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Reading was hard.
Luffy had been learning for weeks now, thanks to his friends - his crew. The Merry had signs and things everywhere, telling him what stuff was, all written in Usopp’s neat handwriting. Usopp had even started making the signs in bright colours to catch Luffy’s attention.
Luffy liked it, and it was working. It still took him longer than everyone else to read a word, and sentences took longer still, but that didn’t change the fact that now, he could read.
For years not being able to read hadn’t bothered him in the slightest. Ace didn’t care about books and stuff like that, so Luffy didn’t bother with them either. If Ace needed him to know something, he just told it to him - there was no need to write anything down when it was just the two of them.
That had changed, lately. His friends wrote everything down. At first he found it strange; he didn’t really see the point. He knew Nami liked to make maps and that those needed labels, but she wrote down so much and he still couldn’t make heads nor tails of half of it. Usopp kept notebooks full of details about his experiments and his tinkering. This was a little easier to fathom why he wrote so much; it would be hard to remember all that without writing it down. Sanji’s writing made the most sense - he wrote down his recipes. Luffy was glad about that, because Sanji’s food was so tasty, so he wanted Sanji to remember how to make it. Zoro did stuff with numbers, and when Luffy asked about that Zoro told him that maths exercises kept your brain sharp.
Zoro liked exercising with his body; it made sense that he wanted his brain to be strong too. But Luffy wasn’t sure why a brain needed to be sharp - he’d eaten brains before and they were usually pretty squishy. Perhaps Zoro just had swords for brains.
It wasn’t strange to him anymore - it was just something his friends did. He wondered if he ought to find something to write about. His handwriting was still pretty bad though. It was frustrating because he knew what he wanted it to look like, but it never came out like that. It didn’t help that he would get distracted halfway through a long word and then forget to finish it before writing the next one. Then there’d be no space for the rest of the word he’d forgotten, unless he squished it in and made a mess of the whole thing. No, he was better off not bothering. Besides, there was way more fun stuff to do aboard the ship than write stuff down.
Which was why he was in the ship’s galley watching Sanji cook.
“Oi, if you’re going to hover like a fly on a cow’s arse you can at least make yourself useful,” Sanji said, as he deftly deflected Luffy’s sixth attempt to sneak a rubbery limb by him to try to snatch a snack off of the countertop.
Luffy’s arm snapped back to its usual length with a thwap. He pouted; he thought for sure this time he’d been sneaky enough, but Sanji had an uncanny ability to sense when someone was interfering with his cooking.
“Fiiiiiiine,” Luffy grouched. He was still sore at having been caught six times. He was usually able to steal food from Zoro without him ever noticing. (What he didn’t know was that Zoro let him.)
“Can you fetch me the baking soda?” Sanji asked, gesturing with his spoon to one of the cupboards to his right.
Luffy wasn’t sure what baking soda was - some kind of fizzy drink, maybe, for baking? He shrugged to himself and headed to the cupboards to find out.
He hopped up onto the counter, using his arms to push himself up and get his knees under him and onto the countertop. He could have just stretched his neck to see into the cupboard, but climbing on things was more fun. Besides, the more he stretched, the faster he got hungry - and he was already really hungry.
(The fact that he’d expended stretching energy on six failed attempts to nab food from right under Sanji’s nose might have something to do with that, though.)
Since Sanji had joined their crew everything in the kitchen had been meticulously labelled. Even the little salt and pepper shakers on the dining table had labels in spindly writing that Luffy found quite hard to read.
The cupboard was full of things, all labelled in Sanji’s curly writing. He shuffled through them looking for anything that looked like some kind of soda can. There were all sorts of packets, jars, and bottles of stuff. Some he recognised, some he didn’t. He shoved them aside until—
There! A big ‘S’ shape and some letters after it that had to be the rest of the word soda. It was even in a can! Perfect. He grabbed it and hopped down off the counter, presenting it to Sanji with a smile.
Sanji took the can from Luffy, not really paying full attention to him. He was too focused on whatever food he was making. Luffy’s stomach grumbled - it smelled good. He really hoped it was nearly ready.
“Thank yo-” Sanji cut off mid-sentence. He moved his pan off of the heat and turned to face Luffy.
“Luffy. What is this?” Sanji asked. The tone in his voice made Luffy think that the question he was asking was not actually the question he was asking. He answered anyway.
“Uhh, it’s baking soda?”
“It is not baking soda, Luffy. It is spam.”
So that’s what the other letters after the big swoopy ‘S’ were. What the hell was spam, anyway?
“What’s spam?” he asked. The word was funny to say. Spam, like if you mixed sports and ham. Or spinning ham. Silent Pam. There had been a lady who lived in Foosha called Silent Pam, maybe she was the one who invented spam.
“What’s spam?” Sanji repeated, sounding a lot like how Dadan used to sound when he and Ace broke furniture. “This is spam - what you’ve just handed to me!”
“But I thought it was baking soda! It has that big curly S and some other letters. It’s basically the same, right?” Luffy said, as he watched Sanji’s face contort and change colour several times before he composed himself and spoke.
“Not even close,” Sanji said, as he turned to the cupboard himself to put the spam back and retrieve the actual baking soda. Sanji didn’t need to hop onto the counter to reach, he was tall enough by himself. Luffy reckoned he should get on the countertop anyway, doing it that way was more fun.
It turned out actual baking soda came in a box, not a can. He didn’t know why they called it soda, then. He watched Sanji measure out some of it into the pan - it wasn’t even liquid, it was a powder! It didn’t look very tasty, either. Maybe the spam would’ve been better after all.
“I thought you had learned to read now, Luffy,” Sanji said. He turned to face Luffy once he’d set the pan to simmer.
Luffy shrugged. He had sat back down at the breakfast bar and was tracing the grains in the wood with his fingertips.
“Yeah, I mean, I can read. ‘S just hard.”
“What’s hard about it?” Sanji asked. This time his question was asking what it was asking, so Luffy answered him - there was no reason not to. Zoro didn’t like cucumbers, Usopp didn’t like wearing socks to bed, Nami and Sanji didn’t like spiders, and Luffy didn’t like reading. Everyone had something.
“Dunno. All of it. Words go fuzzy sometimes and the letters don’t always stay in the same places. And I can’t read your handwriting, ‘s all loopy like your eyebrow.”
The aforementioned eyebrow shot up into Sanji’s hairline before he schooled his expression into something more neutral.
“I like learning it, it’s just hard.”
—
The sun beat down overhead, but the misty spray coming up from the sea kept Luffy cool, even if it did make him a little lethargic. He didn't mind; it was a lazy day, and nothing much had happened yet.
He’d spent most of it so far sitting on Merry’s figurehead, chatting to her about things he saw in the distance. He told her about the islands he spotted in the distance, too far off course for them to visit, and the ships he saw on the horizon. He asked her what she thought they might be doing or where they might be going. She didn't reply, of course, but he still liked to ask.
He was just telling her about two seagulls that had been following them for the past hour - Usopp was fishing on deck so they were probably opportunists - when Zoro came by.
“Luffy, are you talking to yourself?” he asked.
Luffy flopped over onto his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows so he could see Zoro properly. The swordsman looked as he ever did, though perhaps a little sunburnt, and he was looking up at Luffy with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Nope, not to myself, to Merry! I come up here to talk to her cause I don't want her to be lonely,” he explained.
Zoro didn't say anything, he just grunted in acknowledgement and began to climb Merry's figurehead to join him. He was surefooted, and it didn't take him long to scale the sheep’s neck to join him on the crest.
Luffy shifted so that there was space for Zoro between Merry’s horns. It was a little cramped once Zoro had settled himself down between them but, so long as no big waves came along, Luffy wasn't worried about falling off.
They sat like that - him and Zoro wedged together, his head resting against Zoro’s shoulder as he looked out across the sea at a lopsided angle. He continued to tell both Merry and Zoro about the things he could see, gesticulating more now that Zoro was there. Not much had changed from earlier though, and soon he ran out of things to say, lapsing into a comfortable silence. His arms got quieter too, and he fell into his familiar habit of tracing the first characters of Zoro’s alphabet that he had learned onto his swordsman’s skin. Luffy. Zoro. Me. Sword.
“Cook said you didn't like reading,” Zoro said, breaking the silence that had never really been silent. The sound of the waves against Merry’s hull, the rustling of the sails in the wind, the creak of Merry's wooden decks, were all loud and present the whole time. Zoro was just louder.
Luffy stopped tracing the characters, but didn’t let go of Zoro’s hand. (Zoro didn’t let go of his, either.)
“It's hard, I like it more when people tell me stories, like Usopp!”
“Guess it really isn't that necessary, especially now you know the basics, but the cook said you see letters jumping around and shit. That ain't normal.”
“It's not?”
Now that he thought about it, everyone seemed to have a much easier time reading than he did. At first he thought that was because they’d had tons of practice. After all, he was better at beating up giant alligators after he’d defeated fifty or so of them. He just thought he’d have to practice reading more, but maybe reading was different for him.
“Nah, letters don't move,” Zoro said.
Well of course not. The ones Zoro wrote, the symbols in the sand, those stayed where they were. They were pretty. It was the ones from the alphabet everyone else used that were the problem.
“Your letters don't,” Luffy told him.
“My letters? What's special about my handwriting?” Zoro asked, perplexed.
“Not your writing, your letters - the ones from your dojo!” Luffy told him.
“You mean Kanji?”
“Yeah, that!”
“Wanna try learning more of it? Maybe it'll be easier for you,” Zoro offered.
Luffy thought for a moment, going quiet. It would be nice to write stuff quickly, if he needed to. Only Zoro would be able to read it, but that would be okay, because he’d always have Zoro around.
“Yeah, teach me Zoro!”