Chapter Text
He is sleeping. Light, like the tremble of shoji in the wind. Membrane thin between the worlds.
The door slides open.
Wooden floorboards. Bare feet. The weight shifts –
He turns his head while still laying down, hands limp at his sides. No impulse to seek steel and scabbard. The gait is familiar, the presence in the room more so.
His eyelids flutter, sleep-heavy. A shadow falls across the moon-bright floor and he follows it upwards. There’s a woman standing. Her ponytail swishes and skims her back ribs, the jut of her nose a little pronounced.
His heart begins to pound.
She doesn’t bother to crouch. There’s another shadow, prodding out of her hip like a katana hilt. Her hair is lighter than the colour of her eyes. She’s… taller.
“Go to sleep.” Kuina says.
Zoro blinks at her. His head is still heavy, his hands empty of weaponry. His heart thuds away.
“Thirsty?” She asks.
There’s a single silver sickle dangling from her left ear.
Zoro shakes his head.
“Bedtime story?” She continues, in the same measured tone. “Once, there was a green haired boy. While getting out of bed, he tripped on his feet and fell on his sword. The end.”
The wind rustles through the reeds outside. Kuina stares, brow arched, for a couple moments, and turns to leave.
Zoro watches her step through the door. It slides shut, her taller silhouette dancing across the paper.
I had a dream, Zoro thinks.
I was on a pirate ship. And I was carrying your sword.
~
“Would this be your idea of a joke?”
Sanji’s lips purse around the vowel, till it becomes jo-ou-ke, till the k-sound exhales sharply. It’s how he says it, but not all of the time. He talks like someone who’s travelled a lot, even though he only talks of the Baratie.
Luffy has travelled around a lot, and lived in many places, but he only talks one way. His tongue doesn’t bounce across geographies like Sanji’s does, a different place with every emotion.
Zoro talks slow. Luffy watches him enunciate a response, as flat as it comes. “…why.”
“Oh y’know, bottle in a treasure chest. Seems like your kinda thing."
The bottle is dark green, and the only occupant of a heavy, carved chest that they fished out of a Marine frigate. Luffy doesn’t really understand why they haven’t opened it yet.
“It’s not booze.” Nami says. “Booze isn’t treasure.”
“Maybe there were fifty bottles in there,” Zoro says, and Sanji rolls his eyes and scoffs.
“Maybe it’s really tasty,” Luffy offers. “We should open it!”
“That’s still not treasure, Luffy.” Nami says, kneading the bridge of her nose with two fingers, with that tone she uses when she thinks the world operates by a fixed set of rules.
Makino used to make this incredible milkshake, use one of the bar mixers and rattle it over her head and between her knees, high and low. She’d freeze fruit in little cubes and smash them in, let the milk froth to the point of dribbling out, add in fragrant sprinkles of spice. Luffy loved watching her do it almost as much as gulping the drink down.
Alcohol on the other hand, is yucky and comes pre-made and untouched in cold bottles. Luffy knows what treasure tastes like – sweet and milky, or devilish-green.
Maybe they made devil fruit into a milkshake and poured that in. Luffy’s about to voice this idea, but Zoro shrugs and goes, “Don’t mind drinking it.”
Usopp trudges into the galley, apparently done keeping watch for a bit. Luffy waves at him over Nami’s shoulder, even as she grates out, “And what if it’s poison?”
“We could pour it on a plant to double check.” Sanji suggests sunnily.
“That… doesn’t seem very scientifically sound.” Usopp interjects.
“No one’s pouring it, no one’s drinking it, we are going to sell this bottle.” Nami reaches over and closes the lid of the chest with a thud.
“And how’re you going to do that without knowing what it is?”
“Bluffing.”
“Sure. But would that get you the right price for this bottle?”
Luffy looks back and forth between Nami and Zoro. Nami’s lower lip is twitching.
“Nami.” She turns towards Luffy at his prompting, though her eyes are still narrowed in Zoro’s general direction. “What did the marine cadet say was in the chest?”
“He said it was treasure. That they got it from a pirate vault, whatever the hell that is, somewhere in the Grand Line.” Nami tucks an errant orange lock behind her ear, mouth curled in thought.
“Not a lot of crew on the ship, for a vessel carrying treasure.” Sanji props his elbows on the counter. “Not that you’re wrong in the slightest, Nami.”
Zoro exhales in a sigh, quieter than a whisper.
Luffy persists. “Did he say anything else?”
“He said it would lead to your heart’s greatest wish.” Usopp says. “Fondest wish? Greatest wish.”
“Fifty bottles of booze.”
“You know what,” Nami pivots on her heel back to Zoro, voice almost sweet, “why don’t you go and wave that sword of yours around on deck, give your brain a break from the only other thing you can think about–”
“So you don’t wanna know about the empty bottles stashed in the captain’s cabin, or the half-empty green one on his table?” Zoro leans against a high cabinet, arms folded. “I finished that, by the way.”
Silence.
Usopp immediately covers his mouth with a fist, stifling a sound. Sanji’s one visible brow hits his hairline.
Nami takes a calm, measured step back from the counter. “I… am going to get some fresh air.” The skirt flares and off she goes.
Sanji shoots Zoro a scowl and follows her. Usopp trails in their footsteps slowly, lips still pressed tight like he’s trying to suppress a snicker.
Luffy tilts his head at Zoro, “it was your idea of a joke.”
Zoro cracks an eyelid open from where he’s still against the cabinet.
Luffy grins, soft and knowing. “Zoro was being funny.”
Zoro’s expression doesn’t shift by an inch. It doesn’t need to, Luffy can feel the amusement coming off him in waves. Like a dish that smells really nice.
“Did you laugh?” He asks, tone dryer than a desert. Warm, too.
Luffy shrugs. “Was a quiet kind of funny.” He goes up and stands next to Zoro. The sun’s falling through the galley windows, and Luffy feels even warmer.
“Did it taste nice?”
Zoro shrugs back. “You wouldn’t have liked it.”
That’s disappointing. “What kind of treasure doesn’t taste nice?”
“Not everything is about…” Zoro pauses, like he’s trying to find the right word, “sensory?... pleasure.” His face twitches into a grimace, like that didn’t quite come out right.
But Luffy understands. Zoro doesn’t spend time thinking about the rules of the world, but the things he says usually make sense. “The things that make us feel good from the inside.”
“Yeah.” Zoro’s lips flicker into a faint smile, then it fleets away. He tilts his head back into the sun.
Six hours later, they all go to their hammocks and bunk beds and sleeping bags under the tangerine grove.
Twelve hours later, Zoro does not wake up.
~
The air snaps cold at his cheek.
The house is at the foothills of a mountain range. Snowy peaks loom in the distance, wreathed in golden cloud. But the field outside the house is flat, and Zoro can feel the grass rasping at his toes with every step.
Up ahead, there’s the sound of twittering birds, and steel cutting through the air.
He has to stop. His heart is picking up again, his palms clammy. When they tremble towards a hilt, there are only two at his waist.
“There was an accident – ”
Wasn’t there?
His muscles feel like water. He hates this feeling.
Thought translated seamlessly to action, Zoro is moving again. His breaths are steady as ever, even if the other organ in his chest is not as compliant. He isn’t going to dither. He’s on land instead of water, with a stranger instead of his crew. He’s going to get answers. And the starting question is simple. Who – are – you –
He turns the corner. The hilt of Wado Ichimonji gleams golden in the light of the sunrise.
Kuina doesn’t acknowledge him. Kuina, with her… her long blue hair, knotted into a ponytail and winding down her back. Her feet gliding over the ground like paper, hakama-keikogi flaring over ankle and elbow. Her unshakable stance and snake-still breath, and that little curve to the bow of her lip like there’s joy to be had, in this.
He hasn’t stopped moving. His feet take him to a patch a few metres away, chest rising and falling slower with every second. In a couple minutes, his body is drifting through the motions of his usual stretches; like they do this every day.
They finish within milliseconds of each other. The air fleets from their lips as one.
They bow.
When Zoro withdraws his first katana, Kuina’s gaze drops to his grip. He corrects it with a twitch of his fingers, back straightening on automatic. She smirks.
(His form is excellent, but there’s only so much you can hold on to without a partner to– )
They move.
She’s taller than he’s ever seen her, but she’s also shorter than him and that’s… weird. He keeps looking an inch above where her forehead is. Her reach is shorter, but they fall into one step distance like it’s habit. Blocking Wado Ichimonji with an ungraded sword is as much of a bitch as it always was, and Zoro falls back into that too like it’s been no time at all.
Maybe it hasn’t.
The sun crests over the snowcapped peaks, the low-angled sun spearing into their eyes. Zoro lets his fall shut for longer than a blink, lulled by the rhythm and the disbelieving wonder – and immediately gets whacked on the ribs for his trouble. The pain doesn’t register; Kuina’s unimpressed face does.
The bruise thrums, the blood underneath vibrating with the challenge.
He draws his second katana. His arms pull taut in two sword style – Kuina remains unmoving in chudan-no-kamae. They watch.
(“Look at your opponents,” Sensei said, “like you’re taking in the far mountain in the distance. Watching only the feet, the face, the shinai – this is incomplete information, and you may miss clues, or fall victim to a feint. You must take in the whole.”)
And so Zoro does. You could describe a straight line, from the tip of Kuina’s head to the blade of her feet, and it would be no more than ten degrees off the vertical. Perfectly balanced.
She’s magnificent.
When he breaks, she flows immediately into an overhead stance and brings the sword down. He blocks her with greater strength than she’s accustomed to – he can see it in the crease between her brows, and the quiver of Wado Ichimonji in her grip.
(Luffy’s made him stronger.)
The thought is oddly incongruous, in this field stretching out under the mountains. The ocean may as well not exist.
Kuina takes advantage of the distraction and pushes him back several steps, and Zoro’s jaw firms up with irritation. He spins three sixty degrees on his heel, swords flaring out and Kuina has to pull back with a scowl – not exactly a traditional move. She retorts with a couple quick jabs, he flicks each out of the way and swipes at her head.
She puffs a sweaty strand of hair off her lip and wipes the annoyance from her face. He can see her stomach pulling in further, her spine straightening. Pulling it back to the core.
It’s the longest bout they’ve ever fought. And the closest. By the end of it, the sun is a bright gold circle in the sky, pouring heat onto Zoro’s sweat-sodden back. He’s down on a knee, dry-mouthed and panting. Kuina’s gasping a couple metres above, the sharp edge at Zoro’s clavicle trembling by millimetres.
He grins mindlessly at the ground.
(You learn from fighting of course. And you learn from training, and you learn from watching, and he hasn’t had a swordsman for a partner in so long. He’s taken more from these twenty minutes than he has entire bouts with shitty pirates. If he had been using Three Sword today–)
Wado Ichimonji withdraws and glides back into its sheath. Kuina takes a step back, and Zoro comes off the ground like an attack and reaches a hand to her elbow.
“Zoro?”
It’s the first word they’ve said all morning.
Her voice is…
Zoro blinks sweat into his eyes, the sting prickling like tears.
She smiles.
“See you at breakfast.” She says, pulling away from the brittle wax of his grip. Then she lifts a hand and tugs affectionately at his earlobe.
When she turns to walk away, Zoro follows.
~
Zoro examines his memories over breakfast.
There are the ones that feel lived in, filled in with the strokes of a paintbrush in exacting detail. The wooden post at his back, the sun beating down on his neck, the splash of Luffy’s red vest in that dead yard.
“Is that all you are? Is that all you want?”
Shells Town, Syrup Village, the Baratie. Yoru parting his skin like paper, blood swelling to the crease.
(He doesn’t have the scar here. No hardened skin pulling taut over the sternum if he does crunches. No physical imprint left of the lesson.
He feels the loss acutely.)
And then there’s the… other set of memories. The kind that feels like someone’s read them out to him from a book, at a blade’s remove from actual experience. He knows what happened, he just can’t feel it in his body.
Except then he’s sliding his clogs off at the doorway, and Kuina is briskly stirring egg into her rice and grimacing at the natto on the side. And they plough straight into him – her rounded face at eight, ten, fourteen – nose scrunching at the fermented soybean.
Sixteen, and there are two successive pinches at his earlobe, and Kuina grinning over the shoulder of the old man with the sterilized needle. She nods dutifully, single sickle bobbing, while Zoro tunes out the man’s droning about aftercare for piercings; he listens to the cicadas instead, drowsing in the humid, summer night and watches the girl who thought she’d never leave Shimotsuki Island.
She didn’t leave, snarls some horrid part of his mind. You can’t forget that. You can’t.
Zoro kneels on the tatami in the present, thanks the lady serving them food brought over from some tea house. At least they don’t cook; him or Kuina. That would’ve been a detail too much to swallow.
Then he chokes on his first mouthful of rice, a particular memory rising to the occasion.
“You asked me to marry you.”
Kuina blinks at him, like she has no idea what the fuck he’s on about. Then her vision brightens. “Oh, on Shimotsuki. I was what, twelve? I’d have married a goat.”
“Fifteen.” Zoro croaks. He clears his throat with more effort than should be warranted from a practitioner of Three Sword Style. “You were fifteen, I was fourteen.”
“What a scandal.” Kuina drawls. “Whoever heard of the girl being older.”
She’s like this. Why is she like this?
Kuina at fifteen had the bravado but not the nonchalance. You’d marry me, wouldn’t you, she’d thrown out, right in the middle of mokuso and Zoro had never been yanked out of a meditative trance faster.
Father will find a match soon anyway. And you’d let me fight… right?
Oh, that little pause before the question. How he’d hated it.
Who had the audacity to let Kuina do anything?
“But then you’d said something even more scandalous.” Kuina tucks her palms around the bowl of miso, inhales deep.
He’s going to disapprove of your fighting anyway. Why not come with me and never mind the marriage?
“Always a rebel, Zoro.” She sips delicately. She smacks her lips. “Mm, yum.”
~
They’re bounty hunters.
“Wandering swordsmen.” Kuina corrects. “Ronin, if you will. Gender neutral.”
Zoro stares at the bounty board they’re currently standing in front of. He looks back at Kuina.
Kuina’s hair is down – like this, she looks startlingly like Koushirou Sensei. “We didn’t even collect the bounty on the last guy.”
Zoro lets the memory surface. He can feel his lips quirk. “Because we lost his head.”
‘Lost’ is a strong word. The pirate captain’s crew had been pretty persistent, and in lieu of his second katana, Zoro had to use the head of the guy as a blunt instrument. When the first mate pulled a pistol on them, Zoro drew his arm back and off the head went – tumbling through the air like the world’s worst projectile weapon. A split second after it collided with the first mate’s horrified face, up came Wado Ichimonji and skewered through both their skulls like takoyaki on a stick.
It's a good memory.
Kuina’s grin has sharpened edges, eyes gleaming like sun on steel. “That we did.”
“So.” Zoro folds his arms. “Bounty hunters.”
“Renegades of the blade.” Kuina offers, and Zoro finds his smile growing.
They make a note of potential bounties. Zoro pumps water from the village well for seventeen grateful houses and Kuina arranges for passage to their next destination. It’s everything he wouldn’t have known to want. Wouldn’t have distracted himself with imagining. The day passes in seductive simplicity, like a childhood recollection.
Come sundown, the mountain peaks are ablaze with colour and the fields susurrating with the breeze. Zoro sits on the engawa of the house, legs swung over the edge and heels pressed to the earth. The view is more occluded than a sunset at sea, but he doesn’t know if it’s worse. He’s never paid attention before.
Tomorrow at dawn, he steps on a boat again.
Or he wakes up. Either way, the ground will be pitching and rolling underneath, instead of this still, rooted gravity.
He hasn’t thought about a drink all day. It’s a strange point of difference. But the roof of his mouth doesn’t itch, the way it usually does at the idea of booze, so he lets it be.
When Kuina comes to join him, her footsteps near-quiet on the timber floor – there’s a rustle of movement behind before he registers a hand on his sword belt. He stiffens. She turns it all the way around till the hilts sit on his left hip, and she crouches down and sidles up to his right. Shoulder to shoulder.
He can feel the movement of the air as her frame rises and falls with it. He’s still as death.
He doesn’t remember this from the dojo. They both were… Usopp would have called it standoffish. They fought and they swore promises, but Kuina still held herself apart. Awareness of their difference interceding in every moment. The boundary was set clearly, its being a fact of the world. If Zoro didn’t usually like to be touched, then Kuina didn’t touch anyone at all.
There’s nothing loaded about the contact now. She’s just… there, shoulder a couple inches too short. She’s there, and Zoro is holding his breath against his teeth, withstanding a barrage of memories that don’t belong to him. Of a hand with the same callouses as his own, of hair ruffles and arm wrestles and shoulder shoves. Punches on the arm, bandages around the calf, rolling and unrolling. Kicking at cold ankles, sleeping back-to-back.
Once, there was a blue haired girl. While going down the stairs, she tripped and fell to her death. The end.
She’s there, breathing right next to him.
It’s like fighting or falling asleep. It’s ingrained habit, muscle memory, the path his body knows and follows. Whatever it is, Zoro yields to its gravity and sways right. Kuina takes the weight like a wall and tilts her head left. His temple comes to rest on the top of her head.
Maybe the rest of the memories don’t belong to him. But this – the feeling of her hair, ever-so-slightly greasy against his skin – this exists now. This is theirs.
~
Zoro is taking a long time to wake up.
Nami says that twenty-eight hours is more than just a long time. She says it with a hand tight on the wheel, nails white with the pressure, gouging into the wood. Like she’s subconsciously steering them to land already, where they might have more than Red Leg Zeff’s spare kit of bandages to look after a crewmate.
“But Zoro’s good at sleeping.” Luffy points out. “Like me with eating. You wouldn’t worry if I ate an entire sea beast, would you Nami?”
Not that Luffy is entirely sure he could, at the moment. It’s like there’s seawater in his belly, churning and frothing, and the idea of swallowing anything feels vaguely off-putting. Even though it’s midnight and no one’s had dinner yet – Sanji keeps making aborted movements towards the galley to reheat the pot roast from lunch, but never quite gets there. The crew are scattered through the deck, but faced towards each other, lamplight shading their expressions.
The door to the captain’s cabin is swinging back and forth in the wind.
Usopp is crouched down, locs tickling his cheeks. “Maybe he’s hibernating. Like a bear.”
“He is as strong as a bear.” Luffy confirms.
“Of course. He’s hibernating and it has nothing to do with the mysterious liquid he drank half a bottle of.” Nami leans her forehead against her arm braced on the wheel, the waver in the words barely perceptible over the bitterness.
“Alright, that’s enough.” Sanji’s voice cracks through the lapping waves, the sky choked out with clouds. The swinging door, hinges creaking in the wind.
His shoes click over the floorboards, decisive, as he moves to Usopp and holds out a hand. “Help me serve dinner?”
Usopp blinks, even as he seemingly takes the hand on reflex and gets pulled up. “I’m not sure I’m–”
“Sleepy, because Mosshead in there is catching up on the entire ship’s quota for a week. But I’m starving, and I can’t eat a roast by myself now, can I?”
“And you want me to… help?”
“Wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.” Sanji affirms warmly, like this isn’t the first time and he doesn’t smooth away little flecks of sauce if they aren’t swirled just right on the plate. “Surely the great Captain Usopp knows his way around a carving knife.”
Usopp’s teeth emerge in a brief flash, the smile a reprieve in the night.
Sanji looks over his shoulder, hair silver-gold in the lamplight. His voice casts out softer, “Nami?”
It takes a moment to register, but she raises her head from the wheel.
“Maybe a couple tangerines for the gravy? The juice would really freshen it up.”
She doesn’t smile. But something flickers in her jaw, and she finally jerks her chin in a nod.
Luffy is already watching Sanji when he turns towards him, blue eyes gently expectant. There’s something faintly Shanks-like about him, in the moment – like when the man used to wait and wait for Luffy to be done gambolling through the docks, picking through the loot chests, skinning palms on the bristly ropes. Shanks would be leaning against a barrel for hours, lenient, and then he’d start to shift his weight; red hair shimmering in the sun as it started to move away. And Luffy knew to drop whatever he was doing and come skidding down the pier, ready to call it a day.
It’s the same warmth pulled over a different face, that coaxing – come now. time to rest. “Captain?”
Luffy smiles back. “I’ll check on Zoro first. He’d want to have warm food too.”
Sanji’s eyes dim a little. But he nods and says, “I’ll set a plate aside for him.”
Usopp and Sanji file into the galley, Nami drifts towards the tangerine grove. Luffy stays still for a moment, feeling the Merry under his feet. The ocean’s rhythm, vibrating through hull and deck, a slipstream fuelled by the desires of her sailors. Ship and sea, taking them wherever they wanted to go.
The churning in his belly settles. Luffy breathes the salt in.
When he slips into the captain’s cabin, he closes the door gently behind him. There’s not much in here, except extra supply chests Nami liked to put away, and the bed. Zoro is tucked into the far end, on his side, green hair covering his face.
Luffy moved him here after the first eighteen hours. If he was going to sleep awhile, he should be comfortable.
But it’s hard to tell. He looks different. Not in a sweaty or pale way, or how his pulse became increasingly thready under the waxy tint of his wrists after the duel with Mihawk.
In his waking hours, Zoro moves through the world with an unbent spine. He doesn’t shoot sideward glances – he turns his face to look at you. He sheathes his sword in precise movements, finishes his drink in a swallow instead of dribbling droplets. Even when he drowses in a hammock, his body doesn’t curl in on itself.
Now, the cotton sheet is scrunched around his torso and ankles, his face half pressed into the bed. His shoulders are pulled together. Luffy can’t see if his eyes are moving under those thin lids, veined in blue. If he’s dreaming.
“Wake up, Zoro.” Luffy says, quiet.
The wind batters against the cabin walls. The bed creaks, and Zoro shifts.
Luffy can feel the grin stretch across his face, wider and wider till it feels like it’ll leave the bounds of his cheeks completely.
Zoro’s knee comes up, he twists around and flops onto his back. His hand casts out to the side, fingers flexing.
Right! Luffy’s eyes catch on the white-hilted sword leaned up against the wall, placed there carefully by Usopp when they moved Zoro. He bends down and lifts the sword in his hands, just as Zoro’s eyes flutter open.
Grey eyes move across the diamond pattern. Drift up to Luffy’s face.
“You’re just in time for dinner.” It’s the only thing stopping Luffy from clambering right into the bed, contenting himself with rocking back and forth on his heels with a beam. His first mate is very smart indeed.
And Zoro –
Zoro says nothing.
This by itself, isn’t unexpected. Zoro often says nothing. But what accompanies the nothing needs no words – a chin tilt, flattened lips, an unwavering stare. Disdain, amusement, loyalty. It all comes off him, steam billowing gently from a plate, flavours intermingling in the air.
Zoro is saying nothing, and that nothing hooks onto something in Luffy’s chest – yanks him straight back to the deck of the Baratie.
“if I fail to become the world’s greatest swordsman… you’ll be disappointed.”
His eyes had been shiny, glazed over with pain. His grip had been shaking, white hilt held over his head.
Now, Zoro lies still.
His eyes are pinned on the sword like it’s buried in his chest.
The hand that was outstretched on the bedspread moves upwards. Zoro feels for his own ear, the one with the earrings. One, two, three. His hand falls back down.
Luffy holds the hilt forward, for the lack of anything better to do. His belly churns, smile sitting brittle on his face.
Zoro blinks at him, wet-lashed, and reaches out for it slowly. He holds it to his scarred chest, gently, like it’s both murderer and the mourned.
“you could never fail me.”
“Tell me how I can help.”
Zoro says nothing.