Chapter Text
For weeks he had been tripping over his own feet and getting his katana wedged in the makeshift training dummies. Kept forgetting to follow through with his swings, ending up unbalanced and awkward and open for that final strike, though it never came. He stumbled over kata meant for even the greenest of sensei's students, despite the years he spent sharpening them into reflex. Every mistake added its own weight to his limbs until he couldn’t draw Wadou without fumbling and cutting himself on her blade.
He had not touched Wadou since, for fear of staining the snow white thread wound around her hilt. Without her near, the silence only grew, until he thought he might unravel beneath it.
But there was nowhere else. It could only be this-- wild solitude in the mountains, outside the radius of anyone else's grief. Hidden away from that look in sensei's eyes whenever he gazed upon Zoro clutching Wadou and saw only what he could never see again. Far from the other children who still held their breaths as they ran past her now dusty room at the dojo. Far from the doorway to the stairs like a rotting mouth sewn shut, the cellar beneath holding a final stolen breath.
He was haunted, like they all were, but he was not afraid of ghosts. He was afraid instead of the exhaustion he felt, new and unfamiliar, which might one day creep towards defeat, a candle burning low, out.
Despite this, sleep refused to come, no matter how much he tried to lure it with his bared belly, exposed throat, eyes shut and unseeing against the lurking night. And without her to talk to, to spar, he had to drag himself up to find peace elsewhere in the bloodshot hours before dawn.
Tonight Zoro sat under the freezing waterfall and closed his eyes.
Tonight Zoro found him, the king on the pedestal.
Robed, cross-legged and surrounded by fire that looked unreal for how tall the flames were, how singularly red. The sword in his hand an extension of those flames. The king's fanged expression was as livid as Zoro felt these days.
There was no fear left in him anymore, crowded out by rage and exhaustion. But there was still will. It was perhaps the only useful thing he had left.
Zoro drew Wadou, somehow with him on this plane even though he had hidden her in the brush before meditating. A real duel—he hadn’t had one since his two-thousand-and-first defeat. He ached for blood, not the pitiful scrapes on his knees and elbows, but ugly, criss-crossed scars to prove he would and could never stop even if he was inadequate, inept, and out of control.
He needed this, more than sleep.
Wadou slanted in front of him, he approached. But his mind betrayed him almost instantly, flickering under the stress of pent-up tension and so much water. His concentration shattered and he found himself floundering helplessly in the cold, churning river, unable to get back to that dark place where the king stood vigil for the rest of the night.
He paced until his knees gave out instead, his heart tight.
The second night, one faltering step before he heard a drop of water and its rippling echoes, throwing him back.
The third, the fourth, his mouth opening to call out a challenge and swallowing ice instead.
In between, days of bleary sun and heavy silence, leaden bones. Hot, hot anger. Steel embedded in wood.
Her ghost watching.
The fifth night, his hand too frozen to unsheathe Wadou, his eyes rimed with frost despite those flames so close. On the sixth night, a stillness he dared not break, that stretched between them, the king on the other side of the impossible expanse. A stillness he held until he could no longer, his mind gasping, eyes snapping open. The seventh night the same.
Tonight, the eighth night. On his knees, then levering himself up with Wadou.
I’m not afraid of you, he managed to pant.
Tonight will be different. He could feel her eyes on him.
The king stood red-faced and silent and the flames burned hot and high behind him, making the sword in his hand glow. Zoro kept one eye on this sword and Wadou steady. He was brave, not stupid; sensei had taught him better than that. She had taught him better than that.
I’m not afraid of you, he repeated. Raise your sword.
Zoro took a step forward. And for the first time, the king moved, snarling sudden enough and vicious enough that Zoro immediately dropped into a defensive crouch, eyes wide, breath held. But then nothing, and nothing, and nothing, until Zoro blinked and lost his place again, snapping back to the world outside himself. The relentless pounding of the waterfall returned and he drank in water and mist, felt his lungs about to flood.
No, no. His head bowed and his spine curled; his coughing rattled the fury uselessly inside him.
Her ghost watching.
It felt like his neck might snap, but he braced his arms against the smooth, slick rock. He lifted his chin. All around him was the roaring and thundering of water but he could not be swept away by it. He closed his eyes and willed himself still, pulled himself inward breath by measured breath.
The darkness melting back in. The hard fist of his hand, slowly opening. The waterfall reluctantly fading to a trickle before finally disappearing altogether, and then—Zoro heard the crackling of fire.
He stood. The king waited, his face carved into a terrible grimace.
Zoro did not allow himself to hesitate. He strode forward until he was close enough to brush the stone pedestal with his fingertips, and he did so deliberately, irreverent. It was cool to the touch, a contrast to the blistering heat from the flames behind it, which paradoxically did nothing to chase away the encroaching shadows. Zoro looked up just as the king brought his sword down, the point of it inches from Zoro’s exposed throat. Zoro did not wince.
He took another step forward so that the sword point pressed into his skin, burning.
The sword lowered further to nudge against Zoro’s chest, where the anger and frustration and impotence had condensed and steeled itself into something tangible. His heart, knotted and monstrous. All around them the thick, oppressive dark, the heat and the hush.
Zoro raised his chin higher, set his jaw.
The king glaring down at him.
Her ghost watching.
The sword pushed in.
Fire skittered down the blade and into him. It infused into his bloodstream, burst white-hot along his nerves. In a moment, the fire would burn through his flesh and there would be nothing of him left except charred bones and twisted metal, Wadou's hilt a blackened relic. His heart unraveled, his eyes molten pools. If he opened his mouth right now, he was sure fire would roll right off his tongue. But he would not scream. She could not hear him scream.
You're lucky, she had said to him once.
Zoro's mind, breaking, splintering apart in the pain, but the pieces of it still orbited a central truth—My life is promised to greater things. I will not die here.
If only he were left his life, he could relinquish everything else, his heart and his pride and his anger-- her ghost will fuel him in their absence. He needs only his small life. His small, promised life.
And her ghost, always watching.
The sword pulled out, and Zoro crumpled onto the pedestal, cheek slamming against the cool stone. He could not move. He stared at the red arc of his own blood on the king's feet, the steady drip drip drip of it as it flowed out of him to somewhere he could not see.
His vision blurred and he knew he was crying. He had not cried since taking Wadou from her home, not even when thinking of her in the days and nights since. But he could not stop it now. The tears were cold on his face and his entire body felt slack, his chest hollow. He expected to see her, a phantom darkening the edge of his vision, but the loneliness was resounding. He tried to move his hand but only succeeded in smearing blood across the stone. He shut out the sight, the king's feet too close and his own palm a fresh, vibrant red. He breathed in a deep, shuddering breath.
Watch me, he said through the tears, though he did not know who would hear him now. Please, please.
He woke to the thundering of the waterfall coming from far upstream, the sun already gold. The water nudged at him until he crawled up the bank of the river, shivering, and collapsed against the tree whose trunk he had used to mark the feverish passage of days. His katana were still where he had hidden them and he uncovered them now to cradle them in his arms. Wadou’s guard dug into his forehead.
With his eyes closed, he could still see the king with his bared teeth and sword on fire, but there were no remnants of the pain, the burn, no ragged hole in his chest. There were no remnants of anything he had brought before the king's pedestal, not the fury nor the desperation nor even the heavy grief worn smooth from weeks of scraping against his ribs.
He felt dizzy with it suddenly, with the lightness– wild with the blessed emptiness. The fire was a true compassion, one he hadn’t found standing in her funeral procession, in the gifting of Wadou, in sensei’s gaze. His next breath shook through him, and the next, and the next.
She was watching him. He whirled around, ready to face her judgment, his mouth open on a gasp, but there was only a too-bright patch of sunlight where she should have been. In this moment, even the leaves were still. His heart beat quick and loud to fill the silence, then, gradually, found the rhythm of a steady drum. He blinked against the light.
He stood, swinging Wadou in a perfect arc. He said her name. That night, he slept.