Yay for Nakamaship!
Title: Defining Abnormality
Rating: G
Media: fic
Characters: Chopper, Luffy
Word Count: 300
Prompt: Special
He had always been different.
His nose was blue, unlike other reindeers’. They had teased him, whispered behind his back and shunned him. He used to wish that he would wake up one day and be the same as everyone else. But it didn’t happen. Couldn't.
Then he had eaten a Devil Fruit that gave him the abilities of humans. The next day, he had wandered closer to the human dwellings, hoping to find the acceptance that he couldn’t find among his own kind. Two little human children were the first to see him. They screamed, called him a monster, and ran back to the human dwelling.
He told himself that this was nothing. He was used to it. So he shouldn’t be sad, he should have expected the rejection.
His traitorous heart said otherwise.
Now, among the people - these humans - that he called nakama, he was still different. That fact would never change.
But something else had.
He had asked Luffy once whether the captain ever wished that he wasn’t rubber, that he was just normal. Luffy had laughed in that carefree way of his and gave him a simple, oh-so-very Luffy answer.
Luffy didn’t want to be “normal”. Luffy wanted to be rubber, because it made him special.
He had taken that word, flipped it over in his mind, dissected it, put it back together. It wasn’t a new word to him, yet it felt so foreign. Late that night in the men’s quarters when everyone else was asleep, he quietly tested it on his tongue. A certain rubber captain watched from the bunk above as his reindeer doctor finally fell asleep with a smile on his face.
Chopper was different, had always been, will always be. But now he was something else as well.
He was special.