The creature clings to Luffy with tiny, scarred hands, and glares at the few who try to get near him with real hate. Even Chopper, trying to reason with the animal, only gets a silent snarl for his troubles; the boy's face twists easily in rage, the way Luffy's was so quick to smile.

"What's wrong with this thing?" Nami snaps, obviously doing her best not to sound as scared as she felt. Her eyes only leave Luffy's face for seconds at a time. "It's not acting anything like the real Ace!"

Zoro says nothing. He's standing opposite where Luffy's sitting against the glass of the aquarium bar, arms folded, studying the thing in his captain's arms. The villagers had watched with miserable understanding as the creature leaned its head on Luffy's shoulder; as Luffy shivered, and at the same time held it closer.

"We'll find a place for it," Zoro said for his captain, who said nothing at all, and the villagers bowed their head, in thanks or maybe apology, as the Straw Hats walked away.

"Maybe it can only change how it looks," Usopp suggests unsurely, and Luffy finally looks up.

His eyes are wider than usual, face pale, mouth tugged into a frown; but there's none of the anguish all of them are so afraid of, just a sort of stunned and unhappy bewilderment. And hands that simply won't unwrap from around the little boy's back and shoulders.

"What do you mean?" Luffy sounds doubly upset now, as if the entire world has stopped making sense now that his nakama are confusing him, too. "This is just like how Ace was when we were little." His eyes drop back to the freckled face, and his brow furrows a bit in uncertainty. "It's acting just like Ace. Exactly like him."

The boy looks up at Luffy with dark eyes, and Zoro sees it when the soft warmth folds into heat and hard edges as he turns to glare at Robin when she sits near Luffy's side.

Sanji's quiet, "How can that be?" is the only sound in the room, save for the soft ambiance of fish and water.

Zoro thinks of the polite young man who once visited their ship and bowed his head, asking them to please take care of his silly baby brother; and meets the livid, white-hot gaze of this fierce little boy when it's turned towards him without flinching.

"Hey," Luffy chastises, giving the child a little nudge; usually so perceptive where his friends are concerned, he's only just noticed the hostility. "They're okay, they're my nakama."

The glare doesn't disappear from Ace's face, but all the anger does. "Your nakama?"

The rubber boy stalls, and then rubs a hand over Ace's messy hair. "Yeah. My treasure."

The creature turns to Robin again, warily, and she smiles kindly at it. The crew watches it uncoil slowly as the tension bleeds from its shoulders like a sluggishly hemorrhaging wound.

"So this was how Ace was when you were younger?" she asks with patient interest, and Luffy responds to it much more easily than he had to the others' panic and demand, shrugging his shoulders like Sanji's jacket was suddenly too heavy.

"He always had a hard time." The way he's blinking reminds Zoro of a man going into shock, though the brown of Luffy's eyes remains clear. "He was all alone before he met Sabo. It took him a long time to like me." His frown deepens at the boy in his lap. "How do you know?"

The child tilts his head up to look at Luffy, and after a moment, it says, "I can see it. When I concentrate hard on a person, I can see in their heart who they miss most." He touches Luffy's chest, right over the ruined skin, and Luffy flinches in a way that makes Zoro's hand curl reflexively around one of the hilts at his hip. The creature doesn't seem to notice, as it continues, "I was scared before, so I didn't have time to look properly. I could now, though, and change into your last memory of- "

"No." It comes from five different people at once, in varying extremes, and the creature rips its hand away immediately. The atmosphere is charged and heated, because Luffy's face went white.

Hastily, Usopp tries to move the conversation along. "S- So- you can see right into anybody's heart? That's amazing! Why did you- uh, why did you turn into Luffy's brother?"

While it's not projecting Ace's apparently characteristic malice, its eyes are wide and round; with those freckles and a short frown, sitting where it is in Luffy's arms, to anyone on the outside looking in it would probably pass easily as Luffy's brother.

"'Cause he was easiest," it says simply. "His thoughts aren't as confusing as yours. And I could feel his want much better."

Zoro finds that making sense. The rest of us lost what we did when we were very young. Except for Brook, who lost so much all at once he went mad.

But Luffy had a whole childhood to love his brother, the brother who raised him; who sought him out in a sprawling desert to give him a paper that would link them no matter how far from each other they traveled; the brother he didn't save, who died in his arms.

The want must have been a raw, aching thing, even under those two healing years.

"I could turn into someone else," the creature offers suddenly, casting its gaze around. It's eyes linger on Chopper, and Luffy's hand shoots out to grab its wrist not a moment later.

"Don't," he says, fierce and unyeilding and very much like himself. "Don't hurt them like that."

Sanji makes a muted sound of rage at the blatant attestation of pain, and Zoro closes his eye for just a moment.

Idiot captain, suffering on your own.

"Just... turn back into yourself," Luffy continues, with a trace of that charm that drew people in like a moth to a flame. "You were so scared before, we'll help you. There's got to be a place in the world where you can belong. Just- turn back."

He says it with a smile that's as familiar to his friends as the sun, and the little thing blinks up at him reluctantly a moment before its whole body shimmers like the skyline through a heatwave. So quickly they had no hope of watching any sort of transformation, it's a long-eared cat once more, shaking out its fur and flopping its ears as if to reacquaint itself with its own body.

"Thank god," Franky mutters from somewhere to Zoro's right, but the swordsman isn't exactly inclined to agree.

Because the cat makes a soft sound, and reaches up to paw at Luffy's face, to rub away the tears there the best that it can. Robin slides over the rest of the way to put a caring arm around Luffy's shoulders as they shake, and the rest of them stand there in nothing short of despair as their dear captain cries.

"That part is always the hardest," the cat says quietly. "I'm sorry."

Luffy wipes his face and doesn't attempt to smile, hiding behind the brim of his hat; and Zoro wonders for a moment how the cat's magic works. He wonders how real the memories of a stranger could feel, wearing their heart like a suit around yours, knowing everything they knew, everyone they loved.

Zoro watches Luffy, and wonders if the cat changing back felt anything like losing Ace all over again.