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"Do you hear that?" Benn's captain says suddenly, canting his head to one side like a dog. It's late enough that it's circled back around to early, and outside, the early morning sun is brightening the windows of Party's Bar. Makino had carried a dead-to-the-world Luffy upstairs some hours before.
"Hear what," Benn says, because the only thing he can hear is Lucky Roux leading a catastrophically drunk rendition of Binks' Sake, but Shanks is already sliding off of his barstool and heading for the door. Benn raises his eyebrows, but follows, swinging his rifle idly up onto his shoulder.
When he steps outside, squinting against the sun just past the horizon, Shanks is already looking up, tilting his hat to shade his eyes. There's a black dot in the paling sky, rapidly growing, and now that Benn's outside he can hear what Shanks meant, too- there's a faint sound that might be shouting and might be laughter.
Benn squints. "That's not a person, is it?"
"Can't be," Shanks says, then pauses. "In the Grand Line, maybe, but that sort of thing doesn't happen in the East Blue."
"Not reassuring, Captain," Benn says dryly.
The black dot grows larger, gains color and definition, and then, as Benn watches, it seems to flare, a snap of white against the sky that makes Benn blink spots out of his eyes. Shanks is staring, wide-eyed, one hand holding his hat to his head.
If the shape is a person, Benn realizes suddenly, it's not likely to be for much longer, given the whole issue of velocity, and he grabs Shanks's shoulder and pulls him back a few steps.
The falling projectile hits the wide stretch of clear ground right in front of Party's, and that ground-
Benn rubs his eyes with his free hand.
The ground dips, sinking down like something elastic, a sinkhole forming in seconds that makes Benn lurch another step backwards as it nips at his toes. Just as suddenly it snaps back, and the shape that shoots back into the sky again is momentarily a person, and the sound that drew them outside in the first place is, unmistakably, hysterical laughter.
"Well call me Noland and lead me to execution," says Shanks, as the figure hits the apex of its bounce and starts to fall back down, so brilliantly white it hurts to look at directly and laughing loud enough to wake the village.
The sinkhole dips into existence again as it impacts, shallower this time and thankfully further from Benn's feet. Now that he knows what he's looking for, Benn manages a glimpse of sheeting white fabric, tan skin, a flash of yellow-gold before the figure is back up in the air, limbs moving frenetically to the beat of... he can almost hear drums? Maybe the pounding is just in his head.
"Okay, Captain," he says. He feels like he's gone out the other side of drunk and come back round to sobriety again. He also feels lightheaded, like something's pulling his brain in directions it wasn't made to go. "You're the Grand Line veteran. This is way above my paygrade."
His captain, unfortunately, seems to have decided that the appropriate response is his own burst of hysterical laughter. At least Benn assumes it's hysterical.
He squints at the figure as it hits the peak of its jump again, and as it hangs there, suspended for a moment before gravity takes its hold again, Benn thinks for a moment that he's blinked. It's not that, though. The white light just draws back into the figure, leaving something much less fluttery and much more red and blue and human-shaped plummeting towards the ground.
When it hits this time, the ground cracks but doesn't sink, and a plume of dust shoots up into the early morning air.
Benn wonders if it did die this time. Then he sees it move, a shadow taking shape in the disturbed dust, snickering to itself. The air clears. Blue, red, a flash of yellow-gold.
"Whoa, that was fun!" it laughs, straightening up from its crouch and dusting itself off. "Wonder where I am?"
Shanks blinks. He says, "Luffy?"
The figure's head jerks up to look at them, unsettlingly fast, and- Benn has to admit he does look kind of like Luffy, if Luffy was maybe twenty, instead of seven. Sounds like him, too, with that giggling snicker that sounds a little like it's caught in his chest. Whoever he is, he has wind-ruffled black hair and wide dark eyes, and beneath his open shirt there's a massive burn scar that's painful to even look at.
He also has a thin scar under his left eye, clearly old and well-healed, and hanging from a cord around his neck there's a battered straw hat that Benn could recognize from miles away.
"Ah! Shanks!" says- maybe Luffy? Relative of Luffy's? Shanks had said some ominous things about Luffy's grandfather once, but Benn can't remember anything else about the kid's family. Maybe he's got brothers? "You're wearing my hat!" And then, after a quick glance around: "This isn't Wano!"
"It's not," Shanks agrees blankly. "This is Dawn Island."
"That's weird!" maybe-Luffy says, frowning. "I just left Wano! How'd I get back here?"
"Luffy?" Shanks says again.
"Yeah?" Luffy(?) says, absently setting the hat hanging around his neck on top of his head.
"You... what?" Shanks looks at Benn for help, like Benn has any better of a handle on this situation than he does. Benn does not. Benn just has a headache.
"Last time I checked, Luffy was seven," Benn says.
Luffy(?) laughs. "I'm not seven!" he says, unhelpfully. "I'm a pirate!"
"I knew somebody once whose Devil Fruit let her go forward in time," Shanks says, sounding dubious. "But I've never heard of anything like this."
"Oh! Momo's mom?" Luffy says brightly. "I never met her but she sounded cool!"
Shanks makes a noise like a dying Sea King. Benn has never seen him so effectively rendered speechless before. He's kind of impressed.
Behind them, the door swings open, and a few more Red-Hair Pirates pile out onto the porch of Party's Bar, apparently drawn out by the commotion.
"What's this?" Yasopp says, leaning somewhat unsteadily around Shanks's shoulder to squint.
"Might be Luffy from the future," Benn allows, because this may as well be his life now. He'd thought it would at least take until they were over Reverse Mountain before things like this started happening.
"Hi, Yasopp!" Luffy shouts, waving enthusiastically. Yasopp waves back automatically, blinking.
Shanks knocks himself on the side of the head a few times like he's trying to shake water out of his ear. Benn empathizes.
Luffy giggles. He hasn't grown up tall, but he's grown up confident, and his straight-backed self-possession draws Benn's eye in a very familiar way. "Shanks looks pretty funny when he's surprised," Luffy notes. "Don't you remember I promised you I'd become a great pirate?"
Benn has a very, very strong feeling that the Luffy he knows has not in fact made any such promise.
"Why were you in Wano?" Shanks manages eventually, once he's done hitting his head, squinting, and touching his hat. Benn thinks that's the least helpful question he could have asked, because Benn does not actually know what or where Wano is, but at least it's a start.
"Ah!" Luffy hits his palm with his fist. "I went to go beat up Kaidou!"
Shanks blinks. So does Benn, who may not know about Wano but who does know what an Emperor of the Sea is. Shanks says, "And you're still alive?"
"Obviously," says Luffy, as though Shanks is the one who isn't making sense. Then he tilts his head to the side. "Well, I did die. But then I was alive, and the freest, and I kicked his ass!"
Shanks looks at Benn again, speechless once more. Benn shrugs. This is so not his problem, he's decided. He's just going to let events wash over him until things start making Blues-quality sense again. That's probably the best approach to this.
"Makes sense you've met Momonosuke then," says Shanks. He holds his hands out in front of him like he's gripping the ends of a large fish, then continues, in the tone of a man valiantly trying to pretend this is a normal conversation to have, "Man, last time I saw him he was this big. He was a baby. It's so weird to imagine him as an adult."
"It's so weird!" agrees Luffy, grinning. "But he's still eight on the inside. Even if Yamato keeps putting trays on his head to make him look like Oden."
"Can't imagine," Benn says, staring fixedly at an adult he had, until this moment, only known as a particularly energetic seven-year-old. He officially has no idea what's happening in this conversation. His only solace is that his captain looks at least as baffled as he feels. "You're a Grand Line pirate, then?" he asks after a moment, mostly in an effort to focus on something he feels fairly confident he can understand.
"And not just the Grand Line," Shanks notes. "Wano's pretty far along in the New World."
"Well, duh," Luffy says, blinking at him like he can't fathom any reason why anyone would engage in piracy anywhere else. Typical. "I'm gonna be King of the Pirates, so I have to get to Laugh Tale!"
And it's strange, because Luffy, at least the Luffy Benn knows, is a loudmouthed, blustery kid, as kids tend to be, prone to throwing out big claims without any ability to back them up. This Luffy, in comparison, seems- not calm, exactly, but- utterly self-assured, maybe, even as he claims something completely ridiculous like it's simple fact.
Shanks, for some reason, cracks up, laughing so hard he nearly falls over.
"Hey!" Luffy says, scowling, and yeah, that's more familiar. "Shanks!"
Shanks waves off his offense, straightening up again. "Ah, of course you are," he says, grinning widely. One hand comes up to toy idly with the frayed straw at the rim of his hat. "Why not? But you're a long way from where you need to be."
"Eh, my crew will come get me," Luffy says, and there's the confidence again, effortless and jarring. He ruins the effect almost immediately after with a childishly upset face. "Does that mean I have to wait? Nami always tells me I should stay in one place if I get lost, but that's so boring."
"Probably best to," says Shanks, dropping his hand from the brim of his hat. "At least until we clear up how you got here. This Nami sounds like a smart woman."
Luffy breaks off his pout for a smile that takes up half his face. Benn's been loathe to describe anything about this adult Luffy as cute, what with the nasty burn scar and the eyecatching confidence, but the way he lights up can't really be called anything else. Except eerie, admittedly, mouth pulled just a bit too wide and too free. "She's the smartest! And she knows everything about the sea!"
"Your navigator?" asks Snake, from over Benn's shoulder. Half the crew must have wandered outside by now. The other half are presumably passed out drunk.
"My navigator!" agrees Luffy. He waves. "Hi, Snake! Nami's the best navigator in the world. Even better than you!"
"Oh?" says Snake. He sounds mildly thrown. Benn can't blame him. He doesn't know how he'd react if Luffy started throwing around assertions about whoever his vice-captain is. Shanks just leans back and elbows Snake in the gut, though.
"Yep!" says Luffy, still with that odd poise, that complete self-assurance. He points at Yasopp and snickers. "I bet Usopp's a better sniper than you, too."
"Hey!" says Yasopp, startling. His hands go to his gun, and then flit away. "Hey, wait. Does that mean..."
"He's my sniper, and you can't have him back," announces Luffy, picking his nose.
"Is he," Yasopp says, leaning forward. What little Benn has heard of Yasopp's kid in the sniper's more forthcoming (read: sloshed) moments has been glowingly positive- it's not surprising that this catches his attention as effectively as a fishhook. "Hey, imagine that! Usopp... Has he got a bounty?"
Which is what makes Benn realize that: one, this adult Luffy must have a bounty, almost certainly, if he's really a Grand Line captain at the level he'd implied; two, if it's higher than Shanks' current bounty, which is very respectable and quite frankly wildly outsized for the Blues, his captain is going to be completely insufferable for at least the next week.
Luffy nods enthusiastically. "Yeah! It's less than mine, cause I'm the captain, but it's still really high! And it's more than Nami and Franky but less than Zoro and Sanji."
"Yeah? How high is yours, then?" Yasopp says, eyebrows raised.
"Three billion!" Luffy says. "They just raised it, 'cause I beat Kaidou and everything!"
"What," Shanks says.
"It's still not as high as Shanks, though," Luffy continues absently. "'Cause I just became an Emperor."
"Huh," Shanks says, and then, a moment delayed, slaps his hands to his ears. It reminds Benn precisely of how Luffy (the seven-year-old one) acts when he wants to ignore them. "Wait! Don't tell me anything else!"
Luffy giggles. It's completely familiar, but there's still something about the wide stretch of his smile that seems- strange. Maybe that's the Devil Fruit at work. If this really is Luffy as a young adult, and Benn's decided for simplicity's sake to believe that it is, then he's had it for... probably more than a decade, right? Even if it is mostly useless.
"Does Shanks want to fight, then?" asks Luffy, clasping his hands behind his head, still smiling. "Just a little bit! I'm bored, and Shanks is strong."
That stirs Shanks out of his “lost the bounty-measuring contest” stupor. "You think you can take me on, Anchor?"
Benn honestly isn't sure if his captain even realizes what he's saying, or if he's operating off almost a full year's habit of brushing off Luffy the seven-year-old's challenges.
"Sure," says Luffy, shrugging with the careless assurance of the powerful. "Course I can."
Then the air compresses.
Benn has only ever borne witness to his own captain's conqueror's haki, and even that still sometimes leaves him breathless. Catching the very edges of Luffy's feels like walking in on a catastrophic event minutes after it's already happened, like being bowled over by the indifferent wake of a battleship. Shanks, beside him, taking the full weight of it, almost staggers, and then smiles, and then pushes back.
Benn's ears pop. The few clouds in the sky skitter away in fear. The village goes silent, truly perfectly silent, no insects or snoring from the passed-out pirates on Makino's floor or crash of waves.
Luffy, one hand on his hat, grins.
They let go in the same instant. Sound rushes back. Air returns to weighing nothing. Benn tries not to look winded and probably fails.
A light breeze lifts Shanks's hat until his hand clamps down on it, mirroring Luffy, and Shanks laughs, hysterical and delighted. "Sure, Luffy," he says, other hand drifting to his sword. "Let's fight, then."
Luffy's grin widens, impossibly. Another giggle escapes him, and his eyes flash.
"Okay! Shanks is going to be so surprised!" he announces, and something about that's funny to him too, provoking a peal of laughter to match Shanks's bewildered hysteria.
Benn, obeying his very reasonable and well-tuned sense of foreboding, decides that now is about the right time to start ushering the rest of the crew back towards Party's Bar.
In an unprecedented display of obedience, his crewmates actually do shuffle backwards, some of them more steadily than others. Maybe the feeling of a conquerors' clash has, against all odds, managed to afflict a few of them with self-preservation instincts. (Benn won't count on it lasting.)
Luffy is bouncing on his toes, battered sandals slapping against his heels. Shanks is watching him with, Benn thinks, a bit less bafflement and a bit more caution than before, though he's still grinning wide and sharp. "You got a weapon, Anchor?"
"Nope!" Luffy says. "Don't need one. I've got my Devil Fruit."
Benn is, despite his status as possibly the most sober and definitely the most sane person present, extremely curious to see how this is going to go. He knows Shanks is far from being any sort of pushover; their whole crew decently outsizes the meek and mild sea they're currently vacationing in, but Shanks grew up on the Grand Line. Benn, generally speaking, never doubts his captain's ability to win in a fight.
Luffy is also a full foot shorter than Shanks, and armed with only a dud of a Devil Fruit. But he still looks so perfectly self-assured, standing there cracking his knuckles, even though surely he must know how strong Shanks is, if he really does come from a future where Shanks is- implied to be, at least, it hadn't slipped by Benn- an Emperor of the Sea.
"Okay!" Luffy says. "Let's go!"
He inhales, pounds out a quick rat-a-tat rhythm on his chest, and Benn hears-
Drums?
Luffy bounces in place, once, twice, higher, and on the third hop launches himself upwards, and when Benn looks up to follow him, the sun catches in his eyes and makes them water.
Luffy is a white blur when he comes back out of the sky, and Shanks unsheathes his sword just in time to catch the attack across the blade. Around them, the air ripples with force.
Something bends. It might be Benn's brain. The drums in his ears are loud, and Luffy is laughing as he and Shanks spring apart, that same hysterical cackle that drew them outside in the first place.
Well, at least Benn didn't imagine Luffy falling from the sky and using the street as a trampoline, because he hits the ground and it dents around him, tossing him back up a few feet. His shirt and shorts really have gone white, like they've been sitting out in the sun too long, and his hat's fallen off his head to hang from a string at his neck. (Benn makes a mental note to tell Shanks to get one of those too, because Benn's had to rescue that hat way too many times.)
He's still in motion, bouncing, giggling softly. His hair's gone white, too, and wispy, like soft cloud, and there's more cloud in an arc around his head, framing his face. There's something luminous about his skin.
"Huh," Shanks says. There's a note to his voice Benn can't quite place. "You awakened it?"
"Yep!" says Luffy. "That's what Kaidou said, anyway. Now I can have the most fun!"
"Huh," says Shanks. His eyes are tracking Luffy's erratic movement, undeterred, but he does look a little shell-shocked. Benn would just like to know what clouds have to do with rubber. "Future's full of surprises, I guess."
"Isn't it exciting?" says Luffy. He grins, and this time it is much too eerily wide, and his eyes are a startling sunrise red. "Gum-Gum Whip!"
He twists around, then uses the momentum to throw out a kick that stretches his leg and slams his foot into the blade of Shanks's sword. The air ripples again, and now that he's acclimated to the fight Benn can tell neither of them are putting any actual effort in. They're just playing.
"Nice armament," Shanks says.
Luffy retracts his leg with a pout. "I still can't figure out what to call my moves when I'm like this. That's the hardest part!"
Shanks shifts his footing, and Benn realizes the ground under him is still moving, wavering slightly up and down like a taut surface under tension, and not at all like the solid, beaten dirt that it should by all rights be. He gestures the rest of the crew back another step.
Shanks grins and lunges; Luffy yelps and bounces upwards again, flipping over the bright arc of the blade and over Shanks's head, pushing off his shoulders. Shanks stumbles at the unexpected impact, whirls around not quite fast enough to keep Luffy from grabbing him around the waist with both arms (bending in a way that arms are not meant to bend). Luffy whips around in a tight circle before hurling Shanks bodily across the square into the nearest house, which-
Benn blinks.
Which, just like the packed-dirt road, indents like it's not made of wood and glass and brick at all, and Shanks bounces right back out of its facade again. He even manages to land on his feet, stumbling for a second where Benn almost convinces himself he can actually see little stars rattling around his captain's head.
"Huh," Shanks says faintly again, glancing over his shoulder. "Luffy, did you do that?"
Luffy shrugs, still bouncing in place like he's incapable of standing still. His grin is still huge. "I don't wanna break anything! Mr. Mayor would yell at me. And we're just having fun, anyways."
Now, Benn can admit he doesn't know that much about Devil Fruits- his experience thus far having been limited to a few fights with generally unimpressive users who, if anything, tended to rely too heavily on their abilities- but he's pretty sure Luffy's one isn't supposed to do that.
Shanks winces. "Yeah, good point. Don't want Woop Slap kicking us out." He throws a casual sword slash at Luffy, who dodges just as casually by grabbing his head in his hands and bodily moving it out of the way. "Or," he adds as an afterthought, "calling Garp to complain."
Luffy, midair, pulls a face and crashes to the ground. He looks boneless. Dirt ripples around him.
"Not Gramps!" he whines. Then he laughs, kicking his feet up. "Bet I could take him now, though." His hand drops across his face, covering his eyes. "He'd be so surprised when his Fist of Love doesn't hurt!"
Garp is the kid's ominous grandfather? Garp the Hero?
"Oi, Captain," Benn calls, one hand on the shoulders of whichever of his crewmates are directly next to him just in case they decide to recover their lack of self-preservation. "Would it kill you to tell us what you know, ever?"
Shanks just waves him off, because he's a bastard. Luffy is still laughing to himself in the middle of the street, saying something to nobody in particular about how he could knock over Goa Kingdom too.
"You're fighting me, not causing an international incident," Shanks informs him, sounding very slightly harried. Something about that’s uproariously funny to Luffy too, at least until Shanks makes his point by blasting him with conqueror's haki hard enough to flatten him and half the buildings in town. He bounces back up. So do the buildings.
Benn is absolutely certain that is not how the Gum-Gum Fruit is meant to work.
"Shanks is so pushy!" Luffy complains, giggling, running a hand through the tufts of cloud that've replaced his hair.
Shanks blinks, incredulous, and then makes a face at him. "You're the one who wanted to fight, Anchor."
"You sound like Sanji," Luffy laughs. He grabs his shoulder, winding up. Shanks adjusts his grip on his sword. "But okay!"
And then Luffy stops midmotion, blinks up at the sky. "Ah?"
If any other impossible pirates fall out of the sky, Benn decides, he is not going to deal with it. He is going to go back inside the bar, and, if they haven't yet completely demolished Makino's stock, join the rest of the Red-Hair Pirates snoring on the floor in short order.
As it turns out, the next thing that falls out of the sky isn’t a person, but it is somehow even weirder. What at first appears to be a strangely flesh-colored rope drops down from where Luffy had fallen, rapidly uncoiling from itself until Benn can see that it's not a rope at all, but a chain of hands, each growing from the last in little bursts of flower petals.
Okay. Sure. This may as well happen. Whatever. He's pretty sure he's still recovering from the shock of briefly turning into rubber.
"Ah! Robin!" Luffy says brightly. He sets his hat back on his head, and the white light seeps out of him like paint, the clouds on his head dispersing into the air and leaving plain black hair behind. "That means it's time to go. Bye, Shanks! Bye, everybody! I'll see you soon! Tell Makino I said hi!"
Without any further ado, he grabs onto the last hand of the chain, extended and waiting, and, giggling, is yanked unceremoniously back into the sky.
"See you soon, Luffy!" Shanks shouts after him, grinning ear-to-ear. He watches until Luffy vanishes into the blue and white of the sky; when he turns around, Benn has an eyebrow raised. "What?"
"What Devil Fruit did you say you gave that kid?" Benn asks.
Shanks frowns. "I told you, it was the Gum-Gum Fruit. And I didn't give it to him! He ate it on his own! You were there!"
"Rubber doesn't do," Benn pauses, tries to find the right words. Waves a hand. "Any of that."
"Ah," Shanks says, sheathing his sword and plonking himself contentedly onto the ground. "Didn't I tell you about awakening? I'm sure I told you about awakening."
"What," insists Benn, hopping off the bar's porch and stalking over to him, "do clouds and numinous auras of light have to do with rubber? Paramecias don't do costume changes."
Shanks waves a hand vaguely. "Don't worry about it. Also, they so do. I once met a paramecia user who did nothing but costume changes."
"You're changing the subject," says Benn, standing over him.
"I am," agrees Shanks amiably, then looks up. Reluctantly, Benn follows his gaze to see another chain of hands descending from the sky, passing a black dot downward this time. When they reach roof height, they vanish into a haze of petals, and the black dot in question plummets directly into Shanks's lap. Benn needs a vacation from his vacation.
"Ow!" says Shanks.
"Hi, Shanks!" says seven-year-old Monkey D. Luffy, because of course that's who it is. "My crew in the future is so cool! There's this big blue shark guy called Jinbe, and a scary swordsman, and- Oh!" He waves at the sky, and shouts. "Thanks, Robin!"
A disembodied voice chuckles from somewhere in the vicinity. "No problem, Captain."
Seven-year-old Monkey D. Luffy, future Emperor of the Sea, grins wide and sunny, repositions himself on Shanks's lap, and drops right off to sleep.
Benn just stares at him.
"A Warlord and the Demon of Ohara," Yasopp mutters behind him, incredulous. "And a three billion beri bounty."
"Benn," declares Shanks after a long, long moment, looking utterly beleaguered, "we are never going to speak of this again."