Chapter 1: The Boy Who Cried Pirates
The slingshot was a common children's to and he loved it more than anything he owned.
He'd spent three mornings modifying it. Getting the length right, measured against his arm, tested against the width of his palm, adjusted again because the first adjustment still felt wrong when he pulled it back. The pouch sat perfectly now, snug without gripping, open enough to shoot clean, and he knew the difference because he'd fired it two hundred times this morning alone and only four of those shots had gone where he didn't want them to go. Four was too many. He was going to get that to zero.
He was four years old by the way.
The woods behind Syrup Village were big enough to get lost in if you didn't know them, and Usopp knew them well enough. Right now he was hanging upside down from an oak branch by a rope knotted around his left ankle, blood pooling behind his eyes because he's been up here for ten minutes, his sling loaded with a smooth flat stone he'd pulled from the creek bed.
Twenty meters away, three pine cones sat balanced on a fallen log.
Usopp breathed out slow. The pine cones were small, smaller than a fist, smaller than most people would bother targeting from this distance, even right-side-up, even with both feet planted. His hair hung down toward the dirt and the morning light came through the leaves in thin gold strips and he could see the texture of each pine cone's scales from here as clear as if he were standing right next to them.
He let go.
The stone took the leftmost pine cone dead center and sent it spinning off the log hard enough to crack against a tree trunk fifteen meters beyond.
Usopp grinned so wide that the blood rushing to his face made his cheeks ache.
He dropped the next stone into the pouch before the first had even landed, he'd been practicing that, loading fast, not stopping, and took out the middle pine cone with a shot that struck it sideways and sent it cartwheeling into the brush. The third he hit before the second had finished moving, and the crack of stone on pine cone rang out through the trees like a small gunshot, and Usopp let out a whoop that scattered birds from every branch overhead.
He reached up, grabbed the branch, unhooked his ankle from the rope, and dropped to the ground in a roll. He came up already running.
Mom needed to hear about this.
…
Banchina was in the kitchen when he burst through the door, and she didn't even flinch.
"Three for three," Usopp announced, climbing onto the stool by the counter so she had to look at him properly. "Upside down. Twenty meters. Without stopping between shots."
Banchina turned from the pot she was minding. She had flour on her hands and her hair was pinned back loosely and she looked at him with a gentle smile.
"Upside down," she repeated.
"Hanging by my ankle. From the big oak."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Did you check the knot yourself?"
"Three times."
Another moment. Then she smiled, slow and full, and reached over to cup his face in both flour-dusted hands, and the pride in her expression was so big and so completely uncomplicated that Usopp's chest felt too small to hold what it did to him.
"You have your father's genes," she said. "Of course you can do it."
Usopp had heard this his whole life. Your father's genes. Yasopp could shoot a fly off a wall from a hundred paces in the dark and make it look easy, or so the stories went. The ones Banchina told with a smile on her face. Usopp had never met his father. Yasopp had left before Usopp was old enough to hold a memory of him. But he had the stories, and he had his mother's voice when she told them, and he had this. Whatever it was that lived in his hands and his eyes that made distances feel small and targets feel like they were already his.
He was going to make his father look like an amateur.
"I'm going to be a legendary pirate," Usopp told her, because he said this every day and it felt more true every time.
Banchina let go of his face and went back to her pot. "I know you are," she smiled.
Usopp ate breakfast and went back to the woods and trained until his arms shook.
…
That year, he got better in ways he couldn't logically explain.
He went to bed tired and woke up able to do things he hadn't been able to do the day before. He got better at things than the other boys in the village got better at anything, and he'd been watching them to check because he wanted to know how much ground he was covering.
A lot. He was covering a lot.
He started thinking about his shot, not just picking up creek stones but actually thinking, trying to figure out why flat stones flew different from round ones, why windy mornings meant he had to aim somewhere different. He drew things in the dirt with sticks, little pictures of shapes and lines, and one evening Banchina found him outside in the last of the light with his nose in the village doctor's notes, Sorin's, which he'd taken without asking, staring at numbers with his brow all knotted up like there was something in there he almost had and it was annoying him that he didn't have it yet.
She didn't ask what he was doing. She brought him a blanket.
…
Then she got sick.
It wasn't sudden. That was the worst part, watching it come in slowly, a little bit at a time. A cough in the mornings that she waved away when he asked about it. Her face going pale in a way that didn't go back to normal. She stopped finishing her meals. She started moving like things hurt that she wasn't saying were hurting.
Usopp noticed all of it and didn't say anything because she kept saying she was fine and he wanted her to be right.
She wasn't right.
The doctor, a round, grey-haired man named Sorin whose house always smelled of dried herbs and something sour, came to their door on a morning when the coughing had gotten so loud that a neighbor had knocked to check. He was in Banchina's room for a long time. When he came out his face didn't look like one that would give good news.
He looked at Usopp standing in the hallway and seemed to think about how old Usopp was.
"She needs rest," Sorin said. "And medicine. And-" He stopped. Started again. "Come see me tomorrow, boy. I'll show you how to make the teas."
Usopp was at Sorin's door before the sun was up.
He learned everything the old man had.
Not slowly. Not over weeks the way you were supposed to. Sorin showed him something once and Usopp could do it. Showed him twice and Usopp could explain it back better than Sorin had explained it the first time. The doctor would turn around in the middle of showing him something and find Usopp already making a second batch from memory, adjusting one thing by instinct, and usually the adjustment was right, and Sorin's face each time did something that Usopp didn't have a name for.
By the end of the first week Sorin had mostly stopped teaching and started just answering questions.
The teas helped. The compresses helped. The way Sorin told him to prop her up on the pillows helped her breathe easier at night. But helped wasn't fixed, and Usopp was smart enough to understand that Sorin's knowledge had a wall in it, and that wall was coming up fast, and what was on the other side of the wall was the part that mattered most.
The sickness was in her lungs. Something had taken hold there. The herbs could slow it but they couldn't kill it, and Sorin kept his voice steady when he talked about it, and his eyes said something else entirely.
Usopp took three of Sorin's books, the ones the doctor had called probably over your head, but the best reference I have, and read all of them in four nights, looking for anything about lungs and infection and illness, writing things down, trying to find pieces in different books that went together even though they'd been written by different people who'd never met each other.
He thought there was something there. He wasn't sure yet.
He needed ingredients Sorin didn't have, not rare, just things growing in the deep parts of the island that nobody had thought to use for this.
He went to find them.
…
The weeks after that were the hardest Usopp had ever been through, though he didn't think of them that way while he was in them. There was just always the next thing to do. Next plant to find. Next thing to try. Next failure. Start again.
He ranged across the island in a widening circle, getting rained on, getting lost twice and finding himself both times, hauling a bag full of roots and bark and leaves back home to try things and watch them not work and go back out for more. He fell into the creek one morning with a full bag and lost everything and had to start the whole day over.
He cried a bit, walking back out. Then he stopped and kept going.
Mom was worse.
She didn't leave her bed anymore. The coughing had changed into something Usopp could hear through the walls at night, deep and wet and wrong. Sometimes after a bad spell there was blood in the cloth she pressed to her mouth, bright red on white linen, and Usopp had stopped being able to look at that cloth without his stomach going tight and cold. Sorin or his assistant came every day now. The room smelled of medicine and sickness.
She was still herself when he sat with her. Still the eyes and the voice and the way she actually listened when he talked. She asked what he was looking for out on the island and he said a project, and she gave him that look but didn't push.
He told her pirates were coming.
He started doing it the same week she stopped getting out of bed, because he was trying to think of things that might help and his father wasn't coming back, he knew that, he'd always known that, but the idea of it, Yasopp's ship coming into the harbor with his dad at the rail, made her face do something he liked.
So every morning he ran through Syrup Village screaming it at the top of his lungs.
The first morning, the village completely lost its mind.
People poured out of houses. A fish stall went over in the scramble. Old man Riku from the docks nearly threw his back out sprinting for the harbor. Three women screamed. The constable, a big, heavy man named Tauro who had never in his career actually dealt with pirates and whose face showed this very clearly the moment an emergency arrived, ran in a small panicked circle before demanding everyone remain calm, while being completely not calm.
By the time anyone thought to actually look at the harbor, which was empty and peaceful and held nothing but the usual fishing boats, Usopp was already halfway back down the main street. The realization moved through the crowd like a wave.
It's the boy.
The Banchina's boy.
He was lying.
The second morning fewer people ran. The third, some didn't even leave their doorways. By the end of the week the village had stopped bringing attention to it. Exasperation and the worn-out fondness of people who had already given up. Some of the older residents had started using his morning run as a rough measure of the hour, must be about seven, the boy's at it again, which Usopp didn't know.
For Banchina, in her room, it was something else. She heard his voice every morning carrying in from the street, loud and ridiculous and completely, unstoppably alive, and she smiled into the cloth she was coughing into and told herself she was still there to hear him. Which meant she was still there. And that was something.
…
The 'cure' came together on a grey afternoon nine weeks in.
Usopp was crouched over three clay pots in the kitchen surrounded by materials that had taken over every surface, working from a connection he'd made the night before, two passages in two different books that weren't meant to be read together, that nobody who'd read one had ever also read the other, but he'd read both and he could see what they were both pointing at from opposite sides. The thing neither of them named directly but that was sitting right there in the middle if you looked at them at the same time.
It was probably wrong. He'd been probably wrong seventeen times before this.
He made it anyway.
Four hours. Grinding and mixing and waiting, watching the color shift from brown toward amber, smelling it at every stage, adjusting twice because something felt off and he didn't have words for why, just that it did. He strained it through cloth. He put a drop on his finger and tasted it and stood still with his eyes closed.
He brought it to his mother.
Sorin was in his corner chair, he'd practically moved in by now, and he looked at what Usopp was carrying and his face moved through skepticism and tiredness before settling into let the boy try.
Banchina looked at her son. She was pale now — pale and thin, her long nose more prominent because there was less of the rest of her face to balance it. But her eyes were the same as always.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Something I made," Usopp said. "Drink it."
She drank it.
He sat on the floor next to her bed with his knees pulled up and waited.
…
Three days.
Three days of sitting through the nights because he couldn't make himself sleep, listening for every cough, measuring the sound of it, the depth of it, how wet it was. Sorin came twice a day. He didn't say much.
On the third morning the coughing was different.
Not gone. But different, lighter, drier, less of that deep pulling wetness that had been living in it for weeks. Usopp was in the corner chair when he heard it and he froze. He sat like that all morning just listening.
By afternoon Banchina was sitting up in bed for the first time in a month.
By evening she was asking for food.
Sorin stood in the doorway of her room and looked at her and looked at Usopp and looked at the clay pot still sitting on the kitchen counter, and didn't say anything for so long that Usopp started to think something was still wrong.
"Boy," Sorin said at last.
"Yea?"
Sorin looked at Banchina eating a small bowl of broth like someone tasting food properly for the first time in weeks. Then he looked at Usopp, at this small, long-nosed child with hollow eyes and dirt still under his fingernails from the last trip into the island's interior.
"What exactly did you put in that medicine?" Sorin asked, very carefully.
Usopp listed the ingredients. Sorin's face moved through several things.
"I'm going to need you to write that down," the doctor said.
…
He cried in the yard afterward.
He hadn't planned to. He'd walked outside to get some air and then it just came out of him all at once, loud and ugly, his face shoved into both hands, his whole body shaking, everything he'd been holding clenched for nine weeks letting go at the same time. He sat down in the dirt and cried until there was nothing left and then sat there a while longer staring up at the sky going orange over the tree line.
He felt empty. Good-empty. Like something weighing down on him finally was gone.
"Are you all right out there?" Banchina's voice came through the window, still weak but there. Still hers.
Usopp scrubbed both hands over his face. "Yea. I'm great. Completely fine."
"Your eyes are going to be red."
"They're not."
"They are."
He went back inside and sat on the edge of her bed and let her pull him against her side the way she used to before the sick months when he'd been careful about pressing against her, afraid of hurting something. She held him there, her hand moving slowly over his hair. Neither of them said anything for a while.
"You have your father's genes," she said.
Usopp laughed. It came out shorter and messier than usual.
"He couldn't have done that," Usopp said. "What I did."
Banchina was quiet for a moment. "No," she agreed. "I don't think he could have."
He went back to the woods the next morning.
He was angrier than before. Not about anything he could point at exactly, just angrier, a hot tight thing sitting in his chest, pointed in a direction he didn't totally have words for yet. His father had left. Gone to sea. Didn't come back. And his mom had gotten sick and nearly died in a room his dad didn't even know to come back to.
If I had a wife I wouldn't do that. Simple and total, no room in it for anything else. I would stay. I would fix it. I would do anything.
I'm going to be better than him.
He picked up a stone and drove it through a tree at sixty meters and picked up another one.
The training after that went further and harder and longer, and he didn't notice when he was supposed to stop because stopping hadn't occurred to him.
He was still four years old.
He moved stones that grown men in the village would have struggled with, loading them onto a sled and hauling them uphill, making the slope steeper every time his legs stopped feeling it. He did pull-ups from oak branches until his grip gave out, rested, did more. He added weight, stones wrapped in rope tied to his body, first a few, then more, until the extra mass disappeared and he could add more again. He trained on the shore where the waves came in sideways, working his footing, because the sea moved and he was going to live on the sea and he needed his body to know how to stand in things that didn't hold still. Learning how to swim around the island.
His aim, which had already been something, became something he didn't have a useful comparison for anymore.
A leaf at eighty meters. A hundred. He moved the target further and kept going, adjusting for wind by feel because the feel was just there now, not thinking about it, just knowing, his arm going where the stone needed to go before the calculation had finished. He trained blindfolded. He trained with his other hand. He trained past the point of his arms shaking because he needed to know his aim was in his hands and not in having energy to spare.
Sorin watched some of this from the tree line one afternoon and quietly decided never to give the boy a reason to be angry at him.
…
The blacksmithing started because he needed a proper hammer and ended because he forgot to stop.
He wanted something made for him, the right weight, the right balance, built to his grip and his arm and the way he moved, not somebody else's idea of what a hammer should be. He found an old forge on the edge of the village that nobody was using, got it running in three days, and started making things.
The first hammer was wrong. He threw it away.
The second was closer.
The third one was right. He held it by the forge light and turned it over in his hand, feeling the weight sit at the head where he needed it. He'd made a real thing. A good real thing. The feeling of it was completely different from hitting something.
He started making ammo. Different types for different uses, he'd been thinking about this since the medicine weeks, since he'd spent so much time thinking about what compounds did to bodies and environments. A pellet that exploded on impact. A pellet that burned. A pellet that cracked open and released something bad to breathe. He worked through ideas the same way he'd worked through the medicine problem, trying, failing, writing it down, trying again. Banchina gave him a journal she'd been saving. It filled up quickly.
Banchina recovered slowly and then steadily, and by the end of it she was up and in the kitchen and warm and herself again, though she tired faster than before and Usopp noticed and didn't say anything about it.
He built the ship in the evenings.
It started as a raft. By the third week it had a mast. By the sixth he'd rebuilt the hull twice using things from a book on ship construction he'd borrowed from a sailor in the village, the sailor had been quite surprised to be asked and more surprised when Usopp returned it a week later and could discuss the contents like he'd written it himself. The sail was canvas from a merchant's scraps. The rigging was rope he'd twisted himself.
He didn't tell Banchina what he was building it for. She knew.
She didn't say anything until the day he tested it in the shallows and it held, and came back up the beach to find her standing at the tree line watching with her arms wrapped around herself.
"It's a good raft," she said.
"It's better than a raft." He was defensive about this. "I rebuilt the hull twice."
"It's a good raft." Softer this time. "Usopp."
He looked at her.
"Are you going to leave?" she asked.
The question sat between them on the sand. Usopp thought about lying. He'd been getting better at it, better at it every day along with everything else, but his mother was the one person he'd met that lying to felt completely pointless.
"Yea," he said.
Banchina was quiet. She walked down to the waterline and stood next to him and looked at the raft for a while.
"I let your father go," she said. "When he wanted to sail."
"I know."
"I waited a long time after that." A pause. "I'm not doing that again."
Usopp looked at her.
"I'm coming with you," she said.
His mouth fell open. "You, you can't-"
"You almost killed yourself saving my life," she said, and the calm in her voice was completely solid, not a crack anywhere in it. "You were four years old and you went into the island for nine weeks and you brought me back. You don't get to leave me on shore after that."
"It's dangerous," Usopp said. "There are marines out there-"
"You're a pirate."
"I'm four!"
"You just told me you're going to be a legendary pirate." She looked at him with those eyes that saw through everything. "Is the legendary pirate able to handle his mother being on his ship, or not?"
Usopp opened his mouth. The argument was just gone. And underneath it was the thing he hadn't let himself want yet: she's there, she doesn't get left behind, nobody gets left behind, not on his ship, not ever, he's not his father.
He turned back to the water.
"I have to reinforce the hull again," he said.
Banchina smiled. "I'll make dinner while you work."
They left on the morning of his fifth birthday.
The village sent them off with a small celebration. Tauro the constable stood on the dock with his arms folded and looked at a five-year-old and his mother loading a raft-ship and the expression on his face was the look of a man seeing corpses.
Old man Riku pressed a compass into Usopp's palm that morning. Sorin came with a small kit of medicines packed tight for sea conditions and gripped Usopp's shoulder with care.
Banchina stepped aboard with her bag and looked at the horizon.
Usopp pulled the rope off the dock cleat and coiled it. He looked back at Syrup Village one more time and the woods behind everything where a four-year-old had hung upside down from an oak tree and shot three pine cones dead without stopping.
He turned back to the water.
"My pirate legend," Usopp announced to the open sea and the wide world waiting just beyond the harbor's edge, "begins here!"
The sea didn't answer back.
He pushed off and let the wind take the sail, and Syrup Village shrank behind them, and they went.
"THE USOPP PIRATES HAVE SET SAIL!"