PAGE TWO: It's okay, you guys can request again!
ONE PIECE FAN-FOR-ALL
Or, free-for-all-fic, or fic free-for-all, or fic-for-all, whatever phrasing floats your boat.
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Filled | Unfilled (BOTH posts updated to about half of page three, updated Sept 21, 11-something pm, GMT -5 ( Read more... )
When he returns it's dawn, and he still has the swords, Wadou clutched in his fist like a drowning man's rope and Shuusui and Kitetsu dangling less ceremoniously from his trailing hand. The new obsessive fervour that burns in his eyes doesn't seem very much like Luffy at all.
His eyes, shadowed by grey daubs, blink around at them. They seem, despite their intensity, almost unseeing.
He says, "The sword spoke to me. No... Zoro spoke to me." He clutches Wadou against his chest. "There's something I have to do." He looks... there is only one way they can think to describe it. A man possessed.
But he's still Luffy, and he's still the captain, even though -- or maybe because -- Zoro isn't there any more; the one who always backed his crazier ideas. Nobody can bring themselves to question.
And it's possible they want to believe it too, that it's Zoro's spirit and not Luffy's madness driving them from inside that sword. Or maybe they're waiting to see their proof in the making, because-- well, there's surely nothing else in the universe that could bestow upon Monkey D Luffy the dexterity and discipline to complete that dream.
They scour two islands, and purchase an eternal pose to a third, detour days and weeks out of their way to a tiny bare rock with a sprinkling of grass, craggy cliffs, and a wooden shack tucked below the brow of its wind-battered peak.
They should be prepared, but nothing can really brace them for the moment Luffy finally lays Wadou at the feet of the New World's most renowned master of the sword and, bluntly, asks the man to teach him to be the greatest swordsman in the world.
***
He's known throughout this part of the Grand Line; famed, a legend... though they don't know his name. Sometimes, a name is whispered, one they ascribe to him that harks back to an era before Mihawk, before Mihawk's predecessor, before the man before him. But all of that is speculation. Nobody knows the truth.
They only know that he is the master of his art and the last resort of all hopeless causes. Not the Swordsman any more, but the Teacher.
He's also old and fat -- no, not just fat but round like a ball, with a pipe behind his ear and leaning forward on his creaky stool, hands and chin rested on his ratty cane. His tiny hovel behind him, and in front -- the green grass sparsely covers a steep hillside, stretching all the way down to the notch between the cliffs and the route to the sea.
The last resort of all hopeless causes narrows his eyes, gives Luffy a long look up and down, and says, "Not a chance in hell."
***
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"Waste of time. No."
Luffy stands his ground. The Teacher responds in kind. The volume rises and pleading turns to yelling on both sides. Brook, despite being an animate skeleton, manages to cringe, and among the watching crew is a certain gathering sense of, Oh, another one, and they remember that the name they've heard in whispers bookends an initial D.
Finally, the old man stands up. He takes Wadou from its sheath and slaps the grip into Luffy's palm, draws a thin blade from his ratty cane, and in a swift, merciless motion the sword slices, collapsing the captain's legs beneath him.
Luffy falls on his face without time to even try to block. With its next slice, the blade nicks an ear before stabbing the ground. Wadou, knocked from his fingers, lies on the grass. The Teacher stares down his nose, down the length of the bright, thin blade on which he leans, and says, in tones dripping with spite and spittle, "Get up."
He says it with a challenge that anticipates failure, but Luffy grunts, fumbles for Wadou with a shaking hand, and rises inch by painstaking inch on damaged muscle and bone. Blood trickles down each leg from the matching cuts below his knees as he stands, arms hanging slack and legs braced apart. "You'll teach me?" The words drag from his lips in a feral growl.
"Be here at dawn," is his only reply.
***
"You're too old--" thwack "--too stupid--" thwack "--You've the co-ordination of a drunken mule--" thwack "--and I can't work miracles."
The last slice scores his knee again, above the healing wounds of the day before. His leg buckles again. The slope of the hillside snares him and keeps him rolling, over and over, shedding blood on the grass till he finally spins to a stop in a panting pile of rubber limbs at the bottom. Wadou slices down after him in a spinning arc and misses his hand by a hair's breadth.
"And no true swordsman would be caught dead eating a devil fruit!" is Old Fat Sensei's parting shot.
"I CAN'T HELP THAT!" Luffy howls back.
He stares at the ground and bleeds on it some more, body and mind hurting too much to move. It takes half an hour before he can haul himself to his feet, drag Wadou from the mud and clean it, and stumble to the Sunny for more bandages.
He's still back at the old man's shack for dawn the next morning.
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