Chapter Text
Click.
The radio hums for a second before crackling to life.
“This week marks the 10 year anniversary of the World Government’s Defense Corps establishing the Jaeger program in Marie Jois Shatterdome. Spearheaded by then Admiral Kuzan Aokiji after the success of the very first Mark-1 Oro Jackson against what we now know to be a Category 1 Kaiju, the program has evolved and inspired incredible innovation in defence and offence on an international level. Among the heroes celebrated at the Shatterdome this week are fellow Mark-1 Snapper Head with her pilots Jinbe and Arlong as well as the Mark-2s Red Force with Shanks and Buggy and Baroque Utopia with Crocodile and Nico Robin. And of course the stars of the show, having debuted the brand new Mark-3 Wado Ichimonji are prodigies Roronoa Zoro and Shimotsuki Kuina—”
Click.
“I was listening to that,” Zoro deadpans, not opening his eyes where he’s reclining on the practice room’s tatami mats.
Kuina scoffs. He hears a thump, then another, and guesses if he could be bothered to turn he could see her hitting a bokken against the wall. Before he can remind her to make sure not to break another one, she scoffs again. “ ‘Debuted’”, she hisses. “ ‘Prodigies’. We’re not, fucking—pop-idols.” Her bokken falls to the ground with a clatter and she drops to the mats next to him.
Zoro cracks an eye open. “Idols wouldn’t get half the government-funded booze that I saw Zeff have the kitchen staff haul over to the assembly hall this morning.”
“All the booze in the world couldn’t stop me from spitting on the next person who asks me for an autograph,” Kuina grumbles. “Or, worse, an interview.”
“Miss Shimotsuki, tell us, who were you wearing when that Cat 2 hit Alabasta? You looked bewitching. Positively glowing . You absolutely must share your skincare routine.” He makes sure to rattle this off in a perfect monotone.
“Just fuck off and spar with me, would you?”
Zoro closes both eyes again and adjusts his arms behind his head. “I don’t know, I’m comfortable here.”
He hears Kuina get to her feet. “We will get barely any training in between all the dinners Borsalino is forcing us to go to. But if the prodigy wants to slack off…”
The taunt works, Zoro gets to his feet in one fluid motion. “Alright, Miss Shimotsuki, if you want to get your ass kicked that bad.” He catches the bokken Kuina is already throwing his way.
“Loser volunteers with Dad for training room cleanup all month,” Kuina decides.
Zoro readies himself, body low and tensed defensively as he can already sense the way her left leg twitches forward in offence. “You’re on,” He grins.
The alarm blares during the second dinner party of the week. It’s not the Shatterdome-System warning them of movement in the Breach, it’s the nationwide howling of the Breach fully active. The screens show the sea already boiling as Zoro runs past the control room wrestling off his itchy suit jacket and pristine button up at the same time.
“Where was the godamn warning, Borsalino?” He can hear Crocodile roar across the hall just as he slips through the gate onto the metal walkway above the Jaeger depot. In a different world he thinks he should be outraged at the suggestion that the government could have overwritten the warning system for an interdimensional security breach—Now he just hears whatever Borsalino’s reply would have been get silenced by the gate locking behind him and it fills him with grim acceptance.
Kuina was somehow faster than him, already halfway into her Jaeger suit. She still has the vindication left to throw one of her high heels across the gangway, nearly missing Mozu’s shin. “Bastards!” She yells, as the suit engages automatically and clicks closed along her spine. “Pathetic, stupid worms .”
“Ranger, you need to calm down —” Mozu emphasises.
“She knows,” Zoro cuts the depot supervisor off. “Let her get it out of her system.” His suit’s hydraulics snap into place across his arms as he sees Red Force’s conn pod light up and drop across the hangar. Somewhere over a speaker he hears Bogard’s voice: “Cat 2 breached surface, hitting Marie Jois in D-7 minutes, Red Force ejecting now, also employing Wado. Keeping Snapper on stand-by. Not employing Utopia.”
It explains another layer to Crocodile’s rage at Borsalino, but Zoro agrees with the decision. They don’t even need Red Force for a Cat 2. Kuina and him could have handled this on their own, had the warning systems engaged like they should.
A group of cadets has gathered a couple of levels below the gangway, about twenty of their peers. “Kick its ass, Zoro!” He faintly hears Luffy yell.
Kuina’s second heel hits against his armoured shoulder before he can shout back. “I’m done,” She calls, already in the Jaeger’s hatch. “Get a move on, we’re filleting this ugly bitch.”
There’s a wild grin on her face as they take their places next to each other in the pod, one he can’t help but mirror. The access hatch hisses closed behind them, shutting out the noise of the hangar, all of it reduced to the deep thrum of the Jaeger being brought into position to eject as the controls light up before them.
“Initiating neural handshake,” The AI drones.
Zoro closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out. The drift, to him, feels like taking a bath in an arctic river. Just before the freezing current takes him over the edge of a cliff, there’s a strong pull at the base of his neck and then there’s Wado and there’s Kuina, and the ice turns into fire coursing through his veins.
“Right hemisphere calibrated,” He says at the same time that Kuina declares the same for the left.
He doesn’t need to look over at her anymore to know the way her eyebrow twitches in that way it does, when she is stressed.
“Strongest in the world,” He calls over to her, flexing the fingers of his right hand and feeling Wado move hers with him.
“Strongest in the world,” Kuina echoes, as the three of them brace for ejection.
It’s a childish mantra carried over from when they were pre-teens in the early stages of the training program. Whenever the drift engages, whenever ice turns to fire, Zoro feels like it’s true.
First, there’s noise.
The sea beats against the Jaeger, black and unforgiving, yet the white metal stays standing. The wind is howling outside of the cockpit. The control panels show vitals, beeping with distance measurements.
Red Force and Wado are both engaging the Cat 2, a back and forth that is as vicious as it is practised— Red shoves the Kaiju right into one of Wado ’s ready blades, cutting a long gash along the monster’s flank. Vivid cyan bleeds into the sea, quickly overtaken by the black of the waves.
It’s routine as much as fighting giant monsters from another dimension in a robot can be—until it isn’t. Until he feels a prick of dread from Kuina’s side of their drift, hears her murmur a “What’s that?”. Until he follows her eyes and sees the sea boiling to their right.
Until Bogard’s voice overrides the Jaeger’s automated system announcements: “Double event. This is a double event. You have another Cat 2 coming your way, Wado . Engaging Snapper Head.”
But it’s right there, and they’ve drifted ways off from the Shatterdome. Snapper isn’t going to make it in time to be of any help.
And they don’t need to be, Zoro thinks just as he can feel it echoed across their link from Kuina. With a swipe of her hand, she connects to Red Force’s comms. “We got the new one, finish the first off for us, will you?”
“Kid, wait a second—” Kuina cuts Buggy and the connection off with another swipe and Wado turns towards the new threat.
“Watch him write you up for insubordination after we’re back,” Zoro snorts, as Wado crouches for impact. The systems show the Kaiju approaching, and fast.
Kuina snorts. “Not convinced he knows how to write.”
The screen right in front of his eyes keeps blinking violet, something it’s never done. It mostly registers as annoying—he’s going to report this to Mozu and they’re gonna have to take his suit for repairs and he’s going to have to make do with a standard issue one for training. And right at this moment, with a Kaiju rushing straight for them, it’s just inconvenient.
“What does that say?” Kuina asks.
She is also talking about the screen, Zoro can tell. It’s saying something? He takes a millisecond to focus on the flashing letters, just as the comms crackle with Bogard overriding them again from the control tower.
D I S E N G A G E
“Not a Cat 2. I repeat, not a Cat 2. Wado fall back. Now!”
“What does he mean, not a Cat 2—” Zoro starts.
The sea explodes. The systems hadn’t calculated surface breach yet.
The Kaiju’s giant head catapults from the water, straight for Wado, straight into the Jaeger’s torso. Its long body, bigger than anything Zoro’s ever seen, is propelled forward by an even longer tail, studded in bony spikes as long as one of Wado ’s arms.
Bogard is still on the overridden systems. “Disengage!”
But there’s nowhere to go. The Kaiju rams them, and Wado , made to endure, made to resist, made as a last wall between these things and everything that makes humanity, she is thrown back.
“Fuck!”, Zoro screams, or maybe it’s Kuina, or maybe it’s both of them.
They catch themselves against the sea bed, the water roars in between the two monsters and the giant mechs fighting them off.
The Kaiju is on them again in an instance, the spiked tail whips around, curls Wado’ s left arm in a death grip, rips . And it comes right off. They lose a limb.
Kuina screams, or maybe Zoro does. The sea roars, the wind whips into their faces now, ice cold, the systems keep flashing violet and blaring, drowning out Bogard as well as who he thinks is Shanks.
The tail whips back, gears up to whip around their other arm and even as they watch it happen, Wado is not fast enough to evade the onslaught, and they have nothing to counteract, their left blade lost to the black sea.
They still try. They wrench into the attack instead of back, the jagged edges of what is left at their left shoulder meeting the soft underbelly of the beast just before it can start ripping, crashing into it, once, twice. Electric blue viscera rain down on them, and Zoro sees it sear into the controls around him. The metal above his side of the conn pod is gone, there is sea water and Kaiju Blue all over him. And there is so much noise .
“Red For—egory Thr—do Ich—enga—”
The sea is roaring, the wind is howling, the Kaiju throws its head back and screeches as Wado’s shoulder slams deeper into its already open wound.
“Zoro, I think we can—” Kuina starts. Why is she talking? He’s in her thoughts. He can’t hear her. It’s too loud.
“Zoro!”
The Kaiju’s head snaps forward, it jostles them by their right arm. It lunges.
First, there’s noise. First, Zoro’s veins are on fire. First, there’s a pull at the base of his neck and there’s three of them.
Then, there is nothing. Zoro’s veins turn to ice. He is alone.
He screams. It’s just him.
There is shrapnel flying in all directions, as Wado rips diagonally across her torso, as the Kaiju tears a chunk of her off within its jaws and flings it to the rolling sea. Zoro can’t see out of his left eye, his own blood is staining everything not already full of Kaiju Blue, red mixing with cyan. He is ripped apart, and he is alone.
Only, he is not.
Unobstructed by any visor and panels, the Kaiju’s eyes zero in on him, like the Jaeger was just in the way to get to him. Kuina is gone. It’s his turn now, and there’s nothing in the way, nothing he can do.
Only, there is.
The pull at the base of his neck is not so much a pull, it’s as if thousands of tons of polished white metal are tied around it, trying to drag him down. Trying to drag him to Kuina. Trying to drag the three of them together again.
He’s sure that he is still screaming. He doesn’t hear it.
His shoulder, tattered, jagged, hits the Kaiju again, with a force it shouldn’t be capable of. The barbed tail slips around his remaining arm enough to commandeer the blade on it, enough to will it to retract. It throws the Kaiju off balance, it reels back for a millisecond, enough for Zoro to employ the blade again.
It seems so simple. Even as his entire body convulses with the strain, with Kuina’s absence and Wado’ s all encompassing presence, he thinks it should not be this simple. He slices the Kaiju’s head off, exactly like Kuina planned in that millisecond before everything went silent. Exactly like he felt her plan it.
The beast crashes into the waves. It doesn’t make a sound.
Click.
“Today marks the third anniversary of what the world has come to know as the Second Breach. That disastrous day marked great losses: The Marie Jois Shatterdome lost one of the four Jaeger pilots deployed to fight the first ever double event humanity has had to face, permanently injuring two more. As the world mourns Shimotsuki Kuina as a martyr and celebrates her colleagues, co-pilot Roronoa Zoro and the crew of the Red Force , as heroes, it is also looking forward to the future. The Second Breach lowered civilian trust in the Jaeger Program. The WGDC has been reacting accordingly: The Walls of Life that have been conceptualised and built up in record time stand tall and proud as a bastion of human resilience, a promise of safety, of never again having to suffer the devastation of thirteen, of three years ago. The government has been working closely with tech and weapons manufacturer GERMA to develop state of the art remote piloted—”
Click.
“So much for celebrating the heroes. Immediately turned into a circle jerk about those slimy fucks behind the walls—’Remote piloting’, my ass. ” Yosaku laments.
“Didn’t even mention the budget cuts,” Johnny adds. “Fucked up one thing all by themselves and immediately channel 80% of the funding from the guys putting their lives on the line to the ones making a mockery of them with their sleek little gadgets.”
Yosaku nods empathetically. “Sleek little gadgets for sleek little bastards. Have you seen them? In their dumb colour-coordinated suits, looking like godamn powerranger clones. It’s creepy as shit. Did they have to use triplets?”
“Quadruplets,” Zoro cuts in. He’s on his back, one of the odd lumps in Johnny’s couch digs into his shoulder blades.
“What’s that, dude?”
Zoro levels Yosaku with a stare from his half lidded right eye. “The Vinsmokes. There’s four of ‘em.”
“Not on this press tour there isn’t.” Johnny fiddles with his phone screen then holds it way too close to Zoro’s face. “See? One, Two, Three, all lined up next to dear old dad.”
On any other day, Zoro would have shoved the screen away without so much as a glance. He’s been successfully avoiding anything about this topic for three years. But, hell, the anniversary must be making him soft. And he already engaged in the conversation, already said more than he probably should have. He glances at the press photo, and, true to word, there are three of them. Ichiji, Niji and Yonji, with the same dumb grins on their faces they’d have every day in the training hall, the grin of people affirmed in their conviction that they were destined for more than grimey tatami mats and standard issue cadet dorms. Their father next to them, the very source of all of those convictions.
Seems they eventually did give up on Sanji, Zoro thinks to himself. Out loud he hums: “Guess you’re right.”
It’s enough to appease Johnny and Yosaku, who go right back to listing every single wrong turn the government has taken in the last three years. Zoro succumbs to the one single turn he has been taking in the last three years: He tunes everything out.
Three years. Too long. Not enough time.
He doesn’t have to tune out much about the day itself—he doesn’t remember enough of it. The first thing that came to him in clarity back then was days after the fact: Sterile cold lighting, an empty white room, the steady beep alongside his heartbeat, IV tubes he promptly ripped out of his arm. That’s as far as he lets the memory go. He doesn’t need to remember what came after that, after he ran from the hospital room and demanded answers to questions he did not ever want to ask.
The intercom buzzes, pulling Zoro out of his thoughts and Johnny and Yosaku out of their conversation. All three of them groan in relative levels of annoyance—living in work-provided accommodation was great, because it was cheap. It also meant the higherups knew exactly where to find them and when.
“10 beri says some poor fuck died at the top again and they need us to cover tomorrow’s double shift,” Johnny wagers as he trudges over to the intercom.
“Another 10 say Zoro’s in for missing gear again. You need to start wearing those safety lines, bro.”
“Don’t need ‘em,” Zoro grumbles, like he has for the past year. He spent years training for fighting against monsters in giant robots. He doesn’t need a flimsy metal rope to stay safe while hauling a couple of sheets of metal up an absurdly tall wall.
After he was kindly, and then not-so-kindly, asked to take a leave of absence from the Jaeger program, Zoro thought for a good couple of weeks that he would not do anything ever again.
Even after he laid waste to Borsalino’s office at the Shatterdome— The warning alarm. The fucking warning —his leave was settled with a handsome monthly sum. But as the program’s budget was cut, so was the one for sad-sacks like him, liabilities in active duty but too entrenched in their overinflated concept of heroes and martyrs to forget about completely. Now, he may still be praised by the fucking radio, but he had to come crawling to the filthy gray anonymity of a building site to make ends meet, to be left alone.
Ever since all of their funding got channelled to GERMA, the coasts are full of building sites, and the sites are full of people like Johnny and Yosaku, hating the walls, hating the people who came up with them, but building them nonetheless. Easy money, for gruesome manual labour at dangerous heights, all for the promise to keep the population safe. For a moment there, Zoro thought he might have come here to do what he set out to do as a teenager, to fight for the safety of humanity in any way he could. But he’s looked at these walls from all sides, he’s seen their inner workings, GERMA’s precious gadgets.
He knows it won’t be enough.
For another moment, then, he thought he would share this knowledge. But if the powers that be didn’t listen to the acclaimed scientists and engineers formerly employed by the Defense Corps that were saying the same thing—What was he supposed to do, the decommissioned toy soldier lost to obscurity, the name reverently dropped as an afterthought on the radio?
Johnny answers the intercom. “Residence 7-B054 speaking.”
Zoro can’t hear the reply from the other end of the room clearly, but they talk for a long time. Seems to be more than a work assignment. Maybe someone’s going to try to bully him into his safety equipment after all.
“That’s—are you… No, of course. Yes, Sir.”
Johnny clicks the receiver back into place. Zoro does not like the look on his face as he turns to him at all. “Uh, they’re requesting your presence.”
He sighs, from deep within his chest and sits up. Today of all days. “Well, give Yosaku his 20 then.”
Yosaku cheers. “Yeah, give me my 20!”
But Johnny’s eyes stay locked onto Zoro. He looks strangely pale. “It’s not a safety code violation.”
“What other code did I violate, then?” Zoro stretches his arms over his head on the way to where his jacket is haphazardly thrown over a chair.
“None,” Johnny rushes out. “There’s people waiting downstairs—You should hurry, I think.”
Zoro hurries, and he takes the elevator ride down to the residence building's lobby, and he meets a group of uniformed nobodies. The logo on their uniforms makes him want to turn right around. But he follows them into a truck, military grade, carbon steel and bulletproof glass. They drive him along a strip of the Northern wall, mostly finished, to the site’s command centre, soon to be populated exclusively by GERMA schmucks. When he steps into the control room after another elevator ride, he does actually try to turn right around.
“No,” He calls, trying to push through the group of WGDC uniforms behind him. “Fuck off.”
“Ranger, close the door behind you and sit down,” Garp orders. Bogard stands sentinel behind him, fixing Zoro with a look no more inviting than the cold grey of the building site.
“Not your ranger anymore,” Zoro spits, still trying to shove aside Garp’s minions. Only, they aren’t supposed to be Garp’s anymore, Garp stepped down from the Defense Corps position. The position doesn’t exist anymore within the government.
Which brings him to the person sitting beside Garp.
“Roronoa.” Jinbe rests his forearms on the desk in front of him. He looks imposing as much as calm, the Defense Corps logo still on his chest. Zoro wants to jump him.
Zoro shoves backwards from the cadet bodily keeping him from the door and finally turns towards the desk. “What do you want from me?”
“We want you to do your job,” Garp makes a sweeping dismissive gesture that seems to encapsulate the entire South wall. “Instead of slaving away for this sham.”
Disbelief bleeds into Zoro’s indignant scoff. “You were the one handing the sceptre over to Vinsmoke. The tabloids were full of that picture of you shaking your buddy’s hand. Fucking hypocrite—”
Garp turns to Jinbe harshly. “I told you we shouldn’t have come here, Marshal, he is not going to—”
“ Wado Ichimonji is not going to be piloted by anyone else.”
Zoro’s veins turn to ice for the briefest moment. It’s silent in the room, not even so much as a grumble from Garp.
“ Wado was destroyed,” Zoro says. He tries to keep the tremor out of his voice.
Jinbe gets up then, rounds the desk and stands in front of Zoro. Imposing, Calm. Zoro notices that the Defense Corps logo on his chest is altered. “Ranger, we’d like to welcome you back into the lines of the Defense Corps’ Jaeger Restoration Program. We’ve been calling it the Cavalry.” He extends his hand for Zoro to shake. Formal, like they haven’t fought and lived right next to each other. “Your Jaeger will be ready when you are.”
The way back to the residential buildings and then straight to the airport passes in a blur. He’s sitting in a helicopter between two of the Cavalry cadets before he thinks to question if anyone cared to explain his sudden leave to Johnny and Yosaku. They’ll probably think he got sacked.
“It’s good to have you back,” a new voice buzzes in through the headset someone had shoved on him right before the helicopter took off. He knows that voice. As he turns, he meets one of the cadets’ wide blue eyes, made bigger by a pair of glasses. Tufts of pink stick out under the headset and over a bandana.
“Koby?”
It didn’t occur to him to look for familiar faces around him. Seeing Jinbe again had felt like enough, too much. Jinbe hadn’t ever trained with him and the other cadets, with her . Koby had. Koby knew.
Logically, Zoro knows that Koby doesn’t know anything more about him, about Kuina, than anyone else from his old life. But he remembers afternoons between endurance training and painful injections of radiocontrast agent, between cafeteria gruel and smuggled cans of beer in the cadet dorms, and he can’t keep meeting Koby’s eyes even as his former peer keeps chattering on.
“You probably know that GERMA commandeered Marie Jois, so we had to move the entire program to the Ryugu Shatterdome,” Koby tells him.
Zoro grunts. He did not know that. He got blackout drunk the night he learned of the budget change and vowed to avoid any other news on the program like the plague.
“The operation turned pretty low profile afterwards,” Koby continues. “Not as much publicity in it without the funding. But all the old guard is still there. The Marshal, of course, and Franky was put in charge of the Restoration Program, because who else would have done it?” He trails off briefly. “A lot of the cadets left. Not as much publicity in it.”
It sounds bitter, jaded in a way that Zoro wouldn’t have expected from the bright-eyed kid he knew three years ago. Before he can decide if he wants to investigate the shift further, Koby barrages on: “But I’m very sure you’ll like who you’ll be rooming with!”
Zoro’s curiosity immediately makes room for contempt. “Roommates?”
Koby has the nerve to look abashed. “Closer quarters in Ryugu, I fear.”
Great. Zoro grunts again, which Koby seems to take as permission to keep on chattering. “Normally, co-pilots would bunk together, but, well. They’re sort of few and far between right now.”
“Who’s there?”
“Me and Helmeppo, for one,” Koby counts off on his fingers with no small amount of poorly hidden pride. “We got cleared for the Mark-4 Honesty Impact about a year ago. Shortly before that, White Hunter was transferred to Ryugu after the Alabasta Shatterdome got commandeered by GERMA as well, so there’s Smoker and Tashigi. And then there’s Cross Guild , the latest Mark-4. Maybe the last, if Franky is to be believed. It’s piloted by Buggy and Crocodile, who you know, and also Mihawk, who I’m sure you heard of.”
Of course he’d heard. Dracule Mihwak was the sole survivor of the very first Cat 2 breach. Zoro thought he’d been retired for years. But then, Buggy and Crocodile had been temporarily retired to varying extents of their own consent just like Zoro had been after the Second Breach.
Zoro furrows his brows. “That’s it? What about Shanks? Robin? What about the other cadets, where is Luffy?”
“Ah, well,...”
“Rangers,” Bogard’s voice cuts them off sharply from the front of the cockpit. “I need to ask you to refrain from blabbing about classified information that can be easily intercepted over standard aircraft comms.”
Koby straightens in his seat. “Yes, Sir, of course. Won’t happen again.”
Zoro leans back demonstratively and mouths to himself: “Classified information.” He wants to know where his friends are.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Zoro saunters into the room with much more bravado than he felt this entire day. He can feel Sanji’s eyes follow him as he drops his duffle bag onto one of three mattresses in the room, this one bare and clearly unoccupied. The other two are stacked one on top of the other in a bunk contraption that looks more like a ship’s cabin than a military dorm.
While Zoro busies himself with unzipping the bag, he muses, conversationally: “Fancy seeing you here, too. I thought daddy might have locked you up in his high-tech basement.”
Sanji hisses in a sharp breath. “You fucking— I never left.”
Immediately, any good humour Zoro might have gathered at the notion to get to antagonise Sanji again goes out the window. “And look what good it did you,” He bites back. “Cozying up in the dorm of leftover screw-ups.”
He doesn’t care that only three dorms are currently occupied by actual rangers cleared for piloting. He needs this to hit, and he needs the hit to sting. He needs something to go his way today.
It doesn’t.
Sanji spreads his arms in a mocking, welcoming gesture as he lets himself drop onto the bottom bunk. “I saved you a seat!” He grins savagely.
Zoro can’t keep looking at him, just like he couldn’t meet Jinbe’s eyes, just like he couldn’t meet Koby’s.
When he was sixteen, Kuina beat up Yonji and accepted a month of clean-up duty and dorm-arrest from her father, all because she’d gotten fed up with him bullying his brother. Zoro looks straight into the naked lightbulb on the ceiling, blinking the smudgy black imprints of it from his eyes immediately after.
He pretends he’s talking to those smudges when he asks: “So who’s the leftover screw-up in the top bunk?”
Sanji snorts. “Luffy.”
Immediately Zoro goes against his resolve and turns on Sanji. “What the hell is he doing in here, did Ace and Sabo kick him out?”
The blind spots in his seeing eye have subsided enough to see the exact second Sanji’s face freezes. There’s no mockery left in his voice when he replies: “They didn’t tell you?”
A frantic sort of energy rises in Zoro’s chest. Classified information. “Tell me what ?”
“Two years ago—”
The door slams open, the noise drowned out by a nonverbal yell as someone launches themselves at Zoro. The yell subsides into chanting; it takes another moment for Zoro to recover from the onslaught and make out words and to recognise the mop of dark hair nuzzling under his chin. “You came back!” Luffy cheers.
Something in Zoro’s chest gives . For a moment, he elects to ignore all the secrets he isn’t privy to, elects to ignore the feeling of walking into a room he was sure he’d gotten locked out of, even elects to ignore Sanji’s presence.
“I came back,” he echoes. “You were right, after all.”