Chapter Text
Thriller Bark.
It had the richness of rubber flesh but all the blood he tasted was his own. The pulp sank into him, carved a long valley of a wound: made a vessel of his too-thin skin and split-open chest and in his reeling mind maybe it came across to him as Luffy peeling open his ribs all at once- not even bone by bone- and settling inside, one long limb after another: Luffy, with a, hey, Zoro, can you move your lungs? My hat's a bit squished, and a red, wet sound, and Zoro's blood was loud in his ears, loud enough to rupture the seams behind his nose and set his skull to pieces but he must have moved. He must have moved them as he was asked.
As he was asked, staring at an open palm and the death of a long shadow: what can a crew do with a captain without a head?
Nothing, it's true. Nothing at all.
The sun hits the brim of that old hat and lights the straw to bursting - under it, Luffy stares back, expectant.
Starvation left Zoro brittle. A passing bruise drags through his chest before he understands that raw ache as hunger and the thought almost topples him from the cross. This bloodless end that would have been his. This grin that had been teeth at his throat, mine or dead and curious like it was strange that Zoro had hesitated, like there was no world where this bone-tired stranger strung up for the sun would have ever said no.
He doesn't say no.
Nami sweeps in and Luffy avoids a cage.
They settle in an empty home. When Luffy's hat slips to his shoulders and there's no string to catch it, the toss of his hair smells of salt.
"Drink," Nami says, and slides a mug at Zoro. For Luffy she digs a pink block out of the evacuee's pantry. Her smile is slow as she draws up a chair and sits at the other end, and Luffy turns to her with big eyes.
It was meat after all, Zoro thinks, vaguely startled.
"My favorite," Luffy is explaining, and she's saying, "-No, I got that."
Then, "Be my navigator," and she's scowling, with a, "What do you think I am."
Zoro leans back and the crude swords at his hip sag. Dead weight. "What do you mean by that."
"I'll skin you. What do you think it means?"
"Used to mean something different."
"Liar," she says. Nami's arms around him are rough with dust and relief. She was the only other to join with calluses already at her fingertips, and they drag over his eye, just once.
"Luffy," she says, then. "Make fun of me again and I might just quit. What're you gonna do without me? Out on your own for less than an hour and look at us! This is bullshit. This isn't even the strangest bullshit we've been through, damn you, seriously."
She has him by the vest, curls into him until her forehead touches his. Her eyes, bright, are framed by the sway of her hair, cropped at the chin.
"Hey!" Luffy laughs. He pats her shoulder. "What, you knew each other?"
Nami lets go.
"Luffy," she says. This time it’s more of a question.
The dinghy's keel scores a strip into the beach.
"Stuck the landing," Zoro says.
Nami points out that Luffy had been steering, that time. He knows because they’d flipped two times, and asks her why she let that happen; she tells him next time she’ll leave him to sink.
Luffy is already pattering on down, kicking up sand with a hand on his hat. Usopp's voice rings out from beyond the trees, the heads of his little trio peeking up from the foliage. Luffy needles at them until Usopp makes his introduction.
Even at the wrong end of the shore, his slingshot trembles. His arsenal is children's tricks and a mouthful of fantasy. But the sleepy village, lulled to peace by a sweet-talking butler, will have to recognize him another day.
For now, this is Usopp, returning from a cliffside.
He shouts, sprinting by. "Luffy's at the beach!"
"Did it go wrong?" Usopp asks, sometime after. Always with the worries. "Where did we fail?"
He sits at the base of the mast, cross-legged, and Zoro sprawls over the deck, lids heavy.
The Going Merry rocks under them, their steady onwards. Towards the seam of the horizon. The crest of a lonely peak. The sky splits overhead so the sun can peer down, brushstrokes of gold on Luffy's straw hat. Zoro has no answer.
Wano is the cutoff. He remembers nothing beyond his bowing back, pain unfathomable to him now. A black pit over a lurching wave. A starving little girl.
Last, the too-loud drum of a heartbeat.
None of it can be real, but here it is at his side. A man in a boy's skin, versus Luffy: a boy yet.
"He doesn't know me," Usopp is saying. He’s thrown into sharp relief. Scrawny again. A slingshot mismatched with the scope of his sight. "I started thinking about him when we were watching Kuro talk. He didn't know what was going on. I, I didn't know. Zoro, what is this? What the hell are we supposed to do?"
Usopp's confidence was his own, independent from Luffy's faith. But it had a beginning, as all things need to have: and there was no empty space on the Merry or Sunny so it had to have begun somewhere between Luffy's first, get on, Usopp, and the stretch of blue ocean that grew less ceaseless with every instant, lapping at the hull, you're almost there. You were almost there.
Zoro thinks it'll still be Usopp who takes the brunt of having a captain like this. Determined to never understand an adventure before he embarks. Selfish enough to forget them, too.
"He knows that he wants you," says Zoro, once Usopp has finished, fingers fisted into his fringe. "Isn't that enough?"
The restaurant ship falls victim to Luffy's typical rejection of spatial awareness.
"That wasn't necessary," Nami says. Zoro suggests they skip out on this one to dodge the potential bill. Nami laughs in his face.
The inside is spices and steamed fruit, the crackle of a grill under a murmur. On his own tongue, the copper twist of Wado's wet blade.
"Okay," Usopp hisses. He clutches at the tablecloth, upturning Zoro's glass. Luffy's hand drops because his attempted booger vandalism no longer has a target, and Zoro elbows him for trying anyway. "Here comes the waltz."
"Why are the walls coming," Luffy asks. The cook is already twirling towards them, momentum in his favor, adoration melting his face stupid.
Nami waves when he's mid-bow, says, "Hey, Sanji," and Sanji stops. The menu in his hand gleams. She makes a curious noise, something that should have him gushing her praise, but all he does is look her over.
"You know me," he's saying. The delight, this time, is tentative.
Nami's face fixes itself, quick like a dart. Usopp's has not.
"Yes," she says.
A pause. "I've never seen a face as charming as yours at one of our tables."
"Not at one of these, no."
He takes her hand into his palm, bent at one knee, his stare at a stiff angle. "A reminder? I've never cooked for anywhere else."
Nami smiles the smile she pretends is winsome.
"No," she says, just as the doors burst open, and a man staggers in, bedraggled and cheeks gaunt to the bone. He announces himself as Gin, starving, and Luffy is dragged off to who knows where in the crossfire.
Whatever happens next will be the reason Luffy was so taken with Sanji. Why he crashed Arlong Park, gleeful, with a man he hadn't spared a second glance for in the beginning. Why Sanji had been so struck, the same, to have let himself be pulled along.
He doesn't have the time to think. His neck is ash and all that's left of him is the clench of his jaw. Mihawk is as he has always been, and Zoro's body is less his own, unscarred. The dead weights shatter with spite. Wado remains, his teeth scrape steel. Spilling off his chin, heat. On his tongue. Across the chest, one clean cut.
"Okay!" Luffy says, and he's close. Close enough for the press of his palms to mean all of him. He's shoving at the wound, clumsy and panicked, like he can seal it just because he wants to. His skin is hot.
He pushes his hair out of his face and Zoro's blood smears into his temple like a bruise. Under that, his grin is wobbling, vicious, and Zoro grins back until his mouth splits in two. "Okay! Zoro!"
In their makeshift infirmary, where the star of the room is a stack of gauze, Zoro is mocked for being injured.
"Woow," says Nami. "The hell," says Zoro.
She sits at his bedside, nestling a salve into their cabinet, tilted at a false corner. The mattress creaks. The stitches jut like a zipper. His flesh has come back to life.
She tosses a blanket over him without looking. It lands halfway up his knees. "No," she says. "It's just, I think Usopp told it to me differently."
"Differently."
"I wasn't there, you know. To see you cry about losing."
Zoro sends her a look that she ignores.
"Usopp said that."
"No, not at all," she says. She stands up because Sanji's footsteps linger at the door. She calls for him to come in and folds up the staff Usopp's been working on for her. Tucks it to her hip.
Then, snickering, "He made it sound gallant. I'm telling you what I was thinking. I mean, this was a long time ago, but hey, Mihawk? "
"I trained with him."
Nami nods.
Zoro says, "I won't again."
"Yeah," she says. She thumbs the staff into her pocket like she expects it to jump away. She leaves with a slap to his shoulder, smiling.
"Why did you let him do that to the Baratie. His chore-boy roleplay had half the staff near tears."
Zoro turns over and probably tears out three stitches. "It was funny."
Sanji sets a plate on the cabinet. Fish, grilled from the tail. There's a whiff of lemon. The Merry's rooms were small like that. Small enough for the walls to take on every scent.
"Bastard," he says. "He still has the whole world to wreck. Go laugh about that."
Outside, Luffy hollers and Usopp howls something back. A thump, a shout pitching high, and the twin splashes after are followed with complaints about a too-skinny fish.
The silence after is goddamn thick. Too much to discuss but it won't happen between the two of them. Zoro won't say is that it? We're just leaving it all back there because Sanji doesn't need it, wouldn't want it either way. Sanji won't explain himself and the problem that's two years stumbling, everything Zoro heard second-hand before there was a den den mushi up his shoulder and some shameless request filtering through, ragged. Zoro doesn't need it.
"I was talking to Usopp," Sanji starts, instead. His cigarette wilts, his elbow thudding against the wall as he tucks away the lighter. The room is dim enough for a glow. "Get this, alright? He was mad at me."
"And."
"Said I gave him a scare."
Sanji jerks his thumb in the direction of the deck. "You know what's going on?" he asks, isn't expecting an answer.
Zoro looks at him. He wants one. Too bad for him.
"It was like that from the start," he says.
Sanji's mouth purses. He blows out smoke until his other eye blurs.
Nami. Usopp. First, Luffy. Almost Sanji. Sanji's hands on Luffy's shoulders, a hard grip, knuckles whiting. Luffy. Luffy. Why would you need to ask me again?
On Sanji's departure, Zoro sends a word trailing after him. An afterthought. It can be advice if he means for it to be.
Sanji has the gall to laugh.
"This is just some shitty dream, jackass. Sit it out. I’ve had this one before."
"Luffy," Nami says, the moment Zoro rips himself out of bed. Not a moment's hesitation, a glance at him and she's rearing to go. She has chalk pinched between her fingers. A white square sits on the top deck. Luffy perks up from where he's draped over Usopp, and with his attention, she continues, "I want to visit my hometown."
"Ohh."
He flings himself over to where she stands, perching atop the railing. "Which way?"
Nami raps his forehead. "You can leave that to me. Just wanted to check in."
"Right," Luffy says. He glances at the chalk, and she tells him that the Going Merry will have its own orchard, soon enough. She establishes the no-Luffy boundary before they even reach Cocoyasi Village. No Luffy, echoes Usopp, laughing. As though there's a joke to be had, there.
Loguetown.
Luffy scrambles his way up the execution platform, and Zoro can't see him from behind the rows of bars and seedy stores but knows he's there.
The crowds on this end are dispersing to watch the spectacle in the town center. The streets crawl to a comfortable silence, and he picks up an old friend of a sword amidst the panic.
"Pirate-hunter," says a marine. A greenhorn, trusting of Zoro's old title and wary of steel. Zoro walks past him and his odd line of marine janitors. Tashigi is nowhere in sight. Instead, there's Smoker.
Smoker, who has Luffy's bounty poster hanging from one hand, weapon in the other. Under Luffy's paper face, Alive.
"Strawhat Luffy's partner," Smoker says. "That's you."
White smoke sloughs off his shoulders and wreathes the handle.
"Okay," Zoro says. "What about it."
"Kid’s got connections? Tell me about them."
Like hell.
"I'm telling you this now for your own good," Smoker says. His voice is grave. The lines of his face are tight. "Don't enter the Grand Line."
Zoro retraces what he should know about Loguetown. Luffy, getting lost and being pleased with himself for it. A beer. A woman who wasn't Kuina, and a sword that refused to be tamed.
Luffy on the execution platform wearing a grin like a taunt. An unreasonable storm. Before that, there was no Smoker, only a swarm of pirates hellbent on revenge. Why is he here, then. With Zoro? Smoker chased them to Alabasta and chased them after, and Luffy had the cheek to have been fond of him.
"He'll get there," Zoro says, instead of any of that.
Smoker says, "He won't last a day."
The air tastes like metal but there's been no bloodshed. Wado itches and Zoro has a new blade to break in.
"Answer my questions or I kill you," Zoro decides to say, but finds that he doesn't have many questions. Any to ask this man at all, really. He unsheathes and turns to the sky: the clouds have bruised into dark knots. It'll be time, soon.
Smoker's chin dips. He seems disappointed.
Whiskey Peak.
There are some truths that Zoro learned early not to prod: one, sinking into useless thought was only trouble, and it was better to ration what you knew as absolute fact. Your world finds itself changing less. Moving less. Two: for as long as you don't touch them, they might not have been true at all.
Fighting Luffy had never been tradition and Zoro had never enjoyed tradition. It was expectation and a rhythm established to keep him in check but sword in his grip, Luffy's knuckles furrowing deep into his side: the expectation was all on Luffy, and there was no one to keep Luffy in check, so what were they ever except the sensation of flesh and blood and man.
Luffy's capabilities were called into question often enough that even he was able to notice. No weapon but the sinew beneath his skin. It sounded hideously yielding. There were always those who said it looked, so, too.
Whiskey Peak touched the worst of Zoro's doubt, because: what was a captain that couldn't trust his crew.
Whiskey Peak was the worst of it, because: it let Zoro know that he was already in too deep. That his fury was for more than just the threat of death, for the misunderstanding. That he'd already surrendered this much of himself unknowingly, that he couldn't seize any of it back.
He has these understandings tucked away with low interest in how he'll feel about them this time, watching Luffy approach him, watching Luffy's face darken, and something about that childish temper strikes him hollow, and he's watching Luffy snarl beneath him with a demented animal ferocity that spins his head past reason, Luffy's mouth split open and livid: and it's in this moment where Zoro's fingers are suddenly too wet, too hot, where he grips onto the realization- yes. It had been real.
This is real, too. The sensation of a breath scattering out a chest. Zoro had gouged too deep. The blood is on the blunt side of his sword. There's no mistake there.
That is real, too.
He appraises his next words with a level of disconnection that keeps him wondering about what he means by what he says. "They attacked me first. It's a town of bounty hunters."
Luffy's face clears up in an instant. "I see!" he says, and then laughs a burbling laugh that stutters off at the end. It's a goddamn ugly sound and Zoro stares down at him with complicated anticipation. Is he going mad, after all? There were limits he knew not to breach, kept himself conscious of them even as his sword played parched, but those limits brought to him a slew of unanswerable questions. How could he consider himself subordinate to a man weaker than himself. How could he ever call a too-soft man captain, but how could he have ever. So was it the lack of armament, or was it really that pathetic taste of hurt: could it have been that: when Luffy had always, without hesitation, taken Zoro's word as the simplest, easiest truth.
"Shoot," says Luffy, then, with a fresh laugh. "You got me good."
"Did he," Nami snaps.
Zoro looks at her. On his tongue, you're late. It's bewildering relief. She's only a few steps away.
"You aren't dying," Nami says.
Her pace is leisurely, disapproving, even, up until Luffy stops blinking. His eyes close. Open in a stunned wince. He says, "Uh. Uhh, Zoro."
Zoro moves to sling him over his shoulder but Nami's there, already on her knees and peeling open Luffy's vest, and Luffy's eyes twitch through it but it's all curiosity, the look on his face.
"I know," he says, but that hadn't been what he told Zoro, earlier, blood bubbling off his jaw, he'd exclaimed, "Are you going to kill me!" as a real question, not threat or plea to stop but a regular, really, we'll end up like this? Like Zoro hadn't been paying particular attention, like Luffy was reminding him: look, see, look at what you're able to do- was it this? Was this how it could have been, if you had known early on that rubber was only rubber and it was so easy to still be human. That this had been who his captain was, all violent whimsy and broad, blank stare that Zoro never learned to read because it had always been turned on other people: that this was who Zoro had always known, that this was. That this is.
"It would have been easier to wake him up and tell him," Nami says.
"How," says Zoro, and Nami seems to agree because she'd said what she'd said just to say it.
Nights like Whiskey Peak and cold nights on the Sunny and nights when Luffy harassed him long enough for him to snap were never a matter of pride; Luffy's pride had always been in them rather than a labor against. But this wound had come earlier in the fight: and Luffy could have stopped him then- there was no saving the lethal blow, but he could have stopped him then. It couldn't have been pride that kept him standing because he isn't like that, and this Zoro knows, knows because it's been written into the heart of him, because it's always been this that makes Luffy so easy to read.
Luffy shudders but he's looking at Zoro and Zoro's staring back. He crouches, too: his heels shlick, wet with blood.
"Some meat could fix me sooo fast," Luffy says, meaningfully: at Zoro, and Nami laughs, fond.
Nami cleans away more of the blood with a strip she's ripped off her sleeve. Zoro can then see the lip of the wound. There's a wild mess more than just the red and he knows that he struck far past flesh, that it's wild luck that none of Luffy's insides have spilled out.
"We've just been sitting here," Nami says to him, after Luffy's eyes close with finality and his breath evens out. There'd been a moment where he had been entirely still. For that brittle moment, Zoro had wondered if he'd drunken past his limit, in this old, too-new body of his. But that moment had passed. "Were you waiting for Chopper, too?"
The cut spans from his collar to his waist.
"Zoro," Nami says. She sounds like she's just pried her throat loose. "I think I'm done with this. And you are too, I can tell."
He looks at her.
She says, "It looks like half an X. It looks like. Look, Zoro."
It looks like half an X.
"So we're done with this. Aren't we? Done sitting on our asses. Let's go pick up everyone else, fast. This is nice, sure. It's so- peaceful. But look. It looks like half an X."
She's saying, "I get it, Zoro."
She's saying, "I'm sick for saying this, but I'm glad. I'm glad you hurt him. I'm glad this is going to scar. It's not the same. It's not a burn, and it's not the same, and this time there won't be those two years at all."
She's saying, "I wish he came to us sooner. Or that he didn't at all, because then I wouldn't have to think about everything that could have been. He makes me want everything. But I'm- this is horrible. I'm so happy this happened. I'm so glad this happened. Maybe it means that no one else can do this to him."
"The other half," says Zoro.
"You should let go," she says, and Zoro finds that his sword is cutting up into the grooves of his fist.
Nami tugs her bloody fingers through Luffy's hair. "The other half will be ours too," she tells him. Every bit as solemn and tender as the weight in Zoro's chest. She meets his eyes. Her other hand takes his red fist, guides it, seems heartened that he lets her. There's the heat of a living body under his palm.
A pulse. The taste of relief is fierce enough to hurt.