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Lightning flashes, illuminating the room and casting long, cold shadows across the emptiness. Usopp snatches a glance of their two chairs sitting at the bare kitchen table before they’re lost again to the darkness. One, two, three, four heartbeats pass before thunder crashes again. The sound is more like a god’s punch, rattling the windows and piercing Usopp’s heart with a sharp and striking fear.
If he closes his eyes, he can almost picture his mom next to him, holding out a match and saying, “Watch this,” as she makes the fire dance across the long stick. He can nearly pretend that the storm has almost passed, sunlight peeking through their western window just in time to watch the sunset. He can just about imagine that the ghosts in the house disappear.
Just about.
Thunder roars over the deafening downpour, and Usopp lets out a startled yelp into the darkness, a cold shame running through his veins as he ducks his head into his arms, knees curled up to his chest. He can hear his father’s voice, an echoed memory, in a crack through the terror: A warrior does not hide. But what would a warrior do in this situation? What would his father do? His mother?
He thinks of his dad, out there on the waves right now. Waves that have likely reached thousands of meters into the air, met with his dad’s crazed smile. He thinks of his mom, and how she faced everything head-on. He thinks of a warrior, of lassoing lightning and sailing straight into a deadly storm.
Before he can talk himself out of it, Usopp twists the doorknob and sprints out his front door, rain pelting his face and mud squishing under his boots.
“I am not afraid!” He yells at the sky, choking on the rainwater and the embarrassing fear that rushes up his throat.
But just as fast as he ran outside, he runs back in for cover, breaths sputtering and body trembling as he curls up on the floor, knees pressed against his soaked cheeks. His one second of pretense didn’t make him brave: it made him wet, and he feels emptier than before. Around him, the shadows creep closer. The ghosts do, too.
The sun is warm on Usopp’s skin, a tangerine’s sweetness still lingering on his lips, when Franky claps a hand on his shoulder. He ignores the way Usopp jumps and yelps, and instead barrels forward with a smile, “Hiding from Nami?”
And Usopp long knows the tune of this particular song, so he responds in turn. “Only if it's a day that ends in ‘y.’” And Franky laughs loud and long at the repeated joke, and Usopp feels the tension draining from his frame, and Franky acknowledges it with a squeeze of his hand to Usopp’s shoulder. When he presents a new project that he and Usopp had been theorizing about a few nights ago, it's a badly-veiled but appreciated olive branch. Everything Franky gives him feels like a plank of wood being added to a raft that only the two of them are sailing on. It’s given with an open hand, with weightlessness, with a grin that says, I won’t let us drown.
Usopp accepts the contraption without hesitation. He knows the melody and harmony of this in equal parts: Franky offers, he accepts, repeat. Sometimes when Usopp looks down at his hands he sees them bruised and beaten, and he looks at Franky’s and he sees them covered in his own blood, but more often than not, he looks at Franky’s hands and sees creation. Franky always claimed that he was meant to destroy, but Usopp can’t help but look at his nakama and think that there isn’t anything Franky can’t fix.
“Why do you think the spring isn’t unloading?” Franky asks, and when Usopp launches into his theories Franky cocks his head and listens and nods and his eyes gleam.
But when he opens his mouth to respond, it’s Nami’s voice instead that rises above them: “Incoming!”
The ship veers hard towards starboard, but when Usopp trips over his feet Franky grabs his arm, spinning him around and leveling him with an excited look despite the sound of cannonfire.
“How quickly can you fix that loading mechanism?”
Usopp thinks about ducking and covering. He thinks about how he’s a long-range fighter and everyone knows it. He thinks about the mostly-theoretical weapon in his grip that he can fix as long as his hands stay steady enough.
Then he shuts his thoughts out and smiles. The mechanism is familiar in his hands and his mind. Franky’s meaningful gaze is familiar as their eyes meet. A tune, so familiar, hums between them.
Usopp knows this song, and he loves it.
“They’re hiding from us, Usoppun,” Heracles says with a solemn nod, before lifting the log with gusto and cackling at the wave of insects that come skittering and flying out from under it.
Usopp strikes quickly and efficiently, a large worm faltering when his ammo rips through its body, and Usopp grabs it before it can disappear completely. “Dinner!” He crows with a triumphant smile, and bathes in the approval he feels from his beetle-shaped mentor.
Suppertime finds them near the center of the island, the rumblings of the living ground a familiar sensation as the plant beneath their feet digests its daily meals. Usopp licks worm innards from his fingers, dreaming of ham fruits. Heracles nudges him with a knowing look, offering him a single chocolate rock as consolation.
“How far should we go tomorrow?” Usopp asks between licks, and Heracles hums in thought. They can get close enough to the edge of the island to see the shore, but the island is still too ferocious for them to get closer to the sea.
“Same as today.”
Usopp's head snaps to his mentor. He has less than a year before he's supposed to reunite with the crew, and it feels like this year and a half has been good for nothing but catching bugs. How are they supposed to reach the shore of Boyn if he isn't getting stronger? How is he supposed to face his friends when he can't keep up with them in battle? How can he laugh with Luffy if he's always relying on his captain to save him?
Heracles just looks back impassively. “Why not further?” Usopp asks. Why are we hiding, is the question he really wants to know the answer to. Heracles is probably the most capable warrior he’s met outside of Dory and Brogy -- with the outfit to match! -- and yet he still wants to go slow.
He can’t hide from Heracles’ strong focus, even when he diverts his eyes to his soiled hands. A sniper always knows what they're aiming for before they shoot, so they don't bother to draw their weapon if they aren't planning on firing it. And Heracles has a quick trigger finger. So why are they waiting? Is it Usopp’s own weakness that holds them back?
“You have a strange opinion on battle,” Heracles finally says, and when Usopp sneaks a look, his mentor shows him kindness by not looking back. Instead, his eyes are on the island around them, alive in every sense of the word, barely an island at all. “You think it must always be uphill, so that you can be seen from the precipice once you’ve made it to the top.
“But there is no top,” he continues after a long silence that is permeated with insects and strange animal calls and the unending rumbling of Boin. “And when it is fought, it is the one who fills themselves into the cracks and ridges that emerges triumphant. The goal is not to reach the top, but to outlast the others who are also clamoring there. The journey is just as important as the destination, wouldn’t you say?”
Usopp's father is loud, and says weird things, and has hair the color of the caterpillars in his mom's garden. His dad looks at him the same way someone might squint at a bug they've never seen before, though Usopp wants to argue that it's Yasopp who's the strange new insect on their island, not him.
"Usopp, love, say hi," he mother reaches behind her and brushes at his curls, but he merely grips her pant leg tighter and shoves his face into her thigh.
The rustle of fabric. "Your mother tells me you want to be a pirate.” His guns, strapped to his thighs that are dripping with brightly-colored fabric and glittering jewelry, are eye level with Usopp. He finds it hard to look away. It’s just so cool!
But the mention of pirates makes him take a peek at Yasopp. "I-want-to-be-a-brave-warrior-of-the-sea!" He shoves his face back into his mother's thigh, cheeks hot as his parents' laughs intermingle.
"Well," Yasopp chuckles, "I think I might know a thing or two about that. And the first lesson to being a pirate is that a good warrior does not hide. Now will you look at me, Usopp?"
The waves lap noisily against the sides of the ship, spraying water onto Usopp's arms from where they rest on the taffrail. If he were to walk to the bow he would stand with the more eager members of the crew, who are excitedly watching the fast-approaching ship in the distance.
The breeze picks up, and as it takes a little fly and swoops it away in its gusts, Usopp wishes it could do the same for his thoughts: just pick them up and carry them away. He's not good company for the crew right now, and they seem to get it. Even Franky had let him wander off after they had caught sight of the too-familiar jolly roger, patting his shoulder but otherwise not saying anything.
The sea is never silent, but today it's quieter, maybe just for him. In less than an hour, Kabuto will be aimed at the hands that first taught him to shoot. He wonders if they will be just as unfamiliar as the first and last time he had seen them. He wonders if his hands look exactly the same as his father's. He wonders if it matters.
He thinks of his father's lessons of bravery, and how they were clearly just a man trying to connect with his son, and somehow Usopp had taken it and twisted it into his sense of self. Will his father look upon him and feel pride? Usopp doesn't think he cares.
If, when Yasopp looks at his son, he expects to see any of himself reflected back, Usopp thinks he might be in for a surprise. Usopp is about to come face-to-face with a man that he had only seen through the rose-tinted lens of childhood, or as a picture on a wanted poster. Both images paint Yasopp as a king, a god, a hero. Now, Usopp wants to know what his father looks like through the scope of his slingshot. Will Yasopp’s smirk be just as he remembered it? Just as an admirer painted it? He wonders if the same artist painted their posters, then snorts, imagining their wanted posters pinned next to each other in some sort of bastardization of a family portrait.
With one last look at the open ocean, Usopp turns from the stern and begins to walk towards where his nakama are gathered. He can see the wind flapping the Red-Haired insignia wildly, the pattern coming into focus as the ship advances.
In the crow's nest, he can spot a lone figure. His heart gives a weird, tha-thnk!, the telltale sign that a battle is about to begin. His fingertips itch for his weapon, his knees shake, his head is screaming get out of here!!!! He lets out a breathy laugh, because this is what it means to be a brave warrior of the sea. He's terrified, and has never been more ready in his life.