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Waking up to a hand running through his hair had Dragon’s blood running cold before he’d even reached full awareness.
Everyone who worked with Dragon knew, at this point, that he didn’t like to be touched without warning. Especially not while asleep. A stranger might, but in his hazy state of mind, he could only conceive of exactly one being who would, and it terrified him more than anything else in this world.
“Beloved.”
Sometimes, Dragon loathed being right.
Imu, he tried to say, but his throat and tongue wouldn’t respond properly, and spasmed when he tried to clear his airway.
“Shh, rest. Don’t struggle so. Thou hast been unconscious for many days. Mu expects it will take thee some time to recover.”
He managed to make a confused, frustrated noise and Imu chuckled at him. And, perhaps more infuriatingly, understood him. “It was necessary to bring thee home.” The word was practically an obscenity in that voice, speaking of this hell. “Those little pests that follow thee have proven…irritatingly resourceful trespassers within mu’s domain. So, it became necessary to convince them thou art dead. It would not be meet for them to interfere with mu again. Now the world has learned of thy execution, a private affair, and thou art returned to mu.”
Execution. The Revolutionary Army—the world—thought he was dead.
It would work, as a plan. The Summit War was fresh enough in everyone’s memory that no one would really find it surprising the World Government chose a private execution. Everything else can be explained away—even staging an execution with a body double. At that point, with him vanished off the face of the earth, the only reason to call anything surrounding Dragon’s ‘death’ into question would require knowing that the ruler of the World Government, the power behind the Empty Throne, considered Dragon personal property—and had never forgiven him for managing to escape with his own life, let alone his son’s.
And Dragon had never told a single soul exactly how Luffy came into this world.
There would be no rescue this time, not for him. And likely no escape but death.
Dragon met Imu’s burning red gaze, doing his best to convey that wordlessly. He would die before he gives himself up to life in the hands of a monster. They’d been down this road before.
Imu’s hand tightened in his hair, and a purr of satisfaction entered the next words spoken. “Do you see now what thy carelessness with our son has done? He has become irretrievably corrupted by the world. Devoured by the shape of an enemy. This would not have happened, had he been raised in mu’s care.”
No. And Luffy’s childhood free of Imu’s ‘care’ remained one of the greatest victories of Dragon’s life.
“It will not happen with the next one.”
Look. Usopp’s lived and learned from his mistakes by now. He’s proud to call Luffy his captain. He would follow Luffy into hell and back. He has, in fact!
And for all he really wishes Luffy would stop going there, it’s unfathomably worse to have Luffy going there without them.
Especially because it means that the rest of them then have to figure out how to break into—for example—Mary Geoise—without him, because Luffy had of course pulled a Luffy and run in with absolutely no consideration for anyone else involved.
The only consolation available to Usopp in this trying time is that there can be no more fitting retribution against Traffy than the fact that it’s his plan being smashed to pieces. If he didn’t want Luffy running in before half of their forces—including the other half of Usopp’s crew—have gotten into place on the other side of the Red Line, then he shouldn’t have gone and gotten himself captured. And not just by the Marines (New Marineford is already half rubble behind them, which is going to make Koby and Drake upset, but they’ll just have to deal under the circumstances) but hauled away into Mary Geoise.
It’s not like the rest of them can have been expected to stop it. Luffy’s been...off for a few months now. Since Elbaf. Or, more specifically, since the back-to-back news that the Heart and Kidd pirates had been sunk, followed by the paper a few days later with the front-page news that Dragon the Revolutionary had been captured and executed. Luffy had stared at that headline for long enough that Usopp had wondered if they were finally going to have the Big Feelings talk about Ace’s death that the rest of the crew had kind of been bracing for ever since they first met up at Sabaody again.
But Luffy had just said, “I never even got to thank him for saving Sabo,” sounding more like a lost little kid than Usopp could ever remember hearing out of him.
He’d improved when they’d found out the other Supernova captains had lived, and when they’d met up with the Revs on Kamabakka. By the time he’d left Blackbeard a groaning heap behind him and gone to face off with Shanks, he’d even had a real smile on his face.
While they and all their allies had prepared for this final assault, over the past several weeks, Luffy had been as much himself as ever. He’d held it together when they’d said a temporary farewell to Chopper and Robin and Franky and Brook and Jinbe and the Sunny, sailing the long way around to come at the Red Port with half their allies. He’d been waiting patiently—for him, anyway—long enough that it had started to look like maybe nothing would go catastrophically wrong.
Usopp should have crushed that hope down harder. More ruthlessly. Maybe that would have saved them from catching up to Luffy after a frantic day and night of sailing just in time to watch half the Red Line crumble into the sea.
It doesn’t stop them from getting closer, of course. None of them are Devil Fruit users. They’ll swim if they have to. Usopp happens to be a champion swimmer, if anyone’s wondering.
Fortunately, they don’t have to. The ship they—ah—borrowed from Sai and Baby 5 is perfectly adequate to navigate them closer. Especially when crewed by Leo and the other Tontatta pirates.
The Tontatta are also very good at crying out ‘LUFFYLAND!’ at ear-piercing volume, and Usopp appreciates it, because he has every single sense trained to high alert in service of stretching his Observation haki to the limit.
“There!” he shouts, finally, pointing. “There, there, there—”
The ship immediately groans and heaves onto the new course, and he might have fallen overboard if Sanji hadn’t grabbed the back of his dungarees. And if not for Usopp’s impeccable poise and superhuman grace, but he needs to be paying attention for that, and all he can pay attention to right now is the faint electric humming of Luffy’s presence. It’s so faint, almost too faint, he needs to see—
The faint, wavering image of the coastline snaps into focus, and all of a sudden the image is clear before Usopp's eyes of a large man, dressed in a tattered drape of cloth over freshly shredded rags, jumping from rock to rock down the crumbled rockslide. He’s carrying a pair of limp, lanky bodies: one over each shoulder, and the right one wearing an unmistakable straw hat.
“I see him!” Usopp yells. “He made a friend!” Of course he did. “Him, and Traffy—” he concentrates a little harder.
“Unconscious,” Sanji says, but he sounds relieved. “But they’re alive.”
They made it in time.
Getting them all navigated and transported to their captain and his new friend requires some coordination. Sanji ends up with Zoro slung over one shoulder while Usopp rides along on Zeus with Nami, the lucky bastard. The shitty swordsman is somehow even more annoying to carry when he’s not half-dead (too much squirming, obnoxiously meaty thighs) but at least he’s silent and rolls off fast once Sanji lands them in front of the stranger.
The guy straightens up out of a landing crouch, one arm coming up to steady Luffy and the other shoulder rising, keeping Traffy from falling off.
“Blackleg and Roronoa. Here for your captain?”
“What happened to him?” Zoro demands.
“He saved my life,” the man says, simply. “And Law’s. And much of the world into the bargain. The tyrant of the Empty Throne has fallen.”
“Yeah, sounds like Luffy,” Sanji says. “You know our names. Who are you? Hard to see with the hood and all.”
The man hesitates, but pulls back the cloth that’s fallen over his face. Still with the arm holding Luffy—the other one’s hidden under the drape along his body.
Sanji almost regrets pushing him to that, when he sees the brand of the Celestial Dragons along the entire right side of his face—huge, ugly, impossible to hide. “Well. Luffy was calling me Ayato.”
And Sanji can’t really blame him for not wanting to give them another name. Luffy’s definitely made a new friend.
“We’ll take him off your hands,” Zoro says, flatly, and sheathes his swords to scoop their captain. The stranger—Ayato—lets him go with only the slightest hesitation. He seems small against Zoro’s chest—too small for a man who shattered the length of the world.
Ayato still has one arm out of commission, so Sanji lets out a theatrical sigh and grabs their allied captain to hoist over his shoulder. And doesn’t even drop the guy when he cracks open one eye at him.
“Go back to sleep, Traffy,” Sanji says. He’d rather be hauling lovely ladies around, but as long as he’s already got man-stink on him, it’s not a bother.
“Luffy…?”
Sanji obligingly turns him to see Luffy, safe and sound and drooling into Zoro’s scar. Ayato’s looking down at the captain with a fragile sort of fondness. It’s almost a familiar look—the Luffy special, a mix of the disbelief of someone who’s been saved when they weren’t expecting it and the awe that someone like this exists at all—but there’s a layer to it Sanji doesn’t quite understand. Maybe someone else who thinks their shitty rubber captain is a god.
“The baby?” Traffy rasps out, his head jerking slightly before going limp again. Like Sanji needed another shitty, dumbass captain to look after. And he doesn’t even have anything to cook restorative broths till the ship gets—
Wait. “Baby?”
Ayato shifts, his left arm coming out from under the cloak, and sure enough, that’s a baby in the crook of his arm. Bundled up nice and safe and blinking sleepily at the world around it.
“Lily is safe,” Ayato says. “Thank you for looking after her.”
Traffy sighs and passes out again. Or it sounds like that’s what happens. Sanji’s a little distracted, staring at the whole entire baby. Why is there a baby here?
“Luffy!” Nami and Usopp tumble off Zeus, themselves distracted until they confirm Luffy’s alive and breathing. Ayato leaves them to it, walking away into the rocks, and Sanji follows him because he really shouldn’t—
“This looks like it should be stable enough,” he says, coming to a halt on a large slab of stone. “I assume that ship is yours?”
“Yeah. They’ll pick us up,” Sanji says. “So, the baby?”
Ayato curls his arm, tucking her closer against his body. “She’s my daughter.”
No further elaboration. Sanji’s not about to ask, not when the guy is fresh out of Mary Geoise. He pulls out his cigarette and stomps on it before getting closer. No smoking around a baby. “How old?”
Ayato hesitates. “I’m not...sure.”
Ah, crap. Sensitive topic. “I mean, is she on solid food yet?” He can probably improvise baby formula, but…
“Yes. She’s teething.” Ayato frowns. “I think.”
Sanji is not about to ask. “I can make her some puréed vegetables once we get on the ship. And whatever you want to eat. You looked after our idiots, we’ll look after you.”
Ayato looks at him, and Sanji’s seen that look on a hundred different hungry sailors over the years. Not to mention in his own mirror, after the rock. Someone who’s been through a rough enough time that they can’t quite believe it might, finally, be over.
“You’re safe now,” Sanji says, because it’s what you say, even when it’s hard to believe.
The strange man with a scarred face looks down at the baby in his arm, and sinks to a seated position. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe it will be different this time.”
