The departure from Little Garden felt like a door closing.
Not dramatically — there was no time for drama. Nami was below deck, and the ship needed to move; the crew moved it with the focused efficiency of people facing a real problem and identifying the one available solution. Vivi gave what she knew about Drum Island: unstable, recently vacated by its king, with the medical infrastructure potentially compromised, but still the best option available because it was the only one. The crew received this, factored it, and kept moving.
Liam took the wheel, intent on keeping the course steady until Nami could return to her post.
Drum Island was four days by his estimate. He kept that number private.
---
The ship settled into a tense rhythm. Usopp, hands trembling, fixed things already whole, desperate for control. Zoro trained with a desperation that bordered on fury, swinging his swords as if he could cut through dread itself. Sanji emerged with meals no one had requested, his clenched jaw betraying the worry he tried to hide as he poured love and fear into each dish.
Luffy sat at the bow, fists tight against his knees. His eyes didn't rest on the horizon, but flicked obsessively toward the hatch beneath which Nami suffered. Every line of his face communicated not just determination, but a quiet, boiling panic—a refusal to give in, shoulders rigid with fear masked by resolve.
Vivi carried herself with the composure she had spent years perfecting. Carue was never far when she faced something hard. Outwardly, her calm never wavered, but in small moments—her pause outside Nami's door, her lingering gaze at the sea when she thought herself unseen—the cracks showed.
On the second morning, Liam knocked, then entered Nami's cabin to check on her condition.
She was awake, which was better than the night before, but her eyes were glassy, her skin flushed and damp. Comfort was a memory—she flinched from the fever's torture, and her clenched jaw made her grief and frustration palpable. The ship's care could only barely hold the sickness at bay. Propped on her berth, she wore the look of one who loathed helplessness, contemptuous of her body's betrayal.
"You look terrible."
"Thank you." A pause. "How long?"
"Two more days to Drum Island. Maybe less if the wind holds."
She looked at the porthole. The water outside had the gray texture of Grand Line water between islands—not hostile, just present. "You're not going to tell me it's going to be fine."
"It's going to be fine." "Not in a way that erases uncertainty. In the way, I've decided this is the outcome and won't entertain alternatives." He kept his voice level. "We're going to find the right person to treat this. That is what is happening."
"That's not a guarantee."
"It's as close as I can honestly give you." He met her eyes. "I think it's enough."
She was quiet for a moment, the quiet of someone working through the math of their own situation. "Is there actually a doctor on Drum Island?"
"There's a person there who will know what to do with you." He meant this more specifically than it sounded. "I'm confident in that."
She studied him with a searching, haunted look. At last, something shifted—her shoulders dropped, the exhaustion and fear clear in the set of her mouth. "Okay." The word landed like a final act of surrender: someone too tired to keep fighting, yet still bracing herself for whatever came next.
He lingered, even though there was nothing practical left to offer. That was the hardest part—staying when you could not help, staying because it was all you could do.
---
The conversation with Vivi came late on the third day. It was unplanned and unforced, as if the moment had shaped itself quietly around all that came before.
She joined him at the rail. Carue paced nearby with his usual dignity, even when dignity was not required. Vivi watched the water in silence, then found her words.
She found the words as she came to them. "Watching you with Nami. The way you are with all of them. I've been watching how this crew handles things that go wrong, and—" She stopped.
Liam waited.
"My country is the most important thing in my life." "I've known that since I was old enough to understand what a country was. Everything I've done for the past 2 years has been about protecting it. Getting back to it." She looked at the water. "If I agree to your terms—if I join this crew after Alabasta—I'm not agreeing to stop caring about Alabasta. I'm not agreeing to leave it behind."
"I know."
"You offered me a deal that required me to choose between Alabasta and something else. But watching this crew—it's not clear those things are incompatible." She turned to look at him. "You personally guaranteed Alabasta survives. That Crocodile gets stopped. I want to understand what that means before I answer."
"It means I will be between Crocodile and every bad outcome. He has abilities that should make him effectively impossible to stop by conventional means. He is not impossible to stop by my means. I've confirmed this with a different Logia user, and the principal extends." He kept his voice matter-of-fact. "I'm not telling you there is no risk — there is always risk. I'm telling you that I have direct capacity to stop him, and I will use it."
She held this. "If you're wrong—"
"Then I'm wrong, and we adapt." "But I'm not wrong." He looked at the water, then back at her. "Vivi. You have been carrying Alabasta alone for two years. You don't have to carry it alone from here."
Something eased in her expression. It was not dramatic—just the faintest undoing of tension, like a muscle finally relaxing after days of being cramped. Relief shone through exhaustion, a fragile light barely breaking through the weight she still carried.
Vivi looked at the water one more time. "All right. If you can do what you say, you can — when Alabasta is safe, and Crocodile is stopped — I'll join Luffy's crew."
"Good." He didn't extend it or make it a moment. He let it be practical: two people who made a real agreement about a real thing. "It was the right decision."
She looked at him. "How do you know that?"
"Because you've been watching this crew for weeks and you already know it's the right decision. You made it a while ago. Today is just what you named it."
She fell silent for a moment. Then her face shifted—almost a smile, or something close enough to count. Behind them, Carue offered a soft sound of approval.
---
Drum Island appeared through the snow.
The approach was anything but welcoming. The weather made that clear, and the island itself felt unsettled, as if it had survived an upheaval and was still searching for its new shape. The snow wasn't gentle—it slashed sideways in a wind that judged anyone braving it. Through the tempest, the island's outline was all jagged mountain and dark coastline, stripped of any warmth a port might offer.
Nami was still below. She hadn't only gotten worse—her breath came ragged, and her skin now looked ashen with fever. Each hour below deck pressed the weight of worry harder on those above.
The soldiers who came out to meet them had not received new orders in some time — Wapol's departure had left the military apparatus in a state akin to an institution whose leadership had vanished and whose remaining members were carrying out the last instructions they had been given. The last instructions had included something about pirates, and the Merry had a flag.
Liam managed the situation with the crew quickly and efficiently. The urgency was typical of people too worried about their own to waste time on threats. Dalton watched from a distance. His face was set in the practiced assessment of someone used to trouble. He did not step in. He only observed, measuring what the encounter revealed.
When the deck had resettled, he came forward.
Dalton was the guard captain who remained when his king fled—a large man, shaped by years of training and more years of hard thinking. He surveyed the Merry, then the crew, and finally settled his gaze on Liam with the practiced eye of a professional sizing up a challenge. And after a quick conversation about why they're here.
Dalton's eyes moved to the hatch. "Your navigator. How long has she had the poison?"
"Two days from a prehistoric source on Little Garden."
Dalton's expression shifted. New information confirmed what he had already calculated. "She needs Kureha. On the mountain." He looked at the mountain. "The ascent in this weather is not simple."
"We understand that." "We're not looking for simple. We're looking for possible."
"It's possible." Dalton looked at Luffy, who was already looking at the mountain with the expression of a person who had made a decision. "The path is not marked well, and the conditions are going to get worse before they improve."
"I'm going up." Not a decision he was making — it was a fact he was stating.
"She'll need to be carried."
"I know."
Dalton studied him for a long moment, the way someone does when they have seen people pushed to their limits and are recalibrating where this one might break. Then he gave them what mattered: the path's direction, the markers to follow, and a warning about the stretch where the wind would turn against them.
Sanji appeared at Liam's shoulder. "I'll go with him."
Liam glanced at them—Luffy was already moving to fetch Nami, Sanji with the steady look he reserved for hard decisions he wouldn't debate. The rest of the crew gathered: Zoro's hand hovered near his swords, Vivi and Carue stood close, and Usopp wore the strained face of someone struggling to hide what he felt.
He could have gone—he was strong enough to climb in worse weather. But there was only one path to Chopper and Kureha, and the beach was still uncertain. Someone needed to guard the ship. Luffy and Sanji were as capable as anyone for the ascent.
He stayed.
Luffy returned, and Nami gently slung across his back. She had been unconscious for the past hour, her face pale with the exhaustion of someone running on nothing but reserves. Luffy carried her with the absolute care he reserved for what mattered most.
Sanji looked at the mountain.
They went.
---
The mountain did not shrink as they climbed; instead, Liam watched Luffy and Sanji shrink into the white, two shapes swallowed by wind and snow, harder to spot with every step upward. The blizzard thickened, shifting from a storm that judged outsiders to one that simply became the world itself.
They kept climbing.
Dalton stayed at the shore, handling the chaos with the steady competence of someone used to holding together a crumbling island. He answered Liam's questions directly, having decided this crew was less a problem and more a potential ally.
"What happened here after Wapol left?" Liam asked.
Dalton looked at the mountain, too. "The same thing that happens everywhere when leadership evacuates without warning." He was looking at the mountain too. "The people who were running things because they were told to are still running things. The people who were protected by those things are finding out what protection looks like without institutional backing." He paused. "And the people who were held back by those things are finding out what they can do without supervision."
"Which way is that going?"
"Both ways simultaneously, as it usually does." He looked at Liam. "You know about Kureha."
"Kureha's name reached us before we arrived."
"She is the best doctor on this island, and she is difficult, and she is going to be annoyed at your navigator for getting stung by a Little Garden mosquito in the first place."
"Nami will be annoyed right back once she's recovered enough."
"Then they'll get along fine." Something in his expression — not quite a smile, but the direction of one.
---
Waiting on the shore was the hardest kind—the kind where there was nothing to do but hope someone you loved would be all right. Usopp had run out of things to fix. He stood on the beach, staring at the mountain, his face set in the helplessness of someone who had tried everything and now had to endure the hardest task: doing nothing.
Zoro trained—his answer to helplessness was motion, letting his body work while his mind carried the weight it could not set down.
Vivi stood by the water with Carue, her gaze fixed not on the mountain but on the Merry—on the hatch where Nami had lain for days, on the deck where the crew scattered in their own silent struggles with waiting.
Liam perched on a rock by the water, eyes on the mountain, mind on Chopper. He let himself think of Chopper on purpose—a way to face the truth: he was deeply worried for Nami, but he also knew the mountain held the one who could save her. That knowledge did not make the waiting easier. It only meant the story was headed somewhere.
The wind was considerable. The mountain was very white. Somewhere up in all of that white were two people carrying a third person, and a blizzard was doing its best to make that difficult.
The crew stood on the shore and waited.
Liam decided to go up the mountain too.