A/N: I've been sitting on this for almost a year, and I have a feeling it's time to share it, at least the beginning. *Bows*

I do not own One Piece.

The sixth floor of Impel Down. A secret to anyone outside a choice few pirates and those with no less than a post of Vice-Admiral in the marines. The final hell to find in a prison comprised of hells.

Isolation, utter and absolute, from all contact and news of the outside world. The quarters for those the Navy deemed best to disappear altogether.

"What the fuck?!"

Also, currently experiencing a bit of chaos. Usopp staggered to his feet, swaying with each explosion that shook the floor from the other side of the massive double doors.

"A riot?"

One of the fresh faces, the most recent addition, proposed as a guess.

"Don't be stupid."

He immediately got shot down, even when the hinges rattled.

"One of the new prisoners probably ticked off Magellan. It'll quell once he's sprayed his gunk. You better hope those doors hold, cause if his poison gets in here, we're corpses."

At that precise moment, the doors came crashing inward.

"AH! WE'RE GONNA DIE!"

A din kicked up from all the cells, panic the primary reaction, laden with fear, one of the few things (aside from a visit from Domino or Sadi-chan) that could get any of the prisoners agitated.

One exception, insane and with a deep cackle to match, stood out to Usopp, who took in the proceedings almost vacantly.

"And exactly," Doflamingo, the former Shichibukai, wondered aloud. "When has old Maggie's gas ever been white?"

Usopp looked up at the hole where the doors used to be, and found not gas seeping in, but smoke. Buzzing confusion spread and the Joker's laughter only grew louder.

"A mutiny! Chaos! Dissension! The world will come crashing down around our ears, and we get to have a taste!"

"Get your asses moving, runts!" A gruff, throaty voice barked, one the former sniper hadn't heard in years. Two more figures rushed down from within the smoke. "This ain't gonna hold off a bastard like Magellan more than a couple minutes!"

Any other day, for any other riot, Usopp would have rolled over and shut his eyes with wishes for a dreamless, permanent sleep.

"Usopp-san!"

Except the voices of these people, the inciting individuals- they resounded hope. In equal parts desperate, afraid and angry, but hope made them distinct from any previous rioters.

"Step back, Coby-san!"

Tashigi. With only one arm and a familiar, nostalgic white sheath. She must've noticed Usopp staring.

"I guess I thought it'd be poetic," she said. "Lend me his strength or something."

Wado flashed across the steel bars of his cell, and they came apart in evenly sliced chunks.

"Usopp-san!"

"Coby." Usopp said, voice flat and throat hoarse from disuse. The marksman couldn't dredge up the effort for anything beyond wryly conversational. "What brings you here?"

"We're going to get you out of here," the pink haired corporal (Captain? Commodore? Last time Usopp saw him he'd been a tenant under Magellan for the prison. He couldn't remember his rank) declared. He circled around Usopp and his hand turned black. "Give me a second with these."

"Heh."

Usopp didn't know if the sound that tumbled from his mouth counted as a laugh or a sob. Escape? Where to? He had nowhere left to go.

'Oh well,' he thought. 'Might as well play along.'

"Where're we going?" He asked, his shoulders tugged back as Coby shattered his handcuffs with one, precise strike.

"Not 'we', Usopp-san," Coby corrected him. "You."

"Coby-san." Tashigi's voice spoke the young marine's name like both a warning and an urgent plea. A rock dropped in Usopp's gut at the sight of familiar gas pressing through the white smoke.

"You'll pay for this, Smoker!" Magellan's deep voice bellowed from beyond the vaporous barrier. A string of defiant, choice expletives spoke to the mutinous marine's resistance.

"Then I sentence myself," his gruff voice shot back, and another tremor shook the walls. "To kicking your ass for pissing me off, and pissing on the grave of Absolute Justice when I'm through!"

Tashigi clenched Wado, back rigid.

"Go, Tashigi-san! I only need a minute more!"

Coby hadn't even finished saying her name before she dove into the doubtless fatally poisoned smoke without reservation.

"Hey!" Usopp called. "That's dangerous, no one's ever-"

"One man did." Coby said.

Usopp froze, shuddering with the weight of a thousand memories and regrets he'd tried to bury beneath apathy.

"Why are you here?" He asked again, tone tired and terse.

"To set things right." Coby stressed. He tore open Usopp's prison garb and pressed a hand to the sniper's chest.

"Getting weird now…" Usopp muttered, squirming and trying to slide away, though he was pressed against the cell wall.

"It wasn't supposed to end that way," Coby murmured, teeth clenched and his brow deeply furrowed. "I know I'm no Kami, I may not have the right to be so selfish, but of all the ways it could have gone, THAT WASN'T IT!"

Usopp stilled. The other prisoners were caught between cheering for the mutiny to succeed, lamenting impending doom and, in Doflamingo's case, cackling.

"I hate it," Coby said, a glow surrounding his hand. "I hate that can't do more, but you're one of his nakama. If there's anyone to do the job, it's you."

Usopp's long held apathy cracked a bit further, frightened by the sheer desperation in the other man's tone. He'd heard it before, many times, too many, damn near enough to turn him into a hyena like his former Shichibukai cellmate.

"What are you-"

"KID!" Smoker's shout rasped, hacking and breathless. "IF YOU AIN'T DONE IT, DO IT NOW!"

"All of you are hereby condemned criminals and shall be dealt with accordingly!"

Magellan's poison burst through the white smoke on his last word. Pandemonium took hold. Usopp yelled, yet Coby still held the same focused, clinging expression.

"Take this with you," he said, and, impossibly, he planted a tattered, singed, worn straw hat on the sniper's head. "It'll help you remember."

Usopp's brain and mouth stalled over questions and a plea of 'how?', 'where?' and 'please stop looking at me like you're about to die.'

"What are you asking me to do?"

Coby smiled, the dark gas rolling in plumes like the devil's own dust storm toward his back.

"Save them."

Toki Toki no Shoukan

Usopp woke up at home. On his island, in Syrup village, in his bed.

He blinked. Where else would he be?

He stared up at the ceiling. The wood had a stain that looked like an insect colony might find inviting.

"Not super." He muttered.

The phrase, that word, fell off his tongue before he realized he didn't talk that way. He didn't know anyone who did.

Usopp rubbed his eyes. A sense of urgency to do something (he didn't know what) was fading rapidly, and his heart hurt.

"I should go visit Mom." He said, rolling out of bed.

The sound of a soft crunch and a rustle had him leaping backward. His bed didn't make those sounds.

A hat. A worn out, tattered straw hat slowly buoyed back into its natural shape. Usopp must have rolled over it.

He stared.

'Where'd that come from?'

A vision flashed in his mind's eye. A wide, face-splitting grin that shone like a tiny sun on a face with a scar.

Usopp bolted for the door, and didn't stop sprinting until he'd put a full kilometer between him and the house.

That smile, all open trust, acceptance and confidence, scared him more than anything he could remember.

"Hi Mama," Usopp said, sitting in front of Banchina's grave. "I got you a new bouquet."

He'd picked them from a neighbor's garden, same as he did every time he came. Ms. Root had chased him off screaming the first time, so he'd gotten stealthier.

Except…

"Something weird happened today, Mama," he said after laying the random assortment of flowers at the cross. "I snuck past all the guards and beat all the traps like I usually do. But while I was choosing them from the garden, I felt something. And I looked at the front window and Ms. Root was watching me. Except I knew she was, even before I looked."

The young boy shook his head. Everything about the day had been weird, and not in an exciting way.

"Oh yeah," he said, raising his voice over his own thoughts. "Dad's coming home soon! He sent a rare amphibious dolphin to bring me the message. Actually, the messenger was a superhero named Pandaman!"

Usopp wove tale after tale about his Dad's adventures and how Usopp would get to go with him on the next one. He talked for hours.

That straw hat haunted every thought he had of going home.

When he did cave and return, he did so armed. He rounded the front door's threshold with his slingshot at the ready.

'Whoever left the hat could still be around,' he reasoned, fear prompting several terrifying possibilities to take form in his mind. Knees knocking, he swung his sights all around the house interior, anywhere except where he'd left the hat. 'B-but they'll be sorry for breaking and entering the great captain Usopp's home!'

He checked every conceivable hiding place in the house (he'd made use of just about all of them) for… what, he didn't know. Ninjas, maybe? Anywhere he could look that wasn't the bed. He hoped, with the logic children sometimes apply, that if he put off seeing it for as long as he could, the hat would be gone when he finally checked for it. That it would vanish along with all the emptiness and cold, all the life and confounding sense of belonging it conjured.

After finally checking the oven for the fifth time, Usopp forced his gaze to the mattress.

No such luck. The hat, straw and worn, haunting and mesmerizing, tattered and regal, remained.

"Usopp!"

The boy shook his head. An echo of something urgent rang in his ears, accompanied by that face-splitting grin.

"It's only a hat." He whispered, inching his way closer, one foot always behind him for a tactical retreat.

"Just a hat."

His mantra served as background to the fractured pieces that grew in volume as he reached out.

"Just… no."

The denial, the change at the critical moment- where a decision to pull back or press on determined all- came out as an exhalation just before his fingertips brushed the weave.

"It's not just a hat."

Memories came. Too fast, in and out of order, screaming and laughing, bleeding and hoping. He didn't retreat, instead hugging the straw hat to him, crushing it out of its shape, using it as an anchor while his knees buckled and he forgot which way was up. His lungs contracted, burned for air but he'd been lost to a vacuum of weight and space where time held no sway and his only sanity born of his emotions.

And with a desperation he'd never known (except that was a lie- he had, only once, in a previous life), he wailed to fill the void.

Usopp, seven years old, the proud sniper of the Straw Hat pirates, grieved for his nakama.