—Broadcast—
Whatever Chopper's form had become in this place, the hat was the same.
Small and battered, the red of it faded at the edges from years of weather and handling, it sat on the top of the giant deer's head with the comfortable wrongness of something that had always been exactly there. It was Hiriluk's hat. It had never left him. It would not leave him no matter what he looked like.
Nami saw it and stopped trying to be composed about any of this.
She crossed the distance between them at something close to running and put her arms around his neck — the neck of a five-meter deer, which was an entirely different experience from hugging normal Chopper, but the fur was the same texture and the warmth was the same warmth and the steadiness of him was the same steadiness, and she pressed her face against the side of his neck and did not try to stop the tears.
"You've been unconscious for months," she managed, into his fur. "And you've been living perfectly happily here the whole time. I'm so angry at you."
She did not let go while she said this.
Chopper raised one enormous hand and touched the top of her head gently. "I'm sorry. Shub treated me well. I learned things here — things I needed to learn. It was worth the trip, I think."
Nami registered the name and filed it. She would ask about it later. Right now she did not care about anything except that his voice was his voice and he was here and everything in her chest that had been tight for months was, with some effort, releasing.
"Chopper." She pulled back enough to look at him. "I'm not going to force you into anything. But I need to ask — do you want to stay here? Or do you want to come back with us?" She held his gaze. "The adventure isn't finished."
Chopper went quiet.
He looked up the stairs — at whatever was above them in the castle he apparently lived in — and the expression on his face was the one he always made when he was trying to hold two things at once and could not put either of them down. He had always been bad at choosing between the things he loved. It was the same quality that made him good at everything he chose.
He opened his mouth to speak —
And the world stopped.
Not silence — silence was the absence of sound. This was the absence of time. Nami's expression froze on her face. The light in the chandelier hung motionless. The dust that had been drifting in a slow current of air from the open gate sat suspended. Everything that had been in process stopped being in process, and the stillness that replaced it had a weight to it that had nothing to do with volume.
Chopper tried to move his hand. It did not move.
His mind was still working. Everything in it was still working. He thought: there is only one being in this castle who can do this.
She descended the stairs the way she always moved when she was choosing to be seen — not quickly, but with a quality of movement that made speed irrelevant. The black gauze of her skirt shifted around her with the timing of something that did not care about physics. She had the horns of a demon — curved, graceful — and where her ears should have been there were the soft, slightly trembling ears of a sheep, which were somehow the most unnerving part of her appearance because they did not match anything and fit perfectly. Her skin carried its own faint light. Her eyes, when they found Chopper, were deep and warm and completely unreadable to anyone who was not Chopper.
Sky Screen Character Note: Outer God — Shub-Niggurath
She moved past Nami without looking at her — Nami was not moving; from Shub-Niggurath's perspective, at this moment, Nami was not quite real — and wrapped her arms around Chopper from behind. She pressed her face against the back of his neck, into the fur that she had pressed her face into many times over the months they had been in this castle together, learning the warmth of it.
"Are you going back?" she said. Her voice was quiet. "You said you'd stay with me forever."
The law of time loosened. Chopper felt his body return to him.
He held still for a moment in her arms, and then he turned, as much as her hold allowed, so he could see her face.
"I want to finish the adventure," he said. "I want to help Luffy become the Pirate King. I want to become a doctor who can cure any disease — any disease, anywhere. I want to keep my promises." He paused. "I don't want to leave you. I want to stay here. Both of those things are true at the same time."
The castle's light shifted. The warmth of the chandelier cooled by several degrees. The colors of the room deepened toward something that had no comfortable name. Shub-Niggurath's expression did not change but the room changed around her, expressing what her expression did not.
She was quiet for a long moment.
Then she sighed — not a human sigh, something older and more complicated, carrying the accumulated weight of something that had existed for longer than most things and had rarely found reason to feel this particular feeling.
"He hasn't grown up yet," she said. Not to Chopper — to the castle, to the fact of him, to whatever she was reasoning with inside herself. "He hasn't experienced any of the things he needs to experience. Locking him here would ruin him." She was quiet again. "The dream of a doctor is too honest to cage."
She reached up and took a small lock of his fur between her fingers. She pulled it free, carefully, the way you keep something small that means more than its size. She held it in her palm for a moment.
Then she stepped around him, and her face was close to his face, and she kissed him once on the cheek — the unhurried kind, the kind that is a statement rather than a question.
"On the agreed date," she said, "I will come to find you myself. Remember that."
Chopper closed his eyes.
He reached for Nami's hand and found it. He held on.
The castle dissolved — not violently, not gradually, but the way a thought dissolves when a better thought arrives, suddenly complete in its absence. What replaced it was movement: light and fragment and the sensation of crossing distances that did not have names, world-edges sliding past like pages in a book being turned by someone else. None of them were his world. He kept his eyes closed and held Nami's hand and followed the current of Shub-Niggurath's sending until the current delivered them somewhere familiar.
He opened his eyes.
People were shouting.
Several of them were crying. At least one person — this sounded like Luffy — was doing both simultaneously at a volume that suggested he saw no tension between those activities.
The Straw Hats closed in around them with the enthusiastic unanimity of a crew that had been worried for a long time and was expressing the relief through physical contact, which was not ideal for two people who had just woken up from an extended involuntary absence. The pile happened. The protests began shortly after.
"They're patients," Robin's voice said, from somewhere in the middle of the pile, with the calm of someone noting an architectural feature.
The pile reorganized itself into something slightly less structural.
Nami had been unconscious for five days. Chopper, accounting for the coma that had preceded all of this, had been gone considerably longer.
They had woken up within moments of each other, which nobody could explain.
What they could explain turned out to be very little.
Nami rubbed the back of her head and looked around at the expectant faces of eight people waiting to hear everything, and said: "I remember following something into the cherry blossom forest. After that — nothing."
Every face fell.
Chopper's was no different. He looked at his own hands, then at the ceiling, with the careful expression of someone sorting through what their memory contains and finding the shelves largely empty. "I remember a castle," he said. "In a dream. I don't remember what happened there."
He said it without any visible distress, which Nami found slightly strange and could not account for, and then decided not to pursue.
They were awake. They were here. Whatever had happened in the black forest and in the places beyond it had stayed in those places, which was either a mercy or a precaution, and Nami had stopped being certain she knew the difference.
"A party," Luffy announced, with the authority of someone who had made this decision some time ago and was now confirming it publicly. "We're having a party."
The crew's reunion after a year of bad luck warranted nothing less.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~