Seven feet two inches.
Chopper stood in the infirmary, staring at the measuring tape she had tacked to the wall, and processed this number with the calm, analytical detachment of a trained medical professional observing a phenomenon that was, by every metric she understood, completely and utterly impossible.
Seven feet two inches. Up from six foot eight last night. Up from three feet two days ago.
The growth chart she had been maintaining—a meticulous, hour-by-hour record of her height, weight, and measurements, plotted on graph paper with the obsessive precision that Chopper applied to all medical documentation—told a story that no medical textbook had ever told. The line on the graph didn't curve. It didn't plateau. It didn't do any of the things that growth lines were supposed to do, the gradual tapering and eventual flattening that characterized normal biological development. It just... went up. Steadily, persistently, cheerfully upward, like a line drawn by someone who had never heard of the concept of "limits" and wouldn't have respected them if they had.
Chopper should have been alarmed.
Chopper had been alarmed, initially. The first day had been a whirlwind of medical panic—blood tests and hormone panels and bone density scans and frantic consultations with textbooks that offered nothing useful because no textbook had ever needed to address the question of "what do you do when a reindeer-woman spontaneously doubles in height and develops curves that challenge the structural integrity of furniture." The scientist in Chopper had demanded answers, had insisted on understanding, had refused to accept that something this dramatic could simply happen without a mechanism, without a cause, without a logical, reproducible, explicable reason.
But the scientist in Chopper had lost.
Not to ignorance. Not to laziness. Not to the temptation of simply accepting the impossible without question.
The scientist had lost to a memory.
Specifically: the memory of Luffy saying "Cool! Tall is cool!"
That moment—that stupid, offhand, completely thoughtless moment when Luffy had looked up at her (looked up, because she was taller than him now, and the angle of his gaze had done something to her cardiovascular system that she still couldn't fully explain)—had rewritten something fundamental in Chopper's operating system. It had taken the alarm, the concern, the medical urgency of "I am experiencing an unexplained physiological transformation that should not be possible," and it had replaced it with something else entirely.
He thinks it's cool.
He likes that I'm tall.
If I keep growing, he'll keep thinking it's cool.
Therefore: keep growing.
The logic was, from a strictly medical standpoint, insane. It was the kind of reasoning that would have earned a failing grade in any pharmacology course, the kind of reasoning that prioritized the approval of one specific rubber idiot over the entirety of established medical science, the kind of reasoning that a younger, more cautious Chopper would have rejected with horrified professionalism and a stern lecture about the importance of evidence-based medicine.
But the younger, more cautious Chopper hadn't had Luffy look up at her with sparkly eyes and say "cool."
The younger, more cautious Chopper hadn't felt what that did to a person.
So Chopper had made a decision. A conscious, deliberate, eyes-wide-open decision, made with the full awareness that it was irrational and the full conviction that she did not care.
She was going to let it happen.
She was going to welcome it.
She was going to grow as tall and as curvy and as much as whatever mysterious force was driving these changes wanted her to grow, and she was going to do it with a smile on her face and a song in her heart, because somewhere at the end of this impossible trajectory was Luffy looking up at her with those eyes and saying "cool" again, and that was worth more than every medical textbook ever written.
There was, however, a caveat.
A single, non-negotiable, absolutely inviolable caveat that Chopper had established in the privacy of her own mind and which she considered more important than any other consideration, including her own well-being:
If it scared Luffy, she would stop.
Immediately. Instantly. Without hesitation or delay. If at any point—ANY point—Luffy's face showed fear, showed discomfort, showed even the slightest flicker of unease at her size, Chopper would find a way to reverse the process. She would develop a cure. She would synthesize a compound. She would do whatever it took, up to and including consuming every Rumble Ball in her inventory simultaneously, to become small again. She would shrink to three feet. She would shrink to two feet. She would shrink to the size of a cotton ball if that was what it took to erase the fear from his face, because the thought of Luffy being afraid of her—the thought of seeing fear where she wanted to see that sparkly-eyed grin—was so fundamentally intolerable that it made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the ongoing expansion of the chest in question.
This caveat was, unknown to Chopper, entirely unnecessary.
Because Monkey D. Luffy did not experience fear.
Not in any meaningful way. Not in any way that produced the behavioral responses typically associated with the emotion—the flinching, the backing away, the elevated heart rate and widened eyes and primal, limbic-system-driven urge to flee from something dangerous. The neural pathways that connected the concept of "threat" to the response of "fear" existed in Luffy's brain the same way vestigial organs existed in the human body: technically present, completely non-functional, evolutionary remnants of a survival instinct that Luffy had apparently decided was incompatible with his life goals and had simply... turned off.
This was the boy who had punched a Celestial Dragon in the face and laughed about it.
This was the boy who had walked into Impel Down—the world's most inescapable prison, a place of torture and despair that made hardened criminals weep with terror—and treated it like a mildly inconvenient obstacle between him and his brother.
This was the boy who had stood on a battlefield surrounded by the most powerful military force in the world, by Admirals and Vice-Admirals and a hundred thousand elite Marines, and had screamed his brother's name into the sky with a voice that contained not one single atom of fear.
This was the boy who would, one day—in a future that Chopper could not see but that the narrative could—walk into the land of Wano, into the territory of Kaido of the Four Emperors, the Strongest Creature in the World, a being capable of destroying islands with a single attack, and who would also encounter Big Mom, another Emperor, another world-ending force of nature, and Luffy would walk past both of them.
Not around them.
Not away from them.
Past them.
Because his friend was on the other side, and he had made a promise, and promises were things that Luffy kept the way the sun kept shining—not as a choice, not as an effort, but as a fundamental property of existence that could not be altered by anything as trivial as two of the most powerful beings on the planet standing in his way.
Fear was not a language Luffy spoke.
Fear was not a concept Luffy engaged with.
Fear was a thing that happened to other people, and Luffy acknowledged its existence the same way he acknowledged the existence of math: theoretically, distantly, and with no intention of ever letting it affect his behavior.
So Chopper's caveat—her heartfelt, deeply sincere, absolutely genuine promise to shrink if Luffy showed fear—was, in practical terms, like promising to stop breathing if the sky turned plaid. The trigger condition would never be met. The contingency would never activate. Chopper would grow and grow and grow, and Luffy would look up at her with those eyes and say "cool" every single time, and the caveat would remain forever unused, a safety net stretched across an abyss that didn't exist.
Chopper didn't know this.
Chopper thought she was being responsible.
Seven feet three inches.
She smiled at the measuring tape, adjusted her pink hat (which now sat atop a head that was significantly higher off the ground than it had been designed for, the hat itself seeming almost comically small relative to the body beneath it, like a cherry on top of a very large, very curvaceous, very furry sundae), and headed for the door.
The door was, she noticed, shorter than her now.
She ducked.
She had never had to duck before.
She loved it.
The morning—or whatever they were calling it, because the deep sea's absolute commitment to being dark at all times had rendered the concept of "morning" entirely academic—found the crew gathered on the main deck for what Luffy had designated "pre-breakfast warm-up snack," which was a thing he had invented thirty seconds ago and which Sanji was already preparing because the captain wanted it and therefore it existed.
Luffy was sitting on the figurehead, legs dangling over the lion's mane, staring out into the abyss with the wide-eyed wonder that he brought to every new environment, every new adventure, every new moment of a life that he experienced with the unfiltered, undimmed, absolutely relentless enthusiasm of a person who had decided, at a very young age, that the world was amazing and had never once been given a reason to revise this assessment.
"Ne, ne!" he called back to the deck, his voice carrying with the effortless projection of someone who had never spoken quietly in his life and saw no reason to start. "I can see lights down there! Like, WAY down! Do you think that's Fishman Island?"
"It's too early for Fishman Island," Nami replied from the deck, consulting a map that she held in one hand. The other hand was occupied with the important task of being near Luffy, which it accomplished by resting on the railing of the figurehead platform, approximately eighteen inches from the captain's left elbow. "Based on our current depth and trajectory, we should—"
"But what if it IS Fishman Island?"
"It's not."
"But what if—"
"It's NOT, Luffy."
"But—"
"Luffy. It's bioluminescent plankton."
"...Is that edible?"
"Please stop trying to eat the ocean."
"I'm not trying to eat the ocean! I'm trying to eat the things IN the ocean! That's totally different!"
Nami sighed. It was a sigh that contained multitudes—exasperation, fondness, the bone-deep resignation of a woman who had accepted that her captain would attempt to consume approximately sixty percent of all things he encountered, and the equally bone-deep realization that she wouldn't have him any other way.
She was standing close to him. Closer than necessary. Closer than the conversation warranted. Close enough that if he leaned back, he would lean against her, and she would feel the weight of him against her body, and she would have to use every ounce of her considerable willpower to not melt into a puddle on the spot.
She had been following him all morning.
Not following in the sense of "walking behind"—Nami was too skilled for that, too aware of optics, too conscious of the way she presented herself to the world. She followed him the way a shadow followed its source: always present, always connected, always just there, maintaining a distance that was technically "casual" and emotionally "as close as humanly possible without actually climbing onto his back and refusing to get off."
When he went to the figurehead, she went to the figurehead. When he wandered to the kitchen, she suddenly needed to discuss the food budget with Sanji. When he climbed to the crow's nest, she needed to check the... the... the crow's nest weather instruments. (The crow's nest did not have weather instruments. Nami would install some later. For reasons.)
She was a satellite orbiting a sun, and the sun was a rubber boy who was currently trying to determine whether bioluminescent plankton was a food group.
"Luffy, you can't eat plankton."
"Why not?"
"Because—" Nami paused. She actually didn't have a good reason. Plankton was, technically, edible. Some cultures did eat it. The nutritional value was minimal, but— "Because it would taste terrible."
"How do you know? Have you tried it?"
"No, but—"
"Then maybe it's delicious! We don't know! That's the adventure, Nami! Trying new things! Even if they're weird glowy ocean stuff!"
Nami opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Then opened it again. Then closed it again. A smile—small, helpless, completely involuntary—crept across her face despite her best efforts to maintain an expression of stern navigatorial authority.
"You're impossible," she said softly.
"Shishishi! Thanks!"
"That wasn't a compliment."
"Sounded like one!"
It had been. They both knew it. Nami's blush was visible even in the dim bioluminescent light.
Chopper emerged onto the deck, and the world rearranged itself slightly to accommodate her.
Seven feet five inches now. She had grown two more inches in the time it had taken her to leave the infirmary, traverse the corridor, and climb the stairs to the main deck—a journey that had required her to duck under three doorframes, turn sideways to fit through one particularly narrow passage, and navigate a staircase that had been designed for people whose hips were not approximately the width of the staircase itself.
The staircase had been an adventure.
Each step had required careful placement of feet that were now larger than they'd been (proportional growth, her medical brain noted automatically, the skeletal structure expanding uniformly to support the increasing mass), on stairs that were not designed for feet of this size. The handrails—useful for balance, critical for safety—were at her hip height now, which meant they were less "handrails" and more "hip rails," and each step upward had been accompanied by the gentle thump-thump of hips brushing against the railing on alternating sides.
The curves had continued their impossible expansion.
Chopper's chest was now—and she was a doctor, she could be clinical about this—immense. There was simply no clinical term that was adequate. The medical vocabulary for breast size topped out at a certain point, and Chopper had blown past that point sometime around three in the morning. Each breast was now larger than her own head—considerably larger than her head—round and heavy and soft, covered in the fine brown fur that covered the rest of her body, rising and falling with each breath in a slow, hypnotic oscillation that suggested tremendous mass. They pressed against the makeshift top she was wearing (one of Franky's old shirts, commandeered from the laundry and modified with emergency sewing that was already failing) with a force that made the fabric creak softly with each inhalation.
The hips—God, the hips. They had widened to a degree that Chopper, with her medical training, could only describe as "structurally ambitious." Wide, round, flaring out from a waist that had somehow maintained a proportionally narrow profile despite the overall increase in size, they created a hip-to-waist ratio that would have been flagged as a data entry error in any medical database. The thighs below them were massive—each one roughly the circumference of Luffy's torso, thick and round and covered in soft fur that rippled with each step, the flesh beneath jiggling and swaying with a momentum that suggested considerable density.
And behind her—rising behind her narrow waist like a geographical feature, like a hill on a landscape of impossible anatomy—was a rear end that had passed "large" somewhere around midnight, had passed "enormous" around dawn, had passed "monumental" around mid-morning, and was now occupying a category that didn't have a name because no one had ever needed to describe anything this... this.
It was round. Perfectly, almost geometrically round, two great spheres of soft, dense, heavy flesh that moved with each step in a complex, phase-shifted oscillation—one side rising as the other fell, one side jiggling as the other settled, the overall effect a continuous, rolling, almost hypnotic display of motion that was entirely produced by the simple act of walking.
Chopper stepped onto the deck and immediately looked for Luffy.
She found him on the figurehead.
The adoration hit like a wave.
It was stronger today. Noticeably stronger. The feeling that had been "warmth" two days ago, then "fire" yesterday, was now something that didn't have a temperature analogy, something that occupied every cell of Chopper's expanded body simultaneously, a full-body, all-consuming, absolutely overwhelming surge of emotion that made her eyes water and her heart pound and her legs feel simultaneously strong enough to carry her anywhere and too weak to carry her another step.
He's sitting on the lion. He loves sitting on the lion. He looks so happy. His hat is tilted to one side. His legs are swinging. He's talking to Nami about plankton. He's Luffy.
The simplicity of the thought was its power. Not "he's handsome" (though he was). Not "he's strong" (though he was). Not "he's kind" or "he's brave" or "he's any of the thousand adjectives that could be applied to Monkey D. Luffy and none of which would be sufficient."
He's Luffy.
That was everything.
That was the whole argument, the complete case, the full and total justification for why Chopper's heart was beating so fast that her doctor's instincts were triggering a malpractice alarm. He was Luffy. He was the boy who had marched into Drum Island in the dead of winter, climbing a five-thousand-meter mountain with his bare hands, carrying two injured companions on his back, nearly dying of frostbite and hypothermia and sheer physical exhaustion, because a friend needed a doctor and Luffy had decided that the friend was going to get a doctor and neither the mountain nor the cold nor the limits of his own body were going to have any say in the matter.
He was the boy who had looked at a small reindeer with a blue nose—a creature that had been rejected by its own herd for being different, rejected by humans for being a monster, rejected by the only father figure it had ever known through the cruelest possible act of love—and had said: I don't care what you are. I want you on my crew.
He was the boy who had punched the man who made Chopper's mentor cry.
He was the boy who had eaten the flag of a kingdom to prove that he wasn't afraid.
He was Luffy.
Seven feet six inches.
The growth continued, and Chopper embraced it with the fervent, complete acceptance of someone who had found their reason and needed nothing else.
If it makes him say "cool" one more time, I'll grow to a hundred feet. I'll grow to a thousand feet. I'll grow until I can carry him on my shoulder and walk across the ocean floor and kick Sea Kings out of our path and—
But if he's ever scared.
If he ever looks at me with anything other than that grin.
I'll shrink. Immediately. No hesitation.
The caveat stood, firm and inviolable, completely unnecessary, and absolutely sincere.
"CHOPPER!" Luffy spotted her from the figurehead and waved with both arms, nearly falling off the lion's head in his enthusiasm. "You're even TALLER! That's so COOL!"
Seven feet seven inches.
The growth surged. Whether in response to the compliment, the emotion, the sheer force of Chopper's happiness, or some other mechanism entirely, the warm tingling pulsed through her body with renewed vigor, adding a full inch in the time it took Luffy to finish his sentence.
"S-S-SAYING THAT DOESN'T MAKE ME HAPPY, YOU STUPID WONDERFUL BEAUTIFUL JERK~! ♥♥♥"
Three hearts this time. The verbal manifestation of adoration was escalating.
The wiggle was catastrophic.
At seven feet seven inches, with a body that now occupied approximately three times the volume it had occupied at the start of this whole affair, the wiggle was less a physical gesture and more a weather event. The deck vibrated. The tangerine trees swayed in their planters. The mast shuddered slightly. Curves oscillated in every direction—chest bouncing vertically, hips swaying laterally, thighs jiggling anteriorly-posteriorly, rear bouncing with a deep, heavy, seismic rhythm that produced secondary oscillations in the deck planking that were measurable up to twenty feet away.
The pink hat nearly flew off. Chopper caught it with one hand—a hand that was now large enough to palm the hat entirely—and pressed it back onto her head with the desperate, practiced motion of someone whose most precious possession was a hat and who was not going to lose it, not even to the forces generated by her own joy-wiggle.
"You're really getting big, huh!" Luffy said, hopping down from the figurehead with the effortless acrobatic grace that made everything he did look simultaneously dangerous and completely natural. He landed on the deck, bounced once (rubber), and walked over to Chopper with the same casual, unconcerned gait he applied to every situation, from shopping for groceries to declaring war on the World Government.
He stopped in front of her.
He looked up.
Way up.
Chopper was now a full two feet taller than him, and the height difference was dramatic. Luffy—five feet eight inches of rubber and determination and absolute faith in the goodness of the world—stood before Chopper like a child standing before a very tall, very curvy, very emotional adult, his neck craned back, his hat tilting on his head from the angle, his face split by a grin that showed every single tooth.
"Shishishi! I gotta look way up to see you now! This is fun!"
Fun.
He thought it was fun.
Chopper's heart performed a complex maneuver that would have been concerning in a patient but which she was too emotionally compromised to diagnose in herself. Her vision went slightly blurry with tears that she refused to shed because she was a pirate and pirates didn't cry (except that they totally did, constantly, because the Straw Hats were the most emotionally expressive pirate crew in the history of the Grand Line, and crying was basically a crew activity at this point).
"You—you—" Chopper stammered, looking down at him with eyes that were approximately ninety-five percent liquid emotion and five percent pupil. "You really think it's fun?"
"Yeah! It's like when you go into Heavy Point, but different! And you don't even need a Rumble Ball! That's awesome, Chopper!"
Seven feet eight inches.
He said awesome.
He said I'm AWESOME.
AWESOME.
Chopper burst into tears.
Not sad tears. Not scared tears. Tears of such pure, concentrated, overwhelming happiness that they seemed to carry actual light, rolling down fur-covered cheeks that were flushed pink beneath the brown, dripping from a chin that was now considerably higher off the ground than any reindeer chin had ever been.
"I'M NOT HAPPY!" Chopper wailed, in direct and obvious contradiction to every observable piece of evidence. "I'M NOT HAPPY AT ALL! STOP SAYING NICE THINGS, YOU STUPID AMAZING INCREDIBLE PERFECT JERK! ♥♥♥♥♥"
Five hearts.
Five.
The wiggle that accompanied this outburst caused a minor structural event in the deck. One plank actually cracked—not from the impact of Chopper's feet, which were planted firmly, but from the transmitted vibration of curves oscillating at a frequency that the plank was not engineered to withstand.
Franky, from across the deck, winced. "My ship..."
"Sorry!" Chopper squeaked, freezing mid-wiggle, which caused an abrupt deceleration of all moving parts that resulted in a complex, cascading series of secondary bounces as momentum was redistributed through the various anatomical regions that had been in motion.
"SUUUUPER no worries!" Franky called back, already calculating the repair. "I'll just reinforce the deck! With SUUUUPER materials! For our SUUUUPER growing crew member!"
In the kitchen, Sanji was experiencing a crisis.
Not a culinary crisis—Sanji's cooking was, as always, impeccable, flawless, a symphony of flavor and technique that elevated mere sustenance to the level of high art. The crisis was sartorial. The crisis was that Sanji's clothes no longer fit.
The black dress shirt—the uniform, the identity, the physical manifestation of everything Sanji was as a chef—had surrendered completely overnight. The last remaining buttons had popped sometime in the early hours, flying off with enough velocity to embed themselves in the opposite wall (where they now resided, two small brass circles pressed into the wood like rivets, testaments to the incredible forces that had been brought to bear upon them). The shirt now hung open, revealing the full extent of a chest that had progressed from "immense" to "staggering" to its current state of "a natural wonder that should probably be classified as a protected landmark."
Sanji stared at the open shirt in the small mirror that hung next to the spice rack.
Sanji did not see the open shirt.
Sanji did not see the chest.
Sanji did not see the hips that had expanded to a width that made the kitchen's aisles feel narrow, or the thighs that pressed together with enough pressure to warp the fabric of the skirt that was clearly three sizes too small, or the rear that had become so prominent that Sanji had to stand at an angle to the counter to avoid bumping it into things.
Sanji saw the mirror, and in the mirror, Sanji saw a person, and the person's lips were moving, and they were saying:
"He said he loves me. He said he loves me. He said he loves me. He said he loves me."
Luffy had said "I love you" to Sanji twenty-seven hours ago. Sanji had been repeating it since. The loop showed no signs of closing.
"He said he LOVES me."
Steam erupted from both ears. The blush on Sanji's face had achieved a permanence that suggested it might never fully fade—not a temporary flush of embarrassment but a deep, structural reddening of the skin that had become a baseline feature, like eye color or hair texture.
"He said—"
"He says that to everyone, you know," Zoro said from the kitchen doorway.
Sanji spun around—a motion that, given the current state of Sanji's anatomy, was kinetically complex. The rotation began at the feet, propagated upward through the legs and hips, and was then dramatically complicated by the fact that the upper body's center of mass had shifted considerably forward since the last time Sanji had attempted a rapid spin. The result was a slight stumble, a grab at the counter for balance, and a comprehensive jiggling event that affected every soft tissue structure from collarbone to knee and lasted approximately four and a half seconds after the spin itself had concluded.
"I KNOW he says it to everyone!" Sanji snapped, regaining composure with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been cooking in a rocking ship for years and had excellent balance under adverse conditions. "But he said it to ME! Specifically! While looking at ME! While eating food that I MADE! With MY HANDS! And he—"
"He says it to everyone."
"STOP SAYING THAT."
"He said it to a fishcake once."
"HE DID NOT—wait, did he?"
"In Water 7. He was eating fishcakes from a vendor and he said, and I quote, 'I love you, fishcake.'"
Sanji stared at Zoro with an expression that contained approximately equal parts outrage and devastation.
"He... he said he loved a fishcake?"
"He also said it to a tree once. He thought the tree looked cool."
"A tree?"
"And a cloud. The cloud was shaped like a piece of meat."
Sanji's emotional trajectory—which had been cruising at a comfortable altitude of "euphoric" for the past twenty-seven hours—experienced a sudden, dramatic loss of altitude. The chef's shoulders slumped. The blush faded by approximately two shades. The steam from the ears reduced to a gentle simmer.
"...He loves fishcakes," Sanji muttered.
Then, almost immediately, the shoulders straightened. The blush returned. The steam intensified.
"He loves fishcakes, and he loves trees, and he loves clouds, and he loves MY FOOD. And you know what? I'm going to make him the BEST food he's ever had. I'm going to make him food so good that when he says 'I love you' to it, he'll MEAN it. More than the fishcake. More than the tree. More than the CLOUD."
"It's not a competition with a cloud."
"IT IS NOW."
Zoro watched Sanji turn back to the stove with a renewed fervor, blonde hair whipping over one shoulder, hips swaying with each step in a rhythm that was somehow both aggressive and graceful, and the swordswoman felt an emotion that she had not expected to feel in this context: respect.
Grudging respect. Annoyed respect. The kind of respect that came with a side of "I can't believe I'm respecting this" and a garnish of "tell anyone and I'll deny it." But respect nonetheless, because Sanji's devotion to Luffy—expressed through food, through service, through the single-minded determination to nourish and sustain and care for the captain with every skill and every resource at the chef's disposal—was real. It was genuine. It was not less valid than Zoro's own devotion simply because it manifested through a saucepan rather than a sword.
They were both trying to protect him, in the end. Zoro with steel. Sanji with sustenance. Different methods. Same love.
"...Make extra," Zoro said quietly, from the doorway.
Sanji paused. Glanced back. Caught the look in Zoro's single visible eye—a look that was, for a fraction of a second, unguarded and raw and full of the same overwhelming adoration that Sanji felt every time Luffy walked into the room.
"I always make extra," Sanji said. And it was, in its own way, a peace treaty.
Neither of them noticed that the doorway was now too narrow for Zoro's hips.
Zoro was leaning against the doorframe, which she always did, but the lean now involved a lateral compression of both hips against the frame's edges, soft flesh pressing against wood on both sides, bulging slightly above and below the points of contact. The dark pants that had been "snug" yesterday were now "painted on," the fabric so taut across thighs and rear that the individual threads were visible, the seams bearing loads they had never been designed for. The shirt—already open, already failed, already a casualty of the chest expansion—was now basically decorative, two flaps of white fabric hanging from shoulders that were still broad but which now served primarily as a visual counterpoint to the incredibly dramatic curve of everything below them.
Zoro's body had grown. Not dramatically—not like Chopper, whose growth was measured in inches per hour—but steadily, persistently, the quiet accumulation of millimeters in every dimension that added up, over the course of forty-eight hours, to a transformation that was profound. The chest was bigger. The hips were wider. The thighs were thicker. The rear was more prominent. Each individual change was small enough to be dismissed as imagination or lighting or the natural variation of a body in motion. Together, they created a figure that was, by any objective assessment, dramatically more curvaceous than it had been two days ago.
And Zoro—fierce, disciplined, hyper-aware Zoro, who could sense a hostile intent at a hundred yards, who could track the trajectory of a bullet in flight, who could read the subtle shifts in an opponent's posture that telegraphed an attack in the milliseconds before it was launched—noticed nothing.
Because Luffy was talking.
And when Luffy was talking, the rest of the world ceased to exist.
Noon. (Estimated.)
Usopp was in the crow's nest, ostensibly keeping watch for sea creatures and navigational hazards, actually keeping watch for Luffy.
The sniper had an excellent vantage point from up here—the crow's nest was the highest point on the ship, offering a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the surrounding waters through the coating bubble, and on a clear day (or clear night, or clear... deep-sea-eternal-darkness, whatever this was) a skilled lookout could spot approaching threats from considerable distances. Usopp was a skilled lookout. Usopp had the best eyes on the crew. Usopp could spot a bird at three miles and a Marine ship at ten.
Usopp was currently using those world-class eyes to track Luffy's movements across the deck below.
Through the telescopic sight of Kabuto—her upgraded slingshot, modified and improved during the two-year training period into a weapon of terrifying precision—Usopp watched Luffy wander from the figurehead to the mast, from the mast to the aquarium bar, from the aquarium bar to the swing. Each movement was tracked with the focus and precision of a trained marksman, the crosshairs following the straw hat the way a compass needle follows magnetic north.
"He's at the swing now," Usopp murmured to no one, adjusting the scope's focus to achieve maximum clarity. "He's... he's swinging. He's laughing. Oh—oh, he almost fell off. No, he's fine. He's fine. He's doing that thing where he wraps his arms around the ropes like three times. That's so—that's really—"
Cute.
The word formed in Usopp's mind with the unstoppable force of a natural law, and the sniper's face heated to a temperature that probably constituted a fire hazard.
"I didn't think that," Usopp said firmly, to no one, in the crow's nest, alone. "Captain Usopp does not think things like that. Captain Usopp is a fearless warrior of the sea who has defeated—who has—who has a captain who's really, really—"
Cute.
"STOP IT."
Usopp lowered Kabuto and leaned back in the crow's nest chair, staring at the ceiling of the coating bubble overhead. The dark water pressed against the translucent membrane, and in its depths, distant lights flickered and moved—deep-sea creatures going about their deep-sea business, unaware of and uninterested in the emotional turmoil of one sniper in a crow's nest.
Usopp's body shifted in the chair, and the shift was accompanied by a sensation of tightness that the sniper had been vaguely aware of all day but hadn't paused to examine. The overalls were tight. They had been tight yesterday. They were tighter today. The bib—the front panel that covered the chest area—was stretched across a bust that was measurably, visibly, undeniably larger than it had been twenty-four hours ago, the denim fabric pulled taut and thin, the straps cutting slightly into shoulders that had softened further overnight.
The seat of the overalls was also tight—the fabric straining across hips and rear that had expanded to fill the chair completely, soft flesh pressing against the armrests on both sides, the denim creaking faintly with each shift in position. The thighs, thick and round beneath the overalls' legs, pressed together in Usopp's lap with a warm, heavy insistence that made crossing and uncrossing them an involved process.
Usopp noticed none of this.
"He's going to the kitchen again," Usopp observed through Kabuto's scope, tracking Luffy's familiar path toward food. "That's the fourth time today. Fifth? I lost count. He eats so much. Where does it go? He's rubber. Does rubber stretch internally too? That's actually a really interesting question from a biological standpoint. I should ask Chopper. If Chopper isn't too busy being seven feet tall. Which is—that's a whole other thing. When did Chopper get tall? Why is Chopper tall? Why am I—"
Why am I watching Luffy through a sniper scope?
The question surfaced briefly before being dragged back under by the current of adoration that now ran through Usopp's psyche like a river through a canyon—too deep, too fast, too powerful to be dammed or diverted by something as flimsy as self-awareness.
"Surveillance," Usopp decided. "I'm conducting surveillance. For safety. Because that's what a responsible crew member does. I'm keeping the captain safe. From threats. That exist. Out there. In the dark. The very dark, very threatening dark."
The dark was, in fact, entirely non-threatening at this particular moment. The only things moving in the water around the ship were small bioluminescent organisms that posed about as much danger to the Thousand Sunny as a gentle rain posed to a mountain.
Usopp resumed watching Luffy through the scope.
"For safety," Usopp repeated.
The overalls strained.
Usopp didn't notice.
On the deck below, the crew had gathered for lunch.
Chopper sat in Franky's reinforced chair, which was holding admirably despite the fact that the person occupying it now stood seven feet nine inches tall and possessed a body that challenged the concept of "fitting in furniture" the way Luffy challenged the concept of "reasonable dietary choices."
The chair creaked. But it held. Franky's engineering was solid.
Seven feet ten inches.
Seven feet eleven.
Eight feet.
Chopper had reached eight feet tall, and she was beaming.
Not because she was eight feet tall—though the height was, in and of itself, a source of quiet pride that she would never, ever, EVER admit to. Not because her curves had continued their impossible expansion, adding volume with the cheerful persistence of a river filling a valley, every dimension increasing in concert with the height to maintain proportions that were dramatic at any size but were genuinely stunning at this scale.
She was beaming because Luffy was sitting next to her.
Next to her.
She was so tall now that "next to her" was more like "next to her thigh." Luffy's head was at the level of Chopper's shoulder when they were both seated, which meant that when he leaned over to grab a dish from across the table—which he did constantly, because Luffy's approach to shared meals involved claiming approximately eighty percent of the available food as his own personal territory—his shoulder occasionally bumped against Chopper's arm, and each contact, each brief, accidental, meaningless touch, sent a jolt of electricity through Chopper's nervous system that made every piece of fur on her body stand on end simultaneously.
"Oi, Chopper, can you reach that?"
Luffy was pointing at a platter on the far side of the table—a platter that was beyond his arm's reach even with rubber stretching, because Sanji had placed it there specifically to slow down Luffy's consumption rate and buy the rest of the crew a few precious seconds to secure their own portions.
Chopper's arm, which was now approximately four feet long, reached across the table with ease and retrieved the platter.
"Here you go, Luffy!" Chopper said, and her voice cracked on his name again, the way it had been cracking all day, the syllables breaking apart under the weight of emotion they were being asked to carry.
"Thanks, Chopper! You're the best!"
The best.
He said I'm THE BEST.
Eight feet one inch.
The growth surged.
The wiggle began.
The table vibrated.
"Saying that doesn't—doesn't make me—I'm NOT the best—YOU'RE the best—I mean—SHUT UP—♥♥♥♥♥♥♥"
Seven hearts. A new record.
Across the table, the rest of the crew watched this exchange with the complicated mix of affection and jealousy that had become the default emotional state of every Straw Hat member who wasn't Luffy.
Nami's eye twitched. "She's getting to hand him food now. She can reach things for him. That's—that's an unfair advantage."
"Life is full of unfair advantages, Navigator-san," Robin observed serenely, from a position that was—Nami noticed with a fresh spike of jealousy—somehow directly behind Luffy's chair, despite the fact that Robin had been sitting across the table three seconds ago. Robin's hands—whether her own or sprouted duplicates, it was impossible to tell—rested lightly on the back of Luffy's chair, and the archaeologist's smile was the smile of someone who had figured out the optimal position for maximum Luffy proximity and was NOT going to share her methodology.
"Robin, when did you move?"
"Move? I've been here the whole time, Navigator-san."
"You were ACROSS THE TABLE."
"Was I? How strange."
"ROBIN."
"More tea?"
Zoro, for her part, had not moved from her position at Luffy's left side—a position she had claimed at breakfast and had not vacated since, not for training, not for napping, not for any of the activities that typically comprised a day in the life of Roronoa Zoro. She sat in her chair (which was creaking under her own quietly expanded weight, the hips pressing against armrests that were running out of margin, the thighs filling the seat from edge to edge) with her arms crossed and her single eye fixed on the captain with an intensity that could have cut steel.
If anything touches him, the eye said, I will remove it from existence.
Nothing was touching him.
Zoro maintained readiness anyway.
"SANJI!" Luffy bellowed, having consumed the entire platter in approximately eight seconds. "MORE!"
"Coming, Captain~! ♥♥"
Two hearts from Sanji now. The adoration was contagious.
That evening—or night, or whatever it was—Luffy was back on the deck, staring at the abyss through the coating bubble, and Robin was there.
Of course Robin was there.
Robin was always there.
Not in the way that Nami was always there—following, orbiting, maintaining visible proximity through a series of increasingly thin pretexts. Not in the way that Zoro was always there—guarding, watching, maintaining a defensive perimeter through sheer force of protective will. Robin was there in the way that air was there—omnipresent, invisible, essential, occupying every available space without seeming to occupy any particular space, existing in the background of every scene without ever being noticed entering.
Luffy was sitting on the deck. Robin was behind him. Luffy's back was against Robin's chest.
This had happened naturally—or as naturally as anything involving Robin's spatial manipulation could happen. Luffy had sat down. Robin had appeared behind him. Luffy had leaned back, because Luffy leaned against things when he sat (walls, masts, crewmates, large rocks, sleeping Sea Kings on one memorable occasion), and Robin had been behind him, so Luffy had leaned against Robin.
His back pressed into the soft, warm, vast expanse of Robin's chest. His head rested against her collarbone. His weight—the relaxed, boneless weight of a rubber man at rest—settled into her body with the comfortable familiarity of something that had always been this way.
Robin's arms were around him. Not in an embrace—nothing so deliberate, nothing so obvious. They were simply... resting. One arm draped across his chest, the hand holding a book (always a book). The other arm at his side, the hand resting on the deck near his hip. It was casual. It was natural. It was the most intimate thing Robin had ever experienced and she was reading a book about Pre-Void Century pottery techniques while experiencing it.
Multi-tasking.
"Ne, Robin," Luffy said, staring up through the coating bubble at the dark water above them. "Do you think the One Piece is really out there?"
The question was not born of doubt. Luffy did not experience doubt any more than he experienced fear—the neural pathways simply weren't wired for it. The question was born of excitement, of the sheer, electric thrill of possibility, of a boy on the threshold of the world's greatest adventure who wanted to share his anticipation with someone.
"I believe it is, Captain-san," Robin replied, and her voice—warm, low, intimate in the way that a whispered secret was intimate—carried a conviction that matched his own. "The historical evidence is quite compelling. And you've never been wrong about these things."
"Shishishi! That's because I'm going to be King of the Pirates! And the King of the Pirates has to find the One Piece! That's just how it works!"
"That is, indeed, how it works."
"And we're going to find it together! All of us! Because that's what nakama do!"
Robin's arms tightened. Just slightly. Just enough to be a squeeze rather than a rest. Just enough to communicate, through the language of physical contact, everything that her voice could not.
Together.
He said together.
"Yes, Captain-san," Robin said, and her voice was steady, and her eyes were bright, and the book in her hand trembled slightly with the force of the emotion she was suppressing, and her chest—pressed against his back, enormous and warm and soft—rose and fell with a breath that was just a little bit shaky.
"Together."
Luffy grinned. The grin was aimed at the abyss, at the dark water and the distant lights and the future that lay somewhere beyond them, and it contained more certainty than most people accumulated in a lifetime.
"I can't wait," he said.
Robin rested her chin on top of his head.
"Neither can I," she whispered.
The Thousand Sunny sailed on.
Eight feet two inches.
The curves grew.
The love grew faster.
And somewhere in the dark, Fishman Island waited for the boy who would be king and the crew who loved him beyond all reason, beyond all sense, beyond all proportion—in every sense of the word.
To be continued...