the silence of despair. ONE PIECE

16. the guilt of dust

"It's me and my head. In madness, I collapse."

Tony Tony Chopper is aware that he is an abnormality. He knows it every time he looks in the mirror and sees his blue nose or when it reflects on the glass of his beaker while he makes a few medications in his lab.

His blue nose was his demise, the beginning of his anguish and pain, forcing him to be an outcast among his birth family. He knew it from his father's skull strike and the scornful glare of his biological mother, as well as the bullying of his brothers and the abandoning of his pack.

His family regarded him as a monster. An anomaly, they screamed angrily.

They told him that he was born with an incurable sickness in his blood that caused his nose to become blue and cursed him.

However, they failed to tell him that his curse would not protect him from heartbreak, misery, and loneliness. They did not tell him that becoming a monster brings loneliness and misery with no remedy.

In the heartbreak of obtaining a cure for his monstrous nature, Chopper ate the Hito Hito no Mi. As if fate didn't already hate and turn against him, the devil's fruit turned him into a human hybrid. He is trapped between two species that despise him and want him dead for his abnormality.

The devil fruit was claimed to have cursed the user for drowning in the sea, but nobody informed him that it had also imprisoned him in this hideous form. Perhaps he deserves it since fate's vile hands have marked him from the time of his birth, yet it still hurts, it hurts so much to have no place to call home.

He, the monster, emerged with an illness in his blood that had no known cure. Swore to rid the world of all illnesses so that no one would have to experience the same agony that broke his heart. And Chopper found solace in the loving arms of a man whom others deemed dangerous, crazy, and eccentric.

Yet Chopper's dark pink eyes find no insanity and dangerousity in Hiriluk's warm eyes. All Chopper could discover and experience from this man was kindness and selflessness. When his pack wanted him dead and human children beat him unconscious and bloody with rocks, his father saved him. Hiriluk, his father, took him when everyone else abandoned him; he loved him even though the rest of the world despised him; he regarded him as a person with a soul and feelings, not a monster.

Hirikul embraced him as his son and treated him with unparalleled kindness. Regardless of his appearance or monstrosity, he loved him more than anything else. Still, he thought, No! Chopper believed that with Hiriluk, he could cure any illness, including Hiriluk's own.

'You foolish moron, you can't save a person's life with kindness alone,' yelled Doctorine, her eyes welling up.

His fur was smeared with tears of grief as he cried out for the one who loved him when no one else did, his father's name nailed on the wall of his throat. He cried over and over, believing that his tears would bring back his father.

But as a doctor, Chopper learned that the dead remained dead.

Dead men will never come back.

There is no remedy, no blessing, that can restore a man whose heart has stopped and his warmth has left him. The dead are cold and gone, leaving only an empty vessel where their souls left their bodies. (And as a doctor, Chopper understands how cold and icy the flesh of the deceased feels in his paws. He understands how it feels to hear the last dump of a heart, as well as the cries of sorrow and anguish spilling from people's hearts).