One Piece: Dream of Immortality

"I'll see you tomorrow, William. Try not to get into trouble while I'm not watching," Cherry waved goodbye to the young man who had grown on her quite a bit. He had the makings of a great blacksmith, enough that she would be willing to take him as an apprentice were she not gallivanting around the world with Luffy and co. He was a good kid.

"Just call me Will," Will insisted for the umpteenth time. "And I'm not going to get into trouble while you aren't watching."

"I sure hope not! I want to see it when you finally stop being so damned polite!" Cherry laughed as she left him standing in the doorway of the smithy, dumbfounded.

It was pretty late in the day now, too late to go around bothering all the other merchants and shopkeepers in town. The sun was just about ready to set.

Cherry hadn't even realized that time had flown by so quickly…

Should she just kidnap Will?

No, that would be cruel. He's got that lady friend of his to pine for, but doesn't have the guts to confess to.

Although… Cherry could force the issue. If she managed to prod him into action, then maybe he'd get rejected and she could poach him guilt free! Or maybe the girl would say yes and her father would be a big jackass about it, then she could poach him plus one tagalong!

That's a win-win scenario, isn't it? Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.

Once that matter was settled and cemented into her mind, her thoughts turned to her wayward crew. Not a single one of them had come to bother her for the whole day. Not even Zoro did, and she had been half expecting him to turn up to look at the swords if nothing else. Then again, if he was looking for anything at all, chances were that he wouldn't find it.

She swept over the island with her Life Sense. Finding the rest of the crew was easy enough, but when she passed over the governor's manor she had to suppress her gag reflex and retracted her senses as quickly as she could.

"What the fuck?" Cherry muttered to herself, stepping to the side of the street and leaning against a lamppost.

The instinctive disgust she felt wasn't nearly as bad as Pangaea Castle had been, but it still left a bad taste in her metaphysical mouth.

Naturally, this left her feeling a bit more confident about investigating further. Now that had an idea of what to expect, she reached out again and tried to hone in on the source of the ickiness.

Doing this was no less unpleasant than she expected, but she was able to confirm that the source was not a living thing, at least. Not unless it was something like Brook, a creature lacking any vital energy that she could lock onto. The fact that it didn't seem to be moving around, however, dissuaded her from that notion. Though it did not completely rule out the possibility.

Cherry briefly mulled over breaking into the governor's manor and figuring this out, but she really didn't want to end a good day on such a bad note. In the end, she decided to have a look at the manor from the outside, make sure nobody was screaming for help and what not, then she left it alone to deal with another day.

…

"Cherry! Where have you been?" Nami was in her face the moment she stepped onto the Thousand Sunny.

"What are you, my mother?" Cherry waved her away. "I was just hanging out with a local blacksmith. He's a pretty decent artisan, has girl troubles, etcetera. Plenty to keep me entertained for a few hours."

"Oh, good," Nami heaved a big sigh of relief.

"Don't be so melodramatic," Cherry rolled her eyes. "How much trouble could I get into in one day?"

"All of it?" Zoro piped up. Sanji cuffed him upside the head, and then they were fighting again.

"Did you have fun?" Robin sauntered over and gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead.

"I might have to kidnap him. Maybe his girlfriend too," Cherry admitted shamelessly.

"Absolutely not!" Nami shouted. "Besides, we need to go find Luffy! We can't stay here forever!"

"Ehhhh, but Mom~!" Cherry whined in a deliberately obnoxious manner. "I promised William that I'd come visit him tomorroooow~!"

Nami's eye twitched dangerously.

"Luffy has Jinbe with him. He'll be fine," Franky said, polishing the wooden railing of the ship.

"That doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for them. They could be anywhere!" Nami argued. "Besides, we can always explore once we're all back together."

"She's got a point," Usopp agreed with her. His momentary distraction led to the device he was working on to explode in his face and sent him into a coughing fit.

Cherry pulled out her Vivre Book and everyone's eyes latched onto it.

"I keep forgetting that you have that thing," Nami muttered.

"Let's see, then," Cherry ignored her and focused on Luffy and Jinbe's pages. "Ah, it seems that they're already heading this way. No need for us to leave, then, is there?"

Nami huffed. "You could have just said that."

"I forget that I have this thing too sometimes," Cherry smiled. "I can't sense it from inside my pocket very well. Certainly not well enough to track someone with it."

"Speaking of which," Cherry shot a glance at Carrot, Reiju, and Pudding. "I'll need to add you three, if you don't mind?"

"Okay!" Carrot barely understood what was being asked of her, so she just went along with it.

"I don't mind," Reiju twirled a lock of her hair around a finger. She spoke much quieter after, "You can look for me anytime."

"Absolutely not!" Pudding rejected outright, making a big 'X' above her head with her arms. "I only trust Sanji to have my vivre card!"

Sanji sent a startled glance at Pudding before his face broke out in a goofy smile. "You can count on me, Pudding-chan! I will rescue you no matter the danger you find yourself in!"

"Sanji-san…" Pudding looked like she was going to swoon.

Cherry raised an eyebrow at Pudding. "Okay, and who is going to make this vivre card that you want to give to Sanji?"

"Well, I'm sure that I can find someone," Pudding harrumphed with a pout.

"Here?" Cherry smirked. "I doubt it. With the messes we find ourselves in at every island we come across, there might not be the time or opportunity anywhere else, either."

Pudding pout gradually turned into her puffing her cheeks out as far as they would physically go, creating some kind of super-mega pout.

This had the opposite of the intended effect, because Cherry's smile only grew as her face blew up like a balloon.

As the crew watched this silent standoff grow more tense in the strangest way possible, they all had to wonder just how spoiled rotten this girl was, if she thought it would be this easy to get her way. They also pitied her, because Cherry was the worst possible target to attempt this sort of thing with.

Pudding surrendered when her face started turning blue, revealing that she had actually been holding her breath as well. "FINE! Make my stupid vivre card! I don't care!"

"See? That wasn't so hard," Cherry snickered. "Now to do something else that isn't so hard. Say 'please'."

Pudding's jaw dropped in shock.

"I'm waiting," Cherry clasped her hands behind her back and tilted forward, turning her ear towards Pudding as if to hear her better.

With gritted teeth, Pudding seethed, "Please."

Cherry offered her a genuine smile, not dissimilar to the kind a grandmother may give to a particularly precocious child who had behaved for once. Cherry popped her book open, plucked a page free from it and said, "Here you go!"

Pudding stared at the paper Cherry had offered her for a moment. It subtly shifted in her direction, so she moved over only for it to follow her again. "You already made one?"

"Of course I did," Cherry nodded. "While I was pretty sure that you were on the level, I wanted to have something to find you with just in case you betrayed us and ran away."

"Eh?" Pudding was shocked, and maybe a little hurt by the confession.

*whack*

"Don't lie to her like that. It's mean," Robin said, after clocking Cherry on top of her head.

"I'm not allowed to be mean, now?" Cherry rubbed her head with an aggrieved look.

Robin jabbed her in the ribs. "No."

"What…" Pudding hesitated. "Why did you make it then…?"

"She was worried that you'd get cold feet about joining us, run away, then get into trouble somewhere," Robin snitched. "She was just worried about you, that's all."

"Worried about me…?" Pudding eyes flickered back to Cherry who was pointedly looking away, more embarrassed than Pudding had ever seen her.

Then Pudding burst into tears.