luffy my beloved

You laugh as you try to continue writing the latest adventures of the Straw Hat pirates in Wano and all the different tales and battles that the crew went on.

You were halfway through a sentence about Zoro getting lost in the Flower Capital again when Luffy nipped gently at your earlobe. The pen stuttered in your grip, making a splotch of ink on the page.

"See?" Luffy mumbled, his lips ghosting along your jaw as he grinned. "You write too much. You should play more."

His fingers flexed against your skin, rough and warm under your shirt. His touch was everywhere at once, poking at your sides and splaying across your chest, and every time you tried to refocus, he shifted, stubborn as ever. With every distracting press and teasing tug, he made it impossible to remember where you’d left off. Kaido? The Onigashima raid? You honestly forgot, and at this point? Couldn't care less,

Luffy's hands roam greedily under your shirt, fingers splaying wide on your waist as he hauls you fully onto the desk. His mouth claims yours again, tongue pushing deep while his hands roam, before his fingers tug on your waistband, taking everything off in one firm tug.

Luffy lets out a low moan when he sees you're soaking, just waiting for him, probably as desperate for this as he is.

He stands up, stepping back in between your legs, his hips grind forward, the head of his cock sliding through your slick folds.

"Fuck, look at you," he growls, voice rough and low as he leans forward to give you a kiss. "This cunt's already dripping for me. You were trying to write about the crew, but your body's telling me exactly what you need."

He lines up and slowly sinks in, burying himself to the hilt, a guttural groan rips from his throat as your walls clamp down around him. "Shit—tight, so fucking tight. You were made for my cock, weren't you? Made to take every inch of me."

Luffy doesn't wait. He pulls back and slams in again, setting a relentless pace that makes the desk creak under you. His mouth never stops moving; kissing your jaw, nipping your neck, sucking at your shoulder while his hips snap forward. Each thrust drags his cock along your inner walls, the wet sound of your bodies meeting filling the room.

"Grip me just like that," he pants against your skin, teeth scraping your collarbone, his voice almost slurred, like he's drunk on the sensation, the connection. "Fuck, your pussy's squeezing me so good. Like it—FUCK! Like it knows who it belongs to.”

His hand slides up to cradle the back of your neck, holding you in place as he drives deeper. The possessive edge in his voice grows thicker with every stroke. "Like it knows I'm the only one who gets to fuck you like this."

His voice gets lower, letting you hear the emotion in his voice, the almost painful realization of what could have happened. "We almost lost everything out there. Almost lost you.”

His grip gets tighter as he thrusts in deeply, kissing you deeply, before pulling away, an almost manic look in his eyes. “But you're here, alive, and taking my cock like you were born for it."

"Luffy," you gasp, fingers clutching at his shoulders. "Slow down, I—"

"No," he cuts in, voice ragged as he thrusts harder. "Can't slow down. Not when you're this wet around me. Tell me how it feels, tell me you want more."

"It feels—fuck—you feel so deep," you moan, hips jerking up to meet him.

"That's it," he growls, forehead pressed to yours. "Say it again. Say how deep my cock is inside that tight little cunt."

"So deep," you breathe, nails digging into his back. "You're stretching me so much."

Luffy groans loudly, his hips snapping faster. "Good girl. Keep talking. I want to hear every sound you make while I fuck you."

His forehead drops to your shoulder, breath hot against your skin as he focuses on the rhythm. His thrusts turn sharper, more desperate, chasing the tight drag of your cunt around him. "Don't stop clenching like that, feels too good. You're perfect—every squeeze, every sound you make. This pussy was made for me."

"Luffy—please," you whimper, legs tightening around his waist.

"Please what?" he demands, teeth grazing your ear. "Tell me what you want. Want me to fill you up? Want your captain to pump every drop inside this greedy cunt?"

"Yes," you cry out, voice breaking. "Want you to come inside me."

"Fuck yes," he snarls, pounding into you with renewed force. "Gonna give it to you. Gonna stuff you full until it's dripping out. Gonna keep it all in? Please?"

"Yes—yes, Luffy," you moan, body shaking under him.

Behind him, Zoro stands with his arms crossed and his eye doing that thing where it's technically looking at something neutral but is actually tracking everything. Robin is beside him, composed and unhurried, a small book already in her hand that she may or may not have been reading while walking. None of them look particularly surprised to see you. They look, if anything, like people who were expecting you and chose this corner to wait at.

"We were just heading back," Sanji says.

"Mm," Robin says pleasantly, which is not an agreement or a disagreement.

Luffy, meanwhile, has not released your shoulders. He's looking at you with that specific quality of attention he gets sometimes — not the unfocused, world-eating enthusiasm of his default mode, but something sharper underneath it. Interested. He tilts his head, and his grin shifts into something that knows more than it's saying.

"Something happened," he whispers to you, eyes sparkling in mischeif.

It's not a question, more of a statement.

"We went shopping," you say, aiming for nonchalant, but ultimately failing by the look on Luffy's face.

"Yeah." His grin widens. "And something happened."

You open your mouth to deflect, and then his hand moves — unhurried, completely unbothered by the social calculus of the gesture — and his forefinger and thumb find your chin, tilting your face one way and then the other with a thoughtful expression that is entirely at odds with how casual the touch is.

You go still, thrown by the casualness of his touch, but also by his proximity.

He examines you with the gravity of someone doing something very important, turning your face slightly left, then right, his dark eyes moving over your features with an attention that is warm and unabashed and just slightly too knowing for comfort. Your heart does something inconvenient.

"Thought so," he says finally, his voice dropping into something lower, something with a current running beneath it. His eyes trace down, briefly, to your mouth; unhurried, unapologetic about it, and then back up to yours.

He doesn't move closer, just stays there, close enough that you're aware of every point of potential contact, far enough that none of them exist yet. Holding the distance like it's deliberate. Like he's decided on it specifically.

"You're doing that on purpose," you whisper back to him, grateful that the others seem to be talking amongst themselves to give you and the captain a moment.

His grin returns, full and bright. "Doing what?"

"You know what."

"Do I?" He releases your chin, stepping back with the easy confidence of someone who just won something without appearing to try. "You look good," he adds, and the simplicity of it, after everything else, makes another one of your defenses lower.. "You look like you're starting to figure something out."

You stare at him. "That's very cryptic for someone who just manhandled my face."

"I didn't manhandle anything." He looks genuinely offended. "I was being observant. I can show you manhandling."

"He does this," Zoro says, from somewhere behind him, the tone of a man who has witnessed this behavior many times and made his peace with it.

"It works," Luffy says, unapologetically.

"It's alarming," you tell him.

"Also works," he agrees.

Robin makes a soft sound that might be a laugh, quickly converted into something more neutral. Nami, beside you, is not bothering to convert anything; she's smiling with the open amusement of someone watching a favorite scene play out.

Sanji, predictably, looks pained. "Are you done?"

"Probably not," Luffy says cheerfully. Then, to you, with the sudden pivot he does where the lightness drops just enough to let something genuine through: "I'm glad you came today, to the island. This is part of the whole reason we brought you with us, so you can explore and feel safe doing so."

The shift is small but real. You look at him, at the grin that's still there but sitting over something more serious underneath, and feel the specific warmth of being meant.

"Me too," you say.

He nods once, satisfied, like something has been confirmed. Then the grin reasserts itself completely. "Okay. Robin wants you."

"I—" Robin begins.

"She does," Luffy says. "She's been thinking about it since this morning. Franky's said she's been in a daze the whole morning."

"I have been considering," Robin says, with great dignity, "whether your presence might be useful for the research I had planned this afternoon. The phrasing Luffy has chosen is his own."

Luffy turns around to look at the ravenette, a genuine, confused look on his face. "And what's the difference between what you said and what I said?"

The rearrangement happens quickly, with the practical efficiency of a crew that's used to splitting into configurations based on what each situation needs. In this case, Robin and Zoro's stealth and battle smarts were needed to lurk around in the right places and gain more information about the island and see what information they have regarding weapons, history, or One Piece.

"Be back before it gets dark," Sanji says, to you specifically, as if the others aren't there.

"We'll take care of her," Robin says, and something in the way she says it makes Sanji's argument die before it's fully formed. He exhales, and nods, and you catch the slight tension in his jaw that he's choosing not to act on; and the choosing of it, the deliberateness of the restraint, tells you something about how far he's come in the last hour.

You squeeze his hand once before you let go, he quickly squeezes back, before the two groups seperate.

The three of you find your rhythm quickly.

Zoro, it turns out, has a specific approach to reconnaissance: he looks like he's doing absolutely nothing while actually absorbing everything within a six-meter radius. He positions himself at the edges of spaces — a doorway, a market corner, the outside of a building, while you and Robin go in — and simply exists there with his arms crossed and his eye half-lidded, and people walk past him and around him and never look twice, and he sees all of it.

Robin, meanwhile, has a different approach entirely. She moves through spaces as if she belongs in them, regardless of context. Libraries, records offices, and the back room of a shop where old maps are kept in varying states of organization are all hers as she walks with the quiet authority of someone who has never once doubted her right to be curious about things. People answer her questions with the disoriented helpfulness of those who weren't planning to be cooperative but found themselves cooperative anyway and aren't entirely sure when that happened.

You watch her do it twice before you start doing it yourself. Not copying her, your version is different, warmer, more conversational, but drawing from the same principle. Belong. Be interested. Let them think it was their idea to tell you.

"You're a natural," Robin observes, after you've gotten a great deal of useful information from a textile merchant who had, three minutes earlier, been distinctly uninterested in speaking to anyone.

"I've had practice," you say. "Different context. Same principle."

She looks at you thoughtfully. "Veloria."

"And before that." A pause. "You learn to talk to people when talking to people is the difference between safe and not."

Robin is quiet for a moment, and you can feel her filing the information away; not coldly, not clinically, but with the care of someone who understands the weight of what you've just said because they have weight of their own.

"Yes," she says simply. "You do."

The library is your favorite stop.

It's small, a single room attached to the back of a building that also appears to be a cartographer's office and possibly someone's home, but the shelves are dense and the light is good. And the smell of it, old paper and ink and something faintly floral from whatever is growing in the window box, reaches something in you that hasn't been reached in days.

You exhale when you step inside, and Robin notices.

"The smell of libraries," she says, beside you, with the warm recognition of a shared language.

"It's the same everywhere," you say. "Different islands, different climates, different everything, and libraries always smell like this."

"Paper remembers," she says, simply. "Even when the content changes."

You look at her, but she's already moving toward the shelves, her fingers trailing lightly along spines, unhurried. The afternoon light from the window catches the line of her jaw, the dark fall of her hair, the particular grace of her movement through a space full of things she loves.

You stay where you are for a moment, just watching her.

She reaches for a volume, checks the spine, and replaces it. Reaches for another as a small smile graces her lips. "You're staring," she says, without turning around.

"I'm observing," you say. "There's a difference."

She does turn then, and the look she gives you is soft and knowing and amused all at once. "Is there?"

"Well, I don't know. You're the one who told me that."

"I did." She tilts her head. "And what are you observing?"

You consider honesty, then decide it's the only interesting option. "That you're different in here," you say. "You're always composed, but in here it's — like you're not performing composure, as you feel at genuine peace."

She's quiet for a moment, looking at you in the particular way she has; taking you apart carefully, not to damage but to understand.

"Most places," she says, "I'm aware of myself in them. How I fit and what's expected." She looks back at the shelves. "Libraries are the exception. I've never had to think about who I am in a library."

The honesty of it, offered so cleanly, moves through you. "How long have you been reading?"

"As long as I can remember." A pause. "Before that, probably."

"Before you can remember?" You ask, trying to encourage Robin to open up to you.

"I was raised in a place with an extraordinary library," she says, and the words are even, but something in them is not. You recognize the shape of it, the thing that lives in a person when the place they loved is also the place that hurt them. You know that shape from the inside.

You don't ask more, choosing instead to just say: "Then it makes sense."

She looks at you again. The warmth in her expression shifts into something more deliberate, something that's made a decision.

"What about you?" she asks, moving toward you, unhurried. "What do you love that makes the rest of you make sense?"

Your breath adjusts slightly at her approach, at the way she closes the distance between you with the same ease she brings to everything. "Making things," you say. "The moment before, when it's still a blank canvas. When it could be anything."

"And then you make it real," she says.

"And then I make it real."

She's close now, not quite the way she was this morning, in the closet, with your hair in her hands, but close in the way that it feels like everything has narrowed down to the space between two people, where the words become secondary to everything else.

"You asked me this morning," she says, softly, "if it was okay to want more."

Your pulse adjusts as you attempt to hold eye contact with her. You fail at that, eyes darting away quickly before looking back. "I remember."

"I want you to understand what I meant when I said yes." Her hand lifts, and her fingers brush your jaw. "Not as permission. As an answer."

"What's the difference?" you ask, and your voice has gone quieter without you deciding it should.

"Permission is given by someone with authority over you," she says. "An answer is given by someone who has been asked what they want." Her eyes hold yours, and there's something in them that is warm and serious and entirely certain. "I want this. That's the answer."

Your heart is doing something significant. "Robin—"

"You don't have to say anything back," she says. "I'm not asking for a response. I'm just being clear." She finishes with the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.

You look at her. At the afternoon light and the library smell and the extraordinary patience of her, the way she holds space without filling it, the way she's been careful with you from the very first night on the ship in a way that has nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with respect.

You reach up and cover the hand at your jaw with your own, holding it there.

"Robin," you say again, softer this time.

"Mm?"

"Stop being so careful with me."

Something shifts in her expression. Surprise, quickly followed by something warmer, something that looks almost like delight at being caught being too considerate.

You close the remaining distance yourself.

The kiss is soft, warm, and entirely unhurried. Two people in a small library on an island whose name you'll remember specifically because of this moment, because of the paper-and-ink smell and the afternoon light and the way she makes a small sound when you kiss her, almost inaudible, like something she wasn't planning to let out. Her hand turns under yours, fingers lacing together, and she kisses you back with the same patience she brings to everything she does, and somehow that patience is the most devastating thing about it.

When you pull back, you're both quiet for a moment.

Her thumb moves across your knuckles, slow and absent, the way Sanji's does. You wonder if they know they do the same thing.

"You are," she says finally, her voice slightly lower than before, "considerably braver than I gave you credit for."

"You gave me a lot of credit," you point out.

"Yes," she agrees. "And you exceeded it." The smile that follows is real and unguarded, one she doesn't distribute widely. "Well done."

You laugh, and the laugh fills the small library, and she watches it happen with the expression of someone adding something to a list of things they intend to see again.

She brings your joined hands up, briefly, and presses her lips to your knuckles, precise and deliberate.

"Now," she says, returning to her usual register, "I believe I found a reference to a previous inhabitant of this island that I'd like to look into further."

"Right," you say, your voice is admirably steady. "Research."

"Research," she confirms, the picture of composure.

You look at her for one more moment. "Robin."

"Mm?"

"Soon was shorter than I expected."

The smile she gives you then is slow, and warm, and knows exactly what it's doing.

"You made it shorter," she says. "I told you you'd find you were being encouraged."

You shake your head, still smiling, and turn toward the nearest shelf. Your research is waiting, and the afternoon is still going, and somewhere outside is Zoro, and the ship is at the dock, and all of it is yours now in a way that still catches you sometimes, the reality of it arriving in small bright moments like this one.

You pull a book from the shelf and open it, pretending like you're absorbing any of it, when your mind is filled with thoughts of that kiss you just shared.

And from across the room, without looking up from her own volume, Robin says quietly:

"For what it's worth, the moment before, when it could still be anything." A pause. "I think I understand why you love it."

You look over at her to see Robin reading, her expression composed, the small smile still at the corner of her mouth.

You look back at your book, and you're smiling too. You briefly wonder if the Marines knew that the woman they've labeled 'Devil Child, ' all those years ago, was actually incredibly sweet.

—

When Robin was sure she was ready to leave, and with a few more kisses exchanged, you two left the library only to find Zoro nowhere. Robin had sighed before taking your hand and starting walking. The ravenette then tells you how this is a common occurrence with the swordsman, and that he'll turn up eventually. You find Zoro by sound before you see him.

Specifically, you find him by the sound of several women talking at once in the particular overlapping register of people competing for the same attention, voices bright and angled, laughter deployed strategically. You and Robin round the corner of a narrow side street and there he is — leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his eye doing absolutely nothing to encourage the situation and everything to accidentally encourage it anyway, because Zoro has the specific problem of being exactly the kind of person who becomes more interesting the less effort he makes.

Although, to his credit, he looks profoundly bored. He also looks, underneath the boredom, faintly irritated in the way of someone who has been standing in one place longer than intended and has opinions about it.

Then he sees you, and the shift is immediate. Something in his posture changes, the irritation dropping away, replaced by something that sits more easily. His eye moves from you to Robin and back, and then he's already straightening, already turning toward the women around him with the energy of someone closing a tab he didn't open.

"Sorry," he says, with absolutely no indication that he's sorry. "Gotta go. My girlfriends are here."

The word lands in your chest as something dropped from a height.

Girlfriends.

You hear Robin make a small sound beside you — not quite a laugh, something more refined than that — as the cluster of women disperses with varying degrees of grace, and you stand there in the side street with your mouth doing something you're not fully in control of.

Zoro approaches without ceremony, falling into step beside you both with the ease of someone rejoining a conversation he'd only briefly stepped away from.

"Girlfriends," you say, to no one in particular.

Your voice comes out smaller than intended. Slightly flustered, slightly delighted. You turn slightly to look at the man who uses words like weapons and apparently decided to deploy this one casually, in a side street, to a group of strangers, without so much as a warning.

"Sorry I was late," Zoro says, directed generally at both of you, in the tone of someone who is offering the words more as acknowledgment than actual apology. "Hope you got what you needed."

"We did," Robin says. "Productively."

"Mm." He moves closer as he says it — closing a gap that had been unnecessary — and then, without preamble, turns toward Robin and kisses her. Clean and certain, a greeting that doesn't ask permission because it doesn't need to, and Robin receives it with the composure she brings to everything while her hand lifts briefly to his jaw.

When he turns to you, the kiss lands on your forehead, warm and deliberate. His lips press there for just a moment longer than strictly necessary, and you feel the weight of it travel down through you like something settling.

Then his hand moves. A single, light tapbefore his palm finds the curve of your lower back, easy and unashamed, a get-moving gesture that has absolutely no business being as effective as it is.

You move forward.

Behind you, you hear Robin make the sound that is her version of laughing at something she finds delightful.

"Don't," you say.

"I didn't say anything," she says.

"You were about to."

"I was thinking something," she concedes. "That's different."

Robin laughs as she glances at you with the expression of someone watching something she finds genuinely charming. "You're adorable," she says, warmly.

"I'm processing," you say.

"Take your time," she says. "He'll do it again."

Zoro, for his part, says nothing. He walks beside you with his hands in his pockets and the particular quality of a person who has said what they meant and doesn't feel the need to add to it.

You glance at him sideways, and he glances back; the corner of his mouth moves. You look forward again and decide not to examine too closely the increase in temperature your body feels.

You walk for a few minutes through the late afternoon streets, and the conversation settles into the comfortable shorthand of people who've been moving through the same spaces all day, comparing notes. Robin mentions what she found in the library — a historical thread she wants to pull further. You add what you picked up from the textile merchant, the cartographer's assistant, the woman at the medicinal stall who knew more about the island's internal politics than she appeared to.

Zoro listens without commenting, which you've learned means he's paying more attention, not less.

And somewhere in the listening, you become aware of something.

You don't know him, not really. You know the shape of him; the swords, the directness, the morning appearances at your doorway that he describes as passing by. You know the way he exists in a room, the particular quality of his silences.

But you don't know him. Not the way you've been learning the others, question by question, afternoon by afternoon.

And he just called you his girlfriend. In public, casually, and to strangers.

"Zoro," you say.

"Mm."

"What do you want to do? We're done for the day." You glance up at him. "We haven't actually spent any time together. Just us, or us three." You pause. "I realized I've been getting to know everyone and I don't really know you yet. And that's—" you search for the word.

"Weird," Robin supplies helpfully.

"Weird," you agree. "Given the—" you gesture vaguely.

"Girlfriend thing," Robin says.

"The girlfriend thing," you confirm.

"I'm sure," Robin adds, with the pleasant tone of someone enjoying herself, "that the fact you also spent the majority of the recon getting turned around and ending up in the same place three times had nothing to do with why you didn't accomplish anything you'd actually planned."

Zoro looks at her. "I wasn't lost," he says.

"Of course not."

"I was taking a different route."

"Several times."

"Robin," he says.

"Yes?"

A pause. He looks at you instead, and the look that crosses his face then is unhurried and direct and warm in the specific way that Zoro is warm; underneath everything, without performance, like heat from something that's been burning steadily for a long time.

"Anything I want?" he says.

The question lands with a weight that suggests he already knows the answer. Which is how the three of you end up in a bar.

It's not a bad bar. Not the kind you'd avoid, not the kind you'd necessarily seek out, but the kind that exists in every port town, worn smooth by years of use, the kind where no one looks twice at what's happening at the next table, and the drinks are poured with a generosity that suggests the owner has given up on measured shots as a concept.

Robin sits across from you both with a glass of water and an expression of serene, private amusement. She had agreed to this with the ease of someone who had already calculated how it would go.

You and Zoro sit side by side with a line of shot glasses between you that has been lengthening at a rate that would alarm Chopper if he were present.

In the first round, Zoro had been generous. Magnanimous, even.

By the third round, he is looking at you with a new quality of attention.

By the fifth, you set your empty glass down and look back at him with the particular confidence that comes from years of practice and a tolerance built on island celebrations that would make most pirates reconsider their life choices.

"What," you say, with great composure, "you didn't know I was considered a champion back on Veloria?"

Zoro stares at you, then something happens to his face that you have not seen before. Something unguarded and genuinely delighted, a crack in the usual controlled surface that lets through something warmer and more unruly underneath. He laughs, real and low and surprised out of him.

"No," he says. "I did not know that."

"Now you do," you say, and reach for the next glass with the ease of someone who has done this many times on many islands and has never lost.

Robin watches from across the table with the expression of a naturalist observing something rare in its natural habitat. She takes a small, precise sip of her water.

"I did wonder," she says, "when you agreed so readily."

"I had relevant experience," you tell her.

"Clearly."

Zoro refills both glasses. He does it without looking away from you, which should not be as interesting as it is, but his hands know where everything is without needing his eyes, and there's something about that easy competence that you are choosing not to think too carefully about.

"Veloria had champions," he says. Not a question, just turning the information over, placing it somewhere.

"Every harvest season," you say. "Whoever lasted longest at the celebration table. I held the title for three years."

"Three years," he repeats, eyebrow raised, humor clear on his face.

"I'm very competitive," you tell him.

He looks at you, and the look has something in it that is very specific and very warm. "Yeah," he says. "I'm getting that."

The conversation finds its rhythm after that; easier, freer, the kind that alcohol loosens not by removing your judgment but by removing the hesitation around saying what you actually think. You ask him questions, and he answers them, which you quickly realize is rarer than it sounds. Zoro does not answer questions as a rule. He answers yours, though. Directly, without decoration, in the way of someone who has decided you're worth the honesty.

Favorite opponent? Someone who surprised him, he doesn't give a name. What he's training toward? You know the answer before he says it, but hearing it said plainly still does something. Whether he gets lonely on watch, a pause, longer than the others, and then: "Sometimes. Less now."

He doesn't explain what changed; he doesn't need to. You lean in slightly, your shoulder finding his. He doesn't move away, instead shifting his arm, making room. His hand settles at your knee, warm and heavy and entirely without pretense.

"You're a surprisingly good conversationalist," you tell him.

"Don't tell anyone," he says. "I have a reputation."

"Of being impossible to talk to?"

"Of not needing to talk." His eye cuts to you sideways. "Different thing."

"Is it?"

"Takes two," he says simply.

You look at him, at the close warm space between you in this worn-smooth bar with the afternoon turning gold outside and Robin watching from across the table like someone who has known how this was going to go since the beginning. She catches the drifting glance you give Zoro's lips, the way he mirrors you. The way you both lick your lips, but obviously hesitate to push forward.

Well, she'll fix that for you both.

"Zoro," Robin says then, pleasantly. "Be careful. That look in her eye has been there the whole day. She's been trying to kiss me all day."

You turn to her, betrayed. Robin looks back at you with the serenity of someone who has calculated the outcome of this sentence and approves of it.

Zoro slowly turns to look at you, something hungry and unnamed clear in his eyes.

"Is that so?" he says.

"I have been," you say, deciding that honesty is the only interesting option. "She kept saying soon." You look at Robin with narrowed eyes, a self-satisfied smirk on your face now as you lean towards the devil-fruit user, enjoying the way her eyes sharpen on your every movement.

"I was building anticipation," Robin says, unruffled.

"You were enjoying yourself," you correct.

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

Zoro is watching you both with the expression of a man who has just had his evening significantly improved. He leans back slightly, arm still along the back of your seat, his eye moving between you and Robin with a slow, interested quality that has heat at its edges.

"So what happened?" he asks. "With the soon?"

You meet his eye, and something in the look that passes between you is quick and mischievous and warm all at once, the kind that happens between people who have figured each other out faster than expected.

You both turn to Robin at the same moment.

She looks between you, and something shifts in her expression, the composed surface holding while something more alert moves underneath it.

"Don't," she says, with great dignity.

"Robin," you say, leaning forward, your elbows on the table. "We want to ask you something."

"I'm sure you do."

"It's a very simple question," Zoro says, from the other side.

"Mm." She looks at you both. "You're terrible at this. Both of you."

"And what are we doing?" you ask, with complete innocence.

"Making me the sole focus of two people who have just spent an hour determining exactly which approaches work on each other and are now applying them simultaneously." She picks up her water. "As I said. Terrible."

"Is it working?" Zoro asks.

A pause.

"Catastrophically," she says, which is not the answer anyone expected and sends you into laughter that you have to press your hand to your mouth to contain, while Zoro makes that low, satisfied sound that means he's more pleased than he's going to show.

"Hmm, I'm sure that's what you'd like us to believe. Or maybe," Zoro says, and his voice has dropped into something lower now, the bar noise filling the space around you, "she really just wants—"

He turns to you and kisses you.

It's not careful or tentative or asking, it's certain, the way Zoro is certain about things, his hand coming up to your jaw and holding you there with a directness that leaves very little room for anything except the fact of it. Your hand finds the front of his shirt without your permission, the kiss deepens before you've fully caught up with it starting.

Somewhere in the depths of your mind, there was a protesting voice reminding you that you were in a crowded, sticky-floored bar. It tried to surface, but every time you chased it up through the haze, Zoro did something that wrenched you right back down again: teeth nipping at your lower lip, a sound that was almost a growl reverberating from his throat against your mouth, the iron clamp of his fingers on your waist as he tugged you closer. The hand he kept at your jaw was less a caress than a command, though not one you had any thought of disobeying. Zoro kissed the way he fought; unapologetic, single-minded, with no intention of yielding ground.

At first, you half-expected him to glance aside, to check for witnesses, to hesitate in the presence of so much noise and light and other people. Maybe even to laugh the moment off and go back to his drink, as you’d imagined in your more cowardly moments. He didn’t. He never did. The attention of the bar was a non-issue, ignored in favor of the way your mouth opened for him, and the way your hands—when had you lost control of them?—curled into fistfuls at the front of his shirt, searching for leverage, for something solid. He was all muscle and warmth and stubborn intent, and you were suddenly wildly aware of the difference in your size, the way his frame could just close around you and keep you there.

You barely recognized yourself, tasting something wild and reckless in your own response, something you thought you’d left behind years ago. The press of his hips to yours, the way he bent his head to fit the line of your face, the deep, steadying rumble of breath through his nose as if he were fighting not to lose himself; all of it blurred together into a single, electrical pulse that made you light-headed and needful and half-feral with wanting.

It takes Robin a moment before she says, quietly but clearly: "We are in public."

Zoro pulls back by degrees rather than all at once, like he's making a point about it. His thumb moves along your jaw once before his hand drops. He looks at you with the expression of someone who has accomplished something and knows it.

Your grip on his shirt loosens slowly. You become aware that several people at nearby tables are looking elsewhere, diplomatically.

"Right," you say. Your voice is admirably steady for someone whose entire nervous system has just been rerouted. "Public."

"Yes," Robin says. "Public." She's already gathering her things with the composed efficiency of someone restoring order to the situation while internally processing something she would not describe as unaffected. "Shall we?"

The alley is narrow and cool after the warmth of the bar, the light lower now, the sounds of the street one layer removed. Robin leads you into it with the certainty of someone who has decided that being strategic and being decisive are not, in fact, opposites.

She turns, and she kisses you. Just her hands framing your face and the warmth of her and the particular way she kisses, unhurried and entirely present, like she has set aside every other thought in favor of this one.

You make a sound you weren't planning to make.

She pulls back just enough to look at you, and the expression on her face is soft and warm and completely unguarded.

Then she reaches past you.

Zoro steps in behind you as Robin's hands settle at your waist, and the world rearranges itself into the warm press of him at your back, solid and steady, his breath at your temple. Robin kisses you again, slower. Zoro's lips find your jaw, your neck, unhurried, like he's working something out at his own pace. His hands settle at your hips, and Robin's hands are at your face, and you are very thoroughly surrounded.

You turn enough to find Zoro's mouth again, and Robin watches for a moment before his arm reaches past you and draws her in, and then the three of you are rearranging again — Robin kissing Zoro over your shoulder while your forehead rests against his chest, then you turning back to Robin, then Zoro's lips at your temple while Robin says something quiet that makes you laugh into the space between them.

Zoro's hands wander, Robin's hands wander, and you've long since stopped keeping track of whose hands are whose because the information becomes less relevant.

‿︵‿ 𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝  𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼 ‿︵‿

The walk back to the ship takes longer than it should.

This is partly because you keep stopping. Partly because Robin keeps finding things to say that require close proximity to say properly. It wouldn't be wrong to say it might also be because Zoro has apparently decided that forward momentum is someone else's problem, and his hands have opinions that keep interrupting the process.

You make it back to the dock eventually, the Thousand Sunny sits there in the evening light, warm and solid, the familiar creak of her hull and the slap of water against her bow reaching you before you're close enough to see the deck properly.

When you do see the deck, there are three figures on it.

Chopper is sitting at the railing with his hooves folded, looking out at the water. Usopp is beside him, tilted back in a precarious way that suggests he's either very relaxed or asleep. Jinbe stands near the mast with the steady, unhurried presence of someone who has been there a while and does not mind waiting.

All three notice you at approximately the same moment.

Chopper's head comes up first. "YOU'RE BACK!" He's on his feet immediately, and then visibly stops himself, remembering something, and makes a visible effort to convert his sprint-toward-you into a more measured approach that takes about two seconds before he abandons it entirely and sprints toward you anyway. "Are you okay?! How was it?! Did your ribs bother you?! "

"I feel fine," you say, which is true in multiple senses.

"Your face is—" he squints at you with the intensity of a professional. "You're flushed. Were you drinking?!"

"Medically," Usopp confirms from the railing, now no longer asleep. "That is the face of someone who was drinking. Several someones, I'd say."

"I had some drinks," you say. "I'm fine. I won!" You finish, a proud smile on your face as you look at the crew that's there.

"She won," Zoro says, from behind you, and there's a quality in his voice that has not been there before; pride, uncomplicated and direct.

Chopper looks at Zoro, then you, before looking at Robin. After coming to whatever conclusion he has, Chopper turns to look at you again with the eyes of someone who notices everything about a person's physical state, including the things that have nothing to do with medicine.

"Oh," he says.

"Chopper—"

"No, I just—" He adjusts his hat, ears twitching as he refuses to look you in the eyes. "I'm glad you had a good day."

"We all did," Robin says, warmly.

Jinbe nods once, with the particular approval of someone who doesn't need details but has taken in everything. "Welcome back," he says simply.

Usopp is looking between all three of you with the expression of a man doing very rapid calculations. "Okay," he says. "So, how was the island?"

"Good research," Robin says.

"Good drinks," Zoro says.

"Good everything," you say, and leave it at that.

Zoro scans the deck once, taking stock, then looks at the three of them. "Where's the captain?"

"Still in town," Jinbe says. "Luffy found something."

A beat.

"What kind of something?" Robin asks.

"The kind that also involves Nami yelling and Sanji running after both of them," Usopp supplies. "So, a normal something."

Zoro exhales through his nose. "Right."

"They'll be back before long," Jinbe says, with the confidence of a man who has learned to trust the crew's chaos to resolve itself on a schedule.

The conversation continues around you, easy and overlapping, and you let it, stepping further onto the deck and tipping your face up toward the last of the afternoon light. The island sits behind you, green and warm, as the water moves. Somewhere in the distance, a bird calls once and then stops.

You're almost fully in the moment when you notice Usopp.

He's drifted slightly to the side, not far from the group, but angled away from its center in the particular way of someone trying to look like they aren't doing anything specific while very clearly doing something specific. His hands have come out of his pockets and are now doing something complicated at his sides, fingers moving against each other. He glances at you once, then away, then at you again.

You know that quality of fidget. You've watched him tell stories with his whole body, watched him go still when something matters more than the performance. This is the second one. This is Usopp, trying not to show that something has weight.

You drift toward him, unhurried, letting the other conversations continue without you.

"Hey," you say, quietly enough that it's just for him.

He looks at you with the expression of someone caught mid-thought. "Hey! I wasn't — I was just standing here. Totally normal."

"You're fidgeting," you say.

"I fidget all the time. Nerves of steel, actually, I just—" He stops to look at you. The performance drops, just slightly, the way it does with him when he decides honesty is less exhausting than the alternative. "Okay. I have to tell you something."

"Okay," you say, nodding your head encouragingly, the alcohol quickly burning through your body at the serious tone the sharpshooter has taken.

He takes a breath. Let it out. His hands find his pockets again, then leave them. "So. Today, while you were all in town, Jinbe and I were doing things. Around the island, generally." He gestures vaguely. "And we walked past this gallery. A local place, small, but actually really quality curration, nd I went in, just to look, and I got talking to the owner."

You watch him.

"And they mentioned they had an opening," he continues, faster now, the words finding their momentum. "One spot on the current exhibition. They'd had a cancellation and were looking for a piece that fit the collection, and I — I told them about you."

He stops, looks at you with the expression of a man who has now said the thing and must live with having said it.

"I told them about your work," he says, quieter now. "About the gallery on Veloria, about what you do." A pause, "I may have also told them that I personally knew you and had witnessed your legendary talent firsthand, and that the piece I was recommending was by someone who was going to be extremely well known very shortly." He winces slightly. "I used some of my, you know. My Usopp magic."

"Usopp magic," you repeat, humor lingering in your tone, as well as something else the Usopp couldn't specifically name.

"It's a thing. The stories get — it doesn't matter, the point is—" He looks at you directly, and underneath the flustered energy is something genuine and earnest and slightly terrified. "They agreed. There's a spot. If you want it for one of your actual pieces." He makes a careful gesture, "Not copies, but one of yours."

The words reach you in stages.

An opening.

One of your actual pieces.

Him, walking into a stranger's gallery and talking about you. Your work, your talent, the thing you've spent years protecting and hiding and carrying quietly, with enough conviction that they said yes.

You don't say anything.

Usopp watches your silence with increasing anxiety, his eyes moving over your face, trying to read it. "Okay, so, I know I maybe should have asked first, and I know you just got here and you've barely had time to figure out what's happening with everything. And if it's too much or too soon or if you'd rather not, I completely understand. It was probably overstepping, I just thought—" He exhales. "I thought you should get to have your real work somewhere. Not hidden, and not under something else." A pause, smaller. "You deserve that."

The last three words land differently from everything before them.

You look at him, at the earnest, anxious, extraordinary person in front of you, who walked into a gallery on an island he'd never been to and advocated for you with everything he had. Who did it not because anyone asked, but because it occurred to him that you might want it, and he decided to try.

You haven't been on the ship for long. You're still figuring out which sounds mean what, still adjusting to the reality of being somewhere that wants you in it. And this person, this person you've known briefly, looked at your life and found something in it worth fighting for.

Your throat tightens before you can manage it.

"Usopp," you manage to say.

"If it's bad, just tell me."

You close the distance and wrap your arms around him.

He goes still for a full second, the surprised stillness of someone who prepared for multiple outcomes and did not adequately weigh this one, and then his arms come around you, and you feel him exhale, the tension releasing all at once through his shoulders.

"It's not bad," you say, into his shoulder. "It's the opposite of bad."

"Yeah?"

"It's one of the kindest things anyone's done for me in a long time," you say, and the honesty of it comes out simpler than you expected. No performance, no careful management of it. Just true. "Thank you."

His arms tighten slightly. "I just…I figured—"

"I know what you figured," you say. "Thank you."

A beat, and then his chin comes to rest on top of your head, and you feel him smile. Not because you can see it, just because the quality of his stillness changes into something more at ease, something that's stopped holding itself carefully.

"So," he says, after a moment. "You want to go look at your pieces?"

You pull back, and the smile on your face is bright enough that he blinks at it slightly. "Yeah," you say. "Let's go."

Chopper comes because he wants to be here for you in the important moment, to cheer you on as your cheerleader. He appears at the top of the stairs to the storage hold before you've fully descended them, eyes wide and interested. "What are we doing? Can I help? I want to help."

"We're looking at her art," Usopp says.

Chopper's ears perk up to full attention. "I'll get the lanterns!"

The storage hold is warm and smells of wood and canvas, and the particular mustiness of things carefully packed. The pieces you brought from Veloria are in the far corner, wrapped in cloth and secured against the motion of the ship with the methodical care of someone who has transported fragile things before. You unwrap them slowly, and the three of you settle into the task of looking. Properly looking, in the golden lantern light, while the ship rocks gently around you.

There are more pieces than Usopp was expecting. You can tell by the way he goes quiet when the fourth and fifth emerge, by the way he stops trying to say anything and just looks. Chopper makes small sounds at each one. onWder, occasionally something that sounds like it wants to be medical terminology for an emotional response.

You move through them steadily, discussing which pieces travel well, which ones are too large, which ones have the particular quality that works in a curated space rather than a solo exhibition. Usopp has opinions, and this surprises you for approximately thirty seconds before you remember who you're dealing with.

"Not that one," he says, at the sixth piece. "The composition's too interior. It needs its own room."

You look at him. "How do you know that?"

"I build things," he says, slightly defensively. "I understand space."

"He's right, actually," Chopper says, from somewhere behind a large canvas.

"Thank you, Chopper."

"I'm just saying what I see."

"That's what good criticism is," you tell Usopp, and watch him try not to look pleased about it.

The shortlist forms slowly, argued over with good humor, Chopper occasionally weighing in with the perspective of someone who knows very little about formal art and a great deal about emotional response, which turns out to be exactly as useful as technical knowledge in different ways. You listen to both of them. You find yourself laughing more than you expected: at Usopp's embellishments, at Chopper's earnest tangents, at the particular energy of working through something you love with people who want to understand it.

At some point, the decision gets made. The right piece was identified, agreed upon, and set carefully aside.

And then the conversation continues anyway, because none of you moves to end it.

Time does its unhelpful thing again.

You realize it's significantly later than when you first noticed Chopper had gone quiet. You glance over and find him curled against a folded canvas, his hat tilted forward over his face, his small chest rising and falling with the slow evenness of proper sleep. The lantern nearest him has burned low.

You and Usopp are sitting close, shoulders touching, both of you cross-legged on the floor with a piece propped against the wall in front of you that Usopp has been talking about for the better part of twenty minutes. Your chin is resting on your knees, and you're watching him more than the piece.

"—and so what I think it's actually about," he's saying, with the focused energy of someone deep in a theory, "is not the water at all. The water is incidental. What she's actually painting is the moment before the decision. See how the horizon line sits here?" He points, tracing the air in front of the canvas. "It's not a destination, it's a threshold. She's not showing you where the person is going, she's showing you that they're about to go."

You look at the piece, at the horizon line he's pointing to, the quality of light in the upper third that you'd spent four hours on, the figure at the bottom that is more suggestion than shape.

"And the figure is small," he continues, "which everyone always reads as vulnerability, but I think it's scale. She's making the threshold big, not the person small. She's saying—" He stops, as if only just noticing that you've gotten silent, and glances at you. "What?"

"Nothing," you say.

"You're making a face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making the face you make when someone says something that's more right than you expected."

You look at him. He's watching you with that quality he has sometimes — underneath the performance, underneath the stories, the person who sees things clearly and quietly and doesn't always know what to do with that clarity. He's close enough that you can feel the warmth of him in the cool of the hold, close enough that Chopper's soft snoring is the only sound between you.

"That's exactly what it's about," you say, quietly.

He blinks. "Really?"

"Really."

"I thought I was embellishing. Maybe workiing some of that 'Usopp Magic', I was telling you about earlier."

"You weren't. Embellishing that is, because I am certainly charmed by your 'Usopp Magic'."

He looks back at the piece, and something in his expression shifts; the particular quality of someone receiving information that changes how they understand something they've been looking at. "Huh," he says.

"Huh," you agree.

Quiet settles between you, easy and warm. The lantern casts soft light across the canvas, over Chopper's sleeping form, over Usopp's profile as he looks at the painting with new eyes. You watch him, the familiar pleasure of having your work understood mixing with something less familiar. The specific warmth of being understood by this person, in this hold, at this hour.

He turns and finds you already looking. Neither of you says anything for a beat.

The space between you is already small, and it becomes smaller, gradually, the way these things do when neither person moves away. Not dramatically, not all at once, just the slow gravitational shift of two people in a quiet space who have been talking honestly for hours and have run out of reasons to maintain a careful distance.

His nose brushes yours first, then the kiss.

Soft, and slow, and entirely without performance. No story around it, no embellishment, just Usopp being honest in the way he is when he stops trying to be anything else.

His hand finds your arm, light and uncertain, asking rather than assuming, and you lean into it, and the kiss stays exactly what it is: tender, and warm, and real in the particular way of things that aren't trying to be more than they are.

When you separate, his eyes open slowly. There's something in them that is slightly stunned and entirely unguarded.

"Oh," he says.

"Yeah," you say.

A pause. "Was that—"

"Yes," you say.

"Okay." He exhales. "Okay. Good." A beat. "Great, actually."

You laugh, soft enough not to wake Chopper, and he laughs too, the helpless kind, and then you're both pressing your hands over your mouths trying to contain it, shoulders shaking, until it winds down into something warm and residual that sits in the hold around you like a second light source.

"Usopp," you say, when you can.

"Mm."

You look at Chopper, small and deeply asleep against his canvas, his hat askew. "I promised him earlier that I'd cuddle with him tonight."

Usopp follows your gaze. "Right."

"Do you want to stay?" you ask. "Both of you, I mean. All three."

He looks at you, and the expression that crosses his face is soft in a way he doesn't usually let through. "Yeah," he says. "I'd like that."

It takes some rearranging.

Chopper wakes up halfway through being moved, blinks at you with the profound betrayal of the recently interrupted, and then registers what's happening and assists by burrowing immediately into the center of the situation and claiming the warmest available position with the efficiency of someone who has been planning this for days.

The blankets that get involved are a matter of negotiation and eventual compromise. The lanterns are turned low. The ship rocks.

Eventually — after Chopper changes positions twice, and after Usopp gets an elbow somewhere unpleasant and reposition with minimal complaint, after you find the configuration that actually works — you go still.

You're on your side, facing out. Usopp is behind you, his arm settled over you with the careful uncertainty of someone making sure this is wanted, and you press back into him slightly to answer the question he didn't ask. His arm settles more fully, his breath evens out against the back of your neck.

Chopper is tucked against your front, small and warm, his hat abandoned somewhere to your left, his face perfectly peaceful in the low light. Your arm is around him. He makes a small sound in his sleep, satisfied, like someone who has arrived exactly where they intended to be.

The hold is warm as the ship moves beneath you all, gentle and constant.

You lie in the comfortable tangle of them. Usopp's steady warmth at your back, Chopper's soft weight against your chest? and look at the painting you chose, still propped against the far wall where you left it, the threshold and the figure and the horizon line that Usopp read correctly without knowing he was doing it.

Tomorrow it will hang somewhere new, on an island you're soon to leave. Someone who doesn't know you will stand in front of it and bring their own meaning to it, the way people do, the way you always knew they would and chose to allow.

She's not showing you where the person is going. She's showing you that they're about to go.

You close your eyes. Usopp's arm tightens slightly, dreaming or awake, and Chopper's ear twitches once and is still.

The ship carries all you forward into the dark, as you drift off to sleep.

     ‿︵‿ 𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝  𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼 ‿︵‿

You surface slowly, recognizing different aspects of your surroundings to orient yourself.

Warmth first, the particular kind that comes from being surrounded rather than just covered. The familiar rock of the ship beneath you. Chopper's soft weight against your chest, still perfectly asleep, one ear twitching with whatever he's dreaming. Usopp's arm still settled over you both, his breathing the slow, even rhythm of someone who won't be waking for a while yet.

You blink.

The hold is dim, the lanterns burned down to almost nothing, but there's a thread of early light coming through the small window near the ceiling. Pale and grey-blue, the specific color of not-quite-morning, the hour that belongs to neither night nor day.

You blink again. Something is off. You can't name it immediately, just the faint pull of instinct, the sense of a changed variable somewhere in the space. You let your eyes adjust, scanning slowly, and then—

There is a face above you.

Upside down, and all too close. Dark eyes looking directly into yours with the particular quality of someone who has been waiting, with great patience, for exactly this moment of realization.

You stare up at Luffy, while he stares down at you.

His body is oriented the opposite way from yours — he must have approached from the other end of the hold to be like this and the effect is thoroughly disorienting. Like the world has been gently rotated and no one told you. His hair falls downward toward your face, completely unbothered by any of this.

Something in your chest does a helpless, warm thing.

"Good morning," you say, soft and sleepy and genuinely happy to see him in the blurred, undefended way of someone not yet fully awake.

You close your eyes again and press back into the warmth behind you, settling deeper, ready to go back to bed.

You hear a huff of laughter, low and quiet, shaped specifically to not wake the others. Then his shadow shifts, and the thin line of dawn coming through the window disappears as he leans over it — covering the light, closer now, close enough that you can feel the changed quality of the air near your face.

"Seems like someone forgot about ship tradition already," he says. The tone is light, but there's something running underneath it, something that's paying more attention than the casual delivery suggests. "No kiss for your captain?"

A pause, weighted with something playful. "Very rude."

The words reach you in stages, and when you realize what was said, your eyes fly open.

You start to push yourself up, and you make it approximately four inches before you remember, too late, that Luffy's face is directly above yours and he has not moved.

The kiss happens before either of you finishes processing it.

Your mouth meets his, or his meets yours, and there's a second of mutual stillness, both of you absorbing the fact of it, and then it's over, and you're blinking at each other in the pale early light. Both of you were slightly stunned, two people who had just done something that neither of them was precisely expecting.

Luffy pulls back the remaining inch. His eyes are bright, even in the dim light, and the grin that crosses his face is slow and thoroughly pleased with itself and the universe for engineering this specific sequence of events.

"Well," he says cheerfully. "That certainly fixes that."

You press your lips together against the laugh that wants to happen, aware of Chopper and Usopp still sleeping. "That was an accident," you whisper.

"Hmm, was it?" He sounds deeply unconvinced and entirely unbothered by the distinction.

"You were in the way."

"I was right where I was supposed to be." He tilts his head, looking at you in that way he does. Not the surface grin, the thing underneath it, the attention that is sharper and warmer and more serious than the packaging suggests. "Come watch the sunrise with me."

It's not quite a question, but it's not quite a command either. Something in between that is distinctly Luffy. The assumption that you'll want to, offered as an invitation rather than a demand, with enough space in it that you could say no.

You were never going to say no.

"Give me a minute," you whisper.

He nods and straightens, disappearing from your immediate sightline, and you turn your attention carefully to the situation you're in. Usopp is deeply asleep, his face relaxed into something younger than his usual expression, the tension he carries when he's performing fully absent. Chopper is a small warm weight against your chest, his breathing the deep, contented rhythm of someone who has spent a good night exactly where they wanted to be.

You move slowly, carefully. The practiced stillness of someone extracting themselves from sleeping people they don't want to wake.

You lean down first to Chopper, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. He makes a small sound, adjusts, but doesn't wake.

Then you turn, and press a kiss to Usopp's cheek — warm and quiet, as close to a thank you as you can make it without words. His nose wrinkles slightly before he settles again.

You smile at the cuteness of both crew members before turning and finding Luffy waiting in the doorway with his hand extended, patient, grinning at nothing in particular.

You take his hand, following him as he takes you to his desired sunrise watching spot. The ship is quiet at this hour, as quiet as it can be with this crew. The water rocks the boat gently, as the distant cry of a bird somewhere off the starboard side that briefly startles you.

Luffy moves through it with the ease of someone who belongs to all hours equally, who finds no particular magic in the early morning over any other time except that it's quiet and he likes quiet in small doses. His hand stays loosely around yours, leading without pulling, the pace unhurried.

Up through the ship, through the warm dimness of the lower decks, up the stairs to the main deck where the air opens, and the sky becomes visible. He doesn't stop there, tipping his head upward.

You follow his gaze to the crow's nest, to the masthead above it, and then back to him.

"Up?" you ask.

"Best view," he says simply.

You nod, while silently thinking that this might be pushing your luck on your healing injuries, but you are willing to do it. You've climbed higher things for worse reasons.

But to your surprise, Luffy wraps an arm around you, bringing you firmly to his side, while his other stretches out and grabs one of the Sunny's mane pieces before slinging both of you to the top. A breathless gasp comes from your mouth as Luffy laughs at the sound, apparently finding much humor in it.

When you both finally rearrange yourselves comfortably, do you finally take a chance to look and see your new view: the island spreading out around you on one side and the open ocean on the other, and you understand immediately why it's his favorite spot.

The sky at this height is enormous.

At pre-dawn, the sky is not one color but a gradient of them, the deep blue-grey of true night still at the western edge, while the east has begun to bruise purple and amber at the horizon's line. The island below is still mostly dark, its lights few and scattered. The water catches what color there is and multiplies it, shifting.

You sit beside him, and for a moment neither of you speaks, just watches.

"You picked a good morning for it," you say eventually.

"They're all good," he says. Not as a platitude, instead almost like a fact he has actually verified, over years of watching them from various mastheads and clifftops and improbable perches. "Some are better, but there's no bad one."

You look at his profile, the dawn light just beginning to find it, picking out the scar under his eye, the particular set of his jaw, relaxed right now, easy.

"Luffy," you say. "Why were you up? Really."

He glances at you. "Wanted to see you."

"We could have talked at breakfast."

"Could have," he agrees. "But then everyone's there." He looks back at the horizon. "This is better."

You let that sit for a moment, feeling the shape of it — the particular compliment of someone who is generous with themselves, who shares himself widely, choosing to give you something more specific. A morning, a view. Just him.

"It is better," you admit.

He grins, and the grin tips sideways into something more private. "See?"

The conversation finds its rhythm after that, the way conversations do when the setting is right, the hour is quiet, and neither person has anything to perform. You talk about the island; what you found in it, what surprised you, the library and the gallery and the market and the particular quality of the afternoon light on the water. He tells you about his day, which involves a fruit stall confrontation that escalated in a direction you don't entirely follow but which ended with Nami getting three things for free and Sanji threatening violence that might have helped in speeding things along.

"Did you actually cause a problem?" you ask.

He considers. "Hmm, a small one."

"How small?"

"Nami only yelled for a little while," he says, which you are coming to understand as the unit of measurement for Luffy-related chaos. "And there wasn't a physical fight, which would have made it more fun, but at least Nami got things for free, so it was classified as a win."

"That's efficient problem-solving."

"I thought so," he says, comfortably.

You lean back on your hands, the figurehead solid beneath you, the wind moving through your hair at this height, carrying salt and the faint sweetness of whatever is growing on the island's interior. The sun is properly arriving now, the horizon turning from amber to gold, the first curve of it showing above the water line.

You watch it rise.

"Are you happy you came?" Luffy asks you, breaking the silence.

"Yes," you say.

"Even with—" he gestures vaguely, which you understand to encompass Vane and the tunnels and the bruises that are still fading and the life you packed into crates and carried a stranger's ship aboard on a few days' acquaintance.

"Even with," you confirm before pausing. "It's strange, I planned to leave for a long time. I thought it would feel more like running." You watch the light on the water. "It doesn't."

"What does it feel like?"

You think about it, actually. "Like arriving," you say. "Which doesn't make sense, because I've been moving since—"

"Makes complete sense," he says, light-hearted and unbothered."You can move toward things and away from things. Different feeling." He looks at you. "You were moving away for a long time, and now you're not."

The simplicity of it, the way he cuts to the center of things without ceremony, lands somewhere quiet in your chest.

"You do that," you say.

"Do what?"

"Say the right thing without knowing it's the right thing."

He blinks before giving you a charming smile. "I just say what's true."

"That's what I mean."

He looks briefly pleased, then puzzled, then lets it go in the way he lets most things go. Not because they don't matter, but because they've already been received, and he doesn't need to hold on to them. He shifts, drawing one knee up, his elbow resting on it, looking out at the full gold morning.

"I want to talk to you about something," he says.

The change in register is small, but you've been around him long enough now to hear it. The place where the lightness doesn't disappear but deepens into something more serious underneath. You straighten slightly.

"Okay," you say.

"It's about the crew," he starts. "How it works, how we work." He pauses, gathering it. "You should know."

You wait.

"Jinbe, Chopper, and Brook—" he begins, "—they're my crew. They're family. But the romantic stuff, that's not where they are. Jinbe is Jinbe. Brook has his music. Chopper has his medicine." He says it without apology, simply placing each person where they actually are. "That's not how they show love to the crew. Doesn't mean they love less."

You nod, following.

"Franky's different," he continues. "He's dabbled in poly relationships, if he's interested in someone that the crew has brought in. He's not against it, but he moves slowly, and whatever happens there would be up to both of you. No pressure from me, him, or the crew. No expectation." He glances at you. "You'd know if it was going somewhere."

You think of Franky — his enormity, his enthusiasm, the way he'd called you super on the first day and meant it entirely. "Okay," you say.

Luffy nods. "The others…" and here something in his expression shifts into something more comfortable, like he's moved into territory he knows well. "Sanji and Nami find each other often. That's been a thing for a while." He says it plainly, not as gossip, just facts. "Robin and Zoro pair off. They're good together in ways that are quieter than you'd expect from either of them."

You think of Robin in the library, and Zoro in the alley, and how neither of those things surprised you once you stopped to look.

"Zoro and Sanji—" Luffy makes a face that is complicated and fond simultaneously, "—they'd die before they admitted it works, which is funny because it obviously does. They're too similar in the ways they won't say out loud."

You file this away with interest.

"Usopp tends toward me and Nami," he continues, and there's genuine warmth when he says it, the particular warmth of someone describing something that is good and uncomplicated in his experience of it. He looks at you then, briefly. "He's going to be good to you."

"I know," you say, and mean it.

Luffy nods once, satisfied. "I fit into whatever is happening," he says then, about himself, with the same ease he might describe his preferred food or his sleep schedule. "That's just how it is. I'm not built for one lane."

"Does that work?" you ask, genuinely curious.

He looks at you like the question is interesting, but the answer is obvious. "It works if you make it work," he says. "And we do." A pause. "Robin and I don't—" he makes a simple gesture that communicates the category without needing the words. "We're close, and we love each other, but not that way. It's different with her, it's just true for us, and we don't push it."

You look at him. At the clear, uncomplicated way he holds all of this; the complex map of his crew and how they move toward and around each other without apparent weight or confusion. Not because it's simple, but because he's looked at it clearly enough that he knows where everything actually sits.

"That's a lot to manage," you eventually say.

"It's not managing," he corrects, gently. "Managing makes it sound like keeping something from falling apart, and we're not that." He looks back at the horizon, at the full gold morning sitting above the water now, the island warm and green below you. "It just is what it is. People love the people they love, and the shape of it is different for everyone. We just—" he shrugs, "don't pretend otherwise."

You're quiet for a moment. "What about me?" you ask. "In all of that. You mentioned others before. So, this isn't the first time?"

He looks at you.

"You fit," he says. Simply. "You already do. And the others were passing flings, for any combination of the crewmates. But never have we all wanted someone so badly, or at least all together. I want you to understand how it works so you're not surprised by things and so you know you can ask about any of it." His expression shifts into something more deliberate. "No one will push you into anything, that's not how we are." He holds your gaze, and the grin is gone now, and what's underneath it is something more fundamental. The captain, the person who decided to take you in and means to take that seriously. "Anything that happens between you and the crew is your choice, always. My word on that."

"Your word," you say.

"I'm the captain," he says, simply. "Which means what I say about how this crew runs is what happens. No exceptions."

The words land with the weight of something structural. Not a promise decorated with feeling, but a principle stated plainly, the way people who actually keep their word tend to speak.

You look at him for a long moment in the morning light. The sun is fully up now, the sky gone gold and blue, the water bright below you. The island is waking up somewhere to your left, its sounds beginning to carry on the wind.

"Luffy," you say.

"Mm."

"I'm really glad it was your crew."

He looks at you, and for a moment, there's no grin, no performance of anything. Just him, looking at you in the honest early light, with the expression of someone receiving something that matters.

Then the grin comes back, enormous and uncomplicated, and he tips sideways and bumps his shoulder into yours with enough force to make you grab one of the pieces of the lion's mane.

"Obviously," he says. "We're the best crew."

"So modest," you say.

"It's not modesty if it's true."

You laugh, and he laughs, as the sound goes up and out over the water and the waking island and the wide gold morning, and you sit together at the top of the world while the ship stirs to life below you and the day begins in earnest.

And sitting here, with the wind in your hair, the sun warm on your face, the crew below you, already waking up and starting the day, with this ridiculous, extraordinary person beside you? It feels exactly like what Luffy said it would feel like.

Like arriving someplace almost like home.

a/n: i cannot believe that tumblr did not want to allow me to post a 27k fic in it's entirety, so that's why it's split into two parts!

thank you for your patience with uploading this! i know i'm a couple days late, but i was struggling with editing, since i would get to it late at night!

as always, likes, comments and reblogs are always appreciated! i love you very much, here’s a kiss from me to you 😘

dc masterlist | anime masterlist. | tip jar

taglist: @katbug27 @uniquecutie-puffs @savagenctzen @flow33didontsmoke @mybones537 @fangirlingbookworm1 @jellyjamheadobb