"My sincere apologies, Amon. You know how I am about these things."
Brook tucked the item away, then gave his full attention to the matter at hand. Whatever the skeleton lacked in physical anatomy, he appeared to lack nothing in terms of enthusiasm for the subject, and he had enough self-awareness, at least, to recognize when a social situation called for redirection.
"Completely understood," Amon said. "Save it for later. Right now, let's look at the second item. It's considerably more remarkable."
Brook straightened up. Robin leaned in. The first item had been handled in hushed consultation between Amon and Brook, and she'd caught only fragments of it, including the name Big Mom delivered in a tone that suggested something significantly more complicated than the words alone. She had opinions about that, but she kept them to herself.
The second item was a small pill, plain and unremarkable to look at. Brook examined it from several angles and came up empty.
"I genuinely cannot tell what this is," he admitted, looking to Amon.
"It's called a Restoration Pill. The effect is simple enough. Anyone who takes it is restored to their absolute peak condition. Body, strength, technique, all of it."
He looked at Brook directly. "Which means if you eat that right now, I'm fairly confident Ryuma won't be a problem for you anymore. And after that, there's nothing keeping you in this place. You could go back to Twin Cape. You could see Laboon."
Brook's body went very still.
Then his hands began to shake.
"Eating it will..." He picked up the pill with both hands, holding it as carefully as he would have held something made of glass. "It will bring me back to my peak? For Real?"
"Fr." (T/N: hehe)
Brook looked at the pill for a long moment. Whatever was happening behind those hollow eye sockets was not something he put into words. He simply nodded once, deeply, at Amon, and swallowed it.
The effect was immediate.
Light spread through Brook's frame from the inside, soft and warm, filling in the cracks before moving outward. The fractures that Ryuma had left across his bones knit themselves shut one by one, the damage reversing itself with quiet precision. Robin watched it happen with interest.
She had seen remarkable things come out of these jars. The gender-changing pill, the beauty treatment, every strange and impossible thing that had turned up across the journey. Each one had surprised her. She had thought she was past being genuinely startled.
Then the light kept going.
It didn't stop when the bones were healed. It kept moving, kept building, and where there had been only white bone and empty space, something began to take shape. Slowly, unmistakably, flesh.
Amon stared.
He hadn't expected this. The description had said peak condition, and he'd read that as combat peak, the restoration of whatever strength Brook had lost over fifty years of hard living in a fog. But the pill was more literal than that. Brook's skeletal state was the result of his body having decayed after his death and resurrection through the Revive-Revive Fruit. A skeleton was not his natural form. His natural form, his true peak, was a living body.
And so that was what the pill was restoring.
Brook was equally unprepared for it. He'd braced for his injuries to heal. He had not braced for the rest of it. He stood completely motionless as the transformation continued, tears running freely down cheeks that were, for the first time in decades, no longer bare bone.
The silence stretched on for a long time.
"I... I have a body again." His voice came out barely above a whisper. Then louder, cracking with something that had been held down for fifty years. "I have a body again! I'm restored! I actually have my flesh back!"
He pressed both hands against his own face, feeling the substance of it, the reality of it, and simply could not stop crying.
Nobody who had not spent fifty years as a skeleton could fully understand what that moment cost him to feel. He had made his peace with what he was, or had tried to. He had told himself the bones were enough, that he could still play and sing and laugh, that the hollow frame was simply what he was now. He had believed it, mostly, except in the quiet moments when he hadn't.
Now those years of quiet acceptance were dissolving all at once, replaced by something so large he didn't have words for it.
For everything that Amon had done, Brook had no words adequate to the gratitude. So he simply stood there, whole again for the first time in half a century, and let the tears fall.