Time moved differently in Foosha Village when you were paying attention to it.
Most people in a place like that let the days blur together. One morning looked like the last one. The seasons came and went and the village stayed the same and nobody really noticed because nobody was really watching.
Ronald watched.
He watched the way the fishing boats came back heavier in certain months and lighter in others. He watched the way the road into the village got muddy after rain and which parts dried first. He watched the people — who talked to who, who avoided who, who carried something heavy behind their eyes that they never put into words.
He watched himself too.
The body grew the way bodies do. Slowly, then suddenly. One morning he woke up and his feet were hanging off the end of the bed. His shoulders got wider. His hands got bigger. The runs along the coastal path that used to wind him got easier, so he made them longer. The boulder that had moved two inches on the first try moved further each month until one morning it came fully off the ground and he held it there for a count of ten before setting it down.
He was twelve now.
Five years had passed since that first morning in Foosha. Five years of mornings on the coastal path, evenings at Makino's bar, training sessions with Luffy that had evolved from basic push ups on the rocks to something that actually resembled real combat practice.
Luffy had gotten stronger too. Noticeably. The rubbery nature of his body made him unpredictable in ways that were genuinely difficult to account for even when you knew it was coming. He'd stretch an arm back and launch a punch from a distance that shouldn't have been possible and Ronald had taken more than a few of those to the side when he wasn't paying full attention.
It kept him sharp. He appreciated that about Luffy even when it was annoying.
---
They were in the clearing behind the village on a warm afternoon, the kind where the air sits still and heavy and the only things moving are the insects and the occasional leaf.
Ronald was working on his footwork. Moving around a rough circle he'd marked in the dirt, keeping his weight low, changing direction every few steps. It was boring to watch but it was the kind of thing that paid off later in ways you couldn't always trace back to the source.
Luffy was lying on his back in the grass nearby watching clouds.
"That one looks like a fish," Luffy said.
"You've been saying that for ten minutes," Ronald said without breaking his movement pattern.
"There are a lot of fish shaped clouds today," Luffy said seriously. "It's unusual. You should look."
"I'm training."
"You've been doing that circle thing for like an hour. Take a break."
"I'll take a break when I'm done."
Luffy sat up and looked at him. "When are you done?"
"When I decide I am."
Luffy flopped back down. "You're so weird about training. Even Grandpa takes breaks."
"Garp's already strong," Ronald said. "I'm not there yet."
"You're stronger than everyone in this village," Luffy said.
"This village isn't the measuring stick I'm using."
Luffy was quiet for a second. Then he said, "The Grand Line?"
"Among other things," Ronald said.
Luffy sat up again. This time he stayed up. He pulled his knees to his chest and looked at Ronald with a more focused expression than he usually wore during their rest periods.
"Do you ever think about what it's actually going to be like?" Luffy said. "When we actually get out there. On the sea. For real."
Ronald stopped his movement pattern. He looked at Luffy.
"All the time," he said.
"And?"
"And it's going to be nothing like what either of us expects," Ronald said. "No matter how much we prepare or how much we think about it — the real thing is always different from the version in your head."
Luffy thought about that. "Is that scary?"
"A little," Ronald said honestly. "But that's what makes it worth doing."
Luffy grinned at that. The full grin, the one that took up most of his face. "See that's why I want you in my crew. You say things that make sense even when they sound weird at first."
"I said it might be scary," Ronald said, going back to his footwork. "That's not exactly inspiring."
"It is though," Luffy said. "Because you said it anyway. You're not pretending it's all going to be easy. You just don't care that it's going to be hard." He picked up a stick from the grass and twirled it between his fingers. "Grandpa always says that the people who pretend they're not scared are the most dangerous kind of scared. But the people who know they're scared and go anyway — those are the ones worth watching."
Ronald paused his movement again.
He looked at Luffy.
Sometimes — not always, not even often — but sometimes, in moments like this one, Ronald caught a glimpse of what Luffy was actually going to become. Not the loud rubber kid who tripped over his own feet and ate everything in sight. The other version. The one that was growing underneath all of that, steady and quiet and inevitable.
"Garp said that?" Ronald said.
"Yeah. One of his last visits." Luffy tossed the stick. "He said it and then threw me off a cliff immediately after so I was too busy falling to really think about it at the time. But I thought about it later."
Ronald shook his head slightly. "Your grandfather has a delivery problem."
"The worst," Luffy agreed cheerfully.
---
Makino noticed the change in both of them before anyone else in the village did.
She mentioned it one evening when the bar was quiet and it was just her and Ronald at the counter. Luffy had run off somewhere after dinner with the energy of someone who had absolutely nowhere to be and was going there enthusiastically.
She was cleaning the counter in the easy unhurried way she did everything. Ronald was nursing a glass of juice and going over things in his head the way he usually did in quiet moments.
"You've both gotten so big," she said. Not sadly. Just observationally. The way people note something real without making it heavy.
"It happens," Ronald said.
"It does." She smiled. "Though with you two it feels like it happened faster than it should have. I still remember the first time you came in here. Luffy dragged you in and introduced you like you were a prize he'd found somewhere."
Ronald almost smiled. "He introduced me by saying I could skip stones four times."
"That's right," Makino laughed softly. "He was so proud of that. Like he'd discovered something remarkable." She folded the cloth in her hands and leaned on the counter. "You were so serious that day. You sat down and ate and watched everything with those quiet eyes of yours. I remember thinking — this is not a normal seven year old."
"You thought that then?" Ronald said.
"The moment you walked in," she said simply. "But that's not a bad thing. This world needs people who pay attention." She looked at him gently. "Are you happy here Ronald? In Foosha?"
The question caught him slightly off guard. Not because it was complicated but because nobody had asked it before. Not directly. Not like that.
He thought about it genuinely.
"I'm content here," he said carefully. "Happy might be — I don't know if that's the right word. But I don't want to be anywhere else right now. This is where I need to be at this point."
Makino looked at him for a moment. "At this point," she repeated quietly. "You already know you're going to leave someday."
"I think you already knew that too," Ronald said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded slowly. "Luffy too. I've known it about him since he was old enough to point at the horizon and ask what was on the other side." She picked up the cloth again. "I just hope when you both go — you look after each other."
"Luffy will look after himself," Ronald said. "He's better at it than he looks."
"I know," Makino said warmly. "But he's better at it when someone's beside him. Someone who thinks when he doesn't." She looked at Ronald meaningfully. "That's always been you."
Ronald looked at his glass.
He didn't say anything to that. But he didn't disagree either.
---
The years continued their quiet accumulation.
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
The training evolved constantly. Ronald had moved well past basic bodyweight work. He'd started incorporating what he knew about actual combat — weight distribution, reaction timing, controlling distance, reading an opponent's body before they moved. He had no formal teacher for any of it. He built it from logic, from observation, from the scraps of information he'd gathered from Garp and Benn and Shanks over the years and assembled into something functional.
It wasn't perfect. He knew that. There were gaps — things that could only be learned by actually fighting people who were genuinely trying to hurt him, and Foosha didn't offer much of that.
But the foundation was solid. Deep and wide and load bearing. When the real weight came — and it would come — it would have something real to sit on.
Luffy trained too in his chaotic Luffy way. He'd gotten serious about it in the way only Luffy could get serious about something — completely, without half measures, while somehow still managing to fall asleep in the middle of a rest break and wake up ready to go again like nothing had happened.
His strength was genuinely something now. The rubber body that had seemed like a strange gimmick when they were seven had become something Ronald respected without reservation. The elasticity gave him options that didn't exist for normal bodies — reach, impact absorption, angles of attack that broke the usual rules of how a fight moved.
Fighting Luffy in practice was the closest thing Ronald had to fighting someone who didn't operate the way his knowledge expected things to operate. It was the best training he had access to and he used it fully.
---
One evening when they were fifteen, sitting on the hill above the dock the way they had a hundred times before, Luffy looked out at the sea for a long time without saying anything.
Ronald sat beside him and waited.
When Luffy finally spoke his voice was quieter than usual. More settled.
"I think it's almost time," Luffy said.
Ronald looked at the water. The sun was low, the sea dark and wide in front of them.
"Yeah," he said. "I think so too."
Luffy turned and looked at him. "You're actually going to come right? Not just — you're actually coming."
Ronald looked back at him.
In five years he'd watched this person grow from a loud rubber kid with no filter into someone who was still all of those things but underneath it carried something undeniable. Something that pulled. Ronald had read about it, known about it before arriving in this world — the thing that made people follow Luffy without being able to fully explain why.
But reading about it and sitting next to it were different things.
"I'm coming," Ronald said.
Luffy held his gaze for a second. Then the grin came back — full and bright and completely Luffy.
"Good," he said. Like it was settled. Like it had always been settled and this was just the moment they were both acknowledging it out loud.
They sat there until the sun was completely gone and the stars were properly out above them.
Tomorrow would come the same as every other day in Foosha. The fishing boats, the dirt road, the sound of the sea.
But the day after that — or the one after that — something was going to shift.
Ronald could feel it the way you feel weather changing before it arrives.
The tide was turning.
---
*End of Chapter 8*