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i.
For some time after their reunion, that’s exactly what they don’t have: time to settle back into the bellows of their ship, to breathe. The thrill of being thrown into the depths of the ocean calls for the totality of their attention, and the lesser human things like hunger and small talk and earthshattering relief are cast to the wayside.
They’ve waited two years, after all. They can wait longer yet.
ii.
“There you are,” Usopp says upon finding Franky in the engine room, as if he’s surprised. He isn’t. Where else would Franky be if not so deep in the inner workings of any machine he may as well be another part of it, some secret cog or lever that if removed would render the entire system inoperable. But the feigned exasperation and real fondness feel like steps of an old, familiar tradition Usopp falls back into with eagerness, and he’s rewarded with Franky’s grin as he diverts from his task to look at him.
“Oh, hey, Usopp,” says Franky, one hand turned whirring power drill, the other a conveyor belt of nails being fed into wood. “What’s up?”
Nothing much, really; it’s not lunchtime or dinner but some aimless hour between, and for once the ocean is something close to serene with no islands or ships or Sea Kings in sight, and it’s been a whole day and a half since their last emergency (okay, maybe Usopp had gotten carried away showing off his arsenal of Pop Greens to a captive audience—literally—but Chopper had immediately been fished out of the sea by Zoro upon getting launched overboard so it’s not like anyone was harmed, right?). Everyone else is in their usual haunts: Chopper and Robin holed up in the library, Brook polishing his sword, Nami poring over her maps, Sanji in the kitchen, Zoro and Luffy mid-afternoon nap. And Usopp could join them, flop on his back on the sun-warmed deck and count clouds until he drifted off, but his body’s jittery with an anticipatory energy he tried channeling into a new project only for it to burn itself out into restlessness instead. So he left his workbench a mess of scattered parts and scrapped ideas and went looking for someone who could do better.
“Nothing much, really,” Usopp says. “Need an extra hand?”
“An extra hand, you say?” Franky lowers his drill, lets it retract into the rotating toolbelt of his wrist. It whirs and clicks and finally pops out the punchline he’s looking for: the miniature hand that waves at Usopp from the palm of his real—cyborg—one.
“Ha, ha, you got me, I sure walked into that one,” Usopp says. The lenses of Franky’s sunglasses are so dark and metallic he can see his own pained smile reflected in them. “But seriously. If you need any help.” He puffs out his chest, jabs a thumb at himself. “I’m your man.”
The tiny hand pops back inside Franky’s palm like a cuckoo retreating into its clock. “All good, I’ve got it handled. Thanks, though.”
“Sure.” Usopp sags his shoulders back down, scratches his head. “Then is it OK if I just hang out for a bit?”
“Of course,” Franky says, like he’s surprised Usopp even had to ask. “Anytime, bro! Make yourself at home. Hey, you want a drink?” The fridge compartment on his chest slides open in a hissing cloud of cold fog, revealing rows upon rows of pristine cola bottles.
“Nah, I’m fine, and anyway, isn’t that literally your lifeblood? Should I be drinking that?”
Franky’s teeth are as shiny as a salesman’s. “Don’t worry about it! I don’t need nearly as much fuel as I used to in order to run on maximum efficiency.” He flashes a finger gun at him. Usopp wonders if he’s winking, under the sunglasses.
After that Franky gets back to work, and Usopp sits down across from him on the floor, settling in to watch. It’s never not fascinating to see just how many new tricks Franky’s pulled out of his sleeve—no, built directly into his arm, running through the wires and the veins. For all Franky likes to preen, Usopp’s sure that what he’s been shown so far doesn’t even scratch the surface of what circuitry lies beneath skin of metal plates and armour, all the advancements made in the past two years, of which he’s said little.
Usopp, on the other hand, said a lot. And then the ground split into sections like the petals of a flower, if a flower was carnivorous and hell-bent on funneling everything into its giant mouth, which by the way did I mention had teeth? But then I thought, would a godly sniper pirate let himself be eaten by a freaking island? No! So anyway, I started running... What a story it makes, when he gets the beginning and the end of it in order. When he tells it to someone else.
See, Usopp’s got new tricks, too, pockets full of ammo and a garden growing sharp-toothed seeds. He’s come a long way from crying wolf up and down the streets of town, having outrun a weaker version of himself for two years straight without once stopping to look back. He knows a thing or two about reinventing yourself into something new, by now. And his admiration for Franky runs deep, longer than their history as crewmates, stemming from how he stuck to his guns and wore his heart on his sleeve and saw straight through Usopp’s useless fantasy to the crack that cleaved it in two. A man who’s never been afraid to bare anything. But they’re on equal footing now, or at least they’re supposed to be, and instead of looking up to him Usopp can bump shoulders with Franky, nudge him with a brave nod of understanding: hey, Franky, me too, I’ve upgraded, made myself way stronger, better, just like you. And hey, Franky, it wasn’t even hard, right? It didn’t even hurt.
But he thinks maybe that’s something that needs to be asked.
It isn’t quiet in here but the noise is another old comfort, the internal rumble of the Sunny. The clean mechanical hum of Franky’s body running as he drills nails with a laser-focused intent, like he’s forgotten that Usopp’s even here, that anybody is. Franky used to hold nails in his mouth whenever he tinkered, back in the day. Sometimes it got so out of hand he’d accumulate a truly ridiculous number of them clamped between his chiselled teeth, and Usopp and Chopper would take turns asking him innocuous questions just for the moment he’d get distracted enough to reply, and the thunderous clatter of metal as they hit the ground would drown out all the laughter and cursing that followed. They’d help him pick them up, after, of course, scurrying around in his cramped workspace, banging shins and bumping elbows and laughing, still.
“Hey, Franky,” Usopp says. “What are you working on, exactly?”
Franky doesn’t even pause. “Huh, this? It’s a surprise, you’ll see!”
Sure, he will. But he kind of wants to know now.
He gets to his feet, stretches, says, “I’m gonna go up and bug Sanji until he makes me a snack. Want me to get something for you, too?”
Franky’s drill powers down. He looks at Usopp thoughtfully with more consideration than the question seems to call for. After all, Franky no longer needs: the amount of fuel he used to, a helping hand, to eat.
“Thanks, Usopp, I’d like that,” Franky says, and he grins at him, easy, but he doesn’t remove his sunglasses.
iii.
The point of taking first watch is so that everyone else can shut up and go to bed, but Zoro doesn’t have to venture below deck to know that nobody’s sleeping. Well, nobody except Luffy, maybe. He can sense the difference in the sheen of alertness to the air, the tremors of movement underfoot that make up the beating pulse of the ship. All the telltale signs of life are still the same among the crew: the hollow metal echoes of Franky tinkering inside the skeleton of the Sunny, the cook’s cigarette smoke wafting out the kitchen window, the creak of Chopper’s swivel chair. From some faint hallway he thinks he can hear Nami chewing out Usopp over recent expenditures that are to be paid back with interest, that’s right, at a sixty-five percent starting rate, got it?
Still, for all they have against peace and quiet, they know to leave him alone. For the most part.
“Ah, Zoro-san, it’s a lovely night, isn’t it?” Brook swans into his field of vision in a flutter of bright feathers: the garish monstrosity of the boa wrapped around his neck. Both his sword and violin are in hand.
Zoro grunts in response, doesn’t ask the obvious question. Brook doesn’t sleep, not really, though it’s hard to tell when he lies still as the corpse he is in his bunk, hands folded neatly over his ribs, eye sockets empty. Zoro’s always sure that if he spoke Brook’s name in the middle of the night, he would sit up straight and reveal himself awake all along: yes, Zoro-san? What do you need me for? But he hasn’t yet.
“Yes,” Brook says, a pensive murmur, though Zoro hasn’t said anything at all. He’s joined Zoro at the railing to peer out at the sea, the blackness of the night. “I do think...” But he doesn’t finish his thought, only lifts his violin to tuck it lovingly under his chin.
Zoro leaves him to his revelation, whatever flash of inspiration that’s struck, and makes his rounds across the ship. The somber melody follows after him, and between the strains of its notes, the odd discordant stumble and stop—“hmm, not that, I should think,” Brook says distantly, and tries again—he can hear the Sunny settling. Voices have slackened at last into silence, lights flickering out, doors closed. Elsewhere Franky seems to have finished the job, which means they’ll wake up to some new modification in the morning, improved water pressure in the showers or air conditioning or any of the other impossibly ordinary ways the ship can be transformed on them overnight. Zoro keeps his gaze trained on the horizon, the cloudless path the Sunny cuts through the water, and by the time he makes it back to Brook by the railing, he isn’t the only one there.
“Good evening,” Robin says. Like Brook, she offers no explanation for her presence; unlike Brook, her greeting seems purely functional, a polite blankness to the eyes. She’s already turned away to face the ocean as if to stand vigil. Her hair falls loose over her face, shrouding her expression, and beside her, Brook’s violin bow skates over a mournful chord.
Zoro could leave them there, again, could continue his prowl up and down the Sunny, but the night is long, and the sea runs longer, and the truth is he’s gotten used to not being alone. Couldn’t be free of company, those two claustrophobic years; there wasn’t a single crooked shadow on the island in which he could hide from Perona’s giggling ghosts. Not that he was hiding, of course. But between Perona’s lethal clinginess and the damned monkeys that leapt tirelessly for his blades and the gravity of Mihawk’s gaze on his back from the highest window of the highest tower, Zoro hardly ever had a single moment to himself. Even when he found a rare spot of solitude in which to catch his breath, he’d share the space with something else: the weight of the promise he made hanging poised over his head with an executioner’s intent. He picked up his swords and sought out the monkeys instead.
At least Robin and Brook aren’t baying for his blood—though that would certainly make this night more interesting. He smirks a little to himself. He’s yet to spar with any of the crew since they all returned to the Sunny. It’d be a sure cleaner way of discovering the difference these past two years have made than any questions about where they’ve been and what they’ve done—not that he’s asked them. Not that they have, either.
The Sunny rocks under their feet, held fast by the clutch of the waves. He no longer takes this motion for granted, having found himself moored for two years; he knows exactly the length of his chain. Still, for all Perona complained about dying of boredom, the island at least moved in its own way. The shadows, the wind, the ceaseless stirring of the trees. Of all things that lived there it was Mihawk, in fact, who moved the least. At times he seemed to vanish so completely between the seconds that the cut of his cross would be missed by blind eye, so that only the evidence of what was once whole and now lay severed would remain. There it was, that invisible instant where you could be peerless and alone in this world. Zoro would watch for it every time, knew one day he was going to join him there.
But not yet. Still: not yet.
Until then what can he do but accept the closeness of his company and lean against the railing of the Sunny alongside them both. He used to only watch the ocean out of duty, waiting for the darkness to bare itself as threat, ship or sea creature or some monstrous new shape of an island. But now he finds himself just looking. That was all he had to look at, after all, those moments he failed to carve himself a sole space in time and instead lay spent in the wreckage of his own defeat. Past the fog and the trees and the raw ache in his teeth. He’d watch the waves exhaust themselves against the crags of the shoreline, and then he’d get back up to do it all over again.
He mentioned as much to Brook the other night—one just like this—when he asked Zoro what he was looking at. What else is there?
Oh, Brook laughed, but Zoro-san, nobody who looks at the ocean is ever looking, really, at the ocean.
His thumb finds the familiar grip of Wado at his side. The old idling itch to unsheathe his swords, relieve them of being dead weight. But there’s nothing to fight, only Brook tending to his violin, Robin the wrong kind of silence like stillwater. They’ve had friendly spars in the past, not-so-friendly ones too. Tonight feels like it could err on that other side, the edge that draws blood. He thinks he’ll be the one to ask after all. Later. Give it another half hour. Give it another song.
He makes another pass around the Sunny, guarding against nothing, and this time when he circles back they’ve gone.
iv.
It’s four in the morning and Sanji damn near has a heart attack entering the kitchen to a shadow crouched close to the ground in the dark. “Who the HELL,” he starts, hand slamming for the light switch, and is left blinking dumbly at a puffed-up, wide-eyed Chopper hunched over the freezer like a giant sea urchin. “...Oh.”
Without thinking he turns the lights back off.
In the dark he watches Chopper deflate to his usual size. The muted freezer light behind him casts his sheepish smile in a ghostly pallor.
“Shorry, Shanji! I didn’t mean to shtartle you.” Chopper’s whispering, but his words sound slightly garbled for a different reason. Sanji closes the kitchen door behind him, steps closer to see the half-emptied ice cube tray cradled in his arms.
“You’re not hungry,” Sanji says. It isn’t a question.
“Ah,” Chopper says, hastily swallowing whole the ice cube in his mouth. “No, don’t worry, Sanji, I wasn’t stealing food! I just wanted to cool down a bit.”
Makes sense. The Sunny’s been caught in a stretch of relentless humidity, the heatwave persisting well into the night. Chopper’s always suffered summers in his thick coat of fur. Still, something about him scrounging the freezer for ice cubes sets Sanji’s teeth on edge, and he can’t say why. Might be all the cold air he’s letting escape.
“Just take the tray out and shut the freezer,” Sanji says.
“Oh, right, oops!” Chopper does as he’s told, then shuffles over to the table, hops up on a chair, and pops another ice cube in his mouth like it’s candy. He glances back at Sanji, does a double take at his stare. “Sorry, Sanji, are you busy preparing breakfast? I can leave.”
“No, it’s fine, you can sit there,” Sanji says, and he turns away, walks briskly to the fridge and opens it. The blast of chilled air makes him shiver. He stares past the colourful foliage of assorted vegetables that greets him, slabs of dead-eyed fish in ice, colas fizzing in their frosted glass bottles. Last night Luffy requested meat for breakfast, as usual. Robin said, I’m sure anything you decide to make will be delicious, and stepped graciously over his swoon. Nami said, Why don’t you surprise me, not looking up from the charts spread over her desk, and beside her Usopp piped up, Ooh, ask me next! Wait, where are you going? So he’d come in here with a vision of steamed eggs and fluffy rice and a light, delicate broth, but standing now in front of the fridge all he can taste is cold.
“Um, Sanji?” Chopper says from behind him. “Are you supposed to be leaving the refrigerator door open for that long?”
Sanji shuts the fridge. The grimy heat settles back over him like an embrace.
“...I know, it’s way too hot, isn’t it, Sanji? Haha, wouldn’t it be great if Franky built a refrigerator room, but for us instead of for food? You know, I wouldn’t mind if we go someplace cold next. Not too cold, obviously, so that nobody gets sick, but it’s been a long time since we came across a winter island, right? All together, I mean. I know it’s silly, but sometimes I miss it.”
Sanji turns around. Chopper’s sucking happily on an ice cube. He isn’t looking at Sanji but out the window instead.
“Did you know, back on Drum Island, sometimes I used to eat the snow... Not enough to get sick, of course, and not because I was hungry or anything! But it was fun.” Chopper laughs. “I kind of don’t remember what it tastes like, though?” He chomps what’s left of his ice cube and sticks out his tongue as if to mime catching snowflakes, then visibly notices Sanji’s expression. “Uh, Sanji? Are you okay?”
In the dream Sanji woke up from ten minutes ago he was biding his time on a deserted island. He wasn’t too worried, all things considered; he knew this dream very well by now. But on the eighty-fifth day when he stood to confront the hulking shape that sat on the opposite cliff of the island, it wasn’t the old man’s gaunt face looking back at him but Luffy, barely more than a bag of bones wrapped in a straw hat and cloak; and the grinning skull said Sanji, where were you, it’s been two years, I was starving all this time!
“...Are you feeling feverish? Heatstroke can be serious, maybe I should check—”
Sanji jerks back from the hoof Chopper’s raising to his forehead. Chopper freezes, but he doesn’t startle. His gaze turns probing, as if to scan for symptoms.
“I’m fine, Chopper. Still waking up, that’s all.” Sanji nods at the ice cube tray left on the table. “You can take that with you. I’ll make more ice for later.”
Chopper hesitates. But Sanji must have come up clean in his assessment, because he doesn’t ask, only takes the tray and leaves the kitchen with a last lingering glance.
In his absence Sanji can’t remember what he was doing before with his hands. He strides across the kitchen and yanks open a drawer with a violence that rattles the entire row of silverware within. He holds his breath until the clanging echoes end. Leaves the drawer open and ducks out for a smoke.
It’s the scratchy flick of his lighter that steadies his nerves more than anything else. The rest is just following through: the fire and the smoke. He lets the cigarette wilt between his lips and thinks, sugar, syrup, citrus. Crushed ice. They don’t have much in the way of fresh fruit; he wasn’t prepared. He’ll have to make do.
Breakfast is eggs and rice and soup. But later Sanji knocks on the door of the sick bay with a glass dish on a tray in hand.
“Come in!” Chopper calls. He’s turning around in his swivel chair as he says it, and blinks at Sanji in surprise. “Sanji, what is it—oh!”
The heat doesn’t follow Sanji through the doorway. His eyes fall upon the glowing screen of a thermostat on the wall that hadn’t been there before.
“Oh, yeah, amazing, isn’t it? Franky installed it, said it would regulate the temperature better in here. It’s important for patients to be able to focus on recovery without being affected by excessive heat or cold... anyway, is that shaved ice? It looks so good!”
Chopper’s eyes are starry. He isn’t hot, and he isn’t hungry, but he takes the spoon and digs in with a greedy, sweet delight.
“Wow, Shanji! It’sh delicioush!”
Sanji scratches his head. He smiles back at him.
“Yeah,” he allows. “Of course it is.”
v.
“Just leave me alone,” Nami snapped, and the words are still ringing in her ears as she bends down to snip a dead branch off a mikan tree. She didn’t mean to lose her temper, that much should be obvious, and they took it in stride—“Stop bothering Nami-san, you idiots,” Sanji bellowed; “Oi, you’re the only one making a racket,” Usopp said; “Beat it, both of you, I’m going to sleep,” Zoro said, and they continued bickering all the way back inside the Sunny—but saddled with the silence they’ve obligingly left her in, she finds she doesn’t want it after all. She’s the only one still braving the afternoon heat above deck, the rest of the crew hiding out from the sun—everyone except Luffy, that is, who picked a shady spot in the mikan grove to take a nap in half an hour ago and hasn’t moved since. There’s nothing to listen to but the unforgivably loud scrape of her shears, the uneven tempo of her own breathing. The idle spin of the needles in her log pose: a pinwheel trapped in glass.
Two trees down, Luffy shifts in his sleep, splayed out on his back in the grass. Buoyed on his chest, his hat rises and falls.
Nami swallows a sigh. Wipes the sweat from her brow and focuses on the strain of an unyielding branch caught between her blades.
Earlier she started on the task of pruning her mikan trees in a better mood, eager to tackle a dearly-awaited necessity, but a sharp branch grazed her bare shoulder and it stings every time she lifts her arm, and the sun’s getting in her eyes, and two years isn’t that long, but it’s long enough for some overgrowth to have set in. Some rot, too. Some branches of separate trees tangled hopelessly into one another, strangling each other’s space, and it’s these she stares at with a distantly despairing recognition making itself known in the back of her mind.
For the past two years there was no time for self-pity. That isn’t to say they passed fast. Reliable markers of time lost their meaning above the clouds: the position of the sun relative to the horizon, the angle of the shadow it cast. So she learned new ones and tallied the days like she would money, a more precious ledger, her promise paid by the hour. She grew out her hair. She tried to make maps, but her view from above was too telescopic to be useful to anyone using them on the sea, and what was the point if not usefulness? She made lightning instead, winds that rose from the clean release of knots from their ropes, remorseless sheets of rain. She wished for Usopp’s craft or Franky’s handiness to fashion herself a waver; she wished for them. She thought, her younger self would kill her for living her life according to somebody else. Her younger self didn’t know anything at all. She returned to the Sunny with a bento Haredas packed her and a slippery joy in her chest and the sinking feeling of having lost something she can’t ever get back. But she is back.
Her blades snap shut. The cut branch falls. She steps over Luffy’s ankle in the grass and starts on the next tree.
It’s moments like these—unnerving stillness, stifling silence, sun too bright to look at—that the happiness of being back doesn’t even feel real. It’s too large, like she’s swallowed one of her own weather bubbles, thunder cracking her open from the inside out. It reminds her of years ago, standing in the collapsed rubble of her childhood, straw hat in her hands. All that future opening itself up to her, and she hardly even knew where to start, let herself fall headfirst into the ranks of wild fearless ambition only to get stalled by the first door that slammed shut in their faces. The real world. And it felt a lot like growing up, which is good—they needed to. She needed to.
Just—why does it always have to be done alone?
You’re too greedy, Nojiko told her when they were kids, you think you can get everything you want. Watch me, Nami said, sticking out her tongue. And Nojiko did watch, and Nami does have what she wants. Just not all of it.
Like what, exactly, she missed while her crew was scattered across the seas. The bloodless scar where Zoro’s eye once was, clean and healed and no longer anything resembling a wound. The way Sanji runs a hand down the silk of a shirt as he’s bringing it down from the clothesline; the secrecy of it. Usopp’s tales still tend to stretch overly tall, but some she finds no reason not to believe other than the sudden striking certainty that she wouldn’t be able to tell if it weren’t true, that she should be able to tell. Robin’s sketches, the lines formal and precise, sometimes imagined with an artist’s eye, sometimes not. What’s the story behind this one, Nami asked once, and the ensuing memory Robin recounted as casual and clear-eyed as if she were reading off a history book page closed a cold fist of horror around her heart, and from then on she always made sure to ask, and wondered if it made a difference whether she did it out of curiosity or care. And Luffy—
She glances down, startles at his open eyes.
“Oh,” Nami says, “you’re awake.”
Luffy blinks back up at her. Makes no move to get up, hands clasped behind his head, hat laid over his chest.
“Wasn’t sleeping,” he says.
“Should’ve known. You weren’t snoring.” Luffy’s loud even in his sleep.
He doesn’t reply, just slides his big blank gaze back up at the sky. At all the nothing there.
Nami lowers her shears. The sun presses hot and insistent at the skin of the back of her neck. Her tattoo itches but doesn’t hurt. It hasn’t hurt in a very long time.
At her feet, Luffy yawns and doesn’t say a word.
This quietness is new, too. She’s not sure what to do with it. It rankles to have anything taken from them at all, even something so small as a slice of the blind trust they used to have in each other, in always knowing what to do, how to choose, that they would never bend or break or lose. That stubborn grit of belief they harboured like a pearl was worth more than all the treasure in the world. But Nojiko was right, though Nami will never tell her. There’s always a catch. Call it a toll, the price of entry to the New World. Not everything is hers to keep. The hardest lesson she’s ever learned is one of compromise, and she wonders if she’ll ever stop having to learn it. She wonders in what petty, meager ways she, too, has changed; if this is one of them, and if the others can tell.
Two years—it’s not long at all compared to what lies ahead. But it was still supposed to be theirs. Nami steps into the shadow of the tree, plucks a mikan from the unruly gnarl of its branch, and thinks: I wanted them singing songs and getting drunk and winning against Usopp at arm wrestling, I wanted them sailing through storms and saving our friends and robbing our enemies of all they’ll ever hope to have, I wanted them flinging headlong into battle against those who’d try to stop us even if I lied and claimed otherwise and cowered and fled, I wanted them with you.
“Here,” she says instead, and tosses the mikan at Luffy’s face.
Luffy catches it one-handed. His gaze slides to her after the fact, then to the fruit. After a beat he starts to peel it.
“Oi, Nami,” Luffy says.
She thinks he’s going to tell her something. About the past two years, about before that. And before that, and before that; where was it, Captain? Where you were before we could follow you there?
“Is it gonna rain?”
“What?”
Luffy’s mouth is full. Scar carved across his ribs, hat over his heart. He points up at the sky.
“What are you talking about, the sun...” Nami’s voice trails off.
The leaves of the mikan tree tickle the back of her neck, her shoulders, their rustling like hushed laughter in the breeze.
Luffy swallows what’s rest of his mikan; it goes down his throat as a visible lump. He meets her gaze and grins.
Nami bites down viciously on the smile threatening to break over her face. “Get up already and call the others,” she says. The clouds are descending fast. They’ve got minutes, maybe even seconds before the storm’s upon them.
Luffy isn’t listening. “Hey, what’s that?” He points at something in the distance, out at sea. “There’s smoke over there! Something’s burning!”
“Luffy! Did you hear what I said?”
“I think it’s an island!”
The others are spilling out from below deck, roused by their shouting, or else some other sense. Nami drops her shears to the grass. Her arms ache. The first drops fall, cold against her shoulders, wet on her lips. They’ve got their work cut out for them, so much she still can’t even imagine. She can’t even dream of it. She can’t keep the smile from cutting across her face any longer.
“Well, what are you waiting for, then?” she says. “Let’s go.”