Chapter Text
The night Monkey D. Luffy remembered who he used to be, it was raining.
He was five years old, curled up on a thin futon in a shared bedroom of a shrine orphanage in the mountains of Kumamoto Prefecture. His three roommates were asleep. The window was cracked open because Auntie Tomiko always forgot to check it, and the room smelled like wet cedar and cheap detergent.
He should have been asleep. He wasn't.
There was a pressure building behind his eyes. It felt like his skull was too small for what was inside it. The rain hit harder against the tile roof. Somewhere down the hall a floorboard creaked. Somewhere else, in a life that hadn't happened yet, a voice he loved was screaming his name.
"LUFFY!"
He sat up.
The other kids didn't stir. Behind his eyes, something opened, and everything Monkey D. Luffy had ever been came pouring back in.
Straw hat. Sunny. His crew. Their voices. All of them. Nami hitting him for stealing food. Sanji arguing with Zoro. Robin's quiet laugh. Chopper crying at everything. Franky doing the pose. Brook and Jinbe and Usopp. His crew. HIS crew.
Ace grinning. Ace bleeding. Ace, in his arms, dying.
Sabo, on a raft, gone in cannon fire.
Shanks. One arm. A grin. A hat.
Grandpa Garp's fist of love.
Nika. The Sun God. Drums in the sky.
Luffy's small hands fisted in the blanket. His breath was coming very fast. His head hurt so bad he thought he might be sick, and then the pain broke, and it didn't hurt anymore. It felt like coming home.
He sat very still in the dark. Kentaro rolled over in the next futon and mumbled something in his sleep. The rain kept falling. Luffy touched his own face. It was small and round and wet with tears he hadn't realized he was crying.
"Huh," he whispered.
His voice was too high. Weird.
"HUH," he tried again, louder.
Kentaro didn't wake up. Nobody did.
Luffy sat in the dark with his memories, and for the first time since he was a kid the first time, he thought about his crew like he might not see them again.
Where were they? Were they on Sunny? Was Nami yelling at somebody for wasting money? Was Zoro asleep on the deck? Was Sanji cooking? Was Chopper okay? Were they looking for him? Would Robin figure it out first, the way Robin always figured everything out first?
He didn't know. He didn't know if this was a dream, or after, or somewhere far away. He didn't know if he could get back.
His eyes stung again.
But it was Nika drumming in his chest, warm and huge, and Nika didn't do sad. Nika did adventures. Nika did next.
You're gonna see them again, he told himself, fiercely, in the dark. You're the King of the Pirates. You'll always find your crew.
He believed it, because he was Luffy, and Luffy always believed it.
He lifted his hand and tried to stretch his cheek out like rubber.
It didn't stretch. His skin pinched. Ow. Normal cheek. Normal skin.
"Oh," he said.
No Devil Fruit. He kept staring at his hand, small and unstretched, and something warm was pressing against the inside of it from the other direction. It made the air feel a little heavier when he thought about it. Underneath his ribs, curled up like a sleeping animal.
He thought about it.
His pinky finger turned to rubber for one second. It stretched two centimeters longer than the other fingers, waved at him, and snapped back.
Luffy stared at his pinky.
Luffy started laughing.
He clapped both hands over his mouth so he wouldn't wake anyone up and laughed and laughed and laughed, silently, shaking, until his stomach hurt.
Wait for me, he thought, at the crew, at the sea, at wherever they were. Wait for me. I'm coming. I've just gotta figure this one out first.
He didn't know what world this was yet. He didn't know why he was here. But somewhere, a hundred kilometers north, an eight-year-old boy with freckles had woken up six months ago and set his blanket on fire on purpose to check. In Tokyo, in an apartment near the river, a sixteen-year-old girl named Nico Robin had woken up an hour ago with her heart pounding and no idea why she suddenly missed a little brother she'd never had. In Shinjuku, an eleven-year-old with grey eyes had already been awake for seven years and was very quietly, very calmly, becoming a problem for the Higher-Ups' pipeline chart.
Luffy didn't know any of that.
He just knew his cheek didn't stretch, and his pinky did, and somewhere inside him the sun was drumming, and his crew was out there somewhere, and he was going to find them.
He lay back down. He pulled the thin blanket up to his chin. He was still grinning.
"Okay," he whispered to the ceiling. "Okay. Adventure."
He fell asleep to the sound of rain.
Six years later.
Kumamoto Prefecture Regional Sorcery Examination — Preliminary Assessment.
The examiner was a tired-looking woman in her forties named Hara. She had cursed-energy-conductive glasses and a clipboard and twelve years of experience, and she thought she had seen every kind of weird kid there was.
She had not seen this kid.
He was small for eleven. He was wearing sandals in November. He had a red mark under his left eye that his intake form called a birthmark, though it looked more like a stitched scar than any birthmark she'd ever seen. He was grinning at her like she'd just offered him meat.
"Please stand on the mat," Hara said, gesturing at the CE assessment plate on the floor. The plate was a flat black disc wired to a meter on her desk. The meter's display ran from zero to two thousand units. Two thousand was "Grade 1 candidate." She had personally never seen it read above one thousand four hundred in her career, and that had been for a Kamo cousin whose family had come for him within the week.
The kid stepped on the mat.
"Now," Hara said, picking up her pen from behind her ear, "I want you to think about something that makes you feel strong. Not scared. Not angry. Strong. Push that feeling outward. Can you do that?"
"Sure!" the kid said.
The meter's needle jumped, quivered, and pinned itself against the maximum stop. Something inside the casing made a small crunching sound.
Hara looked at the meter.
She looked at the kid, who was still grinning.
"You can stop now," she said, calmly.
"I didn't start yet!"
Hara looked at the meter again.
"…I see. Please, um. Try. Just a little."
The kid closed his eyes and scrunched his face up in concentration. Something in Hara's desk drawer buzzed. The lightbulb in the desk lamp flickered. A framed certificate on the wall shifted half a centimeter to the left and settled.
The meter's casing cracked down the middle with a sharp pop and the needle broke off entirely.
"Stop," Hara said.
"Okay!"
She sat down. She set her clipboard aside very carefully.
"Monkey D. Luffy," she read off her intake form. "Age eleven. Orphan, guardian Auntie Tomiko at Kumamoto Shrine Orphanage. Referred by…" She squinted. "Yourself."
"Yep!"
"How did you know jujutsu sorcery existed?"
"I could see the ghost things! Since I was little! There's one on your shoulder right now. It looks like a squashed frog!"
Hara did not look at her shoulder. She had been a sorcerer for twenty years. She knew the squashed-frog-shaped Grade 4 was on her shoulder. What unnerved her was that a civilian eleven-year-old had spotted it, correctly identified its shape, and was not screaming.
"And what do you think you can do with your cursed energy?"
The kid considered this seriously for about half a second.
Then he stuck his arm out. It stretched across the exam room, snaked lazily around behind her head, and plucked the pen out of her hand where she'd just set it down on the desk. It came back and gave the pen a little wave at her before snapping the pen into his own hand with a twang.
He was still on the mat. He hadn't moved his feet.
"Ta-da," he said.
Hara looked at her empty hand.
She looked at Luffy, who was holding her pen and grinning like a kid who'd successfully swiped candy off a shelf.
"Kid," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Stay. Right. There."
She got up. She walked out of the exam room. She closed the door behind her, and then she walked at a very controlled speed down the hall to the payphone bank, and she called Tokyo.
"Yaga-san," she said when the call connected. "It's Hara. I need you to come to Kumamoto."
"This isn't the check-in time."
"I know."
"Grade 1?"
"No. It's an eleven-year-old."
There was a pause.
"Explain."
"He walked in off the street with no clan file, referred himself, spotted my shoulder-passenger by shape, and cracked my CE meter. Physically. It's in two pieces on my desk. Then he stretched his arm across the room and pickpocketed the pen I was writing with."
"…Stretched his arm."
"Rubber."
"Rubber."
"Rubber."
There was a longer pause.
"Hara. Is he stable?"
Hara considered this. Down the hall, from inside the exam room, she heard a small delighted whoop, followed by the sound of something bouncing very rapidly off multiple walls, followed by silence, followed by a small voice going, "cool."
"He's happy," she said. "That's the word. He's happy."
"I'll be there tomorrow. Do not let anyone else evaluate him. Do not send the file up-channel. The Higher-Ups do not hear about this. The Zenin scouts especially do not hear about this. Do you understand me, Hara?"
"Yes."
"Good." A beat. "Rubber."
"Rubber."
"I'll bring Gojo."
"Please don't."
"I'll bring Gojo and Law."
"Please REALLY don't bring both of them."
"I'm bringing both of them."
The line clicked.
Hara stood there with the phone in her hand for a moment, breathing very carefully. Then she hung up, and she walked back down the hall, and she opened the door to the exam room.
Luffy was upside down. He was hanging from the ceiling by a stretched foot that had hooked itself around the light fixture. He looked delighted.
"Hi!" he said, upside down.
"Please get down."
"Okay!"
He got down. He landed on his feet with no impact at all. He handed her back her pen. He looked at her expectantly.
"Am I in?"
Hara looked at him. She thought about the Higher-Ups. She thought about the Zenin scouts, who trawled the countryside for exactly this kind of prodigy, and what they did to prodigies with no family to protect them. She thought about her own daughter, who had washed out of jujutsu evaluation eight years ago because her CE was too low, and was in university now, safe and ordinary and alive.
"You're in," she said. "But not with the ones who'd usually ask. You'll come to Tokyo. To a school. Do you understand?"
"A school with more people like me?"
"Yes."
"With ghost-fighting?"
"Yes."
"WITH MEAT?"
"…Yes, they have a cafeteria."
Luffy threw both fists in the air and hollered.
Hara sat down heavily and put her face in her hands.
Rubber, she thought. God help Tokyo.
✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。✧*。
Elsewhere. That same day.
In Tokyo, at Jujutsu High, three seventeen-year-old third-years were on the roof of the classroom building.
Satoru Gojo was lying upside down on the tiles, chewing a lollipop stick, staring at the sky, and being aggressively bored. Suguru Geto was sitting cross-legged next to him with a light novel open on his lap. Trafalgar D. Water Law was sitting on the raised concrete edge of the roof with a medical textbook, ignoring both of them with the surgical precision of somebody who had been ignoring both of them since they were twelve.
"Suguru," Gojo said. "Suguru. Suguru. Suguuuuru."
"I will throw you off this roof."
"Yaga just left. He looked shifty. Did you see his face?"
Geto turned a page. "He always looks shifty. That's called being a middle-aged man."
"He looked extra shifty."
"Mhm."
"He took the field kit."
"Field kits are for the field. Solve it, Sherlock."
"Yeah but he was HAPPY about it."
Geto set his book down slowly, put a finger in it to mark the page, and looked at Gojo for the first time. "He was actually happy?"
"Weirdly happy. Like, mouth-corner happy. I saw it through the blindfold."
"You always say you saw it through the blindfold."
"I HAVE THE SIX EYES, SUGURU."
"You have a hangover."
"That too."
"He's dragging you and Law on a road trip tomorrow," Geto added, without looking up again. "He came by Law's room while I was there. Kumamoto."
Gojo sat up so fast his lollipop stick fell out of his mouth. "What."
"Something about a candidate."
"He didn't tell ME."
"You would have made it about you."
"I make everything about me, Suguru, that's my JOB —"
Law, without looking up from his textbook, said, "If you two are going to come with, I'm driving."
"You don't have a license."
"I don't need one."
"That is not how —" Gojo started, then paused. "You know what, fair."
Down the hall, from the direction of the medical bay, they all heard a distant crash and Shoko Ieiri shouting, "GOD DAMN IT, HAIBARA."
"Haibara's on fire again," Geto said.
"Mm."
"He really has to stop doing that."
"Mm."
The three of them, in that moment, were seventeen years old, undefeated, absurdly powerful, and completely convinced they were the strongest sorcerers in Japan.
Somewhere near the river, a twenty-two-year-old scholar named Nico Robin was sitting in a coffee shop with a stack of Heian-era manuscripts and a feeling she couldn't name, like a door had cracked open six hundred kilometers to the south and the wind was different now.
Somewhere in Yokohama, a fourteen-year-old boy with freckles was standing on a rooftop and grinning at nothing.
And a hundred kilometers south of Yokohama, on a mountain in Kumamoto, an eleven-year-old had just remembered he wanted to become the freest man alive and had wandered into a jujutsu evaluation office to make it happen.
Gojo closed his eyes behind the blindfold and stretched. If he'd been paying attention with the Six Eyes at full capacity, he might have felt it: a small, warm, drum-shaped presence six hundred kilometers to the south, laughing.
He didn't feel it.
He would.