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It’s all Luffy’s fault.
They’re a day’s trek from Yuba Oasis, relief so close that Vivi can practically taste it, and that idiot captain had to ruin all her hopes by stumbling head over ass into a sand trap. She was closest to him and he’d grabbed the hem of her robe in a panic, sending them both into the rapidly sinking pit of sand. The last thing Vivi saw before darkness swallowed them up entirely was Nami’s horrified face.
Now, the pit’s spit them out onto a dune, sand trickling from above like a faucet. She rolls out from under the stream, pillow-soft sand cushioning her fall and slipping under her. She tries to stare up at where they fell from, but the room is pitch black. At least there even is a room. It’s a miracle they weren’t buried alive.
Vivi shudders, the thought giving way to the chill of claustrophobia. She hugs herself, looking around nervously. Her eyes strain against the darkness. “Luffy?” she calls.
“Here!”
Vivi startles back, a hand to her pounding heart. His voice is right at her ear.
“Look at what you did!” she accuses, reaching out blindly to grab his shoulders. She can barely make out the whites of his eyes, like this. “We’re trapped! We’re stuck!”
“Hey, it’s fine. The others’ll find us!”
“We don’t have time to wait around for them! The war, the—” Vivi’s tongue twists itself into knots. She feels sick with anxiety. How long will they be trapped here for? They need to find their way back. Need to get to Yuba Oasis and talk with the rebel army, discourage them from fighting her father. Crocodile is collapsing her homeland and she’s stuck underground. She needs to get out of here. She needs to help.
“Hey.” Luffy’s hands find hers, where they still clutch at the cotton shoulders of his robe. “I’ll get you out, ‘kay? Promise. So stop worryin’!”
Vivi clicks her tongue. “Fine,” she says. “Fine. How are you going to do that? We can’t go back up.”
“Maybe there’s some sorta door, here? We can just keep looking around.”
Luffy turns and starts to wander away. Vivi hurriedly grabs his hand, scrambling after him so they don’t get separated in the dark. Their steps echo, the reverberations loud and lingering. The room must be bigger than she first thought. That’s a good sign, right?
“There’s no way out,” a new voice says, echoing around them. “I checked.”
Vivi freezes. She grips Luffy’s hand so tight the rubber contorts, and he whips his head around, yelling, “What the! Who’s there!”
A small flame flickers from across the room. It illuminates the face of a man neither of them noticed before, crossing the distance towards them. Vivi flattens herself against Luffy’s back. Something in her screams danger danger danger at the stranger’s approach.
“You fell into this quicksand too?” Luffy asks, craning his head back to look up at the stranger. Vivi can see better now, thanks to the faint glow cast by the silver lighter in the man’s hand. His brown knuckles are tattooed, serifed letters reading DEATH across his fingers, setting off yet another alarm in her intuition. The man is taller than either of them, taller than even her father, and he’s wearing clothing that’s far too warm for the desert heat. Even the relative chill of this cavern doesn’t warrant a thick sweater and pants. Nothing could warrant the size of the wickedly overlong sword strapped to his back. On his head sits an incongruous spotted hat. Rough, dark hair sticks out from under it. His face is angular and unpleasant.
“Quicksand requires water to form, so no. But if you’re referring to the structure above us… then the answer is also no. I came here of my own volition.”
“Uh, ok,” Luffy says. He sounds lost. “Hmmmm. So. How long have ya’ been stuck here?”
“Longer than the two of you,” the stranger says. “This place used to be an antechamber, but the old door’s been collapsed. The walls are all solid rock, other than this.” He tilts his head in a gesture that suggests they follow him. Luffy seems to have no qualms against it, so Vivi’s forced to follow along as well. As they walk, she processes the statement once more. Thinks back to what the strange man said. He didn’t fall in. He came here of his own volition.
“You collapsed the door on yourself?” Vivi demands, fright forgotten in the face of frustration.
The stranger shrugs. “It collapsed on its own. I didn’t do anything to prompt it.”
Now that Vivi looks closer, the stranger is rather scrawny despite his height advantage and giant sword. Luffy could probably take him in a fight. Her alarm dulls.
“It’s your fault we’re trapped in here!” Vivi accuses.
No response.
This day has gone miserably. First Luffy, now this stranger. They’re so close to Yuba, to saving her country, but now all of that has to be delayed because everything that could go wrong is going wrong. She’s nervous. She’s anxious. She’s holding panic at bay with every bit of willpower she has. Vivi swallows the lump in her throat and does not allow herself to cry. That can be for after all this is over. When her country is safe and her people are free from Crocodile’s manipulation, and she’s finally in the arms of her father again.
The stranger stops and holds his lighter up. Its meager flame manages to illuminate a wall, sandstone that’s been carved into with the thick lines of words and images. Middle Alabastan, Vivi recognizes from her schooling. She always hated language lessons as a child. Too boring. Too easy.
“This is Prince Nefertari Ramose’s final resting place!” she gasps, quickly scanning the text. Epithets and a eulogy in his honor.
“You can read this?” the stranger asks, eyes narrowing at her. Vivi stiffens. Then Luffy wanders up beside her and she reminds herself, again, that this man is no more intimidating than anyone else when she has such a strong ally at her side, a friend who ate a Devil Fruit no less.
“That means we’re in your great-grandpa’s house, or somethin’?” Luffy asks, arms crossed, squinting up at the pictures engraved before him. Vivi slaps his shoulder.
“Idiot,” she hisses. “Don’t go around just advertising that stuff to everyone!”
“Ah, whoops.” Luffy looks over at the stranger and grins. “Hey, don’t tell anyone else that Vivi here is the missin’ princess, ‘kay?”
“Luffy!”
“What?”
“So I’m in the presence of a princess,” the stranger drawls. “Don’t worry. I have nothing to gain by spilling your secret. I’ll be gone from Alabasta as soon as we find our way out of here.”
Vivi shouldn’t trust him, but his face has a severe, solemn set to it that hasn’t once changed since he showed himself. It reminds her a bit of sincerity. This man clearly isn’t associated with Crocodile either, if he isn’t already trying to attack them just for the fortune of her birth. Instead, he turns to Luffy and says, tone dull, “Considering Prince Ramose was born over 400 years ago, you’re missing a good dozen ‘great’s before grandpa.”
“You know who he was?” Vivi asks.
The stranger ignores her again. He knocks on the wall, the sound echoing around the room. “It’s hollow behind this,” he tells them. Vivi would not have been able to pick that up just from the sound alone. “It must be the entrance to his tomb. There should be some mechanism that allows it to open up— slide up, really. You can tell by how it’s set out from the strata around it.” Vivi also would not have been able to pick that up. “I’ve been searching the other walls to see if I could find something. There could be a puzzle to it, but without light…”
“I don’t really get it,” Luffy says, “but you said this is kinda’ like a door too, right? There’s another room behind this one?” The stranger nods. He starts to say something, but his voice gets drowned out by Luffy’s shout of “GUM GUM BAZOOKA!” and the subsequent rain of debris that the wall shatters into.
Luffy’s grin is bright, when the dust settles. Sunshine bottled denser than the lighter fluid snapping flames out of the stranger’s lighter. The oppressive room seems to brighten around them and the air flows less thick, easier to breathe.
Vivi storms toward him and yells, “Luffy! Luffy, why would you do that!”
Luffy’s grin snaps into a frown. His eyebrows bunch into confusion. “He said there was a way out this way. So I helped.”
“You broke it! You ruined it! You can’t just— just—” her voice catches in her throat. No, this will not do, she can’t cry, she must not cry. She thinks of Rain Dinners. She thinks of Crocodile modeling his Casino after an ancient queen’s final resting place, her some-number-of-’great’s grandmother’s tomb that lies just outside the borders of their capital city. How it felt strange and wrong in a way she couldn’t quite articulate, two years ago. She manages to speak through the flash of grief now, voice small. “This was his grave. This was my ancestor’s grave. You can’t just do that.”
“Woah, hey.” Luffy crowds around her, bending over to look up at her from below. Forcing her to meet his eyes instead of staring at the darkness at her feet. “Sorry.” He looks serious, she thinks. It’s hard to tell in the dim light. His pale sclera look serious. It’s a rare expression for Luffy. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Don’t cry. But I couldn’t just leave us stranded here. We needa’ get out. We have to escape as fast as possible, right? That’s what you wanted?”
“Yes,” Vivi sniffles. “But not like this. We can’t just— just desecrate his grave. That feels wrong.”
“He would understand. He loves your country too, so he’d get why his granddaughter needs to break a few walls to save a whole lotta’ lives.”
That does make her feel a bit better. Vivi imagines Prince Ramose looking over his shoulder at her from the afterlife, mourning the current state of his country, worrying over its future. Hoping for her to help. She wipes her eyes and finds them disappointingly wet. When she straightens up again she clears her throat. “We can’t touch anything,” she tells him. “You have to be respectful, Luffy. This is just so we can get to the reb— to where we need to go quicker.” She corrects herself hastily, glancing back at the stranger. Still unwilling to reveal too much. Even if he’s probably not with Crocodile, that doesn’t automatically make him an ally. He doesn’t need to know they’re on their way to the rebellion.
He’s already watching them when Vivi looks back, meeting her eyes with a solemn, golden gaze. The glint of them matches the rings stacked along the curve of his ear. Streetcat bright. “What?” she asks, hoping her voice doesn’t waver too much.
“Nothing,” he says. He nods towards the gaping hole in the wall, and the three of them start to pick their way through it. Vivi still purposefully positions herself so that Luffy is between them.
The hallway yawns around them, wide and dark, footsteps clacking over the dusty stone. The stranger picks up one of the torches lining the walls, a wooden paddle wrapped in cloth. The oil should have dried out by now, but by some miracle he still managed to ignite the tip, stowing his lighter away in favor of the larger flame. It lights the area around them and illuminates the carvings on the walls. Animal sculptures walk alongside them, poised mid-stride where the walls meet the floors. Paintings dance above them, pigment flaking and muted. More inscriptions are carved in Middle Alabastan, a few in the Old version of the language from even longer ago. The latter are to guide the spirit to the afterlife. The former detail that Prince Ramose loved his army of pet kittens very much.
The stranger is watching her again.
“What?” she demands.
“Does it say anything interesting?”
Vivi startles. She looks over at the inscriptions again, mundane and expected, then back at the stranger. Luffy looks between them curiously.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me who you are,” she says. She’s not sure why she feels the need to bargain with him. There’s no logic to it. Just a feeling in her gut that he’ll never give her a straight answer if she doesn’t wrestle it out of him.
The stranger hesitates for a moment. The torchlight flickers across his face, shadows set deep into the recess of his eyes. Under the brim of his hat. Finally, he says, “I’m a doctor.”
Vivi waits for more, but he doesn’t continue.
“You don’t have a name?” she asks.
“What’re we supposed to call you?” Luffy says, doubling down with her.
“Doctor will do,” the doctor responds. “Surgeon if you must. Now, what do the inscriptions say?”
“There are seven cats buried down here with the prince,” Vivi tells him. “And that’s all you’re getting.”
The doctor doesn’t respond. As though nothing bothers him.
Vivi grabs onto Luffy’s hand again and holds it tight, uncaring of how their palms are both clammy and unpleasant like this. He’s been just as much a comfort to her over the past few months as Nami has. Friends she’s grown to rely on and trust, along with the others. She’s never had a brother before, but this might be what it’s like.
“What’s a doctor doing down here?” she asks, looking over at the stranger again. “Why would you ever come all the way here on your own?”
As she’s speaking, she has a flash of memory shock through her. Realization that crashes into her like a wave. History lessons she learned from her tutors, so gruesome that she paid attention for once. Foreign doctors that came to Alabasta searching for cures, over rumors that ground-up mummies were good for one’s health. It was an epidemic from around the time of Prince Ramose’s death, and one that caused his nephew, the then Pharaoh, to close borders and bar all foreign ships from port for the rest of his reign. Even then, smuggling persisted. The practice has slowly died out, but Vivi knows there are the rare few cults that still try their hand at graverobbing and, worse, the cannibalism of the dead.
She swallows thickly, disgust roiling through her. “Mummies are humans,” she says, voice shaking. “They’re the corpses of people. You can’t desecrate them.”
The doctor catches on to what she’s implying. For the first time since they met, he smiles. It’s an unsettling thing. Wide and white, a slash across his narrow face. “I like your active imagination. Luckily for you, I trust science, not hokey beliefs.”
Vivi breathes a sigh of relief. Then the worry comes back. “Then, if you’re not here for that—”
“I’ve always heard that graverobbing is an exciting hobby. Nothing is ever quite as rewarding.”
“You can’t!”
“Can’t I?”
The only thing that keeps Vivi moving is Luffy’s hand in hers. Otherwise she’d stay planted to one spot in indignation and horror, too angry to work her legs.
“You can’t do that,” she says. She tugs Luffy’s hand. “He can’t do that. You can’t let him do that,” she demands.
But Luffy isn’t paying attention. His attention is focused up ahead, distracted by the faint glow of light emanating from the end of the hall. He lets go of Vivi’s hand and abandons her here with the doctor, running off ahead with an excited shout. Vivi watches him go and hates him fiercely for a moment. Then she takes off running after him.
The path opens up into an atrium, yawning wide and tall around them. The stones here are slick. Crept-over with a bioluminescent green moss and damp from the underwater lake taking up the majority of the room. The pathway they’re on is narrow, barely a fraction the size of the dark lake. Vivi’s mouth waters at the sight. What Alabasta wouldn’t give for this much freshwater above ground. Surely, this is a sign that Yuba Oasis is close?
“Woohoo!” Luffy yells, leaning dangerously close over the edge of the path. Vivi’s not a strong enough swimmer to pull him out if he falls in, so she hurries over to yank him back. Luffy just stretches his rubbery neck out to dunk his face in the water and slurp it up instead.
“Are you that eager to die of waterborne diseases?” the doctor snaps, running up to them. He stares down at Luffy, expression caught somewhere between anger and awe, maybe. Vivi knows the feeling.
“Hey Doc, have a taste! You probably don’t have that much water out here in the desert either, do ya’?”
“I’d rather not die like this, thank you,” the doctor says, dry.
Luffy’s laugh gets caught off abruptly. He frowns, standing up and pushing Vivi behind him. His head whips around the room, short black hair flying in her face.
“What is it?” Vivi demands. “What’s wrong?”
That’s when she feels it. A low murmur. Vibration through the stone pathway. A rippling in the water accompanied by a massive shadow. Then the lake erupts as a Sea King leaps out of it, roaring with its maw agape, rows and rows of long teeth on display. It’s the largest Sea King she’s ever seen. Twice the size of any they’d encountered on the Grand Line so far, maybe. Luffy lets loose a Gum Gum Pistol that does very little.
“Vivi, Doc, run!” He says, already winding up for another punch. “I’ll take care of this!”
Vivi doesn’t need to be told anything else. She takes off, feet pumping, aiming for where the cavern exits into another dark hallway. Halfway down the path the doctor passes her, long strides eating up the distance faster. He looks over his shoulder at the fight, seemingly unconcerned. That’s good, right? That means Luffy’s beating the Sea King up? Then the doctor skids to a stop and turns around, running back the way they came. Shit. That can’t mean anything good. Vivi looks over her shoulder and sees the Sea King heading straight for her.
Here’s what she registers: Luffy, spluttering, sopping wet on the path with the doctor standing beside him, like he just pulled him out of the water. The Sea King, closing in by the second, oil-slick black face marred with gnarled scars, gnashing its teeth at her. Serpentine body rising above the water to reach for her, its red gills and whiskers flaring. And the sound of her name shouted in Luffy’s raspy voice.
Then she slips on the wet, slippery stone pathway and crashes onto the ground.
That saves her.
The Sea King tries to take a bite out of the pathway in front of her instead, misjudging the distance, teeth scraping along the stone with an ugly, earsplitting sound, leaving gashes in its wake. The creature snarls, shaking its head out. Vivi scrambles to her feet. It spots her again and prepares itself, body winding back. Vivi starts running. The Sea King lashes out again and Luffy is suddenly there.
“Gum Gum Bazooka!”
And the Sea King is knocked back into the water, dazed and paralyzed, the splash massive enough to drench them all.
“There,” Luffy pants. “I saved ya’, Vivi. So get up. No need to be scared… Let’s get goin'.”
He's swaying on his feet. That’s strange. This sort of battle shouldn’t be causing that. Vivi has seen him take worse beatings and still remain standing.
“C’mon,” he urges. “Let’s… get a move on alr’y…”
And then he collapses. Vivi grabs at him, turning him over, holding his face in her hands. He looks fine. No blood. Then her eyes land on where his robe’s ridden up, and a purpling lash is swollen on his thigh.
“He’s been poisoned,” the doctor says, coming up behind her. Vivi startles. She didn’t even notice. “I can help, but not here. The Sea King won’t be stunned forever. We should get a move on.”
“I didn’t even see him get hit,” she says. She squishes Luffy’s cheeks. They’re cold in her hands from the lake. Less elastic than usual. She misses the warm rubber feel of them.
“It was in the water. Come on. Get up.” Vivi stands, allowing the doctor to pick Luffy up. He sets Luffy’s arm around his shoulders and holds it in place, wrapping his other arm around Luffy’s waist to half-hoist him up. It doesn’t look very effective. The doctor struggles to adjust Luffy more comfortably, but the sword on his back prevents that. Vivi would offer to carry it for him instead, but she expects that would get her nothing more than a reproachful look. Instead, she follows behind them and keeps an eye out for the Sea King’s revival.
The old torch is long gone behind them, and Vivi isn’t comfortable with digging her hand into the pants pocket of a man she doesn’t know, so they do without the doctor’s lighter. Venturing further into this new stretch of hallway, a small hole opens up high above them. The moon shines a pale, faint light in a small circle here. Fresh air wafts in. The hole looks like it’s been drilled straight through the stone, likely made by old graverobbers. Outrage and hope war within Vivi, until she realizes the hole is far too high up to climb out of, with no scaffolding to use for grip anyway.
The doctor sets Luffy on the ground without any gentleness. He takes his hat off and wipes the sweat off his brow, hair wild and unkempt underneath it. It’s strangely flattened at the crown of his head from his hat, until he runs his fingers roughly through it. He looks back up at the hole for a suspiciously long time.
“Too far,” he murmurs.
“We couldn’t climb out anyway,” Vivi sighs.
The doctor scoffs. “Not the problem,” he says to himself. “If I could just…” he holds his hand out, almost like he’s reaching up to the hole in the ceiling, but instead of beckoning upwards his fingers are domed down. “But there’s nothing there.”
“What are you talking about?” Vivi demands. She’s tried. Her friend is poisoned, and she can’t help but feel that’s partially her fault. They’re desecrating her great-something-grandfather’s grave just by standing her. She doesn’t have the patience for this.
The doctor just smiles at her. That same disturbing slashed-white smile. She feels like she’s missed a joke. “Nothing. Just rest. I’ll take care of him.”
The doctor crouches down and sets his hat aside, followed by his sword. Then he starts pulling away Luffy’s robes. Vivi sits and leans back against the wall. A statue of a wide-eyed cat stares back at her, all-knowing. The wind whistles from above. Maybe her grandfather really is watching over her, here. She closes her eyes, just for a moment; she doesn’t intend to sleep… And then she’s gone.
Vivi wakes up briefly, briefly, once, to the feeling of something jostling her arm. She sees the doctor cleaning and wrapping her elbow. There’s a long scrape along it, smeared with blood. She didn’t notice. It must’ve happened when she fell.
“You have terrible taste in boys,” he says, noticing she’s awoken. “It’s almost self-harm. I saw him pick his nose and eat the contents in his sleep.”
“Luffy’s not my boyfriend,” Vivi murmurs. There’s an inkling of displeasure at the assumption. Then sleep takes her again, drowsiness dragging her back down with sweet fingers. Coddling and kind. She dreams of her father. Her long-dead mother, that she shouldn’t be able to remember because she died in childbirth. It’s always Vivi’s fault, isn't it? She dreams of Ramose and his army of cats, and they part around her like a stream, nuzzling her, headbutting into her legs and arms and cheeks, purring into her ears. Then she awakens.
Vivi’s face is pressed into something soft. She’s warm. Something smokey and pleasant scents the air. Her body is heavy against someone else’s. She sighs and nuzzles closer, seeking comfort. Luffy, she thinks. Then she remembers Luffy is passed out from poison and leaps back.
Heart pounding, awareness of herself filtering back to her, Vivi stares in horror at where she was just sleeping against the doctor’s shoulder. He looks back at her, unimpressed.
“Vivi!” Luffy calls. Vivi snaps her head around to see Luffy up and about, awake and alive and grinning. He looks fine. He looks fine. Vivi’s heart soothes with relief. Thank the Gods he’s okay. “Took you long enough to wake up! Here, you gotta’ try this!”
He gestures with the giant slab of meat in his hands. There are more slabs of meat, pierced through with bones and roasting above a fire. That must have been the delicious smokey scent that woke her. Vivi’s mouth waters. She’s starving. The moon is lower in the sky now, making way for dawn to start leaking through the small hole, meaning it's been around 12 hours since they fell into this tomb. She’s thirsty. They’re wasting so much time.
“It’s not as good as Sanji’s food, duh, but it’s Sea King meat! Doc cut it up with that giant sushi sword of his—” Luffy continues, but she doesn’t have the patience to pay attention. She’s going to ignore all her anxiety and the thoughts crowding her head in favor of the most prominent problem.
“It’s not a sushi sword,” the doctor says, rolling his eyes. He’s leaning against the wall, hat and longsword both resting in his lap, reading something from a tiny book by the firelight. He looks peaceful and calm. Vivi will not be tricked.
“Luffy,” she hisses, “If you were awake you should’ve done something!”
“Huh?” The word comes out stretched and muffled from the sheer amount of meat in his mouth.
“You shouldn’t have let him do that!” Her voice wavers. A yell trying to be a whisper. She shuffles further from the doctor. “He could’ve done something.”
It’s rude, Vivi knows, to talk so openly about him and avoid him. But she doesn’t want to be cuddling up so close to a strange man she doesn’t know. He asked her if Luffy was her boyfriend, earlier. Did he want to know if she’s single? Available? Did he move her in her sleep? And she pressed her face into his shoulder and curled around his arm like it was nothing. Did he like it? She would hate it if he liked it. She’d be disgusted. She’s angry at herself for letting her guard down and allowing herself to cuddle him, and even angrier at Luffy for not intervening and protecting her. Luffy just looks up at her, innocently confused.
“Whaddya’ mean?”
“He could be a bad person.”
“But he’s a good guy! He pulled me out of the water, and he patched us all up! And he’s feeding us.” Luffy says, eyes serious. Vivi makes a short, frustrated little scream in her throat. Almost a growl or a grunt.
“Can I defend myself?” The doctor’s voice is lazy and unconcerned. Their attentions snap to him. He levels Vivi with a profoundly flat, bored gaze that does not once drop lower than her eyes. “Firstly, you’re the one who rolled over and leaned on me. Secondly, sorry to disappoint you, but I have no interest in children.”
Vivi bristles. “I’m 16!” she protests.
“You could have fooled me.”
It’s a lie. It has to be, because Vivi knows how she looks. She knows she looks older than some other teenagers her age. Puberty hit her fast. When she wears the right clothes and has her hair up and does her makeup all dark and smokey, she passes for an adult woman in her twenties, easy. That’s how she got away with her alias as Ms. Wednesday at Baroque Works. But. But. Still. Something about the lie relieves her. In a strange and odd way. Feeling the tactile gazes of men much older than her drag over her rear and cleavage when she was undercover was necessary for how amendable it made men to her goals, but it still unnerved her to be seen so intently. To be leered at. Now, to instead be seen as entirely sexless is less unpleasant.
“You know, you’re pretty mean for a doctor,” Luffy says, laughing around his mouthful of food. There are smudges of grease on his cheeks and chin. “Our doctor is a lot nicer.”
“And he’s cute,” Vivi says. She settles in closer to the fire, hugging her arms around herself. Mollified now, from her distrust of the doctor. Luffy is right. The man did save them, and now he’s feeding them too. Vivi grabs a stake and starts chewing on the meat. It’s unseasoned, but there’s nothing else to be done in this scenario. At least it settles the hunger in her stomach.
Luffy sighs, thinking of Chopper. “Y’know, he’d be so tasty if we cooked him up. Me and Sanji were abouta’ do that when we first saw him back on Drum.” Vivi stares at him in alarm. “But we won’t do that now ‘cause we’re friends!” Luffy grins and takes another massive slab of meat.
The doctor watches him with a dark gleam in his eyes. “I’ve never seen someone so blasé about indulging in the custom of the sea. Even excited, dare I say.”
Luffy swallows a chunk of meat. “Huh? What’s that?”
Vivi finishes her food in silence. When they move on, fire snuffed out and bones littering their makeshift campsite, she utters a small apology to Ramose. Whether he’s appeased by it, she has no way of knowing. They continue down the path. The doctor holds a new torch aloft, allowing it to illuminate the path ahead. Luffy’s managed to get himself one as well and is rushing on ahead, just within their sights. Vivi watches the doctor out of the corner of her eye and asks the question she’s been thinking ever since he helped them earlier.
“You’re not really a graverobber, are you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“You can’t be. I mean, you’ve been pretty respectful to this tomb, and you helped us. Like Luffy said, you’re a good person. You can’t be here to do something as evil as that.” Vivi gains confidence in her own words as she speaks; she’s sure of it. The man beside her doesn’t seem anything like what a graverobber would be.
The doctor glances at her. His eyes flicker molten in the unsteady firelight, before they train ahead of him again. His face is weary and resigned when he says, “I am not a good person. You’ve made a very wrong judgement about me. I am here to rob this grave, just in less offensive ways than you’re thinking.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There’s a medical text buried here that I’m hoping to get my hands on. It details a procedure for an operation the prince asked to have performed on him.”
Looking for a textbook doesn’t seem nearly as vile as thieves who would come in here for treasure, or pseudo-scientists only interested in desecrating the mummified human body entombed here. “What’s so special about this operation?”
The doctor looks at her again. “It’s what killed him,” he says. “Prince Ramose spent twenty years trying to prepare for it, trying to find the right person to perform it, and it failed.”
Vivi feels a chill run up her spine. She never learned about this in her lessons. She knows all the great feats of her ancestors, previous Pharaohs and black sheep alike. This isn’t a feat; it's a tragedy. “What kind of operation was it?” she asks softly. “Was he sick?”
“No,” the doctor answers, equally as soft. “He wasn’t sick. He was just old, and the operation was supposed to make him live forever. He was afraid to die.”
That doesn’t sound right. “We’re not afraid of death. Alabastans spend so much of our lives preparing for the afterlife; we know we’ll be fine. And he was of royal blood, so Ramose would have been better than fine. Look at all his cats, here. He’s living peacefully with them.”
“Everyone is afraid of death,” the doctor tells her firmly. “Alabasta has its traditions. Everyone has traditions, something to ease the pain of it. For the dead. For those left behind. But none of that erases the fear. You’re too young,” he tells her dismissively. She feels insulted. Offended. She’s not too young. She’s 16 with the weight of her country on her shoulders. The life of every single person who calls Alabasta their home is in her hands. She’s never been too young. She never had a choice. She’s a princess and a future queen, and they’re violating her dead ancestor’s tomb just by standing here, and the clock is ticking down above them as her country prepares to tear itself apart with a manufactured civil war, and she’s always been prepared for her inevitable death. Everyone is. That’s why they’re so eager for war.
“Like you’re old enough to worry about death too,” Vivi snaps. A clumsy comeback. The doctor almost smiles, and she’s glad he doesn’t. She hates that slash of a thing.
“You’d be surprised.”
A shout startles Vivi out of her frustration. She looks ahead to see Luffy run into another atrium that opens up at the end of this hall, and decides to run after him through the small stretch of darkness between them. She emerges into the room, just as large as the ones before and absolutely shining with wealth. It glows here. Luffy’s torch reflects off everything it touches, the old gold still polished to a shine, glimmering and sparkling with the light. It fractures through crystals and turns into little rainbows that play across ornamental spears and swords, board games and more cat statues, and endless amounts of jewellery. The doctor catches up to them and wrinkles his nose at the opulence.
“What a waste,” he murmurs under his breath.
“It’s so Ramose could use it in the afterlife,” she tells him.
“When it could have been used for public works.”
Vivi grits her teeth. As though she doesn’t know that. She’s well aware of the complexities this life holds. The nuances of it. She’s struggled with it in the past and will continue to do so, after this Crocodile business is dealt with. Balancing her culture and the modern needs of her people is what led to her going undercover anyway, and what has her working with the Straw Hats now to save her home. She doesn’t say any of this out loud, because the doctor has already gone off to search through the tablets and scrolls set aside across the room. He probably doesn’t even care about the waste. He doesn’t know her people. He doesn’t want to help them like she does. He just wants to be superior to her.
Vivi finds Luffy. He’s stuffing a golden helmet onto his head and twirling a spear in his grip. “You can’t keep those,” she tells him, and he drops the spear. Fingers all clumsy.
“What, why not?” he whines.
“Those are Prince Ramose’s, not yours.”
“But he’s not using’em!”
“He is,” Vivi insists, crossing her arms over her chest. “He needs them where he is, in the afterlife. That’s why they’re here, buried with him.”
“Oh.” Luffy pouts, but he takes off the helmet. “Fine, I guess, if he needs’em. I couldn’t even see outta’ that stupid thing anyway.” He drop-kicks the helmet across the room. It hits the doctor smack in the middle of his back, who curses and whips around to glare at them. “Whoops! Sorry, Doc!”
The doctor just turns back around, grumbling all the while. He returns to pouring over the display of texts he’s looking at.
You’d be surprised, he said when she accused him of being too young to fear death. Is he actually dying? Is that why he’s trying to find this medical text? But the operation written within it failed. It killed Ramose. Is the doctor trying to kill himself instead? There are easier methods than whatever this is. Luffy could’ve done it just now, if he’d aimed for the doctor’s head with the helmet. Regardless of whatever the reason is, the doctor still wants that text. He came all the way to Alabasta for it, from wherever it is he’s from. Maybe she should have asked. He has the brown skin and dark hair typical of Alabastans, but that means little here on the Grand Line where pirates and sailors come from all corners of the globe. Imagine that: he crossed into the Grand Line from outside just to get his hands on that text. Does he need it so badly? Does Ramose even need it? Her ancestor is already in the afterlife. What could he want with the account of his botched operation and death? Meanwhile the doctor saved them, patched them up, and even fed them. Vivi crosses the room.
“Do you really want it that badly?” she asks, a nervous clip to her voice. She bites the inside of her cheek, hating that she can’t sound more confident.
The doctor glances at her. He nods.
Vivi hugs her arms around herself. “If you… tell me why you want it, then I might let you look at it.” Have it. She hates herself for this even more.
“It would help me come to terms with something from my past,” he says. The words he chooses are slow and methodical. His voice is tight. Vivi wonders if that sentence pained him to spit out as much as her next one will.
“You can have it,” she says, and closes her eyes tight. I’m sorry, she tells Ramose, her father, all her ancestors. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so so sorry.
A long, silent moment passes between them. When Vivi opens her eyes again, she expects to see the doctor smiling that unsettling slasher grin. Instead, his expression is somber. It’s not pity on his face. It’s something else that she struggles to identify. “I know what it’s like,” he says, “to see pieces of your homeland disappear, while the rest of the world doesn’t care.”
She should know what that means. His home was destroyed too. Graverobbing; civil war. Something or the other. She wishes she knew what that meant. Vivi doesn’t know anything about other countries, she realizes suddenly. It’s horrifying. She’s terrible. She cares only for her own nation, and hasn’t ever paid enough attention to politics outside of it to even know what’s going on. She doesn’t know what his homeland was or how or why it was destroyed, but he’s here in Alabasta saving her and Luffy when they need help, and pulling out a tiny transponder snail from his pocket to snap pictures of the medical text he needs instead of stealing it. She didn’t even know he had that on him. What else doesn’t she know?
“I wish the best for you and your people in getting out of this war,” the doctor says, gaze trained solely on his work. “Unfortunately, I’ve turned into part of the greater world that doesn’t care when someone else’s home is destroyed, so my sympathies are all I can give you. I’ll be leaving Alabasta before your war breaks out.”
“An intelligent decision, though an unkind one. I’ve considered doing the same myself.”
The voice that rings out is unfamiliar. New. Husky yet feminine, and echoing all around them. The doctor stiffens, speeding up his work, snapping pictures even faster. Vivi looks around them frantically. She doesn’t see anyone. Luffy is there, across the room where she left him— and craning his neck up to glare at something high above.
Vivi follows his gaze and finds a woman she has only met once before perching atop a stone shelf piled high with gold. One long leg is crossed over the other. A ten gallon hat sits neatly on her head. Her arms, six or seven of them, spread around her in a halo, holding books and pens and twirling golden bracelets around her knuckles. The sight makes Vivi queasy— is this the Devil Fruit power All Sunday was wielding that fateful day at Whiskey Peak? She smiles down at them with narrowed eyes and a mysterious, knife-sharp sort of beauty. DANGER DANGER DANGER, Vivi’s intuition screams, even louder than it did when she first met the doctor.
“Miss All Sunday,” she says, unsuccessful at steadying her voice.
“Princess Nefertari Vivi,” All Sunday says, buttery smooth.
The doctor finally snaps the text shut, tucking the snail back into his packet. He looks rapidly between the two of them as his hand goes to his longsword. Then, Luffy makes a move.
“Gum Gum Pistol!” he shouts, fist stretching towards All Sunday.
All Sunday dodges, dropping limply towards the ground before a cushion made of her own arms catches her. She stands, light on her feet, arms cross over her chest as a flurry of limbs wave around her like a flesh-colored forest. Her smile is gone. She looks at Luffy with a stern, stiff expression.
“This is a place of rest,” she tells him, voice hard. “You cannot just go around attacking as you please. What if you broke something? Destroyed years and years of history? Would your princess like you very much, anymore?”
Luffy’s arm snaps back into place. He looks thoroughly chastised, which is unexpected. Vivi doesn’t think she’s ever seen him make that sort of expression before. “But—”
“That’s enough. I’m not here to fight with you, Straw Hat. I come to this place to be quiet. To be in the company of history and pay my respects while I think. Ever since I met you, you have been making that far more difficult than it has to be. Leave. I won’t fight you. You won’t fight me. I will not tell Crocodile or anyone else about this encounter. So please, don’t disturb anything else here and just leave.”
“There’s nowhere to leave!” Luffy insists, indignant. He throws his hands up in the air, glaring at her. All Sunday sighs.
“There is a hole in the ceiling halfway between this chamber and the last. I left my ladder there. Climb back up, and please do not kill any more sacred wildlife on the way.”
So the Sea King was sacred? Vivi will have to offer up more prayers after this is all over with.
“Fine,” Luffy sniffs. “Whatever. But don’t think this means I forgive you or anything, lady. You’re helping Crocodile hurt my friends, so the next time we see each other—” he slams his fist into the palm of his other hand. “It’s on sight, ya’ hear!”
“Alright. I hear you.” All Sunday sighs again. She looks exhausted, Vivi notices for the first time. It’s not obvious at first. Her figure is full and her skin and hair are radiant. Well taken care of. But the way her dull eyes are shadowed by the brim of her hat looks lifeless. It’s even worse than the way the doctor looks.
He grabs her shoulder now, pulling her along with him back to the hall. Luffy hurries after them, grabbing her hand when he nears and forcing her to run forward with him. She’s panting by the time they stop near their campsite. Vivi looks up at the hole where the sun is shining through now, already well into morning. She’s expecting to find a rope ladder. Instead, interlocked arms bloom from the smooth stone, just far enough apart to use as foot and handholds. Vivi’s stomach turns. Damn that All Sunday.
“Interesting,” the doctor says, joining them.
“It’s kinda cool,” Luffy admits begrudgingly.
Vivi can’t understand them.
Luffy’s the first to try the ladder. He leaps up past the first few rungs, swinging wildly from one a few feet off the ground before he gets his feet under him. Then he starts to climb. Vivi glances at the doctor and is about to offer him to go before her, already dreading the disturbing climb, but he looks to her first. He holds his hand out, palm facing the floor, fingers domed down. That same gesture he made last night while looking up at the moon.
“My name is Law,” he says. “Don’t feel like you have to honor your end of our deal. I already got what I was coming here for.” Then a bright blue light explodes out from under his fingers as he says, “Room. Shambles,” and the spot where he was standing is empty, save for two wriggling interlocked arms.
Luffy lets out a startled shout from above. Vivi’s head snaps up just in time to chase the sight of the doctor— no, Law, apparently, the asshole had a Devil Fruit power all this time? He couldn’t have used it earlier?— crouched on one limb-rung of the ladder with a hand on the rung above him. He’s three-fourths of the way up. Then he teleports again, leaving in his place a pebble that drops straight down and nails Luffy right in the middle of his forehead. The blue glow surrounding everything sputters out. Law peaks down at them from the edge of the hole in the ceiling.
“Good luck,” he calls down, flashing them a thumbs up, face impassive.
Then he’s gone.
“You couldn’t have taken us up with you?” Vivi shouts, voice hoarse, echoing impossibly loud around them.
“Hurry!” Luffy yells down at her, already climbing faster. As dextrous as the monkey of his namesake. “We can still catch up to that jerk!”
Vivi huffs. She pushes her sleeves up and steels herself against the unsettling sensation of a flesh-ladder against her palms. She climbs.
By the time she gets to the top, exhausted and aching, Law is already gone. Luffy frowns, looking all around them with a hand shielding his face from the sun. “The bastard,” he mutters, squinting into the horizon. “He didn’t even stay and say goodbye! I thought we were friends now!”
“Guess not,” Vivi pants. She sits up, wiping the sweat from her face. There’s something coming towards them from behind that sand dune. “Luffy,” she says, tugging on his robe.
“What is it?” He turns, gaze following where she points. Then he breaks into a grin. “Hey!” he yells, waving wildly. “Hey guys!”
Their friends rush to them, climbing up the sand dune like their lives depend on it. The Straw Hats are her allies. They’re good people. They’re her friends and she’s grown to love them, delighted by just the sight of their relieved faces, feeling the aching weariness already started to leave her body.
Law the doctor could have been her friend too, if given enough time. She wishes they had the chance to become that. He seemed to understand her.
But there is a war just over that horizon. One that pushed him away from this island. The same one that drew her to it. She has no time to be hung up over maybe-friendships. She has a home to save.