Author's Note: I wrote this quite a while ago—right after we learned of Brooke's connection to Laboon, as a matter of fact. It was based on the assumption that he would join the crew.

Disclaimer: I own nothing recognizable from One Piece.

He Fought Them

When Brooke first met the Straw Hat Pirates, they had been to him a moment's release from the misery that was his shadowless, skeleton-ed life—a small indulgence. Right from the beginning, that captain of theirs had been so very cheerful, not even fearing or ridiculing his skeletal self. While his crew had been less than happy with Brooke's appearance, the captain, nonetheless, was adamant about having Brooke join the crew.

Even when Brooke agreed to this invitation, it was not because he thought that he would stay with them. It was a sort of dream. He had been all alone for half a century, dead and useless, and then his shadow had been stolen, rendering him incapable of returning to the one comrade of his that still remained. Then a merry pirate crew came along and asked him to join them, and they had fun together...and lived happily ever after.

Brooke may have been dead, but that didn't mean that he couldn't feel the pain that never left him, always aching in his nonexistent heart, and became an overwhelming burning whenever he actually tried to face it. He had never pretended to be brave. He feared so much that sometimes he wondered if he was doomed to live his death entirely in fear.

So he couldn't resist that brief dream—that he joined this merry pirate crew, became a pirate once again, sailed all the way around the Grand Line with them, and returned to Laboon a member of the Pirate King's crew.

But then the issue of his nonexistent shadow came up when that beautiful young lady brought out the mirror, and the dream was shattered. And then they found themselves in Thriller Bark. Now that the dream was gone, it was not so hard for Brooke to simply leave these wonderful people and return to what he knew that he must do.

They followed him.

Never in his wildest dreams had he ever imagined anyone that would plunge of their own free will into a place that was clearly labeled 'dangerous'; and that, too, being because the captain wanted to find him as much as he wanted see this 'Ghost Island.'

That wasn't all. When he told the shipwright and archaeologist about the whale named Laboon who awaited his return at the Grand Line's entrance, they actually expressed admiration for him. And when they passed this story on to their comrades, why, five of them had actually met Laboon; and their captain had comforted the suicidal whale, which had been grieving its comrades' death!

In all honesty, when Brooke heard about this, he began to wonder what, exactly, this captain of theirs was. Why was he always so happy? How did he always know by pure instinct who would make a good friend? How was it that, pirate though he was, he seemed to leave a trail of blessings behind him wherever he was, as though he were a sort of angel? How was it that he acted so idiotic, but he always had his priorities straight when it really mattered?

When the entire crew asked Brooke to join them after they had learned of Laboon, Brooke did so happily.

That was just the beginning.

The more he learned of the crew, the stranger they seemed to him. At first, it was just small things. Like how everyone pretty much agreed that Luffy was an idiot, yet if he gave an order and was serious and adamant about it, they followed it even if it made no sense to them. Or how once you joined that crew, you may as well have sold your soul to Luffy for all the hold he had over you.

Then, as he learned more and more about his fellow-crewmembers, he noticed something that bemused him to no end.

Everyone—every single member of the Straw Hat crew—had seriously fought their captain at some point. Some of these reasons were laughable; others had tears streaming down Franky's cheeks; others were simply because some of the crew members had started out as enemies to the Straw Hat.

Brooke had first heard about how Nico Robin had been working for an organization called Baroque Works before joining the Straw Hats. Apparently, the Straw Hats were extremely good friends with Princess Vivi of Alabasta (another bemusing fact about them—the way they so easily seemed to earn the respect, and on some occasions friendship, of people working for the government) and Baroque Works had been trying to take over Alabasta. Robin had been the vice president of this organization that they fought in earnest; they had even fought her personally on a number of occasions. Brooke still had yet to figure out how she had ended up a member of the Straw Hat Pirates.

The second member he had heard about was the cook, Sanji. Luffy had been laughing about how difficult Sanji had been to convince to join them. Apparently, Luffy had even gone as far as to nearly strangle the man in an attempt to get him to join. Even without this piece of knowledge, Brooke figured that Sanji and Luffy had probably gotten off on the wrong foot or something from the way that Sanji blew up at at Luffy quite often and the way that they talked about the captain raiding the fridge as if it were potentially harmful (even with that lock).

Then Brooke heard about how when Luffy and Sanji first saw Chopper, their automatic reaction had been to try and eat the reindeer. Apparently, they had spent a good part of their first day in each other's acquaintance running around the place as Chopper screamed, Luffy tried to eat him raw, and Sanji tried to catch him before Luffy so that he could cook him properly. Brooke thought that sounded terrifying, and shuddered at the thought. Poor Chopper.

It wasn't all that much of a secret that Franky and Luffy had started out hating each other's guts. Honestly, when one thought about it from a 'normal person' perspective, the reason why they hated each other had nothing to do with either of them. But when you looked from a Luffy perspective, the fact that Franky's underlings had nearly killed Usopp rendered Franky worthy of torture; and when you looked from a Franky perspective, the fact that a pirate had destroyed his home and taken out every single one of his underlings just because they were doing their job was unforgivable. This was another instance where Brooke had trouble figuring out how they had ended up comrades.

He heard about Luffy fighting Zoro in earnest in an argument between Nami and Luffy and Zoro. Nami, exasperated with her failed attempts to try and convince the two men that they weren't exactly intelligent and so they should listen to her, had sited an example of a time when they had knocked out two (supposedly horribly powerful) people in the vicinity and destroyed a number of buildings as they tried to kill each other. Brooke had had to run to the other side of the ship so they wouldn't hear him laughing once he heard that this had been a result of Zoro slicing about a hundred enemies through while Luffy was asleep, and Luffy, upon waking, thinking that Zoro had cut all the "nice people who welcomed us with a feast" because they hadn't had his favorites among the foods. Only the Straw Hats could have such a serious-yet-comical fight, Brooke thought.

Brooke only heard about Luffy fighting Nami when Luffy pointed out, in the same argument, that when they had first met, Nami had bound him up and handed him over to the enemy without a second thought. Considering how Nami retorted that he was a pirate so he deserved what he got, Brooke seriously began to wonder if Luffy had some sort of magnetism that made anyone he really wanted to join him submit in the end.

Since Usopp and Luffy were always goofing around with Chopper, and Luffy had no reason to eat Usopp since he only displayed cannibalistic tendencies when he was delusional and earnestly starving, Brooke assumed for a while that these two had never really fought. How wrong he was. He heard the story from Chopper about how Usopp and Luffy had a real, serious fight—one whose recounting always, without fail, brought tears to Franky's eyes. And they were not the tears of laughter that rolled down Franky's cheeks at the mention of the Luffy v.s. Zoro fight. Brooke, too, cried (but he had no eyes, so he had no tears; it was just a gesture of sorts, not real crying) at the recounting of this story. He could just imagine it: Usopp fighting with all his might though he knew he had no chance. The comrades on the ship watching in sorrow and horror as their captain and sniper fought as though they were no longer comrades and knowing that this time, there was no simple misunderstanding that just had to be mended to reconcile the two. Luffy finally knocking Usopp out in a single blow. And finally, the tears that streamed down Luffy's face in the shadow of his straw hat's brim as he turned his back on his comrades so that they would not see; the tears that collected in a pool beneath Usopp's fallen, bloody, broken body that really had been in no condition to be dueling in the first place, even if he had had no chance of winning the duel anyway.

As Brooke watched his new comrades, happy and closer than ever, he thought of the many rifts that had formed between them and been mended to bring them closer and closer together. By fighting Luffy, somehow, they all had gained a new respect for him.

And he could not help but wonder how close the day was when he would end up fighting his new captain.

Author's Notes: This, actually, is something I dug up a while back. I wrote it, liked it, deemed it inadequate, and therefore deposited it on my Greatest Journal account. Normally it would have sat there with all the other junk, but whenever I empty the trash on my computer (which is only about four, five times a year) I make sure to go through everything in there to make sure everything in there is really trash. (Unfortunate habit of mine, impulsiveness. I toss things away in fits of strong emotions or lack there of, and then regret it for years to come.) That's how I came across this again. I read it over, and decided that maybe it wasn't as bad as I'd originally thought.