Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
C H A P T E R E I G H T
Rotten work
Intermission (Soteriology)
────────────────────────
TWO DAYS TO the date of Zoro's departure (half a year to hers), Luffy, Nami and Tyche sat en petit comité (read: waiting for Zoro's apparently ensured and surely eventual return while Luffy talked the girls' ears off) during the fourth day after leaving Shells Town.
The shade of a teared palm leaf messily tied to the dinghy's mast blurred their crevices until only tenderness remained of those eaten away by the sea: lethargic Luffy balanced in the rails, mused over how long the drop would feel before the crash; nostalgic Nami felt her hair bristle when the metal of the stray bullet lodged in the floorboard's wood shinned a heartbeat too tempting (she imagined it was her head splintered apart), then busied herself with a roll of bandages whose softness greatly contrasted her own; taciturn Tyche was burning with a moonlight kind of longing (to never touch the sun but be cursed with fleeting warmth).
So, in the fleeting afternoon of the humid summer that oversaw the three, it was unfit for Tyche's hands to itch black with warning dread. With the gentle soul of midday sympathy, Nami catered to Tyche's neck (the smooth laceration, rubbed raw where the bandages had frayed, banished the performer from the music box) while Luffy blabbered away, but whatever warmth her embrace could've offered wasn't overshadowed by the nervous ticking of Nami's hands, the twitching of her body or her flinching when a faraway ship roared to life with a canyon, but by the hint of stridulant ink peeking from under her sleeve, waving a flag of faded-out caution.
Luffy, in the contrary to Tyche, didn't notice anything. In his defence, there was a surprisingly chubby, red crab in the pearly sand of the beach that required his complete attention.
"Are crabs immortal?"
Apparently, the very confused looks thrown his way did nothing to deter his very useful intermission when they had finally fallen silent after a handful of hours of constant talking, even if they did make him place a concerning amount of focus in reformulating the question while balancing in the edge of the dinghy. How he hadn't learnt not to test gravity, after three falls, having his frizzy curls get glued to his forehead, and having Tyche take his straw hat away until he finally dried off, was a mystery in itself.
"And where does the idiom come from?" He went on to continue asking, curiosity as undeterred as half an hour earlier, when he had bombarded both of his crew members with not at all private questions about their pasts. "Are they really immortal? And why do we think about it? I feel like it'd be rude to mock them about not being immortal, you know."
"What is he on about now?" Nami wondered under her breath; as it seemed, confusion was a feeling that couldn't be avoided around Luffy and she doubted they'd resist another day trapped in the coastline without one of them going insane if he didn't stop with the questions.
