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No Parking On The Battleground
hands and scars

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All of the Straw Hats have scars on their hands.

They're mostly small, insignificant things - white spots and lines that you have to really look to see- but Chopper notices them immediately. He has seen a lot of hands and scars while working with Doctorine. He's stitched together any number of wounds and thawed or cut off as many frostbitten fingers, and he knows that each one has a story behind it. These are all different, though. These aren't the hands and scars and stories of strangers, these are the hands and scars and stories of his friends.

(His friends...)

Luffy is making faces at him when Chopper notices. He's crossing his eyes and saying something dumb, waving his hands in front of his face. The midday sun hits them just right, and Chopper sees them: the tiny discolored stripes, some thin and some broad and all of them bone deep, across the top of each of the captain's fingers. Chopper bandaged those fingers himself, not even a week ago, so he knows that story well. It's one of the things about Luffy that baffles and fascinates him the most.

The scars on Usopp's hands are pretty self-explanatory. Chopper only has to watch him repair one thing or another across the ship once to know that he is a builder out of hobby and necessity and not as a profession, and he has hammered or nailed or sawed his hands on a accident on a semi-regular basis.

Sanji's hands surprise him, because it's hard to imagine the chef's hand ever slipping. Still, when he looks hard enough, there are three of them that stand out - one on the outside of his right hand and two on his left, below his thumb and across his knuckles. When Chopper pipes up the nerve to ask what they're from, Sanji turns his hands over to look for them, as if he'd forgotten they were even there, and then he laughs, pointing to each one, and says, "Zippo lighter. Potato peeler. Pantry door."

Chopper actually asks to see Zoro's hands, and the swordsman sets down his weights and holds his clenched fists out to be examined, silently, but obligingly, perplexed. Chopper shakes his hands open and turns them over. At first he only sees calloused fingers and heavy knuckles, but then he notices the scrapes on the sides of Zoro's hands, just behind his thumb and forefinger - where the guard has either broken or smashed against his hand.

Nami's is a line across the back of her left hand, somewhat wide in the middle and tapering out at the ends - the sort of scar a knife would leave. Chopper doesn't ask about these, because Nami has lots of other small and subtle scars on all her hands and fingers. Hers are the worst of them all (still smooth and soft with neat, trimmed nails, but unmistakably the worst) and that really surprises him. Nami doesn't strike him as the type to be careless or clumsy.

There are even fine, off-white lines along the backs and sides of Vivi's hands; long stripes that all flow in the same direction. She claims responsibility for these, herself, when he points them out - learning to swing her peacock blades took months and months of practice, she says, and in the beginning she wrapped them around her arms far more often than she hit her target.

Chopper's hands are different...

All the scars he has are hidden under the fur, even in his human form, and they are all reminders of that Amiudake mushroom. He remembers the deep gouges left in his hoofs, light gray against the black, though the keratin has long-since grown them out and left no trace of them. His scars aren't so easy to see...

But he's sure his friends have plenty of other scars that he can't see, as well.

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(A/n) Word-a-day prompt was SCARS.

-BobTAC