Usopp X Reader 💕One Shots💕

Firework Festival

*Originally published July 19th, 2014*

________Post-Time Skip________

Anticipation hung thickly in the air, filling the air of the moonlit island with its gathering excitement. It was all for a firework festival taking place this evening, a fresh set of colourful explosives lined up somewhere out on the water, just waiting to be launched into the darkened sky. Quite a beautiful festival that took place annually here, expressing passion, excitement, and love. This island the festival was being held on, it had such a familiar feeling to it, yet it was completely different at the same time. It was a reminder, or rather memory, that was plucked forward in your mind, now living fresh in the front of your memory banks. The time, the feeling, the atmosphere, it all reminded you of Firework Island way back two years ago. That beautiful display had etched its way into the depths of your heart, and knowing that yet another display of beauty would be shown tonight, it just made you all the more excited inside, anticipating its beginning.

Though the atmosphere excited you, it felt right to take yourself away from the chattering crowds, filling the streets with their bouncing bodies, shuffling about each other to get the said 'best views' of the show. Calmly, you placed yourself to the side of the wandering crowd, finding an easy route out of the chaos and away. The crew wouldn't mind. It's not like they would leave without you anyway.

Weaving and bobbing, you ducked through the crowd on the tightly packed streets, occasionally having to swing yourself around a lamp post that was placed on the edge of an overhang just to evade the ordeal of getting smacked in the face by a passer-by or even smushed between two of them. Thank god you were nimble enough to not fall off the side. What a nasty fall that would be. This was a repeated process until you had managed to weave your way through the entire street and out onto a soft, earthy path of dirt leading onward, winding in two different directions as you looked on further.

Sighing with relief, you straightened your clothes and proceeded on with a more calm and collected stride up the higher path to the right that wound around the village's main street and up to a cliff that hung over the sparkling sea a good hundred meters from the village itself that was still clustered with many people.

On your walk, the dirt path was only lined with a few stones, strewn from the sides to the center. Coming upon a descent sized one, you took your foot and struck it lightly, kicking it along the path with you as a bit of entertainment. Sadly, it had to be abandoned as the path slowly eased into an incline that would take you atop the cliff.

Slowly, you worked against gravity as the incline became steeper with every step, taking yourself up higher and higher. The further up you climbed, the more the path under your feet would disappear. It became lest defined with its prominent lines of dirt, and soon wore down to having patches of grass on it, becoming more jagged and natural. Soon, the vegetation took over and there were only few patches of dirt left the moment you reached the top of the hill, leaving you to walk on smooth, dew dropped blades of grass, each droplet of dew being accented by the light of the rising moon.

With that, the land evened out, and you had reached the peak of the hill, now walking yourself to the cliff that overlooked the sea, as well as the location of where fireworks lined the waters. You brought yourself up as close as you could to the edge of the cliff and sat down in the soft grass with your legs crossed, leaning back on your hands in wait for the show to start. Looking at the stars and the moon, you deemed it five minutes to midnight, so everything would be set off fairly soon.

It felt oddly different, not being around the crew like the last time you saw fireworks, but it still felt nice with the peace and quiet now being offered to you. Not that the entire crew was with you the last time anyway. Usopp was of course helping the family that ran the show last time, and contributed to that one massive firework that shook the very sea itself. The memory made you smile. You wanted to watch the show with him the first time, but he was busy with that instead. It would've been nice, but now that the thought was on your mind, you realized that you could've tried this time to watch with him. You rolled your eyes at yourself at your spontaneous dumbness, doing such a great job at not even remembering to try and find him and ask. Then again, it wouldn't have been enjoyable in that cluster of people, and it would have been near impossible to find him in it too. Still, you dun goofed, and you mentally facepalmed for that at least ten times over.