crashing into Zoro who seems unfazed.

Jimbe smiles then, serene and in awe. The words of Trafalgar Law sink into his head once more.

If we don’t love, then why do we set sail?

He looks at the boy who he is learning to love more than anything else, and decides to abandon careful for adventure - just for the future King of the Pirates.

Chapter Text

Luffy - he’s so small in Shank’s arms, smaller than he was last night, partying with the Red-Haired pirates held upon their shoulders, and smaller than he was this morning, when he ran into Shanks’s knees and caused a ruckus as they were loading the ship. Shanks doesn’t know why he never noticed it before.

Maybe it’s because now, Luffy is asleep, wrapped in blankets and held in Shanks’s arms, blood on his chin and red stains on the blanket. Maybe it’s because Luffy - vivacious and unstoppable, even with a stab wound to the face - has never been this quiet. This small. This unmoving

Shanks holds him in his arms, sitting in the quiet guest bedroom on the small bed Luffy calls his own above the bar. Knickknacks of child’s toys and treasures, shells Shanks had given to him and odd trinkets the Red Hair pirates had left behind litter the room.

He’s a child - a child who loved the sea more than anything else.

(When Shanks had first met him, Luffy had been sitting by the sea, watching the pirate ship come in. Water had lapped at his ankles, and later - when introductions were over and pirates were mumbling into a fifth round of drinks - Luff had simply stared off into the horizon with a smile.

Walking by tide pools, Luffy had said, The sea’s the best! She’s free! Picking up shells, Luffy had told him Isn’t the sea pretty? Living near the shore, the horizon reflected in his gaze, Luffy didn’t have to speak for Shanks to know that he loved the sea.)

A child, that was loved back by the sea.

Until —

Luffy coughs, and water and blood and dogwood flowers drip out of his small mouth. Shanks takes the blanket and holds him closer, his own arms trembling, terrified.

— Until Luffy had eaten that damned fruit.

It was only a few hours ago but - still - it stays in Shank’s mind.  The way Luffy had bitten in and started choking, not coughing out pieces of fruit but rather flowers. The way his eyes had gone wide and tears had welled up, the way Luffy had clawed at his throat and spit blood unto the floor - the way Luffy had said It hurts and had closed his eyes when Shanks whispered hanahaki.

Shanks watched his captain die in a flurry of petals. He’ll never forget it.

This moment is just the same - seared into his memory like a brand, like a warning, like a curse.

Luffy, Shanks thinks and tilts his head back to the ceiling, feeling tears wanting too well. There is no shame in crying, every pirate knows that - but here, when Luffy is in his arms and may wake at every moment, Shanks must stay strong. He brought the fruit. He tore Luffy from the sea that he loved more than anything. He’s the one who cursed him.

He has to stay strong for Luffy.

(The sea hates Devil Fruit users, the legend states, but Shanks has only ever talked to Buggy and well - he never made it seem that way. Shanks hadn’t really believed it. But this - this is the truth isn’t it? The sea hates.)

There’s another cough from Luffy, but this time - this time he starts shifting. Groaning. Shanks tilts his arms and lets Luffy roll onto his bicep rather than his chest so Luffy is looking straight up at him.

(His hands, bloody and red, still grip Shanks’s shirt. He almost never wants him to let go.)

“Hey Anchor,” Shanks says softly, quietly. “How you feeling?”

Luffy blinks blearily, brown eyes dazed and faintly pained. He adjusts his grip on Shanks’ shirt and looks around, minutely moving his head, absolutely exhausted, before responding. “‘M tired. Hurts.”

Something breaks in Shanks’ chest at that, but he tries not to show it. Luffy is  strangely empathetic, even if he doesn’t care about others emotions that much and he’ll know Shanks’ sorrow -

Luffy tilts his head further into Shanks’s chest and ah - he already knows. “‘M glad you’re here. You always come back. No one really else does.”

His heart clenches. Oh, how he wants to steal this boy away - away from a bar with a woman who tries her best, away from a village that doesn’t understand, and a grandfather who cares but not enough. He wants to keep Luffy with him, wrap him up and let him see the world on the deck of ship, let him wonder, let him live but -

He can’t.

(A ship’s no place for a child who still has somewhere to call home on land.)

Shanks tilts down and presses a kiss onto Luffy’s head, soft and affectionate, his beard scratching at Luffy’s silky hair. The boy gives out a giggle at that, soft and melodious, before a coughing fit starts up again. Hacking and hacking away, flowers spilling out and sinking to the ground. Shanks rubs his back, gently, soothingly, as Luffy starts trembling before sagging in his arms.

When he looks back up at Shanks, his eyes are pained.  

“Shanks?” He asks, quiet. Unnerving. “Am I going to die?”

And Shanks’ heart breaks.

Am I going to die?

Am I going to die?

Am I going to die?

No child should have to ask that, should have to bear that burden, and oh -

Shanks’ reaction is instantaneous and he crushes Luffy to his chest, finally unable to fight the tears that prick at his eyes.

“No,” he lies, he lies so badly, choking out as much conviction as he can manage. “Anchor, Luffy, no. You - I won’t let you. It’s going to be okay, you won’t die, you won’t.” Luffy shakes in his arms, and he knows, doesn’t he?

That Shanks is lying?

He doesn’t let Luffy go, only listens to his mumbled sobs as he cries with him.

“Oh, Luffy,” Shanks says, helpless. “I - we will find a way. We will - I’ll sail the entire world, I’ll find something.  I-‘“ His voice cracks. He can’t get another word out. He just holds Luffy tight, tighter than he’s ever held him, before, and sobs into his pitch black hair. ‘Anchor,” he gasps, and this boy is going to die and it’ll be the death of him.

Shanks knows it.

He knows it.

He wishes he didn’t.

His mind races, trying to come up with something, anything, mind always, always, hitching on the way his captains smile was bloody when he said goodbye to Shanks for the last time, bloody red petals stuck in his teeth.

Did you do it, Shanks had asked, sobbing, clinging to his captains coat on that last day, did you achieve your dream?

Not yet, Roger had said, and that had hurt the most. Roger was a pirate. Roger was the Pirate King.

And to a pirate, losing a dream was worse than death.

Shanks doesn’t want that to happen to Luffy. Luffy, who is small in his arms and dying the same way Roger did. Luffy, who is sobbing and terrified. Luffy, who looks out to sea and says he wants to be a pirate with more determination than anyone else in the world.

Luffy can’t die. He can’t.

Shanks can’t stop his tears. He can’t stop crying.

But.

He -

(He’s got will, Rayleigh had said, when Crocus made exasperated noises about why Roger wasn’t bed-ridden in illness, He’ll stay standing as long as he’s got reason to, and adventure’s a good enough one as any.)

-He won’t let Luffy die.

He takes off his hat with a careful arm, making sure not to move Luffy to roughly, and slowly pulls the hat off his head and place’s it on his Anchor’s. It startles him out of his sobbing for just a moment, his eyes big and red-rimmed with wetness still dripping down.

“Luffy.” Shanks says, despite the tears that match Luffy’s on his face. “You - you wanna be a pirate, yeah?”

Quiet, quieter than he’s ever been, Luffy nods. “Ye-yeah.” He hiccups.

“Then listen to me. Pirates are free.” Each word feels like a vow. Like a promise. Like defiance. Shanks keeps his eyes on Luffy’s, and lets the words carry him. “We do what we want, when we want. We sing, we dance, we sail, we laugh - but most of all Luffy, we chase. Our. Dreams.” Here, he holds Luffy tighter, tipping the too-big hat on his head back enough so he can see Luffy’s entire face. “That’s what a Jolly Roger is. It’s a symbol of our conviction in chasing our dreams. And Dreams - to a pirate - that’s our life. If you have a dream, Luffy, then you’ll live. You got that?”

Luffy is staring at him, eyes wide, tears forgotten. It’s just like when he heard Shanks sing Binks sake for the first time, or when he heard about the tales of the Grand Line. It’s awe.

(Shanks thinks he’ll break if he can’t uphold the pedestal Luffy has placed him upon.)

“Do you?” Shanks prompts again, and Luffy nods.

“Yeah.”

“Then what’s your dream Luffy?”

“To be a pirate!” Luffy says, voice filled with unsteady conviction. “To sail the seas and be free!”

It’s not enough. But it’s a start.

“Then you won’t die Luffy - as long as you’re chasing your dreams, you won’t die.” Shanks voice cracks again. “You can’t die without being a pirate, right?’

C’mon, Luffy - if anyone’s got the same Will as Roger, it’s you so -

“Right!” Luffy says, rubbing at his eyes with a hand and blinking tears away even as that same hand comes to clutch at his chest. “I can’t die - not until… not until I-‘

And what he says next isn’t the dream to be a pirate, but something grander, something that spilled out of Roger’s mouth as he laughed with the entire world - something that makes Shanks burst out in glee and hold Luffy close as a few more desperate tears escape his eyes.

“That’s - that’s right. You can’t die till then. You can’t!”

(It’s not a promise. It can’t be. The Seas to much for that. But… Shanks can pretend.)

That night, Luffy sleeps with the hat on in the crook of Shanks’ arms, new found determination in his eyes even as he cries himself to sleep and sobs through the pain.

He gives the hat back, but the next week there are bandits who pick on pirates and little boys alike, missing arms and little anchors lost at sea.

The next week, Shanks has to leave.

But not before hearing Luffy make another promise.

“I’m the man who will be King of the Pirates!”

He won’t die before achieving his dream.

(Roger did.)

He won’t die before seeing Shanks again.

(Roger did.)

Shanks just has to have faith that this boy - who can smile like the sun, who loves the sea with his whole heart, who has flowers on his lips and in his chest - will live.

King or Dead.

It’s the only choice Luffy has left.

Chapter Text

Privately, Robin is glad Luffy rejects all claims of heroism.

She knows the stories. The histories.

The rise of the hero, his might, his journey to hell, the people that leave and never come back, the miracles of legends, all adding and adding to this wonderful story -

Until the fall, when everything collapses, because if heroes stayed living people would start to ask where are they now.

A hero’s tale is one that ends in tragedy, and tragedy alone.

Robin does not think she could stand it if Luffy’s story -

Luffy, with a smile like the sun and hands that tear down gods -

Luffy, who laughs without a care and he’s only fourteen yet he’s shaken tyrants to their knees -

Luffy, who commands her to choose to live and is dying himself -

If Luffy’s story, her beloved captain’s story, ends in tragedy.

No.

The world would burn if that happened, and Robin does not think she could stand seeing another history be lost.

(Because that’s what will would happen if Luffy died. The Straw Hats would rise and burn the world, with the allyship of a thousand different peoples from a hundred different countries, and the world would know nothing but the hell the Straw Hat pirates felt in their hearts at the loss of their captain.

It would hurt, if Luffy died.

It would burn.)

So even as Luffy does miracles and coughs up bloody blossoms, purple and stained in the same instant, even as he saves people, even as he commits the impossible an impossible amount of times just like the heroes -

She clings to the fact that he waves a black flag over his head, and hopes he will commit one last impossibility.

(Life.)

Chapter Text

The last time Dragon saw his son was when Luffy was three and still toddling around, looking at the world with wide open eyes and a jaw dropped in awe.

(He does that now, but there’s more of a greed to it, a selfishly wonderful kind of greed that can only belong to a pirate king.)

He clung to Dragon’s cape, vibrant and curious, small and fragile. His little hand fisted in the green fabric when the waves splashed to high or Dragon moved too fast, an adorable greed. Love blossomed in Dragon’s heart then, a love he didn’t think he was capable of anymore. It had bloomed when he first held Luffy in his arms, and when he gave Luffy away for the first time.

Now, Luffy reaches up, up, up, and he tugs at Dragon’s hair, pointing to the ocean.

“O-she!” He says, brightly, wobbling, not quite grasping words yet. Dragon laughs all the same.

“Yes, Luffy. Ocean.”

Luffy nods, victorious in being recognized in his valiant efforts to say ocean, and turns back to the sea.

It’s the only times he is still. Quiet.

(Smaller than he is, before the swallowing vastness of the sea.)

Dragon stills with him, watching his son watch the waves, weight light in his arms,  and wonders, quietly, what will happen if he loses his son.

(How marvelous, how wonderful, how dangerous, his son is, to be born wriggling his way into people’s hearts and taking their dreams to build his own. How free.)

He thinks the world won’t survive then. He thinks this boy has his hand wrapped tight around his heart.

He knows it will be the end of him, and he will not be sorry for it… Just as he knows this will be the last time he has to see his son. Least he grows a weak point that will only ruin this boy.

That’s was the last time he saw his son - fragile, three, and gazing at the ocean as if she were the most wonderful thing.

Now, he sees him again, eleven years later. Luffy is small, small still, but he’s wearing a crown of straw and a bloody smile on his lips so he’s strong.

Dragon laughs, brightly, but that is before the petals fall from his son’s mouth, and he knows that Garp hasn’t told him anything. The flowers are cardamines. He recognizes them from the shores of Baltigo.

(It makes him hurt.)

Luffy runs and Dragon chases, saving his foolish boy before he dies, and is grateful the storm wets his face.

This way, at least, no one can recognize his tears.

(What will happen if he loses his son? Ha! A foolish question, drowned in the days of youth. The better question: what will happen when he loses his son to Luffy’s own eternal love?

Dragon looks at Mariejeoise, and vows death.)

Chapter Text

On Ruskaina, there are good days and bad days.

(Rayleigh tries to not think about how they seem to be so much like the last few months aboard the Oro Jackson.)

The good days are the days that Luffy gets up before Rayleigh with a smile on his face, the days that Luffy coughs a few times but not so much that he’s hurting, the days where he’s attentive and looks more at Rayleigh than the ocean. The good days are the days when Luffy looks so much like Shanks, when he was fourteen and sailing with the King of the Pirates.

(Rayleigh wonders what the world has come to, when fourteen year olds lead crews and take down governments, all on their own power without any guidance. He’s not the sort to truly fight that sort of thing but -

With Shanks and Buggy, they were protected by their crew, guided, trusted. The Straw Hats do the same for Luffy - but they weren’t strong enough to be at Marineford.

Fourteen, and already the strongest supernova.

Rayleigh keeps this close to his chest, and works to make him stronger.)

The bad days are the days that Luffy looks more like Roger, more like the fourteen year old Rayleigh knows him to be, just fighting for one more day of life.

The bad days are the days that Rayleigh has to shake Luffy awake, or the days that Luffy doesn’t need to be wakened at all - already is from a nightmare, one that he didn’t alert Rayleigh too. The bad days are the days Luffy shakes, and coughs blood (so much blood) with dead leaves, then shakes even more as he sees the red on his hands. They are the days that Luffy is quiet, that Luff simply stares off at the horizon, that Luffy wanders by the shore when Rayleigh gives him a break and dips his feet in the ocean, the days that they avoid the bonfire and Rayleigh lets Luffy tuck under his arm for warmth in night. 

The bad days are the days when Luffy wakes with Ace’s name on his lips and doesn’t cry where Rayleigh can see him.

Some weeks, there are more bad days than good days.

This is one of those weeks.

Rayleigh wakes to the sounds of soft gasping and looks to his right. In the dim fire light, Luffy is sitting up, still bandaged, clutching his chest. There’s a moment before Luffy starts coughing and when he does, he doesn’t stop. Plume tree blossoms and roses, heleniums and pink verbenas, marigolds littering the ground.

(Ruskaina has never blossomed like this.)

Rayleigh debates letting Luffy just go back to sleep. Sometimes he appreciates Rayleigh’s guidance. Other times, no.

(Rayleigh is here to train Luffy, to push him, to make him great. But trauma - war - it’s a tricky thing, especially when you are fourteen and not quite sure you’ll live to the end of the year. Training Luffy isn’t like training Shanks. It’s another beast entirely, something Rayleigh is still learning only two months in to their training.)

But then those soft gasps turn into panicked half gasps as Luffy can’t get his breathing under control, and Rayleigh can’t stand back any longer.

He gets up, and strides to where Luffy is sitting, settling down to rub his back.

‘Luffy,” Rayleigh says, low and quiet when Luffy doesn’t even notice him. “Breathe.”

Luffy doesn’t. He just keeps gasping, red on his hands and eyes small and panicked. Rayleigh puts his own hand over Luffy’s, blocking the sight of red blood.

‘Breathe. In, for four, out for four - Breathe Luffy.”

The last time this happened, Rayleigh knocked him on the head, the way he used to do for Roger when Roger got like this, and Luffy had curled in on himself and coughed even more. Times like this, Luffy needs something gentler.

As far as Rayleigh can tell, its not something he’s gotten quite often in his life.

(Shanks liked to talk about the little boy that stole his heart when he came back to Sabaody. On and on, and in the night into his drink, about how Luffy looked when he left, like he was being abandoned, like he was being left all alone. How Luffy was so used to being chucked down mountains by his grandfather, that he was so awed by the way Shanks would so gently swing him up on his shoulders.)

Luffy takes a shuddering gasp, panic lessening as he slowly, slowly follows Rayleigh’s orders. “That’s it,” Rayleigh tells him, carefully wiping the blood on his hands away so he’s not set off again. “Breathe.”

Luffy does, one after another, coming back to himself inch by inch. There are tear tracks along his cheeks, dried by the fire, but he barely notices.

“Rayleigh?” Luffy asks, quiet, voice hoarse.

“It’s me,” Rayleigh answers, settling in. Luffy shakes under his hand and slumps into his side.

“Oh.” Luffy’s quiet for a moment. “I thought… I thought you were A- Ace. I thought you were him for a moment.”

Rayleigh hums, but doesn’t give more than that, letting Luffy mark his own way through this. He’s still shaking.

“I wanna go see her.” Luffy says after a pause. He doesn’t get up.

Her…

(Rayleigh has always loved the sea - he loved the world, not as much as Roger but still despite the fact that it took Roger away from him. The sea… he’s not quite sure how to feel about the sea, the love Luffy has for her something different than the love Roger had for the world.

Roger hadn’t found the hatred of the world until he started adventuring - a choice he made to pursue his dream.

Luffy found the hatred of the ocean on accident, young and foolish, and clung to it for seven years. Clung to life. He’s dying each day.

It hurts.)

“Okay.” Rayleigh says, and helps Luffy up when he can barely get his legs to work.

They walk to the ocean then, side by side, the first stray pinks of dawn rising in the sky. Rayleigh keeps a careful control on his Conqueror’s Haki, yet Luffy doesn’t seem to notice. He’s in a daze, hand clinging to the arm that Rayleigh had written 3D2Y on ever so carefully.

Flowers fall behind them. Theres a path in front of them, from the last time they did this.

Flowers, still pristine as ever.

They arrive at the beach as the sun cracks over the horizon, Luffy stumbling to his knees and burying his hands in the waves. Rayleigh takes a careful step back.

(He’s dying, Trafalgar Law had muttered, faster now, and even faster after each dip in the ocean.

Rayleigh had nodded his head, and made no promise to keep Luffy from the sea.

What were pirates, unless they loved her waters?

He regrets that claim now, ever so slightly.)

Luffy’s quiet as the red on his hands washes away. He’s quiet as the sun rises, even as he keeps his eyes steadily on the horizon.

“Rayleigh?” He asks.

Rayleigh hums.

“I miss my crew.”

The last time Luffy had seen them, they were being swiped away by someone known as the Tyrant.

Kuma had said he was sending them all somewhere safe, but Amazon Lily was safe for no man.

It’s no wonder Luffy worries.

“I know,” Rayleigh says, quiet. “But two years.”

“Two years,” Luffy agrees, and trembles. 

I don’t have two years.  

The day before this, Luffy barely had any energy, and spent the majority of the day coughing.

He really doesn’t have two years - but Luff is a man of miracles.

He’ll see his crew again, even if it kills him.

This, Rayleigh knows for fact, even as he sweeps Luffy up in cloak, drying him off. Even as he makes sure to keep Luffy’s attention on him that day, even as he sends Luffy off to train while he makes dinner and extinguishes the fire before Luffy can come back.

It’s a bad day. A day where Luffy is tired and coughing and worried about his crew.

Rayleigh just hopes tomorrow will be a good one.

Chapter Text

Kidd remembers Straw Hat. He had been a brat back then, at Sabaody all those years ago, not even coming up to Kidd’s shoulder and still having baby fat lining his cheeks. The youngest Supernova, the rumors had whispered, only fourteen.

Kidd hadn’t cared about that back then. Why would he, when the rumors - when the entire world - knew that Straw Hat was a crazy bastard that had taken on the world government and won. What’s an age to a reputation like that? To a power like that? Then - then all Kidd cared about was seeing Straw Hat do some crazy shit.

When Straw Hat crashed down the ceiling of that auction, not even breaking in his stride as he smashed his fist into the face of a celestial dragon twice his height, Kidd had gotten his wish.

And yet - he had seen, then, the way flower petals stuck in the brat’s lips as grinned. He had seen the way his lips were bloody without a hit on him, and the way he had spat onto the ground after, leaving an entire flower bud in his wake. The rumors hadn’t talked about that.

Even after the war, with the image of Straw Hat holding his dead brother plastered about the world, petals in his wake, the rumors hadn’t talked about it.

Looking at him now, older but with lips still just as bloodied, Kidd wonders if they do now. It’s a surprise to see him here, in the midst of Wano’s prison camps, but then again - it’s Straw Hat. After two years of absence only to awake to challenge an emperor, Kidd shouldn’t be surprised at where the kid shows up.

He’s still short. His robes sag a bit too big on him, smothering the muscle Kidd knows still must be underneath. His hands hang in front of him, bloody and scratched and sticky with petals as the sea stone drapes around them, and his feet are unsteady as he walks. Even from his cell, Kidd can see it - the gait that sways from side to side, the shakiness of his step,  the stumbling click-clack of his sandals and the clink of his chains as the guards pull him along - they’re making a spectacle of it.

Pathetic, Kidd thinks, and doesn’t quite know who he’s directing it at, bastards.

And then -

Then they throw Straw Hat into his fucking cell as they all cackle so loudly, and it’s all Kidd can do to not break their necks with his bare fists. Annoying bastards. He liked his solitary cell - and now he has Straw Hat to deal with?

Hell-fucking-no - Kidd needs out of this dump not for Straw Hat to drag him down into another admiral-level mess.

(His crew isn’t here, his crew is alone, and Killer is out there somewhere, captured just like him. His crew is strong, but they aren’t as strong as Kidd or Killer, and damn if he’ll let them get hurt because some straw hatted nuisance stirred up trouble.

(Or… at least more hurt than Kidd had let them get. What a shit captain he is, dragging them into an alliance like that.))

“DAMN YOU KAIDO!” Straw Hat screams, swears, and it’s muffled by the bandages wrapped around his face and a gurgling in his throat. “DAMN YOU!”  He stumbles to his feet, shoulders hunched, glare bright - the seas stone is dragging at his body, but even Kidd has to respect how the fire in his eye doesn’t seem to burn out even trapped like this.  “COME BACK AND FIGHT ME! BASTARDS!”

Straw Hat’s chains clink against the prison cell. The wardens just laugh, waving him off, and suddenly, there is darkness again as they shut the cell door.

Still, Straw Hat continues screaming, raging, an edge of desperation in his tone. He’s angry in a way Kidd has never seen him before - though, truth be told, he’s only seen him once. But if the anger he has now doesn’t top his anger when fighting a celestial dragon of all things -

Kidd doesn’t know what could set him off.

(Or, perhaps, he does. That anger rides deep in his belly now, after all, days past when his crew was destroyed. Kidd is a pirate. Straw Hat is a pirate.

Some things don’t change, between men like them.)

Straw Hat smashes his cuffs against the iron bars - against the sea stone bars, Kidd’s tried to fight against them more than he would admit - but it does nothing but make more blood drip out of his robes and down his face. He starts screaming again but -

“BASTA-ACK!” He coughs, wet and ragged in the middle of his words, and doesn’t stop. It’s a hacking cough, once that seems to drag at his throat, and he keeps coughing, over and over till it’s almost like he’s choking one it. Blood spills over his lips and onto the floor as his legs - those weak, trembling legs that Kidd already saw - give out from underneath him. He doesn’t stop coughing even then, his entire body hunched to the ground.

He’s trying to brace himself, trying to hold his chest, but he can’t do both at once.

Straw Hat wobbles.

Finally, Kidd finds the voice to speak. “Oi.”

Straw Hat keeps coughing.

“Oi!”

Straw Hat keeps coughing.

“OI!” Kidd snarls, and reaches a limb over to smack his back.

Straw Hat chokes for one, horrible moment, and then blood splatters on the ground as flowers begin pouring out his mouth as ripped bandages dangle around. Beautiful ones, like marigolds and hyacinths and other flowers of all colors that Kidd will never know the name of. They stick to his bruised cheeks, his hands, the floor, his manacles, but -

He’s finally, finally stopped coughing.

The choking and the flowers stop too, eventually, leaving Straw Hat gasping for breath on the floor, looking small and huh - beneath the bandages, baby fat still clings to his cheeks.

He’s sixteen, Kidd recalls, a whole seven years younger than himself.

Pathetic, he wants to think, but can’t quite make himself do so. Straw Hat walked here after all, with bandages choking his mouth and sea stone laid across his hands, and was still fierce enough that most of the guards backed off. Straw Hat has guts.

And - Kidd realizes, surely and absolutely as Straw Hat drags himself up to sit on his heels - he’s got hanahaki.

(He’s the first-person Kidd’s ever met that has the disease. He never quite thought it’d be like this.)

“Jaggy,” Straw hat murmurs out, the word scratching at his throat. “You’re here?”

“Tch.” Kidd snorts, not energized enough to snarl against the nickname, and settles back against the wall. “Obviously, brat.”

Straw Hat heaves out again, in and out. “… Thanks.” He murmurs again, voice still ragged.

To this, Kidd shrugs. He didn’t - he didn’t do it to be kind. “The coughing was a bit annoying.”

Straw Hat doesn’t say anything to that. He just keeps looking at the small window of light they have, back turned to Kidd and body still - stiller than Kidd had ever seen him. Even in his wanted posters the kid always seemed to be moving.  It unnerves him, ever so slightly.

But - whatever. Straw Hat is being quiet, not coughing, and they’ll be enough nuisances tomorrow. He can ignore the brat’s despondent look till tomorrow, and catch some sleep now.

He’s not in the mood to fight, or puff up his feathers like he would do for his rivals typically. He’s just… tired. And hurt. And he misses his crew.

(Straw Hat is alone now. He’s in the same boat.)

Kidd uses his one hand to pull his coat tighter to himself, and rests back against the wall, determinedly shutting out the world and Straw Hat’s to desperate gasps from the front of the cell. It’s… it’s fine.

Fine.

Fine.

-

Whatever it is, it’s not fine because Kidd wakes up hours later to near-entire darkness in his cell and a shuffling, hacking in his corner. He has half a mind to lash out, because he’s alone in his cell, and noises in the dark have never meant anything good but -

Then he remembers earlier today. He remembers Straw Hat being thrown in the cell. So, no lashing out but -

“Damnit.” Straw Hat is whispering, cursing in his corner, and Kidd doesn’t think it’s out of any consideration for him but rather the hoarseness of his own voice. “Fuck.”

His voice cracks a bit.

(He’s sixteen and he’s been in more wars and fought more emperors than Kidd can claim to. His own weakness burns at him.)

Kidd turns his head. There, struggling in the corner, is Straw Hat. The bandages have all been torn from his face and now lay in his hands, considerably more bloody than the last time Kidd saw them. Flowers lay scattered about Straw Hat’s entire body, and it seems he’s trying to do something with the bandages and his sea stone cuffs.

Whatever it is, it’s not working because even in the dim moonlight Straw Hat’s eyes have lost some of their fire. Some of their rage.

He looks… exhausted.

(His eyes are rimmed red. Kidd doesn’t look too closely.)

He starts hacking again, not as harsh as earlier but seemingly because he doesn’t have the energy to do so harsher. The purple flowers from before - the spindly kind - fall from his lips and the sight of them makes Straw Hat grow - grow more something. Something like desperation and rage and grief but also not quite. It’s not a sight Kidd thinks he should be privy too, but prison does that to a man. It breaks down the barriers in all the wrong ways and it hurts.

So, Kidd does something about it.

“Oi.” He says again, like he did earlier, and yet this time Straw Hat’s response is immediate. His head snaps up, eyes flying wide, his entire body shifting into the defense. It’s easy to tell how the chains wear at him, how red his chest is from that scar, how he halfheartedly used his robes to wipe away the blood, when he’s like this. “The hell you doing, Straw Hat?”

Straw Hat just stares at him, reminiscent of a child caught doing something he shouldn’t. Kidd raises an eyebrow, and Luffy shrugs, stubbornly avoiding Kidd’s eyes as he puffs up his shoulders. “Trying to get the cuffs off.”

Yeah, right. The brat’s a terrible liar even under the exhaustion.

“With the bandages?” Kidd prompts, irritated, because he did not get woken up to get lied too. Luffy shrugs again, but this time holds out his hands, cuffs and bandages and all. His shoulders lilt with some unbidden weight.

“I was trying to stuff the bandages under the cuffs so that it wouldn’t touch me.” Straw Hat says simply. “But I can’t do it like this.”

Huh. That’s… not a bad idea. If the sea stone isn’t touching him, Straw Hat can use his powers. It’s not a bad idea, yeah, except for the fact that the manacles are so skin tight it’s hard to get anything under them, and the fact that the sea-stone would be in such close proximity to the skin that even the tiniest shift would have you back where it started.

Still, Kidd takes a look at what Straw Hat has done. It’s not much - his manacles are tighter than the others Kidd has seen around here, included his one-cuff manacles. Straw Hat’s are more like stockades, binding his wrists so close that they’re almost touching and giving him very little room to even move his elbows. He’s managed to get the tail end of a bloody bandage under his manacle, but nothing more than that.

It’s futile, and Kidd tells him as much. “It won’t work, brat. Too tight, and you’ll still feel the effects. Sides - they’ll switch ‘em out tomorrow morning with the chain ones so you can do their dirty work for them.” He dangles his own, singular chain and cuff as an example.

Straw Hat stares at him with wide, wide eyes, and then goes back to his hands. “That doesn’t matter. Chopper says I shouldn’t let Sea Stone touch me, or things will get worse. So I have to try or he’ll be mad at me. .”

Chopper - isn’t that his pet reindeer? The tiny guy? Kidd shakes his head, dispersing the thought. Who cares about that, when the brat is still trying to get the bandages under the manacles. He’s letting out noisy grunt as he does so, and it’s clear the manacles are pulling at his skin, leaving it bloody and raw with the skin peeled and everything. It doesn’t even deter the brat - he just keeps on going.

That doesn’t answer Kidd’s questions though. “What will get worse?”

(Sue him for sounding like he cares. He’s bored and Straw Hat is noisy, so obviously he has to do something.)

Straw Hat just gives him a dry look, and heaves into another coughing fit. There’s no blood this time, but it does leave Straw Hat looking even more worse for wear, tired and exhausted . He starts to lean against the wall of their little prison, his hands shaky and his head tilting gently as he still - still - goes to mess with the bandages.

Oh, Kidd realizes with a soft murmur. Oh.

The hanahaki. The killing disease. The killing love. It gets worse with the sea stone?

The rumors didn’t say anything about that - but then again, they didn’t talk about it at all when Straw Hat Luffy was the topic.

Before Kidd knows it, the words are spilling out of his mouth. “Give me that, brat,”

“Wha - I’m not a brat!” Straw Hat says indignantly in that hoarse voice of his. “And no!”

“You just now noticed that I’ve been calling you a brat, brat?”

“Oi-“

“And get over yourself. The sooner you stop coughing the sooner I get to sleep, so get over here and give me that.” Kidd waits a beat. “Brat.”

Straw Hat fumes but its only for a moment before he’s scooting along the wall, too tired to get up properly, until he’s right next to Kidd. He holds out his hands and bandages petulantly, almost skeptically, his eyes piercing Kidd’s own.

Damn the brat has a glare.

Kidd ignores this, ignores how he’s helping his rival, and grabs the brat’s tiny wrist. It isn’t gentle, isn’t kind, but it lets him see what the brat has been trying to do. Straw Hat doesn’t flinch. Just sits there, wide eyed and covered in blood and muck.

(It’s harder to avoid the redness of his eyes this way, but Kidd forges on.)

He’s careful as he starts using his hand to push the bandages through. The brat’s manacles make this act easier at least, a little looser than Kidd’s own cuffs, and Straw hat manages to hold still despite his trembling and shaky breaths. It takes a bit of maneuvering, a little bit of teeth, and more than a few trade backs of Stop moving, brat, and Shut it Jaggy, but eventually - eventually Straw Hat’s manacles aren’t touching his skin any more. He’s breathing easier, skin a little warmer, and there’s something Kidd doesn’t want to name in his eyes.

“That better, brat?!” Kidd bites out, trying to regain some of his image despite the way his hand is twisting the kid’s wrists around, double checking.

“Shishishi!” Straw Hat laughs, the first real sign of whatever the fuck kind of joy is going on in his wanted poster showing its face. “Yep! Thanks Jaggy!”

“Whatever.” Kidd settles back into the wall,  bringing a knee up and hugging it in lieu of crossing arms he doesn’t have. “Be quiet now - I want some fucking sleep in this hell hole.”

Straw Hat doesn’t respond. Kidd glances over.

That fucking asshole - he -

He’s already sleeping on the ends of Kidd’s ratty coat, head nestled one the fabric and too-thin limbs splayed out in front of him.  Sleeping. On Kidd’s coat. The only one who was ballsy enough to do that before was -

(An emperor, taking his crew away, a blue and white mask falling-)

-is still here, somewhere.

Kidd has half a mind to shake him off, but - didn’t he say, all those years ago, that he wanted to see Straw Hat do something bat-shit insane?

This has to count. He’s quiet now, at least.

Kidd tucks his head down, and copies him, ignoring the blood staining his coat and the ground, and the ghosting flower petals stirred up by the wind.

(The next day sees Kidd watching Luffy shake as his manacles are interchanged with cuffs that touch his skin. It has Kidd seeing Straw Hat tremble in his cell as Kidd helps him like he did this night, and days later - It seems the tiny reindeer give him a small, thankful nod as he inspects the bandages still wrapped around Straw Hats wrists. There’s an understanding there, a respect that Kidd can’t help but bristle at.

He - He didn’t - whatever this was, it remains here, in Udon, because Kidd is a pirate and so is Straw Hat. The past remains there, and alliances are doomed to falter and fail. This wasn’t an alliance. Not even close. This was….

Whatever.

(And if there are still immortal flowers, purple and tall, stuck in the pockets of Kidd’s coat, then no one has to fucking know.))

Chapter Text

At Thriller Bark, Zoro looks at his captain lying half dead on the ground, and makes a choice.

I’m worried about him, Usopp had said, our enemies are getting bigger and badder - and he keeps pushing himself. What’s going to happen when Luffy can’t keep up?)

Luffy just defeated a warlord.

Luffy couldn’t fight Kuma.

And Kuma wants his head.

“Please!” Zoro commands, Zoro begs, and isn’t it amazing the kind of power Luffy has over him, that he would do this, give up his dream, just for him? “TAKE MY HEAD INSTEAD! I can’t say I am as famous as Luffy - but I promise you if you strike him down, and not me, I will become the world’s greatest swordsman one day - and you will know no peace.”

Luffy is fourteen years old. He hasn’t hit his growth spurt yet, and there’s baby fat still on his cheeks. Chopper says that he might make it to twenty, but only if he stops pushing himself. Luffy won’t.

“So much ambition... and yet you would give up your life,” your dream, “to save this one?”

Zoro glares at him from where he kneels.

(Petals float by his knees. A reminder.)

“It’s the only way to save the rest of my crew! What good is my ambition if I cannot even save the life of my captain?” His captain, Luffy, who took him from a marine courtyard and gave him a path to the top. Luffy, who smiles everyday despite the blood on his lips, and fits perfectly at Zoro’s side when they nap between moments or fight deadly battles.

Luffy -

“LUFFY IS THE MAN WHO WILL BECOME KING OF THE PIRATES!”

(King or dead.

Zoro will choose king every time for his captain.)

Then Sanji comes in - Sanji, who’s always the one to say, no, me, Sanji, who is kind, Sanji, who is an ass, Sanji, who says Tell everyone my regards and tell them to look for a new cook, yeah? When Luffy needs Sanji’s cooking to give him the strength he needs to live.

(It’s important, Chopper had said after Drum, to the whole crew, that Luffy gets all the nutrients he needs - his body is giving half of them up, every day, just by coughing.)

Zoro is a part of this crew.

He is loved by this crew.

But he is only a fighter, a guide. The crew doesn’t depend on him like they do everyone else.

Zoro can die.

Sanji can’t.

Luffy can’t.

Zoro knocks Sanji out with one blow, and does not flinch at the way Sanji weakly grabs on to his arm, so much like Luffy did- does, when he stumbles on deck.

He turns to Kuma.

“I’ve shown I’m a man of my word. Now it’s your turn.”

A challenge.

His last.

“If I lay a hand on Straw Hat Luffy after this… I will be shamed.” Kuma says, voice infuriatingly even, but all Zoro can feel is relief.

(And resignation.

The end is coming.)

“Any man of honor would be,” Zoro acknowledges.

But Kuma picks up Luffy anyway, and Zoro’s hands want to fly to his blades one the ground.

Luffy -

“I will not take his head. But in exchange -“

Kuma’s hand presses to Luffy’s chest, and a paw, red and bright and horrible, emerges like a bubble.

“I will give you a glimpse of hell!”

The paw hangs in the air, ominous and frightening. Flower petals float around it, like omens of death.

(Robin had told them the meanings of the flowers Luffy chokes up, one night when they surrounded their captain at Galley La.

Zoro is sure these mean death.)

“This is all of the pain and suffering your captain is experiencing. His anguish from his battle with Moria and his crew… and the love that resides deep inside his chest.”

Zoro stares at the flowers floating around this balloon of pain, and knows, knows this is what Luffy, fourteen and so young gives up for them, every single day.

“If you are truly taking his place,” Kuma, the Tyrant, continues, “then you must accept his agony.”

King or dead.

“You will die, with what wounds you have now.”

King or dead.

“Have a taste.”

King or -

A bubble, small, connects with Zoro’s chest, and all he knows is white hot agony like lightning, like defeat, like a knife to the heart twisting in deep and destroying,  like hell and hot blades cutting him open.

Dead.

He feels dead.

This is what Luffy gives for them? This, every battle, every tyrant falling to their knees, every god brought down from heaven? Luffy, made of rubber, cracking apart at the seams because he is fourteen and taking on the world before he can die to his own love.

King or dead.

Zoro falls to his back, blood pouring out of his mouth.

He feels like Luffy - coughing up blood every moment of the day.

“Well..?” Kuma prompts, and Zoro thinks again.

King or dead.

There is no hesitation.

“Just let me change the location.”

Zoro is not the one who will be king. There is only one other option for him.

Alone, abandoned, his crew unconscious and captain lying prone to the mercy of tyrants, Zoro takes on suffering of the person he will sacrifice his dream too.

His life too.

King or dead.

It hurts so much.

-

He’s standing in a pool of blood.

He hurts.

He can barely see.

Every bone feels like it is broken, shattered. His face, pain emanating from every pore.

This is Luffy’s pain.

Luffy’s.

Nothing hurts more than the agony inside his chest. It’s like vines creeping up his throat, white hot irons tearing at his lungs, something uncomfortable and settled and it feels like something that will never go away.

Something bone deep.

Something that was part of Luffy’s core.

There are flowers in the blood. He can’t tell their colors. He can’t tell if they mean death, or something worse. He can barely see at all.

This is what Luffy bears for his love? This death, sitting in his chest, ever since he was a child?

(He still is a child.)

Zoro wants to kill the ocean for this.

But -

King or dead.

Luffy had chosen king - and his crew has chosen him.

Zoro, alive, supposes that means he’s not allowed to die.

Sanji is the one to find him, furious, but flowers in the blood stop him.

“What happened here?” Sanji asks.

“Nothing at all,” Zoro shakes out, a single flower like loyalty on his lips, before collapsing.

Only our captain’s pain.

Chapter Text

Zoro wakes to quiet, which is the first sign that something is terribly, terribly wrong. The Thousand Sunny is never quiet – there is the faint whir of machinery, echoing from Franky’s bunk, the soft snores of the cook that he’ll never admit he does, Luffy mumbling in his sleep or coughing, Usopp rustling in his blankets, Chopper’s faint breathing and the click click of tiny hooves – even in the daytime, when Zoro naps, it is never quiet when he wakes. He knows his crew, and he knows they are never silent.

The second sign that something is terribly, horribly wrong is that all Zoro can feel is pain. His limbs ache, his body is like ash and dust, crumbling at every joint, the soft blankets scratch at his skin, the world hurts, hurts, hurts, it’s like fire, like vines, like wretchedness and –

His chest, he can’t breathe, he can’t, he can’t –

With all of his strength, Zoro rolls himself over and coughs over the side of the bed.

There he sees the third sign, and these things always come in threes, that something is wrong.

On the ground, covered in fresh, red blood, is a single flower layer on the flower. An angrec, made of pretty petals of vibrant pink and purple and white.

Zoro can still taste the feathery sweetness in his mouth.

-

He doesn’t remember much after that. Just remembers fading pain and consciousness, and the cool feel of hooves against his forehead, featherlight and caring. His world sways in motions, in what if’s, in pain, in his captain’s pain.

The bandages get changed out. When he blearily blinks his eyes open, he can see a party echoing around him, a thankful change from the silence, and a bottle of sake by his makeshift bedside.

Occasionally, past the pain, past the aching in his chest, his lungs, how it hurts to move a single finger and how his lungs feel like they are chained to the ground, to his spine, unable to breath or exist or anything –

He feels the soft straw of Luffy’s crown upon his head, and a hand, gentle and calloused, scratching through his hair.  He feels the echoing of a party and the wild, joyful laughter of his crew.

It’s nice.

(It’s proof his oath was honored.)

He clings to the feeling as his own weakness, bone deep and sunk into his soul, drags him down into darkness.

-

He wakes up, finally, surely, tired but aware, to the sticky feeling of petals on his lips. He sits up, bandages stretching across his chest and wrapping tight around his head. His fingers drag across his lips in the same motion he’s seen Luffy do a thousand times, when he’s half asleep and spent the night coughing in his sleeps.

His fingertips come back bloody and covered in purple-white petals.

Zoro fights back a shudder that wracks his chest and swallows down the urge to cough. This is nothing. This is just –

This is just part of his captain’s pain. His captain’s pain that he carries each day because he loves the ocean just as wholly as Zoro loves Luffy, loves the ocean despite the pain, despite the trials, because there’s something worth it at the end of it all. It’s just Luffy’s pain. The pain he gives for each of them, in every battle, every aching wound, every declaration against the world because he’s their captain, and he is selfish, and he is theirs.

Zoro can handle flowers, for just a few days. Weeks.

However long it takes.

-

Chopper is the first person to come to see him, and the second his eyes catch on Zoro’s, he begins crying.

“WE WERE SO WORRIED YOU BASTARD!” He cries, and Zoro hates seeing his crew cry but he can’t help but feel a private sort of pride and happiness at having people care for him.

“I know, I know,” Zoro soothes, “But I’m alright. It was nothing.”

Chopper smacks him across the cheek for that one, his little hooves nothing compared to Nami’s furious hits but Zoro goes quiet all the same.

“It was not nothing.” Chopper yells, and starts shouting about collar fractures and blood loss and cracked skulls, how he had to stay up all night and I had to revive you twice, Zoro! Twice! Don’t do that again! Before he starts blubbering into tears again. It takes all of Zoro’s strength just to curl the tiny reindeer into his arms, leaning Chopper against the shoulder that feels more like a brand than being actively burned alive.

“And…” Chopper continues, wiping at his eyes, “I don’t know how you got this injured, but you did something stupid when we were all knocked out and you can’t Zoro, you can’t do that!”

Zoro says nothing, and just curls Chopper tighter to his chest.

He would do it all again in a heartbeat, if it meant Luffy got to achieve his dream.

-

The rest of the crew trickles in after that. Sanji comes in with a warm meal and an angry face, Usopp with quiet respect, Nami with sake hidden behind her back because she’s a witch and an enabler but she’s still crew, still remembers the days when it was Luffy and Zoro and Nami tied together on two boats and shared meals. She’s the one who flicks the hat still resting on Zoro’s head and demands that he gets better.

Franky and Robin trail in next, each with smiles and a story of a party and a crew member coming home. Robin’s eyes are sharp, though, piercing Zoro straight through the heart.

“Our Captain…” She starts, and she smiles as she says it, as she’s always said captain since Ennies Lobby, since flowers in waves and on her hands, “Has been rather energetic, ever since he woke up.”

“Yeah?” Zoro grunts, tugging on the bandages around his fingers.

“Yeah!” Franky confirms, loud and striking a pose. “The little guy has been hopping from place to place! More energetic than I’ve ever seen him!”

“He hasn’t coughed once.” Robin strikes, nailing the truth of the issue in a manner that makes even Franky, boisterous and unrepentant of the way he takes up, slouch in place. Zoro feels his heart tremor, his lungs writhe with vibes. “He’s slept peacefully through the night, and his face has been relatively clean of blood… his own blood at least.”

“Robin!” Franky cries. “Did’ya have to say it like that?!”

“Yes.” Robin says demurely, crossing her legs and giving a laugh before the seriousness sets in again. “Luffy hasn’t coughed. Not once. I can’t tell if he’s noticed or not, our Captain is sweet like that. But…” And she reaches into her little travel bag, one she must have picked up in Water 7 if the little Galley-La symbol is anything to go by. “I’m still finding flowers, leading from the infirmary.”

In her hand is a pristine flower of white and purple. Zoro distinctly remembers coughing it up. His chest seizes, and his fingers dig into the fabric of his blanket.

“King or Dead,” he tells her, and does not tremble.

“King or Dead,” She repeats, tucking the flower into the straw hat upon Zoro’s head. “Just remember that that includes his crew too.”

There’s no question of who Robin is referring to, not with the crown still resting upon Zoro’s head, shading his brow from the dim light.

He barks out a wet laugh, full of petals and blood. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

The scratchiness of the blankets rubs against his skin, his crew’s gaze is heavy on his chest, and a straw hat rests like an oath upon his head.

I’m still here.

Robin smiles, Franky grins, and Zoro knows he can trust his crew, especially with things like this.

-

Luffy is the last to visit, and Zoro didn’t know how worried he was until he feels Luffy collide with his chest, all fourteen years of him, laughing and smiling. Something eases then, makes his aches easier to bear and his heart less heavy. Luffy’s here. He’s alive. Zoro protected his captain, and he did it well.

“Zoro!” Luffy smiles, all big and wide, and trades a carefully woven flower crown for the straw hat upon Zoro’s head. The petals tickle his scalp, but the weight is about the same. “I’m glad you’re up! You missed the party, and Brook – Brook’s gonna become our musician! Our Musician! He’s Laboon’s friend and he’s perfect, Zoro, we sang Bink’s Sake all last night and the Pig-Lady’s crew likes to do the chopstick dance too!”

Zoro just grins up at him, face gentle in a way he would never let the cook see, and gives a light huff. “Yeah?”

“Yeah!” Luffy’s fingers come down to Zoro’s cheek, feather light and thumbing away at something that Zoro can’t quite feel. When Zoro glances over, Luffy’s finger is smeared red. “Yeah. Stop missing parties, Zoro. They’re less fun without you.”

Luffy doesn’t say don’t fight our enemies. Luffy doesn’t say don’t get hurt. Luffy gets it, gets the way that somethings are worth blood and injuries and life, gets it just like Zoro.

But his captain is so selfish, dragging them all on an adventure that their captain himself doesn’t know he’ll reach the end of. So Luffy just says, stop missing parties, and says stay with me, adventure with me, and its all worth it, because that’s what Zoro would ask too.

“Aye captain,” Zoro agrees, eyes roving over the way Luffy’s skin is warmer than he’s ever seen it, the way his mouth has no blood at the corners, the way he trembles with energy and his eyes aren’t dimly clouded by pain or his throat scratchy with flowers. “I won’t miss another party.”

Luffy doesn’t ask about broken promises. Luffy doesn’t ask about Zoro’s broken oath, doesn’t ask about how Luffy suddenly became more important than Zoro’s own name echoing to the heaven’s, doesn’t ask how Zoro’s dream means nothing if it’s not under his captain’s proud banner.

Luffy doesn’t ask.

And with fingers tightening around Luffy’s hand as his captain laugh’s in assurance, Zoro is going to make sure that Luffy never will.

Because Luffy gets it, and Zoro doesn’t know what he’ll do if Luffy understands this.

-

Days pass. Slowly, surely, a party each night filled with singing and dancing that Zoro drinks too, resting heavily on Nami’s shoulder, who only charges him a little bit for it. What’s another thousand belli anyway?

They load the ship up with gold upon gold, supplies upon supplies. Zoro’s not allowed to help with anything, a fact Sanji gleefully enforces with kicks to the head that just get Chopper riled up even more. The crew is laughing and joyful, and no one mentions Warlords of the Sea of men with bear paw prints on their hand. No one asks about wounds that don’t match the scars of a swordsman, and no one mentions the fourteen-year-old captain who’s brighter than he was at the beginning of their little adventure onto this island. Zoro can’t help but be grateful for it all, if annoyed by the fact that he has shadows every time he sits down to take a breather a little too often.

He’s shaken them now, his too-caring crew. His legs tremble as he walks down to the little seaside grave that has been echoing the soft melody of the violin for hours now. It’s a haunting, peaceful song, one of longing and rest.

It seems like a private moment, but Brook is crew now, and Zoro has a mission to do, wrapped in a sheath in his hand. Moments like this are shared now, in the solace of belonging.

The Rumbar Pirates were honorable men. Are honorable men, a honorable crew in Brook’s memory. They died as Yuubashiri did – for a dream.

This is where it belongs – with the grave of the rest of the people their merry little crew has lost.

He lumbers, low and slow, and finally sinks Yuubashiri into its final resting place, just faintly disguising his own collapse onto the ground with something like control.

“Ah! You scared me!” Brook says, pausing in his song.

“Sorry.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah… Just slept too long.”

A pause, the sea-wind rustling the flowers that lie at the foot of the Rumbar Pirate’s grave. Zoro can see the scattering of blood-tipped flowers within the ones that were picked from the island. It feels like a protection of sorts. A blessing.

A thank you, for Brook’s old crew from his new.

Zoro lets the sentimentality of it wash over him for a moment, then claps his hand together in prayer, fighting off the urge to cough. His hands presses against the bandages on his forehead, and against the flowers that lean from the top of the crown still upon his head.

“What’s that?” Brook asks, voice soft.

“A dead sword.” A dead friend. “Please let it rest here as well.”

Brook doesn’t protest, which is as good as a yes, but his eye sockets bore into Zoro all the same, seemingly sketching along the profile of his face and he bloody crown of flowers still in his hair.

“Um...”

“Hm?” Zoro asks, finishing his respects and thanks. Yuubashiri was a good sword. One of the best Zoro’s had.

“Oh… nothing…” Brook trails off, hesitant in his distant sort of way. “Oh! But I did join your crew!”

“That so?” Zoro comments, despite having his ear talked off about this already. “Your bad luck. This crew is a handful, y’know?” He grins as he says it, knowing full well that Brook is just the type of handful this crew takes in. Alone and wild and with dreams and habits too great for any crew other than that of the future King of the Pirates.

Brook doesn’t disappoint.

“Yohohoho!  So I hear! I’ll give your crew my blood and sweat – Oh! But I don’t have either! So you’ll have to do with my bones and soul!”

Zoro smiles wide. “Luffy will ask a lot more.” He says, almost unbidden, because he remembers vowing an oath on a small island in the East, expecting to give only the same but…

His fingers twitch in their templed position, and he remembers dreams and promises and the moments where his crew became more important than winning or his own swordsmanship.

He’s in the Grand Line now, and he would give everything for Luffy, because Luffy asks the impossible in pursuit of dreams, and Zoro cannot stop him.

Brook quiets. He sets his violin down, and reaches up to Zoro’s temple, bony fingers brushing immortal flowers as they sit side by side. “My last captain wasn’t selfish.” He states, just as soft as his motions. “But… he was dying too, pursuing a dream. He asked me to leave him, so that I might live. He… is not like Luffy.”

“No one is,” Zoro murmurs.

“For Captain Yorki, I gave my first life. For this crew, and Laboon – to see our dreams to the end – I will give my second. And I will make sure, with every breath that I cannot take, that Luffy –” His fingers pull away from the angrec petals wrapped around Zoro’s head “—will be the man who becomes King of the Pirates. On this, you have my word.”

Zoro pauses this, before huffing out a laugh in the silence. “You’re his musician. He’s been waiting on you for a long time – he can’t become King of the Pirates without you now.”

Brook looks at him in that odd, assessing way of his and laughs, gleefully. “Yohohoho! I will not disappoint!” He doesn’t mention dying men and warlords, doesn’t mention how Luffy can’t become king of the pirates without Zoro, and just let the silence rise, comfortable at last.

Zoro appreciates it, even as he turns away from his new crewmate and back to Yuubashiri.

He polished the shards the best he could, slipping it into its sheath for the final time with care. He’s given his thanks. His respects, for saving him so many times during battle and protecting his name so that it may rise to the heavens as the world’s greatest swordsman. And yet…

And yet, even in front of this beautiful grave, a perfect final resting place, something is missing.

Zoro’s eyes catch on the bloody flowers at the base of the grave of the Rumbar Pirates – flowers that ensure that centuries from now, the grave will still be blessed with perfect, pristine flowers.

Ah.

Slowly, carefully, Zoro takes the flower crown off his head, the crown of flowers his captain gave to him, made of his own sweat and blood and tears and love.

The crown that means Zoro chose King.

He wraps it around Yuubashiri’s sheath, once, twice, and bows low to the ground.

“Thank you,” he says, hands stained with blood, “for protecting my captain.”

With the final thanks given, Yuubashiri can rest.

Brook, silent, begins to play again, the soft melody aching in Zoro’s chest as he bites down flowers.

The world, slowly, comes back into tune.

-

They set sail.

The aches in Zoro’s chest get lighter. His bandages come off. Luffy starts coughing again, surprised each time but slowly getting used to waking up in the middle of the night again to flowers pouring from his mouth.

(There’s a look that crosses his face, then, a look that reflects broken hope and stolen faith. Privately, Zoro wonders if Luffy had hoped everything just went away – that his love was still here but the consequences weren’t.

Zoro wishes it had been that way too.)

Luffy clambers into Sanji’s hammocks those nights, waking him up for a snack and then leading him back to bed. He tried it with Zoro, once, but Zoro’s coughing just woke both of them and the weight of a rubber man hurt when all of his ribs are still healing.

Zoro still catches Sanji’s eye in the middle of the night. He still flicks between him and their captain, asking is he okay? And letting out quiet breaths when the answer is always, thankfully, yes.

It doesn’t stop him from training though, even when his lungs give out and the room fills with flowers. It doesn’t stop him from seeking out Luffy, from staring at Ace’s burning vivre card and wondering, if somewhere out here, Luffy’s was burning too. Zoro needs to get stronger.

Kuma cannot happen again.

His captain cannot have Zoro be weak again. To have another enemy win again.

Zoro will be strong because his captain is even through coughing fits that send him to his knees.

He has to be.

(Then –

Saboady happens.

Then –

Marineford happens.

Then –

Zoro is left on an empty shore with a broken boat, and immortal, fading petals at his feet, because he wasn’t there for his captain when it counted.

He was too weak.)