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The great and inimitable Sniper King kept his head (adorned, according to his haters, with far too big a nose, but who cares what they think?) even in the most desperate situations. More than once a Marine armada had kept his proud ship under fire from both sides. More than once his crew – all ten thousand men – had fought entire armies on shore. More than once he had been all alone in the midst of enemies armed to their teeth. He got out of all those scrapes hardily, calmly, and without losing his spirit.
Usopp, on the other hand, occasionally lost his spirit. Every once in a while. However, usually it happened for a reason. It didn’t have to be some danger or trouble, but it had to be at least some gloomy thought which unwound a reel of other gloomy thoughts. At the moment, though, there was no reason for that whatsoever. He was just leaning against the wall of the bar and waiting for Nami to come back and not thinking of anything like that. And suddenly his heart clenched – briefly, piercingly. He found himself remembering the weak smile of his dying mother, remembering Kaya and his young pirates that he left behind. All the times when he was not strong enough, not agile enough, and, frankly speaking, not brave enough to help his crewmates when it was needed rushed before his eyes. Even the times when everyone assured him afterwards that everything was fine.
How many times I’ve already let them all down and how many more I will, he thought miserably.
“Oooh! Got to you after all,” a pleased voice proclaimed.
Usopp looked around, then looked up.
There was a fancy goods shop to the right of the bar. On its sign board, a girl was sitting, swinging her leg, wearing a long black dress fit less for the streets of Sabaody in daylight and more for an evening at the opera or perhaps a funeral of someone rich. The girl had long pink hair that Usopp recognized at once. Just like the saucer eyes.
Usopp instinctively took a step back.
“You!” he blurted out, grabbing the slingshot.
“Me,” confirmed Perona, the Ghost Princess, without ceasing to dangle her leg. “Ugh, leave that stick of yours! I was just wondering if you got better.”
Something flashed in the air on his left, emerged as a smear of watery white on his right. Negative Hollows, of course. That’s what it was.
“It’s not a stick!” he yelled, not letting go of the slingshot. “What do you mean by ‘better’?”
“Well, duh, my Hollows didn’t work on you before! And now they did, even if just a little, I could tell it from your face!”
“Nothing worked on me! I had, uh, a stomach ache!”
“Then you had it because of them,” Perona replied, unfazed.
“Don’t celebrate just yet,” Usopp muttered.
Perona shrugged. “You should celebrate too! If they got to you, then your self-esteem isn’t as low anymore.”
“My self…” He blinked nervously. “There’s nothing wrong with my self-esteem, okay?”
“My negative ghosties used to have no effect on you at all!”
“Because I’m already negative!”
“See, so you have low self-esteem!”
“I told you nothing’s wrong with it!” he flared up. He didn’t like that conversation. Look at her sitting here and seeing him for the second time in her life and already trying to diagnose him. The Sniper King had terrific self-esteem. Reasonable and unshakeable.
Usopp, on the other hand… Usopp was honest with himself. Perfectly honest. It was right, it was useful. It kept him from getting too disappointed when something didn’t work out because deep down that was the result he had expected all along.
It was… hm.
It was, in any case, none of her business.
“Yeah, I might’ve. Got better,” he agreed cautiously. There must have been a grain of truth here, for on the Thriller Bark, Perona’s attacks made his friends drop to their knees and howl about their worthlessness but didn’t even make him flinch. It was tempting to dare to believe it. Usopp, who talked big in front of the others, usually was perfectly honest with himself. It was right, it was useful, and it looked like it was totally no good for their upcoming journey to the New World. If all or almost all the tales about that place were true, then in order to survive there one needed at least a crumb of reckless self-belief. Shit. “I’ve learned a lot, y’know. Been training and all.”
Perona nodded, satisfied.
“I noticed,” she said, and slid off the sign board. She flew up to him and dabbed his bicep with her finger. Not a ghost; real. “I can see you’ve bulked up.”
The great and inimitable Sniper King, to no one’s surprise, was mightily popular with the ladies. They would always touch his muscles and flutter their eyelashes and rave about his bravery and strength. They would fall at his feet and lie there in piles. Usopp was… less used to that sort of thing. Usopp blushed.
“Don’t I know it,” he said with studied nonchalance after having calmed down, and thrust his chest out. “And you… What brings you to Sabaody? Because if you’ve nowhere to go, we could…”
“I’m already going,” Perona interrupted him. Well, whatever, it’s not like he cared. “I just brought your swordsman. Or he would’ve lost his way, the poor idiot.”
“Zoro? You brought Zoro? Was he your prisoner or what?!”
“My prisoner? More like the other way around! You people have to teach him not to leave his stinky clothes around, ’cause even Hawkeyes couldn’t!”
“Hawk… wait, Dracule Mihawk? Dracule Mihawk was with you?!”
“Oh, he’ll tell you himself,” waved him aside Perona. “I don’t have time for that. Okay, bye!” She tossed her head, hitting his bare upper arm with her hair; it tickled. Not a ghost. Real. Then she soared up. Usopp was left standing between the bar and the shop, following her with dazed eyes.
“Alright, we can go now,” announced Nami right over his ear so suddenly that it gave him a start. She clapped him on the shoulder, and a thin chain bracelet glittered on her wrist, catching a ray of sunlight. Usopp was sure that when she left, as she had put it, to powder her nose, she didn’t have that bracelet on. “Hey, what’s with the face? Did you see a ghost?”
A ghost of a lovely stranger, he thought. A stranger who remembered him and decided to find him and check up on him. That was nice. A voice inside his head was telling him that what she must’ve been interested in the most was whether he had become vulnerable to her Hollows, but it was the same voice that always told him to prepare for the worst. It was tempting to dare to ignore it.
“You know,” he told her with an enigmatic smile, “I kinda did.”