Chapter Text
"Alright," said Nami, with a tight grip on the back of Luffy's vest. "Before we all scatter, we'd better make sure we get all the supplies we think we'll need before we hit the Grand Line. We don't know exactly what we'll find on the other side or how long it'll take us to reach an inhabited island so if you think you're going to need it, get it now."
In her grip, Luffy was practically vibrating with excitement. There was a brief moment while Nami was talking that Zoro wondered whether he was just going to let his arms slide out from the vest, forsake it entirely, and rocket off towards the execution site of the former pirate king that he was so desperate to see. But he remained in place, fidgeting on the spot.
"Yes, Nami-swaaaaan," said Sanji with a twirl in the navigator's direction. "I'll stock up on ingredients so nobody has to worry about that."
"Thank you, Sanji-kun," said Nami in a voice that was too sweet to be real.
She gave a smile that stalled Sanji's heart in his chest. His body jerked with it, making it visible to everyone looking at him - not that anybody actually cared.
With one hand, the other still restraining their captain, Nami pulled some paper from her pocket. With a regretful sigh, she let Luffy go to separate what the rest of the crew could now tell was three lists and three wads of cash. Luffy, apparently distracted by the crinkling of paper, miraculously remained beside her.
"Alright, so we need ingredients. Perishables and non-perishables-" Nami began, handing a list and the biggest portion of the money across to Sanji.
"Sake," Zoro interrupted.
Sanji took it and scanned over the list with a little nod.
"Yes, Zoro, it's on there," said Nami with an air of exasperation.
"Whatever's on the list, get more than that," Zoro said.
"You get what Nami-san has so graciously allowed you," Sanji snapped back, placing paper and money in the inside pocket of his jacket.
"Sanji-kuun," said Nami with an evil little smile. "If everything else costs more than expected, feel free to slash the amount of alcohol we buy."
"What? No!" said Zoro. "Slash the fancy snacks and stuff you make for the sea witch."
"Nami-san's snacks are a necessity and you had better not be referring to-" Sanji began.
Zoro bristled. "So is my booze!"
"Anyway," said Nami, sharply, stepping between the two furious men. "Aside from food, we also need to replace anything we used when you two-" Here, she paused to look between Usopp and Luffy. The former looked away guiltily. The latter wasn't even looking in the first place. "-were playing around with the cannon and anything we need for general maintenance of the Merry. Usopp, you can be responsible for that."
The list and cash were thrust into Usopp's chest. He lifted his hand to stop them flying away automatically.
"That," Nami said before Usopp could give any kind of a response, "is all the money you are allowed to spend on those things only. Anything you have left comes straight back to me. Got that?"
Usopp swallowed and nodded. When he looked back down at the list, his eyes were sparkling.
Finally she turned towards Zoro and held out another, smaller wad of cash towards him - this time without a list.
Zoro raised one eyebrow, making no move to take it. While he definitely could stand to have some money for new swords, something about the look in Nami's eyes told him that wasn't the mission he was about to receive.
"Pillows, blankets, cushions. Your choice- pick what you want. You can spend all of this but anything you don't spend needs to come back. Understand?" she said, waving the money in front of his face.
"Nope," said Zoro, brows furrowed.
Nami sighed dramatically rubbing her temples with one hand. Four pairs of eyes now looked at her, without a glint of understanding in any of them. She lifted the wad of cash and thwacked Zoro in the forehead with it.
"Nesting materials, Zoro. Get some." She held the money in front of his face.
Zoro's lips pressed tightly together, the frown on his face deepening. On the other side of Nami, meaning in full view of him, the cook seemed to be having a mild aneurism. Usopp looked mildly uncomfortable and Luffy - Luffy's eyes had gone comically wide.
Zoro didn't have the time or the energy for any of it. "No."
"Nami-swaaaaaan, I'll get them for youuuu," crooned the cook. "It'll be a selection of love."
"Don't be difficult, Zoro," said Nami, ignoring Sanji entirely. He could see her eyes darkening as she spoke. "I'm offering you my hard-earned beli for this."
Zoro sniffed. "Don't need it. But if you're offering, there is something I want to buy." He thumbed the hilt of Wado Ichimonji, the only sword attached to his waist, flicking it up just enough to make a slight noise.
"That will be a loan, not a gift, and I expect 300% interest," hissed Nami. "I might make it 400% for abusing my kindness."
"How am I abusing your kindness? I said I didn't want your money for that shit," Zoro retorted. "I don't need it. It's a waste of money. All I need is two new swords."
Nami folded her arms, tapping her feet against the deck of the Merry. "You're being ridiculous."
"You're the one assu-" Zoro began.
Two things occurred almost simultaneously.
First, Sanji solidified from the wispy, love-whipped form he'd taken on earlier and inserted himself between Zoro and Nami, snapping in Zoro's face: "Don't insult Nami-san's needs, shithead! She can have whatever she wants and if you're too much of a chicken to get it for her, I will."
Before Sanji had even finished speaking, Luffy pulled back on Merry's railings and twanged like a rubber band in Zoro's direction. Captain-impact struck squarely in his stomach, knocking the air out of him and his feet out from under him. They landed in a pile of limbs on the ground, the added padding of Luffy's rubbery arms wrapped around him doing less to lessen the force of Merry's hard deck than Zoro would have initially anticipated.
"Someday, Luffy, I will-" he began, voice low and threatening.
Luffy laughed and petted his head. "Shishishi! Sorry, Zoro," he said even though he really, really wasn't. "But Zoro's gotta get pillows and blankets and stuff so we have them for the next time he gets a heat. 'Cause we didn't have any last time so the only thing I could do was-"
Zoro's face flushed a vibrant red as the memory of Luffy's particular brand of heat care popped back into his mind without his consent. Without warning, he shoved Luffy off his lap. The force of the sudden blow sent him rolling several feet away.
In the background, Sanji's voice echoed, "For when he gets a what?"
Sitting up and readjusting his hat, the captain only laughed.
Nope, no, no. He was not going to give in to that stupid grin. It didn't matter how warm it was or how sincere and joyful the captain's voice was. He did not need this. This was useless omega crap. He was above that. Therefore, he didn't want it and no amount of captain-cajoling was going to change that deeply held notion. No way. Not at all.
But his face did not get the memo. Embarrassment continued to burn on his skin.
"No," he all but growled. "I don't need it."
Luffy blinked. "I know but-"
Zoro cut him off. "I don't want it. If we're spending any money on me, it's going to be on swords." He picked himself up off the ground and held his hand out towards Nami. "I'll pay you back."
Nami raised an eyebrow. "I'll lend you 100,000 beli at 300% interest. If you buy what I asked as well, I'll give you 150,000 beli and I'll knock off 5% on the interest."
"I'll take the 100,000," said Zoro darkly.
Nami sighed a long suffering sigh, flipping through the money in her hand with the ease of a bank teller. "Here," she said, then stalked back towards her room, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like, 'if you want something doing...'
"Oi, Nami," Luffy called over to her. He was now already poised with both arms stretched out to the railing, ready to catapult himself towards what was surely going to be some kind of chaos. "Is that it? Can we go?"
Nami gave a flippant wave over her shoulder. "Go ahead," she said, still walking away.
Usopp took evasive action but that did not prevent all three men on the crew being scooped up and catapulted in the direction of adventure.
-
Zoro did not think of Nami's suggestion again until the Going Merry had sailed out of Drum Island's winter climate and he was comfortably installed in the crow's nest attempting to make the most of not being freezing by taking a nap.
It was the giggling that woke him.
"Shishishi! Zoro's gonna love it." Luffy’s voice. Zoro did not move, even though it would have been smarter to.
He wondered what 'gift' he was about to receive today. A new artwork on his face? An octopus in his lap? A cool bug? Probably not a cool bug. Normally Luffy woke him up first for those after he'd reflexively squashed a beetle Luffy had dropped on his nose one time.
"Shhhh!" That was Usopp. Oh no, whatever it was was a group project.
"Are you sure?" asked a different voice. Chopper.
"Shh!" said Usopp again but this time it was a less violent hushing.
Zoro sighed and heard two out of the three of them hold their breath. Luffy stepped on his thigh.
At that, he had no other choice. The only option was to open his eyes and glare up at the nap disturbance. Behind Luffy, he had expected to see sky. Instead, he saw... green.
"What-?" he began.
Luffy dropped down into his lap and held his hands over his eyes. "Shhh!" he said. "You're sleeping."
"I was," said Zoro, voice muffled by the rubbery hands intent on covering as much of his face as possible.
"Go back to sleep. We're making you a pillow fort and you're not allowed to see until it's done."
Weirdly, his instinctive reaction was to close his eyes as requested, ready to go back to sleep. Then the words registered and processed and finally made what was not quite sense.
"A pillow fort?" Zoro echoed, cracking open one eye again.
Luffy reached out to cover said eye and slapped him in the face. "Ah, sorry Zoro."
Zoro glared. "A pillow fort... in the crow's nest?"
"Yeah!" said Luffy enthusiastically, completely oblivious to any of the many reasons that this was a bad idea.
"Not just any pillow fort," added Usopp. "A pillow fort designed and engineered by the Great Captain Usopp, master pillow fort builder of the East Blue, who once constructed a castle made entirely of cushions which survived a siege of fifty days."
"Usopp," breathed Chopper. "You're so cool."
Usopp puffed out his chest and gave a pose of victory. "As of today, you're my assistant, Chopper. Let's put the finishing touches on the Castle of Mount Merry!"
Zoro's nap had not been anywhere near long enough for this. "A pillow fort in the crow's nest," he repeated.
"Yes, Zoro," replied Usopp. "You're in the crow's nest."
"Did you forget where you were sleeping again?" asked Luffy.
"Again?" echoed Zoro.
Luffy shrugged. "Sometimes I wake up on a completely different hammock than the one I went to sleep on."
Everyone else looked between each other in solidarity, having been on the receiving end of Luffy's hammock hopping on numerous occasions. Ignoring this, Luffy picked up a nearby pillow and got up to find a place to put it.
Zoro stopped him. "So you're building a fort in the crow's nest and you don't think that's going to stop whoever's on watch from seeing what's going on or that Nami is going to notice that you stole her bedding when it's in plain view of everywhere?"
Usopp's expression told Zoro that he had not, in fact, thought about that. He and Chopper shared a look, while Luffy hugged the pillow he was holding against himself and commented, "But it's not Nami's. It's yours."
"What?" said Zoro. It was a question but phrased as a command.
Luffy was, of course, entirely unaffected by the tone of his voice but repeated cheerily, "It's not Nami's. It's your stuff. Nami got it all for you in Loguetown for when you have your heat but I guess she forgot to say anything 'cause we had to leave so fast. But Usopp found it in the storage room a while ago and Nami said it was for your heat. But you haven't had a heat in a really long time. And I really wanted to build a pillow fort. So we decided to do it anyway."
The information came out in a big rush of sound. By the time Luffy got to his reasoning for the pillow fort, Zoro was still stuck on the first piece of information.
"Nami bought all of this stuff for me," he said.
"Yup!" said Luffy. "So you can build pillow forts."
"After I said I didn't need any of it?"
Usopp's eyebrows rose, the hairs on his arms beginning to stand up. He took a step back towards the exit.
Luffy replied, "Yup! But you should have it anyway. Dadan's guys told me omegas like to make pillow forts to spend their heats in and you can't make a good pillow fort if you only have one blanket and one pillow. That's just a bed."
"I don't make pillow forts," snapped Zoro.
"That's okay," said Luffy. "We can make one together and show you how."
"That's not-" Zoro began.
"Zoro doesn't need us to show him how to make a nest, Luffy," said Chopper.
Inwardly Zoro thanked him, even though he bristled at the word 'nest' being associated with him.
All thoughts of gratitude immediately left him as Chopper only continued, "While nest building skill is improved over time, all omegas have natural instincts that tell them how to make their nest in the way they find most comforting. Most will incorporate items scented by friends and family."
"Chopper," hissed Zoro.
"Some omegas find it embarrassing but there's nothing embarrassing about biological functions," said Chopper with a little smile.
Zoro wanted to throw him down out of the crow's nest but the longer he looked at the little doctor, the more any desire to do so turned to pre-emptive guilt. Instead, he hissed, "I don't make nests." And tried to pretend that his face wasn't heating up.
"Oh?" said Usopp, elongating the vowel. Zoro hated his tone immediately. "Luffy, do my ears deceive me? Is Zoro admitting he can't do something as simple as-"
"Don't finish that sentence," Zoro hissed. "I don't nest. I don't need to. I'm not-"
Weak. He wasn't weak.
He couldn't do anything about the heats. There were medicines to suppress them but they were costly and required prescriptions to be signed. Nobody would sign his in Shimotsuki village because he was too young, too fertile and too eligible. Why would he want to denounce his body's natural cycles? Why wouldn't he just find a nice alpha instead? A beta even, but settle down soon and he wouldn't have any need to want suppressants.
He would have pushed the matter out of spite but upon further research, he'd discovered other issues that made them difficult for a wandering swordsman to use. The drugs had to be taken at the same time every day. There were several different kinds. Not all islands were able to get all kinds of suppressants and it wasn't advisable to switch.
So he couldn't avoid having his heat. That was fine. He'd grown used to it. His scent was fine too. He couldn't erase it completely but he could control how it was it shared and when. It wasn't the most stereotypically omega scent in any case. As long as he kept his distance from others, it didn't tend to give him away.
But constructing a messy structure of fabric and pillows and clothes? Organising and reorganising the pieces while battling the internal monologue of no, wrong, not there until it was just right, even though it was just a mass of smelly cloth? Then lying in it like a useless sack of unnecessary feelings? Not for him. His own bed was comfort enough. He was safe enough wherever he went. He was strong enough to ensure that.
A measly pile of fabric did nothing to assure safety. If anything it was a target. It told anyone who stumbled upon it that this was where the omega was, that they were probably vulnerable.
Zoro was never vulnerable. He was a swordsman. He wasn’t allowed to be.
Luffy stepped between him and Usopp, grabbing him by the face. "Zoro doesn't like the pillow fort we made him?"
Luffy's eyes, Zoro only now noticed, were huge. Large and dark and imploring. He was pouting, looking up at Zoro. He was always looking up at Zoro because Zoro was slightly taller but normally that was just the way it was. Now it only served to make him look more like a puppy that Zoro had just kicked.
"That's not-" Zoro began, rubbing at the back of his neck. He looked very pointedly away from Luffy but the crow's nest had been enveloped in blankets like a tent and the evidence of the pillow fort was everywhere he looked. His irritation shifted towards discomfort. "You can't have a pillow fort in the crow's nest."
Luffy looked at him, expression unreadable.
"Nami will kill you," Zoro added, like that made it any better.
There was a pause in which Luffy blinked and Zoro felt something sink deep in his stomach. Guilt, a little voice in the back of head supplied. Unnecessary guilt, he corrected. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other until Luffy broke the spell.
"Yosh!" he said. "Let's move it all back down to the storage room."
Zoro deflated. The bullet had been dodged. The pillow fort was no more. Luffy didn't look mad about it or upset (though Usopp looked a little put out). In fact, the pirate captain actually looked determined if anything. So why did Zoro still feel like he had done the wrong thing?
Luffy bent down, collecting an armful of pillows at the same time that Usopp reached up to untie a blanket from the mast. Zoro stood to the side, feeling oddly like helping them in this situation would be like dismantling their dreams.
Luffy shot him a look from between his legs. "We're just gonna have to move Zoro too!" he added with a grin.
Zoro started. "Huh?"
But Luffy was already leaning over the edge of the crow's nest, shouting in a voice loud enough probably for the nearest marine base to hear: "Oi, Vivi! Can you keep watch for a bit? We need Zoro."
"But why?" said Zoro, his own voice drowning out Vivi's reply.
"Thanks, Vivi!" called Luffy, still grinning. "It was Zoro's idea to move the fort, so Zoro's gotta help us."
“What? Don’t jus-“ Zoro began.
But Luffy had already launched his armful of pillows in Zoro’s direction and the swordsman automatically lunged forwards to catch them all before they hit the floor. The captain laughed as he started to gather more.
Roronoa Zoro absolutely did not built nests.
But Luffy was grinning and laughing. And his eyes were bright with excitement. And Usopp and Chopper were babbling about how they could make the damn thing bigger now if they could find supports for it.
And it wasn’t really a nest, was it? It was just a pillow fort. He wasn’t even building it. The others were. He was just here, helping them move things, following the captain’s whims. It was sort of his job to do what Luffy wanted. There wasn’t anything deeper to it.
He didn’t even want to. He was just making his crew happy.
It didn’t break any of his rules.
It was fine.
-
It was not fine.
For all his endless enthusiasm and apparent commitment to building the biggest and greatest of pillow forts, Luffy was more of a hazard than a help. Three complete collapses of the fort’s primary structure later and he was relegated to being handed things by one of the others and told exactly where to put it. And even then, Luffy had a vision. A vision that he strove to achieve.
“Why would you punch it?” asked an exasperated Usopp, as Chopper switched to heavy point in an attempt to hold the side of the fort in place.
Chopper’s attempt fell short, the wall crumbling as much as a pile of pillows and cushions that had definitely been taken from the couch could do.
“It needed a window,” said Luffy, retrieving the pillow he had knocked out of the wall in the first place.
“No, it didn’t!”Usopp replied. “When have you ever seen a pillow fort with windows?”
Luffy seemed to consider this for a moment, finally shrugging as Chopper began to methodically replace the knocked down part of the fort. Zoro picked up one of the fallen couch cushions and handed it to him, relishing an odd feeling of satisfaction as Chopper put it back in the exact space it had come from.
Usopp picked up a pillow, swinging it by the corner until it whacked Luffy squarely in the stomach.
Being made of rubber, Luffy could easily have deflected it but chose instead to grab it, body reeling backwards with the impact. A wolfish grin spread across his face as his eyes dropped their gaze to the pillow in his arms and widened with sudden realisation.
Usopp seemed to realise his error at that exact moment but it was far too late. Luffy was already drawing his arm back and swinging the pillow around and around.
“Gomu gomu no… pillow fight!” he announced, unleashing his pillow at maximum velocity.
Usopp tried to dodge but the pillow caught him firmly in the face, his nose twanging like it too was made of rubber and not an extended creation of cartilage.
“You will regret challenging the Great Captain Usopp to a pillow fight – I once single-handedly fought off-“
Whatever Usopp was claiming to have vanquished, probably with pillows, was lost as Luffy yanked a cushion out of Chopper’s hands and launched that as well. Usopp cut off in a girly shriek which he attempted to transform into a savage war cry.
What followed was a systematic pillow beat down. Usopp’s aim was lethal but Luffy’s reach was unconquerable. While Usopp preferred to launch the pillows from afar, Luffy was more of a swing-and-hit pillow fighter.
It would have been over in minutes if not for the fact that any physical activity with Luffy invariably resulted in collateral damage. In this case, the collateral damage involved Luffy beaming Zoro in the butt with a pillow he was stretching back to drive into Usopp’s midsection.
Zoro and Chopper had not joined the pillow fight. Instead, they had been reassembling the wall Luffy had broken while the captain was distracted – though Chopper had kept glancing over somewhat wistfully when he thought Zoro couldn’t see.
Now though, there was no alternative. There was no getting out of it. The gauntlet (pillow) had been thrown. His butt had been smacked, while he had been bent over, trying to position a cushion in the correct location. Revenge would be swift and merciless.
Zoro spun on his heel, straightening up just in time to slam the cushion he’d been about to put back into the side of Luffy’s head from behind.
Luffy lurched to the side, laughing. He maintained his grip on the corner of the pillow he had been hitting Usopp with but his arm twanged back to his body. A puff of feathers escaped the pillow case, one white curl settling in Luffy’s dark hair as they fell like soft, fluffy snow around the pirate captain.
Zoro watched it, holding his pillow numbly between his hands. Like it had during his heat, warmth bloomed somewhere in his chest in response to the alpha’s bright smile and cheerful laugh. The lighting in the storage room was dim but Luffy was a sun all by himself.
Then Chopper hopped up onto his shoulders and brought an overstuffed cushion down on the top of his head. His reverie was broken and it was on.
The pillow fight raged for many minutes, a blizzard of feathers hanging in the air, unable to land properly with the flurry of limbs that was Luffy in the middle of the room. Laughter and shouts and the occasional scream floated up towards the deck.
At one point, Usopp slipped on a blanket and all three of them whaled on him while he struggled to get up. He had just managed to push free of Chopper and scoot back towards the doorway when the door opened and he fell back against a pair of legs.
“Will you idiots keep it down? I’m trying to– OOF!”
Three cushions struck Nami in the stomach, shoulder and face.
All four of them felt her wrath.
-
Finally, after a dressing down from Nami, the fort construction resumed. Miraculously, it had survived the chaos, which Usopp attributed to his design expertise. Now all they needed to do was expand it, get the roof on and an dress up the inside.
“Put that there – no, there – yeah, the corner,” directed Usopp, pausing in his retrieval of a building block (cushion) of his own.
Luffy hugged the pillow he had been given, resting his chin on it as he picked his way over to the corner Usopp was indicating.
Zoro placed his own cushion where he thought it should be, straightening to watch the captain’s progress. Only to feel the itch in the back of his mind.
He would have agreed with Usopp before. That corner did need reinforcing. A pillow like that would certainly do the job. Even an overzealous Luffy could work out how to place the pillow in that space so that it would achieve this purpose. It was logical, methodical.
It was also wrong.
The moment that Luffy had hugged it, pressed his chin to it, let it rub at the side of his cheek, that pillow’s place had changed. It needed to be in the centre of the nest.
“Luffy,” Zoro began, only to freeze when he realised what it was that was happening.
“Yeah?” said Luffy.
That doesn’t go there, Zoro’s body screamed. It doesn’t belong there.
But it did.
“There’s a feather,” Zoro said instead, “in your hair.”
But that wasn’t it. Luffy dropped the pillow, not even in the location he’d been told to leave it, and ran his fingers through his hair. The niggle grew stronger. That pervading feeling of no, wrong, fix it. But there was nothing to be fixed. The fort was fine. Better than fine, in fact – it was actually looking pretty good.
The fort. Because it was a fort. Their fort. And not a nest, not for him.
“Oh,” said Luffy. Then looked up at Zoro and smiled. “Is it gone?”
It wasn’t.
Zoro stepped forwards with a sigh that was mostly exasperation at his own awful instincts and swiped his own fingers through the hair just above Luffy’s ear. Luffy seemed to lean into the touch of Zoro’s fingers, still smiling. His warmth spread through Zoro’s palm, a hint of his happiness shared in his scent that Zoro was suddenly a lot more aware of. The feather floated slowly to the floor, both of them pausing to watch as it landed on Luffy’s discarded pillow.
“Shishishi, thanks Zoro,” said Luffy, flashing him a grin before bounding back out of the fort to Usopp, who was busy surveying their creation.
He made no effort to retrieve the pillow he’d been asked to place.
Zoro looked at it for a moment, feeling as though it was looking at him, goading him. Place me, place me, place me.
He heard Usopp give Luffy another instruction. Chopper shuffled somewhere behind him. Nobody said anything about the abandoned pillow.
Zoro picked it up and placed it in the centre of the nest, his inner omega purring with contentment. Yes, there. The centre. A place where its scent would be allowed to slowly dissipate outwards, where they could curl up with a blanket and rest their heads, breathing in the soothing scent of a barbeque on the beach. Home.
He recoiled from the pillow as he recoiled from the thought, standing up as much as he was able to and dusting off his hands like that would wipe away the very notion. Chopper paused in the corner of the fort, sending a knowing look in his direction.
Zoro ignored it; there was nothing to know.