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Zoro hadn’t meant to break Perona. He usually prided himself on his self-control and calm, but this whiny, entitled ghost girl just managed to get under his skin in a way no one but the shit-cook did, and she didn’t have the excuse of being his nakama.
It was barely a shove- she was following too close, whining about something or other because Mihawk had her following him around to make sure he didn’t collapse, and he’d only shouldered past her.
There had been a light ‘tink’ noise- something his mind caught on, for some reason, because it wasn’t a noise human bodies made- and then Perona’s arm was on the floor.
It didn’t bleed- it didn’t even look like flesh, lying there still and pale on the rug. Was it… hollow, inside?
Both stared at it for a moment, entirely silent, before Perona sighed and knelt to pick up her arm. “Great going, genius- now I have to glue myself back together again.”
His eyes narrowed in confusion as he processed the sight. “You’re not human.” She stuck her tongue out at him, “No, dummy- I’m a doll. A haunted doll.” He had no idea what that meant, but didn’t say anything.
She tapped fingers against the detached limb, perfect nails making a sound like clinking china, and pointed the arm at him in frustration, “Doll! D-O-L-L! Do you know what a doll is?”
He still didn’t understand, really, but decided he didn’t really need to. What mattered was that Perona was, seemingly, made of ceramic.
He couldn’t have seen it from far back, but… looking at her now, this close- this hadn’t been the first time she’d needed piecing together. He knew that already, because she’d said ‘again’, but… her skin was spider-webbed with cracks, places the ceramic had been carefully repaired, only barely visible against the paleness.
It was strange- she was patchworked in places, almost, like her pet zombie-bear-thing. Most of the lines he could see were repaired in the same pale tone of her skin, but here and there, he spotted lines of purple, dark blue, black. He’d thought them veins, at first, visible through her pale skin.
She suddenly looked incredibly fragile, the porcelain doll.
He’d had no qualms about injuring her back on Thriller Bark- but she’d been a combatant, then. This… he hadn’t been trying to hurt her at all. It was an accident. He hadn’t hurt someone accidentally in years.
Perona had stopped paying attention to him, rotating the arm in her hand with a pinched frown, testing the fit where it had snapped halfway between her elbow and shoulder.
He finally sighed, “Let me do it. I broke it, I should fix it.” Perona glared at him a moment, distrusting, before huffing, “Fine. I’ve got my kit in my room.”
She turned, then seemed to think better of it, huffed, “Just stay here- I’ll bring it down. You can’t get lost if you’re standing still, right?”
And then he was alone, standing in the hallway as she phased through the ceiling. There were shards on the floor- shards of Perona’s arm, that he’d mistakenly broken. So while she was gone, he swept the hallway, picking out each individual ceramic shard from the dust.
After a few minutes, she phased back down, a wooden case bundled to her chest. She floated into the room across from him, but not before glancing back suspiciously, “Literally right here. I can see you. You can’t get lost now, right?”
It only took him two tries to find the right room once he’d finished sweeping, given that there were only two in the hall, and Perona had shouted at him when he turned to the wrong one.
It was some abandoned office, the only occupants of the room an ornate wooden desk with a chair on either side and what looked like a coat-rack covered in an old sheet.
Perona sat at the desk, feet pretzeled underneath her in a way that looked uncomfortable. She was one-handedly emptying the contents of various vials into a mortar, the broken arm lying still on the desk- it was apparently useless until fully pieced back together.
He laid out the collected shards and sat across from her, peering over into the mortar, and stilled. He didn’t know what he’d expected- paint or lacquer, probably the same pale shade of Perona’s skin, to hide the cracks? Not this… light, springy green. The same shade as his hair, he realized. But why…
Perona finished, chalk-like chunks at the bottom of the mortar, and pushed it across the table to him. She flashed a smile that wasn’t quite a smile, “Congrats- you get your own color now.”
He only stared, not understanding anything. Perona sighed, explained as if to a child, “When someone else breaks me, I fix it in a different color, so I always remember who did it.” Zoro hummed.
All those lines in different colors- purple, blue, black- he could assume who had done those, based only on the color schemes of Perona’s former crewmates. “And the… plain?” Another sharp grin, “For when I break myself, dummy.”
And now he was adding a line, in his own definitive shade- another person who’d broken Perona. He’d killed dozens of people, maimed hundreds more, and for some reason, this bothered him more- this inconsequential injury on a haunted doll who didn’t feel pain. Because he hadn’t meant to do it.
Were the others the same, simply inattentive enough to break the porcelain doll by accident? He doubted the others had helped put her back together, however.
He went to work silently, grinding the pigment to a fine powder. It had been a long time since he’d worked with anything like this- Usopp and Chopper were usually the ones grinding away at various powders and whatnot- but muscle memory took over, hand falling easily enough into the careful circular motions.
Sensei Koushirou had tried to teach him the tea ceremony, once, when he was a kid. It was supposed to be part of their training, that they learned the precision and patience and diligence it required.
He hadn’t paid much attention at the time, seeing it as a distraction from his sword work.
It was only later that he bothered to learn. After Kuina had died, Sensei would sometimes take him aside and make them both tea, and they would just sit together quietly. The sounds of the process- the whisking, the gentle steam of water- had been calming, and the careful, practiced grace of the man’s hands had always brought Zoro down from those fits of helpless rage he found himself lost in.
He’d learned to do it, then, watched intently. When he left the dojo to travel on his own, his final act of thanks had been to finally, finally make Sensei a cup of tea the proper way.
This felt like that- the same kind of slow, careful process. The pigment even looked like matcha, in its color and fine texture.
He dumped the contents of the mortar onto the glass pane Perona had set out once finished, and she poured out a dollop of some clear, viscous substance atop it, instructing him to mix it.
It was an adhesive, one made for ceramics, apparently. The glue had a scent- something astringent and chemical, similar to the way Usopp sometimes smelled after spending hours in his workshop lab. It wasn’t a pleasant smell, but it was something familiar, at least, while he was separated from his nakama.
He didn’t think Perona would appreciate the comparison to the one Strawhat she was genuinely afraid of, however, and stayed silent.
As he combined the powder with the glue, it became a uniform shade, even more clearly matching his hair- he looked it over skeptically. “This holds?” She shrugged nonchalantly, crossing her single arm over her chest, “Hasn’t failed yet- keeps my head on just fine.”
He glanced over, could barely see a fine crack across her throat, usually covered by a choker. It blended in to her skin, only the faintest black line visible there.
He carefully applied the glue, brows furrowed in concentration, and settled the shards in place at the break, careful to make each flush. Then he reattached the arm, adjusting it to ensure a firm hold.
What little glue squeezed out of the sides of the crack was wiped away, leaving the green as only the thinnest line across her forearm- easily mistaken for a pen mark or similar. But he knew what it was, and he’d always know it was there.
The arm seemed to come to life, almost, as soon as it was done, and Perona sighed in relief, fingers stretching and clenching to test movement. Her painted nails curled into a fist, and she nodded in satisfaction. “Not bad, for a meathead.”
He sat back in the seat, grunted in response- he wasn’t going to rise to the bait, not this time. He’d have to be more careful from now on- he didn’t like the ghost girl, but the fact remained that he was stuck with her for the time being.
He wasn’t going to break Perona again. Or let anyone else do it, either.