The deep sea was quiet.
This was, objectively speaking, a lie. The deep sea was full of sounds—the groaning of tectonic plates shifting miles below, the distant songs of whales communicating across impossible distances, the clicking and chittering of creatures that had never seen sunlight and wouldn't know what to do with it if they did, the constant, omnipresent hiss of water pressing against the coating bubble with approximately four hundred atmospheres of pressure, a pressure that would have crushed a normal ship into a cube the size of a lunch box but which the Thousand Sunny's Yarukiman Mangrove coating handled with the casual resilience of something that simply could not be bothered to collapse.
But inside the bubble, aboard the ship, in the warm amber glow of the kitchen where the Straw Hat crew was gathered for what Luffy had designated "third breakfast" (a meal that existed in no culinary tradition on earth but which Sanji had prepared without question because the captain wanted it and therefore it would exist), it was quiet in the way that mattered—the quiet of people being comfortable with each other, the quiet of family, the quiet of a crew that had been separated for two years and was still savoring the simple, profound pleasure of being in the same room again.
Chopper was trying to sit in her usual chair.
This was proving difficult.
"It's—nngh—it's too small," Chopper muttered, shifting her weight and attempting to wedge hips into a seat that had, until very recently, accommodated her with room to spare. The chair—a sturdy, well-crafted piece of furniture that Franky had built to withstand the daily chaos of mealtimes aboard a pirate ship—was not designed for the person currently attempting to occupy it. It had been designed for a three-foot-tall reindeer in hybrid form. The person attempting to sit in it was now five feet eleven inches tall and still growing.
Five eleven.
Five eleven.
Yesterday she had been three feet. This morning she had been five six. An hour ago she had been five nine. And now, as she wrestled with the increasingly inadequate chair, the slow, warm, tingling pulse of growth continued its patient, inexorable work, adding millimeters to her frame with each passing minute, stretching her upward and outward with a thoroughness that was, from a purely medical standpoint, absolutely fascinating and completely impossible.
The curves had kept pace.
More than kept pace, actually. The curves had accelerated. Where the initial transformation had given Chopper a figure that was modest relative to the rest of the crew—impressive for a former three-foot reindeer, certainly, but not in the same league as Nami or Robin or the catastrophic abundance of Sanji—the ongoing growth had apparently decided that proportionality was for quitters and had begun adding volume with reckless, almost enthusiastic generosity.
Her chest had gone from "noticeable" to "significant" to "considerable" to "commanding" and was now pushing into territory that could only be described as "monumental." Two enormous, round, impossibly heavy-looking spheres of soft flesh that pressed against the fabric of her pink top—a top that had been replaced three times today as each successive garment lost its battle against the expanding territory it was tasked with covering. The current top was one of Nami's old t-shirts, hastily modified, and it was already losing the war, the fabric stretched taut and thin across a bust that seemed to grow visibly between glances, the hem riding up to expose a strip of soft, fur-covered midriff that hadn't existed an hour ago.
The hips were wider than the chair.
This was the fundamental problem. Chopper's hips—thick, round, dramatically flared from a waist that had somehow remained proportionally narrow despite the overall increase in size—simply exceeded the chair's dimensions. They pressed against the armrests on both sides, soft flesh compressing and bulging slightly over the wooden edges, and every attempt to shift into a more comfortable position produced a complex series of jiggles and wobbles throughout the surrounding anatomy that lasted several seconds and involved at least three distinct body regions.
The thighs were no less problematic. Thick and round and dense with a combination of the muscle that Chopper had always possessed (reindeer were, after all, powerful animals built for running and kicking) and the generous layer of softness that the transformation had added on top, they pressed together when she sat, creating a crease of compressed flesh that overflowed the seat on both sides. Each thigh was roughly the circumference of a normal person's waist. Each thigh jiggled when she moved, a deep, heavy, almost hypnotic oscillation of flesh that spoke of incredible mass and incredible softness existing simultaneously in the same space.
And behind her—extending past the back of the chair by a margin that was frankly impressive—was a rear end that had, at some point during the night, decided that "prominent" was a starting point rather than a destination and had been building on that foundation ever since. It was round. It was heavy. It was absurdly, catastrophically, almost aggressively large, two great spheres of soft, dense flesh that compressed against the chair seat with enough pressure to make the wood creak in gentle protest, that rose behind her like twin hills on a landscape of impossible topography, that bounced and swayed and wobbled with every minor adjustment of position in a display that would have been mesmerizing if anyone had been watching.
No one was watching.
Everyone was looking at Luffy.
"Luffy! Luffy! Look what I made!" Chopper called out, holding up a small vial of blue liquid with the enthusiasm of a child showing a parent a finger painting. The vial contained a new medicinal compound she'd been working on—something to do with enhanced cellular regeneration, the exact details of which she had explained at length to anyone who would listen and several people who wouldn't—and her dark eyes were shining with a light that was equal parts scientific pride and desperate, almost aching desire for the captain's approval.
"Oh, cool!" Luffy said, glancing at the vial with his characteristic half-second of attention before his eyes drifted back to the plate of meat in front of him. "What is it?"
"It's a new medicine! I synthesized it from a deep-sea algae that I collected through the coating bubble yesterday! It can accelerate wound healing by up to three hundred percent! In clinical trials—well, I haven't done clinical trials yet, but my theoretical models suggest—if I calculate the cellular regeneration rate against the baseline metabolic—"
"Does it taste like meat?"
"What? No, it doesn't taste like—"
"Then it's medicine! Chopper's so smart!"
The effect of this simple compliment on Chopper was roughly equivalent to the detonation of a small emotional nuclear device. Her entire face—longer now, more defined, the features maturing in real-time from childlike roundness to something approaching elegant—turned crimson beneath the fur. Her eyes went wide and liquid. Her lower lip trembled. The blue nose practically glowed.
"S-s-saying that doesn't make me happy, you JERK~!"
The wiggle.
Oh god, the wiggle.
Chopper's signature happy-wiggle—the full-body, side-to-side dance of denial that she performed every time someone said something nice to her, the dance that communicated "I am extremely happy but my pride will not allow me to admit this so I will instead call you a jerk while physically vibrating with joy"—had always been cute. It had always been endearing. It had always been one of those small, characterful gestures that made Chopper Chopper.
But the wiggle at three feet tall and the wiggle at five feet eleven inches tall were very different wiggles.
At three feet, the wiggle was a compact, adorable shimmy—a little side-to-side dance that moved the whole body as a single unit, like a penguin expressing delight.
At five eleven, with hips that exceeded the chair's width by several inches on each side, with thighs that pressed together and apart in alternating sequence with each lateral motion, with a chest that swayed and bounced with a momentum that was entirely independent of the body's primary movement, with a rear that oscillated against the groaning chair like a seismograph recording a particularly enthusiastic earthquake—at five eleven, the wiggle was a production.
It was a geological event.
It was a one-woman parade.
It was the single most enthusiastic display of involuntary bodily motion that had ever occurred in the kitchen of the Thousand Sunny, and it lasted approximately eight seconds, during which the chair creaked, the floor vibrated, and at least two dishes on the table rattled from the transmitted kinetic energy.
Chopper did not notice.
Chopper was too busy being happy-but-insisting-she-wasn't-happy, which was a full-time occupation that left no cognitive bandwidth for trivial concerns like "my body is now large enough to register on seismic monitoring equipment" or "I am visibly larger than I was ten minutes ago" or "the chair I'm sitting in is making sounds that suggest imminent structural failure."
Six feet.
The growth hadn't stopped.
Chopper was now six feet tall, and still seated, which meant the chair situation had progressed from "uncomfortable" to "precarious" to its current state of "furniture in crisis." The armrests were no longer merely pressed against Chopper's hips; they were embedded in them, sunken into soft flesh that bulged around the wooden edges like bread dough rising around a spoon. The seat itself was invisible beneath the combined acreage of thigh and rear, and the back of the chair was performing a valiant rearguard action (no pun intended) against the outward pressure of a posterior that continued to expand with no apparent upper limit.
"Chopper, do you want a bigger chair?" Franky offered, having noticed the furniture's distress with the professional eye of a shipwright who took the structural integrity of her creations very seriously. "I can build one in SUUUUPER quick—"
"I'm fine!" Chopper insisted, still wiggling, still blushing, still riding the emotional high of Luffy calling her smart. "Totally fine! Not happy AT ALL! And this chair is perfectly comfortable!"
The chair disagreed. The chair expressed its disagreement through a loud, sharp CRACK that echoed through the kitchen like a gunshot.
Chopper froze.
The wiggling stopped.
For approximately 1.7 seconds, there was perfect silence.
Then the chair collapsed.
It didn't so much break as surrender—a complete, catastrophic, top-to-bottom structural failure that began at the armrests (which snapped like twigs under the lateral pressure of hips that had exceeded their designed load capacity approximately forty pounds ago), propagated through the legs (which buckled outward under the downward force of a body that now weighed considerably more than the small reindeer the chair had been built for), and culminated in the seat itself splintering into several pieces that scattered across the kitchen floor like shrapnel.
Chopper hit the floor with a THUD that vibrated through the hull.
"KYAAA!"
It was, objectively, a disaster. A six-foot-tall, impossibly curvaceous reindeer-woman sitting on the kitchen floor in the wreckage of a chair, surrounded by broken wood, pink hat askew, face burning with embarrassment, curves jiggling from the impact in a cascading sequence of bounces that lasted well into double-digit seconds.
Six feet one inch.
Still growing.
"Are you okay?!" Luffy asked, leaning over the table to look at her. There was genuine concern in his voice—the immediate, uncomplicated concern that Luffy felt whenever any member of his crew experienced distress of any kind. It wasn't complicated by observation or analysis. He didn't notice that Chopper was taller. He didn't notice that Chopper's chest was now roughly the size of prize-winning watermelons. He didn't notice that Chopper's hips had literally destroyed furniture. He noticed that Chopper was on the floor and might be hurt, and that was all he needed to know.
"I'm—I'm fine!" Chopper squeaked from the floor, her voice hitting a register that was somewhere between "mortified" and "if I pretend this didn't happen maybe it didn't happen."
"Good! Shishishi, you broke the chair! That was funny!"
"IT WASN'T FUNNY!"
"It was a little funny."
"LUFFY!"
But the protest was half-hearted, because Luffy was grinning at her, and when Luffy grinned at you—when those dark eyes crinkled and that scar-marked face lit up with genuine, unfiltered amusement—it was impossible to stay mad. It was impossible to stay anything except helplessly, hopelessly, terminal charmed by the sheer force of his joy.
Chopper's blush deepened approximately seven shades. New shades. Shades of red that didn't have names because no one had ever needed them before.
"I'll build you a SUUUUPER new chair!" Franky announced, already on her feet, already pulling tools from compartments in her mechanical forearms. The shipwright's own figure had, it should be noted, undergone some changes since the previous day—changes that she had not noticed, changes that she could not notice because every spare processing cycle in her brain was dedicated to ensuring that Luffy's ship was in perfect working order and that Luffy himself was safe and comfortable and had a SUUUUPER vessel to sail in.
The changes were, nonetheless, significant.
Franky's breasts—already large, already encased in the custom-built mechanical bikini top that was one of the more impressive feats of engineering aboard the ship—had grown. Not by a little. Not by a modest, easily overlooked amount. They had grown by a volume that, had Franky been measuring, would have required her to completely redesign the support structure of the bikini top, because the current structure was at approximately ninety-two percent of its load capacity and climbing. The flesh bulged above and below the metal edges, soft and organic against hard mechanical surfaces, creating a contrast that was simultaneously industrial and impossibly sensual.
The hips, too, had widened. The organic portions of Franky's lower body—the flesh-and-blood components that transitioned into mechanical joints and plating at the knees—were thicker, rounder, more. The transition zone where soft, warm skin met cold, hard metal had expanded, more flesh pressing against more machine, more curve bulging around more armor plating. When Franky moved—striking poses, reaching for tools, bending over to examine the broken chair—the motion set off a cascade of bounces and jiggles in every non-mechanical body part that lasted well after the initiating motion had concluded.
The rear, too. The rear had expanded. Already significant—Franky was a large person, and even the pre-transformation Franky had possessed a certain... presence in the posterior department—it was now pushing into territory that challenged the structural engineering of the pants. The mechanical hip joints creaked slightly with each step, the servos compensating for a center of mass that had shifted rearward by several noticeable inches.
Franky noticed none of this.
Franky was building a chair.
"This one'll be SUUUUPER reinforced!" the shipwright declared, welding steel supports to wooden frame components with a torch that emerged from one forearm. Sparks flew. Metal glowed. The sounds of construction filled the kitchen with their industrial percussion. "Adam Wood frame with steel reinforcement and memory foam padding and adjustable armrests and—you know what, I'm gonna add cup holders! Everyone needs cup holders! That's SUUUUPER practical!"
"Does it need cup holders?" Usopp asked from across the table, and the sniper's voice—while still recognizably Usopp's in its cadence and inflection, still carrying the same undercurrent of nervous energy that characterized everything Usopp said—had a quality to it that was softer, warmer, more melodic than it had been the day before.
Like Usopp's voice, Usopp's body had continued to evolve overnight.
The sniper had gone to bed as a thicc, curvy woman with a modest bust and dramatic hips. The sniper had woken up as a thicc, curvy woman with a considerable bust and even more dramatic hips. The difference was measurable, visible, and—to anyone who was paying attention, which no one was because everyone was paying attention to Luffy—quite striking.
Usopp's breasts had gone up at least two cup sizes since yesterday. They pressed against the straps of her overalls with a new insistence, the denim fabric stretching across a chest that now required significantly more fabric to cover. The gap between the overall straps had widened as the chest beneath them had expanded, revealing a V of brown skin and soft cleavage that deepened with each breath. The overalls themselves—workmanlike garments that had been designed for function rather than fashion—had become, through the simple mathematics of curves, something altogether more... distracting.
The hips, already wide, had grown wider. The thighs, already thick, had grown thicker. The rear, already notable, had become remarkable—rising behind Usopp's narrow waist like a shelf, round and heavy and prominent, testing the structural integrity of the overalls' rear seam with every shift in position. When Usopp stood up, the motion required the thighs to press apart, the hips to shift, and the rear to clear the chair behind it, and each of these actions produced a complex, cascading series of jiggles and bounces that would have been mesmerizing to any observer.
No observer was present.
No observer was ever present, because everyone in the room had their attention locked onto Luffy with the single-minded focus of a lighthouse beam, and Luffy had his attention locked onto his food with the single-minded focus of a missile guidance system, and the recursive loop of "everyone watches Luffy, Luffy watches food, food is consumed by Luffy, everyone's hearts grow three sizes" left no bandwidth for anyone to notice that every curve on every body in the room was quietly, steadily, relentlessly growing larger.
"Of course it needs cup holders!" Franky replied, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. "What if Luffy wants to put a drink down while he's eating? He can't hold a drink AND eat meat with both hands! He needs somewhere to PUT the drink! That's engineering, baby! That's thinking about the USER!"
"I don't think Luffy has ever voluntarily consumed a beverage that wasn't soup broth," Usopp pointed out.
"THAT'S WHY IT NEEDS CUP HOLDERS FOR SOUP BROTH!"
"That's—okay, you know what, that actually makes sense."
"SUUUUPER!"
Six feet three inches.
Chopper, still on the floor, had given up trying to stand. Not because she couldn't—the muscles in her legs were more than capable of lifting her now-considerable mass—but because every time she started to rise, a wave of the warm, tingling, growing sensation would pulse through her body, and her balance would shift as dimensions changed, and she'd end up back on the floor with another THUD that rattled the dishes.
So she sat. On the kitchen floor. Surrounded by the remnants of her former chair. Growing.
Her top had given up entirely. Nami's old t-shirt, which had been struggling valiantly since mid-morning, had finally reached the absolute limit of its material science capabilities and had torn along both side seams with a soft rrrip that was almost apologetic. The fabric now hung from her shoulders in two flaps, technically covering the essential areas but doing so with the resigned inadequacy of a curtain that knows it's too small for the window.
Beneath the ruined shirt, Chopper's body continued its impossible expansion. The breasts were now enormous—there was really no avoiding the word—each one larger than her head, round and heavy and covered in soft brown fur that shifted and rippled with each breath. They rested on the shelf of her crossed arms when she hunched forward, warm and weighty, and they bounced with an independent momentum when she moved that suggested they had their own opinions about physics and those opinions were "no."
The hips touched the floor on either side of her seated form, spreading out like the base of a mountain, wide and round and thick in a way that seemed almost geological in scale. The thighs, folded beneath her in a cross-legged position, pressed together with a soft, heavy compression that made the fur flatten and then spring back rhythmically with each breath.
Six feet five inches.
"Here we go!" Franky announced, producing the completed chair with a dramatic flourish. It was, by any standard, an impressive piece of furniture—reinforced Adam Wood with steel supports, plush memory foam padding, adjustable armrests, and (of course) cup holders. It was also large—Franky had, with the intuitive engineering sense that made her one of the best shipwrights in the world, anticipated the ongoing nature of Chopper's growth and built the chair with considerable margin.
"Wanna sit down, Chopper?" Luffy asked, offering a hand to help her up.
Chopper took the hand.
The contact—his rubber fingers wrapping around her hoof-hand, warm and firm and his—sent a jolt through Chopper's body that had nothing to do with the growth and everything to do with the heart. The adoration that had been building all day—building on top of the baseline adoration that Chopper had always felt for Luffy, the deep, foundational love of someone who had been called a monster and then been called a friend—surged.
It surged like a tide. It surged like a wave. It surged like something vast and powerful and completely beyond control, filling every part of her expanded body with warmth that was different from the growth-warmth, deeper than the growth-warmth, a warmth that started in the chest and radiated outward until it reached the tips of her antlers and the bottom of her hooves.
He's holding my hand.
He reached out and took my hand and he's helping me up and he's looking at me with those eyes and he called me smart earlier and he said my name and he—
I love him.
The thought arrived with the force of a revelation, even though it wasn't one—Chopper had loved Luffy for years, had loved him since the moment he had marched into Drum Island and declared that he wanted a doctor for his crew, had loved him through every battle and every adventure and every stupid, reckless, magnificent thing he had ever done. But the love had changed. It had deepened. It had gone from the love of a friend and crewmate and captain to something that Chopper didn't have a medical term for, something that made her chest ache and her face burn and her heart beat so fast that her doctor's instincts briefly worried about tachycardia.
"T-thank you, Luffy," Chopper said, standing up, and her voice cracked on his name in a way that was equal parts embarrassed and adoring.
Six feet six inches.
She was now taller than him.
She looked down at him—down at the straw hat, down at the scar, down at the grin—and the perspective shift did something to her brain that short-circuited rational thought entirely. He was smaller than her now. He was looking up at her. His neck was tilted back slightly to maintain eye contact, and the angle made him look—
Cute.
He was cute.
He had always been handsome in a rough, wild, untamed sort of way, but from this new angle, with those eyes looking up at her with that guileless, uncomplicated warmth—
He was so cute.
"You're getting tall, Chopper!" Luffy observed, with the same casual, observational tone he might use to note that the sky was blue or that meat was delicious. It was not a concerned observation. It was not a worried observation. It was simply a statement of fact that existed in Luffy's mind for approximately 0.3 seconds before being overwritten by a thought about food.
"Y-yeah," Chopper managed. "I don't know why."
"Cool! Tall is cool! Shishishi!"
He thinks I'm cool.
The happy-wiggle that followed this compliment was seismic. At six foot six, with a body that now rivaled and in some dimensions exceeded the most dramatically curved members of the crew, the wiggle was less a dance and more a tectonic event. Hips swayed. Thighs jiggled. The remnants of the ruined shirt fluttered like surrender flags as the chest beneath them oscillated with a force and duration that challenged the fundamental laws of momentum conservation.
"Saying that doesn't make me happy AT ALL, you STUPID JERK~! ♥"
The heart at the end of that sentence was new. It had appeared spontaneously, the verbal equivalent of the little hearts and sparkles that seemed to manifest in the air around anyone who looked at Luffy for too long. Chopper didn't notice it. Chopper was too busy being overwhelmed by emotions that her (admittedly brilliant) medical mind had no framework to process.
She sat in the new chair.
It held.
The cup holders were a nice touch.
Sanji was making lunch.
Sanji was always making something—the chef's relationship with cooking was less "occupation" and more "ongoing love affair conducted primarily through the medium of fire and knives." The kitchen was Sanji's domain, Sanji's sanctuary, the place where the chaos of Sanji's emotional landscape could be channeled into something productive and beautiful and delicious, and Sanji was currently channeling an ENORMOUS amount of emotion.
Because Luffy had said "this is good."
Three words. Eleven letters. One simple, casual, almost throwaway compliment tossed off between bites of roasted meat with the same offhand ease that Luffy applied to everything he said and did.
"This is good."
Sanji had been replaying those three words on a continuous loop for the past forty-five minutes.
This is good. This is good. This is good.
He said my food is good. He said it's good. He ate it and he liked it and he said it was GOOD and he smiled when he said it, that big stupid beautiful smile, and his eyes crinkled at the corners and there was sauce on his chin and he was happy because of something I made and—
The knife in Sanji's hand moved through the vegetables at a speed that would have been invisible to a normal eye—chk-chk-chk-chk-chk—reducing a head of cabbage to perfectly uniform strips in approximately 1.8 seconds. The motion was automatic, muscle memory so deeply ingrained that it operated independently of conscious thought, which was fortunate because Sanji's conscious thought was entirely occupied by a rubber boy and three words.
This is good.
Sanji's body had continued its transformation with the same quiet persistence that characterized a rising tide—gradual, inevitable, and impossible to ignore once you noticed it, but very easy to miss if you weren't looking.
Sanji was not looking.
Sanji was thinking about Luffy.
If Sanji had been looking—if, somehow, the tsunami of adoration that occupied approximately ninety-eight percent of Sanji's cognitive bandwidth had receded enough to allow for self-observation—the chef would have noticed several things.
First: the breasts were bigger. Again. Still. The black dress shirt—already straining, already engaged in a losing battle against a bust that had been "immense" yesterday and was now somewhere in the neighborhood of "physics-defying"—had popped its top two buttons at some point during the morning, revealing a chasm of cleavage that descended into shadow and suggested depths that cartography had not yet charted. The remaining buttons held through what could only be described as a miracle of materials science, the thread straining audibly with each breath, each motion, each tiny shift of the massive, soft, impossibly heavy breasts they were attempting to contain.
Second: the hips were wider. The black skirt—already snug, already stretched across hips that had been "dramatic" yesterday—was now pulled so tight across a posterior that could only be described as magnificent that the fabric had taken on a glossy, almost reflective quality from the sheer tension. The seams along both sides were visible through the fabric, raised lines of thread that stood out like veins on a flexed muscle, and they were slowly, slowly, slowly giving way, the stitching stretching beyond its designed tolerance one thread at a time.
Third: the thighs. God, the thighs. They pressed together beneath the skirt with a soft, heavy insistence, creating a continuous line of contact from hip to knee that left no gap, no space, no daylight between them. Each step produced a visible ripple that started at the hip and propagated downward through the thigh like a wave through water, the flesh responding to the impact of foot-on-floor with a full-body oscillation that was hypnotic in its regularity and staggering in its scale.
Fourth—and perhaps most notably, from a character standpoint—there was no cigarette. The lips that had held a cigarette for years were bare, unpainted, full and soft, and they were currently pressed together in a small, private smile as Sanji replayed those three words for the forty-seventh time.
This is good.
"Sanji!" Luffy's voice boomed from the dining table. "Is lunch ready?"
"Almost, Captain~! ♥" Sanji's voice hit a register of sweetness that would have given the old Sanji an aneurysm. "Five more minutes! I'm making your favorite—Giant Sea King roast with triple garlic butter and—"
"GIANT SEA KING ROAST?!"
"—and roasted root vegetables from the—"
"FORGET THE VEGETABLES, DID YOU SAY GIANT SEA KING ROAST?!"
"I did, Captain~!"
"SANJI, I LOVE YOU!"
Sanji dropped the knife.
The knife—a precision-forged blade that Sanji had carried for years, that had been honed to a razor's edge through meticulous daily maintenance, that was an extension of Sanji's will in the same way that Zoro's swords were extensions of Zoro's—clattered to the cutting board with a sound that was, relative to the kitchen's ambient noise, barely audible, but which rang in Sanji's ears like a cathedral bell.
He said he loves me.
He said it the way he said everything—casually, thoughtlessly, with no awareness of the impact his words had on the people around him. He said it the way he said "I love meat" or "I love adventure" or "I love my crew"—as a general statement of enthusiasm rather than a specific declaration of romantic intent.
It didn't matter.
Sanji's heart didn't care about context. Sanji's heart heard "I love you" come out of Monkey D. Luffy's mouth and immediately began performing a gymnastics routine that would have earned a perfect score at the Olympics. It did flips. It did somersaults. It did that thing where you spin really fast and then land on one foot and everyone claps.
Steam erupted from Sanji's ears. The blush that consumed Sanji's face was so intense, so deep, so thorough that it extended from hairline to collarbone and showed no signs of stopping. Both hands pressed against cheeks that burned with the heat of a small sun.
"H-h-he—he said—Captain said he—"
"Oi, are you okay?" Zoro asked from the doorway, having appeared at some point during the preceding exchange. The swordswoman leaned against the door frame with her arms crossed beneath a chest that was—Zoro would have noticed if she had been paying attention to anything other than the captain—noticeably larger than it had been that morning.
Zoro had not been paying attention to anything other than the captain.
Zoro was here because of the captain. Luffy was in the kitchen, therefore Zoro was in the kitchen. This was the fundamental equation that governed Zoro's movements through the ship, a simple, elegant formula: Luffy's Location = Zoro's Location ± 15 feet (the maximum distance Zoro's protective instincts would tolerate without triggering a low-level anxiety response that manifested as an irresistible urge to walk toward the captain while pretending to be walking somewhere else).
The swordswoman's own body had continued its quiet expansion. The changes were less dramatic than Chopper's—no sudden growth spurts, no furniture-destroying escalation—but they were cumulative, and the cumulative effect was significant.
Zoro's chest had been "large" yesterday morning. Now it was pushing toward "enormous," two heavy, round, impossibly firm-yet-soft masses that pressed against the white shirt with a pressure that had caused the fabric to develop a faint, barely visible web of stress fractures along the seam lines. The buttons—always stressed, always on the verge of failure—had given up any pretense of fully closing, and the shirt now hung open in a V that revealed a sports-bra-like undergarment working overtime to contain the volume.
The hips had widened further. They were now wide enough that Zoro's sword belt had been adjusted twice since yesterday—let out to accommodate the increasing circumference, the leather strap now sitting at an angle that was almost horizontal, resting on the shelf of hips that flared out from the waist like the wings of a bird. The three swords hung at an angle that was more dramatic, more pronounced, more—one might say—sassy than it had been before, and the effect was less "deadly swordsman" and more "deadly swordswoman who happened to have the kind of hips that poets wrote sonnets about."
The thighs. Zoro's thighs had always been powerful—pillars of trained muscle capable of generating the force needed to launch devastating sword attacks. They were still powerful. They were more powerful, if anything, the muscle denser and more defined than ever. But they were also thicker, overlaid with a layer of soft flesh that rounded out the hard edges and created a silhouette that was equal parts "athlete" and "impossibility." When Zoro leaned against the doorframe, the thighs pressed together below the hemline of the dark pants (which were tighter than they had been yesterday, the fabric straining across quadriceps and hamstrings that had outgrown their containment), and the visible curve of each thigh was enough to make the doorframe feel inadequate.
Zoro did not notice any of this.
Zoro was watching Luffy eat.
"He's fine," Zoro told Sanji, nodding toward the captain, who had abandoned all pretense of waiting for lunch to be formally served and was in the process of dismantling the appetizer platter with his bare hands. "He's always fine."
"I know he's fine," Sanji said, still blushing, still pressing hands to cheeks, still replaying I love you on an internal loop. "I just—he said—"
"He says that to everyone."
"I KNOW that," Sanji snapped, and for a moment—just a moment—a ghost of the old rivalry flickered between them, the competitive fire that had always burned between the chef and the swordsman, the perpetual one-upmanship that had defined their relationship since the day they'd met.
But it was different now. Softer. Less antagonistic, more... competitive-but-in-a-way-that-acknowledged-they-were-both-on-the-same-team. They weren't fighting over who was stronger anymore. They were fighting over—
Well, they were fighting over Luffy's attention, but neither of them would admit this under torture.
Zoro's eye lingered on Sanji for a moment—not in the way it used to, the dismissive once-over of a rival being assessed and categorized and filed under "annoying"—but with something closer to... recognition? Understanding? The acknowledgment that they were both in the grip of the same impossible, ridiculous, wonderful feeling, and that this shared experience created a bond between them that was new and strange and not entirely unwelcome?
"He liked the food," Zoro said, and it was—impossibly, incredibly—an offering. A peace gesture. A verbal olive branch extended by a woman who had built her entire identity around being difficult and was now, apparently, willing to be slightly less difficult in the interest of making Sanji feel better about receiving a three-word compliment from a rubber idiot.
Sanji stared at Zoro.
Zoro stared back.
"...Thank you," Sanji said, and the words came out quiet and genuine and slightly confused, as if the concept of Zoro being nice to her was so foreign that it needed a moment to be properly processed.
"Whatever," Zoro grunted, looking away, the faintest hint of a blush visible on green-haired cheeks. "Just—make sure there's enough for everyone. The captain eats a lot."
"I KNOW the captain eats a lot, I'm the one who FEEDS him—"
"Then feed him MORE."
"I feed him PLENTY, you moss-headed—"
"What did you call me?"
"MOSS-HEAD—"
"Come say that to my face, curly-brow—"
"MY EYEBROW IS A BEAUTIFUL AND DISTINCTIVE FEATURE—"
"IT GOES IN A CIRCLE—"
"AT LEAST I HAVE TWO EYES—"
From the dining table, Luffy laughed. Just laughed—that bright, joyful, ringing laugh that cut through every argument and defused every tension, the laugh that reminded everyone within earshot why they had followed this idiot to sea in the first place.
"Shishishi! Sanji and Zoro are funny!"
Both women stopped mid-argument.
Both women turned to look at the laughing captain.
Both women felt their hearts perform synchronized gymnastics routines.
Both women blushed furiously.
Both women immediately and completely forgot what they had been arguing about.
"...I'll make more food," Sanji muttered.
"...I'll be over here," Zoro muttered.
They retreated to their respective positions—Sanji to the stove, Zoro to the wall near Luffy's chair—and resumed their primary occupations: feeding Luffy and protecting Luffy, respectively. The argument dissipated like morning fog, replaced by the warm, pervasive, all-encompassing atmosphere of adoration that filled the kitchen like a perfume.
Neither of them noticed that Sanji's skirt was tighter than it had been an hour ago. Neither of them noticed that Zoro's shirt had developed a new stress fracture along the left seam. Neither of them noticed that the buttons on Sanji's shirt were now held together by hope and habit and nothing else, or that Zoro's sword belt had reached the last notch and was straining to contain hips that had exceeded its final adjustment, or that both of them were, by any objective measurement, significantly curvier than they had been when the day began.
They didn't notice because they weren't looking at themselves.
They were looking at Luffy.
They were always looking at Luffy.
Evening. (Probably.)
The Thousand Sunny sailed on through the darkness, and the crew had settled into the comfortable rhythms of shipboard life. There were chores to be done, watches to be kept, training to be conducted, and through it all, the constant, unifying thread of Luffy—being near Luffy, watching Luffy, ensuring Luffy's safety and comfort and happiness with a devotion that was, by any external standard, completely excessive and by the crew's internal standard entirely insufficient, they should be doing more.
On the observation deck, Zoro was training.
Not because Zoro needed to train—Zoro was already strong enough to cut steel, to cut fire, to cut things that probably couldn't be cut but capitulated anyway because arguing with Zoro's swords was like arguing with gravity: technically possible, but inadvisable and ultimately futile. Zoro trained because training was what Zoro did. It was meditation. It was prayer. It was the physical manifestation of a will that had been forged in childhood and hardened through years of relentless, punishing, obsessive self-improvement.
She was currently performing weighted squats with a barbell that had approximately three thousand pounds on it.
The squats were perfect. The form was immaculate—back straight, core engaged, knees tracking over toes, the descent controlled and deep and powerful. Two years of training under Mihawk had refined Zoro's technique to a level of precision that was almost mechanical, every rep identical to the last, every motion optimized for maximum muscular engagement.
The view was also perfect, but Zoro didn't know this and wouldn't have cared if she did.
Because each squat—each deep, controlled descent followed by a powerful, explosive ascent—produced a display of muscular and anatomical motion that would have been studied in university biomechanics courses if such courses included a unit on "what happens when impossibly thick thighs and an impossibly large rear are subjected to the forces involved in squatting three thousand pounds."
The thighs—massive, powerful, thick with a combination of hard muscle and soft flesh that created a texture somewhere between "steel cable" and "cloud"—pressed together at the bottom of each rep, the soft flesh of the inner thighs compressing and bulging outward, spreading to accommodate the depth of the squat. The glutes—which had, at some point since yesterday, expanded from "notable" to "extraordinary" to their current state of "a monument to human potential"—engaged with each rep, clenching and releasing in a rhythm that was visible through the training shorts Zoro had changed into (shorts that were, she had not noticed, considerably tighter than they had been when she'd put them on).
The chest bounced with each rep. Up on the descent. Down on the ascent. A rhythmic, heavy, significant bouncing that generated enough momentum to be felt in the soles of Zoro's feet, a secondary motion layered on top of the primary motion of the squat itself. The sports bra held—barely—but the flesh above and below its edges moved freely, soft and heavy and absolutely massive, bouncing and jiggling with each repetition in a display that seemed to defy the concept of containment.
Zoro did not notice the bouncing. Zoro did not notice the tightness of the shorts. Zoro did not notice that the thighs now required a wider stance than they had yesterday, or that the rear was bumping against the safety bar on each descent (a bar that had been set at the correct height yesterday but was now too close because the rear had grown), or that the overall silhouette visible in the reflection of the weight room's mirror was substantially, measurably, dramatically curvier than it had been twenty-four hours ago.
Zoro was thinking about Luffy.
Specifically, Zoro was thinking about the way Luffy had laughed during the argument with Sanji. The bright, ringing laugh. The crinkle at the corners of his eyes. The way his head tilted back slightly, exposing the line of his throat, the X-shaped scar on his chest shifting with the motion of his laughter.
One thousand and one. One thousand and two. One thousand and three.
Each rep was a repetition of devotion. Each squat was a prayer to the altar of "getting strong enough to protect the person who matters most." Each bead of sweat that rolled down green-haired temples was an offering to the singular purpose that had defined Zoro's existence ever since a boy in a straw hat had looked at a lost swordsman and said, with absolute certainty: You're going to join my crew.
One thousand and four. One thousand and five.
The barbell didn't bend. The floor held. Zoro's resolve was harder than both.
Somewhere on the deck below, Luffy was probably doing something stupid and wonderful, and Zoro would be there when he needed her.
Zoro would always be there.
One thousand and six.
The thighs pressed together. The chest bounced. The shorts strained.
One thousand and seven.
None of it was noticed.
All of it continued.
In the workshop, Usopp was crafting ammunition.
This was normal. Usopp was always crafting ammunition—it was one of the sniper's primary pastimes, right up there with telling tall tales, drawing, and being terrified of things that turned out to be significantly less dangerous than anticipated. The workshop aboard the Thousand Sunny was Usopp's second home (the first being wherever Luffy happened to be standing), and it was filled with the tools and materials of Usopp's trade: gunpowder, pop greens, slingshot components, and an impressive collection of seeds and botanical specimens that had been gathered during the two-year training period on the Boin Archipelago.
Usopp sat at the workbench, carefully packing a new type of ammunition into spherical shells. The work required precision and focus, two things that Usopp possessed in abundance when properly motivated—and the motivation, as always, was Luffy.
I need to be stronger. I need to be better. I need to be the kind of sniper who can support the King of the Pirates.
The thought was accompanied by a surge of emotion that manifested physically as a blush across brown cheeks and a slight trembling in the hands that held the delicate shell. Usopp steadied herself—deep breath, focus, you are the Great Captain Usopp, you have defeated ten thousand warriors with a single shot, you are NOT going to mess up this ammunition because you got distracted thinking about how Luffy smiled at you during dinner—and resumed the careful packing process.
As she worked, she hummed. A tune she'd learned during training. Something upbeat and silly and entirely at odds with the precise, technical work she was doing, but the humming was unconscious, a background process that her mind ran automatically while the foreground was occupied by equal parts ammunition-crafting and Luffy-adoring.
She did not notice that her humming was slightly breathier than it had been yesterday, owing to the fact that her chest was pressing against the edge of the workbench with a pressure that hadn't been there before, because her chest was bigger than it had been before, the overalls' bib straining to contain a bust that had expanded overnight by a margin that would have been alarming if Usopp had been aware of it.
She did not notice that she had to sit farther from the workbench than usual, because her thighs—thick, round, soft, pressing together in her lap with a warm, heavy insistence—occupied more space than they had yesterday, and the space between the chair and the workbench that had previously accommodated them comfortably was now insufficient.
She did not notice that the stool she was sitting on creaked slightly with each shift in position, the weight distribution different from what the stool expected, the center of gravity lower and further back than it had been, pulled by a posterior that had added several pounds of soft, dense flesh since the last time Usopp had sat on this particular stool.
She noticed none of these things because she was thinking about Luffy.
He said "cool" when I showed him the new Pop Green yesterday. He said "cool!" with that face he makes, the excited face, the one where his eyes go all wide and sparkly. He thought my Pop Green was COOL. The future King of the Pirates thought MY invention was COOL.
The blush deepened.
The humming intensified.
The ammunition was packed with slightly more force than necessary, because the hands that were doing the packing were trembling with the aftershocks of an emotional earthquake that showed no signs of subsiding.
I'm going to make even better Pop Greens. I'm going to make the best Pop Greens in the world. I'm going to make Pop Greens that make him do the sparkly-eye face EVERY DAY.
This was, Usopp decided, a worthy goal.
More worthy than finding the One Piece, maybe.
Okay, not more worthy. Equally worthy. Adjacent worthy.
Luffy-adjacent.
Everything was Luffy-adjacent now.
And Usopp was fine with that.
More than fine.
The humming continued. The ammunition was crafted. The curves grew unnoticed, expanding with the quiet patience of a tide that had all the time in the world.
Night. (Probably. The deep sea was not forthcoming with temporal information.)
The Thousand Sunny's deck was quiet. Most of the crew had retired to their quarters—or rather, to the single, large sleeping area that had somehow become the default arrangement, because no one wanted to be more than shouting distance from Luffy at any given time, and the men's quarters and women's quarters were too far apart for the crew's collective comfort.
Luffy was asleep on the deck again.
He had a bed. He had a bunk. He had a perfectly good sleeping arrangement that had been specifically designed for sleeping in. He chose, instead, to sleep on the grass under the coating bubble, staring up at the dark water and the distant, drifting lights of deep-sea creatures until his eyes closed and his breathing evened out and his body went limp with the total, instantaneous surrender to unconsciousness that characterized Luffy's approach to sleep (and, indeed, to everything else—Luffy did not ease into things; he crashed into them headfirst and sorted out the details later).
Robin appeared.
She did not walk. She did not approach. She simply... was, materialized in the space next to Luffy like a quantum event, like something that had always existed in this location and had merely been waiting for the universe to notice. She sat cross-legged beside him, and with a gentleness that bordered on worship, lifted his head and placed it in her lap.
Her thighs—vast, warm, impossibly soft—cradled his head like the world's most comfortable pillow. Her fingers found his hair. The stroking began. The book appeared.
This was peace. This was home. This was the closest thing to heaven that Nico Robin had ever known, and she inhabited it with the quiet, fierce gratitude of someone who had learned, through decades of loss and loneliness, to treasure every single moment of belonging.
One by one, the others drifted closer. Nami appeared first, settling against Robin's side with the unconscious naturalness of a planet falling into orbit. Then Zoro, taking up a position three feet away, swords within reach, single eye allegedly closed but actually open to a slit, watching, always watching. Then Chopper—six feet eight inches now, still growing, impossibly curvy and impossibly adorable, curling up near Luffy's feet like a very large, very soft, very emotional guard dog.
Then the others. Sanji, bringing a blanket (for Luffy) and tea (for everyone else). Usopp, carrying a sketchbook, drawing the scene with quick, precise strokes that captured the warmth if not the exact proportions (the proportions were, at this point, beyond the capacity of accurate artistic representation). Franky, sitting cross-legged, making minor adjustments to a mechanical component, humming a SUUUUPER tune. Brook, playing her violin softly—a lullaby, something gentle and old, a melody that had been written for friends lost and was now being played for friends found.
They gathered around their captain like moths around a flame, like planets around a sun, like a crew—a family—around the person who had made them one.
And the curves continued to grow, unnoticed and unremarked upon, expanding with the same quiet inevitability as the love that produced them.
Luffy slept, and dreamed of meat.
And somewhere far below, in the deep dark of the ocean floor, Fishman Island waited.
To be continued...