Title: There it Was
Word Count: 775
Pairing: None.
Rating: T
Disclaimer: If Kanthia owned One Piece, this is definately not how it would end.

-Warning-

Things die. Seriously.

And so it came to pass that the young Roronoa Zoro contracted malaria and died.

His death was swift but painful, and as his last mouthful of air passed into his aching chest he whispered to Chopper that it was too bad he wasn't dying of an infected wound or something interesting. Chopper said he wasn't going to die but it was too late. Like the men of old used to say, there it was.

He was just a swordsman. He couldn't map or fix or cook or heal wounds. Life could go on without him clanking around at dawn and stealing grog from the kitchen, an unfortunate but real expendability. A redundancy. Just a man who lived and died with a broken dream.

They couldn't go back to his home because they didn't know where his home was, and they couldn't go back to the dojo that had sired him because they were halfway up the Grand Line. So they threw his body overboard, bequeathing him to the cold sea with a few useless words.

Fights were harder after that. Nobody had ever taken the time or effort to notice the immense pile of bodies Zoro always managed to create. The difficulties and losses that followed wormed into their conscious and unconscious thought, making them question their loyalties to each other; each silently considering the expendability of their nakama. Arguments became commonplace. The navigator whispered that anyone could fix a ship and fire bullets and lie, and they certainly didn't need him slowing them down even more in battle. The cook conspired with her and two weeks to the day after Zoro's death they tied their marksman up in his sleep and threw him overboard.

Without the good humour of the liar to keep them somewhat chipper, a dark cloud of impenetrable gloom settled over the unlucky band of five. The archaeologist and the doctor turned against the navigator and cook, blaming them for the situation. The captain lay on the deck all day slowly chewing old meat and not really thinking. He couldn't bear to.

And the weather changed to a bitter cold that causes tempers to run high. After a rather rude comment directed at the older woman about the size of her hips, the navigator found herself with a hand wrapped around her slender neck and died in agony.

The ship no longer moved gaily on in the sparkling sea in which it floated; it had no one to read the winds or note the weather. The cook blamed the woman he had once lavished with attention and picked bitter feuds with her. The reindeer tried to get in between them but soon found himself caught in a three-way free-for-all.

Without a navigator to guide them to an island with a real source of food, the doctor soon proved his last usefulness in a delicious steamed venison with a side of seagull and boiled seawater. Perhaps it may have been smarter to ask the archaeologist to grow limbs to serve as food, but that was weird and required too much teamwork.

Time went on like geese that paddle on stupidly towards an unknown destination.

Sallow-eyed and starving under the same stars that had seen him starve once before, the cook lost the last vestiges of his sanity and realized that the dark woman who sat without stirring for long hours was the cause of his problems. He took a seat opposite her and conspired for six hours until the solution dawned on him; he prepared the seagull that night in a delightfully wonderful manner with just the right amount of floor cleaner to see his job done. As he brought it in the galley door, he suddenly found himself totally and very much dead from complications concerning too many hands at once. Satisfied with her completely calm murder which had been committed without even the turning of a head, she ate her very last meal.

Luffy awoke from his hunger-induced coma into a strange nightmare where all of his nakama were dead and his mighty ship sailed on silently like the ghosts of ages past. He pinched the flesh between his elbow and the fold of skin and did not understand why he could not wake up.

He needed a bigger shock.
What was shocking?
Cold water.
Cold water was shocking. That would wake him up.

He launched himself into the black water in the dead of night and waited to wake.

And there wasn't much that anyone could do. I mean, there it was.