A/N: Some of you may know me from the SpaceBattle forums. I lean more towards writing omakes for other works when it comes to One Piece, but I decided not too long ago that I would try my hand at an SI.

Yeah, you can probably tell that I've read This Bites!. Because who has started a One Piece SI recently who hasn't, really?

For as long as I can recall, I've always had the strangest fascination with death.

It was often mentioned as a thoughtless joke that my interests had to do with my name. Perhaps so, but there's something within the concept that calls to me, in a voice that makes my spine crawl. There is the knowledge that it will one day rise and claim me, and I will be left with nothing in that moment but the uncertainty of all that I had ever been told. Who would be correct, and was truth something I would be capable of comprehending once I was gone?

It's usually these thoughts, to be shared with friends once past the point of tipsy and entering the territory of depression, that keep me up at night. It's acknowledging these thoughts that makes me believe I'm smarter than anyone around me, even though I'm well aware that's not true. Seeing through one layer and accepting defeat isn't proof of anything but the conviction I've lacked to think on it any further.

It is my dollar-store philosophy, bolstered and maintained by my own belief that none of it truly does matter. Maybe it's just because I'm still a teenager, or maybe I'm correct, but I like to think of it more as nobody is truly correct, because the questions are so plentiful that there isn't enough time or resources to find them all.

We only live in what we may understand, and death is not something that we understand. It is something that we must learn, as all those who continue to live after they have died apparently have. They exist now beyond our comprehension, but we still know of them. We know of their exploits, of the dreams they inspired and the changes they left behind.

It had been my ambition at one point, to be like them. It was something so irrevocably appealing, to finally find an answer to the questions that I had been asking myself since childhood. I wanted, in my last moments, to know that I had made a change grand enough to be spoken of for millennia after my passing. I wanted to be able to hear about myself, on the other side.

Unfortunately for me, it just wasn't meant to be.

My name is Lucas DeMitri Cask. My friends call me Luke. The precious few who know of my fascination call me Casket when we're alone.

I like pizza with pineapple and anchovies on it. I dislike spiders.

And five minutes ago, I died.

It hadn't even been that grand a death, either. No flames, no fame, hardly any blood until it was all over. No, if anything, it was downright… lame. Eventful for all of five seconds, before the greatest mystery of any lifetime was solved for me.

I slipped in the shower. To be more specific; while I was belting out Weightless by All Time Low at the top of my lungs, I threw my head back a bit too enthusiastically in response to the chorus and sent it right through the glass wall behind me. The pain had been momentary, but after that I was falling to the floor, where I landed on my neck. The last thing I heard was something crunching just below my ear, and then nothing.

No doubt the dumbest fucking thing I'd ever done in my life, not that I would get the chance to top it now. Whoever found the body would be getting an eyeful of me naked, with a stupid grin on my face as a result of the song I'd been in the middle of.

I was too woozy from the impact to really understand what had happened. All I could do was close my eyes as someone… might have shouted my name from behind the closed and locked bathroom door. It was hard to understand through the fog clouding my head.

And that's when things got a little… weird.

XxX

If you asked me to explain what I went through after closing my eyes, I would have thrown up on your shoes and started the cry. If you asked me why I had just had a mental breakdown after ruining your footwear, I would have gone on to tell you the complete truth.

I had absolutely no idea what had happened. I could tell you that when I figured out that I could still think, I was screaming on a beach, and before then was simply pandemonium on my senses.

I couldn't quite recall… clouds. The first image that had crossed my mind was of clouds in all different shades of the colour spectrum and more shapes than I knew could exist. I could remember reaching for one and my hand passing through it. I could remember a tug around my navel with every new colour that entered my vision, conventional to dulled to shades that I never knew existed.

Then there had…or maybe hadn't been hands. Feet. Arms and legs and maybe a torso or two, circling around me as I fell. I remember watching, feeling, as my body was torn apart, my head separated from my shoulders, my mouth still frozen in a stupid grin. I felt as tendrils, visible despite me not being able to seethem, engulfed my face and burrowed through my skin. I remember the tears that couldn't even fall from my face as my body was torn apart and then replaced, destroyed and remade, ground into nothingness and built anew from the ashes.

There could have been talking, words that I would never understand being thrown around as shadows argued. I lay before them, not able to move as they went back and forth, up and over, around and around and around until I was finally able to close my eyes and open my mouth. I couldn't comprehend what I knew or how I knew it. All I could understand was the agony of a body that was mine and wasn't, of an existence that should have finished, of a life that I had already seen flash before my eyes.

The images and sequences may have all passed together, some taking minutes while others took months, and all of them contained within the same blurred haze that I couldn't lift from my eyes. All I could get out; as my bones disintegrated anew, my mind faded, my consciousness ebbed, was a single plea for help.

It was at that point that I felt the sand on my back. I cracked an eye open and immediately slammed it shut as the sun burned at my retina. I tried to take a breath, and the air rattling down my throat immediately opened my mind to a new problem.

Everything, my entire being, from the tips of my toenails to the ends of every strand of hair atop my head; all of it burned. It pulsed inside the bones that cracked as I arched my back off the hot sand, a pain more fantastic than anything else I had ever felt. My fingers raked the ground, my howls of pain actually making birds evacuate where they'd been roosting in the trees.

Through the tears in my eyes, I could only just see the faint mist that was rising from my chest. As soon as it left the surface of my body, an unsettling chill set in the skin that had just been vacated, shivers running up and down my spine as I did my best to push myself away from whatever I was looking at.

The last of the blue mist left my skin. As suddenly as it had started, the pain went with it. I was left propped up on my elbows, gasping like a fish out of water, as I watched the mist drift upwards. The higher it reached, the more transparent it became, until I had nothing to stare at but the clouds above my head.

My limbs were shaking, which I pointedly ignored as I clambered to my feet. The back of my head throbbed as I planted both of my hands in the sand and pushed, and my neck clicked painfully as my spine carried me up. My body felt odd, lighter than it should have, and my stomach lurched once I let go of the ground and tried to rely on my own balance to keep me up.

The sound of shattering glass echoed throughout my ears, unbidden and out of place among the crashing waves that I had been listening to up until that point. Bile rose in my throat as my thoughts caught up with me, and before I could even manage two steps in any direction, I had hunched over and thrown up whatever had been in my stomach.

I died I died I died I diedIdiedIdiedIDIEDIDIEDBUTIDIDN'T-

My heart jumped in my chest. My eyes snapped open at the sensation, a low keening whine rattling up from my burning throat in place of the sob I had been going for. I stared down with bleary eyes, the noise escaping me morphing into a choked squeak as I actually looked at myself.

To start off with, I was naked. That wasn't all that surprising; I'd snapped my neck and stabbed myself in the brain while I was in the shower. I'd have been more concerned if I'd woken up clothed, even if it would have been preferable to the sand that I could now feel in very uncomfortable places.

What was marginally more disturbing was… it. Or, that it wasn't mine. I knew mine; if there was one thing I knew, it was mine. And this most certainly was not mine.

The shock of seeing that connected to me was enough to snap me out of the trance I'd gotten myself into. It was enough to actually make me see that I'd splattered stomach acid all over my own feet, and hear the waves behind me.

Turning around, I shambled like a zombie – hah! – down the beach I'd woken up on, instinctively drawing back once the water proved itself colder than I had been anticipating. I stood there for a moment, just staring at the waves that almost touched the tips of my toes, before the smell of vomit eventually overrode the error messages my brain had been throwing out. The freezing cold water was soon enough reaching up to my waist, where I just… stopped, heedless of all the sharp shit that was poking into the bottom of my foot.

Where the fuck was I? I mean, granted, wherever I'd ended up was probably objectively better than suburbia, Australia, but I wouldn't have minded having some coordinates.

The island I'd woken up on didn't offer up any clues. I turned around, accidentally putting too much effort into the action and almost losing my footing with how quickly my body moved. There were enough trees for it to be considered a jungle, and there was enough sand for it to be classified a beach, and I could see one or two pretty big rocks as well. From where I was standing, there was nothing to suggest how I managed to get here and why I could function properly. As far as I could tell, that wasn't supposed to happen after a surprise lobotomy.

So… was I dead? Was this what came after, an island paradise?

No, seriously, I didn't get it. Where was the fire and brimstone? This hadn't been what I lived my life for.

Letting out a tired sigh, I moved to scratch the back of my head, though that itch died pretty quickly when I got a good look at my hand. Or, more specifically, my index finger. The entire thing was pitch black, with ripples going along the skin that made me worry that it was about to crumble into dust. Experimentally, I flicked at it with my left middle finger – I'd already died once today, and if I did spontaneously combust then I was already standing where I wanted my ashes anyway – and came away from that experience with a throbbing fingernail.

So, here I was, standing in the shallows of an island that may have been deserted, with a single finger the colour and apparent density of obsidian. I was also completely naked, with severe modifications to the most important aspect of my body, had already thrown up all over myself, and… was that a change of clothes hanging from a tree branch all the way back on shore?

I held a hand above my eyes to block out the sun and squinted. A pair of boxers, a pair of briefs (ooh, variety!), a pair of socks, a black t-shirt with a purple skull printed on the front (my favourite), a dark grey pair of jeans (also my favourite), a flamboyant neon orange belt (don't judge me, I'm dead), and a clunky looking jacket with more pockets than what was strictly necessary. Yes, that was a change of clothes hanging from a tree branch all the way back on shore.

Hmm. My eyesight had really improved during all that time I was a corpse. Come to think of it, where were my glasses, and why didn't I need them anymore?

Your other body didn't survive the journey, so I put this one together for you.

Oh. Cool. Thanks, strange writing that had just appeared in the ocean beside me.

No problem.

Well, now that I had an answer to that question- wait a minute.

My head shot down fast enough for the phantom pains in my neck to become real. I paid that morbid reality no mind, far too busy with the fact that my newly painted finger was scrawling a message in the water in front of me, and that I had absolutely no control over it or the arm it was connected to.

Sorry for grabbing a stomach that was already full, that couldn't have been pleasant. Still, it was the best fit, and at least you made it. First one I managed to get past those Life assholes, haha! High five!

Numbly, I raised the hand I still had control over, blinking so quickly that I may as well have just closed my eyes for all the good it was doing me. My out of control hand collided with the one I had offered, and the limb immediately collapsed backwards.

"…Is this normal?" I didn't even register the pain as my voice, usually a bass tone that I was so proud of, came out will all the dignity of a dying squeaky toy. My hand lashed out, carving a single word into the ocean before returning to my side.

Nope.

...Great. Now I was talking to myself. And I was responding. Absently, I pinched my cheek, and almost celebrated when I didn't actually feel it at all. The only things that kept me from concluding that this was a dream was the pain I had already gone through, and the freezing cold water that I'd been standing in long enough to lose sensation in my body. Also, it occurred to me that I should have made arrangements to leave the water over a minute ago, because I losing strength in my legs.

I set a stumbling pace back to the sandy beach, the water lashing against my lower half and almost making me trip too many times to count. It didn't help that one of my arms was flailing out of control, writing out sentence after sentence as I fought the tide, the words following after me and irritatingly easy to see among the waves.

Alright, you're confused, easy enough to see. Lemme just get this outta the way quick. You died, kid.

I finally managed to stumble out of the water, even after going way further out than I had originally thought. The words weren't deterred in the least; they made the transition from water to sand so easily that there may as well not have been a transition in the first place.

I made it two steps, doing my best to ignore the words and the hollow feeling in my chest that they caused, when my arm began to spasm anew and I was forced to the sand so it could continue writing.

Oi, quit ignoring me. Your family has already gone through the funeral, and you're decomposing in your coffin right now.

"Yes, alright, I kind of figured." The wonder of this new development had faded, leaving me with nothing but the conclusion that I wasn't going to crawl across a beach just to reach my clothes, magical arm and finger be damned.

Don't get me wrong, I was confused, and maybe a little bit scared. But I was also wet, and I now had sand all over my legs. It felt horrible; I felt horrible, which my arm must have picked up on, because control over it returned to me and I was able to climb to my feet.

I managed to make my way over to the tree without incident. My legs were reawakening, and I was in the middle of thanking my six-and-a-bit feet of height for actually allowing me to reach the branch my clothes were strewn about on when whoever had possessed my limb decided to start writing once more.

At least this time they chose the tree, instead of the ground. Manoeuvring my body so I could actually get into the boxers was a chore and a half, which I tackled with all the enthusiasm of someone who didn't want to die of infection in the jungle. The extremely laboured breathing would have to remain as the only evidence that I was still panicking quite a bit, even as I read what it was my hand had to say.

Yes. I know. It had been a long day, and I didn't have a towel.

That life is over for you, but through a series of shenanigans and unbelievable coincidences, a new project opened up in my department and you happened to be the soul chosen for it. So congrats on your second lease on life, BUT, that's all it is. Sorry to say kid, but you ARE still dead. And that's where things get a little complex.

"Oh, that's where things get a little complex?" Something deep in the trees in front of me let off a guttural growl, the noise easily echoing down the entirety of the beach. My head snapped up at the noise, which lead to me hastily pulling my boxers up the rest of the way and desperately patting down the jacket's many pockets for… a weapon? A phone? A flare, I don't know, something to defend myself with.

Not that I made it a habit of carrying weapons with me, but they always had their uses. Either way, the pockets were empty, except for a strange lump that I could feel in the far breast pocket. I couldn't quite reach the zipper to that one, and wouldn't be able to until I pulled the jacket down, so for now I would just have to focus on dislodging my pants without ripping them. Even if I hated going outside more than necessary, I at least knew that exposed skin in a damn jungle could and often would end up being a bad idea.

It was at that point that my hand ran out of room on the patch of trunk it had been using. Which led to me almost falling and twisting my shoulder as I was forced onto the tips of my toes so it could reach higher, while I was in the middle of putting my pants on.

See, I don't have a name. Don't need one. One of the titles I have is death, but that's shared between every infinite possibility and reality, so don't get too excited. I'm far from the top.My arm jerked upwards once more, further than I could compensate for, which left me dangling in the air as it continued to thrash about. I could feel all the progress I'd made in getting my jeans on literally slipping away, which was why when I saw the thin branch right in front of my face, I sunk my teeth into it and managed to grant myself some stability. Honestly, it felt like a smart idea at the time.

My hand was finally slowing down, which I only acknowledged from the corner of my eye as it stabbed a full stop into the bark.Come to think of it, I'm barely above an intern, but that's where you come in. I've got a promotion riding on you, alright? All you have to do is perform.

I grunted around the branch, not too thrilled with the idea of trying to form words with a full mouth. These teeth were pretty damn sturdy; I could actually feel the tree branch buckling underneath them as I pulled my pants up around my waist. Once they were secured and I'd managed to swipe the, admittedly garish, belt from the tree, I relinquished my grip on the branch, falling at least half a meter before I hit the sand and stumbled back onto my ass.

My arm was moving before I could. At this point I was just somewhat annoyed as I looped the belt through my jeans' waistband.

See, there's all this corporate nonsense and hoops that we have to jump through to do our jobs. We exist in perfect harmony with Life, but let's be real, they're a bunch of hoity toity pricks. Long story short, we've found a way to cut some corners and recycle some souls, because we're getting an influx.

"Influx of souls?" I repeated, one eyebrow notched upwards. If I was talking to some authority on life, I would have giggled like a high-schooler at the implications.

Nope, instead I was talking to some sort of avatar of the afterlife. And wasn't that a sentence I never thought I would say?

There's something happening in some alternate reality that connects to our office, and people are dropping like damn flies. We have to sign off on every death. We've got a couple of your years' work ahead of us, and even if we're eternal and forever, that's still a pain in the ass. So we made a deal. Put new production on hold for a little while whilst we funnel those souls back into the system. Now, here's where you come in.

My possessed hand whipped to the side, the fingers stretching out as it dipped towards the sand. I had one single moment to realise what was about to happen, for all the good it did me. I only got far enough to slam my eyes and mouth closed as my hand swiped through the sand, destroying the words that had been etched there and spraying sand everywhere.

Only a patch of my chest, which was where I'd managed to get my other hand up to, remained untouched. Using the back of that hand, I wiped as much sand as I could away from my face, snorting and then hacking up hopefully at least a large amount of what had gotten up my nose. I spat it to the side, shook my head a few times to dislodge anything that may have ended up in my hair, and then finally glanced down as my arm stopped thrashing uncontrollably.

The Life higher-ups don't like the plan, but they've been around long enough to know the pains of paperwork. So, we got to choose one soul in our possession who had yet to pass on, and resurrect them in another universe. After a period of exactly three years, a vanguard of Life would appear before you in the form of the greatest warrior to ever exist in that reality, and the success or failure of the operation and project in general is decided in a duel to the death. You put on a good showing, we actually get to go home on time for the foreseeable future. You do poorly, and we throw you in the deepest pit in the underworld until you've learned your lesson. You die, and that's it. Game over, soul gone forever, enjoy never having existed and existing forever in the infinite expanse of possibilities.

I blinked.

Then I wiped my hands on my jeans.

Then I rubbed my eyes.

And then I blinked again, and the writing still, in all that time, hadn't changed into something that made sense.

Which was somewhat hypocritical of me, considering that I wasn't a crying puddle on the beach by now, but until now whatever was talking to me hadn't wanted me to actually do anything. I was dead, why couldn't I enjoy being dead?

"…Excuse me?"

The catch is, you're not supposed to know any of this. I'm breaking the rules by telling you, but what are they gonna do, fire me?

I was supposed to go into a fight to the death with the 'greatest warrior to ever exist' BLIND?

"EXCUSE ME?"

So, I'm the one overseeing you for the most part, and I was allowed to give you three things to get you started. One of them was that nifty new body, and another is that Haki you have there on your finger. The third is the one I'm most proud of, though-

"Whoa, whoa, back up!" I waved my hands, both of them, through the air. I got more sand in my hair, gesturing this way and that at nothing in particular, but I'd wanted attention and now I apparently had it. "Souls are real? A battle to the death? HAKI!? Are you telling me this is-"

My hand abruptly returned to the ground. It almost took my head with it; it probably would have if I hadn't moved it out from behind me a second before it was repossessed.

Well, yeah, I went through your watch history on YouTube. I saw all those theory videos. Keep up, chuckles. Anyway, the final little piece that I'm giving you is what's in your pocket over there.

My finger ripped itself out of the beach, swerving around and taking my upper body with it so it could point towards my jacket. It took me a moment, a second of staring at the dark colouration of the digit and repeating that one word in my head, to understand exactly what was being asked of me.

My stomach felt emptier than before as I pushed myself to my feet, the sand harder to traverse than ever. It was only a few steps to the base of the tree, but I still reached it far too quickly, unheeding of the cost of my jacket or its status as a gift as I pulled it out of the tree and went for the only pocket that I knew had something in it.

My fingers trembled slightly on the zip. I'm not kidding when I say that I seriously did not want to open it.

In the end, it took a force that was not my own to pull the zipper down. Taking the hint, I swallowed the trepidation and reached into the pocket, my fingers closing gently around the soft object that had been placed inside. There was not a force on the planet that could have forced me to hammer that final nail into the coffin of my reality, so it really sucked for me that I had something to fit that criteria – quite literally – on hand.

My hand withdrew. Within it was what could only be a Devil Fruit.

It was a tomato, or at least the same shape and colour as a tomato. Its skin was swirled and flecked with tiny black specks, an image that left my stomach twisting in on itself at the prospect of actually eating the thing. It wasn't larger than any other tomato I'd ever seen, nor was it heavier than any other tomato I'd ever held. It didn't even have an obnoxious smell.

Despite that, I felt ready to hurl all over again.

My hand struck out, an unwelcome feeling at this point. I focused on how glad I was that I'd dropped my jacket before it could be dashed against the tree once again, the previous writing being maliciously scribbled over as I was forced to orbit the tree's trunk.

The words were bigger this time, more obvious, blaring at anybody who was looking. It was intimidating, frightening, maddening to see unravel; the Devil Fruit's soft skin began to compress in my grip before I forced myself to relax it.

The words circled the tree, which meant that I would have to as well in order to grasp their full meaning.

The thing about the label 'Devil'? It's mostly a technicality. So what do you say, kid, do you accept the contract?

My breath hissed out between my teeth as I brought my hand up to stare at the Fruit. The unassuming, seemingly innocent little Fruit that would give me superpowers and likely kill me before anything else in this reality had the chance.

I took a deep breath through my nose and turned towards the ocean. With the tomato in my grasp, I reeled my arm back.

"You want me to eat something that will make it so I can never swim, in a world that's mostly water?" I muttered under my breath, the slight breeze in the air stinging my still sand-covered face. "…Fuck off."

My arm started to move forward.

The shift was instantaneous.

Before I could get more than a few centimetres, my arm froze. I thought for a moment that it was more divine – or perhaps unholy – intervention that was preventing me from playing their little game, but then I became aware of the flames that were racing across my body.

I wasn't talking fancy about the amount of pain I was in. I was, quite literally, on fire.

Oh, and speaking of the pain… it was immense.

I fell backwards, the Devil Fruit rolling out of my hands as I slammed into the ground. My arm was moving again, but I could barely see it through the tears gathering in my eyes and streaming down my cheeks. My muscles, instead of feeling absent as they had before, protested every movement with absolute certainty, the clicking of my bones as they were caught in the cross-fire loud enough to be heard down the entire beach.

I could feel myself slowly burn. To say nothing of the volume I had reached, because I don't know if I could ever describe it with words alone.

The words that were being written in the air in front of me shone through the flickering lights of the fire. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, I could make then out clearly, though actually reading them was another task altogether. Something popped before I could even get halfway through, and I suppose that's when the adrenaline decided it wanted to kick in, because everything got a little bit sharper after that.

Kid, I can see now that I should have been more thorough. You were sent here with a soul, but I took that away from you as soon as you arrived as per the stipulations in my agreement with Life. Remember the blue mist? With that gone, the only thing holding you together is me, but I can't force you to accept my presence, and it's all or nothing. I can only use your hand right now because on some level, you want answers, and I can give them to you. When I said your soul would be gone forever, I meant it. If you die without a soul, you're done. Finished. Gone forever. And if you don't accept this bargain, then I have to leave. You. Will. Die. And don't misunderstand, kid, there's plenty more corpses where you came from.

For a brief second, I entertained the idea of ignoring the words.

To be forever gone, would that erase the pain? If I were to never exist, would my family still have to grieve my death? If I were to accept now that I was going to die and crumble away, would it save me worrying and wasting three years of a new life on a goal that wasn't possible?

And would you believe that it was a hallucination that saved me from that decision? Because it couldn't have possibly been anything else.

I could hear it, a faint whisper from over the waves. I could feel it, the slightest displacement of air amongst the crackling flames that were consuming me whole. I could see it, sitting atop a throne and freer than the birds in the sky.

"I'm going to be King of the Pirates!"

And in that moment, I was reminded of a dream that shouldn't have felt as old as it was. A promise I had made to myself when I was too young, and a promise that I had broken through my own carelessness.

No. I wasn't going to die again.

Not before I changed the world.

"I…accept…"

The words hurt. Fuck, everything hurt. But they were enough, because as soon as I'd finished speaking, the fire was gone. I lay there for a moment, before pushing myself up onto my arms, marvelling at the lack of pain I felt, the lack of damage to my body and my clothing.

Something tapped against my leg. I didn't even have to bother looking at the Devil Fruit, merely picking it up and holding it up to my face as I spoke to the air where the words had been.

"I will eat this Devil Fruit…" I then turned and placed it firmly in the sand, pointedly pushing it away with the back of my hand and raising my eyebrows, "later."

I didn't burst into flames at once this time, which filled me with enough confidence to fold my arms and rock slightly to the side so I could match the slope of the beach. I'd only just managed to get comfortable when a sudden gust of wind - which sounded suspiciously like laughter, for whatever reason - slammed into my back and sent me face first into the sand in front of me.

Just to add insult to injury, something that I could only assume was the Devil Fruit then started jabbing me in the side of the head. Grimacing against the grains that now pervaded every open orifice on my face, I shifted my hips to the side so that I wasn't crushing my new… addition, cursing every which way available in my language when it proved useless and I had to instead shift so I was lying on my side.

Stupid anime worlds and their unrealistically proportioned body parts. And it couldn't have even been a world that I knew inside and out, oh no.

It just had to be One Piece, an anime world that I'd never actually spared the time to properly watch or read.

Great.