#rayliegh

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Here’s what they never tell you about the execution. What the press will never be able to describe and what it’s witnesses will never erase from their nightmares.

When the Pirate King died, his words launching the world into a new era, a new fate, a new, deadly dream, he smiled.

And he laughed as his teeth became sharp and the blades dug into his chest, and he laughed as sand poured from him instead of blood, and he laughed as people said The One Piece is Real and Monster! Monster! In the same shout.

The Pirate King smiled and laughed and the world was never the same.

But they’ll never tell you about the laugh, or the sharpness of his smile, or the sand from his veins.

No.

That story, that funny, traveling tale, does not belong on the tongues of man.

No Laugh Tale ever does.

-

Shanks didn’t go to Laugh Tale. Buggy didn’t either. They were left behind, on a small island just outside dangerous waters, and if they had less faith in their captain they might have said they were abandoned there.

But Roger was their captain, and they were his crew, and silly things like disloyalty and mutiny had no place on a pirate ship.

But when Roger came back, Shanks wondered sometimes.

About what really happened on Lau- Raftel.

Raftel.

(His tongue could never quite twist around the island’s name like his captain could.)

Roger left with a full crew and came back three less. Shanks knows the numbers and not the names, and that’s odd, because it’s usually the opposite. But there were three missing, three missing shapes in his memory, in his crew, in the hammocks around Shank’s bed.

Roger didn’t talk about it. Only laughed, his shadow stretching farther in the sun.

Shanks loved his captain. But he quickly learned to hold his tongue when Roger laughed lest he interrupt the way Roger’s mustache curled with fire and his eyes grew darker, the way he laughed and he world shook, just a little, as if something far bigger than any ship or crew or giant was laughing with them.

Roger wasn’t the same after Raftel.

(And neither was Rayleigh, or Gaban, or Oden. Shanks saw shadows at night and red sand on the decks in the morning, and even with Roger’s coat draped over him and Buggy he still felt cold sometimes, on his beloved ship side home.

The Oro Jackson’s red sails never felt so dangerous.)

Roger wasn’t the same after the island at the end of the sea.

After Laugh-

Shanks chokes on the name, chokes on wet grit in his mouth, and doesn’t think about what his Captain hasn’t told him.

-

Ace smiles sometimes, when he looks at Luffy, and it isn’t possessive or dangerous or conscious, but Sabo notices it all the same.

Ace has always been weird. His skin is rough and he doesn’t go down to the beach but there’s sand in the treehouse, and his shadow is always longer than most at sunset.

(Sunset, whisper the legends that Sabo has read in dark corners, the time when laughter blends into something worse.)

Ace looks to the distance sometimes, goes barefoot other times, feet without the callouses a jungle-raised boy should have. When he rests his head on Sabo’s shoulder, Sabo learns not to question it.

This is his brother, whom he loves.

Whether Ace fights like an island walking or not.

(Still, Ace looks so hungry after certain stories, after three boys play so much they can do nothing but laugh aftterwards, hungry in the manner of something being where it shouldn’t. Like Ace isn’t the only one there.

Sometimes Ace says lets go to the shore, and he says it to both Sabo and Luffy, but he’s really only looking at Luffy with that Not-Ace look in his eye, and Sabo says lets go hunting instead, and takes Luffy’s hand before Ace can.

He trusts Ace.

Not wherever Ace came from.)

-

When Shanks gave Luffy the hat, Luffy had to dump sand out of it before he put it back on his head.

It was weird, then. Red sand.

Why was the sand red?

(Why did it feel ever so slightly wet?)

There was no red sand at Dawn.

(Only red morning and nights, warnings and delights, times when little boys looked to the horizon and got a little lost, singing to some unknowing island’s praises.)

A mystery, Luffy called it, just like he called the pull out to sea, and eventually, the way Ace’s eyes would flicker in the moonlight, a mystery.

Shishishi! He laughed, then, building castles out of the sand that shakes from his hat, just wet enough to stick together in clumps when he so wished. Shishishi!

What a laughing, wondrous story it is.

What a Laugh Tale.

-

Zoro hears Luffy laugh once and only once, a Shishishi ringing out throughout the air, and he is taken.

There is a siren song in that laughter, a pull to something greater, a darkness deeper than the one that dwells deep and not quite dormant in Zoro’s chest.

Shishishi! Luffy laughs, and it echoes like the Ghahahaha! Of the Pirate King before him, echoes like the rumble of waves crashing into liquid shores.

Shishishi! Luffy laughs, and Zoro follows, but never, ever gives his own unique laugh into the fray.

No.

He won’t give that up, not yet.

(The crew eyes Luffy in the dark, sometimes, when he’s most like the tide. Pulling, and pulling, and pulling, to something bigger than all of them.

To Raftel, Luffy never says, as if the name means nothing to him, To the One Piece, he says, and louder, King of the Pirates!.

Raftel never spills from his lips. Only laughter.

And always, the crew wonder what that laughter-in-the-place-of-a-name means.

-

On Saboady, Rayleigh nods to Luffy like a knight to a king not his own, and neither of them seem to notice.

Shakky does.

Nami does.

Shakky looks at Nami and Nami looks at Shakky, and both of them try not to notice the way Saboady shies away from the footsteps of the First King’s right-hand man.

Rayleigh, Shakky tells Nami while the rest of the crew is chattering, smoke drifting from her breath, was different after Raftel. Is different now.

She doesn’t explain how.

Nami knows it in the way Rayleigh walks, the way he looks to the sun and he carefully doesn’t laugh at Luffy, only smirks and chuckles, quiet rumbling that echoes through the bar. The way he walks like a predator and the newspapers call him Dark King in the way they never did before Raftel.

There are islands, Nami tells Shakky as the rest of the crew is leaving the bar, where the winds say they shouldn’t be. As if the land is drawn to him.

She doesn’t say who he is.

Shakky knows it in the way Luffy tracks sand into the bar, in the way he wears a crown of his own power, the way he is The King of the Pirates in the way people say the sea is blue and the sun rises. Knows it in the way isn’t like Rayleigh yet, but Raftel is taking him, bit by bit, mile by mile, drawing him closer closer and closer to the end.

Nami looks at Rayleigh, at his sharp teeth and whispy silver hair, and the way that behind his glasses his eyes are dark pits, and wonders what will happen to her crew once they reach Raftel –

Once they set foot on bloody, bloody shores.

(Because, there has never been an option to turn back.

Luffy will be pirate king.

Nami is on the crew of the Pirate King.

They will go to – Lau-

Raftel.

They will go to Raftel.

And Luffy when not let any of them go.)

-

Three years from the day Monkey D. Luffy sets out, twenty-five years since the death of a king, another crew sets foot on Raftel.

On Laugh Tale – the name solidifying in their hearts, in their souls, in ten souls with more power sea resting in them.

The sand is soft beneath their feet, and for once, no sand falls from the crown of straw resting on Luffy’s head.

There’s so much red. Everywhere they look – red cliffs, red shores, red waves.

The end of the sea, at one dark, dark island.

(They don’t think of why it’s red. Why there’s blood drifting beneath their feet.)

Luffy is the first to walk forward, the first to enter into the island’s embrace, and he is the first to find the One Piece.

He does not laugh. He smiles.

-

Raftel is a false name, a name that falls on butchered tongues, a name unfit for an island’s truth.

Laugh Tale is the truth, a name that sounds like laughter and joy and secrets falling into place. This is the name men think of before they day, before their blood feeds into Laugh Tale’s sands and sinks into its heart.

Laugh Tale takes, just as the Grand Line takes the heart of men. It takes souls and laughter and dreams, and it takes humanity.

Takes what makes men and bleeds them dry onto its shores, for something greater than mortality in the end.

When Roger arrived he laughed at the treasure hidden on Laugh Tale’s shores, laughed at the bones left behind by great men, laughed at the truth of the world.  

A deal was struck then, on red shores under crimson skies.

He didn’t know it till later. Till he left and became Laugh Tale living.

(Till his skin became red sand and his veins became saltwater, till his eyes grew like dark island pits and his haired waved with the wind at the end of the sea.

Until Roger was so much bigger than the man who became Pirate King)

A laugh for a story, a dream for a legacy, an adventure for a fate.

A man for an island, really, it’s so simple.

A couple more years for an island to leave home.

Laugh Tale has been here since before the void swept the Earth for the first time, and will be here until the Earth drowns in sea-swept fury.

Truth, spilt out in laughter.

For that’s what an adventure is, after all.

Laughter.

-

(The second Pirate King laughs on Raftel and the island crumbles at his feet. No deal is struck as a new king expends indomitable will on the island, the world, itself.

There is no greed in his actions. No rage. No selfishness. No sacrifice made. Just a king taking the throne, taking a friend with him across the seas.

When he comes back from the end of the earth there is an absence in the world, and no sand piling at his feet.  The end of the sea is mere water, blood sinking into the ocean floor instead of white sand.

The Pirate King laughs and the world laughs with him.

The Laugh Tale of the Pirate King – on its rightful crew at last.)