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Usopp knew his mother was going to die the very first day the doctor asked for money. His mother used to say the greatest wealth was the love they shared, but love didn’t pay bills. So, the woman grew sick and faded little by little, like a candle in the wind.
The doctor had warned them it would happen, but Usopp refused to believe it. His mother was too strong and brave to die. She was so brave that she had sent his father off with a smile from the harbor. She smiled for so many days that even the marines got offended and forced her to stop smiling under the threat of a million-berry fine—or at least that’s what Banchina told Usopp when he got angry at the blurry figure of his father for not picking him up from school, for not playing with him, or for not teaching him how to pee standing up.
Usopp had to be as brave as his mother had been because someday the pirates would come, and they couldn’t find him crying in bed, could they?
Refusing to believe that a man more thief than doctor could tell him his mother would die, he decided to take matters into his own hands and find the cure for death. He was just a kid, but a kid who could do many things. Usopp had rescued a fourth princess from a bull-headed kraken under the sea at the tender age of three. By five, he had discovered fifty treasures on one hundred and fifty different islands.
There were very few things the great Captain Usopp couldn’t do, and defeating death wasn’t one of them.
“The cemetery’s so full there’s not even room for one more soul with all these sicknesses and dead kids,” Usopp overheard mister Sabino, the shopkeeper, grumble. Sometimes mister Sabino gave him leftover fish bones.
So, Usopp went to the town hall to file a complaint, writing reluctantly that they couldn’t allow anyone else to die if there wasn’t space in the cemetery for their ghosts.
They had no choice but to call the pirates to bring a magician or one of those doctors from the icy lands to cure his mother.
“The pirates are coming! The pirates are coming!”
One day, the pirates would arrive with a ship full of giants, and the problems that humans considered big would shrink. Because bills, illness, and hunger were becoming far too big to be human problems alone.
The pirates would come, and his mother would be saved. But in the meantime, Usopp had to help her bathe.
“The pirates are coming! The pirates are coming!”
The pirates would arrive, but in the meantime, he had to help her eat.
“The pirates are coming! The pirates are coming!”
The pirates would bring back his mother’s joy, the joy Yasopp had taken with him on his ship. But until then, Usopp would cry with her during their farewells.
“The pirates are coming! The pirates are coming!”
Banchina died in the summer, under a merciless sun. And even though the cemetery was too full for another soul, it had room for her body. She had grown so small from eating so little that there was even extra space in the box for him to crawl in.
Hope turned into lies, and Usopp ran far from the cemetery, searching for refuge from the giant-sized problems.
Kaya found him beneath a bush as she strolled through town with her ethereal little frame, flitting over the streets like a fairy untouched by the rot and hunger below. She knelt beside him, and seeing him cry, she placed a gentle hand on his back, tracing small, soft circles to soothe an unsoothable sadness.
“What’s wrong, Usopp? Does something hurt?”
The first truth he had spoken in months was the one that should have stayed a lie:
“I just buried my mother.”
The words hurt so much that he quickly hid them under a lie.
“She was taken by the sea because the current drowns those who love too much unless they’re on a pirate ship.”
“Really?”
Usopp looked at her face for the first time and saw genuine curiosity shining softly in her eyes. The corner of her mouth curved slightly in that unmistakable way men search for in the faces of the women they love, like his father had. And the lie danced on his tongue, coaxing the rest of her smile.
“It almost happened to my dad once, in the Grand Line! Luckily, he’s a pirate! He was near the terrible Blue Monster of Elbaf’s Great Waterfalls when a wave of love hit him…”
The lie went on and on for days and nights until Kaya had to go home, and Usopp had to beg for fish bones at the market.
The lie followed him down the streets and held his hand whenever he looked into Kaya’s eyes, and his heart slammed into his chest.
And one day, without realizing it, the pirates returned to his lips.
“The pirates are coming! The pirates are coming!”