Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In this hour, dawn splits the sky right in half, so that the clouds bleed, and red drops of sun drip down into the frothing ocean. The wheel of colors spin, and what is green is now red, what is blue is now gold. In this hour, Nami’s breath puffs out in her own, personal little clouds, that mix into the damp air. There’s dew on the grass of the lawn and droplets of sea spray clinging to whatever stretch of wood they can drain into. Here, despite a pollen allergy, Nami sits side-saddle in the yard with a pale, crocheted blanket draped across her legs. Atop one of her legs rests a leatherback journal with a fraying tape-and-paper label entitling it as Nami’s Cartography. Between her teeth, she gnaws a wooden pencil.

There’s nothing yet written on this page, just one hastily erased slip of the pencil still feeding its echoes into the grain of the paper. Nami grabs the pencil from her mouth and erases it again. This journal — really much closer to some kind of sketching book — has very little to do with the other maps she has stashed away in the drawers of her wide-surfaced mahogany desk. It’s used more as a book of warm-ups and haphazardly scribbled ideas, so she can begin a project knowing that her hands won’t shake.

The kitchen light turns on, shimmering from the small windows hovering on both sides of the door. Through one of them, Nami spies the tall silhouette of Sanji flicking a lighter up by his jaw with a cold cigarette clenched between his teeth. He’s awake, but it’s unlikely he’ll start breakfast for another hour. He wakes, he smokes, he showers, he cleans, he cooks. That’s his pattern. Nami is awake early enough most mornings that she knows this — she knows the routines of all her crewmates, they all know each other’s just as well as they know breathing. They move as a marching band, all trodding their own paths with the trust that they won’t stumble into anybody’s way. It’s kind of graceful, in some boyish way.

Nami glances once more at her journal, and the blank page collecting the humidity, then she closes it. She’s been stuck in something of a limbo, the last three days. Even the blank pages of her harmless practice journal seem too daunting to press a pencil to. It’s been too calm, too lenient. The sun’s been too kind and the wind too pretty. Her body has made up anxieties to sit curled around her spine until tensions kick back up.

Nami stands and folds the blanket gingerly, her journal tucked under one arm. Goosebumps speckle the skin on her legs, she shivers as she crosses the line. She knocks on the door briefly before shuffling into the kitchen.

Sanji waves a thin stream of smoke away from his face to better see, and when he does his eyes soften and sparkle. Nami shuts the door behind her.

“Hello, my dear, good morning,” he hums. He almost bows subtly, steeping down halfway, but his muscle-memory isn’t quite up to par with the sleepy control addling his mind, so it just looks like an awkward stumble. That tiredness sits under his eyes, dulling his shimmer and spark. He crushes the end of his cigarette on the wall and tosses it in the trash. Nami mumbles a reply and yawns, hiking her folded blanket higher in her arms.

“I can clean while you shower,” Nami offers.

Sanji grins, trying for dashing but ending up startled, “If you’re sure it’s no hassle,” he tilts his head, and his bangs flop as a greasy conglomerate. Nami grimaces.

“No hassle,” she promises, “though I do have a condition,”

“Oh, yeah?” and there’s a flicker of apprehension in his eyes, because he’s a charmer but he’s not ignorant to his debt. Nami smiles as sweetly as she can.

“Can we have maple sausage this morning?”

Sanji frowns, a small crease of the brow and downturn of the lips, “Luffy doesn’t like the maple sausage.”

Pretty much the point, actually. One of the only things Luffy won’t eat, and it means she doesn’t have to defend her plate. She concedes anyway, though — something Chopper once said about rubber organs and fast metabolisms burning calories scarily fast

“Maple sausage and bacon?” she proposes.

Sanji grins again, spinning out of the kitchen “As you wish,”

And so, their routine is set afoot an hour earlier.

***

The buzz and hustle begins thirty minutes into breakfast, as it always does, when Luffy finally crawls out of his sleepy stupor and gains enough of a mind to reach across the table onto Usopp’s plate. He doesn’t have enough of a mind, though, to not knock over the pitcher of orange juice. Robin catches it with a fabricated hand, not even pausing her smiley conversation with Franky. Luffy and his fistful of bacon are halfway back across the table when Usopp notices and yells. Because he yells, Sanji yells, thwacking Luffy on the head with a rolled up newspaper then shovelling three pieces of bacon from his own plate onto Usopp’s.

Nami’s food remains relatively untouched. She rests one arm around the curve of her plate, filled with maple sausage and fruit salad. Zoro has his own plate shoved up against hers and his arm in a mirroring position, so that their arms forge some makeshift wall. A united front. He has yawned seven times in the brief conversation she tried to have, and he can’t seem to keep those fussy tired-tears from falling. Still, he’s an excellent guard against food-prying hands.

The morning moves again. Breakfast ends, Brook and Robin hang behind to clear and clean the kitchen. Nami wanders back out onto the lawn, settling this time below one of the tangerine trees, her journal still in hand. The crew scatters upon the sun-exposed levels of the ship, and for one reason or another Luffy has settled quietly beside her. He isn’t still, his boundless energy tugs grass from the yard and rolls it between his palms, so that his skin finds itself stained a mild green. His legs are criss-crossed, but occasionally he wiggles his ankles like a rabbit thumping its foot. He’s not still — he never is — but he’s quiet, and that makes Nami tight in the throat. Luffy almost always is a chatterbox, but his lips now draw a tersely closed line. He’s smiling, but something fills his eyes halfway up, and he won’t look anywhere but to his left, at the rocking waves.

She jabs a finger into his shoulder. “What has you so quiet?”

She leans close to him so she can see his face at a better angle. He blinks once, twice, squints like he doesn’t want to blink, then blinks a third time. It’s a minute before Luffy answers, but he hums just to let Nami know he heard her.

“I didn’t have a good dream,” he finally answers, leaning back against the base of the tree. He turns to her, “I don’t remember it, though. I just have this feeling in my chest, it’s kinda gross.”

Nami raises an eyebrow, “You’re feeling anxious…?”

Luffy shrugs, breaks into a sunshine and clear-skies grin.“Sure, I can call it that. I’ve been ‘anxious’, and so I thought: you’re scarier than any nightmare I could ever have, and if I sat next to you it’d chase off that feeling.”

The sun decides that very instant to crawl out from a small cirrus cloud and dazzle Nami’s eyes, so brightly she blinks soft tears from the strain. Luffy wiggles himself across the grass and sits properly in front of her, casting his shadow across her eyes.

“Is it working?” Nami asks.

If possible — very much so, for a rubber boy — Luffy’s grin splits wider, “Well, I’m not sure I feel all that bad anymore…?” he tilts his head and scuffs his hair, “I think I feel hungry, actually,”

Nami laughs, the tilt-your-head-back and open-your-mouth-wide kind of laugh. The top of her skull knocks the bark of the tree once, then she peers back down at Luffy, who’s bright smile and soft face is more a comfort than any gold or diamond. He’s like a fruit, a pear or a tangerine. Or maybe he is the branches that fruits grow from, reaching out far and offering up all the sweetness he has.

And that’s just Luffy, always. Luffy, who gives so much to people, like he’s giving away baskets of fruit. Luffy, who knows just how unforgiving life can be, and makes the baskets free anyway. It’s not a consciously selfless decision, Nami’s quite certain given an actual basket of apples, Luffy would eat them all before he could remember to share. It’s just — in passing, there’s all that love to give. Sweetness blooming on every stem.

“I think Sanji is cutting up some watermelon,” Nami contemplates, smiling. Luffy makes some whooping noise and swings his way towards the kitchen. She sits like that for a moment, listening for the inevitable shout and shatter, her hands warmed by her jacket’s cloth.

Then she frowns, and tosses a glance back to the sky. Cirrus clouds. A promise of a warm front, and so a promise of rain. That’s odd, Nami wraps her jacket around her fingers once more, there’s been no other signs of rain recently.

She tosses open her journal, and scribbles a note about keeping an eye on the weather.

***

The cirrus clouds deliver on their rainy promise some four or five hours later, an unusually rapid progression. Even for the Grand Line. It starts with one or two heavy drops that splash into the watermelon mocktail Sanji made her, and in twelve minutes the upper deck is drenched.

There is power in the rain. It brings floods and lightning and clouds that grow darkness like parasitic vines. What Nami’s learned, though — what she’s let herself be taught in these last few months — is that it also fills lands with life, and rivers with water to drink. Of course, she’s always known this, it’s intuitive. But there seems to be a difference between knowing something and understanding it, because as soon as she pushed to understand this, the bad days seemed so much lighter.

Once, so early in their journey that they hadn’t even left the waters of the East Blue, Nami sat through the night with Zoro and Luffy. She’d asked, with the halfway point between a frown and a snarl on her lips: what’s your goal in piracy, anyway? It takes a lot of focus to be the rule it all, and a lot of power to be the best of them all.

Luffy frowned, like the answer was simple and she was the slow one.

That’s a dumb question, he said, the world isn’t here to be ruled. I’m not here to rule it. I just wanna live.

Nami furrowed her brow, breathed a sigh into the air. There’s always consequences to living. You’re not afraid?

Zoro answered her, then, mimicking her sigh as a puff of laughter. He tilted his head back, opening eye, Fear is stupid.

Nami glared, It’s a survival instinct!

Sure, Zoro shrugged, but people say that so much, it’s beginning to sound like an excuse for being a coward. Kinda stupid.

Nami rolled her eyes then, she doesn’t think she would now. The world isn’t here to be feared, either, and fear isn’t here to be disregarded. It’s also not here to loom, and letting it loom is feeding a wild animal and startling when it begins to approach people.

Maybe, then, Nami shouldn’t let this anxiety sit in her spine. Maybe she’s feeding a button buck and not seeing the antlers that are soon to grow.

“Nami!”

Usopp is knocking on her desk, crouched down with his chin pressed to the wood. Nami dozed with the intention of pulling out an unfinished map. The knocking bounces through the woods and leaves a humming in her ear resting on the table. She sneers.

“What do you want, Usopp?” she turns to him, twisting out a crook in her neck, “have you ever thought of waking people up gently?”

Usopp rises with her, rocking back on his heels, “Well, I was going to, but I thought you might, eh, bite me.”

Nami glares, raising an angry fist. “I’m not a snapping turtle!”

Usopp laughs, and then he cuts himself short. Cautious and tense in the muscles of his face. Nami lowers her hand, matching his frown.

“What is it?” she swipes her static hair down flat, and then she sees it.

Her log pose isn’t pointing down anymore. Rather, forward, like it’s humoring the magnetic pull of a new island. She brings it closer to her face, right in front of her eyes.

“What…?”

Usopp scratches his neck, “That’s what I came in to tell you about. Zoro spotted an island in the distance, but we’re nowhere near the Red Line, let alone Fishman Island.”

Nami springs from the desk, out the door and up the stairs to the bow, rain soaking her clothes heavy. She’s her own rainstorm of wet cloth as she whirls around the deck. So they’ve caught another island but — how? There’s no changing their path, and no two islands are this close together. Surely? Thriller Bark hadn’t caught the log pose, but that made sense. It was West Blue, it was drifting as a ship. It wasn’t natural.

She hops up and leans over the taffrail, looking right where the log pose points her — roughly east, almost directly in front of the bow but leaning slightly starboard — and there it is. Off in the distance, only the vaguest of silhouettes hiding within the curling and swirling of the directionless wind, is an island. It’s jagged, perhaps cliff-heavy, and Nami thinks she can make out the shadows of trees coating most of the land. They’d need to get closer to be sure.

“Damnit,” she hisses, jumping back from the taffrail. She rushes over to the top of one of the staircases. On the lawn, the rest of her crew are standing in a line, all wide-eyed and waiting. They’re staring up at her, a tossed together chain of the sharpest ups and downs humanity can offer. Nami clenches her jaw with a fire in the back of the throat.

“You know what to do!” her scream echoes out louder than the rain, and just as angry as whatever storm gods have crashed over these seas. She leans a little over the rail, “get us to that island!”

Various sounds of confirmation, that all conglomerate into a sharp “hai” sound, and then they’re all scurrying off to their posts. Nami slides down the stairs to the center of the lawn, so she can direct with the changes in the wind.

She glances once more back at the island, a knit of unease tightens in her gut. She looks back around at her crew, and the knit unfurls the tiniest amount. There’s a looming peril in the storm, but some whispered comfort in its haze. Like lamp light through fog. Like the beginning breath of the morning, and the final promise of the evening. They’ll be fine, if a little roughed up.

Chapter Text

The storm doesn't ease up the longer they sail, but it doesn’t get worse, either.

It’s a lot of back and forth — rocking and swaying and pulling on ropes, like fighting with heavy chains on all his limbs. It’s a while before they can find a location safe enough to drop anchor. There’s a dock, but it’s destroyed enough that it could just be called two collapsed trees tangling together. A few jagged rocks are poking up from beneath the water, where the tide must be receding.

“Right,” Nami says, walking over to the rest of the crew from wherever she’d been standing. She, like many of the others, has changed her clothes into something dry and brought out a small umbrella. Zoro hasn’t, so his clothes are sopping wet. He couldn’t find a point in changing when it’s still raining.

Nami continues: “We’ll keep most of us here — five of us, as close to half as we can get,”

“Naturally,” Robin agrees, nodding pleasantly. Her arms are crossed as she stands next to Luffy, who’s rocking on his heels and trying to listen.

Zoro leans on the taffrail, elbows draped along the wood, “So how’re we splitting this up?” he asks, “drawing names?”

Nami pales, closing her eyes and pursing her lips for a breath of a moment.

“I’m going!” Luffy shouts, asserting it like it’s law.

“We know,” Sanji gruffs around a cigarette. Somebody chuckles. Zoro rolls his eyes.

“I think Zoro might be right,” Franky says after a minute. When the rain hits him, it makes a metallic thunk and kerplunk sound that Zoro thinks sounds a little like a tin roof. “We should draw names,”

Chopper makes a noise: a harsh blowing of air from his snout, the halfway point between a huff and a snort. Zoro recognizes this, only because of all the times he’s heard it, as the alarm call reindeer tend to make. He watches Chopper curl closer to Usopp, who is holding the doctor quite firmly in his arms with a grimace on his face.

Luffy is drumming two fingers on the ship and looking out at the dock, he’s tilting his head back and forth and splitting his own face with a grin. Zoro kind of smiles and kind of frowns, and readjust his grasp on the situation: it’s riveting, but he might need to keep his wits about him.

Brook laughs, loud and shrill and right beside Zoro. He jumps and holds his left ear, and turns to glower but Brook is already speaking.

“Forgive me, but — well, I just can’t help but find this whole deliberation to be so silly!” He claps his bony hands together, “Let’s just hold a vote!”

Nami makes some pitifully defeated noise. When Zoro looks, she’s staring up at the sky, “There’re no point,” she commiserates, “I’ll be outvoted. Let’s just draw names.”

She sounds mournful, like she’s resigning herself to a watery grave, and not to a name in a hat. She greatly favors doomism over statistics in moments like these, and it is — to quote Brook — so silly.

“...Ok.” Brook says, seeming to find Zoro’s same thoughts in his own head. If he could blink, he would.

***
They toss all but Luffy’s name in an old mixing bowl, and shuffle them around. The folded paper slips rustle as they’re stirred. Nami takes to drawing them, muttering something about increasing her luck. They all huddle in the dining room, around the breakfast bar, as she draws.

She pulls them slowly, one at a time, and Zoro quickly learns this will be an agonizing ordeal.

“Chopper,” she reads. He wails and Zoro picks him up, because that’s calmed him in the past. Nami draws another name, slow and dainty. Zoro has narrowed his eyes so tightly his eyelashes are beginning to curl together in his vision.

“Oh, for the love of—” Zoro mutters, when she takes her time unfolding the paper. He reaches forward and yanks it from her hand.

“Wh— Zoro!”

He grabs one other name from the bowl.

“You can’t just do that!” Nami punches his arm, and it does hurt, but he ignores her and reads the names. Sanji is equally reactive, and is shouting something Zoro doesn’t really care to scoff at. Luffy laughs.

“Me and Nami,” He reads, and Nami punches him again, “Let’s go already.”

He doesn’t consider himself to be a horribly impatient person. For all his bluntness can come across as brutish, he does know waiting. There’s a lot of waiting in sword fighting because there is a lot of learning in sword fighting, and learning is never done well when it’s rushed. There’s just something about seeing an easy task done at a dragging pace that makes him curl his fists and barrel forward. The slower others walk the faster he runs.

Nami sneers, “Let me grab my stuff at least!”

Chopper wriggles out of Zoro’s hold and drops to the ground, “I have to get some stuff too,” he says, shuffling his feet over to the door leading into the sick bay and slipping through it.

Zoro rolls his eyes, “Whatever, just don’t be slow,”

Usopp has this weary irritation pulling shadows onto his face, and he follows plainly when Luffy hooks him by the arm and drags him back onto the deck. The final notes of Luffy’s laughter echo off the rain, back into the warm-lit dining room, and Zoro is almost placated. But Sanji is there, and he’s scowling and trying to say something, and all the unhealed pain from Thriller Bark is really starting to hurt. Some frailer part of him just wants to sit down.

Nami pauses at the door, holding it propped open with her foot. Rain drizzles along the side of her face, “I’ll take all the time I want,” she hisses, “this is your fault!”

Zoro throws his arms out, “How is this my fault!?”

She jabs a finger at him, “I was the one drawing!”

“You were taking forever!”

“Alright,” Robin cuts in, wandering over with her hands stretched out in a soothing gesture. She’s got this amused, tiny smile flowering upwards on her face, and Franky following at her back, “Let’s just get going — Nami, let me help you pack.”

So the three leave.

Zoro betrays his resolve and sits at the table. His vision is spotting. Sanji is still glaring at the side of his face, cold and cutting like frost intent on peeling away skin. And despite this, Zoro cannot find the spark to even bicker.

A single argument, just one. Just one, and he’s collapsing into a chair and cradling his forehead with a scabby hand. His mouth is sour, a little metallic. At some point he closed his eyes. He doesn’t want to open them just yet.

There’s a niggling, Chopper sized voice that whispers to him logic and facts. Tells him this makes sense, there is trauma along his body so heavy it’s bruised his bones. There’s blood where there shouldn’t be, and no blood where there should be. There’s nerves forgetting all they have grown to know. It’s all okay, it’s just how the body wounds.

But there's a louder, formless voice with cold eyes that’s confirming what he’s already begun to suspect: he’s too incapable to heal, too paltry to not get hurt — increasingly creative ways to shout this realization, over and over. Words don’t need to be true when they’re loud, and Zoro’s not a skeptic, he’s just a fighter. It’s easy to take things at face value. He can’t help what he believes.

(He can, he just doesn’t quite know how to change.)

The eyes slip from his face, Sanji has turned away. Zoro opens one eye. He’s pulling a knife from the block.

“I’m packing lunches,” he says, and he almost sounds agreeable, “do you know what you want?”

“Booze,” Zoro says quickly, “sake, whatever,”

Sanji points the knife at him, “Sustenance,”

“Something that keeps me walking,” Zoro decides. Sanji frowns, it’s tiny, but it’s there and it’s earnest and it’s disgusting. Zoro pulls himself out of the chair, pushes himself to the door.

The cook opens his mouth. Zoro leaves.

***

His boots make a loud squelching when he jumps, and then again when he lands further down the ridge. Mud flies everywhere, most of it splatters his pants, some hits his face. There’s tiny bits of metal and mica in the rockier areas of the ground, and looser pieces scamper around. Zoro rises from his crouch and wipes the mud from his cheek with the back of his hand.

Up ahead, Luffy jumps and swings from a looming tree branch to clear an angry creek. Behind, on the other side of the tiny ravine Zoro just leaped, Nami’s paused to scribble in a journal with a scowl on her face. Chopper clops through the mud next to her, snorting and shaking his hooves out each time one gets stuck. He’s on all fours — fully reindeer aside from the sclera visible in his eyes.

It’s been some two hours of hiking from where they’d docked the ship. The sun occasionally gasps through breaks in the canopy, shining in fractures. It’s midday, and they haven’t found any civilization as of yet. It’s midday, and it’s still raining. Nami thinks it’s a rainforest, a temperate one, but Zoro isn’t sure. He doesn’t know a lot about rainforests, but even then, the trees here seem too big, and too sparsely grouped. The moss that covers all the rocks are tangled with dead pine-needles.

Luffy stops his witch-cackle singing intermittently to complain about hunger, and Zoro's backpack full of sandwiches becomes heavier each time he complains. Twinges of mild hunger have begun gnawing at Zoro, too, so he’s not opposed to the idea of settling down to eat at the first shelter they find.

“Hold it!” Zoro calls to Luffy. He halts, and they all wait for Nami to finish writing.

“I got it, I got it…” she mutters. She’s going as fast as she can, of course, but it’s hard to write with the hilt of an umbrella tucked under her chin as she tries to keep her pages dry.

Zoro doubles back — clambers back across the ravine to take her umbrella and hold it for her. She leans towards his shoulder and nods, a small nod, and finishes her writing quickly after that. She snaps her journal with one hand and places it snuggly in her bag. Zoro gives her her umbrella back, and she begins to move forward, but she pauses mid-step to look back over her shoulder.

“I’m not really mad at you, by the way,”

And Zoro rolls his eyes, but he knows Nami can see the ways his shoulders lose some tension. She smiles to herself. Zoro follows her as they stroll to catch up with Luffy.

A short time later, Zoro hears Chopper gasp, and he looks up from the meticulous placing of his boots.

Chopper has raised his head. The tip of his snout is twitching and his ears keep swivelling, back and forth and back and forth. He’s looking at something off in the distance, and Zoro follows his gaze but he can’t quite make out what Chopper is seeing. Except — Zoro squints — maybe there is something, far away, floating up in the canopy.

A light. Soft and yellow and unmoving, large even as the smoky fog tries to smother it. It’s all he can see, but it’s clear Chopper sees more.

“What is it?” Zoro whispers.

“A… lighthouse?” Chopper tilts his head from one side to the other, “Or just a house. Made out of a big tree.”

“A treehouse?”

Zoro jumps. Luffy has turned and reapproached them, and now he’s crouched a little ways from Chopper. He occasionally follows Chopper’s gaze up to the treetops, then back to him with a placid grin.

Chopper shuffles his hooves, “Kind of, but not really,” he says, “you’ll see what I mean when we get closer.”

Luffy nods and springs right back up to his feet. Zoro marches along to follow, eyes fixed on the light above.

A blob forms into shape, mostly swallowed in shadows for now. Shadows that curl and twist and retreat, gossiping their fickle secrets to each other, before reaching with spilled-ink hands to grab more information. Then the light slips in, and the colors are painted. Water-logged bark is sticking to the climbing walls of a large, red trunk. It is a treehouse, a very weird one. The tree itself is entirely hollowed, if the empty door frame at the base of the tree is anything to go by. It’s dark and empty, almost the way strangler figs are left when they’ve clawed out the tree they wrap around. Only the walls are thick and full, not a hole or window to blink at.

The leaves are high up in the canopy, and up there — visible only if Zoro squints — is a large, several roomed and possibly several-storied structure nestled in the widest branches. The shape itself is odd, like two beer caps stuck together at the wide ends, with a few protruding squared rooms. All the lights are on, and though there is very little to see through the distance and the fog, Zoro thinks there might be shadows moving past the windows. People, maybe.

The oddest part of the structure is the balcony that surrounds it. There are several openings, where something like bridges connect from far off. Zoro can follow the bridges with his eyes, and sometimes he’ll find a gazebo interrupting the path, but then the bridges continue on the other side, and the fog obscures where they lead where they lead.

Zoro looks back down, neck aching. Everyone is gone. He scratches his head.

Where— what?

He hears Nami yell something, undoubtedly pissed. Then a long-limbed hand reaches out from the fog and grips his bicep. Zoro scrambles back.

“Luffy, don’t—”

But he’s already being reeled in like some thrashing fish on a line. He hits the base of the hollow tree.

“Luffy!” Zoro snaps, but he isn't around.

It’s not the base of the tree, he realizes, it’s inside the tree, and he’s landed with his back against a wooden staircase. Zoro follows it up with his gaze, it’s unsanded and swirling, and when Zoro pressed his hand against it it’s wet. It isn’t even painted, just a pallid tan color.

Luffy and Nami and Chopper are clattering in after him, saying things. It’s cold here. He’s sitting on uneven ground, on jagged objects. Zoro moves his leg and squints. Loose chunks of shining stone, and melted metal ores, and the occasional lumps of fish bones. Zoro wrinkles his nose on instinct, before he realizes it doesn’t actually smell bad. It smells like fire smoke, wafting from the top of the stairs.

Nami snaps twice in his ear, “Are you listening?”

Zoro tilts his head away from her hand, “Are we going up?” Chopper pokes him with a few tools.

Her jaw hangs, and she looks miserable, “Not you, too,”

That’s when he notices Luffy's already up the stairs, and almost entirely engulfed in shadows. He shrugs.

Chapter Text

It’s going to be kind at the top. It’s going to be warm apple cider and pie out the oven and a thick, red blanket to wrap around his shoulders. The floor will be wood, and it won’t have a carpet, but there will be a fireplace, and people too.

His crew is clattering up behind him, yelling after him. He’s not going as fast as he could, since Chopper is shaking a bit and Zoro has this ghost-strewn look in his eyes. He keeps blinking. Nami’s the fastest on his heels, and she sounds the angriest, so Luffy laughs and runs.

It’s a long climb. A really, really, really, insufferably long climb. He slips three times, and each time when he catches himself, a needle of wood splinters off and jabs into his skin. The stairs seem to reach higher and higher, and there isn’t a spot of light. Luffy just kinda feels that his feet need to go places, so they do.

They reach the top eventually, but there isn’t any entrance for the stairs to go through. It’s just a hard, wooden ceiling. They’re right below the honeycomb-shaped house, he knows it. Luffy frowns at the wood a solid minute until his friends catch up with him. Zoro is wheezing a tiny amount, so Luffy tears his gaze from the ceiling to look. He’s fine, standing straight, chewing his lip and breathing a little hard.

“A trapdoor,” Nami says, because she sees things better than Luffy does. Zoro reaches up and heaves his weight up twice, Luffy helps on the third try, and something snaps. The trapdoor flies off its hinges and lands somewhere to the right.

Luffy’s met with the pattering of rain on his face. They’re on that balcony. He worms his way up through the hole and slides onto slippery wooden planks. The trapdoor has landed in front of a real door, the door of the house. It’s a white door, but there’s speckles of bluish purple that he thinks might be blueberries. He’d love to have some blueberries. Up by the top of the door on both sides, which is rounded and splattered with water-damage, are two warm-lighted windows with cloth curtains pulled over them on the inside.

Chopper's hooves clop onto the wood, so Luffy knows he’s good to open the door. But Nami grabs him by the elbow, tugging him to stop.

“What?” Luffy tilts his head.

“Knock,” she hisses, it’s hard to hear over the rain, “don’t just barge in,”

Luffy frowns in a scrunchy way. He’d pout about it, too, but Nami’s already stepped in front of him to the door.

She knocks, loud and bitter.

There’s a loud clatter from the inside of the house. It’s something glass shattering — plates. Luffy’s broken enough plates, he knows what they sound like shattering. Somebody shouts something, and somebody muffles the shouts, and there’s two other people sitting quietly. Luffy knows, because they're quiet in the loud way. In the way where they know they don’t need to be loud, because just being there is going to pull all the gravity of the room to them.

Luffy leans towards Zoro, “do we have blueberries?”

Zoro shrugs, and has this face about him that seems kind of affronted, “I don’t micromanage the cook when he packs. Or really listen when he said what he packed. We’ll check when we get inside.”

Luffy grins, “Kay,”

Nobody opens the door. Nami knocks again.

“I know you’re there!” she says, partially seething but mainly trying to be patient.

Still nobody, and now Luffy shuffles forward, almost pulled forward by the chest. He squints, but waits for Nami.

At some point Zoro’s picked up Chopper, so he shifts his weight to free an arm so he, too, can knock. He knocks on the wall underneath the leftmost window. “At least open the door and tell us to piss off if you don’t want us here,”

Luffy can feel it: one of the quiet-loud people in the room perks up. It’s a mild change in interest.

Still, nobody answers.

“Alright,” Nami says. She steps back and sweeps her arms in a grand gesture towards Luffy, who’s beginning to grow irritated with all the rain on his face, “be our guest,”

Luffy bounces on his toes, passing Nami to the door. He puts his hand on his opposite bicep and closes his fist.

Zoro snickers. He leans in towards the window again, “That wasn’t really a request,” he says, laughing like glow worms on cave walls, “we’re coming in,”

So Luffy stretches his arm far brack, grazing a few other trees with his knuckles. When he thinks he’s stretched far enough, he frees his arm into momentum, yelling as he does. There’s the tiniest delay, so Nami can stride farther from the door. The rain stings, but only because his fist is pulling forward faster than the water falls. His heart badumps, and just before his fist hits the door, there’s a shrill and shattering shriek from the right window. Luffy has to freeze.

“The door is unlocked you — you ugly brutes!” a lady cries. Luffy can see her shadow hovering behind the periwinkle curtains. She’s floating, “Just open it!!”

Nobody in the house is pleased with her outburst, but nobody in the house has a better idea. They stay silent. Luffy watches the shadow draw her hands to her mouth in a panic, and look over her right shoulder. She sounds familiar, and behaves in an obnoxious way that Luffy has pocketed in a corner of his mind, tied to someone that’s clawing and shrieking her way to the forefront of his memory. She hasn’t made it there yet.

Luffy scowls, “So say that!”

The shadow turns back to the window. She takes her hands and curls them into the skirt of her frilly, angry dress. That’s another thing familiar, Luffy thinks. He’s really trying to remember, and he’s almost there, but his head just hurts.

“Well you were supposed to go away!” She shouts, “not break my house!”

Luffy wants to shout something back, but then the focus of the room bends in another direction, like when the stem of a sunflower stretches to find the sun. Except the sun isn’t there. It’s leaning towards fire instead. It’s one of the quiet-loud people, he’s stood up. Past the rain, when Luffy squeezes his eyes shut, there’s an audible clicking of shoes on the floor. A measured heel to toe walk that sounds like good posture. More like gliding than walking. This man is crossing the room, keeping pointedly from the eyes of the windows. Luffy does see a hand reach out and very soft pull the banshee out of sight. As he mutters to her in displeased tones, Luffy finally clicks it into place.

“It’s Perona!” he announces.

Nami checks her log pose like she’s checking a watch, “Fifty-three seconds,” she makes up, “is that longer or shorter than the last time he tried to remember someone's name?”

“Longer,” Zoro grunts. He blinks again. His eyes are gray, but not in the silver moonbeam way they’re supposed to be, but in the brooding storm clouds that sometimes threaten the sun way.

“But usually he doesn’t even remember the name!” Chopper butts in. Zoro softens, but still not enough. Luffy wants to poke him about all his extra gloom, but Zoro still isn’t ready. So Luffy holds off.

The gliding man has returned to his seat. Behind the door, the banshee sighs in a rough-throated way.

“You can come in,” Perona grumbles.

“Thank you,” Zoro snips, and he doesn’t sound the least bit grateful. Nami turns the knob — it’s golden, which is fun — and opens the door. It opens inward, Perona has to scramble backwards to make space.

The kindness isn’t there. It is warm inside, and it does smell of apples, but the kindness just isn’t there. There are goosebumps tracing like flowering vines all over Luffy’s body. Immediately, he feels deceived, and that’s a strange and cold feeling. It cuts his body warmth straight out of his belly, and so all that’s left is the rain and the wind. He stands at the door that his friends have already entered, and all too suddenly doesn’t want to step inside. The apples smell kind of rotten now.

The floor is uncarpeted wood. Luffy spies a couch, and a thick red blanket folded on one arm. There is a fireplace, and there are people. But it’s not the right people, it’s not the good crowd.

There’s four people here. Perona floats back to the kitchen, on the right side of this open-space common room. The quiet-loud people are still out of Luffy’s sight, because he still hasn’t stepped inside. His friends are hesitating, now, looking back at him at the threshold. Luffy steels himself, drags one leg into the room, then the other.

The room is lit only by lamps, the fireplace is out. Oil lamps. The shadows are rampant on the walls and the floors. The couch is some ugly, speckled gray that’s cradled close to the dark coffee table. There are two armchairs on the far end of the couch, and two men in the armchairs, and a small table between them. Luffy doesn’t look at them yet, urgently not wanting to. He stares at an open door frame across the room that leads into a haunted, dark hallway. He doesn’t take his eyes off of it.

“Shut the door?” Nami asks. Luffy does.

There’s the fourth person, too. Someone in the corner. Someone making themselves small within the shadows, head tilted down and arm across their chest. They aren’t afraid, and Luffy wouldn’t call this hiding. It’s as if — it’s like the times Ace used to shrink, because he felt guilty and so couldn’t really exist quite right. Luffy graces this someone with ignorance.

“Luffy.” There’s Zoro.

And Luffy finally looks to his left, at the chairs. The gravity of the room pulls at his chest, unties his ribs, and exposes the cavity holding his heart. It shoves his heart to the side so it squishes a lung and makes breathing become something far harder than it should be. His chest fills with the rain, violently persistent. It pours an ocean made of blood and water and tugged out fangs still trying to bite. Luffy bites — bites down on his own teeth as he wonders where his smile went. He’s suddenly trembly, and there’s suddenly an arm placed diagonally over his chest. Zoro’s arm.

The leftmost armchair is mauve and ugly, and even uglier because one Sir Crocodile has sprawled across. Rolled cigar in his hand, eyes to the ceiling like they froze there as he was rolling them.

The other armchair is mauve too, and still ugly, but more so bland. Boring and dull. And the gliding man is Mihawk sitting right there, and he has one leg crossed over the other, and his eyes are ever-staring.

Luffy rarely moves under eyes expecting him to, but here he places a palm to his chest, atop Zoro’s forearm. He feels like his chest is spilling too much, he feels invisible and see-through all the same — he’s angry, he realizes. He’s curious and angry and his hair is wet (which just makes him more angry) and the way he’s being stared at feels like he’s being told he’s rambling like a child, but he’ll never find an issue with that because it works for him just the way he wants it to.

Luffy knows Zoro’s arm across his chest looks like a safeguard, like Zoro is holding Luffy back and keeping him from lunging. It’s not — Zoro is just holding him. He isn’t keeping him in place, he’s just keeping him steady. Luffy squeezes Zoro’s arm a little tighter. Chopper is on the ground between their feet, and though Nami is closer to the door she’s still with them, her eyes very thoroughly stuck onto Luffy’s shoulder. They’re all here. Luffy grasps at their steady and closes his chest.

The fourth presence is trying to leave, shuffling to the doorframe. Luffy turns. The man freezes.

He’s in the light now. Gold speckling the black, thin-cloth coat that sweeps the floor. Gold matching the stars on his silly patterned pants, gold against swaths of red.

It’s Shanks.

Oh.

Huh.

Oh.

Luffy scratches at Zoro’s arm, peeling skin. Zoro stays steadfast.

He turns to Nami, silently asking her something that he doesn’t even know, and she’s already trying the door handle. It opens, but—

“The trapdoor is gone!”

Shanks laughs, a very awkward laugh he sometimes used to do. A laugh that twinges something in Luffy’s just-sealed chest.

“Uh— yeah…” Nami shuts the door, turns to look at Shanks as he talks, “We’re all stuck—ish?”

Nami raises one eyebrow. Her hands go on her hips. Luffy thinks Shanks to be very brave to face her head on, but then again he doesn’t really know her. And then again, it’s Shanks.

“Stuck-ish,” Nami echoes.

Shanks scratches his jaw, “There’s bridges that go to other houses, condos I guess. They have beds and bathrooms and clothes…” he trails off, “But, uh, none of us can leave. Or call. It just doesn’t go through.”

“You haven’t tried to jump?” Zoro asks. Nami facepalms, which is weird ‘cause Luffy thinks it’s a very valid question.

There’s a clicking of a tongue, and the clinking of a wine glass as Mihawk sets it down. He rises, crosses to the kitchen. “Yes, he did, actually.”

His face doesn’t move beyond impassive, but Shanks’ grin pulls like he’s in trouble, so Luffy guesses that Mihawk isn’t exactly impressed. Mihawk sidesteps Perona, where she’s pouring a dustpan of broken plates into the trash. Luffy watches, tilting his head as he grabs an oven mit.

“He couldn’t even get past the balcony,” Crocodile startles the air in the room, his voice is all sandy and a little mopey, “Something caught him,”

Luffy swings on him before he can forget.

“You’re supposed to be locked up!” He shouts. He bares his teeth, gnashes long canines together.

Crocodile is impassive too, more openly tired, though. He puts the cigar in his mouth and talks around it, “Pretty sure I still am,”

He intones weirdly, puts all the emphasis on the wrong words. Luffy wants to shout again, but he feels something beneath his fingertips and pauses. On Zoro’s skin, something a little crusty and a little wet. Luffy looks down. He’s drawn blood, little crescent mark-led scratches where Luffy had clawed him.

“Oh,” Luffy tilts his head. He looks up at Zoro, grins sheepishly, “...sorry,”

Zoro blinks. His eyes are still clouds, “I think I’ve faced worse,” he drawls.

Luffy laughs — tilts his head back and bubbles with laughter, because Zoro’s his funniest when he’s softly sarcastic.

“But—” Luffy keeps laughing, but listens too as Zoro asks: “are you good if I let you go?”

It’s in quiet tones, like he’s hiding from all the ears in this room. Zoro wants his privacy; Luffy will find him a room soon.

“No,” Nami answers before Luffy can. Her voice is a little smiley and super irritated. She’s looking at the kitchen, Luffy and Zoro follow his gaze. Mihawk has pulled a pie from the oven, an apple pie, and settled it on the counter. There is apple pie. Luffy is reminded all at once that he’s absolutely famished.

Zoro readjusts his grip across Luffy’s chest, actually tensing his muscles. Actually trying to hold Luffy back. Luffy’s hungry, he almost shoots forward, but — he looks around the room. Mihawk to Perona to Crocodile, skipping Shanks, then going back to Mihawk. Luffy gnaws his lip. Everybody started looking at them. It’s not scary to him, but Nami’s all agitated and Zoro’s gone reclusive. Chopper is small, they haven’t noticed Chopper much.

“We have sandwiches,” Luffy says after a minute, still eyeing the pie, “and probably blueberries. We can just go eat in my room,”

Zoro pulls his hand away and drags it across his face, “You have a room, now? Where?”

Luffy shrugs, “Dunno,” he scratches his jaw, “guess we’ll have to go pick one,”

He swings around, a large and loose swing, and reaches out to the door. Zoro picks Chopper back up, follows with a scowl and no hesitation.

“Luffy,” Nami hisses, it’s almost a sneer. She catches him by the elbow for the second time that evening, and spins him so he looks at her. Her eyes are squinted and wide somehow at the same time. That would be weird, but her eyes always do that when she wants to be heard.

Luffy straightens up, squares his shoulders. He takes Nami’s wrist and pulls her hand off his elbow, “We’re going to eat in my room,”

Nami’s eyes open broadly. Another weird thing, because that isn’t her shocked face. That’s her thinking face. When she finally understands something, her jaw always drops a little.

Her jaw drops a little. Her hand falls to her side, she nods.

They file out the door. Shanks yells out something, quickly: “All the cardinal directions are taken!”

Luffy tosses a thumbs up, and shuts the door with a bang.

***

Nami picks a bridge, one of the three between South and West and leads the charge across it. It swings and sloshes with water, and everyone seems wary, but Luffy doesn’t mind. They couldn’t fall even if they threw themselves off, apparently.

The straight shot the bridge forms is even longer than the climb up those stares. It seems to stretch more with every step they take. Nami snaps that that’s a stupid thing to say, because that isn’t how bridges work. Other than that, though, nobody really talks. The wind swims through long, swinging branches of flowering trees. The rain accosts everything, puttering about. Their footsteps splatter across the soaked wood. But around the storm it’s quiet, no animals chittering or cawing, and despite the easy-pasted grin of Luffy’s face, the hairs on his neck spike and bristle.

The fog paints everything a vague shade of blue, so it’s easy to spot the golden glowing of a caged torch when they reach the condo. It illuminates the shape of it, and this time the place is more house-shaped than awkward honeycomb shaped. Luffy leads them into the shelter.

It’s dark, but there’s a table right by the door with an oil lamp. Luffy struggles with it for a moment before he turns it on. It’s a small mercy of light, but enough to see the room they walked into.

Condo perhaps was the wrong word — this is just a small house, or cabin. Wide living room, cramped kitchen, four-person round table sitting at a halfway point. This floor is carpeted, and the couch is red. It faces the front wall, behind it are shadowed stairs that might turn at a landing, but Luffy can’t really see.

Zoro whistles, “This isn’t so bad,”

Luffy nods, skipping his way over to the couch. It’s plush, not fraying, and it’s kind of fuzzy. There’s another fireplace, too. He curls up, resting his head on the arm.

“I don’t mind it,” says Chopper. He hops up on the couch too, and Luffy welcomes him to lean on his side.

Nami shuts the door and follows in a huff, “Well I do,” she says. She steals the backpack off Zoro’s back and lays it out on the table, “because we can’t just stay stuck here,”

She pulls out sandwiches, four of them. Luffy stretches out and snatches all four, tittering as he pulls them back to his lap. Nami barely blinks, just pulls out three more. Luffy unwraps all four of his, and takes a small moment to stack them all atop each other. He shoves the entire amalgamation in his mouth.

“Are there blueberries?” Zoro asks, sweeping two sandwiches off the table.

Nami peers into the bag, “No,”

Zoro shrugs and circles back to the couch, tossing Chopper a sandwich. But Luffy finds he’s still hungry, and spies a spotty fridge in the kitchen. He asks Nami to check it.

“It’s an empty place, Luffy, there isn’t going to be blueberries in it,” but she goes to check anyway, “why are you craving them so much, anyway?”

Luffy just shrugs, “Everything's blue, I keep thinking about it,”

Zoro chuckles around his sandwich. Nami tugs the fridge open.

“Oh, my god,” she whispers, Luffy can barely hear it. She just stands there for a while, arms gone somewhat slack like jelly.

“What?”

Nami reaches into the fridge and pulls something out — one of those cardboard fruit holders, a big one. It’s full of blueberries.

“There’s three more,” Nami says, blinking. She shuts the fridge.

Luffy stretches again, and steals the box right from Nami’s dumbfounded hand. Some spill as he pulls them to himself, but that’s fine. There’s three more.

“Don’t eat them, you idiot! We don’t know how old those are” Nami yells, but Luffy is already shovelling several handfuls into his mouth.

“Was there meat, too?” Luffy asks, still chewing, “any kind, but maybe steak if we’re being specific,”

“It was just blueberries,” Nami says, still in a weird stupor.

“Check again,” Luffy requests.

“Sure,” Nami sighs, “why not,” and she tugs the fridge open.

“Oh my god!” she says again, this time she shrieks it. She runs a hand through her hair and shakes it out, “Steaks! There weren't steaks a second ago, how—”

And then she pauses. Slowly, she shuts the fridge again until it clicks. Her hand is still firmly around the handle. Luffy can’t see her face, but he knows he knows she’s got her eyes narrowed.

Nami mutters: “Yogurt,” and pulls the fridge back open again. There’s silence and then a scoff, “No yogurt,”

“Booze!” Zoro then calls, cupping a hand around his mouth.

Nami opens it, slowly. “Huh,”

Luffy pushes aside his blueberry box, now empty, and leaps over the arm of the couch to see what Nami’s seeing. Four steaks are at the bottom left, three more blueberry boxes just a shelf above it. A case of beers sits on the door. He grabs one of the steaks, cooked rare, and shoves the entire thing into his mouth.

He shoots his hands up in the air, grinning perhaps manically, “We have an infinity fridge!”

“Yeah…” says Nami, a little bit quiet, “we do,”

Luffy hears movement on the couch, a shuffle and a pop of bones as Zoro stretches, “So it’s not so bad here,”

Luffy nods and grins and skedaddles back over to the couch. He sprawls across the far arm, slices of steak tearing apart between his canines. Nami waits a moment, but then she follows him in crisp, stomping motions. Luffy watches her, bright and grinning as she kneels in front of Luffy. She grabs both his wrists, gentle and stern all at once. Her gaze is glinting with a dire kind of anger.

“You need to listen to me,” Nami says. Her voice is low, as serious as a bleeding stab wound.

Zoro shifts a bit, focusing more gravely — Luffy sees it from the corner of his eye. So Luffy pries the last few strands of meat from between his teeth and leans forward. He stops grinning but he stays smiling, soft and sweet as vanilla flowers.

Nami takes her cue: “Take this seriously.” As she talks she shakes Luffy’s wrists. “I know you’re all excited by the fridge and the treehouse and seeing someone you haven’t seen in a long time—“ Luffy frowns, “—but you need to take this seriously.”

“Nami—“ Zoro tries his best to cut in.

“We can’t leave,” Nami hisses. “We can’t leave and we can’t contact our ship. Our crew is waiting for us, but we aren’t on the radar anymore.”

And true, Luffy can picture them: confused and irritated, maybe worried as the days slink by, but not betrayed and not dissuaded.

“I mean, it could be that we never get out! Then what? What happens to all we’re working towards? What happens to your dream? What happens to mine? You’re so flippant! You’re not getting how awful this is! You never do!”

Luffy pulls his wrists away, stubborn and harsh. Nami quiets, if only because she’s startled. Luffy is frowning now, nearly pressing his teeth into a lock-jawed clench.

He leans forward. “We will get out.”

“You cannot at all be sure—“

“We will get out,” Luffy insists. He takes Nani’s wrists now, unfolds her fists to expose her palms to the ceiling. He takes them and squeezes them and smiles a honeysuckle smile.

Then, it’s a long moment of silence. The air is thin and chilled as four pairs of lungs match their breaths to each other. Then, Nami nods. She murmurs soft, calmed agreements. She rises and shakes herself loose.

Zoro rolls his neck, “It’s cold in here, eh?”

“I’m fine!” Chopper pipes up. Zoro bops him on the nose. Chopper wriggles backwards.

Luffy giggles, but — he looks at the goose pimples all across his arms, the hairs straight and on guard — “Yes! It is cold!” He shakes out his hands and snuggles his arms around his ribs. “Let’s light the fire!”

Nani’s standing, so she coaxes the flame into the pit. It lights quickly and stays bright, so the grates are shut soon. Nami joins them on the couch and places her bag at their feet. Luffy curls near her and she curls near Zoro with Chopper at his side, so they all curl together.

Luffy yawns, watching the fire crackle. The flames consume the wood, popping against like the crunching bite of fangs on a hard shell. The smoke hisses as it vents.

***

The room must get too hot for her after a while, because Nami jumps up and excuses her puffy rain jacket from her torso. She begins pacing. She paces the length of the room, heading far to Luffy’s right then spins right around. She does this about a billion, gazillion times before she stops. This is good, Luffy thinks he’d get sick if he watches her pace anymore.

She drags her palms across her face in a very Zoro way.

“I’m going back to talk to them,” she announces, inhaling.

“Hah?” Zoro stirs from the doze he was in. He sits up on his elbows.

“I’m going back to that— that common area and I’m going to talk to them. Ask questions.”

Luffy flips onto his back. After nearly an hour, Luffy had crawled off the couch to sink into the floor. The rug is kinda itchy. He throws his hat atop his face.

“‘Kay.” He shrugs. Nami doesn’t move, though. Luffy shifts his hat again to peer at her. She’s staring at the front door and chewing her nails.

“What’s in the hallway?” Luffy asks.

Nami turns back to him, blinking, “What?”

Luffy laughs, “In the big-room,” he explains, “There was a big, dark hallway. Can you find out what’s in it?”

“No way!” Nami rolls her eyes, “Find out yourself!”

Luffy pouts — kinda. He cranes his neck back over to the couch. He’d go, but the fire is cozy and there’s steak in the fridge. Blueberries too.

And Shanks may still be in the other room, and Luffy isn’t afraid, but he’s not entirely sure. Neither of them meant to be here, but is it still breaking their promise?

“Chopper?” Luffy calls.

Chopper raises his nose slightly from the couch. He hums.

“Will you go see what’s in the hallway when you go with Nami?”

Chopper startles, sitting up and flattening his ears. “When?”

“Yup!”

“But—“ Chopper looks around the room.

Luffy waves one arm up in the air, “You’ll be fine!”

Chopper closes his eyes, then opens them all wide and fearful, “But… Crocodile.” He whispers the name, like he could be anywhere.

Luffy sits up. He shoves his hat right back atop his head and gets a static pic from his hair. It’s sour to think about the man just a bridge-length away, but even so, Luffy shrugs.

“You and Sanji faced him before.”

Chopper looks to the side, “Yeah…but…”

“You were really cool, too!”

Chopper quiets. A tiny smile quirks his mouth, but he doesn’t stop looking away. “Shush,” he harrumphs, “that doesn’t work.” But he’s already hopping off the chair and meandering towards Nami. Luffy flops back onto his spine, grinning white teeth to the ceiling.

“What about Mihawk?” Nami presses. Zoro’s still dozing.

Luffy shrugs again, “He’s fine,” he tries, but nobody seems to get what he means. He tries again: “Nothing about him feels bad right now. He doesn’t feel bad,”

“Oh!” Nami hisses, face pulling taught into a sneer, “Well that’s alright, then.”

“Exactly!” Luffy cheers, “Have fun!”

They stare at Luffy, who’s flicked his hat back over his eyes. They leave soon, though, when they feel like they’ve gawked long enough, muttering grumpy phrases under their breaths.

Chapter Text

Thunder rolls, grumbling about the rainforest and clawing its way into the walls of the treehouse. It’s tumbling after the lightning that had skittered around the windows just a short moment ago. The storm is picking up. It does that sometimes — not often, the pressure of the droplets stays pretty stable, but on occasion the rains start quickly sleeting with a sidewinding anger. The wind rips branches from their trees and sends them thunking against the walls and windows. The condos get all leaky. Or at least Shanks’ does, but the common area doesn’t. Better build, maybe.

There’s a thing about this island that isn’t noticeable until far into your stay, when it just becomes unnatural: it never stops raining. Even rainforests have their pauses, but there is not a breath of dry air to breathe here. Two and a half weeks, that’s how long he’s been here. He was the most recent to arrive. The second-to-most recent, now.

When he’d tumbled down onto a soaked beach of the island, the storm had cried to him and the wind had pushed on his back, shoving like a child so desperate to move a boulder out the way. Shanks had obliged. He stumbled in from the rain, and found quite the surprise in one Sir Crocodile. One Hawkeyes Mihawk, too, and whatever ghoul of a ward was dragging her boots after him.

Mihawk is the antithesis to himself. So quiet and solemn and bored, but Shanks have never seen him surround himself with people of a similar nature. The people he lets trail him are people so rowdy and curious, climbing life freely like it’s a large dogwood in bloom.

The base of his palm sneers a sharp pain, Shanks grimaces and squints at it. Another glass gut, with blood bubbling up — Perona swept her shattered plates into a trash can then swept herself out of the room. She hadn’t done her best work, leaving thumb-sized and smaller gleaming shards of glass on the floor. Shanks is on his knees, cleaning them up with his hand. He sweeps the glass into a pile with the side of his hand, then curls the glass into the base of his palm before meandering over to dump it into the trash can. There are four more people around now, and at least two of those four scramble around impulsively enough to cut their feet.

Everyone split rather quickly after Anchor left. Crocodile bit his cigar in two, all tense by the door, before he made the break for his condo. He was hunched at the shoulders and grinding his teeth, and though he hid it well, he took breath after preparing breath before he shot out into the rain. Some odd fellow.

Mihawk’s still around here somewhere; he pitters in and out of the common area just to fuss over pie cooling in a tin on a dish towel. Then he leaves to the library on the upper level, probably.

Shanks winces again — another glass cut. He doesn’t need to do this, really. Mihawk loomed over him and said he could call Perona in to finish the job. Shanks waved him off, humming to him about it being fine. He just needs something to do, something slow and tedious to eat away his brain, because he’s anxious when he’d rather be bored.

Anchor is here. Anchor is here and he shouldn’t be, and he won’t look at Shanks for longer than a few heartbeats, and he’s still a bright and beaming force but it had been easy to spot the tiny twist and crease of his brow. Anchor is here, and that means he’s trapped here, and he really shouldn’t have to be.

Damnit, he needs a drink. Or a concussion. Or anything to curb thoughts in his brain if only for a moment. He knows he’s fretting , he knows he shouldn’t force a mile out of an inch of a furrowed brow, it’s just — he’d hate to do wrong by Luffy.

Light flickers from the window, trailed by more snarling thunder. The door clicks a few beats later and two people wander into the room. Shanks pops up from the floor, dumping the last few shards into the trash and pressing his hand on the hip of his pants to quell the blood from the tiny cuts.

He glances over to the door. The ginger is clambering in, all tousled by the storm. Her hair drips and soaks, and by her feet is the creature. The tanuki?

“Nami, right?” Shanks works his way around the kitchen island. The ginger stops her scanning of the room to look right at him, eyes narrowed.

“Yes,” she says, slow. Maybe cautious.

Shanks points to a sanded, wooden door across the room, “That’s a bathroom,” he says, grinning in a far-reaching attempt to be amicable, “there’s towels in there, if you wanna dry off,”

Nami follows his point, head turning slowly. Her hands are in her pockets, and she rolls her shoulders briefly before nodding, “Thank you,”

Shanks hums and pulls himself up on a stool of the kitchen island while she fetches the towels. He’s turned halfway to the door, which is clattering with the wind against its frame, so he sees Nami nab two towels and wrap the tanuki in one. She scrunches her hair with the other, then dabs her face.

“Where is everyone?” Nami asks. She sheds her short, apricot-colored jacket and hangs it up on a nearby hook. Underneath is a cream shirt, and the cut of the cloth matches the cargo pants bunching up around her boots. She’s reaching into one of the pants’ pockets to grab something.

A notebook, Shanks realizes. A small leatherback notebook being flipped open to a water-spotted page.

“Uh… library, condo, and who-knows-where,” he counts the locations off with his fingers. Nami crosses over to the kitchen island and she sits on the stool farthest from him.

“Hm,” Nami mutters. She takes out a pen from the same pocket and clicks it once, then taps it on a drier patch of paper to test it. With a satisfied nod, she turns her head to Shanks. Her eyes are cold and unblinking, maybe like the clear scale that covers a snake's eyes. Shanks drums his hand on the table.

“So—”

“So!” Nami slams her wrist down on the table, ready to write, “What all have you tried?”

Shanks blinks, his smile faltering a tiny amount, “Uh— tried?”

The girl narrows her eyes, “What have you tried to escape?”

There’s a tiny, nail-shaped divot carved into the soft top-layer of the table. It’s a result of fidgety fingers, — Shanks draws his hand over to the divot and continues carving through the wood with gnawed down nails. “Working on an escape already?” he asks, tilting his head slightly.

Nami squints further, pulling her head backwards with a curling frown. “What else would I be doing?”

Shanks frowns too, but he tries to be gentle about it. 

“What are your friends doing?” What’s Luffy doing?

Nami snorts, face falling flat, “Napping,” she huffs. She lifts her left hand and rests it underneath her chin.

Shanks can’t help it — he laughs with his head tilted back. It bubbles up from his chest and curdles out his throat in a burst of emotion that burrows deeper than simple amusement; an expression of relief. It’s such a jolly bark of soul that, had it not been for his hand holding firmly the edge of the table, he would have toppled over on his tipping-back chair.

Nami doesn’t laugh, and though it’s clear her nerves are high wound and fraying, she doesn’t so much as squint. Shanks laughs a little more, it trails to a halt, withering as Nami stares further. Shanks clears his throat.

What all have they tried? Shanks only knows what he tried, and what others tried in his stay here, but the escape attempts likely stretch farther back than his stay.

“Ah, well, you heard how I jumped,” he starts, trying out an easy smile as Nami scribbles down in her book. Shanks rolls his shoulders, and thinks maybe he can make her more comfortable with a little tale. “It’s a funny story, how it happened, actually. I was on the floor just above this one, some two days into my stay, and I was—”

He cuts himself off, because he sees Nami freeze up and collect her book tightly in her hands. She’s drumming her nails on the leather of the cover, and it’s quite the soft and soothing sound. He’s always enjoyed the sounds of tapping, though some seem to find the noise pretty irksome, which Shanks doesn’t get. Honestly, he puffs out a soft sigh at the tapping, and re-calms his center.

It’s as he’s drawing his next breath that he realizes why Nami tensed.

“Please, Red-Hair,” Mihawk’s been in the doorframe behind him for a minute, maybe less or maybe longer. Sometimes he just looms. “She doesn’t need to hear how you got there, just what you did.”

Mihawk crosses into the room, circling around the table, but phantom pinpricks of eyes stay on Shank’s back.

He’s back to fussing at the pie — gives it a few subtle scowls and pokes at the pan it's in. Shanks takes another look at Nami, still tense, and finally registers the impatient air behind her eyes. She doesn’t care for stories, then.

Shanks huffs, flopping over to lean against his arm. “No-fun audience,” he mutters, and wishes he could pull off a petulant pout without looking an ounce more insane than he already does. Instead he watches Mihawk scowl at the pie again, “Hey— what are you doing anyway?”

“The ghost girl made a pie,” he answers, voice a breezy soft. His focus doesn’t waver, encapsulated in the simple movement of checking the temperature, “But, naturally, she forgot it was in the oven. I was keeping an eye on it.”

“Hm,” Shanks hums, but he doesn’t really care. He’s just waiting for—

“It’s cooled well enough, should either of you want some.”

—an offer. Shanks grins, “Gladly!”

Nami raises her hand in a polite dismissal, smile tense and showing no teeth. She’s opened her notebook again, and is wriggling her pen back and forth between her fingers. Occasionally, she fumbles it and it clatters on the table. Shanks listens to the clatters, and the soft clinks of plates and silverware, until a slice of apple pie and a dainty little fork is settled in front of him.

He takes a quick bite before remembering — “Thanks!”

Mihawk barely even hums, just circles the table again, with all the weird and gliding movements of a vulture. He approaches Nami, but keeps a polite, if not excessive, distance from her. “You wanted a list of all we’ve tried?”

“Yes,” Nami huffs, “that’s what I came back here for.”

“And that dog of yours?” Mihawk presses, “what’d he come in here for?”

Shanks swivels around on the barstool, but there’s no dog in the room. Nami had come into the room with the tanuki, but they’ve evidently wandered off.

Nami stills the fidgets of her pen and drags her eyes to the hallway entrance, “He’s a reindeer,” she mutters, and says it like it’s second hand, “and he wanted to explore,”

Mihawk hums again, a disinterested note. There’s a beat, and then he reaches out his hand, all slow-like, in a non-obtrusive ‘give it here’ motion. Shanks watches without blinking. Nami pauses for just one nervous moment before she hands over the pen and notebook. Mihawk scribbles in it, his chicken scratch cursive, perhaps writing the list of escapes. The jump attempts, the climbing, the punching and cutting and sneaking about. 

There’s been a dip in escape attempts, a mellowing in morale. Nobody says it, half of them are too proud to say anything, but it’s been a while, and maybe things are starting to feel bleak. All the rain and their minimal sun is anything but helpful — at least not for Shanks, he’s always enjoyed the spring without the showers.

Perona is the most vocally, dismally upset. Complaining and hissing and crying out at every inconvenience — it’s gross here, it’s lonely here, you’re all so awful, I miss Moria, I want to go home. It’s on loop like a fucked up dial. Shanks was once sympathetic, and that pity still twinges every time she cries, but it’s grown small and cold. She’s noisy in all the obnoxious ways, and she complains and suddenly Shanks remembers he’s stuck too. He’s not with his crew, he’s not on the seas. He’s been stuck with nobody he particularly likes, and fuck it, he’s a little damn lonely. None of the den-dens on anyone's person have been able to grasp a signal beyond the tower, either.

But the apple pie is good. And the cabinets are never empty so long as he asks. So. Little things, cold comforts though they are.

It’s a long while before Mihawk stops writing — they really did try just about everything they could think of — and pulls the pen delicately back, holding it motionless. His eyes flicker over the page in small movements, and then he softly closes them as he tries to recall anything he might have missed.

“You got the jumping?” Shanks asks, shovelling another forkful of pie into his mouth.

Mihawk’s expression pinches, which is something monumental to witness because there’s rarely ever movement in that face. “Of course I did,”

Shanks nods. “Perona’s little astral projection attempt?”

“Yes,”

“Crocodile trying to climb down?”

Nami’s face crinkles, almost like it’s trying to be amused, before she schools it back into caution. Shanks counts it for something.

“You getting frustrated and trying to cut the wall with Yor—”

“Your input is not helpful,” Mihawk finally interrupts, sliding both the pen and the notebook back to their owner, “and I did not get frustrated, I was just covering all the bases.”

If he weren’t such a vampire, Shanks thinks Mihawk’s ears would flush. But of course, Mihawk doesn’t feel such unimportant things as embarrassment or bashfulness. There’s not a flicker of anything human in his eyes as he stalks over to Shanks and recovers his plate. He scrapes the uneaten half of the pie into the trash can, before settling the dishware into the sink and turning on the water.

“Hey!” Shanks throws his arm out and frowns, “I wasn’t done!”

“Apologies,” Mihawk says, sounding about as unapologetic as a rock that just pelted someone's face. He rolls up his smooth, white sleeves and grabs a sponge, “You were talking so much, so I assumed you were.”

Again, Nami’s face twists like it’s trying to rebel and smile. She overcompensates her resistance and pushes her mouth to frown as she mulls over the writing in the book. Her hair falls with the angle of her head; she squints. Her shoulders slowly draw closer to her body and her head draws closer to the page, as though she’s working really hard to figure something out.

Shanks is just about to make some comment about Mihawk’s handwriting, because who writes in cursive anymore? — but a startled presence bursts in from the hall, hooves skittering.

“Uhm… Nami?” the tanuki calls, though Shanks doesn’t think tanuki’s have hooves. His voice is barely above a whisper, so strained and small, that Shanks has to turn in his chair to check the expression on the little guy’s face. Just as wide-eyed and ghost-stricken as he sounds.

“Yes, Chopper?” Nami gets up swiftly, notebook abandoned, and pitters gently over to him. She crouches and hugs her knees; the look in her eyes is patient.

Shoulders raking higher and higher, Chopper glances around the room. He looks to Mihawk first, who is loading the dishware onto the drying rack and supposedly not listening. Chopper looks at Shanks next, and Shanks offers a sugary smile. Chopper rubs his hand-hooves together.

“I, uh… I hear Luffy and Zoro approaching…” he mumbles, “but Zoro’s footsteps don’t sound right.”

Shanks, because he’s turned his interest to the front door, sees Mihawk lift his head up. He keeps his eyes on the towel he’s drying his hands with (excessively). The movement itself was subtle, but he’s angled his head to better see the door. Shanks closes his eyes.

In and out. He takes two slow and deep breaths, then reaches out into the life of the world to see if he can filter in Luffy and Zoro. He does, of course he can. One sweet and one sour apple shuffling across a bridge with some level of difficulty, and not unnoticeable levels of irritation from both parties.

Shanks opens his eyes and frowns.

“What, do you think Zoro might be hurt?” Nami asks, pressing a thin line of her lips and effectively smushing the blood out of them. There’s this pensive relaxation of her furrowed brow, like she might know something but isn’t pleased about it.

“Maybe,” Chopper says, voice still small. His jerk up suddenly and his posture follows, and he looks brighter now, “but at the end of the hall there’s an infirmary! One cot, pretty cozy, and a good amount of decent supplies, so if there’s anything wrong I can fix it!”

Nami ruffles the space between Chopper’s antler buds, grinning. “That’s our doctor,”

And then the door swings open with enough force that a few hinges snap, and Zoro is howling curses like a cat in a bath.

“Luffy— ow— you gotta learn to just leave some things!” he shouts, “I’m fine!”

Luffy’s face is a determined set of lines, brow scrunched and frown severe. His eyes flash with something vehement. “Zoro doesn’t fall over. Ever.” and then those eyes narrow, and it’s not as cute when it’s not a baby face.

Right now, Luffy’s got Zoro’s arm slung over his shoulders, and he’s dragging the man — whose jaw is locked in a furious show of bared teeth — towards the couch. Luffy barely strains to push the man into the cushions, and then spins around, scanning the room.

(His eyes skip rapidly over Shanks).

“Chopper!” Luffy points when he finds him, then in a long arc swings his arm to point at Zoro, “fix him!”

It’s a demand, but it sounds so well-meaning that Shanks barely registers it as such. Chopper yelps and scurries over to the couch. He’s got about a million tools he’s conjured from seemingly nowhere gripped in his hooves; he hops-to like a soldier under orders.

Shanks thinks maybe he should intervene at some point, but he’s about as glued to his chair as Mihawk is to his dish towel, still finding things to dry with it. Besides, Nami is rising to her feet to follow Chopper, and she seems like she carries most of the responsibility of her group.

So Shanks just watches in silence — a silence Benn would call him on, because Shanks doesn’t tend to just watch and he certainly isn’t silent. But Benn isn’t here, so nobody is calling him on anything.

Chopper pokes and prods at Zoro, who’s growing more and more agitated. He’s hiding it well, or as well as he can, but he’s obviously in significant amounts of pain and pain tends to muck up a person's ability to pretend they’re fine. Luffy has clambered up to sit on the back of the couch. He’s got his arms crossed, and a foot is pressed square in the middle of Zoro’s chest because the swordsman won’t stop gunning for all the escape attempts he can.

Away from it all, but only by a few hovering steps, Nami is watching like this isn’t a common occurrence. Shanks doesn’t know if it’s Chopper's fumbling movements, the fact that Zoro is at all in pain, or Luffy’s insistence on fretting, but this scene is alarmingly out-of-place.

There’s a soft schwip as Mihawk slides a large knife into the knife block by the sink. He’s run out of things to dry, and he knows it too as hangs the dishtowel back onto the oven handle. His shoulders move up and down with a deep breath and then he spins on his heel, looking cross and a little wary, and quite intent on breaking up the scene.

He makes a move for the couch, but doesn’t make it past the kitchen island, because Zoro roars out: “Okay, enough! ” and the room falls really, really still.

The time for intervention is long overdue. Shanks slides out of his chair and hustles to stop Mihawk from moving any closer to the couch. He links their arms together and spins Mihawk right back to the kitchen counter. Mihawk must be relieved by this, because there’s no resistance as he’s led, and if he really didn’t want to be moved he wouldn’t be.

The backwater crew are talking again — or, listening while Nami rattles off questions — so Shanks feels he doesn’t have to whisper when he talks to Mihawk, just speak in low tones.

"Forgive my crudeness," he starts, staring Mihawk right in his bug eyes, "but you intervening would be about as helpful as… uh—" he fumbles his hand through the air, trying to rake some kind of comparison from his brain, "—as putting a gift bow on a shipwreck."

Mihawk quirks a brow, Shanks continues. “How about you just…” he chews his lip, glances over at Luffy, and gets an idea, “find one big plate and put about half of the apple pie on it. I’ll do the damage control, yeah?”

Neither of them move, because Mihawk just blinks two slow and deliberate blinks. Shanks wonders when he got to the point of knowing Mihawk that he could translate silences into sentences, because he knows what’s being asked and appropriately adds: “I promise the pie is relevant.”

He pats Mihawk on the bicep and swings back around, sauntering into the fray with a grin he hopes screams appeasement.

“Okie-dokie, let’s sort this out. Nami, to answer all of your questions—” he has no idea what she asked “—I’m sure there’s more comfortable places to do this than this ugly old couch. Like—”

Chopper's little ears swivel to point straight up. Up close, it’s easy to find the gesture damn adorable. “Oh!” he gasps, and wrinkles his little snout in some kind of excitement, “there’s an infirmity here! It's small and only has one bed, but it’s so cozy and it has so many things!”

Shanks snaps his fingers and points, “Little guy’s got it! So how about this: I can walk with Chopper as he takes Zoro to the infirmary, help him get his stuff set up. Nami, you can…”

And then he realizes he hasn’t thought quite this far. She’s got this sour citrus kind of frown and defiance and fire laced throughout all the muscles on her face, and she looks impressively intimidating.

There’s a clunk as a plate is set onto the island, then a clink as a fork is settled atop it. Shanks follows the spin of Luffy’s head as he turns to see what’s been served.

“Perona has shown a significant interest in medicine recently,” Mihawk fills in, “I’m sure she’d be delighted to sit in on this, if you would go fetch her. She’s in the second lounge.”

For somebody so adamant on being alone, he does teamwork like dancing. Nami nods, going a little pale, probably from being addressed by someone who doesn’t dress and smell like a binge-drinker.

“Perfect!” Shanks grins, and points to the hallway, “second lounge’ll be on your left, two doors, down that-a-way.”

Finally, he turns to Luffy, and feels his smile drop into something less forced. “Anchor, how about you take a breath, yeah? You seem pretty wound up. The pie on the table is for you.”

Luffy scurries over to the table, leaving Zoro free to sit up. He shakes through the whole movement.

Nami’s face is still sour. “How is pie gonna help?”

Shanks shoves his hand in his pocket, “How does pie not help?”

That seems to be reason enough for Luffy, at least, because he jumps up into the chair where the pie has been served. There’s a brief, barely noticeable pause — a tiny hesitation before he starts munching, but Shanks catches it and frowns.

“Right!” Shanks spins to look at the couch, “does that sound workable?”

There are a few amicable nods and mutters.

“Okay! Let’s break!”

But nobody moves. Nami shuffles on her feet like she’s amenable to moving, but she ultimately doesn’t. Everyone keeps flicking their gazes to the kitchen island.

They’re waiting for Luffy’s go-ahead, Shanks realizes, and feels his smile soften further. It really is a good group Luffy has found himself with.

The boy in question grins, bits of pie and filling splattered across his teeth, and waves a flippant hand.

“Break!” Luffy repeats, and says nothing else, which could be because there’s uneaten pie fresh in front of his face, but the silence sets a note wrong in Shanks’ head.

The room sets alight with movement; Nami clicks out of the room in a tizzy. Shanks thinks he should probably hop into the fray. He joins Chopper in dragging Zoro off the couch, who only briefly grits his teeth and scowls before allowing the movement to happen. It feels like scruffing a cat.

“So, break it down for me” Shanks starts once they’re in the hallway. The infirmary isn’t too far away, just a few yards, but he feels inclined to fill the silence anyway. “What’s got you so unsteady?”

Zoro levels him with a glare so cold and familiar, Shanks can only think: holy shit, this is Mihawk without the stick up his ass. Then, briefly, Shanks wonders if he had managed to corral Mihawk into sticking with him, if he would have turned out more like this? Quiet and stubborn and blunt still, but looser and more human. Angry instead of bored; anger is a devil, but nothing kills a man more painfully than apathy.

“Don’t feel like saying,” Zoro replies, “I don’t really trust people who are too friendly,”

“You trust Luffy, though,” Chopper says, clopping along by Zoro’s shin.

“Luffy is… joyful, not necessarily kind.”

Shanks thinks of Luffy’s fire, and the temper tantrums and the gut-instinct distrust that triggered narrowed eyes and spitting on shoes, and thinks Zoro is quite on point. Joyful, not kind. Shanks nods along.

“Why are you still holding my arm?” Zoro adds, scrunching up his nose at Shanks.

‘Holding’ is a bit of a stretch, if you ask Shanks. Their arms are more so linked, elbows hooked on elbows like they’re dancing the do-si-do. Only, both of them are facing the same direction. He linked them soon after Zoro stood from the couch, because he swayed and blanched like he might collapse.

“Do you wanna walk by yourself?” Shanks asks, trying for casual. Ultimately, it comes off a bit patronizing, and he and Zoro both grimace.

“Of course I do!” Zoro snaps, “give me my arm back!”

For a moment, Shanks wants to say something along the lines of ‘said I, to the sea beast’, but figures this isn’t the kind of crowd where that joke will land. Shanks isn’t even sure if they’ll know what it means, he doesn’t know what Luffy tells his friends.

Zoro wriggles his arm free and, because the moment of rest he had on the couch must have helped him, walks steadily. Granted, it’s only about five paces as they enter the infirmary, and then he sits down on something of a medical cot. He looks around the room, and Shanks takes the opportunity to do the same.

He’s never actually been in here before. To him, it’s always been the dark room at the end of the hall, the one with the door always open.

The room is lonely. Dark still, but Chopper is fumbling with the oil lamp on the bedside table, so that dark begins to heat up. There’s a small window on the far wall of the room, and a twin bed–medical cot with pale sheets to Shanks’ right. There’s a draft and a moisture in the room that must make those sheets damp, but beside the bed is a stool, so at least a patient doesn’t have to sit alone. Shanks thinks sitting in here alone, with the pittering rain and the scratched wood floors, would feel like a wailing violin. The most human and pained sound an instrument can make.

Choppers shuts a cabinet door. There are cabinets also across the room, and from what Shanks can glimpse before the door shuts fully, they’re full of all things medical. Chopper has tugged out a few things: a stethoscope and a thermometer, and a few other things probably ending in ‘scope’ or ‘meter’ that Shanks can’t identify.

Nami is nearing the door. Her steps aren’t audible, but Shanks can sense it, so he sidesteps to give her room to enter. She knocks lightly before leaning in through the doorway and finding Zoro.

“Hey, Zoro, um…” she glances quickly at Shanks, barely attempting any subtlety, “are you actually okay with Perona sitting in on this?”

It’s quiet in the room for barely a hair of a second, but it’s long enough for Shanks to think ‘shit, she’s right’ and find a new insecurity in his decision making — and that’s a new, bristling feeling. Questioning himself is like finding an apple in an orange tree; it shouldn’t happen, and yet somehow it did.

There’s been this gnawing pressure to get things right that’s settled recently along the curve of Shanks' spine. It’s getting heavier, like smoke.

Zoro shrugs. “So she can see how totally fine I am?” he asks, and shoots a sideways glance at Chopper. The doctor is unphased.

“Nah, I don’t care,” Zoro then says. Nami nods, then urges Perona in with a lazy gesture.

She’s curled in on herself, and for once is demure. A tight lipped smile of awkward pleasantry freezes her face. Shanks watches as her eyes scan the room for a place to sit.

“Chopper, do you need the stool?” Nami asks.

Chopper shakes his head, still organizing his weapons of mass healing. Nami catches Perona’s eyes and makes a gesture that puts Perona in motion. She clutches the stool and moves it to the corner of the room, not saying anything. She’s eerie when she’s quiet, maybe because it's genuine.

“I’m going to see Luffy,” Nami adds, then she’s gone. Rapidly, she fades down the hall.

Shanks thinks he should probably do something too. The window says it’s late in the evening, but not late enough to be night. Still, his condo sounds comfortable now.

“I’m gonna—” he throws his hand in some vague gesture, “—take five, I think.”

It’s quiet. Shanks turns to leave.

A thought hits him, though.

“Oh, but Zoro?”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know if I’m on the mark, but…” he watches Zoro’s face, squinting, “don’t kill yourself over a little embarrassment. You’re fine to be injured.”

Zoro is hunching in on himself. It’s subtle, but it’s enough that Shanks can see it.

“Mihawk doesn’t care, you know.”

That does it. Zoro’s spine straightens, and he perches in that new posture with wide eyes. Or, eyes as wide as he’d let them go. He’s not an expressive one, this swordsman. Shanks is good at reading stone-faced swordsmen though, so he forges on.

“He doesn’t care that you’re not well, it’s just a thing that happens.”

“I’m well,” Zoro corrects, the words spitting out.

“In anycase,” Shanks leans against the doorframe, “he likes you enough not to scrutinize too harshly.”

Chopper is by far done with his organizing, but he still shuffles with the tools. By the swivel of his ears it’s easy to tell he’s intrigued.

“He likes me,” Zoro drawls with more doubt than a skeptic. “He said that?” he asks, like he expects a denial.

Shanks grins, “Not directly, but he talked about you once or twice. That means he probably, definitely likes you.”

“He talks about Zoro?” Chopper asks. His eyes are blown so wide stars could sit in them. They grow wider, though, as he panics and brings his hooves to cover his snout. Zoro tosses a glare over to the reindeer.

“Oh, yes.” Shanks says. Everyone is getting riled up, but it feels like a good kind of riled up, so Shanks can’t help but keep grinning. “He has a high wine tolerance, but a few beers in and he’s quite the gossip.”

The flashing eyes and the shuffling Shanks thinks can equate to wide-gaping mouths and eyebrows up to the sky. He drums his hands on the doorframe, the pushes to leave. Chopper needs to work; the fun Shanks is having is never going to be as important as making sure an injury gets treated, so he leaves.

Still, he grins.

Chapter Text

The evening settled quietly after that moment. Shanks just missed Luffy on his way out, the boy was hustled out of the building by the girl they call Nami, despite his most vocal protests.

Crocodile didn’t return that night either — though it’s likely he will this morning, looking for something more sustainable than whatever the lone coffee maker of his cottage can provide him.

He saw Luffy and ran, that’s what Mihawk gleaned. He stayed about as long as a man would to preserve his dignity, then he left.

Mihawk doesn't care about whatever trivial conflict exists between Crocodile and the little feist. It happened in Alabasta — he reads the newspapers — that’s all that he knows, and all he wants to know. Conflicts are best enjoyed from afar, where you can see the action, but waste no energy on the details.

Zoro stayed overnight. Chopper was in and out of his room, snipping responses to his complaints Mihawk couldn’t hear. Mihawk stayed late too, but only just until the moon yawned at the top of the sky.

He’s in the kitchen again this morning. He’s just finished chopping another banana for the fruit bowl, the last in a long list of assorted breakfast preparations. Flours and sugars and syrups, bowls and whisks, a mat underneath it all. Perona likes to cook in the mornings but she doesn’t like to prepare, and Mihawk rather likes not dealing with squabbling, hungry folk, so he fights half the battle and cuts the fruit.

The door rattles and slams behind Crocodile. He shuffles his boots along the splintering floor and shrugs his heavy wool coat into his arms. Mihawk washes his hands quietly as Crocodile hangs up the coat, then uselessly attempts to squeeze the water from some of his clothes.

“Morning,” Crocodile grumbles when Mihawk shuts the tap off.

Mihawk hums, drying his hands on a dish towel. Crocodile stalks towards the kitchen table, eyeing the ingredients set out. His steps are heavy, his body hobbles with an uneven gait.

“Is anybody else awake?” He asks. His eyes flit around the room in a subtle, shivering movement.

“I don’t know how long children sleep,” Mihawk dismisses; he knows what Crocodile is actually asking. These newcomers exist on their own schedule, and like any creature with a new element in its ecosystem, Crocodile is on guard. Mihawk, for one, is never fully off his guard, but not so aware that he cannot function. This is a new variable for him too, and he notices, but ultimately he doesn’t care.

“Some did stay in the infirmary," he offers as an afterthought. He places the fruit bowl in the fridge, then sidesteps out of the kitchen so Crocodile can get by.

“How come?” Crocodile asks. He catches the fridge before it closes, tugging it at the lip with his hook.

Mihawk watches him narrow his eyes and peer into the fridge until he finds what he’s looking for; he pulls out the eggs. Mihawk doesn’t take those out; when Perona will appear is often uncertain, so it’s best not to risk spoiling anything.

Mihawk walks away, then, bored of the conversation. He has a book on geology and sword smithing dog-eared in the library. He’s left it on the table, he muses as he makes his way up the stairs.

The library is not cozy, but it is trying to be. There are no corners; the room is all rounded out, finished with cobblestone walls and flooring. Looking in from the front, the bookshelves are to the left, and a cluster of chairs and two couches — outfitted with small tables by the arms — make up a lounge to the right. On the far right wall is a long counter with only one sink, a stove, and a tea kettle, as well as two flowers dead in their planters. Mihawk is sure he can salvage them.

Right now, he’s working at the soil. There are dead leaves and scraps of fruit and eggshells sit in a tiny box in the kitchen, composting.

Ultimately, this room is not cozy. Rather, it actively fails that goal: it’s cold and liminal and uniquely off-putting. This is why Mihawk likes it.

His book is on the counter, it's not where he left it. As he gathers it up and moves to a couch, though, he really finds he doesn’t care. He’s getting older, his memories move.

The contents of his book are as such: blood before sword. To make a sword, one needs steel. The type of steel may vary, but the process of making it is mostly unchanged. Steel, of course, is not mined and instead created using carbon and iron. Both of these are mined — the carbon comes from metallurgical coal.

Mining is an expensive industry, and industries breed greed, so corporations take shortcuts. It’s cheaper to outsource mining labor in areas of conflict. Labor costs are lower (if at all anything) when war is tearing apart a country. Corporations aligned with a government may instigate conflict in resource-rich nations, and enslave civilians and refugees to work regardless of consequences. There are no unions in war, because there is no union in war.

So people die, and there’s an infinite muzzle keeping the information hushed. Any one person would not know of a conflict in one of those countries to begin with, let alone any exploitation. The countries picked are the small and hungry ones, the ones people don’t care about.

It’s disgusting, but swords are in high demand. It’s catastrophic, but there’s a long list of problems thought to be worse that need addressing sooner. Mihawk’s jaw twitches as he thumbs the page, but he turns it anyway.

He reads until the newcomers arrive. He knows they’re here, because the noise level drastically increases. Then Shanks arrives, and any hope of focusing on reading quickly decays.

Mihawk is staring at the dead flowers when he hears voices drifting up the stairs.

“The bathroom is across the room! Across the room! How did you manage to get here? And why are you still moving? Stop!”

It’s the ghost girl, she’s squealing at a pair of footsteps as they limp up the stairs. Mihawk does not see who it is, does not bother to try. They do not respond to Perona, just continue up the stairs until they reach the top, body loose and eyes bewildered.

Ah, Roronoa.

Perona floats up behind him. “Nami is evil for putting me up to this.”

Zoro whirls on her, glaring. “Nami’s evil? You weaponize depression and she’s evil?”

Perona settles on the ground beside him. Her feet make no sound as she lands, the frilly pink socks absorb it all.

“You were just calling her a witch!” She narrows her eyes and throws out her arms, “like ten minutes ago!”

Zoro appears confused to such a degree that it can only be genuine. His eyebrows are furrowed, his head is tilted, his hands still.

“And?”

Perona makes a noise that’s almost a scream.

They haven’t seen him yet. Quietly, he notes the page number. Loudly, he snaps the book shut, so that their attention jumps to him.

Perona squeaks and levitates, then puts her hands on Zoro’s shoulders and tries to duck behind him.

“You were reading!” She rushes, before Zoro’s open mouth can form words. Mihawk nods.

“Sorry!” She adds, as if it isn’t her habit to always be up here with him. “He got lost and wandered up here—“ she pokes Zoro in the cheek “— because he’s an idiot! Just a big idiot!”

“Oi!” Zoro snaps. She keeps poking him in the cheek, so he leans over to try and bite her. Mihawk blinks.

“Did you clean up, yet?” He asks.

Perona halts, hand freezing mid-poke, face folding into a frown. “What?”

Zoro is still mostly quiet, he keeps his eyes on the world around him, but not on any one person. He’s standing unobtrusively, but his presence is obvious. He doesn’t seem to know if he wants to exist or not.

“Did you clean up downstairs?” Mihawk presses, folding his hands together.

Perona’s feet touch the ground again. This time they do make a noise: a soft thump as she slumps.

“…no,”

Mihawk barely quirks a brow. “You should do that, then.”

Perona nods like she’s trying to shake her brain out of her skull. There’s this small squeak that she makes as she turns around and leaves.

Zoro is moving to follow her. Mihawk lines his book up neatly with the corner of the coffee table, using the palm of his hand to stabilize it.

“Roronoa, how are you feeling?” Mihawk asks. He rises and takes two measured steps over to the counters.

Zoro freezes, standing still enough that Mihawk can make out the minute trembling of his entire body.

“Fine,” he snaps, not turning his head. His head tilts, though, like he wants too. He has his motions under control, but not his intentions.

Mihawk nods, though Zoro can’t see it. He moves over to the cabinet, to the flower, and stares at the bend of its browning stem. He salvaged some seeds before the petals had fully wilted, they’re now wrapped in a paper bag and settled snugly on a bookshelf in his cottage.

“Come here,” Mihawk beckons Zoro over with a sweeping gesture, like the folding of a bird's wing.

Zoro hesitates, but it's for a sparse few seconds that ordinary eyes would not catch. His walk is stubborn. Everything about him is stubborn. Mihawk takes a half-step backwards, giving him the space to approach the flower.

The petals are dotting the dry dirt in the planter. Zoro eyes the thing inquisitively. Mihawk can see the interest spark, and then die, and a frown creases his mouth.

“What’s up?”

Mihawk nods to the pot. “What do you think of this?”

Zoro squints at the plant. His eyes dart over to Mihawk exactly twice, and it’s clear he’s deliberating on whether this is a test or if Mihawk has gone some kind of insane.

“The flower is dying,” he says finally. His spine straightens and his back shivers with the movement. It’s not a nervous movement — He looks plenty confident of his answer — just a weak one, something that says his muscles aren’t quite working.

Shaping is a concept in psychology that involves slowly guiding a creature into doing what you want by breaking it down into steps. That was a vague definition given by another book in this library, now back on its shelf.

Mihawk hums, nodding again towards the pot. “What does it tell you?”

More silence fills up the space. Thunder rolls across the sky in a calm tumble, following the dim lightning. By all assumptions, the storm should be moving farther away. Yet even with the changes in thunder, the rain never dissipates.

“Is it supposed to tell me something?” Zoro finally gives up.

He’s idly thumbing the edge of the counter. His gaze is sharp as he stares down at the flower, and there’s this little twinge along his brow that keeps twitching. He appears like a large, hairless cat, attempting to bristle its fur.

“A flower has been here long enough to grow, then die,” the petals were a lovely gold once, just two week ago. They are browning and crinkling now. “Someone was here long enough to grow a flower, and someone was gone long enough to let it die.”

“Someone was here before?” Zoro looks around, eyes a little wide. “Where are they?”

“Judging by the flower, and the flower alone, they disappeared,”

Something clatters from downstairs, and Perona shouts a two syllable name that Zoro seems to register. He narrows his eyes to the doorway, but stays where he is.

“Could somebody else here have planted it?”

Mihawk shakes his head, “No one else has been here long enough for that flower to grow.” Zoro nods, eyes still at the doorway. “A black-eyed Susan, it’s called. They take a little over a month to grow — at the least.”

Zoro tosses him a glance, then appears to immediately regret the decision. Both his arms move up and hover around his middle, unsure where to settle.

“I garden,” Mihawk admits. He lets the silence stretch on for a little longer than Zoro would be comfortable with, then nods to the doorway. “Go see what’s broken now,”

It’s meant as an out. Zoro nods once again, and shoves his way out of the library. His shadow fills the cracks in the cobblestone like water, seeping in and flooding out as he flees.

*** 

Mihawk spends the next five days generally avoiding the newcomers; they’re noisy and entertaining, and thus not the kind of people he should hang around. The ghost girl gravitates towards them. Shyly, at first, but she’s finding her feet. This is mostly good: children around her age preoccupy her, and she doesn’t spend as much time trailing him.

He’s content to continue spending most of his time in the library, where people don’t follow him. He’s planted new flowers in both planters, but saved the scraps of the old ones. It’s futile to press dead leaves, but he does it anyway, he might as well.

This morning, Mihawk is the one making breakfast. Perona didn’t want to today, and Shanks has this alarming talent for being able to cook everything decently except for breakfast food. There’s few people here willing to make food in the morning, so when all options are exhausted, Mihawk cooks. Mostly it’s to avoid any outbursts. People here grow cranky on empty stomachs.

He doesn’t mind cooking. The tedious nature of measuring, mixing, and waiting is one of the rhythmic patterns he enjoys. That, and the intricate designs of spider webs.

He started on a jam last night. Today, the air still smells faintly of strawberry, though it still mostly smells like rain. Mihawk pulls one full jar out of the fridge, and as he rises he catches a glimpse of the early-morning blue sky. It's timid through the trees, but the spots of light are brilliant like dragon scales.

He takes a few steps to the window. Perhaps just to watch the world, it’s an indecisive movement. 

The tea kettle shrieks out its whistle and he’s turning quickly on his heel to soothe it.

The English muffins have cooled enough. He cuts them and toasts two at a time. The feist and his crew are awake, hurtling to the common area at bridge-swinging speeds. It’s a presence always loud in Mihawk’s mind, along with Shanks and even Crocodiles. Perona is quiet though, for all her noise.

He flips the eggs and pulls the last pancake off of the skillet, and serves them on white plates to the empty air. He leaves the jam unscrewed, but the top still resting on the jar.

Mihawk is just serving the eggs when he feels it: a sharp sense, frantic and shrill. Like somebody is crying out, but at a frequency that can only ever hurt human ears.

Mihawk wanders out to the balcony.

There’s nothing to see from this high up, but now he can hear it: approaching gun shots, growing louder. Thunder crawls, but Mihawk can still hear the cracks. Twigs and other plants snap as somebody runs.

Two people, two people are running, and some forty are chasing.

Chapter Text

The castor plant is so potently toxic that it takes just six of its seeds to kill a man. They grow in tropical areas, places with year-round high temperatures, meaning they’re hard to find along the Grand Line. The winter seasons of summer islands have them, but only tropical summer islands, and that requires impeccable timing. They never have castor on the ship, though it’s always desired.

Which is why it’s totally cruel and totally sucks that there’s tons and tons of them on this island, and Buggy has to run right past them. His satchel thuds against his hip, dying for even just a leaf.

The guns, close as they are, crack louder than the wind that rackets in his ears. It’s wind that works with him, pushing against his back to move him faster — an unusual show of luck for him, and if he had the time, he’d pause to examine it.

It’s hard to run with the dead weight of a man slung over his shoulder. Even harder when Buggy's wound his arms across the man's back to hold him steady. It would be so much easier to just drop the weight, but carrying Ace is a moral obligation — at least now, given a new sliver of information Buggy is privy to.

Alvida veered away a good few yards back, but Buggy isn’t worried. She’ll still follow, somehow he’s sure, and they aren’t after her anyway.

They are, of course, after Ace. He’s unconscious and heavy as a lie, And still dressed in the torn rags of Impel Down, looking like a dead-weight zebra hoisted up into the air. Buggy isn’t wearing his prison getup, he corralled Alvida into bringing some clothes before she showed up as a getaway boat.

She hadn’t been interested in coming to get him — she’s opportunistic, and that wasn’t an opportunity — but he had been tired, double-crossed, and sick of the craze of inmates, so he hadn’t really been asking so much as telling. Something in his tone must have compelled her; she even brought the good pants.

There’s some jittery crackling of more guns, aimless but there, and Buggy scurries faster.

Who these folks are, Buggy doesn’t know. They came out of the seafoam and tailed them with all the efficiency of some well-evolved pursuit predator. Alvida (because it was ultimately her fault, despite what she will say) ended up crashing the boat onto the shore of this shitty island, and the chase moved to the land.

Buggy doesn’t think he can breathe all that well. It’s coming out all torn and rattle-like — tik-a-tik-tak! — and it hurts right in the sternum, painful enough to compare to the rips in his skin. He’s all bloody along the torso and back, where seastone blades and harsh kicks have wounded him.

Something is sounding from above. It’s hard to hear over the blood in his ears, but there’s something: ringing out from the treetops. Something distant and high-pitched, maybe like a bird.

Except Buggy hasn’t heard a single bird on this island. In the quiet moment before his pursuers docked, that’s the first thing he noticed: the utter lack of fauna.

He’s gaining ground on the pursuers somehow, but that’s just how his luck flips. Something will eventually balance it out, likely something worse. He doesn’t gain ground unless he’s going to fall through the floor.

“Up this way, quick!” the haggard gravel of Alvida’s vocal fry is singing from ahead of him. He dives toward the sound.

He doesn’t need his eyes for this, he’d close them if the ground wasn’t such a tangle of plants. Navigating by sound has always been his knack, before any of his others. If he hadn’t stumbled into the title of clown, he would’ve liked something perhaps related to a bat.

It becomes clear as he follows her, what she’s trying to show him. In the morning light, the pale light that barely breathes, the hollow base of a tree provides perfect cover.

Buggy dives towards it. He pulls a hand off to make a ruckus in the opposite direction in a bleak attempt to throw the chasers off his trail.

There’s an instant relief from the rain as he slides into the hollow. Alvida traipses more leisurely into the cover, almost dancing. There’s this smug smirk she’s wearing that scrunches up her face a bit like a muffin, and Buggy doesn’t know what she’s smug about, but he sticks his tongue out anyway.

He waits until he’s got his hand back on his wrist to shift Ace off his shoulder and bundle him into an easier carry.

“Look,” Alvida breathes, pointing her perfect nose upward.

“Why?” Buggy snaps on instinct, but he lifts his jaw anyway.

Stairs, generally, do not grow inside of trees. If they did, though, it would make sense for them to spiral like these ones do. Up and up and up beyond Buggy’s vision. Distantly, the voices in the trees start to make sense.

“This is a bad idea,” Buggy mutters. He hoists Ace up a little higher and takes a first step up the stairs.

“Sure they won’t follow?” Alvida asks

“Let’s just go,” he replies, scolding the knot in his gut.

***

At some point, when they can distantly see the top and no longer the bottom, Alvida huffs.

“Can you not smell that?” she snaps, scrubbing around her nose.

Recently, Buggy has learned of analogous features, and how different creatures can have different structures that perform the same function, so smell isn’t always connected to a nose. He decides not to hiss a defense of his nose because of this.

He raises an eyebrow, though, because there isn’t much to smell. “The rain?”

Alvida huffs again. “I am not smelling rain.”

Buggy does a weird don’t-jostle-Ace shrug, “Well I am. Get your senses together.”

She scoffs and mutters, “After all I did for you.”

Obviously, Buggy is not meant to hear that, but he pries anyway. “What have you done?”

“Dragged my ass to Impel Down? Got you away?”

Yeah, a lazy job at best.

“Oh! And…” she unclips the lock on her own bag and pries it open to reveal leaves upon leaves of castor plants and the ripe red capsules their seeds live in.

Buggy drops his jaw — seriously, it falls off. “You didn’t!” he gasps when his jaw comes back to his face. He pulls a gambler's grin.

Alvida shrugs just one shoulder. “I didn’t wanna hear you gripe about missing them later.”

“I lied,” he lies, “I definitely smell whatever you’re smelling. So gross.”

“Keep climbing,” Alvida says, though they never stopped. She’s smiling delicately.

The way the tree bends, the stairs have to get less steep the higher they climb, so the last stretch to the top is much easier than the prior trek. Buggy is still tired and wheezy, though, heaving windy breaths. They kept their sprinting pace up the stairs, because even though the guns and the angry shouts didn’t follow them here, Buggy does not want Ace to bleed out in his arms.

In fact, Buggy is moving so fast that his head slams into the ceiling when they hit the top, sending him stumbling back. The ceiling offered more than a little give when he hit it. He shakes himself and squints at the roof.

Trapdoor.

Alvida pushes up on the thing with just two fingers, gently cracking it open. The light is better up here, as is the way of rainforests. Even weird, somewhat pine rainforests. It trickles in, mixing with a warmer, fire-light most likely from a lamp. The light crosses Alvida’s face, and her eyes blaze.

“This is a bad idea,” she whispers, and launches the trapdoor fully open. Buggy watches her crawl out the opening, and waits for her to fully disappear before he follows.

The rain washes his face. It’s awkward maneuvering out such a small gap while holding someone, but he manages to wiggle up onto the floor without faceplanting.

He looks around, crouched and heaving, and curling Ace into his chest so the rain won’t get on his face. They’re on a balcony, one that wraps all the way around a treehouse of a building, with bridges attaching on all sides. The floor is slippery, so Buggy rises slowly. Alvida’s hand twitches like she’s going to help, but she’s distantly transfixed on something to Buggy’s right. Buggy turns to see what it is. 

There’s the soft glow of light from two windows and a door.

And Hawkeyes Mihawk is standing in front of that door, hands folded politely behind his back.

Buggy grins in that way animals do when backed into a corner. “...Hi there,”

“Hello,” Mihawk almost sounds patient as he dips his head in a nod, “would you like some pancakes?”

Buggy doesn’t get the chance to answer, or even process the fact that Dracule fucking Mihawk is offering him pancakes, because cacophony strikes. It’s thudding footsteps, and then it’s a garble of voices, and then it’s the screech of a name Buggy has thought too many times now:

“Ace!”

And then it’s that damn rubber hand gripping into the wood of the treehouse, preparing to spring the rubber brat attached forward.

Luffy launches. Buggy waits until the very last moment to sidestep him; trajectory is harder to change late in the game, and Luffy crashes into the house wall.

He springs back up quickly though, and whirls on Buggy. His eyes are dark and wide. That’s not the right expression for his face. He launches again.

Buggy just spins this time, holding Ace out of reach. “Paws off, you vulture!”

“What are you doing with Ace?”

Buggy is facing the rest of Luffy’s dingy crew now — or at least some of it. Zoro is braced, but isn’t he always? Nami is beside him, and she’s impassive, and that’s scary. He tries his grin.

Distantly more footsteps are coming from another direction. Hurried, but not racing.  Luffy and Buggy play a sort of keep-away with Ace until the footsteps grow close, and a rough voice calls out:

“What’s going on?”

And then: “Buggy?”

Shanks. Buggy doesn’t need to turn around to know that. He knows that voice, old as it has grown, and he knows that stupid worried tone, and he even knows those damn footsteps.

His chest, right then, shatters. The pieces scratch at his heart and compress his lungs with a sharp, sudden, and intimate rage. He starts to shake with it, feels the need to scream. The anger hurts so bad.

He says nothing.

Some other girl is with him, frivolous and floating. She putters around for a bit with wide eyes, before hovering over to Mihawk’s side, where she hesitates even more until she finds the conviction to shove her parasol above his head. There’s a tiny glitch in his distant expression.

Shanks’ arrival distracts Luffy. Buggy seizes this. He weasels around the boy, then barrels past Mihawk and the girl, and pushes into the treehouse where it’s dry.

Everybody follows; Buggy is getting sick of being chased. He beats them to the questions waiting in their opening mouths.

“Do you have a doctor?” he asks, because Ace is not forgotten.

“Yes, I am!” A young voice chitters. Buggy turns: it’s literally a reindeer, but weirder things have happened and weirder things will.

“An infirmary?" he presses.

The reindeer skitters forward across the big room, heading for a looming doorframe. He pauses to hover at that doorframe. Buggy follows.

Luffy also follows, snapping after him. He herds his way in between Buggy and the door, staring fiercely. And Buggy is king of masks, but he knows raw emotion when he sees it. Knows the boil that churns in those beetle eyes, knows the set of that jaw and the furrow of that brow. Buggy raises an eyebrow.

“What happened to him?” behind him, Nami’s voice strains. Buggy doesn’t like how many people are behind him. He shuffles to stand sideways, so he can see both parties in his peripheries.

Luffy clearly did not expect the lack of a fight, and is still searching for words around in his mouth. Buggy waits, but if Shanks keeps shuffling closer and if Ace keeps bleeding, then he won’t wait for long.

Finally, Luffy removes his hat. He sticks two fingers into the ribbon of the old thing and rustles around until he finds something and pulls it out: a dying piece of paper, thinner than a finger.

“You have his vivre card.” Buggy states. “Why do you have his vivre card?”

Luffy forges forward, and burns. “He’s my brother.”

Buggy steps forward twice. He knows his own eyes are sparking, because Luffy looks like he’s never seen this before. He holds Ace out.

“So carry him.”

Luffy does, and he does it like it’s easy. It must be for him. He takes him and scurries down the hall with the reindeer. When he leaves the silence curls.

Except the scraping of a fork, and someone just munching away. Buggy turns to the noise.

Sir Crocodile is slowly eating a pancake at a kitchen island full of food.

“It’s rude to eat before everybody’s served,” Mihawk hums.

“That’s clearly a buffet!” Buggy snaps, at the same time Crocodile says: “You clearly laid it out as a buffet.”

Buggy clicks his jaw shut; of course he’d decided to say something, and of course Crocodile looks over at him. He feels his chest do tight and painful things again, and the thrum of his pulse hums everywhere in his head.

After some plain staring, Crocodile shrugs. “Oh, you escaped,”

Buggy points and glares. “You fucking cheat.”

Crocodile raises his eyebrows and tilts his head as if to say careful, now. Buggy does not miss this memo, backing down and looking away to displace any hostility.

Across the honey floor, Shanks is still shifting closer. Buggy really looks at him for the first time. He’s got this soft tilt to his head and this gentle furrow of his brow. The way he’s approaching must be an attempt to be placating, but all Buggy can feel is the lurching sense that the longer he stays here the quicker he’ll be trapped. That he needs to escape right now.

Pushing a wide circle around Shanks, he carves a clear path to the door and bursts out onto the balcony. He catches himself on the railing, heaving with the sudden urge to vomit.

The rain is just a drizzle now, like the storm has pulled itself back to give Buggy space. He feels around his pockets for a pack of cigarettes (he always has a pack of cigarettes), but when he pulls them out, he finds it’s just a deck of cards. Damn Cabaji, replacing every ounce of nicotine in Buggy’s reach with some senseless thing.

It’s a good brand of cards though, so he doesn’t take it out of the casing just yet. The water would damage them.

The door creaks open. It’s too tentative to be Shanks, too confident to be anyone but Alvida.

“Here,” a hand procures a cigarette and sticks it right in his face. Buggy takes it and lights it, and doesn’t have a problem finding a lighter because he always, always has a lighter.

He takes a drag of the cigarette. It’s not the type he prefers, but it’ll do.

“You’re a life-saver,” he says on the exhale.

Alvida hums a delicate note, but otherwise stays silent. He appreciates that.

When Buggy first got word that Roger’s son was being held in the lowest level of Impel Down, he did not immediately jump into action. He spent a quiet night pulling teeth over what decision to make, because listen: moral obligation and all that, but Buggy’s got a screwy set of opinions about his time on the Oro Jackson. More than half of his mind wanted to be real damn petty.  But Buggy is — unfortunately — human, and humans are foolish, emotional things governed always by a silly social instinct.

So he went down before he went up. He dropped down through all the hellish levels with a silence that felt like death to hold. He did not make it down unscathed — rather, he’s entirely scathed, and now that the first wave of adrenaline is wearing off, all the wounds left untreated are beginning to throb — but he did make it down mostly unnoticed. The very first thing he learned as a child was how not to be seen, and it’s a switch always ready to be flipped.

They’ll assume he knows nothing of Haki outside of the basic understanding that it exists. This is untrue. It would be impossible for him to live the way he has and not know it intricately. Though he’s never expressed a particular interest in using it, it was always fun attempting to reverse engineer its properties. Observation, for example, is not about what he can see, but how he can evade other people’s vision.

Getting up from the bottom was more complicated than getting down. He can only hide so much, and he can’t hide other people, and folks were definitely going to notice if Portgas D. Ace was being dragged up to the prison's front door.

So, long story short, two things happened: Buggy found a reptile in the opposing cell and made a shitty deal, one that fell through because Crocodile is a pathological betrayer; and Impel Down came under attack, carving an easy escape route through the commotion.

Who attacked the prison could very well be the same people who chased Buggy. He doesn’t particularly care about the specifics, it all got him here eventually. He exhales more smoke just to see it die in the drizzle. Alvida is still quiet beside him.

“You don’t smoke,” Buggy says after a while. It isn’t really a question.

Alvida paws the railing, playing some invisible melody on the wood with her spindly fingers. “I don’t,” she says, “I’d like to keep my lungs in tact,”

Buggy joins in on her melody, tapping his own rhythm. “Your lungs can’t be damaged,” if that’s how her fruit works.

She rolls her eyes, and stops them when she’s looking left, so that she can squint at Buggy. “I don’t wanna deal with being addicted,”

Perhaps it’s a show of his cards how quickly he snaps: “I’m not addicted.”

Alvida squints further, staring. Buggy grows fidgety under the pressure. There’s a cold glint of knowing in her eyes, a kind of ‘don’t bullshit me’ shade of brown.

He stubs out his cigarette. “...I have more pressing substance dependencies than this one.”

Silence is weird without crickets, even though it’s day. It’s dark enough to be confused, the overcast of the clouds and the tangle of the canopy create a song of nighttime. There should be bugs insisting on the measure, but it’s just rain. Rain and leaves and wind.

“You’re sober now,” says Alvida.

“Yeah.” Buggy says. It doesn’t feel like a relief.

Alvida is quick to change the subject. “I stayed and listened for a little bit,” she nods to the house, “it would seem we’re trapped here,”

“So I figured,” Buggy flicks the dead half of his cigarette over the railing and watches it vanish, “the trapdoor disappeared,”

He noticed a while ago, Alvida clearly didn’t. She turns to the smooth floor of the balcony where the hole once was. “Shit.” she says.

Buggy chuckles, “Shit.”

“They have questions,” Alvida turns her body to the door, “ready for the press conference?”

One more deep breath, then Buggy nods, and jumps back into the dry light of the fray.

He expects a lot more noise, questions piling over each other, but they’ve actually organized themselves quite well. The more youthful of the bunch here have lined themselves up, and Nami points at the floating (but not anymore) girl in a gesture to start.

“Who was that?” the girl gawks, her hands on her hips.

Buggy swivels his head to look fully at her. He furrows his brow, it takes a couple of tries before the words crawl out of his mouth: “Fire Fist Ace…?”

Girl, pick up a newspaper from time to time.

Zoro rocks back on his heels, but it doesn’t look all that nervous when he does it, just bored. His arms are crossed. “What’s wrong with him?”

Buggy throws out his arms, shrugs. “Narcolepsy? I don’t know, ask his therapist.”

“Be serious,” Zoro mutters. Buggy raises a finger and is about to shout — what, he doesn’t know — but Nami cuts him off.

“Why did you save him?” Her voice is even-keeled and a little quiet, sounding more like she’s musing out loud rather than asking a direct question. That’s until she looks up from the floor and meets Buggy’s eyes, then he feels compelled to answer.

But the only words he knows to say are the truth, so he locks his jaw shut.

“That’s what I’m assuming happened,” Nami continues, “you rescued him from somewhere.”

“Impel Down, yes,” Alvida answers. Nami doesn’t look like she knows what that is, but she doesn’t let it phase her.

She raises her eyebrow, tall as a damn mountain, “I’ve never known you to go out of your way like that,”

Buggy mimics her, quirking the same brow, then he bares his teeth to add a little flare.

“You’ve never known me,” he points out.

Nami has her hands on her hips, so Buggy leans forward and crosses his arms. It comes across as supercilious as he intends, because though she remains stony, her jaw twitches ever so slightly. Beside her, Zoro shuffles with a new stirring anger — at least that’s what Buggy interprets it as.

“She’s right, actually,” Shanks butts in, “You’re… a pack person. You only ever help your people,”

And Buggy knows he’s not the pinnacle of composure — he’s quite prone to his shrill, bumbling outbursts — but he really tries this time. He thinks it’s a brilliant show of control when all he does is curl a lip in a show of teeth. He drags his gaze up and down Shanks’ body and quite genuinely stifles a gag.

Somebody chuckles right under their breath. Buggy figures he hasn’t smiled in the nervous way people expect him to, and should probably roll on with the show before someone calls him out as a flesh and blood hare rather than the porcelain rabbit he pretends to be. He pulls his hand off his wrist and floats it up to shake out his hair, then rocks back on his heels as if he were afraid.

“I just — it’d suck to be tangentially related if Ace died. I don’t know whose hit-list I’d end up on!” Buggy scratches a fake itch on his cheek before reattaching his hand to his wrist, “And I’m a fuckin’ great pirate and all, but I don’t want to waste energy on whatever skirmish that’d throw my way.”

It’s Crocodile who chuckled before, and it’s Crocodile now who clicks his tongue and mutters: “Coward.”

Most of the eyes slip off Buggy then. It isn’t a feeling he usually revels in, that loss of attention, but right now he cherishes it deep within his chest.

The hallway Luffy took Ace down is dark and soft. Buggy remembers maybe seeing doors other than the infirmary, and a staircase at the opposite end. He wanders into that hall, intent to explore a little, but the moment he’s out of view, he recalls the cards in his pocket and the aches all along his body. He hovers just out of sight, pulling out the deck and fidgeting with it. There’s one door opposite to him with carvings of dogs and rabbits running in simple patterns all along its wooden surface.

Shanks follows him out of the room about five minutes later. “You lied,” he accuses.

“Yes,” Buggy says, because there are only two people in this world that can pick out when he truly tells a lie, and Shanks is the first of those two.

“So what’s the truth?”

Buggy starts counting his cards, dealing the deck from one hand into the other. “Not my truth to tell,”

Shanks huffs, face squishing childishly into a sneer, “Why now do you care about someone’s honor?”

“I don’t,” he’s shuffling the deck now, idly throwing the cards into one another, “I just like seeing you irritated.”

“You’re still lying to me!” Shanks' frown is so ugly, it’s pissing Buggy off. He turns his head away.

“I don’t want to tell you the truth!”

“Why?!” Of course, the asshole tumbles back into Buggy’s vision. Buggy poisons him with a dead, cold stare.

“Because I don’t like you,” he hisses, though he knows ‘I don’t trust you’ would sting worse and ring truer. This Shanks still believes he’s trusted. One day Buggy might need to use that.

The wood of the house groans, and it’s the first time he’s ever heard it make any kind of noise. Not even the doors creaked when he pushed them open. Buggy shifts, remembering how high up they really are. He pockets his cards.

The trickle-down, thumbprint pattern indented into the plaster of the walls tickles Buggy’s skin, he leans back into it. Quite meddlesome of this world to throw Shanks into the melting pot with him. Shanks, of course, is like a transition metal — he has a ridiculously high melting point. Buggy is more like a neutron thrown outside of its nucleus: actively decaying, gone in fifteen minutes. It hasn’t always been like this — this instability is the kind that’s rotted out of a strong foundation — but Buggy doesn’t like thinking about how things used to be.

Shanks has said something else. Buggy waves his hand dismissively, “Whatever.”

Shadows warp weirdly by the cobblestone steps curving gently up into the next story. Buggy nods towards them, “What’s up there?”

“Uh, library,”

Oh, hell yeah.

“Cool,” Buggy drifts in that direction, “I’m gonna hang there,”

Shanks, having cooled off quick, throws a quick thumbs up and flashes an equally snappy grin. Buggy hesitates, then adds:

“Come get me if anything changes with Ace,”

And then he’s gone, up the stairs before Shanks can even inhale another breath.

***

The library is quite sweet. He likes the way the rain sounds up here. There’s a long stretch of counter on the right wall, and its cabinets are full of odd trinkets. There’s also a large black binder that’s full of ISBNs, each one correlating to a book on a shelf. He grabbed out from the cabinet and placed it on the tiny table surrounded by chairs and sofas, gently sliding a half-read book to the side. A guide is just useful to have out.

Also in the cabinets are various cures for boredom — crosswords, sudoku, puzzles, stuff like that. Buggy grabbed a coloring page and some old pencils, and settled down on one of the two long couches to color. His knees are pulled up to his chest, and he has a large book against those knees and is using it as a backing for the paper. He’s been coloring for a while now, though he isn’t sure exactly the amount of time that has run away. Time seems to melt and mix like the pigment growing on the page.

It’s the gentle taps of rubber shoes on cobblestone that rouse Buggy. Alvida has, once again, scuttled after him. She’s tucking a large portion of hair behind her shoulder and looking about the library, eyes about as expressive as they’ll get on her face, which is to say: a little wide, but mostly distracted. In the time he’s been up here, she managed to find some new clothes to change into. They’re chic, far different from the faux-expensive outfits she scavenges up — the ones that might make her look higher class, but only to someone without a discerning eye. She’s centered the entire silhouette around a large feather boa. Buggy notes that the flowing ends of the boa are wet, and so maybe she stepped back out into the rain.

“Hey,” he greets, finishing a section of the page with a few strokes of yellow. It’s more or less entirely colored, but his hands still want to move.

“Hello,” she hums back, drawing out the word sweetly. Funny what a change in clothes will do to a personality.

Buggy draws away from his work, wiggling backwards on the couch to hold the paper farther away from him.

It’s a woman on the page. Colored well enough that all the pre-drawn lines are covered up, and so now anything can be added without it looking odd. He’s given her a flower to put in her hair, a lovely hibiscus colored with the same pinks he used for the undertones on her cheeks. Nothing is harsh about her — or nothing is supposed to be.

He knows who the woman on the page is. He knows her honeysuckle hair and her fraying ember freckles, and her eyes, which are always kind, even though he's drawn a furrow into her brow. He fussed with her expression quite a bit while coloring. Nothing about her is supposed to be harsh, but he marked down the lines of disapproval all along the places a face can crease, because he isn’t sure he deserves to draw her. He’s confident that she would not want to be drawn by him.

Buggy tosses the paper aside. It flutters face-down onto the small table.

“Find a nice spot, here?” Alvida asks. She fiddles with her boa, smoothing the moisture out of the ends.

“Something like that,” Buggy says, and he shifts again in his seat, placing both feet flat on the floor and leaning forward to loom over the table. He’s switched his focus, now, to the large binder he set out.

“What about you? Find any nice spots?” he shoots.

 The spine of the book he was using has a sticker with its own ISBN code on it. From what Buggy’s seen, all the books in here do. They sit all glossy and pristine atop the worn down binding of their books. They look new and sour.

He begins flipping through the binderto see if he can find the ISBN of the book he was using to brace his paper on.

“Yes, I did!” she sounds quite pleased, “All those bridges outside? They lead off to other houses — they’re private residencies. I suppose this place is a bit like a treehouse hotel, and we’re in the lobby. Anyway, I found us a place to stay.”

There, scrawled neatly in almost the very middle of the binder. Buggy is sure he’s found the number matching his book. Except—

Well, that’s odd. The book listed in the binder is not the book he has.

“It’s quite cute, actually,” she prattles on. Buggy flips back through the binder, squinting. It’s organized alphabetically, that much is helpful. “It’s got a darling little living room with this plush white couch, and there’s two bedrooms, so plenty of space.”

“That’s perfect,” Buggy hums. 

He’s found the title. He drags his finger along the corresponding number, decidedly not the sequence stickered onto the spine of the book. The couch makes a half-cackle groan as he rises from it, dragging himself over to the bookshelves. He thumbs every spine, squinting at the numbers.

Alvida picks up the coloring page. Buggy watches her twirl it over out of the corner of his eye. She grazes a long nail across the paper, no doubt getting some pigment stuck under her nail.

“Who’s this?” she asks.

“Someone,” Buggy replies. He crouches and scans the lower levels of the shelf. He worries his lip for a moment, but decides to add: “Her name was Rouge,”

“She’s not very red,”

“Can also mean passion,” which she certainly was full of. Buggy moves on to the next shelf.

“Oh,” Alvida isn’t putting the drawing down, and it’s making Buggy itchy in the ribs. “Uh, anyway: that Shanks wants to throw a party,”

Buggy drops his forehead onto the bookshelf briefly. “Of course he does,”

Buggy’s fine with parties — loves them a lot actually. These are just not the folk you party with.

“Something about celebrating you getting Ace out of Impel Down,” she’s thumbing one end of the paper now, bending it. Buggy sneers.

There’s the number! Finally! He pulls the book off the shelf.

The texture of the cover is familiar, and so is the mustardy yellow color and the bright letters of the title.

“Well he might not last very long, the state he’s in. A party is premature.” He points to Alvida and the paper, “Stop that,”

She doesn’t. “Hawkeyes talked him down, though. Or at least, he convinced him to do a mellow one this evening rather than one right now.”

The title of the book: Traps and Trapdoors, and Not Falling Through Them. Buggy’s hands shake because of how tightly he’s begun holding the book.

“That’s impressive,” he tells Alvida. His voice is strong, but it feels weak. He drags the pad of his thumb over the title, then over the sunny illustration of a boy and a lock on it. The lock is held out in the boy’s open palm; the drawing as a whole is so small — more of a doodle — that the lock is more of a vague blob than anything else, but it’s such a familiar image. Buggy has read this book.

Finally, the paper is placed back onto the coffee table. Alvida backs away, a bit casual and a bit tense. “I’ll come grab you an hour before the party, so you can clean up,”

Buggy shoots her a look, “Are you calling me ugly?”

The book in his hand is small. It feels so heavy.

“I’m calling you what I like,” Alvida drawls, “and I’m saying you don’t look… entirely healthy,”

It takes more strength than it should to pry one of his hands off the book, just so he can bring it up and drag it over one of his bandaged wounds. “These’ll buff out,” he shrugs.

Alvida huffs — a laughing noise with a smiling expression — and leaves. Buggy looks back to the book.

When he was quite small, his town had set up a festival of talents. The attractions were the towns folk; anyone with any odd skill was invited to set themselves up and show them off. Festival of talents.

There were caricature artists and glass-walkers. Men and women with well trained pets, the odd contortionist or two, and a lot of loud folk that certainly thought they could sing. Buggy wandered the painted streets, seven and in a stupor, and maybe five dollars in coins ringing in his pockets.

At one particular stall, a man was making loud gossip with the crowd around him. His hands moved, but not to gesture for his words. As he talked, he was picking locks. He had a bucket of them by his feet; old locks, new ones, damaged, and pristine.

Every so often, he would pull a lock from the bucket and stick the poking ends of spindly silver tools into the keyhole. He’d wriggle them around and tap, tap, tap, and the lock would spring open. There was also an empty bucket by his feet.

Buggy shuffled on forward through the crowd, weaving at the grown-up’s feet in a movement that wasn’t practiced so much as it was second-hand.

A reddish lock had just been popped open. It squealed against the rust as it did. Buggy put both hands up on the table and said hi, and said he would like to know how you did that, sir.

Without a lull in his speech or his hands, the man nodded to the other end of the table. There was a stack of books there, mustard hard-cover with a rough paper for the sleeve. The stack was dwindling.

“Oh,” Buggy said, and leaned back, way back on his feet. He peered left, then right, then spied the sun up in the sky and thought: will the shadows get long enough to hide in before the festival ends?

Because look: he really liked puzzles and he really wanted that book, but even seven-year-olds know five dollars in coins doesn’t buy a book, but he shouldn’t have to buy anything if it’s right there in grabbing range. So yes, he was vying to steal it.

The man stopped his movements. His lock thudded down to the table. Buggy remembers the two long steps he’d taken backwards, before he bumped into the leg of an adult behind him and froze.

The man gingerly plucked a copy from the pile, rolled it around in his own hands, then held it out in front of Buggy.

“Take it. No charge,” the man said. His grin was objectively ugly, but pretty because it was kind. His hands, now that Buggy could peer at them, had the callouses he assumed they might have. The kind that comes when you use something enough that it becomes folded in as an extension of your limb. Buggy pulled the book into his hands, it was heavy.

“No charge,” Buggy challenged, testing the pressure of the man's smile.

“No charge,” the man said again. He picked his tools, the extension of his hands, up and went back to his lock, “Go, be a prodigy.”

A seven-year-old armed with a free book does not a prodigy make, but a passion it does spark. If good at anything at all, it’s his puzzles and escapes. One does not run loose through Impel Down without knowing these kinds of things.

And the most important thing about puzzles, Buggy muses over the scrawny book in his hands, is knowing how to find one.

Not to jump the gun, but he’s got that itch that writhes around when he sees something that can be solved. The ISBN’s and the binder shoved so far back into the cabinets like it was hidden there, they poke that sense that says ‘there’s something here’.

Buggy meanders back over to the couch, flipping  through the pages. He finds that there are numerous words underlined and circled. 

“An hour should be good, yeah,” Buggy hums before he remembers Alvida has already gone. He reaches for a pencil and the portrait of Rouge. She liked puzzles too, she won’t mind being drawn over for the sake of one.

His hand repeats the letters he sees, over and over across the drawing until the whole page is filled. When he looks at what he’s written, he finds it’s just one phrase:

‘The numbers.’