Shit, Sanji thought, it’s so damn cold. So cold, he was still shivering violently despite the three blankets he’d wrapped around himself. It was ultimately a good thing, he thought. It kept him from falling asleep for too long. But the cold wasn’t the only reason he was awake, nor was it the only reason he was shaking.
Below-decks, in the women’s quarters, Nami-san was dying.
He wanted to be there with her, he really did, but after Zoro had pulled him aside and said Nami wouldn’t get any sleep with him hovering over her... well, for once they’d seen eye-to-eye. Nami-san needed her rest, and the Going Merry needed a lookout for the night. Hence his current position. He’d been smoking constantly; the bottom of the crow’s nest was one giant ashtray.
“Get better soon, Nami-san,” he said to the false dawn. “No one will clean this up if you don’t make us.”
He pulled the blankets tighter around himself. Shit, he needed a cigarette bad. He checked his pockets. Nothing. He leaned his head back against the mast and closed his eyes. That didn’t last too long, though. He could feel tears of frustration and worry pooling up beneath his eyelids, and the last thing he wanted to do now was cry. Nami-san never cried: no way was he going to.
He wiped his eyes and looked back out at the horizon. Endless ocean. Below him, someone shut the door to the lounge. Sanji looked down. Usopp slowly made his way over to the giant hole Walpol had left in the side of their ship, carrying some boards under one arm and his toolbox under the other.
“Hey Usopp,” Sanji called, thankful for the distraction. “Why’re you out this early?”
Usopp glanced up at him as he set his materials down. “There’s stuff that needs to be done,” he said. He picked up a board and positioned it, then started hammering it into place. “We can’t just sit around waiting for something to happen, you know, not if there’s something we can do.”
For a moment Sanji was furious. How could Usopp just go on like nothing was wrong? Didn’t that long-nosed shithead care about Nami-san at all? Before he could lash out at his crewmate, though, Usopp started talking again. Hesitantly, as if each word hurt. Sanji couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were tense.
“When I was little,” Usopp started, then stopped. He positioned the next board and started hammering. Sanji frowned. His rage had fled as quickly as it came, and now he was curious.
“When you were little?” he prompted.
Usopp shook his head. “When I was... when I was but a mere lad of five--”
Sanji sighed. Usopp was going to tell one of his stories again. Usually he didn’t mind, but they got tiring after a while. He hoped it wasn’t the one about the giant goldfish again. He did not need to hear about islands made of fish shit, not now.
“--my beloved mother--best pie-baker in all of East Blue, she was--well, the village baker grew jealous of her.” He picked up the next board. “Her pies were so fabulous and flavorful that his own were plain in comparison, and so he put a curse on her, and she got sick.” He paused. “Very sick. So sick green spots appeared all over her face like mold.” Sanji rolled his eyes.
“So, being the pirate’s son I was, I commandeered Syrup Village’s only rowboat, an old thing with leaks by the dozen, and sailed the Four Blues in search of the mystical Merman’s Tears, which can cure any sickness in the world.” Sanji wished Usopp’s story were true. Maybe if they found some Merman’s Tears, Nami-san would... He stopped that train of thought right there. No point in thinking about things that couldn’t happen. That was Usopp’s specialty.
“I sailed for forty days and forty nights, and battled countless sea monsters--I could tell you about those, but the stories would take two days to tell properly. I’ll tell you some other time.” Next board. “On the forty-first day, I finally found the island where the mermen lived, and who should be there already but my father?” Usopp squared his shoulders proudly. “My father, Yasopp, the greatest gunner that ever lived! He never told me how, but he knew about my mother, and was also trying to get the Merman’s Tears for her. So we went together, father and son, to the cave where the oldest and strongest merman lived.
“He was a wily thing, with a long snake-tail and smart as a whip. For a week, my father and I battled it, without food or water or sleep, all for my mother. And finally I pinned it to the ground, and I twisted its arm so hard it begged for mercy and wept but a single, solitary tear, which my father caught in a bottle. And so impressed was it by our love and devotion that it called all its brothers, and my father and I rode home on their backs!” Usopp nodded, his breath fogging in the cold, cold air. Sanji sighed and checked his pockets yet again for a cigarette. He found one buried within the folds of his blankets, then set about forcing his frozen fingers to strike a match.
“We arrived in the nick of time--the entire village was already in mourning garb, and the coffin was waiting just outside my mother’s room. The doctor said there was no hope, but we didn’t listen, my father and I. We strode right into her room, and she was so pale...” Usopp stopped for a moment. “She was so pale, we thought she was dead already. But we opened her mouth up and made her drink the Merman’s Tear we had worked so hard to get. And a miracle occurred: the color came back to her cheeks, and she opened her eyes. She was so happy to see my father, and so proud of me! ‘Her brave little warrior of the seas,’ she called me! And not too long after that--”
“Come off it, Usopp,” Sanji interrupted, finally getting a match to light. “That didn’t really happen. It couldn’t have.”
Usopp stared at his toolbox silently, motionless. And then he spoke, so quietly that it was almost carried away by the wind.
“...but that’s what I wanted to happen.”
Sanji lit his cigarette and took a drag from it, then froze as Usopp’s words registered. Usopp was a liar. He lied all the time. But he knew Yasopp really was a pirate; Luffy had confirmed it. So that part at least was true. And if that part of it was true, then maybe the part about his mother getting sick was true too. But since Usopp always lied...
That meant his mother had fallen sick and died, when he was too little to do anything about it.
Nami-san was wasting away just a few yards below them, and neither of them could save her.
Shit, he thought.
The silence lingered for a few more moments, then Usopp positioned yet another board and hammered away. Sanji took another drag from his cigarette.
‘Can’t just sit around waiting for something to happen,’ he recalled. We might not be able to do anything for Nami-san, but we’re doing what we can. He smiled. It’s gonna hafta be enough for now.
He watched Usopp continue his work, his shoulders hunched and his hammering slow. Can’t just sit around waiting...
“Hey Usopp,” he called. Usopp paused, then looked up at him.
“What?” he said warily.
“Why don’t you tell me about the time you saved your hometown from Captain Kuro and his crew?”
Usopp’s face lit up like a lantern before he launched into his dramatic retelling of the story (with himself as the hero, of course). It was a story Sanji had heard before, and he had no doubt he’d hear it again, but it didn’t really matter. Usopp looked ten times happier, pounding away at his repairs with a vigor he’d been lacking only minutes ago.
...not if there’s something you can do.
