Chapter Text
Chapter One: Thirty-Five Years in Pieces
Gol D. Roger died smiling, and Buggy hated him for it. It was not a reasonable hatred, which only made it worse, because Roger had always smiled. He smiled when storms snapped masts, when Marines closed in from three directions, when Rayleigh threatened to throw somebody overboard, and when Shanks and Buggy fought over treasure that usually turned out to be worth less than the argument. Roger laughed loudly, lived loudly, loved loudly, and apparently had decided he would die the same way, on an execution platform in Loguetown with the entire damned world watching.
Buggy had watched too, though he wished now that he had stayed anywhere else. He could have found a tavern three islands away, gotten drunk enough to forget the date, and woken the next morning with nothing worse than a headache. Instead he had stood in that square and watched the last piece of his old life disappear after the Oro Jackson, the final island, the crew’s disbanding, and all those goodbyes everyone had pretended were temporary. Roger had even turned himself in, because of course the bastard could not be captured like a normal pirate.
They had known he was dying. Crocus had bought him time, not a cure, and everyone aboard the Oro Jackson had eventually understood the difference whether they admitted it or not. The execution had not stolen decades from Roger, perhaps not even months, but knowing that did nothing useful for Buggy. A reason for dying did not make someone less dead.
The square had erupted after Roger’s final words. People screamed, laughed, cried, and immediately started talking about treasure, adventure, the Grand Line, and the impossible fortune waiting at the end of the sea. Buggy remembered staring at them and wanting to hit someone, because they heard Pirate King and treasure while he remembered a man who snored loudly enough to shake cabin walls, stole food from the galley and blamed Shanks, lost at cards and accused the deck of cheating, and laughed across a moonlit deck whenever they survived something that should have killed them.
None of those people had known Roger that way, and Buggy had. That was why the cheering felt obscene, and why Shanks choosing that exact day to make everything worse remained one more offense Buggy had not forgiven.
“I want you to come with me,” Shanks had said after they escaped the worst of the crowd. He had been crying beneath Roger’s straw hat, and Buggy had been crying too, although anyone stupid enough to mention that could expect violence.
Buggy had known Shanks for almost as long as he could remember, and there had never been a serious question that both of them would stay at sea. He had assumed the only argument would be whose flag they sailed under, whether Shanks would eventually join Buggy, whether Buggy would temporarily tolerate joining Shanks, or whether they would each become captains and spend the rest of their lives competing over treasure. All of those futures still had Shanks in them somewhere.
Then Shanks said he was not going after the One Piece. Not now, he said, maybe someday, as though Roger’s hat was not sitting on his head and Roger’s treasure was not waiting at the end of the sea. Buggy had secretly believed Shanks might become the next great pirate after Roger, and hearing him refuse even to try felt like discovering the floor had vanished under his feet.
The argument had gone bad quickly. Buggy called him a coward, Shanks said he did not understand, Buggy insisted he understood perfectly, and Shanks asked him to come anyway. By the end they were both crying and shouting, and Buggy swore he would find treasure greater than anything Shanks ever saw. Shanks shouted that Buggy could do whatever he wanted, then, so Buggy walked away.
For the first time in his life, Shanks did not follow. Three weeks later, Buggy was still furious about it, mostly because fury was considerably easier than admitting he had no idea what he was doing.
“You need a crew,” the old man behind the counter told him for the third time. Buggy scowled into his bowl and said, “I know.”
“You need a ship, too.” The old man folded his arms, apparently enjoying himself now, and Buggy repeated that he knew.
“And money.” That finally did it, and Buggy slapped both palms against the counter hard enough to rattle the spoons. “I KNOW!”
The old man regarded him for a long moment before tapping next to the bowl. “That’s twelve hundred beli.” His expression suggested he had seen louder teenagers and found all of them equally unimpressive.
Buggy stared first at the stew, then at the old man. “Twelve hundred? For soup?”
“Stew,” the old man corrected. He did not look remotely ashamed.
“There are four pieces of meat in it.” Buggy jabbed a spoon accusingly into the bowl, while the old man informed him there were five.
Buggy immediately began moving vegetables around. He found four pieces, glared across the counter, and was told the fifth was underneath; annoyingly, it was. “Still robbery,” Buggy muttered, but when the old man suggested he simply not eat it, Buggy ate it.
Hunger was rapidly proving to be one of the more irritating parts of independent piracy. Food had simply existed aboard the Oro Jackson. Buggy knew somebody had bought supplies, tracked stores, decided where they would stop, and made sure there was enough water, medicine, sailcloth, rope, and whatever else a ship needed, but those had always been adult problems. Rayleigh worried about money, Gaban worried about supplies, Crocus worried about medicine, and other crew members handled the thousand invisible jobs required to keep a ship moving.
Buggy and Shanks had handled being apprentices, which apparently had not prepared them for adulthood quite as well as Buggy assumed. Still, he was fifteen, had sailed the Grand Line, eaten the Bara Bara no Mi, and survived things that would make ordinary captains shit themselves. Obviously he could start a crew; he merely needed people, a ship, supplies, money, and somewhere to sleep.
Buggy finished the stew, surrendered twelve hundred beli with profound resentment, and left with six thousand four hundred and thirty beli remaining to his name. He knew the exact number because he had counted it seven times, and treasure had never looked so offensively small.
The Grand Line island was unimportant, which was why Buggy had chosen it. He had left Loguetown aboard the first vessel willing to take him somewhere without inconvenient questions and landed in a trading town with a harbor, shipyard, several taverns, and enough questionable business that nobody cared about an armed blue-haired teenager.
His plan remained excellent as long as he did not examine any individual step too closely. He would find people, acquire a ship, discover treasure, become rich and famous, and eventually cross paths with Shanks again so he could demonstrate exactly what Shanks had thrown away.
“Captain Buggy,” he murmured as he walked through the crowded street. He tried “Captain Buggy, terror of the seas,” then “Captain Buggy, legendary treasure hunter,” and was deciding whether future Pirate King sounded ambitious or simply correct when someone slammed hard into his shoulder.
“Watch it!” Buggy snapped after the man, who kept going without so much as looking back. Buggy was already assembling a better insult when instinct made him touch his belt and find nothing where his money pouch should have been.
For roughly two seconds Buggy stood completely still. Then his feet detached, his upper body shot over the crowd, and half the street screamed as an enraged flying teenager tore after the thief shouting, “YOU BASTARD!”
The thief looked back once, and the expression on his face when he discovered Buggy gaining on him without the assistance of feet was magnificent. Buggy tackled him directly into a fruit stall, scattering oranges into the street while the merchant, thief, and several bystanders all began shouting at once.
Somebody stepped on one of Buggy’s detached feet halfway down the street, which made Buggy scream louder than anyone. For the next several minutes everything dissolved into the kind of chaos he understood perfectly, and for the first time since Loguetown he did not think about Roger, Shanks, tomorrow, or the humiliating size of his remaining fortune.
He recovered his money, acquired three oranges, a bruised jaw, and a permanent ban from a fruit stall whose name he had not bothered learning. Buggy considered that a successful afternoon; his evening was another matter.
Much later, he would rank entering the Crooked Mast as his first mistake and drinking there as his second. Announcing that he was looking for people to join a pirate crew probably belonged around third, while following three strangers into an alley because they knew someone selling a cheap ship had been an especially inspired decision.
There were probably other mistakes in between. Buggy stopped counting when someone hit him in the back of the head.
He staggered but stayed upright, which surprised the men and made Buggy angry enough to grin. He spun, detached one hand, and sent his fist into the nearest man’s mouth from an angle no ordinary punch could reach; when somebody shouted, “Devil Fruit!” Buggy’s grin widened because that was the proper reaction.
Then three more men stepped out of the darkness behind the first three. Six was annoying, but Buggy had fought worse, even if he had usually fought worse with Roger, Rayleigh, Gaban, Shanks, and several dozen exceptionally dangerous pirates somewhere nearby.
That did not mean he was helpless alone. Buggy ducked beneath a club, separated at the waist, and sent his hands in opposite directions to seize two men by their collars and smash their heads together. A knife passed harmlessly through the gap where his ribs had been a moment before, and Buggy kicked the attacker in the stomach while shouting something rude about his intelligence.
A bottle shattered against the wall as Buggy dodged another swing. Glass sprayed across one attacker’s face, and Buggy laughed because fighting made sense in a way everything else currently did not: hit first, cheat when useful, use every advantage, and win before the other bastard figured out what happened.
For several glorious seconds, he believed he had it handled. He did not need Roger or Rayleigh standing behind him, and he certainly did not need Shanks; the weighted net that dropped over him immediately afterward suggested the universe disagreed.
It was not a fishing net somebody had grabbed because it happened to be nearby, either. The rope was thick, the edges deliberately weighted, and the knots arranged to tighten when whatever was inside fought against them. Buggy had seen enough improvised restraints aboard pirate ships to know the difference between something convenient and something made for the job.
“That’s embarrassing,” Buggy managed before the ropes tightened around his separated pieces. He pulled in two directions at once, tangled himself worse, and barely had time to curse before a boot drove into his ribs.
Pain ripped through his side. Another kick caught his stomach, then a club glanced off his head while Buggy tried to force one hand through the rope, and he realized with mounting offense that these men were either familiar with Devil Fruit users or possessed the extraordinary ability to learn from things they had seen thirty seconds earlier.
“Watch his head,” one of the men snapped when another raised the club again. “He’s worth less if you kill him.”
Buggy hated intelligent criminals. He hated them considerably more when one laughed and said, “Roger’s little brat isn’t much without his crew.”
The alley seemed to sharpen around him despite the pain in his skull. “Who told you?” Buggy demanded, and the man smiling down at him became familiar: he had been sitting in the Crooked Mast, listening while Buggy drank and talked too much.
“People pay for information,” the man said. Buggy pulled against the net and told him to go sell it, but the smile only widened.
“Oh, we will.” The man crouched just outside biting distance. “Pirates pay even better for Devil Fruit users.”
Buggy went still. That was much worse than information, and his detached left hand began creeping through the shadows toward a discarded knife before a boot came down across his fingers.
His scream echoed between the buildings. The club hit him again, and after that the night came apart into wet stones, blood in his mouth, rain beginning to fall on his face, and pieces of movement he could never put back into the right order.
He remembered someone finally shouting that blades were useless after another knife failed to do what its owner wanted. He remembered biting somebody hard enough to taste blood that was not his, which remained one of the few details he felt good about, and he remembered the net loosening enough for him to rip himself apart in every direction and spill out of it like a box of badly packed parts.
Buggy ran when he could and crawled when he could not. He cut through alleys he did not know, climbed a wall he barely remembered seeing, fell from somewhere that seemed extremely high afterward, and heard his attackers spreading out behind him.
Somewhere through the rain he saw a painted blue lantern swinging over the rear of a building. He had noticed the place earlier because the entire street made its business obvious after dark, and a back door was still a door; more importantly, somebody inside might object to armed men murdering a teenager on their property.
His legs buckled before he reached it. Buggy swore, looked at the distance remaining, and sent his left hand skittering ahead through the rain while the rest of him dragged itself toward a stack of crates farther down the wall.
“Go,” he hissed at the hand as though it required encouragement. His fingers slapped against the rear service door, scratched uselessly at the wood, and finally curled beneath the lowest edge they could reach before Buggy lost sight of them around the crates.
He never knew whether anyone heard it. Buggy remembered crawling under the crates until his shoulders jammed, remembered thinking that Shanks was an idiot for choosing that moment to crawl into his head, and then remembered nothing at all.
At some point after that, awareness flickered just long enough for Buggy to feel cold fingers pressed against his left wrist. He had no idea how his detached hand had reached him, but the instant skin met skin the Bara Bara no Mi pulled it home with a sharp, familiar snap. Relief barely had time to register before darkness swallowed him again.
When awareness returned, Buggy thought at first he had opened his eyes. A long rectangle of white light stretched above him, too steady to be flame and too cold to be sunlight, and somehow he knew the word fluorescent before he understood that he did not know what fluorescent meant.
He tried to move but felt no response from his body. Then the view shifted, and Buggy realized the body was not his at all.
A woman walked beneath the white lights carrying a bag over one shoulder and a flat black rectangle in one hand. She was much older than Buggy, though he could not see her face clearly, and when the rectangle lit beneath her thumb another impossible word arrived fully formed: phone.
Buggy did not know what a phone was, except some part of him knew perfectly well that it could carry voices across enormous distances, hold messages and pictures and stories, and perform more tasks than anything that size had a right to manage. When he tried to understand how, the knowledge simply stopped. He knew how to use it in the shallow, automatic way a person knew how to tie familiar knots; he had no idea how to make one.
The fluorescent hallway disappeared into a desk covered in glowing drawings. The woman turned a small metal part between her fingers while thinking about clearances, hinges, casters, measurements, and whether somebody had changed a dimension without telling her, and Buggy understood enough of the thoughts to know they belonged to work she had done for years.
Fifteen years, the memory supplied. She had once liked the job and could still lose herself in an interesting problem, but the feeling sitting beneath everything was exhaustion: not the tiredness after a watch or a fight, but something older and accumulated. She needed the job, resented how much of her life it consumed, and spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about something called retirement, which Buggy learned meant having enough money that nobody could make you keep working.
That idea made immediate sense. Before he could examine it, the memory slid somewhere softer: the woman curled in a chair with her phone, reading when she was supposed to be sleeping, then flour dusting a kitchen counter while something sweet baked and dirty bowls waited accusingly in the sink.
She looked at the bowls and decided they could wait until morning. Buggy approved of her judgment, though he resented feeling approval for a decision made by a stranger in a place that should not exist.
Night settled around the next memory. The woman was speaking through her phone to someone Buggy could not see, and before the voice had said more than a few words he knew it was her mother.
The warmth that rose in him was so immediate that Buggy recoiled. He did not know the woman on the other end of the call, did not know her house or her face, and certainly did not love her; the woman whose memory he was trapped inside did, and for the moment Buggy could feel the shape of that love as clearly as his own anger.
Her mother was explaining something she had sewn that day, possibly a bag, and why this version had worked better than the last one. The woman listened while scrolling idly through her phone, teased her mother when she complained that her husband had forced her to go for a walk, and laughed when the older woman demanded to know whose side she was on.
Nothing important happened by Buggy’s standards. Nobody fought, discovered treasure, betrayed anyone, or revealed a secret, and the conversation wandered through family, groceries, what the woman had eaten, what somebody’s children had done that week, and other details Buggy forgot almost as soon as he heard them.
That seemed to be why the memory hurt. It was ordinary enough that both women expected another conversation just like it tomorrow, and when her mother yawned the woman glanced at the time and said she was going to bed.
“Okay. Night, love you, talk to you tomorrow.” Her mother’s voice was warm and absent-minded with habit, and the woman answered, “Night. Love you too. Talk to you tomorrow.”
The call ended. The woman sat alone for another minute before returning to her book, while Buggy remained trapped inside a feeling he had no right to miss.
Morning came with irritation. The woman was tired, did not want to go to work, and hated the construction narrowing the road ahead of her while metal carriages moved around her without horses, sails, or anything Buggy recognized.
Car, the memory told him. He understood the wheel beneath her hands and the pedals beneath her feet, knew the machine used gasoline and an engine, and also knew with frustrating certainty that neither he nor the woman could build one from scraps merely because she knew how to drive.
Orange barriers closed part of the roadway. Another car moved beside hers too quickly, the woman’s attention snapped toward it, and Buggy had only time to understand that there was not enough room before a horn screamed and metal struck metal.
The world lurched sideways with a violence that erased every useful detail. Glass broke, something hit, the belt across her chest locked tight, and then the memory ended so completely that Buggy knew she had died even though nobody said it.
He did not know her name. He did not know where she lived, why he was seeing any of this, or how a dead stranger’s memories had gotten into his head, but the certainty of her death remained while another memory surfaced through it.
This one was absurdly mundane. The woman lay awake in summer heat glaring at the ceiling because her air conditioner had broken, and Buggy abruptly knew that an air conditioner was a machine that could make an entire room cold without ice, servants, or a Devil Fruit.
She was furious about it. Her irritation came through so strongly that for one ridiculous moment Buggy found himself more offended by the broken machine than by the fact that such a machine could apparently exist.
He woke with a gasp that became a strangled noise when his ribs objected. Pain occupied almost every part of him: his head throbbed, one eye barely opened, his mouth tasted terrible, and bandages wrapped tightly around his chest.
Buggy waited until the room stopped rotating before looking around. The ceiling was wood, an oil lamp sat nearby, and hot air barely moved through an open window; everything was reassuringly normal until his mind supplied phone, car, fluorescent light, and air conditioner without permission.
His breathing quickened. A woman seated beside the bed noticed and said, “Easy,” which made Buggy turn his head too fast and immediately regret the decision.
She might have been forty or older, with dark hair streaked in silver and pinned back from a face that suggested years of dealing with other people’s stupidity had left her difficult to impress. “You’ve been unconscious for four days,” she told him.
“Four?” Buggy’s voice sounded scraped raw, and the woman clarified that it had been nearly four before he demanded to know where he was.
“My house.” She waited while Buggy looked around, apparently satisfied that this answered the question.
It did not. The room was small but clean, with bottles, folded cloth, a basin, and fresh flowers in a chipped vase; through the wall came a woman’s laughter, a man’s voice, and music from somewhere below, while perfume lingered faintly in the air.
Buggy looked at her again. “I nearly got beaten to death and woke up in a brothel, didn’t I?”
“That depends on how attached you are to the phrase ‘nearly got beaten to death.’” The woman’s mouth twitched when Buggy frowned. “One of my girls found you behind the Blue Lantern. You had crawled halfway under a stack of empty crates.”
“Smart.” Buggy tried to nod, thought better of it, and kept still.
“You were bleeding all over them.” She raised an eyebrow when Buggy amended his assessment to “less smart.”
He tried to sit up anyway. She planted one hand on his shoulder, Buggy glared, and she stared back until his ribs persuaded him to surrender before she did.
“Two cracked ribs. Concussion. Your shoulder’s a mess, and you’re bruised almost everywhere.” The woman looked him over. “The doctor says if you try getting up again, he’ll tie you to the bed.”
“A few weeks?” Buggy asked after she explained how long the doctor expected him to stay in bed. When she said that had been her reaction too and she considered the doctor optimistic, Buggy decided he did not like her very much.
Unfortunately, he suspected he might like her a little. Then his memory caught up with him: tavern, alley, net, Roger’s name, men talking about his Devil Fruit, and most importantly his money.
“My pouch!” Buggy jerked upright far enough to make his ribs explode with pain, then dropped back with a shout while the woman called him an idiot.
“My money,” he repeated through clenched teeth. She pointed toward a table where his pouch sat untouched beside the wall.
Buggy stared at it, then at her. “You didn’t—” He stopped when one eyebrow rose and decided there were questions a guest in a brothel did not need to finish.
Relief lasted perhaps three seconds before the alley came back with considerably less convenient details.
Six men. The net. Roger’s name. Someone talking about selling information and Devil Fruit users.
They had seen his face. They knew what his Fruit did. They knew—or at least believed—that he had sailed with Roger.
But they did not know his name.
Buggy went back through the night as carefully as his aching head allowed. He had bragged about Roger in the Crooked Mast because apparently alcohol made him an idiot, and he had announced that he was putting together a crew, but he had never introduced himself to those bastards. None of them had called him Buggy. Roger’s brat. Kid. Devil Fruit user. Nothing else.
That was something.
Not enough, but something.
If they were still looking for him, they were looking for a blue-haired teenager with a red nose and a body that came apart. Unfortunately, Buggy had to admit that was a fairly specific description.
He would worry about that when standing up no longer threatened to knock him unconscious.
“My name is Maribel,” she said after the silence stretched. Buggy waited for some impossible burst of knowledge to attach itself to her name, but nothing came; Maribel was simply Maribel, and the absence of anything strange was so comforting he nearly sighed.
“Buggy,” he replied. Maribel said she already knew, which narrowed his eyes immediately.
“You shouted it in your sleep. More than once.”
Buggy narrowed his eyes. “What else did I say?”
“You called someone named Shanks an idiot. Repeatedly. Told a Rayleigh you hadn’t stolen anything.” She paused. “And you cried for Roger.”
Buggy looked away at the last one. Maribel did not comment, and that restraint bought more goodwill than he intended to give her.
She continued after a moment. “You also said some things neither of us understood. Phone. Cars. And you spent a surprising amount of time complaining about something called air conditioning.”
Buggy turned his head back very carefully. “What?”
“Air conditioning.” Maribel watched his expression change. “Does it mean something?”
The room was unbearably hot now that she had said the words. Sweat clung beneath Buggy’s bandages, and his mind supplied a little panel mounted to a wall, buttons beneath his fingers, a low mechanical hum, and cool air pouring through a vent.
His fingers had never touched that panel. Hers had, somewhere impossible, and Buggy swallowed against a sudden rush of nausea.
“What happened to me?” he asked. Maribel reminded him that he had been beaten nearly to death, and Buggy shook his head as much as the concussion allowed. “Before that. Not the fight.”
“I wasn’t there, so you’re going to have to be more specific.” Her dry tone might have irritated him under other circumstances, but Buggy was staring at his own hands.
They were smaller than the woman’s and rough in different places, callused by ropes, knives, training, and years aboard a ship. He remembered other hands moving across something called a keyboard and knew a computer was a machine he could—no, she could—use without possessing the slightest idea how to build one.
“Something’s wrong with my head,” Buggy said. Maribel pointed out that he had a concussion, and Buggy snapped, “No shit.”
“Then maybe stop screaming and trying to throw yourself out of bed.” Maribel stared him down again, and for some reason the ordinary annoyance helped.
Maybe the whole thing was the concussion. Buggy had been hit in the head repeatedly, and Crocus had explained often enough that injured brains did strange things, usually after someone aboard Roger’s ship did something stupid enough to require the lecture.
The explanation almost worked. Then Buggy thought about mechanical engineering and immediately knew the woman had spent years designing special tools, stands, fixtures, storage and transport boxes, things with hinges and casters, and structures meant to hold other things in the right position.
He could see drawings in his mind and understand some of the logic behind them. He also knew, with equal certainty, that she would be furious with anyone who assumed that working around aircraft meant she knew how to build an aircraft, just as knowing an air conditioner existed did not tell Buggy how to manufacture one.
“This is bad,” Buggy muttered. Maribel agreed, and when he pointed out that she did not even know what was happening, she shrugged.
“No. But I’ve known you four days, and you’ve managed to cause problems through most of them.” Her mouth twitched. “I like my odds.”
Buggy would have shouted if his ribs had allowed it. Instead he scowled while Maribel stood and offered to get him water, which made him realize how desperately thirsty he was.
“Food too?” Buggy asked. Maribel reminded him he had been awake for only a few minutes, and he informed her he was injured, not dead.
“You nearly managed the second one.” She sighed when Buggy insisted he was still hungry. “I’ll see what we have.”
She reached the door before Buggy said her name. Maribel glanced back, and Buggy spent an uncomfortable second discovering that thanking someone was much harder without Roger or Shanks doing it first.
“Thanks,” he said at last. Maribel’s expression softened slightly as she told him not to make her regret dragging him inside.
“Your girl dragged me inside.” Buggy could not resist correcting her, and Maribel replied that she had supervised.
“Ah. Very strenuous.” Her softened expression vanished, which made Buggy smile despite his split lip.
After she left, he listened to the Blue Lantern settle around him. Somebody laughed downstairs, a bottle broke, and a woman yelled that Gerald owed her six hundred beli before another voice insisted Gerald owed twelve hundred and a third announced that he owed the house three thousand and deserved a broken finger if he showed his face.
That sounded like a much more reasonable world. Buggy relaxed into the pillow until his eyes wandered to the window and the nearly motionless curtain reminded him that the room was still horribly hot.
A memory surfaced of the woman lowering a thermostat by two degrees and walking away with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had solved a problem. Buggy stared at the wall where no thermostat existed and muttered several things about the unfairness of knowing comforts he could not reproduce.
He understood scraps of the principle—moving heat, compression, coils, some substance that changed state—but that was not the same as knowing how to make the machine. His own world had electricity in places and Den Den Mushi performed feats that would probably make the woman’s engineers cry, yet none of that turned Buggy into an inventor.
He closed his eyes despite himself, and the memories were waiting. This time they came less like complete scenes and more like things caught in a current: the woman younger in a school hallway, somebody excitedly introducing her to fanfiction; a television full of animated figures; books, movies, and stories stacked across years.
Stories were the thread connecting them. She read when she was happy and when she was bored, read when she was procrastinating, watched things when she was too tired to do anything else, and played games about gathering resources, building shelter, organizing supplies, and trying not to die.
Buggy approved of that last category. At least somebody in her impossible world understood sensible entertainment.
Other fragments followed, but they refused to arrange themselves into a biography. She liked baking more than cooking, hated chopping vegetables and cleaning afterward, had family she loved, and had once been closer to friends who gradually moved away until messages became less frequent.
The loneliness Buggy expected was not quite there. She had been comfortable by herself, even preferred it often, but she understood in a tired adult way that relationships disappeared if nobody maintained them; distance could take people without a fight, betrayal, or dramatic ending.
A thought drifted through the memory that a new start might have been good for her. Buggy rejected it so violently the dream seemed to shudder around him.
A new start was what he was doing. She was dead and he was alive, and whatever these memories were, they were not permission for somebody else to take over his life.
The final image before he woke was the woman lying in bed with her phone too close to her face, reading long after she knew she should stop. She was at the best part, she had work in the morning, and she kept reading anyway.
Buggy woke later with tears on his face and wiped them away angrily. The room had darkened, a lamp burned beside the bed, and Maribel had left water and a covered bowl within reach.
He drank slowly and sat with the cup between both hands. The woman had been thirty-five, and somehow pieces of those thirty-five years now existed inside his head without pushing his own memories out.
He could not summon her whole life. Reaching for her engineering degree produced a jumble of equations, drawings, and practical instincts rather than miraculous expertise. The memories behaved like scattered possessions after a shipwreck, arriving with bits of knowledge and emotion still attached.
The incompleteness should have made them easier to dismiss, but it did the opposite. Buggy knew she had spent fifteen years at a job she once liked and eventually wanted to escape, knew she liked stories and baking, knew she had expected machines to cool rooms and hot water to come from pipes, and knew she had spoken to her mother almost every night.
That last memory hurt more than the machines or the impossible world. It was not Buggy’s mother and not Buggy’s grief, yet he remembered the warmth of that ordinary call and the certainty both women had carried that another one would happen the next evening.
Night, love you, talk to you tomorrow. There had been no tomorrow, and Buggy hated the unfairness of it with a familiarity he did not want to examine too closely.
He wondered who had realized she was not coming home, who had gone through her belongings, and whether the book she had been reading was still sitting unfinished somewhere. That last concern was ridiculous enough to make him almost laugh; apparently a death could be tragic and profoundly irritating at the same time.
That, at least, felt familiar. Roger was dead, Shanks was gone, Buggy had nearly gotten himself killed less than a month after declaring he could handle everything alone, and now somebody else’s lifetime was leaking into his dreams.
Maybe the woman had been real. Maybe this was some impossible Grand Line nonsense nobody had bothered naming, or maybe his concussion had broken his brain in a way Crocus would find hysterical if Buggy ever admitted it.
Whatever the explanation, Buggy knew where the boundary was. Roger, Rayleigh, Crocus, Shanks, the Oro Jackson, the Bara Bara no Mi, every fight and humiliation and treasure hunt and stupid argument belonged to him, and no strange memory changed that.
He was Buggy. He was fifteen years old, had sailed with the Pirate King, and still intended to become important enough that Shanks would hear his name from the other side of the sea and regret ever watching him walk away.
Thirty-five years of someone else’s memories might give him foreign habits, useful ideas, uncomfortable emotions, and a passionate hatred of broken air conditioning. They did not get to decide who he was.
The certainty finally let him relax. Downstairs, someone started shouting about Gerald again, another person objected to letting the idiot buy drinks on credit, and something heavy fell over amid several competing voices.
Buggy smiled into the pillow. Some parts of the world still made sense, and for the moment that was enough.
Sleep pulled him under again, but this time the memory waiting for him was quiet. The woman sat curled in a chair with her phone too close to her face, absorbed in a story Buggy could not quite read.
He caught impressions instead of words: pirates, danger, a red-haired man crossing the page. Then a blue-haired figure appeared, and a sharp burst of delighted recognition warmed the memory so suddenly that Buggy tried to focus.
The words blurred before he could make them out. He was left only with the unsettling certainty that whatever story the woman had been reading, she had recognized that blue-haired pirate immediately.