Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s beautiful here.

He’s awake early. The sky is still orange and pink, and the sea glitters with it, holding the sun to its surface like they’re keeping each other warm. The horizon is empty, and the clouds scatter across it like they’re afraid of getting too close. They’re about two days from the next island, by Nami’s last estimate, so the day should be quiet, and calm.

Today, like every other day, could easily be the last of Usopp’s life.

He breathes in deeply and tries to get past it.

He reaches out with his mind, even as his blood runs quietly cold, and checks again, running the same tally he’s been running practically every five minutes since he learned how, and counts them; one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine.

Everyone’s still here. As he knew they would be.

They can take care of themselves, of course, and they’re all so powerful he doubts anyone would benefit from him checking in on them, and he doesn’t need to keep doing it. He doesn’t need to.

What if he checks and someone’s missing? Hell, what if he checks and he’s alone?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Be sensible about this. Have a plan.

If someone’s missing, he raises the alarm. If he’s alone, he…

He feels his heart start hammering in his ribcage, and he squeezes his eyes shut. He’s not alone. His nakama are here, and he can hear Sanji clashing about in the kitchen, and Brook is quietly playing the violin, and everyone else is still asleep below deck. He’s not alone, and if he was, they would find their way back, or he would find his way to them. They’ve been separated before. It will happen again.

He doesn’t want it to happen again. But he could do it, he could follow the breadcrumbs of destruction and revolution they tend to leave in their wake, he could follow them anywhere.

Remember you might die first.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

The surface of the water glimmers, and it is calm. The ocean is barely rippling. Usopp, like the ocean, is serene. He is focused on his task, lining up his new invention, with the net, to catch something. He’s staring at the surface of the water.

Nothing’s biting. He is alone here.

He closes his eyes again. They’re not alone on the ocean, of course, because the ocean is practically teeming with life…and overrun with pirates…and they have no way of knowing what lurks below the surface.

The whir of his mind starts up, and images start flooding in, and suddenly the Thousand Sunny hovers just above another beast. It is almost unknowable, for all he can see are its teeth, in millions of tiny, impossible rows, like deadly pearls. He will scream, but no-one in the world could reach him before the teeth tear him apart.

He snaps his eyes open.

The threats circle below the deceptive calm of the water, in their thousands, their millions, teeming, brimming with excitement about the prospect of tearing him apart. He’s probably delicious, if you’re a fish or an incomprehensible sea monster.

He pushes himself back from the edge with his hands and pushes his train of thought towards invention improvements. It’s easier to distract himself when he’s with other people, but for now the best he can do is try and be productive. Maybe he needs to start making himself armour. Something no set of sharp teeth will bite through. It’s an unproductive pattern of thought. He moves on.

He could be doing something more interesting with the baiting system for this invention, he supposes. He’s bait. Sea monster bait. He would be delicious. He could be using interesting light patterns, maybe something cast by mirrors, along with the food he already has in place. A sea monster could probably see the shadow the ship casts on the water and snatch them before he has a chance to blink. He could adjust the size of the net, maybe automate some of the system, maybe even adapt it as a cautionary system for devil fruit users going overboard.

He should ask Franky what he’d think about that. It’s always good to have extra precautionary measures, and maybe his friend will come up with some interesting way to implement it, something that looks as totally super as the rest of the ship. And sure, the devil fruit users don’t need overcautious Usopp keeping them safe, but it might be nice.

Breakfast is probably just about ready, isn’t it?

He pushes himself up and strolls off like he doesn’t have a care in the world. He’s overdoing it, hands behind his head, whistling a jaunty tune. Yeah. Not a care in the world.

He doesn’t think he’s pulling it off.

__

Usopp switches pages in his sketchbook. He’s sitting with Robin, reading, and Chopper, who is scribbling down what Usopp assumes are medical notes, though he can’t see from here. The weather is good, but he’s sure Nami will be out to make assessments on it soon; it’s been changing a lot, in this part of the sea. The three of them have winter things and raincoats stacked up in a pile by their chairs.

He starts sketching out the Usopp Pirates, the three of them crowded together in the middle of the page, looking up at him. Just the way he remembers.

He pauses. There’s something wrong with the expressions, and he can’t seem to figure out what.

He’s being doing more portraits since he became a pirate. In between invention design, and all the rest of it. He’s drawn practically everyone from Syrup Village, he’s drawn what he sincerely hopes is every friend they’ve come across, and, in the two years he was away from them, he drew his crew.

You could call it sentimental, if you felt like it, but from where he’s standing it feels like practicality.

He doesn’t want to forget their faces. He lives in constant fear of the concept. If he sees someone he once knew, hell, if he sees someone who once saved his life, if he sees someone he cares about, and they don’t see him recognise them, he doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself. People change, and he’s not blind to it, but remembering them as closely as you can lets you anticipate changes.

He wishes he had more pictures, sometimes, but at least he can draw.

The Usopp Pirates are still looking strange, and he’s never had this problem drawing them before. They’re as familiar as it gets, the three kids who used to follow him like ducklings.

They won’t look like this, when he sees them again.

His crew changed so much, in the two years, but he still recognised them, didn’t he? It’s fine. He’s fine. He’ll remember what they look like, or they’ll remember him, and he knows everyone still. He won’t forget.

Most of his crew don’t know the people in his hometown. They don’t know about his oldest friends or his first pretend crew or the town he grew up in, except for the stories he’s told them. Exaggerated stories, because he’s a brilliant storyteller, and that’s what he does best.

And…well, he doesn’t think it’s likely, but if no-one who remembers them makes it…he wants something that’ll tell someone who was important to him. Let them find everyone again. Tell his old friends he went out doing something heroic, even if he died a coward’s death, for his sake.

No, he doesn’t want that to be a lie. He’ll try his best, but if he dies like a coward, that’s what should make it back to his old home. He wants everyone to know the truth of the matter. He wants it to be real. Of course, he also doesn’t want to be dead.

Chopper, triumphant, raises both arms above his head. Some kind of breakthrough. Robin smiles at him, asks what’s got him so excited. Usopp remembers that expression. Successful raid, Usopp pirates.

He tries again.

__

Dinner is lively, and ridiculous, and there is a loud debate carrying its way from one end of the table to the other about what qualifies as an unreasonable amount of salt. Jinbei, who usually insists on mediation, is passionately defending what Sanji insists is oversalting your food. Usopp suspects Zoro has taken his own perspective mostly for the sake of being opposed to Sanji. And Chopper is trying to warn against becoming dehydrated.

In Usopp’s memories, a well-meaning townswoman insists that you can easily run out of clean drinking water at sea.

Usopp has told many cautionary tales. He’s heard many cautionary tales. And, because of the nature of his childhood, he has heard possibly more cautionary tales about the nature of piracy than anyone else on the planet.

He tries to forget. Concerned townspeople take him aside, or shout over while he’s doing jobs for them, or pass them to the Usopp pirates so they can tell Usopp, eyes wide with fear, while he tries to talk them out of panic that he feels just as keenly.

See, the nature of piracy necessitates that many, many things you wouldn’t usually worry about could kill you. And Usopp is absolutely certain Luffy, fearless captain, insane, has never worried about something as trivial as scurvy.

Usopp worries about scurvy every single day.

It is not realistic. Sanji takes good care of them. He couldn’t avoid eating a varied diet if he wanted to.

But they could run out of stores, maybe, or something could happen to the trees, or Luffy, who has never worried about running out of food or not eating a sufficiently varied diet, could just eat everything on the ship in one fell swoop, and Usopp has yelled at Luffy over similar and he’s yelled over less but it never seems to get through the rubber. There’s a kid’s rhyme about it, how all his desperate criticism bounces right off. Luffy’s too positive, too confident, and Usopp admires it as much as it drives him absolutely insane.

And, you see, Usopp knows logically that he’s being negative right now, but it’s not something he can do away with. He’s guarding his vegetables very fiercely, because there is a certainty in him that he would get scurvy first.

He’s unlucky like that. His bones break and stay broken.

He can picture it, and he can see how the titans who surround him brushing it off. Usopp being dramatic again. Usopp just needing to pull through. Chopper telling him he’s developing all the symptoms early and he should have more time.

Usopp is chronically short on time and he’s pretty sure he hasn’t quite had the time to heal right since he was seventeen. There’s always something more important to do.

He pictures them shaking their heads, turning their backs, his teeth shedding from his face. The great pirate God Usopp, the sniper on the future pirate king’s crew, scrapes himself through battles by riding the coattails of greater pirates, victim of scurvy. Disappointing. Lacklustre. So utterly him they’d have no choice but to accept it.

Man overboard. No-one fish him out, his body might attract more food.

Well, at least he would have purpose in death, he supposes. It’s a pretty unappealing bright side, but he’s trying, he needs to be finding bright sides, not every angle of a problem can possibly be so shadowed.

He compensates stupidly, and the face he makes when he starts sucking on a lemon Sanji’s set out as a garnish makes his friends fall about laughing and successfully ends the salt argument before anyone starts using projectiles. He plays it off as a joke and starts insisting he’s completely immune to anything sour, striking a hero pose. Robin puts her mouth behind her hand, which is the Robin equivalent of falling out of her chair laughing, which Luffy’s actually done. Chopper’s eyes light up with stars and he reaches for a lemon wedge.

__

Robin’s a macabre person. Usopp’s many anxieties are definitely not heightened by this.

She’s prone to explaining ways they could die that Usopp had never thought about in his life, and when she tells him how a poisonous creature could be so small it would be almost invisible in the water, and they might not even be able to identify the problem in time to even consider antidotes onboard, he feels his eyes bug out of his head and he shouts something about never going fishing again.

She smiles at him, in her perfectly calm way. She explains that some threats can be impossible to anticipate, but the crew is very good at handling the unexpected. She tells him it would be a shame to lose him as a fisherman over a threat so rare, and that the chances of it happening are so small they’re practically impossible. When he points out they do impossible things all the time, she smiles again. They’re lucky that way, she finishes, and she feels they’re perfectly capable of living.

Usopp can’t tell if she actually thinks any of it is true or whether she’s saying it to comfort him. But she said they couldn’t lose him as a fisherman so he double-checks with Chopper about their poison antidotes onboard and returns to the water.

Brook’s a walking, talking, memento mori. Usopp does not think about how similar his own skull looks, or doesn’t look, when compared to Brook’s.

Brook offers to lend him a comb when he breaks his, a day’s sail from the nearest island. They have similar hair textures, he offers, he’s certain it will work just as well. Usopp, who has definitely not spent a significant amount of time thinking about how similar his hair may or may not be to Brook’s, has to take him up on the offer, and takes his hair out to slick it back again. It’s slightly looser, he thinks, less gravity-defying, but Brook, with impossible cheer, tells him Usopp doesn’t look unlike a young version of himself with his hair down, though he notes differences (the skin was deeper in tone, but it’s not like I have any anymore!).

Usopp utilises false bravado to insist a young version of Brook must have been extremely handsome, then, and Brook laughs along. Of course he was, he insists, one hand on Usopp’s shoulder. But Usopp is his own man, and has his own future to look forward to. Many more years of handsomeness. His own unique face.

And everyone else, to varying extents, seems convinced the crew is immortal. This is fine.
__

Luffy is made of rubber. Franky is mostly metal. Brook is bones. And Usopp is forged, in his entirety, of guilt, of fear, and of panic.

It’s not a sturdy foundation.

You need sturdy foundations, and strong materials, if you want to build something that’s going to last. He’s in his factory, replacing the band on his slingshot, and he feels like an idiot for using something experimental. It snapped in the middle of a fight.

Nothing major. Just a minor altercation with a handful of ships. But it had snapped, and he had screamed, something stupid, something he barely remembered.

It’s guilt first, at the core of things, holding him up, curled like the snake in his stomach, tying itself in desperate knots like it can hold him, all crumbling, all ruins, together. It’s in his throat every time he yells, every time he fails, every time he succeeds, because he’s never going to make up for any of it. He cannot fix himself with the ties of guilt, but there is nothing else to hold him together.

What will his last words be?

It is blinding, his panic, and he needs clear vision more than he needs air. If he can see it all, he can anticipate it, he can push through the shaking of his hands, he can hold up his head, he can do something worthwhile. You have to aim between the beats of your heart, to become truly unshakable, a truly great marksman. You have to slow it down, have to make the world around you proceed at your pace. Impossibly slow, until the whole battlefield looks beautiful, like you have orchestrated the chaos, like you have woven it all for the perfect line of the shot that sails between everything, ignorant of all the world save the path you have chosen it for. You cannot be a panicking sniper, in the middle of a fight. You will not be able to find the space between the screaming beats of your heart.

His teacher insists that he breathe more deeply, in the middle of nowhere, on their island. Usopp feels panic shaking him, as it always does, and it is as if the only reason to suck in air would be to scream.

Has he said his last words to friends already? To his former teacher? What if he dies now, and here? What did he say last, to the people he cares about?

Did he yell again? Did he curse at them? Did he laugh, or joke?

Every time he talks to anyone, he feels it, the fear that moves the blood in his veins. Last time. Last words. Make it count. How will they remember you?

He tries not to overthink it. He just thinks about it, normally, all of the time.

Nami’s Clima-Tact is sitting down here, too, just for maintenance. His last words could have easily been a joke at her, because they trade barbs like it’s catch, I’ll insult you last, I’ll insult you first. It’s friendly, easy, understandable. There’s a similarity to their cowardice that ties them close. She gets some of it.

But if negativity ghosts ran through her, she wouldn’t just keep moving. He breathes in, breathes out.

She’d call him an idiot for thinking about this. And a coward. She’d be right.

Cowardice and fear stack up inside him, unsteady mechanisms, shaking like they’re about to burst through thick leaf cover and go for his throat. It closes fast, with fear balled up in it. He feels it, like he’s weighed down on the microscopic level with the bulk of it, with the heavy, easy, neatly dispersed burden he’s been carrying all his life. You can’t turn off fear when it sticks under your skin like a second layer, when you know it bleeds out of you every time you prove it right, staining like blood, with blood, worse than blood ever could. He can’t get rid of it. He can’t be brave.

He can only manage doing things in spite of the fear. He can’t go on without it.

(And everyone else keeps telling him that’s bravery.)

Later, he’ll return the Clima-Tact and she’ll thank him, and he’ll steal her usual piece and tell her a nonsensical figure about how much she owes him. He won’t actually expect anything. And she’ll insult him for daring to try it, and it will sound like a call to action, from her, like her affronts usually do, and they’ll be off again, back and forth, pretending to be angry and then falling about laughing.

He gets back to work.
__

He survives.

The sun sets, slow, over the water, on a different day, in a different part of the world. The light fades over the water, and stays strong in Usopp’s eyes. Not his last, not yet.

Usopp is alone on deck again. It’s been a while.

He’s just stepped out of an impromptu celebration, and he can still hear his nakama yelling and singing and Brook’s music soars out through the windows, catching itself on night air. He leans back, hands on the railings, and listens.

And he’s negative about it, first, because it’s instinctual, well-practiced. Any enemy would hear the ship coming, would have to be deaf not to. Or the noise could attract a creature from the depths, something that hates sea shanties, something that’s sworn revenge on anyone who dares disturb it. The Thousand Sunny does not cut silently through the night.

It’s not intended to.

Usopp loosens his grip on the railing, which has become alarmingly strong. He could give himself a splinter, or something.

And Usopp practises.

The crew are enjoying themselves, he starts, and they absolutely deserve to. There’s nothing on the horizon, and if there was, he would see it coming. And they would rush together, and they would join him, and there would be many hands making light work of the threat, because they haven’t met anything they couldn’t handle.

Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes his bones break. And they fix it, and he gets better.

He’s getting better.

He knows he is, he knows he has been for a long time now, with every day he gets older. Even when he feels like he’s going backwards. Even when he is perfectly still.

It’s still now, out here, with the stars beginning to make their appearances.

It isn’t still, because the ship is catching the wind and they are still going someplace else, somewhere different, somewhere exciting. He’s waiting for it. He’s prepared. Or, well, as prepared as he possibly can be.

Maybe there will be giants! Or there will be robots, or dragons, or creatures made entirely out of shadows. He imagines them all, and they spin in bright, world-changing colours, reforming futures. They’re strange, to be sure, and he won’t stop being careful, but they will make great stories.

He’s good with stories.

His head tilts and he takes in the stars. He knew, from hazy descriptions, from small smiles and whispered words, that they would be the most beautiful out here, in the middle of the ocean, where they can run from the lights of towns, where there is nothing for them to shine on but the beautiful, endless darkness of the sea. Nothing prepares you for the reality of them, not even seeing them every night. Usopp could see them for another thousand years.

Today will not be the last day of his life.

And, he resolves, as the skies open up, as the stars race across it, as his crew begins spilling out of doors to pull him back, it will not be tomorrow.