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In the wake of it all, of Wano, they watch—and they wait. Because none of them know, not really, what it means. Only Zoro has ever said it out loud (that he doesn’t), but none of them really thought, really believed in something concrete, even if they each held their own superstitions. (It’s hard not to, really, after they’d seen a klabautermann—loved one with their whole hearts, their beautiful Merry.)
And yet of all the people in the world, they’d been the ones he’d chosen. (Because they can’t believe, now, that any of it had been an accident—whether he’d sought them out or not, he’d found them.) But he doesn’t seem changed, not in any fundamental way. No, they think—he’s always been as bright as the sun (brighter, even) and free as the sky (freer, even) and as miraculous as a—
No, he’s always been this way. But now they know.
It’s a small thing, really—and Zoro is the first, because of course he is the first, because no matter what he says they’re all fairly certain his devotion has bordered on worship for years, now—but it’s obvious. Halfway through dinner amid the tangle and chaos of limbs and shoves and cursing, he reaches for Luffy’s plate (for his food) and adds some of his own rice, not enough to be anything in the grand scheme of Sanji’s feasts but enough to matter. Enough to mean something. Because this isn’t like the hundred-thousand times they’ve all added extra to their own plates, turned a blind eye to grasping fingers—it’s deliberate.
Nothing stops, really, when he does it. Some of them don’t even notice. But Luffy notices (and that’s what matters), and Nami sees them both stop (not stop stop, because Luffy never stops moving, not really) and Luffy looks at him, and Zoro looks back, and then Luffy grins and grabs the rice (deliberately, picked out from everything else) and pops it into his mouth, and Zoro’s expression doesn’t change, not really—but. Something. And everything starts up again.
No one says anything, because what is there to say? And Sanji, maybe—of all of them—has been the only one truly offering this the same way Zoro has always offered his life (his whole self, everything he is). So in the morning, Robin plucks a strawberry from her parfait and places it on her Captain’s pancakes, and he eats it and he smiles at her, too—and she feels it deep in a part of her heart that has always been filled with him (since the day she’d begged to die and he’d refused to let her, caved in under a kingdom of sand; when he’d punched through the ceiling and given her the sun), and now she knows why.
And the rest of them, too, one by one. Not at once, by some unspoken agreement that travels between them like so many other things, understood without words. It’s not always food, it’s not always the same, but they each offer something, something with love, and he accepts it from them for the gift that it is.
Nami plucks a tangerine from the branches of her trees, the brightest and ripest of them all, and she sets it on his knee with all the outward respect of an alleycat. He laughs and cheers, sinking his nails into the meat of it, and he declares her fruit the best—the most amazing tangerines that have ever grown in the whole of the world. (She believes it because if he wants them to be, it must be true, because the world should always reorient itself around his desires, she thinks.) He takes her hand, sticky and glistening, and his fingers smear against the glass of her log pose, and she knows she would call forth wrath of heaven itself for him. That she would wrestle the wind, the most fickle of things, into their sails to pull them wherever he wanted—and she would ravage the sea with the worst kind of hurricane to decimate his enemies, too.
This is a revelation, but it does not feel like one—because she knows, fundamentally, that nothing has changed. They just know, now. They understand the depth of it and they lean into it, because what else is there to do?
(And even if he weren’t—
—maybe they would have, anyway.)
She pushes him off with a curse and he laughs at her, and she feels it—all of it—from the scar on her arm to the depths of her soul.
Usopp gives his hands—the deft cleverness of them, their genius, plunging elbow-deep into vats of color (red and yellow and black) and laughing along with his crewmates at the stains. He stitches endlessly on reams of sailcloth, pouring his whole heart into every draw of the chord, because the first time he’d made it for them all but now, now he’s making it for him, and a painted flag (retouched and retouched and retouched) isn’t good enough anymore. And so he gives through the act of creation, and when they hoist it for the first time, Luffy swings him around in a dizzying spiral on the deck as it flaps in the wind against the sun—and he declares his flag the best in the world, and Usopp knows it’s true. Because it’s his flag.
And every time it flies (always, always, always—forever) it is a new thing, a new gift, because no two days are ever the same. And Usopp knows he will never be anything but the bravest as long as Luffy believes in him, because if Luffy believes in him and he believes in Luffy then doubting himself is (somehow) like doubting Luffy—and so he grasps Luffy’s wrists and swings him around, too, and they collapse in a heap, and then Chopper is on them both, and Luffy stretches out for Sanji on the stairs and Nami in her recliner and Zoro against the railing and Jinbei at the helm and—
Brook—he gives continuously, pouring his heart (and oh, but he does have a heart! That, they know—and what a beautiful heart it is!) into every stroke of the bow, every press of the keys, every strum of the strings with all the reverence of a prisoner spared from the gallows at the noose. His songs are odes and shanties and ballads, but they are hymns, too. He plays them from morning to dusk and beyond, so that even when his Captain cannot see him there is proof that he’s there. That he’s grateful. Because Brook has seen the darkness—how could he not worship the sun?
Chopper is the first to leave something, a black stone (round, unobtrusive) he finds in a tidepool on some quick-stop island. It glimmers in the day and sits matte in the night, an unexpected beauty in its strange hidden depths. He runs halfway across the beach until he finds someone to get it, wanting to bring it home because Luffy has drawn the short straw about staying to watch the ship and he’s listening for once—but Chopper knows he’ll be sad to have missed watching the little creatures in the tidepools, too. Jinbei scoops it out of the salty water with one massive hand, and by the end of the afternoon it’s dried and glistening (and Luffy has left the Sunny anyway and no one is surprised, not really).
He sets it in the galley alcove just outside the infirmary door—right under the porthole in direct sunlight. He shows Luffy at the end of the day, and Luffy listens while Chopper explains everything he’d seen, ooh-ing and aah-ing as he talks about tiny fish and octopi and at least one snake, too. And when Chopper says the stone looks just like the color of Luffy’s eyes, he laughs—but they see it, too, now, and they’re reminded that Chopper views the world through the lens of their bodies, always.
Their little doctor, the last defense against death itself. A warrior at the end of the line, holding back the inevitable with impossible strength in his hands (his hooves) and every patch, every brew, every scold. Because so many of them have nearly died, but only Chopper has stared death in the face and said, You will have to fight me, first, on their behalf, every single time.
Chopper sees them all for what they never say—their aches and pains, their needs—and for the moments they’re at their absolute worst (bleeding, crying, vomiting), but above all he sees their beauty, too. His beautiful herd on the sea, his beautiful humans, and his beautiful Captain, too. Chopper has no concept of religion, not really (just like so many human things), but he is a creature of the earth (the forests and the mountains and the snow), and the earth has always revolved around the sun. It is as natural as breathing, really.
Robin finds a book of wildlife from the East Blue (so far from home), and it’s a worn thing—long out of print, long loved by a hundred changing hands—but amid the chaos of escaping that island (another island, because there is always trouble and they are always the ones causing it), she does not get to show him. So as he sleeps, she leaves it there, too—under the window. And when he sees it so many days later he beams at her. She asks him to tell her about the animals there, because she’s never been to the East Blue (and how much softer her life could have been, she thinks, if she’d ever made it to the most peaceful sea—but then she would never have met him).
He takes the book from her hands and flips through, gasping at the artwork, giggling as he relives memories that exist only to two, now—the world short one brother. He stops on the image of a crocodile—some great, menacing thing that the descriptions claim can grow to the size of a house—and he tells her how its skin feels, and how sharp its teeth are, and how dark the inside of its stomach is. He tells her about the bears and the tigers and the wolves and the gorillas as she listens, perched on the galley sofa next to him, letting it fill her up—the sound of his voice. And he talks, and talks, and talks.
And Sanji preps for dinner (slowly, far more food than they need—then boxing cold lunches that they’ll eat for days), and Chopper sits at the infirmary door mashing herbs and pressing pills (again and again, refilling their stock), and Usopp proclaims that the galley’s light is better for sketching (and he fills page after page after page), and Zoro props himself against the doorframe to oil his blades and wax their saya (meditating to the sound of one voice), and Brook folds himself beside Zoro because his sword needs maintenance (and his bow needs wax, too, and he accepts the silent offer), and Franky remembers that the walk-in is due for an inspection (and the coffee grinder and the dehydrator and the stand mixer), and Nami rolls out an entire length of bathy map out onto the dining table (because she can’t roll this map out on the library floor, no, it needs to be on a clean surface), and Jinbei—Jinbei just sits and listens, too, the tattoo on his chest a blistering red next to the scar on his side.
The book stays next to the rock, propped up against the wall, because none of them can bear to return it to the library after that. So when they see a little wooden figurine of him, a children’s toy in a market stall, and he wants it but Nami says it’s outrageous and Usopp declares he can make a better one anyway (and he does, god—he does, because it’s carved with love), that’s where it goes. Made of the rarest, most precious scrap of Adam Wood (Sunny herself, in so many ways) and painted with pigments he’s crushed himself, it sits in a ray of sun that never seems to move no matter the time of day. A little idol, a little King. Luffy says it’s better than a bronze statue—the best.
(They wonder, too, if there is a bronze statue somewhere, and what they might have seen in Skypiea had they only known to look.)
Small things gather there. A neatly trimmed article, an interesting bracelet, a crumpled bounty poster, an unusual snail shell, a length of ribbon, a dried flower—a dozen trinkets that say I’m thinking of you! I’m thinking of you! I’m thinking of you!
When Sanji pulls an extra loaf from the oven (or plates an extra helping of stew or pours an extra glass of lemonade), he falls into the habit of setting Luffy’s there, too—away from the other boys’, lined up on the counter. And if there’s more, whether by Sanji’s hands or their own, no one comments.
It’s not an altar, not really, because he’s right there always—and they’re never losing him again—but it is something.
They’ve all sat by it, in quiet moments. On nights when dreams of lonely islands or unending pain or screaming in the grass feel like too much, they’ll light the candle that Robin has placed there—to read by a softer light in the galley after sundown—and they’ll breathe. And because their Captain is the way he is, when they return to their bunks (or wherever they end up) he’ll come tumbling behind with them, sleepy and warm—wrapping around them, demanding attention because he wants to cuddle even though Luffy, it’s three in the morning! but it always helps. How could it not? They know they’ll never be safer anywhere on earth than right there, right then, tangled in the limbs of a—
And they don’t pray, but if they did it would sound like laughter on the deck and bickering at the dining table. Like Which Island Next? and Keep Your Bandages On! and Look At This! and What Do You Want For Dinner?. Like Help Me! and I Want To Live! and I Want To Go Home To The Sunny!. Like a thousand Aye, Captain-s and a thousand Luffy Is The Man Who Will Be The Pirate King!-s and one I Will Never Lose Again. It would sound the same as it’s always been and the same as it always will be—the honest truth. But maybe they know, now, why saying I Love You in a hundred different ways feels like holding molten gold in their mouths. Hot and bright and deeply precious.
In the wake of it all, they watch—and they wait. Because none of them know, not really, what it means. And if anyone were to ever ask if they believed in god, they would say, No, because there’s nothing to believe—not really. Faith is absolute trust in something they cannot see, cannot hear, cannot feel. And Luffy—Luffy is right there, always. Unshakable, unbreakable, and bright as the sun. So what’s the point of faith if they can reach out and touch him (tossing him across the deck for disturbing the peace, wrestling him into the grass in the midst of a game, squishing him in their laps for a nap in the shade, swinging him by the wrists in a wild dance around the fire) and what’s the point of belief when they can see his smile (the bloody grin after a battle, the open-mouth laughter at some joke, the mischievous smirk they all know means trouble) as proof?
And so nothing changes—not really. Because why should it?