Sea Calendar 1520, East Blue, Goa Kingdom, Mount Colubo
Six months after Ace set sail.
The sun had already begun to tilt westward when a boy in a red vest and straw hat leaped from branch to branch, climbing the hill toward a wooden structure perched between the arms of a great tree. His movements were light and practiced, the way someone moves through a path they have walked a thousand times.
The treehouse was old. Its walls had rotted in places, its roof had faded, and one of the supports on the right side had been leaning since nobody could remember when. But the structure still stood in the same spot as always, as though nothing had changed.
Luffy pulled himself up through the hole in the floor.
The forest had been stingy today. A thin rabbit and two small river fish that weren't much to speak of hung from his belt, the result of three hours wandering. By Luffy's standards this was nearly nothing, but he was too lazy to search any further and the sun was almost gone. He threw his catch into the corner of the room and sat down on the floor.
The room was quiet, same as always.
In the left corner sat a small ship's wheel gone black with age, the one they had struggled to haul up here because Ace said every decent ship needed a helm. On the wall to the right hung a worn piece of cloth whose color had long since faded, pinned to a rusted nail. The ASL flag. The initials were no longer readable from a distance, but Luffy knew what was written there without having to look closely.
His eyes passed briefly over that left corner, over the blackened wheel, over the cloth that had lost its color. He didn't think about anything. Or maybe he thought something, but not long enough to notice.
Then he lay down.
His hands folded behind his head, he stared at the ceiling where the wood had begun to crack here and there. The evening wind came through the gaps in the walls carrying the smell of wet earth and leaves. Outside, the sounds of the forest were shifting, the daytime birds heading home as the night sounds that hadn't fully arrived yet took their place. Luffy closed his eyes, and it wasn't long before his breathing slowed and his body went still.
He didn't know how long he had been asleep when something pulled him out.
Not a sound. Not a touch.
Just a feeling, like something very heavy pressing down on his chest from the inside. The darkness behind his eyelids felt different from ordinary sleep, deeper and denser, as though there was another space behind it that shouldn't have been there.
And inside that darkness, something moved.
Luffy couldn't see its shape. Couldn't hear its voice clearly. But he could feel it, feelings that weren't his but somehow felt completely real inside his chest. A cold fear. A helplessness pressing in from every direction. The sound of screaming that he couldn't place. The shadow of someone falling in a place he didn't recognize.
Then something inside him reacted.
Not a decision. Not a thought. Just something that burst from the deepest point in his chest like a small sun suddenly igniting in a place that should have been dark, pushing out everything foreign all at once.
"Hah!"
Luffy woke up.
His breathing was uneven. His back had straightened on its own and his hands were already bracing against the floor before he had time to think. His heart was pounding hard, but not the way it does after running. More like after a fight, even though he had just been asleep.
He blinked several times. The worn ceiling of the treehouse. The light coming through the gaps in the walls had shifted to red. The normal sounds of the forest.
"...Hah."
Luffy scratched his head, his breathing slowly coming back to normal.
"What just happened..." He furrowed his brow, trying to remember. "It felt like a dream but I can't remember anything."
He tried for a moment, genuinely. But all that was left in his head was a vague feeling already almost gone, like trying to grab smoke with bare hands.
In the end he shrugged.
"Mah. If I can't remember it then it wasn't important."
He stood and patted down his vest, then immediately noticed a far more pressing problem.
"...Damn. Soaked through."
His vest was sticking unpleasantly to his back. Luffy pulled it forward, looked at it briefly, then clicked his tongue.
"Means I have to bathe today."
He picked up his catch from the corner and moved toward the hole in the floor. But just before he jumped down his feet stopped on their own.
His eyes went back to the left corner of the room without him telling them to, to the blackened wheel, to the worn cloth that had lost its color. He stared at it for a moment with no clear expression. Nothing he was thinking about, or at least nothing he could catch from his own mind.
Then he jumped down and disappeared into the forest.
The sky was fully dark by the time Luffy reached Dadan's base.
The wooden door opened with a bang that had been his arrival signal for years. The smell of cooking and cigarette smoke met him from inside.
"Late!" Dogra shouted from the corner of the room without lifting his head from his bowl. "Your food was almost taken by the others."
"Ehh?! Who ate my share?!"
"Sit down and shut up!" Dadan's voice cracked from the direction of the long table. The large woman sat in the same position as every night, back straight, expression displeased, chopsticks in hand. "What did you bring?"
"Rabbit and fish. The forest was stingy today."
"Stingy or you were lazy?"
"The forest was stingy."
Dadan snorted but didn't argue back. Someone from the kitchen took Luffy's catch and the sound of a knife on a cutting board followed shortly after.
Luffy sat at the left end of the long table and immediately attacked the plate set out for him. The atmosphere around Dadan's dining table was never quiet, always someone fighting over side dishes, always someone complaining, always laughter too loud for a room that size. Tonight was no different.
Or nearly no different.
In the middle of the usual commotion Magra came in through the back door. The large man walked with a slight limp, one hand pressing a cloth against his left arm. The color had soaked through to the edges of the cloth, deep red.
Nobody paid attention. This wasn't an unusual sight at a bandit's base.
Luffy's eyes drifted without intention toward Magra, toward the cloth pressed against his arm, toward the red that had already bled through. He hadn't meant to look, but his mouth moved before he realized.
"That's a deep one."
The table didn't stop. But Magra glanced briefly toward Luffy with an awkward expression, not sure what to answer. Dogra sitting beside him looked over with a raised eyebrow.
At the end of the table Dadan, who had been lifting her cup, paused for just a moment, her eyes moving briefly toward Luffy.
Just a moment.
Then Luffy was already back to chewing with full concentration, his head turning toward the kitchen, shouting for more rice like nothing had happened. Dadan drank from her cup and said nothing.
That night, after everyone had gone to sleep, Dadan still sat in her chair.
Her cigarette was nearly finished. The smoke rose in a thin line toward the dark ceiling of the empty room.
She didn't know how many times it had been lately, these small moments she couldn't make sense of. Luffy going quiet in the middle of a meal. Luffy's eyes stopping somewhere they didn't usually stop. Luffy saying something that didn't sound like Luffy.
Nothing big. Nothing she could point to directly and say this is the problem. Just something different, and she didn't know exactly when she had started noticing small things like that.
Dadan drew deeply on her cigarette and let the smoke out slow.
"Stupid kid," she muttered quietly into the dark empty room.
Nothing answered.